791–800 of 878 posts
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Maybe that's a new thing, because I've never heard of it. I have recommended to professionals that they take a public speaking course, but those were not part of any degree program.
> Maybe that's a new thing, because I've never heard of it. You mentioned in another post attending a lecture from Feynman. I think you might be a few decades behind modern academia.
Definitely. And I've seen no evidence there's been any improvement. More like things have gotten worse.
I'm just going to say that "homeschooling" is not a single thing and it's useless to pretend it is. In fact, "public school" is not a single thing and it's mostly useless to pretend it is.
I went to public school. My kids were a combination of public primary school, home schooling, and local community colleges. That experience gives me... well, very little in terms of predicting or understanding what others' experiences were like.
50-kid public schools (the size I went to) can be great for interacting with a diverse group of people -- like, actually interacting with them, not just attending the same school as them. It's also common for "diverse" in this case to mean "kids from a range of socioeconomic situations who are 95% the same race or religion" -- most small schools draw upon a small rural population that is often pretty homogeneous. (That was my experience.)
500-kid public schools naturally have much more diversity in total, but are totally random in terms of what an individual kid will actually experience. It's common for the kids to rigidly stratify themselves. It doesn't matter if there's a kid of a different color from you in your math class if you're surrounded by people like you and he's surrounded by people like him. Athletics are better at mixing people (by forcing a different stratification!), but it's easy to avoid having to deal with "them" even there if you don't want to.
Home schooling varies even more.
Yet that whole argument is also pushing a narrative of "good" vs "bad": being forced together with diverse people is good, so environments where that happens are better! But that's not true either, there are tradeoffs. I'll describe it in terms of stereotypes: public school kids get more exposure and experience with a wider range of kids their age. Home schooled kids get more exposure and experience with adults and kids of other ages. (I'm not saying either of these is universally true, but just go with it for now.) Which is better? You can argue that it's critical to survive the social pressure cooker of traditional schooling because you'll have to handle the same situations as an adult. But you can also argue that if you look at what's happening in public schools, those kids may be good at dealing with each other but they're often failing when faced with the real world. They depend on the collective consciousness that comes from being surrounded by similar-aged people physically and electronically, they're helpless when the responsibility is no longer diffused and they are actually the one and only person who can solve a situation, and they have a sense of entitlement that anything hard is unfair. The stereotypical homeschooled kid is vastly more prepared for many life situations.
So which environment is "better"? mu
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Peers in what sense? There are clearly examples of kids that are both erudite many years beyond their age and kids that excel in technical subjects well beyond their years. Clearly a distribution exists and it’s wider than +/- a few years even if that covers 1 or even 2 standard deviations. For what it’s worth I’ve even met adults who can’t regulate and control their emotional reactions. They often have a prison back…
Age. I said "age peers"
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There are some skills taught in that realm. From personal experience, I have learned to recognize trouble by gait and eyes alone. I get that people get different experiences, but I could have done without that knowledge.
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It seems like a great way to foster a sense of community. Our peers are more than people our age. They are the people older and younger than us too.
> It seems like a great way... It was a small town, in the early 1900's. Everybody knew everybody, including the kids - who freely roamed the town when not doing chores or such. I'd agree that it was very good for the kids' social development...but "foster a sense of community", in the present-day context, sounds like an express ticket to expecting far too much from it.
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Probably like 90% of the time it feel like I'm perpetually in high school and it never really ended.
Assuming that's a negative experience for you, that's worth trying to fix. I'm pushing 60 and most of my career has not been like that. You don't need to put up with it. A big part of that for me was fixing my own social anxiety. But even before I managed that, I found groups that didn't feel that way. Later I worked someplace for a while that was kind of a throwback, but then I changed jobs and it was fine.
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>That's on the kid, not contingent on whether school is public. Yes and no. The interest of the kid to learn is on the kid/family, for sure. However, the fact that a kid who has no interest in learning is forced to go to public school is a function of how public schools operate. Again, free and required is a bad model. They should either be free and selective or, less ideally, available and costly.
> Again, free and required is a bad model. They should either be free and selective or, less ideally, available and costly. This is a good way to ensure the most vulnerable members of your society don't get educated. But I suppose that might be a feature to some people.
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Age. I said "age peers"
I think you completely missed the point I was trying to make. Age peers are an illusion and only appears like a thing because most people follow a standard distribution; but this does nothing for the people who are further away from the mean.
1. I mostly only cared about school w.r.t learning. For most kids, school is primarily a place to socialize.
2. If it took you two years to achieve the same level as what took someone else ten years (going with the 2nd vs. 10th grade example from a few comments up), I don't think you're going to get an appropriate pacing by just moving into the same class as them...
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My kids are not school age yet, and I am not sure on if I will home school or not. But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling. There is the neighborhood kids, you have sports and clubs kids can join, religious groups. Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day. Some people "homeschooling" I know are groups of parents getting together to educate their c…
Everytime I see these kinds of arguments, it sounds like someone desperately trying to argue that a park playground is almost as entertaining for kids as an amusement park. Your example of 5 kids socializing with each other is definitely better than 1 kid at home. It’s also definitely worse than learning to socialize in a school of 500 kids each day. This is undeniable unless you have an argument of how a pool of 500…