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Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

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Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#801

Post by IggleSniggle »

kajumix wrote: post #768
swiftcoder wrote: post #763

The problem with homeschooling is it's pretty much a crapshoot whether you end up in a weird religious environment or an abusive environment, with a long-shot chance of ending up in a fun constructive environment with lots of personalised attention and the opportunity to travel the world. Of course, this is pretty much the same set of dice you roll when you spawn into a traditional school system, except you roll with…

Why do you imply that the fun, constructive environment for homeschooling a long shot, but the weird religious or abusive environment is more of the norm?

I'm going to hazard a guess with zero grounding in data to attempt to answer that, caveat emptor. Please also note that even though these are my guesses, these assertions do not really reflect where I personally land on this. I'm not really sure what the breakdown is, but I think I can understand how someone gets to this point of view.

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In order for parents to choose homeschooling, some (but not all) must be present in the parents:

- a conviction that the herd choice of sending a child to school is wrong, and not just a little bit - the belief that you know education better than expert educators with many years of hard earned experience - relatedly, the belief that you are fully qualified to teach anything of importance, and that anything you can't teach is not of important - the ability to forgo the opportunity cost of an in-home full time tutor

Add these up and you will skew towards parents who either have extremely strong convictions (faith related or otherwise) and a mentality that presupposes that the parent is "right."

In the best case scenario, this is an extremely well educated/informed parent who knows enough to keep their pride at check and can handle their emotions well in the face of at times extremely frustrating circumstances, all well being under more financial strain than they would be if they weren't showing up every day to school. These people definitely exist, and I think most parents strive to be this for their children regardless of how they educate their child.

But the "average" human is not well informed, often makes rash and/or emotional decisions, and is struggling to make ends meet. Thus, the "average" parent that chooses homeschooling skews towards dogmatic thinking and/or a presumption of "I'm right and you're wrong" that over a period of a childhood easily leads to abuse, especially if the parents are struggling to make ends meet.

I guess there is a counter argument that people who choose to homeschool can "afford" to do so and thus are well resourced enough (financially or socially) to have a good shot of success, but even among the top 10% of earners you will be hard pressed to find parents that believe they can afford homeschooling.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#802

Post by zaphar »

karaterobot wrote: post #773
zaphar wrote: post #621

I can't really know nor do I care to speculate on why it's becoming fashionable. But I'm a successful, well adjusted, homeschooled child from when it wasn't fashionable. This comment stood out to me: "Opt out of interacting with average people." And my immediate thought was: "I can't imagine a less effective or worse way teach kids how to deal with people, average or not, than to throw them into a pool of similarly u…

That actually sounds like a good way to teach kids how to deal with others. Just figure it out, in a safe environment with minimal consequences and some guard rails. I wouldn't expect a teacher to teach kids how to socialize, especially on an individual level, but rather to step in when necessary. Being in a big group of people you may not like is pretty much a description of life, and the goal is to learn to functio…

Except the literature from studies on the subject suggest that homeschoolers on average do slightly better than public schoolers on this specific metric. The data suggests public school has worse outcomes.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#803

Post by renewiltord »

aaroninsf wrote: post #784
Scubabear68 wrote: post #623

So we chose private school over home schooling, for both time reasons, educational reasons, and social reasons. But the important thing is we choose to take our kids out of public school. The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year. We did not like what we saw.…

"millions of parents", "their schools" should be "me", "my school." If your school isn't good, I recommend improving if for every other kid, who didn't pull the lottery ticket of affluent parents with flexible jobs. School boards benefit from parents who care and are competent.

This is nonsensical advice. In San Francisco, the school board wants to delay learning algebra to 9th grade. I can't "improve" this place because it's not that the place just needs advice. It's because they have "experts" with "years of experience" that want to do different things. And I'm just a techie who thinks he knows everything.

No thanks. Not interested in spending years of my life arguing with morons who rejected the only gay guy applying to help because he was a White male (this isn't some right wing thing - it was real and explicitly the reason).

When people say "we don't need your help; we know what we're doing" then not helping is doing the right thing.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#804

Post by madhadron »

As usual, it depends. My time in public schools (K through 7th grade in various places in the southeast US) was a mixed bag. Newport News, VA with all the kids of engineers and naval officers? Awesome. I loved school. Most other places? Meh. Rural western Virginia? Terrible. Bullied until I finally snapped and left someone half conscious on the playground (and the football coaches watched as I handed out that beating). I was homeschooled from 8th grade until I left for college at the suggestion of the teachers in the school because they were running out of classes at the high school for me when I was in 7th grade.

I was fortunate to have parents that are extremely well educated and my homeschooling gave me an education that is simply unavailable in a school. Not many kids have sat on the back deck in the Appalachians with their father, learning how to read Virgil in Latin.

There were lots of other homeschoolers in our county who were all religious nuts. Fortunately Virginia requires you to come in and take standardized tests every couple years to see if you're at grade level if you're homeschooling, so the worst cases got corrected. The school district also proctored my AP tests for me, even though they weren't classes the school offered.

My kids are in public school. The public schools where I live are excellent and actually deal with bullying. My kids would rather not go to school, but they're not being traumatized and they're getting a good education and have lots of friends. There's a major emphasis on social-emotional learning, which turns out to be heavily correlated with later performance. Our biggest problem is in high school with parents pressure cooking their kids to try to go to places like Harvard or Yale. I do what I can to counsel the kids and get them off that path. My own kids are firmly convinced that they're going to guaranteed admission state schools, and don't have to try to build a ridiculous resume in high school.

Schools don't have to be horrible. They just have a history of being poorly run in many places.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#805

Post by froh »

notTooFarGone wrote: post #354
froh wrote: post #351

I find looking beyond the rim of your own plate such an inspiring thing when it comes to schooling. Germany for example prohibits home schooling. don't breed detached extremists. however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O. but then on the upside again, you will go to school for at least 13 years if you get _any_ kind of qualified profes…

>however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O As a German that's the first time I hear that. Do you mean Schülerpraktikum? That's usually at age 14. Never heard anyone doing that at age 9.

as others said: Schullaufbahnentscheidung vierte Klasse (at the age of 9 years for most Students)

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#806

Post by wedn3sday »

huehehue wrote: post #736
Scubabear68 wrote: post #728

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In NJ, the School Superintendent is effectively the CEO of the district. Many of them had advanced degrees in education, management, and finance. They control tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Ours has a BA in health, was a gym teacher then an admin person, eventually a principal and then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring. He has been a total disaster because he…

My old gym teacher also taught science because we just couldn't find another teacher, and was genuinely surprised to learn there were forms of matter smaller than atoms. My health teacher was a "permanent substitute" situation where we just watched movies the whole semester and got A's. One of my math teachers died and we just...never hired a replacement, so nobody learned anything that semester. Bonus: my driver's e…

Amusingly I had the exact inverse of this experience. My senior year I signed up for the AP Bio course, but we only got 22 students signed up out of the 25 required to allow the class to happen (a very stupid system in of itself). Because the class was canceled, and the very competent well educated biology teacher had a slot free in his schedule, he was forced into teaching the gym class (which I also had to take since I'd been avoiding PE for the last few years). He knew the situation, and after the first week handed me the advanced bio textbook after class one day, and then turned a blind eye to me sitting on the bleachers reading instead of running laps for the rest of the semester (dont come at me for physical fitness, I was a skateboarder and in better shape than 90% of the kids already).

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#807

Post by graemep »

I think one factor is that technology makes it a lot easier to do.

There are lots of online resources, online courses, tutors who do remote tutoring (I do not think i could have found my daughter a Latin teacher locally very easily, for example), lots of courses both for conventional qualifications (my kids did (I)GCSEs - just as kids do in British schools, (except at schools they do them at 16, we spread them out with my older daughter doing her first when she was 11) and just to learn (e.g. MOOCs).

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#808

Post by froh »

lbrito wrote: post #788
froh wrote: post #351

I find looking beyond the rim of your own plate such an inspiring thing when it comes to schooling. Germany for example prohibits home schooling. don't breed detached extremists. however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O. but then on the upside again, you will go to school for at least 13 years if you get _any_ kind of qualified profes…

>don't breed detached extremists. That seems not to be working out well for Germany.

could be worse, much worse. do you have something specific in mind?

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#809

Post by ToDougie »

woodruffw wrote: post #164

> These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people. It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way. "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people wi…

I don't want my children to have to learn at the pace of the bottom quintile. Obviously average and less-than-average people exist. But I will _not_ be hamstringing my kids to placate the whims of the state or some "modern" moral standard. I know how harmful it is because I went through it.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#810

Post by foobarian »

wccrawford wrote: post #519
dijit wrote: post #497

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m sorry you went through that. I hope life has been kinder to you following this. :(

Generally speaking, yeah. Someone else mentioned the system preparing you for life later, and I can see where the bullies made me stronger as well. I definitely don't condone all that as a way to get stronger, but at least I got something from it. Silver linings and all.

Wish I could say the same. I often wonder how things would turn out if I didn't have the insecurities/other mental handicaps stemming from that period. And fantasize about rewinding time with the current brain and leaving a trail of broken bones in my wake :-D
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