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Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

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Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#931
post #389

OK I guess I’m going to go against the deluge of comments here; And give an appreciable reason instead of denigrating those who might choose this. The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school. I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country. However, school, for me, was by far the sin…

I was schooled in Bangalore India and I particularly loathe and revile both the school and most of my teachers. My school did nothing except make me believe I was a horrible child with no future.

I believe in homeschooling but it isn't very fashionable here.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#932
post #364

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average." Nope. For some people it may be valuable. For me it was miserable, almost to the point of being deadly. It does not prepare you for adulthood or life or what have you in any meaningful sense (think about what would happen in your everyday life if someone…

Your argument is similar to burning the house down, once you discover that you don't like the couch in the living room. Or, more realistically, arguing against taxation based on the idea that rich people avoid being taxed anyways, and it's only poor people who will get the short end of the stick. The school system isn't perfect, and is hard to improve due to many reasons, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't try. It ha…

> It has a purpose which is much more important than the suffering of any individual who goes through it.

How bad would it have to get to change your mind about this? Suicide is already one of the biggest causes of death in young people, and the biggest known contributing factors are things that are determined by the school environment.

I'm all for paying taxes for the greater good. But I don't want anyone I care about to go through what I went through.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#933
Public schools in the US are dependent on federal and state money. Play ball or lose the money. Often the people making the decisions in congressional settings and DOE have personal agendas or money greasing their wheels. Remember the hubbub on Common Core? Teach common core or lose money.

Cruise. Around YouTube for older videos and connect the dots on how Common Core was a money grab that set us back a bit.

Go to local schools and see how school boards tie their ideology to how schools and classrooms are run to get that money. For years in San Francisco you enroll in the school lottery and hope you get to send your kid to the school close enough to you. Otherwise you spend 45 minutes each way to drop them off at school. On top of that classrooms cater to the lowest performing student. What parents with money wind up doing is sending their kids to Kumon like learning centers to fix the gap the classroom has in pushing their kid to be engaged with learning.

With everything else schools are also penalized for suspending or expelling students so teachers have to find creative ways to keep the bad apples away from everyone else.

For context I have family and friends working in public schools across differ states. There’s a reason people want to abolish the DOE and return curriculum back to the local school districts or the state.

I went to an ok school district and didn’t experience any of the problems today’s kids seem to face in school. People got suspended or expelled for being bad. Classrooms didn’t show political or biological ideology to the students.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#934
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…

> too slow for four year election cycles. Maybe that's the problem: that education is so politicized. Yet another reason people opt to homeschool. (For those of you who object so strenuously here to homeschooling, suppose MAGA were to remake public education they way they want it to be. Would you then not seriously consider homeschooling? I bet y'all would.)

I personally.think the solution to the maga craze and polarization is a proportional representation instead of first past the post. oh and control over individualized media and their individualized political campaigning, built on disinformation and bubbles.

has little to do with homeschooling or not.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#935
post #833
post #808

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Well, things can always be worse. That's a tautology. I was implying the growth and "mainstreaming" of afd.

that's an issue world wide and it's based on extremists abusing targeted advertisement and disinformation in individualized media.

orthogonal to schooling.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#937

Earlier quoted context omitted.

School was and remains a prison, that is why they build the gates so high. Worse, its a prison with cult-like re-education towards elements of Marxism, without calling it that, in many cases. Its a spectrum so not all teachers are like that, but there are enough that it can be seen widely. Most of this comes from teacher's followed recommendations made during conferences held by the National Teachers union, which has…

Absolutely not reading this entire diatribe, but you should post some high quality sources to back up your extraordinary claims about Maoist torturer-teachers or whatever.

> Absolutely not reading this entire diatribe.

If you don't read what you comment on, then you miss out on the things you then ask about. It makes anyone look stupid.

The sources on how torture works, were referenced. The authors are well established in their fields, its old material that has not been refuted in any way and is backed by first-hand accounts in the case studies (1950s).

The structural elements they cover are well discussed. These elements are also present in material pushed at the recommendation by the national Teachers Union in the past (at several points). This included, iirc, the Roots movie controversy and this revisionist fictional film being portrayed as historical to push a false narrative.

Teachers aren't generally malign, but bureacracies can be (NEA almost without a doubt imo). The teachers simply did what they were trained to do without knowing what they were trained to do. A potential example of the banality of evil with regards to complacency and sloth.

You may not like it, and not want to see it, and not want to believe it. Nonetheless, it is clearly happening.

James Lindsay has published quite a lot of rationally backed literature on Woke-ism, and its relation to Marxism/Maoism, and how its a cult. He has several publications, and a youtube channel if you are so inclined.

Regardless of what you happen to call a thing, you can describe a thing based on its elemental component or characteristics. Rationally this process is called characterization, and when you find the same elements, and the same outcomes, that suggests a thing that goes by another name (deceitfully to obscure), is the same thing functionally.

When you see the same structures used in Maoist prison camps in the 50s being used in education, the question shouldn't be is this happening because the characteristics match. It should be who chose to do this and why, and is it more important to protect them over your own children. These all have pretty simple straightforward answers.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#938

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I became progressively more withdrawn throughout my school years and for most of high school I was a ghost. I talked to no one and hid in the library during lunch hours, and for all the kinds of reasons that have already been mentioned here. My experience in school contrasts dramatically with my experience going through the scout movement. We had an active and healthy group. we would do 10 weekend camps a year and on…

School was OK, but Boy Scouts was great! We learned to organize into groups, to obey orders and coordinate as groups, play games, watch the Scout Masters (all adult men) discuss and decide matters and then try to do the same ourselves. I also learned how different fathers can be: some with few friends, some with many, each having different abilities, etc. All were wonderful people ready to help us learn. I was never…

I like your anecdote about the boy scouts being a healthy environment- that could well be true and I have no reason to think otherwise.

But I think being blind to the other kids being bullied is probably a common thing, you’re likely better adjusted as an adult and can’t possibly comprehend how common or how helpless kids can be to being bullied.

You can imagine then, a person like you becoming a teacher might not be looking for signs that kids are being bullied, because its rarer than death after all- and all you’d see is the built-up backlash of the bullied kid finally hitting the bully back (because, being a bullied kid fighting back for once is dramatic).

This is a large part of why the the bullied kids end up being punished when finally acting out in zero-tolerance scenarios.

Bullying is definitely more common than death.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#939

Earlier quoted context omitted.

School was and remains a prison, that is why they build the gates so high. Worse, its a prison with cult-like re-education towards elements of Marxism, without calling it that, in many cases. Its a spectrum so not all teachers are like that, but there are enough that it can be seen widely. Most of this comes from teacher's followed recommendations made during conferences held by the National Teachers union, which has…

how is public school teaching kids to take collective ownership of the private means of production? must have slept through those classes. My public schools in Oregon had a lot of anti-communism elements and I got a brief suspension for writing a research paper analyzing and defending the Black Panthers in high school -- cited reason was "defending/promoting terrorists" or something along those lines

They promote 'critical consciousness', which is a framework of looking at things in isolation without resolving indirections, and examining existing relationships by their power dynamics which are treated as static, not dynamic. These are based in fallacy, but more recently described in the critical turn in education, and was somewhat inspired by Paulo Freire's work.

The framework of reasoning being taught, is anything but, and follows circular paths that travel down a spiral of madness, and subjectivity without proper definition; in classic hegelian structure to abuse the contrast principle.

This is seen most recently in people who have contracted the mind virus, Woke-ism. When you adopt this 'critical consciousness', as they call it you blind yourself to the reality of things, and its a self-inflicted violation of your self. The things they do and say often are borderline delusional or insanely irrational, and not based in reality.

Marxist derivatives has not been about seizing collective ownership for quite some time, its been about interference, demoralization, and destabilization. They seized production by seizing the money, and are doing so through debasement as Lenin said in Keynes quote.

The currency allows control of the means of production as the root of all trade (exchange), and this has been seized already back in the 70s, by central planning bankers, and the ECP driven by money printing will be taking hold in a few short years once third stage ponzi is publicly visible. In other words, debt growth > GDP.

This sieving action of resources into fewer and fewer hands through debt is already driving legitimate producing businesses out of business (bankruptcy), or towards mergers, where they close shop which are funded by a money printer. The money printer swallows everything.

All debt issues with 0% fractional reserve is private money printing. This occurred in 2020 silently at the start of the pandemic. They replaced fractional reserve with an opaque capital reserve system (Basel III), which itself is based on fiat valuations that the banks loaning the money/printing the money decide. Carl Menger thoroughly proved how value is subjective. These structures neglect the simple fact that there are dynamics at work that determine value, so the associated banks will be fine until they suddenly aren't, without notice, or predictability (chaos).

Once concentrated, then everything can be seized and nationalized silently with cutout companies backed by the money printer, but in the process production grinds to a halt, shortage ensures, and stops and all value is lost since the store of value as a property of currency fails.

Order wanes, famine, slavery, and death, as occurs in every non-market socialist state to date; only this time it will be a global event and not an isolated nation event. That is the problem with parasites. Sometimes they kill the host, and by extension kill themselves.

> Research paper analyzing and defending the Black Panthers in high school.

Well I guess it would depend on what you wrote. The simple fact of the matter is, the dynamics of a successful protest or movement depend on largely two things.

The responsiveness of policymakers to listen and correct issues, and the inherent threat of violence or imposed cost.

If policy-makers fail to do their job by being unresponsive when their job is serving their constituency, violence holds them to account when the abuse is egregious enough. This once happened back in 1776, with colonists who were not considered british citizens or entitled to such protections without representation.

The politician's know this in theory too because they had to read the books covering these topics. Many of which are central to constitutional law, or social contract theory (Leviathan, Locke, Kant, Rosseau).

Absent the first, no non-violent movement can succeed in making change. You need appropriate political and judicial structures that are responsive to conflicts so they can be resolved non-violently. If they are not responsive (regardless of reason), the sole purpose of law fails, that purpose is non-violent conflict resolution equally under the law.

This used to be the courts, but they too have degraded to the point where if you don't have the money upfront to hire a lawyer, you don't have a seat at the table. A single civil suit today, even a slam dunk one, costs about a 50k retainer, from the lawyers I've spoken with. That's about the average median annual income for most people unspent (on things like food, necessities etc).

A rule of law requires certain elements, if you examine the law today and the associated costs, its largely only available to the select few with money. The 5 or so components have failed enough times to claim several decade long trends.

There is a psychological consistency pitfall in writing about things you don't care about because words alter your perception even if you don't believe it in the moment, the more often you write something the more it impacts you. They did this in the Korean Conflict to PoWs. It generally started with a choice; hard labor, or write an essay with the following prompt, "Why is the US not the best country in the world", to "Why does communism work better than capitalism", and then its read over a loudspeaker and celebrated among the captors, and prisoners.

Its subtle bias, but effective, proven, and documented.

If people can't organize and react to the reality of things being done to them, they implicitly are agreeing to their own destructive end, for themselves and anyone else they happen to manage to carry along with them.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#940
post #389

OK I guess I’m going to go against the deluge of comments here; And give an appreciable reason instead of denigrating those who might choose this. The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school. I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country. However, school, for me, was by far the sin…

I'm both glad and dismayed to hear that I'm not the only one who likens public school to prison. I went to school in California, and I would say my school experience became prison-like between grades 4 and 11. In fairness, I can now look back at my child self and realize that I was delayed in terms of emotional maturity, which contributed to my social problems, but the kind of environment I was in was the wrong one f…

I grew up in Russia and I have a very similar experience emotionally, hating every second of my school life, but somehow I couldn't remember any particular horrors. It was just all so ridiculously sad and hopeless and boring, I couldn't stand listening unpassioned teachers talking about sili memorisation tasks the whole day and didn't feel like I fit socially either (even though I wasn't bullied) so it all felt like a torture.
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