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Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

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Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#971

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." Yet it's not worth the cost of a slowed curriculum.

I'd argue social skills are more valuable than improved curriculum. Not saying you couldn't learn social skills outside of the school system too, but seems to me that curriculum is easier to learn outside of the system than social skills.

The main social skill I seem to have taken away from K–12 is "man, I fuckin' hate normies"

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#972

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.…

Curious, I'm also in NJ, which school district is this?

South Hunterdon School District.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#973

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Exclusion of "average people" is fundamentally required for private property to exist, one of Humanity's best inventions. Few people enjoy private aspects of their life out in public. It is a completely natural and morally good thing to want your own space and to raise your kids your own way. Your kids don't need to be exposed to the often violent whims of society's bottom quartile for 8 hours a day for more than a d…

You missed the point: if you don't like how school work today, you need to improve the schools. If you are saving yourself, especially before helping others (because you have the means that others probably don't), you are the bad person in this situation, and you should reflect on your ethical position some time, preferably soon.

So you are saying that people should remain irrevocably loyal to institutions that have lost their trust, do not further their interests, and are not meaningfully accountable to them, out of some notion that the most important thing to them ought to be optimizing aggregate statistical metrics involving large numbers of strangers, at the expense of the actual direct social obligations and communities that are central to their own lives.

It's an interesting perspective, but I'm afraid it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of real-world human societies and how they hold together over time -- advancing that perspective will inevitably result in society fragmenting into factions that are increasingly at odds with each other, and ultimately collapsing.

Societies are not monolithic entities unto themselves that people somehow owe loyalty to. They're emergent patterns of people -- often with disparate interests and values -- cooperating with each other in pursuit of mutual benefit. Forcing people to be locked into monopolistic social relations that no longer offer those benefits to them is a sure-fire way to destroy society.

We'll be much better off when education in our society is offered by a wide range of approaches that adapt in a bottom-up way to the full diversity of that society, an not dominated by a politicized monopoly that tries to shoehorn everyone into a conformist model that is optimal for no one in particular.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#974

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Studying the subject academically in any real capacity. Also, in the US, every teaching degree requires time in a classroom as a student teacher with an experienced teacher as your mentor.

Studying the subject academically in any real capacity. What do you mean by "in any real capacity"? I have read many books and academic papers about education. And I have experimented with some of the things I've learned. Does that count? Among current K-12 teachers in the United States, what would you estimate is the median number of academic/research papers related to education or adjacent fields that they have rea…

This is what I'm talking about. This attitude of I read a paper or two so I know what it's like in a classroom with multiple kids at different ages that have different needs. Or I know what it's like in a classroom with 20 kids. Yes there are bad teachers, but you present the argument like "there are bad teachers therefore all homeschooling teachers are better" which is absurd.

"There are thousands of effective teachers without teaching degrees."

I doubt it. And there are countless thousands more that are terrible and whose kids are very behind.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#975
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first comment in the page, the first I read, and I can also say, I learned nothing (if anything lies, bad science and nonsense) in school. Coming from a very different country, lived in many others I know is not better in those places. I do not have time to really teach my kids, but I will be all the way by their side, as they go through the brain washing machine of school. I will send them to the school…

How did you learn to write this paragraph?

Literally by my own, with books that luckily I had available. I learned no grammar and certainty no spelling in school. As I was 18 nobody could under my writing because of the terrible spelling.

I had problems also speaking to people, and understanding what they were saying.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#977
Our three kids are in hybrid homeschool / traditional classroom school. What critics of homeschooling don’t seem to get is that homeschoolers find their own cohorts. And those cohorts have kids of different ages. And that means my kids interact with adults, older kids, younger kids, and kids their own age all the time. They learn nuances to social interaction that aren’t available to their counterparts who are locked in with their peers and tend to think their age group is the only one that matters. Sorry, that’s not the real world. In the real world you actually have a myriad of ages to interact with. Is everyone at your work the same age and place in their career development? Of course not.

What about other sources of diversity? Guess what, they are in sports and other community groups too. In fact, by avoiding the time suckers in traditional school, you’d be surprised to see just how quickly the kids can zip through their curriculum and join more extracurricular activities with meaningful social interactions. You mean school isn’t the only place to learn social interaction? Yup.

It’s time we put to death the idea that homeschooling is detrimental to social development. It’s utter nonsense. My wife has taught music at every grade level and in every school type imaginable and anecdotally the homeschooled kids are by far the most confident, socially capable of the bunch.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#978
post #484

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is the first comment in the page, the first I read, and I can also say, I learned nothing (if anything lies, bad science and nonsense) in school. Coming from a very different country, lived in many others I know is not better in those places. I do not have time to really teach my kids, but I will be all the way by their side, as they go through the brain washing machine of school. I will send them to the school…

How did you learn to write this paragraph?

Yah, this paragraph can't be taught at home right? or would taking a few English courses not achieve that, selectively?!

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#979
post #566

This "shouldn't" be surprising. Smart people seeing a wider perspective, seeing the limits of mass-schooling and top-down curricula, seeing other social challenges, and seeing a better option? I live in Seattle; there's a reason it's one of the top metros with per capita private school enrollment and if it weren't for tech incomes, I'd expect homeschooling and homeschooling collectives to thrive. Comments here about…

Note: Quotation marks are not suitable for marking emphasis. https://old.reddit.com/r/suspiciousquotes/ >

Not arguing with your point, and point taken. The quotation marks suggest that I don't fully mean to mean the literal definition or understanding of the word quoted in the context you're reading. But I use quotes too often to equivocate. Thanks for the reminder.

Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

#980
post #749

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." If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it? Seems like there's only something to lose from adjusting to their shittiness. Like Harrison Bergeron And seeing the state of California tr…

When my car broke down in the middle of a DoorDash run, I walked to a nearby park and sat next to a homeless guy who was about my age. He was deaf; we talked via text on our phones about how we'd ended up on the same bench, and I shared some of my food. I learned from him how resilient someone can be, even under incredibly unfair circumstances, but more importantly, he got something to eat. It's not all about you.

You and the homeless guy aren't peers, you just did a nice thing. You're not going to classes with him or working alongside him
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