[HN Gopher] Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing...
___________________________________________________________________
Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of
education
Author : cs702
Score : 236 points
Date : 2023-10-31 14:29 UTC (8 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.washingtonpost.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.washingtonpost.com)
| generalizations wrote:
| https://archive.ph/KftoD
| generalizations wrote:
| > a largely unregulated practice once confined to the ideological
| fringe
|
| Tell me your bias without telling me you're biased.
| 303uru wrote:
| What about that is untrue?
| generalizations wrote:
| Nothing whatsoever - they are technically correct (the best
| kind of correct). And yet it is also a descriptor that is
| likely to prime the reader with a negative connotation.
| There's a reason that witness oaths require not only "nothing
| but the truth", but first of all "the whole truth".
| voxic11 wrote:
| I read it as acknowledging a preconception the reader is
| likely to have and therefor building rapport with the
| reader, not necessarily a sign of bias by the author.
| generalizations wrote:
| That just sounds like bias with extra steps. Which subset
| of readers is the author choosing to build rapport with?
| Which subset are they choosing _not_ to build rapport
| with? Why one, and not the other? And anyway, why build
| rapport at all - this isn 't an opinion piece.
| HEmanZ wrote:
| Is there some misunderstanding in English that "biased" means
| "factually false"? I've seen a lot of people on the internet
| confuse them as the same thing.
|
| Bias is supposed to mean something that is factual but
| presenting a one-sided opinion by e.g using a subset of facts
| and language meant to influence the readers opinion.
| MilStdJunkie wrote:
| It's biased in the same way an unchoked shotgun shoots pellets
| with wider dispersion. K-12 education done independently,
| atomized from regional or national institutions, means people
| come out more different, so the edges of the cluster are
| further away. Homeschoolers are biased about 43% to white and
| rural, so it's pretty fair that the fring is going to be on
| that side of things. I'm kind of stumped as to how that's
| biased.
| zdragnar wrote:
| You can't tell me with a straight face that public education
| is a uniform experience in the US.
|
| Just read through the comments other people have posted in
| subthreads here about their own experiences.
|
| My own school had a wide range of "don't bother learning, get
| pregnant and drop out" to "goes on to elite university"
| students, and everything in-between.
| margalabargala wrote:
| > You can't tell me with a straight face that public
| education is a uniform experience in the US.
|
| No one claimed that "public education is a uniform
| experience in the US". Did you reply to the wrong comment?
|
| Do you think the variability is wider among public schools,
| or among homeschools?
| hotnfresh wrote:
| "Somalia--a country that once conjured images of famine and
| interminable civil unrest--"
|
| Is that snippet most likely an expression of bias, or is it
| most likely setting up to challenge bias?
| alex_young wrote:
| https://web.archive.org/web/20231031143032/https://www.washi...
| boeingUH60 wrote:
| Good luck to these people, hope it turns out well. Personally, I
| can't imagine home-schooling kids. I neither have the time nor
| patience to do that, which is why I appreciate teachers.
|
| Besides, I believe school is also a place for kids to socialize
| with and learn from their peers. I'm very introverted, but I
| think I would have ended up horribly social-wise if I was home-
| schooled.
| krastanov wrote:
| Just FYI, while I share the overall sentiment, I think you are
| not up to date on the socialization aspect of homeschooling.
| Typical homeschooling today includes activities where most
| homeschooled kids from the town gather together for PE or art
| or other enrichment activities, maybe even specialized academic
| activities.
| Loughla wrote:
| There is no such thing as typical homeschooling, in my
| experience in education (decades and decades).
|
| It is extremely dependent on 1. access to wealth, 2.
| underlying reason for homeschooling (religion/safety/other
| item), and 3. where in the country you live (rural v suburban
| v urban).
|
| In that order specifically. Homeschooling is the ultimate
| class solidification technique. Those with wealth can almost
| certainly guarantee their children will do really well. Those
| without don't stand a chance in hell.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| > Homeschooling is the ultimate class solidification
| technique
|
| In what ways that are different from any public or private
| school?
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Yup. There are a few big buckets in the US.
|
| 1. Religious Home Schoolers. They are primarily
| homeschooled because the parents are very religious and
| don't want them in public schools because of fears their
| kids will become too secular.
|
| 2. Wealthy Home Schoolers. These are very well off people
| who choose to home school their kids for any number of
| reasons (like their traditional schooling options being
| poor) but can afford to hire tutors or teachers or if they
| teach the kids themselves, there were previously teachers.
|
| 3. Group Home Schoolers. These are families that have
| grouped up to split the duties of homeschooling across
| multiple families. Sometimes for all classes or just a few.
| The kids are more likely to have more day-to-day connection
| with other kids/students other than their siblings.
|
| All of these groups have tons of cross over. Religious
| group home schoolers is a big thing right now. But your
| opinion on homeschooling is likely heavily built on the
| type of homeschooling you have witnessed/been involved in.
|
| At the end of the day, everyone has their own experience
| and biases built into schooling from their own lived
| experiences. For every, "I was homeschooled and grew up to
| be very social and successful" story, there is a, "I
| learned nothing and I don't know how to talk to people"
| story.
| chasd00 wrote:
| > in my experience in education (decades and decades).
|
| are you a public school teacher by chance? your view seems
| biased against anyone who does not send their kids to
| public school.
| watwut wrote:
| Large part of socialization is what happens outside of
| structured interactions. During breaks, when being with
| friends you have choosen by yourself and so on.
|
| The activities you mention are not even thought about as
| socialization situation outside of homeschooling context -
| because kids come, engage in highly structured activity and
| leave.
| 303uru wrote:
| Ya, this doesn't end well. The data isn't amazing for
| homeschooling, but what I've seen shows a strong bimodal
| distribution. Extremely wealthy home schoolers with tons of
| resources have kids that perform well in college and have
| strong lifetime earnings. Everyone else not so much, unprepared
| for college, earnings well below their peers. Pair this with
| the fairly predatory organizations offering "learning
| materials" and education online. Could probably make a few
| million launching an overnight online school run by a bible
| trained LLM.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Extremely wealthy home schoolers with tons of resources
| have kids that perform well in college and have strong
| lifetime earnings. Everyone else not so much, unprepared for
| college, earnings well below their peers.
|
| So... exactly the same as public schools, then?
| chasd00 wrote:
| right. what they want is "wealthy home schoolers with tons
| of resources" to suffer in college and have low lifetime
| earnings in the same way as "everyone else". That's
| equality.
| zaphar wrote:
| I think possibly the worst place to learn and practice social
| skills is from other kids who are just as in the dark as you
| are.
|
| In my experience a home schooled child is significantly more
| likely to be good at social skills than a public schooled
| child. They are also adept at navigating adult conversation and
| social situations much sooner.
| Loughla wrote:
| My experience is the absolute opposite of yours. In all
| seriousness, there is a trend of homeschooled kids coming to
| the local large high school for the extracurriculars, and the
| school offering Autism testing, because they are so far
| behind socially.
|
| I find it interesting that your experience is the opposite.
| Where in the world do you live?
| zaphar wrote:
| I've lived all over the country. I was homeschooled as well
| and have a number of friends who were.
|
| Anecdotal evidence is going to vary certainly and effect is
| highly dependent on the parent. But I've been around
| homeschooling groups for over 30 years now and the balance
| of them have been significantly ahead of the public
| schooled.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > the school offering Autism testing, because they are so
| far behind socially.
|
| Do you have any published evidence for this?
| rootusrootus wrote:
| My experience is exactly the opposite. Homeschooled kids
| frequently have to learn how to adult all at once, right as
| they get dumped into the pool with everyone else to go find a
| way to make a living.
|
| The most successful kids that I see are the ones who have
| professional instructors by day and excellent support at
| home. Not one or the other, but both.
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > Homeschooled kids frequently have to learn how to adult
| all at once
|
| How does sitting in a room with a bunch of kids, all of
| whom are within one year of you in age, with an authority
| figure at the front telling you exactly what to do, teach
| you "how to adult"?
|
| It might prepare you for Army boot camp, which is the only
| "adult" place you're likely to encounter that kind of
| environment. Even prison usually has a range of age groups.
| rootusrootus wrote:
| > with an authority figure at the front telling you
| exactly what to do
|
| This is not an accurate description of school. Maybe,
| _maybe_ in high school and college you kinda sorta get to
| something resembling that, but for elementary school and
| middle school it is nothing at all like your description.
|
| I'll grant you that 40-50 years ago it was a bit more
| regimented. I'm old too. But I have school age kids in
| both elementary and middle school, and I have a lot of
| experience in what their environment looks like. It's
| very dynamic, lots of hands-on learning opportunities.
| tivert wrote:
| > This is not an accurate description of school. Maybe,
| maybe in high school and college you kinda sorta get to
| something resembling that, but for elementary school and
| middle school it is nothing at all like your description.
|
| Elementary and middle school are even _less_ like being
| an adult than high school
|
| I think GP's point is that the school environment is
| nothing like "adulting," so your original point was just
| plain wrong.
|
| And I agree with the GP: I don't see any reason why home-
| schooled kids would be at a disadvantage to public school
| kids when learning to navigate the adult world, because
| the school environment is strange and not at all focused
| on "adult life skills."
| Turing_Machine wrote:
| > This is not an accurate description of school.
|
| Hmm... so you're saying that students aren't segregated
| into artificial cohorts of a specific age, and there
| isn't an authority figure in the classroom telling them
| what to do?
|
| Perhaps that's the case where you live (though
| I'm...skeptical), but it certainly is the case here and
| everywhere else I've ever lived.
| chasd00 wrote:
| "who have professional instructors by day"
|
| what school age child has access to that? Maybe in the most
| selective and well funded private schools there's
| professional instructors put public school? No way.
| mcast wrote:
| Probably school districts in close proximity to
| prestigious schools (Boston/Harvard) who can hire new
| grads who want to stay within the university bubble.
| weeznerps wrote:
| >They are also adept at navigating adult conversation and
| social situations much sooner.
|
| And they are often worse at navigating interactions with
| children who are not homeschooled (at least I was).
| Specificity is king.
| chasd00 wrote:
| home school kids arent locked in a cage. There's all kinds of
| social engagement activities available to home schoolers, i
| would argue even more than public school. The social
| isolation rumor of home schoolers is totally unfounded in my
| experience. Maybe it was true 30 years ago but it's certainly
| not true for school age kids toay.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| When you have kids your perspective on many, many things
| changes in very big ways. This is more true when the pregnancy
| is planned for and you and your spouse are both ready to have
| children.
|
| We don't personally home school but have many friends that do.
| It's a very common thing in our church and community. It's hard
| to tell what kids are homeschooled versus the ones that aren't.
| Many homeschools engage in co-op programs and use curricula to
| drive personal engagement. For instance in one family we're
| very good friends with they use a curriculum that requires
| community service for middle school ages and up. There are
| several charities that they engage with in addition to the
| community service activities that the church is doing.
| chongli wrote:
| Home schooling doesn't mean setting up the garage with a
| chalkboard and two kids at their desks with mom or dad playing
| teacher. Home schooling doesn't even have to take place at
| home! Lots of homeschooling parents will take their kids to the
| library, the (science, art, natural history) museum, to offices
| and factories, and out into nature preserves.
|
| It also doesn't mean just Billy and his little sister Jenny
| learning all by themselves. Homeschooling parents often join
| groups where they can bring all the kids together. The kids can
| socialize and the parents can share responsibility for teaching
| and supervising.
|
| It also doesn't mean just the parents participate. At my local
| public library, the children's floor has a huge amount of
| programming aimed at homeschooling families. The librarians run
| activities with the kids, showing them how to find books in the
| library for science research, make crafts together (by hand and
| with library 3D printers), learn about engineering by building
| cars and robots with electronics components.
|
| Homeschooling can of course be done badly and we should worry
| about kids in those environments. However, homeschooling done
| right can be far more dynamic and engaging than the best public
| schools around. It also doesn't have to be expensive, it just
| takes time and commitment from the parents involved.
| bluefirebrand wrote:
| In Alberta, homeschool is really more akin to "remote school"
| than homeschool.
|
| The kids are still required to pass the same exams to get their
| high school diploma, and they still get a package of course
| work and required reading and such. They also have access to a
| teacher to ask questions to, who can help explain concepts,
| projects, and such.
|
| My wife was homeschooled here growing up and she loved it. She
| would finish her school for the day in the morning then do
| whatever she wanted for the rest of her time. She would also
| finish her courses early and have long summers. Now she has a
| masters degree and leads teams at work.
|
| Definitely not for every family or every kid, but the outcomes
| don't have to be terrible
| brightball wrote:
| When I moved into my current house about 10 years ago, the family
| next door home schooled. I'd never known any home schoolers
| before and definitely had some notions about how terrible it must
| be until I learned about it.
|
| This family was part of a home school group with other families.
| The kids went to different houses every day and had an instructor
| focus on 1 subject for half of the day, mixed in with free time,
| depending on the age. 2 subjects per day, so as a parent your
| teaching commitment was a half day a week on 1 subject.
|
| They would do field trips. They held a school play in a garage
| complete with costumes and video. And the kids were smart, well
| mannered, socially adjusted kids with very happy and normal
| lives. And there are plenty of sports opportunities as well. As
| far as I know, they all went to public high school too.
|
| Completely shifted my view of what I thought home schooling was,
| which was the kids stuck in 1 house with 1 parent all day in
| social isolation.
|
| The reality was closer to a model of a Montessori school which
| has a huge amount of success stories.
| CharlesW wrote:
| There are many home-schooling success stories, and also many
| home-schooling horror stories.
|
| https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...
| keiferski wrote:
| It seems to me that the only relevant question here is how
| home schooling compares to public schools when it comes to
| "horror stories." And there certainly aren't a lack of public
| school horror stories...
| pixl97 wrote:
| There are plenty of 'public school' horror stories because
| these things are public and can be audited in a great
| number of cases.
|
| You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when they
| happen because they are private. Maybe you'll be a
| therapist and years later get to talk to one of these
| people how they are effectively crippled for the rest of
| their life. Or you'll be like me that grew up in a place
| that had a bunch of religious organizations that
| homeschooled most of their children with educations that
| I'd consider completely and totally deficient, and then
| pull those same people back into the organization as
| cheap/uneducated labor they could abuse.
| keiferski wrote:
| Sure, I don't think anyone denies that there are some
| home schooling horror stories. But it really doesn't seem
| like most public schools do a great job either, so the
| question is if this broken system damages more people
| than one dominated by home schooling.
| klodolph wrote:
| We have some insight into the answer to this, because
| public schooling is (more or less) a replacement for home
| schooling. Home schooling has an incredible amount of
| inequality built in to it. Affluent parents can hire
| instructors. Poor parents may not even be able to meet
| their children's basic schooling needs, if it weren't for
| public schools.
|
| Obviously there's a lot of middle ground between those
| two extremes, and the circumstances today don't exactly
| match the circumstances of the mid-19th century, which is
| roughly when modern public schools started appearing in
| the US (based on the "Prussian model").
|
| There are a lot of different objectives that public
| schooling sets out to achieve. It can be too easy to
| focus on narrow sets of metrics like test scores, or
| collect a bunch of anecdotes about bad experiences in
| public schools (or bad experiences in homeschooling). IMO
| it's probably a lot easier to fix this broken system
| rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling
| instead.
| scarmig wrote:
| > IMO it's probably a lot easier to fix this broken
| system rather than burn it to the ground and do
| homeschooling instead.
|
| Imagine your school district has banned teaching algebra
| to 8th graders, for reasons of equity. You're upset at
| this, since you have a child about to attend 8th grade.
| You go to a school board meeting, express yourself, and
| are at best ignored or more likely called names. What,
| from the perspective of a parent with a child who needs
| an education, do you then do? Fixing the system would be
| nice and all, but how do you do that before your kid
| becomes an adult, let alone make up for all the damage
| public schooling has been doing in the meantime?
| otoburb wrote:
| If a family is willing and resourced to (deeply) consider
| homeschooling because of one subject (you mentioned
| Algebra for 8th graders[1]), then another less
| expensive/effortful path could be hiring an afterschool
| math tutor, or sitting down with your child to work
| through Khan Academy together.
|
| Both suggestions require extra time, while still keeping
| your child "within the system" through attending school
| and (presumably?) receiving a decent-enough education in
| other non-math subjects. If the malaise extends to (many)
| other subjects, then I could see how home schooling
| becomes a more attractive option.
|
| [1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37741653
| petertodd wrote:
| > then another less expensive/effortful path could be
| hiring an afterschool math tutor, or sitting down with
| your child to work through Khan Academy together.
|
| ...so now after your child spends hours every day at
| school, they have to spend yet more hours learning what
| they should have learned in school.
|
| You can see why so many parents decide that for more
| effort, they can save their child a lot of wasted time,
| effort, resentment, and bad influences. Particularly
| families where at least one parent can stay at home (and
| these days, working from home makes that so much easier
| once kids are old enough to learn by themselves).
| ndriscoll wrote:
| The math situation is a clear signal that school
| administration/education departments do not prioritize
| education, and in fact find it unfair that some students
| actually manage to learn something, and want to stop
| that. It's not that they don't have the resources or
| enough interest to fill classes; it's that they don't
| want kids to learn too much. It's fair to infer that this
| attitude is not limited to math.
|
| Ostensibly education is why the schools exist. If they're
| not going to do that, let's at least let the kids go play
| in the park or something. They'd probably get better
| socialization that way anyway.
| sfink wrote:
| > the circumstances today don't exactly match the
| circumstances of the mid-19th century
|
| That's a bit of an understatement. I'm not great at
| history, but my understanding is that the mid-19th
| century was a little lacking in videoconferencing
| software, educated people with the resources to be on the
| other end of that video link, population density to have
| enough other like-minded kids within driving... uh,
| horse-riding range, up to date books, parents who weren't
| gone to the factories or fields during the day, etc.
|
| > There are a lot of different objectives that public
| schooling sets out to achieve.
|
| Agreed. There is a smaller set of objectives that they
| actually do achieve.
|
| > IMO it's probably a lot easier to fix this broken
| system rather than burn it to the ground and do
| homeschooling instead.
|
| I would assert that it's impossible to fix this broken
| system, and I can cite a lot of past history. I would
| also assert that replacing it entirely with homeschooling
| (which is not a single thing, but whatever) is also a
| guaranteed path to failure. The only hope I see is for
| exploration to be possible, and for people in the
| different situations to learn from each other. The public
| school institutions do try to experiment, but are
| incredibly restricted in all sorts of ways. Homeschoolers
| have the training wheels off and are much more free to
| crash straight into the bushes or off a cliff, but in
| practice plenty don't and plenty come up with a lot of
| different ways of doing things, some of them that seem to
| be working quite well in practice -- academically,
| socially, etc.
|
| I agree that sucking resources out of public schools to
| benefit the privileged few is very troubling and
| worrisome. But so is the current state and trajectory of
| public schooling, and holding everyone back may be short
| term fair but long term disastrous.
|
| We're homeschooling one of our kids (both until recently,
| when one went to a public charter high school). We've
| seen the institutional effects firsthand. Simple example:
| we found excellent math resources, but they weren't "A-G"
| accredited for University of California entrance
| requirements. Which gave us pause, since we wanted to
| leave that option open. We ended up going through a A-G
| accredited program, the best of what we could identify,
| for a semester. It was crap: rote memorization of
| algorithms exactly matching to the state standards, lots
| of repetitive exercises, minimally useful feedback from
| teachers and their assistants. My son passed all of their
| tests and got an A+ grade, and is now a semester behind
| in math because none of that stuck in a way that is
| useful for building on. It was a waste of time. We gave
| up on it and the whole accredited path, and went back to
| an online program that is far more conceptual, rigorous,
| and just plain effective. (His earlier public school
| experience was somewhere in the middle, Again he did
| quite well there according to the state tests.)
|
| My guess is that it's yet another form of
| enshittification: A-G accreditation is very valuable, but
| once you get it there's no profit in increasing quality,
| only in growing your student base. There aren't enough
| accredited places to provide any competition on quality,
| especially when there's so much disagreement about what
| "quality" is in the first place, and as usual any useful
| definition ends up being expensive. Non-accredited places
| have to compete on quality.
|
| (For anyone who finds value in my personal opinions:
| Silicon Valley High School math bad, Art of Problem
| Solving math good.)
| dmazzoni wrote:
| Are you comparing the best public schools to the best
| homeschools? Or the worst to the worst? Or the average to
| the average?
|
| I suspect that the education kids get at the worst 20% of
| public schools in the country is still way better than
| the worst 20% of homeschoolers.
|
| I also would totally believe that the education kids get
| at the top 20% of homeschools is better than the average
| public school.
|
| Public schools are far from perfect, but there are
| minimum standards and there are resources at the state
| and federal level to try to improve schools that aren't
| meeting those standards.
|
| My problem with homeschools is that in most states, there
| aren't any standards being enforced. If homeschools had
| surprise inspections and biannual state-run testing, I'd
| be fine with it.
| biomcgary wrote:
| The reason why many homeschoolers opt out of public
| schools is because of those minimum standards. Who wants
| their children to be taught to a minimal standard? My
| autistic son would still be completely non-verbal (and
| probably worse) if we put him into the local public
| school system. We saw the classroom he would have been
| in, it was horrific. Instead, he has a speech language
| pathologist working with him one-on-one three to four
| hours per day.
| pixl97 wrote:
| The homeschooling crowd is so far up their own butts that
| they cannot accept homeschooling has horrific and hidden
| outcomes.
|
| It's kind of the democracy versus authoritarianism
| debate. Authoritarians typically look really good on
| paper because they can conceal their mistakes, while the
| democracy bears all to the populace. And yea, there are
| some benevolent dictatorships with great outcomes, but I
| don't think that a single one of the homeschoolers would
| think that would be a valid point because it's also the
| exception.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Comparing homeschools to the worst public schools is a
| false comparison in the United States, as school quality
| equates to wealth, and poor people by and large don't
| homeschool.
|
| Most of this stuff is driven by religion and politics.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| One of the biggest, most important roles of public
| schools is to pry children away from their parents and
| give them baseline floor of education and independence
| (as well as force them to interact with the public,
| giving them context for what's normal and presenting
| opportunities for abuse to be discovered), no matter how
| crazy or abusive their parents are. The education can be
| pretty mediocre, as long as it achieves this goal.
|
| Letting parents opt out of public schools means that the
| most committed abusers get to sidestep this safety valve.
| dingnuts wrote:
| > educations that I'd consider completely and totally
| deficient, and then pull those same people back into the
| organization as cheap/uneducated labor they could abuse.
|
| You just described public schools, Universities, and
| their relationship to the student loan racket. Deficient
| education followed by indentured servitude through loan
| repayment. False advertising by public school teachers of
| a ticket to the easy life through any university degree.
| If I had a nickel for every person I've met who had their
| life messed up by that lie, I'd be rich
| soco wrote:
| I suppose you are talking about the US school system of
| late, right? Because even there it used to be better, and
| there's also an entire world outside with many different
| systems (possibly with their own rackets, just like
| homeschooling).
| ryandrake wrote:
| > You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when
| they happen because they are private.
|
| You're also not going to hear about the homeschooling
| horrors from the typical HN demographic. Broadly, and
| obviously with exceptions, there are two groups of
| parents who choose to homeschool: 1. Parents who have an
| abundance of educational resources and time and do it to
| provide a higher quality of education, and 2. Parents who
| do it for religious separatism reasons because public
| school gets in the way of their indoctrination. Selection
| bias means you're going to see a lot of the outcomes from
| #1 posting here, and not a lot of #2.
|
| For every example who was homeschooled with a high-
| quality curriculum, had great parent-run
| extracurriculars, socialized well, and so on, how many
| examples are invisibly stuck as someone's housewife who
| can't even be employed because their only textbook was
| the Bible, and they didn't learn anything past 3rd grade
| math? They're not posting their horror story here on HN.
| eduction wrote:
| Why do you presume that religious parents necessarily
| have bad outcomes homeschooling?
|
| I have a relative who is deeply religious. I know I would
| not agree with her on, for example, evolution. But she is
| loving and devoted and her two daughters have received
| tons of time and investment from her in their education,
| far more than they would receive in a public school.
|
| I obviously haven't, like, tested her kids, but they do
| seem smart and well adjusted. I'm not really worried
| about the limitations on their scientific learning --
| it's not ideal if they are skipping some evolutionary
| biology (I actually have no idea but I assume they are)
| but they are going to leave home, go to college in a very
| secular country and get to learn that stuff. I'm sure
| with the internet they are already widely exposed to what
| science has to say about e.g. the creation of the
| universe (which, honestly, how many high school students
| could walk you through?).
|
| By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling
| with the "only textbook is the Bible" and in most states
| you need to file a curriculum every year that gets
| reviewed and approved.
| throwaway626 wrote:
| > By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling
| with the "only textbook is the Bible"
|
| They're pretty common, in fact. Here's a curriculum
| company that'll gladly give you the tools:
| https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/
|
| "The Bible is the only education you need" is a very
| common meme among evangelical Christians.
|
| > and in most states you need to file a curriculum every
| year that gets reviewed and approved.
|
| Most states have almost no recourse to reject submitted
| curricula, no matter how specious they are. One
| influential homeschool association has a 24/7 legal
| hotline specifically for subverting these mild attempts
| at accountability.
| bumbledraven wrote:
| >> By the way, I don't think there is anyone
| homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible"
|
| > Here's a curriculum company that'll gladly give you the
| tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/
|
| Contrary to your claim, the linked page implies nothing
| about the Bible being the "only textbook". It simply
| offers a set of Bible lessons for homeschoolers ("This
| exciting curriculum contains homeschool lessons that
| cover the entire Bible chronologically in four
| years...").
| throwaway626 wrote:
| You misread the claim and are arguing against something I
| didn't say.
| NotSuspicious wrote:
| While you only wrote that that website provides the
| "tools" it would have been very reasonable to infer from
| your comment that you were also implying that they agreed
| with Bible-alone teaching.
| bugglebeetle wrote:
| I would assume any kind of education that is dependent on
| strict adherence to a specific ideological doctrine,
| whose tolerance of free inquiry is similarly constrained,
| to underperform one without these limitations. This was
| my experience of attending public schools that were under
| the thumb of right wing religious nuts vs. attending a
| state university that was not. I learned much more at the
| latter than the former.
| dmazzoni wrote:
| Not all religious parents who homeschool will have bad
| outcomes, but it's by far the largest demographic of
| people who fail to actually educate their children.
|
| As for your last statement: in most states there's no
| oversight. Sure, parents have to file a curriculum that
| gets reviewed and approved. Parents jump through that
| hoop by downloading a curriculum and mailing it in.
| There's nobody checking that they actually follow any of
| that curriculum. There's no state-run testing as a check
| and balance.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Religious groups have broad discretion in curriculum in
| most states.
|
| My kids went to a Catholic elementary school, where I was
| the school board president. A breakaway group tried to
| insert a "classical education" curriculum on the school,
| which is a popular trend in more right-wing Christian
| schools that was adopted from homeschool curriculum.
|
| The biggest growth in private schooling is in this and
| similar curriculum. It's attractive to more reactionary
| people as they can assert "local control" while using
| texts that are too old to be considered controversial.
|
| Parents aren't to blame necessarily, people want what's
| good for their kids. But awful elements of society are
| abusing religion to achieve their social ends. In my
| case, I was accused of being a "Marxist" for not
| condemning a fundraiser that provided winter clothing for
| poor children, including migrants swooped up and shipped
| across the country. We've allowed people to be
| brainwashed by charlatans.
| bakuninsbart wrote:
| If your relative is so indoctrinated by neo-christian
| ideology that they believe in creationism over evolution,
| the question is more if they should raise children at
| all, much less educate them.
| escapedmoose wrote:
| A few friends shared with me some of the textbooks that
| their extremely religious sister uses to homeschool her
| children. They were hilarious! Extremely inaccurate and
| full of indoctrination garbage. Then we all realized that
| this is what these kids' "education" amounts to... not as
| funny anymore. Maybe their only textbook isn't the Bible,
| but that doesn't mean it's any good.
|
| After her eldest child was bordering on middle school age
| and still completely illiterate, she wound up sending the
| lot back to public schools. Thank god, but I still feel
| awful for those kids.
|
| (Mandatory "not all homeschoolers" of course.)
| petertodd wrote:
| Much more important to worry about how well the kids
| understand math, and secondarily, physics (aka applied
| math!) and/or similarly math-using subjects (accounting,
| baking, chemistry, economics, programming, etc. etc.
| etc.) Those subjects are genuinely hard to master, and
| everyone should understand the basics because they're
| useful for so many careers.
|
| As you say, learning the basics of evolution is something
| that can be done on your own in a weekend reading
| wikipedia. Similarly, you can learn the mainstream
| scientific explanations of how the universe was created
| from watching a few youtube videos. That's basically how
| I learned that stuff as an (atheist) homeschooled kid.
|
| School seems to fail to teach the philosophy of science
| well anyway - skepticism, evidence, double-blind testing,
| etc. So I don't think evangelical homeschoolers are
| missing that much.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> public school gets in the way of their indoctrination_
|
| Public schools themselves indoctrinate children--just
| with a different set of values than many parents have.
| The people who built the US system of widespread
| compulsory public schooling in the US were quite explicit
| about that being one of the primary purposes of the
| system. (So were the people who built the Prussian system
| that was referenced elsewhere in the thread.)
| biomcgary wrote:
| Assumptions about homeschooling are just a socially
| acceptable form of stereotyping. I was homeschooled and
| I'm a computational evolutionary biologist with a Ph.D
| from a reasonably well known state university.
|
| Yale flew me out to interview for a biology graduate
| program. I had the credentials and test scores to be
| considered, but was turned down, quite possibly because
| of those stereotypes (based on the questions I got in the
| interview process).
| Animats wrote:
| Right. I've seen #1 in Silicon Valley. One homeschooled
| girl made it into Harvard. (Unfortunately, she died there
| in a horse accident.)
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Very much so. Watching the Last Week Tonight segment
| (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI) on this
| recently, in a startling number of states, a one time
| declaration that you're homeschooling effectively drops
| the kids out of the system with zero oversight from that
| point on.
|
| You get things like a Christian family whose "curriculum"
| for their daughters was: listen to classical music, bible
| listening 20 minutes/day, handwriting, bible
| memorization, exercise 15/day (not great so far, but wait
| for it): clean room 6/week, fold laundry 5/week, clean
| living room 5/week, clear off bar 6/week, tidy shelves in
| dining room 3/week, tidy stereo cabinet 2/week, clean
| brown cupboard in pantry 5/week, clean storeroom 1/week,
| tidy blue chest, dust piano, clean and vacuum, clean
| hallway, make bed...
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| I don't know if that is the only relevant question. If you
| have a terrible time in public/traditional school, you may
| resent and blame a whole slew of factors. If you have a
| terrible time while homeschooled, you are likely to resent
| and blame the people teaching you or the ones who made that
| decision for you. Your parents.
|
| That is a pretty serious factor to weight.
| scythe wrote:
| Research on the question is limited. One review found
| _weakly_ positive average outcomes for homeschooled
| children, although they performed worse in one interesting
| dimension: they were considered inferior military recruits.
|
| https://www.educacaodomiciliar.fe.unicamp.br/sites/www.educ
| a...
|
| Selection effects create a "blind men and the elephant"
| problem when considering anecdotes about homeschoolers.
| Homeschool children who return to public school may do so
| because their parents lack the resources to homeschool them
| effectively, so they might perform worse (academically &
| socially) than the average homeschool child. But homeschool
| children who get jobs in the technology industry and post
| on _Hacker News_ are probably more successful than the
| average. It remains for the reader to determine whether the
| lack of "success" of homeschool children who join the
| military, in contrast to homeschooler mean success
| elsewhere, is due to a selection effect or a psychological
| effect of homeschooling.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| An acquaintance of mine and his wife just started an
| alternative, semi-home school (hybrid system). Neither of
| them have any education experience, just a
| libertarian/anti-government mindset.
|
| They were able to franchise a school for, I believe
| $10-15,000 (certainly under $20K), a background check, and
| a 2 hour open book test for them both.
|
| I struggle to see how this is acceptable for not just
| "homeschooling" your own kids, but other people's kids.
| Amezarak wrote:
| Similarly, there are many public school horror stories. For
| example, despite spending $21k/student, making it the third-
| highest funded school system in the country, 23 Baltimore
| schools failed to produce a single student with basic math
| proficiency.[1]
|
| One of my friends went to a school where she was beaten every
| day and the teachers had totally given up and most of them
| did not teach.
|
| Unfortunately, we need much more data than we have. The
| article mentions school quality is often not the driving
| reason for homeschooling, but you can definitely imagine
| public schools where almost any level of homeschooling is a
| better alternative.
|
| [1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-
| test-r....
|
| My children are in public school, but I am not sure if they
| will stay there. Even in "good" schools, there's many
| problems (especially in middle schools) and a lot of time is
| wasted if your kids have any academic ability at all.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| School is parents + school. I would say about 60% parenting
| and 40% school. If you don't push your kid academically
| nothing is going to happen.
|
| Peer groups matter. In "good" schools you're optimizing the
| peer group. A good/bad school rating has little to do with
| teacher capability.
| toomuchtodo wrote:
| So when do we start blaming parents instead of schools?
| And saying, "this is what you get, take it or leave it,
| you have to put effort in too"? Parents treat themselves
| as customers expecting a turnkey service, when instead
| they are stakeholders with their own book of work and
| responsibilities they need to be accountable for to
| deliver the environment and education their child will
| need to become a functioning member of society.
| huytersd wrote:
| This aspect is so different from South and East Asian
| society. We expect little from the teachers (not to say
| they're bad), the majority of the onus and blame lies
| with the parent.
| Amezarak wrote:
| It sounds like the article is about parents holding
| themselves fully accountable for their children's
| education.
|
| The problem is what you do with the parents who do not
| care at all. People making these statements that "it's
| about the parents" - well, it has some truth to it. But
| when 10% of the students are running the halls, screaming
| and fighting, beating random kids, having sex and doing
| drugs in the bathrooms, and assaulting teachers who don't
| care anymore, then it doesn't matter what the other 90%
| of the parents are doing.
| nradov wrote:
| We started blaming parents long, long ago and never
| stopped. Unfortunately that's not effective in many
| cases. A lot of parents are ineffectual, apathetic, or
| shameless. Blaming them might make the rest of us feel
| morally superior but it doesn't improve outcomes for
| their children.
|
| And for older children, peers tend to influence them more
| than parents anyway. Turning around a failing student
| will often require separating them from their current
| friends. Tough to do when you can't afford to move to a
| better school district.
| ViktorV wrote:
| Just a personal anectode: I'm pretty sure that this
| wasn't true for me. I think some humans have an instinct
| for survival, maybe all of them, if a persons emotional
| needs are met then developing, advancing, learning is a
| natural byproduct without any external pressure. Just
| like we learn to talk and walk without someone telling us
| to do.
|
| All the push just hurt me in the end, I would be a lot
| better off without traditional school, rarely I learned
| anything useful there.
| orochimaaru wrote:
| Push for me isn't edicts. It's providing support and
| opportunity. I send my daughter to extra math lessons.
| She didn't need them she was solidly an average. But
| getting those has really improved her level. I have to
| spend time with her, make learning fun, help with
| homework, coax reasoning out of an opinionated 12 yr old,
| etc, etc.
|
| It's not a "do this or else". It's basically let's do it
| together.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I would guess it's 90% parenting and 10% school.
|
| If you search niche.com, you can see proficiency scores
| correlate exactly with household income. Same school
| systems, same new facilities, same teacher compensation,
| same class sizes.
| jewayne wrote:
| And I would say that 50% of parenting is getting your kid
| into the right school. I don't know about you, but
| suburban life as I know it is organized entirely around
| the importance of a good school district.
|
| And are you saying they have per-student household income
| data? Or they just have the household income data for the
| school district as a whole? Or maybe the household income
| data for the student body as a whole? Those are very
| different things.
| lotsofpulp wrote:
| I assume niche.com is using household incomes for a
| specific school's surrounding neighborhoods, although I
| cannot attest to how accurate it is compared to actual
| school boundaries.
|
| I think we might be saying the same thing though, since
| "right" school generally means a school where a large
| proportion of the other kids have parents who are
| throwing a lot of resources at the kids (including the
| parents' time and attitudes towards academic learning).
| It just so happens that this group of parents is higher
| income, so the easily visible statistic will be
| neighborhoods with higher income households will have
| higher academic proficiency percentages in the schools.
|
| There is also this old map:
|
| https://opportunityatlas.org/
| psychlops wrote:
| I doubt if homeschooling would work in Baltimore either.
| whatshisface wrote:
| What "different" schools allow parents to do is pull the
| top 1% of lucky students out to escape. Maybe most of the
| parents in the low cost of living areas can't give any
| time to their children because they've got three jobs,
| but there are always going to be the few that can. The
| same goes for a few who can one way or another afford
| private school. It's better that three percent get
| through than none.
| jewayne wrote:
| Well, unless having the three percent get through makes
| it impossible to improve the condition of the other 97%.
| Survivorship bias is our favorite logical fallacy here in
| the US.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Yeah, if you reduce the number of frogs in the pot while
| keeping the burner setting constant, the ones remaining
| will boil sooner.
| escapedmoose wrote:
| Baltimore's government has been corrupt af for years for
| some reason or another. In this circumstance, they should
| be treated as an outlier imo
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| Almost exactly like public and private school!
| newsclues wrote:
| Sounds like regular schools or private boarding schools.
|
| Schools are a tool to teach people at scale. Tools can be
| used well or poorly and for various end goals.
| bitlax wrote:
| I guess enough time has passed that people are posting
| Elizabeth Bartolet again.
| omginternets wrote:
| Are there any broad indicators of what separates the success
| stories from the horror stories?
| 303uru wrote:
| Sure, that's one model. The underlying problem is the
| completely unregulated nature. Similarly, there is household in
| my neighborhood that home schools. The kids (all 8 of them)
| never leave the house. They have a 8ft. fence and 1 acre yard
| where I assume they get some outside time. No one visits. Only
| dad is allowed to talk to anyone and when he does it's
| extraordinarily weird.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| For this anecdote I can provide you with about 20 anecdotes
| that are the complete opposite in nature. There is no
| regulation, but does there need to be? Homeschoolers take the
| same standardized tests as everyone else - that's about as
| regulatory as it needs to be (and even that's questionable).
| rjbwork wrote:
| This is just not the case. In many states it's nearly
| completely unregulated, and the home school lobby is
| working diligently to strip even those regulations.
| colpabar wrote:
| You didn't answer his question - why are regulations on
| teaching your own children in your own home so necessary?
| 303uru wrote:
| Stripping myself of my morals and ethics, sure. Maybe I
| don't need to give a shit whether someone else's kid has
| any future. I'd rather care.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| This assumes government schools has everyone's morals and
| ethics in mind.
| whatshisface wrote:
| What we see in the education debate is a consistent lack
| of care for the kids who get ahead (why'd _they_ get
| ahead of _my_ kids?) and a consistent care for the kids
| being left behind, and that produces a trend to
| regulation and centralization that extinguishes anything
| good. The same forces that take children away from highly
| dedicated parents and put them into underfunded districts
| take advanced course tracks and the creativity of
| teachers away from them when they get there.
| eduction wrote:
| This is an insightful way of framing things. It had not
| occurred to me to look at it this way. It describes my
| own issues with school growing up and my own interest in
| homeschooling -- the chance to provide individualized
| instruction and to tap into play and creativity. Schools
| can provide a baseline but for bright, motivated students
| they can be like a straightjacket. It's interesting and I
| suppose logical that the arguments against homeschooling
| focus on the idea that the practice dangerously removes
| that baseline. (I don't find those arguments particularly
| convincing because I had troubled peers who I went to
| public school with, and the school system helped
| precisely none of them substantially improve their
| lives.)
| whatshisface wrote:
| On top of that there is an element of "liability control"
| where putting troubled kids in the same unsuccessful
| system as the other troubled kids makes the kids the
| problem, while putting them in a different unsuccessful
| system, which counts as an action in the non-utilitarian
| trolley problem ethics of our culture, and leads to some
| fraction of blame falling on the individual who tried to
| change the outcome.
| CryptoBanker wrote:
| Because one day those children are going to grow up,
| leave the home, and interact with other members of
| society. At that point it becomes a public interest.
| lcnPylGDnU4H9OF wrote:
| > At that point it becomes a public interest.
|
| This doesn't seem to be so self-evident. Why do I care
| about the education of those around me?
| alistairSH wrote:
| An educated populace...
|
| ...generates more economic activity
|
| ...understands basic civics and government
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > ...understands basic civics and government
|
| The public school system isn't doing that for our fellow
| citizens already. I fail to see why it would be worse if
| the failure happens at home rather than in a government
| building.
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Because they're going to be your neighbors, your co-
| workers, and your fellow voters.
|
| That's also why you care about the state of the public
| school system, even if you have no kids (or they don't
| attend public school).
| illirik wrote:
| A well-educated population is generally considered to be
| a good thing. That's why schooling is compulsory in
| almost every country in the world.
| colpabar wrote:
| Sure. I just don't think this argument that any child who
| is homeschooled is going to grow up and be a complete
| idiot and never contribute to society is a good one,
| especially since all of the comments in this thread
| making that argument are using anecdotes as evidence. I
| recently found out the band director at my high school
| was fucking kids. Can I use that to argue against all
| public schools? Of course not, so others should not be
| able to say "well I knew a kid who was homeschooled by a
| religious weirdo so all homeschooling is bad."
|
| It's just odd that so many people here seem to be so in
| favor of the "sit down and shut up" style of schooling.
| Isn't it pretty widely agreed upon that US public schools
| suck? Don't you think there are some parents who are
| homeschooling their children explicitly because they feel
| their public school would not prepare them to be good
| members of society?
| brodouevencode wrote:
| You're assuming that these existing regulations (assuming
| the ones in public education) produce a net good. Based
| on what I'm seeing from here that's not so much the case.
| rjbwork wrote:
| Because one of the biggest ways that child abuse is
| detected and abated is by interaction between students
| and children. Isolating children in insular communities
| is a really great way to abuse them and hide the evidence
| of it.
|
| Regular interaction with non-custodial adults provides
| more opportunities for child abuse to be uncovered and
| stopped. You can go on youtube and hear myriad
| testimonials from former homeschooled kids that were
| abused for _years_ on end. And nobody knew. Nobody even
| had a chance to know.
| watwut wrote:
| Homeschooling famillies do not do the same tests. And
| especially families whose kids are less likely to ace those
| tests will avoid them when they are voluntary.
| edgyquant wrote:
| > underlying problem is the completely unregulated nature
|
| No that's literally the main benefit. People actually get to
| teach their own kids without state indoctrination (either
| left or right.)
| spacephysics wrote:
| Fully agree, this is the primary benefit.
| alistairSH wrote:
| I love that when a parent tells a kid that Jesus rode a
| velociraptor it's "teaching" but when a school tells a kid
| the universe probably started with a big bang, it's
| "indoctrination".
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Public schools are highly regulated, and are on average
| horrible.
|
| I'd bet a lot on parents caring more about their kids welfare
| than regulators.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| There are many bad public schools - but it seems a bit
| hyperbolic to say the average public school is "horrible".
| giantg2 wrote:
| I guess it depends on how you measure it. If we go by
| percent of kids meeting the standards and a passing grade
| being 70%, you could justifiable say the schools are
| horrible on average.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| Agreed. I could have phrased that better.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| 40% of American adults can't do basic arithmetic[0],
| which seems like a disaster to me. 88% are apparently
| incapable of doing things like reading a simple table or
| comparing two documents and identifying sentences that
| express the same ideas between them[1][2]. Over 50%
| apparently can't scroll through a list of information
| about books and identify the author of a specific book
| they're told to find. I'll never forget that in 12th
| grade I took non-AP government, and we were still
| spending significant time going over the three branches
| of government _again_ (I 'm quite sure this was covered
| in elementary school) and somehow people were not getting
| 100% on everything. Other tasks included--not joking--
| coloring pictures of animals, which the teacher put up
| around the room.
|
| My school was actually rated decently for the area. Not
| the best, but pretty good.
|
| [0] https://phys.org/news/2018-03-high-adults-unable-
| basic-mathe...
|
| [1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
|
| [2] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section
| =1&sub_...
| akira2501 wrote:
| > The underlying problem is the completely unregulated
| nature.
|
| I didn't need your permission to give birth to my children,
| why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate
| them?
|
| > Only dad is allowed to talk to anyone and when he does it's
| extraordinarily weird.
|
| If you feel these children are legitimately being abused in
| some way, I'm guessing there are plenty of state resources to
| address that challenge.
|
| Do you actually feel there's abuse happening? Or, is it that
| you just find them unusual?
| throwaway2203 wrote:
| This is my thing, like what right does a public school have
| to regulate when I can and won't send my kids to school? If
| I decide to take a trip abroad for a month, that's on me...
| why do i have to worry about truancy court and CPS
| breathing down my neck?
| 303uru wrote:
| Your kid has a right to education, you don't get to deny
| them that right. It's funny how rugged individualism
| seems to end with self and extend to happily stomping on
| others.
| vharuck wrote:
| >I didn't need your permission to give birth to my
| children, why do I need your permission when deciding how I
| educate them?
|
| One legal theory that may be relevant was brought up long
| ago for a case on banned books in school: you have the
| right to raise your kid according to your beliefs, but many
| states guarantee children the right to education. So the
| state could regulate homeschooling to ensure all children
| have access to an actual education.
|
| >If you feel these children are legitimately being abused
| in some way, I'm guessing there are plenty of state
| resources to address that challenge.
|
| A lot of those resources rely on processes that come after
| reports from teachers and caregivers. If nobody outside the
| home ever sees or talks to the kids, there's not much the
| state can do to even start an investigation. Children who
| go to daycare or public school are seen by professionals
| trained to spot abuse.
|
| We allow anyone to have children, because otherwise we're
| on a very slippery and short slope towards eugenics. But
| those children are entitled to the same rights and
| protections as their parents. It's hard to strike a good
| balance between a family's freedom and a child's freedom.
|
| _Edited out some unnecessary detours in my ramblings_
| jononomo wrote:
| People just assume that other people must be abusing
| their kids. Sheesh. The commenter is describing a two-
| parent household with 8 children and a massive backyard
| -- the odds are that they're extremely happy and our
| commenter is just a grouch.
| akira2501 wrote:
| > but many states guarantee children the right to
| education
|
| They guarantee the right to /access/ education. This is
| not at all the same as guaranteeing that all children
| "must be educated at a state approved school."
|
| > If nobody outside the home ever sees or talks to the
| kids, there's not much the state can do to even start an
| investigation.
|
| I read an incredible number of police reports. There's a
| lot of abuse that gets detected outside of daycare and
| schools. Unless the children are literally locked into a
| basement, I doubt that the parents can continually
| exercise enough total control to keep whatever other
| abuse their committing hidden.
|
| To the extent that if it is happening, it's an
| exceptionally rare case, and I doubt that simply forcing
| all parents to send their children to a third party for
| education is going to have any impact on these
| particularly pernicious cases.
|
| I understand the instinct, but I think the solution is
| wrong, and it's an inappropriate case to use to defend
| schooling in general.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > They guarantee the right to /access/ education. This is
| not at all the same as guaranteeing that all children
| "must be educated at a state approved school."
|
| That's oversimplifying. You're right about the "at a
| state approved school", but the right is to access
| education to a set standard that will equip them for
| life.
|
| You can't just say "well, they have access to -my-
| education, so we're good". There should be caveats around
| quality and deliverability of education.
|
| Because if you (the generic 'you', not singling you out
| individually) have low/zero value educational material,
| and no desire to provide it for your children, then that
| is /not/ them accessing education in any meaninful sense
| of the concept.
| cycomanic wrote:
| > > The underlying problem is the completely unregulated
| nature.
|
| > I didn't need your permission to give birth to my
| children, why do I need your permission when deciding how I
| educate them?
|
| Because your children are not your property, they are your
| responsibility and we as society have decided that we want
| to make sure that the education is to a certain standard.
|
| As a side note I find it fascinating how people who feel
| strongly about individual freedom, believe they should have
| ultimate authority (sometimes it feels more like ownership)
| over their children. Why do you believe that the freedoms
| do not apply to children?
| akira2501 wrote:
| > Because your children are not your property, they are
| your responsibility
|
| I am their _guardian_.
|
| > and we as society have decided that we want to make
| sure that the education is to a certain standard.
|
| And what is that standard? Passing standardized tests?
| How do you account for the poor performance of American
| schools in general? How do you account for the
| differential performance across the country, let alone,
| wild performance differences across a single city? If a
| child goes to school but fails to become educated, can
| the sue the school district? Does the school owe them
| continued education until they meet the standard?
|
| > believe they should have ultimate authority (sometimes
| it feels more like ownership) over their children.
|
| If something happens to my children and I'm even just
| negligent then I will pay the ultimate price. You cannot
| ensconce in me this responsibility and then deny my
| authority to exercise control over them to maintain it.
|
| > Why do you believe that the freedoms do not apply to
| children?
|
| Why do you think children can't sign contracts or buy
| alcohol? They have _limited_ freedom, under my
| _guardianship_. This is more important than the States
| imputed idealism with respect to "education."
| watwut wrote:
| > How do you account for the poor performance of American
| schools in general
|
| Actually, American schools do not do badly in
| international comparisons. They are the number one, sure,
| but they are still pretty good.
| XorNot wrote:
| Also there aren't "American" schools. There are "American
| state" schools - 50 different versions.
|
| There's also some very unsurprising outcomes based on
| state policy there.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > If something happens to my children and I'm even just
| negligent then I will pay the ultimate price. You cannot
| ensconce in me this responsibility and then deny my
| authority to exercise control over them to maintain it.
|
| That's demonstrably false.
|
| You can do plenty of neglectful or negligent things to
| your children and face zero consequences.
| s1artibartfast wrote:
| I think I can explain the confusution.
|
| The state dictating and setting the rules is no more free
| than the parents setting the rules.
|
| This basically comes down to an argument not of freedom,
| but if the children are property of the state or parents.
|
| When you look at it this way, it makes perfect sense that
| libertairian minded folks would support homeschooling.
|
| After all, the state isnt offering the freedom of choice
| and action to children, it is making legal requirements
| and demands.
| 303uru wrote:
| >why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate
| them
|
| Your kid has a right to education, you don't get to deny
| them that right. It's funny how these arguments are all
| "don't tread on my right to tread on my kid."
| whatshisface wrote:
| I have got bad news about that, the majority of abusive
| households send the kids to school and scare them into
| silence. Regulations against abusive households do exist but
| enforcing them completely would require a degree of
| inescapable surveillance that cannot exist.
| ARandumGuy wrote:
| That may be true, but way more kids get sent to school then
| are home schooled, so that doesn't mean much on its own.
|
| The issue is that when a kid's at school, there are many
| people who may notice something's wrong. From teachers,
| school nurses, school administrators, and even other kids.
| This is by no means perfect, and many, many cases of abuse
| slip through the cracks. But it is something, which is more
| then many home schooled kids have.
|
| While I'd wager most home schooled kids aren't abused, the
| fact of the matter is it's much easier for an abusive
| parent to cover up their abuse if their child is home
| schooled. You may still feel home schooling is a net
| positive, but this aspect is very hard to deny.
| whatshisface wrote:
| Homeschooling requires some degree of investment in the
| child, even just to keep them occupied or tolerate their
| presence. School provides free childcare for long periods
| of time. I don't think the majority of abusive parents
| will ever homeschool their children, because most are not
| believers in teaching an abusive ideology but rather have
| simple personality disorders. "Homeschool makes it easier
| to hide abuse" presupposes that abusive parents are
| planning or organizing abuse which is plainly not true in
| the majority of cases.
|
| Like the Satanism panics of the 1990s demonstrate,
| elaborate imaginings of complex sadistic rituals that are
| necessarily rare[0] bordering on nonexistent, tend to
| capture the public mind and suck oxygen away from
| treating the totally unattractive (not even in the
| capacity of making for a true crime special) real
| problems.
|
| If you want to see this on TV, the last season of The
| Wire was about it.
|
| [0] There were actually a spate of ritual killings in
| Liberia through the 1970s, proving humanity capable at
| least and making the issue to be one of reasonableness.
| escapedmoose wrote:
| Unfortunately, of the 4 people I know personally who were
| homeschooled, it was a vehicle for abuse for 3 of them.
|
| One friend's mom wouldn't teach him the curriculum for
| months, and then when she knew a test was coming up she
| would make him study with her for 14 hours a day to try
| to cram it in. Then when he naturally performed poorly on
| state exams he was punished (often physically) for not
| trying hard enough. She regularly woke him up for classes
| when she wanted to be awake at 2 or 3 am, then later
| after her afternoon nap at 6 or 8pm. He grew up
| constantly tired, without a regular schedule of meals,
| and never made it to the group outings because he felt
| sick all the time.
|
| Another friend's mom just couldn't be bothered to teach
| and just took her out on "learning" hikes with other
| homeschooling moms, never taught her anything, and wound
| up sending her back to public school with severely (I
| mean _severely_ ) underdeveloped skills after being held
| back for several years.
|
| Neither of these parents I'm sure "planned" to abuse
| their children in this way. They just weren't up for the
| task of teaching in the way that a child requires, and
| their own personal issues turned that into a larger
| problem. But my friends suffered for it.
| whatshisface wrote:
| I don't think it's ever going to be possible to separate
| the outcomes of homeschooling from the selection of
| parents who desire to homeschool, but this overall
| neutral study (I'm not really arguing that homeschooling
| is a great thing just that it is okay) doesn't find
| evidence of the three out of four thing that you
| encountered extending to the whole population.
| https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8580227/
|
| My honest sympathies to your friends.
| n3storm wrote:
| Montessori is succesful with healthy wealthy beloved children.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Montessori was invented specifically for bottom income
| special needs kids.
| watwut wrote:
| Yes, but that is not how it is used today. Today it is used
| primary by wealthy heavily invested families.
| MadcapJake wrote:
| It's like people are reinventing all the same stuff schools do
| at scale. Can't we be more efficient as a society?
|
| Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail
| of this setup.
| brightball wrote:
| Are big efficient schools better than lots of small schools?
| bloaf wrote:
| https://www.americanscientist.org/article/the-most-
| dangerous...
|
| This article makes a case that the statistics of small
| sample sizes has bamboozled many different well-intentioned
| groups, including the small school movement.
|
| The argument is that the fact that many of the best schools
| are small is an artifact of statistics (de Moivre's
| equation) rather than evidence small schools are superior.
| giantg2 wrote:
| "Can't we be more efficient as a society?"
|
| Not the way government tends to work in US.
| jgeada wrote:
| It is wild that this is the take. This eep distrust of
| government is at the root of many American problems. It is
| deliberately created and fed, and it directly leads to some
| truly awful results: bad education, bad healthcare,
| virtually no public benefit for all the taxes we pay. But
| we do get world's largest military, large corporate
| subsidies, highest per capita healthcare costs.
|
| Unlike in most other Western countries, education in the US
| is controlled at a local level; every town, district, and
| city etc has its own rules, has to hire its own staff and
| pay for it all out of local taxes. And because the
| generally tiny constituency of each district, a very small
| number of nutcases can change the rules and impose their
| point of view for the school district.
|
| And because of the local funding, there can be huge
| resource and quality differences between schools for
| adjacent locations, just due to crossing some arbitrary
| jurisdiction line.
|
| It is madness, but it is a madness that is deeply
| loved/entrenched here.
| giantg2 wrote:
| It's not really a wild take - that's the reality. It's
| not really distrust _in this case_ either. The question
| was can we educate more efficiently.
|
| This case is of a group of kids being taught by parents.
| The parents give up half a day a week to teach one of
| their homes. They don't need a staff, a building, etc.
| You really can't be more efficient than that model of
| using the existing resources.
|
| And you're only partially right about local control of
| education. There are many federal and state regulations
| that dictate school policies in every facet. These would
| rule out many of the _local_ "nut cases". Much of the
| funding is provided by the state and federal government
| too, depending on the state.
| alistairSH wrote:
| _You really can 't be more efficient than that model of
| using the existing resources._
|
| It's only "efficient" because it doesn't have to scale.
| Add non-wealthy kids into the mix. Add children with
| learning disabilities. All of a sudden, homeschooling
| fails a massive chunk of the population.
|
| Public education has served the US well for most of the
| post-WWII era. Let's fix it, not abandon it.
| jtriangle wrote:
| >Unlike in most other Western countries, education in the
| US is controlled at a local level
|
| It is not. Curriculum is decided far above the heads of
| the districts, as is standardized testing. Funding is a
| problem, though, how much of a problem is wildly variable
| depending on where you are.
| hombre_fatal wrote:
| Scale isn't necessarily good. I went to a massive highschool
| in Texas and suspect I would have had a far better experience
| in a much smaller school whether it be a homeschooling co-op
| or a small public school (the latter didn't exist in my
| hometown, only massive Texan highschools).
|
| And my best classes in uni weren't the massive lectures at
| the University of Texas but rather small summer school
| classes I took in a cheap Houston community college during
| summer break where I could actually interact with the teacher
| and fellow students.
|
| Finally, HNers overuse "reinventing" as a pejorative. If you
| use a similar approach found in another option, and the HNer
| doesn't prefer your option over the other option, you're
| always "reinventing" it. As if some trivial thing in common
| between two options are the only would-be differences between
| them. It's not very thoughtful commentary.
|
| Home-schooling could be 100% identical to public schooling
| except that it's _not_ the local school system and it would
| still deliver on its goal of not being the local school
| system. That 's the whole point.
| brightball wrote:
| "Reinventing the wheel leads to better wheels." - Don't
| remember where I heard it, but it's a good line.
| jononomo wrote:
| I guess if having friends, family, and a garage is
| "privilege", then more power to them -- they'd be idiots not
| to take advantage of this privilege.
| pengaru wrote:
| They're not reinventing anything, they're just doing
| education with a better instructor:student ratio.
|
| We all know the worse the ratio the worse the education tends
| to be. Tutoring is a long established means of compensating
| for this, by supplementing sessions with a 1:1 ratio, clearly
| illustrating the problem.
| chasd00 wrote:
| Also, every parent and student has a direct connection to
| every other parent and student. Doing education "at scale"
| is a terrible idea.
| eutropia wrote:
| "I'll intentionally disadvantage my kids in the name of the
| ideal of egalitarianism" said basically no parent ever.
| huytersd wrote:
| Eh there no clear cut answer that the alternative doesn't
| disadvantage them either
| chasd00 wrote:
| I had someone (childless i might add) try to make me feel
| guilty for pulling my kids out of a school circling the
| drain and into a high performing one in the name of
| diversity. I told them, when the time comes, if they want
| to sacrifice their child on that altar then it's their
| decision but don't ask me to sacrifice mine.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Kind of wild and weirdly refreshing to finally see the
| "everyone is in it for themselves and their own" attitude
| on fully overt display in this article's comments.
| Usually it's masked behind talk of "freedom" and
| "individuality," but here, it's raw and out there in the
| open!
|
| FWIW I probably could afford to send my kid to a better
| private school or alternate-schooling group, withdrawing
| from the community and not-so-great public school system,
| but I don't because then I'm just another contributor to
| the inequality problem. We Live In A Society.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| One's job as a parent isn't to use their children to
| solve systemic issues in society, it's to do the best
| they can for their children.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| I only exist as an educated person who can make a middle
| class income and live a normal life because of public
| education. My single mother is an experienced and gifted
| teacher, but would not have had the time to educate me. We
| could never have afforded to send me to any private school.
|
| My only chance for a normal life and education was public
| school.
|
| A huge amount of americans are poor in time and money. The
| only option their children have is public school. Their
| future is entirely dependent on a public that is willing to
| invest in them so that they even have a future, one that
| isn't just "wage slave at walmart". Sure, it often doesn't
| work out, it's a struggling system that has been abused and
| ignored for decades, and it fails millions every year.
|
| You know what doesn't help any of those millions of kids?
| All the wealthy families sending their kids to private
| schools or homeschooling and removing their property taxes
| from the public school system. Society will not be a better
| place for your kids if they are individually 10% better but
| 10% of the children born in the US basically have no access
| to education.
|
| The advocation of "School choice" as conservatives are
| currently selling it is about taking away the chance I had
| at a middle class life. It's about saving a few thousand
| dollars for already privileged individuals at the expense
| of swathes of people like me who were at least average
| intelligence who had the audacity to be born to a poor
| mother.
|
| If you think public schooling in america is deficient, then
| let us fix it.
| blt wrote:
| > Society will not be a better place for your kids if
| they are individually 10% better but 10% of the children
| born in the US basically have no access to education.
|
| But that's not how they think. They believe the bottom
| 10% deserve their hard lives.
|
| Capitalism needs an oppressed class to function.
|
| The people on top write laws to ensure the oppressed
| class will exist. Then they sell it to the middle class
| using scary stories of crime, religion, etc.
| rcpt wrote:
| How do you propose we measure that efficiency? Attendance
| requirements? Standardized testing?
| jtriangle wrote:
| Scale for scale's sake isn't necessarily ideal, or efficient.
|
| My freshman year of highschool, I was at a very large school,
| around 3400 in attendance. The school had been expanded
| several times, and was more or less at capacity. Some
| facilities were scaled out well, others weren't. There were
| fights on a weekly basis, tons of security trying to prevent
| that, but, they could only do so much. Lunch lines were very
| long, sometimes I'd be lucky to get 10 minutes to eat, mostly
| brought my own lunch because of that. The school was locked
| down a few times that year because of weapon scares. It was
| hell.
|
| Then my sophomore year, they cut the school in half, sending
| most of the students, save for the seniors, to a new school
| across town. That landed the school I attended at around 1400
| kids, my junior year, all of the extra seniors had graduated,
| so, it shrank further to around 1300. From sophomore year on,
| there was not a single fight, everyone knew eachother and got
| along, they cut the security team down to just two people and
| they both were well liked. Test scores were way up, class
| sizes went from 40+ to consistently under 30, and things
| overall were fairly good as far as highschool goes. The new
| school across town was a similar situation from what I
| gathered from friends who went there.
|
| Now you might write that off as it was simply too crowded,
| but, they closed about a third of the school, which was held
| in portable classrooms when the split happened. Some of those
| were re-purposed for offices and whatnot, most got hauled
| away. So the actual density of people didn't really change
| much. We got some extra space to have PE classes in, but that
| was about it, space wise.
|
| You might also write that off as demographic changes, which
| was also not true. In fact, the roughest part of town all
| went to the school I attended, while the nicer, more affluent
| side of town, mostly got sent to the new school.
|
| The way I see it, the school was simply too large, and
| managing that many students day to day, and all of their
| needs and affairs, did not scale well, and bred inefficiency,
| inefficiency that existed long before I got there and
| everyone got to keep their job and maintain that as the
| status-quo. Sure the buildings/campus could physically
| contain them well enough, yes they were all reasonably well
| fed and watered, but they'd become unmanageable in such a way
| that was not likely to be fixed.
|
| In terms of reinvention in public education, smaller schools
| are a decent model, as are smaller class sizes. The real
| deciding factor in how well a student does however, is parent
| buy-in, which homeschool models have in spades, and in
| addition the class sizes are about as small as you can
| reasonably go as well. Understand of course that, parents
| opting to homeschool are paying taxes to public schools,
| while receiving no benefit, and that in addition to paying
| for the costs associated with homeschooling. Not all families
| can afford to effectively pay for schooling twice, hell, most
| can barely afford to exist while paying once. You could very
| likely fix your concerns about privilege by simply
| redirecting money back to homeschool parents that would
| normally be spent on public school. There are very well
| defined $/student numbers out there, so, the amounts would be
| fairly trivial to come up with. You could also really work
| around the whole right/left politically polarized bullshit
| factory by perhaps giving a little more to the lower income
| families and a little less to high income families. I think
| that'd sufficiently frame the nominally 'right wing' framed
| homeschool ideals as neutral, or at least dissonant enough
| that you might get most of everyone on-board provided you
| could get the right palms greased in state government.
|
| Understand of course that, the public education system is an
| enormous apparatus, and they're managing unfathomable numbers
| of students. They're also not setup in fairly clean
| competency hierarchies either. At the local level, seniority
| tends to be king, at the broader level, the ability to
| navigate the political system is the selection factor.
| Neither of those have anything to do with "who's talented at
| educating kids", and while you do have means to measure
| performance, those same means are also decided upon by the
| very same people being effectively measured, so there's an
| incentive to make them easier over time, as that looks
| politically better. So if anything, the incentives we've
| created are exactly backwards, and the system cannot change
| until those incentives are fixed. I don't really know how
| you'd prevent standardized testing from being watered down or
| trifled with. I don't really know how you'd create sufficient
| educator turnover with the unions in place to weed out bad
| teachers. More or less, the system is broken, we need
| bloodsports to fix it, but they've thought of that, and have
| prevented it from happening.
|
| I'm not holding by breath of course. People are more than
| likely going to write it off as "privilege" regardless of the
| changes proposed, with a whole list of valid enough sounding
| reasons that they haven't really thought through, most of
| which won't really have any baring on reality, and nothing
| will change aside from actual children being mortally wounded
| by poor education. That'll continue as-is, furthering the
| class divide, increasing unrest, increasing predatory
| behavior toward people who, could have been saved by better
| policy, but were thought more useful as sacrifices on the
| altar of "the other team's" apparatus.
|
| As for me? I'll be eating beans and rice and driving a 15
| year old honda while putting my future children through a
| homeschool program regardless of what happens.
| inglor_cz wrote:
| If everyone was force-fed the same dinner and compelled to
| wear the same clothes, there would be a lot of societal
| efficiency to unlock. It would also be a nightmare.
|
| People are diverse and have diverse needs. That includes
| kids. AFAIK the most efficient method of education is still
| one-to-one tutoring, the very opposite of "schools at scale".
| Unfortunately it is also very expensive.
| dmurray wrote:
| At what point does this become not "homeschool", but "school,
| with different licensing requirements for the teachers"? It
| doesn't seem right to discuss this setup in the same breath as
| children schooled by their own parent.
| pokstad wrote:
| We've seen something similar here with co-op schools. Not done
| in the home, but the teaching is handled by parents of the
| students. They are very happy with their school.
| keiferski wrote:
| _This is a fundamental change of life, and it's astonishing that
| it's so persistent._
|
| It is pretty misleading for this article to talk about
| homeschooling being a "fundamental change" without mentioning
| that homeschooling was the _default_ practice for most of human
| history. If anything, this is just a return to a long-established
| practice, not a fringe movement.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling
| jwestbury wrote:
| There are many behaviours which were common throughout human
| history which would now be fringe movements. Human and/or
| animal sacrifices, for instance.
| keiferski wrote:
| If animal sacrifice became common again, I would expect
| articles to mention the fact that it was a human practice for
| millennia - and not pretend it's just a fringe thing those
| pesky Other People invented.
|
| Homeschooling was also the default thing a +-century ago,
| while you'd need to go back pretty far to find true
| animal/human sacrifice in European/European-American culture.
| Manuel_D wrote:
| The default thing in preindustrial societies was no formal
| education for the vast majority of the population. The
| elite - a small slice of the population - was homeschooled
| by private tutors, and artisans (also small % of
| population) went into apprenticeships. This isn't really
| analogous to a vision of the world where the majority of
| the population is schooled at home.
| edgyquant wrote:
| What a weird example. Sacrifices have not been common in the
| west for thousands of years and the majority in the Middle
| East for over half that time as well. Seems like a bad faith
| gotcha
| tivert wrote:
| > There are many behaviours which were common throughout
| human history which would now be fringe movements. Human
| and/or animal sacrifices, for instance.
|
| I better example might be freedom from surveillance. It's a
| totally fringe lifestyle to not be tracked everywhere you go,
| at least in a developed country.
|
| But your rhetoric might be useful for shooting down privacy
| advocates during the next dust-up. Privacy may have been
| common in the past but now its fringe, just like animal
| sacrifice. Key escrow is the future!
| bombcar wrote:
| What's sad is the "fringe privacy" lifestyle has been
| getting easier and easier, because so many privacy invading
| things assume you have a GPS enabled phone on you at every
| moment, and are constantly connected to the Internet.
|
| Make those two untrue and it's like you never existed.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| It's a fundamental change versus the Prussian model, which
| provided a basis for much of the educational theory in the US.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Prussian_education_system
| keiferski wrote:
| It's funny how so much of social conflict today basically
| boils down to: industrial systems put in place in the 19th
| century aren't working anymore.
| akira2501 wrote:
| It's constantly going to be with us. These systems weren't
| "put into place" they generated "higher profits" when
| implemented. As such, the people profiting from their
| existence are willing to use some of those profits in
| preventing the advantages of technological advancement from
| reaching the populations they currently enjoy power over.
|
| This is part of the reason why business monopolies are
| social poison.
| lom888 wrote:
| It's interesting that we treat kettling children up indoors by
| age cohort with little movement and making them solve math
| problems ad nauseum as if it were the most natural thing in the
| world and treat those who can't sit still and learn in such an
| environment (or understand the purpose of doing all of those
| math problems for 13 years) as if they are an aberration.
| nonameiguess wrote:
| Surely, this can't be true. For most of human history, children
| may have learned to do whatever their parents did behaviorally
| or vocationally, whether that be to become a forager, farmer,
| peasant, nobility, whatever, but almost nobody ever received
| any kind of general-purpose, primarily academic education, and
| whatever they learned, they learned by following their parents
| around and doing it, not by structured, formal curricula.
|
| I'm sure homeschooling can work out fine, but that is hardly
| assured by simply being inline with historical tradition. If
| you go to war with broadswords and spears, you're going to
| lose. If you insist on living without indoor plumbing or
| refrigerated food storage, you're likely going to have your
| kids taken away, and rightfully so, in spite of the fact humans
| lived that way by default longer than not.
| ouiouibaguette wrote:
| The majority (non-aristocratic, non-clergy) were illiterate for
| most of human history.
| watwut wrote:
| Default state for most human history was that only small
| minority of people can read and write. It also meant that
| majority of people have no say in public affairs.
| tivert wrote:
| > Many of America's new home-schooled children have entered a
| world where no government official will ever check on what, or
| how well, they are being taught.
|
| Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either
| because they're failing at their job or doing things that are
| disagreeable to some subset of the population?
| add-sub-mul-div wrote:
| Sounds like a generational Dunning-Kruger situation.
| Loughla wrote:
| The college I most recently consulted with had to take a
| homeschool "transcript" that can literally be a signed paper
| from the parent handwritten with nothing to back it up.
|
| It's astounding. I don't know if that's just because that
| particular state doesn't have very strict rules around
| homeschooling, or if that's standard; I just haven't done the
| research.
| Amezarak wrote:
| How else do you think a transcript should work? What makes
| you think a random private school transcript has anything
| else backing it up?
|
| Presumably the students are also applying with ACT/SAT scores
| in hand, which do have an established meaning.
| tivert wrote:
| > How else do you think a transcript should work? What
| makes you think a random private school transcript has
| anything else backing it up?
|
| Are you saying things written on a fancy letterhead with a
| stamp can't be unquestionably trusted?
| Loughla wrote:
| Because they have some kind of accreditation body that
| monitors and approves the schools with established
| standards and approved/documented practices, whereas
| homeschool does not?
|
| And ACT/SAT has become optional since covid for most
| institutions.
| Amezarak wrote:
| > Because they have some kind of accreditation body that
| monitors and approves the schools with established
| standards and approved/documented practices, whereas
| homeschool does not?
|
| There are "accredited" homeschool programs, and the
| "accreditation" means probably about as much as it does
| for "accredited" private schools, many of whom don't even
| bother.
|
| Elsewhere in the comments I mentioned the Baltimore
| public school system, where clearly whatever
| "accreditation" it has is completely and utterly
| worthless.
|
| Heck, even my ABET accredited university, although
| overall of high quality, had a few teachers that taught
| me nothing at all and who had no checks on their failure
| to teach.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| I don't think it's the case that if you show up with a
| transcript written in crayon and don't bother to submit a
| standardized test score, your college admission prospects
| are likely to be very good. The tests may be optional,
| but I don't think that means they have to assume you'd
| have done well on them, if other evidence looks iffy.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > And ACT/SAT has become optional since covid for most
| institutions.
|
| So they should go back to requiring it. Seems pretty
| easy.
| eszed wrote:
| >Presumably the students are also applying with ACT/SAT
| scores in hand, which do have an established meaning.
|
| Except...
|
| >More Than 80% Of Four-Year Colleges Won't Require
| Standardized Tests For Fall 2023 Admissions
|
| >An additional 85 schools will be test-blind or score-free,
| meaning that applicants' standardized exam results are not
| considered even if they are submitted. Included in that
| number is the entire California public university
| system....
|
| >[And] at least 1,450 colleges and universities have made
| their test-optional and test-blind policies permanent.
|
| https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/11/15/mor
| e...
| Amezarak wrote:
| One imagines that students with any reason to suspect the
| university they're applying to will not know enough about
| their high school, or possibly derogatory information
| about their high school, will submit an application with
| test scores attached in the "optional" cases.
|
| One of the other reasons for this is because students
| completely unprepared for college from public schools are
| an increasing problem. This is also why they now all
| offer remedial classes under varying names and programs,
| and why first-year university programs are much easier
| than they were in say, 1940.
| jimbob45 wrote:
| "Test-optional" and "test-blind" are vastly different. If
| I can get a leg up on the competition by taking the test,
| then it's basically required even if it's technically
| optional.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| How is that any different from someone who attended a rural
| public high school?
|
| Many of the school districts in my area have consolidated,
| and it's not even possible to verify attendance of students
| from the small schools that no longer exist.
|
| To my knowledge, there is no "accreditation" that matters for
| public high schools - there are only thresholds for which
| state funding is available.
| ejb999 wrote:
| how is this worse than some schools not even requiring
| students to be able to read, write and do some mathematics in
| order to graduate with a HS diploma?
|
| https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/oregon-suspends-
| graduation...
| watwut wrote:
| Difference is thatbin one case it is a scandal that is
| investigated. In the other, there is no one to investigate,
| no rules are broken, it is just homeschooling exactly as
| meant to be per law.
| bitlax wrote:
| https://nypost.com/2023/09/23/students-at-40-of-
| baltimore-hi...
|
| Oh please. No one's going to jail for this.
| asynchronous wrote:
| It is, and article hit pieces like this are exactly why it will
| continue to expand. Newsflash, there's an actual large portion
| of the population that more and more doesn't want what is
| taught to their children regulated by the government.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| Yeah, there are a number of people out there who only want to
| teach their kids what's in the Bible. We should all be so
| lucky as to be a bunch of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidts.
|
| Obviously I'm presenting an extreme example, but society at
| large has a vested interest in ensuring that children,
| broadly, are educated. I'm not saying there are no problems
| with regulations, but I hate how the "deregulate everything!"
| crowd conveniently ignores the reasons those regulations were
| created in the first place.
| urmish wrote:
| People are making a choice for their kids, whether they
| want the after effects of religious or public school
| 'brainwashing'. For many, its a clear cut choice, one way
| or the other.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| It's weird to strip the kids of any agency or
| consideration, but you've phrased it well. People are
| making a choice for their kids -- parents don't own their
| kids, they have something akin to justified paternalism
| over them. Society _should_ care whether parents are
| providing a base level of education and opportunity to
| these kids. It 's pretty apparent from the discussion
| here who grew up around e.g. fundamentalist Mormons or
| Baptists where homeschool kids were often abused as a
| matter of 'doctrine' and those whose experience with
| homeschool kids is more like the Bay Area version of
| precocious children learning in nature.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> Society should care whether parents are providing a
| base level of education and opportunity to these kids._
|
| And society should also care whether government-run
| public schools are doing this--not to mention whether
| they are indoctrinating children with values that many
| parents disagree with.
| mikeyouse wrote:
| Society _does_ care about that, hence why the public
| school standards are all public, school boards are
| elected, and there 's broad democratic oversight.
| pdonis wrote:
| The standards are public, yes, but that does not mean
| they are standards that a majority of the public agrees
| with. They are set by unelected bureaucrats.
|
| School boards are elected, but I don't think "broad
| democractic oversight" is a fair description.
|
| In any case, none of the things you mention prevented the
| US public school system from being explicitly set up to
| indoctrinate children, as explicitly described by the
| people who set it up. So to the extent that society in
| the US cares about educating children, it cares about
| educating them according to a particular political agenda
| that many people do not agree with. That is a major
| reason why homeschooling continues to increase in
| popularity.
| ike2792 wrote:
| I'm sure this varies by state, but where I live in MN home
| schooling parents have to register with the state and meet
| certain curriculum standards. Homeschooled students also
| have to take standardized tests and show certain standards
| of proficiency. The parents need to keep diligent records
| and be in regular communication with the school district.
| We have a lot of friends that homeschool (although we don't
| ourselves), and in general most homeschooled kids seem to
| be meeting or exceeding where their public- or private-
| schooled peers are at.
| politician wrote:
| If you just taught kids the Bible, at a minimum they would
| have amazing literacy skills.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> there are a number of people out there who only want to
| teach their kids what 's in the Bible_
|
| Not all homeschoolers are like this. There are plenty of
| other good reasons for parents not to want their kids to go
| to public schools.
|
| _> society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that
| children, broadly, are educated_
|
| Yes, but for whose definition of "educated"? In the US, at
| least, the government was not supposed to decide that.
| Individual families and communities were. And, as I have
| posted elsewhere in this thread, the people who set up the
| US system of widespread, compulsory public education were
| quite explicit about what _they_ meant by "educated", and
| that included plenty of things that any reasonable person
| would consider to be indoctrination, not education--and
| that was on purpose.
| bloaf wrote:
| With the laws Florida is toying with around trans youth in
| education, you think people here would be more
| understanding of the desire to be able to give the
| government's regulations the finger.
|
| Saying that the cost of giving persecuted minorities an out
| is "then we might not be able to persecute the minorities
| that I've decided actually deserve it" just feels
| fundamentally unconvincing.
| burkaman wrote:
| Will it continue to expand? This article makes the case that
| the large increase in 2020 was driven by temporary pandemic
| conditions, and explicitly not by politics or school quality.
| The graph shows it has already started to decline. Longer-
| term data shows a small peak in 2012 followed by a slow
| decline until the pandemic: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/dige
| st/d21/tables/dt21_206.10.a.... In the article's district
| lookup tool, most districts follow this same pattern of a
| pandemic spike that begins to decline, whether you pick a
| stereotypically liberal or conservative district.
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| > Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either
| because they're failing at their job or doing things that are
| disagreeable to some subset of the population?
|
| It sounds ideal.
|
| But we might want at least _some_ oversight and regulation to,
| for example, make sure kids aren 't being homeschooled on how
| to build rockets and kill some group of people.
| ejb999 wrote:
| because public school kids never kill people?
| onlyrealcuzzo wrote:
| They generally aren't brainwashed to kill people.
|
| Bad apples will fall from any tree. A poisoned tree will
| mostly produce bad apples.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > They generally aren't brainwashed to kill people.
|
| Nor are homeschooled kids.
| u32480932048 wrote:
| Concerns (or "concerns") like this always make me wonder what
| kind of terrible environment the commentor grew up in: a war-
| torn country with child soldiers firing homemade rockets, or
| maybe a cute little cul-de-sac in an upper-middle class
| suburb where all problems are hypothetical yet everything is
| still terrifying.
|
| Maybe modeling the child rocket program[1] on [whatever it is
| that public high schools are doing] would save us?
| [1] https://estesrockets.com/collections/stem-products
| elil17 wrote:
| But should you be able to totally escape from scrutiny? To me
| it seems very wrong to deny a child the opportunity to learn
| the things they'd need to function in society like reading,
| math, and science. Most homeschooling parents are teaching
| these things to there kids, but there are some who aren't. That
| ought to be stopped.
| ejb999 wrote:
| there are plenty of public schools, despite spending
| 10-15-$20K per student are also not teaching those things.
| THAT ought to be stopped.
| elil17 wrote:
| Yeah that should also be stopped.
| standardUser wrote:
| And part of the point of schools, at least in the modern era,
| is that kids have access to authority figures if they are being
| abused at home. That access often ends with home schooling.
| jmspring wrote:
| The statement implies the students being taught in schools
| today are learning at a level they should be. With all the
| exceptions made and dumbing down of curriculum, most classes
| teach to the least abled in the class holding back many.
|
| That said, I don't think home schooling is an option for all
| either. Covid showed how difficult it could be for many
| families.
| Exoristos wrote:
| For some, that may be true. For others, it's a replacement for
| private school that they can't afford.
| at_a_remove wrote:
| The Post has a vague undercurrent of bafflement, a wide-eyed,
| "What could it possibly _be_? " and really only bothers to
| speculate toward the end.
|
| I was on Facebook, idly scrolling, and I received an ad for a
| nearby Montessori school. The ad was a simple lavender square,
| with the name of the school on it (no photo), and simply the text
| "Championing LGBTQIAA+ Lives." Of all of the letters, the "three
| Rs" weren't in evidence. Nothing about how the school will teach
| the child how to learn, prepare them for high school, or provide
| a rounded education. Just "Championing LGBTQIAA+ Lives." Upon
| some mental reflection, I recalled some recent radio ads for
| local universities, and the first sentence was about how they
| were diverse, and then there was something about inclusion and
| equality. No mention was made of "we will prepare you to be an
| adult" or "we will get you a good job."
|
| Unfortunately, I cannot have children, but if I were in a
| position to, I would like to think I would be interested in their
| education to the extent that I would make serious choices. And
| right now, that educational institutions consider their highest
| advertising priority is to display a relentless laser focus on
| DIE to the exclusion of, well, education does give a little
| _pause_ to their selection.
|
| As I recall just how ill-served I was by the many schools I
| attended (we moved quite a lot), both for education and
| socialization, I can only imagine that diverting the already-
| anemic school efforts away from the core mission it even-then was
| not doing a great job at would only make these institutions even
| less-suited to their supposed task.
| burcs wrote:
| We're homeschooling our kids. I was pretty against it at first,
| but seeing our education system degrade to the state it is today,
| and being honest about my schooling experience definitely opened
| me up to it.
|
| I think the biggest argument for schooling is the socialization
| aspect of it. I don't know about the rest of you but I was
| bullied pretty relentlessly throughout grade school and it
| completely changed my personality. I became much more of a loner,
| reserved, quiet, and just defeated. I'm still working through
| some of that baggage 30 years later. That's not the socialization
| that I want for my kids.
|
| I work remotely, my wife freelances. We have lots of friends and
| family with children our kids age, why not surround them by
| people who love them?
| keiferski wrote:
| I think I have basically the same opinion. It's not so much
| that I believe homeschooling is amazing in-itself, but rather
| that the public education system has so clearly deteriorated
| that it seems borderline criminal to subject your kids to it.
|
| The question for me, personally, is private school vs.
| homeschooling. If you can avoid many of the downsides of public
| education via choosing the right private school (and being able
| to afford it), I do wonder if that would be superior to most
| homeschooling setups.
| wizerdrobe wrote:
| We didn't go full home-school, but my wife and I
| intentionally left our city to go raise our kids out in a
| rural area so they could grow up in and around nature and
| with a nice, small school district that smokes anything we
| had back in the city. Better test scores, smaller classes,
| minimal major discipline issues.
|
| Prior to moving, our only "good" option for realistic
| schooling was putting our children in a local Catholic school
| with high fees. Given our state is in the midst of legal
| battles with activist groups fighting to overturn a recent
| school-choice voucher program, seemed moving was the safe
| choice.
|
| For the life of me, I can't understand why anyone but a
| public-sector teacher being finally held to account would
| fight against giving parents options to place their kids in a
| school they see fit.
| boojums wrote:
| I like collecting examples that confirm/deny my biases.
| Would you mind sharing the demographic differences between
| the two schools?
| standardUser wrote:
| I don't understand this talk about "the public education
| system". Every school and school district is going to be
| different. Some are great and others are not. I understand if
| you live in an area with middling-to-poor schools, but lots
| of people live near great public schools.
| keiferski wrote:
| I'm sure there are good public schools, but my experience
| and the experience of everyone I've ever known has not been
| positive. Combined with policies like California's [1], I
| don't think it's unreasonable to just be skeptical of most
| American public education.
|
| 1. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/california-needs-real-
| math-edu...
| rcpt wrote:
| Ridiculous amounts of standardized testing and curriculums
| designed to optimize for that was the main thing we hated.
| Seems to be a thing everywhere.
|
| When I was a kid teachers had a bit more freedom to decide
| what to teach but now you teach to the test or lose your
| funding.
| jewayne wrote:
| Teachers absolutely should teach to the test. And
| individual teachers really shouldn't be in the business
| of deciding what to teach, either.
|
| Why is there an assumption that what is on the test is
| inherently worthless but every individual teacher is
| qualified to design an entire curriculum?
| standardUser wrote:
| The educators that stood out in my life were the ones who
| were passionate and interesting and added their own
| experiences and perspectives. We have somewhere between
| 40-60 teachers over the course of a typical public
| education. I'd hope at least a good cross-section of
| those bring something to the table other than rote
| explanations of test questions.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >Why is there an assumption that what is on the test is
| inherently worthless but every individual teacher is
| qualified to design an entire curriculum?
|
| Because my mother went to school for six years for
| exactly that purpose? Some states have pretty high
| requirements for teachers, and they tend to do well.
|
| Also, the "teach to test" BS is extremely locality
| dependent. There are zero things you can generalize
| across all public schools in the US.
| CodeWriter23 wrote:
| Check for homeschooling groups in your area. Meet and talk to
| parents, you'll find out all about it including resource
| centers for when your child needs to learn topics where you are
| weak.
|
| We've been homeschooling for 7 years. Our child's social
| experience has increased both quantitatively and qualitatively.
| From few/constantly bullied physically and sexually, to
| many/nice thoughtful friends who will jump in and defend her
| instead of filming her, should things go down. She's also a
| leader, does service for her community, and (proud papa moment
| here) at her 4th debate competition (3 per year in this league)
| won 9th place speaker and 3rd place team. Her team swept the
| series of 4 rounds. The only way their team could do
| that...wait for it...lots of practice aka socialization.
|
| The "socialization" boogeyman is one of the most overplayed red
| herrings about homeschooling IMO.
| hn_throwaway_99 wrote:
| I think anyone who has been seriously bullied would definitely
| agree - being bullied as a child can severely fuck up the rest
| of your life. Sure, many/most eventually move on, but like you,
| 30 years later I've got the therapy bills to show for it.
|
| Sometimes I feel a little guilty feeling envious about my
| nieces' upbringing. They went to private school that ran from
| 1-8 grade, so they essentially skipped the middle school
| experience that was detrimental to so many. Honestly, I believe
| middle school as I experienced it (a whole bunch of elementary
| "feeder" schools that fed into one giant middle school for 7-8
| grade) is the dumbest invention in the history of humanity. It
| sticks together kids, at wildly different stages of
| development, in an unfamiliar environment where everyone is
| trying to find their place in the social hierarchy - Lord of
| the Flies should have been set in middle school. Much better
| IMO to just have kids stay together 1-8th grade, and by then
| most folks are at least well into puberty by the time they get
| to high school. Not saying of course bullying doesn't happen in
| high school, but I think by then more kids are able to find
| their "tribe", so if they are bullied they have friends to fall
| back on (again, I'm of course painting with broad strokes).
| akira2501 wrote:
| > That's not the socialization that I want for my kids.
|
| On the other hand, I'd definitely want my children to be
| familiar with it. Bullying is not something isolated to
| schools. I've seen it in nearly every social and political
| situation that exists at nearly every age group. In my
| estimation people are getting worse at identifying it and
| collectively we're getting worse at punishing it.
| doubled112 wrote:
| Dealing with bullies is something you'll definitely see later
| in life.
|
| I'm glad I learned how to shut it down quick or avoid it
| altogether earlier rather than later.
|
| Being let out into the world thinking everybody loves you
| sounds like a terrifying idea too.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| What do you do to quickly shut down an adult bully?
| KoftaBob wrote:
| Sleep with their wife
| doubled112 wrote:
| Well that escalated quickly.
|
| Are you also taking photos for blackmail purposes? That'd
| very possibly shut the whole thing down.
| doubled112 wrote:
| It really depends.
|
| If it's a peer in a more professional setting, simply
| calling them out generally makes you less a target,
| especially if calling out their behaviour is done in a
| group setting. It comes down to the old "stand up for
| yourself" rule we've all heard. Also, calm confidence
| tends to work with adults too.
|
| If the bullying is coming from above, time to move on. I
| have zero patience for it, and there's likely no stopping
| them.
|
| Also, I'm not suggesting you take them outside, although
| I know a couple guys who've been through fights between
| coworkers in their workplaces. Grown men (in their 30s)
| sure can take a long time to grow.
| doktrin wrote:
| > Bullying is not something isolated to schools. I've seen it
| in nearly every social and political situation that exists at
| nearly every age group.
|
| Unless you live in prison or a war zone I highly doubt you've
| witnessed "adult" bullying that remotely approaches the
| ferocity and cruelty some kids have to endure on a daily
| basis.
| pfannkuchen wrote:
| As an adult there is basically no situation where someone is
| harassing you and you have no way out of it. What do you have
| in mind?
| plussed_reader wrote:
| Care to name the region of your 'degrading system' with your
| anecdote?
| arrowsmith wrote:
| > I work remotely, my wife freelances.
|
| Are you both working full-time? What's the arrangement? How do
| you fit the homeschooling in around your jobs?
|
| My wife and I have talked about this a lot. We don't have kids
| yet, but we're very open to the idea of homeschooling when the
| time comes. I'm not sure how we'll do it though - we're in a
| better position than most (we make good money and both wfh) but
| there are only so many hours in the day. I'm interested to know
| how other people make it work.
| gnicholas wrote:
| Kids are in school for 5 or so hours per day, but for many
| kids (especially those who are bright), they are learning for
| perhaps 1 hour of that time. If you can take an hour to teach
| them something, and another 10 minutes to assess their
| progress later in the day, they will learn at least as much
| as they would have in school. Of course, the time commitment
| also varies by grade; younger kids need lots of attention,
| whereas older kids are more self-sufficient. It depends on
| lot based on your particular kids.
| pjc50 wrote:
| So .. I was homeschooled for a couple of years, in the UK, and
| had a relatively normal if solitary experience. But that was
| because my mother was a qualified teacher who'd stopped working,
| and I was a smart kid. This left me naturally favourable to the
| idea.
|
| Since then it's become clear that there are basically two
| categories of homeschoolers: those that want to bring in extra
| education beyond what the public school system can deliver, and
| those that want to bring in _less_ education than the public
| system. Usually in the name of "protecting" them from some
| information for religious reasons. That's where all the attention
| and concern is. Because children can't advocate for themselves,
| especially against their parents.
|
| (The UK had a recent scandal with illegal schools:
| https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/12/ofsted-unc... ;
| running a school for money - heck, even offering a childminding
| service for money - without registering with OFSTED is definitely
| illegal, while homeschooling is legal by default
| https://www.gov.uk/home-education )
| pixl97 wrote:
| This too is my experience.
|
| I grew up in a place with a large number of religious
| organizations and outcome of this is what I would consider
| abuse in a huge number of cases. Would the children themselves
| think so at the time, kinda hard when you're taught "spare the
| rod, spoil the child" and "Of course the Earth is only 6000
| years old" daily.
| n3storm wrote:
| Huge batch of negationists and easy-to-scam-with-health-products
| humans incoming.
| outside1234 wrote:
| The problem with home schooling is that it is a solution for the
| rich and leaves all of the poor kids behind.
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| Yes it is. People forget this because they live in a bubble.
| It's like remote work, nice for the laptop class, but not
| possible for the person growing your food and manufacturing
| your tesla.
| pjc50 wrote:
| Oh, there's definitely poor people doing it as well. Not
| necessarily as well.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| We've looking into this, as deeply as we can as
| "outsiders". We homeschool, but are firmly "middle class"
| from a national perspective and easily in the top 1% income
| in our county.
|
| Regardless of income, the key factor seems to be the
| rationale. If parents want to homeschool because they're
| involved with their kids' lives and want them to succeed,
| they'll do well relative to the available public school
| options.
| BurningFrog wrote:
| There are plenty of people doing low paid jobs like phone
| support from home.
|
| Just like high earners like LeBron James are not allowed to
| WFH and have long commutes.
|
| It just depends on the nature of the work.
| fundad wrote:
| Always nice to see a silly Elon quote
| ryan93 wrote:
| It is almost exclusively a middle class activity. Also not that
| expensive if one parent is home. I knew many homeschooled kids
| who were just given a math textbook and worked through it. You
| only go to math class in public school for about 182 hours a
| year, so a diligent kid can do a year of math in a few months
| no problem.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| The rich hire tutors or send their kids to $25k-$75k/yr private
| school. Or both.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| How familiar are you with the experiences and outcomes of poor
| kids in public schools?
| dxhdr wrote:
| Rich families already do this by sending their kids to private
| schools. Have you seen how expensive and competitive these
| schools are, even starting as early as Kindergarten?
| missedthecue wrote:
| From personal experience, the average homeschooled family seems
| to be blue collar
| throwaway1777 wrote:
| There's a whole spectrum of "home schooling". At one end you have
| parents teaching their own kids, maybe using some online
| resources, libraries etc. but for many it is more like group
| schooling which is almost like a charter or private school where
| you join with other "home" schoolers but don't have a traditional
| teacher and administration, it's basically the remote work
| approach of school vs the in-office approach. Then you have
| actual private schools with a more traditional building and
| teaching method. And finally you have public schools, the default
| choice which used to be seen as the gold standard in terms of
| equal opportunity, but let's forget about that because schools
| are "indoctrinating" kids now.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I would much prefer "backpack funding" aka vouchers. The blue-
| state city I live in spends almost $25k per student per year and
| apart from a few magnet schools they are atrociously bad. Like
| the high school my kids would have to attend if I wasn't wealthy
| had a student murdered outside of it a few years ago.
|
| If you gave parents even 1/3 of that money the state would save a
| fortune and parents would be so much better off. The monopoly
| system of education we have is just so awful. I'm fine with
| having bonus benefits for special needs kids, and public schools
| should always exist to educate the high-needs students. But the
| system we have now is so laughably bad and segregated that anyone
| who defends it must have a financial stake in keeping it running.
| hotnfresh wrote:
| Naive per-student-spending calculations can misleading. Some
| students cost a lot more than others. My state spends hundreds
| of thousands per student in some cases--but that's schools in
| juvenile detention facilities. Nonetheless, that goes in the
| stats. Kids in self-contained classrooms ("special ed" kids who
| can't function in the normal classroom) can be several times as
| expensive to educate as the median kid. Kids in ordinary
| classrooms who get a dedicated assistant, they've got all the
| usual spending plus the fully-loaded cost of the assistant, so
| that's easily over $50k total. Kid in a gifted program? Add
| low-five figures to the cost. Fancy selective-admission public
| schools, which some states have? Typically higher spending per
| student than other schools, which drags up the average.
|
| They also have bussing costs, which (e.g.) private schools
| don't, which further complicates comparisons. That's not a
| small amount of money.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I clearly stated I am fine for the special needs kids getting
| more funding. The central point is to give me - the parent -
| the money that would go to the atrociously bad school so I
| can put my kids (not special needs) into a good school. That
| is the situation for the majority of students.
| throwaway626 wrote:
| So, to be clear, you're fine with funding special needs
| education and etc. as long as it's someone else footing the
| bill.
| monero-xmr wrote:
| I have no idea what you are talking about. I already pay
| via my tax dollars $25k on average per student. I'm
| suggesting reducing that spend, for those that want it
| for non-special needs kids, and giving the reduced amount
| to parents to spend on any school they want - or staying
| in their public school they already have.
|
| The problem is the local public school where everyone in
| my neighborhood is forced to go (unless they are rich) is
| dangerous and ranked bottom 5%. That is extremely racist,
| inequitable, and unfair to people who are forced to
| attend.
| underseacables wrote:
| We started homeschooling our kids during the pandemic with a
| neighborhood group, and it went really well. Everything about
| them improved, not just their academic performance, but also
| their mood got way more positive about learning. Now we have them
| in private school and.. it seems to be going fairly well. They
| don't have the irritability that they did in public schools, and
| I think my children are much happier. From my perspective,
| there's just too much chaos in public education for healthy
| learning.
| chmod600 wrote:
| If you home school, you don't get the money back. Public school
| is something like $12k/yr. That's a lot of money that you're
| essentially opting out of.
|
| For parents who do so for political or culture war reasons, that
| must seem profoundly unfair. To be driven out of the public
| schools means to be denied resources.
|
| Public schools using public money should be especially sensitive
| and as neutral as possible on political or culture war issues.
| That's increasingly difficult, but without that, public school
| doesn't have a good future.
|
| Normally schools are thought of as Democrat-controlled, but
| that's not true everywhere. So rather than just saying that
| everything is OK the way it is, think about how it will be when
| your political opponents are in control.
| keiferski wrote:
| I believe that some states have programs that give you the
| money if you home-school. There seem to be some restrictions,
| though:
|
| https://idealschool.education/full-day-program/utah-voucher-...
| Ancapistani wrote:
| Our state does - we did not take it, because the money comes
| with enough strings to make it distasteful.
|
| We homeschool to keep our kids out of government schools.
| Inviting that same government into our home for a bit of
| money would make no sense whatsoever.
| keiferski wrote:
| Makes sense, and looking at some of the requirements,
| understandable.
| burkaman wrote:
| > as neutral as possible on political or culture war issues
|
| I don't think it's really possible to be neutral about culture
| war issues, sort of by definition, especially when many of the
| wars are about schools themselves. A school is part of American
| culture, it can't somehow choose not to participate. To use a
| historical example, there was a culture war over teaching
| evolution in schools. A teacher at the time could describe the
| history and facts of the controversy without stating their
| opinion on it, but when the students leave that classroom, they
| are still in a school that either teaches evolution or doesn't.
| By existing and having a curriculum, the school takes a
| position in the culture war.
|
| Imagine if your country held a referendum on a certain issue,
| and said "if more than 50% of citizens vote yes, the law
| passes, otherwise it fails". You could have a genuinely neutral
| opinion on the issue ("I don't care which side wins"), but you
| cannot take a neutral action, because not voting makes the law
| less likely to pass. This is unfair, and you can be mad about
| it, but the only way to be "neutral" would be to leave the
| country and renounce your citizenship so that you are no longer
| part of the equation. Similarly, in a culture war, the only way
| to be neutral would be to not participate in the culture in
| question, which is even more difficult than leaving a country.
|
| Let me give one more example: whether or not to tip your server
| in a restaurant. Tipping 10% instead of 20% is not neutral.
| Tipping 50% of the time you go to a restaurant is not neutral.
| You could say "I don't wish to take a position, so I will no
| longer go to restaurants", but I'm confident the anti-tipping
| side would claim you as one of their own. Again it feels
| unfair, but it's just how culture works.
| chmod600 wrote:
| Lack of perfection doesn't mean you shouldn't try to be more
| neutral. Trying by itself (even if failing) earns the trust
| of voters.
|
| And if you live in an area where evolution is a controversial
| topic, then you should leave it up to the parents. You don't
| have a right to use their money to teach something that a lot
| of people don't want to be taught. Of course, there's some
| line where something is fringe enough and you don't have to
| accommodate every last person. Again, try to be neutral,
| don't aim for perfection.
|
| And you know what? Evolution is a nuanced topic. The actual
| claims that can be backed up by first principals using the
| scientific method are fairly narrow. Much of the reasoning is
| very prone to confirmation bias and all kinds of after-the-
| fact fitting rather than forward-looking predictions. To
| stick to the science on the topic of evolution you have to be
| pretty careful and most teachers are not. Not saying it
| shouldn't be taught... I think it has a lot of explanatory
| power outside of pure science and represents a large body of
| important observations. But I don't think it's a good example
| of science-vs-idiots.
| brodouevencode wrote:
| You've just made a strong case for a voucher type of program.
| kashunstva wrote:
| > For parents who do so for political or culture war reasons,
| that must seem profoundly unfair.
|
| I homeschooled my daughter for reasons other than culture wars
| or politics (she's a violinist and public schools didn't regard
| practice time as particularly important.)
|
| But I never thought of public school funding as transactional.
| We did not take direct advantage of the benefit; but a
| reasonably well educated populace benefits me in a host of
| other ways. So I harboured no resentment when paying my public
| school levy.
| chmod600 wrote:
| "We did not take direct advantage of the benefit; but a
| reasonably well educated populace benefits me in a host of
| other ways."
|
| But that's precisely the point: what does "well-educated"
| mean? If the money is going toward reading, writing, and
| 'rithmetic, then few will disagree. When the curriculum,
| environment, or manner of teaching drift into more
| controversial areas, then you might start to see things
| differently.
|
| Imagine the school starts teaching things that don't align
| with your values, and they leave out things that do. How
| would you feel about the way your tax dollars are spent?
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > If you home school, you don't get the money back. Public
| school is something like $12k/yr. That's a lot of money that
| you're essentially opting out of.
|
| That's not money you have a right to as a parent. I don't take
| part in all the social programs my government offers, but I
| don't get all that money back.
| chmod600 wrote:
| Public schools don't have some inalienable right to that
| money either -- they are entrusted with the money by popular
| vote. If we want that to continue, then there needs to be
| very broad consensus that the things teachers are teaching
| are the right things, or at least not the wrong things.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| What other institutions do people try to claw back money
| from when people decide they can do a better job?
| chmod600 wrote:
| Schools are one area where there's a lot of money
| involved, it's a direct service to normal people, and
| those people actually can do a pretty good job without
| the school (not saying that everyone can or that it's
| easy).
|
| Some communities highly dissatisfied with their police
| attempted to defund and/or defunded their department.
| That's not a great example because self-service policing
| doesn't work very well, but it's kinda close.
|
| Ultimately, if you want the voters' money, you need to
| convince them that you at least won't use it against
| them. And it's really easy for people to start thinking
| that it's being used against them when engaging in
| culture war or political issues.
| SketchySeaBeast wrote:
| > Some communities highly dissatisfied with their police
| attempted to defund and/or defunded their department.
| That's not a great example because self-service policing
| doesn't work very well, but it's kinda close.
|
| This is a great example for what should happen - demands
| for systemic reform, not taking what you think is "your"
| money and going home.
|
| It's one thing to opt out of a system, it's another to
| think you're justified to get money back for it. As
| someone without any children am I justified in getting
| 24k/year back because I'm not using the school system for
| my (average) 2 non-kids? Of course not, but I do pay
| taxes for that service.
| gnicholas wrote:
| > _If you home school, you don 't get the money back. Public
| school is something like $12k/yr. That's a lot of money that
| you're essentially opting out of._
|
| Money spent [?] value provided. My kid's class has over half a
| million dollars spent on it per year. But many parents see it
| as merely childcare, and then spend more money on after school
| tutoring and activities.
|
| I can see the appeal of skipping the schooling and doing the
| other activities during the school day. It's probably much
| easier/cheaper to get appointments before 2, when most kids are
| in school. And there's more flexibility in terms of scheduling.
| I just heard today that a family was threatened with being
| kicked out of our local school if they accrued 10 days of
| unexcused absences (which includes vacation days). While I
| don't think the school would actually kick the family out, the
| fact that this is even floated as an idea sounds crazy.
| weeznerps wrote:
| I was homeschooled in the 90s/early 00s in the conservative
| Christian wing of the movement. Personally, I think it was a
| great experience (despite the conservative, religious aspect
| which I later rejected) and made me a more unique person. I would
| not have done well socially in school as a child anyway. My
| brother though, raised in the same environment, resents our
| upbringing. I also meet many homeschoolers raised in conservative
| Christian households who disliked the experience.
|
| Overall, it's a very high variance method of education. For every
| Judit Polgar, you have a woman told her highest calling must be
| to reproduce and be subservient to her husband (I know these
| people personally).
|
| If you have the resources and have intellectually precocious
| children, especially if they are a bit odd, they will likely
| enjoy it and benefit from it. If you have kids that really want
| to play sports at a high level or are socially very successful,
| they might later resent the opportunities they missed and the
| shared experiences they lack. Obviously, this is reductive, but I
| think something like this is true.
| burkaman wrote:
| Is there a story here beyond the pandemic? The data really makes
| it look like homeschooling increased a significant but not mind-
| blowing amount at the beginning of the pandemic, when parents
| pulled their kids out of school either because they thought they
| were unsafe or were upset about mask mandates. Now the rate is
| gradually declining as some kids return to school and some
| parents decide it's working well so they'll keep going until
| their kids are older.
|
| The pandemic is the most obvious cause, and the article notes
| that "Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of
| failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between
| school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores,
| and home-schooling growth." Obviously test scores are not the
| only measure of quality, but at least in this article there is no
| evidence of any cause other than the pandemic. The other possible
| factor discussed in this comment section, politics, doesn't seem
| to be relevant either. There is no correlation between
| homeschooling rates and the politics of the parents or the state.
|
| Also, "fastest-growing" is not very remarkable when the only
| other categories are public and private. Home-schooling is by far
| the smallest category, less than 5%, so basically any increase
| (which has to come from a decrease in at least one of the other
| categories) will make it the fastest-growing category.
|
| Here are statistics going back further:
| https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_206.10.a....
| Homeschooling gradually increased from 1999 to 2012, and then
| started to decline a bit until the pandemic.
| tivert wrote:
| > The data really makes it look like homeschooling increased a
| significant but not mind-blowing amount at the beginning of the
| pandemic, when parents pulled their kids out of school either
| because they thought they were unsafe or were upset about mask
| mandates.
|
| I think you're forgetting the biggest reason: it turns out zoom
| school was a disaster and the worst of both worlds.
| burkaman wrote:
| Yes thank you, definitely should have mentioned that. My
| point is that there were a wide variety of pandemic-driven
| reasons that parents decided to homeschool. Even if all these
| reasons disappeared when the pandemic culturally ended, we
| wouldn't expect homeschooling rates to suddenly drop back
| down to the pre-pandemic level. Switching to homeschooling is
| a huge change, and so is switching back. I would expect the
| rates to gradually decline as fewer new students enter
| homeschool, existing students age out of it, and some
| students switch back to public or private school, and that's
| exactly what the data looks like.
| Taylor_OD wrote:
| Feels like there is a big homeschooling article once every other
| week here and a whole slew of parents saying, "We homeschool and
| its great and our kids love it" and then a bunch of adults
| saying, "I was homeschooled and it was not great, and I did not
| love it"
|
| Regular schooling isn't ideal. But homeschooling is a pretty
| major reaction to that, and it shouldn't be done without serious
| consideration for the non-zero chance that your kids will resent
| you for that decision.
| Ancapistani wrote:
| > But homeschooling is a pretty major reaction to that, and it
| shouldn't be done without serious consideration for the non-
| zero chance that your kids will resent you for that decision.
|
| As a parent of two daughters who are homeschooled -
| _unschooled_ , actually - I 100% agree.
|
| As with everything, our approach is intentional and we're open
| with our kids about it. If they wanted to go to a school -
| public, private, or religious - we would make that happen.
|
| Our eldest is currently taking three hours per day at the local
| public high school. She's 15, wants to own a equine stud farm,
| and is taking every agriculture class she can find. After this
| year she will have exhausted their offerings in that subject,
| so she'll likely start at the local community college in the
| fall.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| John Oliver did a great segment on the issues with home schooling
| in the modern age a few weeks ago.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI
| goalonetwo wrote:
| Ah yes, John Oliver.
|
| Probably one of the most biased formats you can find. Mixing
| comedy with pseudo-facts and personal opinions to push an
| agenda/narrative.
|
| I wish we could only see what he produces as comedy but way too
| often people love to share his clips/narrative as a semi-
| reliable source of information.
| nickthegreek wrote:
| If you have any specific issues with this segment, I would be
| interesting in hearing them.
| goalonetwo wrote:
| Let's start with this thread:
|
| https://twitter.com/wanyeburkett/status/1715586174658441404
| nickthegreek wrote:
| I do appreciate the effort, but I can't see the thread as
| I do not have a twitter account.
| francisofascii wrote:
| Anecdotally I have worked with many colleagues who were
| homeschooled. I suspect a correlation with home school children
| and programmers. Also, just met a ninth grader who enrolled at
| our local high school after being home schooled. He is
| programming Rust and taking Calculus with a bunch of seniors. Not
| sure if he is exceptional or simply was able to fast forward due
| to being homeschooled.
| xxs wrote:
| I find it rather unlikely homeschool process had anything to do
| with, esp. Rust. At that age I did mostly assembly but that was
| just personal search/no teaching. Overall the kid is just an
| anecdote.
| brentm wrote:
| I wonder how this all turns out. I know some people will do a
| great job at educating their kids but I have a feeling that on
| the average most of these kids will have been better off not home
| schooled. I think it takes a pretty special type of kid to do the
| work when the only pressure comes from your mom and dad.
| knodi wrote:
| Home schooling is also the worst form of education, only second
| to no education.
| bluescrn wrote:
| Home schooling can be anything from the very best to the very
| worst, depending on who's doing the teaching and how well
| they're doing it.
| vasco wrote:
| I wasn't homeschooled and it's not legal to do it in my country
| even, so I have a bias. That being said it seems weird to me that
| parents in the US seem to consider that they "own" their kids to
| a much bigger degree than some places in Europe at least. I don't
| have kids but I think most parents around me growing up had a
| sense that their kid also belongs "to society" in a way, and
| going to school and learning about what society "wants you to" is
| expected, in the same way you also are just simply required to
| vaccinate and that's it, because you also "belong to society" in
| some way other than just belonging to your parents.
|
| I wonder how much of the whole debate is mostly about difference
| of opinions between people on both sides of this specific subject
| rather than the ones the media focuses on.
| zo1 wrote:
| So grown ups in a country where children aren't allowed to be
| home schooled generally believe that their children "belong to
| society"?
|
| At what point do we call it culture and "difference of opinion"
| as opposed to just plain old indoctrination or brainwashing?
|
| It's not a left vs right issue, this is freedom vs tyranny.
| Right now the left isn't able see it as Tyranny or
| indoctrination because _their_ predominant opinions and values
| are being taught to children, so it 's convenient. It's another
| form of "civilizing those barbarian <insert unfavorable group
| here>".
|
| At the end of the day, I don't belong to society, and neither
| do my children. They belong to themselves and can choose for
| themselves how they see fit. Until then, I'll instill my values
| to them, and make sure they treat their fellow beings better
| than the way "society" treats them.
| anon291 wrote:
| Well the issue is that the United States is very diverse. Most
| countries are basically monocultural ethnostates. My kids do
| not belong to American society but they definitely belong to a
| particular culture. And within that culture, and families who
| partake, we do 'share' our children.
|
| But, to bring the culture wars into this, how do you feel that
| you have joint guardianship of a child whose parent
| fundamentally disagrees with you? With our church group, I
| trust the parents to discipline, to entertain and to teach in a
| way consistent with my beliefs, even if they're very different
| people. On the other hand, my next door neighbor is convinced
| my daughter is a boy because she likes trucks and would like
| her to be trans, like she has already transed her son. When you
| perceive other adults attempting to abuse your child and this
| is a common enough movement you're not going to be able to feel
| any joint sense of guardianship. And it's not just culture
| issues. Unsurprisingly, neighbors children are also poorly
| behaved, disrespectful, and never get told no.
|
| America has fully embraced multiculturalism without
| assimilation, so there are now dozens of cultures, so no sense
| of joint guardianship over children.
| seltzered_ wrote:
| "Many home-schooling families say they have re-created these
| communal functions through co-ops, or microschools, or Facebook.
| But such groups often cluster by shared ideology; home
| education's rise has coincided with the fracturing of a nation
| unable to agree on the results of the last presidential election
| or how to fight a pandemic that has killed more than 1.1 million
| people."
|
| There was a vice documentary that sorta touched on the political
| & religious biases with some homeschooling communities &
| programs: https://youtu.be/9kuNycfklN4 (2022)
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I was home-schooled until high school. Long story short, it was a
| disaster. I bordered on having no education at all, on top of no
| socialization. I'm so fortunate I got at least four years of
| public school. I still think I suffer to this day. For parents
| who are thinking of home schooling your kids: best of luck to
| you. If you succeed, maybe your kids will be smarter. If you
| fail, you could be setting your kids up for a lifetime of stunted
| socialization skills and poor work habits.
| ejb999 wrote:
| so kind of like public school then?
| arrowsmith wrote:
| > a lifetime of stunted socialization skills and poor work
| habits.
|
| The joke's on you, I wasn't home-schooled and I still got both
| of those.
| brightball wrote:
| Is your username related to the actual program out of
| Toronto?
| arrowsmith wrote:
| No, I'm not Canadian and have no idea what program you're
| talking about.
| brightball wrote:
| https://www.arrowsmith.ca/
| giantg2 wrote:
| Good education vs bad/no education
|
| You'll find this in public schools too.
| Hello71 wrote:
| there are obviously lots of kids that had a very bad
| homeschooling, and also lots of kids that had very bad public
| schooling. many kids are bullied so badly at school that they
| commit suicide, and many more develop antisocial habits there.
| the question is whether those issues are better or worse with
| homeschooling, and a single anecdote doesn't help us with that.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I see a lot of single anecdotes and see no reason not to
| include mine.
| Spooky23 wrote:
| Neither does the balance fallacy.
| biomcgary wrote:
| Did you notice that the article highlights the rise of
| homeschooling co-ops? This is intentional on the part of the
| homeschooling movement. It improves both socialization and
| educational opportunities (e.g., shared lab equipment).
|
| Rather than pearl clutching about individual anecdotes or
| doubling down on government control, I think states should
| provide direct funding to homeschool co-ops in addition to
| direct funding to families. That money and its positive effects
| on socialization and educational development will only work if
| governments keep their noses out of the details (i.e.,
| parallels arguments for UBI).
|
| My son is autistic and non-verbal. The local public school
| program that he would be in is overwhelmed. We hire a speech
| language pathologist to tutor him 3-4 hours a day in our home.
| That is only possible because of Arizona's support for
| homeschooling families. Homeschooling is a great outlet when
| standardization fails.
| lapetitejort wrote:
| I was in a home-school coop about 25 years ago. We attended
| it a few times, until we stopped going. I was just a kid so I
| have no idea why we stopped. I remember it didn't help. I
| didn't know how to do any of the homework they assigned so I
| never did any (a practice that carried into high school).
| Since I never had tests or grades of any sort it didn't
| really matter.
| biomcgary wrote:
| Thanks for the additional details about your experience
| (and I'm sorry about them). Statistically, I'm slightly
| surprised that you were in a co-op that long ago. I was
| home-schooled a few years earlier and the notion of a co-op
| was just starting to be discussed.
| noelwelsh wrote:
| There is a long tradition in this sort of thing in
| anarchist (and related) education. For example
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-
| managed_social_center#Fre...
|
| It's maybe not 100% what you're thinking of, but it's
| reasonably close.
| vkou wrote:
| > Since I never had tests or grades of any sort it didn't
| really matter.
|
| I was homeschooled to grade 3, and just because my parents
| didn't give me tests or grades, it absolutely mattered.
|
| I had to correctly solve, both verbally and in writing,
| enough questions at the end of the current chapter of the
| textbook, to a standard that satisfied them. For every
| subject of study. Every single day.
| spiderice wrote:
| > just because my parents didn't give me tests or grades
|
| > I had to correctly solve ... to a standard that
| satisfied them
|
| In other words, you had tests and grades
| fzeroracer wrote:
| A homeschooling co-op is literally us just reinventing the
| wheel. A large enough co-op becomes a school system and a
| school system eventually adopts a standard curriculum.
| scarmig wrote:
| People who do co-ops might not object to public schooling
| in principle but to the particular implementation that
| their locality has adopted. If co-ops becomes public
| schools with better management, all the better.
| boxed wrote:
| And if they become public schools with worse management
| and driven by crazy people.. what then?
| jiveturkey42 wrote:
| Straw man, slippery slope, false dilemma, causal
| fallacy.. do they teach rhetoric and Aristotelian logic
| in public schools?
| spiderfarmer wrote:
| > The local public school program that he would be in is
| overwhelmed.
|
| Pay more taxes. Solve the problem for all people who run into
| it, not just the ones who can afford it.
| poorlyknit wrote:
| Isn't that just a private school where the parents are the
| teachers?
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| It depends on the co-op. Some meet every day, in which case
| yes it's effectively a private school. My kids used to
| attend a co-op that met once a week for hands-on, group
| learning activities. The rest of the time, they were doing
| their course work at home.
| jrflowers wrote:
| > Rather than pearl clutching about individual anecdotes
|
| > We hire a speech language pathologist to tutor him 3-4
| hours a day in our home.
|
| You have a good point. GP's experience with home schooling
| was an anecdote whereas your experience with home schooling
| is not
| zarzavat wrote:
| People socialised for thousands, in fact hundreds of thousands
| of years before schools were invented.
|
| I went to school and got beat up, colour me sceptical about
| school as a mechanism for socialisation.
| civilitty wrote:
| Were they actually socialized for thousands of years? The
| average (sub)urban school in the US teaches more kids every
| day than the average person would have come in contact with
| in their entire lives, often ten times over. Most people were
| subsistence farmers and didn't travel very far from their
| little village in their entire life.
| wizofaus wrote:
| Arguably any period of history where the majority of people
| lived as subsistence farmers and rarely interacted with
| others not part of the household was an anomaly though, and
| very different to how pre-agricultural societies lived.
| jltsiren wrote:
| The average medieval subsistence farmer probably had ~10000
| people living within 6 miles of them. People tended to live
| in areas with fertile land, and the land could easily
| support 100-200 people per square mile.
| scarmig wrote:
| Socialisation here means "learn to accept arbitrary
| hierarchies and petty injustices as the natural state of the
| world," not "learn to respect other people as human beings."
| In fairness, the former probably maps better to the real
| world.
| defgeneric wrote:
| Socialization is broader than just between peers. It's how
| the individual develops a relationship to society as a whole.
| The public school system is the primary way the state
| socializes kids. You learn the difference between the public
| and private spheres (the school vs the family), how the two
| relate, and how they relate to the broader community. Some
| are better served by it than others but on the whole it's a
| very good thing.
| zarzavat wrote:
| Yeah I can't say I ever experienced the values of the state
| at school, unless the values of the state are "survival of
| the fittest" and "might makes right".
|
| Actually, you might be on to something!
| carlosjobim wrote:
| You believe in a false god you call "the state" and
| "society". These things don't exist, only people exist.
|
| Public schools are operated with the purpose of breaking
| the spirit of the children of the underclass so that they
| become obedient workers or soldiers. That's why the
| education part is so lacking and the obedience training so
| focused. Children are schooled in having no liberty of
| time, no liberty of movement and no liberty of thought.
| Perfect for a soldier or industrial or corporate worker.
|
| On the contrary a successful adult is characterized by
| having liberty of her time, liberty of her movement and
| liberty of her thought.
|
| The purpose of state schools is to create failed human
| beings, because they are needed to serve the rulers.
|
| Schools are specifically made to break communities by
| separating children by age, leaving their main influence to
| be a few teachers, instead of having dynamic interactions
| with adults of all different types.
|
| No institution has been more damaging to humanity than
| state schools.
| SoftTalker wrote:
| You write pretty well based on these few sentences. I have
| found that nothing improved my writing more than reading
| authors I liked and being aware of (in some cases adopting or
| imitating elements of) their writing styles. Did you read a lot
| on your own?
| lapetitejort wrote:
| Pretty much everything I know I picked up in community
| college about six years after graduating high school with a
| 2.6 GPA. I like to think I'm a smart and empathetic person. I
| would love to meet the person who got to use those innate
| skills at a young age instead of having to dredge up whatever
| remained after a decade of neglect.
| giantg2 wrote:
| I think this is a highly individualized question depending
| on the circumstances.
|
| I'd qualify as smart depending on the metric. I actually
| went to a private school (the public schools in the area
| were complete garbage and out of control - bomb threats,
| drugs, etc at the middle school level). It really wasn't
| that challenging and most of my useful knowledge beyond the
| basic read/write/math is self taught. Most of the stuff I
| learned in college was never used. Using those innate
| skills at a young age produced nothing tangible. I won't
| achieve any real success in life even though I checked all
| the boxes when I was younger - smart, good grades,
| extracurriculars, family, religion, went to college, etc.
|
| Really all any good school or parent can do that is helpful
| is teach their kids to want to learn and how to self-teach.
| Most schools are terrible at this and just want to hit test
| scores and follow procedures/regulations (learning
| environment can be atrocious). I'd say most parents are
| average at this.
|
| The real question is, what do _you_ think would be
| different and why can 't you achieve that now?
| anon291 wrote:
| I will second this. I went to a normal parochial school
| and my wife went to a normal public school and we both
| agree that our higher-than-average educational outcomes
| were due to self-teaching and tons of parental tutoring.
| merpnderp wrote:
| I'm sorry for you bad experience, but statistically kids do
| better when homeschooled. It's not like public school as some
| minimal level they're assured to bring kids up to.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| Citation needed.
|
| Beyond studies by the National Home Education Research
| Institute, that is. The three leading studies by
| homeschooling advocates looked at "homeschooled students who
| went to college" and how they did at school versus public
| schooled students at college, and ignored the fact that the
| percentage of homeschooled students who went to college was
| _much_ smaller (why?) than for public schools.
| noirbot wrote:
| My guess for the college admission situation is at least
| partially because, until recently, a lot of public and
| private colleges essentially refused to recognize
| homeschooling as a way to get an education, so your chance
| of getting admitted was almost zero at a ton of schools.
| This lead a lot of people (myself included) to essentially
| join something that's legally an accredited private school,
| but functionally homeschooling, but you take your exams at
| a central place at a central time. For statistical
| purposes, I was private schooled, because that was what I
| needed to do to make it into college. Actually fully
| homeschooled people went to community college and then
| tried and often failed to transfer.
| wizofaus wrote:
| I was curious to know what sort of studies had been done in
| that regard, I didn't notice anything mentioned by the
| article, though admittedly I only skimmed the 2nd half. FWIW
| I don't think I've ever met or known of anyone being home
| schooled in Australia, though I'm sure it must happen.
| gemstones wrote:
| (Educationally)
| jwells89 wrote:
| The majority of my schooling was at home as well, and while
| education was mostly ok (with some notable highs and lows) my
| parents found it difficult to make the scheduling work for
| socialization (in part due to my semi-rural hometown -- any
| activities meant a considerable drive), and so that was largely
| absent.
|
| I've done alright for myself and have even managed to rank
| among top achievers in my family, but it's felt like I've been
| stuck playing catchup in various ways throughout my adult life.
| Now in my mid-30s, in some aspects I feel that I'm where I
| should've been in my mid-20s.
|
| With that in mind I wouldn't say I'm against homeschooling
| necessarily, but I think it's crucial for parents to consider
| if they really have the time available to make it as complete
| as it needs to be. If there's any doubt at all it might not be
| a great idea.
| darigo wrote:
| I mean, this cuts both ways. One of the most consistent
| predictors of success in public school is parental involvement.
|
| The only school I ever went to that was good for socialization
| was community college. Tbh, for learning too. I basically
| learned all of math, from arithmetic up, as an adult at
| community college, to compensate for learning nothing and
| getting pushed through all of the grade levels at public
| school.
|
| I wish they had community colleges where I live now lol.
| gemstones wrote:
| For real. It's telling that the kids don't jump in here to
| defend the practice, hardly ever (also homeschooled, education
| was great, socialization was absolutely problematic despite
| doing all the homeschool group things.)
| cpill wrote:
| read plus the internet are a bit challenging for them :P
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > It's telling that the kids don't jump in here to defend the
| practice, hardly ever...
|
| Homeschooled kids are a minority, and therefore formerly-
| homeschooled adults are a minority too. More of a minority,
| even (since the rate of homeschooling was lower when we were
| growing up). It's not "telling", it's simply the fact that
| not a ton of people exist to give a defense.
|
| For my part I was homeschooled and had a great experience. My
| parents were able to challenge me in ways that the local
| public school wasn't willing to, and they made consistent
| efforts to make sure I had social exposure to other kids. I
| don't believe I am lacking in any way because my parents
| homeschooled me - in fact, if anything I believe it was the
| better option for me.
|
| And I think you need to remember that the other side of the
| coin exists too. My wife went to public school, and was
| bullied by other kids. She has social anxiety and other
| issues _to this day_ (she 's 42 years old) as a result. That
| doesn't mean public schools are all bad, of course, but
| people need to stop ignoring the downsides of public school
| when they compare the two paradigms.
| buildbot wrote:
| Counterpoint - why don't we see defense of homeschooling at
| the same rate of attacks? Even if they are rare, there are
| several posters here that have experienced bad home
| schools. If they are at least 50:50, shouldn't we expect
| the same rate of defense? That we don't see that is
| telling.
|
| Being bullied sucks and has huge negative impacts. I am
| glad though, that I have the tools and experience to
| identify that happening now that I am an adult. A
| homeschooled me might not, and then suffer much more in the
| adult sphere. Negative interactions are something kids have
| to learn to deal with. It's not pretty or fair or even
| safe, but neither is the world.
| lolinder wrote:
| My sense is that we _do_ see defense at approximately the
| same rate as attacks (if not higher), but the attacks
| stand out more because negative emotions weigh more than
| positive ones. Even if we _didn 't_ see equal rates, that
| would be expected for the same reason: someone who hates
| that their parents homeschooled them is far more likely
| to get on and post a scathing comment than someone who
| loved the experience.
|
| Companies have to bribe and cajole customers to leave
| positive reviews because otherwise the few people with
| disastrous experiences will be the only ones who bother
| to review at all. There's no equivalent pro-homeschool
| lobby begging people to get on and defend homeschooling
| on Hacker News.
| lolinder wrote:
| You must be skipping over all of the comments on this thread
| where homeschooled kids do exactly that.
|
| Hi. I was homeschooled. I graduated university top of my
| class, have a high-skill high-paying job, think more
| critically (about everything _including_ religion) than most
| people that I know, and overall I enjoy my life very much. I
| 'm homeschooling my kids.
| Nicholas_C wrote:
| My siblings and I were homeschooled up to about middle school.
| My mother had three years of college but no degree and taught
| all four of us at once. For financial reasons we all ended up
| going to public school at around late elementary/middle school
| and we were miles ahead of everyone from an academic
| standpoint. There were definitely some social issues
| integrating which didn't take long but I think our parents
| could have done a better job exposing us to "normal" kids and
| not moving around so much. YMMV.
| stronglikedan wrote:
| Sorry that happened to you, but thankfully you're in a small
| minority with that outcome.
| camhart wrote:
| When the choice is be happy with your assigned school based on
| your location, or you have to uproot and move your entire
| household, homeschooling becomes one of the few options when
| public school is failing one of your kids.
| chasd00 wrote:
| If you have the ability and desire to homeschool then it's
| always going to be the best choice. Only if you feel like you
| won't be a good teacher or you do not have the resources should
| you consider public/private school. My kids are in public
| school because neither my wife nor I have the time to
| homeschool. However, I feel like we still do about 25%
| homeschool because of the engagement required to actually
| educate our kids. They basically goto school to sit in a chair
| until the workday is almost over.
|
| /both our kids are in one of the "best" public middle schools
| in DFW supposedly. It's still filled with the most wildly
| incompetent staff imaginable.
| ZeroGravitas wrote:
| "Fringe" and "fastest-growing" are in no way contradictory, quite
| the reverse.
| droopyEyelids wrote:
| Great point.
|
| We need a "so-and-so's law" type name for this, even though
| it's obvious when you think about it.
| linuxftw wrote:
| There's always this pretense that other people should have some
| say whatsoever in how another person chooses to educate their
| child. As if what people decided 100+ years ago should exist in
| perpetuity.
|
| What does a public high school diploma afford one these days? The
| opportunity to work manual labor or retail jobs for starvation
| wages, and the opportunity to attend more school that costs money
| for jobs that pay marginally more for most people.
|
| It's wasted time and resources for the vast majority of people.
| Could you imagine trying to train children to become elite
| athletes? As if everyone is going to play on a collegiate sports
| team, so we just spend 8+ hours per day doing athletic training?
| Even though most will never achieve success in collegiate or
| professional sports? Well, at least kids wouldn't be obese in
| that scenario, which is likely going to pay more dividends than
| teaching an average-iq person calculus.
| teaearlgraycold wrote:
| I have a set of cousins that were all home schooled. Most of them
| went to ivy league schools, a couple own very successful
| businesses. I went to public school and haven't done too poorly.
| The most important thing is that your parents give a shit and can
| prioritize their children's well being.
| jawns wrote:
| People talk about homeschooling as if it's one single concept,
| but it's actually a whole bunch of very dissimilar things.
|
| There are people who homeschool because they don't agree with the
| government's viewpoints, people who homeschool because the public
| school system has failed their kids, people who homeschool
| because it just happens to fit their lifestyle. Those are all
| very different motivations.
|
| Likewise, there are people who "unschool," people who use very
| formal curricula, people who make use of co-ops and traditional
| classroom settings, people who use a lot of remote learning,
| people who value social interactions and have their kids involved
| in lots of activities with other kids, and people who are more
| focused on academic achievement. These are all very different
| methods of education.
|
| Beyond that, there are parents who are well equipped to
| homeschool and parents who are not. And there is a small but
| hard-to-ignore percentage who claim to homeschool but really
| neglect their kids.
|
| Treating all these scenarios as a single thing that you can hold
| a single, consistent opinion about suggests to me a lack of
| familiarity with its wide spectrums along multiple dimensions.
| It's like passing a judgment on a person based on their race,
| country of origin, gender, etc.
|
| Disclaimer: Our family homeschools. Both my wife (previously a
| public- and private-school teacher) and I were biased against it
| prior to having kids, but we came to find that a lot of our
| biases and concerns were unfounded.
| torial wrote:
| 100% agree with this.
|
| Also, with the right community, it is possible to have plenty
| of "socialization" with other kids. My family participates in a
| parent-led co-op that allows kids to benefit from different
| strengths in different parents and to have lots of friends.
|
| As my kids are neurodivergent, I think this environment has
| been safer for them and allows them to focus on their passions.
| There is still some peer pressure re: neurodivergence, but I
| think it was less severe than when I was in public school with
| less obvious neurodivergence.
| darigo wrote:
| >it is possible to have plenty of "socialization" with other
| kids.
|
| I agree. Public school is not a great place for
| socialization, and it's not hard to create something better.
| Nothing socializes kids like sitting next to each other
| motionless in silence for several hours lol
| dboreham wrote:
| I'm not sure it's about socializing with other kids.
| There's also something about being able to function in a
| hierarchical organization (e.g. the workplace) that may not
| be developed in a home school environment.
| potta_coffee wrote:
| I went to a violent high school. There were shootings and
| stabbings. Socialization is overrated.
| vrc wrote:
| Do you really think kids in school sit silently and
| motionless in class for several hours? I'd invite you to
| sample any classroom to test that hypothesis. There are
| many reasons to suppose schools aren't the best for
| socialization, but that's not it.
| bluGill wrote:
| The best part about socialization in public schools it you
| will meet someone who isn't like you. I know plenty of home
| schooled kids who got plenty of socialization - but it was
| all people of the same group as their parents. Same
| religion, same politics...
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| The advantage of public school isn't that the socialization
| is super high quality, but that it's going to be broader
| spectrum than pretty much any alternative.
|
| It's not about getting your kids to form the best
| relationships possible, it's about teaching them to be
| comfortable with and learn to handle a huge swathe of
| people that are different from themselves.
|
| And, possibly more importantly than that, it's about
| teaching kids to do this without the immediate presence of
| their parents.
|
| Are public schools a perfectly diverse cross section of the
| population? Of course not. Are they a whole lot closer than
| very nearly any private school or home school? Absolutely.
| low_common wrote:
| What the heck is neurodivergence?
| jandrese wrote:
| It's almost anything out of the ordinary by definition, but
| usually refers to children somewhere on the Autism
| spectrum. They often struggle with being bullied in public
| school and depending on where they are on the spectrum can
| cause considerably increased workload for the school or
| even have outright behavioral problems complete with
| physical violence. That's extreme and rare thankfully, but
| even kids with relatively mild conditions can struggle in a
| chaotic public school environment.
| seabass-labrax wrote:
| Tiny suggestion: s/children/people. It's true that it's
| usually used to refer to children, but that's just
| because autism is most identifiable in early childhood.
| Autism (or Asperger's syndrome) is not something you can
| 'grow out of' or 'cure', because it's a difference in
| basic cognitive functions.
| natpalmer1776 wrote:
| Neurologically divergent individuals who do not adhere well
| to traditional expectations of behavior in social settings.
|
| Given that this is a technical term that has gained
| colloquial usage, not everyone who is identified as (or
| self identifies as) neurodivergent is actually
| neurologically divergent in a literal sense, but
| behaviorally is close enough to be a moot point in non-
| academic settings.
| torial wrote:
| This link has some good details on it - https://my.clevelan
| dclinic.org/health/symptoms/23154-neurodi...
|
| It is a term describing people with mental differences:
| ASD, ADHD, Dyslexia, Tourettes to name a few.
| alexvoda wrote:
| There is a single opinion that is valid of all those different
| forms together: it (home schooling) will increase inequality in
| society in terms of amplitude, spread and flavors.
| quacked wrote:
| Why do you think that?
| kbelder wrote:
| I'm doing everything I can to raise my children unequally.
| BobaFloutist wrote:
| As, understandably, is everyone.
|
| Everyone would do a better job with their taxes than the
| government is.
|
| Everyone drives better than the average driver.
|
| We need some structural limitations to keep things sorta ok
| for everyone.
| A4ET8a8uTh0 wrote:
| Seconding the request to elaborate. There may be good and
| valid arguments against homeschooling but increase of
| inequality sounds.. weird.
| sbuttgereit wrote:
| The notion that you should sacrifice your children on the
| alter of some notion of egalitarianism is something I find
| deeply immoral.
|
| If I have a duty to my child it is too ensure that he has the
| best opportunity to lead a happy, fulfilling life.
| defgeneric wrote:
| Then these should be distinguished and regulated appropriately.
| kup0 wrote:
| Fully agree. For a long time I was heavily biased against it
| because of the versions of it I saw, growing up in a
| conservative religious family and seeing other far _more_
| conservative religious families in our church /etc do a very
| extreme/strict/sheltering form of it- and then becoming non-
| religious, kept that bias.
|
| But over time I've come to realize that is only one very
| specific form of 'homeschooling' that is nothing like other
| forms
| complianceowl wrote:
| I have never been homeschooled or homeschooled my children, but
| as someone who personally knows a looooot of homeschoolers,
| this has got to be the most accurate assessment of
| homeschooling I've seen.
|
| The various people I know who homeschool do it for different
| reasons; like you mentioned, some are entrepreneurs who need to
| stay mobile as a family, some have lost hope in the educational
| system and its ability to educate, and one particular friend
| who is in Mexico has his children in a co-op that consists of a
| large group of like-minded friends where they divide the
| curriculum based on area of expertise (e.g., the mechanical
| engineer teaches math, the fitness couple teaches physical
| education, the history buff teaches history, etc.).
|
| I don't have the network for a co-op, but hands down, that
| would be my school of choice for my kids.
| sfink wrote:
| Thank you. I came here to say this. We're homeschooling, and I
| made the mistake of reading the train wreck of comments on the
| Post article. It was irritating how many people were absolutely
| certain of what homeschooling is and what its shortcomings (or
| successes) are, when it's nowhere close to being one thing.
| Homeschooling is defined by what it is not.
|
| Homeschooling because of COVID policies in public schools? Ok,
| there are some of those, some because things were too strict,
| some because things were too lenient. For religious reasons?
| Yes, some people want more of their religion, some want less of
| others'. Are the parents teaching? Sometimes, sometimes it's a
| co-op, sometimes it's online, sometimes it's at a community
| college. (Usually it's a mixture.) Then there are "non-location
| based charter schools" where the parents receive some of the
| state per-student funding, ...
|
| It's really hard to find a common thread between all of these
| scenarios, because there isn't one. Other than not being in a
| public school. Er... at least, not being in a public school for
| most of the day, since some people _do_ use bits and pieces
| from public schools.
|
| "Not-zebras are awful because they're eating my rose bushes!"
| FireBeyond wrote:
| > Beyond that, there are parents who are well equipped to
| homeschool and parents who are not. And there is a small but
| hard-to-ignore percentage who claim to homeschool but really
| neglect their kids.
|
| There's such a disparity between states. States like mine
| require homeschooled kids to occasionally attend actual school
| for check in or certain classes, and participate in the same
| testing (regardless of your opinion of such testing).
|
| Other states are more vague and less frequent about such thing.
|
| And then a notable swathe of states, you might as well go off
| the grid. Tell the state you're homeschooling, and then that's
| it, you never interact with the state again. Troubling. And
| there's not just neglect, but active abuse, that that can help
| hide.
|
| Texas is working on an amendment that ostensibly cuts taxes on
| child care facilities to make them more affordable. It's very
| easy to tell that those savings won't be passed on to
| consumers. In reality, it's very much more a pro-homeschooling
| thing. "Homeschool your kids and save on your property taxes".
| anon291 wrote:
| > Texas is working on an amendment that ostensibly cuts taxes
| on child care facilities to make them more affordable. It's
| very easy to tell that those savings won't be passed on to
| consumers. In reality, it's very much more a pro-
| homeschooling thing. "Homeschool your kids and save on your
| property taxes".
|
| A 'childcare facility' typically refers to something kids go
| to before school. I've noticed several other commenters make
| the claim that those who are not using daycare facilities for
| their non-school-age children (i.e., the norm up until the
| late 90s) is a form of 'homeschooling'.
|
| It's not. Raising your young non-school-aged children at home
| is the normal way people have raised their children
|
| I have no opinion on Texas's law, but it doesn't sound like
| it's about homeschooling
| pastage wrote:
| It has not been normal to spend workdays with your three
| year old around here for ages. At 1-3 years most if not all
| children go to kindergarten.
| guidoism wrote:
| I wonder how the neglecters/abusers stay hidden. We are in a
| state that doesn't even require notification. As far as the
| school district is concerned our kids don't exist. But the
| medical system definitely knows them. I guess the
| neglecters/abusers don't take their kids to their annual
| well-child visit? Maybe that's the thing that should be made
| compulsory?
| AnimalMuppet wrote:
| Not only do different parents have different skills, but also
| different kids have different needs. And different schools have
| different strengths and weaknesses.
|
| The big thing is this: Parents, the buck stops with you. When
| one of your kids tells you "Every day when I get ready for
| school, my stomach hurts", _pay attention to that_.
| Homeschooling won 't be perfect, no more than public or private
| or charter schools will be. But pay attention enough to see
| when something isn't working, and figure out what you have to
| do to make it better.
|
| This can cut both ways. If you're homeschooling and your kids
| aren't actually learning things, pay attention to that, too.
| jandrese wrote:
| There is a huge spectrum, but back when we homeschooled (my
| wife wasn't yet comfortable sending the kids back to the
| classroom in 2021) we did a few events where local homeschool
| kids got together for various activities. Tree
| identification/nature trail at the park, visits to historic
| sites, stuff like that.
|
| Of the parents I met there was some variety, but 9 times out of
| 10 it seemed like they were mostly doing it because they
| thought the public schools were too secular and were teaching
| "sinful" sciences like evolution. They were all polite about
| it, but it started making me wonder if all of these other
| aspects of homeschooling were just a fig leaf over a whole lot
| of religious indoctrination. Maybe those kids are fine, I
| didn't quiz them, but it did raise an eyebrow.
| llbeansandrice wrote:
| It's really difficult because a lot of the resources and
| groups are created by and supported by this very religious
| group that homeschools.
|
| There is still a very wide margin though. My wife was
| homeschooled because she did gymnastics at a fairly high
| level when she was young and so scheduling was easier for her
| that way. Her older sister wasn't homeschooled hardly at all
| though.
| jandrese wrote:
| Yes, no more recommendations for "excellent PragerU
| material", please!
| petertodd wrote:
| > It's really difficult because a lot of the resources and
| groups are created by and supported by this very religious
| group that homeschools.
|
| ...and why do those groups create so many resources?
| Because they tend to be people trying hard to replicate the
| traditional schooling experience, with high academic
| standards and expectations. Evangelicals are rarely the
| ones doing unschooling.
|
| Source: was mostly(1) unschooled as a kid, but spent a lot
| of time around evangelical Christian homeschoolers because
| we'd go to the gym classes and other organized events they
| ran. The evangelicals didn't seem to have any issues with
| the fact that I was 100% an atheist.
|
| 1) A key exception being reading and writing. The main
| reason why I ended up being homeschooled was the school
| systems useless "whole word" approach to reading was
| failing me. So I was drilled intensively on phonics and
| other traditional techniques, and finally learned how to
| read and write fluently much later than I should have.
| Meanwhile, I had no problem learning math and science with
| much less structure.
| verisimi wrote:
| > religious indoctrination
|
| indoctrination is a given. Do you prefer your secular type,
| the religious type or the government type?
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| I prefer the Reaper type, myself.
| red-iron-pine wrote:
| you exist because we allow it, and will end because we
| demand it
| efd6821b wrote:
| All education is intertwined with indoctrination. At least
| religious indoctrination is a known quantity, unlike other
| less self-aware forms.
| gameman144 wrote:
| This is a pretty strong take. I'd be curious whether you
| believe that education is _inherently_ indoctrination, or
| whether all current education approaches are just also
| indoctrinating?
|
| I disagree on both counts, but it seems like the claims
| there are pretty different in how extreme they are.
| Guvante wrote:
| Are you saying "I believe it is true so it is fine to
| indoctrinate that way"?
|
| I can't find any definition of known quantity otherwise
| given how extremely wide the variations on religious
| teaching is only focusing on science let alone other
| topics like history.
|
| Let alone that there isn't only one religion in the
| world.
|
| If your perspective is "if the parent says it is correct
| it is correct" you cannot say that is different in any
| meaningful way.
| potatopatch wrote:
| That's strange, I knew a lot about how my society
| rejected the views of each of my teachers as a child and
| I feel neither motivation to follow in their footsteps
| nor try to undermine their particular political
| constellations. If those people were all related to me
| and I couldn't get away from them I might feel a bit
| different.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| In religion, they say "God made the heaven and the earth"
|
| How do you know that? "He wrote it in this book"
|
| In education: "Gravity is about 9.8m/s/s"
|
| How do you know that? "Well do this pendulum experiment
| with me and see for yourself."
| gwd wrote:
| It's interesting that you changed the question, because
| if you had education answer the same question, it would
| be a lot less compelling:
|
| > In education: "The earth accumulated matter together
| after a previous supernova."
|
| > How do you know that? "It's written in this book."
|
| In the vast majority of cases, that is literally how the
| teacher knows it: they don't actually know the evidence
| or the chain of reasoning that science took to get to
| where the current theory is, nor how one could actually
| go about gathering the evidence oneself to prove it true
| or false.
| Jensson wrote:
| That is a good question since it is well explained in
| middle school, maybe you forgot it but here goes what
| they told me in middle school:
|
| We were taught basic nuclear physics in middle school and
| were shown the valley of stability.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_stability
|
| Atoms larger than iron came from atoms crashing together
| like in an atom bomb ie super novas and similar, while
| atoms smaller than iron can come from regular decaying
| processes. Doesn't take much to explain that.
|
| Does it explain exactly how the nuclear energy was
| calculated? No, but we can see how people figured out
| that parts of earth came from a super nova. This is very
| different from just "it was written in a book".
| epups wrote:
| Sorry but there is an incomparable difference between
| knowledge obtained by revelation and scientific method.
| The book is the vehicle, not the source of knowledge for
| the latter.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| In education also: "Go to university and do anything you
| like and it'll all work out. Don't worry about the debt."
|
| Anything can be characterised well or badly.
| jjav wrote:
| > indoctrination is a given.
|
| Indoctrination is not a given and should never be
| acceptable in education.
|
| What is indoctrination? Here's one dictionary definition:
| indoctrination: the process of repeating an idea or belief
| to someone until they accept it without criticism or
| question
|
| Note "accept it without criticism or question". This is the
| polar opposite of what education should be, which is to
| encourage investigation, researching topics with a
| scientific method instead of believing without question.
| ARandomerDude wrote:
| > what education should be...with a scientific method
|
| Does the scientific method tell you this? It couldn't
| have, because this is a philosophical belief not a
| scientific one. Very likely, you were indoctrinated to
| believe this.
|
| Not all "doctrine" (teaching) is wrong and not all
| indoctrination is wrong. But everyone undergoes some form
| of indoctrination.
| soperj wrote:
| Would you believe the paper that said that teaching by
| encouraging research with the scientific method is
| better? Would be very ironic if it said that it wasn't.
| bluGill wrote:
| Encouraging researching the scientific method is itself
| indoctrination, though it is done differently from other
| indoctrination.
|
| This isn't bad. I don't think it is worth you while to
| research cannibalism, or a number of other things that
| people have done/believed in over time. Even if you come
| to the "right conclusion" there is just too much too
| research to look into everything people have come up
| with. My life is worse because I - a non-doctor - had to
| research all the anti-vaccination claims to see if they
| really were baseless (they were, but I know from history
| experts are not always right and once in a while a
| conspiracy really does occur)
| Jensson wrote:
| > Very likely, you were indoctrinated to believe this.
|
| No, you are shown how the ancient Greeks did things, and
| how they had a lot of ridiculous ideas. Then they
| introduced Galileo Galilei that showed how experiments
| can rat out many bad ideas and used them to disprove many
| of the things written by the ancient Greeks.
|
| That is how we know the scientific method is valuable,
| nobody has to indoctrinate you to it you can see it
| yourself. The reason the scientific method is so popular
| is because you don't have to get indoctrinated into it,
| it is so obvious that it is a great method.
| gosub100 wrote:
| that definition applies _perfectly_ to modern leftism
| NemoNobody wrote:
| Societies indoctrinate all those that live within them -
| that's what social norms are.
| Jensson wrote:
| > Do you prefer your secular type
|
| What is secular indoctrination? Kids who grow up without a
| religion doesn't get told anything, all you have to do is
| to not indoctrinate the kid into a religion.
|
| There is still school etc, but removing religious
| indoctrination doesn't add anything else, its just less
| indoctrination overall.
| lolinder wrote:
| > Kids who grow up without a religion doesn't get told
| anything
|
| I work in edtech with a bunch of former teachers, and
| this is _absolutely_ untrue. Many elementary and middle
| school teachers see part of their role (regardless of the
| subject they 're officially teaching) as being to teach
| morals to their students, and the morality that they
| choose to teach is every bit as subjective as the
| morality that comes out of a religion.
|
| And if it's not their teachers teaching them morals, then
| it's their parents. You can't raise a child without
| intentionally or unintentionally instilling in them your
| own value system.
|
| The biggest factor in whether someone feels that
| something is "indoctrination" isn't whether it originates
| from a religion but whether they agree with the
| principles being taught.
| Jensson wrote:
| You missed the last line I wrote, I never said there
| weren't other forms of indoctrination:
|
| > There is still school etc, but removing religious
| indoctrination doesn't add anything else, its just less
| indoctrination overall.
|
| I should probably have clarified it in the first bit that
| I meant that the kids weren't told anything about
| religion, not that the kids aren't told anything at all.
| My point is that there is no indoctrination required to
| raise a kid without religion, it is the natural state. I
| and most people I grew up with were raised that way,
| religion was stories we read about in school, not some
| magical thing.
| lolinder wrote:
| I didn't miss it, I disagree with the idea that it's less
| indoctrination overall: it's just _more homogenous_
| indoctrination. A kid who gets taught religion at home
| and secular values at school is _less_ indoctrinated than
| a kid who gets secular values in both places.
| Jensson wrote:
| What are "secular values"? Do you mean that things like
| "you shouldn't hurt others" are secular values? Otherwise
| I don't understand.
|
| If that is what you mean then I'm pretty sure that even
| religious homes teaches secular values.
| xyzelement wrote:
| // other aspects of homeschooling were just a fig leaf over a
| whole lot of religious indoctrination
|
| I was raised totally secular but I now understand that
| religion is about fundamentally aligning yourself to the
| highest aspirations ("what kind of man does G-d want me to
| be?") and even w/o actual faith, I am starting to think
| that's preferable to the current mode of "anything goes, you
| can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any
| of your actions." So yeah I am not surprised that parents
| aren't dying to throw their kids into an environment that
| fosters the latter.
|
| I used to think religion was about deep fear, now I see it
| more as about deep care. You may still disagree with what
| they care about but I find that harder and harder to do,
| personally.
| ImPostingOnHN wrote:
| The question "what kind of person should I be?" could be
| answered by god, I guess, but the alternative would be to
| answer it yourself, and/or consult society, possibly
| friends and family. Not "anything goes".
|
| Putting it in the hands of god means anything goes, and you
| just say that's how you thought god wanted you to be. You'd
| have to trust that society encoded the proper set of values
| and morals into the religion. Which sounds like "ask
| society" but with extra steps, and also you're asking the
| society of 1,000+ years ago instead of the society of
| today.
| ksenzee wrote:
| Not necessarily. For me it's a subset of "answer it
| yourself": it's a way of asking myself "what is my
| potential? What was I put here for? If I had a perfect
| parent, what would they expect of me?"
| drw3 wrote:
| [deleted]
| FredPret wrote:
| We should start a new, more useful religion
| ksenzee wrote:
| I was raised in a conservative Christian denomination and
| left it for a progressive one, and I've learned you can't
| say "Christianity is ___" and be at all accurate. There
| are too many different Christianities. There are
| denominations that are pro-debate, pro-introspection,
| pro-logic, pro-science. They're aiming for exactly what
| the GP is getting at: how best to live out the
| commandment to love one another, to build a society on
| earth where we care for each other and live up to our
| potential.
|
| I bring this up not because I want to wave my "not all
| Christians" flag, but because it is really important for
| our common civic life that post-religious people
| understand there is more to religion than the sad toxic
| morass they grew up with. Society doesn't need religion
| to die off. It needs religion to evolve. It needs people
| who are naturally religious (and there are a lot of us,
| we've evolved that way) to come together for the common
| good, not get shoved into a back closet to worship
| illegally in secret.
| bluGill wrote:
| As a christian I already have a region that is not
| debatable. That helps me be more willing to debate all
| the things outside. Communist, capitalist, jew, muslim,
| hindu, cannibal, republican, democrat, green, other sect
| of christian - all the same to me, something I'm not
| religiously attached to so I can try to understand. Some
| of those I understand enough to conclude they are wrong.
|
| I know some who are strongly religious about their
| political party. I was treasurer of my local Republican
| party for a while, but I was able to leave them when the
| party it self starting going off of the things I
| supported them for (the local party is still pretty
| good). I might return in the future, we will see.
| r00fus wrote:
| > Some of those I understand enough to conclude they are
| wrong.
|
| Sounds like you may be justifying your conclusions
| instead of the other way around.
| bluGill wrote:
| There is no objective way to measure most of the above.
| Cannibals really did exist - not in large numbers. People
| really did sacrifice their kids to the gods. I'm willing
| to state both of the above are wrong.
|
| Note that I didn't state everything on my list is wrong.
| The5thElephant wrote:
| Genuinely curious what your personal approach is to
| "picking" a religion to believe in. Generally I know most
| people don't pick a faith and just have the one they grew
| up with, but you strike me as someone who actually
| critically examines their beliefs (based on your
| comments).
|
| I've had a lot of great conversations with religious
| people about the nature of their faith, but I have never
| gotten a good answer on why they chose their particular
| organized/named faith. Other religions have people who
| believe just as much as you do that their religion is the
| "right" one and all the others are wrong. How did you
| come to choose your particular form of Christianity over
| the dozens of other named faiths you could choose that
| have equal levels of historical correlation to their
| religious texts?
| arcbyte wrote:
| Interestingly you're having the same experience as the
| person you are replying to, but you haven't reached the
| understanding they've reached.
|
| If all those people you say refuse to question their
| beliefs are actually chasing a higher form of good for
| themselves, why would they engage in any kind of activity
| that would undermine that pursuit? It doesn't make sense
| unless you propose to replace it with a structure that is
| more strongly aligned to with the goal of achieving a
| higher form of themselves. Which nobody ever actually is
| when they argue against religion, they just got hurt by
| somebody's interpretation of it and are trying to find
| validation for that hurt.
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > I know you just said "religion," but I can only speak
| about Christianity as I'm deeply familiar with it.
|
| I believe you when you speak of the bad experiences you
| had, but you seem to think that what you've seen is the
| only (or at least the typical) manifestation of
| Christianity. But that isn't true, and if you do indeed
| believe it's true I respectfully suggest you aren't
| deeply familiar with Christianity the way you believe.
|
| I am a Christian, and I was raised Christian. I have
| never _once_ seen a community such as you describe. I
| realize they exist (everyone knows about the WBC, for
| instance), but they aren 't the norm. Christians I have
| known aren't trying to indoctrinate anyone, and they are
| quite happy to entertain respectful discussion and debate
| about their faith. They are only human, of course, and
| like all humans they don't wish to constantly debate
| things they settled for themselves ages ago (so you are
| sometimes going to get individuals who shut you down).
| But on the whole Christians are perfectly willing to
| engage in introspection or intellectual debate _to the
| same extent anyone else is_ (because let 's not forget,
| many people don't do introspection or intellectual debate
| of _any_ topic).
|
| > It's slowly dying in every developed country because it
| doesn't make sense when logic and science are applied.
|
| You are welcome to your opinion, but it stands at odds
| with the fact that there have been many Christian
| intellectuals throughout history. Scientists,
| theologians, and philosophers have all found that their
| faith still makes perfect sense in the context of their
| intellectual pursuits.
| chaostheory wrote:
| Christianity is not one singular entity. There are many
| different sects that can drastically vary from each
| other. Fundamentalist Christians like the Southern
| Baptists are not going to be as accepting or open minded
| as the more liberal Christian sects such as Catholicism.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| > That's what religious people want you to believe, but
| if you watch how they act, how they vote, and how they
| discriminate it could not be farther from the truth.
|
| While your deep understanding of a few people around you
| is your own, Christianity alone has over a billion people
| from all cultures and walks of life ascribing to it. I
| don't think you can realistically claim to treat them as
| a bloc, and to attempt to might cast doubt on your
| ability to even judge well the people you _do_ know.
| throwaway962237 wrote:
| But you can treat religious believers as a bloc because
| they hold a core set of beliefs, and those beliefs cause
| them to act a certain way. In fact, the whole point of a
| religion is to bind a "bloc" of people to a common set of
| beliefs.
|
| The same way you can associate conspiracy theory
| nationalism with Qanon believers, you can associate
| supernatural supremacism (i.e. "chosen by god") with
| Christians, Muslims, and Jews. While these religions may
| promote healthy behavior for "in group" morality e.g.
| community, family, etc. the effects on a geopolitical
| scale are catastrophic.
| User23 wrote:
| > Everyone already "knows" their religion is correct and
| is not actually willing to challenge that because it's
| scary.
|
| 1 Peter 3:15-16 literally commands us to do exactly that.
| But sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts, being ready
| always to satisfy every one that asketh you a reason of
| that hope which is in you. But with modesty
| and fear, having a good conscience: that whereas they
| speak evil of you, they may be ashamed who falsely accuse
| your good conversation in Christ.
|
| Believe it or not, the ignorant bible thumpers are
| actually a minority of Christians worldwide. There is a
| rich apologetic tradition going back centuries and odds
| are good every one of your objections was answered in the
| middle ages at the latest.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| // It's a refuge for indoctrination, meaning you aren't
| allowed to truly question.
|
| The idea that religion has any kind of market cornered on
| THAT concept in the last 7-10 years is a non-starter.
| r00fus wrote:
| If you want an example of current events as it applies to
| the danger of religion take a simple look at the
| Israel/Hamas war.
|
| 1) Hamas jihadists cultivate decades of repression of the
| Palestinian populace into a spectacular terrorist strike
| on Oct 7th.
|
| 2) Israel, an apartheid ethnostate, where Rabbis call for
| extermination of Palestinians in response to the Hamas
| strike (after decades of dehumanization), drops a nuclear
| payload worth of bombs on Gaza - which kills thousands of
| Palestinians (but only a few dozen Hamas soldiers).
|
| 3) In the US, Christianist pastors and churches back the
| Israeli government's push to ethnically cleanse Gaza -
| primarily because apocalyptic prophesy requires Jews to
| be in the "holy land" - all of whom are prophesied to
| perish.
|
| In all of these cases, all of the involved religions make
| the conflict unavoidable. There were steps to peace in
| previous decades but religious extremists assassinated
| key figures to prevent peace.
|
| This isn't exclusive to this region or these religions,
| of course.
| vorpalhex wrote:
| That'd be a great counter example if any of it were
| factually true.
|
| Hamas is the elected government of the Palestinians and
| it's planks include the extermination of the Jews
| wholesale, whether in Israel or elsewhere. Part of why
| Israel was created is because.. a large group of Muslims
| was attempting to enact an extermination of the Jews (and
| did kill quite a few).
|
| Israel is not an apartheid ethnostate in any sense of
| those words and you do dishonor to actual apartheid and
| ethnic conflicts even by a comparison. Gaza itself has a
| luxury car dealership[1]!
|
| Not only do non-Jews have equal rights in Israel but it's
| one of the few countries in the middle east where Arab
| women have a legal right to vote and free travel without
| an escort.
|
| I have no idea where you got three from but it's not
| actually in the Christian Bible or the Torah.
|
| [1]: https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/mena/libyan-
| luxury-car...
| Larrikin wrote:
| Did they not have luxury cars in apartheid South Africa?
| Does having a dealership make the whole shit show in both
| countries okay?
| autoexec wrote:
| > It's slowly dying in every developed country because it
| doesn't make sense when logic and science are applied.
|
| It's not just the contradictions (with science, logic,
| it's own doctrine) that is hurting their numbers. Almost
| all the Christians I know have distanced themselves from
| the church and are embarrassed to be associated with the
| faith because of the way they see other "Christians"
| behave. If more Christians really lived their faith they
| couldn't act/vote/discriminate the way that they do. I
| can't blame my Christian friends and family for not
| wanting to be associated with that.
|
| I suspect that the number of Christians is higher than
| the falling numbers suggest, because many just don't want
| to be grouped in with the loud people who plainly act in
| ways that violate the basic message of the faith.
| prosqlinjector wrote:
| > but if you watch how they act, how they vote, and how
| they discriminate it could not be farther from the truth.
|
| This is a low quality and bigoted comment.
| AlexandrB wrote:
| > "what kind of man does G-d want me to be?"
|
| Unfortunately, there is not a singular answer to this
| question. You still have to choose which religion/sect you
| want to answer this question for you. You can't _really_
| delegate your morals to a deity because the choice of which
| interpretation of that deity 's teachings you want to
| follow is still yours to make.
| austhrow743 wrote:
| I dont see the distinction between sect choice vs
| religious or not religious at all. If you're
| indoctrinated good and hard you're likely to be religious
| in the way the sect you were brought up in is. Choice
| elimination is the whole idea.
| kelnos wrote:
| I hear this a lot, but I just don't agree. Being
| indoctrinated into a particular system of belief is very
| different from not being indoctrinated into any belief
| system at all.
|
| Yes, certainly there are some atheists who are
| "religious" about it, and will vehemently teach their
| children that there is no possibility of any deities or
| afterlife, and that anyone who tries to tell them
| otherwise is mentally defective somehow. But I would
| agree that's just as tragic as indoctrinating someone
| into any religion, and that certainly isn't the only kind
| of atheist. But if you're going to be a part of your
| religion, and teach your children to believe in it,
| that's always going to be some degree of indoctrination.
|
| I do really appreciate parents who are religious, but do
| their best to let their kids find their own way. I
| suspect that's a much rarer phenomenon than the atheist
| parents who do the same, though.
|
| Let's also not get into an atheist vs. agnostic debate.
| My take on it is that if you are not agnostic, at best,
| you're a "religious atheist" who presents belief (that
| there are no deities) as fact, and that's just as
| dishonest as teaching someone the "fact" of a god and
| heaven and hell (or whatever).
| c0pium wrote:
| What's unfortunate about that? Free will is a good thing.
| It doesn't sound like gp is delegating anything, that
| sounds pretty thoughtful.
| addicted wrote:
| Your ideas of secularism and religiousness does not match
| anything in my personal experience whatsoever (I have
| friends of any different religions including many most
| haven't heard of...I was raised in 1 major religion and
| followed 1 other major religion for a few years before
| turning to atheism and non-religousness almost 2 decades
| ago).
|
| Of course it's probably true for certain individuals, but
| you're talking about religion and secularism (which isn't
| the opposite of religion, btw, so I don't even understand
| what it means to be raised "secular", and in fact
| secularism is essential for a society with multiple
| religions) broadly, and you only need to see what's
| happening in the world right now to observe that your
| generalization is almost certainly wrong.
| chaostheory wrote:
| > I used to think religion was about deep fear, now I see
| it more as about deep care.
|
| As someone who has grown up in a religious, conservative
| household, I strongly disagree. Sure, there are many good
| values that a religious conservative household can foster
| such as independence and self accountability. However, you
| cannot its ignore downside either. The same culture
| promotes fear of the "other" ie different religion,
| different ethnicity / race, different political ideology,
| et al. Whether or not these fears are justified is beside
| the point. I'm just pointing out that they exist which runs
| counter to your very short and limited personal experience.
| (I'm also not saying that the other side is free of any
| fault either.)
|
| https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-
| and-...
|
| https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/liberals-
| are-f...
| bigstrat2003 wrote:
| > However, you cannot its ignore downside either. The
| same culture promotes fear of the "other" ie different
| religion, different ethnicity / race, different political
| ideology, et al.
|
| That has nothing to do with religion. These are facets of
| human nature which find a way to express themselves in
| _all_ societies regardless of religion.
| chaostheory wrote:
| One of the main tenants of religion is to make it clear
| that the people who aren't adherents are wrong and that
| they will end up in that respective religion's hell.
| Religion is a large part of it.
| c0pium wrote:
| This is explicitly not what the Catholic Church teaches.
| There is a commonly used rhetorical device in Catholic
| education asking whether, in fact, anyone has gone to
| hell (the answer being that we can't know but it's very
| possible that it's no). This is well summed up by Mother
| Teresa in her famous response that we are not called to
| be successful, but faithful.
|
| There are a lot other religions which are similar in this
| regard. The real issue is that some (many?) who outwardly
| profess to adhere to a particular religion are totally
| ignorant of that religions teachings.
| jkestner wrote:
| > the current mode of "anything goes, you can be whatever
| you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your
| actions."
|
| That doesn't match reality. Do you have kids in public
| school? Of course they judge actions--especially those that
| harm others. Sometimes that's called social-emotional
| learning, one of the things that Florida politicians have
| tried to make a boogeyman. We're certainly willing to
| punish kids based on their actions.
| Teever wrote:
| If the purpose of religion is to align yourself to the
| highest aspirations why do so many large religious
| organizations get caught up stuff like this:
|
| https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mormon-church-ensign-peak-
| whist...
| golergka wrote:
| We secular Jews have completely different first-hand
| experience of religion than most of other people on the
| planet, so while I completely understand and share your
| perspective, I'm not in the least surprised by the reaction
| your comment got.
| jackmott42 wrote:
| Hard to look at the current state of American Christianity
| and think of it as deep care.
| HybridCurve wrote:
| American Evangelicals seem to gravitate toward their
| belief as a form of authoritarianism. It's less about
| compassion and more about incontestable moral authority
| over others.
| underwater wrote:
| What a weird take. Religions ability to influence behaviour
| works because of our lizard brain, not despite it.
|
| The idea of God judging people from afar is an extension of
| the important humans place on social conformity. We are
| hard wired to care about what other people think of us. If
| you remove the religious decorarions then that underlying
| trait still exists.
| kelnos wrote:
| I was raised very Catholic (and decided by my early teens
| that I didn't believe in any of it), and I completely
| disagree with your conclusion. Organized religion (at least
| Christianity) absolutely is about deep fear. "Do this or
| you'll go to hell!" "Believe this or you'll go to hell!"
| Repeat ad infinitum.
|
| I won't deny that some churches (as in, specific people,
| not the system as a whole) can do good in the world; one
| church I attended with my parents as a kid had some great
| community outreach programs that helped a lot of people who
| had fallen through the cracks. And some clergy members are
| good people who are trying to help.
|
| But overall, religion is about control (for the religious
| leadership, and politicians who use religion to gain
| power), and about belonging and feeling less lost and alone
| (for practicioners) in an uncertain world.
|
| Oh, and as an atheist who knows and hangs out with a lot of
| other atheists, I can assure you that "anything goes, you
| can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of
| any of your actions" is not a thing. Or, rather, it very
| much is a thing, but that attitude comes from just as many
| religious people as it comes from the non-religious. And
| there are quite a few actions that religious people take
| that I think are disgusting and immoral, but somehow
| "anything goes" as long they can justify it in the pages of
| their made-up fantasy holy book. I don't consider things
| moral or immoral based on what a storybook tells me; I
| decide based on how I think my actions will affect others.
| My system is certainly not a perfect one, but I dare say
| it's miles ahead of the religious process.
| kulahan wrote:
| You've misunderstood Catholicism. The entire reason
| Christianity is so radical is because it's the first
| major religion of purely love. There is no need to
| sacrifice anyone, you get _infinite_ forgiveness, so long
| as you truly repent, and nearly every facet of
| Catholicism is based around the idea of love.
|
| A fine example is the incredibly important Corinthians
| 13:13: And now these three remain: faith, hope and love.
| But the greatest of these is love.
|
| When we die, there is no need for faith. We have the
| answer. When we die, we have no need for hope - again, we
| have the answer. The Catholic church places love above
| all else.
|
| The idea that you only think "specific people" can do
| good in the world is pretty nuts - the Catholic Church
| alone is the largest non-governmental provider of
| healthcare in the world.
|
| I also don't understand why books are somehow bad places
| to get information, even if they're completely fictional.
| Can you not learn lessons from cartoons, even? Do you
| truly think every moral issue is so simply black and
| white that it doesn't require practice and debate?
|
| I am not going to say religion is perfect by any stretch
| of the imagination, but much of what you're complaining
| about simply is not true.
| dragonwriter wrote:
| > You've misunderstood Catholicis
|
| To be fair, Catholics at even rather high ranks in the
| heirarchy have fairly radical divergent views of
| Catholicism.
| triyambakam wrote:
| > first major religion of purely love.
|
| Hinduism is much older than Christianity. Specifically
| the Shiva sects. Shiva means compassionate one. God is
| seen as immanent love and transcendent reality.
| nunodonato wrote:
| > But overall, religion is about control
|
| how many religions do you know and have experience with,
| in order to make such a claim? don't throw the baby out
| with the bath water.
| wayfinder wrote:
| Religion isn't about any one thing. For some, it's a sense
| of community and meeting people. For others, it's doing
| right by a greater power. Then there are those who do it
| because they've always done it. Some do it because it gives
| a dependable source of meaning. And some do it because they
| actually live in deep fear.
|
| When you talk about living in deep care, that's because
| that's _your path_. Ask someone else and it might be
| completely different.
|
| You still have to choose your own adventure.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| Yeah, it's very weird the way people act as if the
| religious aren't choosing how to live, what to think and
| what action to take, moment by moment any more or less
| than the irreligious.
|
| In my experience in North America I've found that those
| raised irreligious are generally far more in touch with
| living an inherent "do unto others" than people that have
| exceptions and biases against that rule due to a holy
| writ they can selectively pluck from.
| fellowniusmonk wrote:
| As someone who was raised in religious communities, that
| "higher aspirations" is only the position "in principle" in
| reality working with people in the religious community was
| just scams and moral self justification of despicable
| behavior hidden behind soft language and terrible behavior.
| So much contention, so much gossip, so much backbiting
| behavior and hidden evils against children so that
| communities wouldn't "lose face". The worst behaviors, the
| least faith, the most fear, all hidden by duplicity and a
| weekly practice of virtue signaling. This is not isolated,
| my parents were involved in the church in many states and
| internationally, it was everywhere.
|
| I am old enough now that I have seen the outcomes
| projecting into peoples 30s. I know so many poorly educated
| homeschoolers whose lives have been destroyed with no hope
| of recovery by the complete lack of skills their hyper
| religious parents imparted them with, in jail, broke,
| unable to hack it in college and too lacking in common
| sense to make it in the trades or professional work, with
| living standards insanely far below their parents. That
| being said, I am not against homeschooling personally and
| may do it myself.
|
| I think your outsider perspective makes sense since you
| didn't see the self-righteousness and persecution complex
| inherit in the system. It's like a northerner taking "bless
| your heart" at face value because they're dealing with a
| degree of cowardice and dishonest duplicity they haven't
| experienced before. All the best people I have known have
| been atheists or "religious" people who don't take it
| seriously and just follow their own inherent internal moral
| guidance (which is all the religious people are doing as
| well, as at core everyone acts as they choose to act.)
| lolinder wrote:
| Where was this? How did you find the events? How many
| families were involved? Did they find the events through the
| same channels you did, or did the others all know each other
| ahead of time?
|
| In my experience not only is OP correct that there are
| different kinds of homeschooling, but the people involved in
| the different segments don't really interact at all. My wife
| and I were both homeschooled, living less than a mile away
| from each other for 10 years, but we didn't meet until we
| were adults. Her circle was much like you describe, but ours
| was far more secular, and there was very little overlap.
|
| If you accidentally found your way into the local religious-
| homeschooling circles, I can understand how it would be
| eyebrow-raising, but that doesn't mean that the _other_
| circle isn 't close by.
| CaptWillard wrote:
| // other aspects of homeschooling were just a fig leaf over a
| whole lot of religious indoctrination.
|
| While this may technically fit the definition of
| "indoctrination", that's a pretty loaded way to describe what
| parents teach their own children.
|
| // they thought the public schools were too secular and were
| teaching "sinful" sciences like evolution.
|
| Really? In 2021, the hot-button issue among religious parents
| was evolution?
| vel0city wrote:
| I personally know multiple people who homeschooled their
| kids to avoid discussing evolution. There's even been
| debate at state board of education levels about how
| evolution is taught in public schools. There's absolutely a
| lot of people who want to teach their kids humans and dinos
| existed at the same time.
| lolinder wrote:
| I think their point wasn't that religious parents
| wouldn't be concerned about evolution _too_ , but that in
| 2021 they would have expected LGBT issues to be at the
| forefront of the religious right's fears surrounding
| public schools.
|
| For the parental fears to center on evolution either
| suggests either that the parents were censoring their
| larger concerns for OP, or it's an anachronism that
| brings the chronology into question.
| petsfed wrote:
| I mean, you pick the subject, there's a hot-button issue.
|
| Could be evolution in the science side of things, the
| legacy of slavery or colonization in the history side of
| things.
|
| Math is generally pretty safe, although I do see a steady
| stream of "I'm so glad I'm homeschooling my kids, I can't
| believe what $currentEducationalBogeyman is trying to pass
| off as education" when presented with some way to
| understand math that I had to teach myself, in college, to
| do the math faster in my head.
|
| Composition is pretty safe, but as its frequently combined
| with literature (that is, the study of rhetoric in other
| people's writing) which also has a lot of self-censorship.
| It's also unsteady ground, as the Bible should be study as
| literature as well as religious tome, but that can lead to
| kids thinking about the humans who wrote the bible and what
| rhetorical outcome they were reaching towards.
|
| Physical education is safe so long as it limits itself to
| exercise, but health topics like human sexuality are
| obviously going to raise some hackles.
|
| I think it really depends on the parent what is the
| absolute bogeyman of public schooling, but evolution has
| posed the most consistent existential threat to the
| stereotypical fundamentalist who is looking to avoid
| "sinful" public schools.
| rhcom2 wrote:
| Half of Republicans don't believe in evolution
|
| https://www.pewresearch.org/short-
| reads/2014/01/03/republica...
| PsylentKnight wrote:
| > While this may technically fit the definition of
| "indoctrination", that's a pretty loaded way to describe
| what parents teach their own children.
|
| I'm a former homeschooler that had to watch countless Ken
| Ham and Kent Hovind videos. These videos were filled with
| strawmen and faulty logic. I distinctly remember one of
| them tearing into Lamarckism, a theory discredited in the
| 1930's, as if it were something that people actually
| believe in today. Indoctrination is exactly how I'd
| describe it.
| SpicyLemonZest wrote:
| Creationism never went away, it just became less
| politically salient. Public belief in evolution has been
| basically static for decades.
| wskinner wrote:
| I don't know where you live, but my anecdata from being
| homeschooled starting ~20 years ago in the Bay Area
| contradicts this. I was part of a group of more than 50
| homeschooled children of various ages. Our parents all had
| their own reasons for homeschooling us, but to my knowledge,
| none of them did it because they thought the public schools
| were too secular and teaching "sinful" science.
|
| We were aware of families homeschooling for religious
| reasons, but not in the Bay Area.
| geocrasher wrote:
| ^^^^^^^^^^ This.
|
| We unschooled our kids. Worked beautifully. They're both as
| much of a success or failure as if they had gone to public
| school. Had more to do with their idiot gene donor's DNA than
| their schooling.
| DiggyJohnson wrote:
| > Had more to do with their idiot gene donor's DNA than their
| schooling.
|
| What do you mean by this? I'm assuming it's just self-
| deprecating humor.
| geocrasher wrote:
| Their biological father I am not. There's no way my kids
| would turn out the way they did if they had my DNA.
|
| If anything, they'd be dumber.
| maxwelljoslyn wrote:
| > Treating all these scenarios as a single thing that you can
| hold a single, consistent opinion about suggests to me a lack
| of familiarity with its wide spectrums along multiple
| dimensions. It's like passing a judgment on a person based on
| their race, country of origin, gender, etc.
|
| A huge +1 to this, from observing the many friends I have who
| do homeschooling. Judging by their results -- super-smart,
| super-well-behaved children -- has gotten me thinking I'd like
| to do the same once I have kids.
| jeffrallen wrote:
| Your children's future classmates wish you wouldn't keep your
| children from enriching their shared classroom. You might be
| just the kind of parent that the school needs to maintain a
| critical mass of involved parents.
| anon291 wrote:
| My wife resents that her parents made her be this for the
| other kids in her class. This meant my wife had to do
| things like be the one to 'tame' the poorly behaved boy. Or
| she had to be the one to do extra work because the teacher
| would group her with the worst student. This is actually
| not preparation for adulthood. As an adult, when someone
| acts like a jerk, you ignore them and shun them and may
| report them depending on how bad it is. As a child, you're
| forced to interact. As an adult, I choose my colleagues so
| that they're intelligent and pull their weight.
|
| A common complaint I hear from homeschooled kids is
| 'parentification', where their parents expect adult
| responsibility from small children. I fail to see how what
| you're asking for is any different. Children shouldn't be
| expected to do adult's jobs.
| bsder wrote:
| > A huge +1 to this, from observing the many friends I have
| who do homeschooling. Judging by their results -- super-
| smart, super-well-behaved children
|
| Maybe.
|
| The primary difference between the upper classes
| "homeschooling" and the lower classes "homeschooling" is that
| the upper classes will purchase tutors/teachers and the lower
| classes will do it themselves.
|
| A couple of local elementary school kids from your upper
| middle class housing development being put together in a pod
| with two teachers will blow the doors off _ANY_ school--
| public, private, homeschool, whatever. Homeschoolers from
| lower socioeconomic classes _can_ keep up with this, but it
| 's a _LOT_ more effort than they generally estimate.
|
| The problem is the dramatic increase in sophistication
| required in middle school grades. Writing goes from very
| basic sentences to multiple paragraphs. The _vast_ majority
| of people are not equipped to deal with this as they can 't
| write well enough themselves. Math goes from multiplication
| tables to Algebra I. The _vast_ majority of the population is
| not equipped to teach Algebra I. Science comes online as a
| subject in middle school--we _know_ most people aren 't
| equipped to teach that.
|
| The higher socioeconomic classes will recognize that they
| cannot handle the teaching and purchase appropriate teachers
| if they are committed.
|
| The lower socioeconomic classes cannot apply the relevant
| resource _even_ if they recognize the problems. However, they
| are _committed_ to homeschooling at that point and cannot
| back down and say that they need to put their child into
| public school.
| twobitshifter wrote:
| How do you deal with the cases where kids are neglected or
| indoctrinated against American society?
| jdminhbg wrote:
| Take them out of public schools, I guess?
| tw04 wrote:
| Sure, but ultimately when kids receive vastly different
| childhood educations, it will eventually fracture society
| because we're all starting from a completely different set of
| beliefs. Even if some schools are "better" or "worse" for the
| most part they have similar curriculum. As time goes on and
| that curriculum diverges, it'll make the political fractures in
| society today seem like a walk in the park IMO.
|
| The social aspect of schooling is just as important as the
| educational part of it. There's a reason growing up when we had
| home schooled kids that joined for their high school years,
| they were the "weird kids" - they just had absolutely no idea
| how to interact socially with their peers. And for some folks
| that carries on to adulthood.
|
| Disclaimer: my parents were public school teachers, and seeing
| the system deteriorate feels like a travesty. The number of
| parents who think school is daycare is disheartening to say the
| least.
| ndriscoll wrote:
| In theory, society should be robust to differing beliefs:
| allow people to segregate into communities with shared
| beliefs and self-govern. Use higher levels of government
| sparingly to resolve conflicts and where coordination is
| necessary and general consensus exists that the thing you are
| coordinating is desired.
|
| In practice, people have trouble not butting into each
| other's lives. If we're going to try to force a shared belief
| on everyone, it should be to fix that.
| autoexec wrote:
| Segregating everyone into insular pockets of the like-
| minded just feeds ignorance, intolerance, and group-think.
| We shouldn't force beliefs on everyone, but we should
| reject ignoring facts or replacing them with beliefs.
|
| There's a lot to be said for giving all children a baseline
| level of education based on fact so that everyone
| understands the world and the large problems we have and so
| they will know how to work together to face them.
|
| The kids who are only ever taught that the world is 6,000
| years old and flat, that women are inferior, that evolution
| is a lie, that global warming isn't real, or that gay
| people cause hurricanes are going to be at a substantial
| disadvantage in many areas of their lives and they will
| hinder efforts to resolve conflicts, to coordinate when
| necessary, and to reach general consensus.
| Justsignedup wrote:
| Homeschooling _can_ work. But the likelihood of it working well
| is pretty low. You literally have a teacher wife who is
| homeschooling the kids. For most people homeschooling = not
| schooling.
|
| Very heavily used by the hassidic community here in nyc to
| prevent girls from having any education.
|
| I linked to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI as a
| top level post, but just to give you some ideas. This is John
| Oliver's take on it.
| clausok wrote:
| We started homeschooling by happenstance when it turned out
| that kindergarten was going to conflict with our son's beloved
| jiu-jitsu class. The class was a bit of a drive and we weren't
| going to be able to get there in time for his favorite part:
| the 30 minutes of horsing around on the mats before class
| started.
|
| We thought, "Well, it's only kindergarten". It worked out well
| enough (knock on wood) that we just kept going.
|
| Compared to my own harried "THE BUS IS COMING!!!" sleep-
| deprived school days, it has been a wonderful change.
|
| If I could go back in time, I'd put my mom in an ankle lock
| until she agreed to do the same for me.
|
| Especially since I learned that in my home state homeschoolers
| can participate in high-school sports. In high school I had to
| wake up at 4AM for 5AM hockey practice. If I could have
| returned home afterwards and slept, rather than going straight
| to school, I would have thanked the Gods.
| Zelphyr wrote:
| > the 30 minutes of horsing around on the mats before class
| started
|
| Followed by the collective groan about how they're too tired
| to do the warmups.
| justhereforthe wrote:
| May I ask if your son is an only child? I've thought about
| online homeschooling my son when he's old enough (he's still
| a baby), but I wonder if he would be lonely if he turns out
| to be our one-and-done. You mentioned your son's beloved jiu-
| jitsu; does he have other outlets for meeting friends and
| socializing?
| liveoneggs wrote:
| Religion and its associated anti-science (etc) is the majority
| reason for home schooling. The groups in highly-skilled co-ops
| are a small minority and are not what the word normally
| invokes.
| lolinder wrote:
| > The groups in highly-skilled co-ops are a small minority
| and are not what the word normally invokes.
|
| Essentially what this sentence says is "the people that don't
| fit my stereotype are not the image that comes to my mind
| when I hear ${word}." While this is definitely _true_ (it 's
| more or less the definition of a stereotype), it's not a
| refutation of OP's point that homeschooling is more
| complicated than your stereotypes would have you believe.
| petertodd wrote:
| > but it's actually a whole bunch of very dissimilar things.
|
| Even in the same kid it can be very dissimilar.
|
| The main reason I was homeschooled was that the local school
| system's ridiculous "whole word" approach to reading and
| writing was failing me badly, and by age ten I still could
| barely read. So that part of my homeschooling experience was
| very traditional, hands on, drilling in phonics and other time
| tested techniques... and soon I finally could read and write
| fluently.
|
| Meanwhile for math and science, I had no problem figuring it on
| my own with much less input now that I could finally read. I
| wasn't quite unschooled for those subjects. But it was close to
| that.
|
| Funny thing is I actually learned basic programming _before_ I
| could read fluently. I remember the hardest thing about it
| being struggling to read the books I was learning from.
| Programming itself seemed pretty straightforward in comparison.
| rrradical wrote:
| I was (non-religiously) home schooled and very much benefited
| from it. I was able to spend a lot more time reading books than
| I would have in school. I was able to learn about computers,
| programming, etc. I did get some socialization through other
| kids in my neighborhood and events with other home school
| families. I started in back in school around high school and,
| although it was a bit of a transition, I enjoyed it (and don't
| regret homeschooling either).
|
| It probably wouldn't work well for every kid and every family.
| Personally, I found the structure of elementary school very
| constraining and was glad to get out. I'm sure there are pros
| and cons to both approaches.
|
| I think relative to my peers I'm generally able to be a bit
| more self motivated. And I think schools generally teach you to
| solve problems using only the information on the page in front
| of you, whereas the real world is much messier than that.
| bluGill wrote:
| Or so you think. I don't know you, but every home school kids
| I've met shows the lack of meeting
| republicans/democrats/jews/blacks. None of them see that in
| themselves though.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It's hard to know what this looks like.
| lolinder wrote:
| Nearly every _person_ I 've met struggles with empathizing
| with people who aren't in their in-group, that's not a
| homeschooled-specific thing. The enormous polarization in
| the modern political climate is due to precisely the kind
| of insularism that you're calling out, and it's not because
| of the 1.5% of the adult population that was homeschooled.
| nixass wrote:
| In short, homeschooling is idiocracy in making
| turminal wrote:
| Fringe and fastest-growing are not mutually exclusive:
| https://xkcd.com/1102/
| pengaru wrote:
| I expected home schooling to take off in popularity once school
| shootings became normalized and schools responded by increasingly
| resembling prisons.
| brindlejim wrote:
| This appears to be largely a COVID phenomenon. Lacking that
| forcing function, I doubt whether subsequent cohorts of parents
| will opt for that burden. The only thing that might push them to
| maintain the discipline of home schooling is the ideological
| capture of public schools, which leads to discrimination,
| unmonitored chaos and the long-term medicalization of students
| based on dumb ideas, the naming of which will would get this
| comment flagged.
| timerol wrote:
| "Rise from fringe to fastest-growing" seems like a math
| misunderstanding. Something that's small has the largest
| possibility of growing rapidly, expressed as a percentage.
| https://xkcd.com/1102/
|
| The article really doubles down on suspect use of numbers by
| talking about "[Hillsborough County, Fla] vote results have
| predicted the winner in 22 of the last 24 presidential elections.
| Now it is a harbinger of a different trend: the widespread
| adoption and acceptance of home schooling." Spurious election
| correlations make for bad articles.
|
| Within that county since 2017 school enrollment has grown "3.4
| percent, to 224,538 students." (about 7400 student increase),
| while homeschooling has grown 74%, up to 10,680 (growth of about
| 4500 students).
| defgeneric wrote:
| I'm skeptical when these parents their kids cite poor public
| schools as the primary reason for home schooling. When you look
| closer, it's almost always lifestyle and ideology that are the
| main factors.
|
| The often-cited failure in socialization extends beyond
| socialization within peer-groups as well--kids also need exposure
| to a variety of adults and authority figures. It's not only about
| learning how to make friends.
|
| > Today, Hillsborough home-schoolers inhabit a scholastic and
| extracurricular ecosystem that is in many ways indistinguishable
| from that of a public or private school. Home-schooled kids play
| competitive sports. They put on full-scale productions of "Mary
| Poppins" and "Les Miserables." They have high school graduation
| ceremonies, as well as a prom and homecoming dance.
|
| > The Christian home-schooling co-op that had about 40 kids in
| 2011 when McKeown joined it -- a co-op she would go on to direct
| -- has grown to nearly 600 students.
|
| > "Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for
| anything," she said. "We have come such a long way."
|
| I mean reading this it just sounds like they are discovering the
| hard way the concept of... a school??
| pdonis wrote:
| A school-like environment that doesn't indoctrinate their
| children in values that the parents disagree with, which is
| what would happen if their children went to public schools.
| defgeneric wrote:
| Sorry, but the parents' "values" are almost always some
| crackpot nonsense. Public schools at least aim for a measure
| of neutrality, beyond which children can develop their own
| ideas. It's just strange to me that people are so intent on
| having their children mirror their own ideas. Have some
| humility, entertain the idea that you yourself may be wrong
| about everything, and let the kids figure out what they think
| for themselves. The public school gives them a reasonably
| neutral basis to do that, even as the different ideological
| fads come and go in the faculty and administration.
| pdonis wrote:
| _> the parents ' "values" are almost always some crackpot
| nonsense_
|
| "Almost always" is way, way too broad. Yes, some parents'
| values are crackpot nonsense, but many are not. One does
| not have to be a crackpot to prefer homeschooling to US
| public schools.
|
| Also, the values that the people who set up the US public
| school system explicitly said that system would
| indoctrinate children into are nothing to write home about
| either.
|
| _> Have some humility_
|
| Take your own advice. If anyone is being way overconfident
| here, it's you.
|
| _> let the kids figure out what they think for themselves_
|
| It seems to me that homeschooling is far more likely to let
| kids do this than public schools are.
|
| _> The public school gives them a reasonably neutral basis
| to do that_
|
| In the US? You must be joking. Public schools in the US are
| anything but neutral.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| Ok so they invented religious school which, again, already
| exists.
| jononomo wrote:
| > I mean reading this it just sounds like they are discovering
| the hard way the concept of... a school??
|
| Yeah, a school that works.
| tomtheelder wrote:
| It's literally just a religious private school.
| jononomo wrote:
| Hasn't homeschooling been the norm for our species for over a
| hundred thousand years and has only recently (in the last five
| thousand years) begun to seem abnormal?
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I kept waiting for the ideology, which is mostly absent from
| this, but here it is:
|
| >Of the 10 districts with the most home-schooled kids in The Post
| database, nine are in Florida. That's partly because of the
| state's large school districts, but also because its elected
| officials have grown friendlier to home education as they saddle
| public schools with politically charged restrictions on what can
| be taught about race and gender.
|
| So, FL parents are homeschooling because they object to the rules
| recently put in place about teaching about racism and LGBT
| issues?
|
| Somehow, I doubt that.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| No, it's more: "if you homeschool, you, and we are free to not
| even have to worry about this as an issue, versus us trying
| with varying degrees of success to lock it out of your kids
| school".
|
| The two can be entirely compatible.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| I don't even understand this.
|
| FL officials are encouraging homeschooling? That's silly,
| given that the majority of kids will still go to public
| schools.
| FireBeyond wrote:
| It's ideology. If you're invested in taking those things
| out of education, and that's your motivator, then you have
| a couple of options: encourage homeschooling, where it
| can't be mandated, or work to remove it from public
| schools. Who is to say you can't do both? After all, either
| achieves your ideological aims.
| AlbertCory wrote:
| so you claim to have found a motivation for this
| behavior, which you haven't even provided evidence for?
|
| these horrible people are _encouraging_ homeschooling,
| and that 's why it's growing? Extraordinary claims
| require extraordinary evidence. Especially when the whole
| article describes it as a nationwide phenomenon.
|
| I believe "projection" describes this paranoid belief of
| yours.
| deepsquirrelnet wrote:
| Growing up, I had friends from 3 different families of kids that
| were homeschooled.
|
| The first was my neighbor. I'm not really sure why his parents
| homeschooled him. He was an only child, and strikingly similar to
| the character of Cartman from Southpark. Him mom was also
| strikingly similar to Cartman's mom. He didn't learn anything, as
| his mom was not very strict about making sure he did his lessons.
| He had terrible social skills and very few life skills, which all
| came from hobbies that he pursued. He was an intelligent kid, and
| is struggling today due to generally poor work ethic and few job
| skills.
|
| The second family was a typical anti-government family with cult-
| like religious beliefs. They believed God was in charge of their
| reproductive systems and had way more children than they could
| care for. It was a huge family. The first born was able to secure
| a job as an airline attendant, and led a reasonably normal life.
| Last I heard, many of the rest had succumb to methamphetamine
| and/or opioid addictions and have been in and out of jail. All of
| them were substantially undereducated, several with severe speech
| impediments and none with GEDs or high school diplomas.
|
| The last family were the kids of my family's pastor. They were
| generally successful. Their parents were strict, but very
| involved in their kids' education. In many ways, they were
| successful - ahead in reading and math. They were somewhat poorly
| adapted socially, but had enough relationships through the church
| to overcome it.
|
| In my experience, it _can_ be a positive thing for children. The
| success of the children really depends on how involved parents
| are in making sure their kids needs are met. Sadly, it also seems
| like many parents who choose to homeschool do so because they
| don't personally value education.
| mberning wrote:
| To see the mind boggling topics that come up during school board
| meetings and elections I can see why people want to home school.
| ken47 wrote:
| Titles like this irk me. It's likely the fastest growing
| _because_ it's fringe.
| gnicholas wrote:
| The graphics don't help clear things up, either. Showing the
| growth rate over time is interesting, but only if you also show
| the percent of kids in each camp. It's not immediately obvious
| whether homeschooled kids are 2%, 8%, or .2%, from looking at
| the charts (and even doing a ctrl-F on "percent").
|
| It's kind of embarrassing that this article doesn't once
| mention the rough percentage of students that are being
| homeschooled.
| jononomo wrote:
| I'm noticing several comments to the effect that "teachers" have
| some particular qualification to teach that other people don't
| have. But, at least in the US, the qualifications required to
| become a teacher are intended to protect the teacher's union and
| they don't confer any special "teaching ability".
|
| People have been teaching things to each other for hundreds of
| thousands of years, even before there were degree programs in
| education.
|
| I will grant that some people are particularly good at explaining
| things well, but I don't associate that ability with "public
| school teacher" in any respect. In fact, it correlates with being
| bright, which is negatively correlated with being a public school
| teacher.
| sweeter wrote:
| I mean its obvious. There has been a concerted effort to de-fund
| public schools and center the conversation about "right to
| choose" education, alongside a handout of vouchers to attend
| private religious schools AND the implementation of new laws that
| allow tax payer dollars to go to funding those privately owned
| religious schools (seriously).
|
| The intent imo is to make schools seem "scary" and push parents
| to put their kids in private schools that these religious groups
| control, they are for-profit so they can rake in those sweet tax
| dollars and the parents money, while public schools flail and
| kids don't get a proper education. Its a concerted effort to
| privatize and dismantle the public school system. These schools
| don't have to abide by federal laws either, even while receiving
| federal tax money.
|
| Throw that in with the very real dangers of going to school these
| days, these are the only two options after a while. Go to a
| private religious school, or home school... and that is not an
| accident or a coincidence.
| collaborative wrote:
| I find it a bit far fetched to suggest that these private
| religious schools have enough influence to change laws and get
| tax dollars
|
| The much simpler explanation is that having influence over
| private schools is very tempting for the govt and the easiest
| tool is via giving or retaining funding which they don't
| personally have to pay. They just want to secure votes and
| influence
| sweeter wrote:
| You'd be partially correct in saying that private schools
| alone dont have the influence to do this, its more so
| politicians who endorse these schools and own stake in these
| schools that are at the root of the issue. With the goal of
| moving taxpayer money into private monied interests, instead
| of public services. Its a tail as old as time in the US.
| ImJamal wrote:
| While there may be an effort to defund public schools, funding
| (inflation adjusted) has been increasing.
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditures-per-...
| Modified3019 wrote:
| I'm not surprised, american public schools can end up with a lot
| of pathologies that can't be practically addressed by a parent
| outside of "flee and try literally anything else".
|
| My public elementary school was outright hostile to my existence,
| with teachers ignoring/enabling my bullies and then trying to
| punish me when I started fighting back _viciously_ at the
| prompting of my exasperated father. "Anarcho-tyranny" is a good
| way to sum up my experience. You'll likely find it unsurprising
| that I am adhd(I) (fully evaluated) and almost certainly autistic
| to some degree (not fully evaluated as there's not much for me to
| gain on a diagnosis), though these revelations wouldn't come
| until decades later when I learned what these things actually
| meant instead of media tropes. Prior to that I was considered
| "shy /very introverted".
|
| Homeschool was straight up not an option for me, since we were a
| single parent/provider household. I'm extremely lucky that a
| charter middle school opened up around 4th grade. It was amazing
| to see what sort of environment occurred when both teachers and
| children were held accountable and can and would be removed.
| There's also the effects of the natural bias of having most of
| the children there having active and concerned parents involved,
| which I imagine also plays a big role in the ultimate quality of
| the education homeschoolers now get, as opposed to what seemed to
| be more prominently religious/paranoid motivations when I was a
| child.
|
| Also fortunately my public high school was, mostly, tame.
| haizhung wrote:
| Am I the only one thinking that home schooling is the wrong
| solution to the underlying problem?
|
| The problem is that the public education sector has been - for
| years - continuously squeezed dry of any funding. Teachers are
| quitting left and right, and schools are in a terrible state.
| Instead of fixing THAT problem, now people homeschool.
|
| Ok; I guess. At least homeschooling is something that the
| individual can control, public funding not so much.
|
| But it boggles my mind how people can assume, with a straight
| face, that they are equipped to educate their child alone -
| something which is normally a profession for which you have to
| study O(years) (and even then most people aren't really good at).
| What gives parents this confidence? And what gives parents the
| right to squander the future of their children on a whim?
|
| I have two kids, would consider myself very well educated (have a
| PhD, etc), and I habe absolutely 0 confidence in myself schooling
| my kids.
|
| Finally, public schooling is obviously an attempt at leveling the
| playing field between children from different backgrounds. By
| removing your kid from that, I think it further contributes to
| the segregation of our society.
| traject_ wrote:
| > But it boggles my mind how people can assume, with a straight
| face, that they are equipped to educate their child alone -
| something which is normally a profession for which you have to
| study O(years) (and even then most people aren't really good
| at).
|
| The key assumption here is that the expertise and years of
| studying translates to desirable outcomes. The large expansion
| of homeschooling suggesting by the article suggests a great
| rise in people who no longer believe that the expertise
| promoted by teaching schools is actually relevant to teach
| their children.
|
| After all, mass public schooling is only about a century old
| and default human experience in many ways has always been
| closer to what we call homeschooling.
| mrguyorama wrote:
| >The large expansion of homeschooling suggesting by the
| article suggests a great rise in people who no longer believe
| that the expertise promoted by teaching schools is actually
| relevant to teach their children.
|
| "Believe" is the important word there. Are these people
| removing children from school because they actually can do a
| better job, or because the TV told them a school somewhere
| had a litterbox for a furry student?
| marcusverus wrote:
| > The problem is that the public education sector has been -
| for years - continuously squeezed dry of any funding.
|
| Public school spending in the US is up almost 50% in the last
| 30 years.[0]
|
| https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditures-per-...
| haizhung wrote:
| Thanks for the data! It seems that adjusted for inflation, it
| still is an overall net decrease (11,500$ in 1990 equals
| about 27,000$ today).
| jdminhbg wrote:
| No, look at the chart again, it's denominated in constant
| 2021 dollars, i.e., adjusted for inflation. Public school
| spending has increased.
| hagy wrote:
| The data is already adjusted for inflation as indicated in
| the y-axis label, "Expenditure in constant 2020-21 U.S.
| dollars".
| cwoolfe wrote:
| I agree that funding isn't necessarily the problem. We live
| in a wealthy county and have more to spend per pupil.
| Unfortunately that doesn't translate to higher test scores.
| The extra dollars go to administrative positions in the
| central office which may or may not translate to better
| academic performance.
| ryandrake wrote:
| Where's all that money going? Surely not to teachers who are
| chronically underpaid and have 30+ students per class. It's
| not buying school supplies, which our teachers often have to
| pay for out of pocket or hold bake sales to fund.
|
| Is it all going to football fields, useless technology
| spending, and 5 levels of non-teaching administration staff?
| AlexandrB wrote:
| _Where the hell is all this money going_? It 's certainly not
| to teachers, whose salaries have barely changed[1] when
| adjusted for inflation. Is it going to real estate costs?
| Technology costs? Administration? What?
|
| [1] https://www.statista.com/chart/20979/public-school-
| teacher-s...
| bloaf wrote:
| The evidence is weak, but currently leans towards "parents can
| and actually do a better job than the professionals." This
| _includes_ parents with low incomes, and _includes_ parents
| with low educational achievement.
|
| You categorize this as contributing to segregation, but I say
| that it contributes to diversity. Public school is a hugely
| homogenizing force and the homogeneity it targets is not
| necessarily good. I think it is good for society to have a set
| of people who were raised in an environment with fundamentally
| different experiences and priorities.
|
| https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-translator...
| https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/
| owenpalmer wrote:
| > The problem is that the public education sector has been -
| for years - continuously squeezed dry of any funding.
|
| Lack of funding isn't always the problem. As jawns mentioned,
| there's a lot of reasons to remove your kids from public
| school.
|
| > I have two kids, would consider myself very well educated
| (have a PhD, etc), and I habe absolutely 0 confidence in myself
| schooling my kids.
|
| Interesting. I'm surprised you feel this way while
| acknowledging that most educated teachers "aren't really good
| at it". Perhaps you aren't qualified to teach your kids, and
| that's okay. At least you have the self-awareness to know they
| need help from someone else.
|
| > public schooling is obviously an attempt at leveling the
| playing field between children from different backgrounds.
|
| Yep. But it can also stifle the growth of overachievers.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| > something which is normally a profession for which you have
| to study O(years) (and even then most people aren't really good
| at). What gives parents this confidence? And what gives parents
| the right to squander the future of their children on a whim?
|
| You have to consider capacity. It is a parent educating 1-2
| children vs a teacher educating 30+. So while the teacher has a
| lot more training on how, a lot of the how is how to do it in
| bulk.
|
| Would an individual focused on solving any particular problem
| outperform a PhD trying to solve 30 at once? I don't think that
| is unreasonable. Someone who hasn't picked up a book on
| software development yet has a reasonable chance of beating me
| (professional software developer) if I work on 30 projects at
| once.
|
| If you have the means, you can also buy a lot of teaching a la
| carte.
|
| When faced with similar resource and time constraints, teacher
| is going to win. But the gap in those is huge.
| dbjacobs wrote:
| We let our 3 kids choose between homeschool and private school.
| As a result they tended to bounce back and forth between the
| systems depending on their priorities. By the time they reached
| 4th grade I was mostly a coach when they chose homeschooling. I
| would let them know the things they needed to learn and help
| them find curriculum. And when they got stuck on something they
| would come to me for help, but in general they were responsible
| for themselves. Mostly they would only do schoolwork for 3
| hours a day or so.
|
| They had no problems reintegrating into regular school when
| they chose to do so. Our youngest stayed on the homeschool
| track the longest (from 7th grade because they got involved in
| competitive Call of Duty. So they ended up doing the
| homeschool->community college->GaTech track.
|
| > But it boggles my mind how people can assume, with a straight
| face, that they are equipped to educate their child alone -
| something which is normally a profession for which you have to
| study O(years) (and even then most people aren't really good
| at). What gives parents this confidence? And what gives parents
| the right to squander the future of their children on a whim?
|
| There are awesome resources to educate you kid on just about
| anything. The real distinguishing attribute on whether a parent
| can be a good educator is whether their children can spin them
| up emotionally. If a parent can't stay calm when their child is
| pushing their buttons homeschooling probably won't work. And
| then secondarily, a parent should know when they are over their
| head and need to bring in assistance. Not every parent is
| equipped to help their children learn calculus and other
| advanced courses.
| mikrotikker wrote:
| At least in my country the homeschooling is ballooning as
| parents don't want the LGBT stuff and DQST forced on their kids
| but also don't want to be accussed of being a bigot when they
| raise issue with it.
| pokstad wrote:
| Funding is not the issue. Private schools pay their teachers
| less and have higher success rates.
|
| Public schools are still teaching in a style suited for the
| Industrial Revolution. They also are a jobs program, so they
| can't change to accommodate students if it hurts the employees.
| dgunay wrote:
| Ignoring the education/socialization arguments, I'm surprised to
| see that no one has mentioned the ostensibly reduced risk of your
| homeschooled child becoming the victim of a school shooting.
|
| Go on and tell me how statistically the risk is negligible. It
| makes me feel a bit anxious whenever someone I love is doing
| _anything_ with a tail risk of instant death that society has
| somehow normalized, even just driving. I'm not a parent but I
| imagine that kind of thing could really affect some parents'
| peace of mind.
| xyzelement wrote:
| It might help to begin with the end in mind. The goal of
| education and the reason you send your kids to school is so that
| they come out with skills that enable them to succeed in
| society[1] and you also want them to be bolstered as moral and
| ethical human beings.
|
| If you trust the public school to do that - or at least do a
| better job of it than you could yourself - then you send them. On
| the other extreme, you either opt for private school or home-
| school.
|
| I assume people don't make these decisions lightly. The path of
| least resistance is to send your kid to whatever random school
| they are zoned for. The next level of care is to move to an area
| with better schools or hope you can get into a charter school.
| Next level beyond that is paying a heavy price (in dollars or
| hours) to send them to private school or home-school. So I
| respect people who do that, a lot. It comes from care for their
| kids and ability to commit to it deeply.
|
| As a personal observation, I was very lucky with the public
| school education I got in Brooklyn in the 90s. Especially in high
| school, I had many teachers that taught me _how_ to think more
| than _what to think._ But that was 30 years ago and that kind of
| teacher was kinda old-school then. Back then, I can count on one
| hand the number of teachers I had that today would be categorizes
| as "woke crazies" (one tell-tale sign, they grade you on whether
| you agree with them, not the quality of your argument) but I
| suspect that ratio is way worse now. My kid is a toddler and I
| have a bunch of years to evaluate the teaching in our area, but I
| wouldn't think I'd be doing my son a favor sending him to a
| school that constrains thinking and speech rather than encourages
| breadth. I am very far from considering home schooling but if my
| choice is to basically stay home and teach my kids or to send
| them to a brain-deadening environment (that's an extreme, don't
| think it's happening in my town) I know what I'd pick.
|
| [1] that is a combination of technical, thinking, and social
| skills.
| rahimnathwani wrote:
| Not sure how old your toddler is or whether you already know
| about this, but you might consider adding 'Teach your child to
| read in 100 easy lessons' to your cart:
| https://hn.algolia.com/?dateRange=all&page=0&prefix=true&que...
| xyzelement wrote:
| Funny enough, I heard about this book on HN before, took it
| out from the library and didn't do anything with it for
| months, then returned it and just thought to buy it
| yesterday!
| Animats wrote:
| Caution, dark pattern in the data search:
|
| _" This page keeps track of the districts that you search for in
| the database. We use this information as described in our Privacy
| Policy, including to better understand our readers and
| personalize your experience."_
| Justsignedup wrote:
| Just to leave it here, here's John Oliver's take on it.
| https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI
| simplyluke wrote:
| The article's failure to mention the shuttering of many of these
| schools for well over a full academic year seems intentionally
| negligent. My local school district, Seattle, didn't have full
| in-person instruction until the Fall of 2021. We've now got
| decent data on how disastrous remote learning was for kids, so
| parents choosing to take matters into their own hands seems like
| an entirely rational response. I don't have kids but if I did
| would have absolutely looked into alternate options to zoom
| lectures for kindergarteners.
|
| > In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes
| in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of
| 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance
|
| Parents with resources are opting out of a system that was not
| providing for their kids. This isn't surprising.
| WalterBright wrote:
| I had a good time in public schools. All my friends were there,
| and we had a lot of fun.
|
| Didn't learn much of anything, though, which became apparent
| during the disastrous first week of college.
| calebm wrote:
| I heard Salmon Khan give a talk earlier this year where he
| mentioned the "Two Sigma Problem"
| (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem), where
| kids with a private tutor perform 2 standard deviations better
| (on average) than public-schooled children. (Caveat: not all
| parents are going to be quite as good as a private tutor.)
| Pound5260 wrote:
| I see all this comments about how the homeschooled kids fail
| academically, and I cannot help but wonder if the people
| parroting this have any idea of the current state of public
| schools in the US. Homeschooled kids are subject to the very
| strict scrutiny of the court of public opinion (and ironically
| some of the most academically sound kids I have seen were
| homeschooled...) while public school kids can finish high school
| without knowing how to read or do basic math, and that's ok...
| lgleason wrote:
| The lack of quality with public schools has degraded to the point
| of you facing the choice of either spending a boat load of money
| on private, and even some of those have gone downhill, or
| homeschooling. I also know a lot of people who were very
| successful with homeschooling.
| lefstathiou wrote:
| To add my two cents to the HN community scratching their head
| about this: my wife and I are the products of public school, we
| have the means to send our kids to private school, and I am
| actively lining up the people and resources to home school our
| two toddlers.
|
| For us, it comes down to the belief that we can provide better
| moral education, values education, and intellectual rigor than
| the majority of public and private schools we've seen. I also
| don't see the social element being something that can't easily be
| solved for. Our kids are involved in so many activities and they
| are effectively home schooled, whereas countless friends and
| clients are bemoaning how toxic their children's high schools
| have become. The bar seems low to both of us and it's getting
| unapologetically lower. That's the plan anyway, we'll see how it
| plays out.
| SeanLuke wrote:
| This is a terrible, just terrible headline and awful data spin.
|
| Let's start with the obvious: "fringe" is a measure of _size_.
| "fastest growing" is a measure of _rate_. You don 't go from size
| to rate.
|
| Next: the data graphically presented has no axes or explanation,
| but what it appears to be showing is the percentage growth of
| each schooling type relative to its 2017 value. But then there's
| this bit:
|
| > In 390 districts included in The Post's analysis, there was at
| least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools
| during the 2021-2022 academic year ... > The Post estimates that
| there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled
| children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase
| in areas without reliable data.
|
| Let's be charitable and say 2.7 million. The Post data says
| that's 158% of the 2017 value, and 2020 was, oh, let's say, 164%,
| so in 2020 there were 2.8 million. According to the DoE, there
| were 48.1 million kids in public schools in 2020. This is at best
| 1 in 17. Surely the Doe and the WP can't differ by a factor of 2?
|
| https://research.com/universities-colleges/number-of-public-...
|
| Last, the graph clearly shows that, post covid, home-schooling is
| the _fastest_ _declining_ form of education. It has dropped 15%
| since 2020 alone, whereas public school has dropped by, what,
| about 1%? Why isn 't this the headline? Or that clearly
| homeschoolers are being moved to private institutions?
| selimnairb wrote:
| Home schooling should be banned. It is anti-social behavior.
| Also, no parent knows how to teach children of all ages.
| Likewise, no parent knows enough about everything children need
| to learn.
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