Home school is bad because:
- what people learn isn’t controlled by official requirements
- to teach kids properly one need special type of education themselves not parent who comes home at in the evening.
- there is no diploma so getting job will be like “trust me bro, ima best”
- socialization between kids is important.
That being sad US is weird in some of these aspects and they are not properly fullfilled even at schools.
Homeschooling just needs to be abolished except under very specific circumstances (like kids who aren’t physically able to attend schooling due to some illnesses), and even then they need to have an educator certified curriculum and regular checks that the curriculum is being followed. Too many parents use it as an excuse to brain wash their children into being perfect little idiots.
I took calculus in college with a set of twins that were homeschooled. They admitted that they’d never been taught how to solve for a variable, something I was taught in the 6th grade.
I would’ve failed out of highschool but homeschool allowed me to take community college classes that didn’t force 2 hours of busywork every day. If regular schools could deal with different types of students I’d agree, but as it is now that’s not the case.
That doesn’t sound like “home” school though. It might have been the mechanism you leveraged to take alternative classes, but ultimately you got proper classes from an educational institution.
We can talk about reforming public education (a fair push for “homework is bad” exists right now, which may alleviate your problem, which is particularly common among people with responsibilities other than school) and we can talk about school choice, but literal home schooling I’ve not seen turn out well. Admittedly I’ve only known two or three folks, but they all were terrible to try to communicate with and had massive superiority complexes as well as lacking some knowledge/skills. Whether it’s for “not enough religion in the school, but we can’t afford private school” or "the school is not good enough to “enrich” my special snowflake ", the results are similar.
The point they’re making is that homeschooling is far more flexible (for better and for worse) than most public education in the USA. Admittedly, it’s a bit of a patch to fill in the gap, but for some kids it’s incredibly beneficial. I was in a very similar situation: elementary school sucked and was extremely boring; despite the school psychiatrist’s objections, the administration wanted to put me on Ritalin instead of proposing any real solutions. So my parents homeschooled me through middle school. I didn’t actually follow much of the formal material, and instead of followed an “unschooling” approach. It was extremely beneficial compared to getting medicated.
The USA needs education reform, for sure, but kids can’t wait for our value systems in the States to finally figure out good, flexible, and diverse pedagogical techniques.
I think everyone gets that ideal cases exists. But it’s the other side of the matter that is worrisome. Problem is that achieved level is not tested, no one is responsible for kid getting proper professional education and everyone will just do it as they deem good fit subjectively. It’s dangerous variation.
I agree. I would have just been a drop out at 16 had homeschool not been an option.
Drop out in what sense?
Drop out of school- to cease attending any formal education.
So you weren’t homeschooled but had extra lessons at home to not drop out?
I totally understand the need to educate the educators. Few parents are appropriately equipped to become a full-time teacher. That’s a problem, for sure.
But, as a rule, saying “X needs to be abolished” is extremely lazy, naive, and reeks of authoritarianism. If it’s so bad, try proposing something better.
If it’s so bad, try proposing something better.
Like say, a standardised, govt funded education system? With dedicated professionals on staff and specialised facilities?
Like say, a standardised, govt funded education system? With dedicated professionals on staff and specialised facilities?
That still fails to prepare countless students because they don’t quite fit expectations? I was one of those students.
Homeschooling isn’t above criticism, for sure, but public schooling isn’t perfect, either. People don’t just make decisions for no reason. Sometimes they really do have some local insight that you don’t.
School attendance works all around the world. If healthy kids have problems in school, teacher informs parents and they can figure out how to get them extra teaching. But how would you even know kid is lacking behind if being isolated in education. Also curiculum changes over the years. Uncontrolled homeschooling will lead to huge disproportionately in population which will enlarges with each generation. It needs to be formal gov controlled system not just what people feel like is the best.
School attendance works all around the world.
For most kids in most places, I agree. But there are some places around the world where formal government-run school does not work. I live nearby some very rural places with chronically underfunded schools and unique social problems. The teachers I know who work there try their hardest, yet are aware they can’t do a good enough job for their kids. In those communities, formal schooling just isn’t enough.
Provide good options and people will make good decisions. Abolish bad options and people will still make bad decisions.
I agree there are poor countries that luck $$$ but OP doesn’t seem to be about this specific poor regions around the globe though.
If God is real, then he doesn’t want you teaching your children nonsense, he wants you to ensure that they succeed in life. A deck that your grandparents stacked against them.
I homeschooled my kid k-12. When I started, I had no idea how many religious hs-ers there were. I used a secular curriculum, and never even thought about teaching anything regarding religion one way or another. Once I started looking around at all the creationist curricula out there–yikes.
Anyhoo, long story short, my son went on to a college degree (he actually started college classes online at 15–one of the perks of hs-ing for us), and he’s an atheist. Secular homeschoolers do exist!
ETA some links–these are a few secular homeschool curricula. There’s a lot more out there, but this is the majority of what I used through the years:
https://www.calverthomeschool.com/
https://www.keystoneschoolonline.com/
https://www.thinkwell.com/ (Primarily math–the professor that does most of the math instruction is wonderful.)
We are heading down the HS route for our two girls as the oldest has issues that meant that she couldn’t attend school half of last term. My wife has taken her to a couple of meetups and already she come across the Christian and the anti-vax members - even here in far flung New Zealand
Not having kids, but maybe some links to help others out?
Okay, I added a few links to my comment!
Thanks!
Secular homeschool graduate here. Parents homeschooled my brother and I because the public school system was drastically underfunded and we were in quite an education desert. I always hate articles like this, as folks tend to paint broad strokes about homeschoolers… But there’s a reason we never had other homeschooled friends growing up; there were a lot of crazy ones, especially in Michigan, as there is virtually no regulation.
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I thought this was a News website but it feels like a blog. Not only that but when I tried to exit the article it crashed my Sync app.
I have often read sovereign citizen groups on Facebook, and they all “homeschool”, which means the big kids babysit the little ones all day long, and sometimes CPS gets involved and removes the kids and terminates their parental rights because they realize the kids aren’t getting educated and are having the shit best out of them routinely. I think homeschooling can be very dangerous for a child.
I’m not very for homeschooling and it has its place, the problem is that it lacks regulation.
There should be an official education program and tests to make sure kids are learning essential things instead of just babysitting siblings or exclusively learning religious or survivalist stuff.
Yes agreed. But a lot of it is right wing psychos who are just not educating them.
It’s not homeschooling, it’s unschooling.
My parents were both teachers at private or Christian schools while I grew up, and every year, there’d always be a new couple of kids who’s parents couldn’t quite hack it anymore, so they’d send them to school. But couldn’t bear to send their kids to those secular, godless, evolution teaching, sex driven, minority filled public schools, so they’d send them to my school instead.
Those kids were always some of the dumbest, most ignorant people on the planet. Some figure it out, but most don’t. They just double down. They were usually barely literate, couldn’t do math, and had no social skills. It’s how you end up with a 19 year old freshman who can’t read Dr. Seuss.
I know teachers aren’t paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don’t, and it shows.
What were you doing in that school?!!!
Playing ‘Bob the builder’ with troglodyte kids in the hopes of mitigating some of the damage their wilfully ignorant parents inflicted upon the world.
Can we fix it!?..eh, maybe.
I know teachers aren’t paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don’t, and it shows.
Jesus, this makes so much sense that it’s scary to think it’s not universal. Sure, you can teach your kids. Just get certified to do so first. It doesn’t even have to be the same certification as professional teachers, but just a bare minimum, pass the GED level of education. To not have this kind of requirement really seems like society failing those kids.
I don’t feel like a GED is even close to a good standard. Setting the GED as the bar is like setting the bar low enough to be in the hell they’re teaching kids about. But I guess it’s at least something.
Like we are comparing a GED here to people who have masters degrees and sometimes relevant training or degrees in what they teach. It’s like saying “hey if you want to perform an at home DIY surgery on your family, that’s fine, but please play this game of Operation first.”
I totally hear you. I meant GED as in the parent would be able to pass the GED exams now, not that they passed it 20 years ago. I think it would at least be something that could act as a minimum requirement that they can at least understand the material.
You clearly haven’t seen how bad some of our schools in America are. The war on education has been quite successful.
I’ve come to the conclusion that religious faith is a kind of mental illness that was made socially acceptable to keep primitive people from constantly killing each other, sticking instead to only occasionally killing each other within a vague set of guidelines.
Those of us free of it don’t need an insane corkscrew of Escheresque logic and imaginary higher authorities using threats commanding us to not be monsters.
I recently came to a different conclusion. It’s not religious faith. It’s just faith. And it’s not a mental illness. It’s human nature - for a significant segment of the human population.
Those people who are religious fanatics, political fanatics (e.g. Trumpists, Chavez sympathizers), pseudoscience fanatics (e.g. flat earthers, anti-vaxx, homeopathy), celebrity fanatics (Andrew Tate followers), etc, they have to share the same common traits. They’re impressionable people, they need to be patt of a group, and they can’t fathom the idea of switching groups.
It’s just that religion-based control came first.
Or maybe those who were very religious in the past got to survive and thus the genetic traits responsible for fanaticism spread like fire?
Regardless, it’s appalling.
Chavez sympathizers
I’m sorry, whom???
Like Hugo Chavez? Are there any people who care enough about him who arent Venezuelan?
Like Tito, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Che Guevara are all infinitely more valid than fucking Chavez.
Hell Hoxha and Posadas have bigger followings than Chavez
Hugo Chavez followers. They’re as bad if not worse than Trump or Putin followers.
I’ve been an internet socialist for a long time and I have no idea why you think Venezuelans, specifically, are a big problem on the internet.
Maybe the people you hate aren’t really a cult of personality, but it makes you feel better to think about them that way?
"Tucker tole me "
I mean you might be kinda right?
So there are people who think with or without internal monologue, common knowledge
Some people think that the internal monologue may have first developed as an internal dialogue, between the actor, the person and their body, and the “speaker” who they would have not been able to recognize as their own voice, and instead interpreted as a separate being relaying them direction, commands, and interpretation.
The dissociation between the individual and their internal monologue, and the resulting association of that monologue with a directing and counseling presence, could have been taken as the voice of a higher power guiding them, and by extension, others they got to follow them as the “speaker” of this divinity in their head.
If this sounds a bit crazy to you consider how many evangelicals rant and rave about their personal speaking term relationship with God.
So basically, deific religion might derive from people who have an internal monologue but who don’t identify with the speaker of that internal monologue.
Not really a mental disorder so much as a mode of thought that is prone to lead people into believing firmly that they are personally in contact with a separate being who personally directs their behavior and actions and values.
Deus Causa Sui
People in the past weren’t us in different clothes and religion was basically fulfilling political and cultural functions as well. Like today was have mass media and entertainment, at one point religion was basically entertainment as well. People loved having some preacher come to town and do his show, it was what people talked about. Now we have TV shows and movies etc, and a lot of our media has shocking moral implications just as we’d judge religion in the past for. Not all that different. That leads in to civil/civic religion which is practiced by many today and provides a framework for things like a national identity. When you stand for an anthem you’re performing a civil religious ritual, visiting historical/cultural sites is a sort of pilgrimage.
The form that religion evolved through in history was also defined by the conditions of the society and a lot of times compromises with neighboring powers. Viewing religion as a dumb thing for stupid people is intuitively tempting, but it’s ahistorical in that it says more about our views today (including religous/civil religious views) than it does about what people were like in the past.
Americans’ obsession with Jesus and the Bible is so weird.
Just a really weird loud subsect. They’re so loud now because they finally realize they’re the minority and they don’t like it. So they throw tantrums like children because their lifestyle is a commitment to low education and blind faith in a corrupt version of reality and a misinterpretation of their own faith.
Sadly, the Internet (troll farms, social media, etc.) has enabled easy access to loudness, to make it seem like they speak for everyone, when they don’t.
There are plenty of Americans that are Christian and not apeshit. There are also plenty of Americans that are neither Christian, nor apeshit. These two groups just don’t go around screaming about it all day because they’re normal, sane, properly educated people.
We’re in Missouri again. We are selling a lot of product — in fact, we had our first mother and son make a purchase so he could learn about Sacagawea. It made me happy.
It makes me very happy too. I’m going to end my night with this thought.
Literally every place where children are educated is a battleground for the political ideologies of the parents. I’ve seen the exact same stuff described in this article in public schools as well.
Homeschooling has increased by 51% nationwide, while public school attendance has decreased by 4%. Prepare to meet a lot more Karens and their snot-nosed monster kids.
Source: I have two young kids who aren’t so bad
“Not all women are good,” he explains.
“Not all men are good,” I respond.
That’s an amazingly pithy pair of lines
Sounds like something from an unpublished Frog and Toad book
Sellers market with that group of people.
Because a parent working, without any accreditation or training since they were a fucking literal child, totally sounds like a preferable route. Give me a fucking break, it’s an assault on standardized education.
To make it worse, the kid will have a large drop in socialization opportunities and isolated relatively speaking. You just do not get that kind of social utopia ever again in your entire fucking life… the life experiences the child misses out on is significant. You can’t schedule enough playdates to make up for that.
I’m a product of homeschooling, and cannot begin to tell you how detrimental it was to my adult life and being able to function in society.
100% of my socialization growing up came from church. While I have siblings who grew up to be very successful, they all stayed in the church.
It’s a cult. It’s child abuse. You are robbing your child of critical life experience and social development. It also makes it so that anyone escaping from growing up in that will have an extremely difficult time rebuilding their life outside of religion.
While I agree that being homeschooled in a religious community hindered me in a ton of ways I think the one benefit for me was not having to mask my adhd, my mental health now is better for it, but that’s a small victory in a sea of failure.
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Well I didn’t have to mask, but I also didn’t get my ADHD, bipolar or anxiety recognized/diagnosed until well into my adult life, lmao.
I also didn’t get treated for my adhd until the last few years, in fact the main reason I was pulled into homeschooling is because my mother didn’t want me medicated, she’s still a fucking moron.
I’ve yet to get medicated. Last time I tried I had the wrong diagnosis and ended up in grippy socks, and I’m currently living by myself, so starting new meds is kinda frightening tbh.
I did drink/smoke way too much as a coping mechanism, because yakno meds that help someone be able to function like a normal person are EVIL, but letting ur kid go undiagnosed and untreated is so fucking healthy for their long-term mental health.
My parents also managed to fuck up my math track to put me a year behind, and when I found their error and tried to catch up, they didn’t support at all.
Homeschool parents are [very often] imbeciles.
“OK, my daughter loves Harriet Tubman. Tell me what you got!” she says. I explain our product, how we use historical women to teach girls about their worth and potential. The mother says: “But is it woke? I mean, I don’t want to teach my daughter about woke.”
And these people feel qualified to teach history.
You left out the best part.
“What do you mean, ‘woke’?” I ask. She opens her mouth. Half-words and phrases stumble and tumble around. A few talking points from news sources fall out. Finally, she sighs. “I don’t know. Just tell me again what you write.”
The follow-up paragraph is even more amazing, because (like all conservatives) she can’t even say what “woke” is.
That’s because “woke” doesn’t have a concrete definition.
Yes it does. It means you don’t trust politicians or the system, you reexamine your beliefs and look at it critically.
If you don’t think there’s a fascist threat in our country right now, there’s people who are literally burning “woke” books and firing elected “woke” prosecutors. They’re using the word “woke” fairly correctly without understanding what it means, ironically enough, because “non-woke” is whatever lies the party spreads and “woke” is anything that contradicts that
It’s just “what Trump tells me to hate”, there i defined it.
Fox news tells them as well. Either way, people too stupid to have a thought originate from themselves.
I equate it to “progressive”
Which conservatives don’t like because that means they are against progress.
if defining words is that easy for you, can you tell me: “what is a woman?”
some words are more subjective then others and for many feelings and emotions are more important then objective facts to define anything.
Right, so give a vague definition then. Give a conditional definiton. Say “woke is when black people are treated like humans and stuff, you know, like when they say marital rape is bad”. They won’t though, because while that is exactly what it means, they also know they can’t say it out loud.
“Woke” is the thing that opposes their horrible and reprehensible ideas, and they know it. Hell, when DeSantis’ lawyer had to define it in court he went with “the belief there are systemic injustices in American society and the need to address them.” It’s weird though, why haven’t conservatives just grasped on to this definition? Because “woke” is a dogwhistle for “someone who isn’t a trash human like me”.
If you want to define “woman”, I can do way better than a vague definition though. Of course, the question itself is in bad faith, but I don’t give a shit. In terms of gender: “A woman is anyone who wants to call themselves a woman and wants to be called a woman by others.”
Just as an aside, I’m of the opinion gender is a stupid concept anyway and we should get rid of it entirely.
There are words that are notoriously difficult to define in such a way that every edge case is covered. For those words we use criteria. Listing off essential attributes and marking the entire list as provisionally sufficient. The Greeks figured this out 25 centuries ago, just a fyi. I know it is hard for conservatives to keep up with modern ideas but 2 and a half millennium should be enough time.
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I never said i can. I wanted to show how difficult it is to define something like that.
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A women is one of the sexes, usually identified by their genitals. It is biological.
Not to conflate with feminine, which is one of the genders at the end of the gender spectrum. Which is sociological.
It isn’t so hard once you listen to the science and understand the difference between Biology and Sociology.
And that’s the really insidious part. The teacher is too ignorant of what she is ignorant of. If Harriet Tubman “might be too woke” then how would this women teach the nuance of protests? Of sit ins? Letters from a Birmingham jail? Much less modern protests. Her daughter is going to grow confidently saying things like
“I know all about black history, just not the woke stuff.”
And not even understand the tragic irony.
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It is at the school I went to, the school my kids went to, and the schools that my wife teaches at.
Uhhhhh. Yes it is? My niece was going over all of that around 3rd grade. And that’s about the same time I did, this was all in the PNW. I think your school district just had some major omissions.
It was in my school in NJ.
I went through California school a little under a decade ago and can tell you that the letters from Birmingham Jail and an at least somewhat decent overview of sit-ins were absolutely part of my standard curriculum
Though I’d bet there are plenty of places in this country where that’s not true
Grew up in Ohio. We touched on it. We definitely ignored the socialism and the condemnation of white moderates and the armed resistance (of that eta) aside from the black panthers who were portrayed with a mixed light much like Nat Turner was. But we were a Catholic school so we did condemn any violence.
I think the big thing is that it varies wildly. My area for example had a lot of focus on white resistance to chattel slavery, and acknowledgement of the reality of precolombian civilization. That’s not because we were woke but because those that was the local history of southern Ohio. We could go visit an Underground Railroad stop or one of the great mounds for a field trip.
Meanwhile in somewhere like Virginia, I would expect a lot more focus on the colonial period and early English settlement. And I think in somewhere like Birmingham or Memphis if they don’t focus on the civil rights era that’s on fucking purpose. And I assume texas is doing their own thing and pretending they didn’t secede from Mexico and the US over slavery.
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I went to school in Kansas. This was all taught, even there
Or she’ll learn on her own later. It’s sad, but many do it. The line of thinking of “we used to treat black people in utterly horrific ways” -> “we freed them but took a long time to give them the same rights” -> “they’re still mad and saying that racism still is a systemic problem” -> “why” is a path that many white Americans with intellectual curiosity have tread. Some don’t like the answers because they come with expectations, responsibility, guilt, and shame. Others decide that it doesn’t matter and accept what is learned.
It’s a shame she has to start there, but we have to believe that these indoctrinated children aren’t doomed
