Home-schooling
 

What are MB's thoughts on home-schooling? Is it awesome? Should it be outlawed? How much should the government be involved? Fire away.

It can be good depending on how it's done I think. Although this is coming from someone from the public school realm so I imagine it is drastically different.

Home school kids are weirdos.

So I

EDIT: Hit Quick Reply button too early and can't figure out how to delete. Screw this, it's been too long.

You can't delete posts now. Don't ask me why the owners changed it but they did.

I'm cool with it on the condition that the parents pay a bully to come round once a week and ply their trade.

Weirdo chiming in.

The U.S. ranks 17th in educational performance.
32 million adults in the U.S. can’t read. That’s 14 percent of the population.
21 percent of adults in the U.S. read below a 5th-grade level
19 percent of high school graduates can’t read.

According to the Pew Research Ctr, we rank 35th among nations in maths and 27th in science.

The US educational system is an abysmal failure.

And with the institutionalized nationalism children are exposed to in K-12 social studies and history courses, I will have no part in miseducating a child through a government curriculum.

Having grown up in an asylum, I was spared public school education from grades 8-12 and had the good fortune of my autodidact wits to proactively pursue the best education I could attain through independent research.

If I ever have a demon spawn of my own, I would do everything possible to provide homeschooling as an alternative to public education.

Almost all (prob. 90%) home schooled kids are brainwashed evangelicals ala Jesus Camp. I couldn't be more opposed.

So I'll spill some background on myself:

I've done both. I was home-schooled until elementary, then I went to high school. But I dropped out this year and I'm back at home. Here's why.

The emphasis at my school was not on understanding a subject. It was on rote learning enough to pass tests (with cheating and grade inflation, of course), then forgetting it all until exam time when everyone panics. Some teachers were better than others, but I found it frustrating and boring.

So I got my parents to sign off on going back to home-schooling. I teach myself now, and I can say that, while it's very challenging sometimes, I understand stuff way better, I have more time to pursue what I'm interested in, and and my grades are better, even though I'm taking courses that are above my grade level. Counter-intuitively, I also have a much better social life than I did while in school.

(FYI, religion has absolutely nothing to do with it. I'm agnostic.)

So, obviously I'm a fan.

BUT

I have met people who are getting an absolute crap education, who can't compose basic English or multiply fractions. Hence my "under the right circumstances" vote.

Paul, you've obviously never taken the time to get to know the home-schooling community. I'd say at least half of the home-schoolers I know aren't religious. Most of them are simply fed up with the shoddy state of public education.