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.

If I had children I would probably be inclined to homeschool them, because I would feel like guarding them from the failings of the public school system. However, as a teacher I am more inclined to work to reform the public school system from within than to seek alternatives or pour all funding and effort into charter schools or whatever. I know my experience of public school in a very small town must be wildly different from that of people who went to public school in the town I live in now, though.

The only homeschooled kids I knew growing up where hybrid-homeschooled because they lived on a ranch 30 miles out of town and it just made sense for their family not to drive in at 5am (plus like, ranch work), so they homeschooled all their kids until they were old enough to ride the bus. They still got the socialization because they would come to the extracurriculars - soccer on Tuesdays, our art and music classes every Friday, little league in the summer, etc. When they finally started full-time in our school they were in fourth grade and miles ahead of the rest of us in both knowledge and work ethic.

It depends on the parents. I think they should have to get some kind of certification or hire a private teacher if they're going to be homeschooling their kids. I don't trust people not to be idiots.

We've had this discussion with Mordor before.

While I agree with the arguments for home schooling, the life experience of bullying, friendships, social interaction, etc, are some things that the home can never provide and are an absolutely essential part of growing up. Schools also provide a lot of great resources such as expensive computer software licenses, and database access to help students that want to learn more than what's in the classroom.

There is no reason for a child not to be educated at home while attending public school. Stop letting the school raise your kids, and participate in their education. If you don't have time to do this you probably don't have time to home school either.

and @Pet_Sounds - it's a lot about test scores in college as well. :(




:shycouch:

Just wanted to throw some Tech at ja. :)

Lol, what can I say? It's the public servant in me. I don't have a savior complex or anything, it's more a matter of not wanting to complain about it without also trying to find solutions.

I think this is a good point.

A good friend of mine was home schooled for part of his childhood because his dad was a park ranger and they lived on an island where there were no schools. That's a pretty reasonable situation to home school in I guess. I mean what else were they going to do? But he said once they were living somewhere where they sent him to a regular school, he and his brothers had kind of a hard time adjusting and he really felt like they missed out a lot on learning how to interact with variety of other people. I think people are really doing a disservice to their kids on that front if they home school them. I also think there's a pretty high probability of parents' overestimating their own skill at teaching, which is also problematic.

So much this.

So much depends on the situation. I watch a cooking show called Frontier Woman where the family lives on a cattle ranch a million miles from anywhere so she home schools. If I had lived in a crappy neighborhood when my kids were young I would have considered it but both me and Linda had to work full time so we moved to a nicer place and went public.

If you live in a decent area go public and let your kids not only experience the education but also the social experience.

IMO.

My wife and I homeschool. There are great programs out there, but the system can also be an excuse for lazy parents to let their children rot in ignornace.

You could say the same for homeschooling though.

Indeed. :clap:

This was exactly the experience of a friend of mine, who asked a question about some subject (let's say it was history, I can't remember) and was told by the teacher "Oh don't worry: that won't be on the exam." He responded with "I don't care whether or not it's on the ****ing exam; I want to know for my own knowledge!" Weird, huh? Mind you, this is the guy who mitched (played hooky/truant/didn't go in to) off school and when the teacher asked him, the next day, where he had been he said "Stephen's Green" (local park) and then asked incredulously what he was doing there replied "Feeding the ducks!" :laughing:

Legend.

Absolute madman.

I meant homeschooling! lol

Haha

You're opposed to the idea of home schooling because the majority of people who do it have a different opinion? Doesn't really make much sense. Argue against its merits, not the people currently doing it.

I think I'd rather my child went to private or public school personally.

.

Yeah, at least find a charter school.

**** their opinion and their miseducation.

I've seen homeschooling work for some kids and fail for others, same goes for public schools. The likelihood of success obviously depends on a lot of circumstances. Are the parent's responsible, capable, and motivated enough to take on the role of teacher? Does the kid already have a developed social life that he will be able to maintain? Does the kid want to be home-schooled or are the parents forcing him out of the public school system?

I grew up going to public schools but my parents pulled my brother out of the public school system after he was expelled from two of them for dealing. Their complaints weren't with the integrity of public education, they were simply trying to keep him away from the groups that pulled him into that mess. It was too late for him at that point, he had already given up on his education and the act of home-schooling him was seen as nothing more than an authoritarian attack on his social life. He rebelled hard, ran away from home, couch surfed with other dealers for years, got chased out of the province, couch surfed with new dealers, got busted, and now he's stuck in the prison/poverty cycle.

For my future children I would be inclined to try the public school system first, see how it goes, stick with it if it works, or consider an alternative option (including home-schooling) if it doesn't.

I'd rather try a charter/private school first since they seem to get the best results. I have nothing against home schooling in terms of education (obviously dependent on who's doing the teaching) but it's the social aspect that would concern me.

Anybody here spend any significant time in the private school system? I've always wondered if there really is any difference between public and private schools in terms of typical teenage social challenges (mysterious powders and pills passed around at parties, being pressured into trespassing/vandalizing on the way to or from school, being pressured to shoplift etc etc). I'd imagine the generations that grew up with the internet are all exposed to the same teenage culture now, regardless of whether or not your parents try to hide you from it with a private school. How were the parties in private school?

I spent a term and a half in a private school. I hated it and was eventually expelled. There's are big differences between private and public schools (those I attended at any rate). The kids at private school were snobby, did as they were told, there was no drinking, no smoking, no fighting, no trouble making of any kind. Maybe I'm just more comfortable with common rabble, with scum :laughing:, but it felt really unnatural to me, more like trained dogs than curious teenagers.

I went to a military boarding school for two years.

Well it was a boarding school where we couldn't leave except on weekends, and even then the only place to go was a small part of a ****burg redneck town with a ridiculously high STD rate. We weren't allowed to wear civilian clothes, we could go inside each other's rooms, and some of us had rank and could tell the others what to do. So I'd say it was different.

I did shoplift some Astroglide once though.

I don't know how, but somehow we couldn't get any network tv signals in our school, so the only tv we could watch was the school's basic cable, which was like TNT, Discovery Channel... CNN (?), and maybe another couple channels no one wants to watch. Our internet was also kinda restricted, we couldn't have cell phones, no cars, and we were there 24/7 for 9 months out of a year (and I'm including vacation time).

So while we weren't entirely ignorant of the outside world we did have this weird bubble culture. We were pretty much the center of each other's lives, and everyone else was off in "the real world". We even developed our own slang.

lol wut parties?

I had to go to a private school that specializes in helping kids with learning disabilities for most of my elementary years. So... things were not in any way normal in that school.

*snort*

*sniff*

I went to a Christian academy the first 3 years of school. Hearing stories from my friends who went up to 8th grade, I'm so glad I left when I did.

Your parents must have really ****ing hated you.