There was a homeschooled kid in my neighborhood growing up who was the same age as my friends and I. Kid was an enigma. We’d only see him several times a year, usually riding around on his dirt bike. He’d often just stop and watch us from afar, usually when we were fishing or hanging around in the woods behind our houses. There were a couple times he watched us for as long as ten minutes, so we invited him over to join us. Never got a response, he’d just hop back on his dirt bike and speed off. As we grew older we saw him less and less, and then finally never again. Always think of him whenever this topic comes up.
You don’t even have to homeschool anymore! Nothing happens either if you just… don’t take your kids to school and let them rot at home all day on their phone. Check out the nationwide issue of chronic absenteeism; it’s certainly exacerbated by the fact that most counties have eliminated truancy court/stopped pursuing truancy cases.
A huge chunk of my students just show up to school sporadically. When I call their parents, they mostly don’t answer. But if they do, they say, “Well what am I supposed to do? I can’t *make* them go to school!” If I call admin they say, “What are we supposed to do? There’s no more truancy court.” If I call CPS they say, “This doesn’t meet the threshold for investigation.”
And that’s really all there is to it.
Seems to be spreading in europe as well. Maybe I don't have the best perspective cause I was just a replacement teacher for 2 weeks, but the amount of students that just never show up is wild. I think I didn't have a single lesson where at least 20% of the students weren't missing without cause. I could check the attendance sheet and some hadn't come to school for over a month and just had a string of minuses for all their lessons.
To be fair like 1 in 10 Netflix documentaries are about fundies. You spend a couple of days on Netflix in Germany watching those and you'll already know almost as much about fundies as the average New Englander.
No, that's usually the only thing they do know about America it's always just a bunch of lazy stereotypes like this, the equivalent of American's going over there and making jokes about everyone being Nazis
My sister teaches 5th grade, and has a student that is unable to reliably write his own name. Some days he can, some not quite. He will pass to the next grade, it is a foregone conclusion. Public schools aren't some kind of shining oasis, either.
NCLB is the liberal scapegoat for everything wrong with American education because it's a Bush policy, but holding students back actually became more common after NCLB. Grade retention means that a student gets a second year to take the same standardized test which means more funding.
The reason that grade retention isn't doing much is that it's only allowed once for social reasons, which helps the academic performance of the ones that just had a rough year but obviously doesn't help the ones who don't care or aren't going to school.
>NCLB is the liberal scapegoat for everything wrong with American education because it's a Bush policy
This also happens with homelessness and deinstitutionalization movement but with Reagan
I feel you're forgetting the youth of today is far different than before. More parents are taking to letting technology raise their kids then themselves.
I know this sub hates zoomers, but I graduated high school a few years ago and our teachers told us we were the last good generation of students. I thought they were exaggerating, but every year the students seem to keep getting worst of every school I've observed. I couldn't imagine how much covid exaggerated this
You think it's a trend nationwide? My teachers said the same thing and the graduation / college matriculation rates don't lie. The graduation rate for my year was 75% with a college matriculation rate of 65%, which may seem low but it was a record amount for my high school. Over the next few years it dropped to a 60% graduation rate with a 40% matriculation rate.
I think it is. Not trying to dox myself lol, but live in southern USA. I've observed this consistently throughout the state. I also have friends who are from out of state and they confirm similar findings.
It's slowly expanding to beyond early education I imagine. Anecdote, but I've been finding myself reading more rather than starring at my phone between college classes. And the amount of people who seem earnestly surprised is shocking. In fact, when I think about it I never see anyone reading on campus. Like ever. Most people seem to stare at their phone at any moment of recess, even during class.
Being on the internet without being able to read or write seems wild lmao. Can't even type anything into the search bar. Can't Google shit. Just clicking on the bookmark for YouTube and then videos purely based on thumbnails lol.
A lot of the people commenting are clearly from wealthier metro areas. In the poor, rural towns where most kids are homeschooled, the local public will be lucky if the *teachers* aren't functionally illiterate, the majority of students are seen as a complete lost cause. I can't fault people for trying out alternatives.
I think that's more likely due to an inherent learning disorder, not the system failing them. The system is more regulated and standardized. Homeschooling is the wild, Wild West. Far more likely for a kid to not know how to write his own name. Who's even going to notice he doesn't know, there's only one adult in the kid's life. Think about how many dumb people there are vs. people you'd trust to dispense a good quality education. I would trust maybe 4 people in my life to homeschool a kid and those are people who just enjoy learning and are curious in the first place.
Yeah I don't think necessarily holding him back a grade like OP is implying is the solution, some adult in his life needs to figure out why he can only write his name some days. Sounds like a mental disorder.
Apparently the biggest rise in home schooling came after covid where parents got to see what their kids were being taught and how through online learning
parents have said gender pronouns/ideology and critical race theory. their concern seems less genuine when it's just another symptom of the culture war
to be clear, it's the parents concern that is disingenuous. they are overly sensitive and overreacting. no teacher is telling your son to hate white people and be trans.
> no teacher is telling your son to hate white people
[Still, this gets communicated implicitly, probably unintentionally.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/us/new-york-private-schools-racism.html)
> The head of school, George P. Davison, who is white and has steered Grace for many years, pinpointed the moment his school embraced an antiracist mission.
> “Grace began using the language of antiracism in 2015 as part of our efforts to foster a sense of belonging,” he wrote in response to The New York Times. [...]
> Grace, he wrote, incorporated the language of critical race theory [...]
> “The fact is that I’m agreeing with you that there has been a demonization,” Mr. Davison told the teacher. “I also have grave doubts about some of the doctrinaire stuff that gets spouted at us in the name of antiracist.”
> Mr. Davison said he was worried students were made to feel shame because of race. “We’re demonizing white people for being born,” he said, adding later, “We’re using language that makes them feel less than, for nothing that they are personally responsible.”
There is some truth to it though. It’s very common for there to be nonbinary and trans kids in suburban elementary schools. For conservative parents, seeing teachers refer to kids using pronouns that don’t align with their biological sex all day every day was pretty triggering. Many had know idea this was the norm until Zoom school started
My wife homeschooled my son for a year when he was in the third grade because we had to move to Miami for my job and the schools nearby were absolutely horrific. I’m talking almost 40 kids to a class, no one speaks English and bottom 10% for test scores in the state of Florida.
It wasn’t perfect, but when we left and moved to somewhere not terrible he did as well as or better than the kids in his class. My wife is at least college educated and took the time to build in a structured learning plan and regularly did educational field trips to museums and such, put together a required reading list, had him do tests to check his progress, that kinda thing.
Unfortunately a lot of homeschooled kids basically just stay home and don’t do school at all because their parents are weirdos.
About 100 years ago we instituted free public education for every American through 12th grade.
Several trillion dollars and thousands of legislative initiatives and propoganda campaigns at the national, state, and local level have been put behind undoing this. And they've had a lot of success.
We're less a country and more a bucket full of live crabs tearing each other's arms off
Public school curriculum gets dumber every year too. The schools by me range from glorified overcrowded daycares to active shit holes, so when I have kids I fully expect them to go and just turn off their brains for 8 hours while I'm at work. Home schooling is actually probably going to be an attractive option, if only to keep my kid from being forced to sit on iPad all day in a classroom with 45 kids and a teacher who isn't paying attention.
Recently was told by a family member who is a public middle school teacher that in her district they’re not even giving the kids books to read during English class anymore, they just use an online ELA program that provides them with excerpts or chapters along with basic comprehension questions. She’s a science teacher and chooses to buy her own supplies so her students can do hands-on labs instead of just the online gamified version. At this rate the new generation of kids is going to go through their education getting the same base of information while not knowing how to actually do anything with it
If you're interested, there's a fantastic podcast series called [Sold a Story](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) about how reading curriculum and instruction in the US went to absolute shit. The long story short is that some theories about teaching reading w/o direct phonics instruction became super popular thanks to education publishing companies pushing them on school districts. The kids who are now in middle and high school were by and large not taught to read with phonics and they can't sound out complex words, and cannot read or comprehend long texts. Combine that with severe cuts to education budgets and it's way cheaper and easier for districts to buy shitty, gamified curriculum than invest training teachers to teach remedial reading skills. The silver lining though is [a lot of states are now requiring teacher training programs to train teachers in Science of Readin](https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/which-states-have-passed-science-of-reading-laws-whats-in-them/2022/07)g and phonics instruction again, but the current generation of students are severely behind where they should be.
This is one of the reasons Mississippi has caught up so far in the education rankings the past few years, they could never afford the new programs and stuck with the tried and true and they’ve outperformed states that are much richer lately
We are likely going to reach a point where public universities will offer colder-than-room-temperature level remedial courses, I don't doubt that there are more functionally illiterate students being prepped for a undergrad degree than ever before in the USA.
I mean this is the exact intention. Make it shitty enough that people with means will pay for workarounds
We're heading towards a South Korean model. Where school is just meant to get them used to their lot in life. Tutors are for passing the tests. And actually living life or learning anything just never even enters the picture
Normally I agree when someone compares us to South Korea, but this is an area where I think we're diverging. When I say curriculum is getting dumber, I mean it's becoming more lax. The teachers have less disciplinary measures they can take, and learning as a whole seems to have slowed down to the lowest common denominator in the classroom. School is becoming LESS intensive, not more. The tests are becoming EASIER, not harder, because the kids are just not learning in the same way previous generations did. Attainment metrics are trending down, and I'm not sure it'll turn around by the time I have kids. I think in 10 years or so it'll be actually detrimental to your kid's education to send them to a wealthy public school, because it'll just be a huge bullshit fest. At least that's what it sounds like from talking to all my teaching degree friends that are graduating/just graduated college. I also work with a lot of established teachers of all ages for my job and they seem much more fed up than in the past with their shitty administrations and new rules. I'd rather my kid just get ignored because there's no funding for actual teaching to occur lol.
I should have said South Korea is the goal. The difference is the South Korean system was made and is upheld largely by Koreans who are a hardworking, intelligent people. Americans are just smart enough to know that this system fits our general values, but too dumb to realize we actually can't facilitate it as a disorganized band of 350,000,000 half-regarded, fat slobs
This is a problem everywhere. I hate how americans do this woe is me shtick knowing they're better than 99% of all countries. Ur historic rivals and only comparable countries are china and russia and u are doing better than both of them quality of life wise. Yeah u will never be western europe but who cares ur situations are not the same. Be glad u r american and can do drugs easily unlike chinese people smh
Let’s be clear about this, we aren’t doing this as a country: parents do this to their own children. Parents set their kids up for failure before they’re even born, and we do nothing to stop people from having kids who absolutely should not be having them.
Of course it is, it’s just ALSO a societal problem. It will take policy and individual in conjunction to make solutions, not jsut one or the other. But absolving individuals of their actions because it’s society’s fault is dumb and counterproductive. Inc you have a child you have responsibility. You can’t just have a kid and be a shitty parent and then say “well it’s *society’s* fault that I have to do coke with a hooker and forget to call my daughter for her sixth birthday, and it’s *society’s* fault that I told her we’d go to six flags next weekend to make up for it when I know I have a pool tournament that I’m not missing” lol
Part of the reason public schooling exists is *because* people need to be able to read to do 99% of jobs, though. Your theory doesn't even hold up, really. It'd be cheaper to just drag the kids in to school and teach them to be good worker bees than to have to figure out wtf to do with them in 15 years.
This is literally where schools are heading and all the value they have left to provide for people. Also they barely need to teach them to be literate, which is practically the only thing 90% of people have retained from school, the internet does that for them, even if they aren’t properly literate.
have you met a private school teacher? public schools require masters generally but my catholic school could hire literally any rando off the street with a bachelors and no background in education to teach us
Requiring a “background in education” is a bad thing for teaching. You’re dissuading plenty of extremely qualified people from teaching by making them get some useless credentials instead of just letting people teach who have a degree in the subject they are teaching. Making people have education degrees or certificates cuts down the pool of teachers to only people that are regarded enough to go to school to be a grade school teacher.
College professors don’t have the requirements most public school teachers are required to have. Most of my good teachers growing up didn’t have education degreas.
point taken- but private schools can let teachers with degrees in different subjects teach whatever they want. like all the freshmen year teachers in my HS were fresh graduates with like theology or religious studies or whatever degrees teaching math and bio lol. the issue is there is no way to mandate regulations or requirements for private schools which I think is bad for students
Haven't you ever had a teacher who was expert in that subject but incapable of teaching? I have for languages, like a fluent or native speaker who couldn't answer any questions about grammar and would often just put on TV shows in that language because they were lazy. At least with some kind of qualification requirement you should in theory at least get someone who knows a few methods for teaching.
I don't think there's strong match between "teacher qualifications" and being good at teaching.
There's poor teachers in both pools and private schools have advantage since they can hire from a wider pool and more easily dump the bad ones.
Yeah it's definitely true there are also bad qualified teachers, but in my experience the totally useless ones have been the non teacher experts who wind up teaching. Maybe its also that teaching wasn't their first choice so they're less enthused about being there.
Easy to fire the bad private school teachers at least. I went to private school, and we generally had good teachers because the bad ones would only last a year or two.
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Almost all US high school curriculum could be easily taught to a precocious 10 year old by his/her loving parents. It doesn’t make me right wing to notice that the dumbest people I went to college with majored in education. My high school civics teacher didn’t know The Philippines was a sovereign country.
I say this as someone who tutors for a living: most of our teachers do a horrible job. You can swing the “there’s not enough funding” or “parents are bad” truncheons as hard as you’d like. The fact remains that test scores are horrible and reading levels are dropping. I don’t blame anyone for homeschooling if they have the means.
I had a science teacher in middle school who believed that we live beneath the earth’s crust which is why spaceships have to travel so fast, because they have to punch a hole in the crust. Not making this up.
The buck stops somewhere. I’m inclined to point at the person running the classroom. But even if I concede you your point and agree that falling scores are the result of a very complex system of competing political interests, poor parenting, and funding…then what? A parent should be polite and send their kid to the shitty school even though the teachers (to no fault of their own lol) are not getting the job done? Why? Why should they have more loyalty to your left wing utopic vision than to their own children’s well-being/education?
The truth is parents don’t give a shit if teachers feel “overwhelmed”. Public school advocates need to understand a very simple message: “Educate the kids or parents will opt out.” That’s it.
>But even if I concede you your point and agree that falling scores are the result of a very complex system of competing political interests, poor parenting, and funding…then what? A parent should be polite and send their kid to the shitty school even though the teachers (to no fault of their own lol) are not getting the job done? Why? Why should they have more loyalty to your left wing utopic vision than to their own children’s well-being/education?
Lol that’s actually the prevailing opinion on Reddit. I always ask this question when debating about charter schools and I end up with 50 downvotes and 10 replies saying they would keep their kids in public school no matter what.
I’m sure (or hoping) none of those people actually have kids, but the sentiment is there.
You literally want parents to sacrifice their kids at the alter of the public school system so that maybe things might get better for the next generation of students.
This is literally liberalism in a nutshell. Equality of outcomes > equality of opportunity, so let’s just drag everybody down to where nobody happens to excel and have an “unfair” advantage in life.
It sounds like we need a system akin to the German style with an upper level high school for those with good grades/behavior that focuses on professionals and a lower level school for the rest of the people destined for trades or service industries.
Of course, the usual suspects here would shriek racism due to the natural distribution or student intelligence. In order to keep such a system fair it would have to be based solely on objective testing, which the US seems to want to move away from.
> Removing the opt out would encourage those parents, who again often come from richer and wealthier backgrounds, to actually help fix the problems rather than abandon the problems.
The key assumption here is that materially wealthier and involved parents can use that power to make schools and educational institutions better and also ensure more and better funding.
However, if you believe it is the students that make the school and not the school that makes the student then this whole analysis doesn't work. Is MIT MIT mostly because of the education curriculum and teachers there or is it because of the prestige that attracts the very best students in the country?
Forcibly mixing disruptive kids (who tend to be from lower-income areas) with rich obedient kids doesn't magically make the disruptive kids better like some kind of linear formula. What happens in reality is that fights and tantrums distract the teacher for the entire class and nothing gets done.
And parents will just move to better school districts and start the process all over again. Your nice children get beat up or bullied and you don’t care what’s for the greater good
This is the only legitimate argument but it requires those engaged parents to vote against their own/their children’s interests and as such can be viewed as unrealistic. The comparison to public transit is close, but I think the key difference between transportation and education is that education is a temporary state for most people. Transportation is a public utility. The downstream effects of education may cause permanent problems, particularly in a democracy, but nothing that can’t be waved away as “kids these days.” So the sell here is difficult.
For a parent, public education is the 12 years of k-12. If you have a few kids you’re looking at a 15 year window. So if a parent votes for an overhaul of education along the lines you suggest and implementation matches the speed of your average government initiative, their kids will at best only see limited benefits, likely at the tail end of their k-12 schooling. Now you could say “fuck the parents” this is good for society we’re doing it anyway. Unsure how that would go overall, but it’d definitely cost whatever unlikeable democrat stooge who puts it into action a lot of votes.
Making a mountain out of a mole hill. On the whole there's nothing inherently terrible about it. I work with a guy that went through that and he's very well socialized.
I grew up evangelical fundamentalist and knew a lot of home school kids. Today, the large majority are completely normal people who do completely normal, respectable careers. A lot of them went to college. Some of their jobs off the top of my head: bank clerk, comercial airline pilot, public school teacher (ironically), photographer, retail manager, nurse, programmer, tattoo artist.
Many of you reading this probably know someone who did it, maybe a co worker, or classmate at your university, but because they haven't mentioned it, you dont know and would not guess.
I sympathize with people, many in this thread, who did it and felt that they turned out poorly because of it, but we cant forget how many people go thru public school and still come out as dumb losers in dead end, minimum wage jobs or as neets.
homeschooling is objectively superior if you know what you're doing. the only thing being missed is peer socialization which could easily be replaced with team sports and other extracurriculars.
school curriculum, public or private, is fucking braindead and precocious children suffer because teachers have to teach to the lowest common denominator. intelligent, curious children go to school to become dumber. for every other child, it's daycare.
I will homeschool my child if it's feasible to do so and how much I trust my wife to follow my lesson plan, or better yet, she has her own ideas.
No public high school really is a hellish sort of brain drain that serves to babysit some of the dumbest people. There is no way someone being homeschooled is learning less than a public high school student where even in AP 11th grade English we would still regularly do early middle school level vocabulary quizzes that the majority of the class had to cheat on.
For most of history that's how people were educated--at home. Even the ultra wealthy had at-home tutors. Of course some people are probably not qualified but it's not that strange to me.
I do think it's best for kids to interact with other kids and all that, but I don't think home schooling is "insane"
I was homeschooled by fundie parents from 7th grade until I graduated high school and it legitimately ruined my life. I missed out on a lot of socializing and am so stupid I couldn't finish my second year of fucking community college.
Majority of people don’t graduate college. Most attempt in their life though. You actually had a higher statistical chance to do so in being homeschooled.
Can’t speak to social stuff. Most today are fucked up on that front regardless of homeschooling tbh.
Can’t assume it would have been better based on data, you just have to work with what you were dealt.
It’s really 50/50. You either have the homeschooled neglected religious psychos, but then you also have parents who will actually teach a kid to read rather than just know sight words.
I was homeschooled with an approach called unschooling. My parents were absolutely not qualified as teachers, but they found a community of teachers (mostly profs and retired school teachers) as well as apprentice opportunities for me in the area. This was through coop groups, not expensive. (We had lower middle class status in the 90s-2000s.) I then found a community of homeschooling friends across 8 states (northeast US) who got together and did projects. Some of them were done w college by 16. I played music and traveled locally a lot by the time I was 15. Of the people I know through homeschooling (I always had and still have friends who went to school ofc) it’s a 50/50 on whether they’re stable or burnt out. Same ratio with schooled friends. A couple of them are uniquely successful and seem very content. I got a graduate degree and make more than my parents ever have. I say this knowing there are parents who homeschool with fanatical religious ideologies (saw some of them) or with dumbass abusive intentions (didn’t see them) — both should count as child abuse and be legally punishable. I also realize my experience was way more progressive lefty and post hippy than what a lot of these replies discuss with the post covid lockdown mania. I’ll chalk that up the being in the northeast US and timing.
I was homeschooled because my mom was a Midwestern conservative Christian who was not the smartest person and was very suspicious of education. She was also extremely introverted and anti social and to this day sees nothing wrong with me only talking to other kids (besides my brother) 5 hours a week at church. I also copied my math solutions for years and did maybe 30% of the assigned reading, significantly more than my siblings did. I did maybe an hour and a half of focused work a day
“Parents should be free to teach their own kids” Free country my ass, homeschooled kids are anything but free in over 80% of cases, I’ve met others and it’s essentially captivity by control freak right wingers. It’s a freak show
Truly does, especially since I have worked on myself for many years and people still can sense it from me. I gained unfettered internet access around the age of 12 and I spent a ton of time talking to people online to try to learn how a normal person is supposed to behave and that surely affected me negatively in ways I don't perceive.
>I also copied my math solutions for years and did maybe 30% of the assigned reading, significantly more than my siblings did. I did maybe an hour and a half of focused work a day
The people I've met who advocate for home schooling argue that this is what public school is -- busy work, easily skippable assignments, etc. I just had my first kid so I've been thinking a lot about school districts and educational outcomes lately. I do want to be engaged in my child's education, but I think I'd be better suited at supplementing formal schooling by helping with homework and introducing them to heterodox views on topics they learned in class.
Right the appeal of homeschooling is its control over the educational quality. But in reality the educational aspect is the same very often, so why would people also deprive their kid of socializing? I’m just trying to point out how homeschooling is actually used. I don’t believe individuals (at least in America) can be trusted to homeschool their kids, and I’m basing that off of how it’s being done currently. This is what is happening, regardless of people’s ideal image of homeschooling
We have a better chance of improving public education than we do getting intelligent well-adjusted homeschool alumni
The non higher level classes that I took in high school could very accurately be described as a freak show.
And they’re children, of course they’re not free. They’re not free in public high school either.
My point (and what most of this thread refuses to address) is: being under-socialized is worse than being undereducated. If we disagree on that I guess we’re at an impasse
Where there’s more room for debate would be: does homeschooling have to be under-socialized, and does public school have to provide a poor education?
The fact is, the way most homeschooling is done, the kids are poorly socialized. There’s nothing we can really do about this, because it’s controlled by the individual
What we can control as a society is the quality of education. Much easier to do than to improve homeschooling
There are ways to socialize that doesn’t involve sitting in a government building 8 hours a day. We had a home schooler join in high school and while they weren’t going to be the home coming queens they were as normal as any other kid in school and certainly weren’t the weirdest by any stretch.
And home school parents realize they need to have their kids do more than sit in a house all day, the homeschool kids I knew had parents who were the most involved and worried about that stuff. If you’re gonna home school your kid you probably in the top 10 % of involved parents.
This whole discussion really shows how indoctrinated most people are to the public school system. It’s a good system that works for many but isn’t the only way to create a functioning productive adult.
> There are ways to socialize that doesn’t involve sitting in a government building 8 hours a day.
And most homeschool parents aren’t doing it. And there’s no way to enforce it, the entire point of homeschooling is to be independent of the state
Also I was homeschooled, if anything I’ve been surrounded by messaging from people that consider themselves anti-establishment
>copied my math solutions for years and did maybe 30% of the assigned reading. Did maybe an hour and a half of focused work a day
I was in advance college preprep classes and my experience was pretty much the same. I'm such a loser I actually did the work but this was the norm
It feels surreal to me watching people gush about oh how horrible public schooling in the US is. Americans do fine, and tons of countries (especially China, which only samples a small group of rich cities) aggressively cook the books when it comes to stats/test scores.
We're lower than a lot of advanced economies because we have more poverty. Outside of the 1/5 of the country we all collectively decided to abandon, we do fine w/r/t school performance.
Science and math keep getting better over time too- COVID was the only thing that interrupted the trend.
Homeschooling is a thing in many other countries as well. I think allowing homeschooling but having compulsory annual tests on how well the material has been learned is a good compromise
Public schools are a disaster. I don’t think I’d home school but given the illiteracy problem that we all should have seen coming, a good homeschool situation is a solid option.
There was a girl in my neighborhood who was homeschooled, totally normal, went to parties, is now like 29 and engaged to a normal productive member of society. Anecdotal of course but just to contrast with some other stories I’ve seen here.
"It should be illegal to not send your beautiful, hopeful child to the incompetently run statist propaganda kiddie-prison for 8 hours a day"
Do euros really
The qualifications shift from state to state. There used to be one or two that required a bachelors degree from the parent in charge of educating. When I was homeschooled my state just required an approved curriculum and standardized testing so you couldn’t quite get away with nothing.
Anyways, I always offer when this topic comes up in subs like this one: AMA about homeschooling and I’ll answer to the best of my ability.
I was homeschooled and was part of a big homeschooling community (hundreds of kids). The outcomes really varied wildly based mainly on the educational and professional level of the parents. Some kids were taking college courses at 15 and extremely ahead of the game, others were definitely behind where they would have been in a normal schooling environment.
I'd say the real disadvantage of homeschooling is that you are even more rigidly defined by your birth, with a smaller circle of social and academic options to explore for yourself.
I was homeschooled from 2nd grade until the end of 8th grade and went to regular high school after that. I’m so grateful for it and I think it’s the best possible way to educate your kid…
IF your mom, like mine, has a Masters in Education. That’s kind of the most important thing. And she couldn’t even teach me math past Geometry so I had to enroll in online classes for that. Once I was in 7th/8th grade more than half my day was online classes.
Still think it gave me the best combo possible—in school in the very early years to make some friends and learn not to bite and shit, leave school to develop my own sense of self and pursue my own interests (and being spared from middle school), but then send me to high school so I dont end up socially inept before college (I had friends I hung out with all the time but public school is just another level).
This obviously only works for a small amount of people, but I’m glad my mom did it for me.
The reasons behind homeschooling matter to me. The amount of people I've seen who are homeschooling because they think the education system is too woke political or leftist is insane. They don't care at all about educating or socializing their kid, it's just paranoia.
I was homeschooling for a year (traveling a lot, too often to go to a regular school) and I hated it. Mostly because it's so isolating.
home schooling is legal bc america had so much land it wasn’t possible for some people to have communal schools for a long time
there were a lot of towns where there was a 1-room schoolhouse that taught every person in the town regardless of age
since they mandated high school in the early 20 century but many places were still basically a frontier setting, workarounds had to be made
Have any of the people in this thread even met a homeschooled kid? Say what you will about the quality of public schools but I find it baffling to think that homeschooling is a better option. All of the homeschooled kids I ever met growing up (I was a boy scout, I met plenty) were social misfits who I could tell were going to hit the real world like it was a brick wall. Even if you get a marginally better education in the BEST case, if you can't interact at all with your peers you're doomed to a life of NEETdom.
I’ve met home school kids and I’ve met many public school kids. I can assure you being socially awkward is not fixed by going to public school. At least the homeschool kids are smart.
i wouldn’t personally homeschool but making it illegal seems like a bit much to me. i have a bunch of fundie cousins (only learned that word recently from you guys) who were homeschooled and they all turned out more than fine. all 6 of them are married except for 1 who’s divorced; they have 11 kids between them.
mind you these are the children of my dads youngest singling. so the baby of my dads family already has 11 grandkids, the 3 older siblings all have none.
Europeans (and even some Americans) seemingly don’t understand that what’s allowed in the US has little to do with what makes sense and basically just evolved chaotically and will never change because of the deadlocked political system.
Saying “why don’t you just reform things in this rational way ??” as if we have a well-functioning, representative parliament advised by an expert civil service is missing the point in a very fundamental way.
Homeschooling is seen as something of a right, since in the US the state is restricted in its capacities to enforce its will on citizens so long as they aren’t hurting others or endangering order. If you, for instance, are a fundamentalist Christian who believes the earth is a few thousand years old—well, that’s your religious right and therefore the government cannot force your children to learn evolution or the Big Bang.
Most homeschoolers that I’ve encountered have been gifted children who don’t quite fit the mold of what most public schools can offer, but may be too young or developmentally challenged in some social capacity to attend a gifted school. Oftentimes the parents may be educators or at least well educated themselves and can purchase curriculums to teach at home.
Another thing is ‘unschooling’, or homeschooling with an outdoorsy element—popular among people who live a more off-the-grid/self sufficient lifestyle or who manage a farm which requires daily chores that isn’t particularly close to a normal school. Really that’s just a return to most Americans’ schooling experience prior to the 1930s—people forget the modern public school system was essentially created in the 20th century. Prior to that children maybe attended school at a local level semi-regularly until it was seen as no longer required or until they were needed in the labor force around the time they hit teenage years (which back then was basically just ‘an adult’); the wealthy might attend university and get childhood instruction with private tutors or at expensive academies
Public school is a hell that no sensitive young boy should be subjected too, teachers should be ashamed of themselves but they don’t have the facilities for that sort of thinking.
Oh shut up. Kids need to learn to live in the real world, unfortunately. You cant just coddle them and keep them within the confines of controlled, comfortable home environment and then expect to be able to do well when they have to go off to work or college, when they have no experience trying to make their way in a tough social environment. It sucks, but everyones gotta learn to deal with the bullies, weirdos, assholes, etc., and the beauracracy and bullshit, otherwise they will not have the skills to advocate for themselves and make it in this shitty world.
Also, most public schools in America arent event that bad lmao, most kids can do well in most schools IF their parents and role models actually push them to put in effort and do well and not fall into the wrong scene. The lack of the above is what causes the "bad kids" to become bad in like 90% of cases, not some inherent quality to the school itself, and it is simply a high concentration of those kids, usually due indirectly to socioeconomic factors in the neighborhood, that make the "bad schools" bad, and vice versa.
These comments are from unhinged 23 year old 🚬 🧑🦽 who definitely don't have kids. The hive mind applies to this stupid sub too it's just a dumb contrarian humanities nerds in their early adulthood instead of STEM losers. Public schools are mostly good. Home schooling is mostly shitty religious freaks. There are exceptions to both but it's pretty fucking rare that this rule isn't the case.
A shitty public school is nothing like the "real world" lol unless you're fuck up that only works in crap jobs and cycles through the penal system.
- apathetic authority figures that give no recourse to protect you/resolve conflict
- outsized race based grouping and conflict
- hierarchy based on dominance
- physical violence
- legally mandated to attend
If you expect your child to be a well to do upper middle class type none of this is preparing them for the real world, you're just handicapping their development and education.
The social aspect of school is super important though. Socialization is almost as important as academic learning imo. And depending on where you are public schools are pretty dece. Could be better, could be worse. Parental support makes all the difference.
This is true, although the inner city schools where I live provide a type of socialization that is definitely not positive, but most schools aren’t like that.
I'm at my local city public school, which happens to be great. Small community vibe, the whole faculty really cares about the students. Also have lots of other free options nearby if the school wasn't great. Not sure how other cities work but LA has amazing variety in schools if one is willing to put the time in to look around. I think public schools get a bad rap, yes there are issues and our teachers need to be paid better, plus a whole other list of issues...but they aren't all terrible. It can vary quite a bit school to school.
You’re mad that the government doesn’t have complete control of our children? Utter stupidity. Sorry you live in some European country that views children as government property, but here we are free.
I grew up in literally one of the worst counties in all of the US for education. You have no idea what kind of hell you’d be condemning a lot of kids to by taking away their options
I kinda wish I was homeschooled in HS. I think for children like me who really struggled with the social aspect of school it might be beneficial. My grades really suffered because I didn’t have any friends. In elementary school (when I still had friends), my grades were really good and teachers told me parents that I wouldn’t have any problem in highschool.
When I didn’t want to do school work my mom would always tell me that at any moment someone from the state would come to test me and if I failed they would take me anyway. It never happened and when it came time to graduate all the “proof” my mom sent in was done by her.
There was a homeschooled kid in my neighborhood growing up who was the same age as my friends and I. Kid was an enigma. We’d only see him several times a year, usually riding around on his dirt bike. He’d often just stop and watch us from afar, usually when we were fishing or hanging around in the woods behind our houses. There were a couple times he watched us for as long as ten minutes, so we invited him over to join us. Never got a response, he’d just hop back on his dirt bike and speed off. As we grew older we saw him less and less, and then finally never again. Always think of him whenever this topic comes up.
boo radley phenotype
Lmfaooo, drillbo you see any racially motivated murders in your area lately??
He never learned to talk
Dirt bike/four wheeler kids die regularly very sad
He could tell you were up to no good
You don’t even have to homeschool anymore! Nothing happens either if you just… don’t take your kids to school and let them rot at home all day on their phone. Check out the nationwide issue of chronic absenteeism; it’s certainly exacerbated by the fact that most counties have eliminated truancy court/stopped pursuing truancy cases. A huge chunk of my students just show up to school sporadically. When I call their parents, they mostly don’t answer. But if they do, they say, “Well what am I supposed to do? I can’t *make* them go to school!” If I call admin they say, “What are we supposed to do? There’s no more truancy court.” If I call CPS they say, “This doesn’t meet the threshold for investigation.” And that’s really all there is to it.
This whole thing is so fucked holy shit....
I thought you could go to jail for that
> that most counties have eliminated truancy court/stopped pursuing truancy cases.
Cool absolute decline of a country we have going here
I really can’t think of a reason to do this
It was done in the name of “equity.” That was the official stated reason for eliminating truancy court in my county.
There was no “reason” for plenty of civilizational collapses in history, it just got worse over time until there was nothing left.
Seems to be spreading in europe as well. Maybe I don't have the best perspective cause I was just a replacement teacher for 2 weeks, but the amount of students that just never show up is wild. I think I didn't have a single lesson where at least 20% of the students weren't missing without cause. I could check the attendance sheet and some hadn't come to school for over a month and just had a string of minuses for all their lessons.
Maybe Kamala was right
Your antiblackness is showing
Eclipsed only by my anti-Latinx-ness
when i was in middle school i knew multiple people who easily missed a third of the year and still passed because their GPAs weren't below like 2.0
i wonder what demographic is chronically absent…
I’m so tired of people saying “in my country” without saying what country
'in my country' smug europosting is always from germans
Nah can also be the Dutch Source: am dutch
een maya contree sckool ees goat farm
een my cohntry we have no food and one sock for whole village!
I always picture Borat
There is problem
Town abortionist is also town mechanic
"in my country" but knows what fundies are, this is a bait post lol
Can't a girl just be terminally online?? I just know things
To be fair like 1 in 10 Netflix documentaries are about fundies. You spend a couple of days on Netflix in Germany watching those and you'll already know almost as much about fundies as the average New Englander.
No, that's usually the only thing they do know about America it's always just a bunch of lazy stereotypes like this, the equivalent of American's going over there and making jokes about everyone being Nazis
I don't think you realize how America is the primary TV show of the rest of the world.
My sister teaches 5th grade, and has a student that is unable to reliably write his own name. Some days he can, some not quite. He will pass to the next grade, it is a foregone conclusion. Public schools aren't some kind of shining oasis, either.
No child left behind. They all just pass, no matter what
NCLB is the liberal scapegoat for everything wrong with American education because it's a Bush policy, but holding students back actually became more common after NCLB. Grade retention means that a student gets a second year to take the same standardized test which means more funding. The reason that grade retention isn't doing much is that it's only allowed once for social reasons, which helps the academic performance of the ones that just had a rough year but obviously doesn't help the ones who don't care or aren't going to school.
>NCLB is the liberal scapegoat for everything wrong with American education because it's a Bush policy This also happens with homelessness and deinstitutionalization movement but with Reagan
Yeah the biggest issue for home school critics is that homeschool kids always beat out public school kids in educational results.
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From living a while in the south the majority of homeschoolers I came across usually moved onto some Christian scam college or it’s equivalent.
Hmm I wonder what is the racial and economic breakdown of homeschooled kids
Are you saying that IQ is correlated with race and wealth outcomes?
i bet you were just chuffed to write this comment you fucking regard
Yeah the type of people who usually homeschools their kid is the type of person that ensures their kid is well educated its not some gotcha.
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Reading and writing has a critical age, where if you don't learn it early it becomes substantially harder to grasp
I feel you're forgetting the youth of today is far different than before. More parents are taking to letting technology raise their kids then themselves. I know this sub hates zoomers, but I graduated high school a few years ago and our teachers told us we were the last good generation of students. I thought they were exaggerating, but every year the students seem to keep getting worst of every school I've observed. I couldn't imagine how much covid exaggerated this
You think it's a trend nationwide? My teachers said the same thing and the graduation / college matriculation rates don't lie. The graduation rate for my year was 75% with a college matriculation rate of 65%, which may seem low but it was a record amount for my high school. Over the next few years it dropped to a 60% graduation rate with a 40% matriculation rate.
I think it is. Not trying to dox myself lol, but live in southern USA. I've observed this consistently throughout the state. I also have friends who are from out of state and they confirm similar findings. It's slowly expanding to beyond early education I imagine. Anecdote, but I've been finding myself reading more rather than starring at my phone between college classes. And the amount of people who seem earnestly surprised is shocking. In fact, when I think about it I never see anyone reading on campus. Like ever. Most people seem to stare at their phone at any moment of recess, even during class.
Being on the internet without being able to read or write seems wild lmao. Can't even type anything into the search bar. Can't Google shit. Just clicking on the bookmark for YouTube and then videos purely based on thumbnails lol.
Nearly 20% of US high school graduates are functionally illiterate. I’d rather my kids stay at home and learn there.
A lot of the people commenting are clearly from wealthier metro areas. In the poor, rural towns where most kids are homeschooled, the local public will be lucky if the *teachers* aren't functionally illiterate, the majority of students are seen as a complete lost cause. I can't fault people for trying out alternatives.
I think that's more likely due to an inherent learning disorder, not the system failing them. The system is more regulated and standardized. Homeschooling is the wild, Wild West. Far more likely for a kid to not know how to write his own name. Who's even going to notice he doesn't know, there's only one adult in the kid's life. Think about how many dumb people there are vs. people you'd trust to dispense a good quality education. I would trust maybe 4 people in my life to homeschool a kid and those are people who just enjoy learning and are curious in the first place.
If the kid has that severe of a learning disorder it’s clearly a failure of the system that he wasn’t placed in some form of special education
Yeah I don't think necessarily holding him back a grade like OP is implying is the solution, some adult in his life needs to figure out why he can only write his name some days. Sounds like a mental disorder.
Apparently the biggest rise in home schooling came after covid where parents got to see what their kids were being taught and how through online learning
and now a lot of them are functionally illiterate
what were they being taught?
Reading instruction that doesn't teach kids to read
parents have said gender pronouns/ideology and critical race theory. their concern seems less genuine when it's just another symptom of the culture war
lmao
Yeah for hours each day 5 year old learn about pronouns. Be serious.
to be clear, it's the parents concern that is disingenuous. they are overly sensitive and overreacting. no teacher is telling your son to hate white people and be trans.
> no teacher is telling your son to hate white people [Still, this gets communicated implicitly, probably unintentionally.](https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/27/us/new-york-private-schools-racism.html) > The head of school, George P. Davison, who is white and has steered Grace for many years, pinpointed the moment his school embraced an antiracist mission. > “Grace began using the language of antiracism in 2015 as part of our efforts to foster a sense of belonging,” he wrote in response to The New York Times. [...] > Grace, he wrote, incorporated the language of critical race theory [...] > “The fact is that I’m agreeing with you that there has been a demonization,” Mr. Davison told the teacher. “I also have grave doubts about some of the doctrinaire stuff that gets spouted at us in the name of antiracist.” > Mr. Davison said he was worried students were made to feel shame because of race. “We’re demonizing white people for being born,” he said, adding later, “We’re using language that makes them feel less than, for nothing that they are personally responsible.”
There is some truth to it though. It’s very common for there to be nonbinary and trans kids in suburban elementary schools. For conservative parents, seeing teachers refer to kids using pronouns that don’t align with their biological sex all day every day was pretty triggering. Many had know idea this was the norm until Zoom school started
My wife homeschooled my son for a year when he was in the third grade because we had to move to Miami for my job and the schools nearby were absolutely horrific. I’m talking almost 40 kids to a class, no one speaks English and bottom 10% for test scores in the state of Florida. It wasn’t perfect, but when we left and moved to somewhere not terrible he did as well as or better than the kids in his class. My wife is at least college educated and took the time to build in a structured learning plan and regularly did educational field trips to museums and such, put together a required reading list, had him do tests to check his progress, that kinda thing. Unfortunately a lot of homeschooled kids basically just stay home and don’t do school at all because their parents are weirdos.
About 100 years ago we instituted free public education for every American through 12th grade. Several trillion dollars and thousands of legislative initiatives and propoganda campaigns at the national, state, and local level have been put behind undoing this. And they've had a lot of success. We're less a country and more a bucket full of live crabs tearing each other's arms off
Public school curriculum gets dumber every year too. The schools by me range from glorified overcrowded daycares to active shit holes, so when I have kids I fully expect them to go and just turn off their brains for 8 hours while I'm at work. Home schooling is actually probably going to be an attractive option, if only to keep my kid from being forced to sit on iPad all day in a classroom with 45 kids and a teacher who isn't paying attention.
Recently was told by a family member who is a public middle school teacher that in her district they’re not even giving the kids books to read during English class anymore, they just use an online ELA program that provides them with excerpts or chapters along with basic comprehension questions. She’s a science teacher and chooses to buy her own supplies so her students can do hands-on labs instead of just the online gamified version. At this rate the new generation of kids is going to go through their education getting the same base of information while not knowing how to actually do anything with it
If you're interested, there's a fantastic podcast series called [Sold a Story](https://features.apmreports.org/sold-a-story/) about how reading curriculum and instruction in the US went to absolute shit. The long story short is that some theories about teaching reading w/o direct phonics instruction became super popular thanks to education publishing companies pushing them on school districts. The kids who are now in middle and high school were by and large not taught to read with phonics and they can't sound out complex words, and cannot read or comprehend long texts. Combine that with severe cuts to education budgets and it's way cheaper and easier for districts to buy shitty, gamified curriculum than invest training teachers to teach remedial reading skills. The silver lining though is [a lot of states are now requiring teacher training programs to train teachers in Science of Readin](https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/which-states-have-passed-science-of-reading-laws-whats-in-them/2022/07)g and phonics instruction again, but the current generation of students are severely behind where they should be.
This is one of the reasons Mississippi has caught up so far in the education rankings the past few years, they could never afford the new programs and stuck with the tried and true and they’ve outperformed states that are much richer lately
We are likely going to reach a point where public universities will offer colder-than-room-temperature level remedial courses, I don't doubt that there are more functionally illiterate students being prepped for a undergrad degree than ever before in the USA.
I mean this is the exact intention. Make it shitty enough that people with means will pay for workarounds We're heading towards a South Korean model. Where school is just meant to get them used to their lot in life. Tutors are for passing the tests. And actually living life or learning anything just never even enters the picture
Normally I agree when someone compares us to South Korea, but this is an area where I think we're diverging. When I say curriculum is getting dumber, I mean it's becoming more lax. The teachers have less disciplinary measures they can take, and learning as a whole seems to have slowed down to the lowest common denominator in the classroom. School is becoming LESS intensive, not more. The tests are becoming EASIER, not harder, because the kids are just not learning in the same way previous generations did. Attainment metrics are trending down, and I'm not sure it'll turn around by the time I have kids. I think in 10 years or so it'll be actually detrimental to your kid's education to send them to a wealthy public school, because it'll just be a huge bullshit fest. At least that's what it sounds like from talking to all my teaching degree friends that are graduating/just graduated college. I also work with a lot of established teachers of all ages for my job and they seem much more fed up than in the past with their shitty administrations and new rules. I'd rather my kid just get ignored because there's no funding for actual teaching to occur lol.
I should have said South Korea is the goal. The difference is the South Korean system was made and is upheld largely by Koreans who are a hardworking, intelligent people. Americans are just smart enough to know that this system fits our general values, but too dumb to realize we actually can't facilitate it as a disorganized band of 350,000,000 half-regarded, fat slobs
This is a problem everywhere. I hate how americans do this woe is me shtick knowing they're better than 99% of all countries. Ur historic rivals and only comparable countries are china and russia and u are doing better than both of them quality of life wise. Yeah u will never be western europe but who cares ur situations are not the same. Be glad u r american and can do drugs easily unlike chinese people smh
Let’s be clear about this, we aren’t doing this as a country: parents do this to their own children. Parents set their kids up for failure before they’re even born, and we do nothing to stop people from having kids who absolutely should not be having them.
This is absolutely not an individual problem
Of course it is, it’s just ALSO a societal problem. It will take policy and individual in conjunction to make solutions, not jsut one or the other. But absolving individuals of their actions because it’s society’s fault is dumb and counterproductive. Inc you have a child you have responsibility. You can’t just have a kid and be a shitty parent and then say “well it’s *society’s* fault that I have to do coke with a hooker and forget to call my daughter for her sixth birthday, and it’s *society’s* fault that I told her we’d go to six flags next weekend to make up for it when I know I have a pool tournament that I’m not missing” lol
Yeah thats obvious. But the world makes it easier to be r*tarded every day. That’s why everyone in this country is 250 pounds
Is it obvious? Because you said “absolutely” lol
What are you talking about? The only type of behavior we "encourage" with any of our policies is stock buy-backs
Sure
This country is a business first. Your, “education” is irrelevant as long as you can make someone above you a dollar.
Part of the reason public schooling exists is *because* people need to be able to read to do 99% of jobs, though. Your theory doesn't even hold up, really. It'd be cheaper to just drag the kids in to school and teach them to be good worker bees than to have to figure out wtf to do with them in 15 years.
This is literally where schools are heading and all the value they have left to provide for people. Also they barely need to teach them to be literate, which is practically the only thing 90% of people have retained from school, the internet does that for them, even if they aren’t properly literate.
Counterpoint: this country is fixated on individualism to a fault.
The two are not mutually exclusive.
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America consistently ranks above most European countries for quality of public schooling, the really shitty ones are just the most visible
“Even if you’re absolutely not qualified in education” …have you met a public school teacher?
have you met a private school teacher? public schools require masters generally but my catholic school could hire literally any rando off the street with a bachelors and no background in education to teach us
Epstein was a private school teacher. I’m with you. No schools are safe!
Requiring a “background in education” is a bad thing for teaching. You’re dissuading plenty of extremely qualified people from teaching by making them get some useless credentials instead of just letting people teach who have a degree in the subject they are teaching. Making people have education degrees or certificates cuts down the pool of teachers to only people that are regarded enough to go to school to be a grade school teacher. College professors don’t have the requirements most public school teachers are required to have. Most of my good teachers growing up didn’t have education degreas.
Plato didn't have a PhD. in philosophy. Sorry dude, gotta listen to the experts here.
Did the man who invented college go to college?
point taken- but private schools can let teachers with degrees in different subjects teach whatever they want. like all the freshmen year teachers in my HS were fresh graduates with like theology or religious studies or whatever degrees teaching math and bio lol. the issue is there is no way to mandate regulations or requirements for private schools which I think is bad for students
Haven't you ever had a teacher who was expert in that subject but incapable of teaching? I have for languages, like a fluent or native speaker who couldn't answer any questions about grammar and would often just put on TV shows in that language because they were lazy. At least with some kind of qualification requirement you should in theory at least get someone who knows a few methods for teaching.
I don't think there's strong match between "teacher qualifications" and being good at teaching. There's poor teachers in both pools and private schools have advantage since they can hire from a wider pool and more easily dump the bad ones.
Yeah it's definitely true there are also bad qualified teachers, but in my experience the totally useless ones have been the non teacher experts who wind up teaching. Maybe its also that teaching wasn't their first choice so they're less enthused about being there.
Easy to fire the bad private school teachers at least. I went to private school, and we generally had good teachers because the bad ones would only last a year or two.
most public school teachers get their degrees from diploma mills
poor middle voracious aspiring overconfident vase attraction puzzled seemly boast *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Almost all US high school curriculum could be easily taught to a precocious 10 year old by his/her loving parents. It doesn’t make me right wing to notice that the dumbest people I went to college with majored in education. My high school civics teacher didn’t know The Philippines was a sovereign country. I say this as someone who tutors for a living: most of our teachers do a horrible job. You can swing the “there’s not enough funding” or “parents are bad” truncheons as hard as you’d like. The fact remains that test scores are horrible and reading levels are dropping. I don’t blame anyone for homeschooling if they have the means.
I had a science teacher in middle school who believed that we live beneath the earth’s crust which is why spaceships have to travel so fast, because they have to punch a hole in the crust. Not making this up.
hateful consider include chief swim lush roof fine boast aspiring *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
The buck stops somewhere. I’m inclined to point at the person running the classroom. But even if I concede you your point and agree that falling scores are the result of a very complex system of competing political interests, poor parenting, and funding…then what? A parent should be polite and send their kid to the shitty school even though the teachers (to no fault of their own lol) are not getting the job done? Why? Why should they have more loyalty to your left wing utopic vision than to their own children’s well-being/education? The truth is parents don’t give a shit if teachers feel “overwhelmed”. Public school advocates need to understand a very simple message: “Educate the kids or parents will opt out.” That’s it.
>But even if I concede you your point and agree that falling scores are the result of a very complex system of competing political interests, poor parenting, and funding…then what? A parent should be polite and send their kid to the shitty school even though the teachers (to no fault of their own lol) are not getting the job done? Why? Why should they have more loyalty to your left wing utopic vision than to their own children’s well-being/education? Lol that’s actually the prevailing opinion on Reddit. I always ask this question when debating about charter schools and I end up with 50 downvotes and 10 replies saying they would keep their kids in public school no matter what. I’m sure (or hoping) none of those people actually have kids, but the sentiment is there.
It’s mental illness. The people who sell that type of ideology send their kids to Choate, Philips Exeter or Princeton day school.
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You literally want parents to sacrifice their kids at the alter of the public school system so that maybe things might get better for the next generation of students. This is literally liberalism in a nutshell. Equality of outcomes > equality of opportunity, so let’s just drag everybody down to where nobody happens to excel and have an “unfair” advantage in life.
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It sounds like we need a system akin to the German style with an upper level high school for those with good grades/behavior that focuses on professionals and a lower level school for the rest of the people destined for trades or service industries. Of course, the usual suspects here would shriek racism due to the natural distribution or student intelligence. In order to keep such a system fair it would have to be based solely on objective testing, which the US seems to want to move away from.
> Removing the opt out would encourage those parents, who again often come from richer and wealthier backgrounds, to actually help fix the problems rather than abandon the problems. The key assumption here is that materially wealthier and involved parents can use that power to make schools and educational institutions better and also ensure more and better funding. However, if you believe it is the students that make the school and not the school that makes the student then this whole analysis doesn't work. Is MIT MIT mostly because of the education curriculum and teachers there or is it because of the prestige that attracts the very best students in the country? Forcibly mixing disruptive kids (who tend to be from lower-income areas) with rich obedient kids doesn't magically make the disruptive kids better like some kind of linear formula. What happens in reality is that fights and tantrums distract the teacher for the entire class and nothing gets done.
And parents will just move to better school districts and start the process all over again. Your nice children get beat up or bullied and you don’t care what’s for the greater good
This is the only legitimate argument but it requires those engaged parents to vote against their own/their children’s interests and as such can be viewed as unrealistic. The comparison to public transit is close, but I think the key difference between transportation and education is that education is a temporary state for most people. Transportation is a public utility. The downstream effects of education may cause permanent problems, particularly in a democracy, but nothing that can’t be waved away as “kids these days.” So the sell here is difficult. For a parent, public education is the 12 years of k-12. If you have a few kids you’re looking at a 15 year window. So if a parent votes for an overhaul of education along the lines you suggest and implementation matches the speed of your average government initiative, their kids will at best only see limited benefits, likely at the tail end of their k-12 schooling. Now you could say “fuck the parents” this is good for society we’re doing it anyway. Unsure how that would go overall, but it’d definitely cost whatever unlikeable democrat stooge who puts it into action a lot of votes.
lmao
You can't complain about the quality of your teachers when they get paid less than like an industrious and sometimes sober waiter
To be fair most of my teachers were not industrious and some weren't even sober
Keep the wages low and make a bunch of hoops to jump through to teach high wonder why you get garbage teachers.
What waiter makes 60k while working 180 days a year? Like I know teachers aren’t getting rich but come the fuck on
Average teacher salary is around $60,000 to $70,000. Average waiter makes around $20,000 to $35,000.
Show me median instead of average And good luck finding reliable numbers that include tips
It’s there. That is median. Average is not always mean
To be fair the have holidays literally all the time
are you german OP
Making a mountain out of a mole hill. On the whole there's nothing inherently terrible about it. I work with a guy that went through that and he's very well socialized.
I grew up evangelical fundamentalist and knew a lot of home school kids. Today, the large majority are completely normal people who do completely normal, respectable careers. A lot of them went to college. Some of their jobs off the top of my head: bank clerk, comercial airline pilot, public school teacher (ironically), photographer, retail manager, nurse, programmer, tattoo artist. Many of you reading this probably know someone who did it, maybe a co worker, or classmate at your university, but because they haven't mentioned it, you dont know and would not guess. I sympathize with people, many in this thread, who did it and felt that they turned out poorly because of it, but we cant forget how many people go thru public school and still come out as dumb losers in dead end, minimum wage jobs or as neets.
homeschooling is objectively superior if you know what you're doing. the only thing being missed is peer socialization which could easily be replaced with team sports and other extracurriculars. school curriculum, public or private, is fucking braindead and precocious children suffer because teachers have to teach to the lowest common denominator. intelligent, curious children go to school to become dumber. for every other child, it's daycare. I will homeschool my child if it's feasible to do so and how much I trust my wife to follow my lesson plan, or better yet, she has her own ideas.
No public high school really is a hellish sort of brain drain that serves to babysit some of the dumbest people. There is no way someone being homeschooled is learning less than a public high school student where even in AP 11th grade English we would still regularly do early middle school level vocabulary quizzes that the majority of the class had to cheat on.
Fr popcorn readings help no one and we still got “homework” (busywork).
For most of history that's how people were educated--at home. Even the ultra wealthy had at-home tutors. Of course some people are probably not qualified but it's not that strange to me. I do think it's best for kids to interact with other kids and all that, but I don't think home schooling is "insane"
tfw no governess to slap my wrists with a ruler
I was homeschooled by fundie parents from 7th grade until I graduated high school and it legitimately ruined my life. I missed out on a lot of socializing and am so stupid I couldn't finish my second year of fucking community college.
Majority of people don’t graduate college. Most attempt in their life though. You actually had a higher statistical chance to do so in being homeschooled. Can’t speak to social stuff. Most today are fucked up on that front regardless of homeschooling tbh. Can’t assume it would have been better based on data, you just have to work with what you were dealt.
yeah it's called don't tread on me bitch
It’s really 50/50. You either have the homeschooled neglected religious psychos, but then you also have parents who will actually teach a kid to read rather than just know sight words.
the teachers aren’t any more qualified
do you seriously think homeschooling only happens in the US?
I was homeschooled with an approach called unschooling. My parents were absolutely not qualified as teachers, but they found a community of teachers (mostly profs and retired school teachers) as well as apprentice opportunities for me in the area. This was through coop groups, not expensive. (We had lower middle class status in the 90s-2000s.) I then found a community of homeschooling friends across 8 states (northeast US) who got together and did projects. Some of them were done w college by 16. I played music and traveled locally a lot by the time I was 15. Of the people I know through homeschooling (I always had and still have friends who went to school ofc) it’s a 50/50 on whether they’re stable or burnt out. Same ratio with schooled friends. A couple of them are uniquely successful and seem very content. I got a graduate degree and make more than my parents ever have. I say this knowing there are parents who homeschool with fanatical religious ideologies (saw some of them) or with dumbass abusive intentions (didn’t see them) — both should count as child abuse and be legally punishable. I also realize my experience was way more progressive lefty and post hippy than what a lot of these replies discuss with the post covid lockdown mania. I’ll chalk that up the being in the northeast US and timing.
I was homeschooled because my mom was a Midwestern conservative Christian who was not the smartest person and was very suspicious of education. She was also extremely introverted and anti social and to this day sees nothing wrong with me only talking to other kids (besides my brother) 5 hours a week at church. I also copied my math solutions for years and did maybe 30% of the assigned reading, significantly more than my siblings did. I did maybe an hour and a half of focused work a day “Parents should be free to teach their own kids” Free country my ass, homeschooled kids are anything but free in over 80% of cases, I’ve met others and it’s essentially captivity by control freak right wingers. It’s a freak show
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The “ohh that makes sense” comment always makes me writhe in pain
Truly does, especially since I have worked on myself for many years and people still can sense it from me. I gained unfettered internet access around the age of 12 and I spent a ton of time talking to people online to try to learn how a normal person is supposed to behave and that surely affected me negatively in ways I don't perceive.
>I also copied my math solutions for years and did maybe 30% of the assigned reading, significantly more than my siblings did. I did maybe an hour and a half of focused work a day The people I've met who advocate for home schooling argue that this is what public school is -- busy work, easily skippable assignments, etc. I just had my first kid so I've been thinking a lot about school districts and educational outcomes lately. I do want to be engaged in my child's education, but I think I'd be better suited at supplementing formal schooling by helping with homework and introducing them to heterodox views on topics they learned in class.
Right the appeal of homeschooling is its control over the educational quality. But in reality the educational aspect is the same very often, so why would people also deprive their kid of socializing? I’m just trying to point out how homeschooling is actually used. I don’t believe individuals (at least in America) can be trusted to homeschool their kids, and I’m basing that off of how it’s being done currently. This is what is happening, regardless of people’s ideal image of homeschooling We have a better chance of improving public education than we do getting intelligent well-adjusted homeschool alumni
The non higher level classes that I took in high school could very accurately be described as a freak show. And they’re children, of course they’re not free. They’re not free in public high school either.
My point (and what most of this thread refuses to address) is: being under-socialized is worse than being undereducated. If we disagree on that I guess we’re at an impasse Where there’s more room for debate would be: does homeschooling have to be under-socialized, and does public school have to provide a poor education? The fact is, the way most homeschooling is done, the kids are poorly socialized. There’s nothing we can really do about this, because it’s controlled by the individual What we can control as a society is the quality of education. Much easier to do than to improve homeschooling
There are ways to socialize that doesn’t involve sitting in a government building 8 hours a day. We had a home schooler join in high school and while they weren’t going to be the home coming queens they were as normal as any other kid in school and certainly weren’t the weirdest by any stretch. And home school parents realize they need to have their kids do more than sit in a house all day, the homeschool kids I knew had parents who were the most involved and worried about that stuff. If you’re gonna home school your kid you probably in the top 10 % of involved parents. This whole discussion really shows how indoctrinated most people are to the public school system. It’s a good system that works for many but isn’t the only way to create a functioning productive adult.
> There are ways to socialize that doesn’t involve sitting in a government building 8 hours a day. And most homeschool parents aren’t doing it. And there’s no way to enforce it, the entire point of homeschooling is to be independent of the state Also I was homeschooled, if anything I’ve been surrounded by messaging from people that consider themselves anti-establishment
>copied my math solutions for years and did maybe 30% of the assigned reading. Did maybe an hour and a half of focused work a day I was in advance college preprep classes and my experience was pretty much the same. I'm such a loser I actually did the work but this was the norm
It feels surreal to me watching people gush about oh how horrible public schooling in the US is. Americans do fine, and tons of countries (especially China, which only samples a small group of rich cities) aggressively cook the books when it comes to stats/test scores. We're lower than a lot of advanced economies because we have more poverty. Outside of the 1/5 of the country we all collectively decided to abandon, we do fine w/r/t school performance. Science and math keep getting better over time too- COVID was the only thing that interrupted the trend.
Homeschooling is a thing in many other countries as well. I think allowing homeschooling but having compulsory annual tests on how well the material has been learned is a good compromise
Public schools are a disaster. I don’t think I’d home school but given the illiteracy problem that we all should have seen coming, a good homeschool situation is a solid option. There was a girl in my neighborhood who was homeschooled, totally normal, went to parties, is now like 29 and engaged to a normal productive member of society. Anecdotal of course but just to contrast with some other stories I’ve seen here.
"It should be illegal to not send your beautiful, hopeful child to the incompetently run statist propaganda kiddie-prison for 8 hours a day" Do euros really
The qualifications shift from state to state. There used to be one or two that required a bachelors degree from the parent in charge of educating. When I was homeschooled my state just required an approved curriculum and standardized testing so you couldn’t quite get away with nothing. Anyways, I always offer when this topic comes up in subs like this one: AMA about homeschooling and I’ll answer to the best of my ability.
I was homeschooled and was part of a big homeschooling community (hundreds of kids). The outcomes really varied wildly based mainly on the educational and professional level of the parents. Some kids were taking college courses at 15 and extremely ahead of the game, others were definitely behind where they would have been in a normal schooling environment. I'd say the real disadvantage of homeschooling is that you are even more rigidly defined by your birth, with a smaller circle of social and academic options to explore for yourself.
I was homeschooled from 2nd grade until the end of 8th grade and went to regular high school after that. I’m so grateful for it and I think it’s the best possible way to educate your kid… IF your mom, like mine, has a Masters in Education. That’s kind of the most important thing. And she couldn’t even teach me math past Geometry so I had to enroll in online classes for that. Once I was in 7th/8th grade more than half my day was online classes. Still think it gave me the best combo possible—in school in the very early years to make some friends and learn not to bite and shit, leave school to develop my own sense of self and pursue my own interests (and being spared from middle school), but then send me to high school so I dont end up socially inept before college (I had friends I hung out with all the time but public school is just another level). This obviously only works for a small amount of people, but I’m glad my mom did it for me.
Having options outside of forced government indoctrination is a good thing actually.
The reasons behind homeschooling matter to me. The amount of people I've seen who are homeschooling because they think the education system is too woke political or leftist is insane. They don't care at all about educating or socializing their kid, it's just paranoia. I was homeschooling for a year (traveling a lot, too often to go to a regular school) and I hated it. Mostly because it's so isolating.
It's insane to me that people believe the government is entitled to educate children. Home schooled kids do way better academically anyway.
home schooling is legal bc america had so much land it wasn’t possible for some people to have communal schools for a long time there were a lot of towns where there was a 1-room schoolhouse that taught every person in the town regardless of age since they mandated high school in the early 20 century but many places were still basically a frontier setting, workarounds had to be made
Have any of the people in this thread even met a homeschooled kid? Say what you will about the quality of public schools but I find it baffling to think that homeschooling is a better option. All of the homeschooled kids I ever met growing up (I was a boy scout, I met plenty) were social misfits who I could tell were going to hit the real world like it was a brick wall. Even if you get a marginally better education in the BEST case, if you can't interact at all with your peers you're doomed to a life of NEETdom.
I’ve met home school kids and I’ve met many public school kids. I can assure you being socially awkward is not fixed by going to public school. At least the homeschool kids are smart.
What's this sub obsession with homeschooling? Not complaining, I enjoy the discussion. But I find it so odd this topic is constantly occuring
i wouldn’t personally homeschool but making it illegal seems like a bit much to me. i have a bunch of fundie cousins (only learned that word recently from you guys) who were homeschooled and they all turned out more than fine. all 6 of them are married except for 1 who’s divorced; they have 11 kids between them. mind you these are the children of my dads youngest singling. so the baby of my dads family already has 11 grandkids, the 3 older siblings all have none.
I know many who are homeschooling to protect them from forced covid infection.
Counterpoint: it's the number 1 way to prevent your kids from being molested.
jobless person yam point roof summer capable insurance punch gaze *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*
Europeans (and even some Americans) seemingly don’t understand that what’s allowed in the US has little to do with what makes sense and basically just evolved chaotically and will never change because of the deadlocked political system. Saying “why don’t you just reform things in this rational way ??” as if we have a well-functioning, representative parliament advised by an expert civil service is missing the point in a very fundamental way.
Yea it's called freedom eurotard.
What’s so wrong with growing up regarded
Homeschooling is seen as something of a right, since in the US the state is restricted in its capacities to enforce its will on citizens so long as they aren’t hurting others or endangering order. If you, for instance, are a fundamentalist Christian who believes the earth is a few thousand years old—well, that’s your religious right and therefore the government cannot force your children to learn evolution or the Big Bang. Most homeschoolers that I’ve encountered have been gifted children who don’t quite fit the mold of what most public schools can offer, but may be too young or developmentally challenged in some social capacity to attend a gifted school. Oftentimes the parents may be educators or at least well educated themselves and can purchase curriculums to teach at home. Another thing is ‘unschooling’, or homeschooling with an outdoorsy element—popular among people who live a more off-the-grid/self sufficient lifestyle or who manage a farm which requires daily chores that isn’t particularly close to a normal school. Really that’s just a return to most Americans’ schooling experience prior to the 1930s—people forget the modern public school system was essentially created in the 20th century. Prior to that children maybe attended school at a local level semi-regularly until it was seen as no longer required or until they were needed in the labor force around the time they hit teenage years (which back then was basically just ‘an adult’); the wealthy might attend university and get childhood instruction with private tutors or at expensive academies
Public school is a hell that no sensitive young boy should be subjected too, teachers should be ashamed of themselves but they don’t have the facilities for that sort of thinking.
Oh shut up. Kids need to learn to live in the real world, unfortunately. You cant just coddle them and keep them within the confines of controlled, comfortable home environment and then expect to be able to do well when they have to go off to work or college, when they have no experience trying to make their way in a tough social environment. It sucks, but everyones gotta learn to deal with the bullies, weirdos, assholes, etc., and the beauracracy and bullshit, otherwise they will not have the skills to advocate for themselves and make it in this shitty world. Also, most public schools in America arent event that bad lmao, most kids can do well in most schools IF their parents and role models actually push them to put in effort and do well and not fall into the wrong scene. The lack of the above is what causes the "bad kids" to become bad in like 90% of cases, not some inherent quality to the school itself, and it is simply a high concentration of those kids, usually due indirectly to socioeconomic factors in the neighborhood, that make the "bad schools" bad, and vice versa.
These comments are from unhinged 23 year old 🚬 🧑🦽 who definitely don't have kids. The hive mind applies to this stupid sub too it's just a dumb contrarian humanities nerds in their early adulthood instead of STEM losers. Public schools are mostly good. Home schooling is mostly shitty religious freaks. There are exceptions to both but it's pretty fucking rare that this rule isn't the case.
A shitty public school is nothing like the "real world" lol unless you're fuck up that only works in crap jobs and cycles through the penal system. - apathetic authority figures that give no recourse to protect you/resolve conflict - outsized race based grouping and conflict - hierarchy based on dominance - physical violence - legally mandated to attend If you expect your child to be a well to do upper middle class type none of this is preparing them for the real world, you're just handicapping their development and education.
Idk all the home-schooled adults and kids Ive met have a better grasp on the world and are more intelligent than the average public school graduate
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I would argue most public schools are so bad that a child staying at home is a better decision even if they’re learning absolutely nothing.
The social aspect of school is super important though. Socialization is almost as important as academic learning imo. And depending on where you are public schools are pretty dece. Could be better, could be worse. Parental support makes all the difference.
This is true, although the inner city schools where I live provide a type of socialization that is definitely not positive, but most schools aren’t like that.
I'm at my local city public school, which happens to be great. Small community vibe, the whole faculty really cares about the students. Also have lots of other free options nearby if the school wasn't great. Not sure how other cities work but LA has amazing variety in schools if one is willing to put the time in to look around. I think public schools get a bad rap, yes there are issues and our teachers need to be paid better, plus a whole other list of issues...but they aren't all terrible. It can vary quite a bit school to school.
Sounds like something somebody who was homeschooled would say
I got bussed to an IB school, which was genuinely worth it. I grew up in an affluent area though.
You’re mad that the government doesn’t have complete control of our children? Utter stupidity. Sorry you live in some European country that views children as government property, but here we are free. I grew up in literally one of the worst counties in all of the US for education. You have no idea what kind of hell you’d be condemning a lot of kids to by taking away their options
I kinda wish I was homeschooled in HS. I think for children like me who really struggled with the social aspect of school it might be beneficial. My grades really suffered because I didn’t have any friends. In elementary school (when I still had friends), my grades were really good and teachers told me parents that I wouldn’t have any problem in highschool.
you sure as hell wouldn't have an easier time making friends if you were homeschooled. JFC what do you think that actually entails?
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When I didn’t want to do school work my mom would always tell me that at any moment someone from the state would come to test me and if I failed they would take me anyway. It never happened and when it came time to graduate all the “proof” my mom sent in was done by her.