Brainwashing versus Education (Children)

Great Debates
41

Your argument is wildly inaccurate and deliberately ignores what you’ve been arguing. I pointed out, in response to your overly broad claims about public schools as a group, and have now repeated just above this post, that there can be a non-zero number of schools and/or teachers who do something of the sort, but that your comments about public schools as a group were incorrect.

This is fictional. Most textbooks will cover Watergate, or Teapot Dome, or the XYZ affiar, or Abcsam, or what have you. Again, you are asking that everything you’d want to be taught is taught or else it’s “brainswashing”. Sorry, not getting your agenda as the focus of an entire year (or more) of history class does not constitute sinister behavior on the part of any curriculum.

You can’t figure out how an in depth study of any minor subject in American history can take years and there is plenty of good and misbehavior on America’s part in a great many eras, and that there will always be some of it that goes untaught leaving someone to cry “manipulation?”
It refutes your silly claim that not teaching your specific pet issues (which of course could never be taught in enough detail for you to not claim that they’re manipulating something) is “manipulation”.

And yet again, as you are evidently quite ignorant of how textbooks are produced, selected and purchased, you still think that “the government” is behind these things.

You are simply and totally wrong. I’m not sure why you’ve decided to make stuff up that sounds nice, but no, that is not at all how the United States textbook market works. The textbook publication firms’ choices are driven by the schoolboard choices in Texas and California as they make up the largest chunk of the American populace. Pretty much no textbook company can justify the financial investment without capitalizing on those markets. Nor does local government decide what the school board selects as policy, this too is fictional.

Making such agenda driven mistakes does not help an argument.

Yes, and “we” includes all of us who know that parents who believe that evolution is wrong will not teach their children that it is correct.
This obviously excludes you, as you claim this fact is “made up.”

No, no I’m not going to teach you about evolution and why creationism and its cover, “Intelligent Design”, by necessity contain various lies, mistakes, distortions, evasions and fabrications. If you really want to be educated about basic biology, please open another thread on the subject.

Yes, please continue to show how very reasonable your rhetoric is.

No, actually it’s not.
It’s the worst kind of sloppy, agenda driven bullshit. If someone spends seven years at home and then all of high school in public schools, then there is no valid methodology that can be used to separate out the influence of those years in HS versus the others. And despite your lack of understanding, proper methodology in the social sciences does not in fact rely on the propter hoc fallacy, either.

That’s why it’s a fallacy.

Yet again, you are ignorant of what constitutes a proper study.
Self-selection disqualifies a study as it is no longer random. Which means it’s no longer statistically valid for the population at large. Which means as you committed the fallacy of biased sample, your work is methodologically rubbish if you attempt to apply it beyond your test subjects themselves.

These are very basic facts of experimental design which delineate case studies from valid statistical studies.

Pointing out that you’re wrong on the facts and your studies are crap has been more than enough. I’m hardly going to write an essay on pedagogy and wisest practices, showing that you’re wrong is quite sufficient for the present.

Your argument is very… strange. First of all, “smaller student:teacher ratios” is one benefit. It is not plural. Nor have I denied it, as better student:teacher ratios are pretty obviously better in any educational context. Nor is that necessarily a benefit in homeschooling, as any people who are unqualified to teach do not suddenly add value by being the only source of instruction. Nor is a 1:1 ratio required necessary to see benefits, smaller class sizes can yield substantial rewards without the requirements to have one teacher for every student.

And yet again, the cite you pointed to actually dealt with a self-selected non-random sample that evinced an ability to engage in test prep better than larger classes. Hardly a revelation.

Again, your inference proves absurd and your factual claim is actually fiction.

~shrugs~

42

I’m afraid that Finn Again is right about textbooks. Publishers no longer waste time in publishing anything that will not appeal to either Texas or California standards. They are too large a part of the market.

Exactly when is it that teachers are trained in brainwashing techniques? Is it in the curriculum at all schools that train teachers or does this happen at faculty meetings or just when? Are the teachers who were trained in Bible colleges trained in how to brainwash too?

Do all teachers agree politically before the brainwashing starts? Are the teachers brainwashed? All of them or only the teachers who went to public schools?

How long has it been since you have observed a high school history class for an hour?

43

And of course it’s worth adding that while Texas is solidly ‘red’, California is pretty solidly ‘blue’. So there’s no real incentive for textbook publishers to cleave to a left wing or right wing point of view, in any case, as they’d alienate a huge chunk of their potential market. And that as a result, many textbooks aim for as ‘middle of the road’ a position as they can get while being somewhat informative and not substantially challenging many people’s political positions. Of course, that’s why we have teachers in classrooms and we don’t simply have recordings of someone reading from a textbook with Scantron bubble forms in the place of essays on historical topics. Teaching solely from the textbook is a poor pedagogical strategy for any educator, on any subject.

Sure, there are legitimate, objective complaints that can be made about many textbooks in use. There are also personal, subjective biases that might be at work when people think that Subject A needs more space and Subject B really isn’t important and we need Viewpoint C applied to Topic D in order to balance out the traditional narrative, or what have you.

But textbooks as sinister agents of government propaganda and brainwashing?
Blah.

Obviously when they accept that they’re not allowed to violate the First Amendment and preach religion in a public school context, thereby making their students dumb and not displaying the wisdom of religious indoctrination. All that ‘critical thinking’ and ‘learn to develop your own authorial voice so that you can describe, support and defend your personal convictions’ stuff is bullshit.

Myself, I was brainwashed in Professor Snidely Whiplash’s Cryptomarxist Governmental Domination and Religion-Smashing For the First Year Teacher, ED405. I will admit, I much preferred that to Professor Dick Dastardly’s How to Crush Your Students’ Individuality and Personal Convictions, ED473.

No no, you miss the Truth that’s being expounded (emphasis on pounded) by ITR.
Religious education is good, secular education makes people stupid, government-worshiping drones.

Also, we’re making up what the US Constitution and jurisprudence says. ITR knows that the real facts; states can enforce State Religions with penalties up to and including death. Only, of course, after someone is found guilty by a jury of their peers for the crime of apostasy and/or heresy.

Yes. Faculty meetings are notoriously smoothly run, quickly concluded and conducted in the most efficient manner possible. We get together mostly to plot. Also to scheme. There is free coffee.

44

I have to point out that they only tested 5000 out of however many tens? hundreds? of thousands of home schooled children. It seems pretty easy for those children to have been pretty much self selected. The parents who were really involved in the schooling and diligent about the work would have submitted their child for testing. Unfortunately for the public schools numbers, all children are tested, not just those who have parents who are diligent and involved. The parent’s attitude toward education is the primary indicator of academic success no matter how a child is educated. The very few children who manage to overcome lack of parental interest in education are those who run into an adult mentor of some sort, usually a teacher.

When I was a teacher at an on-line high school, I had many students who had been homeschooled up until high school, at which point the parents felt overwhelmed by the curriculum. The kids who had had a well functioning home schooling program did much better than most of the rest of the population for the first year, because their household had a system of school time set in place, and because they had learned skills to be self starters. There was one young man who had been in theory home schooled, but had no skills what so ever. His mom did most of his work for him, but she managed to fail all his classes. Like in public school, there is a spectrum.

45

They were all self selected, and thus the findings cannot validly be extrapolated to the entire body of homeschooled children in the first place. Especially since, by giving HS’ing parents the ability to opt out, we can be assured that many parents who knew that their children would not do well simply refused to put them into the study. When schools in Texas engaged in the same behavior and for the same reasons, we had the “Texas Miracle”, later shown to be fully fraudulent.

Also depending on the lead-time that they got, parents may very well have been able to engage in weeks, or even months, of intensive one on one test prep with their children above and beyond what they were planning in any case. So a self-selected cohort with the ability to set aside curriculum and engage in 100% 1:1 test prep for a period of time did better than the average of every single public school student in the range of the study. It doesn’t exactly take someone trained in educational research and design to figure out what the results would be. Or to find the massive methodological flaws in the study itself.

The entire design is simply sloppy at best, deliberately distorted and agenda-driven at worst. And the fact that an agenda-driven site is trying to use it to make claims that the data does not support is not surprising. The study was utterly worthless as a predictive statistic.

46

Wow. When I was reading this thread I was just assuming that the self selection you mentioned was the self selection that keeps struggling children from poor families from being home schooled. But I boggle at the actual self selection. Some one must have been home schooled in statistics. :slight_smile:

BTW, D.A.R.E got kicked out of our district for not being effective. So much for brainwashing.

47

Are you in favor of all home schooled kids getting tested as to their coverage of the curriculum, like other kids are?
My wife took our kids in a trip around the country for a book, and home schooled them on the way (with the full blessings of our district.) They did fine, being smart kids, but they never got tested when they returned and went back to class. If these tests were given to everyone every year, then we’d have some good data.

Results in school are heavily associated with socioeconomic status - in our district, the percentage of kids in the free school lunch program is the best predictor of test scores for the elementary schools. I lived in a town in NJ heavily dominated by well educated workers at nearby research centers, and our test scores were very high with no home schooling. Any one who home schools is in a situation were one parent can afford to stay home, and I suspect that would account for most of any seemingly advantage. FinnAgain, know of any studies?

48

Sure. I’m going to run to catch a matinee of 9 (looks pretty cool), so I’m going to have to post a bit and run. I can dig up more substantial cites later, as the issue is very complicated. But in general SES status has shown itself to be a significant influence in many students’ educational performance. And parents able to take the time off to teach their children, provide them with reading/educational materials, give them computers and internet access, etc… are invariably going to be from higher SES levels than those who cannot do those things.

Anyways, we can look at, for instance, Interpreting 12th-Graders’ NAEP-Scaled Mathematics Performance Using High School Predictors and Postsecondary Outcomes from the National Education Longitudinal Study of 1988 (NELS:88). Statistical Analysis Report. NCES 2007-328

Or Measuring the Socio-Economic Background of Students and Its Effect on Achievement on PISA 2000 and PISA 2003

It’s worth looking into the methodology there, as the analysis of SES levels isn’t a totally simple task. However, with that being said:

Or An Uneven Start: Indicators of Inequality in School Readiness. Policy Information Report.

49

Oh and, yeah…

… it’s really shocking that this sort of thing is being passed of as legitimate analysis by those with an agenda of promoting homeschooling. Virtually all of us in the educational community (and most people outside of it, for that matter) recognized the massive fraud perpetrated by the “Texas Miracle”. To use some of the same exact tactics in order to argue for the “Homeschooling Miracle” is just as unpalatable and for the exact same reasons.

50

I’d just like to note that the assumption that homeschooling families are universally well-off is not an accurate one. An awful lot of homeschooling families are utterly average, and simply make a lot of financial sacrifices in order to survive on one income. Or they have a family business, or (rarely) both parents work half-time–there are single parents who homeschool and all sorts of arrangements. People who homeschool tend to be very dedicated to the lifestyle, and will sacrifice a lot in order to have it.

(For example, we have been very nearly without income since January. We joined an ISP charter school that pays for materials, but we didn’t give up homeschooling. We’ve done everything but give that up. Or go on gov’t assistance, we haven’t done that either.)

Obviously homeschooling is not an option for every family in the country, for various reasons–but income is not nearly the barrier many people assume it to be.

51

Nobody said that.
The argument is that people who are financially able to take the time and invest the resources will generally be from a higher SES level than those who have to work two or three jobs per parent simply to put food on the table and pay rent. Single parent households will be much less likely to be able to homeschool their children, and so on.

It’s not ironclad and there will always be exceptions. But it’s not much of a stretch to reason that some families who might potentially be interested in homeschooling but who cannot afford to take the time off will simply not choose to take the economic consequences.

Even then, the nature of educational research is such that we can’t point to a ‘silver bullet’ to neatly explain everything away, despite, say, ITR’s overly-simplistic gloss. We know that SES levels tend to correlate with and can fairly reliably predict certain results. No, they don’t always. A non-zero number of low SES level students go on to do truly amazing things. But in general, SES levels tend to be a strong predictive factor even while they do not inflexibly yield unalterable causal chains. Some lower SES families can certainly forgo anything other than cheerios and mac and cheese in order to pay for an internet connection, or make sure their children go to the local public library for hours every day after school or what have you and then stay up all night discussing critical thinking and proper research skills or some such. But the point is that in general, being able to choose to devote a significant chunk of a family’s resources (most important of which tend to be both time and energy) to a student’s education is something that those at the lowest SES levels generally cannot manage. And this is due to the simple facts of necessity and economy.

The other point, of course, is that any ostensibly valid study about homeschooling that relies on parents to self-select for participation is starting off on shaky ground for anything other than a qualitative case study rather than a quantitative longitudinal study. And any such study which then compares those results against mandatory reporting for the entire public school populace within a given geographical boundary is simply crap science that serves no purpose other than to distort the issues.

For the first point, being ‘utterly average’ means that one is closer to the middle of the bell curve, and thus not to the far left edge of it. Further, we really don’t have much solid data on what parents who homeschool. We can of course make certain tentative assumptions, like that they’ll tend to be more committed to it than those who aren’t homeschooling (naturally). But the average percent of a family’s income that gets spent on homeschooling? I’ve never seen a good statistical analysis of that question.

But by the same token, one of the reasons why one of the studies that ITR wanted to use set the lower bound at “seven or more years” is that there is a significant jump in the requirements of curriculum and instruction between middle and high school and a seven year stretch just so happens to allow homeschooling in the lower grades and then public school education with content-area specialists for the upper grades. This is due, in some part, to the numerous hard-science courses which require a fair bit of technical knowledge as well as the fact that it isn’t really until late 7th/early 8th grade that children are cognitively/neurologically able to transition from the general 6th graders’ reliance on concrete concepts to a facility with abstractions and logical systems. There are very real pedagogical concerns that differ when you are teaching sixth graders, seventh graders, eight graders and ninth graders and not everybody is able to develop a robust, challenging and intellectually rewarding full-spectrum high school curriculum.

52

I think that is what I was trying to say.

dangermom, the fact that you have made the schooling a priority is likely to make your children successful. I do believe they would be equally successful in public schools because you do believe education is a priority and are willing to demonstrate it to your kids. I wish there was a way to weed out the parents I see who tell the State they are homeschooling their children so they don’t get the truancy tickets. Most of the time they don’t even have a basic idea where the kid is, much less what they do during the day. While those people don’t join homeschooler’s associations, I have run into several of them in my inner city school district. Those kids won’t do any better in public schools though, either.

53

Yep, I just wanted to put a finer point on it and clarify that we were talking about an entirely self selected group that invalidated any statistical generalizations from it rather than a very large sample size that may have included a certain non-zero percentage of self-selection.

Yep. Just like SES level is a very reliable predictor, so is parental involvement in a child’s education. And that’s part of why the facts have to be expressed in percentages and possibilities of prediction, because there are a great many variables at work and low SES level students with parents who are highly involved can fall outside the middle of a bell curve for low SES level performance.

54

This is the point I was responding to. The amount of income that most people (esp. those used to living on two incomes) would consider adequate for one parent staying home, and the amount that homeschoolers frequently consider adequate tend to be very different numbers. It is truly stunning how little some people manage to live on (including me, the last few months; I have no idea how we are still here). There are single-parent homeschoolers, though not zillions obviously. By “utterly average” I meant income-wise. As I said, not everyone can homeschool–often including the very poor–but you’d be surprised.

[quote=FinnAgain]
But the average percent of a family’s income that gets spent on homeschooling? I’ve never seen a good statistical analysis of that question.

[quote]
That number would be all over the place. You can spend a lot on homeschooling, you can do it for practically nothing, and if you sign on with a public ISP, you can almost come out ahead, because they’ll pay for a lot of lessons that everyone else has to pay for themselves. I used to spend a few hundred dollars a year. In my current program, I’m allowed $900/kid/semester, and I have no idea how I’ll spend it. And the public school district is still making a profit off of me.

I was not addressing the testing/self-selection thing at all and have nothing to say on the subject.

55

But that’s pretty much a tautology. Anybody able to afford to have one parent not working to capacity is more well off than anybody who cannot, and we know that they can afford it because if they couldn’t ,they wouldn’t be able to do it.

Now, sure, there are differences in what various families will consider affordable (“we need to at least go skiing six times this year” vs. “we need to eat meat at least twice a week.”), but I think that the general point is still a good one; many parents who are simply too poor cannot take time off. As those parents are included in the public school system as well and drag down its average due to SES effects, it wouldn’t be beyond the pale to expect some minor influence at least on whatever trends we’d see within the homeschooling community and the national public school system at large.

56

All I’m trying to say is that people tend to assume that homeschoolers are all affluent, and that is not the case. That’s it, that’s my whole point. :slight_smile: