Public vs. private vs. homeschooling

Great Debates
101

You don’t trust the NEA, but you then toss out cites that are all from religiously-oriented homeschooling organizations and we’re supposed to take them at face value, even though much of their resources come from what is arguably the most bigotted institute of higher learning in this country? The same people who actually started a college for homeschooled kids who either couldn’t get into an actual college, or whose parents wanted to continue their shielding of their poor babies from the outside world? Looking at all of the connections between the organizations, I have two words for your cites. Bob Fucking Jones. Okay, that’s three words, but I went to public schools.

As for the OP, I don’t have a problem with homeschooling nor private schooling, as long as the levels of proficiency are in accordance with public schools, and as long as they don’t take funding from the public school system. With that said, homeschooled kids aren’t getting into the good colleges at a similar rate to their non-schooled peers.

This article discusses the subject and it certainly seems to be pretty fair to the home-schooled, while acknowledging that they’re not quite cutting it as a whole when it comes to getting into Harvard.

102

For some things, yes. To give an unbiased take on a movement that puts its members out of jobs, no.

Bob Jones is a screaming idiot. The data was analyzed by an ASU prof and published in a peer -reviewed journal.

The ACT data comes from the people that created the ACT test.

Yes, that difference of two or three percentage points at one school is sooo meaningful.

It’s just as likely they are admitted at a marginally lower rate because they were homeschooled; either becuase of misconceptions about that, or simply because their applications were shorter on activities such as band/sports/clubs and the like. I see nothing in there to indicate they are academically unqualified.

103

It never did. What does constitute rebuttal, though, I will demonstrate. Since you seem to have missed it.

Now, what I will do is rebut each point that you address:
“Actually, I think schools do a piss-poor job of teaching diversity.”
By exposing kids to people, things and ideas that they might not ordinarily encounter, schools actually do a better than fair to middlin’ job of teaching diversity. Unless you are using a definition of “diversity” that has no bearing on reality.
“They stick a kid in a room full of people the exact same age as he is. . .”
At elementary levels, sure. But by the time that kids reach middle and high school, they are regularly exposed to students who are older and younger than they are. And I’m old enough to remember being in an elementary school wherein I was in a class with students a grade level above my own as well as a grade level below. 'Twas a clusterfuck.
“. . .who all come from the same neighborhood. . .”
Utter twaddle. The age of honest-to-Christ neighborhood schools passed before I was a wee lad. While kids interact with and work with many of the same kids in elementary grades, by the time they reach middle and high school, they are encountering and contending with kids from many other places.
“. . .who are all reading the same books (“Special” children are removed).”
Well, yeah, they are reading the same books. What would you have them be reading? As to “Special” children, such as my daughter, you are off the mark. While there certainly are stand-alone classrooms (my child is in one), special ed students attend the same schools and are one of the groups that many, I daresay most, of the students will never encounter in a homeschool situation. Certainly not in a private school.
“Save for the occasional guest speaker, all of the adults they come in contact with are professional educators. . .”
As opposed to the engineers and suchlike that you think should be teaching? In what version of reality would a physicist, for instance, be willing and able to drop his occupational duties to teach a course to a group of homeschooled students? Hell, it’s all but an impossibility for public schools. Hence the guest speakers.
'. . .who (by mandate) themselves have very similar educational backgrounds. . ."
Yes. And? What concrete ideas would you institute wherein people of varied educational backgrounds would teach a class? Or classes? This appears for all the world to be something thrown in to pad what you consider an argument.
“. . .accept a whole host of mandated pedagogical preactices and philosophies. . .”
This certainly sucks, but it has much to do with benchmarks set by the state. And as I’ve already stated to Why Not public schools (well, those that are worth their salt) try to find practices and philosophies that work best for the largest number of students and attempt to look at other teaching methods that might work better for other students. Are you actually advocating elimination of educational standards altogether?
“. . .and teach a heavily-mandated curriculum.”
See above.

If you just want to bitch, well, that’s why the Pit exists. If you have ideas, this is the place to lay them out. Otherwise you’re just pissing in the wind. And based on what you’ve posted thus far, you’re gonna need to replenish your fluid levels soon.

What environment is that? And what about it do you not like?

What lessons do you dislike? Whether implicit, explicit or what have you?

Well, at least this lays out your take on things. Good on ya.

Except that the things you stated are either woefully out of date, simply mistaken or basic byproducts of providing an education to a wide variety of students from widely divergent backgrounds. And again, without concrete ideas of how things should be done instead, you’re providing nothing of import to the debate. As a for instance: Why Not had specific instances why she was unhappy with the public schools where she is, and after discussing it with her, I think that she and I came to an understanding of each other’s position. And upon seeing her specific, concrete reasons for feeling the way that she did, I even agreed with her to a degree. You just came in and started flailing about and saying that the system was bad and that the world would be better with less system. And that literacy rates were higher before mandatory schooling existed (something that you subsequently back off from), and your willingness to argue that independent thought and intellectual curiosity have been curtailed (which you fail to do). And quite frankly, I think that the US could do with more independent thought and intellectual curiosity, so that seems to be a bit of a non-starter.

Yeah, whatever. For the record, nobody wears martyrdom well.

And I would dare to venture that that your suspicions are safe.

Well, and because it isn’t. Whereas your contention that schools do a lousy job of teaching diversity, that “special” students are removed, and that there is something wrong with teachers who have gone to school to learn how to be teachers and spend time in a building with other teachers who have gone to school to learn to be teachers. I’m sorry, what was it you said about circular arguments? When issued out of context, such as you have done here, is.

Not at all. Whatever makes you think I do?

104

GL, I’m not interested in hijacking this thread into a symposium on school reform. I am not (in this thread at least) proposing a better school system; I am not proposing school reform; I am not offering suggestions for improvement. I am supporting the right of people to opt out, for nearly any reason they choose.

You keep pointing out that many of the things I criticize are inevitable results of large-scale institutionalized schooling; that’s exactly my point. I think there are fundamental flaws with the whole idea of mandatory public schools, and they are quite inherent in the system. I think we would be better off rethinking the entire issue of education from the ground up; however, since that is highly unlikely to happen, I support the right of people to educate their children however they see fit, so long as they do not do it in such a way as to harm the rest of society (ie, I do not support letting Klan parents teach their kids how to lynch).*

Except in extreme cases (such as the one above), I don’t see how anyone’s reasons for opting out make a difference. It seems to me very much akin to setting limits on free speech based on content; either speech is free for everyone, or it’s free for nobody. We let the Nazis and any number of other groups speak their minds freely, because as much as we may disdain their ideas, the essence of a free society is that even they have the right to speak. For exactly the same reason, while I think Young Earth Creationists are ridiculous fools, I fully support their right to educate their children in line with their beliefs.

I’ve already given a link listing and explaining some of what I see as the problems with schools (here it is again in a slightly expanded version). Since you seem to think I’m making things up off the top of my head, I’ll expand a bit on what I think is one of the worst of the unconscious lessons schools teach.
Ask a hundred public high school graduates why they go to school, and 90% of them will tell you because someone makes them. That alone should be telling; but should you push them further and ask them why society makes them go – what the purpose of going to school is – I can pretty much guarantee what the two most popular answers will be. I’m confident because I’ve asked that question, either in class or in a writing assignment, to nearly 1000 students who were either HS seniors or college freshman, and these two answers accounted for about 90% of the replies.

The second most common answer is “I don’t know.” The question has never really occurred to them, and they’ve never been asked it before, certainly not by a teacher. To me this is a tragedy. It is my opinion, based on my beliefs and values, that people should be philosophical, reflective and purposeful in all that they do. The idea that a kid would spend 15000 hours over 12 years doing something he doesn’t like, and have no clear reason for it, is insanity. In my opinion, there is a very clear lesson being unintentionally taught here – life is about doing what people who are older/smarter/more educated think you should, and reflecting on *why *you do it is not necessary.

The most common answer is even worse. Boiled down, it’s “money.” They may say something like “so you have a good career,” but if you ask them what a career is good for, or why someone should want one, they will almost never speak in terms of enjoying one’s work or improving society or achieving anything. Instead, they pretty much accept the idea that the sole aim of education is economic gain; and very often implicit in that is the idea that money is the most important thing in life. To me, this is a tragedy.

The problem is that a Public School is very much constrained in its ability to suggest any goal other than. There are all sorts of possible answers to the question of what the purpose of an education is (other than economics) – to know about God’s creation, to become a good citizen, to understand humanity’s place in the natural order – but all of them imply some sort of value system for which there is no societal consensus, and I do not think a taxpayer-funded public school should be endorsing any of them. (It’s worth pointing out that the first mandatory public schools date from a period when there was such a consensus, and arose out of a desire to forcibly assimilate Catholic children into Protestant society.)

Pick any debate that swirls around the system: “Back to basics” or lots of electives? Should schools use standardized tests, and if so which ones? How much time or money should be spent on art, on music, on extracurricular activities? How much freedom should teachers have? All of those issues, and all the rest, can’t be meaningfully answered unless one has a clear idea of what exactly an educated human being is supposed to look like; and we, as a society, are nowhere near in agreement about that (e.g. our disagreement about how much and what kind of diversity is important.) The upshot of it all is that public schools exist as institutions without any clearly defined sense of purpose, and in my experience, it shows in the students they produce.

Issues like this cannot be “fixed” in the system; they are inherent in it. Educating large numbers of students in one place requires standardized schedules, set curriculums, calendars, grading systems, evaluations and on and on. All of these things are essential, necessary parts of running a good school system; and every single day I do things that I think are educationally unsound because of them.

These are the kinds of problems I have with compulsory public schooling. It’s not idle “pissing and moaning” but the result of reading, thought and experience. You may well consider it all airy theorizing and irrelevant to the task of actually educating people; I couldn’t disagree more. On the other hand if you consider it irrelevant to this thread, I agree completely. I’m giving it only because you seem to think that someone has to have a “good reason” for homeschooling.

*Why anyone should want to opt out of the system is pretty much beside the point. * Even if you think that my reasons are bad or foolish, the only thing that should matter is that in a free society people have (to steal a line) the right to be wrong.

  • If you want to know is what a fully-realized libertarian nationwide educational environment would look like, I don’t know for sure. Probably more or less like what we had for the first hundred-plus years of US history; a mish-mash of homeschool, private religious schools, private nonreligious schools, and voluntary public schools, with each town and each family doing what worked for them. I suppose I could dream up some specific proposals that will never be implemented, and we could debate the theory behind them; but I don’t see any of that as terribly germane to the thread as the OP started it, and it’s certainly not why I came in here.
105

I keep reading about how our local public schools are going to be bankrupt soon, but that is not the reason I want to home school my daughter for at least the first few years. Terrible things happened to me in first through third grades. I tried to tell adults, but was either disbelieved or told that I had to figure it out for myself. For three years the situation deteriorated to nearly as bad as it can get. Outside of that torture, the multiple times I was punished or belittled for learning the lesson too fast or too thoroughly also soured me on schools. I don’t want my children to face such idiocy until they communicate much better than I could when I was in first through third grade, and have gained confidence in their own abilities. I also want to know her well enough to be confident I will be able to tell if things are not ok.

I do plan to send her out for lessons and activities with groups, depending on her interests. The difference I see between this and a school, is the limited scope of the activity and limited time commitment. It seems far easier to pull her out of that sort of thing than it would be to pull her out of a school. I think it is easier to be sure that the activity is properly supervised by adults not of the “let the children sort it out for themselves, even if they want to re-enact Lord of the Flies” school of thought that so many of my grade school teachers belonged to.

My daughter is three and a half and doing well. This evening, she was discussing her new globe with her dad, and he was explaining what countries are and how Antarctica is different than other places. She knows all her states, and many countries and other bits of geography, like continents and major bodies of water. She can also count and say her alphabet and all the other things expected of a three year old, including playing well with other children when the opportunity presents itself. We are neither pushing her, nor setting a formal curriculum yet. The formal curriculum will start as she gets closer to school age. I am not a believer in unschooling for my children.

She is learning things so fast now, I don’t want to send her to a preschool where the flood of new things she is learning will be curtailed to the trickle like what I got in kindergarten. She is learning things now that I did not learn until much later, and by that time they were boring and often pointless to me. When she shows interest in something, we teach her about it. If her attention wanders, we let her go play or change subjects and come back to the dropped lesson later. She also often chooses to study on her own. For some of us, homeschooling is not about restricting access to information, it is about opening it up.

106

Dude, seriously . . . It’s nice to have this ideal of going out and changing the world or finding a fulfilling career but nine out of ten people* are *going to end up working 9 to 5 just to pay the mortgage. There simply isn’t a lot of jobs out there which are enjoyable, nor is there a steady paycheck in changing the world.

A smart, creative person might find a way to have a fulfilling, rewarding career but most people aren’t all that smart or creative and will end up stapling papers in an office. That’s just the way the world is.

In a sense, I object to what you’re saying because it leads to discontent but offers no solutions. Yeah, materialism sucks, but when your kid needs braces and the furnace is on its last legs, you go to work because you* have *to, not because it makes you happy. Maybe it’s not such a bad thing that school prepares kids for doing something that you don’t particularly enjoy because it’s your responsibility.

107

Just wondering: is this the approach you want your own kids to take? Do you want your kids to face the fact that the odds are they aren’t all that talented and they’ll probably be stuck in some crappy job they hate, or is it just other people’s kids you want thinking that way?
More fundamentally, for me at least, I reject the idea that education is or should be all about one’s career. The fact that many people may end up in unchallenging, unrewarding jobs is all the more reason to encourage them to become thoughtful and intellectually independant, so that they can create joy and meaning in their own lives. There’s no reason that a person can’t work a quite mundane job and still enjoy the life of the mind; and in point of fact, one of the most frequent observations of European visitors to 1800s America was the fact that they were amazed to see so many ordinary tradesmen and farmers reading and discussing “highbrow” things: science, literature, political theory, etc. But that kind of curiosity is far less common if children are conditioned to see learning as something you are forced to do, that is done at school under supervision, and that you are “finished” with at 18 or 25 or whatever.
Yes, you have obligations you have to live up to; but the reason you live up to them is because they enable you to live your life. If there is nothing higher or better in life than paying the rent … well, shit, pass me the revolver.

108

Isn’t that pretty much the meaning of life? Pretty much every religion and most non-religious belief systems in the world acknowledge that people often feel discontented, and suggest that we need to find a solution.

If someone wants to pass on the effort, they have the right; but I want no part of encouraging it.

109

I agree with this so strongly! I recently argued in a thread about teaching evolution vs. creationism that it probably doesn’t matter that much anyway how much of an understanding HS students have of evoultion, because the chances of the vast majority of students remembering ANYTHING about it other than overly simplistic statements like “we evolved from monkeys” is pretty damn slim. And I believe the reason is exactly what you state…we do not put any effort into making children CARE about what they are learning, or being interested in it beyond what they have to know for a test, and can forget 10 minutes later.

I have a lot of really bright friends, but we never talk about the “highbrow” subjects you mention. Some of it is too touchy these days, like political theory, but a lot of it is just because people don’t have an interest. I believe that’s why folks come on a message board like this one…because it’s hard to find people in real life who want to discuss these issues. I’ve had friends say to me “you are so smart!” But I’m not any smarter than they are…I’m INTERESTED. Anyone can read a book…you have to WANT to. And the thing is, I didn’t get this curiousity from school (and I went to pretty good schools)…I got it from my parents. I don’t think schools are equipped to foster a love of learning, as much as they may want to.

110

Don’t have any kids. If I did, though, I’d want them to learn to accept life as it is: you don’t always love what you do. Life often means having to wear clothes you don’t like, sit quietly and be bored for hours on end, and having to do things the way the teacher/employer wants even if you know of a better way to do them.

Who said that school was the only means of education? I went to a crappy Christian school and learned little more than scripture. (I’m sure my principal would be pleased as punch to know that I can still recite large chunks of the New Testament by heart.) If I had only learned what was offered to me at school, I’d be an utter ignoramus. 90% of my knowledge comes from independant reading and exploring the world on my own.

School teaches you the fundamentals. Even a good college can’t make you “educated” unless you have that curious spark which makes you want to explore the world and learn just for the sake of it.

Let me share a story with you of the very first time I ever got in trouble at school. It was during my first weeks of kingergarten and my mother was called to come in and talk to me. She found me perched on a stool in the principal’s office, a mutinous expression on my face. The principal explained to her that I had refused to recite the alphabet and days of the week along with the other children. I already knew this stuff, I protested. I could read. I saw it as an utter waste of time when those fingerpaints were sitting over there unused.

My mother tried to explain to me that even though I knew these things already, I still had to submit to the structure of the class. It was a valuable lesson and I wish I’d taken it to heart, because I had the same trouble all throughout my school days. I was a bright kid and I resented having to trudge along with the others. MY innatention actually got me put into the LD classes, even though I didn’t belong there.

Later, I went to the Christian school which had a learn-at-your-own-pace system. My mind rebelled again: they wanted me to re-learn their science and *their *Disney-Jesus history.

At some point, it finally dawned on me that I just had to do it and get it over with. My brains and talents didn’t except me from having to do what everyone else had to do. It was an epiphany which kept me from resenting too much my series of McJobs that I held after I graduated.

Now I have a job that I love, but I wouldn’t be able to stay there if it weren’t for my husband. The pay is paltry, though the job is fulfilling. Being able to do what I love is a luxury that most people never have.

Work is what supports your life. It’s not your life itself. Plenty of people have shitty, miserable jobs and as soon as the closk strikes five, they hit the door and start living, doing what they love to do the most. It’s unrealistic to expect that every aspect of your life is going to be what you want to do when you want to do it.

That’s what I’m talking about. I see school as a sort of mental training which prepares kids to have to fulfill their obligations so that they can go out and have fun afterwards. Little Jimmy isn’t getting a paycheck, but his report card will show the results of his work. If the results are good, he can go out and play with his friends. If the results are poor, he has to put more time in before the fun begins. Just like in the real world.

111

Lissa, I’m seeing your argument as a version of the objection to homeschooling that says that homeschooled kids will never develop any self-discipline or the ability to sit down and slog through a job that simply has to be done. That homeschooled kids will never develop any ability to endure unpleasant situations.

I would disagree with this. There are many ways to develop self-discipline, and public school is not the only way (indeed, it often fails to reconcile kids to doing unpleasant work). Homeschooling families are generally very conscious of the need to develop discipline and work hard on it.

You say that if a kid has that spark, he will learn something on his own. But I’m sure you’ve noticed that all kids are born with a curious spark; love of learning is built into human beings. It’s just frequently crushed out of existence. You learned 90% of your knowledge on your own; then why did you have to endure thousands of hours of school? What was the point? Homeschooled kids are just going straight to the 90% part–do you really want all kids to emulate your awful experience? (I know you don’t.)

I’m not saying at all that everyone should homeschool and public schools are completely useless, but many families just want to do it differently. That doesn’t mean their kids will never reconcile themselves to the need to earn a living or the need to sit down and do a job.

A bit off the point–you say that everyone goes off and enjoys themselves after work. I’m not at all sure that’s true. Lots of people go off and look for something to entertain them after work, but quite frequently people do not develop a capacity for true self-education, thought, or even real enjoyment. I’m not blaming schools for that–I think it’s probably worse and more endemic than that–but schools often do not help any.

Anyway, I pretty much agree with furt. There are other ways to educate kids, and people should be free to choose them. I’m not sure why people feel that I need to justify myself to them by giving them my reasons for homeschooling so that they may be judged and found worthy or unworthy; the fact is that my reasons are not the relevant point. I’m usually happy to provide the reasons, though, simply in order to show that homeschoolers are different than most people realize.

(And finally, my husband wishes to chime in: are you saying that we need to spend billions of dollars in order to teach children that life is unpleasant? Why do we need to put them in an institution for 12 years in order to teach that?)

112

I didn’t say that, nor did I mean to imply it…

[quote]
You say that if a kid has that spark, he will learn something on his own. But I’m sure you’ve noticed that all kids are born with a curious spark; love of learning is built into human beings. It’s just frequently crushed out of existence.

The public school I attended before the Christian school was a poor one. The teachers were generally burned-out and plainly unhappy to be there. The Christian school made a concerted effort to crush intellectual curiosity.

It didn’t work on me, but I think that it has more to do with personality. Someone who is really interested in learning isn’t going to be crushed by opposition to it, especially if they have parents who encourage it. In other words, I don’t think the schools are necessarily to blame that many people lose interest in education. I think it has more to do with personality than anything. Abraham Lincoln used charcoal on the back of a shovel to learn to write and walked miles to borrow books even though the story has it that his father was hostile to education. On the other hand, I’ve known people whose parents strongly encouraged independant learning and put them in excellent schools yet they completely lacked any desire to learn more than required.

Could the schools do a better job in encouraging kids to love learning? Possibly. But I think it’s primarily up to the parents to encourage it and then up to the individual child whether they appreciate it or not.

I had to endure thousands of hours of school because it’s the law. Really, I probably could have done just as well, if not better, with no structured learning at all (including homeschooling.)

That said, I do think that my school days taught me some very valuable skills. It taught me patience and how to get along with people whose views are completely opposed to my own.

It taught me submission. Now, don’t think of that in the religious sense. Rather, it taught me that sometimes you have to smother your own impulses, preferences and even your own better judgement when people in authority (such as employers) demand it. It was a hard lesson for me because I have an arrogant streak and I’m automatically suspicious of rules which exist “just because.” Pride doesn’t feed your family. I’ve known quite a few people who stomped away from a job because they felt their employer was being unfair or making unreasonable requests* and suffered hardship as a result. Like it or not, sometimes you have to keep a job in order to be able to survive and sometimes keeping that job means swallowing your pride.

Again, I think that’s a personality issue more than anything. Many people have been raised in completely dysfuntional enviornments but have managed to become well-adjusted adults because they* wanted* to live a normal life. We are shaped by our socialization but we are not prisoners of it.

There’s a bit more to it than that. School has a valuable function of teaching kids to accept structure, but it also teaches them math, English, the sciences and history. Not well in a lot of cases, but it does give a basis.

  • But things that were still within the job description-- not illegal or really unreasonable requests.
113

furt: Hell, I’ve no objection to people choosing to homeschool, parochial school or private school. Nor have I ever.

Nor I. If, however, Klan parents wish to teach their children about autoerotic asphyxiation, I would consider it an honor to supply the rope.

My initial entrance to this thread came in response to your claim that public schools do a “piss poor job of teaching diversity”. And you never really did respond to my contention that they actually do a pretty damned good job of it. Maybe the school you teach at is a total shithole, I don’t know. But as I already said, I am a product of public schools. And while I pretty strenuously disliked it for the most part, the alternative wasn’t any better and in most ways was much worse. That said, I can still recall moments spent in the classrooms of teachers who made a difference in my life. Who imparted lessons that I still carry with me today. Lessons that I should have taken to heart much sooner than I did in many instances, but that’s a whole 'nother thread.

I also never claimed that you were making things up. I said that you were wrong, specifically about many of your claims as to what public schooling is and your claim that literacy rates were higher before the days of public schools, but I never accused you of making anything up. Again, martyrdom doesn’t suit you.

I see that Lissa already responded to many of your points, and in many ways, I would agree with her. In point of fact, many (I would hazard a guess and say most) people work in order to live. Damned few get to do it the other way around. Do I wish that everyone got to do what they really wanted and loved to do? You betcher ass. But that’s not reality.

And I find it terribly depressing that there exists someone who is a teacher that has no more faith in kids than you express in that sentence. Particularly kids at a higher educational level, when they’re supposed to be learning that knowledge and acquisition of same can be fun and exciting.

Then you haven’t paid attention to a single post I’ve made. Because if you had, then you would never have bothered posting:

Because I have never once argued to the contrary.

114

Well…One thing I hated hated hated about public school is that it was very “one size fits all”, and targeted towards Your Average Public School Student.
Since I was scattered all over the board in terms of acheivement, I really felt like they didn’t know how to really teach me …Like my reading and written expressive skills, have always been wicked good, but then again I am deaf and also have a math learning disabilty. My school wasn’t that experianced with how to teach kids with “classic” disablities (as opposed to learning disabilites and things like ADD) So I got lumped into the dumbasses who may not have a real legit LD, but who are warehoused in sped programs, b/c they are just apatheic dumbasses.
Then again homeschooling…I mean how are parents supposed to teach kids about stuff they don’t even KNOW about?
Yeah, some homeschoolers get into Harvard,and other wicked selective colleges. But, most of those kids probaly would have gone to Harvard or whatever, even if they’d gone to an inner city school!

115

Lissa, I see what you’re saying, but I disagree that going to school is the only way to learn that life is real and life is earnest. It really is possible to meet people different from yourself in other places (actually, the other homeschoolers we know are mostly far more different than the kids at the school…) and all those other things too.

The same way we learn anything we want to know–we learn about it too. Or there are other ways. Right now my kid is studying a language I have never learned myself. We are learning together, and it’s a lot of fun (and we have a DVD teacher who helps us with the pronunciation). Since I’ve taken 3 other languages, I’m easily able to transfer what I’ve learned about grammar over to this new one.

Or, we might sign her up for a class in something. We currently do this for music, karate, and swimming. Later on, as a teenager, she will most likely take classes at the local community college (if we’re still doing this by then). Most people do that for advanced math and science, at least.

Or, we might get someone else to be a mentor for her. Many people find other adults willing to teach another language, a special skill, or just any subject. If these are paid mentors, they’re called tutors.

Most homeschoolers these days belong to some sort of co-op group. Co-ops vary widely, of course, but most of them get together and teach something to each other; someone will do history days, or wildlife identification, or whatever.

Hope that helps you understand some of what homeschoolers do. :slight_smile:

116

The socialization is available elsewhere. For example, I have three students in my Taekwondo school that are homeschooled. Taekwondo and their friendships with other kids in the school is part of their socialization.

117

“Special Education” programs in public schools are supposed to provide programs for gifted students just as they do for those with learning disabilities. If I were a parent with a child such as lee’s child, I would certainly make a lot of noise at meetings of the Board of Education until the gifted are provided with an appropriate education. After all, it’s mandated.

Do you mean that most of the members of NEA are opposed to homeschooling or do you mean that the official stance of the NEA is mostly in opposition to homeschooling?

Cite?

Teaching is not a “trade” in the sense that it is used when combined with “union.”

The National Education Association is not a union, although it is not uncommon to find mistaken references to it as such. It is a professional organization of employees. The American Federation of Teachers is a union.

Finally, please cite for the National Education Association holding any educational stance based on protecting its members’ jobs.

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It still sounds like you’re jumping to the definition of “socialization” as “contact with other kids.” I didn’t explain at length (although I did explain), but what I mean are two things:

First, rubbing elbows with categories of people that you’ll likely never interact with on a personal level again. As has been pointed out earlier in this thread, many public high schools teach a really wide socioeconomic range. My high school had trailer trash from a nearby town, rural kids from farms, blue-collar kids from outlying neighborhoods, suburbanites, and pretty-damn-rich kids who lived in 8000 square foot houses and had three televisions in their bedrooms. My experience in college was indeed more culturally diverse (just because my whole state is pretty white), but in high school I interacted with (sometimes for better, sometimes for worse) a lot of people who never went to college, or would never go to a state university, or would never talk Tae-Kwon-Do, or would never be taken to a play group. This part of “socialization” means that you’re meeting people who you weren’t socially selected to meet.

Second, I’m talking about experiencing the pressures of “have-to.” Some homeschoolers here have claimed that kids can get that at home, too, but I simply can’t think it’s the same. Public school teaches you the “have to” of getting up ridiculously early on cold and dark mornings and standing in the rain, of following a schedule to the minute, of getting your crap together in the morning or facing the consequences, of buckling down to do something now, of long-range planning, and of abuse of power by the people you report to. None of them are pleasant lessons, but they’re representative of what Real Life is going to be like unless you can find a way out of it. It’s quite possible that I’m wrong about these being important lessons, but I do feel that they are. A lot of life has to be lived outside of one’s comfort zone–and one’s own home and one’s own parents aren’t and shouldn’t be outside of the comfort zone.

So, there are my extended definitions. As I said in my threadstarter, I think that it should absolutely be an OPTION for parents to homeschool, and I was for a very long time in favor of it myself, because I feel that the cookie-cutter public education I received was probably the best there was to get, but it also failed me in a couple of subject areas. The more I think about it, though, the more I think that one needs to experience a public school for the reasons above.

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I never said that it was.

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I think it is interesting that the assumptions made are made with such certainty. Yes, it is possible to give your child all the benefits of social and societal interactions while schooling at home. No, it is not likely that a majority of home schooling parents can, or even if so able will choose to do so. Yes, the opportunities for exposure to socially normalizing experiences are more broadly extant in a well rounded, diverse, and well administered publicly open schools. No, that does not describe the common condition of public schools in the United States. Yes, the regimentation, and the social pressure to conform to same in public school can teach children a level of a certain type of discipline. No, that is not an unassailably desirable thing for every student. Yes, the availability of highly specialized help for various handicaps among children is more likely to be available in a public school setting. No, that doesn’t mean that handicapped children all need to be mainstreamed, or separated.

Yes, some narrow minded parents will choose home schooling to avoid having their children learn of the opinions the parents despise. No, it won’t work. Yes, the children will suffer. Folks, the children are suffering everywhere, and mostly because of their parents. However, in public schools they are also suffering from gang violence, drug violence, legal mayhem, and all the stuff that we read about in the paper.

Home schooling is neither the cause of, nor a cure for the fact that our (The US) society in general finds the new SUV, and Dancing With the Stars, and Spreading the Benefits of Democracy by Military Action to be far more important that our children. When we do get around to considering the matter, we want to measure our kids against a standard test, and see if we are getting our money’s worth. The fact that it is our kids kids money we are spending is just further irony.

Tris