Not that all parents can stay home with their children to monitor their progress.
Save on building and all the expenses related to them. Kids can still participate in sports.
I would say some teachers would be out of jobs. They would save on money for busses as well
Just seems there could be a different way to teach the children other than going to a class room every day.
They could have centralized testing centers to be sure kids are not cheating on tests
Either group home schooling or a type of day care. Farm it out…they do it all the time. Let someone else foot the bill for business expenses.
Anyone think something like this would work? Or any other sort of scenario?
Our taxes would be better spent?
And what ever happened to the millions of lottery allotments that was suppose to go to the schools? Why we have any school tax in the first place or why is there such demand for us to foot the bill on extra’s? Such as donating classroom necessities like paper, crayons, pens etc. Teachers frequently have to pick up this bill.
Teaching elementary and high school kids is a specialized skill requiring years of training and experience. I don’t think we’d be better off as a country if we outsourced that entirely to amateurs.
I spent a year homeschooling my son in ninth grade. It takes a lot of specialized knowledge to do it well - I’m pretty bright, but when it came to how to grade an English paper - it was hard. I didn’t have other kids to compare his work to - well, THIS is obviously an A - and THIS is obviously and average paper for this age.
We did some things online - but I needed to learn the material to properly explain it to him. And screen attention is weird. Its both incredibly focused and not at the same time. Sometimes he needed to work a problem - pencil on paper, while I watched and made corrections.
And he often needed me to sit on him while he worked. He isn’t necessarily a self starter when it comes to academics.
At home, my 5-year-old has to be begged, cajoled, and threatened to do any school related work. But his teacher tells me in class he’s “a gem” who works really hard. I think I’m a fairly sharp person, too, but trying to get him to focus on school work…::shudder::
If virtual reality ever gets to the point where 99.9% of households have a VR setup, I could see a good argument for abolishing school buildings. The teachers would simply teach through VR, rather than at a central location.
The only other semi-realistic way I can think of, and one that would probably come a lot sooner than SF-quality VR, is if everybody, even people living in the country, has access to very high-speed internet, and a computer at home (very poor people still often do not own a computer). Under such conditions you might be able to do a video-streaming “virtual classroom” type of thing, where everybody has a webcam and can see everybody else.
Regarding the socialization aspect, it’s not just learning to socialize with other people even. Learning how to schedule your life and work within that schedule, go away without your parents and siblings, use a public bathroom by yourself, stand in line, keep your space neat, endure classes/programs/lectures/etc that you’re not particularly fond of, etc etc etc. All that on top of the grind of having to be around other random people all the time. School is so much more than what you learn in books!
So you stop having the kids go to a class room every day, but instead go to a “group home school” and then a “centralized testing center” for the exams. How exactly is this any different from the current system, where the classroom replaces the “group home school” and “centralized testing center”?
In second grade, The Nephew had the problem of being “too slow”, not in his comprehension, but in his work.
This was because his parents had taught him that any time he realized he’d made a mistake he had to erase the whole exercise and restart from scratch. Now, call me cranky and overprotective, but I just can’t see his father breaking down a whole building because someone fucked up a third-floor window, or his mother starting an adult’s vaccination calendar from the very first ones because the patient needed to get the tetanus vaccine…
His teacher taught him to redo things normally. So long as there are around idiots like my brother, his wife, and our mother, thank God for not needing to learn everything from your parents!
Break his spirit before middle school. Middle school is the homework nightmare. My kids are a junior and a senior in high school - and most of my friends kids are older or the same age. Most of us cried more than once during those middle school years. On the plus side, if you can get them through middle school, it is never quite that bad again.
Have you noticed that they haven’t abolished in-person higher education? On-line education is just a supplement. Many college students prefer old-fashioned in-person classes. The advantages are even more pronounced at the primary level.
One (of many) flaw in this scheme is what it would mean for new arrivals to the US. School is where many first-generation kids (and through them, their parents) get acculturated; learning English, American history, culture and so forth. That would be much harder for them without the public school system and would isolate the immigrants.
