As a Christian parent I also have looked at the Bob Jones material and like you, I was floored by some of it.
Now the basics I thought were taught well. For example, how to tell a plant cell vs. an animal cell. How cellular respiration works. The parts of a plant, etc… The periodic table. Force equals mass times acceleration. The basics were all there. But then they go off on some tangent about creationism. Frustrating.
As for evolution. Well its part of the state standards and I think its on the SAT and the ACT so students, even those using books pushing creationism, do learn it.
Would this homeschool curriculum alone prepare them for a college science program with rigorous standards? Doubtful. I think you would need to go to a high school with a good AP program to learn to handle the loads of homework and academic demands college science programs require.
But I cant say the right kid who is smart, focused, and motivated might do fine.
To be honest, just because one goes to a public school and learned from a normalMcGraw Hill textbookwould not ensure success either. I’m more concerned does the textbook explain things well? Does it include worksheets, labs, and review questions that accurately test and apply the students knowledge?
I remember being blown away by Physics I at The University of Kansas (along with about 50% of the other first year students). Not because I didnt grasp the physics part, but all the advanced math, the homework, and the difficult exams because I wasnt prepared for that. I had to go back to a juco and learn all that and then I went back to KU and did fine.
So I can see where your coming from by reading some of the material. I just dont think you can measure student motivation and aptitude purely from it which frankly might be equal to or more important.
If we are operating on the assumption that failing to educate children is abuse and punishable by jail, why do you offset it by the number of children who were not abused? If I beat one of my children, do I get my sentence reduced in a pro rata fashion because I didn’t beat the other three? If I would have had ten kids, then I would be golden.
So the comparison is not apt. If the teacher fails even one child, he or she should get the full sentence under this hypo.
Why does this only apply to home schooled children? Why isn’t a public school child removed from his or her school if the same test is failed? The school has failed in the precise way that a homeschool parent has failed yet there is little to no accountability for the school but an absolute ban on the parent.
Lets say you have a public school system with 90 3rd graders and in that area are 10 home-school kids at that age. The state institutes a rule where all all 3rd graders must pass a test showing they have reading and math skills at that grade level. All the kids get tested on one big day.
The results come back. Of the 90 public school kids, 30 have failed. What should happen? Should the public school hold back those 30 kids?
And lets say the home-schooled kids grades have averaged way above the average for the public school kids and indeed, the home-schooled kids got some of the best grades. Would the public school administrators want it to get out that the home-schooled kids out performed the public school kids and “maybe” cause more parents to pull their kids from the public schools?
That’s the trouble with putting your educational eggs in the one-student-one-teacher homeschooling basket: every individual failure means a per-school failure rate of 100%. No school survives with a failure rate of 100%.
Personally, I’d be fine with giving homeschooling parents whose children fail basic competence tests an opportunity to improve and reform their teaching with stricter scrutiny, the same as schools with high failure rates get. But the homeschooling movement would probably squawk even louder about that “interference with their rights as parents” than they would about simply disqualifying homeschooling parents of failing children from continuing to homeschool. It would also be extremely resource-intensive if supervisors had to make individual home visits to help incompetent teacher-parents improve their teaching.
One could use the same "“all eggs in one basket” when describing public schools. In some areas public schools are just bad and I feel parents should have an alternate choice.
However they might not be able to afford a private school or afford to move to an area with better public schools.
What should they do?
Homeschooling offers a good alternative.
I’m also ok with testing provided public school kids also get tested and they publish the results.
I think you might be misunderstanding how I was using the expression. My point wasn’t to make any claim about the pros and cons of having all students homeschooled or all students public-schooled.
My point was just that one of the intrinsic weaknesses of individual homeschooling is that the failure of any individual student implies total failure for their “school”, because their enrollment consists of one pupil and consequently their failure rate is 100%. A public school (or a private school or homeschooling collective, for that matter) that enrolls multiple students is naturally going to take less of a performance hit if one individual student fails.
This is not in dispute. Once again, nobody is saying that homeschooling can’t be a good alternative to other forms of schooling. Everybody acknowledges that there are plenty of high-achieving homeschooled students.
The argument is simply that we shouldn’t take it for granted that homeschooling with no oversight or assessment will automatically produce better education than the alternatives. And we should not naively assume on the basis of inadequate data that homeschooling is overwhelmingly successful while the failures of homeschooling are just negligible anomalies.
Actually, I think your correct if there are home schooled twins and one fails and one passes that’s possibly an indication that it wasn’t the parents fault and it should be a mitigating circumstance. Likewise with a teacher if 80% pass its an indication its not the teacher.
The problem is most home schools aren’t teaching twins so they only get one bite at the apple. If we have to use your system rather than Urban’s we have to wait until the kid is 18 rather then testing, and helping along the way. If they fail on their first kid out of the gate why should we give them 2 more years to complete screwing up kid number two.
I think the best proposal is annual testing to ensure minimum advancement across all forms of primary and secondary education. Teachers (and homeschool teachers) are investigated if their pass rate falls below a given percentage to determine what is causing the problem. If it is the teacher they can be sent for additional training over the summer to improve. After three years of failures over a 5 year period they are removed from teaching. If a home school parents has three children they would have to fail over 2 years not just a single year prior to being removed.
I’m starting to get hung up on the horrid quality of the curriculum that is considered appropriate for home schooling. Is there a reason we can’t simply provide (and test on) the curriculum used by the public schools in the area?
I watched the course samples for the other topics from the aforementioned HSLDA Online Academy.
The English and Writing course sample is discussing Call of the Wild (nice choice!). Unfortunately, only a minute into it we’re discussing the problem is that Jack London is an atheist and didn’t believe in the Law of Love and Fellowship between God and man. I didn’t even know about London’s religious leanings until watching this and I certainly don’t see why in the fuck it matters one iota.
The Logic and Critical Thinking course sample is covering chapter 3 of Stott’s “Your Mind Matters”, which is a book that goes on to tell the horrors of the “Catholic Christians”, the “Activist Christians”, and the “Pentecostal Christians”. It also shows the word “Christian” on the whiteboard 18 times. I’m going to slowly back away from this shit.
The US History course sample shows the teacher spending the entire time, in the words of one of the students in the session “trying to sell us on his ebook side hustle.” Yes, this teacher wrote an ebook about Japanese submarines off of the Oregon Coast that were (according to him) sunk by blimps and remain there to this day (although no one has found them). This is US History?
If the above is any indication of the state of education among home schooled students, this shit should be outlawed yesterday.
Provided by, say, the ever open-minded Texas State Board of Education. No thanks. We don’t provide and test on curricula to private schools either, and nor should we.
I suppose if you really want to get the Fundy homeschoolers to start agreeing to restrictions, we could get some homeschool Madrasas going (or stories about them) and watch the panic.
And your solution? No matter how bad some local board of education may or may not be, what I linked is not even in same universe as any government-issued curriculum that I’ve seen, so I’m open to options.
The thing is, of course, that the neighbors who “choose those options” of misinformation and ignorance in their homeschooling curriculum aren’t merely making personal choices for themselves. They’re also depriving their unfortunate children of the educational attainments and basic knowledge that they’re entitled to.
Indifference about parental abuse and neglect is not actually a good defense of individual liberties.
Actually, leaving it be does invite abuse. One of the nice outcomes of participating in this thread (thanks OP!) is that I learned of individuals that were harmed in the process. Prior to this thread, I had never heard of Tara Westoever. Now I have her book “Educated” ordered and on the way to my house. Aside from the other forms of abuse, I would classify her home schooling experience as abuse all by itself. While she’s accomplished amazing things, it was despite her experience, not because of it. I would also consider someone who went through K-12 of the curriculum that I’ve been diving into abuse, even if it’s not as bad as no education at all. While students could go through that and come out ahead of someone who was taught nothing at all, it’s still far short of what I would consider an acceptable level of education, and I happen to believe that children do have a right to that.
We might not test private school students ( or we might or the schools might voluntarily administer the tests) but whether private schools are expected to follow a particular curriculum kind of depends on your definition of “curriculum” - if you’re talking about a specific textbook, then no, private schools aren’t generally mandated to use a specific book, but neither are public schools mandated to use a specific book statewide.The whole Texas/California textbook thing isn’t because every third grade math class is going to use the same book - it’s because the publisher wants to get on the list of multiple approved books.
But if you’re talking about a more broadly defined curriculum, then some states do. First, you have states that require that private school students receive substantially the same education as public school students. And then you have states with more detailed requirements - here’s a partial list of NYS requirements from here
There’s a list for grade 7 & 8 and another for high school.
And there’s been a fairly recent bit of controversy in NYC about whether certain private school followed the rather loose rules and whether politicians agreed to delay a report for political reasons.
We’re not talking here about parents merely teaching their kids their religious beliefs. We’re talking about parents (really, ideological movements preying on credulous parents seeking curricular support for their homeschooling efforts) trying to ram demonstrably false religious dogmas into children’s heads as a substitute for the fact-based education and cognitive skills training that they’re entitled to.
The objections you listed in #208 were to religious content and a sales pitch. Content you don’t like isn’t abuse. That doesn’t mean abuse doesn’t occur; it does. But there’s no cause to ban the content you listed.
It wasn’t content I don’t like. I don’t like that we don’t mandate home ec for all students at all high schools. I don’t like that many public schools focus too heavily on abstinence in sex ed. My main problem is the lack of actual useful content. If the biology class was pretty standard except they “taught the controversy” when it came to evolution, I wouldn’t like it, but I could probably tolerate it a bit more. When the entire first chapter is fucking up the discussion about the scientific method and pretending that science still thinks that maggots spontaneously generate in meat, then I have a problem. The book I’m referring to is an award winning home-schooling biology course titled “Exploring Creation with Biology” and the title alone shows the problem. The entire fucking book can’t help but spew garbage as they have to view everything through some fuzzy God-lens. At least hold the shit in until you actually start covering evolution/creation, which is chapter 8.
The first 6 or 7 pages at the very beginning of the book where they define what makes something “alive”, toss around DNA, autotrophs and heterotrophs, asexual reproduction, etc. and then suddenly:
Then you realize that the entire beginning of the book was simply a setup as they want to stress this:
And that glurge is there to introduce the very next section, the Scientific Method, which it turns out is simply a front as what they really want to show is that abiogenesis is bullshit (well, the Aristotle version, which they pretend is what scientists still believe today).
It turns out they have occasionally teach a few facts, but they seem to exist primarily to support the shit that they are about to toss out. I guess that’s why the title isn’t “Exploring Biology with Creation”, which I’d probably find a bit more palatable.