The homeschooling thread reminded me of a conversation my husband and I had last night. Somehow the topic got around to homeschooling and I said that if we had had kids (we don’t and aren’t going to), I would never homeschool them, even if the only alternative would be a school run by some ultra-crazy religion. (I don’t many just any religion, but a crazy religion.)
My reasoning? We already know we’re a little off-kilter. Maybe additional crazy from a different direction would be a better balance than just one crazy viewpoint, and kids need to get exposed to different ideas and viewpoints, even if they are nutty.
My husband disagreed saying that while we might be weird, we’re still pretty educated and it would still be better to homeschool if the only option were a nutty school.
Obviously, the school can’t be nutty enough to teach child molestation or anything of the sort.
So, where would you stand? Better to be exposed to the nuttiness or kept from the nuttiness?
Probably better to be kept from the nuttiness but informed that it exists at some convenient point. The social interaction wouldn’t make up for that.
I was going to mention that it involves your needs, too, so if you need more alone time than homeschooling would bring you, then that might be a deciding factor, too, but on thinking it over, the alternatives of them absorbing the nutty religion or being socially ostracized due to not keeping quiet about their (lack of) religion or the lack of education from that school would make it not worth it even when you factor that in.
If it was relatively benign nuttiness, I probably wouldn’t mind. My family is nutty enough as it is - I have an aunt who doesn’t exist and didn’t find out she wasn’t real until I was pregnant with my first child at 30. I have a certain affinity for nice crazies.
Homeschool, definitely. The fact that you already know kids need different viewpoints tells me you’ll see they get it, which is a hell of a lot better than most “crazy school” institutions IME.
I would homeschool up to about 6th grade if there were no schools in the area that measured up to my standards. After which they’d be packed off to boarding school.
This would only be if there were absolutely no schools in the area that met my educational standards-I would be quite comfortable with a parochial school, a secular private school, a public school. Even a public school with Too Much Religion is okay as long as they leave the science curriculum alone. Once we go to intelligent design territory, see ya lates, I’m packing them off to Phillips Academy as soon as they’re old enough.
Since this is completely hypothetical are we to assume that the immediate society in the near future that you’re living will be filled with people from this school and it’s religion (parents and students)?
If so he probably should attend the wacky school under your watchful eye. If not there’s going to be a day when he has to face the truth and go out and interact with these people as neighbors, co-workers, bosses.
I say better to get an early head-start on knowing how to interact with these nutters from an early age.
I’ll assume that the academics are good, and this is just a religious/cultural discussion. For me it depends on *how *crazy, and how likely they are to try and drag my kids into the crazy. If they can be spectators to the crazy, I can work at home to counteract that. If they’ve got to get on their knees and make personal statements of faith, we’re outta there.
I’m just barely okay with a traditional Catholic school, masses and all (as long as my kid is allowed to sit politely during Communion), but I would not be okay with a Fundamentalist one, either Christian or Muslim. I would not be able to tolerate many of the attitudes towards and about women I see in those camps being modeled to my children.
I’d actually be okay with an Orthodox Jewish school, because from what I can tell, they’re taught *how *to think more than what to think, and that’s cool with me. I could be entirely wrong about that, but it’s my impression. I don’t think they’d spend too much time trying to convert a gentile.
I’d be okay with a crunchy granola Waldorfian woo-woo school (although I don’t travel much in that subculture anymore) because they’re not, in my experience, heavy on the proselytizing - myth is used as literature, not religious experience.
I think children are perfectly capable and bound to learn other viewpoints from books, the internet, movies and their daily interactions with other people. My version of homeschooling would include a homeschooling group, with other parents as teachers as well, if at all possible. If not, I’d enroll my kid in some of the classes and/or activities at the school, but carefully chosen ones. Based on observation of homeschooling families, I know that the pervasive myth of the difficulties of socializing homeschoolers is a crock. You have to work at it if you really want to shelter your kids; it’s an active choice, and not one that I’d make.
Depends on he crazy. If they were going to teach my kids the earth was flat and dinosaurs were Jebus horses, or the Holocaust never happened, that’s a brand of crazy that would affect their actual knowledge and scholarship. Radical viewpoints and ideas that might challenge them would be okay, but if the crazy scale was too far tipped I’d be concerned about their intellectual development.
Yeah, the original hypothetical started like this:
Me: Sure, if there were some horrible catastrophe, we could cobble together enough of an education not to embarrass ourselves, but barring that, even if we were in a place with only one school run by crazies, I wouldn’t want to homeschool.
Him: What if they were really crazy? Crazy religion crazy?