So as not to hijack this thread.
http://boards.straightdope.com/sdmb/showthread.php?t=594198&page=2
At least two people stated this as something they’d outlaw if they ran their own country. I have very little experience with it, but why is it so bad?
The same thing that is wrong with Home Surgery.
Also some kids aren’t socialized properly.
My sister in law home schooled all her children. I don’t like the way she did it because the children only ever got one view of the social sciences, hers. As young adults, the children have some …remarkable gaps in their knowledge of history (for example).
Being very sheltered children, there is a lot of cultural/pop-culture humor they just don’t get. None of the children have dated, as far as I know, and the youngest is about 19. (I’m not saying that one *must *date to be a well-rounded adult, it’s just odd to me.)
A good friend of mine is homeschooling her kids. While I love her to death, she’s not in any way completent to teach her boys about mathematics or science. She doesn’t understand the basics herself; she doesn’t know what she doesn’t know. For that matter, she thinks the trivium and quadrivium are cutting edge.
In many ways it is a blatant rejection of societal norms. In that, I see it as similar to the '60s commune culture.
People do it for a variety of reasons, but many boil down to “I don’t want my kids exposed to those people!” Well, the rest of us are those people, and we are not the monsters you think we are.
Also, there are a segment of people who do this who are basically filling their kids heads full of crap and nonsense. I don’t want a lot of people walking around with their heads filled with crap.
What’s wrong with home schooling? Scoring after the prom is illegal in all 50 states.
A coworker of mine, years ago, “homeschooled” her two kids- one twelve, the other fifteen. Her version of homeschooling was leaving them home all day to play World of Warcraft.
I’m not saying that’s the norm, but the fact that she could do this really bugged me.
My thoughts are detailed in this thread.
Well, I’ve known a few who’ve homeschooled, and while one was just over the top weird, the others seemed to have had a good handle on it. It’s not as if they just get to play all day, there are requirements and homework they have to fill out and send in. So they do have to fulfill standard requirements.
There are certainly wrong ways to home school. Having been homeschooled myself from 1st grade through graduation and being around the home schooling community a lot, I’ve seen everything from the ‘let them do whatever they want’ through the ‘we’re going to recreate the public school environment as much as possible’ methods.
Personally, I am very grateful to have been homeschooled. I was able to learn at my own pace, we could have field trips whenever we decided, follow my own scholarly interests (within reason) as well as many other benefits.
As to the socialization, I feel that I’ve done fairly well. But you could always ask other dopers that have met me what they think.
It doesn’t have to be bad, but in the US, it’s often isolationist and antisocial and amounts to little more than religious brainwashing.
My niece will be 20 in April. She was homeschooled by her grandmother for her entire education before starting college. Her grandmother was not just full of crazy religio-scientific theories (you know, evolution vs. creation and stuff,) she was also one of the most all-around ignorant people I ever met. (Honest to goodness, I once heard her warn my late sister that eating uncooked oats would kill her. As would slightly under-ripe bananas. Believe me, that’s not what killed my sister.) Unfortunately, standards for homeschooling in my state still allowed that ignorant old bitch to be “qualified” to teach her granddaughter. My niece is still taking remedial algebra classes in college. She’s a perfectly bright kid, with ENORMOUS gaps in her academic and social knowledge, and it’s all the fault of the grandmother who wanted total control of what her precious grandbaby was exposed to. (And the same ignorant old bitch prevented contact between my niece and any of my side of the family, else I’d have been glad to tutor her in algebra or English or whatever.)
That said, I homeschooled my own son from ages 5 through 8. He is very advanced academically, but I enrolled him in public school after I realized that his social skills were beginning to lag.
There is no need for it for average children and few homes are qualified to do it.
I can see that kids on either edge of the curve might benefit from it.
School is a shared cultural experience. Isolating kid in families or in small self selecting communities isn’t good for ideas like tolerating diversity, or gaining an understanding of a variety of ideas - and if school doesn’t do that, it at least give you the opportunity. And while it certainly isn’t an absolute that homeschoolers miss out (many homeschooled kids get an excellent education, and excellent socialization, and get exposed to a much wider variety of experiences than they’d get in a traditional school) - many parents who homeschool choose to do so in part in order to isolate their children from the larger culture.
I wouldn’t outlaw it though. Under the right circumstances, I might even consider doing it.
Wouldn’t the same be true of kids in typical schools? And it would also seem to be true that some common forms of social interaction found in schools (e.g. bullying) are not exactly “proper”.
So I’m not sure how you’d go about making the case that the average socialization of kids in school is superior to that of home schoolers. Do comparative statistics exist on such things as crime, drug use, teen pregnancy, and other “social pathologies”?
Am I the only person here that noticed…?
Best wishes,
hh
I must say that the socialization I got in school, on balance, was pretty effin’ negative. I’d have been thrilled to have been homeschooled. Those three years of middle school harassment were unspeakably bad.
I think it can be fine, given a few things: a) the parents are educated enough to know what they know and what they don’t, b) same parents know where to go to find the stuff they don’t know to teach their kid, a class or another parent or whatever, c) the kids have to have activities outside the house and d) it’s not done for the purposes of religious brainwashing, education not being the priority.
I do think to do it well is much, much harder than a lot of people think; sure, I could teach a first-grader given appropriate materials to work with, but a ninth-grader? Especially math? Yikes! I’d be way out of my depth. No thanks.
Absolutely nothing. There isn’t even anything wrong with unschooling. All I can guess is it’s related to the frustration with the fundamentalist Christian mentality. It seems that people are concerned that these fundamentalists aren’t giving their children a proper education, and I agree completely after being in one of their HS groups. They don’t want their children exposed to anything that contradicts their religion’s doctrines.
But we aren’t all like that and we shouldn’t all be filed together. Even then, I can’t help but think it’s not nearly as common as assumed, and why does everyone have to believe the same things anyway? My entire life I was taught about Creationism and gays R evil and we’re all going to be raptured away on a fluffy cloud. I wasn’t homeschooled but it was bashed into my head on a daily basis. And yet by the age of eighteen I already knew better. I had the capacity to understand the stories were just stories. Not everyone will have that no matter what kind of education they receive. The most aggressively militant Christian I know had a regular public school education with two entirely indifferent parents. She picked up going to these youth groups on her own. Kids are like that. They learn a lot more on their own than we give them credit for.
Some people who claim to be all liberal and rant about the government sticking their noses in people’s bedrooms don’t think twice about raising other people’s children. My daughter’s home education is a success story I will brag about shamelessly. She is a healthy happy well-adjusted adult (and posts here occasionally: BloodyL) whose college entrance scores were above the average for our school district. She has a wide variety of friends and activities and I’m one proud mama.
The problem with this socialization issue is that you have to work extra hard to make sure they do develop healthy social skills. You have to put them out there in situations beyond what you’re accustomed to. This goes for all parents though. Your kids aren’t necessarily learning any special social skills in school. If you lock them away after school or only allow them to have certain friends or certain types of friends you are slacking and your children will suffer.
Well, I’ll answer for what could be wrong with some homeschooling:
[ol]
[li]Subjects not covered in enough depth, esp. at middle school level and beyond. [/li]
[li]Not enough resources for some subjects.[/li]
[li]Not enough socialisation with a wide variety of people, similar to what’s available within your local school district.[/li]
[li]Deficient education in general. [/li]
[li]Too much indoctrination into a particular credo without many (or any) external influences.[/li]
[li]Just letting the kids do nothing all day.[/li]
[li] It being used as an excuse, so that the kids’ abuse won’t be noticed. [/li]
[li] Not having enough adult influences beyond the parents. [/li]
[li]Not getting the kids used to a regular routine of getting their arses out the door and into school whether they like it or not.[/li]
[li] Hi, Opal! [/oldschool] [/wrongnumber] :D[/li]
[/ol]
However, good homeschooling doesn’t have those problems. The UK is not ideal WRT homeschooling, but it does at least check for items 1-7 above. The routine bit is more nebulous - there can also be advantages to learning to work without a routine - and the ‘other adults’ bit would generally be fine if points 1-7 were OK.
Homeschooling shouldn’t be a free-for-all - there should be standards; kids are our collective responsibility, not just the parents’.
Only a country or state which provides state schooling which is definitely appropriate for every single child, no matter their needs, should ban home schooling. I don’t know of any such place.
Germany pretty much bans homeschooling, which I find bizarre.
Bertrand Russell, The Functions of a Teacher (1950)
Of course, nowadays teachers take more courses in near-worthless “pedagogy” than they do in the actual subjects they teach.
Don’t get me wrong. Teachers are on the front lines, and even an average teacher does a valuable job. But they have to put up with a lot of shit, and not just from kids and parents.