What's wrong with Home Schooling?

In My Humble Opinion
41

That’s a terrible example. Taylor Swift is incredibly successful and from what I can tell, seems like a pretty sweet girl.
But I would agree. Taking your kid out of the local retard factory will place them at a distinct disadvantage when they are starting their careers working in our nations chain restaurants, bars, nail salons, mailrooms and shopping mall retail outlets.:wink:

A lot has been said about missing out on proper “socialization”. Unless things are radically different from when I was in school, proper socialization in high school and college seems to consist of getting wasted, figuring out how to knock some girl up, picking on anyone who is different and otherwise engaging in activities that are likely to get you injured, arrested or sued. How will a kid mature if he doesn’t learn the valuable lessons of beating up kids who are smaller then him and getting beat up by kids who are bigger?
I’m sort of half joking, but I can see how some kids might benefit from not going through the institutional grind of the public school system. Provided that they are homeschooled according to some strict standards.

42

Not a reply directly to Icarus, but i felt that quote is the basic argument most of you have against home schooling. That and a fear of a lack of socialization (I know too many counter examples..either sociable home schoolers, or anti social public schoolers).

I like that we, in the USA, have the option to home school. I think we should have that option, and that we should let parents choose how to educate their children. Of course we need some minimum standards for math, reading, etc. and for the most part I think we do have those standards through current federal and state laws. Actually, I’m a little worried that the minimum standards could even be manipulated toward a particular viewpoint, and maybe should be limited to the most basic of skills.

I think having the option is important, because I think it is fundamental to our freedoms and protections in this country. It is a given that we will have to put up with some people that make poor choices, such as choosing to home school their child when they are barely competent themselves, but this is part of the price one pays for freedom. If you believe your children are being indoctrinated in some way, whether its toward a religion, away from religion, to some political philosophy, whatever, you have the right to remove them from that system, and I think that is an important freedom.

43

Question for those who cite socialization for opposing homeschooling:

Communities like the Amish have separate schools, and perhaps the main reason is they want to insulate their children from “mainstream” social values. Should this not be allowed?

44

I just had to come in and put in a little note. Just got a blog post from a homeschooling friend (online, not IRL) of mine. She and her husband just took the whole family to Kyrgyzstan to live, for the second time. They homeschool because they like to, and because they move around between the US, Kyrgyzstan, and Uzbekistan. They study the languages intensively and do a lot of things you just can’t do in public school.

My friend is kind of unusual, but her family’s adventurous ways aren’t. Homeschoolers are the ones taking their kids on bike rides across the US, or living for a month on a boat, or moving to Malaysia to run a school, all that sort of thing.* Us more mundane stay-at-home types are, at least, reaping the benefits of not being tied to a school schedule by going to Disneyland when it isn’t crowded or taking our kids on long trips to visit colonial history sites. :smiley: Me, I’m too broke lately, but I do at least get to spend a day next week doing living history at Sutter’s Fort and go to a lot of Gold Rush sites.
*RL examples

45

Dangit, I have to go start school, but one more RL example. A friend of mine is considering homeschooling her child. They live in a podunk little town and worry that the child will be bullied, because she has two mommies. If they lived in my town they’d have way more options, but they don’t. I have to say I think the local homeschooling community is more likely to accept them.

46

Perhaps, but if any country has a reason to be fearful of children possibly being inculcated with radical, extremist philosophies without anything to counter them, it would be Germany. I’m not saying I agree, but I understand where they’re coming from.

47

That depends on what those mainstream values are. I personally disapprove of the tendency of the Amish and similar communities to disassociate themselves from the mainstream, but I don’t think it should be illegal, per se.

48

There’s nothing wrong with home schooling if it’s done right.

The same that has been said here against home schooling can easily be applied to the Chicago Public Schools. I’ve seen people that have high school diplomas from the CPS and could not even read this sentence.

How do you get a high school diploma and can barely read? It happens.

There are good and bad reasons for home schooling. Just the same way as two children in public school will have the same classes and one will do well and the other will fail.

Some kids can take minimal guidance and take it to the end. Others need to have their butts jumped on constantly to achieve. Taking a home school kid and putting him in public school or private school may not help at all if the problem is with the kid.

I for instance, skipped a year in school and graduated early, putting me in college by the time I was 16. But I also learned quickly how to do the minimum to get by and get good grades. That didn’t help me at all once I got to college where everyone was as naturally smart as I am and actually WORKED at it.

Like most things in life you will find bad apples mixed in with the good.

49

Obligatory *Buffy *quote:

“What about home schooling? It’s not just for scary religious types anymore!”

50

Sure.

I will note for the record that none of those critical of home schooling in this thread have provided any studies at all. If anecdotes are all you want, no problem - home schooled kids win a hugely disproportionate number of spelling and geography bees at the national level. Our next-door neighbors home-schooled both their sons. One is learning disabled. The other decided not to pursue his Ph.D. in mathematics, and is some kind of super-high-powered insurance actuary or something similar.

Regards,
Shodan

51

Honest question - Based on your statements, would you support Madrassa as the sole education offered in Muslim communities in the US?

52

I think the point if home schooling is that it isn’t the sole education offered.

53

Curious about this- is this being enforced now? It’s about 8 years ago now, but I used to live with an ex who’s kid sisters (and their baby brother) were being home ‘schooled’, in the UK. The elder could not read at all, at 10, the younger could just about manage to identify most single letters if asked, at age 9. I lived in the same house (most of the time) for several years, and know they had no ‘lessons’ of any kind, that is, at no point did any of their parents or misc. hippies who also hung around the house set aside any time to educate them in.. well.. anything, apart from watching TV. And possibly lesbian issues.

They didn’t go on trips to interesting places, they didn’t go to the library, they didn’t have homework, or work of any kind (well, I did once see their dad trying to read a book with one of them, for about 10 minutes) they just went wherever the adults did, and messed around.
The whole set-up seemed to be so that they could be passed randomly between the two households they were part of, whenever any of the adults felt like it without anyone in authority being able to keep track of them at all.
They didn’t have any outside activities at all, and no child friends. I really hope there’s more checks on parents who homeschool now, but even the most basic checks could have picked up on their appalling level of ignorance.

54

I find this interesting. Here’s a couple of starting points.

Individuals should have as many freedoms as practicable. Freedoms produce diversity. Diversity is good for society.
Mandatory public education in the US is not fulfilling its promise.

Given these two starting points, what is the argument against homeschooling? Everyone screws up their kids in some way or another. You want to know what someone’s head is filled with? You’re out of luck. No one ever knows that. Everyone has crap in their head that someone else would consider freaky and scary. You want people to have a shared childhood experience of mandatory public education? Well, that society would have to forbid immigrants pretty much by default. The Indian person down the road has a far larger variance in their early childhood development and socialization than a US-raised homeschooler. If there is value in society to have this homogeneous type of childhood, then immigrants(being both more different and far more numerous) are a much larger threat to it than homeschoolers. What makes a immigrant who was raised very differently, acceptable but a homeschooler who was raised differently unacceptable?

As to the second point. Given the abysmal results of public education in the US I won’t turn my nose up at ANYTHING that may help. The stellar academic records of homeschoolers are not something to be handwaved over unquantified fears of some sort of poor socialization. These kids are beating the pants off of the publicly educated in pretty much every comparison ever done and they’re doing it on the family’s dime, not the taxpayers. Why the fuck would I want to outlaw that? If some subset of those parents want to teach their kids bullshit it’s no worse than some subset of lousy teachers teaching them bullshit except they probably won’t get the side order of bullying and humiliation which seem such an integral part of public education.

Enjoy,
Steven

55

Gah. This is likely to be a drive-by as I’m slammed at work and just dropped in on the Dope at the end of lunch. I have not read the whole thread, just about the first third, and there’s so much prejudice and venom directed at home school and home education that there’s too much ignorance to be fought on the subject for Cecil, even.

We have homeschooled all our four children for some part of their lives. The eldest is a junior in HS; the next is an 8th grader. Both transitioned to “school school” in 8th grade. The younger two are still with us.

We have experienced everything from the ultra right to the far left in meeting with homeschool groups in south Louisiana and western North Carolina since we started home schooling in 2002. Our experience is unique to us of course, but in general we have found home educators of all stripes to be concerned that their children get the best education they can get. Sure, people on the left stress the things they care about; so do people on the right. Unschooled children can be undisciplined little hellions, big C “Christian” kids can be idotic angels. That can happen if kids like that go to public school too, of course, as it’s not like those parents don’t listen to NPR or skip Fox News if their kids go to public school.

Those who think that socialization is the problem shouldn’t worry. Most often there are too many social outlets for home educated kids and it can be a struggle not to overcommit to outing clubs, PE clubs, Lego Leagues, etc. etc. Most home educated kids know how to get along in society.

What they may lack is the habit of sitting in math class every day from 0800 to 0930 with the rest of the 20 - 40 kids their age while watching one teacher work on the board for most of that time period. Home educated kids have the flexibility to move their day around and spend more time on history one day and more time on math the next, and do that at the dining table and or the couch and or the school room. The adjustment to middle school, high school, or college sit-lecture-listen-homework is the biggest challenge facing home schooled kids, IMHO, as they have not had to experience it. That’s the biggest reason we transition our kids to school school in 8th grade.

Those who think that it’s better that kids leave their homes and spend the day mostly indoors with whatever other neighborhood kids happen to share a similar birthday should keep in mind that for most of human history children didn’t get that kind of education. It’s not at all clear that the model that developed in the industrial revolution is the best approach. Also, there’s bullying, cliques, and other social ills in schools that kids are exposed to that aren’t that great for social development. For example: I was picked on for most of my elementary school years and it sucked and I hated school and I dreaded going. Was that good for me from a socialization standpoint?

I find manyof the arguments against home education presented in the first third of the thread to be full of generalizations and suspictions and, in some cases, are hypocritical. Kind of like and earthy friend at college who complained how the sorority girls made fun of her clothes, but then a few moments later related how she’d just come back from a Grateful Dead show and how there was this one girl there in penny loafers, jeans, and a green cable knit polo sweater and how stupid that girl looked in the sea of tie-dyed Deadheads. Pot meet kettle; kettle pot.

56

If they’re of the quality of your cites, I’m glad they refrained.

For example, I note in this literature review: http://www.eric.ed.gov/PDFS/ED424922.pdf methodological problems exist in many of the “homeschooled is better” studies. Note this review is dated 1994, after the date of most of the cited studies in your second link.

IMO, homeschooling is fine if the homeschoolers can demonstrate they meet the minimum education and knowledge requirements of the full curriculum, the students meet the testing requirements of the standardized tests available, and the students can demonstrate reasonable proficiency in non-standardized skills from a typical public school environment.

I’d be very surprised if the top end homeschooling results didn’t drastically affect the “average” results of homeschooling.

57

Most of human history is irrelevant. Kids might as well get used to sitting in cubicle like environments where bullying and cliques happen.

Trying to raise kids in an idealized bubble is a mistake IMO. They’ll learn how to behave in a privileged state, but unless they manage to stay in that strata, they’ll be ill-equipped to deal with what is the normal for the “rest of us”.

That said, I don’t think homeschooling should be outlawed. It should be carefully regulated. My worry there is that the homeschools most in need of oversight, i.e. rural areas, are the ones that would be least likely to get it.

58

Really?

This is an assumption and generalization that home educators across the board are trying to isolate themselves and their children from society. That’s not the case with the home school families I have been around. Most of my experience has been with folks who have looked at the quality of the educational opportunities around them and have decided that they can do a better job.

59

I’m glad dangermom is in the thread. Her comments ring very true to me.

The couple of homeschooled folks near my own age that I met around and shortly after the time of my own high school graduation struck me not only by their broad competence, but by their easy (not smug) confidence. These were kids who had grown up with the simple understanding that they belonged in every scholarly or cultural pursuit they might turn their minds toward. They were also notably comfortable and happy to interact with people of all ages and backgrounds.

Maybe I’m still a little jealous.

60

My issue with homeschooling is that it’s an individual solution to a social problem. If the local schools are inadequate, having the most involved parents withdraw their children from the school systems just lowers the quality of schools for the kids whose parents are unable or unwilling to be as involved. If every parent who homeschooled spent the same amount of time and energy volunteering at the local public school, how awesome would that be?

(And then maybe I’d stop getting e-mails begging me to volunteer! Everyone wins!)