What's wrong with Home Schooling?

In My Humble Opinion
81

Right. Some homeschooled kids do take independent classes like that.

I’m trying to say that–in the ideal, which I realize doesn’t represent all homeschooling situations–they do learn from qualified people. Some of those qualified people are “teachers” teaching organized classes of one sort or another, some are just folks who have knowledge and skills they can impart. For example, I know of a woodworker near here, in business for himself, who has taken on homeschooled kids as junior apprentices. They get something like a woodshop class, but better.

82

Is taking bunches of individual courses (or hiring a number of tutors) somehow less expensive or better than a private school, then? (Taking it as a given that one homeschools because they don’t like public school.)

I thought charter schools were a part of the public school system?

If you have a question, who do you ask?

Perhaps this is an issue of definition, then, because I wouldn’t call taking classes at college to be homeschooling, I’d call it going to college.

83

A related issue, for me, is auto-didactism. I’m supportive of and admiring of people who are auto-didacts, for the most part. I learned a lot that way myself.

However, and it’s a big however, one issue is that if one is self-taught in a particular area, either as a parent homeschooling children, or as children teaching themselves in a Montessori-style homeschooling situation or an “unschooling” situation, it’s very easy to fall into the tendency of reading or exploring only the things that one finds easy, or most interesting, or that one agrees with. Most people (possibly people on this message board excepted) will naturally engage with information that pleases them in some way - it’s fun, it tells them that their personal opinions about the world are correct, etc.

I happen to believe that there is value to studying things that are difficult that you might not like. A person naturally drawn to math might therefore, in an auto-didactic situation, avoid studying literature or poetry. Some might say “well, what’s wrong with that?” Nothing, particular, except that I think there’s value in having a broad education rather than a narrow one.

In my own experience, I am glad I was “forced” to study people like Freud during my psychology degree, if only due to the fact that it gave me an understanding of how ridiculous he was :slight_smile: I’m not sure I would have chosen to read his writings if it had not been required of me, due to them being outside of my field of interest, but I feel that reading them was valuable to me. I recognize that NOW, but would not have recognized that THEN.

And I think that for some people who are homeschooling, they might have the tendency to not recognize what is and is not valuable about information outside of their area of interest.

84

That assumption right there is a problem. Homeschooling parents do not, by and large, spend all their time thinking about the public school system and how scary it is. An awful lot of them homeschool *because they enjoy it *and think it fits their family best. That’s why I do it.

Anyway, the costs of homeschooling vary wildly depending on how you want to do it and how much time vs. money you want to invest. You can homeschool practically for free–or you can spend thousands. It’s quite difficult, however, to spend anywhere near what the public or private schools cost. Our charter school gives us $800 per kid per semester. It’s hard to spend that much, until a kid gets to high school. The school district makes a profit, so public schools are starting ISPs in droves.

At its core, homeschooling is the family being in charge of a child’s education rather than another governing body, such as the state. (I don’t say just the parent, because that’s not how it mostly works.) If you’re a high school student doing some coursework at home, taking 2 courses at the CC, doing another one online, and apprenticing somewhere else, you’re a homeschooler. Many of us don’t actually spend a lot of time at home. It is what you make it, and what you want to do.

Charter schools are indeed part of the public school system. Homeschoolers may be independent, or they may do part or all of their education through some sort of school or umbrella system. There are arguments in some homeschooling circles over whether belonging to a charter constitutes “real” homeschooling, but on the whole, folks agree that if you’re in charge and your base is at home, you’re a homeschooler.

I’m a librarian. Finding answers to questions is pretty much my specialty in life, and I’m good at it. :cool:

85

As someone who has dealt with entry level employees for the past several years, here’s my take on it. I have seen the good, the bad and the ugly coming out of home schools, public schools and private schools.

The majority of the homeschooled young people tended to be bright enough, but many times had issues with time management. Doing things on someone’s schedule who may not be as flexible as Mom or Dad is problematic in many cases. A lot of times they are also ill prepared to deal with others on their team who are 180 degrees from their experience (although this often isn’t limited to homeschooled workers to be fair). Fortunately, a couple of years down the road in the real world, a lot of these issues are minimized in all but the most sheltered. This is in comparison to people coming from public or private schools.

I realize that I’m seeing, for the most part, a different group than who are accepted into Harvard. My experience is skewed to tech production environments, with young people coming straight from high school and/or going to college/tech school part time. YMMV.

86

As a public school teacher, unlike ITR’s bizarre near-conspiracy theory, I’ve got no problem with homeschoolers. I’m well aware that I don’t offer the ideal educational environment: because we take all children and do so with limited resources, I’ve got to teach multiple lesson plans simultaneously, ensuring that the child with superb writing skills can learn something at the same time as the child who struggles to spell 3-letter words correctly learns something at the same time as the child with no ability to sequence a story can learn something. I’d be a much, much better teacher if I had one student (or even three or four students).

Homeschooling, when done right, is of course going to be better than nearly any public schooling done right, by virtue of having a smaller class and a teacher who knows the student extremely well and a flexible schedule. As a society we’re unwilling to invest the resources to offer such an education to every child.

The only time I’ll get my back up is if people suggest that homeschooling should replace public schooling. Homeschooling is incredibly intensive resourcewise for most people; we offer public schooling because it requires a much lower amount of resources. And, when done well, it can offer a great education. Just not as good as that same teacher could offer to an individual student.

87

First of all, I support giving options. So, no, I do not support any one sole educational option being offered in any community within the US. Secular public school should be one option. the other option would be for parents to provide an alternative education privately (either home or an organized private school).

So if I understand your real question which I interpret as:
Q: “Would you still support private or home schooling, even if it meant all (or nearly all) Muslim Americans chose to educate their children in Islamic religious schools?”
A: Yes, I’ve got no problem with Muslims educating their children any way they see fit, even if none choose public school. As long as the education meets the minimum standards such that the children can become self sufficient adults.

88

If we were to homeschool – which we haven’t decided to do, but is under consideration-- we would have all subjects covered except foreign language (and some electives like art). That we would outsource (and even there, I am good enough at languages that I could help with homework and so on; it’s more pronunciation and grading and so on that I wouldn’t feel competent to do). This, in fact, would be cheaper than either private school OR the increased cost we would have to buy a house in the best school district around here. (Though if you take into account the fact we’d essentially be losing one income of a fairly highly paid engineer, the economics don’t work out at all. It would only be something we’d do because we thought our kid would learn better that way.) Most of the families I know who homeschool have a similar kind of deal, where most core subjects are covered and they really only outsource one or two if any, plus electives.

What would you call a student who attends public high school and takes two classes at the local community college? I’d call her a high school student. Same deal.

89

It doesn’t guarantee it, but things seem to be working out. My niece, who is 16, just started taking some math courses in the community college. She had to take a placement test and placed into Trig/Pre-Calculus, which is just about right for her age, maybe a little advanced.

90

We started homeschooling in December, and it’s already been a huge help for our two. Our daughter is one grade level ahead in math, which she absolutely adores: our son, who has struggled with math, is almost up to his grade level. They have an online curriculum, and they can repeat the lessons as often as they need to so they can fully understand.

Between my husband and I, we’re comfortable enough with most subjects to teach ourselves: however, we are part of a homeschool group, and we know enough to realize when we need help. I majored in music, but my children play trombone. I know very little about the trombone, and I definitely do not know how to teach it. So we have a college student that gives them private lessons so they can continue.

The most important thing? Our daughter’s blood glucose is better controlled, and she’s not missing 2 hours of class daily because the district nurse is freaking out about an occasional 240 BG. She’s hitting puberty, which does a number on your hormones and your insulin resistance. That’s why we did it: to keep her healthy.

We’re willing to go to any length to make sure our children have a good, solid education. We are Christian, but our schoolwork is separate from church. They are expected to learn science from a scientist’s point of view, as I did in school. And I had to sit down with our son last night and debunk some stuff about Muslims and Islam that he learned in his church group. It was a good, frank discussion. As someone who has always been interested in other religions, I really enjoyed being able to discuss it with my son.

That’s it in a large nutshell.

91

You are aware that I am talking about large numbers of people? Larger, I mean, than a sample size of one?

I mean, I’m happy for your sister and niece and all - but I’m not convinced that this is typical or possible for homeschoolers as a group.

92

I think that maybe I should clarify my position regarding home schooling:

I don’t have anything against home schooling per se. There are many, many parents who can and do achieve fantastic outcomes by choosing to teach their children at home (or at home plus other community resources.) As I mentioned earlier, I taught my own son for almost 4 years, until I began to see some serious consequences of that choice. (Academically, he did - and still does - really, really well. Socially, though, I just couldn’t find an adequate - my definition of adequate - peer group for him, and I also faced a lot of challenges in teaching him time management - the sort of stuff you’d figure out quickly in a school setting, but maybe not at home. Doesn’t help that I can be a serious procrastinator, so I was afraid I was passing that habit along to him.)

I think that I’d have more success now as a home schooling parent than I did then, simply because I live in a far more urban and urbane area than I lived when I was home-schooling, and I’m a bit more stable, financially. Here, I could easily find social groups, museums, library programs, music education opportunities, and so forth. There (and then), it would have been a 120-mile round trip drive just to find a home school group that wasn’t explicitly Fundie. There was exactly ONE museum in the town where we lived then - a poorly-run and -organized crapfest of a local “historical society.” I had access to a dial-up internet service that was crappy even by dial-up standards. It was a real struggle, and at the time, finances were pretty damned tight for me, so I was hamstrung by things like that long round-trip to find peer support or the added cost of music lessons. ($20 for gas to go to home-school group was about 40% of my weekly grocery budget at the time, if that adds perspective.)

So now, my two older kids attend public schools (although I’ve chosen to pay a bit more for housing in order for the two of them to be in top-quality public schools.) Both are honor students, and have been since day one of enrollment. The seventh-grader is taking advanced math, science, and Spanish. I could provide him with advanced lessons on math and science, but I only know a smidgeon of French and whatever Spanish I recall from Dora the Explorer and Sesame Street. The fourth-grader is the two-time school spelling bee champ, and will compete at the county level next week. She will perform with the district Honor Choir next month. She excels at art and dance - both offered at no extra charge by her (awesome!) neighborhood school. They’ve both been on multiple field trips this year - to the local arts museum, to a number of historical sites, to the state capital, and so forth. They both perform with their school choirs and drama groups, and each have substantial roles in their spring musicals - scenes from Broadway for the fourth-grader, and “Grease” for the 7th-grader. These are “bonuses” that I simply wouldn’t be able to facilitate if I were still home-schooling.

All of that said, though, I’m of the firm opinion that most educational outcomes are dependent on more than just the quality of whatever school a kid attends. Parents who value education create an atmosphere conducive to learning. Kids who want to learn (either intrinsically or because they want to please their parents) will learn. Teachers can (and often do) create great atmospheres for learning. Schools (even within crummy systems) can become communities wherein learning is valued and encouraged. Even a peer group can create a situation where academic performance is valued or devalued. In home-schooling situations, the failure of even one side (parent or student) can create disastrous outcomes. In a school situation, there are more variables - great school, great parents, smart kid, but friends who thing that learning is “not cool?” Maybe the kid underperforms. Or maybe a good learning environment can overcome indifferent parenting. Like all aspects of parenting, there’s no one “right” way to ensure your kids’ educations.

The only real problem I have with home schooling is that so many people do it for the wrong reasons - they don’t want their kids exposed to “those people,” or to actual science, or so forth. And isn’t that really what education is all about? It’s not just a Joe Friday “Just the facts, ma’am,” but an exposure to new things and different points of view and the encouragement of critical thinking. I truly don’t think that I have the right to tell any other parent how he should raise his child, but I also think that his child has an inborn right to learn and grow and explore. Balancing those rights can be a problem…

93

I had a friend who homeschooled both of her sons due to the horrible schools in her area. Both of the boys were given the choice to attend regular schools full time, or part time with homeschooling. I think the elder boy went to one year of high school but went back to homeschooling, and the younger went for the final 2 years. Both of them are very intelligent young men, have great manners and all around good kids. The eldest graduated last year with a degree in nuclear engineering and the youngest was getting ready to graduate with honors and thinking about going to a college with a strong agricultural sciences program. They’re the examples I tell people when I come across conversations on homeschooling. J and her husband worked their asses off making sure their sons had an all-around, balanced education with being involved with 4H, Little League baseball and football, all kinds of activities where they’d be interacting with kids their age and older.

If daHubby and I had decided on having kids, I know we’d have homeschooled them for at least part of their school years. Part of that decision came from my own nightmare years of education, and the other from the BS that our local school system has become. They’re teaching to the absolute lowest common denominator while smart kids get shoved aside.

I think we should have the choice, but there need to be standards.

94

I used to do childrens programming at a small rural museum, in southern Alberta. we were used as a resource by a number of home schoolers. They basically fell into two groups.
There were those who felt the local school system was lacking in academic rigour, or were concerned that their children faced up to 3 or even more hours on a shool bus (total) each day due to the distances involved.
Then there were those who chose to home school so as to save their kids minds (and presumably souls) from such evils as sex education, evolution and history and science that discussed events before 4004 BC.
The parents of the first group would generally use the museum as a socialization opportunity - arranging with other like minded home schoolers to arrive for a "group’ based activity. These kids loved the museum, we had many hands on and interactive displays, and they would enthusiastically make great and positive use of them. Their questions were insightful and generally very well spoken. behavoir was rambunctious, but generally with in limits of good manners. I do not recall having to ever ask anyone to “behave”. When left alone in a n area, there was never anyproblems with behavoir or rudeness.
The religious home schoolers were another collection indeed. They never made appointments, and seldom showed up as part of a larger group. They huddled around their parents, and had to be essentially prompted to touch, interact and even examine visually any of our exhibits. You could tell they had probably faced or witnessed fairly intense ciorporal discipline at home, and were so lacking in socialisation skills that they mumbled and refused to make eye contact. Oddly enough, if they were left alone in a gallery, they were the ones who would instantly be attempting to go “out of bounds” or even damage items. The parents would interupt/over ride the interpreters with such germs of infectious wisdom as “the indians died out because they they were not of Christ”, or “that isn’t a dinosur bone, cause they’re ain’t no such things…” My favorite was “archeologists go to university so they can learn how to carve Dinosaur bones out of rock”.
Additionally, the non-religious homeschoolers always made sure that their kids put something in the doination boxes and wrote something in the visitor book. I actually caught religious home school kids trying to jimmy the donation box.

Your milage may vary, but from what I have experienced, religious home schooling only exists to reinforce the bigotry, small mindedness and insular points of view that the parents of these poor children have.

Regards
FML

95

I’m finding your takeaway from this review of the literature difficult to reconcile. Firstly the only language I can find in the document which resembles your statement is the last sentence of the abstract where the authors say

This is not the same as your characterization of “most suffer from poor methodology.” Methodological problems exist in pretty much all sociological studies. I’m not finding the conclusion you’re finding, meaning that the authors say the level of problems are severe enough to invalidate the conclusions of the studies being reviewed. You are welcome to your own standard, as you articulate in your second paragraph, but there isn’t anything I can find in the article which resembles your claim of what the authors of the review conclude. Are there specific pages and paragraphs you’re drawing this from?

More puzzling to me is why you believe the negative remarks in the review’s abstract outweigh the positive remarks in their conclusion so severely that it creates a net result of a clear dismissal of the reviewed studies. Again, you’re welcome to dismiss the conclusions of the studies presented because you don’t accept self selected respondent groups, but without some sort of direct quotes from the review I’m not seeing the authors doing that.

Enjoy,
Steven

96

I explained that. Page 16 of the document (17 of the pdf). Nearly all the samples were self-selected. That’s all I need to know to categorize these studies as slightly better than anecdotal.

It’s not about me not accepting self-selected groups. It’s about that not being acceptable scientific methodology.

There are objective standards in psychological and social science research. This review makes it clear that as of that point in time, the research was “in it’s infancy”.

All that a reasonable scientist looking at that data could conclude is that the area was worth further study. Which they did.

The whole “we think this would be a good thing for society” did not address under what conditions and frequency they thought it would be good.

97

In Spain (a country which doesn’t accept homeschooling except in extreme medical cases), that above doesn’t apply. Wholly-private centers, as well as being a tiny, tiny minority, must still have certified teachers and follow the general curriculum - although more loosely than the much-more-common “concertados”, which have to follow the official curriculum completely but may enhance it (for example, when I was in school the official starting age for a second language was 9th grade: my schools required one starting in 4th; when the official age became 4th, those schools started requiring it in 1st).

Here, getting schools to the darkest corners of the country and to children of any extraction was a centuries-long aspiration; it only was achieved in the 20th, and still not completely - but nowadays, the biggest problem is immigrant kids and kids of immigrants, many of whom aren’t in school because they/their parents don’t know they can/should be there (once someone can get them to understand that yes, their kid can go to school every day and get the books and notebooks and pens and one square a day from the school and come back home every day at 6pm and nobody will take the kid away, they’re happy to send them - it’s a lot harder with the “wetback kids”); others, because the parents want to raise the kid in the old country’s culture (hint: if what you want for your children is the old country, stay in it).

I think it’s good to have more than one “track” available, including home schooling… but any and all of those tracks need to be monitored and to have standards beyond “can read? can write? can find ass with both hands and the light on?”

98

You certainly seem to be giving your children an excellent education. But, at a certain point, they need to be able to have “fun” away from home, on their own. If your local high school is good, that might be the time to let them test their wings. Since they’ll still be living at home, your family activities can have educational & interesting aspects.

Please consider how you are going to fill your days after they have gone off to college & started living independently.

99

Given that most kids come out of high school knowing jack shit about most topics they covered in K-12, I don’t really see much need for these supposed qualifications. As mentioned previously, they aren’t required for private school, and those kids seem to turn out fine. Furthermore, teaching one-on-one is much different than teaching a classroom. Sticking me in front of a classroom would be a bad move, but I can teach your kid chemistry if you sit him down with me 3 hours a week, provided he doesn’t have huge deficits in other areas that would make that an extra challenge (the kid who couldn’t figure out that 2 molecules of water have four hydrogens and two oxygens was difficult :smack:). Now granted, I have a PhD in chemistry (oh whoops, I taught myself chemistry in high school, so I guess I shouldn’t have learned anything), but the idea that I’m not able to teach a child (or a small group of children) a range of topics better than the average public school teacher is laughable, especially given that this country’s teaching programs aren’t exactly known for taking in our best and brightest.

Now granted, I can’t teach everything. You mentioned 12th grade calculus (why 12th grade, I don’t know, and not the greatest example since most kids don’t take it, but let’s go with that.) I’m not qualified to teach calculus, unless I were relearning with the kid. There would be lots of “I’ll get back to you on that” as a response to questions. My parents were not qualified to teach me advanced math either. I took two years of math online, one super cheap one with a group of homeschoolers and another through some general correspondence program. It seems to have worked out ok because I started college with credit for those two math classes (not to mention whatever I got from the other 8 AP tests I took.) There are workarounds when you’re in over your head.

100

Get back to me when you’ve done it successfully and we’ll talk about what is “laughable.” Right now, I’m just absolutely tittering.