Look, if you want to SUPPLEMENT your kid’s education with some home activities, then that’s totally awesome and everyone should do it. But this growing movement of everyone deciding they’re educators now is disturbing. I have some minor home improvement ability, but I’m not about to go out and build an office building with what little I know.
Question One: Why?
Question Two: How is public school any better at this?
At the risk of offending some teachers here, I feel that I should disabuse you of the notion that the standard curriculum at any American public school before the high school level is anything your average college-educated professional could handle. Teaching children is a great profession if that’s your bag, but it’s not as much about having any kind of knowledge in a specific subject area and more about being able to get the kid to pick up the book and learn and deal with the interesting problems that having to wrangle sixty unruly brats for eight out of every twenty four hours present. Beyond the 8th grade, you start getting into more varied and specialized subjects where you might need to at least take a refresher course (my sister, for instance, should probably not try to teach calculus to my nephew, not that that’s likely to be any kind of a problem), but before high school, this is stuff that any passably educated person ought to know.
I’m utterly baffled at this idea that school is some sort of grand social melting pot, designed to properly integrate children into society as good worker bees. Did everybody else go through a different school experience than I did? Most of my elementary education involved avoiding bullies, getting made fun of because I suck at sports, and acting like a sniveling little teacher’s pet weasel because that’s the way I could distinguish myself among my peers. I’m pretty sure that I could have gotten all of the positive elements of that (and maybe missed one or two of the negative ones) if my family had just lived in a neighborhood.
No, I’m in the same boat as you. I’m not a dangerous psychopath who intends to teach his kids that evolution is a hoax and vaccines are poison, though, which is kind of the point.
Uh. Because while some suburbs might consist solely of rich Christian white people, the majority of the world isn’t, and certainly won’t be 20 years from now? Why on earth would you ask why on this one?
I’m pretty sure that I could have gotten all of the positive elements of that (and maybe missed one or two of the negative ones) if my family had just lived in a neighborhood.
Now I’m really wondering where you’re going with this, especially with your response above. Just what are you saying here?
I wish we had some good polling data that examined the different reasons why parents decide to homeschool. My gut tells me the vast majority do it for religious reason, but I could be wrong.
Even if the majority of homeschooling was of a religious nature and tended to make more conservative children/young adults, that would scarcely be a coherent argument for banning the practice entirely, much less a decent one. In fact, if that were the sole reason someone wanted something banned - because they ideologically disagreed with the people who are doing it - I’d disregard their opinions completely.
Is anyone else shocked that Seiler wasn’t home schooled?
Perhaps I wasnt clear. The only one of the above that has only homeschool kids is the 2-3 time a week group schooling. The others are the standard clubs/groups/events that normal school kids go to. If the homeschool groups are your concern, then couldnt you make the same comments about private schools, or (in DC which tends to be very divided by race) publicschools where the rich white kids go one place and the poor black ones go somewhere else?
But more importantly, at least in our area, the homeschooling families I know are a diverse group. The ones who introduced my wife to the homeschooling groups here were an African-American man married to a Portugese woman and another African American family.
Now, I totally understand where you are coming from if in your area, all home-schooling parents are white, religious, upper-class people, but thats simply not the case everywhere, and a blanket condemnation is not possible.
Yeah, but that illustrates my point. Your wife is a history expert so of course they’re going to get extra education on that subject. What if they want to learn something your wife isn’t an expert on, like auto mechanics or trigonometery?
The easy answer here is me for math (grad student in economics), and their grandfather for auto mechanics (taught the subject in schools for 30 years while homeschooling his own children. my wife is a second generation homeschooler). But I see your point.
However, this may be arrogance speaking, but I feel like I know enough that given a good textbook, I could teach almost any subject up to a 6th grade level, and some (like math) higher than that. After that (at least in my wife’s family) the parent acted as a facilitator, and if the parent didnt know the answers, they helped the child find the answers. By the time they were in high school, they were supplementing the home learning by taking courses at the local community college. [/QUOTE]
True enough. I’m sure some parents are better teachers than others. But there is so much more to school than just reviewing some basic curriculum and reading it to a kid. If teaching and learning were that black and white we’d all be geniuses.
This is my point too. Home-schooling gives you so much more flexibility in HOW a child learns. They can learn by doing, or by going, or by experiencing. Instead of sitting in a classroom learning about biology from a textbook, they can go out and raise their own garden in the backyard and watch the plants as they grow. Instead of sitting in a classroom learning about American History, they can take the metro downtown and go stare at the Constitution, or visit the American History Museum.
Now, I admit, I live in an area which makes these possible, but if you think homeschooling consists of having a desk in the corner of your living room where the kid is forced to sit and review textbooks all day, there’s no way I can argue this…
I ask because you still haven’t answered. So what. What’s the unique benefit to hanging out with a Benetton ad’s worth of different cultures and influences while you’re trying to learn your multiplication tables? Public schools in the United States have a lot of problems trying to educate kids - ostensibly their primary purpose - so what great social benefit is it that you’re referring to? I honestly don’t get it. My neighborhood now is more diverse than my entire school experience was (to put it in perspective, I have neighbors who are Latin American, Pakistani, and African American, whereas at my school there was pretty much two black guys the entire way through, and they were twins, and I had the fun distinction of being one of the poor kids, and really we weren’t THAT bad off). What would all the children in the neighborhood be missing out on if, all of a sudden, their parents decided that whatever moron has failed to drill into their tiny brains the idea that you should probably not ride your bicycle directly in front of a large motorized vehicle wasn’t adequate to the task and took over the job for themselves? What critical skill would these people not pick up?
A lot of people can tell bad, bad stories about their time in public school. Pretty sure one of our own wrote a pretty damn interesting blog entry about it. I’m saying that the social experience you’re getting at isn’t universally good, and that it’s not a benefit for everybody. If a parent who’s homeschooling a child isn’t keeping them locked away in a clean room and teaching them that the Earth is made out of compressed gummi bear farts and is encouraging a reasonable amount of socialization, what is that child missing?
If your contention is that kids should spend some time around other kids, then I agree. That, however, has almost nothing to do with the question of whether or not a child should do his learning at home, and can be accomplished in other, potentially superior ways. If your contention is that there is something unique to the American public school experience that makes tolerant, well-adjusted, or otherwise desirable human beings, I’m asking what, precisely, that benefit is.
You face the same problem in schools.
I have friends who moved one kid to a different school because he wanted to study Chinese and the local school didn’t teach it.
When I was a kid, I finished my high school’s math curriculum before I was a senior, and there were no more courses.
If my son doesn’t want to do Spanish at his school, he’s SOL (it’s a small school, and they recently dropped French).
OTOH, I have friends who wanted their daughter to learn Hebrew, so they hired a tutor – presumably a home school parent could do the same thing.
I am curious also about homeschooling and cost. Can only well off families afford to homeschool, since you are removing a parent from the work force (unless they work a job in the evenings)? Some of the worse public schools are in the poorest areas. In these places, a parent just couldn’t afford to homeschool it would seem.
Not far from it. I lived on top of a hill like a crazy hermit and had to ride a bus for forty five minutes to get to my school on the other side of the county from me because…well, I don’t really have a good reason. My folks were old and wanted to live out of town and I can’t blame them for any of that, though I might have some choice words for whomever cooked up the school district maps for Hays county (on the other hand, apparently the school that my brother and sister finished at, which would have been a lot closer to where I lived, turned into some kind of gangland haven, so maybe I dodged a bullet on that one). I might be a significantly different person if I had spent more of my off-time hanging around with kids my own age and perhaps not be such an insufferable asshole as a result of it, but the social time that I spent at school wasn’t particularly useful for that. I basically just learned how to kick ass at Magic, never to read a Dungeons and Dragons rulebook in a public setting, and how acting like the smartest kid in the room is a great way to get fifty year old women to treat you like Jesus. I’m not upset that I went to public school, but I don’t think that I would be that different if I had just learned everything at home, and maybe I could have at least had fifteen minutes on Donahue as one of those insufferable little child prodigies or something.
My wife’s family home-schooled their kids on a single teacher’s salary. That said, they didnt drive new cars or take cruises or anything like that…
Personally: 25 hours per week or more (and hanging out with friends doesn’t count). To me the whole point of it is to hang out with a diverse set of people representative of “real world” situations and cooperate with a bunch of people who you like and dislike.
I think it’s certainly possible to do a good job of homeschooling. I just don’t think it’s a common enough outcome to justify the practice.
I’d also stress the value and opportunity of using public school for it’s intended purpose and then supplementing that with additional activities and learning. I went to an extremely underfunded, rural grade school (fun fact: the county I grew up in had one of the highest teen pregnancy rates in the nation). That didn’t stop my parents from supplementing my learning. The school didn’t offer algebra even though I was ready for it. So we worked out a deal where I got an algebra book and worked through it with some help from my mom. I still attended school and I did algebra homework while the other students were doing their regular math course. My math teacher kept up on my progress to make sure I was really learning what I needed to but it was my mom who helped me out with something if I got stuck. Also my parents were both programmers and so they got me an Atari 800 when I was 8 and taught me to program. They didn’t have to home school me to do any of that.
But the real world is segregated, by and large. As are schools and any other social setting. I don’t think arguing about representativeness (nice word, eh?) is a valid stance. You want to promote cultural diversity, not make them live in a representation of reality, because you’re trying to influence reality towards your particular vision, which is one of increased interaction between races and cultures.
Not that there is anything wrong with that, but it ain’t how it is.
H.
I think that increased cultural diversity is one benefit but it’s not what I mean by diversity.
What I really mean is a diversity of relationships between the child and other people. For example with home schooling I think that you are ending up with a somewhat enmeshed relationship between parent and child and I think it’s healthier if the child has a more diverse set of authority figures in their life (even if some of those authority figures aren’t perfect). I also think that socialization with a parent always nearby isn’t going to allow for a very diverse set of relationships between children.
Public school offers a form of guaranteed diversity. I think this is what Anders is getting at. Any parent who home schools is bringing in their world view. As this is the same world view that the child is getting with every other aspect of their life, the child is inherently getting a more restricted worldview overall than if they had the standardized world view of public school mixed with whatever their parents can bring to the table. Now IF the parents themselves have a very broad world view themselves and do a superhuman job of providing opportunities for their child to do other activities then I think it might be possible that they could make everything work out anyway. I just think this is the exceptional case, not the norm, and the exceptional cases probably isn’t worth what we have with the more common cases.
Okeydoke, I can go with that. Now let’s bust those Amish kids out of their schoolhouse and get 'em in public schools!
H.
I think we should make them mine coal to support our industrialized society. Kids have a lot of energy.
That’s what we do with the muslims, so we’d totally do it with the Amish too (if we had any). Or at least that’s how it’s supposed to work over here and I support it (in practice we’re not all there yet - but many young immigrants are getting integrated because we don’t let their parents decide what they should learn in school).
The law does allow homeschooling here, but there’s a strict curriculum to cover.
Yes, interacting with people of multiple races, religions and economic backgrounds is exactly what parents of upper middle class children try to do when choosing school districts or private schools for their children!