Homeschooling seems like an ideal solution for those with a parent at home to improve their children's academic learning. But it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system.
As someone who was homeschooled: it's extremely scary. I've missed out on social experiences and also on actual education and consider myself generally worse-off for it.
Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. How many homeschooling families are also anti-vaxxers or feed into anti-government paranoia? Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for.
My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject. She had a teaching license up until a couple of years ago (they do expire after a while) and taught for several years before we had kids. Then, once they arrived, she decided this was a natural fit. Meanwhile, they're also plugged in with a local co-op with more than thirty kids that they meet up with several times a week.
Homeschooling can be used to keep kids out of the system and deny them a good education, but it can also be the platform for an elite education like no other. There's a reason the wealthiest families in American pay for private tutors and elite schools with tiny class sizes. Nothing beats one on one from a capable instructor.
As my kids grow older, they'll get one-on-one training in the arts, foreign language, and various extra-curricular skills like swimming, dance, etc. from instructors that we hire to assist them. They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school.
Honestly, if there is anything wrong with homeschooling itself, it's that it is only available to middle and upper class families.
You mean the significant majority of home schoolers, driving most of the agenda e.g. around certification and curriculum standards? Public schools are meant to ensure that every child can get a minimal level of education. Obviously it's great when people can do better, whether it's through regular public schools, charter schools, private schools, or home schooling. The problem is that when you open it up to just anyone without any kind of certification, testing, or oversight, it results in a form of neglect.
> it is only available to middle and upper class families
Sadly, no. That might describe the home schoolers you see, but "home schooling" which involves little or no actual schooling is also a common option for the (especially rural) poor. Some of my own first and second cousins grew up that way, and basically never recovered.
Also religion was obligatory up until few years ago after they changed the law that made people do extra work if they want to study religion.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=trump+history+school+book&t=canoni...
About half the population would be offended by those textbooks. You're insisting on an equivalent education, which would mean teaching with that same bias. The whole point is to do otherwise.
One can find other examples in the way books treat the Vietnam war, the North American aboriginal population, LGBT, premarital sex, the causes of the Great Depression, unions, nationalized health care, the electoral college, the second amendment, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Ruth Ginsburg, and so many other political topics. History and sex-ed classes are deeply tied to politics.
You say that parents should be "not allowed to provide their children's with religious/libertarian dogma instead of an actual education", but many parents take the view that schools today are doing exactly that.
Please learn what "equivalent" means. Maybe get some help at your local public school. It doesn't mean "identical" with the same biases etc. It's entirely possible to define what would constitute an equivalent education even in a subject such as history (never mind neutral subjects such as math which you seem unwilling to talk about) without requiring the exact same interpretation. In fact, public schools try very hard to accommodate all manner of ideological biases, while home-schoolers are often very inimical to all beliefs except their own. By demonstrating that tendency, you make a good argument against unregulated home schooling.
My coworker's wife was a math major. She volunteered to help at her child's public school. (kind of surprised that this is allowed, actually) The teacher gave a math problem, "BLANK - 9 = 9", accepting both 9 and 0 as the only valid answers. My coworker's wife tried to correct this, claiming that 18 should be the only valid answer. The teacher insisted that 18 was incorrect because they hadn't covered 2-digit math yet!!!
This is not any sort of impoverished school, nor is it rural or urban, nor is it significantly non-white or immigrant or anything of the sort. It is borderline wealthy. Statistically, you'd expect it to be nearly the best America has to offer.
Nobody should want an equivalent to that.
I’ve never been able to forget that one. Okay, so people make mistakes. But temperatures are like a basic fact of everyday life. Do you really think water boils at 30 degrees hotter than it gets in a hot day? And do you trust these same people to teach your kids about World War II, the Constitution, evolution, climate change, etc?
Most of them get nasty when they are proven incorrect as well.
> My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject.
My parents told themselves the same thing. I apparently had top percentile test scores in several early years, particularly in math. Despite that, my parents completely failed to provide an education after choosing to homeschool.
> She had a teaching license up until a couple of years ago (they do expire after a while) and taught for several years before we had kids.
Neat! Not that it really matters, but I am curious: what did she teach?
> they're also plugged in with a local co-op with more than thirty kids that they meet up with several times a week.
That's also something my parents told themselves and others. Despite that, it wasn't exactly an honest statement. We met with other church members about once every week for about a month. Then about once every quarter of a year for about a year. Then basically never, while my parents fell deep into paranoia.
> it can also be the platform for an elite education like no other.
Yes, it can. But my experience brings with me a very skeptical mind.
> There's a reason the wealthiest families in American pay for private tutors and elite schools with tiny class sizes. Nothing beats one on one from a capable instructor.
While you're right in that there's a reason for private tutors and elite schools, I think you're wrong about your conclusion for the wealthy. I think wealthy parents don't want their children to associate with poor people who can't afford to hire their own private lessons. I think that's also a despicably-elitist action.
> They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school.
It's almost as if you're parroting the same things my parents said. Indeed, I walked away better equipped for computers than pretty much anyone I know. But that's more of a byproduct of spending years in front of a computer than anything that my parents actively tried to teach. Where I gained knowledge about computers there's also loss of other opportunities and knowledge.
> Honestly, if there is anything wrong with homeschooling itself, it's that it is only available to middle and upper class families.
You are wrong. I consider myself middle class. Almost all of my family are somewhere between poor and destitute.
I know some people who were homeschooled as kids (unschooled, in one case), and they turned out to be exceptional people. It seems pretty clear from interacting with them that their attitudes and abilities are a direct result of their schooling (and having parents who would be willing to school their kids in that way).
But I'm sure homeschooling can also turn out very badly if the parents aren't fully committed to doing it well.
But I do think there’s some signal in the fact that I’m dealing with the success cases of public and home schooling, and the homeschooled ones stand out as exceptional in that population.
What kinds of conclusions can reasonably be drawn from that, though, I don’t know.
Except for those whose parents also hire expert tutors. It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities.
When you consider how much homeschooling is by parents who are not themselves professional educators, I suspect a hybrid approach works better on average.
> It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities.
This is true and it's a lot of why we homeschool. There are peers that are getting similarly elite educations and just doing it slightly different ways. If I had a billion dollars, I would be paying for an elite, personal tutor to educate my children. I wouldn't be sending them to a public school. Homeschooling allows my wife and I to provide something analogous to that elite structure for our children, even though they are firmly middle class.
Untrue. Any teacher must be familiar with both the subject matter and basic pedagogy, regardless of whether they're teaching one student or many. Yes, there are additional skills necessary when teaching a larger class, but I think you drastically exaggerate how much of a teacher's job that is.
People put a lot of stock in the intelligence of teachers, but consider it this way, most teachers choose a career that requires a 4 year degree plus certification that won't make enough to live comfortably or earn them over what a standard retail job makes much less pay their loans, this is something they think long and hard on (which is probably not much more than "I really like working with children") and make their decision on. It attracts the kind of people who think that's a good idea. Anyone more intelligent that wants to teach runs the numbers and decides against it except in rare cases. Any pedogogy those kinds of people learn isn't that advanced and can be picked up by most by reading a book on it over a month. These "professional" educators isn't exactly an advanced profession like that of a medical professional or a scientist, most of those people would struggle or fail out of such programs. The alternatives for most teachers is a communications degree, or sports/massage therapy. Altruism doesn't equate to being good at something, the proof is in the quality of education offered today.
Edit: They don't deserve contempt, but I'm saying if you increased teacher's salaries, the competition would be such the people that go for it now would simply unable to compete with the sudden competition based the altruistic motives plus pay. Altrustism only motivates you so much, doesn't last long when you're over worked and under paid and dealing with 30+ class sizes. Pedogogy be damned, you'd get people who would be able to actually teach kids on an individual level and demand more from administrators or have the conviction to walk out and move on to something else if they didn't.
Yeah, I know, it's not a "rational" choice by Randian standards. To some, that means they deserve contempt. To me, it suggests that they have other motivations that might deserve some respect.
I think you are imagining a homeschool from the 1980s. My kids learn many aspects of the subject matter from sources like Khan Academy and Outschooling. The idea that the teacher needs to know the subject matter deeply in order to manage the child's education is obsolete.
If those allow you to outsource the entirety of your child's education, including personalization of the curriculum to individual needs, answering arbitrarily-deep questions about the subject matter, etc. then great, but I'm not sure I'd call that home schooling. That would be more like a (virtual) private school, with the same level of parental involvement. If you want to be more involved you need more training, simple as that, and the fact is that a lot of home-school parents don't even have an average education themselves.
Also remember, you're not the sample. You claim to have some expertise in data science. What do the data suggest, for a typical home-schooler and not just for you or the non-random sample of others in your neighborhood.
[1] https://www.responsiblehomeschooling.org/homeschooling-101/h...
[2] https://www.parentingscience.com/homeschooling-outcomes.html
Seriously, consider what you’re saying. You’re saying that people without an education in pedagogy are unable to teach. Most of the parents reading this probably taught their children how to read before they got to school. The overwhelming majority of college faculty never have any training in teaching. Many, many people tutor without ever getting an M.Ed.
You get better at teaching by teaching, same way you get better at painting by painting or playing music by playing music. You’ll get better faster if you’re paying closer attention to your students and what you’re doing and things like having someone watch your lessons and critique them or reviewing video of your lessons yourself afterwards helps enormously. If you want to be play violin an encyclopaedic grasp of music theory is less useful than another hundred hours playing until you get over 1,000 hours at minimum. Ed school lecturers and professors are not noted for their excellent teaching despite their presumably excellent grasp of theory.
My experience could be unusual, obviously, but what’s very unlikely to be wrong is the literature on the determinants of teacher quality which does not reliably find any effect distinguishable from zero for teacher training or for experience over six years.
My children are homeschooled in a major metro area not in Texas. We also have effectively zero oversight. But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has.
I understand that in rural areas this can mean that such children have all but disappeared from view, but where we live the school districts allow homeschool children to participate in afterschool activities (including competitive sports) and a recent change in state law allows for homeschool children to attend a class or two at the local school and then leave for the day, if that is something a parent wants. The park district offers many sports classes in the middle of the day for homeschool kids, forest preserves and state parks offer nature classes, and museums have science and art courses. Private businesses love us, they offer discounts to fill up time slots that would otherwise go empty. The public library is very welcoming and typically allows use of community rooms for free.
A public school classroom with 30+ children in it simply doesn't have the time to offer as much educational opportunity that our children get in half the time, allowing them so much time during the day for play, imagination, and reading or exploring topics of their own choice (we typically have 30-60 library books at home at any one point in time).
I don't think the question of 'whether oversight is a good idea' is usefully explored by piecemeal examples where everything went fine and the motivation of parents is genuine "interest in the success of our children".
This is not to say there is anything particularly wrong with homeschooling per se, I wouldn't accept that examining piecemeal cases where everything went fine would be a good way of inferring "whether oversight is a good idea" in the case of a church or business or academic institution either.
Homeschooling put me far ahead of my peers. I went back for middle school (6th grade) and skated through the next 3 years until I could take AP classes in high school. I am by no means exceptional nor were my parents great teachers. I think being able to go at my own pace allowed me to learn faster and more thoroughly than if I had been in a classroom.
I'd say there are a lot of upsides to home schooling if parents can swing it, and the downsides can be mitigated by a little extra effort on socializing.
Read Sasse’s “the vanishing American adult.” It’s got some great commentary on what’s wrong with modern school. We take kids, and instead of having them be around adults to socialize them, we let them loose on their own little child-dominated Lord of the Flies society.
I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children.
It certainly is, the book even beats you over the head with it when (spoiler warning I guess?) the warship shows up to rescue them at the end.
I do think the K-12 school doesn't particularly resemble adult life, and is a lot worse in most ways. For one thing, leaving bad situations isn't really an option, while at the same time anti-social behavior is more tolerated. Meanwhile you're doing a bunch of work on things that are quickly round-filed when you're done with them, year after year, and operating under a system that's strangely strict and dehumanizing considering how much shittiness it allows to go on. And I had a pretty good school experience, so this isn't coming from some place of special bitterness.
There's really no evidence for this. The only reason anyone believes this is because modern school is a living hell and if the suffering and misery doesn't serve some practical purpose, we'd all be depressed.
The truth is that there are plenty of people who are schooled privately that turn out just fine.
I am not at all convinced that this is true.
If you're only interested in social experiences then there's all the obvious answers: girlfriends, team memberships, or even just how to discover and talk to other people my age with similar interests. Standing up for myself is hard. Simply talking to people is hard. How to filter the words I say so that people don't take offense to me expressing an opinion.
If you want to expand your question, then also: art, business, chemistry, college, even joining the military required a high school diploma.
We often mistakenly think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. I suggest to you that in the alternate history, with you in a public school, you also would not have had girlfriends. I sure didn't have any, despite being tall and slightly athletic.
The same goes for being able to filter words to not cause offense. One time, that got me fired! My public school education served me just as well as your education served you.
That's also, of course, true of those who send their kids to private school. I think that there's an excellent argument for vouchers which enable parents to allocate the funds that would have gone to a public school to a private school. There are some dangers (because once something is private, it can be advertised and the system can be gamed), but overall I think this is far better than our current 51%-of-parents-decide model.
I don't feel that it'd be a good idea to give homeschooling parents a similar voucher, but only because it's too ripe for abuse: an abusive parent could take the voucher and spend it, and not bother to educate his kids. I don't know how likely it is, but it's worrisome nonetheless.
With the voucher I probably would have added a condenser, nickel crucibles, a kiln, an extra digit on my balance, decent-sized platinum electrodes, and a spectrophotometer. Make it a big voucher and I'll get an electron microscope, an extreme-ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscope, and a DNA sequencer.
- homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest
- homeschooling is at a systemic disadvantage because parents that care enough about their kid's education to take an active part in it have no voice in the public schooling system (my understanding of grandparent's point); in addition, they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it.
Am I misunderstanding?
I am not saying that homeschooling in practice is mostly undesirable. Instead, there can be undesirable elements to it. And those undesirable elements are neither common nor easy to spot.
Nor am I saying that it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who aren't going to act in their child's best interest. I certainly think there's an element of truth to it but don't think it's overwhelmingly the case.
My parents did have legitimate reasons to homeschool some of the family. But I think the legitimate issues were leveraged for, indeed, control. Then: I think they bit off more than they could chew (I have a big family); I don't think they realized just how much effort they volunteered of themselves. At the end of a year, they chose to dig their heels in and continue a broken implementation of homeschool and not addressing the problems that came up, instead of risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades and having to answer to the State.
> they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it.
Yes. Maybe not everywhere but it certainly seemed to be the case when I was in California until moved '03.
The out is dual-enrollment, sometimes called running start or concurrent enrollment. In many locations it is free, leading to an AA degree. Because it is scheduled in the style of normal college, with classes chosen as you please, uneven progress is not a problem.
Consider also that the students bear some responsibility and can easily have disasters in public school. If the students choose to dig their heels in, refusing to study, that simply shuts down any kind of education. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Be careful about assuming your parents did worse than a public school would have done, even if things went badly. Some kids just refuse to learn.
To large extend, homeschooling movement was to large extend motivated politically and does attract fringe groups who want to avoid mainstream society. Avoidance of exposure of certain parts of history or sex ed or gender relationships or culture is strong motivation for many of those families.
It did not became popular in conservative christian male is head of household types randomly.
There are a ton of homeschool groups in our area too that organize activities where all of the kids get together. It is very active giving kids plenty of opportunity to socialize.
We don't homeschool for religious reasons. We do it because we want our kids to get the best possible education without all of the indoctrination and other crap that is pushed through the public education system. This is pretty much the reason most of the other homeschoolers that I engage with do it too. I think homeschooling has a bad rap because of the media and a few bad apples but at least from my experience, that portrayal is not the norm.