In business, you should never outsource your core competency. I wonder if I really should be outsourcing the raising of my kids,that I love most in the world (of course I love my husband too).
Your kids aren't a business, life isn't a business, we should stop trying to optimise everything as if it was a startup, you're already outsourcing 99.9% of your life anyways
Home schooling properly isn't easy, you'll infuses your biases deep into your kids without even noticing it, unless you country's schools are dogshit I'd let them go there
Homeschooling is a feature, not a bug.
> corrupt
In what way ?
it goes without saying that there would be a lot of money and power invested in infusing the future voting public with certain biases not necessarily in their best interest
https://www.heritage.org/education/commentary/im-former-teac...
https://www.reddit.com/r/unpopularopinion/comments/feqtuo/te...
Parents send their kids to school to get an education, not be pushed propaganda.
[0]https://data.oecd.org/eduresource/education-spending.htm
[1]https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2017/02/15/u-s-student...
[2]https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/education/us-students-c...
As an evolutionary developmental biologist, I was trained that the key ingredient to adapting to changing environments is phenotypic diversity (diversity has to precede natural selection). If you think the current system of mass technology, mass corporations, and mass culture are sustainable and desirable, leave your children in a system originally created to meet the needs of the barons of the industrial revolution. They'll fit right in and never notice what they are missing.
Long-term, monocultures are rarely sustainable and generally quite boring. So, if you question the value of our current system (e.g., wealth/power distribution) or think it is unsustainable (e.g., global warming), you might want to raise your children outside of the system. They can always choose to conform later, but it is much harder to reacquire the true creativity that comes from not feeling the internal need to conform.
I was raised outside "the system", but entered the system to get a PhD in evolutionary computational biology and now work for a health related biotech. I got my position because I have a distinctively different approach to problems than most.
On the other hand I can't stand the evangelism of many homeschoolers such as yourself. We tend to avoid homeschooling groups. They (we? :( ) aren't good for just having normal conversations and a laugh with.
> When playing with similarly aged peers, they are consistently the leaders of play because they...
Yeah I know the type. Otherwise known as the precocious brat children everyone else can't wait to get away from.
Absolutely true about me since I have zero interest in being normal and prefer discussing science/philosophy over chitchat. I have a son on the autism spectrum and he didn't fall far the tree. My wife, on the other hand, is much more approachable. To each their own.
> precocious brat children everyone else can't wait to get away from
Perhaps you misunderstood what I was saying about the value of creative play. Other kids beg to come play with our kids because they don't get the chance to experience creative, imaginative play to the same degree in other contexts.
> Other kids beg to come play
Jesus
How does your approach differ?
The stakes are high, and teaching is _hard_.
(Of course, deployment of energy and resources must also be considered. Homeschooling is a TON of effort and might not be worth it for only marginal gains...)
For homeschooling to be the best option, the local schools need to be not only worse than you, they need to be net negative. There are some places with such terrible schools, but if you have the disposable income to spend all day at home teaching the kids, use it to move someplace with better schools.
Homeschooling is not just for anti-establishment weirdos anymore, "normal" people seem to take the leap a lot more.
Not sure what's holding us back; some combination of inertia, fear, doubt, finances no doubt.
If they show any aptitude or creative spark in some area that won't be well-served in the industrial education system, do it.
You're overstating most teachers' competency, not to mention, most of grade school is pretty damn basic... Most commentators on this site are more educated than the typical teacher.
Not to mention, the difference between teaching a class of 30 versus only 1-3 children.
I do question that having a single teacher for 20+ students teaching all subjects for the entire school year is obviously going to work better than motivated homeschooling parent(s). While teachers do have formal education on the matter, it also includes how to manage many children in a classroom setting and how to interface with schools and their processes. The part of the education pertaining to the subjects teachers teach is actually pretty incomplete. To teach elementary students, you have a major, but still teach them subjects that you might only have an average understanding of (like a history major teaching a music class).
Given all that, it doesn't seem hard to believe that parents could do better for a single child than pre-school and elementary school teachers.
As a child gets older their needs evolve such that no one person has everything required to best support that child. That is an advantage of schools (usually high school), but could also be solved with tutoring and other programs available to homeschoolers.
Teachers are babysitters first and foremost.
I chose a middle-of-the-road approach: the schools can teach them socialization skills that I can't, but I can be their full-time tutor when tests come along. That does mean you'll need to spend time re-acquainting yourself with long-forgotten high-school algebra, though.
Then again, research suggests that homeschooling doesn't have an adverse socialization impact [1]...
[1] https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/summaries/home...
"Correct."
When teaching a child to swim, you don't typically throw them into the deep end of the pool, but instead start out in a shallow structured situation until they have learned the basics.
i must therefore disagree with that premise. i was bullied (thankfully just mildly) in school, and i learned nothing from it that would have been useful later.
what we need to kids to learn is that bullying is not part of life and should not be tolerated anywhere, but should be stopped whereever possible. if we want to help children then not by letting them learn how to cope with being bullied, but teaching all children how to not be a bully, and how to recognize when others are being bullied, and how to help both the one being bullied, as well as the bully, who may well act out because they are themselves coming from a difficult situation eg at home.
doing that in a school requires active involvement from teachers and parents. absent that, going to school doesn't provide any benefit on that issue.
Bullying is real, but there is no damn reason to force little kids into it.
I don't know many workplaces that are organized into teams of 25 employees all the exact same age with just one single supervisor decades older as the sole person they spend much time with that isn't their exact age.
School's great weakness regarding socialization is it mostly teaches people how to get along with others who are the exact same age. It overemphasizes this and creates a strange cultural bubble where kids (and later young adults) are overly disconnected from the culture of older and younger generations. So much of what kids "learn" in school is from being around each other-- and what do other kids know? Not much, either. This is the blind leading the blind.
There is no good reason for this, it's just an artifact of running schools in a seemingly cost efficient way. But because we've grown up with it for a few generations now, many of us will try to justify segregating people by exact age as natural and valuable in and of itself, when it's not.
If schools mixed ages more, I'd be willing to consider school "good for socialization" but there is very little about the school environment that resembles anywhere most kids will have to spend a lot of time in as adults, especially successful ones.
btw: montessori teaches a lot of independent learning and is therefore effectively a lot less labor intensive. a single teacher can devote a lot more time to individual students because there is less need to supervise the rest of the class, because each child is busy with they own learning projects
Many of the kids in my college program who were home schooled were also kind of weird and sometimes socially crippled.
A lot of home schooled kids are clearly from incredibly conservative religious fundamentalist families, so that's a stereotype you may have to deal with and quite potentially the type of people you place your children around for extra-curricular socialization activities or in hybrid home schooling environments.
I worked with a lot of MIT graduates, and there was a definite trend of private education amongst them.
Of course that's from outside looking in, probably better to interview those who have been home schooled to get their perspectives.
I wonder if anti-social tendencies are more of a function of a child's home environment, in general, and not specifically related to homeschooling (though, of course, spending more time in the home would amplify the effect of that environment on a person's upbringing....).
I say that because I have spent time around a good number of home-schooled teenagers who live in stable, middle-class, non-extremist households and I can say that basically all of them are able to socially function at a very high level (well above average). Sure they might be hip with the latest Zoomer lingo (are teenagers still Gen-Z?) but they understood how to have intelligent conversations with adults as well as their peers (e.g. look someone in the eye when speaking to them, express their thoughts and opinions clearly, listen and understand what was being said to them).
And of course I'm terrified of the social aspect.
Regarding the social aspect, do you mean your children not getting enough social interaction with other children of the same age, or how home schooling is viewed socially?
I laughed out loud! This is a great term! And yes, these absolutely exist and are more popular now than ever!
Put them in a homeschool pod.
That said, on the other hand multiple people I knew from high school have since overdosed. So there's a spectrum no matter what you do.