Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dragonwriter | Hacker News Reader

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> Why are people in the US so against public schools?

Mostly, even homeschoolers, aren’t.

They either (and the latter is, I guess, a special case of the former, but worth calling out separately) think the existing public schools available to them are a failure in general or for the specific needs of their children that is unresolvable in time to adequately serve their children without being “against public schools” more generally (I’ve known people who work in public education and homeschool that are in this group with regard to their children’s specific needs), or they are ideologically opposed to education that isn’t guided by indoctrination in their particular religious/ideological beliefs and believe that the current public schools available to them are inadequate on those grounds.

For example:

I previously worked in the public schools, and in a museum education program that worked 90% with public school classes. My mom was a public school teacher before I was born. My sister, who I'm quite close to, still works in the public schools. We all went to public schools in my neighborhood. My middle child goes to a public school that I can see from my living room. There's no opposition to public school in my family.

When my oldest finished his public Montessori elementary school and went to the district's Highly Gifted school at age 12, it was a major step back for him. 40 minutes each way on the bus just to be at a school that was cookie-cutter and wasn't able to support his needs, particularly advanced math -- I don't think there's a single teacher in the building who even knows how to assess the gaps in his knowledge; they were trying to teach him what an exponent is when what he actually needed was to fill in gaps in calculus about techniques like Lagrange Multipliers. So he's home with me, because it's better for him. Public school was fine for him as a younger kid, and it's still good for other kids, but it's not a good fit for him now.

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