I don't get it. Why can't bullying exist in the group homeschool at church? It's functionally equivalent to a school. Are you making a brand new point about traditional homeschooling (parent-child) or replying to the OP in the thread?
In home school, there is less people and more choice. There are no perverse incentives that value attendance over education and health.
Choice for whom, the student or the teacher? The teachers are the ones with the agendas, in all senses of the word.
The consequence is that every parent, given a scenario where they feel their kid is being kicked around, will remove their kid from that situation.
That's not a healthy absolute either.
Clearly, I'm not talking about extreme abuse.
But I am talking about more discomfort than I (as the parent) would want for the child in my ideal world.
Parenting is always wanting your child to suffer as little as possible. But a little suffering is good in the long run for the child.
Thus, the fundamental tension in letting parents be the ultimate arbiters of a child's experience.
But yes, I think it's healthy for my children to experience more suffering than I, ceteris paribus, would permit them to experience, if I were omnipotent.
Parents can also easily move kids to other classes to avoid unwelcome company.
B) There is, in practice, no meaningful freedom of association in the real world. Childhood is an appropriate time to learn skills to mitigate the downsides of that fact, including forcing bullies to suffer consequences.
Yeah, bullies generally aren't scared by "the rules" or by the fact that what they're doing is technically illegal either.
This is definitely not the case in the schools our kids go to. The class sizes/composition are shaped by the demands of the teacher's union, we recently learned.
We always thought that the parent survey the school sent out, asking about your child, was so that our kid could be put in a class with a teacher who would be compatible. Not so, we learned!
The information was used to create class cohorts that are evenly balanced, and only after this happens are cohorts assigned to teachers. But at this point in the process, the desires of 20 distinct families cannot be used to match students with teachers.
Instead of focusing on matching certain types of students (those who need more remedial work, those who need more advanced work, etc.) with teachers who are good at providing that type of learning, the school is focused on making sure that all of the teachers have the same class composition, so that none of them can claim to have a "worse" class than anyone else.
I think you meant "there are fewer people." Were you home schooled? Perhaps public school English would have been a better option.
Funny, as a public-school attendee, I would expect the opposite given how many of my peers sailed through on cruise-control with crappy teachers who were sometimes dumber than the kids.
In a way the group homeschool can be thought of like a small private school, it's just simpler to handle personal problems in a small group.
Or they can approve of the bullying. Or they can do nothing because they don’t care, or because they’re socially subservient to the bully’s parents.
It’s simpler to handle personal problems in a small group, it’s also easier for them to fester in a closed group.
The parents also have the option of reorganizing the group to kick the bully’s parents out, along with the bully.
This model isn't new and had problems before.
Such involved parents could never let anything happen arguments ignore how these things develop as less involved parents cargo cult. (You can't get much more blatant in a drop in actual involvement than the example in the article.)
These kinds of groups connecting themselves to actual home schooling will erode it by association.
2. If the parents care enough to homeschool, why would they not care about bullying?
3. Socially subservient to the bully's parents? This feels like a hopelessly contrived and niche edge case that is effectively meaningless because it would be so rare
4. I'm not convinced personal problems fester moreso in a closed group (see: armed forces), and further I'm not convinced homeschooling groups are closed in the first place
All this to say I don't think your argument has any merit and is based on convenient and unlikely hypotheticals.
That describes lots of communities where abuse is epidemic.
Word gets around, but not necessarily from the right people, and - if bad outcomes are not guaranteed - there is nevertheless a strong incentive for it to fall on deaf ears, stronger than it would be in a less tight-knit community.