Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
washingtonpost.com
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This family was part of a home school group with other families. The kids went to different houses every day and had an instructor focus on 1 subject for half of the day, mixed in with free time, depending on the age. 2 subjects per day, so as a parent your teaching commitment was a half day a week on 1 subject.
They would do field trips. They held a school play in a garage complete with costumes and video. And the kids were smart, well mannered, socially adjusted kids with very happy and normal lives. And there are plenty of sports opportunities as well. As far as I know, they all went to public high school too.
Completely shifted my view of what I thought home schooling was, which was the kids stuck in 1 house with 1 parent all day in social isolation.
The reality was closer to a model of a Montessori school which has a huge amount of success stories.
https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...
You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when they happen because they are private. Maybe you'll be a therapist and years later get to talk to one of these people how they are effectively crippled for the rest of their life. Or you'll be like me that grew up in a place that had a bunch of religious organizations that homeschooled most of their children with educations that I'd consider completely and totally deficient, and then pull those same people back into the organization as cheap/uneducated labor they could abuse.
Obviously there’s a lot of middle ground between those two extremes, and the circumstances today don’t exactly match the circumstances of the mid-19th century, which is roughly when modern public schools started appearing in the US (based on the “Prussian model”).
There are a lot of different objectives that public schooling sets out to achieve. It can be too easy to focus on narrow sets of metrics like test scores, or collect a bunch of anecdotes about bad experiences in public schools (or bad experiences in homeschooling). IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead.
Imagine your school district has banned teaching algebra to 8th graders, for reasons of equity. You're upset at this, since you have a child about to attend 8th grade. You go to a school board meeting, express yourself, and are at best ignored or more likely called names. What, from the perspective of a parent with a child who needs an education, do you then do? Fixing the system would be nice and all, but how do you do that before your kid becomes an adult, let alone make up for all the damage public schooling has been doing in the meantime?
Both suggestions require extra time, while still keeping your child "within the system" through attending school and (presumably?) receiving a decent-enough education in other non-math subjects. If the malaise extends to (many) other subjects, then I could see how home schooling becomes a more attractive option.
...so now after your child spends hours every day at school, they have to spend yet more hours learning what they should have learned in school.
You can see why so many parents decide that for more effort, they can save their child a lot of wasted time, effort, resentment, and bad influences. Particularly families where at least one parent can stay at home (and these days, working from home makes that so much easier once kids are old enough to learn by themselves).
This makes the comparison very hard, since one side is has all of its successes and failures critiqued in public, and the other side is only ever talked about with anecdotal data.
Personally I believe there should be some sort of periodic standardized test for homeschooled kids too. Even if it's not for "passing" a grade, so we know in which level of learning they are compared to everyone else.
If we can't compare them, how can we evaluate its merits and flaws?
For the SATs, homeschooled students score ~75 points higher than public school students. We can draw only limited conclusions from that, though. People self select into taking the SATs. And there's the the bigger issue of demographics: given the demographics of homeschoolers who take the SAT, you'd expect them to outperform anyway. Regardless, more data is better.
I would say that "in some states" is the key here. A lot can change depending on the state.
Which has essentially the same incentives and results that the NRA does -- cater to the craziest of your constituents, fan outrage, then push the most extreme views (to protect everyone).
As a result, HSLDA essentially says that no child abuse or sexual assault exists in the home schooling communities, because it's the only way to justify their position that zero regulation is the only appropriate amount of regulation.
Reality, of course, has a non-zero rate of abuse (which the HSLDA then does their best to hide). Warning, pretty terrible stuff: https://www.patheos.com/blogs/lovejoyfeminism/2013/05/hslda-...
But it's psychological outcomes and averages, so I'd take any study with a grain of salt. It does match my experience having home-schooled friends growing up, it's just so much more efficient to be learning at one's own pace than that of the slowest kid out of 30.
Compared to public schools, where most kids are going to take some kind of achievement test. Whether it be the SAT, ACT, or state-level grade advancement test.
Also, the demographics are pretty wonky, as they note:
- 94% white
- 97.2% two-parent marriages
- 93.8% Christian mother (no info on other parent?)
- 2-3x general pop's attainment of 4 year degree or higher
- ~2x likelihood to be in the highest income brackets (50k+)
- Essentially no home schooling families in the lowest income bracket (0.8% vs 12.6% of all families with children)I honestly think social sciences aren't all that amenable to the scientific method - too hard to control all variables - and I'm sure someone could cherry pick studies to say the opposite of what I'm posting here. But, what else can we do?
It's a miracle even drug development on the harder science side works as well as it does.
Thanks! I'll give this one a read later.
Ostensibly education is why the schools exist. If they're not going to do that, let's at least let the kids go play in the park or something. They'd probably get better socialization that way anyway.
Does anyone actually believe this? It would be more than naive to do so. On r/teachers just the other day, I was reading about one of them complaining that all they really are, are baby-sitters so they parents can work dayshift. Even they know what they're for.
But if everyone were to suddenly be willing to speak this truth aloud, it'd be too absurd to continue. People are shamed and guilted into paying the taxes for education. No one could be shamed or guilted into paying for someone else's teenager daycare.
> The math situation is a clear signal that school administration/education departments do not prioritize education, and in fact find it unfair that some students actually manage to learn something, and want to stop that.
I was in first grade in 1980 (1981?). It was like this for me the entire run of it. Wanting to learn more, hungry for it, with them rationing what I could learn to tiny little crumbs a few times throughout the school year. Studies were paced out for the dumbest kid in class. I think I made it to my sophomore year of highschool before I gave up, and when I did, that was my fault too.
It was bad even then, and at least back then they were still pretending that it was about education.
GP clearly believes it, since they wrote this. I believe it too, and I think this is a mainstream belief, not a "more than naive" one. Your one anecdote based on a Reddit rant (and, I assume, personal bias) is not nearly convincing enough to change my mind.
My anecdote, such as it is, is hardly uncommon. It is in fact, nearly a cliche at this point, or a stereotype. I sincerely doubt that me having communicated it to you is your first encounter with the idea.
As to your mind, I don't wish to change it. I am content with you remaining naive. My own children receive advantage from this. Please continue to screw up the public education system for decades, my entire lineage can only prosper the longer this continues.
So we're clear, when a teacher complains about being daycare, what they mean is they're:
- an educator
- an administrative assistant
- daycare
And so you complain about the unreasonable things, but don't mention the reasonable one... because it's literally the job.
Taking kvetching about ancillary mandates to mean that education isn't happening or isn't still the primary job is weird.
When someone disputes this, what they really mean is that they are uncomfortable with the realization that it is daycare, that it hurts them to consider that something so profoundly part of their status quo is rotten to the core, and it makes their own lives seem dishonest. They would rather than misperception that education still occurs to persist unchallenged.
> because it's literally the job.
Hasn't been, for years. It's not improving/reverting. You're willfully blind to it.
> or isn't still the primary job is weird.
Please don't mistake me. I'm not claiming that education has been secondary to other concerns. I'm saying that it doesn't happen at any significant rate at all, isn't in anyone's list of priorities, and that when it does happen it is accidental and unrepeatable.
Or, they disagree, and they have their own thoughts.
> Please don't mistake me. I'm not claiming that education has been secondary to other concerns. I'm saying that it doesn't happen at any significant rate at all, isn't in anyone's list of priorities, and that when it does happen it is accidental and unrepeatable.
As someone with two parents, multiple family members, and past partners in the profession of education, early childhood and other... we will have to agree to disagree.
I'm sure your opinions are formed from your own experiences.
Mine disagree.
Hehe, this is simply not true. Where did this conspiracy theory come from, and why do you think this poorly of people who are spending their time trying to help kids despite low pay and a constant barrage of harsh critical opinions from parents, law-makers, and hordes of armchair critics on the internet?
You’re making wild assumptions and using the worst possible motivation to build a straw man criticism. If you can do better, maybe you should get involved or consider being a school administrator?
I don’t like it when there is less support for the motivated students, and it happened to me in high school. But you are aware the situation we’re discussing is due to needing to educate 100% of the student body up to a minimum standard, right? Public schools are almost always underfunded and short-staffed. Nobody’s trying to actively prevent the smart kids from learning, they’re trying to avoid using all their resources teaching the kids that don’t need it as badly from leaving the larger group of kids who’s families have less money completely behind. Your comment is completely ignoring what happens to the students who are behind in math already, and how to get them enough help.
What is always true is that what’s best for the group isn’t necessarily best for the individual. In this case, you’re suggesting the opposite of prioritizing education for all, and thus you’re not talking about prioritizing education, you’re talking about prioritizing resources toward students that already meet the minimum standards. Schools, teachers, and administrators are trying to prioritize education for all, and they have an explicit duty to get every last kid up to basic minimum standards. If they don’t meet those goals of getting the bottom half of their classes passing, they could lose their jobs and they would be failing to prioritize education for all.
This is false. Why else ban teaching algebra district-wide to 8th graders? The explicit justification is that it helps some students get too far ahead of other students and causes inequitable access to take calculus classes later on, which is considered a bad thing.
Teachers even complain if you help your child accelerate through the textbook for the year.
If a state did the same thing with LGBT topics or evolution, I suspect you'd take no issue with calling it a ban.
Why are so many that hate public schools so focused on these two things? I don't think there's an evolution class, but it would be covered in biology.
They do want those things banned in schools and since they can't get them banned have rage quit the system.
Hahaha you mean the topics that are actually getting banned in states like Florida and Kentucky?
> giving directives that schools are not to devote any resources to teaching 8th grade algebra is in every sense equivalent to “banning teaching algebra”
Again, please provide some specific examples of this happening. Are you getting all worked up over something that is mostly made up or taken completely out of context? No way to know unless you cite the actual problem and demonstrate the magnitude of the problem.
Of course there absolutely is a huge difference between not having the resources for a class and banning it by law, and you know it. You can argue the outcomes might be equivalent, if you want, but it undermines your own argument to exaggerate.
I can't speak to local school board politics outside of SFUSD, but here's a particular example:
https://www.sfexaminer.com/forum/put-algebra-1-back-in-eight...
Opinion piece, but substantive.
https://www.sfchronicle.com/bayarea/article/sfusd-algebra-ma...
A more recent piece.
Googling it I can see that SFUSD is reconsidering https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/...
> The question is not if we can increase acceleration options, but how we can meet that need equitably and while upholding our SFUSD values
Says it all. They have the resources, but still don't want to do it because outcomes will (obviously) diverge.
The California proposal for mathematics education got a lot of play on HN over the last several months, e.g.:
Here you go: https://www.bostonglobe.com/2023/07/14/metro/cambridge-schoo...
I'm sure you'll move the goalposts and say it doesn't count.
Banning advanced math is just another instance of this. A slower paced class for lower performing students would actually help them. Bringing down advanced students only serves to make the school look more equitable.
> A slower paced class for lower performing students would actually help them.
Agreed, bingo! If you don’t have the resources to cater to people who are ahead, the only choice to help those who need help is to lower the bar.
The thing about tracking is that it doesn't require more resources. If you have 6 classes in a year, you can put e.g. the top 17% together, and they can move at a faster pace than the bottom 17%. Or you can let kids take classes with mixed ages. Gifted kids don't need more resources. Literally you could have them go sit in the library and do what they want and they'd probably learn more than sitting in a class where they're forced to pay attention to something they've already mastered. When I was in calculus I was bored enough that I would also read my uncle's discrete math book that he let me borrow, but most teachers don't like when you ignore them, and when you're in a class with the lower end of the aptitude curve, there's negative peer pressure around being a nerd.
Hehe of course it does. You’re talking about more curriculums, more book and material acquisition, more teachers with more training, etc. And maybe lots of schools don’t have 6 different math classes.
> Gifted kids don’t need more resources.
Agreed! That’s maybe why some schools are focusing on the kids who do need more resources?
In fairness to your argument, I think “gifted” kids do need support though, it’s just that they are statistically better at either having it given to them outside of school, or of finding it on their own. What’s left is just a rather weak argument about not letting them get bored. Solving boredom should take a back seat to solving education for the less fortunate, IMO.
> What’s left is just a rather weak argument about not letting them get bored. Solving boredom should take a back seat to solving education for the less fortunate, IMO.
Okay, then let the advanced kids go sit in the library, go outside and play, or go home. Making them sit in class is, if anything, going to make them anti-social and create resentment toward the "dumb" kids. I don't think torturing a kid making them sit bored out of their mind among people they don't like for 15% of their life for no reason is a "weak" thing to argue against.
But the objection is "inequity". Surely this extra effort creates more inequity?
I always laugh at the people insist it's best to let their kids be guinea pigs while public school systems which aren't even utilized but it's most vocal advocates for their own children are on a multi decade track of "figuring it out".
The most likely place someone is to experience violence in their lifetime is in a school, sexual abuse and assault rates are higher than in the Catholic Church or BSA by population. You can't be mad at people for opting out while the rest of the advocates figure it out for the 5th decade of objective decline and empty promises when problems they've experienced when they were in school haven't even been addressed or have gotten worse. They may be voting for the right people and are active advocates for better education but their kids are in immediate need of a better education.
Your "dogwhistle" is itself a dogwhistle (your obvious implication being "only a racist Trumptard could support allowing students to take algebra in 8th grade"). Ironic, in that the people defending the decision implicitly believe that non-white people are less capable of learning algebra than white people. Which itself is stupid, from a historical point of view. Who, after all, first formulated algebra?
Here's my lived experience: algebra in 7th grade, black boy. I'd have been better off taking it later, and making it up with summer geometry, trig, and precalc courses /certs in between algebra, algebra ii, calc, and diff eq/calc ii in high school. If that meant my classmates could have a better chance of keeping up, all the better; being in the historically lily-white gifted track at my magnet high school didn't do much in the way of convincing my teachers not to give up on me at the first sign of weakness. Yet another nuance you either miss or refuse to acknowledge.
The supplementary courses were provided by the school system, by the way. I would have taken them, but I was working or otherwise predisposed. If you really cared, you'd be advocating for the same (especially since a large portion of the general failure to attain math competency in America is due to our excessively long summer breaks).
That's a bit of an understatement. I'm not great at history, but my understanding is that the mid-19th century was a little lacking in videoconferencing software, educated people with the resources to be on the other end of that video link, population density to have enough other like-minded kids within driving... uh, horse-riding range, up to date books, parents who weren't gone to the factories or fields during the day, etc.
> There are a lot of different objectives that public schooling sets out to achieve.
Agreed. There is a smaller set of objectives that they actually do achieve.
> IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead.
I would assert that it's impossible to fix this broken system, and I can cite a lot of past history. I would also assert that replacing it entirely with homeschooling (which is not a single thing, but whatever) is also a guaranteed path to failure. The only hope I see is for exploration to be possible, and for people in the different situations to learn from each other. The public school institutions do try to experiment, but are incredibly restricted in all sorts of ways. Homeschoolers have the training wheels off and are much more free to crash straight into the bushes or off a cliff, but in practice plenty don't and plenty come up with a lot of different ways of doing things, some of them that seem to be working quite well in practice — academically, socially, etc.
I agree that sucking resources out of public schools to benefit the privileged few is very troubling and worrisome. But so is the current state and trajectory of public schooling, and holding everyone back may be short term fair but long term disastrous.
We're homeschooling one of our kids (both until recently, when one went to a public charter high school). We've seen the institutional effects firsthand. Simple example: we found excellent math resources, but they weren't "A-G" accredited for University of California entrance requirements. Which gave us pause, since we wanted to leave that option open. We ended up going through a A-G accredited program, the best of what we could identify, for a semester. It was crap: rote memorization of algorithms exactly matching to the state standards, lots of repetitive exercises, minimally useful feedback from teachers and their assistants. My son passed all of their tests and got an A+ grade, and is now a semester behind in math because none of that stuck in a way that is useful for building on. It was a waste of time. We gave up on it and the whole accredited path, and went back to an online program that is far more conceptual, rigorous, and just plain effective. (His earlier public school experience was somewhere in the middle, Again he did quite well there according to the state tests.)
My guess is that it's yet another form of enshittification: A-G accreditation is very valuable, but once you get it there's no profit in increasing quality, only in growing your student base. There aren't enough accredited places to provide any competition on quality, especially when there's so much disagreement about what "quality" is in the first place, and as usual any useful definition ends up being expensive. Non-accredited places have to compete on quality.
(For anyone who finds value in my personal opinions: Silicon Valley High School math bad, Art of Problem Solving math good.)
"Mistakes of this size are never made innocently." ~Ayn Rand
Inequality of education is a symptom of a self reinforcing broken economic system.
Meanwhile, if I can provide a superior education and social experience for my children, Im glad to have the opportunity to do so. I’ve seen bad outcomes and good ones from homeschooling, and in my particular case I am absolutely delighted with the results (now that my children are adults)
But to achieve that my wife and I invested our entire lives, uprooting ourselves and living experiences with our children as part of their education, sailing around on a boat we rebuilt and going to local schools in other languages as their cultural preparation. It was a bit hellish for my wife and I but the 6 years we invested in that paid unbelievable dividends for our children. Most people can’t or won’t do that.
We weren’t (financially) rich, but I have always prioritized my freedom over material wealth, and you can do amazing things on a modest (60k/year was our passive income from contracting at that time) budget if you have complete control of your time.
I suspect that the education kids get at the worst 20% of public schools in the country is still way better than the worst 20% of homeschoolers.
I also would totally believe that the education kids get at the top 20% of homeschools is better than the average public school.
Public schools are far from perfect, but there are minimum standards and there are resources at the state and federal level to try to improve schools that aren't meeting those standards.
My problem with homeschools is that in most states, there aren't any standards being enforced. If homeschools had surprise inspections and biannual state-run testing, I'd be fine with it.
It's kind of the democracy versus authoritarianism debate. Authoritarians typically look really good on paper because they can conceal their mistakes, while the democracy bears all to the populace. And yea, there are some benevolent dictatorships with great outcomes, but I don't think that a single one of the homeschoolers would think that would be a valid point because it's also the exception.
> homeschooling has horrific and hidden outcomes
Please tell me more, as a homeschooled and successful software engineer and family guy I'm interested. Several people in my family are or have been homeschooled. I could tell you where they're at right now but I've bragged enough with myself already.
Yes, there can be horrific and hidden outcomes with homeschooling. Also with public education. Also with woodworking. Or having kids. Or cooking.
It's about how you do something, and why you do it.
Sorry for being so condescending, but your statements are offensive in their absurdity.
> Please tell me more
https://www.hsinvisiblechildren.org/fatalities/
The root issue is that the homeschooling community, in their general distrust and suspicion of government authority has pushed hard for zero oversight and regulation (mostly through the HSLDA).
In most states, they've been able to achieve that.
And as potentially valid of a goal as avoiding oversight by someone you don't trust might be, it has willingly created a void.
A void that the homeschooling community itself doesn't police.
Consequently, when you do have the worst of the worst home outcomes... there's no one to turn to. And HSLDA even has specific playbooks to help parents avoid CPS intervention.
These cases are then buried to the extent possible (lobbying, media removal requests) because their very existence threatens the overall goal.
What are a few broken eggs to make an omelette, though?
This is horrific.
> What are a few broken eggs to make an omelette, though?
I hope my comments don't suggest that this is the perspective of my thinking.
However I think we should make an effort of separating extreme cases from the norm. It is unjust to judge homeschooling as a concept by these very unfortunate fringe cases, when there's heaps of proven success cases on the other side, furthermore taking into account that abuse also happens despite kids going to public or even private schools.
And also taking into account that the protection laws that are so mentioned here have also been often abused by the government against innocent and honest people and their families.
Most of this stuff is driven by religion and politics.
As so is the backlash. I get the impression that the emotional foundation to many of the objections to homeschooling is the idea that some kids will get a (home-schooled) education that doesn't conform to the commenter's politics or values. School has long been a mechanism for a dominant group to impose its politics and values on other people's kids. Public schools are just a milder form of that than Indian residential boarding schools or Chinese boarding preschools (https://www.nytimes.com/2023/09/15/opinion/china-tibet-board...), but they still perform the same function.
Homeschooling provides an escape from those functions (and other problems), and that's one I'd certainly want available to myself. I can imagine how nightmarish it'd be to be forced to send my kids to one of those Chinese boarding schools.
Deficits of empathy like those that would deny that escape (and the attendant hypocrisy) are getting really grating to me, even in people I more or less agree with.
IMO, private religious schools with appropriate regulation (ie not some indoctrination academy) are a great thing, and I think supporting families in some way to avail themselves of them is a good compromise.
As I stated elsewhere here, my kids went to catholic schools and did great. I’m not approaching this as a “thou shalt public school” perspective. I also coached baseball to age 15, and I can tell you that kids benefit from someone who isn’t mom or dad instructing them.
Is that "typical"?
It's a leap to assume that it's "typical" that homeschooling parents incompetent and incapable of educating their children. If anything, I'd assume the extra attention and emotional investment that's possible could make up for a lack of a educational credentials.
It's also a leap that the public schools would do better. It's also a common theme here that a motivation for homeschooling lack of academic rigor or outright failure of the public schools. I could see homeschooling as the only realistic option for a parent who lives in a failing school district (which are depressingly common) but is not wealthy enough to afford private school tuition (and has no access to vouchers).
And I'm not really biased here: I send my kids to public school.
These don't need to be exceptional, but they do probably need to be above-average to do a decent job, and obviously time and wealth are entangled (no time if have to work two jobs).
You literally do not know what you're talking about. Go read the article I linked, which you clearly did not bother to do.
Yesterday, there was a teach complaining that they weren't allowed to flunk students who did not show up for class. For middle school. They weren't allowed to flunk students who scored 0% on tests, because they would sit at the back of class and play on smartphones the entire time, or disruptively talk to other students.
When they would demand from administration some kind of answer, they'd be told they weren't doing enough to engage the students.
You claim there are minimum standards, and technically that's true... any of us could look those standards up on the internet in only a moment, those standards are ignored for some incredibly large fraction of public schools.
> If homeschools had surprise inspections and biannual state-run testing, I'd be fine with it.
The great thing is, I don't have to put up with you being fine with how my wife and I teach our children. We don't have to answer to you.
I'm not just a contrarian here. You are fine with what the public schools are doing, right now. Your oversight, such as it is, doesn't seem to be effective at doing any of the things that I could want. It does lead me to be suspicious about what it is that you want.
If an argument is based on a single specific case, then an extreme argument can be constructed about anything.
E.g. public school teachers duct taping students to desks
E.g. home schooling parents sexually abusing their children
These things happen at non-zero rates, but neither are representative of the general population.
Letting parents opt out of public schools means that the most committed abusers get to sidestep this safety valve.
Any distraction from a school's primary mission to educate disparately impacts the people who need it most.
School's primary mission is to serve the needs of a societies children.
Inactive children don't learn as well as active children (especially boys). Hungry children don't learn as well as feed children. Abused children don't thrive.
I'm deeply curious why you don't want public school children feed or protected from abuse.
My children are more important to me than, well... just about anything. Including your children or anyone else's.
If other people are so subhuman as to harm their own children, then that's a sacrifice I'm willing to make so that my children aren't abused by the public school system, aren't turned into idiots by the public school system, and aren't indoctrinated by the public school system.
Do you think that when there's a string of tweenage suicides, that the contagion didn't spread via public schools? Am I supposed to put my kids at risk of that, just so you can pretend you'll catch the 1-in-10,000 of horrific abuse, which CPS will just ignore anyway?
You offer a bad bargain. I pay everything and get nothing. Fortunately (and I mean this in a way that the words just can't do it justice... "fortune" of the sort like out of Greek mythology where the gods have smiled upon me and bestowed every blessing and boon) I don't have to take that deal.
Primary schooling's mission is to educate children about capabilities to provide for themselves and those in there care as well as operate as how to perform and behave as productive members of society. Ancillary benefits are nice, but not required, to achieve that mission, thus should only be included in the strategy to the point that they support the overall mission.
So kids learn better when both active and not hungry? Yep, we know this, and thus justifies having lunch, cafeterias, gyms, and PE class. (We should have more funding for these things).
So kids learn better when not abused? Yep, we know this, and thus schools are typically required reporters. (And thank goodness they are -- we should fund more training on these things).
What you missed in my prior comment was that the argument wasn't against any of these outcomes. It was bemoaning that society requires these ancillary benefits in schools in order for society to continue operating at all, not that it's nice that schools are available as resources to provide what should be a child's primary caregiver's responsibilities.
Thus my comment. Schools shouldn't have to be police, meal kitchens, exercise facility, or child care in order for society to function. But they too often are. It's a failure of policy to which no one holds others to account. And insisting or expecting that schools provide these as primary responsibilities does harm to the students to whom need these in their lives, but for the school would not have them.
Help the marginal student? Yes, absolutely, we should fund.
Provide long term assistance (disguised welfare) through the schools? Not appropriate, a full change in situation is warranted for basic needs to be met for children by their caregivers.
Consider this. During the pandemic, we could have conscripted all school teachers in the first few weeks to deliver food to everyone within their school operating areas. A ready, idle workforce to solve one of the fundamental problems, allowing virtually everyone but teachers to remain locked down while focusing use of protective gear during its limited availability. Why didn't we rely on the schooling workforce to deliver food during lockdown? Most of the answers I can see apply to long term welfare and social safety net assistance being provided through schools as well -- training, safety, and other elements that simply aren't appropriate to expect of educators.
You said:
> Completely disagree. [...] Any distraction from a school's primary mission to educate disparately impacts the people who need it most.
This response makes it sound like you don't "Completely disagree." after all.
I've explained my disagreement sufficiently. Have a good day.
but even if that's what the author meant, what's wrong with education being a necessary support for other goals?
it's always quite hard to identify tangible skills that traditional education actually teaches, and explain why those are important to the real lives of graduates. the average person needs, day-to-day, pretty minimal R,W&A skills.
Absolutely insane take.
This is a street that goes both ways. I had parents who were caring, nurturing, and not even remotely abusive. The other children at my public school were physically and emotionally merciless, and the school didn't give a shit. When I started standing up to my bullies and fighting back, I was the one who got in trouble, not them.
In my n=1 data set and lived experience, public schools are the evil, twisted abuse enablers, not the parents.
And you don't need n=1, this is extremely common.
Not sure which is worse.
I have an education thanks to my family and despite public education. I was partially homeschooled. It was my family who helped me go through high-school, not the other way around. For the high-school I went to, I could have (and almost did at one point) ended up being dead, for all they cared.
I won't deny there's abuse and cases in which public institutions have helped and saved people, but by assuming that this is the norm you completely overshot it here with your absolutism.
I disagree with your risk assessment, though. Most kids who are abused are most likely to be abused by a parent, not a stranger. (source: https://www.nationalchildrensalliance.org/media-room/nationa...)
Homeschool requirements vary wildly by state, and even in states with more requirements like testing, kids slip through the cracks. I was never required to take a standardize test by either of the states I lived in (Washington and Oregon). I knew a homeschool girl my age (12) who could not read. Her 16 year old brother could read, but could barely do math. They had no learning disabilities, their mom just wanted the welfare paycheck for them and otherwise ignored them. She already had a 5 year old and a newborn as well to keep the gravy train coming.
I had very little access to mandated reporters, and again nothing enforced by law. Those I did have access to, like my annual visit to my doctor, my mother insisted in sitting in the exam room with me. The doctors made no effort to remove her (they asked me in front of her if I was comfortable with her staying. Of course I said yes, I would have been severely punished at home if I admitted I wanted her to leave.)
Safety rules are not made with the 99% of good people in mind, but to catch the 1% of bad actors. Homeschooling is attractive to good parents because they can improve the outcomes for their children. It is also attractive to bad, abusive parents because it removes children from any external oversight and support structures outside their abuser's control.
I am not trying to downplay any risks here, and even less disregard very unfortunate situations and cases that for sure happen more often than they should.
However I can't see how this becomes as absolute as the parent comment is suggesting, in which by default it is assumed that parents are nefarious agents and public school is the saviour.
Which brings me to:
> Safety rules are not made with the 99% of good people in mind, but to catch the 1% of bad actors.
The risk in accepting this, as it happens so often in society, is ending up having to downgrade everyone to the worst case scenario, and working from that.
> The risk in accepting this, as it happens so often in society, is ending up having to downgrade everyone to the worst case scenario, and working from that.
I think most folks would be fine with homeschooling if there were reasonable regulation for it, including sharing your curriculum and schedule with the state, and allowing surprise inspections during your schedule, so that abuses can be found.
The biggest problem with homeschooling right now is that the lobbying group for homeschooling is vehemently opposed to any form of regulation, which makes it the wild west, which allows abusers to flourish.
If homeschooling wants to prevent the worst excesses, it has to standardize oversight and enforcement mechanisms.
"Zero regulation is the only acceptable amount of regulation," the talking point, enables abuse.
Not by the 99% who are doing it well!! But by the few bad apples out there.
By my thinking:
- Requiring a child be registered with the state as homeschooled
- Requiring a background check on parents who homeschool, and disqualifying those with child abuse priors
- Taking annual standardized tests (grade level or better)
- Surprise inspections (once a year? With parent-requested follow-up surprise inspections, if the first happened on a bad day)
And the homeschooling community should want these things too, because they would provide a firm rebuttal to anyone attacking the practice from a perspective of abuse.
But now... when some abuse happens... but there are continued calls for zero oversight...
That's not a great look.
I'm glad you had a good school experience. I was lucky to avoid the worst of it, but I knew kids who grew up with lifelong PTSD from the bullying / abuse, and complete apathy of the school system.
Likewise, I knew kids at school who had terrible home lives. This was almost a result of drug or alcohol abuse, or just plain neglect on the part of the parents. The children were treated as an annoyance or inconvenience. These parents were glad that school got them out of their sight; I'm sure if boarding schools were free they would happily sent their kids off to one.
I'm convinced that the percentage of parents that would actively make it a full time job to torment their children by homeschooling them is a vanishingly small number. Bad parents simply don't care about their children.
You just described public schools, Universities, and their relationship to the student loan racket. Deficient education followed by indentured servitude through loan repayment. False advertising by public school teachers of a ticket to the easy life through any university degree. If I had a nickel for every person I've met who had their life messed up by that lie, I'd be rich
You're also not going to hear about the homeschooling horrors from the typical HN demographic. Broadly, and obviously with exceptions, there are two groups of parents who choose to homeschool: 1. Parents who have an abundance of educational resources and time and do it to provide a higher quality of education, and 2. Parents who do it for religious separatism reasons because public school gets in the way of their indoctrination. Selection bias means you're going to see a lot of the outcomes from #1 posting here, and not a lot of #2.
For every example who was homeschooled with a high-quality curriculum, had great parent-run extracurriculars, socialized well, and so on, how many examples are invisibly stuck as someone's housewife who can't even be employed because their only textbook was the Bible, and they didn't learn anything past 3rd grade math? They're not posting their horror story here on HN.
I have a relative who is deeply religious. I know I would not agree with her on, for example, evolution. But she is loving and devoted and her two daughters have received tons of time and investment from her in their education, far more than they would receive in a public school.
I obviously haven't, like, tested her kids, but they do seem smart and well adjusted. I'm not really worried about the limitations on their scientific learning — it's not ideal if they are skipping some evolutionary biology (I actually have no idea but I assume they are) but they are going to leave home, go to college in a very secular country and get to learn that stuff. I'm sure with the internet they are already widely exposed to what science has to say about e.g. the creation of the universe (which, honestly, how many high school students could walk you through?).
By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible" and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.
They’re pretty common, in fact. Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/
“The Bible is the only education you need” is a very common meme among evangelical Christians.
> and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.
Most states have almost no recourse to reject submitted curricula, no matter how specious they are. One influential homeschool association has a 24/7 legal hotline specifically for subverting these mild attempts at accountability.
> Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/
Contrary to your claim, the linked page implies nothing about the Bible being the "only textbook". It simply offers a set of Bible lessons for homeschoolers ("This exciting curriculum contains homeschool lessons that cover the entire Bible chronologically in four years…").
As for your last statement: in most states there's no oversight. Sure, parents have to file a curriculum that gets reviewed and approved. Parents jump through that hoop by downloading a curriculum and mailing it in. There's nobody checking that they actually follow any of that curriculum. There's no state-run testing as a check and balance.
My kids went to a Catholic elementary school, where I was the school board president. A breakaway group tried to insert a “classical education” curriculum on the school, which is a popular trend in more right-wing Christian schools that was adopted from homeschool curriculum.
The biggest growth in private schooling is in this and similar curriculum. It’s attractive to more reactionary people as they can assert “local control” while using texts that are too old to be considered controversial.
Parents aren’t to blame necessarily, people want what’s good for their kids. But awful elements of society are abusing religion to achieve their social ends. In my case, I was accused of being a “Marxist” for not condemning a fundraiser that provided winter clothing for poor children, including migrants swooped up and shipped across the country. We’ve allowed people to be brainwashed by charlatans.
To be clear, a 'classical education' refers to a traditional form of education where you break up a child's education into grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages and then mainly use primary sources. There's nothing wrong with this system and it was likely the way many people, including Marx, were educated. The idea that this is 'right wing' is bonkers to me.
If you don’t like it, though, there are less successful countries in this world that still persecute people based on religious belief. You are free to try one out. See how it goes.
I don’t agree with parent, but the reasons are vastly more nuanced than “your ancestors were religious so you’re wrong.” And that’s ignoring the even weirder swipe suggesting parent move to a different country.
Instead I simply suggested a reflection: would you still feel this was a good thing to do if it was your great great grandparents having their children seized? Wouldn’t a great many of us have had our families broken?
I’m an atheist and evolutionary biology is my favorite field outside of CS, but unless you are personally working on figuring out how things actually work, I’m not sure how one belief over another benefits the average person.
Evidence, when not absolute, is as useful as the lack of it.
People accept evolution without having a clue about it.
1) The amount of evidence for a claim. 2) The grandiosity of the claim.
If you tell me you have a pet dog named "Spike" I probably would be willing to accept that with as little evidence as a picture of you holding a dog, found in your wallet [i might even take your word for it, if i knew you to be an otherwise mostly honest person]. Because, dogs exist and are plentiful, billions of people own dogs, and "Spike" is a common name. you may be fooling me (it may be the neighbors dog) but i'm still justified in the believe because the evidence rises to the claim.
If on the other hand you claim that you have a pink polka dotted flying dragon as as a pet named "Chester". I would be a fool to believe you. I have no evidence such a thing exists, or that people have them as pets. I would have to see it in person, and even then, i would need to get a report from teams of biologists/zoologists to be willing to accept the claim. It would require tons more evidence.
And yet, the claim STILL isn't _that_ preposterous. The dragon would be an animal, and i know animals exist. I know there are animals with scales, i know some animals fly. I even now there are some with wild coat patterns.
Now if you tell me you believe in an all powerful all knowing god who is responsible for why there is life? I have zero evidence, i have no experience like what you are describing. I've never been given evidence of a being outside of time and space. I don't know that that is even a thing. I don't know what all powerful is, or if that could exist? or all knowing? is that possible? I have no correlary to compare to. It's not like we know King Neptune exists, and while not infinitely powerful, is still pretty boss. Why would i believe that was the explanation for why there are creatures on this planet?
Evolution, on the other hand, has mounds of evidence. We have a powerful fossil record, We went thru a pandemic that shows the power of mutation. Even our own ability to drink milk. And yet even evolution isn't making all that fanciful of predictions. It doesn't claim to know your thoughts, or how you will die. So the evidence rises to claim. Do we know everything there is to know about evolution? Could we be wrong in some areas? Sure. But we are justified in accepting it.
However, I think you either have too high an opinion of how people go about their ideas and beliefs, or you trust too much in the power and protagonism of reasoning.
I'd bet a lot, if not most of the people, don't go as far as you described. They believe in evolution because that's what's believed right now, and they got taught that in school. Try having a critical conversation about evolution with the average Joe, see what you find out.
Truth is everyone has faith in something. I have faith in God, so I believe certain things that might not seem rational to someone. Other people have faith in science and scientists and teachers, so they believe certain things which definitely don't seem rational to me. They don't have proof, they don't understand the reasonings, they haven't seen evidence. They just have faith in "the experts". And so they believe.
Anyway, why is the idea of God being real _that_ preposterous?
as for trusting in experts, there's no question that that is problematic in the extreme. However, it comes back to how the evidence rises to the claim. Can a group of people be experts in a subject? How can we validate that? Can we verify that their are experts in how electrical wiring works? To a large degree we can. We have lots of evidence. Do they know everything, probably not, but i can have confidence that they are mostly correct. Can we verify there are experts in evolution? Again, i think we can. They have produced mountains of evidence. Do they know everything? No. But they are likely largely correct. Can we verify there are experts in God? What are the tests? How do we verify these experts?
You mention faith, and i have to ask, what good is faith? Is there anything you could _not_ believe, based on faith? If faith has no mechanism to filter out anything, does it tell you anything about what is true or likely true?
There's usually low risk in trusting that a contractor is an expert in electrical wiring if they say so, and I usually trust plumbers or tradesmen to know their stuff and do their work. And how many times I've been wrong.
But my point is that most people don't go through this verification process, examining the credentials of scientists, taking a look at the evidencie, studies, papers, reasoning, etc. that backs up evolution. So it's not a rational belief. It's faith in other people, or a system.
If people did that, they would get to the conclusion that a lot of evidence points at the possibility of evolution being true. But by no means it's proven beyond doubt.
I don't know about your education or professional background, but from my side as a software engineer I very well understand that you can pile up evidence that will point you in a certain direction, and afterwards you might get that small 0.1% that will turn things completely around.
Regarding your questions about faith, I would not say that's how faith works. I have reasons behind what I have faith in. Right now I would not be able to switch my faith to something else just because.
Hebrews 11:1 - Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.
That something is not visible does not mean it doesn't make sense.
Could I be wrong? I guess I could, by definition, and I would be rejecting a scientific theory. Could you be wrong? What's the consequence of that?
Unlike the natural world, the supernatural cannot be observed nor reproduced so it necessarily requires faith in order to function.
In more concrete terms: I don't know how my microwave oven works. I've never built one and don't have a degree in microwave oven technology. But I still don't need to have faith that it works--I can observe it working and if I wanted to, I could take it apart and observe its subcomponents working. I don't do this, but just the fact that I could means that I don't have to blindly believe in it or conjure up explanations about how it works.
you can still be justified in a belief if the prevailing evidence rises to the claim. We can be wrong about anything, and certainly in the mid 1800's people probably thought they knew how physics worked pretty well. They were wrong, of course, However, until evidence was produced that discounted their existing evidence, they were justified in that belief, and, it mostly worked for all intents and purposes for the tests they proposed/attempted, even tho quantum physics says something quite surprisingly different.
>> I would not be able to switch my faith to something else just because.
i don't doubt you. However, 9 billion people can use the process of faith to believe things, including things you think are horrendous. How do you discount their beliefs, while being confident in yours, if all you have is faith to discern the difference? If you are discerning a difference, that difference is coming from somewhere else, likely evidence and rationality. So the process of faith, itself, is not trustworthy, as i'm guessing you feel that at least half the planet is using faith and coming to the wrong conclusions.
After her eldest child was bordering on middle school age and still completely illiterate, she wound up sending the lot back to public schools. Thank god, but I still feel awful for those kids.
(Mandatory “not all homeschoolers” of course.)
As you say, learning the basics of evolution is something that can be done on your own in a weekend reading wikipedia. Similarly, you can learn the mainstream scientific explanations of how the universe was created from watching a few youtube videos. That's basically how I learned that stuff as an (atheist) homeschooled kid.
School seems to fail to teach the philosophy of science well anyway - skepticism, evidence, double-blind testing, etc. So I don't think evangelical homeschoolers are missing that much.
The current internet makes it very easy to self-select (intentionally or not) a bubble, and then never see anything outside of it (or only see one-sided takes you agree with about the “debate”). Given the algorithms major platforms use, I suspect it would be relatively easy to create a bubble in which evolution is never treated as real, and where dinosaur bones were planted to fool people.
Public schools themselves indoctrinate children--just with a different set of values than many parents have. The people who built the US system of widespread compulsory public schooling in the US were quite explicit about that being one of the primary purposes of the system. (So were the people who built the Prussian system that was referenced elsewhere in the thread.)
Yale flew me out to interview for a biology graduate program. I had the credentials and test scores to be considered, but was turned down, quite possibly because of those stereotypes (based on the questions I got in the interview process).
You get things like a Christian family whose "curriculum" for their daughters was: listen to classical music, bible listening 20 minutes/day, handwriting, bible memorization, exercise 15/day (not great so far, but wait for it): clean room 6/week, fold laundry 5/week, clean living room 5/week, clear off bar 6/week, tidy shelves in dining room 3/week, tidy stereo cabinet 2/week, clean brown cupboard in pantry 5/week, clean storeroom 1/week, tidy blue chest, dust piano, clean and vacuum, clean hallway, make bed...
Part of good media literacy is being able to discern the facts from the opinion on the part of the reporter. In this case: Yes, it's clear that the LWT team skews pretty liberal, and because of that, they and I are going to disagree on a lot. But you really don't need to spin the fact that numerous groups of extremely christian parents are providing home schooling that borders on (and sometimes crosses into) child abuse. The way children are treated as parents property in this country is fucking disgusting. This is not simply "someone's child" this is what will eventually become a person, a person who will have to work to earn a living the same as the rest of us, a person who will have to reckon with global politics and issues, a person who will have to file taxes and send out their water bill, I could go on for the rest of the day listing off things they will almost certainly have to do, and NONE of them, not a single, sodding, fucking, solitary one of those things, is going to be helped by Jesus.
My wife grew up in an extremely religious household (not fundamentalist thankfully, but very evangelical all the same) and they completely and utterly failed her in terms of preparing her for the real world, in ways too numerous to name here. She learned a whole lot about Jesus though! Not that it did her much because she's an atheist now, and I basically have to run the logistics of the household because she can't do math.
This is among many reasons for my continued slide further from Atheist to Anti-Theist.
The point is they're not trying to not.
> This is not simply "someone's child" this is what will eventually become a person
No; they're already a person. They're also someone's child.
> and NONE of them, not a single, sodding, fucking, solitary one of those things, is going to be helped by Jesus.
This hyper-emotional take seems unrelated to the discussion. I hope things get better, though.
And my point is I think the act of trying to not is overrated.
> This hyper-emotional take seems unrelated to the discussion. I hope things get better, though.
I'm not afraid of my feelings. The notion of children being raised with nothing but their sky friend's manual is terrifying. We are already in the midst of the fallout of a society largely run by people who think the Rapture is coming soon and that the world was created by god six thousand years ago. The effects on long term planning, problem solving, addressing social ills cannot be overstated when the leadership of so many nations is convinced that God is gonna show up sometime in the next 30 years and pack up humanity like a train set, and therefore there's no point in mitigating the effects of climate change, or taking care of people who refuse to take their magical bullshit seriously and/or respect their bigotries as anything other than what they are.
If that doesn't make you emotional to think about, I think that's a you problem.
That would be very odd indeed. Quite an odd thing to claim, though.
> The notion of children being raised with nothing but their sky friend's manual is terrifying. We are already in the midst of the fallout of a society largely run by people who think the Rapture is coming soon and that the world was created by god six thousand years ago. The effects on long term planning, problem solving, addressing social ills cannot be overstated when the leadership of so many nations is convinced that God is gonna show up sometime in the next 30 years and pack up humanity like a train set, and therefore there's no point in mitigating the effects of climate change, or taking care of people who refuse to take their magical bullshit seriously and/or respect their bigotries as anything other than what they are.
This is just raw prejudice and negativity. More people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 100 years that in the previous 10000, and to a standard higher than that of kings and queens of a couple of hundred years ago. We cooperate and interoperate more; we stand our ground together against evils in the world; we fight poverty and hunger more than anyone ever could've dreamed of in history.
> If that doesn't make you emotional to think about, I think that's a you problem.
This is a non sequitur. One can feel emotions without going on hyper-emotional rants.
Absolutely correct, and none of that is achieved by people raised on a strict diet of Jesus. How many borderline illiterate people from the Appalachians are revolutionizing our world? I am not saying people not born of means are incapable of changing the world (beyond the ways in which the world has ensured it anyway) in fact I am mourning, I am mourning the loss of so much human potential, sacrificed on the altar of this anti-social libertarian experiment within which a child is completely unable to advocate for themselves, their desires, and their being until they turn the magic age of 18, at which point they are thrust into the adult world, whether they have been prepared for it or not in the care of people who are not held accountable to performing that task, and if they fail to perform, they will be cast out, they will starve, they will die.
You're damn right I'm prejudiced against these people. I have seen firsthand the hell they inflict upon their children in the course of following their bullshit ideology. I've listened to hours of their intellectually bankrupt and dishonest defenses of ancient texts they insist are the best foundation for a child's learning, texts full of rape, murder, slavery, torture, all performed in the name of a narcissistic unbeing who demands complete obedience to his arbitrary commands, while demonstrating no measurable effect on the world and insisting he is the only truly righteous force. And his followers in turn wield this book as a weapon against the marginalized worldwide, waging an endless war on everyone different from them, based on nothing but their own bigotry.
My only disappointment in being Atheist is I'm fairly certain there is no hell for these people who so desperately deserve it.
The "public schools as a warrantless, ongoing search by the government into parenting" model of schooling.
Why wouldn't everyone want to sign up for that? I mean, it's not even expensive. Just subject your kids to bullying, bureaucracy, and bumblefuckery (call 'em the Three Bs!) and you too can be under suspicion for 13+ years.
That is a pretty serious factor to weight.
https://www.educacaodomiciliar.fe.unicamp.br/sites/www.educa...
Selection effects create a "blind men and the elephant" problem when considering anecdotes about homeschoolers. Homeschool children who return to public school may do so because their parents lack the resources to homeschool them effectively, so they might perform worse (academically & socially) than the average homeschool child. But homeschool children who get jobs in the technology industry and post on Hacker News are probably more successful than the average. It remains for the reader to determine whether the lack of "success" of homeschool children who join the military, in contrast to homeschooler mean success elsewhere, is due to a selection effect or a psychological effect of homeschooling.
It's not that surprising given that the Prussian schooling system upon which ours is based was meant exactly for that.
They were able to franchise a school for, I believe $10-15,000 (certainly under $20K), a background check, and a 2 hour open book test for them both.
I struggle to see how this is acceptable for not just "homeschooling" your own kids, but other people's kids.
Public schools in countries where schools are treated well have phenomenal success.
US schooling has been taken over (at the level of the state legislatures; blame goes to state Congress not to the schools) by companies selling "achievement" test. And also by charter schools whose success is based on only selecting high-achieving problem-free children?
Why do teachers say they are nothing but babysitters? Maybe because they aren't allowed to teach, to inspire love of learning in the children? And their classroom budgets are so tight they buy school supplies out of their own pockets, while living on an income that is close to poverty level? While facing felony charges for having the wrong book in the shelf behind their desk???
When things like "Creme de la Creme Early Learning Center of Excellence" are real institutions instead of something from a comic dystopia, you know you have a problem.
By definition progress is movement in a direction. Who set the direction? Toward which destination? To achieve which aim and goals? Who benefits? To assume it is the students, the teachers, or "the people" broadly, is a naive and destructive assumption.
Social progress by one definition might include the production of obedient soldiers and factory workers. It might include the limiting of cultural diversity, creating a common core of cultural conformity and homogenization among the youth a country populated by recent immigrants. It might include training the youth to accept authority without question.
If one is interested enough to learn about the actual thinking of the founders and maintainers of public school institutions in the United States and around the world, you can read what they published of their thinking for yourself. John Taylo Gatto unearthed much of this thinking and shared it with the world in his books and lectures.
Here is one transcript you may find enlightening:
https://smarthomeschooler.com/blog/2021/5/28/gatto-six-purpo...
"Public schools in countries where schools are treated well have phenomenal success."
How do you measure such success? There's standardized testing but you don't seem to like that.
Public schools were created in the US to indoctrinate catholic kids - the “unwashed masses of Irish papists.” It was an oppressive institution from the start. They were designed with the same architecture as incarceration systems from France and to this day are mainly serviced by the same companies that service our prisons.
There have been so, so many attempts to recast public schools in the image of our aspirations - most notably Teach for America. I count many of their graduates among my edtech founder friends.
For those of us that have given a portion of our lives to improve these systems, the reality is heartbreaking. Public education is a callous political football whose primary purpose is to make sure children are being babysat so their parents can work. Genuine progress can be made but will be snuffed out by the well oiled grinder for government funding and political promotions.
Administrators determine our children’s future, not teachers, parents, or children. Any of those three would be better.
Yes, there are bright spots. But the vast majority of school systems destroy the aspirations of well-intentioned, newly educated teachers within a couple years. Most teachers leave the profession after less than a decade in it.
The best researchers I’ve found have all reached a stunningly simple conclusion on why better funding does not improve outcomes - students are living in intense poverty. Many students are homeless. Many have no safe place to sleep.
The reason homeschooling is rising is because intelligent, caring parents can give their child a better education simply by not subjecting them to the bizarre social experience that has become most public schools.
The exception to that rule is the proof of what matters - a community of parents/guardians who come together and support a mutual learning center with caring educators.
Co-op, private, public, they all work when you have that.
The real public school horror story is that today, in America, a "good school" is defined as one where your child won't get shot.
I leave the rest of the rant as an exercise to the reader.
One of my friends went to a school where she was beaten every day and the teachers had totally given up and most of them did not teach.
Unfortunately, we need much more data than we have. The article mentions school quality is often not the driving reason for homeschooling, but you can definitely imagine public schools where almost any level of homeschooling is a better alternative.
[1] https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/state-test-r....
My children are in public school, but I am not sure if they will stay there. Even in "good" schools, there's many problems (especially in middle schools) and a lot of time is wasted if your kids have any academic ability at all.
Peer groups matter. In “good” schools you’re optimizing the peer group. A good/bad school rating has little to do with teacher capability.
The problem is what you do with the parents who do not care at all. People making these statements that “it’s about the parents” - well, it has some truth to it. But when 10% of the students are running the halls, screaming and fighting, beating random kids, having sex and doing drugs in the bathrooms, and assaulting teachers who don’t care anymore, then it doesn’t matter what the other 90% of the parents are doing.
And for older children, peers tend to influence them more than parents anyway. Turning around a failing student will often require separating them from their current friends. Tough to do when you can't afford to move to a better school district.
All the push just hurt me in the end, I would be a lot better off without traditional school, rarely I learned anything useful there.
It’s not a “do this or else”. It’s basically let’s do it together.
If you search niche.com, you can see proficiency scores correlate exactly with household income. Same school systems, same new facilities, same teacher compensation, same class sizes.
And are you saying they have per-student household income data? Or they just have the household income data for the school district as a whole? Or maybe the household income data for the student body as a whole? Those are very different things.
I think we might be saying the same thing though, since “right” school generally means a school where a large proportion of the other kids have parents who are throwing a lot of resources at the kids (including the parents’ time and attitudes towards academic learning). It just so happens that this group of parents is higher income, so the easily visible statistic will be neighborhoods with higher income households will have higher academic proficiency percentages in the schools.
There is also this old map:
Schools are a tool to teach people at scale. Tools can be used well or poorly and for various end goals.
This doesn't seem to be so self-evident. Why do I care about the education of those around me?
...generates more economic activity
...understands basic civics and government
The public school system isn't doing that for our fellow citizens already. I fail to see why it would be worse if the failure happens at home rather than in a government building.
And that's a fair criticism of some public schools. And some home-schoolers. And probably some private schools.
That's also why you care about the state of the public school system, even if you have no kids (or they don't attend public school).
It’s just odd that so many people here seem to be so in favor of the “sit down and shut up” style of schooling. Isn’t it pretty widely agreed upon that US public schools suck? Don’t you think there are some parents who are homeschooling their children explicitly because they feel their public school would not prepare them to be good members of society?
Regular interaction with non-custodial adults provides more opportunities for child abuse to be uncovered and stopped. You can go on youtube and hear myriad testimonials from former homeschooled kids that were abused for years on end. And nobody knew. Nobody even had a chance to know.
Varies a lot by states. Some states have no assessment requirement for honeschooled students at all, some have a requirement to keep a portfolio which may or may not be reviewed, some have an standardized testing requirement with more flexibility and lower frequency than public schools, and some have homeschool students take the same standardized tests as everyone else.
https://education.uslegal.com/homeschooling/homeschooling-la...
No that’s literally the main benefit. People actually get to teach their own kids without state indoctrination (either left or right.)
https://www.deccanherald.com/india/scientists-flag-ncerts-mi...
I definitely wouldn't want this kind of "regulated" education for children.
I'd bet a lot on parents caring more about their kids welfare than regulators.
My school was actually rated decently for the area. Not the best, but pretty good.
[0] https://phys.org/news/2018-03-high-adults-unable-basic-mathe...
[1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2019/2019179/index.asp
[2] https://nces.ed.gov/surveys/piaac/measure.asp?section=1&sub_...
I didn't need your permission to give birth to my children, why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate them?
> Only dad is allowed to talk to anyone and when he does it's extraordinarily weird.
If you feel these children are legitimately being abused in some way, I'm guessing there are plenty of state resources to address that challenge.
Do you actually feel there's abuse happening? Or, is it that you just find them unusual?
The homeschoolers get a free pass to do literally whatever... don't you see a dichotomy with what you're preaching?
Why can't you just do anything you want, regardless of the effect it has on your dependents?
Second, I do all those things because it's my responsibility, not because the state will come after me if I don't.
One legal theory that may be relevant was brought up long ago for a case on banned books in school: you have the right to raise your kid according to your beliefs, but many states guarantee children the right to education. So the state could regulate homeschooling to ensure all children have access to an actual education.
>If you feel these children are legitimately being abused in some way, I'm guessing there are plenty of state resources to address that challenge.
A lot of those resources rely on processes that come after reports from teachers and caregivers. If nobody outside the home ever sees or talks to the kids, there's not much the state can do to even start an investigation. Children who go to daycare or public school are seen by professionals trained to spot abuse.
We allow anyone to have children, because otherwise we're on a very slippery and short slope towards eugenics. But those children are entitled to the same rights and protections as their parents. It's hard to strike a good balance between a family's freedom and a child's freedom.
Edited out some unnecessary detours in my ramblings
They guarantee the right to /access/ education. This is not at all the same as guaranteeing that all children "must be educated at a state approved school."
> If nobody outside the home ever sees or talks to the kids, there's not much the state can do to even start an investigation.
I read an incredible number of police reports. There's a lot of abuse that gets detected outside of daycare and schools. Unless the children are literally locked into a basement, I doubt that the parents can continually exercise enough total control to keep whatever other abuse their committing hidden.
To the extent that if it is happening, it's an exceptionally rare case, and I doubt that simply forcing all parents to send their children to a third party for education is going to have any impact on these particularly pernicious cases.
I understand the instinct, but I think the solution is wrong, and it's an inappropriate case to use to defend schooling in general.
That's oversimplifying. You're right about the "at a state approved school", but the right is to access education to a set standard that will equip them for life.
You can't just say "well, they have access to -my- education, so we're good". There should be caveats around quality and deliverability of education.
Because if you (the generic 'you', not singling you out individually) have low/zero value educational material, and no desire to provide it for your children, then that is /not/ them accessing education in any meaninful sense of the concept.
> I didn't need your permission to give birth to my children, why do I need your permission when deciding how I educate them?
Because your children are not your property, they are your responsibility and we as society have decided that we want to make sure that the education is to a certain standard.
As a side note I find it fascinating how people who feel strongly about individual freedom, believe they should have ultimate authority (sometimes it feels more like ownership) over their children. Why do you believe that the freedoms do not apply to children?
I am their _guardian_.
> and we as society have decided that we want to make sure that the education is to a certain standard.
And what is that standard? Passing standardized tests? How do you account for the poor performance of American schools in general? How do you account for the differential performance across the country, let alone, wild performance differences across a single city? If a child goes to school but fails to become educated, can the sue the school district? Does the school owe them continued education until they meet the standard?
> believe they should have ultimate authority (sometimes it feels more like ownership) over their children.
If something happens to my children and I'm even just negligent then I will pay the ultimate price. You cannot ensconce in me this responsibility and then deny my authority to exercise control over them to maintain it.
> Why do you believe that the freedoms do not apply to children?
Why do you think children can't sign contracts or buy alcohol? They have _limited_ freedom, under my _guardianship_. This is more important than the States imputed idealism with respect to "education."
Actually, American schools do not do badly in international comparisons. They are the number one, sure, but they are still pretty good.
There's also some very unsurprising outcomes based on state policy there.
New test scores, known as MCAP (Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program), obtained by Project Baltimore, revealed that 23 schools, including elementary, middle, and high schools, had not one student that could do math at grade level.
Calverton school (https://www.niche.com/k12/calverton-elementary-middle-school...)
A Calverton educator, who reached out to Fox45, claims to have received that text. “[It instructed me to] go into my grade book, make sure no students are failing, and essentially change the grade if they are failing so they will pass with a 60 percent,” said the teacher, whose identity we are concealing upon request.
“I was frustrated as a teacher. We’re public servants. And when we see things like grade changing, that’s self-serving. That’s not helping the kids.”
After watching Fox45’s recent investigations into allegations of grade changing at Calverton, the City Schools employee contacted Project Baltimore to say a couple things. First, according to the teacher, grade changing at Calverton is “very common.”
Second, the educator told Fox45, changing grades is the easiest and fastest way to pass more students, which makes the school and its administrators look better. But, it does a huge disservice to not just the kids, but our entire community.
“Teaching a whole generation of kids that they don’t have to be accountable for their actions, or that hard work isn’t valued or valuable when they are in school, is so discouraging and damaging.”
“There were students on my roster all year that I had never met, had never seen. On paper they passed my class and passed onto the next year.”
“I love my job and I love my students,” concluded the teacher. “I want to see the students at Calverton and other schools across the city, get a fresh start. And it’s going to be hard because the students are used to this now. But the students deserve better and our city deserve better.”That's demonstrably false.
You can do plenty of neglectful or negligent things to your children and face zero consequences.
The state dictating and setting the rules is no more free than the parents setting the rules.
This basically comes down to an argument not of freedom, but if the children are property of the state or parents.
When you look at it this way, it makes perfect sense that libertairian minded folks would support homeschooling.
After all, the state isnt offering the freedom of choice and action to children, it is making legal requirements and demands.
Is the purpose of their lives to serve the interests of the state, or society at large? Or should they be live their lives based on their own interests and priorities.
the libertarian perspective is that if you grant the state and society the authority to control the child, it will use that authority to advance the interests of the state or society.
As if public schools provide kids any sort of freedom or autonomy? What is your point here?
Someone has to be in charge of a kid. Either the parent acts as the authority over their child, or the state does.
I couldn’t possibly agree more! They are MY responsibility. Not yours. Not the state’s. Not society’s. I will educate them the way that I see fit. It’s not my responsibility to educate your kids, and it’s not your responsibility to educate mine, no matter how righteous and justified it may feel.
If you are teaching your children to murder all Jews and that red traffic lights mean go, then you are clearly not capable of being responsible for another human being.
I agree, within reason is always necessary, and if those things were being taught then it's time for a visit from CPS, for sure. But it still feels like a potential slippery slope of "You're abusing this child by teaching them things that aren't approved by the state" in the extreme case. I know that may sound silly, but with as polarized as the country has been recently, and with authoritarianism on the rise worldwide (I saw a man get arrested in the UK yesterday because he criticized some protests on Facebook!), I don't see it being an entirely foreign idea.
I bet there's a correlation between this viewpoint and not having any children.
Your kid has a right to education, you don't get to deny them that right. It's funny how these arguments are all "don't tread on my right to tread on my kid."
Because quite frankly, they didn‘t have a say in the matter and rely upon you entirely to provide an adequate education
The issue is that when a kid's at school, there are many people who may notice something's wrong. From teachers, school nurses, school administrators, and even other kids. This is by no means perfect, and many, many cases of abuse slip through the cracks. But it is something, which is more then many home schooled kids have.
While I'd wager most home schooled kids aren't abused, the fact of the matter is it's much easier for an abusive parent to cover up their abuse if their child is home schooled. You may still feel home schooling is a net positive, but this aspect is very hard to deny.
Like the Satanism panics of the 1990s demonstrate, elaborate imaginings of complex sadistic rituals that are necessarily rare[0] bordering on nonexistent, tend to capture the public mind and suck oxygen away from treating the totally unattractive (not even in the capacity of making for a true crime special) real problems.
If you want to see this on TV, the last season of The Wire was about it.
[0] There were actually a spate of ritual killings in Liberia through the 1970s, proving humanity capable at least and making the issue to be one of reasonableness.
One friend’s mom wouldn’t teach him the curriculum for months, and then when she knew a test was coming up she would make him study with her for 14 hours a day to try to cram it in. Then when he naturally performed poorly on state exams he was punished (often physically) for not trying hard enough. She regularly woke him up for classes when she wanted to be awake at 2 or 3 am, then later after her afternoon nap at 6 or 8pm. He grew up constantly tired, without a regular schedule of meals, and never made it to the group outings because he felt sick all the time.
Another friend’s mom just couldn’t be bothered to teach and just took her out on “learning” hikes with other homeschooling moms, never taught her anything, and wound up sending her back to public school with severely (I mean severely) underdeveloped skills after being held back for several years.
Neither of these parents I’m sure “planned” to abuse their children in this way. They just weren’t up for the task of teaching in the way that a child requires, and their own personal issues turned that into a larger problem. But my friends suffered for it.
My honest sympathies to your friends.
> negatively associated with college degree attainment (RR = 0.77, 95% CI: 0.67, 0.88) and possibly with greater risk of posttraumatic stress disorder.
I’m sure I’m just unlucky and that the 3/4 abuse ratio doesn’t hold for the broader population. Higher rate of PTSD is suspect though.
As an anecdote I have close family member that teaches younger elementary school grades. They have told me about signs of possible abuse they've seen but no available recourse.
I'm also aware that school is a also an environment where abuse occurs. How can we say that we are not exposing public school children to more abuse per capita than homeschooled? There is a school in my neighbourhood that often has the police called in. Lockdowns over students bringing in knives and attacking each other.
It would be good to know these things if making an argument that pivots on abuse.
One last anecdote. All the experiences I can remember having that I'd consider abuse occurred in either: school, work or public transit. Some were bad interactions with strangers in passing, other were more chronic (generally at school).
While it is true terrible things can happen to kids at home, you need stats to compare this with the alternative before a stance should be taken.
It's natural to want to stay out of things, especially if one doesn't know the procedure and worries about messing up a family's lives. But it's better for the people in charge of investigating cops abuse to decide the appropriate course.
As for how reporting happens, it depends on the state. In mine (Pennsylvania), all school employees are made well aware they're considered "Mandated Reporters." They are legally required to report any suspicions of child abuse, either through the state's website, phone line, local police, or the county agency responsible for child abuse cases. The suspected abuse victim doesn't need to say they're being abused or anything at all, the reporter doesn't even have to guess who the abuser is. If the reporter thinks there may have been abuse because they saw or learned about physical (e.g. bruises) or behavioral (e.g. afraid to go home) signs, they have to report it. Not reporting can led to misdemeanor or felony charges for the Mandated Reporter. Somebody who reported their suspicion is immune from civil or criminal liability, and protected from retaliation from the institution they work at, for the report (unless it can be shown they're using reports maliciously). They're also tested as confidential informants in any investigation.
The law also encourages "Permissive Reporters" to report suspected child abuse, but without threatening charges for not reporting. These reporters can do so anonymously.
All this info comes from my wife, who was a daycare teacher, and DuckDuckGo-ing "Pennsylvania mandated reporters."
The number of substantiated (court ruling, protective order, etc) child abuse cases in 2022: around 5,000.
No other group, including doctors, police officers, and Child Protective Services themselves, made more reports. Only around 6% of the school employees' reports were substantiated, making their reports least likely to be substantiated. This leads me to believe school employees have a lower threshold for reporting a suspicion compared to other groups.
And they overlook 100x more students beating the shit out of each other. No, I won't cite it. I lived it, and I have relatives working in that system who say nothing has changed.
BTW there are more than 100k school teachers in Pennsylvania. 10k reports a year represents about 1 in 10 teachers making a single report a year. I retract my 100x remark, it's far worse than that.
If you adjust for scale, I would be utterly flabbergasted if home schooling had a higher per capita rate of abuse than actual public schools unless public schools have changed to the point of being utterly unrecognisable from the 80-90's when it was inflicted on me.
The 4th amendment of the Constitution protects all of us from warrantless searches. If you turn public schools into a method of warrantless searches to ferret out criminal activity, then public schools become unconstitutional.
The strange thing is that you can probably turn public schools into a method of warrantless searches without actually codifying that in statute, without making any major changes to school policy. All you have to do is assert that this is one of the major benefits of public education, and get some large fraction of other Americans to believe the same thing.
> You may still feel home schooling is a net positive,
It's a net positive to undermine fundamental human rights?
A lot of people seem to be implying that religious indoctrination is abuse, when it isn't legally, even if you think it should be. I'm personally in between a rock and a hard place here, since I don't want my kids exposed to either religion or LGBT stuff.
From what I can tell, homeschooled kids are given a curriculum with books/workbooks for both the student and the teacher. They are also tested by the state and must meet certain criteria.
so there seems to be guidance and verification.
Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup.
This article makes a case that the statistics of small sample sizes has bamboozled many different well-intentioned groups, including the small school movement.
The argument is that the fact that many of the best schools are small is an artifact of statistics (de Moivre's equation) rather than evidence small schools are superior.
Not the way government tends to work in US.
Unlike in most other Western countries, education in the US is controlled at a local level; every town, district, and city etc has its own rules, has to hire its own staff and pay for it all out of local taxes. And because the generally tiny constituency of each district, a very small number of nutcases can change the rules and impose their point of view for the school district.
And because of the local funding, there can be huge resource and quality differences between schools for adjacent locations, just due to crossing some arbitrary jurisdiction line.
It is madness, but it is a madness that is deeply loved/entrenched here.
This case is of a group of kids being taught by parents. The parents give up half a day a week to teach one of their homes. They don't need a staff, a building, etc. You really can't be more efficient than that model of using the existing resources.
And you're only partially right about local control of education. There are many federal and state regulations that dictate school policies in every facet. These would rule out many of the local "nut cases". Much of the funding is provided by the state and federal government too, depending on the state.
It’s only “efficient” because it doesn’t have to scale. Add non-wealthy kids into the mix. Add children with learning disabilities. All of a sudden, homeschooling fails a massive chunk of the population.
Public education has served the US well for most of the post-WWII era. Let’s fix it, not abandon it.
I'm not saying to abandon it. I'm saying if the question is efficiency, that particular homeschooling model is very efficient, even if other arrangements need to be made for certain segments of the population (I would revise your "non-wealthy" statement to be "poor" as much of the middle class could make that system work).
Of course there have been multiple attempts to fix the system already. So far we haven't seemed to find the solution. Back to your "non-wealthy" comment, even the current system tends to fail the poor, since parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success (this is largely tied to two parent households, but income plays a role as well).
But many people, both in this forum and in meat-space are doing just that. Perhaps not directly, but the end result of "school choice" (of which there are several flavors) will be the end of generally good-enough public education for most of the population. Toss in the latest conservative boogeymen (CRT, book bans, etc) and the outlook looks pretty gloomy.
parent involvement is one of the largest factors for academic success
I often wonder if our schools are fine, but everything else is broken.
Stagnant wages, longer working hours, fewer 2 parent households, other things.
My big question is if the money per student is the same, but the outcomes are better, then what can we emulate from the charter or private schools? Or is it selection bias since the parents are involved enough to get them in?
Selection bias a real problem with charters and privates. We've already selected for "parents who give a shit". And frequently for "no IEP or other learning disability". So, kids who are, at worst, average intellect with parents who care enough to fill out some paperwork and drive them to school - those kids are going to succeed almost anywhere.
And I totally understand the desire to get your own children a high quality education. That's a large part of why I moved back to Fairfax County. But, I also feel strongly that strong public schools are a requirement for a healthy society.
Charter schools are frequently oversubscribed, and admit students via lottery. This makes it pretty easy to run randomized tests that aren't affected by selection bias.
No, it does not, because the following sources of selection bias exist.
(1) Charters select for actively involved parents, because they are not the default-assigned by-residence public schools, and an active choice is necessary to get into the pool,
(2) Charters, because they are not scaled to only take the actively-choosing parents from the catchment area of a typical district school, select for parents with greater means who are able to make a longer travel to the school for drop off, pickup, and other necessary interactions.
(3) There are often biases in the lottery system; even something as simple as giving favorable consideration for having a sibling already in the school reinforces the impact of other biases.
I agree, that we should have good public schools. I feel they do get written off by many of the school choice proposals. I think there could be more support if pairing public school improvements with school choice. If we can improve the public schools to the point of being attractive, then it wouldn't matter if school choice was a thing. It's definitely an unusual paradigm where there is a public option with many people being forced to it for financial reasons, yet the institution is largely unwilling to compete with private offerings.
The system today is optimizing for standardization federally in order to try and fight the natural entropy toward a highly unequal system where rich kids get dramatically better education and there is a downward spiral for poor kids. It's not achieving this goal today, but decentralizing the system would most definitely reinforce unequal outcomes, not avoid it.
That's the goal[1], but what is it constrained by? Primarily that constraint is cost. If you can improve efficiency (improved outcomes per dollar), everyone stands to benefit, especially at the lower end if you can reallocate that money towards them.
The main problem is that school is trying to be utilized to fix multiple issues at home that it simply can't correct for under the current system (yes that other person's example would make it worse). Federal standards and more money won't fix it. Other policy changes might help, but would be difficult to implement.
[1] I'd argue the goal is for each individual to reach their best potential as opposed to equity. Otherwise we end up with perverse systems that limit some upper end students, as we're starting to see innsome areas. That is not good for society/humanity. Equitable resourcing could be good.
The US education system can stand to spend way more money compared to other budget areas like defense that are massively overfunded. Teachers are paupers for absolutely no good reason. Furthermore, what are you measuring outcomes against? We don't even have a holistic universal measurement of positive outcomes. Standardized tests are a joke and everyone knows it.
This feels like youre getting outside the HN guidelines. What framework? Which parts?
"The US education system can stand to spend way more money compared to other budget areas like defense that are massively overfunded."
Would that money fix anything? Do you have any stats/criteria for how a particular area of the budget is overfunded? Otherwise when taken with your other verbiage, it sounds like just an inflammatory opinion. The US already spends 6.1% of its GDP on education, which is more than most other countries.
"Teachers are paupers for absolutely no good reason."
This is a bit dramatic given the definition. There are a few states with low teacher pay. However, you have to also look at median income and cost of living. Yeah, the average teacher makes about $50k in MS, but median income for MS is $48k per year with a low cost of living in most of the state. I have friends who have turned down public teaching that would pay more than their private teaching job due to the way the schools are run. Clearly pay is not the main issue in my area.
"Furthermore, what are you measuring outcomes against? We don't even have a holistic universal measurement of positive outcomes."
In general, you are right. In the context of this thread, those would be test scores, graduation rate, job/college placement rates.
"Standardized tests are a joke and everyone knows it."
No, not everyone knows it. Care to explain? It seems the test measure what the kids are supposed to know at a specific level. Are there some problems with things like teaching to the test instead of teaching for durable knowledge or love of learning, sure. But if you know how to read/write/etc at your grade level, then your scores will be fine. Seem like one of the best comparisons we have. Are there better alternatives?
It is not. Curriculum is decided far above the heads of the districts, as is standardized testing. Funding is a problem, though, how much of a problem is wildly variable depending on where you are.
And my best classes in uni weren't the massive lectures at the University of Texas but rather small summer school classes I took in a cheap Houston community college during summer break where I could actually interact with the teacher and fellow students.
Finally, HNers overuse "reinventing" as a pejorative. If you use a similar approach found in another option, and the HNer doesn't prefer your option over the other option, you're always "reinventing" it. As if some trivial thing in common between two options are the only would-be differences between them. It's not very thoughtful commentary.
Home-schooling could be 100% identical to public schooling except that it's not the local school system and it would still deliver on its goal of not being the local school system. That's the whole point.
We all know the worse the ratio the worse the education tends to be. Tutoring is a long established means of compensating for this, by supplementing sessions with a 1:1 ratio, clearly illustrating the problem.
FWIW I probably could afford to send my kid to a better private school or alternate-schooling group, withdrawing from the community and not-so-great public school system, but I don't because then I'm just another contributor to the inequality problem. We Live In A Society.
It is interesting to think of parents that see their own children as props, like pawns in some larger game rather than as individuals. I think there are subtle ways that this can happen.
I think a lot of people grew up in overly conservative homes. A common story you hear nowadays is a kid who grew up forced to tow the line in some religion and only once they reached maturity did they even realize there was another world out there. They may even promise themselves that they won't allow the same thing to happen to their own kids.
I don't know anything about you or your family or kids, but your attitude made me wonder if there is a backlash coming. If kids raised in forced diverse circumstances may rebel against their parents since they are being coerced into their parents view of "ideal world", much like the parents of stereotypical tiger asian parents or nutty sports dads.
No matter what way you cut it the will of the parent is subjected on the child. In my opinion that’s how it should be.
The decisive factor is what the focus of the parents will is. Is it personal glory? Is it trying to “make the world a better place”?. I would argue that choosing what is best for the child from the perspective of the parent is the best.
Giving them a robust worldview, a good set of morals and the capabilities to effect change when their older are the right way forward.
Our children are not missionaries that go into the world to make it a better place. Our children are to be nurtured so that when they grow up they can make a positive change in the world.
My only chance for a normal life and education was public school.
A huge amount of americans are poor in time and money. The only option their children have is public school. Their future is entirely dependent on a public that is willing to invest in them so that they even have a future, one that isn't just "wage slave at walmart". Sure, it often doesn't work out, it's a struggling system that has been abused and ignored for decades, and it fails millions every year.
You know what doesn't help any of those millions of kids? All the wealthy families sending their kids to private schools or homeschooling and removing their property taxes from the public school system. Society will not be a better place for your kids if they are individually 10% better but 10% of the children born in the US basically have no access to education.
The advocation of "School choice" as conservatives are currently selling it is about taking away the chance I had at a middle class life. It's about saving a few thousand dollars for already privileged individuals at the expense of swathes of people like me who were at least average intelligence who had the audacity to be born to a poor mother.
If you think public schooling in america is deficient, then let us fix it.
But that's not how they think. They believe the bottom 10% deserve their hard lives.
Capitalism needs an oppressed class to function.
The people on top write laws to ensure the oppressed class will exist. Then they sell it to the middle class using scary stories of crime, religion, etc.
You’ll know this by the people who campaign for voucher programs that we’re all told are evil somehow. Yet the goal of vouchers is to make all options available to everyone.
Without vouchers, all options are only available to those with financial options.
You can go to public school, private school or a home school program. If you want a better public school, you have to move to a better rated school district. In order to do that, you have to be able to afford it.
Without vouchers, poor families only option is public school where they currently live. People opposed to vouchers have 1 goal: preserve the status quo. They’ll tell you absolutely anything to convince you otherwise too.
How exactly does that work?
We homeschool and I pay property taxes that fund our local school just like everyone else in town. I pay for services that I don't use and can be used for other children if the powers that be decide to allocate it that way.
School choice/vouchers defund public schools proportional to loss of public school responsibility for students.
Besides, it is pretty said that the best counter argument against charter schools is that parents will take their fair share of funding and use it to buy a much better education for their children.
To your point about charter schools, there is a strong argument to be made that when parents have a choice where there kids go, public schools will have to make sure they are providing more academic opportunities if they don't want to risk losing the academically minded families (and their money). That seems like it would be a good thing for everyone.
I voted to raise property tax where I live specifically to improve the funding situation for our struggling public schools - I attended a great public school district growing up (because, surprise: my parents could afford to move into the district).
The funding situation needs to be fixed across the board, because indeed everyone attending public school deserves as good an education as I received, but the way the system functions currently is that poor areas get poor schools (at least in the midwest where I've lived).
So, while I whole-heartedly support education reform and improving funding as public policies: I still wouldn't send my own kids to the public school district where I live; they're terrible. I wish they weren't.
My freshman year of highschool, I was at a very large school, around 3400 in attendance. The school had been expanded several times, and was more or less at capacity. Some facilities were scaled out well, others weren't. There were fights on a weekly basis, tons of security trying to prevent that, but, they could only do so much. Lunch lines were very long, sometimes I'd be lucky to get 10 minutes to eat, mostly brought my own lunch because of that. The school was locked down a few times that year because of weapon scares. It was hell.
Then my sophomore year, they cut the school in half, sending most of the students, save for the seniors, to a new school across town. That landed the school I attended at around 1400 kids, my junior year, all of the extra seniors had graduated, so, it shrank further to around 1300. From sophomore year on, there was not a single fight, everyone knew eachother and got along, they cut the security team down to just two people and they both were well liked. Test scores were way up, class sizes went from 40+ to consistently under 30, and things overall were fairly good as far as highschool goes. The new school across town was a similar situation from what I gathered from friends who went there.
Now you might write that off as it was simply too crowded, but, they closed about a third of the school, which was held in portable classrooms when the split happened. Some of those were re-purposed for offices and whatnot, most got hauled away. So the actual density of people didn't really change much. We got some extra space to have PE classes in, but that was about it, space wise.
You might also write that off as demographic changes, which was also not true. In fact, the roughest part of town all went to the school I attended, while the nicer, more affluent side of town, mostly got sent to the new school.
The way I see it, the school was simply too large, and managing that many students day to day, and all of their needs and affairs, did not scale well, and bred inefficiency, inefficiency that existed long before I got there and everyone got to keep their job and maintain that as the status-quo. Sure the buildings/campus could physically contain them well enough, yes they were all reasonably well fed and watered, but they'd become unmanageable in such a way that was not likely to be fixed.
In terms of reinvention in public education, smaller schools are a decent model, as are smaller class sizes. The real deciding factor in how well a student does however, is parent buy-in, which homeschool models have in spades, and in addition the class sizes are about as small as you can reasonably go as well. Understand of course that, parents opting to homeschool are paying taxes to public schools, while receiving no benefit, and that in addition to paying for the costs associated with homeschooling. Not all families can afford to effectively pay for schooling twice, hell, most can barely afford to exist while paying once. You could very likely fix your concerns about privilege by simply redirecting money back to homeschool parents that would normally be spent on public school. There are very well defined $/student numbers out there, so, the amounts would be fairly trivial to come up with. You could also really work around the whole right/left politically polarized bullshit factory by perhaps giving a little more to the lower income families and a little less to high income families. I think that'd sufficiently frame the nominally 'right wing' framed homeschool ideals as neutral, or at least dissonant enough that you might get most of everyone on-board provided you could get the right palms greased in state government.
Understand of course that, the public education system is an enormous apparatus, and they're managing unfathomable numbers of students. They're also not setup in fairly clean competency hierarchies either. At the local level, seniority tends to be king, at the broader level, the ability to navigate the political system is the selection factor. Neither of those have anything to do with "who's talented at educating kids", and while you do have means to measure performance, those same means are also decided upon by the very same people being effectively measured, so there's an incentive to make them easier over time, as that looks politically better. So if anything, the incentives we've created are exactly backwards, and the system cannot change until those incentives are fixed. I don't really know how you'd prevent standardized testing from being watered down or trifled with. I don't really know how you'd create sufficient educator turnover with the unions in place to weed out bad teachers. More or less, the system is broken, we need bloodsports to fix it, but they've thought of that, and have prevented it from happening.
I'm not holding by breath of course. People are more than likely going to write it off as "privilege" regardless of the changes proposed, with a whole list of valid enough sounding reasons that they haven't really thought through, most of which won't really have any baring on reality, and nothing will change aside from actual children being mortally wounded by poor education. That'll continue as-is, furthering the class divide, increasing unrest, increasing predatory behavior toward people who, could have been saved by better policy, but were thought more useful as sacrifices on the altar of "the other team's" apparatus.
As for me? I'll be eating beans and rice and driving a 15 year old honda while putting my future children through a homeschool program regardless of what happens.
People are diverse and have diverse needs. That includes kids. AFAIK the most efficient method of education is still one-to-one tutoring, the very opposite of "schools at scale". Unfortunately it is also very expensive.
Efficient in what way? Children in public schools are now doing worse than previous generations. Efficiency does not beget quality education.
> Not to mention the privilege that is draped over every detail of this setup.
If we, as a society values families more and enables single income households this wouldn’t be privilege, it could be the norm.
it is like the difference between a commercial child care service, and having your friend's kids or you kid's friends over for the day.
I think it depends largely on who controls the process - the parents of a paid professional.
That said, it is not a typical approach either, nor is schooling by a parent. I have used (and this is typical in the UK, although i do not know about the US) paid face to face tutors, taught my self, provided the kids with textbooks etc. to teach themselves, paid for online courses, helped them find other resources and so on.
The paid tutors are qualified (both of them are qualified in the subjects they teach, one is a former school teacher).
In California the student enrolls in a home school program through a local public school. You are assigned a homeschool liaison and can enroll in public school classes. The kids and parents get a weekly checkin and support. You have to pass public school tests. You get a budget from the public school to use for materials.
My grandsons are getting homeschooled through 6th grade. My daughter decided it was just too hard to duplicate a high school education at home so she is phasing them into public school in middle school.
She gave each child the choice of home school or public school. The Covid lockdown made that choice easy for the kids. They know that if they don't keep up, she will send them back to public school. That is quite the motivator.
Just like your neighbors she works with other parents to keep the kids socialized, take them on field trips, and to form a support system. She also signs the kids up for sports.
The downside (from her observation) is since some of the early homeschoolers were bible based, she had to really review the school material. A surprising number of text books use the bible as history or have questionable science. She also noticed that many parents homeschool their kids because they can't participate in regular school (for various reasons). Her kids homeschool as a choice.
The biggest upside is that time is more flexible and the liaison is flexible. The family took a trip to NYC and the liaison was asking the boys quite a few questions about what they saw and learned.
The joke's on you, I wasn't home-schooled and I still got both of those.
You'll find this in public schools too.
Rather than pearl clutching about individual anecdotes or doubling down on government control, I think states should provide direct funding to homeschool co-ops in addition to direct funding to families. That money and its positive effects on socialization and educational development will only work if governments keep their noses out of the details (i.e., parallels arguments for UBI).
My son is autistic and non-verbal. The local public school program that he would be in is overwhelmed. We hire a speech language pathologist to tutor him 3-4 hours a day in our home. That is only possible because of Arizona's support for homeschooling families. Homeschooling is a great outlet when standardization fails.
It's maybe not 100% what you're thinking of, but it's reasonably close.
I was homeschooled to grade 3, and just because my parents didn't give me tests or grades, it absolutely mattered.
I had to correctly solve, both verbally and in writing, enough questions at the end of the current chapter of the textbook, to a standard that satisfied them. For every subject of study. Every single day.
> I had to correctly solve ... to a standard that satisfied them
In other words, you had tests and grades
A grade is a permanent record of a snapshot-in-time evaluation of your understanding of a material.
"Read the chapter, solve the problems in it, we'll go over your work later" is neither a test, nor a grade.
Pay more taxes. Solve the problem for all people who run into it, not just the ones who can afford it.
I feel like they think that the money is given to the kids directly, who waste it on weed and the hippity hop albums or whatever. Call it what it is: racism and classism destroys their critical thinking capacity.
But that's beside the point, because the notion is always brought up as a way to say that the students themselves are a lost cause.
I think our educational outcomes are not in line with our spending because a part of our political apparatus is simultaneously trying to sabotage the program.
> We hire a speech language pathologist to tutor him 3-4 hours a day in our home.
You have a good point. GP’s experience with home schooling was an anecdote whereas your experience with home schooling is not
Government funded homeschool co-ops or government funded homeschool families... Not so much.
As someone who pays taxes under the expectation that the government will do its best to use the money to provide a consistent education for all, I have a limited set of options when it comes to influencing how it gets spent. There is opportunity to improve that situation, certainly, but it's not corrupt. We pay in together and we vote for people who will spend that money on our collective behalf.
I don't have kids, so presumably I won't have the option to redirect that money towards Newton and away from Chaucer (or you know, whatever politically motivated alteration I come up with). People who do have kids shouldn't get different options than I do w.r.t. how the money is spent.
If somebody wants to influence the curriculum that gets funded with tax dollars, they should have the same power to do so as all of the other taxpayers. It should not be coupled to their educational choices for their own kids.
Expecting those children to then spend it on education seems like a stretch, but we're already playing what-if here, so why not?
But unless you have that plan in your back pocket, we're still in a world where scarcity is relevant. If some people want to repurpose the commons in support of their own non-common agendas, then it's up to the rest of us to oppose that.
And you'd give the money to the children's guardians, who can make those decisions on the children's behalf. Maybe they hire a tutor. Maybe they send their kids to a school. Maybe they use the money to offset a stay at home parent.
I don't think UBI makes sense for a variety of reasons, but that's the gist of it, no?
No. That's an argument used by the subset of UBI supporters who believe that UBI should displace all other social support including non-means-tested aid, but that's not the general case of UBI advocates (who generally advocate that UBI should displace means-tested benefits, but there's no general position on universal/unconditional non-cash programs alongside UBI.)
Support for universal (public single-payer or otherwise) health coverage of some kind among UBI supporters is pretty common, for instance.
The more general reason for UBI is the belief that multiple means-testing bureaucracies are duplicative of each other and thr tax system, and prone to adverse incentives due to too-quick clawback both in where it cuts in and in the ratio of aggregated benefit reductions for each increment of additional income.
In general, I prefer:
1. a functioning government
2. a UBI-enabled market
3. a malfunctioning government
It seems to me that the least violent way to kill off a government and bootstrap a new one in its place is to work towards a position where you can safely turn your back on the currency that the incumbent is minting. I view UBI a tool to make such a step more palatable. A safety net for transition times.
It still has to be backed by something, and I think the most likely candidate for that something is demonstrated success in other areas of DIY-government. If people can look around and see that the problems are getting solved, then maybe they'll have enough faith in a UBI system designed to let them safely quit the old ways and participate in building something new. This credibility would come from solving things like education and healthcare, which is why I say I have a hard time imagining a UBI system getting up and running in a community that does not have a grasp of those more immediate problems.
Without that initial success as a credibility-builder, the UBI-paved road to a functioning government will be indistinguishable from a ponzi scheme: here's some pretend thing for you to value.
If people truly have no faith in the existing government's ability to do government things, then their DIY efforts should be gathering steam to sideline that government, not angling for a slice of the tax bill from the very government that they've lost control of. If they get that slice they'll have become the very sort of corruption that they're objecting to.
If that's not an amount of work they're ready to stomach, then maybe they should rethink their disavowal of the existing channels in the first place and instead go participate in them.
I went to school and got beat up, colour me sceptical about school as a mechanism for socialisation.
Actually, you might be on to something!
Public schools are operated with the purpose of breaking the spirit of the children of the underclass so that they become obedient workers or soldiers. That's why the education part is so lacking and the obedience training so focused. Children are schooled in having no liberty of time, no liberty of movement and no liberty of thought. Perfect for a soldier or industrial or corporate worker.
On the contrary a successful adult is characterized by having liberty of her time, liberty of her movement and liberty of her thought.
The purpose of state schools is to create failed human beings, because they are needed to serve the rulers.
Schools are specifically made to break communities by separating children by age, leaving their main influence to be a few teachers, instead of having dynamic interactions with adults of all different types.
No institution has been more damaging to humanity than state schools.
They aren't the state's kids. The school can help parents in things like socialisation, as far as they deem it appropriate, but I think the state raising kids is totally the wrong mindset.
that's sometimes called indoctrination.
Public schools socialises kids like McDonald's feeds a society.
I prefer homegrown tomatoes.
Now a very large portion of us live in detached homes, far away from any groups of children.
I'd qualify as smart depending on the metric. I actually went to a private school (the public schools in the area were complete garbage and out of control - bomb threats, drugs, etc at the middle school level). It really wasn't that challenging and most of my useful knowledge beyond the basic read/write/math is self taught. Most of the stuff I learned in college was never used. Using those innate skills at a young age produced nothing tangible. I won't achieve any real success in life even though I checked all the boxes when I was younger - smart, good grades, extracurriculars, family, religion, went to college, etc.
Really all any good school or parent can do that is helpful is teach their kids to want to learn and how to self-teach. Most schools are terrible at this and just want to hit test scores and follow procedures/regulations (learning environment can be atrocious). I'd say most parents are average at this.
The real question is, what do you think would be different and why can't you achieve that now?
Beyond studies by the National Home Education Research Institute, that is. The three leading studies by homeschooling advocates looked at "homeschooled students who went to college" and how they did at school versus public schooled students at college, and ignored the fact that the percentage of homeschooled students who went to college was much smaller (why?) than for public schools.
I’ve done alright for myself and have even managed to rank among top achievers in my family, but it’s felt like I’ve been stuck playing catchup in various ways throughout my adult life. Now in my mid-30s, in some aspects I feel that I’m where I should’ve been in my mid-20s.
With that in mind I wouldn’t say I’m against homeschooling necessarily, but I think it’s crucial for parents to consider if they really have the time available to make it as complete as it needs to be. If there’s any doubt at all it might not be a great idea.
The only school I ever went to that was good for socialization was community college. Tbh, for learning too. I basically learned all of math, from arithmetic up, as an adult at community college, to compensate for learning nothing and getting pushed through all of the grade levels at public school.
I wish they had community colleges where I live now lol.
Homeschooled kids are a minority, and therefore formerly-homeschooled adults are a minority too. More of a minority, even (since the rate of homeschooling was lower when we were growing up). It's not "telling", it's simply the fact that not a ton of people exist to give a defense.
For my part I was homeschooled and had a great experience. My parents were able to challenge me in ways that the local public school wasn't willing to, and they made consistent efforts to make sure I had social exposure to other kids. I don't believe I am lacking in any way because my parents homeschooled me - in fact, if anything I believe it was the better option for me.
And I think you need to remember that the other side of the coin exists too. My wife went to public school, and was bullied by other kids. She has social anxiety and other issues to this day (she's 42 years old) as a result. That doesn't mean public schools are all bad, of course, but people need to stop ignoring the downsides of public school when they compare the two paradigms.
Being bullied sucks and has huge negative impacts. I am glad though, that I have the tools and experience to identify that happening now that I am an adult. A homeschooled me might not, and then suffer much more in the adult sphere. Negative interactions are something kids have to learn to deal with. It's not pretty or fair or even safe, but neither is the world.
Companies have to bribe and cajole customers to leave positive reviews because otherwise the few people with disastrous experiences will be the only ones who bother to review at all. There's no equivalent pro-homeschool lobby begging people to get on and defend homeschooling on Hacker News.
I'm another successful homeschooled-until-college adult, but homeschooling isn't that common now and it was even less popular when I was growing up.
EDIT: unless you were mentioning defense of homeschooling given they were homeschooled. I would assume most people on HN who were homeschooled had a decent education/homeschooling experience.
> Negative interactions are something kids have to learn to deal with. It's not pretty or fair or even safe, but neither is the world.
Completely agree. If someone assaults you in real life, you should learn that you need to file charges to ensure your assaulter goes to jail. Not sit quietly in the corner while your abuser gets a talking to.
Filing charges to make sure your assaulter goes to jail is a fantasy for many people and situations. Just like in school, justice is not always going to happen. Sorry.
Also, should we through 10 year old bullies in jail? 15? What’s the line?
If someone assaults me I have to become a public prosecutor?
Victims, qua victims, can file a police report. But only the state can file criminal charges, and whether they will or won't depends on, well, lots of things outside of the control of thr victim.
Hi. I was homeschooled. I graduated university top of my class, have a high-skill high-paying job, think more critically (about everything including religion) than most people that I know, and overall I enjoy my life very much. I'm homeschooling my kids.
It's a pity that some people will take a collection of anecdotes as data and treat a lack of countering anecdotes as conclusive proof.
Socialization was hard, mostly because the other kids my age were really, well, dumb. I am still friends with every good friend I had back then. I noticed plenty of problems with other homeschoolers, but nowhere near as bad as the school kids I knew. They were growing up either stressed beyond belief, addicted to drugs, or promiscuous. Occasionally all three. Compared to my religious fundamentalist friend who is now a happily married mechanical engineer, their "enhanced socialization" is worthless.
It's not like kids learn anything in school anymore. Our test scores are nationally tanking, the only reason to get good grades is to get into a better school which will probably not teach you anything valuable, and real knowledge is increasingly devalued. I was raised and taught that knowledge is its own reward, and if you're smart and good at learning, you can do anything you put your mind to.
Guess what? It's true.
What are you working on?
I think being accountable for your work to a person who isn't in your family is actually an important thing to learn. It also turns out, parents aren't really qualified to be teachers just because they believe that they are.
I think the biggest argument for schooling is the socialization aspect of it. I don't know about the rest of you but I was bullied pretty relentlessly throughout grade school and it completely changed my personality. I became much more of a loner, reserved, quiet, and just defeated. I'm still working through some of that baggage 30 years later. That's not the socialization that I want for my kids.
I work remotely, my wife freelances. We have lots of friends and family with children our kids age, why not surround them by people who love them?
The question for me, personally, is private school vs. homeschooling. If you can avoid many of the downsides of public education via choosing the right private school (and being able to afford it), I do wonder if that would be superior to most homeschooling setups.
Prior to moving, our only “good” option for realistic schooling was putting our children in a local Catholic school with high fees. Given our state is in the midst of legal battles with activist groups fighting to overturn a recent school-choice voucher program, seemed moving was the safe choice.
For the life of me, I can’t understand why anyone but a public-sector teacher being finally held to account would fight against giving parents options to place their kids in a school they see fit.
Because they want to indoctrinate your kids. A lot of teachers get into the profession because of a compelling social justice urge, much like a missionary from the church. When they are outside the public school system they are harder to reach.
Additionally, the more kids in the system equates to more political power for the teachers unions since they get to expand.
Hard to disentangle good change from bad; some of the initiative is good, but negative feedback seems to have been translated to "ignore those haters, they have no valid points."
1. https://www.noahpinion.blog/p/california-needs-real-math-edu...
When I was a kid teachers had a bit more freedom to decide what to teach but now you teach to the test or lose your funding.
Why is there an assumption that what is on the test is inherently worthless but every individual teacher is qualified to design an entire curriculum?
Because my mother went to school for six years for exactly that purpose? Some states have pretty high requirements for teachers, and they tend to do well.
Also, the "teach to test" BS is extremely locality dependent. There are zero things you can generalize across all public schools in the US.
Or, in other words, do we need hundreds of thousands of curricula? Doesn't that leave a lot of by definition below average curricula. Would selecting among even dozens of well-designed options make sense instead?
Teaching to the test is akin to teaching music only through sheet music; no instruments. The test is a mile wide and an inch deep and instead of helping students appreciate and understand topics and apply that knowledge creatively, we rush temporary memorization and regurgitation.
Like all measures, once they become a target, they become a poor measure.
We’ve been homeschooling for 7 years. Our child’s social experience has increased both quantitatively and qualitatively. From few/constantly bullied physically and sexually, to many/nice thoughtful friends who will jump in and defend her instead of filming her, should things go down. She’s also a leader, does service for her community, and (proud papa moment here) at her 4th debate competition (3 per year in this league) won 9th place speaker and 3rd place team. Her team swept the series of 4 rounds. The only way their team could do that…wait for it…lots of practice aka socialization.
The “socialization” boogeyman is one of the most overplayed red herrings about homeschooling IMO.
Sometimes I feel a little guilty feeling envious about my nieces' upbringing. They went to private school that ran from 1-8 grade, so they essentially skipped the middle school experience that was detrimental to so many. Honestly, I believe middle school as I experienced it (a whole bunch of elementary "feeder" schools that fed into one giant middle school for 7-8 grade) is the dumbest invention in the history of humanity. It sticks together kids, at wildly different stages of development, in an unfamiliar environment where everyone is trying to find their place in the social hierarchy - Lord of the Flies should have been set in middle school. Much better IMO to just have kids stay together 1-8th grade, and by then most folks are at least well into puberty by the time they get to high school. Not saying of course bullying doesn't happen in high school, but I think by then more kids are able to find their "tribe", so if they are bullied they have friends to fall back on (again, I'm of course painting with broad strokes).
On the other hand, I'd definitely want my children to be familiar with it. Bullying is not something isolated to schools. I've seen it in nearly every social and political situation that exists at nearly every age group. In my estimation people are getting worse at identifying it and collectively we're getting worse at punishing it.
I'm glad I learned how to shut it down quick or avoid it altogether earlier rather than later.
Being let out into the world thinking everybody loves you sounds like a terrifying idea too.
Are you also taking photos for blackmail purposes? That'd very possibly shut the whole thing down.
If it's a peer in a more professional setting, simply calling them out generally makes you less a target, especially if calling out their behaviour is done in a group setting. It comes down to the old "stand up for yourself" rule we've all heard. Also, calm confidence tends to work with adults too.
If the bullying is coming from above, time to move on. I have zero patience for it, and there's likely no stopping them.
Also, I'm not suggesting you take them outside, although I know a couple guys who've been through fights between coworkers in their workplaces. Grown men (in their 30s) sure can take a long time to grow.
Unless you live in prison or a war zone I highly doubt you've witnessed "adult" bullying that remotely approaches the ferocity and cruelty some kids have to endure on a daily basis.
"If another kid is throwing sand at you and won't stop when you ask, tell a grown up."
No, grown ups were also raised on this garbage and won't do anything. What's the teacher going to do if the other kid won't stop? Go tell the principal? And what will they do? Nothing.
The correct thing to do is to shove the other kid. Don't hurt them; just indicate they need to back off. If they still don't, throw sand at them, and then while they're recoiling, shove them down and kick them.
Society has a major problem where proper, proportionate, defensive violence is punished, and it traces back to this kind of crap.
Are you both working full-time? What's the arrangement? How do you fit the homeschooling in around your jobs?
My wife and I have talked about this a lot. We don't have kids yet, but we're very open to the idea of homeschooling when the time comes. I'm not sure how we'll do it though - we're in a better position than most (we make good money and both wfh) but there are only so many hours in the day. I'm interested to know how other people make it work.
The kids were great, and the parents were mostly great, too.
Anyway, maybe there's some similar local programs. If not, I bet you could run one yourself. I bet youtube would make it super easy, actually.
Even when I taught, sometimes the parents would organize something else for a week, like a local hike.
When you have anti-education groups like the Oregon Department of Education [1] running the public school system, any parent that cares and can make the effort should remove their child from public schooling.
This semester they switched my son from high-school chemistry to "environmental science". I asked him, "is oxygen flammable?" He couldn't answer. I looked at the content of the so called environmental science. Its really just a repeat of some basic biology material that he covered last year and lots of politics on pollution and climate change.
[1] https://www.oregonlive.com/education/2023/10/oregon-again-sa...
The problem is that the public education sector has been - for years - continuously squeezed dry of any funding. Teachers are quitting left and right, and schools are in a terrible state. Instead of fixing THAT problem, now people homeschool.
Ok; I guess. At least homeschooling is something that the individual can control, public funding not so much.
But it boggles my mind how people can assume, with a straight face, that they are equipped to educate their child alone - something which is normally a profession for which you have to study O(years) (and even then most people aren’t really good at). What gives parents this confidence? And what gives parents the right to squander the future of their children on a whim?
I have two kids, would consider myself very well educated (have a PhD, etc), and I habe absolutely 0 confidence in myself schooling my kids.
Finally, public schooling is obviously an attempt at leveling the playing field between children from different backgrounds. By removing your kid from that, I think it further contributes to the segregation of our society.
The key assumption here is that the expertise and years of studying translates to desirable outcomes. The large expansion of homeschooling suggesting by the article suggests a great rise in people who no longer believe that the expertise promoted by teaching schools is actually relevant to teach their children.
After all, mass public schooling is only about a century old and default human experience in many ways has always been closer to what we call homeschooling.
"Believe" is the important word there. Are these people removing children from school because they actually can do a better job, or because the TV told them a school somewhere had a litterbox for a furry student?
Does it matter why they pulled their kid out to homeschool if the outcome is better?
Public school spending in the US is up almost 50% in the last 30 years.[0]
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditures-per-...
Is it all going to football fields, useless technology spending, and 5 levels of non-teaching administration staff?
I don't know if every school does this. But ours is public and I wouldn't have known this was a thing if my wife didn't volunteer.
[1] https://www.statista.com/chart/20979/public-school-teacher-s...
You categorize this as contributing to segregation, but I say that it contributes to diversity. Public school is a hugely homogenizing force and the homogeneity it targets is not necessarily good. I think it is good for society to have a set of people who were raised in an environment with fundamentally different experiences and priorities.
https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-translator... https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/
Almasoud, S., & Fowler, S. R. (2016). The difference in the academic achievements of homeschooled and non-homeschooled students. Home School Researcher, 32(1), 1-4.
Cogan, M. F. (2010). Exploring academic outcomes of homeschooled students. Journal of College Admission, 208, 18-25.
Coleman, R. E. (2014). The homeschool math gap: The data. Coalition for Responsible Home Education.
Two of these are journals are devoted to home education (so personally I'm not assigning much weight to that). The Cogan reference seem legit, but is based on 70 home-schooled students admitted to one specific "medium-sized private university".
Lack of funding isn't always the problem. As jawns mentioned, there's a lot of reasons to remove your kids from public school.
> I have two kids, would consider myself very well educated (have a PhD, etc), and I habe absolutely 0 confidence in myself schooling my kids.
Interesting. I'm surprised you feel this way while acknowledging that most educated teachers "aren't really good at it". Perhaps you aren't qualified to teach your kids, and that's okay. At least you have the self-awareness to know they need help from someone else.
> public schooling is obviously an attempt at leveling the playing field between children from different backgrounds.
Yep. But it can also stifle the growth of overachievers.
Or give gifted kids resources their parents cannot afford or that their parents would find offensive
You have to consider capacity. It is a parent educating 1-2 children vs a teacher educating 30+. So while the teacher has a lot more training on how, a lot of the how is how to do it in bulk.
Would an individual focused on solving any particular problem outperform a PhD trying to solve 30 at once? I don't think that is unreasonable. Someone who hasn't picked up a book on software development yet has a reasonable chance of beating me (professional software developer) if I work on 30 projects at once.
If you have the means, you can also buy a lot of teaching a la carte.
When faced with similar resource and time constraints, teacher is going to win. But the gap in those is huge.
They had no problems reintegrating into regular school when they chose to do so. Our youngest stayed on the homeschool track the longest (from 7th grade because they got involved in competitive Call of Duty. So they ended up doing the homeschool->community college->GaTech track.
> But it boggles my mind how people can assume, with a straight face, that they are equipped to educate their child alone - something which is normally a profession for which you have to study O(years) (and even then most people aren’t really good at). What gives parents this confidence? And what gives parents the right to squander the future of their children on a whim?
There are awesome resources to educate you kid on just about anything. The real distinguishing attribute on whether a parent can be a good educator is whether their children can spin them up emotionally. If a parent can't stay calm when their child is pushing their buttons homeschooling probably won't work. And then secondarily, a parent should know when they are over their head and need to bring in assistance. Not every parent is equipped to help their children learn calculus and other advanced courses.
Public schools are still teaching in a style suited for the Industrial Revolution. They also are a jobs program, so they can’t change to accommodate students if it hurts the employees.
Right, so home-schooling just brings that full circle.
Parents aren't teachers and teachers aren't parents. I'd argue that one of main problems with education right now is the dereliction of duty on the parents part, expecting the schools to pick up the slack - which they really cant' do.
Unfortunately I know first hand having had to go to these schools until my parents finally realized their worldview was damaging their children.
Saying that, public schools in communities of stable homes with caring parents with good values tend to be just fine. They still have to deal with issues a private school won’t tolerate but they’re mainly functional.
Not everyone agrees that is the problem.
Bullying and indoctrination are two examples that many people cite as reasons they choose to homeschool.
How good were your "average" classmates?
I can teach my (hypothetical) child better than the "average" teaching-degree graduate. You're selling yourself short if you don't think you can, too, with a focused effort.
My friend group is like 20ish elementary school teachers (US). They are all great people, but they are quite variable in competence. Some are very good, and some can't move beyond the basics in Kindergarten.
What I'm saying is, you're placing way too much faith in the teachers.
Last I heard, in Florida, they were accepting "spouses of active duty military" for teaching positions without further qualification because they're so hard up.
Rather a lot better than before I got it.
Self-learning and reflecting on what you read are two of the most important parts of learning. Too often, schools pay lip service to these ideas, then spoon feed information to students.
I'm late and this probably won't be read, but I disagree. There is no strong correlation between funding and public education "success".
The only thing that correlates is parents involvement in education. This isn't something you can realistically spend your way out of. (It's been tried).
Since then it's become clear that there are basically two categories of homeschoolers: those that want to bring in extra education beyond what the public school system can deliver, and those that want to bring in less education than the public system. Usually in the name of "protecting" them from some information for religious reasons. That's where all the attention and concern is. Because children can't advocate for themselves, especially against their parents.
(The UK had a recent scandal with illegal schools: https://www.theguardian.com/education/2019/apr/12/ofsted-unc... ; running a school for money - heck, even offering a childminding service for money - without registering with OFSTED is definitely illegal, while homeschooling is legal by default https://www.gov.uk/home-education )
I grew up in a place with a large number of religious organizations and outcome of this is what I would consider abuse in a huge number of cases. Would the children themselves think so at the time, kinda hard when you're taught "spare the rod, spoil the child" and "Of course the Earth is only 6000 years old" daily.
[0] 78% of peer-reviewed studies on academic achievement show homeschool students perform statistically significantly better than those in institutional schools (Ray, 2017). Source and lots of other good tidbits: https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:te....)
Your continual assumptions about me are both wrong and offensive.
It is pretty misleading for this article to talk about homeschooling being a “fundamental change” without mentioning that homeschooling was the default practice for most of human history. If anything, this is just a return to a long-established practice, not a fringe movement.
Homeschooling was also the default thing a ±century ago, while you'd need to go back pretty far to find true animal/human sacrifice in European/European-American culture.
I better example might be freedom from surveillance. It's a totally fringe lifestyle to not be tracked everywhere you go, at least in a developed country.
But your rhetoric might be useful for shooting down privacy advocates during the next dust-up. Privacy may have been common in the past but now its fringe, just like animal sacrifice. Key escrow is the future!
Make those two untrue and it's like you never existed.
You're proving GP's point, that was the norm in developed countries 100 years ago and to a relative degree 50 years ago. The organs of the state and of capital which effected surveillance or tracking were tiny and isolated compared to what they are now.
This is part of the reason why business monopolies are social poison.
I'm sure homeschooling can work out fine, but that is hardly assured by simply being inline with historical tradition. If you go to war with broadswords and spears, you're going to lose. If you insist on living without indoor plumbing or refrigerated food storage, you're likely going to have your kids taken away, and rightfully so, in spite of the fact humans lived that way by default longer than not.
Isn't escaping from those officials the whole point? Either because they're failing at their job or doing things that are disagreeable to some subset of the population?
It's astounding. I don't know if that's just because that particular state doesn't have very strict rules around homeschooling, or if that's standard; I just haven't done the research.
Presumably the students are also applying with ACT/SAT scores in hand, which do have an established meaning.
Are you saying things written on a fancy letterhead with a stamp can't be unquestionably trusted?
And ACT/SAT has become optional since covid for most institutions.
There are "accredited" homeschool programs, and the "accreditation" means probably about as much as it does for "accredited" private schools, many of whom don't even bother.
Elsewhere in the comments I mentioned the Baltimore public school system, where clearly whatever "accreditation" it has is completely and utterly worthless.
Heck, even my ABET accredited university, although overall of high quality, had a few teachers that taught me nothing at all and who had no checks on their failure to teach.
So they should go back to requiring it. Seems pretty easy.
Except...
>More Than 80% Of Four-Year Colleges Won’t Require Standardized Tests For Fall 2023 Admissions
>An additional 85 schools will be test-blind or score-free, meaning that applicants’ standardized exam results are not considered even if they are submitted. Included in that number is the entire California public university system....
>[And] at least 1,450 colleges and universities have made their test-optional and test-blind policies permanent.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/michaeltnietzel/2022/11/15/more...
One of the other reasons for this is because students completely unprepared for college from public schools are an increasing problem. This is also why they now all offer remedial classes under varying names and programs, and why first-year university programs are much easier than they were in say, 1940.
For instance - to use your example - which student is more likely to be given your advice: the one from an affluent family attending a well-funded school, or the (let's posit much smarter) one from a family of non-college attendees living in an under-funded district? When the SAT was a formal requirement they'd be more likely to be judged on an actually level playing field.
Many of the school districts in my area have consolidated, and it's not even possible to verify attendance of students from the small schools that no longer exist.
To my knowledge, there is no "accreditation" that matters for public high schools - there are only thresholds for which state funding is available.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/oregon-suspends-graduation...
Oh please. No one's going to jail for this.
Obviously I'm presenting an extreme example, but society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated. I'm not saying there are no problems with regulations, but I hate how the "deregulate everything!" crowd conveniently ignores the reasons those regulations were created in the first place.
And society should also care whether government-run public schools are doing this--not to mention whether they are indoctrinating children with values that many parents disagree with.
School boards are elected, but I don't think "broad democractic oversight" is a fair description.
In any case, none of the things you mention prevented the US public school system from being explicitly set up to indoctrinate children, as explicitly described by the people who set it up. So to the extent that society in the US cares about educating children, it cares about educating them according to a particular political agenda that many people do not agree with. That is a major reason why homeschooling continues to increase in popularity.
Not all homeschoolers are like this. There are plenty of other good reasons for parents not to want their kids to go to public schools.
> society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated
Yes, but for whose definition of "educated"? In the US, at least, the government was not supposed to decide that. Individual families and communities were. And, as I have posted elsewhere in this thread, the people who set up the US system of widespread, compulsory public education were quite explicit about what they meant by "educated", and that included plenty of things that any reasonable person would consider to be indoctrination, not education--and that was on purpose.
Saying that the cost of giving persecuted minorities an out is "then we might not be able to persecute the minorities that I've decided actually deserve it" just feels fundamentally unconvincing.
It sounds ideal.
But we might want at least some oversight and regulation to, for example, make sure kids aren't being homeschooled on how to build rockets and kill some group of people.
Bad apples will fall from any tree. A poisoned tree will mostly produce bad apples.
Nor are homeschooled kids.
Lmao, yes they are. You couldn't be more wrong, kids who attend public school make better military recruits. Public schools teach kids how to conform to institutional systems and follow orders. These are essential skills for effective killers.
Btw, since you're so scared of kids learning how to build rockets.. I learned how to build rockets in public school through a program called TARC. The same design principles I learned for model rockets could be applied to homemade weaponized rockets. Does that frighten you? Do you think that makes me Hamas or something? (Hamas is who you're thinking of right? America doesn't have a domestic rocket attack problem, I'm sure you know that.) You should know that most people in the MIC went through public school. If you're actually afraid of people learning these sort of skills, shouldn't you be advocating for kids receiving a bible-only education that renders them incapable of engineering, and therefore weapon design, and unfit for military recruitment?
Maybe modeling the child rocket program[1] on [whatever it is that public high schools are doing] would save us?
[1] https://estesrockets.com/collections/stem-productsNo, of course not. Is being helpless comforting to you? How often does anyone actually fix a serious problem with an institution? Sure it happens sometimes, but the best almost everyone can hope for it to muddle through being subjected to the problems.
The impulse to put homeschooling under the thumb of government officials is not comforting, because it would remove the agency of parents to respond to problems they experience or fear in the school system.
In this child = cardboard box analogy, I guess home-school would be equivalent to transporting the box in your own car. In this case, the box would also be subject to scrutiny, for example at border crossings.
And I can't argue with your position on how often things are fixed. It wouldn't matter what evidence I found, the goal post would just move a little bit farther. Sure, "it happens sometimes," but never enough to satisfy.
But I can counter with, how often can you fix broken homeschooling that has no auditing or oversight?
Never. Not even sometimes.
That said, I don't think home schooling is an option for all either. Covid showed how difficult it could be for many families.
The intent imo is to make schools seem "scary" and push parents to put their kids in private schools that these religious groups control, they are for-profit so they can rake in those sweet tax dollars and the parents money, while public schools flail and kids don't get a proper education. Its a concerted effort to privatize and dismantle the public school system. These schools don't have to abide by federal laws either, even while receiving federal tax money.
Throw that in with the very real dangers of going to school these days, these are the only two options after a while. Go to a private religious school, or home school... and that is not an accident or a coincidence.
The much simpler explanation is that having influence over private schools is very tempting for the govt and the easiest tool is via giving or retaining funding which they don't personally have to pay. They just want to secure votes and influence
https://www.statista.com/statistics/203118/expenditures-per-...
And there's expectations that the school should address other social needs the children might encounter. So there's lots of programs and interventions and support systems, and the bureaucracy to manage that... and maybe those things work and maybe they don't, but even ineffective programs cost money.
I also think schools would be a classic case where Baumol's Cost Disease would make the cost go up relative to other parts of the economy (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baumol_effect)
And really if you go to schools today it's clear they are more well funded than 30-40 years ago. Teaching was hardly well paid at that time either. But society demands modernity and modernity is expensive.
So the solution is to privatize education so parents can choose a schools that fits their child’s unique needs and suits their values. We are a massive diverse country and it’s crazy to think we have so many shared, universal values.
So, let a marketplace take the place of government schools and give everyone an equal amount of money to choose the school that they see as best fit. The model works for pre-schools and colleges really well and there’s no reason to think it won’t for the rest.
AFAIK, most academic outcomes for home-schooled kids are actually worse when adjusted for income. This is at least true for private school vs. public school (https://www.usnews.com/education/k12/articles/private-school...) but I suspect home school data is much more sparse
Regular schooling isn't ideal. But homeschooling is a pretty major reaction to that, and it shouldn't be done without serious consideration for the non-zero chance that your kids will resent you for that decision.
As a parent of two daughters who are homeschooled - unschooled, actually - I 100% agree.
As with everything, our approach is intentional and we're open with our kids about it. If they wanted to go to a school - public, private, or religious - we would make that happen.
Our eldest is currently taking three hours per day at the local public high school. She's 15, wants to own a equine stud farm, and is taking every agriculture class she can find. After this year she will have exhausted their offerings in that subject, so she'll likely start at the local community college in the fall.
Same goes to the homeschooling — some can be successful, some can be disastrous. The majority of homeschooled kids that would fail, definitely wouldn’t be on these forums. So we’ll hear mostly success stories that came out of it.
It’s hard to apply the comments to a generalized idea from HN.
HSLDA has successfully lobbied against even tracking if a child is homeschooled, so there is no way to truly statistically tell which experience is the representative one. All you get are anecdotes, mostly from the parent's point of view.
Let's start with the obvious: "fringe" is a measure of size. "fastest growing" is a measure of rate. You don't go from size to rate.
Next: the data graphically presented has no axes or explanation, but what it appears to be showing is the percentage growth of each schooling type relative to its 2017 value. But then there's this bit:
> In 390 districts included in The Post’s analysis, there was at least one home-schooled child for every 10 in public schools during the 2021-2022 academic year ... > The Post estimates that there are now between 1.9 million and 2.7 million home-schooled children in the United States, depending on the rate of increase in areas without reliable data.
Let's be charitable and say 2.7 million. The Post data says that's 158% of the 2017 value, and 2020 was, oh, let's say, 164%, so in 2020 there were 2.8 million. According to the DoE, there were 48.1 million kids in public schools in 2020. This is at best 1 in 17. Surely the Doe and the WP can't differ by a factor of 2?
https://research.com/universities-colleges/number-of-public-...
Last, the graph clearly shows that, post covid, home-schooling is the fastest declining form of education. It has dropped 15% since 2020 alone, whereas public school has dropped by, what, about 1%? Why isn't this the headline? Or that clearly homeschoolers are being moved to private institutions?
The often-cited failure in socialization extends beyond socialization within peer-groups as well--kids also need exposure to a variety of adults and authority figures. It's not only about learning how to make friends.
> Today, Hillsborough home-schoolers inhabit a scholastic and extracurricular ecosystem that is in many ways indistinguishable from that of a public or private school. Home-schooled kids play competitive sports. They put on full-scale productions of “Mary Poppins” and “Les Miserables.” They have high school graduation ceremonies, as well as a prom and homecoming dance.
> The Christian home-schooling co-op that had about 40 kids in 2011 when McKeown joined it — a co-op she would go on to direct — has grown to nearly 600 students.
> “Home-schoolers in Hillsborough County do not lack for anything,” she said. “We have come such a long way.”
I mean reading this it just sounds like they are discovering the hard way the concept of... a school??
"Almost always" is way, way too broad. Yes, some parents' values are crackpot nonsense, but many are not. One does not have to be a crackpot to prefer homeschooling to US public schools.
Also, the values that the people who set up the US public school system explicitly said that system would indoctrinate children into are nothing to write home about either.
> Have some humility
Take your own advice. If anyone is being way overconfident here, it's you.
> let the kids figure out what they think for themselves
It seems to me that homeschooling is far more likely to let kids do this than public schools are.
> The public school gives them a reasonably neutral basis to do that
In the US? You must be joking. Public schools in the US are anything but neutral.
What are some examples of values that would lead one to prefer to homeschool their child, and are not "crackpot values"?
Values such as the ones the US was founded on: things like individual liberty and deep distrust of governments, particularly governments wanting to indoctrinate children. And governments have done plenty to earn such distrust.
Also, the US very much was not built on distrust of government because building the US meant building a government everyone would trust.
While I can relate to the deep distrust of governments and have a strong belief in individual liberty, I don't understand the connection to homeschooling. Could you elaborate?
> particularly governments wanting to indoctrinate children. And governments have done plenty to earn such distrust.
Do you have any evidence of US public schools indoctrinating children en masse? I find this a rather extreme claim that I am unaware of convincing evidence of. Thus, I'm a position where, as a rational person, I must assume that the two most probable situations are that the claim is either false or I am woefully ignorant, and that I am ill equipped to engage with this without further exposition.
i'm sorry, but surely you're joking? no schooling - especially public schools of today - is aiming for neutrality. neutrality is a fiction, and saying it is possible is lifting up something vacuous as the standard.
schooling - especially schooling - is always done with a worldview or, if you like, an agenda. read up on the history of schooling. look up a bit on the history of education. the parents know this, the leaders know this, and i hope you'll be honest with yourself for a second and agree also.
this idea of "schooling is neutral, we will sit above everything being taught as an impartial observer and present ideas without taking part or judging" is laughably foolish and impossible. teaching that it is possible is... well at least showing the hand.
> you yourself may be wrong...let the kids figure out what they think
your advice to "show some humility" would be better received if this wasn't such an unloving proposal crouched in an argument against an arrogant straw man. should children be micromanaged, told always what to do and think? that also is unloving. but to let them figure it out for themselves? surely you can't mean something so cruel as to tell them to just trust their individual judgements, rest of the culture (and authorities and parents) be damned. read your history, please, that is the short path to horrors not the way to the chosen land.
Thank Prussia for a system that -- for all its faults -- provides a way out for kids born into religion.
shame on faith communities - and parents - that teach laziness of mind. the effects are obvious, you are not the only person saying this.
> Public schools weren't indoctrinating anything. Rather they taught me to think critically, using proven methods, and avoid fallacies
you are not the first person to claim religion indoctrinates but public schooling doesn't. i'm always surprised how quickly logic and clear reasoning are thrown out in these statements. has it never occurred to you that critical thinking must be founded on something? that proven methods, useful as they are, can also be misused to support accepted truths that are wrong? that distinguishing fallacies requires recognition of truth, which requires acceptance of certain things as true? i guess what i'm trying to point out is that the list of things you were taught is indoctrination, and that to a high degree.
indoctrination is not a bad thing in and of itself. but a system of indoctrination that teaches it isn't indoctrinating scares me.
I don't know which public schools you went to, but the ones I went to (in the US) most certainly were indoctrinating all sorts of things. Nor has that situation improved since I went to school; if anything, in the US it has gotten worse.
As for teaching critical thinking, some of the teachers I had in public schools did that. Many others did not. And I think I was among the more fortunate students; many, as far as I could tell, had no teachers who taught them critical thinking.
Nor should the fact that US public schools are indoctrinating children be a surprise. As I have noted elsewhere in this thread, the people who set up the US public school system explicitly stated that indoctrinating children in the values the State wanted them to have (whether or not their parents agreed) was a goal of the system.
Like what?
That people should be treated with respect? Or how about that literacy is important?
That slavery was bad? Or how about that lesson plan on how the Holocaust was a really bad thing. Maybe it was that time that schools taught that we killed a bunch of Native Americans for their land.
My (public) schooling was rather politically neutral to be honest, but using a banana they did demonstrate how to put on a condom and they talked about STD and pregnancy prevention. One may consider that "indoctrination" but last I checked the "abstinence only" crowd kept getting pregnant out of wedlock at a higher rate than teenagers who were told how to actually prevent pregnancy.
Or maybe people are upset that public schools make such outrageous statements as "some kids have two fathers or two mothers at home."
Which is a fact, since same sex marriage is now the law of the land as ruled on by the supreme court.
Or how about the outrageous statement "some people change their gender". That does indeed happen.
Saying stuff that is true, but that makes some people uncomfortable, isn't indoctrination.
Meanwhile other countries make children memorize speeches by the country's "president for life". That is indoctrination.
Yeah, a school that works.
Seems like the same lesson as private academies that were used to enforce de facto segregation. Run away from the scary change, and try to keep doing things the old way. It's just not sustainable the way public institutions are.
Besides, I believe school is also a place for kids to socialize with and learn from their peers. I'm very introverted, but I think I would have ended up horribly social-wise if I was home-schooled.
It is extremely dependent on 1. access to wealth, 2. underlying reason for homeschooling (religion/safety/other item), and 3. where in the country you live (rural v suburban v urban).
In that order specifically. Homeschooling is the ultimate class solidification technique. Those with wealth can almost certainly guarantee their children will do really well. Those without don't stand a chance in hell.
In what ways that are different from any public or private school?
1. Religious Home Schoolers. They are primarily homeschooled because the parents are very religious and don't want them in public schools because of fears their kids will become too secular.
2. Wealthy Home Schoolers. These are very well off people who choose to home school their kids for any number of reasons (like their traditional schooling options being poor) but can afford to hire tutors or teachers or if they teach the kids themselves, there were previously teachers.
3. Group Home Schoolers. These are families that have grouped up to split the duties of homeschooling across multiple families. Sometimes for all classes or just a few. The kids are more likely to have more day-to-day connection with other kids/students other than their siblings.
All of these groups have tons of cross over. Religious group home schoolers is a big thing right now. But your opinion on homeschooling is likely heavily built on the type of homeschooling you have witnessed/been involved in.
At the end of the day, everyone has their own experience and biases built into schooling from their own lived experiences. For every, "I was homeschooled and grew up to be very social and successful” story, there is a, "I learned nothing and I don't know how to talk to people" story.
are you a public school teacher by chance? your view seems biased against anyone who does not send their kids to public school.
The activities you mention are not even thought about as socialization situation outside of homeschooling context - because kids come, engage in highly structured activity and leave.
So... exactly the same as public schools, then?
In my experience a home schooled child is significantly more likely to be good at social skills than a public schooled child. They are also adept at navigating adult conversation and social situations much sooner.
I find it interesting that your experience is the opposite. Where in the world do you live?
Anecdotal evidence is going to vary certainly and effect is highly dependent on the parent. But I've been around homeschooling groups for over 30 years now and the balance of them have been significantly ahead of the public schooled.
Do you have any published evidence for this?
The most successful kids that I see are the ones who have professional instructors by day and excellent support at home. Not one or the other, but both.
How does sitting in a room with a bunch of kids, all of whom are within one year of you in age, with an authority figure at the front telling you exactly what to do, teach you "how to adult"?
It might prepare you for Army boot camp, which is the only "adult" place you're likely to encounter that kind of environment. Even prison usually has a range of age groups.
This is not an accurate description of school. Maybe, maybe in high school and college you kinda sorta get to something resembling that, but for elementary school and middle school it is nothing at all like your description.
I'll grant you that 40-50 years ago it was a bit more regimented. I'm old too. But I have school age kids in both elementary and middle school, and I have a lot of experience in what their environment looks like. It's very dynamic, lots of hands-on learning opportunities.
Elementary and middle school are even less like being an adult than high school
I think GP's point is that the school environment is nothing like "adulting," so your original point was just plain wrong.
And I agree with the GP: I don't see any reason why home-schooled kids would be at a disadvantage to public school kids when learning to navigate the adult world, because the school environment is strange and not at all focused on "adult life skills."
It actually made for a very unsafe college experience. I had no experience telling anyone no, or doubting anyone's intentions. It took being lured alone with a man to realize that he didn't want to study Calc I, he wanted to make sexual advances on me when I was alone. I was lucky to learn that lesson without getting sexually assaulted.
Took me another few years to realize that I didn't have to obey everything my boss said, even if it was personally detrimental to my career.
My mom, of course, would tell you how great it was that I wasn't socialized with "an unnatural collection of same aged peers" and how I was always "so polite around adults."
Hmm... so you're saying that students aren't segregated into artificial cohorts of a specific age, and there isn't an authority figure in the classroom telling them what to do?
Perhaps that's the case where you live (though I'm...skeptical), but it certainly is the case here and everywhere else I've ever lived.
IIRC that sounds a bit like Montessori (done right), but that's uncommon generally and extremely uncommon in upper grades.
I wasn't even sure what an upper-grade Montessori program would look like, and I found this: https://amshq.org/About-Montessori/Inside-the-Montessori-Cla....
what school age child has access to that? Maybe in the most selective and well funded private schools there's professional instructors put public school? No way.
And they are often worse at navigating interactions with children who are not homeschooled (at least I was). Specificity is king.
There was a stretch between 14 and 18 where I didn't see anyone other than my mom and dad. Oh, I made small talk to the grocery clerk once a week. Frankly, it was appalling emotional neglect, and my dad has apologized for not stepping up to fix it. My mom remains in denial that it was even a problem.
And meanwhile, anytime someone brings up homeschooling there's always a ton of people saying socialization can't possibly be a problem. Usually people who weren't homeschooled themselves, of course.
We don't personally home school but have many friends that do. It's a very common thing in our church and community. It's hard to tell what kids are homeschooled versus the ones that aren't. Many homeschools engage in co-op programs and use curricula to drive personal engagement. For instance in one family we're very good friends with they use a curriculum that requires community service for middle school ages and up. There are several charities that they engage with in addition to the community service activities that the church is doing.
It also doesn’t mean just Billy and his little sister Jenny learning all by themselves. Homeschooling parents often join groups where they can bring all the kids together. The kids can socialize and the parents can share responsibility for teaching and supervising.
It also doesn’t mean just the parents participate. At my local public library, the children’s floor has a huge amount of programming aimed at homeschooling families. The librarians run activities with the kids, showing them how to find books in the library for science research, make crafts together (by hand and with library 3D printers), learn about engineering by building cars and robots with electronics components.
Homeschooling can of course be done badly and we should worry about kids in those environments. However, homeschooling done right can be far more dynamic and engaging than the best public schools around. It also doesn’t have to be expensive, it just takes time and commitment from the parents involved.
The kids are still required to pass the same exams to get their high school diploma, and they still get a package of course work and required reading and such. They also have access to a teacher to ask questions to, who can help explain concepts, projects, and such.
My wife was homeschooled here growing up and she loved it. She would finish her school for the day in the morning then do whatever she wanted for the rest of her time. She would also finish her courses early and have long summers. Now she has a masters degree and leads teams at work.
Definitely not for every family or every kid, but the outcomes don't have to be terrible
For parents who do so for political or culture war reasons, that must seem profoundly unfair. To be driven out of the public schools means to be denied resources.
Public schools using public money should be especially sensitive and as neutral as possible on political or culture war issues. That's increasingly difficult, but without that, public school doesn't have a good future.
Normally schools are thought of as Democrat-controlled, but that's not true everywhere. So rather than just saying that everything is OK the way it is, think about how it will be when your political opponents are in control.
https://idealschool.education/full-day-program/utah-voucher-...
We homeschool to keep our kids out of government schools. Inviting that same government into our home for a bit of money would make no sense whatsoever.
I don't think it's really possible to be neutral about culture war issues, sort of by definition, especially when many of the wars are about schools themselves. A school is part of American culture, it can't somehow choose not to participate. To use a historical example, there was a culture war over teaching evolution in schools. A teacher at the time could describe the history and facts of the controversy without stating their opinion on it, but when the students leave that classroom, they are still in a school that either teaches evolution or doesn't. By existing and having a curriculum, the school takes a position in the culture war.
Imagine if your country held a referendum on a certain issue, and said "if more than 50% of citizens vote yes, the law passes, otherwise it fails". You could have a genuinely neutral opinion on the issue ("I don't care which side wins"), but you cannot take a neutral action, because not voting makes the law less likely to pass. This is unfair, and you can be mad about it, but the only way to be "neutral" would be to leave the country and renounce your citizenship so that you are no longer part of the equation. Similarly, in a culture war, the only way to be neutral would be to not participate in the culture in question, which is even more difficult than leaving a country.
Let me give one more example: whether or not to tip your server in a restaurant. Tipping 10% instead of 20% is not neutral. Tipping 50% of the time you go to a restaurant is not neutral. You could say "I don't wish to take a position, so I will no longer go to restaurants", but I'm confident the anti-tipping side would claim you as one of their own. Again it feels unfair, but it's just how culture works.
And if you live in an area where evolution is a controversial topic, then you should leave it up to the parents. You don't have a right to use their money to teach something that a lot of people don't want to be taught. Of course, there's some line where something is fringe enough and you don't have to accommodate every last person. Again, try to be neutral, don't aim for perfection.
And you know what? Evolution is a nuanced topic. The actual claims that can be backed up by first principals using the scientific method are fairly narrow. Much of the reasoning is very prone to confirmation bias and all kinds of after-the-fact fitting rather than forward-looking predictions. To stick to the science on the topic of evolution you have to be pretty careful and most teachers are not. Not saying it shouldn't be taught... I think it has a lot of explanatory power outside of pure science and represents a large body of important observations. But I don't think it's a good example of science-vs-idiots.
We aren't talking about fine points of evolution, we are talking about the earth being older than mankind at all.
Parents should always have the final say in what their children are being taught, even if it’s patently unscientific. Anything else feels like an incredibly slippery slope of, “Daddy Government knows what’s best for your kids better than you do, so we’re chipping away at your parental rights until we can save your child from your non-governmentally approved ideas!”
What happens when the government decides to teach nonsense?
There is nothing magical about the state that makes it a better arbiter of truth than other institutions. Historically states have a pretty poor record. They tend to push ideas that benefit the people who control them, whether that’s a nobility or a majority faction in the electorate (or both).
Essentially everyone in America agrees with you. This is written into our Constitution.
> It is not the responsibility of the state, in any way, shape, or form, to dictate information to a child that the parents take issue with
This is an impossible standard. We have to make public schooling available, and we can't provide individual tutors for every student, so they must be taught in groups. This guarantees that some students will be taught things that their parents take issue with. To compensate for this we make some escape hatches available like homeschooling, private schooling, or moving to a different school district, but these are all difficult or impossible for most parents. Some schools have offered to let parents take their kids out of class when certain topics are taught, but this approach can't scale to all subjects and topics. It also can't address parents upset about what their child is NOT being taught.
I'm not aware of any educational model that gives all parents complete control over their children's education.
No school curriculum will ever be 100% satisfactory to 100% of people, but I believe that the state has no obligation to enforce a certain educational model simply because it is “correct”. That probably sounds a bit silly, but I just believe that people have the right to believe and teach ideas that run counter to the state-approved message, even if the state is empirically correct.
School does not occupy all the time of a child. If a school teaches something parents disagree with, parents can debunk that when the kids are home. They can bring arguments and kids will eventually make up their own minds.
Homeschooling presents a single view, that of the parents. There is no debate.
I homeschooled my daughter for reasons other than culture wars or politics (she’s a violinist and public schools didn’t regard practice time as particularly important.)
But I never thought of public school funding as transactional. We did not take direct advantage of the benefit; but a reasonably well educated populace benefits me in a host of other ways. So I harboured no resentment when paying my public school levy.
But that's precisely the point: what does "well-educated" mean? If the money is going toward reading, writing, and 'rithmetic, then few will disagree. When the curriculum, environment, or manner of teaching drift into more controversial areas, then you might start to see things differently.
Imagine the school starts teaching things that don't align with your values, and they leave out things that do. How would you feel about the way your tax dollars are spent?
That's not money you have a right to as a parent. I don't take part in all the social programs my government offers, but I don't get all that money back.
Some communities highly dissatisfied with their police attempted to defund and/or defunded their department. That's not a great example because self-service policing doesn't work very well, but it's kinda close.
Ultimately, if you want the voters' money, you need to convince them that you at least won't use it against them. And it's really easy for people to start thinking that it's being used against them when engaging in culture war or political issues.
This is a great example for what should happen - demands for systemic reform, not taking what you think is "your" money and going home.
It's one thing to opt out of a system, it's another to think you're justified to get money back for it. As someone without any children am I justified in getting 24k/year back because I'm not using the school system for my (average) 2 non-kids? Of course not, but I do pay taxes for that service.
Ideally, it would be a back-to-basics reform that would be more neutral. But probably what would happen is a slow draining of the best students along with money until it spirals.
You can say that shouldn't happen, or be mad at the people who opt out, or be mad at the people who underfund it. But it would be better to save it by at least making an effort to be neutral before it gets to that point. Too many teachers look at students as their children to mold according to their personal or party values rather than educating them according to collective or neutral values.
Money spent ≠ value provided. My kid's class has over half a million dollars spent on it per year. But many parents see it as merely childcare, and then spend more money on after school tutoring and activities.
I can see the appeal of skipping the schooling and doing the other activities during the school day. It's probably much easier/cheaper to get appointments before 2, when most kids are in school. And there's more flexibility in terms of scheduling. I just heard today that a family was threatened with being kicked out of our local school if they accrued 10 days of unexcused absences (which includes vacation days). While I don't think the school would actually kick the family out, the fact that this is even floated as an idea sounds crazy.
Tell me your bias without telling me you're biased.
Bias is supposed to mean something that is factual but presenting a one-sided opinion by e.g using a subset of facts and language meant to influence the readers opinion.
Just read through the comments other people have posted in subthreads here about their own experiences.
My own school had a wide range of "don't bother learning, get pregnant and drop out" to "goes on to elite university" students, and everything in-between.
No one claimed that "public education is a uniform experience in the US". Did you reply to the wrong comment?
Do you think the variability is wider among public schools, or among homeschools?
Is that snippet most likely an expression of bias, or is it most likely setting up to challenge bias?
> In fact, high-scoring districts had some of the biggest spikes in home schooling early in the pandemic, though by the fall of 2022 increases were similar regardless of school performance
Parents with resources are opting out of a system that was not providing for their kids. This isn't surprising.
My public elementary school was outright hostile to my existence, with teachers ignoring/enabling my bullies and then trying to punish me when I started fighting back viciously at the prompting of my exasperated father. “Anarcho-tyranny” is a good way to sum up my experience. You’ll likely find it unsurprising that I am adhd(I) (fully evaluated) and almost certainly autistic to some degree (not fully evaluated as there’s not much for me to gain on a diagnosis), though these revelations wouldn’t come until decades later when I learned what these things actually meant instead of media tropes. Prior to that I was considered “shy/very introverted”.
Homeschool was straight up not an option for me, since we were a single parent/provider household. I’m extremely lucky that a charter middle school opened up around 4th grade. It was amazing to see what sort of environment occurred when both teachers and children were held accountable and can and would be removed. There’s also the effects of the natural bias of having most of the children there having active and concerned parents involved, which I imagine also plays a big role in the ultimate quality of the education homeschoolers now get, as opposed to what seemed to be more prominently religious/paranoid motivations when I was a child.
Also fortunately my public high school was, mostly, tame.
The first few (!) years were quite difficult. We didn’t seek out any homeschool group support but we did study about home schooling.
We ended up devising our own curriculum and our kid, eventually, and to some degree ..on his own, became a diligent student. Just learning how to do “school work” was a real hurdle.
The biggest outcome that requires reconsideration is that he was pretty invisible when he applied to colleges. Our demographic qualifications didn’t help. So we’re paying cash for college. He did take some community college classes during the time that would’ve been his last two years of high school.
He really liked community college. He thrived. The local (well regarded) university is an educational black box, offering little support or contact with administrators or educators. Office hours are never kept and often cancelled, for instance. Assignments aren’t managed properly in online systems and teachers can’t be reached by the deadline (it’s almost like a Google support situation — impervious and well guarded).
Still, he found a research position and got offered a job and works with an interesting and accessible professor. Socially, his university isn’t a match. He’s not that interested in college life, and I can’t find a wedge in to encourage him. He’s in a STEM field, so everyone’s pretty anti-social.
So, we’re that kind of homeschool tribe. He turned out fine. He’s very happy that he was homeschooled. Honestly, if I hadn’t been divorced (amicably) and if she hadn’t been anchored here, I would’ve seriously considered moving to another country for his education. It’s what he and I are discussing for his grad school interests. We’re both making lists of places overseas (where we’ve been expats at various times).
K-5: Extreme boredom and anxiety because roughly 1/2 the year is review or test prep. If you are lucky, your child might have a GT teacher.
6-8: Your child will struggle to make friends, especially if they aren't connected to social media. Thankfully, my kids were athletes and musicians but for the smart kids who weren't, I saw a lot of bullying.
9-10: Your kids will learn, but not all that much. They'll start being offered advanced and AP courses, but because of most kids' busy schedules these days, this simply means that they are completely segregated from their friends that aren't "smart."
11-12: Curricula have been gutted, and so your children will leave high school less smart than you are, especially when it comes to history. Your kids will be pushed to take AP courses, not realizing that many of the AP credits they earn wont be honored by many schools depending on their career track. It's relatively safe to say that 30-50% of all of the learning in the K-12 space happens during this time for gifted students. In fact you could probably give kids time off from 6th through 9th grade, and they'd still wind up being 90-95% as knowledgeable as if they hadn't.
In contrast, many of the homeschool families I know have kids who learn for 4-6 hours per week. When they aren't learning, they are at co-ops, on field trips, enjoying free play, or learning other skills (woodworking, music, etc).
Something is fundamentally broken with our public education system. The system is more stressful, less educational, and far more expensive than it was 20 years ago, and it's putting out students who are in many ways hollow.
4th through 7th: seek out a FIRST Lego League program for your kids. FLL teaches then to think and solve problems.
High School: Dual credit does exist. Look for a high school in your area that offers a college degree through dual credit.
The first was my neighbor. I’m not really sure why his parents homeschooled him. He was an only child, and strikingly similar to the character of Cartman from Southpark. Him mom was also strikingly similar to Cartman’s mom. He didn’t learn anything, as his mom was not very strict about making sure he did his lessons. He had terrible social skills and very few life skills, which all came from hobbies that he pursued. He was an intelligent kid, and is struggling today due to generally poor work ethic and few job skills.
The second family was a typical anti-government family with cult-like religious beliefs. They believed God was in charge of their reproductive systems and had way more children than they could care for. It was a huge family. The first born was able to secure a job as an airline attendant, and led a reasonably normal life. Last I heard, many of the rest had succumb to methamphetamine and/or opioid addictions and have been in and out of jail. All of them were substantially undereducated, several with severe speech impediments and none with GEDs or high school diplomas.
The last family were the kids of my family’s pastor. They were generally successful. Their parents were strict, but very involved in their kids’ education. In many ways, they were successful - ahead in reading and math. They were somewhat poorly adapted socially, but had enough relationships through the church to overcome it.
In my experience, it can be a positive thing for children. The success of the children really depends on how involved parents are in making sure their kids needs are met. Sadly, it also seems like many parents who choose to homeschool do so because they don’t personally value education.
What saddens me is that some kids I grew up with were deprived of that in their homeschools. They almost certainly would have done better in public schools than at home. Not that public schools are better than homeschooling, but they are better than neglect.
/both our kids are in one of the "best" public middle schools in DFW supposedly. It's still filled with the most wildly incompetent staff imaginable.
>Of the 10 districts with the most home-schooled kids in The Post database, nine are in Florida. That’s partly because of the state’s large school districts, but also because its elected officials have grown friendlier to home education as they saddle public schools with politically charged restrictions on what can be taught about race and gender.
So, FL parents are homeschooling because they object to the rules recently put in place about teaching about racism and LGBT issues?
Somehow, I doubt that.
The two can be entirely compatible.
FL officials are encouraging homeschooling? That's silly, given that the majority of kids will still go to public schools.
these horrible people are encouraging homeschooling, and that's why it's growing? Extraordinary claims require extraordinary evidence. Especially when the whole article describes it as a nationwide phenomenon.
I believe "projection" describes this paranoid belief of yours.
While it wouldn’t work at all age levels, the program I used was incredibly flexible and really encouraged curiosity.
This isn’t to say I didn’t benefit from attending public schools. There were programs and experiences there that would be difficult to impossible to replicate.
However, overall, I’d guess that at least 50% of time in public schooling is baby sitting and crowd control.
I was on Facebook, idly scrolling, and I received an ad for a nearby Montessori school. The ad was a simple lavender square, with the name of the school on it (no photo), and simply the text "Championing LGBTQIAA+ Lives." Of all of the letters, the "three Rs" weren't in evidence. Nothing about how the school will teach the child how to learn, prepare them for high school, or provide a rounded education. Just "Championing LGBTQIAA+ Lives." Upon some mental reflection, I recalled some recent radio ads for local universities, and the first sentence was about how they were diverse, and then there was something about inclusion and equality. No mention was made of "we will prepare you to be an adult" or "we will get you a good job."
Unfortunately, I cannot have children, but if I were in a position to, I would like to think I would be interested in their education to the extent that I would make serious choices. And right now, that educational institutions consider their highest advertising priority is to display a relentless laser focus on DIE to the exclusion of, well, education does give a little pause to their selection.
As I recall just how ill-served I was by the many schools I attended (we moved quite a lot), both for education and socialization, I can only imagine that diverting the already-anemic school efforts away from the core mission it even-then was not doing a great job at would only make these institutions even less-suited to their supposed task.
Overall, it's a very high variance method of education. For every Judit Polgar, you have a woman told her highest calling must be to reproduce and be subservient to her husband (I know these people personally).
If you have the resources and have intellectually precocious children, especially if they are a bit odd, they will likely enjoy it and benefit from it. If you have kids that really want to play sports at a high level or are socially very successful, they might later resent the opportunities they missed and the shared experiences they lack. Obviously, this is reductive, but I think something like this is true.
When something on the fringe gets a bit more popular it will easily have a phenomenal growth rate.
Let's say I started making computers (somehow). I sell 10 the first year, 10 the next year, but I make to the front page of HN one day and I sell 1000 computers that year.
My growth rate, would outpace every large computer maker in the US (probably) with a good margin (probably).
Yet, nearly everyone in the world would still be using and buying computers from the big vendors (probably). and few people will never know my computer exists.
Since nearly everyone attends public school growth can only come from an increased population, or a return from private school. (or a return from homeschooling)
It would be nice if they included the absolute numbers of people in each category.
Plus their own data seem to indicate that the trend may already have peaked since 2023 numbers are down.
I think a lot of parents will soon find out how much work it takes to properly homeschool their children (child).
Homeschooling has been around a long time. A sudden and radical departure from that growth rate is notable. However, it does appear to have been more of a covid spike that has only partially subsided.
We need a "so-and-so's law" type name for this, even though it's obvious when you think about it.
They call it "No child left behind", i.e. every child left behind.
I doubt even John Taylor Gatto expected mass education to get this bad.
My dad was a teacher at one point and the principal told him he could only fail X number of students (despite a lot more not being proficient) because they'd miss out on certain funding, and it wasn't worth dealing with the parents. My dad eventually quit, in part because of this. That leads to sort of a education backlog where the next grade picks up students that don't meet the criteria, so they are teaching down, slowing the education of everyone else...which moves those kids to the next grade where once again they aren't proficient and it just dominoes. That was 20 years ago, I can't even imagine the state of things now.
There were 51 school shootings in 2022, nearly a weekly occurrence. Is this the rise of home schooling, or just a natural response to the complete apathy and failure of our institutions?
Most of those recorded "school shootings" are simply cases where a gun was fired on school grounds, not a "mass shooting". In literally almost every single case, it's one kid shooting another kid an is gang-related. You can actually go through and see the exact circumstances around each incident, along with a pertaining news article:
https://www.edweek.org/leadership/school-shootings-this-year...
So hopefully that gives you a little bit of comfort! As long as your kids aren't violent teen gang members in the school parking lot after a football game, it's highly unlikely that they'll even know someone who has witnessed gun violence at any school.
For us, it comes down to the belief that we can provide better moral education, values education, and intellectual rigor than the majority of public and private schools we've seen. I also don't see the social element being something that can't easily be solved for. Our kids are involved in so many activities and they are effectively home schooled, whereas countless friends and clients are bemoaning how toxic their children's high schools have become. The bar seems low to both of us and it's getting unapologetically lower. That's the plan anyway, we'll see how it plays out.
Irony aside, in other words, when homeschooling is the (rational) response of a parent doing their best by their children, then Margaret Thatcher has won: There is no society.
It's kind of embarrassing that this article doesn't once mention the rough percentage of students that are being homeschooled.
Public school is treated like a huge daycare by many, but at least kids from negligent parents _had_ to go. My concern is that parents can now say "we're homeschooling" when in reality they're doing fuck all and, worse, are using their kids as house labor.
yes!
> my problem with homeschooling is that it's completely unregulated
oh dear. so...if perhaps you meant "not regulated to x standards" i could agree more readily with that, at least in US / many European. but even conceding that, regulation historically has tended to effectively supplant parental involvement with state involvement (speaking about actual effects of regulation, not intentions). contra your first point about parental involvement.
i suppose it's possible future regulation could be different. but i see no reason given the current cultural climate to think future regulations will in fact uphold parental responsibility over state responsibility.
and besides it appears to me that government funded schooling is being held up as the "huge daycare." it has automatic funding in most places - even those who would not wish to pay, even those who never have children involved in it are contributing. it is in fact consistently used as a way to collect more taxes, but i digress. if i were a lax parent i would not have any inclination to move away from something that is already paid for and easy for me. or if i simply needed a place for my children to go for 8 hours out of the day government funded schooling is an obvious easy option.
in short regulation is not the solution to bad parenting, nor is it a good way to prevent bad parenting.
Anecdotally my spouse whom is a Teacher often has to deal with kids in middle and high school levels who can barely read or do basic math/logic (but have strong influenced opinions on social issues that lean heavily left - just the fact don't get mad. I only mention this to show where the effort lies in teaching our children). Homeschooling is simply a way to try and mitigate putting ones child in an environment that is not accomplishing it's main task which is teach mandatory subjects to an average and hopefully excellent level.
If they would focus on academics instead of politics and ideologies (outside of elective courses that specifically teach these subjects) I think most people would still consider Public Schools in general but until they solve that, these issues will be solved by parents in many different avenues home schooling is just one of them and there will be more that will be tried.
Great, so now they won't even be able to type when they get older. Thank god AI is coming
The pandemic is the most obvious cause, and the article notes that "Despite claims that the home-schooling boom is a result of failing public schools, The Post found no correlation between school district quality, as measured by standardized test scores, and home-schooling growth." Obviously test scores are not the only measure of quality, but at least in this article there is no evidence of any cause other than the pandemic. The other possible factor discussed in this comment section, politics, doesn't seem to be relevant either. There is no correlation between homeschooling rates and the politics of the parents or the state.
Also, "fastest-growing" is not very remarkable when the only other categories are public and private. Home-schooling is by far the smallest category, less than 5%, so basically any increase (which has to come from a decrease in at least one of the other categories) will make it the fastest-growing category.
Here are statistics going back further: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d21/tables/dt21_206.10.a.... Homeschooling gradually increased from 1999 to 2012, and then started to decline a bit until the pandemic.
I think you're forgetting the biggest reason: it turns out zoom school was a disaster and the worst of both worlds.
With online schooling supplemental options, parents working from home, it does seem like this will get more popular.
Part of why we end up with a cohesive society is that no matter where you come from, your kids will be educated mostly together. It will be interesting to see what happens long term if that stops being true.
Obviously this isn't all cases, and some traditional school teachers are questionable at best, but at least traditional teachers had to at least TRY to be subject matter experts before teaching in a traditional school. Sadly I personally know several friends that homeschool their kids and I have to say they are certainly doing a disservice to their children as the kids will only ever be as smart as their teachers and these 'teachers' (ie parents) are not the brightest.
I can feel your arrogance and contempt from here, suffice to say that’s not how “smart” works and it’s certainly not how education works. Sounds like you could benefit from some extra home schooling yourself.
And I've never met a homeschooled kid who didn't seem weird. And by weird, I mean able to easily discuss complex topics with adults, showing not only competent conversation skills, but broad knowledge of the world and how it works.
It goes beyond knowledge. I went to public school but one of my better friends was homeschooled. We knew each other because we participated on the same sports team and consequently saw each other six days a week for most of the year. He was always odd and I knew it, but only some years later did I figure out what was odd about him: He was two years older than me but he always treated me like an equal. He lacked the biases against people of a different ages that were normal in public school attendees. Most older kids (the rest all public school attendees) wouldn't necessarily bully the younger kids, but at best treated them distantly with mild to substantial condescension.
I was the same way, almost all of my friends were the same age as me but kids even one year younger were in some way "little kids" to me, even though some of them were physically larger, faster, and sometimes smarter too. What difference does one or two years make? Now that I'm an adult, I can clearly see that a few years of difference is no difference at all. My homeschooled friend had that figured out years before anybody else.
Clearly not true. Do you think every genius had teachers who ever also geniuses?
You do not need to be a qualified teacher to teach, and you do not need to teach in order to educate. Teachers need teaching skills to teach classes. That is very difficult but not something home educators need to do.
As for subject matter, parents can arrange access to appropriate resources. It is not usual for parents to teach everything and I think that is a bad approach to home education (the term I prefer, for just this reason).
My two home educated kids have been taught some subjects I know, they have gone to classes a bit, had tutors, done online courses, and done a LOT of self-teaching. I like the last of these because it developing study skills.
They have done well academically. My older daughter got a 9 in Latin GCSE, for example, for which she was entirely self-taught. For those unfamiliar with the UK system that is a top grade in public exams typically done at 16 (although my kids did most of theirs younger - less stressful, less at risk from adverse events, and one of the advantages of HE).
Even for subjects I helped them with, once they reached their teens the help needed was very minimal.
A study in Australia found HE was unusual in that working class kids did better than middle class kids. A study in the US found HE kids whose mothers had not graduated high school did better academically than similar kids who went to school. A study in the UK found HE kids did better after adjusting for factors such as parental education and income.
What I do think is a bad idea (and I suspect it what your friends are doing) is to attempt to replicate school syllabuses and teaching methods at home.
A few decades ago, most teachers did not have anything beyond high school education. While there are many valid defenses of public schooling, "public school teachers are more qualified" is not one of them, particularly given the miserable performance of many public schools - qualified teachers in 23 Baltimore schools failed to generate a single mathematically proficient student, and Baltimore is not alone. Credentials on their own don't mean anything if there's nothing worthwhile backing them. If anything, they are currently being used for gatekeeping purposes. For example, I have a Master's degree in CS and I was a TA, but if I were inclined to teach a CS at high schools, I have to spend a few thousand dollars and get a pointless certification.
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If you gave parents even 1/3 of that money the state would save a fortune and parents would be so much better off. The monopoly system of education we have is just so awful. I’m fine with having bonus benefits for special needs kids, and public schools should always exist to educate the high-needs students. But the system we have now is so laughably bad and segregated that anyone who defends it must have a financial stake in keeping it running.
They also have bussing costs, which (e.g.) private schools don't, which further complicates comparisons. That's not a small amount of money.
The problem is the local public school where everyone in my neighborhood is forced to go (unless they are rich) is dangerous and ranked bottom 5%. That is extremely racist, inequitable, and unfair to people who are forced to attend.
People have been teaching things to each other for hundreds of thousands of years, even before there were degree programs in education.
I will grant that some people are particularly good at explaining things well, but I don't associate that ability with "public school teacher" in any respect. In fact, it correlates with being bright, which is negatively correlated with being a public school teacher.
Seems they should compare home-schooling growth to change in school quality. The best schools could decline in quality and still be the best. And parents of those schools might be the ones best-equipped to start home-schooling.
That's when the trouble started.
Go on and tell me how statistically the risk is negligible. It makes me feel a bit anxious whenever someone I love is doing _anything_ with a tail risk of instant death that society has somehow normalized, even just driving. I'm not a parent but I imagine that kind of thing could really affect some parents' peace of mind.
If we outlawed private gun ownership in the country then both school and home could be much safer.
If you trust the public school to do that - or at least do a better job of it than you could yourself - then you send them. On the other extreme, you either opt for private school or home-school.
I assume people don't make these decisions lightly. The path of least resistance is to send your kid to whatever random school they are zoned for. The next level of care is to move to an area with better schools or hope you can get into a charter school. Next level beyond that is paying a heavy price (in dollars or hours) to send them to private school or home-school. So I respect people who do that, a lot. It comes from care for their kids and ability to commit to it deeply.
As a personal observation, I was very lucky with the public school education I got in Brooklyn in the 90s. Especially in high school, I had many teachers that taught me how to think more than what to think. But that was 30 years ago and that kind of teacher was kinda old-school then. Back then, I can count on one hand the number of teachers I had that today would be categorizes as "woke crazies" (one tell-tale sign, they grade you on whether you agree with them, not the quality of your argument) but I suspect that ratio is way worse now. My kid is a toddler and I have a bunch of years to evaluate the teaching in our area, but I wouldn't think I'd be doing my son a favor sending him to a school that constrains thinking and speech rather than encourages breadth. I am very far from considering home schooling but if my choice is to basically stay home and teach my kids or to send them to a brain-deadening environment (that's an extreme, don't think it's happening in my town) I know what I'd pick.
[1] that is a combination of technical, thinking, and social skills.
We took her out of the schooling system and placed her with a tutor (former educator) gave kids like her classes at her home every day from 8 till 2.
Parents becoming teachers without an education background or simply shoving a kid in front of a laptop to do it "online" is simply not workable.
ps: I'm now wondering if this will have the same benefits as remote work. School can be wonderful but also massively damaging. Having ways to learn without bullies, or toxic teachers .. could make a big difference for many.
What does a public high school diploma afford one these days? The opportunity to work manual labor or retail jobs for starvation wages, and the opportunity to attend more school that costs money for jobs that pay marginally more for most people.
It's wasted time and resources for the vast majority of people. Could you imagine trying to train children to become elite athletes? As if everyone is going to play on a collegiate sports team, so we just spend 8+ hours per day doing athletic training? Even though most will never achieve success in collegiate or professional sports? Well, at least kids wouldn't be obese in that scenario, which is likely going to pay more dividends than teaching an average-iq person calculus.
Didn't learn much of anything, though, which became apparent during the disastrous first week of college.
The article really doubles down on suspect use of numbers by talking about "[Hillsborough County, Fla] vote results have predicted the winner in 22 of the last 24 presidential elections. Now it is a harbinger of a different trend: the widespread adoption and acceptance of home schooling." Spurious election correlations make for bad articles.
Within that county since 2017 school enrollment has grown "3.4 percent, to 224,538 students." (about 7400 student increase), while homeschooling has grown 74%, up to 10,680 (growth of about 4500 students).
In cases where they can't (ie a job in the city), it's just because they can't. not because they like "urban life".
I wonder how much of the whole debate is mostly about difference of opinions between people on both sides of this specific subject rather than the ones the media focuses on.
At what point do we call it culture and "difference of opinion" as opposed to just plain old indoctrination or brainwashing?
It's not a left vs right issue, this is freedom vs tyranny. Right now the left isn't able see it as Tyranny or indoctrination because their predominant opinions and values are being taught to children, so it's convenient. It's another form of "civilizing those barbarian <insert unfavorable group here>".
At the end of the day, I don't belong to society, and neither do my children. They belong to themselves and can choose for themselves how they see fit. Until then, I'll instill my values to them, and make sure they treat their fellow beings better than the way "society" treats them.
But, to bring the culture wars into this, how do you feel that you have joint guardianship of a child whose parent fundamentally disagrees with you? With our church group, I trust the parents to discipline, to entertain and to teach in a way consistent with my beliefs, even if they're very different people. On the other hand, my next door neighbor is convinced my daughter is a boy because she likes trucks and would like her to be trans, like she has already transed her son. When you perceive other adults attempting to abuse your child and this is a common enough movement you're not going to be able to feel any joint sense of guardianship. And it's not just culture issues. Unsurprisingly, neighbors children are also poorly behaved, disrespectful, and never get told no.
America has fully embraced multiculturalism without assimilation, so there are now dozens of cultures, so no sense of joint guardianship over children.
There are people who homeschool because they don't agree with the government's viewpoints, people who homeschool because the public school system has failed their kids, people who homeschool because it just happens to fit their lifestyle. Those are all very different motivations.
Likewise, there are people who "unschool," people who use very formal curricula, people who make use of co-ops and traditional classroom settings, people who use a lot of remote learning, people who value social interactions and have their kids involved in lots of activities with other kids, and people who are more focused on academic achievement. These are all very different methods of education.
Beyond that, there are parents who are well equipped to homeschool and parents who are not. And there is a small but hard-to-ignore percentage who claim to homeschool but really neglect their kids.
Treating all these scenarios as a single thing that you can hold a single, consistent opinion about suggests to me a lack of familiarity with its wide spectrums along multiple dimensions. It's like passing a judgment on a person based on their race, country of origin, gender, etc.
Disclaimer: Our family homeschools. Both my wife (previously a public- and private-school teacher) and I were biased against it prior to having kids, but we came to find that a lot of our biases and concerns were unfounded.
Also, with the right community, it is possible to have plenty of "socialization" with other kids. My family participates in a parent-led co-op that allows kids to benefit from different strengths in different parents and to have lots of friends.
As my kids are neurodivergent, I think this environment has been safer for them and allows them to focus on their passions. There is still some peer pressure re: neurodivergence, but I think it was less severe than when I was in public school with less obvious neurodivergence.
I agree. Public school is not a great place for socialization, and it's not hard to create something better. Nothing socializes kids like sitting next to each other motionless in silence for several hours lol
that possibility isn’t even in the range here
the choices are good school district, decent private school, or a home school concept
It's not about getting your kids to form the best relationships possible, it's about teaching them to be comfortable with and learn to handle a huge swathe of people that are different from themselves.
And, possibly more importantly than that, it's about teaching kids to do this without the immediate presence of their parents.
Are public schools a perfectly diverse cross section of the population? Of course not. Are they a whole lot closer than very nearly any private school or home school? Absolutely.
Homeschooling brings you into contact with a self-selected subset of the population, but across much wider range of ages.
This often turns out to be more broadly valuable.
No amount of artificially constructed socialization immersion is going to beat the organic development of spending several hours, every day, surrounded by a ton of other kids.
What you end up with is a kid who has marginal experience with conflict resolution, communication skills, and any degree of independence. Which in turn, makes them perceived as weird, meaning that when they do have social interactions with others, they get marginalized, and further deprived of social development.
Public schools definitely have a misalignment of interests problem, but private schools solve that problem without stunting your child's charisma.
Selecting relatively obscure sports that nonetheless have a decent representation on college sports rosters is a college admissions and scholarship “hacking” thing. Fencing used to be a great choice for that, dunno if it still is.
Given that this is a technical term that has gained colloquial usage, not everyone who is identified as (or self identifies as) neurodivergent is actually neurologically divergent in a literal sense, but behaviorally is close enough to be a moot point in non-academic settings.
It is a term describing people with mental differences: ASD, ADHD, Dyslexia, Tourettes to name a few.
IMO meeting lots of different people, of a mix of ages, in multiple different places is better socialisation than going to the same place with the same people every day.
I have had many years of compliments from people about how good my children's social skills are.
Everyone would do a better job with their taxes than the government is.
Everyone drives better than the average driver.
We need some structural limitations to keep things sorta ok for everyone.
My comment was actually intentionally devoid of connotations and just exposed a direct consequence of the nature of home schooling compared to public schooling. Home schooling simply has many more input variables (wealth of parents, religion of parents, politics of parents, etc. ) and therefore the outputs are much more spread out. Home schooling is an even more individualized form of private schooling and on an axis of equality, an "universal free public schooling only" system would be at one end of the spectrum and a "self funded home schooling only" system would be at the other end of the spectrum with many options in-between. My statement that home schooling is more unequal should not by itself be controversial. If follows directly from what the thread ancestor said, to quote: "People talk about homeschooling as if it's one single concept, but it's actually a whole bunch of very dissimilar things."
What is controversial is whether equality or lack thereof is desirable.
I will argue that striving towards more equality results in better social outcomes.
Before that, I will note that just as parent said above, it is perfectly normal for any parent to desire the best for their own child.
1. My fist argument is that, as parent said, most people overestimate their own capabilities and the quality of their own decision making. All of the different categories of home schooling parents desire the best for their kids and imagine that they will have above average results yet very few will actually be above average, many will be below. I would argue that in this case we are talking specifically about equality of opportunities, and that while a few home schooled students will gain extra opportunities, most home schooled students will be robbed of opportunities that a public education would offer. AS a most extreme example, a flat earther insisting to home school their children and only present "alternative truth" is a danger to their children.
2. My second argument is that a more equal educational system is likely to result in a better adult environment for a student after they finish formal education. In other words, for better outcomes for ones own student it is worth spending on the education of other students too. This is because:
2.1 With more uniform educational outcomes a person will be part of a larger cohort and demographically it is more advantageous to be part of a larger cohort. The group of like minded people being larger means there are more social opportunities which result in more opportunities for both dating and professional networking.
2.2. Even presupposing a home schooled student is a winner and has way above average outcomes, it is better for them to live in a society with a higher baseline of education. Going by Carlo Cipolla's "The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity", which splits people into 4 groups (intelligent, helpless, bandits, stupid) based on 2 criteria (benefits/losses that individuals cause to themselves and benefits/losses that individuals cause to others). Cipolla's 5'th rule says "A stupid person is the most dangerous type of person." And the corollary is: "a stupid person is more dangerous than a bandit". Therefore it is advantageous to the intelligent people to minimize the share of stupid people. A higher baseline of education is a way to hopefully achieve that. The only group that believes it is advantageous (at least on the short term but not on the long term) for the share of stupid people to be larger is the bandits.
3. My third argument is that, educational competitive pressure is detrimental to the health (especially mental and emotional, but also physical) of students. A more unequal educational system results in more competitive pressure. As can be seen in China and South Corea, extreme competitive pressure will result in peaks of performance but will also be largely detrimental to the well-being of the students during and after the years of formal education.
If I have a duty to my child it is too ensure that he has the best opportunity to lead a happy, fulfilling life.
But over time I've come to realize that is only one very specific form of 'homeschooling' that is nothing like other forms
The various people I know who homeschool do it for different reasons; like you mentioned, some are entrepreneurs who need to stay mobile as a family, some have lost hope in the educational system and its ability to educate, and one particular friend who is in Mexico has his children in a co-op that consists of a large group of like-minded friends where they divide the curriculum based on area of expertise (e.g., the mechanical engineer teaches math, the fitness couple teaches physical education, the history buff teaches history, etc.).
I don't have the network for a co-op, but hands down, that would be my school of choice for my kids.
Homeschooling because of COVID policies in public schools? Ok, there are some of those, some because things were too strict, some because things were too lenient. For religious reasons? Yes, some people want more of their religion, some want less of others'. Are the parents teaching? Sometimes, sometimes it's a co-op, sometimes it's online, sometimes it's at a community college. (Usually it's a mixture.) Then there are "non-location based charter schools" where the parents receive some of the state per-student funding, ...
It's really hard to find a common thread between all of these scenarios, because there isn't one. Other than not being in a public school. Er... at least, not being in a public school for most of the day, since some people do use bits and pieces from public schools.
"Not-zebras are awful because they're eating my rose bushes!"
We've called the school district, CPS, and the police. None are able to do anything. These children are being raised to live in poverty.
So yes, I'm against home schooling because it leaves some kids worse off. We have to enforce standards, and until we do I will not comply.
Sweeping generalizations are usually wrong in interesting ways.
- my niece, an 11 year old, told me she want to be a doctor, and I knew that would be impossible unless I get her out of that situation?
- I've watched the 9 year old be physically unable to write any letters _even when having a printed alphabet in front of her_, be unable to speak the alphabet, be unable to even sing it?
- the 14 year old is on the hook for watching these kids, and is stressed and hurting, but we can do nothing?
Your throwaway comments are not helpful to people in real, hurting situations.
There's such a disparity between states. States like mine require homeschooled kids to occasionally attend actual school for check in or certain classes, and participate in the same testing (regardless of your opinion of such testing).
Other states are more vague and less frequent about such thing.
And then a notable swathe of states, you might as well go off the grid. Tell the state you're homeschooling, and then that's it, you never interact with the state again. Troubling. And there's not just neglect, but active abuse, that that can help hide.
Texas is working on an amendment that ostensibly cuts taxes on child care facilities to make them more affordable. It's very easy to tell that those savings won't be passed on to consumers. In reality, it's very much more a pro-homeschooling thing. "Homeschool your kids and save on your property taxes".
A 'childcare facility' typically refers to something kids go to before school. I've noticed several other commenters make the claim that those who are not using daycare facilities for their non-school-age children (i.e., the norm up until the late 90s) is a form of 'homeschooling'.
It's not. Raising your young non-school-aged children at home is the normal way people have raised their children
I have no opinion on Texas's law, but it doesn't sound like it's about homeschooling
https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/advocacy/policy/educati...
Note: Coalition for Responsible Home Education is the "good" group advocating for accountability to prevent neglected kids and abusive parents - while the Homeschooling Legal Defense Association is the group advocating for complete lack of government oversight over homeschooling.
That is true in the public school as well. Local churches used to organize breakfast in some of the parks during the summer for kids whose parents just wouldn't get around to feeding them. Statistically speaking, a child getting sent to the public school is more likely to be in that category than a homeschooled child.
Most parents who don't want to deal with their kids, welcome sending them to have someone else watch them.
The big thing is this: Parents, the buck stops with you. When one of your kids tells you "Every day when I get ready for school, my stomach hurts", pay attention to that. Homeschooling won't be perfect, no more than public or private or charter schools will be. But pay attention enough to see when something isn't working, and figure out what you have to do to make it better.
This can cut both ways. If you're homeschooling and your kids aren't actually learning things, pay attention to that, too.
Of the parents I met there was some variety, but 9 times out of 10 it seemed like they were mostly doing it because they thought the public schools were too secular and were teaching "sinful" sciences like evolution. They were all polite about it, but it started making me wonder if all of these other aspects of homeschooling were just a fig leaf over a whole lot of religious indoctrination. Maybe those kids are fine, I didn't quiz them, but it did raise an eyebrow.
There is still a very wide margin though. My wife was homeschooled because she did gymnastics at a fairly high level when she was young and so scheduling was easier for her that way. Her older sister wasn't homeschooled hardly at all though.
...and why do those groups create so many resources? Because they tend to be people trying hard to replicate the traditional schooling experience, with high academic standards and expectations. Evangelicals are rarely the ones doing unschooling.
Source: was mostly(1) unschooled as a kid, but spent a lot of time around evangelical Christian homeschoolers because we'd go to the gym classes and other organized events they ran. The evangelicals didn't seem to have any issues with the fact that I was 100% an atheist.
1) A key exception being reading and writing. The main reason why I ended up being homeschooled was the school systems useless "whole word" approach to reading was failing me. So I was drilled intensively on phonics and other traditional techniques, and finally learned how to read and write fluently much later than I should have. Meanwhile, I had no problem learning math and science with much less structure.
indoctrination is a given. Do you prefer your secular type, the religious type or the government type?
I disagree on both counts, but it seems like the claims there are pretty different in how extreme they are.
I can't find any definition of known quantity otherwise given how extremely wide the variations on religious teaching is only focusing on science let alone other topics like history.
Let alone that there isn't only one religion in the world.
If your perspective is "if the parent says it is correct it is correct" you cannot say that is different in any meaningful way.
How do you know that? "He wrote it in this book"
In education: "Gravity is about 9.8m/s/s"
How do you know that? "Well do this pendulum experiment with me and see for yourself."
> In education: "The earth accumulated matter together after a previous supernova."
> How do you know that? "It's written in this book."
In the vast majority of cases, that is literally how the teacher knows it: they don't actually know the evidence or the chain of reasoning that science took to get to where the current theory is, nor how one could actually go about gathering the evidence oneself to prove it true or false.
We were taught basic nuclear physics in middle school and were shown the valley of stability.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Valley_of_stability
Atoms larger than iron came from atoms crashing together like in an atom bomb ie super novas and similar, while atoms smaller than iron can come from regular decaying processes. Doesn't take much to explain that.
Does it explain exactly how the nuclear energy was calculated? No, but we can see how people figured out that parts of earth came from a super nova. This is very different from just "it was written in a book".
If you say that is the same thing as religion, then I ask you what steps do I have to take to meet God? I know how to replicate the physics steps, but nobody tells me how to replicate anything that religious people believe in. That makes them inherently different and not at all similar.
It’s written in a book.
As an agnostic, I don't really have a dog in this fight, but science has no better explanation for our origin that the religious people do. It just sounds fancier.
Science doesn't try to explain our origin. Science is a tool to help us understand how the world works, it isn't there to replace religion.
The big bang is just as far as our explanations can take us. We know a lot about how many things works, by using that knowledge and looking at possible processes that would result in our current state we arrived at the big bang if we look far enough back. There is no belief there, its just us observing the world.
Anything that can help us figure out ways the past played out can help us understand the future. For example, if we see that many stars have likely gone supernova in the past, we can look at our own star, the sun, and figure out when or if it will go supernova as well. We can't test stars and supernovas because we don't have control over them, but studying those things means we will have a more accurate understanding of the topic than if we didn't.
Gathering data and making theories about that data is science. The scientific method with experiments is the most important signal and it trumps everything else, but when we lack the ability to do experiments then extrapolating what we know from those experiments is the next best thing and it is still science.
Anyway, I'm not sure why you are so anti-science here. Can you explain why you feel you need to put the big bang on the same level as "God did it"? Do you really think that those two things are on the same level here? The big bang comes from extrapolating what we know from experiments and applying it to the universe and then looking at what happens if we play that backwards. It is a very mundane thing.
Edit: An example that is similar to big bang:
You stand on an open field. You feel something hitting your head. You look down and see a ball. You turn around and see a person standing there, nobody else in sight. Do you think these two are the same level:
"God created the ball and dropped it on your head"
"The person you see had the ball and threw it at your head"
You would say "We can't know for sure which is true, they are equally valid beliefs!", right? If not, why do you think this is different?
The first time I remember hearing that theory was as an adult in a public lecture by an astrophysicist at a local university. (It sounds like I may be a decade or more older than you.) The speaker recited the theory, followed by "at least, that's our current best model", as though they were a Sunday-school teacher reciting some pat explanation for "Why did God made the snake?" that they weren't entirely convinced by.
Which is pretty much exactly my point: real scientists think in terms of evidence and possible models, which are challenged and revised all the time. The lecture wasn't about the development of matter in the universe, so the speaker didn't go into the details, but presumably they knew all the problems with that model.
What's taught to children isn't typically evidence and various models. It's not even typically the most recent best model; at best it will be the best model at the time the textbook came out. At worst it might be the best model at the time the textbook's author left university.
But you know what? That's OK. Middle schoolers don't yet need to have a 100% accurate picture of how the elements formed. They more need to know that the universe is predictable and comprehensible; they need to be given a "big picture" to either decide to learn more about, if they become scientists or engineers, or to talk with scientists and engineers if they instead become managers or politicians (or even stay-at-home parents deciding whether to give their children vaccines).
In the same vein, the people at the time Genesis was written didn't need to be taught astrophysics. They needed to be given an alternate to the Babylonian creation myth.
Go look up the Babylonian creation myth on Wikipedia. The earth and humans were formed from the carcass and blood of various gods after epic battles, more or less by accident; until the gods noticed the humans and thought they'd look like good slaves. Now think about how that story answers these questions: "What is the universe like, and what is my place in it as a normal human being?"
Now read the Genesis account, where God intentionally, step by step creates things in a logical progression, bringing order from chaos. At each step he "saw that it was good", and at the end he "saw that it was very good". How does the Genesis story answer those questions differently than the Babylonian story?
That is what the original readers of Genesis needed to know, and so that's what God told them. How the elements and the planets formed is something we've been allowed to work out on our own.
Not all religious people have the same views as American Christian or Middle Eastern Muslim fundamentalists. For most the books are not literal, and personal experience (of self or others) matters more.
Anything can be characterised well or badly.
Indoctrination is not a given and should never be acceptable in education.
What is indoctrination? Here's one dictionary definition:
indoctrination: the process of repeating an idea or belief to someone until they accept it without criticism or question
Does the scientific method tell you this? It couldn’t have, because this is a philosophical belief not a scientific one. Very likely, you were indoctrinated to believe this.
Not all “doctrine” (teaching) is wrong and not all indoctrination is wrong. But everyone undergoes some form of indoctrination.
This isn't bad. I don't think it is worth you while to research cannibalism, or a number of other things that people have done/believed in over time. Even if you come to the "right conclusion" there is just too much too research to look into everything people have come up with. My life is worse because I - a non-doctor - had to research all the anti-vaccination claims to see if they really were baseless (they were, but I know from history experts are not always right and once in a while a conspiracy really does occur)
Of course it’s not. Indoctrination is encouraging belief and adherence without question, the scientific method is to only accept after rigorously questioning. It’s trivially easy to apply that recursively. One who questions the scientific method is then by definition not indoctrinated and has not reached their belief via indoctrination.
If you're thinking critically about it (i.e. testing it, questioning its predictions and assumptions, et cetera), it's not indoctrination. If it is, then you've broadened the definition of indoctrination to be equivalent to thought, which is a useless overgeneralization.
And to be clear, you can be religious and not be indoctrinated.
No, you are shown how the ancient Greeks did things, and how they had a lot of ridiculous ideas. Then they introduced Galileo Galilei that showed how experiments can rat out many bad ideas and used them to disprove many of the things written by the ancient Greeks.
That is how we know the scientific method is valuable, nobody has to indoctrinate you to it you can see it yourself. The reason the scientific method is so popular is because you don't have to get indoctrinated into it, it is so obvious that it is a great method.
The problem in all cases is that the criticism and question is more apparent than real, and it does not extend to a whole lot of shared assumptions.
Questioning deeply rooted social norms will get you thrown out of most social groups. Well, questioning social norms held by that group will generally get you thrown out. Questioning deeply held social norms of a different group that the group you're in doesn't like will get you elevated in status, but you aren't actually questioning that group's social norms.
What is secular indoctrination? Kids who grow up without a religion doesn't get told anything, all you have to do is to not indoctrinate the kid into a religion.
There is still school etc, but removing religious indoctrination doesn't add anything else, its just less indoctrination overall.
I work in edtech with a bunch of former teachers, and this is absolutely untrue. Many elementary and middle school teachers see part of their role (regardless of the subject they're officially teaching) as being to teach morals to their students, and the morality that they choose to teach is every bit as subjective as the morality that comes out of a religion.
And if it's not their teachers teaching them morals, then it's their parents. You can't raise a child without intentionally or unintentionally instilling in them your own value system.
The biggest factor in whether someone feels that something is "indoctrination" isn't whether it originates from a religion but whether they agree with the principles being taught.
> There is still school etc, but removing religious indoctrination doesn't add anything else, its just less indoctrination overall.
I should probably have clarified it in the first bit that I meant that the kids weren't told anything about religion, not that the kids aren't told anything at all. My point is that there is no indoctrination required to raise a kid without religion, it is the natural state. I and most people I grew up with were raised that way, religion was stories we read about in school, not some magical thing.
If that is what you mean then I'm pretty sure that even religious homes teaches secular values.
The teachers generally push an empathy based approach to morality, which is absolutely not subjective.
Adopting empathy can cause a number of objective moral pronouncements on a good foundation.
I will take empathy based moral pronouncements over “the bible says so” any day of the week.
I was raised totally secular but I now understand that religion is about fundamentally aligning yourself to the highest aspirations ("what kind of man does G-d want me to be?") and even w/o actual faith, I am starting to think that's preferable to the current mode of "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions." So yeah I am not surprised that parents aren't dying to throw their kids into an environment that fosters the latter.
I used to think religion was about deep fear, now I see it more as about deep care. You may still disagree with what they care about but I find that harder and harder to do, personally.
Putting it in the hands of god means anything goes, and you just say that's how you thought god wanted you to be. You'd have to trust that society encoded the proper set of values and morals into the religion. Which sounds like "ask society" but with extra steps, and also you're asking the society of 1,000+ years ago instead of the society of today.
If anything, that is more representative of religion, as long as you say that's what god wanted (e.g. discriminating against LGBT people, trying to overthrow the government, etc.)
In contrast to non-theists, you simply employ a different way to ask yourself and society (albeit a subset of society which more rarely evolves their belief system to comport with the rest of society).
My “not necessarily” was intended for “You’d have to trust that society encoded the proper set of values and morals into the religion. Which sounds like ‘ask society’ but with extra steps, and also you’re asking the society of 1,000+ years ago instead of the society of today.” You don’t have to be asking society; you can ask yourself. As, I think, any sensible person does, regardless of their beliefs.
On the other hand, if you're asking yourself, and your answer isn't biased/affected by religion, then religion is by definition extraneous to your values and morals, which was my position in the first place.
The other side of the coin is, some of the worst atrocities in history were committed by people who asked themselves, and concluded that god wanted them to do it. Others were committed by people who asked themselves, and concluded that they wanted to do it. So religion doesn't seem to be either a good encouragement of good behavior or a good discouragement of bad.
I bring this up not because I want to wave my “not all Christians” flag, but because it is really important for our common civic life that post-religious people understand there is more to religion than the sad toxic morass they grew up with. Society doesn’t need religion to die off. It needs religion to evolve. It needs people who are naturally religious (and there are a lot of us, we’ve evolved that way) to come together for the common good, not get shoved into a back closet to worship illegally in secret.
I know some who are strongly religious about their political party. I was treasurer of my local Republican party for a while, but I was able to leave them when the party it self starting going off of the things I supported them for (the local party is still pretty good). I might return in the future, we will see.
Sounds like you may be justifying your conclusions instead of the other way around.
Note that I didn't state everything on my list is wrong.
I've had a lot of great conversations with religious people about the nature of their faith, but I have never gotten a good answer on why they chose their particular organized/named faith. Other religions have people who believe just as much as you do that their religion is the "right" one and all the others are wrong. How did you come to choose your particular form of Christianity over the dozens of other named faiths you could choose that have equal levels of historical correlation to their religious texts?
When various sects happen to go head to head, it’s like watching an MMA tournament where a very few competitors are well-trained in BJJ and most of the rest seem to hold a white belt in karate from the nearest strip mall. It’s usually not a competition, but a one-sided beating. Caring about some amount of intellectual seriousness would clearly narrow one’s options down a lot.
If all those people you say refuse to question their beliefs are actually chasing a higher form of good for themselves, why would they engage in any kind of activity that would undermine that pursuit? It doesn't make sense unless you propose to replace it with a structure that is more strongly aligned to with the goal of achieving a higher form of themselves. Which nobody ever actually is when they argue against religion, they just got hurt by somebody's interpretation of it and are trying to find validation for that hurt.
I believe you when you speak of the bad experiences you had, but you seem to think that what you've seen is the only (or at least the typical) manifestation of Christianity. But that isn't true, and if you do indeed believe it's true I respectfully suggest you aren't deeply familiar with Christianity the way you believe.
I am a Christian, and I was raised Christian. I have never once seen a community such as you describe. I realize they exist (everyone knows about the WBC, for instance), but they aren't the norm. Christians I have known aren't trying to indoctrinate anyone, and they are quite happy to entertain respectful discussion and debate about their faith. They are only human, of course, and like all humans they don't wish to constantly debate things they settled for themselves ages ago (so you are sometimes going to get individuals who shut you down). But on the whole Christians are perfectly willing to engage in introspection or intellectual debate to the same extent anyone else is (because let's not forget, many people don't do introspection or intellectual debate of any topic).
> It’s slowly dying in every developed country because it doesn’t make sense when logic and science are applied.
You are welcome to your opinion, but it stands at odds with the fact that there have been many Christian intellectuals throughout history. Scientists, theologians, and philosophers have all found that their faith still makes perfect sense in the context of their intellectual pursuits.
It's really only Pope Francis from this past decade who stopped shunning homosexuality and describing it as an illness (even if he upholds the church's teachings that same-sex marriage is an abomination), expressed openness to ordaining married men as priests, and suggested forgiveness for divorcees who have since remarried, but even he has his limits.
He still views gender transition as a sin, upholds the Catholic Church's longstanding opposition to birth control (the pill, condoms) in favor of abstinence, and opposes abortion.
And there are many Catholics in the US who do not view him as their pope, preferring Benedict XVI and especially John Paul II. There are cardinals in the US who have advocated for denying the current US president communion due to his support for abortion (he claims that he does not personally support abortion due to his faith, but would not impose his belief system on others).
Yes, Catholicism might not be as unyielding as Christian evangelism or fundamentalism. But it's by no means the most accepting of faiths.
> Yes, Catholicism might not be as unyielding as Christian evangelism or fundamentalism.
Maybe you meant to direct your comment to someone else because it sounds like we agree?
For instance: Episcopalians support gender and racial equality, as do the Anglicans they're an offshoot of. Presbyterians are similarly accepting, even if they haven't made an official statement on that front. Reform Judaism similarly is an attempt at reconciling historical traditions with the need to exist in a modern world.
It's hard to ascribe a particular ideology to Islam because it varies widely based on its practitioners and their interpretations (as is the case with Baptists, Lutherans, and many other religions where there is not a central authority). Certainly we see very oppressive policies in a number of Middle Eastern countries, but in the US, especially in the past decades we've seen an alignment of American Muslims with the Democratic party and more liberal / progressive policies (largely due to anti-Muslim rhetoric from the right post-9/11).
A few surveys from Pew:
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/12/21/where-chr...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2015/12/02/religious...
https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2016/06/21/where-maj...
If my memory is still ok, I remember those sects splitting due to differences in those beliefs among their members
Because their is a simple trick: God made it so. But most of the time they ignore the flaws of their believe of god's characteristics like Omnipresence, Omnipotence, Omniscience etc.
The world is in pretty bad shape if it's created by an omnipotent omniscient deity. Greek mythology would be a more fitting explanation.
Not like we would have anything to do with it?
If I handcraft a beautiful wooden toy and I give it as a present to a 5-year-old, and they have a tantrum and break it (accident or not), is the state of the toy a testimony to my identity or ability as a craftsman?
Or maybe I should have never given the toy as a present?
Why dies the kid behaves like that in the first place and why is the toy breakable. Shouldn't higher standards apply to an omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient being?
If the world was created by greek gods, ok. They are full of human traits and errors, jealous, vain etc. But the perfect abrahamic god?
This is obviously a poor comparison when speaking about God's purpose in everything, but I think it begins to hint a certain perspective.
“For my thoughts are not your thoughts, neither are your ways my ways,” declares the Lord. “As the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts." Isaiah 55:8-9
That's just a complicated way for: Why? Because!
>I love him, and I want him to live, learn, grow. Because you aren't omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. So whole mythology and the way we are makes more sense if god isn't omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient.
No, it's not. What this means is that you yourself are not the measure of reality, and that there are things that you will not understand, because they are bigger than you. And you not understanding or knowing something is irrelevant to reality. To refuse this is to be like the little child who doesn't want to obey or listen to a wise father that is lovingly giving them instructions for their own good.
> Because you aren't omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient. So whole mythology and the way we are makes more sense if god isn't omnipresent, omnipotent and omniscient.
I really don't follow the reasoning behind this. We don't need God to be messed up in order to explain why we, and everything around us, is messed up.
Every Christian who was ever born was indoctrinated to become one. Except Paul, who was the bronze age equivalent of Jim Bakker.
While your deep understanding of a few people around you is your own, Christianity alone has over a billion people from all cultures and walks of life ascribing to it. I don't think you can realistically claim to treat them as a bloc, and to attempt to might cast doubt on your ability to even judge well the people you do know.
The same way you can associate conspiracy theory nationalism with Qanon believers, you can associate supernatural supremacism (i.e. "chosen by god") with Christians, Muslims, and Jews. While these religions may promote healthy behavior for "in group" morality e.g. community, family, etc. the effects on a geopolitical scale are catastrophic.
Do they? I'll grant you the first part, as that's the point of a religion, but it doesn't seem to automatically imply the second.
The earliest Christians, very famously, went to their deaths voluntarily while publicly forgiving their accusers. While medieval Christians slaughtered thousands trying to retake the holy-land. It's pretty reasonable to argue that those two groups had relatively similar core beliefs, but hard to argue that they had the same actions.
Unless you want to count farming as an action, the vast majority of adherents to basically every religion were, historically, farmers whose lives we know very little about.
It seems much more likely that a group being in power causes the effects that you see. Basically every group has an in-group bias.
1 Peter 3:15-16 literally commands us to do exactly that.
But sanctify the Lord Christ in your hearts, being ready always to satisfy every one that asketh you a reason of that hope which is in you.
But with modesty and fear, having a good conscience: that whereas they speak evil of you, they may be ashamed who falsely accuse your good conversation in Christ.
The idea that religion has any kind of market cornered on THAT concept in the last 7-10 years is a non-starter.
1) Hamas jihadists cultivate decades of repression of the Palestinian populace into a spectacular terrorist strike on Oct 7th.
2) Israel, an apartheid ethnostate, where Rabbis call for extermination of Palestinians in response to the Hamas strike (after decades of dehumanization), drops a nuclear payload worth of bombs on Gaza - which kills thousands of Palestinians (but only a few dozen Hamas soldiers).
3) In the US, Christianist pastors and churches back the Israeli government's push to ethnically cleanse Gaza - primarily because apocalyptic prophesy requires Jews to be in the "holy land" - all of whom are prophesied to perish.
In all of these cases, all of the involved religions make the conflict unavoidable. There were steps to peace in previous decades but religious extremists assassinated key figures to prevent peace.
This isn't exclusive to this region or these religions, of course.
Hamas is the elected government of the Palestinians and it's planks include the extermination of the Jews wholesale, whether in Israel or elsewhere. Part of why Israel was created is because.. a large group of Muslims was attempting to enact an extermination of the Jews (and did kill quite a few).
Israel is not an apartheid ethnostate in any sense of those words and you do dishonor to actual apartheid and ethnic conflicts even by a comparison. Gaza itself has a luxury car dealership[1]!
Not only do non-Jews have equal rights in Israel but it's one of the few countries in the middle east where Arab women have a legal right to vote and free travel without an escort.
I have no idea where you got three from but it's not actually in the Christian Bible or the Torah.
[1]: https://www.thenationalnews.com/world/mena/libyan-luxury-car...
Hamas won under 50% of one election in 2006, then murdered the opposing party and halted all future elections.
You're probably conflating the general fact that the nationalist and religious factions overlap (though there are a great many religious groups in Israel that are not nationalist at all - pretty much all the ultra orthodox), and said nationalists have made extreme statements in the past. But the response to hamas has little to do with that.
(this is my most relevant response to the point you're making, so I'll hold off on the otber incorrect assumptions/statements).
It's not just the contradictions (with science, logic, it's own doctrine) that is hurting their numbers. Almost all the Christians I know have distanced themselves from the church and are embarrassed to be associated with the faith because of the way they see other "Christians" behave. If more Christians really lived their faith they couldn't act/vote/discriminate the way that they do. I can't blame my Christian friends and family for not wanting to be associated with that.
I suspect that the number of Christians is higher than the falling numbers suggest, because many just don't want to be grouped in with the loud people who plainly act in ways that violate the basic message of the faith.
This is a low quality and bigoted comment.
Unfortunately, there is not a singular answer to this question. You still have to choose which religion/sect you want to answer this question for you. You can't really delegate your morals to a deity because the choice of which interpretation of that deity's teachings you want to follow is still yours to make.
Yes, certainly there are some atheists who are "religious" about it, and will vehemently teach their children that there is no possibility of any deities or afterlife, and that anyone who tries to tell them otherwise is mentally defective somehow. But I would agree that's just as tragic as indoctrinating someone into any religion, and that certainly isn't the only kind of atheist. But if you're going to be a part of your religion, and teach your children to believe in it, that's always going to be some degree of indoctrination.
I do really appreciate parents who are religious, but do their best to let their kids find their own way. I suspect that's a much rarer phenomenon than the atheist parents who do the same, though.
Let's also not get into an atheist vs. agnostic debate. My take on it is that if you are not agnostic, at best, you're a "religious atheist" who presents belief (that there are no deities) as fact, and that's just as dishonest as teaching someone the "fact" of a god and heaven and hell (or whatever).
From what I understand, you would say that my mother was indoctrinated and I wasn't, despite both of us growing up in nearly identical households with parents who had the same spread of opinions. This seems like an obvious double standard to me.
She's religious because her school had really good religious role models who taught Mendelian genetics and seemed like respectable adults, and I'm an atheist because I grew up in the Richard Dawkins vs creationism slapfight and didn't get a good impression of religious people during it. It's got nothing to do with indoctrination. Her religious education was arguably less of an indoctrination, since mine was administered by Access Ministries and wasn't particularly nuanced, while hers involved something pretty close to comparative theology.
I don't have a good handle on what's more common on the atheist side: indoctrination into the "be against religion at all costs" camp, or the "we don't believe in that stuff, but we're happy to answer questions and help you find answers and learn about religion if you want to" camp (the latter of which I certainly wouldn't classify as indoctrination).
My hope is that the latter type of atheist family is more common. But that may just be naive wishful thinking.
But I think your situation, with one atheist parent and one theist parent (and same for one set of grandparents), is likely less common than all three categories above. And I would also expect that your mother's situation, where she was introduced to religion during early school years and allowed to make up her own mind, isn't all that common either. But even then, I question how much she really got to make up her own mind. I suspect if she had attended a secular school with no religious role models, she may would have ended up an atheist.
I think the point I'm trying to get across is that I think agnostic atheism is generally born out of a lack of indoctrination. Both theism and strong atheism usually come from being indoctrinated into that sort of thing. The fact that your family is different -- and IMHO fairly rare -- doesn't really invalidate that. It just means there are exceptions, which... well... welcome to our messy universe, where precious little is absolute.
Not to downplay the fact that indoctrination does frequently happen. I just don't think it always happens, and exceptions seem to be quite common for the people around me, though I don't live in the US.
No, the main non-agnostic atheist belief is "The current religions are bullshit" which there is plenty of evidence for, so it is a much more rational belief than belief in any religion. Therefore it can't be classified as a religion since there are strong rational arguments behind it.
Also you don't need to be agnostic or non-agnostic, or even an atheist, to believe that the current religions are bullshit.
I'll never again outsource my morality.
Most often people exhibit bounded rationality, as "completeness" is a heavy cognitive burden and transitivity is hard on the margins.
Neither components of rationality require belief, and both recognize that choices (free will) can be made, suggesting more nuance to your argument is needed.
One can simply observe vehement followers of conflicting religions to determine that someone must be wrong, and it’s more likely that everyone is wrong than not.
But yes, this is the thing that always gets me. It takes a mind-blowing amount of arrogance to believe that your religion -- out of all the thousands that currently or used to be practiced -- is the right one, and everyone else -- billions of people -- just absolutely must be wrong.
And if you don't have that arrogance (but are nonetheless religious), the only reasonable stance to take is that you believe there is a god, or many gods, or perhaps some sort of supernatural universal force; and that there is maybe (but maybe not) some kind of afterlife, or reincarnation system, or... who knows. But I meet precious few religious people who think like this; I guess most people who fall into this category would tick the "spiritual, but not affiliated with a religion" box.
What if that deity has made itself directly known to, and has had direct contact with, humankind?
EG - a devout Jew and a devout Hindu maybe very different in the practices they follow and the words they use, but they would not be very different in the kind of morality they follow, the kinds of family life they lead, etc.
They're a mostly atheist population.
See also Estonia, Japan.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/237609/religions-in-japa...
I do think those religions are safe refuge for "atheist" tendencies and would agree with your point.
It's funny that I attended a Christian school when I lived in Japan as a high school student, but never spoke the language well enough to have any really deep spiritual discussions, sadly.
Japan is #4 @ 40% religious.
Sure, if you look for them you will find some devout Japanese, but they are very much in the minority. In every practical sense, the Japanese are exceptionally secular compared to e.g. the US.
Finland... something like 65% of the population is Lutheran, and that number was 90% in the 1980s. So it seems like the bulk of the current happy adults were raised in a religious environment even if they are now losing it a bit. Interesting to see how well they will persist in the future.
Most of those entered a church a handful times in their life, they aren't practicing Christians they don't believe in any god and don't care about it in their lives. Churches remains empty most of the time in Scandinavia, they are everywhere and welcome people but nobody goes there since they don't care.
The reason people registers with the church is that it gives them an place to marry in and it pays for their burial. It is a transaction and not a religion nowadays, the church owns all these huge buildings that exists everywhere, often the largest gathering place in town.
We even have practicing priests here who doesn't believe in God, for example 25% of priests doesn't believe that Jesus resurrected. Their job is to take care of the church and preach to the choir, not to believe in anything. There aren't enough believers to fill all the priest positions, that is how low our belief is.
Of course it’s probably true for certain individuals, but you’re talking about religion and secularism (which isn’t the opposite of religion, btw, so I don’t even understand what it means to be raised “secular”, and in fact secularism is essential for a society with multiple religions) broadly, and you only need to see what’s happening in the world right now to observe that your generalization is almost certainly wrong.
As someone who has grown up in a religious, conservative household, I strongly disagree. Sure, there are many good values that a religious conservative household can foster such as independence and self accountability. However, you cannot its ignore downside either. The same culture promotes fear of the “other” ie different religion, different ethnicity / race, different political ideology, et al. Whether or not these fears are justified is beside the point. I’m just pointing out that they exist which runs counter to your very short and limited personal experience. (I’m also not saying that the other side is free of any fault either.)
https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/conservative-and-...
https://www.discovermagazine.com/the-sciences/liberals-are-f...
That has nothing to do with religion. These are facets of human nature which find a way to express themselves in all societies regardless of religion.
There are a lot other religions which are similar in this regard. The real issue is that some (many?) who outwardly profess to adhere to a particular religion are totally ignorant of that religions teachings.
For context, I was raised as a Catholic, had well over a decade of theological study (including university level classes), and I’ve had significant contact and relationships with other Christians in the Southern US.
Most religious people do not have the privilege to attend a more intellectual leaning parochial school. Weekly 30 min sermons are not enough, but that is the norm for most religious people.
Your statistics are global for Christianity which includes a lot of developing countries. In the US, Catholics only make up 20% of Christians in America.
To classify your argumentation, this is a "No-True-Scotsman."
With that, I'm three comments deep and thus have made my point sufficiently and it will either be accepted or never can be. Good rule of thumb I picked up from religious subreddits and serves well with topics that are always flame wars. Have a good day.
Ok, back up your claim
That doesn't match reality. Do you have kids in public school? Of course they judge actions—especially those that harm others. Sometimes that's called social-emotional learning, one of the things that Florida politicians have tried to make a boogeyman. We're certainly willing to punish kids based on their actions.
Whereas even in "my time" these values would have resonated with the tone in a public school, I am pretty sure that's not going to be the case today. But these values remain for me very central, and I would sacrifice a lot to ensure my kids are educated in an environment that supports them. A religious school that frames these values along the lines of "what G-d expects of me" would totally work for me separate from whether I literally believed in the religion. "Anything goes" by contrast to this is the vibe that it's fine to not do any of these things.
It's funny/sad to see eg on HN folks saying "oh, I don't see why it's important to have children, or to have my work matter." Right, but the fact that you "don't see it" is sad to me (you do you but I don't have to think it's great) and I don't want my kids to "not see it"
I'm not aware of that class in the curriculum. Is it supposed to be taught during math, history, geology or sports?
These topics come up at the very least in: literature, history, social studies, sex ed, etc...
In terms of the values you cited, such as raising the next generation and contributing to society, these are extremely common values found in a wide spectrum of society and indeed, are heavily emphasized in virtually any education system you care to examine!
One of the primary benefits (and drawbacks) of religion is that it provides a set of packaged values that are straightforward and generally work pretty well for a lot of people. Thousands of years of refinement went into the development of those packages.
They're mostly effective and convenient for a lot of people.
Determining values from first principles is hard, and there are a lot of easy mistakes along the way. You can easily find yourself trapped in nihilism or moral relativity or one of the other common philosophy potholes.
It's kind of like a happy meal vs cooking from scratch. We all know cooking is healthier and cheaper, but sometimes we just don't have time, and there's no guarantee on how it will turn out.
It's a shame they decided to put a bunch of weird stuff in Happy Meals because I think you're right about this.
Not providing guidance to children is at least as bad as providing overly dogmatic guidance.
As a gay man who grew up religious (in public schools), “what god expects of me” was not only oppressing but also the source of a lot of self-doubt, self-hate, depression, and anxiety. (Thankfully I quickly ditched the religion and paved my own path - very content with life now!)
> I don't want my kids to "not see it"
I get where you’re coming from. But also, you can’t force kids to see things a certain way. There’s no amount of schooling or indoctrination that can force them to adopt the outcome you’re expecting of them.
Setting a good example yourself by how and with whom you parent is probably 10x more impactful than the school you sent them to.
Okay, for you, but what about the 90% of the population that shouldn’t forge their own path? Society actually needs them to do what’s expected of them.
Who decides who these 90% are?
>Society actually needs them to do what’s expected of them.
You would be surprised how many people do what society needs without forcing them.
Elders.
> You would be surprised how many people do what society needs without forcing them.
It’s surprising how many don’t. TFR for white people in LA (to use an example of a place where social norms have been upended quite thoroughly) is just over 1, and more than half the adults are unmarried. Without immigration from more religious and rigid Latin American countries, LA would be shrinking in half each generation.
i'm sure that religion is the only reason why immigrants into the United States would want to have kids.
/s There's definitely no US-centric financial/legal/immigration-related reasons, right? /s
This is a phenomenon across the developed world. Permissive western societies are outsourcing the job of perpetuating the population to Catholics and Muslims, just like they outsource industrial production to China. Permissive societies don’t appear to be sustainable without that arbitrage.
Why does the job of perpetuating the population need to be done at all? At what levels? Why those levels? Does it matter where that population lives or their quality of life? Why or why not?
If you're fine with your people's history just disappearing from the world, feel free to never reproduce.
Why is maintaining the human population at or above present levels something that so obviously needs to be done?
I’m only here with my three kids because the British colonized the country I’m from. The Latinos in LA—who are doing the grunt work of society as well the work of raising the next generation, while white people have dogs instead of kids—are only there because the Spanish were worse colonizers than the British. Secular white people tell me how wonderful their permissive, individualistic values are. But it’s like saying how great a job a government is doing when they’re running massive, unsustainable budget deficits. A value system can’t be “good,” in my view, if it can only exist because of an immigrant servant class.
Are those Muslims from the same countries/cultures as the East Asians or is religiosity only one of a host of differences between the cohorts?
"Do no harm" is a terrible metric to use for guiding one's actions. Libertarianism (which is the source of the "no harm" principle) is completely oblivious to the notion that humans are complex, interdependent, and not purely self-determined.
https://www.cbsnews.com/news/mormon-church-ensign-peak-whist...
23 for all have sinned and fall short of the glory of God, 24 and all are justified freely by his grace through the redemption that came by Christ Jesus
Religious organizations are free-riding in society and not paying their fair share. This is criminal and should be prosecuted. Render unto Caesar and all that.
As an example, consider how many religious organizations not only ban LGBT (despite teaching god made them as they are) but outright actively work to disenfranchise them (tolerance failure).
I believe it is reasonable that organizations should not be tolerated when they are corrupt subcommunities cancerously siphoning resources from the body of a community. Whether that organization is commercial, civic, or religious shouldn't affect the determination.
I don't think the purpose of religion is to "align yourself to the highest aspirations", though, but rather to make sense of our place in the world and how to rightly live within it. They have rather different views of this, of course. Traditional Christianity says our place in the world is as children of God who are intended to be the image of God in the world and shepherd it with God's self-giving love. (Getting saved to go to heaven is a relatively new simplification.) Buddhism, in contrast, observes that all composed things are impermanent, so nothing is actually real and forming attachments to things causes pain. The ethics flow out of the views of our relationship within/to the world.
These are crimes, from an organization that purports to be intrinsically different and better than other organizations.
So be better.
The idea of God judging people from afar is an extension of the important humans place on social conformity. We are hard wired to care about what other people think of us. If you remove the religious decorarions then that underlying trait still exists.
Totally not my experience. My lizard brain doesn't want to keep the Sabbath, or spend an hour at the temple, or to donate a lot (or anything) to charity, it doesn't really want to bother raising my kids a certain way, or to be discriminant in my diet, sexual behavior, etc.
It is my higher-level self that sees the elevating function of these things and struggles to override my lizard brain for daily control. When it succeeds, it's glorious. When it fails, I am still happy to have fought.
I won't deny that some churches (as in, specific people, not the system as a whole) can do good in the world; one church I attended with my parents as a kid had some great community outreach programs that helped a lot of people who had fallen through the cracks. And some clergy members are good people who are trying to help.
But overall, religion is about control (for the religious leadership, and politicians who use religion to gain power), and about belonging and feeling less lost and alone (for practicioners) in an uncertain world.
Oh, and as an atheist who knows and hangs out with a lot of other atheists, I can assure you that "anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions" is not a thing. Or, rather, it very much is a thing, but that attitude comes from just as many religious people as it comes from the non-religious. And there are quite a few actions that religious people take that I think are disgusting and immoral, but somehow "anything goes" as long they can justify it in the pages of their made-up fantasy holy book. I don't consider things moral or immoral based on what a storybook tells me; I decide based on how I think my actions will affect others. My system is certainly not a perfect one, but I dare say it's miles ahead of the religious process.
A fine example is the incredibly important Corinthians 13:13: And now these three remain: faith, hope and love. But the greatest of these is love.
When we die, there is no need for faith. We have the answer. When we die, we have no need for hope - again, we have the answer. The Catholic church places love above all else.
The idea that you only think "specific people" can do good in the world is pretty nuts - the Catholic Church alone is the largest non-governmental provider of healthcare in the world.
I also don't understand why books are somehow bad places to get information, even if they're completely fictional. Can you not learn lessons from cartoons, even? Do you truly think every moral issue is so simply black and white that it doesn't require practice and debate?
I am not going to say religion is perfect by any stretch of the imagination, but much of what you're complaining about simply is not true.
To be fair, Catholics at even rather high ranks in the heirarchy have fairly radically divergent views of Catholicism.
Hinduism is much older than Christianity. Specifically the Shiva sects. Shiva means compassionate one. God is seen as immanent love and transcendent reality.
Please cite your sources. Tell this to the South Indian Tamil who say Anbe Sivamayam, Satyame Parasivam (God is immanent love and transcendent reality).
The "Siva as destroyer" is imagery is perpetuated by firstly Hindus who don't worship God as Siva (e.g. Vaishnava, who worship God as Kristna), secondly by the "spiritual but non religious" people of both Hindu heritage and not, and finally by e.g. Christians.
In Saivism there is one aspect of Siva that is "destruction" but it is a synonym for "dissolution" and is not a scary aspect.
Thinking back to an earlier comment up the chain (from someone else) about how being nonreligious doesn't offer enough moral guidance, and I kinda think the "infinite forgiveness" thing is exponentially more fraught than even the most detached "nothing really matters" atheist.
Being able to do literally anything and not face cosmic consequences so long as you say you're sorry is mind-boggling to me. I wonder if it's partly why so many convicted murderers get born-again when they're in prison.
Genuine repentance is marked by sorrow over the harms and wrongs you have done, and sincere efforts to make amends where you can.
It's also marked by an understanding that your actions may have ramifications here and now and a willingness to bear the consequences of what you have wrought, insofar as you are able - "Take up your cross and follow Me," in the vernacular of the religion.
Forgiveness is freely given, in the sense that you cannot earn it and God extends it to you, but it's recognized that even accepting forgiveness requires admission of wrong and actively renouncing your pattern of wrongdoing.
You can't accept forgivenwas for something you think was just fine.
shrug I'm not sure how widely this perspective inn it is shared in modern Christianity.
It's where I wound up when I experienced Jesus' love and kindness firmly dragging my besetting sins in front of me to be dealt with, but since that day I've certainly noticed Christians who don't seem to share this perspective.
Many? I would say it was the central message of Christianity.
> It's where I wound up when I experienced Jesus' love and kindness firmly dragging my besetting sins in front of me to be dealt with, but since that day I've certainly noticed Christians who don't seem to share this perspective.
Sadly that happens.
I would agree, but I don't see it treated or discussed that way in practice by plenty of self-identified Christians.
Real repentance only comes through God:
John 14:6 Jesus saith unto him, I am the way, the truth, and the life: no man cometh unto the Father, but by me.
Sadly you are right, for many reasons this is not necessarily widely understood by everyone that nominally identifies as a Christian.
Though with the important caveats that _forgiveness_ is not identical to _reconciliation_, and that extending mercy to the unrepentant is dangerous and borderline incoherent ("I assure you, he will by no means get out of there before he has paid the last penny").
I've seen those concepts misunderstood, missed, or forgotten far too often in Christian circles.
In the real world we see the consequences of feeling like you can't be forgiven with kids and teens who get labeled as "trouble makers". As soon as that label starts to become permanent and precede them, they live down to other people's expectations of them. When they start feeling like nothing they do will ever be good enough, and that no matter what they do they will be in trouble or someone will find fault with them, they stop trying to improve or stay out of trouble. See also the concept of stereotype threat.
It's not (as I understand it) about "not facing consequences" so much as it is about being possible to be forgiven at all and therefore there is a reason to try to change and to try and make amends and to try to seek forgiveness.
It also isn't enough in any interpretation I've seen to just "say you're sorry". You have to repent, and even secular definitions, let alone religious ones don't seem to interpret "repenting" as simply saying you're sorry.
No it isn't, there is a whole spectrum between "forgiving everything" and "forgiving nothing".
He murdered an assistant professor because she had second thoughts about divorcing her husband when she was going to get a fat divorce check and it ruined his (the murderer's) dreams of training to become a pro golfer. He shot her, threw her body in a hole at a wildlife management area (they found her body after the police interviewed his father and discovered he had a life-long fascination with said hole), drove her car back to her apartment, and then took her credit card and ordered thousands of dollars worth of golf gear before driving to his parents' house 7 hours away.
This was a Catholic altar boy growing up. But Catholicism doesn't like mortal sins too much, so low and behold, his redemption streak began by becoming magically "born again" so that it would be rude for people to ask him questions about his obvious guilt. He's now a luthier and prayer leader at Angola State Penn in Louisiana... and as I've known the guy since I was in diapers, I know that he is categorically full of shit from the interviews I've seen.
I am friends with his sisters and didn't even realize he had a daughter who must have been a toddler at the time that he murdered that woman until I saw her in some of her LSU graduation photos. Didn't look like her aunts, and then I realized the child was the spitting image of her daddy. Sad that he robbed her of a dad over some childish bullshit.
If it truly was like that, wouldn't everyone be doing it? There is, however, a bit more to it:
Acts 3:19 - Repent, then, and turn to God, so that your sins may be wiped out, that times of refreshing may come from the Lord,
Turn to God.
> I wonder if it's partly why so many convicted murderers get born-again when they're in prison.
Convicted murderers get a very real chance to see just how evil people can be.
The worse the symptoms you have, the easier it is to find out you have an illness.
Sadly not everyone wants to acknowledge the illness and accept the remedy.
Turn to God.
You need to constantly be on the look out for Satan and his temptations. There's a laundry list of things you shouldn't do or think about. If you do, you should feel guilty and repent. God is always watching, so be good.
Every individual church is different, and your mileage will vary, but I found them to be similar to office spaces in the level of bickering and gossip as their best, and deeply dysfunctional institutions at worse.
I would also disagree that Christianity was the first major religion of purely love when Buddhism had been around for centuries and had the practice of forsaking one's own enlightenment in order to save all being from suffering.
But: just because that Catholic Church deviated from its own teachings doesn't mean that at least some of those teachings weren't correct. Teachings like "love one another" resonate in any language.
Which is perfectly consistent. The idea is that love is better than fear, but fear is still better than lack of contrition. Accepting this fear as an intermediate step, instead of immediately expecting perfection, is an important psychological step.
Catholicism absolutely has sins that are unforgivable.
how many religions do you know and have experience with, in order to make such a claim? don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
I guess I don't see why control is necessarily a bad thing. Most people would say that something like self-control is (in moderation like all things) a virtue. Certainly I see a lot more people that could use more control than I see people that are so controlled (by either themselves or others) that they could use less.
You're talking about "man consciously accepting his obligation to G-d". That is very positive and in fact to chose to live this way is the highest exercise of free will.
Because if they aren't, then they're about control.
Very few of my Catholic friends and family seem to be motivated by fear, and even at my most annoying and confrontational no one ever tried to “scare” me back into believing.
ymmv, of course.
Is not limited to Catholicism but religion in general, but the stereotype is there for a reason. Maybe the teachings? Maybe anecdotally your group were outliers?
All trying to buy that time away from hell and purgatory and flooding the living crap out of my social media feeds with nonsensical prayers to saints and statues. And they are utterly hypocritical with their proselytizing too. They want to be free to spam that nonsense but post something critical or contradictory and they lose their fucking minds.
Can I ask an earnest question, out of curiosity? What do you think is the role of government in people's lives? Do you believe we should have UBI?
I suspect it is an American, and possibly Irish thing - the guilt thing is a stereotype in the UK too (but not true in practice).
When you talk about living in deep care, that’s because that’s your path. Ask someone else and it might be completely different.
You still have to choose your own adventure.
In my experience in North America I've found that those raised irreligious are generally far more in touch with living an inherent "do unto others" than people that have exceptions and biases against that rule due to a holy writ they can selectively pluck from.
I am old enough now that I have seen the outcomes projecting into peoples 30s. I know so many poorly educated homeschoolers whose lives have been destroyed with no hope of recovery by the complete lack of skills their hyper religious parents imparted them with, in jail, broke, unable to hack it in college and too lacking in common sense to make it in the trades or professional work, with living standards insanely far below their parents. That being said, I am not against homeschooling personally and may do it myself.
I think your outsider perspective makes sense since you didn't see the self-righteousness and persecution complex inherent in the system. It's like a northerner taking "bless your heart" at face value because they're dealing with a degree of cowardice and dishonest duplicity they haven't experienced before. All the best people I have known have been atheists or "religious" people who don't take it seriously and just follow their own inherent internal moral guidance (which is all the religious people are doing as well, as at core everyone acts as they choose to act.)
Which church?
[0] https://www.biblestudytools.com/bible-study/topical-studies/...
[1] https://www.gotquestions.org/what-is-the-church.html
[2] https://www.christianity.com/church/what-is-the-church-its-p...
I'm very aware of the differences between denominations, and the degree to which the grandparent comment generalized across these disparate denominations is definitely problematic, but what I said is accurate: much of American Christianity uses the phrase "the church" in a highly inclusive way that is different than what OP assumed was meant.
The funny part is that everyone is talking about this sort of inherent internal moral guidance, which flies in the face of the modern scientific thought.
Many school curriculums teach that science proves that gender isn't a binary and is divorced from sex, and they often implicitly (and sometimes explicitly) also go further to say that it is hateful to believe otherwise.
So anyone who has an internal moral voice that speaks to this issue, may be contradicted by science.
> Individuals beliefs are often contradicted by science.
Not sure why you asked the first question, given your belief in the second.
And those morals might not be entirely internal if they're regularly preached to.
The school curriculums basically boil down to "Most people are either men or women. Some people aren't, and that's okay - you should still treat them like anyone else." Does your internal moral voice object to any part of that, or is it something else I am missing here?
Do you also disagree with schools teaching kids in a similar fashion about the existence of left-handed people, redheaded people, or handicapped people?
I'm arguing the point, not my own conviction.
The inner moral voice I was defending was someone who believes that it's important to acknowledge and respect the differing roles of the sexes. And object to the scientific insistence that we should concentrate as much on the exceptions as on the normal case.
And I don't think you've accurately depicted the typical stance of schools today, where sex is not based on biology, but instead on social construction. If you need any proof of that, look through this thread and see how many people object to the idea that the physical characteristic of say a penis, and its insemination role in reproduction, is a defining characteristic of a male of the species. People aren't even pretending to make a distinction between gender and sex, they literally have a problem with defining human sexual roles via genitalia.
Is that what they're just teaching, or are they saying that a) human nature is fundamentally gendered, and b) men and women are gender rather than sex classes - that how you look, think and feel relative to socially constructed and recognised gender stereotypes determines what sex you actually are, and that early medical intervention may be necessary to put your mind in the correct type of body?
I agree that society shouldn't police gender non-conformity (perhaps what many home-schoolers would actually like society to do) but as a 'people are a collection of unique individuals, differentiated by sex for the narrow purposes of biological reproduction' kind of person I also object to the 'viewing society through the prism of innate gender' position - which some schools seem to be teaching as scientifically correct when it's actually much more like a ideological and / or metaphysical belief.
No, that is not a strawman https://nypost.com/2022/04/25/transgender-rikers-inmate-gets...
Or female rapists who rape other females with females?
Your morality stops at protecting females against males?
Or should our morality stop at: "since we can't or don't protect everybody let's leave an obvious, extremely vulnerable, and much more common (male-> female rape vs male->male rape) victim class unprotected?"
Women's prisons do not exist for the purpose of forcing women to be human shields against male-on-male sexual violence.
You don't fix prisons by moving inmates. Having inmates socially interact with large groups of other inmates doesn't sound healthy or wise gender not withstanding. You can't put a group together who's only common interest is crime. Each criminal should be housed separately and socialized with trained pros who can help them work through why they are there. It would pay for itself when criminals don't return to crime. At least make it available for the last 6 months
Because illegal abuse will probably always exist - some humans will treat others like craps, illegally. People still understand that those things are wrong.
The act of putting actual perpetrators with a class of much less physically strong victims into the same confined space, however, points to specific mindset where doing wrong is thought as doing right, and not just by one or more wicked persons, but also with state power to support it.
> The act of putting actual perpetrators with a class of much less physically strong victims into the same confined space, however, points to specific mindset where doing wrong is thought as doing right, and not just by one or more wicked persons, but also with state power to support it.
I'm fairly certain regular prisons don't sort by size either, and not all men or women are built the same.
>I'm fairly certain regular prisons they don't sort by size either, and not all men are built the same.
Yes, so let's put women prisoners and biologically stronger male rapists together then, until we also seperate all prisoners by height and strength in the general case...
AKA: there's bad happening already in prisons, so adding bad to it, even if it's a stupidly predictable to foresee and prevent bad, is fine!
I'd argue that we need to actually look at the rate of occurrences for these things and not look at a NY Post article about a single occurrence and our own internal biases and intuition around "biological strength".
Bad stuff happens in prison, we're all agreed, the issue I see is that a much worse outcome is entirely predictable but many people are afraid they're committing a hate crime unless they blind themselves to that eventuality. And the really important question is, "What else does this luxury belief require blindness to?"
> And the really important question is, "What else does this luxury belief require blindness to?"
Good question - this whole conversation is based upon the idea that trans women aren't valid and if they are sexually assaulted in prison at a hugely higher rate (13x)[1] that's acceptable because we need to stop a hypothetical legion of rapists.
[1] https://cpb-us-e2.wpmucdn.com/sites.uci.edu/dist/0/1149/file...
Exactly. They aren't. A 'trans woman' is a type of man and needs to be treated as such when his demands and desires come into conflict with women's needs.
I don't know, why didn't the judge do that in this case? Why not do that with trans athletes? Seems like an obvious solution, yet it wasn't taken. That's the kind of willful blindness (or weakness to social pressure) I'm pointing to.
>this whole conversation is based upon the idea that trans women aren't valid
It really isn't. Some people really have gender dysphoria (I was one so I'm not just talking out of my ass here) and some people really have strong incentives to claim they have gender dysphoria when they don't. Both can be true. What led to this story is that we can't bring ourselves to investigate whether one particular person could be lying.
The problem I'm pointing to isn't that some people have gender dysphoria (some do) or that it's a difficult condition to accommodate (it's really not) or even that our medical system is shit at treating it (it is, but that's a separate problem). The problem is that elements of our culture prioritize helping victims over preventing victimization. Because of their awful health outcomes, trans people today are held as a special class of victim and their desires - not their health outcomes be it noted - are held paramount. Well meaning people would rather prevent trans prisoners today from being raped than ciswomen prisoners tomorrow, despite the obvious asymmetry of suffering in those scenarios. Trans people matter more because they're suffering more, never mind how much suffering would be caused by 'simply affirming their right to exist'.
That's what mainstream curricula are teaching and that's what my moral sense objects to.
What asymmetry is that? I provided a statistic for the abuse trans women currently suffer in the system, but no one else has provided anything but anecdotes and appeals to some sort of common sense. It, and correct me if I'm wrong, feels like you're giving a similar sort of special reverence to cis women who suffer sexual assault than trans.
To be clear, I think sexual assault is bad all around and I hate the idea of abusers slipping being enabled, but it's somehow acceptable that many many trans women are abused instead of the potential for even one more cis woman to be sexually abused in prison than there already are (let's not kid ourselves here, scads of abuse already happens).
I guess the answer to this particular trolley problem for many people is to not even consider pulling the lever because it's 5 trans women but one cis.
This story is the result of two widely accepted proposals:
-Transwomen belong in women's spaces. -The only moral response to someone coming out as trans is to affirm their new identity.
If you agree with both proposals, and many people do, that means in practice you believe one transgender woman is worth >99 cisgender women. No one says that out loud, but prioritizing victimhood means that's the calculus they deal in. Adding more exceptions to problematic examples like this one doesn't address the root problem with that hierarchy of values.
If we want to have this discussion, please provide some actual data about the rate trans women sexually assault women in women's prisons.
There is also no data whatsoever indicating that if a man calls himself a woman, then he poses any less risk to women than other men.
I agree that prisons need to stay sex-segregated, or revert back to being so where authorities have made this abominable ideological error of incarcerating men in the women's prisons.
citations. please. show me the researchers who claim to have empirical knowledge of human morality.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...
Presumably, for all your religious upbringing, you are right-minded enough to not have all those faults. So either you are an amazing exception, or you are not.
There is good and bad in the USA, and in Scandinavia or Asia. And of course there are genuine and false religious people and non-religious people. Indeed, there are both in each of us.
As long as we're trading samples from a single observer's recollections: mine are different. I never homeschooled myself, but I had several friends in high school who had homeschooled until then who were well-educated, were in advanced science and math etc. They've been fine since then, too. Not all parents are good teachers, but many do quite fine.
In some states people who are under investigation for child abuse are allowed to take their kids out of school (the place that abuse is usually reported). The situation is pretty bad.
There was a whole John Oliver episode about it just weeks ago.
As someone who has lived amongst several different communities and denominations, some are worse than others.
I'm guessing you're a former Witness? They're hard to beat.
In pretty much all studies, homeschooled children on average fare the same or better than kids who go to normal schools.
While it's certainly the case that people with fringe views are more eager to homeschool their children, anti-homeschooling sentiments are really not backed by anything of substance.
Any citations? I believe you, but would want to look at the methodology. If they're opt-in studies, then obviously the ones neglecting their kids in homeschool aren't going to join a study where they are scrutinized.
> dealing with a degree of cowardice and dishonest duplicity they haven't experienced before
Grew up in a religious community, seen this first hand. Only public appearences matter.
The same person that chastises people for having sex without marriage could be a weekly visitor at the whore house.
Yeah, but at least there's a defined goal that they're failing at and you can point it out to them with a 30% chance they'll feel shame.
In the secular world it's just free form open world. People have no anchor to cling to or example to fail to aspire to. It's just Elon Musk one week and Kylie Jenner the next.
Wow, what a terrible take. If anyone needs religion to live a moral life, I'm glad they have found it and hope they never lose it.
I'm judged by my peers, my family, my community, and my country. But even if I wasn't, I would know what's right and what's wrong. Moreover, I guess it's good that amoral people can find ethics from 2000 years ago (when women were without worth, slavery was acceptable, etc), because maybe that's better than nothing (only maybe!), but can we all start a religion based on everything we have learned since then?
Is it right or wrong to act on homosexual urges? Is it right or wrong to use abortion as a form of birth control?
Have your answers to those questions remained consistent your entire life or did they change at exactly the same time they changed for the rest of western society ~20 years ago? If your moral stance has been unwavering, kudos. Otherwise, I would argue you don't actually know what's right and wrong; at least not on the "corner" (aka controversial) cases. For those you simply synchronize your moral compass to society's, which itself is not fixed or absolute (stances on abortion, LGBTQ, euthanasia, capital punishment, etc. have shifted a lot in the past few decades).
On these topics, yes. I independently worked through the moral questions of capital punishment in middle school, wrote long papers on euthanasia when I was 15. I explored the morality of abortion deeply also in high school, LGBTQ was never a moral question for me at all and I truly don't understand why it is for anyone outside of their religion telling them its bad without any justification.
I think people should be capable of exploring these topics deeply at a young age.
But I don't see a problem when people change their opinions during their lifetime, with new experiences and better understanding. Much better than blindly following some specific dogma.
Sidenote: I am a Christian, so I'd like to briefly correct the "(when women were without worth, slavery was acceptable, etc)" phrase pertaining to Christianity solely. At its core, the Bible teaches the very opposite of sexism and racism, however, misconstrued verses and nominal Christians distort the message.
So, in short, I don't find your position very convincing. Also, if Christians were some sort of uniquely enlightened group with special access to the metaphysical groups of the universe, why do they keep falling into the same patterns of behavior as all the other humans who don't have this divine guarantee? Like, if religion was actually some special basis upon which to erect a human morality, why does it achieve such similar outcomes as every other basis? If it's because "humans are fallible and don't always accord perfectly to the perfect divine plan allocated to them," then, again, how is that exactly non-relativistic? Is it because the book exists as some sort of measuring stick by which to determine the essential goodness of someone? Because even that depends on the fallible interpretation of the interpreter, unless you presuppose some special person who is blessed with divine discernment to determine the actual divinely-approved interpretation.
It all ultimately devolves to "you just gotta have faith bro." I do not have faith in an entire group of people thumbing their noses at everyone else like their shit doesn't stink. Antisemitism and hate is literally built into every canonical version of Christianity by way of the Churchfathers.
Maybe we should judge Christianity on the outcomes of Christians, instead of on the most compassionate and kindest way they beg us to take their positions. Actually looking at the facts reveals something most priests blush about... we're all equally clueless. The major difference between me and a Christian is that I don't actively look forward to dying, in the hopes I'll get The Good Ending and have an infinitely good time after I've perished in service to people who have an incentive to get me to live my life in service to them.
Empiricism is blind to most of human experience.
I'm still waiting to hear how outsourcing your moral judgments to external human artifacts somehow implies moral absolutism, as opposed to self-reinforcing intersubjective moral relativism.
I don't have any idea what your last sentence means. But I am making the case that something can be real and objective without being empirical.
My last sentence is thus: just because you take your morals from a book doesn't somehow imply that there is a universal, correct morality. Christians are all still moral relativists, their morality is just relative to a human artifact and reinforced by the intersubjectivity of the other people who also take moral cues from that book. The only case one can make otherwise is, "Look, I have no evidence for an objective morality, I have no particularly good reason to believe it exists, but I have faith that it does and so should you." Which is fine, even if I find it personally stupid, but I can not imagine a single Christian argument for an objective morality that doesn't necessarily require faith as an axiom. I do not have that faith, yet I am a moral person. Religion is not required to have a conscience or to treat your fellow humans well. Therefore, I will not pay any attention to Christian claims towards uniquely privileged knowledge of the divinely mandated correct morality; instead, I will treat them the same as any other person, based on what they actually do.
EDIT: I also like how not once do you even try to make a clear distinction between absolutism and relativism, nor do you try to explain how outsourcing your conscience to a religious book somehow implies universal absolutism.
We should take what makes sense from religions, cherry picking the parts of social progress that was somehow made under such an authoritarian and mind-numbing mental opium, and discard the rest. Any claims of moral superiority on the basis of religion should be outright rejected. The metaphysics are likewise senseless in my opinion, so I choose to ignore them.
With no disrespect toward yourself, just a wry acknowledgement of a plain truth - the essential issue with <Some Text> as the external guidebook is that despite it being "conceited for anyone to believe they are the one" this is more or less the sharding issue of the many many many differing interpretations of (choose your own) <Some Book>.
I've travelled the world a lot in the past six deacades and lost count of how many clearly distinct groups of Christians I've encountered.
The Christian on Christian wars over differing takes on the same material have torn kingdoms asunder.
Would you agree that non-human animals aren’t religious? Because we see moral behavior in animals. For example [1]:
> In another experiment with rats, researchers find that if a rat is given the choice between two containers—one holding chocolate and one holding a trapped rat who appears to be suffering—the rat will try to help the suffering rat first before seeking the chocolate. Experiments like these show that animals make moral choices and that their behavior cannot be explained through natural selection alone.
There are lots of other examples, like animals that call out to warn their group of an approaching predator, placing themselves at higher risk.
Also, it seems like you’re arguing that an “external” moral code is The Only Way but then excusing people in biblical times for owning slaves because “that was a long time ago.” But shouldn’t their supposed access to this special moral code have been sufficient to conclude that owning humans as property is immoral?
> You wouldn't even be able to reason that murder is evil.
This is just downright silly. As a rational, thinking person, it’s easy to reason why murdering fellow human beings is not good.
> the Bible teaches the very opposite of sexism
Anyone can search for “sexism in the bible” to see what it has to say in its own words. For convenience, here’s one such link [2].
[1] https://greatergood.berkeley.edu/article/item/morality_anima...
The Golden Rule is pretty self-explanatory and is a solid foundation for moral behavior. I don't rape, murder, steal, etc., not because I'm afraid of God's wrath, or that of the police -- it's because I wouldn't want those things to happen to me or my loved ones and am able to understand that others feel this way too.
Meanwhile, that moral absolutism give license to kill people for blasphemy. And there's plenty more horrible things that are done to others because God said so.
Everybody's entitled to have their own relationship with God (even as an atheist I do in my own way), and I acknowledge that there's plenty of good that comes from people practicing their faith, but that is easily countered by very bad stuff that is morally justified by their interpretations of scripture.
And this concern is everybody's -- because there's ongoing efforts to make the US into a theocracy and that would be a very bad thing.
I acknowledge that a lot of people do very bad things and supposedly justify them with the Bible. But I suggest that if they did something bad, then their justification is wrong, and can't truly be based on the Bible.
I also suggest that when someone justified something bad through the Bible, it can most definitely be countered and corrected with the Bible itself.
Then you're down to opinion vs opinion. Add into that the work that Bart Erhman has done on the veracity of the texts themselves, as well as the fact that the bible was assembled by committee (of men).
We're all entitled to our own beliefs, so I normally wouldn't care, except there are active factions trying to make the US be ruled by biblical law. So in that context, this act of interpretation is very much of everybody's interest.
But without the transcendent, without a higher power, we have no grounding for our morality. Everything becomes subjective and "post-modern". Actions then become "justifiable" - if there is such a thing - by whatever criteria suits us: the greater good, the good of the nation, whatever. But essentially self-interest takes over completely.
The more we move away from God the worse our societies will become.
Orrrrrrrr... maybe... it doesn't? Maybe even when we're all alone and have to figure things out for ourselves we can come to understand ourselves in genuine relation to those around us and discover a kind and empathetic morality built from logical first principles? Even without the fear of the judgement of almighty sky daddy?
Why "kind and empathetic"? Who said that's how we should be?
If we are nothing more than an arbitrary arrangement of matter, formed according to arbitrary laws of physics, and only for a relative moment, then what is "kind" and "empathetic"?
In a godless universe, you are no more significant than a rock. The only sound position you can then take is that there is no such thing as morality.
"People feel good when they help ...". No argument. But is morality just about the feels? No, it isn't.
Now, if one believes in a creator that is many orders of magnitude (or infinitely) more intelligent than a human, sure, saying that they probably have a better insight into morality and we should listen to them makes sense. But it would be because of their greater ability to understand what is moral, not them being the law maker of morality.
Well, because the god can stick you in a fire for all eternity if you follow the human's moral code instead. That's not really a great case for the soundness of their moral teachings but nonetheless presents a compelling argument for obedience.
You say that, and it's good that you did because the arguments you're making don't work together to prove your point in the way that you think they do. What about a godless universe makes morality impossible to justify? Is it that god is the only possible source of morality or meaning or value or something? Because you haven't proven that and can't just take it as axiom.
This is the way it ought to work, but often does not. Or, when your peer group associates criminal or antisocial behavior with positive attributes.
Shaming does not work in a large population of antisocial people. Religion is not THE answer however for a large population of people it is necessary (currently).
Can you think of anything in between? Why the extreme jump to “it’s either all or nothing”?
To state that The Only way to not be a meaningless hunk of rock is to worship your god seems like a pretty big lack of imagination.
I don’t need your god or your god’s rules to appreciate that you’re probably an amazing person in many ways. My partner is “godless” and she’s far more amazing than a rock.
If you want to argue that certain people need religion and that it may provide more benefit to society when those people personally worship their god I can see how this may be a sound argument. Some people really do need jesus, but this hardly means everyone needs jesus or some other sky god to see the value of other people.
This is such a good example of why I push back on organized religions and their foot soldier bible thumpers… this all or nothing thing. I don’t want your god, I don’t want your religious prudery. I thinks it’s amazing that you find meaning there, i really genuinely do. But it isn’t for me. No. I don’t want your god. I still see your value and still care—and, honestly it’s not a wild impossibility that I see value in others and that I do this without a god.
Because you clearly don't understand the context or reasoning behind any of the situations you listed, you resort to simply condemning God upon your own authority.
You think of yourself as better than God.
And that is what sin is.
Try acknowledging God as the authority, as He is your maker, and then you might even get to understand all the events you are ignorantly referring to.
I think most people would agree that mass murders are morally wrong.
> You think of yourself as better than God.
I have my own problems, but otherwise I don't murder people.
> Try acknowledging God as the authority, as He is your maker, and then you might even get to understand all the events you are ignorantly referring to.
Fortunately the god doesn't exist, and the bible is just poorly written fiction.
But even if I was convinced that the Abrahamic god exists, it wouldn't change my opinion that the god is a narcissist psychopath.
That's a rough approximation of my beliefs. The universe is massive and long-lived. I am neither.
I want to leave the world a better place than when I entered it. That trickles down to my daily life - are things better or worse when I go to bed than when I awoke? Being as insignificant as a rock doesn't preclude that desire.
And frankly, it's kind of offensive when Christians tell me I'm less-than-moral because I don't need their scripture to decide what's good or bad.
The moral argument isn't telling you that. You people (HN readers) seem intent on misunderstanding my initial statements.
It's not that atheists are not moral. Not even less moral than religious people.
The point I am trying, and failing, to express is that morality must come from a higher, non-human source. If it does not, then it is just a product of fallible human minds and is entirely meaningless. That's it.
At the scale of the universe, everything we do is meaningless. We simply are what we are and that's that. Realizing this causes me no small amount of existential angst. So I try to live in the moment as best I can and leave the world ever so slightly better than I found it.
So maybe we actually agree (on what lack of religion means, not on what we personally believe about morality or existence)?
This might be more convincing if we had empirical evidence that this “higher power” even exists and could discern (and thus agree on) what it wants and why what it wants is good.
I got $1000 that says that I could name several “Godly” (greater than 90% abrahamic affiliation) that you would immediately label “a shithole country”, but if I were to name the most secular ones, you’d most likely state that “theyre great, beautiful places to live with good people.”
(I'm trying to point out that your comment isn't helpful to the discussion.)
Countering with two Catholic moral | ethical philosophers doesn't negate the suggestion of Cicero, it seems to be just an attempt to make the first proposition a second time.
That's just my drive by two cents worth, FWiW.
It's going to take more time commitment than people reading random forum posts will give to do that. It would be better to try summarising some aspect of his ideas (which is of course a task that would demand time from whoever wishes to promote him). That's why I said the comment isn't helpful.
Would you be willing to give the hours+ time commitment if a random stranger said the two words "Read [name]" with no further elaboration or would you ignore it? It would be more helpful in a discussion to bring actual ideas to the table, or else the discussion would consist of no more than reading recommendations.
In a thread about education, I expect the responses of the educated.
When an absolute position is taken a single exception rebuts the absolute.
If a comment is made regarding the absolute necessity of religion as grounding for morals and virtue and a simple response is given "Read X" then I expect that X addresses either supoort or raises an exception.
Cicero is sufficiently well known for many to be aware of the material, those that are unaware (in a thread about education) should be curious enough to learn more and advance their own position as to why Cicero may or may not be a suitable rebuttal.
FWiW I felt the comment given re: Cicero to be neccesary and sufficient and I'd tip my hat to the user if I had a hat, were to cross paths, and recognised them as such.
But this is just me, a random drive by HN commenter.
Each to their own.
I, for one, made no such comment.
I've been attempting to express the moral argument for God. Religion doesn't feature, as such.
> The more we move away from God the worse our societies will become.
Whose God? How well is it working in Iran, Afghanistan, Pakistan?
The Bard makes an excellent point: "The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose." We could find countless "justifiable" actions that are based on "God told me to", so ignoring that aspect is dishonest.
Is there a threshold for belief in God that you think is necessary for a healthy society? 50%? 75%?
It's not true at all to state that morality has no grounding without a "higher power". (See also: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ethics)
For example: belief in a higher power simply isn't required to allow people to make their own medical decisions. Belief in a higher power isn't required to give someone food.
It's absolutely fine to propose religion as an ethical framework, but I don't think it can possibly make sense to propose it as the only ethical framework, or to propose that society will become worse if humans "move away from God".
There are plenty of good alternatives.
It's not that you need God to be moral. It's that you need an objective "higher power" as the source of that morality.
So I totally agree with what you wrote there, but you can't make a sound argument for a moral position without God or some objective higher power.
> "Belief in a higher power isn't required to give someone food."
So it's a moral duty to give a hungry person food. OK. I agree. Now we could have an exchange where you try to make a strong rational case for that, during which I will ask "why?" an annoying number of times until we get to the part where it's clear there is no basis for the moral duty absent a higher, non-human, source.
Acting so that we decrease suffering, increase wellbeing, and otherwise reduce harm is moral in and of itself without any higher source.
Casual sneaking in of "non-human" here, when a powerful human would fit just as well.
Your issue is that there often isn't a basis for anything at all except "seems to work". That's why we have the joke about the 5-year-old who keeps asking "why", exasperating its parents.
That we don't have a complete rationally-grounded framework doesn't imply the existence of God or even that it's good to act as if such a being exists. Insisting otherwise is basically a god-of-the-gaps argument.
I do understand your argument, and I definitely agree that some set of non-self "objective higher-power" can be very helpful. Like a personal or societal code of ethics. Bodies of law are an attempt at that.
I simply don't agree that our society will become worse the more we "move away from God". It's totally fine if "God" is how you want to do it. But not everyone wants this, and the development of secular philosophy, laws, professional ethics, and personal ethics are excellent substitutes for people who don't believe.
Not to mention, secular alternatives still allow people to practice their religious-based ethical framework without forcing others to do so.
I am a Christian because Christ is God. This is bigger than me. This is outside, and regardless of me.
The first sentence is True. It is at the foundation of community, co-operation, and yes, conformity. You may resent some things about living in a community, but you benefit from and become human through others. [1]
The second sentence is... not a certitude.
[1] _ The real meaning of Ubuntu. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ubuntu_philosophy
I just remember how religious people fought against gay marriage as if it would ban straight marriages.
God seems to want those people be hateful people.
>anything goes, you can be whatever you feel like and there's no judgement of any of your actions.
First of all, there is judgement as soon as you actions hurt others. Beside that you can be and feel like you want.
And I remember questions like "What stops atheists from murdering people or raping kids?"
Sorry, but if the only things that prevents you from being a bad person is that you are being watched over by a higher being, then you are still a bad person.
https://www.statista.com/statistics/234653/religious-affilia...
Statistically, the only communities with positive demographics are religious.
Is divorce allowed?
What is the status of women's rights?
Duty.
The duty of the teacher to protect the student from bullying? Gone.
The duty of the parent to stay in an unfulfilling relationship for the sake of the children.
The duty of the professional (cop? doctor?) to serve and protect the public.
The duty of the prosecutors to enforce the written rules.
The duty of the politician to send our soldier-youths into just wars.
And on and on.
How come your comment history says otherwise (Judaism). I'm perplexed that the new approach to selling religion is pretending to be raised secular and or have others perceive oneself to once be an atheist but then later found the truth in life. Religion was the worst, the worst thing for me to experience in life, and I wish everyone could've experienced similar to me. Since religious people tend to not care about people that have been greatly harmed in life by what they continue to practice, keeping it alive to harm more people. A lot of members of LGBTQ+ classification know what the harm is truly like.
I remember asking a friend's dad "So are you Orthodox, Conservative, or Reform?" and he was like "We're kinda beyond Reform."
Also, these converts were used in proselyting from the populations they came from.
I've noticed most atheists are by default "converts" in a sense, and the now-religious conversion parallels appear to have a few dimensions to it.
Maybe you need to read more about Jehovah's Witnesses, Haredi, and Wahhabism.
So let's consider some numbers for effective fertility. Imagine it was 4. That means each generation (which we'll call 30 years, even though it was probably close to 20) would be twice as large as the one prior. And this could be reversed (to see how big your parents' generation was) by multiplying by 0.5. So let's look back to see what the population would have been 2100 years ago, or 70 generations, using various effective fertility rates.
---
4 effective fertility => 8 billion people today * 0.5 (reversible fertility factor) ^ 70 (total generations) = global population in 100BC of... 0!
3 effective fertility => 8 billion * 0.66^70 = global population in 100BC of... 0!
2.5 effective fertility => 8 billion * 0.8^70 = global population in 100BC of... 1316.
---
So we can say that effective fertility rates had to be lower than 2.5 on average! Average being important since we probably went through cycles of higher and lower effective fertility, but that only makes this scarier. There were probably times in the past where humanity's effective fertility dipped below 2, which means we're on our way to extinction. Anybody seeing this, and thinking about the future of humanity, would have realized how fundamentally critical to our survival simply producing more children was. And what's the lowest hanging fruit there? People having non-reproductive sex.
And on the flip side, secular society prides itself on how smart, objective, no "sky daddy" fantasies, etc it is as it marches towards self-selected extinction.
1) An effectively fertility rate of "N" will result in the next generation being N/2 times as large. So a fertility of 2 means the next generation will be exactly the same size (2 people, having 2 kids who have 2 kids...) while a fertility rate of 4 would result in a doubling of size, and a fertility rate of 1 would result in the next generation being half as large.
2) To reverse the multiplication of some value by "X", you simply multiply by 1/X. So if our population increases by 1.5 in a generation, then to reverse that and get from the new population, back to where we started, we'd multiply by 1/1.5 or 0.66. So for instance 100 * 1.5 = 150. And 150 * 0.66 = 100.
---
So taking the most complex example. Fertility rate of 2.5 = a population increasing factor of 1.25. Reversing that means multiplying by 0.8
So if our parent's generation had a fertility rate of 2.5, that would mean that their population would be 0.8 times the size of our population, which I take as the global population which is about 8 billion. And if their parents also had a fertility rate of 2.5, then the exact same would follow for another multiplication of 0.8. So if we go back "N" generations, we'd end up with a population, for that generation, of 8 billion * 0.8^N.
So going back 70 generations with a fertility rate of 2.5, we finally get the original formula: 8 billion * 0.8^70 = world population 70 generations ago. You end up with this problem that if you don't have a really low effective fertility rate, the population approaches 0 far too quickly, and that's only going back 2100 years!
He still really didn't like religion and the morality associated with it, but it seems he was correct when he predicted that getting rid of it would leave a vacuum in people's lives. His solution to all this, the ubermensch stuff, was a sort of radical self-actualization which I feel we've barely scratched the surface of understanding and applying.
Can you provide any specific examples?
What I see is that in a modern secular society there is plenty of judgement against anti-social behavior. I.e. people are largely allowed to do as they please as long as it doesn't cause direct harm to others. Our laws largely reflect that.
An example would be our societies' increasing tolerance for homosexuality. It harms nobody, and yet it experienced massive stigma for centuries, at least in areas where the majority followed Abrahamic religiona.
In my experience not only is OP correct that there are different kinds of homeschooling, but the people involved in the different segments don't really interact at all. My wife and I were both homeschooled, living less than a mile away from each other for 10 years, but we didn't meet until we were adults. Her circle was much like you describe, but ours was far more secular, and there was very little overlap.
If you accidentally found your way into the local religious-homeschooling circles, I can understand how it would be eyebrow-raising, but that doesn't mean that the other circle isn't close by.
While this may technically fit the definition of "indoctrination", that's a pretty loaded way to describe what parents teach their own children.
// they thought the public schools were too secular and were teaching "sinful" sciences like evolution.
Really? In 2021, the hot-button issue among religious parents was evolution?
For the parental fears to center on evolution either suggests either that the parents were censoring their larger concerns for OP, or it's an anachronism that brings the chronology into question.
Could be evolution in the science side of things, the legacy of slavery or colonization in the history side of things.
Math is generally pretty safe, although I do see a steady stream of "I'm so glad I'm homeschooling my kids, I can't believe what $currentEducationalBogeyman is trying to pass off as education" when presented with some way to understand math that I had to teach myself, in college, to do the math faster in my head.
Composition is pretty safe, but as its frequently combined with literature (that is, the study of rhetoric in other people's writing) which also has a lot of self-censorship. It's also unsteady ground, as the Bible should be study as literature as well as religious tome, but that can lead to kids thinking about the humans who wrote the bible and what rhetorical outcome they were reaching towards.
Physical education is safe so long as it limits itself to exercise, but health topics like human sexuality are obviously going to raise some hackles.
I think it really depends on the parent what is the absolute bogeyman of public schooling, but evolution has posed the most consistent existential threat to the stereotypical fundamentalist who is looking to avoid "sinful" public schools.
I don't think that the theory of evolution was the issue in 2021...
Here's an example that happened in France: parents disgusted by a performance where an adult male performer was pretending, in front of kids, to eat vegetables in a garden, naked, in front of kids "because ecological art" (or whatever that performance was called) [1]
I'm sure I'm the evil, close minded, one, who refuses to see the "art" and the "ecology" in that performance and who sees instead the perversion of kids.
But while I'm the evil one who is seeing perversion, there were people involved in showing an adult male, on all fours, balls and dick out, ass spread, because he had an important message to pass (certainly).
Do that to my kid, and my kid is getting homeschooled the next day.
I don't have a problem with anyone but I do have a problem with proselytism.
[1] the art performance (call it what you want) is now forbidden to be shown to kids (so there's still some sanity out there)... Video of the performance kids saw (the one inside the tweet):
https://actu.fr/auvergne-rhone-alpes/lyon_69123/artistes-nus...
Note that I don't know and don't care if the person who revealed that is an ultra-fundamentalist christian, a neo-nazi, or an alien from outer space... You are not showing that to my kid without repercussion.
This is where public schooling is hypocritical. There are various forms of education about race, gender, etc., but almost no mandatory education on religion?
I'm not saying indoctrination, but education. Shouldn't everyone have a basic understanding of the history and tenets of Buddhism? Atheism? Hinduism? And so on? I think so. Even if the prism of importance is postmodern and focuses on respect fo others' self-identification, religion is clearly a major aspect in self-identification or we wouldn't treat the subject as controversial.
Teaching a kid about the variety of beliefs across the globe and the option of none is likely to make the kid less attached to the bubble of the religion of their parents.
In my country, religion is a 1h/week class from 1'st to 12'th grade and parents have to explicitly opt-out of it if they do not want kids to take part. Opting out is also slightly detrimental to a kids scores. What is thought is pure indoctrination and there is no element of multi-religious sociology and anthropology.
I'm a former homeschooler that had to watch countless Ken Ham and Kent Hovind videos. These videos were filled with strawmen and faulty logic. I distinctly remember one of them tearing into Lamarckism, a theory discredited in the 1930's, as if it were something that people actually believe in today. Indoctrination is exactly how I'd describe it.
Sure it's largely wrong, but it's a strange sort of indoctrination to care about. Sort of like how we tell children the story about electrons being balls that orbit the nucleus. Wrong, but only important for physicists and chemists.
Some science is wrong, but not science in itself.
And mate, you don't need to go into religion or anything to find out that governments willingly lie to you. Also scientists, plenty of times, willingly or not.
> That doesn’t set you up to get far and do well in the world as it is.
There are loads of highly successful and relevant Christian people in every area, including science, right now and throughout history.
If there wasn’t a literal Adam and Eve, then Adam and Eve never sinned by eating fruit from the wrong tree, and thus they never passed that sin down to all of humanity, meaning we aren’t all born with “original sin” for which we need to be forgiven and saved from being sent to hell when we die.
It's also kind of a boring question because there's no experiment we could run to explain how creation miracles worked. It's definitely a fountain of controversy, though.
Almost everyone isn't going to do a deep dive into how it all works/become professionals in that area, so even the science is effectively just a story for them. If parents want to tell their kids a different story, it doesn't really matter much. Public school k-12 science is so basic that as has been said elsewhere in the comments, you can learn it all from Wikipedia in a few days anyway. The important topics are reading, writing, and math/logic. Ideally history and political philosophy, but it's not clear that schools meaningfully teach that anyway.
That was just one example of a particularly egregious strawman. It made "evolutionists" out to be a lot dumber than they actually are by misrepresenting what they believe. They made similar arguments against some of Darwin's since discredited theories, again, as if they were things that modern scientists believe. And there were plenty of other untruths and logical errors, so much so that I think it's very likely these people were not arguing in good faith.
I agree that it's not a very important subject for everyday life or for most careers, but that kind of intellectual dishonesty being presented as the absolute divine truth is not good for developing a child's reasoning abilities imo.
And as another sibling comment points out, creationism tends to pit people against science and intellectualism in general. The only thing that can be truly known is the absolute truth of the Bible.
All this to say who cares? People choose to believe what they want to believe. And for historical reasons there's this belief common that may or may not align with current scientific thought. Let's not make this a hill to die on if it drives parents away.
In my area it certainly was. Vaccines were probably hotter at that time, but they tend to not be a major part of the curriculum, and transgender issues in public schools was just getting on parents radar here when COVID interrupted things.
We were aware of families homeschooling for religious reasons, but not in the Bay Area.
To be fair the topic of evolution only came up because the arborist made an off hand comment about how a particular tree had evolved from a tree that is native to warmer climates to survive in our area and it caused a bit of a stir with the parents. I think the park service got some sternly worded letters afterward.
Not believing in evolution isn't a morality issue, a lot of the stuff that those folks are probably trying to avoid by homeschooling is. In other words, I wouldn't be worried about my kids spending the night at the house with the very conservative non-evolution believing family. That definitely counts for something.
Multiple studies show religious people are happier, healthier, and have greater civic engagement. Mormons, who you probably consider extremely “indoctrinated,” live 5-10 years longer than other whites, are tied with Jews for happiest, and have among the highest upward social mobility of anyone in the US. So those kids are probably in better shape than the public school kids.
If people want to homeschool because public school won't reinforce in their kids that God is great, that's their right as long as they also clear the geography requirements.
And just like that, a discussion about homeschooling veers wildly off-topic into a flame war.
Kids shielded from this kind of actual reality tend, IMHO, are never really then equipped for going out into society of the workplace, where teaching evolution is small change compared to the kind of "sinning" going on all about.
Admittedly some public school systems are just a mess, and private schools are out of the budget for most folks, so home schooling becomes the default. However, unless there's a social education alongside lots of other kids, this is just kicking problems down the road.
Also, the growth probably comes from a more representative cross section of society.
We unschooled our kids. Worked beautifully. They're both as much of a success or failure as if they had gone to public school. Had more to do with their idiot gene donor's DNA than their schooling.
What do you mean by this? I’m assuming it’s just self-deprecating humor.
If anything, they'd be dumber.
A huge +1 to this, from observing the many friends I have who do homeschooling. Judging by their results -- super-smart, super-well-behaved children -- has gotten me thinking I'd like to do the same once I have kids.
A common complaint I hear from homeschooled kids is 'parentification', where their parents expect adult responsibility from small children. I fail to see how what you're asking for is any different. Children shouldn't be expected to do adult's jobs.
If every parent that does have the time to invest in their child’s future, takes said child out of public school, said schools are left with only the uninvolved parents, which makes it worse in a “self fulfilling prophecy” kind of way.
The arguments in favor of home schooling all seem to amount to “fuck you, not my problem, I take care of my own kid, you’re on your own.”
Also, my kids would not have done as well at school - they would have been a lot more like the the other kids, so would not have improved all that much.
Not in the US, but some things are the same here in the UK, and in Sri Lanka where we lived for much of my kid's lives.
(Consider that public schools might not be a “worse education” if resources weren’t funneled away by private schools and home schooling.)
Those parents who can't find the time / motivation to spend some time doing learning activities with their kids really shouldn't have applied for the job of parent in the first place.
If more parents took ultimate responsibility for their kids learning outcomes teachers would be under less pressure, and would have more ability to provide extra help.
> really shouldn't have applied for the job of parent in the first place
Yeah, I mean if you plan on getting laid off from your career some day and have to work two jobs to make ends meet, you really shouldn't have kids. Having kids should only be reserved for people who plan on having no unforeseen issues ever come up in their life, am I right?
Parents should just take responsibility and make sure that they don't ever come across hard times. See also: the poor are just lazy.
Turning every response into a gotcha isn't incisive, there are plenty of other forums better suited than Hacker News if arguing and strawmanning is your thing. Chill out.
Maybe.
The primary difference between the upper classes "homeschooling" and the lower classes "homeschooling" is that the upper classes will purchase tutors/teachers and the lower classes will do it themselves.
A couple of local elementary school kids from your upper middle class housing development being put together in a pod with two teachers will blow the doors off ANY school--public, private, homeschool, whatever. Homeschoolers from lower socioeconomic classes can keep up with this, but it's a LOT more effort than they generally estimate.
The problem is the dramatic increase in sophistication required in middle school grades. Writing goes from very basic sentences to multiple paragraphs. The vast majority of people are not equipped to deal with this as they can't write well enough themselves. Math goes from multiplication tables to Algebra I. The vast majority of the population is not equipped to teach Algebra I. Science comes online as a subject in middle school--we know most people aren't equipped to teach that.
The higher socioeconomic classes will recognize that they cannot handle the teaching and purchase appropriate teachers if they are committed.
The lower socioeconomic classes cannot apply the relevant resource even if they recognize the problems. However, they are committed to homeschooling at that point and cannot back down and say that they need to put their child into public school.
The social aspect of schooling is just as important as the educational part of it. There's a reason growing up when we had home schooled kids that joined for their high school years, they were the "weird kids" - they just had absolutely no idea how to interact socially with their peers. And for some folks that carries on to adulthood.
Disclaimer: my parents were public school teachers, and seeing the system deteriorate feels like a travesty. The number of parents who think school is daycare is disheartening to say the least.
In practice, people have trouble not butting into each other's lives. If we're going to try to force a shared belief on everyone, it should be to fix that.
There's a lot to be said for giving all children a baseline level of education based on fact so that everyone understands the world and the large problems we have and so they will know how to work together to face them.
The kids who are only ever taught that the world is 6,000 years old and flat, that women are inferior, that evolution is a lie, that global warming isn't real, or that gay people cause hurricanes are going to be at a substantial disadvantage in many areas of their lives and they will hinder efforts to resolve conflicts, to coordinate when necessary, and to reach general consensus.
And what if I want my kids to go to a school where they’re encouraged to think for themselves? To be interestingly wrong rather than boringly correct?
I really don’t think the facts you give as examples are that important when it comes to equipping a child with the skills they need for a lifetime. They’ll be faced with a different set of facts later in life anyways. The foundation of an education needs to be a little deeper than “not my enemy’s political views.”
Sure it could make politics more polarized, but hopefully that will result in greater diversity of governments under which one can choose to live. Anything that gets us away from a monoculture and a single world-government is a good thing in my mind.
Very heavily used by the hassidic community here in nyc to prevent girls from having any education.
I linked to https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzsZP9o7SlI as a top level post, but just to give you some ideas. This is John Oliver's take on it.
We thought, "Well, it's only kindergarten". It worked out well enough (knock on wood) that we just kept going.
Compared to my own harried "THE BUS IS COMING!!!" sleep-deprived school days, it has been a wonderful change.
If I could go back in time, I'd put my mom in an ankle lock until she agreed to do the same for me.
Especially since I learned that in my home state homeschoolers can participate in high-school sports. In high school I had to wake up at 4AM for 5AM hockey practice. If I could have returned home afterwards and slept, rather than going straight to school, I would have thanked the Gods.
Followed by the collective groan about how they're too tired to do the warmups.
With playgrounds you get the best part of school, recess, without the rest of it.
If parents would look up from their phones for a minute and watch what's going on in playgrounds they'd be amazed.
Recently I saw about 20 kids, across a wide age range, hold a spontaneous, well-organized game of Among Us.
You won't just make friends there; you'll run in Draco Malfoys too; and that's also valuable.
Essentially what this sentence says is "the people that don't fit my stereotype are not the image that comes to my mind when I hear ${word}." While this is definitely true (it's more or less the definition of a stereotype), it's not a refutation of OP's point that homeschooling is more complicated than your stereotypes would have you believe.
Yeck gross bleck! Religious zealots!
Rich people do homeschooling :
Oh how jealous I am Bartholomew, I wish I could have a private tutor like yours to teach my kid all of the great languages, and look the Au Pair is bringing in the lunch!
If somebody's rich enough to provide a better education to their child despite the economy of scale advantage public/private schools have, then homeschooling can be advantageous. If somebody can't do that, then they're just abusing their kid.
Even in the same kid it can be very dissimilar.
The main reason I was homeschooled was that the local school system's ridiculous "whole word" approach to reading and writing was failing me badly, and by age ten I still could barely read. So that part of my homeschooling experience was very traditional, hands on, drilling in phonics and other time tested techniques... and soon I finally could read and write fluently.
Meanwhile for math and science, I had no problem figuring it on my own with much less input now that I could finally read. I wasn't quite unschooled for those subjects. But it was close to that.
Funny thing is I actually learned basic programming _before_ I could read fluently. I remember the hardest thing about it being struggling to read the books I was learning from. Programming itself seemed pretty straightforward in comparison.
That's really interesting. How did you get introduced to programming? For example, did someone show you BASIC interpreter on a computer? (Not knowing your age, I don't know whether BASIC was popular when you learned basic programming.) What was it like to use a computer barely knowing how to read?
It took until I was about 11 or so to finally get a computer of my own, a $50, rather antique at the time, IBM XT. Though really, the real breakthrough was when I got my second computer, a 286 or so that I literally took from a neighbor's trash. That computer I could mess around with without worrying about breaking it!
It probably wouldn't work well for every kid and every family. Personally, I found the structure of elementary school very constraining and was glad to get out. I'm sure there are pros and cons to both approaches.
I think relative to my peers I'm generally able to be a bit more self motivated. And I think schools generally teach you to solve problems using only the information on the page in front of you, whereas the real world is much messier than that.
There are also a lot of adults who show the lack of meeting a diverse set of homeschool families as well. They don't usually see that in themselves either.
I'll give it a shot: in all these scenarios, there ought to be a minimum standard-- backed up by the state-- to ensure none of these children are being abused or neglected. Public and private schools benefit from the children having to be around many other people every day, some of whom are teachers and administrators who have a profession obligation to report such things.
AFAICT there is no common standard to enforce this across the myriad concepts of home school you mention. There obviously should be. Importantly, none of the "very dissimilar" concepts of home schooling you mention obviate this need.
Homeschooling is great if one or both parents are teachers or come from a teaching background. Homeschooling is a disaster if neither parent has much of a formal education, or lack teaching acumen, but still feel that they are qualified to teach their kids. Between those two extremes is a huge range of variability.
Exams are going to become even more of a factor to ensure kids coming from a range of diverse backgrounds meet the minimum bar for university.
At the end of the day, facts are facts. Not knowing them is detrimental to self, and if in a position of authority, to others as well. People can pretend all education is equivalent, until they need to see a doctor for a disease, or an engineer to build a house or a lawyer to fight their case. Then they want the best, the most qualified. Four years of engineering/medical/law cannot fix 12 years of poor educational foundations.
Edit: Downvotes are welcome, but it won't change what is factual. Homeschooling is guaranteed to increase inequality, not decrease it.
A 2016 study by the National Home Education Research Institute (NHERI) indicates homeschoolers scored between 15 and 30 percentage points higher on standardized academic achievement tests and usually scored higher on the SAT/ACT.
Your statistics support the previous claim. If you have a group out performing the public school by 15 to 30% there will be more spread in educational outcomes. Many would see that as a good thing when some kids get closer to reaching their potential, but not everyone wants that.
It's funny how people will gut the foundation of public education over decades, then turn around and point saying "Look, it's shaky." Of course it's shaky. It's chronically underfunded, teachers have no say over student behaviour and no control over the curriculum.
Why? Public schools are funded by tax money, not by the kids. Less kids using public schools mean more resources for the kids left. No?
I am not following your reasoning.
Can look at some links about this:
https://www.nheri.org/home-school-researcher-the-impact-of-h...
https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/the-homeschool-math-gap...
The data from Alaska is based on "students are enrolled in the state’s popular correspondence programs". If that implies state control of materials and syllabus it is more like school than real home education.
I think you are right in so far as there is a particular sizeable group (affluent hippie women in my experience in the UK) of home educators tend to encourage humanities and creative arts.
It looks from these UK numbers (also admittedly not recent) that HE kids do better at maths here: https://core.ac.uk/download/108200.pdf (page 298).
In general, the internet has been of huge help to home educators: online classes, better access to resources, online advice and community (only useful thing I have ever found on Facebook are HE groups!) so I would expect that to have had a major impact.
We also survived covid lockdowns rather better.
The system is failing those students in such complete ways that I can't see any way in which homeschooling could be worse than that. Those kids could probably learn better math by sleeping with a textbook under their pillow and relying on osmosis.
A kid could probably get better education just by being bored and left in a room with books and select access to educational YouTube videos than what parts of the educational system offer.
Btw there was a epic tweek lately along the lines of: I pay my son 10$ for every book he reads. It's my best deal ever and he thinks he is ripping me off.
Home schooling in this case was basically 70 something credits from the local community college, a handful of CLEP exams, and a bunch of highschool credits from the state online highschool system. The result was a diploma from said local highschool and an AA from the community college and acceptance to a college in the top 50 nationally.
So, its not all dumb parents doing dumb things, but sometimes parents making the best out of a poor set of circumstances.
And AFAIK the diploma from the crappy HS was just a rubber stamp to check the "graduated from HS" for the community college to grant the AA, and the public Uni to take them as a junior (at age 18 no less).
edit: And I should point out the local HS itself apparently had some decent teachers/etc, its just the administration was catering to a conservative community largely disinterested in public education made worse by the fact that the top 10% or so of economically advantaged students had already left the district for a fancy private school or some kind of early college classes similar to my family member. Its the white version of the inner city failing school story, except there wasn't a better highschool on the other side of town for the motivated kids/parents to transfer to unless you also had 15k/year to spend.
The term used historically in the UK (essentially when posh people did it with tutors, look up older biographies of the Queen!) was "private education".
The way I think of it is that it is every form of education other than school.
https://pietersz.co.uk/2021/01/there-is-no-home-education
My experience of it has been good. My kids definitely prefer it to the experiences of their school going friends. I think the individualised opportunities of home education has a lot to do with my older daughter going into a male dominated field - she is doing a degree apprenticeship (work while at university, takes a bit longer, get work experience and salary, and fees paid) in Electrical Engineering at the University of Warwick and Jaguar Landrover.
My only regret is not starting home education earlier.
Probably one of the most biased formats you can find. Mixing comedy with pseudo-facts and personal opinions to push an agenda/narrative.
I wish we could only see what he produces as comedy but way too often people love to share his clips/narrative as a semi-reliable source of information.
There was a vice documentary that sorta touched on the political & religious biases with some homeschooling communities & programs: https://youtu.be/9kuNycfklN4 (2022)
Regardless of income, the key factor seems to be the rationale. If parents want to homeschool because they're involved with their kids' lives and want them to succeed, they'll do well relative to the available public school options.
Just like high earners like LeBron James are not allowed to WFH and have long commutes.
It just depends on the nature of the work.