Please describe to me how believing in evolution is going to help Bill put my plumbing or electrical system in correctly or be able to have a good crop this year.
Also, evolution is not a belief, it’s a fact. Raising a population that can’t tell fact from fiction has profound consequences to us all. Those plumbers and electricians interact with us all in complicated ways, not just their jobs.
The PISA assessment by the OECD demonstrates that only 13.5% of American students age 15 were able to distinguish fact from opinion in reading tests.
In a democracy, that matters more than plumbing and electrical job ability.
This is so important. Raising a generation of children who are so easily misled because they never learned to think rationally or to do research at any level is already biting this country.
Also, homeschoolers do better on standardized tests than their government schooled counterparts. So it seems like we should be advocating for and advancing homeschool interests if we actually care about education, since it is the homeschoolers who are 'doing it right', according to outcomes.
The problem is also that homeschooling has massively different outcomes for different kids. For some it’s a positive, for others it deepens divides.
Homeschooling is worse than a bandaid solution, and a regression for many kids. We can’t ignore those who are hurt by an ongoing deregulation of our educational system just because it works for some.
And worse, we need to look closely at how that system is being abused by those with specific agendas.
What's the distribution among public and home schooling?
Also what is the rate for adults?
I mean how often do we hear something along the lines of "I never used the algebra I learned in highschool" or calculus or whatever.
The reality is that while a lot of school is teaching you the basics, a lot of it is also just teaching you how to learn and how to think critically.
Or just giving you an appreciation for basic things (like science) so when you come across a new concept in your adult life you can better appreciate it and not dismiss it.
It does not appear that this is happening in government run schools as prevalently as you may want to believe.
Even if it isn't happening as much as it should be, doesn't change that there is still value in a proper science and math education.
We know that thanks to republicans many schools can no longer give their kids a proper education.