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Comment by crazydoggers | Hacker News Reader

Bill is a voter, voting on matters of extreme importance to us all.

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.

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>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.

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.

Currently (2023), homeschoolers make up less than 7% of the population. That is likely an all time high. So what you're telling me is that government schools are catastrophically bad at enabling American students to distinguish fact from opinion?

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.

Yes our public schools are doing a poor job. And given the majority of kids go to public school; that is where the attention needs to be directed.

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.

> 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.

What's the distribution among public and home schooling?

Also what is the rate for adults?

I thought evolution was a theory not a fact

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