Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

From my position, saying: "I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it." Comes close to invalidating the experience of another.

1) My primary school clearly took children's advancement seriously (more in things like handwriting, bladder control and cycling proficiency than in subject-matter knowledge or understanding), so it wasn't all pain and no gain, but that mostly stopped at secondary school.

2) Secondary-school maths lessons were (usually) something of a haven because maths teachers were willing to engage in unplanned reasoned argument and for almost three years we worked independently, at our own pace, from booklets while the teacher gave us each in turn one-on-one tuition (for only one or two minutes per lesson, but it did mean that I escaped being uncomfortably pressured to speed up or slow down both when I was working independently and when I had the teacher's attention for a non-punitive reason).

I think British education would be better if secondary schools had a clearer purpose and treated pupils as stakeholders. My experience was that my formal education started at primary school and resumed at university after a seven-year gap. I never really found out how my secondary school was meant to benefit pupils. Pupils ought to not only benefit from school, but understand how it benefits them.

I think schools should reflect clearer thinking about ability-based selection. If pupils are grouped by age and location only, and not at all by ability, then requiring the whole class to work through the same material, in the same way, at the same pace risks seriously inhibiting subject-matter learning. On the other hand, grouping pupils by "general ability" risks putting pupils in some classes more or less advanced than those that would benefit them most, and permanently disadvantaging those who are rejected from the more prestigious academic path at an early age.

Pupils also ought to lead lives they have reason to value. Corporal punishment even for bullies is a net negative, and there should be meaningful protections against teachers using loopholes, such as turning a blind eye to bullying or perpetrating emotional abuse themselves. We had many teachers like that at my secondary school, and one of them was found to have assaulted a pupil while I was there.

Edit:

I think some important points aren't really clear above. I agree with dijit that school can provide pupils with very poor value for the burdens it places on them, but I consider this a missed opportunity, rather than a lost cause. I also suspect some teachers' toxic attitudes about class and violence contribute to the bullying problem, so we should be careful not to let cognitive biases lead us into doubling down on "discipline" in schools, unless there's good reason to believe that isn't part of the problem. I left school many years ago, but before I did, authority figures bemoaned the "end of discipline" and the coddling of pupils, which was at odds with my experience then, so I'm sceptical of any claims that the problem has since been solved.

> By the end of the 1980s, all of the grammar schools in Wales and most of those in England had closed or converted to comprehensive schools. Selection also disappeared from state-funded schools in Scotland in the same period.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar_school

There are private schools that call themselves grammar schools (paid schools, not state funded) and some grammar schools still exist in Northern Ireland.

But the system that defined what a grammar school is - has long since been abolished, and all free-access grammar schools were completely gone from my area before I was even born.

—-

EDIT: seems like the some state funded selective grammar schools exist but they are not exactly distributed evenly.

So, I am wrong; and this situation is actually significantly more class-enforcing than it used to be. Amazing.

But to confirm, there are still areas that have state grammar schools and have the 11 plus: Buckinghamshire, Essex and Kent spring to mind as the obvious ones in the South East.

I suspect in the past, people were less mobile, there wasn't the same disparity in wealth between different localities in the same general area, and school league tables weren't published. So the idea of moving to an area for (among other things) better education for their children wasn't something that was done.

1) The people who are on to bigger and better things are in fact vanishingly rare. Like, yes, Bill Gates dropped out of college, but he dropped out of Harvard, not Evergreen Community College. He wouldn't have been there in the first place if he wasn't already capable of some big things.

2) A really healthy society, with really good schools, would provide a path for those who can't hack it. Its almost definitionally not a good school if the process exposes some deficiencies, then just gives up. Like "well, it turns out your dyslexic, here's your cardboard box and begging pan" sounds like a bad school.

Of course, if you're young and you have no friends, good luck getting your peers to think you're worth defending.

It's easy to be pigeon-holed by the class, and it's self-reinforcing.

I'm saying that, all things being equal, I'd rather my kids be homeschooled with a few gaps, than go to a government school (and be traumatized) and have no gaps.

I think because that is also often because they regard it as normal for kids. A lot of people say things like "bullying toughens them up".

They would not think its OK for the same things to be done to adults. I wonder what the toughens them up lot would think if I showed up at their house with a few friends and gave them a light beating - I think calling the police would be a more likely outcome than thanking me for teaching them to be tough!

Some people have a positive charisma that comes out of treating people well. I'd expect this from the captain of a sports team.

I knew someone who had a negative charisma, who was criminally minded. He was popular among drug users at my school because he would take more chances and thus have the best supply. He got caught on tape selling 3 kilo of cocaine to a cop after I'd graduate. He had a talent to motivate other people into criminal activity and became the leader of a gay bashing gang that seemed to mainly target straight allies because this was the 1980s and folks like that were probably scared about getting AIDS.

I don't picture the elementary school bully as being particularly popular, but he certainly gets deference from the other students. I think of the popular kids in school as being genuinely likeable even if they didn't take a stand against bullies.

I am fortunate enough that I was too young to get sentenced when I snapped, and that I somehow managed to not get badly hurt in that fight. On the other hand, sending those twats to the scool nurse's office and just laughing at their bruises the day after... Worth it! I still smile when I see my own nose in the mirror.

Mind you, teachers are often powerless in many such situations. They can and should follow whatever procedures they have, but the main problems are the toothless anti-bullying policies and those are usually set though some vague government policy rather than schools themselves.

If you don't read what you comment on, then you miss out on the things you then ask about. It makes anyone look stupid.

The sources on how torture works, were referenced. The authors are well established in their fields, its old material that has not been refuted in any way and is backed by first-hand accounts in the case studies (1950s).

The structural elements they cover are well discussed. These elements are also present in material pushed at the recommendation by the national Teachers Union in the past (at several points). This included, iirc, the Roots movie controversy and this revisionist fictional film being portrayed as historical to push a false narrative.

Teachers aren't generally malign, but bureacracies can be (NEA almost without a doubt imo). The teachers simply did what they were trained to do without knowing what they were trained to do. A potential example of the banality of evil with regards to complacency and sloth.

You may not like it, and not want to see it, and not want to believe it. Nonetheless, it is clearly happening.

James Lindsay has published quite a lot of rationally backed literature on Woke-ism, and its relation to Marxism/Maoism, and how its a cult. He has several publications, and a youtube channel if you are so inclined.

Regardless of what you happen to call a thing, you can describe a thing based on its elemental component or characteristics. Rationally this process is called characterization, and when you find the same elements, and the same outcomes, that suggests a thing that goes by another name (deceitfully to obscure), is the same thing functionally.

When you see the same structures used in Maoist prison camps in the 50s being used in education, the question shouldn't be is this happening because the characteristics match. It should be who chose to do this and why, and is it more important to protect them over your own children. These all have pretty simple straightforward answers.

The framework of reasoning being taught, is anything but, and follows circular paths that travel down a spiral of madness, and subjectivity without proper definition; in classic hegelian structure to abuse the contrast principle.

This is seen most recently in people who have contracted the mind virus, Woke-ism. When you adopt this 'critical consciousness', as they call it you blind yourself to the reality of things, and its a self-inflicted violation of your self. The things they do and say often are borderline delusional or insanely irrational, and not based in reality.

Marxist derivatives has not been about seizing collective ownership for quite some time, its been about interference, demoralization, and destabilization. They seized production by seizing the money, and are doing so through debasement as Lenin said in Keynes quote.

The currency allows control of the means of production as the root of all trade (exchange), and this has been seized already back in the 70s, by central planning bankers, and the ECP driven by money printing will be taking hold in a few short years once third stage ponzi is publicly visible. In other words, debt growth > GDP.

This sieving action of resources into fewer and fewer hands through debt is already driving legitimate producing businesses out of business (bankruptcy), or towards mergers, where they close shop which are funded by a money printer. The money printer swallows everything.

All debt issues with 0% fractional reserve is private money printing. This occurred in 2020 silently at the start of the pandemic. They replaced fractional reserve with an opaque capital reserve system (Basel III), which itself is based on fiat valuations that the banks loaning the money/printing the money decide. Carl Menger thoroughly proved how value is subjective. These structures neglect the simple fact that there are dynamics at work that determine value, so the associated banks will be fine until they suddenly aren't, without notice, or predictability (chaos).

Once concentrated, then everything can be seized and nationalized silently with cutout companies backed by the money printer, but in the process production grinds to a halt, shortage ensures, and stops and all value is lost since the store of value as a property of currency fails.

Order wanes, famine, slavery, and death, as occurs in every non-market socialist state to date; only this time it will be a global event and not an isolated nation event. That is the problem with parasites. Sometimes they kill the host, and by extension kill themselves.

> Research paper analyzing and defending the Black Panthers in high school.

Well I guess it would depend on what you wrote. The simple fact of the matter is, the dynamics of a successful protest or movement depend on largely two things.

The responsiveness of policymakers to listen and correct issues, and the inherent threat of violence or imposed cost.

If policy-makers fail to do their job by being unresponsive when their job is serving their constituency, violence holds them to account when the abuse is egregious enough. This once happened back in 1776, with colonists who were not considered british citizens or entitled to such protections without representation.

The politician's know this in theory too because they had to read the books covering these topics. Many of which are central to constitutional law, or social contract theory (Leviathan, Locke, Kant, Rosseau).

Absent the first, no non-violent movement can succeed in making change. You need appropriate political and judicial structures that are responsive to conflicts so they can be resolved non-violently. If they are not responsive (regardless of reason), the sole purpose of law fails, that purpose is non-violent conflict resolution equally under the law.

This used to be the courts, but they too have degraded to the point where if you don't have the money upfront to hire a lawyer, you don't have a seat at the table. A single civil suit today, even a slam dunk one, costs about a 50k retainer, from the lawyers I've spoken with. That's about the average median annual income for most people unspent (on things like food, necessities etc).

A rule of law requires certain elements, if you examine the law today and the associated costs, its largely only available to the select few with money. The 5 or so components have failed enough times to claim several decade long trends.

There is a psychological consistency pitfall in writing about things you don't care about because words alter your perception even if you don't believe it in the moment, the more often you write something the more it impacts you. They did this in the Korean Conflict to PoWs. It generally started with a choice; hard labor, or write an essay with the following prompt, "Why is the US not the best country in the world", to "Why does communism work better than capitalism", and then its read over a loudspeaker and celebrated among the captors, and prisoners.

Its subtle bias, but effective, proven, and documented.

If people can't organize and react to the reality of things being done to them, they implicitly are agreeing to their own destructive end, for themselves and anyone else they happen to manage to carry along with them.

You mistake this being political, and I did not assign these behaviors. These groups have done these acts. Its replete in the histories.

The acts have been littered throughout the historical record repeatedly and regularly starting with Marx and Engels taking from the Jesuits many of the practices that got the Jesuits expelled, and moving forward in time, the actions done by a majority of these people calling themselves such by various names, reflect what you call 'assigned'. They don't self-police and ignore destructive acts, if anything, these people's own actions assigned these to their movement.

I make a point of saying this too, because they change their group names to suit their groups purposes and to obscure their origins; misleadingly in a deceitful way, regularly. They do not want to be tied down by the same repeated failures that are associated with past groups. When you do the same exact things, and expect different results, this is a definition of insanity.

Marxists to Fabians to Bolsheviks, to Maoist, Communist, to Social Democracy, to Social Justice, to Wokeism, and I'm skipping quite a bit here.

There's been roughly a new name every 5-10 years going back to the 1920s, for the same Marxist-based doctrine that fails core components needed for rational objectivity. Failing such it shows the delusion, and fanaticism of those supporting it.

I would have nothing against these belief systems if they were consistent and rational, and in fact there would be no issues if that was met.

All they would have to do is conform to the basic principles inherent in rationalism, that is objective definition, unique meaning in language (no ambiguity of definition), Descartes Rules of Method, and logic. No improper use of the abuse of the contrast principle (hegel).

In other words, falsehoods get discarded.

They do not do this, and that is the core problem. They seek to unify through deceit and omission, that some of them, themselves, believe quite fallaciously, and by using language with multiple contradictory meanings, so no proper context can be made (newspeak). They use coercive methods to induct, following Cult structure as well. Seeming good at a cursory level, while sewing the seeds for evil through delusion, hallucination, and fallacy. These people also almost never happy.

Many leftist movements over the past hundred or so years seek to blur the line between politics, ideology, and economics, and state. This provides them cover to make unprovable false claims and create a power platform. You have part of the group which decries the abuses, while you have the other part pretending to be another group while inducing the same such abuses. Its about control of the resources, not ownership.

Its also beneficial to them to falsely call it political since politics is protected in open societies as is ideology, but this isn't religion, nor should any so called religion/ideology based in delusion or fallacy be protected or supported.

The important difference between real politics and this is in discerning rationally whether that type of ideology is a death cult, whose actions will result in unchecked destruction.

Mises wrote thoroughly about the 6 or so intractable problems of economics under such systems (by structure) because even back then they changed their names regularly (in the 1930s-1950s).

These movements we are talking about seek to make irrational dogma seeking power and control, they make broad nice sounding claims, while setting the stage for indirect but destructive outcomes. This has been demonstrated multiple times in their own policy and publications.

The Russian famine in 1921 for example, or the famines caused by Mao's Cultural Revolution, Maoist Re-education Camps (for the children), the massacres of Hue, Tienanmen Square, political dissident prisoners in Hong Kong, the ongoing acts of terrorism sponsored by the Stasi/KGB, the list goes on for miles.

They of course falsely claim its to make a better future, to get people to cede power to them, but the dynamics and the reality do not match up, and most don't resolve indirectly reference things that show it to be an unobtainable pipe dream, where the real outcome is destruction.

Eventually reality re-asserts when survival is on the line, and failing survival large numbers perish. Production may be continued through slavery, but overall eventually it shows itself to be a death cult.

If you've read any of the material published by the prominent people in these movements, you would see them talking about this, albeit in doublespeak to make it not sound as bad. They never question the viability of their premises.

Now that is frightening.

When you have a movement who abandons rational principles seeking a false utopia while in action only going for short term personal gain, this is destructive. People eventually die when this is unchecked.

Obviously, evil acts are any act that does not result in long term beneficial growth of self or others, and evil people are willfully blind to the consequence of their evil acts.

I'm well aware that there is no monopoly, I never claimed otherwise, but there are clusters or disease vectors where evil seeks to subvert from within until it can show its true face through action.

A group predominantly containing such is important to call out.

The Nazi's were evil, but they started off as the National Socialist German Workers' Party.

The Fabian's had similar origins, resulting in the economic collapse of the UK. They shared tactics, method, and history.

Bolsheviks had similar origins. Maoists had similar origins.

While they all claim to be new and independent groups, their structures show they've adopted core aspects of false or destructive ideology originally derived from Marxism in whole or part.

Political movements with core practices based in false ideology and method, resolving to destruction, are not valid political movements and do not deserve protection.

If you read nothing else, read this, it speaks unpleasant truth. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3263007/

My mum never punched me in my face, followed me around the playground trying to put dog shit in my backpack, steal my books and piss on them or make rumours about me to ensure I was ostracised by the other children. All the while the adults were helpless and continually told me to be a man- and worse, the adults leaning in on it being my problem. A true hopeless feeling.

You will never know how much I can despise you for your presumption that my home-life could possibly be correlated with my school life.

“by definition”. Honestly, go fuck yourself.

There must be some bad apples but mostly they are focused on their sport and the team and don't have time or energy to make trouble, and if they do make trouble, they are off the team.

The time some people attacked me at my dorm I ducked into the room of the captain of the rugby team and that was the last time they came to my dorm. The captain of the football team at my high school was popular because he treated everybody well, I'd say the same about kids who were stars in youth soccer. In fact, even though I didn't feel terribly engaged with it at the time, youth soccer is a precious memory to me because it was one place where I was never mistreated (a group photo shows me standing next to the coach who probably gave me just a little extra attention because of my neurodivergence.)

So no, I (and clearly most of the voters) heartily rejected the new tax proposal. Fiscal discipline before any more or new taxes.

Also: There is no reasonable, commonly understandable way a new roof costs several million dollars. Forget where the money could come from, the demand itself is questionable. As a taxpayer I want to see the school's entire fiscal records, including data that might not be public, if they want that kind of money for what should be a regular maintenance job.

Do you really not see how that's a bad outcome?

Do you not see that removing the funding from the regular public schools to go to teach that nonsense will lead to worse outcomes for those kids who can't leave those regular public schools?

Sure, maybe some students will potentially have some better outcomes if they manage to go to a good private charter school with their voucher that happens to be a decent one. For everyone else it's a worse outcome, unless you think it's a good thing to teach every animal alive today are direct descendants of the ark that was just a few thousand years ago.

Also, kiss special education funding goodbye. It won't be profitable to handle these students. They'll be trapped in those even more underfunded public schools. Hooray, great outcomes!

Most families I know who currently home school do so so to avoid vaccine requirements because germ theory/biology is a lie or because they're worried their kids will be exposed to the idea of the fossil record or that gay people exist in the world or put thoughts like dinosaurs died before humans into kids heads.

You're delusional if you think of these aren't major homeschooling points in the US. Willingly holding your nose to ignore the extreme stench of the anti-intellectualism the rest of the movement massively embodies.

This will be the outcome in an extreme majority of school districts. If anything, this recent election shows fundies vote. To them it's even more than life or death, it's eternal death to miss voting.

That's certainly an indictment.

As compared to what again? Remind me how good government has been doing.

I thought they were just teaching the sounds of the Quran. Like the Pakistani kids don't know any Arabic, and they don't learn to read or understand Arabic. They just memorize and recite the Arabic sounds of the Quran that they've been taught.

The claims around religious education are one of the biggest remaining examples of socially acceptable bigotry.

Why on earth would democracy (or any other form of shared power) be a rational choice for you, from an economic standpoint, if you already are wealthy enough to neuter it to the point where nearly all profits and decision-making authority are allocated to you?

Dictatorship is the ultimate in rational decision-making for a rational self-interested actor. Philanthropy and benevolence are not rational for the wealthy and powerful.

Income inequality and regulatory capture are features of the free market, not bugs. They are baked in by design.

Most countries in the world "patch" those bugs by regulation that moves them away from being pure "free market" economies. Antitrust regulation is a well-known example of this.

Not my intention, but I was diagnosed as a kid when over-diagnosing did seem to be a trend, and I've become skeptical in these times of self IDing.

When I mentioned over-diagnosing it was more referring to the 90s, but I think a lot of adults who were diagnosed then may have been misdiagnosed and never checked.

I don't doubt the research, it's more I doubt how many diagnoses were accurate.

I was diagnosed with ADD as well, so I'm not being entrely dismissive. In this age of self ID I think there can be reason to be.

> All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.

If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?

> "Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't.

Not my intention, I should have said unique or significantly different in the contexts you mentioned or something.

I say it feels tailor-made for ADHD because it feels almost "gamified". It's addictive to see how many classes you can knock out in a week, and you can work at whatever pace you'd like.

Part of the reason I always did poorly in school is that I didn't like how slow everything went, but with WGU I can go whatever pace I want, and the faster I go, the more money I save. Since I'm an extremely impatient person, the fact that I was able to quickly go through the material while only having to focus on one course at a time was kind of game-changing to me.

I already had a decade of software engineering experience when I did WGU, so when I did the Computer Science degree on there I finished the entirety of it (having to start from scratch) in six months, for a grand total cost of around ~$4600.

WGU is hardly the fanciest school, but it's good enough, inexpensive, and most importantly it is fully accredited. If you always struggled with traditional universities, I recommend giving it a look.

See here's the thing. Not they don't. They forfeit that right by being violent and disruptive.

They may have a right to an education, but they need to be at an alternative school with teachers equipped to handle their behavior and classmates who are in similar situations. If they’re going to ruin their classes for their classmates, those classmates shouldn’t be innocent, well-behaved students.

Are you sure administrators care? I live in Oakland, where some of the public schools have absolutely abysmal (academic) statistics. I haven't checked the expulsion statistics. I'm not sure anyone cares.

Are there actionable consequences if these numbers get too high? If they're merely published, as a parent, I would see high numbers as a positive signal if anything...

This is where I wholeheartedly disagree with you. Education is not a right if you can't comply with simple rules. I'd also like to see where you're correlating "violent and disruptive" with a "child in crisis". I'm not saying it's not there, but I am saying I don't believe those two components are exclusive.

These games of "what if" and "what is" must be fun for some people - because they seem to be played quite often. Rules are rules, they can be cut and dry - even in this case. The excuses are played out, the fallback on so many "disorders" is rampant. Either society is essentially fucked, or people are abusing the exceptions. I do agree, there should be some exceptions, but those should be few and far between to avoid slipping through the cracks.

Finally, the implication that a teacher "has to" give a shit has got to be the worst idea Americans have embraced. No, they don't. If my kid was asshole in school - I would handle the situation and apologize. Parents who go at districts for not "giving a shit" about their kid when their kid has been taught there are no repercussions by their parents don't have a right to anything in my opinion.

When I judge an educational institution I could not care less why some child being significantly disruptive is tolerated, even slightly. That institution simply becomes a non starter for a place I might send my children.

Of course parents who don't care about such things, or don't have the luxury of being able to choose, would accept such things. As would those who themselves have 'problem children.' Now think about what this does to the quality of that institution over time.

Basically just another form of indoctrination. Children are not taught science so much as science appreciation.

Chances are she is less "scientifically ignorant" than many people around here, myself included.

Just like my sister's, yours is a specific case. It's sad that they didn't teach you Creation in a way that wouldn't cancel out Science, as Science itself is something profoundly Christian as well.

"O, Almighty God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee!..." - Johannes Kepler

Such religious people like Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, René Descartes, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître?

Not accepting it leads to a profoundly WRONG worldview that bleeds into everyday life in many ways.

Which is utter horse shit, but it’s where we are today.

The result is that many schools don’t really track teacher performance, and as you indicate you can get wild inconsistencies.

The best parents can do (other than leaving) is to aggressively direct kids into the better teachers’ classrooms. We see that all the time - one class has kids who’s parents are “in the know” and gets the good teacher, the other class is where the kids get dumped who’s parents don’t complain. The district knows who is bad and who is not, but is afraid to anger the union, so anything short of actual violence by a teacher against a student won’t have any consequences.

Our school district local enrollment as a result has declined from around 900 kids to just 650 in just a few years as a result. The kids left are those too poor to go private or home school, those not lucky or connected enough to go to a “choice” school, and a small number of die hard loyalists reliving their glory days through their kids at the same school they went to.

Anyway, he didn't give a crap about teaching to the curriculum and he taught us how to think critically and read between the lines of history.

My best friend in college was transsexual, knew who she was in childhood, couldn't be talked in or out of it. She was kicked out of the Air Force Academy which was my gain but our nation's loss. I was proud of my country when I heard this policy changed, not just for the individuals but because the US struggles to attract officers to match the quality of our enlisted warfighters.

I've cross-dressed at times (high heels, fishnets, all that) such as for Halloween and I also know the undercurrents of violence you can feel from ignorant people. Sometimes I bum around the house wearing a long skirt.

I was inclined to be supportive of the modern transgender movement when I first heard about it and when my exposure was through the media. It is their own speech that has alienated me from them.

Once I met people affected and after I joined Mastodon where I've had to add rules to completely block out their continuous hateful spew which frequently gets reposted by people who should know better. I'd be glad to hear "I'm so happy I found a new way to put on makeup that makes me feel like myself" or "I'm really inspired by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos" or "Thank Lynn Conway for that phone in your pocket".

I can't deal with large volumes of negativity from strangers and on leftie corners on the web people from that community are the worst. [1] Whether or not they should exist is beyond my pay grade but I don't want them in my feed at all.

For that matter I feel less safe and not more safe expressing non-conformant gender characteristics because: (1) so many people have gotten inflamed, and (2) I don't buy into the politics.

[1] I just plain couldn't stand the MAGA nuts on Twitter, never mind all the equally hateful people who spew hate against transgender people (who I suspect want people to spew hate at them to justify their world view as much as Benjamin Netanyahu likes Palestinian attacks that justify his world view.)

Yes and no.

You are correct that almost no one is learning full CRT legal theory in K-12.

That said, CRT principles have expanded beyond legal studies, and they have certainly made their way into classrooms. Here is an example of an article that makes a case for it:

https://www.uclalawreview.org/yes-critical-race-theory-shoul...

I’m not sure if you know many education academics, but I assure you that CRT and derivatives thereof have been some low-hanging fruit in education research for over two decades (i.e., relatively easy to get published).

This included "Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project." [1]

Which is pretty wild, because that's a great summary of everything conservatives were objecting to in social studies classes, and provides a good wording for Christopher Rufo's redefinition of CRT.

However, I agree with you that this was a very recent redefinition of the term Critical Race Theory: As far as I can tell, the application of legal scholarship's CRT to education scholarship in the late 1990s was focused on the Critical analysis of teaching outcomes [2, 3, 4], especially racial discrimination in school districts. This seems to have been focused on administrative things rather than course content. There was a subsequent movement around 2016 to bring "Critical Race Praxis" into school districts, which again seems to be focused on removing inequities from school administration and teaching counter-narratives to "K-12 leaders". So I think that this is where conservatives found the term and decided to repurpose it to label the antiracist content which was being incorporated into social studies courses.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210705234008/https://ra.nea.or...

[2] https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/edcast/22/02/state-critica...

[3] https://thrive.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/Just%20what%2...

[4] https://ed.fullerton.edu/lift/_resources/pdfs/multicultural_...

[5] https://www.infoagepub.com/products/Envisioning-a-Critical-R...

You might want to do some looking into the "invention of childhood"; what we understand as "children, teenagers, young adults, adults" is a fairly modern way to look at "stages of development". In the distant past, children participated far more comfortably and fluently in adult society than they do today, when they're sequestered away.

It is very difficult to see any representations of this in the US, where most children are in school, so I'll point to examples in fiction: fictional novels or movies where the protagonist is taken confidently through an unfamiliar city by a child who seems to know every location, has a sleeping place, weapons, a method of finding money, and a network of friends. In these works of fiction, the child is almost always a semi-homeless "urchin"; but this is mostly because modern writers can't conceive of a child that capable without also assuming that the child's parents must not be involved in their life, because modern people equate "parenting and raising children" with "making sure children only ever do child-appropriate things".

My question to you: what do you think it would look like if two loving, attentive parents tried to raise a kid with the confidence and skills of those fictional street children, but also actually fed them and gave them a place to live?

It is very likely that the answer to that question is far closer to the way that children used to behave and live than the way that children are today.

I also recommend looking at old tests and study material (pre-1900, ideally pre-1800) for young children. Children can read, figure, write, and remember at a level far superior than they're assumed to be able to today, and that goes for adult socialization as well.

It also skews the perspectives of homeschool parents into thinking "this is the best system, why doesn't everybody do it?" The answer is, of course, to take the good aspects of each system and make the public school system more viable again, but there are too many entrenched interests on both sides for this to be easy.

That being said, there are and were definitely limits to what public schools can do. They are resource strapped, procedurally constrained, often fighting their own political bureaucratic battles within the school districts, and even within the academic departments.

We ended up leaving the public school for those reasons, and could not be happier.

My observation was: public schools have become much like enterprises, and private schools tend to be more like startups. The public school has so much inertia and tends to have "guardrails" and policies to keep even bad administrations functioning, but at the cost of exceptionalism and performance. Private schools have less of this, and more direct accountability.

You absolutely can have a private school that doesn't educate better than a public school, but I'd argue at least one of two things happen: 1) the school fails to attract student, and closes.. or 2) the school focus shifts away from education to other priorities (e.g., social status, culture, or sports), relegating academics to a secondary role.

It would depend on what you're asking for. It depends on the school district/state, but anything that gets close to the curriculum isn't easy or simple to change.

For example, one of my kids who went to public school had to use this program (I forget the name) for algebra that the school paid for. You used a weird toolbar to input your equations that appeared to be some monstrous Javascript nightmare. It more or less worked, but it wasn't great. To my mind it would have been simpler to teach them LaTeX or something, but whatever.

As a parent, you can't go in and say "why don't you just let them write the answers on paper like everybody else did until 9 minutes ago?" The teachers loved this program, because it did all the teacher work for them. The school administration already paid for it, plus paying for the computers for the kids to use, plus the IT overhead to keep the computers running.

That's a fundamental structural problem that no parent can surmount. "What do you mean use a screwdriver? We paid for all these hammers!"

The incentives that drive public education are often orthogonal to actually teaching the public. It's not a mystery, any trough where money collects will get snouts rooting for some of it. The parents don't have much say in how all this money must be spent because they don't have any say about the money at all, other than moving to a different district or writing off what they pay in property taxes and paying again to do something else.

However I do agree that spending funds in ways that help a public school compete with private and/or homeschooling is a worthy goal. That means you need:

1. more teachers per student in the school. (More admin doesn't solve this. You need smaller class sizes). You'll never be able to afford the one-on-one ratio a homeschool family can achieve but you can certainly close the gap.

2. more focus on actually proven approaches to the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. (phonics, essay writing, literature analysis, and "old math") A lot of pseudo science has entered the class room over that last few decades.

3. fostering more parental involvement in their child's education. This is extremely difficult to improve but has the highest impact. One of the reasons homeschooling on average does better is because the parents are self selected for involvement.

4. holding kids to real standards and having consequences for not meeting those standards. Tricky to do politically but essential for kids to learn both social skills and academic skills.

And, as you say, they are regulated by the government but so is everyone and everything else. In my view, its appropriate to describe public schools as part of "the government" but I also respect the GP's view that they're independent enough to be describe as not "the government".

That said, overall I was pretty happy with history class.

This reads a bit more like spinning a noble savages tale rather than the much more obvious explanation being that the founders were building on the proven greco-roman models and various Enlightmentment figures - as they directly state in a number of federalist papers.

The single greatest influence on American society is what was going on in Britain in the mid 17th century and Americans learn absolutely nothing about it in school. It’s like writing a history or MacOS X that doesn’t mention NeXT.

That would be a synergy of ideas primarily found in Polybius, Montesquieu, and the extant British constitution.

Not to discount the value of teaching about the political system of the Iroquois -- that's an interesting a valid topic to cover in school -- but it's not appropriate to attempt to link it to the US Constitution in a way that's wholly speculative and tenuous, and do so at the expense of properly teaching about the actual ideas that factored into the development of the constitution.