My Parents Were Home-Schooling Anarchists (2011)
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My gripe with the education system is that early on, there's too much focus on learning things that people are going to learn regardless. If your kid learns the alphabet at 4 or at 8, what's the difference? Can anyone not learn how to read a newspaper by the time they leave school?
Later on, when the kids get to the teenage years, they are able to learn a great deal of stuff. But then nobody is really teaching them when they can learn. There's a whole load of scientific stuff that's quite interesting that ends up getting crammed into a few years of high school, and crammed in a way that turns kids off. And culture classes (literature, history) are so horrific some people never pick up another book.
There's also not enough emphasis on motivation. The emphasis is on passing tests. If you're motivated, you can learn anything. You'll even spend your own time and money learning. My guess is the home schoolers have figured this out and that's why they're not that far behind ordinary schools.
It's a huge difference. As soon as a kid can read, they can learn in a way that isn't just you telling them stuff. They can self-direct their learning, read books about stuff, go online and devour Wikipedia, etc. It's not just "hey, can anyone not read a newspaper by the time they leave school?", it's "how soon does this kid have the tool to satisfy their natural curiosity about things that require more than someone telling them about it?" which establishes their relationship with learning itself, with knowing how to learn.
>it's "how soon does this kid have the tool to satisfy their natural curiosity about things that require more than someone telling them about it?"
I don't think that's true at all, an average 4-7 year old who can read, cannot read to a level where they can learn topics complex enough that they "require more than someone telling them about it."
A kid who learns to read at 7 will catch up to the kid who learned at 4, so that by the time they are ready to teach themselves on their own through reading, there won't be a difference.
https://deyproject.files.wordpress.com/2015/01/readinginkind...
Wait. What?
Who the hell thinks that making kids stop liking to read is a thing that should happen?
(Personally I was reading by the time I was four without my parents doing anything more than reading to me on a regular basis, and maybe setting a good model by reading a lot themselves.)
I started school at age 7. There was no difference what so ever between me and other kids by high school.
Similarly, there's a lot of math that you can touch before you are entirely certain of the lower level stuff.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dual-route_hypothesis_to_readi...
I'm pretty sure I learned to read mostly this way, with a big assist from having adults read aloud to me and so memorizing particular stories and then recognizing the appearance of the written words within those stories. Learning about all the letters might have come afterward, and helped me to understand why words are spelled as they are, and also to acquire the "non-lexical route" of systematically sounding out words I didn't know.
Reading acquisition is a pretty complicated process, and I think if we're not teachers or psychologists we might forget that there are so many sub-parts in this process, and that they might also happen in a different order for different children.
I'm not an expert on any of these things, mind you. Just that I learnt to speak and read my home-tongue without ever being able to memorize its alphabet. Now that I think about it, I still can't recite it, yet I speak/write the language fluently.
My problem with education is that there is no 'one-size-fits-all' policy. Some kids fail hard in a structured system that puts emphasis on passing tests, other thrive in it but fail in a less structured 'find-your-own-motivation' system. Like a pendulum we just keep swinging back and forth and realize we keep missing a portion of the kids. I don't know how you fix it because it's expensive to tailor education to a kid. I guess it's all up to the parents.
They went to kindergarten to learn how to listen to people other than their parents and make friends. My social daughter came home for 6 months, then went right back to public school. My introverted and shy son came home for 2 years, and is going back to school this coming year because we're not doing well at teaching him... we see our failures there, and don't want to exaggerate them any more. Plus, he wants more friends, too. We expect they will probably all skip jr. high, as they will be old enough to learn on their own, and the social scene is just painful at the age, and then I'll leave it to them if they want to do the high school experience, or just get a GED and move on to other adventures in their teens.
There also are online teacher-led schools in most states now. Both private and public There are home schooling groups that meet together so each parent can teach a groups of kids in their areas of expertise. There are online curriculum you can purchase, and hard copy curriculum.
On short, there are choices. Many, many choices.
As parents, we need to help our children find the path that is right for each one of them, and it is a more complex decision than a one-time choice to either home school or attend the public schools. As in most things, a middle ground is often a better, if more complex, answer.
This is incredibly valuable, I think. The option to leave a toxic environment.
My best years in public education were the year I broke my knees and was deemed unfit to attend class for the second half of the year - necessitating a three day a week visit from my science teacher to give me an hour of tutelage. Not being around my insanely hostile 8th grade peers got me a semester of straight As and I got the highest score in the class on the algebra one final without even being there.
The other best year was 12th grade, when I took 4 AP courses and study halls. I'd be with good instructors, small class sizes, and peers who were as motivated to succeed as I was. Even honors programs are the domains of parents shoving their kids into the classes through brute force of aggravation with the principal - they just don't want to hear that their kids do not want that, they need their kids to be in honors classes. And they end up ruining those classes for any teacher that gives a damn and for the kids who are there of their own will.
The only important thing to take away is that even an 18 year old is making incredibly short sighted mistakes. If I ever have kids, they would need to consistently want to either reenter school or leave it to make such a switch of their own volition. It has to be a decision not only made over the long term but its ramifications need to be absorbed over such a term.
I would almost certainly never throw them through the public school imagination crusher, unless I had incredible faith in the school. I'd rather go bankrupt hiring private tutors and getting them peer exposure at recreation centers and extracurriculars.
It would be no panacea if most children's education were up to their parents, but it would be a marked improvement on the current USA public schools model, which is, "We teach one way and if your kid can't learn that's her or his problem." Always vote for more school choice.
Now that there is no longer a reason to operate secretly, homeschooling parents can seek out other parents with similar homeschooling objectives and cooperate. Among the first to do this were religious parents, but every year the percentage of homeschoolers who do it for religious reasons declines.
More and more parents are doing it for reasons such as wanting to give their bright kids more advanced classes than the schools are willing or able to provide (that's my own incentive), or to more effectively deal with a child's specific educational needs, or to allow a child to have a "career" (e.g., acting or sports) while still a minor.
Even those of us sending our kids to public schools benefit from this market in homeschooling options. We would be able to benefit a lot more if the "progressive" politicians employed by the teachers unions to keep the decision-making power and money they have wrested from the people from ever reverting back to parents weren't so numerous and well-funded.
Many of us, for example, would love to switch to a partial public / partial private arrangement where our kids could sign up for some of the school classes without being forced to take all or none (while paying full price either way). For example, we might choose PE, sports, and drama (for social), science (for lab facilities), and math (parents might not know it well enough) from school, but choose to do English at home, programming online, art at a local art school, and Chinese from a parents' collective. (And I would be willing to continue paying full fare for the public school while using only part of its program if the remainder were rebated, not to me, but to low-income families in the form of educational vouchers they could use outside school.)
We can do many of those things after school, but the problem is how late "after school" is each day, and how much time after school has to be wasted on useless school homework, because of the requirement that if our kids want any of the benefits the school offers, they are forced to take it all (as part of the political strategy to make opting out of any of the government-controlled system as painful and impractical as possible.) My kids' desire for the social experience of school and my desire that they get excellent educations result in a very long day for them, and I would cut out more than half of their school classes (and even more of the homework) if I were free to do so and give it to my kids as play time.
Full socialization from partial school, higher-quality education from the free market, plus more play time? Still illegal in most states.
A significant portion of parents who homeschool kids are doing it for religious reasons and teaching their children garbage.
I'm an atheist myself, so I have no interest in teaching religion, but I do have a strong interest in parents having more say than the state in what their own children are taught to believe. I'll take the marketplace of diverse ideas that parents sincerely teach to the children they love over the state's agenda for the people it intends to govern, any day. Parents, whether religious or not, should be the primary decision makers in their own children's educations.
It's not a perfect system but it's another option that works better for some students and some families.
It might make a big difference to the individual kid. One of my earliest memories is seeing how adults read words and numbers, I must have been between 4 and 5 years old. I asked my parents to show me how to do that and they replied "no, you'll learn this when you're older, this is not for you." Later in first grade, learning to read and write was no fun at all (I blame the teacher), and guess what: a good number of kids could already do it. Where would the harm have been in taking a few hours to teach me that stuff a couple of years earlier, when I first wanted to?
This anecdote is about learning things early, but overall I agree with you that learning stuff gets massively easier at a later age. I never really understood math and physics until I was in my twenties and had the opportunity to explore the subjects on my own terms.
What if the student is never "ready" though? As part of a project for a small Christian liberal arts college, I had access to anonymized data on admissions and class schedules. They accepted a great deal of homeschooled students. Can you guess what how many of them placed in remedial math classes?
Many times more than their traditionally educated counterparts. The school was not big, these catch-up classes were full of kids home schooled by well meaning parents who never thought their kids were "ready" for basic mathematics. This is a colossal failure, when you get to college without knowing basic math, entire departments are simply closed to you.
Interestingly, they often placed in line with their peers in language, with many placing highly in foreign languages as well. Maybe that says something about the priorities of the average parent of a homeschooler?
https://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/freedom-learn/201003/wh...
Math, math seems more like a side effect of our big old brains. Math can be learned, but it fades quickly. We are able to do it, but we aren't really built to do it.
Anyway, i guess i'm arguing language is hard to screw up.
It's a huge disservice to lump these students in with the others. The students that can actually do the work get held back (and I'm not talking about the high-level students, (who are usually brutally retarded in their development, unless they take matters into their own hands), this impacts the mediocre students as well).
Did you ever try comparing the way you were taught science with friends at non-steiner schools?
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Studies_of_Waldorf_education
Yes, plenty of them. During WWII when they tested recruits something like 1/3 of them lacked basic literacy. It's probably better these days, but don't assume just everyone figures it out.
I have no other way to describe the type of language I saw. Everything from no punctuation, incorrect grammar, run-on sentences, slang. Sentences that just seem to be stuck together, whether due to missing punctuation or something else I don't know. Oh, and that was when their point was valid/related.
These individuals got degrees.
No school bus, no weather radar, not necessarily even enough food. The school lunch program was founded (partly) because so many of those WWII recruits were malnourished.
I think that stat is more of a testament to how far the U.S. has come.
Imagine the damage being done to society if it really is the case that traditional schools result in meaner people.
I switched primary schools once at that age because of massive bullying (in my country switching to a different primary school is almost impossible unless you move to another school zone, so it took quite some effort). The second school was smaller and more diverse socially, and I got through the whole thing much easier.
The other contributing factor though is culture. My middle school was serving a metropolitan suburbia. Demographics were mostly white, a good amount of Hispanics, and few Asian / African kids. Parents were often overbearing and abusive through their helicoptering, Stark contrast with my high school - much more mixed culture, knock 30k off the mean income, tons more violently abused kids who take it out on their peers.
And then I moved to a literal bleach show, where in 1500 kids there were probably ~50 - 100 non-white students, and it was in a college town where the median income was around 100k. The kids were super passive aggressive to an outsider like me, but there was absolutely no violent bullying, and the insularism of the community meant I could just ignore everyone and they ignored me.
Fundamentally though, its systemically broken to stuff kids in grades like this, with the same peers, with no escape for over a decade. Bullying is barely a thing outside of school because its only in school that you cannot escape it. In the real world, you quit jobs with peer abuse, you move away from toxic neighbors, you avoid the bad neighborhoods. It isn't toughening them up because its in no way reflective of reality to have to put up with verbal and physical harassment every day without reasonable recourse.
As long as you have the money or support to quit your job, or move, or avoid the bad neighborhoods.
Do people choose to live in bad neighborhoods? Do they choose to send their children to poorly funded schools? Do they choose to work part time, minimum wage jobs?
> Bullying is barely a thing outside of school because its only in school that you cannot escape it
Or if you're a female on the internet.
Or black in the south.
Or poor.
"My granddad wanted that nobody would be poor"
Do you want everybody to be poor, human-interaction-wise?
What I suspect is happening is that the school environment mixes people of different "cultures" much more thoroughly than non-school environments, which greatly increases the possible exposure of would-be bullies and would-be bully targets.
Could you comment on how the above relates to your experience?
I think that the bullying only really ended up happening (both in and out of school) when there was no adult supervision. I'm not entirely certain, though, since I have tried to purge my memories of what happened during those times.
We found European home educators are often much more "anarchist" in the sense of this article, liberal, free-thinking, non-conforming, often of non-traditional religion / spirituality, who think the state system is too narrow, limited, and structured. In the States it's much more right-wing religious exclusionists who think the system is too liberal, unstructured, and ungodly. A very very weird difference of culture.
My mum wrote a lot about home education, here's her site with all kinds of info about getting started, details about what we did, etc: http://home-ed.info/
I loved it, and it was perfect for me. My brother loves regime and structure, so would probably have done fine in school. I'm much less academic, and do a whole mixture of jobs (acting, teaching, programming, writing, A/V, electronics, etc.) in a non-profit organisation. Almost all stuff that I learned as a kid, with the oceans of free time that I had, and my friends in school didn't. I worked in a theatre company for 3 years, and did school-work in the evenings, or when I had time. I taught myself to code.
With our kids now, my wife (non-home-educated) is a bit skeptical of her ability to home-school. Our son is still too young (he's one). I certainly wouldn't object to him going to school - providing it doesn't interfere with his education too much. :-)
Imagine if all the state money that went into your schooling were invested instead for your minimum basic income: http://slatestarcodex.com/2014/05/23/ssc-gives-a-graduation-...
No. The author resents staying out of school because it also meant staying out of more diverse and more regular social interaction. Successful social interaction requires shared values (which wasn't really the issue) and, at least to a degree, shared social experiences. If two people have hitherto had experiences that are so divergent that ego cannot understand any of the structures or references alter uses, then social interaction becomes very difficult.
Accordingly, fitting in was difficult because of their non-standard upbringing, and while the parents might not have minded that they did not quite "fit in", the children did not have a choice of their own or even the necessary experience that would have enabled them to make an informed choice in the first place.
What is described is the removal from the Zeitgeist, which becomes a problem if others simply assume a shared set of conventions and experiences or if you would like to be part of a group that is based on different premises.
That school was (at least partially) awful was merely a symptom of this underlying social schism, not a cause.
How is sitting in a room with other people, all of whom are within 12 months of your own age, with an authority figure at the front constantly telling you what to do, a "diverse" social interaction?
American schools were designed to produce factory workers who would stay on-task based on the direction of a foreman and bells ringing at certain times. That world doesn't exist any more.
Public education is certainly in need of big reforms, but I'm grateful for the diversity I was exposed to attending one. It's a big part of what keeps me grounded in the ridiculous Silicon Valley bubble.
This ought to be less of a problem now with so many more unschoolers and homeschoolers for support; I think there are better ways to address it than by imprisoning more children rather than less; and it sounds like these ones had a better childhood on the whole and turned out fine as adults.
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Also, in the olden day, people, both kids and adults, were more creative.
Wat? [citation needed]
It probably depends on who you hang out with. Granted, i wasn't there in the 70s, but there are some mighty creative individuals in my sphere of experience, both local and remote.
The kids, as adults, were quite resentful that they lacked an educational background that could've helped them.
These parents doubtless believed they were virtuous in rejecting the culture of the times, but they went quite a bit farther and were basically delusional. People like that should not homeschool.
Honestly, having spent about half my pre-college years at public schools, I would much rather be home schooled than public schooled.
The primary reason is that it seemed like public school classes were always geared towards the lowest common denominator of the class. I hardly did any work (and hardly learned anything) because we spent so much time banging on the same concepts for the benefit of the slowest people in the class. When I finally went to private school, we suddenly started targeting at least the middle of the class. I finally started learning things in school!
The secondary reason is political. Even from a young age, I was very aware of the fact that the public school system didn't treat me like a human being. I'm better at articulating why I felt that way now; it's because the public school system is alarmingly close to the prison system.
As a child, you are legally required to attend school, under threat of force (directed at your parents). Since many people can't or won't do home or private schooling, this amounts to forcing many children to attend public school. Upon arriving, you are not permitted to leave of your own free will. You are subject to the arbitrary directives of non-elected officials. You are stripped of many basic human rights on campus (in particular, the right to free speech and the right to be protected from unreasonable searches and seizures). There is a healthy judicial tradition in the USA of taking away the rights of school children. I'm sure there's a list of relevant supreme court cases around. Public schools in the US also do tons of political indoctrination, like saying the pledge of allegiance on a regular basis. Growing up in that environment was extremely deleterious to my critical thinking; by the time I was in sixth grade, I had all sorts of authoritarian leftist ideas of exactly the sort I'd been subjected to by my teachers and my schools of the last seven years.
It wasn't until I finally switched to private school, where they treated me like a human, that I realized I had been imprisoned about half the days out of every year. Finally, I was free to leave campus of my own accord. Finally, discourse, rather than blind obedience, was the norm. If private school wasn't an option, I'd much rather homeschool my children than expose them to the academic and psychological clusterfuck that is every public school I every attended.
Knowing nothing about you other than that you read and comment on this site I would assume that 1) you are above societal average intellectually and financially and 2) you associate with people who are similarly successful.
Given that you mostly know people roughly as successful as you, it shouldn't be a surprise that people you know who are home schooled are doing about as well as you are.
To directly address your point, I think of the home schooling population as fairly bimodal; there are many parents who choose homeschooling for religious reasons, and there are some (especially with gifted children) who homeschool because the standard curricula move to slow. Which is to say, crazy religious zealots are a large fraction of the homeschoolers, but not representative of the homeschooled people you and I meet.
Incidentally, I was briefly homeschooled with no impact on my academic career.
This argument is nearly uncounterable (that's not a good thing): is anyone going to respond "no I hang out with dumbass bible-thumpers all the time"?
Since we're comparing anecdotes, some homeschoolers I know might comprise another "mode": those whose local public schools are so horrible and dangerous that they cannot subject their children, whom they love, to such an environment.
I'm not sure I understand your objection here. Most people spend their time interacting with people who are similar to them. If anything, this is an argument that anecdotal evidence is quite limited in general. But that doesn't seem controversial at all!
I'm not sure i understand this correctly: you're saying that now, after having managed to un-brainwash yourself, you do not harbour leftist ideas any more? Do you consider this a good thing? (I'm clear on the authoritarian side of your story, and i agree)
Other than that, i totally agree—i experienced the public schools i went to precisely the way you describe. It's a soul-crushing experience.
Around some people, there's a belief that "doing time makes your a person"
But you know what. Regular folks avoid going to prison. Moreover, they avoid doing things leading to that outcome.
Why would you submit your child to prison-like environment? It's not like adults are routinely exposed to that kind of experience. Certainly not required for leading a productive life.
After that, social interactions have been nothing at all like what school prepared me for.
Also, not sharing a huge formative experience with the rest of the population makes it harder to empathize with them.
I am sceptical. I think that these effects are, as you say, subtle, and given how people are able to emigrate/immigrate when adults and still manage to fit in with foreign customs, etc., seems like evidence to me that it isn't all that bad.
All foreign customs are unnatural and irrational when viewed by the outsider—i experience this daily in the country where i'm currently living (been here 3 years, it still seems bizarre sometimes, even though i'm reasonably integrated with local friends and SO etc).
Anyway, perhaps i'm comparing apples to oranges :).
Don't worry, I'm not attached to any particular definition of any particular political philosophy. I'm just curious about what you're trying to say.