Slashdot Mirror
Grade School And High School, School Free
shadowlight1 writes: "This CNet article discusses a complete virtual classroom environment under development over the 'net. It would be especially geared towards the developmentally disabled." The venture this story focuses on is called K12 -- and it's for profit. (You may be surprized by it's spokesman / backer here.) The story also touches on other online education efforts, though, some of which blend well with what homeschoolers have been doing for many years.
.. They'll just go about it a different way:
iCQ UH-OH Sound "Hey, geek, PayPal me your lunch money, or I'll packet your webserver back to the stone age!"
------------
CitizenC
Man, without shitty highschool experiences, where would the crop of angsty goth and industrial musicians be?!? In twenty years we'd have nothing but happy shiny crappy whiny oops-I-fucked-up-again music from the mutant prozac-gobbling offspring of Britany Spears and NSuck.
Like Trent Reznor said, "I could go to therapy but it might ruin my musical career." :^)
--
News for Geeks in Austin, TX
Roblimo? Wouldn't a group of these students make a terrific Slashdot interview? I'd love to hear how well this does and doesn't work and what tech they'd need to make it more usable. Even if they're not pudgy or strange.
By the way, the comment about the risk of increased paste eating made my laugh so hard an Altoid flew into my sinus. Ouch.
As for the rest of your assertions, you provide no evidence to support any of them. Let us take them in order.
First, I must say, I resent your implication that parents that are not opposed to the teaching of sex education and evolution, etc are not concerned about their children's education and that they are party to "indoctrination".
Second, I don't know about your child's school district, but my child's district has written policies on both the teaching of/about religion and controversial subjects -- in the unlikely event there was something I objected to my child being taught I would know how to handle the situation -- have you looked into your district's policies? If not, who are you to be calling me unconcerned?
As laywers like to say "assumes facts not in evidence" -- where is your evidence that it needs saving (and from what)?
Again, a statement without proof. In fact, most reserach shows that, for example, "the average private school student has large advantages in terms of family income and parental education" and "the composite measures of reading, mathematics and general knowledge do not show advantages from attending any of the three broad types of non-public kindergarten" (this study, http://www.nd.edu/~iei/hoffer.pdf, was of kindergarteners).
The number 1 determinate for school success is parental involvement -- and private schools have much fewer "low involvement parents" (obviously, they went to the trouble of enrolling their children in private school).
Personally, I think most people would rather have the Board of Directors of their school answerable to the community rather than the stockholders.
In addition to being laughable on its face, this statement neglects that the federal government has a quite small impact on public education, most of the control is at the local school board level (with varying levels of interference from the state governments).
I know that our son's public school is anything but a 'festering cesspool'. I know this largely because I (and my wife) are regular volunteers in the classroom. I also know this because the district routine has average scores around the 90%ile on national and state standardized assesments.
But, hey, feel free to ignore the facts if they don't fit into your frame outlook way of life and everything -- after all, I'm just another commie (school board member).
Shut up, be happy. The conveniences you demanded are now mandatory. -- Jello Biafra
Geez. From all the belly-aching here, you'd think that selling education was a crime against humanity.
Haven't any of you people ever taken karate lessons, ballet lessons, music lessons, etc as kids? Haven't you attended computer camp or a G&T summer school? Haven't you ever learned a new language at an intensive language school or took (or worked at!) a test prep service?
If it's OK for me to hang out my shingle and take piano students at $30/half-hour, why on earth should it not be OK to run an entire school which charges per semester? Sheesh.
-*- Any technology indistinguishable from magic is insufficiently advanced -*-
But what is wrong with secular humanism? People can worship or not worship whatever they like in their religious communities, but to complain that kids aren't being properly indoctrinated into one religious tradition or another in the public educational system is a little hypocritical. I don't buy the argument that secular education destroys or diminishes the value of religious convictions. I would prefer to see religion taught at home and in the community, not in state-funded institutions.
My main problem with your position though, is that you think interacting with "peers" is a purely positive thing. I would argue that the artificial way we stratify peer groups damages society: how can kids identify with the wider social context when the only culture they know comes from what is popular within their own age group (+/- one year)? What is wrong with kids socializing with younger and older humans, and hearing the stories of a wider group? I think a lot of youth culture's shallowness has to do with the lack of any foundation: each generation leaves nothing behind, because they have no ties to the generation before or after them. The "generation gap" is precisely that: a chasm between humans based solely on when they were born, seperating them from the experiences of others who may have similar interests, values, and problems and forcing them to surrender to the elitist power structures that function even in the lower grades. (being a reject from the system, I have seen first hand what happens when you don't "fit in"... and the former bullies are always the first to complain "What are they whining about? EVERYONE gets teased, it's no big deal.")
I would think geeks in particular can see how damaging this is: do you think that a 12 year old, a 16 year old, and a 20 year old are ever going to be able to make a connection and interact in a positive way? No, because we actively discourage children from interacting with other age groups (both younger and older) for fear of the things that we were too afraid to educate them about in the first place (ie: sex, drugs, crime, etc.). I think kids have a lot to contribute to society, but we force them to take a passive role, denying them a voice in the media and society in general.
Of course, all this makes them much easier to market to, to control and pacify via the culture of conspicuous consumption, and we even play them against their parents, teachers, and other authority figures to "win them over" to our commercial messages. You should be more concerned about the culture of alienation that our school systems are reinforcing than what kids are (or are not) being taught in class, or what they're being taught at home.
No I'm not bashing this idea. It may be a God-send for some of the slower kids but there has to be a program for the extreme opposite.
I was homeschooled all through junior high and highschool, and knew a lot of other homeschoolers (through attending various meetings or homeschool sports leagues) - I noticed very little in the way of personality defects in the parents as whole.
As others have said, generally homeschooling parents either want an education based more in religion, or they are of the "unschooling" variety which just want kids to learn at thier own pace (which can be faster than public school in some/all areas, and slower in the others). My parents were the latter group - For me, that meant a lot of time to be able to pursue computers as a hobby (note that does NOT mean to the exclusion of studying art or literature or other areas of science!).
Homeschooling can be as much or as little about peer interaction as you like. The nice thing about homeschooling is that generally Homeschoolers get a much broader range of peer interaction from all age groups, and so are better equipped to deal with real life and larger groups of people than public school students. Of course, that's just my observation.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
The fish or cut bait is: Is he doing this out of some moral obligation or is this the kind of drive which could be picked up by, say, George W. Bush as a sterling example of how education ought to be done and jammed down everyone's throats.
It's worth reading what the reviewer had to say on Amazon, regarding The Educated Child and Bennett, et al's conservative views.
--
+++ Out Of Cheese Error +++
+++ MELON MELON MELON +++
A feeling of having made the same mistake before: Deja Foobar
Ok, so it shall be said; booooooo! Why must everyone insist on sticking computer screens in front of little kids all the fucking time? Little kids ought to be having books read to them (maybe teaching them to fucking read while you're at it) and do some artwork their moms can stick on the fridge. Having a terminal in front of them is only going to limit their creativity more than being force fed Power Rangers and Card Captors. Hey great and wonderful if you want to let kids play games on a computer but make it a reward for something rather than a curriculum. Legos, blank sheets of newsprint paper, and crayons are going to get their underdeveloped neurons moving. Oh yeah, I realize this is for home schooling purposes. A learning environment is a fucking learning environment. If it is a garage or classroom, it is still going to follow the same ideology. Computers and technology in general should be an additional medium of information exchange not the focus of the learning or the only medium you're going to convey information with. Stop treating disabled kids like some super special extraordinary case. If someone needs a little extra help in any context be it a learning disability or blindness help them where they need it but keep them in the mainstream; no one is being done a bit of good by being segregated.
I'm a loner Dottie, a Rebel.