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Ask Slashdot: Pros and Cons of Homeschooling?
VorpalRodent writes: I went to a private school for about 6 years, then completed my education at the local public school, going on to get a couple undergraduate degrees and a postgraduate degree. My wife dropped out of high school and got her equivalency many years later. Now, she wants to homeschool our son.
There is a significant body of literature which indicates that homeschoolers outperform their traditionally schooled counterparts academically, regardless of the level of education of the parent, and she certainly cares more now that she's older. I don't like anecdotes, but I certainly haven't seen the research borne out in any of the people that I know who were homeschooled. More importantly, it seems like the only reason my wife wants to homeschool is because she doesn't want to let go.
Our son would be going into Kindergarten this coming year. I'm interested in some rational discussion on this, since it seems like the only viewpoints I've ever seen on the matter are "Better academics" vs. "Social interaction," both of which are gross oversimplifications. It doesn't help that I can't find any statistical information on post-schooling outcomes.
There is a significant body of literature which indicates that homeschoolers outperform their traditionally schooled counterparts academically, regardless of the level of education of the parent, and she certainly cares more now that she's older. I don't like anecdotes, but I certainly haven't seen the research borne out in any of the people that I know who were homeschooled. More importantly, it seems like the only reason my wife wants to homeschool is because she doesn't want to let go.
Our son would be going into Kindergarten this coming year. I'm interested in some rational discussion on this, since it seems like the only viewpoints I've ever seen on the matter are "Better academics" vs. "Social interaction," both of which are gross oversimplifications. It doesn't help that I can't find any statistical information on post-schooling outcomes.
Coddling, though still an individual option, is generally better for the parents than the children.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
and No Liberals.
We can't really answer the pros and cons without knowing what we're comparing. Do you live in the ghetto with a 95% black public school system, or the nicest rich white neighborhood in the US? The best public schools will beat homeschooling, the worst are a nightmare to be avoided at any cost.
I mean, haven't you ever met a homeschooled kid? Your kid needs to be properly socialized in a structured environment.
Pro: It has a success rate of 100%, and the achievement level is simply impossible to believe. It could even teach your son to breathe in space. But at the least, he'll grow up to be the world's greatest detective, a caped crusader, and a probably raise a few orphaned kids as well.
Con: You both will have to die after taking your son to a movie.
I have two step-children who fled their abusive father to come and live with me. Both of them were home-schooled for a time (about 12 months each). We learned a lot of powerful lessons from the first one, but even then, we faced huge challenges with the second one. /. in the last 6 months.
Some significant points:
1. Mum and/or Dad are not teachers. We're not qualified to be, and re-assurances from the homeschooling organisation are vacuous. Don't kid yourself about this. Being a teacher is a career choice, and there are very specific skillsets involved.
2. Mum and/or Dad don't want a teacher-student relationship with their child. You can't just throw a switch at 3pm and turn back into a parent. The child is not old/mature enough to process that changeover.
3. The child will lose out on a huge amount of 'non-curriculum learning'. Things like 'how to avoid the schoolyard bully', 'how to read a schedule and navigate to classrooms', 'how to meet project deadlines without parental intervention', 'how to negotiate the fickle friendships that happen in life', 'observe adult role models outside the family'. There are dozens of things like this.
4. There is research to support the position that children perform better when parents are 'hands off'. I can't remember the link, but one interesting one was posted to
5. Some children need real parental nurturing to get over a major life crisis. Most children do not. If your child needs that kind of care, be very careful of breaking your relationship with them by spending 6 hours every day with them.
In both cases, after 12 months, the children returned to regular schooling to a) escape mum and/or dad; and b) get a life/friends. The second one needed a little more encouragement than the first.
Good luck with it! Its been a hard road, and its only two-three years after they returned to regular school that their behaviours are starting to normalise.
A family who lived near mine, growing up, homeschooled their daughter some years, and sent her to public school other years.
In the semesters she was homeschooled - beside the academic benefits of homeschooling one might come up with, the whole family had the freedom to take a two-week trip down to Mexico in January or February every couple years, without being tied to the school schedule.
When she went to public school, she made friends who she would still see often when she was homeschooled.
They didn't plan a strict regimen of homeschool this year, public school that year, they just discussed the option each semester as a family and made a decision based on what felt right at the time.
She turned out normal.
...tested/proven techniques...
you mean like Common Core that is raising a generation of children that can't do math? Or whole language reading that is raising a generation of children that can't spell?
I'm 40, have two kids, one 10, one 3 and I live in the US. My ten year old has dyslexia and the school isn't in a position to help him so my wife augments his education with an alternative method of teaching children how to read. It work well for us.
Some good friends of ours have five children and want a Christian education for their children. With five kids they can not afford private school so the mother teaches all five and that works for them.
I personally went to a shitty public school. To give you a small example, I was ranked in the top 5% of my class overall, aced math, went up through "calculus" in my high school, but when I went to a University of California school, my foundational knowledge was so inadequate (hence the quotes around calculus) I had to take about a year's worth of remedial classes just to start working towards my degree. Yet some of my peers did just fine at places like NYU and Tulane. I games the system, they learned from it. Similarly, my wife attended an equally, but different, shitty school and finished her undergrad degree in three years and her law degree three years later.
My point is, in my experience it all comes down to what you and the child make of it. As I've come to learn with most things in life, you get out of it what you put into it. In the case of children, they get out of it what the parents put into it as in the parents expectations on the child and their overall guidance.
I mean, have you ever met a normal one? Case closed.
//TODO: Insert catchy phrase
There's a huge number of environment and personal factors that go into determining how successful homeschooling will be. The biggest two are the motivation and commitment of the parents and children, and available resources. In a lot of ways, homeschooling will have the same potential pitfalls as being self-employed while working from home do. Lots of potential distractions, with the natural human tendency to put things off for another day (and another, and another). Being self-motivated helps control that.
Resources are also important because if you are going to homeschool, you really want to play up on the opportunities homeschooling provides that traditional schools can't; stuff like more frequent field trips and "worldly" engagements. Many can be combined with vacation type stuff, involving travel to foreign countries and whatnot. It's not cheap, however, and you have to have solid finances to make it work.
You also want to invest in some books and curriculum aimed at the equivalent grade level of your child. You don't have to follow it all perfectly, but there's a surprising amount of stuff that people don't think about when it comes to early-child education. Having access to those resources will help make sure you aren't forgetting some major things.
Also, she should see if she can handle the teaching alongside the caregiving. Have her teach them a specific number of hours a day to get a taste of what it's really like. Some people just can't teach, others lose patience when it doesn't go as they thought it would, and when home-schooling, you don't get to say "school's out - I'm going home, having a few drinks, and not thinking about this until Monday."
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Homeschooled children seem to do exceedingly well in the American national spelling bee. So there you go.
Every Montessori school/group of schools seem different but I've seen many good ones in different countries/states. There are both private and in some cases integrated into the public system Montessori schools. I'm sure quality and, even if they are following state/provincial education guidelines, flakiness, but with a little research you can find a school at a reasonable price that will treat your child as an individual, yet help them grow socially too.
Why the heck is this on Slashdot ?
You would actually ask advice involving your offspring's future on Slashdot?
I iz hom skoold and I terned owt wundurfoll!
Table-ized A.I.
Where is this great literature coming from? Have the results been peer reviewed, or it this simply published in the echo chamber of home schoolers?
I suspect that some results have inherent bias. Perhaps looking at SAT or ACT scores appears to show an advantage, but may not take into account that a vast majority of students in public schools are expected to take the SAT or ACT even if they are not clearly college bound. A home school student who is not college bound is probably not going to be taking the SAT or ACT, and therefore would not show up in the results.
You would need to look at states that require all children of a certain age to take a standardized test. Then you might have some solid data.
You are acting like a controlling dickhead. Don't be a dick!
"The great thing about multitasking is that several things can go wrong at once." -me
You only notice the awkward ones. Most are no less social than standard for intelligent, literate people; football isn't the center of their life. As far as socialization, that same argument works well for prison.
At kindergarten level it's not all about abc's. The social aspect of functioning in a larger group of your peers is also important. Does your son have a lot of kids in his life (siblings, friends, cousins etc etc)> Is he naturally extroverted or does he have a more introverted personality.
I also have a son of that age, only child. We have him in public school and have found that the academics at that age are secondary to the social aspect of school. Only you know what is right, and i am no expert. You should trust your parental instincts above all. Just consider that home schooling can be more isolating depending on your own family environment and social circle. Even if you try something and feel it is not working, no matter what you choose, do not doggedly persist to the bitter end. Monitor and stay flexible. Good luck!
decades of teaching experience and tested/proven technique
You mean decades of educational decline due to the overburdening of the staff by an out of touch government??
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
So I see a lot of negative responses here. Unfortunate. People like to harp on the homeschool horror stories and act like there aren't just as many public/private school horror stories. Both systems have their pros and cons. Some kids would be terrible in a homeschool situation (my wife, for example, really didn't care for it and much preferred a traditional school setting). Other kids thrive at home (I LOVED it and wouldn't change a thing looking back.)
I was homeschooled K-12, then attended four years of school, graduated with a bachelors, landed a job, got married, etc. I played basketball for a local private school, was involved in a homeschool program for highschool where I attended classes once a week with other homeschooled kids. Got a diploma and all that. Personally, I feel like being homeschooled prepared me much better for college and real life than a public school would have, particularly through high school. I was around a range of ages (what other time in life are you surrounded by mostly your own age group?), had to keep my own pace and meet deadlines without a lot of supervision, was able to customize my class schedule and subject matter (within reason) by working with my teachers and parents.
I have siblings that were also homeschooled for most of their education, are also pretty well adjusted adults now and don't have any major regrets about their education. It can work, and work well, if the parents and kids are dedicated to it.
Useless fucking moron. Do you even know what Common Core is? It's not an issue of curriculum, it's corporatization of education.
Slashdot is a rough place to post this. Check out reddit.com/r/homeschooling for a more knowledgeable community, but there are a TON of resources to help you figure this out if it is something you are interested in.
I don't know of anyone doing statistical work on homeschoolers. It would be helpful, but the fact is that homeschoolers tend to integrate very well in society. It's not as if there is a magical 3 percent that stand out all the time for you to notice.
I only know of anecdotal material. I am one of those. I was homeschooled K-12 and am now in medical school (as a nontraditional student, after having worked as a programmer for 10 years). My homeschooling experience was actually very difficult, but it did prepare me for working hard in the world.
I do want to address the point of socialization, however. By and large, homeschoolers are VASTLY better socialized than public schooled children. The reason for this is simple. Unlike public school, where children largely interact with teachers and same-aged peers, homeschooled children interact with a great swath of society from a young age. (There are occasional shut-in familes, but they are rare and you obviously would not be one of them.) Homeschooling is absolutely not a question of academics vs. socialization. Homeschoolers get both.
However, there is a different balance to strike. Your time. Homeschooling is a very serious commitment, particularly in time. This is the part that will get you.
As for your wife letting go, both boys and girls grow up more emotionally mature and resilient if they remain close to their parents until puberty. This translates to better socialization, better mental health, and better emotional capacities through life. So it might not be a bad thing.
I had an awful time at school and am terrified about what my kids school life may be like. But that said this year my eldest goes off to pre-school.
Home schooling sits outside of the norm, so our attitude was that we would keep it as an option for use IF our child struggled or had an experience similar to mine. To homeschool you have to be prepared to take on a burden that is significant. Educating someone is hard and you need to be across a wide selection of material, much of which you haven't touched on or used since you finished school.
Our personal choice was that we would try the school system first. If that didn't work, and if homeschooling addressed some of the reasons why, we would look at it then.
If you are seriously looking at homeschooling, you should try to see if any other parents in your area are doing it in a group. The 'freaky, not normal' homeschooled kids that most people think about are homeschooled in a parent-child dynamic, with no other kids to interact with. The only 'normal' homeschooled kids I've ever seen were homeshooled in a group environment, where several families homeschooled their kids together. (It also helped that one of the teachers had a Master's degree in education). This allows for both the strict attention and focus that homeschooling is generally known for as well as allowing the kids to have peers to interact and socialize with. Don't underestimate the importance of social interactions with other kids, this is usually the downside of one-on-one homeschooling. Without it, your kids will have a serious disadvantage later in life when they are forced to deal with the 'real' world.
Both my wife and I were homeschooled, and we both firmly believe it was one of the best things our parents did for us. You can make it work, but make sure your children continue to socialize (e.g. sports and music did it for us). Do it wrong, and you can screw your kids up. That said, public school gone wrong screws kids up, too. But do it right, and your kids can really flourish in an environment that caters completely to their learning style.
You also need to analyze your reasons. Homeschooling isn't easy-- you need to take your reasons seriously enough to be motivated and organized to make sure your kids stay on track. Reasons that don't truly motivate you as homeschooling parents will cause you to lose your drive, at which point they turn into "those homeschoolers."
This is Slashdot. You came *here* to ask your question about homsechool? And look at your question. I mean, do you see how it reads? You're not really asking for objective information about homeschooling. You're asking only for reasons to hate it. Because if you've visited Slashdot for any more than five minutes in your entire life, you know exactly what kind of responses to expect here. It's a cult-like sort of thing. Drown out everyone who disagrees with a deafening chorus of sheep voices that affirm what Slashdot already believes. Homeschool bad! ba-a-a-a-d ba-a-a-ad ba-a-a.. ba-a-a-a.
You came here. Your mind is made up - why bother asking?
As for me, I know many, many homeschooled kids. If they were homeschooled incorrectly, then they're awkward, or uneducated. If they were homeschooled correctly, they're far more mature, well-adjusted, reasonable, socialized, educated, and rational than the vast majority of public-schooled kids. Let's define "success" in schooling as producing a competent member of society at 18 years of age who can succeed in college or otherwise contribute to the benefit of society, fend for themselves, interact productively with others across multiple age brackets, and demonstrate a decent level of comprehensive practical and theoretical knowledge.
By that measure, the ratio of success to failure is far higher among the homeschoolers I know than among the public-schoolers I know. What makes the difference, of course, is the parents. If you suck, you will ruin your kid's life completely, forever. If you don't, then your kid will do far better than he or she ever would in a mass-market factory school.
Oh, wait. I mean, "Homeschool baaaa-ad baa..slaaaaa-a-a-a-a-shdot.
A high school drop out who wants to keep your kid out of school since she can do better than those idiotic professional teachers.
Oh well, hopefully she's hot.
For what it's worth, my marriage was the same situation as yours(and my now ex-wife was just like yours). Not seeing eye to eye on simple things like this caused too many fights. I want my child to have up to date vaccines and be in public school, and I need my wife to have a decent job because of her lifestyle demands, etc.
After a long debate, we made the choice to move into a good school district and send our kid to school. This was a long fight, as she had family in rural Oregon who homeschool all of their kids, and based on the stories of the kids(dumb as bricks, pregnant by 16, etc), I did not want to send my kid down the same road. She also had separation anxiety(it was bad enough that she did not spend a day apart from him until he was 10[sleepovers] or travel without him until he was 13).
I went to private school for elementary and public school for the rest, and I was very satisfied with my experience, and I've made friends I otherwise would not have made. My time in private school prepared me academically and I was able to do extremely well in public school(entered a year ahead in some subjects), which was beneficial because doing well in public school in California gets you a great deal in state aid to state schools as well as guaranteed enrollment in state schools.
I don't think there is a replacement for the social education school brings(and public school was much more educational in that regard than private school), but I don't think that that is the only reason why. I also think that school provides the opportunities to advance just as much as if you were a real teacher homeschooling your kids.
I'll tell you this, it's way more difficult and far more expensive/time consuming than you might imagine. You should also be very clear about your reasons for doing this, keeping the kid at home is not one of those reasons. I know several homeschooled kids like that and they're a bit stunted, you have to make sure to get out and be active a lot more as well. Look around in your area for enrichment programs, for instance our kids go to public school 1 day per week. It's fantastic, and they make a lot of friends plus get that more structured school environment. Make sure that you're doing this for the right reasons. Finally, it takes an unbelievable amount of discipline from you both as parents. My wife and I are up late hours every week making sure that we have lessons ready, making tests, basically doing the things normal teachers do. If you're still reading and serious about this, it's also very rewarding. Seriously, if you do this right your kid will be light years ahead. You do it wrong and you'll really fuck up your kid's future.
"Some books contain the machinery required to create and sustain universes."-Tycho
I was home-schooled up to the age of 17 and I think it's an OK option as long as you subscribe to some kind of curriculum that includes testing by a third party. I don't think it is something that parents can do these days without assistance; at least not if the student is to have any post-homeschool academic career. In my opinion kindergarten is way to early to start homeschooling. A child that age needs the socialization more than academics, meaning socialization with people other than your immediate family. Unless you were isolated overseas like I was I can't imagine a rational reason to start homeschooling until much later when the issue becomes academics vs. institutionalization.
If public was the only option I had, I would seriously consider homeschooling and working with other homeschoolers in the community for social interaction. (Our state has some of the worst public schools in the US.) I know several parents who homeschool and their kids are doing excellent. Luckily we have a couple of good private schools in the area, and even more luckily, I can actually afford to send my kid there, so that's where she goes -- and does very well. Kids are surprisingly good at adapting to most whatever you throw at them.
For that to be true, though, you have to let them grow and develop as independent human beings. Your wife's reluctance to let go should not be the deciding factor -- this is entirely about your kid's education, not your wife's emotional needs. Good luck finding a way to tell her that without ending up sleeping on the couch for a week, though...
You should check your local school system to see if they offer Virtual School. This will allow you to have the basic course material that other children in your area are getting, plus the extra attention of your wife and any additional activities / materials she wants to teach them. This removes the need for her to construct her own curriculum.
There are State/National Virtual schools too but they lack the local teacher interaction and field trips, etc.
As for the interaction, it is up to you and your wife to make sure they get the proper interaction. Either through after school sports or groups specially designed to socialize home school kids.
Either way this is a huge commitment for your wife as well. This is not a fire and forget proposition. My family feels that schooling at home is a safer alternative than going to public schools these days. There are adjustments though.
Wrong again, anger boy.
Spending all your nights reading conspiracy theories has built up your blood pressure. Slashdot is not an appropriate venue to unleash your bitterness.
1 are either of you teachers??
2 think you did well enough to "bluff" teaching??
if either is yes then hit
http://www.hslda.org/hs/defaul...
NOW no don't read any further in this thread don't do anything but GO TO The HomeSchool Legal Defense Association NOW
if you HomeSchool you NEED the HSLDA for the "Panic Number" minimum.
for those idiot parents who insist on not vaccinating their children.
Putting your own kids at risk is bad enough. Putting others at risk is criminal.
Any insufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
We home-schooled our children. One already has her baccalaureate degree and will soon pursue her masters; while her sister, is married with three kids, pursuing her baccalaureate transitioning to her dream, a Nursing degree. My youngest is a aspiring professional artist...and my eldest is professional programmer. Their academic success is due to my wife's dedication and the curriculum that best fit the children. I agree with other poster--meet the state requirements and socialization is important --so join home-school groups where interactive activities are rife and joint teaching efforts are used. So much to learn--but you control what is taught, respond to learning situations, and limit exposure of 'questionable' teachings (which are dependent upon the parents). We are proud of our children and their quality of education is on par or exceeds public education (dependent upon the child native tastes for subjects). It's worth the effort...in my opinion.
Your dumb wife versus decades of teaching experience and tested/proven techniques.
Home schooled children, on average, score in the 70-80th percentile on achievement tests.
Very few educational fads are "tested" and even fewer are "proven".
Here is an article that provides an overview of home schooling results.
And for balance, here is an alternative viewpoint.
Disclaimer: My kids attend public school, but I do a lot of supplemental home schooling on the weekends, focusing on stuff the schools don't teach: programming, robotics, electronics, wood and metal working, survival skills, etc.
it seems like the only reason my wife wants to homeschool is because she doesn't want to let go.
If that's the true reason then don't home school. Pampered kids never grow up. He'll always rely on his mom for everything because she's always willing to do everything even when asked not to. The sooner this is broken the easier it'll be.
Instead, have her join school activities. Volunteer at the school, host parties for all the kids, get a pet, etc.... He can also go to Kindergarten and be home schooled. Kindergarten doesn't last all day. Try both for a year and see if she still wants to teach. Ask him which he prefers and why.
Homeschooling can be challenging. Yes, homeschoolers statistically are smarter and less scholarly adept. But there are many variables, parents, children, family, friends, education levels, drive, children (yes, I said children twice), etc. If you're not choosing out of fear, give it a try. Maybe it works, maybe not.
We are required to take national standardized tests:
12 years old / more or less 7th grade 99th percentile
10 year old / more or less 5th grade 95th percentile
7 year old / more or less 2nd grade 85th percentile
The interesting part of this --> each kid started formal testing around the 80th percentile and goes up over time. I attribute that to testing weirdness. The early grade tests are very picture oriented and my kids had a hard time figuring out what they were getting at in the pictures.
So besides for testing weirdnesses, I find homeschooling is working well. We focus on critical thinking, figuring things out, getting their work done. We get the flexibility to do all kinds of things -- we went to St. Louis and did lewis and clark. We do science classes, etc...it is all up to the parents.
The "what about socialization" thing is lame too. The kids have two co-ops, swim team, violin, basketball, etc...and besides what kind of situation in the real world are you thrown together with 20 or so of your same age people? Homeschooled kids have to interact on a daily basis with kinds from 6-17ish, and all the adults and learn how to work with and negotiate with and work with all aged folks.
Homeschooling is a huge success in Africa, the Middle East and the tribes in the Rain Forest!
On a more serious note, if you are in an excellent public school district the quantity and quality and breadth of the subjects they teach kids is astounding.
You cannot keep up doing homeschooling.
If you are not in a great public school district, move to one and commute (your kids come first) or do a private school.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
.......your wife doesn't sound academically qualified to be the sole instructor for your child. I say that as someone with two advanced degrees (I do not consider myself able to teach every topic at a high school level either). Now granted this presumably won't be an issue for awhile......say 7 or 8 years. And the obvious retort to this is that there will be a curriculum that she can teach from etc. But without the subject mastery, her ability would be hindered to offer further explanation when your child hits a snag. In short your wife would be one of those teachers that we all had who is reliant on reading verbatim from the "Instructor's Edition". Is that good education? Is that what you want for your kid?
If your wife wants to stay involved, she can bake brownies for the class.
My wife has worked as a teacher and has a related degree. Out oldest daughter went to a private preschool when she was three and quickly became bored with what they were teaching. We learned that the same curriculum would be covered in their four year old class so we decided to start homeschooling at that point. She is currently seven years old and is working on curriculum that is beyond what her nine year old friends are working on in public school. She has more friends than I did when I was her age and they are of a wider age range. She has played soccer, takes dance classes, attends church, and and we meet monthly with a homeschool meetup group.
We also have a four year old daughter who is working on similar curriculum to six year olds in public school.
We homeschool primarily for academc reasons as we have seen the horror that is "common core" and the waste of time that is "no child left behind". We have taught Astronomy, Robotics, Weather, and Bird Studies so far so we aren't just teaching the basics.
We live in Texas which has some of the most homeschool friendly laws on the books. Homeschooling falls under the same statutes as Private Schools. There is no attendance reporting, no mandatory testing, no approved curriculums.
The requirements for homeschooling in Texas are as follows:
The instruction must be bona fide (i.e., not a sham).
The curriculum must be in visual form (e.g., books, workbooks, video monitor).
The curriculum must include the five basic subjects of reading, spelling, grammar, mathematics, and good citizenship.
The State of Texas assumes that if you care enough about your kids to want to teach them yourself that the state will just get out of the way. The Texas Homeschool Coalition holds conventions every year were we take seminars and shop for curriculum.
I Don't Work Here
In my opinion the first few years of school are a decent time to homeschool. There is no way to say what's best for any one kid/family, but there is a very small skill set taught in the first few years. The major subject is reading. This is a subject where one on one time is highly productive and group activities tend to be not as effective. As an example I have an aunt that didn't learn to read till she was in 4th or 5th grade. She got by through memorization of the story books as they were read to the class. When it came time for her 5 minutes with the teacher she could spout the story back and pretend to be reading. If it was a book that she hadn't seen she would look at the pictures and guess. None of her teachers figured out she couldn't read till she was almost done with elementary school. This doesn't happen if mom is spending hours per day, one on one with her child.
As for socialization, I can't tell you how many times my bully avoidance skills have saved me from a near certain pounding at the office. I went to public school and ended up as a physicist, so obviously there is absolutely no socialization benefit to attending public school. (How's that for anecdote.)
Contact other homeschoolers in your area. They often have (or can point you to) teaching materials. Many states have guide lines for home schooling. Be sure to get your kids into the local rec center sports for a little socialization. As a parent, I find the common core reading material to be wholly inapproriate for my kids due to sexuallized content. The common core math is handy in some respects, but mostly confuses the kids.
I made management after a couple of years and was afforded more schedule-leeway... bam, right into the public system they went.
Remember, the most difficult thing in the World to do is be hard on your own kids. It's easy with other peoples kids, the little rat bastards, but do your own kids a favor. A bit of strife is quite the character builder.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
So we homeschooled our oldest daughter, she is now 16 and in her 2nd year of college. We tried to homeschool our middle child, it did not work at all, she is in a charter school now. We are now home schooling our youngest.
1. So first and foremost - DO NOT homeschool unless you intend for it to be a 100% commitment. We had friends that did not and their kids ended up being over two years behind when they hit high school.
2. Pick a curriculum that is already assembled. By that I mean pick one that has the books and workbooks chosen for age appropriate learning and teaching. It would be helpful if the curriculum laid out what to teach when, for example read pages 10-20 of American History on Wednesday. This approach will ensure that the educator and the student are staying on track.
3. Use an outside testing group to regularly test your child(ren), this way you will know if the education they are receiving is age and grade appropriate.
4. You must plan on providing a healthy amount of extra-curricular activities. This will help your child to learn the realities of life, things like bullies, social skills and teamwork.
5. You can largely ignore the individuals that claim that teaching requires special skills. Have you seen the degree program for Educators? Most would be lucky to pass a College Algebra class.
6. Positive socialization - let's say you take little Johnny to soccer. He gets picked on because he sucks. You are there, you can see how he reacts. This becomes a teaching moment and will help you guide his behavior so that he chooses not to hang with kids having behavior traits that are not desirable. In a regular school situation you would likely miss out on this.
7. When you do homeschooling right it is not coddling. In fact it is far more rigorous and encompassing than public schools or even most charter schools.
Whatever your decision, it is imperative that you make the decision being fully informed and be ready for a major commitment!
Going to a school is where you learn how crazy the world is. You interact with kids that are good, bad, friends, enemies, jocks, dorks, geeks, chicks, tomboys, bitches, bullies, honest, liars, druggies, straight edge, spoiled, poor, genius, idiots, boys, men, girls, women. You have teachers that are caring, could care less, inspiring, dead wood, fair, unfair. You interact with individuals, dozens, and sometimes hundreds of people at a time. Computer labs, machine shops, wood shops, sports equipment, art supplies, and these days even 3D printers. All that interaction in the hallways, homeroom, classrooms, gym, music, art, cafeteria. It's all so overwhelming and scary, but that's all part of it too.
Trying to pack this into the home version is quite an undertaking.
My wife and I were scared, well more nervous, about my kids going to school, and thought about homeschooling. I convinced my wife, who would have be the stay-at-home teacher, that it would be too much, and decided I really wanted my kids to go to school. She kept pushing, but I pointed out how hard it was just taking care of the crazy kids and how hard it would be adding in all the above too. Eventually, she gave up on the idea.
The main problem with homeschooling statistics is the self-selection problem as parents choose to homeschool. The homeschooling results are compared to public school results which have a mix of selection and default. We don't know how the kids of homeschooling parents would have turned out had they gone to public schools. Homeschooling parents are presumably more dedicated and involved and would probably be a net positive for public schools with free labor from parents. Homeschooling itself is self-selection but often the research is as well. There are some studies that use a large population - say from a curriculum provider - but many are from those that answer questionnaires. If you were doing a poor job at it, would you answer the questionnaire? There is a tremendous amount of potential in homeschooling if you have the resources, time, energy, support and strong inclination. But it is a huge amount of work and you have to be able to deal with negative or questioning comments from neighbors, relatives, coworkers and others that the kids come into contact with. If you want to see the potential, take a look at Alison Miller - her mother practiced unschooling - basically let the kid study whatever they want to without necessarily any structure or curriculum. Two other well-known examples are Venus and Serena Williams. I believe that they used correspondence lessons. Homeschooling may have given them the time to practice tennis to become the best in the game. It's interesting that their parents didn't have any training for tennis or tennis instruction. The rate of learning at public schools, on average, is abysmally slow. Do even 1/2 of high school graduates know Algebra? There are many excellent districts but you may have to spend a lot of money on real estate to live in one of those districts so that your kids can attend them.
I've no first hand experience but found the Stuff You Should Know episode[1] on the the topic very interesting. 1. http://www.stuffyoushouldknow....
Who would you be doing this for? The child or the parent?
As a parent I taught my kids to read before they went to school, and their times tables before they were 8. I think this was helpful but I will never know.
Some of my neices and nephews have been home schooled out of necessity - living in isolated African areas who have gone to normal school age 13. They have integrated well mostly and one of them was Head Boy at his school.
What their parents did say is that a lot of the home schooling material is produced for children who are being home schooled to ensure that they don't learn some things. Evolution and certain facts of life mainly. Suspect it might be a bit light be a bit light on Climate Change as well!
My vote is to send to normal school and supplement with targeted extra help and trips to stimulating places. My kids now think it was really cool I took them to Bletchley Park before it was full of Benedict Cumberbatch etc !
One point I would make is that because of the internet, kids now learn at least as much from each other as they do from adults. They no longer get one single version of the truth, and the sooner they learn to sort the wheat from the chaff, the better.
I would have to ask - Is there another (?work-related) reason that your partner wants to do this?
Humorous signatures are over-rated.
I would heartily recommend investigating the choices for charter and non-traditional schools.
We live in the attendance area for some of the best schools in California, yet educated our kids in a hybrid manner. Our kids "attended" a charter school that supported homeschooling. They had monthly meetings with their teacher and some specialized classes. When they were older, they could take classes at the local community college and get high school credit for this. Utlizing the local networks of homeschoolers, my kids got plenty of social interaction with other kids.
They all succeeded academically, going on to graduate from excellent universities.
The real "Libtards" are the Libertarians!
Depends on the child, the parents and your school district. The district becomes critically important in the later, high school years as it can offer resources you can't possibly match at home.
There is a lot to be said for the case where sex is not one of the many subjects
But while I've heard a lot of good things about home-schooled kids, one question that arises - how good is this option? I'd imagine that most of us are good in a few subjects, and could probably teach the kids that, but beyond those, then what? Like what if a parent is good at Math, but not Geography? What if one is good at History, but not Physics? How does one fill up the gaps? Would it be by teaming up w/ other parents and each picking a few subjects to teach all the kids involved? Administration aside, how different would that be from a school?
Almost all of the solid research I have seen on what factors actually account for future earnings, success in school, etc. tend to support the idea that the details of what you do for the kids are not really that important, but the broad brushstrokes of how your family and you kids' peer's families view schooling, working to achieve goals, and the importance of critical thinking seem to be more important that what school or educational method is experienced.
The fact that you and your spouse are trying to find "the best" for the tyke probably means that you kid is likely to do well no matter what you choose. Try to find friends for your kids who's families place similar importance on the idea of education, and that will probably help too. Kids who apply to elite schools and do not get accepted seem to have as successful lives as those who attend.
You might also consider that rather than home schooling, you might make an even bigger difference in the wider community's development if you sent your kid to the local school, and then devoted some of the time and resources that you would have spent on home schooling to supporting that local school with volunteering and money. If all of the "keen" parents abandon the public schools for alternative educational programs, us slackers who don't care enough about our kids are going to do so little that generations of public school kids are just going to end up as bums and thugs, putting all the weight of responsibile citizenship on your kids as they grow up. Seriously though, the local school would love to have additional involved parents, and the other families there would also love to have additoinally involved parents.
My wife's family all home schooled for varying amounts of their respective school years. (10 kids - Most still school age).
She home schooled from yr 8-10 when she finished her schooling.
Her younger brothers and sisters who have finished home schooling usually stopped around yr 8 for all intents and purposes, one is a fairly talented developer/graphic designer (with BIT degree) (did I mention smoking hot?). One is a logistics manager for a pretty big company (with B Logistics Accounting), Next girl down is an admin cleric or what ever you call it, next one down is a 2nd year plumber.
Any how, in Australia there is nothing preventing you from doing well if you are home schooled.
Mind you, the parents goal of home schooling (keeping the kids pure from the world n what not, didn't really work too well... The one schooled the most is 'the most christian', the younger brother is a loose cannon, so go figure :s
Peace Out
First, some background. We have 4 kids, in their late teens and early 20s.
A full gamut of personalities - from the artsy kid, to the social diva, to the mathy/introvert, to the football stud. Gross oversimplifications, to be sure, but they hit the archetypes.
Our decision was ultimately *against* homeschooling. Does that mean we were universally happy with our choice to public school our kids? Not entirely. If we knew then what we know now, we'd have looked harder for some sort of private school or charter school that we could have afforded. Our local public schools were terrific in elementary years, mediocre as junior high schools, and pretty nearly horrible as high schools. The high school experience was nearly wasted, with bored unengaged teachers, listless classes, challenges that petered out by 11th grade, and an administration that seemed capable of only making the worst possible choices whenever presented. We should have pulled our kids in junior high and sent them *anywhere* else. Oh, they still did/are doing fine academically - ACTs all 30+ - but this was despite the horrible high school system, not because of it.
The reasons we chose against homeschooling, in no particular order:
- simple expertise: while a reasonably educated parent (we both have Bachelors' degrees) can certainly teach pretty much every elementary and general junior-high subject simply by 'staying ahead of the kid' in the materials, but by high school and certainly in terms of anything advanced placement, nobody's well-rounded enough to be a teacher of everything.
- don't just like what I do: the fact is that if our children developed special interests or things that they loved that we didn't anticipate, there's little we could offer them. We in no way wanted to constrain their interests to our own, which would be natural given our own enthusiasms.
- the "social" thing: humans are social animals. We all exist in a hodgepodge of organizations (formal and informal), status structures, power relationships (formal and informal), with countless others ranging from direct family, relatives, friends, acquaintances, and strangers. *Fundamental* to the emotional and social development of a child is being involved in those evolving relationships *particularly* at certain stages of maturity with others going through the same learning curve. Generally, this is going to continue through our whole lives - at school, at work, in relationships, clubs, volunteer organizations, churches, etc. Simply put, we felt this was very much a 'time served' sort of thing; an hour playdate once weekly (or whatever) wasn't going to give our kids the sort if intrinsic, long-term give and take that primate children and adolescents need to learn those structures and how to navigate them. To best learn the gamut of situations that they would have to deal with would involve not just social experience, but social immersion. And let's be absolutely candid: the teen years for both boys and girls are awash with hormones and their follow-on effects. Learning to come to terms with this (& themselves) in-context is not something you as a parent can deliver by lecture.
- 'bye mom & dad! - following-on to the reason above, the primary thing a kid needs to learn as they mature? Doing without you. Really, how can you teach that?
- sports: if you're in the US, youth sports at a certain level are pretty much only through schools. I think sports are important to the development of a child, learning about competition, to win, lose, deal with others, trust others, as well as important values about diet, physical fitness, and the pure joy of physical activity when you are at the most perfect physical condition you'll ever be in your life. That choice isn't much available to homeschool kids, or if it is it's in a sort of stilted "we'll let them be on the team" sort of way.
- want to give your kid more intensive, in-depth learning better than what schools offer? Nothing's stopping you. School is really only a teeny
-Styopa
The certification argument is almost entirely a red herring for two major reasons. First, if you ask most teachers with certifications, you'll find that a massive portion of their education was based on classroom administration and not effectively communicating specific subject matter. Secondly, most home school curriculum are not based on in seat teacher to student instruction (though there are a plethora of online options if you choose that style). They are generally based on classical education which relies heavily on teaching children a love for reading with a heavy emphasis on classics and an ability to go seek and find answers for one's self.
The brightest 8th grader I know is home schooled. She wanted a more challenging program. I don't know the program she's in, but from her descriptions she's part of a class, and there's a teacher working with them. She also has social contacts outside the home. This started fairly recently, I think 6th grade.
One of my staff is in theory home-schooling a child, but there are several parents in the neighborhood involved, with appropriate backgrounds for teaching different subjects, so it's sort of a community school.
I'm much more skeptical of a scheme where the parent is the only teacher, and there aren't other students involved, for the reasons indicated by others. I also wonder whether you really want to start this in kindergarten.
I think it also depends upon your local schools, and upon your kid. Why not try the school and see how he does?
My wife and I home school our two children, now aged 12 and 15. I'm an engineer and my wife is a stay at home mom. Our kids have been home schooled, they have been in catholic school, and they have been in public school for one year which was one year too much. Kids can succeed in any of these environments if the parents care and make education a priority. Home schooling is not for every one however for our family home schooling is by far the best choice and our kids are doing very well.
The whole socialization argument is without merit. There is good socialization and there is not so good socialization. Our kids are involved in outside activites such as 4H, book club, art class, sports, etc. It can take some time to figure out home schooling, what format and curriculum works best for your family, etc.
Good luck.
I've met a few people who were home-schooled (not from the same families, or even states). Frankly, they came out very strange. My friends and I are all nerds, so I'm accustomed to being different, but these people all seemed weird to me, and that's saying something. I would go as far as to say they were all socially "broken".
I really wish people would stop home-schooling. I've yet to meet anyone who was and turned out "normal". I'm sure they must exist, but of the sample set I have, they're batting 0.000.
... school teachers have to say about schooling vs education in the USA.
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He was in public school through second grade. Kindergarten and 1st grade were great. He had awesome teachers. In the 2nd grade he ended up with a teacher in poor health that probably should have retired 5 years prior. It was not a great year and my wife had always wanted to try to homeschool but I was skeptical. So in 3rd grade he stayed at home.
Overall it went pretty well. There are tons of resources available to help however you must pay attention. My wife wanted to send our son to this 2 hour "science club" thing that met a couple of times a week. At first glance it sounded great until I read through all the literature. Turns out the guy taught Intelligent Design. I just about lost it. Some other home schoolers had recommended him to my wife. People homeschool for a variety of reasons but for a fair number it's because they don't like what is taught in public schools. I'm a fairly liberal guy. Hanging around that crowd was a tough thing for me at times and it was a source of tension between my wife and I.
My son is a social kid and he wanted to go back to school after a year. So for 4th grade, we found a private school with a small class size that seemed like a good fit. He was there through 8th grade but we often questioned whether it was worth the money, - especially once he got to middle school. From a math and science perspective he probably would have been better off in a public school.
We have neighbors with a large family that also homeschool. Once the oldest got to be about 12, he wanted to go to a school and the rest of them kind of followed suit once they got older. They're great kids. We know other families too where the results have definitely been more of a mixed bag. With one family in particular the kids are very accomplished in some areas while severely lacking in others, but that may have happened no matter where they went to school.
My take away from all of this is that success can be had in public, private, or home schools but it depends on the schools, the parents, and most of all the kid.
I'd second this. You have to remember that at some point your kids are going to leave home (you hope) and have to make decisions for themselves about their own education at university and parents can no longer be involved. Indeed this seems to come as a shock for some parents (fortunately very few) when they either call me up or try to visit to discuss their kids performance at university and I have to tell them that privacy laws forbid me from discussing anything about their son or daughter's performance with them. School is a nice way to get both the kid and the parent used to this fact so when they do go to university the gap is not so large.
A further thing to consider is whether the academics really are better for home schooled kids. I'm sure that you can cram facts into their heads but, as a university prof who has seen students from foreign countries where rote learning is de rigour, this does not turn out well at university when they are required to understand and apply knowledge rather than just regurgitate it. In addition there is the benefit of exposing them to different teacher's points of views and interests: your kids are not you and they need to find out what they like.
Lastly I'd also question whether your wife is really capable of home schooling at all. At school all the teachers have managed to get a degree in something plus training as teachers. Your wife is clearly not well educated and lacks any training in teaching young kids: there is a very good reason why school teachers require special training in educational techniques while university professor do not. Kid's minds do not function the same way as adult's and you need to take account of this to be an effective school teacher, particularly for primary school kids.
You should try to get her to "let go". Her insecurity will inconvenience everyone, including your son and yourself. If your son is crying and screaming on the first day of Kindergarten, make him go. No disrespect to your wife, but you probably think she is not qualified to homeschool, being a high school dropout? (Why would you mention this otherwise?) But of course, you can't say this to her.
Maybe try to find a Kindergarten where she can volunteer. That way it may be easier for her to "let go".
We just yanked our kids out of public school. It always struck me that homeschooling was trading a social education for an academic one, so when we found that public school was offering neither that we ought to just do it ourselves. Our daughters participate in extracurricular group activities 4 days a week for multiple hours a day. Most of their "school work" is independent study, meaning they learn to get shit done. They have literally leapt grade level standards in a very short amount of time and have found better peer groups as well.
It's not without challenges. One parent always has to be with the kids. My wife works from home and my job is flexible. We are lucky.
Definitely do your research before making a decision on this one. We considered it, briefly, with our daughter -- but ultimately decided it was just too much to tackle.
One thing I didn't even really consider, initially, is that "homeschooling" doesn't even necessarily have to mean you're keeping your kid at home all day, acting as their full-time teacher.
In at least some areas where there's an active homeschooling community, it's possible to work out arrangements with other people so you teach a subject or two that's your own area of expertise, and then you let your kid learn from other homeschooling parents who are teaching other subjects they're best at teaching. There are lots of possibilities here, up to and including parents who are willing to teach your kid most of the school day in exchange for you bartering for something they need like transportation and fixing meals for them.
At some point, I think this starts to blur the lines enough to where you start asking how much different it *really* is than just putting them in the public school you're already paid for via your taxes anyway? But there are a lot of ways to do homeschooling when you work with others in the community doing the same thing.
I've heard multiple parents who did home school comment that they felt it was easiest and most effective for younger kids though. By the time their kid(s) got to grade 6-9, they often put them back in a standard school. (Probably makes sense as middle school is when kids really begin valuing things other than just the learning process itself. Peer relationships start becoming important, and I think for many kids - it's actually the peer pressure to look intelligent or to "keep up" with one's classmates that provides motivation for them to keep working. With home schooling, part of that is lost or weakened.)
Home schooling is a great way to ensure that your children get the same singular viewpoint and misinformation that their parents grew up with, and that they aren't burdened by the intellectual challenge of deciding which of the conflicting ideas they might encounter from classmates and teachers, is correct.
Just as a healthy immune system needs exposure to a variety of germs during the formative years (with some vaccinations to take care of the worst ones), a healthy intellect needs exposure to a variety of ideas, good and bad. Involved parents at home help to quash the most irredeemable ideas that kids will be exposed to (like vaccines do), while letting children reach their own conclusions about the rest of them (and generally landing pretty close to the tree).
It's bad enough that adults are increasingly getting all of their news and information from singular ideological sources (Fox News, HuffPo, etc), but to restrict the intellectual diet of a child to what Mom and Dad teach them will isolate them before they even leave the nest. One of the great achievements of the American publication education system in the 20th century – something that was worth breaking down separate-but-equal to accomplish – was to bring together children of different ethnicities, religions, races, and even (to some extent) economic classes, teaching them a shared history and a shared set of values. Which they learned as much from each other as from the teacher. As a member of a Middle-Class White Protestant Republican family, I'm a better person – a better citizen – now because of the time I spent learning side by side with kids who weren't all of those things ... and in some cases none of them.
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That is nonsense.
With homeschooling kids learn twice as much in half the time, yes, thats a factor of four.
Of course that implies the teacher/teaching parent knows what he is doing.
Bringing in your racist ideas about other regions on earth disqualifies you anyway beyond believe.
Cost free eBook I read (by iBook/Kobo/Amazon/ObookO/Gutenberg etc.): "The Green Odyssey" by Philip Jose Farmer.
No, homeschoolers do NOT outperform schools. There are NO studies comparing the outcomes of homeschooling and public schools. All the current assessments are based on self-selected tests administered by _parents_.
All I had to do was do time student teaching, get the requisite C's in teacher school, and pass multiple guess tests. Nothing actually evaluated my ability to teach. Fortunately for the students, I cared, and still care, so I study pedagogy, but it's not, shall we say, common or encouraged.
I exited middle school in 2001 or so, and was homeschooled through highschool (sorta). and have not gone to college.
Most of the time, it felt as though I was basically reading slashdot.org and wired.com (it had fewer ads and was nicer, back in 2001 - 2005) without supervision, and my parents never suggested any specific topics to study.
Pros. (of being homeschooled).
Lotsa free time, enough to read linux man pages over and over again, and get a mild familarity with linux (circa 2003 - 2006) and perl 5.8.x
Cons. (of being homeschooled). /still/ living in my parents' basement, and reading slashdot.org all day. After getting an awful sales job for 2 weeks in late 2010, and reading about high underemployment of degreed students; I've basically given up on ever finding a job or going to college. Ranked by enthusiasm, arrogance, shiny credentials, or insider connections . . . there are always going to be dozens of people above me. Why should I struggle to project fake enthusiasm soley to get an $ 8 / hour job that I don't even want; or get $30,000 deep into dept, solely to get a college degree that can't even be used, solely to end up getting, an $ 9 / hour job ? Not my style.
Fewer social connections. I'm currently 27, and
BTW . . . I did try to commit suicide once, and failed, and have the following report. Strangulation hurts more than expected. Cancelled attempt within 4 minutes, 55 seconds. Life doesn't always work as smoothly as expected.
"I was home schooled and I'm totally normal!" - Said many times.
"I'm friends with someone who was home schooled and they are totally normal" - Said 0 times
//TODO: Insert catchy phrase
Listen, homeschooling is not easy and if your wife isn't prepared for it then it will fail. If you have concerns then you should speak with your wife and not the anonymous nerds on the internet. What are her reasons? Is she prepared for the sacrifice? Does she have any ideas on lesson plans, curriculum, etc?
Our kids when to public school for 2 years before we pulled them out, mainly for social anxiety reasons that were starting to affect their health (not eating, high levels of stress and anxiety). They are now thriving and exceeding their peers (mother-in-law works as a teacher and can confirm).
Each child is different. We didn't make the choice until after we saw what the public system was doing for our kids. To get them into an "enrichment" program would have cost us over $10k in testing and would have given them about 1-4 hours per week of "extra" work that they could do outside of their class. We figured we could spend that money on our own resources. My wife spent countless hours over a few months to come up with a curriculum for our kids for just a single year. It's not an easy job and it shouldn't be taken lightly.
But again, you should speak with your wife if you have a concern and take part in the discussion. Welcome to parenthood, it's not always about agreeing with your spouse but by knowing what's right for your child.
I'm going to make an amazing recommendation: go find some local homeschoolers, and look at their curriculums. Watch them teach their kids a day.
The most important thing to find for a homeschooler is a local co-operative. Lexington, Kentucky has 6 different groups that I know about, and I am pretty sure I don't know them all. A couple are primarily social, two of them are more rigorous than the local private schools (and the public school had to open a STEM magnet with UK's help to compete).
My wife has taught our kids all kinds of subjects, all the way through high school. She had to learn several subjects, but had little trouble in helping our kids excel academically (one just missed National Merit Semifinalist by a point or two, the second is on track to be competitive despite being an art major track). If you don't know a subject, purchase a full-service curriculum or take it at a co-op. And field trips are easy: one woman asked us about them, and my kids asked if seeing the Liberty Bell and Independence Hall, the Intrepid, and Gettysburg in a week counted as a field trip....
The number one advantage (and problem) with homeschooling is freedom. We've had a couple of spectacular curriculum failures, but we also were able to get different materials and start over.
The dirty little secret of colleges is that education isn't that hard a subject. The only subject in college easier is social work, and teachers' IQ averages are 20 points lower than the STEM fields. The college classes aren't about learning the subjects (Arts and Sciences students learn more math than math teachers), they're about teaching groups of kids in a subject. If you can teach your kid a subject, you can always teach your child better than a teacher can, because you have 30 times the amount of time a teacher has for your child.
If you want a child that grows up to be that weird guy who stands in a corner talking to himself, go ahead and homeschool.
He'll probably have one of those stupid hyphenated last names too.
Pros: your kid may fare better with homeschooling because (may, not will)
1. Public school classes can only go as fast as the slowest kid. Not so at home. Your kid won't be bored because things aren't moving fast enough to keep their interest. Engagement = better learning
2. You don't have to put up with your kid struggling with the latest bureaucratic nonsense du juor handed down from on high for the education system. You can customize how you teach to your kid's particular mental processes to maximize uptake and understanding.
3. Because of #2 you have some extra room for teaching things that the school system doesn't have time, money, room, teachers, or interest in teaching.
Cons: your kid (and you) may fare worse with homeschooling because
1. Teaching is not a job, it is a personality type. Like "artist" or "engineer". If you are not a teacher you will find homeshooling a miserable experience. Your kid probably doesn't think like you and you don't understand each other's thought processes so explaining new concepts in a way they understand is an exercise in frustration. That's what teachers are good at - figuring out what the mind in front of them needs and adapting to it. If you aren't a teacher, it won't work.
2. While being a teacher isn't just a job, teaching is. A full time job. Don't kid yourself. If you homeschool you are committing to a full time job in your own home for no pay. If you intend to do it right, that is.
3. Homeshcooling requires commitment and fortitude on your part. You cannot half-ass it and expect a good outcome. You are talking about twelve freakin years of near-daily hard work for a kid that won't appreciate how hard it is on you. It will test your patience, stamina, creativity, sanity, and resolve. Be warned.
Could go either way:
1. No schedule. There's a lot of freedom in that. But then there is also a lot of freedom in knowing all your hellions will be out of your hair six hours a day for most of the week if they go to public/private school.
2. State requirements. Some are pretty onerous. It can get expensive. Some are so lax it's ridiculous and its easy to get complacent and slack off your teaching duties.
3. Higher education. Acceptance of homeschool education in universities is all over the map. Some are favorable, some are out-right hostile. Choosing a post-secondary path is a nightmare to try to negotiate at this point, but there's good stuff out there and its getting better. So, you know. There's that.
Unfortunately, I can only offer you my individual experience rather than the hard numbers you seem to be looking for, but I was homeschooled for many years, so hopefully I can add something to the discussion. (I attended a normal Kindergarten, then was homeschooled for grades 1, 4-8 after that)
Homeschooling is a full-time job, and then some. My mother, who was the primary 'teacher' for myself and my siblings, was a proper licensed and educated grade-school teacher for many years before she ever had children. This meant that when it came time to teach me to read, for example, there was no mystery for her about where to begin, what kind of pace a child can learn at, or how to approach the matter. Without intending any disrespect to your wife, this will most likely not be the case for her.
Not to say that it's impossible to prepare, to learn how to teach a child to read (or do basic arithmetic, or write a proper paragraph) but you don't get a practice run when it's your child. If you should find yourself in a situation where you realize things have not gone as planned, getting your son back into the regular flow of the school system will be more stressful for him than it would have been if he had started at the same time as the rest of his age group.
If you do decide to homeschool, I encourage you to look for groups in your area, and get involved with them. As much as the 'lack of social interaction' argument is an oversimplification, it's still something to be aware of. Over and above the social aspect, these groups (for our area at least) meant that things like swimming lessons were possible, or that different parents could teach mini-courses over the span of several weeks as their abilities allowed. I had people teach me everything from advanced mathematics to woodworking to playing the guitar to building model planes. (That last one is hardly part of conventional academics, but that's the beauty of this system.)
Homeschooling groups will also be able to help you prepare for the school year, which is not a task to be underestimated. I remember my mother answering the phone 4 weeks into September and having to explain to another would-be homeschooling parent that gathering and preparing an entire curriculum isn't something you can just do all in one shot at Staples.
So TL;DR Teaching a child is a lot of work all on its own, and making sure they are learning all the other little life-lessons that come with a typical school experience will make it even harder.
As I was homeschooled, my person experience - it was excellent. As for arguments against "social experiences / mono culture" I would argue that depends on the environment, as schools do not necessarily promote great social culture /etc.
In high school years I selected all my own course material,, this allowed me to do college level computer science courses during high school, I was doing C and x86 assembly, and programming EPROM chips, while my friends in local schools were lucky if they got an Apple ][ with a basic interpreter. I also used the flexible times to work on many projects outside my school - programming jobs, volunteer as stage manager for amateur theatre company / etc.
For me the major question to home school is ... is the child self motivated? If you are passionate about learning & study, home schooling offers far opportunities for development than is possible in a structured school experience. It allows you to take on far more advanced levels in your areas of passion / interest and to spend more time on areas you may struggle with. It is also important to ensure you get involved in other groups outside your school - i.e. special interest groups/amateur theatre/sports teams/etc.
Will I home school my own kids? I'm not against it, but don't have plans as yet. If I become unhappy with local schools, then this will probably motivate me to homeschool my kids.
A possibly overlooked advantage is that you won't have to have your child immunized against all manner of diseases. You can help spread the next plague or learn all about the side effects of formerly common diseases like measles, mumps, etc.
At least you won't have to take time off work to care for the sick kid.
Google. you dont have to put up with jackases trying to get you to care about their stupid club x. cartoon peni. are only drawn by siblings and or cousins.
you mean like Common Core?
If you're having trouble with Common Core as an adult, perhaps you don't actually understand math as well as you think.
Kids can and do figure this shit out. What's your excuse?
School is not really about learning actual skills you will use later in life both in the workplace and in your personal life. I'm not saying you don't need some basic math to understand phone contracts or mortgages. I'm saying the social interactions and the incidental learning you aren't graded on is much more useful. You won't get that at home. But that's not even the most important thing...
By far the most important thing you get out of school is proving to others you not only know the material presented, but are capable of sitting down and dong mountains of mostly busy work and doing it well. That's what colleges want to see, thats what colleges expect you to do, that's going to be very important to employers. That's why snobby expensive college prep schools are so important. Simply scoring high on tests won't convey that. In my opinion homeschool is fail sauce because of what society expects. It may be stupid but that's our world.
Send your child to as prestigious a school as possible and then if you want them to learn useful things supplement their education.
Homeschooled children have one of the most important factors contributing to a student's academic success: parents who are highly interested in their child getting a good education. As for homeschooling itself, it is a mixed bag. Some parents make good teachers, some don't. Some public schools are especially good, others especially bad. Some children have certain traits that would make them a bad fit with public school, or would benefit from a faster pace. Homeschooled children run the risk of being socially stunted (especially so for those who would most appreciate not having to deal with people). You said you wanted statistics; I think a relevant one is that colleges seem to prefer homeschooled children over public schooled (but see first sentence).
There are materials available to help with homeschooling. These are probably a good idea unless you really really know what you're doing (which you don't). Even if you don't strictly follow them they can act as guidelines for pace/quantity/topics. You mentioned that your wife, a high school dropout, would be the teacher. Are you sure she has the perseverance to homeschool your children? (Amount of perseverance required of her depends on the amount of perseverance of your children.) You should also see if there are any local homeschoolers and see if you can join forces, or at least talk to someone with personal experience.
Don't waste your vote! Vote for whoever you want, unless you live in a swing state it won't matter anyways
We've started homeschooling our kids after a couple of years in public schools. I won't go into why, but our kids are happier and less-stressed and they are learning at acclerated rates. Not having a rigid school schedule allows for more flexibiity with extra-curricular activities and they school day is leaner and not packed with redundancy that stifles curiosity.
If you home school, the biggest challenge will be finding curriculum. There are lots out there--some kooky some good. The reason most people home school in our state is for religious reasons (i.e, they want to teach creationism and eschew anything secular about science). You're going to find lots of "young earthers" out there and their materials. You will aslo find Wiccans, atheists, and Pastafarians. There's a niche for everything so be judicious. A plus to the Christian curricular materials is that they are great for learning Latin. We teach that as the first secondary language because it is great for grammar as well as all of the root words and scientific applications later. It also makes it easy to branch off into Italian, French, and Spanish. You can just ignore the religiosity of it if you choose.
Try to stay astride with the local school district as far as the core of the compentencies are concerned. Teach those first. You'll spend a lot of time trying to figure out your kids' learning style--the strengths AND weaknesses become quite apparent. You'll probably find that your kids pick up on the material faster when they're not waiting on a teacher to corral 23 other kids along with the unit. This gives you more time to learn. My kids love science experiments and organized field trips with other home schoolers. Find a good community of others you can team up with--parents can share their strengths. We have a French Canadian mom who helps teach French and another who is an engineer helping with science.
There is a great opportunity for success and failure--it's all in what you bring to it. The important thing is to keep your kids curious--it's the engine for learning. Public schools can kill that curiosity but an ill-prepared home school parent can underserve it!
Good luck!
I might know what I'm talkin' about, but then again, this is Slashdot...
When a parent wants their home-schooled child to get a diploma, they can request it from their local public high school (at least in our state). I have friends that are high school teachers that have been tasked with testing these students. The success rate is a mixed bag.
Hate to state the obvious, but the biggest variables are going to be the parent and the kid, which can't be specifically addressed by anyone that doesn't know how stupid you, your wife or your kids are. So really you are in fact looking for vague generalizations that may or may not apply to your situation. If you have a parent that knows how to teach, and knows how to best enhance all aspects of childhood development tailored to each specific kid then chances are they will thrive.
If you have a child with a high level of emotional and normal intelligence they are also going to thrive in-spite of the instruction.
Combine a lazy selfish kid with an equally motivated teacher/parent and you'll have an.... American.
Homeschool offers the highest potential for a complete and thorough education that is perfectly matched to both your kids abilities and interests. There's really no way to argue with this - its just a fact. Public school cannot and will never be able to taylor its educational offering to every individual student.
The real question you need to be asking is - are you willing to put in the time and effort to meet or exceed the level of education your child will get from public school? This isn't just academic but is social as well.
Once you start really asking that question and looking around at curriculums and how much time and energy investment you will need to make, the answer will probably make you weep for the state of public education in America.
I'm not even kidding a little bit.
My wife and I are highly unorganized people. We were a little bit concerned about going down the homeschool route. But there are a wide variety of very good homeschool options out there that offer weekly or daily lesson plans. Putting this together is by far the hardest part but if you are able to put some money into a well organized curriculum then the day to day is much easier. We were able to use a curriculum and there is zero overhead in terms of organizing what to teach when - the order of things is right there and you can go at the pace of your kids.
My kids are easily exceeding their grade level in every category academically. My wife teaches them while I work, but I do some reading in the evenings and sometimes I'll teach a day on the weekend.
In order to achieve this level of education, far exceeding that of public schools, my kids spend about 2 hours "in school" every weekday. And they learn much more than I did when I was in school because all that time is devoted to learning. And not just the memorize this data and spit it back out kind of learning. They are having discussions about topics, asking questions, getting answers. Learning how to explore knowledge and relate to people in the process.
In school teachers speak into a sea of faces and students are commanded to perform. At home you are engaged personally in the learning. Its relational and you don't get left behind or bored. My kids love learning. I'm sure they would hate school.
So those two hours of schooling leave a lot of time in the day. Time to do things like martial arts at the local YMCA's homeschool class. Lots of places are offering homeschool time slot activities and there are plenty of homeschoolers doing these things too. We have plenty of social activities with either other homeschoolers, our church, our extended family, or just being out and about in the world.
We are fortunate enough to live in WA where homeschools are actually part of their local school district. Our kids can use local school facilities like the library - or even take a PE class. We haven't done much with this yet, but its nice to have the option.
Really the bottom line is that your kids academic and social education can be optimized through homeschooling in ways that simply are not possible in public school. Period. ...
That being said... homeschool is not without difficulty or down sides...
It's all going to be on the main homeschooling parent to perform the optimization. My wife is awesome. She cares deeply about our kids education and socialization. It drives her to do much more than I would be doing if I were the homeschooling parent. So while homeschool just actually does offer you the potential to provide your kids with a better education, you really do have to make it your job as a homeschooling parent.
Then there is the fact that the homeschooling parent has zero breaks from the kids. This is a big deal. We love our kids but sometimes people just need a break. So there are a couple nights a week where when I get home from work I take the kids out and do clubs or sports or whatever we have going on that month and give my wife a few hours to chill. I offer her the option of going out,
Our kids were educated at home from around 4th grade to 9th grade. I feel that high school is a good time to introduce them to the good and the bad of public education and will help them transition to college and corporate social structures; Having them go back to high school will also allow them a more traditional transfer to college and help deflect some of the prejudice they might encounter from the unwashed peasants...
I wish that I would have home schooled them from 1st to 9th grade; I was always worried that I was not a good enough teacher, and that they might be missing experiences that they would have in a public school. However, because I was able to instill a love of learning to my children, I really did not have to baby step them through their studies. Their young minds were so fast at picking things up that they were hard to keep up with. If desired, I could have easily had them finish high school math in middle school etc. It was never my intent to accelerate their education to to raise a mythical genius child. I simply wanted them to be happy, and not have their young minds adversely indoctrinated during their developmental years.
We tried to make sure they were well socialized via local community center activities and years of martial arts training. My children had no problem transitioning into the public school system. They were well ahead of their classmates academically and quickly made friends.
I laugh at inappropriate times.
I can offer my perspective, being a homeschooled individual myself (grades 7-12). I took my schooling through a distance education program in my town though and was not taught by my parents and the material I was given was all self-directed learning. I had to register for all my classes and aside from a couple of clarifying questions I had over the years I barely spoke to any teacher. I was the type of person who didn't put a whole lot of effort into my work and yet still got good grades (B's and A's). So some things that I can say that I learned aside from what was in the courses was the ability to estimate how long it will take me to cover some material, how to manage my time, how to teach myself (this has proved to be wildly beneficial as someone who likes to learn new things for fun as well as for work as a programmer). I was also happy because I was able to use these skills that I had acquired after the first year of homeschooling and get into a good groove. This groove meant that I knew that I had to finish a certain amount of work (taking at least 1 hour and at most 6) in a particular course a day. Days where my chunk was finished early I would either do the next days work and then take a day off in the week or I would just quit early. I would spend my extra time either just relaxing or reading up on something I found interesting. I found this time to be very nice considering the long days that I knew my friends were spending at school and with homework after. I figured that if I had spent the same amount of time everyday that kids in school did instead of the way I did it as well as not taking two months off school one winter I could have realistically finished 1.5 - 2 years early. This would of course be if I was pushing myself, I avoided stress and found a more relaxed self learning style to be better for me. Now speaking on the note about what you are identifying as the reason your wife wants to pursue this, I am an introvert and I can deal quite well with being alone. I can for sure see how a child with an extroverted personality might not deal well with this type of environment. It is not every kid who can spend hours a day at home with the dedication to learn and not play. You may find it beneficial to wait until your child is a bit older (maybe around grade 6-7) to see how they would be at learning from home. The other thing to consider at the younger stage of this is engagement. That is the best way to teach and to learn, to enjoy the process and to interact with what is going on. The first few years of school is not at all like the last few years. My cousin homeschool's her two kids and she takes advantage of the fact that they aren't limited to what a classroom can do. They take educational trips to different places and they learn about things that are outside of this boxed curriculum that a school would normally have to stick to to teach a class full of kids. I mention these things because I am not some statistic I am someone who was homeschooled and I know what it's like. I know that homeschooling was better for me. I got away from kids who were smoking pot and or cigarettes in middle school. I was able to finish at the same time as everyone else despite the fact that I spent less time per week doing schooling and taking off weeks at a time in addition to scheduled breaks. I had the freedom to learn on my time and learn extra things that would benefit me that aren't taught in schools. I got to avoid all the crap that happens at high school. But again this is me and my experience. Ultimately it will depend on your son and whoever will be doing the teaching. You can read all the stats and review what the benefits are but if the person isn't right for it then they are not and any viewpoint or potential brought forth in some article or paper won't make a difference. Now you have heard what I liked about homeschooling and the things it has done for me and a potential of what it can do for your son. I might make a suggestion that could solve all your points. Wait a year. Let your kid go to public schoo
This is an important point. It isn't a binary choice between the typical public school (government school) or homeschooling by yourself. There are charter schools, there are schools that run half days and you homeschooled the other half. There are schools that meet one day per week. There are schools where you select which classes to send them to school for and which to do at home.
I was surprised to learn that in my town of about 90,000 households, 1,000 of those homeschooled their kids. That's 1,000 partners to work with. Families share curriculums, there are homeschool sports teams who play against the government schools, and parents teach small classes of three or four other students. So maybe we'll have three or four kids from other families come over for math class, or business or computers, while our daughter goes to music class taught by a friend who is a career musician.
Figure 1,000 families is about 1,800 parents. There are probably some parents who are chemists, some professional musician somebody runs an art studio, etc. So I don't have to teach my daughter art - she can do that at her friend's mother's art studio, then I teach her and her friend computer and technology stuff.
Anyway, there are a LOT of different options. In my area there are "crunchy" homeschool groups, specifically non-crunchy groups ... many choices.
I can not remember when I had my first science class; I do remember science in 5th grade (10 to 11 years old). When does most places start science education? Tim S.
We only homeschooled for a year but here's how I see it:
Pros:
Academics - sky is the limit
Flexible Schedule
Can be tailored to suit the individual child
Have more control over who your kid spends their time with*
Cons:
Danger of controlling too much of your child's life*
Expense - you've got to provide all your own materials
Have to be careful of materials and programs made available to homeschoolers, - often have a political bent
Takes a lot of time to prepare and execute, - especially as the kids get older
"Slashdot is not an appropriate venue to unleash your bitterness."
/. and I think I've completely misinterpreted the whole thing.
WTF? Seriously? Man, a decade of frequenting
Pro: My son is a bajillion times ahead of what public schools were teaching. Music, science, mathematics, etc.
Con: When he went back to high-school for the "social" aspect, he was so far ahead he was bored and didn't perform well.
Now at 19, I fear the boredom has stuck and it has stifled his motivation. This, I believe, will be something he will have to overcome on his own, just as I did. I hope he finds his way soon.
This would be a good post to make on Reddit. ( Specifically http://www.reddit.com/r/AskRed... ) You'll have a larger sample size.
Some fairly positive results that I wasn't expecting to find http://www.cbsnews.com/news/ca...
I was homeschooled a while ago, under the same non-religious approach you seem to be taking (not that from what I saw of other homeschoolers that aspect really mattered).
For me, schooling at home was from just after sixth grade until I went to college - but my younger sisters were taken out of traditional school at the same time. One of them was homeschooled all the way from 1st grade until college.
I would say for all of us it was a big plus. The "social" aspect thing is actually the BEST part of homeschooling, being taken away during your most formative years from spending the majority of your time with people your own age, and instead interacting more with adults. If you think about it this is how people grew into adults for a LONG time until the modern factory sort of school system was introduced. It basically gives you a greater foundation of maturity and a better chance to discover who you are and what you like to do. When I went to college I felt a lot more self-assured about what I wanted than most people there, and peer pressure wasn't an issue as I felt comfortable making choices for myself.
It's not like there is no social interaction at all, I still saw friends from the public school all the time. I just didn't also spend my whole day with them. You can also join sports teams and other things that are traditionally social after-school activities, sometimes the local schools let you join for a fee, other times there are local homeschooling teams.
It's not hard to do a great job educating kids, there are a lot of options for places to get curriculum from, some of them you can get advisors to tailor the curriculum to specific interests of the child.
All that said it's a LOT of work, and requires a lot of commitment. I think it does pretty much require someone to be home - I mostly learned self-directed with my study topics set by my parents, but even so it's good to have someone around to ask questions or just to keep you on track.
If you do go ahead with homeschooling make sure to take advantage of the flexibility it offers you and go on educational trips from time to time.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Comment removed based on user account deletion
>. Most are no less social than standard for intelligent, literate people; football isn't the center of their life.
In my area, at least, there are several thousand kids being homeschooled and it is a social community. They take classes at each other's homes, do field trips together, have sports teams who play against traditional schools ... there is a strong social element, if you choose to engage in it.
As far as football, in one homeschooled family we're close to, the oldest boy looks like he just might be headed to the NFL. If not that's okay - he's getting excellent grades at a prestigious university.
This is sounding a lot like a situation my family is now dealing with, and the results weren't pretty.
My sister-in-law attempted to homeschool her daughter. It's a bit of a mystery why, because it definitely wasn't the usual religious or political reasons. The sister-in-law did not do well in high school, barely made it to graduation. I can only guess that she didn't want her daughter to have the same terrible experience with school that she had.
The end result was that starting at age 11, she kept her daughter at home, did not connect up with local school districts while moving to two different states, and apparently went from minimal schooling at the beginning to no schooling at all. Which should not have been a big surprise since she did so poorly in school herself. Her daughter ended up isolated from other kids her age, mostly just sitting in a room bored out of her mind. The daughter is now 17, the rest of the family has intervened and she's finally getting enrolled into a good small alternative school, where she'll be assessed to figure out where she needs to catch up, but it's going to take awhile because we know she needs some refresher courses on multiplication tables, for instance.
So you have got to ask yourself and your wife hard questions about why she feels qualified to teach when she couldn't even complete high school. Maybe adult life and the GED stuff got her up to normal functioning or maybe even better than usual - but probably not. What happens in the very real possibility that she finds she can't hack it as a teacher? Because the ability to teach is not in all of us, and if it was difficult to learn, it's going to be even more difficult to teach.
I had two cousins that were home schooled until high school where they graduated 1st and 2nd in their class. My aunt actually was a certified teacher- I think this is important. If you have misgivings about you wife's motivation and she really hasn't shown an interest in education I really think it would be a mistake.
I have 'home schooled' my kids in the summer and found that creating lesson plans and going over their assignments after work was exhausting. It is a huge commitment.
love is just extroverted narcissism
I have a few thoughts for you, and a few responses to the comments so far.
First, teaching is hard. I'm not just talking about the amount of time it takes (as one post noted.) Teaching is a skill that is learned and honed over years of practice. I taught math for three years, and during my last year I just began to grasp how far I had to go to become a great teacher. Just as it took me five years as an apprentice carpenter before they let me try basic carpentry, it takes years to develop the skills needed. It is much more than presenting information out of a book.
Second, homeschooling can work and work well. I had plenty of students who were homeschooled that excelled in my classes (I taught at a community college.) One student's experience should boost your confidence. She came to the college at 15 (in our state students can enroll at that age.) She struggled with long division when she started, and within three years had aced Calc 3 and became a tutor in the math lab. My point is that even if there are deficiencies, older students can catch up with remarkable speed.
Third, I would be careful when looking for statistics comparing public/private/charter/homeschooling. I believe to be correct a previous post that said homeschooled children rank in the 70-80th percentile. I also would believe stats showing private and certain charter school students outperforming public school students. But, as we know, numbers can be misleading.
We know that the single best predictor of student success is parental involvement. By far (and I mean really, really far), parents have more of an effect on outcome than anything else, including which type of schooling they get. Parents who choose something other than the local public schools are, almost by definition, engaged parents. I'd bet if you ruled out disengaged parents from the public schools, publics would be right on par with the rest.
Finally, be careful when trying to teach your own children, especially math. On the first day of every class, I would tell students to be careful about getting help from a spouse, parent, or sibling. I have no idea why this is true, but every semester I had a half-dozen students crying in my office because their husband/wife/father got frustrated while trying to help. I have the patience of a saint, and yet I have found myself feeling a tinge of frustration while helping my daughter with her math homework. Don't know why, and don't care. Just be aware of it.
It doesn't really matter if you home school or not. What matters is your level of involvement. Those kids who perform better do so not because they were home-schooled, but because the parents were involved. The trick is making sure you spend time on academics with your kids outside of the school environment. Most well-educated parents already do that which is why you see kids from well-off areas doing better than those from not-so-well-off areas. Single parents who work two jobs just keep a roof over the kids head don't have time to be involved in there kids education.
The social aspect of school may be overrated, but it will probably teach them about "following orders" and working under someone else (ie teacher). And pushing through undesirable situations (don't give up just because some ***twat doesn't like you or even fails you). It'll also give them opportunities to learn cooperation and working with others on projects toward an end goal.
Your kids don't learn to socialize.
That, more than education, will affect them for the rest of their lives.
You have to remember that at some point your kids are going to leave home (you hope) and have to make decisions for themselves about their own education at university
That is *exactly* the most compelling thing about homeschooling. You usually have very little choice about what classes teach, about how far you can customize what you want to learn.
Homeschooling is WAY more like college in that you get to pursue what interest you. Parents should also make sure a foundation is being learned but you can explore topics far deeper than you ever can in public school - exactly the kind of preparation that helps you when you leave home, because you are learning to make educational choices earlier, and learning to study on your own earlier as well. It leads to you feeling a lot better prepared when you get to college than most of the people there...
I know, because I was homeschooled before I went to college.
A further thing to consider is whether the academics really are better for home schooled kids.
Pretty much any external test says yes, in fact it is. You really think that government approved curriculum thought by teachers that cannot be fired is going to be better than a carefully selected set of things thought by people that really care about you?
Don't forget that homeschoolers also have the option sometimes to take classes at the local school anyway, or community college classes for advanced topics well before they go to "real" college.
I'm sure that you can cram facts into their heads
If you are doing that you may as well not homeschool, that's not at all what it's like for any homeschooler I've ever known.
this does not turn out well at university when they are required to understand and apply knowledge rather than just regurgitate it
Because everyone knows all the prepping for standardized tests public school kids have to take has nothing at all to do with regurgitation! Oh wait. In fact that's the whole point of the public school system, is prepared regurgitation when the bell is rung.
Lastly I'd also question whether your wife is really capable of home schooling at all.
Real teaching is about helping kids when they are stuck, but mostly letting them learn. Real teaching is not learning how to force kids to regurgitate facts, which is what public school teachers are by and large trained to do. Real teaching is also about drawing up a good curriculum, but there are MANY resources to help homeschooling parents do just that.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Education isn't just about what is in the class curricula, it is also about learning social skills, and just learning to deal with life. This is particularly true for a smart kid. I was an above average performer in school academically, but I had a tough time with social skills, and with learning to respect people I perceived to be my intellectual inferiors. Public school helped me with that a lot. I was exposed to people from all walks of life and learned that even if you are the Smartest Motherfucker in the Room(tm) that doesn't mean the other people are worthless or that you are better and oh, often you aren't the smartest even when you think you are.
Also it can be pretty hard to teach a really well rounded curriculum when it is just one person. You never know the stuff that may end up being valuable. For me? Various English class and speech class, bar none. They helped me overcome my fear of speaking in front of groups, and honed my communication skills. That is the second thing people will judge you on (after your looks) and it has helped me professionally plenty. All the math I did? Not useful, despite being in computers. Algebra is all I needed.
Plus for smart kids something that can be valuable to learn is that ya, maybe things move at a slower pace than you'd like, you need to STFU, deal with it, and do the work because actual jobs will have that too. You are not going to find some magic position where you are always stimulated, always challenged. Real life will be mired in BS too, so learn to deal with it.
I'm not trying to say public school is perfect, but in general I still feel it is by far the best option.
Also where I work (a university) we notice the same: The public school kids tend to do the best on entrance tests over all. A diploma and given SAT score gets you in the door, but you still have to pass university administered proficiency tests to determine what level of English and math you get in. You see a lot more home school kids getting stuck in the remedial classes than public school kids, including some smart home schooled kids. They just didn't learn what they needed to for university, in the university's estimation.
It's all about socialization, that's pretty important at that age (at any age, really).
Generally you can find some sort of part-time kindergarten (half days or alternate days), that's a nice way to ease into the school system for your wife and your child. Don't underestimate the difficulty for your wife--but ultimately it is better for both of them to spend some time apart.
If after a year or two you decide to homeschool for awhile, then that's totally fine.
I went to a private school for about 6 years, then completed my education at the local public school, going on to get a couple undergraduate degrees and a postgraduate degree. My wife dropped out of high school and got her equivalency many years later. Now, she wants to homeschool our son.
I don't see this ending well.
It is not often these days that you such an extraordinary difference in education between husband and wife. I've seen marriages strained and broken over less.
Is she thinking of a religious or secular education?
Traditional or modern approaches to what should be taught and how to teach it?
I can't speak to why your wife dropped out of school but you both need to be honest about whether she has the makings of a good teacher. You both need to be honest about why she wants to homeschool her son.
Homeschooled children run the risk of being socially stunted
I agree with much of what you said before this (homeschooling is not for everyone), but it is very wrong to say there's any risk of social stunting for homeschoolers. In fact the risk is far less for homeschoolers - because they spend the majority of the day interacting with other adults, learning how to behave like an adult.
In school you are spending a lot of time learning behavior from other kids who also do not really know what good behavior is, how healthy interaction with others works. You learn that a lot better homeschooling than you do at school, as a result you are more mature going into college.
Are you sure she has the perseverance to homeschool your children? (Amount of perseverance required of her depends on the amount of perseverance of your children.)
This is a pretty key factor, how much will they be able to learn self-directed without her watching over them all the time?
If they can learn some math and reading/writing with minimal guidance, you are probably set. The rest can be tailored to children interests which makes them a lot more self-directed anyway.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Your wife clearly doesn't value education.
I feel sorry for your doomed kid.
I suspect she is a bimbo.
I was homeschooled K-12 and loved it. I never had to spend more than 2-3hrs a day doing school work (but would often spend time on my own projects).
The biggest benefit I think is the customization you can give your children. Do they like math? If so, you can let them run free doing algebra to their hearts content. You can get them more advanced curriculum. On the other hand, I struggled putting my thoughts on paper. While this would have likely held me back in school, my parents just let it go. For whatever reason, once I hit my teen years, it just was not a problem any more.
Another really great benefit was being able to travel during the school year. We could go to all of the local museums and attractions while other kids were in school. And we were also plugged into local homeschooling groups so we still got to do things like field trips and sports. Overall, if you have a parent who is excited and willing to do it, I think you'll find it is a positive experience.
However, it's obvious these parents care about their child's education
In reality this is the primary thing that really matters to be successful at homeschooling.
And it's a huge step up from public school teachers where, at best, you MAY get a teacher who also cares that much. But if not, you have wasted an entire year that many things could have been learned in.
Like you say, there are many possible options. But homeschooling can give you great benefits if a more open model of education works for you and your kids... and if it doesn't, you better be thinking very strongly about either college makes any sense for them either.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
My wife and I home schooled our children for many years And then sent them to school. I will say the kids just plain liked each other more when they were home schooled. It's not hard to do, and you can always send them to school later.
No one can raise your kids better than you and your wife
Not for religious reasons. I was in a good suburban public school district but bored as fuck by 3rd grade. Every new subject I would soak up like a sponge for two weeks then be totally out of sync with the class and get bored. In 4th grade they put me in their "advanced" track but it didn't help. Part way through 5th grade my mother pulled me out of school. From there I read a LOT, on many subjects, and did interesting things.
It hasn't hurt me. I make a six figure income in the tech field, am scientifically/generally literate, have successfully pursued hobbies like flying airplanes, DIY electronics, and so on. Note that this was with zero formal schooling from the 5th grade until college.
If/when I have kids, they will not be going to any form of school if I have anything to say about the matter. That isn't to say they will receive no education, but the education they will receive will be in reading, reasoning, and research with a healthy side of learning how to learn. I think that's what people really need, and I don't think public school does a good job teaching those skills.
We home-schooled our children. One already has her baccalaureate degree and will soon pursue her masters; while her sister, is married with three kids, pursuing her baccalaureate transitioning to her dream, a Nursing degree.
I don't want to brag, but if I was to home-school my kid I would not give him a mere masters, I'd give him a kick-ass diploma, like a PhD in Awesomeness. And I'd take it away if he doesn't eat his vegetables.
lucm, indeed.
While you're off at work making sure you can feed everyone and continue with those house payments, who is making sure your kid isn't goofing off? Most kids don't have the discipline for homeschooling, especially when they're in a place where there's always something more interesting to do than the school work in front of them.
You also wind up depriving your child of the ability to develop necessary social skills and "street smarts" which only come from being exposed to the unwashed masses. Don't assume that just because you failed at aspects of it that they will too. You need to allow them a chance to stand on their own two feet if you expect them to walk, let alone run.
BeauHD. Worst editor since kdawson.
I've noticed a lot of people educated at public schools range from socially maladjusted to simply stupid. Why, some of them can't even figure out how to create a Slashdot login!
There are a lot of people who behave like they are still in high-school - where do you think all of the typical nonsense of cliques or bullying is learned from, and than carried forward into college and business and day to day interactions...
Home-schooled kids by and large you don't notice, because why would you? They are more professional, less crass and boorish. They don't attract notice except in passing to note someone seems strangely confident in themselves. But then you forget about them when little Timmy (attending public schools all his life) accidentally staples his finger to a desk.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
If you're a US taxpayer, then those public schools are there in some small part because of you. They are a small army of individuals who were trained just for teaching and educating children. Go investigate and see if you have a good local school and a good school district. If it's "ok" but could be better, then figure out how to get involved. Get elected to the local school board. (It'll be a real eye-opener, and a big commitment, since usually it's an unpaid, elected position.) Make your local public schools better for not just your children but everyone's children.
And if you don't want to go quite that far, but do discover that the local public schools are above state average, then be an involved parent. Studies do show that students whose parents are actively engaged with them and their school are higher achievers. We're not talking about "helicopter parents" but ones who give guidance, set a high bar for their child, help them expect good things from themselves and help them cope and correct course when things don't go as well as they wanted.
As parents, you're always teaching your children, even if you don't mean to be. Your actions are some of the most powerful teaching tools you have, for good or for bad. While your child is young, go look at your local schools, talk to the local home schooling groups, check them out, grade them yourself, check their backgrounds, look at their track records. Good groups, home or public, should be quick to help you find their positive achievements. You need to mine your own data, in your local area. People here, we may have good intentions, but what we think is important in education, may be completely different from what you have where you live.
Good public schools are working to hit their stride, raise levels of achievement, and change the life-long trajectory of as many students as they can. Do they have a drop out rate below, or significantly below the state average? That's typically a tell-tale sign. Do they have their own alternative high-school? If they do, then that typically means they take drop-outs very seriously, and aren't willing to let them go without a fight. How much of their Special Education do they do in-house? If they're working to keep more kids with high needs inside their system instead of just taking the easy way and farming them out to special schools, making that a last resort, then they truly take educating every child, every day...seriously. It's not just their career, it's their passion. You want people of passion educating our children. They care about the outcome of every child who walks in the door, personally. It's their mission to get them to succeed.
If you don't find that at your local public school...then that's the sort of person you need to be when homeschooling. It needs not not just be your career to school your child, it needs to be something you jump out of bed, excited to start the day, type of passion. If you don't have that at the public school, and you don't have it at home, it's time to find a private school that will meet that need.
Public education has been a family business for my entire life. I'm the black sheep, I went into IT. My siblings are teachers, and my father is a retired educator and school administrator. I've watched our local schools very closely for well over a decade, after my father retired. Good schools attract great teachers...rock star teachers, because they all share a passion for changing the life trajectory of a student. Whatever school you decide to put your child in, make sure it has that sort of staff in it.
There are very good public schools, and poor ones. There are great homeschoolers, and ones that are overwhelmed. You're going to have to look at your local options, and make the best decision you can. And remember: If things don't go according to plan, change the plan. Set a good example and help your child make good decisions.
Awk! Pieces of eight. Pieces of eight. Pieces of seven... ERROR: General Protection Fault. [Paroty Error.]
Nursing degree? That's certainly quite an achievement!
Aside from my memories of public school, mostly traumatic, I subbed K-12 for a couple of years for a view from the otherside. American public education compares well enough with other countries up to about the fourth grade, after which it is a race to the bottom. The student subculture becomes increasingly resistant to and contemptuous of learning, which is just so not cool. We were paid more to sub middle school; we called it "combat pay." So seriously consider sparing your children middle school. For some who survive with curiosity intact in spite of middle school, high school can be a learning experience, but for too many it is a wasteland. Our son went to public school K-4, skipping first grade. We often read to him and I recall when he was in kindergarten he announced he could read. I flipped a few chapters ahead in the book I was reading to him and said, "Read this." He read without the slightest hesitation or fumbling, "Compsognathus was a small dinosaur that lived in the late Cretaceous." So I believed him. His fourth grade teacher was good, but I had seen things to come so we secular homeschooled him and were not in league with other homeschoolers in the area who were all religiously motivated. The so called 'gifted programs', all the ones in our area, were a bad joke. I suppose I wanted him to be like me, an autodidactic, which I didn't learn to be in school. He learned to learn and before high school he tested into college level in most subjects. After monitoring classes in one of the top rated high schools in the country that offered a lot of AP classes, he was put off that it took most teachers 10 minutes to get the students to pretend to focus. At thirteen he started college. He did go to a local high school one semester with two foreign exchange students we had taken in "for anthropological research" before going back to college. With an AS in CS he decided not to go to university as he could learn more and faster on his own and thought it would slow him down. He had wanted to get his GED, but was too young at the time, so near the end of college he got it. He is now, early 20's, working IT and doing well thank you. If I recall, I learned about /. from him, so educators all.
it is very wrong to say there's any risk of social stunting for homeschoolers. In fact the risk is far less for homeschoolers - because they spend the majority of the day interacting with other adults, learning how to behave like an adult.
I very strongly disagree with this statement. Adolescents should learn how to interact with adults, sure - but far more important to their social development is interacting with non-adults.
How do you deal with your first crush, your first boy/girl friend? How do you deal with your first bully? Who is your best friend, or your worst enemy? What's your first group of friends? All these need to be peers, and there is no substitute for having these experiences (for better or worse) younger rather than older. So many things about adolescence are the greatest thing ever in your life, and so many things about adolescence break your heart in a way you never thought possible. But experiencing these things at the same age that your peers do - in a way that you can only experience by being immersed with your peers - is the only way to be on an equal footing emotionally, socially and romantically with everyone else you will be dealing with in your young adult life.
I have no doubt that homeschooling can provide a better academic experience. I absolutely do not believe that it can provide the tremendous opportunity to do stupid things, make an ass of yourself in front of everyone, have your heart broken, be an asshole, and find yourself - for better or worse - that swimming in the great pool of co-educational age-equivalent fellow idiots called attending public school can. College is where I learned how to be a useful adult, but public high school was where I learned what not to do, which was in its own way just as important.
Also, I was a horny teenage boy and there were horny teenage girls there. Absurdly painful, awkward and embarrassing - but worth it all in the long run. And the best way I can think of for becoming a (more or less) well adjusted adult.
Your mileage, of course, may vary.
"95% of all Slashdot
I'm saying the social interactions and the incidental learning you aren't graded on is much more useful.
You learn all that homeschooling, only much better because day to day you are interacting with a much wider age range.
That's actually the main area where homeschoolers turn out much better than kids going to public school.
By far the most important thing you get out of school is proving to others you not only know the material presented, but are capable of sitting down and dong mountains of mostly busy work and doing it well. That's what colleges want to see
That sounds like a fucking horrible college, why would you pay $60k/year for that nonsense? What value would ding four years of busywork bring you? What kind of awful life would it prepare you for if that was your job afterward?
That wasn't anything like the college I went to. Yes SOME classes required a lot of work, but it wasn't busywork - it was *thinking* work. The same kind of work I did when homeschooling... the same kind they generally do *not* do in public schools. Homeschooling, if t can work for parent and child, is a vastly better preparation for how you will actually learn and work in college.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
is pointless. All the actual, (good) teachers I know are basically fine with it. The concept also makes a lot of sense as there is currently far too much variation in school curriculum from state to state and sometimes from district to district or school to school. If a kids moves from one state to another and finds they are basically a year or more behind or ahead of they were learning, it's not good for anyone. We also need high school graduates to actually, you know, be ready for college instead of having to take a bunch of remedial courses just to get up to speed on several subjects.
The people developing common core are, by and large, have a great deal of knowledge, experience, and expertise in teaching and developing consistent and engaging curriculum.
Just one example.
Seriously, I don't understand the big stink, mostly coming from idiots who randomly decided that if "the government" had anything to do with it, it must be heinous and evil. Those folks need to get over their own issues and actually LOOK AT the course material. It's not perfect but there's some really really good stuff in there and it's leaps and bounds better than the previous status-quo at numerous school districts across pretty much all states.
some girl I didn't even know decided to kick me in the nuts
Happened to me all the time until I figured out that they were not playing hard to get when they were saying "no"
lucm, indeed.
pros:
You get to shape your kid into a little version of yourself. He/she ends up accepting your worldview as the truth.
cons:
You get to shape your kid into a little version of yourself. He/she ends up accepting your worldview as the truth.
You mean decades of educational decline due to the overburdening of the staff by stupid and lazy parents who all think their kid is a special snowflake but can't be bothered to actually do their job as parents, and instead expect the schools do it for them, then blame it on the schools and the evil gubment when their undisciplined, entitled brats don't excel??
Fixed that for you.
So what you're saying is for all that extra work, you got average results.
Your wife, a dropout from high school but now has a GED, she sounds like an excellent educator. I'd like to bring my kids over so they can go to your home school too.
I can see it now, lots and lots of bible education, little distraction from pesky topics like science.
The future leaders of America, certainly, under your wife's tutelage.
p.s. she can google the tutelage word, apologize to her in advance for using such big words, but maybe she can work them into a spelling lesson.
My personal experience from having a childhood friend that was home schooled is that home schooling often means less teachers, which in the long run means a more narrow view of the world.
Granted, I'm basing this off of 1 person, so it might not be that accurate.
Also, I think most universities are moving towards valuing social skills more and more, rather than academic knowledge, which also should be weighed in.
I think that it is important to give a child as broad a view of the world as possible and I think a public school supported with some help from the parents after school is the best way. One should not leave everything up to a single teacher or even a school. If you have a kid that is ahead of the pack, then they will suffer in public school and the same if they are behind the pack, in those cases help from the parents can balance things out.
Personally I might consider home schooling if I'm certain that my kid was bright, curious and inquisitive enough to handle it. Most parents think their kids are that bright, but few are and chances that your kid is are slim.
That being said, a bright kid will flourish anywhere with the right upbringing and support from the parents.
Somehow homeschooled kids score across the board higher than public education.
Five areas of academic pursuit were measured. In reading, the average home-schooler scored at the 89th percentile; language, 84th percentile; math, 84th percentile; science, 86th percentile; and social studies, 84th percentile. In the core studies (reading, language and math), the average home-schooler scored at the 88th percentile.
Foot, meet mouth.
The reason colleges prefer homeschooled kids is because they score better on standardized tests across the board.
Our family has four children and we have taken advantage of public, private, and homeschool. A lot of people express opinions about homeschooling. Almost all of them have no clue about the topic. In our experience home schooled children are well adjusted and relate to children across grade boundaries. Children in public schools are conditioned to treat others differently based upon their age. Children in public schools also, by and large, are heavily influenced by peers of the same age and don't get much mentoring of others. With home school groups there is an environment that encourages older students mentoring younger without the negative bias and caste system that is present in so many private and public schools. Regarding academics our kids are doing great.
I very strongly disagree with this statement. Adolescents should learn how to interact with adults, sure - but far more important to their social development is interacting with non-adults.
But the thing is you get a LOT of that anyway when homeschooling, as you spend time with friends when out of school. Or with other homeschoolers.
You get much more interaction with a wider range of ages, which is very useful.
How do you deal with your first crush, your first boy/girl friend? Who is your best friend, or your worst enemy?
A little confused here since that works exactly like it does for public school kids.
You just have more ability to avoid "enemies". Just like in real life. Unlike being in prison you get to choose who you interact with mostly. You learn you have real choice, something you can't really learn at school because in fact you don't have real choice about who is around you mostly.
I absolutely do not believe that it can provide the tremendous opportunity to do stupid things
Well lets see. While I was homeschooling, I used to do things like pretend to rally drive in a Honda civic going around 100MPH on gravel roads. And make my own fireworks.
You are SO SO WRONG on that point. Kids have just as much freedom to do stupid things. More really because you can justify raw materials purchases as part of education to your parents, them being unaware of intent...
Also, I was a horny teenage boy and there were horny teenage girls there.
Really confused why you don't seem to think homeschoolers do anything in groups. They usually in fact do more kind of extra-curricular things than public school kids do... while you were sitting at a desk forcibly stopped from interacting with all other students in your vicinity for hours on end, I was doing things like going to museums with other kids, including other teenage girls...
As I said, homeschooling is a far greater experience in socialization because you get a broader range of opportunity, in frankly much better environments that more closely mirror what you will experience in real life. Would you rather learn how to talk to women in a museum or a prison?
I met my wife taking swing dancing lessons, instead of at a bar... because I was inclined to meet and talk to other people while learning or experiencing, instead of sitting placidly. How is that not an awesome social background to bestow on someone? It's a lot more Dos Equis than Barney Fife.
When I was in grade school before I was homeschooled, I was generally pretty shy. The school environment was just making me more so. Some of my "socialization" Involved being hit in the back of a head with a brick, and being tossed around a bit during recess at times - when I didn't care to fight anyone. How was that healthy? There was no reason for it other than I was wiry and a little smarter than many of the other kids. I can tell you hasn't mattered at all knowing how to take a brick to the head in my adult life. What has mattered is being a lot more confident around other people than I used to be even though I'm still inclined to be an introvert. That was something I learned homeschooling, not from public school.
Again, I am not saying homeschooling is for everyone. But for anyone that can derive good academic value from it, you can have huge socialization benefits that go through college into your adult life.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Agreed on all points, with one exception. If one or both parents are already teachers and actually DO have the expertise, plus the motivation to excel at it, it might be fine, otherwise, at the very least they need group homeschooling with rotating teachers, and/or part (structured) online schooling, and/or part public classroom time. I'd argue that in most cases, public schools can be far superior to any and all of the above if augmented by some additional home learning as you mention. You can still get involved in their schooling without having to "own" the whole thing. Volunteering at the school part time is also an option. If the schools in your area really are particularly bad, you chose unwisely where to raise a family and might want to reconsider your decision to stay there, or start belt tightening to try to pay for private school.
We've been homeschooling for 5 years and our kids are doing great. We started doing it because one of our kids was hard of hearing and wouldn't do well in a normal (noisy) elementary classroom.
Common Concern: Socialization. Our kids interact with other kids most every day of the week. A lot of people 'homeschool' but don't keep their children at home -- we sign our kids up for education co-ops, online classes, science camps, math circles, programming classes, writing workshops, karate, fencing, etc... and they mix with a variety of kids (usually multiple ages) and adults.
Pros: Our kids take a strong interest in their school work because we find classes that work for them. They are doing great in the classes they love (my 6th grader is about ready for calculus and group theory).
Cons: Cost. The virtual private school we've created is quite expensive. And if we didn't live a mile from Microsoft in one of the best school districts in the country, I don't think we would be able to find as many great classes.
Where I grew up I had insanely good teachers with great reputation among the parents - including my all time favorite teacher, the high school math professor, who retired like three times and the parents begged him back into teaching, - and general education you did not have to pay for, but even if you did, it would have had to have been extremely expensive before I, if I had to walk a mile in my parents shoes, would have decided not to purchase the awesome quality education they were providing. It's like a free market, if the price is too high you DIY or buy elsewhere, and even if it's cheap but you're getting a crappy education, you can also DIY, like on Ebay price determines whether something is a good deal or not, and you can often have an amazing education pretty much for free (such as state supported), or you can overpay for private school for the quality and value you get there. DIY homeschooling is always an option, and individual citizens have to decide for themselves what's best for them and their children. For instance, in 2nd grade, when I took my homework home and asked my mother to help me solve a system of 2 simultaneous linear equations of two variables, my mother was unable to help, and my 2nd grade teacher when I was 8 years old could not believe how stupid all the parents were, because almost none could solve two simultaneous equations of two independent variables, which to her was piece of cake, and she found it easier to teach it to us, the kids, than to the stuck in an old muddy rut brained parents who were like you can't teach an old fox new tricks. That was the time my mother gave up teaching me, having taught me all the numbers, letter, how to read write way before 1st grade, and my teacher telling her to quit teaching me stuff in advance because I'm extremely bored out of my mind and naughty in class and disturbing. So for homeschooling, parents have to decide whether they can teach their kids simple stuff like a system of simultaneous linear equations of two independent variables, as a taste for what's required to begin with to home school, and otherwise they are at the mercy of professionals to provide the basics to their children.
Some people in the US are like I'm supposed to teach their kids. And my answer to that is that if you knock my house down, cut my grass, bust up the trunk and smash the windows of my car in where I bought a junk house and tried to make a go of it and parked an old car there, then teach your own fucking kids and I don't have to do it.
now my eldest son is talking about buying his parents a house.
The fuck did I do to deserve that??
(his besties have gone on from state secondary to community college, the unemployment register, dead end shelf-stacking and zero hours contracts, even jail, he's buying his mom and dad a fucking HOUSE!?)
Political debates have me rolling my eyes so much I think I got optical whiplash. I should sue. - Foamy The Squirrel
Yes. The action oriented public school system worked wonders for our previous neighbor. She got involved with some stand up kids who got he to smoke pot at 12 and engage in sexual behavior with another girl. So yeah - public school is great.
The reason colleges prefer homeschooled kids is because they score better on standardized tests across the board.
This is true for the homeschooled children that do pursue a collage career. However, those who do fail so bad that they don't even apply for college aren't counted. This skews the numbers pretty badly.
Unless a parent is willing to invest the time it takes to home-school, it's probably not a good idea. It's not something you can do in an hour a day, in-between laundry and watching TV. It requires dedicated effort, and endless long hours. Including time on schooling oneself, to be ready to teach the children.
Some parents manage, and those are the success stories we hear about, with higher than average SAT/ACT scores. But some parents don't have the discipline, dedication or talent, and those kids end up enlisting or staring out the drive through window looking for Mr. Right.
Forget the research, ignore all of the imaginary educational progress that society claims to have made over the past few decades. The well educated mommy always knows best!
I would only have to ask myself, what would -I- want if I were that child?
I already know the answer.
Sent from my ENIAC
the whole point of why home schooling is perhaps not the best option that in the public system you don't get to choose what you teach them.
the "great" thing about homeschooling is that they get to pursue what they want and that's also the worst about it, because well, you could just as well start calling it no-schooling at that point.
and keep in mind that home schooling will require that at least one parent stays home every day to teach, there's not much security in that - either one of you might drop dead - and to keep the kid able to transition smoothly into the public school system in case you need to change the arrangement then you would need to match the curriculum anyhow to some degree.
if you want to create your own republic of dave then sure, homeschooling is the only option. but if you want to control them 100% and control what shows they look and what friends they have and what news they read.. then they're fucked already.
world was created 5 seconds before this post as it is.
very little. The people complaining about Common Core are almost 100% uninformed whiners. The other fraction of a percent actually looked at it in detail and discovered that the math is too hard for them so their children obviously shouldn't have to learn it, or found some non-Christian-like material in the reading and declared the whole thing evil.
I'm not crazy about some of the reading choices, but then again I was shown Night and Fog in school at a young age, as well as the boobies in Romeo and Juliet, and a close up vaginal birth, all well before high school, then later on, DICK (the documentary, which is very NSFW so be careful if Googling it). Nobody needed Common Core for curriculum like that to show up at the time, so I don't think we can really object to Common Core on those grounds alone at this point, though we can of course provide feedback and suggest potential future changes, or possibly even get directly involved and if necessary object to specific material before our children are exposed to it if we really so choose. Otherwise it's just throwing out the baby with the bath water.
Survival skills? Like you drop them in the middle of a forest with only a compass, a topographic map and a knife and tell them to return home? Cool!
70-80th percentile on achievement tests on average? Many Home Schooled kids may do very well but I'm just a tad bit doubtful of your numbers. First off, neither resource provided meets the criteria of peer reviewed research. Secondly, and perhaps more importantly, you will be hard pressed to find a research study that can accurately assess the number of students that are educated outside of our public and private educational systems. Long story short, if you are going to support your argument with "research" then you had best learn the difference between hippie-granola-jesus-crispie-treats and professional research articles.
I was homeschooled K-12 and wouldn't have chosen any other path. I'll be getting my math PhD in the next year or two, and I absolutely credit a great deal of the creativity and independence necessary to achieve this to my parents' choice of homeschooling.
I think I've had a fairly normal social life, with the standard ups and downs.
Homeschooling is a big commitment for parents, and it's important to do it in a supportive environment. I grew up in a city large enough to have a lot of like-minded homeschoolers. By "like-minded" homeschoolers, I mean, in my case, families homeschooling for academic reasons, NOT religious reasons. Homeschooling to expose your kids to the real world is entirely different from homeschooling to PROTECT your kids from knowledge of the real world so that the ideas you teach them cannot be challenged (indeed, these are pretty much opposite goals). People homeschooling for non-religious reasons sometimes feel isolated if they aren't in a metropolitan area, or otherwise near others homeschooling for non-religious reasons, I believe.
Bear in mind that people tend to be terrible at imagining how others can have different experiences from them. I think this is responsible for a lot of the noise out there about folks wondering how homeschoolers socialize and similar types of concerns. I personally cannot imagine how anyone could sit through classes 5 days a week, 9 months a year, for 12 years and not die of boredom, much less pick up creativity or independence or passion for knowledge in the process. But people do, so my imagination is clearly lacking. Similarly, the folks who argue that school is necessary for socialization just cannot imagine how anyone could pick up social skills in a different way than they did. It's a lack of imagination, not a real issue.
I don't know whether I would homeschool my (hypothetical) children, but I wouldn't be worried about any of the standard social concerns. It would depend on my partner, our jobs, our local schools, AND our kids. Homeschooling works for some kids, not for others. This is probably the most important point that doesn't get mentioned much.
My wife and I (mostly my wife) home schooled our son through 5th grade and then transitioned him to a private school. My wife and I are both college educated, I have a job that pays well enough that my wife does not need to work outside the home and as such has chosen to be a home wife/mom.
The main drawbacks to home schooling that we encountered were...
1) It's a lot of work, the parent doing the schooling should consider it their job. If that parent also needs/wants to work outside the home I would find it difficult to recommend home schooling.
2) There is some expense (but a lot less than the private school he attends now).
3) It gets harder as they get older and the material become more difficult. My wife (who is not a math person) had no difficulty teaching all of the math up through 5th grade, but now that he is doing algebra, helping with math homework is something that falls to me.
4) Ignorant people wondered if we were in some sort of cult and were attempting to teach our son that the earth is flat, or that he would become some sort of sociopath because they figure we probably just lock him in a closet with a pile of text books.
The benefits that we enjoyed were...
1) Massive flexibility, during my son's 4th grade year he was studying American history so we incorporated a 4-week trip to the east coast into his program for the year. He was able to see in person many of the famous historical locations that he had, up to that point, only read about. My son probably did 10 times as many field trips by the end of 5th grade as I did in my entire 13 years of public K-12 education.
2) Class size, in every education funding debate I hear, one of the biggest things that teacher's are always asking for is a lower student:teacher ratio. Homeschooling is the absolute sweet spot there, the student teacher ratio in our home school was 1:1.
3) Tailored lesson plans, our son's teacher was the person in the world who knows his strengths & weaknesses the best. I don't think I can overstate this, no teacher will ever know your kids as well as you do or be able to customize the way they instruct them to the same degree. For example when he was younger our son had some vision issues that required special glasses and vision therapy, this caused him to struggle with reading. My wife was able to compensate for this by using more audio book in his lessons while we worked through the reading issues. I think it's pretty likely that without this ability to fit the teaching style to his needs he would have struggled badly in a typical classroom.
4) How many traditional schools let you come to class in your pajamas?
A couple other thoughts...
1) People often wonder why you would want to do yourself that a professional educator has been extensively trained to do. I think this sort of misses the mark, my wife and I were not doing what a professional teacher does (manage a classroom full of kids from many different family backgrounds with very different individual strengths/weaknesses and do it on a very tight schedule).
2) There are TONs of groups supporting home schoolers (at least in our area). There are several great Co-ops where kids can sign up for classes in area that parents feel they are not equipped to teach (e.g. our son was able to take classes like Archery and Robotics at the co-op that would not have been available at a traditional elementary school.
In the end I think the decision will depend a lot on your personal circumstances, if you don't feel good about your local public schools and cannot afford private school then home schooling is worth considering. Are your kids well outside the norms (either above or below) in some areas, if so then home schooling will allow you do adapt their education to help them catch up or allow them to excel. How does your wife get along with your kids? If they already butt heads over many things then making her mom and teacher may not be the best plan; as our son approached the teen years it was more and more difficult for her to act as both mom and teacher and that was a factor in our change from home school to traditional school.
That's my $0.02 worth.
I don't specifically dislike homeschooling, but growing up in the rural South, nearly 95% of parents and children are homeschooled for the wrong reasons. Almost all of those kids end up on welfare for life as adults because they are incapable of even the most basic teenage-capable tasks. They just used it as an excuse to not go to school, and most of the time the parents would just look up the test answers and the kids wouldn't ever even open a book.
Many parents seem to think homeschooling is an excuse to not have to teach their kids hard stuff and hurt their feelings because they can't learn it well, or would prefer to indoctrinate their children religiously instead of teach them about the world. Don't be those parents.
On the other hand, I have seen some very rare bright examples who were homeschooled, but most of the ones I come across are generally much more ignorant of a broad range of knowledge than their peers, and it shows.
Remember that homeschooling is adding another 12 hour day, 5 days a week, to the already 24 hour job of being a parent. If you have the financial freedom, wealth and understanding of knowledge, and the dedication to do it, more power to you.
This is true for the homeschooled children that do pursue a collage career. However, those who do fail so bad that they don't even apply for college aren't counted. This skews the numbers pretty badly.
Try again.
To summarize: .| . 3.16 .| 58.6% .. | . 3.12 .| . 3.13 .| 54.2% .| . 3.18 .| 51.5% .| . 3.46 .| 66.7%
SchoolType | 1yr GPA | 4yr GPA | 4yr graduation rate
Public . . | . 3.12
Private
Catholic . | . 3.13
Home . . . | . 3.41
Ya know what, I was home schooled. I did home schooling for kindy, primary, high and university, and you know what, whenever i went to the school to do the exams i got 100% for every exam and test i ever did right throughout school and university. I graduated with honors from the top Australian university and now earn in excess on 2 million dollars a year and im only 24. I credit home schooling. My parents on the other hand went to state school and have both been cleaners their whole lifes. They raised me in abject poverty and now regret all their lifes decisions they ever made.
I'm from the Government, and I'm here to help. As per your completed request form "Stroke, Period, Question (2015-F)", I will provide a link to a sample of material from the new Common Core curriculum.
For your own good, it is also suggested you learn our "new and improved" arithmetic.
If you manage to help your offspring escape the public (re)education camp then please ensure they are similarly confused and indoctrinated, Citizen.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
I made management after a couple of years and was afforded more schedule-leeway... bam, right into the public system they went.
Sounds like your company sucks.. :-) What if you tried to make the company a bit more parent friendly place to work in, now that you are in management and have more schedule-leeway. A happy worker is a good worker..
Ugh, did you really have to shorten "benefits" to "bennies"?
[[Citation Needed]]
Because, seriously, the accomplishments you list aren't all that impressive and certainly aren't notably better than kids I've known who went to public schools. So either, a) you're not aware that your children are painfully average, b) all four suffer from some learning disability that public schools failed to address, or c) you resided in the country's absolute worst school district or suffered from some other severe disadvantage.
The most motivated, informed, and self-aware eighteen-year-olds I've ever met were homeschooled.
But, how well it works can depend in large part on the kid and the relationship they have with you, and with power structures in general. Some people are motivated to go learn stuff on their own, some do well at learning things from their parents, and for some it helps to be in a more structured environment.
Try again yourself.
The very first words in the study state:
This exploratory study examines the academic outcomes of homeschooled students who enter a
medium size doctoral institution located in the Midwest.
And later on:
Limitations
As mentioned in the previous section, the homeschooled student population used in this study attended a single institution. Additionally, the number of homeschool students is relatively small. As such, the results of this analysis should not be considered inferential to the general population of undergraduate students in the US. Rather, the results of this research should be considered a starting point in order to better understand academic outcomes of homeschool students entering postsecondary education.
I.e. it is biased from the start, excluding those homeschooled kids who did not pursue higher education. It only compares those who attended regular schools with homeschooled students who made it to posteecondary education.
It ignores all the failures who never made it that far.
What is more important ... schooling, or learning?
Not all the learning happen within the context of a 'school', no matter if it is home school, private school or public school. In fact, most of the learning average kids had/have were/are from OUTSIDE of the schools
Nowadays parents seem to forget that. They seem to think that once they throw their children into a school, it's the responsibility of the teachers in the school to teach their kids
NO !!
I have met people from public school backgrounds who are, while not very technically savvy, they are super streets smart, able to detect troubles before the troubles actually begin
On the other hand, some of those who were home schooled might know a lot of stuffs, but unfortunately they lack many of the skills to successfully interact with others, particularly strangers, and often fall pray to scams because they are not aware of the darker side of humanity
No matter which school you send your kids in, you, as the parents, have to know that your kids learn from you more than they ever could learn from their teachers
Learning is not schooling, and no amount of schooling can equip your children if they do not have the opportunity to learn OUTSIDE of the school
Muchas Gracias, Señor Edward Snowden !
because well, you could just as well start calling it no-schooling at that point.
Close, it's called Unschooling
And it's exactly what you do in college too. Just like college, homeschooling means certain fundamental requirements. Just like college, homeschooling means you get to pursue interests in depth on top of core learning...
And it works amazingly well.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
Kids do need to socialise, but we are a tribe animal and not a herd one so quality is more important than quantity. The larger the family the richer the social environment the home-schooled child experiences therefore any claims about socialisation of these children that do not even mention family size should be considered seriously flawed. Then there is the equivalent created by groups of smaller but very connected families. See how context is everything? I suggest you ignore the fools who generalise about home-schooled people, they are often just trolls or envious haters, when they are not self interested educators that are threatened by the practice.
One vital thing to keep in mind is the average IQ of those you would otherwise rely on to raise and teach your offspring, IQ does matter when the adult's is significantly lower than the child's.
Home-schooling also allows for psychological diversity because the child is not as constrained by the need to conform to the lowest common denominator type behaviours of randomly selected peer groups. Most children can get all the social interaction they need from a smaller group of contacts that are spread over a wider range of ages and the relationships are of a far more positive and nurturing nature.
Disclaimer: I am a certified [MSc] teacher in chemistry and physics. Worked the job only a year [went to do PhD and then do R&D in semiconductors] but all my life I have being interested in education and never stopped thinking and learning about it. Sorry for the gigantic post; there is so much to say about this...besides according to Terry Pratchett teachers can only converse in the form of short lectures:))
The major problem of standardized school system is the lack of flexibility and inability to provide different approaches to different types of students. I am not saying anything new here -- the class moves through the curriculum with the speed of the average student, not the best, of course. This is the classical case [to use popular culture reference] of "who and how is going to teach Ender"? On the other hand, the "slow students" are often slower than they can be again because of lack of flexibility in approach.
The major problem of home schooling is politics --> that the majority of people seem to want it not in order to educate their kids better but the opposite, to save them from "evil" knowledge and from hearing different points of view. This home schooling fad perpetuates the whole developed world ATM and the idea comes usually. from the religious circle of the parents. Please, understand me right, I don't want to start a war on this issue but it is true. In mitigation I can say that many other ideologies [politics, business, culture in general] also try constantly to meddle in schools and teach [or not] the students about certain things.
Two issues then -- one, now to make the system more efficient in pure education terms, without considering social and cultural issues. Two [this is the biggie] --> how to deal with the inevitable clash between the culture and knowledge in the family and the culture and knowledge of the world [school].
It is a FACT that what happens at school has major influence on the development of the young mind. It is a FACT that bad teacher can do huge harm and good teacher can do huge good. It is a fact that most families internal culture is narrow-minded compared to what the school teaches. And you cannot possibly separate culture form education. Example --> if you study logic, one of the best text books starts with debunking the whole idea of advertisement and shows you clearly how you are manipulated by it. But that message is universally despised by our culture [for it has been perverted to such degree that any objection against money grabs and inhuman economic structures is labeled as "freedom-hating"] and trust me, some enraged group of parents will protest [especially if daddy is making his bucks in advertisement:)]. During my short tenure I saw many such clashes. Parents asked me "why are you teaching them this, you are just physics teacher, what can you possibly teach them about everyday life". "Everything", was my usual answer and I tried to explain that the scientific approach is a system of thought that is universal and can be applied to any problem. As my physics teacher in high school said "you might be selling groceries all your life but if you understand a bit of physics and scientific approach you will out compete the other grocery shop". Very few parents understood...
Thoughts on issue one:
- make the cooperation between parents school and society more efficient and [wishful thinking] as free of politics as possible.
- Create "clubs of interests" [we used to have those very good under the communist system] where fast kids can learn more. Make those good and affordable.
- here is an idea --> teach skills. Go with the kids to where their parents work. If some kids show interest in advance machining [dad has golden hands and builds interesting stuff] let those kids have internships in that company or similar. Find what the kid really likes and then provide endless torrent of knowledge and practical work in that field. When motivated by curiously and satisfaction we humans excel and do not need a stick to make us
Disclaimer: My kids attend public school, but I do a lot of supplemental home schooling on the weekends, focusing on stuff the schools don't teach
...Aha! Perhaps therein lies the answer: The parents.
Education is best implemented with effective parenting, but rarely benefits the student without it. The Family's value for learning has more to do with the success and/or failure of a child's education than the quality of the school or the faculty. In other words, an education will be as effective as the parents ability to instil its value to the child. Rewards and incentives transform over time, and each student is ultimately self motivated regardless of the quality of carrots and sticks. In a sense, all schooling is ultimately home schooling. Perhaps the school provides the extra-curricular opportunities of most value; beyond the minimum public standard of curricula.
The exception is farmers in very remote areas where there are no schools.
They have "school of the air" for youngsters (didn't you ever watch Skippy?) and send the kids to boarding school for high-school.
But good question! Somebody please explain this "home schooling" oddity - I thought it was just for extreme religious nutters (so extreme they can't find a religious school). Apparently not.
Then...
Now, before you think I did that just to be mean, I am an autodidact. My situation lands even further outside the norm than those who have been home schooled, such as yourself. I'm not trying to indicate that home schooling is a fail, per se; only that it is much more difficult to do well than even its most vocal proponents generally admit to. My own writing is more of an attempt to ape patterns of speech I consider optimum than it is a coherent application of the rules of English. That is a direct result of teaching it to myself according to my own standards. I don't recommend the process, frankly.
There is a very strong tendency for home schooling to pass along failings of the teacher, generally the parents. For instance, if the parents are poor at English, or math, or history, it is that much more difficult for them to catch failures in those areas, and to remediate them when they occur. Then there is the issue of superstition and how it affects scientific understanding, moral and ethical conditioning. Then what to do about the ritualized tribal behaviors inculcated by immersion and overemphasis of team sports rears its massively ugly head. It goes on and on.
Certain subjects are so difficult to teach that the worm turns and you may have a better chance to teach them well than a public school does. For instance, I would liken mathematics to a balanced, inverted pyramid. You teach it from the bottom up, laying each brick upon those that went before it, keeping the structure balanced at all times so that the whole process doesn't result in a flawed, imbalanced outcome. Fail to import a proper understanding of algebra, and the much of the rest of the process is in trouble, the balance is lost and with it, hope of unimpeded progress. So it goes.
Home schooling is a path that will have an immense impact upon the person whom the child will eventually turn out to be. I would find it very difficult to recommend to anyone without knowing so much about the situation, and the parents, that it would be considered invasive.
I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
Where's the 0yr GPA?
My mother is a retired teacher. The mother of my child is a teacher, too. My child is in the public school system. We do some additional teaching after school and I generally buy him more candy on saturdays, if he solves some mathematical puzzles. The teaching quality of every school varies. Generally, by home schooling, you could get much better learning results. The group size is just too large to focus on any individual problem. I think it is fair to say, that public schools teach the theory less effictively than home schooling. Practical application of that theory is known as homework and you should make sure your children actually do them. But not everything that the school teaches is on curriculum. You learn first and foremost social skills. Group sizes are large. There are idiots. There are true friends. There is a cute girl in the first row. You have to work with other people. Just like in real life later on. If you home school your children. they might become anti-social and biased on your personal world views. You can tell them Jesus created the dinosaurs and in your community that might be even recommended. Or skip those parts totally, because they weren't in the bible. Neither option is perfect. I would still choose not to home school my children. That does not mean, that you cannot actively ask your children what they are learning, look at their homework and teach them additional skills they don't learn at school.
at the age of 12 move to ranch, provide 300k dollars for the purchase of scientific equipment (glass ware, chemicals, books electronics parts, electronics test equipment, machine tooling, internet learning (sciencemadness, eevblog, totse) with mild supervison against excessive drug consumption or non scientific death machines and provide legal advice if necessary.
hard lessons could involve
goverment menacing
drug with drawls
bad trips
missing limbs
or at least let him get away with a bit.
good god I hated public school. but I would rather have this "spartan" education (did he fry himself on the rail gun capacitorbank) without the stress of school, which I think seriously fucked me up (even college, man, fuck tests)
*totse for cultural component
Home schooling is something parents do when they're religius nuts or child abusers. No kid would want to be stuck with their parents 24 hours a day and slowly become a socially retarded pariah.
Home Schooling:
Pros: Your over-indulged child won't be a nuisance to other children at school.
Cons: Your maladjusted teenager/young adult will be (a nuisance) later in life.
Public Schooling:
Pros: Your child will learn about life outside of his over-indulged home.
Cons: Other children will have to put up with him.
My mother home schooled both my sister and I from preschool all the way through high school. Since most of the opinions that I see are coming from the parents of homeschooled children rather than anyone thats been through it themselves, I thought I'd offer my own (somewhat biased) opinion:
TL;DR: Do both.
Longer answer:
I did well in grades K-12 and I attribute that to the personalized, one-on-one attention that my mother gave to me. But here are the downsides to homeschooling, per my experiences:
- Learning Curve. As the eldest, my mother made a number of mistakes while learning how to teach. Like, for example, not keeping track of the test answer booklet for my math book. (Math was my most hated subject, and I was a bit of a little shit. To this day, math is not my strong point)
- Social interactions. When I finally went off to college, I was very behind other students in terms of knowing how to interaction socially. I had developed in essentially a vacuum, and that led to arrogance, naivete, and epic level awkwardness. For reference, I went to a school entirely for "geeky" kids and I was STILL the most awkward one there. I got over it, but it caused a lot of problems that could have been avoided by interacting with people my own age sooner.
- Lack of Diversity. This is somewhat part of the social bullet point. But by not interacting with people that were different from my family, I never had my word view challenged. For example: only after going out into the world did I realize that my father was not only pretty sexist, but he was kinda racist as well. Unfortunately, his world view has colored mine in subtle ways that I as an adult find very distressing when they are pointed out to me.
So, those are the problems with homeschooling. The problems with public/private school are fairly well known: lack of individual attention, questionable teaching practices, bullying, schools not teaching practical life skills, etc.
Ultimately, to me, the best solution is to send your children to school but be as involved in their education as you can. Have them practice math with Khan academy, tutor them in english/history/biology/whatever else. Give them lessons in subjects that aren't taught in schools, like how to cook (yes, even if your child is a boy. He's got to be able to feed himself). Personal finances, Sex Ed (I understand public schools are very bad at this subject) and whatever else you think is important for them to know. This is a bit morbid, but if you were to drop dead when they hit 18, what do you think they would need to live in society without the benefit of your counsel? Teach them about insurance, basic plumbing, carpentry, car maintenance, how to write a cover letter and resume, stocks, mortgages, the constitution and how to read and understand a contract. There are any number of things that aren't taught in schools that are INVALUABLE knowledge as an adult.
Like most thing in life, there is no one solution Often, the correct solution is a mixture of many different solutions. Think long and hard about what type of person you want to leave behind, realize ultimately, who your child will be is up to them, and give them the tools and knowledge to be the best that they can be.
Actually home schooling can be popular both on the right and in the left. The right so they can be taught to whatever the parents think are Biblical principles, and the left in order to "protect" the child's self esteem, improve on the quality, or some other justification of that sort. It might also be important to remember that the quality of public education in the US since the 1960s or so has not fared so well, many baby boomers have realized public education today isn't as good as it was when they went to school-- largely because public schools have been under attack by the right in the years since. And then people wonder why things are so polarized, when both the left and right are home-schooling to their personal tastes.
This question isn't the best candidate for an ask Slashdot. The reason is that ANYTHING to do with raising kids is the equivilent of "Is Linux better then Windows" or "Iphone or Android, which should I pick? or "Ford or Honda?" for roughly the same reasons.
The group of people who have the source material you require to make your assessment have a deeply vested emotional commitment to the decision they have made. In this case what they did with their kids. So you're going to get emotional responses.
Additionally the KEY factor that we can't have any insight into is your kid(s). If there's one thing raising a kid has taught me it's that mine is a special snowflake, with all the positives and negitives that implies and I can't take decisions other parents have made for their kids and apply it to mine blindly outside of the most obvious cherry picked cases (e.g. vaccinations) My kid will react in a manner dictated by her personality.
For example, we've taken our kid to Defcon since she was 4. It's been a great experience for her and she self identifies with the type of kid who goes to a hacker conference and learns to solider and tell when someone is trying to social engineer her (a handy skill for your kid to have. Think puppies and vans). Is it the right thing for your kid? Who knows? Sure as heck not me. Do your research and find your answers, but do real research, don't ask on an internet forum :).
Min
On the whole, I find that I prefer Slashdot posts to twitter ones because I don't get limited to 140 chars before
Looking through this thread I'm amazed that no one comments (or not prominently) about the time and effort needed for homeschooling.
For us homeschooling is not an option. We both work full-time and I just could not ask my wife to stop working nor can we afford it financially if I were to.
That being said, our youngest son has Autism and would certainly benefit from homeschooling. He already goes to a special school with smaller classes and extra care, but still we feel that he could progress more academically if we were to school him ourselves.
For us this is a new experience since we have exactly the opposite experience with our eldest son. He is in a normal school (I'm from Belgium, so all schools are state funded but most are privately owned). And he has struggeled enormously academically. We have invested enourmous amounts of time in helping him, only to find out that the only way we could help him was NOT to interfere. Let him go to school and do his own thing.
Conclusion (personal): If homeschooling is an option (doesn't require big sacrifices financially and emotionally) and it works really well (both academically and emotionally) for your kids, then why not? But take into account that while one of your kids may benefit hugely from homeschooling, another may actually suffer.
A useful study would be to ask the question-- on average, what provides better outcomes, 1) a really small class size taught by amateur teachers, possibly as a second job, or 2) large class sizes taught by professionals who don't have a second job (for the most part, anyway), but may be burnt out or are provided with few resources or support. I'm glad it's a decision I don't have to make, but I'm sure glad home schooling wasn't in vogue when I was a kid. My parent's couldn't decide which church to take me to (one Catholic, one Protestant), tried to compromise (Episcopalian), found it met neither of their needs and lost interest (thankfully, as far as I am concerned). I shudder to think what that dynamic might have done to my education...
You only need to teach him four words:
"Ya want fries wizzat?"
"Would you rather learn how to talk to women in a museum or a prison?"
Seriously?
If you're well and broadly educated, teaching your child at home - if it is allowed - isn't the worst option, especially if the public schools available suck.
Sidenote: In Germany, homeschooling is illegal - the reasoning being, that children should be introduced to society and a broader perspective, even if advantages it migh have by being homeschooled are mitigated. It's also a mechanism to prevent fanatics, like religious ones, from raising children with a one-dimensional perspective. While prohibing homeschooling if the child does regular exams to prove its level of education is debatable, there is some reasoning behind this.
That said, maybe you can do a mix: Find likeminded parents and found a mini-school. Your children get the special treatment *and* a broader perspective on things aswell. 10 Families willing to pitch together and a few parents willing to participate can work wonders. You get small classes with the special care and attention and the social interaction all in one box. I remember my days in a private school with 16 students in the class. It was awesome.
If that's not an option, homeschooling done well can be a very good thing. School itself can be hell. I know regular school would have been for me. ... But I also know my father probably would've sucked at homeschooling, so it can be a bit of a tradeoff. ... What does your child say?
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
So what you're saying is for all that extra work, you got average results.
If by average you mean good results, I guess that would be a yes. I mean seriously, in what world of stupidity and cynicism did getting kids through post-graduate education became "average results"?
I'm not a fan of home-schooling in general because, at least in this country, it is generally perceived by the public as a means for Luddites to keep their kids off the sinful, Godless grid.
But here, this is obviously not the case. And for you to simply dismiss the results of their efforts as "average results" (when in this country "average results" means graduating from HS without knowing the difference between "your" and "you're"), that is just imbecile.
Whether you are just being cynically stupid or just deliberately obtuse, only you know.
There are 3 main types of schooling in America.
1. Public schools -- These are schools funded by public sources such as taxes and lottery earnings, etc.. They are often portrayed as crime ridden and failing in educating but this is often a function of the community they are in. Poorer communities tend to have poorer public education systems. It does have the advantage of socializing that other types of education lack (more on this later).
2. Charter / private schools -- These are schools that derive their funding from private sources such as tuition or through vouchers for poorer families. In the case of religious private schools, they also concentrate on their religious teachings as well as the standard curriculum. You find these in richer communities and they have the advantage over public schools because they can pick and choose whether the student will attend. Many see them as siphoning out the best students from the public school system and reducing the resources availible to public schools.
3. Home schooling -- This is where the student is taught at home for various reasons (some valid, some not) mostly for the reason of the perception that the previously mentioned types do not suit the needs or beliefs of the parents. The difficulty with home schooling is one of credentialing and certifying that the state approved requirements are being met. Home schooling requires a much higher degree of involvement on the part of the parents which often can't be the case due to the necessity of having both parents working to make ends meet. You do mostly see home schooling being done by parents who either have a high degree of distrust in the public forms of education or have a religious reason. Lastly, there are some areas that are remote or that have extreme weather conditions where home schooling is the norm. But these circumstances are fewer in the US because of the extensive network of public / private schools available and public funding of busing.
Personally, I think home schooling is a bad thing for kids since it doesn't teach them the proper socialization they will need as adults. It is often done for all the wrong reasons in all the wrong ways which can and often does hold the child back making things worse for that kid. And as the poster of this article has noted, it does tend to be the parents that can't let go of their offspring that want to keep them home all the time. This is unhealthy IMO. I personally believe that home schooling should be the choice of last resort since it does require a much higher degree of commitment from parents which often can't be met especially in poorer communities.
This is a sig. This is only a sig. Had this been an actual sig you would have been informed where to tune for more sigs.
Such a great idea to deprive your offspring(s) of an active social life. Better keep them safe rather than risk catching them years later smoking marijuanas under a bridge. Homeschooling is all about control and oppressiveness.
I'm biased, having homeschooled our 3 children and have seen the results first hand. That said, nearly 100% of the benefit of home schooling can be summed up in 2 words -- "parental involvement". I never look down on those who choose to utilize the public school system, or any system. The reason our kids "turned out well" is because we worked very hard to make it so. It's certainly no guarantee, but if you spend time looking at options and choose the option that seems best for your kids (and by extension, best for you, you are heavily invested in them), you will be doing the right thing.
Like many things in life, you will get out of your kids schooling, what you put into it. Don't abandon your kids to the school system, that guarantees a bad outcome. Take control and be an active, involved parent, and whatever option you choose will be great for them.
Yea send the children to prison!
Prison for all of their youth!
Hurray!
Are you surveying homeless people?
I went to a poor quality public school and many of them ended up dead due to bad decisions, homeless due to bad decisions, in shit jobs due to bad decisions, or otherwise just not doing well due to bad decisions (well, there's the guy who is having a bad time because his developed cancer in his early 20s and hasn't done well since then....). There were some kids I knew that were homeschooled that turned out as well as the few of us who didn't screw up our lives or didn't get caught doing some of the grander dumb shit that went down such as drug peddling.
On the other side, there was an insanely religious family that homeschooled their kids. They turned out to be shitbags. So I do see both sides of the coin, but the original poster did say it wasn't for everyone.
I wrote this a few years back for no real reason, and it happens to be exactly the anecdotal evidence you where looking for, so here goes:
Homeschooling.
Hi, My name might be Jarik, and I was homeschooled.
Wow, sounds like we're at homeschoolers anonymous. But that is sort of how it is. There is a sort of stigmata (and a lot of misinformation) about home schooling, and I'm here to tell you about it.
1. They are a bunch of Religious nuts.
We've all meet them, the guy that says he was homeschooled because Moses appeared to his parents in a stain on the mattress, and now he's enrolled online to become an ordained minister of the church of the blind chihuahua. The truth is, he's just nuts. A lot of people are home schooled, and for a lot of reasons. Personally, me and my sister where homeschooled because where we lived for the first fifteen years of my life was nineteen miles from the nearest school bus stop, over roads that where not much different from a goat path, and after the first snow, the county would get around to plowing them sometime around June. It was just not practical to try and send two kids to school, and so we learned at home. We followed a schedule, did our work every morning, and usually where done and out to play by 2pm. That is not to say that every homeschooling situation is the same as mine, in fact, they vary quite a bit, but the point is, a lot of people resort to homeschooling because its the only reasonable choice available. On the other hand, some of them are religious nuts.
When I was 16, My Mom (Who was the teacher in my family) Decided we needed some socialization or something, and started taking us to a local homeschool group writing class, taught by the mother of another family. Lots of homeschool kids from around the area came to learn to write better, and this is where I met my first 'homeschool weirdo'.
At first, I attributed it to southern culture. (we had recently transplanted ourselves into Texas, from Montana) But after we got to know them more, we realized they where simply not like other people. They talked like they where from the 1800's dressed like they where from the 1920's and maintained eye contact for to long. Or something. It all finally made sense, when the teacher was talking to us about swearing. I have no idea how we went from prepositions and adverbs to that topic, but she finally made the statement that saying "Gee!" and "Gosh!" where the same thing as saying "JESUS CHRIST!" or "GOD DAMN IT." Now, I'm from what most people would call pretty conservative family, but that statement seemed a bit over the top, even to me. Fortunately, It was around that time that I had earned enough personal autonomy to decide not to go to that class anymore. Also, my mom thought that ladies idea was nuts.
2. They are all a bunch of Weirdos.
So you've probably been there, in some party, and there is that one guy that just plain weird. Socially inept, tells creepy jokes, stands funny, something is just off about the guy. While your at the punch bowl, spiking it from your hip flask, you ask the host, "hey, whats up with Josephus? whats his deal?" The host looks at you, wondering who you are and how you got into his apartment, then shakes it off and replies; "Oh yeah, don''t you know? he was homeschooled." More or less. What i'm trying to say is, there is a peculiar brand of weirdo that homeschooling seems to spawn sometimes. Sometimes. One of my co-workers was also homeschooled, and we joke about this. Personally, it feels like cult culture to me. If you've ever watched a documentary about any cult where they interview members, you'll know what I mean. They have this peculiar attitude that what they have learned from their cult is the only things a person can need to know. I attribute that to a lack of outside ideas, and the same thing can happen in homeschooling. If you only ever learn things from one source, and are taught that source is infallible, your outlook on life gets skewed pretty fast. I had the
I've decided to Diversify my Holdings. I've divided my cash between my left and right pockets, instead of all in one.
You can't do everything yourself.
Worse, you can't do everything yourself BETTER.
Best: school + observant and helpful parent.
Final words: School does only educate and not raise kids, parents do.
Doing the ac thing because I don't put this out there a lot.
I was home "schooled" all 12 years for extremely religious reasons, my mother didn't want me to see the real world. Today I'm 37, make a pitiful 40k wage and have no capacity to go back to college. My mother planned on sending me to BSC and going with me for another 4 year round of the same shit but I refused. She left out enough in my education to make higher education out of my reach without tutoring and I have a family to take care of.
I am going to be a permanently under employed home school success story until 8 keel over with a heart attack. Those are the breaks, don't home school your kids.
There are good texts and references on the subjects that back up the academic performance of homeschoolers. I saw them 3 years ago but was looking to see them, not store them.
A counter-example for the few examples. Danielle McBurnett Stringer (http://pendletonpeds.com/danielle-l-mcburnett/) homeschooled. Decided at like 12 that she wanted to do concurrent enrollment. At 16 graduated high school and with a Bachelors in nursing (Summa Cum Laude) on the same day. Investigated quality of life as well as income for her various career options. Earned her Master of Nursing by the time she was 19 (also Summa Cum Laude, I think). Has an exceptional life.
Kids in high schools have security guards and active shooter alerts because their peers not only think it is a good idea, but have in several instances acted on, to bring guns to school and actually shoot and kill other kids. If you think that is "social adjustment" then you are insane.
There are plenty of team activities, group activities, and extracurricular activities to allow home-schooled kids to be as social as they want.
It sounds judgy to say "because she cant let go". I'm not in your situation, but really - posting to the world that your wife can't let go might go over badly if she ever finds out. The fact that you are willing to dishonor her in such a grossly public way does not speak great things.
Initially I was against it but my wife pushed for it. I gave in. I'm so happy I did. The school experience is so different than public school it's difficult to convey. I can say that I have met many high school students and can say that they are the most well-rounded young humans I have ever met. Look into one in your area. It has been my experence that they would welcome your visit to sit in on some classes.
There are two things kids get out of going to public school. The first is indoctrinated, and the second is connections. If you want your kid indoctrinated into our extractive global economy, and you want them to have employment opportunities in it, then you need to send them to public school and not move them around in the middle of it so they can grow up with the same kids. If you are planning to go another direction, then no, they don't need public school. The quality of education they will receive is pathetic and the people they will learn to be like, likewise.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The USA has very libertarian/conservative set of beliefs that is almost unique in the developed world. (Then again, this is Slashdot, which has a similar political bent.)
The people who home-school are similar to the populations who don't vaccinate their children. For a lot of Americans, religion is the major reason and it is a driving force in avoiding the indoctrination of the state. My guess is that most home-schooling involves something of this sort. The other group of people is usually in the upper middle class and think they know better than everybody else. They're overprotective and don't trust other people.
Personally, I think home schooling is a bad thing for kids since it doesn't teach them the proper socialization they will need as adults.
Compared to what? Public schools don't either. The rest of your life isn't going to be spent with a cohort of people who just happen to be mostly within a year of age of each other in a prison scenario with nothing more important to do than create bizarre microtribes and hierarchies.
We all compete against our peers. And the problem in many public schools is that your peers are often lazy idiots that are pretty much effortless to compete against.
Then when you leave that school you're competing against a totally different group of people. And that is where you'll fail because you're not ready for them. You were ready to compete against the other kids in your class room. You could stomp them. But the next group is sometimes a lot harder.
What is nice about homeschooling... is that you don't really have peers. Your parents challenge you. Now, a lot of people think homeschooling is terrible because of the various religious people that tend to be all about homeschooling. But see it from the perspective of a young mind. If you're instead competing for the approval of your parents rather then to simply show that you're as good or better then your peers... then the standards can be a lot higher. I think people try harder in that situation. And they might be better behaved because their whole sense of social self worth is probably tied up in that approval.
Here someone will say that is bad, but if the point is to produce kids that have a high knowledge base then what is the problem?
A major component of why kids do better in private schools is because you tend to have to try a bit harder to equal your peers. They're a little less stupid and a little less lazy. So you have to try harder. But a home schooled kid might be competing literally against his mother and father who are doubtless better educated then nearly any high school student you could name.
Just think about the human animal and how it relates to its world.
An interesting compromise might be to manipulated the class room in such a way that the students do not feel like they are competing against each other but rather against an external standard or perhaps some select group of kids somewhere else.
I've decided to stop wasting my time responding to AC trolls/sockpuppets... so if you want a response from me... login.
So what you're saying is for all that extra work, you got average results.
If only two of his four kids get bachelor's (4 year) degrees which it sounds like is going to happen, then their cohort is way ahead of the average as far as post-secondary education completion, which is a pretty good proxy for "results" since 4 year degrees aren't easy or common.
Homeschooled kid checking in, no more socially awkward than your average person, 20 years old with an MSc and BSc. I'd pretty much say it worked in my case
This is my anecdotal experience, but I'll say right up front that your child's experience will really depend on their temperment, and the way you structure their learning.
Personally, I was bored in school and had cousins that were homeschooled, so I was familiar with the concept. I asked to be homeschooled (around 3rd grade, I was in private school at the time). Learning-wise I picked up a lot more than I would have in the school system, in a much shorter school day - and had a lot of time to screw around.
This is one of the major parts that can be a blessing or a curse, depending on how prone your kid is to get into trouble when left to their own devices. One of the major benefits academically is that a homeschooled kid can get into community college at 15-16 and use those courses to count for both high school and college credit. This means your kid will be done with college several years earlier than their peers.
Socially it means they won't be around people their own age, which could be a problem depending on how outgoing (and again how likely to get into trouble) they are. For me it meant getting a bachelor's degree at 19, but also feeling like I missed out on some significant social milestones that a normal kid would have - prom, etc. I didn't regret it at the time, but I do a bit now - 10 years later. A very extroverted child might not have those issues though.
I would definitely also recommend forcing your kid to do a lot of extracurricular "after school" type activities - sports, clubs, etc - trying to cater to their interests but also forcing them outside their comfort zone a bit. It's really easy to get too comfortable in your own bubble if you're homeschooled. Keep in mind, even with all these extra activities they should still have more free time than a normal kid - so remind them of that and consider it part of their education.
I think if it's done right, homeschooling can be a great opportunity - it's just that some people abuse it or aren't aware of the pitfalls. It sounds like you're taking a good approach to examining whether it's right for your kid, and I hope whatever you choose turns out well. It's a type of education that promotes way more free thinking than normal school, and that's a huge benefit if your kid is the type that will thrive in homeschooling.
To homeschool or not to homeschool: that is the question, but the answer is not binary.
The research is absolutely clear: the kids who do best academically tend to have parents who are interested in their education and, specifically, read to their kids from an early age.
After that, everything is mostly details. You will find kids who do well academically in public schools, in private schools, in charter schools, in homeschools. And you will find kids who are pulled from one and placed into another because the latter didn't pan out.
The main takeaway is that you have to be engaged in your kid's education; that's really the only thing homeschooling has, by definition, over other educational avenues.
Time for my anecdote. Our eldest daughter had a rough time with bullying at her public school a few years ago. She is, at heart, a nerdy kid who had issues wondering why other kids couldn't relate to her ... which is, for better or worse, like chum to a bullying shark in elementary school. We talked to the vice principal, her teacher, and the piece of dog ***t's parents. The bullying mostly came under control. And then, we tried to figure out what to do to make sure our kid didn't look like chum. For us, it involved two things she loves: dance and swimming. Dance gave her good posture and the ability to look confident and strong even when she's nervous. Lifesaving classes taught her to be in control of a situation. And now, she's a confident teenager whose former bully politely ask her for tutoring (and she gets taken out, gratis, for tea and pastries).
If we had pulled her from her public school and homeschooled her, I'm not sure she would've learned that degree of self confidence and poise. And she still would have looked like chum in a private school, but we would have been paying for her to be bullied by well-heeled brats.
FWIW, that's not what my parents did under similar conditions ... and I HATED elementary school. My parents were oblivious, and I've never really learned how to deal with difficult people.
Our other daughter is a different kid; she got an award from her school last year mostly for standing up for classmates who were being bullied. She's ... intense. Public school is a good place for her to be.
Agreed. I know many of the teachers that would be teaching my children personally. I have known many of them for years, even before I had kids. There is no way I want most of them teaching my kids.
You get together with a handful of other home-schoolers - forming a small class. You teach math, that other guy geography. With one/two teacher(s) per pupil you still outperform public school.
Check with the Home School Legal Defense Association. They have been collecting data on home school performance for the last 20+ years.
So, to get them a decent education, off to private school they went. Best decision for their future BY FAR that I ever made.
I mean, haven't you ever met a homeschooled kid? Your kid needs to be properly socialized in a structured environment.
Socialization is useful. School isn't needed for that though. Let the kid join a football team or something - socialize outside of school. Also, the better home-schoolers regularly get together with a few other home-schoolers. smaller than 'a class', but socializing anyway.
I have to say your analogy of the public school system to a prison when it comes to social interaction was very insightful, and completely correct.
"Powers. I have them."
It should be allowed if and only if the parent homeschooling the children meets the qualifications for, and obtains a teaching certificate in the state in question. We can't have a two-tiered education system, one for rational people, and one for religious nutbars.
School isn't just about learning subjects. Its about learning about your society, how to interact with other people in the country you live in. Every single kid I've met who has been homeschooled has been weird. They've all been completely socially inept. They don't know how to interact properly and whilst they may be very clever in the subjects they've been learning, are completely oblivious about the majority of things going on around them at the time. Whilst these parents think they're protecting their kids, they're actually in my opinion harming them irreversibly. They'll eventually leave mothers bosom and go into a world completely unequipped to deal with the society they live in and it'll cause them real problems and hold them back.
Supplementing schooling with home schooling is great. Completely replacing it if you're the kind of parent who doesn't let your kid out to play with the other kids on the street is doing them massive harm.
I only please one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either. - Scott Adams
There is NO WAY to discuss the real world without simplifying it, so by demanding no simplified discussion points, you have insisted on no discussion.
Homeschooling means your children only find out what you want them to know. They only learn what you want them to learn. They only find out what you know (actually, less, since you have limited time to pass on your knowledge).
If you think art is worthless then your child may never find out if they like painting landscapes.
If you think playing an instrument pointless, they may never find out if they like playing the trumpet.
Etc.
Homeschooling limits what your children learns. That's one of the reasons why it works quicker than real school schooling.
A couple of things: your child is an individual who may or may not conform to statistics. What works for your child may not work for others and so I think the idea of statistical research is a red herring.
On a second note, do you want the bureaucrats responsible for public education in charge of how your children are taught? I would strongly recommend private, charter, or home schooling over and above anything run by the government's incompetence.
So if you happened to be a big supporter of women's rights, gun control, and gay marriage, you would be glad that your child was being sent to a school which taught the almost complete opposite of these beliefs? Not just that, but actually promoted behaviours, activities, and social activities based on them? I mean, come on - they are being exposed to different ideas, right? Why stay in their little fantasy world without being exposed to alternative values?
Homeschool only works if the kids can be socialized with things like co-op groups (several parents dropping kids off at 1 house for school) and with good parents who create concrete boundaries around schoolwork. That's how my "well-adjusted" homeschool friends lived. Others didn't turn out as well.
The only other thing public/private school offers is socialization, which is a must, but you get the good with the bad. With a little planning I'm thinking it would be pretty easy to have your kid interact with a wide variety of children and adults.
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If you're in the "south"; in particular West Virginia, Florida, or Mississippi, I would do everything possible to stay out of public school--and basically any state that has adopted "common core"--Common core teachers only teach students how to pass the mandated tests, not how to think/learn.
If you're in the North East--New Jersey to New England, public school might be just fine.
Private schools can be beneficial only if you know how well they teach (sometimes they're only marginally better than private schools)--the teachers can equally do a half-arse job. You may find that some private Christian schools (for example) have a better teaching method than public schools.
Well-funded schools aren't always the answer. Yes, it helps to have money, but their teaching philosophies/curriculum/attention per student is what really matters.
Home school will be alright only if you/you're wife are confident in your teaching abilities. Otherwise, it might be really setting your kids back.
Then again, sometimes a good tutor can be supplement your kids' teaching very well.
Compared to what? Public schools don't either. The rest of your life isn't going to be spent with a cohort of people who just happen to be mostly within a year of age of each other in a prison scenario with nothing more important to do than create bizarre microtribes and hierarchies.
The rest of your or my life maybe, but for most of the poor saps who have to put up with public school, they may very well end up in a life where they only hang with their tribe in prison-like scenarios.
Consider Homer Simpson. The guy just lives a mundane life, going to a prison-like job he hates every day, then after work go to the bar where other people of "his kind" hang. They form some weird tribe based on their favorite sports team. Go Springfield! Shelbyville sucks!
And that's just Homer. There are people IRL who have it much worse than him, and they are much more tribal. They form tribes based on politics (that somebody else fed them through propaganda), or single issues like abortion or gay marriage or climate change, mostly based on irrational feelings and morals instead of reason or logic.
The public schools help shape the people to become like this, and this is how the powers that be want it. Such tribal people are easily goaded to follow the propaganda fed to them.
This is why I support public schools for K-6, but homeschooling or unschooling for 7-12. I went to public school, and I have learned more about the girls I went to class with on Facebook 15 years later from the pictures they post and topics they talk about then I ever knew about when I was in school.
The skills I needed to socialize and be friendly happened after school, not in public schools.
And the guy I replaced at work was homeschooled, and he code code circles around me because he learned it by be passionate about it instead of being forced to figure out the examples the teachers used.
You mean largely because education in the US has been under attack by libtards. The vast majority of educators and administrators are left-leaning.
You can continue believing your liberal propaganda, and blame it on the right though. Get our head out of your ass.
> under attack by the right
Huh? The "left" influence (no spanking, protecting kids from seeing that other kids pray, etc.) causes the schools to go down hill, the "right" brings that light, and it is the fault of the right for attacking?
From what I have observed, modern "homeschooling" (at least in the US) started in the mid-80's. At that time, some parents were beginning to become frustrated with the curriculum offered by public schools and, for many who lived in moderate-income neighborhoods, the mixed-bag of students often provided an atmosphere where quite, good kids were often bullied for various reasons. Parents of these kids wanted them out of an environment that they felt wasn't safe for their children and which also had a greater influence on their children than they did. So, after a couple of court battles that were won, homeschooling became a "thing" and parents slowly started to opt for schooling their children at home.
My extended family was part of this early pioneering group in South Carolina and, in fact, my parents asked me if I wanted to be homeschooled. I was a very self-motivated kid, so I did alright on my own ibn public education. I like the idea, but I knew I would have missed the social interaction. My sister, and all of my cousins (4 of them) were all homeschooled and I observed their experiences.
It is truly an odd thing to observer. All of my cousins graduated with exceptional grades and they passed all of their standardized exams with flying colors. One cousin is a now a physicist at USC (South Carolina) and is a doctoral candidate. He could have gone to any institution of his choosing for post-grad education, however he chose to stay close to home and has stayed at USC. Oh, and USC is VERY happy that he has made this decision. Another cousin has received an A grade in every course she has taken for practically her entire life. She is now working on her doctorate in education and, I think, she might already have one in literature. She is a professor, also at USC.
The other two cousins have done well, but have not achieved the same accolades their siblings. They were never engaged by a drive to learn, but they never rebelled against education. One is a musician, the other is a pastor.
After observing my family and many other former-homeschoolers that I've known, I can definitely say that as independent learners they often tend to develop a personal drive to explore and learn on their own which has done them well in life. However, there are cons to homeschooling, specifically social ones. I've been out of the homeschooling circuit for over 15 years but all of the former-homeschoolers I've met that are of my age, they almost all tend to be... different. This isn't being rude but socially, you develop considerably different when your peers are your parents, siblings and other homeschoolers on occasion.
The best way to describe them in a way that is borderline stereotypical, but honest, is that they tend to be less focused on appearance and "fitting in" with the world around them. They are certainly not all socially awkward (though some of them are) but they seem to have a personal freedom of allowing themselves to be "themselves" and appear as "other" in a world of people who often fit into specific, acceptable, molds. Is this a problem? Some may say yes but it's really hard to say that this is an issue when many of these children do become successful adults who have a passion for learning because they found their own way of engaging education world.
I'm not going to say that this is an answer to your question. In fact, my wife and I have a 3 and 1 year old. We really would rather not homeschool our children but my wife (who was also a homeschooler in High School) is aware of the benefits, inspite of the negative side effects. We really don't want to homeschool because we think the social interaction of children, with other children, is very important to development. However, if our kids don't respond well to the first few years of their primary education, or if we feel like they aren't being pushed hard enough (our three year old can old site-read a little, count past 30 and do very basic addition) then we will likely homeschool her and let her learn at her own acce
As I browsed a bit through the comments, I see mostly replies from either people who have no experience of home schooling or others who are parents home schooling their kids. However, I would like to add my own experience as a child who has experienced almost all types of popular educational methods. I've been to public schools, private schools, correspondence schools, and even college as a replacement for high school. I was also home schooled for a number of years. So here's my story of each method:
From pre-school to first grade, I was in two different private schools. Now, of course, I can't judge much of the academics here since I was so young, but I can judge stress levels. This whole time era was stressful for me due to the quite strict nature of the second private school I attended. If my parents didn't move me out of there, I'm not sure how long I would have lasted.
From first grade to fourth, I was in three different public schools. I loved first and second grade. I learned, played, and just enjoyed everything about it. But, by third grade, the school system decided to try a whole new system of learning. I don't remember the full details, but it involved a complete rework of everything I was used to already. I balked at this change and my parents eventually forced the school to put me in a class that still used the old method. By fourth grade, we had moved so I had to attend a different school. I just couldn't fit with their educational method, and my parents were still frustrated from the last issue a year before. Thus then began a leap into home schooling.
For the rest of fourth grade, my parents bought a preset curriculum and associated books. This didn't end well as neither of my parents had college degrees and since this required quite a bit of hands on work from them, I got frustrated at them.
Starting fifth grade, my parents found, at the time, a totally new way to do home schooling. It was a correspondence school where the school sent everything required and vhs tapes of a licensed teacher in an actual classroom. It was like I was there but didn't have to deal with the nonsense of actually being there. Plus, I got to go as fast or slow over the material as I wanted. This gave me so much freedom that I really enjoyed learning and just kept going.
By the time high school was approaching, the correspondence school just wasn't cutting it enough for me. I wanted more without the wastes of time that it required. And, since this was now the dawn of online versions of everything, my parents signed me up for an online school. But for me, this still seemed pedantic and generally not very engaging.
After frustrating my parents for so long at this point, they worked with the local community college and got me enrolled, full time, at 15 years old. This basically replaced my high school years, and interestingly enough this didn't cause much of an issue of not having any prerequisite knowledge from high school. It goes to show you how much college repeats the same info in high school, especially for the lower level classes. I also absolutely loved this time as I was able to dive deep into learning all that I wanted.
So, here's my opinion of each method:
Private and public schooling can be stressful both from the system itself and from other classmates. Even though I can't comment on bullying as I never was, the stress from the system caused me issues. And not having the freedom to learn the way I wanted would have hindered me. Socializing in this format didn't happen a whole lot for me. I always kept one or two close friends and that was it.
Standard home schooling didn't work for us. But, I can see it working well with parents with better education. Of course, I do think there needs to be a good relationship between the parents and the child or none of this will work well.
However, the correspondence school is an awesome option for parents who either don't have a great education or aren't up to the challe
Your state or county rules may offer a part-time choice as well - when we lived in Iowa, you could do a part time enrollment, which we did to pick up classes that are harder to do with just one student, such as band or a full chemistry lab. My brother in North Carolina has his kids in a charter school part time so they can do athletics
Steve Cline http://www.clines.org, http://www.objectbap.com
Hmmm.....we home schooled our three daughters and I am very pleased thus far.
Eldest daughter is now a freshman studying Bio-Medical Engineering as pre-Med at a major university and had a 3.5 first term. She volunteers as a diver at our Zoo to maintain their tanks.
Middle daughter is graduating this year and is going to dual-major in Physics and Engineering. She is taking Math and Science classes at our community college during her senior year and volunteers at the science center in our city.
Youngest, a Junior, is planning to be a nurse after her BSN and volunteers at the local hospital.
That said, home schooling done correctly consumes a lot of effort,time, and resources.
We've had French and Spanish tutors for 10 years and our oldest two daughters both scored a 4 on the French AP and a 4 on the the Spanish AP test with the youngest testing in a few months. We've also added things like community sports, SCUBA diving, skiing, girl scouts, trips with National Geographic Student Expeditions, several week-long activities Space Camp and Space Academy (highly recommended for ALL students) at NASA's Huntsville facility, plus a lot of travel/culture/history with visits from everywhere to the Galapagos Islands, Egypt, Turkey, Russia, Europe, and nearly all of the USA. My girls have been in most of the major world museums, walked through Auschwitz and the Norman Beaches, crawled through the burial chamber in the Great Pyramids, and even rode a camel in Morocco.
But these activities are expensive and take a lot of time, which were were very fortunate to have plenty of both. So be sure you think it through as to how your will provide a well-rounded education.
Have you worked at a corporation? Except for the similarities in age, I'd say every single damn headache you encounter in elementary school, middle school, and high school except maybe having a colleague mess their pants will occur. Specifically:
1. Some people you work with are assholes.
2. Some people you work with will copy other people's work or otherwise take credit for it.
3. Some people you work with will only pretend to participate in group projects while reaping the benefits.
4. Some people you work with will be too busy talking and playing games to get anything done.
5. Some people you work with will have a poor grasp of hygiene, grooming, or both.
6. Some of your assigned tasks will be boring as hell and merely exist to fill some bureaucratic need for paperwork.
7. You will occasionally need to read, research, speak about, write about, or otherwise deal with topics that don't interest you.
8. There will be people you work with that you find attractive, and you'll have to interact with them in a courteous way and collaborate with them on work without acting inappropriately or being too nervous to proceed.
9. There will be micro-tribes and hierarchies. There's always micro-tribes and hierarchies, some are just more pleasant and well organized than others. There's the appropriate and brilliant quote, "People who say they don't play at politics just play at them poorly."
Even a dream job - and I consider software development pretty close to a dream job for me, I love my work - has all of those problems. I despised elementary school and middle school, had an okay time at high school, and loved college. But I'm grateful I went through schooling because of all of the aspects of day to day employment that it was [i]perfect[/i] preparation for.
I'll throw my $0.02, before you decide whether to homeschool or not, look at your local public school system. My mother was a public educator, and I was a student in the public system. For me and those I knew it was excellent. The caveat is that I was in one of the best public school systems in the nation, and as I've grown older I've seen many school systems that are on the other end of the curve. I lived in a state where public education is highly valued, in many it is not, and the schools suffer as a result. So bad failing schools beware yada yada, everyone says this, but the converse is more important - if you live in an area where the schools are excellent, then take advantage! Your local school system may be excellent, you won't know unless you investigate. Keep in mind also that standardized tests scores are only part of this. You need to look in depth at what other opportunities for studies are being offered, how individual schools are run and taught. Don't get anecdotes from people on slashdot, get them from the people in your neighborhood.
This involves a bit of legwork, but if it's too much to handle then put your kid in public school anyway because teaching them properly at home will be far more work than this.
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/silicon-valley-home-schooling/
In the US homeschooling is more popular with the religious right who don't want them "larnin' bout how we's sended from munkehs". In the UK, it's more associated with drippy-hippy Woodcraft-folk types.
This stereotype holds only for those who are unfamiliar with the reality of American public schools. In the US, homeschooling is more popular with parents who understand that typical US public school systems are a collision of bureaucracy, politics and labor unions where education is an afterthought. It is popular amongst parents who understand that No Child Left Behind's (NCLB) obsession with exams leaves behind children with special needs and punishes educational creativity. It is popular amongst parents who believe that being bullied by a drug-soaked mob of feral children and exposed to peer terrorism and gunplay is not a mandatory component of healthy socialization. It is popular amongst parents who believe that by banning Christianity and a handful of religions from public schools while allowing pseudo-scientific dogma, mammon worship, celebrity worship, political party tribalism, sports worship, brand idolatry, gun idolatry, flag idolatry, Apple idolatry and other forms of materialism provides a toxically unbalanced view of reality.
We have the tribes based on C# vs Java vs Python vs Perl vs Javascript. We have the pro-systemd and anti-systemd tribes. We have the Linux vs FreeBSD vs Mac vs Windows tribes. We still have to deal with cleaning up the technical mess when someone doesn't do their job or does it poorly. We still argue about decisions and job delegations. Dealing with real work includes things like filling in a time sheet (similar to the bullshit paperwork at school), meetings to plan stuff, code comments (whether you think they're necessary or valuable or not, they're extra work), etc... etc...
Our lives in the technology industry aren't quite like a prison scenario, but the analogues between corporate work-life in technology and corporate work-life in regular labor jobs are still present. We have it easier than most others, but the same situations occur.
... Seriously? If a cabbage picked its major right, it could get a B.A. at a lot of schools. How do you think all those frat boys that drank their way through college managed to graduate? Communications, English, Art History, Marketing... Most schools are more concerned about your student loan check clearing the bank than they are about quality of education. As long as your money's good, here, have a degree.
I don't know where you are, but where I am, if you're not in the trades and you don't get a four-year degree, your job options are pretty limited to jobs where you have to wear a name tag and/or a paper hat. Bachelors' degrees are so common that HR departments use the lack thereof to cull out resumes from the flood that they receive, and still manage to hire people, so it can't shrink the candidate pool TOO much. The result is that getting a job running Excel and going to useless meetings (which a high school junior is usually qualified for, skills-wise) requires a four-year degree.
Employers like degrees for a couple of reasons: 1) It shows that you can do mindless irrelevant busy work that accomplishes nothing without going insane, and 2) you most likely have a mountain of student loan debt, which makes you more unlikely to quit once they start and find out they're doing three jobs and getting paid for 2/3rds of one. Notice that neither of those reasons is related to the actual education.
Never underestimate the power of stupid people in large groups.
I am aware of the studies that indicate an average home-schooled child scores better on testing than an average publicly schooled youngster. Though "homies" are sometimes schooled at home because of their parent's religious beliefs, they are still more likely than average to have attentive, involved parents than the lot of the public system's daytime babysitting service... these students would likely do better than average in the public school system.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
Man fuck charter schools. Public money being funneled directly to some scum corporation.
Hey man, he saved one whole byte doing that.
Trolling is a art,
First, know yourself. Then, know your children. Then and only then consider the issue at hand.
Both 'academic/professional success' and 'socialization' are false objectives: they come naturally enough in a healthy environment. But are _you_ as a parent prepared to accept the possibility that your particular little snowflake might have some life to live that is _not_ in keeping with our society's current view of success? Or social norms?
Home schooling provides the unique opportunity of meeting your child's distinct developmental needs, as-is, person to person. This opportunity is wasted if you, the parent, are not able to be conscious of it, and responsive to it. It is also a tremendous amount of effort, no matter how you look at it, so you also need to be able to completely surrender yourself to this being your life for a while. It is also one of the greatest singular opportunities in life for the emotional growth and conscious-raising of the parent(s).
Having said all that, don't believe for one moment that teaching your children is beyond you. It's easier than ever in this networked world, the resources (both materials and like-minded people) are richly abundant. You can do it if you want to.
Many public schools are fine, just fine. Practically all are deeply institutional and are better at turning out sausages than whole human beings. If you desire instilling the values of self-sufficiency, critical thinking, consciousness, and a well-developed sense of self, you ought to give home schooling some honest consideration. If you can't get off the plane of "success/socialization" thinking, though, you will likely find it a frustrating and difficult experience.
More importantly indeed.
It's good that you are putting aside the debate and focusing on your own situation.
Homeschooling is a huge time commitment. It's a defining lifestyle choice. It can work well or not. I know because I've seen and done both.
If you are correct, and I'll come back to that in a minute... if you are correct about your wife not wanting to let go, that in my experience does not work out well for the kids. In my experience it leads to a lack of independence in the kids. I've seen kids who were so carefully managed that the only control they had over their own lives was when they were misbehaving. It escalated as they got older.
On the other hand I've also seen kids who enjoyed their homeschool/co-op school lifestyle and thrived in it.
We married and planned on homeschooling. But (much longer story short) after awhile we realized that we hated homeschooling. It was clear that we and our children would be better off making the best of our community schools, in spite of their reputation. This has worked out well for us. And yet I know other families who still homeschool and are doing fine.
So first of all, this is a decision for you and your wife to make. It's like deciding what state to live in. Florida isn't objectively better than Arizona in any meaningful way. (We could discuss it on slashdot though.) The outcome will be what you make of it.
Which brings me to the real point. You did really well in school. You thrived. Your success today is largely based on your education.
Your wife is bringing a very different perspective to the decision.
I advise you to put aside your preconceived notions about why your wife thinks this way.
You and your wife must be an extraordinary people. Otherwise, why would people who chose such different life paths have managed to meet and get married? Yet, a puzzle, you aren't on the same page on schooling your children. Investigate.
I also advise you to look at what attracts you to your wife, and look at this disagreement you have about homeschooling, and see them as related. Look at this as some kind of anomaly to study. Get to know your wife better. Come from the perspective that she is awesome so this must be awesome too, if I only knew.
Happy hunting.
Personally, I think home schooling is a bad thing for kids since it doesn't teach them the proper socialization they will need as adults.
I had a pretty abysmal public school experience through elementary. And, quite frankly, I didn't start actually socializing with other kids until my parents started homeschooling me. Admittedly, it was only for a couple years, and I went to a public high school, but all of the friends I made while homeschooling had zero problems developing normal nerd-level social skills. Socialization isn't really something you can teach, considering it's so deeply instinctive to us as humans. Albeit, under extreme circumstances, kids struggle with it, but I wouldn't worry. Maybe someday it'll just make for a good story.
You're interested in a RATIONAL discussion and you posted this to /.? Are you on crack?
In Florida all children may complete any or all grades K through 12 through the states online education system for free. :)
(Well not free.. you are already paying for it in taxes.)
So move to Florida already....
No State Income tax.
Lower cost of living.
Warm weather. 58 Low 81 High today.
Disclaimer - My wife is a Real Estate Agent.
Many home schooled don't take the tests, as they would fail the fuck out of them.
The studies that show homeschooling was better were skewed badly.
http://www.patheos.com/blogs/l...
You said that your wife has a GED, while you have a MS. You also stated that SHE has separation issues. Does she want to protect herself by forcing your child to stay home, (until her separation issues abate, when will that be?). Does she have an inferiority complex, that the high school drop out can do just a good a job as those teachers with Masters do? Most veteran teachers do have their masters.
Teaching children the art of reading is a skill, if your child does not pick it up right away will your wife be able to identify the problem and provide the appropriate intervention? Teaching math requires the different skills. The abstract concept that 2 big nickles equals one smaller sized dime most younger children do not understand.
If this is a tough issue for you to confront with your wife, strongly suggest that she should take a "How to Teach Reading course and How to Teach Elementary School math course at the local college. She must get high grades. That way she can prove to herself and to you that she has the ability to properly teach. If she gets low grades that will show that she is biting off more that she can chew.
And she is biting off my that she can chew.
Your kids need preparation for the modern world, and nothing beats the core curriculum of a Public School: "Sit down, Shut up, and Standardized Responses!" Your kids will learn such valuable skills as "Raise Your Hand," "The Authorities Know Everything," and "Don't Talk to Your Neighbor." In addition, they will be given opportunities to learn reading, math, watered-down science and possibly even a little something from the arts at the exact same pace as the stupidest child in your school district! With an education like that, you can rest assured that your precious little snowflakes will do a fine job landing on the rest of the pile.
Or you could take your chances coming up with something of your own, you hippified weirdo.
Home schooled children, on average, score in the 70-80th percentile on achievement tests.
That doesn't really mean much though, as you can't compare how those same kids would have done in Public schools. There's a huge selection bias here, as home schooler's do not have representative parents.
A large part of the low-performers in Public Schools aren't due to random stupidity in the general populous, but rather due to having parents who can't or won't provide a stable home life so that their kids can concentrate on their studies. If the family has the resources to devote an entire person to schooling the kids, they pretty much by definition aren't in that category.
Look at it this way, if you took the average Public School, and removed the test scores for everyone living in poverty or in single-parent families or where all available adults are working so much the kids are alone most of the time they are home and awake, you'd probably also see the remainder in the 70-80th percentile. Perhaps higher.
About 35% of people 25 to 29 have bachelors degrees. So did your pubic school fail to teach you what an average is?
Lots of comments from people who have no clue what they're talking about. We home-school. #1 is an Eagle Scout, and will finish paramedic training this summer. #2 is in conservatory with scholarship. #3 - at 13 has completed a half-dozen college courses, and is now earning money as a software engineer.
For their entire childhood, people remarked that they were well-behaved in public, and knew how to speak to adults.
Juxtapose that with the cesspool that is public education, which wastes huge amounts of the kids' time, and vast amounts of energy is expended on head-games, such as cliques, bullying, and insanely stupid and arbitrary edicts pronounced from teachers and administrators who clearly hate children, or are just absolute lunatics. ( suspending a 9 year-old for "using a magic ring to threaten to make fellow students disappear" - declaring it to be a "terrorist threat." )
Our kids got an average of 2 - 3 hours of instruction per day, and blew all their peers away. We always felt sorry for the poor kid down the street, standing in the rain at 6:15 AM waiting for the school bus - and usually returning between 4:30 and 4:45.
Your dumb wife versus decades of teaching experience and tested/proven techniques.
Home schooled children, on average, score in the 70-80th percentile on achievement tests.
The ones who actually go on to college do, those who don't tend to be left out of these studies.
Also, let me apologize if I rehash things already said in previous comments - I try to avoid getting to deep into the weeds in the
Academic performance: Maybe. My eperience with this was mixed. In the humanities, the strength of the curriculum covered a lot of gaps in my mother's education (said gaps were why she was responsible for teaching the humanities). Unfortunately, the weaknesses in the curriculum created gaps, too - she'd selected a hyper traditional curriculum from a catholic organization, and she tended to insert her own politics into interpretations of history and literature. My father's a research geologist, so he covered math and the physical sciences. The sciences worked out ok, except that he often lacked patience communicating the foundational math concepts - if you got it on his first or second explanation, you were golden; but if you were still stuck you'd probably stay that way. This hampered my younger brother quite a bit.
Socialization: Here's the part that's polarizing. There are definite issues with socialization. It's not that you only interact with family members - there are tons of opportunites to cavort with other kids: playing around your neighborhood (which we did back in the 90s - I gather unsupervised outdoor play is more of a rarity, these days), organized sports, organized clubs (cub/brownie/boy/girl scouts), the local YMCA swimming pool, etc, etc. The problem is most of that play is highly supervised and in small, intimate groups. You don't get any experience navigating the daunting social currents within a larger pool of people that includes a big chunk of relative strangers. The affects of this aren't always obvious, immediately. I started to show it earlier than my little brother - I became pretty withdrawn around kids I didn't know as early as 8 years old. My brother experienced more social awkardness than the norm when he hit about 11. We all stopped home schooling the same year, so my younger sister got out of it at the youngest age (about 5) and she is by far the best socially adapted of the three of us.
Most of the homeschooling families back had some sort of motivation beyond merely "I want my kid to have the best education" - education was always what was talked about first; but a lengthy conversation would make it pretty clear that they were really most concerned about other things: sometimes it was behaviour problems resulting from peer pressure (everything from "too much flirting" to "drugs"), sometimes religion, and (manytimes) more to do with problems the parents have than anything else: including in my mother's case.
These parental problem didn't result in undereducated kids in my family (although we had gaps we had to back fill later), but everyone I saw whose home schooling was motivated by parental issues went through seriuous struggles before they settled into their adult lives. I've kept in touch or reconnected with 3 of the home schooled friends I used to have since then and they all went through a similar trajectory.
Recommendations:
There are no apparent disadvantages homeschooling in curriculum or academic achievement possibilities is what the point was you f8cking troll.
Was hoping to find some modicum of intelligent discussion here but once again it has turned into a monkey fucking a coconut
Tip from a head engineer at NASA: You can't press ctrl/alt/del in space.
Bottom line up front (BLUF). My recommendation is; Try the homeschool over the summer if you find your child is NOT keeping up to a pace to complete within a year then enroll them in a brick and mortar school in the Fall and maybe keep going on the home school curriculum as a supplement. Background: Neither my wife nor I were educated in the United States so we didn't have a good frame of reference for what to expect from the school system here. Our oldest son went to a great full day preschool and we (all 3 of us) were really happy with the activities, soccer, piano, taekwondo that they offered. For the first half of kindergarten, we sent him to public school which in this school district is only half day. He was bullied when they weren't teaching and bored when they were since he had covered all the same material in pre-K. We pulled him from that and sent him to a private school that offered full day Kindergarten. 3 years later, we can't afford the private school anymore and put him back in public school and his homework takes him less than 10 minutes. They put him in a gifted/independent study program that only happens a few hours a week. Our youngest we home schooled using a state approved curriculum and now our oldest is also using the same homeschooling program over the summer to skip grades in the public schools because the state says that the public schools have to accept it. Kids are sponges they are going to retain what ever they are interested in and is near enough for them to reach so home/private/public doesn't matter as much as exposure and practice.
The public school system in America has been under the constant grip of the hard-left since the 60's. If you trend the results against who implements policies you can see on whose door step responsibility for the problem lies.
Not really knowing anything about the subject, I would say look at public schools through the eyes of the media. Student suspended for using the one ring, student suspended for taking a bite out of the wrong corner of a breakfast pastry, child arrested for pointing a finger at another student and saying "bang". Not to mention school administrators using notebook computer webcams to cruise for underage T&A. And these are only the incidents that caught the attention of a major media outlet. Not to mention that some schools don't teach certain sciences (like evolution) which make it extremely difficult for acceptance to most colleges and universities. Another problem with public schools is no child left behind. Children are pushed into the next grade level even if they haven't learned anything from the previous one. This usually makes them disruptive to the other students and lowers their learning. Which increases the stress on the child that was forcibly advanced and increases the chances for being bullied, which will be ignored by administrators until the child snaps and brings a weapon to class.
So. Do you want your child's imagination and any budding artistic expression to be crushed at an early age? Do you want your child to be conditioned to mindlessly obey whatever an authority figure says? Or would you prefer to have an intelligent child capable of making their own choices about a topic instead of taking whatever spin FOX news is currently pushing as fact?
Yes - it is mostly religion, sadly. You'll hear a fair amount of poppycock about "wanting a better education", but if *that* was the goal, a couple of extra hours a day of (Gasp!) reading with them would be far, far better.
The primary advantage is you remove distraction and can focus on teaching one on one. If you can remain on task and have a strict schedule your child can advance very quickly. Public school classes are tailored at 3-4 levels of skill and they lump everyone together and frequently, students are left behind or worse held back if the rest of the class is not ready to advance. But if you have individual instruction you can overcome trouble spots and then accelerate the learning tailored to your child's personality and skills. For example, before you kids even reach middle school age they could be speaking and writing multiple languages. They could have advanced reading skills and be tackling algebra before they hit the 8th grade level.
It is much easier for a parent to interact with their own child then for a stranger. You know your child better than anyone. You can provide much more encouragement and when you hit a bump you can regroup and come at it in a different way to overcome the sticking point. You will know best how your child thinks.
That being said, it comes down to you as a parent being prepared to learn more than your child about teaching and about studying. If you can dive in like a Geek in a tech startup you can help your child shine like never before. Most people are capable of a lot more than we think, with the right motivation and hard work your child can exceed your wildest expectations. Certainly farther than any public or private school could take them in a classroom setting. The only way it would be better is if you hired a private tutor with exceptional skill. You must become that private tutor. So if you as a parent are not prepared for that task then it's not a good idea. It takes a lot of discipline as a home school parent.
Forget about worrying about social interaction in public school being lost. Socialize the child with friends, clubs, activities, etc. You are not locking them in the basement or joining a weird cult. Seek out a home schooling group where you can learn from more experienced parents and obtain the proper curriculum materials to meet the state requirements. Then you can exceed them as your child's education grows.
There is much to be learned, especially the old fashioned way. Children with means in the 1800's were pushed a lot harder and further than today's children. The ideas of rote memorization should not be underestimated. All the new techniques are complete bull pucky! We now know that young children have a brain that can absorb information rapidly, that ability drops as the child gets older. Start them young and you can be amazed.
Public and even private schooling is absolutely terrible in the USA. Go read up on old fashioned education and you will feel stupid indeed. Our forefathers with a classical education would mop the floor with anyone from today's generation. They would just need to become acquainted with technology advances.
Of course it is now effectively illegal to home-school in California. I am surprised that some group or another hasn't challenged this on First Amendment grounds.
I'm gonna go out on a limb and guess that *you* were home-schooled....
" More importantly, it seems like the only reason my wife wants to homeschool is because she doesn't want to let go. "
Before you decide to homeschool or not, the above issue needs to disappear. Put the kid in school. Your wife has to be able to let go. You can always pull the kid out of school if you so decide later, after your kid gets his own personal life started. And your wife gets her mental issues sorted out. Your kid NEEDS to gain independence a bit at a time, going to school is a good way to start on the right path. If your wife keeps the kid close untill he is 18 and then tossed him out he'll be in huge trouble. If the leaving of nest doesn't happen then it's even harder when he is older.
I went to public school. My high school had 5000+ students while I was there, my graduating class was 1300 or so.
Bachelors in CS at 22, Masters in CS at 24. Professional programmer making $86K with a house, wife and 2 kids.
Home schooling is not magic.
Kids will do what is expected of them.
100% of parents that home school have high expectations for their kids.
20% (for example) of all parents have high expectations for their kids.
So if you have these two groups, which one is statistically going to be better?
I'll be frank, if everyone in the USA home schooled, there would be a lot of stupid kids out there that only know how to reiterate jokes from SpongeBob Squarepants.
If your parents are drug addicts, your pretty much screwed if they decide to home school you.
The stereotype is pretty strong in the US too, and not without reason I have known quite a few parents who looked into homeschooling and quickly discovered that all the local resources (such as joint field trips, groups for parents, etc) were focused on religiously motivated homeschooling and they were not happy about the people interacting with the 'homeschool community' exposed their children to.
Fuck off asshole.
From my experience, it isn't Home Schooling vs. Private School vs. Public School. But the level of parental involvement.
Many kids in Public Schools, the parents dump them off to them, as a free day care. Then when they get home, they may just say do your homework, before you can have free time. While not in the realm of abuse or neglect. It puts the child in a disadvantage, as they are not being reinforced with the value of the education.
Private schools (Because the parents are paying out of the pocket) are more concerned on the average about the child's performance. They will be more discerning on trends in the grades of the child so they will be pushed to work harder.
Home Schooling, is maximum parental involvement. So the child has 1 on 1 education.
However if your child is in even the worse public school, and you are very engaged in the child's education and you as the parent insure that you fill in the gaps that may be missing. While the official school can fill in gaps that you may be missing.
For example, my Parents never picked up strong math skills by 6th grade I began to exceed them (Fraction arithmetic/ Beginning algebra) So I needed teachers trained in the topic to teach me the new skill. This type of stuff if were taught at home, would be more glazed over, enough to pass the test, but not done in any detail, as this was a topic my parents were not skilled in.
As well schooling out of the home allows for a larger breadth of education. Even if you have advanced degrees, it doesn't make you an expert in all thing. (Kinda shown in the game show are you smarter then a 5th grader, where smart people with tones of skills still lose the game, because they are so focused on a particular area, and forget some of the details of your early education)
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
While public schools and the social systems that develop in them have faults, I can say I have had pretty consistently negative experiences with home schooled coworkers. Even ones who were really sweet personally were still a nightmare to interact with professionally. I found no improvement in their response to propaganda, they just randomized which sources they believed and did not believe.
You evidently don't have any idea what the national averages are.
Oh wait, there is none, you're just whining because it's not how you learned. Get over it. Learning multiple ways to perform operations is a GOOD thing, and understanding why you're doing them and how they work is even better. Ever taken any computer science? If that's "the most extreme" example of what's supposedly wrong with common core it's significantly better and far head of the dumbed down, idiotic rote memorization taught by many schools previously The people responsible for this material are NOT a bunch of buffoons, they know what they're doing.
I also don't get this "would be" crap. Common Core is already in pretty wide use in the non-moron states/school districts, at least to some degree. My kids are being taught that way, and I've learned a thing or two from THEM as a result!
Check out: http://www.amazon.com/Teenage-.... Look into finding ways to gain more control over school, vs leaving it entirely. Such as enrolling in college courses, etc. If you are using homeschooling to protect your child from science or the outside world - it will end poorly. If you are using freedom from traditional school to let your child really explore and treat middle/high school as early college - go for it! I recommend waiting until middle school.
I turned 22 last week. I was homeschooled all my life until college, and now hold an associate's magna cum laude and a bachelor's cum laude. My mother has no college degrees.
I believe this is a matter of what you want out of life, in addition to how you think it can be achieved. There is plenty of popular ignorance over the latter, but differences over the former undermine communication.
Do you define your child's "greater good" as his paycheck when he's 40, or as his emotional health and stability in life?
To be sure, one should follow from the other (hint: I don't mean health follows from money), but I see many people treating the two as opposed, and calling the parent selfish for prioritizing emotional health. This is counterproductive and ultimately damning for the child's greater good.
I agree with this. One of the worst problems with public school is that your child interacts with a large mob of children at nearly the same age. That's very unnatural, and I think it leads to escalating social problems. To develop, kids should interact with much younger and older children and adults, learning both responsibility and maturity.
In general response to the OP's question, I would say that if he doesn't find home schooling appealing now, he certainly will after experiencing several years of public schooling. If his kid is to turn out right, the parents need to re-educate the child anyway. I have to set with my daughter twice a week to fix what her math teacher is telling her.
I was homeschooled, more unschooled. Honestly I just learned what I wanted on my own because I was too stubborn for school. By stubborn I mean at a young age I figured out I learned quickly from books and 95% of my school day was a waste of time, so I just stopped trying in about the 6th grade. I can honestly say my parents never sat down and taught me any classes, I just read. I taught myself mathematics and multiple languages. Now as an adult, I'm finishing up an Electrical Computer Engineering degree. My point is it depends on the kid. School in no way worked for me and it scared the shit out of my parents to be sure. But through it all we figured out having a curious kid that is intelligent is apparently about equivalent to going to high school, since I've had no problems in college. If I had stayed in public school by some sort of force I imagine I would not have been as successful as I am today. Lesson is if your child is average or stupid or craves attention, American public education is a good idea. If your child shows intelligence and curiosity, let them go and explore.
We home schooled three.
So far we have one finishing up her PhD in Nursing
One with a law degree
And my boy who is a game playing slacker.
ymmv
So basically it comes down to whether your anecdotal experience is typical.
It worked out great for you, but much like public schools, it could also have been a disaster.
The decision to home school should take the entire environment into account along with the other educational options available. To rebut the flame bait in the original post I would purpose that what some people consider coddling is just good teaching practice (one on one instruction). I was home schooled up through grade 8(U.S). My little sister decided that she wanted to go to public school in 7th grade. Her experience in middle school made me glad that I waited. As a very artistic and fanciful child, she was basically tortured by both her peers and her teachers. She came home in tears one time because her 8th grade art teacher told her that she was wasting her time drawing!(She went on to graduate from Maryland Institute College of Art with a degree in painting). She would have been better off if she had skipped grade school and gone straight into High School. In High School she was encouraged to actually improve herself. Note: I would be the first to admit that being home schooled has an adverse impact on social skills development. But in the long run given the large class sizes, I am not sure that the social skills kids are learning in grade school are really that beneficial.
"I myself am made entirely of flaws, stitched together with good intentions."
So much to learn--but you control what is taught, respond to learning situations, and limit exposure of 'questionable' teachings (which are dependent upon the parents).
That's my problem with the whole scenario. Homeschooling your children is, essentially, making your children exactly like you. I mean, sure, I think I'm awesome, but I've done quite a bit of introspection and thinking to get to this point. I don't want a parrot, indoctrinated into my way of thinking without any of the reasoning or life experience behind it. I know there are homeschooling groups that get their children together for the socialization component, but chances are very good that parents will find other parents just like them. In fact, there is a very large homeschooling community in my current city, which is in one of the most conservative and religious states in the country.
My philosophy is: I'm not raising children, I'm raising adults who happen to be children. I want them taught in different ways by different teachers. I want them to at least be exposed to, if not socialize with kids who celebrate different holidays, believe in different things, and have different levels of prosperity. So yeah, homeschooling was never even a consideration for us. At most, I'd consider a magnet school for high school, depending on my kids' interests, but that's a big maybe.
I believe the main point that might lead to good outcomes for homeschoolers is that there is no way you are getting as good of a student to teacher ratio in a classroom. 30-1 or more is what some of the schools in the city near me have now. Even in a good school you will still be looking at 12-1 at the best. 1-1 or 2-1 is such a huge difference that it makes up for the lack of experience on the part of the parent in teaching. Plus the parent knows the child and how to get them to pay attention to the material they should be learning. You also have the option of holding off on a topic if they aren't ready to grasp that concept yet. In class everyone must progress together. Likewise, you can go deeper into a topic if it is something they find interesting.
I do think eventually the material will get beyond our ability to teach it effectively. Sometime before high school we are planning on transitioning our children to public school. But to start I see homeschooling as a huge benefit, even if it is extra work for us.
-- ssoorrrryy,, dduupplleexx sswwiittcchh oonn.. -Quote found on actual fortune cookie.
My own education was in private, parochial schools through my undergraduate engineering degree, and it was outstanding. I went on to add a masters in business from one of the best biz schools in America, and feel very strongly and positively about the quality of what I received. Now, our two daughters-in-law are home schooling their children, and one of my wife's cousins home schooled both her now adult children. My own not very humble and bigoted opinion is that: 1.) It depends on why you want to do this. Does your child have special needs, e.g., do they suffer from ADD or social anxiety? Or are they intellectually gifted and you don't feel they will be challenged by the public system? Do you have strong religious beliefs that you want to be sure are taught? Or ?. If you don't have strong reasons why an outside school won't meet your child's needs, and all you're going to do is to buy and administer a commercial curriculum, I'd ask why you want to do this. 2.) If you do it, *do it right*. Home schooling is much like working from home; it's very, very difficult to maintain any sense of structure and balance in your home classroom with all the other things going on in your and your child's life. One advantage to a public or private school is to remove them from screen time while the laundry gets done, etc. My wife's cousin used a specific room in their home as the classroom, and that communicated the seriousness with which she approached the process. It helped maintain the discipline and structure that are needed. 3.) I had a long career working in customer facing jobs and management for a major American electronics company, and hired and fired people. In a second, retirement career, I've taught math in a number of career schools in the last few years, and I have been appalled at the poor skills in basic arithmetic that I've encountered. Modern careers requires that one be able to both analyze and communicate. At the grade school level, this translates into the need to drill the students *every day* in basic arithmetic facts for yes, two, three, or more years. But many elementary public and private school teachers find this less rewarding than promoting reading and language skills. The children need *both*, but they need the basic arithmetic skills established strongly before they can move on to the creative stuff like algebra and trig. This will mean confronting, cajoling, encouraging, demanding, teasing, laughing,...it's a lot of work and it's intense, and I question whether most parents are up to that. To be fair, many public and private school teachers aren't up to it either, and evaluating your local schools is part of this decision. 4.) An intermediate solution might be to supplement outside school with material tailored to your child's interests. My very technically gifted father had me wiring industrial relay logic from blue prints when I was twelve, and that interest led me to engineering school. One of our granddaughters is visually artistically gifted, and we try to encourage that. Another shows signs of ADD, great physical energy, strong creativity, exceptional skill with numbers, and an insatiable demand for attention. She needs enormous one-on-one time, and until she gets a bit older, could be a real outside school classroom disruption. 5.) My wife taught for 23 years and has a validation in gifted education. One of her observations is that children have to be pushed hard enough to feel challenged, but not so hard as to feel unsuccessful. If your child is outside the normal range, either by talent or lack thereof, or by personality or strong unusual interests, they need to be pushed just hard enough in just the right areas. Maybe you can do a better job of this, and maybe you can't. Be honest with yourself. 6.) You haven't mentioned religious beliefs, but if you're comfortable with a religious perspective, many parochial schools can be a better choice. Or maybe not; as I noted above, I got a killer education from parochial schools, but my own daughters ended up happier and more successful in public schools.
Then find me a study disproving me. I have found NO studies anywhere, ever, that support what you are claiming. Why do I need to do all of the work here? Ive already spent a good amount of time googling things like "student outcomes public private home" and these studies are all I get.
Put up or shut up.
I considered moderation, but it fails to make the point. You're an asshole. I wouldn't be surprised if your own kids disown you as soon as possible.
I have 5 kids, 4 of which are school age. They are all homeschooled, not all of them have always been homeschooled, we move back and forth if needs arise or if a situation is not working.
There is a joke we told at my telecommute job.
"It's so nice for the bank that we work from home, because now we are in the office 24 hours a day."
That is the same attitude we have about school. Every second I spend with my kids has at least an undertone of me trying to keep them excited, curious, and intellectual about the world.
It isn't that they never go to school, because they are home. It is that they never LEAVE school, because our family is a school, with very clear and persistent intellectual goals and pursuits.
This is hard. It is expensive. It is a privilege afforded to us by only needing a single income. Every day we challenge our kids intellectually and academically, there is no other school that we could send them to that could boast that.
I suffer from mild ASD, and I could tell that the other kids knew I was different. Although I can mostly hide it now (I think), it's obvious that some people can still instantly tell. It's not fun when no one will talk to you at school because they can tell you're different. But even I, extremely lonely with no one to play with, thought the home-schooled kids were too strange and didn't want to hang out with them.
So do you really want your kids so messed up that not even lonely outcasts will want to hang out with them, just so you can tout higher than average grades around at your friends?
I think it's ok to send children to public school but intentionally putting them through abuse to "build character" isn't a favour.
It also doesn't work, based on the adults around me. Those with abusive childhoods lack resilience and courage, abuse others, and have authoritarian world-views. Some of the ones who were treated well have a sort of tragic openness, do more things that I admire, and are hard on themselves in actualizing ways rather than toxic ways. That's what "character" means, to me.
I understand there's a difference between a spoiled douchebag and someone with openness, courage, generosity, and empathy, but the difference is NOT that the latter has been abused as a child so fuck you for promoting that sticky idea.
Converesely, are the parents capable of conducting the home school? Do they have the temperment and training necessary? Home schooling a kid or kids is a significant contribution in time. You can't just say you're going to do this, and not commit a significant amount of your time to the task each day, and provide the structure needed.
Do you really understand the subjects, and are you able to convey them to others? It's one thing to be able to do something as simple as add, and quite another to effectively explain this to someone else, particularly someone who has a limited attention span. Schools, particularly universities, are jammed with subject matter experts who cannot communicate effectively.
What is the personality and mind set of the child? Do they need significant social interaction? In many cases, they simply won't get this at home. Will they take acadenic instruction as seriously from mom and dad as they would in a school?
We home schooled two of our kids for a while. Our daughter had serious health problerms, and simply could not keep up with the school structure. Our son, a year and a half younger, seemed to feel his sister was getting more attention, and requested home schooling. Both had been in a private Christian school prior to this, and, after a couple of years, went to a public school. Both were far ahead of their classmates when they returned to school, and remained so for several years.
My wife has a doctorate in what I'd call teaching teachers to teach (it has a formal name, but I can never remember it). I have a BS and MS in physics, with minors in math and computer science. We both taught some at the university level (particularly my wife) prior to trying home schooling. I still had reservations about our ability to teach subjects in which we had minimal background, but it should be obvious that we were probably slightly better qualified than some.
This is one of those areas in which I don't feel there is a universal answer, As stated previously, it depends too much on the circumstances. Given the circumstances we had, I feel we did the right thing. But this is something that no one can really answer for someone else. You are responsible for your kids, not someone else (perhaps especially third parties who really don't know the circumstances). You will need to make the decision, and live with the result. My wife and I wish you well in making a good decision.
My anecdote: My kids are in 1st, 4th and 6th grades. Their mom home schools them. They test at the 4th, 10th and 12th grade levels. They are smart, courteous, self confident, rambunctious, and personable. The public school system is an absolute and complete failure. Keep your kids out of it at all costs.
My experience from tutoring math for years: I would get home school students who had surpassed their parents math skills. So there is some self selection bias of good students with parents who care enough to pursue additional math/physics through tutoring.
The level of socialization of homeschooled children that I tutored was superior in virtually every way. Whether they were homeschooled for religious reasons or not, they were well adjusted young *adults*, far more mature than the regular teenagers I know from tutoring and coaching on a daily basis. Homeschooled kids grew to be adults. They interact with me as an adult. They took on responsibilities in a much more adult fashion -- scheduling tutoring times, paying me directly, etc...
Everyone likes to hate on the religious nuts and lump all of homeschooling in with it, but that was never my experience. Also, as far as socialization goes, they typically aren't locked in a room all day. There are abundant resources and communities surrounding homeschooling that have the kids interacting with others on a daily basis.
My opinion (and my kids are in public school) is that the hate for public school is just hate with virtually no foundation. There may be examples of some homeschooling craziness out there, but it's probably under the rates of public school drug dealing, murders, assaults, etc...
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I was homeschooled from pre-K through high school. Never attended a public school before 1.5 years of "duel enrollment" at the local community college my junior and senior years of high school. Born and raised in an upper-middle class, moderate-to-liberal household on the East Coast, I was fortunate to have dedicated, highly educated parents as my teachers; my mother did do most of the "hands on" education herself. I played four years of high school sports at the local high school. I successfully completed the SAT my senior year of high school (700 verbal/680 math) and applied and got accepted into all 5 colleges I applied for.
Now in my mid-twenties, I have a very successful career by all measures and a strong social life. I would be hard pressed to link my homeschooling past to any significant downside at this point in my life - but I would certainly be comfortable crediting it for several key upsides.
A few thoughts:
- Homeschooling is not for everyone. The "success" or "failure" of any individual's homeschooling experience will be highly sensitive to situational circumstances, such as the parent's ability to teach, the ability to engage with a homeschooling community, social exposure, etc.
- Homeschooling for religious or other "non-educational" reasons is somewhat different than homeschooling to "disrupt" or "hack" education (the latter being my personal experience, although I was exposed to a good amount of the former).
- The greatest benefits of homeschooling include: the ability to enjoy a custom-tailored education that can feed of a student's individual strengths, the opportunity for experimentation, and more friendly environment for truly open-minded thinking.
- The greatest challenges of homeschooling include: compensating for one's weaknesses (both as a student and as a parent/teacher), experiencing a range of social interaction (a common stereotype; true to a certain degree, but far from impossible to mitigate), and as a teacher, doing the extra leg-work required to build a well-rounded education for your child/student.
The decision to homeschool for my parents came from a desire to go beyond what the public system offers. Not that the public system was "wrong" or "bad" - and I always had the opportunity to go to the public school - but my parents made the conscientious decision to put in the time and effort, and they did a truly astounding job, in hindsight.
For anyone considering homeschooling your children, be prepared to work hard, yes, but also to think creatively. You shouldn't aim to "replace the public schooling system" if you want to capture the true value of homeschooling. Instead, you should be seeking to create, from scratch, a custom-tailored education experience for each of your individual children. If you succeed in doing that, I'm certain you and your children can have a tremendously fulfilling homeschooling education.
My 2 cents.
And where do they fall when kids who simply play connect the dots on standardized tests are excluded?
Seriously, I had the privileged of seeing students test scores and a substantial number of them scored in the 0-15% range depending on the test. And they're averaged in with everyone else.
Thanks to the kids treating the tests as a joke, getting into the 70-80 percentile doesn't seem too difficult when a student actually bothers to take the test and put a little effort into it.
As for sharing a classroom with them?
I didn't have any academic classes with them, just filler classes like home-ec. But it was good to be aware of them and who they were.
My personal experience as a homeschooled kid was excellent academically, and somewhat difficult socially.
First, academics: my parents did little beyond the first couple years. They helped me learn to read and do basic math, and then let the books teach me, but really I didn't bother much with the books. I was intellectually curious about the world, however, which I think more than made up for book learning. At 16 I started taking college classes, first at a community college, then at a reasonable state school (VT.edu). By 18 I had 1/3 of a degree's worth of college credits, all As, at which point I transferred to a good liberal arts college (Hampshire.edu), which didn't have grades. I also did well there, as evidenced by getting into several very good PhD programs (MIT, UCSD, Brown). I chose UCSD, and aside from taking a long time to get the PhD I also did very well there.
Did my easy going home schooling experience hurt me? I don't think so. Yes, there were many topics I learned about the very first time in college, but as it turns out that's a fine time to first encounter difficult material. My first community college class was all I really needed to adjust to school learning. It wasn't an easy adjustment, but we are only talking 3 months of my life here, and I still got an A in the class. So, to sum up: home schooling can be pretty easy on the parents and the student.
As for the social side: it was isolating. But I was living in a very small town, where the only other kids were 15 minutes car ride away, or more. I was lonely a lot, and only had a few friends. That started to change when I first went to college, but as a commuter at a state school, the opportunities weren't that good for a shy kid. Going to the residential liberal arts college really helped, and I made lots of friends there, some of which I keep in touch with in the real world (not just facebook). I hope that living in a big city (san diego) will make the socialization part easier for my daughter at an earlier age than it was for me.
To conclude: it worked well for me, and wasn't that hard for my parents. I plan to homeschool my daughter.
I'd like to respond to the allegation that home-schooling is terrible for socialization.
I went to a Catholic school where the average class size was 18 students, and generally, there wasn't a lot of turnover from Kindergarten to 8th grade.
If, among those 18 students, you were branded "unclean" (nerdy, ugly, socially inept, didn't have the right clothes, and back then "gay/lesbian" was an insult also, no matter how straight you were...this was Catholic school after all) and you didn't have any friends (and it spread to the other grades how "unclean" you were), it was conceivable that you could go for close to a decade without making any friends at all (barring any after-school activities where you could make friends among kids that don't judge nearly as much).
If you have attentive parents that pay attention when your kid is never invited to any other kids' houses to play or hang out at the mall, or whatever and generally seems depressed over it, it's up to the parents to figure out how to get your kids properly socialized. For instance, friends who run an all-ages gym have a home-schooling program.
There are resources for parents who wish to home-school, same as there are resources for parents whose kids simply don't fit in. But school doesn't automatically guarantee socialization.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
Don't home school... your kid will miss all the social growth that happens during 5-18, and not really be better off (except maybe better at taking tests, due to doing nothing else). Little of anything I know I learned in school, I learned because I was interested in something and actively pursued it. It's easy to point out home schooled people, and was especially apparent in college days... The very awkward kids with dependence issues.
I personally am disappointed by your outlook of homeschooling. I was home schooled and I got plenty of social interaction. I played sports (football, track, lacrosse, wrestling) all through out my youth and high school. Also not all homeschoolers are locked in their parents house. We spent more time at outside of the house at various class across town. We meet with some of the most diverse groups you can find.
Personally I believe homeschooling is great if the parents have the time to commit and the willingness to explore various options. Just to let you know I graduated with a double major in computer science and math and am now VP of a Web Security firm. Not all path will lead to success. I had just as much chance and any other kid in public/private school. I just ended up where I am with hard work.
Basically, it doesn't matter. Your child's performance in a home school environment or in a public school will be about the same because your child has two parents who are actively engaged his education. This is the main reason private schools and home schoolers generally get better results: their student bodies are drawn from a self-selecting pool of actively engaged parents. Those kids will do well whereever they go because: parents.
As to socialization, there are lots of ways that home schoolers can provide for group socialization. I'm sure your friendly neighborhood search engine can point you in the right direction.
FWIW, my kid goes to a public school. She does fine but receives minimal input from the teachers because they are mainly engaged in dealing with her grossly underprepared classmates. To the school, she is a solved problem because she tests at or above grade level and doesn't cause any disciplinary problems. So basically she spends a lot of time bored. This is mitigated somewhat because she is allowed to read on her own and she takes advantage of that.
As to the wonderful group socialization that comes from public schools... well now she knows who Katy Perry is and she has learned to imitate the whining and complaining of her peers. So there's that.
I believe that your wild 95% observance really probably correlates directly to your own prejudices with regard to the matter than any firm observations.
As a hybrid homeschooling parent of six, in the south, Texas 4A district( we homeschool from k-6, public 7-12) My personal observation of countless homeschooled and public school children, shows a much more nuanced metric that can be broken down simply to one thing, quality parental involvement.
We start off homeschooling primarily for 2 reasons 1- little kids can be real a$$holes,15-25 together, I feel does nothing but encourages pack behavior while stifling independence and free thought. 2-- do you realize how much flipping time is wasted in school each day? We didn't have children to give just send them to a baby sitter. An exemplary elementary+ education can be achieved in less than half the daily time required for public school, while giving your child the benefit of an extremely low student- teacher ratio.
My wife does not have a degree, but she did attend college with a focus on education, and took early childhood development classes and participated in a number of classroom observations. It takes work and dedication to be successful and isn't for everyone. With all the resources available, both secular an religious my wife's biggest challenge is planning our yearly curriculum. It literally takes all summer, and often requires changes mid year, so in my experience doing homeschooling "right" is not cheap!
Our success has been as follows 19F yr old sophomore in state collage, 16M, in top 5 of HS class ,3sport varsity athlete, 15F HS class president, #1 in class. 13M he is our biggest surprise he was a 14 week preemie , and has always been a bit "behind" by our standards, however in public school he is still in the top 10 of his class. Our two youngest will be entering public school in the next 2 years. So, in conclusion if your a half-a$$ed parent to public school child hopefully the school can pick up the slack. If you are half-a$$ed homeschool parent your kid is screwed. If you are in between as parent of either then your child will become a useful member of society. And if you excel as a parent of either education choice your child will excel also. Socialization is I feel the absolute worst reason presented against homeschooling , who in there right mind thinks 5-10 year olds interaction with each other is in any contributing to them becoming functioning adults.
TL;DR- be honest with yourself and your abilities, and your kids will be fine, slashdot is the worst forum for this discussion.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess you're retarded.
I don't really think there are too many terrible choices you can make for your kids' education, since they can get a good education (or bad one!) regardless of whether one makes the choice of public/private/home.
I became interested in home schooling after being asked by a homeschool group for some weekend volunteering of some of their larger events, and of course was surprised that my assumptions about the homeschool lifestyle never really panned out in actual application. I suppose somewhere they do, but you know, there's always *that group* of anti-socialites or whatever sub-group you don't want your kids to be like in your local high school too.
Expertise: The material in high school isn't somehow familiar to you? There's a few things in Calculus I might need to brush up on, but by and large, it's largely independent at that point, and all the materials I need are provided for me anyway. Sometimes this may be dependent on your kids' independence, and your choices for material.
Don't just like what I do: I've never taken gymnastics, or piano, or swimming, or nearly any of the things they do. Now, they do like to read, so that's one thing we have in common.
Social: It's a very rare day when the kids don't get out of the house. Those are usually homework days because they've been socializing a little too much.
Bye Dad: When they are of an age to need adult supervision, they have it; when they don't you give them latitude. They probably have more freedom from a hovering authority in my domain than a school domain. But I don't know how to quantify that. I can make anecdotes all day long, though.
Sports: I already alluded to sports. There's just as much soccermomming with homeschool parents -- with a wider variety of sports. University scholarships are also available for the homeschool athlete.
Field trips: Yep, the kids love this part of home school. They are on top of every new exhibit, and always ask to go. Better than TV/video games, that's for sure.
Learning something bad: I really don't think any except a naive homeschool parent actually believes this. And the kids *definitely* know it's not true.
The real big challenge? Getting them to do their homework consistently! ... If that somehow plays out differently in public school, please share!
Is one personal datum valuable? I don't know, but here's mine.
I was homeschooled from K through 12. It was good. I got to study computer programming and take calculus and all of the other over-achiever stereotypes that homeschoolers are known for. I graduated in the 90's and got my bachelors in computer engineering. I'm now in my 30's, married, we have three kids, and we're homeschooling them. I'm a professional in a technical field, and by most measures am "successful" I suppose? Not sure how much my personal story is valuable to you, but if you're posting on Slashdot, I just thought you might like to hear from another Slashdotter who has gone through a big chunk of life from a homeschooling background.
Anecdotally, I'm still in favor of homeschooling -- but please recognize that your child should be suited to it, you should be suited to it, and your parent-child-relationship should be suited to it. In general I think it can work for most people, but if any of those three aren't compatible with home-schooling for one reason or another, don't force it.
I am really thankful for the opportunities that homeschooling gave me. I don't feel "socially challenged" as a result -- I have my quirks, sure, but in general I do reasonably well whether I'm working in sales or in engineering. You get weird kids in homeschool situations, and you get weird kids in public school situations -- in my personal sample set, the things that matter most are parental involvement, and learning as a lifestyle.
Homeschooling is more than just doing school at home -- it's the overarching attitude of learning being something that one does -- something that you as a parent do, something that the kids do, and something that you do together. Making it formal or structured or adding curriculum -- that's all peripheral to the foundation.
And parental involvement is very important. The "social" barrier in home schooling is certainly there, but it's not a wall so much a curb that you have to step over. Be intentional about play groups, taking your kid to spend the night at a friends', day camps, sports teams, swimming lessons, etc etc etc. It takes effort to give your kids a healthy social diet, but it's extremely feasible if you're conscious about it and willing to put forth effort. I don't have a very high regard for the social structure in most schools these days, so I'm not sure that even sending your kid to a "regular" school would give them a healthy social diet either. Whichever way you go, I think the average parent can be successful. Just be aware of the challenges -- it's never easy -- but then again, nothing about parenting ever seems to be.
Have you worked at a corporation?
Yes.
Except for the similarities in age, I'd say every single damn headache you encounter in elementary school, middle school, and high school except maybe having a colleague mess their pants will occur.
And a lot of those headaches happen precisely because my coworkers happen to be products of public schools. There is this subtle difference between learning how to deal with dysfunctional human behavior and encouraging dysfunctional human behavior.
We home schooled both of our kids for some period of time - the oldest until he was a 4th grader, and the youngest, until she was a 2nd grader. We did not do it for religious or "clingy" reasons - we did it because where we initially lived had very poor schools, with issues of gang activity and violence.
Our oldest was the youngest in his class when he was first placed in public school. And then was skipped yet ahead another grade. This was due not only to his academic standing, but his maturity. Likewise, we had the opportunity to allow the same with our daughter, but did not. Why? Most of our sons friends were in the grade above him, and most of our daughters friends were in the grade she entered into.
Both are friendly, warm . . . normal. Our son was awarded a full-ride to our region's flagship University and is doing well. He is slightly nerdy (he received a 36 on his ACT), but is also into sports - loves racquetball. Our daughter has a 4.0+, runs cross country, and is considering Harvey Mudd for her post-high school education. She is into science and math.
BUT - and here is the big caveat . . . both my wife and I have teaching degrees, with my wife having a Master's in Education. We are also very technologically proficient . . . and active in science.
The outcome of our kids, I don't believe, was vastly impacted by the home schooling . . . they entered public school at a relatively young age. I think basic parenting is the main skill needed . . . 90% of societies issues are due to bad parenting at some level.
The parent isn't a troll.
We home school because we choose our children's curriculum that is best suited to them, and we choose what kinds of people our children are friends with. We can also self-pace, which is notoriously difficult in public schools. Two of my children are much faster than the others at school, so they are almost a grade ahead. The others don't, so they are on schedule.
If you don't want someone else's agenda (political and social liberalism, or umbrella of multisexualism that goes on in public and even private schools) then homeschooling is a good option. Don't jerk your knee and think I'm some sort of Fox loving, knuckle dragging, mouth breathing Luddite. I'm not. I just prefer to be the one that chooses the "agenda" of my children's education. Our kids receive follow the Classical Trivium with a lot of supplementation.
No matter what, you have to care. It takes a lot of time, and its often rewarding as far as discipline and staying focused. And save the crap on socialization. My children have about a half dozen close friends and a bazillion others, and are perfectly well socialized. There is good socialization and bad socialization.
Can homeschooling be done badly? Sure. Can it be done well? Sure.
You must not frequent /.
I never found myself capable of navigating the social realities of schools. I found that the minute I entered the workforce, I was able to deal with the social realities with ease. None of the "socialization" I got in school applied. Adult society is different from school society/youth culture.
I think you're missing his point. The public schools reinforce tribal behavior. The more people who don't get that experience, the better off everybody is.
Thank you so much for this wonderful post. You do a great job explaining the real benefits of home schooling while destroying the strawman arguments agaisnt it.
We found through our own kids (trial and lucky error?) that they really have to find their "people", their social clique within and outside of school.
The growing up never ends..
I was homeschooled from second grade through eighth grade, and attended the local public high school part-time as part of a charter program in which I did half of my coursework at home and half at school. By my sophomore year of high school, I had enough credits to graduate, since I had taken high school level courses in middle school. I chose not to, though--my high school had a strong music program with which I wanted to stay involved, and I didn't want to be that 16-year old in college.
My parents are well-educated (BAs from Stanford and Whitworth), but the key to my success was that they knew their limits. From day one, we were involved with charter/homestudy programs that either hired a qualified teacher, or was taught by a parent who was qualified (i.e. the mom who had a B.S. in biology taught the science classes, the one who had majored in History taught that class, and they hired an incredible English instructor). Class sizes generally ranged from six to fourteen kids, usually plus or minus one grade level. This was advantageous for all, since the younger kids benefitted from the older kids' help, and the older ones solidified their knowledge by helping the younger ones.
We would also collectively do P.E. activities; hired a local tennis instructor to do a semester of tennis for the group, played in municipal sports leagues, and took private gymnastics instruction, all of which qualified under the charter school's P.E. requirements.
At the same time, I worked on several subjects at home. I was able to study formal logic, Latin, and with enough time to spare that I could get my dad to teach me audio and video editing.
Once every two weeks, an Education Specialist (for lack of a better comparison, sort of like a social worker for the charter school) from the school would come and check in with us to make sure that I was actually doing stuff and that my parents weren't just taking the ADA money and buying jet skis or whatever. Which brings up the point that because it was run through a charter school, the state provided the money that normally would have gone to the public school, allowing us to buy supplies or hire the aforementioned teachers in concert with the other families.
My folks didn't have a crazy religious agenda or anything. They were just convinced that public schools generally aren't good, and knew that they could probably do better with some creativity. The initial impetus to homeschool was that my parents were producing a TV show at the time that required travel--so instead of sending me to boarding school, my mom would handle my second-grade education on the road. When the financing for the show fell through, they decided to move forward with the charter program anyway, and the results were good enough that they decided to continue.
When I entered public high school, the first semester was a bit of a rough transition, but I made a lot of friends and things went really smoothly after that.
In conclusion, here's what I'd say:
If your wife knows her limits and is willing to get involved with a homestudy/charter program, it can be a great experience for all involved, though a lot of work for Mom. If you have a kid who is generally self-directed and motivated to learn/get their work done, it's great...but if you have a kid like my younger brother, who was a daydreamer, it can be like pulling teeth, and puts a strain on the relationship. Transitioning the kid to public high school can be done successfully, and I recommend doing so for all the social reasons mentioned above. However, it's ABSOLUTELY imperative to get involved with a large, committed group. Lone wolves are the ones whose naked, unwashed kids end up on the 5 o'clock news about unschooling.
However, if this is just a way to not let go, and your wife is not really committed to the immense amount of work that coordinating your child's education will require, push her to put the kids in public school. One thing that sets off alarm bells for me is that your wife did not atten
Average results would be his kids working in retail some with a college degree and some without and maybe one or two of them getting lucky and getting some sort of supervisor/manager position. That's average. Anyone actually getting and using their college degree is far above average.
I'm not sure if universities are aware of how much of a joke most IB (international baccalaureate) programs are. My wife worked at a private IB school after getting fired from public school because during one of her classes a kid pissed into a water bottle. The school's owner made sure that her worthless child graduated with his IB diploma by any means necessary, including helping him cheat on all of his exams and eliciting help from most of the teachers to do so. Needless to say, my wife refused and was not asked to return the next school year. I've heard similar stories about most of the other private IB schools here in Texas.
Even in the public system, how fast children learn to read is strongly correlated with their family environment, so you might as well keep them home to start. Also most parents are fully capable of teaching basic reading, writing, and arithmetic. It's in the later grades, especially high school, when trained teachers are essential.
Have you worked at a corporation?
As an aside, "corporation" is a poor choice of words to use. In addition to businesses, which are the usual grouping described by corporations, there's also charity non-profits, various government agencies and organizations, various religious groups, and individuals. These have very different feels to them, just from the different sorts of people who are part of these corporations.
Yeah that's what I thought, too. Wow, so your kids turned into nurses and programmers, like everyone else's kids? Great! It looks like homeschooling had not effect on their outcomes.
I have a pretty low opinion of homeschooling. My objection is practical not categorical. Homeschooling is theoretically reasonable but I've never actually met a reasonable homeschooling parent. I'm sure there is one out there somewhere but she must be in hiding.
Ugh, did you really have to whine about what is a perfectly acceptable slang word?
Just another day in Paradise
You've just described a highly dysfunctional work environment, except for the hot coworker part and the "I-sometimes-need-to-do-boring-stuff" part. The boring stuff part becomes dysfunctional if it gets too much, though. I can say from experience that not everywhere is like you describe. Long term, you might want to changing jobs.
As mentioned elsewhere, a number of factors correlate to create a highly artificial and dysfunctional social environment in lower education. A company where you're dealing with high-school social problems is a dysfunctional company. Hell, due mainly to honors classes keeping the bored clowns out of my way, my actual high school experience had few high-school social problems. The lower education dysfunctional environment was mostly middle school and lower.
vi ~/.emacs # I'm probably going to Hell for this.
It is difficult to keep kids from learning. They are wired to be curious and engaged. But somehow, public schools manage to do it; turning bright eager kids into listless, bored and grumpy children.
My wife homeschools our kids. They are incredibly creative and engage in extended, elaborate play. They participate with a homeschooling group and church groups for socialization. My wife has an MD and I have a PhD, so there are no subjects we can't help them in. We live in Michigan where there are no requirements for homeschool.
If you can get your kids to read a lot on their own and make consistent progress in math through the elementary years, you're probably doing just fine.
My oldest recently enrolled in a program where the kids can take college classes while getting credit for high school. He did poorly on his first series of tests because of his unfamiliarity with limited-time tests. But he adapted quickly and aced his second set of tests. He got mostly A's last semester and qualified to move on to where he is taking all college classes this semester. He is 15.
Your dumb wife versus decades of teaching experience and tested/proven techniques.
Home schooled children, on average, score in the 70-80th percentile on achievement tests.
Did you miss the part where his wife, who would be doing the teaching, is a high school dropout? What exactly do you think the odds of getting a kid that scores in the 70-80th percentile out of that scenario?
I do have a few observations on the subject. My wife and I became disillusioned with public school after seeing the results our son was coming home with. We did not have the money for private education so we had to figure out something on our own. We called it homeschooling.
We discovered that there are 2 groups.
The first wants more structure in a child's life than school offers. These people tend to be religious types.
The other group wants less structure. These tend to be the unschoolers.
In the end, it does not seem to matter. Both groups get involved with the kids. The kids benefit.
When our friends heard we were homeschooling, they asked a few questions:
1. Is it legal?
2. You don't have a credential? How could you possibly be qualified?
3. How do you tolerate being with your kids all day?
4. My kids don't listen to me. You must be a saint.
5. What about the "socialization?"
6. And (mostly from teachers) If I had to raise my kids again, I would definitely homeschool.
Fifteen years later, we have our 2 sons (now 18 and 20):
1. Each of them has 2 black belts (Iaido and Jujutsu)
2. Both of them are Eagle Scouts
3. One of them started college at 15. The other started college at 13.
4. Both of them are straight 'A' students.
5. Both of them are employed.
I enjoy their company. We have great fun talking around the kitchen table. They bring their friends over and we enjoy them too.
We did make compromises. Homeschooling does take time. My software business would be more successful if I had devoted the same time to it.
My wife and I don't regret a single minute we spent homeschooling our sons. And, we could not be prouder.
Take this anecdote for what it's worth, but my daughter has been home schooled or attended home school co-ops ever since Kindergarten (Ironically the reason we began to home school her was because of the principal of her elementary school - on the last day of kindergarten he gave a speech in which he pointed out that our children would spend much of their awake hours in the school and so it would be from the school that they would learn their values. I had never thought about it like that, but I clearly remember my years on public school and my wife and I agreed that we didn't want that for our daughter.) Anyway, Junior year of high school she decides that she wants to try public high school. That is fine with us so she starts attending in the fall. By the end of December she had decided to drop out. Here were her findings:
1. The students at public school are apathetic. The teachers were delighted with my daughter since she invariably knew the answers, would raise her hand, and would answer in full sentences. The other students would give as short of answers as possible and had to be prodded. This absolutely shocked her.
2. One day during morning announcements one of the guidance counselors said that she had handouts for some sort of career event coming up and to come by the office to pick one up. My daughter did so. Well it was a shocking experience for both her and the counselor. The counselor informed her that she hadn't actually printed out any of the handouts since in all the years she had been making similar announcements, not one student had ever stopped by to pick one up.
3. She learned that teen pregnancy is much more rampant that she had expected.
By the way, this wasn't some hick high school, but a large school in the suburbs of a large city. The students going here are mainly middle to upper class students.
A side note, even though she only attended one semester, when the year book came out she had more pictures (and even a half page article about her!) in it than any of her friends that attended the full year. She is very out going and vivacious and her fellow students and teachers really liked her, so it wasn't really a surprise. I was mainly surprised that I was so surprised at how apathetic the students are.
Thanks. I have to say I've been pretty lucky, though developmentally, I didn't quite figure out socialization until I left college.
You feel pretty stupid when you realize you didn't figure out at 25 what most kids know by the age of 5. Then you come to the conclusion that nobody else is perfect either, and things even out again.
Some people don't believe in fairies. I don't believe in The Patriarchy.
I know two families that are homeschooling.
In both of these cases, I find that the kids (five, total, between the two families) are extremely intelligent and show it, because there is no "anti-nerd" peer pressure for them to overcome. They speak clearly in full, complex, articulate sentences, and are not afraid to share their ideas.
On the topic of awkwardness, I don't see it. These kids have no problems speaking with adults on an adult level. Social groups exist for kids outside of school, and you should absolutely encourage your kids to get out of the house and do things.
Now, this is very important: I believe, in the cases of these two families, that a critical part of making this work is that the kids have all been encouraged to speak their minds. Sometimes they will pose a challenge to your existing ideas. When that happens, the correct response is to be open to the possibility that you might be wrong. In one of these families, the kids even got the family to change their religion, because the one they were following had too many inconsistencies. That's a big deal.
If you are inclined to take such challenges as "backtalk" then I don't think this will work for you. Your objective should be to raise children that can think for themselves; if that's not what you want, send them to school where they can learn not to think for far less effort than you could teach them.
www.wavefront-av.com
I have met homeschoolers who have the socialization issues you mention (though having also met their parents I wonder if its actually genetic). But, I've met far more homeschoolers who are properly socialized. People who meet our children often express amazement that they are home schooled since they have the same prejudiced that you are expressing and our children clearly don't fit to their preconceived stereotype. Our eldest daughter elected to attend public school her Junior year (you can read more about her experiences in another post I made below) she was so outgoing and popular that when the yearbook came out she had more photos (and even a half page article about her life!) than almost all her friends put together. The teachers loved her too since they finally had a student who was not apathetic and was willing to answer questions using complete sentences (and actually knew the answers!).
The difference is about half of all school children will never end up in any corporation, they are just too dumb and/or violent. It's unskilled physical labor for the good ones and living off crime or government handouts for the bad ones.
Plus most school teachers don't appear to even be trying, they just do minimum to avoid being fired. Only the worst kind of corporations are anywhere near that bad.
Good post except for a couple of things.
Charter schools are funded by public sources. Funding is diverted from public schools in order to fund the charter schools. The charter schools are able to be selective in who they enroll, this means that all of the students with disciplinary problems will be left in the traditional public schools. Also being enrolled in a charter school takes more parental involvement then the traditional public schools(some states even allow charter schools to require a certain number of volunteer hours from the parents). This keeps out poorer students and students who's parents aren't actively involved in their education. The primary purpose of charter schools is to allocate more resources from poorer students for upper middle class students.
Home schooling can also mean private tutoring. This is often the choice of the rich. Though I agree home schooling is usually done by conservative religious parents who don't want their students being taught about evolution or socialized by other students(who have sex and do drugs).
The problem is, the character it builds tends to be pretty destructive, to the person themselves and anyone unlucky enough to get drawn close to them. And in extreme cases, to the world in general.
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
Try It for a semester,
I a lot of school districts here, allow for home schooled kids to participate in a wide variety of "Social" Activities or split education between subjects.
Home schooled students here can take core curriculum at home, reading, writing, math, science, and attend public school for subjects such as art, music, and PE, Sports, Extracurricular clubs etc.
I would suggest a conversation with your local public school administrators about the options in your area.
Depending on the what your kid needs you will have to find what works.
From your perspective, it's about your wife's needs and not your son's. It's valid for parents to have needs, but it's a parents' job to balance those with the child's needs. Rather than talking around those needs, you should address them. What does your wife like most about being with your son all day? What would she do to preserve that even if he was away at school for 30 hours a week? Maybe it's really all about something else. (her sense of purpose, your view of her, not liking the school / her own school experience ... ). The simple logic of school is is that it's free, in most places it works, there are other kids, and you only have to layer on your own effort outside of school hours. But that means nothing if you're not listening to your wife's real concerns.
And the great thing about homeschooling is it teaches you that's not the way things should be, and you don't have to be part of the problem.
The Daddy casts sleep on the Baby. The Baby resists!
In case it went over your head, the analogy is prison = public school. From my personal experience in the public school system, I couldn't agree more. Fellow students = thugs, teachers = guards, principal = warden, cafeteria workers = cafeteria workers.
3) And if you look at common core grade school math and say, "What kind of fucking moron thought up this stupid shit?" Then you are a COMPLETE IDIOT who is so far from having a clue that you would need an interstellar space ship to even reach the nearest one!
Fixed that for you. Idiot!
I haven't actually seen stats on that, but I do know that my home schooled daughter out-scored her public schooled friends by a significant margin on the college entrance exams. I'm not even sure if even one of her public schooled friends scored high enough to even get into a community college ;-)
And if you pick your major wrong, you end up picking cabbages. I guess that proves the American Dream is alive and well !-)
Forget magic. Any technology distinguishable from divine power is insufficiently advanced.
You have to decide what's your goal for your children's schooling. Do you want to get them the best education possible (sadly, best is subjective)? Do you want them to avoid the bullying aspects of "social interaction"? Do you want them to be mostly influenced by your values or let them develop values of their own which may differ significantly from yours?
My wife and I homeschool our five children (ages 3 through 12 currently). Our primary motivation is to instill our values and it's supported by the secondary and tertiary motivations of a great education and being well adjusted people when they mature into adulthood. From an academic standpoint, home educated students trump public and private educated students in performance. See this study (admittedly from a homeschool support group, but you can examine the data for yourself): http://thehomeschooleffect.com
Also, we recently travelled to China for three weeks (not something that's as easy to do educationally when your kids are in public/private school). Another American family we met there said to us, "You homeschool, don't you?". We said "Yes", but asked how they knew. They responded with, "Your kids were outgoing and talked to adults without being overly shy -- it was a dead giveaway". Just an anecdotal point, but the myth of "socialization" assumes that kids need to be around kids to learn social behaviors. But that premise alone assumes that the "other" kids must know social behaviors. On the contrary, we learn best from others that have skills we don't. I.e. kids learn appropriate social behaviors best from people older then them, ideally adults.
Lol, like the adventure where you can try to outrun armed gunmen/students, try to avoid getting beat up by a bully or verbally ripped to shreds every day by a group of nasty teenage girls? Or maybe you would enjoy sitting in a gym for several hours while they comb the school for bombs due to a phoned in threat? HAHAHAHA, some adventure! And that's to say nothing of the "adventures" you can take on the drugs being sold by other students.
Seriously, I'm a product of the public schools, and all of those things happened to me or my friends, with only two exceptions: I never got shot at, and I never took drugs, though other students were definitely doing illegal things. But bullies hitting you, verbal abuse, bomb threats and lock downs (multiple times), all of that happened. So this idea that the public schools are some "developmental and social utopia" and parents who keep their kids at home are "depriving them of an adventure" is seriously misguided.
That said, my wife and I are planning to homeschool our three when they get to be that age, but it's not even primarily for the reasons above. We have many reasons, such as:
Frankly, I see the public schools declining in matters of academic rigor, discipline/safety, silly ideas like letting every kid have a tablet in class so that they can be distracted instead of learning, etc. I just don't see much benefit to my kids being there anymore. Homeschool is so much better in all those areas, and now that so many are doing it the social interaction problems are going away. There are many other kids in nearby homes, coops, etc to be with. So at least at this point, we are full steam ahead on home schooling.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
I attended a conventional school in Kindergarten and first grade before my parents decided homeschooling would be a better approach for myself and my two younger siblings. All of us were educated through high school and transitioned to college and professional careers.
I'm going to turn your viewpoints about "Social Interaction vs. Better academics" around. In my own experience, the quality of the social interactions we had were what made the experience most valuable. My parents eventually settled on an approach called "unschooling". Book and paper work had its place, but when we wanted to learn about history or WWII, we hung around the VFW. When we wanted to learn about electronics and industry, my parents finagled a way to have us shadow an electrician or plumber for a week or so in a sort of unpaid-mini-apprenticeship. When I was ten I wanted to learn about broadcasting. We got a weekly gig doing volunteer programming at a public radio station, a two hour sort of kids-variety show. (My mom wasn't good with tech, so after a 30-minute crash course from another volunteer, I was charged with running all the controls of a 100,000 watt radio station - The things people will just hand the keys over to amazes me)
Contrast that with the experience in most suburban neighborhoods and conventional schools. Because America has so nicely sorted itself along lines of class, race, and demographics, your child will be interacting with his peers. Meaning, if he's white, he'll be in a room with 20-something other white kids from similar backgrounds.
We had access to, and were encouraged, if not required to interact with everyone from younger children, our siblings, to aging retirees. We learned to navigate the world and discover information and gauge its value for ourselves. (As an aside, we also know that the earth is 4.6 Billion years old and that the only place you'll see dinosaurs and people coexisting is on the Flintstones. Praise Jibbers!)
One possible disadvantage would be in regards to access to facilities or equipment. You probably can't put in a swimming pool or chemistry lab, and unless you're going to have another nine kids, you can't field a football team. That being said, many public schools are much more receptive to sharing facilities and equipment and accommodating your kids, even if they aren't enrolled. You still pay taxes to the jurisdiction and have some right to expect access. Even though the districts in our area were initially openly hostile towards, in time my parents and I were able to wear them down with a combination of charm and threats of litigation, and in later years we were allowed to participate in all manner of activities and gain access to equipment.
In summary, it's what you make of it. The vast majority of parents that I know who home-school their children take it very seriously. It's also a tiny population, so observer bias can be a huge problem. You never hear about the majority of families giving their children a good educational experience. You'll hear only about the outliers, those getting a litter of kids into Harvard at 13 or keeping five kids locked up in the cellar somewhere.
As a professor at a community college in the midwest US, I get a lot of homeschoolers...they are by far and away my best students. Adjectives like intelligent, self-directed, well-adjusted, friendly, etc come to mind.
No doubt though that around here, many choose to homeschool on religious grounds. Once in a while I get one that carries a bible or something, but for the most part, they are well adjusted normal kids that take school very seriously and are here to learn...not just, "ahh ya know, kill time till my parents kick me out LOLZ" Most come from large families, so I'm assuming some reason we see so many is that the parents nudged them to choose a community college for the reasonable tuition.
I don't know that I can claim that they are so awesome because they were homeschooled (perhaps they're just good people because they had parents that cared, hence the decision to homeschool them) but I certainly would say that homeschooling wont hurt them provided you make even the slightest effort to get them through a K-12 curriculum.
(I can only offer anecdotal commentary.)
It really depends on the child. I was starting to read and do addition/subtraction at age 3. I wasn't pushed, but as my parents realized my potential, they supported and encouraged me. That support evolved into home schooling.
I did go to public preschool and kindergarten (half day sessions, home schooled the other half). There, the teachers accepted my ability and appreciated my willingness to read stories to and help the other kids.
After that, even though the school's officials acknowledged I was performing at a 3rd grade level, they insisted that I had to be placed according to my age. Being 6, that meant 1st grade. The teacher quickly determined that I always had all the correct answers, so stopped calling on me - not even calling me last, after the other kids gave up. And while I was allowed to participate in group "reading aloud", he was irritated by the fact that I had finished reading whatever story before the other kids were even ready to start the reading session. Also, I was not allowed to help my classmates. While he could not mark down my workbook, quiz and homework scores, he did give me zeros for class participation and "citizenship". When my parents complained, the teacher demanded the school officials assign me to a different teacher. After a week of only slightly better treatment by the other teacher, my parents decided to pull me out and resume home schooling me.
3 years later, a new private school opened. My parents arranged an interview for me. Near the end of the interview, the teacher looked at the public school records and commented "I'm sorry about what the public school did to you. But don't worry, you're the kind of overachieving trouble-maker we want," making my parents laugh. She excused herself, then returned a few minutes later, telling my parents that no further review was necessary and I would be accepted on full scholarship.
I think I got the best of both worlds. Home schooling provided the academic challenge I needed (and wanted). Preschool, kindergarten, Cub Scouts and other activites provided the social development opportunities. Then the private school continued both.
While a bit of strife may help build character, being held back academically is a lot more than a bit of strife. Being home schooled was not easy. My parents gave me lots of challenges, allowed me to meet those challenges, then setting new ones.
Do your kids a favor. Help them set achievable goals. Provide guidance (not easy answers). And don't be afraid to say "I don't know. Let's learn together."
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
I knew a few Home Schooled kids and I'm certain they scored in the 70-80 percentile.
Yet every single one of them managed to get kicked out of their nationally ranked university. And the parents also thought Oral Roberts University was a wonderful school.
yea i got that, that's a pretty ridic comparison
What prison did you do time in btw?
Compare the AC's children's achievements with the average child in public school whose parents care about his or her education and encourage him or her to succeed at school. The results are about the same, with the downside of the homeschooled child lacking critical social skills.
My wife tried the same thing, but it didn't turn out so go.
My wife even with a masters degree in education wanted to home school our kid and couldn't let go.
At first everything was working our kid was learning at a straight pace.
By, about the time that our kid needed to start reading is when everything went down hill.
Although I figures out why in the end.
My wife wasn't really teaching at all, but letting our kid just watch Nick Jr, and other educational shows.
The other problem with home schooling is the back work that has to be done with the city or state depending on your location.
Found out that not only was my kid not getting a good education with home schooling, but my kid also wasn't registered as being home schooled with our city or taking the required tests.
After finding out that I enrolled my kid right away.
The bad part of the story is that my kid was held back 1 year because of home schooling.
All in all I would suggest not doing home schooling at all.
I don't care what studies as what.
IT ISN'T WORTH IT!!!
My oldest is getting her masters now. The youngest is in her second semester junior year with a dual major in biology and anthropology.
I have taught 6th grade science, high school chemistry and physics, university level computer/programming, and vocational classes.
I think public schools are warehouses where children are mostly on their own due to the ridiculous short staffing of public schools. The kids are raising each other based on values they learn from television.
While other kids were suffering through public schools, mine were being mentored by people in our community, volunteering, and following their own interests instead of someone else's lesson plan.
If you are planning on having a successful home school, you must love being around your kid(s) and trust them, and you need to have some time for them. Do not try replicating public school at home. Most kids waste most of their time in school, so a couple of hours a day is plenty. We emphasized reading and journalling every day, but the rest of the curriculum was whenever, as long as it got done. My youngest used to dedicate two weeks every fall to math, and finished the entire years math studies in that time.
Good luck with whatever path you take.
The question is, what is the cause of 1-9.
IMHO the cause for most of 1-9 is because it is mostly LEARNED behavior. It is learned that we accept and tolerate it, which is itself an indictment of the "system" that does accept it and tolerate it at least to the degree that these people are not weeded out.
Assholes, cheaters, lazy, goof-offs etc progress because they do enough to "win" that we overlook them, and so we have to deal with them.
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
True, it is hyperbole. But based on the prison portrayals I've seen in movies and on TV, my experience in public school says that it isn't far off. You might have been raised in a nice community where that wasn't the case. Not all of us are so lucky.
How do you deal with your first crush, your first boy/girl friend?
The same as in school, except that chances are, you won't have one because there is no peer pressure to "get a Boy/Girl Friend". Yeah, you don't learn how do deal with peer pressure, but on the other hand, you don't have to deal with peer pressure at all, and it becomes ALIEN to you. My kids were home schooled, and avoided most of the socially accepted forms of peer pressure, and do not fit many social norms learned in school.
They are socially awkward simply because their adult friends still act like they are in 8th grade (because they learned how to peer pressure in school) and still try peer pressuring techniques on people who it has no effect on. Awkward!
Agent K: A *person* is smart. People are dumb, stupid, panicky animals, and you know it.
As an engineer, I consider math to be the foundation of all my success, and common core has turned math into a laughingstock. Enter homeschooling, where I can pick the "Singapore Math" curriculum. Singapore typically scores number 2 every year on the international math achievement exams, their math program is entirely in (British) English, and I can have their exact program for my kids instead of common core.
Unless the type of "engineer" you are is a Sanitation Engineer and/or your sister really isn't a very good teacher, I can't imagine why you would make such a stupid and uninformed statement as the above. Guess what one of the primary focuses in developing Common Core math actually was? Hint: Teach more like Singapore, South Korea, Japan, in covering fewer subjects but with much more depth and understanding that the students can then apply later more generally. Over all, mathematicians like it, teachers like it, and even students like it once they get used to the different approach. The only laughingstock is people like you.
The worst part is I'm actually a conservative Christian, and yet I still find it necessary to defend Common Core from people like you. My kids are doing wonderfully with Common Core math. So much so, that one daughter went from "I hate math" to "math is my FAVORITE subject" (that is not an exaggeration) within one school year. A younger son basically started with CC from the beginning and is doing exceptionally well.
As for Christianity, my kids already learn about church, in church meetings/classes and to some degree at home. They don't really need that at school itself.
I'll agree with the point about throwing technology at the problem instead of actually improving education, that doesn't work and never has, but it's in no way related to Common Core or the other concerns, and I don't think it's nearly as prevalent as you seem to believe.
We homeschool and have for 4 years. Homeschooling has greatly evolved over the past few decades. Now there are several options for outsourcing ala carte classes and online resources that are as good as or better than what you will find in most traditional schools. One option that we have used for one of our children is a hybrid approach where he attends a public charter school that is online (uses the K12 curriculum). Since it is a public school, it offers most of the same resources that a brick-n-mortar school does (which is great for special needs kids). You still need to supplement in areas such as sports and PE.
Advantages include
-Finding curriculum that works with your child's learning style.
-Flexibility on when you do the work and what pace; your child is not wasting most of the school day standing in line for the water fountain or waiting for the teacher to explain a concept for the fifth time to one student who doesn't get it while the rest of the classroom spaces out.
-All of the other benefits that come with a tailor-made solution over an off-the-shelf solution.
Disadvantages include
-Requires a dedicated adult to pull it off because it truly is a full-time job when done well (there is as much time and effort in preparation as there is in delivery).
-You need to be very intentional about things like socialization and progress testing that are built-in to brick-and-mortar schools.
-Supplemental classes and curriculum can be expensive.
-You will likely need to survive off of a single income.
Couldn't help but notice that almost everybody commenting negatively on home schooling seems to have no actual experience with or knowledge of home schooling. The negative opinions expressed so far are mostly based on 'well it seems to me...' type arguments. Not that there isn't any research indicating potential issues with homeschooling. I just haven't seen much. I have seen lots of evidence (i.e. peer reviewed studies) supporting homeschooling as a viable or better option to most public schooling options.
Disclaimer: I was home schooled. I think I am reasonably well adjusted socially, and academically successful. I am currently pursuing a PhD in Atomic Physics.
A couple of points to consider. These are just my opinion:
1) Learning is much, much, much (can't stress this enough!) more dependent on individual desire and interest than on the resources available to them (at least now days, since resources are nearly unlimited to anyone who cares). I believe one of the biggest failures of public schooling is the tendency to teach students to be passive in their education, to dislike learning, reading, discovery and so on. I was mostly self taught in home school. It would have been great to have licensed, trained, etc., teachers to teach the subjects I was interested in, but I think I learned far more as a self motivated student without trained teachers than I would have as an unmotivated student with teachers.
2) Learning social skills IS NOT THE PURPOSE OF SCHOOL. That is what friends, sports, extracurricular activities and so on are for. This idea that the whole point of school is to learn social skills is ludicrous. Understand, though, that if you are going to home school a child, you need to make sure they have ample social opportunities, especially if they are particularly shy and don't seek that out on their own. That being said, unless they are very shy or you keep them in a cage (figuratively speaking), socialization with peers and others will happen quite naturally without your intervention anyway.
3) Myth: 'Professional', 'trained', 'educated' teachers are much better teachers than parents. Truth: a) Parents have much more capability to help their children want to learn. Now, see my first point. b) Public school teachers don't make much money. Teaching education degrees are significantly easier to obtain than hard STEM degrees (based reports from various friends who have done both). The result of these facts is that teachers are either those who aren't smart or ambitious enough to do something more rewarding, or those who really, really, really passionately care about teaching. I've seen both types in public school systems in the years I did attend school, but (depending on the school) I think the second is much less common. In a sense, then, the teachers and educational 'role models' for children early on are often basically the dregs of higher education. Most of those smart/talented/self-motivated enough to go into a more rewarding career did so. 4) Every child is different. Every parent is different. Every school is different. Every teacher is different. There isn't going to be a right answer every time. I think that most of the time homeschooling is a good or even better alternative. What research exists seems to corroborate that idea. The good news is you can do both. Home school for a couple years. Let your child go to school for a year. Monitor their maturity, their academic progress and social skills. Decide from there what to do. In some cases, you may even be able to do half and half (half day of public school, or just one class daily for older kids, etc.).
You know what else you did? You put actual parental attention into your children's educations. Some people consider that an important factor in student success. Perhaps they would have done just as well if you'd had them in public school and took an active interest. (Or maybe not; there's really no way to tell.) In comparisons of home-schooled children and non-home-schooled children, I never see this taken into account.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
Terrible public schools. No ability to cause change in the program where it is really needed. Common Core.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling
Our kid has turned out very well, is far more knowledgable than his Cupertino High School friends.
Adult literacy programs around the world require 2 weeks in a classroom, and then the adult mind can complete high school in 2 years of self-study with books, continue on to college.
The idea that we need 12 years of layering to produce an educated person is nonsense, a left-over from the Industrial Revolution when they didn't know how long they would have the child, so 'do your best' each year.
Youtube and others have so many resources, a kid needs a computer, internet connection and then being left alone. Add outside group activities, ...
Stop with the stupid rambles against Common Core. It's a curriculum for crying out loud. Nothing more, nothing less. If nothing else, it saves the poorer state and local school districts from doing the busywork of maintaining their own curricula. As far as the quality/content, I consider it an entirely reasonable and perhaps downright boring and uncontroversial. People who bitch about it seem to have no idea what it is that they bitch about.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
common core has turned math into a laughingstock
Are you sure about it? As in - have you read the curriculum and compared it to what, say, your local school district did before hand? I think it's rather uncontroversial and rather similar to what I went through in the elementary school, although admittedly it's paced much slower than it needs to be.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Hmmm.... tried Montessori here. In the class there were about 15 very well behaved, quite, mostly indian children doing exactly what they were supposed to..... and my son running around with no pants on, yelling and generally being crazy. We had to agree with the school that perhaps Montessori was not the best option for him.
The problem is that the schools teach to those standardized tests and homeschools tend to teach children what the parents and children think are important. Then they test both against those standardized tests, and yet the homeschoolers still do pretty well in comparison.
Now, take only those children whose parents took an active role in their education, which by definition includes all the homeschooled. The stats you provide include every child whose parents didn't care about education or who weren't able to be around enough as part of the group. You've got a pretty sizable selection bias there.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
You can feel free to read all about it, the stuff is available online. I tried to look for specific examples of what I dislike about it from assisting with homework, but was unable to find it in the few minutes I can dedicate to it.
It seems like times tables were lost, and instead it is teaching kids hacks to do the math quickly. When they get older and get into more advanced math, it will slow them down as they will still end up trying to do
20 x 30
+
6 x 3
+
20 x 3
+
6 x 30
to get the answer to 26 x 33, rather than just knowing the answer from memorization.
http://ictm.org/presenter%2F49...
But yeah, I could just be quoting political FUD about the common core rather than having to deal with it doing homework with my own kids.
APK likes to ask for responses to the same things over and over. Maybe he just likes the responses?
As a young man, I used to really enjoy W5 (Who What When Where Why); an early investigative TV news program. I enjoyed it, in fact, right up until the day when it did a story on an industry that I actually knew a lot about; when I saw how they essentially fabricated their whole story line out of sensationalized half-truths I realized that I had been duped for years and I discarded the show entirely.
Frankly, this thread has made me feel much the same way about slashdot; the sheer number of (very angry!) posters who are pulling opinions out of their asses, who seem to think that simply having a grasp of some of the stereotypes associated with home schooling means that they actually know something is disappointing.
So let me be clear;
When you talk about the "lack of socialization" I know that you know nothing.
When you talk about "coddling" or "sheltering" kids, I know that you know nothing.
To VorpalRodent, I say that all these angry, uninformed, opinionated posters represent nothing but the intellectual inhabitants of a crab bucket, and as soon as they see a crab trying to get up over the rim they want to grab him and drag him right back down with them.
Ignore these people, because all they know is fear of the unknown and fear of taking responsibility for an important job themselves. This is what you learn from a conventional education; how to live in fear of being different.
Fuck'em; this country was founded on rebels.
"benefits" are something that undeserving human scum get due to society caving in to their entitlement issues.
"bennies" OTOH are something entirely different, something that nice people get as a reward for their talent, hard work, and general awesomeness.
it's not surprising that he'd want to avoid applying the bad word to himself - a lot of money has been spent on cultural programming to achieve that.
Why do I need to do all of the work here?
Because I am not the one that claims that home schooling is as good as or better than actual schools. We don't prove negatives, and it's up to those who make those claims to show that it's so.
That those who do go on to postsecondary education do better if home schooled is no surprised - the very top parents are likely far better educators than the typical school system, which is mediocre by design. But that does not say anything about the average parents or less gifted children. i too would like to see some statistics on how many fall by the wayside.
I think I was lucky in that I had a father who sat down with me for an hour or so after work, and taught me things the school didn't. School plus home schooling in my father's areas of interest and expertise (civil engineering) worked out pretty well. But I'm very afraid of what the results would have been if he were the one who schooled me in things he were truly bad at, like foreign languages or writing cursive.
I know a couple of people on the autism spectrum, one pretty far down it, now in their 20s. The more autistic one didn't do well in a rural school system, but flourished in a suburban one (he graduated, which was a bit of a surprise). The other just plain did well in middle school and high school. In both of the successful cases, the children got the support they needed, but were expected to be as mainstream as possible other than that.
"When you have eliminated the unacceptable, whatever is left, however improbable, must be the truthiness" - Holmes
1) Homeschooling definitely isn't for everyone. My sister and I did great, but that's because we had good parents and both of us are very self motivated and generally love learning new things. Friends who feel similarly about learning but went through the public school system all tell me that it did a great job of both making them (at least temporarily) hate learning, and also providing peer pressure to not show any kind of brains for fear of being picked on. Obviously YMMV depending on schooling environment. I had some friends who tried home schooling for a year and hated it. However, they were both extremely extroverted and had pretty controlling parents (I don't think I'd have done well with their parents either).
2) Reports of socialization being an issue are greatly exaggerated. I was highly active in boy scouts, swim team, and various church things. My sister had a similar set of extracurricular activities. There were also several events per year put on by our homeschooling organization. While neither of us had the quantity of "friends" that our peers in public/private school had, we more than made up for it in quality. The main social difference compared to my public schooled counterparts is that I related way better to adults and kids who were much older than me. My dad was an engineer, and by the time I was 8 I was holding intelligent conversations with his co-workers about their work whenever he'd take me to work with him, or on the occasion my mom drove us up to meet him during lunch. Some people might say that's a negative, but I see is as more the equivalent of living in the US during WWII/Cold War and being fluent in german, japanese, and russian. Arguably not a bad thing to know all of those languages, but also not an easy thing to live with being different in that way at that time.
By the time I got to college, I found the social stuff to be a non-issue. Either I'd end up gravitating towards the smart people in the class (and be highly motivated to keep up with them), or the people who were struggling would gravitate towards me (at which point I'd be highly motivated to stay ahead so I help them along). Also oddly enough, despite being very introverted I had no trouble at all sitting in the front and asking enough questions to keep the lectures interesting in my college classes.
3) There are a lot of people who do home schooling wrong and make the rest of us look bad, but at the risk of invoking the no true scottsman fallacy:
- Myself and the other well adjusted homeschoolers I know generally don't advertise that we were homeschooled. In fact, we went through an umbrella organization that appears to be one of those typical private schools that share space with a church unless you google it and read the website throughly. Even then, it's hard to tell that it doesn't actually have physical classrooms unless you realize that the address is in a business/industrial area that isn't necessarily somewhere where a school would meet
- In general, responsible homeschoolers are going to go through a similar umbrella organization. I'm fairly certain that the "imma isolate mah kids from teh evil world" types would have been thrown out from the one we went through, as they actually had educational standards that people were held to. That means the bad homeschoolers are more likely to stand out when they write down their school on a form (or proudly brag about how they're uncorrupted by the world or whatever) because they're their own schooling entity as far as the state is concerned.
- there are most definitely people who shouldn't homeschool. Either because the kids, the parents, or both don't have the disposition for it. The last thing I'd want to do is pressure those people into doing it anyway, but I'm sure there are lots of home schoolers who don't take that into account and try to sell it as the best thing in the world for everyone
4) Teaching isn't anywhere near as big of an issue
There is this subtle difference between learning how to deal with dysfunctional human behavior and encouraging dysfunctional human behavior.
Heh, that's actually very well stated.
if that's actually a serious comment. I'm hoping you're just trying to be funny, but if not, WOW, did you even READ your own link? Please do us all a favor and do NOT home school your kids! Quite frankly, leave them alone and stop confusing them with "the way I learned it" and undermining their teachers. Either that or at least go watch a Youtube video or three on what they're doing so you actually understand it and can help instead of hindering. Before getting into the specific algorithms, you might want to start here.
In short, teaching kids the "how" and "why" is that absolute best possible thing you can do for their future learning. Teachers still expect some memorization, but that's no longer the focus because it's pointless and stupid to just blindly memorize facts and answer questions without really understanding them. I actually struggled in school for this exact reason, and I got behind in math because I wanted to understand why I needed to do these things and how they worked. I hated math, it took me forever, and I thought I was bad at it. It wasn't until I could understand what was actually going on that I really started to get it, mostly due to getting into computer courses that focused more on algorithms and concepts.
Maybe in your uninformed short-sighted world it could slow them down later, but in the REAL world the kids will be able to use their knowledge of the fundamental "how and why" and apply it to new types of problems, enabling them to pick things up fast and feel more confident in their own abilities. I've personally seen a dramatic change in students from crappy rote memorization and hating math to really catching on and loving math, which gives them confidence and motivates them to do even better and go farther.
I suspect the reason you discount all this may be because YOU still don't fully understand the how and why, even as a parent. That's not uncommon. Either that or maybe you actually do watch Fox News all the time and believe/parrot their guest's FUD, but I'm guessing the former.
Full disclosure, plus minor rant: I'm actually a mostly-conservative who voted against Obama, twice, and I might even flip on Fox News occasionally, but they've basically jumped the shark at this point. I can see where they're coming from, trying to "balance" out the liberal bias of, say MSNBC with an equally, or perhaps even more rabid, conservative bias. That doesn't really work though. This isn't a balance scale where a heavy weight on both sides makes things equal. Instead both sides need to be more reasonable, move closer to the fulcrum, stop trying to prove each other wrong, and build on ideas they both share. It's not "us" vs "them." We are all "us."
So maybe we'll have three or four kids from other families come over for math class, or business or computers, while our daughter goes to music class taught by a friend who is a career musician.
Those were some of the funnest things I can remember from home schooling. There's nothing like being with a small group of people all anxious to learn and having access to someone anxious to share their expertise. And because a lot of homeschoolers tend to be king of becoming an expert in oddly specific fields of knowledge, the sorts of conversations that occurred when 3+ of us got together were always fascinating.
Odd how it seems the number one reason for not homeschooling is socialization? Seems totally American. Send your kids to school to get socialization. Who cares if they learn to love life and all that it entails.
Whether you're talking private or public, an educational environment with the offspring of other parents is an irreplaceable (at times, admittedly unpleasant) lesson that all young people should be exposed to. It's not always pretty, but it grounds a young human in dealing socially with others for the rest of his/her life.
There may be no truth at all to the urban legend that young people are optimally suited to learning a language, but I would bet the light bill money that youth is an optimal time to begin studying the intricacies of human interaction.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
The socialization available in public schools includes being introduced to criminal gangs, attacked by bullies, and contact with mind-degrading drug providers. Kids should be taught to recognize thugs and charlatans before having to interact with them.
Contribute to civilization: ari.aynrand.org/donate
1. You won't get much rational discussion on the topic. Lots of people went to public school, and they turned out fine. Just ask them!
2. More people homeschool today than go to private school. Think of it as private school for the rest of us.
3. Most homeschoolers are involved in a number of programs outside of the house. The idea that your kids are isolated from other kids is mistaken. It's more like a la carte education.
4. I have homeschooled 2 kids all the way from K-12 to Ivy League schools. 2 for 2! It can be done, and it can be done well, but the fact that you are asking on Slashdot tells me you are off to a rough start.
5. Programs vary a great deal from state to state. Find out what's available. Choose the one that matches your educational goals. Don't be afraid. No one cares more about your kids than you. You'll do great.
My grown children are at the house almost every day, and they respect me enough to listen to me some of the time. I kid when I say this, but I'll bet this "disown" thing comes with a smaller grocery bill.
Sigh. Parenting isn't about making things easy for your kids. That's what your heart wants to do, but without some adversity, no living organism learns to thrive.
Happiness in intelligent people is the rarest thing I know.
Ernest Hemingway
I have a college degree and work in IT. My wife has a GED and community college degree. We are based in Oregon. When my oldest daughter began reading and doing basic math at 3yrs of age, I knew I had to do something since the kindergartens and public school system would only hold her back. Here is what we did:
1. Basic research on Oregon requirements including mandatory testing to ensure that your child is meeting basic requirements.
2. Plan a curriculum that covered approximately 8am - 3pm each day. Include a calendar and objectives. We plan this out in the summer so we will have a full school year mostly planned. One of the benefits of homeschooling is flexibility, so in our planning we view this as a guideline to ensure we are covering enough content. Days off and summer time? Generally we match a nearby private school's timing.
3. Include at least one or more extra-curricular items, to include socialization. My children are usually involved in several groups at a time, so they have plenty of interaction and time with other children. Physical education? We have a local aquatic center, boys and girls club, and city youth soccer league.
4. This was the hardest part: since my wife was to be the one spending most of her time teaching, we did some exploration of how confident she was to teach different levels of math and science. Based on that, we decided that our children would switch to private or public school once they reached high-school age. I also spend my day off as the "teacher", which means I get to spend time with my kids.
5. Every week we have "library" day. Over time we evolved this technique: have the child randomly pick two words (both nouns). From that create a research topic. At least three books must be checked out on that topic and a report given next week. Other books are up to the child. Our biggest problem has been controlling how many books they check out. Since they are avid readers we tend to end up with a grocery bag per kid.
6. TV time is a privilege to earn. Movies can be checked out from the public library.
Yes, it takes work and commitment. But I think it has made our family life stronger and given my children opportunities they couldn't have in the public school system. How are they doing academically? Well, I've had to console my oldest daughter in the past when she got one question wrong on the bi-yearly testing required by Oregon. Admittedly, my three other children don't score nearly as high, but they are all easily in the 80%+ bracket.
A lot of Americans are lazy or just looking for their "entitlements" in life. You don't have to be one of them. If you need help getting started, search the following websites:
- HSLDA: www.hslda.org
- Your state home school register - often the local ESD has a list of home school groups in your area where you can share resources or interact with other home schoolers.
- Your state's department of education
It is not true that there is a substantial body of literature that shows that homeschool students do better. The studies that do show this are rife with bias and methodological errors (principally, they tend to design the studies so that most of the children come from higher-income families, who do better in public school too). When you look at more fair samples, the difference isn't so dramatic.
It is very difficult to say whether homeschooling is better or worse academically. The problem is that parents differ dramatically in their teaching ability and their beliefs (some parents' beliefs actively harm their children's educations, e.g. creationism). So it's really really hard to generalize from the studies on homeschool effectiveness to how effective your family will be at promoting academic achievement.
Usually the biggest academic problem areas for homeschool students are math and science, though this may be biased by the large representation of conservative religious groups who homeschool as a matter of faith. Academically, homeschooling may or may not be a benefit depending upon your knowledge and abilities, and upon the quality of your local school system.
It is also worth pointing out that the homeschooling does produce difficulties with socialization. Many homeschool proponents brush off this claim as if it is meaningless, but it really is not. Socialization is about developing a shared social language. It is built from common experiences. Homeschooling children pulls those children out of the path that most people grow up with, which, in turn, means that they are very likely to feel out of place among their peers when they leave homeschool to go to a public school, college, or workforce.
Overall, I'd say it's a decision that has its pros and cons. If you have the ability to homeschool, I would wait and see about the quality of your local school system. If the local school system is of sufficiently high quality, they probably won't do any worse academically if they go to public school, and your child will have an easier time with interacting with their peers later in life.
Very smart kids will succeed in pretty much any academic environment. Public school, private school, home school, whatever.... it takes some effort to figure out what is right for the kids who aren't sponges. Some kids that thrive in one environment will flounder in another. If you've got a little genius and you home school them, you may be tempted to think it's you that's turning them into a genius, but it isn't.
On the other hand, if you've got a six year old that you're homeschooling, are you qualified to recognize if they have a learning disability and come up with an alternate learning approach if they are? Mild autism, dyslexia, etc. How will you tell if they're not catching on as quickly as they should be without a peer group to compare them against? How will they cultivate a love for subjects that don't interest you or that you're not particularly good at teaching?
Plus it's tough to be objective about your own kid. What if you think they're a little genius and they go off to college and it turns out they aren't? (assuming aren't planning to home school them for that, too.) Seems better to learn to navigate a classroom before getting off to college. That's a skill all on its own.
I've got two kids and they are very different learners, and one's a big introvert who'd probably dig home school (and do awesome at it) and the other is a big extrovert who'd probably feel starved by it.
When we started school last year, I thought my daughter was doing awesome and well-prepared, but she was picked out pretty early in kindergarten as someone who needed extra help with reading. I'm an engineer and my wife's a physician -- we're not uneducated people or disinterested in our kids.... but you know what we aren't? Kindergarten teachers.
We homeschooled our kids. It was a wonderful experience for them and for us. Two of them are now adults and the third is still homeschooling and doing great. All of them are both socially and academically far advanced of public schooled kids their ages. They also have better ethics and morals without having to go through the destructive parts that we hear so many people complain about public education.
In our state the rate of homeschooling is very high and it is not about religion or that sort of thing - a common misperception. In fact, of the many families that we know who homeschool, only one is strongly religious. All the others are heavy on the science end.
Public schools are a mess. We can't fix the public school system - people have been trying and failing for decades. Study history, please.
Homeschooling isn't for everyone but it worked great for us and a lot of other people we know.
And no, you do not have to be a 'teacher' to homeschool. That's hogwash.
Not to worry about the interactions part. Your kids would be fine. Sometimes the school is better. Many times the home setting is better. I think you both should follow your instincts.
Not to worry about the interactions part. Your kids would be fine. Sometimes the school is better. Many times the home setting is better. I think you both should follow your instincts.
Here in Australia, home-schooling is almost unheard of. The stereotype here is that only super-religious parents home-school their children, in an effort to shield the children from conflicting viewpoints. The exception is farmers in very remote areas where there are no schools.
What is it in America that makes home-schooling more popular there? Is it mostly religion-driven there too?
Its mostly paranoia driven. Some people dont want the "gubbermint" teaching their children ideas that might contradict creationism, or let them learn about science, the harm caused by easily vaccinated diseases or other things that may break the fragile brainwashing these children have.
We've got our fair share of nutters here in Oz, FOTLs (Freemen On The Land) are basically the Aussie equivalent of paranoid anti-govt rednecks combined with a generous helping of libertarian delusions. The thing is we just dont give them the airtime that their American equivalents get.
That and the public schooling system here in Oz is actually quite good, consistently from kindergarten to university.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.
I never found myself capable of navigating the social realities of schools. I found that the minute I entered the workforce, I was able to deal with the social realities with ease. None of the "socialization" I got in school applied. Adult society is different from school society/youth culture.
I also never found myself capable of navigating the social realities of schoool and found that the minute I entered the workforce I was able to deal
eith the social realities with ease. The difference is that I think that having to deal with the harsher realities of public school in a safe environment
makes it easier to deal with the real world. Public school is an exageration of the real world and helps you be better at handling the real world.
2. Homeschooling academics can be more rigorous. As an engineer, I consider math to be the foundation of all my success, and common core has turned math into a laughingstock. Enter homeschooling, where I can pick the "Singapore Math" curriculum. Singapore typically scores number 2 every year on the international math achievement exams, their math program is entirely in (British) English, and I can have their exact program for my kids instead of common core.
Losing mod points to respond to this, but as a math teacher I can say based on substantial study and practice that you are drinking the wrong cool aid about common core. To see why you have to understand what common core is and isn't. Common core is just the set of standards, and it's important to read a bit of them to realize what that means and doesn't. Everything else that isn't written in the common core standards, but yet people still incorrectly call "common core" is just an attempt at implementation of the common core. If you see a given incomprehensible homework assignment, that's the implementation, not the common core. The standards don't give implementation details, the teacher, textbook, and/or district provide those.
Before I go further though, I will agree with your first statement. Homeschooling can be more rigorous, but as I am considering homeschooling my children, the thing I would do would be to implement the common core to it's fullest extent and attempt to exceed it.
I'll cut to the chase and give you the summary: the common core standards are more rigorous and are a substantial improvement on every state standard before them that I am aware of. They embody the important parts of the best of education research and the math standards for example are substantially based on the previous work of the Principles for School Mathematics developed by NCTM. So if a given implementation is bad, it means either the teacher or textbook are not as good as they could be, not that common core is bad.
Look at the Standards for Mathematical practice: http://www.corestandards.org/M...
and the following specific standard: CCSS.MATH.CONTENT.HSA.REI.A.1
Explain each step in solving a simple equation as following from the equality of numbers asserted at the previous step, starting from the assumption that the original equation has a solution. Construct a viable argument to justify a solution method.
A classroom attempting to implement the standards for mathematical practice to fully meet the standard above will be leaps and bounds above a traditional classroom in terms of rigor, cognitive demand, ability to reach diverse students, etc.
Also having studied the TIMMS study in depth I can say that the reason Singapore does well on the exams isn't necessarily related to their curriculum, but likely has more to do with parental support for education.
Yes - it is mostly religion, sadly. You'll hear a fair amount of poppycock about "wanting a better education", but if *that* was the goal, a couple of extra hours a day of (Gasp!) reading with them would be far, far better.
From my experience it seems to be an even split between the religious and the non-religious hippie types.
Public schools are built on an assembly line model. They spend a specific amount of time on each subject, regardless of how much learning has taken place. They are geared toward average, so students who are at either end of the bell curve are either bored or lost. They capture more kids by slowing down the material, so the bored are more bored.
Homeschooling allows you the freedom of advancing quickly through material at whatever pace is optimal for them. I've had a 'normal' lesson become a multi-week long intensive session that advanced them two complete grades - because it sparked their interest and they wanted to know more. It would have been criminal for me to quench that drive because the clock said biology time was over.
Public (and private) schools are the ONLY place children will ever be forced into an age-segregated environment. It's unhealthy in a 'Lord of the Flies' way. Some people's idea of 'socialization' requires killing the pig.
And you have a son. Schools, especially elementary level schools are geared towards girls. A normal boy will not do well in a mixed-gender class. Boys tend to be active, competitive, and tactile, and need to be taught differently than girls. Homeschooling allows you the freedom to customize for each child.
There are plenty of homeschool sports, music, and art groups available. My kids did several years of theater with productions that were (imho) near professional quality.
And the off-season vacations are fantastic. It frequently feels like you are getting an exclusive tour because very few other people are there.
Finally, homeschooling gives you the opportunity to instill a thirst for knowledge, which public schools seem to stifle.
While I agree in whole, there is one massive, massive difference that separates a corporation and school (and brings school a bit more in line with the GP's simile of prison): Ability to jump away.
When you're in school, especially in less-dense areas, you're stuck. Unless your parents have money and can send you to private/boarding school or have the time and ability to homeschool you, you probably have one and only one option. Even if you have multiple options, your parents have to do the process on your behalf, and even then the requirements to change schools might be beyond your grasp (and require there to be space at the other school.) So you're forced to go to the same school five days a week, where you know you'll get the same tormentors and same teachers and it becomes a minor form of hell. You know you'll get picked on, so you fear stepping through that door each and every day. It's psychological torment that doesn't end when the school day does. (I'm speaking from experience.)
With a corporation, your relative ability to jump appears infinite. The only absolutes that hold you there are A) no financial cushion to tide you over while job hunting and/or B) contractual obligations. Short of those, the only obstacle to leaving is yourself. Even if you don't change jobs, and you have tormentors at work, this does significantly less damage to your psyche because you have that option to walk away. Though you may never use it, having that emergency exit makes it a lot easier to deal with the day-to-day bullshit.
Our families story.
We have one daughter. We sent her to public school from kindergarten through 5th grade, private religious school 6th and 7th grade, homeschool 8th through 11th grade with a smattering of choir and math at the local high school, and community college for her senior year. She is currently a second year junior in mechanical engineering and her education is largely academic scholarship supported.
My wife and I believe very strongly in a good education but if my daughter wouldn't homeschool effectively, then we would have probably gone back to public or possibly private if a better option existed. Every year we evaluated our daughters educational situation and tried to make the best decision for her, which in some cases meant a sacrifice on our part (mostly money). Oh, and we did pay our full share of local taxes to support the public schools.
Opinion based on our experience:
1) Not every kid should be homeschooled. They must have work ethic and character to be self directed and responsible.
2) Not all parents should homeschool their kids. Parents need to have the ability to demand excellence in effort. The kid can't run the school.
3) Many school districts or states now have homeschool programs via the internet. We happened to use a curriculum that was religious in nature but very strong in english and writing.
4) We used school over the internet for the daily teaching and did almost all the grading ourselves. Where we didn't feel competent (grading writing assignments), we found a teacher who was willing to use their expertise to properly grade and comment on our daughters writing and we compensated her at the level she felt comfortable at. It was more than worth it to us.
5) High school grades and especially SAT/ACT test scores are incredibly important to higher education financial support. It's hard for many teens to see that far ahead but it's true. Almost all scholarships are based on academics.
6) Unless you can teach advanced math and science, most home school curriculum's can only take you so far, in our experience, Algebra I. You really need an in person teacher to be able to ask questions of some of the harder concepts. Our daughter had a full year of college calculus her senior year. The local high school was very kind to allow her to take two classes a day during her junior year (Choir, honors pre-calculus). They were excellent to work with and they really appreciated a good student who wanted to learn.
7) Socialization was not an issue. She went to dances, piano competitions, time with her friends, etc.
8) Homeschooling gave us a little more control over her potential friends.
9) Character is just as important, if not more, than academics or socialization. It's also harder to teach and it's easier caught than taught.
10) My wife deserves most of the credit for making home-schooling successful. Without her, it couldn't have been done. This should be #1 on the list.
11) There are some great teachers and administrators in public school who really care about the kids and their education. Our respect and admiration goes out to them.
There's more, but this post is probably too long. Hope this helps.
Public and most private schools use the same textbooks. Is that not monoculture?
A kid not in preschool is part of the 50% who are still home schooled until kindergarten, so you compare development to others who have been schooled. That said not all public schools are the same. If you live in the suburbs your choices are pretty limited, but if you are in a city and your kid is a good test takers, there are lots of options. That is what saved me. While many people I knew moved to suburbs to get a half descent education, I aced my test and by the time I was 8 was going to the top and challenging public schools. At these schools I had access to equipment and professionals beyond what most home schooled can get. I would say for the first few years school would be good. If you can't bare public school, charter schools are acceptable for the young who educational needs are often basic. Private schools are a good option.
"She's a scientist and a lesbian. She's not going to let it slide." Orphan Black
Homeschooler here.
As much as I enjoyed homeschooling and found that the academics were well beyond the accepted local norm, I cannot easily recommend it. It's something that the child really has to be ready for, as the best learning is self-driven. My sister, for instance, homeschooled for a few years with me only to find it was not her cup of tea, and went to matriculate at the local high school.
That being said, I have wondeful, life-long friends that I have gained through local homeschooling groups, and almost all of them are fairly successful and excellent folks, to boot.
Feel free to hit me up if you have specific questions but be forewarned that homeschooling is an extremely personal experience and I can only provide circumstantial guidance, not "real" answers.
Good luck!
We should take care not to make the intellect our god; it has, of course, powerful muscles, but no personality.
Amen to this.
I am a "homeschooling" parent. This does NOT mean my children are taught solely by myself and/or my wife, and it does NOT mean they are taught solely at home. It DOES mean that we have personally selected and combined a number of different educational opportunties for them. These include (but are not limited to):
Enrolling in college coursework while still in high school. Example: Harvard Math 23b. The majority of students in this class are admitted Harvard freshmen, but it is also available in an open enrollment capacity through Extension for anyone of any age willing to pay tuition. I like that peer group for "socialization" a whole lot better than the kids at my local public high school.
Hiring the chair of the language department at a local private high school to come to our home to provide personalized one-on-one instruction in classical Greek and Latin.
Hiring multiple music teachers for piano, guitar, theory, and composition.
Participation in team sports at the local health club.
Engaging a flight instructor for our son to earn a private pilot's rating.
Successfully completing qualifying flights for TARC
The Internet (Obviously). Taking advantage of online educational programs such as AOPS and edX and Open Courseware
Stocking our home with thousands of quality print books and plenty of subscriptions to lots of quality print journals (e.g. Economist, Nature, Lapham's Quarterly, IEEE publications, etc.)
Buying a whole bunch of the Great Courses
Joining CTY
Plenty of socratic dialogue with Mom & Dad. And plenty of unstructured time.
Flexibility to travel (including abroad) during the school year.
Concrete advice for OP: First, read The Underground History of American Education. Make of it what you will --- just include it (or criticisms of it) as a data point. Next, decide if any your local school choices (either public or private) are awesome. Do they approach the quality of Exeter or Boston Latin or Bronx Science? Understand the concept of a feeder school and that this concept can start at the elementary level. Got great public or private school options you like and can afford? Go for it. Not so much? Then go ahead and homeschool kindergarten. I guarantee you that your drop-out wife is capable of teaching your child to read and anything else they are supposed to learn in kindergarten. I guarantee you that unless you are completely negligent that your child will (if you choose) be able to enter first grade after a year of homeschooling and do fine. And I guarantee you that after a year you will be in a much better position to understand if more homeschooling is the right choice.
I look at my peer group--the kids I would hang out with in high school, and a couple of them have committed suicide. Many of them are still single. As a group, by traditional standards (not that it means anything really), modern life has not treated us all that well. Anyway, we accept the past and move ahead..
Good luck and stuff,
d
teaching kids hacks to do the math quickly
Those aren't called hacks, they are techniques and they stem from the structure inherent in numbers. As you progress in mathematics, you're supposed to be building a large vocabulary of such "hacks". Eventually you'll learn your multiplication table without even trying. More importantly, you'll be able to apply said hacks to larger numbers, where memorization doesn't help.
So, your complaint is not only solitary, but severely misplaced. Yeah, I attribute it to FUD. If you hear anything about Common Core from people who haven't read the source text and have no understanding of subject matter, everything you hear will be wrong. And I do mean everything. The misinformation is that bad.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
I forgot the most important thing: you aren't supposed to read about it . You're supposed to read it . Go ahead. It's free.
A successful API design takes a mixture of software design and pedagogy.
Possibly the difference between your public school system and the one I was forced to accept for my (grown) children is that the Bonita school system regularly placed the children in danger accepting gang cultures on campus, labeling knife stabbings as misunderstandings, and other fine standards of public education, such as the English teacher (with tenure) being stoned out of his mind on presentation day. I also liked the parole office showing up at a PTA meeting to inform us the assistant coach for the football team was suspected of giving the boys steroids.
Although, I must admit when I see kids equated to grocery bills for value it's not them I pity. Public schools have been nothing more than management studios, certainly in this century on.
I think tribal behavior is inherent to human beings. We can teach people to be aware of it, and to downplay it. But you'll never get rid of it.
I never said it's the way things should be, or that we should contribute to the problem. But unless you're absurdly lucky, you will have to deal with at least some of those headaches at your work.
As opposed to what? Homeschooling all of those people would fix their behavior problems? Most likely, they brought some or even all of their behavior problems from home to school, and not vice versa.
I do not want to make a blanket assertion that any one path is the right choice. I have the same problem of limited viewpoint as everyone else. But I hypothesize that major and minor behavioral problems are commonplace all over the world, not easy to solve on a massive scale, and thus learning how to deal with them - even though the learning curve is painful to climb - is an essential skill.
I'm moderately bright, I'm not a genius. I have the sense that with proper instruction, I could have finished the academic aspects of my formal education by age 17 (instead of 24). But the things that slowed me down - sometimes working at a pace much lower than I could tolerate, sometimes wasting time because of pointless work, sometimes dealing with unpleasant people, sometimes struggling to prioritize tasks across different sets of responsibilities - were all essential life skills to acquire.
Good point. And this is especially important for the worst schools, in which the whole environment is so toxic to learning and to normal (define that as you wish) social interaction that the drawbacks outweigh the benefits.
Of course, as adults all but the best jobs will still have some garbage to go with the treasure. But it's nowhere near the lock-in as at school.
an educational environment with the offspring of other parents is an irreplaceable (at times, admittedly unpleasant) lesson that all young people should be exposed to. It's not always pretty, but it grounds a young human in dealing socially with others for the rest of his/her life.
Which was why my parents sent me to preschool and kindergarten. And then tried to send me to public school. Then, ultimately, to the private school. And, while not exactly "educational", the various extra-curricular activities contributed to this as well.
The home schooling they did was because I needed the academic challenges that the public schools refused to provide.
Don't try to out wierd me, three-eyes. I get stranger things than you, free with my breakfast cereal. --Zaphod Beeblebr
In a school, your kid is subject to power hungry teachers spending half their time making sure the kids wear the correct uniform and behave how they want them to. And the other half of the time your kid gets taught pointless subjects. When they do end up in a useful class, they're held back by the slowest kid in the room. Teach them at home, and they can learn the subjects you feel are most important, at the speed they are able to.
I would heartily recommend you consider the action/adventure education that is the public school system.
Coddling, though still an individual option, is generally better for the parents than the children.
Re homeschooling. One concern I would have (I am now a grandfather), is the social skills and intermixing with other kids. As well, the recess, lunch hour and after school playing to burn energy. Home school children miss the interaction that is part of our healthy being.
I believe that the homeschooled child may have difficulty in adult years with interaction, or even with understanding his/her own children. If you were always isolated for learning around adults without other children around, you will have difficulty understanding how your child thinks. I would think that one should only do homeschooling if and only if there is a health problem.
Leslie Satenstein Montreal Quebec Canada
That's a complex question. Too big to answer in comments, and beware the trolls who know nothing about it.
Lifetime educator.
The key problem with public schools is that they were literally designed to be "assembly lines of learning," by industrialists who were not particularly into learning per se, but were into getting adequate work out of immigrant workers. A fall back, not an ideal. Socialization in public schools? If avoiding angry people who will beat them up due to problems at home seems like a high priority for your child, or accepting capricious judgments by authority figures who have no idea who you are seems worthwhile, do public school. Public school will change your child's personality forever, in PTSD sorts of ways. In education, higher and K-12, we not only expect that "socialization," we demand it.
Online, when speaking about homeschooling, many homeschoolers inflate what they actually do. We've homeschooled our kids, and our daughter is now top of the class at the local college. Totally unschooled. Mostly, she's bright, happy, confident, and always learning. Biggest problem is accepting the "prisoner mentality" of fellow students.
Here's how you actually (will) do it: Teach your kids to read, by reading to them a lot, and then go get 30 or 40 books a week on every subject at the library, along with math and writing workbooks from the dollar store or walmart. That's what most long-term homeschoolers actually do. That, and a child's native curiosity, got her to the top of the program.
Up side? Many schools send home three hours per day homework. Three hours per day is, in many states, the legal definition of full time homeschooling (the assumption that the rest of the public/private school day is spent dealing with discipline issues, crowd control, and general herding). They're already homeschooling while public schooling. Studies showing that is not a good thing.
On the down side? Um. Your kids won't know how to make up insulting names for their peers?
However, all that changes if you live in an area that requires certain homeschool work, testing, etc. State by state. If that's a problem, look into registering as a non-profit/private school for your family, which is generally (utterly) unsupervised. And go to the library a lot.
If you live in a public school district that cranks out graduates who repeatedly out-perform the rest of the nation, send them to public school. If, like my wife and myself, you are more capable of giving your child an education than is your district, then school at home. We tried two public schools before giving up on them and teaching our son. After only one month of home-school, he has surpassed the grade which his teacher told us he might not pass. Granted, we live in a pretty awful school district.
Fantastic post, thank you.
"What do you despise? By this are you truly known." --Princess Irulan, Manual of Muad'Dib
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I had some similar problems with public education system.
I tested at "13th grade reading and comprehension level" from grade 5, until graduation. The public school system never improved or challenged me in this area.
I was (and am) a voracious reader and I believe reading above my level at an early age is what made that difference; nothing that was done by the teachers because similar to UnderCoverPenguin if I wasn't in line with the 'age appropriate' program they were dishing out I was seen as a problem. So believe it or not sometimes I got put in to remedial classes because the at-grade level or even AP teachers did not like me.
Homeschooling provides the opportunity for a 1-to-1 teacher to student ratio (or maybe a low ratio if you have multiple children) , of a teacher who can be 100% in tune with where that child is at academically and tailor the lessons to that child's abilities and weaknesses as needed.
I'm 44 now, and my son is 5. We are homeschooling him. He is already at at a second grade reading and writing level despite only being pre-school age.
It's certainly not for everyone - but it has advantages too.
Our girls are all homeschooled - although the oldest (13) has now transitioned to high school.
There are as many ways of homeschooling as there are homeschoolers. They range from hot-housers (attempting to cram in more academic information than a school would) to those who wish to go entirely with what the children want. We err on the side of the latter, teaching only when interest is shown in a subject - often learning more in 20mins than if forced to sit through arbitrary lessons (which works something like ripping through a topic on Wikipedia when it intrigues you), giving a truly personalised education that is also less stressful for us as parents.
Our eldest did not read until she was 8 - which was when she wanted to - but by the time she entered high school she had read more than most children of her age, having vociferously consumed whatever she could. It was _her_ thing to read - she never had the negativity of thinking it was "school work" and something that "had to be done".
She is now an A grade student in almost all subjects, topping classes that other students have been taking for 7 years. What's more, she seems to be unique amongst her peers in appreciating her classes as a source of knowledge, rather than a thing-that-must-be-done to force doctrine into her head.
It was her request to go to school - for the social aspect. At parents' evening yesterday the only negative was that she doesn't do her homework if she doesn't see the point in it. I take that as a compliment.
If you cannot see the research born out that home schooled children do better, then you are not looking hard enough and most likely just do not want to fool with your part of the load.I have many friends and business associates with whom I interact socially and do business with and, while there are a few exceptions, the child does better academically and the family is a more closely knit unit.
From your comments, it sounds as though you are looking to justify your wish to send them to public school more than looking for reasons to see whether your spouse is correct.
By all means, send them to public school. At least the school wants them. I imagine the only thing worse than public school, total abject failure that it is, would be a lazy parent.
In some states, for example, Michigan, the law states that a Charter school must accept ALL applicants. As a result, the opposite happens - the Public Schools kick out their worst performers and leave them to the charters.
Just looking at your query, one needn't make any grand assertions about home schooling to give you an answer. You say your wife dropped out of high school and later got the equivalent of a high school degree. She may be a genius or an under-performer. But clearly high school wasn't for HER. (As opposed to your child.) Then you say the main motivating factor in choosing home schooling is that she doesn't want to let go. Well, forget all the distractions about home schooling and which is better and which is worse and so on. Your wife's motivations as you see it are very negative: she doesn't want to let go. That's a terrible reason to do much of anything. You don't need to look any further than that to know that home schooling for such a self-centered reason that has nothing to do with your child or the schooling options in your area or the efficacy of home schooling is a very bad idea indeed.
The matter is really simple. Children learn better when they want to than when they are forced to. Therefor homeschooling is the most sensible option for young children. You can always have the best tutor available when your child gets to 12 or 13 or even at a later stage. But you can never undo the lack of identity or character destruction that was imparted by public schooling and, what basically boils down to, parental neglect of a young child who totally believes in his parents and will develop optimally if allowed to in the the nurturing and lovling environment your wife will give.
I was pulled out of kindergarten because my teacher "was upset that I could already read." Apparently, if she couldn't teach me something, I wasn't entitled to do it. I was home schooled until I was eleven. In sixth grade, due to some family issues, my mother had to return to work, and I had to return to public school.
These are the pros and cons I learned from my experience being home schooled.
Pros (Note that I was lucky enough to have a reasonably sane mother with lots of time teaching me):
Cons:
Short story? I don't regret the time I was home schooled, but neither do I regret what I learned from being in public school. Both environments helped me in different ways.
The last homeschooler I dealt with was my age (roughly 23 at the time) and had no idea what Columbine was. I was partially homeschooled. I was in the system until 16. My last class was drivers ed. I took the GED at 16 and passed. I'm working on my doctorate in Clinical Psych now. So my input is a bit different, but here's what I can say from my experience, and with dealing with schools, and children now: There is a great deal of variability within States, Counties, Districts, and Schools. Schools *can* do *ok*, provided they don't have to provide any special services. Schools are shitty at detecting children with *actual* needs. They use screening measures that are meaningless to identify both gifted and potentially challenged children. Additionally, *if* the school detects the child, it's because they have been falling behind half a grade level for the last few years, placing them 2 full grades behind their peers. That's a lot of wasted time. Curriculum is designed for the middle-of-the-pack student. Those at the high and low end suffer for this design. I would add that Public school is probably a value at the until Middle School. That value probably maintains itself until High School *if* your child is doing well enough to take AP and/or college courses via dual enrollment. I am going to be facing the choices you are facing now in a couple years. In my opinion, a *good* public school that can render special services if mandated by a IEP or 504 plan probably maintains it's value until about 8th grade. By then, academic progress can probably be improved at the individual level. If the school fights IEP or 504 compliance, they are crap, and I wouldn't enroll my child there even if they weren't on a 504/IEP.
It really depends on how the homeschooling happens. I have three kids. The two older went through public schools. We moved to Los Alamos (Home of Los Alamos National Laboratories) specifically for the schools. My two older kids did pretty well K-5 in school. They both liked their teachers and loved science and history. But Middle School crushed them. By the time they went to High School, they had both become anti-intellect, anti-education, anti-reading. My youngest didn't do well in K or 1st grade. We started home schooling him in 2nd grade. Today, he's in 4th. He knows more about history than just about any adult I know. He is learning to program Java, and Python. He is interested in joining the home school speech and debate team, which is small, but all its members are internationally rated in multiple disciplines. He has joined a Lego engineering club, and is looking forward to the robotics team. He is well liked, an incredibly happy. He wants to start his own business, and I'll be working with him on a business plan to kick that off. In short, I'm a fan of homeschooling, provided the parent/s are on-board with projectized learning. Here is a good article from Wired about this: http://www.wired.com/2015/02/s...
It really depends on how the homeschooling happens. I have three kids. The two older went through public schools. We moved to Los Alamos (Home of Los Alamos National Laboratories) specifically for the schools.
My two older kids did pretty well K-5 in school. They both liked their teachers and loved science and history. But Middle School crushed them. By the time they went to High School, they had both become anti-intellect, anti-education, anti-reading.
My youngest didn't do well in K or 1st grade. We started home schooling him in 2nd grade. Today, he's in 4th. He knows more about history than just about any adult I know. He is learning to program Java, and Python. He is interested in joining the home school speech and debate team, which is small, but all its members are internationally rated in multiple disciplines. He has joined a Lego engineering club, and is looking forward to the robotics team.
He is well liked, an incredibly happy. He wants to start his own business, and I'll be working with him on a business plan to kick that off.
In short, I'm a fan of homeschooling, provided the parent/s are on-board with projectized learning. Here is a good article from Wired about this:
http://www.wired.com/2015/02/silicon-valley-home-schooling/
My dad taught college sciene for over 35 years and his opinion of home schooling is very low. Home schooled children do not, in general, get the experimental basis of science because they don't have the lab to do the experiment in.
If you think a child might ever be interested in science or medicine of any sort his recommendation would be not to home school.
First off, I resent being labelled as an "Anonymous Coward". I am an Anonymous Slacker! I don't have an account here and I'm too busy right now to bother.
OK...we homeschooled our 4 kids from the get go - PRIMARILY because I WAS (and my ex-wife STILL is) a rabid fundamentalist and believed public schools were demonic, controlled by the evil NEA, Voddie Bacham is a prophet, denim jumpsuits are appointed by God, blah blah blah...
But I'll put aside my bias and be objective as I can and give you my 4 cents worth and I'll summarize 18 years of homeschooling (so far). I honestly think h/s is awesome - TO A CERTAIN POINT. If I had to do it all over again, this is what I'd do:
1. H/S the kids UP to middle school, and put them in a good public or private school (full time) starting in HIGH school.
2. While h/s, be sure your kids are in a good co-op environment and get a lot of opps for sports and clubs (common in h/s today)
3. SAVE $$ because h/s done right will cost you $$$!
4. Keep an eye on your introverted children!! My oldest 2 are the introverted ones and the youngest are the extroverted ones. We have discovered, CLEARLY, that the introverted/shy kids are having a much harder time relating to life and outside influences than the extroverted ones. One is so fearful of growing up/outside world it's almost as if she's agoraphobic and it's becoming a liability now.
5. DON'T SHELTER YOUR KIDS. It all fun and games now when they're 8, but when they're 17 and they still want to suckle...you've got a problem!
6. If you insist on h/s through High School, be sure your child takes some courses at the local comm college - my son took courses his Jr and Sr year and he was accepted to a top 10 university. I know that helped.
7. Last: this is why I'm concerned about h/s through high school. I think your kids, if there's a good relationship there and they have your respect, I believe they'll do well - they'll have all sorts of positive opps at school (band/choir/clubs/FREE sports/dances) plus they will have EXPERIENCED TEACHERS that can identify and encourage strengths in your kids + counselors that can guide them in what they want to do for college + help TO get into college. My experience: the large homeschool org that we belonged to did NOTHING NADA ZILCHO to help us figure out the process or tricks to applying for college and scholarships - they were ZERO HELP. We were completely on our own and it was a crappy experience. When I was in pub school there were all kinds of resources and counseling to help apply for college. I'm not going to make the same mistake with my other kids. And we need to save the $$ for college.
This is my humble opinion and just an opinion. We both have graduate degrees, one has a teaching credential, and have collectively 63 years of homeschooling experience. Bottom line: if you do it right it's an awesome way to go, but if you plan for them to go to college and adjust well, put 'em in high school!
As someone who went to private institutions for my entire schooling I would highly recommend you send your kids to a school.
My first job as a programmer was offered to me by the cousin of someone I met in school. I frequently networked with people who are in great positions nowadays and give me a heads up/recommend me when a project pops up in their company which also gives me a nice boost of revenue.
A lot of the people I met through school in general have been helped by myself in various ways, and a lot of them have helped me in return.
On the other hand, my cousin who was home schooled and has a double degree is struggling to find a job, I dropped out of university.
While I will not put into question the virtues of homeschooling, which academically might make your child prosper more than the alternative, the networking value is truly great. Alternatively look into meetups with other homeschooling parents so that your child may gain valuable social skills I sometimes do not see with typically home schooled children.
Just my two cents
You are concerned about your wife's ability to teach your child. Well, what has she taught so far? Can your child read? Add? If not, why does your wife think she's going to be able to teach those things now? If so, then what are you worried about?
--
JimFive
Please stop using the word theory when you mean hypothesis.
It depends a lot on your circumstances and the school district you are in as well as the state you reside in. Both my children are homeschooled by my wife with me helping out where applicable. We live in a school district where the high school has a dismal graduation rate of around 40%, the other schools do not much better. Ironically, the high school one district over and just a mile away has a graduation rate of 98%.So in that regards we as parents can't do any worse job than the local public schools. That said, if the public schools were doing well the incentive would be lower. Homeschooling takes a lot of time. My wife spends anywhere from 4 to 8 hours on actual instruction, but that on only four days a week. I do one activity at night or on the weekend. Also, my wife spends several hours a week on prepping for school and staying informed. That means if you have a full time or even part time job you may find not having enough time. Homeschooling isn't cheap, but you definitely can be frugal about it. Also, some states provide the text books no matter if a student is in public, private, or home school. You still need to buy books, materials, and supplies. The more work you put in yourself the less you have to pay. There are many curricula ready to go with instructions and tests and so on already done. Those tend not to be cheap. Homeschooling still has a bad rap, many think you are a religious nutball, a whacky liberal, a sect member, jobless, or the devil in disguise. Also, some school districts have staff that is totally anti-homeschooling. Some districts try to bully homeschoolers with made up rules, so in any case you need to be well versed on the legal framework. In some states like Connecticut you do not have to do anything although a letter of intent to the district is encouraged. In some you have to do a lot of paperwork with quarterly and annual reports, for example in New York. And then there are states like Pennsylvania that make homeschooling total hell with insane restrictions and requirements that are not even applied to public schools. For that reason the stats are hard to come by and often biased depending on who tries to make what argument. That said, the best thing is that you are in control. You and your child set the pace. If the child needs more time with one subject you have the luxury to spend more time. If you want to do an awesome project that takes a few days you can do that as well. If you had enough and need to take a few days off, you can do that as well. Vacation when everyone else is in school is also an option. You don't like a text book...find a different one and sell the other one on eBay or Amazon. All this is not possible in a public school setting. And that is the main reason why homeschoolers might do better academically, they set their own pace and they repeat the stuff they didn't get the first time as many times as it takes. It is possible to be at 7th grade level in reading and writing, but still at 5th grade level in math. That is not a problem at all as homeschooler as long as you get the content covered eventually. Often times it just clicks and a child gets it quickly although before it was like talking to a wall. Some children learn gradually, others have learning spurts and then level off. Nothing wrong with that, but something a public school with 40 kids in a class cannot accommodate. As homeschooler you can also cut out all that crap like daily pledge of allegiance or citizenship courses or whatever other useless garbage gets dumped on kids in schools. You can also prevent that your child's life gets destroyed by curricula such as "Everyday Math" or the many history books with totally distorted facts. Now to the dumb argument of homeschoolers lacking social interaction. Do you know how many school districts do not allow kids to speak to each other on the bus or on the school yard? And definitely not in class unless asked. What kind of social interaction is that? My kids attend a drama club, a choir, and arts and computer classes. In the summer they play with other k
I was home-schooled, and I don't plan to do it with my children if I can avoid the need. I'll be brief, but I feel that any parent considering home-schooling needs to really consider carefully if they are doing it for the child or for their own needs. Overly protective parents seeking to shield their child will do a great deal of harm. Parents who are not able to reasonably assess their own strengths and weaknesses as teachers will also impair their children's development. Finally, and most significant: you may avoid the pitfalls and perils of high school, and that could be an advantage, but I personally know that going straight from home schooling into college was an arduous journey, as I arrived with the social proficiency of an adult, and had no idea how to relate to those in my age group. It effectively took me until age 40 before I reached the point where I felt I could comfortably manage life and family in an "adult" manner (and it still feels weird, to be honest), and I strongly believe that the way I was sheltered and home-schooled by my parents contributed to this very odd form of arrested development.....and it's still not something I've overcome; I've just learned to compensate. There's not enough room and time to talk about it here, but I firmly believe that the home-schooling I received was a blessing for my education but a curse for my general social prowess.
Honestly, there are quite simply too many variables to distill this debate to a simple, reasoned decision.
Pro: Your children are safer from what can happen at school. Your children will likely be healthier, not exposed to illnesses from the dirty masses.
Con: Socialization, seeing what happens in the real world with a variety of different people with various religions, beliefs and lifestyles.
Going to school is conforming to a schedule not of your own choice or making. This is a great way to learn self-discipline and self-mastery. It depends on the parents and the children whether homeschooling is better. If the children are getting away with not going to school because they are obnoxious and undisciplined, it isn't good to homeschool. If the parents have such a dysfunctional lifestyle that they can't keep their children disciplined and in school, it isn't good to homeschool; indeed, in that case it is robbing the children of a better place to be.
I'm not at all against homeschooling for intelligent parents who have integrity. But I have seen cases of homeschooling because the entire family is dysfunctional, and the children grow up unable to even make their own personal schedules. I personally would have liked to homeschool my children for the benefits of more safety, less illness and parental vulnerability from having to deal with other children, parents and school staff - people I never otherwise would have had to know at all. That goes both ways, though. You can meet people you click with through the schools. I did not homeschool because I was exhausted and needed a free babysitter. Luckily, it worked out okay.
As far as learning, social learning is what school teaches best. Children need to be taught school subjects beyond the classroom, at home and in life. They need to learn about money and personal finance. Independent students who have good teachers do best because of their love of learning and the fact that their learning is not limited to school. A bad teacher is less of a problem to a smart kid, and a good teacher can get nowhere with a bad student.
I was home-schooled as well and I completely agree with LaurenCates and penix1 on this one. If I have kids I won't home school them. I don't think learning should take precedent over allowing a kid to be a kid (i.e. making friends and being involved in cohort of other like minds). If become concerned with their academic progress I will take the time to personally tutor them and help them with their homework.
You can always try it for a few semesters and then put your kid back in school to see if he's keeping pace with rest. generally if your kid gets some fresh air exercise great food great literature to read and some good learning experiences from you it will be far supirior to most elementary schools.
I cruised a large sailboat for a few years in the Paciifc and the Atlantic. We met a lot of kids who were being "sea schooled" using one of the fine correspondence schools that caters to cruisers. These were happy, well adjusted, kids whose basic education included multiple cultures and languages, a deep sense of responsibility as crew, and plenty of socialization experiences.
Many of these cruisers "swallowed the anchor" eventually and put their kids in public schools to meet the various state qualifications for university entry. According to the teachers in the San Diego public school system that I spoke to, these kids were usually a grade or two ahead and far more mature that their peers in age.
This is different from some parents that are sheltering their kids from protective or religious reasons, but it points to the fact that the quality of home schooling depends on the parents, the kids, and the actual curriculum. Generalities will be misleading.
It could also be a heuristic at work. Most people who know me probably think they don't know anyone who has been homeschooled (or maybe they think they only know one, and only because he or she had to be removed from public school because they were "troubled"). They would be wrong, because I was homeschooled, but that's not the kind of thing that tends to come up in everyday conversation. Instead we talk about our jobs or our spouses or politics or the weather or whatever. People tend to assume everyone has a similar background to them in the absence of any particular reason to think otherwise.
I think the risk is
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
Casteism
I was homeschooled. Bachelor's at 20, law degree at 23, currently making six figures. DINK household by choice with a net worth approaching half a million and combined annual income over a quarter million in our early thirties. My homeschooling was more magic than your public schooling.
There are 3 main types of schooling in America.
1. Public schools -- These are schools funded by public sources such as taxes and lottery earnings, etc.. They are often portrayed as crime ridden and failing in educating but this is often a function of the community they are in. Poorer communities tend to have poorer public education systems. It does have the advantage of socializing that other types of education lack (more on this later).
2. Charter / private schools -- These are schools that derive their funding from private sources such as tuition or through vouchers for poorer families. In the case of religious private schools, they also concentrate on their religious teachings as well as the standard curriculum. You find these in richer communities and they have the advantage over public schools because they can pick and choose whether the student will attend. Many see them as siphoning out the best students from the public school system and reducing the resources availible to public schools.
3. Home schooling -- This is where the student is taught at home for various reasons (some valid, some not) mostly for the reason of the perception that the previously mentioned types do not suit the needs or beliefs of the parents. The difficulty with home schooling is one of credentialing and certifying that the state approved requirements are being met. Home schooling requires a much higher degree of involvement on the part of the parents which often can't be the case due to the necessity of having both parents working to make ends meet. You do mostly see home schooling being done by parents who either have a high degree of distrust in the public forms of education or have a religious reason. Lastly, there are some areas that are remote or that have extreme weather conditions where home schooling is the norm. But these circumstances are fewer in the US because of the extensive network of public / private schools available and public funding of busing.
Personally, I think home schooling is a bad thing for kids since it doesn't teach them the proper socialization they will need as adults. It is often done for all the wrong reasons in all the wrong ways which can and often does hold the child back making things worse for that kid. And as the poster of this article has noted, it does tend to be the parents that can't let go of their offspring that want to keep them home all the time. This is unhealthy IMO. I personally believe that home schooling should be the choice of last resort since it does require a much higher degree of commitment from parents which often can't be met especially in poorer communities.
There is little students is taught at home in China. Most parents send their children to school, it seems must be do this. And it's specially to home schooling .Most famous example is Zheng Yuanjie. He is a famous fairy tale writer, and he just teach his son at home .At last ,his son became a good writer ,too.But I don't think every home school has the same result. When a child grew, maybe he can learn something by hisself,like me,I learn PCB by my self .I am a PCB design now.It 's my compangy websit.A PCB factory: www.nod-pcba.com .So it's difficulty to say it right or not.
My son went to Kinder and then Primary in the (NSW) State System. All fantastic and lovely and he got a good grounding in all sorts of subjects and made lots of good friends. High school options were not good - he was the one who wanted out of the State system and i agreed as long as he contracted to do the work I set him. It lasted 3 years and was excellent - he went into the NSW TAFE system to do year 10 and then to a private school to do years 11 and 12. He has since studied Graphic Design, Games Development (software) and Mechatronics at university. He's just started working for a software development company. there was no desire on my part to do anything except give him a really good education - which the local high schools didn't really offer. His father and I both ahd a terrible time in high school and so had no feelings that is should be defended as an institution. We used internet, Board of Studies, local home schooling group and occasional hired tutors. We signed up for Streamwatch and monitored our local creek, did kitchen sink science, made furniture, cooked, studied philosophy and did all sorts of life skills as well as academic stuff. We were involved as a fmaily in local amatuer dramatics and he maintained friendships and those friendships still endure. I hired people to teach maths (because I'm lousyu at it) but since he has been studying maths and discrete maths at uni, we can't have done too badly. I was self-employed at the time so that helped. I would say - send them into kindy to get the chips knocked off their shoulders and then look at the local options. If the schools are crap, don't buy in to the system. Read Ivan illich (De-Schooling) and make your own mind up. One thing i ahve noticed aobut my son is that he is able to calmly make up his own mind about what he wants to do. I went through rigid school systems and find that really difficult! he is muchmore mature than me...:-)
Personally, I think home schooling is a bad thing for kids since it doesn't teach them the proper socialization they will need as adults.
What about where the socialization they would learn in public school teaches them 'all the bad things' (i.e. doing coke in history class is okay, etc.)?
And before you say that's where the parents come in to teach them - I say yes, but parents lose when it comes to social pressure to fit in.
blindly antisocialist = antisocial
Anecdotal Reference Sorry.
I have this home schooled friend in his mid-twenties who plays a character in my old school D&D game. While smart, he can barely read. We discovered this when I asked him to read the room descriptions his party was exploring.
He told us when he was about seventeen, the home school subscription service his Mother subscribed to lost its accreditation. (This kind of service supplied all the workbooks and materials for the schooling. I suspect they did all the grading by correspondence as well.) So he never did get an equivalent of a High School diploma.
So the gang even tried to get him enrolled in a GED course at the local Community College. He failed the test on the reading comprehension portion.
We'll keep trying.
Tracy Johnson
Old fashioned text games hosted below:
http://empire.openmpe.com/
BT
Child on Child "social development" is worthless, the blind cannot lead the blind. If one expects a child to develop socially then they need to get those skills from people who have them already, older kids or adults. For me, school was hell, but adult life is just fine, people at least know how to be civil.
A child in the public education system gets on average 7 minutes of personal tuition per WEEK. If you only teach your child 2 hours a day you are outdoing your school by more than an order of magnitude.
I found that when I taught my children math their grades improved dramatically over a specialist math teacher. One of the big differences I found was that I care if my child understands.
The biggest thing though is that you get to teach your child at their pace, not in lock-step with the system that treats teaching like an industrial process. Our children are not objects on a conveyer belt, each child is an individual and should be treated as such.
If the underlying reason is because "it seems like the only reason my wife wants to homeschool is because she doesn't want to let go." than you already know that is a really poor justification for the paradigm shift. However, if you are concerned because a recent article indicated that Universities are now having to target 1st year studies to a 7th grade reading level because that is what the average student leaving High School has mastered... than you may want to consider options. If you are concerned because the options include $40k tuition for a kindergarten school in Boston where my 2 year old granddaughter lives... than you may want to consider options. If you are concerned because every decade for the last 50 years the standards and/or agendas for schooling in this country have radically shifted in pursuit of ensuring that Johnny and Jane can read and instead of producing better educated youth we are getting the exact opposite and you are now worried about the results from the latest and greatest Common Whore Curriculum... than you might want to consider options. If you are concerned because the level of violence at the public schools in your area is on a par with the state prison where you reside than I would not consider keeping them out of such an environment to be "coddling" - as one of the other contributors suggests - any more than I would consider opting out of throwing a 5 year old who can't swim into the deep end of the pool to be "coddling" them than yes... you may want to consider options. The problem is that you really don't have many options and home schooling is not an ideal solution for everyone. My oldest child went through a private school education all the way through her university studies and has done well. But, it was very much like the "perils of Pauline" ... as she crossed an academic level it was like a bridge collapsing behind her. I was able to make do by supplementing her studies with enrichment activities as others have suggested. However, by the time my youngest came of school age the landscape had changed completely and I was putting in so much time and effort to make up for the deficiencies of a "private" school that I reached a point where I decided that I might as well put in a bit more effort and do it all. Please note - I took steps to ensure that my son's academic progress was evaluated by an independent body which would score the tests that I administered on a quarterly basis under timed constraints. Be advised that I was equipped to teach him math through Calculus as well as Biology, Chemistry and Physics. He was taught two foreign languages along with the usual History, Current Events, Civics and both World and American Literature by his mother. The money that I would have spent on tuition was ear-marked for purchasing teaching material, equipment and extensive travel throughout the states and internationally as part of enrichment studies. Arrangements were also made for him to participate in team sports, community volunteer work and age appropriate social events. Every year, I drafted a contract to be signed by all parties concerned - which made it clear what was expected of him and what the parental contribution to the learning process would be - so there could be no wailing of "you didn't tell me" midstream through the year. He was done with his studies by age 16 and went on to audit classes at the local community college to allow him time to mature a bit before going away to the university. He was able to handily meet the admissions criteria for the engineering program at a well known school by age 18. He received a full scholarship and graduated with honors and went full time with the consulting firm that he had begun during his sophomore year. Score 1 for home schooling - it was the right decision for me and mine. However, in all honesty, I cannot in good conscience say that it is one size fits all. In the absence of being equipped to prepare your child to meet rigorous academic criteria so that he will be able to pursue whatever goals he sets for h
Can you cite where homeschooling is illegal in California? a quick Googles showed there was a 2008 ruling that didn't affect existing law allowing homeschooling. The parents still need some oversight (with a partnership with a charter or private school or tutoring center) or they can set themselves up as their own private school. I'm on the road atm, so I can't do a more exhaustive search, but I'd be interested in hearing more information about this if you have some, because I'm coming up blank.
BOOP!
Wow, I really wished I would have posted on this early enough for people to read my thoughts.
I was homeschooled until about 15 when I started taking some classes at a local community college. Now I'm 28. I have been in the military and have advanced well (E-7) over the last 10 years. I currently work in information security and hold a very technical job alongside my military leadership responsibilities. I put school aside when I joined and am just now about to finish my Bachelor's in Computer Science online at a not-super-prestigious university that caters to military and working adults going back to school.
Being homeschooled has had it's ups and downs for me. My parents taught me the simple things at first. Basic arithmetic, English, history, and science were topics my parents led me through and taught me how to understand. At some point between the time I was 10 to 12, homeschooling turned from instruction in to me having reading and assignments without anyone showing me what to do. My parents were pretty strict about it, so I had certain goals I had to meet, but it was tough to learn on my own. This ended up being a major benefit to me as I became an adult because it was normal for me to learn things on my own. I would even dare to say that self-learning is an ability that is necessary to be successful in the computer field.
Since I've been an adult, I've taught myself how to program in multiple languages, I've been successful in online courses, and I continue to learn technical skills on the job. I attribute this ability to learn so much on my own to my parents forcing me to do it for years. Is this the normal outcome of this type of situation? I don't know. I do know my three siblings have also been successful at the academic goals they have set out to achieve.
As previously mentioned, I also believe the most significant downside to homeschooling is the lack of regular social interaction. My parents made every effort to get me and my siblings out and interacting with others, but it was either not enough or the wrong kind of interaction. Homeschool groups were the worst! A lot of families homeschool their children for the wrong reasons and when my only interactions are with the socially retarded or religious fanatics, it doesn't benefit me much. Community sports leagues were very helpful, they were a chance to interact with the "normal" kids (the ones who attended public school). Even as a child, it was apparent these kids were different from me and my siblings. We acted and interacted differently. As an adult, I have overcome a lot of the social anxiety I felt as a child, though some of it still exists. The military is largely to credit for this in my case, but my siblings have also seemed to adjust in their own ways.
All in all, I don't regret having been homeschooled. I've been given such an advantage in some ways, but also a disadvantage in others. As for my 6 and 4 year olds, they attend a private school. If I ever decided to homeschool them, it would be for no more than a couple years at a time. In my opinion, private schools are the way to go. The public school system is a disgusting bureaucratic mess. The free market prevails, even in education.
Regardless of what you choose, make the choice of what's in the best interest of your child and not necessarily what you two are comfortable with! Your kid will appreciate it in the future!
to get the answer to 26 x 33, rather than just knowing the answer from memorization.
Who memorizes the answer to 26 x 33, and how is that better? Most kids when I grew up were taught that to multiply 26 x 33, you start with 3x6 (which you DO memorize, or at least can work it out with addition) to get an 8. Then you carry the one, and add that to 2x3. 78. Ok! Then on the next line you fill in a 0 for the first digit, 3x6 again, so you put an 8 in the next column, carry the 1, add that to 3x2, so another 7. Now you add 78 + 780 = 858. That's how the vast majority of us learned how to do multiplication for numbers larger than 10.
How is that any LESS hacky than applying the FOIL rule for binomials ( 20 + 6 ) x ( 30 + 3 ) or using other algebraic factoring methods?
For some kids, 'strife' is actually painful. Don't trivialize what kids experience just because you're not a kid anymore and don't have to be there with them.
The question is, what is the cause of 1-9.
IMHO the cause for most of 1-9 is because it is mostly LEARNED behavior. It is learned that we accept and tolerate it, which is itself an indictment of the "system" that does accept it and tolerate it at least to the degree that these people are not weeded out.
"Tribalism" and us-vs-them seems to be inherent in humanity, a constant regardless of public schools, private schools, or no schools.
The argument "home schooling is a bad thing for kids since it doesn't teach them the proper socialization" is completely false and there is not a single piece of evidence that supports this claim. It is nothing more than uninformed blabber and prejudice. My children are homeschooled and they join in many activities that provides plenty of social interaction. Plenty of school districts have strict rules in place that undermine or even outright prevent social interaction in schools, so a public school is not necessarily the better place. Besides that, social interaction with whom? A group that can be joined and left at will or a bunch of teenaged bullies that a child cannot escape from in school? Or the teachers who tech because they want to push their agenda? I am very fine with my kids not getting "socialization" from those people.
...of experience with previously home-schooled kids.
It sounds like your wife wants to home school for all the wrong reasons. And she sounds woefully underqualified. At a minimum she should be willing to gear up to learn an incredible number of things she doesn't even know she will need going forward. Otherwise "homeschooling" will end up being hanging out with mom and having fun. And frankly, if your child is halfway intelligent he/she won't miss much from first or second grade, and going to a real school (of any type) by third grade will mean a few months of catching up and no one will be able to tell the difference a year later. But keep up the fun through fifth (or heaven forbid eighth) and any attempt to reintegrate into a normal system will be hampered by gaping holes in absolutely critical skills - the kind of boring stuff that cumulatively adds up over time and that many homeschool mamas ignore because they don't know it as adults, so what use is it? Oh, and 20% or more of kids these days have some sort of learning difference or other. People who take all those education classes learn how to identify them. Those who specialize learn how to effectively remediate. Not all of those education courses are BS. As I said, your wife will need to learn a whole lot of things she doesn't even know she's missing. It's not impossible, but it is more of a job than you would imagine.
Many of the homeschooling success stories you read about happen when both parents have PhD's or other advanced degrees, and lots of resources for European trips, etc. At a minimum, parents with a high level of curiosity and a natural habit of lifelong learning have a chance at being successful homschool parents, with or without degrees. But being overly attached to your own kids is not, in itself, bode will for long term success.
My sister and her husband have 3 children, one of whom is autistic, that they home school.
Their reasons for which include:
1. Bullying
A. Bullying(by other pupils), particularly of smart kids, nerds,geeks, or anyone else who is perceived as different,weak or quiet is a huge problem in school. My sister and her husband perceive it as a problem inherent to the school structure itself and as such will continue to persist unless said structure changes.
Bullying (by teachers) is ne'er discussed yet common, particularly in the case of non-verbal or disabled students who can not report such abuse.
2. Institutionalization
B. The institutional structure of school promotes conformity, obedience to authority, depersonalization,lack of creativity, one size fits all, interchangeable parts mentality. As such it is outdated for the modern workplace which needs workers who can handle rapid change, be creative and self motivated, need little to no supervision.
3. Ghettoization- Pupils are ghettoized with their age-mates.
4. Racism-My sister's children are bi-racial. Although not a deciding factor it's just another way of possibly getting bullied or treated unfairly by teachers.
My sister's children do not behave like wild animals in the manner of their school attending peers. This is obvious at birthday parties, outings etc when they meet-up with their school attending friends who display rudeness, cruelty and immaturity. Instead her children are better able to conduct themselves around adults appropriately.
The reasons for this can be debated. The school children in the brick and mortar situation are likely excercize deprived as they must sit still and be quiet for hours on end leading to a need to expend their pent up energy.
Sorry. No hard data here. Just an anecdote. I must mention that the children will be allowed to attend school if ever they want to go.
The problem is, the character it builds tends to be pretty destructive, to the person themselves and anyone unlucky enough to get drawn close to them.
It cuts both ways. Hitler and Stalin responded to early strife by becoming monstrous. However, you can pick out other examples of people with bad childhoods who went on to do great things. For example, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton were both adult children of alcoholics.
2. Charter / private schools -- These are schools that derive their funding from private sources such as tuition or through vouchers for poorer families. In the case of religious private schools, they also concentrate on their religious teachings as well as the standard curriculum. You find these in richer communities and they have the advantage over public schools because they can pick and choose whether the student will attend. Many see them as siphoning out the best students from the public school system and reducing the resources availible to public schools.
Typical charter schools are actually public schools too. They get funding from the state, and as such don't get to pick who can and can't go. If the school is full, they use a lottery. In my experience, their population tends to be the tails of the curve, where traditional public schools focus more on the middle.