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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
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.
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.
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.
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.
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
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.
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
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!
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.
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.
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.
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
I was homeschooled until high school, and had to deal with exactly that problem.
My father was at work (as an programmer/engineer/manager), and my mother was not particularly strong in the sciences at which I excelled. By 7th grade, I had surpassed their knowledge of basic science, and especially anything computer-related. My daily lesson plan devolved into a cycle of reading material I mostly already knew, asking questions to which I wouldn't get answers, and eventually doing a half-assed job in other subjects to meet the required level of completion that would let me escape to more entertaining things, like teaching myself another programming language.
In retrospect, the single thing my parents did right, above all else, was to teach me how to learn. By the time I got to the public high school, I was able to appreciate my classes as a source of knowledge, rather than a daily prison forcing doctrine into my head. That survives to this day, and is one of the main reasons why I continue to find new fascinating things to explore and learn about the world.
My advice, as someone who survived, is to see homeschooling as a chance to influence the core values your child uses through the rest of his life. Emphasize sportsmanship, creativity, logic... whatever you hope for your child, you can instill at an early age, but you should also be aware of your limits. As soon as your child needs something more than you can supply, you must put their needs first, and send them somewhere with more resources.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
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.
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
The flip side comes in some of the non-core subjects or in areas with high demand and low supply of teachers. I taught a foreign language in public schools for a while, with no education classes behind me, only graduate-level work in the language. Likewise, we hired a computer science teacher who had been a programmer, had run his own business, and had never attended education classes. Even in the core subjects, a number of the math and science teachers came from a military background (it was a Navy town) and had solid educations and practical experience with STEM but no education classes.
It took all of us at least three years to get the hang of teaching. Knowing the field is only half the battle: the other is getting your troops in order. Teenagers may well be creative geniuses and precious snowflakes, but they are not rational adults. They are growing into the role, and they need help doing so. Most of the education classes I had were worthless (the "philosophy of education" course was utter bullshit taught by an aged hippie), but the ones on classroom management and adolescent psychology were immensely helpful. Three years of experience solidified what I learned in those two classes. You might well be able to walk into a room of adults and brief them on any topic adeptly -- that's what people do in business meetings and training all the time -- but it's a far cry from being able to handle a room full of teenagers who haven't reached the age of impulse control, are only starting to come to grips with the hormones raging through their bodies, and honestly don't know why they decided to bring that porn mag or knife to class today.
I became good at civilizing the savages, and I found that the students learned far more when I had learned how to do that. I moved on later back into the adult world, but I still find that I can manage children when I have to. It's invaluable on airplanes when I get seated next to some little germ factory whose mother can't get him to control himself and doesn't understand him or why the airsick bag and everything else in reach fascinates him so. It's amazing how much time parents can spend with kids and yet have absolutely no clue what their kids see in the world; they only see the kids as time-drains to be put in front of a tablet or screen to get them out of the way for a while, or as potential embarrassments who need to be threatened constantly. Neither gives a kid the ability to reason and control himself.
One of the biggest takeaways from the whole experience, both while teaching and afterwards, is that most parents don't have the first clue how to raise their children to become decent adults. Some do, and they homeschool their kids well: my cousin homeschools her two kids for religious reasons, and they behave like adults, but she also had a few years experience in Christian education along with a degree in the same. Most parents who do homeschool their kids do have an active enough engagement in their kids' lives to teach them the control they need to become effective learners, and I've found that a number of homeschooling parents form collectives or co-ops that not only distribute teaching among parents with strengths in subject fields but also share knowledge of how to reach the kids most effectively. These co-ops are usually of such a small scale that they know the kids well and individually, something missing from large public schools. That works for them, but they're a small minority of all parents. I'd doubt that the majority of the population is capable either of organizing effectively or of handling children well. Here I'm thinking especially of the kids I taught who never dealt with their biological parents but lived with their grandmothers (parenting skips a generation in some communities, because the mothers are too busy carousing to raise their own children, and the fathers are unknown or incarcerated). Those kids' parents abdicated the responsibility of raising their children, and school is the only place that they'll find the struc
So what you're saying is for all that extra work, you got average results.
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
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.
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.
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
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
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.
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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.
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.
While I don't want to be as dismissive of this parent's accomplishments as horm was, you would need to know a bit more about the AC before determining if his/her results are common. While only about a third of individuals (34%) of people 25-29 have bachelors degrees, children in the top quartile of income ( > $80k family income) have a 77% chance of getting a bachelors.
So average results for a two child family with a decent income and at least one parent willing and capable of homeschooling is probably going to be one Masters degree and one Bachelors degree by the time they are 30.
Even with a lower income, having parents who care enough about their children's education to even contemplate home schooling probably have a far better than 34% of having their children graduate college. Regardless of if they choose to home school or not.
-- All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing. -- Edmund Burke