It depends mightily on the public school. If you’re from New England or a large city you’ve probably had access to terrific public education but schools in the sticks get nickel-and-dimed in ways that really degrade the quality of education available to poor families. If you’re poor and smart and live in the Appalachians, I understand why you’d home-school.
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It’s more like knowing bible stories and having a sore ass.
CREH is a very good resource, too. The adult kids who were educated at home have fascinating and complicated stories that don’t fit neatly into either the “home-schoolers are freaks” narrative or the “home-schooling is evil” narrative.
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I was referring more to socialization skills learned in public schools rather than the quality of education.
There have been two recent cases a children dying because their parents took them out of public education and declared that they were home schooling them. In both cases the teachers at the public schools notified Children Services about potential abuse and that’s when the parents yanked them from schools, community activities and wouldn’t let home welfare checks happen. Are these the parents that Ryan wants to have more children?
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it’s honestly bigger than that. if a republican is for it, it’s bad for human beings. I wish that was hyperbole.
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We already know the religious right is okay with adults having sex with kids (see Roy Moore), so it’s not much of a surprise they have a group that defends home-schooling parents against charges of child abuse.
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I believe some in this discussion are using the same type of straw man arguments that would be patently ridiculous if used in a discussion regarding public school. There are many homeschooling families whose children are well socialized (school is not the only place to socialize children; there are many other places such as church, sports, clubs, music associations and neighborhood families in which socialization is learned) and well educated. We have friends whose children graduated from homeschool who then went on to schools like West Point, MIT, Cal Berkeley and other prestigious organizations.
As a parent whose children have been both homeschooled and have gone to public school, I can say definitely there are benefits to both systems. Public school does not educate every child well, nor does it ensure every child’s physical and emotional safety. However, I would not criticize all public schools because a parent chooses to harm their child who attends a public school. I would not blame all public schools because there are children who slip through the cracks in that system and leave it uneducated and unprepared for adult life. Nor do I choose to tar all homeschoolers because a some abusers choose to homeschool.
I believe most parents who choose to homeschool their children do so after a lot of thought and the vast majority I have met and interacted with in activities and classes have been wonderful parents and educators. There are many resources available to homeschoolers and the idea that most homeschoolers must be conservative Christians who only care about teaching the bible simply isn’t true.
I live in a state which has minimal oversight on homeschooling. My children entered the public school system after being homeschooled and were immediately placed into the advanced classes available at their grade level. I fully support the rights of parents to choose to homeschool without state interference. I didn’t require state assistance to get my children prepared, and wouldn’t have appreciated having to justify the curricula I designed specifically for my children and my goals for my children. What I did as an educator looked a lot different than what goes on in traditional classroom. But that was exactly why my children weren’t in public school. I didn’t want their education to be like what I saw in traditional public schools in the US.
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How come when I hear “home schooling” I think “no schooling?”
Especially with the gutting of social services at the state level, public schools are where troubled kids still have some visibility to the powers that be. Explicitly saying that you want to avoid regulation is a bad sign.
The other thing is that this give a cover for cutting federal resources to all home-schoolers, whether they’re wacko fundies or not. And because the wacko fundies have other sources of subsidies and curriculum materials, they’ll do OK, but the saner folk will have a hard job made even harder.
Every goddamn kid in America needs to be in a real school and this homeschool bullshit should be fucking illegal.
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Well, you asked whether missing out on the socialization of public schools was good or bad; the answer is that there’s a trade-off of socialization for individual attention and not all socialization is good or worth giving up individual attention for. And the deciding factor is often the quality of the educational environment on offer.
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I concur. Kids can be brutal to their peers in school.
Some people carry emotional scars/ baggage from their school years forever.
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A little vulgar but I tend to agree. There are certain things all kids should learn that can only be taught in a formal school setting.
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Kids who have parents that can write a persuasive note, on a personal check, will still get in.
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Recently in NYC there have been concerns about some of the Orthodox Yeshivas not adhering to state education standards.
Learning Talmud without the basic skills of the three R’s can lead to a tough existence.
Y’all went to WAY better “real schools” than I did.
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The most heavily-regulated homeschool state I am aware of, New York, doesn’t require an agent of the state to regularly observe children for signs of abuse & neglect. Is an annual standardized test administered to a roomful of kids supposed to achieve this? If not, what is it that HSDLA is doing that is going to hamper the state’s ability to observe all children? Should all children be observed by the state? I am not aware of any mandatory child observation beyond annual standardized testing having ever been a factor in any state’s homeschool laws. This seems to conflate the issue of educating children with the potential consequences of children not being observed regularly by outside parties. Forcing children into prison-like settings where they can be cruelly bullied for the sole purpose of protecting them from their parents is a totally fucked notion.
I don’t know about Tena, I am sure she is much younger than me, but I went to an ordinary suburban high school back in the 1960s, all of our administrators and most of our teachers were WWII veterans. The Greatest Generation was really serious about teaching the basic values of good citizenship. We also had an opportunity to learn a lot of things no parent could be expected to teach. Of course our science teachers taught real science, our history teachers taught real history (requiring us to actual source documents) and our English teachers taught us to read some of the best literature they could find. Frankly when I arrived at college I didn’t learn much new the first year or two. I wish our math teachers had been better and our foreign language instruction was inferior, but I doubt any home schooled kid has a teacher capable of the kind of the breadth of instruction my regular old suburban high school provided.
Yes, but I suspect the vast majority parents who do a good job of homeschooling their kids aren’t afraid of oversight. The kinds of parents who are afraid of oversight tend towards:
The paranoid — and it might be good to see how kids are faring with a paranoid parent and
The parents who don’t give their kids an adequate education.
The states aren’t thirsting to provide a ton of oversight. Just enough to make sure the kids are not falling behind.
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