Glad to see this. I view homeschooling as increasingly important in an era where schools are being used for political indoctrination, for example with the injection of CRT and CRT-based ideology into classrooms. I see friends who are teachers often talking about “critical pedagogy”, which is explicitly political and activist. Parents shouldn’t have to monitor how their children are being mismanaged by those in a position of trust, but here we are. For parental rights to have any meaning, homeschooling and school choice more broadly, are critical.
It absolutely is, and your comment is textbook gaslighting. I’ve seen this repeatedly from people who try to define CRT as an arcane framework taught only formally in law schools. Sorry but that’s not true either because it is directly taught, because its derivative concepts are taught, or because the accepted definition of CRT has changed - and it doesn’t matter which. But to claim CRT isn’t in schools in some form is plainly gaslighting. Ibram Kendi tried this sleight of hand as well, claiming anti-racism isn’t CRT, but he is already on the record admitting that CRT is foundational to his work on anti-racism, which is clearly being injected into schools (https://thefederalist.com/2021/06/24/ibram-x-kendi-falsely-c...).
The conversation has been intentionally muddled here by shifting definitions. "Critical Race Theory" is a college course. However the version that is a rebranded "PC culture run amok" is far more prevalent and includes things like teaching kids that the US founders were slaveholders and that owning slaves is a bad thing.
It's the same old story over the decades, but rebranded yet again to get the attention of the news media. "Traditional values are 'under attack' by crazy left wing people who only care about not-you".
‘things like teaching kids that the US founders were slaveholders and that owning slaves is a bad thing.’
When I was in high school the dialog went a step after and implied that the idea of the united states is therefore forever irredeemable. This latter aspect is what most are fighting over, because prominent writers on the left have doubled down on the idea that the U.S. is always destined for failure in that regard.
It has been said that slavery is the original sin of the US. When you start to look at how much of government policy was or is a result of southern states needing to work around the problems that slavery introduced and this feels pretty accurate.
> like teaching kids that the US founders were slaveholders and that owning slaves is a bad thing
That stuff has been taught forever, and nobody objects to it. The objectionable stuff is teaching myths like "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" as fact.
A principal here in North Texas was recently fired from the school for teaching it - it is being taught here and there, but it's not everywhere, at least not yet.
No, he was fired for posting pictures of his interracial marriage on Facebook and refusing to take them down... When he refused, they fired him for "teaching CRT" even though he clearly isn't..
I'm not very familiar with the topic myself, but I did want to note something. A lot of the discussions surrounding politicalization of public schools with various topics read a lot like how people argued against teaching evolution in public schools.
I think a better analogy would be the resistance to teaching intelligent design. Why make space in the curriculum for faith-based, clumsy, ad-hoc ideas?
I don't have children, but if I did -- I would be less concerned about things like that and simply the amount of violence and abuse children seem to go through in schools.
The causes this are: 1) myriad, 2) the result of more than a few decades-long trends in society, and 3) are of course systemic in nature.
However, sometimes if a system is effectively unfixable and requires everyone changing their behavior at once to fix (generally impossible) you simply need to remove yourself from it.
Anecdotal, but somewhere around high school I got robbed (the school was decent, it was just in a tough area). Anyways, I basically spent the last period (last class of the day) in absolute fear. The bell would ring, I’d stick my money in my socks and try to get home safely.
It was my Math class, I didn’t learn shit. Coulda used some homeschooling right about then. Whatever education I received there, or whatever friends I made, wasn’t worth four years of anxiety.
Anecdotally, we know a family that started homeschooling during 2020 because they overheard public school Zoom meetings during lockdown - teaching the kids strongly left-leaning political beliefs that the parents were shocked to hear (I don't know their political persuasions... just not as left-leaning as the school district, apparently.)
The specific incident he talked about was some serious historical revisionism - portraying early religious Americans in an extremely unjustified negative light (and he's not even a Christian).
> By fall, 11.1% of households with school-age children reported homeschooling (Sept. 30-Oct. 12). A clarification was added to the school enrollment question to make sure households were reporting true homeschooling rather than virtual learning through a public or private school.
> That change represents an increase of 5.6 percentage points and a doubling of U.S. households that were homeschooling at the start of the 2020-2021 school year compared to the prior year.
I’m skeptical that this represents a durable increase and deeply skeptical that it represents a durable doubling. Once C19 passes, homeschooling rates are more likely to revert to historical norms than to remain at a 2x level.
We could have homeschooled this past year (because of widespread WFH). I think many of these increased rates were similar opportunistic homeschooling.
Almost certainly it will fall back at least partway. Like the increase in work-from-home, though, it is possible that it will not fall all the way back to pre-pandemic levels. But I think there is no question some of this change will not "stick".
My family is doing this as we have 4th grader twins and a 6th grader that are not eligible for the vaccine yet. Homeschooling is a huge amount of work for the parents. As soon as we can vaccinate the kids they are going back to regular school. While I'm pretty sure the kids are learning more than they did last year, and maybe even more than they would have learned in regular school it's so much less efficient that it just doesn't feel worth it.
But the alternative is the kids get COVID. It's not a question of if but when. The schools here are just not taking it seriously enough, and frankly they probably couldn't given the number of kids in the building. Sure they'll probably be OK when they get it, most kids are, but it seems completely reckless to just send them with the hope that they won't get a bad case. We are hoping to send the 6th grader back for the second half of the semester, he'll be getting the vaccine right after his birthday this month so we have a waiting period, a second shot, and another waiting period before he goes back.
> But the alternative is the kids get COVID. It's not a question of if but when.... Sure they'll probably be OK when they get it, most kids are, but it seems completely reckless to just send them with the hope that they won't get a bad case.
From the statistics I've seen, the risk to children is comparable to the risk from RSV or influenza, and less than the risks of driving them to and from school. I'm curious if you've seen different data.
The current variants (except maybe Mu, we don't have enough data yet) are not too bad for kids, but at the same time I don't want to create an environment with heavy selection pressure on the virus to mutate into a form that is especially contagious in children.
Every grade school is an incubator today. We are just begging for a Nu variant with a transmissiblity factor of 3 in small children.
They’re not carding, so I suspect quite strongly that your 6th grader would “pass” and get the vaccine if you present their arm and say they’re 12. If our 10 year would pass, he’d be vax’d already (even though I think the risk to him is already extremely small).
For a working professional, the amount of knowledge one needs to learn/retain for day-to-day work activities trumps 10x what 10-15 year old kids learn in school. So it's not too hard to go over basic chemistry/physics/biology textbook and explain it to your kids. In addition, if you have smart & interested kids, I think you could save your kids 4-6 hours of learning time every day, while only investing a minimal amount of time yourself (2-3 hours).
We saw our 4th grader last year crushing all of his schoolwork within 45 minutes. Every so often, he’d have one question but otherwise loved being done before 9AM and then having the rest of the day to read, play, or do extension work that we’d dream up for him.
He reports liking this year better because of his friends, but that the school part is way more boring.
i know this is political for americans, but going forward i can only see homeschooling via remote schooling becoming more and more prevalent as families move away from dense cities, and others choose travel as a long-term living situation. it even makes ecological and epidemiological sense and i think more and more countries will warm into it. As for the socializing aspects of school, they 'll be replaced with neighborhood socializing, like it used to be
Someone in one of my college classes said 20 years ago that he saw society at some point topple and the people would go back "in" and him saying that has stuck with me this entire time.
I don't know much about the terminology here, but doesn't "homeschooling" generally imply "the parents determine what the kid gets taught, they just have to make it through finals" and "remote schooling" imply "while still following the school's syllabus"?
u re right -- i had the latter in mind. But if people do choose to become more mobile, they 'll still want their kids to follow a stable curriculum, which means essentially homeschooling (even if it means they follow the state-school classes of their home country)
We're in kind of an interesting time. It isn't weird for homeschooled kids to have a teacher brought in for specialized subjects. Many homeschool groups actually pool and will have parents teach different subjects.
Remote learning seems like a good tool in the mix. It does lend to being more hybrid than pure "home school".
Experience for school is that remote learning was nearly worthless for little ones. Improving for each grade level. School refuses to use remote leaning because of this.
Our own experience was same. Older the kids the better it worked.
We hired private tutors to keep youngest on target. The school was a waste.
Someone who can’t really read is handed a computer. There is a dozen different applications and passwords. Kid knows none of them.
The teachers know maybe half of them.
The number of ways the kid can turn off wifi, disable the mouse or change computer language is amazing.
Mute button took class a month to figure out. Headphones have their own mic button.
Did I mention the kids can’t read, yet are expected to open the correct application or website.
Speaking as a parent whose daughter is homeschooled, I can say that many (most?) "homeschooled" students are getting at least some of the curriculum from a coop, company, or part-time school. The parents having to develop the whole curriculum was more common when homeschooling was a rarer thing; there are now lots of organizations (for-profit and otherwise) catering to them.
Plus, homeschool coops give the kids more social interaction, which many families prefer.
I think the big difference about "remote schooling" is that once you're doing that, it raises the question of "is my public school the one that is best at this, or should I use someone else?" In some cases they may be, but often they are not.
I am German and thus have very different experiences. AFAIK home schooling in Germany is still illegal (as in "not being enrolled in a school at all") because it is (edit: in the opinion of the German state, not necessarily mine) basically essential to a child's development to be part of a social classroom experience.
Seeing how (a vast majority of) schools are also free and ~good, my very clichéd understanding is that the only parents that want to home school their children are those with extreme religious or political opinions they want to foist upon them.
my very clichéd understanding is that the only parents that want to home school their children are those with extreme religious or political opinions they want to foist upon them.
Anecdotally, this is incorrect. Source: we have homeschooled our child in the past (though we are not right now), and we do not have extreme opinions that we want to foist upon them.
I realize I am a sample size of one, but you did say only.
I'm sure you don't, but we're mere mortals with biases and blind spots, one person's reasonable views are extreme to another. This is also anecdotal, but every nutcase I've ever met felt their views were reasonable and obvious. Maybe we're all nutcases, even.
Since Germany is also a Federal system, is this a state-by-state thing or is that 3000 representative of Germany as a whole? Do all States require the, as you put it above, “social classroom” experience, or is that a Federal requirement?
I'm kind of sorry for quoting the 3000 from Wikipedia [0] without a primary source.
Apart from that, it is seemingly indeed left to each state if and how to enforce compulsory schooling - they just all do it. They only differ in the ages/durations required [1].
> my very clichéd understanding is that the only parents that want to home school their children are those with extreme religious or political opinions they want to foist upon them.
In my anecdotal experience it is actually the opposite. Parents are concerned about political activist teachers forcing their beliefs onto children.
Recent examples are teachers in the US who have been captured on video in the classroom bullying children or telling them that any parents who disagree with the teacher’s beliefs are “stupid”, “anti-science”, etc.
Again, in my own experience there is some truth to this and some percentage of teachers purposely bring their politics (left or right) into the classroom with the intent to indoctrinate.
Interestingly, this behavior is completely out in the open in US higher education classrooms. Many teachers proudly and aggressively mix their personal political beliefs into their instruction. I suppose we just accept this as the students are technically no longer “children”?
in my anecdotal experience anyone who is talking about "political activist teachers aggressively mixing their personal beliefs into their instruction" is most likely trying to infuse their children with extreme religious or political opinions, they just don't realize it
Uh huh. Except pretty much everyone has personally experienced it and some us reflect on it with disgust.
Assuming you were educated in the US, can you honestly say that you never witnesses a teacher/professor infuse their political beliefs into their instruction (even if you agreed)? If so, awesome, but that isn’t the experience almost everyone else has.
Frankly, it is reprehensible behavior carried out by teachers who are at best, pitiful adults who are just seeking attention from children. Or, at worst, trying to groom children for their own political purposes.
in high school, the only time that happened was when they unconstitutionally forced me to stand for the pledge of allegiance. in college, 90% of my classes were engineering or math, with zero politics, and the other 10%, if there was any political stuff it was negligible.
i was required to take one class to become a resident assistant that you would probably consider as being mostly designed to shove political beliefs down my throat but in my opinion an understanding of those topics was relevant and necessary to being able to serve a diverse group of residents.
One thing I’ll say is that in America’s somewhat terrible urban schools, the parents are simply less involved in the child’s schooling. There can be any number of reasons, language, shitty job that you have to go to for 10 hours a day, they themselves might lack education to educate, money, etc.
I suspect home schooling will be more of a thing amongst the well off. The institution of schooling, like many of our other institutions, isn’t a wild success. It’s okay, but certainly you can do better if you desire to.
Edit:
Home schooling or tutoring is an existential threat in China.
> [it is] essential to a child's development to be part of a social classroom experience
2nd generation homeschooler here. Of the hundreds of home school families I've known over the last 30-ish years I don't know any that don't have their children take classes together in some form or another.
The question is how much do children need to be in a "social classroom experience."
It was assumed essential, but with the success of homeschooling in other countries, the assumption is likely incorrect unless Germans are a different type of human?
The state holds its opinions and inscribes them into law, then lets them be challenged. That's just how they work.
The homeschooling ban has been challenged, but has most recently been upheld as valid by the European Court of Human Rights [0, unfortunately German only].
> the only parents that want to home school their children are those with extreme religious or political opinions they want to foist upon them.
I was homeschooled K-12 from mid-80s to late 90s, part of the first generation of the modern homeschooling movement.
I'd say 80% of the families matched your description, but I'd guess it's lower today as it seems to be more mainstream. But I bet a least half still match.
>...only parents that want to home school their children are those with extreme religious or political opinions they want to foist upon them.<
The flip side of this is that school system itself is highly political in the USA and the curriculum is often a battleground between the parties for what is mandatory to advocate. Couple that with children in public school being trash pretty often and you don't lose much by homeschooling. Especially if you're a parent who's willing to put in the work to select good resources and groups for your child.
Those with extreme views certainly do exist but they tend to be pushed to the front by those who have vested interests against homeschooling. Most of the people who I've known who homeschooled did it because their child wasn't getting the attention they needed in the school system. Typically after a couple of years at home, they returned to the public school system, having caught up and developed better learning skills.
What I don't understand is this comment "essential to a child's development to be part of a social classroom experience" but it is a very common view. Ignoring online schools, the largest public high school in the US has over 8,000 students and high schools with 3,000-4,000 student are common. When in human history has it been the norm for children to gather daily in such large numbers everyday away from their families, with only high level supervision from adults who aren't their parents nor have much depth of insight into their lives? It's more akin to Lord of the Flies with the occasional adult commentary than a way to learn good social skills. What they learn is the law of jungle and many people are scared for life by the experience. Even at the elementary and middle school levels, enrollment of 1,000 students in a single school is common. There's absolutely nothing natural about this. It's an absurd artificial construct and it's amazing so many people think it is somehow a good thing.
Another common question is how will children make friends if not at school? For myself, most of my friends were those I met at school but about a quarter were from meeting in the neighborhood, through youth group at church, or through family or friend-of-a-friend connections. Just because someone lived in my neighborhood didn't mean they went to my public school. Some went to religious or private secular schools. Some kids at church also attended private secular schools (our church didn't have a school) or a different public school. If I had been homeschooled, I still would have met about a quarter of my friends outside of school, and probably would have met many of the same in-school friend through those friends due to common interests and geography. All of this was without me being into sports, which is another way children meet friends, even if it wasn't one of the ways I met them.
A lot of countries place a lot of value on societal interaction and cohesion. For example, in Switzerland, you go to the school to be "swiss" (they have a lot of immigrants, so this is important), homeschooling really isn't an option in some cantons, while strictly regulated in others.
> Those with extreme views certainly do exist but they tend to be pushed to the front by those who have vested interests against homeschooling.
On the flip side, many homeschoolers have encountered public school teachers with extreme views. Extreme views may be fairly well distributed throughout society.
> Seeing how (a vast majority of) schools are also free and ~good, my very clichéd understanding is that the only parents that want to home school their children are those with extreme religious or political opinions they want to foist upon them.
You have to keep in mind a critical difference between Germany and the US in this regard. The German Basic Law requires religious education to be available to children in public schools. If you’re a Muslim your kid can get instruction in Islamic morality. If you’re atheist you can choose a secular ethics course.
In America, any sort of religious education is illegal in public schools. So everyone effectively gets the secular ethnics course (because you can’t really teach kids without teaching some sort of moral framework). This material often contradicts even mainstream (not “extreme”) Christian or Muslim tenants.
I think the German system is far preferable to the American system, and many of the religious “extremists” you talk about would like such a system.
> I think the German system is far preferable to the American system, and many of the religious “extremists” you talk about would like such a system.
I think you're being optimistic.
One, muslim classes in state schools are extremely rare, and those students get dispensation so they can miss those class hours and go to the local mosque for instruction instead. Only that in several cases those mosques were actually teaching rather extremist and violent things. The state tries to build up more "own" muslim classes (in cooperation with muslim organisations).
Two, all those state school run classes are certainly too "mild" for extremists. I mean, the students of evangelical families (and I don't mean protestant, I mean the extreme strains of protestantism that are rampant in southern Germany) certainly send their kids to protestant classes, but at home they teach the opposite in many cases. You cannot reconcile a state school religion class with and "you need to read the bible literally, all those theological stuff at universities is baloney".
> Two, all those state school run classes are certainly too "mild" for extremists. I mean, the students of evangelical families (and I don't mean protestant, I mean the extreme strains of protestantism that are rampant in southern Germany) certainly send their kids to protestant classes, but at home they teach the opposite in many cases.
My point is that in the United States, even the “mild” Protestant or Muslim stuff is off limits in public schools. Everyone is taught secular humanist morality, often of a highly individualistic variety. So unlike in Germany, even religious people who aren’t “extremists” may want to home school their children.
I’m a liberal Protestant, but I’d still consider home schooling my kids. I just want them socialized in the basics of their religion. That’s an option in public schools in much of Europe but isn’t in the United States.
COVID has changed everything. Perhaps temporarily, perhaps permanently. I'd caution against reading too much into pre-covid trends or covid trends. This has been a hugely disruptive event and it will take time to see how it changes societal behavior patterns.
I agree with some of what you're saying, but I don't think it makes any ecological sense. If you're aiming for a low carbon lifestyle, living in a flat within walking/cycling distance of everything you need is far better than having everyone spread far apart
I could send my kids to very good private schools but we are seriously considering learning pods. Online groups make it easy to meet up with other pods. And I like the ability to craft the syllabus my kids learn from.
The old factory-method of schooling just doesn’t make any sense. Why do you have 45 minutes of math, 45 minutes of English, 45 minutes of etc.? It’s like the format of schooling was invented 150 years ago and never updated.
The online resources just mean that a single instructor is more efficient/effective by leveraging the work of external specialists and can carry students into depths of subjects that were not attainable at that scale a century ago. Your great grandfather may have had to go to college to learn science and math beyond the basic stuff. Today a generalist teacher can leverage everything from a lesson plan to a virtual lecture prepared by teachers who specialize in teaching those subjects.
Where are these kids going to be taught? Are there resources for those who are disabled? What about the poor? What will they eat? Where does the food come from? Etc
Why don’t we take the $10k to $20k we pay per student in America annually to educate them, and let the parent allocate those funds where they want? Learning pods cost less than that for parents, but sadly only the rich can afford it (like most things private).
Basically keep the public funding but give allocation control to parents. Then everyone can have the same choice as rich people.
It literally scales better than any other mechanism of schooling! You have the best possible educators create lesson plans, videos, and visual materials and then lesser-skilled facilitators can assist students as they learn. It’s the absolute most scalable mechanism of education thus created.
I don't think you need a ton of facilities to learn, just as you don't need a giant university to learn most subjects at an advanced level. And we can place pods close to students rather than far away in a centralized place. And for behavioral management / counseling, certain kids need a lot more of that than others, so they should get those resources on an individual basis.
I favor a model of education that lets advanced kids move quicker than slower kids, and if slower kids pick up the pace, the system can adapt for them to move quicker also. A vast improvement over the current system of institutional mediocrity.
I don't think every child would like to optimize their life for academic success, and some would prefer to do things other than university-level education. And that's fine. We should create individual educational plans that match a child's interests and aptitudes, and a system of individualized learning is far better at this than the factory-education model that is currently standard.
Hard agree. I agree that the way we're spending money on kids right now is idiotic. Factory-education is dumb. Just try to remember (sorry I don't mean this in a patronizing way, tone on the internet is hard) that we should have a backstop for children at the margins. But yes, a customizable education system should be able to recognize this. Not force everyone into the same silly pipeline, no matter their interests, circumstances, or aptitude.
One thing that I would love to see in public schools is to allow a "free elective" that public schools administer (assuming the child picks it), which is just a MOOC with an examination schedule. A teacher can be tasked on following-up and ensuring that the child is actually making progress on their assessments, but that's it, maybe even offering a pass/fail option. This offers a low-cost way for children to explore their interests through high-level instruction without having to specifically source a teacher/expert on this material. A counselor would need to work with a child on an individual basis to evaluate whether the free elective was appropriate. Sadly in larger public schools counselors barely have enough time to keep track of their failing students, let alone their successful ones.
That's attractive for motivated parents with the time to design a curriculum and work with their children, or at least evaluate their children's learning. The reality is that most American parents are working at least one job each for part of the day, sometimes even two. Moreover there are a lot of kids who come from essentially broken families. A $10-20k voucher system only helps if there's a public backstop to help these kids not fall through the cracks. I agree that the current system is fairly asinine, but we'd need more than a simple voucher/payout system.
The teachers at our school are pretty level headed, but the NAIS-approved curriculum sources are pretty wacky. For example: https://pollyannaincrlc.org/
For example for Grade 4:
> The full collection of Racial Literacy Grade 4 lessons are designed to help students understand how geography influenced the emergence of civilization. Humans are the only animals to build vast civilizations,* and geography provided or denied the resources that allowed some groups of former hunter-gatherers to become farmers and herders and eventually develop some of the world’s first civilizations. Students will explore the various engineering, technological, scientific, and mathematical innovations of such civilizations, tracing cross-cultural patterns in order to develop a more informed and eclectic worldview––enhancing their own cultural competency. A goal is for students to realize that humans of a given time and place created similar structures and/or inherited ideas to establish a common pattern that was dictated by geography.* With such a lens, students will be able to analyze history and other social assertions that fabricate myths of racial superiority, including the ability to critique and dispel Eurocentric perspectives that favor a myopic view of race.
As a Bangladeshi who has spent a lot of time reading about development economics this is egregiously bad. It mixes up race with culture—a common error caused by projecting American racial politics onto other countries—and reduces the question of why some countries are rich and others are poor to “geography.”
Bangladesh is so bountiful in terms of resources that fish literally jump out of ponds into your net: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dziriaxG1Fk. It’s paradise compared to anywhere in Northern Europe. Resources aren’t why Europeans pulled ahead. That’s an absurd claim.
Which isn’t surprising, because nobody involved with this Pollyanna curriculum is actually a developmental economist or historian. It’s a curriculum that’s formulated by working backward from the premise of cultural equality.
Geography is more than resources. Geography includes navigability, disease, and factors that would have encouraged and/or forced expansion.
Further, that paragraph only mentions race as a problematic myth. I don't see it mixing up race and culture so much as pointing out that Europe didn't expand because Europeans are somehow better. I fail to see a problem with teaching that.
> Geography is more than resources. Geography includes navigability, disease, and factors that would have encouraged and/or forced expansion.
Sure, but it excludes culture, which is the most important factor.
> Further, that paragraph only mentions race as a problematic myth. I don't see it mixing up race and culture so much as pointing out that Europe didn't expand because Europeans are somehow better. I fail to see a problem with teaching that.
You’re embracing the same ambiguity: when you say “European” are you talking about race or culture? “Eurocentric” narratives are mainly about culture, not race. There’s nothing wrong with saying Europeans were more successful because their cultures are better: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric...
Indeed, the “Eurocentric” narrative largely refers to the fusion of Christianity and Roman/Greek thought. The European “race” (Germanic people) assimilated into that culture. Nobody is talking about how great Germanic Paganism was.
Teaching that societal success is explained by “geography” rather than culture is bad for two reasons. One it’s false. Two, it encourages an external locus of control. It teaches people that success is the product of factors outside the control of an individual or group.
But culture itself has a large geographical component to it. Human cultures do not evolve in isolation from their geography. Rather, geography shapes culture as it develops.
Yes, geography is not the only factor in cultural development. There's a certain element of random chance, there's human agency, and then there are feedback loops. It's a super complex system. You're probably right that reducing it to geography is mistake. But I'd no sooner see a curriculum reduce something as complex as the history of industrialization to culture than to geography.
Yes, over emphasizing geography would tend to teach an external locus of control. But overemphasizing culture gives students a misguided sense of cultural superiority, which, while better than racial superiority, is just as likely to lead to discrimination and misunderstanding. The discrimination would just be based on the language that someone speaks or the country that they come from rather than the color of their skin. Slightly more rational? Maybe. Just as devastating? Certainly.
While not explicitly stating it what rayiner is pushing for is to teach the "White man's burden" in school. With MLK burying race as a distinguishing factor, the euphemism that conservatives employ is "culture", better yet "homogeneous culture". It is even more effective because we have a brown man pushing the White Mans Burden trope, similar to Larry Elder.
For example rayiner, who is from Bangladesh, will forget to tell you that the Indian subcontinent is estimated to have produced 25% of world gdp as late as the 18th century. This was an Islamic empire with majority hindu subjects. What followed was the industrial revolution in Europe, production of advanced weaponry, colonization and the hollowing out of the wealth of a subcontinent.
You can continue to engage with brown sahib here, but he will merely dress up the worst of conservative tropes in alternative vocabulary and fish out some random tidbits and obscure statistics to give it a semblance of a scientific argument. He hasn't adopted a full blown Candace owens persona, he is angling for a brown Ben Shapiro habit.
Thank you that was very informative. Every organizing body that centralizes functions (like curricula) is an opportunity for a lot of good (like sharing resources), but also an opportunity for a lot of bad (like institutional capture). Do you have any thoughts on what a fix is? Is it simply greater decentralization?
Why do you have 45 minutes of math, 45 minutes of English, 45 minutes of etc.?
It isn’t just that. Why is it that in the most crucial developmental years of your life you are tasked to learn everything with a bunch of people that are a distraction.
Yes, the socializing part is a distraction, a real one, it’s as if someone at your job says ‘meetings all day, every day, and then after the meetings, make sure you do the work’.
It’s insanity. Hopefully no one in those meetings (your school) goes beyond being a distraction (violent, bullying).
Seems like the difference between homeschooling and remote learning is probably not that large practically speaking. Every parent I know had to put significant attention towards remote learning when they had elementary aged kids. Seems to me it's mostly a matter of where you get your content and lesson plans from. Do you take whatever the school gives you or do you roll your own lesson plans with the copious resources out there.
In the pre-pandemic times there were families who took their curricula from public schools. Often these were students who either had learning disabilities or were talented in a non-academic area (say the piano) and the parents just wanted extra flexibility in terms of education.
Depending on which jurisdiction you live in, there can be a significant difference in terms of paperwork.
Also, if you think that the student might transition back from homeschool to public school, the school will want to do some kind of evaluation to determine what class the student belongs in. If the student had been remote learning via the public school all along, this never comes up.
What type of evaluation? I feel like the larger states all have standardized testing, so as long as your kid passes the tests each year, you did your job.
I was never home schooled but I went to private school through 6th grade, and then went to public through high school. When I switched, I took placement tests that put me into the higher level math and english classes for 7th graders. I imagine it would be something like that.
You aren't necessarily taking the standardized tests if you are homeschooled. E.g. in New York, they have statewide tests called Regents. Not all districts allow homeschoolers to take these tests.
I'm not against homeschooling, my kids are homeschooled. But it's not a decision to take lightly or without thoroughly investigating the rules and regulations about it for your local jurisdiction.
The biggest problem with public schooling is less political indoctrination and more the lack of actual schooling. When educators themselves claim “there is no such thing as learning loss," we should take them at their word. School has very little intellectual content, and many parents are simply starting to recognize that.
The politics is just the latest example of the fact that teachers have a massive conflict of interest when it comes to educating kids. Parents want to maximize the success of their individual kid. Teachers want to advance the various goals of the school system at large. Even though I believe they’re mostly well intentioned, that can take the form of ignoring most kids to try and do damage control for the most troubled students, or sacrificing individual kids at the alter of some larger social ideology.
The big reason for homeschooling is that you can push your own politics or religion on school more. Not everyone does it for that reason, but there are quite a few radicals in the movement who do exactly that.
> The big reason for homeschooling is that you can push your own politics or religion on school more
As a descriptive claim, this might be true (wouldn't shock me if the bulk of parents choose to homeschool for religious reasons). But if it's prescriptive, it's horribly wrong. A moderately intelligent child with moderately thoughtful parents will learn far more outside the school system than within.
A few teachers I know are selling their course material and lesson plans online. A majority of their sales come from home school parents in their local district whos kids attended their classes.
Everyone knows this I think. It's not that no one cares to afford a tutor, its that no a lot of people can afford a tutor or has the time to become a tutor for their own child on top of their other responsibilities. Who gets an A on every exam in college? The kids beating down the professors door the minute before office hours formally start and taking up all the time in the Q and A session with the TA, wringing every spare drop of hands on time with an educator that they can out of the 24 hour day, then they go to the library with their study groups and continue teaching eachother concepts on whiteboards. It's like competing with a runner who does 30 miles a day.
I’m a stat here and so is my sister. Both of us pulled kids out last year due to the unworkable situation of having a small child sit in zoom calls all day.
I'm not a parent, but I did know of some homeschooled kids growing up. Honest question; where do these kids get to socialize without their parents present for long lengths of time now?
I was homeschooled. I played soccer throughout highschool for the homeschool soccer team, played in a youth orchestra, took classes at a homeschool co-op and then local community college. My family also did a lot with our local church. Once I graduated and went to a 4 year university I definitely liked the increased social interaction, but I had plenty in high school.
We homeschooled our two kids through their middle-school years, after it was clear that the supposedly superior charter middle school in the district was failing.
We found local homeschooling groups and it turned out that the kids ended up with more socialization than when they were in traditional school. There were more field trips, PE activities, band (yes, there was a full bad of homeschooled kids) etc. -- partially because with an unparalleled student-to-teacher ratio, a day's worth of lessons can be completed in a much shorter time.
Everyone's mileage may vary, of course, but homeschooling doesn't mean condemning your kid to a shut-in, anti-social experience by any means.
Homeschooled here, agree with other posters, and want to point out this is the same thing that happens with remote working.
Hobbies with structured meetings, book clubs for continued learning, social sports are all things that are added into the mix to get good social activity. And, frankly, they’re a lot more fun than forced office/school interactions.
When I had to go back to public school, I missed homeschooling dearly, and I lost a lot of really good study habits that would have made college easier. Now that I’m working remotely, I have a lot better skill base to work from to manage the work because I was homeschooled.
I've known many homeschooling families very well, and it's a spectrum. There are families where the answer is "they don't", and those children seem to invariable end up with major life skills missing from their repertoire.
I've also known families who did go out of their way to get their kids in programs where they would make friends they could spend time with (both structured and unstructured), and in general give them comparable experiences to what you would get in a traditional school. One such group had a bunch of home-schooled kids put on theater productions every year, etc. Such families seemed to have many of the components of a standard school experience but it was organized a-la-carte by the parents and they were more involved. Those kids seemed to turn out pretty well-adjusted and extremely well educated. If you live in an area where home-schooling is common (that's probably pretty widespread at this point) it's quite easy to find support groups and resources on Facebook, etc. these days.
I am part of this increase, and after a full year homeschooling we will not be sending our kids back to traditional school. What we noticed is that our kids weren't actually learning, they were being pushed through a program so they could pass a test with very little concern about where that would leave them in the future. This was most apparent in math, where foundational concepts were being rushed just to cover the full syllabus and in future years the foundations of computation were not really well covered and when we started to put them though our math program of choice ( Saxon math ) it was really clear they didn't understand the concepts ( for instance, given a word problem there was no real ability to write down the equation, even though they had been taught that material in the past ). It wasn't just math, it was every topic, and it was really apparent as we started to actually evaluate what they knew. As time goes by I am really struggling to see any benefit of the traditional model except for keeping kids busy so their parents can work. Giving kids the individual attention and tailoring the schoolwork for them its just so much better and able to actually instruct the children.
I would much rather live a simpler life in a place with a low cost of living, than require a two income household and offload the education of my children to a system that doesn't particularly care about them being educated.
In California we sent our kids to a private school before pulling them out for home schooling. Essentially I don't think its the school districts fault, I think its a suboptimal model and if you are really well funded with really engaged parents you can kinda make it work. Although the number of Kuman and Russian Math tutoring facilities near me makes me double guess myself on that.
Teaching your children to reason and think as independent agents is a most wonderful gift. It seems like mass education is often aimed at _increasing_ groupthink.
How old were they? I found that around late-middle school/high school, homeschooled kids really start to fall behind. Maybe it was the limit of parental knowledge, I'm not sure.
Third Grade, First Grade, and Pre-Kindergarden. I really shared your concerns about academic performance as the course material gets harder, but what we have settled on is a co-op program that teaches the fundamentals of learning in the early years ( K - 6 ) and then progressively pushes the students towards independent study in the more advanced years, with a very extensive curriculum.
Honestly the foundational work is just as vital to the parents as it is to the kids as we will be simply guiding them through a high school curriculum that is much more advanced that anything we ever experienced. This is the program we are using, but we have two more years before we begin.
I tend to agree that there are some amazing early education opportunities out there. I've seen and been jealous of the education available to 3rd graders.
However, having seen kids give up on the independent study route and beg to go to a standard school, I think you are underestimating how daunting it is to start learning high school subjects as independent studies. Fundamentally, arguing with your peers in history class or being able to ask questions in chemistry is really valuable. A video is interesting, but once you get to the point where there is a part you don't understand, it's really hard to make progress.
A lot of the "challenge" level courses seem to talk about class presentations? Is this a remote school more than homeschool?
They meet once a week for a full day to discuss the course material with a paid tutor. That gives a good time to have those discussions and ask questions.
You are completely correct about how hard independent study can be, in the group our younger kids go to, a few of the older siblings have opted to go back to a classroom settings, not all of them, but every kid is different and with a strong academic basis they can thrive in whatever setting you put them in. More importantly if the students choose to go to college that will almost definitely be a traditional college experience so at some point they will need to be acclimated to traditional school. I hope my children can thrive in the independent program, but if not they will have the skills needed to learn in any environment.
This sounds a lot like my own experiences growing up. We started homeschooling when I was in 3rd grade, and I used Saxon math. When I reached highschool, in nearly all my subjects I had weekly classes taught by other parents with specific domain knowledge, with other students---anywhere from 3 to 10 or so per class. We had ten of us in chemistry, and 16 or so in biology, both with labs. For physics and calculus I found a tutor, a local homeschooling dad who was an electrical engineering university professor, and I had a local Anglican pastor as my Greek tutor.
I found that a solid elementary school foundation from my parents, combined with weekly classes and individual tutoring during highschool, was excellent preparation for my university studies.
Our 3 kids have gone in and out of homeschool at all different ages. We generally left the choice up to them. Our youngest decided to homeschool through high school and is studying computer science at Georgia Tech now.
In the lower grades, the biggest issue is the parent/child dynamics. When things are going badly, do they spin each other up or can the parent keep things calm. If you spin each other up, homeschool is not for you.
In the higher grades, parents need to know their limitations and bring in experts when needed.
Unpopular opinion around here: teachers aren't underpaid, they are drastically overpaid given the utter lack of results they produce.
Certainly much of the blame goes not to the teachers themselves but the entire public education industry, but you can't quibble the total lack of results.
I'd encourage you to flip this same thought process around. Could it not be that the low-quality results are the result of low salaries discouraging quality people from entering the profession? You get what you pay for after-all. It shouldn't be too hard to find this correlation within the Unite States where average public school teacher pay can vary as much as $40,000 state-by-state [1].
Except that, at least in my state, there is an inverse relationship between teacher salaries by district and the education results (as measured by graduation and literacy rates)
> Unpopular opinion around here: teachers aren't underpaid, they are drastically overpaid given the utter lack of results they produce.
Teachers tend to be paid less than an assistant manager at a Walmart. And require a master's degree.
Meanwhile, if you want different results, have teacher's judged differently. Right now, they're judged based on how well the worst performers in their class do. Of course they're going to focus on bringing up the rear.
(Apparently, what I responded to was edited. This was in the original, and still holds true, so I'm leaving my response as written.)
> I don't think this is true when you take into account benefits such as:
> healthcare,
Which WalMart Asst. Managers also get. Better health care in many cases.
> job security
How much is a secure but low paying job worth? Besides, once you're an assistant manager, you probably have decent job security if you don't fuck up.
> pension
WalMart Asst. Managers get access to a 401k. It's not a pension, but it's also not subject to fuckery by elected officials. And if you quit to do something better you can take it with you.
> 3 months off a year.
Teachers aren't paid for their 3 months off, and tend to work unpaid overtime during the year such that it evens out to being the equivalent of a fulltime, year round job anyway.
I seriously doubt Walmart assistant managers are getting anywhere near that level of benefits. I can't find any data on how much Walmart pays out in benefits, but you see to be pretty familiar with how much Walmart pays so please share.
> How much is a secure but low paying job worth? Besides, once you're an assistant manager, you probably have decent job security if you don't fuck up.
I know a bunch of teachers and a few principals and all of them across the board have said it's impossible to be fired as a teacher after the probationary period. I don't know any assistant managers at Walmart, but I've known a few front line managers at retail chains and they were always anxious about hitting their numbers.
> Actually teacher's work less during the school year than other professionals.
Yes, they average 36 hrs/wk over the full year instead of 40 hrs/wk. 10% less time. And they're off 2 or 3 months a year. So, that lines up with my "they tend to work about the equivalent of a regular fulltime job while only getting paid for 9-10 months" statement.
> I seriously doubt Walmart assistant managers are getting anywhere near that level of benefits
And the majority of that is in pension benefits which assumes they work until they earn it out. It's one of those clever accounting things where since most teachers quit after < 10 years, they don't get any of those awesome benefits.
> I can't find any data on how much Walmart pays out in benefits, but you see to be pretty familiar with how much Walmart pays so please share.
I mean, I've just googled it. I saw that they have some 401k plans and some stock purchase plans. They seem to offer decent enough insurance (in that they cover dental and vision as well as health) but I have no idea what their copays are. In looking it up, it seems they also pay for you tuition costs, which is nice.
> I know a bunch of teachers and a few principals and all of them across the board have said it's impossible to be fired as a teacher after the probationary period.
Yes. It's stupidly hard to fire a teacher. But if the underlying job sucks, being secure in it is irrelevant. If teachers tend to quit, it doesn't matter how hard it is to fire them.
Also, the firing or not is very state dependent.
The people I know in retail always seem anxious about their numbers, but I've never heard of any of them getting fired for missing them.
Anecdotally, last year when we got to see the daily schoolwork our 1st grader was asked to do we were shocked with how much below his skill level the assignments were (at our 10/10 school). We can’t do homeschooling for various reasons but it really made us reconsider if there is a way we could make it happen. Perhaps some of this increase is parents getting a close look at what their kids are learning.
No one seems to bring it up here (why?), but the #1 benefit of homeschooling for my family is faith-based education. In the US, approximately 2/3 of homeschooled children and the three most popular homeschooling curriculum providers are explicitly Christian. I love it that my children, and increasingly the children of others, have the opportunity to be brought up in God's instruction. It is not up to the government what my children believe or how they're educated. I hope this trend keeps growing!
I wasn't aware Christians had their own math, history or literature. I've been made sadly aware that some Christians have their own read on science (evolution, geology, apparently virology and epidemiology). So I guess my question would be, what is "faith based education"?
I suppose as long as it's not causing you to abuse your children and you aren't getting public funding, I don't really care.
But I will say, any "God's instruction" that can be undone by secular exposure for 7 hours a day, 180 days/year seems to be extreme enough that I worry it veers into the "bad for the child" zone.
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[ 2.8 ms ] story [ 201 ms ] threadIt's the same old story over the decades, but rebranded yet again to get the attention of the news media. "Traditional values are 'under attack' by crazy left wing people who only care about not-you".
When I was in high school the dialog went a step after and implied that the idea of the united states is therefore forever irredeemable. This latter aspect is what most are fighting over, because prominent writers on the left have doubled down on the idea that the U.S. is always destined for failure in that regard.
That stuff has been taught forever, and nobody objects to it. The objectionable stuff is teaching myths like "systemic racism" and "white supremacy" as fact.
https://www.nbcdfw.com/news/local/carter-in-the-classroom/di...
Some people are of the opinion that there's a master plan to indoctrinate children in kindergarten, and see every example across the country as proof.
Other people deny it's being taught anywhere.
The truth is: school boards are local. Somewhere, they're doing crazy shit. Most places, they aren't.
I am actually curious why you're against it. Which aspects?
this is all calibrated political games to win/keep GOP voters.
The causes this are: 1) myriad, 2) the result of more than a few decades-long trends in society, and 3) are of course systemic in nature.
However, sometimes if a system is effectively unfixable and requires everyone changing their behavior at once to fix (generally impossible) you simply need to remove yourself from it.
It was my Math class, I didn’t learn shit. Coulda used some homeschooling right about then. Whatever education I received there, or whatever friends I made, wasn’t worth four years of anxiety.
http://k12schoolsdata.s3.amazonaws.com/static/docs/8726040c-...
Anecdotally, we know a family that started homeschooling during 2020 because they overheard public school Zoom meetings during lockdown - teaching the kids strongly left-leaning political beliefs that the parents were shocked to hear (I don't know their political persuasions... just not as left-leaning as the school district, apparently.)
> That change represents an increase of 5.6 percentage points and a doubling of U.S. households that were homeschooling at the start of the 2020-2021 school year compared to the prior year.
I’m skeptical that this represents a durable increase and deeply skeptical that it represents a durable doubling. Once C19 passes, homeschooling rates are more likely to revert to historical norms than to remain at a 2x level.
We could have homeschooled this past year (because of widespread WFH). I think many of these increased rates were similar opportunistic homeschooling.
But the alternative is the kids get COVID. It's not a question of if but when. The schools here are just not taking it seriously enough, and frankly they probably couldn't given the number of kids in the building. Sure they'll probably be OK when they get it, most kids are, but it seems completely reckless to just send them with the hope that they won't get a bad case. We are hoping to send the 6th grader back for the second half of the semester, he'll be getting the vaccine right after his birthday this month so we have a waiting period, a second shot, and another waiting period before he goes back.
From the statistics I've seen, the risk to children is comparable to the risk from RSV or influenza, and less than the risks of driving them to and from school. I'm curious if you've seen different data.
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-021-02423-8
Every grade school is an incubator today. We are just begging for a Nu variant with a transmissiblity factor of 3 in small children.
I brought my card and CVS didn’t even want to look at it. (They’re getting paid either way and not via insurance.)
He reports liking this year better because of his friends, but that the school part is way more boring.
That's a potentially big difference.
Remote learning seems like a good tool in the mix. It does lend to being more hybrid than pure "home school".
Experience for school is that remote learning was nearly worthless for little ones. Improving for each grade level. School refuses to use remote leaning because of this.
Our own experience was same. Older the kids the better it worked. We hired private tutors to keep youngest on target. The school was a waste.
+ Would it have been better if remote sessions were smaller? Eg 1 on 1 or groups of 3?
+ How much did the remote software itself become a problem? Latency, tech issues, bad resolution?
+ Did you feel the content was suitable and tailored for remote learning?
The number of ways the kid can turn off wifi, disable the mouse or change computer language is amazing.
Mute button took class a month to figure out. Headphones have their own mic button.
Did I mention the kids can’t read, yet are expected to open the correct application or website.
Plus, homeschool coops give the kids more social interaction, which many families prefer.
I think the big difference about "remote schooling" is that once you're doing that, it raises the question of "is my public school the one that is best at this, or should I use someone else?" In some cases they may be, but often they are not.
I am German and thus have very different experiences. AFAIK home schooling in Germany is still illegal (as in "not being enrolled in a school at all") because it is (edit: in the opinion of the German state, not necessarily mine) basically essential to a child's development to be part of a social classroom experience.
Seeing how (a vast majority of) schools are also free and ~good, my very clichéd understanding is that the only parents that want to home school their children are those with extreme religious or political opinions they want to foist upon them.
Anecdotally, this is incorrect. Source: we have homeschooled our child in the past (though we are not right now), and we do not have extreme opinions that we want to foist upon them.
I realize I am a sample size of one, but you did say only.
Homeschooling a child pretty much involves taking the state to court for your right to do so.
German Wikipedia estimates the number of such cases (I assume before Covid) to below 3000 (Germany has 83m inhabitants).
Apart from that, it is seemingly indeed left to each state if and how to enforce compulsory schooling - they just all do it. They only differ in the ages/durations required [1].
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausunterricht#Deutschland [1] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Schulpflicht_(Deutschland)#Dau...
Hey, we’ve all done it at some point in our lives so no worries, mate.
Thanks for answering though. I’m always curious how other Federal systems tend to function compared to the one I live in.
In my anecdotal experience it is actually the opposite. Parents are concerned about political activist teachers forcing their beliefs onto children.
Recent examples are teachers in the US who have been captured on video in the classroom bullying children or telling them that any parents who disagree with the teacher’s beliefs are “stupid”, “anti-science”, etc.
Again, in my own experience there is some truth to this and some percentage of teachers purposely bring their politics (left or right) into the classroom with the intent to indoctrinate.
Interestingly, this behavior is completely out in the open in US higher education classrooms. Many teachers proudly and aggressively mix their personal political beliefs into their instruction. I suppose we just accept this as the students are technically no longer “children”?
Assuming you were educated in the US, can you honestly say that you never witnesses a teacher/professor infuse their political beliefs into their instruction (even if you agreed)? If so, awesome, but that isn’t the experience almost everyone else has.
Frankly, it is reprehensible behavior carried out by teachers who are at best, pitiful adults who are just seeking attention from children. Or, at worst, trying to groom children for their own political purposes.
i was required to take one class to become a resident assistant that you would probably consider as being mostly designed to shove political beliefs down my throat but in my opinion an understanding of those topics was relevant and necessary to being able to serve a diverse group of residents.
I suspect home schooling will be more of a thing amongst the well off. The institution of schooling, like many of our other institutions, isn’t a wild success. It’s okay, but certainly you can do better if you desire to.
Edit: Home schooling or tutoring is an existential threat in China.
https://www.aljazeera.com/amp/economy/2021/8/23/china-crackd...
These kids are in danger (smirk) of not being nationalists.
2nd generation homeschooler here. Of the hundreds of home school families I've known over the last 30-ish years I don't know any that don't have their children take classes together in some form or another.
The question is how much do children need to be in a "social classroom experience."
The homeschooling ban has been challenged, but has most recently been upheld as valid by the European Court of Human Rights [0, unfortunately German only].
[0] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hausunterricht#Deutschland
This is assuming a good faith argument (steel-manning) on homeschooling as normally practiced.
I.e. I expect new education models to arise from parallel experiments like you see in America versus a monolith.
I was homeschooled K-12 from mid-80s to late 90s, part of the first generation of the modern homeschooling movement.
I'd say 80% of the families matched your description, but I'd guess it's lower today as it seems to be more mainstream. But I bet a least half still match.
The flip side of this is that school system itself is highly political in the USA and the curriculum is often a battleground between the parties for what is mandatory to advocate. Couple that with children in public school being trash pretty often and you don't lose much by homeschooling. Especially if you're a parent who's willing to put in the work to select good resources and groups for your child.
What I don't understand is this comment "essential to a child's development to be part of a social classroom experience" but it is a very common view. Ignoring online schools, the largest public high school in the US has over 8,000 students and high schools with 3,000-4,000 student are common. When in human history has it been the norm for children to gather daily in such large numbers everyday away from their families, with only high level supervision from adults who aren't their parents nor have much depth of insight into their lives? It's more akin to Lord of the Flies with the occasional adult commentary than a way to learn good social skills. What they learn is the law of jungle and many people are scared for life by the experience. Even at the elementary and middle school levels, enrollment of 1,000 students in a single school is common. There's absolutely nothing natural about this. It's an absurd artificial construct and it's amazing so many people think it is somehow a good thing.
Another common question is how will children make friends if not at school? For myself, most of my friends were those I met at school but about a quarter were from meeting in the neighborhood, through youth group at church, or through family or friend-of-a-friend connections. Just because someone lived in my neighborhood didn't mean they went to my public school. Some went to religious or private secular schools. Some kids at church also attended private secular schools (our church didn't have a school) or a different public school. If I had been homeschooled, I still would have met about a quarter of my friends outside of school, and probably would have met many of the same in-school friend through those friends due to common interests and geography. All of this was without me being into sports, which is another way children meet friends, even if it wasn't one of the ways I met them.
On the flip side, many homeschoolers have encountered public school teachers with extreme views. Extreme views may be fairly well distributed throughout society.
You have to keep in mind a critical difference between Germany and the US in this regard. The German Basic Law requires religious education to be available to children in public schools. If you’re a Muslim your kid can get instruction in Islamic morality. If you’re atheist you can choose a secular ethics course.
In America, any sort of religious education is illegal in public schools. So everyone effectively gets the secular ethnics course (because you can’t really teach kids without teaching some sort of moral framework). This material often contradicts even mainstream (not “extreme”) Christian or Muslim tenants.
I think the German system is far preferable to the American system, and many of the religious “extremists” you talk about would like such a system.
I think you're being optimistic.
One, muslim classes in state schools are extremely rare, and those students get dispensation so they can miss those class hours and go to the local mosque for instruction instead. Only that in several cases those mosques were actually teaching rather extremist and violent things. The state tries to build up more "own" muslim classes (in cooperation with muslim organisations).
Two, all those state school run classes are certainly too "mild" for extremists. I mean, the students of evangelical families (and I don't mean protestant, I mean the extreme strains of protestantism that are rampant in southern Germany) certainly send their kids to protestant classes, but at home they teach the opposite in many cases. You cannot reconcile a state school religion class with and "you need to read the bible literally, all those theological stuff at universities is baloney".
My point is that in the United States, even the “mild” Protestant or Muslim stuff is off limits in public schools. Everyone is taught secular humanist morality, often of a highly individualistic variety. So unlike in Germany, even religious people who aren’t “extremists” may want to home school their children.
I’m a liberal Protestant, but I’d still consider home schooling my kids. I just want them socialized in the basics of their religion. That’s an option in public schools in much of Europe but isn’t in the United States.
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/USA/united-states/rura...
The old factory-method of schooling just doesn’t make any sense. Why do you have 45 minutes of math, 45 minutes of English, 45 minutes of etc.? It’s like the format of schooling was invented 150 years ago and never updated.
Groups of 20 families hiring an instructor as a grass roots method + online resources seems automatically scalable to me.
i.e. "ye olde one room schoolhouse"
The online resources just mean that a single instructor is more efficient/effective by leveraging the work of external specialists and can carry students into depths of subjects that were not attainable at that scale a century ago. Your great grandfather may have had to go to college to learn science and math beyond the basic stuff. Today a generalist teacher can leverage everything from a lesson plan to a virtual lecture prepared by teachers who specialize in teaching those subjects.
Khan academy's video tutorials can be a game changer when a child is having trouble understanding a particular concept in math, for example.
Basically keep the public funding but give allocation control to parents. Then everyone can have the same choice as rich people.
The OP pretty much is evidence of such.
No, online “school” doesn’t scale.
I favor a model of education that lets advanced kids move quicker than slower kids, and if slower kids pick up the pace, the system can adapt for them to move quicker also. A vast improvement over the current system of institutional mediocrity.
One thing that I would love to see in public schools is to allow a "free elective" that public schools administer (assuming the child picks it), which is just a MOOC with an examination schedule. A teacher can be tasked on following-up and ensuring that the child is actually making progress on their assessments, but that's it, maybe even offering a pass/fail option. This offers a low-cost way for children to explore their interests through high-level instruction without having to specifically source a teacher/expert on this material. A counselor would need to work with a child on an individual basis to evaluate whether the free elective was appropriate. Sadly in larger public schools counselors barely have enough time to keep track of their failing students, let alone their successful ones.
The teachers at our school are pretty level headed, but the NAIS-approved curriculum sources are pretty wacky. For example: https://pollyannaincrlc.org/
For example for Grade 4:
> The full collection of Racial Literacy Grade 4 lessons are designed to help students understand how geography influenced the emergence of civilization. Humans are the only animals to build vast civilizations,* and geography provided or denied the resources that allowed some groups of former hunter-gatherers to become farmers and herders and eventually develop some of the world’s first civilizations. Students will explore the various engineering, technological, scientific, and mathematical innovations of such civilizations, tracing cross-cultural patterns in order to develop a more informed and eclectic worldview––enhancing their own cultural competency. A goal is for students to realize that humans of a given time and place created similar structures and/or inherited ideas to establish a common pattern that was dictated by geography.* With such a lens, students will be able to analyze history and other social assertions that fabricate myths of racial superiority, including the ability to critique and dispel Eurocentric perspectives that favor a myopic view of race.
As a Bangladeshi who has spent a lot of time reading about development economics this is egregiously bad. It mixes up race with culture—a common error caused by projecting American racial politics onto other countries—and reduces the question of why some countries are rich and others are poor to “geography.”
Bangladesh is so bountiful in terms of resources that fish literally jump out of ponds into your net: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=dziriaxG1Fk. It’s paradise compared to anywhere in Northern Europe. Resources aren’t why Europeans pulled ahead. That’s an absurd claim.
Which isn’t surprising, because nobody involved with this Pollyanna curriculum is actually a developmental economist or historian. It’s a curriculum that’s formulated by working backward from the premise of cultural equality.
Further, that paragraph only mentions race as a problematic myth. I don't see it mixing up race and culture so much as pointing out that Europe didn't expand because Europeans are somehow better. I fail to see a problem with teaching that.
Sure, but it excludes culture, which is the most important factor.
> Further, that paragraph only mentions race as a problematic myth. I don't see it mixing up race and culture so much as pointing out that Europe didn't expand because Europeans are somehow better. I fail to see a problem with teaching that.
You’re embracing the same ambiguity: when you say “European” are you talking about race or culture? “Eurocentric” narratives are mainly about culture, not race. There’s nothing wrong with saying Europeans were more successful because their cultures are better: https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/09/joseph-henric...
Indeed, the “Eurocentric” narrative largely refers to the fusion of Christianity and Roman/Greek thought. The European “race” (Germanic people) assimilated into that culture. Nobody is talking about how great Germanic Paganism was.
Teaching that societal success is explained by “geography” rather than culture is bad for two reasons. One it’s false. Two, it encourages an external locus of control. It teaches people that success is the product of factors outside the control of an individual or group.
Yes, geography is not the only factor in cultural development. There's a certain element of random chance, there's human agency, and then there are feedback loops. It's a super complex system. You're probably right that reducing it to geography is mistake. But I'd no sooner see a curriculum reduce something as complex as the history of industrialization to culture than to geography.
Yes, over emphasizing geography would tend to teach an external locus of control. But overemphasizing culture gives students a misguided sense of cultural superiority, which, while better than racial superiority, is just as likely to lead to discrimination and misunderstanding. The discrimination would just be based on the language that someone speaks or the country that they come from rather than the color of their skin. Slightly more rational? Maybe. Just as devastating? Certainly.
For example rayiner, who is from Bangladesh, will forget to tell you that the Indian subcontinent is estimated to have produced 25% of world gdp as late as the 18th century. This was an Islamic empire with majority hindu subjects. What followed was the industrial revolution in Europe, production of advanced weaponry, colonization and the hollowing out of the wealth of a subcontinent.
You can continue to engage with brown sahib here, but he will merely dress up the worst of conservative tropes in alternative vocabulary and fish out some random tidbits and obscure statistics to give it a semblance of a scientific argument. He hasn't adopted a full blown Candace owens persona, he is angling for a brown Ben Shapiro habit.
It isn’t just that. Why is it that in the most crucial developmental years of your life you are tasked to learn everything with a bunch of people that are a distraction.
Yes, the socializing part is a distraction, a real one, it’s as if someone at your job says ‘meetings all day, every day, and then after the meetings, make sure you do the work’.
It’s insanity. Hopefully no one in those meetings (your school) goes beyond being a distraction (violent, bullying).
Also, if you think that the student might transition back from homeschool to public school, the school will want to do some kind of evaluation to determine what class the student belongs in. If the student had been remote learning via the public school all along, this never comes up.
I'm not against homeschooling, my kids are homeschooled. But it's not a decision to take lightly or without thoroughly investigating the rules and regulations about it for your local jurisdiction.
https://www.lamag.com/citythinkblog/cecily-myart-cruz-teache...
Notably Christian radicals.
As a descriptive claim, this might be true (wouldn't shock me if the bulk of parents choose to homeschool for religious reasons). But if it's prescriptive, it's horribly wrong. A moderately intelligent child with moderately thoughtful parents will learn far more outside the school system than within.
It's only about $50-100/week extra, but it helps.
> the average tutored student was above 98% of the students in the control class
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
At some point. We are going to lose our jobs over her school.
So she played video games during the day and our evenings were spent playing catch-up. Tutors as much as we could.
We found local homeschooling groups and it turned out that the kids ended up with more socialization than when they were in traditional school. There were more field trips, PE activities, band (yes, there was a full bad of homeschooled kids) etc. -- partially because with an unparalleled student-to-teacher ratio, a day's worth of lessons can be completed in a much shorter time.
Everyone's mileage may vary, of course, but homeschooling doesn't mean condemning your kid to a shut-in, anti-social experience by any means.
Hobbies with structured meetings, book clubs for continued learning, social sports are all things that are added into the mix to get good social activity. And, frankly, they’re a lot more fun than forced office/school interactions.
When I had to go back to public school, I missed homeschooling dearly, and I lost a lot of really good study habits that would have made college easier. Now that I’m working remotely, I have a lot better skill base to work from to manage the work because I was homeschooled.
I've also known families who did go out of their way to get their kids in programs where they would make friends they could spend time with (both structured and unstructured), and in general give them comparable experiences to what you would get in a traditional school. One such group had a bunch of home-schooled kids put on theater productions every year, etc. Such families seemed to have many of the components of a standard school experience but it was organized a-la-carte by the parents and they were more involved. Those kids seemed to turn out pretty well-adjusted and extremely well educated. If you live in an area where home-schooling is common (that's probably pretty widespread at this point) it's quite easy to find support groups and resources on Facebook, etc. these days.
I would much rather live a simpler life in a place with a low cost of living, than require a two income household and offload the education of my children to a system that doesn't particularly care about them being educated.
1. Garnet Valley in PA ( this one was the best of all we tried ) https://www.greatschools.org/pennsylvania/glen-mills/garnet-...
2. Fairfax Country in VA ( this one was the worst ) https://www.greatschools.org/virginia/falls-church/fairfax-c...
3. Los Gatos/Saratoga in CA https://www.greatschools.org/california/saratoga/schools/
In California we sent our kids to a private school before pulling them out for home schooling. Essentially I don't think its the school districts fault, I think its a suboptimal model and if you are really well funded with really engaged parents you can kinda make it work. Although the number of Kuman and Russian Math tutoring facilities near me makes me double guess myself on that.
Honestly the foundational work is just as vital to the parents as it is to the kids as we will be simply guiding them through a high school curriculum that is much more advanced that anything we ever experienced. This is the program we are using, but we have two more years before we begin.
https://www.classicalconversations.com/challenge/
However, having seen kids give up on the independent study route and beg to go to a standard school, I think you are underestimating how daunting it is to start learning high school subjects as independent studies. Fundamentally, arguing with your peers in history class or being able to ask questions in chemistry is really valuable. A video is interesting, but once you get to the point where there is a part you don't understand, it's really hard to make progress.
A lot of the "challenge" level courses seem to talk about class presentations? Is this a remote school more than homeschool?
You are completely correct about how hard independent study can be, in the group our younger kids go to, a few of the older siblings have opted to go back to a classroom settings, not all of them, but every kid is different and with a strong academic basis they can thrive in whatever setting you put them in. More importantly if the students choose to go to college that will almost definitely be a traditional college experience so at some point they will need to be acclimated to traditional school. I hope my children can thrive in the independent program, but if not they will have the skills needed to learn in any environment.
I found that a solid elementary school foundation from my parents, combined with weekly classes and individual tutoring during highschool, was excellent preparation for my university studies.
In the lower grades, the biggest issue is the parent/child dynamics. When things are going badly, do they spin each other up or can the parent keep things calm. If you spin each other up, homeschool is not for you.
In the higher grades, parents need to know their limitations and bring in experts when needed.
Personally, I adored homeschooling my children.
Certainly much of the blame goes not to the teachers themselves but the entire public education industry, but you can't quibble the total lack of results.
https://www.edweek.org/teaching-learning/which-states-have-t...
Teachers tend to be paid less than an assistant manager at a Walmart. And require a master's degree.
Meanwhile, if you want different results, have teacher's judged differently. Right now, they're judged based on how well the worst performers in their class do. Of course they're going to focus on bringing up the rear.
Teachers on average make 62k nationally, get 2 months off a year, usually have great health care, pension, and have phenomenal job security.
And I know plenty of teachers without master degrees.
> I don't think this is true when you take into account benefits such as:
> healthcare,
Which WalMart Asst. Managers also get. Better health care in many cases.
> job security
How much is a secure but low paying job worth? Besides, once you're an assistant manager, you probably have decent job security if you don't fuck up.
> pension
WalMart Asst. Managers get access to a 401k. It's not a pension, but it's also not subject to fuckery by elected officials. And if you quit to do something better you can take it with you.
> 3 months off a year.
Teachers aren't paid for their 3 months off, and tend to work unpaid overtime during the year such that it evens out to being the equivalent of a fulltime, year round job anyway.
https://direct.mit.edu/edfp/article/9/3/231/10191/New-Measur...
Teachers get paid an additional ~$35,000 in benefits if they work for the state or federal government.
https://www.bls.gov/opub/btn/volume-8/teachers-job-requireme...
I seriously doubt Walmart assistant managers are getting anywhere near that level of benefits. I can't find any data on how much Walmart pays out in benefits, but you see to be pretty familiar with how much Walmart pays so please share.
> How much is a secure but low paying job worth? Besides, once you're an assistant manager, you probably have decent job security if you don't fuck up.
I know a bunch of teachers and a few principals and all of them across the board have said it's impossible to be fired as a teacher after the probationary period. I don't know any assistant managers at Walmart, but I've known a few front line managers at retail chains and they were always anxious about hitting their numbers.
Yes, they average 36 hrs/wk over the full year instead of 40 hrs/wk. 10% less time. And they're off 2 or 3 months a year. So, that lines up with my "they tend to work about the equivalent of a regular fulltime job while only getting paid for 9-10 months" statement.
> I seriously doubt Walmart assistant managers are getting anywhere near that level of benefits
And the majority of that is in pension benefits which assumes they work until they earn it out. It's one of those clever accounting things where since most teachers quit after < 10 years, they don't get any of those awesome benefits.
> I can't find any data on how much Walmart pays out in benefits, but you see to be pretty familiar with how much Walmart pays so please share.
I mean, I've just googled it. I saw that they have some 401k plans and some stock purchase plans. They seem to offer decent enough insurance (in that they cover dental and vision as well as health) but I have no idea what their copays are. In looking it up, it seems they also pay for you tuition costs, which is nice.
> I know a bunch of teachers and a few principals and all of them across the board have said it's impossible to be fired as a teacher after the probationary period.
Yes. It's stupidly hard to fire a teacher. But if the underlying job sucks, being secure in it is irrelevant. If teachers tend to quit, it doesn't matter how hard it is to fire them.
Also, the firing or not is very state dependent.
The people I know in retail always seem anxious about their numbers, but I've never heard of any of them getting fired for missing them.
Remember: You can't ever fire an underperforming teacher.
I suppose as long as it's not causing you to abuse your children and you aren't getting public funding, I don't really care.
But I will say, any "God's instruction" that can be undone by secular exposure for 7 hours a day, 180 days/year seems to be extreme enough that I worry it veers into the "bad for the child" zone.
https://www.indy100.com/news/pride-flag-allegiance-pledge-sc...
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1427337084591874055?...
https://twitter.com/libsoftiktok/status/1427842328878886914