Re:Why Kids Shouldn’t Sit Still in Class
by mschuster91 on Saturday April 08, 2017 @09:53AM
(#14066900)
On the other hand, forced public schools provide three very important advantages:
1) kids don't fall into religious sect schools as easily as in the US, e.g. the Amish - thereby the state ensures that kids have an experience outside a tightly controlled environment, as well as exposure to stuff like sex ed (which is apparently neither compulsory nor scientifically accurate in some US places).
2) it protects children from abuse going unnoticed (again, religious sects come to my mind, but also "ordinary" home abuse). Simply said, if a teacher notices that a student comes to class every other day looking badly beaten or complains being sexually abused at home, the teacher can inform police. In a homeschooling environment, this protection cannot be provided at all, because parents can literally prevent anybody else from ever seeing the kid.
3) it ensures at least some form of quality of teaching. In Germany there are some exceptions to the mandatory public school system, and these have been fraught with scandals ranging from fake degrees of the teachers to outright corporeal punishments of pupils instead of providing an alternative to public schools (and mostly been shut down).
That said, our public school system is not perfect either - it's not inclusive to students with disabilities, the curriculums are biased towards economical, not societal, needs, it does not provide students with adequate time, place and resources for actual free play, and it selects pupils into the three different high-school tracks way too early. But it's way better than the alternative, whose downsides appear regularly in HN submissions and comments.
1) kids don't fall into religious sect schools as easily as in the US, e.g. the Amish - thereby the state ensures that kids have an experience outside a tightly controlled environment, as well as exposure to stuff like sex ed (which is apparently neither compulsory nor scientifically accurate in some US places).
2) it protects children from abuse going unnoticed (again, religious sects come to my mind, but also "ordinary" home abuse). Simply said, if a teacher notices that a student comes to class every other day looking badly beaten or complains being sexually abused at home, the teacher can inform police. In a homeschooling environment, this protection cannot be provided at all, because parents can literally prevent anybody else from ever seeing the kid.
3) it ensures at least some form of quality of teaching. In Germany there are some exceptions to the mandatory public school system, and these have been fraught with scandals ranging from fake degrees of the teachers to outright corporeal punishments of pupils instead of providing an alternative to public schools (and mostly been shut down).
That said, our public school system is not perfect either - it's not inclusive to students with disabilities, the curriculums are biased towards economical, not societal, needs, it does not provide students with adequate time, place and resources for actual free play, and it selects pupils into the three different high-school tracks way too early. But it's way better than the alternative, whose downsides appear regularly in HN submissions and comments.