Homeschooling generally happens because parents don't like some aspect of public schooling and more often than not it's that general knowledge conflicts with a religious belief.
It may be due to the fact that I live in Idaho which has extremely lax standards for homeschooling (which is why some of the cases I observed happened, people fleeing other states so they could avoid oversight on their kids education).
I will admit this is mostly just my own anecdotes. But, it's also the reasons given by a number of my family members and people from my former church that go down that route.
It does happen, how ever you wish to disparage others for factual statements.
Very few would admit such in public, but social and moral reasons were the overwhelming cause for most to home school. Education was an extreme secondary priority to the point of being not one at all in some families. Some kept the kids out of school to literally put them to work.
The sequestering from society is usually the point - for better or worse. This attracts the exact type of people you would expect it to.
Perhaps the situation is different 20 years later but based on my continued exposure to the "scene" I doubt it. I'd be amazed if the majority of folks are not engaging in home schooling for what amounts to religious reasons - however we want to define religion these days.
There's no fact I would not discuss with my kids. But as someone from an Asian country, I'm becoming increasingly wary of how teachers talk about certain facts--specifically, from an individualist, humanist perspective. I want my kids to understand that they're a cog in a machine, rowing with many other people to move forward a society, and have myriad reciprocal obligations to care what other people need, what they think, to respect their feelings, to allow them to save face, etc. I don't want them to grow up to be "muh freedoms!" Americans. I think a lot of people are in the same boat.
If your goal is to instill values of mutual cooperation, a sense of obligation, etc. in a pluralistic society, I'd think that you'd want to send them to a public school in a large city. That's what the last ~200 years of American immigrants and children of immigrants have more or less done.
In a superficial way, sure. The dominant American culture is intensely individualist. So if you don’t want your kids to grow up that way, you need to buck conformity in that narrow sense.
> If your goal is to instill values of mutual cooperation, a sense of obligation, etc. in a pluralistic society, I'd think that you'd want to send them to a public school in a large city.
The prevailing culture in large city public schools turns those ideas on their head. The focus is on individual self-actualization, and questioning authority, hierarchy, elders, and norms. It’s about what society owes individuals (“rights”) instead of what individuals owe society. There’s a veneer of cooperation and obligation, but it’s framed in terms of what “privileged” (whites, the rich) owe everyone else, not what each individual owes society.
> The prevailing culture in large city public schools turns those ideas on their head. The focus is on individual self-actualization, and questioning authority, hierarchy, and norms. It’s about what society owes individuals (“rights”) instead of what individuals owe society. There’s a veneer of cooperation and obligation, but it’s framed in terms of what “privileged” (whites, the rich) owe everyone else, not what each individual owes society.
This is a pundit's warped idea of what a public school looks like. I was in a public high school not too long ago (one that was and is 60% first-generation Americans), and never at any point did I get the sense (or to this day feel) like my education was intended to make me feel asymmetrically entitled.
And again: there's a sense in which this is far more true for private and home schooling, where the entire point is to eliminate the mutual network of obligations that exist between students, their parents, and the public's interest in favor of private, religious, or sectarian interests.
And that's why you home-school: you don't want the education that your children receive depend on the school's choice of the teacher for your child.
Could public schools be better? Yes, absolutely. We do not fund them enough, the fact that so many of my friends send their kids to private schools despite the enormous cost is testament to that. I have leaned on private schools myself for pre-K, transitional K, and earlier because its support is quite spotty across the USA.
"averages out" - No, it may not.
I had the same teacher for 4th and 6th grade in elementary school. I thought she was great. A friend of mine _changed schools_ so she wouldn't have the teacher again, because the teacher had been verbally abusive to her. I never saw it, but it was a big deal to her.
A year later, I had a teacher who would _publicly_ ridicule and harass me. Sure, I only had to deal with that for one class and homeroom everyday for TEN MONTHS, no big deal, right?
My other teachers weren't like that. But one is enough.
My anecdotal experience as a parent is that there are far more teachers like that now. (The students are often worse, too, which may be one factor.) To write off abuse from a) persons in authority and b) government employees as "oh the kids will get over it" isn't just wrong, it's demeaning.
That is a very bizarre fantasy that sounds like something a Fox News talking head that has never been within 2000 feet of a public school would say.
And what does Fox News have to do with anything?
The protest can mean a lot of things, including the dress code itself being against the norms of the community. One does not need to focus on questioning authority to protest bad decisions.
Also, I am not American.
What does that have to do with anything? Some dress codes are truly stupid, to the point they are literally ignored by both teachers and students. Which is just our chosen way to deal with it, usually. When there is clash, dress code violation is typically seen as something minor, so no reason to protest when you can kinda ignore it.
Frankly, organizing protest is so much work, that kids in your story come across as active people who take governance seriously.
Heck, I'd even say that after essential skills like reading are mastered, homeschooling can lead to great results.
A lot of that depends on the motivation (or lack thereof) of the parents.
Buy some kids just won’t work if you’re not right behind them every day making sure they work. Others would struggle with direction in that kind of environment.
My brother tried to homeschool his kids, but it didn’t work out.
What I want is for kids to get the best education possible and to have as many opportunities as possible to further human knowledge.
You don't become a biologist if you think evolution is a hoax. Dinosaurs are simply cool as shit and I feel bad that kids are kept from them because of "Satan". And you'll have a hard time with geology or astrophysics if you are saddled with a belief in the young earth.
I certainly don't buy the "public education is indoctrinating our kids!!!" line. Do you really think teachers in red states like Idaho are trying to turn kids into communists?
What's telling is that's where you went in this discussion. All the sudden you think politics is involved because I thought illiterate children is a bad thing? Ok buddy.
Sure you do. You are a saint. You posted an agenda ridden comment here because you care about children. That much was obvious.
> You don't become a biologist if you think evolution is a hoax.
What are you doing here if you are a 'biologist'?
> Dinosaurs are simply cool as shit and I feel bad that kids are kept from them because of "Satan".
And yet the guy who claimed the 'Satan' nonsense eventually found out about dinosaurs.
> I certainly don't buy the "public education is indoctrinating our kids!!!" line.
As a product of public education, I can say it does. And if you study the history of modern public education ( starting from germany ), you'll find out that it was created for indoctrination.
> Do you really think teachers in red states like Idaho are trying to turn kids into communists?
Yes. Isn't that why idaho is a hotbed of home schooling?
> What's telling is that's where you went in this discussion. All the sudden you think politics is involved because I thought illiterate children is a bad thing? Ok buddy.
I told you not to bother. I'm an atheist. What do you think my politics is? I know what yours is.
You are transparent to me. I can see through you. I know you because I was you not too long ago. I even predicted your response. Pathetic.
I proclaim you 'Patron Saint of Education'. Certainly you care about children more than their mothers and fathers. Certainly you care about their education more than their mothers and fathers.
Edit: Strange how you say you know so many homeschooled illiterate children and yet you haven't mentioned contacting the authorities to help these children. You must really care about children and their education.
We love the schedule flexibility of homeschooling, the ability to let our kids explore their own interests more, and most of all - we just love being with our kids and they get to have their siblings and parents all day.
> That's because teaching kids is super hard and real easy to mess up.
Forgive me, but this is just absurd.
Reading this from outeide the US, it's bizarre to me that people don't want a professional, trained teacher who can do a better job than they could.
That aside, a fantastic highly trained teacher with 30 students, isn’t likely to outperform a mediocre teacher devoting their full time to 1 or 2.
I wasn’t homeschooled myself but I did help my homeschooled younger (by 20 years) sister with math. If I had the time to devote 30 hours a week or so I’m fairly confident I could outperform even the best teacher teaching my own kids—-assuming they had 20+ full time students.
A lot of parents that homeschool aren’t, and I sure as hell wouldn’t trust them to teach my kid anything past grade 4.
There will obviously be failures , but I don’t think it’s that hard for an average parent teaching 1-4 kids to outperform a trained teacher with 30.
I bet there isn’t a single US public school district where teacher pay keeps pace with minimum wage when divided by the number of hours spent working.
There are many districts with much higher averages. Just one example. In a relatively low cost of living state, Fulton county GA—the county Atlanta is in—the starting salary is $56k, and $62k with a masters. It goes up every year from there.
Also: $62k/yr for a job requiring a masters degree is utterly criminal.
This has nothing to do with the south. Take the highest minimum wage in the country, Washington D.C., at $17 an hour.
The state with the lowest paid teachers pay more than that even assuming 12 hour days.
A masters degree isn’t required, you just start out making a few thousand a year more if you have one. Each year the gap grows though so that it becomes more and more worth it.
Also $62k a year is the starting salary for a teacher with no experience, but it’s only slightly lower than the median salary for anyone with a masters degree.
Also in many states teachers get defined benefit pensions and other benefits which are far better than what nearly anyone in the private sector gets. In Georgia, teachers can retire with their full pension after only 30 years. I know many teachers who retire in their early 50s. 10 years before nearly anyone else.
There are plenty of illiterate people in the US. Evidently teaching kids is, in fact, easy to mess up.
And I don't think you can produce a single example that was homeschooled. Public education is notoriously inconsistent and frequently produces children that haven't met minimum educational requirements precisely because it lacks the individual attention kids need.
> And I don't think you can produce a single example that was homeschooled.
Yeah, I can. Multiple in fact. That's the reason for my initial comment. My experience here isn't exactly unique. Search this threads, there are others raised in these sorts of communities that have similar experiences.
You can find these people to if you like. Simply go attend a fundamentalist religion service and ask around their homeschooling programs. It's really not hard to find if you know where to look.
https://www.nuroretention.com/blog/officials-80-percent-of-r...
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121374...
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/i-couldnt-even-read-the...
https://phdessay.com/can-illiterate-students-graduate-from-h...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/11/...
https://www.highschoolcube.com/the-high-rate-of-functional-i...
And the list goes on. Several of these articles cite a rate of about 20% of adults in the US being functionally illiterate, with about one third unable to read above a 5th-grade level.
If homeschooling produces better results than that, then I'm all for it. Again: Kids need individual attention which they can get more readily in a homeschool environment. In large institutional public education systems, they just get "passed along" as they may be one of 30+ students in a class, and one of 5+ classes a teacher has. Public school teachers don't have enough time in a week to spend one-on-one time with each of their students. In the 90s my high school had class sizes of 35+ and I'm sure it's worse now in some schools.
I'm on board with criticism of government schools, but home-schooling isn't perfect and I have seen examples where kids were kept uneducated, up to functionally illiterate.
Parents have a right to home-school their kids. There will be kids that come out poorly -- it's going to be _fewer_ than if they'd gone to government schools.
If you gave your kids wonderful educations with excellent curriculum, more power to you.
The issue I have is that's not universal. It's that I've seen far too many examples of children that are illiterate. Examples of lazy parents doing things like taking a walk in the park and saying "see, we did biology today!". Examples of parents that "oops, forgot to do school this week/month".
And, in the extreme, "girls don't need eduction, that's for boys".
Perhaps for you, education is not hard and that's wonderful. Truly. But what about for the parents and kids where it is hard?
> But what about for the parents and kids where it is hard?
If it’s too hard, then public school is right there for you take advantage of. I went to public school and it was just fine.
I had to make up a final exam at school for a subject I didn't take. I covered the entire material for 2 years in a couple of weeks and passed the final. That's pretty much my experience of school- 2 weeks worth of material stretched over 2 years. A glorified daycare system. How can you teach a class of 25 young individuals where 90% couldn't care less, anything?
That said I agree this (EDIT: homeschooling) is not for everyone and not everyone does it for the right reasons.
If your government school gave your kids wonderful educations with excellent curriculum, more power to you.
The issue I have is that's not universal. It's that I've seen far too many examples of high school graduates that are illiterate.
What is the problem with that? I am not aware of anything in the daily life that is dependent on the existence of macroevolution, the age of earth, or the history of dinosaurs.
So, I really deeply from my heart have a stance of "live and let live" concerning these topics. I might love science, but I am not a missionary or even an inquisitor for the "scientific truth".
That is why I explicitly wrote "macroevolution" and not "evolution". The emergence antibiotic-resilient bacteria is a phenomenon of microevolution, which is, as far as I am aware, much less controversial in evangelical Christian circles.
Whereas Christian creation stories always felt like mythology, sounds human centric and made up. I read stuff like the Epic of Gilgamesh and realized that some stories in the bibles are based on older iterations written by ancient people.
It is nonsense through the lens of biology, but it's nonsense that's very ideologically convenient to certain demographics, which (perhaps paradoxically) means that terms to talk about the distinction become useful in some sociopolitical or anthropological contexts. For what it's worth, the very particular term for the religiously-motivated typology that accepts microevolution while rejecting macroevolution is baraminology.
Even from a biological perspective this distinction is not nonsense: couldn't there exist an additional mechanism that is not arbitrary mutation and survival/selection of the fittest, which could be an additionally important for the formation of species and macroevolution?
Candidates for such possible additional mechanisms have been proposed from biologists, such as Lamarckism or epigenetics (though the mainstream view in biology is these either could not be observed (Lamarckism) or are not considered to be important for macroevolution (epigenetics)).
"Couldn't there exist different laws of gravity for big things like planets and small things like rocks, which explains why I've never seen rocks attracted to each other?"
Yes, there could in some alternative universe, but not in this one that we know of, and it's not necessary to explain why you don't notice rocks being attracted to each other.
There could exist some difference between "microevolution" and "macroevolution," but not in this universe that we know of, and it's not necessary to explain species.
The entire concept was made up by creationists to try to add a patina of science to their deeply-unscientific beliefs. And the problem with an unscientific world view is that science will never change your mind about things, you'll just decide what science to accept and which to not accept.
Something very related is a topic that is seriously discussed among physicists:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics
The problem with the existing theories of gravitation which seem to work quite well on the scale of solar systems is that there does seem to exist evidence that some observed data on the scale of galaxies might not be well-explainable by these theories. See
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics#Ob...
Very recently new evidence for MOND came up:
> https://phys.org/news/2023-08-smoking-gun-evidence-gravity-g...
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37051241
See also:
> https://tritonstation.com/2023/08/02/is-ngc-1277-a-problem-f...
That’s why education aspires to be more well rounded in most places.
All of this paternalism and hostility towards civil authority isn’t an expression of faith or aspirations towards the divine; it’s a means to exert control on earth to men.
I don't care so much of a kid is like "I hate this dinosaur garbage" or whatever, but I feel awful for the kid that could have been a great paleontologist or biologist only to have that opportunity snuffed.
Sort of the same reason I'd hate for the kids to never be able to read. Sure, maybe there are jobs and people that live full lives never really needing to read anything. However, so much of the world is completely closed off to an illiterate person.
It's not that I'm trying to be a missionary per say, but rather that I believe that sparking knowledge in people is pretty much always a good thing.
Written text is of course something that occurs very often in daily life.
> but rather that I believe that sparking knowledge in people is pretty much always a good thing.
Interestingly, many people who argue this way are very hesitant to apply this argument to sparking knowledge about evangelical Christian theology.
I'm absolutely not hesitant for kids to be taught about evangelical christian theology. I don't think kids should be proselytized to by the state.
That is, I'm more than fine if kids study the bible as part of class. I'm less fine if kids are taught "The bible is the word of god and if you don't believe it you are going to hell".
To put it in another context, I'm perfectly fine if there was a class teaching about Hinduism in high school. I'm far less fine (and I'd think most people would be) if that class involved calling Christians heathens and requiring participation in Satsang.
> To put it in another context, I'm perfectly fine if there was a class teaching about Hinduism in high school. I'm far less fine (and I'd think most people would be) if that class involved calling Christians heathens and requiring participation in Satsang.
To play the devil's advocate: what you described in the last paragraph is exactly how I imagine that classes about evolutionary biology or earth history feel to evangelical Christians. :-)
Teaching a kid about evolutionary biology does not force them to believe it. Just the same as teaching a kid about Hinduism doesn't turn them into a Hindu. Or more extreme, just like teaching kids about harry potter doesn't turn them into wizards.
The more extreme evangelical christian (which to be clear, isn't broadly held) position is that "if my kids learn about this, they might reject the faith therefore they shouldn't learn about it." But that's a silly position. Just like it's silly to say "If kids learn about electricity they might reject Zeus".
Withholding information because it might damage faith is toxic.
The chief difference between evolution and intelligent design is that one actually happened.
> It's not that I'm trying to be a missionary per say
Spoken - or rather, written - like someone who doesn't read much.
Wondering why I haven't seen this consideration raised before, in mainstream press. Nor read of any specific cases of abuse being exposed that way. Would be interested in references.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/apr/16/sexual-abu...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6283686/
https://info.primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/review/sexual-educa...
Even China started pushing comprehensive sex education nationwide due to high rates of rural child sex abuse: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9406756/
A daughter of fundamentalist Muslim parents has the right to have an education, even if they think girls should not be educated.
A girl whose parents are "anti woke liberal gender ideology" still nonetheless has the right to learn how her own body works, how to protect herself, among a thousand other things.
Etc etc.
Do you think it's evil to force parents to teach their kids to read?
This is absolutely false. Did you read the article?
Parents didn't flock to homeschooling during the lockdowns because of religious ideology: they did it because they wanted their children to LEARN.
IME, the two biggest reasons parents chose homeschooling were a) government school academics are garbage and b) government schools were often unsafe.
The parents wanted a SAFE _EDUCATIONAL_ environment for their kids, rather than prisons which allowed students to assault one another while the teachers spent all of their energy trying to get the bottom 10% to meet the absurdly low minimum standards.
Your experience may be very different, but don't use your bigotry to defame millions of parents.
> You only need to be a teaching ninja when you've been tasked when educating children who don't want to be there and aren't interested in what you have to say.
Way to blame the child for teachers failure. Yep, even motivated interested kids needs actual teaching. But yeah if you don't provide they loose motivation and you can then blame them.
Realistically speaking, a large portion of public school graduates are illiterate going off of test scores.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37274958.
The trouble is, this can become a feedback loop, because the only way to dispel the stereotypes is if more normal folks speak up.
I've seen this same phenomenon affect other subcultures too, and I suspect there's probably a name for it, but I don't know what it is.