Home schooling

The phenomenon of home schooling in the US has been growing, fueled mainly by religious parents who object to the secular nature of public schools. The latest news story about this is a set of parents who believed they didn't need to teach their kids much of anything, because the "rapture" was coming soon:

http://www.mystatesman.com/news/news/te ... ase/npDCR/

Home schooling has also come under scrutiny recently as it has provided an unmonitored environment which has concealed cases of sexual abuse, including the "19 Kids And Counting" Duggar scandal:

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/julie-ing ... 53062.html

I spent almost two decades as a department manager in business, and I interviewed a lot of applicants. Some were home schooled, and I consistently found them to be less flexible, lacking social skills and having gaps in their knowledge of common subjects. I suspect that home schooling is less effective in preparing students for employment.

So, my questions are:

1. Should parents be permitted to keep their children out of public schools and educate their children at home, bearing in mind that they are seldom trained educators?

2. If home schooling is permitted, should the children be required to pass standard tests for the appropriate age group/school grade? This is not a requirement is several states, per the articles above.

3. Should the government set minimum curriculum requirements for home schooling and have a mandate to inspect the home schooling environment?

Great guestions and thank you. Yes, Yes and No. We home school our grandkids. Their parents and us team teach. Perhaps some assumptions are non correct?

We have found that our teaching subjects and additional life experiences sessions greatly exceed our local public education standards. Geatly exceed.

Also in our case we are also educated above our local teachers. Also have more down to earth life wisdom. We pass this along to the young people. We are all ex teachers.

I suppose we could let our kids be tested by the state but so far this has not happened. Perhaps the state is embarrassed to even try. They know their standards are lacking.

One of the most expensive failed systems of USA living is our ruined public education system. The State has no business interfering with our kids education. None.

Inspect the site? You must be kidding. The USA Constitution pretty much covers non warrent inspections. You need to understand more about home schooling.

Personal rant. Over 70% of my total property tax bill goes to a public education system that I neither use or approve of. It has been a total failure in my own view.

One local example of home schooling is that the 16 year old kids went from home schooling to a 3rd year study program at Southern Oregon State University. Age 16.

One is now a vetinarian (sp) animal doctor.. The other is now a medical doctor. Both home schooled. Their education was light years above public education. Light years.

Sorry for my speelling. Slight strokes. The rest of me seems to work OK including spending much quality time with my grandkids teaching stuff they never get in public school.

This would include in addition to the failed public ABCs stuff like, martial arts, firearm instruction, edged weapons, survival skills, bicyling, motorcycling, car racing,

Heavy truck driving, manual transmission car driving, steet bikes, horse back riding and carrying of, swimming, scuba diving, physical fittness, bike racing, construction, home economics,

Home and business problem solving, foreign languages, higher math, power boat operations, sail boating, fishing, hiking, running, climbing, expreme sports, sex educations (yep) social skills...

Also a few right hand seat hours flying various light aircraft. Expensive.

And about hundreds more subjects that right now do not come to mind. Our kids seem to do OK. So do their parents who were also home schooled. We are quite proud of them. Yep! Thanks.

Sorry for the bad grammour. No time to polish it. Also we are Agnostics. Not religious at all.

Good topic.
In Australia we have similar concerns. I don't think there is a simple answer as some parents home school exceedingly well and others are hopeless. There is some government oversight on curriculum and standards here though.

As to why, sometimes religious, sometimes isolated locations (our family had some home schooling before we managed to lobby for a state school within driving distance)(really remote locations had pedal wireless school of the air, now solar powered video satellite conferencing), and sometimes other circumstances like carnival workers.

Along with this though is the issue with private versus public schooling. My experience is that brighter students sometimes benefit from private schooling as they go onto university, but average students often find it harder to find normal work as employers believe they are somewhat precious.

Coming from a country in which homeschooling is just flat-out illegal (and thus only practiced by the kinds of religious nutjobs who think that evolution isn't real, sex is bad and evil, and getting to know other girls and boys is detrimental to morals), I do have trouble accepting homeschooling that isn't in some way checked and certified by the authorities. Parents have the right to educate their children as they see fit, but that right is strictly limited by their children's right to not have a bunch of uneducated buffoons ruin their chances at jobs or higher education.

If you, like HB and his folks, are capable of delivering a quality education for your kids on par with or surpassing that of publically available schools, more power to you. But I would think it folly to derive from this a general assumption that anyone doing homeschooling is automatically capable of doing a good job of it, without some form of third-party testing.

Home education isn't illegal in the UK, but there are subtly different requirements between the three different education systems here:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Home_education_in_the_United_Kingdom

Although parents can take the decision to educate at home, they must notify the local authorities and adhere to certain guidelines.

Mike.

Tough call...

In favor, any action take to force any kind of information on people's kids without their consent is not to be taken lightly.


In opposition, a lot of these home schooled kids are getting screwed being taught by parents who while they may be well meaning are simply so unqualified to teach that they don't even know enough to know how unqualified they are. And their kids aren't going to realize how screwed they're getting until it's too late because, well, where are they going to learn that? (And that's not even factoring in the outright abuse cases, which are often caught by people noticing something is wrong when those kids have to go attend school with a bunch of other people around.)


Yes, it's entirely possible to have sufficiently qualified parent and relatives to conduct adequate home schooling, but without standardization and monitoring the bottom line is the quality of care and education home schooled kids receive is going to be wildly haphazard. Some will be fine. Some will be abysmal. ("And then Noah loaded all the animals on a big boat and a big flood came and carved out the Grand Canyon..." )

At one level you can appeal to it properly being the parents call, but at another looking out for the welfare of children when their parents are wholly unqualified to do so properly becomes a societal concern.


Basically, I consider home schooling a gigantic pain in the ass issue that can't be easily dealt with. Just mandating schooling by an accredited institution/instructor is a simple way to address it but it inevitably results in some people screaming about the gub'mint indoctrinating their children or something.

It's hugely individualized. I know lots of people who homeschool who live in multiple school districts and NONE of them homeschool for religious reasons. Virtually all of the tried the public school system first (at least for the eldest child) and fell back on homeschooling when the public schools failed their children.

- Some live in bad school districts. Unfortunately school quality in populated areas is heavily determined by income as the wealthy, middle class, and lower class areas are generally in separate school districts. So if you live in a bad school district you're stuck with limited options: attend the bad schools, pray you get one of the very limited number of charter school slots, send your kids to private school (if you can afford it) or homeschool. Rural areas are simpler. There is one school and everyone goes to it.

- Then there are those who live in the performance driven highly focused school districts. Those schools are driven to be the "best" and are bound and determined to make their students "achieve" at any cost. They run over sensitive students like roadkill. So if you have a sensitive, easily stressed child you can either drug them into a zombie with improper use of ADD and/or other psychiatric meds (before you shout, note that I specified IMPROPER use), pay for private school, or homeschool.

- I also know one family who is homeschooling because their daughter is mildly disabled and her school system utterly failed her. You'd think that with all the money that we're spending on special ed that that sort of thing wouldn't happen. But their child is just "slow". During the part of the day when she was mainstreamed, she couldn't keep up with the "normal" students. During the part of the day when she was in special ed, she was ignored while the teachers dealt with the children with profound disabilities. She slipped through the cracks... too disabled to be normal and not disabled enough to capture the attention of the special ed teachers.


Most of the parents tried addressing their varying concerns with their respective schools but were ignored.


I also know people for whom homeschooling did not work. They tried it and wound up going back to the public school system or squeezing the budget for private school/tutoring. Basically in those cases the children had the sort of personalities where they learn best from anyone who isn't mom or dad.

I also know lots of people who are very happy with the education that their children are receiving in their public schools. Those particular schools have a teaching style which suits those particular children.

What I'd really like to see is a universal charter system such as the one New Orleans has right now. Fewer bad schools exist since few send the children there. Parents can choose a highly driven performance school for those who thrive in that type of environment. Or they can choose a Montessori school for those who thrive in a more flexible setting etc etc. Children aren't clones and they don't all thrive in an identical environment.

California schools are run for the exclusive benefit of the government union, CTA. It stands for "California teachers association" even though more than half its members are not teachers. Most of them are administrative deadwood with ridiculously inflated salaries and contribute little or nothing to teaching. Teachers, students and their parents are tolerated as a necessary evil.

Parents are not allowed any choice in which school their children attend. The bureaucrats can even arbitrarily change school district boundaries, and the only way your kids can continue going to the same school is for you to sell your house and move.

WHO THE FUCK GAVE THEM THAT KIND OF POWER???

This is what happens when those making the decisions don't have to pay the bills.
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Those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it.
Those who do learn from history are doomed to watch everybody else repeat it.

Good homeschooling actually helped me out more than primary school when I was in it. was homeschooled from 8 to 10 as school I was at wasnt doing too well, and parents didnt like the quality of education at next nearest school, so homeschooled me. They went and saw a professional educator liason, had us take tests to determine where we were in our different subjects, created a year long workload that would stimulate us as it pushed us to our limits in the subjects, and was made of the same subject matter as that taught at public schools, only condensed more as instead of having six hours a day to learn subjects, it was until you finished a unit, so me and my brother ended up about 18 months ahead of our peers by the end of the 2 years, even when only doing 3 hours a day or so of actual work.


All of this was through an approved public network ensuring homeschooling quality, otherwise would have been forced to go to a public school.

In addition to the acutal homeschooling, there were also many outings and meetups with other local homeschoolers for project classes, such as learning the ins and outs of making paper and dying materials, conference calls to famous people and scientists to listen to their stories and research, museum trips with worksheets, zoo trips for bio, visits to volcanoes for geography, all sorts. we had a trip a month pretty much, and learnt so much.

This is something posted over on the bar. It is from a an obviously biased source but has some interesting stuff backing it up.

http://www.nheri.org/research/research- ... oling.html

It was posted in response to this article from North Carolina.

http://www.charlotteobserver.com/news/l ... 59617.html

Which is about voucher's for private schools. I thought the article was incredibly even handed in showing the various aspects.

Enjoy,
T2M