A high school student loans a friend, another high school student, his copy of The God Delusion. Two things happen: the friend’s father loses his cool and complains to their school, and a school administrator suggests that this was an establishment clause violation. And this was at a school that allowed the Gideons to distribute bibles in the parking lot!
At least the lunatic father finally returned the book.
It’s ironic. I get accused of being some kind of deranged militant atheist, yet when my kids got handed tracts and evangelical comic books and were asked to attend church and sunday school with their friends (and all of those were reasonably common events), I just gave ’em the thumbs up, read the comics myself (they were uniformly terrible), and shooed ’em out the door on Sunday morning. Yet scrubbing the information their kids are allowed to see is common practice among the religious — it’s the primary reason for Christian home schooling, for instance.
I’ve always figured I was just boosting their intellectual immune system.
(via the Friendly Atheist)
Careful with the broad brush there, PZ. Most home schoolers, superstitious or not, resort to home schooling because of the dismal performance of the government schools. Many of them aren’t even safe. I’ve met kids who are home-schooled because they’re atheists who were sick of the christian students beating on them, and kids who left school because they’re gay and also feared for their safety.
-jcr
#1, that’s why he typed Christian home schooling
I’m curious – do you have any reason to believe this is the PRIMARY reason for Christian Home Schooling, or is this just conjecture on your part?
I am an agnostic, homeschooled by christian parents for the simple reason that the public school system is an inadequate (and in my opinion fatally flawed and failed) system for achieving a decent education. I have known and talked to many people who either were homeschooled or homeschool their children. The primary reason has always been the poor education provided by public schools. Nor have I seen any statistics that would indicate otherwise – in fact, the academic superiority of homeschooling has become accepted by virtually every major educational institution.
So again I ask – do you have any reason to believe that the primary reason of christians homeschooling their children is to scrub the information their kids are allowed to see? If this is anything more than personal bias on your part, it’s news to me! (And no, I’m not speaking of the bias of atheist vs. christian, but the common one of educator vs. homeschooler)
I am curious to see your response to this. Thank you – I have enjoyed reading your blog for many months now, though I rarely have anything to contribute to the subject, as I am a musician with an amateur curiosity and fascination with the sciences.
Public schooling is one of the most effective means to influence the socialization of children. PZ’s naturally suspicious of anyone who doesn’t want their kids exposed to the public school environment.
It’s not that he thinks that it’s good and useful, but that the idea of it is good and useful.
Parents are rarely qualified to teach all the subjects mandated by state education systems, so I have my doubts that homeschooling, except in cases of exceptionally well educated parents with large amounts of free time, is even going to be remotely comparable to what public schools offer. Rather than pulling kids out of the public schools, I wish those parents who are genuinely concerned about the quality of the education would hammer on the schools and demand better instruction there — it would benefit all students rather than a few.
And yes, I know several parents who homeschooled because of their disappointment with the quality of the schools. That’s why I qualified the comment with “Christian”. My experience with Christian homeschoolers is that they do it so their kids won’t get exposed to scary ideas like evolution and sex.
You know this by ESP I suppose?
I’m not too familiar of the views by American educators towards homeschooled students. Mr. Mills, could you provide us with some links that support your assertion that major education institutions consider homeschooling to be academically superior (compared to public/private schools, I’m assuming)? It just seems a bit counterintuitive to me.
I went to one of hose British Public (read private boarding) schools. My grandmother, a wonderful but crazy old lady and who loved books of all types, sent me Micheners “tales of the south pacific” paperback version with a lurid-looking scantily-dressed south-sea-sland woman on the cover. My housemaster immediately confiscated the book and demanded to know who had sent it to me. I told him my grandmother, at which he told me there are born liars and blatent liars and I was of the latter category. I did see the book back at the end of term, but only by getting my parents to intervene.
Given the international standing of US public schools, I don’t think there are many informed and intelligent people who are happy with the current state of affairs.
Presuming that PZ is neither ignorant nor stupid, there are only so many plausible reasons he could be in favor of the system.
I would wonder, though, exactly what he thinks makes a person qualified to teach a subject.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, about a third of home schooling parents list “concern about the environment of other schools” as their primary reason for doing so, and another third list “to provide religious or moral instruction.” But that survey covers all parents, not just Christian ones.
No offense, Mr. Myers, but from what I’ve seen, most teachers in the public schools are no more qualified to teach their subjects than parents are. And this is not an entirely outside point of view – I was a public school teacher after I graduated from college. It was my discovery that the system was far worse than I’d even thought possible.
As for the attitudes of major educators… I do not have any studies on hand, though I should be able to come up with some when I have a few more moments (I’m due back onstage in a few minutes). I know that I read that the number of scholarships offered by colleges and universities specifically for homeschooled students has risen dramatically in the last ten years, and that Harvard and Stanford have both begun programs to recruit homeschooled students (as they tend to have much higher GPAs at the collegiate level).
Here are some easily available studies showing some results of homeschooled students vs. public schooled.
When I have time tomorrow I’ll see if I can track down some more of those articles I read.
http://epaa.asu.edu/epaa/v7n8/
http://www.chec.org/Legislative/News/HomeschoolingStatistics/Index.html
http://www.hslda.org/docs/study/comp2001/default.asp
Way to go kid! Keep fighting the good fight. It may seem you’re fighting like ‘The Thin Red Line”, but we’re with you.
Second, this is religious batshittery at its’ finest!
I cannot assume that Caledonian is neither ignorant nor stupid, so there are only so many plausible bases upon which he could have any standing to pontificate/troll on this subject whatsoever.
How many students have you taught, Caledonian? How many children have you raised and educated at home? What form of educational process or its lack yielde Caledonian, so that I may avoid inflicting similar damage to my children and students, so that you may serve, at least, as a cautionary tale?
I have thoughts on education. Right now, teachers have to get licensed and certified. Even though some are bad teachers, that is at least one layer of competence that you have to go through. Of course I am suspicious of home schooling as many people don’t know as much about science and math as they should, and even though homeschoolers socialize, I think it would be better to have a more random sample of the population to interact with.
Home-“schooling”. Hey, the kids win spelling bees!
Kudoes to Messr Braden. I hope he graduates and moves somewhere better. He obviously has a good head on his shoulders.
As for colleges accepting more homeschooled kids, there is a relatively new development in this area. I happen to live near a major American public University, and the starting quarterback on our (I pay taxes, dammit) team was homeschooled. Now the interesting thing is that, although his parents are devout Christians, the homeschooling appears to have been coorsinated so the young man could take massive amounts of time every day for private instruction in football, which due to school board rules would be impossible for a schooled child, as there are rules governing the amount of time allowed for kids to practice and such.
These kids, and it appears to have recently become more common, are certainly going to be offered scholarships, but not academic ones.
This is not to disparage the man’s education, as my University has a proud history of holding atheletes to much higher standards than is required by the NCAA.
And we still won the championship last year.
nyah-nyah
I remember one day when we picked up my brother at school and all the fifth graders had their red Gideon New Testaments. I had recently seen a documentary on Mao and thought that Mao had visited the school.
You don’t like the christian comics, PZ? Man, you have no appreciation for fine art. How could you NOT like the one where the guy says “damn” to his mom once and then spirals out of control into a life of drugs and crime because of it? That’s pure narrative GOLD!
I think it interesting that the home-schooled and the home-schoolers seem to uniformly think they have had the better education. Measured by what? Performance on standard tests? My experience seems unlike that of others here who seem willing to bash our unique public school system (largely it seems) on the basis of rumor and apocryphal stories, and seemingly also without direct experience. I have been delighted with my son’s experience in a large, urban high school. The teachers were extremely well-trained, and incredibly committed and enthusiastic about their subjects (with few exceptions, and in direct contrast to the private school that he attended as a scholarship student for the first few elementary grades). While in his high school, he traveled with class groups to Asia, Mexico and Europe, and had tremendous opportunities offered that could never have been offered at home (e.g., the opportunity to play Jazz with Wynton Marsalis at Lincoln Center, and a tour of Rome with a classically trained, truely knowledgeable instructor). There are six languages offered at the school, all taught by native speakers, and the theatre department is exceptional, and produces professional level performances in a state of the art performance theatre. My son also took advantage of public scool programs in the summer to attend biology and ecology classes at the nearby University, and several courses during the school year at the community college (e.g. English 101), all of which transferred as credits to the University that he attended. Frankly, I think the public schools offer a trememdous opportunity for ALL students- which is something that definitely sets our schools apart from those in other countries in which I have visited or lived, both in Europe and in Asia. So, do some students fail to take advantage of those opportunities? Are some poorly prepared, poorly fed, poorly housed? Have some recently immigrated with their families from Bosnia, Somalia, Rwanda, Cambodia, Ecaudor…? Yes, in fact at least 25 languages are native to different students at our public high school. And yes, some students are trying to learn English while trying to master their subjects (while many their parents eke out a living working two or three jobs). So, yes, there are a sizable proportion of students who don’t perform well on the mandatory tests. And perhaps removing the students that are not handicapped allows their education in standard subjects, at least those that their parents have the time and expertise to adequately present, to proceed apace, and ultimately allows those students to outperform on exams of the standard material. But who is to say that the students who had so much attention paid by their parents to their educational progress at home would not have made the same, or better, progress in a public school given the same amount of parental committment to their education? And perhaps they then, with their superior training, intelligence, luck, or what have you, could have contributed a little bit more to the life of the public educational community, rather than sit well-educated and self-satisfied, alone in their room.
pz, the word “irony” is defined as:
i fail to see an instance of fundamentalist christians acting like atheism is its own religion, and then trying to protect their children from it is in any way different from the expected. maybe that’s just me, though.
No doubt we could start a completely new thread on the social ramifications of home-schooling. However, I interpreted PZ’s comments as referring to the factual knowledge of the parents. I am a certified English teacher and am confident that I could home-school the hell out of my kid in that subject but my knowledge of the sciences is that of the interested layman. These are not subject matters with which I should be teaching. I am not qualified. Unfortunately, too many parents already think they can do a better job then the people that at least have some qualifications. Say what you will about the schools or the teachers, at least they have some qualifications. Damn few parents or politicians have the right to say that.
From the first link provided in #11 in support of the assertion that home schooled students are better that public schooled peers:
No problems with that procedure, then?
I won’t defend the use of homeschooling for the advancement of religion, but I’d like to raise a related point.
Parents that use homeschooling are trying to take a deeper responsibility in the cohesiveness of their families. Even if they thought the public education system would give their children the best education, they think that they would be removing themselves from a huge part of their childrens lives by sending them of to be educated for 12 years.
The parents are trying to propagate their cultural beliefs no differently than their own DNA. They want their grandchildren and great-grandchildren to be as close to them, culturally, as possible.
Once the parents go down the path of homeschooling, in accepting that great responsibility, they are in control – completely – of their childrens upbringing. For good or bad they can push their religious beliefs into the family very deeply.
I would have thought that the primary concern over home-schooling is not how it affects students’ scores on standardized tests, but rather how it affects the degree and range of interaction that students have with people from diverse walks of life — which, it seems likely, not only has implications for a student’s individual socialization, but also for his or her enculturation as a citizen in a democratic society.
It’s clear that this is all your and Dawkins’ fault, PZ. After all, atheists have an image problem because of you, so I’ve been told.
not only has implications for a student’s individual socialization, but also for his or her enculturation as a citizen in a democratic society.
True. Most homeschoolers have more contact daily with different ages and types of people, as they interact with the normal range of people they meet when doing normal and pertinent outside activities and also meeting with other families, than do public schoolers, who are restricted to contact with people their own age and a few adult caretakers in an artificial, sterile environment where their social activities are restricted and they are expected to sit at desks and follow bells for the entire day.
But your point was?
In regards to the insularity enforced by fundamentalist Christian education, those of you who have never been fundamentalists should know that this “separation from the world” is taken to, I think, a ridiculous level. I speak from experience. To introduce alternative ways and thoughts was to invite Satan to gain a foothold or stronghold in your life.
The other side of this phenomenon is that, sometimes, a tiny ray of the lights of reason and science may be all that’s really needed to deconvert a Christian.
If you want to deconvert your Christian acquaintances, show them that you have a loving, positive life outside of Christ. Be there for them when they do deconvert (they will need friends to comfort them when their Christian friends disavow them). They need to know that you will not abandon them once they turn away from God. Be patient. Sometimes alternative views take a while to sink in. Finally, be informative. It helps to know the Creation myth, as well as modern biology and cosmology, especially about ascertaining the age of the Universe, Earth, etc. If you can show, definitively, how the dates taken from the literal interpretation of Genesis cannot possibly be correct, you will probably bring them around on the rest of their religious system as well. The whole system rests on the Creation account.
Mike Kinsella, I congratulate you on your fabulous parody of over-enthusiastic boosters of America’s public schools.
I Googled “Reasons for Christian Homeschooling” and checked out the first ten results. Every single one of them had some statement similar to this (from result #1):
The standards of English composition seem generally rather poor to me on those sites. (Note, for example, the redundant “however” in the above quote.)
I could sit here and write a rebuttal for every point offered against home-schooling or for public schooling. And some of you could write rebuttals to my rebuttals. We could go ’round and ’round offering great rhetoric. But this isn’t really the right space for it. Besides, the last thing I feel like is trolling on Mr. Myers’ blog. Though I don’t always agree with him, he is an excellent advocate for biological science.
Instead, I make a challenge for both sides of this issue; study it! Analyze it, research it. Throw away anecdotal evidence; we’ve all known somebody who ________. Find studies, talk to people on both sides of the issue. The conclusions I came to may not be the ones you do, and vice versa.
One more thought – try to throw away preconceptions. We assume certain things are natural or necessary, just because we were raised that way. I assume if you’re reading this, you believe in the great advances that science has brought humanity. Many (if not most) of these were not because of what we assumed to be natural, but in direct contradiction to our instincts. When talking about any issue like this, the toughest step to get past is the assumption that something is right or wrong, just because that’s the it’s been done for ___________.
llewelly, though it may seem, or be, parody, I attended public school in the educational backwater that is Florida, and I had an eviable experience. Granted, my school district happened to be a rather well-off one (funny how the income of the district seems to corrolate to both the amount of taxes collected which are marked for education, and the quality of education provided, as determined by standardized test scores), but the underpaid instructors that graced the halls of my schools happened to impart enough education that my high-school was much better at turning out National Merit Scholars than all of the private high schools in the district combined.
The real question is “has our school system sold itself out to the ad agencies clamoring for the best and brightest, thereby screwing the average student out of a quality education.
Oh, and one more thought – in PZ’s original post, by Christian Home Schooling I assumed he meant christians who homeschool their children. I believe he meant the subset of those who homeschool for the sole purpose of indocrinating their children in christian values.
If he does mean the latter, then he is correct, but it seems pretty obvious; indoctrination in any ideology requires first the control of information. This is as true for raising Democrats or Republicans as it is for Christians and Muslims. For that matter, any Patriotism depends upon it every bit as much as Religion… Any subject not based upon undeniable empirical evidence requires it – and you’ll find those subjects to be few and far between.
It’s hypocritical on the information scrubbers’ part, too, and it reflects their deep insecurity. If they’d truly brought their children up in the genuine Christian faith (regardless of denomination), they would not have to worry about heathens like Dawkins ‘corrupting’ them.
These people make the world a scary place for their kids. If they were serious about their faith, they would consider themselves (and their children) filled with the Holy Spirit and nothing in Hell could touch them. It all goes to show what it’s really about – Power. Not God.
From post #11
…but from what I’ve seen, most teachers in the public schools are no more qualified to teach their subjects than parents are…
This is disheartening. Although I already possess two B.S degrees in science, and have worked over 20 career years in in applied science and technology, with a bit pure research thrown in, plus teaching at the college level — I believed my teaching credential advisor when he told me I still need another 20 units of science classes (in addition to my teaching theory classes and student teaching) to be certified to teach science in a California school. I should have told him “But I’m a parent! I am already more qualified than most teachers!” Gee, the time and money I could have saved.
One thing is certain.
If it had been a boook written by a non-militant atheist, it would have had the blessing of the school.
@speedwell:
Thanks for providing a demonstration of the phenomenon of framing that comes up now and again on this blog. By carefully choosing terms with positive and negative connotations, you’ve shown how one can make a claim seem substantive, without actually providing any reason to believe it. Of course, the problem with framing is that it works both ways: one might very well reframe the issue here by describing the environment of homeschoolers as ‘artificial’ and ‘sterile’. Looking past the connotations of these terms, it’s obvious that they merely serve a rhetorical function.
Whether or not most homeschoolers interact with people from a wider range of social and economic backgrounds than do most publicly schooled students is an empirical question that can’t be settled by rhetoric. Prima facie, it seems highly implausible to me that a child who is taught at home would, on average, interact with a wider variety of people than a child who is taught at a public school, given that public schools typically have several hundred students from a wide range of backgrounds, and homes don’t. Of course, I don’t know this for sure and if there’s any evidence to the contrary, I’d love to see it.
uh, PZ, we’re missing a few giant squid here in Seattle.
Can we have them back?
“…but from what I’ve seen, most teachers in the public schools are no more qualified to teach their subjects than parents are…”
Teacher content knowledge aside (and forgetting about skills per se), you may well be overgeneralizing from your peer group (after all, you’re commenting, fairly literately, on a science & atheism blog). IIRC, it’s been claimed that the average American adult reads on a middle-school level. I’m sure we’re all familiar with stats on U.S. science literacy (although I’m still hoping that the big chunk of folks who answered that the sun goes round the earth just got confused . . . .). It’s not unusual to see people who struggle with basic math – making change and suchlike, while I’m frankly too scared to look up studies on general history/geography knowledge.
“All Scripture is given by inspiration of God” from BT’s quote.
So these xians must also believe this from Revelations 2:
18″To the angel of the church in Thyatira write:
These are the words of the Son of God, whose eyes are like blazing fire and whose feet are like burnished bronze. 19I know your deeds, your love and faith, your service and perseverance, and that you are now doing more than you did at first. 20Nevertheless, I have this against you: You tolerate that woman Jezebel, who calls herself a prophetess. By her teaching she misleads my servants into sexual immorality and the eating of food sacrificed to idols.
21I have given her time to repent of her immorality, but she is unwilling. 22So I will cast her on a bed of suffering, and I will make those who commit adultery with her suffer intensely, unless they repent of her ways. 23I will strike her children dead. Then all the churches will know that I am he who searches hearts and minds, and I will repay each of you according to your deeds.
24Now I say to the rest of you in Thyatira, to you who do not hold to her teaching and have not learned Satan’s so-called deep secrets (I will not impose any other burden on you): 25Only hold on to what you have until I come. 26To him who overcomes and does my will to the end, I will give authority over the nations–
27’He will rule them with an iron scepter;
he will dash them to pieces like pottery'[b]– just as I have received authority from my Father. 28I will also give him the morning star. 29He who has an ear, let him hear what the Spirit says to the churches.”
So the prince of peace thinks that striking children dead is how to win hearts and minds. The “dashing to pieces” is a reference to psalms. “dashing”, including particularly children, is a favorite theme of the bible. But remember, it is “inspiration of God”.
Oops! You had to go and mention homeschooling. Now the rabble are choosing their sides and picking up rocks. Which tribe will utterly vanquish the other? Well, neither, this is the internet. But good sport to all of you. Now then, entertain me with blathering!
llewelly.
Sorry, no parody intended. Also sorry not to support your world-view, or perhaps, your experience with your own public schools. You suggest that I am merely an overenthusiastic booster of public schools. I assure you I meant every word, and it was from direct personal experience. Although there may be a lot to boost relative to the virtues of public schools, clearly your experience is different. Do you have a personal experience you would care to relate, rather than some sterile and lame dogma about what’s wrong with the public schools? My points were: 1) the environment in at least the one school with which I had personal experience was tremendous, and unlikely to be replicated in a small group; 2) Our public schools are asked, in addition to education, to provide multiple social support roles to a vast variety of students, some of whom, through poverty or lack of opportunity or lack of motivation, do not or cannot take advantage of that education. 3) I implied that such a broad range of students lead to, ON AVERAGE, underperformance on tests, relative to educational environments that can select their students, and do not have a broader social role to play. 4) And finally, I implied that the highest indicator of potential for exceptional scholastic achievement is parental involvement, and suggested that such a role, if carried out within the public schools, would tend to provide a wider benefit to the society. I also suggest that, no disrespect intended, if your local public school is lacking, that you get off your ass and make it better- I spent many hours focused on the academic environment at my local school, and I was one of many, many involved parents. I think it’s the most important public institution that we have. Although they are a long way from perfect, I also think that bailing, either for home-schooling or private schools should be a last resort, and a choice that supports elitism and xenophobia. But, like I said, my experience is limited to one high school, but it’s a hell of a lot better than the public high schools I attended 40 years ago.
My kids are planning to homeschool their kids–my grandchildren–so I’ve been doing a little reading about it. The largest group of home schoolers are the “christians” and the next largest group are secular counter-culturalists. Yessir, that’s my kids!
Based on what I’ve seen of public school elementary education, I’m all for it.
It’s always interesting how these discussions invariably focus on an implicit dichotomy between conventional campus-attendance public (or private) schools and parents-as-teachers setups.
Unfortunately, I can’t write much more on this topic; I have to go inform my college that my diploma is worthless, as the provider of the correspondance coursework I completed and the charter school I graduated from don’t exist. ;(
My thoughts on this: the issue is quite clear, and what PZ isn’t getting is that the separation of church and state applies loosely for church in the traditional sense, and strictly for church in the satanic sense. I.e., the following is a list of things that are ok to do:
Things that are not ok to do:
I hope this is now clear, I don’t see what the big misunderstanding is.
Someone should share this story with Richard Dawkins. Surely he’d get a kick out of it (in a manner of speaking).
You are so right. My parents sent me and my siblings along to all of the sunday school/christian scout/whatever activities that our friends at school were inviting us to even though I always knew they were atheists. Hell, they event sent us to private catholic school for three years. For the longest time I couldn’t understand it and I really hated going to those things sometimes. Now I see that it was a very well-calculated move.
Knowledge is dangerous to the religious. Without ignorance and indoctrination of children, they wither and die.
OEJ
I would offer that US public schooling is not so much bad as uneven. Its quality seems to correlate with the income level of the neighbourhood serviced. I am a Canadian who worked for four years in the Washington DC area along with some Brits, Aussies and Kiwis who were doing the same. We all lived in the Falls Church area of Arlington VA and were keen to have our kids attend the excellent local schools there, but we would have not allowed them to attend schools in many other lower income or inner city areas. In fact, school quality is the principle factor in housing choice for the Commonwealth families moving to these posts. Our concensus was that our home nation school systems were more (but not completely) level in good quality and that the US schools ranged from much better to much worse. The only real complaint was that the US schools focused too much on US history at the expense of a wider world view. The US schools are especially recommended for their sports and other non-academic programs.
Ironically, a US coworker, who was not receiving our lucrative foreign allowances, lived in a poorer sector of Maryland and was compelled to homeschool his kids because of the poor quality of his local schools. Since he is a fundie, he was well served by his local homeschool support group, which was fundie-based. Personally, I was dismayed by how ideologically compromised the educational material is. Of course, he had other choices, but it did not seem to be as readily available.
I live in a very conservative Christian county in Ohio. I’ve been trying to get Dawkins’ book at the library for a while and it is always checked out. And our public schools pass out invitations to Christian events.
I am an atheist who “homeschools”. I do believe that my daughters will receive a better education from me than by our public schools. I think it depends on the parents and their committment to their children’s education. Some kids will obviously fair better attending public schools. Some kids do not have a love of learning, or a natural curiousity about their world, or it is not nurtured and therefore lost. As a parent, I try to do what I think is best for my children. My oldest child was utterly bored in school. Her teacher told me she was two to three years ahead of her classmates, even though she was a year younger than them. We chose homeschooling as an alternative to private school. We were not able to afford the tuition of the local Montesorri school, and so we homeschool. We are a dedicated family, and for us it works.
This is a reply to a letter that I sent recently to my local newspaper,it comes from a “home schooled”young
Xtian boy.
Published Tuesday, July 3, 2007
Creation vs. Evolution
On June 26, Jonathan P. Smith wrote that divine creation is incorrect, and that the only “true” science supports evolution [“Biblical Creation Museum,” letter]. Well, this is untrue.
I am a 16-year-old, home-schooled student, and I have been blessed to have been put in a godly family that has taught me the truth about creation and evolution. This along with common sense and personal research have led me to the conclusion that the world was created in six 24-hour days by the Lord God Almighty and not by evolution as many “scientists” believe.
Mr. Smith said the theory of theistic evolution is a false hypothesis. He is completely right – this was invented by conformist, spineless “Christians” who wanted to say they were “Christians” while still conforming to the secular scientists.
Mr. Smith says that evolution, or as he calls it, science, has never required any religious or ideological system for its advancement. He is wrong. Evolution is a religion itself because it requires blind faith. It is the God of those who want no God to be held accountable to, who wish to act as they please and have no reason to be held accountable. Mr. Smith also says that religion has over the years conceded to “science.” However, the science that they have conceded to is merely propaganda and falsehoods.
Mr. Smith asks us to reply to his letter with “empirical” evidence of creation. Well, Mr. Smith, the only being that would be able to provide empirical evidence (able to be seen, heard, felt, experienced) of the beginning of the world would have to be an eternal being, which the godless “scientists” supporting evolution claim doesn’t exist.
Therefore, no one can provide empirical evidence for either side. What can be provided is this: For something to exist, it has to be created. Even if the false religion of evolution is true, where did the first cell or atom, or chemical, that everything evolved from come from? The only way to explain this is a divine, eternal, supernatural being.
His parents have done a great job don’t you think?
I’m afraid speedwell has us there. I well remember that my public high school experience went like this:
*bell rings*
Start of the day, I wake up.
*bell rings*
Now I have to go brush my teeth. After five minutes…
*bell rings*
Now I sit down to breakfast.
*bell rings*
Now I rush off to school, where I have no interaction with anyone save my adult minders. During the lunch break, we take our lunches in regimented lines in the cafeteria, not allowed to look left, right, or up from our food nor talk to anyone. Not to mention, there’s no hope of any conversations in the context of a class. That would just be too inconceivable!
*bell rings*
Now I’m off school. I go home, neither looking left nor right nor talking to anyone, as ever. In order to better commit ourselves to the regimentation of students’ daily lives, and foster a complete lack of interaction, there are no afterschool programs of any sort. My experience an offensive linesman on the school football team, in a drama club as well as drama class where we worked afterschool to put on our plays, etc. are completely the invention of my overactive imagination.
*bell rings*
Now I start working on homework
*bell rings*
Dinner time
*bell rings*
Now I have my free time, as long as I’m not conversing with anyone, even my parents. In fact, television is not really allowed either, since by the drama we might get even a faint glimpse of how people interact with one another. Instead, I read. But I can’t read anything too realistic either, so sharply observed psychodramas like James’ The Golden Bowl are out of the question. Instead, I mainly just read Chick tracts and the telephone book.
*bell rings*
Brush teeth again.
*bell rings*
Sleep.
Of course on the weekends I had no choice but to hibernate.
And thank you for bringing up such a painful subject. Ah, the bells! the bells!
This is a serious question…
Are there any movers and shakers, Nobel prize winners, people renowned in their field, etc. in the last 50 years who were home schooled for the bulk of their education prior to entering university/college?
The discussion about home schooling is interesting to me, and I read the reports that someone posted early on that suggest that home-schooled children have better performance. However, my own (limited) experience at university would indicate that not very many of these high-performing home-schooled youths go to university… that is to say, I’ve never met one. In my professional career, to the best of my knowledge, I’ve never met one either, although to be fair I have to admit it’s not a huge topic of conversation.
So what becomes of these home-schooled geniuses? Do they just give up after their GED, or is there a cabal of home-schooled folks leading the world?
The Hartman-McKean-Skitt Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation states that any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror.
To wit: Kudos is singular, not plural, so it doesn’t follow the stupid English spelling rule that most words that end in -o have a pointless -e- inserted between that and the plural ending -s. Conversely, Messieurs is the plural of Monsieur, not a singular.
Are you afraid of “the public school environment”?
The Hartman-McKean-Skitt Law of Prescriptivist Retaliation states that any article or statement about correct grammar, punctuation, or spelling is bound to contain at least one eror.
To wit: Kudos is singular, not plural, so it doesn’t follow the stupid English spelling rule that most words that end in -o have a pointless -e- inserted between that and the plural ending -s. Conversely, Messieurs is the plural of Monsieur, not a singular.
Are you afraid of “the public school environment”?
It can’t be the world, because homeschooling is simply illegal in AFAIK most of it, even though private schools (religious and otherwise) do exist in many countries.
It can’t be the world, because homeschooling is simply illegal in AFAIK most of it, even though private schools (religious and otherwise) do exist in many countries.
Certainly some people have had excellent experiences with US public schools.
Some people also have relatives that smoked three packs a day, drank like a fish, and lived to be 106.
Anecdotes are not data. The data shows that quite a few Second- and Third-World countries’ schools do better than we do on science and math. Quite frankly, I don’t think that the people who enthusiastic about ‘fixing’ the US system have any idea about how to actually bring it about, or it probably would have been done by now.
Americans, as a society, simply don’t care about education. We don’t value it, we don’t give it the resources it needs, we don’t want to take the time and thought required to see that our children do well.
And the debate rages on.
Oh? According to whom?
Read this.
Slightly OT but so is homeschooling. This is something I’ve noticed about fundie cultists. They claim the bible is infallible and then quote mine and misrepresent it so it is actually twisted 180 degrees. The above from revelations is an example.
Rev. (who is claiming to channel Jesus) addresses himself to a church in Thyatria (a city somewhere I guess) about a prophetess called Jezebel. He isn’t happy and is going to kill her and her followers.
Meanings pretty plain isn’t it. If you lived ca. 2,000 years ago and were a Jezebelian, some guy claiming to channel Jesus just threatened to kill you and your kids. Seems like ancient history now. If you aren’t living 2 millenia ago in Thyatira and a Jezebelian, why should you care?
It also appears to have been wrong. The good guys from Thyatira will “I will give authority over the nations-…rule them with an iron scepter;…he will dash them to pieces like pottery’… give him the morning star…” Supposedly the good guys will rule the earth and destroy all the nation states and venus got thrown in as a lagniappe. Well OK, I’m not aware that the good Thyatirians ended up ruling the earth, destroying all the nation states, and owning Venus. Really, Thyatira, seems to have sunk into obscurity millenia ago.
Sounds like idle threats and empty promises from a kook. My mainstream protestant church always ignored revelations. Probably because no one could make any sense out of it.
I suppose one could take it as metaphor, symbolism, or allegory but then it isn’t literal, is it?
Nevertheless, people do it in the “advanced” western world, and if, as the studies above show, it produces a better educated child, then surely over the last half-century, some of these advantaged children must have gone on to great things? Even if they didn’t go to university, did they advance any fields? We’re talking, literally, about thousands, or millions of children who have been home-schooled over the period of time.
I suppose what I’m getting at is that if home-schooling is so much better than the public system, it should be able to show its accomplishments. However, a superficial glance seems to indicate that it does not show that the products of that kind of schooling are advantaged in any obvious way over children who go through more formal schooling.
Maybe home-schooled kids do better on the standardized tests, but is that because they know the material better, or because they’ve been educated directly to prepare for such a test? You can train a person to pass an exam for an amateur radio licence, for example, and when they’re done they’ll have the licence and still not know anything about electronics (the primary subject of the exam).
I went to a small university. In that time, about 500 students attended during the 4 years I was there. To the best of my knowledge, none of them were home schooled. It would seem to me that if, as the studies suggest, home-schooled children are academically advantaged, they should make up a significant part of post-secondary enrollment.
So what I am trying to get at is: Where are they? What becomes of these home-schooled children? If they’re advantaged, where is their mark on the world? If they’re disadvantaged, why is it tolerated by society (apparently it isn’t in many places) since society as a whole ends up paying when uneducated bumpkins are produced?
It seems to me that it should be a simple matter for proponents of home-schooling to stand up and point to their numerous accomplishments.
Home schooled kids do seem to have an advantage in student teacher ratio.
I can imagine that that would be significant in the early grades.
Once the material exceeds the capability of the parents, I’d expect the advantage to diminish.
This homeschooling controversy is a little silly.
If it is done right by motivated parents who actually teach the required subjects, the result is at least equivalent to the schools.
If it is done as part of a brainwashing op by ignorant parents, the result is what you would expect.
I’ve only known a few and they were new age counter culture types. The kids were reasonably educated and went to college eventually but socially awkward, probably because they didn’t interact with the masses of kids in high school.
I have no idea why people who know nothing about homeschooling seem to think that we do it all from our memories. Afterall, parents aren’t qualified, blah, blah, blah. Guess what? We actual use these things called textbooks. They’re AMAZING! Printed words that contain things like math and history and science experiments. Must be the same people who think homeschooled kids are chained to the pipes in the crawlspace instead of being, “socialized.”
Look, I took a vow when I moved down here and attended my first Florida high school, NO kid of mine will go to a Florida public school. They are years behind and simply not good enough. I’m sure they’re just peachy for anyone who never wants to leave the state, but I’d rather my boy have options.
“…Some kids will obviously fair better attending public schools….”
Fare better.
Maybe you will have a post on July 4th, but here is my precocious contribution. Thomas Jefferson on the 50ieth 4th.
“May it be to the world, what I believe it will be, (to some parts sooner, to others later, but finally to all,) the signal of arousing men to burst the chains under which monkish ignorance and superstition had persuaded them to bind themselves, and to assume the blessings and security of self-government. That form which we have substituted, restores the free right to the unbounded exercise of reason and freedom of opinion. All eyes are opened, or opening, to the rights of man.
The general spread of the light of science has already laid open to every view the palpable truth, that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them legitimately, by the grace of God. These are grounds of hope for others. For ourselves, let the annual return of this day forever refresh our recollections of these rights, and an undiminished devotion to them.”
Another quote from my link below.
“If we did a good act merely from the love of God and a belief that it is pleasing to Him, whence arises the morality of the Atheist? It is idle to say, as some do, that no such thing exists. We have the same evidence of the fact as of most of those we act on, to wit: their own affirmations, and their reasoning in support of them. I have observed, indeed, generally, that while in Protestant countries the defections from the Platonic Christianity of the priests is to Deism, in Catholic countries they are to Atheism. Diderot, D’Alembert, D’Holbach, Condorcet, are known to have been among the most virtuous of men. Their virtue then, must have had some other foundation than the love of God.”
http://www.counterpunch.org/brenner07042003.html
Jefferson seemed to rather like the Frenchies.
Why do so many home-school advocates use sweeping generalizations in that home-schooled kids are always better off than the uniformly horrible public schools? We have two kids going to public schools and they are advancing quite nicely. I don’t see any reason why I should attempt to home school them.
Well said Cal…
I completely agree with your statement. In some ways this country reveres much more celebrity and athleticism over knowledge and intelligence. It’s pathetic and absurd.
We sure do have lots of nice air craft carriers and submarines though.
Caledonian:
I can’t support my opinion with much more than my own observations, but generally speaking, I agree. The degree of committment varies from location to location, however. The residents of my home town regularly voted for budget overrides to fund the public schools – in other words, the taxpayers put their money where their mouths were. I recognize that my experience is probably in the minority.
The mediocre state of public education is caused, in part, by the failure of The Market to accurately determine its value, and a not completely unrelated failure of the citizenry to comprehend its importance. That’s my opinion, FWLIW.
Re: Intellectual immune systems
The 19-year-old daughter of an atheist friend of mine has recently become a Christian. I suggested to him that while this must be disappointing for him, to look on the bright side, at least it is evident that he has taught her to think for herself, and not just blindly follow her dad’s lead.
Re: Homeschooling and “leadership”:
Certainly, intelligent kids from disadvantaged backgrounds can benefit greatly from public schooling. However, most of the homeschooled kids with whom I am familiar are highly intelligent kids who were at risk for dropping out of (or being miserable at) conventional group school, as a result of social, emotional and/or learning style issues. In theory, the public school system should be able to address these issues. In they case of my kids, they were not doing so. As a parent, there is only so much I could do to fight to fix the system while my child waited in the background, so I opted instead to re-direct my energies to home-schooling. The vast majority of people who make worthwhile contributions to society are *not* highly visible “movers and shakers” and/or Nobel laureates. On the other hand, I think a child who gets beaten up and teased every day at school is not likely to grow up with good feelings about contributing to the welfare of his/her fellow human beings, and a child who is very bright but alternately bored and overwhelmed by school tasks is less likely to voluntarily seek further education. (For the record, both of my kids were homeschooled for part of highschool, and they are both now excelling in post-secondary school.)
Re: Socialization and bells
Agreed that kids need to learn social skills, but I assert that for many kids, being in a minimally supervised, age-segregated, artificial environment is not an effective way to teach this. Much of the behaviour that is considered acceptable in public schools needs to be un-learned by kids/teens before they can become functional members of society.
So all it takes to be a competent teacher is to have a texbook at hand? That’s very interesting.
The anecdotal, um, evidence presented in this and in similar threads lead me to conclude the following:
1. Homeschooling, when done well, has the potential to produce students who can perform at a higher level than students typically produced by the public schools.
2. Homeschooling, when done poorly, has the potential to produce students who perform abysmally in both the academic and social spheres.
3. Cases of the latter outnumber (and outweigh) the former.
4. Blanket generalizations about the clear superiority or inferiority of homeschooling are useless.
I’m a university English professor & over my 25 years of teaching, I’ve had several home-schooled students, both the Christianist sort & the woo-woo New Age sort. Their abilities varied, but they shared one characteristic: solipsism. They all thought the sun shown out of their assholes.
There ought to be an award for people like Reed who stand up to the religious bullies of this country.
He deserves recognition and thanks from all of us.
Way to go, Reed!
I find it extremely disturbing that loaning a book on school grounds got him into so much trouble.
This country is fucked up.
David M: I saw what you did there. =)
On more than one occasion, I loaned a high-school friend or classmate a book which, taken philosophically, was at least as subversive as The God Delusion. This was back in the day before we had popularized books devoted to pointing out the godlessness of science — we Old New Atheists had to figure it out ourselves — but none of my Asimov paperbacks offered supernatural explanations for the natural world.
Have a safe and happy Independence Day, everybody.
Indeed. I spent nearly my whole twelve years in public schools begging my parents to homeschool me. By high school, the effects of “socialization” basically amounted to a deep resentment of almost everyone I knew, students and teachers alike. Meanwhile, my boyfriend, who went to boarding school and prep school, is just as touchy-feely as the proponents of public education here about learning to get along with people from different backgrounds in the wonderful American public education system.
ISTM that the most obvious advantage of homeschooling is class size. You get to go over something until the whole class gets it.
As a high school science teacher, I can attest to the fact that many teachers, even “qualified” science teachers don’t know much science, but that appears not to matter much considering that most of the homeschooling parents don’t either.
As to why parents would commit to the enormous effort of homeschooling, we can only ask them. Unfortunately, people say what they think they should say in surveys, not what they truly believe. Do you really think someone is going to admit that they are homeschooling so their kids won’t find out the Earth isn’t flat? No, they will talk about safety, “values,” and maybe those ever-so-important spelling bees.
Did I mention class size. It’s the single best explanation I can see for how a heterogeneous group of home schoolers could come up with such impressive results.
Of course it might help that there isn’t much real science on the standardized tests they do so well on.
Also, from a site on homeschooling at
http://www.chec.org/Legislative/News/HomeschoolingStatistics/Index.html
posted by an earlier commenter, I couldn’t resist this quote:
“All education is religious in the sense that it is rooted in basic presuppositions concerning God’s existence, origins, purpose of life, the nature of man, and so on.”
Arrrghh!
And did I mention class size?
So, 60-some-odd comments about homeschooling, and a handful about the actual topic of PZ’s post? Tell you what — let’s really get this comment thread going: Abortion! Political correctness! Circumcision! Guns! Picard! Microsoft! Israel! Boxers! The music industry!
There. Now everybody get out your hobbyhorse and mount up.
Anyway, PZ’s post is yet more evidence for my thesis that there are only four words you need to say to be accused of being a militant atheist out to destroy religious faith. Those four words are: “I am an atheist.”
Let’s not overestimate the complexity of the subjects that need to be taught, either. The majority of things we learn in school – and given how little of what we learn in schools is actually remembered, probably the vast majority of things we retain – is rudimentary data.
It doesn’t take a Masters degree to understand and teach basic points of grammar and spelling. Nor arithmetic or algebra. Nor anything taught in science classes before 7th grade or so.
Relatively few people take more advanced subjects like calculus, chemistry, modern physics, or the various “liberal arts” subjects that are nice but generally of no practical value.
Most teaching just doesn’t require intensive education to accomplish, at least in terms of understanding the material to be taught. Knowing how to teach is something else – and has nothing to do with having an education degree.
Having a degree isn’t magic. Higher education isn’t magic. Education in general isn’t magic. The obsession with the educational process has gone way, way too far.
Yes George (#70), it is disturbing. Profoundly.
K from Florida (#61): Don’t get me wrong, I admire your committment to your children, but the statement that “people who know nothing about homeschooling seem to think that we do it all from our memories” was a strawman begging to be whacked. First, I haven’t noticed anyone making the assertion that homeschool parents teach from memory. Second, though it seems obvious, apparently it does need to be said that simply teaching from a book does not make one a qualified or competent teacher.
Your defensiveness is understandable and not unfounded, but there are better ways to argue your case.
Anyway, I refer you back to my earlier post (#56) and the link contained therein, if you’d like to catch a glimpse of homeschool parents who are NOT like you. There are more than enough of them to go around. :-|
Parenting isn’t magic, but we all know how ridiculously easy it is to fuck it up.
OK, I think we need to need some better data on the public school/home school controversy.
We need a family with a statistically significant number of children (let us say six). They divide the children in two groups. Three are home schooled, three are public schooled. The parents are required to put as much effort into both groups — devoting the same time and resources they put into the home schooled children into the public school children. This means searching out the best curriculum (transferring their children as allowed under NCLB to better performing public school if necessary), and contributing the same $ to the public school as the spend on the home school material.
After 12 years we evaluate the education the children have received using the following criteria:
Academics:
Years of mathematics including advanced calculus.
Years of physics and chemistry.
Years of biology.
Years of English, including comparative literature.
Years of foreign language, including conversational skills and literature analysis.
The above should include one class taught at the college level and be eligible for college credit.
Years of organized team sports, with leadership training.
Years of formal music education, including theory and performance.
Years of computer science (programming and theory).
Years of electives including journalism, photography, electronics, art,drama, etc.
All of the above verified by numerous standardized tests and performance evaluations.
Social Development:
Years of experience in a culturally rich environment population that reflects the the ethnic, sexual, and political makeup of the United States.
The results of this research should give us a better idea of the effectiveness of each education pathway.
The results of this research should give us a better idea of the effectiveness of each education pathway.
Because your somewhat arbitrary criteria are effective for each and every student, rather than “students as a whole,” naturally. No individuals allowed, I guess. No allowing for individual talents and interests, just one-size-fits-all shoehorning into your special idea of what constitutes “quality.”
Looks to me like you want education for its own sweet sake, cramming some sort of curriculum based on your own precious goals, rather than targeted education toward what the other person would actually like to do later in life. When adults learn, they don’t try to cram their heads full of irrelevant crap on the off chance they might want it later (even if they can manage to remember it later). They go after the knowledge they want when they want it. Nobody’s grading our attendance and participation on this blog. There’s no quiz later.
Learning does not start and end with school, and the individual’s right to change their mind about their goals and get further education does not stop at graduation. The public schools are terrible (by design) at teaching people to seek education on their own, and they’re typically terrible at preparing people for specific careers. Homeschooling offers the highest potential for customizing education to the needs of the individual student. Any homeschooling parents who fail to take full advantage of this strength are idiots.
(Oh, nullifidian, the bells in school always drove me crazy. Fifty minute classes. I never got a change to truly immerse myself in anything, hardly even got to finish anything, before the bell rang and jolted me rather violently out of whatever I was trying to do. Your fun little straw man exercise didn’t squelch me or fool anyone else.)
HP – Picard. Clearly.
Re: textbooks. I had looked into homeschooling and asked the St. Paul Public schools for references to libraries that cater to homeschooling parents. They told me to go to the library at one of the local churches, one that has a large library of homeschool textbooks. Guess what? The selecion absolutely sucked!
Did you know that there are textbooks that teach Christian Geometry? Of course, other than the intro which urged students to learn the glory of god’s gift of mathematics, it was standard, but even though it touched on god, there was some actual geometry. In my opinion it was two years behind the recommended grade level.
I had a hard time finding good textbooks on Geography, Biology, Chemistry or history. I decided, no, the kids needed to go to public school.
As to the original topic, it amazes me how people either fail or refuse to understand the establishment or free exercise clauses of the 1st Amendment. The principal of all people should know that a student of a school is not an instrument of the government and is not intruding on anybody’s rights by sharing a book.
I find it rather interesting, the people making rather strong assertions for or against both public schools and home schooling. Heres a thought, it all depends on the circumstances. Some home schooled kids get a great education, some get an abysmal one. Some public schools are phenominal, some are absolutely horrible.
For the record, I wouldn’t send my kid to our local public school is someone paid me to do so. Thankfully, we managed to get him into a charter school with a reasonable student/teacher ratio, for kindergarten, which he starts in the fall. Even so, we will be doing a fair amount of homeschooling on the side, as his school doesn’t focus on things that he wants to learn about. Of course we have been doing it all along. At five, he already reads at a second grade level, understands very basic cosmology, can make up reasonable stories that include an introduction of conflict, escalation to a climax and resolution, understands basic math and has a better fundamental understanding of evolution than most high school graduates.
Whether a child is homeschooled or goes to school, the odds of their success rise in conjunction with their parent’s involvement in and commitment to, their education.
Speedwell wrote in #80
…somewhat arbitrary criteria are effective for each and every student, rather than “students as a whole…
How can you find the curriculum most requested by today’s mainstream colleges “arbitrary”? Are you saying that our entire secondary and post-secondary education standards should be replaced by some in-articulated curriculum you personally have devised? (This seems very arbitrary to me, and seems to reflect your own “precious goals”). Would modern scientific research facilities prefer students who were educated by varying home-school standards, or students who had been educated using the same proven classroom and laboratory methodologies that they themselves have successfully practiced?
..when adults learn, they don’t try to cram their heads full of irrelevant crap on the off chance they might want it later (even if they can manage to remember it later…
I would love to see a supporting argument offering specifics as to why advanced mathematics, physics, chemistry, literature, music etc are “irrelevant crap”.
It seems to me that home school community in general has some personal issues involving education that wish to avoid confronting, choosing instead to engage in a blanket condemnation of the public school system.
If you can’t use it to keep a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and food in your stomach, it’s a luxury.
Things like literature, music, and theater are important, but they’re not essential. We can’t even get the essentials right. Why are we concerning ourselves with luxuries when the necessities aren’t being met?
I often visit a town about 40 minutes away from where this young man lives. It is ominously called Christiansburg. Someone had a sense of humor and the high school nickname is the Christiansburg Demons. A few years back some people (Fundie Xians) objected that the name “Demons” advocated the practice of Wicca and that was a violation of the Establishment Clause. I bet you can guess what they wanted the new mascots to be.
Yes – the Angels. Fortunately they did not get their way.
I always thought so, too. When I was in the USAF, I spent six years working in the education office, which concerns itself with both professional military education (PME) which is mandatory for everyone, enlisted and commissioned alike, as well as post-secondary off-duty education. Because of PME, I had to deal with most, if not all of the commissioned officers on base. The caliber of many of these individuals led me to the conclusion that nearly any motivated person with enough ready cash (or ability to get a loan) could purchase a post-secondary degree.
For that reason, I resisted going to college for years after my discharge, but changed my tune when I learned that there was indeed “magic” in getting that sheepskin. The magic, of course, resided in the attitudes of the people who believe in it, namely, (in my case) too many prospective employers.
Fast forward to my early/mid thirties after reluctantly enrolling in a “mid-level commuter school” (according to a magazine which ranked such things, it was actually George Mason U) in VA. To my surprise, I absolutely LOVE College! This is because I am being exposed to people (both professors and students) who are passionate about their subjects and education in general. What a blast! Magic, indeed.
Fifteen years later, I am stalled in my educational endeavors, what with a marriage and home purchase, but I look forward to the time that I’ll have the money and time to complete my degree.
So, I have to disagree with the first part of that quote and maintain partial/conditional agreement with the second part.
Sorry for not being clear: they do it in the USA. I’m not aware of any other country where it is allowed, and even in the USA it was only made legal when the hippies insisted on it. Because I have nowhere near comprehensive knowledge on the geographic distribution of education laws, I made sure to be vague enough.
Caledonian will probably say that in the average EU country the public schools are better than in the USA. That’s probably true, though the general attitude may not be so different: over here, too, “brainer” is among the worst insults kids hurl at each other.
I’m not so sure about that. I got the opposite reaction from being teased every day for the first 9 or so years (out of 12).
Not my idea. I copied and pasted the whole sentence, including “eror”, from a Language Log post or something; you can google for it (except it might have slashes instead of hyphens). Good ideas are usually stolen. :-)
But thanks for bringing it up — it leads me to the next point:
In the unlikely case you actually mean “understand” by “understand”, and in the likely case that you mean English spelling, that does take a major amount of work.
Sorry for not being clear: they do it in the USA. I’m not aware of any other country where it is allowed, and even in the USA it was only made legal when the hippies insisted on it. Because I have nowhere near comprehensive knowledge on the geographic distribution of education laws, I made sure to be vague enough.
Caledonian will probably say that in the average EU country the public schools are better than in the USA. That’s probably true, though the general attitude may not be so different: over here, too, “brainer” is among the worst insults kids hurl at each other.
I’m not so sure about that. I got the opposite reaction from being teased every day for the first 9 or so years (out of 12).
Not my idea. I copied and pasted the whole sentence, including “eror”, from a Language Log post or something; you can google for it (except it might have slashes instead of hyphens). Good ideas are usually stolen. :-)
But thanks for bringing it up — it leads me to the next point:
In the unlikely case you actually mean “understand” by “understand”, and in the likely case that you mean English spelling, that does take a major amount of work.
Caledonian (#76)
“It doesn’t take a Masters degree to understand and teach…. anything taught in science classes before 7th grade or so.”
Again, as a high school teacher, one of the hardest things we have to contend with is the things kids were told in elementary school that are just plain wrong. Human nature seems to predispose children to believe what they are told early by a trusted adult. Obviously an adaptive trait if the adults know what they are talking about, but I would be willing to bet that some of my students could be standing on the Moon and still say the moon has no gravity, they could watch as blood is withdrawn from a vein and tell you that the brownish-red liquid in front of them is blue, that the way to tell that a whale is a mammal is that it breathes air…..
The thing kids need to learn early about science is the habit of analytical thinking, relying on evidence, respectful questioning of what has gone before. Those are the very things they most definitely will not get in a fundamentalist environment. (I know, because my brother home schools his kids- well, his wife does. They think it is “wickedness” for a child to point out that the parent is wrong.)
I’m not aware of any other country where it is allowed
It is allowed in Australia, Canada, the UK, Ireland, NZ and most (all?) of the EU except Germany ….
I homeschool both of my kids and they’re both academically ahead. I think homeschooling is like public school in the fact that it takes a dedicated teacher to get good results out of a child. Many children have failed at school under the tutelage of a bad teacher and many kids who are homeschooled have fared badly with an inadequate parent. There’s no one rule.
My kids experience works because of the class size, (there’s only 2 kids to teach) and the amount of one on one tutoring I can provide. There was a study a few years ago that stated that the average public school student received but 3 minutes of a teachers individual attention per lesson. How can they compete with hours a day of one on one instruction?
The other advantage I have is money, I throw tons of money at my kids education, they have up to date computers and are members of an online interactive school, (quite aside from the text books they learn from) and I’m always researching and hunting down the best curriculum. I pay for outside lessons for things such as music, sports and languages.
I tend not to mix with the homeschool community in general because I always end up in an argument with Christian Fundamentalists.
One of my sons has Aspergers Syndrome, he spent 6 weeks in a private kindergarten ($6000 a year) where he had hell bullied out of him everyday – by kindergarteners!
I made the choice to homeschool then and there – increasingly I meet parents who are pulling their kids out for similar reasons.
It’s one thing to send your kid to public school for a “well rounded” education, but if you have a kid who’s also up for a “well rounded” beating everyday – it cancels out any positive effects that public schooling might have.
As an English and classical piano major whose partner is a professional, degreed artist, I’m the last person to characterize the arts as extraneous, so knock off the knee-jerk characterization of me as some sort of uncultured redneck, eh?
I was a choir and literary magazine nerd in high school, who took biology for fun. I didn’t bother with physics and calculus at the advice of my advisor, which didn’t hampoer me in the least until a few years ago when I set my heart on becoming a mechanical engineer. (Life is a funny thing.) Sure, I can handle the math and stuff. But if I had become a church choir director like I intended in the first place, I would be out of a job anyway because I’m an atheist.
People change and needs change, and I’ll be getting up to speed on the calculus and physics I wouldn’t otherwise have needed. It’s easier now anyway that I can “homeschool” myself. I can do that, you know, despite not being a qualified math and science teacher. I have a little tool called the Internet to help me. (And so do homeschooling parents.)
While I’m on the subject, I want to thank all of you who are math and science bloggers for helping me out, directly or indirectly. You are all contributing massively to the self-directed education of the people who most want to know what you have to say.
HP: “…there are only four words you need to say to be accused of being a militant atheist out to destroy religious faith. Those four words are: ‘I am an atheist.'”
Similarly, to this atheist homeschooler it seems that there are only four words you need to say to be accused of being a wacko (hippie or fundy) homeschooler out to destroy the public schools: “I am a homeschooler.”
Why I homeschool has nothing to do with whether homeschooling in general is a good idea or produces good results. It has everything to do with what makes the people in my family feel like we’re spending our lives (as nearly as possibly) the way we should.
While I dislike trying to explain “why I homeschool,” or even mentioning that I’m a homeschooler (for the above reason), I do feel a need to speak up when people imply that my primary occupation and my family’s lifestyle should be abolished. And all for an irrational fear about a coming wave of brainwashed homeschooled fundy zombies who are going to — um, what is it we’re afraid of again?
I’m sick of all the anecdotal evidence, stereotypes, baseless predictions, and doomsday rhetoric. Can we please get back to educating and enlightening the public with science, facts, and clear thinking?
“The mediocre state of public education is caused, in part, by the failure of The Market to accurately determine its value,”
What utter nonsense. A service is monopolized by a government-backed cartel, and you claim that this is a failure of the market?
The market is doing a very fine job of providing alternatives to the mediocre schools that we’re all forced to pay for.
-jcr
Mommyrex,
The reason that you and other home schoolers are routinely vilified, is that you are a threat to a very powerful special-interest group. The NEA and the politicians know damned well that they’ve botched the schools, and they’re terrified of more and more parents refusing to hand their kids over to them to have years of their lives wasted in pointless tedium.
What really makes me sick is the way that they demand more funding as the remedy to their own incompetence, while fighting tooth and nail against accountability. The fact is that the USA already outspends Germany and Japan per capita on schooling, and we simply aren’t getting what we pay for.
I’m very fortunate that my own primary education happened mostly outside of the USA. My high school years would have been a complete waste of time, were it not for my mentors at the best summer job I ever had.
-jcr
jcr,
I’m sure the NEA works against homeschooling, but I doubt the NEA is the primary reason so many people oppose homeschooling. The homeschooling movement has its own anti-school voices that encourage people to take extreme sides as well. I’m not happy with anyone who spouts ideas about other people’s motivations and effects without convincing evidence.
I think most people mean well and want to provide a good education and broad experience to kids who might not otherwise get it. I don’t think risks and benefits are being measured objectively on either side, and people are easy prey to this “with us or agin’ us” rhetoric.
Things like literature, music, and theater are important, but they’re not essential.
Zombies are undead who eat human flesh. You don’t barbecue people,…do you? Just a joke.
Homeschooling can be good or bad depending on whether it is done competently or not. As to worrying about a wave of homeschooled, brainwashed fundie zombies, what is there to worry about? They are already here.
If you can’t use it to keep a roof over your head, clothes on your back, and food in your stomach, it’s a luxury.
Things like literature, music, and theater are important, but they’re not essential.
except to musicians, writers, and actors.
more extreme position yanking, eh Cal?
whee!
OTOH, it did produce the very amusing retort from Ken Cope.
Creating a curriculum based on what a single individual wants to do is the very definition of an arbitrary curriculum.
One of the best arguments against homeschooling (at least in America) is the peculiarly American tendency to treat all forms of education, even university education, as if they’re some glorified form of vocational schooling. Here we have the argument that the standard school curriculum ignores what a person would like to do later on in their life, and this is being offered up as a defense of homeschooling. But the conception of homeschooling encompasses every age in which the child would be at school. Are we to create specialized curricula for six year-olds based on what they would like to do later in their life? If so, we’re going to have a lot of specialized training out there for astronauts, presidents, firefighters, and not so much for the claims adjustor or the mortician.
Plus, even in post-secondary education, students change their majors three times on average. If they cannot figure out what they want to do with their lives in their twenties, it’s absurd to think that a pre-teen will have a better grasp.
And in order to determine if something is irrelevant, we have to start with an unshakeable idea about what the child will be doing. If one has determined one’s child will be a fry cook, then there is no need for studying rhetoric, literature, complex mathematics, sciences, etc. It is, in short, an effective way of turning out Stepford children, molded out of the wants of their parents rather than their own inclination (which is as great as the breadth of their education allows).
I’m glad you mentioned this, because you forget it before the post is finished.
And this is an argument for your vocational-school model of homeschooling…how?
It seems to me that much of my education in public schools from elementary school onwards was about how to use a public library and other resources for education. This was reinforced by projects and papers which were supposed to be based on original research not done out of one’s textbook. I’d be amazed to learn how this is not teaching people to seek education on their own.
And I can’t get a good tempeh-based vegetarian dinner at the local steakhouse. Public schools still are not vocational schools, and this is a good thing despite the public perception in America that they should be so.
Well, then homeschooling is being done by idiots in my experience, because I’ve never seen it be about what the needs of the student are, but rather what the whims, preconceptions, and comforts of the parent are.
So much for the idea that education doesn’t stop outside the school, then. Couldn’t you have immersed yourself in something on your own time, if you found the fifty-minute class period so galling?
I would never want to squelch you–you’re too amusing. And as far as it being a strawman, I wasn’t the person who claimed that the experience of the public school student with bells lasted all day and that his or her sole interactions were with an age-segregated group and their adult minders. All I did was illustrate the strawman nature of what you were claiming was the case for students at public schools. That makes it a reductio, not a strawman.
Here is some homeschooling suggestions for xians.
http://www.visionforum.com/booksandmedia/
You get gender stereotypes like “Inspire young men to be courageous” and “Encourage young ladies to be virtuous”.
“Science” is there too with “Incredible creatures that defy evolution” and “God of creation”. A particularly odd one is about blood circulation:
“In Red River of Life, you’ll see what makes your blood, your lifeline, carry its precious cargo of oxygen to every corner of your body. More importantly, you’ll learn how the shed blood of Jesus Christ is the source of life in the Spirit.”
There is much more inanity at the site. Notice the gender stereotypes in their products for girls and boys. Girls get dresses, aprons, and sewing material. Boys get weapons and soldier outfits of all sorts.
It’s almost not surprising that people would think it easy to teach given the examples they see in the news -it was just in the paper today that the Missouri state legislature passed an education funding bill that has an addition that “bars public universities from rejecting them (former state legislators) for faculty positions just because they lack a graduate degree”.(STL P-D)
Yep, because being able to tell some stories about being a politician is exactly the same as teaching political science.
Talk about missing the point of the post.
Re: #93 “The fact is that the USA already outspends Germany and Japan per capita on schooling, and we simply aren’t getting what we pay for.”
I believe that the greatest portion of a school’s budget in the U.S. typically goes to provide health benefits for the employees. Don’t Germany and Japan both have, to some extent, national health care programs? If so, their school budgets would be relieved of that particular expense. Maybe this is because I just watched “Sicko”, but I wonder what that per capita comparison on education spending would look like if we took the health care cost out.
What an intelligent kid! Though it takes a hell of a lot more than intelligence alone to break your programming in bible belt USA. I wish him the very best of luck.
I think it’s interesting that in his own blog, the young man in question says he “believed every word of the Bible” until November 2006. I wonder if this current persecution could have anything to do with how recently he has “converted” to atheism?
i teach college; please keep the home schoolers to a minimum in my classes i tell my millions of bosses– they are used to getting their way and are used to objecting to everything on religious grounds. over the decades i’ve had a dozen or so students complain to the bosses about me (out of thousands taught); six of those were homers in the last decade; employers beware!
Okay, since only a few have said it… (i.e. I don’t care about public/home/unschooling) I have to say I’m pissed that they would even think about punishing a student for loaning another student something to read.
I, for one, am pissed that this went so off topic. This young man is in danger of being punished for loaning a book to someone else, and all you can do is debate home schooling vs. public schooling?
Now, if you’ll excuse me, I’m going over to that young man’s blog, and show some support.
Home schooling neglects a lot of social issues. Schools have bullies, cliques, teams, etc. The school provides social situations (chemistry lab, gym, group projects, etc.) and the students learn to interact with each other. Seeing how other people live and react is an important part of avoiding the self-centered mentality that others have mentioned here.
To those who dismiss literature, history, etc. as luxuries, I say, the material in these subjects is the foundation for the sciences. Math, Physics, Chemistry, etc. are useless without a social context.
As an MIT graduate, I’ve had a belly-full of Math and Physics, and I can tell you that literature and history have made a big difference in my life, and one of my biggest regrets is not taking them more seriously in school.
Yes, we have gotten off-topic.
Students should be able to read and discuss just about anything. How is a child going to learn what a charlatan is, without seeing their guile and analyzing it?
The thinking mind is critical, critiquing, criticizing. Separating the wheat from the chaff is the single most important skill. Everything else derives from it.
If you want to teach values, don’t just shun the ‘bad’ things. Assume that your students are as intelligent as you are. Give them the whole story and let them draw the conclusions. In general you will not be disappointed, probably pleasantly surprised.
Back to home schooling: kids should be exposed to a wide variety of thinking processes. Every one thinks differently, in school a kid has a chance to learn from a variety of teachers. Hopefully at least one of them will make an impression.
So many things to say, but I’ll try to keep it moderate:
Mr. Kinsella: Thank you for your lovely defense of public education (uh, in case it needs to be said, that is not meant at all sarcastically). My experience with public schools was much as you describe–not entirely, as I went to urban schools, and up until high school there was quite a bit of social disorder, bullying, etc. However: all the way through, I received an excellent education, went on to an Ivy League college, etc.
Somebody (I’ve lost track) questioned how many advanced subjects are actually part of the curriculum. My NYC high school curriculum included 4 years each of English and Social Studies, 3 years minimum of foreign language (I took 6), 3-4 years of mathematics (algebra, geometry, trig, and pre-calculus or calculus), and 5 of science (intro, biology, chemistry, physics, plus an elective). As I say, this was a public high school; its requirements were slightly beyond NY State minimums, but only slightly.
My parents are intelligent and educated people, but there is no way they could have provided that sort of education via homeschooling.
Anecdote: My tenth-grade Social Studies midterm was the question, “Discuss the political/social/economic effects of the Reformation on 16th-18th century England, France, and Spain.” Some years later, I worked in a private school, and was invited to guest-teach a few lessons on religion and history in that school’s Social Studies class. In the course of it, somebody asked who killed Christ? I said that he was executed by the Romans. “The Roman Catholics?” asked the student. No, I said, the government of the Roman Empire. All the students looked puzzled; several asked “what’s that?” and the others nodded.
In my experience, homeschooled kids are much like those private-school kids: they have learned a lot about their parents’ beliefs–whether those be Christian-evangelical or New-Age-hippie–and a fair amount of what their parents retained from their own education. But their parents simply didn’t have the knowledge or training, or of course specialization, that our much-maligned public-school teachers do.
Oh yes, and another poster (sorry, I’ve lost your name) said:
If he does mean the latter, then he is correct, but it seems pretty obvious; indoctrination in any ideology requires first the control of information. This is as true for raising Democrats or Republicans as it is for Christians and Muslims. For that matter, any Patriotism depends upon it every bit as much as Religion… Any subject not based upon undeniable empirical evidence requires it – and you’ll find those subjects to be few and far between.
I’m curious as to where this idea comes from. Well, OK: indoctrination, yes; but teaching, NO. It was an essential point of both my formal education and what I learned from my (completely non-religious, but very political) parents that information is free, and genuine education actually REQUIRES exposure to a wide range of viewpoints. So when I went through my parents’ bookshelves as a child, I read Twain and Orwell, and also the Bible and C.S. Lewis and…well, just about anything else that interested me. And the same was true in school: we read “liberal” books and articles and “conservative” ones and “middle-of-the-road” ones and things not so easily classifiable in any of those camps. And that, I still believe, is how it should be.
One of the saddest things about homeschoolers, IMHO, is precisely this confusion about what is indoctrination and what is education. I read an article once, in favor of homeschooling, by someone who said, “the purpose of education is to render children docile.” No, I said (and wrote to the editor), the purpose of education is the opposite of docility: it is to free students’ minds and teach them to think for themselves…
Does anyone notice that the kids who are home-schooled are primarily white? Any guesses why? Because their families have the resources for one parent to stay home with the kids and home school them.
Home schooling is just the latest version of white flight. It’s self-selected segregation.
We could send our son to a high-flying public charter school with a 200+ waiting list because my husband is a teacher there, but we choose not to because the environment is too restrictive. L. would not be forced to learn how to deal with people from all different backgrounds, ethnicities, religions, and academic abilities. Public schools are the ultimate expression of democracy.
The kids I’ve met who are home-schooled can be charming and well-drilled in a variety of academic subjects (there is something to say for a low students-to-teacher ratio). But often their view of the world is very circumscribed, and their opinions absolute. Democracy is not among their ideals or goals, because they are in the right, their God is the right God, and that matters more than the will of the majority.
Maybe you should still your sense of outrage until you read through all the links provided, and you’d make less of a fool of yourself.
Oh. The UK and Ireland notwithstanding, however, it’s not all of the EU except Germany: I mentioned Austria, I can’t imagine for the life of me that homeschooling is allowed in France, and I’d be rather surprised if it were in the formely communist countries.
I’m saying that about France because in French tradition the state has the responsibility to ensure certain things such as a decent education for everyone. Private schools exist in France, apparently even ones with a religious background, but homeschooling I can’t imagine.
Oh. The UK and Ireland notwithstanding, however, it’s not all of the EU except Germany: I mentioned Austria, I can’t imagine for the life of me that homeschooling is allowed in France, and I’d be rather surprised if it were in the formely communist countries.
I’m saying that about France because in French tradition the state has the responsibility to ensure certain things such as a decent education for everyone. Private schools exist in France, apparently even ones with a religious background, but homeschooling I can’t imagine.
For the most part, he wouldn’t run it, he’d dissolve it or rather let it fall to pieces. Perhaps the result would be like Somalia two years ago: Somalia didn’t exist. There was no country, there was no bureaucracy, nobody paid taxes (not even the nascent airline company), and if you had a problem, it was your problem.
I don’t even find that song funny. It portrays the extreme that is opposite of Caledonian.
For the most part, he wouldn’t run it, he’d dissolve it or rather let it fall to pieces. Perhaps the result would be like Somalia two years ago: Somalia didn’t exist. There was no country, there was no bureaucracy, nobody paid taxes (not even the nascent airline company), and if you had a problem, it was your problem.
I don’t even find that song funny. It portrays the extreme that is opposite of Caledonian.
I’m 26, from a rural town (graduating class of 75 people), and I’ve been homeschooled and public schooled.
Despensing with actual annecdotes, the core annecdotal lessons I have learned from both experiences:
a) Students teach themselves, teachers are just facilitators. All the top students in a school are learning on their own, with teachers answering questions and passing out tests. With the internet, the former function is less and less meaningful.
b) You need to be around dense people. A LOT of people, even ones with excellent grades, are quite dense in anything but rote memorization. This was a big shock to me when I rejoined the public school system, but it’s prepared me for the “real world” in the workforce. Working with people who weren’t learning as quickly as myself has saved me from melting down in the workplace (unlike many of my over-achieving insular peers).
My analysis is that both systems have significant flaws. What pains me is that proponents of both systems are battling each other, instead of finding ways to incorporate the advantages from the different styles. Homeschool parents are really motivated (the type that used to be involved in the PTA and Boosters) and could be a powerful driving force for improvement in the public school system (most likely to the chagrin of their children). Public school teachers, even though they’re mostly jaded and cynical, have the proven mettle to handle a disparate student body. Together they could transform our public schools into the best in the world.
Who am I kidding. That would require abandoning selfishness thats two generations deep at this point. We’re pretty much screwed.
David, I agree with your assessment. Not to over-explain, but about the only lines that are appropriate are if any form of pleasure is exhibited, report to me and it will be prohibited. Also, Freedonia|Caledonia.
Art, (some satirical musical theater in this case, The Marx Bros. in Duck Soup), is what comprises culture, which is what Cal considers jettisoning. Without art, literature, music, theater, there is only survival with nothing to live for. Somalia. Art isn’t the luxury picking the pockets of of those in poverty either. Were screwball comedies and tin pan alley songs eschewed during America’s Great Depression, when even the poorest managed to budget for them? Art is the difference between being alive, and living.
Art is what people do. Art is one of the great keys to unlocking history. Music is part of what engages a growing brain, equipping it for mathematics and language and reasoning. Non-musicians make lousy programmers.
Admittedly, this discussion has moved off topic, but it is interesting to me how the home school community frames their arguments in support of home schooling in a way very similar to the intelligent design supporters.
When asked for statistical support for the benefits of home schooling, they give anecdotal evidence based on the own experiences. Sorry, I have no idea what is meant by “my child is academically ahead”. Ahead of what population of students? This is like saying an organism is “too complex” to have have evolved. Too complex compared to what?
We are told there is room for both forms of education. But I know what is meant by public education — what is meant by home schooling. I appears to be the same hijacking of terminology the ID’s use when implying ID is a “science” to be taught in a science class. Because clearly home schooling is meant to replace public school education.
Can none of the parents who are home schooling their children supply me with the details of the child’s education per the criteria I outlined in #79. Don’t quibble about the details — give me an detailed evaluation and support of your curriculum, just as we ask the ID community to supply specifics on intelligent design. You can’t win support by just sniping at established methodologies.
If you are a parent home schooling your child, you are engaging in a major deviation from accepted practice. Maybe you are right. But I think you owe it to your child to be able to provide a powerful rationale, supported by evidence for such a decision.
This is insane. It pains me it happened in Virginia.
Matt –
I think that the real problem with education, here in the states, is that what it really takes, is sending kids to public, charter or private schools and teaching them at home. The problem is that schools simply can’t individualize the curriculum enough, to make it work for every student. They also can’t teach to the lowest, or the highest common denominator, by needs the standards must fall somewhere in the middle, which means a lot of kids aren’t going to get an adequate education, that fits their specific needs. Schools can (and many do) break things down to meet the needs of different ranges of kids, but it still breaks down to some standardization that, unless supplemented by proactive parents, will leave many, if not most kids, with an inadequate education.
It pains me it happened in 2007.
@DuWayne: exactly. I had all my schooling in the UK in the general public education system, and I learned a lot of different things there; I also have very supportive parents who encouraged my to find out about things on my own. On the one hand, I often had a sense of relief at the end of the school day, that now I could go home and carry on reading the latest Stephen Jay Gould collection. On the other hand, I really benefited from the structured classes at school, which made me sit down and concentrate to a degree I wouldn’t have done on my own. My parents would never have had time to “homeschool” me, as they both work (doctors); but they gave me the most educationally supportive environment possible. Shelves of reference books, foreign travel, theatre visits.
Tully –
But I think you owe it to your child to be able to provide a powerful rationale, supported by evidence for such a decision.
Part of the problem here, is that there is no general standard for public schools. The welfare of students and the quality of education, varies wildly from location to location. Even within a localized population. Take my local, of Portland OR. The entire city has several districts. Some are better than others, a few of them are absolutely abhorrent. The public school that my son would be starting kindergarten in the fall, were it not for our getting him into a charter school, is one of the worse in the area.
If we had not gotten him into the charter school, he would be getting home schooled, until we could afford to move to a better district. This is not because we are capable of providing a better education than any public school, it’s because we would be providing a better and safer education experience than that which he would be getting at our local public elementary school. It’s not even that the teachers or curriculum are all that bad, it’s the kids he’d be in school with. An elementary school with fairly serious drug and violence problems.
For a lot of people who do homeschooling, I imagine that it probably wouldn’t matter what public school their child would be attending, fundy ixians especially. However, for many others, I imagine that it’s in large part due to the individual circumstances that their child would be in, or that they have pulled their child out of, that lead them to homeschool.
Trying to provide evidence to support homeschooling as an advantage over public education is going to be virtually impossible for two reasons. One, as I assert above, many don’t see it as better than any public schooling, just their local public school. And two, the stats are going to be seriously scewed by folks who home school their children, for the purpose of secured indoctrination, whether it be ixian or ultra-lefties, or whatever.
DuWayne —
Thanks for the cogent response. I see you have a rationale. You perceive your local public school as unsafe — drugs and violence. But this is a problem in almost all of our public schools. Are you suggesting that you local school is unique, and home schooling is an overall superior option? Again, do you have evidence for your position? I am also interested in you personal opinion — is the charter school option superior to home schooling? And why? Charter schools are becoming very popular.
And to quibble slightly. You assert there is no general standard for public schools. Not even remotely true. There are federal standards, state standards, local school board standards. While these standards are not uniformly met, they in general do not conflict. Because of these standards, you are aware that your local schools fall below them. And because of these standards, you are aware that your child’s charter school is a better.
I am afraid I don’t understand your assertion that providing evidence that homeschooling in general is in effective alternate to public school is an impossibility. Your two reasons don’t seem to any way prevent the collection of evidence in the matter. At this point, since other evidence is apparently not forthcoming, I am even willing to accept good anecdotal evidence as to a parent who created and executed a curriculum equivalent or superior to the criteria I set forth in #79.
I disagree… those folks won’t “skew” the stats at all. What you’re making is a sort of “True Scotsman” fallacious argument.
Those people home school, and their results are wholly relevant to the legitimacy and efficacy of home schooling.
Tully –
It’s not that I think that my local school is unique, it’s that a lot of public schools either don’t have those problems or have them to a far lesser degree. My point is, that when faced with the options of either sending him into a school environment that is unsafe, or teaching him at home, I would teach him at home. And while I don’t have the comparison of what he would get out of the public school environment he would be subjected to, I do have evidence that his mom and I, have done a damn good job with his pre-formal education. He reads at a second grade level and does math at the first grade level. He also has basic understandings of cosmology, geology, electronics, biology and evolution. He also has a spotty grasp of American history and Roman history (I’m a Roman history buff). While for the most part, we have let his interests guide his education up to this point, he has tested above most of the kids in our local public elementary school, who are going into middle school next year, in the areas of reading, reading comprehension, math and science. Keep in mind, he’s going into kindergarten this fall.
I am also interested in you personal opinion — is the charter school option superior to home schooling? And why? Charter schools are becoming very popular.
Yes I do think it’s superior to homeschooling, again depending on the school. The major reason being, that the kids get more socialization there, while maintaining a more reasonable student/faculty ratio. There are also a lot of opportunities for parental involvement, that just aren’t available in more traditional public school settings. This isn’t to say that they’re perfect, we will certainly have to supplement heavily, but that is part of the attraction really. Charter schools, or at least the one he will be attending, put a lot of focus on parental involvement in their child’s education, including providing many tools for supplementing their education at home.
You assert there is no general standard for public schools. Not even remotely true. There are federal standards, state standards, local school board standards. While these standards are not uniformly met, they in general do not conflict. Because of these standards, you are aware that your local schools fall below them. And because of these standards, you are aware that your child’s charter school is a better.
Actually no, their are standardized tests and standards governing the results of those tests. There is however, no set standard for curriculum and the implementation of the curriculum. And mostly outside the control of schoolboards, there is no standard for the populations attending the schools.
I am afraid I don’t understand your assertion that providing evidence that homeschooling in general is in effective alternate to public school is an impossibility. Your two reasons don’t seem to any way prevent the collection of evidence in the matter. At this point, since other evidence is apparently not forthcoming, I am even willing to accept good anecdotal evidence as to a parent who created and executed a curriculum equivalent or superior to the criteria I set forth in #79.
I say that, because, outside standardized tests (which I understand that, overall, homeschooled kids tend to excel at), there isn’t a good measure. The problem is that I simply don’t believe that standardized tests are a reasonable measure of either the quality of the educational experience, or the other aspects of school life, such as socialization.
The other problem, is what exactly we are measuring against? Are we measuring against the best public schools or an average? I would argue that the only reasonable measure, would be against the school that is local to the child/ren involved. By that measure, my child is already ahead of the average at his local school (at least academically) before he even starts. At the same time, the education we would provide, were we to homeschool him, may not pass muster, in better public schools.
Evolving Squid –
I disagree… those folks won’t “skew” the stats at all. What you’re making is a sort of “True Scotsman” fallacious argument.
Those people home school, and their results are wholly relevant to the legitimacy and efficacy of home schooling.
No, I’m not. Of course, I’m not trying to argue for the efficacy of homeschooling over that of all public schools either. My point is, as I address above, the only reasonable comparison, is between the child who is homeschooled and the public schools, local to them. By that measure, people who homeschool, with the intent of indoctrination, skew the results, because they aren’t doing it due to the quality of their local schools, they are doing it to “protect” their child from learning things that might contradict that with which they wish to indoctrinate their child. In those circumstances, the homeschooled child, could be in the best school system in the country, where they would receive the best education available in public schools, yet their parents would still teach them at home.
Contrast that with parents who homeschool their children, because of the abysmal quality of their local school and it certainly would skew the data.
By and by, everything that I have read on the subject, shows that overall, homeschooled kids on average, do better than public schooled kids, on standardized tests. I don’t have specific links and am not going to take the time right now, but if you google [homeschooling “public schools” “standardized testing”] you will find plenty of statistics to support that claim. The problem with that, is that I think standardized tests are a poor indicator of the quality of education. First, they only show what a student is capable of regurgitating. Second, they do nothing to show the quality of anything besides the academic aspects of the education the student has received. There is a lot more to education than academics. Primary education should help a child prepare for the real world they will experience as an adult, this includes socialization, discipline and many other aspects of life that school should help with – which many do.
Also, please keep in mind that I am not trying to argue that homeschooling is the best option. Given the opportunity, I would love to put my child into a good public school. The charter school he will be starting out in, may turn out to be preferable, but I have my distrust of that too. Homeschooling is my last resort, not my first. Ideally, my preferences would go, really good public school, good private school, charter school, on down to homeschool. Given my family’s situation, we are going with the charter school we managed to get my son into, as it’s the best option available to us.
This is the kind of thing that can happen when people (especially liberals) overreact to the seperation of church and state as it applies to public schools. There are similar cases like this where its christian students that have had their rights violated.
Essentially, students are free to express their religious or non-relgious beliefs in school as long as they’re not disturbing class or harrassing other students. That means they can pray (silently or outloud), discuss religion, share books, work religion or non religion into school assignments if its relevant…. This is something many liberals and cosnervative dont understand about what the supreme court has ruled. Its the school (ie the government) that must remain neutral, not the students.
Stratified by parental economic status there is no difference in private school, home school or public school performance. In short, well-off parents see a tremendous value in education and make sure their children get one.
But thanks for promulgating another urban legend based on right-wing talking points.
Darn, the first paragraph was supposed to be italicized. I did something wrong.
Anyway, what I said in the second paragraph stands. IF you bother to look at THE REAL PERFORMANCE DRIVER, you’ll find that when you stratify all three populations by income, the results are very much uniform by income levels.
The reason the results look different, is because the populations being measured are otherwise very different. So all these 120+ posts arguing, by and large, are pointless and show a certain lack of scholarship among the participants.
BTW, I think it’s pretty funny that on a science blog, so many people spouted off without actually doing in-depth research into the issue. It’s not as if people haven’t discovered this and published many, many studies on the correlation with income and casuation through the function of parental attitude toward education of the various income groups.
Since I used the term “academically ahead” I feel that I should explain it further.
My kids, (without having skipped a lesson in their accredited curriculum), are working at a higher grade level than they would be in if they were in school. Furthermore when tested for those higher grades (using public school testing methods) they test out at a high percentile (as judged by the public school system’s own measuring stick).
PS: If some of the scientists on this blog would like to wipe out a large swathe of the homeschooling community, get busy inventing a cheap and cost effective bio fuel. What many people have forgotten to mention here is that a large section of the U.S HS movement today are military kids and their Dad’s probably wouldn’t be there if it wasn’t for the scourge of our modern thirst for oil.
(shakes head) What a one-dimensional way of thinking. Can’t you conceive of sociopolitical positions as anything more complicated than a single line? There’s a whole multidimensional space, defined by dozens of axes, that you’re completely ignoring.
Thanks to DuWayne, I thought we were making some progress in this discussion, but now we are back to assertions without a wit of evidence, and strange tangential lines of reasoning…
Moses. What are you trying to say? That the higher the family income, the better educated the student? Sounds reasonable. Supported by the studies I have seen. But what does that have to do with the my central point — what evidence is there that home schooling provides an equivalent or better alternative to public education? (And by the way, there is no reason to be insulting about blog participants not doing in depth background research in a particular area. If you are not interested in the discussion, no one is making you read it.)
Paula. Like DuWayne, I sense you have personal reasons for you home schooling decision; I am interested in objective evidence for the benefits of home schooling. My question to you is: how do you know they are working at a higher grade level than having enrolled them in the best public school you could get access to? Did you have twins, and put one in public school, the other being home schooled? And I am sincerely sorry about the affect the Iraq War has had on the families of servicemen. I have seen the effects first hand, and it saddens me greatly. If it helps, my family has only one car now, and a mostly ride the bus. I also feel that dependence on foreign oil is negatively affecting most of us.
DuWayne. Your suggestion that the comparisons need to done between home schooling and the local public school is very much in the spirit of my suggestion in post #79 that a good data set might be obtained by a family of six sending 3 kids to public school and home schooling the other 3, and evaluating the results.
I did follow your advice, and googled for evidence that home schooled children out perform public school children on standardized tests. Found lots of claims by home schooling networks, but no studies designed to determine if this was true. And sorry, but I demand that studies be designed to test a hypothesis. Trying to read omens from scattered bones is not convincing research to me.
DuWayne. Your continued assertion that there is a lack of public school standards is getting bizarre. Standardized test measure a students performance in relationship to — well developed public school standards! These standards are printed. They are on line.
http://www.cde.ca.gov/be/st/ss/scmain.asp is an entire website of public school standards. These reflect the federal standards. And this is just the academic part. There are standards for teachers, standards for administrators, health and safety standards, athletic standards, technology standards, architectural standards. All these standards in an attempt to provide a uniform public school system. Do you know of anything like this in the home schooled arena?
And kudos for finding a good charter school for your child. But I caution you. Charter schools (by design) have a freedom in education that lacks some of the checks and balances of public schools. As a child progresses to higher grades, you may find problems in the quality of education your child is receiving, and find yourself with the recourse you would have at a public school.
Tully:
I think DuWayne might be referring to the different state standards. See:
The State of State Standards 2006
The review reflects the opinions of the Fordham Foundation, but they contain links to each state’s standards. So you could compare the science standards of CA (which you linked to and were given an “A” by Fordham) with the science standards of Wisconsin (which were given an “F”).
Tully –
I did follow your advice, and googled for evidence that home schooled children out perform public school children on standardized tests. Found lots of claims by home schooling networks, but no studies designed to determine if this was true. And sorry, but I demand that studies be designed to test a hypothesis. Trying to read omens from scattered bones is not convincing research to me.
Look at the raw statistics. Most homeschooled children take the same standardized tests as public school kids, at least those who wish to go to college. If I get the chance, I will see if I can find them myself. While I don’t buy into the validity of standardized tests, as a measure of the quality of education, this is the same measure that schools use to gauge of success.
Your continued assertion that there is a lack of public school standards is getting bizarre. Standardized test measure a students performance in relationship to — well developed public school standards! These standards are printed.
Again, these are not standards for how to teach or with what curriculum. Certainly they have suggestions, but the schools curriculum is up to the school and their governing school board. Besides which, there are other factors that influence the success of a school. From teachers, to the wealth of the district, even if the state’s suggested standards are followed to the T, the schools themselves, will not be standard to each other.
Also, there is no real standard for controling the student population. Some, including our locale, have extreme problems with the students themselves, making the school environment unsafe, or at least unsatisfactory. I honestly doubt that my son would receive a reasonable educational experience, in an elementary school that has problems with crack and kids bringing weapons to school to beat the crap out of each other.
Do you know of anything like this in the home schooled arena?
Certainly there are suggested standard curriculums, quite similar to those of public schools. It is hard to fight your way through them, to find ones that aren’t put together by those who have ideological motivations behind homeschooling, but they certainly exist, along with a lot of supports for homeschoolers.
And kudos for finding a good charter school for your child. But I caution you. Charter schools (by design) have a freedom in education that lacks some of the checks and balances of public schools.
Believe me, I am and will continue to be, very proactive in the educations of my children. I am going to be one of the checks in my son’s school. I am going into this with the expectation that I will have to supplement his education. To a degree, I assume that his charter school will be a glorified home schooling experience. I am expecting the worse, while hoping to be pleasantly surprised. They do fairly well with their test scores, so we’ll see. In any case, I am taking part in the parent liason council, so at the least, I will have a pretty good perspective on what’s happening at his school. Also, his mom and I, will both be volunteering our time and energy, volunteering at his school. Both of us will be helping out as monitors and I will be taking part in songwriting workshops (that’s what I do professionally, also why we live in a crappy part of town) and helping with the woodworking classes (something that I supplement my crappy income with and one of the main thrusts of his school.
As a child progresses to higher grades, you may find problems in the quality of education your child is receiving, and find yourself with the recourse you would have at a public school.
Good lord, I hope we are in a much better position in a few years. I am in a transition period, careerwise. I am actually trying to get into writing music for advertising, which pays better than what I am doing now (ironically, mostly, religious music – hey, it pays the bills). I have done a few smaller advert jobs, trying to get into the bigger jobs, idealy a contract. Short of that, I am also going back to school myself, so will still have options. I absolutely do not intend to be in this position for too long, though depending how the school works out, we may stay in the vacinity, but that is only if it is an exceptional educational opportunity, we are not keen on staying in this part of town, even in one of the better neighborhoods.
Ultimately, it doesn’t matter much what schools my kids go to (as long as they are safe), we are going to continue to be very proactive in their educations and their schools. If he does end up in one of the public schools, there are opportunities for us to get involved, from advisory councils to the PTA. One of the major reasons I am trying to move forward with my songwriting career, is that it provides me with the time to be an active part of their educations. Momma also works at home and is developing her own career, one that allows for a lot of family involvment.
The demands being made by Tully and others for scientific justification of homeschooling make the unreasonable assumption that group schooling is by default the correct way to educate children and the standard against which all alternatives must be measured. On the other hand, I have not seen any of the homeschoolers here assert that homeschooling is always the best alternative, or that group schools should be eliminated (not even a complaint about paying school taxes despite not using the schools themselves).
Analogies like homeschool:group school :: ID:evolution are similarly unhelpful. Child raising is not a science. Tully demands objective comparisons, asking: How do you know they are working at a higher grade level than having enrolled them in the best public school you could get access to? That misses the point, since most of the schools under discussion are nowhere near being the best. And even so-called “good” schools can have bad teachers, or simply be a bad fit for a particular child.
I think public and private group schools are good for society in general. I personally do several hours/week of volunteer work at a junior high school, despite the fact that my own kids are in universty/college (and both were partly homeschooled). However, I don’t believe group schooling provides the best education for every child (at least for the group schooling which is actually available, as opposed to the theoretical optimal dream schools), and I have a hard time understanding why it is so threatening to supporters of groupschooling to allow the option of homeschooling.
I found this article from Education Policy Analysis Archives on ERIC http://www.ericdigests.org/2000-3/home.htm
The study finds:
I don’t think any of the home school advocates here were claiming anything more than that, were they?
Tully writes:
I have no idea what you are talking about. Charter schools are public schools. I have never heard that parents of kids in charter schools sign away their rights to talk to their child’s teacher, join the PTA, talk to the principal, go to school board meetings or transfer their child to another school. What other recourses are open to parents in our education system?
I put my daughter in the lottery for a spot in a 7-12 college prep charter school. 300 kids signed up for 42 slots (half the slots went to siblings of current students) The school offers 3 foreign languages and a rigorous science and math curriculum. My kid’s default school offers no foreign language in 7/8 and class size is 30%-40% higher. Think the regular schools might be getting a message about what kind of education parents want for their kids?
Sterling argumentation, and very applicable beyond just the homeschooling debate too. Suppose, for example, that I was a beleaguered drug company CEO. I could go to the FDA and claim that just because patients on our drugs showed a higher morbidity and mortality compared to patients on the standard, similar drugs on the market for condition X, that didn’t mean a thing. The FDA is simply making the entirely unjustifiable assumption that the proven effectiveness of the drugs on the market is the benchmark against which my product should be weighed. Instead, what they ought to do is consider the possibility that someone, somewhere, might find our drugs a better fit for his or her condition, and that will outweigh the fact that hundreds or thousands more are dropping like flies on my product.
Nullifidian – look at the article I cited above comparing homeschool and public school test scores. Homeschoolers outscored public school students consistently. Which may not prove anything other than that students do not show increased morbidity on drug Homeschool, granted, but it nullifies your little allegory.
If you think that public school curricula and methodology are rigorously tested against objective criteria, you must not have witnessed the rise and fall of the Whole Language method, and various other fads which sweep through the education community with mind-numbing regularity.
It’s not an allegory, it’s a reductio on the presumption that weighing any new methodology against established systems is illegitimate. And as to your article, it doesn’t even show that much, considering that there was no attempt made to see if the study sample was representative of the homeschooled students in general, nor does it control for socioeconomic variables, even though it weighs the performance of its survey group of homeschoolers against the average performance of public school students. In short, it’s a pretty worthless study all around.
Naturally, I never said anything of the sort, but go ride that hobbyhorse anyway.
If they sweep through with such regularity, why pick a methodology whose soundtrack could have been written by Devo, Belinda Carslyle, and the Eurhythmics?
And even if I accepted your characterization, there is nothing more prone to the faddish than homeschooling, since the requirements are so lax and there is no need for it to improve the learning of a broad socioeconomic spectrum of students. If it weighs against public schooling, then it must weigh even heavier against homeschooling, where there is no oversight of the curriculum beyond that very minimal level established by standardized tests.
DuWayne said:
Only a fool has himself as a lawyer, or attempts to find meaning from raw statistics without a hypothesis from an undesigned study.
Well, no according to links given earlier (Wall Street Journal article) only about 2000 of them took the SAT. Evidently home schooled kids don’t aspire to college in the same percentage of public school kids. (Not quite true — the survey of home schooled SAT takers suggested many were home school at an early age, but then went to public school for high school, so they did not list themselves as home schooled. So Theo Bromines comments that:
should be be amended to add “until they need them, then they expect this giant taxpayer funded system to be there and in functioning order”
Monkeymind said:
You are correct. The home school advocates, in spite of my pleas, have claimed very little about home schooling, preferring instead to continually criticize public schools. Which is why once again — what is it that home schooling does for children? Supply evidence. Not personal stories of how bad the schools are in your neighborhood. There are bad schools everywhere, and yet in spite of these bad schools, we manage to educate a phenomenal number of US citizens. Other countries may do better. Are they doing that by home schooling, or improving there existing public school systems? Or maybe the populations are not comparable. Home schoolers are conducting this experiment, they need to supply the data.
Charter schools are publicly funded schools (if you think home schoolers complain about having fund public schools, how about public school funds being used at elite charter schools not open to all students, without requirements for educating the disabled, free lunch programs etc all which come from the per head funding for regular public school students) , but do not have to function under the same rules as public schools. Check for yourself:
How much local school board oversight?
What are the credentialing requirements for teachers?
What standardized tests are administered?
How many hours of school are required?
How complete is the curriculum?
If you find an excellent charter school, you are in good shape. And you have probably just impoverished a local public school. Lucky you.
Nullfidian — Your analysis of the home school studies is spot on. No need to add anything.
Tully –
Only a fool has himself as a lawyer, or attempts to find meaning from raw statistics without a hypothesis from an undesigned study.
How complicated is it, to look at averaged SAT or ACT scores and compare? Seriously, how difficult is it to simply see which groups have the better scores? I also seem to recall the few homeschooled kids I knew growing up, were taking the same MEAP tests (Michigan standardized test, taken at various grade levels) that I was. I don’t know, but rather assumed at the time that they were required by law to do so. I know that their parents weren’t just willy-nilly allowed to keep them home for schooling, without any sort of oversight, to ensure they were actually getting an education.
There are bad schools everywhere, and yet in spite of these bad schools, we manage to educate a phenomenal number of US citizens. Other countries may do better.
Yes, but what percentage actually get a reasonable education?
I am not really interested in defending homeschooling, as I said, I would prefer to send my kids to a good public school. Short of that, I am willing to send them to any school they will be safe in and supplement what they get. However, given my current circumstances, if my son was stuck with our default public school, he would be getting taught at home. This is not because I believe that we can provide a better education than even most public schools, this is because I know that we would provide a better education than the school he would be attending. He’s already ahead of the curve with kids leaving that school this fall. While he’s bright, for a five year old, any five year old, to be that far advanced of the average population of kids in a school, going into the sixth grade next year, shows performance that’s less than abysmal.
should be be amended to add “until they need them, then they expect this giant taxpayer funded system to be there and in functioning order”
And just what the hell’s wrong with that. If we did end up needing to homeschool our son, it certainly wouldn’t be for the long term, we would have done it until we could move to a better district. Even people who have other motivations for homeschooling their kids, should be able to recognize their shortcoming and realize that while they had enough comprehension of the material they were teaching their children, when the children were at lower grade levels, they are going to become less qualified to provide a quality education, as their child advances. So they shouldn’t decide to send their child to the school they have been, or at the least, are going to be paying taxes to support, when they finally send them there?
Are they doing that by home schooling, or improving there existing public school systems? Or maybe the populations are not comparable.
They are doing a good job in some districts, a really horrifying job in others. It’s easy enough to say that parents should focus on improving the schools that their kids would be stuck in, but when it’s your kid on the block, you damn well do what you think is best for your kid and fuck the bullshit. I have a limited amount of time and energy to devote to my child’s education, more than a lot of parents. I do not have the time and energy it would take to save the pit, that is his default public el and still take care of him.
I’m sorry, but my child comes first for me. I am not willing to sacrifice him, and/or the sibling he will have this winter, to improve the educations of the rest of the kids in this district. Especially as the parents of the kids in this district, won’t bloody well do what it takes to improve it. I don’t doubt, that the teachers in this district, are little different than teachers in other districts. I also doubt that it’s that significantly off the mark in other, controllable areas. The fact is, that a lot of parents in this district, don’t give a damn about their children’s educations. There really isn’t a damn thing that I can do to improve that.
Home schoolers are conducting this experiment, they need to supply the data.
First off, this is not some fucking experiment, it’s our kids lives and educations. Second, I don’t need to justify my decisions to you. I need to do what I believe to be best for my children. This is not a decision that I could base on general statistical data, comparing homeschooled kids, to public ed or other group ed kids. I can’t because I am not interested in homeschooling for the sake of homeschooling or indoctrination, nor would my partner and I, be the same teachers that other homeschool kids get. Certainly, we would follow the best curriculum we can find and supplement to fit our kids interests (as we will anyways), but we aren’t other homeschool parents, nor do we have the same kids, so our results would differ from theirs.
And I sure an hell wouldn’t decide to send one of my kids to the shitty, unsafe local school and teach the other at home, for the sake of statistical data sets. Parents don’t make decisions based on experimentation (at least not competent ones), they make decisions for all of their children, based on what they feel is best for their children. We’re talking about one of the absolute most important aspects of a person’s early development. People who would make these decisions, based on anything besides what they believe is best for their child, shouldn’t be having kids.
Sorry, the lives of my children, aren’t some sort of experiment. My mission in life, is to provide my kids with the tools they need to do absolutely anything they want with their lives. Don’t like it, don’t homeschool your kids, or even consider it. Meanwhile, I am going to do everything I can, to give my kids the best start possible, even if it requires, as a last resort, that I homeschool them.
But doesn’t it make more sense to *KNOW* that it is best for your children rather than to *BELIEVE* it is best for your children?
This is the thrust of my original post, and, I think, the point of many of the posts between that one and this one. On what do you base the belief that you can educate your child better than the public system?
Obviously you have great confidence in your abilities. I can understand that, I am certain I can teach some subjects better than many teachers. You can’t possibly know everything, however, so there must be weaknesses where you will not be as strong (certainly I would have such weaknesses).
Originally I asked that if homeschooling was so good, why does it seem like there is nobody who has aspired to much of anything in the world who is home schooled? Presidents? Nobel winners? University Deans? CEOs? whatever… It’s a bit of a cop-out to say “well not everyone who goes to the public system aspires to be anything.” While that is certainly true, it doesn’t change the fact that SOME people do and you can find them without having to look too hard. My claim, if I can be said to have one, is that homeschooling either doesn’t prepare children for advancing education, or that homeschooled children choose not to pursue it, and in either case, hobble their chances for advancement in the world.
Or perhaps it’s simpler – maybe homeschooled children simply do not have a desire for success imprinted upon them the same way children who go to “regular” schools do? I’m not sure.
In any case, I find it fascinating that there appears to be few/no highly successful homeschooled children in the last 50 years. Since it would benefit homeschool proponents immensely to point to such people as examples of the benefits of homeschooling, I can only conclude that homeschooling probably isn’t as good for children as its proponents make it out to be.
However, I’m prepared to have my mind changed. Produce evidence that homeschooling does an excellent job. In this forum, it seems that nobody has been able to do so. I think it has been established that homeschooling might do an adequate job prior to high school, social aspects notwithstanding, but that’s definitely less than what I am looking for.
Washington… Jefferson… Lincoln… Edison…
I wrote:
The demands being made by Tully and others for scientific justification of homeschooling make the unreasonable assumption that group schooling is by default the correct way to educate children and the standard against which all alternatives must be measured.
Nullifidian sardonically replied:
Which rather misses the point. First, to correctly apply the treatment analogy, I am *not* saying that there is anything wrong with the treatment itself, but that there are patients who are not getting the expected results from the treatment, not to mention experiencing significant negative side effects. Maybe the treatment is not being properly administered – my practitioner is incompetent and I can do a better job administering the treatment myself. Maybe there is a problem with the clinic where the treatment is offered.
Second, where is the “proven effectiveness” of group schooling? Both unfortunately (from a scientific perspective) and fortunately (from an ethical perspective), there are no double-blind crossover trials for parenting.
The two I know of off the top of my head are Erik Demaine and Christopher Paolini .
I would like to note (as someone else did earlier) that homeschooling doesn’t mean the parents have to be the only teachers. Many use PSEO or distance learning programs, much less local classes and programs. In Minnesota, there’s a program called MNVA in which the child is enrolled in public school, but the parents are provided with the curriculum to use at home. They have to regularly meet with a teacher to discuss how things are going, and the kids are tested with the same standardized tests as public school kids are. They even have scheduled field trips.
Good try, but I did limit to the last 50 years. It is unfair to compare people educated before there even was a public education system.
But as a point of fact, Jefferson went to (arguably private) school, Lincoln was self-educated, and Edison went to regular school.
Produce evidence that homeschooling does an excellent job.
Notwithstanding fact that the plural of anecdote is not data, I give you:
1 – age 22) Identified “gifted with learning disabilities”; homeschooled for most of highschool – completed a number of highschool and college courses during that time, but did not actually graduate highschool. Currently in college – completed a 2-year electronics technician program with A average; entering 3rd year of instrumentation technologist program.
2 – age 20) Partly homeschooled for highschool; currently entering 4th year university; on the Dean’s list, and member of Phi Betta Kappa.
And, by the way, both kids (though still geeks) are far more socially adept than I was at their age.
My original undergrad degree was in science education(high school level Earth Science-Biology-Chemistry). I gave it up for two reasons. The first was with the education courses themselves, what i called the certification circle jerk. It seemed the program was padded with courses on abstract educational theories with little application in the classroom. Perhaps they thought that anything practicable would come through student teaching, but i could’ve used a head’s up.
The second reason is the disrespect, for and politics involved with teaching. School board meetings were a nightmare. Everyone seems to have a problem with the way teachers teach, they want them to be baby sitters and social workers, and no one wants to pay them. There was a case in Vail, CO a few years ago when a parent started and initiative to get a pay raise for teachers after one of his daughter’s teachers delivered the pizza that the family had ordered. The teacher had to take a second job to afford living in the area where he was teaching. The initiative failed even after being watered down with a merit pay rider, so that only the exceptionally good teachers could earn a living wage. This Vail fucking Colorado! These people are rich and they still don’t want to pay for their kids’ education. No wonder their brats turn out as bright as Paris Hilton.
This is not uncommon in my area. My brother has a classmate who lives several towns (about 25 miles) away. She’s in the system because her mother teaches at the high school. Our town puts a lot of money into the system and has broken several budgets to ensure the schools stay funded at the level to which they are accustomed, but even so, few teachers can afford to live here on their own.
The biggest problem with home schooling is lack of socialization and diversity of thought. Most kids will have more than a dozen different teachers during their time at school. Those teachers introduce different ideas, even contradicting ideas. Students also offer their own ideas.
Public school is a time and place to learn in different ways, about different things, and different people. I fear that homeschooling only teaches kids to live like their parents and to not question authority.
Those dangers certainly exist, Chris, but what you describe may be homeschooling at its worst, or at its least inspired and most mundane. I’m a supporter of the public school system in practice and in principle, but if there’s one thing I’ve learned on these threads it’s that a sweeping generalization about the apparent limitations of homeschooling invites a humbling refutation by those whose first-hand experiences disproves it.
And let’s not forget how subversive a single book can be. ;-)
There are problems with both systems, but as someone pointed out long ago, the most significant variables are the teacher’s competency and dedication and the student’s willingness and ability to learn.
What troubles me most is the tendency for people to claim the public school system has “failed” and should be discarded. In favor of what, I ask? Those who conclude that public education is useless ought to review just why the founders believed public education was so important in a free and democratic society. [Apply standard qualifying disclaimers to “free” and “democratic” terms here.]
I’m not ignoring anything. It is possible to be on opposite poles of a sphere, or of a six-dimensional super-hyper-sphere.
OK. He wouldn’t prohibit anything, it seems, but he does have a very strange attitude toward happiness…
Oh. I know next to nothing about Freedonia other than the name.
LOL! Science! :-)
I agree culture shouldn’t be jettisoned, but your explanation for that is way off. :-)
What? Desire for success??? In my experience, if anything, any imprinting goes toward not being considered a brainer. Is the competition spirit stronger than that in the USA?
I’m shocked.
I’m not ignoring anything. It is possible to be on opposite poles of a sphere, or of a six-dimensional super-hyper-sphere.
OK. He wouldn’t prohibit anything, it seems, but he does have a very strange attitude toward happiness…
Oh. I know next to nothing about Freedonia other than the name.
LOL! Science! :-)
I agree culture shouldn’t be jettisoned, but your explanation for that is way off. :-)
What? Desire for success??? In my experience, if anything, any imprinting goes toward not being considered a brainer. Is the competition spirit stronger than that in the USA?
I’m shocked.
take a short look around themselves. Around the world preferably.
take a short look around themselves. Around the world preferably.
I agree culture shouldn’t be jettisoned, but your explanation for that is way off
Without early participatory exposure to culture, you don’t get scientists, let alone science. Food clothing and shelter isn’t enough to grow a brain.
Yes, the argument that arts are non-essential is myopic and shallow, one unworthy of our Cal. By the same logic, reading, writing and arithmetic are unessential, for the cash registers are McDonalds are keyed with icons and they make change for the cashier. A job at McD’s puts food in the belly and roof over head, no? And what else matters, eh?
David, maybe I need to clarify a little. It’s difficult (though not impossible) to live in some of the towns around here on a teacher’s salary alone. They can live in the area without much problem, but not necessarily in the town in which they teach. Sad but true. I suppose it’s ironic that the high taxes incurred in part by the town’s support of its school system are a contributing factor! On the other hand, some teachers choose to live farther away simply because they prefer more bucolic surroundings and lifestyles.
Oh. FYI: Freedonia. :-)
Which rather misses the point. First, to correctly apply the treatment analogy,
It’s not an analogy. Who’s missing the point again?
What I was saying, and have already explained in this thread, is that my statement was a reductio on the argument that it’s illegitimate to weigh a new methodology against the existing track record of the old one. Of course it’s legitimate. If one cannot show that one’s method is at least as good as the existing one, then there’s no reason to be doing it. And in this case, nobody’s done that.
DuWayne above said:
Of course, this is not very complicated, but it’s also not informative. It doesn’t address the fact that taking the average of the performance of homeschoolers and the average of the performance of public school students ignores the significant advantage accruing to the homeschool student in general (on average, a more well-off family with significant disposable income). Parents like that don’t usually let their kids languish in school no matter what the context, public, private, or homeschool.
Plus, it’s easy to forget that this is in the context of the United States, where the homeschooling movement is the largest. But the United States is not the only country in the world which has group schooling, so one should also weigh the effectiveness of homeschooling versus group schooling against the most effective group schooling countries.
And that’s not something wrong with a treatment? Despite the fact that I wasn’t arguing an analogy, as should have been clear at the outset, let alone by my follow-up, I can’t help but find that statement funny.
Second, where is the “proven effectiveness” of group schooling?
Oh, it’s nothing. Just several hundred years of the group schooling model being applied over the world, and somehow the world has not imploded and we’re not falling over ourselves in our benightedness. That would suggest to any thinking mind that there is a baseline of functionality against which homeschooling should be weighed. Plus, I would argue that given the disposable income, slight teacher:student ratio, etc. the baseline against which homeschooling should be judged are the group schools in which governments make a significant investment in education, like the nations of Western Europe and the wealthier Asian states. The United States is one of the most backwards of industrialized nations in terms of its commitment to the common weal.
I base my decisions about my child’s education on what I know about her, from coursework and reading on child development and pedagogy (striving mightily to separate wheat from chaff there) from publicly available info on student test scores and curricula for schools in our district, from direct observation of instruction in prospective schools, talking with teachers and administrators, looking at examples of student work, and comparing notes with other parents. Most parents I know do as much of the above research as they can – which is why parents education/income level and involvement in the child’s education are the strongest predictors of student achievement.
Doesn’t mean I will ever KNOW whether I am making the best possible choices, but I think it’s a better bet than automatically assuming that her default school assignment is the best choice. So far, I haven’t resorted to homeschool, but it helps to know that the option is there.
LOL I regularly take my daughter to homeschool playgroups because the kids are so much nicer and more imaginative. Granted there are very fundies in the local HS community – more the John Taylor Gatto types.
Where are you getting this info? Maybe the rules for charter schools are different in your state but in CA they cannot have entrance requirements and I very much doubt that is different in other states. There was free lunch and disabled students were mainstreamed with aides at the parent participation charter elementary school my daughter went to.
It’s true the district often has to provide a facility and the per head attendance money goes with the student. (ADA is such a stupid way to fund schools anyway.) Charters also concentrate parents who volunteer and fundraise at higher rates. On the other hand, charters often compete with private schools as well as public and thus keep more kids in the district. Of the 260 kids who didn’t get a seat in the local college prep charter, I would estimate about 1/3 are going to private schools. It is elite in the sense in that they have high expectations but they also have a full-time bilingual outreach coordinator and extensive tutoring programs.
On the other hand, I detest charters run by private corporations, and any form of corporate intrusion in schools such as contracts with Coke, Pepsi, Channel 1 TV and all the rest of that shite.
Very difficult. Going by the exam numbers, most homeschooled students either don’t take the SAT and ACT in the first place, or they take it but don’t tell the administrating bodies that they’re homeschooled. That means that the scores you’ve got are for a very unrepresentative population of homeschoolers.
Evolving Squid –
Do you not comprehend a thing that I am saying? I am not claiming that I can do a better job than any, or even most, public schools. I don’t think that I can. Nor am I claiming that I want to homeschool my children. All that I have said, is that I know that I can do a better job and considerably safer job, then the default public school my son would attend. My evidence for that, at five, getting ready to go into elementary school, he is ahead of kids leaving the default public school.
To explain. My son has been diagnosed ADHD and is likely mildly bipolar, just like me. As such, he has been seeing a couple of “talking” doctors, as he’s fond of calling them. They recommended and provided placement testing, the results of which were high enough, that they recommended further testing. So we discover that he is reading at a second grade level, with comprehension consistent with that, doing basic math at a first grade level and his basic science scores were off the charts, pushed up heavily by the section that related to engineering principles. Unfortunately, they didn’t include social studies, in the run of tests.
Contrast that with kids going into the sixth grade next year, from his default elementary school. On average, they are reading at a third grade level, with comprehension at the low first. They are at the first grade level for basic math. They are at the second grade level, overall on the science sections. So in some regards, I have already provided a better education than the default public school does, for most of their students.
At the same time, that same school had no less than four kids taken to the hospital in an ambulance, due to violent confrontations and one taken to the hospital due to a drug overdose (crack), in the last school year. My child will never set foot in that school, period. I’d prefer not to, thankfully I don’t have to, but if it was the only other option, I would homeschool him to prevent him having to. Even if the school didn’t have the academic record that it does, it is simply not safe. I gaurantee you, that if I needed to teach him at home, he wouldn’t be getting strung out on crack or getting his ass beat – with a baseball bat in one of the cases.
While the charter school he will attend, may have some problems, the defining characteristics is, the parents of the students actually give a shit about their child/ren’s education.
It would be nice to know ahead of time, exactly what is going to be best for my kids. It would be wonderful to know right now, the best steps to take, to ensure the best possible outcome. But the best statistical analysis, isn’t going to tell me that, if it existed. Even without “special needs” (I hate that euphamism) he could turn out to be gay, in a hostile environment (rather unlikely in most of Portland) or he could decide to reject religious notions in a hostile environment (again, unlikely in Portland, but not impossible). There are any number of circumstances that may arise, that would make even a better public school, too hostile an environment for one or both of my kids to learn in.
Good data could give me probabilities, but none of it will be definitive. I am a hell of an example of that. By all odds, I should have been very successful academically. Theirs no reason that I shouldn’t have a very successful career in engineering, science, psychology or the arts. Instead, I am thirty one, with a GED, just getting going with my higher education, in education and chemical engineering. I am also finally getting my career moving, as a songwriter, after fifteen years of screwing around with it. According to the results of all the tests I took when diagnosed ADHD and based on the statistics that went with them, the probability was, that I should have at least one post graduate degree by now and either still be in academia or managing a successful career by now. Instead I’m a high school dropout, finally trying to make that happen.
Monkeymind wrote:
I am getting my information from what is known as the real world. For example:
University High, http://www.csufresno.edu/univhigh/ a charter school in CA (the state you mentioned above).
From their admission requirements:
There are two primary requirements for a student to be included in the applicant pool:
– Entering Freshmen must have completed all of Algebra I with a grade of C or better and be prepared to take Algebra II at UHS; and,
-Music is a required part of the UHS curriculum for all 4 years. Students should be able to read music, want to study music performance, theory, and history, and participate in an instrumental or vocal performing group.
Admitted students will be required to audition for placement and to take diagnostic tests.
This clever set of requirements has created a nearly all white high school for the children of doctors, lawyers, and college professors, with a per student funding 5 times that of the local population.
I am hoping at some point here you can back up one of your assertions, it is getting tedious doing research for you in the attempt to move this discussion forward.
DuWayne: Bravo for you for taking responsibility for your educational choices for yourself and your son.
I’m there with you wishing that it was possible to KNOW we’re always making the best choices! From the moment the sprog pops out (and even before) seems like parents are magnets for people with very strong, usually inadequately founded, opinions about what we should be doing.
Nullifidian and Evolving Squid – You are so funny! Some parents make statements describing how homeschool is or could be the best possible choice for them, and you demand they justify this decision by proving that homeschool in aggregate is better than public school in aggregate. (Not to mention that it is something of a false dichotomy, since in many districts you can be enrolled in a homeschool program and still be in the public system See example
I can’t do better than quote Bertrand Russell:
Since you can’t prove that homeschool is necessarily harmful, seems like the question should be – is the possible harm of some types of homeschooling worth withdrawing this option from all parents?
I have no doubt by the way that if homeschool were outlawed we’d have a lot more Christian fundamentalist private schools, so it wouldn’t necessarily solve the problem of Christian separtism.
Monkeymind —
Clever of you to try to reverse the thrust of the discussion, but if you read the posts, you will see the discussion is about proving the claims that public schools are the problem, and the solution is home schools. No one is being asked to prove home schooling is better than public schooling, they are being asked to prove public schools are worse that home schooling. Go back to post #79. This is very simple. Show me a home school curriculum that meets my abbreviated public school curriculum. (My children have reminded my that I forgot to include the 3 years of world and US history, and world geography.
The default position on US education is public school. A proven alternative is private school. Why are these not acceptable, using actual evidence from comparable populations.
DuWayne objected my characterizing home school as an experiment. I agree and retract that. The word experiment implies an objective attempt to test an hypothesis. All I am reading is unsupported bigotry and prejudice towards public education.
Sorry to be rude, but after 2+ days of discussion, no one has yet to post one scintilla of evidence that public schools are inferior to home schooling.
Well, so was I, from a rather thorough research of all the options in my district. I think pretty much everyone here is either presenting their specific situations as their specific situations (OK) or generalizing from their specific situations (not OK) and googling stuff, plus small amounts of actual knowledge about how public schools work in the US.
So I was guilty of generalizing from the charter schools in my district, which follow a parent participation model and have no entrance requirements, mainstream disabled kids, and at least some of which provide free meals.
You know, a lot of parents I know are committed to the idea of public education, but struggle daily with the realities. Are my choices harming educational opportunity for other kids? I try not to be in denial about this. I live in a low-income neighborhood and I definitely talked up the charter elementary school and urged others to apply. (maybe I wasn’t so proactive about the competitive high school lottery – I’m human. I’ve logged a lot of hours at school board meetings and on school bond measure campaigns so i hope it offsets any harm I might do with my unreasonable demands for a rigorous academic program for my daughter. (irony alert)
After not getting into the charter high school, I went to the orientation night at my kid’s default middle school. Comparing notes afterward, I found that at least 10 parents had mentioned to the principal that they had applied to the college prep 7-12 school, and asked pointed questions about foreign language and science curriculum. Whaddya know, now they will be offering Spanish!
Tully, I don’t think any of those who shared their specific situations here made any claims that public schools are THE problem or that homeschool is ALWAYS superior to good public education for all students.
For me, the question remains, does the possible harm that accrues from allowing parents to make this choice, worth taking away that choice. I don’t know the answer to that question.
Monkeymind–
Thank you for your civil response to my exasperated posts. I am of course not a disinterested party in this discussion — my children’s stellar public high school has been destroyed by charter schools, NCLB and home schooling. All because the student population in 90% minority and poor. The wealthy in our district originally sent their kids to the school for its high academic standards, then fled at the first alternative. The excuses — too many drugs, too violent. A one size fits all excuse.
There are some charter schools that cater to the lowest performing students, offering alternative education. I have not formed and opinion on these schools yet. But charter schools specifically created to provide a sheltered education to the children of the elite I find personally offensive. They have more funding per student, and being outside the teachers union, can siphon off the best teachers with promises of higher salary. They can ignore the disabled and slow learning, and expel the underachievers and troublemakers (unless a contribution is forthcoming from the troublemaker’s parent). The only time the appear before a local school board is for initial certification (and this is a new regulation, put in place after several charter schools were found to be merely pretending to be a school and pocketing the money).
Since charter schools can filter the students taking the benchmark tests, their scores are useless. Charter schools can recruit brilliant students outside of the local school district, in order to capture academic attention, and inflate the school’s standing.
Again, great if you can get in. Just try not to drive by the inner city school lacking playground equipment, qualified teachers, or an adequate curricula. You may be reminded the money is going to new computers and field trips across town.
Show me a home school curriculum that meets my abbreviated public school curriculum.
MNVA (a homeschooling program run through the public school system – see post 147) uses K12 Curriculum .
No one is being asked to prove home schooling is better than public schooling, they are being asked to prove public schools are worse that home schooling.
In my case, my son is dyslexic, and homeschooling is better for him at this point in time. I wouldn’t say public schooling itself is worse – it’s just worse for my son right now. It all depends on the child, the parents, the circumstances, and so on.
Monkeymind wrote:
Again, read the of thread. A sample of the comments is posted below. I see no caveats along the line of “most public schools are ok, but a few are bad and require an alternative”. (I am purposely ignoring your use of capitalizing to create absolutes).
Ok, tired of cutting and pasting. It goes on and on…
Senritsu —
I was excited by your link to a home school curriculum — Only to be shown a series of advertisements, with no detailed curriculum. The samples did not load, so I couldn’t look at those.
Do you have experience with this curriculum? How does it compare in detail to Miller’s Biology text (The Dragonfly Book), which is a standard in my school district.
Or, be honest — Did you really do research as to the quality of the program?
Tully –
This clever set of requirements has created a nearly all white high school for the children of doctors, lawyers, and college professors, with a per student funding 5 times that of the local population.
So I am perusing that schools web site right now. So lets see.
Nearly all white? While it seems that most of the students are white, it is a slim majority. 45% of the students are minorities. I daresay, that is not a “nearly all white school.”
And while I can’t find the breakdown of that specific school, or what the actual district pay out per student, the California Education Code governing state funding of charter schools, doesn’t seem to provide for any more funding per pupil for charter schools, than it does any other school. Too, that specific school seems to receive a lot of private funding, though they unfortunately don’t provide a breakdown of their funding on their site, so it could be that they get more local public funds per pupil, than the default public schools.
Ultimately, when it comes to the high school level, they are attempting to provide a specific educational focus. Presumably, most of the students who would like to attend, are doing so with the intention of pursuing a career in music or at least the intention of focusing their future education in music. Why then, shouldn’t they expect the students coming in, to have a certain amount of grounding in music and music theory. The musical requirements aren’t even all that high, any child having spent enough time in public school music programs, to know that they would like ot focus their education on music, will have the necessary skills to be admitted. If they don’t have the requisite background or interest, there would be no reason for them to attend.
The math requirement is also not much of a problem, for most any student who has made any effort in school. My guess would be, that they require algebra I, because they want kids to have a decent grounding in math before they come to that school, as they don’t appear to focus much on math. Not something that I particularly care to see, but if kids, and/or their parents, want them to be educated thus, that is their choice.
I really don’t see much difference between the pre-requisites for this school and the pre-requisites for entry into various elective programs that public schools may offer. As the whole point of the school is to focus on music electives, I think the pre-requisites are entirely acceptable. Would you think it unfair for a high-school band instructor to require students coming into band, be capable of reading music and playing their instrument? If not, why shouldn’t they? Or more to the point, why should the education of the other students be undermined, by students lacking in any musical skills?
Again, I am not interested in defending charter schools for the sake of charter schools. I am only sending my kid to one, because of all the options available to my family, that is the best one. My strongest preference, would be to see him go to a good public school. As that is not available to us, we are using the options that we feel will provide the safest and best educational environment.
Re: 168 “[Charter schools] have more funding per student, and being outside the teachers union, can siphon off the best teachers with promises of higher salary.”
Back when I took an intro teaching course at the school of ed., the stats were actually that charter school teachers made less than public school teachers, and private school teachers even less than that, on average. Yet, both charter and public school teachers reported higher job satisfaction than public school teachers, again on average.
The stats we looked at also seemed to show that funding per school, as well as the school’s performance, varied pretty much by community rather than by school type (public, private, charter). With a few notable exceptions, poor communities had poor schools and rich communities had rich schools. Some charter schools were good; others not so much.
The issue of education reform is a complex one, and I think there is some emotion-based over-generalization and over-simplification going on here.
Tully –
Again, read the of thread. A sample of the comments is posted below. I see no caveats along the line of “most public schools are ok, but a few are bad and require an alternative”. (I am purposely ignoring your use of capitalizing to create absolutes).
What the hell have I been saying the entire time. I prefer public schools. I accept that most public schools, could probably teach my child far better than I could. I have been clear that my first choice, given the option, would be a good public school. I have been abundantly clear that the only reason that I am not sending my son to his default public school, is because of violence, violence to the extent that kids had to be taken to the hospital in an ambulance – in elementary school. And the drug problems, drug problems bad enough, that one kid (fourth grade) was taken to the hospital due to a crack OD. That and the fact that my kid, pre-kindergarten, is ahead of the curve of kids leaving that school this fall, to enter the sixth grade.
I am not measuring this against any but our families, default location. I am not claiming that homeschools or charter schools, are superior to any school, but this one. While I am sure other schools like it exist in the various public schools out there, I would hope they are few and far between. I am also not trying to say that poverty is the only factor making this one suck. The poorest school in the area, is in another local district. They have the highest percentage of homeless students in the state of OR. They also manage to get consistently average test scores, with a B- federal rating. They also have a significantly high Asian population, with parents who, regardless of their financial status, focus on their children’s educations.
I daresay the biggest problem that our default location faces, is lack of parental involvement. Something very hard to remedy, certainly not my responsibility. My responsibility is to take care of my children the best adn safest way possible. That means they will not go to our default public school. Not unless someone can prove to me, that he will get a reasonable, safe education there. Thus far, the statistics I have seen, would say otherwise.
I wonder if the original poster of that comment is aware that “government schools” (which is best heard as “gummint schools”) is one of those loaded, red-flag terms, like “Darwinist”.
Virtually every time I’ve seen that phrase it’s been in a post that reeks of Limbaugh and Coulter. And I mean REEKS.
DuWayne —
This is sensitive issue for me at the moment, and I definitely (inflated/exaggerated/flat out lied) to make my point.
You are correct that ~54% of the students are white. I was distorting to make the point that only a little over 20% are African American or Hispanic. Let’s compare that the the surrounding school district:
University High :
White or Asian 69%
Hispanic or African-American 21%
Surrounding School District:
White or Asian 30%
Hispanic or African American 69%
A fascinating reversal for a publicly funded school legally required to server all students equally. How can this be?
1. Locate the school at the farthest reaches of the community, requiring students to supply their own transportation 2x day (no overhead for buses, which the other school must subtract from the daily student stipend the state awards)
2. Pick a cultural attribute popular among one the desired ethnic group (Western classical music) and make it a requirement. The school district was forced to cancel music education due to funding issues? sucks for you — we have private tutors.
3. Omit a cultural attribute the undesired ethnic group excels at and goes to school for — athletics of any kind. I’m not much of an athlete myself, but water polo is what keeps my kid excelling at his school.
4. Charter yourself in another school district many miles away. Let’s you not have to publicize yourself in the local school district — but hey those who should know,will know if you know what I mean.
5. Pretend the school is very academically rigorous to discourage those with low self-esteem about their education. Hope nobody notices the lack of AP courses. And give those glowing recommendations to Stanford!
Would I care if this was a private school? No. But it is not. It is funded with public $. But is designed to cater to a few elite in the community. And they tend to justify it be saying they have to do what is best for their child.
Tully:
The samples loaded for me (I use Firefox with AdBlock – I did have to allow scripts on the page for everything to load properly).
K12 was developed by William J Bennett, and is very focused on “core knowledge.” MNVA notes that it meets the MN state standards, so the quality is good enough as far as the state is concerned.
I don’t use it because I’m using programs that accommodate my son’s dyslexia. But I do know many families that use it and recommend it. Most homeschoolers mix and match instead of buying a complete package because doing so allows them to tailor the materials to their own children. So if you’re asking about a single, complete curriculum for homeschoolers, I don’t know of many. For families that are homeschooling gifted children, some use Stanford’s EPGY but even that requires parents to supplement for certain subjects.
Tully, DuWayne:
They have us right where they want us don’t they? Fighting amongst ourselves for the few scraps thrown to public education by the powers that be.
My first choice would be to scrap our current system, which in effect ties education funding to property values, and replace it with one that is more equitable for all students, regardless of the neighborhood their parents can afford to live in. Meanwhile those of us who live in crappy neighborhoods have to make choices that are going to suck for somebody.
Tully, I think the charter school that my daughter is 65th on the waiting list for is making an honest attempt to provide a real college prep education to all comers and has been responsive to criticism of elitism by hiring a bilingual outreach coordinator – with outside funding. In your public school, what is/was the ethnic breakdown of the students who actually take the AP courses? Tracking has been around since before there were charter schools.
Senritsu – “developed by William J Bennett” (Reagan’s Sec. of Ed.) is not a selling point for me. I prefer the approach of Ted Sizer and the Coalition of Essential Schools.
“developed by William J Bennett” (Reagan’s Sec. of Ed.) is not a selling point for me.
Ha – nor me, but then I’m not big on the core knowledge/E. D. Hirsch, Jr. stuff either. But I’ve been surprised at the variety of people that have spoken highly of it, and it is one of the few complete programs I know of.
I agree. State and Federal funds are part of the picture too, of course, but the disparity in local funding between more and less affluent areas creates a discrepancy in educational quality and opportunity that shouldn’t exist. There’s a vicious-circle, death-spiral aspect to this, too, in that a poorly-funded school is apt to perform poorly and may consequently lose funding.
A friend moved to Seattle recently and found herself in a situation very much like DuWayne’s. She was disappointed and disturbed by conditions in the local public school, so she started looking into homeschooling her daughter. She was able to place her daughter in a nearby school that was able to provide a much better learning and social environment than the school in her district – a choice DuWayne apparently did not have – but I believe she would have committed herself to homeschooling her girl if the other school hadn’t been available. Like DuWayne, she had no axe to grind with “public education” per se; her decision would have been based entirely on what was best for her daughter in that specific locale.
Kseniya –
A friend moved to Seattle recently and found herself in a situation very much like DuWayne’s.
This has been the most disturbing aspect of moving to the PacNW for me. I know very little about the situation in Seattle, except that it is similar to the one in Portland. Portland has some world class public schools, if you live in the right district. The problem is, that the city (actually the whole county, as my district is both a Portland district and a Gresham district) is split up into several districts. You can move your child from school to school, but only inside your district. Thus, they can keep the “riff raff” out of the better schools.
The Reynolds school district, which is our district, is the worse of all of them, though it’s not actually the poorest. the problem is that they don’t have the ability to implement some of the programs that have been successful in other districts, such as strict dress codes or uniforms. Parental objections to that one in particular, have been overwhelming. Another problem is, that while this isn’t the poorest district, it has less funding than the poorest district in the area, because of the screwy tax base and their refusal to pass millages. The reason for that, is that people who live outside the district, are on the districts tax base, rather than their own. Quite reasonably, they don’t want to pay for a different district, with their property taxes.
What gets me about the PacNW, is that for all the talk about how “progressive” it is here, there are some unbelievably regressive policies (not just, but especially related to education) that are worse in many regards, than those of the places I grew up and lived, in Michigan. There is more than one Portland and I don’t live in the decent, “progressive” one. Although, given what I have seen of the “good” Portland, it is largely peopled by hypocritical assholes, that can talk progressive all day, but when it comes down to it, they are perfectly satisfied with the status quo, as long as their Portland stays good, clean and wealthy – and the wealth stays their.
Tully –
I am sorry that this is a sore spot for you. To be honest, I am not happy with the situation my family is faced with either. Honestly, I am not real happy with the charter schools and the way they function, I would much rather see the money go to public schools and see public schools perform the function of offering the programs that they traditionally have, that charter schools have stepped in to pick up on.
I think that it is just as important to have language classes, phys ed, music, theater, home ec and industrial arts, as it is to have a solid college prep. Having had all of those in school, I have been able to survive because of them. I worked as a handyman/remodeler, up until a recent injury precluded it. Before I had a family, I was able to survive on my musical abilities. And I am quite the capable cook, in part because of what I learned in school. I also have a lot of professional friends who have been well served by similar courses from primary school.
I realize that it is hypocritical of me, but I cannot put my children into our local public school, nor can I do what it takes to fix them. It can’t be done alone and there are not enough people motivated to do it either. I would homeschool them if I had to, but given the option of sending them to the charter school, that is what we chose, as preferable to trying to manage it ourselves.
By and by, I am going to study education, not because I want to teach, but because I intend to enter the political arena, surrounding the education system in the greater Portland area. I am already going to school board meetings and as time and education allows (i.e. in five to ten years) I am going to shoot for getting on the school board’s advisory council. From their I intend on moving upwards, onto the school board, hopefully with a PHD to my credit. I would just love to get into a position to beyond that, to fix the fucking mess, that splits up the districts, as badly as they are.
Rather than focus everything on it right now, when I have a child about to enter school and a baby due in December (along with starting school myself in the fall), I am going to take it a step at a time. I will take on more and more responsibility, as my children get older and more independent, saving the running for elected positions, for when they are in high school and beyond. Until then, however, there is no way someone could pay me, to send my kid to our local, default public school. As such, I will be the hypocrite and do what I have to do for my child. Hoping that someday, I will be in a position to affect real change in the school that I am currently refusing to send my child to, along with many others.
When has it ever been otherwise? It takes only a little time for revolutionaries to become aristocrats. People aren’t interested in doing good for others at their own expense – and what people like you don’t want to recognize is that there’s no reason for them to.
Caledonian –
People aren’t interested in doing good for others at their own expense – and what people like you don’t want to recognize is that there’s no reason for them to.
Unfortunately, I am learning just how true that is. Having spent my life relatively poor, in an atmosphere of poor friends who take care of each other, it is disappointing to discover that those who have more means to do so, often don’t. There are notable exceptions to that, some on a grand scale, like the Gates, others on a smaller scale that are a part of my life. However, it is all too often that people just want to talk the talk, so they can look good and feel self-righteous, but when it comes down to it, they are just full of shit.
To be sure, I understand and respect that not everyone wants to and I don’t feel compulsion is the answer. But when they want to claim certain values, I expect them to live up to those values. When they don’t, I don’t believe they are worthy of the least bit of respect. If they don’t actually want to put up, fine, but then they should shut the hell up and stop being hypocrites. I don’t even care if they want to admit who they really are, I would just like them to stop claiming to be what they aren’t.
I have a lot more respect for someone like you, who as far as I can gather is fairly libertarian. I can respect that you don’t want to fund everyone else’s education or welfare, you at least admit that’s how you feel. I can disagree with you and I can debate you (though not here and now) about the value to society and even you personally, to ensure a quality education and even some welfare. We may not change each other’s minds, but at least we can carry on a reasonable, honest discussion. With people like the ones around here (to be sure not nearly all of them are like that) that simply isn’t possible. They claim to support the same things I support, meanwhile undermining it.
I suspect people think I’m much more libertarian than I actually am, mostly because of the contrast between myself and the majority opinion at this site.
It’s not so much that I’m necessarily against a tax-financed public school system, but such systems tend towards kakaistocracies at the best of times, and our current society is hardly at the best of times. I dislike the idea that public school systems are inherently desirable simply because they’re public, and I resent having to support educational systems that are stupid, inefficient, and grossly inadequate.
Plenty of other countries can pull off public education with grace and style. Their more socialistic-style societies produce long-term problems that I suspect are beginning to become manifest, but at least they’ve made them work in the short term. We can’t pull that off, and trying to pretend that we’re as functional as they are is a terrible mistake.
I said: I am *not* saying that there is anything wrong with the treatment itself, but that there are patients who are not getting the expected results from the treatment, not to mention experiencing significant negative side effects.
Nullifidian replied:
Is saying that a treatment is not suitable for everyone the same thing as saying there is something wrong with it? Take anti-depressants, for example: many people need to try several different types before they find one that is right for them.
And as to how we know group schooling works:
Sure, that’s how we know that group schooling works, for the majority of kids. But the historical record of group schooling also shows us that kids with learning disabilities, however intelligent, often drop out (or are kicked out) – the same historical information can show us how and when groupschooling doesnt work. Granted, in the more modern instantiations of group schooling, that happens rather less often than it used to, but it still means that group schooling is not suitable for every child.
My son, identified as LD/gifted, was failing high school. The school was apparently un-interested in assisting us to address this. In an interview with his math teacher, the comment was: “Son” is quiet and doesn’t cause any trouble in class. (Ironically, if he had been more of a trouble maker he probably would have got more attention and/or assistance from the school.) To me, this is a clear case where group schooling was not working. So, we tried homeschooling as an alternative. Apparently, it worked, as he is now very successful in his college program. Could we have done things differently? Possibly, though at the time there were no other options that I was aware of, other than forcing him to stay in school while I fought with the administration. (Even if I won, it would likely have been to late to do Son much good.)
As far as I can see, almost all the homeschoolers in this discussion are supporters of public schooling, in theory, and in practice wherever possible. We have provided anecdotal reports of the groupschooling failures and homeschooling successes that have helped us to form our conclusions and make our decisions. I am at a loss to understand how and why these decisions are a threat to others. If we are wrong, we have made a bad parenting decision. Lots of parents do that, in ways that can have far worse consequences.
Caledonian –
I agree with you, that our schools are failing overall. That is why I am so keen on getting an education in that field and trying to do something about it. I am also going to study chemical engineering, only because I love chemistry and if the music career doesn’t work out, I want to make a living too. Somehow, I doubt that working to improve education is going to provide any sort of living, certainly not from the start.
I have several Japanese friends. Mostly because my closest friend is heavily involved in the sister city program, back in Lansing, MI, from which I hail. One thing that I noticed consistently, and was told is the absolute norm, even for students that don’t make it over here, is that the Japanese love learning. I see it some, with Japanese Americans, but the more generations you get from Japan, the mroe it seems to fade.
My goal, is to help build a school system, that will foster students that have that same love of learning. I see the same thing in every young child I know. Somehow, our schools seem to do a hell of a job at entirely quashing that, in most kids. Certainly there are exceptions, but I think it’s pretty much the norm, here in the states. I know it did for me, it was only after I quit school and directed my own education, that I got back to my absolute love of learning.
I want to see most kids make it through their entire primary education, without losing that love of learning. Unfortunately, the lionshare of the responsibility for fostering that, rests entirely on the shoulders of the parents. There are vast improvements that can, and must be made in the schools. However, there is only so much that can be done to motivate parents to get involved.
Theo –
But the historical record of group schooling also shows us that kids with learning disabilities, however intelligent, often drop out (or are kicked out) – the same historical information can show us how and when groupschooling doesnt work.
And that is a huge concern for me. My son has already been diagnosed with ADHD and I assume that, as he has exhibited many of the symptoms and it’s my other genetic problem, he’s probably bipolar. At the least, in the charter school, he’ll get more personal attention and they will be wroking with us, to figure out the best support we can provide at home. Also, we will be welcome to help out in the classroom.
So… can it be that the root of the problem is that schools are financed by the district in the USA, so that poor districts can only afford bad schools? Over here such a proposal would be considered chutzpah. Schools are financed directly by the country or at least the “state”.
And no, this doesn’t lead to averaging out. It leads to keeping the minimum high. There are public schools that, by tradition, are elite schools full of kids by rich parents; and then there are private schools anyway. The daughter of Austria’s Social-Democrat federal chancellor goes to the Lycée Français.
In the long term, there are several such reasons, which all amount to the “expense” turning out to be an investment. Off the top of my head:
– Reciprocal altruism.
– Everyone benefits from an educated society. Illiterate unskilled workers are not productive. If employers have to educate their workers themselves, they pay…
– Who shall buy Henry Ford’s cars?
So… can it be that the root of the problem is that schools are financed by the district in the USA, so that poor districts can only afford bad schools? Over here such a proposal would be considered chutzpah. Schools are financed directly by the country or at least the “state”.
And no, this doesn’t lead to averaging out. It leads to keeping the minimum high. There are public schools that, by tradition, are elite schools full of kids by rich parents; and then there are private schools anyway. The daughter of Austria’s Social-Democrat federal chancellor goes to the Lycée Français.
In the long term, there are several such reasons, which all amount to the “expense” turning out to be an investment. Off the top of my head:
– Reciprocal altruism.
– Everyone benefits from an educated society. Illiterate unskilled workers are not productive. If employers have to educate their workers themselves, they pay…
– Who shall buy Henry Ford’s cars?
Oh, yes, indeedy, but that’s not what I’m talking about here. Not making sacrifices today to reap a benefit tomorrow – making sacrifices today that give no benefit, ever, or even a penalty over time.
The type of behavior that Our Leader is talking about when he demands patience and sacrifice for the War in Iraq. The kind of behavior that subsidizes incompetence and rewards mindless loyalty.
It’s partly the fault of Christianity, since that kind of “selflessness” is explicitly praised in it. It makes about as much sense as Leviticus forbidding intercropping because it makes categories complex and it’s a metaphor for exogamy.
I’m not trying to say that homeschooling is superior to public schooling, or that public schooling is inferior to homeschooling. I’m just trying to say that my decision for my kids is not equivalent to a public policy decision that effects all kids, including my own. The homeschoolers who say HS is best for every individual and the public schoolers who say PS is best for every individual are both missing that point. The fact that public schooling is a great thing for society does not mean that the exclusion of alternative methods is a greater thing for society.
As for whether homeschooling is like alternative therapies vs. medicine, or “Intelligent Design” vs. science, I think these analogies are ridiculous. Institutional education is not scientifically applied, nor are its basic assumptions and broad understandings constantly challenged and verified within the field.
Now, I’m not specifically making this argument, but since the comparison to pseudo-science vs. science has been made, why couldn’t the comparison to mainstream religion vs. questioning/atheism equally be made?
Look at what we’re hearing as arguments in favor of public schooling/against homeschooling:
(The default position on US religion is Christianity. Proven alternatives are Judaism and Islam.)
(Based on what I’ve seen of religion, I’m all for it.)
(On what do you base the belief that human life can have purpose without God?)
(The biggest problem with atheism is a lack of basis for morality.)
(Show me how atheism provides the exactly what Christianity provides within the framework of theology.)
Most people are happy to live and let live — go along with schooling/religion in their own lives because it satisfies their requirements for education/a belief system. Or they never question it.
Many homsechoolers are like many atheists. They interrogate conventional wisdom, aren’t satisfied with its conclusions, and choose a different way, willing to change when evidence shows they should. They might even pitch in with charities that happen to be religious, or work to get supporters of evolution elected to the state school board.
Some vocal homeschoolers are like the most activist anti-theists. They see a system that is more destructive than beneficial, and ultimately seek to turn enough people against it that the system crumbles. They think they do this for the good of all children.
Then there are the people who can’t imagine society without religion or public schooling. They work hard to make life difficult for those who choose atheism or homeschooling, and ultimately seek to outlaw homeschooling, or deny full citizenship to atheists. They might try to censor atheist books (hey, look! a reference to the original topic!). They think they do this for the good of all children.
Yes, I agree it’s a silly analogy, so please don’t quote-mine to represent these as my stated opinions. I only present it as a counter to the science/pseudo-science analogies, and one that’s at least as worthy of consideration.
In that second-to-last paragraph I wrote
but I should have said
Then there are the people who can’t imagine society without universal religion or mandatory public schooling.
(My last category is the extreme minority who want to exclude alternatives to the mainstream belief/education system)
David Marjanovic –
The problem with that, at least here, is that those in power at the state and federal levels, are very partisan. It would mean standards that would change with the winds of political fortune and would likely fail to address the serious problems at the local level, which are different problems in different locales.
That doesn’t mean there aren’t those, myself included, who would like to see more authority and funding at the state level. The problem with implementing such a system, is that it would require giving the state boards of education, a certain amount of autonomy from the political process, something that many Americans are extremely uncomfortable with.
The other problem, is that it still wouldn’t address the most egregious problem, parental involvement. It is easy t say that parents need to get involved. It’s easy for a lot of parents to want to be more involved. However, many parents, no matter how much they want to be more proactive, it’s just not possible.
My partner and I, have had to make a lot of sacrifices to retain the level of involvement in our son’s life and education that we have. If I were working the same hours I worked, before my son came along and his mom was working too, we wouldn’t live in the ghetto. But we also wouldn’t have much time (for me, no time) to spend raising our child. While this has been good for his pre-education, it has been hard on our relationship and put us in the predicament we’re in now, with our local school being worse than substandard.
Mommyrex wrote:
I’m sorry, is there some protocol I should follow when responding to criticism of my posts via to use of your “silly analogies”?
If you have a response to post #79, then please respond. So far only Senritsu has (thank you, wish there had been some actual information).
Actually, the comment was the critics of public education were using the same argumentative strategy as the ID’s. There was no comparison of home schooling to ID. You post has done little to disprove the observation.
Look, I get it. For some of us, our children are not capable of participating in public education. That’s ok with me. It may be due to a real and specific aspect of public education in the individual’s environment. Completely understandable.
We have not had blanket condemnation of public education in quite a few posts. This is a good thing. Peace.