Home Schooling

[StarshipTitanic]

I really, really can't stand the people who correct non-native English speakers (who don't ask) while they cannot speak English perfectly and without flaw themselves.

Two things.

One, I was posting that as a partial joke seeing as this thread was about education. Two, I hadn't noticed he was from a European country.

Without a smilie it is very hard to notice.

[Spanky The Dolphin]

Before being home schooled, Utsanomiko and I attended a private school for kids with learning disabilities (normal stuff like ADD/ADHD and dyslexia, etc..., not retards and such) for grades 1-8. It provided an excellent educational and social environment.

My parents pulled us out and decided to home school us not for anything like religious or education reasons: Mom is an excommunicated Catholic and Dad is a Methodist, and both are very casual when it comes to religion and such. It was because the tuition was getting way too expensive for my parents to justify spending on our educations. That and some parents were starting to take advantage of the school, and kids with much more severe mental, learning, and social problems were getting let in.

I was home schooled by my mother for grades 7 and 8, but I repeated 8th grade in a local Catholic school to help me catch up to speed in terms of taught subjects, homework, and social factors before I started public high school (Utsanomiko was for grades 6-8 before attending HS). I thought it was a very good school, and religion class and Friday Mass were the only major religious elements present (well, prayers, too, but those weren't a problem).

It was a pretty good experiance, I'd have to say. There was a small gap in math, but I recovered quickly enough. I did have some trouble with the higher levels of algebra and geometry in MS and HS, but that was more because I have trouble working with abstract math that I'm never going to use.

Science wasn't really covered that much by us, but that was partially because we thought science was cool while growing up, so we read a lot about it in our spare time.

We primarily centered on history, and we've always done well in that area, again due to an interest in it (at least for me).

The only thing that was really effected for me was my social skills. Why I've always been very shy and reserved, the two years of home schooling probably stunted my ability to interact and communicate with others. But I'm not resentful about it at all, so I'm just trying to improve it while in college.

That's pretty much about it...

[Kitsune]

What?? How many grammatical errors were there in my post??

BTW, in Denmark, schools don't start teaching English until 4th grade, so it didn't matter that much.

You probably type better than 80% of Americans <g>

The only thing I was surprised was that I have a friend in the Netherlands and he told me that home schooling is not allowed there

[AdmiralKanos]

A few points:

1. The population of this board is unusually irreligious. Therefore, any home-schoolers on this board were probably not home-schooled for religious reasons. However, the same is not true for the general population, and if you investigate home-schooling parental support newsgroups and bulletin boards and websites, you will see that they are overwhelmingly dominated by fundies whose motivation is to keep their kids away from what they consider "bad influences" (read: anyone who's not a fundie).
2. You cannot teach that which you do not know or do not remember from your own schooling, so homeschooling becomes progressively more problematic as you advance in grade levels.
3. Home-schoolers' scores on comparative tests tend to be skewed by the fact that they do not participate in standardized tests unless they CHOOSE to. According to Newsweek, a much lower percentage of homeschoolers participate in SAT tests and other standardized comparative exercises. It stands to reason that only the best homeschoolers are taking these tests, hence they appear to be doing better than they really are as a group.

In the end, most home-schoolers are taught at home for all the wrong reasons (mostly, to keep them away from blasphemies).

[David]

Some statistics http://www.uhea.org/stats.html

[David]

Some more info http://www.ericfacility.net/ericdigests/ed435709.html

[David]

Employers know what they can expect from high-school grads. What will they think of a home-schooled child?

In today's society, a job where nothing more than a high school diploma is required usually does not require alot of thought. In some thing that requires either technical training or a college degree, I'd say the person's grades would speak for themselves.

Home schooling could catch on

Considering more than a million children now homeschool in the US, I say it already has.

[Faram]

The only thing I was surprised was that I have a friend in the Netherlands and he told me that home schooling is not allowed there

Don’t know about the rest of Europe but here in Sweden there is no such thing as home schooling.

But if you want to you can start your own private school enrol the kids and thatch them, But you have to follow the school laws.

Those laws include what needs to be thatched and how many hours each subject shall have.

There are inspectors that make sure that you follow the law.

[Peregrin Toker]

You cannot teach that which you do not know or do not remember from your own schooling, so homeschooling becomes progressively more problematic as you advance in grade levels.

This is why my parents only homeschooled me during 1st grade and sent me to a public school as soon I was ready for 2nd grade. And I can only thank them for that - if I was homeschooled all the way through grade school, I'd probably be even more of a weirdo than I am today.

Also, the thing about homeschooling is that it depends on the parents. If the parents are very highly educated, I don't see that big a problem with it - but I don't think that the less intelligent people should homeschool their children.

[UltraViolence83]

Considering the collapse of this country's education system, by the time I have kids I think I myself would do a much better job at teaching them. Of course, I don't want to socially stunt my kid(s), so I'd only do this if he/she already has a good amount of friends to play with.

As for most families with two spouses working, fuck that shit. I've never liked the idea of daycare, and if my hypothectical wife and I are poorer, so be it. I'd like my wife to take care of the child when it's very young while I work and then she'll work while I homeschool (I could get a nightshift job). If everyone did this, we wouldn't need to all be working and keeping the kids in the company of professional strangers for the better part of the day just to make ends meet. I hate society, can't you tell?

I thought you needed to buy textbooks and homeschoolers are required to take tests every so often, not just impromptu lessons.

[David]

No they are not required to, but most homeschoolers do buy text books from the same companies that schools do, like Saxton and ABeka for example. As for taking standardized tests, most colleges will accept a homeschool diploma the same as a private school diploma. As far as college goes, the ultimate measure of the student is in their SAT, ACT, TASP ( in Texas case) scores, and then the grades they get after they are in college, not their grades before.

[Gil Hamilton]

Considering the collapse of this country's education system, by the time I have kids I think I myself would do a much better job at teaching them. Of course, I don't want to socially stunt my kid(s), so I'd only do this if he/she already has a good amount of friends to play with.

As for most families with two spouses working, fuck that shit. I've never liked the idea of daycare, and if my hypothectical wife and I are poorer, so be it. I'd like my wife to take care of the child when it's very young while I work and then she'll work while I homeschool (I could get a nightshift job). If everyone did this, we wouldn't need to all be working and keeping the kids in the company of professional strangers for the better part of the day just to make ends meet. I hate society, can't you tell?

I thought you needed to buy textbooks and homeschoolers are required to take tests every so often, not just impromptu lessons.

Like I described on Spacebattles, the Public School system hasn't collasped as much as many right-wing commentators described. For instance, in Pittsburgh, I know for a fact that AP kids in public schools did significantly in any sort of testing you can name than homeschool kids with little exception. As long as your hypothetical child is willing to actually take school halfway seriously, there is no reason why they won't do well in public school.

[BrYaN19kc]

I know a couple of students at our university went through home schooling grade school/middle school/high school.

I've heard them comment in classes numerous times that they resented it very much because they were fairly isolated and didn't get the chance to meet other students their age. They were totally against it.

[UltraViolence83]

My ideas only work if the child has friends to play with outside of school. If not, then it's a bad idea in my opinion.

When I entered 3rd grade I was transferred to another school which housed an SBH classroom. SBH stands for "Special Behavioral [Something]" and it's for kids who are basketcases and all around pricks. I was both. I never had more than 2 friends at a time outside of school and NO friends in school. We just basically sat there quietly doing our work the whole day. If you get out of line, you get a "mark" on your weekly record, and on Friday they are tallied up and if you go over your limit you can't have extra recess or watch the movie or whatever.

In 7th grade I was put back into normal school. Those four years did NOT help me. I was pretty much isolated from the other kids except for the hyperactive pricks in my own classroom. Bastards.

Let's just say that SBH's methods of doing things is very different from the norm. I flunked all my classes except gym, even though I still passed and was put into a "learning difference/disability" class for english and math.

So in conclusion, it would appear that it all depends on the child involved and their personality and environment. Isolation didn't work out for me.

[Tsyroc]

I've known two families that home school their kids.

I don't know much about one of the families but I do know that they participated in an organization that got groups of home schooled kids involved in activities together.

The other family is pretty much doing the home schooling thing for religious reasons. Both parents are very nice people and they aren't what I would call fundamentalists but they are very religious and sometimes on the verge of drifting into fundy land. They have five boys and the mother has been home schooling them all (well the youngest is only about 2 years old). I believe she has a teaching degree. Her husband is a pharmacist I work with and he might have a degree in history but I don't recall.


One thing that is nice about home schooling is that the family has more flexibility in when they take vacations. They can always do some of the schooling while they are away.

[Uraniun235]

On the "not learning how to work in teams" point:

From what I've experienced in public education, "teamwork" is a fucking joke. A better description would be "pairing the stupid kids up with the smart ones and having the smart ones drag the stupid ones along"... and I've had teachers that openly admitted to me that's why they were doing it, albeit in less blunt language. Double the work for the smarter kids while the stupid ones are either constantly frustrated by the smart kid's actual comprehension of what the teacher just said, or kick back knowing that the smart kid's grade rests on the group product and that he'll get it done one way or the other.

"Teamwork"?!? If that's what we need to learn in high school, no wonder so many people are colossal failures; in the real world, nobody (except for a vocal minority of asshole lawyers) will defend you from an employer for riding the coattails of someone else's work and expecting to get paid for it.

Considering the collapse of this country's education system, by the time I have kids I think I myself would do a much better job at teaching them.

So, if it's collapsed, doesn't that mean the country itself will implode sometime within the next couple of decades?

There's gambling potential here. Which year will the nation implode?

Frankly, from what I've experienced, it's not the high school level that's "collapsed"... given the increasing stupidity of students, the bullshit is occurring at a lower level... elementary, perhaps, or middle school level. It's really a shame, because free public education is part of what makes free nations great... my band teacher loved to tell us about a Brazilian exchange student who said the most surprising thing about the US was how the schools weren't divided into classes; the rich and poor kids went to the same school (except for the minority of private schooled children), instead of being divided into the school where doctors' and lawyers' children went to and the school where the ditchdiggers' and factory workers' children went to.

But with the conservative push for "vouchers" and more emphasis on private schooling (which is only bolstered by the failure of SOME schools, and especially by Bush's empty rhetoric of "no child left behind"), there could very well develop schools of affluence and schools of poverty.

Frankly, for the most part, kids really should go to school with other kids. Although I've heard of parents getting together and doing collective homeschooling (i.e. like a class of 12 or so that meets regularly at someone's house), this usually entails public or private school. The socialization, especially with video games so prevalent now, is critical; fuck, I went to public school my whole life and I was still socially inept... imagine if I had never set foot in a public institution until high school... or even college. Or someone like me.

[Ace Pace]

from my own experiance, actully passing it now, the problem occurs in middle school, the teachers are crap and don't know a thing.

Elementry school, at least the teachers KNOW something, and also they take time to learn about the kids, and pair them up in something aproaching order.

[Tsyroc]

On the "not learning how to work in teams" point:

From what I've experienced in public education, "teamwork" is a fucking joke. A better description would be "pairing the stupid kids up with the smart ones and having the smart ones drag the stupid ones along"... and I've had teachers that openly admitted to me that's why they were doing it, albeit in less blunt language. Double the work for the smarter kids while the stupid ones are either constantly frustrated by the smart kid's actual comprehension of what the teacher just said, or kick back knowing that the smart kid's grade rests on the group product and that he'll get it done one way or the other.

"Teamwork"?!? If that's what we need to learn in high school, no wonder so many people are colossal failures; in the real world, nobody (except for a vocal minority of asshole lawyers) will defend you from an employer for riding the coattails of someone else's work and expecting to get paid for it.

While I agree with your comments they also made me realize how much "teamwork" I have to put up with at work on a consistent basis.
On that note, learning about "teamwork" in school may actually help prepare you for the real world in one way or another.

[Next of Kin]

A better description would be "pairing the stupid kids up with the smart ones and having the smart ones drag the stupid ones along"... and I've had teachers that openly admitted to me that's why they were doing it, albeit in less blunt language.

They probably threw the term "cooperative learning" around which is just another buzzword word for group work.