Posted on 12/10/2015 7:51:53 AM PST by Sopater
This article focuses more on the positive aspects of homeschooling and less on the negative ones of the alternatives.
It shows that as long as we are free to educate and raise our children at home, there is hope for this country.
Yeah, homeschooling is great.
But precollegiate schooling via the parents is terribly inefficient.
It ignores the simple economic principle of the division of labor and indicates a breakdown in social trust.
It’s too bad many of us have no other choice.
Welcome to the dark ages.
This is pure hate! They are teaching homeschoolers to burn crosses and tie minorities to the back of their pickup trucks and drag them to death while singing about the greatness of Reagan! And these scores are the proof! (/NEA)
I am VERY VERY pro homeschooling.
But I have recently learned that there are limits. I am currently trying to help a homeschooling family where the prime motivation seems to be that the parent is too lazy to get out of bed in the morning and get the kids on the school bus.
I am VERY VERY much against government interference in people’s private lives. If I weren’t, I’d report this family to child protective services or something. But I expect that would just make the situation worse and allow the government to stick their nose into people’s personal business where it doesn’t belong. If anyone has any suggestions on what they would do to help these kids who are learning very little and ill-prepared for any sort of life outside their home, please post or FReepmail me.
The 17-year-old cannot add and subtract and has the math knowledge of a 3rd grader at best. As far as I can see, the parent and the oldest child are all about excuses and getting by with minimal work, staying up late and watching movies instead of getting a job or doing homework or anything productive. Not sure about the younger kids but this can’t be a good environment for them, either.
Most Americans are not master teachers in more than one or two subjects. A division of labor is the solution for limited resources.
The younger years are easier.
As sad as that situation is, it is really the responsibility of the parents to raise those children. Their children will suffer because of their neglect in educating them. Although I agree that laziness is not a reason to homeschool, I would expect that sending the children to gov’t school would not solve the problems that they have at home.
I graduated public high school with kids who’d been public schooled for 13 years. More than a few of them couldn’t read the diplomas they received. Many of them didn’t know the simplest multiplication facts.
Get back to me on lazy homeschoolers when public schools are gaduating literate humans.
gaduating = graduating.
Coffee quota incomplete.
Consider this “innovative idea”. Consider ballet schools, music schools, math centers—a division of labor.
It's a question of philosophy. In pursuit of the goal of maximum economic output for the society, it is "inefficient" for a parent to be the educator for his/her own children. The way of maximum efficiency should be for children to be reared from birth in large groups by workers at the lowest cost, while the biological progenitors take their highest-value role as producers. This is the Marxist model.
If the goal is to produce an 18- to 20-year-old person with such-and-such knowledge and skills, then institutional schooling also has the potential to be more "efficient," because those providing the schooling can be specialists who convey their knowledge to larger groups. This also allows the biological progenitors of the students to maximize their economic value as producers, since they are freed from the daily supervision of their offspring.
The view of the family in which the very fact of living and learning together at any age is in itself a value is very different from either of the previous philosophies.
Home-school doesn’t always mean teach everything by yourself.
Home-school co-opts, dual credit classes at the junior college, online classes, paid classes that cater to homeschool students. Do you honestly think that in a group of millions of bright families that you are the first to consider that innovative idea?
It took a couple years of college classes before my kids realized that my wife and I were pretty good teachers. This was an unforeseen consequence of us taking good advantage of the external teaching available. If we knew a fantastic teacher that would do a better job than us in a subject, we would sign the kids up for that class. As a result, every “other” teacher they were exposed to were fantastic teachers. Their conclusion was that mom and dad were just average.
It was not until they had repeated exposure to a non-filtered set of teachers that they got the perspective to see how we really rated.
The key difference is that even when we didn’t teach it ourselves, we had complete control to pick the teacher, the curriculum and had accountability that if they were doing something we did not approve of then we had authority to pull the kids without having to fight endless levels of bureaucracy.
Like Marxism, the theory fails in reality.
* The high level of expertise simply is not needed to teach most classes.
* Institutional teachers are rarely as motivated to care for a child as their parent is
* When a child gets to the level where expert teachers make a difference, the homeschooling model allows the flexibility to pursue those experts where the institutional model is rigid and uses a one-size fits all approach.
One of my daughters was very attached to her mother. In a public school, that was a problem because in a room of 30 students, the teacher cannot give every student that kind of attention. The advice given by another homeschool mom was that it was a fantastic opportunity. Let the kid sit on your knee as long as she does educational activities. She will outgrow wanting to be right next to mom, but the education would benefit her an entire life time. It was great advice, and worked just as described.
It is amazing the level of ignorance displayed by many non-homeschoolers as they seek to enlighten others with their brilliance.
Oh, my. Learning together as a family is great and even greater through the division of labor.
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