I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.
I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.
I used to sell books, oh, 30 years ago or so now.
The home schoolers were the scariest bunch of people you'll encounter.
Had one guy ask where the weather control books were, and I was like "You mean seeding clouds to make it rain? I think we have..."
"No! I mean the government weather control programs!"
Had another lady convinced her electricity was going to give her cancer because it came from a nuclear power plant and was radioactive.
We are homeschooling one of our kids because his particular needs were not being met by the local school. Meeting other homeschool families is always nerve-wracking for me. I never know if they're going to be a normal family adapting to an unusual situation, or tinfoil-hat nuts using homeschool as an excuse to hide their children from the outside world.
“No! I mean the government weather control programs!”
"Check the science fiction section."
Careful. You might help create another religion.
It’s astounding how little people know about how the world works even without home schooling factored in.
The weather control books are in Red Alert 2.
It's not homeschooling, it's unschooling.
My parents were both teachers at private or Christian schools while I grew up, and every year, there'd always be a new couple of kids who's parents couldn't quite hack it anymore, so they'd send them to school. But couldn't bear to send their kids to those secular, godless, evolution teaching, sex driven, minority filled public schools, so they'd send them to my school instead.
Those kids were always some of the dumbest, most ignorant people on the planet. Some figure it out, but most don't. They just double down. They were usually barely literate, couldn't do math, and had no social skills. It's how you end up with a 19 year old freshman who can't read Dr. Seuss.
I know teachers aren't paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don't, and it shows.
I know teachers aren’t paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don’t, and it shows.
Jesus, this makes so much sense that it's scary to think it's not universal. Sure, you can teach your kids. Just get certified to do so first. It doesn't even have to be the same certification as professional teachers, but just a bare minimum, pass the GED level of education. To not have this kind of requirement really seems like society failing those kids.
I don’t feel like a GED is even close to a good standard. Setting the GED as the bar is like setting the bar low enough to be in the hell they’re teaching kids about. But I guess it’s at least something.
Like we are comparing a GED here to people who have masters degrees and sometimes relevant training or degrees in what they teach. It’s like saying “hey if you want to perform an at home DIY surgery on your family, that’s fine, but please play this game of Operation first.”
You clearly haven't seen how bad some of our schools in America are. The war on education has been quite successful.
What were you doing in that school?!!!
Playing 'Bob the builder' with troglodyte kids in the hopes of mitigating some of the damage their wilfully ignorant parents inflicted upon the world.
Can we fix it!?...eh, maybe.
When I hear a woman say "I'm not a feminist" my first thought is "WHY THE HELL NOT??"
For the same reason they oppose public health, public school, trans rights, diversity, equity, and inclusion. They literally don't know what they are.
I know at least 2 Republicans that when you actually talk about individual policy preferences it comes across as moderate democrat. One of them was a virulent PRO masker because of their job.
I think people just don't pay attention to actual policies, it's all just the soundbites and controversy.
because the word feminism has different meanings for different people. for some it means equality and a way to get there. for others it means men are bad and women should get priority treatment. communication is hard when there is no objective meaning for any of the words we are using.
But that second meaning is a bogeyman. No one says "I am a feminist" and means that.
Because a lot of modern (so-called 3rd wave) "feminists" are just greedy people demanding things that will advantage them but doing so behind the cover of the group so that it doesn't look like all the other greedy bastards - it's rightwing thinking disguised as "for the group", which is why they worry way more about "the glass ceiling" (which disadvantages high middle class people who aren't in an "old boys network", which includes almost all women from thst social strata) rathar than, say, the very low salaries for women who are blue collar workers.
The previous waves of Feminism were of the "we want to be treated like everybody else" (or as I like to think of it: "get out of my way and let me be all that I can be").
People react very differently to the "gimme shit" crowd than they do the "stop hindering me" one, and sadly the former are a lot louder (as usual for people driven by greed) and have come to dominate the image of Feminism in Anglo-Saxon countries.
Perhaps their understanding of feminism has come from the violently extreme "kill all men" types of feminists or the opposing "get back in the kitchen" type of conservative shitbags making up all sorts of scary and mean things about them.
“I do have one question, though ― do you teach feminism? I mean, I believe in equality, but I am not a feminist, and I don’t want to teach it to my daughter.”
I take the approach I used in Missouri.
“What do you mean?” I ask her.
“Well, do you teach that women are better than men?”
“No, I teach all genders are equal and should be treated as such.”
She buys three kits.
Jesus wept.
This is the problem with the kind of disinformation the right wing media pushes. If you describe something in as objective truthful a way as possible, suddenly none of this shit is controversial.
I've seen people totally on board with a description of public health turn around and just rail against how Obama care is Communist.
So much of this just depends entirely on ignorance. Kinda why these people are homeschooling in the first place.
Our babysitter was bemoaning her lack of insurance and my ex told her about the Affordable Care Act. She was thrilled!
"At least it ain't that fuckin' Obamacare!"
Ex said the babysitter was stunned when it was explained.
Ignorance is fine if your approach is to ask questions instead of assuming
I homeschooled my kid k-12. When I started, I had no idea how many religious hs-ers there were. I used a secular curriculum, and never even thought about teaching anything regarding religion one way or another. Once I started looking around at all the creationist curricula out there--yikes.
Anyhoo, long story short, my son went on to a college degree (he actually started college classes online at 15--one of the perks of hs-ing for us), and he's an atheist. Secular homeschoolers do exist!
ETA some links--these are a few secular homeschool curricula. There's a lot more out there, but this is the majority of what I used through the years:
https://www.calverthomeschool.com/
https://www.keystoneschoolonline.com/
https://www.thinkwell.com/ (Primarily math--the professor that does most of the math instruction is wonderful.)
Secular homeschool graduate here. Parents homeschooled my brother and I because the public school system was drastically underfunded and we were in quite an education desert. I always hate articles like this, as folks tend to paint broad strokes about homeschoolers... But there's a reason we never had other homeschooled friends growing up; there were a lot of crazy ones, especially in Michigan, as there is virtually no regulation.
We are heading down the HS route for our two girls as the oldest has issues that meant that she couldn't attend school half of last term. My wife has taken her to a couple of meetups and already she come across the Christian and the anti-vax members - even here in far flung New Zealand
I've come to the conclusion that religious faith is a kind of mental illness that was made socially acceptable to keep primitive people from constantly killing each other, sticking instead to only occasionally killing each other within a vague set of guidelines.
Those of us free of it don't need an insane corkscrew of Escheresque logic and imaginary higher authorities using threats commanding us to not be monsters.
I recently came to a different conclusion. It's not religious faith. It's just faith. And it's not a mental illness. It's human nature - for a significant segment of the human population.
Those people who are religious fanatics, political fanatics (e.g. Trumpists, Chavez sympathizers), pseudoscience fanatics (e.g. flat earthers, anti-vaxx, homeopathy), celebrity fanatics (Andrew Tate followers), etc, they have to share the same common traits. They're impressionable people, they need to be patt of a group, and they can't fathom the idea of switching groups.
It's just that religion-based control came first.
Or maybe those who were very religious in the past got to survive and thus the genetic traits responsible for fanaticism spread like fire?
Regardless, it's appalling.
People in the past weren't us in different clothes and religion was basically fulfilling political and cultural functions as well. Like today was have mass media and entertainment, at one point religion was basically entertainment as well. People loved having some preacher come to town and do his show, it was what people talked about. Now we have TV shows and movies etc, and a lot of our media has shocking moral implications just as we'd judge religion in the past for. Not all that different. That leads in to civil/civic religion which is practiced by many today and provides a framework for things like a national identity. When you stand for an anthem you're performing a civil religious ritual, visiting historical/cultural sites is a sort of pilgrimage.
The form that religion evolved through in history was also defined by the conditions of the society and a lot of times compromises with neighboring powers. Viewing religion as a dumb thing for stupid people is intuitively tempting, but it's ahistorical in that it says more about our views today (including religous/civil religious views) than it does about what people were like in the past.
I mean you might be kinda right?
So there are people who think with or without internal monologue, common knowledge
Some people think that the internal monologue may have first developed as an internal dialogue, between the actor, the person and their body, and the "speaker" who they would have not been able to recognize as their own voice, and instead interpreted as a separate being relaying them direction, commands, and interpretation.
The dissociation between the individual and their internal monologue, and the resulting association of that monologue with a directing and counseling presence, could have been taken as the voice of a higher power guiding them, and by extension, others they got to follow them as the "speaker" of this divinity in their head.
If this sounds a bit crazy to you consider how many evangelicals rant and rave about their personal speaking term relationship with God.
So basically, deific religion might derive from people who have an internal monologue but who don't identify with the speaker of that internal monologue.
Not really a mental disorder so much as a mode of thought that is prone to lead people into believing firmly that they are personally in contact with a separate being who personally directs their behavior and actions and values.
Deus Causa Sui
American homeschooling seems to be particularly vulnerable to fascist/religious indoctrination. In most countries where homeschooling is common there's usually a social contract that's enforced to at least regulate the kind of education kids get outside of traditional schooling.
Social contract? Sounds a lot like socialism to me! /s
My brother and sister-in-law a few years ago tried homeschooling their kids to avoid having to drop $20K a year (each) in tuition to their preferred private school ($20K a year for K-6!) The "homeschooling" situation was actually four days a week in a school with teachers and everything, and one day a week supervising the kids at home doing lesson plans prepared by the school. This alleged homeschooling situation was in place so the school could legally hire uncredited teachers, allowing them to be cheaper - by paying teachers near minimum wage instead of a still-shitty starting salary in the $40Ks. Fucked up in so many ways, but at least this school wasn't religion-based.
In America, right wing supporters are often the dullest tools in the shed. They're sure they're right, but they don't understand how anything works, historical context, how to discern truth from bullshit, or what words mean.
"I Love the Poorly Educated" -Donald J. Trump
My step sister is going to homeschool her kids, which will be great for her youngest since she named him Jedidiah. Shockingly someone who named their kid that stopped coming to family gettogerthers after my sister's kid came out trans.
She was sad she didn't get invited to my wifes baby shower, even if my niece wasn't planning on going I still wouldn't invite her because you can't just choose to cut out part of the family because you're a bigot and expect everyone else to still want you around.
My father was uninvited from the yearly family reunion due to him not joining the anti-transgender circle jerk that formed there.
Ironically though I still get emails asking me to come, for the record I am my father's transgender daughter.
I feel like they either missed a key detail or they're just not very bright. I'm pretty sure it's a little column a little column B.
If it wasn't a 2-hour drive, I would crash it for the free food and just not say anything to anybody.
But I think I could get a bucket from the colonel to myself for just a little bit under what I pay in gas money. Plus that side of my family is so old that all they're going to bring is fast food anyway. Everyone who was good at cooking is either dead or is too arthritic to do so. A shame, I am a southerner who appreciates the truth of The Stereotype of the home cooked meal.
The only two reasons why I'm not going to go ahead with that plan of just getting a bucket for myself, is that I would probably get a better meal and support a smaller business by getting my eight piece from Church's Chicken. Well that and it's going to be a tight month, my car and my switch need to be repaired at the same time. And I only pray Nintendo leaves my fucking Pokemon data intact because it's not like I could back that up somehow. I mean theoretically it might have been possible if the damn thing would have turned on.
Please pray for the safe return of my shiny Dialga, I gave a good Zacian for it.
Maybe i'm already half asleep, but i love this comment that starts out on topic then drifts into a unrelated rant written in the most entertaining way.
I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that they invite you because they think they can "straighten you out", the garbage they believe is that all kids are straight and cis and it's down to brainwashing by the deep state Jewish space lasers that anyone would think otherwise.
For your own sake, best to stay away.
My father was uninvited from the yearly family reunion due to him not joining the anti-transgender circle jerk that formed there.
Ironically though I still get emails asking me to come, for the record I am my father's transgender daughter.
I might be misreading your situation, but just from this limited context, your father seems to have his priorities straight. Feel free to tell him that a random internet stranger thinks good of him.
Jedidiah? Like 2 D's JeDidiah??
It's a name.
Americans' obsession with Jesus and the Bible is so weird.
Just a really weird loud subsect. They're so loud now because they finally realize they're the minority and they don't like it. So they throw tantrums like children because their lifestyle is a commitment to low education and blind faith in a corrupt version of reality and a misinterpretation of their own faith.
Sadly, the Internet (troll farms, social media, etc.) has enabled easy access to loudness, to make it seem like they speak for everyone, when they don't.
There are plenty of Americans that are Christian and not apeshit. There are also plenty of Americans that are neither Christian, nor apeshit. These two groups just don't go around screaming about it all day because they're normal, sane, properly educated people.
“Not all women are good,” he explains.
“Not all men are good,” I respond.
That's an amazingly pithy pair of lines
Sounds like something from an unpublished Frog and Toad book
I was homeschooled. I 'graduated' without a valid diploma and had to get a GED. I don't speak to my parents and my child is currently enjoying his day at public preschool. All my church friends who were raised similarly also are in similar situations. That's about all I'll say about it.
I was homeschooled up until 12. I went to college at 15. That's about all I'll say about it.
Was college homeschooled as well?
The name of the homeschool teacher? Albert Einstein.
That's about all I'll say about it.
Yeah, I know. It is hard to keep a lie going
thank you for saying it! good homeschool experiences tend to be under rated. Not all homeschool kids have religious nutbags or unschooling types for parents.
Tuition paid using the money you stole from the public education system.
How many poorer kids do you think that money would have helped get into college that didn't go so you could at 15?
We had to pull my daughter out of her middle school and put her in an online school for reasons I don't wish to go into, but thankfully the online school is run by the county school corporation and she has a curriculum built by accredited teachers who are also there to talk to the kids by phone, videoconference or in person during school hours. And they are so receptive too. Suddenly I feel like educators care about my child.
But homeschooling? I would never even think of it. I don't know the first thing about pedagogy and neither does my wife. We did a less formal version of online schooling that was hastily put together during COVID while she was still in elementary school and it relied on me doing a lot of the teaching and I sucked at it. There's a big difference between being able to do fourth grade math and being able to teach a fourth grader how to do fourth grade math. A lot of those kids are getting so underserved by having parents, even well-meaning parents, who are not educators try to give their education.
And that doesn't even go into the "my son is learning to be a Christian as a homeschooler" bullshit.
There are definitely kids who would be better served by an alternative to regular public or private school, even school they can do from home. But educators need to be behind it, not parents. Not unless those parents have degrees in education.
exactly, parents trying to homeschool a dozen different subjects is always the worst option
That's what co-ops are for. We had one day a week where various parents would teach on their specialty, like theatre, biology, writing, music, etc.
Dumbass Christian Karens
I have often read sovereign citizen groups on Facebook, and they all "homeschool", which means the big kids babysit the little ones all day long, and sometimes CPS gets involved and removes the kids and terminates their parental rights because they realize the kids aren't getting educated and are having the shit best out of them routinely. I think homeschooling can be very dangerous for a child.
I'm not very for homeschooling and it has its place, the problem is that it lacks regulation.
There should be an official education program and tests to make sure kids are learning essential things instead of just babysitting siblings or exclusively learning religious or survivalist stuff.
Yes agreed. But a lot of it is right wing psychos who are just not educating them.
Because a parent working, without any accreditation or training since they were a fucking literal child, totally sounds like a preferable route. Give me a fucking break, it's an assault on standardized education.
To make it worse, the kid will have a large drop in socialization opportunities and isolated relatively speaking. You just do not get that kind of social utopia ever again in your entire fucking life... the life experiences the child misses out on is significant. You can't schedule enough playdates to make up for that.
I'm a product of homeschooling, and cannot begin to tell you how detrimental it was to my adult life and being able to function in society.
100% of my socialization growing up came from church. While I have siblings who grew up to be very successful, they all stayed in the church.
It's a cult. It's child abuse. You are robbing your child of critical life experience and social development. It also makes it so that anyone escaping from growing up in that will have an extremely difficult time rebuilding their life outside of religion.
I worked at a homeschool public charter school for a few years. A good chunk of the parents were only in it because they wanted to use Christian curriculum and other conservative garbage to teach their children.
The school even had me go to a professional development event that ended up being a Christian leadership conference held at a church. One of my coworkers walked out once she realized it was religious and she was forced to use her PTO for the remaining days of the conference. I should have done the same.
Thank goodness homeschooling is illegal in this country. The best effect is that crazy nutjob parents are not able to install their delusions on their kids as much as they can in the US.
Homeschooling is also illegal in Brazil, and you can bet the mf of Bolsonaro and his government tried to make it legal. The Supreme Court strike them down, with the argument that socializing was a fundamental part of education and a kid's right and the law passed by the government couldn't guarantee that the kids would have it.
Every time I see articles in this topic, it just solidifies my opinion that homeschooling should not be allowed. We live in a community, and part of that means learning a common set of skills, social interaction with others in your community, and secular, science-based lessons.
As a homeschool survivor I wholeheartedly agree. I'm middle aged now and I still struggle with basic social skills.
I went to school and have the same issues lol
I was homeschooled through middle school because the public school administration wanted to put me on Ritalin despite the school psychiatrist's objections.
Public schools aren't perfect either.
I will say homeschooling can be a good teaching style.... With oversight. I am slightly biased because I was home schooled through the 7th grade. My mom wasn't a religion nut, I was homeschooled because the regular public school didn't have the to services for my IEP. So I went to a Charter home school program that had what I needed. To be honest I think I turned out far better than I would have at any regular school.
But yours is the exception not the rule. Most home schoolers are corn pone conservatives who want their kids to embrace the same ignorance, mistrust, and hate that they embrace.
Right that's why I specified a difference. With oversight. Such a thing would be good because one on one student and teacher, and proof of what was learned is given to a teacher every month or so.
I haven't met many in my homeschool group. Maybe those ones don't join the groups?
With oversight and with parents actually trying to educate. I live in a very liberal, very educated area and have met quite a few homeschoolers. They have the best intentions and none were overly religious. However, I thought only one homeschooling family was actually benefitting their kids, and I’d describe it similarly to you. Actually, they happened to be the most religious of those I met but were committed to doing the best for their kids.
I do think many home schoolers from both ends of the spectrum are a problem
So, my stepkids (now: boy 12, girl 11) were falling behind in public school and were being passed on to the next grades despite the fact that they were almost a full grade behind in math and reading.
My now-wife decided to pull them out of public school and home school them to try to get them caught up. In our county, we have an AWESOME "public school at home" program where the kids are home schooled, but still go into a school one day a week for socialization and tutoring by licensed teachers. It was a fuck ton of work for her, but in ONE YEAR in the program, not only did the kids catch up, but they're actually almost a full year ahead now.
But... that was with the full support of a county school system and a full-time investment in her kids. This wasn't a "throw a computer at them and let them figure it out" and it certainly wasn't a "summer is different from winter because Jesus said so" program. It was a guided program designed, administered, and overseen by actually licensed teachers. There were performance goals to hit, regular checkins, and available tutoring for things my wife wasn't capable of teaching correctly.
This year, since both kids were so far ahead, we gave them a choice and let them decide whether they wanted to continue the program now that they're caught up. My stepdaughter wanted to go back to regular school. My stepson wanted to stay in the program. He's in middle school as of this year, and middle school begins to be more self-guided. My wife starts nursing school in the spring so she can't dedicate the 8-ish hours necessary to take both kids through the program beginning next semester. So we let them each do what they wanted. My stepson finishes his mostly-self-guided school day in three hours or so then has the rest of the day to do with as he wishes and is still ahead of where he should be. My stepdaughter is miserable because each day is an 8 hour slog and the curriculum moves too slowly for her now, plus the other kids are dicks to her (as kids tend to be). She's considering going back into the program next year when it will be mostly self-guided for her as well.
But this success story is more about my awesome wife and this particular program. It's been a crazy amount of work and a full-time job for my wife to take both kids through this program, and that's WITH the support of a full teaching staff in a county-run program. It's no surprise to me that other programs are more-or-less a joke. If you're not willing to put in the work and/or your idea of education is "It's that way because the LORD said so now stop asking questions and write Jesus on every line," then you're dooming your children to failure and ridicule.
Not trying to piss on your parade, you've done awesome, but this story of yours tells me less about how great homeschooling is and more how badly US education sucks
Homeschooling is so common in the US because the education system sucks. It's literally a 'fine, I'll do it myself'
100% agreed.
But also keep in mind that this was a county program, run by the county school system.
So the potential IS there. We just need to stop hamstringing our teachers with bullshit restrictions, financial burdens, and NCLB bullshit.
the other kids are dicks to her (as kids tend to be)
This is the point that I've observed to be a tricky one.
Other kids are dicks, but that also holds true for adults. Perhaps the most valuable thing I got from school is navigating that very scenario.
Also, I was at least somewhat to blame, by being an arrogant, insufferable, cringy little guy. If there were one thing that could have been better is if a trusted adult had me confront my own attitude earlier rather than just letting me think the problem was all with other folks.
I learned to recognize situations I didn't want to interact with, how to avoid acting in a way to get dragged into such situations, how to engage amicably when I had to, and how to recognize and engage with groups that are more keeping with my tastes.
I think if you're going to be annoyed by stupid people, you probably shouldn't make stupid people a core part of your business model. I'm not saying everyone who homeschools their kids is stupid. Just most of them. Like nearly all of them.
They're helping people. Sure not all people at these events but some do get the message and that's the point.
I was homeschooled (and I mean homeschooled, like, in the subculture) from Kindergarten through high school and am nominally a functioning member of society in spite of that fact. AMA.
I'm sorry, dear, but if you've ended up on lemmy it's fair to say there is something a tiny bit non-functional about you.
I did say nominally.
What were the most difficult things about transitioning from being a 'homeschooled' kid to being a 'functioning member of society' for you?
I'm not the OP but was also homeschooled similarly. For me it was being culture shocked by how many different nuanced perspectives are out there. Growing up I was provided more of a black and white view and very little social interaction to teach me otherwise - until college haha.
It actually was a nice revelation realizing not everyone is so prejudiced and bigoted about everything. However, the damage was done and I still had to work a lot to undo it and "catch up" to how to normally interact. Now I'm well adjusted so it's all kinda in the past for me, but I won't do that to my kids.
Prob one of the other difficult things for me is being taught homophobia and having to learn how shitty that is and the guilt that I still live with to this day because of beliefs I used to hold. That sucks.
For me, because my homeschooling was part and parcel with a very conservative religious upbringing, the most difficult part is, in a sense, still ongoing.
I don't want to imply my childhood was like Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt or something, I was aware of what was going on in the world and stuff, but certainly sheltered and heavily influenced by my parents in how interpreted what was going on.
Breaking away from that, interacting with society more directly and more diversely than I otherwise would have, has overlapped with breaking away from a lot of the cultural and religious beliefs that were instilled in me.
That's not an overnight process. I think anyone who has left behind a religious upbringing could relate to that, homeschooled or not, but the homeschooling and relative 'isolation' adds a twist to it.
Congratulations! Do you find people point out you have gaps in "common" knowledge?
It's not pointed out to me, necessarily, but I stumble over (or into) many gaps in my knowledge. Mostly having to do with soft skills though.
Another homeschooler chiming in, my circles actually tended to perform better than our local public/private schooled friends on the SAT/ACT, and myself and a lot of my friends went in to some sort of STEM field.
Granted, there is a spectrum. As a homeschooling parent now I see a different side of this community. There are some kids that really should be in a school system because they aren't being taught what they need to be taught. I don't agree completely with the video, but John Oliver has a decent video he posted recently on homeschooling.
Side note, it's really hard to find a balanced, not white-washed, Christian/not at odds with our worldview, but not Christian nationalist history curriculum. We have a worldview and want our kids to be educated in a manner that matches our world view, but we want them to learn accurately what happened throughout history. I might end up having to buy the curriculum in the article, it sounds promising.
And, what constitutes a 'better adult'? This question is, ultimately, at the heart of the decision for people like my parents who chose to home school for religious reasons.
For my parents, a 'better adult' was one who had a personal relationship with Jesus Christ, believed that the smallest possible government should somehow exert the maximum amount of control over people's bodies and beliefs, and that the earth is 6,000 years old despite all readily available evidence.
Happily, they also believed a 'better adult' is a well-read one and so they encouraged me to read as much as possible and were (in hindsight) surprisingly lax with what I read, as long as it was a book. So I ended up drawing much different conclusions than they did about stuff.
Homeschooled kids are either geniuses or ignoramuses. There is no in-between.
Or in a class that eould make them prime targets for harassment if they were normally schooled.
Yeah my school robotics team lost to home school kids. And then somr other hone school kid i know did know the sun was larger then Jupiter
We are planning to homeschool because school isn't liberal and woke enough.
Kidding aside, it's mostly because of the abuses of teachers, bullying, and school shootings.
I homeschooled for a few years in an area without school shootings (not the USA). It was weird for me because I don't think kids belong in factories and want/ed to get my kids real critical thinking and media literacy.
I'm apparently a gigantic weirdo and struggled to hold conversations with other homeschooling parents because they were most definitely not interested in helping their kids have independent thought.
I was homeschooled and it was fine, I did great on standardized tests, had friends, am not a fundamentalist nutjob, etc... I'd like to say to these people please stay, I know it's hard for them but what they're doing is desperately needed. Lots of those people are decent people who live in an echo chamber of conservative insanity, they need patient loving people like you to show up and let them see there's more to life than their bubble.
Similar situation here. I was raised home schooled for all of my education. Got a GED, good score on the ACT, got a 4.0 in the community college where I got an associates degree. The problem is parents who homeschool because they don't want their kids to turn "woke" or be "converted" by exposure to the fact that non-straight, non-cis people exist. A lot of the time, the emphasis is only on indoctrination, and there is little or no actual education involved.
I have been to homeschool conferences - there are some good resources there, and a LOT of really pretty awful stuff like this article mentioned. People like the author are so incredibly impactful, even if they don't realize it. They may never see results but those seeds matter. Even if the parents don't get it, the kids will.
At a conference last year, there was a speaker talking about parenting difficult children (Kirk Martin with Celebrate Calm). He was presenting very much a solid gentle parenting approach (though he didn't call it that) that is very contrary to the culture of a lot of homeschool groups. He spent a lot of time unpacking his experiences as someone who grew up with really strict physical discipline, the impact it had on him, his experience being a parent - kind of leading people on a journey from where they might be to where they should be as parents.
He also spent a bit of his talk on how the Bible doesn't teach us to raise our kids to fight in a culture war and just really pretty clearly calling out a lot of the toxic far right christian-nationalist talking points. Sure he made a lot of people uncomfortable, but those thoughts will stick with them.
After his talk he was spent over an hour talking with people outside of the conference room answering questions. His next talk was packed as well.
Anyway, all that to say - I know it can take a lot out of someone to deal with people in those environments, but it is absolutely impactful and so desperately needed.
Or we could just outlaw homeschooling and take away parental rights for anyone who tries to do it anyways.
Child abuse, child marriages, child SA, and parentification numbers would plummet over night once these fundy bastards lost their ability to breed new cultists like rabbits.
I think you're vastly overestimating how often those things happen in homeschool. Most of them are awesome people that just happen to be stuck in a terrible media bubble.
And if there were no homeschool the crazy fundie portion of homeschoolers would just send their kids to a crazy fundie private school or move to a small town where everyone in the public school were all crazy fundies also.
Yeah let's ruin a thing that works for a lot of people just because some people do it badly. great take.
I grew up homeschooled for my entire K-12 experience through the 2000s and 2010s and went to my fair share of homeschool conventions throughout it. (They're really popular and they always have separate events for the kids.)
There's no governing body for any of these curriculum. My science education would always change depending on the book. At one point, I was told that all the animals in the world were vegetarian before Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil then turned carnivorous. Another series of videos I received spent a literal hour and a half "dunking" on evolution before actually giving a much more valid argument for its existence. (I actually am trying to find a way to convert the crappy flash swf files into video so I can share the insanity if anyone knows how to do that. FFmpeg hath failed me.)
Math was less volatile but had its quirks. I had one curriculum (Life of Fred) that quite literally was made with crappy clipart and not really even written by a person who was qualified to make kids content. It was just purposely obtuse and my mother took me off of it once I wasn't making any progress on it. I made it through two of those books for what it's worth.
Economics and "stewardship" was also high-key Republican trickle down economics and one time they actually blamed social programs for causing the Great Depression.
But, all that said, I got a super advanced education that put me well ahead of most other kids my age and I'm only listing the worst aspects of Christian homeschool curricula. Generally, homeschooling (Christian or secular) is almost entirely dependent on the parent actually giving a crap about their kid's unique needs and strengths. At the very least, if you're going to homeschool (no, I don't mean charter school) your kid for an extended period, make sure that you're involved with activities with other kids and that you really look through what your kid is reading.
On the video bit. I'd try recording them with OBS as a window or screen capture. It isn't conversation but should suffice.
I had a similar experience -- science curriculum was weird because while it was generally solid on the basics of physics and biology, the fundie taboo against evolution and/or acknowledging the age of the universe meant some topics had to be talked around, ignored, or handwaved away. Our curriculum of choice didn't go as far as "the Devil buried dinosaur bones to trick scientists into atheism," but I've heard stories.
Where things got more insidious, IMO, is in the softer subjects like history. Most of the available curricula are written from an explicitly right-wing perspective, and offer a perspective on world history that is often virulently jingoistic and bigoted. Our American History curriculum was from a popular publisher affiliated with a southern religious school that banned interracial dating until 2000, and only dropped the ban under legal pressure -- as you might imagine, it was explicit in its support of the Lost Cause mythology of the Confederacy, among other distortions.
Worse still, though, is the way that homeschooling can give cover to abuse and neglect. Like you I got a pretty good education in spite of all the above, but I know people from that community who experienced abuse at the hands of their parents and had no way to escape because their access to the outside works was carefully managed and controlled. There's a reason why one of my closest friends from those days is now deeply involved with an advocacy group campaigning for tighter regulation and oversight of homeschooling families -- she has some horror stories to tell.
Home school is bad because:
That being sad US is weird in some of these aspects and they are not properly fullfilled even at schools.
Homeschooling just needs to be abolished except under very specific circumstances (like kids who aren't physically able to attend schooling due to some illnesses), and even then they need to have an educator certified curriculum and regular checks that the curriculum is being followed. Too many parents use it as an excuse to brain wash their children into being perfect little idiots.
I took calculus in college with a set of twins that were homeschooled. They admitted that they'd never been taught how to solve for a variable, something I was taught in the 6th grade.
I would've failed out of highschool but homeschool allowed me to take community college classes that didn't force 2 hours of busywork every day. If regular schools could deal with different types of students I'd agree, but as it is now that's not the case.
I totally understand the need to educate the educators. Few parents are appropriately equipped to become a full-time teacher. That's a problem, for sure.
But, as a rule, saying "X needs to be abolished" is extremely lazy, naive, and reeks of authoritarianism. If it's so bad, try proposing something better.
I'll be a rare beacon for somewhat positive home schooling. At least when I started it in the late 90s. Graduated highschool in 2000.
Yeah, there is a fair amount of religious nut jobs/conservatives when you get out in bufu, but my group was mostly kids with hippie parents and kids with learning disabilities that would have never thrived in public school.
Maybe our group was more social than some of these extremist religious groups, because I had plenty of friends and social interaction. Homeschool isn't always kids being locked away from society by crazy parents, sometimes it is the last option of a misfit child that would fail to thrive if forced into the mould of a model student.
The main thing that I missed out on, by not going to high school proper, was getting regularly bullied and the stress of having to hurry to the bus every morning. If homeschooling hadn't been an option I'd of just been a drop out.
I suppose a number of people would still consider me a drop out because I wasn't forced to suffer as they did.
Edit: I'll add that my group were mostly naturalist/scientist in learning. As far as I know there weren't any flat-earthers/creationists. Maybe I was lucky because of my geographic location.
Maybe things are different now, but that's how it was for me back in the 90s/2000s.
This was my experience too, though I was in the UK where our religious and conservative nutjobs tend to hide because they secretly know they're in the wrong. I was homeschooled for several years and found that I was able to thrive in areas that a conventional school structure wouldn't have allowed.
I'm now a fully-adjusted and emotionally-intelligent adult with a confidence that most people my age are still learning.
From what I know of people homeschooling, my understanding is that it was something people did for practicality/preference and then nutjobs started seeing it as a way to remove their kids from mainstream education and indoctrinate them to some crazy worldview. I know some normal people doing it nowadays still.
Yeah, homeschooling is popular with conservatives, but it's also popular with hippies and that's usually a better outcome for the kid.
I wish i was raised in one of those anarchist communes. I would have turned out vegan and an annoying prick but at least it's a different set of problems than the old ones i'm used to
Hah! Funny you should say that. I turned out vegan(not the annoying kind, eat what you want) and, if anything, I'm empathetic to a fault. I try to reason why everyone does anything.
I've probably spent half of my life puzzling out bullies back stories.
We’re in Missouri again. We are selling a lot of product — in fact, we had our first mother and son make a purchase so he could learn about Sacagawea. It made me happy.
It makes me very happy too. I'm going to end my night with this thought.
Literally every place where children are educated is a battleground for the political ideologies of the parents. I've seen the exact same stuff described in this article in public schools as well.
Homeschooling has increased by 51% nationwide, while public school attendance has decreased by 4%. Prepare to meet a lot more Karens and their snot-nosed monster kids.
Source: I have two young kids who aren't so bad
Fear of knowledge should be an incarceratable offence. Wilful ignorance is the true pandemic.
I don't homeschool my kids because I want them to be smarter than I am
"Home is the cradle of the world's misinformation."
When you ask your kids what 6*5 equals and they tell you to do your own research
That or they tell you 26 because they became the kinda "I'm so smart" bugger raised by doctorate parents that insists on answering in base 12 so they can turn it into a lecture about how great base 12 is.
Sellers market with that group of people.
Great article, thanks
This is pretty shocking and also horrifying, and now I’m sad.
If God is real, then he doesn't want you teaching your children nonsense, he wants you to ensure that they succeed in life. A deck that your grandparents stacked against them.
I thought this was a News website but it feels like a blog. Not only that but when I tried to exit the article it crashed my Sync app.
Do we allow people to choose how they indoctrinate their children? We all are. We all were. The only question is who's indoctrination.
all genders are equal and should be treated as such
But we only sell and you will only find products for girls and about how girls are great. No other genders.
The vast majority of what we already teach in society is about white men. Someone offers stories that are about something other than white men because they see that women are under represented in teaching, not because they believe that only successful women should be included in teaching. You're intentionally obfuscating the point...
Yeah, because two wrongs make a right. Instead of, "Here are some balanced teaching materials that contain a diversity of races and genders and cultures.", what we need is to repeat past mistakes, only backwards and not based on data or with any metric based goal in sight, but our perceptions of, "vast majorities".
I quoted the person and described their product accurately. It's in the article. That's not obfuscation.
Schooling will never be great everywhere at scale in the united states, no matter how much money you pump into it. Giving good parents the option to teach their kids themselves is a good thing, even if some parents abuse the privilege.
Abuse the privilege? In most states homeschooling allows literal abuse.
Child abuse is illegal. If you have any evidence of it then report it to the authorities. You don't have to make homeschooling, which works very well for a large group of people, including neurodivergent people, illegal just because it's one of many avenues for abuse. I personally believe giving the government the ability to mandate education policy is a path towards authoritarianism.
That’s a great ideal, but it doesn't seem to work out in reality. Most homeschoolers are ideological to the detriment of the kid, or unrealistic about their qualifications to the detriment of the kid, or want to take back their school taxes to the detriment of all kids.
There certainly are good parents doing effective home schooling for good reasons, but it really seems like a minority. How can we protect the kids when the majority of cases are really not in their best interest? How do we even evaluate hat fairly without putting ourselves into the situation of judging personal beliefs?
The most fair solution is kids must goto an accredited school of some sort, whether public, parochial, or charter, and meet a standard of education. Parents should feel free to educate on their belief system at home or on weekends. People here love to blame religion, but most religion is perfectly fine. Certainly where I live, parochial schools teach proper science and exceed public school standards, in addition to teaching Ethics, Theology, and encouraging Community Service. Or public schools are pretty good and religions/ethnicities/cultures run “Sunday School”. It’s a good model.
Of course a huge part of the problem is places that don’t value education for their kids. This is truly horrible and as a parent I just can’t understand what sort of narcissistic monster would be like this. But they voted for how they want their tax dollars used, so what can I say except not live there? I’m willing to send aid, especially to help lift their kids out of the dismal future they’re locked into
Look at how Chinese are approaching education and you can get an idea on how to do things at scale.
Lol let's not suggest that the Chinese have cornered the market on education.
If you want good education, look at Finland or Germany.
China is ethnically and culturally homogenous for the most part. That has a large role in the success of running social programs at scale. Also I'm not sure we should look to China for inspiration on social policy, they are notoriously authoritarian.
And these people feel qualified to teach history.
The follow-up paragraph is even more amazing, because (like all conservatives) she can't even say what "woke" is.
And that's the really insidious part. The teacher is too ignorant of what she is ignorant of. If Harriet Tubman "might be too woke" then how would this women teach the nuance of protests? Of sit ins? Letters from a Birmingham jail? Much less modern protests. Her daughter is going to grow confidently saying things like
And not even understand the tragic irony.
if defining words is that easy for you, can you tell me: "what is a woman?"
some words are more subjective then others and for many feelings and emotions are more important then objective facts to define anything.
You left out the best part.