Aug 25 2012

Home-Schooling Versus Public Education

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Shorter Tenured Radical: Right-wing extremist republican scum prize home-schooling and hate public education because they explicitly desire a populace that is as greedy, ignorant, and bigoted as possible, with the goal of serving their combined theocratic and plutocratic ends by preventing knowlegeable engaged citizenship.

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1

skeptifem

August 25, 2012 at 2:17 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment

If that were the truth they wouldn’t reproduce the school environment in their own homes. Seriously, look into homeschooling products- religious homeschoolers tend to buy the same type of shit that teachers do. A ton of em have desks and chalkboards and everything, and teach the same lesson plan as the state (available with worksheets in handy year by year booklets). Fundies just don’t want their kids to hear unapproved ideas from an outside source (like evolution from teachers or different religious ideas from fellow students).

I am not trying to say that such an environment isn’t intellectually stifling, its probably just equally as stifling as most schools. There are a lot of homeschooling alternatives that liberals are into that aim to maximize the influence of the world outside their own homes.
2

the_innkeeper

August 25, 2012 at 3:08 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment

Like many things in life: garbage in, garbage out. I am an atheist and my GF and I homeschool our kids using the K12 curric. We choose to do so to avoid the BS that plagues our society in the school system. It does give us the flexibility to push our kids when we can and when we need to reinforce something that needs touched on again. My 6 year old can do long division and reads Harry Potter.

People use homeschooling as a shelter and as a method of avoiding the mediocracy of some public school systems. You goals do dictate your means and ends.
3

Pen

August 26, 2012 at 5:07 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment

It doesn’t seem to be working then, since homeschoolers consistently perform at least as well as publicly educated children on academic tests, higher education enrollment, transition to working life and community involvement. Possibly some of them end up less likely to know about or believe in evolution, but I even doubt that, given the determination of many families and schools to achieve that goal anyway.
4

dean

August 26, 2012 at 7:24 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment

since homeschoolers consistently perform at least as well as publicly educated children on academic tests, higher education enrollment, transition to working life and community involvement.

Facts known to be suspect, since the ones who test are self-selected: there is not the universal testing for home-schooled students as there is for public school students. Whether there should be such emphasis on testing is in question – I don’t think there should be.

We get a fair percentage of new students in our math courses (college algebra, some in calculus) who were home-schooled. They tend to be able to do quite well on problems that are just like the problems in the text. They do not do well on problems that require little bits of tweaking to solve. I am not talking theoretical items, but the type of problems you like to see students solving at the end of a semester. In short: memorizing traditional steps is a strong point: going beyond is not. Not every student does the latter, but the home-schooled far short far more often than the public schooled.

The population of home-schoolers is large, so it is likely that some subset is being well-served and is producing capable, talented, “graduates”. The evidence (locally and nationally) is that this subset is not as large as proponents claim it to be.
5

Corvus illustris

August 26, 2012 at 11:45 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment

{Home-schooled students] tend to be able to do quite well on problems that are just like the problems in the text. They do not do well on problems that require little bits of tweaking to solve.

That was my impression (I retired from what was evidently the same line of work as yours ten years ago). There had to be a “right” way (as well as a correct answer) for every problem, and brain freeze–almost fright–set in if the problem required any originality. There are unusual situations in which the parents are really intellectually competent and develop their kids’ abilities beyond what even an exceptional classroom school could do, but those are few (only a couple among my personal acquaintances).
6

Comradde PhysioProffe

August 26, 2012 at 11:49 am (UTC -7) Link to this comment

Please note that this post is not about home-schooling per se, but about the extremist right-wing zeal for home-schooling and hatred of public education. Whether nice progressive home-schoolers represent the vast majority of home-schoolers and whether their kids are well educated has absolutely nothing to do with this post.

(Not that there’s anything wrong with drifting to a different discussion in the comments here.)
7

San Ban

August 26, 2012 at 12:00 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment

Home-medical treament and home-electrical engineering are also popular and just as successful as that done by trained pros!
8

Anonymouse

August 26, 2012 at 3:42 pm (UTC -7) Link to this comment

Liberal, progressive homeschooler weighing in: we’re surrounded by right-wing whackaloon homeschoolers where I live. Whatever awful scenario you’re imagining the right-wingers do…you’re likely right. There’s a miniscule subset of us who are homeschooling for educational purposes (and by “educational”, I mean, “actual, fact-based, reality-based learning that leads to college and then to a good career”).