General Education Thread

Once you get to the point of actually regulating it, you then have to justify diverting those funds from mainstream education in order to actually enforce this regulation. And once it's regulated, then the requirements are liable to be harder to reach without time, education, and money—you've brought up the cost of textbooks before. All of which turns it into a wealth transfer to those that already have the most.

Mmm, I imagine if you keep adding more and more regulation to keep them in line with public standards you eventually just reach a point where you're just molding them into mini- charter schools.

And I'm sure you know more than me about it so I'll take your word.

And now we're back to anecdotal evidence.

Sorry but the very specific set of circumstances that you experienced in life is not very compelling evidence.

Yeah it’s hard to justify home schooling enforcement when you have such an underfunded school system in general, in a country with a better school system I’d say the argument is stronger due to the lack of such desperate need for funding to be allocated to schools.

On IQ tests, I’d note that on top of the already mentioned issues a raw IQ number means nothing, as IQ is based on percentiles and a comparative scale, with tests having varying ranges and percentiles assigned to numbers.

I don’t know my raw IQ score, but I know the percentile that I fall into, I also know that my IQ percentile doesn’t prevent me being wrong and incorrect on a number of important subjects.

Did you even read the articles? They're not even that long.

edited 23rd Mar '18 8:30:04 AM by PushoverMediaCritic

To go back to the point about IQ, here's an excerpt from Sheldon White's article Conceptual Foundations of IQ Testing, part of a series of papers about intelligence testing in a historical perspective:

If any of you are currently connected to a university, I can provide a link, if you'd like to read the whole thing.

IQ testing is bullshit. And I say this as someone who supposedly has a high IQ. Actually, that's one of the reasons I don't think much of IQ testing.

I had a high enough grade average to qualify for a Mensa school. Then I realised what a whole school full of me would be like.

The horror...the horror.

I had a whole school of me.

I thought your brother was homeschooled with you?

He's adopted, so he didn't come in until about halfway. After that point, fair enough.

Just a reminder: if you're going to post links to articles, it's best to provide a summary of what the article says instead of expecting people to click the links. Sometimes articles are hidden behind paywalls, and sometimes people just can't or won't click on the links.

I think we even had someone posting an article link that ended up going to a website that tried to run illegal scripts, so expect people to be wary when you just post a link without any context and just say "Read this article."

Ok I just had the chance to read those articles.

The first is an opinion puff piece. I immediately disregarded it.

The second seemed very biased. I also disregarded it.

They both were extremely anecdotal.

My mother's boyfriend is a soon-to-be-retired Education inspector in Western France, who happens to be in charge of evaluating non-public education in his sector (and was a former teacher himself), which meant, since all education has to be supervised in France, private schools, prisons schools, or homeschooling, among others. He has done that for a few decades.

He described three kinds of home schools:

• very healthy one by very literate parents (more often than not, teachers/researchers), where the kids learned much faster than their equivalents in school
• cult-like schools, whether religious or not
• incredibly poor communities, both economically and intellectually

Of the three, obviously, only the first seemed healthy - and even then, he said that while the kids were extremely knowledgeable, their social growth was regularly stunted if the parents did not spend enough time to "force" a degree of social interaction (with sports or other extracurricular activities). He added that those were parents that would mostly put their kids in school if school satisfied them - they were seldom "anti-school", more "anti bad schools".

The latter two were horrible, and the second one actively evil.

So even if there are some parents that can be incredibly good at homeschooling (provided they have the time and dedication for that), they cannot replace other kids when it comes to social development. Since we are in an era where social networks tend to isolate people more than they gather them - it requires, in my opinion, a lot of supervision.

edited 23rd Mar '18 12:23:12 PM by Julep

The stats that the biggest advocate of homeschooling in the thread posted says that 64% are doing it for religious reasons. That's cause enough to shut it down as abusive—any parent who is that desperate to keep their kid from being exposed to other religious beliefs is probably unqualified to teach.

I'm skeptical of the idea that all religious homeschoolers are awful cult people, even if many of them are. Also, again: 2012 stats. Little outdated.

edited 23rd Mar '18 2:10:28 PM by PushoverMediaCritic

There's no religious reason to keep your kids home unless you don't want them exposed to the rest of the world.

Also, you liked those stats when you thought they supported your point.

Even so, it still indicates that ~900,000 homeschoolers are perfectly good people.

It indicates that a majority aren't and that the claim it's a viable alternative, or worse yet, "the best way to learn" is bunk.

I would like to point out (as has been said many times but repeatedly ignored) that the majority of you all actually agree with Pushover: homeschooling needs to be regulated, but well-regulated homeschooling isn't a bad thing. So first, please let's everyone dunk our overheating reactor cores in seawater.

Now. Pushover (and everyone else), could I ask what regulations you think would be necessary to ensure that homeschooling is not used as a tool of fundamentalist indoctrination, among other failure modes?

I would just like to restate my opinion as well-regulated homeschooling being something that should, in essence, exist as a failure mode when it becomes physically impossible for the normal educational system to incorporate a student. Up until that point, the focus should be on addressing whatever concerns cause homeschooling to reduce its prevalence.

I'm also not a fan of public schools, but that's a different problem.

Remove "religious" as a reason for keeping the kids home for starters.

I think a mandatory yearly placement test would be a good way to measure whether or not kids are learning the basic fundamentals of life. Also, it's not the same in other states, but in Arizona you have to register yourself as a homeschooler and sign a contract saying that you will provide an education to your children. I also, in general for all, support government people coming by randomly to households just to check up and make sure everything is going fine and nobody is being abused.