Home SchoolingFollow

Dang, I've missed out on both mine.

No. I've seen anxiety disorder successfully treated by means of an egg rolled over someone's chest who's been sprinkled with holy water, and I would never take my child to a shrink before trying this first.

I'll admit I'm probably not in the majority, though.



Edited, Mar 11th 2008 9:22pm by Atomicflea

Simple answer: No.


Your problem is that you think it's the state's responsibility to take care of everyone. It's not. Once you realize this, it's pretty obvious how wrong you are...

So the way to equality is to force everyone to have a bad education? You really are a socialist.


So the pursuit of individual happiness and freedom does not gel with your idea of the social good. I can cite from personal experience that public schools do not equal a better education versus private schools as an example for others without it being a narrow self centered view.

So the way to equality is to force everyone to have a bad education? You really are a socialist.

No, idiot, but it may be that it's to force YOUR CHILDREN to have a worse education.



So the pursuit of individual happiness and freedom does not gel with your idea of the social good.

Wrong. Abject selfishness at the expense of others arbitrarily born into worse circumstances does not gel with my idea of the social good.

Your kids should have an advantage because they fell out of a richer ******? That really seems better for society to you? The perpetuation of class stratification is fine, so long as you're in the top half? Grow the **** up.



I can cite from personal experience that public schools do not equal a better education versus private schools as an example for others without it being a narrow self centered view.

********* You can't, because you're citing from personal experience. By definition it's a narrow self centered view.

Home schooling breeds weirdos. If Tracy Flick was real,she'd decidedly be home-schooled before going off to college and law school....


...and meeting some charmingly sleazy guy who wants a career in politics.

But Tracy Flick with bizarre religious convictions.


Oh and she'd have 15 brothers and sisters who wear modest Christian dress.




Edited, Mar 12th 2008 12:06am by Annabella

I personally know a woman who "home schools" her two sons so they can stay home and take care of her twin baby girls while she works. Her official line of reasoning is that they have ADD so she can give them the work at your own pace education they need, but I don't buy it. Someone called DFCS on her not too long ago.

The baby girls are cute, but I pity them having a mom like her.

damn trailer trash

My parents both had degrees in early childhood education and they COULD have home schooled me, but guess what? They were both firmly against home schooling, because they believed that the social interaction and playtime with peers was just as important as any actual book learning I could get. My mom was part of the petition to restore recess for 4th and 5th grades in our county, because that kind of exercise and playtime is just as important for kids developmentally as math and reading at that age.

Edited, Mar 12th 2008 12:19am by catwho

Anectodal evidence from a single, biased person is good enough for you guys?

That's like gbaji's "I have all the elements of a scientific proof."

Every student would have their education dollars per student reduced, resulting in a worse education not just for the private school students forced into the public school system, but also the students already in the public school system.



Based on ******* what, exactly? Your imagination? The idea that it's somehow a zero sum game, where money spent on education can never be altered??


Having the opportunity to pursue happiness and individual freedoms is for all, rich or poor; enabling those with out the benefit being spawned of a rich ****** to work hard and earn their way out of poverty. Rags to riches is more than an American cliché, it is the real American opportunity for all, regardless of whether all able to successfully pursue it.

*********


My father came from to America after growing up in a one room apartment in a slum with seven siblings and earned his way to eventually being an AVP with a brokerage firm and he never even finished high school. The fact that there are opportunities here for those that choose to pursue it, is what makes America great.


Wow, that's great. Well, his grandchildren deserve to go to private schools then so they can have an advantage over people born in slums today. That was inspiring. My ****'s still rock hard just thinking of the Horatio Alger like fairy tale of your father's life. Of course this all happened before you were born, right? Then he told you about it between stories of his great victories in the war, his time as a riverboat gambler on the mighty missisip', and how Santa was coming any day now.



I could go gbaji on the philosophy of perspective and all knowledge deriving from personal observation, but you already know this stuff, you just feel the need to get the last word in, regardless of whether it is correct.


What the **** are you talking about? I'm not even vaguely clear what your point is. Is it that you haven't gotten beyond the selfish child brain existence of only being able to view things as they directly immediately impact you? When you see an attractive woman do you just run over, foaming at the mouth and start ******* her? Do you just eat anytime you see food?

Stop and think for five seconds. No one's going to pass a law in your lifetime saying your kids can't go to their exclusionary white children school with just the appropriate number of coloreds shipped in for flavor. Relax, it's not about you. You don't have to justify every selfish thing you do with a larger philosophy. I don't pretend playing poker is good for the people I take money from. Most of them are compulsive gamblers with real problems who's lives are being ruined by it. I accept that. I don't have to make stupid rationalizations like I'd be impeding their freedom by not playing them, or that someone else would if I didn't or whatever. I'm hurting them to benefit me. That's the way it is. It's wrong, but I do it anyway, willfully, because I want to.

My ego's not dependent on lying to myself. You should give it a shot sometime.

I may just be naievely stating the obvious, but it seems like a lot of people are missing some key points here.

To regulate homeschooling, the parents themselves would need to be certified and checked up on a regular basis. This requires huge amounts of manpower. In a state like California there are a few hundred school districts. How many *thousands* of people would require individual oversight for homeschooling? The problem with public schools is overall lack of resources per hundreds or thousands of kids each, and you want to pull those resources away to look over one or two children per household?

Eliminating private schooling does not mean that the public schools would remain at the same level they are now. The funding for private schools in grants and tuition would funnel into the local school districts. This would (ideally) *increase* the overall education level being provided in public schools. Think about private schools. Almost by definition they are quite expensive and take in huge amounts of money. Is this money just going to disappear? No, the richies will spend this money on improving the public schools.

Now, I'm not saying I'm strictly behind the idea of forced public schooling. I like the idea of being able to keep my precious little snowflake safely at home while I impart on him the amassed knowledge of my years. But I also understand the problems inherent with regulating such a situation. If you have a supremely gifted child, put them in public school. With the right upbringing and attention while at home, they will still flourish.

The day you get fundamentalist Muslims home-schooling their children, you'll start thinking about it differently.

For me home schooling is the wrong way to go, there are plenty of private schools out there that provide any sort of theocratical based schooling you could wish for, be it Christian or Islamic or <Insert Sect here> which are required to follow a certain level of non religious education in addition to any other lessons they wish to add.

I realise i am talking from a UK perspective but these schools are inspected in the same way as public schools to make sure that pupils are protected from extremist ideas to the best that they can be.

Home schooling resticts in too many ways, reduces child interaction with thier peer groups and removes the often vital social awareness that comes from just being around lots of different people.

My own son is struggling with language at the moment because he basicly had less interaction with other people than the other kids of his age, for a miriad of reasons. We thankfully spotted it early and took measures to correct it before it became a serious problem.

I'm sure that there are exceptions to this but frankly Children are too important to take the risk that "Hey it might be ok". Schooling is more than just learning to Spell or Multiply, it teaches kids about life beyond the home and that too me makes it essential.

Argue if you want about the Quality of schools if you like but if you have an issue with that then by all means provide additional home schooling for your kids in addition to the classroom work they are getting at public/private school.

Thats what my Father did for me.