I homeschooled my 2xe sons. I served as Director of Community Life for the TAG Project for a time. This was support for my ability to homeschool my kids in a situation where no school, public or private, was qualified to adequately accommodate them at both ends of the spectrum at the same time, which was what they needed. My oldest has two conditions which can each lead to a neurotic relationship to food severe enough to require in patient intervention. He has a healthy relationship to food because of my approach to handling his issues.
There are an awful lot of things that can go wrong in a child's life that can potentially lead to a need for enormous resources at state expense from medical to mental health to behavioral, which can go very differently if there is a sufficiently knowledgeable full time parent to handle it before it goes so very wrong.
You are in error. More education is not wasted on raising kids. Your opinion sounds incredibly ignorant to me.
What baffles me is the amount of people in the US, usually in parochial cultural settings, who lack significant formal education or pedagogical background and are nevertheless deemed fit to home-school their kids. How is this legally possible? Now can a high school drop-out single mom (absent some extraordinary characteristics) possibly provide a well-rounded and adequate curriculum in a variety of general education subjects, ranging from math to literature, to world history, to biology?
If anything, the problem is that there aren’t nearly enough PhDs teaching kids.
Absent abuse, in the US we allow a very large degree of freedom in ways people are allowed to raise their children, no matter how unconventional and ill advised.
You're legally allowed to mess your kids up in many ways, such as by not teaching them life skills, encouraging teen marriage and pregnancy, teaching them bad manners, withholding critical information from them, giving them misinformation, disallowing them to be around unapproved peers, having tons of kids, raising them to be hateful (Westboro Baptist Church, KKK,...) etc, etc, etc.
BTW, I actually know of a high school dropout single mom who homeschools her kids. Of course, since she's unemployed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a stay at home mom so shes entirely dependant on her own mom for every single thing, there's no father in the picture. She's a 35 year old child. Her kids are going to be so screwed up and entirely ill prepared for adult life, but it's legal, her "homeschool" is registered with the state.
For better or worse in the US individual liberty is valued over almost everything else.
The online high schools these days are varied and pretty good. If you have a child with special needs or just doesn’t fit into the box the public education system is designed around then homeschooling is the best option. You don’t need a PhD to teach grammar to an 8 year old. There’s also a wealth of incredible videos and teaching materials to help too.
If anything I think parents are best suited to teach their own children until high school given the parents have a reasonable IQ.
Well, yes, a high school drop-out single mom may be able to do a fine job of homeschooling. Or may not. And that will depend on a lot of factors beyond their formal education.
I am not comfortable with the suggestion here that a parent needs advanced education to successfully homeschool. There are support systems for homeschoolers. I was involved with that at one time.
If you homeschool gifted kids, even if you have a lot of formal education, you can find yourself really challenged. You can find yourself dealing with a child who knows more about a subject than you do, even though you have had college classes in the subject.
One way to handle that is to become a resource person for the child. Instead of instructing them, you participate on email lists and what not, learn what books and other materials have a good reputation and make sure the child has access to such materials. There is no reason a high school drop-out cannot take a similar approach.
A bigger problem in my mind is that when women go to college and have difficulty with a subject, they are often actively steered towards early childhood education. One outcome of this fact is that a high percentage of elementary school teachers are not only bad at math, they are math phobic. They pass this math phobia on to impressionable young children and may not be really qualified to teach math.
My oldest son likely has dyscalculia. By the time I pulled him out of school, he feared and loathed math. When he asked questions in school, his teachers often read him the explanation in the book. He read well above grade level. If the book explanation were going to help, he didn't need the teacher for that. It never helped him.
Fortunately, I had more college level math by the time I graduated high school than most people with non STEM bachelor's degrees have. I also have a background tutoring it and I can find novel ways to explain it. I was eventually able to get my son over his fear of math and give him a solid grounding in the subject.
When men struggle with subjects like math in college, they are not encouraged to give up and "go do something easier, like teach small kids." My ex is not good at math. I tutored him when he took college math classes. No one suggested he give up. They expected him to man up and do what it took to meet the standard to complete his goals.
This is very much a gendered difference in student outcomes and it has all kinds of negative consequences for not only both genders -- because men don't get support for making other choices if they genuinely can't do something -- but for the entire fabric of society.
So, ideally children should be taught about life and how the world works, helped with homework, and/or home-schooled by people with little to no formal postsecondary education?
I homeschooled my 2xe sons. I served as Director of Community Life for the TAG Project for a time. This was support for my ability to homeschool my kids in a situation where no school, public or private, was qualified to adequately accommodate them at both ends of the spectrum at the same time, which was what they needed. My oldest has two conditions which can each lead to a neurotic relationship to food severe enough to require in patient intervention. He has a healthy relationship to food because of my approach to handling his issues.
There are an awful lot of things that can go wrong in a child's life that can potentially lead to a need for enormous resources at state expense from medical to mental health to behavioral, which can go very differently if there is a sufficiently knowledgeable full time parent to handle it before it goes so very wrong.
You are in error. More education is not wasted on raising kids. Your opinion sounds incredibly ignorant to me.
It also sounds ignorant and ill-considered to me.
What baffles me is the amount of people in the US, usually in parochial cultural settings, who lack significant formal education or pedagogical background and are nevertheless deemed fit to home-school their kids. How is this legally possible? Now can a high school drop-out single mom (absent some extraordinary characteristics) possibly provide a well-rounded and adequate curriculum in a variety of general education subjects, ranging from math to literature, to world history, to biology?
If anything, the problem is that there aren’t nearly enough PhDs teaching kids.
>How is this legally possible?
Freedom.
Absent abuse, in the US we allow a very large degree of freedom in ways people are allowed to raise their children, no matter how unconventional and ill advised.
You're legally allowed to mess your kids up in many ways, such as by not teaching them life skills, encouraging teen marriage and pregnancy, teaching them bad manners, withholding critical information from them, giving them misinformation, disallowing them to be around unapproved peers, having tons of kids, raising them to be hateful (Westboro Baptist Church, KKK,...) etc, etc, etc.
BTW, I actually know of a high school dropout single mom who homeschools her kids. Of course, since she's unemployed^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H a stay at home mom so shes entirely dependant on her own mom for every single thing, there's no father in the picture. She's a 35 year old child. Her kids are going to be so screwed up and entirely ill prepared for adult life, but it's legal, her "homeschool" is registered with the state.
For better or worse in the US individual liberty is valued over almost everything else.
1 reply →
The online high schools these days are varied and pretty good. If you have a child with special needs or just doesn’t fit into the box the public education system is designed around then homeschooling is the best option. You don’t need a PhD to teach grammar to an 8 year old. There’s also a wealth of incredible videos and teaching materials to help too.
If anything I think parents are best suited to teach their own children until high school given the parents have a reasonable IQ.
5 replies →
Well, yes, a high school drop-out single mom may be able to do a fine job of homeschooling. Or may not. And that will depend on a lot of factors beyond their formal education.
I am not comfortable with the suggestion here that a parent needs advanced education to successfully homeschool. There are support systems for homeschoolers. I was involved with that at one time.
If you homeschool gifted kids, even if you have a lot of formal education, you can find yourself really challenged. You can find yourself dealing with a child who knows more about a subject than you do, even though you have had college classes in the subject.
One way to handle that is to become a resource person for the child. Instead of instructing them, you participate on email lists and what not, learn what books and other materials have a good reputation and make sure the child has access to such materials. There is no reason a high school drop-out cannot take a similar approach.
A bigger problem in my mind is that when women go to college and have difficulty with a subject, they are often actively steered towards early childhood education. One outcome of this fact is that a high percentage of elementary school teachers are not only bad at math, they are math phobic. They pass this math phobia on to impressionable young children and may not be really qualified to teach math.
My oldest son likely has dyscalculia. By the time I pulled him out of school, he feared and loathed math. When he asked questions in school, his teachers often read him the explanation in the book. He read well above grade level. If the book explanation were going to help, he didn't need the teacher for that. It never helped him.
Fortunately, I had more college level math by the time I graduated high school than most people with non STEM bachelor's degrees have. I also have a background tutoring it and I can find novel ways to explain it. I was eventually able to get my son over his fear of math and give him a solid grounding in the subject.
When men struggle with subjects like math in college, they are not encouraged to give up and "go do something easier, like teach small kids." My ex is not good at math. I tutored him when he took college math classes. No one suggested he give up. They expected him to man up and do what it took to meet the standard to complete his goals.
This is very much a gendered difference in student outcomes and it has all kinds of negative consequences for not only both genders -- because men don't get support for making other choices if they genuinely can't do something -- but for the entire fabric of society.
4 replies →
So, ideally children should be taught about life and how the world works, helped with homework, and/or home-schooled by people with little to no formal postsecondary education?
Seriously?