Comment by abalashov
7 years ago
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.
Ugh. Yeah, that's the kind of pathology I had in mind at the heart of my comment.
All this "freedom" has much to recommend it, one can hardly deny, but it has it limits.
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.
Yes, but a certain level of literacy, cultural development and education is still required on the part of the parent in order to make effective use of all those resources. One still has to make sensible judgments about how to appropriate them and to supplement them with intelligent pedagogy.
Doubtless, some parents who home-school their parents have an adequate foundation for this. However, some of the greatest proponents of home-schooling I've met most definitely do not, and it boggles my mind.
This is true. I’ve seen it. I’m not sure this is such a bad thing. I know this sounds crazy but I kinda want to see how this plays out. Maybe some education diversity will have positive impacts we can’t forsee
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For reasons better addressed in PG's timeless "Nerds" article (http://paulgraham.com/nerds.html) better than in most other places, I don't think many children, least of all intelligent children, really "fit" into the box of public school.
But that's part of the point, as I see it. Lots of modern institutions are a bit unnatural and require some contortion for humans to squeeze themselves into. Public school is valuable in teaching that, or at least it was to me and many other people I know, as we reflect upon it years later.
We have the worlds okayest public education system. I’m glad I have the freedom in my state to offer my children something better at home, because the system utterly failed me (or I failed to adapt to it).
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.
Thank you for your feedback; it was quite interesting.
One thought:
I am not comfortable with the suggestion here that a parent needs advanced education to successfully homeschool.
I did not mean to make that suggestion, either. I deliberately chose the language of my comment to leave open the possibility of pedagogical experience or aptitude without the corresponding formal education. Perhaps it is my mistake that this did not come across as emphatically as I had meant it.
However, I still harbour a great deal of scepticism about the capacity of many parents I've seen take up home-schooling, simply on the basis that they don't seem particularly knowledgeable, curious, or educated themselves — whether formally or informally.
Well, unfortunately, I think that is sometimes due in part to people in authoritative positions having no respect for their "lessers," whether that is children, women, people of color, poor people, underlings at work or some other category. So a lot of things that get framed as "instruction" or "education" is really about enforcing an unhealthy pecking order that is actively harmful to whomever is framed as "lesser."
There are no easy solutions for that situation. But I think it starts with having a high degree of respect for individuals and their right to choose, even under circumstances where it is challenging to feel real respect for them. Or, perhaps, especially at such times.
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