Can anyone pinpoint the exact time and place when public school became the end all be all of it all?
Question:
I see people who sent their kid's to public school. Saying
kid's who are homeschooled are missing something.
I see public school parents talking about how wrong we are.
Yet I dont see on the news ever! Where a gun,drugs,kinfe,ect.
Was ever brought to my class. None of my students have ever
shown up late,with out supplies,been absent.
Im at an ever bigger loss with all this talk about social stuff.
What do they mean by...Never done anything in front of a class? Or Don't have friends? Or The real world..
LoL, can someone please inform me of what world do we live in?
(its 5:30 am I havent been to bed yet!)
I have been online paying bill and setting leason plans.
Getting ready for Girl Scouts and todays play dates for my younger one's.
Or do they not do these things in the public school world?
Answer:
Don't worry Olivia. I think it is just something on line people do for 'kicks'. I cannot imagine that anyone really thinking that the public school has all the right answers.
There was an answer before me about a teacher who could not be a good teacher after being up all night. The answer in public school would be for the teacher to call in 'sick' and get a substitute teacher. The substitute teacher would spend her time keeping order, keeping the kids quiet enough not to bother other classes, and have them doing 'work sheets' for review of things the kids should already know. In home school, we can sleep until 1:00 and then start school or take the day off and have a learning day on Saturday or Sunday.
Well whats right for some isnt right for others..
A teacher with no sleep isnt going to do much for her class! If your kids went to school, you would have plenty of time to pay bills and get things organised.
I dont like the idea, but if the public shools in my area were no good, I would home school.
You are righ though - Public schools are not everything and they are not always the best way to go..
Just as with virtually anything else, home schooling can go either way. If your child learns well in a one-on-one environment and you are dedicated to keeping up the education then it can be a very positive experience - especially if your child learns at a faster pace than public school classes are taught.
On the other hand, some kids learn better by interacting with others; from hearing different points of view. Even just hearing the teacher's responses to other student's question.
Obviously if a child is home schooled they need to be given opportunities to interact with other kids their age. Scouts and sports can fill these roles.
One of the main issues I see with homes schooling is parents trying to maintain very careful control over their child's environment. This if fine for younger children, but as they get older (like into their teen years) I think it's increasingly important to learn to interact with the world on the world's terms rather than in the tightly controlled world their parents construct. If a kid isn't given the chance to do this it leaves them ill equipped to deal with the world once they go off to college or out on their own.
I also think a child needs to have an opportunity to learn in a classroom environment in order to be prepared for college.
I have known kids who were home schooled that became very well adjusted adults. But I have also known kids who were home schooled and had a very difficult time interacting with people their own age because they never developed the social skills.
By the way, when I talk about a classroom environment, it doesn't have to be a public school. I think many private schools can give a child those same benefits.
I went to public schools and so did my wife I don't remember guns, knifes etc in school. The news only reports the negative because that is what a lot of people want to hear. That's why some people have a bad opinion of homeschooling. They hear of some nut isolating his family from the rest of the world on the news and they think all homeschoolers are that way. It's no better for you to do the same thing taking an incident and applying it to all public schools. I bet there's a knife somewhere in your home and your kid knows where the medicine cabinent is. Could I blow it up and say homeschooled children have access to knives and drugs? There are pros and cons to everything. Public schools could always be better and have things that need to be fixed. The same is true for homeschooling, but you're probably too defensive to admit it. You don't have a problem absolutely ripping into public schools but when someone you probably don't even know makes a slightly negative comment you're "at a loss". There will always be ignorant people. That applies to the homeschooled as well as those in "the system" . The fact that you're so defensive makes it seem like you don't have confidence in what you're doing. Do what you think is right for your kids and forget what other people say.The more you fight stereotypes by ripping on "the other side" the longer the stereotypes will exist.
{clap clap clap}
There's no exact time or place. As people became used to that form of enforced schooling, they started seeing it as that's how it always was and that it's the best thing. It's a pure inability on their part to think outside of their experience. However, things would be different if they started having teachers in school actually teaching about homeschooling. You'd have a whole new generation of people who would actually respect it. Although, THAT's not likely to happen anytime soon--the public schools tend to really hate homeschooling! (Of course they do--the predominant attitude here from the teachers' union is even one of animosity towards private schools.)
This idea of it being taught in school intrigues me: how many kids get the attitude that their teachers know everything and their parents don't? How many arguments have I witnessed between parent and child because the parent is saying something different from the teacher (or the child believes the parent is saying something different) and the child believes the teacher over the parent? How many people grow up through the public school system believing they need to be taught by some "expert" and that they're parents don't fit the bill? It's an immature thought, one that doesn't contain enough analytical thought, but it's one that's not obvious and wouldn't be challenged in school.
The truth is most home schooled kids have a much more diverse social life than kids in public school.
Home schooling is different to most people and it is also time consuming and takes responsibility, many parents don't want to be different, some don't want to have the added responsibility, and sadly enough many don't want to take th e time to invest in their children.
I home schooled myself back in the late 80's and early 90's when it was even more challenging to do so. I grew up having people think they could walk up to me and my family and tell us how wrong we were. (A select few actually encouraged us so that was nice!)
The sad thing we never condemned the public schooled kids and their families, yet many people took it upon themselves to tell us exactly what they thought the "dangers" of home education were.
Now I see many of my fellow home school graduates socially adept, successful, and in prestigious positions. I know it is fear of difference talking through most people that oppose us.
My son is now 2nd generation homeschooler and I am dealing with the social issue question all over again.
It is really ridiculous, especially now since the studies have shown that home schooled individuals are much better adjusted than their public school peers.
I suppose all we can do is keep going to play dates, study dates, sleepovers, group outings, and field trips as always and hope that eventually the public education crowd will stop feeling scared of difference and stop criticizing (and perhaps even take pointers in order to repair their failed system.)
I'll make a few observations.
1. I have a few friends who home-school their kids. Their kids are happy, bright, well-adjusted, agreeable kids. Generally they're very heavy-duty Christian, but that's okay -- it's a free country. Homeschooling works for them, and I bet it probably works pretty well for most.
2. I think the idea that homeschooling parents are doing it so that they can get away with child abuse is the most absurd garbage ever. Abuse can happen in any family and at any socioeconomic level. Whether or not the kids are home schooled is irrelevant. The socialization thing is stupid too because all the homeschool parents that I know involve their kids in a whole bunch of activities.
3. Everyone I know who home schools their kids are highly educated and relatively well off financially. Otherwise probably they wouldn't be doing it ... they'd be putting their kids in school so that the spouse could contribute more to the family income. Okay there are probably some lower middle class families who make the big sacrifice and eat rice and beans, and maybe there are some who have work-at-home jobs or part-time employment in the evenings, but I don't know any personally, and remember, this is about my own personal observations as an outsider to the home school concept.
4. I've often seen it advertised on this forum that home schoolers generally perform better on the standardized tests (SAT) than public schoolers. I wonder if those studies are controlled for income level. And I wonder that because I am guessing that the average incomes of homeschool families are higher than the national average. I'd be interested to learn about that, but I'm not interested in reading about any "studies" that aren't published in the peer-reviewed literature. So if you're going to blow that particular horn, back it up with citations to the primary literature.
5. Whenever homeschooling is criticized or even just questioned (and you can understand why people might be concerned -- it's because there's a lot at stake), we see responses from kids who were or are home schooled that say how great it is. Okay fine. Well how about a public school example? I went to public school. I had great teachers (and some lousy ones), a wonderful selection of interesting classes, and (yes -- of course) parents who cared and who participated in my education. Let's just summarize by saying I did great in school, got all the big scholarships, graduated first in my class at university, and so on. So ... it is possible, but the parents do have to be paying attention. Were drugs available at my high school? Yes. Did kids smoke and drink and have sex? Yes. Did they beat each other up in the hallway? Sure. The one thing we didn't have was guns. I never heard of a gun being brought to school, but there were certainly knives and other pointy objects.
6. Yes it's sad that some people criticize home schooling without learning more about it first. But I'll bet if you put four homeschool moms in a room with a hidden microphone, it would take about ten minutes before the discussion would turn to how glad they are that their kids aren't in the godless and downright evil sewer of public schools and how bad public schools are and how terrible it is and awful with the guns and the sex and the drugs, even though many of THEM actually went through public school and did just fine.
7. Oh and the original purpose of enforced public schooling through high school was so that little kids would be kept out of the work force and leave those low-paying menial jobs to adults who could demand a higher wage.
Homeschooling came, primarily, into being in modern times in the 1980s when two college graduate parents did it to their kids and sued when no one accepted them. They won.
Priort to that Thomas Jefferson and Ben Franklin were homeschooled.
Public Schools starte in the mid-1600 by edcits of the Congregatonalist and Presbyterians who declared ALL towns must have a school program
This was SECULARIZES by the mid 1900
Prior to 1600 ONLY the RICH and POWERFUL were schooled
There was no general PUBLIC EDUCATION for John and Susie
A smart peasant was a dangerous person
The Relgious brought public primary and secondary education and then later founded Harvard and Yale for advanced education in America
Religion started it all
The states took it over around 1920
It was pretty good until about 1960
Then it went down hill
Don't know why
Maybe there were simply too many kids from the Baby Boomer generation!
It wasn't immigration, bilingual (although that had an impact), desegration.
The education system went down hill BEOFORE ALL THAT
Homeschool SUCCESSES (and there are some failures as well) have improved things since 1990
Public Education took a big nose dive between 1965 (the hippie movement) and 1990.
Desegregation and immigration help to bury public education.
It is a FACT that ENGLISH AS A SECOND LANGUAGE Asians and Persians and Arabs DO BETTER than anyone else and they are not BILINUGUALLY EDUCATED!
Look up the stats. You'll see NEAR and FAR EASTERNERS do better than anyone else.
That is a statstical fact and THEY ARE NOT BILINGUALLY EDUICATED nor are they BUSSED
They simply TRY HARDER, maybe because DADDY BEATS THEM IF THEY DON'T
Discipline is a major factor in success at school. That is also a statstical fact.
"Easterners" do better than ALL "Westerners" in most AmiericanPublic Schools
THAT is a statstical fact!
"EASTENERS" are Asians(Japanese, Chinese, Korean), Persians, Hindus (Inida Indians), Pakistanis, Arabs.
STATSITICALLY the biggest undersachivers are HISPANICS
and THEY ARE BILINGUALLY EDUCTATED!
They see the system their kids are in, and they see it sputtering and dying. They want the best for their kids, and it hurts to see that.
It hurts more when another system comes along that works, and actually works better.
To defend themselves, they spread some lies, doublethink, and other crap.
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