Home Schooling

Discussion in 'Free Thoughts' started by yinyinwang, Jan 2, 2004.

  1. Dr Lou Natic Unnecessary Surgeon Registered Senior Member

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    Hahaha good one.

    In my experience homeschooled kids seemed like they actually had a better education than other kids but didn't have real personalities. They were like dull adults without the smarts to back up that dullness. They were just sad hollow shells of human beings.
    I'm thinking of kids that were homeschooled ther whole life then came to my school in the tenth grade.
    It was so funny how naive and gullible they were and also kind of disturbing how dull they were. Like children of the corn without the interesting homicidal tendencies.

    I think homeschooling won't prepare you for real life at all. But they do tend to be good at school, for what thats worth (for the record that is actually worth nothing).

    Also I tried to take up a homeschooling thing after school and it was just fucking impossible. It wasn't homeschooling as much as doing school without a teacher at home by myself. Just reading textbooks and doing the questions and then being sent exams on the text books. That was the idea anyway.
    I mostly just watched cable and went skateboarding in that time period.
    Another reason school is better is because you are kind of forced to go and its like a routine of going and you just do it. Without that its hard to make yourself do school work, for me anyway.
     
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  3. curioucity Unbelievable and odd Registered Senior Member

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    For now, I can firmly say no to the first question. Here's my opinion:
    Formal schools are routine-based organizations, which means by ignoring slight flukes, all knowledge gained from such education are pretty much never-changing in generations, and for me that's extremely horrible..... I even start to be unable to focus on school because of severe boredom.... not even my (now dead) PC can help me (as a side note, I often play games when it comes to fighting boredom).
     
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  5. yinyinwang Registered Senior Member

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    This is a reasonable worry but not for all cases.
     
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  7. sargentlard Save the whales motherfucker Valued Senior Member

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    Is it really? I wonder parents home school their kids in the first place? To shut them out of the real world and its often negative implications on the kids? Isn't that paranoia in some way? Public schools may not be the grand coup of education but if a child is willing he/she has many oppertunities provided by a public education system to learn so the excuse that home schooling is better isn't so viable IMO.

    The parent is distraught over what their childern may learn but eventually they will learn the good with the bad, with or without them.
     
  8. yinyinwang Registered Senior Member

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    at school students have varieties, a place to show, a group of identity,etc.
     
  9. cthulhus slave evil servant Registered Senior Member

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    "So yes, homeschooling is about restriction of exposure to external influences, and that sounds like an attempt at indoctrination.

    I doubt you get many liberal parents homeschooling, I wonder if we can dig up some figures somehow?"

    in my case it is exactly what your saying, and exactly the opposite of what your implying.
    we live in a relitivly rural town in south carolina (arent they all?) run amock with evangelicals. sure, they may be required to teach you about evolution and whatnot, but the teachers emidiatly contradict with "however, acording to the bible...". thats esentialy the reason, coupled with the fact that my mother is one of those tree hugging, hippy, environmentalist, extreem liberals.
    and of course shes indoctrinating her spawn, and im SO happy she is! my whole life ive grown up around her rants and ravings, wich luckily for me greatly contradict the conservative christians im surounded by.
    aside from myself i know of only one other athiest in this town by the way, and were both viewed as devil worshippers. its kinda fun realy...

    so please, dont have so many preconseptions, ok?
     
  10. Weiser_Dub Registered Senior Member

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    I fear the public education system almost as much as I fear homeschooling.

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  11. yinyinwang Registered Senior Member

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    Oh! I suffered so much from the boring teachers! God damn it.
     
  12. Closet Philosopher Off to Laurentian University Registered Senior Member

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    I think that a student might not recieve as good of education if they were homeschooled, but I agree, the social experience is one of the main components of a public school education. Waht will often happen is when the student gets into high school levels of education, they end up in the public school system in grade 9 bacause the way home schooling works at this level is very different and is quite a large task for parents (at least in Ontario). There are a few people eho have been caught in this situation at my school. They have very little interaction with peers and adults other than their parents. They have very few social skills, and they can't seem to get with it. It is like their home was turned into an anti-social prison. So instead of going out saturday night, to someone's house or seeing a movie with friends, they stay home and play scrabble with their parents.
     
  13. yinyinwang Registered Senior Member

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    That is it. A dilemma. I dn't think a school will prepare a student socially, it is not a social field in the first place.
    But homeschooling does narrow down the scope of view. The question is the timing. when and how.
     
  14. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    When cybernetic implanted memory and skills are available we can get ride of both systems, until then do as you wish. :m:
     
  15. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    You gotta be kidding, Wellky! Have you been paying attention to the performance record of the last couple of generations of government-schooled alumni? By any measure I'd say their basic getting-along-with-others skills are abysmal. Relationships with friends, family, co-workers. Durability of marriages. Skill at raising children. Just their raw language skills, which to a great degree shape their ability to interact with others, suck.

    Public schools have become so disorderly and downright violent, that the primary qualification for a public school teacher these days is survival skill. Teachers are not being selected for skill at teaching kids how to interact with each other (much less how to read, do math, understand history, and all that other "old-fashioned" stuff), so the kids are creating their own crucibles of social learning. As a result the worst of the schools (and there are a great many in that category) are just miniature versions of "Lord of the Flies."

    If by "interacting with society," you mean that home-schooled kids won't respond correctly the first time they encounter a bully, thief, cheater, stalker, rapist, vandal, extortionist, or con artist in real life, I suppose you're right. But if the graduating classes turned out by the government schools have created a society in which those encounters are commonplace, it's not much of a recommendation.

    As for the charges that many home-schooling parents have an agenda of indoctrination, I'm sure you're correct. But do you imply that the government does not? They want an adult citizenry that is already accustomed to constant surveillance, arbitrary searches and arrests, overcrowding, irrational reward systems, misinformation, powerlessness, and leadership that is selfish, incompetent, dishonest, cruel, and unaccountable.

    And that's just the indoctrination by the adults. How about the indoctrination by the community of other brainwashed students? What you buy and where you buy it is more important than what you contribute. You must be a loyal member of the tribe. Don't do anything that might distinguish you from the crowd. Look down upon those you are told to look down on. Follow all trends slavishly.

    Government schools have destroyed two entire generations of Americans and are well into the third. Don't believe me? Look at your parents, which a surprisingly small number of you ever even talk about here! It's like they're so clueless that they're not really part of your lives.

    I don't know if home schooling is the answer or if a proliferation of parochial, Montessori, and other non-government controlled schools will do a better job. But the public school system is a disaster. I'm really surprised to see the number of its victims who are bravely defending it! Check back with us after you've spent about ten years trying to make it in the world with the dismal education and "interaction skills" it has provided and let's see how you feel about it then!
     
  16. yinyinwang Registered Senior Member

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    I can't be that free. When the society is working on rubbish papers you have to collect them by spending your time and effort.
     
  17. yinyinwang Registered Senior Member

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    I doubt if this could happen.
     
  18. dagr8n8 Registered Senior Member

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    i would never let my kids be home schooled all home school kids that i know of are "socialy retarted"
     
  19. yinyinwang Registered Senior Member

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    Is it because they did it the wrong way or the way is wrong?
     
  20. gendanken Ruler of All the Lands Valued Senior Member

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    Yinyiwag:
    Of course not. There are people there.
     
  21. yinyinwang Registered Senior Member

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    ????????????
     
  22. ElectricFetus Sanity going, going, gone Valued Senior Member

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    yinyinwang,

    Why do you doubt it could happen?

    Fraggle Rocker,

    Do you have any proof it was the conventional schooling systems that is causing Americas problems now??? Without any your entire argument is invalid.
     
  23. Fraggle Rocker Staff Member

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    There are no "proofs" of social theories, not in the true scientific sense. That's why it's a little bogus to call sociology a "science." So you know you're safe with this cheap shot. And since I know you're not into cheap shots I guess that was a cheap shot of mine.

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    I'll assume that's not really what you meant to do and I'll try my best to answer you.

    First: It is clearly not just the alleged decline in the quality of public education that has caused all of our ills, if only because it goes back further than that. America has been steadily changing since Roosevelt's first term, changing into a nation of people who don't feel a visceral, survival-based need to take responsibility for their deeds. The hard-core conspiracy theorists say that the Great Depression was just an evil plot by the Gilgamesh Society (that seems to have supplanted the Trilateral Commission as the secret evil international manipulators, especially since the T.C. ain't so secret) to scare the people in all the industrialized democracies into turning their power back over to their governments, where it could be more easily managed by cabal.

    Whether or not that explanation is true, the dawn of the welfare state, the order-of-magnitude increase in tax rates, and the casual acceptance of principles that were once denounced as socialist by the industrialized democracies are both causes and effects of a breakdown of individual responsibility.

    Nonetheless, a major milestone in this devolution was the massive paradigm shift in the nature of public education after WWII. The importance of critical thinking, reasoning, being able to read, staying informed, and questioning authority waned, as parents were told that since they were too busy to continue a million-year-old tradition of teaching social skills to their own children, the schools must concentrate on teaching their own theories of how to "get along." These included allowing bullies, vandals, and just plain brats to be carried along with the tribe instead of sent home for a dose of parenting, making it difficult for much teaching and learning of any kind to take place; and moreover giving these miscreants the same rewards and promotions as the real students, eroding the reasons for anyone to bother trying to learn.

    As these children became what now pass for adults, society as a whole began to break down. Children who never learned how to resolve disputes grew into mothers and fathers who could not keep a marriage together. Children who could not concentrate on a homework assignment became workers who could not complete their tasks without intense oversight. Children with few examples of elders whose wisdom and leadership made life better became voters who could not see any important difference between a Rhodes Scholar and an extra from "Deliverance" who can't read his own teleprompter.

    All I can offer in place of proof is my own observations. I consistently see that people who attended private or parochial schools, or those in certain foreign countries where this phenomenon is arguably not as far advanced, are, on the average, better at critical thinking, reasoning, reading, staying informed, and questioning authority than diplomates from American public schools.

    This is a statistical observation. I've met plenty of public school graduates who are brilliant leaders and plenty of private school products who get all their news from TV and don't understand it. But I see a strong correlation and that's what I'm pointing out.

    I know that correlation does not imply causation. If you have a better hypothesis to explain this, please enlighten me. If you think this social experiment needs to run for a few more generations before we can be sure of the cause-and-effect relationship, I can't argue. I fear the results, but you'll be the one who has to live with them, not me, so again, I have no right to argue.
     

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