And homeschooling is skyrocketing nationwide as more parents decide to pull their kids from government schools. Long-term, I think we will see an even greater move in this direction.
But then you look at the actual reasons people are homeschooling, and by and large, it's parents who are opposing some perceived "indoctrination": Fundamentalist Christians objecting to things like sex ed, biology, evolution. More and more now, it looks like it's not just being driven by religion but by political ideology. Our local "moms" group is full of people pulling their kids out to prevent them from "being indoctrinated by the liberals" and for anti-vax reasons. For every 1 parent homeschooling because they really can provide a better education at home, there are probably 100 parents who are totally unqualified, will leave huge gaps in their kids' education, and are only doing it for ideological reasons.
In theory, having a smart parent at home DIYing their kids' education sounds like a great idea, but in practice, it's all the wrong people doing it for all the wrong reasons.
I would dispute that this is the wrong reasons. The most common complaint I hear is around racial theory/ identity politics/ or whatever you want to call it. People don't like their 1st grade child being taught that they are an oppressor by virtue of their birth and guilty and responsible for generations of injustice.
These are views that I believe are harmful and untrue. I would feel the same way if the school was was teaching the earth revolved around the sun, or God made women to be subservient to men
I generally agree that forgoing basic education is not a solution. Most parents I know readily admit that they don't have the bandwidth for homeschooling and choose private schools as a solution.
I'm not to interested in tilting at individual facts, so hopefully we can skip that part, and agree that different world views are instilled in children as part of their education (by whatever means).
I often hear it parroted that certain people are oppressors by virtue of their birth and guilty and responsible for generations of injustice. I do not want my children to internalize this message.
With that context, perhaps we can agree that all parents are opposed to teaching children ideologies they don't personally agree with.
I would further suggest that many parents currently pulling their children from schools are doing so based on the message above.
I often hear the same strawman from right-wing sources. Usually the actual content is benign, like GP mentioned (topics like the US Civil War was fought over slavery). I've never heard any teacher or curriculum say the things being alleged or seen any evidence that they were said, which returns to the bulk of GP's comment: people are having degraded education over falsely perceived indoctrination.
Do you deny that people hold this belief? Do you believe it yourself?
P. S. Why do people keep bringing up the civil war? Did I miss something?
If they believe that racial guilt exists or is deserved is relevant to the conversation of if it is or should be taught in schools.
I don't think that you and I can have a discussion unless we agree on the subject we are even talking about.
Uh, the earth does revolve around the sun
So what happens is parents start forming homeschool support groups, they pool resources, divide responsibilities based on expertise and knowledge, and eventually recreate the concept of a school from scratch. I guess it can then eventually undergo the same moral fracture and the cycle repeats.
Anyone who was able to graduate high school back when that meant something can teach all of those subjects to the end of primary school if they’re willing to read and put in some work, by any reasonable standard.
Also was home schooled for 5 years. From watching others I can fairly confidently say my parents were far above average for the time and area in terms of being educators and trying to get ahead of the "socialization" curve. They had degrees and tried their best to teach to lesson plans prepared by professionals, modifying as they saw fit.
These groups tout how well-rounded they are, but many are bluntly filled with extremist nutjobs. Abusively so in many cases. My parents were utterly blind to this, and to this day like to talk about how "well rounded" socially I was.
I was not. I was exposed to the nutjobs and crackpots of society in a fairly intimate manner at a very young age, with very little supervision other than whichever adults were performing a given lesson at the time.
Not saying this to scare anyone away from home schooling. If done thoughtfully, carefully, and evidence-based it certainly can have great outcomes. I just have my hairs stand on end when I hear folks talk about these groups as some sort of fix for the problem - when in fact they are the problem to begin with in my experience.
Homeschool may be becoming more "mainstream" but I think a lot of folks just now starting out due to the pandemic are in for some very hard truths in the next couple years.
This has a whole satanic panic feel about it from people who should know better.
You response beggs a really interesting question: where do new ideas come from and how do they spread in society. It is clear that there are generational difference in opinion that change over time, so kids get new ideas somewhere. Clearly their friends and the media are a big part of it too, but where do those opinions come from?
I think education is a big part of this, even if it isn't always overt (sometimes it is). If most of your teachers buy into a specific ideology, that certainly colors what they teach. If you are teaching soft subjects like literature, history, ect, there is a lot of subjectivity in how to interpret things and frame them.
For the overt stuff, my friends 2nd grader recently became obsessed with climate change. Their teacher had them making protest signs and marching around the elementary school, and now they ridicule gifts that aren't eco friendly and think the world is doomed. While I believe in climate change, I think it is a complex topic that most adults fail to comprehend, let alone a 2nd grader.
I also think that most history taught in US public schools has been severely rewritten to support a liberal agenda, which strays so far from the truth it borders on fantasy.
I totally get manual labor being a virtue and I agree we should all seek it out to some extent, but making it your primary profession, in my opinion, does not hold a candle to software development for life quality.
If it's facts like mathematical or logical axioms, or similar such things that are virtually undisputed except by the utmost extreme fringe elements of humanity, probably we agree what a fact is. If it's "scientific consensus" well... maybe still, but it's getting hazy. If it's "lived experience" or "history as written by the victors" then we aren't agreeing on what a fact is anymore, in my opinion. And there are many levels of variability below that.
The conclusions made based on a fact are progressively more impacted by the amount of variability. The consequences arising from making decisions based on those conclusions even moreso.
If the conclusion is "my children will be treated like prisoners in public school and informed subtly through virtually every lesson plan that their skin color changes how they are supposed to behave and how they should view their positions in life" are that I vote for somebody who supports charter schools and voucher systems, the consequences might be that I end up campaigning for that single issue regardless of party or candidate.
Or maybe it's just taking my kids out of school and using one of the many pre-made self-learning curricula for a variety of topics and give them a laptop and frequent checkups to ensure they're learning. Or maybe I outsource it to my church. Or maybe I outsource it to YouTube and Wikipedia.
Or maybe I say fuck it and let them go play in the yard all day, or go to the mall, or go to their own protests all day, or join a street gang, or try to get tiktok views, or invent some thing, or write a book, or overdose, or chat on discord all day, or get a job, or join a club. Lot of options, lot of ways to "fail to educate" on any given topic.
Frankly, everyday life will do that for a lot of folks.
The “DIY vs professional” mental model is not as helpful as other perspectives when evaluating homeschooling. Homeschooling is an extension of parenting, something we do not outsource outside of extreme situations, often involving criminal behavior. The ideal child-curriculum-pedagogy fit for each stage of growth for each child varies so much that understanding the child is a valuable educational skill. Parents are in a unique position to exercise this skill.
Where teachers do outperform parents as professionals is in leading a group of students to achieve standards in tandem within a large bureaucracy. The skill of deep per-child customization and response becomes less important than skills like public speaking, organizational psychology, reporting and forming rapport with strangers. Trained teachers outperform any particular child’s parent in these tasks.