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Comment by s1artibartfast | Hacker News Reader

Everyone I know that has the funds are pulling their kids out primarily for the indoctrination aspect, and I plan to do the same.

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

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I don't think leaving huge holes in someone's education, because a parent (or one of these co-ops) can't teach it properly, is a good trade-off for shielding him/her from perceived indoctrination. Notice I specifically said perceived because it's mostly exaggerated or outright untrue. If merely teaching kids that the Civil War happened, and that it was actually about slavery is now indoctrination, then anything can be considered indoctrination. There are a lot of parents out there that oppose teaching facts they personally disagree with, and these people are the ones who least should be homeschooling.

>I don't think leaving huge holes in someone's education, because a parent (or one of these co-ops) can't teach it properly, is a good trade-off for shielding him/her from perceived indoctrination.

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...

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.

I didn't say I heard that specific phrase from teachers, but I hear it from other people in real life all the time.

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?

Yay, make it personal despite getting delivered objective facts without providing any facts to bolster your own believes. yikes.

OK, so do you think that you can never ask a person what position they hold when discussing that very topic?

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.

The nice thing is that it doesn't matter what I believe is deserved or not the thing is that there was wrong doing and that the wrong doing should be teached in school. Imagine Germany not teaching their children about the second world war. LOL

I think we are talking about entirely different topics/ talking past eachother. I too agree that school should include the darker parts of history and lessons learned from them.

I don't think that you and I can have a discussion unless we agree on the subject we are even talking about.

> if the school was was teaching the earth revolved around the sun

Uh, the earth does revolve around the sun

Haha, thanks. I guess my educational indoctrination won out even when I tried to type it wrong. too late to edit and fix.

well technically it revolves around the ever-shifting center which is only approximated by the center of the sun by virtue of its mass, or something along those lines I dunno I'm no scientist

I read the original comment and didn't notice this until you mentioned it. Gave me a great chuckle, thanks.

I don't think the parent was arguing necessarily that its wrong for parents to want their children to be taught certain things or a certain way. I think the argument being put forth was that most parents don't have what it takes to teach their kids. Let's say you take your kid out of school because you don't like what he's being taught in history class or whatever. Okay, well do you have what it takes to teach your kid music, art, geometry, calc, English, physics, biology, chemistry, etc. Most people I would say don't have that kind of broad capacity.

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.

The homeschool support groups add a lot in this context and I foresee a time where every suburb and neighborhood will have one or more of them. That, combined with all of the curricula available offline and online, there isn't much specialized knowledge that parents need to have in order to get started. By the time kids hit middle school and high school, they are able to do quite a bit of learning on their own and are taught how to seek out help if they need it.

> The homeschool support groups add a lot in this context

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.

You seem to be projecting your personal experience on to a large population.

> Let's say you take your kid out of school because you don't like what he's being taught in history class or whatever. Okay, well do you have what it takes to teach your kid music, art, geometry, calc, English, physics, biology, chemistry, etc. Most people I would say don't have that kind of broad capacity.

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.

You can barely get kids to do the assigned reading, what indoctrination do you think is happening? Same goes for any areas of higher education where people think the universities are turning their kids into liberals.

This has a whole satanic panic feel about it from people who should know better.

I get where you are coming from with the satanic panic. I do think that some of the "excitement" around the topic is over the top. But even without it, I think there a some fundamental considerations and choices for people to make about how their kids are educated.

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 believe in climate change and this would not be okay with me.

I'm shocked, shocked <casablanca.gif> that normie parents would pull their first graders out of a school that has Drag Queen Story Hour.

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