this post was submitted on 23 Jul 2024
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Anything that makes you apply your hand to your face.
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And this is exactly why homeschooling exists. For the most part of course. It's people who want a certain view of History taught and don't want to have to worry about pesky things like facts or history or books. That's why so much homeschooling is deeply Evangelical Christian, and somehow even the weirder branch of Evangelical Christians if that's a thing, also why so much of it has Nazi shit involved. Yeah if you've never looked it up there's a lot of Nazi propaganda in the homeschooling community. It's just great..
That’s… not really homeschooling. The US is so weird. Are there not curriculums (curriculi?) to follow and standard exams to sit regardless of where your education took place? Most the homeschooled people I know lived in the arse end of nowhere growing up and didn’t have another choice.
Curricula.
curriculi, curricula
That’s the word. I knew we had an option. Thanks.
That's not really true with everyone. I know a fair number of home schooled people and there were taught better than the schools. When you're in school, you can only learn as fast as the slowest learning. The "smarter" kids are held back. When we were in lockdown from the pandemic, kids could learn at their own rate from the online classes, and half my sons class was done with the semesters curriculum before the first quarter was done. The teacher had to find more for them to do which resulted in half the class jumping a grade when everyone went back to school.
I would let me kid do online schooling in a heartbeat if I could, he'd be miles ahead compared to going to school.
Yeah, strong “No true Scotsman” energy here.
The vast majority of homeschooling parents are absolute weirdos who have no business teaching anyone, especially children.
I don't want to generalize, nor am I American, so this is probably irrelevant anyway, but as my wife is an experienced spec ed teacher and I myself have also worked in the educational system for most of my life I feel somewhat competent in giving some perspective.
Now, we do live in one of the Nordic countries, and I've lived in one of the others as well, and we were both raised bi-lingual (Swedish speaking Finns, to be exact). As my immune system is compromised due to a chronic sickness and I'm also an asthmatic, we decided to keep our son home for quite a while during Covid. My wife works with a relatively small group of pupils (~5) since she's a private teacher for children with some form of Autism so we didn't regard that as a really dangerous vector, as they were all masked up due to their own medical issues.
Anyhow, even with all our experience and know-how (and that's besides the social part he missed) it was a major undertaking to homeschool our boy even for a 6 month period, and he's a smart boy too. We made most of the material myself except for his school books, and damn if it wasn't close to a full time job. Ironically we all did get COVID (and I survived, to my surprise) about 2 weeks after he went back to school.
His handwriting had improved a lot though, and he were several chapters in front of the rest of his class in math. He's also almost a year before his peers in English, which means he speaks three languages almost fluently at 10 years old.
So, tl;dr: you're not wrong, but it is possible. Exhausting, but possible.
Edit: typos.
As a homeschooler who's not that and has a group of other not thats, you're right that many homeschoolers do it to restrict or provide incorrect education but you can't generalize that to all.
Your sentence is proof you shouldn't be teaching your kids how to write.
Lemmy threads aren’t formal writing, they’re textualized speech. Of course you’ll find non-standard phrasing. Note that the punctuation and spelling are correct.
What you call formal writing is what many people would call writing that is most easily understood.
Nice.
What you’re describing isn’t “homeschooling”, it’s really “distance learning” or “online schooling”. It’s still proctored by professionals and taught by credentialed teachers, and uses widely accepted curricula and content that is also taught in a regular school.
“Homeschooling” in a lot of ways leaves the teaching and day-to-day up to the parent. They only have to give benchmark tests mandated by the state to show the child is progressing every year, but what they teach the rest of the time is up to them. Which is why a lot of conservative groups like it, so they can teach their kids their version of history and leave out the parts that are uncomfortable.
Your kid was learning the public school curriculum in a remote setting. This is vastly different than mom or dad giving them dubious materials from a religious company selling home schooling crap.
Yes that's why I didn't say everyone I said for the most part. Because for every one kid like the one you're talking about there's 50 that don't get anywhere near that level of quality education. Even ignoring all of the racist sexist and let's be honest evil indoctrination that goes on in homeschooling, there's also a large amount of abuse and exploitation that goes on. Homeschooling is a shit show.
You would quickly run into a problem where your kid doing it. That problem being that a lot of that online schooling is from Prager U, and companies like that. They have cornered a lot of the marketplace on homeschool materials. So the only thing he'd be miles ahead on is thinking that black people liked being slaves.