Not every family fits the stereotype I know I have in my mind.

I’m curious, which families broke the stereotypes for you? I have to admit I wasn’t surprised by any of the families in this book. Sure, some of the parents weren’t as extreme as the others, but I didn’t think it was a coincidence that the author chose to profile the most sympathetic families in the first and last chapters. Overall, I found the vast majority depressing and disheartening: heavy religious indoctrination, false science, revisionist history, isolationist/segregationist parenting, and harsh corporal punishment. In addition, at least two of the six families were providing their children with substandard education. None of that went against the stereotypes for me.

My body is mine. I’ve always had it, ever since I was born. Nobody knows it better than I. So I don’t no stupid doctor to treat me when I’m ill.

I don’t agree with that.

This is just one anecdote from a stranger on the internet so by all means, ignore it But here’s a story. I ran into an old acquaintance (friend of an ex) after not seeing her for 5 years and asked what she was doing. I was surprised to find she was teaching math at a middle school. The last I had seen her she was working at some insurance company with her BA in English. She told me that math is apparently a hard subject to find teachers for so she was able to get the job despite not having a teaching degree or a math degree. Now maybe it was a temporary lack in this state at that time (this was 10 years ago), I don’t know, but she told me how she had to read the book ahead on the weekends to make sure she knew the material to teach the kids. And I’m not knocking her, she’s a perfectly intelligent, nice woman. I’m sure she did a great job. But it did make a point.

There are plenty of teachers who are against homeschooling, but I personally know quite a lot who decided to homeschool their own kids *because* of their years teaching. Public and private school teachers both. I guess they get the cold shoulder in the teacher’s lounge?

There’s also age to consider. I’m of the opinion that most of what goes on in grade school is just busy work and filler. My oldest is 10. At this age there is no need for her to be sitting at a desk having facts stuffed in her head every day. I’d rather inspire her to *want* to learn in the first place. Take her to aquariums, show her cool videos, get great books from the library, go bird watching, go to the museum. Actually live life instead of learning about it from a teacher.

Damn. I’m one of the crazies huh? LOL!

What I hate is the stereotype that only religious nutters homeschool.

I think that’s the stereotype because it’s a large majority.

According to the National Center for Education Statistics, quoted in wikipedia:

Statistically, the typical American homeschooling parents are married, homeschool their children primarily for religious or moral reasons, and are almost twice as likely to be Evangelical than the national average.

It’s kinda like the stereotype that only white people watch Glenn Beck. It’s not completely true. It’s just mostly true.

She actually used a homestudy course offered by a real high school with telephone and internet support if she needed it and finished three years of high school in half that time because she was zealous and even worked through the summer.

The only problem with homeschooling is the school and, hence, the diploma were in a different state than ours and had different requirements for graduation. Now that she’s in college, she had to take classes to complete what our home state requires.

I stress this wouldn’t be for every child, probably not most. My daughter works best at her own speed and has always had problems with growing bored in public schools because getting straight A’s was too easy for her. In high school, even though she had a close-knit group of friends (and still attended some dances, etc. with them after leaving), she was just totally frustrated with the emphasis on social activities rather than academia.

Also, homeschooling does need to be very closely supervised and, at the very least, have testing done yearly to make sure kids have been taught all they should have. With no oversight, it is far too open for abuse. Not just with religious nuts who want their kids to have every bit of information religion-tainted but the parents who couldn’t be bothered and letting the kid hang out is less trouble than dealing with the school.

I’ll admit that there’s something to be said for knowing your kids. You start off with a rather large shared schema, so that can be an aid to learning. But in all my teacher education thus far, only a few bits of classes here and there have dealt with how to teach large groups. We learn about cognitive psychology, strategies for retention, and different learning styles. Classroom management is only a small part, and we’re expected to learn that more from practical experience than through didactic methods.

And speaking of methods! This is where expertise in the subject area is critical. If a teacher does not understand what he or she is teaching, it’s essentially the same as lecturing. If you don’t understand it deeper than the level of the text in the book, then that text is your only recourse. You can’t get around the ideas and approach from multiple angles. So an inexpert parent who’s teaching from a book designed for a general audience is certainly no better than a teacher who’s teaching a general audience, and that teacher (due to expertise) knows how to help out students who learn best by some less-than-orthodox strategy.

If the only content in my teacher education program were crowd control, then this woman would have a leg to stand on with the argument that there’s no better teacher for her kids than her. That, of course, is not the case.

“If children do poorly in homeschools, we should send them to public schools:” without first establishing that the public schools do better (when, in fact, they statistically do worse), this is just a non sequitur.

Actually, I think the argument is “if specific child X is doing poorly being homeschooled by their family, then they should go to public school.”

The fact that some public schools have bad outcomes for a certain number of their students does not tell us that homeschooling would produce a better outcome for each one of those individuals.

Indeed, given who normally fails at public school, those particular students statistically usually have it very bad at home.

To say that homeschooling students statistically do better at tests says nothing by itself, because people who homeschool are a self-selected group. You cannot make a prediction based on that as to how each individual kid in public school would do were they homeschooled. Nor can you say that the average homeschooled child wouldn’t have done *even better* in a traditional school. At least not with over-general data like “kids do better on average.” You must know it’s self-selecting and cannot be made to apply to every individual, without exception, even in cases of particularly bad homeschooling.

It has nothing to do with education and everything to do with the state attempting to achieve a monopoly over education.

Funny, private schools don’t seem to have any problem meeting those standards. You’d think the evil government conspiracy to monopolize education and control kids’ minds would have outlawed those by now, huh?

As someone who has two degrees in education, I really resent what that woman says about her ability to teach. I doubt she knows very much about educational psychology, social foundations of education, curriculum writing, lesson plan writing, rubric building, unique learning needs, classroom management, or any of that “teacher” stuff.

If that offends you, you’ll love this excerpt from Richard Feynman’s essay Cargo Cult Science:

But then I began to think, what else is there that we believe? (And I thought then about the witch doctors, and how easy it would have been to check on them by noticing that nothing really worked.) So I found things that even more people believe, such as that we have some knowledge of how to educate. There are big schools of reading methods and mathematics methods, and so forth, but if you notice, you’ll see the reading scores keep going down–or hardly going up–in spite of the fact that we continually use these same people to improve the methods. There’s a witch doctor remedy that doesn’t work.

There’s a great passage by Richard Dawkins (from The God Delusion, I think) ridiculing the Christian argument that one can’t reject their religion without fully exploring every nuanced opinion on the shape of angel wings. The same applies to your social foundations of education.

Homeschoolers typically have help writing curricula, don’t need formal lesson plans, don’t need formal rubrics, don’t care about the learning needs of anyone other than their children, don’t have to manage a classroom, and don’t really need to be concerned with any of that “teacher” stuff.