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I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.
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this post was submitted on 02 Nov 2023
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I was homeschooled and it was fine, I did great on standardized tests, had friends, am not a fundamentalist nutjob, etc... I'd like to say to these people please stay, I know it's hard for them but what they're doing is desperately needed. Lots of those people are decent people who live in an echo chamber of conservative insanity, they need patient loving people like you to show up and let them see there's more to life than their bubble.
Similar situation here. I was raised home schooled for all of my education. Got a GED, good score on the ACT, got a 4.0 in the community college where I got an associates degree. The problem is parents who homeschool because they don't want their kids to turn "woke" or be "converted" by exposure to the fact that non-straight, non-cis people exist. A lot of the time, the emphasis is only on indoctrination, and there is little or no actual education involved.
I have been to homeschool conferences - there are some good resources there, and a LOT of really pretty awful stuff like this article mentioned. People like the author are so incredibly impactful, even if they don't realize it. They may never see results but those seeds matter. Even if the parents don't get it, the kids will.
At a conference last year, there was a speaker talking about parenting difficult children (Kirk Martin with Celebrate Calm). He was presenting very much a solid gentle parenting approach (though he didn't call it that) that is very contrary to the culture of a lot of homeschool groups. He spent a lot of time unpacking his experiences as someone who grew up with really strict physical discipline, the impact it had on him, his experience being a parent - kind of leading people on a journey from where they might be to where they should be as parents.
He also spent a bit of his talk on how the Bible doesn't teach us to raise our kids to fight in a culture war and just really pretty clearly calling out a lot of the toxic far right christian-nationalist talking points. Sure he made a lot of people uncomfortable, but those thoughts will stick with them.
After his talk he was spent over an hour talking with people outside of the conference room answering questions. His next talk was packed as well.
Anyway, all that to say - I know it can take a lot out of someone to deal with people in those environments, but it is absolutely impactful and so desperately needed.
Or we could just outlaw homeschooling and take away parental rights for anyone who tries to do it anyways.
Child abuse, child marriages, child SA, and parentification numbers would plummet over night once these fundy bastards lost their ability to breed new cultists like rabbits.
I think you're vastly overestimating how often those things happen in homeschool. Most of them are awesome people that just happen to be stuck in a terrible media bubble.
And if there were no homeschool the crazy fundie portion of homeschoolers would just send their kids to a crazy fundie private school or move to a small town where everyone in the public school were all crazy fundies also.
Ban private schools too and hit the fundy towns with anti housing covenant laws to make it financially impossible for them to get away with that shit.
Yeah let's ruin a thing that works for a lot of people just because some people do it badly. great take.
I suppose the question would be if it works for some people, and even then, would institutional learning really not work for the same people?
To the extent potentially functional folks can't deal with educational institutions, it's likely that the "real world" will inflict similar challenges. Usually best to acclimate to those situations rather than trying to avoid the unavoidable.
"Works" for a lot of people while robbing money from the public education system they're taking vouchers to not pay for.
I mean, those vouchers are for what the school would've received for that student.
What if the student never existed? Are those non-existent children robbing the public schools?
This take seems silly to me. As long as the education the student gets is of quality, I'm not going to stress over the details of where exactly they learned their stuff.
So my generation (in school from the 70s-80s) had a significantly lower population than the ones that preceeded us, resulting in a downgraded education curriculum.
Tell me I deserved that for not being able to find enough peers.
The point of socializing some goods and services is becauae profit doesn't drive mail service to rural and wilds. Profit doesn't drive cures for rare diseases. And profit doesn't drive the availability of basic education to all Americans when there are low-population classes or a region with too few kids.
So the per-capita formula for budgeting a school doesn't actually work...if the state is there to serve the public and not the capitalist.
If we admit the state is there to serve capital and not the public, well, then we have a much greater crisis.
I'm not arguing for the per-capita formula, but if that's what we're using, let's not act like these kids are greedy bandits running off with all the public education money.
I'm not even sure that it's bad that you be able to go elsewhere. I don't want people being taught a fundamentalist agenda on tax payer dollars, but I also don't want kids to be forced into schools that are a bad fit for them because "that's where their parents live." I always did better in a more independent study environment, I probably could've had an easier time (in terms of learning things) if my parents had pulled me out and let me go to an online school that let me just skip the lecture and dive into the actual material.
Every state has different funding structures as well. Ohio bases funding IIRC primarily off of real estate taxes in the local community ... which leads to schools like the one I went to having ancient text books and public schools in rich neighborhoods having (at least anecdotally) literal iPads for every student back in like ... 2010.
I know Ohio's system has been ruled unconstitutional twice but nobody's actually fixed it. Education funding is a mess, but "having options" isn't a bad thing so long as those options are of sufficient quality.
The student does exist though, so them leaving the system and taking the money is stealing from the community pot because you don't want your kid to mix with the poors.
I know at least one very good friend that was home schooled because he was poor and he simultaneously had a bullying issue. His mom pulled him from public school and put him in an online school to resolve the issue.
And in doing so stole that money from the educators that have to handle the kids who can't just fuck off to some private online school
This dude is literally on every social program available with no father and a very sick mother. You make it sound like he was some rich kid that just "ran off to private school" and that erased all his problems.
You need a reality and attitude check.