Homeschooled: How American Home Schoolers Measure Up

[Carjosse]

Private education. I'm an atheist but my kid never spent a day in the public school system (we had him in Christian and Catholic schools) . well that's not true he ended up in State college he's 9 months away from his JD and now he's a commie heh heh

Again you don't have really have a need for it if you have good public education. In Canada private schooling is rare except in Quebec but that is due to language issues. Both Canada's rich (including most of the government and the Prime Minister), poor, and middle class send their kids to public school even in downtown of large cities because we have good public education. There is no reason to send a kid to private school if you have good public education.

 

[AngryOldGuy]

There is no reason to send a kid to private school if you have good public education.

Just like if you have great socialized medical care there is no reason to seek out superior private healthcare that you have to pay out of pocket for? So lemme get this straight. If a 'free' public education was equal or superior to a private education then you'd have no reason to pay for something that was free? Or the old adage: you get what you pay for, is really not true or If the French would just stop being silly and speak English this would be a better country or... wait I really love maple syrup on my pancakes at breakfast but who in their right mind would spend that much for tree sap?

 

[imagep]

Again you don't have really have a need for it if you have good public education. In Canada private schooling is rare except in Quebec but that is due to language issues. Both Canada's rich (including most of the government and the Prime Minister), poor, and middle class send their kids to public school even in downtown of large cities because we have good public education. There is no reason to send a kid to private school if you have good public education.

I believe that we have fairly good schools in the US, at least in areas where families value education. It's not really the building, or the desks, that makes a school good or bad. It's the families that the students come from. When you have a classroom full of students who's parent (notice I didn't say "parents") says things like "ain't no one ever learned nothing from a book", or "I ain't never used no algebra at work", then the kids in that classroom are pretty much doomed to failure, no matter how hard the teacher tries and no matter how fancy the desks are.

I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that we have a higher poverty rate in the US than in Canada, and also a higher percent of single parent families. I suspect that poverty and the family situation has a lot more to do with our education problem than anything else.

The reason that schools in the US are thought to be so bad is because the good schools rarely get discussed in the media. I've seen many a documentary on how bad our "inner city" schools are, but I've never seen a documentary showing how good our suburban schools are. There is a reason for that - no one would bother to watch a show on good schools. It just wouldn't be interesting. Just like anything on the news, bad news catches attention. I often watch the local 11pm news just before going to bed, and I've seen a zillion segments about a bad car wreck or a house fire, but I have never seen a single segment about all the drivers who didn't have a wreck that day or all the houses that didn't burn down.

Most of the public schools that are in middle and upper class neighborhoods in the US are competitive with any schools in the world. Think about it, when we read the headlines about some school where 90% of the students did below average, then somewhere there must be a school where 90% of the students did better than average. If most schools did worse than average, then the average would be "below average", which is of course mathematically impossible.

 

[jag2594]

I believe that we have fairly good schools in the US, at least in areas where families value education. It's not really the building, or the desks, that makes a school good or bad. It's the families that the students come from. When you have a classroom full of students who's parent (notice I didn't say "parents") says things like "ain't no one ever learned nothing from a book", or "I ain't never used no algebra at work", then the kids in that classroom are pretty much doomed to failure, no matter how hard the teacher tries and no matter how fancy the desks are.

I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that we have a higher poverty rate in the US than in Canada, and also a higher percent of single parent families. I suspect that poverty and the family situation has a lot more to do with our education problem than anything else.

The reason that schools in the US are thought to be so bad is because the good schools rarely get discussed in the media. I've seen many a documentary on how bad our "inner city" schools are, but I've never seen a documentary showing how good our suburban schools are. There is a reason for that - no one would bother to watch a show on good schools. It just wouldn't be interesting. Just like anything on the news, bad news catches attention. I often watch the local 11pm news just before going to bed, and I've seen a zillion segments about a bad car wreck or a house fire, but I have never seen a single segment about all the drivers who didn't have a wreck that day or all the houses that didn't burn down.

Most of the public schools that are in middle and upper class neighborhoods in the US are competitive with any schools in the world. Think about it, when we read the headlines about some school where 90% of the students did below average, then somewhere there must be a school where 90% of the students did better than average. If most schools did worse than average, then the average would be "below average", which is of course mathematically impossible.

The marxist theory on education is outstanding. The USSR scientific achievements have been evident of marxism.

 

[AngryOldGuy]

The marxist theory on education is outstanding. The USSR scientific achievements have been evident of marxism.

wow just wow

 

[American]

Can you tell us all about those countries which have a higher standard of living than in the US and yet don't have a public school system? I want to learn more about them.

Don't try to change the subject, this is about the choice of how people choose to educated their families and having options. The results are in on homeschooling, but some people want to turn these people into fanatics for political gain. And would like to see this choice gone.

 

[Bodi]

I find the OP irrelevant except that it is interesting. It has nothing to do with the success or failure of public school. All you have to do is to see the education level of the parent to understand why.

 

[AngryOldGuy]

And would like to see this choice gone.

I'm amazed it isn't illegal already, give em time buddy give em time
It took longer than a day to burn down Rome

 

[AngryOldGuy]

the education level of the parent

and what does that have to do with home schooling?
No wait I get it

 

[Dr. Chuckles]

I believe that we have fairly good schools in the US, at least in areas where families value education. It's not really the building, or the desks, that makes a school good or bad. It's the families that the students come from. When you have a classroom full of students who's parent (notice I didn't say "parents") says things like "ain't no one ever learned nothing from a book", or "I ain't never used no algebra at work", then the kids in that classroom are pretty much doomed to failure, no matter how hard the teacher tries and no matter how fancy the desks are.

having school funding heavily tied to property tax doesn't really help with the above

 

[AngryOldGuy]

My kid had a gf during sophomore year when he was going to prep school she attended Chaparral High School in Paradise Valley
the school's test scores and the quality of education was a bit better than average heh heh

 

[Carjosse]

I may be wrong, but I am pretty sure that we have a higher poverty rate in the US than in Canada, and also a higher percent of single parent families. I suspect that poverty and the family situation has a lot more to do with our education problem than anything else.

I can't look that up because apparently no one in Canada ever bothered to define what the poverty rate is, but they do have a level of income called the low-income cut-off level and if your below it your considered poor even though you may not be for your area and it was 8.8% in 2011 and falling while in the U.S. at the same time it was 15% and may or may not have gone up. For single-parent families in Canada it is 16.7% while in the U.S. the best I could find was 28%. In Canada growth over 5 years in single parents families was 5% while married families only went up 3.7% but if you combine that with common-law it outpaces single-parenting in growth. A recent thing in Canada is being a single-parent on purpose (no divorce or teen pregnancy, they just wanted children). I also noticed that all the statistics in the U.S. seem to be very race based while ours are usually for all races.

 

[Gathomas88]

Until I started reading your posts on homeschooling, I was nearly 100% against it. Mostly because the only two home schooled kids that I personally have ever known were not actually being "schooled" at home.

It didn't take long before your posts, and a some by a few others, totally changed my mind about it. I'm outright sold on the idea now. I bet I'm one of the very few posters on this forum who has ever changed their mind on anything due to this forum, and you are certainly one of the few posters who ever was able to get someone to change their mind.

Congrats - to both of us!

To be fair, there are some forms of homeschooling of which you probably should be wary.

My family was actually fairly traditional as far as Homeschooling goes. My college educated mother handled most of the teaching, and she used a lot of store bought curriculum to add structure to her own efforts. We also used correspondence courses for some of the more advanced subjects when things got to the "high school" level and above.

"Unschoolers," on the other hand, believe in pretty much exactly the opposite. The movement is made up of little more than a bunch of dried up old hippie parents who "like, don't believe in structured education, man."

In my experiences with them (which were thankfully few and far between, as unschooling tends to be rather rare within the greater homeschool community), a lot of the children raised this way tended to do have trouble getting into college. Their parents would spend so much time teaching them subjects like music or art history that they would basically bomb the SAT due to their poor skills in math and English.

To each their own, I suppose. However, that honestly strikes me as being a bit of a waste. :shrug:

I find it interesting to note, however; that, contrary to Pasch's claims, the only homeschoolers I am aware of who can be said to have actually "harmed their children" through teaching them at home weren't religious or Conservative at all, but rather secular and quite Liberal. :lol:

 

[AngryOldGuy]

Gathom 'unschooling' that sounds sick

Ya mention the SAT, after being in private school all his life
when my kid had just turned 18 he got to college n got a job
teaching sat prep for Princeton Review it paid only 25 bucks an hour part time
while he carried a full class load, they offered him a jerb full time for fidy thou
but he went to lawl school and started teaching LSAT n GRE prep for Kaplan
so yeah he got work from going to private school while he was still a teenager
but 'home schooling' sounds odd heck liberated wimen these days don't wanna stay home n raise
kids much less teach em anything

 

[Gathomas88]

Gathom 'unschooling' that sounds sick

Ya mention the SAT, after being in private school all his life
when my kid had just turned 18 he got to college n got a job
teaching sat prep for Princeton Review it paid only 25 bucks an hour part time
while he carried a full class load, they offered him a jerb full time for fidy thou
but he went to lawl school and started teaching LSAT n GRE prep for Kaplan
so yeah he got work from going to private school while he was still a teenager

I'm not going to lie. That's pretty awesome.

Honestly, what you have mentioned above is probably the only way I can think of that Homeschooling can be said to have "set me back" in life. I have effectively zilch in the way of experience when it comes to "networking."

In an ideal world, we could all be successful on merit, ability, and hard work alone. However, the older I get, the more I'm starting to see just how far from "ideal" the real world truly happens to be. :lol:

No one really cares what you can do; especially not in this economy. It's all a matter of who you happen to know that can vouch for you.

The simple fact of the matter is that I just plain don't know all that many people. :shrug:

To be fair, however; the same is almost certainly true of many of the less privileged children going through the public school system, so it seems fairly unlikely Homeschooling is exclusively to blame for that.

but 'home schooling' sounds odd heck liberated wimen these days don't wanna stay home n raise
kids much less teach em anything

You kidding me? My mother basically lived for that stuff. :lol:

She must've dragged us to every museum and civil war battlefield within a four state radius at least once while we were growing up, and we did a lot of hands on projects. She really made the experience her own.

Now that we're all more or less grown, she's started a new career as a nurse.

If anything, I think that "liberated" women who believe that it is impossible to be "fulfilled" within the home actually deny themselves a lot of very worthwhile opportunities. They're so fundamental afraid of coming off as being in any sense "submissive" that they fail to realize that motherhood isn't anything to be ashamed of.

 

[AngryOldGuy]

yeah all the rich kids (and some of the parents) he knew from school have helped a boatload

It was funny, an Arizona State Supreme Court judge was really curious about his having graduated from Brophy
(like it was some skull & crossbones knda dealio)
he got the internship and did cases all summer, it was unpaid, the next summer his internship paid 2 grand a week
for a private law firm I laughed and said: heh yeah told ya them gubbermint jerbs were crap

 

[AngryOldGuy]

motherhood isn't anything to be ashamed of.

daumn straight it is the bedrock on which our civilization stands upon!
And that's why things are crumbling down around us

 

[Bodi]

daumn straight it is the bedrock on which our civilization stands upon!
And that's why things are crumbling down around us

She is a ****ing disgrace... as is her hill billy **** of a dad. Trash.