In nursing school we had to do a Denver II Developmental Screening on a child aged 6-18 months. I wound up assessing the child of one of my parent’s church friends. The couple were young but old enough to be well-educated with decent paying jobs based on the neighborhood. They weren’t fundies by any means, in fact, the father was the primary caregiver. He proudly gave me the child’s health history, including that they had never had a single cold. He attributed their good health to never having been to daycare, which was likely true.

As I progressed through the developmental screening the child was doing great at fine and gross motor, but was lagging significantly in language/social. The dad seemed kind of nervous and I, the first semester nursing student, probably did a shit job of reassuring him. I really saw the gears start turning in his head though as he realized that playing with other children was actually super important developmentally.

One person cannot be smarter in every single subject than every single teacher that the kid would ever have.

This is the bit about homeschooling I’ll never get. Yes, a good chunk of a child’s education will be done by general educators that a competent parent could probably expect to compare to, but going into middle and high school or it’s equivalent, these teachers are focused and experienced in a single subject far more than a parent could ever hope to be. Unless the public school is absolutely trash, it seems like a disservice to their children, tbh.

And frankly that’s like the best case scenario. Like that myopic view of homeschooling is the best you can have it get with homeschooling. There’s a whole another end of the spectrum it involves straight up Nazis and child abuse and child slavery and just so much depression and sadness.

I’m not sure I get the arguments based around better education quality. One of the primary controllable determinants of a child’s educational attainments is parental involvement. Spend a couple of hours with the kid going over their homework and helping them stay a chapter ahead, and I bet the kid would not only be academically successful but also socialized.

Also, a lot of school systems have a fast track learning program for gifted students. You might have to shop around for a school with one if you’re in a low population area, but I think that driving your kid for 45m to a STEM high school probably takes less time than lesson prep and teaching.

the only reason everyone’s all screwed up is just that nobody sat down and really micromanaged their child’s education enough.

That’s the line that described every homeschooling advocate I’ve ever met.

Fully agree with this, having known both parents who homeschooled their children, and the children who were homeschooled. To put it bluntly, I have seen the trauma that many of the children have in how they are controlled and the emotional abuse that their homeschooling did to them because it was their parents controlling every aspect of their life. Now, with the parents, I also shall say the harsh fact that the majority of the parents I know that want to homeschool are the types who want to decide for themselves what their “little genius” will become, creating an entitled image of what they will make their children become, and will not permit anything that isn’t their image. The child is not allowed to actually develop.

And I’ll say that as a parent.

As a product of homeschooling exclusively, can confurm.

As a former homeschooler i get what he’s saying paritally, there are a lot of those what i call “extreme helicopter parents” in the community. But there are other reasons to do it. I was discriminated against by my local public school. In the days before the 2004 IDEA extensions went into effect. We couldn’t afford to sue, so homeschooling was our only recourse.

The district was finally sued into submission in 2016. My parents and i both agree it wasn’t the best situation. When i got to college i was like years ahead in English/humanities but had to take remedial math for three years . I took six years on a four year degree because of the unevenness of my skillset

And this was before the internet got big so you’d often get Fundamentalist Christian propaganda by mistake. And not realize it until the book blamed the flappers for the great depression for example. The authors were good at hiding their biases, until they got to 20th century history and then they just lost the plot

That was actually the best educational moment of those years… Mom read that and was like “Oh Shit…” And then my Dad turned it into a lesson in how to spot bias in sources. And mom dumped a bunch of first wave feminism on me.

But this poster confuses one particularly loud segment of the community with the whole thing,

And we as a community may eventually need the liberal homeschooling laws, if the US gets more authoritarian with book banning and limiting what teachers can say and such.

So i hesitate to endorse this, even though i get it

“pastors” see there’s your problem.

Isn’t it good for us the victims of crapitalism? Less competition and more chances of getting jobs with the homeschooled people out of the way :(

Who’s “y’all”? Religious fundamentalists? There are other people who homeschool. I did it for a while and now that my kids are back in school - they wouldn’t be if circumstances allowed - they are way ahead of their peers in terms of understanding the work they’re given.

And “smart enough” implies school is doing something special that children need, but it just isn’t. Kids want to learn. It is a remarkable feat that school is able to make them hate it.

And “cutting your children off from society” implies that school is somehow an integral part of society. It just isn’t. It is the factory-prison model of school that has helped to atomise society and make us dependent on states institutions like school for interpersonal connection. There are other, better ways of doing it.

EDIT: A lot of people here in a solarpunk instance quite happy to let the state mandate what and how their children are taught, apparently. It’s weird though, none of the people arguing with me seem to have a great grasp on reading comprehension. Almost like they weren’t taught good critical thinking skills.

EDIT 2: Just have a read of Chomsky’s take on education and democracy. It’s quite revealing: https://chomsky.info/20130601/

EDIT 3: Wait, I’m not even subscribed here. WTF is this sub? It’s locked and the only posts are from the mod, so it’s basically their personal soapbox they’ve branded as “texts from solarpunk”, and then they post shit like this that’s just basically hot-takes. FOH. Blocking this fucking place.