Print

Please login or register.
1 Hour 1 Day 1 Week 1 Month Forever
Login with username, password and session length

[GlyphGryph]

^ AHAH - their "pre-school" is the same as our "kindergarten". So in this respect, school begins at the same age.

Preschool generally indicates something optional, and isn't much more than daycare. I'm not surprised they have it, but I'd doubt attendance would be mandatory, which is a big deal.

The differences between weakest and strongest students are the smallest in the world, according to the most recent survey by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). “Equality is the most important word in Finnish education. All political parties on the right and left agree on this,” said Olli Luukkainen, president of Finland’s powerful teachers union.

This... actually really worries me. And was part of why I was talking about the spread earlier. Finland's system seems keen on pulling up the underachievers, but what about those who could excel? Are they being failed, is their potential being cut off for the benefit of the others? I'm not sure that sort of thing sits well with me. Quite a few things of Finland's system don't, looking at it more in depth. I certainly explains why they are doing well - they seem to CARE about doing well, but I'm not sure the goals they have would be my own.

Also, the wonder of the Finnish system in no way proves a lack of reason to homeschool in places that are, ya know, NOT Finland.

[Reelya]

This... actually really worries me. And was part of why I was talking about the spread earlier. Finland's system seems keen on pulling up the underachievers, but what about those who could excel? Are they being failed, is their potential being cut off for the benefit of the others? I'm not sure that sort of thing sits well with me. Quite a few things of Finland's system don't, looking at it more in depth. I certainly explains why they are doing well - they seem to CARE about doing well, but I'm not sure the goals they have would be my own.

Since they're topping the world tests, I'd say they're doing ok across the board, although in the articles they do talk about targeted programs to push the top students further.

Also, the wonder of the Finnish system in no way proves a lack of reason to homeschool in places that are, ya know, NOT Finland.

Homeschooling is just creepy. Sorry. Very few countries even allow it. Almost all of them are from us in-bred English-speaking nations. Most non-English speaking nations aren't crazy enough to allow it, except for some third-world places which haven't invented school yet.

"Countries with the most prevalent home education movements include Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. ".

[Truean]

"The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education." - Albert Einstein

Sadly my experience is on par with this. I'm mostly self taught from hanging out in libraries for hours on end; still am. It's kind of a sad thing if you think about it. America has a school system that teaches to the test and still fails. The tests don't measure anything like practical skills, even in academic subjects like reading comprehension and writing. Nobody sits down with you and just goes over how to figure out what to put on a blank piece of paper (or a computer screen, whatever). In writing, there's a process and an organization (several types and you can pick one) and nobody shows you that. The reason there is an organizational method to writing (or was) is to ease reading comprehension and further the overall purpose of communication.

I am glad I was not home schooled, because my family are neanderthals, who have restraining orders against one another (I couldn't make this stuff up). Often the worst thing for a kid are the parents....

[Frumple]

Homeschooling is just creepy. Sorry. Very few countries even allow it. Almost all of them are from us in-bred English-speaking nations. Most non-English speaking nations aren't crazy enough to allow it, except for some third-world places which haven't invented school yet.

I... what? "Creepy" and "Used by few countries" isn't exactly a stunning defeat of the merits of homeschooling, nor is homeschooling somehow "crazy." If the parents are capable of teaching the material and understand (and compensate for) the issues (generally re: socialization) involved with homeschooling, there's no big reasons I'm aware of to not homeschool (and depending on the area, possibly a number of reasons to.). If there are, I'd love to hear about it.

I can understand if you're leery about homeschooling (the sentiment's fairly common in the states, too, if generally unmerited) but I've personally met a number of partially and fully homeschooled individuals -- my mother did some teaching for several, actually -- who were no more maladjusted than most of the people I've met that weren't homeschooled.

The biggest issue I know of with homeschooling is ensuring the quality of education; making sure the teacher (read: the parent(s)) knows what they're talking about. That's usually pretty easy to pull off, though, from what I've seen. In the US, at least, most states (at the very least the ones I'm semi-familiar with) have a pretty specific test standard even for homeschooled kids and it's quite easy to hire teachers for temporary supplementary tutoring (especially considering how shitty teacher salaries are), to make sure the student's on top of the material.

Basically, I'll give that maybe the Australian situation is such that public schooling is notably better than home, but in the states... no. Public schools in most areas are varying shades of shit. It's not even remotely difficult to match or surpass them with alternative education methods. What are your reasons to distrust homeschooling in particular, Reel?

[Nadaka]

The most common reason for homeschooling around here is that the parents hold the religious belief that public school will expose their children to sin and challenge their faith. For some this belief is so strong that they believe that the school is actively conspiring to lead their children astray and convert them to evil by teaching about evolution, space, history, sex education and tolerance for blacks and gays.

So yes, "creepy" is a fairly good description of it.

Edit: Also, it looks like religious discrimination against Christians actually does exist, at least a tiny bit. Two women were fired in Britain for violating their employee dress code for wearing crucifixes. The reasoning behind that argument is that wearing the crucifix is not a requirement of the faith, only a voluntary expression, so it is not protected like other religious wardrobe.

http://news.yahoo.com/british-women-sue-crucifix-necklaces-cost-them-jobs-112000077.html

[Reelya]

Well, i was a little tongue in cheek with the "creepy" comment xD we only hear about home-schoolers in related to American religious extremists here who want to avoid teaching their kids evolution, etc. I don't think I ever met a home-schooled person, to be honest. And, i did some checking around and the largest advocacy group in the USA sells the idea on the anti-evolution band-wagon, secular home-schoolers were complaining about that, which makes them look bad, i can accept that.

Australia's doing a lot better in the PISA rankings than USA, so I'd merit public education in Australia is a notch above that of the United States. Certainly with a free, universal, and top-notch system like Australia, i would never consider using home-schooling here for my kids if I had any.

But the argument about relative school quality can work both ways for home-schooling. You might say given the appalling public system in the United States, that home-schooling is the way to go, but that can only ever be a stop-gap measure. I'd say that if you feel compelled to home-school it just means you should start advocating for a decent school system instead, then home-schooling wouldn't be needed.

[Frumple]

Yeah, I definitely wouldn't advocate for universal -- or even particularly widespread, really -- homeschooling, I just think it shouldn't be outright dismissed without good reason. The practice does have its problems, but the examples I've personally seen (including a couple of religiously motivated examples! Most I've known were either medically or socially motivated.), at least, turned out alright. So it seems like a relatively viable alternative, when the kid (/their parents) runs into problems (whatever those problems may be, including religious) with the local schools. There's merits to the practice, basically, and they don't seem to necessarily not stack up to the merits of public schooling.

The usage by religious extremists is an issue, but there's still a fair number of folks that homeschool for other reasons; relative quality of education is sometimes an issue, as is simply school availability -- sometimes a student just has trouble with the schools in their area, so they get pulled out, ferex. The religiously motivated do get a lot more air-time, though. They're disproportionately (to their population) loud in the states. Makes "good" news, I guess.

But yeah, my experience is US-filtered, and we're pretty notorious over here as having one of the worst public school systems in the first world. Homeschoolers turning out as well as our public schoolers might say more about the latter than the former

[justinlee999]

Was homeschooled before, one of the best moments in my life, I learned fairly fast, too.

But while the books were mostly well written, it was Christian, and thus fairly biased and Creationist, always trying to shove anti-evolutionism into my face, hiding facts support evolution away.

My mom brought me into homeschooling because it was way better than most public schools (which it is, if not for the Creationist teaching, but last I heard the public school syllabus is fairly Creationist as well). Not for any religious reasons like "HURR DURR EXPOSE CHILD TO SINS".

My country is a heavily religious country, and people usually assume you believe in God, even teachers. Public schools here suck heavily, so homeschooling is honestly a better choice most of the time.

[GlyphGryph]

Saying homeschooling shouldn't be allowed because religious folks use it is incredibly stupid. No one here has said home schooling can't be done poorly. But I've seen it done really really well, as well.

Of course, I'm from liberal New England - most of our homeschooling tradition isn't religious based but rather teacher-based. In other words, public education here is so bad I know quite a few teachers who form outside-work education pools and homeschool their kids amongst themselves because they actually know what they're doing.

[justinlee999]

Them Finnish education articles makes me wish to be born in Finland. So much cheaper than my current education, and it sounds so much better too.

[RedKing]

My wife and I are seriously considering homeschooling for our kids when they're around the middle-school age (10 to 13 or so). Reason being, my middle school experience was absolutely horrific. I like to joke that I went to "William Golding Junior High". Massively overcrowded, underfunded, the teachers were mostly burnt out and had reached the point of hating children, and attempts at discipline were usually mistargeted when they were applied at all. This is the same school where I saw two girls get into a fight which involved a length of bicycle chain and a steel pipe, and one of the vice-principals ended up in the hospital. The same school where more than one girl was gang-raped in the back of the bus. The same school where all ~1,000 6th and 7th graders were packed into the lobby before classes (said lobby was designed to only hold about 200 people) and the exit points were secured with padlocked sections of chain-link fencing which were only opened when the first bell rang. This meant a daily stampede to fight your way through crowd, reach your locker, then reach your class in the five minutes until the next bell. Tardiness was typically heavily penalized, even if the teacher saw you desperately clawing your way through the crowd trying to reach the door.

My wife's experience was nowhere near as traumatic, but she also at one point was in training to be a teacher. She withdrew from that program when she looked around at her classmates and realized just how stupid most of them were. Nice enough people, but frankly if they didn't have the teacher workbook with all the answers in it, they wouldn't have been able to answer half the questions themselves.

I'll grant that homeschooling in the US (especially in the South) gets a bad rap because a lot of people that choose to do so belong to the "I ain't letting no libruhl book-larning mess with my young'uns head" crowd. But the other large contingent of homeschoolers are the people with MAs and Ph.Ds who realize that they know these subjects far better than their kids' teachers do. Given that my community is rife with people with advanced degrees, I've considered looking into forming some kind of "homeschool co-op", where people could pool their resources and knowledge to form something like a "homeschool" school, maybe with online components to allow different people to teach their area of expertise.

[GlyphGryph]

The "co-op" homeschool has, in my experience, the best sort of results. If you go forit, good luck! I hope it works out.

[justinlee999]

My wife and I are seriously considering homeschooling for our kids when they're around the middle-school age (10 to 13 or so). Reason being, my middle school experience was absolutely horrific. I like to joke that I went to "William Golding Junior High". Massively overcrowded, underfunded, the teachers were mostly burnt out and had reached the point of hating children, and attempts at discipline were usually mistargeted when they were applied at all. This is the same school where I saw two girls get into a fight which involved a length of bicycle chain and a steel pipe, and one of the vice-principals ended up in the hospital. The same school where more than one girl was gang-raped in the back of the bus. The same school where all ~1,000 6th and 7th graders were packed into the lobby before classes (said lobby was designed to only hold about 200 people) and the exit points were secured with padlocked sections of chain-link fencing which were only opened when the first bell rang. This meant a daily stampede to fight your way through crowd, reach your locker, then reach your class in the five minutes until the next bell. Tardiness was typically heavily penalized, even if the teacher saw you desperately clawing your way through the crowd trying to reach the door.

My wife's experience was nowhere near as traumatic, but she also at one point was in training to be a teacher. She withdrew from that program when she looked around at her classmates and realized just how stupid most of them were. Nice enough people, but frankly if they didn't have the teacher workbook with all the answers in it, they wouldn't have been able to answer half the questions themselves.

I'll grant that homeschooling in the US (especially in the South) gets a bad rap because a lot of people that choose to do so belong to the "I ain't letting no libruhl book-larning mess with my young'uns head" crowd. But the other large contingent of homeschoolers are the people with MAs and Ph.Ds who realize that they know these subjects far better than their kids' teachers do. Given that my community is rife with people with advanced degrees, I've considered looking into forming some kind of "homeschool co-op", where people could pool their resources and knowledge to form something like a "homeschool" school, maybe with online components to allow different people to teach their area of expertise.

For a moment I thought that was in a third-world country.

[RedKing]

What, the middle school stories? lol, it felt like being in a third-world country. There's also the fact that that age bracket is when kids can be the most vicious. They're old enough to have outgrown their childhood deference to authority and "grown-ups", and still too young to have fully developed a sense of personal identity and empathy. So you wind up a clique-based hierarchy, where the only way to move up the chain is to drag someone else down.

Want to be more popular? Make fun of someone else.
Want to stop being the omega (i.e. lowest-ranking member of a group and common target for aggression)? Find someone else to take your place.

I can't see putting my daughter through that emotional meat-grinder.

[justinlee999]

What, the middle school stories? lol, it felt like being in a third-world country. There's also the fact that that age bracket is when kids can be the most vicious. They're old enough to have outgrown their childhood deference to authority and "grown-ups", and still too young to have fully developed a sense of personal identity and empathy. So you wind up a clique-based hierarchy, where the only way to move up the chain is to drag someone else down.

Want to be more popular? Make fun of someone else.
Want to stop being the omega (i.e. lowest-ranking member of a group and common target for aggression)? Find someone else to take your place.

I can't see putting my daughter through that emotional meat-grinder.

Indeed, but holy shit, gang rape at 13, and injuring the vice-principal? Batshit insane.

Past that age now, but I've never actually thought of raping someone, I'd blame the overpopulation and under-education rather than the middle school age bracket.