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[Graknorke]

I dunno, I think sometimes it's better to ignore things you can't fix, but maybe that's just a thing I have been taught because I have a tendency to mope during the day when I think about Africa or whatever.

I would have to agree on that one. If you can't fix it then worrying just causes unnecessary stress.

[Iceblaster]

Well, I haven't posted here in a long while, eh?

Spoiler: Religious-y stuff (click to show/hide)

So it turns out my sister's being homeschooled starting next school year. Joyous. Second grade - twelfth grade spent learning about Jesus and how you're worthless in the eyes of god, et cetera. Maybe I'm exaggerating my parent's beliefs, but eh. They're on par with fundies. Not ones you'd see on the insane side of fstdt, but I have this inkling that they aren't too far off.

• They believe in an imminent rapture before they or us pass away.
• Believe gay marriage is wrong, obviously.
• Young Earth Creationists

And such. They aren't book burning harry potter haters, at least. Doesn't mean they aren't fundies, in my mind.

Mainly, I'm sad because it's my six year old sister being indoctrinated into Christianity before she's able to rationally make a decision on her religious beliefs, as by the time she is, she'll probably be quite a ways away from knowing what any other belief entails because she's been told that Islam is a cult and Atheists have no sense of morality all her life.

By no means, of course, are my parents using homeschool as a chance to have an hour a day bible class. It's just that I feel like being homeschooled this early on, most likely, grounds of religious belief is... Damaging.

Maybe I'm just a teenager trying to sound smart right now. Who knows. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Don't intend to cause any arguments by posting this of course. Just been feeling sad about this specific topic for a while now. might as well put it on a public forum

[Tawa]

Speaking as a regular FSTDT commenter, I am going to safely say that that is terrible in its most basic form.

[Bohandas]

Well, I haven't posted here in a long while, eh?

Spoiler: Religious-y stuff (click to show/hide)

So it turns out my sister's being homeschooled starting next school year. Joyous. Second grade - twelfth grade spent learning about Jesus and how you're worthless in the eyes of god, et cetera. Maybe I'm exaggerating my parent's beliefs, but eh. They're on par with fundies. Not ones you'd see on the insane side of fstdt, but I have this inkling that they aren't too far off.

• They believe in an imminent rapture before they or us pass away.
• Believe gay marriage is wrong, obviously.
• Young Earth Creationists

And such. They aren't book burning harry potter haters, at least. Doesn't mean they aren't fundies, in my mind.

Mainly, I'm sad because it's my six year old sister being indoctrinated into Christianity before she's able to rationally make a decision on her religious beliefs, as by the time she is, she'll probably be quite a ways away from knowing what any other belief entails because she's been told that Islam is a cult and Atheists have no sense of morality all her life.

By no means, of course, are my parents using homeschool as a chance to have an hour a day bible class. It's just that I feel like being homeschooled this early on, most likely, grounds of religious belief is... Damaging.

Maybe I'm just a teenager trying to sound smart right now. Who knows. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Don't intend to cause any arguments by posting this of course. Just been feeling sad about this specific topic for a while now. might as well put it on a public forum

I never understood why homeschooling was legal. The only situation I can imagine where it wouldn't be markedly worse than a public school education would be if the person in question lived in a really badly mismanaged inner-city school district where the principal had embezzled all the funds and all the students were heavily armed; in which case it might be about equal to a public school education.

[BFEL]

The only situation I can imagine where it wouldn't be markedly worse than a public school education would be if the person in question lived in a really badly mismanaged inner-city school district where the principal had embezzled all the funds and all the students were heavily armed; in which case it might be about equal to a public school education.

So basically "only in America"?

My sads is that I appear to have exactly zero games that work the way they're supposed to/I want them to right now.
And I have SO MANY FUCKING GAMES.
HOW ARE ALL OF THEM BROKEN?

Though it IS partially just me having really fucked up modding standards at this point. Haven't played Skyrim in about a year because I can't stand it without ALL THE MODS, but ALL THE MODS make my computer explode.

[TheDarkStar]

Well, I haven't posted here in a long while, eh?

Spoiler: Religious-y stuff (click to show/hide)

So it turns out my sister's being homeschooled starting next school year. Joyous. Second grade - twelfth grade spent learning about Jesus and how you're worthless in the eyes of god, et cetera. Maybe I'm exaggerating my parent's beliefs, but eh. They're on par with fundies. Not ones you'd see on the insane side of fstdt, but I have this inkling that they aren't too far off.

• They believe in an imminent rapture before they or us pass away.
• Believe gay marriage is wrong, obviously.
• Young Earth Creationists

And such. They aren't book burning harry potter haters, at least. Doesn't mean they aren't fundies, in my mind.

Mainly, I'm sad because it's my six year old sister being indoctrinated into Christianity before she's able to rationally make a decision on her religious beliefs, as by the time she is, she'll probably be quite a ways away from knowing what any other belief entails because she's been told that Islam is a cult and Atheists have no sense of morality all her life.

By no means, of course, are my parents using homeschool as a chance to have an hour a day bible class. It's just that I feel like being homeschooled this early on, most likely, grounds of religious belief is... Damaging.

Maybe I'm just a teenager trying to sound smart right now. Who knows. Feel free to correct me if I'm wrong.

Don't intend to cause any arguments by posting this of course. Just been feeling sad about this specific topic for a while now. might as well put it on a public forum

I never understood why homeschooling was legal. The only situation I can imagine where it wouldn't be markedly worse than a public school education would be if the person in question lived in a really badly mismanaged inner-city school district where the principal had embezzled all the funds and all the students were heavily armed; in which case it might be about equal to a public school education.

Homeschooling is legal because there are occasionally extreme circumstances (bullying and no other local schools, corruption in the school district that leads to terrible schools, etc). It's not regulated all that well, though.

[flame99]

I'd like to go into homeschooling for the above reasons, though that wouldn't end so well for me (I love both of my parents, but they frankly couldn't be trusted teach someone how to open a door correctly, and I'm lazy enough that any attempts to teach myself would just result in me deciding to play video games half an hour in). A shame that there aren't any other schools nearby... 

[Reelya]

The only situation I can imagine where it wouldn't be markedly worse than a public school education would be if the person in question lived in a really badly mismanaged inner-city school district where the principal had embezzled all the funds and all the students were heavily armed; in which case it might be about equal to a public school education.

So basically "only in America"?

Basically this. You don't hear people bemoaning the condition of public education in any country except America. I'm in Australia and if you talked about homeschooling to keep kids out of that evil public education system here, virtually everyone would think you're crazy and probably part of some extremist conspiracy / cult type religion, whereas that attitude seems reasonably common in the USA.

So, is the US public education system really imploding like they say? I'll take it on faith that it is. But it says nothing about the merits of public education. Almost everywhere in the world has a public education system which is definitely not imploding. How many countries are exceeding USAs standards by using a heavily privatized system? There are no examples of this succeeding anywhere. We have over 200 countries as test-cases. There's no reason to pioneer a completely unknown system on blind faith that it will be better, when there are countries massively exceeding the USAs test scores already.

[flame99]

It's not quite as bad as some sources would say it is. It's still pretty damn bad, though.

[Reelya]

An analogy would be that your country has a terrible traffic-light system, and there are a lot of crashes. So Libertarians propose a traffic-light free system where people use hand-signals instead of the evil centralized traffic control. They promise this will be better than any possible traffic-light system: just look how the system is already failing to prevent accidents. Non-Libertarians say, look at other countries: they have traffic light systems which actually work, why don't we copy those instead of inventing some ficticious sci-fi system? The Libertarians will obviously claim that the effectiveness of traffic lights in those other countries is irrelevant, or they're not really "free" because they have to follow the man's rules. So clearly the holy grail is abolishing traffic lights altogether, at which point the free market will prevent accidents.

[Bohandas]

The only situation I can imagine where it wouldn't be markedly worse than a public school education would be if the person in question lived in a really badly mismanaged inner-city school district where the principal had embezzled all the funds and all the students were heavily armed; in which case it might be about equal to a public school education.

So basically "only in America"?

Basically this. You don't hear people bemoaning the condition of public education in any country except America. I'm in Australia and if you talked about homeschooling to keep kids out of that evil public education system here, virtually everyone would think you're crazy and probably part of some extremist conspiracy / cult type religion, whereas that attitude seems reasonably common in the USA.

A low opinion of the educational system? or being crazy and probably part of some evil extremist conspiracy / cult type religion? They're both kind of common

[Gunner-Chan]

Although I still made a lot of progress recently, it's still... It still feels rather unfair losing a close friend because magic spaghetti monster said so. At least if someone isn't lying to me about the whole situation.

Today's just turning out to be one of those days I end up dwelling on that again.

[TheDarkStar]

An analogy would be that your country has a terrible traffic-light system, and there are a lot of crashes. So Libertarians propose a traffic-light free system where people use hand-signals instead of the evil centralized traffic control. They promise this will be better than any possible traffic-light system: just look how the system is already failing to prevent accidents. Non-Libertarians say, look at other countries: they have traffic light systems which actually work, why don't we copy those instead of inventing some ficticious sci-fi system? The Libertarians will obviously claim that the effectiveness of traffic lights in those other countries is irrelevant, or they're not really "free" because they have to follow the man's rules. So clearly the holy grail is abolishing traffic lights altogether, at which point the free market will prevent accidents.

Accurate.

[Sergarr]

I seem to be running out of black tea. This makes me sad.

[CrzyMonkeyNinja]

Would it be dorky if a recently-graduated homeschooler burst in to shed some light on the homeschooly thing?
Probably... It would probably be very dorky.  It would probably also provide more fuel for the derailment.

So yah, maybe I'll not do that. Unless you all want me to. Heck I'd make a thread to discuss it if people want some insight.

Eh, I think I'll leave my sort summary at the least:

There are some pretty hokey homeschoolers and there are some pretty hokey homeschool parents, but both I and many of my homeschooling friends have come through quite well-adjusted (so far as I can tell - we are quite nerdy, so there's that) and with what I am certain is a higher quality education than we might have otherwise gotten. Mostly that's from working in small groups with specialized tutors after we reached the limits of our parents' knowledge. So yah, it's neither as bad nor as one-dimensional as you guys seem to think.