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[WillowLuman]

More perspective is always good.

[Worldmaster27]

* Worldmaster27 hugs Caroline

It's good to know that your grandmother is supportive, even if it appears that she wouldn't be able to take care of you in the event of a falling out with your family.

I hope your problems will clear up soon. Unfortunately hope is about all I can offer you, but yeah.

In personal sads, my family is going to florida tomorrow. Which will likely consist of them keeping a closer eye on what I do since where we're staying has a pretty open floor plan. Weee. Also getting to listen to my parents complain about crowds and other people and why can't everyone be like them? will be a blast.

Also they were talking about miss Jenner (I don't know what her chosen name is, so y'know) amid earlier amid other trashing on liberal topics and yeah sorry caroline i guess when i kidnap you i cant just have you live under my bed or some crap

@homeschooling: I was homeschooled for all of middle school, and from what I can remember it was endless boredom, loneliness, and generally crap. Not a lot of religious instruction from my parents though that may have come from using the K12 curriculum thingy. I don't really have much to compare it against, but yeah. There was a lot of freedom with schedules and stuff though and I think we went to museums and stuff occasionally so y'know

[Sirus]

Sick sick sick sick
been popping pills all day without much effect

[Tack]

Your grandmother sounds like the coolest though.

[hops]

I used to be on the "zero tolerance" side of the drugs debate, but really things aren't that black and white. I'm sorry for you having to deal with intolerant parents, Caroline.

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.

I kind of don't understand how homeschooling hasn't been abused to create a cult yet. I mean, serial killer families are things that exist, but if it is legal to homeschool kids, why hasn't anyone attempted to use it to completely brainwash their children into perfect cultists which will do everything the parents will? What's stopping someone from pushing the concept of homeschooling to its limits?

I'm not saying homeschooling is wrong, but there should be some sort of legally obligated examination? Of course, that can easily be used to brainwash the mass, but they have as much chance of getting away with it as the public education system trying to turn students into Aleph cultists.

[Putnam]

uh

homeschooling is very much used for cult brainwashing

like it's practically a hallmark of cults to do that

[hops]

Oh.
Now I wonder why nobody has succeeded in taking over the United States and proclaiming themselves as the Overlord of South Canada yet.

[Eric Blank]

Probably because the last guy to proclaim themselves emperor didn't really accomplish much beyond amusing the locals and being accepted as an eccentric but okay fellow.

[Orange Wizard]

Oh.
Now I wonder why nobody has succeeded in taking over the United States and proclaiming themselves as the Overlord of South Canada yet.

Mostly because the President has lots of guns. Kind of like how John Key has a bunch of swords in his office.

uh

It's one of the reasons everyone (in NZ) thinks the Reformed church is a cult.

[Arx]

I don't see why everyone seems to hate homeschooling. I was homeschooled for eight and a half years, because even in the top streams of all my classes at various public and private schools I spent >50% of lessons reading under my desk. "No child left behind" == "No child let ahead."

Calculus and algebra have always been pretty natural to me, because I learned about algebra when I was about eight, and knew conceptually what calculus was by the time I was ten. I knew what imaginary numbers were at ~11 and could work out trajectories by 13 because I was building scale model siege engines at home.

I can cook, bake, clean, and do very nearly everything else required of an independent adult, and have been able to for years. I 'can use a computer' (according to the recent WTF thread discussion). I can argue literature with people who have actual degrees in it, and I have a basically bottomless store of occasionally useful trivia.

I guess a public school is as good as homeschooling or better for a lot of kids, but I think I would have gone insane if I had to sit through all those years at an actual school. I'm 90% sure homeschooling was a lot better for me.

[Spehss _]

Well it's not like you can't learn outside of school hours.

[Descan]

Also, pretty sure you have to still pass the public school exams if you're home schooled. So. Yeah.

@Spehss: I'm not sure what you're trying to say. Yeah, you can learn outside of school hours, but what's the point? It's just a waste of time to go to a building to read for 8 hours, scribble on some paper and get a scribble back telling you how durn smart you are, and then go home and ACTUALLY learn things, instead of, you know, doing something fun and being a kid human being?

[Arx]

Well it's not like you can't learn outside of school hours.

Yes it is. My parents actually took me out of the public school system for my second stint at homeschooling because I was so worn out from being bored that when I got home I'd just sit and play computer games, which we pretty much all (in the family) agreed wasn't good.

[Tack]

Two things you didn't learn at homeschooling, Arx. Cynicism and Atheism.
Naturally this makes the cynics and atheists see a problem with homeschooling.

But truthfully I believe that there's a few things you can only learn when crammed into a gigantic pool of other people. I don't mean algebra and such, I mean things like 'What is weird and what is not weird'. 'How to give fun facts without appearing like a know-it-all' or 'Why having friends is better than sitting in the library alone and reading'.
I went to boarding school personally and that taught me a thousand thousand things I'd have never learned if I were home-schooled.
That being said to agree with Arx, I probably would've done Much better academically if I had've been homeschooled.

On another note, that religion angle they're talking about. You throw a kid in a religious school and they may still come out with some kind of doubt in their beliefs. If you homeschool them hard enough, it's far less of a risk.
Which does kind of make the whole 'cult' thing sound less than ludicrous.

[Eric Blank]

Also, pretty sure you have to still pass the public school exams if you're home schooled. So. Yeah.

Technically all you need to do in the U.S. is pass the testing for the GED, which is legally recognized as an equivalent of a high school diploma. It is similar to tests you would take in class, though.