I am a homeschooling mom...

[agilebrit]

And I will not wank. No, I won't. Not there, anyway. Eh. *grabs a tissue and cleans up* Seriously, I couldn't let that go.

However, all you have to do is look at the "quality" of fic at FFN to see the sort of "education" that public schools are churning out. Semi-literate snowflakes who bristle at the merest hint of criticism? Pretty much.

Yeah, not in my house. Da Boy already gets corrected if he doesn't capitalize "I" or the word at the start of a sentence, and he's seven. And I don't think I'm stunting his creativity.

Comments

[bojojoti.livejournal.com]

Generalizations are an ineffective way to deal with any situation. Anyone can find quotes to "prove" an argument.

As for schooling, I think parents are best at evaluating what is best for their child(ren). We did a combination private school/public school. I was very disappointed in much of what public school had to offer. Our children did have some excellent teachers, but they had many mediocre ones.

I respect parents who choose home schooling. It still comes down to each parent choosing the best solution for them.

[fierynotes.livejournal.com]

Hm. I can go either way on this. If I may? I'll try to keep the splooge to a minimum.

The most important variable is the child's willingness to learn. Unless public school has gotten considerably worse since I graduated, it has all the resources for a motivated kid. The problem is most kids aren't. That's what parents and teachers are for.

The next important variable is how engaging the teachers are. I've been lucky, in that many of my teachers cared, and could make us care too. Perhaps I hogged all the good ones? (In my senior year, class sizes approached forty, and yet a calculus class was made available for me and less than ten other students.)

Teaching is a skill and a talent. Obviously, many of the teachers in public schools don't have it. Having gotten to know you, I'm prepared to believe that you have this talent, but I'm not prepared to believe that all those parents who do it have any more skill as teachers than the ones in schools. The standards required of a public schoolteacher may be inadequate, but what are the standards required of a homeschooler?

(There are also subjects that I feel ought to be required, but that many homeschoolers will carefully omit on, say, religious grounds. Indeed, one of the motivations cited by some homeschoolers is the intention of not covering these subjects. But let me not descend too far into wank...)

[whirligigged.livejournal.com]

I was going to comment similarly when you posted about Drillbit Taylor, but I ended up going on for too long and deleted it - I've committed the same fault here. Please excuse my inability to form concise comments! I keep going over and adding things to clarify. XD

I've attended public school since I was six, and I do want to defend public schools a little. Movies like Drillbit Taylor are not going to be an accurate portrayal of anything resembling real life. You know this, obviously, but I do want to confirm that things like that - the bullying, the total apathy of the faculty? Would never happen in my high school, nor the middle and elementary schools I attended. I can only speak for my own city's school system - I'm just south of Boston. There's varying education quality, yes. I'm also of the opinion that homeschooling is great for the same reason that smaller college classes are desirable to prospective students. It's personalized to fit the students' needs, more time is devoted to the individual student, and without a twenty-five student class who all need to learn the material, the pace is accelerated.

I still feel public schools are undeserving of this very poor reputation. Do we have unintelligent, often semi-literate students? Yes. Obviously. There is no placement test to get into public school. With large student bodies, there is going to be a range of intelligence within that body. There are also those students who are Harvard, Brown, or MIT-bound.

I watch my teachers make an effort every single day, and I do bristle when I see it implied that every single one of them sits on their hands all day and let the kids pee on each other or something. They reach out to the kids they see struggling in classes and grades. What it boils down to most of the time isn't the quality of the material, it's that in public schools it's up completely to the student to accept the teacher's efforts or not, because unlike in homeschooling, there are many other students who require that teacher's attention as well.

I feel a little at a loss here, because I'm certain you were aware of all the points I attempted to make above. What I tried to get at is that I'm getting the vibe that intelligent people who attended public schools are being viewed as the exception, while I know from personal experience that's not the case at all. I'm not saying the smart kids are the rule, but neither are the truly dense ones - who I really do think are in the minority, but I don't have stats or IQs so I won't go there - and there are far more intelligent public school students than popular culture (let's not talk about shows like The Hills, okay?) would have anyone think, I suppose because kids going out party hard are more exciting than kids reading or watching the SciFi channel with their friends in the living room on a Friday night (also assuming that smart kids don't party, which, come on).

I'm going to admit, I don't see what the particular problem is here (in regard to the post you linked). I think either the post was edited to be less offensive before I got to it, or perhaps what you were talking about were the rude comments about homeschooled students? All I saw in the post itself was a very defensive rant about the negative generalizations that tend to be made about public schools.

I do hope this doesn't sound like an attack, toward either you or toward homeschooling. It isn't meant to be in the least. It is, however, and forgive my defensiveness, me bristling quite a bit at the criticism - forgive me. While public schools are certainly deserving of some criticism, I don't think they are deserving of the attitude that the education they provide shouldn't garner any respect, and I do feel it's a bit of a put-down, unconscious or not.

[palmaceae.livejournal.com]

i'd rather, i dunno, sell my house and live in the ghetto than send any kid of mine to public school (private parochial school only, or maybe homeschooling). the lack of any standards whatsoever, educationally or morally. and yeah, i bet i am generalizing, but i have no faith in the system.

GOD FORBID YOU CRITICIZE YOUR CHILD'S SPELLING. IT MIGHT HURT HIS SELF ESTEEM.

Hihi

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

Totally off topic here, and I apologize. You're a Utah writer, I'm a Utah writer (and a friend of Paul and Ken). We ought to friend each other, yah? :) I'm pretty liberal on a lot of issues, conservative on lots of others, so posts about conservatism don't bug me, even if I disagree.

Back on topic: I'm a public school graduate and I think I turned out alright. However, I was in mostly honors courses, and I took a very active part in my own learning. I suspect I'm in the minority on that last part.

[upstart-crow.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'll add some more thoughts :)

I loved middle school and high school, which probably makes me kind of a rarity among people. But I hated elementary school because I was bullied and even sexually assaulted by other students from about ages 7-11. This severely impacted my ability and interest in learning and kept me in pretty basic classes for the first two years of middle school, because I was about a D student throughout elementary school. I actually was abused so badly that I developed PTSD and have spent thousands in therapy trying to treat it. And this was in the 1980s and early 90s.

If I ever have a child (I don't want to and don't intend to, but hypothetically), I would prefer to home school him or her because I wouldn't want my child to go through what I did - which was to learn how to be traumatized, not to stand up for myself and "work things out on my own" (preposterous!). I don't think, however, that this is necessarily a flaw in public schools but rather a social flaw in understanding how much each individual child needs in the way of protection from their peers.

As far as the socializing argument goes ... I basically had only a few friends in high school and almost none in college because I was a depressive, socially stunted mess thanks in part to being bullied as a child. So I don't think I learned a darn thing about socializing from public schools, either. In fact, I think I learned awful socialization and coping strategies as my default.

However, I also had wonderful teachers at all stages of my education, and only one public teacher who was lazy and incompetent. The rest were fair to outstanding, and more often than not it was the students' fault for not wanting to learn from them. I'm not entirely sure how one can push education on a student who doesn't want it in any schooling arrangement, including home school. I mean, you can punish a child or teen for not doing his or her homework or goofing off, but you can't make them do it - or want to do it - in the first place, yeah?