Like it's mainly just an excuse for parents to not expose their kids to political stuff they don't like?
In almost all cases, kids are homeschooled because their parents are weird about something.
I used to work at an alt school for homeschooled kids. (I live in a neoliberal haven, so it wasn't usually religious nutjob parents, mostly either hippy patents, the kids were being bullied at school, the kids were serious athletes or performers and regular school schedule didn't work, etc.)
The kids were mostly undereducated and, more importantly, under socialized. I met a 14 year old kid who couldn't tell time or name the months of the year - his parents were of the "unschooling" philosophy and his mother was a teacher at a bullshit school. (I don't live in the States where seemingly anyone can be a teacher, there is a fairly significant series of qualifications she attained).
There is a weird subsection of the left who thinks public school is some sort of capitalist machine and not a victory hard-won by labour. They don't know what they're talking about. Public school is largely good - if yours needs improving fight for those improvements, but don't take your kids out unless you have to.
some sort of capitalist machine
Yeah, in the US...that's exactly what it is. Public schooling was institutionalized here for 1 reason - to create cogs for the machine. And this is why today, you have places like TN who recently passed a law FORBIDDING any school district to go to remote learning - in the middle of a fucking pandemic - because not only do schools provide cogs for the machine, they also provide subsidized daycare so that parents aren't home caring for their kids.
Maybe it's different abroad, but here public schools are not some beacon of shining light for the labor movement
This is an ahistorical take considering public education was won by the labour movement. Of course public schools have been attacked and/or controlled by the state to push its own goals, capitalists do that with fucking everything.
TN who recently passed a law FORBIDDING any school district to go to remote learning
That's a great example of the state intentionally attacking the education system, not schools / teachers being inherently bad. Public schools are viewed by conservatives as a threat to their goals for a reason.
Chuds have been working to dismantle the educational system for at least the last 40 years. I know a bunch of teachers and they're all either progressive or full-on leftists.
Looking at a social system in decay from attacks by conservatives and deciding the solution is that we should destroy it is exactly what they want you to do.
Yes. It's a fucked up end result of privilege, contrarianism, arrogance, and incompetence.
All the schools around the region I grew up in had a tendency to move people initially hired as assistant coaches into teaching positions. Often without a degree or prior teaching experience. It was also common to see a teacher's wife or husband get an inexplicable job at the school, also without degrees. My uncle was both my chemistry and history teacher in high school. He was educated in neither, had no degree, and originally worked as a volunteer football coach (he never played football).
Also yes, public schools in capitalist countries are capitalist machines that reproduce the social cues and structures necessary for its existence. Not to say they aren't needed. Education is necessary. I imagine public schools in socialist countries are different.
The issues with public schools in the US are largely a reflection of US culture - specifically the lawsuit-happy and "I need to speak to the manager" attitudes. Parents view schools as a service and themselves as the customer, and teacher's goals have more to do with keeping parents happy, by passing their kids along regardless of learning ability, than with actually educating students. What matters is that students get the right piece of paper, and get into a good college. The idea of China's "gaokao" could never happen in the US system because the parent's whose kids can't pass the test would whine to the manager. Same deal with the debates around CRT - parents view the school as a service, so if their kid is hearing things they don't like/getting political, they whine to the manager.
gaokao
am i missing something about this because this seems like a college entrance exam and the US has those. there's just multiple and it doesn't apply to the rich.
Not sure of the reasons but stuff like the SAT doesn’t have the same influence on admissions it did a decade ago. And in theory they’re kinda voluntary for everyone. I don’t remember needing anything like it for community college either. All my SAT score did was tell them I didn’t need precalc. The Chinese test sounds like a mandatory thing for anyone who wants to go to school at all.
this is a mega-complex topic and i just wanted to get the dissenting word in. US education is so byzantine and pregnant with every political and social issue that comparison to a functional system is almost absurdist comedy
because our problems are very beyond the (true) assertion that parents treat schools like a business, that's not what precludes a national examination culture. because the US has a national examination culture and reducing them has been part of reducing racially conceived obstacles. Because the US is racist and vile. So reducing the importance of standardised tests, which so many children cannot afford is a band-aid on the systemic design to churn out poor people without qualifications & rich people with pieces of paper that they've 'earned' which justify their places on top of the poor.
this kind of logic makes no fucking sense in so many countries because they just... fund education? and alot of them fund it nationally to even further reduce educational inequality. I'm sure China's not perfect and has its own issues with educational inequality and shit, but its very different from the US and for very different reasons, and one shouldn't boil the US system down to an entitled bourgeois mentality approaching education.
That's the point - the rich can't get their dumb kids into good colleges unless they can pass the entrance exam.
the rich are best situated to pass an entrance exam. its not some great equalising force that eliminates unfair advantage. China's still probably better off on that front but more due to funding public schools and not systematically denying education to huge swaths of their country on purpose
this is wildly aggressive for a point the post in question did not make
Would we want something like the gaokao here though? That kind of testing culture sounds like it comes with its own massive problems. Not sure if it’s widespread or anything but back in high school I remember there being a lot of fuss about things like the AP program and having to “teach to the test.”
I just want to say I love this place! :comfy: :meow-tankie:
My husband and I have been thinking about adopting children in a few years, and yesterday on my commute (TRAIN!) back I was literally thinking about the possibilities and problems of homeschooling vs public school. I have no preconceptions to any of these (I was educated in China where we learned basic Marxism stuff in high school) and the responsibility of ensuring a good socialist education for our future kids feels more daunting than anything I’ve even thought of doing. So reading all the experiences and perspectives here are just so heart-warming.
Y’all the best!!!
i feel like letting kids interact with each other is probably the most important social function of schooling nowadays considering how little they get to outside of school
it's still a bit odd as if you want to you can force your kid to learn things or do homework after school. My mum would make me do maths after school all the time
I think a lot of folks underestimate how much effort is required to home school and honestly people aren’t up for the task.
Having said that public school in the US is mostly a hell scape and people who think they can make it better may as well believe in electoralism. Public school will teach your kids that cops help people, that the US is good and the native Americans gave the pilgrims this land, communism and fascism are the same, that it’s good and normal to sit at a fucking desk for 8 hours a day when you are a literal child and to stand and salute when you pledge the flag. And this is if you’re lucky enough to be in a “good” school district. If you are in a bad district they’ll spend all day breathing asbestos reading out of tattered texts from the 80s in a class with 50 other students where there’s no AC and the teachers don’t have chalk.
And now you have the increased stress of covid, school shooter drills, bullying, standardized tests, giant class sizes, literal fucking cops with guns walking around etc etc
I think once kids are old enough to be assertive enough to know bullshit when they see it then public school can be okay but until that point it’s better to have an alternative if you can afford it. It’s SUPER expensive though. If the choice is strictly between public school and home schooling then public school is still better unless you are in the .5% of people who have the energy and stamina to spend 8 hours teaching your kid a well rounded curriculum.
Edit:
https://www.eastbaytimes.com/2016/10/06/black-panther-school-ahead-of-its-time/amp/
I think a lot of folks underestimate how much effort is required to home school and honestly people aren’t up for the task.
Idk if it was here, or on the old sub, or some other other reddit place but some dude posted a really long post about being depressed in his youth and it opened with him talking about how his mom had decided to home school him, but kinda gave up on it less than a year in and he sorta was just allowed to bum around the house directionlessly for a few years and basically never left his house or had friends his age. This was oddly reflective of my experience, my mom was super confident she could give me a better schooling than the guberment did and pulled me out but then sort of... planted herself on the couch. She soon realized it wasn't doing me any favors and enrolled me in a "homeschool group", which was really just a regular school but it was run out of a church and everyone was a fundie christian. Then I went back to public High School and it was fine.
I can't really say if public school would have been worse, but I do feel I missed out on a lot of socialization I could have had in my teens and I think lead me to be a bit maladjusted in my early 20s.
Yes. I was home-schooled for a couple years in grade school and it massively fucked me up a while when I eventually got to go to public school again.
My whack-job conservative mom unironically tried to teach me that math was pointless, cryptids existed + were dinosaurs or demons that had survived noah's flood, christians were persecuted by the gay agenda, plate tectonics was a lie, being gay was a choice, and that george washington was chosen by god as a prophet to invent america. I only saw other kids 2 or 3 times a week at most.
Thankfully I've always been a nerd, so I fact-checked everything online and knew it was all bullshit, but I was locked in my house and threatened with punishment if I didn't "answer correctly" on the shitty tests I was given. This curriculum wasn't just homebrewed content my parents had come up with either, it was bulk printed and sold at a profit by a christian homeschooling group.
The public school system has a lot of problems, but it is much better than not having one at all. It's hilarious when I see radlibs / cranks who want to "abolish public education" or think "all teachers are cops" or whatever the fuck.
Homeschooling is almost always child abuse. Wanting to destroy public education means you want children to be abused even more than they already are.
edit: added a caveat to the end. community schools can be good if they're run by leftists.
I have a lot of chill af christian friends, so I think leftist Christianity is awesome.
With that said, pretty much all the fundamentalists and other bigots should either be re-educated if they're kids or shot if they're adults. To phrase it in a way that would offend them: The fundamentalist pharisees taking the lord's name in vain to justify their hatred and ignorance deserve complete eradication.
If you can legally drink alcohol in America and you're still a bigot, you don't deserve to live. If someone figures it out after that age, then cool, they're not in the "cheaper to fix with a bullet" category.
Fuck, I'm activated and angry right now. I haven't thought about this home schooling shit in years.
I have a lot of chill af christian friends
I've meet 3 and all of them kinda lowkey admit they think most of it is BS and just enjoy the community.
Not trying to deny your experiences but I can't help but shake a heavy skepticism of the idea that there's a "woke" version of Christianity.
Jesus was the leader of a Millenarianist cult that said some vaguely communist (really more agrarian communalist) things and then had his teachings used to make a giant ass theocratic state. There’s wisdom in his teachings like most historical figures but we really shouldn’t oversell his “commie-ness”
Right, like Jesus cannot be a communist because he was a religious leader. Under communism, Marx said that religion should be abolished.
That wasn't really my point. More just assigning a modernist political ideology to a guy who existed in the Roman Empire, in a period before even Feudalism developed, is a bit of a fools errant. If you enjoy the Christian community and want to read a generally progressive message from Jesus' teaches great, he wasn't really a "communist" though.
You can disagree with Marx on that still very much be a Marxist/communist.
Of course organized religion is often a breeding ground for reactionary organization or activity, but you can't suppress it too aggressively (if at all) because it will foment reactionary zeal. Sort of like stamping out drug use, you don't want to just sic authority on them and force them to stop. Once it starts happening on the fringes of society you end up with an even bigger problem. I don't know enough about Russian/Slavic religious culture to have my own opinion on the matter, but I do hear this criticism toward the USSR and their policy toward religion being flawed at best.
this is literally what i assume all homeschooling is like
I had it easy compared to some of the kids I knew who were also home schooled.
I would go to a "homeschool group meet up" once every 1-2 months when my parents felt like it. You would spend a day going between hour long "classes" given by different parents in the group.
One girl had her science lessons rewritten to only be domestic labor and her parents were upset that the science lesson on a meetup day wasn't segregated based on gender. The next time I went, only the boys got to learn about creationism. Women were taught how to be a good wife and serve jesus by serving your husband.
My mom was very irritated about that (home schooling was her idea, my dad just went along with it) and complained to the group, but was ignored. You'd think she would realize the views of the ideology she was pushing, but she was so obsessed with being the smartest one in the room she walked herself right into fascism by attacking anything she didn't understand instead of just being curious.
Wasn't for me. I spent a lot of time running around in the woods.
I got to do a good amount of that too, but I think I would have have done that anyways.
Feral child gang represent.
I'm glad you survived all that bullshit, Bolshe. What advice would you give any other kids trying to escape that kind of situation?
Thanks, I'm glad I did too. It's one of many things that probably caused me to not come out sooner.
What advice would you give any other kids trying to escape that kind of situation?
CW abuse
- Survive until you can leave.
- Be kind to yourself and take care of your health as much as you can.
- You are beautiful. Everything that is happening is not your fault.
- Your parents are not safe if they are doing things like this to you. You owe them nothing.
- Find friends wherever you can. I spent a lot of time ditching church to hang at skate parks and also making friends online.
- Learn to manipulate people in power into thinking that you aren't worth their time or are on their side.
- Don't compromise who you are internally, but put up whatever appearance you need to show for them to not hurt you. ** Note: This is really hard to do. I played a role to keep myself safe, but I wound up getting so good at it I thought I was a cishet man. Be careful.
- If your parents are willing to teach you things you can verify as outright lies, then you should just assume everything they tell you is a lie unless you want to bother verifying.
- Trust is good and beautiful. Don't let them take that from you. There are a lot of good people.
- Your parents are weak. They are probably behaving the way they are because they were also abused. That isn't your problem. Don't waste time feeling sympathy for their toxicity.
- Lie to your parents and steal everything you can from them to make sure you get out of their house with as much economic security as you can.
- Sometimes parents get much less shitty when they don't have power over you anymore. That still doesn't mean they are safe, it just means they don't think they can control you the same way they used to.
- You can completely just stop talking to them once you're free and never talk to them again. Everyone chooses their family, some people just wind up keeping the cards they got dealt instead of looking through the deck and picking a better hand.
- Find interests and hobbies that are yours and focus on them. This can be literally anything. Just reinforce your own identity in small ways.
- Get therapy with a secular therapist as soon as you can. I prefer CBT, ACT, or DBT, but any therapist who is trans positive probably has their shit together.
- It's going to be okay and you're going to build a good life once you're free.
- Life is beautiful and so satisfying, stay curious about the future.
This list got really heavy, sorry. Hopefully that was helpful anyway. :soviet-heart:
Hey, was your mom my guitar teacher, and do you have an older brother that she used to beat the shit out of with a riding crop?
My mom is part of a much larger movement of equally shitty people. She was "moderate" compared to some of the people I met.
Riding crops were never used, the abuse was mostly psychological.
:amerikkka-clap:
I guess it figures that my experiences with an iron-fisted homeschooling harridan would be in no way unique, aside from the physical abuse stuff being a lot more widely accepted 20+ years ago.
Most parents that are part of the christian right still view physical abuse as their god-given right and even a moral responsibility. "My parents hurt me and I turned out okay so it's fine" logic.
Reading people's homeschooling experiences here, I wonder if one of the most impactful things a socialist group might do would be to set up their own community schools. Teach Howard Zinn and stuff like that.
This would be really cool but the cops would almost certainly come fuck you up
Counterpoint: Public schools are ass and mainly used for indoctrination.
Most of the people I’ve met who were completely home schooled are extremely uneducated. I knew one person who was schooled entirely at home who was very smart, but that’s because his rich parents paid for tutors.
I was semi home schooled for almost my whole middle school and highschool years. I ended up in a forum full of weirdo radical extremests so... :comfy-cool:
if you're looking to go, "homeschooling is bad," then you might have some people argue that, in some cases, it can be more ideal than us public schooling. I think those arguments are correct. But it is also a way for fundies to abuse their kids.
For the most part, homeschooling in the U.S. is almost entirely used by fascists to commit child abuse.
well dontya know, public schooling is socialism, hillary clinton (who is a demon,) also nanny state like the UK.
Just imagine all the "I don't like gubberment socialism totaliatarianisms!" types following up with "because it's not a Christian kind of censorship and totalitarianism, of course."
