It’s not homeschooling, it’s unschooling.
My parents were both teachers at private or Christian schools while I grew up, and every year, there’d always be a new couple of kids who’s parents couldn’t quite hack it anymore, so they’d send them to school. But couldn’t bear to send their kids to those secular, godless, evolution teaching, sex driven, minority filled public schools, so they’d send them to my school instead.
Those kids were always some of the dumbest, most ignorant people on the planet. Some figure it out, but most don’t. They just double down. They were usually barely literate, couldn’t do math, and had no social skills. It’s how you end up with a 19 year old freshman who can’t read Dr. Seuss.
I know teachers aren’t paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don’t, and it shows.
You clearly haven’t seen how bad some of our schools in America are. The war on education has been quite successful.
What were you doing in that school?!!!
Playing ‘Bob the builder’ with troglodyte kids in the hopes of mitigating some of the damage their wilfully ignorant parents inflicted upon the world.
Can we fix it!?..eh, maybe.
I used to sell books, oh, 30 years ago or so now.
The home schoolers were the scariest bunch of people you’ll encounter.
Had one guy ask where the weather control books were, and I was like “You mean seeding clouds to make it rain? I think we have…”
“No! I mean the government weather control programs!”
Had another lady convinced her electricity was going to give her cancer because it came from a nuclear power plant and was radioactive.
We are homeschooling one of our kids because his particular needs were not being met by the local school. Meeting other homeschool families is always nerve-wracking for me. I never know if they’re going to be a normal family adapting to an unusual situation, or tinfoil-hat nuts using homeschool as an excuse to hide their children from the outside world.
The non tinfoil hat group should develop a secret sign, like a manager telling a runner on first to steal, so you do not have to suffer fools.
Like ear tug, ear tug, nose scratch, and then adjust your belt. I want credit if you use this one 😂
Something like “Hey… where can I buy books that align with common core?”
The reaction for that one should do it
This is brilliant!!!
I don’t get it?
Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I believe common core refers to the core standards of knowledge & skills that the government requires in public education.
Yes, but mostly people relate it to math because it teaches kids to solve problems, not just find the right answer. One thing common core math teaches is how to count in groups of 5. You have to show your work in elementary school to get full credit and even if you get the right answer, you could get 0 points because you didn’t solve the problem as required. Conservatives hate this because it makes them use their brain.
One of those things I hear people rail against as being big government indoctrination and/or something something Obama.
You know the tin foil hat people are going to pick up on this and think it’s all a conspiracy.
The sign is silence when the weirdos get going with the face of “I am letting you talk because I am concerned if I don’t you might attack me in the parking lot but rest assured I am thinking about something else”
This us us exactly.
“No! I mean the government weather control programs!”
“Check the science fiction section.”
It’s astounding how little people know about how the world works even without home schooling factored in.
And they vote!
The weather control books are in Red Alert 2.
When I hear a woman say “I’m not a feminist” my first thought is “WHY THE HELL NOT??”
Perhaps their understanding of feminism has come from the violently extreme “kill all men” types of feminists or the opposing “get back in the kitchen” type of conservative shitbags making up all sorts of scary and mean things about them.
Those first type of feminists do not exist, it’s a strawman
I homeschooled my kid k-12. When I started, I had no idea how many religious hs-ers there were. I used a secular curriculum, and never even thought about teaching anything regarding religion one way or another. Once I started looking around at all the creationist curricula out there–yikes.
Anyhoo, long story short, my son went on to a college degree (he actually started college classes online at 15–one of the perks of hs-ing for us), and he’s an atheist. Secular homeschoolers do exist!
ETA some links–these are a few secular homeschool curricula. There’s a lot more out there, but this is the majority of what I used through the years:
https://www.calverthomeschool.com/
https://www.keystoneschoolonline.com/
https://www.thinkwell.com/ (Primarily math–the professor that does most of the math instruction is wonderful.)
Secular homeschool graduate here. Parents homeschooled my brother and I because the public school system was drastically underfunded and we were in quite an education desert. I always hate articles like this, as folks tend to paint broad strokes about homeschoolers… But there’s a reason we never had other homeschooled friends growing up; there were a lot of crazy ones, especially in Michigan, as there is virtually no regulation.
Not having kids, but maybe some links to help others out?
Okay, I added a few links to my comment!
Thanks!
American homeschooling seems to be particularly vulnerable to fascist/religious indoctrination. In most countries where homeschooling is common there’s usually a social contract that’s enforced to at least regulate the kind of education kids get outside of traditional schooling.
Social contract? Sounds a lot like socialism to me! /s
My brother and sister-in-law a few years ago tried homeschooling their kids to avoid having to drop $20K a year (each) in tuition to their preferred private school ($20K a year for K-6!) The “homeschooling” situation was actually four days a week in a school with teachers and everything, and one day a week supervising the kids at home doing lesson plans prepared by the school. This alleged homeschooling situation was in place so the school could legally hire uncredited teachers, allowing them to be cheaper - by paying teachers near minimum wage instead of a still-shitty starting salary in the $40Ks. Fucked up in so many ways, but at least this school wasn’t religion-based.
I’ve come to the conclusion that religious faith is a kind of mental illness that was made socially acceptable to keep primitive people from constantly killing each other, sticking instead to only occasionally killing each other within a vague set of guidelines.
Those of us free of it don’t need an insane corkscrew of Escheresque logic and imaginary higher authorities using threats commanding us to not be monsters.
I recently came to a different conclusion. It’s not religious faith. It’s just faith. And it’s not a mental illness. It’s human nature - for a significant segment of the human population.
Those people who are religious fanatics, political fanatics (e.g. Trumpists, Chavez sympathizers), pseudoscience fanatics (e.g. flat earthers, anti-vaxx, homeopathy), celebrity fanatics (Andrew Tate followers), etc, they have to share the same common traits. They’re impressionable people, they need to be patt of a group, and they can’t fathom the idea of switching groups.
It’s just that religion-based control came first.
Or maybe those who were very religious in the past got to survive and thus the genetic traits responsible for fanaticism spread like fire?
Regardless, it’s appalling.
Chavez sympathizers
I’m sorry, whom???
Like Hugo Chavez? Are there any people who care enough about him who arent Venezuelan?
Like Tito, Castro, Ho Chi Minh, Mao, Stalin, Lenin, Trotsky, Che Guevara are all infinitely more valid than fucking Chavez.
Hell Hoxha and Posadas have bigger followings than Chavez
Hugo Chavez followers. They’re as bad if not worse than Trump or Putin followers.
I’ve been an internet socialist for a long time and I have no idea why you think Venezuelans, specifically, are a big problem on the internet.
Maybe the people you hate aren’t really a cult of personality, but it makes you feel better to think about them that way?
"Tucker tole me "
People in the past weren’t us in different clothes and religion was basically fulfilling political and cultural functions as well. Like today was have mass media and entertainment, at one point religion was basically entertainment as well. People loved having some preacher come to town and do his show, it was what people talked about. Now we have TV shows and movies etc, and a lot of our media has shocking moral implications just as we’d judge religion in the past for. Not all that different. That leads in to civil/civic religion which is practiced by many today and provides a framework for things like a national identity. When you stand for an anthem you’re performing a civil religious ritual, visiting historical/cultural sites is a sort of pilgrimage.
The form that religion evolved through in history was also defined by the conditions of the society and a lot of times compromises with neighboring powers. Viewing religion as a dumb thing for stupid people is intuitively tempting, but it’s ahistorical in that it says more about our views today (including religous/civil religious views) than it does about what people were like in the past.
I mean you might be kinda right?
So there are people who think with or without internal monologue, common knowledge
Some people think that the internal monologue may have first developed as an internal dialogue, between the actor, the person and their body, and the “speaker” who they would have not been able to recognize as their own voice, and instead interpreted as a separate being relaying them direction, commands, and interpretation.
The dissociation between the individual and their internal monologue, and the resulting association of that monologue with a directing and counseling presence, could have been taken as the voice of a higher power guiding them, and by extension, others they got to follow them as the “speaker” of this divinity in their head.
If this sounds a bit crazy to you consider how many evangelicals rant and rave about their personal speaking term relationship with God.
So basically, deific religion might derive from people who have an internal monologue but who don’t identify with the speaker of that internal monologue.
Not really a mental disorder so much as a mode of thought that is prone to lead people into believing firmly that they are personally in contact with a separate being who personally directs their behavior and actions and values.
Deus Causa Sui
Americans’ obsession with Jesus and the Bible is so weird.
My step sister is going to homeschool her kids, which will be great for her youngest since she named him Jedidiah. Shockingly someone who named their kid that stopped coming to family gettogerthers after my sister’s kid came out trans.
She was sad she didn’t get invited to my wifes baby shower, even if my niece wasn’t planning on going I still wouldn’t invite her because you can’t just choose to cut out part of the family because you’re a bigot and expect everyone else to still want you around.
My father was uninvited from the yearly family reunion due to him not joining the anti-transgender circle jerk that formed there.
Ironically though I still get emails asking me to come, for the record I am my father’s transgender daughter.
I feel like they either missed a key detail or they’re just not very bright. I’m pretty sure it’s a little column a little column B.
If it wasn’t a 2-hour drive, I would crash it for the free food and just not say anything to anybody.
But I think I could get a bucket from the colonel to myself for just a little bit under what I pay in gas money. Plus that side of my family is so old that all they’re going to bring is fast food anyway. Everyone who was good at cooking is either dead or is too arthritic to do so. A shame, I am a southerner who appreciates the truth of The Stereotype of the home cooked meal.
The only two reasons why I’m not going to go ahead with that plan of just getting a bucket for myself, is that I would probably get a better meal and support a smaller business by getting my eight piece from Church’s Chicken. Well that and it’s going to be a tight month, my car and my switch need to be repaired at the same time. And I only pray Nintendo leaves my fucking Pokemon data intact because it’s not like I could back that up somehow. I mean theoretically it might have been possible if the damn thing would have turned on.
Please pray for the safe return of my shiny Dialga, I gave a good Zacian for it.
Maybe i’m already half asleep, but i love this comment that starts out on topic then drifts into a unrelated rant written in the most entertaining way.
Oh my dear little baby fetus Jesus in the morning, just covered in bacon and smoked Gouda cheese and stapled to a tiny little 3” cross, that made me laugh my ass off and blush at the same time.
For extra fun. Read it in the Skyrim Female Argonian voice
I’m going to go out on a limb and guess that they invite you because they think they can “straighten you out”, the garbage they believe is that all kids are straight and cis and it’s down to brainwashing by the deep state Jewish space lasers that anyone would think otherwise.
For your own sake, best to stay away.
Honestly, I think you’re overthinking it. I legitimately believe that they actually forgot I was transgender due to how not often they see me.
Well, that’s a … win?
Transphobic relatives are a lot like war and timeshares. - “The only winning move is not to play.”
It does come in handy when you have that one annoying Uncle who acts like he’s your best buddy, when in reality he’s an annoying asshole who doesn’t even give a shit about your company, he just wants to feel young by being “A bro” around the young’uns…
Second my Uncle Wes found out I was trans, he finally shut the fuck up and just quietly keeps his distance. It has… actually made him easier to tolerate. Now his son, my cousin, on the other hand… Not so much.
I have nothing against Christians, one of my best friends is a devout Catholic, sharp as a whip too, got his doctorate in Mathematics and is a huge nerd when it comes to numbers, but… I have about as much patience for Young Earth Creationists and Biblical Literalists as they do for me.
I nearly slapped that child one Thanksgiving when I casually mentioned the existence of dinosaurs while everyone was talking about Jurassic World (Had recently come out), but see, I made the mistake of talking about dinosaurs like they were real animals that once existed instead of Hollywood monsters made up by Liberal Media… So he starts chanting “THE BIG BANG IS A FAERIE TALE! NOT A THEORY!” (despite the fact that a Priest was the one who came up with the Big Bang…), over and over until I “apologize to Jesus” for my “blasphemy”
I don’t, I just let him keep doing that while I just dig into some Mashed Potatoes, eventually his mom, my Aunt has to coax him into just shutting the fuck up. The dinner table was quiet after that and I spent the rest of the day locked in my room.
I honestly hate that kid (He’s just becoming a teenager now, my mom had kids way before my aunt did), but it’s clear his Dad messed him up… At this point his Mom understands the problem, has more or less given up on religion altogether (Which tbh, kinda sucks, I hate it when extremists ruin belief systems for everybody else… I’m not a Christian, but fuck, the idea of a Loving God is a wonderful coping mechanism with how terrible the reality of the world is) and is quietly doing the “Grin and bear it for the kid till he’s 18” thing.
Still good for my Aunt I guess, she used to be a fanatic like the rest of them, my hobby used to be casually trolling her by mentioning which characters in “Current Popular Thing” were gay, just to watch her freak out… But… after seeing the damage her husband’s “Let’s just go ALL IN on the worst interpretation of Jesus possible!” has done to her kid, she’s chilled out quite a bit. Typically I see her without her husband and kid these days, she plans weekends where she comes down to get away from him, which she usually spends getting drunk on red wine, watching movies, and being good company.
I do hope the kid’s rude awakening when he goes into the real world isn’t too terrible, I’d like to see him snap out of it and realize what a monster his father is, but I’d hate to see him jump to the opposite extreme and become a “Reddit Atheist” ya know?
(Note: This aunt and uncle are on my mom’s side, the reunion people are on my dad’s side, which is why my Uncle remembers, but my dad’s side apparently doesn’t)
There are times I’m glad to come from a small family, the drama is similar but there’s just less of it.
And yeah, people do come around. I didn’t talk to my mum at all for 12 years, and it was a very slow restart, whereas now she refers to my enby partner as an essential part of the family, and loves when we come to visit.
There’s other relatives I cut out and don’t intend on reconnecting with, but at least it wasn’t all of them.
My father was uninvited from the yearly family reunion due to him not joining the anti-transgender circle jerk that formed there.
Ironically though I still get emails asking me to come, for the record I am my father’s transgender daughter.
I might be misreading your situation, but just from this limited context, your father seems to have his priorities straight. Feel free to tell him that a random internet stranger thinks good of him.
No you understand the situation perfectly.
Jedidiah? Like 2 D’s JeDidiah??
It’s a name.
I was homeschooled. I ‘graduated’ without a valid diploma and had to get a GED. I don’t speak to my parents and my child is currently enjoying his day at public preschool. All my church friends who were raised similarly also are in similar situations. That’s about all I’ll say about it.
I was homeschooled up until 12. I went to college at 15. That’s about all I’ll say about it.
Was college homeschooled as well?
The U in PragerU is for College. /s
No, two years of community college and transferred to a state university as a junior at 17
The name of the homeschool teacher? Albert Einstein.
That’s about all I’ll say about it.
Yeah, I know. It is hard to keep a lie going
Technically it’s a junior college program because I still had some high school requirements until I was 16 and took the high school proficiency exam. After passing that I did not have to attend any classes in the program.
At 17 I transferred to a state university as a junior because I accumulated enough credits in the community college.
Tuition paid using the money you stole from the public education system.
How many poorer kids do you think that money would have helped get into college that didn’t go so you could at 15?
how did they steal money from the public education system for being homeschooled?
Every student not in public education is money not in public education, literally every state that permits home schooling sees to that via those god forsaken voucher programs.
I didn’t receive any money for it
I’m not in favor of the voucher programs, but you’re diluting the opposition to them by claiming some incredibly misinformed bullshit. Just seems funny that we’re talking about education systems, and yours seems to have failed you.
The voucher program hands parents the money the schools would have gotten for having their child enrolled and lets them spend it on a private school with an agenda or a homeschooling program with an agenda instead.
Literally it exists entirely to take money that should have gone to the public school system and letting all the rich and white families siphon it off to totally not segregated private school classrooms and totally not creationist and quiverfull homeschool programs.
If ya don’t believe me just look at the rate of adoption of these kinds of programs and enrollment of rich and white kids in these kinds of programs pre and post Brown V Board.
These systems were concocted by segregationists for segregationists to maintain educational segregation and inequality.
This feels like you’re a bit defensive about your understanding of the subject. Somehow you’ve been led to believe that this affects every kid not in public school. That’s demonstrably false.
We homeschool in North Carolina and get exactly zero dollars for it. You’re correct in general about the terrible effect that vouchers have on public schooling but incorrect about it being applied to homeschooling. I don’t know if it’s different in other states.
dumb take
It’s literally what they’re doing, if you think it’s dumb take it up with the dumb politicians who have it out for education that’s legally required to not teach kids the world’s 6000 years old.
I would have spent the same money going to college anyway? I just did it earlier, this post makes no sense
thank you for saying it! good homeschool experiences tend to be under rated. Not all homeschool kids have religious nutbags or unschooling types for parents.
Of course not all homeschooling is bad. But these days it does seem that homeschooling tends to skew towards the ultra-conservative MAGA Jesus crowd.
source: salon.com articles and reddit/lemmy
Yes, but also no. Home school gets some seriously unfair treatment in the media, but living it every day myself I can confirm there are quite a few home schooling parents that absolutely earn that criticism.
One of the hardest parts of home schooling my own kids is finding other home schoolers to meet up with that aren’t frigging nuts.
Eh, even if the parents are educating, the social development of such folks as I have seen is horribly stunted, and stunted during some key formative years. Doesn’t help when the parents are telling the kids they are so smart that no school could hope to teach them right.
Even if you acquire knowledge, life can suck if you can’t deal with people.
As a home school parent, socialization is really the hardest and most expensive part. We use an online, self-paced version of the state curriculum (provided by the state, so yes it fully “counts”) so that part is pretty easy. But keeping them involved in communities outside the home, with other kids and adults, is a constant effort. They can finish a whole week of curriculum work for all their core subjects in 8 hours or so (hence the online self-paced school), but all the extra curriculars and meetups that keep them socially active consume most of the rest of the week (and many of them are pretty expensive).
Home schooling is not for the faint of heart, and it’s certainly not the easy button some people treat it as.
Opinions are like assholes my friend, everyone’s got one but we don’t need to share them just for the hell of it… you do you, but this was a dumb thing to say so i’m going to file it with all the rest of the dumb shit people say. have a nice day
I have often read sovereign citizen groups on Facebook, and they all “homeschool”, which means the big kids babysit the little ones all day long, and sometimes CPS gets involved and removes the kids and terminates their parental rights because they realize the kids aren’t getting educated and are having the shit best out of them routinely. I think homeschooling can be very dangerous for a child.
I’m not very for homeschooling and it has its place, the problem is that it lacks regulation.
There should be an official education program and tests to make sure kids are learning essential things instead of just babysitting siblings or exclusively learning religious or survivalist stuff.
Yes agreed. But a lot of it is right wing psychos who are just not educating them.
Because a parent working, without any accreditation or training since they were a fucking literal child, totally sounds like a preferable route. Give me a fucking break, it’s an assault on standardized education.
To make it worse, the kid will have a large drop in socialization opportunities and isolated relatively speaking. You just do not get that kind of social utopia ever again in your entire fucking life… the life experiences the child misses out on is significant. You can’t schedule enough playdates to make up for that.
I’m a product of homeschooling, and cannot begin to tell you how detrimental it was to my adult life and being able to function in society.
100% of my socialization growing up came from church. While I have siblings who grew up to be very successful, they all stayed in the church.
It’s a cult. It’s child abuse. You are robbing your child of critical life experience and social development. It also makes it so that anyone escaping from growing up in that will have an extremely difficult time rebuilding their life outside of religion.
While I agree that being homeschooled in a religious community hindered me in a ton of ways I think the one benefit for me was not having to mask my adhd, my mental health now is better for it, but that’s a small victory in a sea of failure.
Well I didn’t have to mask, but I also didn’t get my ADHD, bipolar or anxiety recognized/diagnosed until well into my adult life, lmao.
I also didn’t get treated for my adhd until the last few years, in fact the main reason I was pulled into homeschooling is because my mother didn’t want me medicated, she’s still a fucking moron.
I’ve yet to get medicated. Last time I tried I had the wrong diagnosis and ended up in grippy socks, and I’m currently living by myself, so starting new meds is kinda frightening tbh.
I did drink/smoke way too much as a coping mechanism, because yakno meds that help someone be able to function like a normal person are EVIL, but letting ur kid go undiagnosed and untreated is so fucking healthy for their long-term mental health.
My parents also managed to fuck up my math track to put me a year behind, and when I found their error and tried to catch up, they didn’t support at all.
Homeschool parents are [very often] imbeciles.
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We had to pull my daughter out of her middle school and put her in an online school for reasons I don’t wish to go into, but thankfully the online school is run by the county school corporation and she has a curriculum built by accredited teachers who are also there to talk to the kids by phone, videoconference or in person during school hours. And they are so receptive too. Suddenly I feel like educators care about my child.
But homeschooling? I would never even think of it. I don’t know the first thing about pedagogy and neither does my wife. We did a less formal version of online schooling that was hastily put together during COVID while she was still in elementary school and it relied on me doing a lot of the teaching and I sucked at it. There’s a big difference between being able to do fourth grade math and being able to teach a fourth grader how to do fourth grade math. A lot of those kids are getting so underserved by having parents, even well-meaning parents, who are not educators try to give their education.
And that doesn’t even go into the “my son is learning to be a Christian as a homeschooler” bullshit.
There are definitely kids who would be better served by an alternative to regular public or private school, even school they can do from home. But educators need to be behind it, not parents. Not unless those parents have degrees in education.
Dumbass Christian Karens
Every time I see articles in this topic, it just solidifies my opinion that homeschooling should not be allowed. We live in a community, and part of that means learning a common set of skills, social interaction with others in your community, and secular, science-based lessons.
As a homeschool survivor I wholeheartedly agree. I’m middle aged now and I still struggle with basic social skills.
I went to school and have the same issues lol
I was homeschooled through middle school because the public school administration wanted to put me on Ritalin despite the school psychiatrist’s objections.
Public schools aren’t perfect either.
So, my stepkids (now: boy 12, girl 11) were falling behind in public school and were being passed on to the next grades despite the fact that they were almost a full grade behind in math and reading.
My now-wife decided to pull them out of public school and home school them to try to get them caught up. In our county, we have an AWESOME “public school at home” program where the kids are home schooled, but still go into a school one day a week for socialization and tutoring by licensed teachers. It was a fuck ton of work for her, but in ONE YEAR in the program, not only did the kids catch up, but they’re actually almost a full year ahead now.
But… that was with the full support of a county school system and a full-time investment in her kids. This wasn’t a “throw a computer at them and let them figure it out” and it certainly wasn’t a “summer is different from winter because Jesus said so” program. It was a guided program designed, administered, and overseen by actually licensed teachers. There were performance goals to hit, regular checkins, and available tutoring for things my wife wasn’t capable of teaching correctly.
This year, since both kids were so far ahead, we gave them a choice and let them decide whether they wanted to continue the program now that they’re caught up. My stepdaughter wanted to go back to regular school. My stepson wanted to stay in the program. He’s in middle school as of this year, and middle school begins to be more self-guided. My wife starts nursing school in the spring so she can’t dedicate the 8-ish hours necessary to take both kids through the program beginning next semester. So we let them each do what they wanted. My stepson finishes his mostly-self-guided school day in three hours or so then has the rest of the day to do with as he wishes and is still ahead of where he should be. My stepdaughter is miserable because each day is an 8 hour slog and the curriculum moves too slowly for her now, plus the other kids are dicks to her (as kids tend to be). She’s considering going back into the program next year when it will be mostly self-guided for her as well.
But this success story is more about my awesome wife and this particular program. It’s been a crazy amount of work and a full-time job for my wife to take both kids through this program, and that’s WITH the support of a full teaching staff in a county-run program. It’s no surprise to me that other programs are more-or-less a joke. If you’re not willing to put in the work and/or your idea of education is “It’s that way because the LORD said so now stop asking questions and write Jesus on every line,” then you’re dooming your children to failure and ridicule.
the other kids are dicks to her (as kids tend to be)
This is the point that I’ve observed to be a tricky one.
Other kids are dicks, but that also holds true for adults. Perhaps the most valuable thing I got from school is navigating that very scenario.
Also, I was at least somewhat to blame, by being an arrogant, insufferable, cringy little guy. If there were one thing that could have been better is if a trusted adult had me confront my own attitude earlier rather than just letting me think the problem was all with other folks.
I learned to recognize situations I didn’t want to interact with, how to avoid acting in a way to get dragged into such situations, how to engage amicably when I had to, and how to recognize and engage with groups that are more keeping with my tastes.
