2) what difference does it make if 99% of the early adopters are ultra-right wing, conservative Christian creationists? If homeschooling my kids gives them the best environment to develop academically and socially, why should it affect my decision to know the motivation of everyone else that's doing it?

As engineers, this should be an easy point to take hold of. How is the publicly elected government planning curriculum somehow less indoctrination than a parent doing the same?

I'd love to see these people back it up with facts. To me it seems like a lot of people make up their mind about homeschooling and then use this as a straw man argument against it. Again, just because the early adopters are motivated by a certain factor doesn't mean that you (or I) need to be motivated by the same factor. We could end up having the same positive conclusion about homeschooling but for very different reasons.

edit: For the record, I don't at all think home-schooling should be outlawed or even at all discouraged (quite the opposite!), but I do think it should regulated, which is a scary ball of wax, to be sure.

Look, no one is denying that there are lots of religiously motivated people that homeschool their children. But for those that aren't, this is a completely irrelevant fact. If you've got an argument that shows me that homeschooling as an educational approach is fundamentally flawed because religious people are a majority of the early adopters, I'd love to hear it.

This is generalization.

1. Those that shouldn't be homeschooling because they are not trained as educators, certainly not in all of the subjects they need to teach, but they are religiously conservative to the point of some social withdrawal, and don't want their kids going to public school and being exposed to drugs and liberalism. I've known many people in this category. BTW- I'm somewhat conservative and religious, so when I say they are conservative and religious, I mean really conservative and religious.

2. Those that are so liberal they take their kid on a round the world trip spending all of their life's savings and money from their newly-sold house to do so, homeschooling (some would say no-schooling or light-schooling) during the trip with little support or structure. When they got back they got a lower-paying job and started from ground-zero again, with their kid who disliked the trip and missed months of education. I only know one person in this category.

I have never been introduced to a no-speed-limit homeschooler.

Now you know someone who doesn't fit either of those molds :)

I'm co-moderator of a secular homeschooling group and your description doesn't really match anyone in our group (20-30 families). There are unschoolers, but there are also people who follow various approaches to varying degrees.

How many in your group of 20-30 have the qualifications that would allow them to be teachers in every subject that they teach their children if they were to apply for jobs in your public school system?

While I believe in your freedom to homeschool your children, why does the public school system have those requirements for their teachers? It isn't only to have the ability to manage kids and parents. While I believe that your group may do an excellent job at educating your students, 84% of 1.5 million students were estimated to be homeschooled only at home as of 2007 according to http://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id=91 , and I doubt that all of them are sufficiently qualified to teach all subjects required in their local public school.

Teachers are generally intelligent and well-meaning. Their paper qualifications and their ability to actually teach are not as strongly correlated as one would hope, though. While on average I'd expect a qualified teacher to be better at teaching than a member of the general public, I know many members of the general public who are not eligible for jobs as K-12 teachers, but nonetheless are excellent at teaching both children and adults. Amusingly, one qualified teacher I know was given a crash primer in the subject he now teaches professionally by a friend of mine... after he was officially qualified to teach it. On the other hand, I know a teacher in Switzerland who spent several years telling his students random anecdotes about his life, rather than actually teaching the students anything whatsoever about the subject he's paid to teach - and this is a country with much stricter requirements for teachers than the US.

Public schools have requirements for their teachers for a number of reasons: covering themselves, filtering out some unqualified people quickly, etc. The qualifications are neither necessary nor sufficient for finding good teachers, sadly. In programming, qualifications tend to be poorly, and sometimes even negatively, correlated with ability and productivity; I'm not convinced the situation is massively different in K-12 education.

There are no magic bullets for education. Not everyone teaching is even vaguely capable of doing so; there are some horrifically incapable people teaching in the public school system, and also some who homeschool. The majority of teachers in either system do a more-or-less tolerable job, and some excel.

http://www.psychologicalscience.org/journals/pspi/PSPI_9_3.p...

I'm in agreement with Diane Ravitch, the historian of education, that the college education major should be abolished. Instead students who aspire to be teachers should get a degree in any other field, and take a few courses on classroom management.

Teachers dedicate themselves to teaching for numerous reasons. They don't take on student loans for no reason whatsoever; the credentials they get are part of the price of going into a system with intentional barriers to entry.

Don't confuse a system of "reject some of the good, weed out most of the really bad, and usually get ok results" as something which is an entirely accurate indicator of competence. The shortcomings of the current system don't make it a lie, obviously - but putting decades into a process doesn't necessarily make it better, either.

I'm saying that in many cases, if suffices for a parent to simply understand what subject materials their children need to learn, and then teach them to read well at an early age, after that parents do not necessarily need to be knowledgeable about those materials because the books contain the knowledge.

I think what I'm describing is nearly synonymous with the hacker mentality that I would expect to be held in high regard in this forum.

Each child has different needs and different strengths and weaknesses. They progress in each subject at different paces. Our daughter is 5th grade age. At this point, we're still comfortable with the education we can give her ourselves (using materials created by people with a good deal of experience teaching their subject areas!). There will likely be times when she has reached the point where we can no longer adequately teach her certain subjects. But, there are tons of resources today and more coming every day for teaching those subjects.

I was talking with one of the other dads in our group last week and they're deciding how to proceed with their 8th grader for next year, when she'd be entering high school. One of the options they're exploring is one in which she would be able to attend courses at a local community college (for free via their local school district). Programs like that exist in many places.

Homeschooling families don't live in a vacuum.

This is why logjam's argument is a pure fallacy.

But the reality is that the homeschooling movement is dynamic:

http://www.topmastersineducation.com/homeschooled/

In time, it's easy to envision the secular population outnumbering the religious.

So, to your point, if atheists had been the early adopters in this case, you would support homeschooling. But since the early adopters were religious, you are against it, correct?

Not if the Atheists were teaching their kids information we know to be wrong as solid fact.

If there was a group of Atheist KKK members supporting homeschooling so they can teach their kids that blacks are inferior we'd have the same issue.

The problem is the isolation, there's no standard that home schooling is compared against, there's no child education services that come along and ensure the student knows the alphabet.

http://www.topmastersineducation.com/homeschooled/

On a political level, the federal government has taken a hands off Jeffersonian approach (as far as I know) and let the individual states experiment. Some states are very involved while others are very hands off. You can explore the variety of approaches and see for yourself which work (if any) and which don't (if any).

The fact of the matter is that the vast majority of homeschooled kids do as well or much better than their public school counterparts when it comes to knowing the alphabet and much more (see link above). If your primary argument for outlawing/regulating it is that kids are being taught non-fact based information, let's go ahead and shut down all the churches, mosques, and synagogues while we're at it.

Thinking about it further, I actually appreciate that there are a lot of kids being homeschooled for religious reasons. It doesn't really affect me or my family in any negative way and they are creating a market where there was none -- no mean feat.

That means that people who do want to homeschool their kids for reasons I personally agree with will have more materials available that might not exist if not for the zealots.

And, ultimately, you have no right to police what I teach my children.

Most of them are perfectly capable, not-stupid people, doing a good job raising their kids and educating them.

You wouldn't call them stupid, or think their kids were stupid, if you met them without knowing they were creationists. The fact that they're mistaken about evolution is not very important in the big picture.

no, its not very important whether they are creationists or not. The more worrying fact is that given the overwhelming evidence that points to the theory of evolution as being true, they decidedly deny it in favour of a less proven theory. I.e., they lack critical evaluation skills which is important in deciding matters - such as who to vote for.

I think you're wrong about that. Most people's opinions, on most things, are not particularly well thought out.

All of us, you and me included, are walking around with wrong ideas we picked up as received wisdom or that help us fit in with our social group.

Seizing on creationism and trying to make it into something uniquely awful indicating failures of intelligence or character that most people don't have, is likely a socially motivated error in itself.

i dont think you understood my point - which isn't that creationism is awful, but that blindly believing something without evaluating the evidence is awful. Those people who just claim evolution is true without having read any of the supporting evidence, but simply to " fit in with our social group" is just as bad.

What's wrong with the notion that the creator just used evolution to create things? Why must he create them as they are.

Cuz i personally view the creator as The Great Coder (or Goder or God for short :P) who jsut wrote an epicly long program and hit the "Compile and execute" button! (hence the BIG BANG) :P

Just a thought

That is basically the modern catholic church's opinion on the matter.

The problem you are having is that the word "creationism" is not a definition, it is a summary. For the most part, the word refers to a literal belief in the genesis book of the bible.

Nothing, but there are a lot of people who are unwilling to accept the truth of any statement that contradicts their understanding of the biblical creation story (typically the understanding given to them by someone else). For them the timescale required for evolution is out of the question, humans absolutely had to coexist with dinosaurs, and the entirety of the universe was created in a six day period. Evidence is irrelevant to such people; either they try to concoct a different explanation that fits in with their beliefs or they just use an escape hatch e.g. "Satan planted the evidence."

Fortunately a large number of people accept your proposed version, that evolution is the process used by the Creator. There are also a number of people who accept my proposal: religion serves various social purposes and is not in any way useful for explaining physical phenomena (that is what science is about).

No it doesn't, it shows a presence of severe cognitive bias.

I would be skeptical of any other opinions they hold regarding biology, geology, and morality but they probably don't have any preconceived notions about math, or physics.

Of course you must have read claims like "the speed of light changes over time" and "all that light was created en-route 6000 years ago". This allows them to believe a ridiculous premise but still participate in reality and use their GPS with a clean conscience.

But I think there are many creationists who can reconcile their differences with reality by believing the seven days of creation are a metaphor or some sort of measure in "God years", so they can reject evolution like they were brainwashed to, but they have no problem believing in the speed of light and measurements of distances between stars.

If there is no way to effectively regulate it to ensure that the children are getting a real education, then yes. Parents should not be permitted to deny their children a real education. They can supplement that real education as they please, but not deprive them of it.

Your options for remediation all require resources that parents in lousy school districts don't have. Moving to the burbs requires money (apartments in the burbs don't take housing subsidies), a reliable car, a dealing with a lot of hassle as a non-white person (getting pulled over by the cops, etc). Your solution of suing the school district into submission requires that you as a parent have lots of time and resource to manage a litigation. That requires lots of external support -- that 3 hour detour to sit in some court hearing is 3 hours of lost wages.

If the state is failing to provide the education that I feel is appropriate to my child, I have the right to intervene, period. If I'm doing something extreme or harmful to my child, the state has the ability to intervene, to the point of seizing custody if I'm not acting in my child's best interest.

I received a Catholic education at one point in my life. The teachings of the Catholic Church are offensive to many people. Does my exposure to catholic docterine disqualify my education? In my mind, one of the core components of a "real education" would be to respect others beliefs and avoid meddling in the affairs of others. Sounds like our perspectives vary.

Your school doesn't have the money for fancy microscopes? Welcome to society; get involved with it and fix it.

> Does my exposure

I thought I was clear: exposure to religion in an education is not what concerns me (unless, of course, it is in a public school). The RCC, for all of its numerous faults, has their schools in developed countries teaching proper science, not religion in place of science (for the most part), and not in the same class. They are pretty damn low on my list of concerns.

My concern is with adults deciding to swap out science lessons with religion lessons. This is what the majority of homeschoolers do, and this is what many protestant religious schools do.

> If I'm doing something extreme or harmful to my child

Denying your child access to a basic science education is exactly that. Children have a right to receive and education and parents have absolutely no right to deprive 'their' children of that.

Explanation by example: You want to send your kid to Catholic School where he can learn proper biology and latin prayers or whatever shit? Cool, knock yourself out. You want to send your kid to public school where he can learn biology, then teach him that Jesus rode dinosaurs when he comes home at the end of the day? Cool, knock yourself out. You want to keep your kids out of schools that teach biology and instead only expose your child to Dino-Cowboy Jesus theory? Then you should have your children taken away from you, as you are clearly incapable of raising them.

I'm wondering what you think of that; is that different from what you meant by swapping out science lessons or is it close enough in your eyes? Do you think my experience was the exception to the rule when it comes to homeschoolers? How do you know what most homeschoolers teach? (I'm honestly curious; not just trying to argue with you.)

Presenting religious arguments in science lessons qualifies as swapping out science with religion, no matter how much those lessons teach you the opposing position (generally only done so that the student is able to "lie" on standardized testing).

Think of it this way: would it be acceptable to teach kids in chemistry, "...and that kids, is the periodic table of elements. Of course WE know that there are five elements, which are represented by these five Platonic solids. We know this for the [holybook] tells us so."?

Children have a right to receive a science education that has not been purposely sabotaged. If parents want to give their child such a blatantly slanted education, then it needs to be in addition to a proper education.

That you made it out alright says nothing of the acceptability of such abuse.

I disagree that it would have been a good thing for me to have been taken away from my parents because of the curriculum they chose. I can't even imagine what that would have done to me and my siblings.

Have you seen a foster home? I don't think you would say this if you had much experience with the foster child programs.

How do you propose people living in poverty both provide their children with the necessary resources (textbooks, a microscope, maps, a computer) and have enough time to instruct their children?

(And those of you who are not parents do not fully comprehend how disturbing this is to those of us who are.)

It's way less persuasive than you think it is.

Not to mention you must be unfamiliar with news of just that happening in Germany.

Perhaps we shouldn't allow YOU to vote, as proposed in this discussion for those who are supposedly seen as having poor critical thinking skills.

And we shouldn't allow you to teach your kids either, nor to have the option to send them to the school of your choice. All under the logic of this discussion. Enjoy.

Suggesting that someone's children be taken from them is absolutely the threat of showing up at their doorstep with guns. Do you think people just say "no, it's no big deal, take my kids that I love."? Not a chance.

I'm not sure if you're being a dick or if you haven't thought this through (or both).

The only difference there would be that homeschooling would no longer count as "attendance".

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compulsory_education#United_Sta...

Really little different than the other circumstances in which Child Protective Services might show up with a police escort.

There are many places in the US where this "real" education is entirely unavailable in the public school system. What do you do then?

Oh, but you probably just mean that they don't have enough money for new microscopes... In that case @jeltz has your bases pretty well covered.

Part of my problem with public schools stems from that experience - I knew valedictorians from a few graduating classes near mine in the public schools closest to me, and they just weren't as well-educated. It's possible that I had an abnormal experience, but I doubt it - my father graduated from one of those same public schools, and he's extremely intelligent (mechanical engineer, owns a robotics engineering company). Even still, he chose to send us to a private school because he didn't expect us to get as good of an education in the public system.

Of note: the private school I went to paid significantly less to its teachers than did the public schools around. I'm very aware of this because my brother is a teacher. He had to make a conscious decision to forego higher pay for his ideals, because he too felt that the public school system just doesn't have as much to offer.

My point is, microscopes and money are not the problem I have with the public schools.

Unfortunately for your whims, in a free country, parents can decide to school their children however they see fit. More unfortunately for your whims, the fact that homeschoolers are tremendously better prepared for university (or work if they choose) than their peers is the subject of countless news articles over the years. The statistics favor the homeschoolers, and that includes the majority being complained about here that dare to choose Creation over evolution.

There, there, little totalitarian, it will be OK. Just move to China.

Can you think of the REAL problem that is the issue in this regard instead of inflicting massive collateral damage because it's an easier path?

Have you considered the case where the parent is not 'stupid'?

The irony of the situation is that parents who are educated and intelligent and, therefore, great candidates to be good homeschool teachers also realize that they are not up to the task of homeschooling their children.

Hmm.