I have to agree with tokenadult. It may be the circles I run in but the people I know who homeschool do so for the 'There is No Speed Limit' effect rather than to indoctrinate their kids with some religious belief or insulate them from ideas that conflict with such religious indoctrination.
Though I appreciate the initiative of those that homeschool, there are only two kinds that I've known:
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.
I've been schooled in several systems, and done "distance learning" as well; all of it was secular, and I'm not religious. The competence of my teachers varied; I had one math teacher, in a Canadian public school, who refused to confirm if negative numbers existed. My math teachers in Canada generally kept students as far away from math, beyond a terribly slow and boring curriculum, as possible. A year I spent in the US had me more than 3 years ahead of my peers when I returned to Canada, and in the US, we were all laughably behind compared to a new classmate we had from China, or the people I later went to school with in Europe.
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.
I think the evidence would bare out that the qualifications you speak of are not necessary. A typical college educated adult can likely bring a child up to speed on what they need to know from K-12 education. We homeschool, and I don't remember all the nifty rules for short and long vowels, but the books we use have that information.
So, you're saying that all of those in our government responsible for determining what requirements are needed for public education are wrong, and that the decades and decades of experience they have in determining what should be required mean nothing? Loads of teachers dedicate themselves to educating themselves as teachers and taking on student loans for no reason and then never say anything about it? It's all just a big lie?
I teach and that more or less sums up my current view on the subject. Academic departments and journals of education produce a large amount of crap that later turns out to be poorly researched. This results in nonsense educational fads like learning styles, when there is no good evidence for them:
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.
The requirements are partly political, and accurately certifying competence for the number of people required to teach is not a solved problem.
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 think we agree that the requirements for primary education, as determined by government are important, but we disagree that the presence of trained educators is necessary for a child to learn those materials.
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.
I'd say that the best qualification they have is that they know their kids, and care deeply about them. They provide student/teacher ratios that are impossible to match.
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.
Since the post you replied to actually cited surveys which show that most home schooling occurs for religious reasons, yes, obviously your perception is down to the circles you run in. It's great that some people homeschool their kids well. Most don't.
No, because X is not static. Today, the religious component (the early adopters) represent a large portion of the entire group (and I would challenge this if you're looking at the homeschooling movement worldwide and not just in the US).
But the reality is that the homeschooling movement is dynamic:
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?
> "So, to your point, if atheists had been the early adopters in this case, you would support homeschooling."
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.
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.
Because X is not a problem. The problem is the problem. X is merely a vector.
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.
