The fact that homeschooling is referred to as indoctrination when compared with public schooling sickens me. I can't really think of many more poorly designed systems than (1) a popularly elected government, who (2) controls what its future voters are taught.
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?
Well, in my view, it's similar to how we manage a publicly elected government planning laws; we set up an adversarial system with different actors with different incentives all having a voice in the process. So federal government entities have a (admittedly, too loud IMO) voice, but so do local community school districts and the parents that go to their meetings and argue with them. This system acts to sort of filter whatever indoctrination is happening through the lens of all the people that were involved in the process. For better or worse, there is no such filter with home-schooling, it can be purely what the parents think best.
> How is the publicly elected government planning curriculum somehow less indoctrination than a parent doing the same?
Unless the parents' house has 200+ kids in it and equally numerous teachers, then their children will often be exposed to a wider range of viewpoints in a school.
I also don't fully understand how being publicly elected affects the curriculum. Reading into the curriculum being taught is very tinfoil-hat. Many teachers are still largely autonomous, and while they must meet certain standards, are free to teach cursory information of their choosing.
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?