Why do Republicans cripple their children with homeschooling?

[Skull Pilot]

You made a broad sweeping generalization without any backup.

`
Thank you Captain Obvious. It's called an "opinion."

And I showed you that it was wrong

 

[hadit]

Add to that an online curriculum with teachers to head homework and available for advice and help, and there are very few limits to what a child can learn at home. Heck, their school day is done in 2 or 3 hours.

Heck, their school day is done in 2 or 3 hours.

???

There is a lot of time in the school day devoted to things other than learning. Homeschooling teachers don't have 30 kids to wrangle and can focus their entire attention on a very small number, so the actual learning gets done a lot faster. Think of how long the average kid sits bored in class waiting for slower kids to catch up and the class clown to shut up long enough for the teacher to teach. Then add in the time between classes.

Clearly your classroom experience differs from mine and all the kids of whose I'm aware. Additionally, three hours is about the bare minimum of studying I and my kids did after the formal classroom instruction period ended.

I'm sure that there are efficiencies to be gained from homeschooling; however, I'm equally sure that there are efficiency declines as well. How the gains and losses net, I cannot say. What I can do is apply some basic assumptions and "guess-timate" how much time an extremely efficient home instruction process would take at a minimum.

Assumptions and premises:

• Assumption on Quantity of Classes per day (student and teacher workload): Going off the "old school" model (schedule) under which I was taught -- I'm using that because the more "matrixed" approach some schools today use is just harder to "add up" -- I'll assume a student takes 7 classes each day, each lasting 50 minutes for a total of 5.8 hours of formal instruction (I realize that one could teach one subject all day each day, or use some other scheduling approach, but the pedagogical sagacity of doing so with young children is dubious at best):
  • Math (up to precalculus)
  • Science (biology, chemistry and physics)
  • History (American and Western Civilization)
  • English (composition and literature)
  • Foreign language (modern; grammar and literature)
  • Theology/comparative religion alternated with P.E.
  • Some other class: classical language, computer science, art, music, shop, economics, second math, second science, second history, etc.
• Premise -- Instruction: College classes are conducted such that nearly the entirety of the lecture is used for formal instruction that, for the most part, happens without interruption by students asking questions.
  • Assumption: For now, I'll assume a home instructor is able to achieve a "collegiate" degree of efficiency.
    • Constraint: I realize the likelihood of doing that with a young child, to say nothing of doing it in a home setting with the interruptions attendant to it and expecting one can cover content at that pace and expect a child to master it, is somewhere between slim and none, and "slim's train has left the platform," but let's just go with it anyway, at least for now.
  • Assumption: Because of the one-on-one setting, the instructor will be able to assign readings and problems targeted not only around what the student must learn, but s/he will be able to do so with greater efficiency whereby what s/he assigns is targeted at the areas where the student is weak and assign no or nearly no work that covers elements with which the student is strong.
    • Constraint: For this assumption to hold true, the instructor must, among other things:
      • Be prescient about the student's general and specific strengths and weaknesses (the child may not consistently make clear that they don't understand things, but for now I'll assume the kid does)
      • Be aware of the specific learning objectives/achievement their state requires.
      • For technical subject like math, science, computer science, economics, etc., know both the chosen textbooks and the subject matter to know what specific skill and techniques any given homework problem addresses.
• Premise -- Instruction: The objectives of home schooling is to provide the same degree of preparation as is conventional schooling:
  • Prepare a child for college or a vocation.
  • Teach a child so they master (i.e., get As) the content in a given course. (That a child legitimately earn anything other than As in a one-on-one teaching setting shouldn't even be possible, but for completeness sake, I've mentioned it.)
  • Teach a child so the master the non-explicit "content"/learning objectives for a given course.
    
    For example, math, along with teaching math operations also teaches structured logical thought processes (deductive reasoning and abductive solutioning). History teaches about wars, kings and queens, but it also builds a student's adroitness for analyzing events and forming strong arguments about cause and effect (inductive and abductive reasoning), along with supplementing writing skills.
    • Develop sound critical thinking thinking skills with regard to linear (basic) dilemma analysis and solving. (K through junior high)
    • Develop sound critical thinking skills with regard to non-linear (complex) dilemma analysis and solving. (high school)
    • Develop collaboration skills.
    • Develop leadership and "being led" skills.
• Premise -- Student workload: Home schooled students must read the chapters in their textbooks just as must any student.
  • Assumption -- Student workload Homeschooled students have homework amounting to an average of at least 30 minutes per class per day, thus about 3.5 hours minimum per day. By the time they get to high school, that increases to something around 45 minutes to hour per class per day. That could be reading chapters in their texts, performing research for projects/papers, rehearsing a piece of music, solving assigned problems, reading supplemental materials/content, etc. (I'll grant that this level of workload doesn't come about until junior high. For younger students, I'd put it at about two hours every other day, or six hours per week.)
    
    From my own experience, the 3.5 to 7 hours of daily outside-of-class studying, for a total of somewhere between about 18 hours and 35 hours per week, will be spread out over seven days. Regardless of how one apportions the workload, the work still must be done.

Though the above is but a very high-level take on what has to be accomplished, I think it's absurd to think homeschooling will produce enough efficiency for a school day to be done in two or three hours. Even teaching with the extreme efficiency, for a child, of a college course, one's going to need 3.5 hours to perform the formal instruction. The student's school day isn't, however, done after the explicit instruction is done.

Heck, their school day is done in 2 or 3 hours.

Even not considering your assertion with the structure I have above, anyone can tell you that one cannot teach a chapter of "whatever" in 25 minutes. Think about how much time it takes to teach a young child long division or to teach a junior high schooler a simple algebraic theorem. Some concepts don't need much discussion; few kids need more than a single mention of, say, the commutative property of addition and multiplication. Nevermind that part of teaching involves imbuing the child with the skill to know when to apply a given concept/tool and when not to, in other words, teaching the importance and application of context. That is what takes time, more than 25 minutes. (Judging by how often people I observe here, as well as among the general public, completely disregard context, I'd say some people need sixty-plus years to master the importance, role and application of context.)

You don't have to teach every subject every day. You can make Tuesday, for example, math day and focus on that. You can make a lot of progress when you have that kind of time and flexibility.

First, even taking that approach does not obviate the need to invest the same basic quantity of time. That approach merely addresses how the time is used on any given day.

I anticipated your saying that. It's why I included the following parenthetical remark:

I realize that one could teach one subject all day each day, or use some other scheduling approach, but the pedagogical sagacity of doing so with young children is dubious at best

So, now that you have made the remark, I bid you to soundly address how you can be sure to overcome the pedagogical shortcomings of a disjointed approach to teaching a continuous topic to young learners. Conventional schools could use the "one subject per day" approach, but they don't because young students need the consistency and continuity of there not being long gaps between their encounters with a given subject. The bigger the temporal gap, the more they forget, thus the more, or more in depth, the teacher must review at the start of the class. Having to do that reduces the efficiency gains that you are specifically trying to argue exist in a homeschool setting.

Forgetting details and whatnot is not unique to children. Surely you've been part of a group or panel, or even worked on something on your own, whereby you observed that a bit of refreshing is needed after a week long gap in seeing the material? For adults, the refresher can be pretty quick, perhaps five or ten minutes, because an adult's retention capabilities are different, bolstered as they are by voluminous amounts of prior experience children have yet to acquire, but for a student the same is not so. Moreover, along with learning content, students, particularly (ideally?) those below the tenth grade, are learning how to learn, learning how they specifically learn best. (Having raised four kids, I can say too that they way one's child learns best may or may not be the way the parent learned best.) Thus, not only is forgetting not unique to kids, it's a more profound phenomenon. One think of it thus: it's a hell of a lot easier to forget that which one has only barely, if at all, mastered/learned.

In addition to the retention challenge, one must also overcome the fact that people generally don't have attention spans that run for 3.5 hours. I'm not saying one must teach a given topic "straight through" for 3.5 hours, but whether one does or doesn't, with a child, one's going to have to remind them of stuff from the beginning of the instruction session, thus cutting into that "maximum efficiency" goal. Moreover, if one breaks it up into several sessions over the course of a day, well, so much for your two to three hour school day. Remember, you're the one, not I, who's asserted that a homeschooling environment is markedly more efficient and less time consuming than is conventional school setting.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades. As the students mature, of course they spend more time studying. It has been the experience, however, of many home schoolers, that, on average, they need far less time "in school". Of course their learning doesn't stop just because they put the books away.

 

[usmbguest5318]

???

There is a lot of time in the school day devoted to things other than learning. Homeschooling teachers don't have 30 kids to wrangle and can focus their entire attention on a very small number, so the actual learning gets done a lot faster. Think of how long the average kid sits bored in class waiting for slower kids to catch up and the class clown to shut up long enough for the teacher to teach. Then add in the time between classes.

Clearly your classroom experience differs from mine and all the kids of whose I'm aware. Additionally, three hours is about the bare minimum of studying I and my kids did after the formal classroom instruction period ended.

I'm sure that there are efficiencies to be gained from homeschooling; however, I'm equally sure that there are efficiency declines as well. How the gains and losses net, I cannot say. What I can do is apply some basic assumptions and "guess-timate" how much time an extremely efficient home instruction process would take at a minimum.

Assumptions and premises:

• Assumption on Quantity of Classes per day (student and teacher workload): Going off the "old school" model (schedule) under which I was taught -- I'm using that because the more "matrixed" approach some schools today use is just harder to "add up" -- I'll assume a student takes 7 classes each day, each lasting 50 minutes for a total of 5.8 hours of formal instruction (I realize that one could teach one subject all day each day, or use some other scheduling approach, but the pedagogical sagacity of doing so with young children is dubious at best):
  • Math (up to precalculus)
  • Science (biology, chemistry and physics)
  • History (American and Western Civilization)
  • English (composition and literature)
  • Foreign language (modern; grammar and literature)
  • Theology/comparative religion alternated with P.E.
  • Some other class: classical language, computer science, art, music, shop, economics, second math, second science, second history, etc.
• Premise -- Instruction: College classes are conducted such that nearly the entirety of the lecture is used for formal instruction that, for the most part, happens without interruption by students asking questions.
  • Assumption: For now, I'll assume a home instructor is able to achieve a "collegiate" degree of efficiency.
    • Constraint: I realize the likelihood of doing that with a young child, to say nothing of doing it in a home setting with the interruptions attendant to it and expecting one can cover content at that pace and expect a child to master it, is somewhere between slim and none, and "slim's train has left the platform," but let's just go with it anyway, at least for now.
  • Assumption: Because of the one-on-one setting, the instructor will be able to assign readings and problems targeted not only around what the student must learn, but s/he will be able to do so with greater efficiency whereby what s/he assigns is targeted at the areas where the student is weak and assign no or nearly no work that covers elements with which the student is strong.
    • Constraint: For this assumption to hold true, the instructor must, among other things:
      • Be prescient about the student's general and specific strengths and weaknesses (the child may not consistently make clear that they don't understand things, but for now I'll assume the kid does)
      • Be aware of the specific learning objectives/achievement their state requires.
      • For technical subject like math, science, computer science, economics, etc., know both the chosen textbooks and the subject matter to know what specific skill and techniques any given homework problem addresses.
• Premise -- Instruction: The objectives of home schooling is to provide the same degree of preparation as is conventional schooling:
  • Prepare a child for college or a vocation.
  • Teach a child so they master (i.e., get As) the content in a given course. (That a child legitimately earn anything other than As in a one-on-one teaching setting shouldn't even be possible, but for completeness sake, I've mentioned it.)
  • Teach a child so the master the non-explicit "content"/learning objectives for a given course.
    
    For example, math, along with teaching math operations also teaches structured logical thought processes (deductive reasoning and abductive solutioning). History teaches about wars, kings and queens, but it also builds a student's adroitness for analyzing events and forming strong arguments about cause and effect (inductive and abductive reasoning), along with supplementing writing skills.
    • Develop sound critical thinking thinking skills with regard to linear (basic) dilemma analysis and solving. (K through junior high)
    • Develop sound critical thinking skills with regard to non-linear (complex) dilemma analysis and solving. (high school)
    • Develop collaboration skills.
    • Develop leadership and "being led" skills.
• Premise -- Student workload: Home schooled students must read the chapters in their textbooks just as must any student.
  • Assumption -- Student workload Homeschooled students have homework amounting to an average of at least 30 minutes per class per day, thus about 3.5 hours minimum per day. By the time they get to high school, that increases to something around 45 minutes to hour per class per day. That could be reading chapters in their texts, performing research for projects/papers, rehearsing a piece of music, solving assigned problems, reading supplemental materials/content, etc. (I'll grant that this level of workload doesn't come about until junior high. For younger students, I'd put it at about two hours every other day, or six hours per week.)
    
    From my own experience, the 3.5 to 7 hours of daily outside-of-class studying, for a total of somewhere between about 18 hours and 35 hours per week, will be spread out over seven days. Regardless of how one apportions the workload, the work still must be done.

Though the above is but a very high-level take on what has to be accomplished, I think it's absurd to think homeschooling will produce enough efficiency for a school day to be done in two or three hours. Even teaching with the extreme efficiency, for a child, of a college course, one's going to need 3.5 hours to perform the formal instruction. The student's school day isn't, however, done after the explicit instruction is done.

Heck, their school day is done in 2 or 3 hours.

Even not considering your assertion with the structure I have above, anyone can tell you that one cannot teach a chapter of "whatever" in 25 minutes. Think about how much time it takes to teach a young child long division or to teach a junior high schooler a simple algebraic theorem. Some concepts don't need much discussion; few kids need more than a single mention of, say, the commutative property of addition and multiplication. Nevermind that part of teaching involves imbuing the child with the skill to know when to apply a given concept/tool and when not to, in other words, teaching the importance and application of context. That is what takes time, more than 25 minutes. (Judging by how often people I observe here, as well as among the general public, completely disregard context, I'd say some people need sixty-plus years to master the importance, role and application of context.)

You don't have to teach every subject every day. You can make Tuesday, for example, math day and focus on that. You can make a lot of progress when you have that kind of time and flexibility.

First, even taking that approach does not obviate the need to invest the same basic quantity of time. That approach merely addresses how the time is used on any given day.

I anticipated your saying that. It's why I included the following parenthetical remark:

I realize that one could teach one subject all day each day, or use some other scheduling approach, but the pedagogical sagacity of doing so with young children is dubious at best

So, now that you have made the remark, I bid you to soundly address how you can be sure to overcome the pedagogical shortcomings of a disjointed approach to teaching a continuous topic to young learners. Conventional schools could use the "one subject per day" approach, but they don't because young students need the consistency and continuity of there not being long gaps between their encounters with a given subject. The bigger the temporal gap, the more they forget, thus the more, or more in depth, the teacher must review at the start of the class. Having to do that reduces the efficiency gains that you are specifically trying to argue exist in a homeschool setting.

Forgetting details and whatnot is not unique to children. Surely you've been part of a group or panel, or even worked on something on your own, whereby you observed that a bit of refreshing is needed after a week long gap in seeing the material? For adults, the refresher can be pretty quick, perhaps five or ten minutes, because an adult's retention capabilities are different, bolstered as they are by voluminous amounts of prior experience children have yet to acquire, but for a student the same is not so. Moreover, along with learning content, students, particularly (ideally?) those below the tenth grade, are learning how to learn, learning how they specifically learn best. (Having raised four kids, I can say too that they way one's child learns best may or may not be the way the parent learned best.) Thus, not only is forgetting not unique to kids, it's a more profound phenomenon. One think of it thus: it's a hell of a lot easier to forget that which one has only barely, if at all, mastered/learned.

In addition to the retention challenge, one must also overcome the fact that people generally don't have attention spans that run for 3.5 hours. I'm not saying one must teach a given topic "straight through" for 3.5 hours, but whether one does or doesn't, with a child, one's going to have to remind them of stuff from the beginning of the instruction session, thus cutting into that "maximum efficiency" goal. Moreover, if one breaks it up into several sessions over the course of a day, well, so much for your two to three hour school day. Remember, you're the one, not I, who's asserted that a homeschooling environment is markedly more efficient and less time consuming than is conventional school setting.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades. As the students mature, of course they spend more time studying. It has been the experience, however, of many home schoolers, that, on average, they need far less time "in school". Of course their learning doesn't stop just because they put the books away.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades.

Let me be clear. I don't have a negative view of homeschooling. I'm merely aware of the challenges of doing it well. To be sure, it can be done well. Some two million parents homeschool their kids, but there are some 250 million parents in the country. It's thus not surprising that some subset of the two million who homeschool their kids do a fine job of it. That it can be done well -- with or without the temporal efficiencies you cite -- isn't really the or an issue. The issue is that if one does homeschool one's kids, if one does not do so with outstanding effect, the child is the loser. If one is committed to homeschooling, it's not as though one can change the school one's child attends so as to secure a more effective scholastic environment.

Yes, homeschooling from about kindergarten to middle (perhaps junior high) school is somewhat more time efficient than often is public schooling. It's a wholly different matter when one gets to the high school level.


I reached out to an educator acquaintance some time back to request some sample test questions from one of his American history classes. (I merely passed them on to a friend who was looking for such.) Here are some taken from various portions of the educator's class.

Answer the following questions by referring to the late-nineteenth-century photograph below by journalist Jacob Riis.
​

Conditions like those shown in the image contributed most directly to which of the following?
(A) The passage of laws restricting immigration to the United States
(B) An increase in Progressive reform activity
(C) A decline in efforts to Americanize immigrants
(D) The weakening of labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor

Advocates for individuals such as those shown in the image would have most likely agreed with which of the following perspectives?
(A) The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was justified.
(B) Capitalism, free of government regulation, would improve social conditions.
(C) Both wealth and poverty are the products of natural selection.
(D) Government should act to eliminate the worst abuses of industrial society.

The conditions shown in the image depict which of the following trends in the late nineteenth century?
(A) The growing gap between wealthy people and people living in poverty
(B) The rise of the settlement house and Populist movements
(C) The increased corruption in urban politics
(D) The migration of African Americans to the North

Essay questions:

• Evaluate the extent to which trans-Atlantic interactions fostered change in labor systems in the British North American colonies from 1600 to 1763.
• Evaluate the extent to which new technology fostered change in United States industry from 1865 to 1900.
• Evaluate the extent to which globalization fostered change in the United States economy from 1945 to 2000.

It may be that I grossly misunderstand/underestimate the average home school instructor, but I find it hard to construe that whatever time savings may accrue to the student and teacher in the K to junior school years do so sufficiently to counteract the vastly more involved lectures and study needed come the high school period of the home schooling process. Based, however, on the pervasive insipidity of much public discourse I hear -- both here on USMB and in the news and among public figures -- I don't think so.

I have no doubt that parents can learn and become apt instructors of content (explicit and "knock on") such as American history or anything else, and, obviously, some parents already have most or all the subject matter and contextual knowledge and skills needed to so. That said, among the folks I know well enough to presume they have the skills and knowledge to homeschool their kids, I can assure you that not one of them would do so. They wouldn't because doing so would force them to take a serious hit to their household income. For myself (I became a single parent many years ago when my wife passed), my capability and will to homeschool my kids would have had nothing to do with whether I did or didn't do so. My need to provide for them vastly outweighed any potential considerations of homeschooling them; I had to work.

 

[Windparadox]

And I showed you that it was wrong

`
`
Woosh!

 

[hadit]

There is a lot of time in the school day devoted to things other than learning. Homeschooling teachers don't have 30 kids to wrangle and can focus their entire attention on a very small number, so the actual learning gets done a lot faster. Think of how long the average kid sits bored in class waiting for slower kids to catch up and the class clown to shut up long enough for the teacher to teach. Then add in the time between classes.

Clearly your classroom experience differs from mine and all the kids of whose I'm aware. Additionally, three hours is about the bare minimum of studying I and my kids did after the formal classroom instruction period ended.

I'm sure that there are efficiencies to be gained from homeschooling; however, I'm equally sure that there are efficiency declines as well. How the gains and losses net, I cannot say. What I can do is apply some basic assumptions and "guess-timate" how much time an extremely efficient home instruction process would take at a minimum.

Assumptions and premises:

• Assumption on Quantity of Classes per day (student and teacher workload): Going off the "old school" model (schedule) under which I was taught -- I'm using that because the more "matrixed" approach some schools today use is just harder to "add up" -- I'll assume a student takes 7 classes each day, each lasting 50 minutes for a total of 5.8 hours of formal instruction (I realize that one could teach one subject all day each day, or use some other scheduling approach, but the pedagogical sagacity of doing so with young children is dubious at best):
  • Math (up to precalculus)
  • Science (biology, chemistry and physics)
  • History (American and Western Civilization)
  • English (composition and literature)
  • Foreign language (modern; grammar and literature)
  • Theology/comparative religion alternated with P.E.
  • Some other class: classical language, computer science, art, music, shop, economics, second math, second science, second history, etc.
• Premise -- Instruction: College classes are conducted such that nearly the entirety of the lecture is used for formal instruction that, for the most part, happens without interruption by students asking questions.
  • Assumption: For now, I'll assume a home instructor is able to achieve a "collegiate" degree of efficiency.
    • Constraint: I realize the likelihood of doing that with a young child, to say nothing of doing it in a home setting with the interruptions attendant to it and expecting one can cover content at that pace and expect a child to master it, is somewhere between slim and none, and "slim's train has left the platform," but let's just go with it anyway, at least for now.
  • Assumption: Because of the one-on-one setting, the instructor will be able to assign readings and problems targeted not only around what the student must learn, but s/he will be able to do so with greater efficiency whereby what s/he assigns is targeted at the areas where the student is weak and assign no or nearly no work that covers elements with which the student is strong.
    • Constraint: For this assumption to hold true, the instructor must, among other things:
      • Be prescient about the student's general and specific strengths and weaknesses (the child may not consistently make clear that they don't understand things, but for now I'll assume the kid does)
      • Be aware of the specific learning objectives/achievement their state requires.
      • For technical subject like math, science, computer science, economics, etc., know both the chosen textbooks and the subject matter to know what specific skill and techniques any given homework problem addresses.
• Premise -- Instruction: The objectives of home schooling is to provide the same degree of preparation as is conventional schooling:
  • Prepare a child for college or a vocation.
  • Teach a child so they master (i.e., get As) the content in a given course. (That a child legitimately earn anything other than As in a one-on-one teaching setting shouldn't even be possible, but for completeness sake, I've mentioned it.)
  • Teach a child so the master the non-explicit "content"/learning objectives for a given course.
    
    For example, math, along with teaching math operations also teaches structured logical thought processes (deductive reasoning and abductive solutioning). History teaches about wars, kings and queens, but it also builds a student's adroitness for analyzing events and forming strong arguments about cause and effect (inductive and abductive reasoning), along with supplementing writing skills.
    • Develop sound critical thinking thinking skills with regard to linear (basic) dilemma analysis and solving. (K through junior high)
    • Develop sound critical thinking skills with regard to non-linear (complex) dilemma analysis and solving. (high school)
    • Develop collaboration skills.
    • Develop leadership and "being led" skills.
• Premise -- Student workload: Home schooled students must read the chapters in their textbooks just as must any student.
  • Assumption -- Student workload Homeschooled students have homework amounting to an average of at least 30 minutes per class per day, thus about 3.5 hours minimum per day. By the time they get to high school, that increases to something around 45 minutes to hour per class per day. That could be reading chapters in their texts, performing research for projects/papers, rehearsing a piece of music, solving assigned problems, reading supplemental materials/content, etc. (I'll grant that this level of workload doesn't come about until junior high. For younger students, I'd put it at about two hours every other day, or six hours per week.)
    
    From my own experience, the 3.5 to 7 hours of daily outside-of-class studying, for a total of somewhere between about 18 hours and 35 hours per week, will be spread out over seven days. Regardless of how one apportions the workload, the work still must be done.

Though the above is but a very high-level take on what has to be accomplished, I think it's absurd to think homeschooling will produce enough efficiency for a school day to be done in two or three hours. Even teaching with the extreme efficiency, for a child, of a college course, one's going to need 3.5 hours to perform the formal instruction. The student's school day isn't, however, done after the explicit instruction is done.

Heck, their school day is done in 2 or 3 hours.

Even not considering your assertion with the structure I have above, anyone can tell you that one cannot teach a chapter of "whatever" in 25 minutes. Think about how much time it takes to teach a young child long division or to teach a junior high schooler a simple algebraic theorem. Some concepts don't need much discussion; few kids need more than a single mention of, say, the commutative property of addition and multiplication. Nevermind that part of teaching involves imbuing the child with the skill to know when to apply a given concept/tool and when not to, in other words, teaching the importance and application of context. That is what takes time, more than 25 minutes. (Judging by how often people I observe here, as well as among the general public, completely disregard context, I'd say some people need sixty-plus years to master the importance, role and application of context.)

You don't have to teach every subject every day. You can make Tuesday, for example, math day and focus on that. You can make a lot of progress when you have that kind of time and flexibility.

First, even taking that approach does not obviate the need to invest the same basic quantity of time. That approach merely addresses how the time is used on any given day.

I anticipated your saying that. It's why I included the following parenthetical remark:

I realize that one could teach one subject all day each day, or use some other scheduling approach, but the pedagogical sagacity of doing so with young children is dubious at best

So, now that you have made the remark, I bid you to soundly address how you can be sure to overcome the pedagogical shortcomings of a disjointed approach to teaching a continuous topic to young learners. Conventional schools could use the "one subject per day" approach, but they don't because young students need the consistency and continuity of there not being long gaps between their encounters with a given subject. The bigger the temporal gap, the more they forget, thus the more, or more in depth, the teacher must review at the start of the class. Having to do that reduces the efficiency gains that you are specifically trying to argue exist in a homeschool setting.

Forgetting details and whatnot is not unique to children. Surely you've been part of a group or panel, or even worked on something on your own, whereby you observed that a bit of refreshing is needed after a week long gap in seeing the material? For adults, the refresher can be pretty quick, perhaps five or ten minutes, because an adult's retention capabilities are different, bolstered as they are by voluminous amounts of prior experience children have yet to acquire, but for a student the same is not so. Moreover, along with learning content, students, particularly (ideally?) those below the tenth grade, are learning how to learn, learning how they specifically learn best. (Having raised four kids, I can say too that they way one's child learns best may or may not be the way the parent learned best.) Thus, not only is forgetting not unique to kids, it's a more profound phenomenon. One think of it thus: it's a hell of a lot easier to forget that which one has only barely, if at all, mastered/learned.

In addition to the retention challenge, one must also overcome the fact that people generally don't have attention spans that run for 3.5 hours. I'm not saying one must teach a given topic "straight through" for 3.5 hours, but whether one does or doesn't, with a child, one's going to have to remind them of stuff from the beginning of the instruction session, thus cutting into that "maximum efficiency" goal. Moreover, if one breaks it up into several sessions over the course of a day, well, so much for your two to three hour school day. Remember, you're the one, not I, who's asserted that a homeschooling environment is markedly more efficient and less time consuming than is conventional school setting.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades. As the students mature, of course they spend more time studying. It has been the experience, however, of many home schoolers, that, on average, they need far less time "in school". Of course their learning doesn't stop just because they put the books away.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades.

Let me be clear. I don't have a negative view of homeschooling. I'm merely aware of the challenges of doing it well. To be sure, it can be done well. Some two million parents homeschool their kids, but there are some 250 million parents in the country. It's thus not surprising that some subset of the two million who homeschool their kids do a fine job of it. That it can be done well -- with or without the temporal efficiencies you cite -- isn't really the or an issue. The issue is that if one does homeschool one's kids, if one does not do so with outstanding effect, the child is the loser. If one is committed to homeschooling, it's not as though one can change the school one's child attends so as to secure a more effective scholastic environment.

Yes, homeschooling from about kindergarten to middle (perhaps junior high) school is somewhat more time efficient than often is public schooling. It's a wholly different matter when one gets to the high school level.


I reached out to an educator acquaintance some time back to request some sample test questions from one of his American history classes. (I merely passed them on to a friend who was looking for such.) Here are some taken from various portions of the educator's class.

Answer the following questions by referring to the late-nineteenth-century photograph below by journalist Jacob Riis.
​

Conditions like those shown in the image contributed most directly to which of the following?
(A) The passage of laws restricting immigration to the United States
(B) An increase in Progressive reform activity
(C) A decline in efforts to Americanize immigrants
(D) The weakening of labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor

Advocates for individuals such as those shown in the image would have most likely agreed with which of the following perspectives?
(A) The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was justified.
(B) Capitalism, free of government regulation, would improve social conditions.
(C) Both wealth and poverty are the products of natural selection.
(D) Government should act to eliminate the worst abuses of industrial society.

The conditions shown in the image depict which of the following trends in the late nineteenth century?
(A) The growing gap between wealthy people and people living in poverty
(B) The rise of the settlement house and Populist movements
(C) The increased corruption in urban politics
(D) The migration of African Americans to the North

Essay questions:

• Evaluate the extent to which trans-Atlantic interactions fostered change in labor systems in the British North American colonies from 1600 to 1763.
• Evaluate the extent to which new technology fostered change in United States industry from 1865 to 1900.
• Evaluate the extent to which globalization fostered change in the United States economy from 1945 to 2000.

It may be that I grossly misunderstand/underestimate the average home school instructor, but I find it hard to construe that whatever time savings may accrue to the student and teacher in the K to junior school years do so sufficiently to counteract the vastly more involved lectures and study needed come the high school period of the home schooling process. Based, however, on the pervasive insipidity of much public discourse I hear -- both here on USMB and in the news and among public figures -- I don't think so.

I have no doubt that parents can learn and become apt instructors of content (explicit and "knock on") such as American history or anything else, and, obviously, some parents already have most or all the subject matter and contextual knowledge and skills needed to so. That said, among the folks I know well enough to presume they have the skills and knowledge to homeschool their kids, I can assure you that not one of them would do so. They wouldn't because doing so would force them to take a serious hit to their household income. For myself (I became a single parent many years ago when my wife passed), my capability and will to homeschool my kids would have had nothing to do with whether I did or didn't do so. My need to provide for them vastly outweighed any potential considerations of homeschooling them; I had to work.

I understand that. Sorry to hear you lost your wife. That had to be devastating. You are correct that home schooling is serious business and that parents have to know what they're getting into. In our case, an online curriculum helped tremendously. Even though both my wife and I have college degrees, it was helpful to have teachers available for subjects with which we were not as familiar.

 

[deanrd]

Clearly your classroom experience differs from mine and all the kids of whose I'm aware. Additionally, three hours is about the bare minimum of studying I and my kids did after the formal classroom instruction period ended.

I'm sure that there are efficiencies to be gained from homeschooling; however, I'm equally sure that there are efficiency declines as well. How the gains and losses net, I cannot say. What I can do is apply some basic assumptions and "guess-timate" how much time an extremely efficient home instruction process would take at a minimum.

Assumptions and premises:

• Assumption on Quantity of Classes per day (student and teacher workload): Going off the "old school" model (schedule) under which I was taught -- I'm using that because the more "matrixed" approach some schools today use is just harder to "add up" -- I'll assume a student takes 7 classes each day, each lasting 50 minutes for a total of 5.8 hours of formal instruction (I realize that one could teach one subject all day each day, or use some other scheduling approach, but the pedagogical sagacity of doing so with young children is dubious at best):
  • Math (up to precalculus)
  • Science (biology, chemistry and physics)
  • History (American and Western Civilization)
  • English (composition and literature)
  • Foreign language (modern; grammar and literature)
  • Theology/comparative religion alternated with P.E.
  • Some other class: classical language, computer science, art, music, shop, economics, second math, second science, second history, etc.
• Premise -- Instruction: College classes are conducted such that nearly the entirety of the lecture is used for formal instruction that, for the most part, happens without interruption by students asking questions.
  • Assumption: For now, I'll assume a home instructor is able to achieve a "collegiate" degree of efficiency.
    • Constraint: I realize the likelihood of doing that with a young child, to say nothing of doing it in a home setting with the interruptions attendant to it and expecting one can cover content at that pace and expect a child to master it, is somewhere between slim and none, and "slim's train has left the platform," but let's just go with it anyway, at least for now.
  • Assumption: Because of the one-on-one setting, the instructor will be able to assign readings and problems targeted not only around what the student must learn, but s/he will be able to do so with greater efficiency whereby what s/he assigns is targeted at the areas where the student is weak and assign no or nearly no work that covers elements with which the student is strong.
    • Constraint: For this assumption to hold true, the instructor must, among other things:
      • Be prescient about the student's general and specific strengths and weaknesses (the child may not consistently make clear that they don't understand things, but for now I'll assume the kid does)
      • Be aware of the specific learning objectives/achievement their state requires.
      • For technical subject like math, science, computer science, economics, etc., know both the chosen textbooks and the subject matter to know what specific skill and techniques any given homework problem addresses.
• Premise -- Instruction: The objectives of home schooling is to provide the same degree of preparation as is conventional schooling:
  • Prepare a child for college or a vocation.
  • Teach a child so they master (i.e., get As) the content in a given course. (That a child legitimately earn anything other than As in a one-on-one teaching setting shouldn't even be possible, but for completeness sake, I've mentioned it.)
  • Teach a child so the master the non-explicit "content"/learning objectives for a given course.
    
    For example, math, along with teaching math operations also teaches structured logical thought processes (deductive reasoning and abductive solutioning). History teaches about wars, kings and queens, but it also builds a student's adroitness for analyzing events and forming strong arguments about cause and effect (inductive and abductive reasoning), along with supplementing writing skills.
    • Develop sound critical thinking thinking skills with regard to linear (basic) dilemma analysis and solving. (K through junior high)
    • Develop sound critical thinking skills with regard to non-linear (complex) dilemma analysis and solving. (high school)
    • Develop collaboration skills.
    • Develop leadership and "being led" skills.
• Premise -- Student workload: Home schooled students must read the chapters in their textbooks just as must any student.
  • Assumption -- Student workload Homeschooled students have homework amounting to an average of at least 30 minutes per class per day, thus about 3.5 hours minimum per day. By the time they get to high school, that increases to something around 45 minutes to hour per class per day. That could be reading chapters in their texts, performing research for projects/papers, rehearsing a piece of music, solving assigned problems, reading supplemental materials/content, etc. (I'll grant that this level of workload doesn't come about until junior high. For younger students, I'd put it at about two hours every other day, or six hours per week.)
    
    From my own experience, the 3.5 to 7 hours of daily outside-of-class studying, for a total of somewhere between about 18 hours and 35 hours per week, will be spread out over seven days. Regardless of how one apportions the workload, the work still must be done.

Though the above is but a very high-level take on what has to be accomplished, I think it's absurd to think homeschooling will produce enough efficiency for a school day to be done in two or three hours. Even teaching with the extreme efficiency, for a child, of a college course, one's going to need 3.5 hours to perform the formal instruction. The student's school day isn't, however, done after the explicit instruction is done.

​

Even not considering your assertion with the structure I have above, anyone can tell you that one cannot teach a chapter of "whatever" in 25 minutes. Think about how much time it takes to teach a young child long division or to teach a junior high schooler a simple algebraic theorem. Some concepts don't need much discussion; few kids need more than a single mention of, say, the commutative property of addition and multiplication. Nevermind that part of teaching involves imbuing the child with the skill to know when to apply a given concept/tool and when not to, in other words, teaching the importance and application of context. That is what takes time, more than 25 minutes. (Judging by how often people I observe here, as well as among the general public, completely disregard context, I'd say some people need sixty-plus years to master the importance, role and application of context.)

You don't have to teach every subject every day. You can make Tuesday, for example, math day and focus on that. You can make a lot of progress when you have that kind of time and flexibility.

First, even taking that approach does not obviate the need to invest the same basic quantity of time. That approach merely addresses how the time is used on any given day.

I anticipated your saying that. It's why I included the following parenthetical remark:

I realize that one could teach one subject all day each day, or use some other scheduling approach, but the pedagogical sagacity of doing so with young children is dubious at best

So, now that you have made the remark, I bid you to soundly address how you can be sure to overcome the pedagogical shortcomings of a disjointed approach to teaching a continuous topic to young learners. Conventional schools could use the "one subject per day" approach, but they don't because young students need the consistency and continuity of there not being long gaps between their encounters with a given subject. The bigger the temporal gap, the more they forget, thus the more, or more in depth, the teacher must review at the start of the class. Having to do that reduces the efficiency gains that you are specifically trying to argue exist in a homeschool setting.

Forgetting details and whatnot is not unique to children. Surely you've been part of a group or panel, or even worked on something on your own, whereby you observed that a bit of refreshing is needed after a week long gap in seeing the material? For adults, the refresher can be pretty quick, perhaps five or ten minutes, because an adult's retention capabilities are different, bolstered as they are by voluminous amounts of prior experience children have yet to acquire, but for a student the same is not so. Moreover, along with learning content, students, particularly (ideally?) those below the tenth grade, are learning how to learn, learning how they specifically learn best. (Having raised four kids, I can say too that they way one's child learns best may or may not be the way the parent learned best.) Thus, not only is forgetting not unique to kids, it's a more profound phenomenon. One think of it thus: it's a hell of a lot easier to forget that which one has only barely, if at all, mastered/learned.

In addition to the retention challenge, one must also overcome the fact that people generally don't have attention spans that run for 3.5 hours. I'm not saying one must teach a given topic "straight through" for 3.5 hours, but whether one does or doesn't, with a child, one's going to have to remind them of stuff from the beginning of the instruction session, thus cutting into that "maximum efficiency" goal. Moreover, if one breaks it up into several sessions over the course of a day, well, so much for your two to three hour school day. Remember, you're the one, not I, who's asserted that a homeschooling environment is markedly more efficient and less time consuming than is conventional school setting.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades. As the students mature, of course they spend more time studying. It has been the experience, however, of many home schoolers, that, on average, they need far less time "in school". Of course their learning doesn't stop just because they put the books away.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades.

Let me be clear. I don't have a negative view of homeschooling. I'm merely aware of the challenges of doing it well. To be sure, it can be done well. Some two million parents homeschool their kids, but there are some 250 million parents in the country. It's thus not surprising that some subset of the two million who homeschool their kids do a fine job of it. That it can be done well -- with or without the temporal efficiencies you cite -- isn't really the or an issue. The issue is that if one does homeschool one's kids, if one does not do so with outstanding effect, the child is the loser. If one is committed to homeschooling, it's not as though one can change the school one's child attends so as to secure a more effective scholastic environment.

Yes, homeschooling from about kindergarten to middle (perhaps junior high) school is somewhat more time efficient than often is public schooling. It's a wholly different matter when one gets to the high school level.


I reached out to an educator acquaintance some time back to request some sample test questions from one of his American history classes. (I merely passed them on to a friend who was looking for such.) Here are some taken from various portions of the educator's class.

Answer the following questions by referring to the late-nineteenth-century photograph below by journalist Jacob Riis.
​

Conditions like those shown in the image contributed most directly to which of the following?
(A) The passage of laws restricting immigration to the United States
(B) An increase in Progressive reform activity
(C) A decline in efforts to Americanize immigrants
(D) The weakening of labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor

Advocates for individuals such as those shown in the image would have most likely agreed with which of the following perspectives?
(A) The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was justified.
(B) Capitalism, free of government regulation, would improve social conditions.
(C) Both wealth and poverty are the products of natural selection.
(D) Government should act to eliminate the worst abuses of industrial society.

The conditions shown in the image depict which of the following trends in the late nineteenth century?
(A) The growing gap between wealthy people and people living in poverty
(B) The rise of the settlement house and Populist movements
(C) The increased corruption in urban politics
(D) The migration of African Americans to the North

Essay questions:

• Evaluate the extent to which trans-Atlantic interactions fostered change in labor systems in the British North American colonies from 1600 to 1763.
• Evaluate the extent to which new technology fostered change in United States industry from 1865 to 1900.
• Evaluate the extent to which globalization fostered change in the United States economy from 1945 to 2000.

It may be that I grossly misunderstand/underestimate the average home school instructor, but I find it hard to construe that whatever time savings may accrue to the student and teacher in the K to junior school years do so sufficiently to counteract the vastly more involved lectures and study needed come the high school period of the home schooling process. Based, however, on the pervasive insipidity of much public discourse I hear -- both here on USMB and in the news and among public figures -- I don't think so.

I have no doubt that parents can learn and become apt instructors of content (explicit and "knock on") such as American history or anything else, and, obviously, some parents already have most or all the subject matter and contextual knowledge and skills needed to so. That said, among the folks I know well enough to presume they have the skills and knowledge to homeschool their kids, I can assure you that not one of them would do so. They wouldn't because doing so would force them to take a serious hit to their household income. For myself (I became a single parent many years ago when my wife passed), my capability and will to homeschool my kids would have had nothing to do with whether I did or didn't do so. My need to provide for them vastly outweighed any potential considerations of homeschooling them; I had to work.

I understand that. Sorry to hear you lost your wife. That had to be devastating. You are correct that home schooling is serious business and that parents have to know what they're getting into. In our case, an online curriculum helped tremendously. Even though both my wife and I have college degrees, it was helpful to have teachers available for subjects with which we were not as familiar.

Many right wingers feel they know all they need to know about science and math.,

Republican calls algebra "fuzzy math" for using letters with numbers.

 

[hadit]

You don't have to teach every subject every day. You can make Tuesday, for example, math day and focus on that. You can make a lot of progress when you have that kind of time and flexibility.

First, even taking that approach does not obviate the need to invest the same basic quantity of time. That approach merely addresses how the time is used on any given day.

I anticipated your saying that. It's why I included the following parenthetical remark:

I realize that one could teach one subject all day each day, or use some other scheduling approach, but the pedagogical sagacity of doing so with young children is dubious at best

So, now that you have made the remark, I bid you to soundly address how you can be sure to overcome the pedagogical shortcomings of a disjointed approach to teaching a continuous topic to young learners. Conventional schools could use the "one subject per day" approach, but they don't because young students need the consistency and continuity of there not being long gaps between their encounters with a given subject. The bigger the temporal gap, the more they forget, thus the more, or more in depth, the teacher must review at the start of the class. Having to do that reduces the efficiency gains that you are specifically trying to argue exist in a homeschool setting.

Forgetting details and whatnot is not unique to children. Surely you've been part of a group or panel, or even worked on something on your own, whereby you observed that a bit of refreshing is needed after a week long gap in seeing the material? For adults, the refresher can be pretty quick, perhaps five or ten minutes, because an adult's retention capabilities are different, bolstered as they are by voluminous amounts of prior experience children have yet to acquire, but for a student the same is not so. Moreover, along with learning content, students, particularly (ideally?) those below the tenth grade, are learning how to learn, learning how they specifically learn best. (Having raised four kids, I can say too that they way one's child learns best may or may not be the way the parent learned best.) Thus, not only is forgetting not unique to kids, it's a more profound phenomenon. One think of it thus: it's a hell of a lot easier to forget that which one has only barely, if at all, mastered/learned.

In addition to the retention challenge, one must also overcome the fact that people generally don't have attention spans that run for 3.5 hours. I'm not saying one must teach a given topic "straight through" for 3.5 hours, but whether one does or doesn't, with a child, one's going to have to remind them of stuff from the beginning of the instruction session, thus cutting into that "maximum efficiency" goal. Moreover, if one breaks it up into several sessions over the course of a day, well, so much for your two to three hour school day. Remember, you're the one, not I, who's asserted that a homeschooling environment is markedly more efficient and less time consuming than is conventional school setting.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades. As the students mature, of course they spend more time studying. It has been the experience, however, of many home schoolers, that, on average, they need far less time "in school". Of course their learning doesn't stop just because they put the books away.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades.

Let me be clear. I don't have a negative view of homeschooling. I'm merely aware of the challenges of doing it well. To be sure, it can be done well. Some two million parents homeschool their kids, but there are some 250 million parents in the country. It's thus not surprising that some subset of the two million who homeschool their kids do a fine job of it. That it can be done well -- with or without the temporal efficiencies you cite -- isn't really the or an issue. The issue is that if one does homeschool one's kids, if one does not do so with outstanding effect, the child is the loser. If one is committed to homeschooling, it's not as though one can change the school one's child attends so as to secure a more effective scholastic environment.

Yes, homeschooling from about kindergarten to middle (perhaps junior high) school is somewhat more time efficient than often is public schooling. It's a wholly different matter when one gets to the high school level.


I reached out to an educator acquaintance some time back to request some sample test questions from one of his American history classes. (I merely passed them on to a friend who was looking for such.) Here are some taken from various portions of the educator's class.

Answer the following questions by referring to the late-nineteenth-century photograph below by journalist Jacob Riis.
​

Conditions like those shown in the image contributed most directly to which of the following?
(A) The passage of laws restricting immigration to the United States
(B) An increase in Progressive reform activity
(C) A decline in efforts to Americanize immigrants
(D) The weakening of labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor

Advocates for individuals such as those shown in the image would have most likely agreed with which of the following perspectives?
(A) The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was justified.
(B) Capitalism, free of government regulation, would improve social conditions.
(C) Both wealth and poverty are the products of natural selection.
(D) Government should act to eliminate the worst abuses of industrial society.

The conditions shown in the image depict which of the following trends in the late nineteenth century?
(A) The growing gap between wealthy people and people living in poverty
(B) The rise of the settlement house and Populist movements
(C) The increased corruption in urban politics
(D) The migration of African Americans to the North

Essay questions:

• Evaluate the extent to which trans-Atlantic interactions fostered change in labor systems in the British North American colonies from 1600 to 1763.
• Evaluate the extent to which new technology fostered change in United States industry from 1865 to 1900.
• Evaluate the extent to which globalization fostered change in the United States economy from 1945 to 2000.

It may be that I grossly misunderstand/underestimate the average home school instructor, but I find it hard to construe that whatever time savings may accrue to the student and teacher in the K to junior school years do so sufficiently to counteract the vastly more involved lectures and study needed come the high school period of the home schooling process. Based, however, on the pervasive insipidity of much public discourse I hear -- both here on USMB and in the news and among public figures -- I don't think so.

I have no doubt that parents can learn and become apt instructors of content (explicit and "knock on") such as American history or anything else, and, obviously, some parents already have most or all the subject matter and contextual knowledge and skills needed to so. That said, among the folks I know well enough to presume they have the skills and knowledge to homeschool their kids, I can assure you that not one of them would do so. They wouldn't because doing so would force them to take a serious hit to their household income. For myself (I became a single parent many years ago when my wife passed), my capability and will to homeschool my kids would have had nothing to do with whether I did or didn't do so. My need to provide for them vastly outweighed any potential considerations of homeschooling them; I had to work.

I understand that. Sorry to hear you lost your wife. That had to be devastating. You are correct that home schooling is serious business and that parents have to know what they're getting into. In our case, an online curriculum helped tremendously. Even though both my wife and I have college degrees, it was helpful to have teachers available for subjects with which we were not as familiar.

Many right wingers feel they know all they need to know about science and math.,

Republican calls algebra "fuzzy math" for using letters with numbers.

Irrelevant to the thread. Go away.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Sorry to hear you lost your wife.

Thank you.

 

[usmbguest5318]

Clearly your classroom experience differs from mine and all the kids of whose I'm aware. Additionally, three hours is about the bare minimum of studying I and my kids did after the formal classroom instruction period ended.

I'm sure that there are efficiencies to be gained from homeschooling; however, I'm equally sure that there are efficiency declines as well. How the gains and losses net, I cannot say. What I can do is apply some basic assumptions and "guess-timate" how much time an extremely efficient home instruction process would take at a minimum.

Assumptions and premises:

• Assumption on Quantity of Classes per day (student and teacher workload): Going off the "old school" model (schedule) under which I was taught -- I'm using that because the more "matrixed" approach some schools today use is just harder to "add up" -- I'll assume a student takes 7 classes each day, each lasting 50 minutes for a total of 5.8 hours of formal instruction (I realize that one could teach one subject all day each day, or use some other scheduling approach, but the pedagogical sagacity of doing so with young children is dubious at best):
  • Math (up to precalculus)
  • Science (biology, chemistry and physics)
  • History (American and Western Civilization)
  • English (composition and literature)
  • Foreign language (modern; grammar and literature)
  • Theology/comparative religion alternated with P.E.
  • Some other class: classical language, computer science, art, music, shop, economics, second math, second science, second history, etc.
• Premise -- Instruction: College classes are conducted such that nearly the entirety of the lecture is used for formal instruction that, for the most part, happens without interruption by students asking questions.
  • Assumption: For now, I'll assume a home instructor is able to achieve a "collegiate" degree of efficiency.
    • Constraint: I realize the likelihood of doing that with a young child, to say nothing of doing it in a home setting with the interruptions attendant to it and expecting one can cover content at that pace and expect a child to master it, is somewhere between slim and none, and "slim's train has left the platform," but let's just go with it anyway, at least for now.
  • Assumption: Because of the one-on-one setting, the instructor will be able to assign readings and problems targeted not only around what the student must learn, but s/he will be able to do so with greater efficiency whereby what s/he assigns is targeted at the areas where the student is weak and assign no or nearly no work that covers elements with which the student is strong.
    • Constraint: For this assumption to hold true, the instructor must, among other things:
      • Be prescient about the student's general and specific strengths and weaknesses (the child may not consistently make clear that they don't understand things, but for now I'll assume the kid does)
      • Be aware of the specific learning objectives/achievement their state requires.
      • For technical subject like math, science, computer science, economics, etc., know both the chosen textbooks and the subject matter to know what specific skill and techniques any given homework problem addresses.
• Premise -- Instruction: The objectives of home schooling is to provide the same degree of preparation as is conventional schooling:
  • Prepare a child for college or a vocation.
  • Teach a child so they master (i.e., get As) the content in a given course. (That a child legitimately earn anything other than As in a one-on-one teaching setting shouldn't even be possible, but for completeness sake, I've mentioned it.)
  • Teach a child so the master the non-explicit "content"/learning objectives for a given course.
    
    For example, math, along with teaching math operations also teaches structured logical thought processes (deductive reasoning and abductive solutioning). History teaches about wars, kings and queens, but it also builds a student's adroitness for analyzing events and forming strong arguments about cause and effect (inductive and abductive reasoning), along with supplementing writing skills.
    • Develop sound critical thinking thinking skills with regard to linear (basic) dilemma analysis and solving. (K through junior high)
    • Develop sound critical thinking skills with regard to non-linear (complex) dilemma analysis and solving. (high school)
    • Develop collaboration skills.
    • Develop leadership and "being led" skills.
• Premise -- Student workload: Home schooled students must read the chapters in their textbooks just as must any student.
  • Assumption -- Student workload Homeschooled students have homework amounting to an average of at least 30 minutes per class per day, thus about 3.5 hours minimum per day. By the time they get to high school, that increases to something around 45 minutes to hour per class per day. That could be reading chapters in their texts, performing research for projects/papers, rehearsing a piece of music, solving assigned problems, reading supplemental materials/content, etc. (I'll grant that this level of workload doesn't come about until junior high. For younger students, I'd put it at about two hours every other day, or six hours per week.)
    
    From my own experience, the 3.5 to 7 hours of daily outside-of-class studying, for a total of somewhere between about 18 hours and 35 hours per week, will be spread out over seven days. Regardless of how one apportions the workload, the work still must be done.

Though the above is but a very high-level take on what has to be accomplished, I think it's absurd to think homeschooling will produce enough efficiency for a school day to be done in two or three hours. Even teaching with the extreme efficiency, for a child, of a college course, one's going to need 3.5 hours to perform the formal instruction. The student's school day isn't, however, done after the explicit instruction is done.

​

Even not considering your assertion with the structure I have above, anyone can tell you that one cannot teach a chapter of "whatever" in 25 minutes. Think about how much time it takes to teach a young child long division or to teach a junior high schooler a simple algebraic theorem. Some concepts don't need much discussion; few kids need more than a single mention of, say, the commutative property of addition and multiplication. Nevermind that part of teaching involves imbuing the child with the skill to know when to apply a given concept/tool and when not to, in other words, teaching the importance and application of context. That is what takes time, more than 25 minutes. (Judging by how often people I observe here, as well as among the general public, completely disregard context, I'd say some people need sixty-plus years to master the importance, role and application of context.)

You don't have to teach every subject every day. You can make Tuesday, for example, math day and focus on that. You can make a lot of progress when you have that kind of time and flexibility.

First, even taking that approach does not obviate the need to invest the same basic quantity of time. That approach merely addresses how the time is used on any given day.

I anticipated your saying that. It's why I included the following parenthetical remark:

I realize that one could teach one subject all day each day, or use some other scheduling approach, but the pedagogical sagacity of doing so with young children is dubious at best

So, now that you have made the remark, I bid you to soundly address how you can be sure to overcome the pedagogical shortcomings of a disjointed approach to teaching a continuous topic to young learners. Conventional schools could use the "one subject per day" approach, but they don't because young students need the consistency and continuity of there not being long gaps between their encounters with a given subject. The bigger the temporal gap, the more they forget, thus the more, or more in depth, the teacher must review at the start of the class. Having to do that reduces the efficiency gains that you are specifically trying to argue exist in a homeschool setting.

Forgetting details and whatnot is not unique to children. Surely you've been part of a group or panel, or even worked on something on your own, whereby you observed that a bit of refreshing is needed after a week long gap in seeing the material? For adults, the refresher can be pretty quick, perhaps five or ten minutes, because an adult's retention capabilities are different, bolstered as they are by voluminous amounts of prior experience children have yet to acquire, but for a student the same is not so. Moreover, along with learning content, students, particularly (ideally?) those below the tenth grade, are learning how to learn, learning how they specifically learn best. (Having raised four kids, I can say too that they way one's child learns best may or may not be the way the parent learned best.) Thus, not only is forgetting not unique to kids, it's a more profound phenomenon. One think of it thus: it's a hell of a lot easier to forget that which one has only barely, if at all, mastered/learned.

In addition to the retention challenge, one must also overcome the fact that people generally don't have attention spans that run for 3.5 hours. I'm not saying one must teach a given topic "straight through" for 3.5 hours, but whether one does or doesn't, with a child, one's going to have to remind them of stuff from the beginning of the instruction session, thus cutting into that "maximum efficiency" goal. Moreover, if one breaks it up into several sessions over the course of a day, well, so much for your two to three hour school day. Remember, you're the one, not I, who's asserted that a homeschooling environment is markedly more efficient and less time consuming than is conventional school setting.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades. As the students mature, of course they spend more time studying. It has been the experience, however, of many home schoolers, that, on average, they need far less time "in school". Of course their learning doesn't stop just because they put the books away.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades.

Let me be clear. I don't have a negative view of homeschooling. I'm merely aware of the challenges of doing it well. To be sure, it can be done well. Some two million parents homeschool their kids, but there are some 250 million parents in the country. It's thus not surprising that some subset of the two million who homeschool their kids do a fine job of it. That it can be done well -- with or without the temporal efficiencies you cite -- isn't really the or an issue. The issue is that if one does homeschool one's kids, if one does not do so with outstanding effect, the child is the loser. If one is committed to homeschooling, it's not as though one can change the school one's child attends so as to secure a more effective scholastic environment.

Yes, homeschooling from about kindergarten to middle (perhaps junior high) school is somewhat more time efficient than often is public schooling. It's a wholly different matter when one gets to the high school level.


I reached out to an educator acquaintance some time back to request some sample test questions from one of his American history classes. (I merely passed them on to a friend who was looking for such.) Here are some taken from various portions of the educator's class.

Answer the following questions by referring to the late-nineteenth-century photograph below by journalist Jacob Riis.
​

Conditions like those shown in the image contributed most directly to which of the following?
(A) The passage of laws restricting immigration to the United States
(B) An increase in Progressive reform activity
(C) A decline in efforts to Americanize immigrants
(D) The weakening of labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor

Advocates for individuals such as those shown in the image would have most likely agreed with which of the following perspectives?
(A) The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was justified.
(B) Capitalism, free of government regulation, would improve social conditions.
(C) Both wealth and poverty are the products of natural selection.
(D) Government should act to eliminate the worst abuses of industrial society.

The conditions shown in the image depict which of the following trends in the late nineteenth century?
(A) The growing gap between wealthy people and people living in poverty
(B) The rise of the settlement house and Populist movements
(C) The increased corruption in urban politics
(D) The migration of African Americans to the North

Essay questions:

• Evaluate the extent to which trans-Atlantic interactions fostered change in labor systems in the British North American colonies from 1600 to 1763.
• Evaluate the extent to which new technology fostered change in United States industry from 1865 to 1900.
• Evaluate the extent to which globalization fostered change in the United States economy from 1945 to 2000.

It may be that I grossly misunderstand/underestimate the average home school instructor, but I find it hard to construe that whatever time savings may accrue to the student and teacher in the K to junior school years do so sufficiently to counteract the vastly more involved lectures and study needed come the high school period of the home schooling process. Based, however, on the pervasive insipidity of much public discourse I hear -- both here on USMB and in the news and among public figures -- I don't think so.

I have no doubt that parents can learn and become apt instructors of content (explicit and "knock on") such as American history or anything else, and, obviously, some parents already have most or all the subject matter and contextual knowledge and skills needed to so. That said, among the folks I know well enough to presume they have the skills and knowledge to homeschool their kids, I can assure you that not one of them would do so. They wouldn't because doing so would force them to take a serious hit to their household income. For myself (I became a single parent many years ago when my wife passed), my capability and will to homeschool my kids would have had nothing to do with whether I did or didn't do so. My need to provide for them vastly outweighed any potential considerations of homeschooling them; I had to work.

I understand that. Sorry to hear you lost your wife. That had to be devastating. You are correct that home schooling is serious business and that parents have to know what they're getting into. In our case, an online curriculum helped tremendously. Even though both my wife and I have college degrees, it was helpful to have teachers available for subjects with which we were not as familiar.

home schooling is serious business and that parents have to know what they're getting into. In our case, an online curriculum helped tremendously. Even though both my wife and I have college degrees, it was helpful to have teachers available for subjects with which we were not as familiar.

Indeed, it's my understanding, as goes one's odds of successfully homeschooling one's kids, that, as you and your wife did, adhering to a highly structured model for doing so greatly increases the quality of the outcomes parents and their children achieve. Efficaciously availing oneself of the resources available from the extant and available school system to supplement one's efforts to homeschool one's kids also is a key success factor. Indeed, for some scholastic activities, doing so is the only way success can be achieved.

Am I in a position to assert that homeschooling is the right or wrong, likely effective or ineffective course of action for any specific family/child? Other than my own, no. Am I in a position to evaluate whether one's stated reasons are good, bad, mediocre, ill fated, poorly considered, etc? To an extent, yes, but not entirely or always. What do I think about the very existence of the homeschooling option? I'm indifferent about it. I won't gripe about it being eliminated, but neither will I advocate that it be removed. It exists and I'm okay with that being so.

 

[usmbguest5318]

You don't have to teach every subject every day. You can make Tuesday, for example, math day and focus on that. You can make a lot of progress when you have that kind of time and flexibility.

First, even taking that approach does not obviate the need to invest the same basic quantity of time. That approach merely addresses how the time is used on any given day.

I anticipated your saying that. It's why I included the following parenthetical remark:

I realize that one could teach one subject all day each day, or use some other scheduling approach, but the pedagogical sagacity of doing so with young children is dubious at best

So, now that you have made the remark, I bid you to soundly address how you can be sure to overcome the pedagogical shortcomings of a disjointed approach to teaching a continuous topic to young learners. Conventional schools could use the "one subject per day" approach, but they don't because young students need the consistency and continuity of there not being long gaps between their encounters with a given subject. The bigger the temporal gap, the more they forget, thus the more, or more in depth, the teacher must review at the start of the class. Having to do that reduces the efficiency gains that you are specifically trying to argue exist in a homeschool setting.

Forgetting details and whatnot is not unique to children. Surely you've been part of a group or panel, or even worked on something on your own, whereby you observed that a bit of refreshing is needed after a week long gap in seeing the material? For adults, the refresher can be pretty quick, perhaps five or ten minutes, because an adult's retention capabilities are different, bolstered as they are by voluminous amounts of prior experience children have yet to acquire, but for a student the same is not so. Moreover, along with learning content, students, particularly (ideally?) those below the tenth grade, are learning how to learn, learning how they specifically learn best. (Having raised four kids, I can say too that they way one's child learns best may or may not be the way the parent learned best.) Thus, not only is forgetting not unique to kids, it's a more profound phenomenon. One think of it thus: it's a hell of a lot easier to forget that which one has only barely, if at all, mastered/learned.

In addition to the retention challenge, one must also overcome the fact that people generally don't have attention spans that run for 3.5 hours. I'm not saying one must teach a given topic "straight through" for 3.5 hours, but whether one does or doesn't, with a child, one's going to have to remind them of stuff from the beginning of the instruction session, thus cutting into that "maximum efficiency" goal. Moreover, if one breaks it up into several sessions over the course of a day, well, so much for your two to three hour school day. Remember, you're the one, not I, who's asserted that a homeschooling environment is markedly more efficient and less time consuming than is conventional school setting.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades. As the students mature, of course they spend more time studying. It has been the experience, however, of many home schoolers, that, on average, they need far less time "in school". Of course their learning doesn't stop just because they put the books away.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades.

Let me be clear. I don't have a negative view of homeschooling. I'm merely aware of the challenges of doing it well. To be sure, it can be done well. Some two million parents homeschool their kids, but there are some 250 million parents in the country. It's thus not surprising that some subset of the two million who homeschool their kids do a fine job of it. That it can be done well -- with or without the temporal efficiencies you cite -- isn't really the or an issue. The issue is that if one does homeschool one's kids, if one does not do so with outstanding effect, the child is the loser. If one is committed to homeschooling, it's not as though one can change the school one's child attends so as to secure a more effective scholastic environment.

Yes, homeschooling from about kindergarten to middle (perhaps junior high) school is somewhat more time efficient than often is public schooling. It's a wholly different matter when one gets to the high school level.


I reached out to an educator acquaintance some time back to request some sample test questions from one of his American history classes. (I merely passed them on to a friend who was looking for such.) Here are some taken from various portions of the educator's class.

Answer the following questions by referring to the late-nineteenth-century photograph below by journalist Jacob Riis.
​

Conditions like those shown in the image contributed most directly to which of the following?
(A) The passage of laws restricting immigration to the United States
(B) An increase in Progressive reform activity
(C) A decline in efforts to Americanize immigrants
(D) The weakening of labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor

Advocates for individuals such as those shown in the image would have most likely agreed with which of the following perspectives?
(A) The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was justified.
(B) Capitalism, free of government regulation, would improve social conditions.
(C) Both wealth and poverty are the products of natural selection.
(D) Government should act to eliminate the worst abuses of industrial society.

The conditions shown in the image depict which of the following trends in the late nineteenth century?
(A) The growing gap between wealthy people and people living in poverty
(B) The rise of the settlement house and Populist movements
(C) The increased corruption in urban politics
(D) The migration of African Americans to the North

Essay questions:

• Evaluate the extent to which trans-Atlantic interactions fostered change in labor systems in the British North American colonies from 1600 to 1763.
• Evaluate the extent to which new technology fostered change in United States industry from 1865 to 1900.
• Evaluate the extent to which globalization fostered change in the United States economy from 1945 to 2000.

It may be that I grossly misunderstand/underestimate the average home school instructor, but I find it hard to construe that whatever time savings may accrue to the student and teacher in the K to junior school years do so sufficiently to counteract the vastly more involved lectures and study needed come the high school period of the home schooling process. Based, however, on the pervasive insipidity of much public discourse I hear -- both here on USMB and in the news and among public figures -- I don't think so.

I have no doubt that parents can learn and become apt instructors of content (explicit and "knock on") such as American history or anything else, and, obviously, some parents already have most or all the subject matter and contextual knowledge and skills needed to so. That said, among the folks I know well enough to presume they have the skills and knowledge to homeschool their kids, I can assure you that not one of them would do so. They wouldn't because doing so would force them to take a serious hit to their household income. For myself (I became a single parent many years ago when my wife passed), my capability and will to homeschool my kids would have had nothing to do with whether I did or didn't do so. My need to provide for them vastly outweighed any potential considerations of homeschooling them; I had to work.

I understand that. Sorry to hear you lost your wife. That had to be devastating. You are correct that home schooling is serious business and that parents have to know what they're getting into. In our case, an online curriculum helped tremendously. Even though both my wife and I have college degrees, it was helpful to have teachers available for subjects with which we were not as familiar.

Many right wingers feel they know all they need to know about science and math.,

Republican calls algebra "fuzzy math" for using letters with numbers.

Many right wingers feel they know all they need to know about science and math.,

OT:

Facts do not cease to exist because they are ignored.
-- Aldous Huxley, Complete Essays 2, 1926-29​

As goes the formation and analysis of most public policy ideas and implementations, many people period do not know "all they need to know." Their state of ignorance in that regard does not, however, stop them from opining on such matters.

Being ignorant is not so much a shame as being unwilling to learn.
-- Benjamin Franklin​

 

[usmbguest5318]

First, even taking that approach does not obviate the need to invest the same basic quantity of time. That approach merely addresses how the time is used on any given day.

I anticipated your saying that. It's why I included the following parenthetical remark:

​

So, now that you have made the remark, I bid you to soundly address how you can be sure to overcome the pedagogical shortcomings of a disjointed approach to teaching a continuous topic to young learners. Conventional schools could use the "one subject per day" approach, but they don't because young students need the consistency and continuity of there not being long gaps between their encounters with a given subject. The bigger the temporal gap, the more they forget, thus the more, or more in depth, the teacher must review at the start of the class. Having to do that reduces the efficiency gains that you are specifically trying to argue exist in a homeschool setting.

Forgetting details and whatnot is not unique to children. Surely you've been part of a group or panel, or even worked on something on your own, whereby you observed that a bit of refreshing is needed after a week long gap in seeing the material? For adults, the refresher can be pretty quick, perhaps five or ten minutes, because an adult's retention capabilities are different, bolstered as they are by voluminous amounts of prior experience children have yet to acquire, but for a student the same is not so. Moreover, along with learning content, students, particularly (ideally?) those below the tenth grade, are learning how to learn, learning how they specifically learn best. (Having raised four kids, I can say too that they way one's child learns best may or may not be the way the parent learned best.) Thus, not only is forgetting not unique to kids, it's a more profound phenomenon. One think of it thus: it's a hell of a lot easier to forget that which one has only barely, if at all, mastered/learned.

In addition to the retention challenge, one must also overcome the fact that people generally don't have attention spans that run for 3.5 hours. I'm not saying one must teach a given topic "straight through" for 3.5 hours, but whether one does or doesn't, with a child, one's going to have to remind them of stuff from the beginning of the instruction session, thus cutting into that "maximum efficiency" goal. Moreover, if one breaks it up into several sessions over the course of a day, well, so much for your two to three hour school day. Remember, you're the one, not I, who's asserted that a homeschooling environment is markedly more efficient and less time consuming than is conventional school setting.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades. As the students mature, of course they spend more time studying. It has been the experience, however, of many home schoolers, that, on average, they need far less time "in school". Of course their learning doesn't stop just because they put the books away.

I'm saying that home schooling parents have found that they do not need to invest the same amounts of time that traditional schools, especially in the younger grades.

Let me be clear. I don't have a negative view of homeschooling. I'm merely aware of the challenges of doing it well. To be sure, it can be done well. Some two million parents homeschool their kids, but there are some 250 million parents in the country. It's thus not surprising that some subset of the two million who homeschool their kids do a fine job of it. That it can be done well -- with or without the temporal efficiencies you cite -- isn't really the or an issue. The issue is that if one does homeschool one's kids, if one does not do so with outstanding effect, the child is the loser. If one is committed to homeschooling, it's not as though one can change the school one's child attends so as to secure a more effective scholastic environment.

Yes, homeschooling from about kindergarten to middle (perhaps junior high) school is somewhat more time efficient than often is public schooling. It's a wholly different matter when one gets to the high school level.


I reached out to an educator acquaintance some time back to request some sample test questions from one of his American history classes. (I merely passed them on to a friend who was looking for such.) Here are some taken from various portions of the educator's class.

Answer the following questions by referring to the late-nineteenth-century photograph below by journalist Jacob Riis.
​

Conditions like those shown in the image contributed most directly to which of the following?
(A) The passage of laws restricting immigration to the United States
(B) An increase in Progressive reform activity
(C) A decline in efforts to Americanize immigrants
(D) The weakening of labor unions such as the American Federation of Labor

Advocates for individuals such as those shown in the image would have most likely agreed with which of the following perspectives?
(A) The Supreme Court’s decision in Plessy v. Ferguson was justified.
(B) Capitalism, free of government regulation, would improve social conditions.
(C) Both wealth and poverty are the products of natural selection.
(D) Government should act to eliminate the worst abuses of industrial society.

The conditions shown in the image depict which of the following trends in the late nineteenth century?
(A) The growing gap between wealthy people and people living in poverty
(B) The rise of the settlement house and Populist movements
(C) The increased corruption in urban politics
(D) The migration of African Americans to the North

Essay questions:

• Evaluate the extent to which trans-Atlantic interactions fostered change in labor systems in the British North American colonies from 1600 to 1763.
• Evaluate the extent to which new technology fostered change in United States industry from 1865 to 1900.
• Evaluate the extent to which globalization fostered change in the United States economy from 1945 to 2000.

It may be that I grossly misunderstand/underestimate the average home school instructor, but I find it hard to construe that whatever time savings may accrue to the student and teacher in the K to junior school years do so sufficiently to counteract the vastly more involved lectures and study needed come the high school period of the home schooling process. Based, however, on the pervasive insipidity of much public discourse I hear -- both here on USMB and in the news and among public figures -- I don't think so.

I have no doubt that parents can learn and become apt instructors of content (explicit and "knock on") such as American history or anything else, and, obviously, some parents already have most or all the subject matter and contextual knowledge and skills needed to so. That said, among the folks I know well enough to presume they have the skills and knowledge to homeschool their kids, I can assure you that not one of them would do so. They wouldn't because doing so would force them to take a serious hit to their household income. For myself (I became a single parent many years ago when my wife passed), my capability and will to homeschool my kids would have had nothing to do with whether I did or didn't do so. My need to provide for them vastly outweighed any potential considerations of homeschooling them; I had to work.

I understand that. Sorry to hear you lost your wife. That had to be devastating. You are correct that home schooling is serious business and that parents have to know what they're getting into. In our case, an online curriculum helped tremendously. Even though both my wife and I have college degrees, it was helpful to have teachers available for subjects with which we were not as familiar.

Many right wingers feel they know all they need to know about science and math.,

Republican calls algebra "fuzzy math" for using letters with numbers.

Irrelevant to the thread. Go away.

I don't agree with the "go away" part of your remark. I do agree with your assessment of the irrelevance, regarding the thread topic, of the other member's comment.

 

[Bruce_T_Laney]

Ask public school kids, even in college, "Who won the Civil War"?

North Korea!?!

( Kidding!!! )

 

[Bruce_T_Laney]

Phyllis Schlafly - Conservapedia

Homeschooling always makes me think of Phyllis Schlafly. Phyllis is considered by many to be the mother of the conservative movement. I once saw a hilarious interview by her where she said she did all the right things.
She homeschooled her kids to insulate them from the nastiness of modern society. She married a strong man and great father figure and she bowed down to him as the master of the the house. They disciplined their children. And in spite of doing everything absolutely the right way, one of her sons turned out gay. She said she just couldn't understand how this could happen.

This is a complicated and competitive world. Many parents are old fashioned. They want to teach a 1950's education in a world that needs a 2017 education.

Home-schooled children do terrible in math.

The Homeschool Math Gap: The Data

In many cases, homeschooled teens are expected to teach themselves algebra or calculus out of a textbook without the aid of any kind of teacher or adult help—something most children likely cannot do successfully.

Just The Facts: The Pros & Cons Of Homeschooling

Can homeschooling make or break a child’s future?

Adults who were homeschooled often reference extreme social awkwardness as an obstacle they experienced upon entering college or the workforce. Others, whose teaching was steeped in religious ideology, note astonishment and even anger towards their parents because they were shielded from scientific learning and had no knowledge of subjects like evolution, the big bang theory or even the existence of dinosaurs.

----------------------------------

Wow, imagine not even knowing that dinosaurs were real or going to a college science class and knowing nothing of evolution.

I've seen a lot of fake statistics. But common sense will tell you that coming from an ultra conservative background, you obviously won't do well in math and science.

I'm not even sure what kind of jobs conservatives who have home-schooled their children think those kids are qualified for. Remember 87% of lost manufacturing jobs were automated.

I can see conservatives setting their kids up for a failed life. They don't know math or science and they haven't been socialized.

We all know why Rderp is so stupid, because he went to a Chicago union run public school system

One of the worst public school systems in America...

How do I know?

Grew up outside Chi-town, so I know!!!

 

[Unkotare]

Ask public school kids, even in college, "Who won the Civil War"?

Every kid at the public school where I work certainly knows.

 

[elektra]

A thread based on lies. Public, common core education is pure liberal progressive socialist brainwashing. Common Core, nothing in thus world has been invented or built by a student of common core. That is a fact.

 

[Nia88]

This shit should be illegal...All major test should be done under the super vision of a teacher or professor.

No wonder the loserterian is so stupid as it wasn't taught to think.

Although I feel like banning homeschooling is wrong because there are some children who thrive from homeschooling. I do think it needs to be heavily regulated. Homeschooling isn't regulated enough.

Like you said the children should be required to sit for a standardized test under the supervision of a teacher.

I am a teacher. I've had students join my class who were previously home schooled. And all but one of them were below the expected level for reading, writing and math. It seemed to many that their parents who were homeschooling them didn't have a clue what they were doing.

The children also lacked social skills and were seen weird to the other children.

 

[Nia88]

A thread based on lies. Public, common core education is pure liberal progressive socialist brainwashing. Common Core, nothing in thus world has been invented or built by a student of common core. That is a fact.

So teaching children multiple ways of solving a math problem is liberal? Reading standards is a liberal agenda?

 

[Nia88]

That is utter bullshitResearch shows that home-schooled students are certainly capable of adjusting to the college curriculum academically – home-schooled students generally score slightly above the national average on both the SAT and the ACT and often enter college with more college credits.

`
`
Your source proved nothing. Did you even read it? It's just a USA Today article listing four different sources (links) that offer their opinions.

And you show no proof for your opinion.

The fact is home schooled kids do better on the SAT and ACT tests than the average public school student

So refute that if you can

Reference please.

 

[Unkotare]

This shit should be illegal...All major test should be done under the super vision of a teacher or professor.

No wonder the loserterian is so stupid as it wasn't taught to think.

Although I feel like banning homeschooling is wrong because there are some children who thrive from homeschooling. I do think it needs to be heavily regulated. Homeschooling isn't regulated enough.

Like you said the children should be required to sit for a standardized test under the supervision of a teacher.

I am a teacher. I've had students join my class who were previously home schooled. And all but one of them were below the expected level for reading, writing and math. It seemed to many that their parents who were homeschooling them didn't have a clue what they were doing.

The children also lacked social skills and were seen weird to the other children.

More regulation is seldom the answer to anything.

 

[elektra]

A thread based on lies. Public, common core education is pure liberal progressive socialist brainwashing. Common Core, nothing in thus world has been invented or built by a student of common core. That is a fact.

So teaching children multiple ways of solving a math problem is liberal? Reading standards is a liberal agenda?

Yes, Common Core is a Liberal/Democrat idea. As of yet, we can not show one great advancement in technology that was a result of a Common Core education. Nothing. But Liberals think they know best. Sad, really.