Blah blah blah. I am not even going to read what you wrote after I glimpsed one of the paragraphs by mistake. That was bad enough.

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Wow. What a mature contribution to the debate.

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"Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
-Joseph Welch

The response fits the quality of Chan's post. He degenerated into slobbering on himself talking some nonsense about the religion of science or science being God, totally manhandling what I said. It's not worth dealing with that type of bizarre incoherence.


I already know the gist of his argument, and it's not going to change: "Fap fap fap, government's evil, fap fap fap, public school is bad, fap fap "indoctrination" fap fap fap, private is awesome, fap fap fap." He's a conspiracy theorist who thinks evolution is indoctrination and that everything would be great if parents were able to do whatever they wanted. Anarchism lite.

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The next one of those he posts will be the first.

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Jarlaxle
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I know that I will never be politically correct
And I don't give a damn about my lack of ettiquette
--Jim Steinman

this approach isnt very useful to the kids who were put through crappy home school now though, the market is happy to discard these people as "damaged goods" and start again on the next generation. good economics perhaps, but a bit inhumane.

my theory:

once apon a time there were no schools. education was done by parents and other adults that the parents thought would be a good influence on their kids. this works when things like literacy, numeracy and independent critical thinking are not priorities in life, because society is so simple the minimum requrements for an individual are low.

as society became more complicated, schools became necessary. it became impossible, or at least very very difficult, for home to provide everything a child needed to develop the skills to live in a complicated society.

children who are home schooled run the risk of ending up without the skills that prepare them for life in this century. it takes parents who are dedicated, well resourced, broad minded, socially integrated and naturally good educators for it to succeed. this is possible sure, but it does not describe the majority of home schooling parents.

of course for school to succeed it requires teachers who are dedicated, well resourced, broad minded (or numerous teachers providing different points of view) trained staff and a safe, positive school environment. this may not be the case every time, but that is the fault of policy makers and budgets, not an inherent fault with the concept of school.

i do not think going back to middle ages education is a good idea in the 21st century.

So, discard them. Other parents may learn from it and ensure their kids get an appropriate education (which does not mean subjecting these kids to those damned government indoctrination centers).

Given the piss-poor job the government indoctrination centers (public schools) in America are doing, it isn't a good idea to leave education in the hands of the government either.

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A panda walks into a cafe. He orders a sandwich, eats it, then draws a gun and fires two shots in the air.

"Why?" asks the confused waiter, as the panda makes toward the exit. The panda produces a badly punctuated wildlife manual and tosses it over his shoulder.

"I'm a panda," he says at the door. "Look it up."

The waiter turns to the relevant entry and, sure enough, finds an explanation.

"Panda. Large black-and-white bear-like mammal, native to China. Eats, shoots and leaves."

So a crummy school isn't inherently the fault of the concept of school, but a crummy parent teacher is inherently the fault of homeschooling as a concept?

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"Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
-Joseph Welch

Speaking generically, and recalling long-gone school days, I think one of the biggest problems is we teach kids what to think, but rarely teach them how to think. Because factoids are quantifiable, it's easier and more efficient to cram kids full of relatively useless information (and each generation has to learn what WE did, plus more!), but many schools and teachers don't deal with tools that help them put it all together in a useful way.

Take history. Many, many kids absolutely hate it. Geography too. "Why should I memorize the names and dates of a bunch of dead guys?" It's not relevant. Any spark of curiosity tends to get worn down by the weight of yawningly boring detail.

Now, this isn't to say that I care for that New Agey uber-alternative, circled-desk style either, but because schooling has been (necessarily) institutionalized, I think we've lost our way, and the willingness to improve the way public education fundamentally works.

I recall really struggling with Algebra. It just wasn't clicking. I was falling further behind, because algebra builds on itself, and you can't really move on, until you've gotten the concept of that last chapter. I wanted to understand why the formula worked the way it did, not just to blindly trust it. But, given the size of the class, and the speed we went to get through it all, I got left behind. I didn't get the concept of "balancing the equation" until about halfway through the semester: it just seemed like the teacher would toss any old number up and somehow, it would work. So, on tests, I would end up doing the problem ten times, trying each number. Brutal. I developed a real mental block, and to this day, I've convinced myself that I just can't do math.

Not all kids learn the same way, that's very true. But, from a logistical standpoint, we can't simply shove all the responsibility for education to the parents (who work two jobs now)....and, there's a value in the social part, too. It's GOOD for kids to be around other kids of different class, races, wealth status, etc. I'm sure most people don't favor the allowance or promotion of an aristocratic, isolated class of kids. So, there's just got to be a different way to approach it all.

I'm committed to the concept of public education, but we need to tear down the whole structure and methodology. Rethink what's being acheived. Obviously, this would require the nation to make education a priority again, a tall order, to be sure.

Chan's right when he rails against "conformity factories". That's precisely how we have treated it: the basic format hasn't changed since the schools were set up to pump out factory workers.

I don't see homeschooling as a mass solution. It works fine on an individual basis, but if we completely dismantled the public system in favor of random, individual solutions, there's gonna be problems, and with no coordination, I fear the inconsistency is going to put people at too much of a disadvantage at a critical time in life. No, I'd like to see smaller class sizes (20 max.), a greater emphasis on critical thinking than memorization, more and smaller schools (increasing the choice available reasonably to walk or bike to).....things like that.

This, like many other things I get all worked up over, would require a complete and drastic societal change. We're in a bad period of anti-intellectualism, right now, and education is suffering serious neglect, at least policy and funding-wise.

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Unfortunately, the Founders did not address the possibility of this nation becoming populated with obnoxious twits.

My instructor's told me there was no way to balance it other than trial and error, so it took forever of guessing.

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Skerlink, I agree with a lot of what you say. In fact, I am a huge supporter of public schools.

I just think there should be the option of homeschooling.

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"Have you no decency, sir? At long last, have you left no sense of decency?"
-Joseph Welch