SeleucusNicator said:
Moreover, your critique of "mom and dad cannot be impartial teachers" is meaningless, as the same can be said for virtually any human being, including public school teachers.
It's not meaningless. There's a very clear bias in having a parent teach a child. Unless a public school teacher has
sexual relations with a student, the level of distrust on grading is much, much higher when your mommy and daddy want you to get an A.
SeleucusNicator said:
I've actually heard that in Canada, there is a fair amount of indoctrination in public elementary schools. Your arguments of "freedom of thought" and "academic choice" are strange, because there is not much of that in elementary school. I don't know about Canada, but in the United States you are generally not allowed to pick your own classes and teachers until high school, and not really until college (which is where true academic freedom begins).
Good.
Some indoctrination is necessary. You can't
not indoctrinate over facts like 1 + 1 = 2, or evolution being true, what is safe sex, the holocaust happening, or "natural" food being inherently fallacious. Critical thinking happens in different areas.
But that's not the indoctrination that we're criticizing. We're criticizing the indoctrination of patently false and fringe ideas which will only hurt the child to believe that it is true later in life. We're criticizing the complete lack of exposure to different viewpoints that you can get from
being around people outside of your family. It is vicious to force your child, consciously or subconsciously, to have the same belief system as yourself, whether it be religious, political, or otherwise.
Bigfoot3814 said:
puglover was homeschooled and he's going to college.
Yes. A
community college.
And he
missed a year of school.
Aegis said:
Being home schooled does not mean a child will not be accepted into a University. In actuality, they have to take standardized tests by the State, to ensure that they are actually on-par with their public school peers. They do in fact obtain their HS diploma, take the SAT/ACT and can get into Universities rather easily.
This isn't done in every state, which is a huge part of my problem - the lacks of checks. And it does make it harder to reach into university because of the fact that someone who gets all As from his parents is inherently suspicious.
Besides, it doesn't matter. There are a lot of abusive parents who are willing to indoctrinate. High school dropouts should not homeschool. There needs to be checks on both. You can cry "BUT PARENTS KNOW BEST" all you want, but there are many,
many horrible parents in the United States which is causing this country to turn into a craphole, and the least you can do is make sure they arn't crappy parents before they are schooled instead of trusting them beforehand - abusive parenting needs to be
prevented, not merely
punished. You cannot appeal to tradition when reality says otherwise. You need to make sure that the teachers are sane, for example, or are smart enough to comprehend the subject.
And all of it can be done by accredited private schools, too, without these massive problems.
luiz said:
It would not surprise me at all if homeschooled kids performed better than public school kids in standardised tests. In fact I have read some stuff that suggest as much.
The studies are crap. Homescooling is self selected. Schooling is mandatory. You're talking about a bunch of parents who care about their kids in one way or another as opposed to everyone else. It's not a statistically fallacious comparison.
