home schooling or public schooling

Columnist and academic Mike S. Adams has just put out a column revealing the extent to which postmodernism has poisoned the educational well. Not only do postmodernist teachers deny the existence of absolute truth in abstract moral issues--now they even deny the existence of truth IN PHYSICS!!!

As reported by Adams, a master's-degree candidate wrote a thesis discussing architecture. In it, the candidate made the common-sense statement that a bridge needs to have certain physical attributes in order even to stand up. The candidate's professor, however, was such a worshipper of "making up your own reality" as to deny even this! The professor, who doubtless often drives across actual bridges whose existence depends on specific physical qualities, nonetheless treated the degree candidate as intolerant or narrow-minded FOR STATING THIS CONCRETE FACT!!
 
I was public schooled. My family did not have the funds to private school me untill college and even that was me taking out loans to pay for it.

Due to a very severe learning disability I have and the fact I was bullied a lot and had a hard time fitting in, my mother gave me the option to be homeschooled, but I chose to stay in public school. I was able to get the help to cope with my learning disability, and I learned to stand up for myself against the bullies. It is just as well too. In the "real" world, I can't always run away from my problems and expect mom and dad to be there to protect me.

Iroincially I also ended up making peace with many of my former bullies as they grew up, I grew up and they saw I was a much more different person from the other kids. They saw I was a genuinly nice guy, a trustworthy person, and a very smart kid and that they had no reasons to hate me in the first place. Many of them started sticking up for me. They also didn't have to worry about me stealing their girl friends as I was more focused on my academic persuits then dating.
Plus I got to study subjects I don't think my mom would have taught me, like Greek Mythology, Shakespeare, and Astronomy.

I think like a lot of things, you take out of your education what you put into it. I had some friends who were homeschooled who did end up being wonderfull people and had great social skills. One is currently serving as a missionary in China .Another is a concert Pianist. Another studied for a year in Japan and plans to go back and teach English there.

However I also had a friend who was homeschooled, and while he is very brilliant with computers his mother was so over bearing that he has no social skills, and she didn't bother teaching him math so he fell behind his classmates when he got back to public school and was held back a year. His only social out-let prior to returning to school was the church Youth Group where he and I were both picked on by the "cool crowd." My father was the only volunteer who noticed this and did something about it.

My roomate my Freshman year of college was homeschooled up untill college. His mother let him wake up for school whenever he wanted to and because of it he had a difficult time adjusting to a college schedule and fell behind in his classes. He had a hard time interacting with the other guys on the floor and ticked us all off when he started dating a girl I was interested in and didn't bother to tell me as he didn't know that you don't persue the girl your best friend likes and not tell him.
 
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well my mom has nervs of steel she can handle every thing me and my brothers can throw at her and i do agree if the parents do not have the time or intelligence to teach there kids then its best to send them to a public school
 
I agree with John's comment on page one ... public school experiences and home school experiences differ widely, and you can't just say, "home schooling is better" or "public schooling is better."

My husband's daughters went to private school and got a great education, but a severely secular one. Their school did not even allow "See You at the Pole" prayers! My niece went to public school, and she also seems to have gotten a great education: she got a scholarship to her state uni, and just finished her first semester there with straight A's -- with a major in microbiology, so she is no slouch academically. And she's a dedicated Christian. School did not seem to impact her spirituality in any bad way.

That said, I also know a family that the mom home-schooled a couple of the siblings for several years, and they were dumb as a box of rocks with little to no social skills. Their sister who did home-schooling for only a year or two and public school the rest of the time is much smarter, graduated from college and takes care of herself. For them, home-schooling with mom was a joke!

So, I think maybe the education you get depends upon who is administering it, what their level of knowledge and teaching ability is, and how motivated you are to learn and profit by what's offered ... whether in public school, private school or home school.
 
inkspot said:
I agree with John's comment on page one ... public school experiences and home school experiences differ widely, and you can't just say, "home schooling is better" or "public schooling is better."
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But you CAN say that freedom within a lawful society is better than arbitrary tyranny. And between homeschooling and the public-school establishment, there is ONLY ONE side which is trying, for self-serving reasons, to make the other side illegal.
 
Well in my experince homeschooling /cyberschooling is better than regular school. I was the only person I knew about that got picked on in the regular school I went to in the grade/grades I was in (1-2, 3-4 ect) and it had a negitive effect on my social skills and life skills. In the school I go to now called BOSS (its a cyberschool) I'm active and happy with my classes and I don't want to stop doing it. I even wrote a 200 sum page book and I'm writing another one. My cousin who is two years older than me and has always been homeschooled also wrote a book.
I'm not exactly all that social with people I don't know when I see them face-to-face but I do have several friends.

But each to his or her own.
 
I go to a public school, but I wish I was homeschooled. I don't like that I come home with loads of homework every day, and that I have to wake up early in the morning, when I would much rather sleep in. Plus, I'm starting to hate my school. I want to move to a different one, but we don't have much to offer. :(
 
I don't know that one is really better than the other. They both have their pros and cons. I've always been in public schools, and I'm glad. While of course not all home schooled kids are deprived of the chance to gain social skills, i think it's safe to sat that public school kids have more opportunities, simply because they come in contact with, depending on the size of the school, anywhere from hundreds to thousands of people on a regular basis. Also, I've had the opportunity to be involved in so many extra curricular activities that i might not have if i was home schooled.
 
inkspot said:
I agree with John's comment on page one ... public school experiences and home school experiences differ widely, and you can't just say, "home schooling is better" or "public schooling is better."

My husband's daughters went to private school and got a great education, but a severely secular one. Their school did not even allow "See You at the Pole" prayers! My niece went to public school, and she also seems to have gotten a great education: she got a scholarship to her state uni, and just finished her first semester there with straight A's -- with a major in microbiology, so she is no slouch academically. And she's a dedicated Christian. School did not seem to impact her spirituality in any bad way.

That said, I also know a family that the mom home-schooled a couple of the siblings for several years, and they were dumb as a box of rocks with little to no social skills. Their sister who did home-schooling for only a year or two and public school the rest of the time is much smarter, graduated from college and takes care of herself. For them, home-schooling with mom was a joke!

So, I think maybe the education you get depends upon who is administering it, what their level of knowledge and teaching ability is, and how motivated you are to learn and profit by what's offered ... whether in public school, private school or home school.
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Yeah. I remember when I went to private school for not even a year. I got picked on by MOST of the kids at the school(this was a 6-12 school) and the teachers didn't do much about it. Plus, I kept getting into fights with a girl who was CONSTANTLY being mean to me, and the school never did anything about it until it was too late and I had hurt someone. Also, the school work was hard! My grades were slipping, and my teachers didn't do much to help me. I'm glad I got expelled from that school(well, technically, I'm not expelled, they just told me to leave and that if I could come in a few years, I could, but I don't want too. So there! :p). Now with the school that I go to, I get a lot more help, and the teachers and staff help me with my problems more. :)
 
I was homeschooled the whole way through. Due to varous circumstances (my personality, our tiny churches, and a lack of neighborhood kids) I struggled with shyness during my teen years. But my mother had always made an effort to get me out of my overly-comfortable zone (holed up somewhere with a book). As a result, I did get involved in a decent number of extracurricular activities at various times during my schooling--tae kwon do, classes from the county adult education service, Spanish classes, camps, and 4-H. At this stage in homeschooling, a lot more is available than was in the early days of modern homeschooling ('80s). I'm now in college, and while I had some social growth to do my first semester--getting used to roommates with various backgrounds isn't easy even for institutionally school students--I wasn't "backward," thanks to my mom's efforts. Since she was also pretty strict when it came to scheduling--I have high school transcripts and a graduation certificate thanks to her efforts and a homeschool record-keeping service--I had no trouble adjusting to college academics. They only seemed differently structured than in high school, not more difficult.

The lack of social exposure, while it had a downside, did allow me to accomplish a lot of reading on my own that I couldn't have done had I attended an institutional school. I don't think homeschoolers are generally smarter than public schoolers, but the home school atmosphere can encourage students to make more use of what intelligence they do have. (Of course, most of us at least know of homeschoolers who are lazy, backward, negligent, etc. That's inexcusable for any parents, homeschoolers or otherwise. But test scores do show that, in the main, the home school methods are effective for most people. After all, many of the Founding Fathers were homeschooled for at least part of their education, and they were certainly not backward.)

As Copperfox already noted, freedom is also a central issue. Parents have the right to decide what's best for their individual children and family situation. Whether schooling at home or institutionally, they should take the primary responsibility for overseeing their children's education.
 
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This brings to mind something I have mentioned before on TDL but not recently. Enemies of homeschooling, when they trump up a panic over lack of socialization, operate on a never-questioned, never-examined presupposition: that human contact doesn't COUNT as socialization unless it's with the child's own EXACT age group.

For most of history, however, it has been perfectly commonplace for children to grow up largely associating with persons older or younger than themselves--in other words, with whoever was AVAILABLE. And somehow, they managed to create civilization anyway.

Cramming kids into a herd of ONLY their age peers causes a REAL isolation for them: isolation from the wiser input of their elders, and isolation from opportunities to learn to be tolerant of their juniors. Peer pressure then fills the vacuum. Age segregation thus results in the blind leading the blind.
 
I'll just pop in a question. I don't know what's the best of homeschool and public/private school (We don't have homeschool) ... But I know that education is what you make of it. A teacher can't learn you a thing. A teacher puts everything in place so that you can learn for yourself. You cannot be forced to learn. A public school may have bad influence because you may get distracted with other things. There are certainly other things on a public/private school that can be way more interesting then learning. But to begin with; if you're not interested in learning, I don't believe home school nor public school will help ... I think I'm pretty much on Inkspots side when I come to think of it :p ... But on a side note I KNOW that some things are better taught at home then on a school. I learned all of my english at home, for example

My question, however ... In Norway, you can get a practical education on Highschool. You choose away the 'college'(Though you can do college if you do an extra year) education to do something practical, like electrician and the like ... If it's the same in America, how do kids who homeschool learn all the practical necessities that is needed for a profession? Is it just homeschooling until you jump into a company that will teach you all you need to learn?
 
In the US, you are supposed to stay in school until age 16, but if you quit then without a high school diploma, it is very hard to get any work except unskilled jobs like servers in restuarants, maids at hotels, or day labor, that type of thing. Here you usually need at least your high school diploma to get into most vocation programs or colleges. It's rare for a company to sort of "draft" you out of school and train you at their expense, I believe. High school completion usually takes until age 18.

I believe parents have a right to educate their chldren at home, and I have no problems with home schooling in that regard, particularly because the public schools have become a way to indoctrinate kids to attitudes that the parents may not like or believe in.

But I also think the state has a responsibility to make sure kids who are home schooled are getting an education. I think about one of my girl friends in college who went to an unlicensed church school/private school run by the parents in the church, so it was sort of a community "home school." She got a horrible education! She could not read very well, had no study habits, minimum math skills ... Someone should have noticed that she was not achieving!
 
American schools typically try to teach students to have a "well-rounded" education. Afterwards, it is up to students and their parents to decide what college to go to. However, we also have trade schools (which are colleges for learning how to be electricians, etc). It is no different in homeschooling, except that alot of homeschoolers start college earlier than traditional highschool students (though some public students choose to take highschool courses that offer college credits). Typically, it is just as easy for homeschool students to enter a college as for those who are otherwise schooled.
 
Doffen said:
I learned all of my english at home, for example
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Me too :D I learned english at the age of 5 or 6 when my sister had english books from school. They were partly black and white and partly colored. So I thought it was a color book and nicely colored all black and white pics and started to read them and learned the basics :D My sister wasn't aso happy with my colorful results though :p
 
That's hilarious! But how smart you were to learn English by yourself from a school book!

Digressing ... for Xmas my husband and I got Rosetta Stone CD's that are supposed to teach us Spanish on our computers. Can't wait to get started!
 
fernshirehobbit said:
American schools typically try to teach students to have a "well-rounded" education. Afterwards, it is up to students and their parents to decide what college to go to. However, we also have trade schools (which are colleges for learning how to be electricians, etc). It is no different in homeschooling, except that alot of homeschoolers start college earlier than traditional highschool students (though some public students choose to take highschool courses that offer college credits). Typically, it is just as easy for homeschool students to enter a college as for those who are otherwise schooled.
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Ahh, okey, then I understand. We typically have two years of high-school education on different subjects, like electricians, or people who wants to do college after high-school... The people who chooses to do two years of something practical has to do an apprenticeship in a company after that. Thanks; cleared it up for me! ;)
 
I've been homeschooled all my life and I enjoy it. But I have to say if it were my choice I would go to public school for high school.
 
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