@99: npage 148 put up an informative link at post #73 (which seemed to contradict whatever point he was trying to make).

And here are some more stats regarding college:

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/eri…

It's important to remember that there are plenty of people who would say that their social adjustment was negatively impacted by going to public school. That doesn't mean that public school isn't a good idea. But there is zero evidence which suggests homeschooled kids do worse than public schooled kids when it comes to academics or social interactions.

Here's the link I just tried to post:

http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/eri…

It may be true that most people don't have the skills to home school their kids, but that doesn't mean ALL people don't have those skills. Should you outlaw something because some people are bad at it? I think a better solution would be to require that the parents have some sort of credentials, like a graduate degree or something. My parents both have PhDs and very wide interests; they're definitely more qualified than some of the teachers I had at public school. We considered homeschooling after it was clear that my 6th grade teacher knew less math than me, but ended up successfully finding a private school instead. The main reason my parents preferred to find me a school was so that I'd have some sort of social life; not for any worries about them being able to teach the academics. If we hadn't lived in an area where we could find a private school, that would have been a perfectly good reason for home schooling.

I'd be willing to agree that a significant portion of homeschooling parents do it for reasons I wouldn't approve of, but I don't necessarily think that means it should be outlawed completely. I would appreciate some more oversight, though, to avoid situations like this. That way, parents who ARE qualified could show some official person that they are, in fact, teaching the kids, and parents who are crazy and stupid would get noticed.

Also, notice that its possible to homeschool a kid for a year or two while having them go to school for the other 10 years. Then they get plenty of experience with dealing with a system, etc, but also experience with a different type of school.

The weird thing is , I think that in most cases homeschooling is a bad idea. But you guys are being so over the top angry about it that I can't agree with you at all. There ARE situations where homeschooling makes sense, and it would be stupid to outlaw it in all cases.

@pox

If you can't tell me that you've found some way to light a fire under your child so that he wants to learn, please encourage your child to enter into a career field in which he can loiter as long as he'd like until he feels like doing his job. I spent a shitty weekend in a hotel in the backass end of North Dakota because it snowed on Christmas and the plowmen decided that "plowing would take too much time away from the important things, like family." I shouldn't complain, as it only took a day's ranting to convince the local electrician to come out to the hotel to try to fix the furnace after it shut down on Christmas Eve and left us all freezing in -30F weather from 12AM Christmas Day until 12PM December 26th. Yeah, my introduction to the results of "proper homeschooling" could have left me dead in the middle of a field thousands of miles away from home, whereas the "mainstream, sinful/slacker" public school-bred workers in North Dakota's cities had their roads plowed as soon as the sun came up on Boxing Day. Homeschooling may not be the worst thing in the world, but the results of homeschooling *here* has left me with "possible permanent damage" in my toes and sheets of flesh peeled from my feet, all because some douchebag parents decided that it was OK for their kids to learn at their own pace, and the kids learned that it was OK to do *everything* at their own pace. Thank God that I didn't meet a doctor who liked to do everything at "his own pace", he probably would have shown up on new Year's Day with a bonesaw and some charming wooden feet. 8-)

Well, that link certainly seems to prove the point that the overwhelming majority of homeschoolers are religious nutjobs.

Dingo, what proves that point? I'm a secularist, but having a strong faith and going to church on Sundays hardly qualifies one as a "religious nutjob."

@101 the point i was making is that homeschooling has no benfit as measured by first year gpa or standardized tests. All that propornets say they can do a better job than public school but this show otherwise. If all these parents are such great teachers how come the students can't out perform the public school heathens.

#110: possibly not, if you don't think that all people sufficiently religious to "have strong faith" and regularly attend church are religious nutjobs, but placing "a strong emphasis on orthodox and conservative biblical doctrine" certainly does.

@112, it doesn't matter if it has a benefit. What matters is that it's an educational choice which doesn't diminish academic or social achievement (in fact your link said there was slight improvement in academic achievement). Since there's no evidence that there are no negative effects, what's the problem with it?

Are there kids who hate it? Sure. Are there kids who hate public school? Sure. Are there kids from both groups who enjoy their respective experiences? Of course. Again, what's the problem with homeschooling?

Damnation. Should have read, "Since there's no evidence that there are any negative effects, what's the problem with it?"

Dingo, I will concede your "religious nutjob" point. But all the evidence points to a steadily increasing percentage of secularists and moderates among homeschoolers.

That said, most homeschoolers I know are Democrats and rather secular, though I have met and interacted regularly with a few "nutjobs," even had pleasant, friendly conversations about faith with them. Their kids played nicely with mine and they always had a good time together.

Most "religious nutjobs," however, send their kids to public and private schools. So, it's really nothing to do with homeschooling itself. It's all about the people doing the homeschooling.

The most important fact is that there is no evidence that homeschooling provides an inherently worse education than public schooling. Individuals who do a poor job in ensuring the education of their children can be found everywhere.

Holy crap everyone, did you not read @106?? Homeschooling is a direct cause of frostbite! Fucking hell, I had no idea. Well, I've changed my mind. Homeschooling = bad. Very, very bad.

Maybe, 116, but I still think it's weird.

Dingo, we can agree wholeheartedly that religious nutjobs are weird. Wherever they are and however they're educating their children, they are weird.

Homeschooling secularists, like my friends and me, are not weird. We are merely different. And fun at parties.

@112. The study stated there was a non-statistically significant increase which is equivalent to saying there is NO increase. People mention non-significant changes in studies when they are unable to show significance and are frustrated about it.

The point I'm making is that the majority of the reason I hear that people home school for is to improve their kids education which is junk. Most of the ones I know were all socially stunted until they got into a public school setting. So while their academic performance is not worse or better their social skills are worse. They use the guise of providing a better education to cover their real and less acceptable reasons to homeschool. Sure some kids like it and some kids hate it just like public school but as others have said, you learn more than the subjects at school.

No, I meant homeschooling is weird. (Religious nutjobs too, obviously). I wholeheartedly agree with 120 that homeschooled kids' social skills are worse and that most homeschoolers use the guise of providing a better education to cover their real and less acceptable reasons for homeschooling. To be healthy, parents and kids need to spend time apart, and kids need to learn to socialize with their peers in the types of situations they will be encountering in real life, ie working together in diverse groups of people with different beliefs and cultures; working on a schedule; learning in a structured environment; following instructions from someone other than their mother; concentrating and working when they'd rather be playing; and so on.

By the way, here's another story about some great straight parents:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/nati…

Home schooling is not the abuser here, this girl's loser father is! (and possibly her mother - notice how she got less press) Why are you all up in arms over home schooling? Yes, yes, a way for the parents to isolate the child. It's also sometimes the only relief when you're kids getting harassed into the ground at school, or you live in a bible-land where the coach thinks it's okay to call fourteen year old boys faggots and English teachers get to assign bible verses as reading material. Did you think about any of that?

@122: Middle school's really the worst. People would mess with me at lunch, so I'd go talk to one of the two cafeteria supervisors. He'd always be busy, and he'd tell me to talk to the other supervisor. Guess what the other supervisor would say?

@122 What happens when you get into a real work environment and it's not a school bully but you boss that is degrading you for being a POS that can't get your work done? It's something people need to learn, how to deal with assholes. The kids that snapped in high school would have snapped at some point in their lives. If it wasn't high school it would have been at work, at the gym, their home.

#120: There is zero evidence to support your repeated assertion that homeschooled kids do worse socially than public schooled kids. Anti-homeschoolers repeat this myth in exactly the same way creationists repeat "there are no transitional fossils."

You can believe that homeschoolers have fewer social skills than public schoolers, but it's purely a faith-based argument.

@121, there are a lot of good reasons to send your kids to public school. There are a lot of good reasons not to send your kids to public school. All of those reasons are personal and subjective. To pretend that one method is THE method for all kids is to believe that all kids are the same. But kids are individuals and individuals learn things in different ways.

And, like I said above, you can keep repeating that homeschoolers do worse socially, but in the complete absence of data to demonstrate this (while in the face of some data which contradicts it: http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICDocs/data/eri…), it's not a reasonable or intellectually honest position to take.

It's not at all a faith-based judgement. I have a close friend who homeschools and her kid lacks the social skills that other kids have because she's not in close contact with other kids all the time like the children who go to school are, and when she is she's in contact with other homeschooled kids.

@126, Current gave a fine response to what really is nonsense. Your boss isn't going to physically abuse you and steal your lunch money. The idea that kids NEED to be forced to spend time with other kids who will physically and emotionally abuse them while they're also forced to learn a variety of things they have no interest in and will have no use for, is simply nonsense.

130, that's a terrible argument. You can't reasonably say that because you've met a few homeschoolers who lack social skills that homeschooling is the cause.

I was a teacher for years and I've met hundreds of public schooled kids who had almost no social skills at all. But it would be childish of me to suggest that it's because of public school that these kids were as they were.

If you were in a freshman sociology course and wrote a paper to defend the argument that homeschooling is inherently worse for kids socially than public school, and then went on to defend your point by saying, "I know these homeschooled kids and they weren't quite right and I know this guy who knows some homeschooled kids and he felt the same way," what kind of a grade would you deserve?

Your thinking on this subject is identical to that of people who are prejudiced against other groups of people. You use anecdotal evidence of the behavior of individuals to make sweeping generalizations of entire groups of people you know nothing about.

It stands to reason that a kid who doesn't spend his time around his peers in a shared cultural situation won't have the same cultural references as his peers, and will therefore not fit with them. It's not even the same as kids from foreign countries entering a new school system, because at least, like their peers, they've BEEN TO SCHOOL. I see this first hand in my friend's kid, who lacks most of the shared experience of her peers, doesn't know how to interact like other kids interact, and doesn't share other kids' interests because she doesn't get to participate in their shared culture.

But as you say, often it's not just because they're homeschooled that they're socially weird. It's because they're homeschooled because their parents are religious nutjobs.

The way we educate our kids is very personal. It's as personal as how we feed them, how we talk to them, how we teach them discipline and religion.

If this thread was about how some people were raising their kids to believe in Native American mythology or maybe they had converted to Islam, or they were devout Lutherans, I wonder what the reaction would be to posters who said, "Yeah, I grew up with some Muslims and they were really angry all the time, so that's a really irresponsible spiritual choice they've made." Or, "My best friend is raising her kids to believe in sun gods and other aboriginal origin myths and they don't seem to know how to have a conversation with me, so those beliefs obviously don't work."

What would we think of these arguments? They are, quite obviously, silly. They're ignorant and judgmental. Why is it so hard for people to admit they don't know what makes people do the things they do?

I was a behavior specialist for years working with emotionally disturbed kids and adolescents, and the best psychiatrist I ever worked with was a doctor who, when asked to explain certain behaviors, would regularly say, "I don't know." This profoundly experienced and learned woman wouldn't pretend to know things she couldn't justify with evidence because she knew that such thinking wouldn't help our clients. Admitted ignorance was our first step in finding things out.

One attribute I find in common at places like this and at places like Free Republic (which, like Pete Townsend, I only visit for research purposes), is this baseless certainty about who people are and why they do the things they do. That reflex is the beginning and end of prejudice and it's never based in an appreciation for the power of objective reality.

But lots of people have convinced themselves that they know what's best for kids (as if all kids were one person), and what kind of education works best (as if all kids learned the same way), even if they don't have kids and haven't been in a school in years.

This problem doesn't appear so much with other subjects. People who've never looked under the hood of a car don't tend to pretend they know about transmissions.

But when it comes to kids, we all know. The people I worked with who actually helped kids who needed it most, who spent years turning destroyed lives around, they were the first ones to say they didn't know. Because they didn't. I don't. And neither do you. We just do our best with the people we love most. And to pretend that you know what's wrong with people you've never met, who may or may not be perfectly happy and responsible and loving, is to stoop to the arrogance and willful ignorance one finds on sites like Free Republic.

Dingo, I don't know of any homeschooled kids who don't have the same cultural references as their peers or who don't regularly see their peers in learning and playing situations.

I suspect we would end up agreeing more than we disagree if we were talking.

Sorry for the rant above. Must go. I'll annoy you all later, I'm sure. Have a great weekend.

I do see your points and I do agree with you somewhat, but since you bring it up I don't think parents should indoctrinate their kids into their religious belief systems either....

sorry.. the people i know who home school are all crazy christians. and the reason they home school is to prevent their kids from being "corrupted" by a diversity of thought.

Don't forget all the school teachers, priests, little league coaches, scout leaders, etc. who abuse children. I was abused. I was not homeschooled. I homeschool my kids, in part, to keep them safe. However, mostly I homeschool them because I know I can do a better job than the teachers. If someone with a college degree doesn't think they can pass on a basic education to their child -- presumably the same basic education they received from teachers -- where's the logic in that? I can pass on a childhood education to my children. If you think I can't, that's a pretty sad illustration of the school system's abilities to turn out competent adults.

The narcissism of Dan's headline shocks me. He reads about this poor child's horrific ordeal and thinks, "It's all about gay rights! It's all about meeeeeeee!"

I guess this has turned into two different stories. One, this man would have been a sadistic child abusing bastard no matter what. He would have found a way to do what he was doing any number of ways. We've been reading about many such people who were abusers very much like this, but were not homeschooling. Second,we're hearing what a heated topic homeschooling seems to be. I just can't beleive the hate rants people can turn any subject into.(I'm waiting for the one comparing snowy days to sunny days.I'm sure someone will argue that if you like snow you want to murder homusexuals, whereas if you prefer sun, you're liberal communists who want to sell the country to Satan.) Homeschooling is not for everyone. It was certainly not for my family. I was able to shore my kids up where they were weak. They took art and music at the school, and continued with all of their sports leagues. I was not organised enough for it, and my kids knew how to push my buttons. (Family dynamics never change.) It was a positive wonderful thing and helped in MANY different ways.We were all pretty thrilled when they went back to school the next year, but changes were positive and obvious.My cousins three kids all ended up with two years of college when they graduated from high school. I know that is not always the norm, but it worked for them.

This link illustrates one of the reasons why we homeschool:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/02/14/magazi…

I was homeschooled because I'm much too smart for all of you. I have an IQ of 200 and I was reading at a high school level during the trigonometry classes I was taking when I was 4.

If you plebs can't accommodate me in that gaggle of lowest common denominators you call an education system, that's your fault, not mine.

I know of some very successful home-schooled situations, including a family that lived in our county, but in a very small rural area with a one-room, multi-grade classroom. The parents chose to homeschool their kids instead, and every single one of them ended up at an Ivy League college. And other friends who've home-schooled their children have made a point of enrolling their kids in local sports, dance, and music programs to help them socialize. But that may be more the exception than the rule. I also consider my roommate's wacky evangelical sister. She flunked 8th grade and dropped out, never went back to school again, yet she insists on home-schooling all of her (now adult) children. Of course, her sole goal is to isolate her kids from any sort of non-Christian thought. They are completely unprepared for socializing in the world, much less higher education.

That, however, has nothing to with Dan's original point.

I believe Dan's original point is that some people homeschool their kids as a way to isolate them and cover up their abuse of their kids. Some people, not all.

Just as schools have regulations, including private schools, perhaps home-schoolers should face periodic scheduled and unscheduled inspections from educators and/or social workers. Sadly, in these economic times, I'm not sure that's feasible.