Homeschooling: Not always the answer

310 thoughts on Homeschooling: Not always the answer

1. The argument that it makes the most “practical” sense to teach your kids in New York City.

   Sure. If you don’t count “supporting yourself and your family” in the category of “practical.” I see an echo of what happened in the nineteenth century, where the wealthy families had tutors and governesses for their kids and only the middle classes went to school (the working-class children, of course, had factories work in and chimneys to sweep).

2. Here’s another from the article:

   I was teaching graduate students at Columbia. Why shouldn’t I teach my own children, too?

   Because teaching graduate students is exactly like teaching five year olds.

   1. Infuckingdeed. At least when my mother started homeschooling me, she had double digits of experience in teaching kids my age or older.

   2. Oh, sure, grad students are just like elementary kids. I often point at a book and say “know this shit by Wednesday” to first graders and they can do it no problem, just like highly educated adults can! I also test 5-year-olds rigorously on the scientific literature, which I assume they keep up with in their spare time. Duh.

      1. As I have learned, you can’t even do that with undergrads: there is a big difference even between teaching college freshman and college seniors … forget about the difference between teaching grad students and teaching elementary students.

   3. I teach graduate classes. No way in hell could I teach 5 year olds. My grad students know how to ask questions and I can talk to them like adults and they will learn. They call me out when I assume they know something that they don’t. I can talk to a 5 year old, but at the right level to teach? I don’t know. Not the same at all.

   4. My attempts to explain elementary school math concepts to my son — most memorably, how to use a protractor to measure angles — were highly traumatic for both of us, and usually ended up with one or both of us lying on the floor, kicking and screaming.

      Homeschooling would not have been an overall success.

      1. That’s how any hw help from my mother usually ended.

         I, however, feel confident I could teach my son anything! Up until he’s expected to learn long division and any math which comes after that, unless of course we skip the learning of “how to do math” and head straight into the learning of “how to enter math equations into a scientific calculator.” 😛

         Ans now that I think of it, I probably won’t be that useful if he goes for chem in HS rather than enviro science…. Did I mention I have no plans to homeschool, ever?

      2. Hahaha, yes! Ditto with my Dad trying to teach me algebra. Not pretty!

   5. As I began teaching at the undergrad and grad level, my daughter started school. She is now at her 3rd school in 3 years and I can firmly attest to the fact that teaching grade schoolers requires a certain skill set that you do not just come by as you make your way through higher education…

      My daughter has had:
      – 2 wonderful teachers who trained and viewed elementary education as a vocation.
      – 1 bad teacher who, surprise, surprise, was not trained as a teacher but instead was working at night to get certified (I sympathize with her situation but she should not have been given a classroom of 25 kids when she clearly was not ready for them… 3 years in a row).
      – 1 new teacher (2nd career, so she was not 23) who was, um… learning.

      My son has now started and has a young (2 or 3 years of experience) teacher who is truly gifted at it — she manages to get my son and 22 other little kids to sit down and work all day long whereas I can barely get him to stay seated to eat a meal, not something I fully appreciated with my much more calm and compliant oldest.

      My point is bad & inexperienced teachers have only increased my respect for those who make it look easy, whose kids love to be in their class, and who seem to genuinely enjoy being in the classroom because I am 1,000% is not something I could do 1/2 as well.

   6. …and a child turning five suddenly makes what they need to learn and how they need to learn it so incredibly alien and difficult that the people who have literally taught them everything in a completely organic way for the last five years are suddenly incapable of continuing to do so, they they must be handed over to the care of professionals?

3. When is a choice not a choice? When you’re everyone BUT the smug white fella who writes for the Atlantic.

4. Why shouldn’t I teach my own children, too? What if I took the time and energy I was putting into arranging our sons’ education and devoted it to actually educating them?

   . . . . When you set the city’s gorgeous mosaic of intellectual and cultural offerings against its crazy quilt of formal education, you can’t help but want to supplement your children’s schooling with outings to museums, zoos, historic sites and neighborhoods, and the like.

   This is truly annoying, given the fact, as Jill points out, that this guy’s wife seems to do not only the overwhelming majority of the teaching of academic subjects, but 100% of the outings to the gorgeous mosaic.

5. I taught my daughter at home for one school year through an online charter school due to the low quality of the local school. It was an excellent experience, but I was still quite relieved when the neighborhood school was closed and changed into a charter school that so far is much better. Put my kids there, and while I’m glad for the option, I much prefer keeping my kids in some degree of public school. I work at home, so I wasn’t giving up my income entirely, but it did make it harder to work.

   Of course, many homeschoolers loathe the online charter schools, as they’re still funded by the state and therefore aren’t true homeschooling. Frankly, I liked having the structure the program provided, plus the flexibility to do other things when we wanted to.

6. I’m glad to finally see a tiny bit of feminist debate on homeschooling. I’m a sociology professor and just finished a 10-year interview-based study of homeschooling mothers.

   I examined mothers’ “choice” to homeschool (re: class and gender), the immense workload involved, husbands’ (in general) paltry contributions to it (and housework and parenting), mothers’ dearth of “me-time” and how they were able to suppress their sense of independent selves for years (and how they made this okay), and how outsider stigma against homeschoolers is really cast as an attack on mothers “unacceptable” emotions.

   Although I think there are some feminist elements to homeschooling and it may be liberating for some women, in its current incarnation in the US, I think homeschooling is disempowering for women overall. I argue that this is mostly because it gives women an opportunity to legitimate the already-disempowering and super-intense idea of what it means to be a “good” mother in our society.

   1. Jennifer, will your research be published so that the public can access it? I would be very interested to read about your study.

      1. I’m also interested; it sounds fascinating.

         1. Me three.

   2. I’m glad to finally see a tiny bit of feminist debate on homeschooling.

      Me too. Homeschooling is even more work to keep women in the home, like there isn’t enough.

7. 2. The horror at the idea that a 23-year-old teaching assistant might be covering his first-grade son’s classroom. A 23-year-old? Teaching FIRST GRADE? Horrible. Unacceptable.

   Actually, when I was in education school, the conventional wisdom was never (if possible) to have your child in the classroom of a first-year teacher.

   As you (Jill) say in your point #3: “well-trained and experienced teachers know teaching methodology and lesson plans and learning styles”. A first-year teacher is not an experienced teacher.

   1. Sure. But a first-year teacher is almost definitely better trained than a parent who did not go to school to be a teacher.

      1. Yes, of course a first-year teacher is better trained at teaching than a parent who is not trained at teaching.

         But the issue was whether or not having a first-year teacher is horrible and unacceptable, and my point is that it is actually rather undesirable.

         Also, teacher training notwithstanding, I don’t think it’s an inherently preposterous idea that a not-teacher-trained parent might be better at teaching their child than a first-year teacher.

         1. Right. But I didn’t say it was an inherently preposterous idea. It’s certainly possible that the parent would be a better teacher. I did say that it’s preposterous to assume that a first-year teacher totally sucks, and to conclude that you as a parent (also with no experience teaching first grade, and no training in first-grade teaching) would naturally be better.

      2. My take on this was the problem was that he now had a teacher assistant. Generally TAs don’t have the training of a teacher so I don’t see how they could teach a class. I was confused by that part.

      3. Jill: I dunno…my parents were well-read, intelligent, intellectually flexible working class folks. I’m pretty sure that if they had the time or resources to have homeschooled me they would have been better, despite their foibles and our family dynamics, than the shitshow of burnouts and petty tyrants who consistently failed to do much more than train me to be an obstinate, oppositional, ass. Sure, I’d have gotten more Abbie Hoffman than algebra and biology probably would have been lost some ground to learning the bass but I’m not entirely convinced thats a bad thing.

         No, not all (or perhaps even most) parents are going to be up to the task, but I think we need to be realistic about educators not necessarily being all they’re cracked up to be and the possibility that a good deal of parents might be better teachers than the bitter civil servant whose been trained in fifteen different methods of making children docile enough for indoctrination. Then again, maybe thats just my hippie parents showing through. The teacher’s strike had me all kinds of confused because it felt like I was the only person who still remembered that teachers were part of “The Man…”

         1. Except that apart from cute, appropriated phrases wielded haphazardly, grammar school teachers are overwhelmingly women, and the struggle for workers’ rights is hardly a victory for the big, bad elite.

         2. I dunno, the whole transformation of children into docile bodies or funneling them into the prison pipeline seems like a win for the powers that be. I mean, sure, sometimes they agitate for better pay from management but at the end of they day they’re still just asking for more money from the meat grinder. A victory for “labor rights” when the “labor” in question is breaking children like horses doesn’t strike me as anything worth celebrating.

            Also, kids are pretty disempowered. They are, by definition, subject to the whims of whoever has custody and lose huge swaths of what the rest of us would consider civil rights. They’re routinely beaten for misbehavior, have no real right to speak, and the agencies which are supposed to protect them are almost uniformly underfunded to the point of becoming a bad joke.

   2. “Actually, when I was in education school, the conventional wisdom was never (if possible) to have your child in the classroom of a first-year teacher.”

      And this is why parents should have limited input into such details. Sure, it’s better to have a (good) experienced teacher. But in order to have experienced teachers, there have to be first-year teachers. And, while I have no proof, I suspect that first-year teachers being stuck with the students whose parents aren’t extremely invested in their education isn’t good for things as a whole.

      1. But in order to have experienced teachers, there have to be first-year teachers.

         True. This problem is not unique to teaching, though. For example, would you rather be the first person a surgeon performs a particular procedure on, or the 300th?

         1. It depends, is the surgeon completely jaded and worn down by number 300? :p

         2. On a therapy note, I’d be the first client of someone. One of my professors swears up and down that she prefers interns to more experienced therapists because interns are more innovative and less jaded. Having seen an intern and very experienced professionals as my therapist, I’d be inclined to agree.

         3. Yes, but…a surgeon is rarely told to go perform surgery by themselves for the first time. So that’s not really an apt comparison, because it doesn’t actually happen that way with surgeons.

            First year teachers don’t suck because they have to, but because we are more concerned with testing kids than supporting new teachers. Back before the economy bottomed out and everyone was worried about what was going to happen to education when all the baby boomers retired, the big issue (aside from test scores) was new teacher retention. Because we pretty much just throw them in there with minimal hands on experience and pretty much no mentors. So those first year teachers don’t just suck, they also know they suck and that everyone thinks they suck…and then they understandably start to get discouraged and look at other options.

         4. This is seriously nonsensical. I work in a school, so please allow me to make this clear: NO first year teachers are ever just chucked into the classroom and left to fend for themselves. For their first year, for EVERY teacher, there is mandatory, intensive mentoring, lesson observations, planning and assessment time with more experienced teachers, and a hell of lot of feedback on their performance. The idea that they are just put in front of kids and told ‘teach’ is absolutely wrong.

         5. Catherine

            Your experience is very different from my Mom’s then. (Who started teaching in public schools about 15 years ago, not 30 or more, just in case people started thinking that). She had training and classes and student teaching and evaluations, but it’s not like she had someone assigned to her her first year. And it certainly wasn’t the kind of apprenticeship that surgeons go through – which is what I was replying to – which would be closer to requiring that new teachers team teach with experienced teachers their first few years.

            How new teachers get trained is also something that varies from state to state, as that’s where the standards are set. So – it’s extremely possible for what you describe to be the norm where you are, but for there still to be an need for improvements overall as a country.

   3. never (if possible) to have your child in the classroom of a first-year teacher.

      How does this even make sense? Whom shall a first-year teacher instruct? Nobody? Or just the poor saps whose parents aren’t in-the-know and don’t pull strings to get “the best” teacher? How is a new teacher supposed to get experience?

      A teacher in my kids’ elementary school received the “Teacher of the Year” award from the city in which he taught afetr his first year of teaching. So assuming a first-year teacher is a “bad thing” is pretty knee-jerk. And it makes me wonder just how perfect people want teachers to be.

      Teaching is hard, thankless, largely unrewarded, and undervalued. More power to anyone who thinks she can do a better job of it than an educated, trained teacher. Good luck with that..

   4. Interesting. During my time in education school, I never heard this once. It’s also interesting since they had us in classrooms for the duration of our time in education school, which amounted to about three years of classroom experience before ever getting our own classrooms.

      So, I’m assuming your information is old or incomplete.

   5. I have been told this and I get it having 2 children in elementary school right now but there is a little bit of sacrifice on the part of individuals necessary for the common good…

      Unless we expect experienced teachers to teach forever and accommodate increasingly large classes in areas experiencing even minimal population growth, at some time it is necessary for children to have a 1st year teacher. If they have support from their administration and students’ parents and, hopefully, some mentoring, new teachers will learn and the kids will be no worse for wear. Frankly, that would be better than a burnt out teacher…

      From personal experience: my daughter’s school (racially and SES integrated) underwent a large growth spurt that required them to hire 2 new teachers for her grade, totaling 4. One new hire was a very experienced teacher, the other was a new teacher. One already on staff had 3 years of experience but did not have a degree in education and was not yet certified, the other had some experience and I think was a certified teacher but generally recognized as a “weak” teacher.

      Some of the “connected” parents successfully lobbied to have their children moved to the new but experienced teacher’s class concentrating the kids with involved parents in one room…

      It totally threw off the the balance the previous year’s teachers had sought to create when assigning classes for that year (spreading parental resources and challenging students across the rooms so the teachers would have similar work loads). The result was 1 high preforming class, 1 functioning class, and 2 problematic classes.

      The functioning class was the new teacher’s who preformed heroically, who, had the other 2 classes not been train wrecks, might have had enough support from the administration and specialty teachers (who were often pulled into the other classes to serve as general classroom aids) to manage a high preforming one like the experienced, trained teacher.

8. The assumption that anyone can be as good of a teacher as a trained teacher.

   On the one hand, there is some truth in this. On the other hand, it is very different to teach your kid in a one-on-one setting as opposed to a full classroom of kids. It is a huge advantage so that the parent do not have to be anywhere near as good a teacher as the professional teacher and still do a better job for that specific kid.

   The economic privilege inherent in being able to choose this option seems fairly obvious, though.

9. “The horror at the idea that a 23-year-old teaching assistant might be covering his first-grade son’s classroom.”

   My own horror was more about the fact that a university instructor apparently doesn’t know the difference between a “teaching assistant” and a “teacher’s assistant” — I’m pretty sure it was the latter who was teaching his child. As a teaching assistant myself, I doubt anyone would let me near a grade-school classroom (nor should they).

   1. LOL! “Kids! Where are your damn theses? And you know that midterm is three hours long. Put down that crayon!”

      1. Tinfoil, you laugh, but that’s pretty much how my childhood went, lol. My parents were interesting teachers, both of them. Love them to death for it.

         (Except for the writing bit, they didn’t start pushing that until I was in my teens and couldn’t put it off any longer even though it still hurt.)

         1. As my mother would say: “Well, that is a way to do it.”

            Sounds quite interesting, indeed!

10. Not a fan of homeschooling, despite the good intentions of people like the oblivious guy who for some reason had his article published in the Atlantic. The things kids learn in school are different from what they learn in the home. These lessons – cooperation, social skills, collaboration – are of great practical value. Then there is the idea of freedom – kids need to be free of overweening helicopter type parents who watch and correct their every move. In schools, kids develop autonomy as they must in real life.

    In observing my kids’ teachers, I have noticed that they pay attention to these fundamental development skills. I’m a well educated guy, but until meeting and talking to my kids’ teachers, I had no idea about educational pedagogy, and the difference between say, how to teach 1st vs 2nd grade. It’s easy to become familiar with educational milestones (is she reading at grade level? are his math skills where they should be?), and it is great to expose kids to milestones of art, science, and culture. Yet what has impressed me most about my kids’ public school education is the degree to which their teachers have focused on the social issues.

    I’d also like to give a shout out to Jennifer Lois who commented above. It does seem to me that she’s on the money about how homeschooling is symptomatic of a “super-intense idea” about what it is to be a good mother that is ultimately disempowering and maybe an impediment to a healthy family life.

    1. This. Thanks for writing my comment for me 🙂

    2. The things kids learn in school are different from what they learn in the home. These lessons – cooperation, social skills, collaboration – are of great practical value.

       Yes! This is why all kids in school are cooperative, well-socialised people who show a great ability to work tog-

       Oh wait.

       In schools, kids develop autonomy as they must in real life.

       The idea that schools allow kids autonomy, much less allow them to develop it, is so ridiculous it borders on adorable.

    3. If the only place your children are learning cooperation collaborate and social skills is in a school classroom then I am sorry for them. And I think there’s a lot less ‘autonomy’ being developed in public schools than there is the compulsion to conform to the herd mentality of one’s age-mates…or the always wonderful experience of being turned on by said age-mates for being perceived to not fit in.

       Some children do get a wonderful education and a good social experience in school, public or private. Many don’t. Some children do not receive adequate opportunities to interact with others and to develop social skills when home schooled. Many do. I’m glad your children are having a successful schooling experience, but deciding, based on that, that you have the right to dictate that that experience is best for every child? Absolutely disagree.

11. Until the age of 16, I was not only homeschooled, but also unschooled. I had literally no academic discipline whatsoever; as my friends went to school, I stayed in my neighborhood by myself and played on computers and with countless toys all day. Eventually, my lack of education was so severe that I had no idea what fractions were by the age of 13. Not a clue. On the bright side, I caught up pretty quickly at the age of 14 due to my own motivation and a little bit of family pressure, and I learned to read by myself. Nevertheless, being unschooled has been a huge disadvantage for me – not only in regards to academic achievement, but also social skills.

    My mom used to justify her unschooling by claiming that I would suddenly rise up, begin to want to study things, and eventually become a genius if I wasn’t forced to be educated. She loved me very much, and I knew she didn’t want to neglect me. Now she totally regrets unschooling me. And to this day I have no grudge against her. But I know for a fact that she was living proof that being a single college drop-out mom is not enough to be a good teacher.

    Homeschooling is only acceptable in my eyes when there are trained teachers and when the children are able to develop social skills in a spontaneous, natural manner.

    1. Wow, jesus, you survived unschooling? And you’er this smart/motivated/together? All my admiration for you.

       My parents homeschooled me right through to college, but I had lots of other teachers for things they couldn’t teach me themselves (chemistry, Tamil, music, yoga, philosophy etc). And they were both trained teachers, one a qualified teacher, who both detested the idea of unschooling. (If anything, I wound up with a more rigidly structured day than most of my schoolgoing friends, not less!)

       1. Well, I’m certainly glad that I caught up over time. But I wish it wasn’t at the expense of mental well-being. Only recently have I managed to eschew the worst of my social anxiety and self-hatred, both of which have resulted from being unschooled. So yeah, the whole picture isn’t very pleasant. That said, I understand that my case is probably unique in many respects.

          Oh, and here’s another problem with parents being teachers: when conflict arises between the parents, everything gets abysmal very quickly. For instance, when my parents got a divorce, my education went down the drain very quickly. For a few years after the divorced I was just barely being unschooled; in fact, I was being ignored almost completely. Unschooling parents usually try to intellectually inspire their children, but my mom was too busy with other things to pay enough attention to my education.

          Again, my case was unique. But it’s no secret that homeschooling can lead to some pretty screwed up consequences for your kids, especially in regards to social interaction.

          1. Yeah, I totally agree that homeschooling can be bad for social skills. In my case, it was probably a lifesaver, actually; I have mental/social fails that would essentially have incapacitated me as a child, socially, and disabilities that meant I would have definitely failed horribly in the Indian school system (requires lots of writing, and my hands don’t work), where I was actually served really well by self-directed education. Also, since my parents are social workers it was go to rural fundie schools (ick) or be in a boarding school (which I repeatedly refused), so.

             I got lots of time with other kids, but I’m an extreme introvert with anxiety issues, so the one-on-one schooling (particularly given my mother’s a brilliant teacher) and the disability accommodations, half-assed and ableism-garnished though they were, suited me way better than any public schooling. And my parents are ridiculously fuzzy at each other even wandering towards 30 years together, so I guess I’m privileged that way.

       2. Agreed. Mxe you are amazing and inspiring.

    2. This is very similar what happened to me, with a dose of Hard Right Trad Catholicism. Un-un-schooling is hard as hell. Spending your whole adult life knowing that a lot of what you imprinted on throughout the years is bad and wrong is hugely difficult and painful. You do your best to re-learn and re-imprint and re-educate yourself, never quite knowing when you can stop unlearning the past and move forward. You always suspect you’ve still got some foundational things completely wrong, but they’re so deeply ingrained you can’t be sure what they are.

       1. I can totally relate. Every day I constantly feel that there are tons of things flying over my head. I’m always worried about pushing friends away because I’m terrified of making some mistake that I would have avoided if I grew up differently. Fortunately, my social anxiety is gradually going away, but it has impacted me severely.

          I’m very sorry to hear that you also faced religious extremism. I haven’t personally dealt with extremism, but I certainly have dealt with some shitty religious attitudes. Hint: my dad’s side of the family is devoutly Islamic.

          One day, you and I will move past the re-learning stage and start the learning phase. It’s only a matter of time.

    3. I’m sorry that was your experience of unschooling, but I would also like to suggest that it’s not at all representative of unschooling in general. Any more than my brother, who graduated from a supposedly exemplary public school as a functional illiterate b/c no one cared if he could read so long as he kept leading the football team to victory, is representative of all public schoolers. It sounds, sadly, like your mother used unschooling as an excuse to simply…leave you to your own devices and not bother to be involved, as a teacher or a parent. I’m admittedly biased, as I have 3 ‘unschooled’ kids 13 through college age…but they’re all doing fine, thanks, with no crippling social or academic issues.

12. My parents had multiple graduate degrees and when it turned out the public middle school near us was terrible, I know they considered homeschooling. I know they thought things like “we’re both qualified to teach college, so we’re qualified to teach our kids”. And I think they would have been great at the academic part. But they recognized that there’s also a lot that goes on at school like socialization and making friends and not being trapped with your parents 24/7, and of course it would have been a lot of work for them too, so we were all relieved when they found a good school I could go to instead. Homeschooling was something they saw as a viable backup plan, but definitely not ideal.

    On the other hand, in the hours that I wasn’t at school, they definitely imparted a lot of education to me. You can still explain mathematical concepts to your kids and take them to museums even if they attend school.

    1. Yeah, my parents taught me a lot outside of and around school hours. And I know that the 100% most important thing they did for me academically was instill in me a love of reading; that’s gonna do a lot for a kid even if they go to a mediocre-at-best school.

       1. Yes. My SAHM tutored me after school for quite a few years. And I learned things in school she never would have known to teach me.

    2. My parents did do a decent amount of teaching me, mostly informally by encouraging me to read and discuss things, but also formally. For instance instead of signing up for an SAT prep course I just went through one of the prep books with them, since they were fully qualified to teach that kind of material. But the idea of just being home with them day after day and not learning to function on my own among my peers? Sounds terrible. I know homeschool groups are always saying they make sure to get their kids together for activities, but somehow it never sounds like anywhere near the same level of time to form relationships without your parents watching every moment of it. I think that even when parents are highly qualified academically, there are socialization concerns to take into account about homeschooling. And when the parents aren’t highly qualified academically… well, then there can be even more problems with the idea.

       I had a friend who was homeschooled mainly because he was being picked on in the public schools and his parents thought the school system wasn’t helping him with his learning disability very well. And maybe they were right that it was a bad environment for him. But the problem with homeschooling was that his mom just wasn’t qualified to teach him all the subjects, and so some things he learned by reading, and some things he never really learned very well at all.

       1. But the idea of just being home with them day after day and not learning to function on my own among my peers? Sounds terrible.

          As an intellectual, introverted and — most crucially — fat kid, it would have been a dream come true for me. (I know, “whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger,” but it came very close to killing me, literally.) I vowed as a child that if I ever had a child of my own, naturally carrying my own fat genes, I would homeschool him/her.

          1. whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger

             I have never agreed with this. None of the truly painful experiences I’ve been through has made me stronger. Just a bit damaged and hardened.

          2. Vidya, as a kid with physical disabilities (that weren’t apparent at the time), I know precisely what you mean. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” – well, I guess failing through school and being branded an underachiever and slacker despite having a MENSA-level IQ and immense drive to learn would have made me stronger. A lot stronger. I’d have been the strongest corpse in India. (Think that’s an exaggeration? Check out the suicide stats for teenagers there.)

             I’ll take my learning, my intelligence, my ability to manage my disabilities, my self-esteem and my not being dead from bullying over some fucking arbitrary “socialisation”.

             Which, if everyone learned it in school, would result in slightly fewer dipshits occupying this site, wouldn’t it?

          3. Well, let’s face it, dipshittery is one of the things we learn through socialization.

          4. As an intellectual, introverted and — most crucially — fat kid, it would have been a dream come true for me

             Me, too. It always grates on me when people act as though the only way to gain social skills is in school. I didn’t gain social skills at school. I watched what the other kids were doing and realized I was completely unlike them; my values and my background were totally different. I flailed around with pathetic ham-handed attempts at being likeable, had no guidance and was ultimately branded a “troublemaker with a bad attitude” because I started lying and acting rebellious in an inept bid to carve out a niche for myself with my peers. I learned how to get along with people from watching the adults in my life, not the kids. Once I realized that I could be like my mother, my grandmother, my dance teacher, my therapist, everything clicked into place. In the years from when I was twelve to sixteen, I dissolved the outward persona I’d been presenting at school and re-made myself into someone I liked. But I wasted a lot of time, collected bad habits, and burned a lot of bridges. If I had been in a safe environment all along that didn’t goad me into toxic behaviour, I would probably be much more accomplished.

             Living in the world and interacting with all kinds of people teaches you how to live, not just going to school and interacting with children.

             And if what people REALLY mean that it’s about “learning how to play the game and get along”, then say so, and don’t pretend it’s about “socialization” in general. I’m happy to be a unique individual and I think it’s crucial to have people in society who haven’t been conditioned into mild sociopathy.

          5. And I know one of the reasons my parents did consider homeschooling is that I was being picked on, and if it had gotten much worse I probably would have ended up homeschooling. In my case, sticking it out for a few miserable years was much better in the long run – I learned a lot about not giving in to peer pressure and figuring out who I wanted to be friends with. But if the bullying had gotten worse, it wouldn’t have worked out. That’s why I said homeschooling does work for some people, especially when their parents are qualified to teach standard high school subjects like mine were. But I think that if your are not educated or intellectual, its going to be hard to learn academic topics from them, so it would be best if we could come up with other solutions to bullying in school. Students shouldn’t have to have the luck to be born to highly educated well adjusted patient parents in order to have a chance to be properly taught standard high school subjects like calculus.

          6. I said what I meant better below: yes, homeschooling can be a life saver for some kids, if they are being tormented at school but their parents are supportive. And that’s one reason I would certainly not outlaw homeschooling. But saying that homeschooling is better than being constantly tormented and/or beaten up at school is a pretty low bar. Ideally there should be solutions to bullying in school that don’t involve having to have a supportive parent who can stay at home full time that you get along with that can teach every subject, because lots of kids don’t have that. A parent can keep a kid at home to save them from bullying, but still not be qualified to teach them, say, geometry proofs or chemistry.

          7. I have never agreed with this. None of the truly painful experiences I’ve been through has made me stronger. Just a bit damaged and hardened.

             EG – I think a lot of that depends on context and your definition of stronger. Being damaged and hardened was, at least twice in my life, the thing that made the difference and allowed me to survive some of the worst I’ve been through. I’ve never really been glad that I had to learn to look at life as a series of predator/prey relationships for a decade but I’m certainly thankful I had the ability to do so when I was being preyed upon because the alternative would have been worse.

          8. . Being damaged and hardened was, at least twice in my life, the thing that made the difference and allowed me to survive some of the worst I’ve been through.

             I think we can agree, though, William, as survivors, that that kind of strong isn’t necessarily the kind you want to institutionally impart to all children. I tend to look at it as tough vs strong, myself. Being a survivor made me tougher – more able to take shit that others fling at me without falling apart. It didn’t make me stronger, though, which is a more proactive and positive thing in my book. But maybe we’re arguing semantics.

          9. I understand what you’re saying, William, but I honestly don’t think that the experiences I’m thinking of have made me stronger. If anything, they’ve made me more vulnerable by producing areas of trauma that are more sensitive than they have to be (which raises the question, I guess, of how I can be both hardened and sensitive–and I don’t have an answer here). The things I’m thinking of in my life, though, are not necessarily the result of abuse or predatory relationships…I guess some of them are. But one of them made it nearly impossible for several years for me to feel good about sex. My father’s rejection of me after my parents’ divorce just made me very vulnerable to depression. The loss of my best friend–leaving aside how unjust it was to her, of course–just caused me great pain and again depression. Those things haven’t helped me survive anything. They’ve just made everything harder. They may–and this is the only positive thing I will say about them–have deepened my understanding and empathy of other people’s suffering. Maybe not, though; I was empathetic as a kid, too.

          10. Macavitykitsune: I really like that idea of tough vs. strong. I can say from my own experience that tough has, sometimes, lead to strong but not always and a lot of that comes down to a combination of privilege and temperament. Sometimes the toughness has allowed me to be strong by giving me what I needed to weather the worst and succeed. Still, I wish I’d never needed any of it. If only there was a way to impart the strength without the trauma.

              Also, I’m always worried I’ve gotten your name wrong and go back to check three or four times when I respond to you.

              EG: I totally hear what you’re saying. My point was more that we need to be aware that not everyone’s experiences of trauma are the same. I’ve certainly got weak points left, too, but for a long time they were well hidden by over-developed strengths. I think in the context of a discussion about schooling its important to constantly underline just how different individuals are because I think educators generally fail to account for those differences. I mean, we’ve got probably more than 20 people here talking in one way or another about educational trauma and no one really has the same story, responses, or solutions.

          11. Co-signed, William.

          12. If only there was a way to impart the strength without the trauma.

              I’ve often wished for that myself. Though, tbh, the kind of tough I feel I gained through trauma was a…cold, insulated, practical sort of tough, the kind that lets you cut abusers loose without a second thought, burn bridges, make tough decisions. The strength to do the right thing, to work towards my goals, to not compromise on my ideals in the process… I gained that around my trauma, not through it, if that makes sense.

              And you can always just call me Mac! It’s simpler, lol. But you’ve never misspelled it yet!

          13. Macavitykitsune: Cosign on the cold, practical sort of tough. Sometimes its been terrible, but it can also come in quite handy when you’re advocating for someone else. I just have to remember to temper it when I’m in one of my patient’s IEP meetings.

              As for the name, I could call you Mac but part of my tough is that I never allow myself the easy way out.

    3. You can still explain mathematical concepts to your kids and take them to museums even if they attend school.

       I know! I loved this in the article: Wow! We live in New York City! With, like, museums and stuff! We’d better homeschool so we can take advantage of all this wonderful opportunity! Poor, poor schoolchildren who never see anything cool.

       1. We aren’t NYC residents but we do live in a city with museums and stuff… and my son, a public school kid, is going to a wild bird sanctuary on a field trip… something I would have never thought of or been motivated to do because it is just not my “thing” and it is a fair distance outside of the city.

          My son is over the moon about it and I am thrilled for him — he is exposed to things beyond the relatively limited and highly overlapping spheres of interest that his dad and I have, which does include going to said museums and stuff on the weekend.

          On the flip side, I organized a field trip to the municipal recycling facility (MRF) for my daughter’s grade (I’m in resource mgmt)… and none of the parent chaperons knew anything about the facility before going and learned a lot about resource mgmt on the trip.

13. Was I the only person here to have a positive experience being homeschooled? While I understand that there can be problematic aspects to homeschooling if people aren’t careful to avoid them (the same goes for formal schooling as well), I have to say it can get a bit annoying when people who don’t have experience homeschooling act like it’s an inferior way of learning. It’s simply a different way.

    I wouldn’t advocate homeschooling for everyone because we all have different learning styles, but for some people, being homeschooled can be an excellent way to get an education.

    1. My relatives homeschooled (unschooled, even) four kids off and on who are now adults who are happy with how they spent their educational years, fwiw.

       1. That’s awesome that your relatives and their kids had a good experience homeschooling. I was more or less traditionally homeschooled (had a fairly set schedule to follow, used text books, etc.), so I always find it interesting to hear about people who’ve successfully unschooled.

    2. Nope, you’re so not. See my other comments on the thread. I positively thrived under homeschooling.

       1. Glad to hear from a fellow homeschooler who benefited from it! I got a chance to look at your posts after I wrote my original post (it got hung up in moderation for awhile so I don’t think yours were there when I first wrote mine), and I have to say I’m really happy that your parents were able to homeschool you. It sounds like you were the perfect candidate for it too – a kid who had great potential but couldn’t thrive the way they deserved under standard schooling. I think sometimes people who aren’t really fans of homeschooling don’t realize just how stiffing traditional school’s one-size-fits-all learning structure can be for students who just don’t fit that size. I wish more students could have the opportunity to try different ways of learning so they could figure out what works for them as well.

    3. How was the work balance between your mother and your father? Did your mother have a career? Did your father also homeschool you or carry half the household workload? I am sure that some homeschooled kids turned out fine, but I am really curious how their mothers fared, and that is my main concern with it.

       1. That’s definitely a valid concern and one I hope all caregivers who are considering homeschooling think about thoroughly before diving into homeschooling.

          My own parents have a traditional setup – my dad’s pretty much always been the sole breadwinner, and my mom has stayed at home since I was 3. Before that, she worked at an insurance office, but she didn’t really have any career goals or aspirations until about twenty years later when she started a decorative wall finishing business for a couple of years (at that point I was in college and my two younger brothers were going to high school). Both of my parents had considered homeschooling me and my brothers for awhile before they started homeschooling us when I was in the 3rd grade and agreed that since she was the one who was at home she would be our teacher. She also did the majority of the housework and cooking, though my brothers and I pitched in when we were old enough to do so and so did my dad over the weekends or if he got home early.

          I don’t think my mom felt that she was unfairly saddled with her workload – she’s told me that she and my dad had agreed early on that his job would be earning money for the family, and hers would be doing the majority of raising and teaching the kids, cleaning and cooking (while it sounds like a lot, the time she had to spend doing this stuff on a daily basis and the time my dad would spend working/commuting to work were fairly similar, especially as my brothers and I got older). Not a setup that everyone would want, but it’s worked for them, and they both seem pretty happy (both with each other and in general) after 32 years of marriage. I think there were times that she felt isolated because she spent most of her days with three kids, and we weren’t a part of any homeschooling groups and we moved around a lot so that didn’t help much for her forming tons of outside adult relationships. However, when the boys started playing hockey, I think things got better for her on that end. Despite sometimes feeling isolated, I don’t think she regrets choosing to homeschool us and having that extra time with her kids.

          I think my mom chose to go about homeschooling in the best way she knew how to, and I know if ever had kids and I decided to homeschool them, I’d probably do some things differently so that it would best fit my family’s situation. I have a feeling most families – whether they’re homeschooling, working outside the home, staying at home but sending the kids to school, working from home, etc. – take the good and the bad of any situation and make it work as best as possible.

14. The question of whether teachers are good at their jobs is a different one from whether they are good at education. Society is doing it wrong if the most exciting day of the year is the one where you don’t have to attend the institution it set up to facilitate learning for three months. I suspect its twin imperative of facilitating docility is the culprit.

    1. We have a whole institutionalized system working to grind down students; laying that all at the feet of teachers is absurd.

       1. Laying any of it is. They’re a countervailing force to the capitalists and politicians behind the social control model.

          1. I’d argue that they’re band-aids on a hemorrhage at best and collaborators profiting from a brutal lie at worst. Just because the Warden and the Governor are complete scum doesn’t mean the guards are ruffled angels.

          2. A highly flawed school isn’t a prison. Except for the ones that literally are.

          3. I suspect it depends very strongly on the school.

          4. A highly flawed school isn’t a prison. Except for the ones that literally are.

             I have a practical and a philosophical answer to that. The practical answer is that I’ve worked in a high school in Chicago that was just a normal local school which possessed holding cells, metal detectors, four armed police officers, fifteen unarmed guards who were allowed to use physical force, and locked doors. Sure, no one had been sentenced to anything, but they were compelled to attend and it often wasn’t distinguishable from the local county lock up.

             The philosophical answer is that schools are, and traditionally in the west have been, organized in the same way and around the same principles as prisons, mental institutions, and boot camps. It is a compulsory, often uniformed, uniform attempt to create docile bodies. Schools promote discipline first. They might not always have the brutality or restriction of a prison, but you’ve little experience with the special education system if you don’t realize that thats less a moral stance than a concern of cost that gets phrased as “least restrictive environment.” School exist to promote and perpetuate a certain kind of power-knowledge and both they exist within the same system, and share spectrum with, prisons. Theres a reason our schools have a constant push towards increased observation and uniformity. Theres a reason we talk about the school-to-prison pipeline. Theres a reason school funding is so disparate.

          5. It is a compulsory, often uniformed, uniform attempt to create docile bodies. Schools promote discipline first.

             This. Check out the roots of the modern school system in the UK in particular; they grew right out of the workhouses. (And the same model was exported to most if not all British colonies that were still colonies in the late 1800s/early 1900s.) I’m not stating some homeschooling propaganda here, it’s simple historical fact. That’s an angle people don’t ever really consider, you know; that the educational systems of many countries are following patterns of colonisation (India, Singapore, Hong Kong to name a few), aimed at creating a docile and over-specialised population that’s woefully undertrained in critical thinking and shrinking away from questioning authority. Can’t think why colonisers would want to do that at all. I strongly suspect schools for NA kids would be the same in the US, or “inner city” schools, for that matter. Same aims, same execution. The residential schools in Canada were certainly built along those lines.

             So yeah. When people talk about pulling their kids out of the system, it’s also important to know what the system is in the first place, and what the status of the parents wrt race/class is. Sure, some of them probably shouldn’t be educating a child, but I can think of several people in my life who benefited more from half-assed informal schooling (sometimes only from themselves) than from equally half-assed formal schooling that was accompanied by a steady stream of casteist, hueist, misogynistic verbal and physical abuse. Some of them are in trades now, some wrote exams privately and went on to college. The ones who tried to “stick it out” are the ones who got fucked over to incapacity, more often than not.

15. I was homeschooled, and it was not ideal for me. My parents used fundamentalist christian textbooks and provided almost no structure. Lack of socialization was also a problem, despite what many homeschoolers claim to the contrary.

    With that said, I think much of what makes up an education degree is not evidence based. The US doesn’t have a good system for producing the best teachers possible for all students, and many students in public schools are short-changed.

16. I was entertained by his anticipation of a university education characterized by “[t]ightly focused class sessions; expert presentations complemented by individual instruction; hands-on learning in areas that vary from day to day and year to year; education undertaken in the wider world.” Now, granted, I went to a state school, but I have some pretty distinct freshman memories of 150-student lectures, brilliant but unapproachable senior faculty, and breakout sessions led by (gasp!) 23-year-old TAs. It may well be different for whichever private school Elie’s kids are able to attend.

    1. Probably less so than you or he imagine. I went to a small private school and it wasn’t all that uncommon for classes to be 10-15 people; I had a 100-level intro course where I was one of three students. But that didn’t mean there weren’t bigger ones for more popular fields and core classes, and those featured the same distance and indifference from professors that is such a hallmark of lecture courses in bigger schools. A single individual can’t have a personal relationship with each individual student in a class of thirty+, especially when you’re only seeing them two-three times a week. What was really fun is that outside of bigger fields like psych or English, most professors had little to no experience teaching larger classes and couldn’t adjust their teaching methods to suit the changed venue. Cross-curriculum classes were an absolute nightmare as a result with professors having to scrap an entire semesters worth of lesson plans a few weeks in because they can’t do all the individual assignments, presentations, and discussions they had planned with so many students. Also, not having an army of TAs to run interference doesn’t magically get rid of bad professors. They have no problem throwing out ridiculous expectations and capricious judgments in person, or being Where’s-Waldo in tweed despite a three-acre campus and posted office hours. And while on one hand the low professor to student ratio means there are more people who can take an invested interest in your child and their education, those people wont actually do that. Your professors expect you to be adults and handle your own shit; Prof. Cool may go off the notes every day telling these cool stories and teaching you so much about the world, but you better be studying what they’re skipping on your own time because it will be on the test and “you didn’t tell us that” is not an excuse. Small schools are great but they aren’t Plato’s Fantasy-land Academy where students learn by sipping from an ambrosial cup of wisdom held forth by learned professors. Your education is entirely in your own hands so you better have left home with a nice dose of self-sufficiency to go with that ambition.

       1. I have no doubt that Elie knows more than I do about academic culture at private institutions. (I think–think–his part-time professoring is for Georgetown.) So if kids are able to attend a small, private institution, they’ll probably be prepared by their homeschooling, and if they end up at a Big U, they’ll… adapt.

          1. From the tone of Elie’s article I think his kids are going to get a slap in the face regardless of what institution they end up at when they have to deal with an educational structure that isn’t centered around them. You can feel just as isolated and forgotten in a tiny school as you can in a big one.

    2. I went to a state school myself, but I’ve been told and have read over and over that the Ivies rely on teacher’s assistants just as heavily. We all know that the big name schools operate on the publish or peril system. One thing I will disagree with you on: I actually found that my brilliant professors were pretty approachable given that a shockingly low percentage of students took the time to go to office hours, ask questions, etc. I felt like a lot of the students cared more about their grades than their actual education. I think that probably speaks to how they were trained in their pre-college experience, which could be a potential argument for homeschooling.

       In reality, though, I think it’s just plain too large a task for one parent to take on, and that my parents taught me intellectual curiosity by supplementing my public and private school education, rather than supplanting it. If educating children well is too challenging for your local public school, why is it magically easier for one parent to do alone? And what are you teaching your children when you insist that they’re just too good to slum it with the unwashed masses at public school? I don’t believe that’s a way to teach children to challenge social structures; I believe that’s a good way to teach children to perpetuate those structures.

       1. Yes on the approachable thing. I was a TA at large university (though my program was great; the head of the department put together a thick binder for all of us on teaching philosophies and various lesson plans tailored to the subjects we were supposed to teach, we had weekly meetings with all the other TAs and two professors, we practiced grading the week before big assignments were due, etc. I’m told many TAs do not have this support system). While I had sixty students a semester, I was always ready to meet and talk with any of them. Most of the professors in my department would talk your ear off if you gave them the chance.

          This may just be because of the field (English), but I suspect the unapproachable aspect of professors is when students want to pester you for an hour so they can figure out how to get the grade they want with the least effort possible. There were students I just had to say, “Look, the assignment’s written out in your workbook. We’ve gone over this five times. If you can’t figure out what to do, I’ve got nothing for you.”

       2. FWIW, I’m Ivy educated, and my classes were often under 30 people. I think I only had TAs in 3 of my classes, and my professors were, across the board, extremely accessible and helpful. This might be because I was in the humanities (English major, Women’s Studies minor); I think my friends in the sciences had a pretty different experience.

17. For the last couple of years I’ve been teaching computer skills to adults. Yes, I know a lot about the subject but not a lot about how to teach.
    I am still struggling with dealing with students who are all over the map in terms of what they know when they start the class. How to keep the quick ones occupied while bringing the slow ones along.
    Just because I’ve written books on the subject doesn’t actually help.

    I am filled with admiration for teachers — especially the teachers I had in school.

18. The not-ideal experiences re: homeschooling that I’ve seen presented here are things I can relate to.

    I (and my three younger siblings) were homeschooled so that my Father could continue to subject us to psychological, physical, (and in my case) sexual abuse (my teacher and guidance counselors had been calling social services d/t concerns that I was suffering abuse/neglect).

    My Mum used A Beka textbooks because she was able to get them for free from the donation box at the church where our association meetings were held. We had almost zero structure in our homeschooling – by the sixth grade, I was making my own choices about what I wanted to focus on in my daily studies, which suffered because I became the primary caregiver to my three younger siblings (parents are alcoholic, SAHM went back to work). I knew that I wouldn’t be able to balance taking care of my brothers/school/taking care of other people’s kids, so I stopped my education at the end of the tenth grade by taking and passing my GED.

    I attribute a fair amount of the fucked-up abuse I lived through to the fact that my parents were able to hide behind the wall of homeschooling. Once they didn’t have to worry about ‘appearances’, they were free to do whatever they wanted to/with us, and my Father took full advantage of that situation.

    I wonder how many people have stories similar to my own – how many voices are lost behind the wall of home education. The fact that young people being homeschooled don’t generally have parent-free access to GCs/social workers is something I find problematic.

    1. I’m so sorry for what you suffered. And I strongly agree–parent-free access to other adults, and the chance to develop relationships with other people unsupervised by parents are vitally important.

    2. I’m sorry, too, Kerandria – and your point about “hiding” when there is no other adult interaction in children’s lives is well taken.

       You shouldn’t have had to sacrifice your childhood.

    3. Kerandria, I’m so sorry that happened to you. Hugs if you want them.

       And yes, homeschooling parents who isolate their kids need to be given the side-eye about sixty times as hard as non-homeschoolers, imo.

19. i think there are good reasons to homeschool (and less than stellar reasons) and good experiences/methods and bad experiences/methods, so I know I sound like the ultimate fence sitter, but I really can’t rail against it even with the bad stuff. People suck sometimes. But I’m glad the option exists. One of my volunteers has a very bright daughter in 5th grade who has a couple of learning disabilities that make it very difficult for her to succeed in the school environment in her home town. If it wasn’t such a small area, maybe there’d be a small charter school or something that’d better suit her, but it’s a very small town so there aren’t a lot of options. So she somewhat reluctantly decided to home school her, just to keep her daughter from being written off. It helps that the state has some sort of online school/curriculum to follow, too.

    And I have a friend who was kind of in the same boat, but as a child. She’s very very bright but has pretty severe dyslexia and had some speech problems when she was younger. The school system utterly failed her, so her parents- who are super giant hippies at heart- yanked her out in 3rd grade and she was homeschooled until 7th. I know the social thing gets trotted out, but I don’t think being homeschooled means lacking opportunities to learn social skills. She was very involved in a lot of clubs and sports and 4-H, and with the homeschooling group kids (very hippy-ish, she says). The worst thing about it, she says, was going from a having pretty positive, supportive, and accepting interactions and relationships with other kids to going straight into the conformist hell that is a big middle school. She only lasted a year at it before ending up at the tiny artsy middle school I was attending, which is when we became friends. And then she got screwed again by the public school system when high school rolled around.

20. Because teaching graduate students is exactly like teaching five year olds.

    Hehehehehe

    Oh, buddy…

    1. This is my first semester as a TA, and I’m quite young, unprepared, and terrified. But my goal in life is to teach (high school though) and so I’m going to keep at it and get better.

       But the thing that surprised me the most was how much time I have to spend on “behavioral” issues. I have mostly freshmen and things like “he took my pen…she’s looking at me”… are not things reserved for middle and high school. They happen in college.

       And because my rules as a TA are that I’m not allowed to kick anyone out of class or be “mean” to them, I am left with only being allowed to ask them to come speak with me in office hours which I can’t force them to do. So it’s almost worse than high school…I can’t even send them to the principal’s office or give them detention!

       I’m sure not all colleges are like that but TA’s are sometimes just thrown in there and not given enough training or power to do it as well as possible. So far I’ve just done the best I can, keeping the class mostly under control, and getting them to speak the new language (I teach a foreign language, 101). It’s an experience.

       For the record I get super pissed at people who say anyone can teach. It’s fucking hard. I get paid to teach and for the “salary” they assume 15 hours of work per course taught/per week. I work around 30 between teaching, lesson planning, office hours, grading, and extra-curricular activities we have to run. I live in a city where there have been recent strikes by teacher’s unions, and I kept hearing random people on the subway or bus talking about how teachers get paid so much for so little work and that they should stop complaining. What planet do they live on?

21. Considering the horrific amounts of emotional and physical abuse that I suffered through in public schools as a queer kid and considering that my instructors were either oblivious, too overworked to care, or dismissed the abuse as “kids being kids”, I don’t think homeschooling is such a bad idea. Watching my ex’s daughter suffer through abuse at her school convinced me that there is something deeply broken in US schools. Another era, another town, and in a supposedly wholesome, progressive community and regardless, the same terrible treatment happened to her as well. Bullying and abuse are at epidemic levels in our schools. That’s the sad reality that so many children face on a daily basis.

    When I contrast my experience and my ex’s daughter’s experience with several of my friends’ children who were homeschooled, the potential benefits of homeschooling become clear. When the choice is between sending your kid into a toxic social environment that could damage them for life vs. schooling at home, the advantages become obvious.

    Yes, the evangelical Christians who homeschool are doing so for extremely fucked, unhealthy reasons, but other folks have some pretty good justifications for taking this route. Until the epidemic of abuse and neglect in public schools improves, I’ll remain supportive of those who can manage to scrape together the resources to homeschool their children.

    1. Whenever I hear stories of gay kids being driven to suicide, I think homeschooling might have been a better option (depending on their parents attitudes, of course). So its not like I’m against it completely, if its a way to save a kid. But saying that homeschooling is better for some kids than being picked on and beaten up day after day at school is a pretty low bar.

    2. When the choice is between sending your kid into a toxic social environment that could damage them for life vs. schooling at home, the advantages become obvious.

       Yes. This. Right now, my wife and I are planning to have a baby in 2014. The possibility of homeschooling is on the table because our reasoning is the same as yours. It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around how painful and devastating it can be to suffer abuse at school. They think that it’s like tripping during a marathon; there are some tears and it’s hard and then you get over it and get up again and keep running. They don’t understand how scarring it can be to be totally immersed in a hurtful environment. I will be affected for the rest of my life by being abandoned by caring adults and thrown to the mercy of my peers, and not for the better. And it’s not because I am weak or lacking. It’s because it was just. That. Bad.

       1. It’s hard for people to wrap their heads around how painful and devastating it can be to suffer abuse at school. They think that it’s like tripping during a marathon; there are some tears and it’s hard and then you get over it and get up again and keep running. They don’t understand how scarring it can be to be totally immersed in a hurtful environment. I will be affected for the rest of my life by being abandoned by caring adults and thrown to the mercy of my peers, and not for the better. And it’s not because I am weak or lacking. It’s because it was just. That. Bad.

          THIS.

    3. I can see everyone’s points here and don’t disagree with them, but just for balance feel I should point that being homeschooled would have driven me to suicide. Luckily, all my parents could do to me was to put me into conversion therapy against my will. Had they been able to keep me away from the romances that were all I had to sustain me, I’d never have lived to be old enough to vote.

       And yet I like homeschooling in theory, at least as an option. My instinct is just to hope for a low parental involvement, although (on a good day) I can accept that some young people are so constituted as to learn best from a parent.

22. Thank you, Jill, for pointing out the lack of regard for teaching as a profession (your point #3). I wanted to note that this extends beyond the discussion of homeschooling. It’s a problem teachers face in the classroom all the time, especially from parents of their students. There is definitely a sense of “Well I went to school, therefore I know what teachers should do.” No!!! The worst part about that is that it usually comes from adults who were very successful in the traditional model of schooling – sit quietly, raise your hand, listen to teacher, repeat back to teacher what they just told you. As a graduate student, that’s how most of us naturally approach teaching, because we’ve all been successful academically. I’ve learned so much about why that need not be the case for everyone, and how to better teach for all students. It’s not something you just “know’ how to do, you have to learn, and I have amazing respect for teachers. Other folks just treat them as employees instead of professionals (like lawyers and doctors), and that is a huge problem in our school system.

    1. “Other folks just treat them as employees instead of professionals (like lawyers and doctors), and that is a huge problem in our school system.”

       see the chicago teachers’ strike. it was more about “who’s going to watch my kids” than about the working conditions of the people responsible for educating the future generation of citizens. hell, more people are up in arms and supportive of the NFL referees and their labour struggles.

       and my boys go to a classical school, the direct opposite of un-schooling. i love it and they do, too.

       1. I think it’s harder for people to understand the types of issues teachers have to encounter…they just don’t understand there’s this whole bureaucratic side, that the teacher just doesn’t come in, teach the lesson, then leave for the day.

          I’ve been attending school board meetings for the past week for my current job, and I was just flabbergasted by what the new requirements for Illinois schools are. People see these strikes and think it’s all about salary (and boo-hoo, aren’t teachers overpaid or some shit we heard on the news?) and don’t realize that it’s actually about the red tape that makes actual teaching almost impossible.

    2. I’ve learned so much about why that need not be the case for everyone, and how to better teach for all students. It’s not something you just “know’ how to do, you have to learn, and I have amazing respect for teachers.

       But you aren’t the norm. I was one of those kids who wasn’t successful academically. I was incredibly bright but I’d been through some pretty serious trauma and I had a poorly-understood learning disability. I wasn’t one of those kids who sat quietly and raised their hands. My experience was that I would have, on average, one teacher every year who even bothered to try instead of just letting me skate by with the high D I could earn by ruining the curve on tests and only doing the assignments that caught my attention. Maybe half of those who tried could actually figure out how to engage me. I walked out of high school with a 1.8 GPA, an ACT score in the 30s, fifteen suspensions, an attendance rate in the high seventies, and glowing letters of recommendation from the three teachers who gave a shit that I encountered over four years. Not a single one of those letters came from a special education teacher. Compulsory primary and secondary education nearly killed my interest in school. If it wasn’t for parents who constantly reminded me that my education had not yet begun and all I had to do was survive this I wouldn’t have gone to college and on to earn a doctorate. So forgive me if I’ve somewhat less faith in the inherent goodness of teachers.

       1. Honestly William, how do you know you are the norm? Your one anecdotal experience doesn’t prove that traditional education is a failure for everyone else.

          1. I’m not the norm. I know a lot of people who have had better experiences than me. I even know people who have gone to the same schools I did who had pretty good experiences. That said, mine is not an uncommon experience either. Any system that produces kids like me is broken. Any system which fails to graduate fifty percent of it’s students is a failure. Any system which cannot better than a three-in-ten rate for basic scholastic achievement is utterly broken. Chicago’s is the third largest school system in the US and it fails the majority of it’s students.

23. this is my four year old’s first school experience. he loves it. I am wracked with guilt. I know better. I know that I am doing him a disservice in the long run. I feel pressured by family and economics to have to enroll him. but I don’t really have any other choice.

    good thing he loves it or I’d probably jump off a bridge.

    1. Hang in there Ericka!

       As scary as it must be to send your kid off to a school you don’t feel is right for him, just keep supplementing him with the lessons you want him to absorb when you have him around (and not just the academic lessons, but also the ethical, spiritual and philosophical ones you want to impart on him as well). I’m sure that will leave a big effect on him.

       And if one day your economic situation does allow you to educate him the way you’d like to, I’d encourage you to go for it. As powerful as family pressure can be, you probably know your son better than anyone else, so while you should consider their concerns if they’re valid, try not to let their disapproval dictate one of the most important parenting decisions you’ll probably ever make. Tough, I know, but it’s worth fighting for your convictions.

       Good luck – I’m sure your son will turn out just fine!

24. My mom was a teacher for nearly 15 years. She cares very much about the school system and education policy. She was a great teacher, and won some school “best teacher” awards and the like. The system was so unfair, unrewarding, an ineffective that she eventually quit to homeschool my brother and sister, both of whom have special needs. Don’t just assume that parents who take their kids out of public schools don’t care about “society at large or their smaller community.” My mom worked her ass off for society at large for long enough, but when they started punishing my little brother for his attention problems instead of working with him, she’d had enough.

    And by the way, my dad had to start working overtime and double shifts to make up the income we lost when my mom quit. It wasn’t like we just had a bunch of money to support this choice. We had a lot of trouble getting by for a while until my dad found a better job.

    Now my mom is a lot happier. Caring so much about a totally thankless job in a shitty school system was wearing her out. Teaching her kids and volunteering in the community is much better for her health. My mom is happy, my siblings are being treated like people instead of like problems, and my dad has a better job now, so even he doesn’t have to work quite as much. Homeschooling isn’t always the answer, but sometimes it is.

    1. I always raise an eyebrow when people who don’t like homeschooling use the argument that homeschoolers are selfish and depriving the rest of society by not being in a public or private school. If homeschooling happens to be the best (or hell, even just better) situation for a particular student, why should they have to give up that opportunity just to learn in a traditional classroom and “better society”?

       1. Nobody–at least nobody I support–is saying that anybody ought to give up homeschooling if it’s what’s best for their family. But the general impact is similar to private school: it removes affluent families who care about education and have the time/resources to do something about it from the educational system, and that has an impact on those who are left behind.

          1. Yeah – Homeschooling and attending private schools are definitely a privilege that’s mostly accessible only to families who can live off one salary/afford tuition, and it is a problem the decision to homeschool or attend public school affect those who attend private school.

             If you look at it strictly through with a social justice perception, then theoretically, affluent families should put their kids in public schools to increase the school’s resources/parental involvement/etc. But if said public school isn’t that great and parents have the opportunity to provide their kids a better education via homeschooling or private school, I’d imagine you’d be hard-pressed to find parents willing to keep their kids in public school.*

             It’s a crappy situation when you have to chose between bettering your own kid’s education through homeschooling or private school or sticking it out in public school to make said school better at the possible detriment of your kid’s education.** I think the real answer is a major renovation of our schools so that by choosing Option A doesn’t deprive those who chose Option B. Of course, that may (probably) never happen in my lifetime, so until then, I think everyone will have to deal with the consequences of their choices as best they can.

             * Sorry if my original post came off as accusing people on this board of arguing that homeschooling is bad for society. You’re right that no one on this board has argued that, or that people shouldn’t homeschool if its the best option for them. Emily’s post reminded me of an article on Slate that had a lot of posters using that argument, and I should have clarified that.

             ** I just want to make it clear that I don’t think (for those who have/had the opportunity) that choosing to go to public school instead of going to private school or being homeschooled will give you a sub-par education – you can a stellar education, a so-so education or a crappy education as a homeschooler, at a private school, public school, monasary school, charter school, etc.; it all depends on the school, your teachers, and your experiences.

    2. Also – really glad homeschooling has been a good experience for your family!

25. I used to think that if I had children they’d be better off homeschooled, but when my sister trained as a teacher for I was amazed how much things have changed. I’m so impressed by everything she does as she teaches 4-5 year olds, how everything she does as a teacher is about paying attention to the child as a whole person, and the pedagogy at that age is about how they learn and who they are, much less about making sure they can sit down and do sums. It’s totally different from my own experience as a child at school, which was miserable.

    But this is in a region where primary school teaching is a fiercely competitive profession– even before the recession there were 50 applications for every place on the teacher training course, and actually getting a permanent job once trained was even more competitive. I don’t know whether the local teaching and curriculum are good because teachers (who are obviously people interested in pedagogy) have a high social status and therefore more power to dictate best practice in education, or if teachers have retained their high social status because the curriculum and teaching are so good. Probably a mixture of both; it’s a virtuous circle. But the US seems to be sending itself in the wrong direction on that circle. I think social respect for teachers is a vital part of having an effective education system.

    (that said, if you’re in a country/region where the education system isn’t effective, it’s possible you’ll teach your kids better than a trained teacher in school, not because you’re a better teacher but just because you don’t have to manage a classroom full of kids when you teach. I would CRY if I had to supervise more than 20 4year olds, never mind actually trying to teach them something.

    1. So I’m in New Zealand where we have pretty good primary schools which our current Government is trying to ruin.

       I was interested in the reference to classes of over 20 four year olds. Here school starts at 5 and these new entrant classes have no more than 20 kids. 4 year olds are either at home, daycare or public or private kindergartens. Our public kindergarten has a ratio of 2 teachers, a student teacher and a parent helper for groups of 30 3-4 year olds. From this perspective even 20 4 year olds to one teacher seems too many.

       1. Yes. There’s a teacher’s assistant for the classes full of young children. There has to be because a lot of their activities are structured play; it wouldn’t be humanly possible to keep an eye on all the kids at once, otherwise.

          I would still find it unbelievably stressful to manage a classroom like that for even five minutes.

26. I say this as a teacher who is home today taking care of a sick wife and kids…

    Everything you say in this post is correct. And I appreciate it.

    However, it is also true that if you send your children to private schools or move to an awesome neighborhood to make sure your kids go to the “good” public school, you are exactly as much a part of the problem as home schoolers. And you are also exercising a privilege many people do not have.

    Bad schools are very rarely bad because of the teachers. Typically, it’s the population. The more at-risk kids you have in a school the harder it is to meet their needs. Having a balanced school population with some very wealthy kids and some kids in a rough social situation and a lot of kids in the middle is the ideal. That’s the one policy, if you ask me, that would do the most to transform our schools.

    And I’ve seen it. If you have more than, say about 1/3 of the kids in your classroom who aren’t having their needs met at home, it’s very hard to get much of anything done. Not impossible, but it’s tough. But if you can keep it to around 1/3 (or less), it’s amazing how everyone kind of rises to the challenge. This happens because expectations across the class are different.

    We are probably going to home school at least some. This is because the schools here are not especially good. It will not be easy. It will be much cheaper than sending our kids to private school. It will also be better for them than most of the public school options available to us.

    It will also make us part of the problem.

    Sometimes there is not a right answer.

    1. Bad schools are very rarely bad because of the teachers. Typically, it’s the population.

       Somehow it never is the teacher’s fault, is it? Its always the system or the administration or families or students. Those last two I absolutely buy as part of the problem, the third I know to be part of the problem, but that last one? “[T]he population?” Say what you mean to say: some kids are just too tough to teach. Get off your cross and go fuck yourself.

       If you have more than, say about 1/3 of the kids in your classroom who aren’t having their needs met at home, it’s very hard to get much of anything done.

       Funny, I work in a small private therapeutic high school with about 60 kids, virtually all of whom have the kind of dysfunction both within themselves and at home that is on par with the worst you’re likely to encounter. Madness, along with the trauma and parental chaos which tends to breed it, is the baseline for our “population.” Our students are the kinds of kids who have had their 504, and then their IEP, then usually a series of failures and hospitalizations. They’re the kids schools either throw up their hands over and say “theres nothing we can do in-house” or are forced to place by the threat of an ADA suit. Ours are the kids who are thrown away. They manage to succeed. We’ve got a college-bound rate for our seniors in the high 80s and a drop-out rate of very nearly zero. Then again, we demand a high degree of flexibility from the teaching staff and don’t tollerate bad teachers.

       1. I work in a small private therapeutic high school with about 60 kids

          If only we as a society cared enough to structure our schools in that way, you’re right, disadvantaged populations would get the actual support they need.

          1. Yes. This exactly. Small schools are wonderful.

       2. Okay, cool. So are we denying that, nationwide, school performance correlates almost perfectly with the percentage of the population on free and reduced lunch or are we going to pretend that is not a fact?

          You teach at a private, therapeutic high school with 60 kids. This tells me your class sizes are what? 6 kids? Maybe 10?

          I’m sure you guys do a great job with those kids. I really am. But your situation is in no way analogous to a regular public high school classroom, which is what I’m talking about.

          I never said some kids are too tough to teach, and I don’t believe that.

          But yeah, you give me 30 kids none of whom are having their basic needs met and then you give me 30 kids who go to public school in a wealthy suburb. I can teach both of those groups, but which one do you think is going to make more progress in a year?

          I’m human. I see 120 kids in a day. I can’t parent them all. I need to have a life beyond my job, and if I didn’t, it would still be impossible to meet all those needs.

          But you give me 10 of those tough kids in a class of 30 instead of 20 or 30, that I can do something with.

          That’s also well-documented in research. It basically generates a positive form of peer pressure. Kids who don’t have good role models at home follow the examples of kids they’re put into class with. You get the right mix, it works great.

          Working where you do, I’d guess you know all of this, but you want o put a negative spin on what I said, fine.

          Also, I didn’t say teachers are never the problem. I said it’s rare. I have absolutely known some incompetent teachers. But you need more than a few to bring a whole school down.

          1. Okay, cool. So are we denying that, nationwide, school performance correlates almost perfectly with the percentage of the population on free and reduced lunch or are we going to pretend that is not a fact?

             I’m denying that, after the number of friends and patients I’ve seen crushed by bad teachers, that your lot is blameless in the system. I’ve seen teachers choke students, I know of a teacher at the high school I attended who is widely known to pick a student to have sex with each year and has been caught in the act who was still teaching ten years after I graduated, I’ve been called a retard to my face, I’ve seen teachers throw desks, I’ve heard the word “uneducable” more times than I care to count. So yes, poverty is a big factor, but assholes and oppressors exist at every level of the system.

             But your situation is in no way analogous to a regular public high school classroom, which is what I’m talking about.

             Where I’ve also worked. The inner-city public high school I worked at had some great, motivated teachers, they also had teachers who were known to drive kids to dropping out. The public high school I attended was racially integrated, SES integrated with a working-to-middle class core, and selective entry. We graduated less than 70% of our class. Everyone I knew who dropped out could have stayed with more support but, you know, it wasn’t there.

             I can teach both of those groups, but which one do you think is going to make more progress in a year?

             The answer is clear. I’m also living in a city which just had a major teacher’s strike where the union behaved in a way guaranteed to increase class sizes.

             More to the point, the meme of the “difficult student” is common. I hear it all the time. I heard it a lot when I was in school, I hear it about the kids who suddenly turn around when they come to my school, I heard it over and over again when teachers were arguing against accountability during the strike that just ended. When I hear a teacher mention “difficult populations” I almost immediately hear it as a dog whistle, the educational equivalent to “those people.”

          2. My lot? That’s a pretty broad brush.

             Obviously, our experiences our wildly different. I’ve never seen teachers do the things you mention. That includes my experience as a student and an educator. The stuff you mention is inexcusable.

             I get that “difficult populations” can set off an alarm. But it’s also important to acknowledge that as part of the problem. Unless I’m reading you wrong, you do acknowledge this.

             I’m from Indiana but a good friend from college went to New Trier. That school should set off alarm bells to because the resources available to kids who go there are so out of proportion to what nearly every other public student in the country gets.

             When it comes down to it, I will and have taught rooms of 30 kids all of whom were struggling with issues at home. I did my best, but I know I failed some of those kids. It’s not lack of effort (at least on my part and on the parts of most other teachers I know) it’s lack of time and lack of resources. If that makes me a bad teacher in your book, fine, I’m a bad teacher, but I don’t know anyone in my situation who saves all the kids. If I help a few a year, I feel like I’ve done something worthwhile.

          3. Obviously, our experiences our wildly different. I’ve never seen teachers do the things you mention. That includes my experience as a student and an educator. The stuff you mention is inexcusable.

             I saw those kinds of things on a regular basis. I saw worse once when I was a student in the therapeutic system twenty years ago. I’m also a regular witness of lesser wounds inflicted by frustrated teachers who, no doubt, would offer their ballooning class sizes and the terrible state of their students as an excuse for losing their shit and saying the kinds of things that expose a fundamentally contemptuous view of the people who they’re supposed to be serving. Its a serious, widespread problem and, truthfully, I’m a little concerned that you claim to have never seen it’s signs.

             I’m from Indiana but a good friend from college went to New Trier. That school should set off alarm bells to because the resources available to kids who go there are so out of proportion to what nearly every other public student in the country gets.

             Ahh, yes, New Trier, the school district so rich that they can build a special building to segregate their disabled students and distract from the fact that eating disorders, drug use, self-injury, and suicide is endemic. But…fuck…look at their test scores. I do often wonder how the fuck anyone who draws a paycheck from that district sleeps at night when they know that their focus on performance is literally killing children.

             If I help a few a year, I feel like I’ve done something worthwhile.

             Honestly, thats a big part of the problem. The school systems are run by thieves and pressured by politicians, administrators generally don’t care at all about children unless they somehow advance a career, communities are fucked up, kids are hungry, and the best a teacher can do is “help a few a year.” Yeah, that is worthwhile, but what about the enormous number of kids who you know will fail? What about the ones who fall between the cracks? What about the ones who just quietly disappear in their sophomore year and no one knows its because they’ve swallowed a bottle of pills or opened a vein? What about the ones who don’t do anything so serious as try to kill themselves but just lose faith in education and drop out? Or the students who are just bright enough to see the scaffolding and realize that whats being billed as an education is a cruel joke told as the considerate hand of authority closes around their throats?

             You’ve taken offense to my attitude, I get that. I’m used to it because I’ve been offending teachers since I asked to learn about the solar system in kindergarten and pissed off my over-worked, under-supported so much that when I was hurt a month later she denied me first aid because “bad children don’t deserve band aids” and left me with a scar on my face that people still ask about. But, and I understand that this hurts, the school system is not good enough and teachers are part of the school system. That attitude that you’re doing the best you can and happy to help just a few is, as someone who was failed by a yearly parade of professionals teachers who just didn’t have it in them to deal with me, fucking unconscionable. It is telling to me that the first Teacher’s Union strike Chicago saw in twenty five years came down to cash, rehiring rules, and evaluations rather than class sizes or resources. Its telling to me that the CTU chose to sacrifice the needs of children for employment security while pimping those same children out so they could play saints. I know thats hard for teachers to hear. I’ve been getting called an asshole a lot over this belief lately. Fifteen years ago when I said shit like this I’d get sent to the principle’s office and push buttons until I got a three day vacation, but I’d still say it just as I do now. The “woe is me” routine impresses me as much now as it did then.

          4. So what do you want me to do? Under our trimester system, I’ll probably 200 kids this year. 140 of them will need serious help. Am I responsible for all of them because I see them an hour a day? If so, I quit. That’s too much to ask. Social workers don’t deal with that kind of case load. Am I supposed to abandon my family and stay at school 16 hours a day? No. You want to get all holier-than-thou? Fine. But you’re not saving all 140 of those kids either. No one is. You know why? Because we lived in a fucked up society that does not care for its poor. You want to gripe at somebody, go gripe at the deadbeat parents (where were yours, by the way, when you were having such hard time. I’d have been on the teacher denying your a bandaid like white on rice). Go gripe at the teachers who really don’t do anything (I’ve seen the little things you mention, but not the big. I’ve never seen a student assaulted by a teacher, but I have see the reverse. I have known of teachers having sex with students, but they got fired), but leave those of us trying to do something alone.

             And leave unions out of it. If unions were so bad, Europe’s educational systems would be in chaos. They aren’t.

             Yes, the system is inadequate, but that doesn’t mean everyone in the system is. Hell, you are part of the system. Everyone involved in education is.

             I’m a teacher and I’m a human. I’m not a robot, and I’m not single-handedly responsible for 140 kids. I do what I can. If that’s not good enough for you, good luck, because your never going to find more than a handful of people who meet your standard, and most of them will burn out within a few years.

          5. So what do you want me to do?

             I wouldn’t mind seeing a teacher’s union strike over the conditions their students have to live under instead of whether or not a fired teacher gets to be first in line when another school in the district has an opening. Chicago schools have gone to seed for twenty five years and when the teachers finally went on strike they demanded compensation concessions which they knew would lead to fewer teachers.

             I want to see the system burn. I want to see us start over.

             You want to get all holier-than-thou?

             Keep calling a victim holier-than-thou, its what I’ve come to expect from your ilk since I was called a “school house lawyer” for having the audacity to expect my IEP to be followed. Unlike you, I’ve bled for this bullshit on both sides.

             But you’re not saving all 140 of those kids either.

             Nope, but I’m saving more than you, in no small part because the work I do is built to revolve around empowering kids despite a fucked up society rather than indoctrinating the easy ones and washing my hands of the rest.

             Because we lived in a fucked up society that does not care for its poor.

             And who, exactly, does that society pay to perpetuate the knowledge on which that particular system of power and value is based?

             You want to gripe at somebody, go gripe at the deadbeat parents

             Family therapy is part of my job…

             where were yours, by the way, when you were having such hard time

             They were about the only people behind me, but nice attempt to throw an aspersion.

             I’d have been on the teacher denying your a bandaid like white on rice

             They were. Thanks to the teacher’s union its virtually impossible to fire a teach in this city. Besides, who is going to believe a kid who talks too much and his working class parents over someone who has dedicated their lives to education. My parents took it as far as they could but, you know, the police always do look after their own…

             I’ve never seen a student assaulted by a teacher, but I have see the reverse.

             Most abuse goes unseen because abusers are generally pretty good at hiding their actions. I’ve never been assaulted by a patient, but I have seen it happen to other clinicians. Thing is…the powerless attacking the powerful isn’t the same level of transgression as the reverse.

             but leave those of us trying to do something alone.

             No. The greatest thing I learned in school was to follow only those directions which make sense to me or have consequences which might harm me. I will not leave those of you trying to do something alone because, and I cannot stress this enough, you’re part of the same system. You are, to me, a collaborator. Teachers are not allies who have gone awry. They are willful enemies because, amongst the larger systems, even the best have generally only picked favorites from amongst the prisoners. I do not doubt that the system has forced you into that. I’ve as much sympathy for that as I do for the fact that rape culture helped lead my rapist to rape me.

             And leave unions out of it. If unions were so bad, Europe’s educational systems would be in chaos. They aren’t.

             Unions aren’t necessarily bad. I’m deeply pro-union. My father and his father are both union workers (although my father’s union ceased serving it’s workers in favor of serving men from Bridgeport with broken noses some time ago). American unions, however, are often fucked up in ways that European unions are not. Teacher’s unions, for instance, look much more like the Fraternal Order of Police to me than the IWW.

             Yes, the system is inadequate, but that doesn’t mean everyone in the system is. Hell, you are part of the system. Everyone involved in education is.

             Am I a part of the system? I work for a school, yes, but does it resemble yours at all. You’ve been careful to point out just how different my school is from yours. The school I work at has an enormous amount of autonomy within the system and I have an enormous amount of autonomy within the school. Our teachers have an enormous amount of autonomy coupled with incredible flexibility.

             There are better systems out there. I’m part of one. There is another a few blocks from my home. They all require more money. They also all require that poor teachers find different professions. They require that children be put first. They require discipline becoming a means rather than an end. Thing is, I never really see teachers fighting in an organized manner for a different system. In Chicago I see the exact opposite happening. Until that changes I will continue to see teachers as an impediment to change.

             If that’s not good enough for you, good luck, because your never going to find more than a handful of people who meet your standard, and most of them will burn out within a few years.

             You start with honey, then move to authority, then to guilt, then to threats, then finally to “this is how it is now deal with it.” How disappointingly, boringly, familiar.

          6. William, you’re just being an asshole:

             I want to see the system burn. I want to see us start over.

             Yeah, best of luck with that. Let’s light Jason on fire. 9_9

          7. William, you’re just being an asshole

             Yup. My tone is off, my attitude is unacceptable, and I’m being an ingrate.

       3. Also, just out of curiosity, where do most of your kids come from? I could be wrong, but I’m guessing it isn’t schools in affluent suburbs. Why? Because these schools aren’t overwhelmed by hundreds and hundreds of troubled kids.

          I teach in a school of almost 2000 kids. 70% of our population is at-risk. That’s 1400 kids.

          1. We take kids from a pretty enormous radius that ranges from the extremely affluent North Shore suburbs to some very poor (sub)urban sprawl areas. We’ve a pretty specific specialty and there just aren’t many people out there who do what we do and still have high academic standards. Still, we do have kids from some of the highest performing schools in the state (which “happen” to have amongst the highest suicide rates in the state). Thing is, though, our kids aren’t “at risk,” they’re “past risk.” We’re talking about multiple hospitalizations, extensive medication lists, severe trauma history (often because of teachers who were too busy to address even the most brutal and open of bullying), and home situations that are often difficult to describe.

          2. You know why? Because we lived in a fucked up society that does not care for its poor.

             Bingo. And no teacher, no matter how great or caring, can resolve this.

             Jason, I have observed the kinds of things you’re talking about, and I am glad you DO care. You sound like you ARE making a difference in kids’ lives, and I think it’s ludicrous to expect teachers to fill in the gaps society creates. Teachers are expected to teach, to parent, to coach, to discipline, to provide social work and therapy services. It’s absurd, and impossible.

             So, thank you for doing the best you can, and for trying to maintain some balance in your life so you CAN do a good job.

       4. You start with honey, then move to authority, then to guilt, then to threats, then finally to “this is how it is now deal with it.” How disappointingly, boringly, familiar.

          ….

          William, ANYONE would have moved in that direction. He’s not your teacher, you’re not his student, and him getting agressive after you repeatedly insist he’s a “collaborator” to child abuse and a “willful enemy” to children is not a rhetorical strategy he’s using on a student, but rather on a peer, and not unexpected.

          (FWIW, I don’t disagree with you that there’s a refusal to ever blame teachers. I get sick of it myself.)

          1. I get that, Chava. I came out of the box aggressive and looking for a fight. Maybe it wasn’t the best strategy but I’m frustrated and not especially interested in playing the old “oh you’re such a treasure to our community for dedicating your lives to children” game when it makes me sick and few teachers are interested in unpacking it. I fell that if you’re going to enter into a service profession you only really have any business being there if you like serving. I don’t like therapists who bitch about sick patients and only want to work with the worried well, either. All too often discussions about how schools fail children degenerate into discussions of how hard it is for teachers. It makes me wish I had a fiery sword…

             Still, if anyone’s feelings were hurt: I’m not sorry. I’m what happens when teachers like Jason are the best we can hope for. It isn’t good enough.

          2. I agree, William. I remember being told by a psychiatrist I saw once upon a time that she refused to work with schizophrenic patients because “they were too sick to be in the community.”

             I think I may be your only fan in this thread, but I’m a fan.

       5. So, William, you’re a special snowflake who works in a special snowflake school that’s completely unlike the vast majority of schools in this country.

          And you think this gives you some authority to trash the teachers at those other (large, underfunded, unspecialized) schools for being insufficiently willing to martyr themselves trying to single-handedly fix hundreds of kids who are being failed by their parents and communities on every level?

          Give me a fucking break.

          1. So, William, you’re a special snowflake who works in a special snowflake school that’s completely unlike the vast majority of schools in this country.

             I’m not terribly special, but the school I work at is in that it actually serves students.

             And you think this gives you some authority to trash the teachers

             Basic cognition gives me the ability to trash teachers, twelve years of being their victim gives me the ammunition and context to do it, twenty years or so of pretty brutal oppression gives me the complete and utter lack of giving a shit what my oppressors think necessary to do so, but authority? Nah, thats not a game I’m interested in playing. Not then, not now. I’m not asking anyone to submit.

             schools for being insufficiently willing to martyr themselves trying to single-handedly fix hundreds of kids who are being failed by their parents and communities on every level?

             My problem is not the unwillingness to martyr oneself. My problem is the complete and utter unwillingness to engage in any self-criticism that I see so often from teachers. Seems like someone else is always to blame. In therapy I’d call that out and try to help someone work through it. In this discussion I’ll attack it and will be neither intimidated nor shamed into silence.

          2. I feel like our dialogue about teachers is intensely polarized. On the one hand, we have teachers as heroes, on the other hand we have teachers as lazy, money-grubbing union-using leaches on the system.

             It reminds me a bit of the way that we talk about soldiers – either they’re laying their lives on the line for OUR COUNTRY and are patriotic heroes who should be deferred to in public (given airplane seats, etc), or they’re evil baby-murdering genocidal raping maniacs conditioned to have contempt for all brown people everywhere. There’s very little room in between to talk about how most people join the military – or become teachers – or go into nursing and medicine – because they’re good jobs.

             And the people who want good jobs want them for a variety of reasons, stability and pay being two big factors, but also predictability, some level of personal satisfaction…

             I don’t think that teachers should be heroes or martyrs on the hire-em-young-and-use-em-up model of Teach for America, but I do think teachers need to be held to higher standards, academically and morally. It’s not okay to mock students, it’s not okay to react defensively when your authority is questioned, it’s not okay to suspend a student who refuses to say the pledge, it’s not okay to physically hurt or sexually assault students (!), it’s not okay to teach outdated material because the teachers’ ed courses you took taught you watered-down material that actual majors would never touch… NOT OKAY!!!

27. I think part of the problems being discussed here have to do with the real vulnerability of children in our society. Kerandria’s parents used homeschooling to keep her accessible for abuse, to take away her childhood, and to take away any time and opportunities she might have had unsupervised by her abusive parents. William, among other people, was utterly brutalized by an educational system that is too often used to grind students into obedience (and yes, that has been historically one of its aims, though I don’t think that’s been the only aim). It’s just too easy in our society to abuse children, both personally and institutionally. The problem with homeschooling as a solution to institutional abuse (and I mean the problem on a mass scale, not individual) is that it makes escape from abuse something available only to those with money. And the problem with school as a solution to parental abuse is that it doesn’t work as well as you’d like (though I do think that time away from parents is crucial in all kinds of ways) and that it can so easily be thwarted by parents.

    I don’t know where that leaves us.

    1. With a lot of interrelated problems to tackle and too many people promoting one-system-to-rule-them-all solutions. Just as not everyone can afford the time and resources needed to educate tiny humans at home (never mind do it well), the public school system is a product of its evolution in society which results in individual and systemic miseducation.

       A good, well-rounded education system that instills basic skills without destroying curiosity and trying to force every student into the same set of expectations is a necessity *because* it’s damn near impossible for many parents, alone or together, to carve out time for primary education. For those who can, or for children who would be poorly assisted within the public system, it’s a perfectly viable option, but certainly not a panacea, for reasons expressed above.

       I don’t have an easy answer. There isn’t one.

    2. The problem with homeschooling as a solution to institutional abuse (and I mean the problem on a mass scale, not individual) is that it makes escape from abuse something available only to those with money.

       Exactly. And also, that home not also be an abusive situation. I too had an extremely abusive school experience, and benefited greatly from withdrawing and taking my GED, and before that getting home instruction for medical reasons, but i was in an incredibly fortunate position to be able to do that. The kids in school situations like mine whose families can’t homeschool them, or can’t get instruction for them, or are as abusive as the school, or just don’t exist? What do we do about those kids?

    3. I don’t know where that leaves us.

       Honestly, ideally? Utopically? (if that’s a word, lol)

       Smaller communities handling education on lesser scales. Instead of one school of 400 kids, four schools of a hundred or fewer kids. Using technology like Skype and the Internet to get better access to better teaching materials, with a teacher always in the class to assist.

       Accommodating physical learners better than we do (that pesky test score gap between boys and girls? this is half the reason why), by having smaller learning groups, which provides more time for experiential learning. PAYING TEACHERS WELL.

       And yes, a less capitalistic system that means that BOTH parents can and will be involved in their kid’s education (having time, money to spare for it). Parents who are qualified in one or two subjects donating regular time to teaching; I had the benefit of learning literature from someone who had a Master’s in it, and statistics and math from someone similarly qualified, and I love both subjects. I also attribute my lack of interest in others like chemistry/physics to the fact that neither of my parents were particularly invested, AND they couldn’t find someone really talented to teach me. Even one parent participating regularly in teaching for two hours a week would make a difference both to the central teacher’s ability to get things done, AND to the level of the kids’ exposure to various subjects.

       Involving fathers in their kids’ education and in giving them extra lessons. (I will never, ever underestimate how much watching my parents’ marriage contributed to my becoming a feminist; if anything, my dad’s more feminist than my mother.)

       Accommodating different learning styles in test-taking and assignments (this is not doable with larger schools where the teacher can’t afford to create three different tests, say, for multiplication, and hand one out to verbal learners, one to visual and one to physical.

       Removing the concept of age-based classrooms. At nine, I was reading Jeffrey Archer and (the shame!) Ayn Rand, and still only doing chemistry at my grade level, and geometry a little below my grade (it was going to end up being a lot, lol). The fact that I was the only student meant that both could be accommodated. And please, for the love of god don’t tell me this isn’t workable; my mother’s school managed this kind of varied age group class, with some creative timetable juggling that I’ll be happy to go into if anyone wants to know.

       And since I’ve rambled on wayyyyyy too long, I’ll stop now.

28. It sounds more like people form their opinions on homeschooling because it’s associated with your political right, and not because they actually want to discuss the subject. Am I correct in assuming most posters here are American?

    1. What makes you think the two things are mutually exclusive?

29. Not just because a university education is our unquestioned aspiration for our children, but also because it seems to be the closest model for the education we are now trying to provide. Tightly focused class sessions; expert presentations complemented by individual instruction; hands-on learning in areas that vary from day to day and year to year; education undertaken in the wider world—these aspects of our so-called homeschooling are basic to postsecondary learning.

    The author of this piece has a much rosier and much more optimistic view of college education than I do.

    1. The author of this piece has a much rosier and much more optimistic view of college education than I do.

       Agreed. Please tell my state university chemistry teacher who taught a classroom of 250 that he should have “tightly focused class sessions; expert presentations complemented by individual instruction; hands-on learning in areas that vary from day to day and year to year; education undertaken in the wider world.”

       I totally failed that class (my first failed class ever), and he had no idea who I was. I transferred later to a small, private college, where I got more attention and graduated at the top of my class, but even then there was no “hands-on learning in areas that vary from day to day and year to year.” And the education expense was much, much higher – about 4.5 times the cost and that was a bargain for a private education.

30. In my job, I get to experience the joy that is homeschooling catalogs.They are some of the most racist, classist and sexist things I’ve ever viewed in my life.

    Obviously, not all homeschooling experiences are like that, but omg.

31. Tossing random ideas out there:

    Would some of the problems related to educators’ failure to identify and correct for negative influences beyond school walls, for whatever reason (overload, burnout, relative inattentiveness, competence, etc) be mitigated by cranking class sizes in primary years to 15/class or less, maybe even down to 10 students/class?

    1. The research on the impact of class sizes is mixed, but most teachers will say this helps. What really matters, at least in high school, is planning and prep time. US teachers spend far more time in the classroom than other Western nations, even with our generally shorter school year. It is hard to be that “on” all day.

       Whether you shrink class sizes or increase planning time, you still run into the same problem: You’d need to hire a lot more teachers.

       1. And that’s a “problem” only in that our populations flatly refuse to devote the kind of resources toward education and care up front that would mitigate other, more severe problems in the future. I’d rather drop three, four, ten times as much money on more teachers than… well, I’ve got a list of money sinks that somehow ended up with higher priority than teaching kids and ensuring they’re well cared for and loved.

          1. You could actually find a lot of the money already in the system. Millions of dollars are spent on designing and administering standardized tests and various other nonsense that accomplishes nothing beyond giving politicians something to talk about (ACT and SAT scores, for instance, do not correlate particularly well with real-world achievement).

             But that money somewhere useful and you could solve at least some of the problem without dropping an extra dime into the pool.

          2. And that goes for higher ed as well. My department has two copiers. They’re both over 12 years old, and they each break down once a week at least. I’m not exaggerating. But apparently there’s no funding to ensure that one of the most popular majors on campus has a functioning xerox machine. And they keep upping the class sizes.

          3. ACT and SAT scores, for instance, do not correlate particularly well with real-world achievement

             My understanding is that they don’t correlate well with college achievement, either.

          4. Amen. Standardized tests are a joke. They test one thing: how well you can take a standardized test.

          5. ACT and SAT scores, for instance, do not correlate particularly well with real-world achievement

             My understanding is that they don’t correlate well with college achievement, either.

             So true, I got a perfect score on the Math portion of the SAT, and I flunked out of one college and dropped out of another. High school was super easy for me due to similar standardized tests. As soon as I was required to self motivate, I realized I wasn’t nearly as good at school as I thought I was.

    2. And not just class size. General conditions. My best friend’s little sister went a school so overcrowded that they were on split-shift, nobody had her/his own locker, and classes were meeting in stairwells. It wasn’t much of a surprise when it came out that she had been cutting at least 3 days out of every week. When a friend of mine became a public school teacher, she walked into her classroom to find a broken ceiling dripping yellow sludge onto her desk. When we put kids in conditions like that, we’re sending a message to them about how much we value them and their education. If we want them to value it, we have to value it too.

    3. And adding in more support services so that teachers aren’t also trying to act as social workers, nurses, addictions counsellors, etc. at the same time. I’ve recently started working with some local high schools in my area looking at their non-academic service programming and it is comprehensive – especially with high-needs populations (as Jason mentioned above) who are dealing with a lot of other issues behind the scenes which impact greatly on their academic engagement and achievement. Schools are small communities and they are about more than classroom education – teachers alone can’t manage it all.

       I don’t think the problem is “population” or “teachers” – it seems like a broader systemic issue: student needs, teacher and administration capacity, community and city politics, regional interests, national priorities, etc. I think what this thread aptly demonstrates is the overwhelming need for options and for flexible support as well as on-going attention to the basic needs and rights of students.

       1. And adding in more support services so that teachers aren’t also trying to act as social workers, nurses, addictions counsellors, etc. at the same time.

          This. People are always shocked when they find out how many psychologists we keep on staff. Granted, its the nature of the school, but support services are woefully inadequate in most districts.

          The thing is, if you put a kid into our school who isn’t appropriate for the setting they’ll have trouble. I think you’re absolutely right that flexibility is paramount here. One of the things we need to give up is this idea of a uniform education that can be applied to any student. Smaller, more specialized, better supported, better staffed, more accountable schools are the road out of this.

32. I just want to pop in to say that I was homeschooled/unschooled until college by lefty parents, have had friends throughout my entire life (despite a couple big moves), and was academically successful in college and professionally successful after that.

    Yes, icky gender dynamics can come out in homeschooling – both my parents have worked my entire life, but my mom was 80% responsible for my education. This is not the fault of homeschooling, this is part of a bad dynamic that is pervasive in every aspect of my parents marriage.

    I think seisy made really good points – there are good reasons to homeschool and bad ones. My mother wanted to home/unschool me because she had a terrible K-12 experience – both in terms of academics and bullying. The way people homeschool, and the lives of homeschooled children are hugely diverse, and while laws vary state by state there is typically some sort of oversight by the schools. In one state I lived in, I had to submit a portfolio of work at the end of the year. In another state, I had to take a standardized test approved by the local school.

    I absolutely 100% support having a strong public school system. Home/unschooling does not make sense for everyone. But it is a really good choice for some people. Please do not pretend we are a monolith.

    1. I absolutely 100% support having a strong public school system. Home/unschooling does not make sense for everyone. But it is a really good choice for some people. Please do not pretend we are a monolith.

       THIS!!!

       Just want to chime in and say I was a homeschooler who had a similar experience to you – thrived in homeschool from 3rd through 12th grade, did well in college and grad school, and am now building up a decent career.

       Glad to hear I’m not alone!

33. These data about homeschooling add a lot to the discussion I think.

    I’m not sure why as a psychologist with a Ph.D., I should be certain that a teacher whose college entrance scores are most likely lower than average is going to do a better job than me, given the results?

    The truth is, there are few professions that don’t involve proficiency from experience rather than books. My guess is that traditional teachers will tell you they’ve learned most of what they need to know by practicing. Why shouldn’t parents do the same in homeschooling their children? Despite the tragic experiences of some here, most parents love their children and want the best for them, no matter what form of education they choose.

    And as an aside, I’ve felt much more pressure to pursue a career than I’ve ever felt to give it up. For me, feminism is freedom. How is telling women that it’s selfish to homeschool any different than telling them it’s selfish to work outside the home?

    1. Seriously? We’re playing “my test scores are better than your test scores”?

       Standardized tests measure nothing but how good you are at taking standardized tests. I agree that too many lousy students are funneled into education, but that has nothing to do with their SAT scores.

       The issue with gender and home-schooling isn’t selfishness (that’s an issue that can be raised with anyone and home-schooling). The issue is that it’s yet more uncompensated, insecure, isolating, domestic labor expected from women. You can choose your choice, but choices have consequences, and the consequences, financial and otherwise, to women of being the partner who bears the brunt of the domestic labor have been clear for years. Adding yet more labor to what we expect of the “good mother” will help nobody.

       1. Standardized tests measure nothing but how good you are at taking standardized tests.

          Seconded. When I was in school I was regularly scoring embarrassingly well across the board despite reading Lovecraft in the back of the room with headphones in when I wasn’t cutting class, sleeping, or fucking around. I sure as hell wasn’t learning in class but if you only looked at test scores I’d be the kid you tried to build a curriculum around. My sister, on the other hand, is every bit as bright as I am and actually payed attention in class but just never had the same intuitive understanding of tests.

          1. Yea, they tried to track me into remedial classes several times because of my standardized test scores. My parents had to get involved and ask if my, you know, actual GRADES/vocabularly/writing samples counted for more than the pitiful excuse for an IQ test that is the Otis Lennon.

    2. I very much doubt that those bar charts comparing the test scores of kids whose families are affluent enough to home school them with all public school students are controlled for family income. And if they aren’t, they’re worthless.

    3. “For me, feminism is freedom. How is telling women that it’s selfish to homeschool any different than telling them it’s selfish to work outside the home?”

       Is this a trick question? I believe the latter enables independence while the former does not? Moms make their decisions for complex reasons, and I’m not discounting that complexity. However, it would be flat out dishonest to argue that moms who homeschool aren’t dependent on their husbands, at least in a financial sense. It’s not freedom- it may be a reasonable choice in a given situation, but you can’t argue that it’s freedom. Did you read Jill’s post past the headline?

       Also, you’ve done a really messed up thing by using the word “women” when you mean “mothers.” Only in Ann Romney’s world are the two interchangeable terms. I don’t have or intend to have kids, but so far I’ve still got my lady card.

       1. Moms make their decisions for complex reasons, and I’m not discounting that complexity. However, it would be flat out dishonest to argue that moms who homeschool aren’t dependent on their husbands, at least in a financial sense.

          Or, you know, you could apply that Complex Reasoning of yours to the fact that not everyone’s mother stops working so she can homeschool. Mine hasn’t worked less than full-time since I was two, and usually more. THat said, this was possible because my dad does a lot of housework AND was very involved in teaching me (he taught math and the sciences and computer “stuff” – I sadly have no head for programming – and joined in language classes).

          That said, about my mother…for the last 15 she’s run a non-profit school and voluntarily given up her salary to pay others’, which is again a facet of economic privilege. But to hear “homeschooling mothers” as if they’re all granola-crunching hippies or cowering housewives drives me nucking futs.

          1. I responded to the original poster’s comments, and I never said anything about whether I had complex reasoning, whether only hippies and fundies homeschooled, and so on. You’ve read all of that into what I said; it’s just not there.

             If you’re mom was able to hold down a job and homeschool, great. It’s not something I’ve ever heard of, and it’s not what the orginal commenter described. However, the point remains that it did not constitute “freedom.” I never actually said I think “freedom” is a good thing, and I think obligations are really valuable. What I did object to were the logical inconsistencies of the above comment and the original piece. It’s really unfair to throw in an orange and say I mischaracterized an apple.

             You really have no idea where I’m coming from- I have 3 learning disabilities, and I am very, very well-versed in the obstacles presented by traditional schooling. I am totally sympathetic on that front. I’m just bothered by the disingenuousness of the original comment and the original article.

          2. Samanthab, I never said that you said those things, merely that I’m seeing those things conflated a lot on this thread and to please remember that women who homeschool – like women everywhere – aren’t a monolith. To argue from the perspective that all homeschooling mothers everywhere are SAHMs seems frankly ridiculous to me, as I’ve known a bunch of homeschooling mothers and I think one of them stayed home full-time to do it (and she had disabilities that made work practically impossible, anyway, disabilities that eventually killed her). One of the most successful homeschooling moms I know is a surgeon. Another’s a teacher. Etc, etc.

             Your thesis was to argue that it’s “dishonest” to say that women can be financially independent while homeschooling. My reply indicated that in my experience, lolololol this is not remotely true. While it’s true that if my mother re-entered the formal workforce at this point she’d earn less than my father, it’s only because principals and head teachers earn less than experienced software consultants on average.

             I totally agree, though, that the original article is disingenuous as fuck. Dude’s clearly not doing any of the work, has weird understandings of college and school, and I predict the results of this endeavour to be poorly educated entitled snots. But maybe that’s just me.

          3. If you’re mom was able to hold down a job and homeschool, great.

             I’ve done this too, actually.

       2. However, it would be flat out dishonest to argue that moms who homeschool aren’t dependent on their husbands, at least in a financial sense. It’s not freedom- it may be a reasonable choice in a given situation, but you can’t argue that it’s freedom.

          Agreed. There is a lot of choice feminism that goes on with people claiming that traditional gender roles, such as those that occur when a woman stays home to homeschool children and thereby becomes financially dependent on her husband, are “feminist.” Thanks for calling bullshit on this.

          1. There is a lot of choice feminism that goes on with people claiming that traditional gender roles, such as those that occur when a woman stays home to homeschool children and thereby becomes financially dependent on her husband, are “feminist.”

             Oh, totally agreed! Do you have similar objections to (full-time) working women married to (full-time) working men who equally participate in childcare, education and housework? Or do you just conveniently ignore that that’s a possibility, because you get to rail about women’s choices more comfortably that way?

          2. I am not sure if I understand your comment, but to clarify, this post by Jill in June on choice feminism is basically my argument.

             And equally shared parenting is my planned parenting style.

          3. There is a lot of choice feminism that goes on with people claiming that traditional gender roles, such as those that occur when a woman stays home to homeschool children and thereby becomes financially dependent on her husband, are “feminist.”

             Um. You’re not saying that women who stay home to homeschool children and are financially dependent on their husbands can’t be feminists. Are you?

          4. I read the noun “gender roles” going with “are ‘feminist,'” so not the women themselves, but the gender roles they decide to occupy.

          5. Past, I read it the same way EG did, which is why I agreed with that sentence.

    4. How is telling women that it’s selfish to homeschool. . .

       With the changed to nested threads, it’s possible I missed it, but who told women that they’re selfish to homeschool?

34. Pingback: Feminists Now Dictating How Your Children Should Be Educated

35. I have been homeschooling my three children for the past four years. Everyone makes their own choices but I wanted to say the choice we made was made by both my husband and I. Homeschooling Moms aren’t forced into this or made to stay home. They do it because they feel it’s best for their children. Children come first, not “me time.” Mothers of this generation have turned into selfish women who ship their kids off to day care, after school care etc. to have a career. Raising the next generation is the most important career a women can have! As far as financial independence my husband has always refereed to his income as our money. In fact he likes to brag to others at the “work” I do at home for our family. I believe if more Moms did stay home (homeschool or not) we wouldn’t have so many rude, disrespectful, immature and non social children. Yes, I said non social. Ever talk to a homeschooler? They will look you in the eye, shake your hand and call you Mr. or Mrs. My son’s friends that aren’t homeschooled barely acknowledge when I’m speaking to them let alone provide eye contact. Not to mention the know nothing of how a household runs. Homeschool kids help with laundry, chores an daily errands. This prepares them for going off to college and being on their own. Being in a state controlled classroom for 7 hours a day doesn’t do that.

    1. Homeschooling Moms aren’t forced into this or made to stay home. They do it because they feel it’s best for their children. Children come first, not “me time.” Mothers of this generation have turned into selfish women who ship their kids off to day care, after school care etc. to have a career. Raising the next generation is the most important career a women can have!

       Oh, go to hell. It is not selfish to not want to be at the financial mercy of somebody else. It is not selfish to pursue something you love and are good at–the world is not swimming in so many talented people that we can afford to do without them. It is not selfish for adult women to consider their own needs and decide not to sacrifice every aspect of themselves on the altar of The Children. It is modelling a healthy life.

       Why do you say it’s the most important career a woman can have? Do men have more important things to do? As important as it may be, the pay is shit, the benefits are worse, there’s no opportunity for advancement and the job security is nil. Try using it in the “work experience” section of your cv and see how far you get.

       As far as financial independence my husband has always refereed to his income as our money.

       Yep, so did my dad. Until he left my mom for another woman. Then his tune suddenly changed.

       I believe if more Moms did stay home (homeschool or not) we wouldn’t have so many rude, disrespectful, immature and non social children.

       Sure. Children were so much polite back in the old days blah blah blah, get off my lawn. Until you have some actual evidence that kids are worse today, forget it. Because all the actual studies suggest that the only difference between kids with SAHMs and kids with moms who work for pay is that the latter are more socially deft.

       Not to mention the know nothing of how a household runs. Homeschool kids help with laundry, chores an daily errands. This prepares them for going off to college and being on their own. Being in a state controlled classroom for 7 hours a day doesn’t do that.

       It’s true, it’s impossible for children to help with chores unless they’re homeschooled. Why, I never helped with laundry, helped with dusting, took out the trash, washed the tub, set the table, etc. Any memories I have to the contrary are clearly false implants.

       1. Raising the next generation is the most important career a women can have!

          Why isn’t it just as important for men?

          Are you really that insecure that you feel compelled to put down women whose lives are different from yours? And children raised differently from yours? What supremely arrogant nonsense.

          And the ability to do laundry is the most important skill for any kid to have before going to college? Clearly, that’s enough all by itself to justify 12 years of home schooling! I’m amazed that my son had time to figure it out despite all those hours in a state-controlled classroom.

          Go to hell is right.

       2. Because all the actual studies suggest that the only difference between kids with SAHMs and kids with moms who work for pay is that the latter are more socially deft.

          I don’t believe this is true – or, for that matter, something that can be proved. It’s just more b.s. in the “SAHMs are better!” “No, working mothers are better!” game.

          Also, why aren’t men ever, ever, EVER referred to as “working fathers”?

          1. You can believe it or not, but that’s what I’ve read.

    2. Ericka, to characterise schooling kids as non-social is fucking annoying. My kid goes to school and she’s perfectly social, fuck you very much. She also helps with the household stuff, is extremely polite to people she meets, and is a kind and sensitive and outgoing person. Just because you’ve drunk the anti-feminist swill the Extreme Homeschoolers feed you doesn’t mean that every woman should devote herself to her kids (and I say that as a student/SAHP, and the wife of a former SAHM), that women can’t have a greater career than that (tell that to my homeschooling mom, of whose dozen or so schools I am incredibly fucking proud), or that financial dependence is A-Okay.

       And I’m a homeschooler who believes totally that anyone who can and wants to homeschool should, so please don’t get all up in my face about my not knowing what I’m talking about.

    3. Raising the next generation is the most important career a women can have!

       Could you please provide some examples of careers that men can have that are more important than raising the next generation, as well as reasons why women cannot have those careers?

       Also — and I apologize for nit-picking — woman is spelled w-o-m-a-n, not m-o-t-h-e-r.

       1. Could you please provide some examples of careers that men can have that are more important than raising the next generation?

          Clearly Ericka’s answer would be NONE OF THE CAREERS. Because otherwise that would be misogynistic and anti-feminist and ridiculously religiously based an-

          oh.

    4. Mothers of this generation have turned into selfish women who ship their kids off to day care, after school care etc. to have a career.

       Some mothers want to be able to feed and clothe their children. Working moms with kids in school are still able to have kids who are social, polite, and help out around the house.

       +1 to the ‘fuckyouverymuch’ sentiment.

       1. And actually, lots of studies show that having a working mom has great benefits for children. Daughters of working moms tend to be more independent and do better in school. Children who have high-quality childcare from someone other than their parents also do extremely well — better than children with a stay-at-home mom (the key there, of course, is quality).

          I’d also like to push back on this idea that there’s “nothing more important” than giving up your entire life to raise the next generation. First, working mothers do raise their children, but that aside: Why is it “selfish” to have your own life and not give everything up in the service of your kids? Do you then expect your kids to do the same? What the heck is the point of raising “the next generation” if we expect the female half of every generation to stop just as she’s getting going?

          1. Children who have high-quality childcare from someone other than their parents also do extremely well — better than children with a stay-at-home mom (the key there, of course, is quality).

             Can we not turn this into another anti-SAHM thread, please?

             There are plenty of reasons pro and con to SAH v. WOH. In light of the current economic situation we face here in the U.S., however, the calculus and reasons behind making that decision are far more complicated then they ever were say 5 years ago.

             1. Can we not turn this into another anti-SAHM thread, please?

                I’m not turning it into an anti-SAHM thread. I am pointing out that there are tangible benefits to having a working mother, in response to a commenter declaring that it is THE BEST EVER to have a stay-at-home mother. There are certainly pluses and minuses to both, but I do think it’s important to push back and to point out that there are many good things that come out of having a mom who works. That conversation almost never happens, because while conservatives feel just fine bashing working women and going on and on about how stay-at-home moms are necessary and the best and working women are selfish and their kids will have problems and feel unloved, feminists are supposed to all just agree that women should choose their choice. That’s bullshit and it’s tiresome. There are benefits to women working, and to moms working. Describing those benefits does not mean I am saying that SAHMs are making a bad or wrong choice.

          2. I’d also like to push back on this idea that there’s “nothing more important” than giving up your entire life to raise the next generation. First, working mothers do raise their children, but that aside: Why is it “selfish” to have your own life and not give everything up in the service of your kids? Do you then expect your kids to do the same? What the heck is the point of raising “the next generation” if we expect the female half of every generation to stop just as she’s getting going?

             Is being a stay-at-home mother, or even being a homeschooling stay-at-home mother, synonymous with not having your own life, giving everything up, and stopping just as you’re getting going?

             1. Is being a stay-at-home mother, or even being a homeschooling stay-at-home mother, synonymous with not having your own life, giving everything up, and stopping just as you’re getting going?

                When you give up on your career to focus full-time on motherhood and when you construct all of your days and your life around your children, as Erica suggested was the only right and non-selfish thing to do? Yes, I think it is.

          3. When you give up on your career to focus full-time on motherhood and when you construct all of your days and your life around your children, as Erica suggested was the only right and non-selfish thing to do? Yes, I think it is.

             What you and Ericka seem to be missing, Jill, is that this is never the simple, cut and dried issue that either of you are presenting it to be.

             We’ve retreated this tired, old topic so many times here at Feministe, and it’s incredibly discouraging that the nuanced and complicated factors at play seem to get pushed to the side in the fight from both sides to claim the moral high ground. PMED’s comment was largely a rhetorical one, intended to point out that being a SAHP is not “synonymous with not having your own life, giving everything up, and stopping just as you’re getting going,” just as being a WOHP is not synonymous with being “selfish women who ship their kids off to day care, after school care etc. to have a career.”

             In the meanwhile, the classist undertones of this overheated language rarely gets unpacked, because everyone is too busy shouting each other down and getting their backs up at the offensiveness getting tossed around like confetti at a children’s birthday party.

             1. What you and Ericka seem to be missing, Jill, is that this is never the simple, cut and dried issue that either of you are presenting it to be.

                Obviously. But I wasn’t talking about SAHMs generally. I was talking about SAHMs in Erica’s vision of them. Which is why my reply was to Erica — because I was replying to her specific points and not talking about all or even most SAHMs.

          4. I don’t think you can say that children with good daycare do better or that studies show they are more socially deft as that is not often or even always the case. Take a look at the study below and realize that the individual variables for each family make what they choose the best course for them. I don’t understand preaching to people what they should do–i.e. that women should not stay home even if that’s what they want and find most fulfilling. You really think you know more than they do about their own lives?

             http://www.nichd.nih.gov/news/releases/child_care.cfm

             About the study:”The more time children spent in child care from birth to age four-and-a-half, the more adults tended to rate them, both at age four-and-a-half and at kindergarten, as less likely to get along with others, as more assertive, as disobedient, and as aggressive, according to a study appearing in the July/August issue of Child Development.
             However, the researchers cautioned that for the vast majority of children, the levels of the behaviors reported were well within the normal range.
             In fact, a mother’s sensitivity to her child was a better indicator of reported problem behaviors than was time in child care, with more sensitive mothering being linked to less problem behaviors. Higher maternal education and family income also predicted lower levels of children’s problem behaviors..
             The findings are from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development.”

    5. Mothers of this generation have turned into selfish women who ship their kids off to day care, after school care etc. to have a career. Raising the next generation is the most important career a women can have! As far as financial independence my husband has always refereed to his income as our money. In fact he likes to brag to others at the “work” I do at home for our family. I believe if more Moms did stay home (homeschool or not) we wouldn’t have so many rude, disrespectful, immature and non social children.

       Holy wow.

       Hey Erica? Stop presuming to speak for all the SAHM/Ps out there, it’s insulting and obnoxious. If you ever wonder why SAHPs get so little respect these days, take a look in the mirror. Do whatever you want to do for whatever reasons, but don’t expect others to not disagree with you or judge those reasons when you insist upon pushing them onto everyone else.

       For the record, if it wasn’t already absolutely clear, I disavow anything this crank has to say about parenting, mothering or SAH’ing.

    6. Oh this is just PRECIOUS. Because life as an adult is all about knowing how to toss clothes in a washing machine and dusting. But wait! Her son won’t need to know how to do that because boy. He will probably only need to learn how to deal with money. That’s all in the bible after all.

       But for real, what do homeschoolers do when a child’s need for learning outstrips the parent’s knowledge? My daughter is a ninth grader now and she’s in advanced algebra and taking chemistry, and while I did take college algebra not that long ago, I don’t think I could explain it to her, because I barely felt like I got a grip on it myself. And I haven’t touched chemistry since high school myself. My writing is also terribly informal, and as she wants to be an editor, she really ought not to look to me to help her there. My Spanish is also just a little better than hers, so I could maybe help her, but not teach it.

       This doesn’t mean that I don’t recognize that homeschooling is a viable option for a number of children, and that there are parents that excel at such a thing. But we have a large and vocal population of them like the lovely Ericka W. who are doing such a massive disservice to their children, that probably borders on abusive, that I can’t help but give the side-eye to anyone that says that they are a homeschooler.

       1. In answer to your question re: teaching skills, most of the homeschooling parents I know hire tutors or enroll kids in classes to learn things they can’t teach themselves. It’s how I learned art, music, yoga, phys. ed and Tae kwon do (much as I sucked at those two, lol) and eventually chemistry when I got above the level of what my dad could teach. I also have the advantage of grandparents who are fucking awesome at language skills – I know more Tamil than my parents to this day, and can dabble in Malayalam and Sanskrit though I wouldn’t call myself fluent by a long shot. I also had the opportunity (and I know everyone doesn’t have the privilege of Connections) to stay with others and learn from them directly in exchange for work, which is how I caught up on Hindi and further knowledge of Hindu scripture and philosophy, and spent months volunteering abroad at various schools. I also lived in Mumbai by myself for two years, learning French and German.

          Luckily, my parents have a shit-ton of degrees between them, and could cover the humanities, math, physics and biology between them, and they could have taught me above grade-school level in programming, civics, philosophy and statistics, though I didn’t have much interest in any of those and kind of coasted on what my syllabus required (as with the sciences and math).

          Of course, like I keep having to disclaim on this thread, I’ve had a secular homeschooling under two professionals who were both working full-time and chipping in equally on my learning time and childcare I required, so I seem not to be very typical as homeschoolers go.

36. I have no idea how to work the block quote thing, but this is in reply to Ericka.

    <blockquoteI believe if more Moms did stay home (homeschool or not) we wouldn’t have so many rude, disrespectful, immature and non social children. Yes, I said non social. Ever talk to a homeschooler?

    So, it is impossible to have both a career and a polite child? I’d don’t think I’ve that one before. What is considered “rude” and “disrespectful” to one person may not be to another. I find it very disrespectful to say that a women who puts her child in day care in order to have a career/earn money/pay her bills is selfish.

    I also have a nagging suspicion that when you refer to learning about running a household you actually mean teaching the girls how to do all of the domestic chores while the boys skate by.

    I must also disagree with the motion that homeschooling is always a mothers choice and she is never forced into it. In my experience with the fundie right many of these women don’t have a choice. They marry very young, are brainwashed into using no birth control, and give birth to more babies than they can handle. They’re usually very poor, the family has one car, and they are left to the mercy of their husbands. If he says they’ll homeschool, then homeschooling it is. You cannot properly educate a child when you have 6 or 7 kids under 10, are pregnant, have to cook all your meals from scratch, do all the laundry, go to church 4 times a week, and cater to your husband’s every whim. This does happen in far right extreme Christian circles more than many people realize.

    1. Becky, WORD. That is all. And I say this as a homeschooled kid: my parents were young professionals who maintained their careers and who were economically privileged enough to have part-time domestic help (which is actually fairly cheap in India, ftr). Also, they were secularly motivated (the fundies in the family are in the grandparent generation). I tend to side-eye the Natural Living or Quiverfull people really hard over this.

    2. WOW!!!! First I want to say I almost fully agree with Erica W., I disagree about the behavior of homeschool VS public schooled children, I see very little social differences between the two groups, some home schooled kids can be a pain and some public schooled kids can be a pain. I think you “see” more behavior problems in public school kids because of the AMOUNT of public school kids VS home schooled kids. As for the rest of what you said BULL SH.. !!!!! I have the privilege to stay home and spend all day with my three kids, we fully believe in birth control, and I am the one who wanted to homeschool our kids when my oldest started having issues in public school. It is very offending when people ASSume things with out ANY facts to back them up. There are thousands of families that homeschool so we can tailor an eduction for each of our children. No “packaged” curriculum that has proven time and time again that it is not meeting standards. Why would I send my child to a school that spends thousands of $$ per student and can’t show any benefits of the increased spending???? We live in one of the richest countries in the world, why don’t we rank in the top ten in education????

       1. If you read what I wrote you will see that I am talking about a small portion of homeschooling moms, those who would identify themselves as right wing fundamentalists. I am not talking about the homeschool community as a whole here.

37. Wow, what filthy language! You may not agree with my opinion and I don’t agree with yours but to tell someone to “go to hell” or “f… you” is that really necessary? So why weren’t those comments blocked for foul language? Take a look at the Bible. A women is the primary caretaker of children and her most valuable job is in the home. This is my opinion. You don’t have to agree with it but I do expect some dignity from fellow adults. You’re language is like a bad mouthed teenager. I can see this is just plain negativity, I want nothing to do with this type of thing.

    1. Take a look at the Bible.

       I did. That’s why I disagree with pretty much everything you’re saying.

       1. Muahahahahaha

    2. Huh, calling people “selfish” and “rude, disrespectful, immature and non social” doesn’t display negativity?

    3. Please please please nobody mod out this comment. I think it just made my entire week.

    4. You don’t have to agree with it but I do expect some dignity from fellow adults.

       Well, all people deserve respected as individuals. But this opinion

       A women is the primary caretaker of children and her most valuable job is in the home.

       is full of shit and so deserves zero respect.

       I can respect you as a person and still call you out on your stupidity. It doesn’t have to be one way or another. If you can’t deal with people reacting badly to your sexist opinions, then just leave this place.

    5. You may not agree with my opinion and I don’t agree with yours but to tell someone to “go to hell” or “f… you” is that really necessary?

       Necessary? No. Effective and fun? Yes. That’s why I do it.

       So why weren’t those comments blocked for foul language?

       Because this isn’t a kindergarten classroom, so foul language is allowed. It’s one of the ways adults communicate. If you can’t handle that, you shouldn’t be here.

       Take a look at the Bible.

       I’m not Christian. One of the wonderful benefits is that I don’t have to give any shits at all about what the Bible says about gender roles. In fact, I don’t have to accord its opinion any respect or dignity whatsoever.

       1. Lol! What I would give to have the gall to say that about the Bible to half the fundies i know!

    6. A women is the primary caretaker of children and her most valuable job is in the home.

       You’re language is like a bad mouthed teenager.

       Oh man. Hopefully you are not the one teaching English to your children.

    7. Sweetie, you’re the one who came in here acting all smug and superior because you think your life choices are The Only Way To Do It Right. You aren’t allowed to get mad when people tell you to fuck right off because you have your head up your (probably very class-privileged, if you can afford to stay home instead of working) ass. You’re judging a lot of people here. You’re shaming women who can’t have or don’t want kids and more or less saying they are worthless. You’re shaming women who want to work because they enjoy it. You’re shaming women who have no choice but to work, because they are too poor not to. Another thing: if mothering is the only career a woman can have, do you only have sons, are you teaching your daughters laundry ‘for college’ so they can go get their Mrs and then make some grandbabies for you? Are you going to tell them that the most important job for them is to be a mommy, so fuck any dreams that they had?

38. I attended public schools k-12, and learned nothing academic in any public school until about the ninth grade. That’s probably a bit of an exaggeration, but I think it’s fair to say that most of the learning I did, I did at home, several years before the information was presented to me in class. The only real exception would be math, starting with the pre-algebra sequence in the seventh grade.

    Both of my parents have attended grad school, and my father is a college professor; my brother and I learned very differently as kids – I was an early reader and my brother a late reader, and he was generally more obstinate, self-contained, individualistic, and imaginative – but both of us benefited immensely from the time investment my folks put into us.

    If/when I parent, I intend to do what my folks did with us: send the kids to public schools (provided those schools are physically safe and more or less emotionally safe) and teach them in the evenings. There are inevitably going to be things that, as a parent, I will not be able to teach as well as a professional teacher – like, say, music education, or computer science – and particularly when you get into high school, a certain level of expertise really helps. My folks weren’t able to give me much help with math and science (their strengths were always in the humanities) and as a result I struggled in them until I got to college and received better education.

    In defense of the home schoolers, I will say a lot of my teachers were not very good, and not very bright. The problem with teacher education and teachers’ departments is that they’re producing teachers who know how to manage a large room of kids, but may not know much at all about the subject they’re supposedly teaching. There is nothing more frustrating than being a bright kid in the back of the room who asks a question and is told, by the teacher, “That’s not on the test, so I’m not going to cover it,” ie, “I have no fucking idea, because the watered-down science education classes for teaching majors I took didn’t cover it.” I mean, I’ve looked at the curricula for bio courses for teacher’s majors at the university I attend – it’s piss-poor! If teachers’ ed majors are being taught material that’s already fifteen years out of date, and they’re given textbooks to teach from that are thirty years out of date, you’ve got a problem.

    Particularly in middle school and high school a lot of the socialization kids get from their peers and from teachers is to keep your head down, to identify with authority figures rather than the oppressed, to take punishment with sullen acquiescence. As a bright kid from a middle-class family, I didn’t experience a lot of it directly, except inasmuch as I butted heads with teachers who didn’t understand how to teach a kid who already knew more about their subject than they did… I remember fighting with my tenth-grade English teacher about when, exactly, the golden age of Athens was! But I had huge problems with peers – sexual harassment, physical harassment, unending “teasing” – because of the generally anti-intellectual character of public school.

    Also, I really resent the idea that parents shouldn’t do whatever the hell they can to get their kids the best education they can. Damn straight I’m glad my folks fought to keep me out of the classrooms of notoriously poor teachers, and I intend to do the same for my kids. “Social Justice” isn’t worth wasting a year of your kid’s life on worksheets, in class videos, and humiliation for speaking up and speaking out.

39. I really resent the idea that parents shouldn’t do whatever the hell they can to get their kids the best education they can.

    Has anybody here advanced this idea? Or is the mere acknowledgment that a home-schooling trend will have a negative effect on the kids left behind so threatening? What’s the big deal? I’m able to acknowledge that when I buy a t-shirt from the Gap or something, I’m complicit in supporting sweatshop labor. Sometimes the things we do have negative consequences for others.

    1. EG, FWIW I’ve been one of the strongest voices for homeschooling on this thread and I haven’t seen such arguments being put forward. That said, though…. your point here needs addressing.

       For my parents, yes, it was a matter of wanting me to have better than the other options where we lived. Which, once I left my parents’ (then) elementary school, would have been fundie school #1 where students were routinely beaten with tree branches until they were bruised and bleeding, organised and graded by caste, boys and girls couldn’t even talk to each other without being subjected to invective or beatings, and students were routinely dispatched to do the teachers’ grocery shopping if they were talking in class. Or fundie school #2, which had a rep for being WORSE. At that point it’s not a matter of being “complicit in negative consequences”, any more than people who’ve fled fascist regimes are complicit in oppressing the people left behind. I wouldn’t make that argument for all US public schools, but judging by some of the things William’s said upthread…eh, I don’t know.

       1. Right, which is why I’m not suggesting that parents shouldn’t do their best for their kids and families, whether that means homeschooling or whatever. But I don’t think it should be beyond the pale to note that homeschooling, like private school, removes parents with resources and motivation from the public school system, and if it becomes a significant trend, like private school, that will have a knock-on effect on the kids who are left behind.

          That doesn’t mean I’m saying that you shouldn’t homeschool. I don’t think it’s immoral or anything to say yep, that’s a downside, but I’m not going to sacrifice my kid’s education on the alter of what’s best for society at large.

    2. I wish I could cite the study, but there’s a study floating around there that found that students who parents wanted to put them in a different school had better outcomes than students who didn’t. What was interesting though was that this outcome was the same regardless if the student got into the new school or not.

    3. And to continue from my earlier comment (which went into mod damn it), you can’t place education on the same scale as T-shirts; it’d be more appropriate to consider it with healthcare as a basic human right, in which case your argument that giving someone a good (or even better) education makes them complicit in someone else getting a worse one is…well. Ridiculous. Unless you’re also recommending that all people go to quacks and receive Magic Beans for their stomach cancer because some people can’t afford anything except Magic Beans.

       (WHich is not to say that all homeschooling is better than all traditional education, or even some. I’ve seen some prize creepazoids in the homeschooling movement in the US, like our charming Ericka above. It’s not remotely religious a movement in India, so I’ve never had to deal with that, and make of that what you will.)

       1. You’re complicit in something when you refuse to advocate for change. Buying magic beans doesn’t have much to do with it. Quack healthcare is also rarely cheap.

          And you’re insulting the uninsured and poor when you assume they make dumb decisions rather than ending up in ER’s or y’know, dying. Statistically, that’s what happens.

          It’s great that homeschooling was valuable to you- no one is questioning that. When you choose to pretend that downsides don’t exist, however, you start to sound callous to those kids and parents who don’t have the luxury of your options- poor people become morons who buy magic beans.

          1. You’re complicit in something when you refuse to advocate for change.

             And you know I don’t advocate for change because…? Right. You don’t.

             For the fucking record. My homeschooling parents? Homeschooled me because they were in a desperately poor area running non-profit schools for people who couldn’t afford to attend even the cheap public or religious-fucknut-run schools. I worked in that school full-time WHILE STUDYING in non-teaching (and teaching support) positions for eight fucking years, most of those without pay because I was too young to be paid. I put off college for seven years after I finished high school so I could volunteer and advocate for education. I’ve cheap and effective teaching materials for that school, spent two afternoons a week for several years doing outreach programs in neighbouring schools that my parents didn’t run, gone from school to school in my district talking about ways people can use the teaching aids my parents produced for free. I’ve done fundraising for more charity efforts than I can count, done disaster relief after the 2004 tsunami, tutored in whatever spare time I had around my studies.
             I’m in college to be a teacher. Which I plan on doing in, again, poor areas, where I can make a difference. I’ve been all over every thread about education Feministe has had for months, advocating for better conditions.

             I’m twenty-fucking-four years old today and I’ve done all this. You want cred for advocacy in changing education? Produce yours. Let’s have the prick-waving dick-fight, I’m all up for it.

             And you’re insulting the uninsured and poor when you assume they make dumb decisions

             No, I’m implying they can’t afford the things that work. On account of they’re poor. And uninsured. Which is what happens when you’re poor, you can’t afford things. Ask me. I’m poor.

             When you choose to pretend that downsides don’t exist

             I think downsides definitely exist to traditional schooling AND homeschooling. I don’t think, however, that wanting the best you can manage means you’re necessarily trampling on others (particularly when your decision removes you from the playing field, rather than putting you on the field with bigger guns).

             poor people become morons who buy magic beans.

             So, the phrase “cannot afford” doesn’t actually appear in your line of vision? Right.

       2. I think you’re not addressing the actual criticisms of how home-schooling as a trend will effect the kids who are left behind. It’s not that education is a finite resource. It’s that families with resources and the motivation to advocate for better education will no longer be putting those things to use for the common good; they will be taken out of the pool of families using the public school system. So they won’t be part of the PTA, they won’t be volunteering, they won’t be invested in making sure the schools are good. They’ll be putting their energies elsewhere.

          1. You’re assuming that “homeschooling parents” and “parents who advocate for change in education” are naturally mutually exclusive groups. I agree that in your example below, as a non-parent you have no say in what’s being taught in any given class, but that doesn’t prevent you from doing any one of a thousand things other than direct classroom interference to improve education, so the idea that anyone who’s homeschooling must not be devoting any time to improving others’ education is, fairly objectively, wrong. It’s rather like saying that the rich wouldn’t give any time to the poor unless they were poor, or that the educated don’t spend any time giving others education. Objectively just plain wrong.

             Also there’s the fact that for some people, their advocacy is directly linked to their decision to homeschool (or alternatively school) their children. I’m NOT an isolated example, a lot of social workers who are “in the field” so to speak have had to at least partially homeschool their kids if they didn’t want to just send them to boarding school and get them out of the situation altogether. (For the sake of this conversation, I’m including putting their kid in with a class they’re teaching, as was my case. I know several other kids in the same boat, though I’ve never met them in meatspace, since we’re a scattered sort of nongroup, lol.)

          2. I don’t think I’m assuming their mutually exclusive groups; I think I’m assuming that 1) people have limited time and attention, and 2) parents can be involved in advocacy and decisions about a school that non-parents can’t. Parents can do extra-school advocating as well as the intraschool kind. Non-parents can’t. They can only do the extra-school kind. I think that pretending otherwise is disingenuous. This is how it plays out when people send their kids to private school: they don’t spend a lot of time in activism around public education. I don’t see why the class of people wealthy enough to homeschool would be generally different.

             And you know, the rich, as a class, don’t do a lot to help poor people.

          3. I don’t think I’m assuming their mutually exclusive groups; I think I’m assuming that 1) people have limited time and attention, and 2) parents can be involved in advocacy and decisions about a school that non-parents can’t.

             *nods* If that’s your take on it, I totally agree. I guess I’m also skewed in perception because most of the people I know who homeschool(ed) have been advocates, or at the very least major donors to public education advocacy, largely because of the reasons they began homeschooling – issues with the public system, endemic bullying, abuse by teachers, ableism etc (I’m practically the only one I know personally who was always homeschooled, as opposed to pulled out of school). It stands to reason that that group would be more likely to take up arms, so to speak, and I admit to perception bias there.

40. But Mac, actually, I do think that giving someone a good (or even better) education can make you complicit in someone else getting a worse one. My stomach cancer treatment probably won’t affect your stomach cancer treatment (though there might be, I don’t know, a medication shortage, and if I get the medication, then there isn’t enough for you). But my schooling can definitely affect your schooling.

    1. Drat, that was supposed to be a reply to Macavitykitsune’s 10:24 am 9/28 post.

    2. …how? I mean, no, seriously. How does one person getting a better education worsen another’s, unless you’re going to apply some sort of mercantilist attitude to education?

       Then, by that count, no teacher should ever try harder than the absolute minimum to teach hir students, because that might make them complicit in someone else getting a poor education by comparison. Children shouldn’t ever try to get better grades than the base minimum, because if they get into college, then others don’t, because colleges can only take so many people at a time. No parent should ever campaign for more funds for their kids’ schools, because then they’re taking funds away from other schools and thus being complicit in others getting a worse education, because there’s only so much money to go around. I also guess I shouldn’t have tried to get my kid in a school of choice (whose district began literally a house away from mine), and happily accepted her going to Gang And Drug School (which happened despite my best efforts), because that way hey, at least I spared someone else a terrible education. That was totes the ethically purer and Better Feminist thing to do.

       Sorry, but chucking a “you are creating starving children in Africa” derail at parents who want their kids to not wind up in awful learning situations (and believe you me, a whole lot of parents are homeschooling for exactly that reason) is kind of a majorly asshole thing to do. Particularly when parents are also being blamed left, right and centre when they are perceived to not be doing THE ABSOLUTE BEST by their kids. Particularly when, I’m really sorry to burst your bubble, but homeschoolers are, what, 2.7% of the population? Far less than, I dunno, people who beat other people at the game to get into college. Talk about being complicit in others’ lack of education.

41. Mac, I should explain that I’m speaking as a parent who has both homeschooled and done a school switch to improve her children’s education. So, if I’m chucking a “you are creating starving children in Africa” derail at anybody, it’s at myself. But I don’t think it is a derail.

    You ask how one person getting a better education can worsen another’s? Here’s a personal example.

    My child switched to a different school, where she will get a better education. Three other children did too. As a result, because of the school district maximum class size policy, the remaining children are in a class that is almost twice as big as their class would have been, if my child and the other three children had stayed. The remaining children will get a worse education this year because my child is getting a better education.

    I do not, at all, regret the decision to switch my child to a different school. However, I do, regret this consequence of the decision.

    1. And this is all your child’s fault and yours, as opposed to the result of a truly dipshit rule in the book? I genuinely don’t get it. But if you want to blame yourself, go ahead, I guess.

       1. Mac, you asked how, and I gave you an example of how.

          Now you’re probably right, and in a perfect, resource-unlimited, social-justice world, it would indeed not be possible for one person’s better education to worsen another person’s. But in this world…

          1. Fair enough, Past, and I’m not arguing your point itself. If it’s a question of consequences rather than complicity in oppression (which really are two different things), then yes,anyone having anything good takes something away from someone else.

       2. It’s not a question of fault or blame. It’s a question of consequences.

       3. Here is another concrete example: if my child is in a kindergarten class that learns a lot of bullshit about the first Thanksgiving and Christopher Columbus is a hero, as a parent, I have the social capital, the cultural capital, and the motivation to speak to the teacher and/or the principal about the true history of the Indigenous people of North America and what Columbus really did, and advocate for a more accurate education for all the children in the class.

          If I’m homeschooling, I can make sure my child gets that more accurate education, but I have been removed from the pool of parents who can have that positive effect on the class as a whole. The children who are still in that class do not get the benefit of my social capital and motivation.

          1. What about parents who are sending their kids to public school who fight to get their kids out of the classrooms of poor teachers and into the classrooms of decent teachers? Or out of bad public schools and into good ones? Because the public school system as it exists often makes it easy for people to coast. I was taught factually incorrect material in a number of classes by teachers who didn’t care and belittled me for asking questions when I didn’t understand. Most of my teachers were competent and a few were excellent, but some were godawful (a Gym teacher comes to mind who would set students to race sprints as far and fast as they could, until people collapsed puking on the track; then there was the honors English class that read a total of two books and spent the rest of the year on worksheets).

             I mean, should we do away with all academic tracking (general vs academic vs honors vs AP at the school I attended)? Should charter schools be abolished? Should all kids get the same kind of education with no choice about where and who to get their education from, to create an idealized, egalitarian society?

             I’m not saying you’re advocating for governmental policies that would enact those kind of sweeping changes, but – let’s imagine you were Queen of Education for a year. What would you do to address the problems you’re worrying about?

             This is something I’ve thought about a lot personally, but mine is the perspective of the bright kid who met so few challenges she became a lazy smart-ass, and mine are not/were not the needs of most. I’m interested in hearing other versions of educational utopia 🙂

          2. What about them? Obviously, one can make the same arguments, to a lesser degree.

             I don’t follow regarding your question about what I would do. I’m not Queen of Education; I never claimed to be. I support practically all of the measures suggested above. More importantly, I’ve never held with the idea that you have to have the blueprints for a solution in order to be allowed to point out a problem.

          3. If I’m homeschooling, I can make sure my child gets that more accurate education, but I have been removed from the pool of parents who can have that positive effect on the class as a whole. The children who are still in that class do not get the benefit of my social capital and motivation.

             I have an…ugly question. What happens when your social capital and motivation aren’t enough to change anything and, after a year of banging your head against a wall, you find that the situation has not changed at all for your child’s class but that your child is now experiencing push-back from an angry teacher? Or, say, you manage to change the nature of the classroom instruction and the teacher is a mature adult who accepts constructive criticism with grace but several of the children in your child’s class liked hearing about Christopher Columbus being a hero and have now targeted your child for social isolation and bullying? Is it worth risking those relatively common situations for the chance of making things better for other students by your presence? Say theres no malice in the school whatsoever but your kid has a serious learning disability and the school has a crap special education department. Is it worth the gaps and struggles and lack of support your child will face to improve the school-as-a-whole by fighting for a better special ed department? Say you know virtually nothing about the special education department at the school but you know the best program in the nation for your kid’s disability is down the street and you have the resources to send them. Whats the call to make?

             Thats my problem with this line of argument around education. At some point the fundamental assumption is that a worse outcome for one’s own child is a social responsibility. I’ve been aggressive in this thread, but oppositional personality aside, some of the most damaging experiences I had in school came from being a kid with a disability who was constantly treated as if somehow he should be grateful that a school granted him his right to education. Time and again I was treated like a burden and had my legally mandated accommodations treated as privileges. It got so bad that my parents had to go into debt to bring in an education lawyer during the end of my time in high school. As a disabled person in society I have constantly been asked to give for others. I’ve been conditioned to think first if asking for help will make me a burden, to agonize over whether or not I deserve not just to function but to live. I’ve got a problem with taking that same demand and placing it on others.

          4. My point, though, EG, is that this problem of relatively privileged people being in a better position to advocate for their kids’ education is a problem far broader than home-schooling. We can decry white flight, parochial schools, and homeschooling for draining resources from public school systems, but these are population trends that arise not necessarily from top-down policy (though sometimes this is the case) but from individual choices.

             I think supporters of public schools need to make a better argument than the one I’ve seen on this thread – namely, that parents should stop looking for the best existing education in their area, whether that’s public, charter, private, home-schooling, or what have you, and rather keep their kids in inadequate schools while fighting for change. Because this is not a convincing argument for an individual, that for some amorphous greater good they should struggle against huge and often intractable bureaucracy instead of individually taking action to improve the education of their own child.

             What’s the phrase? That dog won’t hunt.

          5. For William:

             I don’t think that understanding that an action has some negative consequences means that nobody should take that action. That’s what I was trying to say with the t-shirt example. I do things all the time that have negative consequences for other people; that’s what it means to live in relative comfort in the first world under global capitalism. The steps that I take to make my own life decent depend on other people suffering.

             So by all means, if in some alternate universe I decide that homeschooling is the best choice for my family (ha, I’d have to be independently wealthy and have a different personality altogether), what I’m doing is deciding that I want the benefits to my kid enough to accept the consequences of giving up on public schools.

             There are no good choices; there are no choices that don’t have negative consequences. That’s what institutional, systemic corruption, exploitation, and oppression mean. You choose which bad consequences are acceptable to you. I think the fantasy that we can find a choice without negative consequences ties in the fantasy that we make a significant difference with our individual choices. I don’t think we do. Organized, co-ordinated action on the part of multiple people, yes. An individual choice about how to educate your child, no.

          6. I think the fantasy that we can find a choice without negative consequences ties in the fantasy that we make a significant difference with our individual choices.

             Its not so much that I believe you can make a choice without negative consequences (although I’d argue the “negative” part a bit but that’d be a derailing navel-gaze) as I have a real problem with the guilt that gets built into people getting by with the resources on hand. I don’t think the solution to shitty schools is to make people who have resources feel like they’re abandoning their fellows for saying “fuck this” and looking for something better, I think the solution for shitty schools is to give everyone more options so that poor parents can abandon a bad school as readily as rich parents. I think bad schools should become ghost towns and subjected to post-mortems. I think the public school system (and it needs to be public because even though vouchers look great on paper I’m increasingly convinced that they don’t pan out) needs to be more nimble, varied, and adaptive. I think the neighborhood school system and standardized course loads need to go the fuck away. I don’t like the idea that getting there might sometimes involve starving Leviathan, and I’d really like to see that not happen, but I cannot begrudge a parent for running from the beast.

          7. I guess I just don’t feel guilt about things that are beyond my control, so things like this–they don’t make me feel guilty. The only way, with my salary, I can afford to buy the clothing I need to dress professionally is to buy products made in sweatshops. It’s not about an individual choice; it’s about my place in global capitalism (I don’t know why the sweatshop analogy is the only one I can think of tonight, but there it is). There’re any number of things like that–not guilt, not fault, not blame, just the options available to me in order to make a life I can be happy with. But those options have consequences, and not acknowledging them doesn’t make them go away. It just also doesn’t make me feel guilty.

             The problem is, though, bad schools won’t become ghost towns. They’ll just be full of kids whose parents couldn’t or didn’t care to find them better options, or kids who couldn’t get into the better options. I’d love all the things you describe. But poor parents won’t get those options.

42. My point, though, EG, is that this problem of relatively privileged people being in a better position to advocate for their kids’ education is a problem far broader than home-schooling.

    Indeed. I never said otherwise. But again, observing that a trend has negative consequences and contributes to a problem does not mean that therefore nobody should do it. We all do things with negative consequences all the time, because we find the benefits to ourselves or others worth it.

    We can decry white flight, parochial schools, and homeschooling for draining resources from public school systems, but these are population trends that arise not necessarily from top-down policy (though sometimes this is the case) but from individual choices.

    I fundamentally disagree. White flight was made possible by urban planning policies that made it possible to live in suburbs and commute to cities to work, for instance. Homeschooling is the result of plenty of policies, from secular public schools, in the case of the fundamentalists, to horrific public school experiences going unremedied, which are the result of our government’s fundamental devaluing of children and education. People make choices, but not in circumstances of their choosing, and if you weight those circumstances adequately, those choices can become reasonably predictable.

    I think supporters of public schools need to make a better argument than the one I’ve seen on this thread – namely, that parents should stop looking for the best existing education in their area, whether that’s public, charter, private, home-schooling, or what have you, and rather keep their kids in inadequate schools while fighting for change. Because this is not a convincing argument for an individual, that for some amorphous greater good they should struggle against huge and often intractable bureaucracy instead of individually taking action to improve the education of their own child.

    Nobody has made this argument. Nobody. Nobody has said “Keep your kids in public school for the greater good.” In more than one comment, I have specifically said that I was not making that argument. Acknowledging that an action has a negative consequence does not mean that you must not take that action. It is simply discussing how a trend contributes to the larger situation.

    You mentioned white flight. In a thread about white flight, should I not mention the way it allowed the federal government to fuck up black communities by developing policies of malevolent neglect to cities, while maintaining white support? If I do say that, does that automatically mean that I’m saying that white people shouldn’t move to suburbs?

    As for supporters of public school make a convincing argument–the argument that all kids, regardless of affluence, have a right to an education isn’t convincing to you? Because that’s why I support public schools, and I can’t think of a better reason.

    1. Bah. That was went to be a reply.

       1. Have I mentioned my anti-love for threaded comments?

          1. I think they’d be great if we had another couple levels of depth and some means of highlighting new comments.

             1. I take that back…

          2. Ok, this is weird. I wrote a comment that was supposed to be a reply to Alexandra, but forgot to put it in the right place, and then it went into moderation. But…the comments I put in reply to my own comment complaining about threaded comments…didn’t go into mod? So a comment can be in mod, but replies to it aren’t in mod? So weird.

          3. Oh my word I’m all about the anti love for the threaded comments.

          4. I agree that it should either not be threaded, or be threaded-er. Er. Like 10 levels instead of 4, I dunno, a la Sociological Images.

    2. I am a product of public education (k-12, am at a public college now). I would not home school, and I can’t see myself shelling out tens of thousands of dollars to private schools, so yes, I will send my (hypothetical future) kids to public schools. And inasmuch as possible, I will send them to public schools in good school districts, where I know they will be physically safe and are likely to get at least a little individual attention.

       I think public schools are an incredible force for good in society, and I make the criticisms I make of public schools because I want them to be better. Absolutely I support them; I think there we are in agreement.

       However, I am so tired of discussions where people say “Here’s a valid criticism,” and then people respond, “Okay, now what? What am I supposed to do about it?” and the conversation ends, with one set of people defensively justifying their actions and another set of people reiterating the original criticism. I asked you uphtread what you’d do as Queen of Education because I think it’s important that conversations start to talk about how we can all improve education (instead of simply trying to negotiate it as individuals) on a policy level. As far as I can tell, the only person on this conversation who’s done something substantively different in public schools is William.

       1. I don’t bother, because I fundamentally don’t think we’ll get the needed changes. Not the way our system works.

          1. …in my book, that kind of apathy is actually more reprehensible than just quitting the system. What’s the point of analysing a system and pointing out all the flaws of all the alternatives to that system and then just going “*shrug* Oh well”? It seems needlessly (and uncharacteristically) snarky of you to be critical of people who’ve chosen other paths, or whose parents have (such as me), without even pretending to give a shit about attempted solutions, or proposed solutions, or theoretical solutions, or even a conversation about what theoretical solutions we could come up with. The system’s too broken? Cool. So were a lot of other things, before we fixed them. What makes education the immutably fucked thing on the planet that you seem to think it is?

          2. I think most things are immutably fucked up. More importantly, I don’t see the point of spending lots and lots of time coming up with a solution that I have no way to implement or see implemented. That is frustrating and a waste of my time. It’s not apathetic to note that I don’t have to have a solution because nobody in power is coming to me for advice; it’s realistic. And deciding not to waste my time drafting a comprehensive plan to fix public education, when I spend my professional life trying to put together a real college education for my students without a working xerox machine or unbroken blackboards and with a teaching load twice what my colleagues at comparable institutions have, is a perfectly fair decision on my part about the allocation of my time, attention, and energy.

             As for criticizing your parents–perhaps you could point to where I did that? When I say that being a SAHM leaves a woman very financially vulnerable, I’m not criticizing SAHMs individually or saying it’s never a good decision. When I say that wearing high heels fucks up women’s feet and knees and backs, I’m not criticizing women who wear heels or saying that nobody should ever wear them–I wear them myself. What is this ridiculous idea that analyzing the negative consequences of a social trend is tantamount to attacking the individuals who make those decisions? What is this weird idea that it’s unheard of to acknowledge that we all have to compromise ideals in daily life, or that it’s some kind of insult to say that?

             As to why point out problems, then, well, because that’s what I do. I like analyzing things and discussing them. That’s why I’m on a discussion board rather than out in the streets. That’s why I’m an academic rather than an activist. And I’m not apathetic, thank you very much; I’m bitter and cynical. However, I’m a bitter and cynical person who, as I noted above, supports practically all of the ideas others have floated. Since I did in fact say that, I’m not sure why I’m expected to re-list them here.

          3. I fundamentally don’t think we’ll get the needed changes. Not the way our system works.

             Time to abandon that system? through homeschooling maybe? I mean, since it’s unfixable and all. But of course that would be oppressing others indirectly, so I guess we should all stay and suffer while the people higher up in the system (in this case, teachers, professors, principals) shrug and say “what to do, lol”.

          4. Posted that before seeing your reply, sorry. And yeah, fair enough. I guess I’m just annoyed because my life as a homeschooled kid is an endless parade of people who pick apart every detail of my past, pounce gleefully on everything that’s remotely wrong, point to it as why I’m somehow successful despite my schooling (while all public schoolers are successful because of it) and then offer me a big shrug and nothing when I ask what they’d have the alternative be for someone in my situation. It really felt like we were repeating that pattern (though you didn’t do the picking at me thing, for which I’m really grateful, btw).

          5. Actually, by “system,” I meant our political system–what I meant was that I think that the levers of power to completely re-organize and adequately fund our public education system are practically inaccessible. Not just to someone like me, but to anybody. I can’t imagine people having the political leverage to completely revamp public ed being willing to use the political capital to do so. Those aren’t the kind of people who get into power.

             Anyway, why would I pick at you? My mother tutored me after school for years (and I went to one of the schools regularly cited as one of the top 3 public schools in the city). I don’t think homeschooling is inherently bad for kids–hell, it’s how the upper classes educated their kids most of the time in the west. Having a personally tailored curriculum sounds like it could be great (with the usual caveats about personality, relationship with parents, blah blah blah.). In Vindication of the Rights of Woman, Mary Wollstonecraft advocated comprehensive public education for all children with no distinction made as to class or gender for the first several years. I still think it would be a great idea. But it’s not what we have now, so…people do what they do.

             But glad we resolved this difference relatively amicably. I dislike disagreeing with you.

          6. EG, tbh, I don’t see a top-down reworking of public education happening either. I’ve seen repeated top-down attempts in India, some extremely good-intentioned, some even reasonable, and all ending up being fairly useless or actively harmful. Half the reason I support alternative schooling systems is that I simply don’t see a top-down reformation occuring. Certainly not in Bootstrapsia.

             I mean, it’s a sad day when I can state fairly reasonably that India has a better chance – relative to its beginnings of course – of revamping and improving its education system than the US does at this point, but that’s my opinion. As dire as the situation remains, it’s still getting better…you guys seem to be on a dangerous road towards Way Worse.

          7. Half the reason I support alternative schooling systems is that I simply don’t see a top-down reformation occuring.

             Seconded.

43. One thing that homeschooling seems to leave out of a child’s life is any sort of checks and balances in caregiving and education.

    If there is a problem with the parents, the teachers have a chance to catch the problem and address it. If there is a problem with a teacher, the parents have a chance to catch it and address it. If a teacher one year is bad, the next year there is a different teacher, who is likely to be better, or at least bad in a different way so that things may balance out (e.g., one year’s teacher is stronger at teaching reading, the next year’s teacher is stronger at math – each teacher’s strength balances the other’s weakeness.)

    In particular, an abusive or neglectful parent can use homeschooling as a way to hide abuse and neglect, isolating the child from other adults who would have the training, and even the legal duty, to report or investigate problems. If homeschooling goes wrong, there needs to be a way to fix it, beyond the child, years later, trying to sort out on their own whatever mess was made.

    It’s great that some people had good experience being homeschooled. But those who had bad experiences, or even experiences where some aspects of their life or education weren’t addressed well, seem to have had a particularly hard time. Many of those who had problems at school have, in this thread, also reported getting support from their parents. Those who have had problems being homeschooled haven’t really shared ways in which they had support at the time for getting things improved.

    ***

    Schools also do a very specific job of teaching children to be part of a self-organizing group, which is essential to urban life. On 9/11, one of the more remarkable, and unremarked on, things that happened was that thousands of people, all together, organized to evacuate several different very large buildings, and did so effectively and without panic. Only a few people panicking in a crowded stairwell could have led to a much worse disaster.

    Schools teach this. Deliberately, through fire drills and the like. But also in daily school life, as students move from classroom to schoolbus, or from one class to the next, with limited supervision even when young, and near complete independence within a few short years.

    And I can’t think of any good way for a homeschooling parent to teach a child this cooperation. There just aren’t enough people around. Certainly not enough people whom you barely know, when the parents choose every interaction. The advice of a parent on what to do in the abstract is not the same as daily experience that makes this life-saving cooperation automatic. The presence of a trusted parent chances the psychological dynamic, compared to finding this type of cooperation natural, automatic, and independent.

    1. In response to your second point (because I don’t disagree with the first):

       1. Summer Camps.
       2. YMCA daycamps.
       3. Swimming lessons.
       4. Sunday school.
       5. Peewee football.
       6. Girl Scouts.
       7. Little League.
       8. Soccer.
       9. Gymnastics

       etc etc etc.

       1. 1. Summer Camps.
          2. YMCA daycamps.
          3. Swimming lessons.
          4. Sunday school.
          5. Peewee football.
          6. Girl Scouts.
          7. Little League.
          8. Soccer.
          9. Gymnastics

          Well, any parent who sends their kids to those thing is no more home schooling than my parents, who sent me to public school, but did many of those activities with me. All those things you described are forms of schooling, done out of the home.

          1. Well, any parent who sends their kids to those thing is no more home schooling than my parents

             And if someone keeps a kid inside the house and never lets them participate in any external activities or personally unsupervised activites ever, they’re not homeschooling, they’re doing a certain something else that starts with A and ends with BUSE. Just sayin’.

          2. Fat Steve, homeschooling” means “schooling done exclusively in the home”? What if we went outside into the back yard? Would that still count?

             You might want to look at various states’ legal definitions of homeschooling.

          3. PA, that’s the methodology, don’t you know. Eliminate everything that kids can/should do that’s non-abusive from your definition of homeschooling, and then whinge about how all homeschoolers are abusive eleventyone. Seen it before, so many times, *yawn* etc.

       2. 1. Bible Camps.
          2. Prayer Group.
          3. Church.
          4. Sunday school.
          5. Tossing the football around with people from church.
          6.America Heritage Girls.
          7. Bible Study.
          8. More Church.
          9. Field trip to protest at women’s health clinic.

          Homeschooling in the US is a red flag for social isolation for a reason. But even when you get away from fundies hovering on the edge of compound-level tribalism, you still get a lot of people using it as a way to cordon their kids off from “the other.” What people often don’t realize is that public school isn’t necessarily immune from that sort of thing. It wasn’t uncommon for the wealthier subdivisions in my old home-town to manipulate zoning to guarantee exclusive access for their children to a public elementary or even middle school. Social isolation should be a red-flag in any form; it’s just seems more obvious when it’s one family shielding one set of kids.

44. Why all the negativity toward people who follow/believe in the Bible? Since when is being involved in church and such related activities a negative?

    1. 1) I’m Jewish. Historically, people who follow/believe in the Bible have not been good news for us.

       2) I’m a woman and a moral person, and I find the view of morality and women’s roles promulgated by much of the Bible repellant.

45. EG
    So instead you pass judgement on others? The Bible is God’s word. If you don’t follow His laws then what is your moral compass?

    1. From one Christian to another:

       Stop. Just stop.

    2. So instead you pass judgement on others? The Bible is God’s word. If you don’t follow His laws then what is your moral compass?

       Most people’s moral compasses comes from an evolved desire to propogate the species, which naturally involves helping others.

       (Your moral compass comes from this too. If the laws of your religion were overly contrary to this biological desire then you would simply reject them. Other less compassionate religions such as Islam probably appeal to baser biological instincts.)

       1. I’m very amused by your use of “less compassionate religions such as Islam”

          1. And I’m amused by your politically correct myopia.

             While it is clear that both religions have good and bad followers, and I don’t mean to condemn these people, Islam is simply more violent, authoritarian and closed-minded than Christianity. I’m not bigotted — I’m hardly a fan of Christianity — I’m just an observer of facts.

          2. OK, seriously. Are you looking at only the last 15 years of Christianity or something (though that’s no great shakes, either)? Christianity is swimming in blood.

       2. Other less compassionate religions such as Islam probably appeal to baser biological instincts.

          You cannot be serious about this. Have a look at the history of Christianity and get back to me.

       3. less compassionate religions such as Islam

          Which ones are more compassionate? Because if your answer isn’t Baha’ism I’m going to laugh my ass off. You want to know about Christian legacies? Ask non-whites and Jews.

          1. Hell, ask ANYONE suspected of being non-Christian during the Inquisition, no matter their race about the compassion of Christians. They might have had an opinion to offer.

    3. Shorter Barbara R.:

       “The only reason I’m not a shitty person is I am worried Sky-Dad will catch me and punish me”

       1. Shorter all major patriarchal religions?

    4. I actually find that I’ve become far more compassionate and understanding of my fellow beings after rejecting much of my Catholic upbringing. As children, yes, we may need guidance and concrete rules imposed upon us in order to learn how to be kind, empathetic and compassionate people. Once we become adults, however, there is no longer such a need for an artificial source of rules to govern one’s behavior and world view. Also, we have laws that we rely on in a civilized world to manage the harmful and dangerous behavior of our citizens.

       The Christian Bible in all its iterations is just one book, and it is replete with amoral behavior undertaken in the name of your God. As is much of the history of the Western World.

       In short, I think that in rejecting the Bible one can actually find a much stronger moral compass with which to guide one’s life choices and conduct.

    5. Speaking as an atheist, I see no evidence for your claim that the Bible was written by any deity. Even if it were, the sort of deity it describes is, in my opinion, no better than any other tyrant and it would be my moral duty to disobey when appropriate.

       My values, as passed on by my atheist mother, are based on developing human happiness and maximizing the life-chances of all people, with a side order of making sure everybody has the opportunities they need to make the most of any qualities they wish to develop.

       1. Beautifully said EG.

    6. If you don’t follow His laws then what is your moral compass?

       Two thoughts in her head to rub together?

       Not that you’d know whereof I speak.

    7. I would think it is her own sense of recognizing that other people exist in this world, and deserve the same level of dignity and respect that she deserves? You know, the understanding that we all live in a community, and the happier our neighbor is, the happier we are? It seems pretty self-evident to me, and you don’t need some god to tell you how to treat your neighbor in order to be a decent human being. Unless you just really, really suck at it and need the carrot and/or stick method to not be an asshole to those around you.

    8. Which words should we all be using as our moral compass? That one should rape ones father to complete gods plan, that we should ritually murder our children to demonstrate the depths of our devotion, or that we should offer our daughters to gang rapists as evidence of our hospitality? And for what? A god who would kill our families as a test of faith? I prefer my non-Biblical moral compass thanks.

46. It’s called faith EG. I feel sorry for you.

    1. And I for you. I’ll continue to hope that you embrace critical thinking. Where there is life, there is hope.

       By the way, I have plenty of faith. Just not in anything divine.

    2. Why, Barbara? I would really like to hear why you feel sorry for EG.

       EG, I feel sorry for you too. It must be so flipping hard to be so awesome. Shedding all of the tears and all of the pity for you right now.

       1. I am a universal object of pity, it’s true.

          Sometimes I’m more awesome than others, though.

    3. OMG Barbara stop being a condescending fucknut.

47. We are only alive now because Jesus died on the cross for us. It doesn’t get anymore real than that.

    1. HOLY SHIT ARE YOU IN HEAVEN RIGHT NOW??

       Because if you’re not, and you genuinely think “We are only alive now because Jesus died on the cross for us” – you severely misunderstood what that story said. And you probably shouldn’t be speaking on behalf of Christians.

    2. You can keep saying that, but without some actual evidence, you’re convincing nobody.

       Let me give you an example:

       Vampires walk among us, biding their time until they drain us of all our blood, at which point they will sprout wings and migrate to Mars.

       Did that convince you? No? Well, that’s just how I feel.

       1. An amendment for Feministers who are believing Christians: I wish to cause no offense; the point I was trying to make was that you can put anything you like a sentence, so I went for something patently absurd. In order to better respect your feelings, it might have been better to choose a sentence representing a religion that Barbara R. would not accept…though then I probably would have said something inaccurate regarding those beliefs.

48. You probably believe we come from monkeys too.

    1. And you think our closest physical relatives are dust-bunnies and Skeletor, so I don’t really know what’s more outlandish.

       1. YOU LEAVE COUSIN SKELETOR OUT OF THIS.

       2. We did come from dust, stellar dust to be exact, as did all organic molecules.

    2. Interestingly, there is a great deal of evidence for Darwin’s theory of evolution. I’ve read about it and seen it and listened to experts speak about it. Based on this evidence, it is beyond doubt that we share a common evolutionary ancestor with monkeys.

       I also believe in gravity and the germ theory of disease. Should any evidence surface that any of these theories are incorrect, I will reconsider. But it’s going to take more than a deeply ignorant woman blathering about Christianity. It would take actual evidence.

    3. Although Barbara is right about the monkeys thing, we aren’t descended from them at all. Being that we are apes and shit.

    4. ‘Come from monkeys’? A little kinky for me, thanks.

       1. Fucking bonobos, amiright? :p

    5. Pleeeeeeeeeeeeease tell me this is a Poe. Pls pls pls.

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