I was homeschooled. I have pretty mixed feelings on whether this was a good thing or not. Kawoomba asked, so here:
Pros:
No bullies
Teaches you how to teach yourself
No PE/sports
Go to college early
Cons:
Go to college early
Limited contact with others left me pretty socially inept.
No resources (chemistry experiments, etc)
After Algebra II, you’re on your own.
With Saxon math books.
No sense of position among one’s peers, no sense of why one might go to college, higher learning, etc. I’m maybe +1 S.D. appearance and +3? S.D. IQ but had no idea until much much later.
History books tend to be extremely biased (America is a christian nation, gosh darn it) (but my parents somehow mostly avoided this)
Biology books tend to be completely wrong because you have to lie a lot when you don’t believe evolution (I’m still pissed about this)
Science/astronomy books tend to have wrong sections because you have to lie a lot when you believe the earth is 6000 years old
Of these problems, most of the really bad ones seem easy to prevent if you’re aware of them. I expect I could do a really awesome job of homeschooling myself and a really terrible job of homeschooling a more normal person.
I really hated school as a kid. My best guess is that a public school with a good gifted program would have been an improvement, but one without would have been worse than what I experienced.
My best guess is that a public school with a good gifted program would have been an improvement, but one without would have been worse than what I experienced.
Good thing you were homeschooled then. The latter is much more common than the former.
public school with a good gifted program
What is this mythical thing you speak of? Oh, wait, you did say “America”.
At the risk of being annoying by repeating myself on this point: Outside the US, UK and Tokyo (and more recently some parts of China), there is no such thing as “public schools with good gifted programs”.
In fact, for most of the population, there is simply no such thing as “public schools with gifted programs”. I suspect that for a significant fraction of countries, you could even drop the “public” part altogether.
On another note, most of the “Cons” listed after “After Algebra II, you’re on your own” seem to be situational and just as likely to occur in a public school as in homeschooling. Including the part about a sense of position. Public high schools don’t always give you a good accurate sense of your position applied in the real world, they usually instead give you a sense of how much things are broken.
So all in all, I’d say as far as education goes for most people in the world, or even for most people in first-world countries, or even for most middle-class-or-higher children living in urban environments, if the listed cons are really the worst of it then you’ve had a comparatively superb education.
Outside the US, UK and Tokyo (and more recently some parts of China), there is no such thing as “public schools with good gifted programs”. In fact, for most of the population, there is simply no such thing as “public schools with gifted programs”. I suspect that for a significant fraction of countries, you could even drop the “public” part altogether.
For a few years I was teaching in a public school for giften children in Slovakia. It required IQ at least 2 standard deviations above the mean (i.e. Mensa level). Originally the requirement was both for students and teachers. Later, the requirement for teachers was dropped (because these days the schools in Slovakia consider themselves lucky to find any teachers), but it seems to me most of the teachers there would fulfill the requirement anyway.
I was told we should be lucky that such school exists, because in most European countries, the mere existence of such school would be “politically incorrect”. (In Czech Republic, a similar project had to be done as a private school. And in some countries, probably even that would be impossible.) Even here, many people seem driven mad by the idea that the nature already gave advantage to some people and now the society is going to help them even more. It’s like only the unlucky people deserve any help. Many people express the opinion that the smart children should stay in the same schools as the less smart children, because it is somehow supposed to help the less smart children. And we should not care whether it harms the smart ones; they already are privileged, aren’t they? Or there is a rationalization that for a gifted child, being separated from you equally smart peers and spending all times with the average kids is a good thing, because when they grow up, they will have to deal with the average people most of the time, so they better learn it while they are young. It is as if people believed that a gifted child spending their time with other gifted children will inevitably become an autist or member of some evil mastermind clique, but surrounded with average children they will become a happy normal kid. (Ironically, most parents don’t care about IQ of their kids, so many gifted children are discovered by being sent to psychologist after having problems in their “normal” school. Seems like the data contradict the folk theory, but as usual, most people don’t care about the data if they can have an opinion instead.)
Interestingly, it is considered perfectly “politically correct” to have special public schools focused on art or sport. Those schools are allowed to be public and to have admission criteria that most children could not pass. Only when the intelligence becomes the criterium, it somehow becomes an unacceptable elitism. The analogy with the public art schools and sport schools was successfully used when lobbying to allow creating this one school I taught at. But it was only an exception to create one experimental school. It cannot be used to create more schools like this. (In the current political climate, we are lucky that the experiment is allowed to continue, but there is no chance it would be officially declared successful. I guess there are even no hard criteria for success other than the government liking the idea.) Which is bad, because I would like to see some competition in this area.
Sometimes I think the smart people should simply support each other, regardless or even against the rest of the society. We should treat other gifted people as members of the same opressed minority, like ethnic or religious minorities do. Perhaps create secret textbooks for gifted children, or even build a shadow educational system? The internet should make it easier. -- But then I remember that Mensa tried something similar, and somehow the results are not impressive. Maybe because Mensa was too focused on measuring the raw intelligence, instead of developing rationality. We should help the gifted children to become successful and rational people. Maybe we could still find some people in Mensa who would support this goal.
I was told we should be lucky that such school exists, because in most European countries, the mere existence of such school would be “politically incorrect”.
I’ve gotten the same kind of response up here in Canada, heard at least one account to that effect for Russia (Moscow specifically), and south america / africa can arguably be excused because they should start by having schools in the first place (they kind of do, but not enough and not everyone has access to basic education).
As for the middle-east, well, you’re either Taliban or you’re a poseur heretical scrub, as far as I can tell. So the only “gifted” education available is to be a distinguished and promising elite of the religious teachings of [Insert locally favored sub-sect or religious curriculum].
Overall, your post very much nails all I’ve seen, though if I had to conjecture the simplest hypothesis I can to explain this behavior and connotation, it would be that people have this belief that everyone has an equivalent amount and distribution of strengths and weaknesses; There cannot be one human who is physically fit, much more intelligent than normal, good-looking, hard-working, and psychologically stable. If all the observable traits are there, one of the less-observable ones must be broken—“This kid is not normal, stay away from him, he could be dangerous.”
Outside the US, UK and Tokyo (and more recently some parts of China), there is no such thing as “public schools with good gifted programs”.
This seems dubious and hard to ascertain. What evidence do you have that most other countries lack such schools?
(There are public schools for gifted children in Russia, and I’d guess in many places. The usual setup is not to filter directly by IQ, as Viliam_Bur describes (which does seem potentially socially inappropriate) but to admit students based on hard competitive tests in math/physics, and have as teachers either college professors or former math/physics olympians.)
There are public schools for gifted children in Russia, and I’d guess in many places. The usual setup is not to filter directly by IQ, as Viliam_Bur describes (which does seem potentially socially inappropriate) but to admit students based on hard competitive tests in math/physics, and have as teachers either college professors or former math/physics olympians.
Filtering by mathematics correlates positively with filtering by IQ, but it is not the same thing. Most gifted people are not great in maths.
One of advantages of teaching in a school of children filtered specifically by IQ was that it disproved my many prejudices about high-IQ people. Those children were different from the average, but it was not easy to say how exactly; the simple explanations all failed. For example some of them were great at maths, certainly much higher ratio than in the average school, but most of them were not. Similarly with other traits—many interesting traits were more frequent than in the normal population, and yet, even within the gifted population they remained a minority; just a greater minority than usual. If you try to filter by these traits, you will find many gifted people, but even more gifted people you will filter out.
As a student I was in a math-oriented high school. I would say most people there were highly intelligent too. Yet, it was different. The interesting aspect of the IQ-filtering school for gifted children is that you get many talents of a different kind together. Often you have one child with multiple talents—in a math-oriented school they would probably develop some of them and supress the rest. In IQ-oriented school, they can develop their math talent during the math lessons, and e.g. artistic talent during their art lessons. Without an IQ-oriented school they would have to choose, either math or art; or at least only one of them at school, and other only in afternoon activities.
As an example: on the school for gifted children we started organizing a high-school competition in making computer games. That is not exceptional per se; there exist many other programming competitions. The difference is that in a typical programming competition, you have an exact problem, and you get points for algorithm that solves the problem. In this game-making competition you get points for multiple aspects of the game: graphics, music, storyline, presentation, and the technical flawlessness. So the programming is important, but the algorithm is not everything, other aspects matter too. In my opinion, this difference is a nice metaphor for the difference between the schools.
My primary evidence is that Canada is more on the liberal and open side of things relating to most countries in the world, has a higher diversity of educational programs than in most places AFAIK, and is quite high up the prosperity and economic stability scale by current worldwide standards—yet it has no such things as public schools with gifted programs.
The closest to “gifted” programs there is is the International Baccalaureate program, and yet even that gets diluted and stretched into an additional unnecessary year in Quebec (the rest of Canada implements the program a bit more directly, without the additional stretch year). There is no additional content, and the program that I took here barely meets the basic requirements for the certificate of accomplishment for Middle Years of the Baccalaureate program (this I obtained together with my local Diplome du Secondaire, slightly inferior to an actual High School diploma, at age 17.)
Basically, If you’re gifted here in Canada, the best you can hope for is to either get lucky with a private school filled with awesome teachers, or have excellent homeschooling. Since Canada scales rather high on the aforementioned global metrics, and I have a decent prior that Canada has a bigger per-capita education budget than most countries, it seems likely that Canada not having any such schools is much more likely in worlds where having such schools is a very rare or special thing for a country, rather than in worlds where Canada is somehow a strange cultural outlier and represents the exceptions.
I have specific evidence of such schools in the US, I remember hearing of two examples in the UK (but I don’t remember the examples themselves—sorry), and I’ve read or heard many times of such schools in Tokyo. China pumping lots of money into anything makes the news, and I’ve seen a few articles that says they’re expanding their current programme to get more geniuses working for them in the future.
(small jump to represent some internet searches and being surprised)
On the other hand, while writing this and looking for some of my previous sources, I just found this.
The first thing that jumps at me is that there seems to be a lot more schools with gifted programmes in Ontario than I was led to believe, and the six random ones I checked were operating back in 2003/2004 (which is around where my family and I started looking). This suggests either that we searched incorrectly, were lied to by the counselors and advisers we consulted, that they were simply much harder to find and get into back then than they are now, or any combination of those.
At any rate, it seems I now need to re-evaluate those beliefs. One fact remains, though: Our family expended above-average effort in trying to get me to a gifted program, skip a year, or otherwise get me out of the fatal failure mode I was in, and failed utterly. I also don’t see much for Quebec, unfortunately, but as the page is in English it would be expected that its writers would not be aware of french-language gifted schools, if there are any, which makes it seem more likely that there are some.
The above-average effort claim doesn’t seem hard to support—the average parent would simply not care that their child is gifted and would not attempt to get them out of a “normal” school program, as far as I’m aware. Actually seeking to do anything in this case seems like the exceptional non-status-quo reaction. As for failing utterly, well, I completed my normal high school curriculum and then dropped out of cégep (pre-university college thinghy corresponding to last year of high school).
Basically, I don’t have a formal education as good/equivalent to regular american high school diplomas. My experience was utterly boring and unproductive. I gained virtually no adjustment skills and still hate every moment I spend with “average” people (I literally feel like I’m interacting with inferior beings, which means I have to spend effort to suppress these feelings because they’re irrational and not reflectively coherent, which means I dislike these interactions partially because of this). I have no hope of going back into higher education for at least one more year, and even then I’m not sure I want to at all. I’ve been trained to loathe formal education, hate those who would prevent proper reprogramming of the whole system, and generally have strong emotional responses linked to the years of boredom and (that-psychological-thing-that-felt-like-torture) whenever the subject comes up. If all of this is not considered a failure, then I consider the entity doing the considering to have a flawed and counter-productive evaluation method and point of reference.
Anyway, hopefully this rant wasn’t completely pointless and useless to everyone else. If anyone has further evidence one way or another for the issue of gifted schools and how available they are, it would be welcome. If someone has evidence or arguments that could make me dissipate my vendetta against the educational system, even better—unless they have evidence that such a vendetta is a desirable and effective thing to hold, but my credence in this belief just took a large drop, and by looking at what kind of evidence I had been searching for in the past I believe I’ve already seen much more of the evidence for this than for its counterpart.
(My objection is primarily to your apparent overconfidence in the strong claim about the absence of such programs in most countries, for which you do seem to lack adequate evidence, and so it is incorrect to assert it in that form.)
I agree. It felt like I had more evidence, and I had a strong belief of comparative mental category to things that warrant such confidence. Thanks for leading me to debunk this.
Well, as I recall the gifted program I attended (in the States, in Texas specifically) was just harder busywork. Logic puzzles featured prominently, and there were crosswords instead of wordfinds. It was there that I formalized my hatred of formal logic problems. (The problems frequently featured concepts or information which, if you used knowledge which came from outside the puzzle, would lead you to the wrong answer. Not uncommon in logic puzzles, and completely wrongheaded; it always reeks of doublethink to me.)
The problems frequently featured concepts or information which, if you used knowledge which came from outside the puzzle, would lead you to the wrong answer.
Could you clarify if this means “an answer marked as wrong, but probably correct in the real world” or rather “an answer clearly wrong in the real world, with the premises of the puzzle broken”? I also notice that the latter interpretation leaves ambiguous whether those answers would usually be marked correct or wrong, which might be intentionally left out if there’s no specific correlation there.
I’m uncertain what you mean by the latter—the former is one case, but if you mean that the correct answer to the logic puzzle would clearly be wrong in the real world, the latter is also true. So possibly both; I was referring to a pretty broad category of poorly-considered logic puzzles.
Ah, yes, upon re-reading my wording wasn’t quite clear either.
What I was referring to is an annoying category of puzzles that require certain specific outside knowledge bits to arrive to the “correct” answer as would be marked, even though by the premises of the puzzle and the information given this is clearly a wrong answer and the desired answer isn’t even applicable to the real world in non-contrived scenarios.
In other words, a specific subset of the broad category of poorly-considered logic puzzles. Since you were referring to its parent/superset, the point is rather moot.
I got a heavy dose of “think for yourself” from my parents that not all homeschool kids get. Some kids I knew got really huge amounts of religious indoctrination. I was well into my 20′s when I finally deconverted, so I guess I did, too.
(I’m not entirely sure if they expected me to actually “think for myself” or not if it meant changing my mind about something like evolution, but regardless, I certainly did learn to do that.)
So all in all, I’d say as far as education goes for most people in the world, or even for most people in first-world countries, or even for most middle-class-or-higher children living in urban environments, if the listed cons are really the worst of it then you’ve had a comparatively superb education.
I guess enough people have said similar things to me that it’s time to update my opinion. Certainly, it could have been much worse.
Indeed. I do agree that by the standards we should hold ourselves to, or at least the standards I wish we had, your education doesn’t sound all that appealing at all.
At the risk of being annoying by repeating myself on this point: Outside the US, UK and Tokyo (and more recently some parts of China), there is no such thing as “public schools with good gifted programs”.
To add to the other countries people have mentioned, Australia has them too.
Doing no sport isn’t good. It helps to develop a healthy body. I would however prefer methologies like Feldenkrais or Martial Arts over the standard school curriculum.
Most of the negatives that you list have to do with the way that your parents chose the books. If your parents wouldn’t have been fundamental Christians they could have given you much better books.
My younger siblings did end up in some sort of group homeschool PE class. My mom tried a few things before finding that, which apparently was nice. I put it in the “pro” category only because I think I would have really hated PE. I wouldn’t say my life was completely devoid of physical activity, just probably less than average.
If your parents wouldn’t have been fundamental Christians they could have given you much better books.
Agree, but it’s my understanding that most homeschoolers do so for religious reasons. I trust the average LWer to do a lot better on this score than the average christian.
Doing no sport isn’t good, but doing no PE can be good, given that a possible consequence of PE is that you learn to hate sport and end up doing even less of it than you would have otherwise.
It would be good to have some officially recommened (not mandatory, just offered as a standard solution) list of textbooks for homeschooling, preferably free online. So everyone who would want to know what they are missing, could just read the textbooks. Also it would be helpful for parents that avoid schools for reasons other than disagreeing with the curriculum.
Perhaps one day Khan Academy or someone similar will make it. (On the other hand, one day the fundamentalists will have their own alternative version, probably called Jesus Academy.)
It would be good to have some officially recommened (not mandatory, just offered as a standard solution) list of textbooks for homeschooling, preferably free online.
Several fundamentalist christian groups do exactly that, except for the free online part. Makes indocrina—er, teaching easy for people. My mom mixed and matched and mostly evaded the worst stuff everywhere except science.
Martial arts are good for getting some people who aren’t interested in usual team sports to enjoy being active, but they’re also very bad at getting many people who do enjoy more standard activities to be active. This brings to mind Yvain’s experience teaching, where he found that the most effective methods to getting to most students were exactly the ones he’d found boring as a kid.
I’ve never participated in a Feldenkrais session, but looking it up, it doesn’t strike me as something most students would be enthusiastic about either.
My issue isn’t so much with methods of teaching as with content.
I don’t think that there any reason that justifies teaching a kid to jump as wide or as high as possible. The same goes for activities like shot putting. If you optimize your jumb for distance you aren’t optimizing it for using your body in a way that prevents you from hurting your back.
A goal of present sport eduction is to train children to be good at the Olympic activities. I object to that goal.
As far as team sports go they aren’t as bad but I still don’t think they are optimzed to teach useful life skills.
A goal of present sport eduction is to train children to be good at the Olympic activities. I object to that goal.
Not in theory. If you ask school administrators or state education officials, they’re more likely to tell you that it’s about teaching kids discipline, teamwork, getting in shape and so on. In practice, kids’ sports have become increasingly specialized and competitive, with parents investing huge amounts of time and money into their kids’ training, and sports injuries, especially overuse injuries which were almost unheard of in child athletes a few decades ago, have shot up dramatically.
It’s hard to restructure kids’ sports programs to better address the purposes they’re nominally geared towards though, because the sports activities are strongly driven by parents who want to see their kids compete.
Not in theory. If you ask school administrators or state education officials, they’re more likely to tell you that it’s about teaching kids discipline, teamwork, getting in shape and so on.
Getting kids to do broad jumps doesn’t seem to me to maximize either discipline, teamwork or getting in shape.
Schools should just cut out the whole track and field athletics business.
If you want kids to do basketball, I have no problem. Let them compete in basketball. The sport was created in the late 19th century by a physical education professor who thought a bit to create a good team sport.
While we are at a topic, there are also team sports created in the 20th cenutry. Underater hockey seems like a good candidate for a sport that provides benefits.
Getting kids to do broad jumps doesn’t seem to me to maximize either discipline, teamwork or getting in shape. Schools should just cut out the whole track and field athletics business.
Track and field does do quite a lot to get students in shape; most of the fittest students I knew in high school were track athletes. And it certainly requires considerable discipline.
A large part of the trouble with changing the athletic curriculum though, is that the people who’re most in need of basic, safe athletic training to improve their fitness are those who, along with their parents, are least involved in the current system. The people who participate in the system, who have the most power to shape it, are mostly sports practitioners, coaches and enthusiasts, for whom the bottom line is already written.
The people who participate in the system, who have the most power to shape it, are mostly sports practitioners, coaches and enthusiasts, for whom the bottom line is already written.
Not completely. If you go as an adult to a gym they might give you crossfit which is a modern system. They are not likely to tell you to do broad jumps.
Gyms make money by catering to what the clients want. School gyms don’t care what the clients want, because the clients are a captive audience. School gyms give kids what the parents and coaches want for the kids.
Suppose that instead of paying to go to the gym voluntarily, all adults were made to go to the gym, and all adult competitive sports practitioners were selected from among gym attendees and encouraged to get into sports based on their gym performance. Gym activities would tend to become highly sports oriented, even if the nominal reason for mandatory gym attendance was to promote fitness.
History books tend to be extremely biased (America is a christian nation, gosh darn it) (but my parents somehow mostly avoided this)
Biology books tend to be completely wrong because you have to lie a lot when you don’t believe evolution (I’m still pissed about this)
Science/astronomy books tend to have wrong sections because you have to lie a lot when you believe the earth is 6000 years old.
These three seem like one point (biased curriculum.)
I’m surprised by the socialization ones; I thought there were studies saying homeschoolers were actually socialized just fine, thank you? (It’s possible you were just unusual in this regard, I guess.)
These three seem like one point (biased curriculum.)
Agree, similar points, I split it out because it’s apparently possible to be relatively sane about american history and relatively insane about evolution, which I wouldn’t have expected. From my large sample size of two or three, other homeschoolers I know got both or neither.
I thought there were studies saying homeschoolers were actually socialized just fine, thank you?
I have two hypotheses; first, most of my social-interaction-hours growing up were spent with adults. As a result I got (I think) very good at impressing adults, but pretty much didn’t understand my peers at all. I’m not sure if the studies can confirm or refute this, I haven’t looked in detail. I wouldn’t trust homeschoolers themselves to be rational about this. It’s also worth noting that homeschooling is not terribly unified, my experience may have been atypical. Second hypothesis is that I started life out with −3 S.D. social skills and public school wouldn’t change that.
I have two hypotheses; first, most of my social-interaction-hours growing up were spent with adults. As a result I got (I think) very good at impressing adults, but pretty much didn’t understand my peers at all.
Incidentally, I suspect that it would be great if most kids spent most of their time interacting only with adults, so that when they did meet each other kids, much of the painful conflict and pointless costly signaling associated with typical teenage years could just be skipped over.
Hm. I was going to say that I don’t think that policy will have that effect—but after a bit of thought, I’m not quite sure if I know what you mean by “painful conflict and pointless costly signaling associated with typical teenage years.” Can you give an example?
Things like smoking and excessive drinking for the sake of showing that you’re Cool and Rebellious for doing the exact things that the adults say you shouldn’t do, for example. It’s easy to see why that kind of behavior might emerge in an environment where other kids your age are your ingroup that you want to impress, and adults are the outgroup that you can attack in order to distinguish yourself. But if adults were actually the ingroup you were trying to impress, it seems like people would be more likely to try to impress them by actually acting more mature, and that “maturity is high status” would carry over even to the more limited interactions they had with folks their own age.
I see. I guess I am an example in favor of your theory. I’m not entirely sure that this is an unambiguously good thing, though, because sometimes you should impress your peers in ways adults would not approve. Or, to put it another way, the optimal balance of grown-up-ness and fun shouldn’t have a factor of 0 for either category...
(I suppose if the adults were never wrong about classifying things as fun-but-harmful, then I’d change my mind.)
I have two hypotheses; first, most of my social-interaction-hours growing up were spent with adults. As a result I got (I think) very good at impressing adults, but pretty much didn’t understand my peers at all.
Ooh, I hadn’t though of that one.
I wouldn’t trust homeschoolers themselves to be rational about this. It’s also worth noting that homeschooling is not terribly unified, my experience may have been atypical. Second hypothesis is that I started life out with −3 S.D. social skills and public school wouldn’t change that.
On the one hand, I don’t think these were conducted by homeshoolers or based on surveys.
On the other hand, I only think that this is supported by studies because a homeschooling-related website told me so, while I was looking for material to support my argument regarding a specific individual (who I’m pretty sure was at −1 S.D and wasn’t likely to improve in public school.) I hadn’t seen anything to contradict it till your comment, and it seemed like it should have a fairly high prior, so...
This may be only anecdotal evidence, but I would consider being bullied for a bit a positive net influence in my life for a couple reasons:
I have always been somewhat arrogant. While being bullied did not decrease said arrogance, or even immediately result in any changes, when I looked back and saw how people treating me made me feel, it became somewhat of a motivator to mask some of my arrogance to spare others feelings. As knowing the right people can make a large difference in various opportunities, I feel some opportunities I have received had I not learned to mask said arrogance.
Eventually you learn to deal with it. While bullying to the extreme someone kills themself is clearly bad, and in other cases it can seriously damage people’s psyches, for others “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. I learned that while there are some people you can “make” like you by acting differently, some people are just shitty people and not worth your time. There’s a balance between the social benefits of people liking you and the stress of ping too far to being a people pleaser.
This is far from an advocation of bullying, but without it those lessons would have been much harder to come by.
I feel the social benefits, even accepting the risk that bullying could happen and have a significantly negative influence, outweigh a lot of the benefits of homeschooling. I would most likely take an approach similar to my own parents’. I went to a public school, and when I came home I had a library of thousands of books to browse and read from. I still was able to get the benefits of being able to teach myself, but without the loss of social interaction (even parentally provided social interaction doesn’t match up, in my opinion, as the people you’re interacting with will likely be far less varied in nature).
(No argument with anything you’re saying, but I’d like to record my skepticism that uncontrolled bullying is the best way to provide people like you with that particular service, and skepticism that there are very many people who require that service.)
Also keep in mind that you’re going to have to deal with assholes once you hit the real world. While protecting children from them at young ages is an idealistic goal, at some level you will have to learn to face them. In a lot of less than extreme circumstances, you can learn and improve strategies to handle them.
I’m not trying to imply that bullying is good by any means. I also don’t think it is nearly as terrible as it is portrayed to be. It is extremely dramatized by the media because of the few instances where it is extreme and the bullied takes extreme action. In a lot of cases “bullying” is minor in nature and not significantly different than other “initiation rites” at higher ages. I am all for teachers doing their best to prevent bullying, but some minor things should be let go.
As for homeschooling, for a parent considering it I would add the pro that you can increase the pace of the cirriculum to keep your child from getting bored by mindless repetition. Again from personal experience, I could have learned several classes (particularly math) much faster than it is taught in a public school environment, and as a result I didn’t do homework (I would get 70′s in classes counting homework as 30%) because I didn’t think I was learning anything. So being able to pace classes efficiently would be a significant pro for homeschooling.
I would once more emphasize the positives of social interaction, and find a way, whether through sports, or preferably a way involving both sexes, to make sure your child is getting that interaction. My point on bullying isn’t that I think it’s a net positive, just that the negatives aren’t as extreme as portrayed in the media and aren’t enough to seriously cut into the benefits of the socialization.
What was bad about the Saxon program for you? I liked its spaced repetition; though being taught in a private school by a retired engineer probably masked any shortcomings in the textbooks. Should I stop recommending Saxon math?
Well, I don’t actually know. I do know that math/physics in college was a lot easier, not sure if due to teacher or that it was review for me or what. I’m the sort of person that just wants to understand the concepts and really hates rote repetition, so I can’t say I enjoyed it. (I write computer programs to do the rote repetition!)
Mostly I was saying that because I had a public school math teacher express pity upon learning that I learned with Saxon. Maybe it’s just fine for some people?
When I read this I thought “yes they are, but aren’t teachers biased as well?”, but then I read the following two bullets and I realized you might have had in mind a waaaaaay higher level of bias than I had.
Some of the books have a lot of material on how “godly” the founding fathers were, how america is like the fulfillment of prophecies, etc. I have no idea how bad normal history books are, though. For my folks, the opposite meme sort of won (“christians are a tiny, persecuted minority in this country”). Some people manage to believe both memes at the same time, but not my parents.
I don’t know much about the US, but here in Italy, until one or two decades ago, some people say history textbooks tended to have a left-wing bias whereby communists in the 20th century (esp. WWII) were depicted in a more favourable light; and then they were called out for this and they’ve probably overcompensated for that. (I don’t know much about 20th-century history from anywhere else, so I won’t judge myself.)
I was homeschooled. I have pretty mixed feelings on whether this was a good thing or not. Kawoomba asked, so here:
Pros:
No bullies
Teaches you how to teach yourself
No PE/sports
Go to college early
Cons:
Go to college early
Limited contact with others left me pretty socially inept.
No resources (chemistry experiments, etc)
After Algebra II, you’re on your own.
With Saxon math books.
No sense of position among one’s peers, no sense of why one might go to college, higher learning, etc. I’m maybe +1 S.D. appearance and +3? S.D. IQ but had no idea until much much later.
History books tend to be extremely biased (America is a christian nation, gosh darn it) (but my parents somehow mostly avoided this)
Biology books tend to be completely wrong because you have to lie a lot when you don’t believe evolution (I’m still pissed about this)
Science/astronomy books tend to have wrong sections because you have to lie a lot when you believe the earth is 6000 years old
Of these problems, most of the really bad ones seem easy to prevent if you’re aware of them. I expect I could do a really awesome job of homeschooling myself and a really terrible job of homeschooling a more normal person.
I really hated school as a kid. My best guess is that a public school with a good gifted program would have been an improvement, but one without would have been worse than what I experienced.
Good thing you were homeschooled then. The latter is much more common than the former.
What is this mythical thing you speak of? Oh, wait, you did say “America”.
At the risk of being annoying by repeating myself on this point: Outside the US, UK and Tokyo (and more recently some parts of China), there is no such thing as “public schools with good gifted programs”.
In fact, for most of the population, there is simply no such thing as “public schools with gifted programs”. I suspect that for a significant fraction of countries, you could even drop the “public” part altogether.
On another note, most of the “Cons” listed after “After Algebra II, you’re on your own” seem to be situational and just as likely to occur in a public school as in homeschooling. Including the part about a sense of position. Public high schools don’t always give you a good accurate sense of your position applied in the real world, they usually instead give you a sense of how much things are broken.
So all in all, I’d say as far as education goes for most people in the world, or even for most people in first-world countries, or even for most middle-class-or-higher children living in urban environments, if the listed cons are really the worst of it then you’ve had a comparatively superb education.
For a few years I was teaching in a public school for giften children in Slovakia. It required IQ at least 2 standard deviations above the mean (i.e. Mensa level). Originally the requirement was both for students and teachers. Later, the requirement for teachers was dropped (because these days the schools in Slovakia consider themselves lucky to find any teachers), but it seems to me most of the teachers there would fulfill the requirement anyway.
I was told we should be lucky that such school exists, because in most European countries, the mere existence of such school would be “politically incorrect”. (In Czech Republic, a similar project had to be done as a private school. And in some countries, probably even that would be impossible.) Even here, many people seem driven mad by the idea that the nature already gave advantage to some people and now the society is going to help them even more. It’s like only the unlucky people deserve any help. Many people express the opinion that the smart children should stay in the same schools as the less smart children, because it is somehow supposed to help the less smart children. And we should not care whether it harms the smart ones; they already are privileged, aren’t they? Or there is a rationalization that for a gifted child, being separated from you equally smart peers and spending all times with the average kids is a good thing, because when they grow up, they will have to deal with the average people most of the time, so they better learn it while they are young. It is as if people believed that a gifted child spending their time with other gifted children will inevitably become an autist or member of some evil mastermind clique, but surrounded with average children they will become a happy normal kid. (Ironically, most parents don’t care about IQ of their kids, so many gifted children are discovered by being sent to psychologist after having problems in their “normal” school. Seems like the data contradict the folk theory, but as usual, most people don’t care about the data if they can have an opinion instead.)
Interestingly, it is considered perfectly “politically correct” to have special public schools focused on art or sport. Those schools are allowed to be public and to have admission criteria that most children could not pass. Only when the intelligence becomes the criterium, it somehow becomes an unacceptable elitism. The analogy with the public art schools and sport schools was successfully used when lobbying to allow creating this one school I taught at. But it was only an exception to create one experimental school. It cannot be used to create more schools like this. (In the current political climate, we are lucky that the experiment is allowed to continue, but there is no chance it would be officially declared successful. I guess there are even no hard criteria for success other than the government liking the idea.) Which is bad, because I would like to see some competition in this area.
Sometimes I think the smart people should simply support each other, regardless or even against the rest of the society. We should treat other gifted people as members of the same opressed minority, like ethnic or religious minorities do. Perhaps create secret textbooks for gifted children, or even build a shadow educational system? The internet should make it easier. -- But then I remember that Mensa tried something similar, and somehow the results are not impressive. Maybe because Mensa was too focused on measuring the raw intelligence, instead of developing rationality. We should help the gifted children to become successful and rational people. Maybe we could still find some people in Mensa who would support this goal.
I’ve gotten the same kind of response up here in Canada, heard at least one account to that effect for Russia (Moscow specifically), and south america / africa can arguably be excused because they should start by having schools in the first place (they kind of do, but not enough and not everyone has access to basic education).
As for the middle-east, well, you’re either Taliban or you’re a poseur heretical scrub, as far as I can tell. So the only “gifted” education available is to be a distinguished and promising elite of the religious teachings of [Insert locally favored sub-sect or religious curriculum].
Overall, your post very much nails all I’ve seen, though if I had to conjecture the simplest hypothesis I can to explain this behavior and connotation, it would be that people have this belief that everyone has an equivalent amount and distribution of strengths and weaknesses; There cannot be one human who is physically fit, much more intelligent than normal, good-looking, hard-working, and psychologically stable. If all the observable traits are there, one of the less-observable ones must be broken—“This kid is not normal, stay away from him, he could be dangerous.”
This seems dubious and hard to ascertain. What evidence do you have that most other countries lack such schools?
(There are public schools for gifted children in Russia, and I’d guess in many places. The usual setup is not to filter directly by IQ, as Viliam_Bur describes (which does seem potentially socially inappropriate) but to admit students based on hard competitive tests in math/physics, and have as teachers either college professors or former math/physics olympians.)
Filtering by mathematics correlates positively with filtering by IQ, but it is not the same thing. Most gifted people are not great in maths.
One of advantages of teaching in a school of children filtered specifically by IQ was that it disproved my many prejudices about high-IQ people. Those children were different from the average, but it was not easy to say how exactly; the simple explanations all failed. For example some of them were great at maths, certainly much higher ratio than in the average school, but most of them were not. Similarly with other traits—many interesting traits were more frequent than in the normal population, and yet, even within the gifted population they remained a minority; just a greater minority than usual. If you try to filter by these traits, you will find many gifted people, but even more gifted people you will filter out.
As a student I was in a math-oriented high school. I would say most people there were highly intelligent too. Yet, it was different. The interesting aspect of the IQ-filtering school for gifted children is that you get many talents of a different kind together. Often you have one child with multiple talents—in a math-oriented school they would probably develop some of them and supress the rest. In IQ-oriented school, they can develop their math talent during the math lessons, and e.g. artistic talent during their art lessons. Without an IQ-oriented school they would have to choose, either math or art; or at least only one of them at school, and other only in afternoon activities.
As an example: on the school for gifted children we started organizing a high-school competition in making computer games. That is not exceptional per se; there exist many other programming competitions. The difference is that in a typical programming competition, you have an exact problem, and you get points for algorithm that solves the problem. In this game-making competition you get points for multiple aspects of the game: graphics, music, storyline, presentation, and the technical flawlessness. So the programming is important, but the algorithm is not everything, other aspects matter too. In my opinion, this difference is a nice metaphor for the difference between the schools.
My primary evidence is that Canada is more on the liberal and open side of things relating to most countries in the world, has a higher diversity of educational programs than in most places AFAIK, and is quite high up the prosperity and economic stability scale by current worldwide standards—yet it has no such things as public schools with gifted programs.
The closest to “gifted” programs there is is the International Baccalaureate program, and yet even that gets diluted and stretched into an additional unnecessary year in Quebec (the rest of Canada implements the program a bit more directly, without the additional stretch year). There is no additional content, and the program that I took here barely meets the basic requirements for the certificate of accomplishment for Middle Years of the Baccalaureate program (this I obtained together with my local Diplome du Secondaire, slightly inferior to an actual High School diploma, at age 17.)
Basically, If you’re gifted here in Canada, the best you can hope for is to either get lucky with a private school filled with awesome teachers, or have excellent homeschooling. Since Canada scales rather high on the aforementioned global metrics, and I have a decent prior that Canada has a bigger per-capita education budget than most countries, it seems likely that Canada not having any such schools is much more likely in worlds where having such schools is a very rare or special thing for a country, rather than in worlds where Canada is somehow a strange cultural outlier and represents the exceptions.
I have specific evidence of such schools in the US, I remember hearing of two examples in the UK (but I don’t remember the examples themselves—sorry), and I’ve read or heard many times of such schools in Tokyo. China pumping lots of money into anything makes the news, and I’ve seen a few articles that says they’re expanding their current programme to get more geniuses working for them in the future.
(small jump to represent some internet searches and being surprised)
On the other hand, while writing this and looking for some of my previous sources, I just found this.
The first thing that jumps at me is that there seems to be a lot more schools with gifted programmes in Ontario than I was led to believe, and the six random ones I checked were operating back in 2003/2004 (which is around where my family and I started looking). This suggests either that we searched incorrectly, were lied to by the counselors and advisers we consulted, that they were simply much harder to find and get into back then than they are now, or any combination of those.
At any rate, it seems I now need to re-evaluate those beliefs. One fact remains, though: Our family expended above-average effort in trying to get me to a gifted program, skip a year, or otherwise get me out of the fatal failure mode I was in, and failed utterly. I also don’t see much for Quebec, unfortunately, but as the page is in English it would be expected that its writers would not be aware of french-language gifted schools, if there are any, which makes it seem more likely that there are some.
The above-average effort claim doesn’t seem hard to support—the average parent would simply not care that their child is gifted and would not attempt to get them out of a “normal” school program, as far as I’m aware. Actually seeking to do anything in this case seems like the exceptional non-status-quo reaction. As for failing utterly, well, I completed my normal high school curriculum and then dropped out of cégep (pre-university college thinghy corresponding to last year of high school).
Basically, I don’t have a formal education as good/equivalent to regular american high school diplomas. My experience was utterly boring and unproductive. I gained virtually no adjustment skills and still hate every moment I spend with “average” people (I literally feel like I’m interacting with inferior beings, which means I have to spend effort to suppress these feelings because they’re irrational and not reflectively coherent, which means I dislike these interactions partially because of this). I have no hope of going back into higher education for at least one more year, and even then I’m not sure I want to at all. I’ve been trained to loathe formal education, hate those who would prevent proper reprogramming of the whole system, and generally have strong emotional responses linked to the years of boredom and (that-psychological-thing-that-felt-like-torture) whenever the subject comes up. If all of this is not considered a failure, then I consider the entity doing the considering to have a flawed and counter-productive evaluation method and point of reference.
Anyway, hopefully this rant wasn’t completely pointless and useless to everyone else. If anyone has further evidence one way or another for the issue of gifted schools and how available they are, it would be welcome. If someone has evidence or arguments that could make me dissipate my vendetta against the educational system, even better—unless they have evidence that such a vendetta is a desirable and effective thing to hold, but my credence in this belief just took a large drop, and by looking at what kind of evidence I had been searching for in the past I believe I’ve already seen much more of the evidence for this than for its counterpart.
(My objection is primarily to your apparent overconfidence in the strong claim about the absence of such programs in most countries, for which you do seem to lack adequate evidence, and so it is incorrect to assert it in that form.)
I agree. It felt like I had more evidence, and I had a strong belief of comparative mental category to things that warrant such confidence. Thanks for leading me to debunk this.
Well, as I recall the gifted program I attended (in the States, in Texas specifically) was just harder busywork. Logic puzzles featured prominently, and there were crosswords instead of wordfinds. It was there that I formalized my hatred of formal logic problems. (The problems frequently featured concepts or information which, if you used knowledge which came from outside the puzzle, would lead you to the wrong answer. Not uncommon in logic puzzles, and completely wrongheaded; it always reeks of doublethink to me.)
Thanks for the input!
Could you clarify if this means “an answer marked as wrong, but probably correct in the real world” or rather “an answer clearly wrong in the real world, with the premises of the puzzle broken”? I also notice that the latter interpretation leaves ambiguous whether those answers would usually be marked correct or wrong, which might be intentionally left out if there’s no specific correlation there.
I’m uncertain what you mean by the latter—the former is one case, but if you mean that the correct answer to the logic puzzle would clearly be wrong in the real world, the latter is also true. So possibly both; I was referring to a pretty broad category of poorly-considered logic puzzles.
Ah, yes, upon re-reading my wording wasn’t quite clear either.
What I was referring to is an annoying category of puzzles that require certain specific outside knowledge bits to arrive to the “correct” answer as would be marked, even though by the premises of the puzzle and the information given this is clearly a wrong answer and the desired answer isn’t even applicable to the real world in non-contrived scenarios.
In other words, a specific subset of the broad category of poorly-considered logic puzzles. Since you were referring to its parent/superset, the point is rather moot.
I got a heavy dose of “think for yourself” from my parents that not all homeschool kids get. Some kids I knew got really huge amounts of religious indoctrination. I was well into my 20′s when I finally deconverted, so I guess I did, too.
(I’m not entirely sure if they expected me to actually “think for myself” or not if it meant changing my mind about something like evolution, but regardless, I certainly did learn to do that.)
I guess enough people have said similar things to me that it’s time to update my opinion. Certainly, it could have been much worse.
Indeed. I do agree that by the standards we should hold ourselves to, or at least the standards I wish we had, your education doesn’t sound all that appealing at all.
To add to the other countries people have mentioned, Australia has them too.
Doing no sport isn’t good. It helps to develop a healthy body. I would however prefer methologies like Feldenkrais or Martial Arts over the standard school curriculum.
Most of the negatives that you list have to do with the way that your parents chose the books. If your parents wouldn’t have been fundamental Christians they could have given you much better books.
My younger siblings did end up in some sort of group homeschool PE class. My mom tried a few things before finding that, which apparently was nice. I put it in the “pro” category only because I think I would have really hated PE. I wouldn’t say my life was completely devoid of physical activity, just probably less than average.
Agree, but it’s my understanding that most homeschoolers do so for religious reasons. I trust the average LWer to do a lot better on this score than the average christian.
Doing no sport isn’t good, but doing no PE can be good, given that a possible consequence of PE is that you learn to hate sport and end up doing even less of it than you would have otherwise.
My first skim of this made me think I was reading and advertisement for Dapoxetine. Perhaps it’s been too long since I’ve been in highschool...
It would be good to have some officially recommened (not mandatory, just offered as a standard solution) list of textbooks for homeschooling, preferably free online. So everyone who would want to know what they are missing, could just read the textbooks. Also it would be helpful for parents that avoid schools for reasons other than disagreeing with the curriculum.
Perhaps one day Khan Academy or someone similar will make it. (On the other hand, one day the fundamentalists will have their own alternative version, probably called Jesus Academy.)
Several fundamentalist christian groups do exactly that, except for the free online part. Makes indocrina—er, teaching easy for people. My mom mixed and matched and mostly evaded the worst stuff everywhere except science.
Martial arts are good for getting some people who aren’t interested in usual team sports to enjoy being active, but they’re also very bad at getting many people who do enjoy more standard activities to be active. This brings to mind Yvain’s experience teaching, where he found that the most effective methods to getting to most students were exactly the ones he’d found boring as a kid.
I’ve never participated in a Feldenkrais session, but looking it up, it doesn’t strike me as something most students would be enthusiastic about either.
My issue isn’t so much with methods of teaching as with content.
I don’t think that there any reason that justifies teaching a kid to jump as wide or as high as possible. The same goes for activities like shot putting. If you optimize your jumb for distance you aren’t optimizing it for using your body in a way that prevents you from hurting your back.
A goal of present sport eduction is to train children to be good at the Olympic activities. I object to that goal.
As far as team sports go they aren’t as bad but I still don’t think they are optimzed to teach useful life skills.
Not in theory. If you ask school administrators or state education officials, they’re more likely to tell you that it’s about teaching kids discipline, teamwork, getting in shape and so on. In practice, kids’ sports have become increasingly specialized and competitive, with parents investing huge amounts of time and money into their kids’ training, and sports injuries, especially overuse injuries which were almost unheard of in child athletes a few decades ago, have shot up dramatically.
It’s hard to restructure kids’ sports programs to better address the purposes they’re nominally geared towards though, because the sports activities are strongly driven by parents who want to see their kids compete.
Getting kids to do broad jumps doesn’t seem to me to maximize either discipline, teamwork or getting in shape. Schools should just cut out the whole track and field athletics business.
If you want kids to do basketball, I have no problem. Let them compete in basketball. The sport was created in the late 19th century by a physical education professor who thought a bit to create a good team sport.
While we are at a topic, there are also team sports created in the 20th cenutry. Underater hockey seems like a good candidate for a sport that provides benefits.
Track and field does do quite a lot to get students in shape; most of the fittest students I knew in high school were track athletes. And it certainly requires considerable discipline.
A large part of the trouble with changing the athletic curriculum though, is that the people who’re most in need of basic, safe athletic training to improve their fitness are those who, along with their parents, are least involved in the current system. The people who participate in the system, who have the most power to shape it, are mostly sports practitioners, coaches and enthusiasts, for whom the bottom line is already written.
Not completely. If you go as an adult to a gym they might give you crossfit which is a modern system. They are not likely to tell you to do broad jumps.
Gyms make money by catering to what the clients want. School gyms don’t care what the clients want, because the clients are a captive audience. School gyms give kids what the parents and coaches want for the kids.
Suppose that instead of paying to go to the gym voluntarily, all adults were made to go to the gym, and all adult competitive sports practitioners were selected from among gym attendees and encouraged to get into sports based on their gym performance. Gym activities would tend to become highly sports oriented, even if the nominal reason for mandatory gym attendance was to promote fitness.
These three seem like one point (biased curriculum.)
I’m surprised by the socialization ones; I thought there were studies saying homeschoolers were actually socialized just fine, thank you? (It’s possible you were just unusual in this regard, I guess.)
Agree, similar points, I split it out because it’s apparently possible to be relatively sane about american history and relatively insane about evolution, which I wouldn’t have expected. From my large sample size of two or three, other homeschoolers I know got both or neither.
I have two hypotheses; first, most of my social-interaction-hours growing up were spent with adults. As a result I got (I think) very good at impressing adults, but pretty much didn’t understand my peers at all. I’m not sure if the studies can confirm or refute this, I haven’t looked in detail. I wouldn’t trust homeschoolers themselves to be rational about this. It’s also worth noting that homeschooling is not terribly unified, my experience may have been atypical. Second hypothesis is that I started life out with −3 S.D. social skills and public school wouldn’t change that.
Incidentally, I suspect that it would be great if most kids spent most of their time interacting only with adults, so that when they did meet each other kids, much of the painful conflict and pointless costly signaling associated with typical teenage years could just be skipped over.
Hm. I was going to say that I don’t think that policy will have that effect—but after a bit of thought, I’m not quite sure if I know what you mean by “painful conflict and pointless costly signaling associated with typical teenage years.” Can you give an example?
...maybe this supports your point...
Things like smoking and excessive drinking for the sake of showing that you’re Cool and Rebellious for doing the exact things that the adults say you shouldn’t do, for example. It’s easy to see why that kind of behavior might emerge in an environment where other kids your age are your ingroup that you want to impress, and adults are the outgroup that you can attack in order to distinguish yourself. But if adults were actually the ingroup you were trying to impress, it seems like people would be more likely to try to impress them by actually acting more mature, and that “maturity is high status” would carry over even to the more limited interactions they had with folks their own age.
I see. I guess I am an example in favor of your theory. I’m not entirely sure that this is an unambiguously good thing, though, because sometimes you should impress your peers in ways adults would not approve. Or, to put it another way, the optimal balance of grown-up-ness and fun shouldn’t have a factor of 0 for either category...
(I suppose if the adults were never wrong about classifying things as fun-but-harmful, then I’d change my mind.)
Ooh, I hadn’t though of that one.
On the one hand, I don’t think these were conducted by homeshoolers or based on surveys.
On the other hand, I only think that this is supported by studies because a homeschooling-related website told me so, while I was looking for material to support my argument regarding a specific individual (who I’m pretty sure was at −1 S.D and wasn’t likely to improve in public school.) I hadn’t seen anything to contradict it till your comment, and it seemed like it should have a fairly high prior, so...
This may be only anecdotal evidence, but I would consider being bullied for a bit a positive net influence in my life for a couple reasons:
I have always been somewhat arrogant. While being bullied did not decrease said arrogance, or even immediately result in any changes, when I looked back and saw how people treating me made me feel, it became somewhat of a motivator to mask some of my arrogance to spare others feelings. As knowing the right people can make a large difference in various opportunities, I feel some opportunities I have received had I not learned to mask said arrogance.
Eventually you learn to deal with it. While bullying to the extreme someone kills themself is clearly bad, and in other cases it can seriously damage people’s psyches, for others “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger”. I learned that while there are some people you can “make” like you by acting differently, some people are just shitty people and not worth your time. There’s a balance between the social benefits of people liking you and the stress of ping too far to being a people pleaser.
This is far from an advocation of bullying, but without it those lessons would have been much harder to come by.
I feel the social benefits, even accepting the risk that bullying could happen and have a significantly negative influence, outweigh a lot of the benefits of homeschooling. I would most likely take an approach similar to my own parents’. I went to a public school, and when I came home I had a library of thousands of books to browse and read from. I still was able to get the benefits of being able to teach myself, but without the loss of social interaction (even parentally provided social interaction doesn’t match up, in my opinion, as the people you’re interacting with will likely be far less varied in nature).
(No argument with anything you’re saying, but I’d like to record my skepticism that uncontrolled bullying is the best way to provide people like you with that particular service, and skepticism that there are very many people who require that service.)
Also keep in mind that you’re going to have to deal with assholes once you hit the real world. While protecting children from them at young ages is an idealistic goal, at some level you will have to learn to face them. In a lot of less than extreme circumstances, you can learn and improve strategies to handle them.
I’m not trying to imply that bullying is good by any means. I also don’t think it is nearly as terrible as it is portrayed to be. It is extremely dramatized by the media because of the few instances where it is extreme and the bullied takes extreme action. In a lot of cases “bullying” is minor in nature and not significantly different than other “initiation rites” at higher ages. I am all for teachers doing their best to prevent bullying, but some minor things should be let go.
As for homeschooling, for a parent considering it I would add the pro that you can increase the pace of the cirriculum to keep your child from getting bored by mindless repetition. Again from personal experience, I could have learned several classes (particularly math) much faster than it is taught in a public school environment, and as a result I didn’t do homework (I would get 70′s in classes counting homework as 30%) because I didn’t think I was learning anything. So being able to pace classes efficiently would be a significant pro for homeschooling.
I would once more emphasize the positives of social interaction, and find a way, whether through sports, or preferably a way involving both sexes, to make sure your child is getting that interaction. My point on bullying isn’t that I think it’s a net positive, just that the negatives aren’t as extreme as portrayed in the media and aren’t enough to seriously cut into the benefits of the socialization.
What was bad about the Saxon program for you? I liked its spaced repetition; though being taught in a private school by a retired engineer probably masked any shortcomings in the textbooks. Should I stop recommending Saxon math?
Well, I don’t actually know. I do know that math/physics in college was a lot easier, not sure if due to teacher or that it was review for me or what. I’m the sort of person that just wants to understand the concepts and really hates rote repetition, so I can’t say I enjoyed it. (I write computer programs to do the rote repetition!)
Mostly I was saying that because I had a public school math teacher express pity upon learning that I learned with Saxon. Maybe it’s just fine for some people?
When I read this I thought “yes they are, but aren’t teachers biased as well?”, but then I read the following two bullets and I realized you might have had in mind a waaaaaay higher level of bias than I had.
Some of the books have a lot of material on how “godly” the founding fathers were, how america is like the fulfillment of prophecies, etc. I have no idea how bad normal history books are, though. For my folks, the opposite meme sort of won (“christians are a tiny, persecuted minority in this country”). Some people manage to believe both memes at the same time, but not my parents.
I don’t know much about the US, but here in Italy, until one or two decades ago, some people say history textbooks tended to have a left-wing bias whereby communists in the 20th century (esp. WWII) were depicted in a more favourable light; and then they were called out for this and they’ve probably overcompensated for that. (I don’t know much about 20th-century history from anywhere else, so I won’t judge myself.)