Discussion Homeschooling hot mess

[Ajay]

Having been through 12 years of Catholic school, my opinion is any academic benefits are a function of being a private school - just like any other private school - rather than being a religious school.

I agree. As usual, the parents are paying for their kids education in addition to paying taxes, so they're expectation are higher (but aren't quite up to the tradition of providing an excellent classical education as was historically the case).

My one religion teacher, who was the exception rather than the norm, did try to teach us something about social justice. I wish he could have explored the topic so much more, and without the confines of Catholicism.

The schools must adhere the Catholic doctrine or the Bishop will make changes - dramatic ones if need be. Social justice should be taught in Catholic schools. I'm surprised it wasn't. It's fundamental a cardinal virtue - Justice (duh) and the theological virtue of Charity.

 

[Fenixgoon]

I agree. As usual, the parents are paying for their kids education in addition to paying taxes, so they're expectation are higher (but aren't quite up to the tradition of providing an excellent classical education as was historically the case).

The schools must adhere the Catholic doctrine or the Bishop will make changes - dramatic ones if need be. Social justice should be taught in Catholic schools. I'm surprised it wasn't. It's fundamental a cardinal virtue - Justice (duh) and the theological virtue of Charity.

I have no idea what you mean by the bolded.

As for the latter part, yes Catholic schools need to adhere to Catholic teaching, but that is exactly what cripples them. Because you are literally prohibited from having meaningful discussions on certain topics. Your position as a teacher *has* to be consistent with the church. Even your private life has to be consistent to an extent - a school can fire a pregnant teacher if they're not married.

 

[Perknose]

The biggest problem with homeschooling is it allows abusive households to pull their children out of the only monitoring system around, the public school system.

Want to have babies with your 12 year old because god told you so? Home school.

Recently read a long-form investigative article highlighting this. My cursory search for same couldn't come up with a link. Frightening, is what it is, though.

 

[Perknose]

Read through this WaPo article if you can stomach it: Free access link.

 

[Amused]

Wapo today published a sobering look at the totally unregulated and unsupervised homeschooling trend in America:

What home schooling hides: A boy tortured and starved by his stepmom​

Roman Lopez was 11 when he went missing. His years of torment were concealed by home schooling.​

Gifted article:

https://wapo.st/3RnyVI2

 

[Perknose]

Wapo today published a sobering look at the totally unregulated and unsupervised homeschooling trend in America:

What home schooling hides: A boy tortured and starved by his stepmom​

Roman Lopez was 11 when he went missing. His years of torment were concealed by home schooling.​

Gifted article:

https://wapo.st/3RnyVI2

Click on the post just above you.

 

[Vic]

IMO homeschooling is the equivalent of acting as your own lawyer or performing your own surgeries.
Those on the wrong end of Dunning Kruger scale will never understand.

 

[Amused]

Click on the post just above you.

Whoops! Sorry!

 

[Perknose]

Whoops! Sorry!

NP! My post was not exactly self-explanatory on the face of it.

 

[Moonbeam]

I see a mixed bag. Public school, the only kind I knew, made me feel stupid as a child. It left me with a need to want to be smart rather that who I am. This need for me turned into ambition rather than defeat but for what reason, so I could point to grades and say I was smart. I see no reason for regret as I can't change what was but I wish in many ways I had a teal teacher who could see my strengths and weaknesses better than what really happened. I could have avoided so much pain, but then pain made me like I am, a seeker.

How schools destroy learning experiences of young minds

Investigate how traditional education methods can harm a child's learning experience. Examine the negative effects of standardized testing.

www.educationnext.in

I wonder also what I would have become had I an AI handy to answer my questions and teach me things I was interested in. Can you imagine being able to satisfy your curiosity to deep levels any time you gut the =urge? The future could be very bright is the left hand of self hate doesn't stab us in the back and we self extinct when the door opens up to infinity.

 

[Ajay]

Wapo today published a sobering look at the totally unregulated and unsupervised homeschooling trend in America:

What home schooling hides: A boy tortured and starved by his stepmom​

Roman Lopez was 11 when he went missing. His years of torment were concealed by home schooling.​

Gifted article:

https://wapo.st/3RnyVI2

Again, not generally in favor of homeschooling, but.... My wife has been a teacher in a small city (100k pop) for ~35 years. She has seen everything from undernourished kids, kids have have not been given a bath or shower for weeks, and kids who have been beaten and abused in other ways that at times made her angry/sick. A fair number of calls to DCYF by the principles. Federal an state aid helps, but doesn't solve the problem. Also families donate clothing to schools as well. A lot of that is from poorer neighborhoods where the parents themselves are raised well and don't know how to take care of their own children. The other part is rampant drug and alcohol use, where children are neglected as their parent(s) are high - particularly those on heroin.

I'm not saying that way happened in the above wasn't horrific - I just think it's important to point other that the US is doing a poor job when it comes to child welfare; and it cuts across society irregardless of how kids are educated.

 

[ivwshane]

100k people is a small city now? Unregulated education is no different than any other business sector with little to no regulations, it’s ripe with fraud and abuse, sprinkled in with role model businesses.

 

[Ajay]

100k people is a small city now? Unregulated education is no different than any other business sector with little to no regulations, it’s ripe with fraud and abuse, sprinkled in with role model businesses.

Well, compared to even Boston - yes. Never mind NY, LA, etc. I think Manchester is the 256th largest (oh, 115K it turns out): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_...s_by_population#50_states_and_Washington,_D.C.

I guess my point is that at one school, in one 'mid-sized' city - there was more neglect and abuse than should be acceptable. The school my wife worked at wasn't the worst by a good margin. Again, child welfare is problematic in the US and there are likely many thousands of stories like the one quoted from WaPo across the country. Just plain neglect would be a much higher number.

There's data on this at https://www.aecf.org/ But it would take me a while to parse. It focuses more on foster care and race inequities.

 

[HomerJS]

Nothing wrong with homeschooling, a lot of people are homeschooled. It takes a two-parent or a single parent household with a decent job to have the energy to teach your child education skills needed for society.

There is when based on religion

 

[nakedfrog]

Again, not generally in favor of homeschooling, but.... My wife has been a teacher in a small city (100k pop) for ~35 years. She has seen everything from undernourished kids, kids have have not been given a bath or shower for weeks, and kids who have been beaten and abused in other ways that at times made her angry/sick. A fair number of calls to DCYF by the principles. Federal an state aid helps, but doesn't solve the problem. Also families donate clothing to schools as well. A lot of that is from poorer neighborhoods where the parents themselves are raised well and don't know how to take care of their own children. The other part is rampant drug and alcohol use, where children are neglected as their parent(s) are high - particularly those on heroin.

I'm not saying that way happened in the above wasn't horrific - I just think it's important to point other that the US is doing a poor job when it comes to child welfare; and it cuts across society irregardless of how kids are educated.

It seems weird to me that your response to the notion that homeschooling can and does hide some abuse and neglect is "well, abuse/neglect happens to kids in the public school system too". Yes, it does, and as you've noted, there are outside resources that can come into play for some of those.

 

[evident]

I have no idea what you mean by the bolded.

As for the latter part, yes Catholic schools need to adhere to Catholic teaching, but that is exactly what cripples them. Because you are literally prohibited from having meaningful discussions on certain topics. Your position as a teacher *has* to be consistent with the church. Even your private life has to be consistent to an extent - a school can fire a pregnant teacher if they're not married.

I went through 12 years of catholic school + 4 years at a catholic university so i know what you're talking about with regard to deviation from church positions.

But there really are ---some--- decent catholic schools out there that provide an education that's comparable or better than some of the public schools in the area.

 

[HomerJS]

I went through 12 years of catholic school + 4 years at a catholic university so i know what you're talking about with regard to deviation from church positions.

But there really are ---some--- decent catholic schools out there that provide an education that's comparable or better than some of the public schools in the area.

When there was a conflict with Catholicism and science what was taught?

 

[Fenixgoon]

When there was a conflict with Catholicism and science what was taught?

At least in my experience, Catholicism doesn't deny any science (e.g. creationism). That "theory" is really a concept of faith - that god creating everything, not necessarily that the universe was established in 7 days and that the earth is 5000 years or whatever bullshit. The big bang theory originates with a papal astronomer from 1500 or something like that.

So there wasn't really ever a conflict of science and faith.

Mostly it's on the issues of morality/sex. The church will say that contraception is an affront to the family, but natural family planning is ok. And obviously that abortion is morally wrong because the church believes life begins at conception. Or that the only 100% effective birth control method is to not have sex. Sure, that's technically correct, but it's far from a practical solution. People are gonna fuck. If you don't want abortions, give people tools so they don't have babies.

 

[evident]

At least in my experience, Catholicism doesn't deny any science (e.g. creationism). That "theory" is really a concept of faith - that god creating everything, not necessarily that the universe was established in 7 days and that the earth is 5000 years or whatever bullshit. The big bang theory originates with a papal astronomer from 1500 or something like that.

So there wasn't really ever a conflict of science and faith.

Mostly it's on the issues of morality/sex. The church will say that contraception is an affront to the family, but natural family planning is ok. And obviously that abortion is morally wrong because the church believes life begins at conception. Or that the only 100% effective birth control method is to not have sex. Sure, that's technically correct, but it's far from a practical solution. People are gonna fuck. If you don't want abortions, give people tools so they don't have babies.

^ this. well, they did persecute galileo and deny evolution for centuries, but it's not that way in the modern ages or at least when i was alive. When it comes to science, or at least creationism and that stuff, the Catholic church accepts evolution and teaches it in their schools. I'd be shocked to find a catholic school that didnt teach it. its all the abortion bullshit that you can't really go against. but that's mostly taught in religion class where if you just parrot the responses you get an A+.

believe me, there is a huge chasm between the homeschooling / private schooling being discussed in this thread vs mainline catholic schools or catholic academies.

 

[HomerJS]

^ this. well, they did persecute galileo and deny evolution for centuries, but it's not that way in the modern ages or at least when i was alive. When it comes to science, or at least creationism and that stuff, the Catholic church accepts evolution and teaches it in their schools. I'd be shocked to find a catholic school that didnt teach it. its all the abortion bullshit that you can't really go against. but that's mostly taught in religion class where if you just parrot the responses you get an A+.

believe me, there is a huge chasm between the homeschooling / private schooling being discussed in this thread vs mainline catholic schools or catholic academies.

How did they deal with slavery and Columbus?

 

[IronWing]

How did they deal with slavery and Columbus?

I attended both public and Catholic schools. There wasn't much difference in the teaching of slavery or Columbus. Slavery was taught as an historic evil. Columbus was sanitized in the both public and Catholic schools back then.

Certain historic events were taught in a vastly different manner in the Catholic schools between the time my parents went to school (pre-Vatican 2) and the time I did (post-Vatican 2). For example: when my mom was in Catholic school, the Mexican Revolution and Spanish Civil War were taught as primarily anti-clerical in nature with the underlying political and economic grievances as minor secondary points. The Catholic Church aligned with Franco in Spain and against Juarez in Mexico. The difference in the social teachings of the Church between pre-Vatican 2 and post-Vatican 2 cannot be over-emphasized. To put the pre-Vatican 2 Catholic Church in perspective, Pope Benedict XVI, i.e. the Panzer Pope, was in the reformer camp during Vatican 2 deliberations.

As far as evolution goes, the Catholic Church views evolution as fact. It insists that at some undefined point in human evolution, the human form became a suitable vessel for an eternal soul and, through the grace of God, became fully human. The Church has taken no stance on exactly when this occurred and probably never will.

The biology of abortion was accurately taught in biology class. Because the Church's teaching on abortion was crystal clear, the biology teachers didn't have to tiptoe around it and could simply present facts of fetal development and where abortion fit in.

 

[Ajay]

It seems weird to me that your response to the notion that homeschooling can and does hide some abuse and neglect is "well, abuse/neglect happens to kids in the public school system too". Yes, it does, and as you've noted, there are outside resources that can come into play for some of those.

I find it weird that you put a comment in quotes that I didn’t say.

 

[Meghan54]

I find it weird that you put a comment in quotes that I didn’t say.

It’s called paraphrasing…the quotes are used to distinguish that.

Homeschooled, I take it?

 

[Ajay]

It’s called paraphrasing…the quotes are used to distinguish that.

Homeschooled, I take it?

Well, his paraphrasing obfuscated my actual intention. Anyway, did you read what I wrote? I’m not in favor of homeschooling and I wasn’t homeschooled. Maybe you should stop making unfounded assumptions. Just a thought.

 

[nakedfrog]

Well, his paraphrasing obfuscated my actual intention. Anyway, did you read what I wrote? I’m not in favor of homeschooling and I wasn’t homeschooled. Maybe you should stop making unfounded assumptions. Just a thought.

*her
I guess your intention was indeed unclear, which is probably why I said (paraphrasing) "this response seems weird". This is a thread about things that can go wrong with homeschooling, your post essentially said "bad things happen to kids in public schools too" (uh, again, paraphrasing, to be clear...)