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> home school seems like the the only real solution Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed i

by _rpd 9y ago

> home school seems like the the only real solution Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed in other areas. There are good schools, but they are rare and often expensive. Schooling co-ops are an interesting option, but again I think you have to get lucky with the available talent pool.

VLM 9y ago
Parental involvement in education is kind of like eating healthy, in that its expensive and time consuming and not always fun, but the alternative being failure and disaster and death is kind of motivational. The stick is mightier than the carrot. That also assumes a modern curriculum is good. It is highly optimized, but optimized to what? Like all group activities the odds of the group goals matching your own is very low.
- _rpd 9y ago
  Well said. Of course, the goal should be to instruct the student as they would have wished from the perspective of their older selves. A damnably hard goal set to estimate. To enable fluid interaction with the bulk of society, however, my estimation is that the goals should include at least knowledge of the most popular curriculums, as taught to other students. There are a lot of socially valuable games set up around such curriculums and a student may be justifiably resentful if they are not competitive. A capable educator will go beyond that and treat the curriculums themselves as objects of study, but here the capabilities of the student come into play, since most are out of middle school before being able to comfortably make such distinctions.
- Trill-I-Am 9y ago
  What do you take away from the fact that many, many people in America don't eat healthy?
vivekd 9y ago
>Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed in other areas. At least for the first few years of a child's life, I think a parent can handle the curriculum. And it doesn't necessarily have to be time consuming. I think kids will pick things up faster when being taught one on one by a parent as opposed to a stranger. Also, they can go at their own pace rather than at the pace of the class which should allow for a lot more to be crammed into much shorter periods of time. Maybe in higher grades there will be things that parents cannot adequately teach, but these can be supplemented through means much less drastic than locking kids up for hours and hours in a school environment. It will require one parent to stay at home with the kids . . . but I don't think that was ever really optional, our society has just chosen to pretend that it was an option because we seem to have our values misplaced.
- white-flame 9y ago
  > I think kids will pick things up faster when being taught one on one by a parent as opposed to a stranger. I would actually disagree with that. To a kid, a teacher is its own mythical authoritative being solely focused on instruction and keeping the class orderly. (ymmv for poor unruly schools) It's always world-shattering for a little one to see their teacher in "normal life" at the store or wherever. A parent is more familiar, and is somebody that you have arguments with. Being at home also has its own distractions, because you're usually not locked down to one thing in your own house. I agree that factory-style education is pretty terrible, but some of the nuggets are useful, like getting away from the home to a dedicated place & people of learning.

by _rpd 9y ago

VLM 9y ago

Parental involvement in education is kind of like eating healthy, in that its expensive and time consuming and not always fun, but the alternative being failure and disaster and death is kind of motivational. The stick is mightier than the carrot. That also assumes a modern curriculum is good. It is highly optimized, but optimized to what? Like all group activities the odds of the group goals matching your own is very low.

_rpd 9y ago
Well said. Of course, the goal should be to instruct the student as they would have wished from the perspective of their older selves. A damnably hard goal set to estimate. To enable fluid interaction with the bulk of society, however, my estimation is that the goals should include at least knowledge of the most popular curriculums, as taught to other students. There are a lot of socially valuable games set up around such curriculums and a student may be justifiably resentful if they are not competitive. A capable educator will go beyond that and treat the curriculums themselves as objects of study, but here the capabilities of the student come into play, since most are out of middle school before being able to comfortably make such distinctions.
Trill-I-Am 9y ago
What do you take away from the fact that many, many people in America don't eat healthy?

vivekd 9y ago

>Many parents/guardians are not suited to teaching a modern curriculum, or their talents are best employed in other areas. At least for the first few years of a child's life, I think a parent can handle the curriculum. And it doesn't necessarily have to be time consuming. I think kids will pick things up faster when being taught one on one by a parent as opposed to a stranger. Also, they can go at their own pace rather than at the pace of the class which should allow for a lot more to be crammed into much shorter periods of time. Maybe in higher grades there will be things that parents cannot adequately teach, but these can be supplemented through means much less drastic than locking kids up for hours and hours in a school environment. It will require one parent to stay at home with the kids . . . but I don't think that was ever really optional, our society has just chosen to pretend that it was an option because we seem to have our values misplaced.

white-flame 9y ago
> I think kids will pick things up faster when being taught one on one by a parent as opposed to a stranger. I would actually disagree with that. To a kid, a teacher is its own mythical authoritative being solely focused on instruction and keeping the class orderly. (ymmv for poor unruly schools) It's always world-shattering for a little one to see their teacher in "normal life" at the store or wherever. A parent is more familiar, and is somebody that you have arguments with. Being at home also has its own distractions, because you're usually not locked down to one thing in your own house. I agree that factory-style education is pretty terrible, but some of the nuggets are useful, like getting away from the home to a dedicated place & people of learning.