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Why do you presume that religious parents necessarily have bad outcomes homeschooling? I have a relative who is deeply religious. I know I would not agree with

Why do you presume that religious parents necessarily have bad outcomes homeschooling? I have a relative who is deeply religious. I know I would not agree with her on, for example, evolution. But she is loving and devoted and her two daughters have received tons of time and investment from her in their education, far more than they would receive in a public school. I obviously haven't, like, tested her kids, but they do seem smart and well adjusted. I'm not really worried about the limitations on their scientific learning — it's not ideal if they are skipping some evolutionary biology (I actually have no idea but I assume they are) but they are going to leave home, go to college in a very secular country and get to learn that stuff. I'm sure with the internet they are already widely exposed to what science has to say about e.g. the creation of the universe (which, honestly, how many high school students could walk you through?). By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible" and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.

throwaway626 3y ago
> By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible" They’re pretty common, in fact. Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/ https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/ “The Bible is the only education you need” is a very common meme among evangelical Christians. > and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved. Most states have almost no recourse to reject submitted curricula, no matter how specious they are. One influential homeschool association has a 24/7 legal hotline specifically for subverting these mild attempts at accountability.
- bumbledraven 3y ago
  >> By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible" > Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/ https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/ Contrary to your claim, the linked page implies nothing about the Bible being the "only textbook". It simply offers a set of Bible lessons for homeschoolers ("This exciting curriculum contains homeschool lessons that cover the entire Bible chronologically in four years…").
  - throwaway626 3y ago
    You misread the claim and are arguing against something I didn’t say.
    - NotSuspicious 3y ago
      While you only wrote that that website provides the "tools" it would have been very reasonable to infer from your comment that you were also implying that they agreed with Bible-alone teaching.
bugglebeetle 3y ago
I would assume any kind of education that is dependent on strict adherence to a specific ideological doctrine, whose tolerance of free inquiry is similarly constrained, to underperform one without these limitations. This was my experience of attending public schools that were under the thumb of right wing religious nuts vs. attending a state university that was not. I learned much more at the latter than the former.
dmazzoni 3y ago
Not all religious parents who homeschool will have bad outcomes, but it's by far the largest demographic of people who fail to actually educate their children. As for your last statement: in most states there's no oversight. Sure, parents have to file a curriculum that gets reviewed and approved. Parents jump through that hoop by downloading a curriculum and mailing it in. There's nobody checking that they actually follow any of that curriculum. There's no state-run testing as a check and balance.
Spooky23 3y ago
Religious groups have broad discretion in curriculum in most states. My kids went to a Catholic elementary school, where I was the school board president. A breakaway group tried to insert a “classical education” curriculum on the school, which is a popular trend in more right-wing Christian schools that was adopted from homeschool curriculum. The biggest growth in private schooling is in this and similar curriculum. It’s attractive to more reactionary people as they can assert “local control” while using texts that are too old to be considered controversial. Parents aren’t to blame necessarily, people want what’s good for their kids. But awful elements of society are abusing religion to achieve their social ends. In my case, I was accused of being a “Marxist” for not condemning a fundraiser that provided winter clothing for poor children, including migrants swooped up and shipped across the country. We’ve allowed people to be brainwashed by charlatans.
- anon291 3y ago
  > A breakaway group tried to insert a “classical education” curriculum on the school, which is a popular trend in more right-wing Christian schools that was adopted from homeschool curriculum. To be clear, a 'classical education' refers to a traditional form of education where you break up a child's education into grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages and then mainly use primary sources. There's nothing wrong with this system and it was likely the way many people, including Marx, were educated. The idea that this is 'right wing' is bonkers to me.
bakuninsbart 3y ago
If your relative is so indoctrinated by neo-christian ideology that they believe in creationism over evolution, the question is more if they should raise children at all, much less educate them.
- eduction 3y ago
  As an English speaker on this site, the odds are very high you are descended from someone who believed in creationism. I argue it is good our ancestors weren’t forcibly taken from our other ancestors ala Stalin, Mao etc. simply for being Christians as it was defined a few generations ago. If you don’t like it, though, there are less successful countries in this world that still persecute people based on religious belief. You are free to try one out. See how it goes.
  - jmye 3y ago
    This is a weird argument. I don’t agree with parent, but the reasons are vastly more nuanced than “your ancestors were religious so you’re wrong.” And that’s ignoring the even weirder swipe suggesting parent move to a different country.
    - eduction 3y ago
      Not a question of anyone being wrong. Having the opinion that my relative should have her children taken by the state might be repulsive to me but it is a statement of values, not something that can be refuted. Instead I simply suggested a reflection: would you still feel this was a good thing to do if it was your great great grandparents having their children seized? Wouldn’t a great many of us have had our families broken?
- pfannkuchen 3y ago
  Is there utility in believing in evolution over creationism in the average person’s life? If so, what is it? I’m an atheist and evolutionary biology is my favorite field outside of CS, but unless you are personally working on figuring out how things actually work, I’m not sure how one belief over another benefits the average person.
escapedmoose 3y ago
A few friends shared with me some of the textbooks that their extremely religious sister uses to homeschool her children. They were hilarious! Extremely inaccurate and full of indoctrination garbage. Then we all realized that this is what these kids’ “education” amounts to… not as funny anymore. Maybe their only textbook isn’t the Bible, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good. After her eldest child was bordering on middle school age and still completely illiterate, she wound up sending the lot back to public schools. Thank god, but I still feel awful for those kids. (Mandatory “not all homeschoolers” of course.)
petertodd 3y ago
Much more important to worry about how well the kids understand math, and secondarily, physics (aka applied math!) and/or similarly math-using subjects (accounting, baking, chemistry, economics, programming, etc. etc. etc.) Those subjects are genuinely hard to master, and everyone should understand the basics because they're useful for so many careers. As you say, learning the basics of evolution is something that can be done on your own in a weekend reading wikipedia. Similarly, you can learn the mainstream scientific explanations of how the universe was created from watching a few youtube videos. That's basically how I learned that stuff as an (atheist) homeschooled kid. School seems to fail to teach the philosophy of science well anyway - skepticism, evidence, double-blind testing, etc. So I don't think evangelical homeschoolers are missing that much.
pfannkuchen 3y ago
Science has basically no idea about how the universe started, and it’s worrying how many people think it does.
- mbfg 3y ago
  The good thing about science, tho, is it's open to learning what the answers are, rather than presuming them.
jmye 3y ago
> I'm sure with the internet they are already widely exposed to what science has to say about e.g. the creation of the universe (which, honestly, how many high school students could walk you through?). The current internet makes it very easy to self-select (intentionally or not) a bubble, and then never see anything outside of it (or only see one-sided takes you agree with about the “debate”). Given the algorithms major platforms use, I suspect it would be relatively easy to create a bubble in which evolution is never treated as real, and where dinosaur bones were planted to fool people.

throwaway626 3y ago

> By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible" They’re pretty common, in fact. Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/ https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/ “The Bible is the only education you need” is a very common meme among evangelical Christians. > and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved. Most states have almost no recourse to reject submitted curricula, no matter how specious they are. One influential homeschool association has a 24/7 legal hotline specifically for subverting these mild attempts at accountability.

bumbledraven 3y ago
>> By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible" > Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/ https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/ Contrary to your claim, the linked page implies nothing about the Bible being the "only textbook". It simply offers a set of Bible lessons for homeschoolers ("This exciting curriculum contains homeschool lessons that cover the entire Bible chronologically in four years…").
- throwaway626 3y ago
  You misread the claim and are arguing against something I didn’t say.
  - NotSuspicious 3y ago
    While you only wrote that that website provides the "tools" it would have been very reasonable to infer from your comment that you were also implying that they agreed with Bible-alone teaching.

bugglebeetle 3y ago

I would assume any kind of education that is dependent on strict adherence to a specific ideological doctrine, whose tolerance of free inquiry is similarly constrained, to underperform one without these limitations. This was my experience of attending public schools that were under the thumb of right wing religious nuts vs. attending a state university that was not. I learned much more at the latter than the former.

dmazzoni 3y ago

Not all religious parents who homeschool will have bad outcomes, but it's by far the largest demographic of people who fail to actually educate their children. As for your last statement: in most states there's no oversight. Sure, parents have to file a curriculum that gets reviewed and approved. Parents jump through that hoop by downloading a curriculum and mailing it in. There's nobody checking that they actually follow any of that curriculum. There's no state-run testing as a check and balance.

Spooky23 3y ago

Religious groups have broad discretion in curriculum in most states. My kids went to a Catholic elementary school, where I was the school board president. A breakaway group tried to insert a “classical education” curriculum on the school, which is a popular trend in more right-wing Christian schools that was adopted from homeschool curriculum. The biggest growth in private schooling is in this and similar curriculum. It’s attractive to more reactionary people as they can assert “local control” while using texts that are too old to be considered controversial. Parents aren’t to blame necessarily, people want what’s good for their kids. But awful elements of society are abusing religion to achieve their social ends. In my case, I was accused of being a “Marxist” for not condemning a fundraiser that provided winter clothing for poor children, including migrants swooped up and shipped across the country. We’ve allowed people to be brainwashed by charlatans.

anon291 3y ago
> A breakaway group tried to insert a “classical education” curriculum on the school, which is a popular trend in more right-wing Christian schools that was adopted from homeschool curriculum. To be clear, a 'classical education' refers to a traditional form of education where you break up a child's education into grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages and then mainly use primary sources. There's nothing wrong with this system and it was likely the way many people, including Marx, were educated. The idea that this is 'right wing' is bonkers to me.

bakuninsbart 3y ago

If your relative is so indoctrinated by neo-christian ideology that they believe in creationism over evolution, the question is more if they should raise children at all, much less educate them.

eduction 3y ago
As an English speaker on this site, the odds are very high you are descended from someone who believed in creationism. I argue it is good our ancestors weren’t forcibly taken from our other ancestors ala Stalin, Mao etc. simply for being Christians as it was defined a few generations ago. If you don’t like it, though, there are less successful countries in this world that still persecute people based on religious belief. You are free to try one out. See how it goes.
- jmye 3y ago
  This is a weird argument. I don’t agree with parent, but the reasons are vastly more nuanced than “your ancestors were religious so you’re wrong.” And that’s ignoring the even weirder swipe suggesting parent move to a different country.
  - eduction 3y ago
    Not a question of anyone being wrong. Having the opinion that my relative should have her children taken by the state might be repulsive to me but it is a statement of values, not something that can be refuted. Instead I simply suggested a reflection: would you still feel this was a good thing to do if it was your great great grandparents having their children seized? Wouldn’t a great many of us have had our families broken?
pfannkuchen 3y ago
Is there utility in believing in evolution over creationism in the average person’s life? If so, what is it? I’m an atheist and evolutionary biology is my favorite field outside of CS, but unless you are personally working on figuring out how things actually work, I’m not sure how one belief over another benefits the average person.

escapedmoose 3y ago

A few friends shared with me some of the textbooks that their extremely religious sister uses to homeschool her children. They were hilarious! Extremely inaccurate and full of indoctrination garbage. Then we all realized that this is what these kids’ “education” amounts to… not as funny anymore. Maybe their only textbook isn’t the Bible, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good. After her eldest child was bordering on middle school age and still completely illiterate, she wound up sending the lot back to public schools. Thank god, but I still feel awful for those kids. (Mandatory “not all homeschoolers” of course.)

petertodd 3y ago

Much more important to worry about how well the kids understand math, and secondarily, physics (aka applied math!) and/or similarly math-using subjects (accounting, baking, chemistry, economics, programming, etc. etc. etc.) Those subjects are genuinely hard to master, and everyone should understand the basics because they're useful for so many careers. As you say, learning the basics of evolution is something that can be done on your own in a weekend reading wikipedia. Similarly, you can learn the mainstream scientific explanations of how the universe was created from watching a few youtube videos. That's basically how I learned that stuff as an (atheist) homeschooled kid. School seems to fail to teach the philosophy of science well anyway - skepticism, evidence, double-blind testing, etc. So I don't think evangelical homeschoolers are missing that much.

pfannkuchen 3y ago

Science has basically no idea about how the universe started, and it’s worrying how many people think it does.

mbfg 3y ago
The good thing about science, tho, is it's open to learning what the answers are, rather than presuming them.

jmye 3y ago

> I'm sure with the internet they are already widely exposed to what science has to say about e.g. the creation of the universe (which, honestly, how many high school students could walk you through?). The current internet makes it very easy to self-select (intentionally or not) a bubble, and then never see anything outside of it (or only see one-sided takes you agree with about the “debate”). Given the algorithms major platforms use, I suspect it would be relatively easy to create a bubble in which evolution is never treated as real, and where dinosaur bones were planted to fool people.