Deciding to homeschool?

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I’ve read quite a bit by Gatto. I don’t think our current system is perfect, one of the reasons I homeschool. But I’m less on the anarchist end of the spectrum than I suspect he is, and think public education is needed, even when not perfect.
 
And I think those that want it should pay for it and those who think it’s evil should not be forced to pay for it.
 
And what happens to the kids of those who don’t want to pay of it? What happens to society if there are large portions of a generation that grow up without any education at all and are unable to hold a decent job?
 
Neither of us know, do we?

I think this just goes back to what I said earlier. You can’t be happy unless you have control over me. Morals mean nothing as long as you control the money supply.
 
Compulsory education purges the greatest intellectual and creative gifts from the hearts and minds of our children. IF you truly do read and understand Gatto, and those like him, this would be so forcefully clear to you- you would be NO advocate of compulsory schooling. Why do people tend to believe that nothing promising can come out of human beings without the help of the state? It is the state that that PREVENTS innovation and progress.
 
“I’ve noticed a fascinating phenomenon in my thirty years of teaching: schools and schooling are increasingly irrelevant to the great enterprises of the planet. No one believes anymore that scientists are trained in science classes or politicians in civics classes or poets in English classes. The truth is that schools don’t really teach anything except how to obey orders. This is a great mystery to me because thousands of humane, caring people work in schools as teachers and aides and administrators, but the abstract logic of the institution overwhelms their individual contributions. Although teachers to care and do work very, very hard, the institution is psychopathic – it has no conscience. It rings a bell and the young man in the middle of writing a poem must close his notebook and move to a different cell where he must memorize that humans and monkeys derive from a common ancestor.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education
 
Catholic All Year is a housewife with a seven figure household income and thus a great deal of resource access for homeschooling that the 99.9% probably shouldn’t take as a given.
 
ktmeyer said:
And what happens to the kids of those who don’t want to pay of it? What happens to society if there are large portions of a generation that grow up without any education at all and are unable to hold a decent job?
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:roll_eyes:

Some people would rather let children suffer for the sins of their parents.

They would rather it be acceptable to send a 5-year old into a coal mine 10-year-old into a factory. Afterall, they’d be much more beneficial to their family that way. Why is it fine? Because that’s not their kid. Those kids lose an eye or die in a fire? Welp, that’s what their family chose for them.

At the heart of the compulsory attendance hatred is a pure ignorance of the ways we’ve enriched society through education. It is pretending that our country has not already had to fight for giving children what they deserve. Perhaps public school isn’t perfect, but it’s better than what children faced 100 years ago.
 
ThePCWife said:
Catholic All Year is a housewife with a seven figure household income and thus a great deal of resource access for homeschooling that the 99.9% probably shouldn’t take as a given.
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:roll_eyes:

And it takes $200-$500 a year to enroll a student in Seton/Kolbe/OLOG depending on the grade level. (and there are usually steep family discounts) Besides a pen and some scratch paper, you don’t need a single other thing to give your kid one of the finest Catholic educations today.

Oh and guess what? Most of the really amazing Catholic correspondence schools recommend working with your local public school when it comes to drivers’ ed, language, science, art and advanced mathematics.

The local schools have supply lists that run into the $200 range, nevermind clothing and other needed things if your kid is going to be out in public every day.

Simcha already does enough hit pieces on Kendra. Let’s not try and downplay her because of her income. She has good ideas if you want to plan your own curriculum…that’s all.
 
So I can’t have read and understood him unless I also agree with him?

I can assure you, I read it, understood it, and disagreed with much of it.
 
Huh?

She mostly uses Mother of Divine Grace, one of the most affordable programs out there. And her best articles are about stuff like finding your own path, not stressing out over math for a 4 yr old, balancing things between multiple kids, etc. None of which has anything to do with her income.
 
So…do you feel this way about ALL taxes? All laws? I mean, laws control people, and you seem to be against that.
 
There are outstanding cover schools here and they refuse to align themselves in any way with state schools/ curriculums. If you read Gatto, then you would know that he advocates self education, even unschooling, and before you criticize, you should research the way in which the most prominent private schools in the world educate their students. The curriculums are based-- 10% of curriculum is dictated by the institutions and the whopping, remaining 90% is left to the students to decipher for themselves based on their own individual characteristics and interpretations, in other words, they are most proficient when left to their own devices. Student directed education vs. state directed education propels minds outside of the realms that compulsory schools are determined to contain them–sharply educated, analytical minds are far too grave of a threat to the state.
 
All of this, with the caveat that some of the Catholic-specific boxed curriculums can be more than a bit over the top, especially in regards to history. (I’m remembering learning, for example, that it was okay for Franco to stick a million people into concentration camps because he was Catholic. 🤨 )

Also, speaking as an adult who was homeschooled, PLEASE assess every year whether or not this was a good decision for you and your kids, and do so honestly. Also, please have them take standardized tests on a yearly basis to ensure that they aren’t falling behind. Tests do have their place, and can be valuable tools in identifying potential problems which can easily slip past when you’re both parent and teacher. A kid consistently demonstrating grade-level understanding of math, for example, can reassure parents that they and the curriculum are doing well for the kid, while going from grade-level understanding to “three grade levels behind” in a short period of time is REALLY concerning.

I’ve told my story here before, but in brief–once I hit about 5th grade, I wasn’t really schooled, as such. That led to HUGE problems for me once I initially attended public school as a junior, and even more so when I went to college. My math knowledge was somewhere between “dreadful” and “nonexistent,” my understanding of social mores and expectations, especially in the classroom, ditto.

There also can be the issue I ran into when I stopped homeschooling, which is that it can be hard to integrate socially into society at large if you aren’t used to it. I had been taught from my earliest years that “public school kids” were bad and evil people, so I could hardly socialize with or even talk to them, but then the homeschooling parents wouldn’t let their kids spend time with me anymore either because I was, you guessed it, a “public school kid” now and therefore a bad influence who MUST, by definition, be using drugs and sleeping around. In reality, I’ve never used drugs, took my first drink on my 21st birthday, and had sex for the first time on my wedding night, but, well…that wouldn’t have fit the narrative, would it?

(A lot of them, especially the girls, had a similar educational experience to mine–nothing much past 4th/5th grade.)

Goodness, that was a bit of a ramble. Short version: reassess every year both on an academic and family level; use a rigorous curriculum; be willing to identify weaknesses and bolster as necessary, whether academic or social. Come to think of it, that’s what I expect any good parent does, regardless of what schooling method they use.
 
Or, we understand that not all–probably not most–parents are capable of guiding their children through an unschooling education.

Personally, I do not agree with unschooling and think that the highly trained mind needs the structure of a classical curriculum.

I also understand that many parents would not educate their child given the option not to educate them. They would have them do nothing or earn money.

You still are completely obsessed with your education ideas and refuse to acknowledge how you’d address parents who would withdraw their children from society because they didn’t believe in education…AT ALL. As a child when my teacher tried to correct my atrocious spelling and gave me words to learn at home—we’re talking basic words like “stop” my parents were furious and said that teaching was not their job and they didn’t see the need for me to learn how to spell.

They would have been FINE with me not learning how to spell or read or write. I remember vividly when a parent yelled at my kindergarten teacher because the teacher taught her child how to spell "milk’ because apparently until then the mom and her husband could spell drinks without their child knowing.
 
That is the beauty of a free country. We don’t have to agree with each other. Now, if I was not forced to pay for Marxist “education” agendas, all would be fair and just.
 
UbiCaritas said:
Goodness, that was a bit of a ramble. Short version: reassess every year both on an academic and family level; use a rigorous curriculum; be willing to identify weaknesses and bolster as necessary, whether academic or social. Come to think of it, that’s what I expect any good parent does, regardless of what schooling method they use.
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Hey Ubi,

No, I totally get it.

Classical education is only as good as the people that write the curriculum. I remember the TERRIBLE book that I used in Seton for science written by young earth creationists. They realize now that that book was a bad idea…but back in the late 90’s and early 2000’s it was all the rage. It set me back SO much in college.

It’s funny because my husband’s parents (one an educator himself) saw the book, said nope, and enrolled him in the local public school for science.

I’m 100% for a year by year, child by child decision-making process. That’s why I love Rebecca Frech. She wrote one of “the books” on homeschooling–Teaching in your Tiara–but even she has admitted that homeschooling (whether that be curriculum or unschooling) is now not the right decision for every last one of her 8 children. Public school, private school, and homeschooling are all tools she now uses.

My point was that it’s hardly necessary for someone to make 7 figures to homeschool…it’s very affordable for a SAHP with no educational theory knowlege to atleast provide the fundamental core knowlege needed for social proficency.
 
“Independent study, community service, adventures and experience, large doses of privacy and solitude, a thousand different apprenticeships — the one-day variety or longer — these are all powerful, cheap, and effective ways to start a real reform of schooling. But no large-scale reform is ever going to work to repair our damaged children and our damaged society until we force open the idea of “school” to include family as the main engine of education. If we use schooling to break children away from parents — and make no mistake, that has been the central function of schools since John Cotton announced it as the purpose of the Bay Colony schools in 1650 and Horace Mann announced it as the purpose of Massachusetts schools in 1850 — we’re going to continue to have the horror show we have right now.”
― John Taylor Gatto, Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling
 

Please watch. This is not education for the good of society. Please watch the whole thing and let me know your thoughts on this “education.” They education system is confessing, this is not about the students. The purpose of education is to build a society to embrace new ideas of the future.
 
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