Waldo JaquithThe popular evidence that homeschooling is effective is largely premised on the research of one man. His research turns out to be garbage. One notable group has found that homeschooling can be regressive, harmful, and enable abuse: his children. https://wapo.st/41dMz3T
(My high school diploma is from a home schooling curriculum group. I have many friends and family members who were homeschooled. It can be great! But boy do I not relate at all to the country’s mass of Christian homeschoolers. That’s a lot of white kids who are being sheltered from science, culture, and reality by domineering parents.)
Andromeda Yelton@waldoj oh man as an accidental homeschool mom do I have feelings about the fact that this choice was largely made possible by the HSLDA
*shudder*
@thatandromeda We homeschooled our kids from 2020–22, because Covid. It was alarmingly easy, in an administrative and oversight sense.
Mirishuli@thatandromeda @waldoj It wasn’t. That’s a lie HSLDA invented in 1985. My oldest was 4 in 1985 and I was doing the research. Mike Farris, Brian Ray and Mary Pride destroyed the secular homeschooling organizations and co-opted it for Christian Nationalists. A magazine called Home Education Magazine chronicled the take over. Mark and Helen Hegener were the publishers.
@MiriShuli @waldoj ORLY! What were the homeschooling laws like pre-1985?
@thatandromeda @waldoj Each state was and is different. Texas state constitution makes it legal. A few states use “covering schools” as their preferred method. Some states have you register and then meet with a reviewer twice a yr. Some have multiple paths, but it is legal in all 50 states. It can be a great way to educate kids. The movement was championed by John Holt and the hippie generation as they had children. Then the Christian Nationalists moved in.
@MiriShuli @waldoj but to be clear, this was the legal case before 1985 as well? I’m reasonably familiar with the situation now but unsure how to read your verb tenses.
Jessamyn@waldoj Yep, the public library here serves a lot of homeschoolers and there are a very very wide range of levels of rigor you see in various "modalities"
David Yee
S. Kaeth@waldoj
Secular homeschooling as a means to provide more hands-on learning experiences and allow the kids to progress at their own rate is WILD. So much curriculum is religious, while we spend hours searching for rigorous curriculum that addresses racism, colonialism, etc, and bonus points if it's not America-centric. I want my kids to understand religions, but I also want them to have solid science skills and critical thinking. It's hard to find like-minded groups though (& I used to run one).
Secular homeschooling as a means to provide more hands-on learning experiences and allow the kids to progress at their own rate is WILD. So much curriculum is religious, while we spend hours searching for rigorous curriculum that addresses racism, colonialism, etc, and bonus points if it's not America-centric. I want my kids to understand religions, but I also want them to have solid science skills and critical thinking. It's hard to find like-minded groups though (& I used to run one).
Virginia MurrSame. So much the same. (The religious stuff just floods the homeschool markets ... it's frustrating.)
I eventually settled on a basic (plain, vanilla) "curriculum" but I add a ton of supplemental materials and projects. And, like you, I'm always on the lookout for inclusive, diverse materials.
@VirginiaMurr @waldoj
Exactly. Although finding the supplemental materials and projects can lead to some amazing gems!
Exactly. Although finding the supplemental materials and projects can lead to some amazing gems!
Nelson Minar@waldoj children belong to society, not just their parents.
@nelson I regret that these parents disagree vehemently with that statement.
Cassandrich
klausfiend has moved@waldoj Some of my relatives home school; I went through private "nondenominational" Christian schooling. Some it was good. Some less so. A book I read recently called "Jesus and John Wayne" helped me to unravel a LOT of the logic behind the phenomena; I think a lot of folks are truly unprepared for how vast and deep a cultural movement it really is.
laurent
Homeschooling: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Matt Franz@waldoj We only did it as a last resort because special education failed our son. And my wife and I were both certified teachers. It is hard. Really hard. Then paid for college-level tuition so my son could graduate from a school with smaller classes because we didn't want to have to fight the district to get them to pay for it.
Voltaire@waldoj homeschooling is fantastic for those who are able. The amount of time kids waste sitting, learning nothing in school is inhumane.
But the reality of most homeschooling is possibly worse. If only there were a way to encourage freedom, without it inevitably being *that* “freedom”. For many kids who grow up with extremely Christian parents, school is a great place to learn about how life actually works. Homeschooling means they don’t get that until college (which is often discouraged).
But the reality of most homeschooling is possibly worse. If only there were a way to encourage freedom, without it inevitably being *that* “freedom”. For many kids who grow up with extremely Christian parents, school is a great place to learn about how life actually works. Homeschooling means they don’t get that until college (which is often discouraged).
@waldoj I spent a lot of my teenage years biking around my city, sitting next to the Mississippi River or in a library. I was terrified I would fail college because of how little time I spent on “school subjects,” but after getting all A’s my first semester that fear was negated. I hope I will be able to afford to let my kids have such an experience, and encourage them even more than my parents did to just do whatever they enjoy.
Richy222
Truth Or Consequences ✅ 🇺🇦"Cotton Mill Man" - Jim & Jesse song released in 1964:
"......The company taught us all the rules
On how to work with spinning spools
So the bosses' son could
Drive a big black Sedan
The company owned the houses
And the company owned the grammar school
You'll never see an educated cotton mill man
They figure you don't need to learn
Anything but how to earn
The money that you pay upon demand
Geoff Berner@waldoj is there any evidence that state schooling benefits children? We know that suicide rates among children go up on school days and go down during holidays and even single days off. So is there any evidence for schools?
Adrian Riskin 
@Geoffberner Especially evidence strong enough to justify forcing kids to attend state schools at the point of a policeman's gun. If it's so darn good for them I'd expect them and their families to be able to figure it out on their own and not have to be violently forced.
@AdrianRiskin public school was a great reform over sending kids down the coal mine. But there really isn't any evidence that school is good for children, unless you compare it to working in a coal mine.
@Geoffberner I love it as an option, not so much as a legal mandate.
OpenDNA⚙️@AdrianRiskin @Geoffberner You have remarkable faith in the reasoning of people who are unconvinced that measles is bad for children.
@opendna @Geoffberner Well, sure, I get that argument, but I think it doesn't hang together, although it's not easy to say why in a few words.
First, people who decide what goes on in schools are either elected or chosen by electeds. In order to argue that compulsory schooling is on average better for kids it's necessary to argue that voters on average choose competent and well intentioned school runners who continue to be both competent and well intentioned after they're chosen.
Obviously this doesn't happen all the time even if it does on average, so to defend compulsory schooling is necessary to argue that on-average better outcomes are better rather than that each kid individually deserves the best it's possible to provide for them. That is, to treat kids as abstractions rather than as the individuals their parents and the kids themselves for the most part see them as.
Even if you're willing to sacrifice some nonzero tranche of kids to electeds' mistakes, incompetencies, neglect, or even villainy by accepting better average outcomes over best possible individual outcomes, it's also necessary to argue that elected officials are on average capable of knowing what's best for kids and capable of implementing it for the most part better than their parents. But you've already committed to the claim that a majority of voters choose the right people to run schools, which implies that a majority of people already choose what's best in your version of things. Arguments for compulsory schooling then already assume that the majority of people think school is better for their kids.
Even assuming that school officials somehow do know the best thing, the next question is whether that best thing is so much better than letting parents decide that it's also better to violently impose it through criminalization of truancy. Once an action is criminal then people who engage in it have a radically lower life expectancy because they're now subject to arrest and imprisonment. Police and jailers are allowed to use all physical force necessary to effect arrests and imprisonment. Even assuming that in every case school attendance is better for every kid it seems hard to argue that it's so much better that it's worth lowering their mom's life expectancy to enforce it, or even to put their mom in jail (in theory this could be either parent but in practice it's mom). When the kids get older their truancy is also criminalized and some of them will get arrested, locked up, injured, raped, from this. Again, are the benefits so great that they're worth these risks?
All of this is leaving out the at least plausible claim that a major purpose of compulsory public education is to reproduce a commoditized work force rather than to benefit kids. I could go on like this indefinitely. The argument isn't that making school voluntary is always better for children, it's that making it compulsory has high costs to children and parents imposed by that compulsion that must be accounted for when arguing for compulsion. I don't see how the violence is justified by the outcomes.
I apologize both for the length of this response and for its sketchiness. Here's something I wrote on this recently, assuming you've made it this far.
https://chez-risk.in/2023/10/03/against-compulsory-schooling/
@AdrianRiskin @Geoffberner Teachers are unelected professionals. School administrators are unelected professionals. State curricula are designed by unelected professionals.
Yes, above them are elected school boards and legislators who occasionally interfere with professionals and over-rule scientific best-practice (in education as in medicine). It is no mystery why the faction most enamored of home schooling also most often seeks to impose their reactionary politics on others.
@AdrianRiskin @Geoffberner Nor, frankly, is it any mystery why they demand the state use lethal force against Others while being outraged when any obligation is put on themselves. They demand incarceration for pot smokers and anyone who helps a woman get an abortion, but riot when asked to wear a mask. This is not hypocrisy; it is core to their ideology.
Philosophizing about the reasonable limits of state power is too divorced from reality to offer guidance when domination is the objective.
@opendna @Geoffberner it's not philosophizing. The cops arrest people whose kids skip school. They arrest older kids. It's ongoing violence and the justification is that it's good for kids. Every faction relies on violence. Education professionals wouldn't have jobs without cops forcing kids into schools at gunpoint, and yet they won't do studies on how that constant exposure to violent coercion affects kids.
Violet Madder@AdrianRiskin @opendna @Geoffberner
And kids are LEARNING MACHINES. It's their main purpose in life.
It really takes WORK to make them hate it.
And meanwhile, for a lot of people all this is basically moot, because if both parents are working nobody has TIME to homeschool the kids anyway.
HeavenlyPossum@opendna @Geoffberner @AdrianRiskin
Aren’t you literally talking about their use of state power in ways you find objectionable when you talk about “domination”?
@HeavenlyPossum @Geoffberner @AdrianRiskin I'm referring to a pervasive theological movement in the US.
@opendna @Geoffberner @AdrianRiskin
Right—a theological movement that poses the threat that it does precisely because it can mobilize state violence in ways you find objectionable (rather than in ways you approve of).
@HeavenlyPossum @Geoffberner @AdrianRiskin It is a threat because it can (and does!) mobilize violence without the state, and sometimes against it.
I oppose their violence because it seeks to exterminate myself, everyone I love, and and my own culture of pluralist tolerance. I don't think that's unreasonable.
You got me: I'm a hypocrite for being intolerant of intolerance and being willing to use violence to protect the peaceful.
@AdrianRiskin @Geoffberner @opendna
If I gave the impression that I am opposed to self-defense against reactionary violence, I promise that is not the case.
I just discount the state as a vehicle of self-defense. The state is defined by aggression and, as you have correctly noted, can easily be redirected from violence against some other people to violence against you.
@opendna @Geoffberner elected officials set licensing standards, so ultimately they control who gets to be a teacher and what the standards of teacher behavior are. Yes, mostly they leave educators alone, but they certainly don't have to, just look at Florida.
If unelected people really are ultimately in charge it only makes it even more clear that there's no justification for using violence to force kids into school. Do you want experts, elected or not, pointing guns at you to compel or prevent action because they've determined it's best for you? Do you want that for your kids? For other people's kids? Because that's what we've got with compulsory schooling.
@AdrianRiskin @Geoffberner Florida is a good example of what happens when homeschool fundamentalists gain control of the state.
If you argue that both democratic decisions are illegitimate and expert decisions are illegitimate, you've argued that legitimacy is impossible. Is state violence always unjustified? Even to protect property? No, that's okay. But violence to secure citizens' rights to equal access public services should be subservient to the parents' property rights over children. 🤔
@opendna @Geoffberner No, state violence is always unjustified. Violence to force children into school doesn't "secure citizens' equal rights" to anything other than to be forced violently to comply with the laws of the state.
Anyway, I didn't argue that democratic decisions are illegitimate. I argued that if one believes that democratic decisions are legitimate and if it's democratically decided to force kids into schools and if one argues that compulsory schooling is good for kids then one has also agreed that the majority of parents agree that school is good for kids. The point is to undercut the argument that most parents don't know what's good for their kids. This belief is incompatible with the belief that compulsion is necessary to provide a putative good for children. It's inconsistent. I don't believe any of the hypotheses.
@AdrianRiskin @Geoffberner If state violence is always unjustified, it is unjustified to check private violence.
That is an argument for the reintroduction of slavery.
@opendna read a book. Slavery is absolutely impossible without the support of state violence. Facilitating slavery is the whole reason for the existence of settler colonial governments in the Americas. Without the police power and courts whose decisions are backed by violence there is no slavery in the modern sense.
@AdrianRiskin The colonial settler states are fined examples of what happens without an activist liberal state acting in the public interest. The colonies themselves were for-profit corporations, commerce was virtually unregulated, public services effectively non-existent, and individual liberty contingent on wealth and proximity to power.
Every king is a pirate, and every pirate works to become a king. The collective action problem is how to kill the pirates before they become kings.
@opendna when did the state start acting in the public interest? This is a serious question. How and when did that change occur? Do you have any evidence for this claim at all?
I would argue that it never did. Rather, in the interest of the stability of capitalism the state evolved a system of camouflage that hid its primary function, which is the continued exploitation of labor. Du Bois's Black Reconstruction in America is very good on this topic. You're arguing in favor of what he called "the great American assumption," but now as then it is absolutely false that the state has anyone's interests in mind other than the plutocrats who control it.
@AdrianRiskin I don't think it comes as a moment, evenly, or consistently.
Not my area of scholarship (and I know there's mountains of it) but I'm gonna guess that - in the US - it comes on two tracks: one, from above, in response to the military need for mass mobilization (a lineage from the Militia Acts to the GI Bill and 26th Amendment), and a second from below (including unionization, the Progessive Movement, the Civil Rights Movement, etc).
@AdrianRiskin professionally, we use laws laid down a century ago to claw water back from capitalism for the public benefit. They fight us at every step, but we win every time. So I agree, but with nuance.
As a fan of Scott Timcke's work, I'm pessimistic that the arc of history will bend favorably. I expect that we'll see further regression in democratic states.
@opendna in the US, anyway, capitalism and the state are one and the same. It's been that way from the beginning. I suspect that what you see as winning against capitalism i see as capital and the state successfully laying down another layer of camouflage. The only time when American government at any level has actually opposed capitalism was during the few years of congressional reconstruction, when it looked possible to redistribute plantation land to former slaves to give them a genuine chance to opt out of wage labor. Hayes Tilden put an end to that and capital has only consolidated and extended its power and reach since then. The only sense in which government has ever controlled capitalism is by restraining it when the extreme greed of some capitalists threatens to provoke a crisis, thus putting the projects of the entire ruling class at risk. The civil war is an example of this.
But if you know these facts as facts, and you seem to, and still believe its possible for government to oppose capitalism I suspect we're never going to agree. This is a weltanschauung problem rather than a factual one, so not resolvable by debate.
@AdrianRiskin I'm not sure it's possible for the liberal state to be *anti*-capitalist.
We use the liberal system to restore riparian ecosystems and return a commons to the public.
Is a byproduct of imposing environmental sustainability that we also impede the capitalist tendency to over-exploit until collapse?
Yeah, probably.
If I summarized this as “you need a good state to stop a bad state,” would that be an accurate summary of your argument here?
@HeavenlyPossum @AdrianRiskin With allowance for every possible form of social organization, yes. Any social organization which can mobilize enough violence to stop a bad state is functionally a state.
“Any social organization which can mobilize enough violence to stop a bad state is functionally a state.”
I strenuously disagree, and would argue that the historical record does not support your conclusion.
@HeavenlyPossum That seems to be a theme in this conversation.
@opendna @AdrianRiskin @Geoffberner
This does not logically follow at all.
@HeavenlyPossum @AdrianRiskin @Geoffberner Everywhere the state retreats from its obligation to use violence to protect individuals from slavery, slavery reappears.
There is always someone willing to use violence to steal labor if there is no risk to doing so. This doesn't stop being true if they become do numerous and organized that they gain an effective monopoly on violence and become the de facto state.
@AdrianRiskin @Geoffberner @opendna
Where had the state retreated and allowed slavery to reappear? How is slavery possible in the absence of state violence to suppress individuals’ capacity for self-defense against other individuals?
Edit: oh, I see. “This doesn't stop being true if they become do numerous and organized that they gain an effective monopoly on violence and become the de facto state.” You think anarchism is merely “the absence of the state” in the crude sense of state failure. It’s quite a bit more than that!
@HeavenlyPossum @AdrianRiskin @Geoffberner A state is an organization with a monopoly on the use of violence. I'm only aware of two modern anarchist states, and neither renounced violence or permitted slavery. Anarchism within a liberal state can be nonviolent, but that's not quite the same.
In my lifetime, many failed states have seen slavery revivals, some dictatorships tacitly permit it, and it has been found where liberal states are too absent (usually sweatshops, farms, and brothels).
@opendna @Geoffberner @AdrianRiskin
I would encourage you to reconsider those “places where the liberal state is absent” as, in fact, under state control. Dictators, failed states, and states that permit or encourage places like sweatshops are all manifestations of the same state we oppose.
The 14th amendment didn’t end slavery; it merely allowed for the transformation of slavery (into compulsory wage labor) and its perpetuation (as prison labor). The “liberal state” as an ideal might be opposed to slavery, but in practice they’re not, and that’s not because those states are weak or absent.
@opendna @AdrianRiskin @Geoffberner
(Failed states usually entail the collapse of some central and paramount authority. That’s not the same thing as *anarchy* except only in the colloquial sense of “disorder.” Failed states are usually battlegrounds for substate actors vying to replace that paramount authority, where as anarchism entails opposition to coercive hierarchies of any kind and the pursuit of voluntary strategies and mechanisms for settling conflict without coercion.)
@opendna @HeavenlyPossum @Geoffberner do you have one piece of evidence of this? It's contrary to the entire history of the US.