Comments on: Homeschooling Research and Scholarship

By: Martin Bento

Martin Bento — Tue, 23 Dec 2008 02:03:32 +0000

Point 2 should be retracted or revised. What he says is that the data is not there to say whether homeschooling is better or worse than other methods, but that is not the same as his heading, which states the the superiority of homeschooling is “simply not true” i.e., definitely false. What it is is unproven, but it could easily be true that homeschooling is either better or worse than other methods, based on the assertions on the site. If this seems like a nit, remember that this is aimed largely at journalists, who, I will bet money, will read and treat this as “the superiority of homeschooling has been definitively disproved”, which is a fair reading of his heading, actually, though not what he argues.

By: MarkUp

MarkUp — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 17:32:08 +0000

I think he needs to specify the lead pipe and country of origin.

By: engels

engels — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 16:49:39 +0000

Oh come on, Keith, you can’t really think being hit over the head with a lead pipe is this bad…

By: sg

sg — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 10:33:33 +0000

When I wrote my comment about people in England I wasn’t exactly thinking of the kinds of situations where my attitude to Londoners makes a difference. I was thinking of the 12 year olds who threw stones at my partner (maybe she had the wrong attitude when she walked past them?); my colleagues brother who was robbed at knifepoint of 600 pounds (maybe he looked at them wrong?); my flatmate who had fruit thrown at him; the kids who trashed the schoolgate across from our house, and when we called the police their first question was “are they black?”; the station worker who screamed at the guy next to me when he asked her to repeat the information she was telling everyone; the parcel delivery company who nearly lost all my worldly belongings because they “don’t do” redirections; the fact that my bicycle route to work is constantly changing because of all the crime scenes I ride through. Maybe that group of hoodies who attacked me when I rode my bicycle past them were angry at me for not saying “hello, chaps!”?

Maybe it’s my attitude which caused these things to happen? When I first came here I thought approaching people with a warm and polite manner would get a polite response. I still do, but for some reason being warm and polite to people in shops doesn’t work to convince the strangers who live near me to pick up their dogshit. So I dance along the road to the station, avoiding the dog poo and the criminal children who won’t make way for me on the pavement, jumping over the rubbish that English people can’t be bothered putting in a bin or taking home, listening to their foul-mouthed telephone conversations that they insist on having in public, and I wonder if it was always this way? Because if so then yes, dsquared is right. Otherwise I do wonder if England has really got better…?

And yes, I would worry about putting my children into a school here, if this is what they learn.

By: Dave

Dave — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 09:01:56 +0000

Knowing what we know now about what may or may not happen in the future, re. peak oil, catastrophic climate change, avian flu et cetera ad infinitum, clearly we are in no position to decide yet whether anything is ‘better’ overall. Global society has taken a huge punt on the benefits of fossil-fuel-driven industrialisation. SO FAR huge benefits, and huge costs, have stacked up, of all kinds from universal literacy to vaccination to iPhones…

But I’d have to say, as a card-carrying pessimist, that the odds of the bungee-rope of progress snapping, and all of us plunging back to the ‘lifestyle’ of Irish peasants c.1840, or worse, are shorter now than they were in the 1950s, pace nuclear war at least. I’d be really surprised if the proportion of the world’s population enjoying a really comfortable lifestyle doesn’t decline in the next 50 years.

But hey, that’s the advantage of being a pessimist, all your surprises are pleasant ones.

By: ejh

ejh — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 08:48:44 +0000

Surely you could only manage that once?

By: Keith M Ellis

Keith M Ellis — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 06:31:45 +0000

I’m not sure why I haven’t yet learned that, for years now, reading the comments at CT is a lot like beating myself in the head with a lead pipe.

By: virgil xenophon

virgil xenophon — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 06:27:36 +0000

curious citizen

Some excellent observations….

By: virgil xenophon

virgil xenophon — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 06:25:47 +0000

Alex Higgins@83

Lets not pretend, shall we. The vast majority of those who post here are unabashedly
“on the left” in varying degrees and make no bones about it. This is not to say, however, that as a man of the right I don’t appreciate some of the fine argumentation advanced here—or otherwise I wouldn’t join in the conversation. I am always seeking to expand my horizons, but I often can’t resist stating the obvious. Your response is typical of so many here and comes under the heading of “can dish it out, but….” Most here have no compunction about making the most condescending and snarky comments about those on the right in general and conservatives in particular—but that’s ok, right? Because the road only runs one way for those with the “Vision of the Anointed.” Witness the personal polemical—not academic—attacks on myself within the confines of this thread, for example. If you would care to go back and parse the exact language of my posts and the various subsequent replies it is quite obvious that all the snarky “nastiness” originates from sources other than myself—just do a simple word count for starters.

By: tom bach

tom bach — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 03:24:38 +0000

Engles, you need to consider the difference between taking issue with what dsquared said and what you said, which is to say you haven’t, I don’t think, been paying attention to who is arguing with whom and what those whoms have been arguing, not that there is anything wrong with that, he or me equivocated so as not to be ad hominem, which would be wrong because pointing out that my pleasure depends on another’s misery is just fallacious and not at all a wizard wheeze.

By: roy belmont

roy belmont — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 03:10:47 +0000

Emancipation is progress. Crack cocaine not so much.
A mulatto USPresident, progress. Young black male prison statistics, not.
Latino representatives in Congress, progress. Maquiladoras, no.
I could go on, but forbear.
Not only is it impossible to say definitively anything resembling “Life is better now”, say I it is deceptive, and obscures the chauvinist angle from whence the assertion comes.
What people really mean by those kinds of statements is that life has gotten better for them and their own.
The pretense, consciously intentional or not, that that’s not the case, is really what’s objectionable to me, however encouraging it is when people extend that out to the very margins of existence.
And it is that kind v. kind thing that’s operating in at least some of the home-schooling movement. Not always just to the advantage of anti-scientific delusionalists and the detriment of heroically laboring public school teachers.
It (progress, life getting better) creates what it rewards as much as it rewards specific parts of what’s already there.
As contentious as the debate over evolution being taught in schools gets, the idea that evolutionary processes are still operating on humans as a species doesn’t get much respect anywhere.
The world is a much safer place for small timid people who prefer to spend most of their time indoors. Life has gotten better for small timid people who prefer etc.
If at the same time life has gotten harder for large aggressive people who prefer to spend most of their time outdoors, over time the face of humanity will change to reflect that dynamic.
Then the statement “life has gotten better” becomes not only inaccurate, but suspect.

By: Omega Centauri

Omega Centauri — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 02:05:43 +0000

This had been a pretty fascinating discussion, until the last three or four dozen comments, when things seem to have degenerated into ad hominens or barely disguised lefties versus righties. A few interesting things here. I came into this thinking that the vast majority of homeschooled was because of religious intolerance for the greater society. At least the few cases I personally know all follow this rule. My memories of my public education lead me to believe that the environment of the hall, dominated by early teenagers, is definitely something to be concerned about. In my case I was one of the intellectually oriented -probably borderline Asperger’s who had a pacifist attitude towards bullying. The results, were as unsettling, as predicatable, and the amygdala hijack dominated social awkwardness that resulted could never be totally overcome. So I have a lot of sympathy for the argument about parents wanting to avoid the bad social environment. At least for the schools and times when my kids went through school, the schools made a big deal about antibullying programs (at least when communicating with parents). I never felt a need to take any of them out of the public schools -or enroll them in Karate lessons, as a protection against bullies.

There are two major areas of concern about the increasing trend towards home-schooling, and private education. The most obvious one is the quality of education the nonpublicly schooled get. The second one is the potential of cultural “balkanization”. Are we in danger as a society of losing out social cohesion? Could we end up coming to blows over the red/blue ( or Evangelicals versus non-evangelicals)? This latter fear is why I wish I had been more prescient as a young adult. Had I to do it over, I would have emigrated to Sweden as a young adult.

By: engels

engels — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:59:42 +0000

To be clear, it's implied in what I wrote above that I don't think that anyone who doubts that the world in 2008 is better than the world in 1950 is 'off their cake'. They may even be right. What I find silly is the idea that it is in principle impossible to discuss such questions. I am not a Whig or a Panglossian, but neither do I have much time for Cratylus.

By: curious citizen

curious citizen — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:36:42 +0000

But isn’t the point not that some have it better and some have it worse, but that there are rather important structural relationships between the better and the worse? some better for some makes better for others, but other better for some makes worse for others. If there’s a preponderance of the latter, the claim that on balance ‘life’ is better now than in the ‘50s seems less convincing. One surely has to ask for whom? Was dsquared claiming that life is on the whole better for all those alive now, or rather only for those living in inner London?

By: tom bach

tom bach — Mon, 22 Dec 2008 00:17:33 +0000

Engles, you must be a lot of fun during Marx Brothers’ movies. Some are some aren’t isn’t equivocation it is, tada, the fact of the matter and phrased in a clearly failed attempt at humorous. See if I put conviction together with … oh never mind.

Of course you can say you had a bad day but you cannot say that everyone else did too. Comparative judgments, of the sort dsquared made, that leave out everything else, riots, famine, despotism, genocide, etc, because it happened to thee and not to me amount to the same thing. Saying this as emphatically and derisively as dsquared said earns the utterance and utterer the sarcastic sobriquet Dr. Whig von Pangloss, in my humble opinion. Take the riots, no please really take them, that there are no more riots in Brixton is not evidence that there are not any longer riots, that the Badder Meinhoffs of Europe no longer do their thing would not be evidence that nihilistic terrorists elsewhere no longer , you know, do their things. Better for German is the absence? Maybe. The expansion of the German state’s and states’ power to monitor its citizenry grew at a rather dizzying and frightening rate. Personally, I prefer not worrying about being blow up, except of course one does one occasion doesn’t one, but at the same time I find the growth of surveillance state troubling. But that’s just me, born to equivocate and unable to say with rapier like wit that those who think other than I are not just wrong but “off their cake.”