Homeschooling Research and Scholarship

One of the principal motivations of home schoolers is to restrict what their children learn. This underlies their (implicit) belief that contact with the outside world is dirty or polluting.

This is the same mindset that underlies the closed communities where kids aren’t home schooled but are segregated to within their own group. Typical of these are the Amish and Hasidim.

Most such groups believe in a strict hierarchical social structure and the ideals of the “progressive” educational movement started by John Dewey are anathema to them. Personally, I would prefer to see a system where all kids were required to go to public school. Any special religious or cultural education that their parents want to inflict on them can be provided after the regular school day or on the weekends and/or in the summer.

In a mixed society the best way to avoid prejudice and factionalism is to expose kids to as wide a range of their fellow residents as possible. Of course ideologues (especially religious ones) know that this will make the kids less dogmatic and more independent which is why they are so opposed to it.

Discussions about the “quality” of home or parochial schooling are just diversions to distract from the basic anti-democratic nature of the entire endeavor.

Or, if one prefers to ignore the tendentious tedium one has come to expect from Sam, here is the corrected robertdfeinman:

One of the principal motivations of many home schoolers is to restrict what their children learn

Robert’s original statement is on the whole undoubtedly true. Yet there are homeschooling parents in America who teach their own kids precisely because they wish the kids to have a full education, not one bowdlerised of content the schools fear will provoke mouthbreathing parents to protest as unacceptable.

Very cool–I’ve forwarded the link to two people already.

Thanks; this is terrific to hear about. I don’t know whether to be glad or horrified that in the twenty-two years I’ve been talking to journalists and academic researchers on this topic, this is the first time that I know of that someone has put together a moderately rigorous, apparently nonpartisan collection of resources. And a Homeschooling 101 for reporters! Maybe they’ll finally stop calling it home schooling.

notsneaky/

Has it ever occurred to you that for many parents unfortunately trapped in the worst of this nation’s public schools “the ways of the playground, cruel as it can be” is another way of saying “Cruel as in dead?”

Virgil, if you had packed in one more platitude about PC fascists and multi-cultis having ruined the public schools and about how things were so much better back in the 50s when you were at the Lab School (really? No drugs or gangs at the Lab School? You don’t say), the light from my monitor would not be able to leave your post.

Kunzman’s site looks like a great resource, and it’s the sort of thing that I agree with Harry ought to be mandatory viewing for any journalists reporting on home schooling. It worries me, though, that a post about a site hosting research of which the main findings are that we don’t have any comprehensive picture of home schooling in the US, that we don’t know what the average home-schooled child looks like, and that there is in fact no ‘average home-schooled child’, seems immediately to have attracted responses that assume exactly the opposite on all three counts. (The ‘manys’ are pretty thin veneer.) Are we so stuck in our pet theories about home schooling that we can’t help ourselves? I bet Kunzman finds fundraising dinners insufferable.

Poor Dan Simon, always the victim here at Crooked Timber. I’ve got kids in the public schools in Oklahoma, a well known left-wing utopia, and the curriculum is neither PC-drenched nor a tidal wave of leftist agitprop. American conservatives sure have a well-developed sense of victimhood. In fact, it’s their defining feature.
Anyway, thanks for the Kunzman link. Looks like a valuable resource for people who want to learn rather than just massage their wounded egos.

Virgil, sure it occurred to me. What’s your point?

But if you had just pointed that out

I believe what was pointed out in the post was that reliable data does not exist to compare home schooling outcomes with those of public schooling.

Not MY children RB@9, they’re grown. But for the unfortunate poor trapped in the inner city it’s another matter. Living in New Orleans as I do I can attest that such things happen more often than one might think. They just finished sentencing a young HS thug who invaded a school grounds and shot a gang opponent dead in the gym literally at high noon a couple of years ago. So, notsneaky@13, my point is that once it’s YOUR flesh and blood on the line, depending on where you live, you, like Obama, the Clintons and practically every other liberal politician will elect the pvt school route in order to satisfy the “special needs” of your child. You lefties are sooooo predictable. You talk a good game until it’s YOUR kid on the line, then……..?

When we lived in Louisville we had a couple who were friends of ours who were both artists of note–one locally, the other regionally/nationally. The wife, a native of Germany, was “uber” liberal and swore her children would go to public schools–until the time came. Then off to the most exclusive pvt k-12 girls school in the city. Talk is cheap novakant–I’ve been around the race-track too many times with guys like you
to believe anything you say about this matter regarding “future” progeny except yes, I believe that you probably DO believe what you wrote about sending your children to public schools–for now.

BTW, I really didn’t mean to slam ALL public schools–they’re a lot of very good ones out there with excellent teachers, it’s just that I think one should not be too condescending towards homeschoolers–there are many valid reasons to avoid the public system depending on where one lives; which is also not to say that pvt schools are Ultima Thule either. They do indeed cherry-pick, skim and avoid special needs types as a general rule. Our own son went to both public and pvt schools in Louisville and his experience in the public ones at the HS level was superior to the pvt one he started out in; although his grammar school experience was all pvt. But in many jurisdictions, for all their faults, pvt schools or home schooling, are far preferable to going the public route.

“Test scores unambigiously show continuous deterioration across the board—and have for decades now since, oh about 1963, in point of fact; with only an occasional upward, unsustainable blip”

You know that’s not actually true, though, right? At least looking at the NAEP – a major national yardstick, scores are generally flat or trending slightly upwards. In fact, this is a constantly repeated point by Cato and all the other think tanks and ideologues who are dead set against increases in ed funding (on the grounds that it’s done no good) or even public schools in general – though they rarely address the competing argument about how while all groups have gotten better – sometimes impressively, historically lower-scoring groups now make up a larger percentage of the test population, giving the impression of stasis, etc. (see Simpson’s paradox).

Dan, if you’re going to talk with Harry, please do it by e-mail.

The statistics reported by this researcher presents dated information, at best, and skewed information (for whatever agenda), at worst. While it’s not necessarily mis-reporting the facts, it does leave out important information and it leads people to make erroneous assumptions. If you go to the NCES site you’ll find a more recent 2006 study that looks at family reasons for homeschooling.

31.2% of respondents indicated that Concerns about environment of other schools was their MOST IMPORTANT reason for homeschooling

29.8% of respondents indicated that To provide religious or moral instruction was their MOST IMPORTANT reason for homeschooling

16.5% indicated that Dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools was their MOST IMPORTANT reason

These stats are different from the reported “Applicable reasons” for homeschooling. In this case, 85.4% of all respondents indicated that *one of the reasons* they homeschool is because of Concern about environment. 72.3% noted Religious/moral instruction as *one of the reasons*; and 68.2% selected Dissatisfaction with academic instruction as *one of the reasons*.

http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2006/homeschool/TableDisplay.asp?TablePath=TablesHTML/table_4.asp

If you read the About Me page of the website you will see the following bio. Not necessarily someone looking to present a fair and balanced view of homeschooling.

My name is Rob Kunzman, and I teach in the Indiana University School of Education … I was never homeschooled myself, and don’t homeschool my own kids, but I do consider homeschooling a perfectly legitimate educational option, … As my Research Publications webpage details, my scholarship focuses on the intersection of religion, citizenship, and education, including several recent publications on homeschooling. My forthcoming book from Beacon Press explores the world of conservative Christian homeschooling …

I have three children in public school in a big, east coast Democratic stronghold city – yes, in the city – and I have yet to see this deluge of left-wing propaganda/pc whatever, that everyone talks about. Of course, I’m a liberal, so if I’m not offended by it, it must be propaganda. Yes, they did learn that you shouldn’t smoke, and there have been mentions of holidays other than Christmas at this time of year, so I guess it’s a socialist paradise after all.

If you’re homeschooling your child primarily to ensure their religious or moral instruction, you’ve pretty much demonstrating that you’ve actually failed as a parent in their moral instruction. You’re saying that your influence isn’t strong enough to keep them on the track that you desire if they can have substantial contact with people with other values. Instead they have to be shielded from such people. This strikes me as pretty futile, because you won’t be able to keep out the outside world for ever.

I have a lot more sympathy with people who have taken to homeschooling
because they have tried the school system and it isn’t working for their specific child, for example, if they are being bullied or have special needs that the school can’t easily meet. But how much of the ‘Concerns about environment of other schools ‘ is really about the realistic needs of your own child, and how much is it about parents not wanting them to mix with black children/common children/poor children etc?

I appreciate the thoughtful attention that people here have paid to the website and the topic of homeschooling in general.

One point of clarification: the data cited by Ms. Keener (comment #25) from “a more recent 2006 study” are actually drawn from the same 2003 NCES survey I mention. I’m well aware of those stats, but not sure how they suggest I’ve presented an inaccurate or skewed picture of homeschooling.

I’m also not sure why Ms. Keener doubts I can be “fair and balanced,” or even what my “agenda” is. I hope that the totality of my comments on my website and elsewhere will lead readers to conclude that I explore the topic in a careful and reasonable manner.

Which parents of school children do all the time, when they talk with their children about things outside school.

Yes, because all children fill in their parents about every question that comes up during the school day.

What those who are home schooling for moral reasons really want is that no-one else should be allowed to talk to their child about such matters.

My prejudice is to agree generally, but I do believe there’s a case to be made that homeschooling can provide more freedom in education to students rather than less. Pie in the sky maybe, but nobody really knows.

Bruce

I’m a significant fan of home-schooling (my wife was homeschooled, she and I have both tutored homeschoolers, we’re likely to homeschool our own children.) That said, this statement is just wrong: “I just don’t see stories about home schools producing functional illiterates or innumerates.” There are plenty of homeschoolers who do an appalling job, especially in the less regulated states. (Pennsylvania probably has the best balanced regulations in my knowledge.)

magistra,

This just doesn’t make sense:

If you’re homeschooling your child primarily to ensure their religious or moral instruction, you’ve pretty much demonstrating that you’ve actually failed as a parent in their moral instruction. You’re saying that your influence isn’t strong enough to keep them on the track that you desire if they can have substantial contact with people with other values.

It’s more that if the authority structure, and the peers, and the atmosphere of school, all lean against your values, it’s much harder to pass those values on. Maybe this is failure, but if so all parents are failures. No 0ne would think that having your children hang out with the local white supremacist group 8 hours a day is entirely compatible with teaching equal treatment of everyone.

Public schools are under the (indirect) control of the public. In many places people vote for the local school board. This means that if there is something wrong with the curriculum than the parents can demand it be changed. We have seen several prominent examples of this where parents have sued (and won) to get creationism and other religion masquerading as science removed from the schools.

When you can point to equal examples on the other side–where, say, a pre-politicization view of homosexual activity was introduced in the schools because that’s the majority position of the voters, or where a traditional program of Christmas carols was added because of public pressure–you might have something approximating an argument. The suits, you may note, overturned the voters preferences–they wouldn’t have been in court otherwise.

I also think that the main influence of Dewey-influenced schooling is well after the end of the mass immigration of the turn of the century. The Lab School started in the late 1890’s; mass immigration ended in the early 1920’s. I can’t imagine that most educational activity was Dewey-influenced until the 1920’s and 1930’s at the earliest.

Consider the kid who attends the local public school. He is 13, and somewhat effeminate. He is routinely bullied (including regular physical attacks) by other boys for being gay (which he may or may not be). When his mother approaches the school they refuse to do anything because the physical attacks are off the premises, and the verbal attacks are nothing to worry about. The police have no interest in dealing with this sort of case. The mother lacks the skills that middle class parents have to negotiate the system and/or get other parents to join in some sort of action against the school. Is there anything wrong at all with her homeschooling him?

This is not a made up case. In the real case she lacks the skills to homeschool (she didn’t graduate high school herself) but she does have access to people who could do some of the work. I know for sure that this is not the sort of reason that most homeschoolers have for homeschooling, but shutting off the option is shutting off the option for all. If you doubt that schools and communities like the one I describe exist, you probably live in Madison Wisconsin or the Bay Area.

This is not a made up case… If you doubt that schools and communities like the one I describe exist, you probably live in Madison Wisconsin or the Bay Area.

Or Madison Indiana, which seems to have a population equally devoted to quality education and maintaining a quality school environment. (I’m not sure whether thanking you for a response to your own post is proper blog etiquette, but — thank you for sharing the anecdote, I appreciated hearing it.)

…we spent a lot of time reading Chariot of the Gods and talking about aliens and Easter Island and the Bermuda triangle. So, was this child abuse? Am I owed damages?

I think this kind of snark is a disservice to legitimate cases where a child is experiencing harassment and/or abuse, whether at home or at school.

I worked with one special-needs student who was enrolled in public high school after his aunt won a custody battle against his parents. He had been taught the alphabet, counting to ten, and rudimentary speech. He seemed to be of average intelligences across Gardner’s spectrum — and, from a basis of not knowing how to add two-digit numbers, he was working with algebra competently by the end of his sophomore year — but severe underdevelopment crippled him. He had been “home schooled” in the most pernicious sense: no schooling whatsoever. This, I say without qualification, is an example of child abuse. I don’t mean to be defensive about this, but I do feel it’s important to not trivialize the topic.

I’m sure there are special cases and the odd anecdote which shows that the public schools have failed some individual student, but that’s not what motivates the vast majority of home schoolers. It is an old rhetorical trick to cite some special case as a way to counter a general argument, but it’s still irrelevant.

Most parents who home school (see the stats cited above) do so because they don’t want their kids exposed to ideas that they don’t like. This has all to do with authoritarianism and the “strong father” view of child rearing. Such parents know that the more kids are exposed to a variety of other ideas the less likely they are to blindly follow their parent’s ideology. That’s why cults segregate themselves and their children. The Amish are losing the next generation in large numbers as the kids see the benefits of modern society.

There was an under appreciated book that came out this year about what is really happening in the Evangelical movement, “The Fall of the Evangelical Nation” by Christine Wicker. She cites studies which show that a large fraction of kids of Evangelical parents leave their parents faith (about 50%). She also cites statistics that show that the movement isn’t really as large as they would have you believe. Even the most cursory connection with a church is counted as “membership”.

So people can argue about “liberal” bias in the public schools, or bullying, or whatever, but the nub of the matter is the desire of parents to produce under-educated children who won’t question authority. Instead what they get is under-educated children who leave the church anyway, but are poorly equipped to deal with modern society.

That’s why it is a form of child abuse.

Do you bother to read the other comments, especially the links? I clipped this from the site (sorry about the formatting not being perfect, that’s why you are supposed to follow the links):

Reasons for homeschooling Applicable1 Most important
Number Percent Number Percent
Concern about environment of other schools2 935,000 85.4 341,000 31.2
Dissatisfaction with academic instruction at other schools 748,000 68.2 180,000 16.5
To provide religious or moral instruction 793,000 72.3 327,000 29.8
Child has a physical or mental health problem 174,000 15.9 71,000 6.5
Child has other special needs 316,000 28.9 79,000 7.2
Other reasons3 221,000 20.1 97,000 8.8

Religious instruction was cited by 72.3%.

Now if it were just religious instruction that was important they could send their kids to after school, Sunday school and/or any number of other programs. I have neighbors on both sides of me who do exactly that, one sends their kids to Hebrew school and the other to Chinese language/cultural classes.

robertdfeinman

I understand your concern about indoctrination although I am very much glad that the USA has a long tradition (most recently seen in the Texas Supreme Court reversals of the executive branch decisions on polygamists sects) that its the right of a parent to teach “bunk” to their kids. For me, procreation, indoctrination and, if need be, isolation are as fundamental human rights as liberty, equality and fraternity. But haven’t you pointed out with your heartrending example of the Amish, that these things are self-limiting and awfully hard to sustain in the long run.

So while I think you are a little more than half correct about the parental motivation for homeschooling, are you really against parents removing their children from situations where drugs, alcohol, pornography, blasphemy (OK, I admit I put that one in to tease you – but I went to public school so I learned to bully the moralists early on) and a general unmannerly lack of respect for authority is as prevalent as it is in a typical American junior high or high school?

Martin:
This isn’t supposed to be a discussion of my belief systems. It’s supposed to be a discussion of whether home schooling is a “good thing”.

I claim that it’s defects outweigh its benefits in the vast majority of cases. In those cases where they don’t there should be alternatives. The most serious claim is that public schools fail to help the most at risk kids. Now the proper (although somewhat idealistic) solution is to make the public schools better. Public schools are about the only area where the public has direct input into how things are run, that’s one of the reasons that they provoke so much heat. All that civic frustration has no place else to go.

Now in many places even the most motivated parents can have little effect on the public schools. The most common reason being that the area is poor, the schools are funded by local real estate taxes, and the states shortchange the districts most needing the extra aid. This is a failure of our society at large, the schools just reflect the bigger picture.

So if we want to see better educational outcomes we need to make society at large more equitable. Having parents retreat into their own enclaves only makes things worse.

History has shown that getting kids exposed to the widest range of people is the best way for them to avoid becoming as prejudiced as their parents. So we may not be able to do much to fix the attitudes of those already adults, but there is no reason which should permit them to spread their intolerance to the next generation. The US will be majority non-WASP by the middle of this century.

It will be ironic if this new majority starts to act as mean-spirited as the white majority has for much of the US history. Moving to a more equitable and less decisive society might actually be in their self interest.

It’s strange that in discussing homeschooling and the state of public education in this country, the educational systems in other countries are never mentioned.

I’m under the impression that the U. S. lags behind other countries regarding student achivement math and science. If that’s true, I wonder what these other countries are doing differently.

Salient:
You have to learn how to read surveys. There is a thing called “social desirability” bias which makes people give answers that they think are more acceptable than what they really believe. This comes up a lot when asked about frequency of church attendance, for example.

Actual census of attendees tend to produce a level at about 20% while people self report at about a 40% rate.

“Concern about environment” is a poorly worded question, some can take it to mean bullies, but others can take it mean keeping their kids away from ideas they don’t approve of. We haven’t even gotten into the whole area of sex education. Similarly “religious or moral instruction” might apply to worried atheists as well, but its not likely to be a significant percentage. For most people moral is seen as part of a religious framing of behavior.

For those who are upset about their local public schools I still maintain that there are better alternatives to home schooling. They may require work to set up, but so do all the parallel activities that home schoolers create for their kids. The difference is that if they wanted to formalize the private instruction they would have to meet all sorts of regulations about place and staff, while with home schooling they can pretty much do as they wish.

It’s still child abuse, no matter how earnestly the parents want to do a good job. I can’t speak for the conditions in the cotton belt, but here in the northeast there are many public and quasi-public alternatives to the standard public school. My town has an alternative high school with only a hundred or so kids to handle those who don’t fit in. There are also state run programs for kids with special needs who can’t be accommodated in regular schools. However with the push to mainstreaming this is much less used than several decades ago.

Those areas with the most resistance to public education (like the cotton belt) also have the worst school systems and the lowest scoring students. Even when the GOP governor of Alabama tried to raise taxes to improve the schools his effort was defeated by local business interests (timber, especially) which didn’t want to pay higher taxes.

Quality schooling is not a high priority for many in this country, one only has to look at the willingness to accept mediocre graduates like Bush and Palin to see how little education is valued by conservatives.

““Concern about environment” is a poorly worded question”

Yes, and I find it interesting that nobody is reading into it what I think is one of the strongest reasons for homeschooling — the culture of outright hostility for intellectual curiousity that exists among kids in public school. I can’t speak for elementary school since I was homeschooled till 7th grade, but the derision you can incite from your classemates in junior high for showing any interest or aptitude at academic subjects really shocked me. Learning to speak with a restricted vocabulary and feigning disinterest were vital survival skills I had to pick up quickly. A lot of people just accept this without really questioning it in a fish not aware of water kind of way, but when you are dropped into it from a very different environment it is pretty shocking.

Like many of you, I’m a homeschooler and I’m appalled at what I’m sure Mr. Kunzman might have said. My family has had an excellent experience with homeschooling and I want to share it with you all.

Yesterday, my sons Owen Frederick (10) and little Prezelt Wundermere (8) learned about the great Satan that is Barack Obama and what they can do to counteract his threat to Constitutionalism and the Republican ideal. Then we listened intently to two hours of the Rush Limbaugh show; unfortunately, it was a re-broadcast from before the election and Rush just went on and on about how the American people couldn’t possibly elect a black man. My boys learned a lot though. There’s the Acorn and then there’s Osama’s (oops, Obama’s) racist pastor. Why couldn’t more voters see that he’s the anti-Christ?? Impeach him now!!

Then we went to the aquarium, but some Hispanic and mulatto children were already there with a school group, so we made a beeline for the exit. The boys said something about not wanting to go because the fish were interesting and they were meeting other kids who were nice, but I couldn’t let them be part of that environment. Then we went to a church homeschool meet-up where the boys made macaroni sculptures based on Scripture (1 Corinthians 6:9) and the parents discussed the many signs of the end times.

I think homeschooling is much better than public school because I was teased mercilessly when I was a schoolboy and my parents still made me get on that bus every day. Plus, I never learned anything there. Still to this day I have no idea what a tool I am.

I have heard that public school teachers actually fondle themselves in front of their students and then throw the results all over the blackboard. The students never say a word because they’re too busy snorting cocaine and texting their dealers. That’s why my kids will never set foot in a public school. Shocking!

robertdfienman, where do you get your ideas of homeschoolers and homeschooling? Do you have some special inside source for your stereotypes or do you feel you are merely repeating the popular wisdom as seen on TV?

Believe it or not homeschoolers have friends and interact with others. Most don’t even believe they are the center of the universe! The biggest “social skill” you learn in school is how to deal with being forced to sit next to someone who hates you for long periods of the day. Since graduating from public school this isn’t a skill I’ve had to use again. I guess it’s good training for future prisoners though.

Well, that was supposed to be a blockquote up to this sentence, which is my commentary:

Ah yes, what “child abuse” it is to want your own child to avoid such an experience.

I think a fair reading of the comments here so far only demonstrates the extent to which some are truly whistling past the graveyard insofar as the degree to which the entire sociocultural matrix of society (with respect to discipline, respect for authority, thuggism the spread of drug usage, anti-intellectualism and anti-social behavior in general) has deteriorated since the fifties. This obviously is not PC to point out, implying as it does that things “were better” in the Jim Crow era, and with far fewer immigrants “of color” (obviously mainly from “south of the border”) to sully the picture.

But truth be told the facts bear this line of argument out. The classic bit of empirical data which says it all was the famous classroom survey of teachers done in 1944, I believe, that listed the top three complaints of teachers about student comportment
as chewing gum in class, running in the halls and throwing spitballs. All we need do is read the comments of many here, let alone consult current survey data, to realize that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is working with a vengence in society in general and in the nation’s public schools in particular. There are, of cource several reasons why this is so, but I think two stand out–both of distinctly different origin but nevertheless inextricably intertwined’

First was the introduction of drugs into society on a massive scale in the mid-sixties.
By comparison the previous thirty years had been relatively drug free. Worse, drug usage was seen by many as “cool” (still is) and accepted, if not outright encouraged and approved by many trend-setters in the media, Hollywood and liberals/”intellectuals” in academia and out as a protest against “the establishment,” which brings us to point number two.

As Shelby Steele has pointed out in his work “White Guilt, ” it was necessary for the Civil Rights movement, if they were to get traction for their cause, to undermine and discredit the moral authority of the (predominately WASP) establishment and power structure. The same may be said of the anti-Vietnam war protest movement. And they were largely successful. These two facts, then have largely combined to contribute to today’s sad state of affairs in our nation’s public schools as far as conditions of comportmant and attitudes towards learning goes.

Additionally, yet a third factor leading to parent’s dissatisfaction has been the “dumbing down” of the curriculum by the likes of leftist ideologues like William Ayers in the belief that the schools should be used as a mechanism of ideological exhortation rather than a repository for the transmission of knowledge. Of course types like Maurice Melliuer @11 think such “rantings” by guys like me about “PC fascists and multi-cults” are nothing but senseless “platitudes.” But sometimes things are true even if pointed out by those on the right.

Until these sociocultural trends of drug usage, lack of respect for authority and
the transformation of America’s schools into enviro-marxist multi-cult agitprop mills
urging the nation’s children to pester/inform on parents in efforts to mold society
to the likes of those like curriculum development leader William “I’m a Communist
with a small”c” Ayers, everyone attempting to arrest the slide of this nation’s secondary schools into academic oblivion is simply re-arranging the deck chairs.

PS to salient: At the Public HS school I attended EVERYONE took the PISA test who
was in what is now labeled the “college prep” curriculum. (’58-’62)

That

Obviously, the quality of home schooling depends pretty crucially on the parents involved. I agree that many parents should not be teaching – but, you know, the same applies to many teachers.

I went through public schools, private schools, and home schooling as a child, and they all had their advantages and disadvantages. But the most important thing I gained from home schooling is something that external schooling does not do a very good job of promoting at all: learning to teach yourself, rather than relying on others to teach you. Even apart from the problem of kids’ hostility to academic achievers, external school tends to promote two very bad ideas: the idea that the point of learning is to pass tests, and the idea that learning is something you do by listening to teachers, rather than by your own efforts. Actually, I would say the idea that the main point of school is social interaction should be in that class too – but unfortunately, when school is compulsory and takes up most of kids’ time, this idea becomes self-fulfilling.

screaming obscenities at each other … bullying and degrading, in the most graphic and unmistakable ways … and the females usually laughing hysterically at each insult … fights … and enough anger to blow up a city block or, for that matter, a city

Sounds a lot the Republican party, doesn’t?

#60: Leave it out, grandad, the culture war is over and your side lost.

All we need do is read the comments of many here, let alone consult current survey data, to realize that the 2nd Law of Thermodynamics is working with a vengence in society in general and in the nation’s public schools in particular

And yet the world continues to get better – we produce more, live longer, have lower crime rates and at an ever increasing rate. Funny that, eh?

”And yet the world continues to get better – we produce more, live longer, have lower crime rates and at an ever increasing rate. Funny that, eh?”

Remember there are indeed many ways to measure “better.” Producing more is no panacea even if were distributed more equitably as it also means we consume more and throw out more; living longer means we get to do the former longer and quite often with the aid of drugs which many species down stream from us would argue is not such a good deal all selfishness aside; and the crime rate is a mutable statistic/reality when you also have the most folks in prison.

Not always that funny really, like a number of virgil’s points.

seems to be frighteningly oblivious to the extent of environmental collapse the earth,

I am not sure how this could be blamed on the public school system, although I am sure Virgil will give it the old college try (which, frankly, is a bit outdated and embarrassing, compared to the vastly superior modern college tries which are available today).

Seriously, if someone wants to argue that life has got worse rather than better since the 1950s, they’re off their cake.

“Life” hasn’t got worse or better is the point.
Right now today my life is better than it was in June, when it was not so good.
But the whole year hasn’t been as good as 2006 which was a pretty good year compared to the three or four preceding and the two following.
Add in close family and friends and divide by…yes well you see, you need a central watchadooey, I want to say valence, and we don’t have one, except the “me and mine” nebulosity.
Factoring it by the statistical majority won’t work either, unless you leave out things like dying oceans and melting glaciers etc. not to mention all kinds of global zones of merely human immediate suffering.
You have to dial your “better” right down to the local proximate, geographically and chronologically, to make it work.
You can always do one of those everybody-today-has-x-plus-y versus everybody-back-then-had-x-minus-y sorts of calculations, but the deal-breaker really is the environment for the right-now crowd.
What has delivered all your indisputable advances has also set the world on fire, relatively speaking.
You can say about anything that provides measurable good that that’s what it essentially is, if you leave out the co-incident negatives. In this case very large ones.
Owning 200 healthy slaves has made my family very comfortable compared to how it was when we first settled here and had to work the land oursleves.
After the plague my great-great-Uncle Pietr made a small fortune in real estate, which my grandfather turned into a sizable inheritance for my mother.
The hurricane caused 3 billion dollars in damage, much of that cost going to contractors, as they rebuilt what was destroyed.
The skewing omissions operate just like what VirgXen elides as he yearns for the days when happy families left their front doors unlocked and white middle-class kids could play down the block without cellphones and adult supervision and cctv cameras on everything 24/7.

… in addition to other things (just read your other comments)

I’m not sure what to say to someone who thinks the question of whether schools do a decent job can be settled merely by asking whether there has been material progress since 1950.

And engels — saying (as I do) that 12-to-17-year-olds can be awfully unpleasant when they travel in packs and bully academic-minded loners does not in any way equate to “hating America.” To suggest as much is unbelievably stupid.

Roy, just for fun, could you point me to whatever it is I wrote on this thread that led you to conclude that I am ‘frighteningly oblivious to the extent of environmental collapse the earth, currently and for the foreseeable future sole home for whatever type or chauvinist form of resident human one endorses’? Thanks ever so much…

roy belmont makes some good observations @72. Yes, it is indeed for society to simultaneously advance and regress in a number of areas–and I certainly was not talking about one-way streets in all areas–concentrating only on those things which affect secondary education.education.

I am also hardly oblivious to the “realities” of the “black experience” in the “socius.”
As a freshman at a Univ. in the deep south in 1962 Jim Crow was in full flower–separate fountains, restrooms and waiting romms, etc. By the time I graduated all that had gone away before my eyes. And as I am married to a Louisiana Creole–a woman “of color”–I think I am more in direct touch with the sociology of the black community than probably anybody who posts here who is white–so spare me the lectures.

And as for engels. well LOL, every time lefties are accused of hating their country they fall back on the old “the highest form of patriotism is to criticize my country when I think it wrong” bit. I guess that’s a refuge allowed only for those on the left. Besides, I volunteered and fought for my country at some personal sacrifice. Going to go through the motions of the old, “thanking me for my service to the nation–even though deluded ” meme , engels?” Or are you going to eschew even going through the motions and bestir yourself instead to call me a baby-killing Yankee Air Pirate? Yes, I’ll admit it, I am indeed a minion of evil–but I assure you my duties are largely ceremonial

dsquared: Your quote @70 is not mine, and no, I wouldn’t think of attempting to do as you suggest, so please don’t try to read minds.

But I look at the behaviour of modern English people and I do wonder how dsquared can claim that they aren’t worse than they used to be.

perhaps you get out of these things what you put in. However, when was the last race riot in the UK? When was the last riot of any kind remotely on the scale of the Brixton, Handsworth or Toxteth riots.

English people are so hard and rude and mean to each other, their English so universally sub-literate, everything is broken and/or dirty, no-one knows how to be nice to anyone

As I say above, if you go round with that kind of attitude, you’re not going to have a nice time anywhere you go. I do in fact spend a lot of time out in public, and in my experience, they’re perfectly all right.

English people are so hard and rude and mean to each other, their English so universally sub-literate, everything is broken and/or dirty

no-one knows how to be nice to anyone

“As I say above” pauses, takes pinch of snuff” if you go round with that kind of attitude” sneezes discreetly into perfumed handkerchief” you’re not going to have a nice time anywhere you go” smiles, surveys the room ” I do in fact spend a lot of time out in public, and in my experience…” petard explodes.

Roy, what on earth point are you trying to make? I am a resident of an inner London borough, where I regularly leave my house and talk to people. I like them; they’re nice. If you, sg and Virgil go around and constantly find that people are horrible, rude, vicious etc, then it really might be because you’re not being all that pleasant yourselves.

the better or worseness of the world hinges on one’s experience of it

Up to a point Lord Copper. You would have to have a very strange and unrepresentative position to both be in the position of sending your children to public schools in the USA or UK and to see your life as obviously worse than it would have been in the 1950s.

engels#84
An inexplicable confusion of yourself, not by content but identity, with dsquared, in my post @69 is the only explanation. My apologies.
I’m chagrined, abashed, though forging on withal.
dsquared #85:
In the late 60’s and for a teensy bit of the earliest 70’s in the US there was a great deal of public agitation by young people, as there was elsewhere in the world.
It stopped abruptly. Things were suddenly quiet. Peaceful.
This gets attributed to various things depending on the bias and experience of the attributor. That it was quiet might be because there was a sudden bloom of contentment, and optimistic faith in establishment systems. Might not, though.
Considering the amount of energy and criminally immoral efforts those systems were provably expending and undertaking to protect their interests in other parts of the world it seems naive to think so.
The problem I have with most fictional Orwellian dystopias is they don’t illuminate the bright side, the flowery gardens and laughing children of the beneficiaries. It’s all drudge drudge drudge, gray concrete and low dull skies.
Whereas you can have both dystopia and utopia competing for dominance side by side, as we do, here and now.
Occupying the nicer bits of that polarity can lead to rosy views of contemporary society. As always it falls to the more advantaged to penetrate surface gloss.
Noblesse oblige and all that.
Tom Bach pretty much caught the rest of my point and delivered it more concisely.
The metric for things being “better” involves more than just people being nice to each other in public. The index of quiet suffering as subjectively experienced by me, at the store and in the faces of people in the street, has been rising lately, steeply.
Surprising as it may be to some I generally leave clerks smiling after retail interchanges, and sometimes have “nice” conversations with the other people in line.
This seems a consequence of a sort of oceanic feeling of Whitmanesque confraternity, which I welcome. As opposed to a well-fed sense of personal contentment, which I reject.

Engles, I never said that things were better in the 50s. And, in the interest of being accurate about what I think, I will now assert that they weren’t for the same reasons that they aren’t now. And, to be even yet more clearer, Virgil Xenophon’s position, I submit, on the history of education as Heraclitus write small is as silly as is dsquared’s Panglossian, or — if you prefer — Whiggish, version.

Unmistakenly engels this time:
“they think things were better in the 50s”
There is no “things”. Are no.
Is no “life” as in “life was better then…”.
Only that thing, those things. This life, that life. These lives, those lives.
Conflating individual lives is a mechanical stratagem, useful for mechanical processes but ultimately inhuman.
Possibly if you have a chance to get paid by National Geographic for writing something about the life of Otzi and his peer group you can deliver comparative valuations about the quality of life then versus now. But you’ll have to elide things that some of us think are essential, others peripheral.
That those who think wide-open vistas and clean water pretty much everywhere are peripheral luxuries are still trying mightily to pretend the contemporary environment is itself peripheral should shed some light on this topic.
Which is where I came in, I think.

So the reason students are rioting in Athens is that they think that the question of whether or not the world was a better place in the 50s is indeterminate?

Well, the world is big and wide and round. But in the bit of it where I live (in the Niger Delta area of Nigeria), it’d be hard for me to say with any confidence that life for most people is better than it was in the ’50s. On the one hand, people in the Delta now ‘enjoy’ being citizens of an independent nation, rather than being colonial subjects. On the other, their opportunities to participate in the processes of collective decision making are limited and actually doing so can be lethal. I think it’s probably the case that there is greater opportunity to attend university today, but it’s also almost certainly the case that Nigerian universities are much, much worse than they were in the ’50s. Oil production has increased, and oil revenue with it, but this has only led to the immiseration of tens of millions in the region, and the pollution of our air, water and soil. There are certainly more TVs, electric irons, air conditioners, telephones, cars and tin-roofed houses now, but there are also many, many more guns. And while ‘life’ for most people is not as terrible as it was during the later years of the civil war, I am not sure how one could claim that ‘life is better now than it was in the ’50s’.

My life was certainly better when I went to university in London. I couldn’t help thinking, though, when I walked along the Southbank – parliament on one side, the Shell Building on the other – that the material ‘betterness’ of my life in London was bound up in so many ways to the material awfulness of life for most in the Delta.

Anyone who can blithely claim that anyone who doesn’t agree that life is better now than in the ’50s is off his cake, is clearly someone lucky enough to have plenty of cake.

(But armed militancy in the Delta, or riots in Athens, or contentment at bus stops in inner London, are not connected to the question of whether was better in the ’50s or not, but to a response of people to the world as they find it – their lives, now.)

Engles, I mentioned the riots because dsquared said that there were no more riots like those of Brixton, etc. If we look elsewhere, there are, in fact, all manner of riots, go figure. These riots have nothing to do with the 50s, and, for the record, I am not a fan of the 50s; you are confusing me with someone else.

Tom, the reason I keep mentioning the 50s is that is what this argument was about. Daniel never said that everything is hunky-dory right now, or stated any other ‘Panglossian’ view that you seem to be arguing against, only that the world has got better since the 50s, which is a specific and perfectly defensible comparative judgement, which is not refuted by pointing out that for some people it hasn’t, and certainly isn’t by pointing out that for some people now life is awful. I imagine that Daniel is aware of the latter. I certainly am.

The other point was simply that most ordinary Londoners are not, in fact, arseholes, again an eminently defensible claim which in my no doubt limited experience happens to be true.

Pangloss or Whig the idea that things have gotten better would seem to be embedded in the claim that: “Seriously, if someone wants to argue that life has got worse rather than better since the 1950s, they’re off their cake.” All manner of things have gotten worse and all manner of things have gotten better, is my point and, I think, Roy’s (if I may) point. So to argue that pointing out that some “things” have improved and insist that saying otherwise is “off one’s cake” seems to me to be both Whigish, in the sense of perpetual progress, and Panglosian in the sense that ignores the continued misery and, to steal another of Roy’s points, growing ecological disaster, whic –so the experts tell us — is only getting worse. But again, perhaps you see a more subtle argument embedded in the above quote or the wagish Waugh dismissal that follows slightly later on. As to Londoners, some are some aren’t, I argue with conviction and from first hand experience.

To sum up: some things are better; some things are worse, and at least one one very important thing is demonstrably worse; people are people no matter how small, which means some are a$sholes but most definitely not all.

Ah just what we need, an unbiased source of reference material for a topic where the issue is a gang of crazy religious nuts wanting to cram their kids full of dogma.

Note that I said that the religious nuts are ‘the issue’, not that all home schooling parents are religious nuts or even most religiously inclined home schooling parents are the issue. But some home schooling parents who are the issue are the issue precisely because of their particular irrational and ignorant beliefs and because of their irrational and intolerant lifestyles.

Some home schoolers certainly do have good reason, in some cases it is a necessary choice. But others are completely and utterly hatstand, they could no more teach a child than they could hold a rational conversation.

Society should not sanction ignorance as an acceptable lifestyle choice.

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?

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 anti-bullying 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.

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.

curious citizen

Some excellent observations….

Surely you could only manage that once?

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.

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