When it comes to schooling

[dr3032]

I've been thinking lately about what I would do if I had children. I've got a few names picked out, thought over what discussions/explanations might need to be had, but the one thing I never seem to make my mind up about is what manner of schooling for them to attend. Public school, private school, Christian school, or home school.

On one hand, Christian or home school seem like obvious answers. Public school has lots of secularism in it, not to mention what children might learn from other children. There also seems to be a growing mindset of trying to brainwash children when they're young, of telling kids that this or that is natural or okay, even though I really don't think a school should be very opinionated and it's not their place. I'd like to try and keep my metaphorical children safe from that nonsense, and while a Christian school would probably still face troubles as well, i'd just hope that all the issues of public school would be less so.

One a side note, home school is a bit... Of low consideration. A child needs to be able to socialize in order to grow, in my opinion. 

However, on the other hand, keeping a kid safe and away from that negativity might not be the greatest idea. As one who attended public school myself, it did play a part in me becoming who I am. It might be better for a child to experience or witness such things, so that when it happens, I could possibly try to explain and reason it. Not that i'd let them know everything when they're far too young, of course, but i'd rather they not be ignorant of what other people do or believe so that they might be able to better handle it when they get older.

So, i'm posting this question here to see what you all think. Do you think it best to try and keep a child safe, or do you think it's best if they... Swim upstream, in a way?

[warrior12]

Like everything else, scrutiny and investigation has to be done in any adventure and a child schooling is no lesser.  Proper planning and seeking out the better schools, be it public or private has to be done.  Even though the parent knows that  private or home schooling their child would provide for some better values and stricter discipline, the child at some time would feel deprived as to the so called freedom that the secular world has.  They may not know it is to their benefit that the choices made for them would help them to develop into better adults as to virtues ect.

However, it's a tough world that we live in and many don't have that luxury to do private or home school and their kids have to tough it out with the rest.  It then  becomes the parents duty to monitor and teach the values as best as they know how and show examples to their kids the values that would mold them into decent citizens and as a believer the values that the bible teaches.  It would definitely be a pull between society and the home for the values that would be attached to the kid in maturity.  This is why the christian believe in faith and prayer, as a guiding factor in the development of their loved ones.  In this world today, kids have to be put on a short leash or they soon wonder in to the bright lights and get lost.

If one can afford the private school cost ect, it seems like the better choice to me anyway.  Home school takes away the social bonding that is necessary for early development,but it is the safest as mom or dad is always their by their side, but which later on the parents can get blamed by the very kids for keeping them too safe.  Choices.

 

[GandalfTheWise]

Here are the main issues as I see them now.  I'm in my mid-50s with kids in their late 20s and early 30s and a couple new grand kids.  Here's the input and advice I'm giving my kids.

1. Avoiding generational isolation.   Healthy socialization includes having your kids spend significant amounts of time with a range of people across many age groups in informal settings.  During childhood and adolescence, instead of surrounding kids with people who've survived childhood and adolescence and can see it as one part of life, formal schooling systems and extracurricular activities surround kids with other kids who don't know any more about life than they do themselves.   I recall a discussion on relationships on another forum where a mid 20s person was asking why anyone would get married and have kids.  When asked for more details, it turns out this person had not seen successful relationships in her peer group and her knowledge of relationships was coming primarily from talking with people who didn't know how to make a relationship work.    A number of "old-timers" all said the same thing and recommended that she expand her social network to spend time with people in good marriages.   Set up situations for your kids to be around adults who are doing well in life so they can see what a good life can look like and how it comes about.   By "good life", I'm talking about a combination of financial freedom, comfortable relationships, lack of stress and frustration, mature spirituality, and in general being contented with life.  I intentionally differentiate this from saying Christians because some Christians frankly do not have their lives together yet.

2a. Avoid media saturation and enable a consistent pace of life.    The reality is that our brains were made to operate at a consistent pace of life.  Technology allows us to overwhelm our brains with faster and more disjointed input than they can process effectively.  Having kids enrolled in activity after activity does not allow them to slow down.

2b. Read to kids a lot and teach them to love books.  

3. Teach them to how to become independent lifelong learners.   Here's an example of what I mean.  Typical foreign language learning looks like this.  Take 4 years of HS Spanish, test out of a year of university Spanish, and then take 2nd year university Spanish.  Get straight As in all of these courses and be able to use Spanish a little bit.  In contrast, successful independent language learning means learning how to learn so that you can hold conversations with native Spanish speakers within a year or two of starting to work on Spanish and being able to use 2 or 3 other languages by the time you are 30 years old.  Formal education is little more than an assembly line approach to produce minimal acceptable results in the masses by remembering things long enough to pass courses.  Pretty much everyone is capable of learning much more than they do in formal schooling.   

4. Enable and encourage them to have their own relationship with God.  This is a tough balance.  You don't want to shelter them so badly they cannot stand on their own as they get older.  You don't want them to fall into something that has a permanent effect on their life.   Some friends of ours (Christians for decades) have a couple kids (now in their 30s).  One for a brief time fell into the wrong crowd in HS and within a short time of joining this crowd was addicted to heroin.  It was basically a predatory drug dealer who managed to get more than one kid hooked.   This has now been a lifelong struggle for him (and his family).  Our friends are still frustrated with the public school system that didn't expel the drug dealer and let him have access to their son during school hours.

 

I think that these types of considerations are the main issues.  Depending on the situation, a public school, private school, home schooling, or unschooling might be your best option for addressing these issues.  Ultimately though, one of the main issues is that your kids will likely learn more from your example than your words or your schooling choices for them.  

 

[Willa]

7 hours ago, GandalfTheWise said:

Ultimately though, one of the main issues is that your kids will likely learn more from your example than your words or your schooling choices for them.  

  

I especially agree with this statement.   Kids learn what you do more than what you say.  Give them love, consistent discipline, praise and encouragement.  Be a stay at home mom while they are at home.  I always said that if they mess up I want it to be my fault, not blamed on someone else.  That doesn't mean that as they get older they won't make bad choices.  But it is up to us to bring them up to know God.   We can teach them to apologize and make it right when they do wrong.  We can also teach them to pray and ask God to forgive them from the time they are very young.  

As far a schooling goes, our older son went to two Christian schools.  In each of them he had an abusive teacher.  The first abused him emotionally.  The second abused other students physically.  He will never send his kids to a private school.  But today the indoctrination in public schools a much worse than 40 years ago.  I honestly don't know what I would do.  

[The_Patriot21]

Anyone who believes homeschoolers dont get socialization has allowed themselves to believe in a great big fat lie. 

Proof of that...my parents homeschooled me and my brothers. Well, me and the youngest predominantly. My middle brother who is 2 1/2 years younger then me was predominantly private and public schooled. 

Now...the public schooled one, my brother, had virtually no social life. He was bullied and with the exception of one friend, kept predominantly to himself.

Now, me on the other had, had a huge social life. I was active in sports, boyscouts, CAP, held a job when i was old enough, hung out with friends on a regular basis. I was extremely social in school. I not only interracted with as many people that any regular schooled kid did, but had more meaningful relations.

My youngest brother...kind of a loner, but he still had friends in school still does.

Now ironically, me and my middle brother have switched. Now hes a social butterfly that gets out and hangs with friends, and im the loner that doesnt like to be around people. In fact outside of work and church almost the only people i spend time with is my family.

Can homeschooling socially isolate your kids? Only if your being a lazy and irresponsible parent. And even then, youd have to work at it. 

Studies also show homeschoolers often learn their material far better, and tend to score higher on performance tests then either private or public schools as well as develop a good work ethic, so even if they dont learn the "valuable" social skills in school environments, they will do good in a job and will learn any such skills as an adult.

With that said i did take 1 or 2 public school classes and had many public schooled friends. Most if the "social" skills that they had consisted of drinking, smoking, bullying, and who slept with who. Yes, all good social skills every responsible adult should have. Not.

No, all my kids are homeschooled. They will never be public schooled. Private schooled....probably not, but we shall see what the future holds. They have friends, theyre active in church sports and other extra curricular activities, but i want them to grow up with the best chance at success possible, and thsy means at home where they can learn about God, and they can be around people of high moral character, not being taught day in and day out by their teachers that there is no God and surrounded by people who would drag them astray.

[R. Hartono]

Children need to learn to get socialized at school, the world is created for us all so they need to live together.

[Sower]

6 hours ago, R. Hartono said:

Children need to learn to get socialized at school, the world is created for us all so they need to live together.

I totally disagree. The teachers hands are tied, and no discipline. The new age government curriculum is the standard.
It would be best if parents would ck out all that goes on in school, public and Christian. Many affluent troubled students are kicked out of public school and enter private Christian schools, bring their troubles. Ask the other parents. Get involved. Ask them about 'Values clarification' being taught.

Why do public school teachers send their own children to private schools at a rate 2X the national average?

In his latest weekly column, economist and GMU professor Walter E. Williams presents these facts about where various groups of parents send their own children – private or public schools:

General public: Nationally, 11% of all parents enroll their children in private schools, and 89% of American students attend public schools.

Public School Teachers: Nationally, more than 20% of public school teachers with school-age children enroll them in private schools, or almost twice the 11% rate for the general public.

Philadelphia Public School Teachers: 44% enroll their own children in private schools, or four times the national average.

Cincinnati Public School Teachers: 41% enroll their own children in private schools, more than three times the national rate.

Chicago Public School Teachers: 39% enroll their own children in private schools, more than three times the national average.

Rochester, NY Public School Teachers: 38% enroll their own children in private schools, or more than three times the national rate.

San Francisco-Oakland Public School Teachers: 34% enroll their own children in private schools, slightly more than three times the national average.

New York City Public School Teachers: 33% enroll their own children in private schools, three times the national rate.

Members of Congress: 33% to 44% enroll their children in private schools, three to four times the national average.

"The fact that so many public school teachers enroll their own children in private schools ought to raise questions. After all, what would you think, after having accepted a dinner invitation, if you discovered that the owner, chef, waiters and busboys at the restaurant to which you were being taken don’t eat there? That would suggest they have some inside information from which you might benefit

Wonder why?? Kinda obvious......to me.

 

 

 

[Sower]

Yown and Patriot summed it up extremely well. But to add.

A hundred or two hundred years ago,  most children were schooled in their own home, or their neighbors 'auntie',  where they were born. It was an Agrarian society. The kids didn't suffer from lack of socialization, just the opposite. They lived with babies to grandparents, aunts and uncles and cousins, and all their neighbors. This is called a family unit, with their own family values. Not government run bureaucracies like today, with a maze of thousands of kids confined in a single location, everybody losing hours of travel to comply with the school schedule. With just a few hints of what was going on in the government schools back in the early eighties, then investigating more thoroughly,  we took our kids out of public school,  two in 1st and third grade, and one not in school yet.   They were all taught at home, and now they teach theirs (our grand children) at home. We have home schooled  grand children in Christian college. ( My son was told he didn't measure up when tested at the local public school when we decided to let him experience real world government schooling with his peers his junior and senior years. (He decided then,  at 15 yrs old, to go straight to college, no refresher courses, and made the Deans list) My wife was a high school graduate, myself, a high school drop out. I went eleven years to Catholic parochial school, then my last year to public school. It was sad, the public high school teaching me as a senior what I learned as a sophomore in Catholic school. Bored and quit, joined the Marines, went to da Nam.

Not everyone is qualified to home school. If you are not dedicated to the word, raising up your children in the way he/she should go, willing to be a one income family, doing without the secular trappings, willing to trust wholly in God to accomplish the goal, with all your inadequacies worries and fears, then you aren't qualified. We were not qualified.  And it was scary back then, so much unknown. But we were fast learners. In Texas in the early eighties when we started, it was illegal to home school.  Later, the Leeper case changed that. The fear of truant officers knocking on the door with the sheriff disappeared. Texas went from the worst laws to the best, which all the rest of the country adopted later. My wife says, if you are not led/convinced of the Holy Spirit to home school, don't! (On average, the mom carries 90% of the teaching load) Radical step back then for young believers, and learning  parents. But God was/is on the throne.
Yes, there are still some really dedicated teachers, with a calling to teach. But most have their hands tied, unable to cope with the bureaucracy, and lack of disciplinary action. Some kids do well in public school, if really grounded in true values, a solid home life, and good relationships with parents. We did not want to take a chance. Most people do not know what is going on in these schools when the kids go in and the doors close behind them. And they do not WANT TO KNOW. This would require a major lifestyle change, and that is unacceptable.
There are alternatives. Research. Talk to others in the same boat.    Talk/listen to God.   He will make the path straight.

[The_Patriot21]

Nowwhere in the bible does it day children "have" to be socialized at school. In fact, im living proof you dont have to be, to be successful in life. The entire "socialization" argument is not based upon any kind of actual evidence. Just because your surrounded by kids doesnt mean you will somehow become better adjusted as an adult or be able to integrate any better. Being schooled at home doesnt mean you wont. 

[Sam34]

My siblings and I go to blended school. 3 days a week we go to school at church with other kids, but it's still our parents teaching. The other 2 days we are homeschooled. I am 15 and this is the first year we have done this. So far it has been the best year of school I have ever had.