When it comes to schooling

[Unfailing Presence]

On ‎12‎/‎19‎/‎2018 at 11:40 AM, dr3032 said:

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?

I do not have children but have learned from cousins that do ,  that the term " Home School " is a bit misleading . I found out that it is a very well organized accredited national organization that includes many activities were other home schooled children are together and engage in group activities outside the home socializing on a regular basis .  It is not as isolated as it sounds . 

To me, if I had children it could also be 6 of one & a half dozen of the other .

It has been pretty well established that what moral values that can be transmitted and instilled in the heart a child are generally fixed in their heart by the age of 7 years old . 

It is not just moral questions behind the home school program as well .   They are much better educated .  It is a much more in depth learning experience . 

To me I would home school the child up to a point and then give them exposure that would include the principles of the " world " which hopefully they have been sufficiently raised at that point to recognize .  Maybe around the 8th or 9th grade . 

At some point you have to remember that they do not belong to you but to God  . 

Edited December 21, 2018 by Unfailing Presence

[just_abc]

To the OP

If I may ask a question.  Which country are you refering to?  

The situation in different countries can be different.  Sometimes some major issues which public schools in one country or location face might not always be the same in another country.  

Just a thought.

Edited December 21, 2018 by just_abc

[warrior12]

Let's face it, the genie is out the bottle already.  The system is in place for control of our lives and the ropes are tightening.   In the public school system, the educators are allowed to call out kids they think have learning issues and behavior problems and thus need to be medicated, AHAD comes to mind.  Then vaccinations which some don't agree with and if your kids does not have the records to prove it they are not allowed in the public system.  These and many more such as bullying are worrisome to parents and should be indeed.   But in most household, both parents work and the choice is limited unless private schooling is affordable.   There are many many household just trying to keep the lights on, so the struggle goes on.

Everyone wants the best options for their child and close monitoring of the child development when he is exposed to the outside elements of society.  Most of a child discipline starts at the home and it is the onus on the parent to probe and check for signs and symptoms where problems starts to creep in.  The believer has to stand strong in faith and prayer as he does for everything else in his life as he stands by and believe in his God by Faith.  It is analogous to spiritual warfare, when you know not when the enemy shows up, but you have to be prepared and have the full armor on at all time. 

[Omegaman 3.0]

On 12/19/2018 at 8:40 AM, dr3032 said:

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. 

Before our kids were school aged, by wife approached me about homeschooling our kids. My initial reaction was along the lines of: "Are you nuts? How would then ever get social skills, learn how to interact with others?"

My wife, being the wise woman that she was, and knowing her husband, did not bother to argue with me, she just took advantage of the fact that it is my nature to investigate things and said: "Why don't you research that?"

So I did. When I had done enough to reach a conclusion, my mind set was different. Now, I was thinking that socialization was the best reason to home school, and avoid public schools. The bottom line was about more than socialization though. Did I want them exposed to and indoctrinated by people and a system, that wanted them to see spiritual things as superstitious, and leftist ideologies persuading them about what is moral, and what is not, if indeed, they would be taught that such a thing as morality even existed.

I wanted my kids, to learn that there was a creator, and not have to try to undo what they were learning from teaches who spent more time with them than I could. Kids are going to tend to learn from someone, and to hand them over to teachers for that, is in my opinion, telling the child that the teacher is more of an authority to be listened to, than their parents are.

I don't think that is God's order. God instituted families, and gave the responsibility of training to their parents. I think also, that children want to learn from their parents, what to learn from those who love them enough to take care of them, and be their for them, day after day. Most kids tend to view their parents as heroes, and hang on every word they say. Of course kids will also be rebellious, but in most school situations, those rebellions are not dealt with effectively, and teachers had to act within guidelines, that are very restricted and delayed. This is growing more true in the home too now, as the government interferes with parenting, sometimes for good, but often no so much.

Parents sometimes feel, that they are under-qualified to teach their own children. Sometimes, that might be so. Most elementary school trhough high school teachers are not exactly geniuses in most cases, at least in my experience. That is not a slam on teachers, they do not need to be geniuses, in order to teach. Much of what teachers learn about, in order to be teachers, is teach methods, the subject matter than they teach, generally comes out of a text book. Parents can read text books too, and pass that information to their children. The teaching methods, on the other hand, change from decade to decade, because those in the field of education, seek to be more effective at it, that others have been in the past. This leads to experimentation, experimentation with our children as the guinea pigs. Newsflash: Parents have been teaching their children for thousands of years, hundreds of generations have passed information, and values, to their kids, and I do not see where the fundamentals have  changed, or need changing from how things have been traditionally done.

Every parent that would seek to teach their children, has their own life experiences, and know people with life experiences, about how they themselves have learned to do things. Do you know how to read? If so, how did you learn? Can you not then, do the same for your children? Same goes for math, science, history, etc.

I learned in public school, that is to say, that I attended public school. When I think about it, I got some instruction in public school, which I did not always understand. We had about thirty kids in our classrooms typically. Teacher taught us corporately, as a group. There was little time, for individual instruction. There was little time for the teacher to get to know how I learned best. Was I good at understanding spoken words, was I a better visual learner, was I hands on, etc.

Thing is, I would go home, not understanding how to do fractions, or why grammar worked the way it did. Other things, I could not grasp fully, were also leaving me scratching my head. The best thing the teacher did, was send homework home with me. At home, it was mom, who got me through it. She had the time and the patience to help be learn the things I was not getting. She had me reading out loud, so that I improved at that. My mom was not a smart, and educated woman. However, my mom was there for me.

When it came down to it, the public school took the role of deciding what subjects I needed to study. It was my mom, that really did the teaching. I was in essence, really more home schooled that publicly educated. Once I realized this, I was more comfortable with the idea of home schooling.

Now, that I was more able to see, that educationally, moms (and dads) are able to teach, the idea had more appeal. One of the things that my research revealed, was that on average, by the time student have reached 18 years of age, they are academically about to years ahead of a public school child, it they had been private schooled, and a home schooled student, was typically about 2 years ahead of a private schooled student. That was interesting to me.

As an anecdotal story, let me elaborate that point. When my oldest kids, reached the age of what is normally 9th grade, we got this idea. There was no specified age level, to attend the local, public school community college. As home schoolers, is was required of us, to see that our kids were educated in certain topics. Math, was on of those topics. We enrolled our kids in the community college. Our best student/child,took algebra there. When he was tested, he scored at a level, which was considered equal to second year college. So there, in his case, he was matching the statistic, more or less, but even more, that home schooled students tend to out perform (academically) their public school counterparts by 4 years, in this case 5 years.

It was also interesting to learn, that the acedemic prowess of  home-schooled students, did not seem to be linked to the education level  of their parents. One thing I recall, was that there was some kids who had entered a national contest, I do not recall what it was called, but it was the equivalent of a spelling bee, but it was not about spelling, but covered all sorts of subjects of study. This kid who won, was home-schooled. Here is the thing about him, His parents we not well educated them selves, the had graduated high school, but we just average. They were rural farmers, old school family farm type farmers. The kid performed well academically, being taught by parents of academic mediocrity.

Another interesting statistic, was that there are all sort of professions among home educators, but, the most common, the most likely to keep their children outside of public school, are public school teachers, or at least that was the case in the early 90s when I was doing my research.

Another anecdotal story: Our youngest daughter, was not a good student, she always struggled a bit. learning did not come easily to her, and if concerned me some. Of course, I do not know whether she would have done better outside of home-school education, perhaps she would have. However, what I can say is that at the age of 27, she has been employed as a nurse at a local hospital. She took a GED after home-schooling, and enrolled in the community in the new neighborhood we later moved to, and got here nursing degree there. As I said, learning was not naturally easy for her, but she had developed some self direction and work ethics in the home-school environment, and that served her well enough to finish college, something that I never did.

So, back to socialization. What I concluded after my investigations, was  that I was just plain ignorant. It boiled down to this:

Would I prefer to have my children learn there values, from a secular system that does not encourage ideas like faith and moral absolutes, one that perhaps even encourages them to "experiment" to learn about themselves? Do I want my kids to learn social skill, from other kids, who also do not have social skills yet? Might these kids, be into sex, and drugs, and who know what else, is that what I would choose to be influences on their young lives? I know what that was like, I learned about sex, when I was in the 3rd grade, from a 7th grader. That was partially, my parents fault, because they did not supervise me well enough, to oversee who I was making friends with. Would it not be better, I asked myself, for my kids to learn social skill by interacting with well balanced adults?

By contrast, when we elected to home educate our children, we met the parents of the children who would become the friends of our children, and at times, we would veto certain choices our kids might have made for friends. We we involved in the lives our our kids, we cared enough to provide intelligent supervision in their lives.

It might sound like we were over bearing, over protective. I am sorry if I gave that impression, but I do not think we were.

So, did it work, did out kids get properly socialized? Well, they are all at ease, self confident, but not bullies, bragarts, nor into substance abuse, or any number of things people view as negatives. Let me put it this way. Looking back to the zero to age 21 years that our kids transitioned from newborns to full adults, they accumulated 105 years of experience between them (we had 5 kids). In all those years, we never heard even one complaint about them from another child, or and adult, nor supervisors, Christian leaders, etc., etc. The worst thing I ever learned about them in all those years, was that there was a time, when the two boys decided to go and purchase a small color TV and game console, without out permission. They hid it in their closet, and the girl, who knew about it, conspired to keep the secret from us, their parents. Mind you, they bought this system with their own money, and we never gave them an allowance. Any money they had to spend, was money that they earned, or had gotten in gifts on birthdays etc. So this major evil, was to keep a secret from their parents, about something that was not itself, and evil, lol.

My bottom line here, is that yes, it is quite possible to kids to be socialized outside of public school. Home education, does not mean isolation, it means and attempt to separate them from bad influences, UNTIL they are mature enough to make their own wise decisions.

Also, as home school parents, we had the opportunity to meet other home school parents, and their kids. What struck me most about them (the kids) was how mature beyond  their ages, they seemedto be, and how polite and helpful that they typically were.

There is no guarantee that home schooled kids will come out great, not that public schooled kids will come out rotten, but it does not hurt, to change the odds to favor your own kids, we did that, because we thought that was the most loving thing to do.

[Neighbor]

On 12/19/2018 at 11:40 AM, dr3032 said:

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?

Having personal exposure to each, I suggest there is no answer.  The need is the same in each case; that need is for the parents to be heavily involved in oversight, without becoming the helicopter parent that stifles all exploration of the world.