I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.
I've Been To Over 20 Homeschool Conferences. The Things I've Witnessed At Them Shocked Me.
"I am 20 minutes into the presentation when a woman interrupts me. 'When are you going to talk about God in all of this?' she asks."
“OK, my daughter loves Harriet Tubman. Tell me what you got!” she says. I explain our product, how we use historical women to teach girls about their worth and potential. The mother says: “But is it woke? I mean, I don’t want to teach my daughter about woke.”
And these people feel qualified to teach history.
I used to sell books, oh, 30 years ago or so now.
The home schoolers were the scariest bunch of people you'll encounter.
Had one guy ask where the weather control books were, and I was like "You mean seeding clouds to make it rain? I think we have..."
"No! I mean the government weather control programs!"
Had another lady convinced her electricity was going to give her cancer because it came from a nuclear power plant and was radioactive.
It's not homeschooling, it's unschooling.
My parents were both teachers at private or Christian schools while I grew up, and every year, there'd always be a new couple of kids who's parents couldn't quite hack it anymore, so they'd send them to school. But couldn't bear to send their kids to those secular, godless, evolution teaching, sex driven, minority filled public schools, so they'd send them to my school instead.
Those kids were always some of the dumbest, most ignorant people on the planet. Some figure it out, but most don't. They just double down. They were usually barely literate, couldn't do math, and had no social skills. It's how you end up with a 19 year old freshman who can't read Dr. Seuss.
I know teachers aren't paid much, but if you have the audacity to say that you can do a better job than 4 or 5 professionals at teaching your kid every subject, you should have to take a test to be certified, and your kid needs testing too. Some states require it, most don't, and it shows.
“I do have one question, though ― do you teach feminism? I mean, I believe in equality, but I am not a feminist, and I don’t want to teach it to my daughter.”
I take the approach I used in Missouri.
“What do you mean?” I ask her.
“Well, do you teach that women are better than men?”
“No, I teach all genders are equal and should be treated as such.”
She buys three kits.
Jesus wept.
I homeschooled my kid k-12. When I started, I had no idea how many religious hs-ers there were. I used a secular curriculum, and never even thought about teaching anything regarding religion one way or another. Once I started looking around at all the creationist curricula out there--yikes.
Anyhoo, long story short, my son went on to a college degree (he actually started college classes online at 15--one of the perks of hs-ing for us), and he's an atheist. Secular homeschoolers do exist!
ETA some links--these are a few secular homeschool curricula. There's a lot more out there, but this is the majority of what I used through the years:
https://www.calverthomeschool.com/
https://www.keystoneschoolonline.com/
https://www.thinkwell.com/ (Primarily math--the professor that does most of the math instruction is wonderful.)
I've come to the conclusion that religious faith is a kind of mental illness that was made socially acceptable to keep primitive people from constantly killing each other, sticking instead to only occasionally killing each other within a vague set of guidelines.
Those of us free of it don't need an insane corkscrew of Escheresque logic and imaginary higher authorities using threats commanding us to not be monsters.
In America, right wing supporters are often the dullest tools in the shed. They're sure they're right, but they don't understand how anything works, historical context, how to discern truth from bullshit, or what words mean.
"I Love the Poorly Educated" -Donald J. Trump
My step sister is going to homeschool her kids, which will be great for her youngest since she named him Jedidiah. Shockingly someone who named their kid that stopped coming to family gettogerthers after my sister's kid came out trans.
She was sad she didn't get invited to my wifes baby shower, even if my niece wasn't planning on going I still wouldn't invite her because you can't just choose to cut out part of the family because you're a bigot and expect everyone else to still want you around.
We had to pull my daughter out of her middle school and put her in an online school for reasons I don't wish to go into, but thankfully the online school is run by the county school corporation and she has a curriculum built by accredited teachers who are also there to talk to the kids by phone, videoconference or in person during school hours. And they are so receptive too. Suddenly I feel like educators care about my child.
But homeschooling? I would never even think of it. I don't know the first thing about pedagogy and neither does my wife. We did a less formal version of online schooling that was hastily put together during COVID while she was still in elementary school and it relied on me doing a lot of the teaching and I sucked at it. There's a big difference between being able to do fourth grade math and being able to teach a fourth grader how to do fourth grade math. A lot of those kids are getting so underserved by having parents, even well-meaning parents, who are not educators try to give their education.
And that doesn't even go into the "my son is learning to be a Christian as a homeschooler" bullshit.
There are definitely kids who would be better served by an alternative to regular public or private school, even school they can do from home. But educators need to be behind it, not parents. Not unless those parents have degrees in education.
Dumbass Christian Karens
I have often read sovereign citizen groups on Facebook, and they all "homeschool", which means the big kids babysit the little ones all day long, and sometimes CPS gets involved and removes the kids and terminates their parental rights because they realize the kids aren't getting educated and are having the shit best out of them routinely. I think homeschooling can be very dangerous for a child.
Because a parent working, without any accreditation or training since they were a fucking literal child, totally sounds like a preferable route. Give me a fucking break, it's an assault on standardized education.
To make it worse, the kid will have a large drop in socialization opportunities and isolated relatively speaking. You just do not get that kind of social utopia ever again in your entire fucking life... the life experiences the child misses out on is significant. You can't schedule enough playdates to make up for that.
I worked at a homeschool public charter school for a few years. A good chunk of the parents were only in it because they wanted to use Christian curriculum and other conservative garbage to teach their children.
The school even had me go to a professional development event that ended up being a Christian leadership conference held at a church. One of my coworkers walked out once she realized it was religious and she was forced to use her PTO for the remaining days of the conference. I should have done the same.
I will say homeschooling can be a good teaching style.... With oversight. I am slightly biased because I was home schooled through the 7th grade. My mom wasn't a religion nut, I was homeschooled because the regular public school didn't have the to services for my IEP. So I went to a Charter home school program that had what I needed. To be honest I think I turned out far better than I would have at any regular school.
So, my stepkids (now: boy 12, girl 11) were falling behind in public school and were being passed on to the next grades despite the fact that they were almost a full grade behind in math and reading.
My now-wife decided to pull them out of public school and home school them to try to get them caught up. In our county, we have an AWESOME "public school at home" program where the kids are home schooled, but still go into a school one day a week for socialization and tutoring by licensed teachers. It was a fuck ton of work for her, but in ONE YEAR in the program, not only did the kids catch up, but they're actually almost a full year ahead now.
But... that was with the full support of a county school system and a full-time investment in her kids. This wasn't a "throw a computer at them and let them figure it out" and it certainly wasn't a "summer is different from winter because Jesus said so" program. It was a guided program designed, administered, and overseen by actually licensed teachers. There were performance goals to hit, regular checkins, and available tutoring for things my wife wasn't capable of teaching correctly.
This year, since both kids were so far ahead, we gave them a choice and let them decide whether they wanted to continue the program now that they're caught up. My stepdaughter wanted to go back to regular school. My stepson wanted to stay in the program. He's in middle school as of this year, and middle school begins to be more self-guided. My wife starts nursing school in the spring so she can't dedicate the 8-ish hours necessary to take both kids through the program beginning next semester. So we let them each do what they wanted. My stepson finishes his mostly-self-guided school day in three hours or so then has the rest of the day to do with as he wishes and is still ahead of where he should be. My stepdaughter is miserable because each day is an 8 hour slog and the curriculum moves too slowly for her now, plus the other kids are dicks to her (as kids tend to be). She's considering going back into the program next year when it will be mostly self-guided for her as well.
But this success story is more about my awesome wife and this particular program. It's been a crazy amount of work and a full-time job for my wife to take both kids through this program, and that's WITH the support of a full teaching staff in a county-run program. It's no surprise to me that other programs are more-or-less a joke. If you're not willing to put in the work and/or your idea of education is "It's that way because the LORD said so now stop asking questions and write Jesus on every line," then you're dooming your children to failure and ridicule.
I was homeschooled and it was fine, I did great on standardized tests, had friends, am not a fundamentalist nutjob, etc... I'd like to say to these people please stay, I know it's hard for them but what they're doing is desperately needed. Lots of those people are decent people who live in an echo chamber of conservative insanity, they need patient loving people like you to show up and let them see there's more to life than their bubble.
I grew up homeschooled for my entire K-12 experience through the 2000s and 2010s and went to my fair share of homeschool conventions throughout it. (They're really popular and they always have separate events for the kids.)
There's no governing body for any of these curriculum. My science education would always change depending on the book. At one point, I was told that all the animals in the world were vegetarian before Adam and Eve ate the fruit of the knowledge of good and evil then turned carnivorous. Another series of videos I received spent a literal hour and a half "dunking" on evolution before actually giving a much more valid argument for its existence. (I actually am trying to find a way to convert the crappy flash swf files into video so I can share the insanity if anyone knows how to do that. FFmpeg hath failed me.)
Math was less volatile but had its quirks. I had one curriculum (Life of Fred) that quite literally was made with crappy clipart and not really even written by a person who was qualified to make kids content. It was just purposely obtuse and my mother took me off of it once I wasn't making any progress on it. I made it through two of those books for what it's worth.
Economics and "stewardship" was also high-key Republican trickle down economics and one time they actually blamed social programs for causing the Great Depression.
But, all that said, I got a super advanced education that put me well ahead of most other kids my age and I'm only listing the worst aspects of Christian homeschool curricula. Generally, homeschooling (Christian or secular) is almost entirely dependent on the parent actually giving a crap about their kid's unique needs and strengths. At the very least, if you're going to homeschool (no, I don't mean charter school) your kid for an extended period, make sure that you're involved with activities with other kids and that you really look through what your kid is reading.
Home school is bad because:
- what people learn isn't controlled by official requirements
- to teach kids properly one need special type of education themselves not parent who comes home at in the evening.
- there is no diploma so getting job will be like "trust me bro, ima best"
- socialization between kids is important.
That being sad US is weird in some of these aspects and they are not properly fullfilled even at schools.
I'll be a rare beacon for somewhat positive home schooling. At least when I started it in the late 90s. Graduated highschool in 2000.
Yeah, there is a fair amount of religious nut jobs/conservatives when you get out in bufu, but my group was mostly kids with hippie parents and kids with learning disabilities that would have never thrived in public school.
Maybe our group was more social than some of these extremist religious groups, because I had plenty of friends and social interaction. Homeschool isn't always kids being locked away from society by crazy parents, sometimes it is the last option of a misfit child that would fail to thrive if forced into the mould of a model student.
The main thing that I missed out on, by not going to high school proper, was getting regularly bullied and the stress of having to hurry to the bus every morning. If homeschooling hadn't been an option I'd of just been a drop out.
I suppose a number of people would still consider me a drop out because I wasn't forced to suffer as they did.
Edit: I'll add that my group were mostly naturalist/scientist in learning. As far as I know there weren't any flat-earthers/creationists. Maybe I was lucky because of my geographic location.
Maybe things are different now, but that's how it was for me back in the 90s/2000s.
We’re in Missouri again. We are selling a lot of product — in fact, we had our first mother and son make a purchase so he could learn about Sacagawea. It made me happy.
It makes me very happy too. I'm going to end my night with this thought.
Literally every place where children are educated is a battleground for the political ideologies of the parents. I've seen the exact same stuff described in this article in public schools as well.
Homeschooling has increased by 51% nationwide, while public school attendance has decreased by 4%. Prepare to meet a lot more Karens and their snot-nosed monster kids.
Source: I have two young kids who aren't so bad
Sellers market with that group of people.
Great article, thanks
If God is real, then he doesn't want you teaching your children nonsense, he wants you to ensure that they succeed in life. A deck that your grandparents stacked against them.
This is pretty shocking and also horrifying, and now I’m sad.
I thought this was a News website but it feels like a blog. Not only that but when I tried to exit the article it crashed my Sync app.
I believe firmly, in the end reason will prevail. We need to support the sane people (like them writing this article) to get there faster and with lesser victims, but it will prevail. I have to believe that, I have kids. What a time to be alive, right?
Do we allow people to choose how they indoctrinate their children? We all are. We all were. The only question is who's indoctrination.