One Eyed Jack
New member
Dread Helm said:
I went to public school.
Homeschooling vs. Public Schooling
- Thread starter JoyfulRook
- Start date
I went to public school.
Mustard Seed
New member
Public education certainly lacks a great deal. Home schooling, no matter how well administered, lacks items also. I think to say one or the other is always inherently better is not correct.
I think that I received the best of both worlds. I attended public schools while still receiving an ample education from my parents. I saw, first hand, how the world in general works. I saw, first hand, the ineptitude and impotence and misdirected power that entrenched institutions had and I could contrast it to the specificity and advantage of a strong familiy environment.
I personaly know many people that have been homeschooled or gone through the whole of the public school spectrum and I've seen brilliant, well adjusted, individuals come out of both sides. I've also seen both sides, both with the seemingly same frequency, churn out some problematic personalities. I think the parents should have all the say in exactly how to raise their childeren, so long as they are not killing or abusing their children.
No matter how sick our institution of public education is it's only a serious problem when a child comes from a family that is not fullfilling it's responsibilities to it's children. Essentialy, regardless the degree or place of a child's education, the success is largely a factor of capable parents. If a parent is impotent, for whatever reason, in teaching and raising a child, then it's largely irrelevant as to whether the parent entirely homeschools, partialy homeschools, sends them to private or public institutions. If a child does not have a capable, humble, loving, and sacrificing parent(s) or parental figure then their chances to survive any system of education in a productive way are seriously jeopordized.
Of course improving the capacity and agility of our education system, whether carried out by governmental buerocracy, private enterprise, private organizations or private individuals is of the utmost importance I get disapointed when we sink into the view of 'my way or the highway' on either side of the two, or more, extreems.
We can argue about what we think the best ideal situation is. We can pretend that throwing money at the problem will fix it. We can pretend that vast overhauls as to the running of governmental bueraucracy will magicaly turn the tide. We can be forever tied to the illusion that there's test scores or GPA's or degrees or grants or tax breaks or tuition hikes or tuition cuts or teacher raises or technology or self-esteem programs or utter isolation from public education or religion or secularism will matter in some earth shattering way. All the while we will forget the aim and underlying purpose for supplying an education. We will forget that the glory of God is intelligence. We will forget that not every kid is built the same. That the exact mechinations of whatever education system the child is in will only benefit the pupil when and where the cogs mesh and the student is edified rather that estranged. We'll forget about the fact that the student and teacher relationship needs to be more than a one way learning experience. We'll fail to see that the goal is not so much to teach the student as it is to create the desire and capacity for the student to want to learn. Innovation, intuition, critical thinking, independent thought, either home or public or private institutions can suck an indivividual of access to, and capacity in, these things. Whether it's a college professor, a caring parent, a teacher or administrator in a school, all can make mistakes that can impede and suffocate the capacity, likewise each can enspire, encourage, and be a catalyst for such things.
If you ask me the problem is not, at it's core, an issue of exacting administration of education. It is, rather, a problem of society, loosing perspectives, on all sides, as to our purpose. We've become so institutionalized, so lost to the best, and original purpose, of seeking an "education" that we are simply perpetuating primarily inane, largely superfluous, and in general, misdirected points centering around conflicts that rotate around pride and personal dogmatic allegiences to misconceived inerrancy of various institutions rather than to base, and revolve the argument around, the true issues, the true north, of the issue of education.
But that's what our society is hooked on. Perpetuating arguement for the sake of perpetuating argument and saying "hooray for our side". Very few people, dialogs, institutions and individuals ever focus on the real issues long enough to see the real problems and begin to contrive real sollutions. Giving heedance to a demagauge and/or feeding the ego of our pretended superior grasps on various issues is a far more appealing course of action.
I'm not dissing the fervent application of principles that one knows to be correct. I'm simply pleading for us to be certain that what we are specificaly advocating will truly advance those true principles for which we aim. Our aim can only be as good as our capacity to discern our target. If we simply swing at what we think we want we may end up misdirecting or damaging it rather than sending it on to it's intended trajectory to the desired target.
I think that I received the best of both worlds. I attended public schools while still receiving an ample education from my parents. I saw, first hand, how the world in general works. I saw, first hand, the ineptitude and impotence and misdirected power that entrenched institutions had and I could contrast it to the specificity and advantage of a strong familiy environment.
I personaly know many people that have been homeschooled or gone through the whole of the public school spectrum and I've seen brilliant, well adjusted, individuals come out of both sides. I've also seen both sides, both with the seemingly same frequency, churn out some problematic personalities. I think the parents should have all the say in exactly how to raise their childeren, so long as they are not killing or abusing their children.
No matter how sick our institution of public education is it's only a serious problem when a child comes from a family that is not fullfilling it's responsibilities to it's children. Essentialy, regardless the degree or place of a child's education, the success is largely a factor of capable parents. If a parent is impotent, for whatever reason, in teaching and raising a child, then it's largely irrelevant as to whether the parent entirely homeschools, partialy homeschools, sends them to private or public institutions. If a child does not have a capable, humble, loving, and sacrificing parent(s) or parental figure then their chances to survive any system of education in a productive way are seriously jeopordized.
Of course improving the capacity and agility of our education system, whether carried out by governmental buerocracy, private enterprise, private organizations or private individuals is of the utmost importance I get disapointed when we sink into the view of 'my way or the highway' on either side of the two, or more, extreems.
We can argue about what we think the best ideal situation is. We can pretend that throwing money at the problem will fix it. We can pretend that vast overhauls as to the running of governmental bueraucracy will magicaly turn the tide. We can be forever tied to the illusion that there's test scores or GPA's or degrees or grants or tax breaks or tuition hikes or tuition cuts or teacher raises or technology or self-esteem programs or utter isolation from public education or religion or secularism will matter in some earth shattering way. All the while we will forget the aim and underlying purpose for supplying an education. We will forget that the glory of God is intelligence. We will forget that not every kid is built the same. That the exact mechinations of whatever education system the child is in will only benefit the pupil when and where the cogs mesh and the student is edified rather that estranged. We'll forget about the fact that the student and teacher relationship needs to be more than a one way learning experience. We'll fail to see that the goal is not so much to teach the student as it is to create the desire and capacity for the student to want to learn. Innovation, intuition, critical thinking, independent thought, either home or public or private institutions can suck an indivividual of access to, and capacity in, these things. Whether it's a college professor, a caring parent, a teacher or administrator in a school, all can make mistakes that can impede and suffocate the capacity, likewise each can enspire, encourage, and be a catalyst for such things.
If you ask me the problem is not, at it's core, an issue of exacting administration of education. It is, rather, a problem of society, loosing perspectives, on all sides, as to our purpose. We've become so institutionalized, so lost to the best, and original purpose, of seeking an "education" that we are simply perpetuating primarily inane, largely superfluous, and in general, misdirected points centering around conflicts that rotate around pride and personal dogmatic allegiences to misconceived inerrancy of various institutions rather than to base, and revolve the argument around, the true issues, the true north, of the issue of education.
But that's what our society is hooked on. Perpetuating arguement for the sake of perpetuating argument and saying "hooray for our side". Very few people, dialogs, institutions and individuals ever focus on the real issues long enough to see the real problems and begin to contrive real sollutions. Giving heedance to a demagauge and/or feeding the ego of our pretended superior grasps on various issues is a far more appealing course of action.
I'm not dissing the fervent application of principles that one knows to be correct. I'm simply pleading for us to be certain that what we are specificaly advocating will truly advance those true principles for which we aim. Our aim can only be as good as our capacity to discern our target. If we simply swing at what we think we want we may end up misdirecting or damaging it rather than sending it on to it's intended trajectory to the desired target.
Lord Vader
New member
The problem is that no good reason exists for coercive mass schooling. So you can't claim that it's one choice of many, merely assuming that there is some valid reason for their existence in the first place. It's not logical to point out that kids from supportive homes do well and so therefore schools have a reason to exist. That's like saying that kids from supportive home lives are better behaved in jail, so sending them to jail is one option for them, since they seem to do well there, at least compared to kids from non supportive home lives. So the onus is on you to show that there is a reason for the in the first place. Schools are the aberration that have to be justified. Mass schooling and homeschooling are not two pretty faces in the same crowd. Not schooling is the default setting. It doesn't have to be justified. It was already here. Coercive schooling only got instituted in 1900 and it is the one that needs to be justified.
Mustard Seed
New member
Lord Vader said:
"Coercive schooling" was an attempt to overcome the shortsighted nature of a great many that saw children more as tools to support the family enterprise rather than as items in which the nation had a vested interest in seeing develop into independent entities that could prove sufficiently capable in being the backbone of a society that intended to survive in a world of conflicting ideologies and powers and principalities.
I'll openly admit and decry the manner and trajectory of the coercive mass schooling, but one cannot tenably claim that this nation would be in a better situation, as a whole, if the governement had never made any attempt to facilitate the education of the masses. I personaly have serious issues with governement's excessive medling in the lives of our children and the workings of our families, but equally I would be as critical of a government that allowed children to remain in victorian institutions or situations in which child slave labor, or the confinement of a child to merely the socio-economic and intellectual heritage that their parents were willing to pass on to them, was mistaken for a proper education.
However much you decry the evils present, or inherent to, "mass coercive education", I have a difficult time seeing you present a tenable scenario that would have produced better results overall than that which was enacted in face of the prevailing situation of the early 1900's and the era that led up to such.
Lord Vader
New member
Mustard Seed said:
You have to show that growing up without schools meant growing up without a proper education. You have to show that coercive mass schooling is a sensible answer to child slave labour or other social woes. If there is no scientific theory or learning that gives them validity, how can they be an answer to anything?
Bertrand Russel called the American experiment with mass schooling the most radical social experiment of the 20th century next to the Russian revolution. I ask you, how can taking someone at age 5 and making them spend their time until age 18 being told what to think and when to think it not be destructive? Look at your own predilection for championing it on nothing but the mere *assumption* that there is something like a scientific theory of learning somewhere that serves as its foundation and gives it validity. A mere assumption! Growing up in school effected us all in ways we can spend a life time uncovering like the layers of an onion.
No Worries
New member
You dont teach a child what to think, you teach them how to think and how to discern evidence and tools to do that alongside facts.
You teach a child French....how French people communicate.
You teach a child math......how to use math and how math works.
You teach a child science....how to think scientifically and how the world works.
The last one is where ID is flawed. You teach a child evolution but you also teach it how those conclusions were reached. As the child progresses then it learns how to discern between what it has been taught and what it can see for itself. If a scientist can find another way to explain things then that is taught. Newton was the everything until Einstein shed a little more light but that just raised more questions. If taught properly a child is taught how to think not what to think. When you teach a child history you teach it facts and then provide it with evidence from all sides so they can deduce why an event occurred. Education is a tool. It means that when they are old enough to decide what direction they wish to go in then they have the tools at their disposal to achieve it. Education is the great liberator. The more education one has the more potential one has.
Childhood is about learning. We have a responsibility to teach and to teach as diverse and as in depth as possible.
You teach a child French....how French people communicate.
You teach a child math......how to use math and how math works.
You teach a child science....how to think scientifically and how the world works.
The last one is where ID is flawed. You teach a child evolution but you also teach it how those conclusions were reached. As the child progresses then it learns how to discern between what it has been taught and what it can see for itself. If a scientist can find another way to explain things then that is taught. Newton was the everything until Einstein shed a little more light but that just raised more questions. If taught properly a child is taught how to think not what to think. When you teach a child history you teach it facts and then provide it with evidence from all sides so they can deduce why an event occurred. Education is a tool. It means that when they are old enough to decide what direction they wish to go in then they have the tools at their disposal to achieve it. Education is the great liberator. The more education one has the more potential one has.
Childhood is about learning. We have a responsibility to teach and to teach as diverse and as in depth as possible.
No Worries said:
You are out of your mind.
You have continuously made false allegations and defended them like a 2 year old defends his favorite blanket. Your pompousity and arrogance show a lack of maturity in the highest degree.
See above.
That depends on who I am talking to, I adjust my level of maturity for each person with whom I'm conversing. :baby:
Besides, I never claimed to be mature! :devil:
More pompousity from the whiny Australian. How did we ever get along without you? :darwinsm:
JoyfulRook
New member
Your education must have missed that part.No Worries said:
No Worries
New member
Shalom said:
It just means a child has choice.
When someone decides what they want to do with their life it means that they have that option open to them. If someone decides they want to be a doctor at 16 but you've not taught them any chemistry or biology so they dont know if they're even suited to it and if they are they still have several more years to get them upto scratch. What if they want to be a lawyer mathematician but you've not taught math to a reasonable level, then they're not going to be able to compete with their peers for a long time. You're holding kids back. Teach them a broad and in depth base and when they want to do something they stand a better chance of being able to acieve it.
If liberal means allowing a child to be who they want to be and allowing them to make up their own mind, to be happy in what they do then yes I must be a liberal. What do you suggest, teaching them something narrow and shallow and dictating to them this is what you will be.
Lord Vader
New member
kmoney said:
Not knowing why you think you need to act on a child (or anyone).
Mustard Seed
New member
Lord Vader said:
No. You have to demonstrate how they would have received a proper education if they'd been permited to remain in the common state of common children of that day. It's obvious that those who are stuck in victorian style child labor situations, or those who are tied only to a familial enterprise with no interest in actively educating childeren beyond what was needed to maintain the family enterprise, were not, in that day, going to voluntarily change, in a significant way, the manner, and degree, in which they are educated. You need to demonstrate to me a massive industrialized nation that got to the position of first world super power without government endorsement, and some degree of enforcement, of univiersal education. I have history to demonstrate what education has enabled us to arrive at. You are the one that needs to demonstrate a tenable alternative path to our current status, or a better status.
Okay. Tell me how many children, who are US citizens, are locked in victorian style labor camps/institutions? The odd thing is that the mere request for a "scientific theory" to support my position validates a great portion of what universal manditory education has done for this nation. Before "coercive mass schooling" most of the populace would not demand a "scientific theory" to validate governmental actions. The whole idea that you are talking about government 'answering' for it's actions with something that gives them intellectualy founded 'validity' demonstrates how far we've come.
Your claim is just silly. For all the snaffus and problems and serious issues with coercive mass education you have the burden of showing how a lack of such a system would have landed us in a better situation.
How can you think it would be any less destructive than keeping the masses locked in industrial age workshops, or stuck on family run farms?
That's not what I'm basing it on. I'm basing it on what history has born out. You have some demented view that somehow your view would have produced a far more favorable set of historical events between then and now. You're like so many liberals that critique US foreign policy over the last several decades. It's as easy picking your nose to find problems, failures and serious issues with what's occured. What you are impotent in doing is providing a tenable alternative to what history has given us. The burden of proof is not on me, I have the last century of US dominance to demonstrate, at the very least, the benign, and at the best, the very helpfull effect of mass coercive education. Show us a civilization that got further than we have, in the same amount of time, without an equivilant course of educating it's populace.
Yes. I am merely assuming that my life is better for having received standard, mandatory, coercive, mass, public education. I'm merely assuming that the reason I'm not in some hard labor camp, that I'm not forced into the oppresive economic systems that were experienced before mass coercive education or similar systems that are outside of our society (third world) is just some mere coincidence that has nothing at all to do with the fact that education has been manditory for the youth in the country I was fortunate enough to grow up in.
If you want to talk about assumtions then demonstrate the tenability of your assertion that an absense of the mass coercive education would have produced an America so much better, so much more capable at surviving Axis and Soviet world domination agendas. Show me what country in the world managed to dominate the world culturaly, economicaly, politicaly and militariliy WITHOUT any coersion from it's government to acheive an educated populace.
Lord Vader
New member
The claim is that coerced instruction is needed to learn. I'm not asking for proof that mass compulsory schooling is needed to create a corporatocracy - that much, I know, has been proven. But it has not been shown that coerced instruction is necessary in order for children to grow up, in order for people to learn. The claim is that coerced instruction is needed for kids to learn (or that history would have stopped cold at 1900 A.D.). Saying that I have to prove that it isn't is reversing the burden of proof, a logical fallacy.
Mustard Seed
New member
Lord Vader said:
Your view of what is or isn't a corporatocracy, and what does or doesn't constitute requisits to an environment for the learning of children, is rather interesting, and confused. I would ask for definitions of what you see as resulting in learning, or as to what is or isn't a corporatocracy, if it didn't seem so blatantly obvious that you harbor some nigh inherent view that the corporation is in some way or means inherently evil. With such a generaly safe assumption, in light of your choice of words, it becomes a rather simple means to realize that your problem in perception is due to a dogmatic hold to a world view that is inherently biased against corporations and all things resembling such. It's rather easy to see why one would be so ready to, regardless the abscence of any more feasable, more tenable, alternatives, to utterly reject the current system regardless it's merits. Simply realign what is or isn't 'learning' for children and what is or isn't the aim and you've, for the moment, dodged the bullet with regard to actualy defending your hardline stance in your demonization of, and resulting dismissal of, the current education set up.
So could you please tell us both what constitutes the optimum environment for the obtainment of an adequate learning environment and situation for children AND also inform us as to the particulars of as to why corporatocrasy is inherently evil and what exactly falls within the confines of such a label. For example, this being a theological board, could you demonstrate an example--the most clear and archtypical possible--of corporatocrasy found in the pages of the scriptures as you see them?
Thank you much.