More kids being alternatively schooled

I know a few folk who home schooled that don't fit into those categories. They only home schooled up until the kids were old enough to attend comprehensive school. When they sent the kids to school they told the teachers that they were home ed so they had to sit tests to see if they had recieved the proper level of education and did really well, higher than average apparently.
The middle class hippies I know who said they were going to home school seem to do it for a wee bit before sending the kids to school after a couple of years.
Wouldn't surprise me if it was mostly a middle class guardian reader thing mind.

I'd agree with you about steiner schools but I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to give any evidence about home schooling that wasn't anecdotal. Like I said the people I know who have home schooled properly have only done it till the kids were old enough to attend comp. I more wanted to point out that it's not not just mental christians, militias and middle class guardian readers that home shool. As far as primary education (4-10) goes I think home schooling is grand as long as the kids have a proper ability to socialise with other kids.

My son was home educated for a number of years. i don't which of your categories i fit in? I suggest that you go and read any of a number of books written on the subject. If you are really interested, i will give a list of good starters.

Well no wonder you're such an expert on the subject!

I think this fairly reflected my son's experience of growing up too (even including 2 years of primary school). He certainly hasn't expressed any major misgivings about being home educated, although i do know a couple of people who do, but given i also know many people who were unhappy with their schooling, so what. i relly don't think you do want to question your assumptions.

I think you see the extremes Xians - hippies and don't realise the majority of folks are clustered around the middle. I am off to bed now, will post more soon.

Have you looked into Montessori type schools? They're apparently pretty good alternative schooling for younger kids. I know quite a few folks that have gone to Steiner schools and their experiences are mixed. One guy was just mental all the time (got into fights, didn't do shit etc) but as soon as he transferred to the public school system he did really really well. Others usually liked the school when they were young kids but started hating it as they got older. According to them the Steiner school treated them as primary school children all the way up to last year of high-school.

My daughter just turned eight (she would be in the second grade). I have cared for her since she was two or three, and schooled her since she was four. She reads for pleasure, with inflection, sans the public school monotone. She adds and subtracts two and three digit numbers in her head, and is learning multiplication by fours (calculating again in her head, not memorizing tables.) She complains about history class, because sometimes my impromptu monologues on class struggle (that the text book fails to address adequately), are, well, lengthy and impassioned. Most of her science education takes place outdoors, hands on.

I'll be the first to admit she is an exceptionally able child, but none can claim her education is inferior. Seeing to her socialization needs as she matures is becoming increasingly difficult , but we are working on that. Last semester we attended a DIY community school, but dropped out this term. The reason we quit was, for the expenditure of time and energy involved on my part, the experience was not contributing sufficiently towards our rather traditional curriculum. Our family hopes to have her in a larger school setting at some point. Maybe. We are deciding a year at a time. Oh, and a troubled cousin from the urban mean streets nearby is coming to stay with us. I guess I'll be teaching him as well. He is what we call "black" here in the usa (though his ancestry is less than %50 African. Mostly German and Puerto Rican.) He's a bright kid, but it freaks him out when he sits in on my daughter's classes: "You're doing that already?"

I'm not a fundamentalist, ergo I'm a hippie, right? In spite of the fact that I talk like a redneck, and once identified as a long haired country boy of the Charlie Daniels variety (prior to the Reagen era when Charlie recorded the patriotic tune "In America", and I disowned him.) If I had a purple mohawk instead of hair over my collar, and my ring was in my eye or tongue rather than my ear, and I traded all my Stones vinyl in for Ramones CD's, would I then have the libcom poster's seal of approval to educate my child? To place her outside the reach of the post Columbine metal detectors that can land a boy in jail for carrying a pocket knife (happened to a friend of mine), the rent a cops who patrol the school grounds, and the routine searches of personal property that typify the War on Drugs era? All that, without even going into the abysmal excuse for an education that public schools offer/require.

There now. I feel better.

Oh yeah. I should add that home schooling, useful though it is for rearing children who can think outside the corporate/governmental norms, does not constitute a revolutionary strategy, or even a component of one. Because (as has been said) most working folks simply don't have the option. We are fortunate, and old (the younger the parents, the less likely they can afford to home school, i would think.)

i knew a few of them from queens once
could yiz let up on conor? homeschooling has always been misprepresented in the press as a right-wing christian thing and if you weren't familiar with it you wouldn't know otherwise. it's always seemed to me that the plutrality of homeschooling parents were brainiacs and/or had children they thought were brainiacs, and considered the public school curriculum unchallenging. frank zappa came from a family of autodidacts, iirc, and fit into this category.

Yeah, I could do that. He is catching some pent up frustration of mine, resulting from a series of other people's posts, that i have let slide. Sorry, X.

I get the impression that more and more "normal" (though mostly middle class) people are choosing to homeschool these days rather than just the stereotypical religious nutters/crazy hippies. A friend of mine who home educates was involved in the local Education Otherwise group and there were lots of families doing it, quite a range of people and few overtly hippies.

I'm not so keen on Steiner tbh but I have a friend who went to a Steiner school and had no problems, went on to uni etc.

Yeah homeschooling's another individualised solution to a collective problem. I think for some people it's a response to the growing climate of the fear of community and the outside world. The whole discourse of paedophiles, muggers, and kids going outside being "threatening" in themselves means that most parents think their little darlings are simply too precious for this cruel world. I mean, I'm not directing that at Randy or Jason, but I think there is a certain element in the decision of many parents.

And I know two Steiner School kids from uni. One's a really well-rounded, if slightly quiet and kinda introverted guy who's a really good friend of mine, but yeah has hippy parents who encourage him and his girlfriend to have a baby slapbang in the middle of their final year of uni 6 months after they split up and got back together again. The other one's a bit of a funny case, think he might be autistic. Incredibly talented musician (and for that reason he went to Steiner School I think) but dropped out of the final year of his music degree in order to work fulltime in pyramid scheme selling fruit juice that he thinks literally cures back pain.

So yeah, some shit anecdotal evidence to counter the positive stories here, in the interests of balance obviously. In the second case, he appears to struggle to relate to people and has an...intermittent relationship with reality and rationality. Whether that's Steiner School I dunno.

besides, i just called you and your kid brainiacs.

and choccy, what crawled up your ass? nobody said this was a cure for capitalism, randy knows that he's in a special situation that allows him to do what he's doing, and i was mostly wretched in school and would have loved learning at home. i taught two years in a public school and it was a good school so nobody here is ragging on public school in itself, either. but if you can take control, why not? in many places one parent will take in the children of maybe a half-dozen families who help with expenses and that's one way working class people can swing it.

Can someone explain what a steiner school is? I've had a quick google but I can't work out how they're different to normal schools.

don't reckon home-schooling is all that great, socialising is probably one of the key things you learn at school. watched a doc about japanese schools they have really strict schools where they actually encourage bullying amongst the students:

http://www.pep-web.org/document.php?id=jaa.029.0085a

don't think they encourage bullying so much in chinese schools but think the competitive climate out there isn't good for the kids - because of the one child policy adults put all the pressure on just one kid - they have to do well - they become introverted and turn to the internet:

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/news/world/asia/article1294058.ece

Why don't we get a group of adults together, each specialising in a different area, and they could facilitate the learning of all the children in the community.

not sure i follow the logic there. shouldn't we be trying to socialize the bullying out of people?

so the teacher/s you had when you were seven had degrees in all these things?

ok, randy, sorry, go ahead, start pissing on him again

i'm quoting them, aren't i

There's no question that, as X says, an age is reached when no individual is qualified to teach a varied curriculum. (But I think any reasonably intelligent adult should be able to teach second grade, as i am doing. Economics and time management is the problem there.) I am not sure where the point of incompetence is reached. Many kids are home schooled throughout grade school, i am told, then excel in college. I doubt most parents are up to that, but apparently some are.

i agree with Jess that a non-governmental community school seems the ideal. That might not suffice throughout all learning levels, but could reasonably be expected to extend the years. That is, the pooled knowledge would be greater than any individuals. So I was really disappointed that we had to pull our lil one out of the local effort. What i learned was, there needs to be a certain level of agreement regrading educational goals--a measure of theoretical unity, if you will--for community schooling to work. That level of agreement was just not present.