"Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation."
If true, one could argue it is a real issue, because it is not clear that the country's 'management' is intellectually on the high end either.
My wife and I homeschool because we feel we can provide a better education to our kids than the local public schools can - making this decision after giving them a trial run. If you do decide to homeschool, it is important that you never grow complacent in how much responsibility you are taking on.
So many families around us homeschool for religious/dogmatic reasons and the quality of their kids education is a secondary concern. Naturally, they tend to do worse than public school children.
That's a subjective evaluation, no? ;) I'm sure their parents would say they did way better on the religion/dogmatism ruler!
> So many families around us homeschool
This seems like the "gateway drug" to cult indoctrination and worries me.
I'm going in completely the other way- My son (who will be 4 in June) is going to a good public school system here for socialization reasons, and I will supplement that with whatever I can (such as the critical-thinking skills I have acquired which were never taught to me). Additionally, I refuse (despite having a Catholic family) to indoctrinate him into ANY religion before he learns critical thinking first, because I will make an argument that this is no different than "grooming", except for "worldview control" instead of "sexual control".
I've met and worked with some of the most startlingly brilliant home schooled people, that are utterly crippled socially. They ended up being unable to work with others, despite on paper they ought to be leaders. People underestimate the critical value of childhood socialization. When a child finds they do not know the giant host of media nonsense other kids know intimately, they cannot participate in a huge amount of their imaginary fun which uses these media products as the foundation for their social set's humor and identity. That creates a very difficult to unseat insecurity.
False dichotomy. After a certain age you should let them have a voice in their educational goals, and before they are able to express their preferences you should be helping them figure out what those are. You should be creating a family environment where your kids feel like people, and where they feel safe no matter what happens. You should be teaching your children to think critically and stand up for what they believe in, and setting a good example for them in terms of your personal values. If you don't have a self-consistent set of ethical values, and expect everyone else to determine those for you, I hate to break it to you, but you shouldn't have had kids.
> If you don't have a self-consistent set of ethical values, and expect everyone else to determine those for you, I hate to break it to you, but you shouldn't have had kids.
Clevon's not listening to this slop and neither should anyone else.
Unless you're a total psycho, go ahead and have kids. They are wonderful and life changing. They'll probably make you a better person. You don't need to be a perfect parent. You don't need to read a bunch of heavily marketed books on how to be a good parent. You don't need to listen to internet hero advice. You'll figure it out.
Did you even notice that you only spoke of the significance of having kids in terms of what it means for "you", i.e. in terms of the parent's experience? You did not move even minimally towards figuring their perspective, i.e. the first-person conscious experience of the kids themselves, into your moral reasoning. At all. You speak as if they are extensions of your being, and not actual completely new individuals. In my book, such lack of theory of mind towards even those who are closest to you, is exactly "total psycho" behavior. Of the disavowed kind, sure.
Sorry, but it's not your kids' job to "change your life" or "make you a better person", that's entirely on you. This does not change once certain pre-human hormonal changes and other self-delusion incentives manage to scrub it from your mind. Saying "I've done my job: I've raised a family; what more is there to ask of me?", and passing the responsibility of becoming a non-idiotic human being down the generations is doing your offspring (as well as everyone else on the planet) a disservice verging on the truly monstrous. No surprise that a stochastic parrot can outsmart half of yall, and its yesmen are quite successfully bullying the other half into smiling submission.
Also, what the fuck is a "Clevon"? Lemme guess, nobody told you that you could've given your kid a real name instead of not betting their entire identity on a contingent societal norm of mutual acceptance that we now see falling apart in real time?
> Did you even notice that you only spoke of the significance of having kids in terms of what it means for "you"
It was a direct response to your "point", which was even quoted.
> You speak as if they are extensions of your being, and not actual completely new individuals. In my book, such lack of theory of mind towards even those who are closest to you, is exactly "total psycho" behavior.
Wow. One of us is definitely psycho.
> Sorry, but it's not your kids' job to "change your life" or "make you a better person", that's entirely on you.
You're putting words in my mouth. As I said, this is in direct response to your "point" which was directed at the unenlightened "you". I never said it was your kids responsibility (or job). What a convenient leap of logic.
I don't even know how to address your paragraph of your word salad. I will say only that I have kids, they are lovely, they definitely changed me and I wouldn't trade them for the world. Luckily we weren't deterred by sanctimonious parenting slop.
Clevon is a reference from the movie Idiocracy.
> Lemme guess, nobody told you that you could've given your kid a real name instead of not betting their entire identity on a contingent societal norm of mutual acceptance that we now see falling apart in real time?
Whew... you've owned me now I guess? You might need a break my dude.
I'm terribly sorry that your culture has imposed such low thresholds of permissible cognitive density! I definitely believe that it would be morally horrendous to pass that down to one's offspring.
>I will say only that I have kids, they are lovely, they definitely changed me and I wouldn't trade them for the world. Luckily we weren't deterred by sanctimonious parenting slop.
And again you did not acknowledge their perspectives as sentient beings separate from you. You could've said, they are happy. You could've said, they are doing well. You could've even said, they will never entertain convincing doubts as to whether their particular lives are worth living - which is not the case for you can't imagine how many people who were also the kids of some parents at some point.
But what you said is, they are lovely (external appraisal) and that you wouldn't trade them for the world - a fixed expression with zero meaning and misleading premise. There's no weird either/or situation where "trading one's kids for the world" would be on the table (though I've seen parents sell out their kids for less, or sometimes for nothing at all, with the same air of moral stuperiority that you are here attempting to exude); the purpose of repeating this formulaic phrase is to distract from the understanding that kids are given to the world, and, in return, the world is given to them. If anyone even remembers to tell them that, anyway.
I do admit my biases: I only speak from observation and experience, not from a set of phraseologisms drilled into me during freshman year to make me unable to critically examine how my life choices affect other people.
Hey, that's exactly how I made my first buck! How did you know?
Two of them in fact. I keep that holy $2 banknote on the cork board above my mantelpiece. It's pinned next to my todo list with a gold butterfly pin. Actually I'm lying - that banknote is my todo list.
Anyway, that was yet another really fucked up thing for you to say, broski, considering my entire sector has repeatedly been brought to starvation and used as the world's bank of "artificial intelligence" (first by brain drain, then by outsourcing - once yall realized our people might want to raise families too, what, in your backyard?) before enough smart people slipped through the cracks of the education system to accumulate the corpus of knowledge required for building human-free stochastic parrots.
Think about that the next time you feed your lovely children their mandatory freedom fries.
It’s more about the whole package. I homeschooled. Thanks to COVID and some ensuing frustrations with the district, my kid has done public, private and homeschool at different times. I’m in a moderately large metropolitan area, for context.
If a kid has a good environment at home — safe, fed, loved, healthy, encouraged and given access to do things they’re interested in — they’ll do great. Public schools are mostly in the business of serving kids who have problems with one or more of these things, so if you can provide all of them you are not their target audience. Such families don’t have the problems that the district spends most of its energy thinking about.
IMHO, that’s a situation where homeschooling shines if the kid is ok being alone a lot and also has a good social life. (Young kids tend to play with neighbors anyway; older kids move in friend groups, so the game is to get them opportunities to meet other kids until they can break into one of those.)
A lot of people get stuck on “can you really teach everything yourself?” No. You can’t. But that’s ok, because it’s a completely different process to school and the skills and resources you and your kid need are different. Your kid will need to self-teach more and more as he or she gets older, and your job is to make sure they have the resources and encouragement to do that. If they’re not independently interested in doing that, it’s probably not a good fit.
Alternatively, you can pick a private school. These are costly to families, which can make it seem like they’re rich when in fact
they often have less funding per student than a public school. What they DO have is a more tightly focused mission. Private schools also tend to target families who are able to provide that strong home environment, and who don’t have serious learning disabilities or behavioral problems. Thus, they don’t need as high a budget per student, as they can skip many of the most difficult and costly responsibilities a school has. Their governance structures can vary, but in general I think the fact that they’re outside of the normal election process helps them define a more coherent set of principles and consistently apply that over many years. They’re also smaller and so information has fewer layers of bureaucracy to penetrate, and decisions can be made faster. This shows in everything from curriculum and facilities to discipline and staff morale. Some private schools do this better or more nobly than others, but public schools struggle to do it at all due to the realities of electoral politics. Thus, the private schools near me have tended to be no-phones-allowed for many years; the public schools are only now and with great effort able to implement that, and even I think it will be hard to make it stick.
Most importantly… it’s about what the kid wants. Do your best to avoid making your kid spend his or her childhood somewhere they don’t want to be, doing stuff they don’t value.
"Governments don't want a population capable of critical thinking, they want obedient workers, people just smart enough to run the machines and just dumb enough to passively accept their situation."
If true, one could argue it is a real issue, because it is not clear that the country's 'management' is intellectually on the high end either.