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Re: [seul-edu] Home schooling question

Petr R. Vicherek wrote:
...
If you look at your arguments, then you'll see that either the students
enjoy internet, smaller classes and personal attention because they are homeschooled, or that they are homeschooled because of lower income or
attention defficiencies.
Please don't make suppositions and then treat them as though they were
facts.  You are entitled to your opinions, but you should properly regard
them as such and not use them to back your arguments.  If you have
pointers to applicable studies that you have derived your information
from, then please share them.


  Also, few parents would load their children with junk subject such
as "Social Sciences" or "cultural diversity" classes and would spend
the saved time on solid academics.

I hope this is intended to be sarcastic, but I don't see how it supports
your point if it is.


  Most of your factors are thus related to homeschooling situation.
  So, there is some truth in the statistics, afterall.

  From my experience with homeschooling:
  Not knowing how to teach is the third biggest problem, and takes a year
for the parents to learn. Of course, the oldest child suffers the most.
The first and second problem is lack of competitivenes among peers for
the students that need it and lack of authority equal to that of school
teacher.

School teacher and authority in the same sentence?  You must not be
in the U.S.  (Is the sarcasm in this statement apparent?)
No one has such an interest in a child as his own parent. Just that
might make the parents better teachers, because they have the best motivation.
There are lots of children that are not their parent's number one concern,
as sad as that is.  I would guess that (just my opinion here, I am not
aware of any studies to back it up) very few, if any, of those children
are homeschooled.  Which only supports Mr. Downes' argument (which by my
interpretation is not that homeschooling is not better, but that the
statistics cited earlier cannot be used to draw a conclusion as to why
homeschooled children do better on standardized tests).

-Don

--
Don Christensen       Senior Software Development Engineer
djc@cisco.com         Cisco Systems, Santa Cruz, CA
  "It was a new day yesterday, but it's an old day now."