= 27d567bc2d48d9f40e9ccc20ea370b15)
JDM comments on Open Thread, January 16-31, 2013 - Less Wrong
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
= 783df68a0f980790206b9ea87794c5b6)
Loading…= b715d02e85f7b3b4ae65ca3d3e450868)
Subscribe to RSS Feed
Powered by Reddit
= f037147d6e6c911a85753b9abdedda8d)
You are viewing a comment permalink. View the original post to see all comments and the full post content.
Comments (221)
I was homeschooled. I have pretty mixed feelings on whether this was a good thing or not. Kawoomba asked, so here:
Pros:
No bullies
Teaches you how to teach yourself
No PE/sports
Go to college early
Cons:
Go to college early
Limited contact with others left me pretty socially inept.
No resources (chemistry experiments, etc)
After Algebra II, you're on your own.
With Saxon math books.
No sense of position among one's peers, no sense of why one might go to college, higher learning, etc. I'm maybe +1 S.D. appearance and +3? S.D. IQ but had no idea until much much later.
History books tend to be extremely biased (America is a christian nation, gosh darn it) (but my parents somehow mostly avoided this)
Biology books tend to be completely wrong because you have to lie a lot when you don't believe evolution (I'm still pissed about this)
Science/astronomy books tend to have wrong sections because you have to lie a lot when you believe the earth is 6000 years old
Of these problems, most of the really bad ones seem easy to prevent if you're aware of them. I expect I could do a really awesome job of homeschooling myself and a really terrible job of homeschooling a more normal person.
I really hated school as a kid. My best guess is that a public school with a good gifted program would have been an improvement, but one without would have been worse than what I experienced.
This may be only anecdotal evidence, but I would consider being bullied for a bit a positive net influence in my life for a couple reasons:
I have always been somewhat arrogant. While being bullied did not decrease said arrogance, or even immediately result in any changes, when I looked back and saw how people treating me made me feel, it became somewhat of a motivator to mask some of my arrogance to spare others feelings. As knowing the right people can make a large difference in various opportunities, I feel some opportunities I have received had I not learned to mask said arrogance.
Eventually you learn to deal with it. While bullying to the extreme someone kills themself is clearly bad, and in other cases it can seriously damage people's psyches, for others "what doesn't kill you makes you stronger". I learned that while there are some people you can "make" like you by acting differently, some people are just shitty people and not worth your time. There's a balance between the social benefits of people liking you and the stress of ping too far to being a people pleaser.
This is far from an advocation of bullying, but without it those lessons would have been much harder to come by.
I feel the social benefits, even accepting the risk that bullying could happen and have a significantly negative influence, outweigh a lot of the benefits of homeschooling. I would most likely take an approach similar to my own parents'. I went to a public school, and when I came home I had a library of thousands of books to browse and read from. I still was able to get the benefits of being able to teach myself, but without the loss of social interaction (even parentally provided social interaction doesn't match up, in my opinion, as the people you're interacting with will likely be far less varied in nature).
(No argument with anything you're saying, but I'd like to record my skepticism that uncontrolled bullying is the best way to provide people like you with that particular service, and skepticism that there are very many people who require that service.)
Also keep in mind that you're going to have to deal with assholes once you hit the real world. While protecting children from them at young ages is an idealistic goal, at some level you will have to learn to face them. In a lot of less than extreme circumstances, you can learn and improve strategies to handle them.
I'm not trying to imply that bullying is good by any means. I also don't think it is nearly as terrible as it is portrayed to be. It is extremely dramatized by the media because of the few instances where it is extreme and the bullied takes extreme action. In a lot of cases "bullying" is minor in nature and not significantly different than other "initiation rites" at higher ages. I am all for teachers doing their best to prevent bullying, but some minor things should be let go.
As for homeschooling, for a parent considering it I would add the pro that you can increase the pace of the cirriculum to keep your child from getting bored by mindless repetition. Again from personal experience, I could have learned several classes (particularly math) much faster than it is taught in a public school environment, and as a result I didn't do homework (I would get 70's in classes counting homework as 30%) because I didn't think I was learning anything. So being able to pace classes efficiently would be a significant pro for homeschooling.
I would once more emphasize the positives of social interaction, and find a way, whether through sports, or preferably a way involving both sexes, to make sure your child is getting that interaction. My point on bullying isn't that I think it's a net positive, just that the negatives aren't as extreme as portrayed in the media and aren't enough to seriously cut into the benefits of the socialization.