My Issue With Homeschooling - A Child Left Behind

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septembersaphirre
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My Issue With Homeschooling - A Child Left Behind

Postby septembersaphirre » Tue Oct 12, 2010 4:53 pm

My belief is not that people shouldn't have a right to homeschool their children. I just think there need to be more rules. There should be a standard that parents are held to regarding homeschooling their children. You can say "I should have the right to do what I want with my children as a parent!" but what about the children who's parents are not making sure they get an adiquate education or are being abused? Are you so selfish that you don't think there should be monitoring to assure the safety of innocent children or are you that afraid for people to see what you are doing in your home? If you have nothing to hide, what's wrong with rules? Inspections? A CPS worker talking to your child?

I am 29 years old and was homeschooled from 1st grade through highschool. I should have graduated in 1999, but I didn't. My mother did not take the proper steps to make sure I had a diploma, heck, a textbook hadn't entered my house since I was in the 4th grade. My mother would spend most of her days asleep while my sister, 4 years my junior, and I would be left to fend for ourselves. When she did get up, she was looking for a reason to beat us or verbaly abuse us.

My father worked overseas and was rarely home. Before his arrival every few months or so, we would have the talk that we couldn't say anything bad about her to him or we'd be in big trouble. And we knew what that meant. A hanger, a woden spoon, a belt, punches to the back of the head, her squeezing your face so hard you had bruises. We also weren't suposed to "complain" to ANYONE about her. Nor were we aloud to compain about homeschooling. Neither of us EVER saw a doctor or a dentist EVER.

The only time we left home was to go to church. My point is: nobody questioned it, nobody did anything. I walked all over town desperately while she slept and got a job at 17. She told me to quit or get out. I got out. I ended up falling in with a man that abused me for 6 years horribly and am now far away and safe and a finally building am happy life and am in counceling.

I have no diploma. I probably have the math skills of a 6th grade child. The thing is, I know so many other adults now who were homeschooled and have similar stories.Something needs to be done. I can't stand the thought of this happening to another child. Would you not sacrifice some of your own privacy to save a child? What are you hiding?

jcollins
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Postby jcollins » Wed Oct 13, 2010 4:52 am

Your post suffers from the logic fallacy: Converse Fallacy of Accident or Hasty Generalization. It argues from a specific case(your experience) to a general rule. Example:
Argument: Every British person I know is a middle aged woman. Therefore all British people are middle aged women.
Problem: Those people one has met are a subset of the entire set. One cannot have met all people.

You cite your experience as well as others you have talked to as evidence. On the whole homeschoolers are doing well(much better than their government school counterparts in comparison) socially, academically, and in terms of personal happiness.

Academically better:
http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/200908100.asp

Socially better:
http://www.hslda.org/research/ray2003/Beyond.asp

"Homeschool graduates are active and involved in their communities. Seventy-one percent participate in an ongoing community service activity (e.g., coaching a sports team, volunteering at a school, or working with a church or neighborhood association), compared to 37% of U.S. adults of similar ages (Table 2). Eighty-eight percent of the homeschool graduates surveyed were members of an organization (e.g., such as a community group, church or synagogue, union, homeschool group, or professional organization), compared to 50% of U.S. adults."

Better in terms of personal happiness:
http://www.hslda.org/research/ray2003/Enjoyment.asp

"Taking all things into consideration, 59% of the subjects reported that they were “very happyâ€

narrow4life
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for real?

Postby narrow4life » Thu Oct 14, 2010 2:52 pm

Looks like OP is a "fake" account, or just really interested in causing a stir. Just joined, and this is the only post, and a poor one at that.

There are several things about the post that are way off...for example:

"My point is: nobody questioned it, nobody did anything. I walked all over town desperately..."

The problem is not that you were homeschooled. Homeschooling did not cause your poor upbringing (if it were even real), nor did it prevent your poor upbringing from being discovered.
We use My Father's World Homeschool Curriculum for our 2 kid's homeschool education.

cpascal
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Postby cpascal » Wed Oct 20, 2010 1:50 pm

If the OP's story is true, I'm very sorry that she came from an abusive home. I had toxic relatives growing up, and I know how it is.

At the same time, home schooling isn't to blame. I attended government schools and nothing was ever done to protect me from the home. Many other kids from abusive homes attend government schools too, and they're also not rescued. And that's before you even start on the bullying and other negative social aspects of the schools themselves.

Why not still get your diploma? There are a lot of online high schools, or you could study to take the GED. There's all sorts of useful information on this website, and there's no reason why a lot of it can't apply equally to an adult learner.

uid467
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Postby uid467 » Tue Dec 14, 2010 9:14 pm


JEarnest
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Postby JEarnest » Fri Dec 17, 2010 8:58 pm

Jene' Earnest
WAHM to AnnMaree (7) and Georgia (6)
www.mymangosteen.com/whynotnow

hypnot
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Homeshooling is OK

Postby hypnot » Mon Dec 27, 2010 1:40 pm


squrrl
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Postby squrrl » Mon Oct 17, 2011 7:35 am

I see that this is an older post, but the subject is one I've been thinking about lately as I research general homeschooling laws. I share the others' doubts as to the authenticity of the post, if only because it really stretches the imagination that the person could know "so many" people in the same situation, but also because the post disregards the fact that there IS oversight in almost all states, and in many states, fulfilling gov't requirements is actually a fair little bit of work.

If true, though, this story has to be extremely rare. Public school is just too good a deal for the parent. The bus goes by in the morning, it takes your kids away, and you get free babysitting, maybe even free food, for the next eight hours. If you really didn't care about your kids, it would be absolutely bizarre to pass up this society-sanctioned opportunity to get rid of them. This is certainly how it works three doors down from me, where the mother never visits though she works half a mile away and the father spends his days at the tv, and he rarely even remembers to sign the various permission slips that come home. Keeping your child at home automatically requires a great deal more effort, or, even if you choose to ignore your childrens' requests, more annoyance. That doesn't mean that the OP's story is untrue, but it would take a special sort of sick to keep your kids home and then ignore them. Plus, as noted, state law in many, if not most, states, would pick up on this level of neglect.

Also, though, as others have pointed out, neglect is certainly (obviously) possible in children sent to school, and the school doesn't necessarily do anything to prevent it. The thing is, child protection laws should have prevented this sort of neglect, regardless of homeschooling laws. They don't always, but that's not homeschooling's fault in any way.

My guess is that someone with an inflated sense of the powers and responsibilities of the public school system, and little or no idea of the actual laws regarding homeschooling, created this post as a hypothetical situation. My apologies if I am wrong--and I am confident that there ARE people out there who have experienced this horrible level of neglect--but I consider it to be sufficiently wildly unlikely as to not be a viable criticism of homeschooling.


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