That’s an interesting topic. In most states, homeschooling is almost meaningless because there are no required assessments to demonstrate student proficiency in any subject. And 11 states don’t even require a parent to simply notify the state that they’ve pulled their kid out of school.
That's because there are roughly two types of home schoolers, and they're at opposite ends of the achievement spectrum. The high achiever cohort are the ones you see who outperform students in their GPAs, SATs, and get into highly selective colleges. The others don't even finish HS much less apply to college so you don't hear about them.
Sure, I don't contest that. Parents can definitely fail to educate their children properly at home. Students in government schools suffer from the same problem though.
The point is that the average result appears to be better.
My point was that the average result doesn't account for the lowest performers because they're not even included in those scores that are being averaged. It's skewed towards the high performers.
> And yet home-schooled students widely outperform government-schooled students, both during homeschooling and in college GPAs.
I'd love to see your citations on that.
Because my impression is that, precisely because of the lack of regulation in many states, homeschooling has bimodal outcomes.
Some children turn out better (read: those of wealthy, educated parents with extra time to spend on educating) while some children turn out much worse than even the worst public schools (read: kids of religious/political-indoctrination parents and/or ones of limited socioeconomic means/time).
At minimum, it seems pretty reasonable to have homeschooled kids take the same milestone tests as public school kids, in order to objectively measure if their teachers are doing the job well.
You know, considering (a) it's a decision children aren't empowered to make for themselves, (b) there are a lot of crazy-as-fuck parents out there, and (c) it's something that will define the rest of kids' lives.
"Oops, my bad" in the event of poor outcomes won't put Humpty Dumpty back together again.
If you look into these you'll see people arguing against Ray's studies saying "the population is overly white, overly married parents, and overly Christian, it doesn't represent potential results for the wider population". That's definitely true, but it's also a fact of the home-schooled population that those groups are wildly over represented, and the results of that actual population being called "meaningless" is what I was responding to.
It is fair to argue that home-schooling isn't a panacea, and wouldn't work for everyone. I never intended to say it would. I did include the second study which is specifically about black American home-schooled students and their results.
As for the rest of your post, I understand your opinion, but don't share it.
The guy you're replying to only posts simple takes to derail conversations. He doesn't have citations.
Comparisons like his don't make sense. There's no dividing line between government-schooled and home-schooled in real life, there's a range of connections and dependencies. There is no friction or animosity between Government Education as an institution and people who homeschool. Their goals align.
> Comparisons like his don't make sense. There's no dividing line between government-schooled and home-schooled in real life, there's a range of connections and dependencies. There is no friction or animosity between Government Education as an institution and people who homeschool. Their goals align.
I'm not sure what I said that made you think I'm arguing against this point. Government Education is absolutely necessary and a common good. It's a bare minimum that keeps a lot of children from a life of total ignorance and squalor.
I do think that government education has some pretty major flaws, but I didn't say anything to setup some zero-sum competition between the two approaches. I was
replying to the statement "In most states, homeschooling is almost meaningless because there are no required assessments to demonstrate student proficiency in any subject", which is a bit ridiculous and, in context, is trying to paint home-schooling as some backdoor approach to child labor.
I don't think so; preserving goodness and decency comes at little personal cost to most of us, but McCarthy's effort in the book is at its core a depiction of these things surviving even the apocalypse, and at an incredible cost.
That fire they carry is not extinguished even in a world where all systems and pretenses at civilization have been ruined. It finds the wider flame, and decent folks to tend it.
It is one of the more optimistic works he's done, not despite the setting, but because.
TL;DR: An old testament reference to the "malevolent god". E.g. "god in the old testament wasn't so nice or forgiving.."
> In Gnosticism, the Demiurge is the lesser creator god who fashioned the material world and is often seen as the God of the Old Testament, Yahweh. Unlike the supreme, unknowable God, the Demiurge is ignorant, imperfect, and sometimes malevolent, responsible for the flaws of the physical world and the imprisonment of the divine spark within humans. Gnostic beliefs see a spiritual journey not as submitting to the Demiurge, but as a process of escaping his creation to return to the true, good God.
Not an Old Testament reference, but a Gnostic belief. 1 John addresses Gnosticism by refuting some of its claims such as Jesus only appearing to be human. While John doesn't reference the Demiurge, the concept goes hand in hand with this Gnostic teaching that Jesus was a pure spiritual being. Gnostics considered material things evil, so Jesus coming in the flesh and a benevolent creator God did not fit their worldview.
If you want to learn more about the demiurge, this guy provides a good simple explanation and puts it in context. Without ever mentioning gnosticism, by the way. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EgGfQdv_rPc
Or maybe he was searching for "structure", the way Grothendieck was - in pure math, in systems biology, in complex networks (e.g. civilizations, culture, occult) and in individual behaviors
It'd take something like encouraging through monetization the replication of papers / experiments, with completely transparent methods (i.e. a video archive, or such).
However i presuppose that we can also fix greed, payola (and other bribery), litigation of results that some don't like, and so on. I don't think those are solvable (in my lifetime, probably.)
So an alternative would be for a non-profit with large funding to open laboratories around the planet and run replication experiments; this would need to be their only purpose. You'd have to figure out how to convince people to do the thankless work of proving or disproving others' experiments, designs, and so on. Even if you somehow could assign prestige for being the hardest-nosed re-researcher in the program...
And even then, you'll still have people that believe outlandish, patently unbelievable things. You'll still be unable to be 100% sure that something is correct.
It did result in jail time. The linked document states that the testing lab supervisor was sentenced to 3 years. (Not sure how much of that time was actually served, apparently he was suffering from dementia.) More info: https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/2018/08/company_supervis...
