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@2rafa @Tree You think that way because you’re both boomers. The reason people used to like the town bicycle is because they would occasionally get a turn to ride the town bicycle. That’s where the term comes from! When the town bicycle gets seized from the public commons and only the mayor and the five richest businessman in town get to ride it anymore, it just becomes yet another symbolic way you’re getting ground into the dirt. You have to open Instagram and see the mayor in his stupid little top-hat doing donuts in the town square on the bicycle that you never get ride going ding-ding-ding on the bell and you grit your teeth in hatred and tab over to BicycleHub dot com to look at even more bicycles that you’ll never, ever get to ride. Forget actually owning a bicycle, they’re much too expensive. You’ll just have to walk.
As I recall 2rafa is a recently married millennial woman.
So like I said, a boomer.
No?
If you’re over thirty, you’re a boomer. The future is now, OLD MAN.
Is that a reference? A joke? I don't get references, because I was raised in a homeschool bubble determined to turn us all into 18th Century boomers.
Oh hey, good to see you! We're currently homeschooling our offspring in such a bubble, except not really because we're concerned it may backfire.
(Quickest version is: We don't own a tablet, we do own a TV and a Roku. Also we're teaching them our weird values and old-fashioned academic knowledge that no one cares about anymore and might not even believe if someone tried to tell them, and offspring may end up out there assuming it's common knowledge :wince: ...so yeah, "18th century" [knowledge with] "Boomer" [ish values].)
Uh...any thoughts? Pitfalls we should avoid? Ways to help our offspring end up OK?
Hi!
As far as I can tell, the biggest thing is that some families do quirky homeschooling because they like that kind of thing, and then maybe their ideology guide what they do for it, what books they read and groups they join, but in general they're just into that kind of thing. Bryan Caplan and David Friedman's families sound like that, my mom was like that, and this generally goes well. If it turns out the child wants a lot more structure or interactions than the parents are providing, or the parents get super stressed over the whole thing, they can find a school and go there, or do some other arrangement. This is interesting and aesthetic. How well it goes depends on both the personalities of the parents, and also the kids. I liked it quite a lot, and especially liked doing a lot of 4-H clubs and reading a lot of books. Sewing club with Jane Austen film watching and tea was lovely. College was fine, but it might be worth having the child take a real math class at some point, most families aren't up to teaching math that well even when they know it, because it's a subject that benefits from extrinsic motivation.
Other families do it for strict religious or ideological reasons, but are not really suited to it, and years later their daughters write blogs about how awful the whole thing was, but they didn't say anything at the time for fear of getting into even worse trouble. Some of my childhood friends have done that. Aella has a lot to say about it. It mostly seems to come down to situations where some super intense ideologically opinionated parents believe that Public School is Bad, and the Homeschooling is more moral, and then go on to subscribe to very specific advice about child rearing that doesn't necessarily work out for the parents or children in question. The can go either way -- intense punishment focused child rearing, or negligent attachment parenting, but with no checks, and taking it too far. It seems to go especially poorly when the children in question were adopted, and do not share a bond from infancy and similar proclivities, though biological children sometimes inherit the same personalities that led to their parents rebelling against the mainstream. Anyway, I do feel quite suspicious when some mother says that they don't necessarily like the process of homeschooling, but are doing it because her husband read some super scary articles about Groomers in the Public Schools, so now it's the Only Moral Way.
We are not currently homeschooling, and don't have any plans to. We do use tablets, though I feel a bit bad about it. Here's an interesting post from Zvi this morning on a related topic. We are very heavily in the Everything is Childcare phase of parenting, even with the public schooling, and I might have different opinions in the future. The child in public school especially really likes organized activities, structure, friends, rainbows, unicorns, and Disney princesses at this point in her life, and I might have a very different experience with another child, or at a different stage.
Thanks!
I had special needs that couldn't be met in a school, and so do my offspring (and honestly from what I've read of their writings on this, same kinda thing applies to Caplan's and Friedman's kids). This both means that school wouldn't be better, and also that homeschooling can be imperfect and still be the best of a bad bunch of options...and still be imperfect. (See here and Ctrl-F "for Jason" for more detail; see also the comment thread started by "Dr. Dad.")
I grew up in a blue bubble; my good private school handled my needs very badly partly because of our blue cultural milieu. Then, starting shortly after Racefail '09, my well-intentioned efforts to lend my analytical skills to the cause led to a couple defenestrations.
So you could say I'm a mirror image of a /r/homeschoolrecovery or self-declared "ex-fundie" type. As they were harmed by their attempted "education," I was harmed by mine; as they were harmed by (an aspect of) red culture, I was harmed by (an aspect of) blue culture. And when I encounter such people, my impression is typically that they're well versed in the flaws of their own experience, but very naive about the flaws of others. So that's why I wonder about the flaws of homeschooling.
Our problem is that the same thing that makes school a bad fit also makes it hard to find social opportunities (which also means school is not a good solution). So far we have the local gym's "kids' get-togethers," which is at least unstructured multi-age social time, but it's not with the same kids every week; we have the occasional gathering with coreligionists, but our weirdo religion is so far-flung that these gatherings are rare; and same for our family. We're on the waiting list for the secular homeschool co-op (but it seems like co-ops around here get founded and fail pretty quickly so IDK). Girl Scouts seems like the best bet so far (well, for girls), but there's no open troops near here, so right now we have a Juliette (hopefully we'll eventually have a troop, in the meantime she enjoys the badge activities and is proud when she's helpful and I remind her she's fulfilling her Girl Scout Promise)...
4-H starts at a comparatively old age; what did you do for social interaction before then, or were you OK at home until 4-H age?
As an autodidact, I had the problem I mentioned of going out into the world and assuming all sorts of things were common knowledge that...weren't. I wonder how avoidable that really is; experts are famous for forgetting that their "jargon" isn't common knowledge, after all. It may be that any good education, no matter where it comes from, will set graduates up for that. Did you have that experience too?
Anyway, thanks again!
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