You must not know what HSLDA is. Their news is not propaganda. That's just uninformed, very uninformed of you to suggest that. HSLDA has fought tooth and nail for decades for parental rights, back when it was illegal in *most* US States to homeschool. They are an in-the-trenches legal team that is one of the primary reasons it's now legal to homeschool all across the country. We have used their legal services to intercede several times already, to protect us from over-zealous school administrators that try to gate requests with special provisos or demand compliance above what individual State law requires. When HSLDA steps in, historically, school administrators back down after HSLDA clarifies State law for them. All US homeschoolers are required to comply with State law.

No, you don't have to become a nanny state to address family problems. Parents have to address their children, and society has to address the family unit on a much larger level. The state cannot function as surrogate normalized family. It can't for very long without giving rise to despotism. You might recall some failures on your side of the pond.

At what point was the ineffectiveness of the talking-head model not obviously deficient? It was *already* obvious that if you spend time in as small groups as possible, educational achievement directly increases. I think humanity has known this pretty much...forever. Apprenticeship, guilds, etc.. What's always worked better will in the future still work better. That said, statistics *can* tell us which kinds of institutional teaching methods are the *least inefficient* compared to the gold standard of 1-on-1 methods, or simply put to score a rhetorical point: homeschool methods.

It's clear at this point you don't understand homeschooling. It is varied. In our situation, we pay a regionally accredited Catholic school for their materials and access to instructors - actual teachers. Our kids are registered in that school, which has 16000 students. They are available by phone, chat, video, email, etc. at all kinds of hours. We, as parents, make ZERO pretense to be experts at anything the kids learn. That's stupid, and your assumption is based this misunderstanding. A child needs 2 things to learn: access to quality media on a given topic and 2) access to people who are experts on given topics. Between our paid services and the internet, none of these are lacking. In fact, we have the opposite problem. We have so many choices of where to get expert answers, the overwhelming thing is narrowing down what sources use. It can be harder than it sounds. Go to a homeschool convention in the US if you care. It's a bazaar of resources bigger than you can possibly get your mind around, even the small regional ones.

I lifted that quote from 1 Tim 1:8-9, which says in full: "We know that the law is good, provided that one uses it as law, with the understanding that law is meant not for a righteous person but for the lawless and unruly, the godless and sinful, the unholy and profane, those who kill their fathers or mothers, murderers...". Here, St. Paul is talking about Jewish law, specifically the 10 Commandments, upon which the understanding of Western law resides. Paul's greater point is that good people who do right don't need restraints on them. In that sense, law protects good people from bad people. The freedom of bad people gets restrained, not the freedom of people of goodwill.

In Germany, it is a matter of criminal law to homeschool one's children. Something is askew with that philosophically and morally. Hopefully, reason will prevail and German law will change for the better, as it has in the past. Across the globe, homeschooling gaining, not losing ground, and to be on the right side of freedom is to be on the side for parental rights to educate their children. In the US, the Supreme Court "has repeatedly stressed that while parents have a constitutional right to send their children to private schools and a constitutional right to select private schools that offer specialized instruction, they have no constitutional right to provide their children with private school education unfettered by reasonable government regulation"", and the "reasonable government regulation" is provided by State law, which is widely varied. That said, it is now legal in all 50 US states, and the issues today are whether or not homeschoolers are entitled to state or city resources or funds, etc..

To put it plainly, if you have relatively few dollars and an internet connection, and just maybe an eReader or two, you can get a grade and highschool education that far exceeds most public school offerings costing in some cases 5% of the public school cost. It's just not that hard regardless of what any teacher's union or state government might think. We do it everyday. It's not for everyone but we are glad with our options and choices.

You also live in same country that arrests homeschoolers. That is political, not scientific.

http://www.hslda.org/hs/international/Germany/201104190.asp

First, my friends are teachers. Teachers don't need protection from me. What are you talking about? Of course there are good and bad teachers. Now listen to you come unglued:

Sounds like parents need protection from you. Regardless, the disruptive environment due to the family unit breakdown (kids with no life skills as you put it) is way beyond the ability of the school system to address. It *took* what it could not manage, and now can't easily give back: the role of surrogate parent. So now it just ends sadly for many uneducated dropouts and "graduates" that can't do grade school math. Call a failure a failure. But you know, those kids that want to succeed for whatever reason, will find a way, regardless if they are public schooled, charter schooled, private schooled, home schooled, or unschooled.

Back to my point. The schools *took* parental responsibilities. They take them everyday. They go above parents heads and hide behind specially crafted laws. What part of that have you missed? If you go around parental authority by means of the law, you lose the moral ground to complain to the parents about what they are or aren't doing. I can't speak for Germany, but here in the US the schools, like Horace Mann first envisioned, took on the role of surrogate parent, and they keep that role by force of laws backed by..."science". So, if you take the job of surrogate parent you get the babysitting job with it. That is why kids can't be left alone in a classroom. Require adult supervision is, of course, babysitting, whether it involves changing diapers or handing out detention slips. And, you can't have it both ways

And the point of the article is that with access to books, which only the rich had, is now cheap and ubiquitous, which is why homeschooling can exist today, and why it's growing by leaps and bounds in some countries...where it's legal. A free country produces free thinkers. A country of excessive laws produces lawless people.

No. If the students were doing actual work (the "homework") in school, the "teacher" would be a tutor, directing and guiding instead of being a front-of-the-room talking head that reads the instructions to the kids - from the book they have right in front of them - and bores many of them into "acting up." If the kids where learning in school, there'd be no homework. My kids don't do homework because what they do is *actually* learn in an efficient, compact manner *every* single day with *no* fluff. That is what homeschool is about. It's more effective, fairly or not, at a fraction of the cost, is bully and drug free, and is wonderful for the parent-child relationship, which is a problem for many in Western cultures.

Two thoughts: "The law is for the lawless" and "bad company corrupts good morals".

When my vice-principal friend says babysitting, he means it. He literally spends his time dealing with behavior problems, and makes dozens and dozens of parent calls and meetings a week. He babysits, un-metaphorically.

Not true. The amount of knowledge and what knowledge specifically is completely relative. They had full days of learning back then, and learning is learning. It's just different stuff. We've not evolved into smarter, more complex humans in the last 2000 years. People were pretty damn smart in Europe and Asia back then.

Regarding homework, you said:

Stop and think for a second. That is precisely what they should be learning in school, during the school day.

This is an unresolvable problem that currently creates pitiful outcomes and reflects the broken state of education in the US. The smartest kids are held back (somewhat, either literally or bureaucratically) and the slowest kids simply get left behind. But since it's the "best we can do", we settle for it, because "best we can do" protects the interest of the institutions (teachers unions, the public school system, etc.) and not the students. Putting students first would up-end this model completely. It can be done, but it's not done. It's a case of institutional self-preservation delimited by a "this is what can do for you and nothing more" philosophy, that comes with a staggering monetary cost regardless of outcome. There are far cheaper models, but they are radically outside the institutional norm.

I'm talking about state-mandated compulsory school attendance, like in New England in the mid-19th century. Horace Mann believed "that universal public education was the best way to turn the nation's unruly children into disciplined, judicious republican citizens."

And this: "Mann also suggested that by having schools it would help those students who didn't have appropriate discipline in the home. Building a person's character was just as important as reading, writing and arithmetic. By instilling values such as obedience to authority, promptness in attendance, and organizing the time according to bell ringing helped students prepare for future employment. Mann faced some resistance from parents who didn't want to give up the moral education to teachers and bureaucrats"

So yes, the NEA position is propaganda. You can't even get rid of bad teachers without a lawyer and $$$ to go with the effort. "But if we just spend more money..." is not the answer. If it was truly a pure science, after 160 years of field work, surely we'd know more and have better results by now. But the evidence of homeschoolers, who spend less than $500 per child per year and have far better results, is problematic for the public education sector. Yet the NEA maintains parents are not qualified and SAT scores are significantly better? The average public school spend per student is over 10k, nearly $900 of that going to transportation alone.

http://www.hslda.org/docs/news/hslda/200105070.asp

I know several teachers and am close friends with a vice-principal who confide quite candidly that the majority of their work is babysitting in one form or another. That is the racket: pay for an "advanced degree" based on "science" only to end up babysitting. Why not skip the required "science" and just go babysit? What is scientific about that reality? That is the racket, the price of admission: a teaching degree.

You don't need science to tell you how to teach a kid. You need a little wisdom. We've been doing it without science for thousands of years. Managing small herds of kids? That might require some science. The ability to teach children is biological at it's core.

The teachers union website says it believes that parents are not qualified to teach their children. Yet scores of homeschool parents teach their kids, and these kids test higher across the board in all subjects, period.

Public school kids have hours of homework per day because they can't learn in class or don't learn (much) from their teachers. Homeschool kids don't have homework. They do the work during their school day. In the end, most public schools kids teach themselves during homework time. Public schools are in many ways just babysitting farms so both parents can work.

We homeschool. My oldest is in Advanced Math, which is for juniors and seniors, but he is a sophomore. I don't know any of the math he does, nor does my wife. He is self-taught, and due to our simple curriculum choices and environment at home, that will always be the case. Our youngest is in private school for a few more years, but we'll homeschool him for high school as well.

Does this sound scientific, or does it sound like propaganda? I just copied this from the 2011 NEA Guidelines PDF available on nea.org:

"B-82. Home Schooling

The National Education Association believes that home schooling programs based on parental choice cannot provide the student with a comprehensive education experience. When home schooling occurs, students enrolled must meet all state curricular requirements, including the taking and passing of assessments to ensure adequate academic progress. Home schooling should be limited to the children of the immediate family, with all expenses being borne by the parents/guardians. Instruction should be by persons who are licensed by the appropriate state education licensure agency, and a curriculum approved by the state department of education should be used.
The Association also believes that home-schooled students should not participate in any extracurricular activities in the public schools. The Association further believes that local public school systems should have the authority to determine grade placement and/or credits earned toward graduation for students entering or re-entering the public school setting from a home school setting. (1988, 2006)"

Yes, supposed to be. "Supposed" is the operative word. Functionally, it is not the goal. The goal in most public schools is to get kids ready for color-in-the-dot tests, which has nothing to do with getting kids to love learning. Most public education is geared to get kids to score well on a test, which in the end, only proves how well one can take a test. Test taking is a skill that has little application outside of test taking.

"The future educated person may well be someone who has the interest to learn independently..." There it is. That was the past, and needs to become the present and future again. It was never any other way until relatively recently.

Teaching is work, but is not that hard. Teaching does not have to take much time. Teaching does not require expertise in various topics. The more you "teach" the more you might wasting your time. If your goal is to teach all the subjects, good luck with that. You will probably fail. If your goal is to teach your kids to teach themselves, and you NEVER budge from that basic requirement, your kids will learn by themselves and you won't do much "teaching" at all. The teaching you will do will be administrating the environment and providing the resources for kids to learn for themselves. You won't have to learn calculus or Latin, but your kids will be able to, with the right self-learning mandate from you - the homeschool administrator. That's how we do it and it works in spades. The results are extraordinary.

The goal of many homeschoolers is to teach one thing: to teach the kids to teach themselves. Everything is secondary to this primary task.

"There's a reason we have a whole field of science dedicated to teaching - educational science" It's mostly a racket. It's not that hard to teach kids, especially one on one or in very small groups. It's a whole different thing to figure out how to teach classroom full of kids.

I second Unity3D.

Here is a fundamental misunderstanding of homeschooling: "3. Parents have the capability to do it. (How many know parents whose maths is non-existent or whose spelling is beyond comprehension?)" Homeschool kids teach themselves from quality text books and by input from a variety of other sources. Your job as parent is never to teach calculus, but to teach the child to teach themselves, and then provide access to information, services, and people where necessary. Teach children to teach themselves. This is the mission statement of our homeschool "academy". It just works, like putting seeds in the ground and providing water and sun. It's less work than you imagine, from an academic point of view. Homeschooling is essentially an administrative task, done correctly. In fact, the average non-college degree parent has children the score the same, and sometimes above, as those children of college degree parents.

mirra.com Plug it in, install one app, and in 10 minutes, you'll start seeing your (default) My Documents folder backed up. It has remote access and stores up to 8 previous version of the file. It's not a file server. It's a backup device, plan and simple. It even allows you to share / sync files across a network if you wanted to, like an MP3 collection.