Drlee wrote:I think there is another aspect to this that we jumped over all to quickly. That is the value of in-school teaching versus online teaching. We have a few hundred years of only using the one example. But. Consider the conservative position.
Conservative people, often conservative Christians, have been home schooling in significant numbers for decades. Clearly it has the need for a parent to be home or work from home. Here is the result of one study:
So have we actually studied a hybrid of home/online school? Could not this be the answer, at least in the near term? I get that school is a marvelous babysitter but perhaps that is simply not "worth it".
Maybe it would not be so bad a thing (and worth financially subsidizing) to have parents who are able school as many kids as possible at home. The average spent per student (and yes I know this is overly simplistic) is about $12,000. per year. If parents got, say $8,000 of that to school their kids at home and the district got $4K to provide support we could have a near solution. Especially for parents with more than one kid.
This is a rare time in our history. Time to think out of the box.
For one, it is not the same thing a parent that "chooses" to home school a child vs a parent that "has to" because of the socio-economic/health. The one that chooses might have a vocation for this, or perhaps he/she was homeschooled himself/herself and has some experience, or perhaps there were multiple children and the first one didn't go so well. As far as studies go, the methodology is important and just want to point out that correlation does not imply causation. Maybe the households that choose to homeschool are better off financially (after all, they can afford to have a parent at home), or maybe the kids do get in college more often but do not translate into better overall success (e.i they might enter/finish college because they are more socially isolated and less distracted by social events/pressure but later in life suffer because of this?) and many other factors...
to be clear I am not claiming that any of this is happening, after all I did not review all those papers, but just pointing out the examples of how some co-founding variables can exist and no matter how good the study design, chances are there are many unaccounted variables (regardless of whether or not they change the outcome).
I while ago I heard something along the lines of "school is not to learn what it factually accurate, but to learn what others are learning" and this points out the fact that sometimes we learn crap stuff, but if you and I learn the same crap we can reasonably function in the world. If my crap is different from your crap, then we might have issues
.
In any event, short term... this might be necessary REGARDLESS of which one is better if any. Long term... I don't know if I would want my kids to grow in a world without schools. I am an introvert who enjoys being an introvert (kind of schizoid personality disorder
) and still thinks school is important.
Financially it would ruin teachers/school staff.