Comment by UltraSane

Comment by UltraSane 4 days ago

Homeschooling parents are divided into two separate groups. One is secular with college degrees who really want to give their children a better education than they could get in a school AND are able to do so.

The other group are very religious who don't want their children learning about evolution or many other secular things.

The only real issue I have with homeschooling in the US is that regulations vary wildly by state. Some states have so little enforcement that it is possible to teach a child essentially NOTHING by the time they are 18 and face no punishment for ruining that child's life.

elcritch 4 days ago

Certainly a biased view of religious home schoolers. Most of my religious friends who homeschool are college educated and many have postgraduate degrees. Some do disbelieve evolution, or at least disdain it a bit. Pretty much all of them are motivated people however. Of course that's just my little bubble.

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brightball 4 days ago

The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. It always comes up in these discussions as a boogeyman anyway.

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- pesus 4 days ago
  
  It's not necessarily just the idea of evolution itself, but rather that it's indicative of someone's willingness to continuously and actively reject all evidence in order to maintain the beliefs they've decided are true.
  
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  humanrebar 4 days ago
  
  Most of the disagreements are fundamentally metaphysical (would God make fossils?), so debates about evidence, expertise, and scientific consensus are beside the point.
  
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  rayiner 4 days ago
  
  But highly educated people believe this too. There’s lots of wacky and unscientific, ideas out there that people believe because they come from Columbia University social science professors instead of the Bible. After the last several years I take back everything I said when I was younger and an atheist about religious people and not believing in evolution.
  
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  thirdtruck 4 days ago
  
  The trick here is that we can reject OP's unnecessarily binary categorization as a premise and focus on the illogical and under-developed personal systems for testing reality and challenging beliefs that represent a far greater concern than the particulars of categorically unexamined beliefs.
  
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  thirdtruck 4 days ago
  
  Precisely this.
  Xe were raised young earth creationist and that requires gaslighting your own child on established science, going so far as to regularly test them on their willing to believe or lie about believing patent untruths. Oh, plus the constant repression of one's identity, the lack of exposure to a wider range of perspectives and experiences, and the panopticon of surveillance by people with near total control of your socializing, especially in the suburbs. That really fucks a child up.
  That kind of homeschooling is a cult, no matter how much our wider culture has normalized the literal insanity.
  
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- UltraSane 4 days ago
  
  "The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. "
  Not accepting it leads to a profoundly WRONG worldview that bleeds into everyday life in many ways.
  
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  arkey 4 days ago
  
  Such as? I'm honestly and genuinely curious.
  
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- dmonitor 4 days ago
  
  It’s directly correlated with young earth creationism and climate change denial. A significant portion of the population being taught "don’t trust scientists they’re lying on behalf of the literal devil" has done terrible things to American politics.
  
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  arkey 3 days ago
  
  > It’s directly correlated with young earth creationism and climate change denial.
  Is it though? Any sources to back that?
  From what I know CC denialists come in all shapes and sizes, from Christians to Conspirationist Atheists to people who are hoping for the return of the Anunnaki. As well as firmly Creationist Christians that don't deny the climate change at all.
  
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standardUser 4 days ago

> Some do disbelieve evolution, or at least disdain it a bit.
That's an absurd belief and any system of education that results in that level of ignorance in science has failed.

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randerson 4 days ago

I'd add at least a 3rd group: Parents of kids with sensory (e.g. autism) or behavioral issues that are incompatible with learning at a school.

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UltraSane 4 days ago

That still falls under option 1.

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- Glyptodon 4 days ago
  
  I'd broaden the group to "kids who parents feel have been done wrong or failed by the local school and see home schooling as the best choice available." I don't think this group is quite as consistently college educated as group 1.
  
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aliasxneo 4 days ago

The way this is written seems to imply that religious people don't have similar (or the same) reasons as secular people.

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UltraSane 4 days ago

I suppose from their perspective they do but from my perspective they are just going to raise scientifically ignorant people. I was raised young earth creationist Lutheran and understand this world quite well.

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- arkey 4 days ago
  
  On the other hand, my sister is a firm Creationist Christian, has a PhD and had a brilliant career in research (albeit nothing directly related to 'The Beginning of All Things').
  Chances are she is less "scientifically ignorant" than many people around here, myself included.
  Just like my sister's, yours is a specific case. It's sad that they didn't teach you Creation in a way that wouldn't cancel out Science, as Science itself is something profoundly Christian as well.
  "O, Almighty God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee!..." - Johannes Kepler
  
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  UltraSane 4 days ago
  
  Are we talking young-earth creationist or "God triggered the big bang and guided evolution" creationist? Because there is a huge difference between them!
  Young earth creationists are scientifically ignorant by definition.
  
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- thallium205 4 days ago
  
  Are you arguing that religious people are scientifically ignorant?
  Such religious people like Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, René Descartes, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître?
  
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  programjames 3 days ago
  
  I think they would be the first to acknowledge they are scientifically ignorant compared to our times.
  
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  UltraSane 3 days ago
  
  To my knowledge non of them were young earth creationists.
  
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- aliasxneo 4 days ago
  
  So you're suggesting that religious people who home school have some sort of intrinsic characteristic that causes them to raise scientifically ignorant people? It just seems a bit far-fetched to me for someone who claims to be pro-science, especially given the number of respected religious scientists in the world.
  
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  UltraSane 3 days ago
  
  "So you're suggesting that religious people who home school have some sort of intrinsic characteristic that causes them to raise scientifically ignorant people?"
  Not intrinsic but very highly correlated with WHY they are home-schooling in the first place.
  They are Evangelical young earth creationists.
  
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- drivebyhooting 4 days ago
  
  To be fair most high school graduates might recite the “right scientific facts” while having no basis for supporting them. The earth is 4 billion years old. Survival of the fittest drives evolution. Why? How do you know?
  Basically just another form of indoctrination. Children are not taught science so much as science appreciation.
  
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  UltraSane 4 days ago
  
  How old is the earth then? The Universe?
  
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thelock85 4 days ago

A few weeks ago while giving a talk to some business school students, I was shocked to find most of the students and children of the faculty were homeschooled for K-12. This was a Baptist-affiliated university. I really had no clue this was so prevalent amongst evangelicals.

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carlosjobim 4 days ago

Schools shouldn't teach neither evolution, nor creationism, nor any other origin story. Because it is something that doesn't matter at all – knowledge without value.

Worse is that the majority pupils around the world will be taught both the Abrahamic creation story, the origin of man according to evolution, and usually a third or even fourth creation story from local pre-Abrahamic mythology. In the same school and from the same teacher. Talk about confusion of the highest order!

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hilux 4 days ago

There is another issue. Kids in the first group can get an incredible academic intellectual education, AND be emotionally and socially stunted. I have directly observed this, unfortunately. It also happens in very liberal, high-end, private schools.

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arkey 4 days ago

Those groups do overlap.

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watwut 4 days ago

There is also abusive parents who want their kids to be isolated and do not want social services to get involved.

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