I hear this a lot, and it may be true, but I am very skeptical that it matters.
The statistics about home-schooled children don't support the idea that they have horribly inaccurate models of the world guided mostly by religious thinking.
Or if they do it doesn't seem to affect life achievement in any important way.
Instead home-schooled children are typically more advanced at graduation and have higher lifetime achievement metrics than their public school counterparts.
As an athiest, and a bayesian, it's difficult for me to worry about other peoples religious beliefs that don't seem to negatively affect them or me. Especially when there is propaganda taught in the public schools that does warp the students' world views in ways that harms them and me.
> The statistics about home-schooled children don't support the idea that they have horribly inaccurate models of the world guided mostly by religious thinking.
I'd be surprised if any such statistics exist. I've seen studies about the reasons parents choose to homeschool, and various outcomes of homeschooled kids versus public school kids, but none about what particular beliefs homeschooled kids have regarding, say, the age of the Earth.
Homeschoolers tend to outperform their regular school peers. But I think parental involvement is a significant differential and is probably contributing to the outcomes.
"In study after study, the homeschooled have scored, on average, at the 65th to 80th percentile on standardized academic achievement tests in the United States and Canada, compared to the public school average of the 50th percentile."[1]
"Descriptive analysis reveals homeschool students possess higher ACT scores, grade point averages (GPAs) and graduation rates when compared to traditionally-educated students."[2]
That doesn’t control for socioeconomic background.
Yes, homeschooled kids do better than the average. The average is also dragged down by the country deciding that if your parents are poor you should starve.
Please check the work of howard zinn or event just watch one of his talks. The entire curriculum is structured to support an ideological narrative more than to provide an honest historical or ethical platform of understanding.
Propaganda being the incorporation of political ideology into much of the lesson plan - even when banned.
Whatever it is, public schools are an absolute failure. But that could be attributed to the immigration in the US over the last half decade. North Carolina lost like 20% of their student base following mass ICE raids.
Many teachers around me have mentioned how the portion of non-English speakers has dramatically increased and is causing significant degradation to their effectiveness in the classroom and the outcomes.
I can give a very simple example - in my high school history class, the cold war was presented as a conflict between communism and democracy - despite the fact that on an economic field the conflict was clearly between communism and capitalism, while on a political field proponents of both systems were happy to subvert the democratic process whenever someone had the audacity to vote for the wrong economic system.
Ooh, as I was typing I thought of a better example - remember the four food groups? eight to twelve servings of grains per day? Less obviously propaganda, though I'd argue the farm lobbies pushing it count. But harms in terms of its link to obesity and heart disease are pretty damn stark.
Given that school children are a huge captive audience of future consumers/voters/employees it would be incredibly strange if the curriculum wasn't the target of all kinds of special interest groups that aren't perfectly aligned with public interest.
> Maybe focus on keeping the conversation productive
I didn't and don't want to have this conversation. Technically, I didn't even ask alphazard what they meant, and in any case, I didn't ask anyone else what alphazard meant, as if someone else could magically interpret alphazard's cryptic remark any better than I could, which they can't, as proved by the multiple different unsolicited answers I received.
I was perhaps morbidly curious what the atheist was objecting to in public schools when they nonetheless seemed perfectly fine with conservative religious homeschooling.
technically North Korea has had elected leaders since the founding. They have elections in North Korea. Doesn’t make me convinced North Korea isn’t a communist dictatorship.
As an athiest, and a bayesian, it's difficult for me to worry about other peoples religious beliefs that don't seem to negatively affect them or me. Especially when there is propaganda taught in the public schools that does warp the students' world views in ways that harms them and me.