How good is homeschooling? The people at the Friday forum believes it to be the best education a child can get. They believe it is more engaging and more efficient, where the student learns at a higher rate while learning to enjoy it. On top of these positives, there are no real negatives. They said the social aspects of home schooling is particularly not a problem, contrary to popular beliefs. While many of these arguments the forum said Friday was true, some of their points hold some problems.

Fist of all, it is true that homeschooling is probably more efficient than a regular classroom. Just think how good public education would be if there was 1 teacher for every 1-3 students. It would probably be much more efficient too. Because of this, home school education doesn't have to wait around for students of different learning speeds because not only are there fewer kids to account for. Also, siblings with similar genetic makeup and environment will probably be of similar academic capabilities, which would make for faster transition through material.

Also, it is also true that home school kids are more engaged and like school more. But why is this? Is it because the home school education is much better? Think about the kind of kid who gets home schooled. Is it the student with a poor home life and unintelligent parents? Usually not. It is usually the student who is from a good family; a family that is not only intelligent but a family that highly values academics. Why would a family that doesn't care about schooling take a kid out of school and teach them? When you then look at the students in pubic school that love to read and are engaged, it is the students with similar family lives and similar intelligence within the family. When looking at it like this, one would expect the home-schooled student to be high achieving in public school as well. Therefore, home school students make a homogeneous group. This means students that are home-schooled are not representative of the general population. Because of this, you cant compare the attitude, competence, or achievement of home schooled students with other student.

Is the social aspect of home schooling detrimental to the students? I think it depends on the perspective taken and the type of homeschooling. From my perspective, I believe the secular type of home schooling is not detrimental. I have known people from my school who were homeschooled but had many friends in public school. No matter where you go to school, neighbor children will become friends. I also knew some home schooled kids who were in extra-curricular activities at the public school. This seems like they are just regular kids.
However, I have also known home school kids from the religious type. The socialization aspect of this is much more different than that of secular. I know of parents of children who took them out of school because the kids at the public school were all bad and not good enough Christians. They disallowed their children to become friends with them; they could only befriend those of the highest piety. I think it is really hard to find "pious" 10 year old boys. Needless to say these kids did not have very many friends. As such, when they went to college, they had a hard time making friends and becoming involved with the students around them.
This is only my perspective. I see it as a problem because I have experienced having a lot of friends and I preferred that to having very few friends like I had before I went off to kindergarten. To home-school people, socialization is not a problem. Its not a problem because they haven't experienced the other side. To the religious family, they were better of for not having friends because they were better Christians for it. Because this issue is one of personal perspective, it is not really applicable in an argument requiring universal agreement.

As we see it now, home schooling is probably better quality education than that of public schooling. However, this is usually only true for those that choose to partake in public schooling. It would not be better education for everyone. For families that value and are involved in academia, public school will teach their children better. For families with poor parenting, home school would be much worse education than what the child would get in the public school.

So is homeschooling better or worse than public education? It depends. This is why it is inappropriate to directly compare and contrast between the two.

Is there a problem with teacher training?

I think the most efficient way to improve schools is to improve the training and ability of teachers. Many majors at college, especially biology and chemistry, are particularly difficult. It seems just about one in four incoming freshmen are pre-med or pre-dentistry or pre-vet ect. If all of these students were actually allowed to fulfill their dreams of becoming a doctor, I would be very nervous about going in for open-heart surgery. I only want the best of the best working on life or death issues that doctors must do. Because of this, it is important that the into to biology and into to chemistry classes at luther are "weed out" classes. In this way, hopefully many of the students who do not have the ability to perform at high levels will switch their major. Then only the smartest people are able to go to become doctors.

Is the Education Major like this? I don't think so. In fact, I know a couple people with less-than-adequate intellectual abilities to become education majors because they have been weeded out of 3 majors already. A friend from high school scored an 17 on his ACTs, which means he really has no business to be accepted into college in the first place. At Coe in Cedar rapids, he was weeded out of 3 majors because they were too hard. Because of these 3 majors, he was on academic probation. Not only did he became an elementary education major, he started geting over 3.5 GPAs and got on the deans list!!!!!! This person shouldn't even have been accepted into college!
I know another person at luther who is almost just like this.

My mother is a teacher, and she gets so mad when her school hires new teachers. They are mostly from Upper Iowa, which is a notoriously crappy school. These teachers who graduated from a horrible education program are getting the jobs at her school just because they are from postville originally. One of the new teachers diddn't even know alot of the educational terms used today like differentiated education, co-teaching, and the like.

I think it should be the Education Major that is weeding students out. Not every person who wants to become a teacher should be allowed to do so. Just like you wouldn't want even an average person doing surgery on you, why would you want a less intelligent person doing education on you or your children?

Of course the difference between being a doctor and and a teacher is about $100,000. That's why so many smart people want to become doctors. Since less really smart people want to be teachers, it is hard to weed people out and then have a shortage. However, if the teacher salary was increased, it would be good incentive to attract people that are pre-med caliber. If this was done, along with giving them a rigorous training program instead of one that anyone can graduate through, Education would be better.

If the issue is GPA or education quality doesn't predict who will be a good teacher, I would have to disagree. Of course this does not predict good teachers from one case to another, but few thing rarely do. However, I think if we looked at the GPAs and teacher quality over the thousands of teachers from the past half of a century, I would bet that the better teachers on average would be the ones that have high GPAs.