Homeschooling, home education, school education and the upbringing of children

thorbiorn

The Living Force
FOTCM Member
In various posts accross the forum there have been notes on education, public education and home education or homescholing, but the search engine did not return a thread with thi, therefore a new topic. The background for my interest is what I wrote in another thread:
https://cassiopaea.org/forum/threads/session-9-june-2018.46026/post-767210 said:
Apart from the specific context there is also a general like the downgrading of the school system. In The Weight of Chains 2, which describes the development in the former Yugoslavia from around 2000 - 2010, there is a passage at minute 52-54 which describes how the downgrading of the existing educational system, by changing it to a western model, has changed the quality of the knowledge of the students, leaving them more open to being mislead. Another video
Russian Homeschooling - Great Documentary - a New Trend in Russia
explains how the Russian system of education has also suffered from Western NGO programs mainly sponsored by George Soros in the 1990'ïes. For more on the issue with respect to Russia see the article where I found the video.
The video on "Russian Homeschooling" has been made by some Christians using a homeschooling programme called Classical Conversations, but that is not played very strong, and the documentary give a very decent review of the situation of US education as well, including a short clip with a very old John Taylor Gatto, author of Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Education

There are many sites about home schooling and also many books about the topic:
Best Homeschooling Books (183 books) or another list:
Don't Miss These Must-Read Homeschooling Books
The following links to a book about the experiences of one homeschooler: http://www.jrbooksonline.com/PDF_Books/Homeschooling_Odyssey-Matthew_James-1998-131pg-EDU.pdf It is short read and gives some insight, though written before the advent of smartphones and computers really became popular, the situation in the school system is worse now.

Another book I have found is from the early 20th century and is written by Charlotte L Manson. It is available online at CM Series Her work on the methods and goals of education includes a Christian perspective, in other words a non materialist approach. As a result she can deal with many more aspects of a person like character, ethics, obedience, discipline and will. Her 20 points of educating children is here: Charlotte Mason's 20 Principles

Could a discussion of what education could be, give a perspective on the education we provide to young people and ideas of how to counteract the problems being amplified in the present schoolsystems of many countries? Might another effect be a greater understanding of the programmes that were instilled in us, when we went to school.
 
In this post there are remarks about or relating to education and home education picked from other threads with added comments.
First of all, some of the current issues with education are expressed in the following two post. The first quote is from the thread
Challenging Postmodernism: Philosophy and the Politics of Truth - David Detmer
[...]
luc
It seems to come down to this I think: this whole relativism business is completely illogical and self-contradictory from the get-go. The only way out for the postmodernist is to attack logic itself - so he does away with it consciously and unconsciously. But since other people find it ridiculous to do away with simple logic, the postmodernist needs to impose his will on them using power.

This combination of doing away with logic and using power explains a lot of what we're seeing today: like the double standards when it comes to racism, the mercilessness they show when someone points out the obvious logical errors, the whole "cultural appropriation" thing even though other cultures don't give a hoot about it and so on. I don't think most of the postmodernists realize what's going on, but this illogical "theory" acts like a mind-virus, suspending logic and reasoning and activating "wishful thinking" and "impose your will on reality" circuits.
What is horrifying to realize is that a whole generation of kids were brought up on this nonsense. In fact, maybe two generations: the one that took up the teaching positions of the current masses of children was smaller, and confined to academia; now it has gone global because they are all out there teaching kids from elementary school on up. And I think that the "common core" math business imposed by Bush and his gang emerged out of this.

Meanwhile, we have serious studies recently showing that IQ scores of Americans have been falling since the 70s about 7 points per generation. They attribute it to technology, but Postmodernism is undoubtedly partly to blame. That's one heck of a decline!!!

Average human IQ has been dropping since 1970 -- Sott.net
Horrifying for several reason, one could be related to the story of the Pied Piper, which was mentioned in the Session on June 9, 2018:
(L) The Pied Piper is the story where he makes a deal that he'll get rid of the rats if they pay him some money. After he got rid of the rats, they didn't pay him. So then he used his flute that he previously used to get rid of the mice or rats to lead all the children away. The mountain opened up and he took the kids into the mountain and they never came out again. I thought that was pretty creepy.
While identifying the challenges do not solve them, it might help to identify some of the steps needed to reduce them. From the thread The failing American School System
As noted, the US school system has been declining for years and it has now reached something of a nadir. Parents who want their children to be well educated don't have many options. Home schooling is one, obviously, but so many families have both parents working so that it isn't feasible.

I think parents should band together and create something like the old time one room schools and pay a good teacher to sort of "home school" their kids for them. My grandmother had an 8th grade education in such a school and knew the classics, some Greek and Latin, geography, decent math, etc. She was way better educated than kids that graduate from high school nowadays.
And from the older thread: Hold on to your kids: Why parents need to matter more than peers - Gabor Maté
I've been saying for years that children should NOT be sent to school until they are about 8 or 9 years old. Prior to that, they should spend only a few hours per day in an more or less open play situation where they can learn their letters and numbers and interact with other children to learn social skills. Then, real school at 8 or 9, but with breaks to allow for the development of their myelin sheathing. Further, that they should be tested at about age 12 to see if schooling should continue or if having the basics of reading, writing, arithmetic is enough and it's now time for them to start doing what they really like and which will form the basis of a career. If a kid likes working with tools, this would be the time to let him try it out for a few months to see if that is what is going to make a good life for him. Or working with plants, or designing things and building them, or working with animals, or cooking, or sewing, and so on. If there is academic ability and the kid WANTS to continue studies, that should be an option that is nourished also: medicine, mathematics, engineering, etc. There should be special schools where kids can go and "sample" different careers and decide what they like and are best at doing.

Modern day educational systems are creativity destroying soul-killing machines.
Apart from the possibility of homeschooling, it is also an experience that not all schools are the same, even among public schools, just as the quality of teachers also vary.

The choice one makes depends also on the circumstances. If one belongs to a small community then a few points on education are availble in the thread: Show #66 - Lessons from collapse of USSR for USA: Interview with Dmitry Orlov
Laura quoted May 19, 2014 the observations Dmitry Orlov published in the book
Communities That Abide and on his blog. Here is an excerpt that relats to education:
IX. You Probably Shouldn't pretend that your life is more important than the life of your children and grandchildren (or other members' children and grandchildren if you don't have any of your own). [...] As a member of the community, you do not live for yourself; you live for the community—specifically, for its future generations. The main purpose of your community is to transcend the lifespans of the individual members by perpetuating its biological and cultural DNA. To this end, you probably should avoid sending your children through public education, treating it as mental poison. It has very little to do with educating, and everything to do with institutionalization. Also, if a child is forced to recite the Pledge of Allegiance in class, that creates a split allegiance, which you should probably regard as unacceptable. If this means that your community has to expend a great deal of its resources on child care and home schooling, so be it; after providing food, shelter and clothing, it's the most important job there is.
To put the above quote in context there is a summary in a review on Amazon:
Here's the premise: The collapse of Western industrial civilization is imminent for a number of reasons that author Dmitry Orlov has spelled out in his blog and other books he has written. What to do about it? Mr. Orlov, has studied the problem and come up with an answer which he summarizes in the introduction to this book, "We will abide because:
1. we are self-sufficient.
2. we have the ability to self-organize and recover in the face of calamity; and
3. we will not be tied to any one place but will remain mobile.
In other words, the answer is to found or join a community that abides.
Mr. Orlov provides the lead essay in this book in which he examines some communities that abide and comes up with some rules for what to do and what not to do if you want to form a community that abides. Some of the communities that Mr. Orlov has studied are the Roma/Gipsy, Mormons, Amish, and the Hutterites. These communities currently exist embedded in or spread across various nation states. The assumption appears to be that if the larger societies in which these communities are embedded collapse, these communities will abide because they have rejected all the features of industrial societies that make them prone to collapse.
Several other authors have contributed essays on various other communities that have survived and maintained their identities. Albert Bates writes about The Farm, a commune founded in Kentucky by hippies escaping San Francisco. Jason Heppenstall writes about Laos: Resilience in the Face of Genocide. Ray Jason writes about Sea Gypsies. Two doctors, James Truong and Peter Gray each contribute essays on what medicine in a post industrial society might look like. [..]
Much of the tradition of modern western education had origins with the church. The clergy had to read the Bible, and after the advent of Protestantism, it became important that lay people could read the Bible. In consideration of this history, and the reality that many of the homeschooling efforts have been undertaken by Christians, why not include a quote from the Session on July 12, 2014 (This is the session, that occured at the time the research on the origins of the Jesus myth was taking off, see the thread Was Julius Caesar the real Jesus Christ?)
In the section where the C's have stepped aside and Caesar has stepped in there is:
Q: (Atriedes) If you could give 3 pieces of advice to the world, what would they be?

A: I was wrong to think I could change the masses by example. Humans are fickle and self-centered for the most part. Thus, if you wish to really effect changes, it can only be done by early education, and even then it is fragile and will not last. In the end you must be true to your own nature and fear nothing. If you do that you may make a difference after you are gone. That is not exactly what you are looking for, but there are no 3 pieces of advice that serve all events.
[...]
Early education! How early one may ask and for how long? This might require detailed knowledge of the stages of development of the brain and physiology to determine which windows of opportunities there are and what kind of learning is most suitable at each stage for different types of children.

Below is the section which follow the above quote:
[...]
Q: (L) Were you satisfied with how Augustus handled things after your death?

A: A vile boy who manipulated everyone and everything.

Q: (Atriedes) Do you mind if your memory and image is used in a religion?

A: As long as it is with understanding of the truth. What is religion anyway but that which binds people together as is showed with my army.

Q: (Atriedes) Did you have any vices?

A: None that controlled me.

Q: (Alana) I want to know what inspired you, and kept you going despite the times? What was like your belief, faith...?

A: I was most inspired by Posidonius and the ideas of the Stoics of the ancient times. What drove me was love and pity.

Q: (L) Love and pity for who?

A: Humanity

Q: (L) Pity, why?

A: They are lost.

Q: (L) Anything else? (Andromeda) Is today really your birthday?

A: Yes.

Q: (Everyone) HAPPY BIRTHDAY!!

A: Ave People of Cassiopaea, farewell! Goodbye.
 
After the coronavirus lockdowns many rather than going to school, now have to stay in their homes where they might receive distance education from their school or educational center.

If one wanted to begin a school in Denmark, even if one wanted to do homeschooling, one would be advised to have statements regarding practices, values and goals which have to be within set limits, but there is also some freedom. The requirements are in general terms written on a page from the Ministry of Education, translated they contain:
Practice:
A description of how the school organizes its everyday life is usually an indication of the school's practice.
The practice will most often be described in a contemporary language.
A description of the practice must be stated in the individual curriculum and not the values.
[...]
Purpose:
A description of what the school wants and what goals it has set is usually an indication of the school's purpose.
The purpose is often the nature of declarations of intent.
The purpose will most often be described in future-oriented language.
[...]
Values:
The school's values indicate why the school has set its goals and set up its practice.
The foundation of values is the prerequisite for the school's business - it is the idea on which the school is based.
The values must be long-lasting, as it is difficult to change.
The values will most often be described in a timeless language.
Parents who have children learning from home which in a quarantine situation has become a part of the extended classroom, have the chance to influence the practice, the purpose and the values through their attention and support.
 
Thank you for starting this thread, thorbiorn, which is so timely with all these lockdowns. I home educated my kids for many years, although in an unconventional manner, so I will see if there is anything I can dig up from the past.:-)
 
Today I found these notes from talks by Gurdjieff in 1924. How accurate they are I don't know. And they are translated from Russian using the machine translation in the browser. Probably an original in English exists somewhere. If you read, you will probably think like me that some things have changed since 1924. Still there may be something to consider.
George Gurdjieff "Man is a polysyllabic being" Subject: Esotericism RAISING CHILDREN New York, March 1, 1924

QUESTION: There is a method of raising children based on suggestion during sleep. What's so good about this method?

ANSWER: This type of suggestion is nothing more than sequential poisoning. It destroys the last signs of will.

Parenting is a very complex thing. It should cover everything. It would be bad, for example, to give children only physical exercises.

In general, education is limited to mental education. The child is forced to learn poems by heart like a parrot without any understanding, and the parents are happy when he achieves this. At school, he also teaches everything mechanically, and after passing the "mark" exams, he still does not understand anything and does not prove anything. In terms of mental capacity, he is an adult of forty years, but in fact a ten-year-old child lives in him. He doesn't think he's afraid of anything, but he's basically a coward.

His morality is purely automatic, purely external. As he learns poetry, so he learns morals. But the child's essence, his inner life, is left to itself, without any control. If we are honest with ourselves, we must admit that adults, like children, have no morals: our morals are entirely theoretical and automatic. But if we are truly sincere, we will discover how bad we are.

Parenting is just a mask that has nothing to do with our nature. People believe that one method is better than another, but in reality, everyone is worth each other. We are all the same, but we quickly discover the straw in our neighbor's eye. We are all blind to our flaws. If only a person can look inside himself and put himself in the other person's shoes, he will find that he is no better. If you want to be better, try to help your fellow man. But today, people only seek to plot and trip each other up. In reality, a person cannot help Another, cannot support him, because he cannot even help himself.

First of all, you must think about yourself, you must try your best to elevate yourself. You have to be selfish. Selfishness is the first stage on the path to altruism, Christianity. However, selfishness must have a good motivation, which is very difficult. We teach our children to be ordinary egoists, which is the result of our upbringing. We should always judge them by ourselves. We know very well who we are, and we can be sure that with the help of modern education, our children will, at best, be like us.

If you want the best for your children, you should always want your own well-being. Because if you change, your children will change too. For the future of your children, you must temporarily forget them and think about yourself.

If we are satisfied with ourselves, we can continue to raise our children with a clear conscience, as we have done so far. But are we satisfied with ourselves?

We must always start from ourselves, we must take ourselves as an example, because we cannot see the other through the mask that he is wearing.

Only when we know ourselves can we know the other. Internally, all people are the same. They have the same good intentions to become better, but they can't achieve it. It's also not easy for them. They are still unhappy and full of regrets. You have to forgive them for being like this today and think about tomorrow. If you feel sorry for yourself, then you should feel sorry for others when thinking about the future.

Raising children in doubt is the gravest sin. If you believe in what you are doing, your responsibility is not so great as if you began to doubt it.

The law requires your child to go to school. So be it! But you're his father, you don't have to settle for school. You know from experience that the school provides only knowledge and information, and that it develops only one center. You must therefore make every effort to reclaim all this living knowledge and fill the voids. It's only a compromise, but sometimes a compromise looks better than nothing.

Raising children poses a big problem that is even scary to think about. The strange thing about modern education is that when it comes to sex, children grow up without direction.

We see what the result of such education is. From our own experience, we all know that this important aspect of life is almost completely abandoned. There is rarely a person who will be normal in this regard.

This skew is progressing. Sexual manifestations are found in a child of four or five years old, and if they are not directed, they can go down a bad path. This is the beginning of that parenting, and your own experience will help you do that. It is very rare that children were brought up normally in this regard. You're often depressed about your child, but there's nothing you can do about it. And when he himself begins to understand what is good and what is bad, it is often too late; the evil has happened.

Guiding children about sex is a very delicate thing, because each particular case requires a different approach: a deep knowledge of the child's psychology. The less you know, the more at risk you are. Explaining or forbidding something leads to the fact that this thought settles in his head, arouses curiosity and pushes him to the forbidden fruit.

The sex center plays a very big role in our lives. Seventy-five percent of our thoughts come from this center and affect everything else.

Only the peoples of Central Asia are without anomaly in this respect. There, sex education is included in religious rites and the results are excellent.
QUESTION: How long can the child be managed?

ANSWER: In general, the upbringing of a child should be based on the principle that everything should proceed from one's own desire. Nothing should be given to him in a completely finished form. You can only offer him an idea, instead of guiding him, or even indirectly controlling him from a distance, leading him, starting with another thing, to the desired point. I never teach directly, otherwise my students wouldn't have learned anything. If I want one of my students to change, I start from afar or reach out to the other, and that's how they learn.

This should happen in the same way, because what is directly said to the child, he accepts mechanically and later it also manifests itself in him mechanically.

Mechanical manifestations and that which is acquired by the individual are different; their properties are different. The former are created, and the latter create. The former are not creation, they are only creation through man, not man himself. This is interpreted, among other things, by art, which has nothing authentic. In the creation of art of this kind, you can see where each individual act comes from.
ВОСПИТАНИЕ ДЕТЕЙ - Человек - это многосложное существо (Георгий Гурджиев) | Читать онлайн бесплатно без регистрации
What Gurdjieff says about sex education has changed, and not necessarily for the better when one considers the added confusion about encouraged self-identified gender orientations, freedom to do operations, and it does not stop there.
 
The interview Whitney Webb conducts with John Klyczek may be an update to what is going on in the educational sphere, as far as the use of technology is concerned. After the first 50 minutes, they get into the question of vaccinations and how the implementation of controls in schools would help to establish a social credit system.
School World Order with John Klyczek
Whitney is joined by professor, author and Unlimited Hangout contributor John Klyczek to discuss how teachers unions and the US education system are selling out to Big Tech as well as the oligarch class and their long-standing plans to exploit students to advance the 4th Industrial Revolution. Originally published on 10/05/21.
Klyczek mentions that first Director General of Unesco was Julian Huxley:
Sir Julian Sorell Huxley FRS[1] (22 June 1887 – 14 February 1975) was an English evolutionary biologist, eugenicist, and internationalist. He was a proponent of natural selection, and a leading figure in the mid-twentieth century modern synthesis. He was secretary of the Zoological Society of London (1935–1942), the first Director of UNESCO, a founding member of the World Wildlife Fund, the president of the British Eugenics Society (1959-1962), and the first President of the British Humanist Association.
In the interview they have some remarkable statements about what Julian Huxley expected to happen in the future, which is not so fra from where we are today.

John Klyczek is the author of School World Order: The Technocratic Globalization of Corporatized Education From Amazon there is:
For more than twenty years, Charlotte Thomson Iserbyt has been warning the American people of the New World Order stratagem to overthrow democratically elected school boards with public-private partnerships between the federal government and globalist corporations. In this volume, John Klyczek expounds on Iserbyt’s theories by tracing her work to the present moment as a last ditch effort to stop the corporatization of education. Klyczek explores how the infamous Yale Secret Society, Skull and Bones, utilized Robber Baron philanthropy and stimulus-response psychological conditioning to institute a corporatist system of workforce training for a fascistically planned economy. He then explains how this system is being upgraded to a technocratic education system of corporatist “school choice” through virtual education technologies that program students for a globally planned economy. School World Order will teach you the ulterior agenda behind the ed-tech movement: data-mining students for research and development into artificial intelligence and transhumanist biotechnologies for the establishment of an authoritarian, post-human society.
 
Homeschooling, if it is even allowed in a country, often has to match a public standard in key subjects. If one only sticks with the standard and public teaching materials, it may, depending on the situation and the ability of the student, fall short of what might be true and helpful, since the curriculum of public schools is restricted. It would have to because one can not learn all at once, but some subjects are not covered, though they easily could be, or the teaching materials are slanted toward a particular ideological position. This is even more the case in a society where totalitarianism is setting in or has gained power.

An example of resistance to a totalitarian control of knowledge is Education in Poland during World War II. The Wiki has:
World War II saw the cultivation of underground education in Poland (Polish: Tajne szkolnictwo, or tajne komplety). Secretly conducted education prepared scholars and workers for the postwar reconstruction of Poland and countered German and Soviet threats to eradicate Polish culture.
And:
However, many teachers, professors and educational activists organized underground courses all around the country, reviving the tradition of Flying University from the times of partition of Poland. Those who survived the A-B Aktion and were not sent to concentration camps actively lectured to small groups in private apartments. The attendants were constantly risking deportation and death.
About the Flying University mentioned above, there is:
Flying University (Polish: Uniwersytet Latający, less often translated as "Floating University") was an underground educational[1] enterprise[2] that operated from 1885 to 1905 in Warsaw, the historic Polish capital, then under the control of the Russian Empire, and that was revived between 1977 and 1981 in the communist People's Republic of Poland. The purpose of this and similar institutions was to provide Polish youth with an opportunity for an education within the framework of traditional Polish scholarship when that collided with the ideology of the governing authorities. In the 19th century, such underground institutions were important in the national effort to resist Germanization under Prussian and Russification under Russian occupation.[3] In the People's Republic of Poland, the Flying University provided educational opportunities outside government censorship and control of education.[4]
Reading about education in Poland during WWII, I wondered if that memory was an example for Andrew Lobaczewsky to do his work on Ponerology.
 
Primary and secondary education is changing. Where I am in southern Scandinavia, the last few years has seen a shift towards digital platforms, with or without e-books. Online teaching received a boost during COVID lock-downs with everyone being forced to do it. And now, online schools announce that their cooperation with municipalities, traditionally responsible for most of public schooling, is rapidly increasing. Chats and posts in a local homeschooling thread shows that more homeschoolers join the trend too, so you have an emerging situation where both municipalities, local homeschoolers, and distance learners in other countries subscribe to the same service. The service offers both individual and group teaching, with individual feedback for individual assignments.

The application of AI is moving into course planning too AI, it is claimed a detailed course programs can be made within a quarter of an hour. That is what I learned from the following short video:
The possibilities for homeschoolers may grow, the possibilities for decentralized learning too, but if a large number of people use the same applications, subscribe to the same services, the apparent decentralisation will be parallel to an increased centralization from the AI/educational company perspective. To balance the negative effects from this AI development, one will need to think about how to use the technology wisely.
 
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