The teacher's union was rabidly anti-homeschooling when my kid was little. I pointed out, on a local radio program, that homeschooled kids did much better than schooled kids academically. The head of the teacher's union became apoplectic, saying "Well, what do you expect? You're teaching one-on-one!" Her assumption was that I TAUGHT my kid. Educare--to draw out. I was an unschooler until I was accused of child abuse for homeschooling. That happened hours after I painted some anti-Iraq War signs on my car windows. The accuser was a neighbor of mine--we lived on boats--who was a White Supremacist member of LAPD. By the time we left the big city and my kid was a teenager, he wanted to take music courses at the local school. The guidance counselor was apoplectic. She said, "But you're homeschooled! The public school can teach you nothing!" Cracked me up. The School Superintendent had a BA in Physical Education.
I am very pro-union except for the teachers' union. I think it's terribly corrupt. Years later I volunteered at a local school to tutor kids who were below grade level in literacy. My method--teaching the CHILD and not the subject--increased their reading level by 3 years on average in 3 months, even the kids in the special ed behavioral unit, some of whom were on THORAZINE, and had had NO instruction in reading before they met me. One kid increased FIVE YEARS in occasional sessions over that period of three months. FIVE YEARS. (Palestinian-American, of course.) The teacher's union considered their credentialed people highly successful if their kids' reading level increased one year over a one-year period. I thought that was the expectation, not some glory-be accomplishment. I was put at a child's desk outside the classroom of the head of the school's union local. I listened to this woman all day long yelling at and denigrating these seven-year-olds. The emotional abuse was extreme. The two kids from her class eventually quit the tutoring with me because they couldn't take her hostility to it. How can kids learn anything when they're constantly berated for being "stupid"?
I went to Kindergarten in an Arabic-speaking school in Beirut. Those teachers were the very best of my entire education. They focused on creativity and friendship. The teachers were incredibly gentle and kind. That's what I remember most. I loved that school and remember so much of what we did there because of their approach to kids. It must be cultural. You can see it in the way the Palestinians adore their children.
People who don't like kids tend to have had very tough childhoods emotionally. Often I think it's jealousy. They never got the parenting they needed and they don't want others to get it either. American culture in particular doesn't like vulnerability and "weakness". Children are vulnerable and weak. Often I've seen left-leaning parents abrogate their job as parents. They want to be liked. So their kids grow up without limits, consequences, the works. And when they don't perform in a manner to reflect well on their parents, the parents get angry. Horrible generalization, I know. But extreme permissiveness is as bad as extreme control. I'm shocked by how much "freedom" most American parents give their teenagers. No wonder they're depressed and anxious.
I once took a long Greyhound bus ride with my kid when he was roughly 10 months old and commenting constantly on what was happening. He was quite precocious verbally but just babbling, not yet understandable. He didn't talk as much or as loudly as the adults on the bus. But the bus driver was so angry he threatened to kick us off in the middle of the Redwoods because, he said, my kid was making too much noise.
I also think this culture is terribly hostile to animals, pet ownership notwithstanding. Can't take my dog anywhere. His favorite pasttime is people-watching. People care more about how I care for him than they do about how their own children are being cared for. One's relationship to animals is very indicative of many things. Also food! You ever really watch strangers eat? You can tell so much from that!!!
Schooling was designed for corporate interests. Kids learn mostly social control and how not to question, how to fit in. Who wants to realize how subservient and out of control they really are? Your social value is how you fit in as a cog of the machine. Who wants to recognize that? We're individuals! We make it by MERIT! HAHAHA. Don't you just love that malarkey??!!! Leftist aren't immune to that. If anything, since the guard rails aren't as clear as among conservatives, they're probably more vulnerable to the desire to be accepted and fit in.
I agree entirely that unions should be supported, with the exception of those for teachers, but I would add cops. I agree with much of what you wrote but I'm deeply distrustful of the teaching of reading at all. The American people were much bigger readers before the advent of adult control over the process of acquiring literacy. There's nothing so deeply intricate about that process that requires it be explicitly taught to the average child, and in fact there's loads of evidence that turning it into an industry has killed the whole thing. (This is not to deny that changing technology has played a role, but I think schooling has done the most harm.) As I've said elsewhere, reading suffers from its association with school (as do math, history, foreign languages, etc.). It's interesting that you believe that teenagers have too much freedom in the U.S. What I see instead is that we've eliminated the time-honored practice of giving kids increasing amounts of actual independence as they grow up, and replaced it with permissiveness where screens, junk food, and cheap consumerism are concerned. In other words, we imposed a "deal" on kids some time in the 1990s: give up spending any time whatsoever outside the company of adults and we'll let you eat egregious amounts of processed food and put a device in your hands the minute you get restless, starting when you're toddlers. (Thus the obesity epidemic among kids: we've taught them to drown their grief and boredom in emotional eating just like adults do.) So while there are many parents who appear to be disinterested in parenting (this was much more epidemic among the middle-class in the 1970s), the biggest trend that I can make out is helicopter parenting that encourages adults to see themselves as knights in shining armor to their children. The amount of ego involved in parenting these days is colossal, but it's cleverly disguised as "protecting" children. The bottom line is that, yes, we're a deeply anti-child society while insisting how pro-child we are. Other cultures are much more humane in this respect, and it's because they have a tolerance for the innate qualities of natural childhood: mess, noise, non-linear learning, and learning that's more effective in the context of free play. There's simply too much money to be made and too many jobs generated by controlling children and treating them as fragile morons for Americans to pass up. Children are an industry and as long as we have predatory capitalism we will continue down the path of colonizing childhood and denying young people any say over their education or anything else. The only choice for people like us is to opt out by having home births and educating at home and in alternative schools. To my mind, these are the most deeply democratic movements in the U.S. today, and I support them with all my heart.
We live in a "literate" society that is, ironically, more truly illiterate than supposedly illiterate societies. How much of your culture's literature can you quote by memory? My kid was reading without realizing he was reading. When he was 3. Just because of billboards. I spent 20 minutes explaining the parts of speech and how the English language was developed (so he would not expect all rules of grammar to be universal) when the boys in his racial group in Kindergarten demanded he could read. In three weeks, on his own, he was reading college level. We live in a literate society. You cannot avoid the printed word. Nor why would you want to? It's the only way you can communicate with generations who were dead before you were born.
As for teens, give a teenager money, an iPhone, a car (at 15??? Are you nuts?), their own wing of the McMansion (for middle-to upper middle-class people), their own TV, computer, etc. When do they see their parents? When they need money or birth control? Helicopter parents are out there in the middle class but not in the working class. Those parents do not have the time for such nonsense. They do seem to go to every sports games, which I find a peculiarly American thing. But all these kids spend most of their time doing stuff their friends (or internet acquaintances) might know about but their parents really have no clue. The incidence of porn-watching among young teens is epidemic. The drug-taking (and I'm talking about pharmaceuticals) is horrendous. Yes. These kids spend most of their waking hours with WAY too much freedom, totally unsupervised, and super vulnerable to every kind of predator you can think of. And it is the kids' parents who gave the pedators the keys to their kids' bedrooms. Horrendous. I would never give a teenager a car at 15. Mine didn't get a license until he was 23, which is how old I was when I started driving. Thankfully he did not have a cell phone until he bought one himself. In his 20's. Thank god. I have two but don't use either. I am very concerned about the surveillance state. I have seen 18-month-old babies in grocery carts with their own cell phone or other tablet. This is crazy. Their executive function doesn't develop till they're 30. What are parents thinking of? Just going along with the Jones's, is my guess. Or they're not thinking at all. Kids used to grow up in extended families. That's where they learned most of what they know. We need to go back to families being families--not disparate individuals. Indeed, social changes we're facing right now demand that we go back to focusing more on community and less on individual obsessions. Or we're not going to survive, individually OR as groups. American kids have way too much freedom and way too little parenting. I have friends whose kids are joining the military, thinking that's a guaranteed wonderful career. I'm watching what's going on world-wide and I ask them: WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? DON'T YOUR LOVE YOUR KIDS/GRANDKIDS??? They say, "Oh, I want them to be happy." This is nuts. Those kids are going to come back totally mentally ill, as most vets of recent American wars are mentally ill to one degree or another. You cannot participate in mass murder without paying a HUGE price. Sacrificing your kids for the friggin' billionaires. This is nuts.
As for police unions, are you aware that quite a few of them refused PCR testing because they knew their DNA was being harvested and actually shared not just with a company in the US but also with an entity in China? I stopped donating blood because of this issue. Police need unions. People are nuts and guns are everywhere. They need protection from the public. And if we did not have police, most of us wouldn't be able to leave our homes with any guarantee of being able to return home again. I do ancillary work remotely with a police entity. I called them pigs in the 70's like most of my cohort. But cops really do need unions. So do foster parents, in my opinion. Foster parents have no protections at all and foster kids know exactly how to hurt you the most. That's what the foster care system has taught them. That's why people are leery of being foster parents, sad to say. Being a cop is a friggin scary career move. They fear the public more than the public fears them. Truthfully.
Before I go on I’d like to agree with you that left and right are horribly simplistic. It’s definitely not a two camp binary, nor a two-dimensional spectrum. It’s more of a polydimensional space in which every individual occupies a unique position. People tend to cohere in certain areas but there’s no straightforward left-right curve, and if there was, I certainly don’t think it would be a classic bell curve with most people in the centre.
I’m British so I have a different experience of state education; my only knowledge in detail of the American system comes from American friends who have been through it. Some of their descriptions are hard to believe - you really have no rigorous system of end-of-school examinations on the subjects studied? Just a multiple choice quiz?
But my suspicion is that the reason American schools are so horrific (according to former inmates) is conservatives. The British state education system, along with most of those in Europe, was designed by socialists and has mainly been managed by socialist teachers; most teachers and academics are leftist because fundamentally understanding more of how the world works tends to move people to the left. In Europe teachers and academics have been allowed to have more influence than I suspect they have in the US; accordingly the system is more tuned to the needs of the students, rather than the businesses who run the schools.
Well it was at the time I went through it. Not so much the last 20 years, essentially because of conservatives in the Labour and Conservative parties. I suspect they what we have now is a lot closer to yours than it was in say 2000.
One of my American friends describes never bothering with school in her teens, but just turning up for the SAT and passing it easily. If this is a fair description then homeschooling is a viable alternative. But the fundamental problem as a widespread strategy is that parents can only teach their children what they know. My mum cannot understand maths. I can. This has only been possible because I was taught it by trained professionals. Same for the French and German languages. Same for various other subjects. My parents did however teach me to read before I started school, so I would have been miles ahead of my peers in a homeschooled society - but again, why should I get this massive advantage over other kids who weren’t so lucky? I didn’t earn it.
So homeschooling as a widespread option would ensure that the children of the uneducated remain uneducated. It’s not a child’s fault if their parents can’t do maths; it’s not fair to deny them life opportunities as a result. The only way to ensure that all children have the opportunity to better themselves through education is for the state to step in. And leaving education in the hands of businesses will ensure that the profit motive comes before the educational one every time. This ultimately is why leftists are generally behind state education - it’s the only way to guarantee a good minimum for everyone.
If you think you can do better than the state you should absolutely be entitled to try, with suitable monitoring to ensure that you are actually teaching the child something (otherwise it’s child abuse). But I struggle to see how you’re going to replicate the social experience, and the fact that a huge amount of what any student learns is from their peers. Most of the homeschooled people I know are significantly socially inept (even worse than me); in some cases they were like this before and were withdrawn from school due to bullying. I can understand this, but the thing is that the world does contain other people, you are going to have to deal with them so they should really be a central part of your education. I’m guessing though that modern homeschooling communities have ways round this, again I’m comparing with Britain in the 90s.
Sorry for the long post, just wanted to give my opinion as to why leftists like state education.
Not sure how much most Americans know about your system but I've had many British friends who came here (illegally, a lot of them, which is possible if you're Caucasian with minimum worry) because of how rigid and class-based educational opportunities are in Britain. My own nieces were in Oxford when they were 14 (their father had a sabbatical at Oxford University) and were put in the local school. Of course, they had not taken the exam to funnel them towards university or vocational school when they were 11 and their parents were appalled by your educational system. The majority of teachers in the US do lean left because they're "educated" (although I don't think a major in Education is an education). And I do know there are multiple opportunities in the US system to get back on track if, for example, you lose a parent to death or divorce or addiction sometime in your youth, or you decide you prefer a different career, etc. That's why a lot of Brits come here. To get back on track educationally. As a young reader you would have been ahead of some homeschoolers and way behind others. Homeschoolers tend to be 2-4 years ahead of their peers intellectually. They also get along with adults phenomenally well. And many have gone from homeschooling to Ivy League institutions (which I don't recommend for anyone). Much of the socialization you get in school from other kids is dysfunctional. Probably why so many people took the jab when it was clearly not an intelligent move. I wasn't strong in math either as a kid, but that was because of the math system my school was using in high school. Many years later I needed more math for an allied medical degree and found I have a marked ability in math. In fact, I just thought it was common sense and getting what I needed was a breeze. I just do most of it in my head. And they wanted to see every step on paper in high school, which they called "New Math". My kid taught himself math, which is easily done. His (homeschooled) math skills were so strong that he was made the Math Teacher's Assistant in college for classmates who had both public and private educations and had many more years of math than he did. That says it all, really. He only had Algebra I but had stronger math skills than kids with Advanced Calculus. I wanted to be home educated by my father (who was very well-educated degree-wise) because I admired the way John Stuart Mill was educated. (He declined.) I have worked with homeschooled kids of parents who lack much formal education. Some of them did no better in formal education than they did at home, although I did teach them to read at grade level. They knew how to garden and hunt and build things with their hands which are skills formally educated people often lack, and which will come in handy in the near future, I expect. But standardized education is a waste of time. I know I was pretty bored during school (inside the classroom--I learned international politics outside class but my school was in an unusual place with an extremely international population--because rather than focusing on subjects that riveted me (in which I tested off the charts, as do many kids with specialized interests) I had to waste my time plodding along at what was considered my agemates' level.
Test results do not indicate what you know and, ESPECIALLY, they do not indicate if you know HOW TO LEARN. Your teachers in school had no idea what kind of world you would be facing today, I think we can both agree. So their primary responsibility, whether they were homeschooling parents or in a state or private school, was to TEACH YOU HOW TO LEARN. NOT what to learn. Ideally, you should be learning every day of your life. That's how we evolved. And it is essential for our survival as individuals and as a species.
Although I attended a private international school of much higher standards than my American peers in university (who attended both state and private schools in the US and other countries), what I really learned was two-fold: How to learn what I felt *I* needed to learn, and international politics. By that I include intelligence services whose kids I went to school with, all the backroom machinations that are hidden behind reported political decisions, real lived international history (from my classmates' families' experiences) etc. I use that second form of education every day. In fact, I am pretty well-equipped to analyze what's going on right now. And I engage people online because that is probably the most effective form of activism I can engage in. I don't have money, getting my passport renewed would involve ridiculous machinations because of my complicated heritage, and I refuse to be vaccinated so it's pretty much pointless anyway. But I am very grateful that I know enough not to be frightened of what's going on, and being really well educated in dealing with authoritarianism and propaganda. I grew up with this stuff in the street--NOT in the classroom. Colonialism and imperialism? Been there. Watched it up front and personal.
The human juvenile brain cannot do but to learn. That's how it works. Just as I am very careful with what I do in front of my extremely bright horse, I know kids "learn" from everything we do in front of them. You have no idea what your kids' teachers do in front of them or what holes they have in their education or what serious emotional or social deficits they have. You don't even know what happens when their classroom door is closed.
I don't think homeschooled people are socially inept. I think they have not been forced into conformity. You can look at it as a weakness; I consider it a strength. In fact, it is a real adaptive asset right now and will be more so in the future. The entire planet is moving into a very difficult time. Your degrees will not protect you. In fact, they are likely to blind you to what is going on. And you will learn the skills your "uneducated" mates have are extremely valuable.
Leftists like state education because a lot of them make a living through it. Although I don't really know what you mean by "leftist". I don't think many of my public school teachers in the US (where I was in school for a total of 4 years) were leftist in the least. The union people defend the public school system because they earn nice money, have great benefits, a LONG summer vacation, and a reliable pension after they retire. Though I think that last bit is about to be flushed down the toilet, in the UK as well as in the US, thanks to those populations' penchant towards conformity. I suggest you read up on the history of the development of public (state) education, as well as private education. In this country it is not about education. Nor is it in yours. It's more about class--keeping people in the class their parents were born into. There's more class mobility here but not as much as people think. I think you call private school "public". If you look at the intellectual background of your royal family, even the most privileged kids in the U.K. apparently have pretty poor "public" education. I do not like your elitism at all. Ours is bad enough but yours is over the top. And is very much related to your long history of colonialism. But that's another subject entirely. Or is it? How does a degree in Art History prepare a kid to be King?
The teacher's union was rabidly anti-homeschooling when my kid was little. I pointed out, on a local radio program, that homeschooled kids did much better than schooled kids academically. The head of the teacher's union became apoplectic, saying "Well, what do you expect? You're teaching one-on-one!" Her assumption was that I TAUGHT my kid. Educare--to draw out. I was an unschooler until I was accused of child abuse for homeschooling. That happened hours after I painted some anti-Iraq War signs on my car windows. The accuser was a neighbor of mine--we lived on boats--who was a White Supremacist member of LAPD. By the time we left the big city and my kid was a teenager, he wanted to take music courses at the local school. The guidance counselor was apoplectic. She said, "But you're homeschooled! The public school can teach you nothing!" Cracked me up. The School Superintendent had a BA in Physical Education.
I am very pro-union except for the teachers' union. I think it's terribly corrupt. Years later I volunteered at a local school to tutor kids who were below grade level in literacy. My method--teaching the CHILD and not the subject--increased their reading level by 3 years on average in 3 months, even the kids in the special ed behavioral unit, some of whom were on THORAZINE, and had had NO instruction in reading before they met me. One kid increased FIVE YEARS in occasional sessions over that period of three months. FIVE YEARS. (Palestinian-American, of course.) The teacher's union considered their credentialed people highly successful if their kids' reading level increased one year over a one-year period. I thought that was the expectation, not some glory-be accomplishment. I was put at a child's desk outside the classroom of the head of the school's union local. I listened to this woman all day long yelling at and denigrating these seven-year-olds. The emotional abuse was extreme. The two kids from her class eventually quit the tutoring with me because they couldn't take her hostility to it. How can kids learn anything when they're constantly berated for being "stupid"?
I went to Kindergarten in an Arabic-speaking school in Beirut. Those teachers were the very best of my entire education. They focused on creativity and friendship. The teachers were incredibly gentle and kind. That's what I remember most. I loved that school and remember so much of what we did there because of their approach to kids. It must be cultural. You can see it in the way the Palestinians adore their children.
People who don't like kids tend to have had very tough childhoods emotionally. Often I think it's jealousy. They never got the parenting they needed and they don't want others to get it either. American culture in particular doesn't like vulnerability and "weakness". Children are vulnerable and weak. Often I've seen left-leaning parents abrogate their job as parents. They want to be liked. So their kids grow up without limits, consequences, the works. And when they don't perform in a manner to reflect well on their parents, the parents get angry. Horrible generalization, I know. But extreme permissiveness is as bad as extreme control. I'm shocked by how much "freedom" most American parents give their teenagers. No wonder they're depressed and anxious.
I once took a long Greyhound bus ride with my kid when he was roughly 10 months old and commenting constantly on what was happening. He was quite precocious verbally but just babbling, not yet understandable. He didn't talk as much or as loudly as the adults on the bus. But the bus driver was so angry he threatened to kick us off in the middle of the Redwoods because, he said, my kid was making too much noise.
I also think this culture is terribly hostile to animals, pet ownership notwithstanding. Can't take my dog anywhere. His favorite pasttime is people-watching. People care more about how I care for him than they do about how their own children are being cared for. One's relationship to animals is very indicative of many things. Also food! You ever really watch strangers eat? You can tell so much from that!!!
Schooling was designed for corporate interests. Kids learn mostly social control and how not to question, how to fit in. Who wants to realize how subservient and out of control they really are? Your social value is how you fit in as a cog of the machine. Who wants to recognize that? We're individuals! We make it by MERIT! HAHAHA. Don't you just love that malarkey??!!! Leftist aren't immune to that. If anything, since the guard rails aren't as clear as among conservatives, they're probably more vulnerable to the desire to be accepted and fit in.
I agree entirely that unions should be supported, with the exception of those for teachers, but I would add cops. I agree with much of what you wrote but I'm deeply distrustful of the teaching of reading at all. The American people were much bigger readers before the advent of adult control over the process of acquiring literacy. There's nothing so deeply intricate about that process that requires it be explicitly taught to the average child, and in fact there's loads of evidence that turning it into an industry has killed the whole thing. (This is not to deny that changing technology has played a role, but I think schooling has done the most harm.) As I've said elsewhere, reading suffers from its association with school (as do math, history, foreign languages, etc.). It's interesting that you believe that teenagers have too much freedom in the U.S. What I see instead is that we've eliminated the time-honored practice of giving kids increasing amounts of actual independence as they grow up, and replaced it with permissiveness where screens, junk food, and cheap consumerism are concerned. In other words, we imposed a "deal" on kids some time in the 1990s: give up spending any time whatsoever outside the company of adults and we'll let you eat egregious amounts of processed food and put a device in your hands the minute you get restless, starting when you're toddlers. (Thus the obesity epidemic among kids: we've taught them to drown their grief and boredom in emotional eating just like adults do.) So while there are many parents who appear to be disinterested in parenting (this was much more epidemic among the middle-class in the 1970s), the biggest trend that I can make out is helicopter parenting that encourages adults to see themselves as knights in shining armor to their children. The amount of ego involved in parenting these days is colossal, but it's cleverly disguised as "protecting" children. The bottom line is that, yes, we're a deeply anti-child society while insisting how pro-child we are. Other cultures are much more humane in this respect, and it's because they have a tolerance for the innate qualities of natural childhood: mess, noise, non-linear learning, and learning that's more effective in the context of free play. There's simply too much money to be made and too many jobs generated by controlling children and treating them as fragile morons for Americans to pass up. Children are an industry and as long as we have predatory capitalism we will continue down the path of colonizing childhood and denying young people any say over their education or anything else. The only choice for people like us is to opt out by having home births and educating at home and in alternative schools. To my mind, these are the most deeply democratic movements in the U.S. today, and I support them with all my heart.
We live in a "literate" society that is, ironically, more truly illiterate than supposedly illiterate societies. How much of your culture's literature can you quote by memory? My kid was reading without realizing he was reading. When he was 3. Just because of billboards. I spent 20 minutes explaining the parts of speech and how the English language was developed (so he would not expect all rules of grammar to be universal) when the boys in his racial group in Kindergarten demanded he could read. In three weeks, on his own, he was reading college level. We live in a literate society. You cannot avoid the printed word. Nor why would you want to? It's the only way you can communicate with generations who were dead before you were born.
As for teens, give a teenager money, an iPhone, a car (at 15??? Are you nuts?), their own wing of the McMansion (for middle-to upper middle-class people), their own TV, computer, etc. When do they see their parents? When they need money or birth control? Helicopter parents are out there in the middle class but not in the working class. Those parents do not have the time for such nonsense. They do seem to go to every sports games, which I find a peculiarly American thing. But all these kids spend most of their time doing stuff their friends (or internet acquaintances) might know about but their parents really have no clue. The incidence of porn-watching among young teens is epidemic. The drug-taking (and I'm talking about pharmaceuticals) is horrendous. Yes. These kids spend most of their waking hours with WAY too much freedom, totally unsupervised, and super vulnerable to every kind of predator you can think of. And it is the kids' parents who gave the pedators the keys to their kids' bedrooms. Horrendous. I would never give a teenager a car at 15. Mine didn't get a license until he was 23, which is how old I was when I started driving. Thankfully he did not have a cell phone until he bought one himself. In his 20's. Thank god. I have two but don't use either. I am very concerned about the surveillance state. I have seen 18-month-old babies in grocery carts with their own cell phone or other tablet. This is crazy. Their executive function doesn't develop till they're 30. What are parents thinking of? Just going along with the Jones's, is my guess. Or they're not thinking at all. Kids used to grow up in extended families. That's where they learned most of what they know. We need to go back to families being families--not disparate individuals. Indeed, social changes we're facing right now demand that we go back to focusing more on community and less on individual obsessions. Or we're not going to survive, individually OR as groups. American kids have way too much freedom and way too little parenting. I have friends whose kids are joining the military, thinking that's a guaranteed wonderful career. I'm watching what's going on world-wide and I ask them: WHAT ARE YOU THINKING? DON'T YOUR LOVE YOUR KIDS/GRANDKIDS??? They say, "Oh, I want them to be happy." This is nuts. Those kids are going to come back totally mentally ill, as most vets of recent American wars are mentally ill to one degree or another. You cannot participate in mass murder without paying a HUGE price. Sacrificing your kids for the friggin' billionaires. This is nuts.
As for police unions, are you aware that quite a few of them refused PCR testing because they knew their DNA was being harvested and actually shared not just with a company in the US but also with an entity in China? I stopped donating blood because of this issue. Police need unions. People are nuts and guns are everywhere. They need protection from the public. And if we did not have police, most of us wouldn't be able to leave our homes with any guarantee of being able to return home again. I do ancillary work remotely with a police entity. I called them pigs in the 70's like most of my cohort. But cops really do need unions. So do foster parents, in my opinion. Foster parents have no protections at all and foster kids know exactly how to hurt you the most. That's what the foster care system has taught them. That's why people are leery of being foster parents, sad to say. Being a cop is a friggin scary career move. They fear the public more than the public fears them. Truthfully.
Before I go on I’d like to agree with you that left and right are horribly simplistic. It’s definitely not a two camp binary, nor a two-dimensional spectrum. It’s more of a polydimensional space in which every individual occupies a unique position. People tend to cohere in certain areas but there’s no straightforward left-right curve, and if there was, I certainly don’t think it would be a classic bell curve with most people in the centre.
I’m British so I have a different experience of state education; my only knowledge in detail of the American system comes from American friends who have been through it. Some of their descriptions are hard to believe - you really have no rigorous system of end-of-school examinations on the subjects studied? Just a multiple choice quiz?
But my suspicion is that the reason American schools are so horrific (according to former inmates) is conservatives. The British state education system, along with most of those in Europe, was designed by socialists and has mainly been managed by socialist teachers; most teachers and academics are leftist because fundamentally understanding more of how the world works tends to move people to the left. In Europe teachers and academics have been allowed to have more influence than I suspect they have in the US; accordingly the system is more tuned to the needs of the students, rather than the businesses who run the schools.
Well it was at the time I went through it. Not so much the last 20 years, essentially because of conservatives in the Labour and Conservative parties. I suspect they what we have now is a lot closer to yours than it was in say 2000.
One of my American friends describes never bothering with school in her teens, but just turning up for the SAT and passing it easily. If this is a fair description then homeschooling is a viable alternative. But the fundamental problem as a widespread strategy is that parents can only teach their children what they know. My mum cannot understand maths. I can. This has only been possible because I was taught it by trained professionals. Same for the French and German languages. Same for various other subjects. My parents did however teach me to read before I started school, so I would have been miles ahead of my peers in a homeschooled society - but again, why should I get this massive advantage over other kids who weren’t so lucky? I didn’t earn it.
So homeschooling as a widespread option would ensure that the children of the uneducated remain uneducated. It’s not a child’s fault if their parents can’t do maths; it’s not fair to deny them life opportunities as a result. The only way to ensure that all children have the opportunity to better themselves through education is for the state to step in. And leaving education in the hands of businesses will ensure that the profit motive comes before the educational one every time. This ultimately is why leftists are generally behind state education - it’s the only way to guarantee a good minimum for everyone.
If you think you can do better than the state you should absolutely be entitled to try, with suitable monitoring to ensure that you are actually teaching the child something (otherwise it’s child abuse). But I struggle to see how you’re going to replicate the social experience, and the fact that a huge amount of what any student learns is from their peers. Most of the homeschooled people I know are significantly socially inept (even worse than me); in some cases they were like this before and were withdrawn from school due to bullying. I can understand this, but the thing is that the world does contain other people, you are going to have to deal with them so they should really be a central part of your education. I’m guessing though that modern homeschooling communities have ways round this, again I’m comparing with Britain in the 90s.
Sorry for the long post, just wanted to give my opinion as to why leftists like state education.
Not sure how much most Americans know about your system but I've had many British friends who came here (illegally, a lot of them, which is possible if you're Caucasian with minimum worry) because of how rigid and class-based educational opportunities are in Britain. My own nieces were in Oxford when they were 14 (their father had a sabbatical at Oxford University) and were put in the local school. Of course, they had not taken the exam to funnel them towards university or vocational school when they were 11 and their parents were appalled by your educational system. The majority of teachers in the US do lean left because they're "educated" (although I don't think a major in Education is an education). And I do know there are multiple opportunities in the US system to get back on track if, for example, you lose a parent to death or divorce or addiction sometime in your youth, or you decide you prefer a different career, etc. That's why a lot of Brits come here. To get back on track educationally. As a young reader you would have been ahead of some homeschoolers and way behind others. Homeschoolers tend to be 2-4 years ahead of their peers intellectually. They also get along with adults phenomenally well. And many have gone from homeschooling to Ivy League institutions (which I don't recommend for anyone). Much of the socialization you get in school from other kids is dysfunctional. Probably why so many people took the jab when it was clearly not an intelligent move. I wasn't strong in math either as a kid, but that was because of the math system my school was using in high school. Many years later I needed more math for an allied medical degree and found I have a marked ability in math. In fact, I just thought it was common sense and getting what I needed was a breeze. I just do most of it in my head. And they wanted to see every step on paper in high school, which they called "New Math". My kid taught himself math, which is easily done. His (homeschooled) math skills were so strong that he was made the Math Teacher's Assistant in college for classmates who had both public and private educations and had many more years of math than he did. That says it all, really. He only had Algebra I but had stronger math skills than kids with Advanced Calculus. I wanted to be home educated by my father (who was very well-educated degree-wise) because I admired the way John Stuart Mill was educated. (He declined.) I have worked with homeschooled kids of parents who lack much formal education. Some of them did no better in formal education than they did at home, although I did teach them to read at grade level. They knew how to garden and hunt and build things with their hands which are skills formally educated people often lack, and which will come in handy in the near future, I expect. But standardized education is a waste of time. I know I was pretty bored during school (inside the classroom--I learned international politics outside class but my school was in an unusual place with an extremely international population--because rather than focusing on subjects that riveted me (in which I tested off the charts, as do many kids with specialized interests) I had to waste my time plodding along at what was considered my agemates' level.
Test results do not indicate what you know and, ESPECIALLY, they do not indicate if you know HOW TO LEARN. Your teachers in school had no idea what kind of world you would be facing today, I think we can both agree. So their primary responsibility, whether they were homeschooling parents or in a state or private school, was to TEACH YOU HOW TO LEARN. NOT what to learn. Ideally, you should be learning every day of your life. That's how we evolved. And it is essential for our survival as individuals and as a species.
Although I attended a private international school of much higher standards than my American peers in university (who attended both state and private schools in the US and other countries), what I really learned was two-fold: How to learn what I felt *I* needed to learn, and international politics. By that I include intelligence services whose kids I went to school with, all the backroom machinations that are hidden behind reported political decisions, real lived international history (from my classmates' families' experiences) etc. I use that second form of education every day. In fact, I am pretty well-equipped to analyze what's going on right now. And I engage people online because that is probably the most effective form of activism I can engage in. I don't have money, getting my passport renewed would involve ridiculous machinations because of my complicated heritage, and I refuse to be vaccinated so it's pretty much pointless anyway. But I am very grateful that I know enough not to be frightened of what's going on, and being really well educated in dealing with authoritarianism and propaganda. I grew up with this stuff in the street--NOT in the classroom. Colonialism and imperialism? Been there. Watched it up front and personal.
The human juvenile brain cannot do but to learn. That's how it works. Just as I am very careful with what I do in front of my extremely bright horse, I know kids "learn" from everything we do in front of them. You have no idea what your kids' teachers do in front of them or what holes they have in their education or what serious emotional or social deficits they have. You don't even know what happens when their classroom door is closed.
I don't think homeschooled people are socially inept. I think they have not been forced into conformity. You can look at it as a weakness; I consider it a strength. In fact, it is a real adaptive asset right now and will be more so in the future. The entire planet is moving into a very difficult time. Your degrees will not protect you. In fact, they are likely to blind you to what is going on. And you will learn the skills your "uneducated" mates have are extremely valuable.
Leftists like state education because a lot of them make a living through it. Although I don't really know what you mean by "leftist". I don't think many of my public school teachers in the US (where I was in school for a total of 4 years) were leftist in the least. The union people defend the public school system because they earn nice money, have great benefits, a LONG summer vacation, and a reliable pension after they retire. Though I think that last bit is about to be flushed down the toilet, in the UK as well as in the US, thanks to those populations' penchant towards conformity. I suggest you read up on the history of the development of public (state) education, as well as private education. In this country it is not about education. Nor is it in yours. It's more about class--keeping people in the class their parents were born into. There's more class mobility here but not as much as people think. I think you call private school "public". If you look at the intellectual background of your royal family, even the most privileged kids in the U.K. apparently have pretty poor "public" education. I do not like your elitism at all. Ours is bad enough but yours is over the top. And is very much related to your long history of colonialism. But that's another subject entirely. Or is it? How does a degree in Art History prepare a kid to be King?
In your opinion, what is a "leftist"?