[PLUG-TALK] Home schooling.

glen e. p. ropella gepr at ropella.net
Wed Oct 5 00:48:07 UTC 2011


Russell Johnson wrote circa 11-10-04 04:01 PM:
> 
> On Oct 4, 2011, at 3:58 PM, glen e. p. ropella wrote:
> 
>> I think that's one of the reasons some people exhibit such non sequitur,
>> because they spend too much time working alone.  It's less about being
>> "churched" and more about teamwork, composing individual actions into
>> larger, composite actions.
> 
> That has to be one of the best arguments I've ever seen against home schooling. 

Well, I don't think it's an argument against home schooling, in general.
 As with everything, a balance has to be struck between collectivism and
individualism.  Too much socialization may create socialist robots who
parrot the party line[1] and can't tie their shoes without someone
telling them how.  Too much isolation may create wackos who have private
meanings for every term and who can't get along well with others.

One might arrive at a hypothesis for the right balance if we studied the
entropy of solutions found to a common, broad, set of problems over a
spread of various groups whose members (kids) have varying degrees of
isolation/socialization.  The number of variables to control would be
huge, though.  You'd have to control for family income, lifestyle (TV,
videogames, sports participation, hobbyist parents, etc.), geography,
etc.  I heard an interesting talk at PSU awhile back[2] on measuring
"advanced mathematical thinking" that immediately brought to mind the
story of Srinivasa Ramanujan[3] and G.H. Hardy, and how unconventional
some of Ramanujan's work was.  Genius though he was, we might speculate
that, had he learned math in a more conventional environment, he may not
have contributed quite as much.

Anyway, short of such a set of experiments, the only thing we can say is
that _some_ kids may need large schools and some may need to be
privately tutored.  But many of the (non-religious) home schooling
groups I've run into near Portland have consisted of teams of parents
teaching teams of children, which seems like a nice compromise to me.

[1] http://religion.blogs.cnn.com/2011/07/31/do-you-speak-christian/
[2] http://www.mth.pdx.edu/events/colloquium.asp?id=262
[3] https://secure.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/wiki/Srinivasa_Ramanujan

-- 
glen



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