Your point about teaching kids to interact with adults from the get go sounds compelling and it did make me think. Threating children and young adults as proper individuals (or as one might say adults) is important, but human development and especially the social aspects of it are more complex than just getting skill and knowledge for the future. Being part of a group of peers as the context of your development has a lot of benefits and I believe it's the healthiest way for things to be. I have some experience as a high school teacher and as an informal educator and I have read and done research on the topic and this is my interpretation and opinion. I've seen a lot of homeschooled children having trouble fitting in later in life and for many of them the lack of interaction with peers shows. Of course, this is not true for everyone and there are individuals with similar problems caused by regular schools and their downsides (like bullying which you rightfully pointed out).
I'm sure you realize that the single example of your grandchildren is barely representative. There are tons of success stories and tons of failures with both systems as the success of either is largely dependent on highly variable human factors. There are tons of kids who have gone through the public school system who are raking in the BIG BUX alongside your granddaughter and she probably has somebody with that background on top of her in the company food chain. In my opinion that's a moot point.
In the end, it's really a matter of opinion and every parent has the right and responsibility to evaluate the the options available to their child and their child's needs. I'm by no means an advocate for the current state of education and surely not to what it is in the US, but I'm convinced homeschooling is not a good solution to the problem.
P.S.: I think you should attribute more of your granddaughter's success on her and her abilities and dedication as I'm sure that she would have been successful if she had gone through the other route too.
one word.
Detroit.
or...with an increased vocabulary...as homeschoolers would have.
Kansas city..where the federal government came in for a decade or two because the public schools stunk.
or...how about the department of education?
I drove a school bus for years...I saw bright eyed cheerful happy kindgergarteners..turned into sullen, hateful, resentful teenagers in just a decade.
Kids are born GENIUS...and it take K-12 to beat it out of them.
That's all undoubtedly true. I'm just saying it's not an either-or situation. Of course, the US is not the place to look at for good examples in K-12 education.
the absolutely BEST thing the government could do for education in the united states (or anywhere)...is nothing.
Quit.
Walk away...go do something else.
let the parents handle it..
Well, this is where we would probably disagree the most. Not everything in the world can be fixed with deregulation and education is certainly not one of those things. If you look at the nations around the world where kids are doing best in terms of their academic abilities, you'll find that lack of government involvement has never been a piece of the puzzle in the success stories so far.
It's hard for me to imagine how somebody would believe that leaving education to the parents would yield the best results. Education needs to be viewed as a public service like roads. If government doesn't build and take care of roads, infrastructure on the whole is going to fall into disrepair pretty quickly. Maybe some neighbourhoods, communities or towns will handle it themselves more efficiently, but the country as a whole will suffer. The same goes for education at least in my opinion.
A great number of parents are simply ill-equipped to handle their children's education and if the government doesn't help out, those children will be left with abysmal academic preparedness for higher education, life or whatever. On top of this, you have a great number of parents who wouldn't have the time or resources to provide their children with proper education. If the government doesn't take care of education, nobody will.
I feel that the idea that the government should walk away from everything is very political idea and it's a viewpoint that is typically American. Unfortunately, applying it to education prevents otherwise logical people from being pragmatic about public interest issues where government could and should do a lot of good IF allowed and able to do its job properly. That's a HUGE "if", but the government is the only real long-term solution that has any real chance of working. If it's not the government, there are not real market or social forces to push the system in the right direction. That's why you see countries like Finland in the forefront of truly modern education because those are places where this type of thinking is quite unpopular.
The biggest problem around the world is that governments are generally failing at this job (as they are at many others). Unfortunately, there is no realistic alternative, at least in my opinion. Still, I don't view people with your views in this as counter-productive as when the government is failing, there needs to be grass-roots movement to find and show the better way for the government to be able (and forced) to follow.
The ONLY job that the government has , legititmately..it to keep OTHER governments away.
Governments are insane..the only thing useful for them to do it keep other insane goverments away.
as for roads...I've thought about that.
the first roads were private. I'm a retired truck driver and I've been over ALL of the US interstate and a good bit of the rest of it..(including a LOT of goat trails)...the BEST roads....are private. (toll roads)..
and another thing..where the hell are our AIRCARS? if we had aircars we wouldn't NEED roads..
OR...pneumatic tubes..they had them in chicago in the 20's...
Elon Musk is talking about a hyperloop..same thing..
If the market could regulate things as efficiently as you wish it could, it would have regulated governments out of existence by now. I hope you realize that the private toll road system is a setup that would restrict trade and would leave a lot of people without proper roads since they would be too small of markets to expect a decent profit from. There were places where it was implemented and it was a total pain in the ass, that's why places like the UK got rid of it. The market is as good at defending a land from foreign invaders as it is good at building roads or providing education - not at all.
I understand why this libertarian idea is so attractive and why it's so popular stateside, but you have to try to look at failures and successes from all over the world to see that a lot of things are much more nuanced. A lot of things that I'm sure you will say cannot be achieved through increasing government are getting done by governments around the world, you just have to look at the whole sample that humanity has to offer and draw pragmatic conclusions based on the data available, not just on the beliefs you have about the world.
Let me be absolutely honest here as I would be when talking to a close friend, I really think that the idea of the free market building roads better than governments is quite frankly delusional. Let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater, right?
regarding tollroads..I'm not saying "would"...I'm saying "Does"..toll roads are better than gubment roads...I've been over enough of them to have a qualified opinion.
The reason the free market hasn't won out?
Well it's not a free market.
In the US, currently, there are ten MILLION rules and regulations on business. How is that free?
Government, is by definition...a monopoly on violence. Either you do what they say...or they kill you. Pretty simple.
Gubement is stoopid...they have NO idea what to do...so they do stoopid thing..and YOU must do stoopid things too. If you don't..they kill you.
There...that pretty much explains everything...any more questions?
Home-schooling is an industry in itself, with prepared materials and curricula for parents to follow while teaching their children. The results are pretty easy to find as many studies have been done that have conclusively demonstrated the advantages of homeschooling by comparing achievement in quantitative studies, here a write up from The Washington Time that is very informative: http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/aug/30/home-schooling-outstanding-results-national-tests/ - especially the quote "Five areas of academic pursuit were measured. In reading, the average home-schooler scored at the 89th percentile; language, 84th percentile; math, 84th percentile; science, 86th percentile; and social studies, 84th percentile. In the core studies (reading, language and math), the average home-schooler scored at the 88th percentile.
The average public school student taking these standardized tests scored at the 50th percentile in each subject area. "