[camelNotation]

Professional educators really only need the training and certification because they are dealing with students at scale. One on one teaching is not remotely the same as teaching in a classroom setting where you have to adapt to multiple learning styles and multiple achievement levels all while using standardized assessment techniques, detailed lesson planning, and classroom management skills. The vast majority of what composes an education degree is there because you are educating a large, diverse group. When it is just one teacher working one on one with a single student, a lot of that is irrelevant. The way you teach, the way you assess their progress, and the way you adapt to their needs is much more natural. And most of the principles that apply in both contexts can be learned on the fly.

> It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities.

This is true and it's a lot of why we homeschool. There are peers that are getting similarly elite educations and just doing it slightly different ways. If I had a billion dollars, I would be paying for an elite, personal tutor to educate my children. I wouldn't be sending them to a public school. Homeschooling allows my wife and I to provide something analogous to that elite structure for our children, even though they are firmly middle class.

[notacoward]

> Professional educators really only need the training and certification because they are dealing with students at scale.

Untrue. Any teacher must be familiar with both the subject matter and basic pedagogy, regardless of whether they're teaching one student or many. Yes, there are additional skills necessary when teaching a larger class, but I think you drastically exaggerate how much of a teacher's job that is.

[surge]

The Pedogogy doesn't matter as much as you think it does, because you learn it from your kid what works pretty fast. Most of the pedogogy is crap and outdated and you have to choose one and stick with it for the class where with homeschooling you can try many different teaching methods without having to get approval from the school board, and even then you have the pick the one that works for most students but leaves out others.

People put a lot of stock in the intelligence of teachers, but consider it this way, most teachers choose a career that requires a 4 year degree plus certification that won't make enough to live comfortably or earn them over what a standard retail job makes much less pay their loans, this is something they think long and hard on (which is probably not much more than "I really like working with children") and make their decision on. It attracts the kind of people who think that's a good idea. Anyone more intelligent that wants to teach runs the numbers and decides against it except in rare cases. Any pedogogy those kinds of people learn isn't that advanced and can be picked up by most by reading a book on it over a month. These "professional" educators isn't exactly an advanced profession like that of a medical professional or a scientist, most of those people would struggle or fail out of such programs. The alternatives for most teachers is a communications degree, or sports/massage therapy. Altruism doesn't equate to being good at something, the proof is in the quality of education offered today.

Edit: They don't deserve contempt, but I'm saying if you increased teacher's salaries, the competition would be such the people that go for it now would simply unable to compete with the sudden competition based the altruistic motives plus pay. Altrustism only motivates you so much, doesn't last long when you're over worked and under paid and dealing with 30+ class sizes. Pedogogy be damned, you'd get people who would be able to actually teach kids on an individual level and demand more from administrators or have the conviction to walk out and move on to something else if they didn't.

[notacoward]

> most teachers choose a career that requires a 4 year degree plus certification that won't make enough to live comfortably or earn them over what a standard retail job makes

Yeah, I know, it's not a "rational" choice by Randian standards. To some, that means they deserve contempt. To me, it suggests that they have other motivations that might deserve some respect.

[leetcrew]

I have a lot of respect for teachers who are in it for the long haul. it's definitely not an easy job. that said, most of the teachers I know personally decided to become teachers after graduating with an bachelors in art history and realizing it was going to be pretty hard to find work as a museum curator. altruistic or pragmatic?

[camelNotation]

> Any teacher must be familiar with both the subject matter and basic pedagogy, regardless of whether they're teaching one student or many

I think you are imagining a homeschool from the 1980s. My kids learn many aspects of the subject matter from sources like Khan Academy and Outschooling. The idea that the teacher needs to know the subject matter deeply in order to manage the child's education is obsolete.

[notacoward]

> Khan Academy and Outschooling

If those allow you to outsource the entirety of your child's education, including personalization of the curriculum to individual needs, answering arbitrarily-deep questions about the subject matter, etc. then great, but I'm not sure I'd call that home schooling. That would be more like a (virtual) private school, with the same level of parental involvement. If you want to be more involved you need more training, simple as that, and the fact is that a lot of home-school parents don't even have an average education themselves.

Also remember, you're not the sample. You claim to have some expertise in data science. What do the data suggest, for a typical home-schooler and not just for you or the non-random sample of others in your neighborhood.

[surge]

https://www.dailyinfographic.com/homeschooling-by-the-number...

[notacoward]

Lots of problems with that infographic. Four sources listed, two of which are homeschooling-advocacy organizations, with no indication which numbers are drawn from which source. How were the samples selected? Are they apples to apples, or mandatory all-inclusive numbers for the public schools vs. voluntary respondents to a survey for home school? [1] is a better source for demographic information, painting a quite different picture, while [2] highlights some of the ways that advocacy groups have been caught distorting the achievement numbers in their favor.

[1] https://www.responsiblehomeschooling.org/homeschooling-101/h...

[2] https://www.parentingscience.com/homeschooling-outcomes.html

[barry-cotter]

I taught kindergarten for five years and teach small groups and individuals at various levels now. Basic pedagogy is really, incredibly basic and the kind of stuff you pick up by experience relatively quickly even without formal instruction in it. More generally the economics of education literature shows that the only reliable determinants of teacher quality are subject matter expertise and teaching experience. Subject matter expertise is specifically not expertise in pedagogy because teaching qualifications have no discernible effect on students’ education whereas a Math teacher with a Math Master’s gets better results, or a Chemistry teacher with a Chemistry Master’s etc.

Seriously, consider what you’re saying. You’re saying that people without an education in pedagogy are unable to teach. Most of the parents reading this probably taught their children how to read before they got to school. The overwhelming majority of college faculty never have any training in teaching. Many, many people tutor without ever getting an M.Ed.

[notacoward]

Since you're sharing your experience, would you like to address the original claim that "professional educators really only need the training and certification because they are dealing with students at scale"? Or would that not suit the preferred narrative?

[barry-cotter]

I think that’s actually too kind to training and certification since it implies that they’re useful when dealing with students at scale. The main benefit from learning about pedagogy was not in the application, it was in knowing the jargon for talking to other teachers and sounding like a professional. What’s annoying is that the jargon U.K. and US trained teachers use differs slightly.

You get better at teaching by teaching, same way you get better at painting by painting or playing music by playing music. You’ll get better faster if you’re paying closer attention to your students and what you’re doing and things like having someone watch your lessons and critique them or reviewing video of your lessons yourself afterwards helps enormously. If you want to be play violin an encyclopaedic grasp of music theory is less useful than another hundred hours playing until you get over 1,000 hours at minimum. Ed school lecturers and professors are not noted for their excellent teaching despite their presumably excellent grasp of theory.

My experience could be unusual, obviously, but what’s very unlikely to be wrong is the literature on the determinants of teacher quality which does not reliably find any effect distinguishable from zero for teacher training or for experience over six years.

[burfog]

This confirms what another teacher told me: the training is garbage. He found it to be insane psychobabble that he could only tolerate while drunk. There was nothing useful. The teacher training did almost nothing to cover the key skill of classroom control. His fellow students were incompetent, spending most of their time partying. You could pass if you regurgitated the nonsense.

[leetcrew]

idk what it's like where you live, but in my state all you need to be a teacher is a bachelors degree and a teaching certificate. the degree doesn't need to be related to the subject you teach and you don't need the certification either if you want to teach at a private school.