[paraknight]

I don't get it. Why can't bullying exist in the group homeschool at church? It's functionally equivalent to a school. Are you making a brand new point about traditional homeschooling (parent-child) or replying to the OP in the thread?

[labster]

As a child in a public school, you have no right to freedom of association, and no right to freedom from association. Your school chooses your classes, and the state will use violence to ensure you attend those classes, bully or not.

In home school, there is less people and more choice. There are no perverse incentives that value attendance over education and health.

[jbigelow76]

In home school, there is less people and more choice.

Choice for whom, the student or the teacher? The teachers are the ones with the agendas, in all senses of the word.

[whatshisface]

No parent's agenda is for their child to be kicked around by another kid.

[watwut]

It routinely happens in families and friends groups of parents (kids of parents friend bully the kid). It the setup described above, the kid have less choice over who friends will be.

[cma]

School often serves as a release from parents' social machinations to let you find your own friends from a sampling of the general public.

[ethbr1]

> No parent's agenda is for their child to be kicked around by another kid.

The consequence is that every parent, given a scenario where they feel their kid is being kicked around, will remove their kid from that situation.

That's not a healthy absolute either.

[whatshisface]

Would "we must force parents to keep their kids in situations where they (the parents) believe the children are being abused, to make sure the kids grow up tougher than their parents desires would result in," be a solution anyone would actually want?

[ethbr1]

I'd want that for my kids, because I think it'd be net-best for them.

Clearly, I'm not talking about extreme abuse.

But I am talking about more discomfort than I (as the parent) would want for the child in my ideal world.

Parenting is always wanting your child to suffer as little as possible. But a little suffering is good in the long run for the child.

Thus, the fundamental tension in letting parents be the ultimate arbiters of a child's experience.

[Jka9rhnDJos]

Right, because children are never abused at home…

[whatshisface]

I added the phrase "by another kid" so nobody would reply with that but it looks like it didn't work because... you might not have read to the end? :-P

[likesprivacy]

That other kid could well be a sibling

[tweetle_beetle]

Isn't the whole premise of this grouped home schooling that it makes life easier for the parents, at the expense of tying into some commitments? There surely can never be enough grouped home schooling setups in any given locality with the freedom to break existing commitments for a parent to easily swap between them. It seems like there is a strong incentive for a parent to stick to the status quo.

[smt88]

A) You absolutely have freedom of association in public school. There is statutory and empirical intolerance for bullying, to the point that libertarians have been complaining that there isn't enough due process for the alleged bullies.

Parents can also easily move kids to other classes to avoid unwelcome company.

B) There is, in practice, no meaningful freedom of association in the real world. Childhood is an appropriate time to learn skills to mitigate the downsides of that fact, including forcing bullies to suffer consequences.

[HeWhoLurksLate]

You know how good black / gray hat hackers are at circumventing the law or just don't even think about it?

Yeah, bullies generally aren't scared by "the rules" or by the fact that what they're doing is technically illegal either.

[gnicholas]

> Parents can also easily move kids to other classes to avoid unwelcome company.

This is definitely not the case in the schools our kids go to. The class sizes/composition are shaped by the demands of the teacher's union, we recently learned.

We always thought that the parent survey the school sent out, asking about your child, was so that our kid could be put in a class with a teacher who would be compatible. Not so, we learned!

The information was used to create class cohorts that are evenly balanced, and only after this happens are cohorts assigned to teachers. But at this point in the process, the desires of 20 distinct families cannot be used to match students with teachers.

Instead of focusing on matching certain types of students (those who need more remedial work, those who need more advanced work, etc.) with teachers who are good at providing that type of learning, the school is focused on making sure that all of the teachers have the same class composition, so that none of them can claim to have a "worse" class than anyone else.

[tp34]

> In home school, there is less people and more choice.

I think you meant "there are fewer people." Were you home schooled? Perhaps public school English would have been a better option.

[labster]

Haha no, I learned English as she is spoke at a California Distinguished School. They taught English using the whole language method, because learning grammar is literally unimportant to learning language. I’m sure you can see how good I learned in thirteen years of public school.

[bavell]

> Were you home schooled?

Funny, as a public-school attendee, I would expect the opposite given how many of my peers sailed through on cruise-control with crappy teachers who were sometimes dumber than the kids.

[hahn-kev]

If a kid is a bully then the parents organizing the group can kick that kid out (as a last resort). Additionally if a child is being bullied they can tell their parents and the parents can take action directly, this can happen publicly but there's a lot of layers of administration making it non-trivial.

In a way the group homeschool can be thought of like a small private school, it's just simpler to handle personal problems in a small group.

[masklinn]

> If a kid is a bully then the parents organizing the group can kick that kid out

Or they can approve of the bullying. Or they can do nothing because they don’t care, or because they’re socially subservient to the bully’s parents.

It’s simpler to handle personal problems in a small group, it’s also easier for them to fester in a closed group.

[chongli]

It’s not a closed group. You can pull your kid out and put them in a different group. It’s not like public school where your kid is forced to go to the one school in your catchment area.

The parents also have the option of reorganizing the group to kick the bully’s parents out, along with the bully.

[fatfingerd]

Private schools achieve that and have more ability to do so than homeschooling teacher as a service does.

This model isn't new and had problems before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capturing_the_Friedmans

[achates]

If I can find a news article about a public school teacher who molested children will you support shutting those down too?

[fatfingerd]

I think your article is less likely to have the investigation beginning with the post office and more likely to have affects of multiple regular people not being OK with something, and being present.

Such involved parents could never let anything happen arguments ignore how these things develop as less involved parents cargo cult. (You can't get much more blatant in a drop in actual involvement than the example in the article.)

These kinds of groups connecting themselves to actual home schooling will erode it by association.

[Jka9rhnDJos]

If I can find an article about a parent molesting a child, will you support sending them to public school?

[bavell]

1. What parent would approve of their kid getting bullied? What are you talking about?

2. If the parents care enough to homeschool, why would they not care about bullying?

3. Socially subservient to the bully's parents? This feels like a hopelessly contrived and niche edge case that is effectively meaningless because it would be so rare

4. I'm not convinced personal problems fester moreso in a closed group (see: armed forces), and further I'm not convinced homeschooling groups are closed in the first place

All this to say I don't think your argument has any merit and is based on convenient and unlikely hypotheticals.

[dgb23]

It’s not unlikely that the bully is a child from a parent who organizes the groups…

[hattmall]

No one that's going to the additional effort of finding and participating in this type of school is going to let their kid be a legitimate bully. That level of parental involvement is what's lacking from a bully's life.

[masklinn]

That is laughably naïve. Plenty of parents think their little angel can do no wrong and will at best ignore evidence to the contrary.

[sibeliuss]

While I do agree with you here, I do think the OP has a point. Homeschool parents are _involved_. Its a small, close community. Word gets around.

[masklinn]

> Its a small, close community. Word gets around.

That describes lots of communities where abuse is epidemic.

[mftrhu]

Small, close communities are communities where the bonds between each participant is much stronger, making it costlier - both in terms of immediately broken relationships, and of backlash from the rest of the group - for people to sever it.

Word gets around, but not necessarily from the right people, and - if bad outcomes are not guaranteed - there is nevertheless a strong incentive for it to fall on deaf ears, stronger than it would be in a less tight-knit community.