Talk:Homeschooling

Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 27 August 2018 and 10 December 2018. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): Enc1002, Llh1004, Slc1014.

Above undated message substituted from Template:Dashboard.wikiedu.org assignment by PrimeBOT (talk) 22:33, 17 January 2022 (UTC)

Biased?

What do you think about moving "According to Elizabeth Bartholet, surveys of homeschoolers show that a majority of homeschoolers in the USA are motivated by "conservative Christian beliefs, and seek to remove their children from mainstream culture"." with updated sourcing to criticism? E. Bartholet is a vocal critic of homeschooling and her writings maybe considered biased.Barbie1979 (talk) 05:59, 1 January 2022 (UTC)

The entire article otherwise has to have been written by people willing to extrapolate very limited research. A lot of the referenced being used are from advocacy groups, or corporations that have learning tools to sell. Critics can't be dismissed simply by them having a critical opinion, that's already understood. Compare it to homeopathy maybe, there's many critical voices on the practice, yet they are taken fully seriously on Wiki. Despite being biased. You could start by demonstrating why you think that her writings aren't good, and not just that she disagrees with you. ~~ Kameloso (talk) 01:16, 2 May 2022 (UTC)

References

"Not educating children at all"

Pinging Ft109 and Tacyarg. Ft109, I appreciate your efforts, but I'm more inclined to agree with Tacyarg. However, whenever there's disagreements about things, starting a discussion on the revelant talk page should happen instead of repeatedly restoring the content in question. So let's all talk about this and try to come to some sort of understanding?

Personally, I think it's relevant to include information about different types of homeschooling instead of just generalizing across the board. Some people recieve a relatively good education at home, like one of my parents, and others really don't. I also agree about Tacyarg's argument about sourcing. I see where you're coming from in regards to that. Educational neglect does seem to be a term that is used elsewhere [1]. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 11:54, 30 November 2022 (UTC)

Aspects of the danger of potential educational neglect are already mentioned in the last paragraph of the lead section. However, "not educating children at all" is not a form of homeschooling, but simply the abscence of getting an education (which can also happen to school children who can't cope with the school system). So no, there's nothing to discuss about that; this edit was simply inappropriate, unneutral and factually wrong.-- Maxeto0910 (talk) 23:15, 1 December 2022 (UTC)

I disagree that there's nothing to discuss. I'm not even involved in any of this and I saw the content added and removed a few times. I was trying to friendly reach out to the editors in question so we could try to reach some sort of consensus. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 08:50, 2 December 2022 (UTC)

@Clovermoss As the person who originally added "not educating children at all", I'll admit I should've worded it differently.

That being said, I think that it makes sense to acknowledge that educational neglect exists, and not over-generalize. I don't see how only including the views of homeschool-avocate parents helps the article remain neutral.

I have since changed it to say "-in a less strict manor, which in some cases may include the children not being educated at all". I think that this makes it more clear that it only applies to some children, and not all. Shane04040404 (talk) 08:35, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

One potential is that one might think that educational neglect overlaps with Unschooling and that they're synonymous terms, but I think that would be more of an opinion to combine the two and not a fact, so I think it's appropriate to list them as too separate things. Shane04040404 (talk) 08:43, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

I know I haven't edited or commented before now but I've been watching this for a few days, and I have a question; is there a better source than this for the content in question? If that's the best we can provide then it probably doesn't belong, since that's hardly an unbiased review form a site whose advocacy is evidence just by reading the full url of the link. When that is the source given it does come across as an issue, and is the main issue I have with the content; the wording could possibly be solved by drawing from a better source. - Aoidh (talk) 08:46, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for bringing this up Aoidh! As I said earlier, I agree that there should be better sourcing and agree with you entirely that this shouldn't really be what's cited. I'm also not sure that this is the best way to phrase the content in general but my thoughts at the time were mostly surrounding how some people are abused this way and ignoring that might not be what's best. I've reread the thread and Maxeto0910 mentions that there's already content about the dangers of educational neglect at the end of the lead and it's somewhat vague? It doesn't mention educational neglect explicitly. I don't think indoctrination is the best way to put it. This source could potentially be used for something different [2]? There's also this [3]. I'm not sure I'm explaining my thoughts the best here, but maybe you kind of get what I'm trying to say? This is more an American-centric context and maybe what I'm thinking about would be more suited to Homeschooling in the United States. Your thoughts? Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 11:20, 3 December 2022 (UTC)

Unfortunately I can't view the GBooks link it's saying the page is unavailable for viewing (I notice what can be viewed changes so I'll try again later) but I think the Kunzman paper would be a good source, it's been subsequently cited and used as a reference by a few dozen other papers. - Aoidh (talk) 04:56, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

@Aoidh The second source is the better of the two anyways. :) Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 07:24, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

With the Kunzman source in mind do you have a proposed wording for the content? The source does seem focused on the homeschooling through a religious lens, I'll try later to find some sources that discuss a more generalized context as well. - Aoidh (talk) 17:20, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Honestly I'm still trying to decide that myself. Part of the reason I've had difficulty envisoning certain changes to this article is that I don't want to generalize and I'm a bit anxious about where I'd even start in some respects. I'm wondering if maybe I should start improving Homeschooling in the United States and work from there? What are your thoughts on the neutrality tag? I do think statements like "Also known as interest-led or child-led learning, unschooling attempts to follow opportunities as they arise in real life, through which a child will learn without coercion" is more biased towards homeschooling advocacy, if anything. The person who added the tag seemed to think that this article was biased towards criticism. I don't want to go too much the other way, but I do think there could be a better general balance. Do you think I'm on the right track here? I might try to make some bold edits later. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 17:43, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

So for better or worse I have never had any exposure to homeschooling, good or bad, so I'd like to think I'm approaching the subject from a disinterested perspective. With that in mind the sentence you quoted doesn't seem particularly biased one way or another. I skimmed through a few random passages and the main thing that I saw was that this article learns heavily on using scare quotes. I'm not going to start messing with the article in my current tired state, but I'll at least try to tackle some of that over-reliable of quotation marks in a little while. - Aoidh (talk) 18:18, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

I think I was just being picky about the word coercion because it implies students who aren't unschooled are being coerced. Feel free to tackle this whenever you're ready to. I'm interested in doing something eventually myself but I can get indecisive and distracted so we'll see. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 18:23, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

Ah, I see what you mean. I think changing the word coercion to something like guidance or just removing it outright is fine too. I did come across a sentence which concerned me, namely the sentence in the lede about homeschooled students "have equally or better developed social skills and participate more in cultural and family activities on average than public school students." The source for that statement says "these are subjective questionnaires completed by children’s parents and it is difficult to determine the validity of parents’ views of their own child’s social skills" but the content in the article certainly does not reflect that this is the a survey of how parents viewed their child's socialization skills. I've made an attempt to reword that to reflect the source. It could probably be worded better or even just removed or moved into the article itself instead of the lede, but what it said was certainly not reflective of the actual content of the reference. - Aoidh (talk) 20:10, 4 December 2022 (UTC)

I've been busier today than I thought I would be so I didn't really have the time to do anything drastically different, but I did make a few changes. [4][5][6]. If there's anything that I did that was controversial, we can discuss it. Clovermoss🍀 (talk) 04:49, 6 December 2022 (UTC)