Two second-graders were discussing home-schooling, which one child had recently started.
- Home-schooled girl: “I study from 9 to 11:30. It’s a half day every day, basically. After that, I read or sometimes watch a show.”
- Public school girl: “How can you learn everything?”
- Home-schooled girl: “You have boys in your class, right? And you know how they delay everything. In home school there are no boys.”
[The parents’ explanation is a little different. Their daughter is a full grade level ahead in a rich suburban school district that has a good reputation. “Massachusetts has zero funding for gifted and talented,” said the mother. “They figure that if you’re smart you can go to private school.” The schedule is actually a bit longer than 9-11:30, especially on those days when art and music are taught. Things do go fast: “It took us about 1.5 months to finish the first half of 3rd grade Singapore math.” In the parents’ opinion, the bureaucracy required to take a child out of public school was minimal. It seems that the main obstacle to home-schooling in Massachusetts is parents who would rather be doing something else, not red tape. Will these parents keep it up? Perhaps not. Their daughter is “motivated by competition in the classroom.”]
Related:
- Do home-schooled kids have better manners?
- Touring the Mediocrity Factory (meeting with principal of rich suburban public school)
- Yacht-schooled children
“You have boys in your class, right? And you know how they delay everything. In home school there are no boys.”
She is right. Learning variance is greater in males than in females, so if enough boys are present there is the guarantee at least on will be dumb as a rock (whereas girls will do more or less the same). Even of some of the boys are brilliant, if the class has to go at the speed of the well-below-average boys, the learning of the whole class will suffer.
In case you are wondering, you provided the data for the above yourself some time ago.
And yet when they grow and become an adult, they shout “inequality” and want to be in same places as men.
It is pretty backward and sexist of you to insist that there is any difference between a male and a female brain. According to the latest research “there’s no such thing as a ‘male’ or ‘female’ brain” ( https://www.newscientist.com/article/dn28582-scans-prove-theres-no-such-thing-as-a-male-or-female-brain/). Boys just fake the difference.
There is an easy solution, though, to defeat such faking:
It is well-known that “Gender, like all social identities, is socially constructed. ” ( https://othersociologist.com/sociology-of-gender/). Besides, gender is fluid according to the latest research in the area. So, the teaches can just re-label boys as girls, and , hey presto, everyone will be “more or less the same”.
For other purposes, like drywall hanging, boys can be re-labelled back to boys, and we can even add some girls to the crew as boys of course if there’s a shortage in the occupation.
It’s so efficient that you only need one teacher per student, plus parents who can forgo an income for 12 years! In economic terms, children’s time isn’t worth anything until age 15 or so, so presumably it makes sense for them to bear the lack of efficiency, versus adults who’s time has value in the present.
Perhaps there is something to be said for sex segregated schooling after all? But until then, your friend’s sexist child will have to fear a knock on the door at night from the ACLU.
https://www.aclu.org/sex-segregated-schools-separate-and-unequal
Though this part was extra funny
As noted ACLU representative Barbie once remarked, math is hard. However, home schooling on the one-on-one principle would according to this theory be the peak of educational attainment.
(The real reason appears shortly after the quote above.)
Massachusetts has zero funding for gifted and talented
I wonder what is meant by funding for gifted and talented. It could some sort of educational bureaucratic buzzword that this woman picked up in another state. It sounds highly unlikely that these rich school districts don’t have separate honors or AP classes for the brightest. If you looked into it, you’d probably find that the local high school sends a significant portion of its graduates to elite colleges every year.
Pretty sure that mom means this.
“In fact, Massachusetts ranks 48th among the 50 states in the percentage of its schools that offer gifted programs. Spending for high-achieving youngsters statewide comes to just $438,000 this year, putting Massachusetts in the company of states like Mississippi.”
From 1999.
And more recently (2012), nothing’s changed, very little funding.
http://www.milforddailynews.com/article/20120527/News/305279984