Lil' Bear just spent a year in a Montessori school. I don't think her time is  well utilized, but worse the liberal derp is strong with parents and teachers.

Mama Bear and I are looking into Classical Schools (2 day classroom, the rest is homeschooling). Is anyone trying Classical Schools? What is your experience?

Thanks Kbear.

Traditional private is the way to go. Homeschooling just doesn't expose kids to all the social interaction they would otherwise get. Not to mention the sports and club activities.

In before all the homeschoolers tell you how wrong you are

i'm not telling anybody they're wrong or right....
i was mainly enrolled in private schools, but had a time at 100% homeschooling as well......i never lacked any socializing or sporting activities. granted, some were with the church, but i played baseball, football, and soccer with the local pee-wee type sports groups. there are valid reasons for not homeschooling, but if social interaction is a problem (as in there isn't enough) then the parents are being lazy.

I want to do private school, but the nearest non-religion based one is an hour away.

I am going to look into the homeschooling or see if there is any homeschooling groups in our area.

At 9th grade she can go to public school to play sports, go to prom, have cliques or whatever high school girls do.

A teacher I had in high school did that with all three of his kids. All of them are super smart, very social (normal) and very popular. They breezed through classes too since the standardized testing in elementary school didn't have a chance to ruin them.

Well, the sales pitch is that Montessori leads into a classical-style guided education.  
That Montessori gives kids the baseline fundamentals for both independent study and social collaboration.  
That there is a cumulative effect to education, and that Montessori is the fastest way to build the required foundation.

Is that accurate?  I don't know.


ETA:  WRT public schools...  if you're going to send your kids to public school (and there are reasons to do so, not the least of which is to introduce them to the failures of bureaucratic ineptitude), DO NOT do it for high school.  At least, not if your kid thinks they might want to go to college.

Public high school (and this does vary), is basically 1.5 years of education stretched out over 4.  They will waste a significant portion of your child's time.  If they want to be academically challenged, don't do it.

Of course, middle or junior high is just as bad, but the advantage there is that extracurriculars don't take up so much time that you can't supplement at home to keep them on-pace with the rest of their civilized peers.  You try to do this in high school, with higher workloads and more sports/activities, when they also want to date, go out with friends, learn to drive...  Not going to happen.

The 5th to 8th grade window is the best target for public school indoctrination.  It'll also help them to really appreciate their private high school, because they'll already know how bad it is on the other side.
You give them private school for their whole life and then throw them in a public high school?  They're going to hate it for 4 years.

My daughter goes to a Private School now and will continue until my son who is six months old starts. Then we may have to evaluate Home Schooling because of the costs. The Church she goes to school at has a Classical School too which we may look into. It allows them access to Social Activities and Sports at the Private School but without the full costs or full time teaching.

He's so wrong..............

Frankly, having been surrounded by homeschooled kids for several years now, I have forgotten what the problem was..........homeschooling is so common now that the social objections are irrelevant.

As much a fan of homeschooling as I am, if I lived close to a school that had a curriculum as described above and teachers - with the freedom to control their classrooms - like MRW to teach, I'd be perfectly comfortable sending my kids there.

+1 to MRW's contrast of Classical with Montessori.

Tell me about your senior prom.



 

Hell, I went to public school and to my senior prom, both sucked.

Other than getting really good at slacking off and copying homework most of my learning was done in trade school or at work. Beyond 9th grade math and english I really don't use a lot of the things I learned in school.

The rest that I know I either learned via reading on my own time, or out of necessity at work.

And I still actively seek knowledge, I always have a few books being read at one time, and a new skill set I am trying to learn. I am hoping that homeschooling my daughter will teach her to learn on her own terms, so after the basics she can seek out what interests her and hopefully make a living off it some day.

My teachers hated me in school, I refused to do homework and barely paid attention but aced tests and quizes and breezed through most of the standardized tests (my year was the last year before the new batch of mandatory ones behind us)

I didn't care to learn what they were cramming down our throats, but luckily my retention skills are borderline ridiculous so I was able to just sort of glide through high school, good thing there was trade school for two years of it or I would have gone insane.

pretty much all the sources i am finding for Classical schooling seem to be religion based.  are there secular schools that have a Classical curriculum?



 

You make my point. That isn't socialization. That's whoring your daughters out.

treat it as literature, as it should be

I have the same issue here. It's either catholic schools, or crazy hippy schools where the emphasis isn't on learning, but on "being free" and other stupid shit.

i was going off MRWs definition of Classical schooling having its roots in Ancient Greece



 

That's why my sisters went to uber conservative school that didn't have dances.





 

I have 3 kids in Classical Conversations. The curriculum is tough, but it is what they are used to. History from the ancient civilizations, they are just getting to the Roman Republic, to the writing assignments that are more in depth than what I did in college. I was a science guy. Wish I had gotten to do this stuff when I was their age. And yes at this time of year we spend a lot of time at the baseball field, all play sports and when we have free time we fish and hunt. It is the way to go.

Try it, you may like it too.

Biggest no-shit investment in my kids education:

iPad Mini


The amount of high-quality educational content is staggering.  I mean truly staggering.  It's interesting, well made, and my kids take to it.  They also have a thing where they're partnering with major universities and offering their classes & content for free as well, so it offers more than apps reinforcing K-12 curriculum (which it does so well), but whole curriculum on software development, physics, photography, or any of a number of other interesting and worthwhile subjects that I would like to cram into their little heads in a manner not unlike learning kung-fu in the matrix.


I'm sure most of this will trickle over to Android, in time, but right now that little $300 device offers greater depth and breadth of education, dollar for dollar, than anything else available.



Can't contribute on classical schools though, sorry.

i was rereading a John Adams biography recently and it pointed out that his children were were reading Roman and Greek philosophers (in the original Latin and Ancient Greek) by their mid-teens.  thats the kind of education i wish i had...

Thanks, you described the big issue I had with Montessori. Lil Bear did not choose any math at school, therefore we had to teach her at home.

The level of education available through the iTunes U app is amazing.  World class schools, such at MIT, have placed their curricula on line for open access.  There is something in every subject to suit all levels of education.

My kids are in a similar program called "Classical Conversations". It's a Christian program but focuses on "the trivium" which from my understanding is the basis of classical education. Grammar, logic and rhetoric. Learn your vocabulary so that you can formulate full thoughts, then learn to logically process information, and then learn how to present/defend/debate your beliefs so that you can better understand them.

They go one day a week and are homeschooled the rest. They really like it, and they get plenty of group interaction both on school days, and the mothers have get togethers/play dates through the week. Plus they have friends in church (the school program is not affiliated with the chruch we go to. Plus, at least in my county, home schooled kids are eligible to participate in the sports andextracurricular activites that the public school system offers, if they choose to.

The Jesuits are your best bet for the Classics.

Or  you could move to a place with good public schools, might not be realistic depending on locale

No many publics schools going the route of Latin and Ancient Greek during grade school, these days.

Mine did Latin back in the day but that was a while ago

+1

In before the Liberal Arts haters.