Except for those whose parents also hire expert tutors. It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities.
When you consider how much homeschooling is by parents who are not themselves professional educators, I suspect a hybrid approach works better on average.
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
