Home schooling in Switzerland

Family, Education, Health and Pets
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While there ofc are terrible kids, I think if you, your spouse and your family are from a line of righteaus, moral people - the chances of your kids “randomly” becoming murdering psychopaths is not a good reason to not have kids (very tiny chance).

You can and should influence the people your kid spends time with as a parent, as they probably probably do more parenting than you ever could anyway. The moment your kid is out to school however, it’s basically rolling dice on the system…

In Aargau homeschooling is allowed btw. (which means you could partially recoup some influence if you wanted) and I have considered that, as it would allow you to use the school day much more efficiently and if you have a large family and one parent stays home anyway, it’s probably a smart idea, provided you also create opportunities for your kids to socialize outside of your household.

But I also think being able to at least partially offload the kids from home is very valuable for them as well… I just hate the inefficiency of the school system. It’s so terrible, I genuinely don’t get why people like it so much. Education is very important, schools are yuck :nauseated_face:.

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Finally we agree on something, even it is off-topic: School is bad for kids!

Kids have a natural wish to learn as much as possible. Then we imprison them in a small room and force them to listen the whole day to boring things from a person they probably hate. Or, as John Lennon said:

As soon as you’re born they make you feel small
By giving you no time instead of it all
Till the pain is so big you feel nothing at all
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
They hurt you at home and they hit you at school
They hate you if you’re clever and they despise a fool
Till you’re so fucking crazy you can’t follow their rules
A working class hero is something to be
A working class hero is something to be
When they’ve tortured and scared you for twenty odd years
Still they expect you to pick a career

Mandatory school in Switzerland is now 9 years and I think Kindergarten is mandatory too in some Kantons. In many places there are politically spoiled teachers, which may be good: as most kids hate their teachers they choose the opposite political spectrum. :rofl:

Even with (or because of?) the immigration Switzerland performs best of the DACH countries in PISA tests. But then we take school too serious like almost everything. I had to help a friend of mine when he was 40. He had to write a 100 times “I will not bring my kid too late to school anymore!”. Either that or he would have to pay a big fine…

BTW: I know that even if the kids hate teachers, the teachers should not hate the kids. But that is difficult. A niece of mine is a teacher and after being bullied for many years (once a week they punched a hole in her bicicle) she gave up.

Most countries do not cherish teachers like we do in Switzerland. In Spanish one speaks of the “case de maestro”, the teachers house, for the worst house in the village. I think Pink Floyd said it well “teachers leave them kids alone!”. Except for a few students, most cannot even speak any other language than Swiss German and can hardly write or do a simple calculation without the phone. That is after 9 years of torturing them at school…

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I think Neil Degrasse Tyson said:

Students who get straight A’s do so not because of good teachers, but in spite of bad teachers."

And in my personal experience, this is very true. A good teacher can easily lift the class to an above 5 avg grade, while a bad teacher means only the smart asses get good grades (or well, the ones who care about school).

I for myself beleive this whole system is a bit of a scam and the value of tertiary education is just a joke for economic fields (like IT or business). It’s a self perpetuating cycle of useless major HR people setting degree standards of domains they have no clue about and only hiring uni degree staff means they’ll also only hire uni degree staff.
For students, I think it’s great, it delays their growing up phase quite a lot, 25yo students can be less mature than a 15yo apprentice.

The whole structure of centralized institutions (which in modern times offer almost 0 value) to get a paper (which is expensive and tedious) so you can do a job you could also objectively do without the paper is insane…

I am doing a bachelor on the side now and will be done by the end of the year and I’ve talked to other people if this really is what the so proud academic eco system aspires to and I kid you not it is…

If I was a polititian, I’d completely speerate education as in “making people productive in their choosen fields of work” and research. Anyone who wants to work at a regular job shouldn’t be required to write meaningless reports for a useless paper.

EDIT:
I luckily found my way and we’re on track to becom milliionaires before 30, studying full time would’ve cost me at least 500K in NW and I already do earn a “uni graduate” level of compensation.

Even with uni I was quite unlikely to work at Google or any other tryhard workplace.

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Now that is where I can´t agree. If you look at the history before mandatory schooling, the girls hd no access to education, because “kitchen, chruch and kids” and the boys had to work.
That meant only the rich could give their children a rudimentary education. Should mandetory schooling change then you can bet that the already poorly educated adults would not bother with educating thier children to even a minimum standard.
Homeschooling is probematic, here in the Fatherland it is thought that homeschooling is bad and it is illegal; imagine a conservative muslim family homeschooling their children, what would their values be, how would they have a chance to integrate?
Not to say that there is no room for reforms… For instance I ws tortured with algebra in eighth and nineth in 1975 and 1976 and have never used it again.

By the way, I still have this from my schooldays.
…showed it to my Granddaughter the other day showed how it worked and how I could calculate with it.
Pen and paper, slipstick and know how… and she just asked alexa for the answer.

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Got to use the old argument though: “you wont always have alexa around”

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Spoke for myself, sorry. If it is between child work and school I suppose school is like a holiday.

In my time school was a real horror, hated every day of it. Beaten by the teachers almost every day, fortunately they were not very strong. But then the janitor who was a rock of a man took his turn too. Had to get stitches after the beating and my father refused to report him because they were in the same club. “You surely have done something to deserve that.” he said to me as 10 year old. We had a class meeting, the first after 45 years, just when the janitor died and we did seriously speak about pissing on his grave!

With 15 I was strong enough to fight back and promptly was thrown out of school for doing so. Finally my life began!

Today (according to my niece the teacher) things are the other way 'round, children do beat the teachers who cannot do anything because the actual laws.

The basic problem is the same: why do they incarcerate children for 9 years, boring them with people they hate? Of course, hard child work is worse and still exists (like “Heuferien”).

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Your teachers probably were mostly men, that used to be the same here (4th grade and higher).

Today’s teachers in primary school are 90% women, and half on the secondary level. As you mention, from age 15 you can fight back against a man, a woman can’t physically control boys of that age, probably not even if they’re a couple years younger than that. Even less so bad ones as they have experience.

(kindergarten is mandatory nowadays. It’s 2 years in most cantons, but some (few) have only one year, mandatory school starts one year later in these)

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“Don’t know what a slide ruler’s for”…I still have my father’s from early 1900s, inlayed in ivory.

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After my father died in ´98 my toxic stepmother kept his things, I got nothing, not even his watch… that is another stroy though.
He had been gifted a sliderule at the end of his apprenticeship, it was magnificent, ivory nonius on a mahogony frame, her imbecilic grandkids chucked it in the bin, along with other things that I considered mine.
Among them an over 200 year old colonial teak seachest, a full set of high quality imperial tools, Optical instruments, so many memories were taken and destoyed through uncaring ignorance.

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It certainly is. To people like Aargauer who want to homeschool their kids: You wouldn’t have gotten far with my little self, unless you had a full chemistry lab in your house, a well-stocked library, a doctorate in mathematics/calculus/trig/geometry, a good microscope, the ability to teach music theory, dance, and art history, and a thorough grounding in world history and culture. Oh, and an art studio with ability to provide expert instruction. This is what school gave me. YMMV.

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In my very limited contact with a handful of home-schooled kids, I think the best description of them would be “special”. They can name 98 types of butterfly but don’t know that you need to unwrap a cake before you eat it.

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Not only that, in school you can be sure that the teacher has a certified knowledge of at least basic teaching skills and a cirruculum that is in line with what the rest of the country is learning.
Homeschooling has the danger that your kids learn Pokemon whereas the rest of the community learns Startrek. Also homeschooling has the danger of indoctriantion with the children learning the values of the parents.

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Oh, I forgot the ability to teach Latin, Greek, French, Spanish, German, and Japanese. Never mind literature…

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I totally agree with you here plus there’s a lot more to schooling than just learning the basics.

Times have changed since most of us were in school and even in Switzerland which is often considered backwards/old school when it comes to education kids are not chained to a desk for nine hours a day sweating over their workbooks.

Plus there’s the whole social aspect to take into consideration as well. There’s more to school than just learning.

Homeschooling may work well for some but it really is just a small minority of kids. Most homeschooled kids I’ve met have been ‘special’ which echos Shirley’s experience.

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It’s learning how to learn, and where to find information. It is also life-long friendships/connections.

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Yeah, this is a huge problem btw… Not that they’re women, but that especially men basically get discriminated in the education system by both male and by female teachers. Part of it is bias and misandry, but the education system in general has just ben feminized - lack of competition, toughness, hard facts - all for “bringing everyone on the same page” inclusivity bs.

The whole education system has kind of been infiltrated - I remmber the toughness of school was harder in 4th grade than it was in 9th grade. The whole inclusion nonsense and a lack of actually learning and studying something makes the traditioal education system pretty obsolete.

The moment you can read and write, you could plow through the whole 9y school curriculum in like 3-4y at max, even with a 100iq child - because the way classes, teaching and testing works is outdated and optimized for a long gone time period.

I’ve also thought about sending my kids to school in the country where my wife is from - the have a much better PISA score, but the problem is: They use the same shitty education system ot begin with… at least they ain’t normalizing or praising mental illnesses and low sill migration like in the western world (even in Switzerland with Lehrplan 21)

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Public schooling also indoctrinates your kids, just in a state approved manner… But we’ll see a lot of changes to the education system in the following decades, as it has ben institutionally infiltrated.

Oh and uh… I think it’s the right as a parent to indoctrinate my kid how I want, if I want to. Not that I can force them ofc, they’re a human with human rights, but I don’t see why a rando teacher with a chill in the park college degree can tell my kids they can be women if they believe so strong enough :man_shrugging: for example.

I don’t really want to, I’ve just thought about it, because the level of public education is erroding in favor of inclusion and I don’t agree with that development.

Yeah, we hadn’t had any of the cool things you mentioned. Libraries are everywhere and the teaching of culture and arts… well, I’d rather teach them more science or history or whatever than that stuff.

But you could also turn that around: Because you can be much more efficient when teaching, you could do a lot more trips to historic sites here in Switzerland for example, you could fulfill the educational guidelines (which you always need to follow, even as a home schooled kid, because it gets checked and you write the same federal exams afterwards).

Learned Japanese in 5-6y to C2 level, school is a hinderance in language learning in all circumstances. A teacher is not needed to learn languages and besides methodology and very expert output training, absolutely not needed for anything.

This is true and the other things are actually much more important - but since you can homeschool more effectively, you can also send your kids to clubs and stuff to socialize. If you plan to keep them locked in the hosue… well then you’re gonna get the butterfly autists lol.

Imho none of that is acomplished at school for most people and it doesn’t get better with adult education either.

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Highly improbable and hyperbolic portrayal of Swiss schools.

The schools we’ve used just taught a normal curriculum. The kids come out with pretty good English, too… :wink:

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Oh fine…I’ll leave you to it, then. The next generation is already at Stanford, MIT, and Harvard.

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In Vaud home schooled kids must sit the same exams, at the same time, as regular pupils. If they are falling behind they can be required to attend school.

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and by then it may be too late.