Where do we draw the line between teaching and parenting?

Question

Recently I became aware of this proposal for a new Homeschooling Stackexchange site. After looking at the sample questions they prepared, I felt that much of what they felt was on-topic would qualify as good questions for our site, too.

If there are a number of people who are interested in Homeschooling, and there seems to be a lot of overlap, I felt that we should consider reaching out to the followers of that proposal and invite them to participate here.

However....

Before we do that, we need to decide as a community where we draw the line between on topic and off topic with regards to teaching.

Currently, our faq categorizes questions about "school-based teaching" under "might be on-topic here but you can get better response on our sister sites". The suggestion for "school-based teaching" is another proposal dedicated to teaching.

A discussion was started about whether the proposed Educators site would want our teaching-related questions. Both responses indicated that they felt questions related to parents teaching their own children should probably be on-topic for Parenting, rather than Educators.

It seems that we, as a site, do not have a clear definition of when questions on teaching are considered on-topic for us, and when they are not. We had the beginnings of a chat discussion on the topic, which you are welcome to review. This discussion includes a number of examples of questions that seem to hover in the grey area that currently exists between what we consider clearly on-topic, and clearly off-topic.

We have 39 questions with the [education] tag, of which 4 are closed.

We have 3 questions with the [homeschooling] tag, one of which is closed, and 1 of which I retagged today, as the question did specify that the OP was considering homeschooling as an option.

How do we, as a community, feel about questions on Homeschooling? How do we feel about questions related to education performed in traditional school settings? We want to focus on this site as a parenting resource, but we also want to attract experts who may not actually be parents. Where do we draw the line between questions that are useful to parents, which will elicit expert-level responses, and questions that focus too much on "education"?

Is education completely distinct from parenting? If so, how do we define that distinction?

Answer 1

Until there's a site in beta that's healthy and appears it'll survive, my take would be that if the question has to do with children learning it's on topic. If in the future there's an SE site that the person asking the question is likely to get a better answer to the question, then to me that would be the time to develop a more formal position on the subject.

Answer 2

Is education completely distinct from parenting? If so, how do we define that distinction?

Absolutely not! The education of the child is the primary responsibility of the parents.

The schooling of the child can be differentiated from parenting. But as anyone with any knowledge of American public schools can attest, there is not necessarily much education going on during "schooling".

In any case, the parents need to be heavily involved, and the parents need to drive the process.

I think the Homeschooling site should be rejected, and the content merged into parenting.se or split between parenting.se and an "education" site if one exists.

Answer 3

There are many areas of overlap, but there are also many areas of divergence. A Homeschooling parent might be active on both sites, but there are questions I don't think can be successfully asked here where they probably would be on a homeschooling site. For example, I asked a question wanting a comparison of three distinct homeschooling styles and got a comment about them looking like "fads". My needing to first educate the general population on this site about things like Charlotte Mason in order to ask my question in the first place devalues this site as a place to discuss homeschooling matters. While in general, educating the public about homeschooling isn't a bad thing, and I do consider it part of what I do after having made this choice, It does significantly decrease the ease and efficiency of use for me as a parent at this site.

My impression is not based on one question alone, I only listed one example as just that, an example. There are a lot of heavily believed in myths about what homeschooling is and who chooses to use it that have also put up a front. I do not say this simply to editorialize or to critcize but to express from my perspective the downfalls of this site as a resource for the homeschooling parent, if the site wants to be more inviting as a resource for these parents it needs a separate community for these parents, or needs to expand its definition of parenting.

Answer 4

Homeschooling questions should be on-topic, so long as it meets our general guidelines, and is not otherwise off-topic (shopping questions, legal issues, too localized, too general, open-ended, etc.).

Education is a fundamental part of parenting, and the distinction between education that takes place in a class-room and education that occurs through direct interaction between a parent and a child is rather arbitrary.

So long as a question addresses something that could be relevant to a parent, acting in the role of parent, questions about education and homeschooling should be on-topic. Questions that would only be of interest to professional educators (e.g. regarding licensing, adhering to government regulations, addressing issues without interfering with parental decisions, addressing issues with parents, etc.), or questions that focus on curriculum specifically, would be off topic.

Questions on strategies or techniques for teaching a specific skill or developmental milestone, or addressing general educational issues, are on topic.

Examples of on-topic education or homeschooling questions:

From our site:

• Should extracurricular activities be required for home-schoolers?

• How does one formally educate a gifted child without wrecking childhood?

• How do you handle bilingual education in a country where you do not speak the language natively?

• What are some strategies for raising a bilingual child?

• How much pressure should I put on my kids to learn?

• How do I teach my child to speak in sentences?

• In what ways can you help a child develop self-control and delayed or deferred gratification?

From the Homeschooling Proposal:

• Does homeschooling impair children's social skills?
• Are there any peer-reviewed studies linking home-schooling to better or worse performance in university studies?
• Unfortunately I can no longer homeschool my children, ages 6 and 10. How can I make the transition to public school easier for them?
• How can I teach my homeschooling students to become more self-motivated, especially when I have multiple students at multiple ages.

Examples of off-topic education or homeschooling questions:

• Where can I purchase amateur lab equipment for experiments and labs?
• Where can I find information about the laws regarding homeschooling in [state/province/country]?
• What are the best books for preparing for the SAT?
• What is a good progression of topics to introduce geometry?
• What is an appropriate, current text book on Biology for an 8 year old?

Answer 5

One-line summary: Anything that is (usually) taught in school is off-topic. See details below.

Obviously parents are also teachers, but on different matters. Of course parents teach and educate to great lengths, but not in a scholarly meaning. Teaching to respect others' toys, learning to tie shoelaces ... call it what you will, but words like "teaching" and "education" and "learning" can refer to home as well as school. In my mind it's quite easy to discern between teaching and parenting. For me, the pragmatic difference is that anything that is (usually) taught in school is teaching while anything that teachers (usually) expect kids to have learned at home is parenting.

Let me try to clarify the above: I draw the line between parenting and teaching at the point where the focus switches from the child's general development to a focus on scholarly/academic/curriculum content. Basically, if a teacher would think hmm, that's something the parents ought to have taught, then it's parenting. Similarly, if a parent would think hmm, we should discuss this with the teacher, then it's teaching. Topics concerning teaching should be (or remain) off-topic. This is the "school-based teaching" that our FAQ currently refers to.

Beofett's answer provides excellent examples of grey-area questions which, by their wording, sound as if their topic is teaching. In my opinion many of those are not actually about teaching, but about parenting. Much of what I learned in school is something my parents could not have taught me, whether for lack of spare time between work and sleep, or for lack of knowledge in a particular topic. Learning to count to three, or knowing left from right and red from green -- these are easily in the parenting realm, while learning calculus or history or chemistry isn't, or at least doesn't have to be.

Let's take an example:
Learning to speak in sentences is parenting -- this is something I'd expect from any four-year-old. However, learning to write in full sentences and compose a 500-word essay is something I'd expect kids to really learn and practice in school -- that's teaching.

More examples:
Homeschooling vs. self-motivation, or vs. bilingual, or vs. "gifted" ... these topics aren't related to what you learn in school. It's not the teacher's job to address them. It's the parent's job in every case!

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Related: homeschooling

I don't like that homeschooling gets special treatment. If we allow homeschooling, then we should also allow regular (school)teaching.

I don't care whether "school" refers to homeschooling or some degree of formalized institution. I've been told that in the US there is public vs private vs gifted vs home, but who really cares? I went to school to learn. "School" is one concept to me, not four. Yeah I know, the parents do the teaching, but so what? For a homeschooling parent, a situation might arise that would be useful to raise on this site. That situation would then be a parenting question anyway, wouldn't it? What does schooling have to do with it? This is my reasoning for cutting off school-related topics but allowing those that really boil down to a parenting issue in the first place.

Let's just put all kinds of "school" in one big off-topic basket, and put "parenting" in another on-topic basket. Why should homeschooling have a special place inside that parenting basket? If any person (parent or teacher) has a question on a topic that is the parent's job, then it's on-topic. If it's about how a homeschooling parent should address some aspect of the curriculum, that's not parenting, hence off-topic.

I would accept homeschooling if it remains one small area among a multitude of others, on par with other tags. If the homeschooling tag grows to a considerable size in relation to the general "tag cloud," then I'd be worried that our site is devalued for users who are only interested in parenting questions.