OK I guess I’m going to go against the deluge of comments here; And give an appreciable reason instead of denigrating those who might choose this.
The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school.
I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country.
However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life. For the entirety of my young life, school was a prison. With inmates who would beat you, Emotionally abuse you, the “wardens” did not want to be there either, and did not care how the other inmates treated you… sometimes doubling down on the behaviour themselves. - The comparison is further solidified by 6-foot galvanised steel bars surrounding the complex, and that I visited an actual psychiatric prison not long after and the cafeteria, recreational grounds, rooms, etc; were identical to those of my school.
Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning, Everything that got me through school was things that my mother taught me- And as a consequence, I was always top of my class.
I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
and for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children- The ostracised, are learning to be helpless and to be victims- They are not learning to “socialise” more. If anything it is probably more harmful for those people to be exposed to more people until they’ve had time to form on their own.
I'm both glad and dismayed to hear that I'm not the only one who likens public school to prison.
I went to school in California, and I would say my school experience became prison-like between grades 4 and 11. In fairness, I can now look back at my child self and realize that I was delayed in terms of emotional maturity, which contributed to my social problems, but the kind of environment I was in was the wrong one for helping me overcome that delay. Any slight difference about myself, whether it be my body, or my clothes, or my interests, was a target of daily ridicule. The majority of teachers were entirely self serving and didn't give a damn, even when I was being victimized out in the open. Oh yeah, and my property was repeatedly stolen and my belongings destroyed in front of me.
Having gone through all that, there is no way I'm ever putting my future children in such a system.
The way I think about the socialization argument against home schooling is this: Is it better to be highly socialized but traumatized or modestly socialized by not traumatized?
I think it's more valuable for children to be socialized with a smaller number of other children while being in a safe environment. Tossing children into an ocean of other children that is poorly controlled with callous teachers, creating an unsafe environment, has a rapidly diminishing returns on socialization and a greater chance of being counterproductive.
The principal always told me "just walk away" and I said, "You fool, the bullies have legs".
The key thing that enables bullying is your being confined in a space with them. Bullying can leave scars that last a lifetime that will affect your employment, your relationships, your children, everything. Not least hearing complete crap from authorities primes you to distrust authorities unconditionally.
I can see why an adult who's never dealt with these difficulties in childhood would give that sort of advice, but it's bewildering how school administrators weren't (and probably still aren't) trained on the reality that "just walk away" is a platitude in the context of an environment where bullies have a captive audience.
It reminds me of how we were told "stick and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me", which is easy to say as an adult with autonomy and other sources of fulfillment; in reality, words not only hurt, but have lasting social consequences. If some turd of a kid has the charisma to humiliate you in front of everyone, even when only verbally, that can lead to a permanently damaged sense of self and lack of respect from peers.
Some people have a positive charisma that comes out of treating people well. I'd expect this from the captain of a sports team.
I knew someone who had a negative charisma, who was criminally minded. He was popular among drug users at my school because he would take more chances and thus have the best supply. He got caught on tape selling 3 kilo of cocaine to a cop after I'd graduate. He had a talent to motivate other people into criminal activity and became the leader of a gay bashing gang that seemed to mainly target straight allies because this was the 1980s and folks like that were probably scared about getting AIDS.
I don't picture the elementary school bully as being particularly popular, but he certainly gets deference from the other students. I think of the popular kids in school as being genuinely likeable even if they didn't take a stand against bullies.
I’m not sure if I agree with this essay, but have you heard about the theory that Ender’s Game is pornography? ( There’s lots of other theories about the book, but this is my favorite )
https://archive.is/JtbIY
Having the emotional maturity to deal with things you don’t like happening has a major influence on how tough being bullied feels like. It’s rarely much time or physical pain, but some kids obsess over it even if they aren’t the major target they often feel extremely persecuted.
Adults can watch something happening and think nothing particularly significant is going on while some kids are experiencing extreme internal distress.
The typical case of physical bullying is not just "things happening that you don't like"; it's wanton, unprovoked assault and battery. Even lesser forms of bullying generally involve some kind of unambiguous threatening, menacing or intimidation. The "emotionally mature" way of dealing with such things in any sane society is not to just walk away, but rather to acknowledge that such actions are inherently an outrage to their fellow students' basic human dignity, and demand that those responsible face meaningful consequences. The fact that "it's rarely much physical pain" (and that merely because kids are involved as opposed to adults) is completely irrelevant.
That may be your memory, but in the typical day it’s intimidation and emotional abuse. Especially in terms of girls who make up half the population, they rarely get punched in the face but arguably have larger issues to deal with.
I’m not accusing you of misrepresenting the situation, just trying to convey what’s objectively going on can feel very different from what people’s lived experience is. Someone with older siblings can barely register being bullied in some situations that really are traumatic to others.
In elementary school I had a girl in class who the other girls made fun of. There was nothing physical. Boys kind of made fun of her as well, but what really stuck to her was the other girls. She did therapy, but even her therapist told her that she is a hopeless case. Which is obviously extremely unprofessional and terrible. She ended up taking her life in her 20s. It was just mental bullying by peers. It is very sad to think back at the time. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her to deserve this bullying, and peers did it as some sort of self esteem popularity type of thing.
I do remember school being this survival of the fittest type of thing as well. Some were naturally good at it, others not so much, different people handled it differently.
Certainly it was the most common for me (also California public school). That does not mean I would not bring up the physical violence as the first item in the list! It's the one least open to interpretation.
>The "emotionally mature" way of dealing with such things in any sane society
If my children lived in a war zone and were suffering constant (high risk) of being killed or mutilated, the mature way of dealing with that wouldn't be to teach them to take cover, or survival skills, or medical triage and first aid... it'd be to just leave and never go back. Get one million miles away from it. Normalizing it, saying "what are you gonna do, we live in a war zone" is strange. But it's just as bizarre to say "you should become an anti-war activist and demand that the diplomats make a lasting peace".
No, just get the fuck out as quickly as is humanly possible, and never look back. Later, when you're someplace safe, maybe you do therapy for the PTSD (I have my doubts that it works), but the first and most important step is to put distance between yourself (or your children) and the threat, enough distance that makes it impossible for the threat to follow.
> Adults can watch something happening and think nothing particularly significant is going on while some kids are experiencing extreme internal distress.
I think because that is also often because they regard it as normal for kids. A lot of people say things like "bullying toughens them up".
They would not think its OK for the same things to be done to adults. I wonder what the toughens them up lot would think if I showed up at their house with a few friends and gave them a light beating - I think calling the police would be a more likely outcome than thanking me for teaching them to be tough!
I got picked on all the time as a kid in school. I did not like it, but it did develop several traits that I learned to appreciate later in life. First and foremost, I am not the slightest bit bothered by anyone mocking me anymore. I don’t get easily embarrassed at all.
At the same time, I also learned to fit in a lot better. Getting picked on for things I said or did create some social conditioning about what was and wasn’t acceptable.
This type of bullying was helpful in hindsight.
Physical bullying is different ballgame and I don’t understand anyone that thinks it’s acceptable.
Cyberbullying is on a whole other level of publicly humiliating a developing child in front of everybody they know, often by anonymous people who will take steps to make sure it never goes away if they want to.
The latter 2 are totally unacceptable and dangerous.
The first getting lumped in with bullying creates bullying apologists I think, because there can be beneficial side effects of helping kids learn social norms.
I think the root of this problem is the principal-agent problem.
It literally doesn't matter to teachers (a) if you get bulled at school (they are not being bullied themselves) or (b) if you have problems later in life.
Maybe a bullied kid will completely lose it as an adult and murder a bunch of people. But does the teacher who completely failed to help them get arrested? No, therefore it just doesn't matter to them at all.
The only thing that would prevent this is teachers actually caring or being kind. And of course there are some that do and are. But relying on that isn't enough. There need to be right incentives set in order enable the majority of teachers to put in the effort to act in the right way.
(I don't know what that incentive structure looks like I'll admit.)
We pay for a private school, it's expensive yes and I know not accessible for all, but it's kind of the best of both worlds. You get to choose the school and it's a community vibe. It helps when the other kids, potential bullies, know your kid and know their parents talk to your parents. It also helps as the staff is acutely tuned in to things like this, and they have amazing ways of conflict resolutions. It's not difficult, it just requires some attention and thought. They reinforce golden rule type actions/behaviors/leading by example/etc. As an example, if one kid picks on another one, instead of detention - they will both be given a 'private talk' and then paired up on some activity. The result is, they were constructively scolded then had a chance to bond and become friends - and it works. It's never going to be fully eradicated, but it's amazing just how little there is and how supportive everyone is in trying to develop good humans.
They also assess the kids emotional maturity early on. Those that they feel are not ready to go from Kinder to 1st get a 'Primer' year. It's basically holding them back in Kinder but with a positive twist.
Tons of other benefits as the parents hold a lot of power (since we pay). But also, the quality of staff/teachers, and low ratios are quite a perk compared to our area's public schools which are poorly rated.
I went to public school myself, and while I was never bullied, I do think I was a target of bullies at some time. Any time I felt like someone was bullying me, I fought back and would often be disciplined under zero tolerance rules. That's how my parents taught me to deal with it, 'stand up for yourself boy' kind of thing. We've taught our kid not to hit and to be kind and he is, but that's exactly what I think would make him a huge target in a public school environment.
This is why introducing a degree of school choice is becoming a popular policy among parents in both parties, but I think bringing back rapid expulsion to disciplinary boys/girls schools would be even more impactful. Unfortunately, recent social justice activism has stymied that possibility in progressive areas. Either restore unfettered power of self-curation to the environment and ensure it is wielded effectively, or parents will demand more flexibility in choosing from non-monopoly options.
I'm sorry - you're following all the comments about public schools being like a prison and you're suggesting people get expelled faster or disciplined more to improve schools?
my kid goes to private school. expelled students by grade:
1st: 2
2nd: 4
3rd: 4
4th: 3
5th: 5
6th: 3 (so far)
why am I saying this? we pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for having access to this kind of environment. if there is a kid who is fucking up everyone else, the “everyone else” should not have to suffer through it. I would pay double what I pay now for this priviledge for my kid. so yes, 100%, more expelling and more discipline is needed
Isn’t that an absurd indictment of your school? If my (converted) $30k/year school had to expel even a single student every year that would be a massive failure in my eyes.
The crazy thing is, the American populace is already paying ~15k per student for public education. Why are they not expelling kids who are fucking up that environment?
well they will when they realize that MANY children should be left behind… (move to special ed schools
or some vocational schools if they are high school age)
I'm of the opinion that parents are largely to blame for all this stuff. School is viewed as daycare and education not really prioritized by a large part of our population. Teacher's get all the blame and that's not right at all.
I'm for things that entails negative consequences for the parents prior to the kid being pigeon holed as a deplorable or unfitting for academic environments. Sending them home is one way to make the parents suffer. But before that, let's group them together and then find ways to level them up as a cohort. Everyone suffers when the class has a huge standard deviation of skills/knowledge/enthusiasm/engagement/support/etc.
I could not agree more with everything you said - it is really on parents largely. if my kid was one causing trouble in school I would 100% consider this my failure. and your idea about sending them home is for sure good in my book - of course this may create additional shitstorm on the kids if the parents are shitty but it is definitely one way I think makes sense to start with.
let's group them together and then find ways to level them up as a cohort I also agree with this but am thinking there has to be time limits etc... everyone should be given a 2nd chance and for kids I think everyone should be given 10th chance :) but both parents and kids have to understand that there are consequences and there are time limits to patience for behaviour correction.
Prisons would be a lot safer if the dangerous inmates got kicked out of prison and left behind the ones who didn't attack other inmates.
If you want to improve schools quickly, expelling problem kids is the easiest way to do it. But that would cause consequences to the expelled kids, as well as society.
Most problem kids can be rehabilitated with some investment of time in a positive, welcoming environment though. Not so much if you stick them in prison school. They’ll just live up to your expectations in that case.
I've been following the topic for a while as a minority and I worry about this as well as cops in our schools continuously raising the specter of violence and school shootings raising the real concern of violence.
It doesn't feel like expelling students has reduced violence or improved the quality of the day to day when I see the tracking of these issues.
yeah, in what world would that not help? they're not getting kicked out of the school system, just the school. lowest-common-denominator idealism like you are espousing here is one of the primary reasons why schools have gotten so terrible.
Obviously there is a bigger picture in all of this. I don't know what the correct balance is, but assume that all problem kids (for some strict definition of problem) were expelled and placed in a "problem school". I highly doubt that is going to improve that child's life or attitude, but obviously it will help those at the previous school. So we end up with a large number of kids who will almost certainly grow up to be "problem adults", in many cases criminals. Suddenly the problem you solved for the first school is now the problem of society at large.
In a perfect world, most of those problem children would be mentored correctly in regular schools and given a path to a better adult life, and therefore not create a future "problem adult".
In practice, it doesn't seem to work like that, and I agree, "problem children" do cause frictions and disruptions and worse for other children at regular schools.
I find it appalling that parent who can afford a private school, even with much sacrifice, would instead send their children to a a public school.
It is the equivalent of eating soup at a homeless shelter when you can go to the store and buy something better, made worse by the fact that you are making the decision for someone else that cannot decide on their own.
There is an assumption that private is better always and that’s not true. Top 10-20% of private is better but it’s expensive and not available to most. There is a lot of poor and low quality private too.
I attended a private school for a couple of years, and I have to say it was worse than the public ones.
Now obviously this is going to be neighbourhood, country, and community specific, but the problem I had with observing private schools was that now the school had an additional incentive not to expel students, rich and influential parents had extra influence over whether their child could be disciplined and how the school should do things, and half of the time the problematic behaved people were... the rich people and their children. Having and paying money isn't exactly a free ticket to well-adjusted children especially if the children are mimicking the culture they see at home and the society awards bullying and various behaviours with more money... Which most of ours do.
And this was on top of the downsides of private schools: being image obsessed over academics and intellectual investigation, surrounded by non egalitarian private school twats, and bunches of arbitrary private school rules. Now obviously this is not all private schools, but in the same way it's not all public schools either.
I think in this system it's a roll of the die. In my country, neighbourhood and in my life, my kid is currently going to public school and, touch wood... thriving for now. The other private schools around here have too much woo like Waldorf and Steiner and they steer away from evidence based methods in literacy and numeracy.
But I don't know if that's going to hold off into the older ages, and I can't promise, much to my wife's chagrin, not to consider homeschooling considering my own experience of high school also approaching that of a dysfunctional prison and a poor educational environment.
PS: there was plenty of interpersonal violence at the private schools when I grew up.
You couldn’t really own anything and had to prepare for anything nice to be stolen, or anything they looked dear to you (even if not nice) to be destroyed.
I heard of kids having their shoes stolen, but I never had that.
I’m sorry that happened to you, I hope you are doing better now. :(
This is a major reason (but far from the only reason) that we homeschool. Knowing what I know about the school system, about my own experience thereof, and about my kids' personalities, it would be grossly immoral for me to put them through it. The risk of long-term trauma would be too high.
There is some risk of their being isolated (but very low, since they are with other kids three days a week), and a slightly higher risk of missing chunks of learning (which we aim to mitigate in the obvious ways). But ultimately I'd rather my kids have a few gaps in their knowledge than be traumatized by the school system.
> I'd rather my kids have a few gaps in their knowledge than be traumatized by the school system
I went through a normal school system (the first 8 years still during the communist regime in my country, so take that "normal" with a grain of salt), and the gaps in my knowledge are enormous, in some cases subject-wide. I know literally nothing about chemistry, except the bits you learn here and there from TV shows and such. I vaguely remember some kind of equations, but nothing stuck. Biology - everything I know I know from somewhere else, mostly from that TV show with talking blood cells [1].
Surprisingly, I had pretty good grades, but it had nothing to do with knowledge - I was able to quickly scan the textbook before an exam and somehow it was sufficient, but there was no retention, I forgot everything after the exam. I was forced to learn Russian for 4 years and I remember literally nothing, not even the alphabet.
Those are mostly just anecdotes - I am sure that modern schooling can do better than rote memorization in a toxic environment. What I want to say is that motivation, a friendly environment, and fun learning are a lot more important than how well the teacher knows, say, chemistry. It is entirely possible that your kids will retain more knowledge, not less.
I am only talking about elementary school, college was different - I loved it and learned a lot.
Agree, there are plenty of kids who go to government schools and have enormous gaps in their knowledge, in the west as well.
I'm saying that, all things being equal, I'd rather my kids be homeschooled with a few gaps, than go to a government school (and be traumatized) and have no gaps.
I grew up in Russia and I have a very similar experience emotionally, hating every second of my school life, but somehow I couldn't remember any particular horrors. It was just all so ridiculously sad and hopeless and boring, I couldn't stand listening unpassioned teachers talking about sili memorisation tasks the whole day and didn't feel like I fit socially either (even though I wasn't bullied) so it all felt like a torture.
School was and remains a prison, that is why they build the gates so high.
Worse, its a prison with cult-like re-education towards elements of Marxism, without calling it that, in many cases. Its a spectrum so not all teachers are like that, but there are enough that it can be seen widely.
Most of this comes from teacher's followed recommendations made during conferences held by the National Teachers union, which has used many Marxism-based pedagogy while obscuring it.
These things are subtle to anyone who doesn't have some exposure to real life torture constructs, and how those constructs work (mechanism and means).
Schools are also failing to educate and provide people with the skills they need to succeed, the sole purpose for the school's centralized state-run existence.
The teachers exhibit qualities that any centralized system without a loss function has. They have no duty to investigate issues of performance with co-workers since absent an effective loss function (cutoff where you get fired), social standing and seniority become more important. In these types of collectivist systems, regardless of role, creating a hostile work environment hurts the group, and investigating issues creates a hostile work environment. They are all co-workers after all.
Social mental coercion also occurs towards the excellent teachers, since they make all the average teachers look bad. Those teachers then haze, backstab, and undermine in any way they can sabotaging and interfering while imposing social personal cost until the excellent leave, the ones that remain are the average, continually gravitating towards the least common denominator. In state-run institutions with free money, this becomes negative production value.
Sending and subjecting your children to brainwashing and torture is the greatest betrayal.
An example of one these subtle but effective techniques follows, its called the hot potato. It is one of many techniques.
A student is called out in front of the class and asked to answer a question, the question will be opinion based, and the teacher will reflect disapproval if answered incorrectly (in their opinion). These will be mixed in with fact questions to muddy the water so its unclear this is what they are doing.
This technique in pedagogy isolates the student called, making them anxious in front of their peers, often times because answering incorrectly has delayed be inevitable personal cost. At this age, they often don't have the biology to self-reflect or introspect to recognize the basis for why this is happening. They just feel anxious, and rightfully so.
The level of disapproval shown by the teacher results in driving two parallel processes. One that results in inducing bullying from the approval seeking students in that peer group, without the teacher needing to directly or explicitly take action. This bullying, or coercive shunning, is an ever present threat to the subject. The bullies having participated have (their own) consistency drive their efforts, with negative consequence. These are circular processes where both participants become the victim and perpetrator through induced behavior (as a result of structure).
Answering according to the torturer's opinion, forces inherent challenges of fighting your own psychology. It enables the consistency principle in psychology to warp the subjects mind over time (our identity largely remains consistent, which is based in this underlying cognitive bias we all have). What we write, and the words we use, even if we consciously don't agree with them will warp us towards agreement given sufficient repeated exposure and time.
You see this with used car salesmen when they ask innocuous, but carefully constructed questions seeking agreement, and once you answer (in any way but a specific way), they know they've got a sale excepting external factors.
The main principles of influence can be applied beneficially, or coercively. Robert Cialdini goes into these principles, and how they work.
Robert Lifton, and Joost Meerloo cover the reality of torture, how it actually works in their books written in the 1950s (with details from actual torture done by Mao, and the Nazi's).
The reality is, in the 1950s the limits of perception were found, and processes and techniques discovered that let you break and twist people. It started with torture, then a big issue with Cults, then it was used in AdTech and business process design to impose personal cost on the customer. It wasn't just used there, it spread widely, and its hard to find areas that have not in part been shaped by this to an individuals detriment.
The research was also not shared widely in whole either, its been repackaged to obscure the origins, such as conferences on pedagogy done by the Teacher's Union, or Game Design (within the Octalysis Frameworks), too many other places to count. The elements are there for those that know what to look for.
In general, all you really need to get this started are three elements for torture. Isolation, removal/lack of agency (unable to leave without causing loss, disadvantage or detriment), and cognitive dissonance; often where what is said isn't true, and loops back forcing the subject to engage in a endless loop of torture.
It caustically will break anyone down, and Social Media ensures Children can't limit exposure because of addiction triggers, and the lack of biology during Children's existing development to control addiction. The phone follows them everywhere they go, as it does for most of us. These things do break down everyone eventually, and quite a lot of the indoctrinated masses lack the ability to discern or recognize it is happening. Once broken and blinded you tend to stay blinded and broken excepting certain rare individuals.
Ironically, when people break down past a point they segment into the unresponsive dissasociate, or the psychotic seeking self annihilation. Two cohorts. The latter is often a semi-lucid state capable of planning. It seems to mirror objective characteristics seen in Active Shooters.
Rational thought under such psychological stress described breaks down fairly quickly.
You send your kids to school to receive the same tools that were provided to the parents in living a beneficial productive life. Many important tools are no longer taught, and in their place frameworks promoting inducement in false belief, practice, and ideology (towards nihilism) while blinding them to rational thought, have grown. You see this in the Woke cult, and many maoist/marxist inspired movements under adopted group names that change regularly to obscure and mislead.
These two things are why smart and intelligent parents are homeschooling. You don't send your children to Maoist re-education camps and expect them to be able to survive afterwards. The process destroys the individual psyche.
Even the intelligent may not know the process of what's happening, but they often more keenly discern and sense something being wrong and remove their kids from such environments, so long as they were paying attention and fulfilling their parental obligations (many today have or do not, unfortunately).
What you say about the reality and mechanisms of torture may be true. But your insistence on assigning this behavior to some political side is, frankly, frightening.
It won't change the amount of political violence that's ahead of us, but I would recommend that you, at a personal level, question those associations.
No political side, no country, or race has the monopoly of evil, and if you believe otherwise you have some serious work to do.
> But your insistence on assigning this behavior to some political side is, frankly, frightening.
You mistake this being political, and I did not assign these behaviors. These groups have done these acts. Its replete in the histories.
The acts have been littered throughout the historical record repeatedly and regularly starting with Marx and Engels taking from the Jesuits many of the practices that got the Jesuits expelled, and moving forward in time, the actions done by a majority of these people calling themselves such by various names, reflect what you call 'assigned'. They don't self-police and ignore destructive acts, if anything, these people's own actions assigned these to their movement.
I make a point of saying this too, because they change their group names to suit their groups purposes and to obscure their origins; misleadingly in a deceitful way, regularly. They do not want to be tied down by the same repeated failures that are associated with past groups. When you do the same exact things, and expect different results, this is a definition of insanity.
Marxists to Fabians to Bolsheviks, to Maoist, Communist, to Social Democracy, to Social Justice, to Wokeism, and I'm skipping quite a bit here.
There's been roughly a new name every 5-10 years going back to the 1920s, for the same Marxist-based doctrine that fails core components needed for rational objectivity. Failing such it shows the delusion, and fanaticism of those supporting it.
I would have nothing against these belief systems if they were consistent and rational, and in fact there would be no issues if that was met.
All they would have to do is conform to the basic principles inherent in rationalism, that is objective definition, unique meaning in language (no ambiguity of definition), Descartes Rules of Method, and logic. No improper use of the abuse of the contrast principle (hegel).
In other words, falsehoods get discarded.
They do not do this, and that is the core problem. They seek to unify through deceit and omission, that some of them, themselves, believe quite fallaciously, and by using language with multiple contradictory meanings, so no proper context can be made (newspeak). They use coercive methods to induct, following Cult structure as well. Seeming good at a cursory level, while sewing the seeds for evil through delusion, hallucination, and fallacy. These people also almost never happy.
Many leftist movements over the past hundred or so years seek to blur the line between politics, ideology, and economics, and state. This provides them cover to make unprovable false claims and create a power platform. You have part of the group which decries the abuses, while you have the other part pretending to be another group while inducing the same such abuses. Its about control of the resources, not ownership.
Its also beneficial to them to falsely call it political since politics is protected in open societies as is ideology, but this isn't religion, nor should any so called religion/ideology based in delusion or fallacy be protected or supported.
The important difference between real politics and this is in discerning rationally whether that type of ideology is a death cult, whose actions will result in unchecked destruction.
Mises wrote thoroughly about the 6 or so intractable problems of economics under such systems (by structure) because even back then they changed their names regularly (in the 1930s-1950s).
These movements we are talking about seek to make irrational dogma seeking power and control, they make broad nice sounding claims, while setting the stage for indirect but destructive outcomes. This has been demonstrated multiple times in their own policy and publications.
The Russian famine in 1921 for example, or the famines caused by Mao's Cultural Revolution, Maoist Re-education Camps (for the children), the massacres of Hue, Tienanmen Square, political dissident prisoners in Hong Kong, the ongoing acts of terrorism sponsored by the Stasi/KGB, the list goes on for miles.
They of course falsely claim its to make a better future, to get people to cede power to them, but the dynamics and the reality do not match up, and most don't resolve indirectly reference things that show it to be an unobtainable pipe dream, where the real outcome is destruction.
Eventually reality re-asserts when survival is on the line, and failing survival large numbers perish. Production may be continued through slavery, but overall eventually it shows itself to be a death cult.
If you've read any of the material published by the prominent people in these movements, you would see them talking about this, albeit in doublespeak to make it not sound as bad. They never question the viability of their premises.
Now that is frightening.
When you have a movement who abandons rational principles seeking a false utopia while in action only going for short term personal gain, this is destructive. People eventually die when this is unchecked.
Obviously, evil acts are any act that does not result in long term beneficial growth of self or others, and evil people are willfully blind to the consequence of their evil acts.
I'm well aware that there is no monopoly, I never claimed otherwise, but there are clusters or disease vectors where evil seeks to subvert from within until it can show its true face through action.
A group predominantly containing such is important to call out.
The Nazi's were evil, but they started off as the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
The Fabian's had similar origins, resulting in the economic collapse of the UK. They shared tactics, method, and history.
Bolsheviks had similar origins. Maoists had similar origins.
While they all claim to be new and independent groups, their structures show they've adopted core aspects of false or destructive ideology originally derived from Marxism in whole or part.
Political movements with core practices based in false ideology and method, resolving to destruction, are not valid political movements and do not deserve protection.
how is public school teaching kids to take collective ownership of the private means of production? must have slept through those classes. My public schools in Oregon had a lot of anti-communism elements and I got a brief suspension for writing a research paper analyzing and defending the Black Panthers in high school -- cited reason was "defending/promoting terrorists" or something along those lines
They promote 'critical consciousness', which is a framework of looking at things in isolation without resolving indirections, and examining existing relationships by their power dynamics which are treated as static, not dynamic. These are based in fallacy, but more recently described in the critical turn in education, and was somewhat inspired by Paulo Freire's work.
The framework of reasoning being taught, is anything but, and follows circular paths that travel down a spiral of madness, and subjectivity without proper definition; in classic hegelian structure to abuse the contrast principle.
This is seen most recently in people who have contracted the mind virus, Woke-ism. When you adopt this 'critical consciousness', as they call it you blind yourself to the reality of things, and its a self-inflicted violation of your self. The things they do and say often are borderline delusional or insanely irrational, and not based in reality.
Marxist derivatives has not been about seizing collective ownership for quite some time, its been about interference, demoralization, and destabilization. They seized production by seizing the money, and are doing so through debasement as Lenin said in Keynes quote.
The currency allows control of the means of production as the root of all trade (exchange), and this has been seized already back in the 70s, by central planning bankers, and the ECP driven by money printing will be taking hold in a few short years once third stage ponzi is publicly visible. In other words, debt growth > GDP.
This sieving action of resources into fewer and fewer hands through debt is already driving legitimate producing businesses out of business (bankruptcy), or towards mergers, where they close shop which are funded by a money printer. The money printer swallows everything.
All debt issues with 0% fractional reserve is private money printing. This occurred in 2020 silently at the start of the pandemic. They replaced fractional reserve with an opaque capital reserve system (Basel III), which itself is based on fiat valuations that the banks loaning the money/printing the money decide. Carl Menger thoroughly proved how value is subjective. These structures neglect the simple fact that there are dynamics at work that determine value, so the associated banks will be fine until they suddenly aren't, without notice, or predictability (chaos).
Once concentrated, then everything can be seized and nationalized silently with cutout companies backed by the money printer, but in the process production grinds to a halt, shortage ensures, and stops and all value is lost since the store of value as a property of currency fails.
Order wanes, famine, slavery, and death, as occurs in every non-market socialist state to date; only this time it will be a global event and not an isolated nation event. That is the problem with parasites. Sometimes they kill the host, and by extension kill themselves.
> Research paper analyzing and defending the Black Panthers in high school.
Well I guess it would depend on what you wrote. The simple fact of the matter is, the dynamics of a successful protest or movement depend on largely two things.
The responsiveness of policymakers to listen and correct issues, and the inherent threat of violence or imposed cost.
If policy-makers fail to do their job by being unresponsive when their job is serving their constituency, violence holds them to account when the abuse is egregious enough. This once happened back in 1776, with colonists who were not considered british citizens or entitled to such protections without representation.
The politician's know this in theory too because they had to read the books covering these topics. Many of which are central to constitutional law, or social contract theory (Leviathan, Locke, Kant, Rosseau).
Absent the first, no non-violent movement can succeed in making change. You need appropriate political and judicial structures that are responsive to conflicts so they can be resolved non-violently. If they are not responsive (regardless of reason), the sole purpose of law fails, that purpose is non-violent conflict resolution equally under the law.
This used to be the courts, but they too have degraded to the point where if you don't have the money upfront to hire a lawyer, you don't have a seat at the table. A single civil suit today, even a slam dunk one, costs about a 50k retainer, from the lawyers I've spoken with. That's about the average median annual income for most people unspent (on things like food, necessities etc).
A rule of law requires certain elements, if you examine the law today and the associated costs, its largely only available to the select few with money. The 5 or so components have failed enough times to claim several decade long trends.
There is a psychological consistency pitfall in writing about things you don't care about because words alter your perception even if you don't believe it in the moment, the more often you write something the more it impacts you. They did this in the Korean Conflict to PoWs. It generally started with a choice; hard labor, or write an essay with the following prompt, "Why is the US not the best country in the world", to "Why does communism work better than capitalism", and then its read over a loudspeaker and celebrated among the captors, and prisoners.
Its subtle bias, but effective, proven, and documented.
If people can't organize and react to the reality of things being done to them, they implicitly are agreeing to their own destructive end, for themselves and anyone else they happen to manage to carry along with them.
Absolutely not reading this entire diatribe, but you should post some high quality sources to back up your extraordinary claims about Maoist torturer-teachers or whatever.
If you don't read what you comment on, then you miss out on the things you then ask about. It makes anyone look stupid.
The sources on how torture works, were referenced. The authors are well established in their fields, its old material that has not been refuted in any way and is backed by first-hand accounts in the case studies (1950s).
The structural elements they cover are well discussed. These elements are also present in material pushed at the recommendation by the national Teachers Union in the past (at several points). This included, iirc, the Roots movie controversy and this revisionist fictional film being portrayed as historical to push a false narrative.
Teachers aren't generally malign, but bureacracies can be (NEA almost without a doubt imo). The teachers simply did what they were trained to do without knowing what they were trained to do. A potential example of the banality of evil with regards to complacency and sloth.
You may not like it, and not want to see it, and not want to believe it.
Nonetheless, it is clearly happening.
James Lindsay has published quite a lot of rationally backed literature on Woke-ism, and its relation to Marxism/Maoism, and how its a cult. He has several publications, and a youtube channel if you are so inclined.
Regardless of what you happen to call a thing, you can describe a thing based on its elemental component or characteristics. Rationally this process is called characterization, and when you find the same elements, and the same outcomes, that suggests a thing that goes by another name (deceitfully to obscure), is the same thing functionally.
When you see the same structures used in Maoist prison camps in the 50s being used in education, the question shouldn't be is this happening because the characteristics match. It should be who chose to do this and why, and is it more important to protect them over your own children. These all have pretty simple straightforward answers.
I went to a state school in the North of England with a GCSE pass rate between 30-40% and this is a fair description of what it was like. At the time the performance of all schools was based on the percentage of students achieving at least a C including Maths and English, and as Goodhart’s law suggests this inevitably meant the school’s resources were optimised for getting students around the C grade borderline to pass while all other students didn’t get an education suited to their ability. The Gove reforms included changing how schools are assessed to a value-added measure, that I believe is commonly used in the United States, which has created the incentive for schools to focus on all students rather than just those near an arbitrary passing grade. The deeper underlying issue that’s harder to solve is the anti-aspirational culture that pervades through a lot of schools in deprived areas, in my experience most students didn’t really get the value a good education could bring to their lives and like the original comment treated it like internment rather than a route out of poverty.
I went to a school that had a lot of good teachers, and I learned a lot from them.
But when it came to bullies, the school was just as you described. Worse, the punishment for being in a fight was the same whether you started it or you were just beaten up. If you made the fight get noticed, you got punished. It was quite clear that they had no interest in stopping the fights, just in making sure they didn't get reported.
And on the bus, the driver didn't like my family because she once turned the bus around on our grass, tearing up a bunch of it, and my father was angry about that. In retaliation, she let bullies beat me up on the bus for years and turned a blind eye.
My education would probably have suffered if I was home schooled because both my parents were forced to work to make enough money to survive. And I'd be even more introverted than I am now.
Not being supported by the adults who pretend to be trustworthy is nearly as damaging as the bullying itself. Like you, I would be punished alongside the perpetrator even if I didn't throw a single punch or insult. This is extremely toxic because it completely breaks trust and causes children to lose faith in the system they're in, and they shut down. I know I did. I stopped telling anyone my problems because experience told me saying anything only lead to more shame.
The only true advice I could give to a child with bullying issues is physical violence - as fast as possible. It is sad. It doesn't take many humans to make school/life/work miserable.
> Worse, the punishment for being in a fight was the same whether you started it or you were just beaten up. If you made the fight get noticed, you got punished.
I'm not saying that this is anything close to optimal, but it should be noted that under this system (which is reminiscent of the way ancient Chinese criminal law worked, per Legal Systems Very Different from Ours[0]) people who get beat up should still report and take the punishment. Sure, you'll get punished for it once but you'll also build a solid reputation for not letting things slide, so it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to beat you up again.
[0] Except that the punishment back then for being involved in a crime (generally a theft or a swindle of some sort) was, guess what-- you got beat up.
> […] so it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to beat you up again.
That is, unfortunately, not how this works. The only ways to stop bullying are to be able to stand up to the bullies, which usually is not a realistic proposition (you wouldn't get bullied in the first place if you could) and can lead to further escalation (right on up to shootings or stabbings); to have a very, very empathic teacher who will put their foot down; or to have solid anti-bullying programs which use effective, proven methods to stamp out bullying.
Mind that nothing will deter a really determined bully, and getting punished because your victim spoke up instead of accepting the bully's power will escalate things from 'bullying just because you are available' to 'bullying because I now want you, and specifically, you, as miserable as you can be, all the time'.
From my experience with school bullying it was an entirely social problem. If the rest of the classroom agreed that you shouldn't be bullied then there were few ways for a handful of kids to go against that consensus, and most of them would backfire on the would-be bully.
Of course, if you're young and you have no friends, good luck getting your peers to think you're worth defending.
The one time I got attacked, one of the top three popular guys in the class went berserk on my attacker. This happened in grade school and the next aborted attempt at bullying wasn't until the end of middle school by someone who had transferred in later on.
Let's call this what this is, it is "below terrible" instead of "anything close to optimal". It's an interesting tidbit from a game theory perspective, but telling your child who is getting beaten up to not worry and play the long game is 1) horrible, 2) only works if everyone else in the game is rational. I don't remember bullies getting into trouble and stopping.
> you'll also build a solid reputation for not letting things slide
This is a terrible idea that was obviously flown as a butt-covering excuse by administrators who, like the school administrators, have discovered that it is much easier to fight reporting of crime than it is to fight crime.
I am deeply disappointed to see it treated as some sort of deep truth, when in fact it is a shallow lie that anyone with the slightest understanding of bureaucracy ought to have seen through in no time at all.
Wish I could say the same. I often wonder how things would turn out if I didn't have the insecurities/other mental handicaps stemming from that period. And fantasize about rewinding time with the current brain and leaving a trail of broken bones in my wake :-D
I went to grammar school (UK) in the 1990s, and also absolutely loathed it. I think it set me up horribly for life and (especially) for my career. People use the phrase "PTSD" too lightly, but I think it gave me something like it that I often feel in an office full of people, and especially during in-person meetings. Years of CBT and ERP have helped a lot, and now I'm middle-aged I think I've put the worst of it behind me. I remember that horrible feeling that both the bigger kids and the teachers were against you, and the sense of utter helplessness and despair.
A few times my parents hired tutors for subjects I was struggling in, and I remember that suddenly I found myself enjoying them. I think I would have benefited greatly from being homeschooled, but of course at that time it was unheard of in the UK. I know it's not for everyone. There's no perfect answer. What's certain is that there's nothing 'normal' about sitting in a room with 30 people who are exactly the same age as you, plus one official authority figure.
So school certainly 'socialized' me, but not in a good way.
It wasn't entirely bad. I got a reasonably good education, and some of the teachers have left a positive impression. Overall though it was horrible.
PTSD is misapplied quite a bit these days, though CPTSD (the C stands for complex) seems to be the most appropriate clinical definition for the kind of scattered traumatic damage people experience, especially from childhood.
Glad to know you've received the help that you needed and have been able to move on. I compartmentalized and put off working on my traumas for far longer than I should have. People underestimate how much a dysfunctional school environment can mess someone up even when the home environment is mostly healthy. I screwed up great relationships in large part because I still had trust issues and CPTSD triggers that I didn't even realize at the time.
No joke, I'd rather have only known the neighborhood kids growing up than have thousands of kids to socialize with while having fucked up things happen to me. So what if I wouldn't experience prom night? If it's not the right environment for me, then it's not worth it.
Thanks. Yes, CPTSD would be more accurate -- the result of a state of near-constant low-level fear. I had, and continue to have, massive trust issues, particularly at work. I struggle to think everyone doesn't secretly hate me and that I'm not constantly on the verge of getting fired, even though I can see it's not logical. Steadily getting better now thanks to CBT and similar techniques.
But I have lost many friends and career opportunities as a result of my time at school. I had a basically healthy and happy home environment, but as you say, school can still screw you up badly.
Also Grammar school (in the 1980s), I got lucky as I got in the 'express track' and did O-levels after 4 years not 5 so I went to uni at 17. Probably a good thing as some kids were total sh*ts and 5 years of them would have been awful
Wow, it seems like the UK education system is a very severe environment. Remember Anthony Hopkins saying the same thing about it being brutal, having received abuse from both the teachers and the other students.
Yeah, just from my perspective having gone through the US public schools, the schools here seem to be a lot more open and friendly (following the American stereotype). But at the same time, we probably have a lot lower standards in terms of learning, and also the US has a lot of variation in school quality.
I grew up in the US, we're about the same age, and I went to a public school where I had a similar experience. More than anything else, I remember the crushing boredom and the feeling that time had slowed to a crawl. I wasn't beaten or abused, but I felt trapped in amber, and the school really was prison-like, just as you describe it. I've never hated anything so much in my life as I hated school.
So I escaped the prison. I dropped out at age 14 and went to work in a book warehouse at the age of 16. Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but to this day I consider it among the best decisions I've ever made.
Now I have young children of my own, and I'm not sure how I'm going to handle their education, but home schooling -- /w private professional tutoring and organized athletic activities -- looks like the best option. There's no way I'd subject them to public school.
I learned basically nothing in my k-12 public school but it was fun times.
Emotionally? It is really hard to top those times in high school.
It was the opposite of a prison for me. Like a garden of adolescent roses that had nothing to do with the real world other than the sweet smell of roses as an adolescent.
It is why I am glad to be child free. Anyone posting here is going to have a child that is better off than almost anyone who has ever lived.
I would suspect the best strategy in 2025 for anyone here is to not crush the creativity of the child. The only thing bad you can really do is to impose yourself too much on the child. The more hands off the better. The lighter the touch the better.
Yours skills are not what your child will need t+50 years.
It also says something about the quality of the "education" that you were able to (presumably) manage some sort of technical aspirations and career without the "required education".
> Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but ...
In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable.
Some of those screaming people probably cared about you and your future. Most of them just resented you, for highlighting the actual state of their society and schools. And perhaps making them doubt their own choices.
> In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable.
That depends.
Those who drop out because they can't hack it will find misplaced regret, blaming future woes on dropping out when in reality the problem is a continuation of the deficiencies that lead them to dropping out.
Those who drop out because they have bigger and better plans won't think about it again.
I think there are two assumptions embedded in the parent comment that I think you're ignoring:
1) The people who are on to bigger and better things are in fact vanishingly rare. Like, yes, Bill Gates dropped out of college, but he dropped out of Harvard, not Evergreen Community College. He wouldn't have been there in the first place if he wasn't already capable of some big things.
2) A really healthy society, with really good schools, would provide a path for those who can't hack it. Its almost definitionally not a good school if the process exposes some deficiencies, then just gives up. Like "well, it turns out your dyslexic, here's your cardboard box and begging pan" sounds like a bad school.
> The people who are on to bigger and better things are in fact vanishingly rare.
Dropouts are rare full stop, and those that do drop out overwhelmingly have life issues that causes them to drop out. The well rounded people who do okay in school aren't the ones dropping out, it is those with things like mental disabilities. It is not the act of dropping out that is impactful, it is the problems that lead to dropping out that continue after dropping out. It is a misconception that continuing in school would have cured what ailed them.
> A really healthy society, with really good schools, would provide a path for those who can't hack it.
You severely underestimate just how challenging life is for some people. If dyslexia was the biggest challenge to overcome, we'd have nothing to speak of. Some of these kids are, to be blunt, effectively vegetables. They are accepted into school for the sake of relieving the parents/primary caregivers, offering what is a babysitting service, but there is no academic value in them being there. They will not continue in school for prolonged periods of their life and there is no reason for them to.
I guess in your imagined "really healthy" society, all people are perfectly equal. That's impossible. But if we did somehow live in your made up world then we can say that we already have "really good schools". Nobody in our schools we have drops out without a good reason.
From a quick search, the State of Michigan has roughly an 8% dropout rate. Whatever your criteria for the term "rare", that is a huge number of kids.
If you are trying to run a really healthy society (vs. a Social Darwinism dystopia), then putting all the kids who don't do well in academic classroom settings on a "things like mental disabilities" - "effectively vegetables" spectrum seems extremely counterproductive.
> Whatever your criteria for the term "rare", that is a huge number of kids.
It is! When I go to the school to pick up my child, it is shocking how many have overtly visible challenges, never mind those who don't present to someone just casually walking in the door. It is rare, but rare is still a lot of people in large populations.
I live next door to Michigan and 3% of the students have their own personal assistant in school for the schools to be able to cope to their severe challenges, and, by accounts of family who work in that industry, that many more should have an assistant but there isn't a sufficient workforce to fill those roles. So that is around 6% of the students, give or take, right there who aren't really a good fit for being in schools. Used to be that they would have been dumped into institutions and never step foot in school, but that's not socially acceptable anymore.
Hey guys, I just wanted to butt in to clarify that I'm not mentally disabled or dyslexic. I'm basically neurotypical... well... more or less.
I dropped out simply because I found school insufferably boring and an almost complete waste of time. Some of my earliest memories are of myself thinking "oh man, it's still just Wednesday -- two more days to go until the weekend?!" (Fast forward to today, and I find myself looking forward to Monday!)
Just about everything else I found myself doing with my time -- including actual hard labor -- felt more rewarding and productive. (At least I was making money that I could use to buy 3dfx cards and RAM chips.) In truth, past phonics, don't think that I even learned anything in school; I was always ahead of the class just by reading books at home and at the library.
My parents shed many tears, but they came to terms with my dropping out, because I had exhibited depressive symptoms from about the age of 9 or 10, and those symptoms entirely vanished when I didn't have to go to school.
I'm sure that there are many others like me. Public school often tries to shove round pegs into square holes. There are better ways to learn, of that I'm certain.
And this is sort of the case that I was gesturing towards. A good school system is not one that just pounds on you to sit in class until you can regurgitate some fact. Its one that lets students figure out what they're good at before they have to be on their own.
Montessori, vocational programs, self-directed learning on and on and on.
Nobody should have to pick between "follow this specific concept of schooling" or "be institutionalized". That's not good schooling.
> Its one that lets students figure out what they're good at before they have to be on their own.
The best way to figure out what you are good at is to do it. That is not the role of school and will never best be served by school.
I know we've gotten caught up in a society that dreads children doing anything other than academics and sports, but it needn't be that way. In this hypothetical ideal society, it is most definitely not that way. Be careful to not let a poorly considered status quo cloud your judgement.
Where I live (U.S.), new schools are literally built like prisons... each wing is laid out from a central "observation area" for the administrators. It's just a panopticon design modeled after penitentiaries.
I was with my family in our new local high school. My dad and I were the only two who noticed the layout.
The panopticon design was originally intended for schools too, as well as other institutions:
> Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums. He devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison, so the term now usually refers to that.
The criticism section of the Wikipedia article focuses on political aspects, but to me, the very idea of keeping someone feeling like they're always watched sounds like psychological torture.
Many of the bullying stories on here involve either a do-nothing response by authorities or both sides being punished. I do not see how constant monitoring ensures any kind of protection or justice.
I don't think I've ever met in a public place for Craigslist trades. I've always gone to the seller's house. I don't think we've ever sold anything, but when we put something up for free online we just leave it outside and tell them to come get it.
In Missouri, high-school buildings use the same blueprints as state prisons. Why bother designing something custom? They serve the same purpose. They literally are prisons.
If a teenager fails to show up for school, a police officer will eventually show up to arrest their parents and place the teenager in the custody of a "foster family." Now both parent and teenager are imprisoned. And we are told this is freedom.
To make matters much much worse, children in state custody with the foster system are routinely exposed to all kinds of abuse. Many foster families operate like a profitable business where costs are minimized and care is entirely absent.
I feel I must point out that education buildings in Missouri do not share designs with prisons as a norm. Maybe this is true somewhere in the state but not here.
People look at ugly schools, and they look like prisons, and the kids are captive in the ugly buildings, so it invites the prison metaphor. But makes no sense. Schools are a series of classrooms, prisons are a series of small cells. The designs would not be reusable at a fundamental level, or any practical level.
There are in fact a great many school room sized cells in the United States. "Dormitory" housing is the norm for a significant percentage of inmates in jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers (imagine a school gym filled with bunks and you're often not far off). To add to the school-prison linkage, many facilities have lockers as well, replete with padlocks that make dandy weapons.
That said, I am still doubtful there are 1:1 copies of jails being used as schools, regardless of visible similarities. I don't see any of these supposed jail/high schools with secured rec yards for instance, which generally make up part of the structure of the facilities that look most like the examples given.
I think we pretty much universally agree that mandatory schooling is preferable to the alternative, do you really think an illiterate populous is preferable? So yes actually that is freedom. Society guarantees that you will not be illiterate just because your parents were crack addicts, I think that's a good thing.
I don't think an illiterate populous is the alternative unless you think most people lack intrinsic motivation and also have families that don't value education. Seems extremely unlikely. Maybe you wouldn't have gone to school if you had a choice but most people would, if nothing else for free childcare.
You are missing the point, "most" is not all, I don't think most people/families are like this at all, we don't do this for most people. I think you would be surprised about the number of low-income children in the US who will never see a classroom if we abandoned compulsory education. It is also an effective measure to increase equality and class mobility.
14 million children in the US are food insecure. 43 million people live in poverty, 12.9% [1]
You know how many people in the US are illiterate? 21% [2]
Do you think that number will increase or decrease if we got rid of compulsory education?
> You know how many people in the US are illiterate? 21% [2] Do you think that number will increase or decrease if we got rid of compulsory education?
Just 20% in 1875[1], despite the primitive education system of the time. Is the answer no change, it being limited by the innate capabilities of the people, not limited by what they do?
The source above yours and the one on Wikipedia are using different metrics for literacy. These are generally not comparable. Measuring literacy in a useful way, especially over historic timescales, is harder than it sounds.
There's security checkpoints and police officers in bulletproof vests and carrying guns as well in some cases, because what if a school shooter shows up? Of course, when one does show up a hundred militarized police will show up and... do nothing, because what will the union do if one gets shot?
I live in the UK now, but grew up in the US. My own experience is pretty similar.
I was also a highly sensitive kid so took the abuse pretty hard. I was bullied by both other kids _and_ by teachers. I still remember one teacher openly calling me weird in class and picking on me (I was very introverted and shy due to years of bullying/anxiety, which I guess made me "weird"). Both physical and mental abuse from other kids. One "highlight" was being openly sexually assaulted in PE class and the teacher didn't even care.
I was messed up psychologically for a very long time after my school experience. Extreme social anxiety, hyper sensitivity to criticism, constant feelings of anxiety and depression. It took a failed marriage and years of therapy until I was able to overcome most of this trauma and kind of start to live normally (in my 40s).
As a result, like you, I am incredibly cynical of schooling systems. I see my kids suffering in British schools (in secondary), and it really pains me. They loved primary where there were small classes and secondary just has completely sucked out the joy of school for them. I wish I could just retire from work and full time home school them.
The kind of school you went to sounds very different from the grammar school that my working-class father went to in the 1960s and that helped him escape a life of asbestos-breathing drudgery in moribund shipyards.
There were problems with the grammar school system as well.
They were created to provide a pathway to the middle class for bright children from working class families. But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.
Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".
In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.
My kid got in, and it turns out everyone else used a tutor (I stupidly took the advice not to do so from his teacher, who thought he'd get in just fine). This is in fact why playdates seemed to die out in the year or two before the test, the kids were being tutored but for some reason nobody would admit it.
When I went for the intro evening, the parents were simply the same kinds of people (often the same actual people) as the private primary where my kid went. Essentially, it is a private school where you don't pay fees. Same parents, with £30K more in the bank each year. The kids get into the top unis at a similar rate to the local fancy private school, which takes in all the classmates who didn't get in.
I have to say, they are a good bunch of kids. There's none of the bullying problems that everyone else is reporting in my kid's year. They have an environment where they have other quite nerdy kids doing nerdy kid stuff, without judgement.
But they are not a socially diverse bunch of kids. I'm not seeing any social mobility at all. Where are the kids whose parents are in the trades? Parents who aren't working? How come everyone I meet works in finance, law, accounting, medicine, or other white collar work?
I think it's the tutoring. It lets the marginal white collar kids win over the marginal "other social class" kids.
I am guessing you live in an area with high average housing prices in the catchment area of your school? Over the past 60 years, several generations of parents moving to catchment areas of good schools creates a self-reinforcing loop where only middle class people can afford to live near good schools.
My parents were both grammar school kids with working class parents, who didn't get any special prep for the 11+ beyond what their state primary school gave them. Both were the first people in their families to go to university and both managed to get into Oxford (where they met!). There was definitely a sweet point period when the system did what it intended in that sense, but there was obviously the drawback that if you ended up in the comprehensive system, you were stuck there and you had a situation where children got labelled at a young age.
Obviously some areas still have grammar schools and the impression I get from people living in those areas is that to stand a fighting chance with the 11+, you need out of school tuition or for your parents to be educated enough and have time to tutor you yourself. House prices are also obviously high in grammar school areas too! I've seen recent 11+ papers and having bright children at state schools around that age who are at the top of their year academically, I think they would struggle with them without any preparation or tuition.
> But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.
> Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".
That doesn't sound like a question a middle class kid would know anything about - not unless your definition of "middle class" is far different from mine.
> In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.
But given most schools now in the country (given only a small subset still have grammar schools) are done by catchment area, much of this still exists in comprehensive education too. Now, if you're well off you just buy a house in the right area so your kids get in to the good school.
I suspect in the past, people were less mobile, there wasn't the same disparity in wealth between different localities in the same general area, and school league tables weren't published. So the idea of moving to an area for (among other things) better education for their children wasn't something that was done.
I'm not really sure that's true. One of the things about grammar schools was that they covered quite wide areas since they were the top 25% scorers of exams. So think three ordinary sized secondary schools to a single grammar (which were usually single sex as well in those days).
No they weren’t. There are still many (163 according to a very quick google search) selective schools in the UK with entrance based on taking the 11+ exam.
Edit to clarify they are state funded and not private.
Just to confuse things, some former grammar schools turned into private schools but kept 'grammar' in their name.
But to confirm, there are still areas that have state grammar schools and have the 11 plus: Buckinghamshire, Essex and Kent spring to mind as the obvious ones in the South East.
Birmingham also had a grammar school system that is state funded, although most are supported by a charitable foundation as well.
This all became more complex again with the introduction of academies (twice, with different goals and subtly different setups) and free schools (although are those really a thing any more?) and I'm sure New New Labour will at some point add another category if school in the interests of simplicity...
> By the end of the 1980s, all of the grammar schools in Wales and most of those in England had closed or converted to comprehensive schools. Selection also disappeared from state-funded schools in Scotland in the same period.
There are private schools that call themselves grammar schools (paid schools, not state funded) and some grammar schools still exist in Northern Ireland.
But the system that defined what a grammar school is - has long since been abolished, and all free-access grammar schools were completely gone from my area before I was even born.
—-
EDIT: seems like the some state funded selective grammar schools exist but they are not exactly distributed evenly.
So, I am wrong; and this situation is actually significantly more class-enforcing than it used to be. Amazing.
Some counties in England still have state grammar schools and still follow the 11+ process. The 163 that the poster above you is referring to are state, selective, schools, rather than private grammar schools. There's a list linked in the Wikipedia page you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammar_schools_in_Eng...
> all free-access grammar schools were completely gone from my area before I was even born.
That's because you lived in an area that didn't have the 11+ exam. I did, and I went to a state-funded grammar school in the 1990s. It's still there, famously.
I have a friend who teaches at a state funded grammar, and that wikipedia article includes a whole section on Current British grammar schools, which are selective and state funded o_O
There are plenty free non-fee-paying Grammar schools all around London. There are some private fee paying schools that were historical Grammar schools and still have it in their name.
The only issue is that Grammar schools are super selective these days, based on my own experience there are at least 10 applicants for every single place, as well as multiple rounds of tests to filter out children. In the end it’s a lottery of sort too as local councils decide who is awarded a place.
My neighbours kid took the 11+ two years ago to go to a state funded selective school in Warwickshire. 4 of my friends went to a grammar school (slate funded) in the 2000s and that school still exists in the same form it did back then.
Most grammar schools are gone but there are far from none.
The vast bulk of councils in the UK abolished the 11+ system. It does still exist in some places. Unfortunately, the system was ditched by the Labour government of 1976. Our current Labour lot are trying to do the same thing to our private schooling system.
One of the past Labour governments decided that there should be no new grammar schools created. So the existing ones continued to function but, as some closed down, their number diminished.
Thank you. I get irrationally angry, when I hear the 'socialization' argument, precisely because of the experience you described. To be fair, it does, in a weird way, prepare you for some areas of adulthood, but I think those areas are thankfully somewhat avoidable.
Interesting, if there is one thing that I have learned in my life, it is that you can pick up your stuff and leave. It is depressing that what we teach our kids is that they just have to stay in that bad situation; that there are no options.
The book Lord Of The Flies made a lot more sense when I realized it was a satire of British elite schools, rather than a real exploration of what cast away young people would actual do in that situation.
>The boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination
I've always assumed that the babies grown in test tubes and graded into alphas to epsilons in Huxley's "Brave New World" are simply a metaphor for children going throught the UK school system.
In that case the homeschooled are akin to the "savage" in the story.
I hated school as well but I would still disagree on almost all points with you.
But I was lucky enough to go to a good public school, found many lifelong friends there, learned a ton of aside skills that help me now in my personal and professional life.
I think it’s really sad that more and more people opt out of society, either in school or elsewhere. I can understand it to some extent but I think everyone will come of poorer in the end if we all sit in our separate boxes, only thinking about ourselves and how we can profit more.
I’m usually optimistic about the future but this is a hella depressing trend.
To be fair to home schooling - a lot of it involves groups and organised activities. It's not really a separation in practice, but opting out if the default system. (There are those that separate too)
> Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
I hear your overall point, but treating this issue as a dichotomy undermines your point. Critics of homeschooling aren't claiming that schools are perfect, or that schools educate ideally. The claim is that, as poorly as our teachers are equipped to educate students, parents are, on average, worse equipped.
You're insinuating here that you were not educated in school. You're making that claim in a text-based format. How did you learn to read and write? Are you making the claim that your mother taught you how to read and write, and the school had nothing to do with it?
Here's the problem with what you're saying: a lot of homeschooled children don't know how to read and write. Or add, subtract, multiply, and divide. And contrary to your theory of education, memorisation is useful in learning these skills. A kid who has memorized how to do addition and subtraction can make change at a cash register, and a lot of homeschooled adults can't do that.
There are outliers in both schoolchild and homeschooled child experiences. I am one myself: my mom homeschooled me for kindergarten and first grade, and did a great job, but she had the advantage that she was a schoolteacher. And maybe your experience was an outlier in that you really did learn nothing in school. But the averages, at a systemic level, are that homeschooled children are at a large disadvantage compared to children educated in a school.
I'm early 50s and went to school in the Republic of Ireland - late 70s, 80s. I really feel the same as the OP here. It felt like a daily prison, combined with huge amounts of memorisation for exams. (promptly forgotten)
Maybe a child could put up with the incarceration if it wasn't for the bullying on top of that too. No escape.
Aside: In the 70s the Headmaster had a cane that was used occasionally but at least that died out later.
But on a more optimistic note, I think there's some 'alternative schools' becoming more popular in Ireland now, like 'Forest School Ireland' etc... sounds more healthy anyway!
I don't have any friend from my school times. Bullying was the norm back in late 80's and the 90's till I am in college on '99.
The real friends? the real education? started at college. School was a 12 years full of non sense useless stuff to someone's practical life and improvement (to me and many of people around me. The most I remember of these days were math and science lessons that were beneficial and my father alone was more than capable teaching me that... other than language lessons, religious teaching that were just a formality for us (we learn religion the best from home, our extended family) etc etc. At the end? We lost most of 12 years that are the best for internalizing more engineering and professional education. Yes we are capable of that at that age, I and my younger brother at the least built some robots and actual cars with suspension and steering etc although using old Lego collections (since we grew poor we couldn't afford actual tools) and that was ALL on our own at home and we didn't have internet or anything. We modified RC cars to go faster by soldering capacitors to give that boost to the motor (at the expense of battery life and potentially burning the motor) when we were in middle school.
Programming you say? my love for computers and computer games? all at home too, with some help from my older cousin (that I will visit in 30 minutes, he is 67 years old now and without him I wouldn't even dream of getting a PhD in CS, and of course my professors who I revere and respect).
Nearly all my useful skills, other than math and science as I mentioned), I and my brother learned on our own... at home. It all started at home. The school? was torture and a formality we had to go through or no one will hire us.
I am for minimal formal schooling with specialization starting from day 1, each one can choose a MUCH shorter path and more focused on what they want to do... switching between specializations and/or profession shouldn't be like collapsing a sky scraper we have built with hay (like it is now the case). wasting people's lives, causing them trauma for whatever miss function (e.g. students being beaten for silly missed homeworks etc). This system is age old and not effective, and there are more effective ways. Most of those who changed the world were school drop outs for a reason... they focused on what really matters and connected it to reality.
That sucks and I really don't mean to well actually here.. but in that scenario - which doesn't sound like the default outcome of going to a public school anywhere - would this not be "just" a reason to go for homeschooling later, only after the system has provably failed (long-term).
Also maybe I have a false impression but I always thought people decided about homeschooling long before the kid(s) get to normal school age.
That said, I don't have a strong opinion here and I can see how it's useful in certain situations, but I guess might have hated it even more than I hated school (after a certain age, I liked it when I was little) - but also none of my parents went to university or something, so I was on my own in math etc after a certain point, so not sure how they would have even managed to get me to finishing.
My argument is that school experiences vary drastically, that everyone commenting before me was saying that homeschooling their children was egotistical, stupid and harmful.
When I, have a good reason why I might consider not sending my own kids to state school, because my experiences were so bad.
Just because your own school was sadly, terrible, doesn't necessarily mean your kids' would be similar, though? A formula that's worked for us, is - find a school with nice staff, be wary of huge academy chains (UK specific) and above all, seek peers that are very diverse - in terms of class, education level, wealth, race, nationality etc. That way your kids avoid being bullied for being "weird" because there's no such concept of "weird"-ness, kids in such a group have many different perspectives. To me, that's a far better environment for kids to develop and flourish, than siloed in a homeschooling situation.
Kids are excellent at pattern matching, and "weird" doesn't go across racial lines, weird is the kid who's a little on the spectrum, or not emotionally mature enough their first year to deal with circumstances- and instead shuts down.
It's easy to be pigeon-holed by the class, and it's self-reinforcing.
I had a good experience in public K-8 (I went to a specialized STEM high school so I’ll leave that aside) but I didn’t learn anything. Public school is day care. My kids’ expensive private school is day care with better food.
It sounds like he is just describing being bullied in school and teachers not being great about it. Far from universal but also far from uncommon, in the UK or any country I have heard of. Bullying is a very common and documented problem in schools.
Even if bullying is common (say, every school or even every class experiences some bullying), that doesn't necessarily make it a very common experience for those who go through school (the majority of children in a class will neither be bullies nor bullied).
I think it's very area specific - how prosperous the area is. Reading that post was like he was at my school, word for word. I was on the "not bullied end" of that arrangement and life was still hell as you had to constantly watch over your shoulder, align with factions for fear of real violence if you weren't in the right place at the right time. A lot fo the older kids were linked to serious crime in the local area at the ages of 15 and 16 only. All in all I would say the goths got the most amount of abuse on a day to day basis.
I’m 35 now, so, millennial; for additional context I was brought up in a city called Coventry which is a city that was in decline during that period. (just like most of the north of the UK following Thatcher’s closing of the mines).
As a consequence of this experience, though, I saw that I wasn’t exactly entirely unique either, as there were other children treated as I was and we sought each other out. So I know that while my experience is not universal: that it is at least shared by a handful of people within my schools alone. - I would hazard to guess more outside of my school have these experiences too.
I know my experience isn't especially portable as I went to a public school in the home counties, but not all of my friends did, and while I understand they experienced teachers with varying levels of competence and interest, none of them has described it in as harrowing terms as yours, and all came away with friends and a fairly decent education, albeit one that they probably had to have a bit more determination to get than I did.
My mum worked in various UK state schools as an assistant from around 2000-2010 and described serious budgetary problems throughout the system, and teachers trying their best in adversity. She also described the many obstacles in the way of getting the bad kids out of classrooms so they couldn't disrupt things so much. I have a friend who teaches at a grammar school, who is fairly intelligent and interested in his subject, and seems to teach well to kids who are interested, though again there seems to be little money to achieve anything.
I'm not claiming shitty, prison-like schools don't exist or trying to invalidate your experience, it was clearly terrible, but I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it.
I am often left confused by responses like this. I think it would be fair to suggest that some significant percentage of chidren suffer in schools or have harrowing experiences that they are going to carry with them through life until dealt with. If this is the case, why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn? I don't believe you are meaning to suggests that the situation as it stands doesn't need change, but that is nonetheless implicit in your statements.
From my position, saying: "I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it." Comes close to invalidating the experience of another.
Whether school is a net benefit (that can stand to be improved) or a net detriment (a system that needs to be uprooted and upended entirely) depends significantly on that "some significant percentage".
If the percentage is 10% of children suffering through school, that's a horrendous number, but still leaves school as an overall positive experience for the vast majority, even though significant work needs to be put it to fix its problems.
If the percentage is 50% of children suffering, then it's a crapshoot if your child will benefit or be deeply disturbed by school, and the whole system needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch.
One anecdotal experience can't help one decide which of these is the right approach. I'd venture a guess that, since most people are not clamoring for fundamental school system reforms, the experience of most voting adults has been largely positive or at least neutral in school.
The author paints a picture of schools as literal prison, as a place where children are forced to go to waste their time and be tortured. They invite the reader to conclude that the entire exercise is worthless and should be abandoned -
"Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education."
"I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. "
> why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn?
It depends on the conclusion. If the conclusion is "school as a concept is so irredeemably bad that we should scrap schools entirely because of my experiences", I'm not sure it's supportable because of the lack of universality.
If the conclusion is "some schools have been run so poorly that students are left with lifelong emotional scars and little education to show for it, we need to do something about that", I'm all onboard.
Feel (some) of your pain - was bullied some in school, and actually had terrible compressed nerve problems that made sitting in high school all day terrible. But think what this person is saying is that this probably isn't the experience of most students. And in all humbleness, would have to agree, don't think me and my friends wouldn't say it's was an extremely abuse experience.
Not saying it doesn't need to be fixed, but that like most systems handling large volumes, for better or worse, it caters to the majority:(
Like you, I'm older than dijit and went to school in the home counties, but my experiences were also unpleasant enough for me to question the value of my time at school. I went to non-selective "state" (i.e. public-sector) schools in a middle-class area where nearly all of the other pupils presented as working class. Somehow I managed to pick up a combination of working, middle and upper class mannerisms, which seemed to attract more bullying from authority figures than from my peers. I suspect many of my teachers were bitterly resentful about the (then recent) banning of corporal punishment in the state sector. My secondary school seemed to model itself on "public" (i.e. private) schools, where corporal punishment was still legal. The saving graces of my school days included:
1) My primary school clearly took children's advancement seriously (more in things like handwriting, bladder control and cycling proficiency than in subject-matter knowledge or understanding), so it wasn't all pain and no gain, but that mostly stopped at secondary school.
2) Secondary-school maths lessons were (usually) something of a haven because maths teachers were willing to engage in unplanned reasoned argument and for almost three years we worked independently, at our own pace, from booklets while the teacher gave us each in turn one-on-one tuition (for only one or two minutes per lesson, but it did mean that I escaped being uncomfortably pressured to speed up or slow down both when I was working independently and when I had the teacher's attention for a non-punitive reason).
I think British education would be better if secondary schools had a clearer purpose and treated pupils as stakeholders. My experience was that my formal education started at primary school and resumed at university after a seven-year gap. I never really found out how my secondary school was meant to benefit pupils. Pupils ought to not only benefit from school, but understand how it benefits them.
I think schools should reflect clearer thinking about ability-based selection. If pupils are grouped by age and location only, and not at all by ability, then requiring the whole class to work through the same material, in the same way, at the same pace risks seriously inhibiting subject-matter learning. On the other hand, grouping pupils by "general ability" risks putting pupils in some classes more or less advanced than those that would benefit them most, and permanently disadvantaging those who are rejected from the more prestigious academic path at an early age.
Pupils also ought to lead lives they have reason to value. Corporal punishment even for bullies is a net negative, and there should be meaningful protections against teachers using loopholes, such as turning a blind eye to bullying or perpetrating emotional abuse themselves. We had many teachers like that at my secondary school, and one of them was found to have assaulted a pupil while I was there.
Edit:
I think some important points aren't really clear above. I agree with dijit that school can provide pupils with very poor value for the burdens it places on them, but I consider this a missed opportunity, rather than a lost cause. I also suspect some teachers' toxic attitudes about class and violence contribute to the bullying problem, so we should be careful not to let cognitive biases lead us into doubling down on "discipline" in schools, unless there's good reason to believe that isn't part of the problem. I left school many years ago, but before I did, authority figures bemoaned the "end of discipline" and the coddling of pupils, which was at odds with my experience then, so I'm sceptical of any claims that the problem has since been solved.
As a parent with kids in the UK state school system, I've noticed a considerable attitude change in terms of reducing bullying, acknowledging and supporting learning difficulties (dyslexia, ADHD, autism), and on trying to keep kids happy and engaged, in a way that simply didn't exist during my time in the '80s and '90s.
In the same way, my own experiences at school were a significant attitude change compared to the learn-by-rote and corporal punishment era of my parents.
I couldn't claim that it works for every student or that every school is like that - plus the entire school system is now stretched financially to breaking point in a way that it wasn't when I was there, and there are additional new problems such as social media - but I do feel that in general things have moved in the right direction.
I have some friends who teach in Cov, there are some particularly bad schools in the city sadly. Sorry to hear you went through one of them. The effective postcode lottery of schools has an awful affect on how the part of our lives plays out.
Having said that, your experiences weren't a million miles from mine in the 80's in the crap end of Hampshire. Most of the violence there though was from other pupils, rather than teachers.
However, speaking to my daughter schools these days do tend to be kinder, gentler places than when I grew up. Fights seem to happen never rather than on a daily basis.
40's, male, had a horrible experience at state secondary school in semi-rural Scotland. I now have young kids in primary, and I can see how shit the education aspect in particular is - my kids constantly complain about how boring it is, and one finds everything ridiculously easy. For example, he's been doing addition and subtraction up to ten at school for 3 years!?
Even if it's not hell, it could be so much better. It could be a place that kids actually look forward to going every day. Instead, we put them through 12 years of mandatory low grade torture where nothing they do is connected to the real world, their interest or curiosity, and when they're done they're launched into a world of AGI and ASI where none of what they learned is remotely enough for them to contribute to society in any way.
This is the first comment in the page, the first I read, and I can also say, I learned nothing (if anything lies, bad science and nonsense) in school. Coming from a very different country, lived in many others I know is not better in those places. I do not have time to really teach my kids, but I will be all the way by their side, as they go through the brain washing machine of school.
I will send them to the school just because I want them to interact with other people of same age, and also learn how much stupid people is around, and show them it won't get any better later in life. But I do not expect, at all, that they will learn something useful.
It's like all the people that insist "School never taught me anything useful like how to balance a check book" when you learned how to balance a checkbook in the math class that person never paid attention to.
I'm sick and tired of being told what school is good and bad for by the very people who never paid attention. A school cannot magically make you motivated to learn things for 16 years. It's drudgery to most humans and always be, because we aren't naturally """meant""" to learn complicated and robust concepts for 16 years.
Our options are deal with that and help kids who don't want to learn do things they don't want to do, or have a general populace that knows nearly nothing about the world around them.
Literally by my own, with books that luckily I had available. I learned no grammar and certainty no spelling in school. As I was 18 nobody could under my writing because of the terrible spelling.
I had problems also speaking to people, and understanding what they were saying.
I hated school too, but I'm not sure I would have learnt much at home. My parents both lack higher education and frankly haven't been able to keep up with me past the age of 12 or so. Home schooling might work for children of smart people to be accelerated into the exact same field as them. But it won't work for kids like me or those who just aren't good at whatever their parents do.
That may be less true than it was 20 years ago. Even free resources like Khan Academy can go a long ways in helping parents educate their kids beyond what they know themselves. And for parents willing to spend even a fraction of what the public school would spent on education, they can pick and choose curriculum, tutors, or even online live classes with teachers well beyond what they would have in their local high school.
That said, parents without much of an education themselves may tend to set the bar too low for their children, but that often appears to be an issue in the public school as well.
School for me was a gladiator academy. Useful for producing gladiators I suppose but at the expense of any genuine intellectual curiosity or love of learning. Thankfully I had an informal opportunity to stay after school when the budding gladiators all went home to torment small animals or whatever it was they did, when I could sit in peace and play on the school’s Apple II. That opened my eyes to an entirely different world, which I now have the privilege of inhabiting.
Some of my siblings liked school, and my parents were wise enough to make the homeschool/government school decision on a child by child basis. I’m very grateful that they had the courage to make that decision in my case against fierce opposition by all of polite society.
I became progressively more withdrawn throughout my school years and for most of high school I was a ghost. I talked to no one and hid in the library during lunch hours, and for all the kinds of reasons that have already been mentioned here.
My experience in school contrasts dramatically with my experience going through the scout movement. We had an active and healthy group. we would do 10 weekend camps a year and on those weekends I would hit the ground running when we arrived on friday evening and wouldn't stop until I was back in the van to go home on Sunday afternoon. I rose to the rank of troop leader, I won the youth of the year award, I would lead the campfires on the group weekends for 150 kids and their parents. I'm 49 and still in touch with the core group I went through the scout movement with, we're all lifelong friends. I probably would have killed myself if I didn't have Scouts.
School was OK, but Boy Scouts was great! We learned to organize into groups, to obey orders and coordinate as groups, play games, watch the Scout Masters (all adult men) discuss and decide matters and then try to do the same ourselves.
I also learned how different fathers can be: some with few friends, some with many, each having different abilities, etc. All were wonderful people ready to help us learn.
I was never bullied (in school or out) and I can think of only a few instances where I saw it. So I am always disappointed to see numerous claims of bullying "pile up" online whenever there is a discussion of school. One gets the impression that everyone has been bullied always and that school was/is hell. But my experience was that bullying was truly rare: rarer than snakebite, rarer than black widow spider bite, indeed, rarer than actual death! My conversations with others with whom I associate indicate similar experiences. School was fun and rarely boring.
I like your anecdote about the boy scouts being a healthy environment- that could well be true and I have no reason to think otherwise.
But I think being blind to the other kids being bullied is probably a common thing, you’re likely better adjusted as an adult and can’t possibly comprehend how common or how helpless kids can be to being bullied.
You can imagine then, a person like you becoming a teacher might not be looking for signs that kids are being bullied, because its rarer than death after all- and all you’d see is the built-up backlash of the bullied kid finally hitting the bully back (because, being a bullied kid fighting back for once is dramatic).
This is a large part of why the the bullied kids end up being punished when finally acting out in zero-tolerance scenarios.
Such an accurate description of what I went through in Switzerland. Kids are mean, and I had to be mean to survive too. It stained my character in ways I am still trying to overcome more than a decade later.
I didn't enjoy my (US) public school experience, but it gave me a lot of skills for interacting with other people, including people I disliked. Based on the people I've met who were home-schooled, they lacked a lot of those skills.
I agree with this (as the bloggers seems to too). Yeah, dealing with all the different personalities you see at school is an important skill, as is dealing with difficult situations. Yeah, would like to think I was in general a nice kid, but had some share of being bullied, and unfortunately have also bullied another kid (neither were common in my life, but you had to learn how to handle these situations, and also make mistakes to learn from them). Yeah, this understanding of people is super useful, and for me at least, the corporate world can be just as ruthless as a school playground. Need to know how to navigate all those egos.
> Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
There’s so many classes that I want a refund on my wasted childhood time. Reading the “classics” in English, studying foreign language, Theology (Catholic schools), History (yes, History). I hated all these classes, didn’t learn much from them beyond what it took to pass the tests, then quickly forgot what they taught. Anything useful that would have come from those subjects I learned later, through alternate more enjoyable means (e.g. Assassin’s Creed was way more effective in teaching me the history those games covered).
I never read pretty much any book written before 1970, never learned a foreign language beyond a single semester of Spanish, and certainly had no Theology in a US Public school. Now as an adult, I do want to learn all those things (to some degree) and feel like I missed out on it; “If only I had a better education.” But I probably would have been more like you, uninterested and equally as dismissive of my childhood education if I were forced to learn all of those things at that age. Is it a problem with educators, families, or just the children themselves that they will grow up and realize the opportunities they’ve lost?
Also British, although i was living abroad when I started home educating (the correct term in UK law, and more accurate because the whole point is that its not HE).
> It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning
This is why I stuck with home educating up to GCSEs. I wanted my kids to enjoy learning and they do. They have a very wide range of interests and good academic results and IMO are better prepared for A levels and university than they would have been at school (even really good schools).
> find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work,
This is why we have so much after school stuff and breakfast clubs. Yes, it means some kids get fed in the morning, but a lot of them seem to get given junk food.
> for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children
IMO home education is better for socialisation. What skills do you learn from meeting the same group of people your own age in the same place everyday? My kids had more time to do things by themselves (anything from going to a shop to taking a bus to meet up with a friend). They did (between them) guides, dance, sea cadets, sailing, D & D, art classes, singing classes piano classes, drama, stage fighting and more. They had both remote (which develops a useful skill set these days) and face to face tutors at for some GCSE subjects. it would be really hard for kids tied by school hours plus home work to do as much.
> the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
The chasing of metrics has been a disaster. My younger daughter is at sixth form college for A levels and it has deteriorated since her older sister went there. it is still good but they have become a lot more rigid and I feel they are less focused on students best interests and more on the metrics.
I went to one of the best schools in the UK (consistently top 10 academically), with no bullying problems, no corporal punishment (it had abolished it in Victorian times IIRC), excellent facilities - and I still think my kids had a better education than I did
Interesting story and very good points :) I certainly have concerns, that much of the curriculum in school here in UK is basically pointless box-ticking (metrics as you refer to it), and a certain part of the day is just a waste of time and/or at a pace that doesn't suit brighter kids. OTOH there's some great stuff at school that'd otherwise be hard to replicate. I know people that do homeschool or private school with good reason, due to the limitations of state school. Sounds like you've done a lot to ensure your kids have friends and go to things where they meet other kids. So in your case, probably the lack of social side is less of an issue... however, isn't that quite an investment of your time? (and to some extent cost). you list a lot of things your kids go to, that must mean quite a lot of "ferrying" / "taxi-ing" around? Or are they very independent and using public transport? To me , it sound like you've done homeschooling right, but I kind of wonder whether a lot of people would be unable or not enlightened enough to do all the social side you've done.
In one word, yup. My solution: In class put head down and just ignore the teacher. I DID want to learn the good material (math and science) so DID that in the one hour of daily 'study hall' and when I got home. And, with this approach, in math and science did quite well in aptitude tests and achievement tests. Those test results, and NOT what the teachers said about me, got some higher-ups to send me to summer advanced math/science programs.
That self-learning approach served me well in school, work, and life to the present.
The plane geometry teacher was one of the worst. We had a disagreement: She thought that in her subject she was superior, a lot better than the students were (actually, not for long!), regarded the students as subordinates, and tried to intimidate us. So, I communicated with her only a few times but then was showing that I was better in the subject than she was. I.e., one reason I worked hard and DID learn well was to show up the teachers, show that they were NOT better, even in their own subject, and keep them from being nasty to me, trying to subordinate me.
Since my brother wanted me to go for the football team, I did. The coach was no help at all and treated me with contempt. I was not any good at football, didn't try self-learning, but the coach was no help. As part of dumping on me, the coach gave me an old helmet, not effective, unique on the team. One day another player gave his elbow to my head, and I hit the ground maybe a little hurt. In one word, the coach was a bully. To heck with that: I quit the team.
The people who say "it's to make you interact with normal people!" miss a key point. In the real world, you meet a person, and if they treat you like shit, you walk away. If they physically assault you in the workplace, you can report them to HR, and there's a good chance you'll never have to see them again. In school, you get told you need to have empathy for their propensity to beat you, get subtly or not-so-subtly victim blamed, and you still have to interact with them for at least a year, and maybe years.
Exit is probably the most powerful strategy to dealing with certain kinds of situations, and schools deny you that.
Agreed but what about the person that doesn't exactly treat you like s** but they are difficult to work with, but in order for you to achieve the thing you need at work you have to work with them daily? Then walking away isn't an option - perhaps just going to work somewhere else is not feasible. So then, a certain amount of experience of dealing with idiots at school can be useful can't it? (within reason... ;) )
>I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding.
Institutional childcare in general is mostly this; a necessity driven by an economic imperative. Both parents must work. School is a continuation of that logic, although as the kids get older and more independent this becomes less important.
This was my reaction upon seeing the question in the post title, too.
I've chosen not to have kids (my childhood experience of other kids being one contributing factor) but if I did I would not want them to be anywhere near a UK state school.
> Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
Funny enough, in the US, most states changed their methods of teaching (especially math) 10-20 years ago. And facebook is still filled with parents (although probably mostly grandparents) bitching about not understanding "common core math" without trying to understand it, and expressing how they learned via rote memorization and that is what we should use instead.
To be fair - the US changing their mathematics education system has been worse for the mathematics program. The kids learning math now who don't learn from outside networks will be significantly worse off in mathematics by far.
Also there is no other way for people to learn mathematics then without doing the work to learn. This utopian idea that's bled into the education stream that we can teach math without significant amount of problems to practice on is kind of nuts.
Youth polling consistently ranks public schooling middle-high school as the literal worst time in their life. However, I still think they should do it as it gives them exposure to the bottom quartile of the population. It gives them motivation and reason to structure the rest of their life to do anything and everything to never have to interact said population group again.
>I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country.
>However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life.
Hey this is more or less the universal experience world over. Be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.
I was schooled in Bangalore India and I particularly loathe and revile both the school and most of my teachers. My school did nothing except make me believe I was a horrible child with no future.
I believe in homeschooling but it isn't very fashionable here.
> I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
The problem is, when you allow homeschooling, a non-insignificant number of children will have to endure the same, just the wardens and torturers will be their own parents. There have been more than enough cults who actually promote that parents keep their children from "outside influence", and on top of that come the pedophiles, again especially in religious circles. Even private schools suffer from such issues, again mostly religious ones, but there also have been a fair share of scandals surrounding "ordinary" esoteric schools.
I would rather fight for government-run schools to have proper budgets for a high quality learning experience, adequate staff, modern curricula and teaching methods and actually sensible policies against bullying of all kinds than to allow systems to thrive that are even worse than what you went through.
34 year old who grew up on Guernsey (small island south and independent of Britain but with very much the same values) and went to a state-funded Grammar school for secondary and can't relate to all of this, but certainly most. The details are different but I agree that the education offered is subpar and the "socialisation" argument is bullshit. School left me feeling more isolated and alone than I've ever been.
I grew up in the US and I hated every single day of school. I don't have a favorite teacher I remember fondly, I don't have friends from school, etc. I absolutely hated it.
But I still am against home schooling. I still got social skills from going to public school that homeschooled kids lack. I still don't think your average parent is equipped to give their children a good education.
I have people I know who have homeschooled their kids. Without exception these people are narcissists with insane views who are using it as a way to indoctrinate their children into having the same worldview that they hold.
Homeschooling should be illegal. It is child abuse.
My mum never punched me in my face, followed me around the playground trying to put dog shit in my backpack, steal my books and piss on them or make rumours about me to ensure I was ostracised by the other children. All the while the adults were helpless and continually told me to be a man- and worse, the adults leaning in on it being my problem. A true hopeless feeling.
You will never know how much I can despise you for your presumption that my home-life could possibly be correlated with my school life.
Lots of kids home lives are worse than your school life. But that's not the point I was making. You are letting your personal horrible experience define the whole discussion for you. But that is completely beside the point I was making. Yes some kids are physically abused even tortured at school, some kids are physically abused even tortured at home. You don't make policy decision based on outlier cases that are already illegal.
As I explained in my initial comment, the problem is average parents are not equipped to be good teachers and homeschooled kids are being denied the variety of experiences that kids going to an actual school are getting. That's why I said all homeschooled kids are being abused by definition. Not the same type of abuse you got at school or I got at home. But they are being denied a proper education. They are being denied the opportunity to learn to make friends and socialize with different people. When it's time for them to finally go out into the world they will be poorly equipped to do so.
If I thought home schooling was a sure fire way to avoid violent abuse for any kids, maybe it would be worth the trade off. But we both know if anything abusive parents are also going to abuse their kids via home schooling.
I honestly think on the whole homeschooling is doing more damage to the kids being put through it and should be illegal. Obviously before actually doing that we should do scientific studies and surveys of adults who went through it and make a decision based on that rather than just my opinion. But right now we let parents do it just because extremist parents insist on it. And I think we are failing those kids.
If it weren't for homeschooling my autistic daughter would be spending her day in the headteachers office shaking and crying due to her cripping anxiety.
I'm glad that you have a way to help your daughter. But there are many kids with similar issues and homeschooling can't be our solution for all of them. Instead we need to figure out how to accomodate them at schools.
Not sure about USA, but here in UK there are special schools for people whose autism really makes it unviable for them to be in mainstream school (whether that's a failure of the mainstream school, or just level of anxiety etc of the student). Such special schools are often wonderful, with the most amazing, dedicated staff. Usually staff have specialist training (albeit not always to as high level as one might like, due to underfunding) and much experience of working with autistic people. So, able to provide things that parents with no prior knowledge of autism, and jobs to go to and bills to pay, are less able to provide.
> I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work
Open an history book and look how it was before schooling was free and mandatory.
I do agree that the most recent spin on it is far from ideal and that the underlying goals seem to have shifted, but I can clearly and easily imagine an alternative way that doesn't involve home schooling.
The problem is the same as in many other industries, once you optimise everything to please the capitalistic beast we created you're set for personal hell
If there's one thing I was surprised when I moved to the UK from Portugal were the number of stories work colleagues told about bullying in school. Although there were fights and stupid games in the schools I went to in Portugal there was never systematic bullying.
You might not have succeeded at that. You did a very good job at denigrating school though :)
Let me try to tell you my view: both homeschooling and schools have risks. A child can suffer mistreatment both at school and at home.
School however offers something that homeschooling can't: options. If you have a bad teacher, you will have another 4 which are average, and 1 or 2 which are actually decent. There will be bullies, yes, but you also have opportunities to make friends.
At home, all you have is a single adult. If that adult happens to be a psycho, there's no escape.
I say this as someone who suffered at school. My ADHD got completely unnoticed, being of the inattentive kind. I didn't know how to relate with others, I had no friends. I would pick up a book and read in a corner during recess. I got bullied. For me school was something I "endured", not something I enjoyed.
I also happen to be the elder of 4 children. My younger brothers and sister went to the same school I went to. They had different teachers, different co-students. All of them were happy at school, and they turned up just alright.
Now, my parents. My mum is ok (for someone who has raised 4 people) but my dad is a self-absorbed narcissist. My brothers and sister stopped talking to him 20 years ago. He doesn't know his own grandchildren. I still talk with him, but out of pity. There's no love left.
So yeah. I suffered at school. It happens. My siblings didn't. I think homeschooling with my mum would have been ok, she's decent. But homeschooling with my dad? I would be way worse than I am now.
Bullies couldn't do what they do if they did not have the support of the other students, teachers, administration, etc. As late as college I was harassed by criminally minded person who led a criminal gang that was not held in check until they finally smashed somebody in the face with a rock in front of many witnesses. Two people were driven to suicide.
The leader has been to prison and if he got out and went straight I could forgive him, even celebrate him, because it is so hard to get out of being justice involved. I'm still angry at the college administrator who told me "my hands are tied" who many see as a hero because he really did a lot of great things for our school -- but I wonder who else was driven to suicide and I fantasize about going to his funeral and dumping over his casket. An apology from him would go a long way, I've asked for it, I never expect to get it.
If you're being bullied in elementary school you don't get friends. It could be that the bullying drives away friends, or if you had friends you wouldn't get bullied, or the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you not to get friends. Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.
I guess you are answering to the "you also get friends" part of my comment.
What you suffered was horrifying, I hope you have recovered. There's degrees in bullying. Mine was not that bad in comparison to yours. The kid who was a bane of my existence would not attack me every single day, at every single hour. I was not important enough or "fun enough to mess with", I suppose. It was more like a "once per week" kind of thing.
I was not very successful at making friends. But I did make a couple. The first one was the other guy who was also regularly bullied. He had clear developmental issues, I don't think teachers could turn a blind eye on them like they could on mine. We talked about videogames, almost exclusively. It helped, somewhat. Then he (I think) became romantically interested in me and I had to cut it off.
Then there was another kid who regularly came to my house. We played with legos, which I had many. Then he stopped liking Legos. (Children...)
My school did give me many more opportunities to make friends. Retrospectively, I know I could have made more. I just didn't know how to. In my case it would be "the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you to not get friends". I only managed to make real friends in highschool (and even then it was just 2 or 3). And that was after I decided to make a conscious effort to understand the social rules that seemed to come naturally to others.
I think my problem was more a "me" issue. The bullying didn't help but I suspect I would have made very few friends independently of it.
> Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.
I do agree. Unfortunately many children's homes are not safe environments. Homeschooling for them is worse than bullying can ever be at school. Imagine 24-7 with your bully, who is way bigger than you and from whom you also depend for food, water and shelter.
Wow, that is tremendously messed up! I'm sorry you had to experience that. Kind of makes my young adult life sound like a cake walk.
Ironically, it was the jocks and the gang affiliated kids who always left me alone. I don't know exactly why, though I figured the jocks were popular enough to not waste their energy tormenting someone socially beneath them.
Anyway, I completely agree with what you've said. Whenever I experienced bullying, it was in close correlation to how callously indifferent the overall system was. The couple of schools I went to where I didn't experience trouble had empathetic teachers and administrators whom actually built trust with the students. The earlier schools I went to were mostly run by selfish teachers (whom I later learned were even more selfish than I realized at the time!) and administrators who would punish the bully and the victim equally out of laziness/callousness/stupidity; or look the other way entirely! Guess which ones I suffered under and which ones I didn't.
> If you're being bullied in elementary school you don't get friends. It could be that the bullying drives away friends, or if you had friends you wouldn't get bullied, or the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you not to get friends. Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.
I know you're referring to elementary school here, but I think this dynamic you're describing also explains why so many kids have a rotten time in middle school. Usually, middle school lasts only a few years, and can easily mean being separated from any sort of peer group you have for multiple reasons. If your friends are even slightly older or younger than you are, then one will have to face a year of middle school without them. Depending on where your friends live, they might end up in a different middle school even though you both went to the same elementary school.
Even though I did have one good friend in elementary school (we are still best friends today), he is a year older than I am, and even though we went to the same middle school I had to spend at least 1 year in elementary school without him and then another during my second year in middle school. And I know he had the same problem in reverse. When you're seen as having "no friends", even though you actually do, everyone treats you like you have the stink of death. Those were some of the worst years of my life.
I hate the stereotype in movies that jocks are bad.
There must be some bad apples but mostly they are focused on their sport and the team and don't have time or energy to make trouble, and if they do make trouble, they are off the team.
The time some people attacked me at my dorm I ducked into the room of the captain of the rugby team and that was the last time they came to my dorm. The captain of the football team at my high school was popular because he treated everybody well, I'd say the same about kids who were stars in youth soccer. In fact, even though I didn't feel terribly engaged with it at the time, youth soccer is a precious memory to me because it was one place where I was never mistreated (a group photo shows me standing next to the coach who probably gave me just a little extra attention because of my neurodivergence.)
Yup, I agree. I'm sure there's bad apples out there, but I had the least issues with jocks and popular people. Even in America, they didn't pick on me, and I was always confused by how vilified they were in popular media. Looking back, it was always these sort of middle of the road kids who were the problem; neither particularly popular nor at the bottom of the totem pole. Completely unremarkable, and with incredibly fragile egos.
Your analysis is on point. With some exceptions, popular people are usually popular for a valid reason.
There was this one guy I remember who wasn't exactly a jock, but sort of overlapped with them I guess. I'm pretty sure he played rugby. He had a great physique for a high schooler, was charming to everyone, and had the sort of look about him like he would become a "dreamboat doctor" as an adult. Anyway, I was doing miserably in chemistry class, not necessarily because I was bad at science but I was just having a tough time in school in general which made me unfocused. Without even asking him, he offered to help me study for my exams, and I took him up on it even though I did feel ashamed for needing help. With his help, I passed that class with what was the equivalent of a C grade in New Zealand. He became class president, and I know he was the one to deserve it. I'm grateful to this day that he was one of the few people during my school career who actually cared. And yeah, he was probably the most popular student there.
As another product of the British 'education' system, this is all very familiar.
If you're interested in some content that really helped me understand why I hated school so completely, I recommend "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto, and "Free to Learn" by Peter Gray. Peter Gray also has a very nice blog called "Play Makes Us Human" at https://petergray.substack.com/
As a parent of a toddler, deciding on schooling options is one of the most serious decisions I'll have to make with my partner over the coming years and it terrifies me. Home schooling is a very attractive option from my perspective, but only due to lack of alternatives that offer the sort of nurturing and positive environment that I want my child to have.
To heavily paraphrase a short of stature comedian: Childhood and School is basically jail. You're confined with a bunch of violent sociopaths, have minimal agency over what you do everyday, spend most of your free time trying to smoke weed out of improvised pipes, and the greatest reward you can obtain is like a bag of Doritos.
This does prepare you to life though. More likely than not you will go to office. You will find yourselves with bullies, and again you can become a victim. Rather than feeling sorry about yourself, school prepares you to fight with bullies, to find inmates, to find friends. I think you could have not understand the life lessons.
You will also enter other communities, where again, you will find bullies.
Good grief, if the lack of caring for the kids, the indifference of the educators is now reframed as a virtue and core function of the failing school system I guess we are in deep trouble.
Nope, if I have to share an office with an ethnic gang that attacks co-workers because of their different ethnicity I will certainly not "deal with bullies" but leave the place.
In a way you're right, I worked in a consulting firm that seemed to have that mentality, and I did find bullies, and it seemed the only way to go forward was to become a bullying, lying cheat yourself.
Then I went on to work for a more civilised company that believed in people being decent and such, and discovered that you can actually coexist with people and foster growth without stepping on other people on your way.
If you think one can just "fight with bullies, find inmates, find friends" and everything will be alright, you're quite clueless to some experiences many people have gone through.
>You will find yourselves with bullies, and again you can become a victim.
I don't know what kind of places you've worked at, but everywhere I've worked if anyone behaved even 10% like the average high school bully they'd have been fired on the spot.
"everywhere I've worked if anyone behaved even 10% like the average high school bully they'd have been fired on the spot." unless...they're the CEO ? ;)
This is abhorrent. The feeling of safety underpins emotional well-being. What you advocate is only the repetition of past suffering. Without safety, what is left but fear?
Reality? And those safe spaces are built upon and upheld by others - who bully the other mean bullies to keep it that way. Every part of civilization is a energetic effort and if the civilization runs low on energy/supplybribery - the space closes with a thunderclap as the structure giveth.
I can agree with that, it's the best counter argument, at least. Though it's a weak one.
Cause there is certainly better ways to prepare a kid to the real tough life than having him to go through a prison. I can certainly see what the OP went through by relating to my own experience. I managed better, I was more often than not in the neutral ignored camp but I really see how bullies made life miserable to others, and how it could have been very different. These tensions didn't help me, it was just an issue I had to deal with, more or less successfully. But I really felt a liberation when I started my first job, though I've no rights to complain about my childhood.
Regular teaching is a thing of the past. Specific lessons tailored to a kid capacity through AI (let's give it a few more years) is the future. Most modern countries will certainly start swapping regular teaching within the 10 next years, the rest of the world will follow.
spending precious studying time on fighting and searching for transient "friendship"... yeah, that'll teach you about life. Nobody needs eggheads, boxers are in trend!
I have worked in 5 different companies, not one had any bullying. (Technically there was a one-off event involving a colleague and it was dealt with severely enough that it never happened again)
While I hate to admit that you are not inaccurate, we are humans and should be able to find a way to raise the youth without resorting to storing them in prisons while they explore how to physically and emotionally torture one another. The fact that we accept this as a mere expression of nature is beyond horrifying, because schools are anything, but nature. I would sooner accept gangs of free roaming kids across the neighborhood, but you can't have that, because that would impede private property and businesses.
<< God how I hate idea of "safe spaces".
It is not a question of safe space. It is a question of what you are teaching. Because of the people like you, who think it is perfectly fine education, I can accurately pinpoint 'troublemakers' and 'danger' as I walk down the street and avoid the place. That is explicitly NOT what early education should be.
> These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people.
It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way. "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
Why? Being in tech doesn't make you a hacker. Most people, even very talented engineers, are still happy to follow boss, do a 9 to 5, and don't really bend or break the rules... they don't go against the elite. They see themselves as the elite.
Agreed. "Tech" includes a lot of people who are not hackers.
It's worth pointing out though that the "hacker" types who go with the flow are in many cases doing so motivated by pragmatism and cynicism. They don't really believe in management or in the company or the product, but they gotta stick around until their shares vest or whatever.
> they don't go against the elite. They see themselves as the elite.
These are not the only two options. Deciding some people are "the elite" and defining people as being either part of that group or in opposition to it is your choice, but it is not the only choice.
I don't want my children to have to learn at the pace of the bottom quintile. Obviously average and less-than-average people exist. But I will _not_ be hamstringing my kids to placate the whims of the state or some "modern" moral standard. I know how harmful it is because I went through it.
Your perspective is valid, but I think its worth reconsidering some of the assumptions youre making. Assuming your child is above average may not always reflect reality. Being above average at a thing does not make you above average at all things. The public education system provides resources like gifted programs, AP courses, and extracurricular activities to challenge / engage students at all levels of above/below average. So if your kid is an advanced learner they can still thrive without being “hamstrung.” I think using terms like “hamstring” dismisses the value public education provides in fostering diversity of experiences, social skills, and engagement with peers.. things that cant be replicated in a homeschooling environment.
> The public education system provides resources like gifted programs, AP courses, and extracurricular activities to challenge / engage students at all levels of above/below average. So if your kid is an advanced learner they can still thrive without being “hamstrung.”
The issue is that some liberal schools of thought are pushing towards detracking in hopes of reducing inequality in a Harrison Bergeron sort of way. So public schools are not offering those advanced courses. E.g. California was going to remove 8th grade Algebra as an option, but thankfully there was enough backlash to stop this.
It's generally safe to assume your child will be above the bottom quintile for anything they care about. I went to a decent public school, and gifted programs, AP courses and extracurricular activities are lacking. Most students do not care about learning. I've talked to some people from Lexington High School (often considered the best public school in the US), and they had the same sentiment.
"I thought you guys usually have a bunch of olympiad medalists though; don't students care about academics at your school?"
"No, there's only really 10–15 of us who try, and hold up the rest of the school's reputation."
At Least in the northeast US, there are advanced courses or tracts a student can be placed in if they're above their peers. Is that not the case in your schools?
I am a strong supporter of public school, to the point I volunteer often and advocate for them.
"Whims of the state" -- I'd recommend you make sure to advocate for a strong department of education, which for its many activities is a facilitator of credentialing. It's fundamentally societal and operated politically and bureaucratically.
'"modern" moral standard" -- I agree, we should target humanist ideals only as they are sourced from naturalism, otherwise we have neomodern or otherwise misaligned religious tenets creep in as "values" when they're really misplaced. Some folks advocating pro-religious values in schooling are quite insidious -- using religious freedom (where people have a right to practice in their homes and even the public square) as an injection to favor their religion as the majority in an area, to the exclusion of people who do not believe as they do. It's quite sad to see the Constitution, written fundamentally by Deists who were motivated more by motives closer to religious existentialism than current triumphalism, be run so roughshod over!
If you meant something else by modern moral standard, my apologies, I simply see this common thought-terminating cliche in a lot of places and it falls apart with 2 seconds of introspection.
I think a better question is: How did the median get so much better over 150 years, and why can't it keep getting better?
150 years ago, the average person was illiterate, poorer (in all senses of the word) and less connected to the world around them. Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going? So the outlier, super special "phenom" today is the median of tomorrow.
> 150 years ago, the average person was illiterate
Not true in the case of the US, which famously adopted a culture of universal literacy earlier than the rest of the world. By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history; they took literacy very seriously for complicated historical reasons. Their book consumption per capita was also the highest in the world by a very large margin back in those days, which lends evidence.
It may or may not be relevant to your point, but at least in the US the idea that the average person was illiterate is ahistorical. They were the best read population in the world 150 years ago, and took some pride in that.
> By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today
But the states does have among the lowest literacy rate in the west. Less than 80% was considered literate in 2024, compared to almost 99% in the EU (with a range from 94% to almost 100%).
Of the 20% of US adults who don't have a level of literacy necessary to be considered "literate", 40+% are from other countries with low levels of literacy.
Wrong signal. The problem is demographic. Not being mean, just a fact that a lot of people are illiterate live in the US, but were not born and raised here.
My read of history is that the puritans basically had universal literacy not that long after the printing press hit Europe. I believe America and Israel are unique among modern countries in being founded by people whose ancestors had achieved universal literacy in the 1500s.
Something like that. They believed it was important that everyone was literate enough to read and understand the Bible themselves, without it being filtered through a historically corrupt Church that engaged in selective representation and interpretation of the Bible for their own manipulative purposes. Basically, they wanted everyone to be able to go to the source to determine what was and wasn’t moral and Christian, instead of relying on assertions by self-interested third parties.
Regardless of if they achieved their religious objectives, that earnest mission to make every human soul capable of reading the Bible for themselves produced the social good of a literate population capable of reading prodigious amounts of non-Bible content.
It is an interesting consequence of how the religious wars in Europe spilled over into in the early Americas.
I would argue the downside was that this perspective got secularized and morphed into the particularly American paranoid distrust of institutions that has caused at least as many problems as it has solved. In fact, I think the American obsession with homeschooling has those same Puritan roots.
I think you can more readily and correctly connect the American distrust of institutions first to the treatment of the colonists by the British Empire, and later to immigration of people fleeing authoritarian countries. One also cannot dismiss the distrust in authority among put upon minorities. The British Empire was no less brutal in its American colonies than in other places.
The Puritans were always few in number and were demographically displaced by later immigration around the fishing industry in New England.
Displaced in terms of total population, but the aristocracy of the US was mostly Mayflower types will into the 20th Century.
I think some overstate the influence of Radical Protestants on American ideology with offhand references to Max Weber or by calling whatever their pet cause is a fight against "secular puritanism." On the other hand, I do think there are some interesting parallels.
For example, one could argue that the mistreatment of colonists by the mother country was overstated by a population already distrustful of the Crown. I'm no expert, but it would be interesting to read more about that dynamic.
I don't disagree, but the descendants of the Puritans stopped being Puritans pretty quickly. The Halfway Covenant was only about 40 years after they landed in Plymouth and there were virtually no Puritans by 1740.
"Pretty quickly" may be an exaggeration there, given that 1740 was a good five generations after the founding of the Plymouth colony, and they were still famously conducting witch trials only fifty years earlier.
But it surely did happen -- IIRC, Adams and Jefferson were both noting in their correspondence how by the end of the 18th century most of the Puritan descendants had somehow become Unitarians.
Like I said, the halfway covenant was less than 2 generations after landing, and the character of Puritanism in America was totally different after that point.
IANAH but I'm not sure one can really separate "treatment of the colonists by the British Empire" from the struggle between Dissenters and the Established Church. Yes, Puritans were relatively few in number but they were influential. Later colonists would have had to fit themselves into the society created by the Puritans, if nothing else by constituting their own power base in opposition to the Puritan one. They are still part of our foundational myth and buckle-shoe-wearing caricatures of them /still/ go up all over the country every single November.
> Yes, Puritans were relatively few in number but they were influential
They were influential in a narrow geography of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for about 50 years. Their own children and grandchildren largely rejected Puritanism resulting in the Half-Way Covenant and the eventual demise of Puritanism. I agree that they're part of the foundational myth, but it's just that myth.
I don't think that's particularly accurate for the US. Perhaps some of the Protestant settler communities were very literate, but I'm quite certain literacy would have been far lower by the time the country was actually founded, as slaves were imported and immigration from other communities picked up.
This seems like a suspiciously bold statement. Both in the assertion that these groups had achieved universal literacy, and in that other groups hadn't been at least as literate. Japan comes to mind, wrt the latter. Literacy, if not universal, was also widespread across the Muslim world.
Sounds like Americans were literate back then. I also suspect that most were _more_ connected to the world around them. Not the broader world, but the immediate world around them.
Unless the original commenters sneak-edited their comment, they included the word "whites" specifically to not ignore the non-whites and point out that universal literacy was not "universal" in the early US.
Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going?
Schooling didn’t fix all that. There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications… the list goes on and on and on. Some of these things contributed major improvements to the average person.
Advances in medicine and nutrition, for example, contributed to sharp declines in early childhood mortality and morbidity. Advances in reproductive health care (along with everything else) led to huge declines in birth rates. Smaller families have more resources and attention available for each child.
Other advances had less of an impact but still add up when combined. Widespread access to refrigeration improved nutrition and reduced spoilage, allowing increased consumption of meat. More meat means taller, stronger, healthier children.
On the other hand, schooling hasn’t improved all that much in 150 years. You can find lots of writing samples and old exams for schools from back then. The bigger difference is that children stay in school much longer and have less need to rapidly enter the workforce in order to support the family. This last factor is a product of many of the advances listed above.
> There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications…
You might say that's also a success of the schooling (and higher education) system - unless the people who produced these advances were all home schooled, which I somehow doubt...
Some were. Some would have made major advances whether they'd had a lot of formal schooling or not.
And many who had a lot of schooling learned to repeat, obey and sit still for 12-16 years.
And maybe had less initiative than they were born with. Maybe they learned to not question what they were told.
1. Thomas Edison
Minimal formal education; mostly homeschooled by his mother. Edison was a voracious reader and learned through experimentation.
2. The Wright Brothers (Orville and Wilbur Wright)
Neither completed high school. They learned through self-study, practical work, and their experiences running a bicycle repair shop.
3. Henry Ford
Left school at 15 years old. Ford learned engineering and mechanics by working as an apprentice.
4. Michael Faraday
Minimal formal schooling. Faraday worked as a bookbinder and educated himself through books and observation.
5. Benjamin Franklin
Left school at age 10 due to financial constraints. Franklin was self-taught, primarily through reading and experimentation.
6. George Eastman
Dropped out of school at age 14. Eastman learned accounting and photography on his own.
7. Elisha Otis
Had little formal education and learned mechanics and engineering through work experience.
8. R. G. LeTourneau
Dropped out of school in the sixth grade. He learned engineering through hands-on work and experimentation.
9. John D. Rockefeller
Dropped out of high school to take a business course and learned through practical experience.
10. Philo Farnsworth
Learned electronics and physics by reading and tinkering, despite being unable to afford college.
Most scientific advances throughout history prior to about the 1950s were made by people whose education was either informal or private (including apprenticeship). Private tutoring was the predominant mode of formal education (below university level) throughout history.
I have this discussion with my wife who works at a school.
Children are required to be there. The school has to provide them with all manner of opportunities.
On the flip side, the school can't expect anything from the kids other than attendance. They don't really get to expect a certain level of behavior or performance. They can't relegate the bad actors (behavior or performance) away from those who wish to participate fully. Everyone has to be mixed together.
So you give a certain vocal minority that don't care about the education a heckler's veto. They are regularly disruptive and can't be removed.
Nobody has a solution for actually improving that group of student, but there are enough people involved in public education that demand these students be included in the process that they are trying to wreck.
I can not talk for the US, but in Sweden it was schooling. I think Sweden has better literacy rates earlier than the US, but I guess I really should compare this on a state level considering how the US works. I am pretty sure that it is a political goal not an economic one, this is obvious considering US black literacy levels took until 1979 to be comparable to whites. I would like to point out that the Danish nobility discussed but decided against keeping poor and oppressed farmers illiterate in the 18th century, so it is not really an issue of globalization.
>I am pretty sure that it is a political goal not an economic one, this is obvious considering US black literacy levels took until 1979 to be comparable to whites.
I don't follow. 1979 would have been a high point in closing the black/white economic gap in America (partly because of the falling economic prospects of white Americans at the time).
Over here education came first economics later, that will color my conclusions. I am pretty sure giving black people as little education as possible was a political goal in the US.
Neglecting black education was a political decision with an economic component, in that it helped support the system of slavery, and later kept jobs that required education segregated. Siphoning tax dollars from black communities to use elsewhere (instead of to support their educational institutions) would be another aspect of this phenomenon.
> 150 years ago, the average person was illiterate, poorer (in all senses of the word) and less connected to the world around them. Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that.
Illiterate, yes, but likely better at other skills like milking cows and knowing which plants in the forest were edible. Less connected to the global world and culture, yes, but more connected to the hyper local environment around them. I don't know if the schooling "fixed" anything, it just created a new, national or global template for what a human being should be like.
It took way less than 100 years to eradicate illiteracy, and further improvement followed. However, as soon as a system is established, the forces that corrupt that system start acting, finding ways to exploit it to their own advantage. Then, as special interests (politics, unions) take over, the quality stagnates and then decays.
>Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going?
Schooling has fixed all that, and still works just fine. Just not in America, because that country is rapidly self-destructing. Schooling is still working fine in the rest of the world.
Because an educated populace is harder for the ultrarich to control and abuse, because an educated populace with free time can revolt against those in power, and because as a consequence of those two things ultrarich conservatives have consolidated ownership of media and used it to defund education and convince the population that funding education is bad.
This isn't the slam dunk you think it is. The article indicates that money isn't evenly distributed, which explains the conservatives goal with vouchers and charter / private schools.
My SO taught at all 3 kinds of the school in the US, in urban and suburban areas. The pay is bad everywhere, but worst at the non-union schools. Only teachers left have no better options or believe in the religion or cause of teaching, and even they tend to leave such schools the moment they have enough experience or better options. None of this is good for the kids at such schools.
The more affluent schools can afford to hire experts and keep them. I went to a rich(er) high school and had my choice among many specialty electives and advanced placement. My SO attended a highschool that was something between prison and daycare. My friend's private school was a religious indoctrination factory. Home schooled friends were often academical average to great, all socially awkward well into adulthood, and many were taught conspiracies or outright lies as long as it fit their parents "biblical worldview".
Public school was an escape from a cult-like community for me. I'm grateful my parents were too poor to force me into an alternative until I was old enough to refuse.
It sounds like you have a beef with how citizens socialize their children into the dominant religion of the society—which is literally considered a human right[1]—and less so with how schools are funded in the U.S.
See Article 18.4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/... (“The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.”)
Prohibitions on religious education in public schools—which don’t exist in many developed countries, such as Germany and Sweden—hurts the majority of people who would do better under that system.
Urban teachers are not getting rich teaching poor kids. Having seen the classrooms first hand, the kids lives are like a low-grade war zone. Sometimes they even work themselves to pay for their charter school tuition, and keep the lights on at home. Siphoning public funds off to the pockets of PE owned schools is not going to improve outcomes.
Mormons' affluence is in spite of their faith, not because of it. Utah also has more MLMs and scams than most others.
Having lived in a cult-like religion, I'd rather be less wealthy yet mentally well than 'socialized' into magical thinking and all the various idiotic garbage I was taught. Public schools are often one of the only ways kids can escape abusive, exploitive, or otherwise unhealthy circumstances.
> Urban teachers are not getting rich teaching poor kids. Having seen the classrooms first hand, the kids lives are like a low-grade war zone. Sometimes they even work themselves to pay for their charter school tuition, and keep the lights on at home. Siphoning public funds off to the pockets of PE owned schools is not going to improve outcomes.
Nobody is getting rich running schools. But everyone in the Baltimore public school district continues to draw salaries even though in some high schools many kids are reading at a kindergarten level. https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/77-tested-at....
So let the PE folks take their shot, or at least provide ways for the small fraction of involved parents to get their kids out of failing schools.
> Mormons' affluence is in spite of their faith, not because of it.
Mormons were literally driven out of the rest of the country for their religious beliefs and settled land that has no resources and can barely support farms and agriculture. Yet they built a thriving civilization in the middle of nowhere. Utah is one of the most stunning success stories in the world, up there with Israel and Singapore.
> Having lived in a cult-like religion, I'd rather be less wealthy yet mentally well than 'socialized' into magical thinking and all the various idiotic garbage I was taught. Public schools are often one of the only ways kids can escape abusive, exploitive, or otherwise unhealthy circumstances.
Mormons are tied with Jews for the happiest people in the country. Being socialized into religion, with uniform norms and expectations, is for most people mentally healthy. They’re also literally healthier. They live significantly longer than non-LDS white people: https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol10/3/10-3.pd....
The fact that you believe the ultra rich conspire to control and abuse the uneducated shows that you are part of that group of average people parents want their kids to stay away from.
I agree with this and that's why I think social media, mass media and so on exist.
However I'm curious as to why you attribute or limit this to 'conservatives' only. Is this really something exclusive or characteristic of the conservative side? At least where I am from it's the left that's more interventionist in regards to education rather than the right, that interventionism being used to make education more rigid and controlled by a biased government.
And the media is definitely not consolidated, you've got clearly two sides competing at a pretty equal level.
Establishing standards for education and defunding public schools to siphon the funds to churches are not the same thing. Conservatives have been attacking and defunding educational standards and attacking the educated and the concept of education - hence the repeated claims of "liberal bias", the artificial cultural war against university, etc.
And two sides at equal levels? Are you living in 1979? Local media is nearly all Sinclair. All the cable networks are owned by conservatives. Even traditionally liberal newspapers like the Washington Post are owned by rich assholes taking over the editorial board. And social media in the US is now dominated by two literal fascists.
My apologies for not being from (or exclusively referring to) the US of A.
From where I'm from I'd say yes, both sides at equal levels more or less, fairly favoured toward the left, but now changing a wee bit because the left went waaaaay too left.
Europe would now seem to be shifting towards the right at some levels, but from historically (recently at least) being fairly leftist.
Anyway, aren't CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian... overtly left-leaning?
>Anyway, aren't CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian... overtly left-leaning
For CNN and MSNBC, no. Neither was every truly liberal in the global sense (like the Democratic Party, closer to centrist than anything else) and both have started drifting rightward in the last 4 years such that they're now roughly "American Centrist" with a slight left lean i.e. conservative in most of the rest of the world.
At least where I’m from, the majority of homeschooled children are in conservative Christian (or Mormon) families, with a minority (but still notable) in super-left-wing hippy families. Very, very few in non-extreme families.
And that actually makes sense from a strictly logical point of view. The extremes are the ones who precisely don't want to conform to the status quo imposed by the alleged controlling higher powers.
As purely anecdotical data, where I'm from it's actually the opposite, majority hippies, vegan, alternative/free education advocates, etc, and a minority of mostly morally-concerned non-left-leaning (mainly religious) people, as well as specific cases of children with special needs that simply can't adapt to public education because of external reasons (bullies).
As a matter of fact, the hardcore religious right in my country have their own private education institutions, which are quite powerful themselves.
So even the (non-catholic) Christians who homeschool because of religious and moral convictions end up being moderate/center people trying to move away from both extremes.
You are attacking a strawman. I think most people would agree that public schools 30 years ago were better than public schools 150 years ago. I find it much harder to believe that public schools today are better than they were 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you
A billion times this. School is not to train you on Math, English or Science. It's also to teach you how to cooperate, how to reach consensus, how to make decisions as a group, and so on.
These soft skills are absolutely critical to maintain a properly functioning society.
Schools used to do this, but the push for risk reduction, metrics, and rules has become so great that it no longer happens. There used to be thousands of student-run organizations in schools across the country. That wasn't a euphemism like it is now-there were no teachers or other adults involved. The kids running them did have to learn to cooperate and make decisions in a responsible way, or face the natural consequences of the group falling apart and social failure.
Now, such organizations are banned. The closest analogue is a "student" council, run by an adult, that might get to choose the color of the wallpaper at prom.
Cooperation requires shared goals. I can't cooperate with someone when we're not sharing goals. Young students don't have shared goals other than "survive in this classroom for 11 months out of a calendar year". So there's no lessons in cooperation.
>how to reach consensus,
Of what use is consensus, without shared goals? Sounds more like indoctrination.
>how to make decisions as a group,
Same as above.
>These soft skills are absolutely critical to maintain a properly functioning society.
These skills are actually being used to murder civilization/society, even as we speak. The current fertility rate is sub-replacement, but the children being indoctrinated in public schools are being indoctrinated to be even less fertile than that. Many will grow up to be and remain childless as adults, and as that happens, society will not replace those people who are dying of old age. Society then dies itself just decades later. Your society, such as it is, is absurdly dysfunctional. I suppose if one were to define "properly functioning" as "polite to a fault" or "as peaceful as cattle trudging down the slaughterhouse chute"...
why can't homeschooling involve the same attributes? genuine question. from what i've been seeing in modern trends, homeschooling doesn't literally mean you sit and your mother teaches you all day and then you "go home" by migrating to your bedroom. you're still in a small group with other children, all of whom likely still share characteristics where disagreements will naturally happen, and cooperation will need to occur to move forward. the way I see homeschooling is simply a parallel to the traditional public school path, but in smaller, more focused groups with a far more controlled environment. not seeing how this is inherently bad
> less controlled environments later in life when it's harder to change habits, like in uni or in the workplace.
You're right on pointing out the environments in which homeschoolers often perform poorly, but you used the wrong word. Homeschoolers are bad at more controlled environments, where you must work within the confines of bureaucratic systems run by people who didn't design them. Timesheets, changing place when the bell rings, studying only what's on the test and reproducing at the correct time, speaking differently to people based on how much authority they hold over you according to a system of record--that is difficult for people who are used to a lot of freedom in terms of how they spend their time, and how they interact with other people.
yeah i see the argument, and its an important skillset to be able to deal with chaos/bullies but this other part of me wonders whether dealing with bullying early on is healthy at all?
to be clear, i do believe that tough personalities that aren't straight up bullying can still happen inside of a group homeschooled environment.
Bullying seems to be a phenomenon almost exclusive to children. Adults don't mess with each other as much for various reasons, not least of which is that adults have more options to deal with the problem.
I think the way to handle socializing kids if you homeschool is to enroll them in extracurricular activities where they can meet all kinds of people. If the activity is a good one, you'll still probably avoid the worst types that appear in public schools, and give the kids more exposure to different kinds of people. And if it doesn't work for some reason, you can switch activities or groups more easily than you could ever switch schools.
Plenty? I've almost never seen it. I had a few teachers drop occasional insults toward me but they would never dare do anything to me like a kid would. They can't even spank students anymore. Almost every issue that a kid has with a teacher is caused by bad behavior. Of course I haven't been in grade school in decades and I went to probably a nice school in the scheme of things. I have seen quite a few stories of teachers doing awful things to their students, for example harassing them about politics. But I really think these cases are rare, and most likely kinds of teacher harassment are easily avoided by students.
I've tutored literally hundreds of homeschoolers at this point, mostly in the high school ages as their parents ran out of math ability. As a whole, they are far better socially adapted than the average teenager.
Sure, there is selection bias among those who get that far in math, and those who would seek out tutoring. But I had 9th graders coming to me already behaving well as adults. More often than not they were in charge of working things out with me, not their parents.
Every time one of these threads comes up I cringe, because virtually nobody here has worked with a large number of these kids. They just remember the one weird kid who stood out. If homeschoolers were to put forth the same arguments based on the one weird kid from public school, homeschooling would win by a landslide.
People say it's about socialization, but homeschoolers are out there doing it in a normal way all the time. Parent needs to go to the post office -- there is a class on that, and why. Everything can turn into a lesson and not just something taken care of by parents. They come out of this experience with far more adult level socialization and civic knowledge than the average kid, by a wide margin.
Who are kids in high school getting their social queues from? The drug dealers? The bully? The good kids in high school are typically well adjusted because of things taught to them not by their peers, but by their family and community outside of school.
Yes, homeschooling can be done poorly. But it is not inherently a poor education, and in my experience is far superior to the average experience at a public school. Some exceptions apply for those things which a large school may be able to have by aggregating sufficient students and resources toward (marching band, science classes, AP level courses).
I think kids copy what they see. If they spend disproportionate time with adults, they will often act mature for their age. That isn't always a good thing, because they do need to deal with other children eventually. Of course, this is not a universal rule, and it's hard to keep kids from getting influenced by TV and random other kids they will eventually see.
I really couldn’t learn that from my experience in american k-12. I was too stubborn, emotionally stunted, and usually ahead of my peers, so I’d isolate myself and learn what I was interested in. I taught myself to make music, install and use linux, to write c++, to develop games etc on my laptop during and outside of classes, and the only reason I was even able to do that much was the disinterest and disregard of most teachers. Maybe that environment wasn’t the right one for me, and if it wasn’t, then it makes me wonder how many other people are underserved.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
Seems like there's only something to lose from adjusting to their shittiness. Like Harrison Bergeron
And seeing the state of California trying to push math classes later because of "equity", seeing public schools dissolving gifted programs, it makes me think that privatization is the only way forward instead of trying to make amends with the current progressive stupidity
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
This is prejudice in the most basic sense: you literally don't know any of these things about the people you're surrounded by in a society. The person who rides the bus next to you could be a couch potato, or a talented artist, or something entirely different that simply isn't legible to you.
I don't know anything about California's math classes. I'm saying that, on a basic level, anybody who thinks this way about people they don't know is demonstrating the exact traits they're smugly claiming to be above.
I feel like you and the parents post are compatible views of the world that could be simultaneously held in the same brain without dissonance.
Reading your comment, it seems to focus on the individual. “The person” you know nothing about.
The parent comment seems to be Bayesian, the probability of “the person” being something.
I do think it’s possible to simultaneously believe that:
* every single person you meet in every possible circumstance might be an exceptional human
* your are more likely to encounter exceptional humans in specific circumstances and you can optimize for that
I believe this holds true regardless of your definition of exceptional.
A (maybe) obvious example: if you believe exceptional humans want to grow their own food and live on communes, you probably don’t want to live in the financial district of Manhattan. That would be a bad way to optimize for finding people who share your values.
Similarly you’re unlikely to find a thriving software developer community in Springfield Illinois. If you go to Springfield and assume everyone you meet can’t program, you’re going to be wrong - there are good programmers there. But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.
> But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.
And if you want to find the best mathematician you stay in academic circles. But the best mathematician of your era might be in a random district in India. So you shouldn't immediately exclude everywhere else, or your 'optimisation' may be a relatively low local maximum.
It is impossible for an individual to do this search themself, so you have to have some global sorting. Top-down approaches include math competitions and national testing. More federated approaches include just... moving to communities where the average is closer to you.
I feel like you both got and missed the point, and it relies on your misuse of exceptional that doesn’t escape the original discussion:
Society needs and has exceptional people living in communes, in the financial district, in software development communities, and yes even in Springfield, Illinois.
Sharing your values or not does generally not correlate with exceptional.
If you are just looking for someone in your field to learn a trade from, well, great, but that is hardly the intent of primary education.
When my car broke down in the middle of a DoorDash run, I walked to a nearby park and sat next to a homeless guy who was about my age. He was deaf; we talked via text on our phones about how we'd ended up on the same bench, and I shared some of my food. I learned from him how resilient someone can be, even under incredibly unfair circumstances, but more importantly, he got something to eat.
I was (and remain) a few bad breaks from his situation. I'm not responsible for his state, but we absolutely are peers (i.e., same age, facing the same broad socioeconomic environment).
Exactly. It's not all about you. It's best for the community to encourage education, and dragging down students who actually care about education does the opposite.
Your selfishness is not equal to my desire for common prosperity. If anything, lone wolf-ism is what drags us down (no matter how proficient the wolf thinks he is). We live in a society.
Suppose you have a kid that you have reason to believe is at the 90th percentile. This isn't uncommon; it's one in ten kids.
The average kid at the average school is at the 50th percentile. Moreover, the speed of the class isn't even the speed of the average kid because then the 40th and 20th percentile kids would get left behind. To get out of this you'd need a school with a gifted program and enough 90th percentile kids to fill it, and many of them don't have one.
looking after someone who has just been picked on by all the other kids?
schools introduce us to a wide range of children who are representative of the people we’re going to have to deal with later on in life.
not saying there aren’t alternatives.
but specialising for only the 90th percentile of one thing seems like a way to isolate someone later in life because they may not have learned how to deal with people who aren’t in the 90th percentile of that one thing.
and i say that as someone who hated my time at school and has struggled with the repercussions in later life.
It could be the 90th percentile of science and the 60th percentile of literature and the 40th percentile of music. But if they throw you in with the 50th percentile kids in all cases then you're being held back in science and literature and you're holding back the other kids in music.
> schools introduce us to a wide range of children who are representative of the people we’re going to have to deal with later on in life.
This is why home school families come together so their kids can socialize with one another.
As someone who was in the 90th percentile, I can confirm that it wasn't a universal quality about my entire being. I got to be in higher-level courses where I excelled. Those are generally available, even in public school systems.
And just because I was good at math and writing didn't mean that I "deserved" to be in some separate system where I got the "best" of everything (with diminishing returns). When I eventually encountered people who were afforded just such a deal ("elite" private school in a wealthy area), they were far less impressive than the top college-level facilities they enjoyed as grade schoolers; it seemed like a waste of money that could have been put to more efficient use, as far as society writ large might be concerned.
Who is talking about "deserved" or anything like that? Parents want their kids to excel, if they think they can provide that themselves better than what the school is offering then they make the best choice available to them.
> When I eventually encountered people who were afforded just such a deal ("elite" private school in a wealthy area), they were far less impressive than the top college-level facilities they enjoyed as grade schoolers
This is exactly the argument in favor of home schooling. If you just throw money at it but pay little attention to it then you get a beautiful campus with expensive landscaping and not necessarily the highest quality education, because it's easier for parents to judge the quality of the facilities than the quality of the instruction. Whereas if you actually care and you want something done right you have to do it yourself.
Hoity-toity campuses are actually more efficient than every little prince getting his own personal tutor. The problem in both cases is that the parents of these children, as a class, demand the income and social infrastructure necessary to get their children this education, at everyone else's expense.
At some point, the masses say, "No." They realize that they're never getting a seat at that particular table, and turn from fighting over the charity spots to attempts at dismantling their exploitation. From there, you either get a robust public school system that provides a decent education for everyone, or a police state.
Suffice it to say, no one parent's dreams for their kids should come at the expense of another's.
> Which seems to be an argument to move the child to a school with a gifted program rather than homeschool.
What if there isn't one within a reasonable distance, or your locality doesn't have school choice?
> Many homes also lack numerous gifted children and specialist programs.
The issue is that you need the absence of children who would hold back the class, not necessarily that you need the presence of other gifted children except insofar as you need to fill out the class, which is not an issue when the class size is one.
There are boarding schools, schools of the air, etc. Serious parents can move house for catchments, etc.
I grew some 1,500km north of the nearest city and got by .. still managed to hook up with Terrence Tao and Paul Erdős when I got to university and ran a math club. When one of my kids was ready for high school we got a house in the catchment of the only public school with an aviation program so they could build and fly a light aircraft.
> The issue is that you need the absence of children who would hold back the class,
I enjoyed going to school with hunter gathers in the Kimberley .. I don't feel they held me back, I did get to learn how to fish, to hunt, to swear in several languages.
Despite a lot fighting at high school, on and off the fooball field, I managed to pick up enough abstract algebra to work on CAYLEY/MAGMA which cracked a few quantum encryption candidates recently, enough linear algebra and calculas to author a geophysical processing suite, etc.
> There are boarding schools, schools of the air, etc. Serious parents can move house for catchments, etc.
Those all sound expensive. Not everyone can afford that.
> I enjoyed going to school with hunter gathers in the Kimberley .. I don't feel they held me back, I did get to learn how to fish, to hunt, to swear in several languages.
Is this something you'd expect to experience in the median US public school?
You're being pedantic. Average in common usage means "middle" as much as "arithmetic mean", and it doesn't really matter to the point whether the mean is above or below the median because all that is necessary to the point is for the 50th percentile to be below the 90th.
Ish? Even the common usage of "middle" doesn't necessarily describe where the average student is with regards to any skill they are learning in school. You can argue that we are using a common usage of "average" here, akin to how many fingers does the average human have. But, in a discussion on education, I confess leaning to pedantry seems rather apropos?
My gripe here is the parent post is an appeal to how "average" students are quite bad. But, there is no substantiation to that point. It is, instead, taken as a given in what is essentially a culture war talking point.
It would help if I wasn't exposed to so many parents that are convinced their kids are somehow gifted among gifted kids.
> My gripe here is the parent post is an appeal to how "average" students are quite bad. But, there is no substantiation to that point. It is, instead, taken as a given in what is essentially a culture war talking point.
The point isn't that average is bad, it's that your kid probably isn't exactly average.
You could also want to home school them if they're below average, to keep them from getting left behind. The way a lot of public schools treat kids with developmental disabilities is sadly a lot like the way corporations treat cost centers.
> It would help if I wasn't exposed to so many parents that are convinced their kids are somehow gifted among gifted kids.
Everyone thinks they're above average. Around half of them are right.
I have yet to see this line pushed by anyone that doesn't view dysfunctional classrooms as indicative of what the average student would do. So, fair that I am maybe letting my experience there color my thoughts here.
And I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea of homeschooling not being an automatic terrible thing. Sold a Story went a long way to convincing me that some really bad choices were made in how to teach reading.
My main nitpick is that that wity quip at the end is not even wrong. Not all values are population weighted, such that you can certainly have some skills where over half of the population is over what you would call average ability.
Humility is only considered a virtue because the vast majority of people rank their abilities too high. The GP is coming from an assumption that the person is ranked higher than those around them; humbling such a person makes the rankings even more inaccurate.
This is not why humility is considered a virtue. That's not at all how virtues work. In general, in ethics, there are schools of thought that try to derive ethics from the idea that particular behavior is beneficial to someone / a group in a short term / long term etc. or based on virtues, the transcendental rules that are beyond questioning. These rules don't have to have any tangible benefits, there can be no proof through experimentation that establishes that the rule is right or wrong. Usually, such rules are given through some extra-human authority (a divine revelation, a dream etc.)
People who build their ethics on virtues might believe that, for example, being brave is a virtue. And so, regardless of the consequences, they will aspire to be brave. Similarly, people who believe in virtues will see humility as worth pursuing regardless of whether it makes one better off, long term or short term. It's just good to be humble. End of story.
The reasoning behind non-virtue ethics is usually complicated and subject to debate. It also usually shows that rules derived through such reasoning could contradict the desirable outcomes (that we intuitively find desirable). One of the particularly dangerous and undesirable such outcomes is the belief in moral relativism that opens a door to justifying a lot of actions we'd intuitively find repugnant.
Virtue ethics avoids moral relativism simply by not trying to base ethics in experimentation. Which is why some philosophers find it an appealing approach.
to be axiomatic declarations. My issue with these kind of axioms is they're not really necessary. You can get everything useful by only considering things that are good for somebody. Now, we don't live in a perfectly informed and rational society, so it can be good (for society) to indoctrinate everyone with this axiom. But, as with all axioms, not everyone will believe in them. So, if I'm told,
"You need to be more humble, it's a virtue,"
that's begging the question! I need some external reason to either adopt the axiom or humility. Society as a whole seems to have adopted this axiom, but why is that? There was probably an evolution of axioms, where ones that didn't work got rejected, while ones that mostly worked got inculcated. I think most people overestimate their abilities, which would lead to fighting over positional goods. I think the role of the humility axiom is to prevent such fighting, but it comes with drawbacks.
Since the Enlightenment, most wealth has been created by thinking really hard. This means you really want to rank people near the top accurately, so you can give them resources to go and create their ideas. The axiom of humility regresses everyone toward the mean—which is great when the GDP is measured in bushels, but not so great when it is measured in transistors.
>"Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
Context is /everything/.
Dealing with "average" people as an adult means dealing with them under the boundaries, strictures, customs, and etiquette of adults in your society enforced, in some sense at least, by laws, and with people are are, at least in theory, bound to serve and protect who will come to your aid when those boundaries are broken.
Dealing with "average" people (really just the lowest quintile cause all the problems) for me in school resulted in multiple fractures, trips for stitches, and ultimately /my expulsion/ from one school district because I had the gall to hit back rather than just let some kid beat me to death while a teacher watched and did nothing.
I've been accused of all manner of things in other comment threads for my ardent desire to protect my children from what you think of as "average", and I'll happily take your words and savor them because it means my children will never be beaten, robbed, see a dead body at a bus stop on their way home for school, or any of the other horrible shit that happened to me because I had to be surrounded by the "average".
The entire point of my own economic mobility and gaining wealth was to create a better future for my children, and that /very much/ includes their education. You can take your exposure to the "average" a.k.a. unnecessary torture and shove it.
Exclusion of "average people" is fundamentally required for private property to exist, one of Humanity's best inventions. Few people enjoy private aspects of their life out in public. It is a completely natural and morally good thing to want your own space and to raise your kids your own way.
Your kids don't need to be exposed to the often violent whims of society's bottom quartile for 8 hours a day for more than a decade. It doesn't need to happen. It would be better if it did not. It is a net negative experience, whose main lesson is: avoid these people. That can be taught pretty quickly by a parent.
You missed the point: if you don't like how school work today, you need to improve the schools. If you are saving yourself, especially before helping others (because you have the means that others probably don't), you are the bad person in this situation, and you should reflect on your ethical position some time, preferably soon.
Your suggestion that the educational system, any meaningful part of it, is welcoming of constructive criticism of any kind is not compelling. The US government has put such enterprising parents on terrorist watch lists for speaking up at school board meetings.
If a system is specifically set up against you, runs poorly, and in a real sense hates you, you have the option to let it fail without you. It is the polite, and least conflict path to leave it to its failure, and to forge your own way.
On the other hand, listening to people who tell you that you are unethical, guilty of an *ism of some kind, or bad, does not have a good track record of success. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. What you suggest is specifically not going to happen on my part.
> Your suggestion that the educational system, any meaningful part of it, is welcoming of constructive criticism of any kind is not compelling.
Then you, as a conscientious citizen, need to put pressure back on the US government. Instead, you are trying to save yourself at the expense of others, who cannot save themselves. You are like a grown-up man, who's trying to escape a sinking ship by pushing women and children off the deck to make way to the lifeboat.
I don't think your attitude warrants any kind of niceties. You should be treated like any other narcissistic egotist. It's not important to convince you, it's more important to either isolate you, or to prevent you from acting in the way you want by other means. Same way how it's not important to convince criminals to do good: it would've been nice if it was possible, but humans don't live long enough, and often lack capacity to reform, while the rest of the society usually lacks the resources to reform the offenders.
Don't forget that I am saving my own children at the """expense""" of other, usually very disruptive if not outright violent children. Make sure to add that to the list of grievances.
A nice bit of irony is that the same top down, authoritarian control your comment strives for is the same sort of control that prevents schools from improving themselves. Massive government control enacted to fix some social ill or another hobbles admins and teachers, preventing them from punishing disruptive kids, and thus ruining the teaching environment.
The idea that the government owns or in anyway deserves control over our children must be opposed, with arms if necessary.
"Improving" a system your opponents control by sacrificing your children's safety and education is a bad idea. The United States has several good options for parents to avoid the hell that modern antiracist educational doctrine has created.
So you are saying that people should remain irrevocably loyal to institutions that have lost their trust, do not further their interests, and are not meaningfully accountable to them, out of some notion that the most important thing to them ought to be optimizing aggregate statistical metrics involving large numbers of strangers, at the expense of the actual direct social obligations and communities that are central to their own lives.
It's an interesting perspective, but I'm afraid it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of real-world human societies and how they hold together over time -- advancing that perspective will inevitably result in society fragmenting into factions that are increasingly at odds with each other, and ultimately collapsing.
Societies are not monolithic entities unto themselves that people somehow owe loyalty to. They're emergent patterns of people -- often with disparate interests and values -- cooperating with each other in pursuit of mutual benefit. Forcing people to be locked into monopolistic social relations that no longer offer those benefits to them is a sure-fire way to destroy society.
We'll be much better off when education in our society is offered by a wide range of approaches that adapt in a bottom-up way to the full diversity of that society, an not dominated by a politicized monopoly that tries to shoehorn everyone into a conformist model that is optimal for no one in particular.
The well known adage of “buy the cheapest house you can afford in the most expensive neighborhood” is a sign that is what many think. The rat race to make sure your kids are in league with other parents of similar or higher stature is a huge contributor to home price dynamics.
Lol what? I've never heard that adage and it seems like really bad advice. Your neighbors aren't going to cut you a check at any point so what even is this.
It's about exposure to the way richer people think and access to the same community resources. Property taxes pay for schools. The best schools are in the richest communities.
I know this is true for the US. The vast majority of public school budgets are paid from local property taxes. This gives wealthy communities a significant advantage. Princeton, New Jersey is famous for its high property taxes and excellent public schools.
Are there any other countries that use a local-tax funding model for public schools? Most other nations that I know use a national funding model.
This is not true. Only half of public school spending comes from local taxes. The other half comes from state funds and offsets the local property tax differences.
Here is the breakdown for Maryland: https://dls.maryland.gov/pubs/prod/NoPblTabPDF/2024PubSchool.... My county, Anne Arundel, received half the state funding of poorer counties. In terms of total funding, it’s below the median, but has above average schools for the state because school quality is more a function of the types of kids in the school moreso than funding.
My country uses a national funding model but most people would still strongly prefer to go to a public school in an affluent neighborhood. Even if the funding is exactly the same, you are still much more likely to get more "desirable" classmates (fewer chance of migrants, drug use, etc. as well higher overall academic motivation, more involved parents who contribute to the school community, etc.).
I went to public schools near the city center and/or with a good reputation and I got a retrospectively insane proportion of wealthy schoolmates mixed with a few lower class ones. And an even more insane number of serious crimes: bribery (multiples), manslaughter, contraband, murder.
Note in some European contexts (like UK) "public school" means something more along the lines of "private school" in the US. They have selective admissions, there's usually tuition, etc.
> The schools are "public" from a historical schooling context in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession or family affiliation with governing or military service, and also not being run for the profit of a private owner.
Exactly. Most private schools were meant for weak students, wealthy but pathetically snob families, or often both; a specific high school, run by nuns and now disbanded, distinguished itself with even greater occurrences of newsworthy criminals and psychopaths.
Baltimore is famous for its high per student funding of public schools ($21,000 per student in 2023). It's also famous for the terrible outcomes of its public school students.
This is a common misconception. The high per capita funding is partially due to required emergency funding of repairs resulting from deferred maintenance - both in the literal sense, and in reference to the hollowing out of the city's industry and, therefore, capacity for stable community and family life. Baltimore is a Rust Belt city smack dab in the middle of a region that happily moved on to the service economy; poorer Baltimore residents are surrounded by people who can bid up the rates of goods in the area (and they do).
Other jurisdictions don't have to put so much into student funding directly.
This doesn’t pass a smell test. You are saying that maintenance spend is significant fraction of school fundings. Let’s say that that fraction is 20% of funding (if it was much lower, your argument doesn’t make sense, because it would make the maintenance spend irrelevant). That’s over $2M/school/year. This is enough to entirely rebuild a school from the ground up every 10 years.
A few Baltimore schools had to close down a few years ago because they had no working heat/AC. Asbestos is an issue. As are pests. It's not that it was uncomfortable to be in some of these buildings, it was literally unsafe. When things get this dire, they cost a lot more to fix. Anything you move in to do uncovers other issues, and contractors can bend you over on change orders because it simply has to get done. I wouldn't be surprised to find some amount of graft involved, either.
So, yes, maintenance is a significant portion of spend. The schools were allowed to get into really bad shape, physically, in a way that doesn't at all reflect on the enthusiasm or capability of students or teachers.
If schools get $20k+ per student, but somehow fails to keep AC working, then it is a clear case of extreme incompetence at best, likely pointing to criminal levels of mismanagement. You don’t solve that problem with shoveling even more money into the fire, you fire everyone involved and start over.
You could throw an extreme amount of money at schools but require it be spent on specific initiatives. Things like resource officers, hiring someone with specific qualifications, and boatloads of staff training.
You can average that out to a per student basis and say "look we're spending so much on education" but if the money is going to train teachers how to deal with crisis situations like school shooters, it's not really being spent on educating the student.
How that money actually gets allocated matters.
> Are there any other countries that use a local-tax funding model for public schools?
Doubt it. In my province of Canada (Alberta), school is paid for by provincial taxes and money is distributed based on the amount of students.
That being said, since kids are assigned to schools based on proximity, it's still worthwhile being in a nicer neighbourhood since the kids will come from more affluent families...
Your local private school also isn't going to cut you a check, and I've yet to meet anyone with money that had a hard time sniffing out aspirational neighbors. Not buying it.
The assumption is that upper class kids are more likely to have the types of behaviors and attitudes that you'd like your kids to adopt (e.g. getting a C or even a B is embarrassing/shameful, AP classes are table stakes, drug use bad, video games/tv limited, more likely to have intact households, expected to be polite/treat others respectfully) while lower class kids are more likely to have the types of behaviors and attitudes you'd like your kids to avoid (e.g. no point in applying yourself, parents have no idea what you're up to or how you're doing in school anyway, drug use normal or cool, kids raised by tv/computer/phone, family tree is more of a chain with random links sticking out, family yells at each other so loud the neighbors hear it). It's an attempt to manipulate the Overton window that your kid will encounter interacting with peers.
100% of the individuals that I've known who ended up either shot dead in the street or caught serious charges were from upper middle class, outright wealthy neighborhoods, or were keeping company with rich kids. Maybe my sample is badly skewed but around these parts all the wealthy are known for is buying their lunatic children out of trouble.
In my experience, the positive attributes you list tend to be more associated with middle class than upper classes. At a certain amount of wealth, you can see very problematic behaviour.
This is the kind of contemptuous skepticism of facts from, and lack of trust for, folks trying to help you understand something that permeates neglected communities and interferes with the educational process.
That attitude is prevalent in poor schools, but rare in rich schools and is properly dealt with by better educators that prefer wealthy schools with good salaries.
That sort of antagonism toward authority is incredibly disruptive in a community of People who want to achieve something.
Parents want to get their kids away from it for a reason. It's unhealthy. You're an example of the point. I don't mean any offense by it, just that it's easy to sniff out that you haven't experienced both sides of the coin so you reveal stubborn ignorance.
It inhibits learning and communicating. It's repulsive.
If you buy a cheap house in a good neighbourhood, you spend as little as possible on the building, and are mostly buying land. You are presumably buying a house because you think the land will increase in value.
it’s to make sure your kids go to the best school possible, and are surrounded by as many future successful people as possible. considering schools are funded based on tax revenue, it’s not the worst idea
Tax revenue is spread across all schools, at least in California.
Poor schools actually get more government funding per student.
This is why good school districts California usually have ties to non-governmental chairty parents associations that parents contribute directly.
It is also a huge part of why California passed prop 13. After property taxes we're separated from funding local schools, homeowners were simply much less willing to pay for taxes that won't go to their kid or community.
i doubt the adage is california specific, and likely came about before prop 13.
as an outsider, i think cali’s schooling system is beyond fucked, mostly due to the focus on the bottom 25% of students. the middle and high achieving students are being neglected and leaving. positive feedback loop.
"Average" does a lot of heavy lifiting here. People who affluent try to avoid are dangerous, mentally scarred and physically sick people. And if that's who you call average then it's a testament to failure of society and our systems. That's what the affluent are trying to check out of. They are the only ones who can try.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
Yet it's not worth the cost of a slowed curriculum.
I'd argue social skills are more valuable than improved curriculum. Not saying you couldn't learn social skills outside of the school system too, but seems to me that curriculum is easier to learn outside of the system than social skills.
Exposure to Diverse Perspectives: Diverse classrooms can expose students to different viewpoints, problem-solving approaches, and ways of thinking. 1 This can broaden their understanding and enhance their critical thinking skills. 2 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262420245_Effects_o... Gurin (1999,college is significantly linked to
Thoroughly disagree, and I can draw on my experience of meeting average people to know that it wasn’t a universally valuable experience and I much prefer spending time around people that are more like myself. Perhaps that is what you meant by the valuable experience, to be disabused of my illusion that meeting average people was a good idea. Having learned that lesson I shouldn’t have to repeat it.
Also, I don’t have to deal with average people, I have apps that do that for me.
Having said that, two things can be true, I can prefer not to be around average people and I can be concerned for their lack of flourishing as I do prefer to live in more egalitarian society, especially one that can have better averages.
people pretend to be this welcoming learned creatures but in reality it's still referral by people, who you know, like working with people that look like us etc
I like to think you mean that the so-called “elites” end up studying some useless degree and only can get jobs as trust-fund burger stand employees, serving fries to the “dummies” who chose to work hard and become wealthy the old-fashioned way
> who chose to work hard and become wealthy the old-fashioned way
That's so last century. Now about as real as Santa. Now you can only get wealthy by inheritance or gambling. Even if it means gambling with you health you still need to win for it to amount to anything. There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now. I'm not sure if there ever was.
At some point in your life you'll look back at your past and notice how much of the hard work you did amounted to very little of your wealth and how most of your wealth can actually be attributed to gambles you took and won, even though similar people took similar gambles and lost. How the most work that contributed to your wealth wasn't particularly hard and some hard work you did actually delayed or diminished your success. At least you'll see it if you are going to be an honest person not one of those "I did it all by myself!" self-deluders.
At some point in your life you'll realise that not everyone thinks the same way as you do. Hopefully it happens for you before your mindset seriously dents your future prospects.
Your original assertion "There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now" is ludicrous: was it possible a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago? Did anyone become wealthy through methods other than gambling or inheritance a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago? If even one person did, this disproves your assertion, unless you want to claim some as-yet-unmentioned recent change that made it possible then and impossible now.
Your supporting theory about gambling is only true if you define every single choice you make in life as a gamble to some extent, which is a weird way of thinking about the world.
As for the "you didn't build that" stuff & snark, I don't recall claiming I did anything all by myself, nor did I see anyone claim you have to do everything all by yourself to "earn wealth". Nice strawman.
> At some point in your life you'll realise that not everyone thinks the same way as you do.
Of course. There are many people who are wrong.
> Hopefully it happens for you before your mindset seriously dents your future prospects.
My future is already secured.
> "There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now" is ludicrous: was it possible a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago? Did anyone become wealthy through methods other than gambling or inheritance a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago?
No.
> If even one person did, this disproves your assertion, unless you want to claim some as-yet-unmentioned recent change that made it possible then and impossible now.
Only if you insist on treating the assertion rigidly which is unwise for all assertions pertaining to any other realm than math.
> I don't recall claiming I did anything all by myself
Ah, so you are a person who thinks whatever is said is about them specifically.
> nor did I see anyone claim you have to do everything all by yourself to "earn wealth". Nice strawman.
It's a well known psychological observation that people who achieved success typically misattribute it disproportionately to themselves even if they know it was pure chance.
"> "There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now" is ludicrous: was it possible a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago? Did anyone become wealthy through methods other than gambling or inheritance a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago?
> It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way
Optimism is the default state of non-broken children.
Sober realism is what's needed and required from adults.
Time to graduate - we have enough optimistic children running around with scissors already :)
> "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
What are you talking about?!
I'm a highly educated, "high class" (professional career) person, and I've been socially segregated from "average" people since high school (so, since I was 15). Literally primary school was the last time I ever interacted with "average" people in a meaningful way (beyond "hi, thanks" to the supermarket cashier/bank teller).
Society truly does segregate you by social class, and unless you truly seek different classes (which I don't really, I'm a geek so my interests are quite niche) you don't "normally" interact.
No wonder that "elitist" politicians are so removed from the "average" people (hint: Brexit, Trunmp). Thank god for Twitter, allowing to break social bubbles at least a little bit!
The fact that you don't personally meet with "average" people isn't the point. The point is that they exist, and they affect your existence, and they will not and cannot be made to disappear. The "average" people have to share resources with you, and in a way the resources cannot be segregated... unless we start building colonies in space, and send "non-average" people there or some similar dystopian project.
Someone comes in with a gripe that the bottom quintile imposes negative externalities on their education system. Your response is that the same people impose positive externalities when they grow up. These are not the same. If they were still imposing negative externalities when they grow up, I wouldn't want them to exist around me, and sending "non-average" people to space or some similar dystopian project [or jail] would be the correct game-theoretical response.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
Nope. For some people it may be valuable. For me it was miserable, almost to the point of being deadly. It does not prepare you for adulthood or life or what have you in any meaningful sense (think about what would happen in your everyday life if someone e.g. decided you had insulted them somehow, and punched you. Think about how different your experience of that probably is to the average person. And then think about what that experience is like for a schoolkid). It's just a whole load of unnecessary suffering.
Your argument is similar to burning the house down, once you discover that you don't like the couch in the living room. Or, more realistically, arguing against taxation based on the idea that rich people avoid being taxed anyways, and it's only poor people who will get the short end of the stick. The school system isn't perfect, and is hard to improve due to many reasons, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't try. It has a purpose which is much more important than the suffering of any individual who goes through it. It's a shared good that can only be made better if everyone participates. When people who can contribute the most are allowed to be excluded, the whole thing becomes worthless. But, guess what, those who thought that they may be exempt from contributing to the public pool will inevitably find out that the public who was in this way deprived of a public good hates them, and will eventually come after them with pitchforks and torches.
> The school system isn't perfect, and is hard to improve due to many reasons, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
The people you hear giving up today have tried to fix the system. It's a little insulting to insinuate otherwise. When I was in high school, I tried to start a CS club, but no one was interested. I helped run MATHCOUNTS at the local middle school, and we had five people show up on a good day (<1% of the student body). Most students don't care anymore, and why should they when you have to fight the school to take AP Biology as a freshman? Gifted programs are being eliminated in the name of equity, and common core standards are lower than they ever have been. A friend who immigrated in seventh grade said America's seventh grade math classes are years behind China's (and she went to a better school than me). How do you get years behind in seven years?!
I don't think it is possible to fix the education system. The student body has adopted an anti-learning culture, administrators are lowering standards to raise their metrics, and most teachers would be wholly unfit for an ideal classroom, let alone the ones they're supposed to oversee nowadays. I am all for "burning the house down". I think the best solution would be to fire everyone, raise salaries by 10x, and then hire back 10% as many people. After all, the professorship pyramid scheme has lots of PhDs who might be interested in teaching for $300K/year.
> It has a purpose which is much more important than the suffering of any individual who goes through it.
How bad would it have to get to change your mind about this? Suicide is already one of the biggest causes of death in young people, and the biggest known contributing factors are things that are determined by the school environment.
I'm all for paying taxes for the greater good. But I don't want anyone I care about to go through what I went through.
Learning how to co-exist with different sorts of people is definitely a valuable experience.
Trying to do that in an completely artificial institution that arbitrarily divides people into age cohorts in a way that resembles no organic social pattern and forces all social interaction to conform to bureaucratic rules is not just not a value experience, but in fact actively inhibits the above goal.
The kinds of social skills and expectations kids develop in a school environment often need to be unlearned entirely in order to function effectively in a complex and dynamic society.
For me, it wasn't the "stay away from average people" but "remove the bottom percenters", and that made schooling much better.
Out here, in my schooling, the first stage of schooling was an elementary school, from ~7-15yo (8 years), and by default, you're enrolled into the nearest school to your home. Sometimes there are ways to choose other schools, but all the other pupils there, are there, because it's their nearest school.
What that means is, that you have, in a same class group (~25 people) a wide distribution of capabilities but also mental states, behaviours, etc. From geniuses that contribute to the whole schooling experience, to kids who somehow manage to stay basically illiterate even after 8 years of schooling, and just cause problems for everyone else. What that means is, that many of the lectures are based around trying to get the lower percentiles to learn at least enough for a minimum passing grade, and the top percentiles are either bored or lose interest. + all the behavioural issues.
After you finished elementary school, your grades of the last few years (2? i forgot) are calculated, you do some standardized testing, the numbers are calculated by some formula, and you get a numeric score, that is then used to enroll into high schools (and in most cases, the top X candidates by that score get accepted to a school, depending on how many apply, and how many open spots (X) there are.
There are many high school options, but most of the smarter kids enroll to 'general' high schools (gymansiums) for the next 4 years (and then college), and even those have reputations for some being better, and others worse, even though they technically teach by the same teaching programme (same courses, same subjects,...). Why are some better? Because smarter kids apply, and you get a high school where ALL of the students are from the "top 20%" of elementary schoolers. That means that teachers don't have to waste their time on "illiterate" kids, there are less behaviour problems, if everyone in class understands the lecture relatively quickly, the teacher can add some extra "college level" lectures, etc. This, for better students, is a much better learning experience, both from school lecture experience, to general interactions with classmates (where you're not the only smart one in the class and have noone to help).
Add to this that smarter kids usually have smarter, more involved parents, and that means that also the teachers have to bring out their A-game, and not just bare minimum to get the kids a passing grade, because the grades and (another) standardized testing is then used to apply to colleges.
So yeah... some separation is not a bad thing.
TLDR: "staying away from averages" might sound stupid, but "removing the 'worst' students lets others perform better" is IMHO true.
society has always been this way, from the hunter gatherer days, to middle ages - that's why people want to become part of the elite.
It's only recently that the average people have had the chance to become elites, rather than be born into it. But the desire to be elites, molded by evolutionary/darwinian pressure, is not gone, nor different, than in the past. Another word for it is "the human condition".
> It's only recently that the average people have had the chance to become elites, rather than be born into it.
It still mostly depends on being born into it. In the US your odds of going from impoverished to wealthy are extremely slim and socioeconomic mobility is among the worst compared to other developed countries. The US falls behind South Korea, Lithuania, Estonia, Singapore, Malta, and Slovenia, while the Nordic countries top the list.
Depending on the study, socioeconomic mobility in the US has either stagnated since the 1970s or actually declined. Average people have little hope of substantially improving the situation they were born into while the percentage of people born into wealth (but not the 1%) who slide downward in socioeconomic status grows. Wealth inequality continues to accelerate at an insane pace. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1962-_Net_personal_wealth...)
Just about everyone would like to be one of the "elites" but most people would be happy with a fair chance to meaningfully improve their lifestyle.
I know an extended family of third world impoverished immigrants who became middle class by basically all going to nursing school. It is almost a joke that all Filipinos become nurses, it's almost fool proof way to have at least a car, shitty apartment and decent food to eat. It's worth looking into for anyone who is stuck, none of it is particularly difficult to learn although it is hard work.
I'm going to guess that only a small number of impoverished immigrants manage to legally move to a developed country at all, but I wouldn't doubt that those who do could see their situation improve.
There's a lot of need for nurses which has made the job attractive, but it's worth noting that wages have been going down (https://www.incrediblehealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/...), they aren't especially higher than the money other workers make, and the actual working conditions for nurses have gotten worse. Telehealth also threatens to reduce both their wages and the number of (US) nurses we'll need in the future.
If people just want work, elder care seems like it'd be a safe bet for a while, but those wages and working conditions can be even worse.
In the US your odds of going from impoverished to wealthy are extraordinarily good. I personally know dozens of examples, even excluding tech entirely. Social mobility is a term of art in economics and only weakly correlated with the ease of becoming wealthy. It doesn’t mean economic mobility.
Social mobility is a measure of relative rank change. In countries with compressed wage ranges, such as those you mention, “social mobility” is an artifact of the mathematics, it doesn’t mean you are meaningfully wealthier than the average person. You can double your household income in the US to above average and still not be “socially mobile”. Social mobility is not a meaningful measure for continent-sized economically diverse countries.
A person can go from the trailer park to being upper middle class in a place like Mississippi and it doesn’t count as socially mobile because you are being ranked against the household income of someone in Seattle, 3,000 km away. As far as the person in Mississippi is concerned, they are living the dream.
The opportunity to improve your standard of living in e.g. Europe pales in comparison to the opportunity to do so in the US. It won’t be classified as “socially mobile” in the US as an artifact of how the math works, but no one in the US cares.
You are demonstrating that you have no idea what “social mobility” means. It is a term of art in economics, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. Being “socially mobile” has nothing to do with your ability to change your standard of living.
In countries like the US, you can achieve enormous gains in income and still not be socially mobile by definition. Specifically, it has nothing to do with how easy it is to become wealthy, which is what most people incorrectly intuit it means.
High “social mobility” is worthless if it doesn’t come with a high standard of living.
> In countries like the US, you can achieve enormous gains in income and still not be socially mobile by definition.
No, mass of people cant. The thing you describe can happen and not affect the global stats only because it happens to few people in one relatively small location.
I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. The reading/math skills are so dismal, any student who learns at home is bored as hell.
I'm curious where you live. My spouse and I selected the area we live in based on the school district when our kids were around pre-K age. We live in a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation.
Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works. I've never heard a story like this and we've been in the district for 8+ years.
As for skills, my kids are probably 3 years ahead of where I was at the same age. Devices are not a huge component of their schooling, although I am on a parent board that's pushing back on SaaS creep. They're forced to have Google accounts which I'm proposing to remove and/or minimize. Math and reading programs are fantastic. Teachers are great. There have been one or two mediocre teachers but nothing to really complain about.
We also have great private options, but again, we moved to this district to take advantage of the public schools.
As an observation the homeschooled kids that participate in extracurricular activities along with the public school kids are definitely behind. Not only from a traditional education standpoint, but also social skills. It's always an awkward conversation when those parents engage in a conversation asking where our kids are at with respect to reading, math or science.
Our goal is to have our kids be the best version of them that they can be. If they're happier, healthier and better equipped than we were then I'll be happy. I look at a lot of parents who want their kids to be stars and it's painful. Modern day parenting has lost its way in US society on so many levels.
There really seems to be two kinds of public schools. One is willing to expel students who are violent and disruptive and this allows the students who are willing and able to learn to do so. The other refuses to expel violent and disruptive students and they make it nearly impossible for the willing and motivated students to actually learn.
There are some rotten incentives at work here, as well as constraints that aren’t obvious from a parent or student’s point of view.
For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them. In practice, this means that expelling a student (short of some extreme situations) is a lengthy process of ass-covering. Even when administrators are doing the right thing, from the outside it can look like nothing is being done. Think HR putting you on a PIP.
Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to.
And then, what does “violent and disruptive” actually mean? How much violence? No tolerance? What about a bullying victim who sticks up for themselves? Playground scuffle? At what point does the dial turn from teaching a child not to hit, to teaching a child that they are bad and do not belong? What about non (physically) violent bullying? What about children who are disruptive, but not violent (surely including a lot of those posting here about how their ADHD was misunderstood)?
Sometimes expulsion is the answer, even keeping in mind that every student expelled before 16 is just going to school someplace else. But the problems are more complex than people often realize.
> The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to.
This is where I wholeheartedly disagree with you. Education is not a right if you can't comply with simple rules. I'd also like to see where you're correlating "violent and disruptive" with a "child in crisis". I'm not saying it's not there, but I am saying I don't believe those two components are exclusive.
These games of "what if" and "what is" must be fun for some people - because they seem to be played quite often. Rules are rules, they can be cut and dry - even in this case. The excuses are played out, the fallback on so many "disorders" is rampant. Either society is essentially fucked, or people are abusing the exceptions. I do agree, there should be some exceptions, but those should be few and far between to avoid slipping through the cracks.
Finally, the implication that a teacher "has to" give a shit has got to be the worst idea Americans have embraced. No, they don't. If my kid was asshole in school - I would handle the situation and apologize. Parents who go at districts for not "giving a shit" about their kid when their kid has been taught there are no repercussions by their parents don't have a right to anything in my opinion.
The purpose for "blame" or "fault" is to know who to punish to best improve society. The "what if" and "what is" scenarios stem from treating "blame" as a mysterious entity that leads to punishment, and then pathological (pathos) appeals that no one is really to blame. It seems rather tautological that society should adopt rules for blame that improves society, not rules that make people feel good inside.
- The kid's behavior isn't their fault. They might have a medical condition or a home situation causing them to act this way. It's tempting to write kids like this off, but we shouldn't punish kids for their parents' failings.
- No matter what, this represents a problem we have to solve. Either family can solve it at home, educators can solve it at school, or some LEO can solve it in the carceral system, but you burn more money and suffer worse outcomes the further down the pipeline you solve it (not unlike bugs in software engineering).
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I have a hot take that school is so frustrating because it's one of the very few things in the US money and status don't readily fix. Your household income might be $250k a year, but your kid's playing kickball with... people who make less, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. The US isn't good at these kinds of "let's make society as a whole healthier so we avoid the worst outcomes" type problems, preferring to use those bad outcomes to motivate people to not be poor/lazy/unlucky.
Unfortunately the resources required to create some kind of middle tier education are truly bonkers (it's also de facto racist: 30% of Black kids and 20% of Hispanic kids are impoverished, so if you're saying "poor kids with all their problems not welcome here" you're kind of also saying Black/Hispanic kids with all their problems not welcome here--which also doesn't super work because of de facto segregation, so you're also saying "no middle tier schools here"). There are around 70m kids in the US. Let's take the top 2/3 (they're in households making > 199% of the poverty line) and assume ideal class size of 12. That's $229,000,000,000 a year just in salary (current median teacher salary is $58,950), which is more than 2/3 the current DoE budget, plus you'd have to dramatically increase salary and benefits if you wanted to hire that many new teachers anyway.
But, yeah overall my point is it's really hard to appreciate the scale of the problem both like, logically (can it really cost this much money?), emotionally (my kid got hit with a chair today), and culturally (I honestly thought making a quarter of a million dollars a year ensured my kid would never be hit by a chair in school; who do I see about this). But, it really is just the case we are going have to spend money like crazy and hire a shitload of professional educators. It might seem expensive, but you'll pay 10x if kids slide to the end of the pipeline--to say nothing of the moral cost.
In neighborhoods with better school districts, home prices and rents are higher in proportion to the demand people have for better schools, creating de facto segregation based on income, and by your logic, by race too.
What do you mean by "fault"? My concept of "fault" is whoever I'm going to punish to make society better. (More precisely, assume everyone has some policy `p_i` for actions they take. If a certain action `a` is bad for society, they get punished proportionally according to `KL(a, p_i)`, i.e. they are that much at fault.)
If their home circumstances are forcing them to act this way, then too bad for them! That is part of them and they should be blamed until you can fix the root cause.
Expecting children to be responsible for their own actions to this degree is unrealistic, any policy built on that expectation will be ineffective at best and likely harmful, and thus anyone advocating for it is at best asking us to waste resources and at worst asking us to harm kids.
You've got over 20 posts in this thread, many of them putting the blame on children with no evidence that this would be helpful (probably because it wouldn't be). You've yet to contribute good ideas or substantial new information to our discussion. Your behavior is making our group worse, and ironically if we were to follow your advice here we'd have to throw you out.
I can tell you're passionate about, but frustrated by this issue. My advice is to take a breath and if you're really interested, do some reading and get involved. There are successful education systems out there (everyone references Finland); things aren't hopeless.
> You've yet to contribute good ideas or substantial new information to our discussion. Your behavior is making our group worse, and ironically if we were to follow your advice here we'd have to throw you out.
Do you really believe this? I flagged your comment, because I'm worried that you are trying to convince people by building an ethos (and tearing down others' ethos) instead of appealing to logic. Your writing is very good, but there isn't much substance to it. For example, you say
> Expecting children to be responsible for their own actions to this degree is unrealistic
but don't substantiate why it is unrealistic. I've found that when people disagree (in America) there are usually layers of rhetoric that have been built around the issue, so much so that it can be hard to dig down to the crux of the issue and actually resolve the disagreement. This is why I'm worried about how you're writing: it seems to be adding layers instead of removing them. (EDIT: Note, I don't think you are doing this intentionally.)
Now, I do think I have been adding to the discussion. For example:
- I proposed we raise salaries by 10x and fire everyone to balance the budget.
- I gave an anecdote showing that even top-tier public schools have anti-learning cultures.
- I've pointed out that the "for whom" is important when discussing what is good or bad.
I wanna start off by saying you're clearly a smart person and I'm not trying to run you out or anything. I'm--both deliberately and subconsciously--saltier post Trump v2 and I'm trying to work through it. A big part of me wants to litigate everything all the time, but I'm gonna avoid that here because I believe in the HN community and that wouldn't build and strengthen that community (imagine the breathing exercises it took to attain this level of clarity haha).
Instead I want to discuss your basic point: we should expel problem kids because it improves outcomes for non-problem kids. I don't want to come off as condescending but I DDG'd for "does expelling students improve outcomes" and literally nobody thinks that. Here's some stuff to read:
"evidence shows these tactics aren’t effective in changing a student’s conduct, and carry major long-term risks for their welfare. Students most affected tend to be those with higher and more complex needs, such as those with disabilities and mental health issues."
"The findings underscore that suspending students does little to reduce future misbehavior for the disciplined students or their peers, nor did it result in improved academic achievement for peers or perceptions of positive school climate." (emphasis mine)
"Suspensions do not reduce classroom disruptions, and often encourage them."
"Suspensions do not improve outcomes for students, whether suspended or not."
"Suspensions do not prevent, and may increase, the risk of school violence."
"Restorative justice focuses on reconciliation with victims, learning from misconduct, and repairing harm caused by student misconduct. Victim-offender mediation is a common restorative justice program. For one example, in Denver Public Schools, a successful school-based restorative justice program decreased expulsions by 82%, suspensions by 39%, and referrals to law enforcement by 15%."
"Black students in North Carolina are more than four times as likely to be suspended or expelled as white students. Research has found no evidence that the over-representation of Black students in school suspension rates is due to higher rates of misbehavior."
"In total, Washington students lost over 169,689 days of class time during 2015. When students are suspended or expelled, they cannot participate in class, are less likely to complete schoolwork, and are more likely to skip school."
TL;DR: suspending and expelling doesn't do what you think it does; instead it causes a lot of harm; other approaches are better.
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Alright, now for some soapboxing. Again, you're a smart person, so I earnestly want to know did you jump in this thread to push your wildly incorrect take before Googling, or have you drank some kind of anti-DoE anti-public-education anti-teacher kool-aid? I'm so deeply weary of arrogant STEM people assuming there are no smart people anywhere else--I just wrote a whole screed in that Paul Graham wokeness thread about this exact thing. Educators are smart! They run studies on how best to educate! They're so easy to find and read!
This is the kind of thing I'm thinking about when it comes to what improves and enriches a discussion. Giving people information they may not have, getting new information and making connections that aren't yet there, giving people grace. The moment we give in and just start trying to win the argument we've lost the whole thing--we have to enrich our mental model of the world together. Or more pointedly, I'm relying on you to help me enrich my mental model of the world, so I need you to call me out when I'm blathering on tilt (could maybe be doing that here) or I've got it wrong, or you know something I don't. If you're gonna be effective at that, you have to do the reading, you have to be self aware, and you have to have compassion. It is work, but people doing that work is how HN stays valuable.
Thanks for the very thoughtful response! I admit I also get salty, particularly when it comes to education. It feels so obvious things should be a specific way, but of course that may just be my STEM person arrogance :P.
So, what I'm mostly confused about is why expulsion wouldn't work. We know some schools are better than others. We know students in "gifted" classes do better than others, and if your references are correct even a regular student in a "gifted" class would soak up the positive climate and turn out better than in a regular class. This seems to imply that expelling enough students should make the school better. For an extreme example, you could have everyone take a test, expel the lowest 50% of marks to a lower-tier school, and the remaining students would have better marks. This comparison is a little unfair, because expulsion is usually reserved for disruptive behaviour, not poor marks, but you could similarly have every teacher compile a list of misbehaving students. When I hear that expulsion wouldn't fix the problem, it must be because they are not expelling enough people!
I'm also a little leery of drawing the same conclusions as the news articles you linked. It seems likely that suspension/expulsion does always work, there's just a causation between lots of students misbehaving in a school and more students being expelled in the school. For example, the second news article says
> The findings underscore that suspending students does little to reduce future misbehavior for the disciplined students or their peers, nor did it result in improved academic achievement for peers or perceptions of positive school climate.
which has a few paragraphs on peer spillover effects from out-of-school suspension vs. in-school suspension. They do find a 1-2% decrease in the peers achieving ELA/math credit with out-of-school suspension (20-30% for the suspended), but there are also 20,000 incidents of out-of-school suspension with a median length ~two weeks [Table A.4]. Their data comes from the NYCDOE which has just under a million students, which means their peers also being suspended could account for half of the decrease! Then there's the correlation between negative school climate, more grievous offences, and out-of-school suspension (re: Table A.4), and it seems to be a clear-cut case of Simpson's paradox.
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Alright, time for the spicier part of this comment.
> I just wrote a whole screed in that Paul Graham wokeness thread about this exact thing. Educators are smart! They run studies on how best to educate! They're so easy to find and read!
I don't think the so-called educators are being smart. I think the average wokist is smarter than the average MAGAt (by a lot), but most systems fall into the Goodhart trap. People who optimise for looking good rather than being good often bubble to the top. This is why I think many woke arguments lean heavily on emotional appeals. The callous or ignorant MAGAts that only care about the gas price ironically end up with a more meritocratic system, because results matter.
I didn't partcularly like Graham's essay either, but I do sympathise with the anti-woke sentiment almost entirely because I believe this Goodharting has devastated the education system. For example, a common refrain I found in the comment section and your linked articles was,
> Expelling the student is not a good solution. Think about how this will effect his life! And what if he's going through abuse? Is it even his fault?
The MAGAt mentality is "I don't care, show me the results". They find current schools lacking, but don't particularly care about why they're lacking which is where school choice/vouchers come in. You don't need to fix things if you can just let the market find something better. This is a rather callous/ignorant take, and you can do much better by caring to find where the current system went wrong. I suspect it's because wokists forgot why we assign moral blame.
I think the purpose of "blame" in society is to figure out who to punish/rehabilitate to make society better. Note that even if there is a confounding factor it does not excuse the blame. I believe I've already mentioned this to you: you assign moral blame based on KL(bad action, person's policy). Why? If someone puts a gun to your head, and tells you to rob a store, you are unlikely to repeat the action. Your policy is really only, "rob stores when I have a gun to my head". On the other hand, if you were abused as a child and turned out a kleptomaniac, you are extremely likely to repeat the offence.
Now, rehabilitation has to actually work. If someone is starving, it doesn't matter how many beatings you give them, they will still steal food. Positive rehabilitation is often better for society, because you don't need to spend a bunch of money on the justice system, and the rehabilitated criminal can hold a job and pay taxes. Punitive rehabilitation works by decreasing the cost of future crimes from similarly-minded people. Note that I'm being really careful to talk about what is good for society, not the criminal. After all, every individual except the criminal (and friends/family) gains more by asking for the good of society, not the individual.
This ties into wokism and education as so: the wokist gives the emotional appeal,
> Expelling the student is not a good solution. Think about how this will effect his life! And what if he's going through abuse? Is it even his fault?
and the proper response is,
> good for whom?
As I mentioned at the start of this comment, it is good for the top 50% of students to expel the bottom 50% to an alternative school. Should we? In reality, we have to work under money and (as you pointed out) pitchfork & torch constraints. My issue with emotional appeals is they bring out the pitchforks, for potentially no good reason.
For example, I went to middle school in a rather conservative city, but even there the gifted program was eliminated in the name of equity. High school graduation standards have dropped, again in the name of equity. And California briefly proposed not allowing 8th graders to take algebra (for equity's sake) until they received massive backlash.
I care much more about what is actually good for society than what looks good. I really don't see how it's good to be holding back our brightest students to the bottom quintile's pace, or allow disruptions from known troublemakers.
At this point I'm rather tired; I might continue writing this tomorrow, but I probably won't. I'll just end with what I wish the school system looked like:
1. A national placement exam for each grade (including Kindergarteners). Students get placed into schools and classrooms entirely from their rankings (within the local system). The top scorers are offered room and board at nationally-run schools.
2. Disruptive students get kicked to penitentiaries. I read elsewhere in this thread of a city with three tiers of schools: one for regular students, one for first-time expulsions, and a last for the chronically expelled. This is what I'm imagining.
3. The same people that write olympiad problems and run the summer camps are hired to create a new curriculum. Quite frankly, Common Core is a failure; you see a decline in AMC 10/12 scores and participants about eight years after it was introduced, i.e. just enough time for the students who learned from Common Core to be taking the exams.
4. Everyone is fired, and as many people as money there is are hired at $300–500k/yr (in total compensation) to teach. At $15k/yr per student (what the US currently spends), and 30 students to a class, this should be just doable.
> Thanks for the very thoughtful response! I admit I also get salty, particularly when it comes to education. It feels so obvious things should be a specific way, but of course that may just be my STEM person arrogance :P.
Thank you (also for indulging)! As an also-arrogant STEM person myself we can muddle through together haha.
> So, what I'm mostly confused about is why expulsion wouldn't work.
I think a number of dynamics are at play here:
- Schools don't usually reach for suspension/expulsion that quickly because they're weighing the impact of the problem kid's behavior on others vs. the impact of a suspension/expulsion on the kid, so their disruptive lingers.
- Some schools have zero tolerance policies that suspend/expel very quickly, but it turns out that creates a super weird climate (students defending themselves are also suspended/expelled, school staff feel pretty bad suspending/expelling all the time, you can't build relationships with problem kids which is deeply dehumanizing on both sides, etc.)
- Problem kids have a weird habit of just coming right back. A lot of us are envisioning a relatively rich school district with multiple nets to cordon off problem kids, bost districts have the one school, maybe if they're lucky there's an "alternative school" in the parking lot, which is a trailer that should only ever have 5 people in it, but it has 15. Maybe some people are advocating for some kind of super harsh zero-tolerance-expelled-forever pipeline, but let me introduce those advocates to the School-to-Prison Pipeline [0].
- Problem kids are still in your neighborhood, your kid is pretty likely to still see them outside of school, and that leads to more weird social dynamics.
But moreover, let's say that zero-tolerance-expel-immediately leads to better outcomes for kids and we have some way of totally segregating problem kids both in school and broader society. Those kids are still a problem for society that we'll have to deal with at some point. Today they're throwing stuff in class, tomorrow they're breaking the windows of your car or running drugs in your neighborhood. At that point in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, rehabilitating the person is extremely expensive.
> seems to be a clear-cut case of Simpson's paradox
Nah, definitely not. A commonly cited paper [1] has a pretty good table breaking down the effects of various classroom properties on outcomes. Reading it, you'll immediately get a great look at why private/charter school outcomes are so much better: they work pretty hard to cherry-pick kids that lead to better outcomes, thus exacerbating the School-to-Prison Pipeline issue by putting more pressure on public schools. Anyway, there's so much on this topic you're gonna have to switch your argument to explaining a conspiracy in educational research:
Blame essentially never works, and it's because people are the products of systems. You talk about Goodhart's Law; another dynamic is where we do things that feel good or confirm our understanding of the world despite poor outcomes. Harsh disciplinary policies are the poster child for this. I'm gonna assume here you're pretty naive to the criminal justice space (this is because anyone who knows anything about criminal justice understands blame essentially never works), so I strongly encourage you to interrogate your priors here and read up on deterrence, punishment, and so on.
> National placement test for each grade
This would really only measure socioeconomic status, like most (all?) standardized tests. You also get stuck in tracks, so if say your mom dies in 3rd grade, you do poorly on the test and get bumped down, you're probably bumped down forever. That's a bad outcome.
> Disruptive students get kicked to penitentiaries.
Not only are there completely valid reasons for students becoming disruptive (parental issues, injuries, mental health issues, etc), the expense of this is out of this world. Even in the cheapest state (Arkansas) spending-per-inmate is $23k/yr--the median is something like $60k. Your options here are dramatically increase taxes or create a truly horrific human rights disaster.
> The same people that write olympiad problems and run the summer camps are hired to create a new curriculum.
This doesn't work because different people learn in different ways. You need dedicated, educated, well-compensated, supported professionals applying state-of-the-art techniques and research to get the outcomes we want. Also when you talk about replacing Common Core with some new standard, you're still not escaping Goodhart's Law.
> Everyone is fired, and as many people as money there is are hired at $300–500k/yr (in total compensation) to teach [30 student classes].
30 student classes obviates any benefit you'd get from anything else. There are no systems with those class sizes that are achieving the outcomes we want. You also can't literally fire all teachers. The NEA or teacher tenure won't let you. Training and interviewing 2.333 million teachers (plus administrators) is a gargantuan undertaking. Who moves to the middle of nowhere in Arizona, or Mississippi? How will you find so many qualified people? That $15k/yr number you keep citing isn't all salary; we spend around $236b on ~4m teacher salaries, which yields ~600k teachers (at $400k/yr salary), so you still need to find $680b (which is more than the budget of Medicaid) for the remaining 1.7 million teachers. You also have to somehow survive the political fallout of firing hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have families and various health issues.
> 30 student classes obviates any benefit you'd get from anything else. There are no systems with those class sizes that are achieving the outcomes we want.
I disagree? Universities have larger lectures, and students can move to lower classes if theirs moves too fast. I think your argument goes somewhat like:
| Assume each student randomly needs extra help some x% of the time. Then, the expected length until no needs help is (1-x%)^-n. Just to throw a number out there, assume ten students can move half as quick as one student. Then by the time you get to thirty students, you're moving 20% as fast as with ten students.
However, x% decreases with higher-salary teachers, and you can just move on without answering questions: "Ask me after class, we don't have time today." Finally, if you organize classes so similarly ranked students are together, the correlation in needing help increases, and the pace improves.
> You also can't literally fire all teachers. The NEA or teacher tenure won't let you.
Not with that attitude! Milei layed off 20% of his federal employees, and Musk 80% of Xitter. So, it is possible. They can protest, but I don't have sympathy for shitty teachers looking after their own interests.
> Training and interviewing 2.333 million teachers (plus administrators) is a gargantuan undertaking. Who moves to the middle of nowhere in Arizona, or Mississippi? How will you find so many qualified people?
I think the key is to steal employees ;). If you're offering double the salary, I think the local universities might lose a few professors. Also, as I mentioned, the university pyramid scheme is pumping out more PhDs than they know what to do with. There are also many universities shutting down as enrollment drops. Finally, interviewing 2 million teacher positions is a gargantuan undertaking, but each town only needs a few dozen. The federal government can create a teachers' job board for people to apply to, and let local towns do the hiring. Lots of doctors move to the middle of Nowhere, Mississippi, so I'm sure lots of teachers would too for a competitive salary.
> You also get stuck in tracks, so if say your mom dies in 3rd grade, you do poorly on the test and get bumped down, you're probably bumped down forever. That's a bad outcome.
Bad for whom? It's great for the kid who got bumped up. If you really want a better spot, you can study harder for the next test. No one is *stuck* in tracks. Do you know how I got good at math? I just solved thousands of math competition problems I found on AoPS.com. I would have improved faster if I had a coach/teacher to guide me, but the resources are out there if someone actually wants to hop tracks. It'll be harder than just never losing your spot, but that's no reason to give up.
> This [olympiad problem->curriculum writers] doesn't work because different people learn in different ways. You need dedicated, educated, well-compensated, supported professionals applying state-of-the-art techniques and research to get the outcomes we want. Also when you talk about replacing Common Core with some new standard, you're still not escaping Goodhart's Law.
I call bullshit. The SAT/ACT do not go high enough to distinguish the top 0.1% from the top 0.5%, and other (American/state) standardized exams are even worse, which means the so-called professionals literally do not have metrics that can capture that signal to tune their curriculae against. On the other hand, olympiad problem writers/camp counselors have a proven track record of doing exactly that. Here are two anecdotes:
1) In elementary school, my gifted class' teacher was complaining that her evaluations looked bad, because her students never showed improvement. It wasn't because they didn't improve, it's just because they stayed at 99%.
2) When Luke Robitaille got second in MATHCOUNTS in sixth grade, the next two years of exams became much harder, solely to make sure he wouldn't get a perfect score. His eighth grade year had the lowest top twelve cutoff in history, but at least there was a full spread at the top.
At the very least, we should agree that smarter students need an Uncommon Core curriculum.
> Today they're throwing stuff in class, tomorrow they're breaking the windows of your car or running drugs in your neighborhood. At that point in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, rehabilitating the person is extremely expensive.
In my other reply, the TLDR; is essentially, "it's the other way around". It's much more expensive to rehabilitate them in the classroom than in the prison system.
>> 30 student classes obviates any benefit you'd get from anything else. There are no systems with those class sizes that are achieving the outcomes we want.
> I disagree? Universities have larger lectures, and students can move to lower classes if theirs moves too fast. I think your argument goes somewhat like:
You're doing the thing again where you apply your expertise to a domain you're naive to. Google for class size and outcomes.
>> You also can't literally fire all teachers. The NEA or teacher tenure won't let you.
> Not with that attitude!
Contracts are contracts. Attitude has nothing to do with it.
> I think the key is to steal employees ;). If you're offering double the salary, I think the local universities might lose a few professors.
How do you deal with losing... let's just say 2m people from other high-value professions? Unemployment is at historic lows. You also haven't wrestled with finding ~$700b to pay for all of this. There's ~100,000 public schools in the US in ~13,000 school districts. You think you'll get good outcomes letting them all hire individually? Will you put caps on salary so smaller districts don't lose out?
You've honestly not thought through this at all. You're again walking onto an issue you're entirely ignorant of, and if you were in charge of it you'd thoroughly destroy it.
>> You also get stuck in tracks, so if say your mom dies in 3rd grade, you do poorly on the test and get bumped down, you're probably bumped down forever. That's a bad outcome.
> Bad for whom? It's great for the kid who got bumped up.
You're naive to the problems with standardized testing and trying to supplement with anecdata.
> [Weird takes on common core and standardized testing]
There may be a problem with the educational system not serving highly gifted students, but that's way further down the list than kids who graduate without basic reading and math skills. I'm not saying we can't walk and chew gum at the same time, but dealing with gifted students is a whole other kettle of fish (which judging by your anecdata I'm confident you've read nothing about).
>> Today they're throwing stuff in class, tomorrow they're breaking the windows of your car or running drugs in your neighborhood. At that point in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, rehabilitating the person is extremely expensive.
> In my other reply, the TLDR; is essentially, "it's the other way around". It's much more expensive to rehabilitate them in the classroom than in the prison system.
I'm gonna quote something from my response to Paul Graham's wokeness essay: "It's like someone's running an experiment on how many times you can be bafflingly wrong before people notice." I'm noticing.
I think the school->prison pipeline is a real issue, but I think a poor quality of education is a much bigger deal because smart, educated people generate exponentially more wealth since the industrial revolution. If you want what is best for everyone, you would focus more resources on top-performing students rather than less! Sure, top-performing students would turn out better than mid-performing students—even with fewer resources—but that's a tautology and an emotional appeal. I think the tricky part is to make sure top students give back to society once they graduate, but that seems more of a cultural issue to solve. Boring students to death probably doesn't help, though.
Now, you brought up that national testing + placement would mostly reflect socio-economic status. I think this is concerning because it lead to in-groups reinforcing themselves, which naturally decreases motivation for future rich people to help the rest of society. However, we already have examples of placement tests, and this isn't what happens! NYC has several "specialized" schools, including one of the best high schools in the nation, Stuyvesant. Admissions to Stuyvesant are entirely based on your rank on the SHSAT, yet 48% of their students are "economically disadvantaged" according to USNews. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I would expect lower or lower-middle class. This data also matches up with my intuitions: although intelligence is heritable (through genes or upbringing), there are exponentially more "economically disadvantaged" people than rich people, so even though rich kids are overrepresented, they are still outnumbered by poor(er) kids.
Also, keep in mind that rich people will always be able to pay for private schools or tutors if they find public education lacking. So, you are really only depriving poor students of any possibility of a good education by lumping everyone together, which is worse for reinforcing classism. As you mentioned, charter/private school outcomes are so much better because they work pretty hard to cherry-pick kids that lead to better oucomes. Why not give everyone that opportunity?
That's a little facetious, because not everyone has that opportunity. Some people are just not genetically predisposed towards exams, or they're being abused at home, or they have to work after school to buy food for their younger siblings. But, it doesn't really matter why someone cannot do/be better if we're unable to fix the why. Until it can be fixed, the problem is just a part of them and they'll be punished for it. This isn't very sympathetic, but it's the game-theoretical optimal approach for getting to the Pareto frontier.
You mention that blame/punishment essentially never works, which is probably because humans are not perfectly rational agents. Sure. I've definitely seen this when I play Risk online. You have to use different strategies when people are irrational/prone to mistakes, e.g. with novices it's usually good to make a big stack and wait for everyone else to noob-slam, while with masters it's better to work with the othe rplayers to slowly choke out the rest. Optimal strategies may be less tolerant to mistakes, and a common mistake humans make is, "this person hurt me, so I will hurt them even more," without considering why they were hurt. A common theme I saw in school->prison pipeline studies is that youth get disaffected with society/the justice system, so they end up committing more crimes. If people really are being irrational, in such a way that punishment will not work, you really only have three options:
1. Force them into rationality.
2. Rehabilitate them through positive reinforcement.
3. Eliminate them from society, e.g. sending them to Louisiana/Australia, prisons/executions, or closed communities.
I'd argue that you should take whichever option is best for society, i.e. costs it the least. Why?
a) Societies cannot be comprised of mostly (weighting by utility) negative-externality people for very long.
b) Everyone else is better off by eliminating such people, thus they are motivated to do so in whichever way is cheapest.
If it were cheaper to just execute all criminals, or commit horrific human rights disasters to make prisons cheap to run, that's what society should do. Historically, that's what societies have done. Nowadays, it probably isn't cheaper; even if the average inmate spends just as much time in prison as out of it, they are probably close to net-positive to society. The cheapest solution probably is rehabilitation for most people except the unfixable, and even there, life in prison is probably cheaper than execution.
So, I think I agree with you about rehabilitation, but probably not for the reasons you cite. I think "people being products of systems" is a rather naive take; if people were products of stable systems (in the physics sense), punishment actually would work. Conservatives have a bias towards everything being a stable system [which is true; you are exponentially more likely to end up in more stable (determined by transition probabilities) trembling-hand/thermodynamic equilibria], which is probably why they're all pro-punishment and such. Note that rehabilitation can still be cheaper, but at least punishment would work. It's only when you have unstable systems that punishment might not work at all. It's a little worrying to think that America's system might be unstable right now, but the race riots and past two elections kind of show it is. More accurately, it's too easy to transition out of its current maximum for punishment to really dissuade future malcontents.
-----
Alright, let's return to education. I think we're in agreement that:
I) The school->prison pipeline is real.
II) Imprisonment is expensive, probably moreso than rehabilitation.
As I put at the top, we probably disagree that:
III) This cost is more than that of a poor education system.
I think rehabilitation through the education system is far more expensive. Here's just a back-of-the-napkin calculation. Suppose that all inmates are directly a result of the school->prison pipeline. It costs ~$70bn/yr to incarcerate them, but let's also assume we're missing out on 2 million people * $65k/yr = $130bn from jobs they could be working. This amounts to about $200bn/yr in costs to society.
Now, the number of billionaires increases by about 36 each year, and the average billionaire has $7bn. If a better education were to double the number of billionaires produced each year, this would entirely offset the cost. Of course, billionaires are usually better at capturing value than producing it, but at least some educated STEM guy below them is producing the value. I think this is entirely doable by expelling more students. In fact, I think the justice system will only start costing more than the wealth generated from better education (through the top students) once the pitchforks and torches come out.
Similarly, we should be able to do a cost-benefit analysis on teacher salaries. In reality, the most efficient use of money is to pour it into the top schools (and have entrance exams), but the metrics don't look as good. Most legislators care about the quintiles, not the top 0.1%, plus the wokists hate inequity. And, even bottom schools need much better teachers than are currently around. That's why I want to raise all salaries to $300-500k/yr.
You mentioned that only $236bn is spent on ~4m teachers, but there actually is another $600bn going elsewhere. If you want an average class size of 20 students, you only need ~2.5m teachers, so it should be possible if you strip everything else to the bare-bones. My elementary school class was taught in a portable, and I think that's better than having a shitty teacher.
You've done a lot of thinking here, but if you did 80% of the thinking and 20% of the reading you'd reach better conclusions. There are systems that spend more per student than the US does, more % of GDP than the US does, they have lower classroom sizes than the US, they have better systems for gifted students, their students spend more time in class, they pay teachers professional salaries, they have more state of the art instructional programs, etc. etc. etc. None are trending towards the outcomes you're suggesting; in particular the EU isn't producing more billionaires (this is a product of income and wealth inequality, not educational system efficacy).
> I'd argue that you should take whichever option is best for society, i.e. costs it the least. Why?
> a) Societies cannot be comprised of mostly (weighting by utility) negative-externality people for very long.
> b) Everyone else is better off by eliminating such people, thus they are motivated to do so in whichever way is cheapest.
I can't imagine what you might mean by negative-externality people, but whatever it might be let me inform you there are lots of countries/governments/societies in the world that aren't doing so hot, and they've been doing not so hot for quite some time. Is this some kind of quasi-rational-market hypothesis for societies? Nowhere is this true. Why do people stay in abusive relationships? Why did Black people continue to live in States that practiced segregation? Why do people still eat unhealthy food, or smoke, or drink?
> If it were cheaper to just execute all criminals, or commit horrific human rights disasters to make prisons cheap to run, that's what society should do. Historically, that's what societies have done.
I think relying on the actions of governments who knew almost nothing (Earth is flat, what is air, diseases are punishment from God, the sun revolves around Earth) is a bankrupt argument. Governments have almost never been data-driven. Reducing the rubric of how governments/societies should act to "do whatever's cheaper" is... so wrong I don't even really know where to start. How do you justify investments? How do you justify things like entering WWII or The Manhattan Project? How do you know what's cheaper or will result in the most gains ahead of time? This can't be a real argument. Are we about to go the entire history of how governments work? I refuse. Do more reading.
> I think "people being products of systems" is a rather naive take; if people were products of stable systems (in the physics sense), punishment actually would work.
Punishment doesn't work. Deterrence is a myth, and recidivism rates are off the charts. Again you're naive to the criminal justice system. If we don't think better systems/environments lead to better outcomes and worse systems/environments lead to worse outcomes, why are we trying to improve the US educational system at all? A kid's educational attainment is preordained right? Even if you think this is a straw man, it does us no good to consider "some kids just suck" when building an educational system, again because of the School-to-Prison Pipeline where bad outcomes are so lopsided.
> Similarly, we should be able to do a cost-benefit analysis on teacher salaries. In reality, the most efficient use of money is to pour it into the top schools (and have entrance exams), but the metrics don't look as good.
Your argument relies on the prospect of these super students increasing GDP so much we offset the cost of shunting tons of students into the School-to-Prison pipeline. Not only is there no evidence for this, it's a deeply immoral system. I refuse to even continue considering it.
To be pointed about it, I have people in my family who are special needs. I myself was disruptive in school because of life circumstance. When you advocate literally for imprisoning me and members of my family, at some point I have to recognize we're fighting. I've reached that point now.
> I can't imagine what you might mean by negative-externality people
Google is your friend. Essentially, in a counterfactual universe where they never existed, the world would be better off. If you have more negative externalities than positive externalities, your society is draining wealth, and will eventually disappear.
> Punishment doesn't work. Deterrence is a myth, and recidivism rates are off the charts.
We've already gone over this. Go rehabilitate, I don't care. Just rehabilitate people in a way so they aren't actively commiting crimes against education.
> Your argument relies on the prospect of these super students increasing GDP so much we offset the cost of shunting tons of students into the School-to-Prison pipeline. Not only is there no evidence for this, it's a deeply immoral system. I refuse to even continue considering it.
You are trying to coerce one group into sacrifcing enormously for another group, and you say my system is immoral? If sacrifices have to be made (they don't), why do you get to choose who bleeds on the altar?
Also, there is plenty evidence that super students do offset the cost. For example, North Korea's system puts disproportionally more money into their top students, and they usually rank higher on the International Mathematics Olympiad than every European country except Russia. The benefit is mostly for their defense: they really needed nuclear weapons, and they couldn't get them without investing in their best students. They might not even exist as a country today if they didn't do so. What could be more beneficial to their society?
> To be pointed about it, I have people in my family who are special needs. I myself was disruptive in school because of life circumstance. When you advocate literally for imprisoning me and members of my family, at some point I have to recognize we're fighting. I've reached that point now.
This upsets me. Have you, this whole time, only been arguing for your in-group? Every time you said, "what is best for society," did you really just mean what is best for the people you care about? I, too, want what is best for my in-group, but I've tried to talk about how ranking/expulsions/etc. would increase wealth generation, and improve everyone's quality of life.
Quite frankly, your in-group needs my in-group, not the other way around. If we really are just trying to capture value for our in-groups, people in mine could just give up on public schools and go home-school their kids. I don't think this is optimal for either of our in-groups, but you have to acknowledge that if you want certain people to go to public school, you can't be defecting against those very people! If we really do have a conflict between two in-groups, why do you feel entitled to anything from the other side?
You've mentioned the school->prison pipeline, and how a lack of education brings out the pitchforks and torches. This is entirely true on the other side as well. As you saw in the comment section, a lot of smart people literally feel like school was prison to them. They were bullied, abused, had no freedom, etc. We've both acknowledged that bad students may become disaffected with school and society (if we don't rehabilitate properly), but only I've seemed to recognize that good students will too. Perhaps the difference is, disaffected bad students become violent, while disaffected good students become quantitative traders. Well, guess what? If your entitlement comes through a threat of violence, the correct response is to eliminate that threat.
Maybe you are alright with threatening violence, but I'd rather we not fight. And we don't have to. Society holds itself together through mutually beneficial deals (and a plethora of convenient lies). The minimum I'm asking for is for public schools to be mutually beneficial. This is why, although I think it is best for society to put extra resources into their top stuents, I am okay spending only equal resources.
>Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education.
They may have a right to an education, but they need to be at an alternative school with teachers equipped to handle their behavior and classmates who are in similar situations. If they’re going to ruin their classes for their classmates, those classmates shouldn’t be innocent, well-behaved students.
They have a right to education much like one has the right to bear arms or publish a book. You can have it, but your rights end where you demand someone else give it to you involuntarily, particularly with violence.
Which is where an expulsion often leads, similar to how adults unable to function in society are channeled into SSDI, homelessness, or prison in some combination.
There are unlikely to be many caring and constructive adults there though, for reasons that should be obvious.
"Rights" only exist through the will of an omnipotent force, which is an undefined concept. I think it's better to respond to ill-defined arguments with simply that: "interpretation error, argument 'right' is ill-defined."
> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them.
Are you sure administrators care? I live in Oakland, where some of the public schools have absolutely abysmal (academic) statistics. I haven't checked the expulsion statistics. I'm not sure anyone cares.
Literal children are incapable of forfeiting their rights by being "violent and disruptive", and it would be insane if they could because they can't possibly begin to understand what they'd be giving up. Clearly that right is sometimes taken from them anyway, but that's neither the fault or a failure of the child.
Often kids who get their right to education taken from them are failed by their parents and/or by the schools, but the blame cannot be placed on the child for that. Every child, excepting those with significant mental illness or intellectual limitation, can and should be successfully educated. Any educational system that is incapable of handling a child's tantrum or helping a child in crisis is a failed system.
It isn't an either / or. Expelled children have to go somewhere. So you provide education / rehabilitation facilities where they hopefully manage to get their behaviour under control and can be brought back into mainstream education or stay in those institutions where they can at least get a bit of an education rather than just being left to roam the streets. Whether there's the appetite to fund that kind of institution properly is another matter.
This is what they did in my school district when I was growing up. You had 3 tiers. First tier is regular school. If you get expelled, you go to tier 2 which is a school for people who got expelled. If you get expelled from there, you go to tier 3 school, which is where all the really bad kids go. This worked pretty well, keeping in mind all the students' needs in mind.
They did away with that since I was young and now they just let the disruptive kids run rampant.
Keep in mind, you only have one chance really to get an education. If your learning is impeded by uncontrollable children, you now have a greater risk of life failure because you weren't able to learn the fundamentals, because a class of 30 was always being disrupted by one or two people. Say you didn't learn pre-Algebra well because of disruption; now you're behind when it comes to the higher level math for the rest of your school tenure and ultimately, life. These disruptions could have major long term consequences for other kids trying to learn.
Finally, teachers' average turnaround is 4 years last time I checked. That means there are very few veteran teachers available to show new teachers the ropes and how to manage a classroom full of teenage kids. Not that it matters, the new teachers will look for other careers within 4 years on average. The cycle continues.
> If you get expelled, you go to tier 2 which is a school for people who got expelled.
So if you're a kid who's already struggling, you get sent to be surrounded by other kids who are already struggling.
> you only have one chance really to get an education.
That's true for the bad kids too.
I 100% get where you're coming from. My kids come home from school and tell stories about disruptive stuff other kids do and how much it gets in the way of the school functioning effectively.
At the same time... what are we supposed to do with those kids? The kids that have behavioral problems are much more likely to be that way because they have a bad home life. So if you expel them, they're missing out on education and they're spending more time in a bad environment. They're not going to get any better after that. Then what? Now they're a year behind academically and have the shame of being expelled. Their behavior is likely even worse because they spent a year not being socialized in a bad environment. So they're even worse next year, and they get expelled again.
Eventually, they stop going to school entirely. But at least here in the US, the number of jobs available to people without any kind of school degree gets smaller every year. So now they can't find work.
What do desperate people do? Commit crimes. So now we have a system that effectively just produces uneducated mentally unhealthy criminals.
I think you're missing something. Getting expelled doesn't mean you didn't attend school for the remainder of the year. Getting expelled meant you were sent to a school for expelled kids. If you got expelled from there, you went to a school for expelled x2 kids. In the US, it's illegal to not attend school under the age of 16.
>and have the shame of being expelled.
Shame is a powerful motivator, but only works sometimes. The alternative is to ignore the behavior or reward it, both worse solutions IMO.
I think the idea is if kids are disruptive, put them with other disruptive kids so the amount of disruption is minimized. All the kids in the disruption school are already disruptive. Also, you don't want to teach the current non-disruptive kids that being disruptive is acceptable, otherwise, you'll just create more disruptive kids by inaction.
Do you really want to force good students to have to be in the same classroom as the kind of students who get expelled from public schools? Do you understand just how bad your behavior has to be to actually get expelled?
"At the same time... what are we supposed to do with those kids? "
The most important thing is to NOT allow them to prevent other kids from getting an a good education.
> Do you really want to force good students to have to be in the same classroom as the kind of students who get expelled from public schools?
Where precisely do you think "the kind of kids who get expelled from public schools" should be? I mean that literally, concretely.
Do we send them home where they are statistically much more likely to be abused and not have access to reliable nutrition? Imprison them? Ship them to some sort of Lord of the Flies island?
Do I want disruptive kids in the same room as my kids? Not really. Is it the least bad place I can think of to put them? Unfortunately, yes.
This is a deeply hard problem. Sure, if you only care about well-behaved kids it's easy: kick out the bad eggs and forget they ever existed. But if you consider that those bad kids are actual people who will still participate in your society, you need some solution for how to help them.
>Where precisely do you think "the kind of kids who get expelled from public schools" should be? I mean that literally, concretely.
That's really the make-or-break question. IIRC, it was kids who constantly got into fights. Kids caught with knives, drugs, or firecrackers; kids in gangs, etc. It was kids who constantly disrupted the classroom, even after being assigned to after school detention multiple times. It was kids who disrespected teachers (cussing them out, threatening them, attacking them, etc). It was kids that got pregnant. It was even kids that cheated because it was taken more seriously back then.
The levels were: write sentences on the board after class, get sent to the principal's office with a parent call, get after school detention, get after school detention a whole lot, get expelled. Sometimes like in the case of knives, it would go straight to expulsion.
Today, teachers will send kids to the principal's office to get them out of the classroom and they just get sent back to continue disruption. Back then, teachers were expected to teach and the administration dealt with unruly kids. Disciplining kids who are bad is hard on the heart, but in the long term, not disciplining them is way worse for them. There's no discipline today in schools (other than getting arrested, which really should be avoided at all costs). There hasn't been discipline in schools for a generation. It shows not only in schools but in society as a whole.
> Is it the least bad place I can think of to put them?
Bad for whom? If you have the two options:
(A) Bad for people causing negative externalities.
(B) Bad for people causing positive externalities.
I will choose the former over the latter every time. Sure, it's bad for the kid to be getting abused since they're expelled from school, but it's bad for the kid to be getting abused since this other kid wasn't expelled from school.
Your solution it to let disruptive children ruin the education for all students so that no one gets a good education? You are making home-schooling sound much more appealing. Public Schools aren't supposed to be daycare centers, they are supposed to teach children.
I think you and many others in this discussion presume that kids fall into a neat binary classification:
1. Good kids who were always and will always be good kids.
2. Bad kids who were always and will always be bad kids.
Further, any interaction between a bad kid and a good kid is strictly making things worse for the good kid.
I can definitely understand how someone might end up with that belief system. It was probably formed while they themselves were a kid and thus lacks the nuance and maturity that comes with time.
A closer picture of reality is that:
1. People go through good and bad periods. An "good" kid might become a "bad" kid for a year while going through the divorce of their parents. A "bad" kid might get the structure or diagnosis they need and blossom into their better potential. Kids mature at different rates and times.
2. Being around "good" kids is good for "bad" kids. If the people in their home life are awful, having a community of mentally healthy kids around them during the day can be very helpful for learning how to behave better.
3. Being around "bad" kids is often good for "good" kids. Obviously, it's not OK for some kid to bully or abuse another. But short of that, it's often useful and educational for kids to be exposed to a variety of personalities and maturity levels. Do we want our kids to grow into adults that have the skills to take care of and help other people who are struggling? I do. They can learn many of those skills in school by being part of the support network for bad kids.
Often, when they do, it turns out that kid wasn't so bad in the first place.
Overall, this simplified mindset is one I see all the time where we look at situations as a consumer: Is this a thing I want to "purchase" or not? Instead, it's better to look at the entire situation as an environment that you are both consuming and yourself part of.
They always talk about "it takes a village". We all both need a village and are the village for each other.
1. Good kids who were always and will always be good kids.
2. Bad kids who were always and will always be bad kids.
Further, any interaction between a bad kid and a good kid is strictly making things worse for the good kid.
My experience in K-12 proves that this is in fact largely TRUE.
" Being around "bad" kids is often good for "good" kids. "
This is just a mind-numbingly stupid take. A 10th grader taking advanced calc and programming robots doesn't benefit from being forced to interact with an illiterate 19 year old who has been held back 3 times and steals his lunch money every day. This is in fact almost a human rights violation for the smart kid.
"I can definitely understand how someone might end up with that belief system. It was probably formed while they themselves were a kid and thus lacks the nuance and maturity that comes with time."
Thank you for demonstrating the point that there are constraints and complications that are difficult to appreciate from the outside. The law generally disagrees with you.
And that really hasn't turned out very well. Letting the most disruptive students ruin the education of other students isn't fair at all to those students AND is pretty damn stupid when you consider how much tax money is spent educating those students and the harm to society from not educating them.
To be clear, I am not about to justify any sort of violence anywhere. That said...
Many violent and disruptive students were just kids with special needs. And I don't mean mental conditions or anything like that.
I mean a kid that would do WAY better if he was in a trade class doing something that motivates them, rather than being frustrated and forced to endure a rubbish secondary education, several hours crammed into a small room with other people and getting nowhere.
But of course that's more difficult to implement than a generic standardising/equalising pipeline of norm-conforming average citizen production.
I think we should focus on students already trying to be a positive influence in the school, rather than catering to the bottom quintile. After all, that is how schools got in this situation in the first place.
My point was not clear. What I'm saying is that often it would be better for a certain profile of people to not be forced to attend what in my country is mandatory secondary education, and that it would be better to put them to work on stuff they might enjoy.
But of course that would mean the system needs to contemplate individuals, instead of collectives, and the system doesn't like that.
> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions.
Are there actionable consequences if these numbers get too high? If they're merely published, as a parent, I would see high numbers as a positive signal if anything...
When I was in high school there was a local school that was notorious. Apparently here the public schools were not allowed to expel kids if they would no longer have local options. This was the worst school, and thus the last place the kids would end up. So it was basically just a prison.
There's a big difference between someone with an IEP (usually massive trauma and mental illness also) doing things and a "regular" student doing them. Expelling a kid usually just means they move to a different school, and all expulsion is doing is moving the burden down the chain, usually from more affluent places where parents are equipped to complain, to less affluent ones. Particularly if the room destroying-violence kiddo's family don't have lawyers.
When I judge an educational institution I could not care less why some child being significantly disruptive is tolerated, even slightly. That institution simply becomes a non starter for a place I might send my children.
Of course parents who don't care about such things, or don't have the luxury of being able to choose, would accept such things. As would those who themselves have 'problem children.' Now think about what this does to the quality of that institution over time.
I do think it's totally fair to put pressure on the school to reduce mainstreaming of kids with major behavior issues. But it's really not about "tolerating" or "not tolerating"- you're witness a system failure and responding by making the problems worse for everyone but the wealthy in a society where governance is premised on the population at large being well educated.
* Tossing around hot potato kids doesn't resolve things in a good for society way.
* Concentrating the proportion of kids interfering with normal income families by removing all the high-income kids from the school doesn't resolve things in a good for society way.
* Letting people choose to send their kids to charters while all the kids of low-involvement parents are still stuck in a situation with a concentrated proportion of problems doesn't either.
Unfortunately there are a several things at play:
* Increased availability of specialized, non-mainstream resources for moderate+ (moderate is pretty severe most of the time IMO) kiddos, gen pop behavior interventions, etc.
* Better general welfare for parents (often unstable/low income ones).
* More push back from districts when parents w/ lawyers demand stuff that's bad for the rest of the classroom.
IMO institutional quality is purposefully damaged by people who hate paying taxes or supporting the general welfare - public schools are basically being purposefully doomed in much the same way that Republicans say "government always bad" and then set out to make it fail on purpose to prove their point, only with a wider variety of motives at play. "I'm sending my kids to private school, why should I pay taxes for public schools?" is not an uncommon strain of thought.
It's a doom loop leading to societal regression into a stratified society unable to properly self-govern IMO.
Kids with major behavioral issues should be getting a bootcamp-style education, where their tendencies can be held in check by adequate physical supervision. This is not about denying anyone an education - if anything, it's doing the exact opposite and addressing their unique educational needs in the most effective way.
While I certainly agree that specialized care and instruction is needed, it is unfortunately not that case that "bootcamp-style" is actually universally fitting. Autistic kids need autism specific early intervention. Many kids with extreme behaviors or mood disorders will respond better to reward structures than they will to heavy-handed discipline. Appropriate settings with professionals trained in behaviors (IE the management and alterations of) can have substantial success, especially if the home environment is not antagonistic/trauma inducing.
> ...unfortunately not that case that "bootcamp-style" is actually universally fitting. Autistic kids need autism specific early intervention. Many kids with extreme behaviors or mood disorders will respond better to reward structures...
These things are not mutually incompatible. Kids with autism who actually have major behavioral issues will clearly benefit from some physical supervision, in addition to whatever autism-specific intervention may be most appropriate for them. Similarly, rewards for good behavior can often go hand-in-hand with some sort of more rigorous discipline for those who persist in damaging and harmful conduct - these things will hopefully be complementary.
It hardly matters to other students WHY a particular student is making it very hard for them to learn and using up all the teacher's time. Only that they ARE.
Administrators are constantly castigated for disciplinary actions, as the "throwing chairs" behavior is not evenly spread among the different cultures that students come from.
Different rates of suspensions leads to accusations of racism, and said accusations lead to Hail Mary attempts to make unequal rates equal, including forbidding any meaningful type of punishment for certain varieties of students.
If this sounds far fetched, public officials in Rotherham became objectively evil in their attempts to avoid racism accusations, "1400 children betrayed" is a extremely understated headline, if you want to learn more.
> Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works.
Our local education superintendant _in_ _his_ _program_ _document_ is saying that he will go after any teacher attempting to impose discipline in a "community inappropriate manner".
I have friends who were teachers in San Francisco unified School district who quit because students were literally attacking and breaking the bones of teachers and not being expelled.
It was a really hard choice for them because they were a bleeding heart liberal and wanted to use their PHD to help the underprivileged
> a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation
To have a great school district where housing isn't overly expensive is rare these days. I would have to guess it is hard to find a house in such a district unless you waive inpections and pay in cash.
After spending some time on the teachers subreddit I completely understand why so many people are choosing to homeschool. The amount of in-classroom abuse -- verbal and physical -- in addition to the entitled parents is shocking.
There's also rising awareness among parents of neurodiversity while many schools are still stagnant and failing to correct.
I have ADHD. My wife doesn't, but most of her siblings do. Our kids do. Our kids love reading and love learning new things, and I know from my own experience that the fastest way to kill that love would be to send them to a public school that doesn't know how to work with ADHD brains.
There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom. This matches my experience, and I want better for my kids.
> There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom.
Doctors aren't sure if I have ADHD or Major Depression or Bipolar II (I've been diagnosed and attempted to be treated for all three), but this fits into my experience.
I was consistently frustrating to my high school teachers, because I was clearly learning the material, but I wouldn't do my homework, and I'd get bored during class, and as a result I would get bad grades. I don't think the teachers took any joy in giving me a bad grade, but they were kind of forced into it because I didn't really fit into the bureaucratic mold that they needed me to fit in.
This eventually led to me almost flunking out, and eventually dropping out of my first attempt at university. I did eventually finish my bachelors, but it was at Western Governors University (WGU), which feels almost tailor-made for the ADHD-brained people.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but the American GPA system still kind of gives me anxiety when I think about it.
You pay per-term, not per class, and you can take as many classes as you'd like per term. You take one class at a time, and many classes can be finished after taking a test and/or completing a project.
I say it feels tailor-made for ADHD because it feels almost "gamified". It's addictive to see how many classes you can knock out in a week, and you can work at whatever pace you'd like.
Part of the reason I always did poorly in school is that I didn't like how slow everything went, but with WGU I can go whatever pace I want, and the faster I go, the more money I save. Since I'm an extremely impatient person, the fact that I was able to quickly go through the material while only having to focus on one course at a time was kind of game-changing to me.
I already had a decade of software engineering experience when I did WGU, so when I did the Computer Science degree on there I finished the entirety of it (having to start from scratch) in six months, for a grand total cost of around ~$4600.
WGU is hardly the fanciest school, but it's good enough, inexpensive, and most importantly it is fully accredited. If you always struggled with traditional universities, I recommend giving it a look.
> you can take as many classes as you'd like per term. You take one class at a time, and many classes can be finished after taking a test and/or completing a project.
Is it all based on self-guided learning? Because I can't see how this system could work with the classic system of bottom-up lectures accompanied by tutorials and exercise classes?
It’s self-guided. There aren’t lectures or anything. They have reading stuff they recommend, and there are course instructors you can reach out to if you need help.
Some courses do have recorded lectures, but nothing live.
I think that there's a reasonably good chance that if school were like that by default, I probably would have done better. It's hard to juggle six classes at a time like you're expected to in American high schools.
If I had a magic wand and could make the education system however I'd like, I'd make it so every student spends the exact same amount of time on the subject, but I'd make it so you only ever manage a single class at once, instead of trying to interleave everything.
This isn't even that weird of a concept, even in the US; American summer schools will often do exactly this. Instead of doing an hour per day over the course of 180 days, you do roughly thirty six-hour days. That's how I took gym in high school, and how I retook calculus (even though I passed the AP exam first-try).
Honestly, I'd bet there are a variety of delivery models that would be most effective for each person. Having choice in that would really be amazing. Unfortunately, its also very hard to organize and measure.
Yeah, that's true. I'm not entirely sure how you'd implement it but it would be great if there was options to do the one-class-at-a-time model or the traditional one if you prefer, though almost by definition the public school system is (mostly) one-size-fits-all.
It's definitely not for everyone, and to be honest I'd recommend a trying a traditional university first if that's an option.
The reason I liked it is because I have always just been better at teaching myself stuff than being taught. I like working at my own (usually faster) pace and I really hate waiting to make progress. WGU is a perfect system for someone with that mentality, particularly since it's inexpensive.
I think the quality of the education is "ok". I think you'll leave with a good enough education in computer science to be "useful", but I will acknowledge that the fast-pace does make it easier to get away with skipping the boring stuff than it would be with a traditional school.
If you already have a lot of experience with software, WGU can work as a "legitimizer" if nothing else, though. I had a bit of a complex about dropping out and not having a bachelors. That pretty much went away once I got my bachelors from WGU.
Oh! Xir entire software developer career has been built on skills xe taught xirselves from childhood (never took a CS course in college; majored in fine arts) so this sounds absolutely perfect! Probably would have crushed it there back in the day, too. Thank you!
ADD/ADHD was over-diagnosed for a long time. Why are you so sure all the people you mention have it vs other explanations? What is it you think makes ADHD brains special?
As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
It’s also debatable how over diagnosed ADHD is. The diagnosis criteria has certainly changed, but current literature estimates about 6% adults are believed to some degree of ADHD [1]—though many are high functioning and find ways to cope with varying degrees of success and difficulty.
Totally on board with your comments on disparagement, but there's been a rash of autism diagnoses in my daughter's school to the point where in some classes 20% of students have been diagnosed as autistic. I feel at that point people are diagnosing personality, and it's using the (UK) special educational needs system to force schools to pay attention to different learning styles. (My daughter's school is actually pretty good on that front if you point it out to the staff, so I'm not sure what's triggering it particularly in her school, but it may be to do with releasing government funding for extra classroom assistants).
ADHD and autism are diagnosed based on behaviors. This might work for cases at the more extreme end of the spectrum, but when it comes to trying to identify more mild cases, you are going to start seeing a lot of overlap in behaviors of the larger population. Couple that with extra funding for kids who can be said to have ADHD and autism, and you get a recipe for overdiagnosis.
Maybe it is worth it to try to make sure fewer kids with the issue slip through the cracks at the expense of diagnosing kids who don't actually have it. Maybe it's not, but it makes sense why it can happen.
You and GP make great points, and these are situations that are becoming more common. Luckily, there is some light at the end of the tunnel (at least for ADHD). There's been a lot of study in recent years and medical science is starting to identify physiological markers commonly correlated with ADHD [1][2][3]. The sad thing is that the science hasn't advanced far enough to include these in the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. It's my hope we'll see an updated DSM and medical training within the next decade, but it'll be a long and painful wait.
> As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
Not my intention, but I was diagnosed as a kid when over-diagnosing did seem to be a trend, and I've become skeptical in these times of self IDing.
When I mentioned over-diagnosing it was more referring to the 90s, but I think a lot of adults who were diagnosed then may have been misdiagnosed and never checked.
My heart goes out to you. Misdiagnosis is just as bad (and sometimes worse) than not being diagnosed. I've known people who were diagnosed with ADHD with very bad outcomes because it later turned out that they had bipolar disorder; the wrong medical treatment literally ruined their life. At the same time, I've had periods in my life where I couldn't focus on important conversations with my partner because of a noisy bird nearby.
If you suspect you have a condition or someone is advocating for you to seek treatment, please seek a qualified psychiatrist who's specifically trained in diagnosis. Better yet, make sure they're in touch with your primary care provider [1]. Psychiatric assessment and diagnosis its own psychiatric specialty for a reason, but doctors with these qualifications are criminally difficult to get time with for a variety of reasons.
Me and my friends were in the wrong side of the culture (tabletop RPGs, video games and heavy metal) and I can bet we would all be diagnosed back then as it felt it was mostly "feisty kids that don't fit".
There are many volumes on the subject, but I'm honestly tired of debating this with people who doubt ADHD is a thing. If you're legitimately curious, there are myriad sources out there about the differences in ADHD brains.
Suffice it to say that I'm sure. All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
"Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't. I just know that we don't work in the way that the world expects us to.
I don't doubt the research, it's more I doubt how many diagnoses were accurate.
I was diagnosed with ADD as well, so I'm not being entrely dismissive. In this age of self ID I think there can be reason to be.
> All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?
> "Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't.
Not my intention, I should have said unique or significantly different in the contexts you mentioned or something.
> If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?
There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes—there's too much similarity and too many people with both to be a coincidence. But in the case of my family, most of us do just fine in reading social cues... when we're paying attention. Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.
> Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.
Yes, this is something I deal with as well.
It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.
I've wondered if I am on the spectrum also but I don't match a lot of the base/core traits, although I feel ADHD or ADD alone doesn't explain some of my, ahem, quirks either.
I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.
> It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.
These days they don't draw a distinction any more. There are different presentations of ADHD, but it's all the same disorder.
> I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.
No worries, sorry for reacting negatively! I've had a lot of people assume that ADHD is not a thing at all, and it gets exhausting having to explain it. I pattern matched on your comment too aggressively.
> There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes
Autism and adhd definitely appear to share traits, and I suspect there's a shared cluster of genes affecting certain aspects of neural linking between regions of the brain. Even without shared genes it makes sense that a "networked system" of core brain functions would share similar behaviors if the parameters were tweaked in similar ways.
Were you the downvote I got instantly after commenting, lol? I'm simply curious and that should be sufficient, I'm not really sure what it has to do with you though.
Homeschooling parents are divided into two separate groups. One is secular with college degrees who really want to give their children a better education than they could get in a school AND are able to do so.
The other group are very religious who don't want their children learning about evolution or many other secular things.
The only real issue I have with homeschooling in the US is that regulations vary wildly by state. Some states have so little enforcement that it is possible to teach a child essentially NOTHING by the time they are 18 and face no punishment for ruining that child's life.
Certainly a biased view of religious home schoolers. Most of my religious friends who homeschool are college educated and many have postgraduate degrees. Some do disbelieve evolution, or at least disdain it a bit. Pretty much all of them are motivated people however. Of course that's just my little bubble.
The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. It always comes up in these discussions as a boogeyman anyway.
It's not necessarily just the idea of evolution itself, but rather that it's indicative of someone's willingness to continuously and actively reject all evidence in order to maintain the beliefs they've decided are true.
Most of the disagreements are fundamentally metaphysical (would God make fossils?), so debates about evidence, expertise, and scientific consensus are beside the point.
But highly educated people believe this too. There’s lots of wacky and unscientific, ideas out there that people believe because they come from Columbia University social science professors instead of the Bible. After the last several years I take back everything I said when I was younger and an atheist about religious people and not believing in evolution.
The trick here is that we can reject OP's unnecessarily binary categorization as a premise and focus on the illogical and under-developed personal systems for testing reality and challenging beliefs that represent a far greater concern than the particulars of categorically unexamined beliefs.
Xe were raised young earth creationist and that requires gaslighting your own child on established science, going so far as to regularly test them on their willing to believe or lie about believing patent untruths. Oh, plus the constant repression of one's identity, the lack of exposure to a wider range of perspectives and experiences, and the panopticon of surveillance by people with near total control of your socializing, especially in the suburbs. That really fucks a child up.
That kind of homeschooling is a cult, no matter how much our wider culture has normalized the literal insanity.
Existence of vestigial structures in organism. Why do humans get goosebumps when we don't have enough hair to insulate us? Because it's an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors when the reflex would actually cause hair to trap more air for better insulation.
Understanding evolution is crucial for crop management. The development of pesticide resistance in insects follows the same principles as antibiotic resistance. Farmers who don't understand evolutionary principles might not recognize the importance of rotating pesticides or implementing refuge areas to prevent resistance from developing.
Medical research often relies on animal models because of shared evolutionary history. Our biological similarities with other mammals exist because of common ancestry. Without this framework, it becomes harder to understand why medicines tested on mice or primates might work in humans, or why certain diseases affect multiple species similarly.
Human susceptibility to back and knee pain is a consequence of how recent bipedalism is in our evolution. Same for why humans are so prone to chocking, our larynx evolved to enable speech at the cost of making it easier for food to enter it.
Thanks to ubertaco for the neat response point by point, but I don't think any of your points are relevant, even if they are true.
I know a couple of big-scale farmers in the US. They are Christian, and believe in Creation. That doesn't stop them from using the necessary pesticides, or choosing the adequate strain of corn seeds, etc.
Believing in Creation doesn't turn you into an illiterate moron. Believing God created everything according to a design and purpose is not incompatible with acknowledging the presence of similarities and design patterns throughout all of Creation, and believing that doesn't suddenly poof take away your rational capabilities to think and understand things.
Either way, I was asking for is a real situation in which someone will be negatively impacted because they hold a Creationist belief.
Will a Creationist live a sad life without fully embracing the misteries of goose-bumps? Will a farmer not use pesticides, or choose the wrong one because Creationism? Will Advil won't work on a Christian because they don't understand that rats and rabbits are our cousins? Will their knees hurt more (or maybe less?) because they think humans were standing up from the beginning?
More generally all of modern technology is a result of the exact same processes that led to the theory of evolution. If you reject it where do you draw the line?
"Believing in Creation doesn't turn you into an illiterate moron"
You kinda do have to be a moron to be a true young earth creationist. I went to Lutheran schools that taught me that the earth was created by god 6000 years ago and evolution was an evil plot created by Satan. By the time I was 15 I realized how stupid this was and how the theory of evolution fits the evidence and is self-consistent. One of the biggest realizations I had is that the theory of evolution, due to requiring such VAST amounts of time for evolution to occur, actually has nuclear fusion embedded in it as a dependency because nothing else could allow a star to shine for so long. When Darwin first proposed the theory a major and reasonable objection was the timescales needed because at the time it was thought that the Sun was powered only by gravitational collapse which would last less than 20 million years. Then this utterly absurd source of power for stars was discovered that could allow them to last for almost 1000 times as long.
> all of modern technology is a result of the exact same processes that led to the theory of evolution
Could you please elaborate? I'm not sure I understand. Are you referring to the scientific method?
If so, I really feel the need to insist that being Creationist or Christian is not exclusive or incompatible with that. Guess what, I am Christian, I believe in a Creator God and yet I am (surprise, surprise) an accomplished Software Engineer.
I can understand if you think I'm stupid because of my beliefs. That's your opinion and I'm totally fine with it.
What I'm trying to say is that holding these beliefs doesn't make you intellectually impaired, or unable to use reasoning. We're just working with different assumptions.
You have faith in Nothing, from which everything came, I have faith in Something (God) from which everything came. And it is faith indeed, because you don't and can't possibly have definite proven knowledge of the origin of things. You weren't there.
To you, nuclear fusion is evidence of evolution. Fine. To me, alongside the rest of Creation, it is evidence of God.
Therefore, you will reason a certain set of things, and I will reason a different set of things. Because we have different starting points, we will reach different conclusions.
"What I'm trying to say is that holding these beliefs doesn't make you intellectually impaired, or unable to use reasoning. "
They prove their is something fundamentally wrong with your logical reasoning and evaluation of evidence.
You use God as an explanation for why the universe exists but cannot explain where God came from so you are just adding an extra unnecessary step.
Your software engineering background gives you a unique perspective to understand this: When debugging code, you follow the evidence (logs, stack traces, reproducible errors) rather than starting with assumptions about what should be happening. Evolution works the same way - we follow the evidence rather than starting with assumptions about how life should have developed.
The power of evolutionary theory isn't just that it explains what we see - it's that it makes testable predictions. For example, evolutionary theory predicted we would find transitional fossils in specific geological layers before we actually found them. It predicted specific genetic relationships between species that were later confirmed by DNA sequencing. Just as in software engineering, a theory that makes accurate predictions is more valuable than one that only explains what we already know.
You're absolutely right that being religious doesn't make someone intellectually impaired. But perhaps consider that accepting evolution doesn't require abandoning faith in God - it might instead lead to a deeper appreciation of the elegant mechanisms through which creation could have unfolded.
Not to mention the tens of thousands of people who were killed in the witch trials (medieval and contemporary), among so very many other examples.
Few things are more personally relevant than not getting tortured and executed by your neighbors because you were granted no defense against spectral evidence.
> Few things are more personally relevant than not getting tortured and executed by your neighbors because you were granted no defense against spectral evidence.
As @arkey points out, this happens with atheistic beliefs as well. By numbers communist purges have killed vastly more people than all religions combined just due to the numbers of people involved in modern ages.
The denunciations are very similar with actual evidence rarely being required or needed. Or it’s based on some characteristic of being on an outside group. Netflix’s adaptation of the Chinese authors book “Three body problem” gives a visceral showcasing of what that would’ve been like as one of the characters father is denounced and killed during that time for having “anti-Marxist” beliefs like gravity.
I’ve been to the Pol Pot’s killing trees in Cambodia where they slaughtered millions of people. Anyone who was educated in any way were considered polluted by capitalism and killed. Things like having spectacles was sufficient evidence.
I’ve seen the holocaust monuments in Berlin and Tel Aviv where the ideals of racial purity based on pseudo scientific interpretations of evolution were a key philosophical underpinning.
Actually much of the anti-evolutionary zeal in the US can be partially traced back to progressives (of that period) use of “evolution” to justify mass forced sterilization of “undesirables” by several US states during the 1910-1930’s.
Really humans are pretty flawed with any belief system. You fool yourself if you think “scientific” or “atheist” are any hindrance to these group behaviors.
Oh honey, xe are visibly queer. None of the above is new to xe, as a matter of survival. And a matter of sanity, as xe were raised to believe that the world was created from whole cloth six thousands years ago and that dinosaurs either lived with humans or were an invention of the devil.
There are no such things as atheist beliefs any more than there are a-unicorn beliefs, even if many things have been done in its name. The same goes for evolution. And no, communism isn't any more inherently atheistic than German fascism was inherently Catholic (it certainly wasn't atheistic) nor US democracy inherently Protestant. Anyone doing anything "in the name of evolution" is projecting their own hate and small-mindedness onto whatever convenient vocabulary at hand, as has happened over and over and over long before science. Avoid confusing belief with confidence in replicability, not when only one was sufficient for humanity to reach the moon.
No, as a science-minded secular materialistic atheist, xe are burdened with expecting nuance, detail, precision, specificity, and consistency of xirselves and in xir communications. But xe also expect the same of others in kind. Tell xe again how belief will save you from junk forensic science if you are ever accused falsely of a crime? Because actual science has no patience with such nonsense whereas xir original point still stands. We can resume this discussion after that.
What about the tens of millions of people who have been killed because atheism?
But how about this: the first time that any relevant powers decided that slavery was wrong at a global level was due to Christian beliefs, fancy that. And luckily they went on to impose that moral belief to the rest of the world. (England, France vs. Slavery)
It's true that a lot of evil has been done in the name of Christianity, but that's not of Christianity. If I came to your home and punched you in the face in the name of your mother, would you blame your mother?
But Christianity and the Bible have been abused very wrongly by evil powers as tools for control, something possible through deceiving illiterate, uneducated people.
As some other comments mention, Protestant Evangelicals made a big push for literacy precisely so people could read and interpret the Bible themselves, without depending on interested third parties.
Anyone taking a little time to read the Bible will see and understand that the Crusades were wrong, racism is wrong, oppressing women is wrong, and so on.
To play the devil's advocate here, as someone who grew up homeschooled and in a culture of "micro-scale evolution exists, but macro-scale evolution has not been demonstrated":
>Antibiotic resistance
...is a micro-scale adaptation, like an organism's immune response. Recognizing it does not require belief in a prehistoric common ancestor for all organisms; it just requires observing changes that happen on a much smaller and more rapid scale.
>Existence of vestigial structures in organism. Why do humans get goosebumps when we don't have enough hair to insulate us? Because it's an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors when the reflex would actually cause hair to trap more air for better insulation.
This is non-falsifiable conjecture about a pre-historic past based on observation of present structures. It is equivalent to "we obviously know that dinosaurs did not have feathers, because their skeletons do not have feathers, and feathers would have made them more visible to predators, so they wouldn't have had feathers."
>Understanding evolution is crucial for crop management. The development of pesticide resistance in insects follows the same principles as antibiotic resistance.
...which, again, is a micro-scale adaptation, like an organism's immune response. You can notice pesticide resistance occurring in pests and rotate your pesticides without having to sign on to the unverifiable claim that this happens because all life derives from a single organism.
>Medical research often relies on animal models because of shared evolutionary history. Our biological similarities with other mammals exist because of common ancestry. Without this framework, it becomes harder to understand why medicines tested on mice or primates might work in humans, or why certain diseases affect multiple species similarly.
This is more non-falsifiable distant-past conjecture based on observation of current structures. Is it necessary to believe a particular set of conjectures about the origins of mammals' biological similarities in order to recognize the fact in front of you that the mammals are biologically similar, and thus some mechanisms of action may apply across species, provided those similarities are retained?
>Human susceptibility to back and knee pain is a consequence of how recent bipedalism is in our evolution. Same for why humans are so prone to chocking, our larynx evolved to enable speech at the cost of making it easier for food to enter it.
...which, again, is non-falsifiable distant-past conjecture that has no bearing on recognizing the existence of the verifiable current-day reality in front of you: humans have back and knee pain. Is it necessary to accept a particular set of unprovable conjectures about the distant-past origins of this particular skeletal structure in order to make decisions about how best to treat a symptom that exists today resulting from the skeletal structure that you see immediately in front of you?
But the micro vs. macro distinction is only one of time and scale and that's the whole point: species aren't "real," even fish aren't "real" in any ontological sense, but the countless organisms that we categorize as such existed, exist, and will continue to exist regardless of how we conceive of them.
The ask of evolution and science in general is to accept the incredibly narrow capacity of human cognition as a starting point for an even deeper understanding rather than an end goal to rationalize towards.
>But the micro vs. macro distinction is only one of time and scale and that's the whole point: species aren't "real," even fish aren't "real" in any ontological sense, but the countless organisms that we categorize as such existed, exist, and will continue to exist regardless of how we conceive of them.
This is an excellent rebuttal to the micro/macro distinction, because it's working in the correct direction, which you've stated well:
>to accept the incredibly narrow capacity of human cognition as a starting point for an even deeper understanding rather than an end goal to rationalize towards.
Using the notion of "species" as a "ground truth", as though it were some biological law, is a self-defeating point precisely because the definition of "species" is "a somewhat-arbitrary taxonomy developed by people to try to group organisms together based on observed common traits."
Want to have your mind blown? The creationist fallacy of "irreducible complexity" isn't just wrong for eyeballs and flagellum but for upward complexity as well. And lateral complexity.
OK, for falsifiable how about evolution predicts patterns of genetic similarity between species that match their apparent morphological relationships - a correlation that didn't have to exist but does.
That's not what falsifiable means. It's not experimentally verifiable. There is no way to conduct a test that would negate it if it were untrue.
It is why, being intellectually honest, the theory of evolution as the origin of species is called a "theory" in the academic sense: it's a proposed model that fits the data available on hand, but which has not been experimentally verified in its premise. Short of time-travel, I'm not sure how it can be experimentally verified.
"Falsifiable" means "I can construct an experiment that could yield an outcome that directly demonstrates this idea as false." This is sort of like the difficulty that exists with the four-color theorem [1]: yes, you can run a lot of examples using computer-assisted proof tech, but at best what that tells you is "we haven't found a counterexample yet."
Except, for non-falsifiable claims like the theory of evolution as the origin of species, there is no experiment you can run to provide a counterexample. The theory covers any possible counterexamples by simply saying "that form of life must have evolved from a different origin point and/or under different conditions (regardless of whether we can recreate those conditions)", and tucks any counterexample in neatly into itself without feeling threatened by falsifiability. It is "total" by having an "escape hatch" for any counterexamples.
That stacks it up alongside "a deity made everything, and designed an ordered universe with certain mechanics, including giving organisms the ability to adapt"; both are explanations that fit the available data, but neither can be experimentally verified. Similarly, that theory is "total" by having an escape hatch: "well, maybe the deity did something different in that case." Young-earth Creationists do this with visible starlight that is a million or more lightyears away: "maybe God just accelerated that starlight so that humans would have a pretty night sky."
That tendency is similar to "maybe the [hypothetical] organisms on Mars adapted from a different common ancestor that maybe was made of non-living substances that are similar to the non-living substances that comprised Earth's first organism." Boom, done, no need to re-examine the premise, you just fold it in with "maybe the same magic worked a little differently over there," just like saying "maybe God made starlight go faster in the direction of Earth."
As long as you don't engage in denial of the available data because of your theory, then I don't understand why holding a particular non-falsifiable theory is mandatory.
It doesn't matter if I hold to the theory that the universe began as an origin-less hypercompressed single point of matter suddenly and rapidly decompressing...if I'm in the lab next to you claiming that vaccines cause autism. The problem is not which non-verifiable theory I hold about an unrelated subject, but rather my denial of the available data on hand.
Similarly, it doesn't matter that Louis Pasteur was a Creationist when discussing the mechanisms he discovered by which vaccines work. What matters is his recognition of the reality of the data at hand, and his work to explore and build on it.
It’s directly correlated with young earth creationism and climate change denial. A significant portion of the population being taught "don’t trust scientists they’re lying on behalf of the literal devil" has done terrible things to American politics.
> It’s directly correlated with young earth creationism and climate change denial.
Is it though? Any sources to back that?
From what I know CC denialists come in all shapes and sizes, from Christians to Conspirationist Atheists to people who are hoping for the return of the Anunnaki. As well as firmly Creationist Christians that don't deny the climate change at all.
I'd broaden the group to "kids who parents feel have been done wrong or failed by the local school and see home schooling as the best choice available." I don't think this group is quite as consistently college educated as group 1.
I suppose from their perspective they do but from my perspective they are just going to raise scientifically ignorant people. I was raised young earth creationist Lutheran and understand this world quite well.
On the other hand, my sister is a firm Creationist Christian, has a PhD and had a brilliant career in research (albeit nothing directly related to 'The Beginning of All Things').
Chances are she is less "scientifically ignorant" than many people around here, myself included.
Just like my sister's, yours is a specific case. It's sad that they didn't teach you Creation in a way that wouldn't cancel out Science, as Science itself is something profoundly Christian as well.
"O, Almighty God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee!..." - Johannes Kepler
Are we talking young-earth creationist or "God triggered the big bang and guided evolution" creationist? Because there is a huge difference between them!
Young earth creationists are scientifically ignorant by definition.
Young-earth creationist, as in "God created everything from scratch in 7 days".
There are many scientists out there that believe in that. They are not scientifically ignorant, they just believe different stuff from you, which, mind you, unless you've seen all proof and understand everything about it to the very last detail, you just hold a faith-based belief of what you're told about by a specific bunch of people/books.
People forget that we often know a lot about stuff, but then we discover more stuff which totally changes the stuff we knew and so on.
Not intending to start a flamewar here or anything, but the fact is that even if there's a lot of evidence for many claims about it, the THEORY of Evolution is not failsafe let alone definitely proven.
You can choose to go with it until we have something better, that's your choice.
Allow that same choice for the rest of the people out there.
"There are many scientists out there that believe in that. "
Not any GOOD ones.
"They are not scientifically ignorant, "
They are actually.
" they just believe different stuff from you, "
They believe very stupid things directly at odds with all evidence. All of modern technology is a result of the exact same logical thought that led to the theory of evolution. If you reject it where do you draw the line? Do you reject fusion in stars because there is no reason for them to last so long?
"People forget that we often know a lot about stuff, but then we discover more stuff which totally changes the stuff we knew and so on."
> Do you reject fusion in stars because there is no reason for them to last so long?
No. Why would I?
You see? You're jumping to absurd conclusions. The fact that I don't believe in Evolution does not mean I reject the Scientific Method, or technology, or reasoning, or logic.
I'm an engineer. I like and enjoy Science, building things, researching, learning, understanding, reasoning, creating. Don't try to make it incompatible or exclusive.
> Not any GOOD ones.
Maybe you should review a bit your history of Science.
I think the gp's worldview doesn't allow for such a person to exist. It's an anomaly and, therefore, must be fake. Otherwise, I can't make sense of the way they have been arguing in this thread.
I think it's you who doesn't understand how science works, making claims like the fact that Evolution needing something like nuclear fusion to explain longevity of stars, and nuclear fusion existing, must then mean Evolution is real.
According to the Scientific Method (which I obviously must not understand) an honest researcher would posit an hypothesis (which ideally should be falsifiable, unlike Evolution, or Creation for that matter) and then should rather try to prove that hypothesis false. That's what I do at my SE job. If you are unable to prove a falsifiable hypothesis as false, chances are you're right.
You see, because Evolution and Creation are not falsifiable, they need a certain amount of faith to be accepted. I acknowledge my faith in God, and I acknowledge that I cannot scientifically and undeniable prove the existence of God or Creation through purely empirical methods. That's actually a necessary aspect of it. I do, however, see a lot of evidence which points me to that way, and it points me to that way because of where (or rather, on who) my faith is placed.
You, like it or not, do have faith too, but it is placed in a different set of persons and scriptures. You have faith in Modern Science. It's a faith, a 'trust' if you will, you choose to risk having in a lot of data that, by the way, you cannot possibly have had the chance to validate personally.
I invite you to honestly reflect on that.
This will most likely be my last response because at this point I am not sure this conversation is constructive at all.
Are you arguing that religious people are scientifically ignorant?
Such religious people like Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, René Descartes, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître?
Our times are like they are in part thanks to their work.
Yes, there is much more knowledge at least content-wise nowadays than then. Does that make their contributions ignorant, or invalid? Remove what they did in their day, what are we left with?
no. I don't really understand what your point is. Are you trying to argue:
> They were Christian, thus you can be a scientific genius in your time and still Christian.
? You have to keep in mind, these people were scientific geniuses in a time where people had recently established that the Earth orbited the Sun. The first periodic table wasn't compiled until 1869, hundreds of years later. Given they had no alternative explanation, is it any wonder they were content with answers from religion? I'm not sure you realize this, but the whole separation of religion and science is a recent phenomenon. They used to be the same thing, just explanations for how the world worked. It was only when empirical evidence and scientific theories started explaining the world better than "the gods" that religion began claiming a separate sphere of influence.
So you're suggesting that religious people who home school have some sort of intrinsic characteristic that causes them to raise scientifically ignorant people? It just seems a bit far-fetched to me for someone who claims to be pro-science, especially given the number of respected religious scientists in the world.
"So you're suggesting that religious people who home school have some sort of intrinsic characteristic that causes them to raise scientifically ignorant people?"
Not intrinsic but very highly correlated with WHY they are home-schooling in the first place.
I'm not sure you understood my comment (despite quoting it). Otherwise, why would you assume any religious person who is home-schooling is automatically an Evangelical young Earth creationist? What about Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or practically any other religious person who home schools?
Your thesis seems to be that religious people are anti-science, which is a very outdated and frankly wrong stereotype to be pushing in 2024.
Do you think there are many religious parents who choose homeschooling because it lets them reinforce their worldview? GP says he was raised in such a household, I have friends who were homeschooled for that reason. There are probably many religious people who just find public schools uncouth, but I think there are more who homeschool primarily for easier indoctrination. I don't think GP is automatically assuming anything about individuals, they're just pointing out that a significant fraction of the homeschooling population will come from Evangelical Young Earth Creationists.
Based on your comment, I would assume you are religious. Quite frankly, religious doctrines are anti-science, or more accurately anti-epistemology. The Young Earth Creationists are a dim example of this, but even your generic Christian believes in lichs based on two-thousand-year-old hearsay. You say this
> is a very outdated and frankly wrong stereotype
but why? It seems more true than any religion. I think you could make an argument that it's impossible to convince people they're wrong, so to avoid fighting you should avoid making such comments, but that's empirically not true.
I was being absolute in my language because I was trying to understand the extent of GP's views on this subject. Sure, it's entirely possible that it didn't translate across and that we're talking about a "significant fraction" of religious people raising scientifically ignorant kids. Even then, it's almost impossible to prove because we're not operating with a well-defined meaning for "scientifically ignorant."
However, you've now moved the goalpost by stating that "religious doctrines" are anti-science. That wasn't the original argument. We're talking about whether or not religious people, who homeschool, will necessarily produce scientifically ignorant children.
Nonetheless, the more I think about this, the more the conversation is pointless because we'd spend an eternity working out what scientifically ignorant looks like. A person may agree with 80% of the scientific theories in the world and disagree on 20% and someone might say that makes them "scientifically ignorant." Which I find amusing, considering the amount of fraud going on in modern scientific journals.
I want to make it clear that the main issue is anti-epistemology. Trusting authority figures on "the science" isn't much different than trusting authority figures on "the gods", but there is a big difference between how the two schools of thought investigate new ideas. Religions take their axioms as inviolable, while science usually treats them as convenient beliefs until better ones come along.
I'm less worried about people being scientifically ignorant than people who lack the ability to think through ideas (specifically, most religions have built-in thought-stoppers such as "doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith"). For example, Socrates was a great thinker, and even though he was terribly ignorant by today's standards, I wouldn't be worried if our society was composed of people like him. I am worried about people who have literally been indoctrinated out of the capacity for reason.
Well, regarding that concern, we are in total agreement. However, I have many religious friends, and none of them have demonstrated being indoctrinated out of a capacity to reason (and yes, a few were homeschooled).
I'm not suggesting these individuals do not exist, but I find it very troubling to make blanket statements like the GP's. As I said, it's a stereotype I often see on HN, and I think it's very distasteful as it eliminates an entire group of people from the conversation because "they can't reason."
" Otherwise, why would you assume any religious person who is home-schooling is automatically an Evangelical young Earth creationist?"
Because in the US this is largely true. And young earth creationists are most empathically anti-science. I know because that is how I was raised and I have rejected all of that nonsense.
To be fair most high school graduates might recite the “right scientific facts” while having no basis for supporting them.
The earth is 4 billion years old. Survival of the fittest drives evolution. Why? How do you know?
Basically just another form of indoctrination. Children are not taught science so much as science appreciation.
Under what circumstances would it matter? As long as people believe the earth is older than around 3,000 years they are going to have more of a problem with general background ignorance than their misconceptions about that specific fact.
If a group of people believing a random untrue fact is a threat, there are a vast number of threats out there. Far more than the school system can possibly deal with. Misidentifying the age of the earth is harmless compared to things like economic misconceptions and there aren't many school systems making a credible effort to correct those.
The neat thing about science is that all the explanations have to fit together. The explanation for why the sun shines so bright for so long can't contradict the explanation for why birds can fly. When you reject an explanation as fundamental as evolution and the ages of the earth you really put yourself at a disadvantage in understanding many other things.
I actually had a young earth creationist say that the sun doesn't use fusion and thus its lifespan is more in line with the creationist worldview and I responded with neutrinos emitted from the fusion reactions in the sun.
A few weeks ago while giving a talk to some business school students, I was shocked to find most of the students and children of the faculty were homeschooled for K-12. This was a Baptist-affiliated university. I really had no clue this was so prevalent amongst evangelicals.
Schools shouldn't teach neither evolution, nor creationism, nor any other origin story. Because it is something that doesn't matter at all – knowledge without value.
Worse is that the majority pupils around the world will be taught both the Abrahamic creation story, the origin of man according to evolution, and usually a third or even fourth creation story from local pre-Abrahamic mythology. In the same school and from the same teacher. Talk about confusion of the highest order!
There is another issue. Kids in the first group can get an incredible academic intellectual education, AND be emotionally and socially stunted. I have directly observed this, unfortunately. It also happens in very liberal, high-end, private schools.
I've known people who were going to some of the top private schools in the U.S. who were still paying for weekend math classes because the schools weren't reaching them at their level.
Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students, and they're fine with them not learning anything in the class as long as as the teachers are hitting their goals. I imagine the same attitude is harming the other students as well, but it's especially easier to see with high performing students where their needs are often openly ignored.
It’s easier to see with kids who have stronger behavioral or learning needs.
I was a 3rd grade teachers aide and I saw the distinction first hand. A gifted child was given advanced textbooks and space to work at his own pace. The teacher didn’t really teach much, but the child was learning.
Conversely there was another kid who just got headphones to watch videos in the back of the room. I guess learn st his own pace, except the videos didn’t actually seem educational to me. I think it was mostly just done to keep him preoccupied.
>Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students
If you really believe this, then sue your school district. In my area, there was a district where parents believed high performers were not getting the necessary resources and through a combination of legal pressure and partnership with the school district, made it a priority in the same way that district had prioritized education for other specialized needs. Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
If you really believe this, then sue your school district.
AIUI, California school districts are under no obligation to meet kids where they're at, i.e. if a kid is ahead they don't have to be offered differentiated content or acceleration.
> Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
It's worth discussing the administrators and the budget (though our budget is much higher than the national average), but why should we reflexively dismiss concerns about the teachers? There are advanced students who only get acknowledged as such when the teachers tell them "don't do that, we haven't learned it yet."
There's a large difference between trying to engage advanced students with limited resources, and not trying to engage or even acknowledge advanced students at all.
Yes, and... In states where property taxes fund schools, there are basically two ways to pay for a good school: a) go to a private school, b) live in a school zone with high real estate values. At various points my wife and I calculated that 8 years at ~25k/yr tuition would work out to about the same as the ~200k house price delta we'd have to pay to move to a better school zone.
And I suppose option #3 is rationing, which is how some schools do it (our daughter is in a gifted academy where admission is limited via lottery.)
>In states where property taxes fund schools, ... b) live in a school zone with high real estate values
Here's some tangential anecdata.
I'm in Oregon, the county I live in pays for the local schools through property taxes. More than half of the tax goes to the schools if I recall.
Anyway, that's not the fun part. The fun part is one of the schools needs(wants?) a new roof. Sounds reasonable, here are the unreasonable parts: They want to raise funds with additional taxes, because they refuse to budget and earmark money for it. They also said they need(want?) several million dollars to do it. The taxes would also be used by the county to buy school-issued bonds from the school to fund the new roof, rather than directly using the tax dollars.
Unsurprisingly, the county measure to introduce that new tax failed during the election in November with a resounding laugh.
The entire way our schools are operated begs some very hard questions.
Our local schools, like many around the country, spooled up new permanent programs in response to the influx of COVID funding which they always knew to be temporary.
Now that the funding has gone away, they say they have a funding crisis, and will have to cut other things unless they can get the state to "adequately fund" them.
What you’re describing is the completely normal way of funding capital projects… they presumably need to fund the improvements at once (the roofing contractors aren’t going to be paid over the next 15 years) and tax payers won’t want a huge spike in taxes so the district will sell bonds with a ~15 year horizon, taxpayers can have slightly higher taxes for 15 years, and the funds are available for improvements on day one.
You seem to be under the impression that the school district has enough extra funding that they could just put tens of millions of dollars aside and complete the improvements as they come up, but can you imagine the shrieking that would erupt if they had a school board meeting and disclosed a capital improvement fund with millions of dollars in it? People would demand that their taxes be lowered post haste since it’s clear the schools don’t need all the money they’re being given.
Something like a new roof is an expense known literally years in advance. You know when something will be due for repair or replacement due to reaching the end of design and/or useful life. The proper way to handle that kind of expense is to set aside some money every year in the budget toward an earmarked fund until you have enough when time comes to buy a new roof.
So no, I (and clearly most of the voters) heartily rejected the new tax proposal. Fiscal discipline before any more or new taxes.
Also: There is no reasonable, commonly understandable way a new roof costs several million dollars. Forget where the money could come from, the demand itself is questionable. As a taxpayer I want to see the school's entire fiscal records, including data that might not be public, if they want that kind of money for what should be a regular maintenance job.
So basically you think taxes should have been set higher a long time ago so they would have a yearly surplus that could have been saved up to pay for a new roof?
I don't see why this is preferable to lower taxes that just cover operations and short term maintenance, with separate bond issues to play for things like new roofs which are expensive but only come up ever 20 to 30 years.
There is quite a bit of variability in how long a roof lasts, because it can be greatly affected by weather and climate and accidents. With the "save for it out of a surplus" approach you'd need enough surplus so that you'll be ready if it turns out your current roof needs replacing on the low side of the roof lifetime range.
But then what happens when you reach that and the roof turns out to actually still be fine? Do you just keep adding each years surplus to the roof fund? I bet taxpayers wouldn't like that. They'd want taxes to be lowered to get rid of the surplus.
But then when you do replace the roof you'd have to raise taxes back to what they were to start building the fund for the next roof. So you still end up with the pattern being higher taxes for several years after a roof is installed and then lower taxes from then until it is time for the next new roof.
That's the same pattern you end up with under the "use a bond issue to pay for a roof when needed" approach.
>So basically you think taxes should have been set higher a long time ago so they would have a yearly surplus that could have been saved up to pay for a new roof?
Yes.
Simply put: If you can't or won't budget+save for a known future expense, I'm not giving you money to pay for it when it comes knocking.
>But then what happens when you reach that and the roof turns out to actually still be fine?
Save what's in there for when the roof really hits end of usable life and either: A) Keep adding to the fund if it's justifiable, or B) Remove the line item from the budget and reduce or reallocate the budget accordingly.
We're not talking about RNGesus throwing down a randomass thunderbolt at the school and blasting a randomass hole through it on a randomass Thursday. We know reasonably when the roof will need replacing for an absolute fact, and at least a ballpark estimate how much it will cost.
Fiscal discipline goes a long way to convincing me to pay (more) taxes.
Lol never worked construction for government gigs? I was once hired on as a laborer for a city government funded arts building. The construction boss had to buy a very expensive and gawdy table from the mayor's kids. The government was paying themselves. It's likely 30% roof and 70% old boys network of hiring select people for favors.
I'm quite aware what the several million buckeroos are actually "needed" for, and I'm all the more vindicated in telling the school and county to get fucking bent.
Unfortunate that kids have to indirectly get caught in the crossfire, but such is life.
I did the same math comparing portland with suburb schools (around portland and seattle) and came to the same conclusion. But one other thought is when the money goes to the mortgage, you get to keep the wealth after (assuming you sell to downsize at some point).
More money in the mortgage principal you theoretically keep when you later downsize housing, but you also will probably spend a good bit more in taxes as well.
Yes, good to do the calculation properly before making the decision if its motivated primarily by finances; sometimes the outcome can be surprising. Ironically speaking specifically about Portland, you'll pay _less_ in taxes moving to e.g. Washington schools in addition to getting better schools. But I think this is likely a special case.
IME private schools also tend to be in more expensive areas, so you will either still have to pay more for housing, or spend a lot of time and transportation costs to get between home and school. Plus friends from school will live further away.
And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district.
>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English.
This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that we don't need to get our kids proficient in English (it is the lingua franca after all), but there's more here than meets the eye. In my area we are headed toward universal bilingual education, which I see as only a good thing. That means that it may take longer to reach full proficiency, but the overall outcome is more capable and prepared students.
I don’t want my kid in a classroom where everything has to be repeated in Spanish. It’s already this way for school meetings and it slows information sharing down to a crawl.
If there was mandatory English and Spanish in elementary school classrooms I would consider home schooling.
Outside of certain fields (skilled trades primarily) my children will not need to be proficient in Spanish to be successful in the United States. It’s a nice to have and should not slow down everything else.
The teachers in this school don't speak Spanish. The Spanish speaking children are struggling, and the rest of the kids cannot proceed at the same rate.
I'm not pretending to have solutions, and I'm certainly empathetic for all involved. Just stating the reality that this is a suboptimal learning environment.
this is the experience i see at our local schools. english as first language kids are bored and not challenged. the class is moving slower because half the kids are only learning english for the first time at school. “modern” progress ideology is to not separate the students by ability anymore and there’s less accelerated tracks
Perhaps you shouldn't have a knee jerk reaction of getting yourself irritated then. The GP clearly said 1/4 students don't speak English, not 1/4 students speak one more language besides English.
My kid is in a program where they spend half the day, and learn half the subjects, in a language that most of the students didn’t initially speak at all. They pick it up and do quite well.
I think you missed the point of the parent, which is that ~1/4 of the students are dead weight at the cost of the rest of the class. It isn't "misguided" if their experience is different than yours.
If your outcome is students that are more capable at languages but less capable in virtually every other subject, is the result really "more capable and prepared students"? I'm not opposed to bilingualism but you're lying to yourself if you think this comes at zero cost to at least some students.
for kids in early development, their skill level in all the other subjects later will be essentially determined by their linguistic ability. math is a language. there is research that shows benefit to bilingual programs, but there has to more structure than just dumping esl kids in there with everyone else.
Forgive me, but with machine translation becoming nearly a solved problem — why would kids spend years of their lives learning new languages anymore? By the time they grow up, won't that be a rather useless skill — except perhaps in very nuanced contract negotiations?
This seems to reflect a lot of what I hear about as well. Everything is too entrenched from a decision making standpoint for any one person to make a difference in reforms.
A free market fixes anything where people have the ability to "vote with their wallet" and simply stop paying for services which aren't meeting expectations when they find another that does. Things like employer sponsored health insurance are insulated from you choosing a different option for yourself and we get the situation that we currently have because of it.
Education is the same way but the only ways to vote with your wallet are...
1. Buy a house zoned for the school that you want.
2. Pay for private school.
3. Home school.
4. In some areas, school choice where you can choose from another of the available public options may be viable too.
The only long term solution here that has potential to fix things legislatively is a true school voucher program that would let you take the tax money assigned for your kids education and put it into whatever option you believed was actually best for their education.
This _should_ lead to a start-up like small business ecosystem with lots of small Montessori style schools especially for younger kids. Most likely a "neighborhood schools" model would pop up and parents would end up walking their kids to school again, even in suburban areas.
Most likely you would still see bigger options for high school still as teenagers crave more socialization. Sports would likely revolve more around communities than individual schools too.
You'd of course see some specialties. Schools advertising why they were the best option for your kids and then having to prove it in order to keep them. Yes, there would definitely be religious schools as there already are now.
My guess is that a lot of the current home school co-ops that are popular in my area would simply become suddenly funded because the parents involved as pretty happy with the model. I had a lot of biases against home schooling until I saw how these co-ops work and it's really effective. Basically just like a normal school small school with parents teaching different lessons on different days. Each parent's commitment is a half day a week to teach and they still do school plays, etc.
Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service.
We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively failing to teach kids for those few years. Meanwhile the public schools which can't be choosy will end up with fewer resources and have worse outcomes for the kids who have parents who can't afford private transportation to the few nicer, choosier voucher schools.
Being able to read the Bible would be a big improvement on say the Baltimore school system, which spends $22,500 per year per student: https://www.city-journal.org/article/are-baltimore-students-... (“According to the 2022 NAEP test, only 10 percent of fourth-graders and 15 percent of eighth-graders in Baltimore’s public schools are proficient in reading.”)
Literally, madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran would be an upgrade.
Those numbers do not mean what you seem to think. 1st, proficiency on that test is a pretty high bar. There are kids making perfectly adequate progress who don’t score proficient. Second, average per-pupil costs are meaningless. Baltimore city pays for two of my kids’ educations. One costs the city about $8k (the money that a school gets for a kid with no extra needs). The other costs well over $100k, due to significant disabilities. Baltimore has a disproportionate number of kids with significant needs of some sort, including learning disabilities, extreme family poverty, and ESL learners. Those kids need extra resources. A voucher system isn’t going to change that.
Those numbers are actually painting a rosier picture of what is actually happening in Baltimore and other cities. In 23 out of 150 school, zero students - none! - were proficient in math. Not a single student. There is simply no way to put lipstick on that pig.
>The Maryland State Department of Education recently released the 2022 state test results known as MCAP, Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program.
>Baltimore City’s math scores were the lowest in the state. Just 7% of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, which means 93% could not do math at grade level.
>But that’s not all. WBFF combed through the scores at all 150 City Schools where the state math test was given. In 23 Baltimore City schools, there were zero students who tested proficient in math.
In the other 127 schools, what percentage of students were proficient in math? How about other schools given the same test? It's hard to draw conclusions without context as to what an average or above average school scores in these tests.
Not saying they are useless but standardized tests only work for kids who take them seriously.
I recall taking these as a kid, and there were kids who would just fill in the bubbles. They would not even read the questions. They thought it was funny.
So when we have anecdotes, we get told to look at the stats for objective facts. Alternatively, when we do have stats, we get told "no those numbers do not mean what you think they mean" as a way to dismiss the abysmal numbers. So which is it.
Let's face it, we all know it, just some of us are too scared to say it publicly. In large urban areas in America, there is a (large / huge / significant) portion of the school population that is illiterate, speaks non-functional english in the form of black-culture slang, the rest don't even speak english in an english-speaking country, and practically none of them are going to be functional adults that don't require assistance and handouts to survive.
I tend to see big per student spending in public schools as suggestive that they've been loaded up with a disproportionate share of the kids with IEPs.
>madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran
I thought they were just teaching the sounds of the Quran. Like the Pakistani kids don't know any Arabic, and they don't learn to read or understand Arabic. They just memorize and recite the Arabic sounds of the Quran that they've been taught.
I can believe that they don't actually teach the grammar of Arabic or how to speak or write it, but they don't even translate the meaning of the verses to Urdu (or whatever the local language is)?
I'm not an expert in this area at all. But I was under the impression that for some of these schools, that is the case. My understanding is that some (many?/most?) Muslims believe that the Quran was a direct revelation from Allah in Arabic, and so translations are somewhat suspect, risking incorrect interpretations from humans.
I know that Muslims believe that translations of the Quran are of a lesser status, but I didn’t think that would extend to not even explaining their meaning to the students.
They usually do teach you to read Arabic, which is mostly the same script as Urdu. But you don't understand what you're reading which doesn't really make it any better.
Why would it give people worse education? Besides who are you or any of us to decide what is and isnt a good education for someone elses kids? It's not your job to police ideas.
Are you really arguing schools getting taxpayer money to teach kids humans walked with dinosaurs and all modern biology is a lie a good educational outcome?
Do you really not see how that's a bad outcome?
Do you not see that removing the funding from the regular public schools to go to teach that nonsense will lead to worse outcomes for those kids who can't leave those regular public schools?
Sure, maybe some students will potentially have some better outcomes if they manage to go to a good private charter school with their voucher that happens to be a decent one. For everyone else it's a worse outcome, unless you think it's a good thing to teach every animal alive today are direct descendants of the ark that was just a few thousand years ago.
Also, kiss special education funding goodbye. It won't be profitable to handle these students. They'll be trapped in those even more underfunded public schools. Hooray, great outcomes!
But those kids who are "being left behind" are good to have vouchers too. You don't think there will be small schools who want to take them?
I had a bunch of random teachers teach really dumb stuff while I was in public school. I don't believe those things, because I had parents who were involved in my education. It's never a good idea to leave your kids education to the whims of someone else.
Public school doesn't have some magic monopoly on good ideas. And private/voucher schools aren't going to have a monopoly on bad ones.
Why would the kids not be able to leave public schools? They will all have vouchers?
> You don't think there will be small schools who want to take them?
Spending a second of logic on it and thinking critically, there won't. Why would a school empowered to be choosy and subject to profit motivations choose the pricier students to specialize that reduce their rankings?
And why do you think a flood of schools arguing germ theory is a lie be a public good?
I went to religious private school and too had teachers who taught some bullshit things. Dinosaurs were fakes buried in the soil by the devil to test believers. Evolution is a lie by the government. And yet by personal experience I'm more learned than the average public school peer I know. I'm a somewhat special person though; I know many in my class that still believe without question. It's not a good thing for society overall to have such "knowledge".
As for why kids wouldn't be able to leave the public schools, some schools will be required to provide transportation. Others won't. Some will be able to be choosy, some won't. You see where this goes? Those schools which are choosey and don't provide transportation will end up selecting the most well off while those unable to be choosy and/or forced to provide transportation will be forced to shoulder those who aren't good performers who don't get into the choosy schools with a transit scholarship.
Ok, so… you went to some self-described example a school you are complaining about, turned out great, and are upset that kids might not keep going to known-failing schools?
Maybe… there is more to school than facts? Maybe it’s about order and discipline and shared values too?
> Maybe… there is more to school than facts? Maybe it’s about order and discipline and shared values too?
Maybe status-quo bias is so powerful that people will see an institution that fails at literally everything it tries to do and instead of concluding that it's a failing institution they will pick some other random thing and decide the institution must actually be about that, because the idea that the institution is actually pointless is too horrible to contemplate.
> I went to religious private school and too had teachers who taught some bullshit things... And yet by personal experience I'm more learned than the average public school peer I know.
Should that not give you pause about the general quality of the schools you're defending? Do you not see where parents might see you in fundie school learning about how man rode the dinosaurs alongside a public school kid that somehow knows even less than you about history or biology, and think "hmm maybe I'd like to find something else"?
> Should that not give you pause about the general quality of the schools you're defending?
No, because I've seen the average of the extremist schools which will grow with the voucher program and they're far worse than the negatives I experienced. Education like Eve gives Adam two apples, how many apples does Adam have; it doesn't matter Jesus will come soon here's another chapter of the KJV.
Except there's no reason to believe extremist schools should grow significantly. Most people aren't extremists (pretty much by definition). In fact, good schools are a usual top tier concern when looking at housing. Your worry about fly-by-night schools extracting profits and fleeing is also not particularly hard to solve: hold them liable for damages/a return of n years of voucher funds if the school fails to meet standards and require them to carry insurance or post a bond to prove they can meet their liability. High performing schools or new schools associated to people/organizations with a previous success record will have cheap premiums. Dodgy schools will have expensive premiums or will be uninsurable. Your worry about special ed is also not that complex: give higher funds for those kids to offset their higher cost.
> Are you really arguing schools getting taxpayer money to teach kids humans walked with dinosaurs and all modern biology is a lie a good educational outcome?
I'll say yes. Most people I've seen who have gone through that type of schooling are good members of society. They work jobs, they pay taxes, they have friends, they often go on to higher education, they raise families, and they may be happier than the average person. The outcome is perfectly fine.
You are ignoring the externalities. We end up with an ignorant society that ultimately harms all of us. I hate to use a movie trope here, but we're barely a step above Idiocracy when it comes to the ability of the average American to function and make decisions. This ultimately becomes self destructive.
87% of kids attend public k-12, and secular and Catholic schools together make up the majority of private, so if we're barely a step above Idiocracy, it seems a bit silly to point at the "man rode the dinosaurs" people.
I went to a young earth creationist Christian school and it messed me up. Most of us had a hard time adjusting to life outside the Evangelical Christian bubble. It's really hard to connect to others when your identity is tied up in believing a lot of outlandish things and it's hard to love yourself because you're given a long list of crazy rules to follow. I was told that kissing someone before I was married would taint my soul and whoever I married would be disgusted by me if I did so. Most people I've kept in touch with regret going to that school and every queer person I know has been absolutely traumatized by the experience. I'm happy, and by your criteria, a good member of society but that was despite my school. It took a lot of therapy, personal growth, and finding a community of people who actually care about me to be happy.
Catholics aren't generally young-Earth creationists, and overall the Church argues the age of the earth is a scientific not a religious question.
I totally agree there are many religious schools which are extremely high quality. Despite a few strange views at the school I went to, the general quality of education was quite high. However, I refuse to ignore the many other examples of schools which are not high quality. They should be called out, and there's no way I want my tax dollars going to teach their nonsense.
The thing is - the average school is terrible. NAEP scores show less than 25% reach "basic" proficiency in math, and reading is even worse.
I can't find any comparable stats on just religious schools, but I strongly suspect they are, on average, performing substantially better than non-religious schools. The reasons for that are more to do with the students than the schools, but the exact reason is inconsequential - the point is that people are targeting them because of the religious aspect and not the quality of education.
The typical claim of evolution is illogical. Even if a religious school solely and exclusively taught creationism while not even paying lip service to the controversy (which few to none do), it's not at all like a child's education would be permanently crippled. As the most important things learned in basic education are not facts, but skills - reading, writing, and arithmetic in particular.
A school which can be choosy in admissions will likely have students with better proficiencies. It's easy to have only top scoring students when you can kick out the bottom scoring ones.
> the point is that people are targeting them because of the religious aspect and not the quality of education
This is the point I'm making. Many people aren't going to end up choosing the school because of the quality of the education, they'll be choosing it because it aligns with their world view. That germ theory is a lie, the Earth is 5,000 years old, scientists are liars out to eliminate Christ from society, and that the only things you need to know is what is in the Bible.
Let's assume what you're saying is true, though I'm sure you realize you're being rather hyperbolic, at a minimum.
I think the purpose of school is to teach the fundamentals - reading, writing and arithmetic in particular.
I don't really care what worldview a school endorses so long as they are completely transparent on it.
Young Earth theory and creationism is one side of a coin - 80 genders, intersectionalism, and critical theory is the other.
If a parent is down with these worldviews, I see no problem so long as the school is excelling at their primary educational responsibilities, and also making their ideological motives transparent to parents.
Or private equity owned schools. Imagine how bad product they could effectively deliver. The would not even teach humans walking with dinosaurs... As they would do bare minimum of teaching anything at all...
Why would parents send their children to those schools? Never mind who owns them; I would expect the kind of hypothetical schools you’re describing to go bankrupt quickly. Private equity is not in the business of losing money in predictable ways.
Same reason parents send their kids to public schools: because the price is right. Since we're importing legions of indentured servants, wages aren't rising, and parents have to make tough decisions in order to pay for basic necessities.
A thriving education system is an indicator of a prosperous society, not a cause.
Schools are a state and local matter. So just because you might be frustrated with the government in your area ain't my effing problem. To chastise all public schools is a false narrative.
Two, then you wouldn’t be opposed to eliminating the dept of education then, right? I hope Trump follows through on his promise you seem to agree with.
Come on, be serious. In a huge country with 50M students attending primary/secondary school you can always dredge up a few horror stories but those are far from the typical case. On the scale of ways that schools damage kids, teaching them the unscientific mythology of certain Christian sects is hardly the worst. The Catholic church, which is one of the largest private school operators, has no official position on paleontology or evolution through natural selection.
I am serious. If you're thinking most of the families are chomping at the bit to repurpose tax dollars to Catholic schools you've clearly never interviewed the average homeschool family South of the Mason-Dixon. They don't even think Catholics are Christian; many would align a priest with Satan!
Most families I know who currently home school do so so to avoid vaccine requirements because germ theory/biology is a lie or because they're worried their kids will be exposed to the idea of the fossil record or that gay people exist in the world or put thoughts like dinosaurs died before humans into kids heads.
You're delusional if you think of these aren't major homeschooling points in the US. Willingly holding your nose to ignore the extreme stench of the anti-intellectualism the rest of the movement massively embodies.
This will be the outcome in an extreme majority of school districts. If anything, this recent election shows fundies vote. To them it's even more than life or death, it's eternal death to miss voting.
This isn't pure statistics though. This dataset is massively biased. And out performed on what, that 2+2=4 or that 2+2=Who know what except that God gives us our provision despite what our eyes see and logic tells us
Even if there were more ways to "vote with your wallet" is abundantly clear that a lot of parents, respectively, (a) couldn't care less anyway, and (b) can't actually tell a good charter or voucher school from a bad one.
When the purpose of schooling is ensuring a civic floor amongst citizens the effectiveness of things like the home school co-ops mentioned can't come at the expense of population at large unless we wish to surrender the republican form of government for something else.
You need to contrast suggested ideas to the current systems, not an idealized standard that the current system is nowhere near achieving.
For instance NAEP scores consistently demonstrate only about 25% of students achieve "basic" proficiency in math, reading is even worse. Its going to be difficult to do worse.
And I mean that very literally - some percent of people would become competent in e.g. basic math with 0 public education due to family or personal interests. I can't imagine it's "that" far from 25%.
Nothing magical about it. It’s pure economics and rational decision making. The institutions we complain about in this country every day are completely insulated from it. Everything else survives or fails on its own merits.
Pure economics and rational decision making are the exact reasons for engaging in regulatory capture, bribery, and oligarchy.
Why on earth would democracy (or any other form of shared power) be a rational choice for you, from an economic standpoint, if you already are wealthy enough to neuter it to the point where nearly all profits and decision-making authority are allocated to you?
Dictatorship is the ultimate in rational decision-making for a rational self-interested actor. Philanthropy and benevolence are not rational for the wealthy and powerful.
Income inequality and regulatory capture are features of the free market, not bugs. They are baked in by design.
Most countries in the world "patch" those bugs by regulation that moves them away from being pure "free market" economies. Antitrust regulation is a well-known example of this.
I don’t know where you live, but kids (plural!) assaulting teachers like that would be very unusual. I have a lot of family and friends in elementary education and management. Stories like that are the kind of thing that get talked about for years if they happen, not something that happens enough to be referred to in the plural.
A family member who taught at a title 1 elementary schools encountered chair/desk throwing multiple times in the short time she was there. I think unfortunately YMMV greatly depending on the area where you live
Very expensive suburb of Seattle. I was shocked to hear this as well. Reported to me by my friend who is the school counselor and had to deal with these kids (plural) herself.
It’s good they had access to counseling and I hope she was able to help some of them. I don’t imagine most kids are born wanting to throw chairs at people. Something is going on at home.
The girl in the math class before me would beat the shit out of my desk like clockwork. She hated math, was violent, and very autistic, no apparent other issues nor even hate towards humans. Nothing could be done, just wait for the tantrum to end then take my seat.
Room destroyers are pretty common, but they usually have IEPs.
TBH there's no good choices for many - big mental health issues and trauma, no home or family support, and no real options: kids have to go somewhere, self contained classrooms are at capacity, there are worse kids in line to get put in facilities, and often you can't really do that unless parents push for it anyway.
Yeah, I know one kid that threw a chair in school. We use public education because I think it's good for kids to be independent at an early age. It can't be healthy to spend 16 years within bluetooth range of your parents at all times.
A slightly different perspective: schools are mass produced education. Mass produced in the sense that they are the lower cost in terms of person hours to produce an educated child. Like all mass produced products, it's better than 1/2 hearted solo attempts to do the same thing, but a parent that can afford to put a huge amount of time into it can do better job as lots of comments here attest.
If true, that also provides an explanation for the rise home schooling: more people can afford to do it.
I have observed that any two-tier system accentuates inequality, be it health, education, security, or anything. When one group pays to have a system better than a universally provided one, the differences between both tend to increase, as the incentive to keep the universal system only as a fall-back to the private one by investing less on it (or by receiving generous donations from the private sector) is tempting to politicians.
A former colleague of mine, who grew up in communist Yugoslavia, remembered how he cherished summer vacations when kids from different schools went together to state-operated summer camps. I thought this was an excellent way to build inter-group bonds between kids that would never have met in other circumstances, learning to work together in team-building and educational activities. It didn't turn out well for the country, or, at least, it wasn't sufficient to prevent the breakup and the disaster that happened because of it, but still seems like a good idea.
Over time, my opinion changed from a strong supporter of free market economics to more deliberate models. I would support banning homeschooling along private schools completely. If a country wants to build a society that sees itself as a group of individuals with equal rights and obligations, you need to start early.
Of course, this would never pass any legislative body in the US.
So we chose private school over home schooling, for both time reasons, educational reasons, and social reasons.
But the important thing is we choose to take our kids out of public school. The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year.
We did not like what we saw. A few teachers were really good. Many never bothered to show up, “class” was a note to do homework or something. Others were just plain terrible teachers who didn’t know their subjects well and couldn’t really teach.
More and more our district was also relying on computers and software to make tactically replace books and teachers, and not surprisingly that did not work so well.
Yes, remote learning and covid and all that was a shock to everyone, and all schools took a hit during that time. But this was a window directly into schools, and seeing how well yours did in the face of adversity.
The truth is, at least for our school district here in NJ in the US, schools suck in massive amounts of money, give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it.
There has also been the constant creep over the years to turn schools into social welfare systems. This is well intentioned, but in reality is just another bureaucratic money suck.
I could go on. But in short, home schooling and private schools both have risen in popularity because Covid revealed just how bad many public schools in the US have become.
> what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like
Well, you got to see what they were really like while they were in the midst of dealing with a traumatic global pandemic in their own personal lives while also trying to deal with an essential job that looked nothing like what they had trained for while trying to support a virtual classroom full of children who were also in the middle of a traumatic global pandemic.
Many others did not make it work just due to bad luck or timing.
But districts like ours completely failed at it because the entire leadership is incompetent and teachers never got the support they needed from the administration to make it work (including monitoring teachers to ensure they were actually working).
> give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it.
Seems like a bit of a non sequitur? If anything one could hope that a gym teacher would value play and movement over chaining kids to a desk all day?
In NJ, the School Superintendent is effectively the CEO of the district.
Many of them had advanced degrees in education, management, and finance. They control tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ours has a BA in health, was a gym teacher then an admin person, eventually a principal and then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring.
He has been a total disaster because he lacks leadership skills, does not understand finance and hides behind the hodgepodge of technical jargon that public education has become.
My old gym teacher also taught science because we just couldn't find another teacher, and was genuinely surprised to learn there were forms of matter smaller than atoms.
My health teacher was a "permanent substitute" situation where we just watched movies the whole semester and got A's.
One of my math teachers died and we just...never hired a replacement, so nobody learned anything that semester.
Bonus: my driver's education teacher was arrested for a DUI (but not terminated)
These situations were all in different schools in different US states, so the lack of quality control in admin that you describe definitely resonates.
My best history teacher was the gym teacher who was really hired as loophole because they couldn't hire a basketball coach which is what he really was.
Anyway, he didn't give a crap about teaching to the curriculum and he taught us how to think critically and read between the lines of history.
I know a large number of teachers who have been campaigning for years to eliminate all forms of teacher evaluations, with the claim that “you can’t measure what we do!”.
Which is utter horse shit, but it’s where we are today.
The result is that many schools don’t really track teacher performance, and as you indicate you can get wild inconsistencies.
The best parents can do (other than leaving) is to aggressively direct kids into the better teachers’ classrooms. We see that all the time - one class has kids who’s parents are “in the know” and gets the good teacher, the other class is where the kids get dumped who’s parents don’t complain. The district knows who is bad and who is not, but is afraid to anger the union, so anything short of actual violence by a teacher against a student won’t have any consequences.
Our school district local enrollment as a result has declined from around 900 kids to just 650 in just a few years as a result. The kids left are those too poor to go private or home school, those not lucky or connected enough to go to a “choice” school, and a small number of die hard loyalists reliving their glory days through their kids at the same school they went to.
> but is afraid to anger the union, so anything short of actual violence by a teacher against a student won’t have any consequences
Everyone should watch the fantastic documentary "Waiting for Superman" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/) that highlighted just how problematic the teacher's unions have become and how much of an impediment to education they are.
Even in cases of gross negligence (showing up to school drunk, completely failing to teach, etc) bad teachers just get bounced to another school. Teachers who physically assault or sexually abuse a student might remain on the payroll for years while the bureaucracy slowly reviews their case.
The unions have also prevented any form of incentivizing teachers to perform well or rewarding good teachers. In fact, the union leaders prevented the teachers from even voting on changes (that the majority of teachers wanted) that would have allowed good teachers to be rewarded and bad teachers to be removed from the classroom.
There are a lot of problems with education in America, but the teachers unions have to be right at the very top of the list.
Amusingly I had the exact inverse of this experience. My senior year I signed up for the AP Bio course, but we only got 22 students signed up out of the 25 required to allow the class to happen (a very stupid system in of itself). Because the class was canceled, and the very competent well educated biology teacher had a slot free in his schedule, he was forced into teaching the gym class (which I also had to take since I'd been avoiding PE for the last few years). He knew the situation, and after the first week handed me the advanced bio textbook after class one day, and then turned a blind eye to me sitting on the bleachers reading instead of running laps for the rest of the semester (dont come at me for physical fitness, I was a skateboarder and in better shape than 90% of the kids already).
"The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year."
This kind of myopyic outlook that conflates the then-traditional instruction period to the remote instruction paradigm greatly cheapens every other point of your argument.
None of the teaching staff that had to adapt to that period of time were trained to make that experience 1:1 for the prior expectations and to use that as a basis to judge their entire ability is petty as fuck.
GP mentioned they were totally incompetent in their subject areas. It doesn't matter what medium they are transferring information through if they have no information to transfer.
This is nonsensical advice. In San Francisco, the school board wants to delay learning algebra to 9th grade. I can't "improve" this place because it's not that the place just needs advice. It's because they have "experts" with "years of experience" that want to do different things. And I'm just a techie who thinks he knows everything.
No thanks. Not interested in spending years of my life arguing with morons who rejected the only gay guy applying to help because he was a White male (this isn't some right wing thing - it was real and explicitly the reason).
When people say "we don't need your help; we know what we're doing" then not helping is doing the right thing.
I had to rewrite my response a few time to remove all the curse words.
At least in NJ, you have no idea what you are talking about. Our school laws are completely broken. Just so you know I have spent about 300 hours a year for the past three years fighting with, dealing with, trying to improve our district.
How did you choose the private school? There are so many choices around us but it seems hard to figure out their quality without actually sending a child there, or having close connections. Wish there was a review forum of some sort.
We live in western central NJ so the options are pretty limited. There were only a handful to pick from, and there were roughly two price tiers: tier “A” was around $15,000 a year per student, tier “b” elite schools were $50,000 and up per student per year. Our choices were down to only three schools, one was out because it was all-boys, and we chose out of the other two based on meeting teachers and staff.
I can't really know nor do I care to speculate on why it's becoming fashionable. But I'm a successful, well adjusted, homeschooled child from when it wasn't fashionable. This comment stood out to me: "Opt out of interacting with average people."
And my immediate thought was: "I can't imagine a less effective or worse way teach kids how to deal with people, average or not, than to throw them into a pool of similarly untrained people and telling them to just "figure it out". Which is essentially what public school does. Teachers can't be expected to help 30+ children work through that. They don't distribute across the pool of students in a way that can be effective for that. Homeschooling I firmly believe can be a more effective way to get exposure and learn how to deal with other people than a public school.
Public schools are training grounds for poor social skills.
We all get better at a talent by practicing it. We make mistake. We watch others. We determine our own preferences for what we like/don't like. We learn, grow. Kids figure it out.
How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better? You wouldn't get same exposure to the buttload of social interaction and scenarios in a closed system like that.
Practice, with guidance is superior to practice without guidance. Homeschooling doesn't mean isolation in the average case. You get a lot of practice as a homeschooler. The primary difference is that your practice is both with other adults and children while supervised and also modeled directly to you in homeschooling by other adults while public school is primarily unsupervised and lacking in a modeled behavior to observe.
The number one thing people would comment to my parents about me was that I was so comfortable socially in adult conversations and environments. I wasn't even in high school yet. I had adult level social skills by age 12. I didn't learn how to interact with people from other kids who had no idea how to either. I learned it from my parents and practiced what I learned with both other children and also adults. I'm only anecdotal evidence but a number of studies have backed up my own experience. A few links I had on hand can be found here.
No offense, but the idea of having adult level social skills as a child is terrifying to me. Most of the people who I've encountered who describe themselves that way also talk about the burden of from a young age totally internalizing the idea of every interaction being a performance. Every interaction is a new opportunity to try and convince adults that you are worldly and smarter than other kids. That tends to mess you up. Of course, this is purely anecdotal.
"Adult-level social skills" for children was historically normal, and it's only in the past century that children are assumed to be incapable of speaking plainly and intelligently to adults, or vice versa.
You might want to do some looking into the "invention of childhood"; what we understand as "children, teenagers, young adults, adults" is a fairly modern way to look at "stages of development". In the distant past, children participated far more comfortably and fluently in adult society than they do today, when they're sequestered away.
It is very difficult to see any representations of this in the US, where most children are in school, so I'll point to examples in fiction: fictional novels or movies where the protagonist is taken confidently through an unfamiliar city by a child who seems to know every location, has a sleeping place, weapons, a method of finding money, and a network of friends. In these works of fiction, the child is almost always a semi-homeless "urchin"; but this is mostly because modern writers can't conceive of a child that capable without also assuming that the child's parents must not be involved in their life, because modern people equate "parenting and raising children" with "making sure children only ever do child-appropriate things".
My question to you: what do you think it would look like if two loving, attentive parents tried to raise a kid with the confidence and skills of those fictional street children, but also actually fed them and gave them a place to live?
It is very likely that the answer to that question is far closer to the way that children used to behave and live than the way that children are today.
I also recommend looking at old tests and study material (pre-1900, ideally pre-1800) for young children. Children can read, figure, write, and remember at a level far superior than they're assumed to be able to today, and that goes for adult socialization as well.
To be honest, I just saw a really phenomenal dark comedy routine about somebody who was adept at socializing with adults at 6 or 7 and I've been thinking a lot about that dynamic and the dark side of being a precocious kid. I wasn't that extreme, but I related to some of it, and then I ended up projecting that onto your description of home school kids. And yet, this guy wasn't home schooled. I think those are totally separate issues. Would be an interesting separate topic, though.
I went to a brutal and oppressive public school in a 3rd world country yet I was able to interact with the adults around the age of 11-12. I was always one step ahead of my 3 years older sister. I think a lot of this was I was jealous of her getting attention from thrme other adults and especially my parents from an early age. I self learned how to read and write when I was 4, exactly at the same period she was learning at school.
This resulted in quite a bit of psychological problems for me, since I always thought my peers are stupid. You start to isolate yourself, and this trying to impress adults changes form into trying to impress your boss etc.. My parents had no idea of course, so no use to blame them. But fir my own kids this is something I'm trying to keep an eye on. I think it is possible to distinguish what is genuine and what is for getting positive confirmation and attention. The best measure is the capability to entertain yourself. If a kid is able to not get bored when with adults without interaction they have a healthy amount of self confirmation.
So the show I saw is not yet available in a recorded format, but I recommend checking out Gary Gulman's comedy special The Great Depresh. And if they do ever record the live performance I saw, I really recommend you check that out. Somehow both funny and extremely enlightening, and right on topic with what you're saying.
You don't just stay home with your siblings. A major factor of how homeschooling works is homeschoolers have local organizations or co-ops where they do things together.
And, yes, this is just reinventing some aspects of the public school system in the private sphere. But that is because parents, rightly or wrongly, feel they have zero influence over how the public school works, so they just sideload their own version.
(I would say that the parents are right about having zero influence, as quite a lot of American public schools are so big and so bureaucratized that parents do not have a real voice without herculean effort.)
The big difference about that reinvention is that there are way more parents present in those environments than the typical public school variant. So both good behaviors to observe are more visible and also interventions are significantly more frequent.
It takes more effort to homeschool than farming it out to public schools, so you're naturally selecting for involved parents. To the detriment of public schools, it should be noted.
It also skews the perspectives of homeschool parents into thinking "this is the best system, why doesn't everybody do it?" The answer is, of course, to take the good aspects of each system and make the public school system more viable again, but there are too many entrenched interests on both sides for this to be easy.
There's also a variety of kids' ages at these events, so the younger can learn from the older (and parents can easily intervene if this isn't going well). And you know who your kids are interacting with: you know something about the families, or at least know someone who knows them, so the odds of malign influences are much lower.
I really take issue with the position that parents have zero influence. Our children attend a "mediocre" public school in our US city. We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results. I always go into it thinking that we are whiny parents talking to an overworked staff, and the results are incredible.
For anyone who is considering homeschooling but isn't sure, there is a real middle ground: actually engage with your huge staff at the public school who are hungry for parent involvement because it seems like the parents don't care and the kids are just there for the babysitting.
Public schools work great, but you do have to remain engaged and be ready to problem solve. It's like homeschooling but you get a whole publicly funded (somewhat overworked but enthusiastic) support staff to accomplish educational goals for your child.
Yes of course schools vary but if approach ANYONE with a combative attitude they are likely to fight back, even if you're on the same side. Approach with sympathy, open communication, and the occasional set of hands in the classroom, and you can get the best for your child.
I can attest to this exact same scenario with my children and their schools. I observed both types: the parents who immediately entered the school combative towards administration (not looking to collaborate on a solution, just shouting loudly to "fix it"), and parents who spent time engaging with administration towards a description of the problem and ideas for resolving them.
That being said, there are and were definitely limits to what public schools can do. They are resource strapped, procedurally constrained, often fighting their own political bureaucratic battles within the school districts, and even within the academic departments.
We ended up leaving the public school for those reasons, and could not be happier.
My observation was: public schools have become much like enterprises, and private schools tend to be more like startups. The public school has so much inertia and tends to have "guardrails" and policies to keep even bad administrations functioning, but at the cost of exceptionalism and performance. Private schools have less of this, and more direct accountability.
You absolutely can have a private school that doesn't educate better than a public school, but I'd argue at least one of two things happen:
1) the school fails to attract student, and closes.. or
2) the school focus shifts away from education to other priorities (e.g., social status, culture, or sports), relegating academics to a secondary role.
>We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results.
It would depend on what you're asking for. It depends on the school district/state, but anything that gets close to the curriculum isn't easy or simple to change.
For example, one of my kids who went to public school had to use this program (I forget the name) for algebra that the school paid for. You used a weird toolbar to input your equations that appeared to be some monstrous Javascript nightmare. It more or less worked, but it wasn't great. To my mind it would have been simpler to teach them LaTeX or something, but whatever.
As a parent, you can't go in and say "why don't you just let them write the answers on paper like everybody else did until 9 minutes ago?" The teachers loved this program, because it did all the teacher work for them. The school administration already paid for it, plus paying for the computers for the kids to use, plus the IT overhead to keep the computers running.
That's a fundamental structural problem that no parent can surmount. "What do you mean use a screwdriver? We paid for all these hammers!"
The incentives that drive public education are often orthogonal to actually teaching the public. It's not a mystery, any trough where money collects will get snouts rooting for some of it. The parents don't have much say in how all this money must be spent because they don't have any say about the money at all, other than moving to a different district or writing off what they pay in property taxes and paying again to do something else.
I think it isn’t that unusual for homeschooling parents to form groups, you can do an art class together (otherwise hard to afford), start up some recurring social events, that sort of thing.
K-12 school is sort of a weird social situation, right? You are mandated to be there (you can’t even quit or find a new job), your manager has the right/responsibility of in loco parentis, your co-workers can’t be fired and their only punishment for goofing off is that they might get nagged a bit, and your worst peers don’t care about that at all. I don’t think it is obviously good practice of grown up social skills. You can see the maladaptive behavior that sticks around after—office gossips, bullying, that sort of thing (I mean, that sort of behavior is present everywhere, but I’m pretty sure it is enhanced by the fact that these are strategies to win in the pressure cooker).
If you practice unproductive social interactions and unhealthy coping skills all day, you will get better at unproductive social interactions and unhealthy coping skills.
> How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better?
This is a very reductionist view of homeschooling.
While some folks certainly do have this experience when homeschooled, a well-designed home schooling experience will have an abundance of social interactions with non-family members.
Sports is an obvious one, but there are also many homeschool groups that engage in learning activities together.
Exactly. Which is why kids need to practice their social skills in environments that actually reflect how real-world societies functions, rather than being sequestered in an institution with utterly distorted, artificial social structure.
That actually sounds like a good way to teach kids how to deal with others. Just figure it out, in a safe environment with minimal consequences and some guard rails. I wouldn't expect a teacher to teach kids how to socialize, especially on an individual level, but rather to step in when necessary. Being in a big group of people you may not like is pretty much a description of life, and the goal is to learn to function and even thrive in that environment. I support home schooling too, but I don't think there's anything about it that naturally lends itself to learning this skill. Many homeschoolers manage it, but it takes extra work, whereas being in 'gen pop' teaches it as a side effect.
Except the literature from studies on the subject suggest that homeschoolers on average do slightly better than public schoolers on this specific metric. The data suggests public school has worse outcomes.
I didn't say that home schooling produced poor social skills, and in fact said something like the opposite. My point was that traditional schooling was a perfectly fine way to learn social skills, as a side effect of being forced to socialize. If home schooled kids and traditionally-schooled kids have somewhat similar social skills, and (as you say) teachers in public schools aren't teaching these skills directly, how do you suppose kids are learning them?
> in a safe environment with minimal consequences and some guard rails
The problem is that a public school, at least in the US, is /not/ a safe environment with minimal consequences, and it has effectively no guard rails. Your idea is a nice one, but it's not realistic, and reality is exactly why people are opting out of public schooling for their children.
The way kids learn to "deal with people" is by becoming more and more like them until they fit in. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the people in question.
The school I went to had, luckily, excellent teachers. One of them, not sure if as a coordinated effort or not, was big on letting the class decide things and helping us form the social structures needed for that - structuring discussions, votes, rules, and so on. I suspect it was a reaction to the dictatorship time requirement of studying an idealized version of Brazil's political organization.
There are definitely hero teachers and administrations in public schools. They aren't the norm though and it's a bit of a lottery whether your child will end up with one.
A first step is to properly fund public schools. Then one would need to better select teachers (which becomes an option if teaching pays better) and train them. Teachers need to be trained in teaching, not only their subject matters, and need to be kept updated.
There are a lot of schools that get funded quite well and perform very poorly. It matters how you spend that money. The data on this is hard to properly interpret too since higher income parents tend to live in higher income areas which means better funded schools and those parents also tend to be more involved in their childrens academic and social success than lower income so the correlated variables get confusing.
However I do agree that spending funds in ways that help a public school compete with private and/or homeschooling is a worthy goal. That means you need:
1. more teachers per student in the school. (More admin doesn't solve this. You need smaller class sizes). You'll never be able to afford the one-on-one ratio a homeschool family can achieve but you can certainly close the gap.
2. more focus on actually proven approaches to the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. (phonics, essay writing, literature analysis, and "old math") A lot of pseudo science has entered the class room over that last few decades.
3. fostering more parental involvement in their child's education. This is extremely difficult to improve but has the highest impact. One of the reasons homeschooling on average does better is because the parents are self selected for involvement.
4. holding kids to real standards and having consequences for not meeting those standards. Tricky to do politically but essential for kids to learn both social skills and academic skills.
This is another problem - school quality influences real estate valuation. If I support my local school and it gets better results, not only I can claim tax credits for donating to the school, but I also increased the value of my house. Or a house near a school I support.
Donations to support schools should always be equally divided among all schools, period, so that these donations can't create favored and disfavored regions. That public schooling should be both universal and uniform should be a given.
If you read something like Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, you realize that teachers didn't. In the middle+ class at least, the children's parents did that work by organizing specific extra-curriculars, such as dances, from a very young age. These ensured that the children learned manners, dated people of acceptable character or class, etc.
That social infra is simply gone today. Parents don't have much of an interest, or are erroneously(!) assuming that teachers are supposed to do it, or used to do it. We are less class focused* today, which may be good, but certainly less manners and etiquette focused as well.
* by that I mean like, if you are an American of German descent, you are not particularly worried if you child is dating an American of Irish descent, whereas you might have been in 1940. Similarly (and overlappingly) for Protestant/catholic etc etc. Not even what we typically think of as class today! We're so blind to a lot of that stuff now, we forget it existed, just like the other social infrastructure.
> That social infra is simply gone today. Parents don't have much of an interest, or are erroneously(!) assuming that teachers are supposed to do it, or used to do it.
You might be missing the fact that back in the day there often used to be one parent working and one parent staying at home. Nowadays both parents need at least one job. Wealth inequality at it again.
Personally, I have high functioning autism. I would do terrible at interpersonal relationships, but then get near perfect scores on all the tests.
Teachers would anticipate that I would be terrible and then when I got perfect scores on all the tests, they would be pissed off.
I think there are a lot of tech people that are neurodivergent and had terrible experiences in school and would love to avoid my child having that experience.
Also, I’m not super happy about the extreme views on race, sex and religion that are going through the school system. I would like the opportunity to teach a more moderate view. I feel like people who don’t have kids who make comments about this trully don’t understand many parents perspectives on this.
Also, when you are a parent, you find that you have to move to specific areas to get good schooling and homeschooling would allow you to live where you want to and not pay and go through the application for private school.
It’s interesting that everything in this article that’s anti-homeschool relies on the parents not doing something correctly, which I think most people just assume they correct for that. I’m not worried about abusing my own kids, because I’m not going to abuse them. Honestly, my mom was a teacher and she was anti-homeschool and many of the anti-homeschool bullet points were provided by the union and I think she just wanted to get full funding for the school and the state wouldn’t provide funding to the school when the homeschoolers didn’t show up and wasn’t really caught up in those arguments.
However, my wife is never going to homeschool our kids or allow me to do it, so it’s just not going to happen.
My son's district has a black superintendent and at least one black principal but otherwise black (and other) kids don't get to see the example of black teachers (and learn school is a "white thing you wouldn't understand" the same way that boys come to the conclusion that school is for girls when they don't see any male teachers -- the problem here is representation-ism that stops at the very top, if they do get a black teacher they get promoted out of the ranks immediately)
When my son was in middle school he was quite inspired by a curriculum unit on the Harlem Renaissance and liked the school's black principal.
Later on he felt the attitude about gender (man vs women as opposed to something else) was very oppressive and that it contributed to him and other students falling victim to incel ideology and sometimes body dysmorphia. Today he struggles to talk to girls not because he's afraid of being rejected but because he's afraid of being reported.
If support of trans folk is "Too far" for someone, they were already running towards fascism. There's nothing progressive about denying folks their gender identity, and to the extent that "Progressivism" is a force in America, it is better off without the Anti-trans contingent.
No it isn’t. The vast majority of progressive people don’t buy into any of the gender/trans discussion. It’s definitely not a core tenet of being a progressive, but a very vocal minority is definitely trying to make it so.
I disagree, and I find an even more vocal, even smaller group seems very invested in making sure people know who exactly we need to throw to the fascists to make them finally stop being fascists.
Hard agree with this. I've stopped calling myself progressive because it's so tainted by this bullshit. Now I do my best to draw a line between actual leftist views and this harmful faux-progressive nonsense whenever I talk politics with anyone.
My best friend in college was transsexual, knew who she was in childhood, couldn't be talked in or out of it. She was kicked out of the Air Force Academy which was my gain but our nation's loss. I was proud of my country when I heard this policy changed, not just for the individuals but because the US struggles to attract officers to match the quality of our enlisted warfighters.
I've cross-dressed at times (high heels, fishnets, all that) such as for Halloween and I also know the undercurrents of violence you can feel from ignorant people. Sometimes I bum around the house wearing a long skirt.
I was inclined to be supportive of the modern transgender movement when I first heard about it and when my exposure was through the media. It is their own speech that has alienated me from them.
Once I met people affected and after I joined Mastodon where I've had to add rules to completely block out their continuous hateful spew which frequently gets reposted by people who should know better. I'd be glad to hear "I'm so happy I found a new way to put on makeup that makes me feel like myself" or "I'm really inspired by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos" or "Thank Lynn Conway for that phone in your pocket".
I can't deal with large volumes of negativity from strangers and on leftie corners on the web people from that community are the worst. [1] Whether or not they should exist is beyond my pay grade but I don't want them in my feed at all.
For that matter I feel less safe and not more safe expressing non-conformant gender characteristics because: (1) so many people have gotten inflamed, and (2) I don't buy into the politics.
[1] I just plain couldn't stand the MAGA nuts on Twitter, never mind all the equally hateful people who spew hate against transgender people (who I suspect want people to spew hate at them to justify their world view as much as Benjamin Netanyahu likes Palestinian attacks that justify his world view.)
I'm sorry you experienced that, and that kind of hate has not been my experience - though that kind of negativity in other online cultures certainly has been.
Trans people behaving badly does not make me want them to cease existing, or make me feel less for their cause. "Trans people want hate spewn at them to justify their worldview" feels like a hilariously backwards belief outside of a few professional activists, who I am not particularly inclined in listening to in the first place.
> Their cause is to universally redefine "woman" to include men who desire to be women, and "man" to include women who want to be men.
This is a reductive view that presupposes gender as a pre-existing discernable static fact of a person's biology as opposed to an apparently extant human phenomena. The idea that they are the same is a profoundly simplistic view of the issue, one not supported by modern psychology or human archaeology, littered with happy societies full of folks we would now consider "gender non conforming". It's not a new cause, nor is it attempting to "redefine" anything.
> We can already see the effects and they're not good
People living authentically is great, actually. Respecting others and their preferences, also good. It genuinely doesn't hurt anyone. The effects to my life are roughly equivalent to my friend Phillip telling me he prefers Phil.
> harmful to women and girls in particular.
In very hypothetical, "just asking questions" ways that have yet to be borne out in any sensible reality. What has happened many times is cis and trans women being harassed for baseless, paranoid reasons. It's especially repugnant a defense when you consider that trans folk - trans women in particular!- are among the most vulnerable to attack and abuse.
If we were worried about harm to women and girls in a tangible, meaningful sense, we would be quick to punish actual perpetrators of verifiable assault than play feminist only when we find a more vulnerable throat to crush.
> This is a reductive view that presupposes gender as a pre-existing discernable static fact of a person's biology as opposed to an apparently extant human phenomena.
And yours is a subjective take that opposes this rather basic, verifiable fact.
It's like I can't win. If I behave too feminine as a man people give weird looks to me and mockingly refer to me as a woman. A significant portion of the society still does not think men should be very effeminate.
So I am like ok, sure, I don't care much about this gender ideology, but if society does not think I am a man, then I am a woman!
Then people are not happy again. They call me a man who just wants to become a woman.
It's pretty standard for middle schools to hold assemblies discussing sexual harassment and healthy relationships, but they don't always do a great job communicating those concepts.
Back when I was in middle school about a decade ago, the principal got up on stage with a police officer and explained that sexual harassment is when you talk to a girl and she feels uncomfortable. He then went on to assert that the school had zero tolerance for sexual harassment, describe various authorities to whom victims could report instances of sexual harassment, and implore students not to risk their future by engaging in sexual harassment.
If you weren't super confident in your ability to predict or control other people's feelings, probably your takeaway from that assembly was that talking to girls was a risky thing to do.
"Don't make people uncomfortable" and your takeaway is you shouldn't talk to them at all. I don't think the problem there lies with the sexual harassment narrative.
I was bullied in elementary school and graduated the same way Ender Wiggin did.
I was out two years and skipped three, started in the middle of freshman year.
I had no idea how I was going to find a mate. The world my parents grew up in, where my mom was introduced to my dad by his sister, was long gone. I knew I couldn't trust anything I saw on TV or in the movies. Adults, including my parents, were completely dismissive of my concerns. Might have made a difference if I had a sister, but she was born premature and I never saw her before she died.
I sat next to a beautiful girl in English who left me feeling entirely outclassed. [1] I came home crying from school about this every day for most of a year until I met the new physics teacher who let me hang out in the lab during study breaks, which gave me some meaning in my life and led me to get a PhD in the field. I still was afraid I'd wind up alone forever and went to a "tech" school which had an unfavorable gender ratio; I did find a girlfriend in my senior year, then was lonely and miserable in grad school. I found someone who was a friend of a friend and I've been involved in a love triangle ever since which he lost out in. My partner is a 100% reliable person from the same culturally Catholic background of myself (my parents did not involved me with the Church, she did all the things and has a positive orientation towards religion but doesn't take communion because she doesn't believe it literally.)
Boys today don't have it any easier. My immediate reaction is to be sympathetic towards "incels" but as an organized group they teach boys self-loathing which is primary to the 50% attraction-50% hate that they express towards women (hmmm... something a lot of people who are more or less healthy feel towards their parents because the conflicts that come out of being dependent on people)
[1] She was traumatized by her parents going through a nasty divorce. She teaches the Quechua language in Hawaii now. There's a photo of her next to a huge dog, no sign of any human relations. I probably did better at love than she did in the end.
Of course, a lot of activities carry risk; doesn't mean teenagers will completely abstain from them.
The missing piece here might be that, as a teenager, it's pretty easy to convince yourself that the main way girls will reject you is by expressing that they're uncomfortable. (I believe this is called "getting the ick" in modern slang; the old movies your parents like call it "get lost, creep".) So if you're afraid of rejection, it's plausible that you'd be afraid of the legal consequences of making someone uncomfortable more than the personal embarrassment or emotional pain of the actual rejection.
You might be being facetious and trying to imply that the political views taught in school are actually moderate, but I'm going to take the question literally anyway.
One example is the idea that a bio man should and must be called a woman if they declare themselves to be so. Regardless of whether or not you agree, it is an extreme viewpoint that has only just now become acceptable to believe in terms of history.
No one is learning about Critical Race Theory anywhere other than law school (or possibly undergraduate sociology classes that pre-law students would be likely to take). It's a heterodox thread in legal scholarship. Whatever you think primary schoolers are learning about race, it's not Critical Race Theory.
> No one is learning about Critical Race Theory anywhere other than law school (or possibly undergraduate sociology classes that pre-law students would be likely to take).
Yes and no.
You are correct that almost no one is learning full CRT legal theory in K-12.
That said, CRT principles have expanded beyond legal studies, and they have certainly made their way into classrooms. Here is an example of an article that makes a case for it:
I’m not sure if you know many education academics, but I assure you that CRT and derivatives thereof have been some low-hanging fruit in education research for over two decades (i.e., relatively easy to get published).
There were two definitions of Critical Race Theory. In 2021, the National Education Association adopted a Business Item [1] to "Share and publicize, through existing channels, information already available on critical race theory (CRT) -- what it is and what it is not; [...] and share information with other NEA members as well as their community members."
This included "Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project." [1]
Which is pretty wild, because that's a great summary of everything conservatives were objecting to in social studies classes, and provides a good wording for Christopher Rufo's redefinition of CRT.
However, I agree with you that this was a very recent redefinition of the term Critical Race Theory: As far as I can tell, the application of legal scholarship's CRT to education scholarship in the late 1990s was focused on the Critical analysis of teaching outcomes [2, 3, 4], especially racial discrimination in school districts. This seems to have been focused on administrative things rather than course content. There was a subsequent movement around 2016 to bring "Critical Race Praxis" into school districts, which again seems to be focused on removing inequities from school administration and teaching counter-narratives to "K-12 leaders". So I think that this is where conservatives found the term and decided to repurpose it to label the antiracist content which was being incorporated into social studies courses.
People are getting disillusioned by education; partly because of politics, but also because there's a good reason not to trust the experts.
Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see.
If a doctor or nurse or scientist says something is "evidence based", it works (most of the time). If a teacher or teaching academic says "evidence based", they mean they have some kind of evidence behind it, like in that Simpson's episode ('Well, your honor, we've got plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are 'kinds' of evidence.')
Teaching as an academic discipline has been basically spun out of whole cloth. Universities didn't (really) study education until governments told them to teach it, so they got a ragtag bunch of PhD thesis done, and the best way to do this is to use a very "philosophical" approach, and a very thin actual evidence base. Then they have to teach this to student teachers, most of whom are not really equipped to assess evidence. Then the student teachers who are great at the kind of essays that any student teacher can "engage with" will end up being the next generation of professors.
Schools are run by teachers (who are badly trained) and politicians the public service (which generally defers to the universities). Yes there is a more conservative "evidence based" movement, but even it is nowhere near good enough.
> Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see.
Hand washing at hospitals is controversial (again)?
Exactly, this kind of BS "eduction" the teachers receive doesn't really equip teachers with the knowledge to teach anything beyond 12 years old.
I believe any subject teacher (i.e. mathematics, physics, english, etc.) should hold at least a bachelors in that subject alongside with a teaching/pedagogy degree. Every bad teacher I've had only had the teaching degree, the best teachers I've had only had a PhD in their subject. Not bad as in dislike - there were plenty of good, competent teachers whom I disliked.
I dislike this notion of "degrees" as proxies for the ability to get the job done. Why not just... interview people. Let them teach a class or two, and see how it goes. Just like with every other job.
> because there's a good reason not to trust the experts
I hate this. Where else do we get knowledge from if not experts and academics in their fields? That's how humans grow our collective knowledge. People learn, gather evidence, build knowledge and then share it. The people who have done the learning over many years are called "experts". Those are the people I want to learn from, no?
> conservative "evidence based" movement
Evidence should not be political. You can either prove something, or you cannot. It is neither conservative, nor liberal.
When the experts say that algebra should not be taught in 8th grade, and the experts say that guessing at words instead of sounding them out is a better way to learn to read, and the experts say that calc can be replaced with 'data science' which is actually just data literacy, and so on and so forth, I'm not really interested in how the precise definition of 'experts' actually refers to something about 'growing our collective knowledge'. I'm more interested in staying away from all that. It's a fun gotcha to say things like 'well evidence either is or isn't', but it doesn't change the material reality of who's doing what and what they're likely to be doing in the near future. Public schooling is fucked, the group of people saying 'listen to the experts' is the group of people making it worse, a lot of it is explicitly political, and your best options for guaranteeing that you avoid it are homeschooling or parochial school, regardless of what words and rhetoric can be said about it.
Don't forget the we can't teach the 4 operations in first year of primary school.
Meanwhile, all the books from 1950 have them by lesson 2 and school was mandatory at that time.
We homeschooled our kid for a few months due to her marvelous classmates, teacher and director, she wrote and learnt more than 4 years worth of study in Switzerland. Unfortunately she is highly sociable and we couldn't give her the constant "stream of kids" all day long.
Wouldn't the best of both worlds be a mixed approach? Let her socialize at school and learn some things and teach her extra at home? Sort of home school lite?
> your best options for guaranteeing that you avoid it are homeschooling
Accepting your premise that "public schooling is fucked" (I disagree) there's absolutely zero guarantee that homeschooling is any better for any particular child. It's a completely random chance whether your parent, or whichever potentially untrained person, is going to provide you with an education that sets you up for society, work and the wider world.
Public schools at least have defined curricula, governance structures, complaints procedures, _accountability_ in some form.
1 untrained parent teaching <4 kids is better than an expert with 25 kids to teach.
Public schools have terrible curricula, procedures, and accountability. Go look at any school in Detroit and see how effective schooling is. They have all the things you mention, and they are ABYSMAL. Truly a terrible option, every one of them. They are also VERY well funded.
Homeschooling doesnt have a guarantee of success. Public school does come with a guarantee of failure.
> Public school does come with a guarantee of failure.
I disagree, because it's demonstrably false, but I don't think there's a reasonable point of debate here. I'm sorry you feel that the state has failed so badly here.
One of detroit's best schools. 58% are proficient in reading at their level. 20% (!) Are proficient in math. That is a failing grade. The other schools are not better.
Enrolling a student at a school like this is a bad idea. Perhaps "guaranteed failure" is hyperbolic, but reality is not far enough from that statement for any sort of comfort.
These are badly functioning systems that need a major overhaul.
If the parents cared and were well educated then those numbers would be much better, simply by them helping kids with homework etc. But schools shouldn't require that.
John Ogbo actually studied this and came to a similar conclusion, that much of the racial achievement gap (specifically where he studied in Oakland California) can be closed by parents investing time into their kids education. He was decried as a white supremacist (he's black, by the way).
No, I don't think these outcomes are being determined by RNGs, but rather by much more deterministic inputs related to the intentions and resources of the parents.
I estimate that I have a 90% chance of being better. If you aggregate everyone in the country, the median person might not have a 90% chance of being better, but that has nothing to do with me.
Can you explain why you disagree? Students have been performing worse each year, beginning a couple years before COVID. For example, scores and number of test-takers on the AMC 10/12s have decreased. Similarly, teacher retention is at an all-time low. Do you think it's relatively easy to fix, or that things will naturally get better over time?
There is a very simple rebuttal to this: In almost every high $$ trial the defense and prosecution will both call expert witnesses. These experts will then directly contradict and disagree with each other. Which of these experts should be trusted? It was an expert who testified that cigarettes are good for you, an expert who testified that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and an expert who verified that Oxycontin is not addictive. Those are not the people you want to learn from, no.
We celebrate countless outsiders like Galileo and Darwin who have disrupted the consensus of "experts" and were considered highly political at the time. History simply does not defend the infallibility of "experts", and does support the idea that you should not blindly trust a person who claims expertise.
Everybody should look into the work of Philip Tetlock and consider reading his book Superforecasters. There is a mountain of scientific evidence to show that the more a person considers themselves an expert in a topic the more vulnerable they are to making assumptions and being proven wrong as time progresses.
Education theory is divided among educational progressive and conservatives, it doesn't entirely align with political parties.
Educational progressivism is actually more antiquated than conservatism - the classic progressives were 19th century while the conservatives were 20t century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_education
Large groups of experts in a non-science can be wrong. Either the Vatican University theology department, or a Baptist theology department would be at least one example.
> I hate this. Where else do we get knowledge from if not experts and academics in their fields?
Knowledge is generated via examination of reality itself. "Experts" are merely people who have conducted the most thorough examination of reality. Relying on them is a convenience to speed up acquisition of useful knowledge, but not a necessity.
The world is full of people claiming to be experts, but who are, variously:
* charlatans or hucksters evoking the outward trappings of expertise but lacking genuine understanding;
* people who may have valid knowledge in one area pretending to expertise in other areas;
* people who may have valid knowledge, but whose motivations are primarily driven either ideological commitment, pecuniary interests, rent-seeking, or other perverse incentives;
* and people who may have valid knowledge, but mistakenly conflate empirical knowledge with normative authority, and believe that knowing what "is" entitles them to make "ought" decisions for others.
Genuine experts in empirical fields should be in the business of presenting evidence and arguments that stand on their own merits, and empowering others to make better-informed decisions. Reliance on experts should be based entirely on the quality of the information they bring to the table, and not on trust per se.
Anyone who cites their own putative expertise as a reason for why they should not have to explain themselves or justify their conclusions -- or, especially, who cites expertise as a basis for claiming authority over others -- absolutely should not be trusted.
The combination of is-ought conflation and the expertise-as-authority mindset is both incredibly dangerous and extremely prevalent in our society today. People with domain knowledge in a technical field often mistakenly think they are qualified to universalize value judgments about normative matters that relate their empirical field, and think they are entitled to use force to impose those value judgments onto others.
When confronted with this sort of hubris, it's entirely understandable why some people choose to eschew involvement with these putative experts even if it means potentially having less reliable empirical information to work with.
Eventually and it was massively controversial within academia. There were studies that showed it worked, but studies are positivist and for many education academics, positivist is an insult. That's why it took literally generations and a political war to soak into academia at large after the science was uncontroversial.
Homeschooling is seeing a surge in popularity, its not just tech people or high status people.
IME it's a lack of trust, sending your kids to be raised by strangers. I grew up in a small town and some of my teachers were basically neighbors.
For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools which might serve a thousand students from 4 different towns it's placed somewhat equidistant to, ie, in the middle of nowhere
I know in my area they're doing consolidation of schools because there are fewer kids enrolled than when the schools were originally constructed. Even after some consolidation many schools are barely over 60% of their enrollment capacity which is estimated to go down almost another 10% in the next five years.
People haven't been having nearly as many kids for a while. Fewer kids means fewer students. Revenue to operate the building is tied to number of students; fewer students means less revenue to keep things operating satisfactorily.
When the majority of the homes surrounding the elementary are filled with retirees whose kids have moved elsewhere instead of young families it is no surprise the school closes.
> For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools
In my experience it's because schools are being treated as a business, and businesses are usually more efficient when there's consolidation of expenses. Why pay for 3 schools with 10 teachers each when you could instead consolidate classes and pay for 1 school with 15 teachers? To a business, the decision is purely made out of cost. Alas, a lot of governments have such tight budgets (for many legitimate and illegitimate reasons) that cost benefits outweigh the human benefits.
Depends on area. Portland schools have plenty of money but still struggle. Administration and retirement perks eat up most of the budget. In a sense its that they are not a business that leads to that kind of issue.
But ultimately its a complex issue. eg voucher systems would resolve the above issues, but create entirely new sets of problems which may be worse along the way.
Not sure if I agree with this. Schools are not exactly run by the government, rather local school districts.
My (not data based) impression of school levies is that they nearly always get approved by voters, even in tax-averse areas, so if there is a lack of funding, it is usually real, rather than through a misplaced need to be "efficient".
> Schools are not exactly run by the government, rather local school districts.
What gets approved by voters? Ahh, right, government services. How are those paid? By taxes. Who collects taxes? Governments, of course.
I don't know where you are in the world. In the US, public schools are funded by government money counted by number of students and their test scores. So more students = more funding, better scores = more funding. There are other kinds of schools, private schools and charter schools come to mind, with different funding types. But often those include additional costs to the parent on top of the taxes they already pay.
How do public schools get managed by the district? Again I'm not sure where you are, but here the public school administration gets voted in during government elections. The public education system's requirements are defined by law and, above the district level, managed by county or state education services.
> if there is a lack of funding, it is usually real, rather than through a misplaced need to be "efficient"
Don't get me wrong, I think efficiency has its place. But I think it is extremely easy for school administrators to end up in a business-first mindset instead of a serve-people-by-educating-them mindset.
In many places in the US, though probably not all, school districts levy their own taxes independent of municipal or county governments. The reason we might not describe school boards as "the government" is, well, they don't govern us and are distinct from the organizations which do. They don't have the power to levy taxes or pass laws. Its almost like a large co-op where all the citizens of an area fund and vote on the inner workings of the school.
And, as you say, they are regulated by the government but so is everyone and everything else. In my view, its appropriate to describe public schools as part of "the government" but I also respect the GP's view that they're independent enough to be describe as not "the government".
school districts levy their own taxes independent of municipal or county governments. The reason we might not describe school boards as "the government" is… They don't have the power to levy taxes.
In my district, direct democracy determines the level of tax. They can't, for example, pass a law that collects a tax on business income or whatever. They could probably collect usage fees of some sort. I'm thinking in school field trips and paid lunches. But truth be told I'm not intimately familiar with the legal or bureaucratic basis for those fees.
The irony of this is that you rely on strangers for critical stuff like ensuring you don't get electrocuted or burned at home or even ensuring that the water that you drink won't make you ill or that your car is a good enough condition to not lead you to a fatal crash. Any of these affects your close relatives. What makes education different?
I think there's a broad perception that education professionals are ideologically captured by the left. It's hard to know how true this is, but individuals like "libsoftiktok" have made a career out of stoking that fire.
Also, unlike your other examples of strangers working on things, there's not really a feedback loop of review and rework where mistakes can be corrected. If your child gets a bad education, that's time lost that's really hard to recover and can set them back for life.
Edit: To add, the "ideological capture" perception is important because of what education is. When you're dealing with an electrician, it doesn't matter who they vote for because electricity works the same way regardless. Teachers don't just regurgitate information but promote a set of values and expectations in their classroom so their personal opinions can matter a lot. And that's not even getting into teachers who explicitly try to teach students their worldview.
If the water you drink is having problems, you'd have campaigns over it, protests, people trying to get it resolved and potentially lawsuits. People would band together to do whatever they could to fix the problem that they see.
Education is seeing the exact same thing. Parents see a lot of problems. They are going to school board and council meetings, people are campaigning on solving the issue and people are taking whatever measures are in their power to fix it...like home schooling.
When people see problems, they want to fix them. It's exactly the same thing.
Exactly right. Plenty of people have in-home systems to bring their municipal water to the quality that they want (e.g. filters, softeners). Many more even have wells because there is no municipal water.
Many people research safety ratings before purchasing a car as a proxy for how reliable a given manufacturer is at ensuring good outcomes in a crash.
I have some friends who live in area with the bad water quality... They end up drinking/cooking with store-bought water, instead of city-provided one from the tap.
When I need electrician/plumber/general contractor/etc..., I choose one based on recommendations and reviews.
If you know (say from conversations with other parents) that your local school is bad, why would you send your kids there? It is like choosing an electrician with bad reviews only because their office is next door to you, or living in bad-water area, drinking city water and getting sick every week.
The cost and timeline to evaluate quality is completely different; I can get multiple opinions for my possessions, and utilities are fairly objective to evaluate (and the cost to do so is small relative to the scale of the operation).
Schools are limited for choice, expert evaluation is limited, outcomes are potentially unclear... That's before you get into issues with the politics of a teacher or problem students.
some people feel better when they think they're in control, despite the fact that the outcome could be even worse. The ability to have control gives the reassurance that the outcome is going to be acceptable (without evidence).
Even further than that, individual evaluations of ‘better’ can meaningfully vary. Not everyone has the same metric of success here and I think there are many reasonable yet distinct evaluation criteria.
It's pure economics. One large facility is cheaper in fixed cost terms than four smaller facilities. It's also cheaper in variable costs of staffing and other economies of scale like consumables. Lastly, the size of the large school means the cost of special features like a wood shop, kitchen, large theatre, art facilities, etc., are relatively smaller and thus more easily included in the whole package.
You're right that something is definitely lost. It's an externality that's forced on you and your children. There are compensations, but it's not an unambiguous win.
American schools just aren’t very good. I remember when I was in third or fourth grade, my mom flipping out about why we were spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math. To this day, my mom, who grew up in Bangladesh but got a classic British education from a tutor, is more well read in western literature than I am (Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Socrates, Plato, etc.)
As far as I can tell, private school doesn’t even fix the problem. My kids go to a pretty expensive private school and it’s not rigorous or challenging—the main benefit is that the kids are better behaved so there is less chaos and distraction.
The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization. They don’t learn anything substantive about the founding U.S. cultures (big differences between Puritans and Jamestown settlers). They don’t study European history as a required course so they know almost nothing about how the modern world came to be (Westphalian nation states, etc). And they learn almost no world history beyond ancient civilizations (native Americans, ancient Egyptians, etc).
I spend $33,000 a year on my daughter’s education and she was telling me about some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe—but she has no idea what the Magna Carta is, or what the political structure was of the UK that we declared independence from, who Plato is, etc. My mom was more educated as a girl in a desperately poor Muslim country in the 1950s than my daughter in an affluent DC region private school.
I attended the best school district in my state, and the history education was absolutely miserable. Didn't cover either World War, but covered and re-covered early American history in a very boring, unrevealing way.
Not sure how it is today but in the late 90s it felt like we had a section about Nazis and WW2 every year in high school (in Germany). Yes, I get it, it's important - but it's not important to rehash it every year for 9 years.
That said, overall I was pretty happy with history class.
>The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization... some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe.
> some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe
Do you mean the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee [1]? I.e., the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy? The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers? The form of government of one of the major regional powers at the time the US was formed? Don't know why your daughter's teachers would bother teaching her about that. Sure, it's awful if they were neglecting all those other things, but seriously, anyone learning American colonial-era history needs to learn about the Iroquois Confederacy.
> The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers?
This reads a bit more like spinning a noble savages tale rather than the much more obvious explanation being that the founders were building on the proven greco-roman models and various Enlightmentment figures - as they directly state in a number of federalist papers.
I don't think the "noble savage" idea applies in this case. The problem of the noble savage idea is that it portrays indigenous people as simple, pure, and uncorrupted, while overlooking that indigenous people are complex just like non-indigenous people.
It's no myth that the Haudenosaunee and other indigenous people had sophisticated governments that could have inspired the writers of the US Constitution. The Haudenosaunee's democracy-ish form of government extends back probably a thousand years. The people who wrote the US Constitution had contact with these people. The exact extent to which this shaped the Constitution is up for debate, of course.
Yes, the US government draws from European roots too. I hope my kids learn about both the Magna Carta and the Great Law of Peace.
> The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers?
That would be a synergy of ideas primarily found in Polybius, Montesquieu, and the extant British constitution.
Not to discount the value of teaching about the political system of the Iroquois -- that's an interesting a valid topic to cover in school -- but it's not appropriate to attempt to link it to the US Constitution in a way that's wholly speculative and tenuous, and do so at the expense of properly teaching about the actual ideas that factored into the development of the constitution.
The single greatest influence on American society is what was going on in Britain in the mid 17th century and Americans learn absolutely nothing about it in school. It’s like writing a history or MacOS X that doesn’t mention NeXT.
> dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
And don't even start on how little is dedicated to explain slavery and the social and economic ramifications until the late 20th century. Or how the native people were actively suppressed during the expansion to the West, and how all that lead to some of the current social and economic structures around predominantly Native American groups.
> I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
Really? I remember the Civil War being a unit (significantly less than a semester) in US History, which was one class in my sophomore year of high school.
I don't think OP disagrees, or their mother. I think it's more the time spent on such things. They might be worth a semester or two, but the world would be a much better place if we learnt a little about a lot, because to functionally understand one thing means to understand the links between things. I person would have a much deeper understanding of the American Civil war if they understood the British Empire at the time their competition with France to dominate the world stage, and how the US fits within that. Instead, the US seems to teach about the Civil War as if it were an independent conflict when not much happened before or after.
I believe early grade schools should be relatively broad in the subjects they teach. Not every child will be interested in math or science. And there's nothing wrong with that. I feel many parents don't agree, especially those from a technical background. A healthy society should have a diverse set of skills across many disciplines. Though I do believe if children are interested in furthering their study on a particular subject (not just math), there should ideally be opportunities from schools.
It’s shameful to not be interested in math and science—that’s like saying you’re not interested in reading. But putting that aside, the other subjects should be educational.
I remember what triggered my mom was us spending an inordinate amount of time making clay models of Native American villages. American kids shouldn’t graduate high school knowing more about the shapes of Native American houses than the conceptual underpinnings and history of their own civilization.
I believe there's value in learning about such topics such us how historical village buildings are created from a child's perspective. Regardless whether it's Native American, European, or African, etc. It allows us to reflect on what was built before and to understand what to avoid or improve in future development. Not to teach them the exact technical details, but to light a spark to those children inclined. We need people who are interested in such things to study it so future generations can understand where we have come from and how far we have gone. I believe it also allows us to appreciate that there are many peoples and countries today that still live this way and allow us to be empathetic or humbled by their way of living.
I believe math and science should be invested in but if I had a choice between a broad learning curriculum and a focused one, ill choose broad.
If you've ever watched a movie or listened to music, you'll be surprised to know not all of the artists are well versed in math or science. You may be surprised that many of the people, experiences, entertainment, and sports you absorb may not be math inclined either. I personally find value in that.
Because people live in a world that is understandable through math and science. They don't need to specialize in those subjects, but as a human in reality they should familiarize themselves with reality.
Western literature is bad because it was written by cis white men. Native Americans lived here and had an advanced society that was way better and it didn't have capitalism. /s
I thought this was a really bad article. "Suddenly"?? I've heard many tech parents go full bore into homeschooling for at least about 2 decades now.
Also, for the particular issues she talks about (e.g. social isolation), essentially all of the tech parents I know that are into home schooling put a ton of effort into having a really rich social environment, e.g. either through "group schooling" or lots of outside activities.
It's really a blog post and if you read it that way (i.e. a personal story / take on the topic) then it's fine.
I've replaced the title with a somewhat more neutral question from the article. If there's a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, and preferably using representative language from the article), we can change it again.
Covid and the school shutdowns, did create a real boost in the homeschooling. Exacerbated by the particularly draconian shutdowns and masking in areas where there are a lot of tech workers like the Bay Area.
I think it merely made parents aware of what was already happening.
My nephew texted my brother during his lunch break to ask for more credits for his switch account. My brother asked why play games instead of talking or hanging out with others. My nephew sent back a video of the lunch room: every single student had their eyes glued to a digital device of some sort.
The experience kids have in schools isn't what we as adults went through - a common thing for every generation - but when you can get more interaction and socialization via home school networks and groups of motivated parents, it is hard to argue against it.
> My nephew sent back a video of the lunch room: every single student had their eyes glued to a digital device of some sort.
Wow, this just makes me intensely sad. We are ruining a generation of humans with these digital narcotics. Say what you want about being a Chicken Little, or that every generation looks at the next generation's behavior with some amount of trepidation ("MTV will corrupt your mind!"), but this feels pretty different to me. Humans are social creatures, and human children need lots of unstructured social play, and they need to be allowed to get bored, and we're killing all that.
Hearing accounts like this where apparently kids bring game consoles to school as a regular thing further makes me support schools having technology lockers.
Does the US really not do that yet? That's crazy. My children have school laptops for work and need to lock their phones up upon arrival until departure. You couldn't bring in a Switch, period. Sometimes they look at YouTube videos or play web games etc at lunch time on the laptop, but AFAICT they've been discouraging that more and more.
I'll let you in on a secret. I did own a GameBoy while in elementary school. I did bring it to school a few times against my parent's wishes. When teachers saw me playing with it, it was confiscated and held at the front office only to be released at the end of the day. After a few times of that happening the confiscation also resulted in a parental phone call.
The same went with cell phones. I had a cell phone in high school. If it was being used during a class or even chirped a single sound it would be confiscated to be released at the end of the day at the front office. They were not to be used during school time.
I think trying to equate the situation in the 90s with what's going on is a mistake because it glosses over the huge differences and increased harm in today's world.
I also had a Gameboy in the 90s. I played with it quite a bit, but nowhere near the average amount of time spent on screens by kids today. And I don't think there is any school in the US in the 90s where you'd see every kid glued to a digital device at lunch.
I think it's like saying "hey, I smoked weed in the 60s" and comparing that to someone freebasing cocaine today - or heck, even smoking weed today, as today's weed has about 10-100 times the amount of THC as most 60s weed.
Completely agree, but it's not really like "tech homeschooling is a new thing" vs. the fact that public schools (I'd argue especially in the Bay Area, e.g. see the school board recall) got so bad during the pandemic that parents had huge motivation to find an alternative.
And the fact of the pandemic makes this article even worse in my opinion: "Gee, why would parents with means want to find an alternative when public schools had to go all remote for extended periods and were a shit show in general?"
There is still an implicit "othering" of other children. They are in one camp and yours are in another. If they have any semblance of imagination as kids do, they will dream up reasons beyond the one you gave them
Our two kids are homeschooled and are generally equally excited to play with all their friends (some homeschooled, some in regular public school, some in private school).
I have yet to see or hear any "othering" of their friends. In fact, I'd say the breadth of different social situations they are exposed to makes the "othering" less likely.
Isolation is not a requirement in home schooling. It can happen? Yes, it's a risk.
Can the opposite happen? Yes, I've seen it personally. My home schooled nephews know and are known by everyone in their village and surroundings. Sometimes I feel at 6 and 8 years old they have more diverse professional connections and acquaintances than I have right now.
Yeah, the whole "maladjusted home school kid" is a thing we were cognizant of when making this decision.
To your second point: I think the best predictor of success in any education setting is intentionality and involvement from the parents. That said, with home school you get nights and weekends AND days to spend in whatever way is most optimal for your kids.
In what way is the ”othering” different than what children otherwise do, apart from being in different kind of schools? As you wrote children (or more generally) people can make up all sorts of reasons for that.
> - Impatience with the idea of connecting on a meaningful level with other people: who needs ‘em?
> - An abiding sense of detachment from reality
I'm the same age and have the same things, and I went to traditional school K through university. Idk if that has much to do with how you were schooled, or at least not being home schooled doesn't just magically fix that.
Those are all symptoms of ADHD. I am reluctant to point that out, but I see this a lot. I'd like to respond with a small footnote. Or wait until the comment drops below the fold. Alas, I cannot. :)
Also schizotypy which maybe 5% of people have and gets DXed basically 0% of the time. It's a developmental disability which will make you a target for relentless bullying which will screw you up much more than you need to be screwed up.
You should be reluctant to DX ADHD, everybody seems to have it because it's promoted by an addictive pill industry, it's almost as fashionable as gluten intolerance used to be or autism is these days. #notactuallyautistic
Interesting. I read the wiki article and the mayo clinic page on it. School uniforms are not uniformly a bad idea I think. We as a civilization should really focus on removing bullying as memetic virus. It has knock on effects that are larger than we realize, like most forms of harm.
I think most people seem to have it, because I think most people do to some degree, most things are a spectrum. We simply aren't prepared for the world we have accidentally created for ourselves. I personally don't find the pills addictive. Speaking of which, this quite long video, "Dopamine Expert: <clickbait redacted>" is quite good, esp if you are a fan of neurology and neuropsychology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6xbXOp7wDA
Whether schizotypy is dimensional (you have more or less of it) or taxonic (you have it or you don't) is a primary controversy. One fact is that the 'schizogene' postulated by Meehl which would make it taxonic certainly does not exist or efforts to find it would have born fruit in the genomic age.
The dimensional view is personified by Gordon Claridge who edited a few conference proceedings which may be closer to the truth but fail to tell a compelling story. You might read these and walk away thinking "nothing more to see here folks"
by Mark Lenzenweger tells a compelling story that might be less true. My life made 100% more sense the day it fell into my hands after decades of looking for answers.
I don't really like the DSM definition of STPD; today I could mark up my first psych eval with a highlighter and add a few symptoms I've experience sense and satisfy it, but as a person who reads about psychodiagnosis for fun I read it and missed it numerous times. (Also despite my condition causing me a lot of trouble, I don't feel like I'm really that ill.) If Lenzenweger is right, it could be diagnosed by an eye tracking test.
As for school uniforms I think they have some good points and some bad points. As a kid they might have done me some good but I probably would have been resistant, as I was to many things. And for bullying I'll share
written by USMC officer, journalist, novelist and US Senator Jim Webb which is a compelling but even-handed account of the role of hazing in promoting group cohesion that was recommended to me by one of his classmates from the Naval Academy one day when I was giving blood.
Reading it now, I am reminded of the importance of sleep. The only time I have experience "visual aberrations" is when I have been very sleep deprived. Items in my periphery would rotate, like my mind was attempting to dream. And then there is this description of one of the cases
> single male who works for the U.S. Postal Service, typically during the midnight shift.
People should be very very cautious about working swing shifts or night shifts.
I am not that far in, but it looks to me like STPD is a precursor to full Schizophrenia, and that if caught early could avoid it entirely. This might be what the book says.
Oh the DSM, it seems chock full of ... spicey illinformed kinda right by accident correlation isn't causation kind things. After reading enough of it, I don't even see it anymore. I am sure there is still some phrenology in there.
Hazing as a bonding exercise is barbaric. I have seen scrapbooks of USN sailors that have crossed the Tropic of Cancer and Equator. Yeah, no.
Meehl's hypothesis is that some fraction of schizotypes, maybe 5-10% develop schizophrenia in early adulthood. I'm too old for that now.
It could be that I've compensated because my verbal intelligence is too high to measure. I got 800 verbal/760 math on the SAT and probably gave up 40 points to the line noise in my brain. I struggled to get more than 90% on math quizzes in high school because of that line noise but as my education progressed (physics PhD) I got better at not making mistakes on math. I've maxxed every verbal test and subscale I've taken.
I am worried that I won't be able to compensate so well when I am older; psychotic dementia would be a terrible burden on the people around me. I've seen people who aged well because they had good emotional habits, I can only hope I've got enough time to improve mine.
My proposal: Forrest is just an average person guy, those who know him (but not how he feels about himself) may describe him as “well adjusted”. How Forrest feels is a reasonable response to a culture that rewards and incentivizes maladjustment.
I find looking beyond the rim of your own plate such an inspiring thing when it comes to schooling.
Germany for example prohibits home schooling. don't breed detached extremists. however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O. but then on the upside again, you will go to school for at least 13 years if you get _any_ kind of qualified professional education.
China has one (1) math text book for 1.4bn people.
France has competitive cognitive Tests (Concours) to enter highest education.
maybe a problem is that everybody went to school so everyone thinks they are experts. it's hard to evolve schooling. like steering a super tanker. slooow. too slow for four year election cycles.
In a nutshell, only schooling forces you to confront other beliefs in a way preparing you for life in a pluralistic society and thus schooling as such is a cornerstone in education.
private schools German flavor are okay because their curriculum has to comply and their final exams are state controlled.
So for example even if you went to some evangelical creationist belief system school, you'd have to understand and know evolution. And every student gets sex ed no matter if the parents think that's a bad idea, including contraceptives, abortion rights and all.
And likewise every student is confronted with the Hollerith machine planned systematic mass deportation and mass murder of 6 Mio Humans for having a "wrong" birth certificate, using scheduled, planned trains and scheduled, planned mass murder factories. And every student learns how that came to be and how a weak democracy was overturned into a mind control oppression state.
1. Government schooling won't force you to confront other beliefs: it will deliver you a particular set of beliefs. Example: sex ed (which must, logically, be delivered from one or another moral perspective; there is no neutrality). Or history, which in many Anglo countries used to whitewash 19th-century crimes, and now goes to the other extreme of ignoring anything good.
Empirically, it is pretty clear that government schools do not produce, and are not designed to produce, children who are capable of examining things from multiple points of view.
2. Ultimately it's a philosophical question: who is ultimately responsible for the child's development? And, therefore, who has the right to make the final decision on this? The parents, or the state? That's obviously a much bigger question, but it will determine one's attitude to homeschooling.
do you see the difference of "government schools" in contrast to curricula elaborated by democratically elected boards? especially in a country with proportional representation, which reflects into said boards?
also the controversy is built into the curricula. "these are the positions, discuss"
and yes my top comment is exactly addressing the top point. and how it may be a good idea to think about how other cultures approach education and why.
> do you see the difference of "government schools" in contrast to curricula elaborated by democratically elected boards? especially in a country with proportional representation, which reflects into said boards?
I don't think it makes much difference. Even if we grant for argument's sake that the people elected to school boards are likely to represent the majority of the people entitled to elect them, why should my children be fed the majority view just because it's the majority?
> also the controversy is built into the curricula. "these are the positions, discuss"
Presumably that doesn't happen with every topic. What is presented as factual, and what is presented as opinion, is significant and necessarily reflects a worldview.
By saying "here is the pro-X argument, here is the anti-X argument, discuss", and then stopping there, you are necessarily teaching that X is something opinion-based and non-factual, or at least too trivial to matter. And I, as a parent, may think that X is factual and important. So somebody's views have to win out - mine or someone else's. There is no neutrality anywhere in reality.
> only schooling forces you to confront other beliefs in a way preparing you for life in a pluralistic society and thus schooling as such is a cornerstone in education
That's absolute nonsense.
Public schooling grooms you to fit into a rigid, calculated mould for society. You learn which is the right way and things to think, and which ones are wrong and you're not allowed to think, according to the current government in place. Your comment exudes precisely that.
On the flip side, a long history of multiple paths through public education has led to Germany being a country where there is no universal expectation that everyone should/must get at least an undergraduate degree, and so inflation (in terms of both price and dilution of value) of degrees is lower than in countries like the UK or especially the US.
An acknowledged, well-designed, and state-supported path to vocational education is very good; social mobility is important within such a system, and a lack of social mobility doesn't have to be baked in.
oh, I agree "Länderhoheit", state level control of curricula, was one of the weaker ideas in German education. East Germany got that that much better. Finland had sent envoys to East Germany and copied their system (not the curricula, mind you), to create their Pisa winning system in the 1980s...
Maybe that's the problem: that education is so politicized. Yet another reason people opt to homeschool.
(For those of you who object so strenuously here to homeschooling, suppose MAGA were to remake public education they way they want it to be. Would you then not seriously consider homeschooling? I bet y'all would.)
I personally.think the solution to the maga craze and polarization is a proportional representation instead of first past the post. oh and control over individualized media and their individualized political campaigning, built on disinformation and bubbles.
They're talking about the division between Gymnasium, Realschule, and Hauptschule. It's actually state to state nowadays whether they have separate schools or Gesamtschulen, but I understand even in Gesamtschulen, in many Bundesländer there's some internal separation.
Where are you in DE, that this is unknown to you? In Köln just 15 years ago I knew parents who had the horror scenario: a 4th grade teacher who quietly believed that girls shouldn't go to university. They switched their daughter schools that year.
this is very reductive and really hyperbolic.
Also hauptschule does not exist in most states anymore.
I also know enough people who did perfectly fine via Realschule to academics. Of course it's a decision with pretty much a single point of failure which is suboptimal, but don't act like it's predetermining your whole carrer.
Also a lot of countries have different goals, and most people when they think of optimization of schooling think of better outcomes at the top end, whereas administrators think of better outcomes at the bottom end. The difference between stimulating your smartest people enough that they become leading beacons of their field vs minimizing the amount of people that get left behind. In some places there's a mixed approach with magnet schools but there's many countries where that doesn't exist.
Not sure inspiring is the word I would hve picked :D
Overall it sounds a tad better than the US, but far from perfect.
Especially not accounting for different developmental speed of kids annoys me, although from what I heard it'd a bit better these days than in the 90s - e.g. even if they sent you to the Realschule instead of Gymnasium and at age 15 you decided you wanted to go to university they wouldn't make your life extra hard.
hehe, yes I absolutely agree partitioning schooling is a bad idea. It's much smarter to have shared learning and make a difference inside a class "Binnendifferenzierung" and it's also much smarter to create GATE gifted and talented programs (Hochbegabtenförderung) as enrichment and maybe after grade 8 or 9 as dedicated boarding schools.
yah, Prof. TikTok (and Dr. FB before that), personally targeting political views, that's magic. can't blame schooling for that. it's rather _despite_ schooling. and it happens worldwide (thus my wild guess about TikTok and similar media products)
The author's thesis is that the rise in home-schooling is driven by a desire to "opt out of being around average people," and he implies that he is not home-schooling his own children in part because he himself was home-schooled and believes that may have contributed to his own struggles with social stress.
However, given his self-description, it seems there is a decent chance he would have struggled with social stressors regardless of what education setting he was in, possibly even more so if he had been exposed to bullying or excessive social stressors in a more traditional public education setting.
Exposing oneself to just the right dose of poison in order to develop immunity is a delicate science.
When I was younger, I was also taught to believe that nurture always triumphs over nature, but as I got older and eventually had my own kids, I found out that nature was winning way more of those battles than I first realized.
We live in a social climate where we can't even assert ourselves of someone's gender based on their name out of fear from a very local special interest group that has far reaches into public education system and this is another big reason why parents who can't afford private school opt for home schooling.
The fact that parent had to edit their comment and could not call a man a he answers the article's question very well.
It means the user, a relatively recent account, is trawling for bites. The KKK in the username and the slant of many of their comments might hint at a touch of bad faith edge lording.
I find this somewhat hypocritical given that you've recently made suggestive statements about users comments being posted and mocked on other forums, along with vague threats of their real identities being uncovered e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pkkkzip
I didn't say you threatened to do it, just that you suggested vague threats of it occurring.
> i dont think the ppl expressing ... here realize the screenshot of their content is being ... shared on other platforms ... coupled with ... the discoverability of usernames connected to their other real world profiles
This is one of the main reasons why there are more dogs than children in SF. There are some good public schools but parents don't want to deal with the vagaries of the lottery system so they move out to other school districts.
I read thst San Francisco decided not to offer Algebra until high school so no one would feel left behind. One of those dystopian decisions that emerged from a well intentioned DEI initiative. A decision that defies logic and surprise didn't help. That would be enough of a red flag for me. https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-...
my son is in pre algebra in 6th grade. I assume that mean algebra next year. I'm glad his fifth grade teacher realized he knew it all early in the year and moved him to sixth grade math early.
You could literally live next to a school and there’s a chance your kids can’t go there.
There are many kids from low income, broken families who are just really bad students. Bullies. Disruptive. Disrespectful to teachers. It was hell going through public schools in SF.
Average people aim to provide a good a start for their kids as possible; average aims to avoid public school if possible. You now only have a set of people defined by behaviour or ability too poor for private, parents who don't care, or ones with no options...
Basically it's opting out of being around the dregs
I'm not sure what your point is. All parents want to send their kids to the best schools. They buy expensive real estate for this reason. There is a very clear, unspoken reason why parents want to avoid poor areas for schools.
SF has a lottery system. This means all kids in the city are mixed. Unfortunately, my experience was absolutely horrible for learning.
If the average student is a bully, disruptive, and disrespectful to teachers then I think I might actually opt out of being around average people if possible.
And what's so bad about it? Mind you, it's not just 'being around', but "being stuck with them for 30% of your life for years in a situation out of your control".
I wonder the same thing, I have friends who send their kids there and are happy with it. Not surprisingly for SF, most of the parents are educated with good incomes and expect their kids to go to college. That has its own set of downsides of course, but you could do a lot worse.
Don't know why this is downvoted, seems like a reasonable question. I don't know much about SF or public schools in the US. Are they all bad? do we have data comparing public/private schools in these areas?
Public and private schools don't take the same tests, so we don't have good days to compare the schools. Even if we did, it would be hard to disentangle the impact of selection bias.
You could look at college acceptances or similar, but those aren't unbiased either, as colleges look at estimates of class rank, not just absolute performance.
The actual title of the article is: "Why are tech people suddenly so into homeschooling?" which is not exactly the same as "becoming fashionable". Why not use the original title?
IME, poor quality of education at a shocking number of schools, even in "good areas".
Granted, I grew up in a rural place, and from a social perspective my school years were pretty good (high school was great, it was literally like movies that were popular at the time in the 2000s). I have many friends that I still talk to very often that I've known for the better part of 20-30 years.
Seems like this experience isn't the norm here. I suspect my experience is both a function of time and place.
Those positives aside, the "education" I received through high-school was incredibly poor.
I'm absolutely blown away when I see kids today taking programming classes in high school or calculus or "AP Stats" or any of this stuff.
I'd not even heard of "Mechanical Engineering" until some friends picked that as a college major my senior year, to say nothing of programming as a vocation.
Granted this was 20-odd years ago, but considering the low quality, any parent that wants their kids to aspire to "more" in an equivalent position today would have to either:
- pay loads for a private school
- spend substantial time giving their kids supplementary education outside of school (barring the naturally curious and ambitious). Given time and energy constraints, such a proposal doesn't even seem feasible)
It's pretty obvious to me why you'd want to homeschool today, given experiences like this and the boundless high-quality material instantly available online and elsewhere.
America hasn't really taken public education seriously in a long time. That's funding for schools, serious academic standards, building more schools so class sizes stay reasonable, and insisting on having rules in place to make sure classes are not disrupted. People either just want to throw money at the problem or lower standards or make sure rich communities have good schools and poorer communities get what they "deserve" (ie. "you don't make enough/your house is not worth enough, so your school's quality will/should suck").
The way that civic pride, communities, and public education, were all tied together has withered away in the last 4-5 decades. Now, access to good, serious, education is a zero-sum game.
We are in an age where people who watch a youtube video think they know more than the experts. Being a good teacher is a skill and understanding childhood development is something that requires proper education. I'm not saying there is never a good reason to home-school your kid, but most people who do it are unqualified and from my limited experience the kids who are home schooled have huge holes in their education. Surprisingly, they do seem to be fine socially which is what you hear many people worry about.
Ah, the experts. I have no sort of education in education at all. Why was I better (and still am) at helping mates learn and solve CS exercises at Uni than some of the expert and qualified teachers? A friend of mine recently started a CS course to pivot his professional career. When he doesn't understand what the teacher is on about, he comes to me for help.
I have huge respect for the concept of teachers, but sadly a lot of people are teachers because they didn't know what else to be.
> from my limited experience the kids who are home schooled have huge holes in their education
I don't want this to sound snarky at all, but I'd honestly be happy to provide you with real life cases that would broaden your experience and hopefully tilt your viewpoint.
Studying the subject academically in any real capacity. Also, in the US, every teaching degree requires time in a classroom as a student teacher with an experienced teacher as your mentor.
Studying the subject academically in any real capacity.
What do you mean by "in any real capacity"? I have read many books and academic papers about education. And I have experimented with some of the things I've learned. Does that count?
Among current K-12 teachers in the United States, what would you estimate is the median number of academic/research papers related to education or adjacent fields that they have read in the past 24 months?
in the US, every teaching degree requires
A teaching degree is neither necessary not sufficient for effective teaching. There are thousands of ineffective teachers with US teaching degrees. There are thousands of effective teachers without teaching degrees.
This is what I'm talking about. This attitude of I read a paper or two so I know what it's like in a classroom with multiple kids at different ages that have different needs. Or I know what it's like in a classroom with 20 kids. Yes there are bad teachers, but you present the argument like "there are bad teachers therefore all homeschooling teachers are better" which is absurd.
"There are thousands of effective teachers without teaching degrees."
I doubt it. And there are countless thousands more that are terrible and whose kids are very behind.
I have one child. If I were to homeschool my child, I would not need to know "what it's like in a classroom with 20 kids".
I'd imagine there are approximately zero homeschoolers who are managing a classroom of 20 kids.
The skills, knowledge and behaviors required to obtain and keep a job as a public school teacher are not the same as those required to homeschool your own kids.
I'm so worried for those parents raising children outside of school without degrees in childhood development! Think of all the unqualified parenting time happening without skilled teachers to supervise!
Teachers are mostly very uneducated and ineffective at teaching itself and the subjects they teach. I don’t think spending time to get an education degree or certification means much. Parents care for their children more than any random teacher, especially ones that resist performance measurements to judge their effectiveness. I would expect the average parent to be FAR more effective just based on that care.
I went to a rural public school, underfunded as they come, and my HS math teacher is still in the top 3 of all teachers / instructors I've had throughout my life. If my parents were to teach me math, I simply wouldn't be working in a STEM-field today.
The majority of my teachers were good. The dynamic was completely different compared to being around my parents.
Homeschooling often gets confused with self-directed education, aka “unschooling”. These are not the same.
The former tends to replicate school and requires a teacher, usually a parent. It’s basically school with added/paced/altered/enriched curriculum at the cost of socialization, although that can be compensated with other forms of peer groups, especially in urban area. Comparing this method versus school A or school B is pretty much like comparing school A and B as two schools can be as different as any given school and homeschool.
The latter is what John Holt referred to as homeschooling but is based on self-determination theory and has an abundance of science to support it. Neuroscience backs this theory too, I think the rate at which active learning learns is somewhere around x20 faster than passive learning (ie “teaching”). Very serious folks like John Holt, Peter Gray, or Akilah Richards to name a few have dedicated their life work to supporting self-directed education as a superior form of education. What Peter Gray’s research shows shows is that outcomes are basically the same except for life satisfaction and psychological outcomes. In essence, it leads to same rates of secondary education, jobs and socio-economical outcomes, except an unschooled child makes for a much happier adult later on.
Sadly, because the majority of people went through contemporary schooling or some version of it, people’s biases makes people not want to hear this.
I’m not sure what the OP’s circle looks like but I would be surprised if none of those so called “techs pro-homeschooling” are only doing the school at home version without having stumbled upon any of the science around self-directed.
> Homeschooling often gets confused with self-directed education, aka “unschooling”. These are not the same.
There are also a lot of other approaches. Home education is a blanket term for every approach to education other than schools with class rooms.
I think my own approach was a hybrid. I expected academic progress (especially in English and maths, which are enablers for studying other things), but let the kids follow their interests too.
That’s right. And at the other end of that spectrum, there is what some refer to as “radical unschooling” which gives total agency to the child over the material they’ll learn. I know some radical unschoolers who’ve even ended-up in conventional schools because it was their decision. It may sound like a paradox but it happens, usually not more than a few years though, but again, depends on what’s available to them wherever they live, and also the friends/peers and what they are doing too. I think these choices come down to the child, parenting style and the environment in which the child evolves. There is no right or wrong in my opinion.
In his 2017 paper[1], Peter Gray goes in depth on all the different self-directed education approaches including some of the well-known self-directed “schools”, from Summerhill in the UK to Sudbury Valley in the U.S.
I don't think this article is a good faith analysis of Homeschooling. Clearly the author was home schooled and had some concerns with how they were instructed. With that in mind the arguments that are brought up are very much ignoring the breath of options that are all covered under "homeschool". There is far more diversity in the home school world beyond academic overachiever and religious fundamentalist.
Fundamentally home school allows children to be taught in a way that is appropriate for them, and with the speed and oversight they require. Something that you can't really do in a corporate school setting. All three of my children learn at different paces, and require different amounts of involvement. They all require much more involvement then they ever got at traditional schools, and they have at times progressed through their coursework much faster or much slower then the "average" pace.
It is true that if you have a child that is a academic prodigy they will greatly benefit from homeschooling, and its true that keeping your children in your home can allow you to be the greatest influence in their moral and social instruction, but its also true that even "average" students will probably do better with 1-1 instruction from a parent who is well equipped then they will with a teacher who might be better trained, but is ill equipped to actually instruct each individual pupil.
As for the main point that somehow this is some form of elitism where homeschool families don't want their kids around the common rabble. The homeschool families I know range from households where both parents hold post secondary degree's, to ones where the parents got GED's, and the career expectations are suitably broad for the kids being schooled. This stands in stark contrast to traditional school which ranks its self on how many kids go to 4 year colleges, and looks down on anyone who would join a trade, or be a home maker. This is literally my biggest complaint with school in the Bay Area. If your kid didn't get into Berkeley or Stanford your household was perceived to be a failure, and if they had any desire to do something other then be a Product Manager at a FAANG then they were going to be forced to live at home forever or move to another state.
> Why are tech people suddenly so into homeschooling?
Are they? I mean statistically. Or is that just an observation from some random articles about a handful of freaks?
> and let me tell you, at no time were my six siblings and I considered the cool kids on the block.
I don't want to defend homeschooling but in my experience, the cool kids on the block tend to end badly. These are the girls that end up pregnant at 16 or in relationships with abuse partners, the boys that end up in addiction and a career of jumping from shitty jobs to shitty jobs.
Having said that it is nice to be able to develop social skills. I used to be super shy and had to force myself to grow a more sociable person and I am glad I had to force myself doing that by going to school.
As someone who had both good and really bad times in schools, works in tech, and is considering it for our kids, some thoughts:
Never once did I want my kid to “not be around mediocre”, it’s the extremes I want to filter.
Part of the reason we’re considering private school is to avoid the bullies/wannabe gangbangers who don’t care if they end up in jail that made my own life miserable.
Similarly, our concern is with the other extreme, anxiety-ridden, high-expectations “has to change the world” is not what we want his social culture to be.
A group of kids that enjoy learning, understand the employee/entrepreneurial trade-off but may still opt for a 9-5 is what we’re after.
A friend of mine half-jokingly suggested “the cheapest private school” to balance this out, and actually seems like a half-decent solution.
Like with general life consequences, we want them to experience as much variance on their own while avoiding extreme swings with long-term negative repercussions (horrific injury, jail, dangerous drugs). This is just one facet among many for us.
There are private schools which have more and less competitive environments, it just depends. I'm not convinced that filtering by tuition cost will necessarily get you what you want, you'd want to research the individual school and talk to families and so on.
It's true that there has always been a sizeable chunk of religion motivated home schoolers, historically there was a long tail with motivations and efficacy that was all over the map.
One thing that's really common is for parents to try it when they feel that the local system is failing their kids in some way and the family economics supporting are acceptable.
There are also many permutations - it wasn't uncommon when I was younger for parents to do it through middle school, but have their kids attend high school because they felt that it was the point where socialization became important in a way that couldn't be handled effectively with home school.
Obviously there's a huge range of efficacy, too.
That said, I think you have to ask why are charter schools and vouchers (not just home school) becoming even more fashionable despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large? And a lot of it is because society has gotten more and more zero sum and it's going to increasingly self cannibalize.
Which is not that far off from the writer's premise.
> That said, I think you have to ask why are charter schools and vouchers (not just home school) becoming even more fashionable despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large?
People demanding it is evidence that political public education should adapt to that demand. It may or may not pay off, but this is how politics works, and education is politicized.
There is NO WAY that voters are going to see commentary like yours and be dissuaded -- that's just not how politics works. Have you ever changed someone's mind really on politics?
It would be much better to look at what's been motivating voters to demand vouchers / whatever else you don't approve of and see if you can satisfy their demands in some other way, such as reducing the politicization of education in other ways.
>despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large?
You don't find the experience of New Orleans following their conversion to a complete charter system in 2005 (10 percentage point gain in college acceptance rates, improvements on standardized tests by about a third of a standard deviation) to be meaningful evidence?
The population of New Orleans is less than 10% of the population of Louisiana. Also, I'm not aware of a single metric by which Louisiana is considered to be last place in K-12 education in 2024. State PISA scores are basically on par with California, spending per student is higher than Nevada. It's certainly no Massachusetts, I've seen it ranked around 40th out of 50 on different metrics, but I think you're revealing some ignorance in assuming Louisiana's school system is ranked last in the nation.
I had trouble in the public schools because of bullying linked to my schizotypy (then undiagnosed despite what I'm told later was an exceptionally good psych eval for the late 1970s) They were going to drug me so my parents took me out for two years, I skipped three and was successful in high school. (In the single year my parents were able private school I was treated as I had some rights and dignity)
My son struggled in elementary school in a different way. Our school got labeled as a "persistently dangerous school" because we had an principal who, unlike others in the district, filled out the paperwork honestly (and got fired for it.) I lost faith in the superintendent when he first words in a meeting were "we're going to appeal it" as opposed to something like "we're going to do everything in our power to make this school safe".
I was active in the PTA (maybe the only dude; that same superintendent was dismissive of my wanting to be active in my son's education at the same time he welcomed the mother of a 'special' child who could call the state and light a fire under his ass to do so) and was very impressed with the teachers for one year, but the next year they seemed disorganized and the precipitating incident was when my son made a horribly violent doodle and the teacher wrote "Great!" with an underline on it. We didn't take him back the next day and kept him out for two years. We couldn't get him on a good reading program but we got him far above grade level on math with Kahn Academy. (As an adult circumstances got him interested in reading, now he's reading The Economist every week, books on chess openings, psych textbooks I loan him, etc.)
We never quite filled out the paperwork but two years later we slotted him into middle school where he was successful.
Economics plays into this too. Housing in good school districts is often much more expensive, and private schools are ridiculously expensive.
COVID is another factor. Anecdotal of course, but I've only met two home schooled families since moving to our present city 3 years ago, and one of them started out of necessity during the pandemic and found that it worked well and so never went back -- but they're a one income family so one parent has the time (the only way it works, IMO, unless you co-op with another family or two, which can work if you're friends). I must say I was very impressed with their kids.
In Seattle schools have double the budget compared to the years ago, and spend more than 25K per student each year. The schools are worse than ever, which has convinced me that funding isn’t the problem. This might be a local issue though, with a very ideological school district that has ignored the basics of education.
I was responding to the part about housing being expensive near good schools, and the idea of good schools in general. Expensive housing and associated taxes often affect local school budgets, and those budgets are often stated as the reason the school is good. But my experience has been that the budgets don’t change school quality, it must be other factors. Sorry it may have been somewhat unrelated.
I don't know whether budgets change school quality, but there is a marked difference in most cities between schools with high and low performance outcomes as measured by test scores, graduation rates, etc. (not that test scores are the best measure of life in general, but they're what's available in terms of academic understanding). And if you look at the schools with high ratings and where they are located, you'll find that it correlates greatly with income, and even more so you'll find that schools with the lowest performance correlate greatly with low income. (These are averages; there are brilliant students at all these schools.)
Families with higher income have more resources and more ability to support their child's education (after school activities, tutoring, a more academically-oriented environment, and most importantly, the absence of financial stress on the family unit which can greatly affect children especially if the parents (or in many cases a single parent household) has to work multiple jobs just to put food on the table much less be able to handle much else.
I think it's really housing is expensive near good schools because people (with kids) want to live near good schools so it drives up the price.
I guess also people who buy their house based on education probably have a positive effect of the education in that area but I think it's more of a market effect of the school already being above average.
As a parent with young kids moving to a new city a few years ago, we based our house hunting process on being near the best public schools (based on academic achievements; not much else to go by), and paid quite a bit more for our house than we would have otherwise. I know it sounds selfish, but our concern is that if our kids are mostly surrounded by other kids who don't have high academic standards (through no fault of their own, just their environment doesn't support that or it's not even a goal), then they will have a hard time bucking the tide, so to speak.
This sort of aligns with some other comments here. Parents want their kids to be around other kids that are better than the average. So like kids who behave well, aren’t violent, care about grades, have attentive parents, etc. I completely support that way of thinking given what school can be like when you don’t have that, which I did not like or benefit from in any way (even though some claim that mixing with other types of people is somehow positive).
Not really. If you've grown up in Asia you're used to wearing a mask whenever you are feeling unwell or have a cold. We do that out of courtesy to others, and it makes a lot of sense (which is why the practice has continued at hospitals since COVID). My kids were both in elementary school during COVID and got used to it quickly and were just fine.
Many American parents did not consider masking their children to be OK. If you want to know one reason many more are homeschooling now: that's one reason. There's other related reasons too. All the covid reasons to homeschool:
- schools were closed for too long
- remote learning wasn't working
- forced masking of children when
schools reopened, both against
the children's and parents' will
- politicization of all things health
Probably, but what you're not factoring in is teachers being afraid of going "back to the office" (like most other people were at the time). Unless you're going to force them or fire them (and then where do you get new teachers from?).
I've seen enough pictures of mask-free politicians surrounded by mask-wearing children. Forcing children to wear masks was NEVER about protecting the adults. It was about petty tyrants up and down the power structure exercising power over the helpless and their equally helpless parents (helpless because they depend on schools being childcare). Protecting adults was merely the excuse they needed.
All the assholes who chose to force masking -without evidence!- on children don't get to cry now when parents choose homeschooling.
(There was never any evidence of masking working. Fauci himself had written a paper about how masking didn't work in the Spanish Flu pandemic and instead caused problems. Today it's understood that masking never worked. There is no reputable science that shows masking working in any significant way, and certainly not enough to justify forcing captive audiences to wear the fucking mask. Never again.)
Like I said, it wasn't such a big deal for the kids. Were your kids traumatized by having to wear a mask, or are you just generally pissed off for no particular reason?
> without evidence
Of course there's evidence that masks prevent the spread of airborne diseases -- it's not that it protects the wearer from viruses penetrating the mask, but it greatly reduces the amount of viral load that is spewed out by a sick person, which in turn reduces the amount of viral load that others are exposed to especially in confined settings. This isn't specific to COVID.
> Today it's understood that masking never worked.
Not true. Masks can't fully protect you or prevent COVID but they do reduce the amount of viral load you're exposed to depending on the environment.
There has been a considerable increase in speech delays and disorders after 2020.
Some of that is related to lack of diverse socialisation (watching/hearing different people talk) but also caused to masking. Not being able to watch the mouths/lips critically affects a kid's speech development.
> Like I said, it wasn't such a big deal for the kids.
That is a ridiculous thing to say. Many people, children and adults were very unhappy to wear those disgusting things and/or found them very uncomfortable, and "traumatized" or not should never have been forced to. And yes, being forced to wear them by "authorities" who weren't is traumatizing for some. How dare you say something so fucking offensive? Who the fuck are you to say "it wasn't such a big deal for the kids"?
Anyways, now you know: many people hated it, hated you and your ilk for being such petty, tyrannical little shits about it, and now it's our turn to do things you don't like, like homeschool. There's nothing tyrannical towards you in others homeschooling, but you are all so offended by it because it takes away your power.
> Of course there's evidence that masks prevent the spread of airborne diseases -- it's not that it protects the wearer from viruses penetrating the mask, but it greatly reduces the amount of viral load that is spewed out by a sick person, which in turn reduces the amount of viral load that others are exposed to especially in confined settings. This isn't specific to COVID.
Utter bullshit, but even if you were right it wouldn't justify forced mask wearing, especially for children.
> Not true. Masks can't fully protect you or prevent COVID but they do reduce the amount of viral load you're exposed to depending on the environment.
They cannot protect you AT ALL from covid or any small viruses. The boxes say so themselves.
> And yes, being forced to wear them by "authorities" who weren't is traumatizing for some.
maybe for some; not for any of the parents I met before, during or after COVID.
it's obvious you don't have kids who were in school at that time, so you ... are representing parents somehow??
> hated you and your ilk for being such petty, tyrannical little shits about it,
wtf? I haven't met anyone who hated me, well, I guess now I have :)
> and now it's our turn to do things you don't like, like homeschool.
Actually, I was homeschooled myself and homeschooled my eldest child (worked out pretty good too, she got a full scholarship to a top engineering college). I like homeschooling. So you really have no idea what you're talking about.
> Utter bullshit
It's actually true. Maybe once you stop your rabid screams you'll calm down enough to do some serious research.
> They cannot protect you AT ALL from covid or any small viruses
Oh my, next you'll be telling me COVID was/is a hoax and that the earth is flat.
> > They cannot protect you AT ALL from covid or any small viruses
> Oh my, next you'll be telling me COVID was/is a hoax and that the earth is flat.
You left out the part where it says so on the box. You're also changing the subject from the horrible and unjustifiable masking of children. Changing the subject is an implied concession. Making up a strawman is pretty desperate. Masking the children was horrible and unjustifiable, and you know that quite well. And you know what, I thank you and the others who engaged in it for it because now no one will be able to do that again for another hundred years. Covid Zero ended in China because the CCP found the limit of what people would tolerate without revolting -- all those petty tyrants clad in full body PPE were going to be getting killed, that much was clear. Here in Texas all that crap got nipped in the bud real quick and next time will be much quicker.
Are private schools all that ridiculously expensive though? I'm enrolling my kid into University School (a private boys only school in Cleveland) and the tuition is like 30k$ per year.
My school district in south WA is a representative example. Outcomes in math & English have been poor and continue declining. Attendance has dropped by > 30% despite mild population growth. Cost / student are among the highest, and due to the lacking attendance, deficits have led to staff cuts, leading to worsening outcomes. A death spiral.
To many, schools are perceived to be costly, unsafe indoctrination centers that push left-leaning agendas. Extended covid lockdowns were a huge betrayal.
You only have one chance to raise your kids, and the competition is getting tougher every year. Homeschooling in the area has tripled.
Some of the criticism is justified, some isn’t. But with failures on the academic outcomes, safety, and subjective failures on the ideology – the onus is on public schools to win back trust.
You can shame the homeschoolers , but that won’t bring them back. Time will tell if they succeed, but compared to public schools, the bar is so low that odds are in the homeschoolers favor. Especially if their parents care enough to do it.
I have a theory that is grounded on no-scientific evidence whats-so-ever. This applies only to the 2-5y population.
1) kids in nursery get sick a whole lot, and is not always just 'building up their immunitary system', it really is a one-two punch of constant illness that drugs for months on, with little to no recovery mechanisms. This is truer in bigger city with a higher turnover of the class cohort
2) a lot of the socialization aspect of nursery is overrated. Parallel play is a thing, and the need for socialization doesn't require a whole 8 hours. There are plenty of other opportunities to socialize. Especially in higher density areas, where institutions are more involved in creating moments for kids to socialize.
3) the cost of central group based nursery has skyrocket. (just empiric evidence), at the same time there is an increasing supply of 20-something-y-old that don't want a nursery job, but are happy to do a more flexible working hour in a less 'stressful' enviroment (aka less children, more home based).
The combination of the 3 things has made homeschooling a lot more interesting for parents.
It's becoming fashionable outside the US as well. And the core reason is that public schools deteriorate.
Public school systems sucks at diversity. It demands parents and students to endure diversity (i.e. putting kids from all walks of life into a single class), while it delivers zero itself, i.e. refusing to diversify its offerings as affluent kids from high-iq parents need different schooling than the fresh foreign refugee-arrival from a war-torn country.
Teachers Unions make sure to deflct any "market pressure" from teachers and these unions' political arms (i.e. left-leaning progressive parties) rake in extra profits because they can cry wolf about the bad state of education or worsening abilities for poorer people to rise through the ranks via merit. Crocodile Tears.
This "shouldn't" be surprising. Smart people seeing a wider perspective, seeing the limits of mass-schooling and top-down curricula, seeing other social challenges, and seeing a better option? I live in Seattle; there's a reason it's one of the top metros with per capita private school enrollment and if it weren't for tech incomes, I'd expect homeschooling and homeschooling collectives to thrive. Comments here about neurodiversity needs are also on point.
I live in the Seattle metro, and tomorrow morning is the first day of class for our homeschool co-op, where I'm teaching software engineering to high schoolers.
Not arguing with your point, and point taken. The quotation marks suggest that I don't fully mean to mean the literal definition or understanding of the word quoted in the context you're reading. But I use quotes too often to equivocate. Thanks for the reminder.
I went to a public school and regarded it as prison, no bullying went on, but the system is not designed to educate, it is designed to instill obedience, and the pace of learning is dictated primarily by mediocrity of the teachers(I had a rare great 5th grade teacher so this is why I think the the teachers more so than the students abilities dictates the results).
People recommending private school: these do not exist in all locations, try finding a good one in a rural area
It seems standards in public schools have only fallen since I attended, and based on how social media is trending, we seem to be getting dumber and less informed.
I could never force a child to attend public school in the US, unless it happened to be one of the rare good ones I hear exist.
If we ever get something like what is described in "The Diamond Age" perhaps that will help solve the school problem.
I think the author is simply wrong is their assumption. I'm pro-homeschooling, more or less fit the described profile and I don't see a slightest problem with my kid interacting with average people nor do I have contempt for them. The problem I see though is with putting the child into a non-voluntary community. Those tend to be toxic and prison-like.
Also, the school education is not crap because it's done by average or designed for the average. It's crap because it objectively can't adapt to an individual kid's pace. There's just no way around teaching kids in huge groups that doesn't involve everyone working as a teacher. Maybe AI will help here.
“He climaxed his teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. Later that year he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall called “An Evening With John Taylor Gatto,” which launched a career of public speaking in the area of school reform, which has taken Gatto over a million and a half miles in all fifty states and seven foreign countries." http://crn.hopto.org/archives/john-t-gatto/
The problem with homeschooling is it's pretty much a crapshoot whether you end up in a weird religious environment or an abusive environment, with a long-shot chance of ending up in a fun constructive environment with lots of personalised attention and the opportunity to travel the world.
Of course, this is pretty much the same set of dice you roll when you spawn into a traditional school system, except you roll with disadvantage when it comes to the long-shot.
I don't know, I was fortunate enough to roll the long shot, and it worked out pretty well for me. Though I will echo the article's note that forming emotional attachments continues to be a bitch if you didn't have a large peer group at a young age...
> it's pretty much a crapshoot whether you end up in a weird religious environment or an abusive environment, with a long-shot chance of ending up in a fun constructive environment with lots of personalised attention and the opportunity to travel the world.
It's a crapshoot for the kid, but a parent who's considering homeschooling knows pretty well whether they are going to be the fundamentalist type or not. If they are, they likely aren't here reading this discussion.
I assume GP was considering the societal value of homeschooling. I.e., what (if any) bureaucratic checks should be in place to ensure the children are actually being educated (assuming that home schooling is legal at all).
There are a lot of types of fundamentalists. I don't know that being raised in some sort of AI Accelerationist Musk/Theil-adjacent Silicon Valley environment is necessarily going to go particularly well for the kid either...
Why do you imply that the fun, constructive environment for homeschooling a long shot, but the weird religious or abusive environment is more of the norm?
My kids are enrolled in a homeschool parent partnership program (because its one of the few public montessori programs within an easy before-school-drive for our kids). My experience has been that the families attracted to that school fall into one of two categories:
1) Families who are skeptical of standard American public school methods and/or families who have recognized that standard public school methods don't work for their children's peculiarities. They treat the program (and especially the Montessori program) as like a school acceleration program.
2) Families who do not want the government dictating the terms of their children's education in any way shape or form. Within this latter category, the minority are active participants in their children's education, and the majority are the weirdly religious and/or abusive sorts.
The school's administration seems to cater to category 2, and expend a lot of time and effort to try to communicate that whatever requirement they're enforcing (like "your child must actually talk to, in-person, on the phone, or via video call, a teacher holding a state-issued teaching certificate at least once per 2 school weeks") is not a school requirement, but a state requirement, and failing to meet these minimum requirements will trigger a state investigation, not a school investigation. Its sort of unsettling to hear them belabor the point, but then, during the parent orientation where I was hearing that sort of thing, it seemed like most of the audience was not at all interested in suspending whatever they were doing (conversations, watching youtube videos, etc) while the principal was talking through that stuff. Like, its telling that the administration goes to great pains to say "we aren't holding you to the rules designed specifically to prevent child abuse and neglect, so don't send us your death threats or whatever", and most of the audience to that actual message of how to comply with those rules are themselves completely disengaged from the presentation of them.
I'm going to hazard a guess with zero grounding in data to attempt to answer that, caveat emptor. Please also note that even though these are my guesses, these assertions do not really reflect where I personally land on this. I'm not really sure what the breakdown is, but I think I can understand how someone gets to this point of view.
--
In order for parents to choose homeschooling, some (but not all) must be present in the parents:
- a conviction that the herd choice of sending a child to school is wrong, and not just a little bit
- the belief that you know education better than expert educators with many years of hard earned experience
- relatedly, the belief that you are fully qualified to teach anything of importance, and that anything you can't teach is not of important
- the ability to forgo the opportunity cost of an in-home full time tutor
Add these up and you will skew towards parents who either have extremely strong convictions (faith related or otherwise) and a mentality that presupposes that the parent is "right."
In the best case scenario, this is an extremely well educated/informed parent who knows enough to keep their pride at check and can handle their emotions well in the face of at times extremely frustrating circumstances, all well being under more financial strain than they would be if they weren't showing up every day to school. These people definitely exist, and I think most parents strive to be this for their children regardless of how they educate their child.
But the "average" human is not well informed, often makes rash and/or emotional decisions, and is struggling to make ends meet. Thus, the "average" parent that chooses homeschooling skews towards dogmatic thinking and/or a presumption of "I'm right and you're wrong" that over a period of a childhood easily leads to abuse, especially if the parents are struggling to make ends meet.
I guess there is a counter argument that people who choose to homeschool can "afford" to do so and thus are well resourced enough (financially or socially) to have a good shot of success, but even among the top 10% of earners you will be hard pressed to find parents that believe they can afford homeschooling.
> I guess there is a counter argument that people who choose to homeschool can "afford" to do so
I would say that the vast majority the quote-unquote "normal" homeschool parents I know are broke hippies/homesteaders/vanlife/wooden-sailboat types.
Definitely are rich folks who go down this path, but they tend to pay fancy private tutors and end up with something much more resembling a traditional education
Well, normal, boring people tend to send their kids to school, so your chances of a normal, boring homeschooling experience are pretty slim. And even the most well-intentioned of counter cultural folks don't always excel at parenting, never mind educating.
I've met a fair number of other homeschooled folks over the years who had a great childhood, but I've met more for whom the lack of community/government oversight meant their parents could get away with things we wouldn't generally countenance (be that actual abuse, various forms of religious indoctrination, or just plain old "unschooling" - aka "ignore the kids till they go away").
> Well, normal, boring people tend to send their kids to school, so your chances of a normal, boring homeschooling experience are pretty slim.
Depends what you mean by normal. My experience is kids get more freedom, meet a wide range of people, and generally get a much better education. Maybe it is different here in the UK.
> And even the most well-intentioned of counter cultural folks don't always excel at parenting, never mind educating.
The home ed community in the UK does have a lot of hippie types in it, but even if I do not see eye to eye with them I think their kids are mostly a lot better educated than the average school child.
> hings we wouldn't generally countenance (be that actual abuse,
which also happens to school going kids. it happens more often to school going kids (and as far as I can see from stats, home ed kids are at lower risk - more likely to be investigated, less likely to have action taken). On top of that there is a fair amount of abuse in schools.
> just plain old "unschooling" - aka "ignore the kids till they go away").
that is not what unschooling is. Unschorling parents can make a great deal of effort, its just that they let kids decide what they want to learn and facilitate it.
Yes, I was originally homeschooled in the UK, and while a lot of the parents where pretty far out there, there was definitely a lower prevalence of weird religious cults and that sort of thing (than in the US).
> that is not what unschooling is
That's why I put "unschooling" in quotes. There are certainly folks doing ethical things under that banner, but the legitimacy of the term provides cover for a lot of folks who aren't doing the ethical thing.
These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people.
I agree in part and disagree in part:
Agree - they're absolutely "hacking" education for their kids. The 1:1 student/teacher ratio and the ability to custom tailor almost every part of the curriculum are the biggest selling points--and that's true whether it comes from a desire to give their kids the best they can, or a desire to micromanage and control every aspect of their lives.
Disagree - I think it's less about "average people" overall and more about opting out of learning from and being trained by what can feel like a gachapon of teachers and administrators in public (and to a lesser extent, private) schools. It probably seems to them like, "If I wouldn't hire this person to work at my company, why would I 'hire' them to do the much more critical task of preparing my child for their future?"
None of the arguments convince anyone. Homeschooling remains what it was in the creationism-and-spelling-bee days: an ideological choice.
In other words...
Windows = public school
Mac = private school
Linux = homeschool
As someone who once heard, in 11th grade pre-calculus, that pi is a rational number equal to 22/7, I cannot be so surprised that many parents would choose to homeschool their children. Most parents have no idea what is going on in their childrens' schools.
Well, I went through through the public school system from rural (hamlet) kindergarten till big city university and I say ... it's OK as a default baseline but if one wants some resemblance of competitiveness and performance from their kids, one cannot avoid private tutoring.
If that is done by the parents / family, then it's almost like home schooling. But I don't like home schooling because the kid is left out of the system and the studies are not recognized. At some point they will have to take traumatizing equivalence tests, which can be entirely avoided by playing along - go to a public school, or in my kid's case, a private school which follows the same curricula.
But I stress again, even with private school, there's no replacement for private tutoring if you want your kid to succeed in life.
I'm a native Finn and went to a public school here in Finland in the 00s. My overall experience was good, though of course I didn't always enjoy it. I liked some teachers more than others. I learned a lot and was bored a lot. I was subjected to the occasional bullying (who wasn't?) but I never felt truly unsafe. I also got along well with most people most of the time. I had to overcome my shyness to give presentations to my classmates. I got to know people from different socio-economic backgrounds. While navigating through childhood and puberty I made a lot of mistakes, as did all other kids, but ultimately it was a good childhood, and in hindsight I am really glad I wasn't homeschooled (not that it's common here anyway). Without the social connections I made and social skills I learned, I undoubtedly would've had a very different kind of life, and not in a better way I think.
"Social awkwardness and anxiety
Difficulty in forming IRL friendships
Impatience with the idea of connecting on a meaningful level with other people: who needs ‘em?
An abiding sense of detachment from reality"
I can tell you from personal experience, going to school doesn't prevent this.
2) Yet, public school sucks. Most normies don't wanna learn and the system doesn't reward nor incentivize the smart, initiated students who want to excel. There are many normies that teachers just gotta essentially ... just babysit. And God forbid that a teacher stands up for themselves. Then some Karen has go and destroy that teacher and their career.
But also not functionally a union. Teachers are actually represented by their state affiliate, and whether or not they can collectively bargain (the sine qua non of being a union) varies from state to state. Personally, I've lived in several states, but none in which the state Education Association was able to collectively bargain for its members.
Every K-12 teacher I've known (male and female) has had times when they've come home crying from the stress. (workload, the kids you care about and can't help, ...)
The NEA does something about pay and tenure but when it comes to protecting teachers emotionally forget about it. Roughly half of the people who get a teaching certificate at their own expense discover it is a job that they can't stand to do.
State affiliates acting at the behest of a national union is a functional union, and have been effective in collectively bargaining for members since the 1970s.
I recommend looking into the many things that NEA (and other national unions like it) do to enact their agendas regardless of their ability to bargain within a given state. For example the U.S. Department of Ed basically exists because of the NEA's lobbying efforts.
Most people here would be good homeschooling parents.
This site doesn’t represent the world at large.
I was personally homeschooled, and while I ended up with a positive outcome, I cannot say the same thing for any of my peers (other kids I met through homeschooling groups.) There were many children that, in retrospect, were suffering from abuse or neglect that the structure of school could have prevented, or at least a mandatory reporter could have caught.
For more anecdotes, take a look at r/homeschoolrecovery (which is nearly 1/6th the size of r/homeschooling.) Many of the stories there are so gut-wrenchingly bleak. Any margin improvement in educational outcomes hardly seems worth it given some of the pain described there.
I think as a professional in tech, it's frightening and obvious how behind schools are in keeping up with the modern world. I'm not talking about having ipads. AI will be he most significant technology humanity has experiences. We need to pivot toward an educational model that enhances creativity and cooperative communication but I just don't see that happening. It's still the bucket model of learn this don't ask questions, kids are a bucket and they need to be filled up by knowledge. It's outdated NOW, with absolutely no indication there will be significant changes.
I feel like there should be a different word for those that "home school" their child by hiring a private teacher and they learn in the house. For me, homeschooling means one of the parents (often the mother) teaches the child(ren) in their home.
I know many teachers, and they have a very specific set of skills on how to teach. I wouldn't expect any old parent to know this and I suspect home school kids are worse off for it? But I'm happy to be pointed to evidence on the contrary.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Who is physically doing the homeschooling? The rich tech people? Their spouses?
It sounds like what he is criticizing is just extra-private private schooling or something like that. As distinct from homeschooling by parents, which is the more… eclectic version the author grew up with.
So, I don't claim to have Big Data on this, but I homeschooled my child, and one of the most common things in homeschooling I saw was that people used co-ops. Thus, the kids are around other kids, and the parent doesn't have to know everything.
In my case, I chose it because the public schools in my part of town (low income) were low achieving, and proto-fascist in their policies on being able to control your own appearance. They had both state level (Texas, conservative) and city-level (Austin, progressive) political influences, the worst elements of both.
Just my own experience, but it doesn't much match what the article describes.
Homeschooling is another way to protect your kids from social media. If they aren't subjected to forced hang outs with kids who are all on social media, it becomes much easier to control their access to it (or rather its access to them).
Public schools in the US are dependent on federal and state money. Play ball or lose the money. Often the people making the decisions in congressional settings and DOE have personal agendas or money greasing their wheels. Remember the hubbub on Common Core? Teach common core or lose money.
Cruise. Around YouTube for older videos and connect the dots on how Common Core was a money grab that set us back a bit.
Go to local schools and see how school boards tie their ideology to how schools and classrooms are run to get that money. For years in San Francisco you enroll in the school lottery and hope you get to send your kid to the school close enough to you. Otherwise you spend 45 minutes each way to drop them off at school. On top of that classrooms cater to the lowest performing student. What parents with money wind up doing is sending their kids to Kumon like learning centers to fix the gap the classroom has in pushing their kid to be engaged with learning.
With everything else schools are also penalized for suspending or expelling students so teachers have to find creative ways to keep the bad apples away from everyone else.
For context I have family and friends working in public schools across differ states. There’s a reason people want to abolish the DOE and return curriculum back to the local school districts or the state.
I went to an ok school district and didn’t experience any of the problems today’s kids seem to face in school. People got suspended or expelled for being bad. Classrooms didn’t show political or biological ideology to the students.
I know quite a few people who have started homeschooling their kids in recent years, including one who stopped homeschooling their kiss last year and will be pulling their kids back out of school this spring.
The most common reasons I hear are either that the public schools they are zoned for are terrible, mainly complaints over safety and/or drugs. The other common reason is just not seeing the value in the education being provided, often complaining of teacher quality or the design of a school system modelled after a program meant to churn out good factory workers.
I turned out OK in public school, but I was held back at different points, particularly in math, because I (and a few others) were too far ahead of the other kids. We literally had to repeat an entire year of content at one point. Kudos to the teachers who enabled & fostered that, but shame on the school system for not continuing to support. I'm pretty sure one of my classmates gave up on academics at that moment (he never really excelled again like he used to).
I'd like my kids to be free to follow their curiosities. It's definitely work to homeschool but for us, it may be worth it.
I'm a huge supporter of public education. I think it's one of the most important things for the government to fund.
And, unfortunately, that's part of what's moving me towards homeschooling my child. We've not 100% decided on it yet. However, we are on the brink.
The issue we have is our school is underfunded and our child has special needs. Their day in class, from what we've observed, is primarily just daycare with no actual schooling. Even though they are on the border of being severe, they have no interaction with their peers which is a major reason we wanted them in school in the first place. The end result is they are spending a very large amount of time watching youtube or sitting in a corner.
The issue is our school district and our state does not want to fund public schools. They want to find ways to send money to private schools. The end result is the salaries for everyone involved are pitiful. Everyone that deals with my kid at school works 2 jobs. Some of them are making more money at mcdonalds than at school. And, surprise, the end result is even if they want to find staffers they can't find them.
Our district further bans parents from volunteering. So even though my wife is a SAHM, she can't lend a hand in my child's school to make up the staffing problem and improve my kid's education.
All of this has pushed us towards wanting to homeschool. Which really sucks because I don't think that's the ideal education for my child. I worry that we'll have gaps in the education we try to give them. I worry that they won't get to socialize with any peers. I worry that they will ultimately get left behind. But school isn't providing what we want.
One thing I've never understood with homeschooling: How come parents think they have the competence to be a teacher? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
> Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
This applies equally to paid teachers, along with numerous downsides that don't apply to parents (i.e. being able to tailor education to a single individual, developing a relationship that lasts close to two decades, ability to slow down and speed up course material where necessary, and more). Paid teachers, contrary to semi-popular mythology, are not special and don't do anything that an average person couldn't do (they are not extra-"competent"). In the natural course of being a parent you learn how to interact, guide, and teach your children.
This argument also fails in many concrete situations. For example, where I grew up there is a decent homeschooling community made up of people with average levels of education, low to average income, and yet the kids perform very well academically and are well socialized. Saying that these parents are not competent because didn't get a badge (education-related degree) is absurd considering they do as well as the people who did get that badge.
Great, I'm sure you'll have no problem using the services of a self-taught doctor, lawyer, or engineer then. After all, why would they need to be taught by a professional?
Go spend some time in a classroom and get a fucking clue how much more there is to teaching than what your layman's view entails. You, and this disrespect for our educators and the potential of what we could be offering in our public schools is why we are the laughing stock of the developed world.
Teaching twenty kids of wildly different levels is always going to be harder that teaching a single kid, so parents have a great advantage by default.
Yes, there are educators who are so great they can teach all 20 kids amazingly well, but those are super rare. Most likely kids who are learn much faster or much slower than the rest will be left behind. If you child is in this group, it's better off to stay away from public school.
(It could have been much better if there were advanced classes, "magnet" schools, etc.. but in many states those programs are being cancelled and everyone is being forced into rigid programs.)
It is an objectively measurable fact (e.g. by test scores) that K-12 teaching, in the US, pays poorly, lacks prestige, and attracts far from the best and the brightest.
If you are blindly relying on certified professionals in soft fields such as general medicine and law you are in for a bad time.
At a minimum you need to use your judgement to vet good from bad practitioners in those fields.
Also "disrespect our educators" is so funny. Sorry, they're not that serious, mostly dumb. And we're not the laughingstock of the developed world, we are the rulers of the developed and undeveloped world
I'm a former public school teacher -- maybe I can explain.
There's a lot of competence necessary to teach two dozen kids with different backgrounds and mastery levels, even in the rare moments when 2-4 of them aren't actively trying to derail the entire class.
The base level of competence necessary to go through a curriculum with one/a few of your own children is much, much lower. Could I do better with one/a few of your children given as much time and attention? Pretty definitely. Can I do better if your kid is in my classroom? In most cases, no.
Sure, there are things I could explain or guide a kid through because of my background and skills that homeschooling parents can't (though it mostly just takes more time and effort), but there's a huge amount they can do because of their relationship, access, and ability to devote time and attention that I couldn't hope to. And with modern homeschooling resources, tutors/group microschooling, online courses and group study, etc., the deficits have never been easier to overcome.
Also, two underdiscussed points:
1. An untrained, literate adult probably needs less than two hours to help a kid through what they'd learn in an eight-hour day at school. That time can go to other things. If they're productive, great. If they're not, no huge loss.
2. People significantly overestimate the level of care and competence average teachers have. You remember some fantastic ones. If fantastic and caring was the norm, you were quite lucky.
I'm generally not a fan of home schooling in a lot of cases, part of what school does is expose you to a vertical slice of humanity, and you will almost certainly be dealing with that for the rest of your life.
HOWEVER... remember that "home schooled" doesn't mean "as a parent you are the only teacher" right? You can hire tutors, you can form teaching groups with other parents, you can use online resources, etc. If done WELL and with a sense of one's own limitations, and the need to socialize your child, homeschooling can work.
It's just unfortunate that so often homeschooling is used as a way to ensure that no outside influences interrupt a parent's particular brand of ideological indoctrination... although in the narrow case of tech parents, I suspect that's less of a driving force.
Agreed. Titles and credentials do not mean what they used to, in education and a lot of other fields.
Sufficient erosion in the meaning and value of 3rd party teaching credentials then diminishes the relative value of outsourcing the process vs. doing it in-house: literally.
We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids.
We think we have a relationship with our own child that allows us to understand what they need and how to communicate with them in a way that works for them. We think we have the time (assuming one parent is full time parenting) to give our child the attention they need to excel. And we believe that a combination of relationship and individual attention goes further in K–12 than any amount of formal training in education.
If you do that, the normal education is redundant. You wouldn't put a university student in class to learn multiplication; it's an insulting waste of their time. Why would you do the same to a 10 year old who mastered it years ago?
Not really—public school takes up 6+ hours of every day, and I'd like my kids to have self-directed time as well. If we tried to do some sort of after-school tutoring with mom that would deprive them of valuable time to choose their own stuff to work on.
And what would be the point? If we're right that their mom is better equipped to teach them than a teacher is (because of time to dedicate to them and a personal relationship and understanding) then what do we gain by having a teacher do it too?
(This isn't the thread for the socializing argument, because OP started with teacher qualifications. I'll just add that we are aware of that concern and have strong mitigations in place.)
Not really. There are only so many hours in the day. The time between school and bedtime is extremely limited and involves other time consuming activities such as after school sports and eating dinner.
I work on homework with my kid every day and after all those things it's not like we have time (or she has energy) to fill in holes in her at-school learning
Next time you're in the car, try teaching your kid about solving systems of equations where both are linear vs one is linear and the other is parabolic. It's a lot easier to sketch it out on scratch paper than to pontificate from the driver's seat.
that's not germane to this conversation. it's about parents without formal teaching certs working with their children to given them what they need to excel.
Sure those things (history/philosphy/etc) matter but in our society you still have to do well on math tests to do well in life.
As a parent you can teach them directly (homeschool) or augment a public school education, but the augmentation route needs to be done in slack time, which is tough.
>We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids.
While this is a good and rational awareness of one's own capabilities, as someone who grew up in Bible-belt homeschooling circles and saw a wide variance in approaches and effectiveness, the "homeschool co-op"/"homeschool group" model where one parent teaches one subject to many kids, classroom-style, is super common. See, for example, "Classical Conversations" [1], a pretty common one in my area, that leans on "parent as classroom teacher to many kids", without much in the way of prerequisite qualifications.
The same logic applies to teachers, and can be applied against your own question.
As an example i once lost a mark on a math test because when rounding to the nearest whole number, i put 3.0 as the answer. Wrong. 3 is a whole number, 3.0 is not i was told, and threatened with suspension on protest. That kind of thing sticks with you.
I agree with your sentiment however, i just dont think its a powerful retort.
> As an example i once lost a mark on a math test because when rounding to the nearest whole number, i put 3.0 as the answer. Wrong. 3 is a whole number, 3.0 is not i was told, and threatened with suspension on protest. That kind of thing sticks with you.
I got threatened with suspension on protest once. It was about the meaning of a word, but still.
Luckily, I'm a university brat, so I just waited a couple days until my dad was keeping me at his office, then I wandered down the hall, and I asked some professors for a detailed and referenced way to push back. I brought candy and tums, because that's what professors want from children who can't bring beer.
About a week later, I went in with a 30 page computer printed essay. As a nine year old. It had six phone numbers in the back, four to PhDs, which could be called for further detail if needed. It was addressed to both the teacher and the principal.
An opening note was "please look into how Marilyn vos Savant was treated when she explained the Monty Hall problem, when considering whether teachers are permitted to threaten students for disagreeing politely. Are you really so afraid of being incorrect?," written by an internationally renowned mathematician.
I was carrying an etymological breakdown that to this day I can barely read, stretching all the way back to the hypothetical proto-indo-european roots.
Professors don't like kids being threatened.
I did not hear about that teacher doing that again while I was in that school.
Type theory comes from math. Numbers in math do in fact have types. Most of the time we ignore it but numbers in math have types. math also has the concept of max number rolling back to zero ogain something anyone who has studied types in math would know. Rounding error is studied in several different math fields.
negative zero isn't in any math I know of. It is only in obsolete computer science though.
Mathematicians generally work with sets, not types. The first thing you do after defining the reals is agree that the naturals, integers, and rationals are subsets. From a type theory perspective, they are all type ℝ, and, roughly, the naturals satisfy the proposition "n:ℝ is a natural number".
Mathematics has a lot of different theories and some small branches have different rules. I've done mod math for example (it was maybe one week of classes) where you don't get an infinite set of possible numbers. It isn't nearly as interesting as far as mathematicians are concerned (for good reason) so it isn't looked at much but those theories exist.
I am no Terry Tao, but I do have a degree in mathematics. Other than possibly in a class on numerical analysis, I don't remember anything resembling types.
We definitely spent more time discussing different kinds of infinity than we did discussing rounding error!
I can believe that the situation might be different in "applied mathematics" or definitely in "engineering mathematics" - but at least at Berkeley, the latter degree is in the College of Engineering, not under the Math Department at all.
There is a lot of math never taught. types in math are mostly a dead end and so rarely taught - particularly since computer science moved to a seperate department. Even before then it was mostly applied math.
So, what was the purpose of the conversation then? In the vast majority of cases, in most normal mathematical manuscripts, '3.0' is '3'. There is no distinction.
The point is to refute the claim that math never uses a bunch of computer concepts like types - those concepts all have roots in formal math theories and so the claim is false. That that theory is not of much use in the vast majority of math doesn't mean there is no math behind it.
> The right answer they were looking for was 3, not 3.0. Adding that .0 implies a precision which is not correct.
In contemporary mathematics, 3 is 3.0 . Both 3 and 3.0 belong to the set of integers. There is no additional precision being demonstrated by adding a 0 at the end of the 3. This is simple notation, not refering to a new concept.
>>> a = 3.0
>>> b = 3
>>> type(a) == type(b)
False
The right answer they were looking for was 3, not 3.0. Adding that .0 implies a precision which is not correct. They weren't looking to see if you knew the arithmetic with that question, they wanted you to show you understood what they meant by "whole number" and understand you can't just leave arbitrary precision after rounding. You didn't give the right answer and apparently kept complaining about it instead of trying to figure out why you were wrong to the point they threatened suspension. I imagine your complaints based on your assumption you couldn't be wrong were causing quite a distraction.
For example, 10 / 3 = 3.333... right? We're then asked to round to the nearest whole number, and the answer should be 10 / 3 = 3. It is not correct to then say 10 / 3 = 3.0, because that is just wrong.
I'd end up siding with the teacher on this one. Just acknowledge you didn't understand what they were looking for and do better next time.
As someone who (almost!) has a PhD in mathematics I'm going to have to call you out on this point. You are thinking like an engineer and talking about precision, but this is mathematics, not engineering. We make no distinction between the "real" number 3, the "complex" number 3, and the "whole" number 3. The number 3 lives in each of these universes as the same object (so to speak) because these sets (whole, real, complex) numbers are included in one another. Writing 3.0 is a representation for 3 just as 2.9999... is a representation of 3. Perhaps the bigger question we should be asking here is what was the purpose of all of this discussion? I've seen such petty treatment by teachers all the time and it always discouraged me from pursuing math until I met professors in university who actually tried to teach us something interesting and beautiful about math. This question could have led in that direction actually with a discussion of different kinds of numbers but unfortunately many math teachers in the US are not capable of this, or are too discouraged by the other craziness in schools to have the energy for such conversations.
"Whole number" means that the mantissa is 0, and is not related to what some random programming language asserts in its representational type system.
Math terms like "whole number" are not defined in terms of the behavior of computer programming languages.
In math, not only are 3.0 and 3 the same thing, but also, so is 2.9999999...
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> They weren't looking to see if you knew the arithmetic with that question, they wanted you to show you understood what they meant by "whole number" and understand you can't just leave arbitrary precision after rounding.
Can you show any math reference that supports this viewpoint? This goes against my college mathematics training.
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> You didn't give the right answer
According to mathematics, 3.0 and 3 are the same thing (and so is the Roman numeral III, and so on.) So is 6/2.
It is deeply and profoundly incorrect to treat an answer as incorrect because the mantissa was written out.
The teacher is simply incorrect, as are you.
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> Just acknowledge you didn't understand what they were looking for and do better next time.
If a teacher asks "what is the country north of Austria," in an English speaking school, and you write "Germany," and the teacher says "no, it's Allemande," they're just incorrect. It doesn't matter if the teacher is French. There are only two ways to look at this: either the correct answer is in the language of the school, or any international answer is acceptable.
A normal person would say "oh, ha ha, Germany and Allemande are the same place, let's just move forwards."
A person interested in defeating and winning, instead of teaching, might demand that the answer come in in some arbitrary incorrect format that they expected. That's a bad teacher who doesn't need to be listened to.
Yes, we know there's also some kid who is explaining to just do as teacher instructs, but no, we're there to learn information, not to learn to obey.
> Can you show any math reference that supports this viewpoint? This goes against my college mathematics training.
> The word integer comes from the Latin integer meaning "whole" or (literally) "untouched", from in ("not") plus tangere ("to touch"). "Entire" derives from the same origin via the French word entier, which means both entire and integer.[9] Historically the term was used for a number that was a multiple of 1,[10][11] or to the whole part of a mixed number.
It's very clear you're out of your element on this, and you have multiple people with an actual math background telling you the objection is somewhere between meaningless and wrong.
The takeaway from trying to really nail down a definition of "integers" (or anything, really) is going to be something along the lines of "if it quacks like a duck up to unique isomorphism, it's a duck". The encoding is not important and one frequently swaps among encodings when convenient. In any case, no one who knows any math is going to say to a child that 3 and 3.0 aren't interchangable outside of some extremely specific contexts. In fact that's not even encoding: it's notation. They can be literally equal, not just equivalent. Those particular contexts aren't ordained, and e.g. propagation of uncertainty is "better" than significant figures if you're doing engineering anyway.
Writing something like '10/3=3' is likely to trigger the mathematicians because lots of people get confused about what '=' is supposed to mean (and often use it to mean something like "next step indicator"). '3=3.0' not so much.
The exact context was given. They wanted only whole numbers.
> Writing something like '10/3=3' is likely to trigger the mathematicians
Sure, when lacking the context of all answers should be rounded to the nearest whole number. But that was the context, and it's astounding so many people with alleged math backgrounds arguing things like intergers aren't a thing to understand.
Assuming you want to be able to make statements like ℕ⊆ℚ⊆ℝ (as one normally does), 3.0 is a whole number, 3 is a real number, and 3.0=3=2.9999999...
Being equal to 3, 2.9999... is also a whole number.
Teaching to use '=' in a statement like '10/3=3' is an example of where teachers don't know math in depth and make errors about details that are actually important/later cause confusion. 10/3 is not equal to 3. '=' doesn't mean "answer". Then not accepting 3.0 which is equal to 3 just layers on that confusion. '=' is transitive. If a=b and b=c, then a=c.
Saying 3.0≠3 is a subtlety you really only get into in math when defining these things, and then you immediately redefine them so that 3.0=3 and you don't have to think about it again.
You're continuing to focus on the functional similarities and functional equivalences of 3, 3.0, 6/2, 2.999... etc. You're right, from an arithmetic standpoint, these are all the same value. I've definitely always agreed with this and fully understand it.
But the question wasn't testing that you knew how to divide and round. The question was testing if you understood what the teacher was trying to teach about whole numbers, integers, rational numbers, real numbers, etc.
6/2 as written is not an integer. It is not a whole number. The value it represents can be written as a whole number, I fully agree, but as written it itself is not a whole number. Whole numbers are the set of numbers Z including -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4,... I doubt any math teacher, upon teaching "what is a whole number", draws a number line and proceeds to label it -3.999, -6/2, -12/6, -5/5, 0, 5/5, 12/6, 6/2, 3.999..., and on.
The notation was the key part of the question and was a key part of the answer.
The teacher wasn't looking for a value (which is what you're so focused on looking at), they were looking for a notation, a format.
Then the teacher is teaching something that someone more knowledgeable in the subject will later have to unteach. I'm focusing on functional equivalences because that's how math works as practiced by mathematicians. The functional equivalences are the point, and you may not notice it, but you're also relying on those equivalences, which is why you can write "6/2" in the first place. Integers are already equivalence classes of pairs of natural numbers (which is why 2-3=3-4). Rationals are equivalence classes of pairs of integers (which is why 3/1 = 6/2). If you actually try to define any of this stuff in a coherent way, you're immediately forced to deal with equivalence as a central idea.
6/2 is a whole number. 6/2 = 3. 3 is a whole number. They are equal. Usually, they are the exact same mathematical object. It is not merely that they share properties. They are literally definitionally the exact same thing (the same set in ZFC). "n is a whole number" is a proposition. It is true for n=6/2.
If a teacher is teaching that 6/2 is not an integer, unless they are in the middle of constructing the rationals and need to make a distinction between integers and equivalence classes of pairs of integers, then they are wrong. The very first thing you do after you're forced to make that distinction is you make it go away. They shouldn't be teaching the student to hyperfocus on a specific notation or format. That's a bad lesson to teach, and is something a real teacher will need to fix later. Actual mathematics professors are happy to let you write "let <christmas tree>∈ℝ". An intro proofs professor will definitely put something like "-3.999..., -6/2, -12/6, -5/5, 0, 5/5, 12/6, 6/2, 3.999..." on a number line to illustrate the point that these are just different ways to write the same thing. Fluidity in switching through and following different notations without getting distracted is a centrally important mathematical skill.
> unless they are in the middle of constructing the rationals and need to make a distinction between integers and equivalence classes of pairs of integers
Finally, you're starting to understand the context of the question at hand.
I'm also happy you're starting to show you do understand there's a notational difference between 6/2 and 3. That the values are the same the notation is quite different, thus there are some differences. Not functionally, true, but notationally.
The notational difference was the point of this lesson. You may think it'll only be a barrier in the future to point it out like that (maybe it is!), but the notational difference was the lesson.
> Fluidity in switching through and following different notations
If you don't really have an understanding of the notations, you're going to have a hard time being fluid switching between them.
> An intro proofs professor
An intro proofs professor wasn't leading the lesson, it was probably an elementary or middle school math teacher. The point of the lesson is different, the context of the lesson is different.
Given that most math teachers haven't studied algebra/likely haven't seen the definition of any of these things, and the distinction is not relevant when discussing rounding, I highly doubt that the teacher was making that distinction, or even aware it exists. More likely, the teacher was making a distinction that does not exist, which only confuses students.
In any context that a child is working in, 6/2 and 3.0 are a whole numbers. If the teacher says otherwise, they are wrong. Just because the teacher wants to teach a lesson doesn't mean that lesson is actually correct. The teacher is just confused.
If they weren't confused, it would be highly inappropriate to go into that level of detail with anyone other than a curious gifted kid that's asking questions that are years ahead of a normal curriculum. So much so that it's beyond the level of knowledge expected of a schoolteacher.
You also wouldn't mark it wrong because the entire point is to define things in a way that makes the distinction go away. Even after that distinction has been presented and is front-of-mind, you still generally write down whatever representative is convenient.
It's either literally wrong, philosophically/pedagogically wrong, or both.
Pretty sure all teachers I had even in elementary school studied at least high school level algebra. In middle school and above they all had masters or better in mathematics.
> the distinction is not relevant
> I highly doubt that the teacher was making that distinction, or even aware it exists
> the teacher was making a distinction that does not exist
The distinction both exists and does not exist. Incredible.
> it would be highly inappropriate to go into that level of detail
The detail of a thing that does not exist, right?
> it's beyond the level of knowledge expected of a schoolteacher.
Right, the teacher is wrong because you wouldn't expect the schoolteacher to be smart enough to be right about it.
Yes, the distinction both exists and it doesn't. When defining things, you might start off by saying "the natural numbers are von Neumann ordinals". Then you construct the integers as certain infinite sets of pairs of natural numbers, and you say "actually when I say natural numbers I mean integers that contain a pair where the 2nd number is 0". Then you define rationals as certain infinite sets of pairs of integers, and say "actually when I say integers I mean rationals that contain a pair where the 2nd number is 1", and so on. So for a brief moment during the construction of the next step, there is a distinction. Then you immediately retcon your definition and get rid of it. No one ever uses the intermediate definitions again.
There's similar logical snags when trying to define real numbers because technically you'll need distances which have to be rational because you don't have real numbers yet, but really you'd like distances to be real. It's not actually an issue though, and as far as everyone is concerned, distances are real.
Or you define things only up to unique isomorphism by their properties and wash your hands of the whole ordeal. The construction is merely to show that some object with those properties exists.
The teacher is wrong because if they are being pedantic about it to a child, they're a bad teacher. And they're missing the point.
> adding that .0 implies a precision which is not correct. They weren't looking to see if you knew the arithmetic with that question, they wanted you to show you understood what they meant by "whole number" and understand you can't just leave arbitrary precision after rounding.
If you round 3.05 down to 3, 3.00 is not arbitrary precision, its explicit precision that's reflective of the rounding operation you did. I wasn't claiming that `type(3.0) == type(3)`. I was claiming that:
>>> round(3.0) == 3
True
And that such a representation was valid within the context of the question. This was long before I was wise enough to understand that sir, this is a public school, just do what the book says and don't make me talk with the students more than I need do.
It's incredible despite multiple additional individuals telling you that you're wrong you continue doubling down on it.
10 / 3 != 3.000000000000000000000000 no matter how many times you refute it. You should really learn to accept it and continue on and look deeper inside yourself into this. It's sad you still haven't learned this lesson from elementary education. Maybe they should have suspended you.
In no world does 10 / 3 = 3.0. This is just a falsehood as much as 2 + 2. = 5. I don't care about your large values of 2.
'10/3 = 3' is also false, and is something you put forward as true. Meanwhile, '10/3 ≈ 3' and '10/3 ≈ 3.0' are both equally true, as is '10/3 ≈ π' if you're in a pinch. Also true is that math is full of conventions, and it makes sense to use the conventions you feel are appropriate for what you're doing. Sometimes that might be significant figures, which I suppose you're alluding to. Other times, it might be propagation of uncertainty. Other times error tracking is not even relevant; you might just round the thing but also want to have all of your expressions be of the same type. For that matter, you may have 3: ℝ = 3.0: ℝ by definition. The other poster never gave any indication of whether or why some particular convention should apply.
Teachers not having the time to muse about such ideas and instead needing to package everything into a presentation appropriate for an entire room full of children is one of the more obvious failure modes of industrialized education.
'10 / 3 = 3' is either bad notation or wrong. It's not true under any usual definition of 10, 3, / or =. '3 = 3.0' on the other hand is perfectly reasonable in many circumstances. If you think 10/3 can equal 3 but not 3.0, you are either confused or confusing or both. What you mean to write is '≈', and when you do that, it's obvious that 3 and 3.0 are both usable in that sentence.
It is perfectly reasonable to define 3: ℕ = succ(succ(succ(zero))). It's also perfectly reasonable to define 3: ℝ as the image of succ(succ(succ(zero))): ℕ under the canonical embedding. Or you can define 3: ℚ with the obvious element. You can also define 3.0: ℚ or 3.0: ℝ as the obvious elements. If you were really a deviant, I suppose you could even define 3.0: ℕ, and people would roll their eyes, but everyone would understand you. Obviously, there are reasonable ways to define things so that `3 = 3.0` is a meaningful sentence (typechecks) and also literally true.
Again, different conventions are used in different contexts. The "user" of mathematics should pick the conventions and notations that make sense for what they're doing to communicate what they're trying to say. That itself is an important lesson. The sigfig convention you learned in middle school isn't the word of God.
Not being aware of these things to be capable of musing about them is I suppose another issue with our education system.
If I ask for someone for 3 of something and they give me 3.001 of it, it's whatever. If I ask someone for 3.000 of something and they give me 3.001 of it, it's out of spec.
Admittedly I only did this in school and it's been over 10 years, but I recall when doing engineering drawings, we'd specify ± (or separate lower/upper tolerances in some situations). Using decimal points to indicate uncertainty was not a thing I believe I did after high school. Does any actual professional use decimal places and not explicit ±?
Similarly, we calculated those ± values using the chain rule/uncertainty propagation, not with the simple decimal place rules you learn as a kid. I assume no one serious uses the child rules when CAD software can just as easily use the real ones.
> we'd specify ± (or separate lower/upper tolerances in some situations)
> we calculated those ± values using the chain rule/uncertainty propagation
Yes, that's common in detailed engineering documents. It still doesn't change the fact if I ask for 3.000 and you give me 3.001 I'm not going to consider that in-spec despite not giving a ±. It's assumed if I wrote it out to that decimal point I'm caring about that level of precision.
> Using decimal points to indicate uncertainty was not a thing I believe I did after high school
Well, I'd imagine since the topic of lesson was understanding whole numbers at a basic level this was probably a high school or lower class, probably more like elementary or middle school. You know, in that time when you did use decimal places to indicate precision. This person wasn't talking about losing points at their engineering job.
I was homeschooled from 2nd - 8th grade. My elementary school was trying to put my brother on adderall and my class had sorted me into the "blue" group of readers (colors of the rainbow for reading ability). I apparently came home talking about how I was slow and it was okay because we all learn at our own pace.
Definitely not a great school! both my brother and I ended up going to college and getting engineering degrees, and had zero issues with academics in high school. My mom did a pretty okay job but it was absolute hell on her, I entered high school ahead on mathematics/history but pretty behind on writing and science. The science I dont blame my mom for, all the curriculum at the time was insanely religious, so the ones we could find were very dry.
That's like half your job as a parent: teaching your kids stuff ( the other half being: keeping them alive). You are THE most qualified person on the planet to teach your own kids anything.
This is exactly why I dislike the push to erode parental rights or attack homeschooling, which is happening in many blue states. Parents know best, not a civil worker (teachers) or bureaucrat or the “state”.
I am absolutely not the most qualified person on the planet to teach my kids quantum physics. I'm also absolutely not the most qualified person on the planet to teach them geology. Probably also not the most qualified person to teach them advanced biochemistry.
Well, maybe not best, but it's also not something I would advocate for taking away from parents. It's silly to pretend parents need a degree to teach their kids something when teaching their kids how to live life is half of the job.
Depends on the parents because a lot of them are more than qualified. The typical education major isn't exactly a scholar, but that is also true of most people.
One thing I've never understood with public schooling: How come teachers think they have the competence to be in loco parentis? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
> How come teachers think they have the competence to be in loco parentis?
Multiple members of my wife's family are teachers in the local public school system. From what they have told me: they don't want to be in that place. Parents demand it of them, despite their strong attempts to push back and say "hey this one is your job as the parent to solve". So that's the reason in at least some cases, although probably not all.
Here in this country it's not teachers that assess their own compentence to be educators, it's their mentors that guide and grade them through a university Bachelor of Education Course and their first year trials of "live" teaching in the wild.
I had numerous teachers that won local and regional teacher of the year awards that were, too put it bluntly, terrible at teaching. The actual pedagogical education that teachers receive is not good, and when you look at the rigor in their degree programs it would be found extremely wanting compared to just about any hard science degree program. There are numerous examples of pedagogical research being neglected to be included in programs for dogmatic reasons, and the usage of such methods like whole word reading over phonics would indicate large scale failure.
Anecdotally, if I were to stack rank my education in k-12 based on quality of teacher, it would essentially be all professors followed by k-12 teachers, with those receiving more teacher instruction being lower on the list. I was once instructed by a history teacher, to not use examples on a history essay that we didn't learn in class, because she had to look them up.
I find it incredibly easy to believe that I can teach my children better than the average teacher.
The USA hasn’t had a healthy education system for decades, so parents who have gone through that system are a) not very well educated and b) think they can do better.
This is a weak argument. The US has a patchy K-12 system whose quality varies from abysmal to world-beating, depending on many factors. It has, indisputably, one of the world's best universities. Lots of people who have gone through the former but are also products of the latter. They can be very well educated, and do better than credentialed teachers (let's face it, the only difference is that; also a known fact that brighter, higher-IQ people do not gravitate toward K-12 teaching).
When I was in school for my master's degree some years ago, several of my classes were heavily populated by teachers (New York State requires teachers to have or get a master's degree within 5 years of being certified). All were humanities teachers (English, Social Studies, ect - no STEM). At least half of them had great difficulty simply writing a one page essay. With one or two exceptions, reading comprehension was absolutely abysmal. At least two of them were functionally illiterate (in a master's program!). All were certified teachers who were actively working in schools.
The fact is that in many places school standards have been so low and social promotion has been going on for so long that we now have people coming out of high school and college that have never achieved anything academically. Many of these people go into teaching (even when schools were academically rigorous, majoring in education was always regarded as one of the least challenging areas of study).
That isn't to say that there aren't good teachers, or that there aren't smart teachers - there certainly are. It is to say that having an education degree or a teacher's certificate does not mean that one is qualified to do anything.
Does this mean every parent is smart enough or cut out to properly home school their child? Of course not! What it means is that (many) schools have effectively failed as institutions and until they are improved many people are going to look for alternatives.
Educators are trained to teach any kid effectively. Parents have the much easier problem of teaching a handful of specific kids, who they've spent their entire lives with and share half their DNA.
Teachers in most countries are, at best, mid-wits with no practical or real world experience. I know teachers who barely passed math in high school who are now match teachers. It's like a basketball teacher who went to "Basketball Teaching School", who's never played basketball in his life, teaching kids how to play basketball.
The average public school teacher is somewhere in the average top 40-30% in intelligence/academic achievement. Anyone who's a top performer academically is going to be much more competent than the average public school teacher.
We haven't really decided what we're going to do with our kids. I personally think I'd enjoy homeschooling them, but I don't know what their preferences will be. Their mom would appreciate the break. That said,
1. Teachers develop skills in managing rooms of ~30 kids. I believe this is completely different from tutoring someone 1:1 and likely has very little overlap.
2. Part of my day job is already mentoring/teaching. I enjoy that part of my work. I've received feedback that I'm good at it. Actually when I was younger I thought I'd switch into teaching after building up some savings with programming. I've since heard/read enough about the realities of being a teacher that I can't imagine doing that job (especially with public school). Homeschooling or teaching a homeschool pod seems like the best way to actually be able to teach if that's your inclination.
3. The k-12 curriculum is not really much to cover. Schools move at a pace appropriate for the slower kids in the room. It doesn't seem like a high bar to beat, and most of what I've found looking into it indicates that homeschool parents generally do outperform schools with a fraction of the time spent.
3a. I've already been teaching my 3 year old phonics and reading when she's in the mood. She doesn't really have the attention to sit and focus for more than ~5 minutes, but that's okay, and it's still going alright. I expect she'll already be years ahead of the school curriculum before it's even time to start. So initial results have been promising and suggest I am indeed capable of teaching a child.
4. When it comes to more advanced/in-depth understanding, I don't expect teachers to have the background. Like just looking at the math education program at my alma mater, there's no requirement for real analysis or algebra. There's no requirement for science courses (physics, chemistry, etc.). All of the options in the math department except education require at least a minor in another STEM subject. It's no surprise that a common trope is that teachers (particularly math) don't know how to answer how something gets used in the real world, but that's insane to me as a status quo. There are tons of applications of pretty much any math you might learn before graduate level in pretty much any field you examine (conic sections stand out to me as a niche thing that we covered in high school. Not that they don't have applications to e.g. orbits, but they don't seem to apply to other fields, and I don't believe the connection to physics was made in my high school class anyway (presumably because math teachers where I grew up aren't required to learn physics)).
Honestly I think school is mostly more useful for socializing and something like arts/crafts that entail mess and require a bunch of energy to do at home, especially before high school/AP classes. The academic part seems trivial. Once you've reached that conclusion, it makes sense to ask whether there are alternatives that are better suited/are more aware of and aligned to their purpose as enrichment.
Good points. Your last paragraph suggests we really need a drastic rethink of how education works and where funding goes. Right now a one size fits all solution with no competition is what gets funded.
Hundred percent. They vastly underestimate teaching in the same way that people resorting to homeopaths for serious illnesses underestimates the training and knowledge doctors go through.
As someone who sends their kids to private school for religious reasons, the idea of public school is wild to me. You have to send to a specific school based on location? Teacher's unions who strong arm schools into not being able to fire bad teachers?
I really don't understand why school vouchers aren't more popular. Parents need to have the ability to choose where to send their kids. They have much more agency in private schools where they are the people paying salaries.
I think the best way to fix the education system would be a voucher based system where the vouchers would be X dollars which would cover public and some private schools, but parents would have the option of choosing where to send their kids and if they want to spend more to send to better schools. Make schools compete for students.
There should also be some standard homeschooling kit or some sort of national resources that enabled parents to homeschool more easily.
I send my kids to a public school which I love, but I agree about vouchers. Giving more control to parents is important as these school districts become more monolithic and unions become more powerful.
Homeschooling is becoming fashionable because school systems have become shittier... Teachers are unable to discipline kids, there's zero consequences for kids who are disruptive, instead of failing kids school systems are dumbing down the curriculum, there's also massive institutional biases...
Plus it's more or less a golden age for homeschooling: there's more resources available than ever.
The headline is somewhat begging the question,
but the author's key observation is on point:
People homeschooling their kids are implicitly,
and sometimes explicitly,
going for "opt out of being around average people".
Increasing the quantity and quality of good influences on your children is just good parenting.
If I know there's a kid down the street who seems like he will grow up to be a criminal, and another kid who seems like he'll grow up to be a kind, hard-working, well adjusted person, there is a 100% guarantee I will encourage my kids to play with the second kid, not the first.
I am not saying anything about "worth of a person", I don't believe it is even a thing.
All I know that children (and many adults too) do similar thing that their peers do. So if I want to increase the chance that my child will graduate from high school, they should be around people who will graduate from high school. Similarly, if no one in their class will go to college, the chances they will go to college will be smaller.
Note there are exception to the each rule, and I am talking about "chances", not certainties.
I found this explanation extremely unsatisfying considering that you could make the same choice and put your child into private education if you're a successful tech person.
I know families that homeschool and I like to read articles like this one to see if anyone "gets it." So far, no hits.
They're opting out of mediocre instruction and government-mandated values enforcement ("DEI" in its public school curricula form); the other kids are irrelevant. The homeschoolers I know are average and have lots of social activities with average peers in their community.
If you look around and see "government-mandated values enforcement ("DEI" in its public school curricula form)",
I already fear for your children,
whether you home school them or not.
From what I hear, it really feels like parents are more willing to homeschool than to be engaged with their children's education.
You thinking your kid needs some additional sauce to not be "average". Rad, teach them that at home. What about sending your kid to school prevents you from doing that?
I'm not saying school is perfect. But lately Parents care more than students about getting an "A" and if not it's the "Damn Teacher's" fault.
They want to protect their kids from the discomfort of not doing well in school. When they should be working with their student to help develop their talents.
While I appreciate the author's perspective, esp as someone who experienced homeschooling, I think here in the US we often forget what these efforts have cost, their real value and who is lobbying against them.
Universal education, for all children in a nation, is an incredibly recent thing. Its also essential for real participation in a democracy which requires, at minimum, an understanding of the governing body and at maximum whatever we're slogging through now. Could the curriculum be better? Definitely. You know who is stopping that? Shit politicians. We need better ones because no matter what you think, they aren't going away,
Education has also continuously and purposefully been underfunded and politicized by the political right and intermittently eviscerated by corrupt players on the left and right. This is on purpose. The rise of homeschooling is directly correlated with how much funding public schools have lost, the lack of safety and how difficult it is to operate successfully. You now send the kid to school and get cut with a thousand small asks for cash when we could just revise how taxes are collected and distributed. Put out a gun ban. We don't need metal detectors, and cops and clear backpacks and active shooter drills and teacher trainings and and and. We need LESS GUNS and most americans agree but private industry is limiting us.
The rise of homeschooling is correlated with how many people are concerned about the politicization of schools, their libraries, their teachers, their cirruculum.
We keep having presidents who appoint leaders to the department of education who do not believe in education being available for all citizens. Schools continue to expand their mission to feeding kids who can't be fed. To programs for kids who can't be home. No one seems as focused on fixing why there are so many hungry kids instead focusing on a 'lunch account' and the debt of middle schoolers.
This is all intensely documented and yet another example of cutting a public good. A public good by the way, that made America a place that everyone in the world wanted to go. Yes, I got picked on in school and was bored in my classroom. Yes it could have been better. This though, this is a concerted effort to get us to divest once again, just like we are from net neutrality, the post office, the EEOC etc.
Homeschooling doesn't scale, this is why it's not a solution for everyone. I can't see a fundamental drawback to it, like there are none in say, private jets: only problem is that neither can be applied to any sizeable minority, let alone not to the majority, of people. But if you can do it, do it.
The need for socialisation and being able to get along with the average had any meaning for as long as we had any hope for the "society" thing. Now it is obvious that there is no society (and it is arguable whether one really ever existed, maybe only for short periods in times of grave crises).
I've considered homeschooling but ultimately decided against it because:
A - It's illegal where I live, you have to jump hoops to do it
B - I think an extra opportunity for socialising with kids is worth a bit of pain - we wouldn't have the energy for organising alternatives and also take care of the kids education
C - By sending kids to a nice private school you get rid of a lot of problems of public school: unmotivated / openly hostile and punishing teachers, classmates with bad behaviour disrupting class, immigrant classmates who don't speak the language and / or create gang of people from the same country to gang up on kids (exactly like in prison)
When I went to school things weren't as bad as today and kids were not getting stabbed in public school, still it felt like a prison because of the slow learning pace and because everyone learns at a different pace and wants to learn about different things. School is simply the wrong idea for the majority of boys, it's just a silly machine that print mindless employees.
The strongest reason for not sending them to school is the latest EU mandatory gender theory / sexual education propaganda being taught to kids in school since last year.
Ultimately I decided that years of socialisation with peers trumps a few lessons about political BS; I'm confident I can teach them to distrust authority and teach them that they cannot trust blindly everything they hear in school or on the newspaper.
My friends who pursued illegal homeschooling are quite happy, they even found a teacher who is teaching kids illegally in someone's home, and by grouping the kids together across multiple families they have a soft school experience.
I don't have kids, but if I did, there's not a snowball's chance in hell I'd let a state educate them, with the possible exception of the Nordic countries.
I loved public school (class of 99). I still miss the style of learning. Can you imagine going deep on a topic for 50 minutes then switching? AP classes got double periods. I found it so refreshing and I learned a ton.
Eg, science, math, study hall, lunch, Spanish, History, Art, English… in a single day?
I loved it. What worked for me was studying for tests — and the harder the classes you took, the less homework there was (or it wasn’t required). I had a great history teacher, occasionally good math & English teachers, a great art teacher, and mediocre science teachers. The science TEXTBOOKS were fabulous — you could just read through those things and become a genius.
No more textbooks these days — it’s all some pdf segment to download. Bummer for my kids.
These days, there are way fewer tests, so my kids always freak when they have tests. I thought tests were great! Just one focused period to perform and then move on. Homework and projects were a big problem for me, because I could never start early enough — it was always a last minute dash. Maybe that trained me to produce fast output, though.
Kids were sometimes awful, but there was no way I was going to be popular so I just did my nerd thing. There were enough of us.
They had a great drama program which I loved — I did every play and musical I could. And they even had a speech and debate club — so I competed at “extemporaneous” speech—when I went to state competitions, they got the students all together to clap me out like they’d do for the football team. That was unnecessary and funny for the nerd.
My kids don’t get these kinds of opportunities, I fear. I was pretty lucky.
Maybe I'm a crappy adult, but I lack the patience, empathy, emotion regulation skills that I feel good teachers have.
I would rather send my kids to a private school than try to homeschool them myself. Thankfully, the public schools in the the area I choose to live in are excellent. We do augment at home with tutors and extracurricular learning.
I did not catch any data that quantified if this is truly becoming fashionable. From what I know in US stats, homeschooling definitely had a run during covid but its already going down and even at its peak was barely measurable compared to students in public/private. It would be nice if he quantified where this idea comes from before going into the rant.
My kid has a really hard time learning from me. It's resistance and stress for both of us. After all my role is to be a parent so naturally I'm a friend and a foe. Much more than a teacher. But I also don't have a big problem with that.
Obviously he also has his challenges in school. It's a public school but in Austria, so it ain't that bad. But there is also the saying that you aren't learning for school, you are learning for life.
So you aren't just learning for your subject, you are also learning to get along with people, how to avoid conflicts, how to manipulate a bit and how to trick some of the systems. All of that is not so much possible in homeschooling.
People do know that around here and it's more of a distrust into the system that might parents want to get their kids not taught in school in recent years, while their thinking behind the distrust does make them very bad teachers overall.
As a German family, we opted out of the system to gain back freedom as a family. With regular school, you are bound to external schedules like vacation, when you have to get up,...
We learned, that it's around 1 hour per day to achieve what kids learn during most of the day in regular schools. Doing homeschooling therefore is much more efficient time wise.
in addition, we can train our kids to be self and critical thinking, something that does not exist in regular schools.
There are more reasons to consider, but these are our most important factors.
* smart tech folks who value education not seeing education value in local schools
* chronically underfunded public schools based on local property taxes, fewer programs, etc.
* good private schools aren't cheap
* political axes to grind esp. by the right to defund the Dept. of Education, and create curriculums that don't sell well (e.g. bibles in school, pro-oil & gas slants, etc.)
Comment I was replying to was deleted so I will repost as a top level comment without additional context:
----
I agree this is probably the biggest tradeoff, but attention all parents, there's a cunning and affordable solution to the challenge of spoiling versus opportunity. It's guaranteed to work, anecdotally, at least sometimes:
Live in a big house and send your kids to a nice school, but roster them on truly hood (n.b. I mean real deal heart of the ghetto) travel sports teams. Only two requirements are as follows:
(1) that the team must be decently coached and
(2) practice field and home field must be in a genuinely scary neighborhood. Please don't assume I mean a run-of-the-mill bad neighborhood.
Ideally Pop Warner when younger and AAU BB by high school, but really anything other than lacrosse or fencing works. I personally was raised on hood travel baseball, and I am being 80% serious about this suggestion. Go Hurricanes.
Ain't no one gonna take this advice seriously on here. hn is the most NIMBY place on the internet especially when it comes to their own kids. MMW pearl clutching is imminent.
When math is racist, acronyms are White supremacy culture, and classics like Shakespeare are ditched due to "misogyny", it's no secret why homeschooling is becoming fashionable.
I have no idea how common this, I hadn’t much of this trend among tech weirdos before this article.
The one thought that I imagine is being told you’re “above average” and “destined to do great things” your whole life by your socially-deemed successful parents is just another set of probably unrealistic expectations placed on kids.
I try and homeschool my kid when they are home (from school). I say some of those things, but I also say, when we are fixing a clogged drain by disassembling the plumbing. "You could be a plumber, lots of hard problem solving and you are not afraid to get dirty". You can have high expectations that they live an actualized life w/o projecting your own life-arc desires on them.
If my kid turns out thoughtful, kind and a whole actualized person, then they are successful no matter what.
The problem with homeschooling is that rarely is someone so well rounded that they can supply the full spectrum of education that a child needs. Blackbody vs an RGB source emulating a full spectrum. We all have cognitive blindspots.
> The problem with homeschooling is that rarely is someone so well rounded that they can supply the full spectrum of education that a child needs. Blackbody vs an RGB source emulating a full spectrum. We all have cognitive blindspots.
While this is true, it's not like schools are teaching kids a full spectrum of knowledge either. In particular, a lot of practical skills are often not taught in modern schools - personal finance, cooking, basic home maintenance and construction ("shop class"), etc. How valuable some of this stuff is will depend on the child of course.
I agree with this, but IMO the more correct solution is to look for the gaps in learning from all sources and look to fill those instead of removing a massive chunk of education assuming one can do all of it better.
I think is another example of monotheistic cultures favoring linear narratives, rigid taxonomies and 1 to 1 causal chains. This is the world that we live, that we seek The Reason (singular) that something is the way it is. And if it isn't it the way we want, what ever is closer to the root of the taxonomy needs to get replaced.
> How do you expect to change the world for the better when you’ve been taught from an early age, subconsciously or not, to hold most of the people around you in contempt? 4
Not everyone would recognize this, and be willing to call it out.
I wonder whether that came from the writer's religious homeschooling, and if so, whether it came from learning from decent people who taught and embodied the better Christian values? Or from a reaction to the distancing that can kinda be implicit (e.g., hints that people not in the religious group are a less-enlightened Other)? Or both?
This blog takes a very narrow view on the subject… more people are realizing how the school systems are and that education can be done in different and even sometimes better ways.
This is my take as well. A huge burst of new tooling appeared during covid because the traditional school system essentially disappeared.
That tooling isn't going to disappear just because schools are finally open again, and some of it is actually fairly compelling.
I'm in a large metro, and the schools near me are terrible. 1/10 and 2/10 scores are typical. All the traditional schools we're zoned for fall well into the bottom 10% of my state. We attended lots of public engagement meetings for these districts (everything from guided tours to district superintendent interviews to parent-teacher nights). My takeaway? These schools are struggling with kids who don't have housing, don't regularly eat, can't get transportation, and have parents who utterly disengaged or downright abusive.
They aren't trying to excel at education, they're trying to literally keep 20% of the kids alive and fed, and then scrape them over the failing line so they don't get their funding cut.
I have nothing but respect for the educators placed into those circumstances - seriously, it's an impossible job and they get paid peanuts for it.
But I also absolutely refuse to put my kids into that system. Full fucking stop. It's not a place to provide enrichment and growth.
But... that leaves us the spot where
1. We win a lotto and get placed into a charter school (which only rate marginally better than the default schools - 4/10 instead of 2/10).
2. We pay for private schools to the tune of $30k/kid/year, or nearly half a million US for our family over the course of my kids education.
3. We move.
4. We home school.
Prior to covid, I had basically already picked "move" as the answer when all my kids hit schooling age, but there's actually enough tooling now that we will likely consider group based (pod) home schooling first. Home schooling doesn't have the same reputation that it did prior to covid, and it's not just "religious fundies" or "anti-gov whackos" anymore. Those groups definitely still exist, but with online tooling - we have much better options to filter out the crazy folks and spread the load out so that kids get social interactions, have a real teacher (often with better credentials than the school teachers) and get 1 on 1 interactions from adults.
I think one factor is that technology makes it a lot easier to do.
There are lots of online resources, online courses, tutors who do remote tutoring (I do not think i could have found my daughter a Latin teacher locally very easily, for example), lots of courses both for conventional qualifications (my kids did (I)GCSEs - just as kids do in British schools, (except at schools they do them at 16, we spread them out with my older daughter doing her first when she was 11) and just to learn (e.g. MOOCs).
Because I want my kids to succeed in reading, history, math, and science, and schools instead give them iPads and teach them <rest of answer self-censored in self-preservation, but you know exactly what goes here>
We are not able to homeschool our son. Two problems: 1) we don't have time - we both work so there is little time to prepare the material; 2) it is very difficult to teach one's own kids. It's a LOT easier for a teacher to do that at school.
But I do sit with him every night for 30 mins to go over alphabet and Math. I think I'll extend it to maybe 45 mins when he goes to primary, but anything longer than 1 hour is going to be harmful.
At least in the US the education system is so incredibly bad for anyone reasonably intelligent where homeschooling is an option it should be the clear preference. At least until high school.
You guys don't research demographic before real estate purchases? That must be why you find this new movement hard to understand. Have someone more plainly honest give you the details.
No one seems to have mentioned AI/LLMs yet. Between Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and LLMs, if your child has curiosity, the resources to tutor have never been better.
Those are sources, and while curiosity is great most kids are focused on specific things not everything. Kids need direction and somebody them to focus on things they dont want to learn- like a kid who loves animals isnt going to learn math or how to write well, and a kid whos interested in history might not care at all about science.
Parents are no better at this unless they are incredible focused on utilizing a curriculum and addressing their own issues along the way- And even then, learning with other kids is incredibly helpful. Talking to a computer is not a replacement for a teacher (yet).
> Talking to a computer is not a replacement for a teacher (yet).
I agree. The limitless patience and non-judgement of a computer is very valuable in a learning context. LLMs won't be better than the best private tutors, but its very likely they'll be better than 80% of junior high through college teachers.
LLMs hallucinate and often provide incorrect answers. They're a fabulous tool if you're not necessarily looking a specific, correct, answer. But I'm not sure I would want my kids to use them as a tutor, without someone to vet the output.
That's a very good concern to have. Grounding[0] helps a lot with this and will continue to improve. I'll also add that I've had human teachers who were confidently wrong about things.
Nice, thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware of this, but certainly anticipated we'd continue to see improvement in this area. And I completely agree on teachers being wrong, usually without realizing it, but not always. :)
We get weekly summaries of our childrens curriculum from the school. I run it through chatgpt and get quality weekly study guides for reinforcement at home, its awesome.
interesting take. Heard of Synthesis? (hint: DARPA funded).
At the local elementary school, we are told the kids are being kept safer now thanks to being tracked by AI cameras.
Some parents, maybe especially those with insight into tech fact vs. tech marketing, may have reservations about "tutors" whose services (perhaps for free) come with the stipulation that they are free to record every bit of data about your kid and do with it as they please.
The're being silly, right? Because?
As everyone on HN knows: software is super safe, and the entities/corps controlling it, so, so benign. Data doubly so -- hacks basically never happen, am I right? No one cares about your kid?
Well, all of my kids went to school and they basically learned how to read and write and that’s it. Everything interesting they learned talking to me or watching dumb YouTube videos I suppose. I would have happily homeschooled my children, but I have to pay rent.
For most of history, homeschooling was the norm for those who could afford private tutors. We know how our current mass-production type education appeared, but what needs to be explained is how it surviving into the 21st century.
Following is recent video of my homeschooled son that this community might appreciate. It gives an opportunity to tailor education and challenge kids potential.
Thankfully I live in a country with one of the best public school systems in the world leveraging its Catholic history, but it is something I have looked into, mainly because I think children are capable of so much more than what they learn in school and also the 'conditioning' aspect of schooling.
From what I know of the USA, all students are placed together in classrooms. Now I'm not sure if that's on the federal level or state level, but I cannot imagine the brightest students being held back by the weakest/misbehaving ones. Where I live we are placed into different grades, where students are grouped by their academic performance. There is no prejudice or superiority/inferiority associated with it and it just works.
I've only heard anecdotes from the Teachers sub on Reddit, but if that was my child in the USA I would homeschool 100%.
Because (USA perspective) government-provided schooling is shit, and getting shittier.
People whinge about Trump possibly abolishing the Department of Education, but maybe no DoE is better than the one we've got. Because between Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and whatever psychological experiment the education establishment has cooked up recently, I can't distinguish between the education system's serious proposals and sinister plots by a saboteur to undermine education from within.
What's really needed is a constitutional convention. Abolish and reboot the entire government, implement a multiparty parliamentary system with actually functional, corruption-resistant government agencies and bodies. Homeschooling is citizens' response to a state that's failed in its basic responsibilities.
I grew up overseas. My K-12 was a hodgepodge of schools and tutors all over the world.
I am also "on the spectrum," which means that I'm a bully magnet (much better, these days, but it lasted far beyond grade school).
Had a number of other issues, that came to a head, when I was 18.
Dropped out of school, basically, in 11th grade, and got my GED, a bit before I would have graduated, if I had stayed.
Most of my education after that, was a redneck tech school, OJT, home experimenting, and a whole bunch of seminars and focused tech classes. Couple of math classes in college.
I did OK, but a hell of a lot of others, with similar backgrounds, did not.
I am ambivalent about homeschooling. I think it may do well, for some people, and not, for others. I know that there's a "Little Nazi" homeschooling program that's popular with the bedsheets-as-a-uniform crowd, but it might be possible to get a far better education, at home, than the best prep school could give you.
Somewhat tangential, but a big part of math proficiency is varied repetition (eg, Kumon's practice sheets where you repeat the same operation with different numbers) and you can almost just make these yourself now.
Our three kids are in hybrid homeschool / traditional classroom school. What critics of homeschooling don’t seem to get is that homeschoolers find their own cohorts. And those cohorts have kids of different ages. And that means my kids interact with adults, older kids, younger kids, and kids their own age all the time. They learn nuances to social interaction that aren’t available to their counterparts who are locked in with their peers and tend to think their age group is the only one that matters. Sorry, that’s not the real world. In the real world you actually have a myriad of ages to interact with. Is everyone at your work the same age and place in their career development? Of course not.
What about other sources of diversity? Guess what, they are in sports and other community groups too. In fact, by avoiding the time suckers in traditional school, you’d be surprised to see just how quickly the kids can zip through their curriculum and join more extracurricular activities with meaningful social interactions. You mean school isn’t the only place to learn social interaction? Yup.
It’s time we put to death the idea that homeschooling is detrimental to social development. It’s utter nonsense. My wife has taught music at every grade level and in every school type imaginable and anecdotally the homeschooled kids are by far the most confident, socially capable of the bunch.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. I think as parents we have many possibilities to teach values to our kids without homeschooling them. In my view they should learn how to integrate in average society no matter if it is a perfect public schooling system or not. When it comes to values, parents still have a lot space to guide them through live without having full control. As long as the public school system only bends and doesn't break them I think it is a good way to show them how average society works. If they decide not to be high-end tech people later on, it will be much easier for them to flow with the average masses.
We are homeschooling our two teenagers. We live in Ireland which has a pretty decent education system and has a high percentage of students going on to third level education.
The problem is that it is really bad at handling children who are neurodivergent. My daughter is autistic and my son has ADHD and they just stuggled to fit in at school. They were filled with anxiety and the supports for them just weren't there. Spending on special needs supports is pitifully low despite Ireland being so cash rich right now.
So now we homeschool them and they are doing grand learning at their own pace.
But it's not just that that makes me favour home schooling. For me one of the biggest issues with state education pretty much everywhere the world over is the idea that at a certain age a child should have reached a certain academic standard and if they haven't then that is seen as a failure or at the very least a problem. This is complete and utter nonsense. We all learn at different speeds, some pick up knowledge early, some pick it up later. What matters is that by the time they leave school they are in possession of most of the life skills they need.
I also have issue with what is taught and how it is taught. Most subjects are taught with a focus on rote. Children are told to learn things, but aren't really told WHY they should learn things. That why bit is so important to help a childs mind develop.
For me there is also a bit of a morality issue. If you go an look at a school curriculum there will nearly always be something that you as a parent do not agree with. For me its the idea of teaching children that there only option in life after education is to get a job, be a good worker and keep going until retirement. I don't subscribe to that idea, I believe there are alternative life pathways. The problem is that if I send my children to a state school they will be forced to learn and accept things I fundamentally disagree with and that to me is morally dubious.
I think a lot of home schooling is a culture war issue as well. A quick look at Libs of TikTok will show some of the teachers that some parents would like to avoid.
These are actual videos that teachers have put on tiktok themselves. Some of it may be performative, but even the fact that they think putting something like that on tiktok is a good idea, speaks to their professional qualities.
I have many teachers in both my immediate and extended family. All of the ones who aren't retired say the same thing: the quality of parents is in the absolute shitter in two major aspects: parents don't want to teach their children anything they see as "the school's job" such as how to read or work on anything with their children at home. The second way is discipline. They instill no values of discipline or respect for the rights of others in their children. The "back of the room peanut gallery" that was one in ten or one in twenty children when I was young has grown to one in three. These are kids who've never seen negative consequences for anything they've ever done and steadfastly believe that will continue into their adulthood.
As usual, it depends. My time in public schools (K through 7th grade in various places in the southeast US) was a mixed bag. Newport News, VA with all the kids of engineers and naval officers? Awesome. I loved school. Most other places? Meh. Rural western Virginia? Terrible. Bullied until I finally snapped and left someone half conscious on the playground (and the football coaches watched as I handed out that beating). I was homeschooled from 8th grade until I left for college at the suggestion of the teachers in the school because they were running out of classes at the high school for me when I was in 7th grade.
I was fortunate to have parents that are extremely well educated and my homeschooling gave me an education that is simply unavailable in a school. Not many kids have sat on the back deck in the Appalachians with their father, learning how to read Virgil in Latin.
There were lots of other homeschoolers in our county who were all religious nuts. Fortunately Virginia requires you to come in and take standardized tests every couple years to see if you're at grade level if you're homeschooling, so the worst cases got corrected. The school district also proctored my AP tests for me, even though they weren't classes the school offered.
My kids are in public school. The public schools where I live are excellent and actually deal with bullying. My kids would rather not go to school, but they're not being traumatized and they're getting a good education and have lots of friends. There's a major emphasis on social-emotional learning, which turns out to be heavily correlated with later performance. Our biggest problem is in high school with parents pressure cooking their kids to try to go to places like Harvard or Yale. I do what I can to counsel the kids and get them off that path. My own kids are firmly convinced that they're going to guaranteed admission state schools, and don't have to try to build a ridiculous resume in high school.
Schools don't have to be horrible. They just have a history of being poorly run in many places.
Most parents are worse teachers than the average teacher. Most parents can't afford the time/money to teach their kids. This is a passion project for the 1%.
And no, educational videos on YouTube are not a replacement for a curriculum. We saw that during COVID where the attainment of children worsened.
There are bad schools and bad teachers. The solution is not bulldozing the entire system and replacing it with something worse.
This is like saying people should self-diagnose and medicate because there's a few dodgy hospitals and doctors.
USA is 18th and eight of the countries above it are European. The fifteen below it have a comparable score to the USA. That is 23 European countries that are either above or around the same performance (or slightly lower) as the USA. Unless you mean Eastern Europe, which seems like a strange thing to single out
I am not so much worried, what position you are in. I am more worried if you are rising or sinking. The countries I was thinking in Europe are...sinking in the school rankings.
The problem: There are cultures that highly value education. Chinese for example. And then there are cultures where education either has much less value, or a different definition (e.g. considered highly educated if a person has memorized the complete Quran).
DEI. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The "inclusion" is a problem with some cultures. They bluntly reject being "included". They considered their culture as highly superior and want to include you into their culture. At the same time, they are not able to understand why their countries are shitholes and believe that the wealth and success of Western countries is just by chance and luck and culture has no play in that.
For starters:
* Rule of law
* open society
* women rights
* Democracy
* Market Economy
* strict separation of church and state
* No tribal culture
* Freedom is speech.
* And don't marry your cousin. Your cousin may be good-looking but trust me, inbreeding won't make you smarter.
because of the paranoid delusions about Them and What They Are Doing;
because the kids (and in many cases the teachers) are awful human beings that people (idiots or not) don't want their kids to be around several hours a day every day;
because of school shootings and other forms of violence;
because the value in this is no longer clear to anyone;
because the only people demonstrating "leadership" in this matter are leading outraged mobs around to prop up themselves and their power structures rather than anything productive.
Or, in our case, our youngest has autism and ADHD and was unable to be successful in the "not homeschool" environment (for numerous reasons), so we removed him from it.
It sucks, my sons went to catholic schools, and now an independent Catholic high school. The new breed of “evangelical style” Catholics are starting to appear. They are more political and reactionary in terms of religious politics/practice.
Where infrastructure doesn’t exist, homeschools and stuff like “classical education” are gaining traction.
the mandatory part of mandatory education is the very source that rots this society. what's happening in schools run by the "western enlightened democratic" powers that be is outrageous.
liberating education would be a major blow to the social engineers running the matrix -- or at least that's what i think when i'm optimistic... maybe these days they could easily compensate through the screens.
and if you have an urge to argue with this, then first read John Taylor Gatto's essays to understand what's going on. after that we can discuss the specifics.
I’m not sure why it is becoming fashionable, but the reality of parents homeschooling children, who are functionally illiterate and never finished high school, is a recipe for disaster.
One important function that public school offers to society is protection for children. Teachers are mandatory reporters, and so are many school staff. Parents are not.
Anecdotally, those around me that are homeschooling are doing it for one of two reasons:
1) Right-wing disgust over woke issues.
2) Fear of school shootings.
That's coming from a non-tech middle/lower-middle class setting. 20-30 years ago, when I was in school, most of the homeschoolers seemed (again anecdotally) to be based on religion or some other idiosyncratic reasoning rather than the reasons I cited above.
The active shooter drills and other security measures that American kids go through in some schools are positively dystopian. Even if the chances of a school shooting are statistically very low, the measures put in place to prevent them are probably not good for kids' psychological well being.
I have some friends who are Christian but left wing (their kids would come over to play and draw pictures about helping poor people.) The dad teaches CS at a small Catholic college, mom stayed home and educated their kids.
The "disgust over woke issues" existed in some form 30 years ago when people were homeschooling but it had not hardened into the constellation it is in now. Back then you could get folks like that to talk articulately about how they disagreed with secular values, introduce a word like "woke" and now people talk past each other, at best, if they talk at all.
Personally I see it as bad theology as much or more so than bad science.
I mean, how do you reconcile the idea that "God is great" (Muslim slogan but how you can not believe that as a theist?) with the idea that the world is just 6000 years old and he sits on the throne and is obsessed with Jewish people as opposed to the scientific picture that the world is at least 13 billion years old, 'his image' is inscribed into the molecular structure of our cells, which implies God is a lot bigger than that.
I'm a product of department of defense school system. My parents were lower class, I received a world class education. My mom taught me to read and count before kindergarten, mostly via playing card games with her. I was in NC at that time, and they thought I was a savant!
Overall, my experience was good, some bullying of course, but at that time administrators held the ultimate key which was we will first tell your parents, and then subsequently your parents commanding officer, which would result in work disciplinary action. When I lived in Japan, there were a couple kids that were bad enough to get that to trigger. Stupid stuff like huffing air freshener, or just beating the hell out of people.
My short stint in NJ public school was ok, but it lacked the rigor/structure of the DoDDs school. I ended up at a good engineering university, but had a good amount of debt.
In Philadelphia, public schools are essentially DMZs, with private schools for kids that want to do things with their lives. This sounds harsh, but our tax system reflects this, as well as our disrepair of public school buildings (lead, abestos).
My Dad gave up his best years to the military and his body suffered, but it was certainly not for nothing. He retired at 42, with a pension after 20y in USMC. Healthcare is taken care of.
It's hard to say whether it is the escalating cost of schools which are commodifying it "It's so expensive I shouldn't have to xyz", leading to low parental involvement (maybe that is normal?), or continuous concierge service for helicopter parents as well. My friend who is a teacher has an entire class of students exploiting the IEP system to get extra time on exams, less choices in multiple choice, less reading, landscape rather than portrait tests (yes this is real), and other things that absolutely blow up her ability to be efficient at anything in the class room. I'm sure there is an argument to be made in favor of this, but it cannot operate in this way. At her school (Allentown, PA) the inmates are running the asylum due to administrators treating parents as "customers" and the parents as "the service provider". It is a sad state of affairs. In my world, parents ALWAYS sided with the teacher no matter what, which meant you had no chance at causing a problem in that way.
I don't know if there is a good solution on the horizon. I think the overwork of parents, combined with the exploitation of the school for better marks is a sick system. Only private systems seem to be able to surf this in a meaningful way because they can remove bad actors.
It's difficult to understand the hostility some people have toward homeschooling. Even if someone doesn't care for it, it is bizarre to insist on others not doing it (in some cases, governments insist so much that it is illegal to homeschool). Of course, parents are the primary educators of the their own children. They may delegate that responsibility to others for certain subjects, domains, or scope, but the authority rests with them. The decision of how to educate is also a prudential one. For the rest of this post, I will use "education" in the narrower sense of what would fall within the scope of the school.
That being said, you cannot categorically judge either homeschooling or "institutionalized" education, as the quality entirely depends on the concrete situation. Both can be done poorly or done well. There may be aspects here and there that set them apart, where one is better than the other, but on the whole, in principle, both can be done well or poorly. Both can fail or harm the child.
Of course, to be able to evaluate the quality of education requires that we first have at least a sense, if not a definition, of what education is and what it is for. Immediately, this is where the trouble starts.
If you ask most people today what education is about, the most common answer I would expect is "to prepare you for a job". Primary education is to prepare you for university, and university is for preparing you for a job. Interestingly, this is not the traditional mission of education, which is perhaps best embodied by the classical liberal arts taught in the trivium and quadrivium. Their aim was to free the human person as a human person, and a human person is a rational animal. The classical notion of freedom is the ability to be what you are — human, i.e., a rational animal — which is quite different from the modern notion of being able to do whatever you want. This classical notion of freedom is the reason for the liberal in liberal arts. Now, the modern concept of rationality also differs from the classical, so even here we have divergence.
The point is that the liberal arts were distinguished from the servile arts. It is the teaching of the servile arts that would prepare you for the job. While the gains of a liberal arts education translate into benefits in all things, they were not per se for the sake of specialized work. Their value was not instrumental, even if they do have downstream benefits for the instrumental. This is like the difference between theory and practice. One seeks understanding, the other seeks to achieve some kind of subordinate or secondary good.
Now, as to why homeschooling is becoming more attractive, we need to consider the reality of education as it actually is today. I don't want to turn this into an essay, but a few big motivations are:
* the poor quality of education
* the alienating and hostile nature of many schools
* the hostile ideological presuppositions of an education system, often insinuated rather than explicitly commanded
As to how effective homeschooling is at correcting for these faults, that will depend on the particular situation, more or less. From what I understand, homeschooling parents will often meet with other homeschooling parents and draw from curricula that already exist for this purpose. Sometimes these parents decide to found school themselves (as we are seeing in some cases with the rising interest in classical education).
Training kids to sabotage their mathematical ability to "level the playing field" is the most asinine thing I've ever seen and I'm disgusted it's still being taught.
This is such a narrow view of homeschooling as to be idiotic.
> That voice likes to say: You should just homeschool them. Opt out of interacting with average people, because average people will only damage your kids.
The author makes a statement about why they think people prefer homeschooling, and yet they do not mention having spoken to a single currently homeschooling parent to ask why they homeschool. This is like me writing an article about some group I'm not a part of (say, farmers) and saying "why don't they all get organic certified? As far as I can tell it's because most farmers don't like nature."
tl;dr: this is a completely uninformed tirade from someone who unfortunately had a bad experience with their religious upbringing, which involved homeschooling, and is generalizing the negative emotions towards all homeschoolers whatever their reason for opting out of school. Ironically this article that's ostensibly criticizing homeschooling parents as snobs is dripping with disdain and condescension.
The reductive & random assumption that people opt out of school they object to the students is baffling to me. Does it not occur to the author that people take issue with institutionalization of their kids in school? It's not the other children, it's the one-size-fits-all meat grinder of school most secular homeschool parents object to.
Bonus: The footnotes are hilarious. The footnote to their argument that people homeschool because they're snobs is:
> I don’t think I’m straw-manning, because I’m pretty sure someone is going to highlight the “opt out of interacting with average people” quote on Twitter/X and say “this, but unironically.”
"I don't think I'm inventing a weak interlocutor to argue against because I've invented another imaginary person on twitter who agrees with the first imaginary person I created" I'm honestly laughing reading this.
I went to public school as did my wife. That's why we homeschool. It was a terrible experience overall; all these kids in a totally unnatural environment wasting time. I say unnatural, because generally if someone is tormenting you daily you can get away from that person. Even at a job, you could quit and find another job. In school, you are trapped with your tormentor(s) and constantly forced to take part in social hierarchies you have no interest in being part of. I was a loser through middle school which was not fun, then in high school I was not engaged so I became bored and lazy. When I had an engaging class (like mens choir, german, spanish or woodshop; even though another kid did intentionally burn me with a hot bit off the drill press among other antics) or I was able to be creative, I put a lot of effort in and it felt rewarding. But mostly I look back and say "what a massing f*cking waste of time that was." Not only did I not spend my time doing something better, it destroyed much of my natural curiosity and creativity.
We homeschooled our two older kids, the eldest is now in their second year of an extremely competitive engineering university program. She wanted to go to Uni so she took some online classes to prep then enrolled in school in grade 9. That was completely different from my experience in large part because she chose to go to school, so she had no one to blame for "why do I have to be here?" like I did. She owned her own choices & succeeded.
As for "what about socialization" that is the most laughable part to me. Sure I learned "socialization" in school: kill or be killed. I learned to be a mean, cynical, jaded child who could survive in that institutional environment. My children were free to spend full days socializing with other kids when we got together, and met frequently at libraries & parks with other homeschool kids, as well as engaging in extracurriculars. And if they're having a spat with another kid? That's fine, they can take a break for a bit then reconnect with them later; no need to force them together daily.
The funniest thing to me about "what about socialization" is that when I was in school & chatted with a friend in class, guess what I was always told? "Do that on your own time, you don't come to school to socialize." Ha. But seriously, avoiding the maladaptive "socialization" of what I think can fairly be called "industrial schooling" is one of the biggest perks of homeschooling.
The extracurriculars were easier too because they were not already tired from an early wakeup and full day of school! My younger kids who are now in regular school now are absolutely fried after a day at school + extracurriculars.
The amount of energy I spend now supporting school for my younger kids is crazy. Stressful mornings harrying sleepy kids out of bed and out the door, kids upset over bullying and inequity in the classroom, begging for designer clothes (where did that come from?), getting them to do their homework, oh and then there's "teaching my kids shit they were supposed to learn in school but the teacher didn't teach them" i.e. I'm having to "homeschool" them in addition to school. Sooo many conflicts spring from school. Having my kids in school often feels like more work that homeschooling rather than less.
Academics are easy. Tons of free online resources + Outschool where you can pay a teacher for one-off classes. My older kids took the 8 week essay writing class then breezed through high school english. When younger, if they wanted to play iPad I'd say "do 30m khan academy then you can do 30m iPad." Regular trips to the library & read to them... it's really not hard to cover academics through middle school, then if they want to go to high school, go ahead. Or apprentice, or focus on something else.
If you have any questions about homeschooling from a veteran parent who's also had kids in public school, let me know.
arguments from article -
>Pro-homeschooling: At school, you’re in danger of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
>Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home.
Sure, but the parents choosing to homeschool are either the ones abusing or not (obviously they could have an abusive uncle but the parents tend not to think of this) if Not, then its not a counter-argument because they know it's not and they do not know about the school. If abusing the know it and they might prefer to homeschool for that reason.
>Pro-homeschooling: Kids learn faster one-on-one; Bloom’s 2-sigma problem is undefeated.
>Anti-homeschooling: Kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence can fall through the cracks without professional involvement.
many kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence need more 1 on 1, and will also be more likely to get all the other negative school interactions that are arguments against schools.
>Here’s what I think is really going on.
I heard Elon Musk homeschooled his kids, anyway if you have the money, it's a status symbol.
Also about lousy school environment anecdotes going around here - I went to high school in Utah, where I heard a teacher tell the class that A.D meant After Noah, and B.C meant Before Christ. I WIN! Oh wait...
Both of my children were Home Schooled until High School (technically 7th and 9th grade). They've been students at a private school and now one attends an excellent private High School and one attends the 4th best High School in my state.
They are straight-A students (lowest grade: 94%; History -- my Daughter). They are shocked that they attend school for 7 hours a day and there are kids who "struggle" while they finish their homework on the ride home, don't study, and get the grades they get. They are in advanced classes and both have had a perfect score in Math all three years. Mom and I are also divorced and have been since they were 2 and 4. They make friends easily but struggled when they were Home Schooled because they have less exposure to kids their age. They were given the choice when my son hit 9th grade "continue or attend Public School or a school we can afford). They didn't want to miss out on "The High School Experience" but both, enthusiastically, want to Home School their own kids one day.
They aren't unique/gifted. There are plenty of students at their schools who do as well as they do and were not Home Schooled. The difference, though, is they "did school" in a given weekday for never longer than 1.5 hours. Most days were 30 minutes. September-April with summers off and that was it.
Religion was not a factor in our choice. My son's ASD Type 1 diagnosis played a role, the way Math was taught to me played a role, the arrogant belief that I could do better and the fact that my ex-wife didn't work played a role. Mostly, talking to other Home Schooling parents and their children and "wanting my kids to be like that" was the primary factor. Watching a 13-year-old speak intelligently and with confidence about a subject they understand and actually expect an adult to listen to them is kind of crazy, especially when they really are intelligent and should be listened to.
In a decade of Home Schooling, I have talked at length with hundreds of families and their children who took that path (various conferences, Home School events at local businesses, and extra-curricular activities done "during the school day" for Home School kids). I've observed a few things: All of them teach as much as we did. None of them will admit to it until their kids are in college or they decide to send them to traditional schools and "their child's education is validated by someone else." Nobody who is actively Home Schooling will admit to an outsider that their children get 1-1.5 hours of education a week day because you'll call CPS on us. All of their children are about a year or two ahead of children "their grade" despite this minimal amount of lesson time.
I read over and over and over again about how Home Schooled children are ignorant, don't believe in evolution, believe the world is flat, their parents don't actually "teach them" -- I have no doubt those children exist and I haven't seen them because the Home Schooled families I encounter attend conferences, belong to groups (we didn't), and care about their child's education. I live in a state that, at one point, had the largest number of practicing Home School families (not sure where it is, today) and the most liberal rules around it -- literally "take them out of school"; that's it.
Everybody seems "to know some invented Home Schooled child" who had some kind of major life problem. I usually challenge for specifics and it's always turned out the kid doesn't exist. Knowing any child who is Home Schooled is unusual. But knowing the one child validates your choice to NOT Home School, the statistics of which make them extremely rare, and you find they're parroting some anecdote they heard. My daughter's school[0] has about 1,700 students in it. Her last had about 500. I have asked every single one of her teachers, her counselors and several teachers they don't have "have you ever had a Home Schooled kid in your class, before?" I'd guess 40 educators and some staff/administrators. There's exactly one who had exactly one child in her class at her last job who was Home Schooled. He was an excellent student. And this in a state that has a lot of Home Schooled students. Judging by Facebook, you'd think there's one hiding around every corner peeing in people's Cheerios.
I suspect it's people feeling (needlessly) insecure about the choices they made for their own child and feeling threatened by the fact that I chose differently. I don't encourage people to choose to Home School. It's not for everyone -- for starters, you can't do it with two full-time working parents and that means it's simply not an option for most people. However, this topic very rarely came up without judgement from everyone who didn't Home School about what a dangerous choice I made when I was still Home Schooling. It's a lot more fun, now, since I can point to their success.
Yes, some Home Schooled kids struggle/drop out of college or can't hold down a job. Certainly none of us have met a kid who drank his way through Freshman year of College, or was ill-prepared by their public school and failed out. And we came from High Schools where everyone received a degree, too. Studies continually affirm the success of Home Schooled students, yet "everyone knows some Flat Earther child from Home Schooled parents." Children fail in every type of education. They fail less in Private schools and Home Schools. They fail more in Public school (largely because of "everyone goes there, including children in extremely difficult life circumstances"). The problem is that these wrong impressions of Home Schooled kids turn into laws that ban or curtail the freedom to have the choice of Home Education.
I know if I had chosen a more traditional route, my kids would have had the same probability of success. I would have been deeply involved in their education whether or not I was the one teaching them and that's how you get successful students in traditional education, too. While it might be nice to stand on some high horse, claim that "I just love my children more than you did", pretend that all of this was some massive sacrifice and I'm some super-parent by comparison to all of you who went the traditional route, that would be a self-aggrandizing lie. I paid for and followed curriculum. It was easy. The only challenging part of it is that "your kids will argue, yell and cry at you when they struggle"; they won't do that with a stranger.
With all of the extra non-lesson time they had, it was probably easier for them to excel. But I don't look down on people for not making that choice. Quite the opposite, everyone looked down on me for the entire duration that I was a Home Schooling Dad. It's silly.
And I'd do it all over again if given the choice for one reason alone: My kids are incredible self-learners and that was the one thing that I was very intentional about. Both of them have the confidence that "nothing is beyond their ability to learn" and that it's a simple matter of finding the right information, studying and practicing. My daughter is a shining example of this: She has learned to plays Guitar, Drums, Bass, and Piano (some proficiently, some she's well on her way). She has never had a lesson. She can read music and tabs and she can sit down and compose as well as learn to play anything she wants to learn to play on Guitar, Bass and Drums. She's getting there with Piano, but it's a much more difficult instrument and she just started last Summer with that one; she's got a few years behind her on the others. But I bought her a full sized weighted-key MIDI piano last summer and I had 15 years of lessons, competitions and study in that instrument as a child/teenager, so I have a good understanding of typical progress in learning it. She took it to Mom's and decided she didn't want to take it back and forth but brought it back here over Christmas break. I listened to her practicing and had to walk into her room to make sure it was actually her playing rather than the computer playing back some MIDI file. In three months she's as far along as I was after 5-6 years of lessons. She doesn't even realize how well she's playing; nobody told her it was unusual for her to be able to play some of the things she's playing at her skill level. A teacher would have never had her playing those things. She just went ahead blissfully unaware of the fact that it's extremely hard to play some of the things she's learned to play and that probably made the biggest difference of all. She wanted to play it, so she sat down and learned how to play it, never getting discouraged over the fact that "you don't learn something like that until year 5." Her technique (fingering ... stop snickering) is even correct.
Both of my children love to learn new things, just like me. Except, I didn't learn that about myself until formal education was over. They have always known that about themselves.
[0] My son attends a private school that is very small and the results were the same but less surprising to me.
I went to public school (not in SF) but the only "wokeness" was historically accurate — erm — history classes. We didn't have books banned in the library or English courses either.
The lack of physical safety is a product of policy (or rejection of) by the same people whining about "wokeness".
Learning about systematic racism has been relabeled as Critical Race Theory, and suddenly teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre or how banks used to discriminate against minorities for lending is considered extremism and "woke". Growing up, learning this stuff in history books, was just normal and made sense in order for us to avoid repeating these mistakes.
Yeah, I took advanced placement history and government. Things were taught clearly, factually and without bias.
Students aren't going to benefit from hiding inconvenient truths about this country's history and founding. We certainly don't need religion forced into classrooms either.
> suddenly teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre or how banks used to discriminate against minorities for lending is considered extremism and "woke".
No, these things were taught to me in school and I’ve never heard anyone consider historical facts like this to be CRT except people railing against conservatives (ironically demonstrating their own ignorance of what CRT is).
What’s problematic about CRT is its postmodern view that liberalism is inadequate (or worse) at eliminating racism; downplaying objectivity in favor of “lived experience” that can supposedly never be truly understood by white people; rejecting colorblindness out of hand; advocating segregation of minorities in the name of “safe spaces”; regularly and unscientifically trumpeting the existence and scope of unconscious bias; emphasizing intersectionality to the point of essentialism.
The famous Smithsonian “Assumptions of Whiteness” infographic (https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rationa...) is an example of these concepts infesting a mainstream cultural educational entity. There’s room to critique current racial discourse and advocate for changing models, but to state that the scientific method and “objective, rational linear thinking” are white values, implying that whites have a monopoly on science or that minorities are less capable at it, is obviously derived from critical theory, and is (I think unquestionably) horrifically racist. When there is any sign of these viewpoints seeping from higher academia into elementary schools, it’s perfectly natural for parents to become concerned.
"The Stop WOKE Act, also known as the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act and redubbed the Individual Freedom Act, is a Florida state law which prohibited schools and businesses from teaching certain concepts related to race, gender, racism, and privilege. In addition to that, it prohibits Florida educational institutions and businesses from discussing whether race, gender, and systemic racism intersect with various social systems, including legal, healthcare, education, and so forth. Penalties would include disciplinary action, including job termination, and loss of public funding for state schools.[1][2]
After passing both chambers of the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature along party lines, it was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis on April 22, 2022, and entered into effect on July 1.[3] Intended by DeSantis to "fight back" against "woke indoctrination" and critical race theory"
You may not have personally been impacted but this is a real occurring to our schools (and workplaces) under the scapegoat of "CRT" and being "Woke". The Stop Woke Act is just one of many examples.
The lack of physical safety is caused by many things, and I doubt you can lay the blame on people complaining about wokeness. There are bullys, drug dealers, gangs, normal hormonal teenagers fighting, interpersonal drama, romance, poverty. All sorts of things influencing the violence.
I was referring to complacency as it relates to guns and the horrific violence inflicted with said guns.
Bullies are everywhere. One runs X. You deal with them.
I never saw any drug dealers or gangs and the rest of what you’re describing sounds like what I’d expect as a normal part of growing up.
One of our many societal shortcomings (or outright failures) is that we treat poverty as a moral failing, not with any sort of kindness, interest in understanding the root cause(s) or meaningful attempts to address the issue.
I don’t think we do this consistently, and to the extent “we” do, it’s because we’ve lost the distinction between the working and striving poor vs the poor that consistently make poor choices no matter how much help you would give them.
> Bullies are everywhere. One runs X. You deal with them.
Elon Musk yells at people, I knew bullies in High school that would put people into the hospital. There is a big difference between being yelled at and getting hit with a baseball bat.
> I never saw any drug dealers or gangs
Congratulations on not growing up in poverty. This is the reality for a large portion of America.
Alvin Toffler called it back in the 70s (in Future Shock); in there, he thought educated elites would move towards homeschooling, nothing political on his analysis at least (that may match current trend?)
There's nothing inherently right-wing about homeschooling. You could just as easily homeschool as left-wing parents who don't want your kids immersed in an environment where other kids judge them by what brands they're wearing, and where the teachers all subscribe to the capitalist view of how society should function.
It's true that homeschooling has been more prevalent among the right wing, but there are lots of people who do it for lots of reasons. We did it when our local elementary school was bottom third in the state. My wife called up the vice principal, and asked why we should put our kids in their school. He said that their school could toughen up our kids. We decided that "tough" wasn't our main goal for our daughters, and we noped out of that school.
Public school education is a shit show in many western countries. I'm not in the USA but all the talk about private schools and lotteries is very real. The only thing we don't have is charter schools leaching public funds.
The USA is ranked below most other western public school systems so I don’t think you can conclude “the US are doing bad because all western countries are”. It’s just a matter of priorities and the US prioritizes defense over education.
Are those education metrics even measuring the correct things? Many other countries have higher scores of educational achievement, and yet on average we ignorant Americans go on to be more productive and more innovative than any other major developed country. Just to pick one example, the USA develops about 80% of the new prescription drugs every year. Does it really matter if we can't integrate a function or remember when the Civil War started?
American exceptionalism is one hell of a drug, I think this denial is one of the reasons why you are impotent to fixing any one of your numerous glaring issues like education, health care, housing, infrastructure, etc.
>Pro-homeschooling: At school, you’re in danger of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home. And the risk gets bigger if you eliminate outside influences that might notice when something’s wrong.
You’d have to be an idiot to think that this argument could be used in a conversation about homeschooling with any particular potential homeschooler.
Answer to question: because public schooling is becoming a place of indoctrination/brainwashing (particularly of woke mentality), rather than a place of learning. This is very apparent in America, but even happens in outside places like England - kids as young as 7 are being taught and groomed with unnecessary sex and sexual ideas, when that age is meant for innocent play and exploration.
I know a few parents who've taken objection to this. They would rather have their children be properly taught, rather than be taken advantage of for their high impressionableness.
Educational merits aside, this is part of a broader trend of losing or dismantling the few “public” parts of our society we have left. People simply don’t want to be forced to interact with others in the physical world, especially others not like them. They certainly don’t want to be asked to trust a stranger for any reason, unless there’s an app to mediate the trust.
The bad news is that there are 8 billion of us and more every day. There’s not enough space or resources for us to isolate ourselves. It can’t end well.
OK I guess I’m going to go against the deluge of comments here; And give an appreciable reason instead of denigrating those who might choose this.
The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school.
I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country.
However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life. For the entirety of my young life, school was a prison. With inmates who would beat you, Emotionally abuse you, the “wardens” did not want to be there either, and did not care how the other inmates treated you… sometimes doubling down on the behaviour themselves. - The comparison is further solidified by 6-foot galvanised steel bars surrounding the complex, and that I visited an actual psychiatric prison not long after and the cafeteria, recreational grounds, rooms, etc; were identical to those of my school.
Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning, Everything that got me through school was things that my mother taught me- And as a consequence, I was always top of my class.
I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
and for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children- The ostracised, are learning to be helpless and to be victims- They are not learning to “socialise” more. If anything it is probably more harmful for those people to be exposed to more people until they’ve had time to form on their own.
I'm both glad and dismayed to hear that I'm not the only one who likens public school to prison.
I went to school in California, and I would say my school experience became prison-like between grades 4 and 11. In fairness, I can now look back at my child self and realize that I was delayed in terms of emotional maturity, which contributed to my social problems, but the kind of environment I was in was the wrong one for helping me overcome that delay. Any slight difference about myself, whether it be my body, or my clothes, or my interests, was a target of daily ridicule. The majority of teachers were entirely self serving and didn't give a damn, even when I was being victimized out in the open. Oh yeah, and my property was repeatedly stolen and my belongings destroyed in front of me.
Having gone through all that, there is no way I'm ever putting my future children in such a system.
The way I think about the socialization argument against home schooling is this: Is it better to be highly socialized but traumatized or modestly socialized by not traumatized?
I think it's more valuable for children to be socialized with a smaller number of other children while being in a safe environment. Tossing children into an ocean of other children that is poorly controlled with callous teachers, creating an unsafe environment, has a rapidly diminishing returns on socialization and a greater chance of being counterproductive.
The principal always told me "just walk away" and I said, "You fool, the bullies have legs".
The key thing that enables bullying is your being confined in a space with them. Bullying can leave scars that last a lifetime that will affect your employment, your relationships, your children, everything. Not least hearing complete crap from authorities primes you to distrust authorities unconditionally.
I can see why an adult who's never dealt with these difficulties in childhood would give that sort of advice, but it's bewildering how school administrators weren't (and probably still aren't) trained on the reality that "just walk away" is a platitude in the context of an environment where bullies have a captive audience.
It reminds me of how we were told "stick and stones will break my bones but words will never hurt me", which is easy to say as an adult with autonomy and other sources of fulfillment; in reality, words not only hurt, but have lasting social consequences. If some turd of a kid has the charisma to humiliate you in front of everyone, even when only verbally, that can lead to a permanently damaged sense of self and lack of respect from peers.
There is more than one kind of charisma.
Some people have a positive charisma that comes out of treating people well. I'd expect this from the captain of a sports team.
I knew someone who had a negative charisma, who was criminally minded. He was popular among drug users at my school because he would take more chances and thus have the best supply. He got caught on tape selling 3 kilo of cocaine to a cop after I'd graduate. He had a talent to motivate other people into criminal activity and became the leader of a gay bashing gang that seemed to mainly target straight allies because this was the 1980s and folks like that were probably scared about getting AIDS.
I don't picture the elementary school bully as being particularly popular, but he certainly gets deference from the other students. I think of the popular kids in school as being genuinely likeable even if they didn't take a stand against bullies.
I’ve taken away more from Ender’s Game than from anything an adult ever told me. From what I’ve seen, breaking the bullies’s nose is very effective.
I’m not sure if I agree with this essay, but have you heard about the theory that Ender’s Game is pornography? ( There’s lots of other theories about the book, but this is my favorite ) https://archive.is/JtbIY
XKCD is universal... https://xkcd.com/1216/
Having the emotional maturity to deal with things you don’t like happening has a major influence on how tough being bullied feels like. It’s rarely much time or physical pain, but some kids obsess over it even if they aren’t the major target they often feel extremely persecuted.
Adults can watch something happening and think nothing particularly significant is going on while some kids are experiencing extreme internal distress.
The typical case of physical bullying is not just "things happening that you don't like"; it's wanton, unprovoked assault and battery. Even lesser forms of bullying generally involve some kind of unambiguous threatening, menacing or intimidation. The "emotionally mature" way of dealing with such things in any sane society is not to just walk away, but rather to acknowledge that such actions are inherently an outrage to their fellow students' basic human dignity, and demand that those responsible face meaningful consequences. The fact that "it's rarely much physical pain" (and that merely because kids are involved as opposed to adults) is completely irrelevant.
That may be your memory, but in the typical day it’s intimidation and emotional abuse. Especially in terms of girls who make up half the population, they rarely get punched in the face but arguably have larger issues to deal with.
I’m not accusing you of misrepresenting the situation, just trying to convey what’s objectively going on can feel very different from what people’s lived experience is. Someone with older siblings can barely register being bullied in some situations that really are traumatic to others.
In elementary school I had a girl in class who the other girls made fun of. There was nothing physical. Boys kind of made fun of her as well, but what really stuck to her was the other girls. She did therapy, but even her therapist told her that she is a hopeless case. Which is obviously extremely unprofessional and terrible. She ended up taking her life in her 20s. It was just mental bullying by peers. It is very sad to think back at the time. There was absolutely nothing wrong with her to deserve this bullying, and peers did it as some sort of self esteem popularity type of thing.
I do remember school being this survival of the fittest type of thing as well. Some were naturally good at it, others not so much, different people handled it differently.
Certainly it was the most common for me (also California public school). That does not mean I would not bring up the physical violence as the first item in the list! It's the one least open to interpretation.
>The "emotionally mature" way of dealing with such things in any sane society
If my children lived in a war zone and were suffering constant (high risk) of being killed or mutilated, the mature way of dealing with that wouldn't be to teach them to take cover, or survival skills, or medical triage and first aid... it'd be to just leave and never go back. Get one million miles away from it. Normalizing it, saying "what are you gonna do, we live in a war zone" is strange. But it's just as bizarre to say "you should become an anti-war activist and demand that the diplomats make a lasting peace".
No, just get the fuck out as quickly as is humanly possible, and never look back. Later, when you're someplace safe, maybe you do therapy for the PTSD (I have my doubts that it works), but the first and most important step is to put distance between yourself (or your children) and the threat, enough distance that makes it impossible for the threat to follow.
> Adults can watch something happening and think nothing particularly significant is going on while some kids are experiencing extreme internal distress.
I think because that is also often because they regard it as normal for kids. A lot of people say things like "bullying toughens them up".
They would not think its OK for the same things to be done to adults. I wonder what the toughens them up lot would think if I showed up at their house with a few friends and gave them a light beating - I think calling the police would be a more likely outcome than thanking me for teaching them to be tough!
There are levels to this stuff too.
I got picked on all the time as a kid in school. I did not like it, but it did develop several traits that I learned to appreciate later in life. First and foremost, I am not the slightest bit bothered by anyone mocking me anymore. I don’t get easily embarrassed at all.
At the same time, I also learned to fit in a lot better. Getting picked on for things I said or did create some social conditioning about what was and wasn’t acceptable.
This type of bullying was helpful in hindsight.
Physical bullying is different ballgame and I don’t understand anyone that thinks it’s acceptable.
Cyberbullying is on a whole other level of publicly humiliating a developing child in front of everybody they know, often by anonymous people who will take steps to make sure it never goes away if they want to.
The latter 2 are totally unacceptable and dangerous.
The first getting lumped in with bullying creates bullying apologists I think, because there can be beneficial side effects of helping kids learn social norms.
A lot of adults have the same experience. They are perpetually persecuted.
> The principal always told me "just walk away"
I think the root of this problem is the principal-agent problem.
It literally doesn't matter to teachers (a) if you get bulled at school (they are not being bullied themselves) or (b) if you have problems later in life.
Maybe a bullied kid will completely lose it as an adult and murder a bunch of people. But does the teacher who completely failed to help them get arrested? No, therefore it just doesn't matter to them at all.
The only thing that would prevent this is teachers actually caring or being kind. And of course there are some that do and are. But relying on that isn't enough. There need to be right incentives set in order enable the majority of teachers to put in the effort to act in the right way.
(I don't know what that incentive structure looks like I'll admit.)
We pay for a private school, it's expensive yes and I know not accessible for all, but it's kind of the best of both worlds. You get to choose the school and it's a community vibe. It helps when the other kids, potential bullies, know your kid and know their parents talk to your parents. It also helps as the staff is acutely tuned in to things like this, and they have amazing ways of conflict resolutions. It's not difficult, it just requires some attention and thought. They reinforce golden rule type actions/behaviors/leading by example/etc. As an example, if one kid picks on another one, instead of detention - they will both be given a 'private talk' and then paired up on some activity. The result is, they were constructively scolded then had a chance to bond and become friends - and it works. It's never going to be fully eradicated, but it's amazing just how little there is and how supportive everyone is in trying to develop good humans.
They also assess the kids emotional maturity early on. Those that they feel are not ready to go from Kinder to 1st get a 'Primer' year. It's basically holding them back in Kinder but with a positive twist.
Tons of other benefits as the parents hold a lot of power (since we pay). But also, the quality of staff/teachers, and low ratios are quite a perk compared to our area's public schools which are poorly rated.
I went to public school myself, and while I was never bullied, I do think I was a target of bullies at some time. Any time I felt like someone was bullying me, I fought back and would often be disciplined under zero tolerance rules. That's how my parents taught me to deal with it, 'stand up for yourself boy' kind of thing. We've taught our kid not to hit and to be kind and he is, but that's exactly what I think would make him a huge target in a public school environment.
This is why introducing a degree of school choice is becoming a popular policy among parents in both parties, but I think bringing back rapid expulsion to disciplinary boys/girls schools would be even more impactful. Unfortunately, recent social justice activism has stymied that possibility in progressive areas. Either restore unfettered power of self-curation to the environment and ensure it is wielded effectively, or parents will demand more flexibility in choosing from non-monopoly options.
I'm sorry - you're following all the comments about public schools being like a prison and you're suggesting people get expelled faster or disciplined more to improve schools?
my kid goes to private school. expelled students by grade:
1st: 2
2nd: 4
3rd: 4
4th: 3
5th: 5
6th: 3 (so far)
why am I saying this? we pay tens of thousands of dollars per year for having access to this kind of environment. if there is a kid who is fucking up everyone else, the “everyone else” should not have to suffer through it. I would pay double what I pay now for this priviledge for my kid. so yes, 100%, more expelling and more discipline is needed
Isn’t that an absurd indictment of your school? If my (converted) $30k/year school had to expel even a single student every year that would be a massive failure in my eyes.
I am not sure I am following what you are saying here? what kind of failure?
there is a lot of parents that have money to pay for private education for their kids and there is also a lot of those kids that are fuckups.
if you mean failure of the parents - you are 100% - complete failure of the parents.
The crazy thing is, the American populace is already paying ~15k per student for public education. Why are they not expelling kids who are fucking up that environment?
well they will when they realize that MANY children should be left behind… (move to special ed schools or some vocational schools if they are high school age)
I'm of the opinion that parents are largely to blame for all this stuff. School is viewed as daycare and education not really prioritized by a large part of our population. Teacher's get all the blame and that's not right at all.
I'm for things that entails negative consequences for the parents prior to the kid being pigeon holed as a deplorable or unfitting for academic environments. Sending them home is one way to make the parents suffer. But before that, let's group them together and then find ways to level them up as a cohort. Everyone suffers when the class has a huge standard deviation of skills/knowledge/enthusiasm/engagement/support/etc.
I could not agree more with everything you said - it is really on parents largely. if my kid was one causing trouble in school I would 100% consider this my failure. and your idea about sending them home is for sure good in my book - of course this may create additional shitstorm on the kids if the parents are shitty but it is definitely one way I think makes sense to start with.
let's group them together and then find ways to level them up as a cohort I also agree with this but am thinking there has to be time limits etc... everyone should be given a 2nd chance and for kids I think everyone should be given 10th chance :) but both parents and kids have to understand that there are consequences and there are time limits to patience for behaviour correction.
Prisons would be a lot safer if the dangerous inmates got kicked out of prison and left behind the ones who didn't attack other inmates.
If you want to improve schools quickly, expelling problem kids is the easiest way to do it. But that would cause consequences to the expelled kids, as well as society.
Often dangerous inmates are moved to higher security prisons. Gang members are segregated, etc.
"Your kids should take one for society" is an atrocious pitch.
"Your kids should be stuck with people who ruin their lives because criminals are" is also terrible.
The correct response is moving problem kids to problem schools, then to disciplinary schools, and if necessary to juvy.
Put people where they belong, with the people they belong with.
Otherwise the people stuck with the trash will leave (and maybe that's okay in the end)
Most problem kids can be rehabilitated with some investment of time in a positive, welcoming environment though. Not so much if you stick them in prison school. They’ll just live up to your expectations in that case.
Most of the time, there's no rehabilitation. These kids just ruin some other kids' lives.
Then the problem is there is no rehabilitation isn’t it.
It’s not like those kids were born genetically terrible.
I suppose we're reading and experiencing different things. Here's what I'm reading:
April 2021: https://publications.csba.org/california-school-news/april-2...
Ballard Brief at BYU: https://ballardbrief.byu.edu/issue-briefs/racial-inequality-...
2018 GAO report: https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-18-258
I've been following the topic for a while as a minority and I worry about this as well as cops in our schools continuously raising the specter of violence and school shootings raising the real concern of violence.
It doesn't feel like expelling students has reduced violence or improved the quality of the day to day when I see the tracking of these issues.
yeah, in what world would that not help? they're not getting kicked out of the school system, just the school. lowest-common-denominator idealism like you are espousing here is one of the primary reasons why schools have gotten so terrible.
Obviously there is a bigger picture in all of this. I don't know what the correct balance is, but assume that all problem kids (for some strict definition of problem) were expelled and placed in a "problem school". I highly doubt that is going to improve that child's life or attitude, but obviously it will help those at the previous school. So we end up with a large number of kids who will almost certainly grow up to be "problem adults", in many cases criminals. Suddenly the problem you solved for the first school is now the problem of society at large.
In a perfect world, most of those problem children would be mentored correctly in regular schools and given a path to a better adult life, and therefore not create a future "problem adult".
In practice, it doesn't seem to work like that, and I agree, "problem children" do cause frictions and disruptions and worse for other children at regular schools.
I find it appalling that parent who can afford a private school, even with much sacrifice, would instead send their children to a a public school.
It is the equivalent of eating soup at a homeless shelter when you can go to the store and buy something better, made worse by the fact that you are making the decision for someone else that cannot decide on their own.
You have a choice of what public school your child goes to based on where you live. Many parents “shop” for their schools in this way.
There is an assumption that private is better always and that’s not true. Top 10-20% of private is better but it’s expensive and not available to most. There is a lot of poor and low quality private too.
Kids make do at good public schools. Source: went to one of them.
Lol. My public school sent 10% of its senior class to ivy league schools last year. I'll take it. Not all of them are inner city hell holes.
I attended a private school for a couple of years, and I have to say it was worse than the public ones.
Now obviously this is going to be neighbourhood, country, and community specific, but the problem I had with observing private schools was that now the school had an additional incentive not to expel students, rich and influential parents had extra influence over whether their child could be disciplined and how the school should do things, and half of the time the problematic behaved people were... the rich people and their children. Having and paying money isn't exactly a free ticket to well-adjusted children especially if the children are mimicking the culture they see at home and the society awards bullying and various behaviours with more money... Which most of ours do.
And this was on top of the downsides of private schools: being image obsessed over academics and intellectual investigation, surrounded by non egalitarian private school twats, and bunches of arbitrary private school rules. Now obviously this is not all private schools, but in the same way it's not all public schools either.
I think in this system it's a roll of the die. In my country, neighbourhood and in my life, my kid is currently going to public school and, touch wood... thriving for now. The other private schools around here have too much woo like Waldorf and Steiner and they steer away from evidence based methods in literacy and numeracy.
But I don't know if that's going to hold off into the older ages, and I can't promise, much to my wife's chagrin, not to consider homeschooling considering my own experience of high school also approaching that of a dysfunctional prison and a poor educational environment.
PS: there was plenty of interpersonal violence at the private schools when I grew up.
I forgot about the lack of personal property.
You couldn’t really own anything and had to prepare for anything nice to be stolen, or anything they looked dear to you (even if not nice) to be destroyed.
I heard of kids having their shoes stolen, but I never had that.
I’m sorry that happened to you, I hope you are doing better now. :(
This is a major reason (but far from the only reason) that we homeschool. Knowing what I know about the school system, about my own experience thereof, and about my kids' personalities, it would be grossly immoral for me to put them through it. The risk of long-term trauma would be too high.
There is some risk of their being isolated (but very low, since they are with other kids three days a week), and a slightly higher risk of missing chunks of learning (which we aim to mitigate in the obvious ways). But ultimately I'd rather my kids have a few gaps in their knowledge than be traumatized by the school system.
> I'd rather my kids have a few gaps in their knowledge than be traumatized by the school system
I went through a normal school system (the first 8 years still during the communist regime in my country, so take that "normal" with a grain of salt), and the gaps in my knowledge are enormous, in some cases subject-wide. I know literally nothing about chemistry, except the bits you learn here and there from TV shows and such. I vaguely remember some kind of equations, but nothing stuck. Biology - everything I know I know from somewhere else, mostly from that TV show with talking blood cells [1]. Surprisingly, I had pretty good grades, but it had nothing to do with knowledge - I was able to quickly scan the textbook before an exam and somehow it was sufficient, but there was no retention, I forgot everything after the exam. I was forced to learn Russian for 4 years and I remember literally nothing, not even the alphabet.
Those are mostly just anecdotes - I am sure that modern schooling can do better than rote memorization in a toxic environment. What I want to say is that motivation, a friendly environment, and fun learning are a lot more important than how well the teacher knows, say, chemistry. It is entirely possible that your kids will retain more knowledge, not less.
I am only talking about elementary school, college was different - I loved it and learned a lot.
[1] Il était une fois... la vie - https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0284735/
Agree, there are plenty of kids who go to government schools and have enormous gaps in their knowledge, in the west as well.
I'm saying that, all things being equal, I'd rather my kids be homeschooled with a few gaps, than go to a government school (and be traumatized) and have no gaps.
I grew up in Russia and I have a very similar experience emotionally, hating every second of my school life, but somehow I couldn't remember any particular horrors. It was just all so ridiculously sad and hopeless and boring, I couldn't stand listening unpassioned teachers talking about sili memorisation tasks the whole day and didn't feel like I fit socially either (even though I wasn't bullied) so it all felt like a torture.
Every public school I've been to has literally been built like a prison. Every student I ever met made the same comparison.
School was and remains a prison, that is why they build the gates so high.
Worse, its a prison with cult-like re-education towards elements of Marxism, without calling it that, in many cases. Its a spectrum so not all teachers are like that, but there are enough that it can be seen widely.
Most of this comes from teacher's followed recommendations made during conferences held by the National Teachers union, which has used many Marxism-based pedagogy while obscuring it.
These things are subtle to anyone who doesn't have some exposure to real life torture constructs, and how those constructs work (mechanism and means).
Schools are also failing to educate and provide people with the skills they need to succeed, the sole purpose for the school's centralized state-run existence.
The teachers exhibit qualities that any centralized system without a loss function has. They have no duty to investigate issues of performance with co-workers since absent an effective loss function (cutoff where you get fired), social standing and seniority become more important. In these types of collectivist systems, regardless of role, creating a hostile work environment hurts the group, and investigating issues creates a hostile work environment. They are all co-workers after all.
Social mental coercion also occurs towards the excellent teachers, since they make all the average teachers look bad. Those teachers then haze, backstab, and undermine in any way they can sabotaging and interfering while imposing social personal cost until the excellent leave, the ones that remain are the average, continually gravitating towards the least common denominator. In state-run institutions with free money, this becomes negative production value.
Sending and subjecting your children to brainwashing and torture is the greatest betrayal.
An example of one these subtle but effective techniques follows, its called the hot potato. It is one of many techniques.
A student is called out in front of the class and asked to answer a question, the question will be opinion based, and the teacher will reflect disapproval if answered incorrectly (in their opinion). These will be mixed in with fact questions to muddy the water so its unclear this is what they are doing.
This technique in pedagogy isolates the student called, making them anxious in front of their peers, often times because answering incorrectly has delayed be inevitable personal cost. At this age, they often don't have the biology to self-reflect or introspect to recognize the basis for why this is happening. They just feel anxious, and rightfully so.
The level of disapproval shown by the teacher results in driving two parallel processes. One that results in inducing bullying from the approval seeking students in that peer group, without the teacher needing to directly or explicitly take action. This bullying, or coercive shunning, is an ever present threat to the subject. The bullies having participated have (their own) consistency drive their efforts, with negative consequence. These are circular processes where both participants become the victim and perpetrator through induced behavior (as a result of structure).
Answering according to the torturer's opinion, forces inherent challenges of fighting your own psychology. It enables the consistency principle in psychology to warp the subjects mind over time (our identity largely remains consistent, which is based in this underlying cognitive bias we all have). What we write, and the words we use, even if we consciously don't agree with them will warp us towards agreement given sufficient repeated exposure and time.
You see this with used car salesmen when they ask innocuous, but carefully constructed questions seeking agreement, and once you answer (in any way but a specific way), they know they've got a sale excepting external factors.
The main principles of influence can be applied beneficially, or coercively. Robert Cialdini goes into these principles, and how they work.
Robert Lifton, and Joost Meerloo cover the reality of torture, how it actually works in their books written in the 1950s (with details from actual torture done by Mao, and the Nazi's).
The reality is, in the 1950s the limits of perception were found, and processes and techniques discovered that let you break and twist people. It started with torture, then a big issue with Cults, then it was used in AdTech and business process design to impose personal cost on the customer. It wasn't just used there, it spread widely, and its hard to find areas that have not in part been shaped by this to an individuals detriment.
The research was also not shared widely in whole either, its been repackaged to obscure the origins, such as conferences on pedagogy done by the Teacher's Union, or Game Design (within the Octalysis Frameworks), too many other places to count. The elements are there for those that know what to look for.
In general, all you really need to get this started are three elements for torture. Isolation, removal/lack of agency (unable to leave without causing loss, disadvantage or detriment), and cognitive dissonance; often where what is said isn't true, and loops back forcing the subject to engage in a endless loop of torture.
It caustically will break anyone down, and Social Media ensures Children can't limit exposure because of addiction triggers, and the lack of biology during Children's existing development to control addiction. The phone follows them everywhere they go, as it does for most of us. These things do break down everyone eventually, and quite a lot of the indoctrinated masses lack the ability to discern or recognize it is happening. Once broken and blinded you tend to stay blinded and broken excepting certain rare individuals.
Ironically, when people break down past a point they segment into the unresponsive dissasociate, or the psychotic seeking self annihilation. Two cohorts. The latter is often a semi-lucid state capable of planning. It seems to mirror objective characteristics seen in Active Shooters.
Rational thought under such psychological stress described breaks down fairly quickly.
You send your kids to school to receive the same tools that were provided to the parents in living a beneficial productive life. Many important tools are no longer taught, and in their place frameworks promoting inducement in false belief, practice, and ideology (towards nihilism) while blinding them to rational thought, have grown. You see this in the Woke cult, and many maoist/marxist inspired movements under adopted group names that change regularly to obscure and mislead.
These two things are why smart and intelligent parents are homeschooling. You don't send your children to Maoist re-education camps and expect them to be able to survive afterwards. The process destroys the individual psyche.
Even the intelligent may not know the process of what's happening, but they often more keenly discern and sense something being wrong and remove their kids from such environments, so long as they were paying attention and fulfilling their parental obligations (many today have or do not, unfortunately).
What you say about the reality and mechanisms of torture may be true. But your insistence on assigning this behavior to some political side is, frankly, frightening.
It won't change the amount of political violence that's ahead of us, but I would recommend that you, at a personal level, question those associations.
No political side, no country, or race has the monopoly of evil, and if you believe otherwise you have some serious work to do.
> But your insistence on assigning this behavior to some political side is, frankly, frightening.
You mistake this being political, and I did not assign these behaviors. These groups have done these acts. Its replete in the histories.
The acts have been littered throughout the historical record repeatedly and regularly starting with Marx and Engels taking from the Jesuits many of the practices that got the Jesuits expelled, and moving forward in time, the actions done by a majority of these people calling themselves such by various names, reflect what you call 'assigned'. They don't self-police and ignore destructive acts, if anything, these people's own actions assigned these to their movement.
I make a point of saying this too, because they change their group names to suit their groups purposes and to obscure their origins; misleadingly in a deceitful way, regularly. They do not want to be tied down by the same repeated failures that are associated with past groups. When you do the same exact things, and expect different results, this is a definition of insanity.
Marxists to Fabians to Bolsheviks, to Maoist, Communist, to Social Democracy, to Social Justice, to Wokeism, and I'm skipping quite a bit here.
There's been roughly a new name every 5-10 years going back to the 1920s, for the same Marxist-based doctrine that fails core components needed for rational objectivity. Failing such it shows the delusion, and fanaticism of those supporting it.
I would have nothing against these belief systems if they were consistent and rational, and in fact there would be no issues if that was met.
All they would have to do is conform to the basic principles inherent in rationalism, that is objective definition, unique meaning in language (no ambiguity of definition), Descartes Rules of Method, and logic. No improper use of the abuse of the contrast principle (hegel).
In other words, falsehoods get discarded.
They do not do this, and that is the core problem. They seek to unify through deceit and omission, that some of them, themselves, believe quite fallaciously, and by using language with multiple contradictory meanings, so no proper context can be made (newspeak). They use coercive methods to induct, following Cult structure as well. Seeming good at a cursory level, while sewing the seeds for evil through delusion, hallucination, and fallacy. These people also almost never happy.
Many leftist movements over the past hundred or so years seek to blur the line between politics, ideology, and economics, and state. This provides them cover to make unprovable false claims and create a power platform. You have part of the group which decries the abuses, while you have the other part pretending to be another group while inducing the same such abuses. Its about control of the resources, not ownership.
Its also beneficial to them to falsely call it political since politics is protected in open societies as is ideology, but this isn't religion, nor should any so called religion/ideology based in delusion or fallacy be protected or supported.
The important difference between real politics and this is in discerning rationally whether that type of ideology is a death cult, whose actions will result in unchecked destruction.
Mises wrote thoroughly about the 6 or so intractable problems of economics under such systems (by structure) because even back then they changed their names regularly (in the 1930s-1950s).
These movements we are talking about seek to make irrational dogma seeking power and control, they make broad nice sounding claims, while setting the stage for indirect but destructive outcomes. This has been demonstrated multiple times in their own policy and publications.
The Russian famine in 1921 for example, or the famines caused by Mao's Cultural Revolution, Maoist Re-education Camps (for the children), the massacres of Hue, Tienanmen Square, political dissident prisoners in Hong Kong, the ongoing acts of terrorism sponsored by the Stasi/KGB, the list goes on for miles.
They of course falsely claim its to make a better future, to get people to cede power to them, but the dynamics and the reality do not match up, and most don't resolve indirectly reference things that show it to be an unobtainable pipe dream, where the real outcome is destruction.
Eventually reality re-asserts when survival is on the line, and failing survival large numbers perish. Production may be continued through slavery, but overall eventually it shows itself to be a death cult.
If you've read any of the material published by the prominent people in these movements, you would see them talking about this, albeit in doublespeak to make it not sound as bad. They never question the viability of their premises.
Now that is frightening.
When you have a movement who abandons rational principles seeking a false utopia while in action only going for short term personal gain, this is destructive. People eventually die when this is unchecked.
Obviously, evil acts are any act that does not result in long term beneficial growth of self or others, and evil people are willfully blind to the consequence of their evil acts.
I'm well aware that there is no monopoly, I never claimed otherwise, but there are clusters or disease vectors where evil seeks to subvert from within until it can show its true face through action.
A group predominantly containing such is important to call out.
The Nazi's were evil, but they started off as the National Socialist German Workers' Party.
The Fabian's had similar origins, resulting in the economic collapse of the UK. They shared tactics, method, and history.
Bolsheviks had similar origins. Maoists had similar origins.
While they all claim to be new and independent groups, their structures show they've adopted core aspects of false or destructive ideology originally derived from Marxism in whole or part.
Political movements with core practices based in false ideology and method, resolving to destruction, are not valid political movements and do not deserve protection.
If you read nothing else, read this, it speaks unpleasant truth. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3263007/
how is public school teaching kids to take collective ownership of the private means of production? must have slept through those classes. My public schools in Oregon had a lot of anti-communism elements and I got a brief suspension for writing a research paper analyzing and defending the Black Panthers in high school -- cited reason was "defending/promoting terrorists" or something along those lines
They promote 'critical consciousness', which is a framework of looking at things in isolation without resolving indirections, and examining existing relationships by their power dynamics which are treated as static, not dynamic. These are based in fallacy, but more recently described in the critical turn in education, and was somewhat inspired by Paulo Freire's work.
The framework of reasoning being taught, is anything but, and follows circular paths that travel down a spiral of madness, and subjectivity without proper definition; in classic hegelian structure to abuse the contrast principle.
This is seen most recently in people who have contracted the mind virus, Woke-ism. When you adopt this 'critical consciousness', as they call it you blind yourself to the reality of things, and its a self-inflicted violation of your self. The things they do and say often are borderline delusional or insanely irrational, and not based in reality.
Marxist derivatives has not been about seizing collective ownership for quite some time, its been about interference, demoralization, and destabilization. They seized production by seizing the money, and are doing so through debasement as Lenin said in Keynes quote.
The currency allows control of the means of production as the root of all trade (exchange), and this has been seized already back in the 70s, by central planning bankers, and the ECP driven by money printing will be taking hold in a few short years once third stage ponzi is publicly visible. In other words, debt growth > GDP.
This sieving action of resources into fewer and fewer hands through debt is already driving legitimate producing businesses out of business (bankruptcy), or towards mergers, where they close shop which are funded by a money printer. The money printer swallows everything.
All debt issues with 0% fractional reserve is private money printing. This occurred in 2020 silently at the start of the pandemic. They replaced fractional reserve with an opaque capital reserve system (Basel III), which itself is based on fiat valuations that the banks loaning the money/printing the money decide. Carl Menger thoroughly proved how value is subjective. These structures neglect the simple fact that there are dynamics at work that determine value, so the associated banks will be fine until they suddenly aren't, without notice, or predictability (chaos).
Once concentrated, then everything can be seized and nationalized silently with cutout companies backed by the money printer, but in the process production grinds to a halt, shortage ensures, and stops and all value is lost since the store of value as a property of currency fails.
Order wanes, famine, slavery, and death, as occurs in every non-market socialist state to date; only this time it will be a global event and not an isolated nation event. That is the problem with parasites. Sometimes they kill the host, and by extension kill themselves.
> Research paper analyzing and defending the Black Panthers in high school.
Well I guess it would depend on what you wrote. The simple fact of the matter is, the dynamics of a successful protest or movement depend on largely two things.
The responsiveness of policymakers to listen and correct issues, and the inherent threat of violence or imposed cost.
If policy-makers fail to do their job by being unresponsive when their job is serving their constituency, violence holds them to account when the abuse is egregious enough. This once happened back in 1776, with colonists who were not considered british citizens or entitled to such protections without representation.
The politician's know this in theory too because they had to read the books covering these topics. Many of which are central to constitutional law, or social contract theory (Leviathan, Locke, Kant, Rosseau).
Absent the first, no non-violent movement can succeed in making change. You need appropriate political and judicial structures that are responsive to conflicts so they can be resolved non-violently. If they are not responsive (regardless of reason), the sole purpose of law fails, that purpose is non-violent conflict resolution equally under the law.
This used to be the courts, but they too have degraded to the point where if you don't have the money upfront to hire a lawyer, you don't have a seat at the table. A single civil suit today, even a slam dunk one, costs about a 50k retainer, from the lawyers I've spoken with. That's about the average median annual income for most people unspent (on things like food, necessities etc).
A rule of law requires certain elements, if you examine the law today and the associated costs, its largely only available to the select few with money. The 5 or so components have failed enough times to claim several decade long trends.
There is a psychological consistency pitfall in writing about things you don't care about because words alter your perception even if you don't believe it in the moment, the more often you write something the more it impacts you. They did this in the Korean Conflict to PoWs. It generally started with a choice; hard labor, or write an essay with the following prompt, "Why is the US not the best country in the world", to "Why does communism work better than capitalism", and then its read over a loudspeaker and celebrated among the captors, and prisoners.
Its subtle bias, but effective, proven, and documented.
If people can't organize and react to the reality of things being done to them, they implicitly are agreeing to their own destructive end, for themselves and anyone else they happen to manage to carry along with them.
Absolutely not reading this entire diatribe, but you should post some high quality sources to back up your extraordinary claims about Maoist torturer-teachers or whatever.
> Absolutely not reading this entire diatribe.
If you don't read what you comment on, then you miss out on the things you then ask about. It makes anyone look stupid.
The sources on how torture works, were referenced. The authors are well established in their fields, its old material that has not been refuted in any way and is backed by first-hand accounts in the case studies (1950s).
The structural elements they cover are well discussed. These elements are also present in material pushed at the recommendation by the national Teachers Union in the past (at several points). This included, iirc, the Roots movie controversy and this revisionist fictional film being portrayed as historical to push a false narrative.
Teachers aren't generally malign, but bureacracies can be (NEA almost without a doubt imo). The teachers simply did what they were trained to do without knowing what they were trained to do. A potential example of the banality of evil with regards to complacency and sloth.
You may not like it, and not want to see it, and not want to believe it. Nonetheless, it is clearly happening.
James Lindsay has published quite a lot of rationally backed literature on Woke-ism, and its relation to Marxism/Maoism, and how its a cult. He has several publications, and a youtube channel if you are so inclined.
Regardless of what you happen to call a thing, you can describe a thing based on its elemental component or characteristics. Rationally this process is called characterization, and when you find the same elements, and the same outcomes, that suggests a thing that goes by another name (deceitfully to obscure), is the same thing functionally.
When you see the same structures used in Maoist prison camps in the 50s being used in education, the question shouldn't be is this happening because the characteristics match. It should be who chose to do this and why, and is it more important to protect them over your own children. These all have pretty simple straightforward answers.
I went to a state school in the North of England with a GCSE pass rate between 30-40% and this is a fair description of what it was like. At the time the performance of all schools was based on the percentage of students achieving at least a C including Maths and English, and as Goodhart’s law suggests this inevitably meant the school’s resources were optimised for getting students around the C grade borderline to pass while all other students didn’t get an education suited to their ability. The Gove reforms included changing how schools are assessed to a value-added measure, that I believe is commonly used in the United States, which has created the incentive for schools to focus on all students rather than just those near an arbitrary passing grade. The deeper underlying issue that’s harder to solve is the anti-aspirational culture that pervades through a lot of schools in deprived areas, in my experience most students didn’t really get the value a good education could bring to their lives and like the original comment treated it like internment rather than a route out of poverty.
This was exactly my experience in the South too.
It's funny that society has the same issue - refusing to expel disruptive students, refusing to imprison or deport criminals, it's all the same.
Frustratingly, under pressure, Bridget Phillipson looks set to roll back most of those reforms.
It's not always anti aspiration. It's knowledge that the school system isn't doing anything for them.
I went to a school that had a lot of good teachers, and I learned a lot from them.
But when it came to bullies, the school was just as you described. Worse, the punishment for being in a fight was the same whether you started it or you were just beaten up. If you made the fight get noticed, you got punished. It was quite clear that they had no interest in stopping the fights, just in making sure they didn't get reported.
And on the bus, the driver didn't like my family because she once turned the bus around on our grass, tearing up a bunch of it, and my father was angry about that. In retaliation, she let bullies beat me up on the bus for years and turned a blind eye.
My education would probably have suffered if I was home schooled because both my parents were forced to work to make enough money to survive. And I'd be even more introverted than I am now.
But man, the bullying was bad.
Not being supported by the adults who pretend to be trustworthy is nearly as damaging as the bullying itself. Like you, I would be punished alongside the perpetrator even if I didn't throw a single punch or insult. This is extremely toxic because it completely breaks trust and causes children to lose faith in the system they're in, and they shut down. I know I did. I stopped telling anyone my problems because experience told me saying anything only lead to more shame.
The only true advice I could give to a child with bullying issues is physical violence - as fast as possible. It is sad. It doesn't take many humans to make school/life/work miserable.
I saw one of my bullies after high school, and I asked him why he stopped hitting me. He looked me in the eyes and just said, "You got big."
He was only scared that I'd hit him back, and nothing else.
> Worse, the punishment for being in a fight was the same whether you started it or you were just beaten up. If you made the fight get noticed, you got punished.
I'm not saying that this is anything close to optimal, but it should be noted that under this system (which is reminiscent of the way ancient Chinese criminal law worked, per Legal Systems Very Different from Ours[0]) people who get beat up should still report and take the punishment. Sure, you'll get punished for it once but you'll also build a solid reputation for not letting things slide, so it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to beat you up again.
[0] Except that the punishment back then for being involved in a crime (generally a theft or a swindle of some sort) was, guess what-- you got beat up.
> […] so it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to beat you up again.
That is, unfortunately, not how this works. The only ways to stop bullying are to be able to stand up to the bullies, which usually is not a realistic proposition (you wouldn't get bullied in the first place if you could) and can lead to further escalation (right on up to shootings or stabbings); to have a very, very empathic teacher who will put their foot down; or to have solid anti-bullying programs which use effective, proven methods to stamp out bullying.
Mind that nothing will deter a really determined bully, and getting punished because your victim spoke up instead of accepting the bully's power will escalate things from 'bullying just because you are available' to 'bullying because I now want you, and specifically, you, as miserable as you can be, all the time'.
From my experience with school bullying it was an entirely social problem. If the rest of the classroom agreed that you shouldn't be bullied then there were few ways for a handful of kids to go against that consensus, and most of them would backfire on the would-be bully.
Of course, if you're young and you have no friends, good luck getting your peers to think you're worth defending.
This is what happened to me, I suspect.
The one time I got attacked, one of the top three popular guys in the class went berserk on my attacker. This happened in grade school and the next aborted attempt at bullying wasn't until the end of middle school by someone who had transferred in later on.
Let's call this what this is, it is "below terrible" instead of "anything close to optimal". It's an interesting tidbit from a game theory perspective, but telling your child who is getting beaten up to not worry and play the long game is 1) horrible, 2) only works if everyone else in the game is rational. I don't remember bullies getting into trouble and stopping.
> you'll also build a solid reputation for not letting things slide
This is a terrible idea that was obviously flown as a butt-covering excuse by administrators who, like the school administrators, have discovered that it is much easier to fight reporting of crime than it is to fight crime.
I am deeply disappointed to see it treated as some sort of deep truth, when in fact it is a shallow lie that anyone with the slightest understanding of bureaucracy ought to have seen through in no time at all.
I’m sorry you went through that.
I hope life has been kinder to you following this. :(
Generally speaking, yeah. Someone else mentioned the system preparing you for life later, and I can see where the bullies made me stronger as well.
I definitely don't condone all that as a way to get stronger, but at least I got something from it. Silver linings and all.
Wish I could say the same. I often wonder how things would turn out if I didn't have the insecurities/other mental handicaps stemming from that period. And fantasize about rewinding time with the current brain and leaving a trail of broken bones in my wake :-D
I went to grammar school (UK) in the 1990s, and also absolutely loathed it. I think it set me up horribly for life and (especially) for my career. People use the phrase "PTSD" too lightly, but I think it gave me something like it that I often feel in an office full of people, and especially during in-person meetings. Years of CBT and ERP have helped a lot, and now I'm middle-aged I think I've put the worst of it behind me. I remember that horrible feeling that both the bigger kids and the teachers were against you, and the sense of utter helplessness and despair.
A few times my parents hired tutors for subjects I was struggling in, and I remember that suddenly I found myself enjoying them. I think I would have benefited greatly from being homeschooled, but of course at that time it was unheard of in the UK. I know it's not for everyone. There's no perfect answer. What's certain is that there's nothing 'normal' about sitting in a room with 30 people who are exactly the same age as you, plus one official authority figure.
So school certainly 'socialized' me, but not in a good way.
It wasn't entirely bad. I got a reasonably good education, and some of the teachers have left a positive impression. Overall though it was horrible.
PTSD is misapplied quite a bit these days, though CPTSD (the C stands for complex) seems to be the most appropriate clinical definition for the kind of scattered traumatic damage people experience, especially from childhood.
Glad to know you've received the help that you needed and have been able to move on. I compartmentalized and put off working on my traumas for far longer than I should have. People underestimate how much a dysfunctional school environment can mess someone up even when the home environment is mostly healthy. I screwed up great relationships in large part because I still had trust issues and CPTSD triggers that I didn't even realize at the time.
No joke, I'd rather have only known the neighborhood kids growing up than have thousands of kids to socialize with while having fucked up things happen to me. So what if I wouldn't experience prom night? If it's not the right environment for me, then it's not worth it.
Thanks. Yes, CPTSD would be more accurate -- the result of a state of near-constant low-level fear. I had, and continue to have, massive trust issues, particularly at work. I struggle to think everyone doesn't secretly hate me and that I'm not constantly on the verge of getting fired, even though I can see it's not logical. Steadily getting better now thanks to CBT and similar techniques.
But I have lost many friends and career opportunities as a result of my time at school. I had a basically healthy and happy home environment, but as you say, school can still screw you up badly.
Also Grammar school (in the 1980s), I got lucky as I got in the 'express track' and did O-levels after 4 years not 5 so I went to uni at 17. Probably a good thing as some kids were total sh*ts and 5 years of them would have been awful
Wow, it seems like the UK education system is a very severe environment. Remember Anthony Hopkins saying the same thing about it being brutal, having received abuse from both the teachers and the other students.
Yeah, just from my perspective having gone through the US public schools, the schools here seem to be a lot more open and friendly (following the American stereotype). But at the same time, we probably have a lot lower standards in terms of learning, and also the US has a lot of variation in school quality.
I grew up in the US, we're about the same age, and I went to a public school where I had a similar experience. More than anything else, I remember the crushing boredom and the feeling that time had slowed to a crawl. I wasn't beaten or abused, but I felt trapped in amber, and the school really was prison-like, just as you describe it. I've never hated anything so much in my life as I hated school.
So I escaped the prison. I dropped out at age 14 and went to work in a book warehouse at the age of 16. Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but to this day I consider it among the best decisions I've ever made.
Now I have young children of my own, and I'm not sure how I'm going to handle their education, but home schooling -- /w private professional tutoring and organized athletic activities -- looks like the best option. There's no way I'd subject them to public school.
I learned basically nothing in my k-12 public school but it was fun times.
Emotionally? It is really hard to top those times in high school.
It was the opposite of a prison for me. Like a garden of adolescent roses that had nothing to do with the real world other than the sweet smell of roses as an adolescent.
It is why I am glad to be child free. Anyone posting here is going to have a child that is better off than almost anyone who has ever lived.
I would suspect the best strategy in 2025 for anyone here is to not crush the creativity of the child. The only thing bad you can really do is to impose yourself too much on the child. The more hands off the better. The lighter the touch the better.
Yours skills are not what your child will need t+50 years.
It also says something about the quality of the "education" that you were able to (presumably) manage some sort of technical aspirations and career without the "required education".
I know the feeling.
> Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but ...
In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable.
Some of those screaming people probably cared about you and your future. Most of them just resented you, for highlighting the actual state of their society and schools. And perhaps making them doubt their own choices.
> In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable.
That depends.
Those who drop out because they can't hack it will find misplaced regret, blaming future woes on dropping out when in reality the problem is a continuation of the deficiencies that lead them to dropping out.
Those who drop out because they have bigger and better plans won't think about it again.
I think there are two assumptions embedded in the parent comment that I think you're ignoring:
1) The people who are on to bigger and better things are in fact vanishingly rare. Like, yes, Bill Gates dropped out of college, but he dropped out of Harvard, not Evergreen Community College. He wouldn't have been there in the first place if he wasn't already capable of some big things.
2) A really healthy society, with really good schools, would provide a path for those who can't hack it. Its almost definitionally not a good school if the process exposes some deficiencies, then just gives up. Like "well, it turns out your dyslexic, here's your cardboard box and begging pan" sounds like a bad school.
> The people who are on to bigger and better things are in fact vanishingly rare.
Dropouts are rare full stop, and those that do drop out overwhelmingly have life issues that causes them to drop out. The well rounded people who do okay in school aren't the ones dropping out, it is those with things like mental disabilities. It is not the act of dropping out that is impactful, it is the problems that lead to dropping out that continue after dropping out. It is a misconception that continuing in school would have cured what ailed them.
> A really healthy society, with really good schools, would provide a path for those who can't hack it.
You severely underestimate just how challenging life is for some people. If dyslexia was the biggest challenge to overcome, we'd have nothing to speak of. Some of these kids are, to be blunt, effectively vegetables. They are accepted into school for the sake of relieving the parents/primary caregivers, offering what is a babysitting service, but there is no academic value in them being there. They will not continue in school for prolonged periods of their life and there is no reason for them to.
I guess in your imagined "really healthy" society, all people are perfectly equal. That's impossible. But if we did somehow live in your made up world then we can say that we already have "really good schools". Nobody in our schools we have drops out without a good reason.
> Dropouts are rare full stop, ...
From a quick search, the State of Michigan has roughly an 8% dropout rate. Whatever your criteria for the term "rare", that is a huge number of kids.
If you are trying to run a really healthy society (vs. a Social Darwinism dystopia), then putting all the kids who don't do well in academic classroom settings on a "things like mental disabilities" - "effectively vegetables" spectrum seems extremely counterproductive.
> Whatever your criteria for the term "rare", that is a huge number of kids.
It is! When I go to the school to pick up my child, it is shocking how many have overtly visible challenges, never mind those who don't present to someone just casually walking in the door. It is rare, but rare is still a lot of people in large populations.
I live next door to Michigan and 3% of the students have their own personal assistant in school for the schools to be able to cope to their severe challenges, and, by accounts of family who work in that industry, that many more should have an assistant but there isn't a sufficient workforce to fill those roles. So that is around 6% of the students, give or take, right there who aren't really a good fit for being in schools. Used to be that they would have been dumped into institutions and never step foot in school, but that's not socially acceptable anymore.
Hey guys, I just wanted to butt in to clarify that I'm not mentally disabled or dyslexic. I'm basically neurotypical... well... more or less.
I dropped out simply because I found school insufferably boring and an almost complete waste of time. Some of my earliest memories are of myself thinking "oh man, it's still just Wednesday -- two more days to go until the weekend?!" (Fast forward to today, and I find myself looking forward to Monday!)
Just about everything else I found myself doing with my time -- including actual hard labor -- felt more rewarding and productive. (At least I was making money that I could use to buy 3dfx cards and RAM chips.) In truth, past phonics, don't think that I even learned anything in school; I was always ahead of the class just by reading books at home and at the library.
My parents shed many tears, but they came to terms with my dropping out, because I had exhibited depressive symptoms from about the age of 9 or 10, and those symptoms entirely vanished when I didn't have to go to school.
I'm sure that there are many others like me. Public school often tries to shove round pegs into square holes. There are better ways to learn, of that I'm certain.
And this is sort of the case that I was gesturing towards. A good school system is not one that just pounds on you to sit in class until you can regurgitate some fact. Its one that lets students figure out what they're good at before they have to be on their own.
Montessori, vocational programs, self-directed learning on and on and on.
Nobody should have to pick between "follow this specific concept of schooling" or "be institutionalized". That's not good schooling.
> Its one that lets students figure out what they're good at before they have to be on their own.
The best way to figure out what you are good at is to do it. That is not the role of school and will never best be served by school.
I know we've gotten caught up in a society that dreads children doing anything other than academics and sports, but it needn't be that way. In this hypothetical ideal society, it is most definitely not that way. Be careful to not let a poorly considered status quo cloud your judgement.
> I dropped out simply because I found school insufferably boring and an almost complete waste of time.
That's having a bigger vision. Never fear, you are already well accounted for.
> forced internment for children
Where I live (U.S.), new schools are literally built like prisons... each wing is laid out from a central "observation area" for the administrators. It's just a panopticon design modeled after penitentiaries.
I was with my family in our new local high school. My dad and I were the only two who noticed the layout.
The panopticon design was originally intended for schools too, as well as other institutions:
> Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums. He devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison, so the term now usually refers to that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Whether it’s friendly and encourages healthy development is another question.
The criticism section of the Wikipedia article focuses on political aspects, but to me, the very idea of keeping someone feeling like they're always watched sounds like psychological torture.
In fairness if you’ve ever been bullied and corned out of view of the teachers, having someone seeing you may feel like a relief.
Many of the bullying stories on here involve either a do-nothing response by authorities or both sides being punished. I do not see how constant monitoring ensures any kind of protection or justice.
That assumes they'll do anything instead of turn a blind eye.
In my school experience they turned a blind eye unless you fought back in which case they would punish you for fighting back.
And yet, I bet when you make a trade on craigslist (showing my age :), you meet in a public place where people can see you. Why?
Key word is always. It's not just about being observed (with or without knowing when and by whom), but also having no control over it.
Craiglist-mediated exchange is a choice. School, prison or workplace is not - not in any practical sense.
I don't think I've ever met in a public place for Craigslist trades. I've always gone to the seller's house. I don't think we've ever sold anything, but when we put something up for free online we just leave it outside and tell them to come get it.
In Missouri, high-school buildings use the same blueprints as state prisons. Why bother designing something custom? They serve the same purpose. They literally are prisons.
If a teenager fails to show up for school, a police officer will eventually show up to arrest their parents and place the teenager in the custody of a "foster family." Now both parent and teenager are imprisoned. And we are told this is freedom.
To make matters much much worse, children in state custody with the foster system are routinely exposed to all kinds of abuse. Many foster families operate like a profitable business where costs are minimized and care is entirely absent.
I feel I must point out that education buildings in Missouri do not share designs with prisons as a norm. Maybe this is true somewhere in the state but not here.
Yeah I didn't mean all of them. A couple of examples that I am aware of are Ozark High School and Waynesville High School.
There is no way this is true.
People look at ugly schools, and they look like prisons, and the kids are captive in the ugly buildings, so it invites the prison metaphor. But makes no sense. Schools are a series of classrooms, prisons are a series of small cells. The designs would not be reusable at a fundamental level, or any practical level.
I can't believe people think this is true. There are no school room sized cells in any prison. At least not in this country.
There are in fact a great many school room sized cells in the United States. "Dormitory" housing is the norm for a significant percentage of inmates in jails, prisons, and immigration detention centers (imagine a school gym filled with bunks and you're often not far off). To add to the school-prison linkage, many facilities have lockers as well, replete with padlocks that make dandy weapons.
That said, I am still doubtful there are 1:1 copies of jails being used as schools, regardless of visible similarities. I don't see any of these supposed jail/high schools with secured rec yards for instance, which generally make up part of the structure of the facilities that look most like the examples given.
I'm sure they make some modifications, but they started with the plans for a prison. The overall building footprint and architecture is the same.
> And we are told this is freedom.
I think we pretty much universally agree that mandatory schooling is preferable to the alternative, do you really think an illiterate populous is preferable? So yes actually that is freedom. Society guarantees that you will not be illiterate just because your parents were crack addicts, I think that's a good thing.
I don't think an illiterate populous is the alternative unless you think most people lack intrinsic motivation and also have families that don't value education. Seems extremely unlikely. Maybe you wouldn't have gone to school if you had a choice but most people would, if nothing else for free childcare.
> most people would
You are missing the point, "most" is not all, I don't think most people/families are like this at all, we don't do this for most people. I think you would be surprised about the number of low-income children in the US who will never see a classroom if we abandoned compulsory education. It is also an effective measure to increase equality and class mobility.
14 million children in the US are food insecure. 43 million people live in poverty, 12.9% [1]
You know how many people in the US are illiterate? 21% [2]
Do you think that number will increase or decrease if we got rid of compulsory education?
[1] https://www.nokidhungry.org/who-we-are/hunger-facts [2] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...
> You know how many people in the US are illiterate? 21% [2] Do you think that number will increase or decrease if we got rid of compulsory education?
Just 20% in 1875[1], despite the primitive education system of the time. Is the answer no change, it being limited by the innate capabilities of the people, not limited by what they do?
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
The source above yours and the one on Wikipedia are using different metrics for literacy. These are generally not comparable. Measuring literacy in a useful way, especially over historic timescales, is harder than it sounds.
There's security checkpoints and police officers in bulletproof vests and carrying guns as well in some cases, because what if a school shooter shows up? Of course, when one does show up a hundred militarized police will show up and... do nothing, because what will the union do if one gets shot?
My favorite was the lady cop in Texas who said she would only "go in" if her kid was in there. Your kids? ... Not her problem.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=--rt8aVV2zk
I live in the UK now, but grew up in the US. My own experience is pretty similar.
I was also a highly sensitive kid so took the abuse pretty hard. I was bullied by both other kids _and_ by teachers. I still remember one teacher openly calling me weird in class and picking on me (I was very introverted and shy due to years of bullying/anxiety, which I guess made me "weird"). Both physical and mental abuse from other kids. One "highlight" was being openly sexually assaulted in PE class and the teacher didn't even care.
I was messed up psychologically for a very long time after my school experience. Extreme social anxiety, hyper sensitivity to criticism, constant feelings of anxiety and depression. It took a failed marriage and years of therapy until I was able to overcome most of this trauma and kind of start to live normally (in my 40s).
As a result, like you, I am incredibly cynical of schooling systems. I see my kids suffering in British schools (in secondary), and it really pains me. They loved primary where there were small classes and secondary just has completely sucked out the joy of school for them. I wish I could just retire from work and full time home school them.
The kind of school you went to sounds very different from the grammar school that my working-class father went to in the 1960s and that helped him escape a life of asbestos-breathing drudgery in moribund shipyards.
There were problems with the grammar school system as well.
They were created to provide a pathway to the middle class for bright children from working class families. But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.
Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".
In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.
Can confirm.
My kid got in, and it turns out everyone else used a tutor (I stupidly took the advice not to do so from his teacher, who thought he'd get in just fine). This is in fact why playdates seemed to die out in the year or two before the test, the kids were being tutored but for some reason nobody would admit it.
When I went for the intro evening, the parents were simply the same kinds of people (often the same actual people) as the private primary where my kid went. Essentially, it is a private school where you don't pay fees. Same parents, with £30K more in the bank each year. The kids get into the top unis at a similar rate to the local fancy private school, which takes in all the classmates who didn't get in.
I have to say, they are a good bunch of kids. There's none of the bullying problems that everyone else is reporting in my kid's year. They have an environment where they have other quite nerdy kids doing nerdy kid stuff, without judgement.
But they are not a socially diverse bunch of kids. I'm not seeing any social mobility at all. Where are the kids whose parents are in the trades? Parents who aren't working? How come everyone I meet works in finance, law, accounting, medicine, or other white collar work?
I think it's the tutoring. It lets the marginal white collar kids win over the marginal "other social class" kids.
I am guessing you live in an area with high average housing prices in the catchment area of your school? Over the past 60 years, several generations of parents moving to catchment areas of good schools creates a self-reinforcing loop where only middle class people can afford to live near good schools.
My parents were both grammar school kids with working class parents, who didn't get any special prep for the 11+ beyond what their state primary school gave them. Both were the first people in their families to go to university and both managed to get into Oxford (where they met!). There was definitely a sweet point period when the system did what it intended in that sense, but there was obviously the drawback that if you ended up in the comprehensive system, you were stuck there and you had a situation where children got labelled at a young age.
Obviously some areas still have grammar schools and the impression I get from people living in those areas is that to stand a fighting chance with the 11+, you need out of school tuition or for your parents to be educated enough and have time to tutor you yourself. House prices are also obviously high in grammar school areas too! I've seen recent 11+ papers and having bright children at state schools around that age who are at the top of their year academically, I think they would struggle with them without any preparation or tuition.
> But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.
> Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".
That doesn't sound like a question a middle class kid would know anything about - not unless your definition of "middle class" is far different from mine.
British "middle class" is a higher class than US "middle class", and servants were relatively cheaper back then.
Think in terms of the family in Mary Poppins. That's Middle Class.
> In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.
But given most schools now in the country (given only a small subset still have grammar schools) are done by catchment area, much of this still exists in comprehensive education too. Now, if you're well off you just buy a house in the right area so your kids get in to the good school.
Yeah, that's the new problem.
I suspect in the past, people were less mobile, there wasn't the same disparity in wealth between different localities in the same general area, and school league tables weren't published. So the idea of moving to an area for (among other things) better education for their children wasn't something that was done.
I'm not really sure that's true. One of the things about grammar schools was that they covered quite wide areas since they were the top 25% scorers of exams. So think three ordinary sized secondary schools to a single grammar (which were usually single sex as well in those days).
"Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do"
This is incredible...
For non-british readers; state-funded Grammar schools famously, were abolished.
(I’m being downvoted, but this just objective fact, and something my grandfather brings up commonly).
EDIT: according to a lot of HN comments; they still seem to exist but they aren't evenly distributed.
There certainly were none in my city.
Despite one being named a grammar school, it does not follow a grammar school curriculum: https://www.coventrypublicschools.org/schools/cgs
How messy.
No they weren’t. There are still many (163 according to a very quick google search) selective schools in the UK with entrance based on taking the 11+ exam.
Edit to clarify they are state funded and not private.
Just to confuse things, some former grammar schools turned into private schools but kept 'grammar' in their name.
But to confirm, there are still areas that have state grammar schools and have the 11 plus: Buckinghamshire, Essex and Kent spring to mind as the obvious ones in the South East.
Birmingham also had a grammar school system that is state funded, although most are supported by a charitable foundation as well.
This all became more complex again with the introduction of academies (twice, with different goals and subtly different setups) and free schools (although are those really a thing any more?) and I'm sure New New Labour will at some point add another category if school in the interests of simplicity...
This is just incorrect information.
> By the end of the 1980s, all of the grammar schools in Wales and most of those in England had closed or converted to comprehensive schools. Selection also disappeared from state-funded schools in Scotland in the same period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar_school
There are private schools that call themselves grammar schools (paid schools, not state funded) and some grammar schools still exist in Northern Ireland.
But the system that defined what a grammar school is - has long since been abolished, and all free-access grammar schools were completely gone from my area before I was even born.
—-
EDIT: seems like the some state funded selective grammar schools exist but they are not exactly distributed evenly.
So, I am wrong; and this situation is actually significantly more class-enforcing than it used to be. Amazing.
Some counties in England still have state grammar schools and still follow the 11+ process. The 163 that the poster above you is referring to are state, selective, schools, rather than private grammar schools. There's a list linked in the Wikipedia page you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammar_schools_in_Eng...
> all free-access grammar schools were completely gone from my area before I was even born.
That's because you lived in an area that didn't have the 11+ exam. I did, and I went to a state-funded grammar school in the 1990s. It's still there, famously.
I went to a state grammar school, graduating in 2012. They still exist. There's a map of them here: https://www.theexamcoach.tv/grammar-and-independent-schools/...
I have a friend who teaches at a state funded grammar, and that wikipedia article includes a whole section on Current British grammar schools, which are selective and state funded o_O
There are plenty free non-fee-paying Grammar schools all around London. There are some private fee paying schools that were historical Grammar schools and still have it in their name.
The only issue is that Grammar schools are super selective these days, based on my own experience there are at least 10 applicants for every single place, as well as multiple rounds of tests to filter out children. In the end it’s a lottery of sort too as local councils decide who is awarded a place.
My neighbours kid took the 11+ two years ago to go to a state funded selective school in Warwickshire. 4 of my friends went to a grammar school (slate funded) in the 2000s and that school still exists in the same form it did back then.
Most grammar schools are gone but there are far from none.
Key word being "most". I attended a state funded grammar school in the 2000s.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammar_schools_in_Eng...
They are mostly gone from the UK, but Kent has a fully functioning, state-funded grammar school system.
As does Northern Ireland.
this, for example, is a state grammar school
https://www.queenelizabeths.derbyshire.sch.uk
The vast bulk of councils in the UK abolished the 11+ system. It does still exist in some places. Unfortunately, the system was ditched by the Labour government of 1976. Our current Labour lot are trying to do the same thing to our private schooling system.
One of the past Labour governments decided that there should be no new grammar schools created. So the existing ones continued to function but, as some closed down, their number diminished.
There's one just down the road from me.
Thank you. I get irrationally angry, when I hear the 'socialization' argument, precisely because of the experience you described. To be fair, it does, in a weird way, prepare you for some areas of adulthood, but I think those areas are thankfully somewhat avoidable.
It prepares you as much as it desensitizes you to accept bad environments because that's all the "adults" can do for you.
Interesting, if there is one thing that I have learned in my life, it is that you can pick up your stuff and leave. It is depressing that what we teach our kids is that they just have to stay in that bad situation; that there are no options.
The book Lord Of The Flies made a lot more sense when I realized it was a satire of British elite schools, rather than a real exploration of what cast away young people would actual do in that situation.
What six real castaway boys did in 1966:
https://www.newsweek.com/real-lord-flies-true-story-boys-isl...
>The boys had set up a small commune with food garden, hollowed-out tree trunks to store rainwater, a gymnasium with curious weights, a badminton court, chicken pens and a permanent fire, all from handiwork, an old knife blade and much determination
I've always assumed that the babies grown in test tubes and graded into alphas to epsilons in Huxley's "Brave New World" are simply a metaphor for children going throught the UK school system.
In that case the homeschooled are akin to the "savage" in the story.
EDIT: corrected spelling!
I've not encountered "Brave New World" but I love (and can see) the metaphor!
I read it when I was a kid… a homeschooled kid!
It was required reading in my school.
Can’t argue with that! :D
I hated school as well but I would still disagree on almost all points with you.
But I was lucky enough to go to a good public school, found many lifelong friends there, learned a ton of aside skills that help me now in my personal and professional life.
I think it’s really sad that more and more people opt out of society, either in school or elsewhere. I can understand it to some extent but I think everyone will come of poorer in the end if we all sit in our separate boxes, only thinking about ourselves and how we can profit more.
I’m usually optimistic about the future but this is a hella depressing trend.
A lot of people don’t opt-out themselves, but the society opts them out. Be it a bully or stigma in school, not fitting in high-school or uni.
To be fair to home schooling - a lot of it involves groups and organised activities. It's not really a separation in practice, but opting out if the default system. (There are those that separate too)
> Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
I hear your overall point, but treating this issue as a dichotomy undermines your point. Critics of homeschooling aren't claiming that schools are perfect, or that schools educate ideally. The claim is that, as poorly as our teachers are equipped to educate students, parents are, on average, worse equipped.
You're insinuating here that you were not educated in school. You're making that claim in a text-based format. How did you learn to read and write? Are you making the claim that your mother taught you how to read and write, and the school had nothing to do with it?
Here's the problem with what you're saying: a lot of homeschooled children don't know how to read and write. Or add, subtract, multiply, and divide. And contrary to your theory of education, memorisation is useful in learning these skills. A kid who has memorized how to do addition and subtraction can make change at a cash register, and a lot of homeschooled adults can't do that.
There are outliers in both schoolchild and homeschooled child experiences. I am one myself: my mom homeschooled me for kindergarten and first grade, and did a great job, but she had the advantage that she was a schoolteacher. And maybe your experience was an outlier in that you really did learn nothing in school. But the averages, at a systemic level, are that homeschooled children are at a large disadvantage compared to children educated in a school.
I'm early 50s and went to school in the Republic of Ireland - late 70s, 80s. I really feel the same as the OP here. It felt like a daily prison, combined with huge amounts of memorisation for exams. (promptly forgotten)
Maybe a child could put up with the incarceration if it wasn't for the bullying on top of that too. No escape.
Aside: In the 70s the Headmaster had a cane that was used occasionally but at least that died out later.
But on a more optimistic note, I think there's some 'alternative schools' becoming more popular in Ireland now, like 'Forest School Ireland' etc... sounds more healthy anyway!
I agree with you. This is coming from Saudi.
I don't have any friend from my school times. Bullying was the norm back in late 80's and the 90's till I am in college on '99.
The real friends? the real education? started at college. School was a 12 years full of non sense useless stuff to someone's practical life and improvement (to me and many of people around me. The most I remember of these days were math and science lessons that were beneficial and my father alone was more than capable teaching me that... other than language lessons, religious teaching that were just a formality for us (we learn religion the best from home, our extended family) etc etc. At the end? We lost most of 12 years that are the best for internalizing more engineering and professional education. Yes we are capable of that at that age, I and my younger brother at the least built some robots and actual cars with suspension and steering etc although using old Lego collections (since we grew poor we couldn't afford actual tools) and that was ALL on our own at home and we didn't have internet or anything. We modified RC cars to go faster by soldering capacitors to give that boost to the motor (at the expense of battery life and potentially burning the motor) when we were in middle school.
Programming you say? my love for computers and computer games? all at home too, with some help from my older cousin (that I will visit in 30 minutes, he is 67 years old now and without him I wouldn't even dream of getting a PhD in CS, and of course my professors who I revere and respect).
Nearly all my useful skills, other than math and science as I mentioned), I and my brother learned on our own... at home. It all started at home. The school? was torture and a formality we had to go through or no one will hire us.
I am for minimal formal schooling with specialization starting from day 1, each one can choose a MUCH shorter path and more focused on what they want to do... switching between specializations and/or profession shouldn't be like collapsing a sky scraper we have built with hay (like it is now the case). wasting people's lives, causing them trauma for whatever miss function (e.g. students being beaten for silly missed homeworks etc). This system is age old and not effective, and there are more effective ways. Most of those who changed the world were school drop outs for a reason... they focused on what really matters and connected it to reality.
That sucks and I really don't mean to well actually here.. but in that scenario - which doesn't sound like the default outcome of going to a public school anywhere - would this not be "just" a reason to go for homeschooling later, only after the system has provably failed (long-term).
Also maybe I have a false impression but I always thought people decided about homeschooling long before the kid(s) get to normal school age.
That said, I don't have a strong opinion here and I can see how it's useful in certain situations, but I guess might have hated it even more than I hated school (after a certain age, I liked it when I was little) - but also none of my parents went to university or something, so I was on my own in math etc after a certain point, so not sure how they would have even managed to get me to finishing.
My argument is that school experiences vary drastically, that everyone commenting before me was saying that homeschooling their children was egotistical, stupid and harmful.
When I, have a good reason why I might consider not sending my own kids to state school, because my experiences were so bad.
Just because your own school was sadly, terrible, doesn't necessarily mean your kids' would be similar, though? A formula that's worked for us, is - find a school with nice staff, be wary of huge academy chains (UK specific) and above all, seek peers that are very diverse - in terms of class, education level, wealth, race, nationality etc. That way your kids avoid being bullied for being "weird" because there's no such concept of "weird"-ness, kids in such a group have many different perspectives. To me, that's a far better environment for kids to develop and flourish, than siloed in a homeschooling situation.
Kids are excellent at pattern matching, and "weird" doesn't go across racial lines, weird is the kid who's a little on the spectrum, or not emotionally mature enough their first year to deal with circumstances- and instead shuts down.
It's easy to be pigeon-holed by the class, and it's self-reinforcing.
I had a good experience in public K-8 (I went to a specialized STEM high school so I’ll leave that aside) but I didn’t learn anything. Public school is day care. My kids’ expensive private school is day care with better food.
I think you're right to start by saying this isn't universal worldwide, or even within Britain.
You describe hell. But I don't believe that your experience is dominant or even that common in the UK. Which generation are you from?
It sounds like he is just describing being bullied in school and teachers not being great about it. Far from universal but also far from uncommon, in the UK or any country I have heard of. Bullying is a very common and documented problem in schools.
Even if bullying is common (say, every school or even every class experiences some bullying), that doesn't necessarily make it a very common experience for those who go through school (the majority of children in a class will neither be bullies nor bullied).
I think it's very area specific - how prosperous the area is. Reading that post was like he was at my school, word for word. I was on the "not bullied end" of that arrangement and life was still hell as you had to constantly watch over your shoulder, align with factions for fear of real violence if you weren't in the right place at the right time. A lot fo the older kids were linked to serious crime in the local area at the ages of 15 and 16 only. All in all I would say the goths got the most amount of abuse on a day to day basis.
I’m 35 now, so, millennial; for additional context I was brought up in a city called Coventry which is a city that was in decline during that period. (just like most of the north of the UK following Thatcher’s closing of the mines).
As a consequence of this experience, though, I saw that I wasn’t exactly entirely unique either, as there were other children treated as I was and we sought each other out. So I know that while my experience is not universal: that it is at least shared by a handful of people within my schools alone. - I would hazard to guess more outside of my school have these experiences too.
I'm around 11 years older than you.
I know my experience isn't especially portable as I went to a public school in the home counties, but not all of my friends did, and while I understand they experienced teachers with varying levels of competence and interest, none of them has described it in as harrowing terms as yours, and all came away with friends and a fairly decent education, albeit one that they probably had to have a bit more determination to get than I did.
My mum worked in various UK state schools as an assistant from around 2000-2010 and described serious budgetary problems throughout the system, and teachers trying their best in adversity. She also described the many obstacles in the way of getting the bad kids out of classrooms so they couldn't disrupt things so much. I have a friend who teaches at a grammar school, who is fairly intelligent and interested in his subject, and seems to teach well to kids who are interested, though again there seems to be little money to achieve anything.
I'm not claiming shitty, prison-like schools don't exist or trying to invalidate your experience, it was clearly terrible, but I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it.
I am often left confused by responses like this. I think it would be fair to suggest that some significant percentage of chidren suffer in schools or have harrowing experiences that they are going to carry with them through life until dealt with. If this is the case, why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn? I don't believe you are meaning to suggests that the situation as it stands doesn't need change, but that is nonetheless implicit in your statements.
From my position, saying: "I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it." Comes close to invalidating the experience of another.
Whether school is a net benefit (that can stand to be improved) or a net detriment (a system that needs to be uprooted and upended entirely) depends significantly on that "some significant percentage".
If the percentage is 10% of children suffering through school, that's a horrendous number, but still leaves school as an overall positive experience for the vast majority, even though significant work needs to be put it to fix its problems.
If the percentage is 50% of children suffering, then it's a crapshoot if your child will benefit or be deeply disturbed by school, and the whole system needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch.
One anecdotal experience can't help one decide which of these is the right approach. I'd venture a guess that, since most people are not clamoring for fundamental school system reforms, the experience of most voting adults has been largely positive or at least neutral in school.
The author paints a picture of schools as literal prison, as a place where children are forced to go to waste their time and be tortured. They invite the reader to conclude that the entire exercise is worthless and should be abandoned -
"Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education."
"I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. "
> why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn?
It depends on the conclusion. If the conclusion is "school as a concept is so irredeemably bad that we should scrap schools entirely because of my experiences", I'm not sure it's supportable because of the lack of universality.
If the conclusion is "some schools have been run so poorly that students are left with lifelong emotional scars and little education to show for it, we need to do something about that", I'm all onboard.
Yet another person here who agrees with OP. I think you're vastly underestimating how common our experiences were. Vastly.
Feel (some) of your pain - was bullied some in school, and actually had terrible compressed nerve problems that made sitting in high school all day terrible. But think what this person is saying is that this probably isn't the experience of most students. And in all humbleness, would have to agree, don't think me and my friends wouldn't say it's was an extremely abuse experience.
Not saying it doesn't need to be fixed, but that like most systems handling large volumes, for better or worse, it caters to the majority:(
Like you, I'm older than dijit and went to school in the home counties, but my experiences were also unpleasant enough for me to question the value of my time at school. I went to non-selective "state" (i.e. public-sector) schools in a middle-class area where nearly all of the other pupils presented as working class. Somehow I managed to pick up a combination of working, middle and upper class mannerisms, which seemed to attract more bullying from authority figures than from my peers. I suspect many of my teachers were bitterly resentful about the (then recent) banning of corporal punishment in the state sector. My secondary school seemed to model itself on "public" (i.e. private) schools, where corporal punishment was still legal. The saving graces of my school days included:
1) My primary school clearly took children's advancement seriously (more in things like handwriting, bladder control and cycling proficiency than in subject-matter knowledge or understanding), so it wasn't all pain and no gain, but that mostly stopped at secondary school.
2) Secondary-school maths lessons were (usually) something of a haven because maths teachers were willing to engage in unplanned reasoned argument and for almost three years we worked independently, at our own pace, from booklets while the teacher gave us each in turn one-on-one tuition (for only one or two minutes per lesson, but it did mean that I escaped being uncomfortably pressured to speed up or slow down both when I was working independently and when I had the teacher's attention for a non-punitive reason).
I think British education would be better if secondary schools had a clearer purpose and treated pupils as stakeholders. My experience was that my formal education started at primary school and resumed at university after a seven-year gap. I never really found out how my secondary school was meant to benefit pupils. Pupils ought to not only benefit from school, but understand how it benefits them.
I think schools should reflect clearer thinking about ability-based selection. If pupils are grouped by age and location only, and not at all by ability, then requiring the whole class to work through the same material, in the same way, at the same pace risks seriously inhibiting subject-matter learning. On the other hand, grouping pupils by "general ability" risks putting pupils in some classes more or less advanced than those that would benefit them most, and permanently disadvantaging those who are rejected from the more prestigious academic path at an early age.
Pupils also ought to lead lives they have reason to value. Corporal punishment even for bullies is a net negative, and there should be meaningful protections against teachers using loopholes, such as turning a blind eye to bullying or perpetrating emotional abuse themselves. We had many teachers like that at my secondary school, and one of them was found to have assaulted a pupil while I was there.
Edit:
I think some important points aren't really clear above. I agree with dijit that school can provide pupils with very poor value for the burdens it places on them, but I consider this a missed opportunity, rather than a lost cause. I also suspect some teachers' toxic attitudes about class and violence contribute to the bullying problem, so we should be careful not to let cognitive biases lead us into doubling down on "discipline" in schools, unless there's good reason to believe that isn't part of the problem. I left school many years ago, but before I did, authority figures bemoaned the "end of discipline" and the coddling of pupils, which was at odds with my experience then, so I'm sceptical of any claims that the problem has since been solved.
As a parent with kids in the UK state school system, I've noticed a considerable attitude change in terms of reducing bullying, acknowledging and supporting learning difficulties (dyslexia, ADHD, autism), and on trying to keep kids happy and engaged, in a way that simply didn't exist during my time in the '80s and '90s.
In the same way, my own experiences at school were a significant attitude change compared to the learn-by-rote and corporal punishment era of my parents.
I couldn't claim that it works for every student or that every school is like that - plus the entire school system is now stretched financially to breaking point in a way that it wasn't when I was there, and there are additional new problems such as social media - but I do feel that in general things have moved in the right direction.
I have some friends who teach in Cov, there are some particularly bad schools in the city sadly. Sorry to hear you went through one of them. The effective postcode lottery of schools has an awful affect on how the part of our lives plays out.
Yeah, Coventry is rough. This is a good anecdotal overview for anyone interested: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Watch-My-Back-Geoff-Thompson-ebook/...
Having said that, your experiences weren't a million miles from mine in the 80's in the crap end of Hampshire. Most of the violence there though was from other pupils, rather than teachers.
However, speaking to my daughter schools these days do tend to be kinder, gentler places than when I grew up. Fights seem to happen never rather than on a daily basis.
I'm 34, grew up in London, went to state primary school and private secondary school. dijit's account of schooling ressonates strongly with me.
40's, male, had a horrible experience at state secondary school in semi-rural Scotland. I now have young kids in primary, and I can see how shit the education aspect in particular is - my kids constantly complain about how boring it is, and one finds everything ridiculously easy. For example, he's been doing addition and subtraction up to ten at school for 3 years!?
Even if it's not hell, it could be so much better. It could be a place that kids actually look forward to going every day. Instead, we put them through 12 years of mandatory low grade torture where nothing they do is connected to the real world, their interest or curiosity, and when they're done they're launched into a world of AGI and ASI where none of what they learned is remotely enough for them to contribute to society in any way.
This is the first comment in the page, the first I read, and I can also say, I learned nothing (if anything lies, bad science and nonsense) in school. Coming from a very different country, lived in many others I know is not better in those places. I do not have time to really teach my kids, but I will be all the way by their side, as they go through the brain washing machine of school.
I will send them to the school just because I want them to interact with other people of same age, and also learn how much stupid people is around, and show them it won't get any better later in life. But I do not expect, at all, that they will learn something useful.
How did you learn to write this paragraph?
It's like all the people that insist "School never taught me anything useful like how to balance a check book" when you learned how to balance a checkbook in the math class that person never paid attention to.
I'm sick and tired of being told what school is good and bad for by the very people who never paid attention. A school cannot magically make you motivated to learn things for 16 years. It's drudgery to most humans and always be, because we aren't naturally """meant""" to learn complicated and robust concepts for 16 years.
Our options are deal with that and help kids who don't want to learn do things they don't want to do, or have a general populace that knows nearly nothing about the world around them.
Literally by my own, with books that luckily I had available. I learned no grammar and certainty no spelling in school. As I was 18 nobody could under my writing because of the terrible spelling.
I had problems also speaking to people, and understanding what they were saying.
Yah, this paragraph can't be taught at home right? or would taking a few English courses not achieve that, selectively?!
I hated school too, but I'm not sure I would have learnt much at home. My parents both lack higher education and frankly haven't been able to keep up with me past the age of 12 or so. Home schooling might work for children of smart people to be accelerated into the exact same field as them. But it won't work for kids like me or those who just aren't good at whatever their parents do.
That may be less true than it was 20 years ago. Even free resources like Khan Academy can go a long ways in helping parents educate their kids beyond what they know themselves. And for parents willing to spend even a fraction of what the public school would spent on education, they can pick and choose curriculum, tutors, or even online live classes with teachers well beyond what they would have in their local high school.
That said, parents without much of an education themselves may tend to set the bar too low for their children, but that often appears to be an issue in the public school as well.
Yes, 1000x this!
School for me was a gladiator academy. Useful for producing gladiators I suppose but at the expense of any genuine intellectual curiosity or love of learning. Thankfully I had an informal opportunity to stay after school when the budding gladiators all went home to torment small animals or whatever it was they did, when I could sit in peace and play on the school’s Apple II. That opened my eyes to an entirely different world, which I now have the privilege of inhabiting.
Some of my siblings liked school, and my parents were wise enough to make the homeschool/government school decision on a child by child basis. I’m very grateful that they had the courage to make that decision in my case against fierce opposition by all of polite society.
I became progressively more withdrawn throughout my school years and for most of high school I was a ghost. I talked to no one and hid in the library during lunch hours, and for all the kinds of reasons that have already been mentioned here.
My experience in school contrasts dramatically with my experience going through the scout movement. We had an active and healthy group. we would do 10 weekend camps a year and on those weekends I would hit the ground running when we arrived on friday evening and wouldn't stop until I was back in the van to go home on Sunday afternoon. I rose to the rank of troop leader, I won the youth of the year award, I would lead the campfires on the group weekends for 150 kids and their parents. I'm 49 and still in touch with the core group I went through the scout movement with, we're all lifelong friends. I probably would have killed myself if I didn't have Scouts.
School was OK, but Boy Scouts was great! We learned to organize into groups, to obey orders and coordinate as groups, play games, watch the Scout Masters (all adult men) discuss and decide matters and then try to do the same ourselves.
I also learned how different fathers can be: some with few friends, some with many, each having different abilities, etc. All were wonderful people ready to help us learn.
I was never bullied (in school or out) and I can think of only a few instances where I saw it. So I am always disappointed to see numerous claims of bullying "pile up" online whenever there is a discussion of school. One gets the impression that everyone has been bullied always and that school was/is hell. But my experience was that bullying was truly rare: rarer than snakebite, rarer than black widow spider bite, indeed, rarer than actual death! My conversations with others with whom I associate indicate similar experiences. School was fun and rarely boring.
I like your anecdote about the boy scouts being a healthy environment- that could well be true and I have no reason to think otherwise.
But I think being blind to the other kids being bullied is probably a common thing, you’re likely better adjusted as an adult and can’t possibly comprehend how common or how helpless kids can be to being bullied.
You can imagine then, a person like you becoming a teacher might not be looking for signs that kids are being bullied, because its rarer than death after all- and all you’d see is the built-up backlash of the bullied kid finally hitting the bully back (because, being a bullied kid fighting back for once is dramatic).
This is a large part of why the the bullied kids end up being punished when finally acting out in zero-tolerance scenarios.
Bullying is definitely more common than death.
Such an accurate description of what I went through in Switzerland. Kids are mean, and I had to be mean to survive too. It stained my character in ways I am still trying to overcome more than a decade later.
I didn't enjoy my (US) public school experience, but it gave me a lot of skills for interacting with other people, including people I disliked. Based on the people I've met who were home-schooled, they lacked a lot of those skills.
I agree with this (as the bloggers seems to too). Yeah, dealing with all the different personalities you see at school is an important skill, as is dealing with difficult situations. Yeah, would like to think I was in general a nice kid, but had some share of being bullied, and unfortunately have also bullied another kid (neither were common in my life, but you had to learn how to handle these situations, and also make mistakes to learn from them). Yeah, this understanding of people is super useful, and for me at least, the corporate world can be just as ruthless as a school playground. Need to know how to navigate all those egos.
> Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
There’s so many classes that I want a refund on my wasted childhood time. Reading the “classics” in English, studying foreign language, Theology (Catholic schools), History (yes, History). I hated all these classes, didn’t learn much from them beyond what it took to pass the tests, then quickly forgot what they taught. Anything useful that would have come from those subjects I learned later, through alternate more enjoyable means (e.g. Assassin’s Creed was way more effective in teaching me the history those games covered).
I never read pretty much any book written before 1970, never learned a foreign language beyond a single semester of Spanish, and certainly had no Theology in a US Public school. Now as an adult, I do want to learn all those things (to some degree) and feel like I missed out on it; “If only I had a better education.” But I probably would have been more like you, uninterested and equally as dismissive of my childhood education if I were forced to learn all of those things at that age. Is it a problem with educators, families, or just the children themselves that they will grow up and realize the opportunities they’ve lost?
"Chapter 1: Letters from Prison"
https://laniakeabooks.org/books/letters-from-prison/part-1/#...
Also British, although i was living abroad when I started home educating (the correct term in UK law, and more accurate because the whole point is that its not HE).
> It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning
This is why I stuck with home educating up to GCSEs. I wanted my kids to enjoy learning and they do. They have a very wide range of interests and good academic results and IMO are better prepared for A levels and university than they would have been at school (even really good schools).
> find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work,
This is why we have so much after school stuff and breakfast clubs. Yes, it means some kids get fed in the morning, but a lot of them seem to get given junk food.
> for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children
IMO home education is better for socialisation. What skills do you learn from meeting the same group of people your own age in the same place everyday? My kids had more time to do things by themselves (anything from going to a shop to taking a bus to meet up with a friend). They did (between them) guides, dance, sea cadets, sailing, D & D, art classes, singing classes piano classes, drama, stage fighting and more. They had both remote (which develops a useful skill set these days) and face to face tutors at for some GCSE subjects. it would be really hard for kids tied by school hours plus home work to do as much.
> the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
The chasing of metrics has been a disaster. My younger daughter is at sixth form college for A levels and it has deteriorated since her older sister went there. it is still good but they have become a lot more rigid and I feel they are less focused on students best interests and more on the metrics.
I went to one of the best schools in the UK (consistently top 10 academically), with no bullying problems, no corporal punishment (it had abolished it in Victorian times IIRC), excellent facilities - and I still think my kids had a better education than I did
Interesting story and very good points :) I certainly have concerns, that much of the curriculum in school here in UK is basically pointless box-ticking (metrics as you refer to it), and a certain part of the day is just a waste of time and/or at a pace that doesn't suit brighter kids. OTOH there's some great stuff at school that'd otherwise be hard to replicate. I know people that do homeschool or private school with good reason, due to the limitations of state school. Sounds like you've done a lot to ensure your kids have friends and go to things where they meet other kids. So in your case, probably the lack of social side is less of an issue... however, isn't that quite an investment of your time? (and to some extent cost). you list a lot of things your kids go to, that must mean quite a lot of "ferrying" / "taxi-ing" around? Or are they very independent and using public transport? To me , it sound like you've done homeschooling right, but I kind of wonder whether a lot of people would be unable or not enlightened enough to do all the social side you've done.
In one word, yup. My solution: In class put head down and just ignore the teacher. I DID want to learn the good material (math and science) so DID that in the one hour of daily 'study hall' and when I got home. And, with this approach, in math and science did quite well in aptitude tests and achievement tests. Those test results, and NOT what the teachers said about me, got some higher-ups to send me to summer advanced math/science programs.
That self-learning approach served me well in school, work, and life to the present.
The plane geometry teacher was one of the worst. We had a disagreement: She thought that in her subject she was superior, a lot better than the students were (actually, not for long!), regarded the students as subordinates, and tried to intimidate us. So, I communicated with her only a few times but then was showing that I was better in the subject than she was. I.e., one reason I worked hard and DID learn well was to show up the teachers, show that they were NOT better, even in their own subject, and keep them from being nasty to me, trying to subordinate me.
Since my brother wanted me to go for the football team, I did. The coach was no help at all and treated me with contempt. I was not any good at football, didn't try self-learning, but the coach was no help. As part of dumping on me, the coach gave me an old helmet, not effective, unique on the team. One day another player gave his elbow to my head, and I hit the ground maybe a little hurt. In one word, the coach was a bully. To heck with that: I quit the team.
The people who say "it's to make you interact with normal people!" miss a key point. In the real world, you meet a person, and if they treat you like shit, you walk away. If they physically assault you in the workplace, you can report them to HR, and there's a good chance you'll never have to see them again. In school, you get told you need to have empathy for their propensity to beat you, get subtly or not-so-subtly victim blamed, and you still have to interact with them for at least a year, and maybe years.
Exit is probably the most powerful strategy to dealing with certain kinds of situations, and schools deny you that.
Agreed but what about the person that doesn't exactly treat you like s** but they are difficult to work with, but in order for you to achieve the thing you need at work you have to work with them daily? Then walking away isn't an option - perhaps just going to work somewhere else is not feasible. So then, a certain amount of experience of dealing with idiots at school can be useful can't it? (within reason... ;) )
>I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding.
Institutional childcare in general is mostly this; a necessity driven by an economic imperative. Both parents must work. School is a continuation of that logic, although as the kids get older and more independent this becomes less important.
This was my reaction upon seeing the question in the post title, too.
I've chosen not to have kids (my childhood experience of other kids being one contributing factor) but if I did I would not want them to be anywhere near a UK state school.
> Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
Funny enough, in the US, most states changed their methods of teaching (especially math) 10-20 years ago. And facebook is still filled with parents (although probably mostly grandparents) bitching about not understanding "common core math" without trying to understand it, and expressing how they learned via rote memorization and that is what we should use instead.
To be fair - the US changing their mathematics education system has been worse for the mathematics program. The kids learning math now who don't learn from outside networks will be significantly worse off in mathematics by far.
Also there is no other way for people to learn mathematics then without doing the work to learn. This utopian idea that's bled into the education stream that we can teach math without significant amount of problems to practice on is kind of nuts.
Youth polling consistently ranks public schooling middle-high school as the literal worst time in their life. However, I still think they should do it as it gives them exposure to the bottom quartile of the population. It gives them motivation and reason to structure the rest of their life to do anything and everything to never have to interact said population group again.
>I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country. >However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life.
Hey this is more or less the universal experience world over. Be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.
I was schooled in Bangalore India and I particularly loathe and revile both the school and most of my teachers. My school did nothing except make me believe I was a horrible child with no future.
I believe in homeschooling but it isn't very fashionable here.
> I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
The problem is, when you allow homeschooling, a non-insignificant number of children will have to endure the same, just the wardens and torturers will be their own parents. There have been more than enough cults who actually promote that parents keep their children from "outside influence", and on top of that come the pedophiles, again especially in religious circles. Even private schools suffer from such issues, again mostly religious ones, but there also have been a fair share of scandals surrounding "ordinary" esoteric schools.
I would rather fight for government-run schools to have proper budgets for a high quality learning experience, adequate staff, modern curricula and teaching methods and actually sensible policies against bullying of all kinds than to allow systems to thrive that are even worse than what you went through.
34 year old who grew up on Guernsey (small island south and independent of Britain but with very much the same values) and went to a state-funded Grammar school for secondary and can't relate to all of this, but certainly most. The details are different but I agree that the education offered is subpar and the "socialisation" argument is bullshit. School left me feeling more isolated and alone than I've ever been.
I grew up in the US and I hated every single day of school. I don't have a favorite teacher I remember fondly, I don't have friends from school, etc. I absolutely hated it.
But I still am against home schooling. I still got social skills from going to public school that homeschooled kids lack. I still don't think your average parent is equipped to give their children a good education.
I have people I know who have homeschooled their kids. Without exception these people are narcissists with insane views who are using it as a way to indoctrinate their children into having the same worldview that they hold.
Homeschooling should be illegal. It is child abuse.
Because what I was literally forced by the state to endure, is not child abuse.
Come one.
Yes some kids face abusive situations in public schools. But all kids are by definition facing abuse when home schooled imho.
> by definition
My mum never punched me in my face, followed me around the playground trying to put dog shit in my backpack, steal my books and piss on them or make rumours about me to ensure I was ostracised by the other children. All the while the adults were helpless and continually told me to be a man- and worse, the adults leaning in on it being my problem. A true hopeless feeling.
You will never know how much I can despise you for your presumption that my home-life could possibly be correlated with my school life.
“by definition”. Honestly, go fuck yourself.
Lots of kids home lives are worse than your school life. But that's not the point I was making. You are letting your personal horrible experience define the whole discussion for you. But that is completely beside the point I was making. Yes some kids are physically abused even tortured at school, some kids are physically abused even tortured at home. You don't make policy decision based on outlier cases that are already illegal.
“all kids are facing abuse by definition when home schooled” is still ringing.
By your own words here you should be agreeing with me, that homeschooling should be a legal choice.
That making a policy decision based on an outlier (home abuse) that affects everyone is bad.
As I explained in my initial comment, the problem is average parents are not equipped to be good teachers and homeschooled kids are being denied the variety of experiences that kids going to an actual school are getting. That's why I said all homeschooled kids are being abused by definition. Not the same type of abuse you got at school or I got at home. But they are being denied a proper education. They are being denied the opportunity to learn to make friends and socialize with different people. When it's time for them to finally go out into the world they will be poorly equipped to do so.
If I thought home schooling was a sure fire way to avoid violent abuse for any kids, maybe it would be worth the trade off. But we both know if anything abusive parents are also going to abuse their kids via home schooling.
I honestly think on the whole homeschooling is doing more damage to the kids being put through it and should be illegal. Obviously before actually doing that we should do scientific studies and surveys of adults who went through it and make a decision based on that rather than just my opinion. But right now we let parents do it just because extremist parents insist on it. And I think we are failing those kids.
If it weren't for homeschooling my autistic daughter would be spending her day in the headteachers office shaking and crying due to her cripping anxiety.
I'm glad that you have a way to help your daughter. But there are many kids with similar issues and homeschooling can't be our solution for all of them. Instead we need to figure out how to accomodate them at schools.
Not sure about USA, but here in UK there are special schools for people whose autism really makes it unviable for them to be in mainstream school (whether that's a failure of the mainstream school, or just level of anxiety etc of the student). Such special schools are often wonderful, with the most amazing, dedicated staff. Usually staff have specialist training (albeit not always to as high level as one might like, due to underfunding) and much experience of working with autistic people. So, able to provide things that parents with no prior knowledge of autism, and jobs to go to and bills to pay, are less able to provide.
> I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work
Open an history book and look how it was before schooling was free and mandatory.
I do agree that the most recent spin on it is far from ideal and that the underlying goals seem to have shifted, but I can clearly and easily imagine an alternative way that doesn't involve home schooling.
The problem is the same as in many other industries, once you optimise everything to please the capitalistic beast we created you're set for personal hell
I hear everything you are saying, but...
Now imagine that all that is true, except it's your home.
If there's one thing I was surprised when I moved to the UK from Portugal were the number of stories work colleagues told about bullying in school. Although there were fights and stupid games in the schools I went to in Portugal there was never systematic bullying.
I'm sorry you had a bad time at school.
> give an appreciable reason
You might not have succeeded at that. You did a very good job at denigrating school though :)
Let me try to tell you my view: both homeschooling and schools have risks. A child can suffer mistreatment both at school and at home.
School however offers something that homeschooling can't: options. If you have a bad teacher, you will have another 4 which are average, and 1 or 2 which are actually decent. There will be bullies, yes, but you also have opportunities to make friends.
At home, all you have is a single adult. If that adult happens to be a psycho, there's no escape.
I say this as someone who suffered at school. My ADHD got completely unnoticed, being of the inattentive kind. I didn't know how to relate with others, I had no friends. I would pick up a book and read in a corner during recess. I got bullied. For me school was something I "endured", not something I enjoyed.
I also happen to be the elder of 4 children. My younger brothers and sister went to the same school I went to. They had different teachers, different co-students. All of them were happy at school, and they turned up just alright.
Now, my parents. My mum is ok (for someone who has raised 4 people) but my dad is a self-absorbed narcissist. My brothers and sister stopped talking to him 20 years ago. He doesn't know his own grandchildren. I still talk with him, but out of pity. There's no love left.
So yeah. I suffered at school. It happens. My siblings didn't. I think homeschooling with my mum would have been ok, she's decent. But homeschooling with my dad? I would be way worse than I am now.
So, there. Options.
Bullying is not just something that one does to another person. It's the social destruction of self that is mediated by a group:
https://www.amazon.com/Bullying-Social-Destruction-Laura-Mar...
Bullies couldn't do what they do if they did not have the support of the other students, teachers, administration, etc. As late as college I was harassed by criminally minded person who led a criminal gang that was not held in check until they finally smashed somebody in the face with a rock in front of many witnesses. Two people were driven to suicide.
The leader has been to prison and if he got out and went straight I could forgive him, even celebrate him, because it is so hard to get out of being justice involved. I'm still angry at the college administrator who told me "my hands are tied" who many see as a hero because he really did a lot of great things for our school -- but I wonder who else was driven to suicide and I fantasize about going to his funeral and dumping over his casket. An apology from him would go a long way, I've asked for it, I never expect to get it.
If you're being bullied in elementary school you don't get friends. It could be that the bullying drives away friends, or if you had friends you wouldn't get bullied, or the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you not to get friends. Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.
I guess you are answering to the "you also get friends" part of my comment.
What you suffered was horrifying, I hope you have recovered. There's degrees in bullying. Mine was not that bad in comparison to yours. The kid who was a bane of my existence would not attack me every single day, at every single hour. I was not important enough or "fun enough to mess with", I suppose. It was more like a "once per week" kind of thing.
I was not very successful at making friends. But I did make a couple. The first one was the other guy who was also regularly bullied. He had clear developmental issues, I don't think teachers could turn a blind eye on them like they could on mine. We talked about videogames, almost exclusively. It helped, somewhat. Then he (I think) became romantically interested in me and I had to cut it off.
Then there was another kid who regularly came to my house. We played with legos, which I had many. Then he stopped liking Legos. (Children...)
My school did give me many more opportunities to make friends. Retrospectively, I know I could have made more. I just didn't know how to. In my case it would be "the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you to not get friends". I only managed to make real friends in highschool (and even then it was just 2 or 3). And that was after I decided to make a conscious effort to understand the social rules that seemed to come naturally to others.
I think my problem was more a "me" issue. The bullying didn't help but I suspect I would have made very few friends independently of it.
> Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.
I do agree. Unfortunately many children's homes are not safe environments. Homeschooling for them is worse than bullying can ever be at school. Imagine 24-7 with your bully, who is way bigger than you and from whom you also depend for food, water and shelter.
Wow, that is tremendously messed up! I'm sorry you had to experience that. Kind of makes my young adult life sound like a cake walk.
Ironically, it was the jocks and the gang affiliated kids who always left me alone. I don't know exactly why, though I figured the jocks were popular enough to not waste their energy tormenting someone socially beneath them.
Anyway, I completely agree with what you've said. Whenever I experienced bullying, it was in close correlation to how callously indifferent the overall system was. The couple of schools I went to where I didn't experience trouble had empathetic teachers and administrators whom actually built trust with the students. The earlier schools I went to were mostly run by selfish teachers (whom I later learned were even more selfish than I realized at the time!) and administrators who would punish the bully and the victim equally out of laziness/callousness/stupidity; or look the other way entirely! Guess which ones I suffered under and which ones I didn't.
> If you're being bullied in elementary school you don't get friends. It could be that the bullying drives away friends, or if you had friends you wouldn't get bullied, or the same deficits that cause you to get bullied also cause you not to get friends. Just being in a safe environment is a basic human right.
I know you're referring to elementary school here, but I think this dynamic you're describing also explains why so many kids have a rotten time in middle school. Usually, middle school lasts only a few years, and can easily mean being separated from any sort of peer group you have for multiple reasons. If your friends are even slightly older or younger than you are, then one will have to face a year of middle school without them. Depending on where your friends live, they might end up in a different middle school even though you both went to the same elementary school.
Even though I did have one good friend in elementary school (we are still best friends today), he is a year older than I am, and even though we went to the same middle school I had to spend at least 1 year in elementary school without him and then another during my second year in middle school. And I know he had the same problem in reverse. When you're seen as having "no friends", even though you actually do, everyone treats you like you have the stink of death. Those were some of the worst years of my life.
I hate the stereotype in movies that jocks are bad.
There must be some bad apples but mostly they are focused on their sport and the team and don't have time or energy to make trouble, and if they do make trouble, they are off the team.
The time some people attacked me at my dorm I ducked into the room of the captain of the rugby team and that was the last time they came to my dorm. The captain of the football team at my high school was popular because he treated everybody well, I'd say the same about kids who were stars in youth soccer. In fact, even though I didn't feel terribly engaged with it at the time, youth soccer is a precious memory to me because it was one place where I was never mistreated (a group photo shows me standing next to the coach who probably gave me just a little extra attention because of my neurodivergence.)
Yup, I agree. I'm sure there's bad apples out there, but I had the least issues with jocks and popular people. Even in America, they didn't pick on me, and I was always confused by how vilified they were in popular media. Looking back, it was always these sort of middle of the road kids who were the problem; neither particularly popular nor at the bottom of the totem pole. Completely unremarkable, and with incredibly fragile egos.
Your analysis is on point. With some exceptions, popular people are usually popular for a valid reason.
There was this one guy I remember who wasn't exactly a jock, but sort of overlapped with them I guess. I'm pretty sure he played rugby. He had a great physique for a high schooler, was charming to everyone, and had the sort of look about him like he would become a "dreamboat doctor" as an adult. Anyway, I was doing miserably in chemistry class, not necessarily because I was bad at science but I was just having a tough time in school in general which made me unfocused. Without even asking him, he offered to help me study for my exams, and I took him up on it even though I did feel ashamed for needing help. With his help, I passed that class with what was the equivalent of a C grade in New Zealand. He became class president, and I know he was the one to deserve it. I'm grateful to this day that he was one of the few people during my school career who actually cared. And yeah, he was probably the most popular student there.
This shows how vastly different people's experiences are with their school system at their location. It's probably either extremes we hear most about.
Agreed. If I ever have kids, I'm signing them up for MMA classes from the second they have to step onto school grounds.
As another product of the British 'education' system, this is all very familiar.
If you're interested in some content that really helped me understand why I hated school so completely, I recommend "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto, and "Free to Learn" by Peter Gray. Peter Gray also has a very nice blog called "Play Makes Us Human" at https://petergray.substack.com/
As a parent of a toddler, deciding on schooling options is one of the most serious decisions I'll have to make with my partner over the coming years and it terrifies me. Home schooling is a very attractive option from my perspective, but only due to lack of alternatives that offer the sort of nurturing and positive environment that I want my child to have.
To heavily paraphrase a short of stature comedian: Childhood and School is basically jail. You're confined with a bunch of violent sociopaths, have minimal agency over what you do everyday, spend most of your free time trying to smoke weed out of improvised pipes, and the greatest reward you can obtain is like a bag of Doritos.
This does prepare you to life though. More likely than not you will go to office. You will find yourselves with bullies, and again you can become a victim. Rather than feeling sorry about yourself, school prepares you to fight with bullies, to find inmates, to find friends. I think you could have not understand the life lessons.
You will also enter other communities, where again, you will find bullies.
God how I hate idea of "safe spaces".
Good grief, if the lack of caring for the kids, the indifference of the educators is now reframed as a virtue and core function of the failing school system I guess we are in deep trouble.
Nope, if I have to share an office with an ethnic gang that attacks co-workers because of their different ethnicity I will certainly not "deal with bullies" but leave the place.
So... you're either predator or prey?
In a way you're right, I worked in a consulting firm that seemed to have that mentality, and I did find bullies, and it seemed the only way to go forward was to become a bullying, lying cheat yourself.
Then I went on to work for a more civilised company that believed in people being decent and such, and discovered that you can actually coexist with people and foster growth without stepping on other people on your way.
If you think one can just "fight with bullies, find inmates, find friends" and everything will be alright, you're quite clueless to some experiences many people have gone through.
>You will find yourselves with bullies, and again you can become a victim.
I don't know what kind of places you've worked at, but everywhere I've worked if anyone behaved even 10% like the average high school bully they'd have been fired on the spot.
Adult bullies tend to be smarter about it. There are unfortunately plenty of ways to bully someone, without explicitly breaking any workplace rule.
"everywhere I've worked if anyone behaved even 10% like the average high school bully they'd have been fired on the spot." unless...they're the CEO ? ;)
This is abhorrent. The feeling of safety underpins emotional well-being. What you advocate is only the repetition of past suffering. Without safety, what is left but fear?
Reality? And those safe spaces are built upon and upheld by others - who bully the other mean bullies to keep it that way. Every part of civilization is a energetic effort and if the civilization runs low on energy/supplybribery - the space closes with a thunderclap as the structure giveth.
I can agree with that, it's the best counter argument, at least. Though it's a weak one.
Cause there is certainly better ways to prepare a kid to the real tough life than having him to go through a prison. I can certainly see what the OP went through by relating to my own experience. I managed better, I was more often than not in the neutral ignored camp but I really see how bullies made life miserable to others, and how it could have been very different. These tensions didn't help me, it was just an issue I had to deal with, more or less successfully. But I really felt a liberation when I started my first job, though I've no rights to complain about my childhood.
Regular teaching is a thing of the past. Specific lessons tailored to a kid capacity through AI (let's give it a few more years) is the future. Most modern countries will certainly start swapping regular teaching within the 10 next years, the rest of the world will follow.
spending precious studying time on fighting and searching for transient "friendship"... yeah, that'll teach you about life. Nobody needs eggheads, boxers are in trend!
I don’t know if this is satire or not, but all research shows bullying to be extremely harmful to youth.
Yes, and I think silly "tough guy" posturing and a lack of empathy as in that comment is one of the common consequences...
This is completely wrong as far as I can tell.
I have worked in 5 different companies, not one had any bullying. (Technically there was a one-off event involving a colleague and it was dealt with severely enough that it never happened again)
Lucky you. I've seen quite a bunch of the opposite. But then you do whatever you can to move on and find another job with a better atmosphere.
Sadly, it wasn't so easy as that with school.
While I hate to admit that you are not inaccurate, we are humans and should be able to find a way to raise the youth without resorting to storing them in prisons while they explore how to physically and emotionally torture one another. The fact that we accept this as a mere expression of nature is beyond horrifying, because schools are anything, but nature. I would sooner accept gangs of free roaming kids across the neighborhood, but you can't have that, because that would impede private property and businesses.
<< God how I hate idea of "safe spaces".
It is not a question of safe space. It is a question of what you are teaching. Because of the people like you, who think it is perfectly fine education, I can accurately pinpoint 'troublemakers' and 'danger' as I walk down the street and avoid the place. That is explicitly NOT what early education should be.
> These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people.
It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way. "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
> These tech parents are hackers by nature
Why? Being in tech doesn't make you a hacker. Most people, even very talented engineers, are still happy to follow boss, do a 9 to 5, and don't really bend or break the rules... they don't go against the elite. They see themselves as the elite.
> Being in tech doesn't make you a hacker.
Agreed. "Tech" includes a lot of people who are not hackers.
It's worth pointing out though that the "hacker" types who go with the flow are in many cases doing so motivated by pragmatism and cynicism. They don't really believe in management or in the company or the product, but they gotta stick around until their shares vest or whatever.
Speaking for a friend.
> They don't really believe in management or in the company or the product, but they gotta stick around until their shares vest or whatever.
This is exactly what I’m referring to when I tell people that the tech industry changed and is no longer fulfilling.
> they don't go against the elite. They see themselves as the elite.
These are not the only two options. Deciding some people are "the elite" and defining people as being either part of that group or in opposition to it is your choice, but it is not the only choice.
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I don't want my children to have to learn at the pace of the bottom quintile. Obviously average and less-than-average people exist. But I will _not_ be hamstringing my kids to placate the whims of the state or some "modern" moral standard. I know how harmful it is because I went through it.
Your perspective is valid, but I think its worth reconsidering some of the assumptions youre making. Assuming your child is above average may not always reflect reality. Being above average at a thing does not make you above average at all things. The public education system provides resources like gifted programs, AP courses, and extracurricular activities to challenge / engage students at all levels of above/below average. So if your kid is an advanced learner they can still thrive without being “hamstrung.” I think using terms like “hamstring” dismisses the value public education provides in fostering diversity of experiences, social skills, and engagement with peers.. things that cant be replicated in a homeschooling environment.
> The public education system provides resources like gifted programs, AP courses, and extracurricular activities to challenge / engage students at all levels of above/below average. So if your kid is an advanced learner they can still thrive without being “hamstrung.”
The issue is that some liberal schools of thought are pushing towards detracking in hopes of reducing inequality in a Harrison Bergeron sort of way. So public schools are not offering those advanced courses. E.g. California was going to remove 8th grade Algebra as an option, but thankfully there was enough backlash to stop this.
It's generally safe to assume your child will be above the bottom quintile for anything they care about. I went to a decent public school, and gifted programs, AP courses and extracurricular activities are lacking. Most students do not care about learning. I've talked to some people from Lexington High School (often considered the best public school in the US), and they had the same sentiment.
"I thought you guys usually have a bunch of olympiad medalists though; don't students care about academics at your school?"
"No, there's only really 10–15 of us who try, and hold up the rest of the school's reputation."
It’s highly unlikely your kids will be one of those 10-15
Speak for yourself. It's highly likely that my kids will be one of those 10–15.
At Least in the northeast US, there are advanced courses or tracts a student can be placed in if they're above their peers. Is that not the case in your schools?
I am a strong supporter of public school, to the point I volunteer often and advocate for them.
"Whims of the state" -- I'd recommend you make sure to advocate for a strong department of education, which for its many activities is a facilitator of credentialing. It's fundamentally societal and operated politically and bureaucratically.
'"modern" moral standard" -- I agree, we should target humanist ideals only as they are sourced from naturalism, otherwise we have neomodern or otherwise misaligned religious tenets creep in as "values" when they're really misplaced. Some folks advocating pro-religious values in schooling are quite insidious -- using religious freedom (where people have a right to practice in their homes and even the public square) as an injection to favor their religion as the majority in an area, to the exclusion of people who do not believe as they do. It's quite sad to see the Constitution, written fundamentally by Deists who were motivated more by motives closer to religious existentialism than current triumphalism, be run so roughshod over!
If you meant something else by modern moral standard, my apologies, I simply see this common thought-terminating cliche in a lot of places and it falls apart with 2 seconds of introspection.
I think a better question is: How did the median get so much better over 150 years, and why can't it keep getting better?
150 years ago, the average person was illiterate, poorer (in all senses of the word) and less connected to the world around them. Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going? So the outlier, super special "phenom" today is the median of tomorrow.
> 150 years ago, the average person was illiterate
Not true in the case of the US, which famously adopted a culture of universal literacy earlier than the rest of the world. By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history; they took literacy very seriously for complicated historical reasons. Their book consumption per capita was also the highest in the world by a very large margin back in those days, which lends evidence.
It may or may not be relevant to your point, but at least in the US the idea that the average person was illiterate is ahistorical. They were the best read population in the world 150 years ago, and took some pride in that.
I was surprised to read this post. Thank you to share. From Wiki, I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
And: And:> By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today
But the states does have among the lowest literacy rate in the west. Less than 80% was considered literate in 2024, compared to almost 99% in the EU (with a range from 94% to almost 100%).
Of the 20% of US adults who don't have a level of literacy necessary to be considered "literate", 40+% are from other countries with low levels of literacy.
Wrong signal. The problem is demographic. Not being mean, just a fact that a lot of people are illiterate live in the US, but were not born and raised here.
Success itself could be to blame for the recent reversion.
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My read of history is that the puritans basically had universal literacy not that long after the printing press hit Europe. I believe America and Israel are unique among modern countries in being founded by people whose ancestors had achieved universal literacy in the 1500s.
Something like that. They believed it was important that everyone was literate enough to read and understand the Bible themselves, without it being filtered through a historically corrupt Church that engaged in selective representation and interpretation of the Bible for their own manipulative purposes. Basically, they wanted everyone to be able to go to the source to determine what was and wasn’t moral and Christian, instead of relying on assertions by self-interested third parties.
Regardless of if they achieved their religious objectives, that earnest mission to make every human soul capable of reading the Bible for themselves produced the social good of a literate population capable of reading prodigious amounts of non-Bible content.
It is an interesting consequence of how the religious wars in Europe spilled over into in the early Americas.
Like most social breakthroughs, this was coincident with a major technological breakthrough: the invention of the printing press.
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Personal attacks and/or religious flamewar will get you banned on HN. You can't post like this or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42712561 here.
If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.
I would argue the downside was that this perspective got secularized and morphed into the particularly American paranoid distrust of institutions that has caused at least as many problems as it has solved. In fact, I think the American obsession with homeschooling has those same Puritan roots.
I think you can more readily and correctly connect the American distrust of institutions first to the treatment of the colonists by the British Empire, and later to immigration of people fleeing authoritarian countries. One also cannot dismiss the distrust in authority among put upon minorities. The British Empire was no less brutal in its American colonies than in other places.
The Puritans were always few in number and were demographically displaced by later immigration around the fishing industry in New England.
Displaced in terms of total population, but the aristocracy of the US was mostly Mayflower types will into the 20th Century.
I think some overstate the influence of Radical Protestants on American ideology with offhand references to Max Weber or by calling whatever their pet cause is a fight against "secular puritanism." On the other hand, I do think there are some interesting parallels.
For example, one could argue that the mistreatment of colonists by the mother country was overstated by a population already distrustful of the Crown. I'm no expert, but it would be interesting to read more about that dynamic.
I don't disagree, but the descendants of the Puritans stopped being Puritans pretty quickly. The Halfway Covenant was only about 40 years after they landed in Plymouth and there were virtually no Puritans by 1740.
"Pretty quickly" may be an exaggeration there, given that 1740 was a good five generations after the founding of the Plymouth colony, and they were still famously conducting witch trials only fifty years earlier.
But it surely did happen -- IIRC, Adams and Jefferson were both noting in their correspondence how by the end of the 18th century most of the Puritan descendants had somehow become Unitarians.
Like I said, the halfway covenant was less than 2 generations after landing, and the character of Puritanism in America was totally different after that point.
IANAH but I'm not sure one can really separate "treatment of the colonists by the British Empire" from the struggle between Dissenters and the Established Church. Yes, Puritans were relatively few in number but they were influential. Later colonists would have had to fit themselves into the society created by the Puritans, if nothing else by constituting their own power base in opposition to the Puritan one. They are still part of our foundational myth and buckle-shoe-wearing caricatures of them /still/ go up all over the country every single November.
> Yes, Puritans were relatively few in number but they were influential
They were influential in a narrow geography of the Massachusetts Bay Colony for about 50 years. Their own children and grandchildren largely rejected Puritanism resulting in the Half-Way Covenant and the eventual demise of Puritanism. I agree that they're part of the foundational myth, but it's just that myth.
I don't think that's particularly accurate for the US. Perhaps some of the Protestant settler communities were very literate, but I'm quite certain literacy would have been far lower by the time the country was actually founded, as slaves were imported and immigration from other communities picked up.
This seems like a suspiciously bold statement. Both in the assertion that these groups had achieved universal literacy, and in that other groups hadn't been at least as literate. Japan comes to mind, wrt the latter. Literacy, if not universal, was also widespread across the Muslim world.
> and less connected to the world around them.
Sounds like Americans were literate back then. I also suspect that most were _more_ connected to the world around them. Not the broader world, but the immediate world around them.
No offence, but your comment is quite racist.
> literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history;
The rates only looked okay if you cut out at least 20% of thr population?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic...
Yeah, it was okay in New England but many states had laws preventing slave education.
It’s racist to break out statistics along what was literally the single most determinative factor for life outcomes in antebellum America?
No its racist to claim that literacy rates in the States were the highest in the world.
As long as you ignore all those pesky non-whites.
Unless the original commenters sneak-edited their comment, they included the word "whites" specifically to not ignore the non-whites and point out that universal literacy was not "universal" in the early US.
Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going?
Schooling didn’t fix all that. There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications… the list goes on and on and on. Some of these things contributed major improvements to the average person.
Advances in medicine and nutrition, for example, contributed to sharp declines in early childhood mortality and morbidity. Advances in reproductive health care (along with everything else) led to huge declines in birth rates. Smaller families have more resources and attention available for each child.
Other advances had less of an impact but still add up when combined. Widespread access to refrigeration improved nutrition and reduced spoilage, allowing increased consumption of meat. More meat means taller, stronger, healthier children.
On the other hand, schooling hasn’t improved all that much in 150 years. You can find lots of writing samples and old exams for schools from back then. The bigger difference is that children stay in school much longer and have less need to rapidly enter the workforce in order to support the family. This last factor is a product of many of the advances listed above.
> There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications…
You might say that's also a success of the schooling (and higher education) system - unless the people who produced these advances were all home schooled, which I somehow doubt...
Some were. Some would have made major advances whether they'd had a lot of formal schooling or not.
And many who had a lot of schooling learned to repeat, obey and sit still for 12-16 years.
And maybe had less initiative than they were born with. Maybe they learned to not question what they were told.
1. Thomas Edison Minimal formal education; mostly homeschooled by his mother. Edison was a voracious reader and learned through experimentation.
2. The Wright Brothers (Orville and Wilbur Wright) Neither completed high school. They learned through self-study, practical work, and their experiences running a bicycle repair shop.
3. Henry Ford Left school at 15 years old. Ford learned engineering and mechanics by working as an apprentice.
4. Michael Faraday Minimal formal schooling. Faraday worked as a bookbinder and educated himself through books and observation.
5. Benjamin Franklin Left school at age 10 due to financial constraints. Franklin was self-taught, primarily through reading and experimentation.
6. George Eastman Dropped out of school at age 14. Eastman learned accounting and photography on his own.
7. Elisha Otis Had little formal education and learned mechanics and engineering through work experience.
8. R. G. LeTourneau Dropped out of school in the sixth grade. He learned engineering through hands-on work and experimentation.
9. John D. Rockefeller Dropped out of high school to take a business course and learned through practical experience.
10. Philo Farnsworth Learned electronics and physics by reading and tinkering, despite being unable to afford college.
Most scientific advances throughout history prior to about the 1950s were made by people whose education was either informal or private (including apprenticeship). Private tutoring was the predominant mode of formal education (below university level) throughout history.
I have this discussion with my wife who works at a school.
Children are required to be there. The school has to provide them with all manner of opportunities.
On the flip side, the school can't expect anything from the kids other than attendance. They don't really get to expect a certain level of behavior or performance. They can't relegate the bad actors (behavior or performance) away from those who wish to participate fully. Everyone has to be mixed together.
So you give a certain vocal minority that don't care about the education a heckler's veto. They are regularly disruptive and can't be removed.
Nobody has a solution for actually improving that group of student, but there are enough people involved in public education that demand these students be included in the process that they are trying to wreck.
150 years ago people could absolutely read.
> schooling fixed all that
Not globalization, industrialization, and urbanization?
I can not talk for the US, but in Sweden it was schooling. I think Sweden has better literacy rates earlier than the US, but I guess I really should compare this on a state level considering how the US works. I am pretty sure that it is a political goal not an economic one, this is obvious considering US black literacy levels took until 1979 to be comparable to whites. I would like to point out that the Danish nobility discussed but decided against keeping poor and oppressed farmers illiterate in the 18th century, so it is not really an issue of globalization.
>I am pretty sure that it is a political goal not an economic one, this is obvious considering US black literacy levels took until 1979 to be comparable to whites.
I don't follow. 1979 would have been a high point in closing the black/white economic gap in America (partly because of the falling economic prospects of white Americans at the time).
Over here education came first economics later, that will color my conclusions. I am pretty sure giving black people as little education as possible was a political goal in the US.
Neglecting black education was a political decision with an economic component, in that it helped support the system of slavery, and later kept jobs that required education segregated. Siphoning tax dollars from black communities to use elsewhere (instead of to support their educational institutions) would be another aspect of this phenomenon.
> 150 years ago, the average person was illiterate, poorer (in all senses of the word) and less connected to the world around them. Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that.
Illiterate, yes, but likely better at other skills like milking cows and knowing which plants in the forest were edible. Less connected to the global world and culture, yes, but more connected to the hyper local environment around them. I don't know if the schooling "fixed" anything, it just created a new, national or global template for what a human being should be like.
It took way less than 100 years to eradicate illiteracy, and further improvement followed. However, as soon as a system is established, the forces that corrupt that system start acting, finding ways to exploit it to their own advantage. Then, as special interests (politics, unions) take over, the quality stagnates and then decays.
>less connected to the world around them
In what way do you mean this?
>Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going?
Schooling has fixed all that, and still works just fine. Just not in America, because that country is rapidly self-destructing. Schooling is still working fine in the rest of the world.
>Why can't it keep going?
Because an educated populace is harder for the ultrarich to control and abuse, because an educated populace with free time can revolt against those in power, and because as a consequence of those two things ultrarich conservatives have consolidated ownership of media and used it to defund education and convince the population that funding education is bad.
The irony of saying that while being uneducated enough to think anyone ever “defunded education.” https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/02/do-we-shortch...
This isn't the slam dunk you think it is. The article indicates that money isn't evenly distributed, which explains the conservatives goal with vouchers and charter / private schools.
My SO taught at all 3 kinds of the school in the US, in urban and suburban areas. The pay is bad everywhere, but worst at the non-union schools. Only teachers left have no better options or believe in the religion or cause of teaching, and even they tend to leave such schools the moment they have enough experience or better options. None of this is good for the kids at such schools.
The more affluent schools can afford to hire experts and keep them. I went to a rich(er) high school and had my choice among many specialty electives and advanced placement. My SO attended a highschool that was something between prison and daycare. My friend's private school was a religious indoctrination factory. Home schooled friends were often academical average to great, all socially awkward well into adulthood, and many were taught conspiracies or outright lies as long as it fit their parents "biblical worldview".
Public school was an escape from a cult-like community for me. I'm grateful my parents were too poor to force me into an alternative until I was old enough to refuse.
Incorrect, in most states poor districts receive slightly more funding than affluent ones: https://www.urban.org/sites/default/files/publication/90586/...
It sounds like you have a beef with how citizens socialize their children into the dominant religion of the society—which is literally considered a human right[1]—and less so with how schools are funded in the U.S.
See Article 18.4 of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/... (“The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.”)
American subgroups that socialize their children into community religious norms are among the most successful. For example, Mormons: https://americanaffairsjournal.org/2020/11/utahs-economic-ex....
Prohibitions on religious education in public schools—which don’t exist in many developed countries, such as Germany and Sweden—hurts the majority of people who would do better under that system.
Urban teachers are not getting rich teaching poor kids. Having seen the classrooms first hand, the kids lives are like a low-grade war zone. Sometimes they even work themselves to pay for their charter school tuition, and keep the lights on at home. Siphoning public funds off to the pockets of PE owned schools is not going to improve outcomes.
Mormons' affluence is in spite of their faith, not because of it. Utah also has more MLMs and scams than most others.
Having lived in a cult-like religion, I'd rather be less wealthy yet mentally well than 'socialized' into magical thinking and all the various idiotic garbage I was taught. Public schools are often one of the only ways kids can escape abusive, exploitive, or otherwise unhealthy circumstances.
> Urban teachers are not getting rich teaching poor kids. Having seen the classrooms first hand, the kids lives are like a low-grade war zone. Sometimes they even work themselves to pay for their charter school tuition, and keep the lights on at home. Siphoning public funds off to the pockets of PE owned schools is not going to improve outcomes.
Nobody is getting rich running schools. But everyone in the Baltimore public school district continues to draw salaries even though in some high schools many kids are reading at a kindergarten level. https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/77-tested-at....
So let the PE folks take their shot, or at least provide ways for the small fraction of involved parents to get their kids out of failing schools.
> Mormons' affluence is in spite of their faith, not because of it.
Mormons were literally driven out of the rest of the country for their religious beliefs and settled land that has no resources and can barely support farms and agriculture. Yet they built a thriving civilization in the middle of nowhere. Utah is one of the most stunning success stories in the world, up there with Israel and Singapore.
> Having lived in a cult-like religion, I'd rather be less wealthy yet mentally well than 'socialized' into magical thinking and all the various idiotic garbage I was taught. Public schools are often one of the only ways kids can escape abusive, exploitive, or otherwise unhealthy circumstances.
Mormons are tied with Jews for the happiest people in the country. Being socialized into religion, with uniform norms and expectations, is for most people mentally healthy. They’re also literally healthier. They live significantly longer than non-LDS white people: https://www.demographic-research.org/volumes/vol10/3/10-3.pd....
>Because an educated populace is harder for the ultrarich to control and abuse,
This is the bottom line; this right here.
We're being led to a second dark age ON PURPOSE.
You're delusional. Revolt always came from people with an empty stomach, not from the comfortable leisure class.
Plus, an "educated" populace is as easy or maybe even easier to control, it's willpower against all odds that characterizes the truly ungovernable.
So the best you can hope for, if mass control is what you want, is the combination of comfortably and leisurely uneducated people, isn't it?
The fact that you believe the ultra rich conspire to control and abuse the uneducated shows that you are part of that group of average people parents want their kids to stay away from.
I agree with this and that's why I think social media, mass media and so on exist.
However I'm curious as to why you attribute or limit this to 'conservatives' only. Is this really something exclusive or characteristic of the conservative side? At least where I am from it's the left that's more interventionist in regards to education rather than the right, that interventionism being used to make education more rigid and controlled by a biased government.
And the media is definitely not consolidated, you've got clearly two sides competing at a pretty equal level.
Establishing standards for education and defunding public schools to siphon the funds to churches are not the same thing. Conservatives have been attacking and defunding educational standards and attacking the educated and the concept of education - hence the repeated claims of "liberal bias", the artificial cultural war against university, etc.
And two sides at equal levels? Are you living in 1979? Local media is nearly all Sinclair. All the cable networks are owned by conservatives. Even traditionally liberal newspapers like the Washington Post are owned by rich assholes taking over the editorial board. And social media in the US is now dominated by two literal fascists.
My apologies for not being from (or exclusively referring to) the US of A.
From where I'm from I'd say yes, both sides at equal levels more or less, fairly favoured toward the left, but now changing a wee bit because the left went waaaaay too left.
Europe would now seem to be shifting towards the right at some levels, but from historically (recently at least) being fairly leftist.
Anyway, aren't CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian... overtly left-leaning?
>Anyway, aren't CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian... overtly left-leaning
For CNN and MSNBC, no. Neither was every truly liberal in the global sense (like the Democratic Party, closer to centrist than anything else) and both have started drifting rightward in the last 4 years such that they're now roughly "American Centrist" with a slight left lean i.e. conservative in most of the rest of the world.
At least where I’m from, the majority of homeschooled children are in conservative Christian (or Mormon) families, with a minority (but still notable) in super-left-wing hippy families. Very, very few in non-extreme families.
And that actually makes sense from a strictly logical point of view. The extremes are the ones who precisely don't want to conform to the status quo imposed by the alleged controlling higher powers.
As purely anecdotical data, where I'm from it's actually the opposite, majority hippies, vegan, alternative/free education advocates, etc, and a minority of mostly morally-concerned non-left-leaning (mainly religious) people, as well as specific cases of children with special needs that simply can't adapt to public education because of external reasons (bullies).
As a matter of fact, the hardcore religious right in my country have their own private education institutions, which are quite powerful themselves.
So even the (non-catholic) Christians who homeschool because of religious and moral convictions end up being moderate/center people trying to move away from both extremes.
You are attacking a strawman. I think most people would agree that public schools 30 years ago were better than public schools 150 years ago. I find it much harder to believe that public schools today are better than they were 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you
A billion times this. School is not to train you on Math, English or Science. It's also to teach you how to cooperate, how to reach consensus, how to make decisions as a group, and so on.
These soft skills are absolutely critical to maintain a properly functioning society.
Schools used to do this, but the push for risk reduction, metrics, and rules has become so great that it no longer happens. There used to be thousands of student-run organizations in schools across the country. That wasn't a euphemism like it is now-there were no teachers or other adults involved. The kids running them did have to learn to cooperate and make decisions in a responsible way, or face the natural consequences of the group falling apart and social failure.
Now, such organizations are banned. The closest analogue is a "student" council, run by an adult, that might get to choose the color of the wallpaper at prom.
>It's also to teach you how to cooperate,
Cooperation requires shared goals. I can't cooperate with someone when we're not sharing goals. Young students don't have shared goals other than "survive in this classroom for 11 months out of a calendar year". So there's no lessons in cooperation.
>how to reach consensus,
Of what use is consensus, without shared goals? Sounds more like indoctrination.
>how to make decisions as a group,
Same as above.
>These soft skills are absolutely critical to maintain a properly functioning society.
These skills are actually being used to murder civilization/society, even as we speak. The current fertility rate is sub-replacement, but the children being indoctrinated in public schools are being indoctrinated to be even less fertile than that. Many will grow up to be and remain childless as adults, and as that happens, society will not replace those people who are dying of old age. Society then dies itself just decades later. Your society, such as it is, is absurdly dysfunctional. I suppose if one were to define "properly functioning" as "polite to a fault" or "as peaceful as cattle trudging down the slaughterhouse chute"...
why can't homeschooling involve the same attributes? genuine question. from what i've been seeing in modern trends, homeschooling doesn't literally mean you sit and your mother teaches you all day and then you "go home" by migrating to your bedroom. you're still in a small group with other children, all of whom likely still share characteristics where disagreements will naturally happen, and cooperation will need to occur to move forward. the way I see homeschooling is simply a parallel to the traditional public school path, but in smaller, more focused groups with a far more controlled environment. not seeing how this is inherently bad
> far more controlled environment
They risk being able to function better in highly controlled environments with other kids that share the same background as them. Not optimal.
they risk being totally unprepared for less controlled environments later in life when it's harder to change habits, like in uni or in the workplace.
> less controlled environments later in life when it's harder to change habits, like in uni or in the workplace.
You're right on pointing out the environments in which homeschoolers often perform poorly, but you used the wrong word. Homeschoolers are bad at more controlled environments, where you must work within the confines of bureaucratic systems run by people who didn't design them. Timesheets, changing place when the bell rings, studying only what's on the test and reproducing at the correct time, speaking differently to people based on how much authority they hold over you according to a system of record--that is difficult for people who are used to a lot of freedom in terms of how they spend their time, and how they interact with other people.
yeah i see the argument, and its an important skillset to be able to deal with chaos/bullies but this other part of me wonders whether dealing with bullying early on is healthy at all?
to be clear, i do believe that tough personalities that aren't straight up bullying can still happen inside of a group homeschooled environment.
Bullying seems to be a phenomenon almost exclusive to children. Adults don't mess with each other as much for various reasons, not least of which is that adults have more options to deal with the problem.
I think the way to handle socializing kids if you homeschool is to enroll them in extracurricular activities where they can meet all kinds of people. If the activity is a good one, you'll still probably avoid the worst types that appear in public schools, and give the kids more exposure to different kinds of people. And if it doesn't work for some reason, you can switch activities or groups more easily than you could ever switch schools.
> Bullying seems to be a phenomenon almost exclusive to children.
Plenty of teachers are bullies, including up until Uni.
Plenty? I've almost never seen it. I had a few teachers drop occasional insults toward me but they would never dare do anything to me like a kid would. They can't even spank students anymore. Almost every issue that a kid has with a teacher is caused by bad behavior. Of course I haven't been in grade school in decades and I went to probably a nice school in the scheme of things. I have seen quite a few stories of teachers doing awful things to their students, for example harassing them about politics. But I really think these cases are rare, and most likely kinds of teacher harassment are easily avoided by students.
I've tutored literally hundreds of homeschoolers at this point, mostly in the high school ages as their parents ran out of math ability. As a whole, they are far better socially adapted than the average teenager.
Sure, there is selection bias among those who get that far in math, and those who would seek out tutoring. But I had 9th graders coming to me already behaving well as adults. More often than not they were in charge of working things out with me, not their parents.
Every time one of these threads comes up I cringe, because virtually nobody here has worked with a large number of these kids. They just remember the one weird kid who stood out. If homeschoolers were to put forth the same arguments based on the one weird kid from public school, homeschooling would win by a landslide.
People say it's about socialization, but homeschoolers are out there doing it in a normal way all the time. Parent needs to go to the post office -- there is a class on that, and why. Everything can turn into a lesson and not just something taken care of by parents. They come out of this experience with far more adult level socialization and civic knowledge than the average kid, by a wide margin.
Who are kids in high school getting their social queues from? The drug dealers? The bully? The good kids in high school are typically well adjusted because of things taught to them not by their peers, but by their family and community outside of school.
Yes, homeschooling can be done poorly. But it is not inherently a poor education, and in my experience is far superior to the average experience at a public school. Some exceptions apply for those things which a large school may be able to have by aggregating sufficient students and resources toward (marching band, science classes, AP level courses).
I think kids copy what they see. If they spend disproportionate time with adults, they will often act mature for their age. That isn't always a good thing, because they do need to deal with other children eventually. Of course, this is not a universal rule, and it's hard to keep kids from getting influenced by TV and random other kids they will eventually see.
I really couldn’t learn that from my experience in american k-12. I was too stubborn, emotionally stunted, and usually ahead of my peers, so I’d isolate myself and learn what I was interested in. I taught myself to make music, install and use linux, to write c++, to develop games etc on my laptop during and outside of classes, and the only reason I was even able to do that much was the disinterest and disregard of most teachers. Maybe that environment wasn’t the right one for me, and if it wasn’t, then it makes me wonder how many other people are underserved.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
Seems like there's only something to lose from adjusting to their shittiness. Like Harrison Bergeron
And seeing the state of California trying to push math classes later because of "equity", seeing public schools dissolving gifted programs, it makes me think that privatization is the only way forward instead of trying to make amends with the current progressive stupidity
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
This is prejudice in the most basic sense: you literally don't know any of these things about the people you're surrounded by in a society. The person who rides the bus next to you could be a couch potato, or a talented artist, or something entirely different that simply isn't legible to you.
I don't know anything about California's math classes. I'm saying that, on a basic level, anybody who thinks this way about people they don't know is demonstrating the exact traits they're smugly claiming to be above.
I feel like you and the parents post are compatible views of the world that could be simultaneously held in the same brain without dissonance.
Reading your comment, it seems to focus on the individual. “The person” you know nothing about.
The parent comment seems to be Bayesian, the probability of “the person” being something.
I do think it’s possible to simultaneously believe that:
* every single person you meet in every possible circumstance might be an exceptional human
* your are more likely to encounter exceptional humans in specific circumstances and you can optimize for that
I believe this holds true regardless of your definition of exceptional.
A (maybe) obvious example: if you believe exceptional humans want to grow their own food and live on communes, you probably don’t want to live in the financial district of Manhattan. That would be a bad way to optimize for finding people who share your values.
Similarly you’re unlikely to find a thriving software developer community in Springfield Illinois. If you go to Springfield and assume everyone you meet can’t program, you’re going to be wrong - there are good programmers there. But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.
> But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.
And if you want to find the best mathematician you stay in academic circles. But the best mathematician of your era might be in a random district in India. So you shouldn't immediately exclude everywhere else, or your 'optimisation' may be a relatively low local maximum.
It is impossible for an individual to do this search themself, so you have to have some global sorting. Top-down approaches include math competitions and national testing. More federated approaches include just... moving to communities where the average is closer to you.
I feel like you both got and missed the point, and it relies on your misuse of exceptional that doesn’t escape the original discussion:
Society needs and has exceptional people living in communes, in the financial district, in software development communities, and yes even in Springfield, Illinois.
Sharing your values or not does generally not correlate with exceptional.
If you are just looking for someone in your field to learn a trade from, well, great, but that is hardly the intent of primary education.
> you can optimize for that
I think that this is the core problem - you can't.
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
learning how to be patient and tolerant regarding situations / people / things i do not like or think of as “beneath me”.
tends to lead to better decision making as one can respond, rather than knee jerk react to everything.
edit — also, i tend to find i can learn a lot more useful lessons from beginners.
in the beginners mind there are a lot of possibilities. in the expert’s mind (especially self proclaimed ones) there are few possibilities.
children are a great example of this.
When my car broke down in the middle of a DoorDash run, I walked to a nearby park and sat next to a homeless guy who was about my age. He was deaf; we talked via text on our phones about how we'd ended up on the same bench, and I shared some of my food. I learned from him how resilient someone can be, even under incredibly unfair circumstances, but more importantly, he got something to eat.
It's not all about you.
You and the homeless guy aren't peers, you just did a nice thing. You're not going to classes with him or working alongside him
I was (and remain) a few bad breaks from his situation. I'm not responsible for his state, but we absolutely are peers (i.e., same age, facing the same broad socioeconomic environment).
Exactly. It's not all about you. It's best for the community to encourage education, and dragging down students who actually care about education does the opposite.
Your selfishness is not equal to my desire for common prosperity. If anything, lone wolf-ism is what drags us down (no matter how proficient the wolf thinks he is). We live in a society.
> lone wolf-ism is what drags us down
with respect to what metric? economic growth? that's probably not true, lone wolfism is what drives people to develop expertise in the first place
if the metric is community or "sustainability" or something else, is pursuing that metric in the place of economic growth sustainable long term?
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
The appearance of humility^[0]? I don't really see what there is to gain either.
[0]: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Section II, Paragraph 9
Well, one reason is that your assumption that they are all or mostly inferior is wrong.
Suppose you have a kid that you have reason to believe is at the 90th percentile. This isn't uncommon; it's one in ten kids.
The average kid at the average school is at the 50th percentile. Moreover, the speed of the class isn't even the speed of the average kid because then the 40th and 20th percentile kids would get left behind. To get out of this you'd need a school with a gifted program and enough 90th percentile kids to fill it, and many of them don't have one.
the 90th percentile of what?
sport?
english lit?
maths?
music?
socialising?
being the mother hen?
being a jock?
teaching everyone else things in the library?
class clown?
being the wacky one?
skateboarding?
acting?
rebelling?
looking after someone who has just been picked on by all the other kids?
schools introduce us to a wide range of children who are representative of the people we’re going to have to deal with later on in life.
not saying there aren’t alternatives.
but specialising for only the 90th percentile of one thing seems like a way to isolate someone later in life because they may not have learned how to deal with people who aren’t in the 90th percentile of that one thing.
and i say that as someone who hated my time at school and has struggled with the repercussions in later life.
i still learned a lot near the classroom tho.
> the 90th percentile of what?
It could be the 90th percentile of science and the 60th percentile of literature and the 40th percentile of music. But if they throw you in with the 50th percentile kids in all cases then you're being held back in science and literature and you're holding back the other kids in music.
> schools introduce us to a wide range of children who are representative of the people we’re going to have to deal with later on in life.
This is why home school families come together so their kids can socialize with one another.
As someone who was in the 90th percentile, I can confirm that it wasn't a universal quality about my entire being. I got to be in higher-level courses where I excelled. Those are generally available, even in public school systems.
And just because I was good at math and writing didn't mean that I "deserved" to be in some separate system where I got the "best" of everything (with diminishing returns). When I eventually encountered people who were afforded just such a deal ("elite" private school in a wealthy area), they were far less impressive than the top college-level facilities they enjoyed as grade schoolers; it seemed like a waste of money that could have been put to more efficient use, as far as society writ large might be concerned.
Who is talking about "deserved" or anything like that? Parents want their kids to excel, if they think they can provide that themselves better than what the school is offering then they make the best choice available to them.
> When I eventually encountered people who were afforded just such a deal ("elite" private school in a wealthy area), they were far less impressive than the top college-level facilities they enjoyed as grade schoolers
This is exactly the argument in favor of home schooling. If you just throw money at it but pay little attention to it then you get a beautiful campus with expensive landscaping and not necessarily the highest quality education, because it's easier for parents to judge the quality of the facilities than the quality of the instruction. Whereas if you actually care and you want something done right you have to do it yourself.
Hoity-toity campuses are actually more efficient than every little prince getting his own personal tutor. The problem in both cases is that the parents of these children, as a class, demand the income and social infrastructure necessary to get their children this education, at everyone else's expense.
At some point, the masses say, "No." They realize that they're never getting a seat at that particular table, and turn from fighting over the charity spots to attempts at dismantling their exploitation. From there, you either get a robust public school system that provides a decent education for everyone, or a police state.
Suffice it to say, no one parent's dreams for their kids should come at the expense of another's.
Which seems to be an argument to move the child to a school with a gifted program rather than homeschool.
Many homes also lack numerous gifted children and specialist programs.
> Which seems to be an argument to move the child to a school with a gifted program rather than homeschool.
What if there isn't one within a reasonable distance, or your locality doesn't have school choice?
> Many homes also lack numerous gifted children and specialist programs.
The issue is that you need the absence of children who would hold back the class, not necessarily that you need the presence of other gifted children except insofar as you need to fill out the class, which is not an issue when the class size is one.
There are boarding schools, schools of the air, etc. Serious parents can move house for catchments, etc.
I grew some 1,500km north of the nearest city and got by .. still managed to hook up with Terrence Tao and Paul Erdős when I got to university and ran a math club. When one of my kids was ready for high school we got a house in the catchment of the only public school with an aviation program so they could build and fly a light aircraft.
> The issue is that you need the absence of children who would hold back the class,
I enjoyed going to school with hunter gathers in the Kimberley .. I don't feel they held me back, I did get to learn how to fish, to hunt, to swear in several languages.
Despite a lot fighting at high school, on and off the fooball field, I managed to pick up enough abstract algebra to work on CAYLEY/MAGMA which cracked a few quantum encryption candidates recently, enough linear algebra and calculas to author a geophysical processing suite, etc.
> There are boarding schools, schools of the air, etc. Serious parents can move house for catchments, etc.
Those all sound expensive. Not everyone can afford that.
> I enjoyed going to school with hunter gathers in the Kimberley .. I don't feel they held me back, I did get to learn how to fish, to hunt, to swear in several languages.
Is this something you'd expect to experience in the median US public school?
I did learn how to swear in several languages in US public school. I'd expect that's somewhat universal.
I find your statistic mistake rather amusing in light of the point you are making. :D
Distributions aren't all normal, for one. And skill levels are often quantized in a way that majority of people will be above a 50% level on it.
You're being pedantic. Average in common usage means "middle" as much as "arithmetic mean", and it doesn't really matter to the point whether the mean is above or below the median because all that is necessary to the point is for the 50th percentile to be below the 90th.
Ish? Even the common usage of "middle" doesn't necessarily describe where the average student is with regards to any skill they are learning in school. You can argue that we are using a common usage of "average" here, akin to how many fingers does the average human have. But, in a discussion on education, I confess leaning to pedantry seems rather apropos?
My gripe here is the parent post is an appeal to how "average" students are quite bad. But, there is no substantiation to that point. It is, instead, taken as a given in what is essentially a culture war talking point.
It would help if I wasn't exposed to so many parents that are convinced their kids are somehow gifted among gifted kids.
> My gripe here is the parent post is an appeal to how "average" students are quite bad. But, there is no substantiation to that point. It is, instead, taken as a given in what is essentially a culture war talking point.
The point isn't that average is bad, it's that your kid probably isn't exactly average.
You could also want to home school them if they're below average, to keep them from getting left behind. The way a lot of public schools treat kids with developmental disabilities is sadly a lot like the way corporations treat cost centers.
> It would help if I wasn't exposed to so many parents that are convinced their kids are somehow gifted among gifted kids.
Everyone thinks they're above average. Around half of them are right.
I have yet to see this line pushed by anyone that doesn't view dysfunctional classrooms as indicative of what the average student would do. So, fair that I am maybe letting my experience there color my thoughts here.
And I'm somewhat sympathetic to the idea of homeschooling not being an automatic terrible thing. Sold a Story went a long way to convincing me that some really bad choices were made in how to teach reading.
My main nitpick is that that wity quip at the end is not even wrong. Not all values are population weighted, such that you can certainly have some skills where over half of the population is over what you would call average ability.
> what is there to gain from it?
Humility.
Humility is only considered a virtue because the vast majority of people rank their abilities too high. The GP is coming from an assumption that the person is ranked higher than those around them; humbling such a person makes the rankings even more inaccurate.
This is not why humility is considered a virtue. That's not at all how virtues work. In general, in ethics, there are schools of thought that try to derive ethics from the idea that particular behavior is beneficial to someone / a group in a short term / long term etc. or based on virtues, the transcendental rules that are beyond questioning. These rules don't have to have any tangible benefits, there can be no proof through experimentation that establishes that the rule is right or wrong. Usually, such rules are given through some extra-human authority (a divine revelation, a dream etc.)
People who build their ethics on virtues might believe that, for example, being brave is a virtue. And so, regardless of the consequences, they will aspire to be brave. Similarly, people who believe in virtues will see humility as worth pursuing regardless of whether it makes one better off, long term or short term. It's just good to be humble. End of story.
The reasoning behind non-virtue ethics is usually complicated and subject to debate. It also usually shows that rules derived through such reasoning could contradict the desirable outcomes (that we intuitively find desirable). One of the particularly dangerous and undesirable such outcomes is the belief in moral relativism that opens a door to justifying a lot of actions we'd intuitively find repugnant.
Virtue ethics avoids moral relativism simply by not trying to base ethics in experimentation. Which is why some philosophers find it an appealing approach.
I consider phrases like
> It's just good to be humble. End of story.
to be axiomatic declarations. My issue with these kind of axioms is they're not really necessary. You can get everything useful by only considering things that are good for somebody. Now, we don't live in a perfectly informed and rational society, so it can be good (for society) to indoctrinate everyone with this axiom. But, as with all axioms, not everyone will believe in them. So, if I'm told,
"You need to be more humble, it's a virtue,"
that's begging the question! I need some external reason to either adopt the axiom or humility. Society as a whole seems to have adopted this axiom, but why is that? There was probably an evolution of axioms, where ones that didn't work got rejected, while ones that mostly worked got inculcated. I think most people overestimate their abilities, which would lead to fighting over positional goods. I think the role of the humility axiom is to prevent such fighting, but it comes with drawbacks.
Since the Enlightenment, most wealth has been created by thinking really hard. This means you really want to rank people near the top accurately, so you can give them resources to go and create their ideas. The axiom of humility regresses everyone toward the mean—which is great when the GDP is measured in bushels, but not so great when it is measured in transistors.
Humility is relative. Humility in front of actual experts is good. It has to be earned
Becoming humble in front of people who suck is learning the wrong life lesson
> Homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto.
I hate this fucking site lol
>"Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
Context is /everything/.
Dealing with "average" people as an adult means dealing with them under the boundaries, strictures, customs, and etiquette of adults in your society enforced, in some sense at least, by laws, and with people are are, at least in theory, bound to serve and protect who will come to your aid when those boundaries are broken.
Dealing with "average" people (really just the lowest quintile cause all the problems) for me in school resulted in multiple fractures, trips for stitches, and ultimately /my expulsion/ from one school district because I had the gall to hit back rather than just let some kid beat me to death while a teacher watched and did nothing.
I've been accused of all manner of things in other comment threads for my ardent desire to protect my children from what you think of as "average", and I'll happily take your words and savor them because it means my children will never be beaten, robbed, see a dead body at a bus stop on their way home for school, or any of the other horrible shit that happened to me because I had to be surrounded by the "average".
The entire point of my own economic mobility and gaining wealth was to create a better future for my children, and that /very much/ includes their education. You can take your exposure to the "average" a.k.a. unnecessary torture and shove it.
Exclusion of "average people" is fundamentally required for private property to exist, one of Humanity's best inventions. Few people enjoy private aspects of their life out in public. It is a completely natural and morally good thing to want your own space and to raise your kids your own way.
Your kids don't need to be exposed to the often violent whims of society's bottom quartile for 8 hours a day for more than a decade. It doesn't need to happen. It would be better if it did not. It is a net negative experience, whose main lesson is: avoid these people. That can be taught pretty quickly by a parent.
You missed the point: if you don't like how school work today, you need to improve the schools. If you are saving yourself, especially before helping others (because you have the means that others probably don't), you are the bad person in this situation, and you should reflect on your ethical position some time, preferably soon.
Your suggestion that the educational system, any meaningful part of it, is welcoming of constructive criticism of any kind is not compelling. The US government has put such enterprising parents on terrorist watch lists for speaking up at school board meetings.
If a system is specifically set up against you, runs poorly, and in a real sense hates you, you have the option to let it fail without you. It is the polite, and least conflict path to leave it to its failure, and to forge your own way.
On the other hand, listening to people who tell you that you are unethical, guilty of an *ism of some kind, or bad, does not have a good track record of success. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. What you suggest is specifically not going to happen on my part.
> Your suggestion that the educational system, any meaningful part of it, is welcoming of constructive criticism of any kind is not compelling.
Then you, as a conscientious citizen, need to put pressure back on the US government. Instead, you are trying to save yourself at the expense of others, who cannot save themselves. You are like a grown-up man, who's trying to escape a sinking ship by pushing women and children off the deck to make way to the lifeboat.
I don't think your attitude warrants any kind of niceties. You should be treated like any other narcissistic egotist. It's not important to convince you, it's more important to either isolate you, or to prevent you from acting in the way you want by other means. Same way how it's not important to convince criminals to do good: it would've been nice if it was possible, but humans don't live long enough, and often lack capacity to reform, while the rest of the society usually lacks the resources to reform the offenders.
Don't forget that I am saving my own children at the """expense""" of other, usually very disruptive if not outright violent children. Make sure to add that to the list of grievances.
A nice bit of irony is that the same top down, authoritarian control your comment strives for is the same sort of control that prevents schools from improving themselves. Massive government control enacted to fix some social ill or another hobbles admins and teachers, preventing them from punishing disruptive kids, and thus ruining the teaching environment.
The idea that the government owns or in anyway deserves control over our children must be opposed, with arms if necessary.
"Improving" a system your opponents control by sacrificing your children's safety and education is a bad idea. The United States has several good options for parents to avoid the hell that modern antiracist educational doctrine has created.
So you are saying that people should remain irrevocably loyal to institutions that have lost their trust, do not further their interests, and are not meaningfully accountable to them, out of some notion that the most important thing to them ought to be optimizing aggregate statistical metrics involving large numbers of strangers, at the expense of the actual direct social obligations and communities that are central to their own lives.
It's an interesting perspective, but I'm afraid it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of real-world human societies and how they hold together over time -- advancing that perspective will inevitably result in society fragmenting into factions that are increasingly at odds with each other, and ultimately collapsing.
Societies are not monolithic entities unto themselves that people somehow owe loyalty to. They're emergent patterns of people -- often with disparate interests and values -- cooperating with each other in pursuit of mutual benefit. Forcing people to be locked into monopolistic social relations that no longer offer those benefits to them is a sure-fire way to destroy society.
We'll be much better off when education in our society is offered by a wide range of approaches that adapt in a bottom-up way to the full diversity of that society, an not dominated by a politicized monopoly that tries to shoehorn everyone into a conformist model that is optimal for no one in particular.
Your duty as a parent is to your own children first. Not to other people’s children or to the state.
> It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way.
Maybe that's not how society thinks? That's one person's opinion.
The well known adage of “buy the cheapest house you can afford in the most expensive neighborhood” is a sign that is what many think. The rat race to make sure your kids are in league with other parents of similar or higher stature is a huge contributor to home price dynamics.
Lol what? I've never heard that adage and it seems like really bad advice. Your neighbors aren't going to cut you a check at any point so what even is this.
It's about exposure to the way richer people think and access to the same community resources. Property taxes pay for schools. The best schools are in the richest communities.
Are there any other countries that use a local-tax funding model for public schools? Most other nations that I know use a national funding model.
This is not true. Only half of public school spending comes from local taxes. The other half comes from state funds and offsets the local property tax differences.
Here is the breakdown for Maryland: https://dls.maryland.gov/pubs/prod/NoPblTabPDF/2024PubSchool.... My county, Anne Arundel, received half the state funding of poorer counties. In terms of total funding, it’s below the median, but has above average schools for the state because school quality is more a function of the types of kids in the school moreso than funding.
My country uses a national funding model but most people would still strongly prefer to go to a public school in an affluent neighborhood. Even if the funding is exactly the same, you are still much more likely to get more "desirable" classmates (fewer chance of migrants, drug use, etc. as well higher overall academic motivation, more involved parents who contribute to the school community, etc.).
I went to public schools near the city center and/or with a good reputation and I got a retrospectively insane proportion of wealthy schoolmates mixed with a few lower class ones. And an even more insane number of serious crimes: bribery (multiples), manslaughter, contraband, murder.
Note in some European contexts (like UK) "public school" means something more along the lines of "private school" in the US. They have selective admissions, there's usually tuition, etc.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_(United_Kingdom)
> The schools are "public" from a historical schooling context in the sense of being open to pupils irrespective of locality, denomination or paternal trade or profession or family affiliation with governing or military service, and also not being run for the profit of a private owner.
Exactly. Most private schools were meant for weak students, wealthy but pathetically snob families, or often both; a specific high school, run by nuns and now disbanded, distinguished itself with even greater occurrences of newsworthy criminals and psychopaths.
Baltimore is famous for its high per student funding of public schools ($21,000 per student in 2023). It's also famous for the terrible outcomes of its public school students.
This is a common misconception. The high per capita funding is partially due to required emergency funding of repairs resulting from deferred maintenance - both in the literal sense, and in reference to the hollowing out of the city's industry and, therefore, capacity for stable community and family life. Baltimore is a Rust Belt city smack dab in the middle of a region that happily moved on to the service economy; poorer Baltimore residents are surrounded by people who can bid up the rates of goods in the area (and they do).
Other jurisdictions don't have to put so much into student funding directly.
This doesn’t pass a smell test. You are saying that maintenance spend is significant fraction of school fundings. Let’s say that that fraction is 20% of funding (if it was much lower, your argument doesn’t make sense, because it would make the maintenance spend irrelevant). That’s over $2M/school/year. This is enough to entirely rebuild a school from the ground up every 10 years.
A few Baltimore schools had to close down a few years ago because they had no working heat/AC. Asbestos is an issue. As are pests. It's not that it was uncomfortable to be in some of these buildings, it was literally unsafe. When things get this dire, they cost a lot more to fix. Anything you move in to do uncovers other issues, and contractors can bend you over on change orders because it simply has to get done. I wouldn't be surprised to find some amount of graft involved, either.
So, yes, maintenance is a significant portion of spend. The schools were allowed to get into really bad shape, physically, in a way that doesn't at all reflect on the enthusiasm or capability of students or teachers.
If schools get $20k+ per student, but somehow fails to keep AC working, then it is a clear case of extreme incompetence at best, likely pointing to criminal levels of mismanagement. You don’t solve that problem with shoveling even more money into the fire, you fire everyone involved and start over.
Yeah but how is that funding actually applied?
You could throw an extreme amount of money at schools but require it be spent on specific initiatives. Things like resource officers, hiring someone with specific qualifications, and boatloads of staff training.
You can average that out to a per student basis and say "look we're spending so much on education" but if the money is going to train teachers how to deal with crisis situations like school shooters, it's not really being spent on educating the student. How that money actually gets allocated matters.
> Are there any other countries that use a local-tax funding model for public schools?
Doubt it. In my province of Canada (Alberta), school is paid for by provincial taxes and money is distributed based on the amount of students.
That being said, since kids are assigned to schools based on proximity, it's still worthwhile being in a nicer neighbourhood since the kids will come from more affluent families...
Your local private school also isn't going to cut you a check, and I've yet to meet anyone with money that had a hard time sniffing out aspirational neighbors. Not buying it.
The assumption is that upper class kids are more likely to have the types of behaviors and attitudes that you'd like your kids to adopt (e.g. getting a C or even a B is embarrassing/shameful, AP classes are table stakes, drug use bad, video games/tv limited, more likely to have intact households, expected to be polite/treat others respectfully) while lower class kids are more likely to have the types of behaviors and attitudes you'd like your kids to avoid (e.g. no point in applying yourself, parents have no idea what you're up to or how you're doing in school anyway, drug use normal or cool, kids raised by tv/computer/phone, family tree is more of a chain with random links sticking out, family yells at each other so loud the neighbors hear it). It's an attempt to manipulate the Overton window that your kid will encounter interacting with peers.
A related adage to present this succinctly, "you are the company you keep".
100% of the individuals that I've known who ended up either shot dead in the street or caught serious charges were from upper middle class, outright wealthy neighborhoods, or were keeping company with rich kids. Maybe my sample is badly skewed but around these parts all the wealthy are known for is buying their lunatic children out of trouble.
https://opportunityatlas.org
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In my experience, the positive attributes you list tend to be more associated with middle class than upper classes. At a certain amount of wealth, you can see very problematic behaviour.
This is the kind of contemptuous skepticism of facts from, and lack of trust for, folks trying to help you understand something that permeates neglected communities and interferes with the educational process.
That attitude is prevalent in poor schools, but rare in rich schools and is properly dealt with by better educators that prefer wealthy schools with good salaries.
That sort of antagonism toward authority is incredibly disruptive in a community of People who want to achieve something.
Parents want to get their kids away from it for a reason. It's unhealthy. You're an example of the point. I don't mean any offense by it, just that it's easy to sniff out that you haven't experienced both sides of the coin so you reveal stubborn ignorance.
It inhibits learning and communicating. It's repulsive.
If you buy a cheap house in a good neighbourhood, you spend as little as possible on the building, and are mostly buying land. You are presumably buying a house because you think the land will increase in value.
It's related to "it's all about who you know"
it’s to make sure your kids go to the best school possible, and are surrounded by as many future successful people as possible. considering schools are funded based on tax revenue, it’s not the worst idea
Tax revenue is spread across all schools, at least in California.
Poor schools actually get more government funding per student.
This is why good school districts California usually have ties to non-governmental chairty parents associations that parents contribute directly.
It is also a huge part of why California passed prop 13. After property taxes we're separated from funding local schools, homeowners were simply much less willing to pay for taxes that won't go to their kid or community.
i doubt the adage is california specific, and likely came about before prop 13.
as an outsider, i think cali’s schooling system is beyond fucked, mostly due to the focus on the bottom 25% of students. the middle and high achieving students are being neglected and leaving. positive feedback loop.
I frequently hear people, mostly online, arguing that we should eliminate opportunities for smart children as a means to close the performance gap.
Bush's no child left behind was catastrophic. Terrible strategy.
Not to forget that "Average" people are, in many ways, the foundation of any functioning society.
Not since the industrial revolution.
"Average" does a lot of heavy lifiting here. People who affluent try to avoid are dangerous, mentally scarred and physically sick people. And if that's who you call average then it's a testament to failure of society and our systems. That's what the affluent are trying to check out of. They are the only ones who can try.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
Yet it's not worth the cost of a slowed curriculum.
I'd argue social skills are more valuable than improved curriculum. Not saying you couldn't learn social skills outside of the school system too, but seems to me that curriculum is easier to learn outside of the system than social skills.
The main social skill I seem to have taken away from K–12 is "man, I fuckin' hate normies"
Average people aren't the problem. It's the below average. And that low getting lower is indulged for some reason.
Exposure to Diverse Perspectives: Diverse classrooms can expose students to different viewpoints, problem-solving approaches, and ways of thinking. 1 This can broaden their understanding and enhance their critical thinking skills. 2 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262420245_Effects_o... Gurin (1999,college is significantly linked to
Thoroughly disagree, and I can draw on my experience of meeting average people to know that it wasn’t a universally valuable experience and I much prefer spending time around people that are more like myself. Perhaps that is what you meant by the valuable experience, to be disabused of my illusion that meeting average people was a good idea. Having learned that lesson I shouldn’t have to repeat it.
Also, I don’t have to deal with average people, I have apps that do that for me.
Having said that, two things can be true, I can prefer not to be around average people and I can be concerned for their lack of flourishing as I do prefer to live in more egalitarian society, especially one that can have better averages.
people pretend to be this welcoming learned creatures but in reality it's still referral by people, who you know, like working with people that look like us etc
no better place to see that than in tech and HN
"Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
if by “deal with” you mean serving them fries on their way to a ski trip, perhaps :)
I like to think you mean that the so-called “elites” end up studying some useless degree and only can get jobs as trust-fund burger stand employees, serving fries to the “dummies” who chose to work hard and become wealthy the old-fashioned way
It was a reference to 'Good Will Hunting'. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's first movie.
Both Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had movies before that. It was Damon's breakthrough for sure tho.
> who chose to work hard and become wealthy the old-fashioned way
That's so last century. Now about as real as Santa. Now you can only get wealthy by inheritance or gambling. Even if it means gambling with you health you still need to win for it to amount to anything. There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now. I'm not sure if there ever was.
If you really think this way, you're absolutely correct you will never build wealth. It is definitely possible though.
At some point in your life you'll look back at your past and notice how much of the hard work you did amounted to very little of your wealth and how most of your wealth can actually be attributed to gambles you took and won, even though similar people took similar gambles and lost. How the most work that contributed to your wealth wasn't particularly hard and some hard work you did actually delayed or diminished your success. At least you'll see it if you are going to be an honest person not one of those "I did it all by myself!" self-deluders.
At some point in your life you'll realise that not everyone thinks the same way as you do. Hopefully it happens for you before your mindset seriously dents your future prospects.
Your original assertion "There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now" is ludicrous: was it possible a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago? Did anyone become wealthy through methods other than gambling or inheritance a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago? If even one person did, this disproves your assertion, unless you want to claim some as-yet-unmentioned recent change that made it possible then and impossible now.
Your supporting theory about gambling is only true if you define every single choice you make in life as a gamble to some extent, which is a weird way of thinking about the world.
As for the "you didn't build that" stuff & snark, I don't recall claiming I did anything all by myself, nor did I see anyone claim you have to do everything all by yourself to "earn wealth". Nice strawman.
> At some point in your life you'll realise that not everyone thinks the same way as you do.
Of course. There are many people who are wrong.
> Hopefully it happens for you before your mindset seriously dents your future prospects.
My future is already secured.
> "There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now" is ludicrous: was it possible a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago? Did anyone become wealthy through methods other than gambling or inheritance a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago?
No.
> If even one person did, this disproves your assertion, unless you want to claim some as-yet-unmentioned recent change that made it possible then and impossible now.
Only if you insist on treating the assertion rigidly which is unwise for all assertions pertaining to any other realm than math.
> I don't recall claiming I did anything all by myself
Ah, so you are a person who thinks whatever is said is about them specifically.
> nor did I see anyone claim you have to do everything all by yourself to "earn wealth". Nice strawman.
It's a well known psychological observation that people who achieved success typically misattribute it disproportionately to themselves even if they know it was pure chance.
"> "There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now" is ludicrous: was it possible a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago? Did anyone become wealthy through methods other than gambling or inheritance a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago?
No."
You should seek professional help.
I'm doing perfectly fine. Just never subscribed to protestant/capitalist myth. Thank you for your concern.
> It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way
Optimism is the default state of non-broken children.
Sober realism is what's needed and required from adults.
Time to graduate - we have enough optimistic children running around with scissors already :)
> "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
What are you talking about?!
I'm a highly educated, "high class" (professional career) person, and I've been socially segregated from "average" people since high school (so, since I was 15). Literally primary school was the last time I ever interacted with "average" people in a meaningful way (beyond "hi, thanks" to the supermarket cashier/bank teller).
Society truly does segregate you by social class, and unless you truly seek different classes (which I don't really, I'm a geek so my interests are quite niche) you don't "normally" interact.
No wonder that "elitist" politicians are so removed from the "average" people (hint: Brexit, Trunmp). Thank god for Twitter, allowing to break social bubbles at least a little bit!
The fact that you don't personally meet with "average" people isn't the point. The point is that they exist, and they affect your existence, and they will not and cannot be made to disappear. The "average" people have to share resources with you, and in a way the resources cannot be segregated... unless we start building colonies in space, and send "non-average" people there or some similar dystopian project.
Someone comes in with a gripe that the bottom quintile imposes negative externalities on their education system. Your response is that the same people impose positive externalities when they grow up. These are not the same. If they were still imposing negative externalities when they grow up, I wouldn't want them to exist around me, and sending "non-average" people to space or some similar dystopian project [or jail] would be the correct game-theoretical response.
Trump isn't in any way "average". He's been more separated from "average" people than you have.
No, the point is that the preferences of "average" people (Brexit, Trump) are surprising for the "elites".
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience
While true, it is true as like a side quest. Just because something is valuable doesn’t mean you should revolve your life around it.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
Nope. For some people it may be valuable. For me it was miserable, almost to the point of being deadly. It does not prepare you for adulthood or life or what have you in any meaningful sense (think about what would happen in your everyday life if someone e.g. decided you had insulted them somehow, and punched you. Think about how different your experience of that probably is to the average person. And then think about what that experience is like for a schoolkid). It's just a whole load of unnecessary suffering.
Your argument is similar to burning the house down, once you discover that you don't like the couch in the living room. Or, more realistically, arguing against taxation based on the idea that rich people avoid being taxed anyways, and it's only poor people who will get the short end of the stick. The school system isn't perfect, and is hard to improve due to many reasons, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't try. It has a purpose which is much more important than the suffering of any individual who goes through it. It's a shared good that can only be made better if everyone participates. When people who can contribute the most are allowed to be excluded, the whole thing becomes worthless. But, guess what, those who thought that they may be exempt from contributing to the public pool will inevitably find out that the public who was in this way deprived of a public good hates them, and will eventually come after them with pitchforks and torches.
> The school system isn't perfect, and is hard to improve due to many reasons, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
The people you hear giving up today have tried to fix the system. It's a little insulting to insinuate otherwise. When I was in high school, I tried to start a CS club, but no one was interested. I helped run MATHCOUNTS at the local middle school, and we had five people show up on a good day (<1% of the student body). Most students don't care anymore, and why should they when you have to fight the school to take AP Biology as a freshman? Gifted programs are being eliminated in the name of equity, and common core standards are lower than they ever have been. A friend who immigrated in seventh grade said America's seventh grade math classes are years behind China's (and she went to a better school than me). How do you get years behind in seven years?!
I don't think it is possible to fix the education system. The student body has adopted an anti-learning culture, administrators are lowering standards to raise their metrics, and most teachers would be wholly unfit for an ideal classroom, let alone the ones they're supposed to oversee nowadays. I am all for "burning the house down". I think the best solution would be to fire everyone, raise salaries by 10x, and then hire back 10% as many people. After all, the professorship pyramid scheme has lots of PhDs who might be interested in teaching for $300K/year.
I don't insinuate otherwise. It doesn't matter how much they tried. The way forward is to keep trying.
Why? To someone who has given up on the education system, why should I try to fix it, instead of burning it down and remaking it in my own image?
> It has a purpose which is much more important than the suffering of any individual who goes through it.
How bad would it have to get to change your mind about this? Suicide is already one of the biggest causes of death in young people, and the biggest known contributing factors are things that are determined by the school environment.
I'm all for paying taxes for the greater good. But I don't want anyone I care about to go through what I went through.
Learning how to co-exist with different sorts of people is definitely a valuable experience.
Trying to do that in an completely artificial institution that arbitrarily divides people into age cohorts in a way that resembles no organic social pattern and forces all social interaction to conform to bureaucratic rules is not just not a value experience, but in fact actively inhibits the above goal.
The kinds of social skills and expectations kids develop in a school environment often need to be unlearned entirely in order to function effectively in a complex and dynamic society.
For me, it wasn't the "stay away from average people" but "remove the bottom percenters", and that made schooling much better.
Out here, in my schooling, the first stage of schooling was an elementary school, from ~7-15yo (8 years), and by default, you're enrolled into the nearest school to your home. Sometimes there are ways to choose other schools, but all the other pupils there, are there, because it's their nearest school.
What that means is, that you have, in a same class group (~25 people) a wide distribution of capabilities but also mental states, behaviours, etc. From geniuses that contribute to the whole schooling experience, to kids who somehow manage to stay basically illiterate even after 8 years of schooling, and just cause problems for everyone else. What that means is, that many of the lectures are based around trying to get the lower percentiles to learn at least enough for a minimum passing grade, and the top percentiles are either bored or lose interest. + all the behavioural issues.
After you finished elementary school, your grades of the last few years (2? i forgot) are calculated, you do some standardized testing, the numbers are calculated by some formula, and you get a numeric score, that is then used to enroll into high schools (and in most cases, the top X candidates by that score get accepted to a school, depending on how many apply, and how many open spots (X) there are.
There are many high school options, but most of the smarter kids enroll to 'general' high schools (gymansiums) for the next 4 years (and then college), and even those have reputations for some being better, and others worse, even though they technically teach by the same teaching programme (same courses, same subjects,...). Why are some better? Because smarter kids apply, and you get a high school where ALL of the students are from the "top 20%" of elementary schoolers. That means that teachers don't have to waste their time on "illiterate" kids, there are less behaviour problems, if everyone in class understands the lecture relatively quickly, the teacher can add some extra "college level" lectures, etc. This, for better students, is a much better learning experience, both from school lecture experience, to general interactions with classmates (where you're not the only smart one in the class and have noone to help).
Add to this that smarter kids usually have smarter, more involved parents, and that means that also the teachers have to bring out their A-game, and not just bare minimum to get the kids a passing grade, because the grades and (another) standardized testing is then used to apply to colleges.
So yeah... some separation is not a bad thing.
TLDR: "staying away from averages" might sound stupid, but "removing the 'worst' students lets others perform better" is IMHO true.
[dead]
> "Average" people are the norm
society has always been this way, from the hunter gatherer days, to middle ages - that's why people want to become part of the elite.
It's only recently that the average people have had the chance to become elites, rather than be born into it. But the desire to be elites, molded by evolutionary/darwinian pressure, is not gone, nor different, than in the past. Another word for it is "the human condition".
> It's only recently that the average people have had the chance to become elites, rather than be born into it.
It still mostly depends on being born into it. In the US your odds of going from impoverished to wealthy are extremely slim and socioeconomic mobility is among the worst compared to other developed countries. The US falls behind South Korea, Lithuania, Estonia, Singapore, Malta, and Slovenia, while the Nordic countries top the list.
Depending on the study, socioeconomic mobility in the US has either stagnated since the 1970s or actually declined. Average people have little hope of substantially improving the situation they were born into while the percentage of people born into wealth (but not the 1%) who slide downward in socioeconomic status grows. Wealth inequality continues to accelerate at an insane pace. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1962-_Net_personal_wealth...)
Just about everyone would like to be one of the "elites" but most people would be happy with a fair chance to meaningfully improve their lifestyle.
I know an extended family of third world impoverished immigrants who became middle class by basically all going to nursing school. It is almost a joke that all Filipinos become nurses, it's almost fool proof way to have at least a car, shitty apartment and decent food to eat. It's worth looking into for anyone who is stuck, none of it is particularly difficult to learn although it is hard work.
I'm going to guess that only a small number of impoverished immigrants manage to legally move to a developed country at all, but I wouldn't doubt that those who do could see their situation improve.
There's a lot of need for nurses which has made the job attractive, but it's worth noting that wages have been going down (https://www.incrediblehealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/...), they aren't especially higher than the money other workers make, and the actual working conditions for nurses have gotten worse. Telehealth also threatens to reduce both their wages and the number of (US) nurses we'll need in the future.
If people just want work, elder care seems like it'd be a safe bet for a while, but those wages and working conditions can be even worse.
lol
some days i get sad and then i log into HN to read about their take on eugenics and history and that cheers me up
Nursing can also pay extremely well, at least in California, and for those willing to travel.
In the US your odds of going from impoverished to wealthy are extraordinarily good. I personally know dozens of examples, even excluding tech entirely. Social mobility is a term of art in economics and only weakly correlated with the ease of becoming wealthy. It doesn’t mean economic mobility.
Social mobility is a measure of relative rank change. In countries with compressed wage ranges, such as those you mention, “social mobility” is an artifact of the mathematics, it doesn’t mean you are meaningfully wealthier than the average person. You can double your household income in the US to above average and still not be “socially mobile”. Social mobility is not a meaningful measure for continent-sized economically diverse countries.
A person can go from the trailer park to being upper middle class in a place like Mississippi and it doesn’t count as socially mobile because you are being ranked against the household income of someone in Seattle, 3,000 km away. As far as the person in Mississippi is concerned, they are living the dream.
The opportunity to improve your standard of living in e.g. Europe pales in comparison to the opportunity to do so in the US. It won’t be classified as “socially mobile” in the US as an artifact of how the math works, but no one in the US cares.
If US had many people "going from impoverished to wealthy", its social mobility stats would be better. You are seeing few outliers, that is it.
You are demonstrating that you have no idea what “social mobility” means. It is a term of art in economics, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. Being “socially mobile” has nothing to do with your ability to change your standard of living.
In countries like the US, you can achieve enormous gains in income and still not be socially mobile by definition. Specifically, it has nothing to do with how easy it is to become wealthy, which is what most people incorrectly intuit it means.
High “social mobility” is worthless if it doesn’t come with a high standard of living.
> In countries like the US, you can achieve enormous gains in income and still not be socially mobile by definition.
No, mass of people cant. The thing you describe can happen and not affect the global stats only because it happens to few people in one relatively small location.
I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. The reading/math skills are so dismal, any student who learns at home is bored as hell.
Private schools are outrageously expensive.
Homeschooling is becoming the pragmatic choice.
I'm curious where you live. My spouse and I selected the area we live in based on the school district when our kids were around pre-K age. We live in a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation.
Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works. I've never heard a story like this and we've been in the district for 8+ years.
As for skills, my kids are probably 3 years ahead of where I was at the same age. Devices are not a huge component of their schooling, although I am on a parent board that's pushing back on SaaS creep. They're forced to have Google accounts which I'm proposing to remove and/or minimize. Math and reading programs are fantastic. Teachers are great. There have been one or two mediocre teachers but nothing to really complain about.
We also have great private options, but again, we moved to this district to take advantage of the public schools.
As an observation the homeschooled kids that participate in extracurricular activities along with the public school kids are definitely behind. Not only from a traditional education standpoint, but also social skills. It's always an awkward conversation when those parents engage in a conversation asking where our kids are at with respect to reading, math or science.
Our goal is to have our kids be the best version of them that they can be. If they're happier, healthier and better equipped than we were then I'll be happy. I look at a lot of parents who want their kids to be stars and it's painful. Modern day parenting has lost its way in US society on so many levels.
"Expulsion works."
There really seems to be two kinds of public schools. One is willing to expel students who are violent and disruptive and this allows the students who are willing and able to learn to do so. The other refuses to expel violent and disruptive students and they make it nearly impossible for the willing and motivated students to actually learn.
There are some rotten incentives at work here, as well as constraints that aren’t obvious from a parent or student’s point of view.
For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them. In practice, this means that expelling a student (short of some extreme situations) is a lengthy process of ass-covering. Even when administrators are doing the right thing, from the outside it can look like nothing is being done. Think HR putting you on a PIP.
Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to.
And then, what does “violent and disruptive” actually mean? How much violence? No tolerance? What about a bullying victim who sticks up for themselves? Playground scuffle? At what point does the dial turn from teaching a child not to hit, to teaching a child that they are bad and do not belong? What about non (physically) violent bullying? What about children who are disruptive, but not violent (surely including a lot of those posting here about how their ADHD was misunderstood)?
Sometimes expulsion is the answer, even keeping in mind that every student expelled before 16 is just going to school someplace else. But the problems are more complex than people often realize.
> The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to.
This is where I wholeheartedly disagree with you. Education is not a right if you can't comply with simple rules. I'd also like to see where you're correlating "violent and disruptive" with a "child in crisis". I'm not saying it's not there, but I am saying I don't believe those two components are exclusive.
These games of "what if" and "what is" must be fun for some people - because they seem to be played quite often. Rules are rules, they can be cut and dry - even in this case. The excuses are played out, the fallback on so many "disorders" is rampant. Either society is essentially fucked, or people are abusing the exceptions. I do agree, there should be some exceptions, but those should be few and far between to avoid slipping through the cracks.
Finally, the implication that a teacher "has to" give a shit has got to be the worst idea Americans have embraced. No, they don't. If my kid was asshole in school - I would handle the situation and apologize. Parents who go at districts for not "giving a shit" about their kid when their kid has been taught there are no repercussions by their parents don't have a right to anything in my opinion.
The purpose for "blame" or "fault" is to know who to punish to best improve society. The "what if" and "what is" scenarios stem from treating "blame" as a mysterious entity that leads to punishment, and then pathological (pathos) appeals that no one is really to blame. It seems rather tautological that society should adopt rules for blame that improves society, not rules that make people feel good inside.
A couple things are true here:
- The kid's behavior isn't their fault. They might have a medical condition or a home situation causing them to act this way. It's tempting to write kids like this off, but we shouldn't punish kids for their parents' failings.
- No matter what, this represents a problem we have to solve. Either family can solve it at home, educators can solve it at school, or some LEO can solve it in the carceral system, but you burn more money and suffer worse outcomes the further down the pipeline you solve it (not unlike bugs in software engineering).
---
I have a hot take that school is so frustrating because it's one of the very few things in the US money and status don't readily fix. Your household income might be $250k a year, but your kid's playing kickball with... people who make less, and there's really nothing anyone can do about it. The US isn't good at these kinds of "let's make society as a whole healthier so we avoid the worst outcomes" type problems, preferring to use those bad outcomes to motivate people to not be poor/lazy/unlucky.
Unfortunately the resources required to create some kind of middle tier education are truly bonkers (it's also de facto racist: 30% of Black kids and 20% of Hispanic kids are impoverished, so if you're saying "poor kids with all their problems not welcome here" you're kind of also saying Black/Hispanic kids with all their problems not welcome here--which also doesn't super work because of de facto segregation, so you're also saying "no middle tier schools here"). There are around 70m kids in the US. Let's take the top 2/3 (they're in households making > 199% of the poverty line) and assume ideal class size of 12. That's $229,000,000,000 a year just in salary (current median teacher salary is $58,950), which is more than 2/3 the current DoE budget, plus you'd have to dramatically increase salary and benefits if you wanted to hire that many new teachers anyway.
But, yeah overall my point is it's really hard to appreciate the scale of the problem both like, logically (can it really cost this much money?), emotionally (my kid got hit with a chair today), and culturally (I honestly thought making a quarter of a million dollars a year ensured my kid would never be hit by a chair in school; who do I see about this). But, it really is just the case we are going have to spend money like crazy and hire a shitload of professional educators. It might seem expensive, but you'll pay 10x if kids slide to the end of the pipeline--to say nothing of the moral cost.
In neighborhoods with better school districts, home prices and rents are higher in proportion to the demand people have for better schools, creating de facto segregation based on income, and by your logic, by race too.
Absolutely yeah, it's like the "ZIP code is destiny" is also some kind of self-fulfilling prophecy.
What do you mean by "fault"? My concept of "fault" is whoever I'm going to punish to make society better. (More precisely, assume everyone has some policy `p_i` for actions they take. If a certain action `a` is bad for society, they get punished proportionally according to `KL(a, p_i)`, i.e. they are that much at fault.)
If their home circumstances are forcing them to act this way, then too bad for them! That is part of them and they should be blamed until you can fix the root cause.
Expecting children to be responsible for their own actions to this degree is unrealistic, any policy built on that expectation will be ineffective at best and likely harmful, and thus anyone advocating for it is at best asking us to waste resources and at worst asking us to harm kids.
You've got over 20 posts in this thread, many of them putting the blame on children with no evidence that this would be helpful (probably because it wouldn't be). You've yet to contribute good ideas or substantial new information to our discussion. Your behavior is making our group worse, and ironically if we were to follow your advice here we'd have to throw you out.
I can tell you're passionate about, but frustrated by this issue. My advice is to take a breath and if you're really interested, do some reading and get involved. There are successful education systems out there (everyone references Finland); things aren't hopeless.
> You've yet to contribute good ideas or substantial new information to our discussion. Your behavior is making our group worse, and ironically if we were to follow your advice here we'd have to throw you out.
Do you really believe this? I flagged your comment, because I'm worried that you are trying to convince people by building an ethos (and tearing down others' ethos) instead of appealing to logic. Your writing is very good, but there isn't much substance to it. For example, you say
> Expecting children to be responsible for their own actions to this degree is unrealistic
but don't substantiate why it is unrealistic. I've found that when people disagree (in America) there are usually layers of rhetoric that have been built around the issue, so much so that it can be hard to dig down to the crux of the issue and actually resolve the disagreement. This is why I'm worried about how you're writing: it seems to be adding layers instead of removing them. (EDIT: Note, I don't think you are doing this intentionally.)
Now, I do think I have been adding to the discussion. For example:
- I proposed we raise salaries by 10x and fire everyone to balance the budget.
- I gave an anecdote showing that even top-tier public schools have anti-learning cultures.
- I've pointed out that the "for whom" is important when discussing what is good or bad.
I wanna start off by saying you're clearly a smart person and I'm not trying to run you out or anything. I'm--both deliberately and subconsciously--saltier post Trump v2 and I'm trying to work through it. A big part of me wants to litigate everything all the time, but I'm gonna avoid that here because I believe in the HN community and that wouldn't build and strengthen that community (imagine the breathing exercises it took to attain this level of clarity haha).
Instead I want to discuss your basic point: we should expel problem kids because it improves outcomes for non-problem kids. I don't want to come off as condescending but I DDG'd for "does expelling students improve outcomes" and literally nobody thinks that. Here's some stuff to read:
[0]: https://theconversation.com/why-suspending-or-expelling-stud...
[1]: https://www.nea.org/nea-today/all-news-articles/school-suspe...
[2]: https://disabilityrightsnc.org/resources/stop-suspending-stu...
[3]: https://www.aclu-wa.org/sites/default/files/media-documents/...
[4]: https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/rel/Products/Region/central/Ask-A-RE...
[5]: https://gafcp.org/2023/04/11/the-impact-of-early-suspension-...
[6]: https://learningpolicyinstitute.org/product/crdc-school-susp...
[7]: https://theconversation.com/expelling-students-for-bad-behav...
[8]: https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ED581500
[9]: https://pedagogue.app/why-suspending-or-expelling-students-o...
[10]: https://spark.bethel.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1625&co...
Some excerpts:
"evidence shows these tactics aren’t effective in changing a student’s conduct, and carry major long-term risks for their welfare. Students most affected tend to be those with higher and more complex needs, such as those with disabilities and mental health issues."
"The findings underscore that suspending students does little to reduce future misbehavior for the disciplined students or their peers, nor did it result in improved academic achievement for peers or perceptions of positive school climate." (emphasis mine)
"Suspensions do not reduce classroom disruptions, and often encourage them."
"Suspensions do not improve outcomes for students, whether suspended or not."
"Suspensions do not prevent, and may increase, the risk of school violence."
"Restorative justice focuses on reconciliation with victims, learning from misconduct, and repairing harm caused by student misconduct. Victim-offender mediation is a common restorative justice program. For one example, in Denver Public Schools, a successful school-based restorative justice program decreased expulsions by 82%, suspensions by 39%, and referrals to law enforcement by 15%."
"Black students in North Carolina are more than four times as likely to be suspended or expelled as white students. Research has found no evidence that the over-representation of Black students in school suspension rates is due to higher rates of misbehavior."
"In total, Washington students lost over 169,689 days of class time during 2015. When students are suspended or expelled, they cannot participate in class, are less likely to complete schoolwork, and are more likely to skip school."
TL;DR: suspending and expelling doesn't do what you think it does; instead it causes a lot of harm; other approaches are better.
---
Alright, now for some soapboxing. Again, you're a smart person, so I earnestly want to know did you jump in this thread to push your wildly incorrect take before Googling, or have you drank some kind of anti-DoE anti-public-education anti-teacher kool-aid? I'm so deeply weary of arrogant STEM people assuming there are no smart people anywhere else--I just wrote a whole screed in that Paul Graham wokeness thread about this exact thing. Educators are smart! They run studies on how best to educate! They're so easy to find and read!
This is the kind of thing I'm thinking about when it comes to what improves and enriches a discussion. Giving people information they may not have, getting new information and making connections that aren't yet there, giving people grace. The moment we give in and just start trying to win the argument we've lost the whole thing--we have to enrich our mental model of the world together. Or more pointedly, I'm relying on you to help me enrich my mental model of the world, so I need you to call me out when I'm blathering on tilt (could maybe be doing that here) or I've got it wrong, or you know something I don't. If you're gonna be effective at that, you have to do the reading, you have to be self aware, and you have to have compassion. It is work, but people doing that work is how HN stays valuable.
Thanks for the very thoughtful response! I admit I also get salty, particularly when it comes to education. It feels so obvious things should be a specific way, but of course that may just be my STEM person arrogance :P.
So, what I'm mostly confused about is why expulsion wouldn't work. We know some schools are better than others. We know students in "gifted" classes do better than others, and if your references are correct even a regular student in a "gifted" class would soak up the positive climate and turn out better than in a regular class. This seems to imply that expelling enough students should make the school better. For an extreme example, you could have everyone take a test, expel the lowest 50% of marks to a lower-tier school, and the remaining students would have better marks. This comparison is a little unfair, because expulsion is usually reserved for disruptive behaviour, not poor marks, but you could similarly have every teacher compile a list of misbehaving students. When I hear that expulsion wouldn't fix the problem, it must be because they are not expelling enough people!
I'm also a little leery of drawing the same conclusions as the news articles you linked. It seems likely that suspension/expulsion does always work, there's just a causation between lots of students misbehaving in a school and more students being expelled in the school. For example, the second news article says
> The findings underscore that suspending students does little to reduce future misbehavior for the disciplined students or their peers, nor did it result in improved academic achievement for peers or perceptions of positive school climate.
The linked findings come from this study:
https://www.air.org/sites/default/files/2021-08/NYC-Suspensi...
which has a few paragraphs on peer spillover effects from out-of-school suspension vs. in-school suspension. They do find a 1-2% decrease in the peers achieving ELA/math credit with out-of-school suspension (20-30% for the suspended), but there are also 20,000 incidents of out-of-school suspension with a median length ~two weeks [Table A.4]. Their data comes from the NYCDOE which has just under a million students, which means their peers also being suspended could account for half of the decrease! Then there's the correlation between negative school climate, more grievous offences, and out-of-school suspension (re: Table A.4), and it seems to be a clear-cut case of Simpson's paradox.
-----
Alright, time for the spicier part of this comment.
> I just wrote a whole screed in that Paul Graham wokeness thread about this exact thing. Educators are smart! They run studies on how best to educate! They're so easy to find and read!
I don't think the so-called educators are being smart. I think the average wokist is smarter than the average MAGAt (by a lot), but most systems fall into the Goodhart trap. People who optimise for looking good rather than being good often bubble to the top. This is why I think many woke arguments lean heavily on emotional appeals. The callous or ignorant MAGAts that only care about the gas price ironically end up with a more meritocratic system, because results matter.
I didn't partcularly like Graham's essay either, but I do sympathise with the anti-woke sentiment almost entirely because I believe this Goodharting has devastated the education system. For example, a common refrain I found in the comment section and your linked articles was,
> Expelling the student is not a good solution. Think about how this will effect his life! And what if he's going through abuse? Is it even his fault?
The MAGAt mentality is "I don't care, show me the results". They find current schools lacking, but don't particularly care about why they're lacking which is where school choice/vouchers come in. You don't need to fix things if you can just let the market find something better. This is a rather callous/ignorant take, and you can do much better by caring to find where the current system went wrong. I suspect it's because wokists forgot why we assign moral blame.
I think the purpose of "blame" in society is to figure out who to punish/rehabilitate to make society better. Note that even if there is a confounding factor it does not excuse the blame. I believe I've already mentioned this to you: you assign moral blame based on KL(bad action, person's policy). Why? If someone puts a gun to your head, and tells you to rob a store, you are unlikely to repeat the action. Your policy is really only, "rob stores when I have a gun to my head". On the other hand, if you were abused as a child and turned out a kleptomaniac, you are extremely likely to repeat the offence.
Now, rehabilitation has to actually work. If someone is starving, it doesn't matter how many beatings you give them, they will still steal food. Positive rehabilitation is often better for society, because you don't need to spend a bunch of money on the justice system, and the rehabilitated criminal can hold a job and pay taxes. Punitive rehabilitation works by decreasing the cost of future crimes from similarly-minded people. Note that I'm being really careful to talk about what is good for society, not the criminal. After all, every individual except the criminal (and friends/family) gains more by asking for the good of society, not the individual.
This ties into wokism and education as so: the wokist gives the emotional appeal,
> Expelling the student is not a good solution. Think about how this will effect his life! And what if he's going through abuse? Is it even his fault?
and the proper response is,
> good for whom?
As I mentioned at the start of this comment, it is good for the top 50% of students to expel the bottom 50% to an alternative school. Should we? In reality, we have to work under money and (as you pointed out) pitchfork & torch constraints. My issue with emotional appeals is they bring out the pitchforks, for potentially no good reason.
For example, I went to middle school in a rather conservative city, but even there the gifted program was eliminated in the name of equity. High school graduation standards have dropped, again in the name of equity. And California briefly proposed not allowing 8th graders to take algebra (for equity's sake) until they received massive backlash.
I care much more about what is actually good for society than what looks good. I really don't see how it's good to be holding back our brightest students to the bottom quintile's pace, or allow disruptions from known troublemakers.
At this point I'm rather tired; I might continue writing this tomorrow, but I probably won't. I'll just end with what I wish the school system looked like:
1. A national placement exam for each grade (including Kindergarteners). Students get placed into schools and classrooms entirely from their rankings (within the local system). The top scorers are offered room and board at nationally-run schools.
2. Disruptive students get kicked to penitentiaries. I read elsewhere in this thread of a city with three tiers of schools: one for regular students, one for first-time expulsions, and a last for the chronically expelled. This is what I'm imagining.
3. The same people that write olympiad problems and run the summer camps are hired to create a new curriculum. Quite frankly, Common Core is a failure; you see a decline in AMC 10/12 scores and participants about eight years after it was introduced, i.e. just enough time for the students who learned from Common Core to be taking the exams.
4. Everyone is fired, and as many people as money there is are hired at $300–500k/yr (in total compensation) to teach. At $15k/yr per student (what the US currently spends), and 30 students to a class, this should be just doable.
> Thanks for the very thoughtful response! I admit I also get salty, particularly when it comes to education. It feels so obvious things should be a specific way, but of course that may just be my STEM person arrogance :P.
Thank you (also for indulging)! As an also-arrogant STEM person myself we can muddle through together haha.
> So, what I'm mostly confused about is why expulsion wouldn't work.
I think a number of dynamics are at play here:
- Schools don't usually reach for suspension/expulsion that quickly because they're weighing the impact of the problem kid's behavior on others vs. the impact of a suspension/expulsion on the kid, so their disruptive lingers.
- Some schools have zero tolerance policies that suspend/expel very quickly, but it turns out that creates a super weird climate (students defending themselves are also suspended/expelled, school staff feel pretty bad suspending/expelling all the time, you can't build relationships with problem kids which is deeply dehumanizing on both sides, etc.)
- Problem kids have a weird habit of just coming right back. A lot of us are envisioning a relatively rich school district with multiple nets to cordon off problem kids, bost districts have the one school, maybe if they're lucky there's an "alternative school" in the parking lot, which is a trailer that should only ever have 5 people in it, but it has 15. Maybe some people are advocating for some kind of super harsh zero-tolerance-expelled-forever pipeline, but let me introduce those advocates to the School-to-Prison Pipeline [0].
- Problem kids are still in your neighborhood, your kid is pretty likely to still see them outside of school, and that leads to more weird social dynamics.
But moreover, let's say that zero-tolerance-expel-immediately leads to better outcomes for kids and we have some way of totally segregating problem kids both in school and broader society. Those kids are still a problem for society that we'll have to deal with at some point. Today they're throwing stuff in class, tomorrow they're breaking the windows of your car or running drugs in your neighborhood. At that point in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, rehabilitating the person is extremely expensive.
> seems to be a clear-cut case of Simpson's paradox
Nah, definitely not. A commonly cited paper [1] has a pretty good table breaking down the effects of various classroom properties on outcomes. Reading it, you'll immediately get a great look at why private/charter school outcomes are so much better: they work pretty hard to cherry-pick kids that lead to better outcomes, thus exacerbating the School-to-Prison Pipeline issue by putting more pressure on public schools. Anyway, there's so much on this topic you're gonna have to switch your argument to explaining a conspiracy in educational research:
Suspending Progress: Collateral Consequences of Exclusionary Punishment in Public Schools: https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1177/0003122414556308
Effects of School-Wide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports on Child Behavior Problems: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC3483890/
Teacher Support for Zero Tolerance Is Associated With Higher Suspension Rates and Lower Feelings of Safety: https://sci-hub.st/https://doi.org/10.1080/2372966X.2020.183...
Schoolwide positive behavioural interventions and supports and human rights: transforming our educational systems into levers for social justice: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9897741/
School-wide positive behavioral interventions and supports and students with extensive support needs: a scoping review: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9897773/
The Impact of Schoolwide Positive Behavioral Interventions and Supports on Bullying and Peer Rejection: https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamapediatrics/fullarticle/...
> Stuff about blame
Blame essentially never works, and it's because people are the products of systems. You talk about Goodhart's Law; another dynamic is where we do things that feel good or confirm our understanding of the world despite poor outcomes. Harsh disciplinary policies are the poster child for this. I'm gonna assume here you're pretty naive to the criminal justice space (this is because anyone who knows anything about criminal justice understands blame essentially never works), so I strongly encourage you to interrogate your priors here and read up on deterrence, punishment, and so on.
> National placement test for each grade
This would really only measure socioeconomic status, like most (all?) standardized tests. You also get stuck in tracks, so if say your mom dies in 3rd grade, you do poorly on the test and get bumped down, you're probably bumped down forever. That's a bad outcome.
> Disruptive students get kicked to penitentiaries.
Not only are there completely valid reasons for students becoming disruptive (parental issues, injuries, mental health issues, etc), the expense of this is out of this world. Even in the cheapest state (Arkansas) spending-per-inmate is $23k/yr--the median is something like $60k. Your options here are dramatically increase taxes or create a truly horrific human rights disaster.
> The same people that write olympiad problems and run the summer camps are hired to create a new curriculum.
This doesn't work because different people learn in different ways. You need dedicated, educated, well-compensated, supported professionals applying state-of-the-art techniques and research to get the outcomes we want. Also when you talk about replacing Common Core with some new standard, you're still not escaping Goodhart's Law.
> Everyone is fired, and as many people as money there is are hired at $300–500k/yr (in total compensation) to teach [30 student classes].
30 student classes obviates any benefit you'd get from anything else. There are no systems with those class sizes that are achieving the outcomes we want. You also can't literally fire all teachers. The NEA or teacher tenure won't let you. Training and interviewing 2.333 million teachers (plus administrators) is a gargantuan undertaking. Who moves to the middle of nowhere in Arizona, or Mississippi? How will you find so many qualified people? That $15k/yr number you keep citing isn't all salary; we spend around $236b on ~4m teacher salaries, which yields ~600k teachers (at $400k/yr salary), so you still need to find $680b (which is more than the budget of Medicaid) for the remaining 1.7 million teachers. You also have to somehow survive the political fallout of firing hundreds of thousands of people, many of whom have families and various health issues.
[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School-to-prison_pipeline
[1]: https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC9159706/#T2
To make a couple other points:
> 30 student classes obviates any benefit you'd get from anything else. There are no systems with those class sizes that are achieving the outcomes we want.
I disagree? Universities have larger lectures, and students can move to lower classes if theirs moves too fast. I think your argument goes somewhat like:
| Assume each student randomly needs extra help some x% of the time. Then, the expected length until no needs help is (1-x%)^-n. Just to throw a number out there, assume ten students can move half as quick as one student. Then by the time you get to thirty students, you're moving 20% as fast as with ten students.
However, x% decreases with higher-salary teachers, and you can just move on without answering questions: "Ask me after class, we don't have time today." Finally, if you organize classes so similarly ranked students are together, the correlation in needing help increases, and the pace improves.
> You also can't literally fire all teachers. The NEA or teacher tenure won't let you.
Not with that attitude! Milei layed off 20% of his federal employees, and Musk 80% of Xitter. So, it is possible. They can protest, but I don't have sympathy for shitty teachers looking after their own interests.
> Training and interviewing 2.333 million teachers (plus administrators) is a gargantuan undertaking. Who moves to the middle of nowhere in Arizona, or Mississippi? How will you find so many qualified people?
I think the key is to steal employees ;). If you're offering double the salary, I think the local universities might lose a few professors. Also, as I mentioned, the university pyramid scheme is pumping out more PhDs than they know what to do with. There are also many universities shutting down as enrollment drops. Finally, interviewing 2 million teacher positions is a gargantuan undertaking, but each town only needs a few dozen. The federal government can create a teachers' job board for people to apply to, and let local towns do the hiring. Lots of doctors move to the middle of Nowhere, Mississippi, so I'm sure lots of teachers would too for a competitive salary.
> You also get stuck in tracks, so if say your mom dies in 3rd grade, you do poorly on the test and get bumped down, you're probably bumped down forever. That's a bad outcome.
Bad for whom? It's great for the kid who got bumped up. If you really want a better spot, you can study harder for the next test. No one is *stuck* in tracks. Do you know how I got good at math? I just solved thousands of math competition problems I found on AoPS.com. I would have improved faster if I had a coach/teacher to guide me, but the resources are out there if someone actually wants to hop tracks. It'll be harder than just never losing your spot, but that's no reason to give up.
> This [olympiad problem->curriculum writers] doesn't work because different people learn in different ways. You need dedicated, educated, well-compensated, supported professionals applying state-of-the-art techniques and research to get the outcomes we want. Also when you talk about replacing Common Core with some new standard, you're still not escaping Goodhart's Law.
I call bullshit. The SAT/ACT do not go high enough to distinguish the top 0.1% from the top 0.5%, and other (American/state) standardized exams are even worse, which means the so-called professionals literally do not have metrics that can capture that signal to tune their curriculae against. On the other hand, olympiad problem writers/camp counselors have a proven track record of doing exactly that. Here are two anecdotes:
1) In elementary school, my gifted class' teacher was complaining that her evaluations looked bad, because her students never showed improvement. It wasn't because they didn't improve, it's just because they stayed at 99%.
2) When Luke Robitaille got second in MATHCOUNTS in sixth grade, the next two years of exams became much harder, solely to make sure he wouldn't get a perfect score. His eighth grade year had the lowest top twelve cutoff in history, but at least there was a full spread at the top.
At the very least, we should agree that smarter students need an Uncommon Core curriculum.
> Today they're throwing stuff in class, tomorrow they're breaking the windows of your car or running drugs in your neighborhood. At that point in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, rehabilitating the person is extremely expensive.
In my other reply, the TLDR; is essentially, "it's the other way around". It's much more expensive to rehabilitate them in the classroom than in the prison system.
>> 30 student classes obviates any benefit you'd get from anything else. There are no systems with those class sizes that are achieving the outcomes we want.
> I disagree? Universities have larger lectures, and students can move to lower classes if theirs moves too fast. I think your argument goes somewhat like:
You're doing the thing again where you apply your expertise to a domain you're naive to. Google for class size and outcomes.
>> You also can't literally fire all teachers. The NEA or teacher tenure won't let you.
> Not with that attitude!
Contracts are contracts. Attitude has nothing to do with it.
> I think the key is to steal employees ;). If you're offering double the salary, I think the local universities might lose a few professors.
How do you deal with losing... let's just say 2m people from other high-value professions? Unemployment is at historic lows. You also haven't wrestled with finding ~$700b to pay for all of this. There's ~100,000 public schools in the US in ~13,000 school districts. You think you'll get good outcomes letting them all hire individually? Will you put caps on salary so smaller districts don't lose out?
You've honestly not thought through this at all. You're again walking onto an issue you're entirely ignorant of, and if you were in charge of it you'd thoroughly destroy it.
>> You also get stuck in tracks, so if say your mom dies in 3rd grade, you do poorly on the test and get bumped down, you're probably bumped down forever. That's a bad outcome.
> Bad for whom? It's great for the kid who got bumped up.
You're naive to the problems with standardized testing and trying to supplement with anecdata.
> [Weird takes on common core and standardized testing]
There may be a problem with the educational system not serving highly gifted students, but that's way further down the list than kids who graduate without basic reading and math skills. I'm not saying we can't walk and chew gum at the same time, but dealing with gifted students is a whole other kettle of fish (which judging by your anecdata I'm confident you've read nothing about).
>> Today they're throwing stuff in class, tomorrow they're breaking the windows of your car or running drugs in your neighborhood. At that point in the School-to-Prison Pipeline, rehabilitating the person is extremely expensive.
> In my other reply, the TLDR; is essentially, "it's the other way around". It's much more expensive to rehabilitate them in the classroom than in the prison system.
I'm gonna quote something from my response to Paul Graham's wokeness essay: "It's like someone's running an experiment on how many times you can be bafflingly wrong before people notice." I'm noticing.
I think the school->prison pipeline is a real issue, but I think a poor quality of education is a much bigger deal because smart, educated people generate exponentially more wealth since the industrial revolution. If you want what is best for everyone, you would focus more resources on top-performing students rather than less! Sure, top-performing students would turn out better than mid-performing students—even with fewer resources—but that's a tautology and an emotional appeal. I think the tricky part is to make sure top students give back to society once they graduate, but that seems more of a cultural issue to solve. Boring students to death probably doesn't help, though.
Now, you brought up that national testing + placement would mostly reflect socio-economic status. I think this is concerning because it lead to in-groups reinforcing themselves, which naturally decreases motivation for future rich people to help the rest of society. However, we already have examples of placement tests, and this isn't what happens! NYC has several "specialized" schools, including one of the best high schools in the nation, Stuyvesant. Admissions to Stuyvesant are entirely based on your rank on the SHSAT, yet 48% of their students are "economically disadvantaged" according to USNews. I'm not entirely sure what that means, but I would expect lower or lower-middle class. This data also matches up with my intuitions: although intelligence is heritable (through genes or upbringing), there are exponentially more "economically disadvantaged" people than rich people, so even though rich kids are overrepresented, they are still outnumbered by poor(er) kids.
Also, keep in mind that rich people will always be able to pay for private schools or tutors if they find public education lacking. So, you are really only depriving poor students of any possibility of a good education by lumping everyone together, which is worse for reinforcing classism. As you mentioned, charter/private school outcomes are so much better because they work pretty hard to cherry-pick kids that lead to better oucomes. Why not give everyone that opportunity?
That's a little facetious, because not everyone has that opportunity. Some people are just not genetically predisposed towards exams, or they're being abused at home, or they have to work after school to buy food for their younger siblings. But, it doesn't really matter why someone cannot do/be better if we're unable to fix the why. Until it can be fixed, the problem is just a part of them and they'll be punished for it. This isn't very sympathetic, but it's the game-theoretical optimal approach for getting to the Pareto frontier.
You mention that blame/punishment essentially never works, which is probably because humans are not perfectly rational agents. Sure. I've definitely seen this when I play Risk online. You have to use different strategies when people are irrational/prone to mistakes, e.g. with novices it's usually good to make a big stack and wait for everyone else to noob-slam, while with masters it's better to work with the othe rplayers to slowly choke out the rest. Optimal strategies may be less tolerant to mistakes, and a common mistake humans make is, "this person hurt me, so I will hurt them even more," without considering why they were hurt. A common theme I saw in school->prison pipeline studies is that youth get disaffected with society/the justice system, so they end up committing more crimes. If people really are being irrational, in such a way that punishment will not work, you really only have three options:
1. Force them into rationality.
2. Rehabilitate them through positive reinforcement.
3. Eliminate them from society, e.g. sending them to Louisiana/Australia, prisons/executions, or closed communities.
I'd argue that you should take whichever option is best for society, i.e. costs it the least. Why?
a) Societies cannot be comprised of mostly (weighting by utility) negative-externality people for very long.
b) Everyone else is better off by eliminating such people, thus they are motivated to do so in whichever way is cheapest.
If it were cheaper to just execute all criminals, or commit horrific human rights disasters to make prisons cheap to run, that's what society should do. Historically, that's what societies have done. Nowadays, it probably isn't cheaper; even if the average inmate spends just as much time in prison as out of it, they are probably close to net-positive to society. The cheapest solution probably is rehabilitation for most people except the unfixable, and even there, life in prison is probably cheaper than execution.
So, I think I agree with you about rehabilitation, but probably not for the reasons you cite. I think "people being products of systems" is a rather naive take; if people were products of stable systems (in the physics sense), punishment actually would work. Conservatives have a bias towards everything being a stable system [which is true; you are exponentially more likely to end up in more stable (determined by transition probabilities) trembling-hand/thermodynamic equilibria], which is probably why they're all pro-punishment and such. Note that rehabilitation can still be cheaper, but at least punishment would work. It's only when you have unstable systems that punishment might not work at all. It's a little worrying to think that America's system might be unstable right now, but the race riots and past two elections kind of show it is. More accurately, it's too easy to transition out of its current maximum for punishment to really dissuade future malcontents.
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Alright, let's return to education. I think we're in agreement that:
I) The school->prison pipeline is real.
II) Imprisonment is expensive, probably moreso than rehabilitation.
As I put at the top, we probably disagree that:
III) This cost is more than that of a poor education system.
I think rehabilitation through the education system is far more expensive. Here's just a back-of-the-napkin calculation. Suppose that all inmates are directly a result of the school->prison pipeline. It costs ~$70bn/yr to incarcerate them, but let's also assume we're missing out on 2 million people * $65k/yr = $130bn from jobs they could be working. This amounts to about $200bn/yr in costs to society.
Now, the number of billionaires increases by about 36 each year, and the average billionaire has $7bn. If a better education were to double the number of billionaires produced each year, this would entirely offset the cost. Of course, billionaires are usually better at capturing value than producing it, but at least some educated STEM guy below them is producing the value. I think this is entirely doable by expelling more students. In fact, I think the justice system will only start costing more than the wealth generated from better education (through the top students) once the pitchforks and torches come out.
Similarly, we should be able to do a cost-benefit analysis on teacher salaries. In reality, the most efficient use of money is to pour it into the top schools (and have entrance exams), but the metrics don't look as good. Most legislators care about the quintiles, not the top 0.1%, plus the wokists hate inequity. And, even bottom schools need much better teachers than are currently around. That's why I want to raise all salaries to $300-500k/yr.
You mentioned that only $236bn is spent on ~4m teachers, but there actually is another $600bn going elsewhere. If you want an average class size of 20 students, you only need ~2.5m teachers, so it should be possible if you strip everything else to the bare-bones. My elementary school class was taught in a portable, and I think that's better than having a shitty teacher.
You've done a lot of thinking here, but if you did 80% of the thinking and 20% of the reading you'd reach better conclusions. There are systems that spend more per student than the US does, more % of GDP than the US does, they have lower classroom sizes than the US, they have better systems for gifted students, their students spend more time in class, they pay teachers professional salaries, they have more state of the art instructional programs, etc. etc. etc. None are trending towards the outcomes you're suggesting; in particular the EU isn't producing more billionaires (this is a product of income and wealth inequality, not educational system efficacy).
> I'd argue that you should take whichever option is best for society, i.e. costs it the least. Why?
> a) Societies cannot be comprised of mostly (weighting by utility) negative-externality people for very long.
> b) Everyone else is better off by eliminating such people, thus they are motivated to do so in whichever way is cheapest.
I can't imagine what you might mean by negative-externality people, but whatever it might be let me inform you there are lots of countries/governments/societies in the world that aren't doing so hot, and they've been doing not so hot for quite some time. Is this some kind of quasi-rational-market hypothesis for societies? Nowhere is this true. Why do people stay in abusive relationships? Why did Black people continue to live in States that practiced segregation? Why do people still eat unhealthy food, or smoke, or drink?
> If it were cheaper to just execute all criminals, or commit horrific human rights disasters to make prisons cheap to run, that's what society should do. Historically, that's what societies have done.
I think relying on the actions of governments who knew almost nothing (Earth is flat, what is air, diseases are punishment from God, the sun revolves around Earth) is a bankrupt argument. Governments have almost never been data-driven. Reducing the rubric of how governments/societies should act to "do whatever's cheaper" is... so wrong I don't even really know where to start. How do you justify investments? How do you justify things like entering WWII or The Manhattan Project? How do you know what's cheaper or will result in the most gains ahead of time? This can't be a real argument. Are we about to go the entire history of how governments work? I refuse. Do more reading.
> I think "people being products of systems" is a rather naive take; if people were products of stable systems (in the physics sense), punishment actually would work.
Punishment doesn't work. Deterrence is a myth, and recidivism rates are off the charts. Again you're naive to the criminal justice system. If we don't think better systems/environments lead to better outcomes and worse systems/environments lead to worse outcomes, why are we trying to improve the US educational system at all? A kid's educational attainment is preordained right? Even if you think this is a straw man, it does us no good to consider "some kids just suck" when building an educational system, again because of the School-to-Prison Pipeline where bad outcomes are so lopsided.
> Similarly, we should be able to do a cost-benefit analysis on teacher salaries. In reality, the most efficient use of money is to pour it into the top schools (and have entrance exams), but the metrics don't look as good.
Your argument relies on the prospect of these super students increasing GDP so much we offset the cost of shunting tons of students into the School-to-Prison pipeline. Not only is there no evidence for this, it's a deeply immoral system. I refuse to even continue considering it.
To be pointed about it, I have people in my family who are special needs. I myself was disruptive in school because of life circumstance. When you advocate literally for imprisoning me and members of my family, at some point I have to recognize we're fighting. I've reached that point now.
> I can't imagine what you might mean by negative-externality people
Google is your friend. Essentially, in a counterfactual universe where they never existed, the world would be better off. If you have more negative externalities than positive externalities, your society is draining wealth, and will eventually disappear.
> Punishment doesn't work. Deterrence is a myth, and recidivism rates are off the charts.
We've already gone over this. Go rehabilitate, I don't care. Just rehabilitate people in a way so they aren't actively commiting crimes against education.
> Your argument relies on the prospect of these super students increasing GDP so much we offset the cost of shunting tons of students into the School-to-Prison pipeline. Not only is there no evidence for this, it's a deeply immoral system. I refuse to even continue considering it.
You are trying to coerce one group into sacrifcing enormously for another group, and you say my system is immoral? If sacrifices have to be made (they don't), why do you get to choose who bleeds on the altar?
Also, there is plenty evidence that super students do offset the cost. For example, North Korea's system puts disproportionally more money into their top students, and they usually rank higher on the International Mathematics Olympiad than every European country except Russia. The benefit is mostly for their defense: they really needed nuclear weapons, and they couldn't get them without investing in their best students. They might not even exist as a country today if they didn't do so. What could be more beneficial to their society?
> To be pointed about it, I have people in my family who are special needs. I myself was disruptive in school because of life circumstance. When you advocate literally for imprisoning me and members of my family, at some point I have to recognize we're fighting. I've reached that point now.
This upsets me. Have you, this whole time, only been arguing for your in-group? Every time you said, "what is best for society," did you really just mean what is best for the people you care about? I, too, want what is best for my in-group, but I've tried to talk about how ranking/expulsions/etc. would increase wealth generation, and improve everyone's quality of life.
Quite frankly, your in-group needs my in-group, not the other way around. If we really are just trying to capture value for our in-groups, people in mine could just give up on public schools and go home-school their kids. I don't think this is optimal for either of our in-groups, but you have to acknowledge that if you want certain people to go to public school, you can't be defecting against those very people! If we really do have a conflict between two in-groups, why do you feel entitled to anything from the other side?
You've mentioned the school->prison pipeline, and how a lack of education brings out the pitchforks and torches. This is entirely true on the other side as well. As you saw in the comment section, a lot of smart people literally feel like school was prison to them. They were bullied, abused, had no freedom, etc. We've both acknowledged that bad students may become disaffected with school and society (if we don't rehabilitate properly), but only I've seemed to recognize that good students will too. Perhaps the difference is, disaffected bad students become violent, while disaffected good students become quantitative traders. Well, guess what? If your entitlement comes through a threat of violence, the correct response is to eliminate that threat.
Maybe you are alright with threatening violence, but I'd rather we not fight. And we don't have to. Society holds itself together through mutually beneficial deals (and a plethora of convenient lies). The minimum I'm asking for is for public schools to be mutually beneficial. This is why, although I think it is best for society to put extra resources into their top stuents, I am okay spending only equal resources.
"Expecting children to be responsible for their own actions "
And expecting other children to suffer for their actions is wildly unfair.
Life isn't fair.
>Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education.
They may have a right to an education, but they need to be at an alternative school with teachers equipped to handle their behavior and classmates who are in similar situations. If they’re going to ruin their classes for their classmates, those classmates shouldn’t be innocent, well-behaved students.
They have a right to education much like one has the right to bear arms or publish a book. You can have it, but your rights end where you demand someone else give it to you involuntarily, particularly with violence.
Notably, the courts say children don’t have those rights.
Also, essentially not ‘the right to an education’ but rather a legal mandate to be educated. The specifics of which vary by state.
Which is where an expulsion often leads, similar to how adults unable to function in society are channeled into SSDI, homelessness, or prison in some combination.
There are unlikely to be many caring and constructive adults there though, for reasons that should be obvious.
"Rights" only exist through the will of an omnipotent force, which is an undefined concept. I think it's better to respond to ill-defined arguments with simply that: "interpretation error, argument 'right' is ill-defined."
> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them.
Are you sure administrators care? I live in Oakland, where some of the public schools have absolutely abysmal (academic) statistics. I haven't checked the expulsion statistics. I'm not sure anyone cares.
In my experience, they start caring if the racial composition of the expulsions (or other discipline) does not match the study body.
The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education.
See here's the thing. Not they don't. They forfeit that right by being violent and disruptive.
Literal children are incapable of forfeiting their rights by being "violent and disruptive", and it would be insane if they could because they can't possibly begin to understand what they'd be giving up. Clearly that right is sometimes taken from them anyway, but that's neither the fault or a failure of the child.
Often kids who get their right to education taken from them are failed by their parents and/or by the schools, but the blame cannot be placed on the child for that. Every child, excepting those with significant mental illness or intellectual limitation, can and should be successfully educated. Any educational system that is incapable of handling a child's tantrum or helping a child in crisis is a failed system.
What about the other children's right to education this being impinged by the disruptive students?
It isn't an either / or. Expelled children have to go somewhere. So you provide education / rehabilitation facilities where they hopefully manage to get their behaviour under control and can be brought back into mainstream education or stay in those institutions where they can at least get a bit of an education rather than just being left to roam the streets. Whether there's the appetite to fund that kind of institution properly is another matter.
This is what they did in my school district when I was growing up. You had 3 tiers. First tier is regular school. If you get expelled, you go to tier 2 which is a school for people who got expelled. If you get expelled from there, you go to tier 3 school, which is where all the really bad kids go. This worked pretty well, keeping in mind all the students' needs in mind.
They did away with that since I was young and now they just let the disruptive kids run rampant.
Keep in mind, you only have one chance really to get an education. If your learning is impeded by uncontrollable children, you now have a greater risk of life failure because you weren't able to learn the fundamentals, because a class of 30 was always being disrupted by one or two people. Say you didn't learn pre-Algebra well because of disruption; now you're behind when it comes to the higher level math for the rest of your school tenure and ultimately, life. These disruptions could have major long term consequences for other kids trying to learn.
Finally, teachers' average turnaround is 4 years last time I checked. That means there are very few veteran teachers available to show new teachers the ropes and how to manage a classroom full of teenage kids. Not that it matters, the new teachers will look for other careers within 4 years on average. The cycle continues.
> If you get expelled, you go to tier 2 which is a school for people who got expelled.
So if you're a kid who's already struggling, you get sent to be surrounded by other kids who are already struggling.
> you only have one chance really to get an education.
That's true for the bad kids too.
I 100% get where you're coming from. My kids come home from school and tell stories about disruptive stuff other kids do and how much it gets in the way of the school functioning effectively.
At the same time... what are we supposed to do with those kids? The kids that have behavioral problems are much more likely to be that way because they have a bad home life. So if you expel them, they're missing out on education and they're spending more time in a bad environment. They're not going to get any better after that. Then what? Now they're a year behind academically and have the shame of being expelled. Their behavior is likely even worse because they spent a year not being socialized in a bad environment. So they're even worse next year, and they get expelled again.
Eventually, they stop going to school entirely. But at least here in the US, the number of jobs available to people without any kind of school degree gets smaller every year. So now they can't find work.
What do desperate people do? Commit crimes. So now we have a system that effectively just produces uneducated mentally unhealthy criminals.
>Now they're a year behind academically
I think you're missing something. Getting expelled doesn't mean you didn't attend school for the remainder of the year. Getting expelled meant you were sent to a school for expelled kids. If you got expelled from there, you went to a school for expelled x2 kids. In the US, it's illegal to not attend school under the age of 16.
>and have the shame of being expelled.
Shame is a powerful motivator, but only works sometimes. The alternative is to ignore the behavior or reward it, both worse solutions IMO.
I think the idea is if kids are disruptive, put them with other disruptive kids so the amount of disruption is minimized. All the kids in the disruption school are already disruptive. Also, you don't want to teach the current non-disruptive kids that being disruptive is acceptable, otherwise, you'll just create more disruptive kids by inaction.
"So if you're a kid who's already struggling,"
Do you really want to force good students to have to be in the same classroom as the kind of students who get expelled from public schools? Do you understand just how bad your behavior has to be to actually get expelled?
"At the same time... what are we supposed to do with those kids? "
The most important thing is to NOT allow them to prevent other kids from getting an a good education.
> Do you really want to force good students to have to be in the same classroom as the kind of students who get expelled from public schools?
Where precisely do you think "the kind of kids who get expelled from public schools" should be? I mean that literally, concretely.
Do we send them home where they are statistically much more likely to be abused and not have access to reliable nutrition? Imprison them? Ship them to some sort of Lord of the Flies island?
Do I want disruptive kids in the same room as my kids? Not really. Is it the least bad place I can think of to put them? Unfortunately, yes.
This is a deeply hard problem. Sure, if you only care about well-behaved kids it's easy: kick out the bad eggs and forget they ever existed. But if you consider that those bad kids are actual people who will still participate in your society, you need some solution for how to help them.
>Where precisely do you think "the kind of kids who get expelled from public schools" should be? I mean that literally, concretely.
That's really the make-or-break question. IIRC, it was kids who constantly got into fights. Kids caught with knives, drugs, or firecrackers; kids in gangs, etc. It was kids who constantly disrupted the classroom, even after being assigned to after school detention multiple times. It was kids who disrespected teachers (cussing them out, threatening them, attacking them, etc). It was kids that got pregnant. It was even kids that cheated because it was taken more seriously back then.
The levels were: write sentences on the board after class, get sent to the principal's office with a parent call, get after school detention, get after school detention a whole lot, get expelled. Sometimes like in the case of knives, it would go straight to expulsion.
Today, teachers will send kids to the principal's office to get them out of the classroom and they just get sent back to continue disruption. Back then, teachers were expected to teach and the administration dealt with unruly kids. Disciplining kids who are bad is hard on the heart, but in the long term, not disciplining them is way worse for them. There's no discipline today in schools (other than getting arrested, which really should be avoided at all costs). There hasn't been discipline in schools for a generation. It shows not only in schools but in society as a whole.
> Is it the least bad place I can think of to put them?
Bad for whom? If you have the two options:
(A) Bad for people causing negative externalities.
(B) Bad for people causing positive externalities.
I will choose the former over the latter every time. Sure, it's bad for the kid to be getting abused since they're expelled from school, but it's bad for the kid to be getting abused since this other kid wasn't expelled from school.
Your solution it to let disruptive children ruin the education for all students so that no one gets a good education? You are making home-schooling sound much more appealing. Public Schools aren't supposed to be daycare centers, they are supposed to teach children.
I think you and many others in this discussion presume that kids fall into a neat binary classification:
1. Good kids who were always and will always be good kids.
2. Bad kids who were always and will always be bad kids.
Further, any interaction between a bad kid and a good kid is strictly making things worse for the good kid.
I can definitely understand how someone might end up with that belief system. It was probably formed while they themselves were a kid and thus lacks the nuance and maturity that comes with time.
A closer picture of reality is that:
1. People go through good and bad periods. An "good" kid might become a "bad" kid for a year while going through the divorce of their parents. A "bad" kid might get the structure or diagnosis they need and blossom into their better potential. Kids mature at different rates and times.
2. Being around "good" kids is good for "bad" kids. If the people in their home life are awful, having a community of mentally healthy kids around them during the day can be very helpful for learning how to behave better.
3. Being around "bad" kids is often good for "good" kids. Obviously, it's not OK for some kid to bully or abuse another. But short of that, it's often useful and educational for kids to be exposed to a variety of personalities and maturity levels. Do we want our kids to grow into adults that have the skills to take care of and help other people who are struggling? I do. They can learn many of those skills in school by being part of the support network for bad kids.
Often, when they do, it turns out that kid wasn't so bad in the first place.
Overall, this simplified mindset is one I see all the time where we look at situations as a consumer: Is this a thing I want to "purchase" or not? Instead, it's better to look at the entire situation as an environment that you are both consuming and yourself part of.
They always talk about "it takes a village". We all both need a village and are the village for each other.
1. Good kids who were always and will always be good kids.
2. Bad kids who were always and will always be bad kids.
Further, any interaction between a bad kid and a good kid is strictly making things worse for the good kid.
My experience in K-12 proves that this is in fact largely TRUE.
" Being around "bad" kids is often good for "good" kids. "
This is just a mind-numbingly stupid take. A 10th grader taking advanced calc and programming robots doesn't benefit from being forced to interact with an illiterate 19 year old who has been held back 3 times and steals his lunch money every day. This is in fact almost a human rights violation for the smart kid.
> My experience in K-12
"I can definitely understand how someone might end up with that belief system. It was probably formed while they themselves were a kid and thus lacks the nuance and maturity that comes with time."
You think making good student's life miserable is "nuance"?
> Literal children are incapable of forfeiting their rights by being "violent and disruptive"
They can. And do. We have 12-year-old "children" literally robbing stores around here.
If this happens, they should exercise their right to education from inside a locked institution.
sometimes i think im sheltered and i am but then i see stuff like this and feel good
Thank you for demonstrating the point that there are constraints and complications that are difficult to appreciate from the outside. The law generally disagrees with you.
And that really hasn't turned out very well. Letting the most disruptive students ruin the education of other students isn't fair at all to those students AND is pretty damn stupid when you consider how much tax money is spent educating those students and the harm to society from not educating them.
To be clear, I am not about to justify any sort of violence anywhere. That said...
Many violent and disruptive students were just kids with special needs. And I don't mean mental conditions or anything like that.
I mean a kid that would do WAY better if he was in a trade class doing something that motivates them, rather than being frustrated and forced to endure a rubbish secondary education, several hours crammed into a small room with other people and getting nowhere.
But of course that's more difficult to implement than a generic standardising/equalising pipeline of norm-conforming average citizen production.
I think we should focus on students already trying to be a positive influence in the school, rather than catering to the bottom quintile. After all, that is how schools got in this situation in the first place.
My point was not clear. What I'm saying is that often it would be better for a certain profile of people to not be forced to attend what in my country is mandatory secondary education, and that it would be better to put them to work on stuff they might enjoy.
But of course that would mean the system needs to contemplate individuals, instead of collectives, and the system doesn't like that.
> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions.
Are there actionable consequences if these numbers get too high? If they're merely published, as a parent, I would see high numbers as a positive signal if anything...
When I was in high school there was a local school that was notorious. Apparently here the public schools were not allowed to expel kids if they would no longer have local options. This was the worst school, and thus the last place the kids would end up. So it was basically just a prison.
There's a big difference between someone with an IEP (usually massive trauma and mental illness also) doing things and a "regular" student doing them. Expelling a kid usually just means they move to a different school, and all expulsion is doing is moving the burden down the chain, usually from more affluent places where parents are equipped to complain, to less affluent ones. Particularly if the room destroying-violence kiddo's family don't have lawyers.
A big difference to whom?
When I judge an educational institution I could not care less why some child being significantly disruptive is tolerated, even slightly. That institution simply becomes a non starter for a place I might send my children.
Of course parents who don't care about such things, or don't have the luxury of being able to choose, would accept such things. As would those who themselves have 'problem children.' Now think about what this does to the quality of that institution over time.
I do think it's totally fair to put pressure on the school to reduce mainstreaming of kids with major behavior issues. But it's really not about "tolerating" or "not tolerating"- you're witness a system failure and responding by making the problems worse for everyone but the wealthy in a society where governance is premised on the population at large being well educated.
* Tossing around hot potato kids doesn't resolve things in a good for society way.
* Concentrating the proportion of kids interfering with normal income families by removing all the high-income kids from the school doesn't resolve things in a good for society way.
* Letting people choose to send their kids to charters while all the kids of low-involvement parents are still stuck in a situation with a concentrated proportion of problems doesn't either.
Unfortunately there are a several things at play:
* Increased availability of specialized, non-mainstream resources for moderate+ (moderate is pretty severe most of the time IMO) kiddos, gen pop behavior interventions, etc.
* Better general welfare for parents (often unstable/low income ones).
* More push back from districts when parents w/ lawyers demand stuff that's bad for the rest of the classroom.
* Teachers quality needs improving. (Many reasons.)
IMO institutional quality is purposefully damaged by people who hate paying taxes or supporting the general welfare - public schools are basically being purposefully doomed in much the same way that Republicans say "government always bad" and then set out to make it fail on purpose to prove their point, only with a wider variety of motives at play. "I'm sending my kids to private school, why should I pay taxes for public schools?" is not an uncommon strain of thought.
It's a doom loop leading to societal regression into a stratified society unable to properly self-govern IMO.
Kids with major behavioral issues should be getting a bootcamp-style education, where their tendencies can be held in check by adequate physical supervision. This is not about denying anyone an education - if anything, it's doing the exact opposite and addressing their unique educational needs in the most effective way.
While I certainly agree that specialized care and instruction is needed, it is unfortunately not that case that "bootcamp-style" is actually universally fitting. Autistic kids need autism specific early intervention. Many kids with extreme behaviors or mood disorders will respond better to reward structures than they will to heavy-handed discipline. Appropriate settings with professionals trained in behaviors (IE the management and alterations of) can have substantial success, especially if the home environment is not antagonistic/trauma inducing.
> ...unfortunately not that case that "bootcamp-style" is actually universally fitting. Autistic kids need autism specific early intervention. Many kids with extreme behaviors or mood disorders will respond better to reward structures...
These things are not mutually incompatible. Kids with autism who actually have major behavioral issues will clearly benefit from some physical supervision, in addition to whatever autism-specific intervention may be most appropriate for them. Similarly, rewards for good behavior can often go hand-in-hand with some sort of more rigorous discipline for those who persist in damaging and harmful conduct - these things will hopefully be complementary.
It hardly matters to other students WHY a particular student is making it very hard for them to learn and using up all the teacher's time. Only that they ARE.
Why would a school expel students? They get money for each person sitting in the desk.
Administrators are constantly castigated for disciplinary actions, as the "throwing chairs" behavior is not evenly spread among the different cultures that students come from.
Different rates of suspensions leads to accusations of racism, and said accusations lead to Hail Mary attempts to make unequal rates equal, including forbidding any meaningful type of punishment for certain varieties of students.
If this sounds far fetched, public officials in Rotherham became objectively evil in their attempts to avoid racism accusations, "1400 children betrayed" is a extremely understated headline, if you want to learn more.
> Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works.
Our local education superintendant _in_ _his_ _program_ _document_ is saying that he will go after any teacher attempting to impose discipline in a "community inappropriate manner".
So basically, nobody gets expelled.
I have friends who were teachers in San Francisco unified School district who quit because students were literally attacking and breaking the bones of teachers and not being expelled.
It was a really hard choice for them because they were a bleeding heart liberal and wanted to use their PHD to help the underprivileged
> Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem.
I don’t care whose problem it is, I’m not subjecting my kids to that kind of nonsense.
> a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation
To have a great school district where housing isn't overly expensive is rare these days. I would have to guess it is hard to find a house in such a district unless you waive inpections and pay in cash.
After spending some time on the teachers subreddit I completely understand why so many people are choosing to homeschool. The amount of in-classroom abuse -- verbal and physical -- in addition to the entitled parents is shocking.
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There's also rising awareness among parents of neurodiversity while many schools are still stagnant and failing to correct.
I have ADHD. My wife doesn't, but most of her siblings do. Our kids do. Our kids love reading and love learning new things, and I know from my own experience that the fastest way to kill that love would be to send them to a public school that doesn't know how to work with ADHD brains.
There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom. This matches my experience, and I want better for my kids.
> There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom.
Doctors aren't sure if I have ADHD or Major Depression or Bipolar II (I've been diagnosed and attempted to be treated for all three), but this fits into my experience.
I was consistently frustrating to my high school teachers, because I was clearly learning the material, but I wouldn't do my homework, and I'd get bored during class, and as a result I would get bad grades. I don't think the teachers took any joy in giving me a bad grade, but they were kind of forced into it because I didn't really fit into the bureaucratic mold that they needed me to fit in.
This eventually led to me almost flunking out, and eventually dropping out of my first attempt at university. I did eventually finish my bachelors, but it was at Western Governors University (WGU), which feels almost tailor-made for the ADHD-brained people.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but the American GPA system still kind of gives me anxiety when I think about it.
> Western Governors University (WGU), which feels almost tailor-made for the ADHD-brained people
I would very much appreciate it if you could expand on this point a bit. What makes WGU particularly suited for folks with ADHD?
You pay per-term, not per class, and you can take as many classes as you'd like per term. You take one class at a time, and many classes can be finished after taking a test and/or completing a project.
I say it feels tailor-made for ADHD because it feels almost "gamified". It's addictive to see how many classes you can knock out in a week, and you can work at whatever pace you'd like.
Part of the reason I always did poorly in school is that I didn't like how slow everything went, but with WGU I can go whatever pace I want, and the faster I go, the more money I save. Since I'm an extremely impatient person, the fact that I was able to quickly go through the material while only having to focus on one course at a time was kind of game-changing to me.
I already had a decade of software engineering experience when I did WGU, so when I did the Computer Science degree on there I finished the entirety of it (having to start from scratch) in six months, for a grand total cost of around ~$4600.
WGU is hardly the fanciest school, but it's good enough, inexpensive, and most importantly it is fully accredited. If you always struggled with traditional universities, I recommend giving it a look.
> you can take as many classes as you'd like per term. You take one class at a time, and many classes can be finished after taking a test and/or completing a project.
Is it all based on self-guided learning? Because I can't see how this system could work with the classic system of bottom-up lectures accompanied by tutorials and exercise classes?
It’s self-guided. There aren’t lectures or anything. They have reading stuff they recommend, and there are course instructors you can reach out to if you need help.
Some courses do have recorded lectures, but nothing live.
I have always loved the idea of a one class at a time model. I think Cornell has a program like this that I read about too.
I think that there's a reasonably good chance that if school were like that by default, I probably would have done better. It's hard to juggle six classes at a time like you're expected to in American high schools.
If I had a magic wand and could make the education system however I'd like, I'd make it so every student spends the exact same amount of time on the subject, but I'd make it so you only ever manage a single class at once, instead of trying to interleave everything.
This isn't even that weird of a concept, even in the US; American summer schools will often do exactly this. Instead of doing an hour per day over the course of 180 days, you do roughly thirty six-hour days. That's how I took gym in high school, and how I retook calculus (even though I passed the AP exam first-try).
That’s pretty much what Cornell does. It’s basically 3 weeks on, all day, one class, a week off, then repeat.
https://www.cornellcollege.edu/one-course-at-a-time/
Interesting. I'm afraid I hadn't heard of Cornell College (apparently not related to Cornell University), but it seems legit.
I hadn’t either. I just saw the program years ago and it stuck with me as a great model.
Honestly, I'd bet there are a variety of delivery models that would be most effective for each person. Having choice in that would really be amazing. Unfortunately, its also very hard to organize and measure.
Yeah, that's true. I'm not entirely sure how you'd implement it but it would be great if there was options to do the one-class-at-a-time model or the traditional one if you prefer, though almost by definition the public school system is (mostly) one-size-fits-all.
Oh damn, xe really want to look into WGU after this.
It's definitely not for everyone, and to be honest I'd recommend a trying a traditional university first if that's an option.
The reason I liked it is because I have always just been better at teaching myself stuff than being taught. I like working at my own (usually faster) pace and I really hate waiting to make progress. WGU is a perfect system for someone with that mentality, particularly since it's inexpensive.
I think the quality of the education is "ok". I think you'll leave with a good enough education in computer science to be "useful", but I will acknowledge that the fast-pace does make it easier to get away with skipping the boring stuff than it would be with a traditional school.
If you already have a lot of experience with software, WGU can work as a "legitimizer" if nothing else, though. I had a bit of a complex about dropping out and not having a bachelors. That pretty much went away once I got my bachelors from WGU.
Oh! Xir entire software developer career has been built on skills xe taught xirselves from childhood (never took a CS course in college; majored in fine arts) so this sounds absolutely perfect! Probably would have crushed it there back in the day, too. Thank you!
ADD/ADHD was over-diagnosed for a long time. Why are you so sure all the people you mention have it vs other explanations? What is it you think makes ADHD brains special?
As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
It’s also debatable how over diagnosed ADHD is. The diagnosis criteria has certainly changed, but current literature estimates about 6% adults are believed to some degree of ADHD [1]—though many are high functioning and find ways to cope with varying degrees of success and difficulty.
0. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...
1. https://chadd.org/about-adhd/general-prevalence-adults/
Totally on board with your comments on disparagement, but there's been a rash of autism diagnoses in my daughter's school to the point where in some classes 20% of students have been diagnosed as autistic. I feel at that point people are diagnosing personality, and it's using the (UK) special educational needs system to force schools to pay attention to different learning styles. (My daughter's school is actually pretty good on that front if you point it out to the staff, so I'm not sure what's triggering it particularly in her school, but it may be to do with releasing government funding for extra classroom assistants).
ADHD and autism are diagnosed based on behaviors. This might work for cases at the more extreme end of the spectrum, but when it comes to trying to identify more mild cases, you are going to start seeing a lot of overlap in behaviors of the larger population. Couple that with extra funding for kids who can be said to have ADHD and autism, and you get a recipe for overdiagnosis.
Maybe it is worth it to try to make sure fewer kids with the issue slip through the cracks at the expense of diagnosing kids who don't actually have it. Maybe it's not, but it makes sense why it can happen.
You and GP make great points, and these are situations that are becoming more common. Luckily, there is some light at the end of the tunnel (at least for ADHD). There's been a lot of study in recent years and medical science is starting to identify physiological markers commonly correlated with ADHD [1][2][3]. The sad thing is that the science hasn't advanced far enough to include these in the diagnostic criteria for ADHD. It's my hope we'll see an updated DSM and medical training within the next decade, but it'll be a long and painful wait.
1. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/endocrinology/articles/...
2. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC7461955
3. https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/human-neuroscience/arti...
> As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
Not my intention, but I was diagnosed as a kid when over-diagnosing did seem to be a trend, and I've become skeptical in these times of self IDing.
When I mentioned over-diagnosing it was more referring to the 90s, but I think a lot of adults who were diagnosed then may have been misdiagnosed and never checked.
My heart goes out to you. Misdiagnosis is just as bad (and sometimes worse) than not being diagnosed. I've known people who were diagnosed with ADHD with very bad outcomes because it later turned out that they had bipolar disorder; the wrong medical treatment literally ruined their life. At the same time, I've had periods in my life where I couldn't focus on important conversations with my partner because of a noisy bird nearby.
If you suspect you have a condition or someone is advocating for you to seek treatment, please seek a qualified psychiatrist who's specifically trained in diagnosis. Better yet, make sure they're in touch with your primary care provider [1]. Psychiatric assessment and diagnosis its own psychiatric specialty for a reason, but doctors with these qualifications are criminally difficult to get time with for a variety of reasons.
1. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC10669410/
Both me and my little brother were diagnosed as kids also. Neither of us have it--we were just little shits.
Me and my friends were in the wrong side of the culture (tabletop RPGs, video games and heavy metal) and I can bet we would all be diagnosed back then as it felt it was mostly "feisty kids that don't fit".
There are many volumes on the subject, but I'm honestly tired of debating this with people who doubt ADHD is a thing. If you're legitimately curious, there are myriad sources out there about the differences in ADHD brains.
Suffice it to say that I'm sure. All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
"Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't. I just know that we don't work in the way that the world expects us to.
Thank you for answering.
I don't doubt the research, it's more I doubt how many diagnoses were accurate.
I was diagnosed with ADD as well, so I'm not being entrely dismissive. In this age of self ID I think there can be reason to be.
> All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?
> "Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't.
Not my intention, I should have said unique or significantly different in the contexts you mentioned or something.
> If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?
There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes—there's too much similarity and too many people with both to be a coincidence. But in the case of my family, most of us do just fine in reading social cues... when we're paying attention. Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.
> Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.
Yes, this is something I deal with as well.
It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.
I've wondered if I am on the spectrum also but I don't match a lot of the base/core traits, although I feel ADHD or ADD alone doesn't explain some of my, ahem, quirks either.
I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.
> It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.
These days they don't draw a distinction any more. There are different presentations of ADHD, but it's all the same disorder.
> I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.
No worries, sorry for reacting negatively! I've had a lot of people assume that ADHD is not a thing at all, and it gets exhausting having to explain it. I pattern matched on your comment too aggressively.
Look into AuDHD, PDA, and monotropism. See if any of it resonates. Definitely feels like our current diagnosis paradigm is in dire need of changes.
> There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes
Autism and adhd definitely appear to share traits, and I suspect there's a shared cluster of genes affecting certain aspects of neural linking between regions of the brain. Even without shared genes it makes sense that a "networked system" of core brain functions would share similar behaviors if the parameters were tweaked in similar ways.
Why are you so confident that they shouldn't be confident?
Were you the downvote I got instantly after commenting, lol? I'm simply curious and that should be sufficient, I'm not really sure what it has to do with you though.
Homeschooling parents are divided into two separate groups. One is secular with college degrees who really want to give their children a better education than they could get in a school AND are able to do so.
The other group are very religious who don't want their children learning about evolution or many other secular things.
The only real issue I have with homeschooling in the US is that regulations vary wildly by state. Some states have so little enforcement that it is possible to teach a child essentially NOTHING by the time they are 18 and face no punishment for ruining that child's life.
Certainly a biased view of religious home schoolers. Most of my religious friends who homeschool are college educated and many have postgraduate degrees. Some do disbelieve evolution, or at least disdain it a bit. Pretty much all of them are motivated people however. Of course that's just my little bubble.
The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. It always comes up in these discussions as a boogeyman anyway.
It's not necessarily just the idea of evolution itself, but rather that it's indicative of someone's willingness to continuously and actively reject all evidence in order to maintain the beliefs they've decided are true.
Most of the disagreements are fundamentally metaphysical (would God make fossils?), so debates about evidence, expertise, and scientific consensus are beside the point.
But highly educated people believe this too. There’s lots of wacky and unscientific, ideas out there that people believe because they come from Columbia University social science professors instead of the Bible. After the last several years I take back everything I said when I was younger and an atheist about religious people and not believing in evolution.
The trick here is that we can reject OP's unnecessarily binary categorization as a premise and focus on the illogical and under-developed personal systems for testing reality and challenging beliefs that represent a far greater concern than the particulars of categorically unexamined beliefs.
Precisely this.
Xe were raised young earth creationist and that requires gaslighting your own child on established science, going so far as to regularly test them on their willing to believe or lie about believing patent untruths. Oh, plus the constant repression of one's identity, the lack of exposure to a wider range of perspectives and experiences, and the panopticon of surveillance by people with near total control of your socializing, especially in the suburbs. That really fucks a child up.
That kind of homeschooling is a cult, no matter how much our wider culture has normalized the literal insanity.
"The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. "
Not accepting it leads to a profoundly WRONG worldview that bleeds into everyday life in many ways.
Such as? I'm honestly and genuinely curious.
Antibiotic resistance
Existence of vestigial structures in organism. Why do humans get goosebumps when we don't have enough hair to insulate us? Because it's an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors when the reflex would actually cause hair to trap more air for better insulation.
Understanding evolution is crucial for crop management. The development of pesticide resistance in insects follows the same principles as antibiotic resistance. Farmers who don't understand evolutionary principles might not recognize the importance of rotating pesticides or implementing refuge areas to prevent resistance from developing.
Medical research often relies on animal models because of shared evolutionary history. Our biological similarities with other mammals exist because of common ancestry. Without this framework, it becomes harder to understand why medicines tested on mice or primates might work in humans, or why certain diseases affect multiple species similarly.
Human susceptibility to back and knee pain is a consequence of how recent bipedalism is in our evolution. Same for why humans are so prone to chocking, our larynx evolved to enable speech at the cost of making it easier for food to enter it.
Thanks to ubertaco for the neat response point by point, but I don't think any of your points are relevant, even if they are true.
I know a couple of big-scale farmers in the US. They are Christian, and believe in Creation. That doesn't stop them from using the necessary pesticides, or choosing the adequate strain of corn seeds, etc.
Believing in Creation doesn't turn you into an illiterate moron. Believing God created everything according to a design and purpose is not incompatible with acknowledging the presence of similarities and design patterns throughout all of Creation, and believing that doesn't suddenly poof take away your rational capabilities to think and understand things.
Either way, I was asking for is a real situation in which someone will be negatively impacted because they hold a Creationist belief.
Will a Creationist live a sad life without fully embracing the misteries of goose-bumps? Will a farmer not use pesticides, or choose the wrong one because Creationism? Will Advil won't work on a Christian because they don't understand that rats and rabbits are our cousins? Will their knees hurt more (or maybe less?) because they think humans were standing up from the beginning?
More generally all of modern technology is a result of the exact same processes that led to the theory of evolution. If you reject it where do you draw the line?
"Believing in Creation doesn't turn you into an illiterate moron"
You kinda do have to be a moron to be a true young earth creationist. I went to Lutheran schools that taught me that the earth was created by god 6000 years ago and evolution was an evil plot created by Satan. By the time I was 15 I realized how stupid this was and how the theory of evolution fits the evidence and is self-consistent. One of the biggest realizations I had is that the theory of evolution, due to requiring such VAST amounts of time for evolution to occur, actually has nuclear fusion embedded in it as a dependency because nothing else could allow a star to shine for so long. When Darwin first proposed the theory a major and reasonable objection was the timescales needed because at the time it was thought that the Sun was powered only by gravitational collapse which would last less than 20 million years. Then this utterly absurd source of power for stars was discovered that could allow them to last for almost 1000 times as long.
I'm actually sorry to insist, but whatever.
> all of modern technology is a result of the exact same processes that led to the theory of evolution
Could you please elaborate? I'm not sure I understand. Are you referring to the scientific method?
If so, I really feel the need to insist that being Creationist or Christian is not exclusive or incompatible with that. Guess what, I am Christian, I believe in a Creator God and yet I am (surprise, surprise) an accomplished Software Engineer.
I can understand if you think I'm stupid because of my beliefs. That's your opinion and I'm totally fine with it.
What I'm trying to say is that holding these beliefs doesn't make you intellectually impaired, or unable to use reasoning. We're just working with different assumptions.
You have faith in Nothing, from which everything came, I have faith in Something (God) from which everything came. And it is faith indeed, because you don't and can't possibly have definite proven knowledge of the origin of things. You weren't there.
To you, nuclear fusion is evidence of evolution. Fine. To me, alongside the rest of Creation, it is evidence of God.
Therefore, you will reason a certain set of things, and I will reason a different set of things. Because we have different starting points, we will reach different conclusions.
"What I'm trying to say is that holding these beliefs doesn't make you intellectually impaired, or unable to use reasoning. "
They prove their is something fundamentally wrong with your logical reasoning and evaluation of evidence.
You use God as an explanation for why the universe exists but cannot explain where God came from so you are just adding an extra unnecessary step.
Your software engineering background gives you a unique perspective to understand this: When debugging code, you follow the evidence (logs, stack traces, reproducible errors) rather than starting with assumptions about what should be happening. Evolution works the same way - we follow the evidence rather than starting with assumptions about how life should have developed.
The power of evolutionary theory isn't just that it explains what we see - it's that it makes testable predictions. For example, evolutionary theory predicted we would find transitional fossils in specific geological layers before we actually found them. It predicted specific genetic relationships between species that were later confirmed by DNA sequencing. Just as in software engineering, a theory that makes accurate predictions is more valuable than one that only explains what we already know.
You're absolutely right that being religious doesn't make someone intellectually impaired. But perhaps consider that accepting evolution doesn't require abandoning faith in God - it might instead lead to a deeper appreciation of the elegant mechanisms through which creation could have unfolded.
Exactly this.
Not to mention the tens of thousands of people who were killed in the witch trials (medieval and contemporary), among so very many other examples.
Few things are more personally relevant than not getting tortured and executed by your neighbors because you were granted no defense against spectral evidence.
> Few things are more personally relevant than not getting tortured and executed by your neighbors because you were granted no defense against spectral evidence.
As @arkey points out, this happens with atheistic beliefs as well. By numbers communist purges have killed vastly more people than all religions combined just due to the numbers of people involved in modern ages.
The denunciations are very similar with actual evidence rarely being required or needed. Or it’s based on some characteristic of being on an outside group. Netflix’s adaptation of the Chinese authors book “Three body problem” gives a visceral showcasing of what that would’ve been like as one of the characters father is denounced and killed during that time for having “anti-Marxist” beliefs like gravity.
I’ve been to the Pol Pot’s killing trees in Cambodia where they slaughtered millions of people. Anyone who was educated in any way were considered polluted by capitalism and killed. Things like having spectacles was sufficient evidence.
I’ve seen the holocaust monuments in Berlin and Tel Aviv where the ideals of racial purity based on pseudo scientific interpretations of evolution were a key philosophical underpinning.
Actually much of the anti-evolutionary zeal in the US can be partially traced back to progressives (of that period) use of “evolution” to justify mass forced sterilization of “undesirables” by several US states during the 1910-1930’s.
Really humans are pretty flawed with any belief system. You fool yourself if you think “scientific” or “atheist” are any hindrance to these group behaviors.
Oh honey, xe are visibly queer. None of the above is new to xe, as a matter of survival. And a matter of sanity, as xe were raised to believe that the world was created from whole cloth six thousands years ago and that dinosaurs either lived with humans or were an invention of the devil.
There are no such things as atheist beliefs any more than there are a-unicorn beliefs, even if many things have been done in its name. The same goes for evolution. And no, communism isn't any more inherently atheistic than German fascism was inherently Catholic (it certainly wasn't atheistic) nor US democracy inherently Protestant. Anyone doing anything "in the name of evolution" is projecting their own hate and small-mindedness onto whatever convenient vocabulary at hand, as has happened over and over and over long before science. Avoid confusing belief with confidence in replicability, not when only one was sufficient for humanity to reach the moon.
No, as a science-minded secular materialistic atheist, xe are burdened with expecting nuance, detail, precision, specificity, and consistency of xirselves and in xir communications. But xe also expect the same of others in kind. Tell xe again how belief will save you from junk forensic science if you are ever accused falsely of a crime? Because actual science has no patience with such nonsense whereas xir original point still stands. We can resume this discussion after that.
What about the tens of millions of people who have been killed because atheism?
But how about this: the first time that any relevant powers decided that slavery was wrong at a global level was due to Christian beliefs, fancy that. And luckily they went on to impose that moral belief to the rest of the world. (England, France vs. Slavery)
It's true that a lot of evil has been done in the name of Christianity, but that's not of Christianity. If I came to your home and punched you in the face in the name of your mother, would you blame your mother?
But Christianity and the Bible have been abused very wrongly by evil powers as tools for control, something possible through deceiving illiterate, uneducated people.
As some other comments mention, Protestant Evangelicals made a big push for literacy precisely so people could read and interpret the Bible themselves, without depending on interested third parties.
Anyone taking a little time to read the Bible will see and understand that the Crusades were wrong, racism is wrong, oppressing women is wrong, and so on.
To play the devil's advocate here, as someone who grew up homeschooled and in a culture of "micro-scale evolution exists, but macro-scale evolution has not been demonstrated":
>Antibiotic resistance
...is a micro-scale adaptation, like an organism's immune response. Recognizing it does not require belief in a prehistoric common ancestor for all organisms; it just requires observing changes that happen on a much smaller and more rapid scale.
>Existence of vestigial structures in organism. Why do humans get goosebumps when we don't have enough hair to insulate us? Because it's an evolutionary leftover from our hairy ancestors when the reflex would actually cause hair to trap more air for better insulation.
This is non-falsifiable conjecture about a pre-historic past based on observation of present structures. It is equivalent to "we obviously know that dinosaurs did not have feathers, because their skeletons do not have feathers, and feathers would have made them more visible to predators, so they wouldn't have had feathers."
>Understanding evolution is crucial for crop management. The development of pesticide resistance in insects follows the same principles as antibiotic resistance.
...which, again, is a micro-scale adaptation, like an organism's immune response. You can notice pesticide resistance occurring in pests and rotate your pesticides without having to sign on to the unverifiable claim that this happens because all life derives from a single organism.
>Medical research often relies on animal models because of shared evolutionary history. Our biological similarities with other mammals exist because of common ancestry. Without this framework, it becomes harder to understand why medicines tested on mice or primates might work in humans, or why certain diseases affect multiple species similarly.
This is more non-falsifiable distant-past conjecture based on observation of current structures. Is it necessary to believe a particular set of conjectures about the origins of mammals' biological similarities in order to recognize the fact in front of you that the mammals are biologically similar, and thus some mechanisms of action may apply across species, provided those similarities are retained?
>Human susceptibility to back and knee pain is a consequence of how recent bipedalism is in our evolution. Same for why humans are so prone to chocking, our larynx evolved to enable speech at the cost of making it easier for food to enter it.
...which, again, is non-falsifiable distant-past conjecture that has no bearing on recognizing the existence of the verifiable current-day reality in front of you: humans have back and knee pain. Is it necessary to accept a particular set of unprovable conjectures about the distant-past origins of this particular skeletal structure in order to make decisions about how best to treat a symptom that exists today resulting from the skeletal structure that you see immediately in front of you?
Xir father used to argue the same thing.
But the micro vs. macro distinction is only one of time and scale and that's the whole point: species aren't "real," even fish aren't "real" in any ontological sense, but the countless organisms that we categorize as such existed, exist, and will continue to exist regardless of how we conceive of them.
The ask of evolution and science in general is to accept the incredibly narrow capacity of human cognition as a starting point for an even deeper understanding rather than an end goal to rationalize towards.
>But the micro vs. macro distinction is only one of time and scale and that's the whole point: species aren't "real," even fish aren't "real" in any ontological sense, but the countless organisms that we categorize as such existed, exist, and will continue to exist regardless of how we conceive of them.
This is an excellent rebuttal to the micro/macro distinction, because it's working in the correct direction, which you've stated well:
>to accept the incredibly narrow capacity of human cognition as a starting point for an even deeper understanding rather than an end goal to rationalize towards.
Using the notion of "species" as a "ground truth", as though it were some biological law, is a self-defeating point precisely because the definition of "species" is "a somewhat-arbitrary taxonomy developed by people to try to group organisms together based on observed common traits."
Want to have your mind blown? The creationist fallacy of "irreducible complexity" isn't just wrong for eyeballs and flagellum but for upward complexity as well. And lateral complexity.
OK, for falsifiable how about evolution predicts patterns of genetic similarity between species that match their apparent morphological relationships - a correlation that didn't have to exist but does.
That's not what falsifiable means. It's not experimentally verifiable. There is no way to conduct a test that would negate it if it were untrue.
It is why, being intellectually honest, the theory of evolution as the origin of species is called a "theory" in the academic sense: it's a proposed model that fits the data available on hand, but which has not been experimentally verified in its premise. Short of time-travel, I'm not sure how it can be experimentally verified.
"Falsifiable" means "I can construct an experiment that could yield an outcome that directly demonstrates this idea as false." This is sort of like the difficulty that exists with the four-color theorem [1]: yes, you can run a lot of examples using computer-assisted proof tech, but at best what that tells you is "we haven't found a counterexample yet."
Except, for non-falsifiable claims like the theory of evolution as the origin of species, there is no experiment you can run to provide a counterexample. The theory covers any possible counterexamples by simply saying "that form of life must have evolved from a different origin point and/or under different conditions (regardless of whether we can recreate those conditions)", and tucks any counterexample in neatly into itself without feeling threatened by falsifiability. It is "total" by having an "escape hatch" for any counterexamples.
That stacks it up alongside "a deity made everything, and designed an ordered universe with certain mechanics, including giving organisms the ability to adapt"; both are explanations that fit the available data, but neither can be experimentally verified. Similarly, that theory is "total" by having an escape hatch: "well, maybe the deity did something different in that case." Young-earth Creationists do this with visible starlight that is a million or more lightyears away: "maybe God just accelerated that starlight so that humans would have a pretty night sky."
That tendency is similar to "maybe the [hypothetical] organisms on Mars adapted from a different common ancestor that maybe was made of non-living substances that are similar to the non-living substances that comprised Earth's first organism." Boom, done, no need to re-examine the premise, you just fold it in with "maybe the same magic worked a little differently over there," just like saying "maybe God made starlight go faster in the direction of Earth."
As long as you don't engage in denial of the available data because of your theory, then I don't understand why holding a particular non-falsifiable theory is mandatory.
It doesn't matter if I hold to the theory that the universe began as an origin-less hypercompressed single point of matter suddenly and rapidly decompressing...if I'm in the lab next to you claiming that vaccines cause autism. The problem is not which non-verifiable theory I hold about an unrelated subject, but rather my denial of the available data on hand.
Similarly, it doesn't matter that Louis Pasteur was a Creationist when discussing the mechanisms he discovered by which vaccines work. What matters is his recognition of the reality of the data at hand, and his work to explore and build on it.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four_color_theorem
It’s directly correlated with young earth creationism and climate change denial. A significant portion of the population being taught "don’t trust scientists they’re lying on behalf of the literal devil" has done terrible things to American politics.
> It’s directly correlated with young earth creationism and climate change denial.
Is it though? Any sources to back that?
From what I know CC denialists come in all shapes and sizes, from Christians to Conspirationist Atheists to people who are hoping for the return of the Anunnaki. As well as firmly Creationist Christians that don't deny the climate change at all.
> Some do disbelieve evolution, or at least disdain it a bit.
That's an absurd belief and any system of education that results in that level of ignorance in science has failed.
I'd add at least a 3rd group: Parents of kids with sensory (e.g. autism) or behavioral issues that are incompatible with learning at a school.
That still falls under option 1.
I'd broaden the group to "kids who parents feel have been done wrong or failed by the local school and see home schooling as the best choice available." I don't think this group is quite as consistently college educated as group 1.
The way this is written seems to imply that religious people don't have similar (or the same) reasons as secular people.
I suppose from their perspective they do but from my perspective they are just going to raise scientifically ignorant people. I was raised young earth creationist Lutheran and understand this world quite well.
On the other hand, my sister is a firm Creationist Christian, has a PhD and had a brilliant career in research (albeit nothing directly related to 'The Beginning of All Things').
Chances are she is less "scientifically ignorant" than many people around here, myself included.
Just like my sister's, yours is a specific case. It's sad that they didn't teach you Creation in a way that wouldn't cancel out Science, as Science itself is something profoundly Christian as well.
"O, Almighty God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee!..." - Johannes Kepler
Are we talking young-earth creationist or "God triggered the big bang and guided evolution" creationist? Because there is a huge difference between them!
Young earth creationists are scientifically ignorant by definition.
Young-earth creationist, as in "God created everything from scratch in 7 days".
There are many scientists out there that believe in that. They are not scientifically ignorant, they just believe different stuff from you, which, mind you, unless you've seen all proof and understand everything about it to the very last detail, you just hold a faith-based belief of what you're told about by a specific bunch of people/books.
People forget that we often know a lot about stuff, but then we discover more stuff which totally changes the stuff we knew and so on.
Not intending to start a flamewar here or anything, but the fact is that even if there's a lot of evidence for many claims about it, the THEORY of Evolution is not failsafe let alone definitely proven.
You can choose to go with it until we have something better, that's your choice.
Allow that same choice for the rest of the people out there.
"There are many scientists out there that believe in that. "
Not any GOOD ones.
"They are not scientifically ignorant, "
They are actually.
" they just believe different stuff from you, "
They believe very stupid things directly at odds with all evidence. All of modern technology is a result of the exact same logical thought that led to the theory of evolution. If you reject it where do you draw the line? Do you reject fusion in stars because there is no reason for them to last so long?
"People forget that we often know a lot about stuff, but then we discover more stuff which totally changes the stuff we knew and so on."
> Do you reject fusion in stars because there is no reason for them to last so long?
No. Why would I?
You see? You're jumping to absurd conclusions. The fact that I don't believe in Evolution does not mean I reject the Scientific Method, or technology, or reasoning, or logic.
I'm an engineer. I like and enjoy Science, building things, researching, learning, understanding, reasoning, creating. Don't try to make it incompatible or exclusive.
> Not any GOOD ones.
Maybe you should review a bit your history of Science.
I think the gp's worldview doesn't allow for such a person to exist. It's an anomaly and, therefore, must be fake. Otherwise, I can't make sense of the way they have been arguing in this thread.
Anyone who honestly believes the world was created by God 6000 years ago does not understand how science works.
Anyone who honestly believes the world was created by God 6000 years ago does not understand how science works.
I think it's you who doesn't understand how science works, making claims like the fact that Evolution needing something like nuclear fusion to explain longevity of stars, and nuclear fusion existing, must then mean Evolution is real.
According to the Scientific Method (which I obviously must not understand) an honest researcher would posit an hypothesis (which ideally should be falsifiable, unlike Evolution, or Creation for that matter) and then should rather try to prove that hypothesis false. That's what I do at my SE job. If you are unable to prove a falsifiable hypothesis as false, chances are you're right.
You see, because Evolution and Creation are not falsifiable, they need a certain amount of faith to be accepted. I acknowledge my faith in God, and I acknowledge that I cannot scientifically and undeniable prove the existence of God or Creation through purely empirical methods. That's actually a necessary aspect of it. I do, however, see a lot of evidence which points me to that way, and it points me to that way because of where (or rather, on who) my faith is placed.
You, like it or not, do have faith too, but it is placed in a different set of persons and scriptures. You have faith in Modern Science. It's a faith, a 'trust' if you will, you choose to risk having in a lot of data that, by the way, you cannot possibly have had the chance to validate personally.
I invite you to honestly reflect on that.
This will most likely be my last response because at this point I am not sure this conversation is constructive at all.
Are you arguing that religious people are scientifically ignorant?
Such religious people like Nicolaus Copernicus, Galileo Galileo, Johannes Kepler, Isaac Newton, Robert Boyle, Blaise Pascal, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, René Descartes, Gregor Mendel, Georges Lemaître?
I think they would be the first to acknowledge they are scientifically ignorant compared to our times.
Our times are like they are in part thanks to their work.
Yes, there is much more knowledge at least content-wise nowadays than then. Does that make their contributions ignorant, or invalid? Remove what they did in their day, what are we left with?
> Does that make their contributions ignorant
Yes
> or invalid?
no. I don't really understand what your point is. Are you trying to argue:
> They were Christian, thus you can be a scientific genius in your time and still Christian.
? You have to keep in mind, these people were scientific geniuses in a time where people had recently established that the Earth orbited the Sun. The first periodic table wasn't compiled until 1869, hundreds of years later. Given they had no alternative explanation, is it any wonder they were content with answers from religion? I'm not sure you realize this, but the whole separation of religion and science is a recent phenomenon. They used to be the same thing, just explanations for how the world worked. It was only when empirical evidence and scientific theories started explaining the world better than "the gods" that religion began claiming a separate sphere of influence.
To my knowledge non of them were young earth creationists.
So you're suggesting that religious people who home school have some sort of intrinsic characteristic that causes them to raise scientifically ignorant people? It just seems a bit far-fetched to me for someone who claims to be pro-science, especially given the number of respected religious scientists in the world.
"So you're suggesting that religious people who home school have some sort of intrinsic characteristic that causes them to raise scientifically ignorant people?"
Not intrinsic but very highly correlated with WHY they are home-schooling in the first place.
They are Evangelical young earth creationists.
I'm not sure you understood my comment (despite quoting it). Otherwise, why would you assume any religious person who is home-schooling is automatically an Evangelical young Earth creationist? What about Muslims, Jews, Hindus, or practically any other religious person who home schools?
Your thesis seems to be that religious people are anti-science, which is a very outdated and frankly wrong stereotype to be pushing in 2024.
Do you think there are many religious parents who choose homeschooling because it lets them reinforce their worldview? GP says he was raised in such a household, I have friends who were homeschooled for that reason. There are probably many religious people who just find public schools uncouth, but I think there are more who homeschool primarily for easier indoctrination. I don't think GP is automatically assuming anything about individuals, they're just pointing out that a significant fraction of the homeschooling population will come from Evangelical Young Earth Creationists.
Based on your comment, I would assume you are religious. Quite frankly, religious doctrines are anti-science, or more accurately anti-epistemology. The Young Earth Creationists are a dim example of this, but even your generic Christian believes in lichs based on two-thousand-year-old hearsay. You say this
> is a very outdated and frankly wrong stereotype
but why? It seems more true than any religion. I think you could make an argument that it's impossible to convince people they're wrong, so to avoid fighting you should avoid making such comments, but that's empirically not true.
I was being absolute in my language because I was trying to understand the extent of GP's views on this subject. Sure, it's entirely possible that it didn't translate across and that we're talking about a "significant fraction" of religious people raising scientifically ignorant kids. Even then, it's almost impossible to prove because we're not operating with a well-defined meaning for "scientifically ignorant."
However, you've now moved the goalpost by stating that "religious doctrines" are anti-science. That wasn't the original argument. We're talking about whether or not religious people, who homeschool, will necessarily produce scientifically ignorant children.
Nonetheless, the more I think about this, the more the conversation is pointless because we'd spend an eternity working out what scientifically ignorant looks like. A person may agree with 80% of the scientific theories in the world and disagree on 20% and someone might say that makes them "scientifically ignorant." Which I find amusing, considering the amount of fraud going on in modern scientific journals.
I want to make it clear that the main issue is anti-epistemology. Trusting authority figures on "the science" isn't much different than trusting authority figures on "the gods", but there is a big difference between how the two schools of thought investigate new ideas. Religions take their axioms as inviolable, while science usually treats them as convenient beliefs until better ones come along.
I'm less worried about people being scientifically ignorant than people who lack the ability to think through ideas (specifically, most religions have built-in thought-stoppers such as "doubt your doubts before you doubt your faith"). For example, Socrates was a great thinker, and even though he was terribly ignorant by today's standards, I wouldn't be worried if our society was composed of people like him. I am worried about people who have literally been indoctrinated out of the capacity for reason.
Well, regarding that concern, we are in total agreement. However, I have many religious friends, and none of them have demonstrated being indoctrinated out of a capacity to reason (and yes, a few were homeschooled).
I'm not suggesting these individuals do not exist, but I find it very troubling to make blanket statements like the GP's. As I said, it's a stereotype I often see on HN, and I think it's very distasteful as it eliminates an entire group of people from the conversation because "they can't reason."
" Otherwise, why would you assume any religious person who is home-schooling is automatically an Evangelical young Earth creationist?"
Because in the US this is largely true. And young earth creationists are most empathically anti-science. I know because that is how I was raised and I have rejected all of that nonsense.
To be fair most high school graduates might recite the “right scientific facts” while having no basis for supporting them. The earth is 4 billion years old. Survival of the fittest drives evolution. Why? How do you know?
Basically just another form of indoctrination. Children are not taught science so much as science appreciation.
How old is the earth then? The Universe?
Under what circumstances would it matter? As long as people believe the earth is older than around 3,000 years they are going to have more of a problem with general background ignorance than their misconceptions about that specific fact.
If a group of people believing a random untrue fact is a threat, there are a vast number of threats out there. Far more than the school system can possibly deal with. Misidentifying the age of the earth is harmless compared to things like economic misconceptions and there aren't many school systems making a credible effort to correct those.
The neat thing about science is that all the explanations have to fit together. The explanation for why the sun shines so bright for so long can't contradict the explanation for why birds can fly. When you reject an explanation as fundamental as evolution and the ages of the earth you really put yourself at a disadvantage in understanding many other things.
I actually had a young earth creationist say that the sun doesn't use fusion and thus its lifespan is more in line with the creationist worldview and I responded with neutrinos emitted from the fusion reactions in the sun.
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A few weeks ago while giving a talk to some business school students, I was shocked to find most of the students and children of the faculty were homeschooled for K-12. This was a Baptist-affiliated university. I really had no clue this was so prevalent amongst evangelicals.
Schools shouldn't teach neither evolution, nor creationism, nor any other origin story. Because it is something that doesn't matter at all – knowledge without value.
Worse is that the majority pupils around the world will be taught both the Abrahamic creation story, the origin of man according to evolution, and usually a third or even fourth creation story from local pre-Abrahamic mythology. In the same school and from the same teacher. Talk about confusion of the highest order!
There is another issue. Kids in the first group can get an incredible academic intellectual education, AND be emotionally and socially stunted. I have directly observed this, unfortunately. It also happens in very liberal, high-end, private schools.
Those groups do overlap.
There is also abusive parents who want their kids to be isolated and do not want social services to get involved.
I've known people who were going to some of the top private schools in the U.S. who were still paying for weekend math classes because the schools weren't reaching them at their level.
Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students, and they're fine with them not learning anything in the class as long as as the teachers are hitting their goals. I imagine the same attitude is harming the other students as well, but it's especially easier to see with high performing students where their needs are often openly ignored.
It’s easier to see with kids who have stronger behavioral or learning needs.
I was a 3rd grade teachers aide and I saw the distinction first hand. A gifted child was given advanced textbooks and space to work at his own pace. The teacher didn’t really teach much, but the child was learning.
Conversely there was another kid who just got headphones to watch videos in the back of the room. I guess learn st his own pace, except the videos didn’t actually seem educational to me. I think it was mostly just done to keep him preoccupied.
>Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students
If you really believe this, then sue your school district. In my area, there was a district where parents believed high performers were not getting the necessary resources and through a combination of legal pressure and partnership with the school district, made it a priority in the same way that district had prioritized education for other specialized needs. Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
> Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
It's worth discussing the administrators and the budget (though our budget is much higher than the national average), but why should we reflexively dismiss concerns about the teachers? There are advanced students who only get acknowledged as such when the teachers tell them "don't do that, we haven't learned it yet."
There's a large difference between trying to engage advanced students with limited resources, and not trying to engage or even acknowledge advanced students at all.
> If you really believe this, then sue your school district.
It’s very funny (in a depressing way) reading this sentence as a non-American.
| Private schools are outrageously expensive.
Yes, and... In states where property taxes fund schools, there are basically two ways to pay for a good school: a) go to a private school, b) live in a school zone with high real estate values. At various points my wife and I calculated that 8 years at ~25k/yr tuition would work out to about the same as the ~200k house price delta we'd have to pay to move to a better school zone.
And I suppose option #3 is rationing, which is how some schools do it (our daughter is in a gifted academy where admission is limited via lottery.)
>In states where property taxes fund schools, ... b) live in a school zone with high real estate values
Here's some tangential anecdata.
I'm in Oregon, the county I live in pays for the local schools through property taxes. More than half of the tax goes to the schools if I recall.
Anyway, that's not the fun part. The fun part is one of the schools needs(wants?) a new roof. Sounds reasonable, here are the unreasonable parts: They want to raise funds with additional taxes, because they refuse to budget and earmark money for it. They also said they need(want?) several million dollars to do it. The taxes would also be used by the county to buy school-issued bonds from the school to fund the new roof, rather than directly using the tax dollars.
Unsurprisingly, the county measure to introduce that new tax failed during the election in November with a resounding laugh.
The entire way our schools are operated begs some very hard questions.
Our local schools, like many around the country, spooled up new permanent programs in response to the influx of COVID funding which they always knew to be temporary.
Now that the funding has gone away, they say they have a funding crisis, and will have to cut other things unless they can get the state to "adequately fund" them.
What you’re describing is the completely normal way of funding capital projects… they presumably need to fund the improvements at once (the roofing contractors aren’t going to be paid over the next 15 years) and tax payers won’t want a huge spike in taxes so the district will sell bonds with a ~15 year horizon, taxpayers can have slightly higher taxes for 15 years, and the funds are available for improvements on day one.
You seem to be under the impression that the school district has enough extra funding that they could just put tens of millions of dollars aside and complete the improvements as they come up, but can you imagine the shrieking that would erupt if they had a school board meeting and disclosed a capital improvement fund with millions of dollars in it? People would demand that their taxes be lowered post haste since it’s clear the schools don’t need all the money they’re being given.
Something like a new roof is an expense known literally years in advance. You know when something will be due for repair or replacement due to reaching the end of design and/or useful life. The proper way to handle that kind of expense is to set aside some money every year in the budget toward an earmarked fund until you have enough when time comes to buy a new roof.
So no, I (and clearly most of the voters) heartily rejected the new tax proposal. Fiscal discipline before any more or new taxes.
Also: There is no reasonable, commonly understandable way a new roof costs several million dollars. Forget where the money could come from, the demand itself is questionable. As a taxpayer I want to see the school's entire fiscal records, including data that might not be public, if they want that kind of money for what should be a regular maintenance job.
So basically you think taxes should have been set higher a long time ago so they would have a yearly surplus that could have been saved up to pay for a new roof?
I don't see why this is preferable to lower taxes that just cover operations and short term maintenance, with separate bond issues to play for things like new roofs which are expensive but only come up ever 20 to 30 years.
There is quite a bit of variability in how long a roof lasts, because it can be greatly affected by weather and climate and accidents. With the "save for it out of a surplus" approach you'd need enough surplus so that you'll be ready if it turns out your current roof needs replacing on the low side of the roof lifetime range.
But then what happens when you reach that and the roof turns out to actually still be fine? Do you just keep adding each years surplus to the roof fund? I bet taxpayers wouldn't like that. They'd want taxes to be lowered to get rid of the surplus.
But then when you do replace the roof you'd have to raise taxes back to what they were to start building the fund for the next roof. So you still end up with the pattern being higher taxes for several years after a roof is installed and then lower taxes from then until it is time for the next new roof.
That's the same pattern you end up with under the "use a bond issue to pay for a roof when needed" approach.
>So basically you think taxes should have been set higher a long time ago so they would have a yearly surplus that could have been saved up to pay for a new roof?
Yes.
Simply put: If you can't or won't budget+save for a known future expense, I'm not giving you money to pay for it when it comes knocking.
>But then what happens when you reach that and the roof turns out to actually still be fine?
Save what's in there for when the roof really hits end of usable life and either: A) Keep adding to the fund if it's justifiable, or B) Remove the line item from the budget and reduce or reallocate the budget accordingly.
We're not talking about RNGesus throwing down a randomass thunderbolt at the school and blasting a randomass hole through it on a randomass Thursday. We know reasonably when the roof will need replacing for an absolute fact, and at least a ballpark estimate how much it will cost.
Fiscal discipline goes a long way to convincing me to pay (more) taxes.
Lol never worked construction for government gigs? I was once hired on as a laborer for a city government funded arts building. The construction boss had to buy a very expensive and gawdy table from the mayor's kids. The government was paying themselves. It's likely 30% roof and 70% old boys network of hiring select people for favors.
I'm quite aware what the several million buckeroos are actually "needed" for, and I'm all the more vindicated in telling the school and county to get fucking bent.
Unfortunate that kids have to indirectly get caught in the crossfire, but such is life.
I did the same math comparing portland with suburb schools (around portland and seattle) and came to the same conclusion. But one other thought is when the money goes to the mortgage, you get to keep the wealth after (assuming you sell to downsize at some point).
More money in the mortgage principal you theoretically keep when you later downsize housing, but you also will probably spend a good bit more in taxes as well.
Yes, good to do the calculation properly before making the decision if its motivated primarily by finances; sometimes the outcome can be surprising. Ironically speaking specifically about Portland, you'll pay _less_ in taxes moving to e.g. Washington schools in addition to getting better schools. But I think this is likely a special case.
Yes, I definitely agree, YMMV, tax situations and school district quality vary greatly depending on specifics.
IME private schools also tend to be in more expensive areas, so you will either still have to pay more for housing, or spend a lot of time and transportation costs to get between home and school. Plus friends from school will live further away.
And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district.
> And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district.
That's the whole point. Keeps out the riff-raff.
No need to hide behind euphemism. Just say what you mean.
Yeah, I moved house recently. The #1 factor for picking the house was the good high school 500m away.
It's a situation like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model
where "voice" never works.
TIL, thank you for sharing that.
Btw, I'm trying hard to think of places (today) where "Voice" works. For instance, in a corporate setting, I can personally attest that it does not.
Perhaps there are some "small-scale" contexts where it does work (HOA?)
>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English.
This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that we don't need to get our kids proficient in English (it is the lingua franca after all), but there's more here than meets the eye. In my area we are headed toward universal bilingual education, which I see as only a good thing. That means that it may take longer to reach full proficiency, but the overall outcome is more capable and prepared students.
This is exactly the point of the article.
I don’t want my kid in a classroom where everything has to be repeated in Spanish. It’s already this way for school meetings and it slows information sharing down to a crawl.
If there was mandatory English and Spanish in elementary school classrooms I would consider home schooling.
Outside of certain fields (skilled trades primarily) my children will not need to be proficient in Spanish to be successful in the United States. It’s a nice to have and should not slow down everything else.
The teachers in this school don't speak Spanish. The Spanish speaking children are struggling, and the rest of the kids cannot proceed at the same rate.
I'm not pretending to have solutions, and I'm certainly empathetic for all involved. Just stating the reality that this is a suboptimal learning environment.
this is the experience i see at our local schools. english as first language kids are bored and not challenged. the class is moving slower because half the kids are only learning english for the first time at school. “modern” progress ideology is to not separate the students by ability anymore and there’s less accelerated tracks
There is a very big difference between a bilingual school and a school where half the kids don't understand the language that math is being taught in.
Perhaps you shouldn't have a knee jerk reaction of getting yourself irritated then. The GP clearly said 1/4 students don't speak English, not 1/4 students speak one more language besides English.
My kid is in a program where they spend half the day, and learn half the subjects, in a language that most of the students didn’t initially speak at all. They pick it up and do quite well.
I think you missed the point of the parent, which is that ~1/4 of the students are dead weight at the cost of the rest of the class. It isn't "misguided" if their experience is different than yours.
If your outcome is students that are more capable at languages but less capable in virtually every other subject, is the result really "more capable and prepared students"? I'm not opposed to bilingualism but you're lying to yourself if you think this comes at zero cost to at least some students.
for kids in early development, their skill level in all the other subjects later will be essentially determined by their linguistic ability. math is a language. there is research that shows benefit to bilingual programs, but there has to more structure than just dumping esl kids in there with everyone else.
Forgive me, but with machine translation becoming nearly a solved problem — why would kids spend years of their lives learning new languages anymore? By the time they grow up, won't that be a rather useless skill — except perhaps in very nuanced contract negotiations?
You think it's useless to be able to communicate to someone directly without the use of an intermediary translation device?
Well, within 30 years or so AI will be better than humans at everything, so…
This seems to reflect a lot of what I hear about as well. Everything is too entrenched from a decision making standpoint for any one person to make a difference in reforms.
A free market fixes anything where people have the ability to "vote with their wallet" and simply stop paying for services which aren't meeting expectations when they find another that does. Things like employer sponsored health insurance are insulated from you choosing a different option for yourself and we get the situation that we currently have because of it.
Education is the same way but the only ways to vote with your wallet are...
1. Buy a house zoned for the school that you want.
2. Pay for private school.
3. Home school.
4. In some areas, school choice where you can choose from another of the available public options may be viable too.
The only long term solution here that has potential to fix things legislatively is a true school voucher program that would let you take the tax money assigned for your kids education and put it into whatever option you believed was actually best for their education.
This _should_ lead to a start-up like small business ecosystem with lots of small Montessori style schools especially for younger kids. Most likely a "neighborhood schools" model would pop up and parents would end up walking their kids to school again, even in suburban areas.
Most likely you would still see bigger options for high school still as teenagers crave more socialization. Sports would likely revolve more around communities than individual schools too.
You'd of course see some specialties. Schools advertising why they were the best option for your kids and then having to prove it in order to keep them. Yes, there would definitely be religious schools as there already are now.
My guess is that a lot of the current home school co-ops that are popular in my area would simply become suddenly funded because the parents involved as pretty happy with the model. I had a lot of biases against home schooling until I saw how these co-ops work and it's really effective. Basically just like a normal school small school with parents teaching different lessons on different days. Each parent's commitment is a half day a week to teach and they still do school plays, etc.
Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service.
We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively failing to teach kids for those few years. Meanwhile the public schools which can't be choosy will end up with fewer resources and have worse outcomes for the kids who have parents who can't afford private transportation to the few nicer, choosier voucher schools.
Being able to read the Bible would be a big improvement on say the Baltimore school system, which spends $22,500 per year per student: https://www.city-journal.org/article/are-baltimore-students-... (“According to the 2022 NAEP test, only 10 percent of fourth-graders and 15 percent of eighth-graders in Baltimore’s public schools are proficient in reading.”)
Literally, madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran would be an upgrade.
Those numbers do not mean what you seem to think. 1st, proficiency on that test is a pretty high bar. There are kids making perfectly adequate progress who don’t score proficient. Second, average per-pupil costs are meaningless. Baltimore city pays for two of my kids’ educations. One costs the city about $8k (the money that a school gets for a kid with no extra needs). The other costs well over $100k, due to significant disabilities. Baltimore has a disproportionate number of kids with significant needs of some sort, including learning disabilities, extreme family poverty, and ESL learners. Those kids need extra resources. A voucher system isn’t going to change that.
>Those numbers do not mean what you seem to think
Those numbers are actually painting a rosier picture of what is actually happening in Baltimore and other cities. In 23 out of 150 school, zero students - none! - were proficient in math. Not a single student. There is simply no way to put lipstick on that pig.
>The Maryland State Department of Education recently released the 2022 state test results known as MCAP, Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program.
>Baltimore City’s math scores were the lowest in the state. Just 7% of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, which means 93% could not do math at grade level.
>But that’s not all. WBFF combed through the scores at all 150 City Schools where the state math test was given. In 23 Baltimore City schools, there were zero students who tested proficient in math.
https://katv.com/news/nation-world/23-baltimore-schools-have...
In the other 127 schools, what percentage of students were proficient in math? How about other schools given the same test? It's hard to draw conclusions without context as to what an average or above average school scores in these tests.
>In the other 127 schools, what percentage of students were proficient in math?
Citywide the number was 7%. Better than 0 I suppose but still awful.
>Just 7% of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, which means 93% could not do math at grade level.
How about outside the city? This is a statewide test, how are other areas doing?
Not saying they are useless but standardized tests only work for kids who take them seriously.
I recall taking these as a kid, and there were kids who would just fill in the bubbles. They would not even read the questions. They thought it was funny.
So when we have anecdotes, we get told to look at the stats for objective facts. Alternatively, when we do have stats, we get told "no those numbers do not mean what you think they mean" as a way to dismiss the abysmal numbers. So which is it.
Let's face it, we all know it, just some of us are too scared to say it publicly. In large urban areas in America, there is a (large / huge / significant) portion of the school population that is illiterate, speaks non-functional english in the form of black-culture slang, the rest don't even speak english in an english-speaking country, and practically none of them are going to be functional adults that don't require assistance and handouts to survive.
I tend to see big per student spending in public schools as suggestive that they've been loaded up with a disproportionate share of the kids with IEPs.
>madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran
I thought they were just teaching the sounds of the Quran. Like the Pakistani kids don't know any Arabic, and they don't learn to read or understand Arabic. They just memorize and recite the Arabic sounds of the Quran that they've been taught.
I can believe that they don't actually teach the grammar of Arabic or how to speak or write it, but they don't even translate the meaning of the verses to Urdu (or whatever the local language is)?
I'm not an expert in this area at all. But I was under the impression that for some of these schools, that is the case. My understanding is that some (many?/most?) Muslims believe that the Quran was a direct revelation from Allah in Arabic, and so translations are somewhat suspect, risking incorrect interpretations from humans.
I know that Muslims believe that translations of the Quran are of a lesser status, but I didn’t think that would extend to not even explaining their meaning to the students.
They usually do teach you to read Arabic, which is mostly the same script as Urdu. But you don't understand what you're reading which doesn't really make it any better.
Do they at least give a translation of the verses?
Why would it give people worse education? Besides who are you or any of us to decide what is and isnt a good education for someone elses kids? It's not your job to police ideas.
Are you really arguing schools getting taxpayer money to teach kids humans walked with dinosaurs and all modern biology is a lie a good educational outcome?
Do you really not see how that's a bad outcome?
Do you not see that removing the funding from the regular public schools to go to teach that nonsense will lead to worse outcomes for those kids who can't leave those regular public schools?
Sure, maybe some students will potentially have some better outcomes if they manage to go to a good private charter school with their voucher that happens to be a decent one. For everyone else it's a worse outcome, unless you think it's a good thing to teach every animal alive today are direct descendants of the ark that was just a few thousand years ago.
Also, kiss special education funding goodbye. It won't be profitable to handle these students. They'll be trapped in those even more underfunded public schools. Hooray, great outcomes!
But those kids who are "being left behind" are good to have vouchers too. You don't think there will be small schools who want to take them?
I had a bunch of random teachers teach really dumb stuff while I was in public school. I don't believe those things, because I had parents who were involved in my education. It's never a good idea to leave your kids education to the whims of someone else.
Public school doesn't have some magic monopoly on good ideas. And private/voucher schools aren't going to have a monopoly on bad ones.
Why would the kids not be able to leave public schools? They will all have vouchers?
> You don't think there will be small schools who want to take them?
Spending a second of logic on it and thinking critically, there won't. Why would a school empowered to be choosy and subject to profit motivations choose the pricier students to specialize that reduce their rankings?
And why do you think a flood of schools arguing germ theory is a lie be a public good?
I went to religious private school and too had teachers who taught some bullshit things. Dinosaurs were fakes buried in the soil by the devil to test believers. Evolution is a lie by the government. And yet by personal experience I'm more learned than the average public school peer I know. I'm a somewhat special person though; I know many in my class that still believe without question. It's not a good thing for society overall to have such "knowledge".
As for why kids wouldn't be able to leave the public schools, some schools will be required to provide transportation. Others won't. Some will be able to be choosy, some won't. You see where this goes? Those schools which are choosey and don't provide transportation will end up selecting the most well off while those unable to be choosy and/or forced to provide transportation will be forced to shoulder those who aren't good performers who don't get into the choosy schools with a transit scholarship.
Ok, so… you went to some self-described example a school you are complaining about, turned out great, and are upset that kids might not keep going to known-failing schools?
Maybe… there is more to school than facts? Maybe it’s about order and discipline and shared values too?
> Maybe… there is more to school than facts? Maybe it’s about order and discipline and shared values too?
Maybe status-quo bias is so powerful that people will see an institution that fails at literally everything it tries to do and instead of concluding that it's a failing institution they will pick some other random thing and decide the institution must actually be about that, because the idea that the institution is actually pointless is too horrible to contemplate.
> I went to religious private school and too had teachers who taught some bullshit things... And yet by personal experience I'm more learned than the average public school peer I know.
Should that not give you pause about the general quality of the schools you're defending? Do you not see where parents might see you in fundie school learning about how man rode the dinosaurs alongside a public school kid that somehow knows even less than you about history or biology, and think "hmm maybe I'd like to find something else"?
> Should that not give you pause about the general quality of the schools you're defending?
No, because I've seen the average of the extremist schools which will grow with the voucher program and they're far worse than the negatives I experienced. Education like Eve gives Adam two apples, how many apples does Adam have; it doesn't matter Jesus will come soon here's another chapter of the KJV.
Except there's no reason to believe extremist schools should grow significantly. Most people aren't extremists (pretty much by definition). In fact, good schools are a usual top tier concern when looking at housing. Your worry about fly-by-night schools extracting profits and fleeing is also not particularly hard to solve: hold them liable for damages/a return of n years of voucher funds if the school fails to meet standards and require them to carry insurance or post a bond to prove they can meet their liability. High performing schools or new schools associated to people/organizations with a previous success record will have cheap premiums. Dodgy schools will have expensive premiums or will be uninsurable. Your worry about special ed is also not that complex: give higher funds for those kids to offset their higher cost.
I don’t think supporters of the existing American public school are in any position to lecture anyone about “outcomes.”
> Are you really arguing schools getting taxpayer money to teach kids humans walked with dinosaurs and all modern biology is a lie a good educational outcome?
I'll say yes. Most people I've seen who have gone through that type of schooling are good members of society. They work jobs, they pay taxes, they have friends, they often go on to higher education, they raise families, and they may be happier than the average person. The outcome is perfectly fine.
You are ignoring the externalities. We end up with an ignorant society that ultimately harms all of us. I hate to use a movie trope here, but we're barely a step above Idiocracy when it comes to the ability of the average American to function and make decisions. This ultimately becomes self destructive.
87% of kids attend public k-12, and secular and Catholic schools together make up the majority of private, so if we're barely a step above Idiocracy, it seems a bit silly to point at the "man rode the dinosaurs" people.
I went to a young earth creationist Christian school and it messed me up. Most of us had a hard time adjusting to life outside the Evangelical Christian bubble. It's really hard to connect to others when your identity is tied up in believing a lot of outlandish things and it's hard to love yourself because you're given a long list of crazy rules to follow. I was told that kissing someone before I was married would taint my soul and whoever I married would be disgusted by me if I did so. Most people I've kept in touch with regret going to that school and every queer person I know has been absolutely traumatized by the experience. I'm happy, and by your criteria, a good member of society but that was despite my school. It took a lot of therapy, personal growth, and finding a community of people who actually care about me to be happy.
They better not teach that. We all know dinosaurs aren't real!
I joke but religious education isn't all bad. One of my smartest friends in High School went to Santa Clara University and really liked it.
Many Catholic high schools are also among the highest performing in the country.
The claims around religious education are one of the biggest remaining examples of socially acceptable bigotry.
Catholics aren't generally young-Earth creationists, and overall the Church argues the age of the earth is a scientific not a religious question.
I totally agree there are many religious schools which are extremely high quality. Despite a few strange views at the school I went to, the general quality of education was quite high. However, I refuse to ignore the many other examples of schools which are not high quality. They should be called out, and there's no way I want my tax dollars going to teach their nonsense.
The thing is - the average school is terrible. NAEP scores show less than 25% reach "basic" proficiency in math, and reading is even worse.
I can't find any comparable stats on just religious schools, but I strongly suspect they are, on average, performing substantially better than non-religious schools. The reasons for that are more to do with the students than the schools, but the exact reason is inconsequential - the point is that people are targeting them because of the religious aspect and not the quality of education.
The typical claim of evolution is illogical. Even if a religious school solely and exclusively taught creationism while not even paying lip service to the controversy (which few to none do), it's not at all like a child's education would be permanently crippled. As the most important things learned in basic education are not facts, but skills - reading, writing, and arithmetic in particular.
A school which can be choosy in admissions will likely have students with better proficiencies. It's easy to have only top scoring students when you can kick out the bottom scoring ones.
> the point is that people are targeting them because of the religious aspect and not the quality of education
This is the point I'm making. Many people aren't going to end up choosing the school because of the quality of the education, they'll be choosing it because it aligns with their world view. That germ theory is a lie, the Earth is 5,000 years old, scientists are liars out to eliminate Christ from society, and that the only things you need to know is what is in the Bible.
Let's assume what you're saying is true, though I'm sure you realize you're being rather hyperbolic, at a minimum.
I think the purpose of school is to teach the fundamentals - reading, writing and arithmetic in particular.
I don't really care what worldview a school endorses so long as they are completely transparent on it.
Young Earth theory and creationism is one side of a coin - 80 genders, intersectionalism, and critical theory is the other.
If a parent is down with these worldviews, I see no problem so long as the school is excelling at their primary educational responsibilities, and also making their ideological motives transparent to parents.
Or private equity owned schools. Imagine how bad product they could effectively deliver. The would not even teach humans walking with dinosaurs... As they would do bare minimum of teaching anything at all...
Why would parents send their children to those schools? Never mind who owns them; I would expect the kind of hypothetical schools you’re describing to go bankrupt quickly. Private equity is not in the business of losing money in predictable ways.
Same reason parents send their kids to public schools: because the price is right. Since we're importing legions of indentured servants, wages aren't rising, and parents have to make tough decisions in order to pay for basic necessities.
A thriving education system is an indicator of a prosperous society, not a cause.
> As they would do bare minimum of teaching anything at all...
As compared to what again? Remind me how good government has been doing.
Schools are a state and local matter. So just because you might be frustrated with the government in your area ain't my effing problem. To chastise all public schools is a false narrative.
For one, you mean local government.
Two, then you wouldn’t be opposed to eliminating the dept of education then, right? I hope Trump follows through on his promise you seem to agree with.
Come on, be serious. In a huge country with 50M students attending primary/secondary school you can always dredge up a few horror stories but those are far from the typical case. On the scale of ways that schools damage kids, teaching them the unscientific mythology of certain Christian sects is hardly the worst. The Catholic church, which is one of the largest private school operators, has no official position on paleontology or evolution through natural selection.
> The Catholic church ... has no official position on paleontology or evolution through natural selection.
That's certainly an indictment.
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I am serious. If you're thinking most of the families are chomping at the bit to repurpose tax dollars to Catholic schools you've clearly never interviewed the average homeschool family South of the Mason-Dixon. They don't even think Catholics are Christian; many would align a priest with Satan!
Most families I know who currently home school do so so to avoid vaccine requirements because germ theory/biology is a lie or because they're worried their kids will be exposed to the idea of the fossil record or that gay people exist in the world or put thoughts like dinosaurs died before humans into kids heads.
You're delusional if you think of these aren't major homeschooling points in the US. Willingly holding your nose to ignore the extreme stench of the anti-intellectualism the rest of the movement massively embodies.
This will be the outcome in an extreme majority of school districts. If anything, this recent election shows fundies vote. To them it's even more than life or death, it's eternal death to miss voting.
This would all be a solid argument if home schooled kids didn’t significantly outperform public school kids.
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/
This isn't pure statistics though. This dataset is massively biased. And out performed on what, that 2+2=4 or that 2+2=Who know what except that God gives us our provision despite what our eyes see and logic tells us
Standardized testing
That’s a meaningless statistic. What matters is how each group respectively would do in the other format versus what they do in their present format.
Even if there were more ways to "vote with your wallet" is abundantly clear that a lot of parents, respectively, (a) couldn't care less anyway, and (b) can't actually tell a good charter or voucher school from a bad one.
When the purpose of schooling is ensuring a civic floor amongst citizens the effectiveness of things like the home school co-ops mentioned can't come at the expense of population at large unless we wish to surrender the republican form of government for something else.
You need to contrast suggested ideas to the current systems, not an idealized standard that the current system is nowhere near achieving.
For instance NAEP scores consistently demonstrate only about 25% of students achieve "basic" proficiency in math, reading is even worse. Its going to be difficult to do worse.
And I mean that very literally - some percent of people would become competent in e.g. basic math with 0 public education due to family or personal interests. I can't imagine it's "that" far from 25%.
> A free market fixes anything
https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-fairy/
Nothing magical about it. It’s pure economics and rational decision making. The institutions we complain about in this country every day are completely insulated from it. Everything else survives or fails on its own merits.
Supply and demand. It’s a natural law.
According to Saint Frederick Von Hayek as popularized by J. Howard Pew and his crew. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_V_AZRZfu9I
Pure economics and rational decision making are the exact reasons for engaging in regulatory capture, bribery, and oligarchy.
Why on earth would democracy (or any other form of shared power) be a rational choice for you, from an economic standpoint, if you already are wealthy enough to neuter it to the point where nearly all profits and decision-making authority are allocated to you?
Dictatorship is the ultimate in rational decision-making for a rational self-interested actor. Philanthropy and benevolence are not rational for the wealthy and powerful.
Income inequality and regulatory capture are features of the free market, not bugs. They are baked in by design.
Most countries in the world "patch" those bugs by regulation that moves them away from being pure "free market" economies. Antitrust regulation is a well-known example of this.
> Kids are throwing chairs at teachers.
I don’t know where you live, but kids (plural!) assaulting teachers like that would be very unusual. I have a lot of family and friends in elementary education and management. Stories like that are the kind of thing that get talked about for years if they happen, not something that happens enough to be referred to in the plural.
A family member who taught at a title 1 elementary schools encountered chair/desk throwing multiple times in the short time she was there. I think unfortunately YMMV greatly depending on the area where you live
Very expensive suburb of Seattle. I was shocked to hear this as well. Reported to me by my friend who is the school counselor and had to deal with these kids (plural) herself.
It’s good they had access to counseling and I hope she was able to help some of them. I don’t imagine most kids are born wanting to throw chairs at people. Something is going on at home.
The girl in the math class before me would beat the shit out of my desk like clockwork. She hated math, was violent, and very autistic, no apparent other issues nor even hate towards humans. Nothing could be done, just wait for the tantrum to end then take my seat.
Room destroyers are pretty common, but they usually have IEPs.
TBH there's no good choices for many - big mental health issues and trauma, no home or family support, and no real options: kids have to go somewhere, self contained classrooms are at capacity, there are worse kids in line to get put in facilities, and often you can't really do that unless parents push for it anyway.
Yeah, I know one kid that threw a chair in school. We use public education because I think it's good for kids to be independent at an early age. It can't be healthy to spend 16 years within bluetooth range of your parents at all times.
A slightly different perspective: schools are mass produced education. Mass produced in the sense that they are the lower cost in terms of person hours to produce an educated child. Like all mass produced products, it's better than 1/2 hearted solo attempts to do the same thing, but a parent that can afford to put a huge amount of time into it can do better job as lots of comments here attest.
If true, that also provides an explanation for the rise home schooling: more people can afford to do it.
Private schools isn’t much better. Kids don’t learn much more, everything is just less chaotic because they can counsel out the ones who can’t behave.
> Private schools are outrageously expensive.
I have observed that any two-tier system accentuates inequality, be it health, education, security, or anything. When one group pays to have a system better than a universally provided one, the differences between both tend to increase, as the incentive to keep the universal system only as a fall-back to the private one by investing less on it (or by receiving generous donations from the private sector) is tempting to politicians.
A former colleague of mine, who grew up in communist Yugoslavia, remembered how he cherished summer vacations when kids from different schools went together to state-operated summer camps. I thought this was an excellent way to build inter-group bonds between kids that would never have met in other circumstances, learning to work together in team-building and educational activities. It didn't turn out well for the country, or, at least, it wasn't sufficient to prevent the breakup and the disaster that happened because of it, but still seems like a good idea.
Over time, my opinion changed from a strong supporter of free market economics to more deliberate models. I would support banning homeschooling along private schools completely. If a country wants to build a society that sees itself as a group of individuals with equal rights and obligations, you need to start early.
Of course, this would never pass any legislative body in the US.
So homeschooling is not just an ideological choice anymore
Ah, so you just opt out of being around average people. OK.
So we chose private school over home schooling, for both time reasons, educational reasons, and social reasons.
But the important thing is we choose to take our kids out of public school. The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year.
We did not like what we saw. A few teachers were really good. Many never bothered to show up, “class” was a note to do homework or something. Others were just plain terrible teachers who didn’t know their subjects well and couldn’t really teach.
More and more our district was also relying on computers and software to make tactically replace books and teachers, and not surprisingly that did not work so well.
Yes, remote learning and covid and all that was a shock to everyone, and all schools took a hit during that time. But this was a window directly into schools, and seeing how well yours did in the face of adversity.
The truth is, at least for our school district here in NJ in the US, schools suck in massive amounts of money, give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it.
There has also been the constant creep over the years to turn schools into social welfare systems. This is well intentioned, but in reality is just another bureaucratic money suck.
I could go on. But in short, home schooling and private schools both have risen in popularity because Covid revealed just how bad many public schools in the US have become.
> what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like
Well, you got to see what they were really like while they were in the midst of dealing with a traumatic global pandemic in their own personal lives while also trying to deal with an essential job that looked nothing like what they had trained for while trying to support a virtual classroom full of children who were also in the middle of a traumatic global pandemic.
Yes.
And many made it work in the face of adversity.
Many others did not make it work just due to bad luck or timing.
But districts like ours completely failed at it because the entire leadership is incompetent and teachers never got the support they needed from the administration to make it work (including monitoring teachers to ensure they were actually working).
> give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it.
Seems like a bit of a non sequitur? If anything one could hope that a gym teacher would value play and movement over chaining kids to a desk all day?
In NJ, the School Superintendent is effectively the CEO of the district.
Many of them had advanced degrees in education, management, and finance. They control tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ours has a BA in health, was a gym teacher then an admin person, eventually a principal and then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring.
He has been a total disaster because he lacks leadership skills, does not understand finance and hides behind the hodgepodge of technical jargon that public education has become.
My old gym teacher also taught science because we just couldn't find another teacher, and was genuinely surprised to learn there were forms of matter smaller than atoms.
My health teacher was a "permanent substitute" situation where we just watched movies the whole semester and got A's.
One of my math teachers died and we just...never hired a replacement, so nobody learned anything that semester.
Bonus: my driver's education teacher was arrested for a DUI (but not terminated)
These situations were all in different schools in different US states, so the lack of quality control in admin that you describe definitely resonates.
My best history teacher was the gym teacher who was really hired as loophole because they couldn't hire a basketball coach which is what he really was.
Anyway, he didn't give a crap about teaching to the curriculum and he taught us how to think critically and read between the lines of history.
I know a large number of teachers who have been campaigning for years to eliminate all forms of teacher evaluations, with the claim that “you can’t measure what we do!”.
Which is utter horse shit, but it’s where we are today.
The result is that many schools don’t really track teacher performance, and as you indicate you can get wild inconsistencies.
The best parents can do (other than leaving) is to aggressively direct kids into the better teachers’ classrooms. We see that all the time - one class has kids who’s parents are “in the know” and gets the good teacher, the other class is where the kids get dumped who’s parents don’t complain. The district knows who is bad and who is not, but is afraid to anger the union, so anything short of actual violence by a teacher against a student won’t have any consequences.
Our school district local enrollment as a result has declined from around 900 kids to just 650 in just a few years as a result. The kids left are those too poor to go private or home school, those not lucky or connected enough to go to a “choice” school, and a small number of die hard loyalists reliving their glory days through their kids at the same school they went to.
> but is afraid to anger the union, so anything short of actual violence by a teacher against a student won’t have any consequences
Everyone should watch the fantastic documentary "Waiting for Superman" (https://www.imdb.com/title/tt1566648/) that highlighted just how problematic the teacher's unions have become and how much of an impediment to education they are.
Even in cases of gross negligence (showing up to school drunk, completely failing to teach, etc) bad teachers just get bounced to another school. Teachers who physically assault or sexually abuse a student might remain on the payroll for years while the bureaucracy slowly reviews their case.
The unions have also prevented any form of incentivizing teachers to perform well or rewarding good teachers. In fact, the union leaders prevented the teachers from even voting on changes (that the majority of teachers wanted) that would have allowed good teachers to be rewarded and bad teachers to be removed from the classroom.
There are a lot of problems with education in America, but the teachers unions have to be right at the very top of the list.
Amusingly I had the exact inverse of this experience. My senior year I signed up for the AP Bio course, but we only got 22 students signed up out of the 25 required to allow the class to happen (a very stupid system in of itself). Because the class was canceled, and the very competent well educated biology teacher had a slot free in his schedule, he was forced into teaching the gym class (which I also had to take since I'd been avoiding PE for the last few years). He knew the situation, and after the first week handed me the advanced bio textbook after class one day, and then turned a blind eye to me sitting on the bleachers reading instead of running laps for the rest of the semester (dont come at me for physical fitness, I was a skateboarder and in better shape than 90% of the kids already).
> (...) then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring.
I guess the board is at fault here?
"The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year."
This kind of myopyic outlook that conflates the then-traditional instruction period to the remote instruction paradigm greatly cheapens every other point of your argument.
None of the teaching staff that had to adapt to that period of time were trained to make that experience 1:1 for the prior expectations and to use that as a basis to judge their entire ability is petty as fuck.
GP mentioned they were totally incompetent in their subject areas. It doesn't matter what medium they are transferring information through if they have no information to transfer.
"I haven't been trained" is the refrain of the incompetent
I think you are seeing through the trend that many people disagree with you.
"millions of parents", "their schools" should be "me", "my school."
If your school isn't good, I recommend improving if for every other kid, who didn't pull the lottery ticket of affluent parents with flexible jobs.
School boards benefit from parents who care and are competent.
This is nonsensical advice. In San Francisco, the school board wants to delay learning algebra to 9th grade. I can't "improve" this place because it's not that the place just needs advice. It's because they have "experts" with "years of experience" that want to do different things. And I'm just a techie who thinks he knows everything.
No thanks. Not interested in spending years of my life arguing with morons who rejected the only gay guy applying to help because he was a White male (this isn't some right wing thing - it was real and explicitly the reason).
When people say "we don't need your help; we know what we're doing" then not helping is doing the right thing.
> When people say "we don't need your help; we know what we're doing" then not helping is doing the right thing.
Not helping is doing the only thing they allow you to do. But also, removing yourself from the consequences of their folly is a wise thing to do.
I had to rewrite my response a few time to remove all the curse words.
At least in NJ, you have no idea what you are talking about. Our school laws are completely broken. Just so you know I have spent about 300 hours a year for the past three years fighting with, dealing with, trying to improve our district.
The Hard-core History podcast had a very similar exchange.
American: well if your communist government is mistreating you, simply vote for a different president!
Cue a million responses just like yours showing how it just isn't possible.
The people you hear giving up today have tried to fix the system. It's rather insulting to insinuate otherwise.
How did you choose the private school? There are so many choices around us but it seems hard to figure out their quality without actually sending a child there, or having close connections. Wish there was a review forum of some sort.
We live in western central NJ so the options are pretty limited. There were only a handful to pick from, and there were roughly two price tiers: tier “A” was around $15,000 a year per student, tier “b” elite schools were $50,000 and up per student per year. Our choices were down to only three schools, one was out because it was all-boys, and we chose out of the other two based on meeting teachers and staff.
My family has lived in 4 states and 3 countries and the only time we ever homeschooled…was in NJ back in the early 2000s.
Curious, I'm also in NJ, which school district is this?
South Hunterdon School District.
I can't really know nor do I care to speculate on why it's becoming fashionable. But I'm a successful, well adjusted, homeschooled child from when it wasn't fashionable. This comment stood out to me: "Opt out of interacting with average people."
And my immediate thought was: "I can't imagine a less effective or worse way teach kids how to deal with people, average or not, than to throw them into a pool of similarly untrained people and telling them to just "figure it out". Which is essentially what public school does. Teachers can't be expected to help 30+ children work through that. They don't distribute across the pool of students in a way that can be effective for that. Homeschooling I firmly believe can be a more effective way to get exposure and learn how to deal with other people than a public school.
Public schools are training grounds for poor social skills.
This doesn't make sense to me.
We all get better at a talent by practicing it. We make mistake. We watch others. We determine our own preferences for what we like/don't like. We learn, grow. Kids figure it out.
How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better? You wouldn't get same exposure to the buttload of social interaction and scenarios in a closed system like that.
Practice, with guidance is superior to practice without guidance. Homeschooling doesn't mean isolation in the average case. You get a lot of practice as a homeschooler. The primary difference is that your practice is both with other adults and children while supervised and also modeled directly to you in homeschooling by other adults while public school is primarily unsupervised and lacking in a modeled behavior to observe.
The number one thing people would comment to my parents about me was that I was so comfortable socially in adult conversations and environments. I wasn't even in high school yet. I had adult level social skills by age 12. I didn't learn how to interact with people from other kids who had no idea how to either. I learned it from my parents and practiced what I learned with both other children and also adults. I'm only anecdotal evidence but a number of studies have backed up my own experience. A few links I had on hand can be found here.
* Medlin, R. G. (2013). Homeschooling and the question of socialization revisited. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 284–297. https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socia...
* Shyers, L. E. (1992). A comparison of social adjustment between home and traditionally schooled students. Home School Researcher https://archive.org/details/comparisonofsoci00shye
* Taylor, J. W. (1986). Self-concept in home-schooling children. (Doctoral Dissertation). Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services. https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/726/
No offense, but the idea of having adult level social skills as a child is terrifying to me. Most of the people who I've encountered who describe themselves that way also talk about the burden of from a young age totally internalizing the idea of every interaction being a performance. Every interaction is a new opportunity to try and convince adults that you are worldly and smarter than other kids. That tends to mess you up. Of course, this is purely anecdotal.
"Adult-level social skills" for children was historically normal, and it's only in the past century that children are assumed to be incapable of speaking plainly and intelligently to adults, or vice versa.
You might want to do some looking into the "invention of childhood"; what we understand as "children, teenagers, young adults, adults" is a fairly modern way to look at "stages of development". In the distant past, children participated far more comfortably and fluently in adult society than they do today, when they're sequestered away.
It is very difficult to see any representations of this in the US, where most children are in school, so I'll point to examples in fiction: fictional novels or movies where the protagonist is taken confidently through an unfamiliar city by a child who seems to know every location, has a sleeping place, weapons, a method of finding money, and a network of friends. In these works of fiction, the child is almost always a semi-homeless "urchin"; but this is mostly because modern writers can't conceive of a child that capable without also assuming that the child's parents must not be involved in their life, because modern people equate "parenting and raising children" with "making sure children only ever do child-appropriate things".
My question to you: what do you think it would look like if two loving, attentive parents tried to raise a kid with the confidence and skills of those fictional street children, but also actually fed them and gave them a place to live?
It is very likely that the answer to that question is far closer to the way that children used to behave and live than the way that children are today.
I also recommend looking at old tests and study material (pre-1900, ideally pre-1800) for young children. Children can read, figure, write, and remember at a level far superior than they're assumed to be able to today, and that goes for adult socialization as well.
It didn't mess me up and I didn't treat any interaction as a peformance. They were just fun conversations.
Yeah, that's not fair to you at all, I'm sorry.
No apologies necessary. You were just sharing your own personal experiences. I wasn't offended or hurt.
To be honest, I just saw a really phenomenal dark comedy routine about somebody who was adept at socializing with adults at 6 or 7 and I've been thinking a lot about that dynamic and the dark side of being a precocious kid. I wasn't that extreme, but I related to some of it, and then I ended up projecting that onto your description of home school kids. And yet, this guy wasn't home schooled. I think those are totally separate issues. Would be an interesting separate topic, though.
I went to a brutal and oppressive public school in a 3rd world country yet I was able to interact with the adults around the age of 11-12. I was always one step ahead of my 3 years older sister. I think a lot of this was I was jealous of her getting attention from thrme other adults and especially my parents from an early age. I self learned how to read and write when I was 4, exactly at the same period she was learning at school.
This resulted in quite a bit of psychological problems for me, since I always thought my peers are stupid. You start to isolate yourself, and this trying to impress adults changes form into trying to impress your boss etc.. My parents had no idea of course, so no use to blame them. But fir my own kids this is something I'm trying to keep an eye on. I think it is possible to distinguish what is genuine and what is for getting positive confirmation and attention. The best measure is the capability to entertain yourself. If a kid is able to not get bored when with adults without interaction they have a healthy amount of self confirmation.
So the show I saw is not yet available in a recorded format, but I recommend checking out Gary Gulman's comedy special The Great Depresh. And if they do ever record the live performance I saw, I really recommend you check that out. Somehow both funny and extremely enlightening, and right on topic with what you're saying.
You don't just stay home with your siblings. A major factor of how homeschooling works is homeschoolers have local organizations or co-ops where they do things together.
And, yes, this is just reinventing some aspects of the public school system in the private sphere. But that is because parents, rightly or wrongly, feel they have zero influence over how the public school works, so they just sideload their own version.
(I would say that the parents are right about having zero influence, as quite a lot of American public schools are so big and so bureaucratized that parents do not have a real voice without herculean effort.)
The big difference about that reinvention is that there are way more parents present in those environments than the typical public school variant. So both good behaviors to observe are more visible and also interventions are significantly more frequent.
It takes more effort to homeschool than farming it out to public schools, so you're naturally selecting for involved parents. To the detriment of public schools, it should be noted.
It also skews the perspectives of homeschool parents into thinking "this is the best system, why doesn't everybody do it?" The answer is, of course, to take the good aspects of each system and make the public school system more viable again, but there are too many entrenched interests on both sides for this to be easy.
> To the detriment of public schools, it should be noted.
Yes, but what means of violence do you possess to be able to force these parents to be involved in the education of other people's children?
There's also a variety of kids' ages at these events, so the younger can learn from the older (and parents can easily intervene if this isn't going well). And you know who your kids are interacting with: you know something about the families, or at least know someone who knows them, so the odds of malign influences are much lower.
I really take issue with the position that parents have zero influence. Our children attend a "mediocre" public school in our US city. We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results. I always go into it thinking that we are whiny parents talking to an overworked staff, and the results are incredible.
For anyone who is considering homeschooling but isn't sure, there is a real middle ground: actually engage with your huge staff at the public school who are hungry for parent involvement because it seems like the parents don't care and the kids are just there for the babysitting.
Public schools work great, but you do have to remain engaged and be ready to problem solve. It's like homeschooling but you get a whole publicly funded (somewhat overworked but enthusiastic) support staff to accomplish educational goals for your child.
Yes of course schools vary but if approach ANYONE with a combative attitude they are likely to fight back, even if you're on the same side. Approach with sympathy, open communication, and the occasional set of hands in the classroom, and you can get the best for your child.
I can attest to this exact same scenario with my children and their schools. I observed both types: the parents who immediately entered the school combative towards administration (not looking to collaborate on a solution, just shouting loudly to "fix it"), and parents who spent time engaging with administration towards a description of the problem and ideas for resolving them.
That being said, there are and were definitely limits to what public schools can do. They are resource strapped, procedurally constrained, often fighting their own political bureaucratic battles within the school districts, and even within the academic departments.
We ended up leaving the public school for those reasons, and could not be happier.
My observation was: public schools have become much like enterprises, and private schools tend to be more like startups. The public school has so much inertia and tends to have "guardrails" and policies to keep even bad administrations functioning, but at the cost of exceptionalism and performance. Private schools have less of this, and more direct accountability.
You absolutely can have a private school that doesn't educate better than a public school, but I'd argue at least one of two things happen: 1) the school fails to attract student, and closes.. or 2) the school focus shifts away from education to other priorities (e.g., social status, culture, or sports), relegating academics to a secondary role.
>We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results.
It would depend on what you're asking for. It depends on the school district/state, but anything that gets close to the curriculum isn't easy or simple to change.
For example, one of my kids who went to public school had to use this program (I forget the name) for algebra that the school paid for. You used a weird toolbar to input your equations that appeared to be some monstrous Javascript nightmare. It more or less worked, but it wasn't great. To my mind it would have been simpler to teach them LaTeX or something, but whatever.
As a parent, you can't go in and say "why don't you just let them write the answers on paper like everybody else did until 9 minutes ago?" The teachers loved this program, because it did all the teacher work for them. The school administration already paid for it, plus paying for the computers for the kids to use, plus the IT overhead to keep the computers running.
That's a fundamental structural problem that no parent can surmount. "What do you mean use a screwdriver? We paid for all these hammers!"
The incentives that drive public education are often orthogonal to actually teaching the public. It's not a mystery, any trough where money collects will get snouts rooting for some of it. The parents don't have much say in how all this money must be spent because they don't have any say about the money at all, other than moving to a different district or writing off what they pay in property taxes and paying again to do something else.
I think it isn’t that unusual for homeschooling parents to form groups, you can do an art class together (otherwise hard to afford), start up some recurring social events, that sort of thing.
K-12 school is sort of a weird social situation, right? You are mandated to be there (you can’t even quit or find a new job), your manager has the right/responsibility of in loco parentis, your co-workers can’t be fired and their only punishment for goofing off is that they might get nagged a bit, and your worst peers don’t care about that at all. I don’t think it is obviously good practice of grown up social skills. You can see the maladaptive behavior that sticks around after—office gossips, bullying, that sort of thing (I mean, that sort of behavior is present everywhere, but I’m pretty sure it is enhanced by the fact that these are strategies to win in the pressure cooker).
You get better at what you practice.
If you practice unproductive social interactions and unhealthy coping skills all day, you will get better at unproductive social interactions and unhealthy coping skills.
> How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better?
This is a very reductionist view of homeschooling.
While some folks certainly do have this experience when homeschooled, a well-designed home schooling experience will have an abundance of social interactions with non-family members.
Sports is an obvious one, but there are also many homeschool groups that engage in learning activities together.
> We all get better at a talent by practicing it.
Exactly. Which is why kids need to practice their social skills in environments that actually reflect how real-world societies functions, rather than being sequestered in an institution with utterly distorted, artificial social structure.
That actually sounds like a good way to teach kids how to deal with others. Just figure it out, in a safe environment with minimal consequences and some guard rails. I wouldn't expect a teacher to teach kids how to socialize, especially on an individual level, but rather to step in when necessary. Being in a big group of people you may not like is pretty much a description of life, and the goal is to learn to function and even thrive in that environment. I support home schooling too, but I don't think there's anything about it that naturally lends itself to learning this skill. Many homeschoolers manage it, but it takes extra work, whereas being in 'gen pop' teaches it as a side effect.
Except the literature from studies on the subject suggest that homeschoolers on average do slightly better than public schoolers on this specific metric. The data suggests public school has worse outcomes.
I didn't say that home schooling produced poor social skills, and in fact said something like the opposite. My point was that traditional schooling was a perfectly fine way to learn social skills, as a side effect of being forced to socialize. If home schooled kids and traditionally-schooled kids have somewhat similar social skills, and (as you say) teachers in public schools aren't teaching these skills directly, how do you suppose kids are learning them?
> in a safe environment with minimal consequences and some guard rails
The problem is that a public school, at least in the US, is /not/ a safe environment with minimal consequences, and it has effectively no guard rails. Your idea is a nice one, but it's not realistic, and reality is exactly why people are opting out of public schooling for their children.
The way kids learn to "deal with people" is by becoming more and more like them until they fit in. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the people in question.
> Which is essentially what public school does.
The school I went to had, luckily, excellent teachers. One of them, not sure if as a coordinated effort or not, was big on letting the class decide things and helping us form the social structures needed for that - structuring discussions, votes, rules, and so on. I suspect it was a reaction to the dictatorship time requirement of studying an idealized version of Brazil's political organization.
There are definitely hero teachers and administrations in public schools. They aren't the norm though and it's a bit of a lottery whether your child will end up with one.
A first step is to properly fund public schools. Then one would need to better select teachers (which becomes an option if teaching pays better) and train them. Teachers need to be trained in teaching, not only their subject matters, and need to be kept updated.
There are a lot of schools that get funded quite well and perform very poorly. It matters how you spend that money. The data on this is hard to properly interpret too since higher income parents tend to live in higher income areas which means better funded schools and those parents also tend to be more involved in their childrens academic and social success than lower income so the correlated variables get confusing.
However I do agree that spending funds in ways that help a public school compete with private and/or homeschooling is a worthy goal. That means you need:
1. more teachers per student in the school. (More admin doesn't solve this. You need smaller class sizes). You'll never be able to afford the one-on-one ratio a homeschool family can achieve but you can certainly close the gap.
2. more focus on actually proven approaches to the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. (phonics, essay writing, literature analysis, and "old math") A lot of pseudo science has entered the class room over that last few decades.
3. fostering more parental involvement in their child's education. This is extremely difficult to improve but has the highest impact. One of the reasons homeschooling on average does better is because the parents are self selected for involvement.
4. holding kids to real standards and having consequences for not meeting those standards. Tricky to do politically but essential for kids to learn both social skills and academic skills.
> which means better funded schools
This is another problem - school quality influences real estate valuation. If I support my local school and it gets better results, not only I can claim tax credits for donating to the school, but I also increased the value of my house. Or a house near a school I support.
Donations to support schools should always be equally divided among all schools, period, so that these donations can't create favored and disfavored regions. That public schooling should be both universal and uniform should be a given.
> Teachers can't be expected to help 30+ children work through that.
The big mystery is: how did teachers manage this miracle 50 or 80 years ago?
If you read something like Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, you realize that teachers didn't. In the middle+ class at least, the children's parents did that work by organizing specific extra-curriculars, such as dances, from a very young age. These ensured that the children learned manners, dated people of acceptable character or class, etc.
That social infra is simply gone today. Parents don't have much of an interest, or are erroneously(!) assuming that teachers are supposed to do it, or used to do it. We are less class focused* today, which may be good, but certainly less manners and etiquette focused as well.
* by that I mean like, if you are an American of German descent, you are not particularly worried if you child is dating an American of Irish descent, whereas you might have been in 1940. Similarly (and overlappingly) for Protestant/catholic etc etc. Not even what we typically think of as class today! We're so blind to a lot of that stuff now, we forget it existed, just like the other social infrastructure.
> That social infra is simply gone today. Parents don't have much of an interest, or are erroneously(!) assuming that teachers are supposed to do it, or used to do it.
You might be missing the fact that back in the day there often used to be one parent working and one parent staying at home. Nowadays both parents need at least one job. Wealth inequality at it again.
Did they?
> Homeschooling I firmly believe can be a more effective way to get exposure and learn how to deal with other people than a public school.
In your homeschooling are you with other students or just your family members?
> Public schools are training grounds for poor social skills.
This statement doesn’t make sense to me.
Personally, I have high functioning autism. I would do terrible at interpersonal relationships, but then get near perfect scores on all the tests.
Teachers would anticipate that I would be terrible and then when I got perfect scores on all the tests, they would be pissed off.
I think there are a lot of tech people that are neurodivergent and had terrible experiences in school and would love to avoid my child having that experience.
Also, I’m not super happy about the extreme views on race, sex and religion that are going through the school system. I would like the opportunity to teach a more moderate view. I feel like people who don’t have kids who make comments about this trully don’t understand many parents perspectives on this.
Also, when you are a parent, you find that you have to move to specific areas to get good schooling and homeschooling would allow you to live where you want to and not pay and go through the application for private school.
It’s interesting that everything in this article that’s anti-homeschool relies on the parents not doing something correctly, which I think most people just assume they correct for that. I’m not worried about abusing my own kids, because I’m not going to abuse them. Honestly, my mom was a teacher and she was anti-homeschool and many of the anti-homeschool bullet points were provided by the union and I think she just wanted to get full funding for the school and the state wouldn’t provide funding to the school when the homeschoolers didn’t show up and wasn’t really caught up in those arguments.
However, my wife is never going to homeschool our kids or allow me to do it, so it’s just not going to happen.
My son's district has a black superintendent and at least one black principal but otherwise black (and other) kids don't get to see the example of black teachers (and learn school is a "white thing you wouldn't understand" the same way that boys come to the conclusion that school is for girls when they don't see any male teachers -- the problem here is representation-ism that stops at the very top, if they do get a black teacher they get promoted out of the ranks immediately)
When my son was in middle school he was quite inspired by a curriculum unit on the Harlem Renaissance and liked the school's black principal.
Later on he felt the attitude about gender (man vs women as opposed to something else) was very oppressive and that it contributed to him and other students falling victim to incel ideology and sometimes body dysmorphia. Today he struggles to talk to girls not because he's afraid of being rejected but because he's afraid of being reported.
The support of trans ideology is destroying the progressive movement. What a shame because they’re driving people straight into the arms of fascists.
If support of trans folk is "Too far" for someone, they were already running towards fascism. There's nothing progressive about denying folks their gender identity, and to the extent that "Progressivism" is a force in America, it is better off without the Anti-trans contingent.
No it isn’t. The vast majority of progressive people don’t buy into any of the gender/trans discussion. It’s definitely not a core tenet of being a progressive, but a very vocal minority is definitely trying to make it so.
I disagree, and I find an even more vocal, even smaller group seems very invested in making sure people know who exactly we need to throw to the fascists to make them finally stop being fascists.
Hard agree with this. I've stopped calling myself progressive because it's so tainted by this bullshit. Now I do my best to draw a line between actual leftist views and this harmful faux-progressive nonsense whenever I talk politics with anyone.
I write about my experience here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42682305#42688501
My best friend in college was transsexual, knew who she was in childhood, couldn't be talked in or out of it. She was kicked out of the Air Force Academy which was my gain but our nation's loss. I was proud of my country when I heard this policy changed, not just for the individuals but because the US struggles to attract officers to match the quality of our enlisted warfighters.
I've cross-dressed at times (high heels, fishnets, all that) such as for Halloween and I also know the undercurrents of violence you can feel from ignorant people. Sometimes I bum around the house wearing a long skirt.
I was inclined to be supportive of the modern transgender movement when I first heard about it and when my exposure was through the media. It is their own speech that has alienated me from them.
Once I met people affected and after I joined Mastodon where I've had to add rules to completely block out their continuous hateful spew which frequently gets reposted by people who should know better. I'd be glad to hear "I'm so happy I found a new way to put on makeup that makes me feel like myself" or "I'm really inspired by electronic music pioneer Wendy Carlos" or "Thank Lynn Conway for that phone in your pocket".
I can't deal with large volumes of negativity from strangers and on leftie corners on the web people from that community are the worst. [1] Whether or not they should exist is beyond my pay grade but I don't want them in my feed at all.
For that matter I feel less safe and not more safe expressing non-conformant gender characteristics because: (1) so many people have gotten inflamed, and (2) I don't buy into the politics.
[1] I just plain couldn't stand the MAGA nuts on Twitter, never mind all the equally hateful people who spew hate against transgender people (who I suspect want people to spew hate at them to justify their world view as much as Benjamin Netanyahu likes Palestinian attacks that justify his world view.)
I'm sorry you experienced that, and that kind of hate has not been my experience - though that kind of negativity in other online cultures certainly has been.
Trans people behaving badly does not make me want them to cease existing, or make me feel less for their cause. "Trans people want hate spewn at them to justify their worldview" feels like a hilariously backwards belief outside of a few professional activists, who I am not particularly inclined in listening to in the first place.
Their cause is to universally redefine "woman" to include men who desire to be women, and "man" to include women who want to be men.
Why support this nonsense? We can already see the effects and they're not good, and harmful to women and girls in particular.
> Their cause is to universally redefine "woman" to include men who desire to be women, and "man" to include women who want to be men.
This is a reductive view that presupposes gender as a pre-existing discernable static fact of a person's biology as opposed to an apparently extant human phenomena. The idea that they are the same is a profoundly simplistic view of the issue, one not supported by modern psychology or human archaeology, littered with happy societies full of folks we would now consider "gender non conforming". It's not a new cause, nor is it attempting to "redefine" anything.
> We can already see the effects and they're not good
People living authentically is great, actually. Respecting others and their preferences, also good. It genuinely doesn't hurt anyone. The effects to my life are roughly equivalent to my friend Phillip telling me he prefers Phil.
> harmful to women and girls in particular.
In very hypothetical, "just asking questions" ways that have yet to be borne out in any sensible reality. What has happened many times is cis and trans women being harassed for baseless, paranoid reasons. It's especially repugnant a defense when you consider that trans folk - trans women in particular!- are among the most vulnerable to attack and abuse.
If we were worried about harm to women and girls in a tangible, meaningful sense, we would be quick to punish actual perpetrators of verifiable assault than play feminist only when we find a more vulnerable throat to crush.
> This is a reductive view that presupposes gender as a pre-existing discernable static fact of a person's biology as opposed to an apparently extant human phenomena.
And yours is a subjective take that opposes this rather basic, verifiable fact.
It's like I can't win. If I behave too feminine as a man people give weird looks to me and mockingly refer to me as a woman. A significant portion of the society still does not think men should be very effeminate.
So I am like ok, sure, I don't care much about this gender ideology, but if society does not think I am a man, then I am a woman!
Then people are not happy again. They call me a man who just wants to become a woman.
[dead]
> Today he struggles to talk to girls not because he's afraid of being rejected but because he's afraid of being reported.
Why would anyone be reported to any authority figure for speaking to girls?
It's pretty standard for middle schools to hold assemblies discussing sexual harassment and healthy relationships, but they don't always do a great job communicating those concepts.
Back when I was in middle school about a decade ago, the principal got up on stage with a police officer and explained that sexual harassment is when you talk to a girl and she feels uncomfortable. He then went on to assert that the school had zero tolerance for sexual harassment, describe various authorities to whom victims could report instances of sexual harassment, and implore students not to risk their future by engaging in sexual harassment.
If you weren't super confident in your ability to predict or control other people's feelings, probably your takeaway from that assembly was that talking to girls was a risky thing to do.
"Don't make people uncomfortable" and your takeaway is you shouldn't talk to them at all. I don't think the problem there lies with the sexual harassment narrative.
Many young people are vulnerable.
I was bullied in elementary school and graduated the same way Ender Wiggin did.
I was out two years and skipped three, started in the middle of freshman year.
I had no idea how I was going to find a mate. The world my parents grew up in, where my mom was introduced to my dad by his sister, was long gone. I knew I couldn't trust anything I saw on TV or in the movies. Adults, including my parents, were completely dismissive of my concerns. Might have made a difference if I had a sister, but she was born premature and I never saw her before she died.
I sat next to a beautiful girl in English who left me feeling entirely outclassed. [1] I came home crying from school about this every day for most of a year until I met the new physics teacher who let me hang out in the lab during study breaks, which gave me some meaning in my life and led me to get a PhD in the field. I still was afraid I'd wind up alone forever and went to a "tech" school which had an unfavorable gender ratio; I did find a girlfriend in my senior year, then was lonely and miserable in grad school. I found someone who was a friend of a friend and I've been involved in a love triangle ever since which he lost out in. My partner is a 100% reliable person from the same culturally Catholic background of myself (my parents did not involved me with the Church, she did all the things and has a positive orientation towards religion but doesn't take communion because she doesn't believe it literally.)
Boys today don't have it any easier. My immediate reaction is to be sympathetic towards "incels" but as an organized group they teach boys self-loathing which is primary to the 50% attraction-50% hate that they express towards women (hmmm... something a lot of people who are more or less healthy feel towards their parents because the conflicts that come out of being dependent on people)
[1] She was traumatized by her parents going through a nasty divorce. She teaches the Quechua language in Hawaii now. There's a photo of her next to a huge dog, no sign of any human relations. I probably did better at love than she did in the end.
Of course, a lot of activities carry risk; doesn't mean teenagers will completely abstain from them.
The missing piece here might be that, as a teenager, it's pretty easy to convince yourself that the main way girls will reject you is by expressing that they're uncomfortable. (I believe this is called "getting the ick" in modern slang; the old movies your parents like call it "get lost, creep".) So if you're afraid of rejection, it's plausible that you'd be afraid of the legal consequences of making someone uncomfortable more than the personal embarrassment or emotional pain of the actual rejection.
I believe there is an SNL skit on this topic.
> Also, I’m not super happy about the extreme views on race, sex and religion that are going through the school system.
Maybe I'm living under a rock; what extreme views are going through the school system?
You might be being facetious and trying to imply that the political views taught in school are actually moderate, but I'm going to take the question literally anyway.
One example is the idea that a bio man should and must be called a woman if they declare themselves to be so. Regardless of whether or not you agree, it is an extreme viewpoint that has only just now become acceptable to believe in terms of history.
> Maybe I'm living under a rock; what extreme views are going through the school system?
Not op and not taking a stance on any of these here, but:
1. Critical race theory (CRT)
2. Gender fluidity
3. Endorsement and use of Christianity/Bible in public schools
These are all hot-button issues in education today, at least in some states and districts.
No one is learning about Critical Race Theory anywhere other than law school (or possibly undergraduate sociology classes that pre-law students would be likely to take). It's a heterodox thread in legal scholarship. Whatever you think primary schoolers are learning about race, it's not Critical Race Theory.
> No one is learning about Critical Race Theory anywhere other than law school (or possibly undergraduate sociology classes that pre-law students would be likely to take).
Yes and no.
You are correct that almost no one is learning full CRT legal theory in K-12.
That said, CRT principles have expanded beyond legal studies, and they have certainly made their way into classrooms. Here is an example of an article that makes a case for it:
https://www.uclalawreview.org/yes-critical-race-theory-shoul...
I’m not sure if you know many education academics, but I assure you that CRT and derivatives thereof have been some low-hanging fruit in education research for over two decades (i.e., relatively easy to get published).
There were two definitions of Critical Race Theory. In 2021, the National Education Association adopted a Business Item [1] to "Share and publicize, through existing channels, information already available on critical race theory (CRT) -- what it is and what it is not; [...] and share information with other NEA members as well as their community members."
This included "Provide an already-created, in-depth, study that critiques empire, white supremacy, anti-Blackness, anti-Indigeneity, racism, patriarchy, cisheteropatriarchy, capitalism, ableism, anthropocentrism, and other forms of power and oppression at the intersections of our society, and that we oppose attempts to ban critical race theory and/or The 1619 Project." [1]
Which is pretty wild, because that's a great summary of everything conservatives were objecting to in social studies classes, and provides a good wording for Christopher Rufo's redefinition of CRT.
However, I agree with you that this was a very recent redefinition of the term Critical Race Theory: As far as I can tell, the application of legal scholarship's CRT to education scholarship in the late 1990s was focused on the Critical analysis of teaching outcomes [2, 3, 4], especially racial discrimination in school districts. This seems to have been focused on administrative things rather than course content. There was a subsequent movement around 2016 to bring "Critical Race Praxis" into school districts, which again seems to be focused on removing inequities from school administration and teaching counter-narratives to "K-12 leaders". So I think that this is where conservatives found the term and decided to repurpose it to label the antiracist content which was being incorporated into social studies courses.
[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20210705234008/https://ra.nea.or...
[2] https://www.gse.harvard.edu/ideas/edcast/22/02/state-critica...
[3] https://thrive.arizona.edu/sites/default/files/Just%20what%2...
[4] https://ed.fullerton.edu/lift/_resources/pdfs/multicultural_...
[5] https://www.infoagepub.com/products/Envisioning-a-Critical-R...
CRT is a boogeyman. It’s not ”taught” anywhere.
Its principles are most certainly taught. They were 10 years ago in my high school. Come to find out these were from CRT sources.
People are getting disillusioned by education; partly because of politics, but also because there's a good reason not to trust the experts.
Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see.
If a doctor or nurse or scientist says something is "evidence based", it works (most of the time). If a teacher or teaching academic says "evidence based", they mean they have some kind of evidence behind it, like in that Simpson's episode ('Well, your honor, we've got plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are 'kinds' of evidence.')
Teaching as an academic discipline has been basically spun out of whole cloth. Universities didn't (really) study education until governments told them to teach it, so they got a ragtag bunch of PhD thesis done, and the best way to do this is to use a very "philosophical" approach, and a very thin actual evidence base. Then they have to teach this to student teachers, most of whom are not really equipped to assess evidence. Then the student teachers who are great at the kind of essays that any student teacher can "engage with" will end up being the next generation of professors.
Schools are run by teachers (who are badly trained) and politicians the public service (which generally defers to the universities). Yes there is a more conservative "evidence based" movement, but even it is nowhere near good enough.
> Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see.
Hand washing at hospitals is controversial (again)?
Neither should be controversial.
Exactly, this kind of BS "eduction" the teachers receive doesn't really equip teachers with the knowledge to teach anything beyond 12 years old.
I believe any subject teacher (i.e. mathematics, physics, english, etc.) should hold at least a bachelors in that subject alongside with a teaching/pedagogy degree. Every bad teacher I've had only had the teaching degree, the best teachers I've had only had a PhD in their subject. Not bad as in dislike - there were plenty of good, competent teachers whom I disliked.
I dislike this notion of "degrees" as proxies for the ability to get the job done. Why not just... interview people. Let them teach a class or two, and see how it goes. Just like with every other job.
> because there's a good reason not to trust the experts
I hate this. Where else do we get knowledge from if not experts and academics in their fields? That's how humans grow our collective knowledge. People learn, gather evidence, build knowledge and then share it. The people who have done the learning over many years are called "experts". Those are the people I want to learn from, no?
> conservative "evidence based" movement
Evidence should not be political. You can either prove something, or you cannot. It is neither conservative, nor liberal.
When the experts say that algebra should not be taught in 8th grade, and the experts say that guessing at words instead of sounding them out is a better way to learn to read, and the experts say that calc can be replaced with 'data science' which is actually just data literacy, and so on and so forth, I'm not really interested in how the precise definition of 'experts' actually refers to something about 'growing our collective knowledge'. I'm more interested in staying away from all that. It's a fun gotcha to say things like 'well evidence either is or isn't', but it doesn't change the material reality of who's doing what and what they're likely to be doing in the near future. Public schooling is fucked, the group of people saying 'listen to the experts' is the group of people making it worse, a lot of it is explicitly political, and your best options for guaranteeing that you avoid it are homeschooling or parochial school, regardless of what words and rhetoric can be said about it.
Don't forget the we can't teach the 4 operations in first year of primary school. Meanwhile, all the books from 1950 have them by lesson 2 and school was mandatory at that time.
We homeschooled our kid for a few months due to her marvelous classmates, teacher and director, she wrote and learnt more than 4 years worth of study in Switzerland. Unfortunately she is highly sociable and we couldn't give her the constant "stream of kids" all day long.
Wouldn't the best of both worlds be a mixed approach? Let her socialize at school and learn some things and teach her extra at home? Sort of home school lite?
> your best options for guaranteeing that you avoid it are homeschooling
Accepting your premise that "public schooling is fucked" (I disagree) there's absolutely zero guarantee that homeschooling is any better for any particular child. It's a completely random chance whether your parent, or whichever potentially untrained person, is going to provide you with an education that sets you up for society, work and the wider world.
Public schools at least have defined curricula, governance structures, complaints procedures, _accountability_ in some form.
1 untrained parent teaching <4 kids is better than an expert with 25 kids to teach.
Public schools have terrible curricula, procedures, and accountability. Go look at any school in Detroit and see how effective schooling is. They have all the things you mention, and they are ABYSMAL. Truly a terrible option, every one of them. They are also VERY well funded.
Homeschooling doesnt have a guarantee of success. Public school does come with a guarantee of failure.
> Public school does come with a guarantee of failure.
I disagree, because it's demonstrably false, but I don't think there's a reasonable point of debate here. I'm sorry you feel that the state has failed so badly here.
https://www.niche.com/k12/cass-technical-high-school-detroit...
One of detroit's best schools. 58% are proficient in reading at their level. 20% (!) Are proficient in math. That is a failing grade. The other schools are not better.
Enrolling a student at a school like this is a bad idea. Perhaps "guaranteed failure" is hyperbolic, but reality is not far enough from that statement for any sort of comfort.
These are badly functioning systems that need a major overhaul.
If the parents cared and were well educated then those numbers would be much better, simply by them helping kids with homework etc. But schools shouldn't require that.
John Ogbo actually studied this and came to a similar conclusion, that much of the racial achievement gap (specifically where he studied in Oakland California) can be closed by parents investing time into their kids education. He was decried as a white supremacist (he's black, by the way).
> It's a completely random chance
No, I don't think these outcomes are being determined by RNGs, but rather by much more deterministic inputs related to the intentions and resources of the parents.
I estimate that I have a 90% chance of being better. If you aggregate everyone in the country, the median person might not have a 90% chance of being better, but that has nothing to do with me.
Can you explain why you disagree? Students have been performing worse each year, beginning a couple years before COVID. For example, scores and number of test-takers on the AMC 10/12s have decreased. Similarly, teacher retention is at an all-time low. Do you think it's relatively easy to fix, or that things will naturally get better over time?
I think to avoid arguments on the term "experts", just replace every instance of it with "so-called experts".
There is a very simple rebuttal to this: In almost every high $$ trial the defense and prosecution will both call expert witnesses. These experts will then directly contradict and disagree with each other. Which of these experts should be trusted? It was an expert who testified that cigarettes are good for you, an expert who testified that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and an expert who verified that Oxycontin is not addictive. Those are not the people you want to learn from, no.
We celebrate countless outsiders like Galileo and Darwin who have disrupted the consensus of "experts" and were considered highly political at the time. History simply does not defend the infallibility of "experts", and does support the idea that you should not blindly trust a person who claims expertise.
Everybody should look into the work of Philip Tetlock and consider reading his book Superforecasters. There is a mountain of scientific evidence to show that the more a person considers themselves an expert in a topic the more vulnerable they are to making assumptions and being proven wrong as time progresses.
I believe op meant conservative as in less radical and more willing to acknowledge that their ideas have flaws rather than the GOP.
Education theory is divided among educational progressive and conservatives, it doesn't entirely align with political parties.
Educational progressivism is actually more antiquated than conservatism - the classic progressives were 19th century while the conservatives were 20t century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_education
Large groups of experts in a non-science can be wrong. Either the Vatican University theology department, or a Baptist theology department would be at least one example.
> I hate this. Where else do we get knowledge from if not experts and academics in their fields?
Knowledge is generated via examination of reality itself. "Experts" are merely people who have conducted the most thorough examination of reality. Relying on them is a convenience to speed up acquisition of useful knowledge, but not a necessity.
The world is full of people claiming to be experts, but who are, variously:
* charlatans or hucksters evoking the outward trappings of expertise but lacking genuine understanding;
* people who may have valid knowledge in one area pretending to expertise in other areas;
* people who may have valid knowledge, but whose motivations are primarily driven either ideological commitment, pecuniary interests, rent-seeking, or other perverse incentives;
* and people who may have valid knowledge, but mistakenly conflate empirical knowledge with normative authority, and believe that knowing what "is" entitles them to make "ought" decisions for others.
Genuine experts in empirical fields should be in the business of presenting evidence and arguments that stand on their own merits, and empowering others to make better-informed decisions. Reliance on experts should be based entirely on the quality of the information they bring to the table, and not on trust per se.
Anyone who cites their own putative expertise as a reason for why they should not have to explain themselves or justify their conclusions -- or, especially, who cites expertise as a basis for claiming authority over others -- absolutely should not be trusted.
The combination of is-ought conflation and the expertise-as-authority mindset is both incredibly dangerous and extremely prevalent in our society today. People with domain knowledge in a technical field often mistakenly think they are qualified to universalize value judgments about normative matters that relate their empirical field, and think they are entitled to use force to impose those value judgments onto others.
When confronted with this sort of hubris, it's entirely understandable why some people choose to eschew involvement with these putative experts even if it means potentially having less reliable empirical information to work with.
[flagged]
Please try to be civil. I mentioned phonics, do you agree with what I said on it or not?
Reintroduction of phonics has been pushed - hard - by academia.
Eventually and it was massively controversial within academia. There were studies that showed it worked, but studies are positivist and for many education academics, positivist is an insult. That's why it took literally generations and a political war to soak into academia at large after the science was uncontroversial.
What's wrong with phonics? Look-see as the only other alternative that I know of has awful results.
What did you have in mind?
Homeschooling is seeing a surge in popularity, its not just tech people or high status people.
IME it's a lack of trust, sending your kids to be raised by strangers. I grew up in a small town and some of my teachers were basically neighbors.
For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools which might serve a thousand students from 4 different towns it's placed somewhat equidistant to, ie, in the middle of nowhere
I know in my area they're doing consolidation of schools because there are fewer kids enrolled than when the schools were originally constructed. Even after some consolidation many schools are barely over 60% of their enrollment capacity which is estimated to go down almost another 10% in the next five years.
People haven't been having nearly as many kids for a while. Fewer kids means fewer students. Revenue to operate the building is tied to number of students; fewer students means less revenue to keep things operating satisfactorily.
When the majority of the homes surrounding the elementary are filled with retirees whose kids have moved elsewhere instead of young families it is no surprise the school closes.
> For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools
In my experience it's because schools are being treated as a business, and businesses are usually more efficient when there's consolidation of expenses. Why pay for 3 schools with 10 teachers each when you could instead consolidate classes and pay for 1 school with 15 teachers? To a business, the decision is purely made out of cost. Alas, a lot of governments have such tight budgets (for many legitimate and illegitimate reasons) that cost benefits outweigh the human benefits.
Depends on area. Portland schools have plenty of money but still struggle. Administration and retirement perks eat up most of the budget. In a sense its that they are not a business that leads to that kind of issue.
But ultimately its a complex issue. eg voucher systems would resolve the above issues, but create entirely new sets of problems which may be worse along the way.
Not sure if I agree with this. Schools are not exactly run by the government, rather local school districts.
My (not data based) impression of school levies is that they nearly always get approved by voters, even in tax-averse areas, so if there is a lack of funding, it is usually real, rather than through a misplaced need to be "efficient".
> Schools are not exactly run by the government, rather local school districts.
What gets approved by voters? Ahh, right, government services. How are those paid? By taxes. Who collects taxes? Governments, of course.
I don't know where you are in the world. In the US, public schools are funded by government money counted by number of students and their test scores. So more students = more funding, better scores = more funding. There are other kinds of schools, private schools and charter schools come to mind, with different funding types. But often those include additional costs to the parent on top of the taxes they already pay.
How do public schools get managed by the district? Again I'm not sure where you are, but here the public school administration gets voted in during government elections. The public education system's requirements are defined by law and, above the district level, managed by county or state education services.
> if there is a lack of funding, it is usually real, rather than through a misplaced need to be "efficient"
Don't get me wrong, I think efficiency has its place. But I think it is extremely easy for school administrators to end up in a business-first mindset instead of a serve-people-by-educating-them mindset.
In many places in the US, though probably not all, school districts levy their own taxes independent of municipal or county governments. The reason we might not describe school boards as "the government" is, well, they don't govern us and are distinct from the organizations which do. They don't have the power to levy taxes or pass laws. Its almost like a large co-op where all the citizens of an area fund and vote on the inner workings of the school.
And, as you say, they are regulated by the government but so is everyone and everything else. In my view, its appropriate to describe public schools as part of "the government" but I also respect the GP's view that they're independent enough to be describe as not "the government".
school districts levy their own taxes independent of municipal or county governments. The reason we might not describe school boards as "the government" is… They don't have the power to levy taxes.
???
In my district, direct democracy determines the level of tax. They can't, for example, pass a law that collects a tax on business income or whatever. They could probably collect usage fees of some sort. I'm thinking in school field trips and paid lunches. But truth be told I'm not intimately familiar with the legal or bureaucratic basis for those fees.
The irony of this is that you rely on strangers for critical stuff like ensuring you don't get electrocuted or burned at home or even ensuring that the water that you drink won't make you ill or that your car is a good enough condition to not lead you to a fatal crash. Any of these affects your close relatives. What makes education different?
I think there's a broad perception that education professionals are ideologically captured by the left. It's hard to know how true this is, but individuals like "libsoftiktok" have made a career out of stoking that fire.
Also, unlike your other examples of strangers working on things, there's not really a feedback loop of review and rework where mistakes can be corrected. If your child gets a bad education, that's time lost that's really hard to recover and can set them back for life.
Edit: To add, the "ideological capture" perception is important because of what education is. When you're dealing with an electrician, it doesn't matter who they vote for because electricity works the same way regardless. Teachers don't just regurgitate information but promote a set of values and expectations in their classroom so their personal opinions can matter a lot. And that's not even getting into teachers who explicitly try to teach students their worldview.
It's not different.
If the water you drink is having problems, you'd have campaigns over it, protests, people trying to get it resolved and potentially lawsuits. People would band together to do whatever they could to fix the problem that they see.
Education is seeing the exact same thing. Parents see a lot of problems. They are going to school board and council meetings, people are campaigning on solving the issue and people are taking whatever measures are in their power to fix it...like home schooling.
When people see problems, they want to fix them. It's exactly the same thing.
Exactly right. Plenty of people have in-home systems to bring their municipal water to the quality that they want (e.g. filters, softeners). Many more even have wells because there is no municipal water.
Many people research safety ratings before purchasing a car as a proxy for how reliable a given manufacturer is at ensuring good outcomes in a crash.
It's really not that different.
I have some friends who live in area with the bad water quality... They end up drinking/cooking with store-bought water, instead of city-provided one from the tap.
When I need electrician/plumber/general contractor/etc..., I choose one based on recommendations and reviews.
If you know (say from conversations with other parents) that your local school is bad, why would you send your kids there? It is like choosing an electrician with bad reviews only because their office is next door to you, or living in bad-water area, drinking city water and getting sick every week.
The cost and timeline to evaluate quality is completely different; I can get multiple opinions for my possessions, and utilities are fairly objective to evaluate (and the cost to do so is small relative to the scale of the operation).
Schools are limited for choice, expert evaluation is limited, outcomes are potentially unclear... That's before you get into issues with the politics of a teacher or problem students.
> outcomes are potentially unclear
Same is true for home schooling
some people feel better when they think they're in control, despite the fact that the outcome could be even worse. The ability to have control gives the reassurance that the outcome is going to be acceptable (without evidence).
Even further than that, individual evaluations of ‘better’ can meaningfully vary. Not everyone has the same metric of success here and I think there are many reasonable yet distinct evaluation criteria.
It's pure economics. One large facility is cheaper in fixed cost terms than four smaller facilities. It's also cheaper in variable costs of staffing and other economies of scale like consumables. Lastly, the size of the large school means the cost of special features like a wood shop, kitchen, large theatre, art facilities, etc., are relatively smaller and thus more easily included in the whole package.
You're right that something is definitely lost. It's an externality that's forced on you and your children. There are compensations, but it's not an unambiguous win.
American schools just aren’t very good. I remember when I was in third or fourth grade, my mom flipping out about why we were spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math. To this day, my mom, who grew up in Bangladesh but got a classic British education from a tutor, is more well read in western literature than I am (Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Socrates, Plato, etc.)
As far as I can tell, private school doesn’t even fix the problem. My kids go to a pretty expensive private school and it’s not rigorous or challenging—the main benefit is that the kids are better behaved so there is less chaos and distraction.
> spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math
After a bunch of years overseas, I returned to the US to complete my last two years of high school.
I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization. They don’t learn anything substantive about the founding U.S. cultures (big differences between Puritans and Jamestown settlers). They don’t study European history as a required course so they know almost nothing about how the modern world came to be (Westphalian nation states, etc). And they learn almost no world history beyond ancient civilizations (native Americans, ancient Egyptians, etc).
I spend $33,000 a year on my daughter’s education and she was telling me about some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe—but she has no idea what the Magna Carta is, or what the political structure was of the UK that we declared independence from, who Plato is, etc. My mom was more educated as a girl in a desperately poor Muslim country in the 1950s than my daughter in an affluent DC region private school.
I attended the best school district in my state, and the history education was absolutely miserable. Didn't cover either World War, but covered and re-covered early American history in a very boring, unrevealing way.
Not sure how it is today but in the late 90s it felt like we had a section about Nazis and WW2 every year in high school (in Germany). Yes, I get it, it's important - but it's not important to rehash it every year for 9 years.
That said, overall I was pretty happy with history class.
>The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization... some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe.
The Iroquois Confederacy. Irony.
> some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe
Do you mean the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee [1]? I.e., the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy? The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers? The form of government of one of the major regional powers at the time the US was formed? Don't know why your daughter's teachers would bother teaching her about that. Sure, it's awful if they were neglecting all those other things, but seriously, anyone learning American colonial-era history needs to learn about the Iroquois Confederacy.
[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Law_of_Peace
> The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers?
This reads a bit more like spinning a noble savages tale rather than the much more obvious explanation being that the founders were building on the proven greco-roman models and various Enlightmentment figures - as they directly state in a number of federalist papers.
I don't think the "noble savage" idea applies in this case. The problem of the noble savage idea is that it portrays indigenous people as simple, pure, and uncorrupted, while overlooking that indigenous people are complex just like non-indigenous people.
It's no myth that the Haudenosaunee and other indigenous people had sophisticated governments that could have inspired the writers of the US Constitution. The Haudenosaunee's democracy-ish form of government extends back probably a thousand years. The people who wrote the US Constitution had contact with these people. The exact extent to which this shaped the Constitution is up for debate, of course.
Yes, the US government draws from European roots too. I hope my kids learn about both the Magna Carta and the Great Law of Peace.
> The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers?
That would be a synergy of ideas primarily found in Polybius, Montesquieu, and the extant British constitution.
Not to discount the value of teaching about the political system of the Iroquois -- that's an interesting a valid topic to cover in school -- but it's not appropriate to attempt to link it to the US Constitution in a way that's wholly speculative and tenuous, and do so at the expense of properly teaching about the actual ideas that factored into the development of the constitution.
It was from the extensive intellectual discourse on separation of powers during the English civil war: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Separation_of_powers
The single greatest influence on American society is what was going on in Britain in the mid 17th century and Americans learn absolutely nothing about it in school. It’s like writing a history or MacOS X that doesn’t mention NeXT.
> dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
And don't even start on how little is dedicated to explain slavery and the social and economic ramifications until the late 20th century. Or how the native people were actively suppressed during the expansion to the West, and how all that lead to some of the current social and economic structures around predominantly Native American groups.
My daughter's middle school science class spent a month and a half chewing through water and rock cycle. I don't think geology is in her future.
> I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
Really? I remember the Civil War being a unit (significantly less than a semester) in US History, which was one class in my sophomore year of high school.
I think that Native American history, the Civil War, and Geology are all reasonable subjects to cover in school.
I don't think OP disagrees, or their mother. I think it's more the time spent on such things. They might be worth a semester or two, but the world would be a much better place if we learnt a little about a lot, because to functionally understand one thing means to understand the links between things. I person would have a much deeper understanding of the American Civil war if they understood the British Empire at the time their competition with France to dominate the world stage, and how the US fits within that. Instead, the US seems to teach about the Civil War as if it were an independent conflict when not much happened before or after.
I believe early grade schools should be relatively broad in the subjects they teach. Not every child will be interested in math or science. And there's nothing wrong with that. I feel many parents don't agree, especially those from a technical background. A healthy society should have a diverse set of skills across many disciplines. Though I do believe if children are interested in furthering their study on a particular subject (not just math), there should ideally be opportunities from schools.
It’s shameful to not be interested in math and science—that’s like saying you’re not interested in reading. But putting that aside, the other subjects should be educational.
I remember what triggered my mom was us spending an inordinate amount of time making clay models of Native American villages. American kids shouldn’t graduate high school knowing more about the shapes of Native American houses than the conceptual underpinnings and history of their own civilization.
I believe there's value in learning about such topics such us how historical village buildings are created from a child's perspective. Regardless whether it's Native American, European, or African, etc. It allows us to reflect on what was built before and to understand what to avoid or improve in future development. Not to teach them the exact technical details, but to light a spark to those children inclined. We need people who are interested in such things to study it so future generations can understand where we have come from and how far we have gone. I believe it also allows us to appreciate that there are many peoples and countries today that still live this way and allow us to be empathetic or humbled by their way of living.
I believe math and science should be invested in but if I had a choice between a broad learning curriculum and a focused one, ill choose broad.
If you've ever watched a movie or listened to music, you'll be surprised to know not all of the artists are well versed in math or science. You may be surprised that many of the people, experiences, entertainment, and sports you absorb may not be math inclined either. I personally find value in that.
> It’s shameful to not be interested in math and science
What? Don't you know anyone who is not a nerd? I know many very fine people with no interest in either, and they have nothing to be ashamed of
Because people live in a world that is understandable through math and science. They don't need to specialize in those subjects, but as a human in reality they should familiarize themselves with reality.
> the main benefit is that the kids are better behaved so there is less chaos and distraction.
This is such a scam, unreal.
Private schools have a market with one of their distinguishing features being "kids don't openly flail around instead of paying attention"
They're only able to get away with "only" being marginally better cause the bar is so, so low.
(I'm not condemning you, it's just obscene the amount of effort and time required for kids to get even something that approaches a decent education)
Western literature is bad because it was written by cis white men. Native Americans lived here and had an advanced society that was way better and it didn't have capitalism. /s
I thought this was a really bad article. "Suddenly"?? I've heard many tech parents go full bore into homeschooling for at least about 2 decades now.
Also, for the particular issues she talks about (e.g. social isolation), essentially all of the tech parents I know that are into home schooling put a ton of effort into having a really rich social environment, e.g. either through "group schooling" or lots of outside activities.
It's really a blog post and if you read it that way (i.e. a personal story / take on the topic) then it's fine.
I've replaced the title with a somewhat more neutral question from the article. If there's a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, and preferably using representative language from the article), we can change it again.
Covid and the school shutdowns, did create a real boost in the homeschooling. Exacerbated by the particularly draconian shutdowns and masking in areas where there are a lot of tech workers like the Bay Area.
I think it merely made parents aware of what was already happening.
My nephew texted my brother during his lunch break to ask for more credits for his switch account. My brother asked why play games instead of talking or hanging out with others. My nephew sent back a video of the lunch room: every single student had their eyes glued to a digital device of some sort.
The experience kids have in schools isn't what we as adults went through - a common thing for every generation - but when you can get more interaction and socialization via home school networks and groups of motivated parents, it is hard to argue against it.
> My nephew sent back a video of the lunch room: every single student had their eyes glued to a digital device of some sort.
Wow, this just makes me intensely sad. We are ruining a generation of humans with these digital narcotics. Say what you want about being a Chicken Little, or that every generation looks at the next generation's behavior with some amount of trepidation ("MTV will corrupt your mind!"), but this feels pretty different to me. Humans are social creatures, and human children need lots of unstructured social play, and they need to be allowed to get bored, and we're killing all that.
Which is why so many districts are pushing for no mobile devices during the school day.
Hearing accounts like this where apparently kids bring game consoles to school as a regular thing further makes me support schools having technology lockers.
Does the US really not do that yet? That's crazy. My children have school laptops for work and need to lock their phones up upon arrival until departure. You couldn't bring in a Switch, period. Sometimes they look at YouTube videos or play web games etc at lunch time on the laptop, but AFAICT they've been discouraging that more and more.
Some schools have moved to this model, but it definitely is not a standard. It is also not always popular with the families or students.
https://www.dallasnews.com/news/education/2024/12/28/a-north...
I'll let you in on a secret. If I had owned a GameBoy and not only a Super Nintendo I would have also brought it in in the 90s.
I'll let you in on a secret. I did own a GameBoy while in elementary school. I did bring it to school a few times against my parent's wishes. When teachers saw me playing with it, it was confiscated and held at the front office only to be released at the end of the day. After a few times of that happening the confiscation also resulted in a parental phone call.
The same went with cell phones. I had a cell phone in high school. If it was being used during a class or even chirped a single sound it would be confiscated to be released at the end of the day at the front office. They were not to be used during school time.
I think trying to equate the situation in the 90s with what's going on is a mistake because it glosses over the huge differences and increased harm in today's world.
I also had a Gameboy in the 90s. I played with it quite a bit, but nowhere near the average amount of time spent on screens by kids today. And I don't think there is any school in the US in the 90s where you'd see every kid glued to a digital device at lunch.
I think it's like saying "hey, I smoked weed in the 60s" and comparing that to someone freebasing cocaine today - or heck, even smoking weed today, as today's weed has about 10-100 times the amount of THC as most 60s weed.
Completely agree, but it's not really like "tech homeschooling is a new thing" vs. the fact that public schools (I'd argue especially in the Bay Area, e.g. see the school board recall) got so bad during the pandemic that parents had huge motivation to find an alternative.
And the fact of the pandemic makes this article even worse in my opinion: "Gee, why would parents with means want to find an alternative when public schools had to go all remote for extended periods and were a shit show in general?"
This piece makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims.
Just because you are putting a child in a siloed environment doesn’t mean you’re teaching them that everyone else is beneath them.
If you are homeschooling and not teaching humility, kindness, etc then you’re doing it wrong.
- parent of 6 homeschooled kids
There is still an implicit "othering" of other children. They are in one camp and yours are in another. If they have any semblance of imagination as kids do, they will dream up reasons beyond the one you gave them
Our two kids are homeschooled and are generally equally excited to play with all their friends (some homeschooled, some in regular public school, some in private school).
I have yet to see or hear any "othering" of their friends. In fact, I'd say the breadth of different social situations they are exposed to makes the "othering" less likely.
Ever thought it might be the other way round?
I'd send my kids private, but no way would I isolate them with home schooling. You're meant to do that on evenings and weekends anyway.
Isolation is not a requirement in home schooling. It can happen? Yes, it's a risk.
Can the opposite happen? Yes, I've seen it personally. My home schooled nephews know and are known by everyone in their village and surroundings. Sometimes I feel at 6 and 8 years old they have more diverse professional connections and acquaintances than I have right now.
Yeah, the whole "maladjusted home school kid" is a thing we were cognizant of when making this decision.
To your second point: I think the best predictor of success in any education setting is intentionality and involvement from the parents. That said, with home school you get nights and weekends AND days to spend in whatever way is most optimal for your kids.
In what way is the ”othering” different than what children otherwise do, apart from being in different kind of schools? As you wrote children (or more generally) people can make up all sorts of reasons for that.
> Here are some things I struggle with at age 32:
> - Social awkwardness and anxiety
> - Difficulty in forming IRL friendships
> - Impatience with the idea of connecting on a meaningful level with other people: who needs ‘em?
> - An abiding sense of detachment from reality
I'm the same age and have the same things, and I went to traditional school K through university. Idk if that has much to do with how you were schooled, or at least not being home schooled doesn't just magically fix that.
Those are all symptoms of ADHD. I am reluctant to point that out, but I see this a lot. I'd like to respond with a small footnote. Or wait until the comment drops below the fold. Alas, I cannot. :)
Also schizotypy which maybe 5% of people have and gets DXed basically 0% of the time. It's a developmental disability which will make you a target for relentless bullying which will screw you up much more than you need to be screwed up.
You should be reluctant to DX ADHD, everybody seems to have it because it's promoted by an addictive pill industry, it's almost as fashionable as gluten intolerance used to be or autism is these days. #notactuallyautistic
Interesting. I read the wiki article and the mayo clinic page on it. School uniforms are not uniformly a bad idea I think. We as a civilization should really focus on removing bullying as memetic virus. It has knock on effects that are larger than we realize, like most forms of harm.
I think most people seem to have it, because I think most people do to some degree, most things are a spectrum. We simply aren't prepared for the world we have accidentally created for ourselves. I personally don't find the pills addictive. Speaking of which, this quite long video, "Dopamine Expert: <clickbait redacted>" is quite good, esp if you are a fan of neurology and neuropsychology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6xbXOp7wDA
Whether schizotypy is dimensional (you have more or less of it) or taxonic (you have it or you don't) is a primary controversy. One fact is that the 'schizogene' postulated by Meehl which would make it taxonic certainly does not exist or efforts to find it would have born fruit in the genomic age.
The dimensional view is personified by Gordon Claridge who edited a few conference proceedings which may be closer to the truth but fail to tell a compelling story. You might read these and walk away thinking "nothing more to see here folks"
This monograph
https://www.amazon.com/Schizotypy-Schizophrenia-View-Experim...
by Mark Lenzenweger tells a compelling story that might be less true. My life made 100% more sense the day it fell into my hands after decades of looking for answers.
I don't really like the DSM definition of STPD; today I could mark up my first psych eval with a highlighter and add a few symptoms I've experience sense and satisfy it, but as a person who reads about psychodiagnosis for fun I read it and missed it numerous times. (Also despite my condition causing me a lot of trouble, I don't feel like I'm really that ill.) If Lenzenweger is right, it could be diagnosed by an eye tracking test.
As for school uniforms I think they have some good points and some bad points. As a kid they might have done me some good but I probably would have been resistant, as I was to many things. And for bullying I'll share
https://www.amazon.com/Bullying-Social-Destruction-Laura-Mar...
and also
https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Honor-Bluejacket-Books/dp/15575...
written by USMC officer, journalist, novelist and US Senator Jim Webb which is a compelling but even-handed account of the role of hazing in promoting group cohesion that was recommended to me by one of his classmates from the Naval Academy one day when I was giving blood.
Reading it now, I am reminded of the importance of sleep. The only time I have experience "visual aberrations" is when I have been very sleep deprived. Items in my periphery would rotate, like my mind was attempting to dream. And then there is this description of one of the cases
> single male who works for the U.S. Postal Service, typically during the midnight shift.
People should be very very cautious about working swing shifts or night shifts.
https://time.com/3657434/night-work-early-death/
I am not that far in, but it looks to me like STPD is a precursor to full Schizophrenia, and that if caught early could avoid it entirely. This might be what the book says.
Oh the DSM, it seems chock full of ... spicey illinformed kinda right by accident correlation isn't causation kind things. After reading enough of it, I don't even see it anymore. I am sure there is still some phrenology in there.
Hazing as a bonding exercise is barbaric. I have seen scrapbooks of USN sailors that have crossed the Tropic of Cancer and Equator. Yeah, no.
Meehl's hypothesis is that some fraction of schizotypes, maybe 5-10% develop schizophrenia in early adulthood. I'm too old for that now.
It could be that I've compensated because my verbal intelligence is too high to measure. I got 800 verbal/760 math on the SAT and probably gave up 40 points to the line noise in my brain. I struggled to get more than 90% on math quizzes in high school because of that line noise but as my education progressed (physics PhD) I got better at not making mistakes on math. I've maxxed every verbal test and subscale I've taken.
I am worried that I won't be able to compensate so well when I am older; psychotic dementia would be a terrible burden on the people around me. I've seen people who aged well because they had good emotional habits, I can only hope I've got enough time to improve mine.
One commenter proposed ADHD, the other high IQ.
My proposal: Forrest is just an average person guy, those who know him (but not how he feels about himself) may describe him as “well adjusted”. How Forrest feels is a reasonable response to a culture that rewards and incentivizes maladjustment.
Signed on behalf of
Los milenaristas milenarios de militante
This is due the author presumably having a really high IQ, not homeschooling. He would feel the same way with regular schooling.
I find looking beyond the rim of your own plate such an inspiring thing when it comes to schooling.
Germany for example prohibits home schooling. don't breed detached extremists. however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O. but then on the upside again, you will go to school for at least 13 years if you get _any_ kind of qualified professional education.
China has one (1) math text book for 1.4bn people.
France has competitive cognitive Tests (Concours) to enter highest education.
maybe a problem is that everybody went to school so everyone thinks they are experts. it's hard to evolve schooling. like steering a super tanker. slooow. too slow for four year election cycles.
”don't breed detached extremists”
This doesn’t follow. In addition, there are plenty who fit that description who did go to a state school.
well, the German constitutional court thinks it does follow, indeed, and they are much smarter than I am in their argument:
https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rk200...
In a nutshell, only schooling forces you to confront other beliefs in a way preparing you for life in a pluralistic society and thus schooling as such is a cornerstone in education.
private schools German flavor are okay because their curriculum has to comply and their final exams are state controlled.
So for example even if you went to some evangelical creationist belief system school, you'd have to understand and know evolution. And every student gets sex ed no matter if the parents think that's a bad idea, including contraceptives, abortion rights and all.
And likewise every student is confronted with the Hollerith machine planned systematic mass deportation and mass murder of 6 Mio Humans for having a "wrong" birth certificate, using scheduled, planned trains and scheduled, planned mass murder factories. And every student learns how that came to be and how a weak democracy was overturned into a mind control oppression state.
And that makes a _lot_ of sense.
Two points here:
1. Government schooling won't force you to confront other beliefs: it will deliver you a particular set of beliefs. Example: sex ed (which must, logically, be delivered from one or another moral perspective; there is no neutrality). Or history, which in many Anglo countries used to whitewash 19th-century crimes, and now goes to the other extreme of ignoring anything good.
Empirically, it is pretty clear that government schools do not produce, and are not designed to produce, children who are capable of examining things from multiple points of view.
2. Ultimately it's a philosophical question: who is ultimately responsible for the child's development? And, therefore, who has the right to make the final decision on this? The parents, or the state? That's obviously a much bigger question, but it will determine one's attitude to homeschooling.
do you see the difference of "government schools" in contrast to curricula elaborated by democratically elected boards? especially in a country with proportional representation, which reflects into said boards?
also the controversy is built into the curricula. "these are the positions, discuss"
and yes my top comment is exactly addressing the top point. and how it may be a good idea to think about how other cultures approach education and why.
> do you see the difference of "government schools" in contrast to curricula elaborated by democratically elected boards? especially in a country with proportional representation, which reflects into said boards?
I don't think it makes much difference. Even if we grant for argument's sake that the people elected to school boards are likely to represent the majority of the people entitled to elect them, why should my children be fed the majority view just because it's the majority?
> also the controversy is built into the curricula. "these are the positions, discuss"
Presumably that doesn't happen with every topic. What is presented as factual, and what is presented as opinion, is significant and necessarily reflects a worldview.
By saying "here is the pro-X argument, here is the anti-X argument, discuss", and then stopping there, you are necessarily teaching that X is something opinion-based and non-factual, or at least too trivial to matter. And I, as a parent, may think that X is factual and important. So somebody's views have to win out - mine or someone else's. There is no neutrality anywhere in reality.
> only schooling forces you to confront other beliefs in a way preparing you for life in a pluralistic society and thus schooling as such is a cornerstone in education
That's absolute nonsense.
Public schooling grooms you to fit into a rigid, calculated mould for society. You learn which is the right way and things to think, and which ones are wrong and you're not allowed to think, according to the current government in place. Your comment exudes precisely that.
On the flip side, a long history of multiple paths through public education has led to Germany being a country where there is no universal expectation that everyone should/must get at least an undergraduate degree, and so inflation (in terms of both price and dilution of value) of degrees is lower than in countries like the UK or especially the US.
An acknowledged, well-designed, and state-supported path to vocational education is very good; social mobility is important within such a system, and a lack of social mobility doesn't have to be baked in.
oh, I agree "Länderhoheit", state level control of curricula, was one of the weaker ideas in German education. East Germany got that that much better. Finland had sent envoys to East Germany and copied their system (not the curricula, mind you), to create their Pisa winning system in the 1980s...
> too slow for four year election cycles.
Maybe that's the problem: that education is so politicized. Yet another reason people opt to homeschool.
(For those of you who object so strenuously here to homeschooling, suppose MAGA were to remake public education they way they want it to be. Would you then not seriously consider homeschooling? I bet y'all would.)
I personally.think the solution to the maga craze and polarization is a proportional representation instead of first past the post. oh and control over individualized media and their individualized political campaigning, built on disinformation and bubbles.
has little to do with homeschooling or not.
>however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O
As a German that's the first time I hear that. Do you mean Schülerpraktikum? That's usually at age 14. Never heard anyone doing that at age 9.
They're talking about the division between Gymnasium, Realschule, and Hauptschule. It's actually state to state nowadays whether they have separate schools or Gesamtschulen, but I understand even in Gesamtschulen, in many Bundesländer there's some internal separation.
Where are you in DE, that this is unknown to you? In Köln just 15 years ago I knew parents who had the horror scenario: a 4th grade teacher who quietly believed that girls shouldn't go to university. They switched their daughter schools that year.
this is very reductive and really hyperbolic. Also hauptschule does not exist in most states anymore.
I also know enough people who did perfectly fine via Realschule to academics. Of course it's a decision with pretty much a single point of failure which is suboptimal, but don't act like it's predetermining your whole carrer.
I guess he is talking about the three school types you can go to after elementary
or four (adding Gesamtschule) but yes, the what she's talking about.
as others said: Schullaufbahnentscheidung vierte Klasse (at the age of 9 years for most Students)
Also a lot of countries have different goals, and most people when they think of optimization of schooling think of better outcomes at the top end, whereas administrators think of better outcomes at the bottom end. The difference between stimulating your smartest people enough that they become leading beacons of their field vs minimizing the amount of people that get left behind. In some places there's a mixed approach with magnet schools but there's many countries where that doesn't exist.
Not sure inspiring is the word I would hve picked :D
Overall it sounds a tad better than the US, but far from perfect.
Especially not accounting for different developmental speed of kids annoys me, although from what I heard it'd a bit better these days than in the 90s - e.g. even if they sent you to the Realschule instead of Gymnasium and at age 15 you decided you wanted to go to university they wouldn't make your life extra hard.
hehe, yes I absolutely agree partitioning schooling is a bad idea. It's much smarter to have shared learning and make a difference inside a class "Binnendifferenzierung" and it's also much smarter to create GATE gifted and talented programs (Hochbegabtenförderung) as enrichment and maybe after grade 8 or 9 as dedicated boarding schools.
>don't breed detached extremists.
That seems not to be working out well for Germany.
could be worse, much worse. do you have something specific in mind?
Well, things can always be worse. That's a tautology.
I was implying the growth and "mainstreaming" of afd.
that's an issue world wide and it's based on extremists abusing targeted advertisement and disinformation in individualized media.
orthogonal to schooling.
> don't breed detached extremists.
There are plenty... Who's that Nazi kid with the face tattoos? I don't remember his name.
yah, Prof. TikTok (and Dr. FB before that), personally targeting political views, that's magic. can't blame schooling for that. it's rather _despite_ schooling. and it happens worldwide (thus my wild guess about TikTok and similar media products)
I'm saying your thesis is wrong. Public schooling doesn't prevent extremists and homeschooling doesn't breed extremists.
The author's thesis is that the rise in home-schooling is driven by a desire to "opt out of being around average people," and he implies that he is not home-schooling his own children in part because he himself was home-schooled and believes that may have contributed to his own struggles with social stress.
However, given his self-description, it seems there is a decent chance he would have struggled with social stressors regardless of what education setting he was in, possibly even more so if he had been exposed to bullying or excessive social stressors in a more traditional public education setting.
Exposing oneself to just the right dose of poison in order to develop immunity is a delicate science.
When I was younger, I was also taught to believe that nurture always triumphs over nature, but as I got older and eventually had my own kids, I found out that nature was winning way more of those battles than I first realized.
Judging by the name and picture, I'm pretty sure Forrest Brazeal is a he.
Excellent point. Comment updated for accuracy.
We live in a social climate where we can't even assert ourselves of someone's gender based on their name out of fear from a very local special interest group that has far reaches into public education system and this is another big reason why parents who can't afford private school opt for home schooling.
The fact that parent had to edit their comment and could not call a man a he answers the article's question very well.
This is word salad. What does it mean to "assert yourself" of someone else's gender?
It means the user, a relatively recent account, is trawling for bites. The KKK in the username and the slant of many of their comments might hint at a touch of bad faith edge lording.
"Please respond to the strongest plausible interpretation of what someone says, not a weaker one that's easier to criticize. Assume good faith."
https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
and no, I'm not part of the KKK I wish people would focus on the content of my arguments not my username.
pkzip was taken so I chose something easier to remember.
> and no, I'm not part of the KKK
I can't say I ever said or thought that you were.
I did assume you thought it amusing to stick KKK in your name and stick with it though.
I find this somewhat hypocritical given that you've recently made suggestive statements about users comments being posted and mocked on other forums, along with vague threats of their real identities being uncovered e.g. https://news.ycombinator.com/threads?id=pkkkzip
Where did I threaten to dox HN users?
I didn't say you threatened to do it, just that you suggested vague threats of it occurring.
> i dont think the ppl expressing ... here realize the screenshot of their content is being ... shared on other platforms ... coupled with ... the discoverability of usernames connected to their other real world profiles
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42687521
It's funny how I rarely think to look at someone's username.
Because public school system sucks, invites abuse from both other children and the teachers and is designed for the lowest common denominator.
It's not rocket science that parents who have means to give their kids something better do so.
It's like asking why rich people eat better food, do sports, go to better schools and are healthier: it's because they can afford a better services.
Having gone through the San Francisco public schooling system, I would never send my kids there.
I'd rather home school them if I lived in San Francisco, or if I have money, send them to private school.
This is one of the main reasons why there are more dogs than children in SF. There are some good public schools but parents don't want to deal with the vagaries of the lottery system so they move out to other school districts.
Same thing in Boston.
> I would never send my kids there.
Why not, what's wrong with it? What could you do better at home, or what could private schools do better?
I read thst San Francisco decided not to offer Algebra until high school so no one would feel left behind. One of those dystopian decisions that emerged from a well intentioned DEI initiative. A decision that defies logic and surprise didn't help. That would be enough of a red flag for me. https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-...
Algebra in 8th grade is back this year. https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/....
I have no other knowledge to vouch for SFUSD either way though.
It's not fully back. Read the fine print.
my son is in pre algebra in 6th grade. I assume that mean algebra next year. I'm glad his fifth grade teacher realized he knew it all early in the year and moved him to sixth grade math early.
You could literally live next to a school and there’s a chance your kids can’t go there.
There are many kids from low income, broken families who are just really bad students. Bullies. Disruptive. Disrespectful to teachers. It was hell going through public schools in SF.
So it's "opt out of being around average people", then?
Average people aim to provide a good a start for their kids as possible; average aims to avoid public school if possible. You now only have a set of people defined by behaviour or ability too poor for private, parents who don't care, or ones with no options...
Basically it's opting out of being around the dregs
Am I correct in reading this as you saying poor people and the ones with no options are "dregs"?
I'm not sure what your point is. All parents want to send their kids to the best schools. They buy expensive real estate for this reason. There is a very clear, unspoken reason why parents want to avoid poor areas for schools.
SF has a lottery system. This means all kids in the city are mixed. Unfortunately, my experience was absolutely horrible for learning.
If the average student is a bully, disruptive, and disrespectful to teachers then I think I might actually opt out of being around average people if possible.
And what's so bad about it? Mind you, it's not just 'being around', but "being stuck with them for 30% of your life for years in a situation out of your control".
I wish they were average.
Average people are cool. We're trying to opt out of being around the bottom 10%.
The lottery is pretty rough on people, and a lot of the schools are not amazing.
What's "not amazing" about them?
[dead]
I wonder the same thing, I have friends who send their kids there and are happy with it. Not surprisingly for SF, most of the parents are educated with good incomes and expect their kids to go to college. That has its own set of downsides of course, but you could do a lot worse.
Don't know why this is downvoted, seems like a reasonable question. I don't know much about SF or public schools in the US. Are they all bad? do we have data comparing public/private schools in these areas?
Public and private schools don't take the same tests, so we don't have good days to compare the schools. Even if we did, it would be hard to disentangle the impact of selection bias.
You could look at college acceptances or similar, but those aren't unbiased either, as colleges look at estimates of class rank, not just absolute performance.
The actual title of the article is: "Why are tech people suddenly so into homeschooling?" which is not exactly the same as "becoming fashionable". Why not use the original title?
dang edited it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706248
IME, poor quality of education at a shocking number of schools, even in "good areas".
Granted, I grew up in a rural place, and from a social perspective my school years were pretty good (high school was great, it was literally like movies that were popular at the time in the 2000s). I have many friends that I still talk to very often that I've known for the better part of 20-30 years.
Seems like this experience isn't the norm here. I suspect my experience is both a function of time and place.
Those positives aside, the "education" I received through high-school was incredibly poor.
I'm absolutely blown away when I see kids today taking programming classes in high school or calculus or "AP Stats" or any of this stuff.
I'd not even heard of "Mechanical Engineering" until some friends picked that as a college major my senior year, to say nothing of programming as a vocation.
Granted this was 20-odd years ago, but considering the low quality, any parent that wants their kids to aspire to "more" in an equivalent position today would have to either: - pay loads for a private school - spend substantial time giving their kids supplementary education outside of school (barring the naturally curious and ambitious). Given time and energy constraints, such a proposal doesn't even seem feasible)
It's pretty obvious to me why you'd want to homeschool today, given experiences like this and the boundless high-quality material instantly available online and elsewhere.
Socialization is the other concern.
America hasn't really taken public education seriously in a long time. That's funding for schools, serious academic standards, building more schools so class sizes stay reasonable, and insisting on having rules in place to make sure classes are not disrupted. People either just want to throw money at the problem or lower standards or make sure rich communities have good schools and poorer communities get what they "deserve" (ie. "you don't make enough/your house is not worth enough, so your school's quality will/should suck").
The way that civic pride, communities, and public education, were all tied together has withered away in the last 4-5 decades. Now, access to good, serious, education is a zero-sum game.
We are in an age where people who watch a youtube video think they know more than the experts. Being a good teacher is a skill and understanding childhood development is something that requires proper education. I'm not saying there is never a good reason to home-school your kid, but most people who do it are unqualified and from my limited experience the kids who are home schooled have huge holes in their education. Surprisingly, they do seem to be fine socially which is what you hear many people worry about.
> think they know more than the experts.
Ah, the experts. I have no sort of education in education at all. Why was I better (and still am) at helping mates learn and solve CS exercises at Uni than some of the expert and qualified teachers? A friend of mine recently started a CS course to pivot his professional career. When he doesn't understand what the teacher is on about, he comes to me for help.
I have huge respect for the concept of teachers, but sadly a lot of people are teachers because they didn't know what else to be.
> from my limited experience the kids who are home schooled have huge holes in their education
I don't want this to sound snarky at all, but I'd honestly be happy to provide you with real life cases that would broaden your experience and hopefully tilt your viewpoint.
What do you consider the "proper education"?
Studying the subject academically in any real capacity. Also, in the US, every teaching degree requires time in a classroom as a student teacher with an experienced teacher as your mentor.
Among current K-12 teachers in the United States, what would you estimate is the median number of academic/research papers related to education or adjacent fields that they have read in the past 24 months?
A teaching degree is neither necessary not sufficient for effective teaching. There are thousands of ineffective teachers with US teaching degrees. There are thousands of effective teachers without teaching degrees.This is what I'm talking about. This attitude of I read a paper or two so I know what it's like in a classroom with multiple kids at different ages that have different needs. Or I know what it's like in a classroom with 20 kids. Yes there are bad teachers, but you present the argument like "there are bad teachers therefore all homeschooling teachers are better" which is absurd.
"There are thousands of effective teachers without teaching degrees."
I doubt it. And there are countless thousands more that are terrible and whose kids are very behind.
"This attitude of I read a paper or two so I know what it's like in a classroom with multiple kids at different ages that have different needs."
How is this different from "I went to teachers' college so I know how to teach"?
I have one child. If I were to homeschool my child, I would not need to know "what it's like in a classroom with 20 kids".
I'd imagine there are approximately zero homeschoolers who are managing a classroom of 20 kids.
The skills, knowledge and behaviors required to obtain and keep a job as a public school teacher are not the same as those required to homeschool your own kids.
I'm so worried for those parents raising children outside of school without degrees in childhood development! Think of all the unqualified parenting time happening without skilled teachers to supervise!
Teachers are mostly very uneducated and ineffective at teaching itself and the subjects they teach. I don’t think spending time to get an education degree or certification means much. Parents care for their children more than any random teacher, especially ones that resist performance measurements to judge their effectiveness. I would expect the average parent to be FAR more effective just based on that care.
But good teachers can make a huge difference, it's a shame identifying them is a black art and so few people get that access.
I went to a rural public school, underfunded as they come, and my HS math teacher is still in the top 3 of all teachers / instructors I've had throughout my life. If my parents were to teach me math, I simply wouldn't be working in a STEM-field today.
The majority of my teachers were good. The dynamic was completely different compared to being around my parents.
Leave the teaching to the professionals.
Homeschooling often gets confused with self-directed education, aka “unschooling”. These are not the same.
The former tends to replicate school and requires a teacher, usually a parent. It’s basically school with added/paced/altered/enriched curriculum at the cost of socialization, although that can be compensated with other forms of peer groups, especially in urban area. Comparing this method versus school A or school B is pretty much like comparing school A and B as two schools can be as different as any given school and homeschool.
The latter is what John Holt referred to as homeschooling but is based on self-determination theory and has an abundance of science to support it. Neuroscience backs this theory too, I think the rate at which active learning learns is somewhere around x20 faster than passive learning (ie “teaching”). Very serious folks like John Holt, Peter Gray, or Akilah Richards to name a few have dedicated their life work to supporting self-directed education as a superior form of education. What Peter Gray’s research shows shows is that outcomes are basically the same except for life satisfaction and psychological outcomes. In essence, it leads to same rates of secondary education, jobs and socio-economical outcomes, except an unschooled child makes for a much happier adult later on.
Sadly, because the majority of people went through contemporary schooling or some version of it, people’s biases makes people not want to hear this.
I’m not sure what the OP’s circle looks like but I would be surprised if none of those so called “techs pro-homeschooling” are only doing the school at home version without having stumbled upon any of the science around self-directed.
> abundance of science to support it
A few citations would be helpful.
have a read through peter Gray's articles on the Psychology Today website. They cite quite a lot of research.
Can you cite some of these claims, to guide someone like myself who has never heard of any of these things?
https://www.self-directed.org/resources/research
> Homeschooling often gets confused with self-directed education, aka “unschooling”. These are not the same.
There are also a lot of other approaches. Home education is a blanket term for every approach to education other than schools with class rooms.
I think my own approach was a hybrid. I expected academic progress (especially in English and maths, which are enablers for studying other things), but let the kids follow their interests too.
That’s right. And at the other end of that spectrum, there is what some refer to as “radical unschooling” which gives total agency to the child over the material they’ll learn. I know some radical unschoolers who’ve even ended-up in conventional schools because it was their decision. It may sound like a paradox but it happens, usually not more than a few years though, but again, depends on what’s available to them wherever they live, and also the friends/peers and what they are doing too. I think these choices come down to the child, parenting style and the environment in which the child evolves. There is no right or wrong in my opinion.
In his 2017 paper[1], Peter Gray goes in depth on all the different self-directed education approaches including some of the well-known self-directed “schools”, from Summerhill in the UK to Sudbury Valley in the U.S.
[1] https://cdn2.psychologytoday.com/assets/self-directed_ed.-pu...
I don't think this article is a good faith analysis of Homeschooling. Clearly the author was home schooled and had some concerns with how they were instructed. With that in mind the arguments that are brought up are very much ignoring the breath of options that are all covered under "homeschool". There is far more diversity in the home school world beyond academic overachiever and religious fundamentalist.
Fundamentally home school allows children to be taught in a way that is appropriate for them, and with the speed and oversight they require. Something that you can't really do in a corporate school setting. All three of my children learn at different paces, and require different amounts of involvement. They all require much more involvement then they ever got at traditional schools, and they have at times progressed through their coursework much faster or much slower then the "average" pace.
It is true that if you have a child that is a academic prodigy they will greatly benefit from homeschooling, and its true that keeping your children in your home can allow you to be the greatest influence in their moral and social instruction, but its also true that even "average" students will probably do better with 1-1 instruction from a parent who is well equipped then they will with a teacher who might be better trained, but is ill equipped to actually instruct each individual pupil.
As for the main point that somehow this is some form of elitism where homeschool families don't want their kids around the common rabble. The homeschool families I know range from households where both parents hold post secondary degree's, to ones where the parents got GED's, and the career expectations are suitably broad for the kids being schooled. This stands in stark contrast to traditional school which ranks its self on how many kids go to 4 year colleges, and looks down on anyone who would join a trade, or be a home maker. This is literally my biggest complaint with school in the Bay Area. If your kid didn't get into Berkeley or Stanford your household was perceived to be a failure, and if they had any desire to do something other then be a Product Manager at a FAANG then they were going to be forced to live at home forever or move to another state.
> Why are tech people suddenly so into homeschooling?
Are they? I mean statistically. Or is that just an observation from some random articles about a handful of freaks?
> and let me tell you, at no time were my six siblings and I considered the cool kids on the block.
I don't want to defend homeschooling but in my experience, the cool kids on the block tend to end badly. These are the girls that end up pregnant at 16 or in relationships with abuse partners, the boys that end up in addiction and a career of jumping from shitty jobs to shitty jobs.
Having said that it is nice to be able to develop social skills. I used to be super shy and had to force myself to grow a more sociable person and I am glad I had to force myself doing that by going to school.
As someone who had both good and really bad times in schools, works in tech, and is considering it for our kids, some thoughts:
Never once did I want my kid to “not be around mediocre”, it’s the extremes I want to filter.
Part of the reason we’re considering private school is to avoid the bullies/wannabe gangbangers who don’t care if they end up in jail that made my own life miserable.
Similarly, our concern is with the other extreme, anxiety-ridden, high-expectations “has to change the world” is not what we want his social culture to be.
A group of kids that enjoy learning, understand the employee/entrepreneurial trade-off but may still opt for a 9-5 is what we’re after.
A friend of mine half-jokingly suggested “the cheapest private school” to balance this out, and actually seems like a half-decent solution.
Like with general life consequences, we want them to experience as much variance on their own while avoiding extreme swings with long-term negative repercussions (horrific injury, jail, dangerous drugs). This is just one facet among many for us.
There are private schools which have more and less competitive environments, it just depends. I'm not convinced that filtering by tuition cost will necessarily get you what you want, you'd want to research the individual school and talk to families and so on.
This makes sense and is probably what we’d do.
The “cheapest private school” suggestion was also a response to avoiding another culture we wanted to avoid: entitled rich kid
The idea was that a tuition filter might help here, but that was purely off my friend’s experience as I have none with private school.
It's true that there has always been a sizeable chunk of religion motivated home schoolers, historically there was a long tail with motivations and efficacy that was all over the map.
One thing that's really common is for parents to try it when they feel that the local system is failing their kids in some way and the family economics supporting are acceptable.
There are also many permutations - it wasn't uncommon when I was younger for parents to do it through middle school, but have their kids attend high school because they felt that it was the point where socialization became important in a way that couldn't be handled effectively with home school.
Obviously there's a huge range of efficacy, too.
That said, I think you have to ask why are charter schools and vouchers (not just home school) becoming even more fashionable despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large? And a lot of it is because society has gotten more and more zero sum and it's going to increasingly self cannibalize.
Which is not that far off from the writer's premise.
> That said, I think you have to ask why are charter schools and vouchers (not just home school) becoming even more fashionable despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large?
People demanding it is evidence that political public education should adapt to that demand. It may or may not pay off, but this is how politics works, and education is politicized.
There is NO WAY that voters are going to see commentary like yours and be dissuaded -- that's just not how politics works. Have you ever changed someone's mind really on politics?
It would be much better to look at what's been motivating voters to demand vouchers / whatever else you don't approve of and see if you can satisfy their demands in some other way, such as reducing the politicization of education in other ways.
>despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large?
You don't find the experience of New Orleans following their conversion to a complete charter system in 2005 (10 percentage point gain in college acceptance rates, improvements on standardized tests by about a third of a standard deviation) to be meaningful evidence?
https://news.tulane.edu/news/new-orleans-reforms-boost-stude...
Congratulations to Louisiana on improving from 50th-ranked state in education to...50th-ranked state in education?
The population of New Orleans is less than 10% of the population of Louisiana. Also, I'm not aware of a single metric by which Louisiana is considered to be last place in K-12 education in 2024. State PISA scores are basically on par with California, spending per student is higher than Nevada. It's certainly no Massachusetts, I've seen it ranked around 40th out of 50 on different metrics, but I think you're revealing some ignorance in assuming Louisiana's school system is ranked last in the nation.
What you see with that result is way more complicated than just "charter schools working."
Circumstances can drag you into it.
I had trouble in the public schools because of bullying linked to my schizotypy (then undiagnosed despite what I'm told later was an exceptionally good psych eval for the late 1970s) They were going to drug me so my parents took me out for two years, I skipped three and was successful in high school. (In the single year my parents were able private school I was treated as I had some rights and dignity)
My son struggled in elementary school in a different way. Our school got labeled as a "persistently dangerous school" because we had an principal who, unlike others in the district, filled out the paperwork honestly (and got fired for it.) I lost faith in the superintendent when he first words in a meeting were "we're going to appeal it" as opposed to something like "we're going to do everything in our power to make this school safe".
I was active in the PTA (maybe the only dude; that same superintendent was dismissive of my wanting to be active in my son's education at the same time he welcomed the mother of a 'special' child who could call the state and light a fire under his ass to do so) and was very impressed with the teachers for one year, but the next year they seemed disorganized and the precipitating incident was when my son made a horribly violent doodle and the teacher wrote "Great!" with an underline on it. We didn't take him back the next day and kept him out for two years. We couldn't get him on a good reading program but we got him far above grade level on math with Kahn Academy. (As an adult circumstances got him interested in reading, now he's reading The Economist every week, books on chess openings, psych textbooks I loan him, etc.)
We never quite filled out the paperwork but two years later we slotted him into middle school where he was successful.
Economics plays into this too. Housing in good school districts is often much more expensive, and private schools are ridiculously expensive.
COVID is another factor. Anecdotal of course, but I've only met two home schooled families since moving to our present city 3 years ago, and one of them started out of necessity during the pandemic and found that it worked well and so never went back -- but they're a one income family so one parent has the time (the only way it works, IMO, unless you co-op with another family or two, which can work if you're friends). I must say I was very impressed with their kids.
In Seattle schools have double the budget compared to the years ago, and spend more than 25K per student each year. The schools are worse than ever, which has convinced me that funding isn’t the problem. This might be a local issue though, with a very ideological school district that has ignored the basics of education.
SF: 27k
OK, but the issue I was bringing up has nothing to do with funding for schools.
I was responding to the part about housing being expensive near good schools, and the idea of good schools in general. Expensive housing and associated taxes often affect local school budgets, and those budgets are often stated as the reason the school is good. But my experience has been that the budgets don’t change school quality, it must be other factors. Sorry it may have been somewhat unrelated.
Yeah, fair point.
I don't know whether budgets change school quality, but there is a marked difference in most cities between schools with high and low performance outcomes as measured by test scores, graduation rates, etc. (not that test scores are the best measure of life in general, but they're what's available in terms of academic understanding). And if you look at the schools with high ratings and where they are located, you'll find that it correlates greatly with income, and even more so you'll find that schools with the lowest performance correlate greatly with low income. (These are averages; there are brilliant students at all these schools.)
Families with higher income have more resources and more ability to support their child's education (after school activities, tutoring, a more academically-oriented environment, and most importantly, the absence of financial stress on the family unit which can greatly affect children especially if the parents (or in many cases a single parent household) has to work multiple jobs just to put food on the table much less be able to handle much else.
I think it's really housing is expensive near good schools because people (with kids) want to live near good schools so it drives up the price.
I guess also people who buy their house based on education probably have a positive effect of the education in that area but I think it's more of a market effect of the school already being above average.
I tend to agree.
As a parent with young kids moving to a new city a few years ago, we based our house hunting process on being near the best public schools (based on academic achievements; not much else to go by), and paid quite a bit more for our house than we would have otherwise. I know it sounds selfish, but our concern is that if our kids are mostly surrounded by other kids who don't have high academic standards (through no fault of their own, just their environment doesn't support that or it's not even a goal), then they will have a hard time bucking the tide, so to speak.
This sort of aligns with some other comments here. Parents want their kids to be around other kids that are better than the average. So like kids who behave well, aren’t violent, care about grades, have attentive parents, etc. I completely support that way of thinking given what school can be like when you don’t have that, which I did not like or benefit from in any way (even though some claim that mixing with other types of people is somehow positive).
Where I live all the districts have the same funding per student across the entire MSA. The inner city schools still do much worse.
The economic situation of the parents is a greater factor than the funding of the school IMO
I agree but many keep claiming that inner city schools just lack money despite evidence otherwise.
Masking children was fucking cruel.
Not really. If you've grown up in Asia you're used to wearing a mask whenever you are feeling unwell or have a cold. We do that out of courtesy to others, and it makes a lot of sense (which is why the practice has continued at hospitals since COVID). My kids were both in elementary school during COVID and got used to it quickly and were just fine.
Many American parents did not consider masking their children to be OK. If you want to know one reason many more are homeschooling now: that's one reason. There's other related reasons too. All the covid reasons to homeschool:
> remote learning wasn't working
I agree with this one.
> schools were closed for too long
Probably, but what you're not factoring in is teachers being afraid of going "back to the office" (like most other people were at the time). Unless you're going to force them or fire them (and then where do you get new teachers from?).
I've seen enough pictures of mask-free politicians surrounded by mask-wearing children. Forcing children to wear masks was NEVER about protecting the adults. It was about petty tyrants up and down the power structure exercising power over the helpless and their equally helpless parents (helpless because they depend on schools being childcare). Protecting adults was merely the excuse they needed.
All the assholes who chose to force masking -without evidence!- on children don't get to cry now when parents choose homeschooling.
(There was never any evidence of masking working. Fauci himself had written a paper about how masking didn't work in the Spanish Flu pandemic and instead caused problems. Today it's understood that masking never worked. There is no reputable science that shows masking working in any significant way, and certainly not enough to justify forcing captive audiences to wear the fucking mask. Never again.)
Like I said, it wasn't such a big deal for the kids. Were your kids traumatized by having to wear a mask, or are you just generally pissed off for no particular reason?
> without evidence
Of course there's evidence that masks prevent the spread of airborne diseases -- it's not that it protects the wearer from viruses penetrating the mask, but it greatly reduces the amount of viral load that is spewed out by a sick person, which in turn reduces the amount of viral load that others are exposed to especially in confined settings. This isn't specific to COVID.
> Today it's understood that masking never worked.
Not true. Masks can't fully protect you or prevent COVID but they do reduce the amount of viral load you're exposed to depending on the environment.
There has been a considerable increase in speech delays and disorders after 2020.
Some of that is related to lack of diverse socialisation (watching/hearing different people talk) but also caused to masking. Not being able to watch the mouths/lips critically affects a kid's speech development.
> Like I said, it wasn't such a big deal for the kids.
That is a ridiculous thing to say. Many people, children and adults were very unhappy to wear those disgusting things and/or found them very uncomfortable, and "traumatized" or not should never have been forced to. And yes, being forced to wear them by "authorities" who weren't is traumatizing for some. How dare you say something so fucking offensive? Who the fuck are you to say "it wasn't such a big deal for the kids"?
Anyways, now you know: many people hated it, hated you and your ilk for being such petty, tyrannical little shits about it, and now it's our turn to do things you don't like, like homeschool. There's nothing tyrannical towards you in others homeschooling, but you are all so offended by it because it takes away your power.
> Of course there's evidence that masks prevent the spread of airborne diseases -- it's not that it protects the wearer from viruses penetrating the mask, but it greatly reduces the amount of viral load that is spewed out by a sick person, which in turn reduces the amount of viral load that others are exposed to especially in confined settings. This isn't specific to COVID.
Utter bullshit, but even if you were right it wouldn't justify forced mask wearing, especially for children.
> Not true. Masks can't fully protect you or prevent COVID but they do reduce the amount of viral load you're exposed to depending on the environment.
They cannot protect you AT ALL from covid or any small viruses. The boxes say so themselves.
> And yes, being forced to wear them by "authorities" who weren't is traumatizing for some.
maybe for some; not for any of the parents I met before, during or after COVID.
it's obvious you don't have kids who were in school at that time, so you ... are representing parents somehow??
> hated you and your ilk for being such petty, tyrannical little shits about it,
wtf? I haven't met anyone who hated me, well, I guess now I have :)
> and now it's our turn to do things you don't like, like homeschool.
Actually, I was homeschooled myself and homeschooled my eldest child (worked out pretty good too, she got a full scholarship to a top engineering college). I like homeschooling. So you really have no idea what you're talking about.
> Utter bullshit
It's actually true. Maybe once you stop your rabid screams you'll calm down enough to do some serious research.
> They cannot protect you AT ALL from covid or any small viruses
Oh my, next you'll be telling me COVID was/is a hoax and that the earth is flat.
> > They cannot protect you AT ALL from covid or any small viruses
> Oh my, next you'll be telling me COVID was/is a hoax and that the earth is flat.
You left out the part where it says so on the box. You're also changing the subject from the horrible and unjustifiable masking of children. Changing the subject is an implied concession. Making up a strawman is pretty desperate. Masking the children was horrible and unjustifiable, and you know that quite well. And you know what, I thank you and the others who engaged in it for it because now no one will be able to do that again for another hundred years. Covid Zero ended in China because the CCP found the limit of what people would tolerate without revolting -- all those petty tyrants clad in full body PPE were going to be getting killed, that much was clear. Here in Texas all that crap got nipped in the bud real quick and next time will be much quicker.
No sorry, this was full time whether sick or not. And if you're sick you just skip school. It was fucking cruel and wrong.
Are private schools all that ridiculously expensive though? I'm enrolling my kid into University School (a private boys only school in Cleveland) and the tuition is like 30k$ per year.
My school district in south WA is a representative example. Outcomes in math & English have been poor and continue declining. Attendance has dropped by > 30% despite mild population growth. Cost / student are among the highest, and due to the lacking attendance, deficits have led to staff cuts, leading to worsening outcomes. A death spiral.
To many, schools are perceived to be costly, unsafe indoctrination centers that push left-leaning agendas. Extended covid lockdowns were a huge betrayal.
You only have one chance to raise your kids, and the competition is getting tougher every year. Homeschooling in the area has tripled.
Some of the criticism is justified, some isn’t. But with failures on the academic outcomes, safety, and subjective failures on the ideology – the onus is on public schools to win back trust.
You can shame the homeschoolers , but that won’t bring them back. Time will tell if they succeed, but compared to public schools, the bar is so low that odds are in the homeschoolers favor. Especially if their parents care enough to do it.
I have a theory that is grounded on no-scientific evidence whats-so-ever. This applies only to the 2-5y population.
1) kids in nursery get sick a whole lot, and is not always just 'building up their immunitary system', it really is a one-two punch of constant illness that drugs for months on, with little to no recovery mechanisms. This is truer in bigger city with a higher turnover of the class cohort
2) a lot of the socialization aspect of nursery is overrated. Parallel play is a thing, and the need for socialization doesn't require a whole 8 hours. There are plenty of other opportunities to socialize. Especially in higher density areas, where institutions are more involved in creating moments for kids to socialize.
3) the cost of central group based nursery has skyrocket. (just empiric evidence), at the same time there is an increasing supply of 20-something-y-old that don't want a nursery job, but are happy to do a more flexible working hour in a less 'stressful' enviroment (aka less children, more home based).
The combination of the 3 things has made homeschooling a lot more interesting for parents.
It's becoming fashionable outside the US as well. And the core reason is that public schools deteriorate.
Public school systems sucks at diversity. It demands parents and students to endure diversity (i.e. putting kids from all walks of life into a single class), while it delivers zero itself, i.e. refusing to diversify its offerings as affluent kids from high-iq parents need different schooling than the fresh foreign refugee-arrival from a war-torn country.
Teachers Unions make sure to deflct any "market pressure" from teachers and these unions' political arms (i.e. left-leaning progressive parties) rake in extra profits because they can cry wolf about the bad state of education or worsening abilities for poorer people to rise through the ranks via merit. Crocodile Tears.
This "shouldn't" be surprising. Smart people seeing a wider perspective, seeing the limits of mass-schooling and top-down curricula, seeing other social challenges, and seeing a better option? I live in Seattle; there's a reason it's one of the top metros with per capita private school enrollment and if it weren't for tech incomes, I'd expect homeschooling and homeschooling collectives to thrive. Comments here about neurodiversity needs are also on point.
I live in the Seattle metro, and tomorrow morning is the first day of class for our homeschool co-op, where I'm teaching software engineering to high schoolers.
I'd love to read about your experience doing this!
Note: Quotation marks are not suitable for marking emphasis.
<https://old.reddit.com/r/suspiciousquotes/>
Not arguing with your point, and point taken. The quotation marks suggest that I don't fully mean to mean the literal definition or understanding of the word quoted in the context you're reading. But I use quotes too often to equivocate. Thanks for the reminder.
I went to a public school and regarded it as prison, no bullying went on, but the system is not designed to educate, it is designed to instill obedience, and the pace of learning is dictated primarily by mediocrity of the teachers(I had a rare great 5th grade teacher so this is why I think the the teachers more so than the students abilities dictates the results).
People recommending private school: these do not exist in all locations, try finding a good one in a rural area
It seems standards in public schools have only fallen since I attended, and based on how social media is trending, we seem to be getting dumber and less informed.
I could never force a child to attend public school in the US, unless it happened to be one of the rare good ones I hear exist.
If we ever get something like what is described in "The Diamond Age" perhaps that will help solve the school problem.
I think the author is simply wrong is their assumption. I'm pro-homeschooling, more or less fit the described profile and I don't see a slightest problem with my kid interacting with average people nor do I have contempt for them. The problem I see though is with putting the child into a non-voluntary community. Those tend to be toxic and prison-like.
Also, the school education is not crap because it's done by average or designed for the average. It's crap because it objectively can't adapt to an individual kid's pace. There's just no way around teaching kids in huge groups that doesn't involve everyone working as a teacher. Maybe AI will help here.
“He climaxed his teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. Later that year he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall called “An Evening With John Taylor Gatto,” which launched a career of public speaking in the area of school reform, which has taken Gatto over a million and a half miles in all fifty states and seven foreign countries." http://crn.hopto.org/archives/john-t-gatto/
The problem with homeschooling is it's pretty much a crapshoot whether you end up in a weird religious environment or an abusive environment, with a long-shot chance of ending up in a fun constructive environment with lots of personalised attention and the opportunity to travel the world.
Of course, this is pretty much the same set of dice you roll when you spawn into a traditional school system, except you roll with disadvantage when it comes to the long-shot.
I don't know, I was fortunate enough to roll the long shot, and it worked out pretty well for me. Though I will echo the article's note that forming emotional attachments continues to be a bitch if you didn't have a large peer group at a young age...
> it's pretty much a crapshoot whether you end up in a weird religious environment or an abusive environment, with a long-shot chance of ending up in a fun constructive environment with lots of personalised attention and the opportunity to travel the world.
It's a crapshoot for the kid, but a parent who's considering homeschooling knows pretty well whether they are going to be the fundamentalist type or not. If they are, they likely aren't here reading this discussion.
I assume GP was considering the societal value of homeschooling. I.e., what (if any) bureaucratic checks should be in place to ensure the children are actually being educated (assuming that home schooling is legal at all).
> If they are, they likely aren't here reading this discussion.
Why not?
There are a lot of types of fundamentalists. I don't know that being raised in some sort of AI Accelerationist Musk/Theil-adjacent Silicon Valley environment is necessarily going to go particularly well for the kid either...
Why do you imply that the fun, constructive environment for homeschooling a long shot, but the weird religious or abusive environment is more of the norm?
My kids are enrolled in a homeschool parent partnership program (because its one of the few public montessori programs within an easy before-school-drive for our kids). My experience has been that the families attracted to that school fall into one of two categories:
1) Families who are skeptical of standard American public school methods and/or families who have recognized that standard public school methods don't work for their children's peculiarities. They treat the program (and especially the Montessori program) as like a school acceleration program.
2) Families who do not want the government dictating the terms of their children's education in any way shape or form. Within this latter category, the minority are active participants in their children's education, and the majority are the weirdly religious and/or abusive sorts.
The school's administration seems to cater to category 2, and expend a lot of time and effort to try to communicate that whatever requirement they're enforcing (like "your child must actually talk to, in-person, on the phone, or via video call, a teacher holding a state-issued teaching certificate at least once per 2 school weeks") is not a school requirement, but a state requirement, and failing to meet these minimum requirements will trigger a state investigation, not a school investigation. Its sort of unsettling to hear them belabor the point, but then, during the parent orientation where I was hearing that sort of thing, it seemed like most of the audience was not at all interested in suspending whatever they were doing (conversations, watching youtube videos, etc) while the principal was talking through that stuff. Like, its telling that the administration goes to great pains to say "we aren't holding you to the rules designed specifically to prevent child abuse and neglect, so don't send us your death threats or whatever", and most of the audience to that actual message of how to comply with those rules are themselves completely disengaged from the presentation of them.
I'm going to hazard a guess with zero grounding in data to attempt to answer that, caveat emptor. Please also note that even though these are my guesses, these assertions do not really reflect where I personally land on this. I'm not really sure what the breakdown is, but I think I can understand how someone gets to this point of view.
--
In order for parents to choose homeschooling, some (but not all) must be present in the parents:
- a conviction that the herd choice of sending a child to school is wrong, and not just a little bit - the belief that you know education better than expert educators with many years of hard earned experience - relatedly, the belief that you are fully qualified to teach anything of importance, and that anything you can't teach is not of important - the ability to forgo the opportunity cost of an in-home full time tutor
Add these up and you will skew towards parents who either have extremely strong convictions (faith related or otherwise) and a mentality that presupposes that the parent is "right."
In the best case scenario, this is an extremely well educated/informed parent who knows enough to keep their pride at check and can handle their emotions well in the face of at times extremely frustrating circumstances, all well being under more financial strain than they would be if they weren't showing up every day to school. These people definitely exist, and I think most parents strive to be this for their children regardless of how they educate their child.
But the "average" human is not well informed, often makes rash and/or emotional decisions, and is struggling to make ends meet. Thus, the "average" parent that chooses homeschooling skews towards dogmatic thinking and/or a presumption of "I'm right and you're wrong" that over a period of a childhood easily leads to abuse, especially if the parents are struggling to make ends meet.
I guess there is a counter argument that people who choose to homeschool can "afford" to do so and thus are well resourced enough (financially or socially) to have a good shot of success, but even among the top 10% of earners you will be hard pressed to find parents that believe they can afford homeschooling.
> I guess there is a counter argument that people who choose to homeschool can "afford" to do so
I would say that the vast majority the quote-unquote "normal" homeschool parents I know are broke hippies/homesteaders/vanlife/wooden-sailboat types.
Definitely are rich folks who go down this path, but they tend to pay fancy private tutors and end up with something much more resembling a traditional education
Well, normal, boring people tend to send their kids to school, so your chances of a normal, boring homeschooling experience are pretty slim. And even the most well-intentioned of counter cultural folks don't always excel at parenting, never mind educating.
I've met a fair number of other homeschooled folks over the years who had a great childhood, but I've met more for whom the lack of community/government oversight meant their parents could get away with things we wouldn't generally countenance (be that actual abuse, various forms of religious indoctrination, or just plain old "unschooling" - aka "ignore the kids till they go away").
> Well, normal, boring people tend to send their kids to school, so your chances of a normal, boring homeschooling experience are pretty slim.
Depends what you mean by normal. My experience is kids get more freedom, meet a wide range of people, and generally get a much better education. Maybe it is different here in the UK.
> And even the most well-intentioned of counter cultural folks don't always excel at parenting, never mind educating.
The home ed community in the UK does have a lot of hippie types in it, but even if I do not see eye to eye with them I think their kids are mostly a lot better educated than the average school child.
> hings we wouldn't generally countenance (be that actual abuse,
which also happens to school going kids. it happens more often to school going kids (and as far as I can see from stats, home ed kids are at lower risk - more likely to be investigated, less likely to have action taken). On top of that there is a fair amount of abuse in schools.
> just plain old "unschooling" - aka "ignore the kids till they go away").
that is not what unschooling is. Unschorling parents can make a great deal of effort, its just that they let kids decide what they want to learn and facilitate it.
> Maybe it is different here in the UK.
Yes, I was originally homeschooled in the UK, and while a lot of the parents where pretty far out there, there was definitely a lower prevalence of weird religious cults and that sort of thing (than in the US).
> that is not what unschooling is
That's why I put "unschooling" in quotes. There are certainly folks doing ethical things under that banner, but the legitimacy of the term provides cover for a lot of folks who aren't doing the ethical thing.
mind sharing some of your experience regarding emotional attachments / social groups?
These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people.
I agree in part and disagree in part:
Agree - they're absolutely "hacking" education for their kids. The 1:1 student/teacher ratio and the ability to custom tailor almost every part of the curriculum are the biggest selling points--and that's true whether it comes from a desire to give their kids the best they can, or a desire to micromanage and control every aspect of their lives.
Disagree - I think it's less about "average people" overall and more about opting out of learning from and being trained by what can feel like a gachapon of teachers and administrators in public (and to a lesser extent, private) schools. It probably seems to them like, "If I wouldn't hire this person to work at my company, why would I 'hire' them to do the much more critical task of preparing my child for their future?"
None of the arguments convince anyone. Homeschooling remains what it was in the creationism-and-spelling-bee days: an ideological choice.
In other words...
And TempleOS?
As someone who once heard, in 11th grade pre-calculus, that pi is a rational number equal to 22/7, I cannot be so surprised that many parents would choose to homeschool their children. Most parents have no idea what is going on in their childrens' schools.
> I can’t help but notice that history’s richest and most successful people have raised some pretty unpleasant kids.
Could that be because newspapers like to report on those and people like to read stories about how awful rich kids are?
There are plenty of unpleasant kids from modest backgrounds. It's just that their tales are boring.
Well, I went through through the public school system from rural (hamlet) kindergarten till big city university and I say ... it's OK as a default baseline but if one wants some resemblance of competitiveness and performance from their kids, one cannot avoid private tutoring.
If that is done by the parents / family, then it's almost like home schooling. But I don't like home schooling because the kid is left out of the system and the studies are not recognized. At some point they will have to take traumatizing equivalence tests, which can be entirely avoided by playing along - go to a public school, or in my kid's case, a private school which follows the same curricula.
But I stress again, even with private school, there's no replacement for private tutoring if you want your kid to succeed in life.
Great point about private tutoring, I agree.
The equivalence tests are going to be country/US-state specific though. Many do not require such tests at all.
I'm a native Finn and went to a public school here in Finland in the 00s. My overall experience was good, though of course I didn't always enjoy it. I liked some teachers more than others. I learned a lot and was bored a lot. I was subjected to the occasional bullying (who wasn't?) but I never felt truly unsafe. I also got along well with most people most of the time. I had to overcome my shyness to give presentations to my classmates. I got to know people from different socio-economic backgrounds. While navigating through childhood and puberty I made a lot of mistakes, as did all other kids, but ultimately it was a good childhood, and in hindsight I am really glad I wasn't homeschooled (not that it's common here anyway). Without the social connections I made and social skills I learned, I undoubtedly would've had a very different kind of life, and not in a better way I think.
"Social awkwardness and anxiety Difficulty in forming IRL friendships Impatience with the idea of connecting on a meaningful level with other people: who needs ‘em? An abiding sense of detachment from reality"
I can tell you from personal experience, going to school doesn't prevent this.
Certainly doesn't guarantee a better outcome that's for sure. This seems more like something that needs to come from good parenting.
Not sure about fashionable, but rather:
1) Private school is expensive as hell.
2) Yet, public school sucks. Most normies don't wanna learn and the system doesn't reward nor incentivize the smart, initiated students who want to excel. There are many normies that teachers just gotta essentially ... just babysit. And God forbid that a teacher stands up for themselves. Then some Karen has go and destroy that teacher and their career.
Because public education has become a vector for propaganda.
Because we spend more per student but with awful results.
Because our brightest don't become schoolteachers.
Because education is years if not decades behind the skills curve.
Because big, powerful teachers unions make change impossible.
Because parents have spared the rod and spoiled the child.
I don't think I've ever heard "big powerful unions" and "teachers" in the same sentence before.
The NEA is the largest union in the United States.
But also not functionally a union. Teachers are actually represented by their state affiliate, and whether or not they can collectively bargain (the sine qua non of being a union) varies from state to state. Personally, I've lived in several states, but none in which the state Education Association was able to collectively bargain for its members.
Every K-12 teacher I've known (male and female) has had times when they've come home crying from the stress. (workload, the kids you care about and can't help, ...)
The NEA does something about pay and tenure but when it comes to protecting teachers emotionally forget about it. Roughly half of the people who get a teaching certificate at their own expense discover it is a job that they can't stand to do.
State affiliates acting at the behest of a national union is a functional union, and have been effective in collectively bargaining for members since the 1970s.
Not when the state affiliates are not allowed to collectively bargain.
I recommend looking into the many things that NEA (and other national unions like it) do to enact their agendas regardless of their ability to bargain within a given state. For example the U.S. Department of Ed basically exists because of the NEA's lobbying efforts.
Most people here would be good homeschooling parents.
This site doesn’t represent the world at large.
I was personally homeschooled, and while I ended up with a positive outcome, I cannot say the same thing for any of my peers (other kids I met through homeschooling groups.) There were many children that, in retrospect, were suffering from abuse or neglect that the structure of school could have prevented, or at least a mandatory reporter could have caught.
For more anecdotes, take a look at r/homeschoolrecovery (which is nearly 1/6th the size of r/homeschooling.) Many of the stories there are so gut-wrenchingly bleak. Any margin improvement in educational outcomes hardly seems worth it given some of the pain described there.
I think as a professional in tech, it's frightening and obvious how behind schools are in keeping up with the modern world. I'm not talking about having ipads. AI will be he most significant technology humanity has experiences. We need to pivot toward an educational model that enhances creativity and cooperative communication but I just don't see that happening. It's still the bucket model of learn this don't ask questions, kids are a bucket and they need to be filled up by knowledge. It's outdated NOW, with absolutely no indication there will be significant changes.
In conversations like this, I often find it clarifying to ask if your interlocutors have children. Nothing strips away ideology like a screaming baby.
Underrated comment here
I feel like there should be a different word for those that "home school" their child by hiring a private teacher and they learn in the house. For me, homeschooling means one of the parents (often the mother) teaches the child(ren) in their home.
I know many teachers, and they have a very specific set of skills on how to teach. I wouldn't expect any old parent to know this and I suspect home school kids are worse off for it? But I'm happy to be pointed to evidence on the contrary.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Who is physically doing the homeschooling? The rich tech people? Their spouses?
It sounds like what he is criticizing is just extra-private private schooling or something like that. As distinct from homeschooling by parents, which is the more… eclectic version the author grew up with.
So, I don't claim to have Big Data on this, but I homeschooled my child, and one of the most common things in homeschooling I saw was that people used co-ops. Thus, the kids are around other kids, and the parent doesn't have to know everything.
In my case, I chose it because the public schools in my part of town (low income) were low achieving, and proto-fascist in their policies on being able to control your own appearance. They had both state level (Texas, conservative) and city-level (Austin, progressive) political influences, the worst elements of both.
Just my own experience, but it doesn't much match what the article describes.
Homeschooling is another way to protect your kids from social media. If they aren't subjected to forced hang outs with kids who are all on social media, it becomes much easier to control their access to it (or rather its access to them).
Public schools in the US are dependent on federal and state money. Play ball or lose the money. Often the people making the decisions in congressional settings and DOE have personal agendas or money greasing their wheels. Remember the hubbub on Common Core? Teach common core or lose money.
Cruise. Around YouTube for older videos and connect the dots on how Common Core was a money grab that set us back a bit.
Go to local schools and see how school boards tie their ideology to how schools and classrooms are run to get that money. For years in San Francisco you enroll in the school lottery and hope you get to send your kid to the school close enough to you. Otherwise you spend 45 minutes each way to drop them off at school. On top of that classrooms cater to the lowest performing student. What parents with money wind up doing is sending their kids to Kumon like learning centers to fix the gap the classroom has in pushing their kid to be engaged with learning.
With everything else schools are also penalized for suspending or expelling students so teachers have to find creative ways to keep the bad apples away from everyone else.
For context I have family and friends working in public schools across differ states. There’s a reason people want to abolish the DOE and return curriculum back to the local school districts or the state.
I went to an ok school district and didn’t experience any of the problems today’s kids seem to face in school. People got suspended or expelled for being bad. Classrooms didn’t show political or biological ideology to the students.
I know quite a few people who have started homeschooling their kids in recent years, including one who stopped homeschooling their kiss last year and will be pulling their kids back out of school this spring.
The most common reasons I hear are either that the public schools they are zoned for are terrible, mainly complaints over safety and/or drugs. The other common reason is just not seeing the value in the education being provided, often complaining of teacher quality or the design of a school system modelled after a program meant to churn out good factory workers.
I turned out OK in public school, but I was held back at different points, particularly in math, because I (and a few others) were too far ahead of the other kids. We literally had to repeat an entire year of content at one point. Kudos to the teachers who enabled & fostered that, but shame on the school system for not continuing to support. I'm pretty sure one of my classmates gave up on academics at that moment (he never really excelled again like he used to).
I'd like my kids to be free to follow their curiosities. It's definitely work to homeschool but for us, it may be worth it.
> Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
Because public education has gotten progressively worse.
I'm a huge supporter of public education. I think it's one of the most important things for the government to fund.
And, unfortunately, that's part of what's moving me towards homeschooling my child. We've not 100% decided on it yet. However, we are on the brink.
The issue we have is our school is underfunded and our child has special needs. Their day in class, from what we've observed, is primarily just daycare with no actual schooling. Even though they are on the border of being severe, they have no interaction with their peers which is a major reason we wanted them in school in the first place. The end result is they are spending a very large amount of time watching youtube or sitting in a corner.
The issue is our school district and our state does not want to fund public schools. They want to find ways to send money to private schools. The end result is the salaries for everyone involved are pitiful. Everyone that deals with my kid at school works 2 jobs. Some of them are making more money at mcdonalds than at school. And, surprise, the end result is even if they want to find staffers they can't find them.
Our district further bans parents from volunteering. So even though my wife is a SAHM, she can't lend a hand in my child's school to make up the staffing problem and improve my kid's education.
All of this has pushed us towards wanting to homeschool. Which really sucks because I don't think that's the ideal education for my child. I worry that we'll have gaps in the education we try to give them. I worry that they won't get to socialize with any peers. I worry that they will ultimately get left behind. But school isn't providing what we want.
School is the industrialization of childhood.
Help help I'm being repressed
civilization is the industrialization of society
yeah, and child labor was not banned, but made mandatory and pointless.
One thing I've never understood with homeschooling: How come parents think they have the competence to be a teacher? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
> Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
This applies equally to paid teachers, along with numerous downsides that don't apply to parents (i.e. being able to tailor education to a single individual, developing a relationship that lasts close to two decades, ability to slow down and speed up course material where necessary, and more). Paid teachers, contrary to semi-popular mythology, are not special and don't do anything that an average person couldn't do (they are not extra-"competent"). In the natural course of being a parent you learn how to interact, guide, and teach your children.
This argument also fails in many concrete situations. For example, where I grew up there is a decent homeschooling community made up of people with average levels of education, low to average income, and yet the kids perform very well academically and are well socialized. Saying that these parents are not competent because didn't get a badge (education-related degree) is absurd considering they do as well as the people who did get that badge.
Great, I'm sure you'll have no problem using the services of a self-taught doctor, lawyer, or engineer then. After all, why would they need to be taught by a professional?
Go spend some time in a classroom and get a fucking clue how much more there is to teaching than what your layman's view entails. You, and this disrespect for our educators and the potential of what we could be offering in our public schools is why we are the laughing stock of the developed world.
Teaching twenty kids of wildly different levels is always going to be harder that teaching a single kid, so parents have a great advantage by default.
Yes, there are educators who are so great they can teach all 20 kids amazingly well, but those are super rare. Most likely kids who are learn much faster or much slower than the rest will be left behind. If you child is in this group, it's better off to stay away from public school.
(It could have been much better if there were advanced classes, "magnet" schools, etc.. but in many states those programs are being cancelled and everyone is being forced into rigid programs.)
It is an objectively measurable fact (e.g. by test scores) that K-12 teaching, in the US, pays poorly, lacks prestige, and attracts far from the best and the brightest.
> Go spend some time in a classroom and get a clue how much more there is to teaching than what your layman's view entails.
How, by the lack of it?
A lot of people bet for home schooling because, not despite of, their perspective from inside a classroom.
If you are blindly relying on certified professionals in soft fields such as general medicine and law you are in for a bad time.
At a minimum you need to use your judgement to vet good from bad practitioners in those fields.
Also "disrespect our educators" is so funny. Sorry, they're not that serious, mostly dumb. And we're not the laughingstock of the developed world, we are the rulers of the developed and undeveloped world
I'm a former public school teacher -- maybe I can explain.
There's a lot of competence necessary to teach two dozen kids with different backgrounds and mastery levels, even in the rare moments when 2-4 of them aren't actively trying to derail the entire class.
The base level of competence necessary to go through a curriculum with one/a few of your own children is much, much lower. Could I do better with one/a few of your children given as much time and attention? Pretty definitely. Can I do better if your kid is in my classroom? In most cases, no.
Sure, there are things I could explain or guide a kid through because of my background and skills that homeschooling parents can't (though it mostly just takes more time and effort), but there's a huge amount they can do because of their relationship, access, and ability to devote time and attention that I couldn't hope to. And with modern homeschooling resources, tutors/group microschooling, online courses and group study, etc., the deficits have never been easier to overcome.
Also, two underdiscussed points: 1. An untrained, literate adult probably needs less than two hours to help a kid through what they'd learn in an eight-hour day at school. That time can go to other things. If they're productive, great. If they're not, no huge loss.
2. People significantly overestimate the level of care and competence average teachers have. You remember some fantastic ones. If fantastic and caring was the norm, you were quite lucky.
I'm generally not a fan of home schooling in a lot of cases, part of what school does is expose you to a vertical slice of humanity, and you will almost certainly be dealing with that for the rest of your life.
HOWEVER... remember that "home schooled" doesn't mean "as a parent you are the only teacher" right? You can hire tutors, you can form teaching groups with other parents, you can use online resources, etc. If done WELL and with a sense of one's own limitations, and the need to socialize your child, homeschooling can work.
It's just unfortunate that so often homeschooling is used as a way to ensure that no outside influences interrupt a parent's particular brand of ideological indoctrination... although in the narrow case of tech parents, I suspect that's less of a driving force.
> part of what school does is expose you to a vertical slice of humanity
I love that phrasing! I think I'm going to use it – thank you.
>Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
100%. But this also applies to people with degrees in education, teaching certs, and employment at your local school.
How do parents judge the ability of local teachers to be a good (pedagogical) teacher? If they discover a bad teacher, what is their recourse?
Agreed. Titles and credentials do not mean what they used to, in education and a lot of other fields.
Sufficient erosion in the meaning and value of 3rd party teaching credentials then diminishes the relative value of outsourcing the process vs. doing it in-house: literally.
We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids.
We think we have a relationship with our own child that allows us to understand what they need and how to communicate with them in a way that works for them. We think we have the time (assuming one parent is full time parenting) to give our child the attention they need to excel. And we believe that a combination of relationship and individual attention goes further in K–12 than any amount of formal training in education.
You can do all that on top of a normal education.
If you do that, the normal education is redundant. You wouldn't put a university student in class to learn multiplication; it's an insulting waste of their time. Why would you do the same to a 10 year old who mastered it years ago?
Not really—public school takes up 6+ hours of every day, and I'd like my kids to have self-directed time as well. If we tried to do some sort of after-school tutoring with mom that would deprive them of valuable time to choose their own stuff to work on.
And what would be the point? If we're right that their mom is better equipped to teach them than a teacher is (because of time to dedicate to them and a personal relationship and understanding) then what do we gain by having a teacher do it too?
(This isn't the thread for the socializing argument, because OP started with teacher qualifications. I'll just add that we are aware of that concern and have strong mitigations in place.)
Not really. There are only so many hours in the day. The time between school and bedtime is extremely limited and involves other time consuming activities such as after school sports and eating dinner.
I work on homework with my kid every day and after all those things it's not like we have time (or she has energy) to fill in holes in her at-school learning
I teach my kids valuable lessons in the car, during dinner and on evening walks. But I’m not in a country that is starving their education system.
This is asinine.
Next time you're in the car, try teaching your kid about solving systems of equations where both are linear vs one is linear and the other is parabolic. It's a lot easier to sketch it out on scratch paper than to pontificate from the driver's seat.
Try talking about history, philosophy, literature, religion, sociology, or physics while driving. Audio books exist, after all.
that's not germane to this conversation. it's about parents without formal teaching certs working with their children to given them what they need to excel.
Sure those things (history/philosphy/etc) matter but in our society you still have to do well on math tests to do well in life.
As a parent you can teach them directly (homeschool) or augment a public school education, but the augmentation route needs to be done in slack time, which is tough.
>We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids.
While this is a good and rational awareness of one's own capabilities, as someone who grew up in Bible-belt homeschooling circles and saw a wide variance in approaches and effectiveness, the "homeschool co-op"/"homeschool group" model where one parent teaches one subject to many kids, classroom-style, is super common. See, for example, "Classical Conversations" [1], a pretty common one in my area, that leans on "parent as classroom teacher to many kids", without much in the way of prerequisite qualifications.
[1] https://classicalconversations.com/
The same logic applies to teachers, and can be applied against your own question.
As an example i once lost a mark on a math test because when rounding to the nearest whole number, i put 3.0 as the answer. Wrong. 3 is a whole number, 3.0 is not i was told, and threatened with suspension on protest. That kind of thing sticks with you.
I agree with your sentiment however, i just dont think its a powerful retort.
> As an example i once lost a mark on a math test because when rounding to the nearest whole number, i put 3.0 as the answer. Wrong. 3 is a whole number, 3.0 is not i was told, and threatened with suspension on protest. That kind of thing sticks with you.
I got threatened with suspension on protest once. It was about the meaning of a word, but still.
Luckily, I'm a university brat, so I just waited a couple days until my dad was keeping me at his office, then I wandered down the hall, and I asked some professors for a detailed and referenced way to push back. I brought candy and tums, because that's what professors want from children who can't bring beer.
About a week later, I went in with a 30 page computer printed essay. As a nine year old. It had six phone numbers in the back, four to PhDs, which could be called for further detail if needed. It was addressed to both the teacher and the principal.
An opening note was "please look into how Marilyn vos Savant was treated when she explained the Monty Hall problem, when considering whether teachers are permitted to threaten students for disagreeing politely. Are you really so afraid of being incorrect?," written by an internationally renowned mathematician.
I was carrying an etymological breakdown that to this day I can barely read, stretching all the way back to the hypothetical proto-indo-european roots.
Professors don't like kids being threatened.
I did not hear about that teacher doing that again while I was in that school.
Well, you were technically wrong. Which is wrong. var wholeNumber = 3.0; - what type will be assumed for that value?
The class is mathematics. In mathematics, numbers do not have types.
You also shouldn't try to mention INT_MAX, negative zero, rounding error, or other computer science topics which do not exist in mathematics.
Type theory comes from math. Numbers in math do in fact have types. Most of the time we ignore it but numbers in math have types. math also has the concept of max number rolling back to zero ogain something anyone who has studied types in math would know. Rounding error is studied in several different math fields.
negative zero isn't in any math I know of. It is only in obsolete computer science though.
Mathematicians generally work with sets, not types. The first thing you do after defining the reals is agree that the naturals, integers, and rationals are subsets. From a type theory perspective, they are all type ℝ, and, roughly, the naturals satisfy the proposition "n:ℝ is a natural number".
Mathematics has a lot of different theories and some small branches have different rules. I've done mod math for example (it was maybe one week of classes) where you don't get an infinite set of possible numbers. It isn't nearly as interesting as far as mathematicians are concerned (for good reason) so it isn't looked at much but those theories exist.
I am no Terry Tao, but I do have a degree in mathematics. Other than possibly in a class on numerical analysis, I don't remember anything resembling types.
We definitely spent more time discussing different kinds of infinity than we did discussing rounding error!
I can believe that the situation might be different in "applied mathematics" or definitely in "engineering mathematics" - but at least at Berkeley, the latter degree is in the College of Engineering, not under the Math Department at all.
There is a lot of math never taught. types in math are mostly a dead end and so rarely taught - particularly since computer science moved to a seperate department. Even before then it was mostly applied math.
Contemporary mathematics is duck typed.
Usually but when it matters (which is rare) the can use types.
So, what was the purpose of the conversation then? In the vast majority of cases, in most normal mathematical manuscripts, '3.0' is '3'. There is no distinction.
The point is to refute the claim that math never uses a bunch of computer concepts like types - those concepts all have roots in formal math theories and so the claim is false. That that theory is not of much use in the vast majority of math doesn't mean there is no math behind it.
You said:
> The right answer they were looking for was 3, not 3.0. Adding that .0 implies a precision which is not correct.
In contemporary mathematics, 3 is 3.0 . Both 3 and 3.0 belong to the set of integers. There is no additional precision being demonstrated by adding a 0 at the end of the 3. This is simple notation, not refering to a new concept.
For example, 10 / 3 = 3.333... right? We're then asked to round to the nearest whole number, and the answer should be 10 / 3 = 3. It is not correct to then say 10 / 3 = 3.0, because that is just wrong.
I'd end up siding with the teacher on this one. Just acknowledge you didn't understand what they were looking for and do better next time.
As someone who (almost!) has a PhD in mathematics I'm going to have to call you out on this point. You are thinking like an engineer and talking about precision, but this is mathematics, not engineering. We make no distinction between the "real" number 3, the "complex" number 3, and the "whole" number 3. The number 3 lives in each of these universes as the same object (so to speak) because these sets (whole, real, complex) numbers are included in one another. Writing 3.0 is a representation for 3 just as 2.9999... is a representation of 3. Perhaps the bigger question we should be asking here is what was the purpose of all of this discussion? I've seen such petty treatment by teachers all the time and it always discouraged me from pursuing math until I met professors in university who actually tried to teach us something interesting and beautiful about math. This question could have led in that direction actually with a discussion of different kinds of numbers but unfortunately many math teachers in the US are not capable of this, or are too discouraged by the other craziness in schools to have the energy for such conversations.
"Whole number" means that the mantissa is 0, and is not related to what some random programming language asserts in its representational type system.
Math terms like "whole number" are not defined in terms of the behavior of computer programming languages.
In math, not only are 3.0 and 3 the same thing, but also, so is 2.9999999...
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> They weren't looking to see if you knew the arithmetic with that question, they wanted you to show you understood what they meant by "whole number" and understand you can't just leave arbitrary precision after rounding.
Can you show any math reference that supports this viewpoint? This goes against my college mathematics training.
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> You didn't give the right answer
According to mathematics, 3.0 and 3 are the same thing (and so is the Roman numeral III, and so on.) So is 6/2.
It is deeply and profoundly incorrect to treat an answer as incorrect because the mantissa was written out.
The teacher is simply incorrect, as are you.
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> Just acknowledge you didn't understand what they were looking for and do better next time.
If a teacher asks "what is the country north of Austria," in an English speaking school, and you write "Germany," and the teacher says "no, it's Allemande," they're just incorrect. It doesn't matter if the teacher is French. There are only two ways to look at this: either the correct answer is in the language of the school, or any international answer is acceptable.
A normal person would say "oh, ha ha, Germany and Allemande are the same place, let's just move forwards."
A person interested in defeating and winning, instead of teaching, might demand that the answer come in in some arbitrary incorrect format that they expected. That's a bad teacher who doesn't need to be listened to.
Yes, we know there's also some kid who is explaining to just do as teacher instructs, but no, we're there to learn information, not to learn to obey.
> Can you show any math reference that supports this viewpoint? This goes against my college mathematics training.
> The word integer comes from the Latin integer meaning "whole" or (literally) "untouched", from in ("not") plus tangere ("to touch"). "Entire" derives from the same origin via the French word entier, which means both entire and integer.[9] Historically the term was used for a number that was a multiple of 1,[10][11] or to the whole part of a mixed number.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer
The question was to understand the idea of a "whole number" aka an integer.
It's very clear you're out of your element on this, and you have multiple people with an actual math background telling you the objection is somewhere between meaningless and wrong.
The takeaway from trying to really nail down a definition of "integers" (or anything, really) is going to be something along the lines of "if it quacks like a duck up to unique isomorphism, it's a duck". The encoding is not important and one frequently swaps among encodings when convenient. In any case, no one who knows any math is going to say to a child that 3 and 3.0 aren't interchangable outside of some extremely specific contexts. In fact that's not even encoding: it's notation. They can be literally equal, not just equivalent. Those particular contexts aren't ordained, and e.g. propagation of uncertainty is "better" than significant figures if you're doing engineering anyway.
Writing something like '10/3=3' is likely to trigger the mathematicians because lots of people get confused about what '=' is supposed to mean (and often use it to mean something like "next step indicator"). '3=3.0' not so much.
> outside of some extremely specific contexts.
The exact context was given. They wanted only whole numbers.
> Writing something like '10/3=3' is likely to trigger the mathematicians
Sure, when lacking the context of all answers should be rounded to the nearest whole number. But that was the context, and it's astounding so many people with alleged math backgrounds arguing things like intergers aren't a thing to understand.
Assuming you want to be able to make statements like ℕ⊆ℚ⊆ℝ (as one normally does), 3.0 is a whole number, 3 is a real number, and 3.0=3=2.9999999...
Being equal to 3, 2.9999... is also a whole number.
Teaching to use '=' in a statement like '10/3=3' is an example of where teachers don't know math in depth and make errors about details that are actually important/later cause confusion. 10/3 is not equal to 3. '=' doesn't mean "answer". Then not accepting 3.0 which is equal to 3 just layers on that confusion. '=' is transitive. If a=b and b=c, then a=c.
Saying 3.0≠3 is a subtlety you really only get into in math when defining these things, and then you immediately redefine them so that 3.0=3 and you don't have to think about it again.
You're continuing to focus on the functional similarities and functional equivalences of 3, 3.0, 6/2, 2.999... etc. You're right, from an arithmetic standpoint, these are all the same value. I've definitely always agreed with this and fully understand it.
But the question wasn't testing that you knew how to divide and round. The question was testing if you understood what the teacher was trying to teach about whole numbers, integers, rational numbers, real numbers, etc.
6/2 as written is not an integer. It is not a whole number. The value it represents can be written as a whole number, I fully agree, but as written it itself is not a whole number. Whole numbers are the set of numbers Z including -3, -2, -1, 0, 1, 2, 3, 4,... I doubt any math teacher, upon teaching "what is a whole number", draws a number line and proceeds to label it -3.999, -6/2, -12/6, -5/5, 0, 5/5, 12/6, 6/2, 3.999..., and on.
The notation was the key part of the question and was a key part of the answer.
The teacher wasn't looking for a value (which is what you're so focused on looking at), they were looking for a notation, a format.
Then the teacher is teaching something that someone more knowledgeable in the subject will later have to unteach. I'm focusing on functional equivalences because that's how math works as practiced by mathematicians. The functional equivalences are the point, and you may not notice it, but you're also relying on those equivalences, which is why you can write "6/2" in the first place. Integers are already equivalence classes of pairs of natural numbers (which is why 2-3=3-4). Rationals are equivalence classes of pairs of integers (which is why 3/1 = 6/2). If you actually try to define any of this stuff in a coherent way, you're immediately forced to deal with equivalence as a central idea.
6/2 is a whole number. 6/2 = 3. 3 is a whole number. They are equal. Usually, they are the exact same mathematical object. It is not merely that they share properties. They are literally definitionally the exact same thing (the same set in ZFC). "n is a whole number" is a proposition. It is true for n=6/2.
If a teacher is teaching that 6/2 is not an integer, unless they are in the middle of constructing the rationals and need to make a distinction between integers and equivalence classes of pairs of integers, then they are wrong. The very first thing you do after you're forced to make that distinction is you make it go away. They shouldn't be teaching the student to hyperfocus on a specific notation or format. That's a bad lesson to teach, and is something a real teacher will need to fix later. Actual mathematics professors are happy to let you write "let <christmas tree>∈ℝ". An intro proofs professor will definitely put something like "-3.999..., -6/2, -12/6, -5/5, 0, 5/5, 12/6, 6/2, 3.999..." on a number line to illustrate the point that these are just different ways to write the same thing. Fluidity in switching through and following different notations without getting distracted is a centrally important mathematical skill.
> unless they are in the middle of constructing the rationals and need to make a distinction between integers and equivalence classes of pairs of integers
Finally, you're starting to understand the context of the question at hand.
I'm also happy you're starting to show you do understand there's a notational difference between 6/2 and 3. That the values are the same the notation is quite different, thus there are some differences. Not functionally, true, but notationally.
The notational difference was the point of this lesson. You may think it'll only be a barrier in the future to point it out like that (maybe it is!), but the notational difference was the lesson.
> Fluidity in switching through and following different notations
If you don't really have an understanding of the notations, you're going to have a hard time being fluid switching between them.
> An intro proofs professor
An intro proofs professor wasn't leading the lesson, it was probably an elementary or middle school math teacher. The point of the lesson is different, the context of the lesson is different.
Given that most math teachers haven't studied algebra/likely haven't seen the definition of any of these things, and the distinction is not relevant when discussing rounding, I highly doubt that the teacher was making that distinction, or even aware it exists. More likely, the teacher was making a distinction that does not exist, which only confuses students.
In any context that a child is working in, 6/2 and 3.0 are a whole numbers. If the teacher says otherwise, they are wrong. Just because the teacher wants to teach a lesson doesn't mean that lesson is actually correct. The teacher is just confused.
If they weren't confused, it would be highly inappropriate to go into that level of detail with anyone other than a curious gifted kid that's asking questions that are years ahead of a normal curriculum. So much so that it's beyond the level of knowledge expected of a schoolteacher.
You also wouldn't mark it wrong because the entire point is to define things in a way that makes the distinction go away. Even after that distinction has been presented and is front-of-mind, you still generally write down whatever representative is convenient.
It's either literally wrong, philosophically/pedagogically wrong, or both.
> most math teachers haven't studied algebra
Pretty sure all teachers I had even in elementary school studied at least high school level algebra. In middle school and above they all had masters or better in mathematics.
> the distinction is not relevant
> I highly doubt that the teacher was making that distinction, or even aware it exists
> the teacher was making a distinction that does not exist
The distinction both exists and does not exist. Incredible.
> it would be highly inappropriate to go into that level of detail
The detail of a thing that does not exist, right?
> it's beyond the level of knowledge expected of a schoolteacher.
Right, the teacher is wrong because you wouldn't expect the schoolteacher to be smart enough to be right about it.
Yes, the distinction both exists and it doesn't. When defining things, you might start off by saying "the natural numbers are von Neumann ordinals". Then you construct the integers as certain infinite sets of pairs of natural numbers, and you say "actually when I say natural numbers I mean integers that contain a pair where the 2nd number is 0". Then you define rationals as certain infinite sets of pairs of integers, and say "actually when I say integers I mean rationals that contain a pair where the 2nd number is 1", and so on. So for a brief moment during the construction of the next step, there is a distinction. Then you immediately retcon your definition and get rid of it. No one ever uses the intermediate definitions again.
There's similar logical snags when trying to define real numbers because technically you'll need distances which have to be rational because you don't have real numbers yet, but really you'd like distances to be real. It's not actually an issue though, and as far as everyone is concerned, distances are real.
Or you define things only up to unique isomorphism by their properties and wash your hands of the whole ordeal. The construction is merely to show that some object with those properties exists.
The teacher is wrong because if they are being pedantic about it to a child, they're a bad teacher. And they're missing the point.
> adding that .0 implies a precision which is not correct. They weren't looking to see if you knew the arithmetic with that question, they wanted you to show you understood what they meant by "whole number" and understand you can't just leave arbitrary precision after rounding.
If you round 3.05 down to 3, 3.00 is not arbitrary precision, its explicit precision that's reflective of the rounding operation you did. I wasn't claiming that `type(3.0) == type(3)`. I was claiming that:
And that such a representation was valid within the context of the question. This was long before I was wise enough to understand that sir, this is a public school, just do what the book says and don't make me talk with the students more than I need do.It's incredible despite multiple additional individuals telling you that you're wrong you continue doubling down on it.
10 / 3 != 3.000000000000000000000000 no matter how many times you refute it. You should really learn to accept it and continue on and look deeper inside yourself into this. It's sad you still haven't learned this lesson from elementary education. Maybe they should have suspended you.
In no world does 10 / 3 = 3.0. This is just a falsehood as much as 2 + 2. = 5. I don't care about your large values of 2.
'10/3 = 3' is also false, and is something you put forward as true. Meanwhile, '10/3 ≈ 3' and '10/3 ≈ 3.0' are both equally true, as is '10/3 ≈ π' if you're in a pinch. Also true is that math is full of conventions, and it makes sense to use the conventions you feel are appropriate for what you're doing. Sometimes that might be significant figures, which I suppose you're alluding to. Other times, it might be propagation of uncertainty. Other times error tracking is not even relevant; you might just round the thing but also want to have all of your expressions be of the same type. For that matter, you may have 3: ℝ = 3.0: ℝ by definition. The other poster never gave any indication of whether or why some particular convention should apply.
Teachers not having the time to muse about such ideas and instead needing to package everything into a presentation appropriate for an entire room full of children is one of the more obvious failure modes of industrialized education.
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'10 / 3 = 3' is either bad notation or wrong. It's not true under any usual definition of 10, 3, / or =. '3 = 3.0' on the other hand is perfectly reasonable in many circumstances. If you think 10/3 can equal 3 but not 3.0, you are either confused or confusing or both. What you mean to write is '≈', and when you do that, it's obvious that 3 and 3.0 are both usable in that sentence.
It is perfectly reasonable to define 3: ℕ = succ(succ(succ(zero))). It's also perfectly reasonable to define 3: ℝ as the image of succ(succ(succ(zero))): ℕ under the canonical embedding. Or you can define 3: ℚ with the obvious element. You can also define 3.0: ℚ or 3.0: ℝ as the obvious elements. If you were really a deviant, I suppose you could even define 3.0: ℕ, and people would roll their eyes, but everyone would understand you. Obviously, there are reasonable ways to define things so that `3 = 3.0` is a meaningful sentence (typechecks) and also literally true.
Again, different conventions are used in different contexts. The "user" of mathematics should pick the conventions and notations that make sense for what they're doing to communicate what they're trying to say. That itself is an important lesson. The sigfig convention you learned in middle school isn't the word of God.
Not being aware of these things to be capable of musing about them is I suppose another issue with our education system.
If I ask for someone for 3 of something and they give me 3.001 of it, it's whatever. If I ask someone for 3.000 of something and they give me 3.001 of it, it's out of spec.
Admittedly I only did this in school and it's been over 10 years, but I recall when doing engineering drawings, we'd specify ± (or separate lower/upper tolerances in some situations). Using decimal points to indicate uncertainty was not a thing I believe I did after high school. Does any actual professional use decimal places and not explicit ±?
Similarly, we calculated those ± values using the chain rule/uncertainty propagation, not with the simple decimal place rules you learn as a kid. I assume no one serious uses the child rules when CAD software can just as easily use the real ones.
> we'd specify ± (or separate lower/upper tolerances in some situations)
> we calculated those ± values using the chain rule/uncertainty propagation
Yes, that's common in detailed engineering documents. It still doesn't change the fact if I ask for 3.000 and you give me 3.001 I'm not going to consider that in-spec despite not giving a ±. It's assumed if I wrote it out to that decimal point I'm caring about that level of precision.
> Using decimal points to indicate uncertainty was not a thing I believe I did after high school
Well, I'd imagine since the topic of lesson was understanding whole numbers at a basic level this was probably a high school or lower class, probably more like elementary or middle school. You know, in that time when you did use decimal places to indicate precision. This person wasn't talking about losing points at their engineering job.
> 10 / 3 can = 3, depending on the expected levels of precision.
>
> 10 / 3 will never = 3.0.
You should read what they wrote again. They wrote with `≈`, which is a different operator than `=`.
What they wrote is correct.
.
> It is sad you still haven't learned this lesson after many decades.
>
> I hope I'm never on a bridge you build or plane built to the specs you write if you truly think 10 / 3 = 3.00000.
HN doesn't allow this sort of behavior.
I was homeschooled from 2nd - 8th grade. My elementary school was trying to put my brother on adderall and my class had sorted me into the "blue" group of readers (colors of the rainbow for reading ability). I apparently came home talking about how I was slow and it was okay because we all learn at our own pace.
Definitely not a great school! both my brother and I ended up going to college and getting engineering degrees, and had zero issues with academics in high school. My mom did a pretty okay job but it was absolute hell on her, I entered high school ahead on mathematics/history but pretty behind on writing and science. The science I dont blame my mom for, all the curriculum at the time was insanely religious, so the ones we could find were very dry.
That's like half your job as a parent: teaching your kids stuff ( the other half being: keeping them alive). You are THE most qualified person on the planet to teach your own kids anything.
This is exactly why I dislike the push to erode parental rights or attack homeschooling, which is happening in many blue states. Parents know best, not a civil worker (teachers) or bureaucrat or the “state”.
I am absolutely not the most qualified person on the planet to teach my kids quantum physics. I'm also absolutely not the most qualified person on the planet to teach them geology. Probably also not the most qualified person to teach them advanced biochemistry.
Well, maybe not best, but it's also not something I would advocate for taking away from parents. It's silly to pretend parents need a degree to teach their kids something when teaching their kids how to live life is half of the job.
Alas, not every parent is well educated.
So?
So they're not the most qualified person to teach children, contrary to the claim.
Depends on the parents because a lot of them are more than qualified. The typical education major isn't exactly a scholar, but that is also true of most people.
One thing I've never understood with public schooling: How come teachers think they have the competence to be in loco parentis? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
> How come teachers think they have the competence to be in loco parentis?
Multiple members of my wife's family are teachers in the local public school system. From what they have told me: they don't want to be in that place. Parents demand it of them, despite their strong attempts to push back and say "hey this one is your job as the parent to solve". So that's the reason in at least some cases, although probably not all.
Here in this country it's not teachers that assess their own compentence to be educators, it's their mentors that guide and grade them through a university Bachelor of Education Course and their first year trials of "live" teaching in the wild.
I had numerous teachers that won local and regional teacher of the year awards that were, too put it bluntly, terrible at teaching. The actual pedagogical education that teachers receive is not good, and when you look at the rigor in their degree programs it would be found extremely wanting compared to just about any hard science degree program. There are numerous examples of pedagogical research being neglected to be included in programs for dogmatic reasons, and the usage of such methods like whole word reading over phonics would indicate large scale failure.
Anecdotally, if I were to stack rank my education in k-12 based on quality of teacher, it would essentially be all professors followed by k-12 teachers, with those receiving more teacher instruction being lower on the list. I was once instructed by a history teacher, to not use examples on a history essay that we didn't learn in class, because she had to look them up.
I find it incredibly easy to believe that I can teach my children better than the average teacher.
The USA hasn’t had a healthy education system for decades, so parents who have gone through that system are a) not very well educated and b) think they can do better.
This is a weak argument. The US has a patchy K-12 system whose quality varies from abysmal to world-beating, depending on many factors. It has, indisputably, one of the world's best universities. Lots of people who have gone through the former but are also products of the latter. They can be very well educated, and do better than credentialed teachers (let's face it, the only difference is that; also a known fact that brighter, higher-IQ people do not gravitate toward K-12 teaching).
When I was in school for my master's degree some years ago, several of my classes were heavily populated by teachers (New York State requires teachers to have or get a master's degree within 5 years of being certified). All were humanities teachers (English, Social Studies, ect - no STEM). At least half of them had great difficulty simply writing a one page essay. With one or two exceptions, reading comprehension was absolutely abysmal. At least two of them were functionally illiterate (in a master's program!). All were certified teachers who were actively working in schools.
The fact is that in many places school standards have been so low and social promotion has been going on for so long that we now have people coming out of high school and college that have never achieved anything academically. Many of these people go into teaching (even when schools were academically rigorous, majoring in education was always regarded as one of the least challenging areas of study).
That isn't to say that there aren't good teachers, or that there aren't smart teachers - there certainly are. It is to say that having an education degree or a teacher's certificate does not mean that one is qualified to do anything.
Does this mean every parent is smart enough or cut out to properly home school their child? Of course not! What it means is that (many) schools have effectively failed as institutions and until they are improved many people are going to look for alternatives.
> It is to say that having an education degree or a teacher's certificate does not mean that one is qualified to do anything.
It absolutely does in Finland. It absolutely carried meaning when I was educated in my (non Finnish, non US) country.
What is revealed here is that a New York State teachers certificate doesn't mean much.
Educators are trained to teach any kid effectively. Parents have the much easier problem of teaching a handful of specific kids, who they've spent their entire lives with and share half their DNA.
Teachers in most countries are, at best, mid-wits with no practical or real world experience. I know teachers who barely passed math in high school who are now match teachers. It's like a basketball teacher who went to "Basketball Teaching School", who's never played basketball in his life, teaching kids how to play basketball.
The average public school teacher is somewhere in the average top 40-30% in intelligence/academic achievement. Anyone who's a top performer academically is going to be much more competent than the average public school teacher.
I dunno... what qualifies them to be a parent?
We haven't really decided what we're going to do with our kids. I personally think I'd enjoy homeschooling them, but I don't know what their preferences will be. Their mom would appreciate the break. That said,
1. Teachers develop skills in managing rooms of ~30 kids. I believe this is completely different from tutoring someone 1:1 and likely has very little overlap.
2. Part of my day job is already mentoring/teaching. I enjoy that part of my work. I've received feedback that I'm good at it. Actually when I was younger I thought I'd switch into teaching after building up some savings with programming. I've since heard/read enough about the realities of being a teacher that I can't imagine doing that job (especially with public school). Homeschooling or teaching a homeschool pod seems like the best way to actually be able to teach if that's your inclination.
3. The k-12 curriculum is not really much to cover. Schools move at a pace appropriate for the slower kids in the room. It doesn't seem like a high bar to beat, and most of what I've found looking into it indicates that homeschool parents generally do outperform schools with a fraction of the time spent.
3a. I've already been teaching my 3 year old phonics and reading when she's in the mood. She doesn't really have the attention to sit and focus for more than ~5 minutes, but that's okay, and it's still going alright. I expect she'll already be years ahead of the school curriculum before it's even time to start. So initial results have been promising and suggest I am indeed capable of teaching a child.
4. When it comes to more advanced/in-depth understanding, I don't expect teachers to have the background. Like just looking at the math education program at my alma mater, there's no requirement for real analysis or algebra. There's no requirement for science courses (physics, chemistry, etc.). All of the options in the math department except education require at least a minor in another STEM subject. It's no surprise that a common trope is that teachers (particularly math) don't know how to answer how something gets used in the real world, but that's insane to me as a status quo. There are tons of applications of pretty much any math you might learn before graduate level in pretty much any field you examine (conic sections stand out to me as a niche thing that we covered in high school. Not that they don't have applications to e.g. orbits, but they don't seem to apply to other fields, and I don't believe the connection to physics was made in my high school class anyway (presumably because math teachers where I grew up aren't required to learn physics)).
Honestly I think school is mostly more useful for socializing and something like arts/crafts that entail mess and require a bunch of energy to do at home, especially before high school/AP classes. The academic part seems trivial. Once you've reached that conclusion, it makes sense to ask whether there are alternatives that are better suited/are more aware of and aligned to their purpose as enrichment.
Good points. Your last paragraph suggests we really need a drastic rethink of how education works and where funding goes. Right now a one size fits all solution with no competition is what gets funded.
Hundred percent. They vastly underestimate teaching in the same way that people resorting to homeopaths for serious illnesses underestimates the training and knowledge doctors go through.
As someone who sends their kids to private school for religious reasons, the idea of public school is wild to me. You have to send to a specific school based on location? Teacher's unions who strong arm schools into not being able to fire bad teachers?
I really don't understand why school vouchers aren't more popular. Parents need to have the ability to choose where to send their kids. They have much more agency in private schools where they are the people paying salaries.
I think the best way to fix the education system would be a voucher based system where the vouchers would be X dollars which would cover public and some private schools, but parents would have the option of choosing where to send their kids and if they want to spend more to send to better schools. Make schools compete for students.
There should also be some standard homeschooling kit or some sort of national resources that enabled parents to homeschool more easily.
I send my kids to a public school which I love, but I agree about vouchers. Giving more control to parents is important as these school districts become more monolithic and unions become more powerful.
Homeschooling is becoming fashionable because school systems have become shittier... Teachers are unable to discipline kids, there's zero consequences for kids who are disruptive, instead of failing kids school systems are dumbing down the curriculum, there's also massive institutional biases...
Plus it's more or less a golden age for homeschooling: there's more resources available than ever.
The headline is somewhat begging the question, but the author's key observation is on point: People homeschooling their kids are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, going for "opt out of being around average people".
Increasing the quantity and quality of good influences on your children is just good parenting.
If I know there's a kid down the street who seems like he will grow up to be a criminal, and another kid who seems like he'll grow up to be a kind, hard-working, well adjusted person, there is a 100% guarantee I will encourage my kids to play with the second kid, not the first.
The poster above references the 'average person'. Do you think that the average person is not going to be a good influence?
Average person _where_?
If the school is bad enough, then an average student there (because there are many more students than teachers) might not be a good influence.
There are schools in my state with <50% graduation rate, the average student there won't even finish the school.
So ability to graduate from high school determines the worth of a person?
I am not saying anything about "worth of a person", I don't believe it is even a thing.
All I know that children (and many adults too) do similar thing that their peers do. So if I want to increase the chance that my child will graduate from high school, they should be around people who will graduate from high school. Similarly, if no one in their class will go to college, the chances they will go to college will be smaller.
Note there are exception to the each rule, and I am talking about "chances", not certainties.
Depends if your kid is above or below average.
I found this explanation extremely unsatisfying considering that you could make the same choice and put your child into private education if you're a successful tech person.
I know families that homeschool and I like to read articles like this one to see if anyone "gets it." So far, no hits.
They're opting out of mediocre instruction and government-mandated values enforcement ("DEI" in its public school curricula form); the other kids are irrelevant. The homeschoolers I know are average and have lots of social activities with average peers in their community.
If you look around and see "government-mandated values enforcement ("DEI" in its public school curricula form)", I already fear for your children, whether you home school them or not.
You fear for other people's kids.. over politics?
Schools where I live is a race to the bottom where the best pupils are limited by the worst. No wonder homeschooling is becoming fashionable.
Come from a family of teachers.
From what I hear, it really feels like parents are more willing to homeschool than to be engaged with their children's education.
You thinking your kid needs some additional sauce to not be "average". Rad, teach them that at home. What about sending your kid to school prevents you from doing that?
I'm not saying school is perfect. But lately Parents care more than students about getting an "A" and if not it's the "Damn Teacher's" fault.
They want to protect their kids from the discomfort of not doing well in school. When they should be working with their student to help develop their talents.
While I appreciate the author's perspective, esp as someone who experienced homeschooling, I think here in the US we often forget what these efforts have cost, their real value and who is lobbying against them.
Universal education, for all children in a nation, is an incredibly recent thing. Its also essential for real participation in a democracy which requires, at minimum, an understanding of the governing body and at maximum whatever we're slogging through now. Could the curriculum be better? Definitely. You know who is stopping that? Shit politicians. We need better ones because no matter what you think, they aren't going away,
Education has also continuously and purposefully been underfunded and politicized by the political right and intermittently eviscerated by corrupt players on the left and right. This is on purpose. The rise of homeschooling is directly correlated with how much funding public schools have lost, the lack of safety and how difficult it is to operate successfully. You now send the kid to school and get cut with a thousand small asks for cash when we could just revise how taxes are collected and distributed. Put out a gun ban. We don't need metal detectors, and cops and clear backpacks and active shooter drills and teacher trainings and and and. We need LESS GUNS and most americans agree but private industry is limiting us.
The rise of homeschooling is correlated with how many people are concerned about the politicization of schools, their libraries, their teachers, their cirruculum.
We keep having presidents who appoint leaders to the department of education who do not believe in education being available for all citizens. Schools continue to expand their mission to feeding kids who can't be fed. To programs for kids who can't be home. No one seems as focused on fixing why there are so many hungry kids instead focusing on a 'lunch account' and the debt of middle schoolers.
This is all intensely documented and yet another example of cutting a public good. A public good by the way, that made America a place that everyone in the world wanted to go. Yes, I got picked on in school and was bored in my classroom. Yes it could have been better. This though, this is a concerted effort to get us to divest once again, just like we are from net neutrality, the post office, the EEOC etc.
Homeschooling doesn't scale, this is why it's not a solution for everyone. I can't see a fundamental drawback to it, like there are none in say, private jets: only problem is that neither can be applied to any sizeable minority, let alone not to the majority, of people. But if you can do it, do it.
The need for socialisation and being able to get along with the average had any meaning for as long as we had any hope for the "society" thing. Now it is obvious that there is no society (and it is arguable whether one really ever existed, maybe only for short periods in times of grave crises).
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I've considered homeschooling but ultimately decided against it because:
A - It's illegal where I live, you have to jump hoops to do it B - I think an extra opportunity for socialising with kids is worth a bit of pain - we wouldn't have the energy for organising alternatives and also take care of the kids education C - By sending kids to a nice private school you get rid of a lot of problems of public school: unmotivated / openly hostile and punishing teachers, classmates with bad behaviour disrupting class, immigrant classmates who don't speak the language and / or create gang of people from the same country to gang up on kids (exactly like in prison)
When I went to school things weren't as bad as today and kids were not getting stabbed in public school, still it felt like a prison because of the slow learning pace and because everyone learns at a different pace and wants to learn about different things. School is simply the wrong idea for the majority of boys, it's just a silly machine that print mindless employees.
The strongest reason for not sending them to school is the latest EU mandatory gender theory / sexual education propaganda being taught to kids in school since last year.
Ultimately I decided that years of socialisation with peers trumps a few lessons about political BS; I'm confident I can teach them to distrust authority and teach them that they cannot trust blindly everything they hear in school or on the newspaper.
My friends who pursued illegal homeschooling are quite happy, they even found a teacher who is teaching kids illegally in someone's home, and by grouping the kids together across multiple families they have a soft school experience.
I don't have kids, but if I did, there's not a snowball's chance in hell I'd let a state educate them, with the possible exception of the Nordic countries.
Loaded question: in order to answer you have to agree with the premise. Homeschooling is not "fashionable", it's out of necessity.
I loved public school (class of 99). I still miss the style of learning. Can you imagine going deep on a topic for 50 minutes then switching? AP classes got double periods. I found it so refreshing and I learned a ton.
Eg, science, math, study hall, lunch, Spanish, History, Art, English… in a single day?
I loved it. What worked for me was studying for tests — and the harder the classes you took, the less homework there was (or it wasn’t required). I had a great history teacher, occasionally good math & English teachers, a great art teacher, and mediocre science teachers. The science TEXTBOOKS were fabulous — you could just read through those things and become a genius.
No more textbooks these days — it’s all some pdf segment to download. Bummer for my kids.
These days, there are way fewer tests, so my kids always freak when they have tests. I thought tests were great! Just one focused period to perform and then move on. Homework and projects were a big problem for me, because I could never start early enough — it was always a last minute dash. Maybe that trained me to produce fast output, though.
Kids were sometimes awful, but there was no way I was going to be popular so I just did my nerd thing. There were enough of us.
They had a great drama program which I loved — I did every play and musical I could. And they even had a speech and debate club — so I competed at “extemporaneous” speech—when I went to state competitions, they got the students all together to clap me out like they’d do for the football team. That was unnecessary and funny for the nerd.
My kids don’t get these kinds of opportunities, I fear. I was pretty lucky.
Maybe I'm a crappy adult, but I lack the patience, empathy, emotion regulation skills that I feel good teachers have.
I would rather send my kids to a private school than try to homeschool them myself. Thankfully, the public schools in the the area I choose to live in are excellent. We do augment at home with tutors and extracurricular learning.
I did not catch any data that quantified if this is truly becoming fashionable. From what I know in US stats, homeschooling definitely had a run during covid but its already going down and even at its peak was barely measurable compared to students in public/private. It would be nice if he quantified where this idea comes from before going into the rant.
My 9 y/o getting shot at school isnt something I want on my risk register.
You might want to calculate the probabilities on that. The majority of kids are shot in or around their home, not school.
that's the primary reason you homeschool? isn't there easier ways to manage this particular risk?
Suggest some?
My kid has a really hard time learning from me. It's resistance and stress for both of us. After all my role is to be a parent so naturally I'm a friend and a foe. Much more than a teacher. But I also don't have a big problem with that.
Obviously he also has his challenges in school. It's a public school but in Austria, so it ain't that bad. But there is also the saying that you aren't learning for school, you are learning for life.
So you aren't just learning for your subject, you are also learning to get along with people, how to avoid conflicts, how to manipulate a bit and how to trick some of the systems. All of that is not so much possible in homeschooling.
People do know that around here and it's more of a distrust into the system that might parents want to get their kids not taught in school in recent years, while their thinking behind the distrust does make them very bad teachers overall.
As a German family, we opted out of the system to gain back freedom as a family. With regular school, you are bound to external schedules like vacation, when you have to get up,... We learned, that it's around 1 hour per day to achieve what kids learn during most of the day in regular schools. Doing homeschooling therefore is much more efficient time wise. in addition, we can train our kids to be self and critical thinking, something that does not exist in regular schools.
There are more reasons to consider, but these are our most important factors.
* smart tech folks who value education not seeing education value in local schools * chronically underfunded public schools based on local property taxes, fewer programs, etc. * good private schools aren't cheap * political axes to grind esp. by the right to defund the Dept. of Education, and create curriculums that don't sell well (e.g. bibles in school, pro-oil & gas slants, etc.)
Comment I was replying to was deleted so I will repost as a top level comment without additional context:
----
I agree this is probably the biggest tradeoff, but attention all parents, there's a cunning and affordable solution to the challenge of spoiling versus opportunity. It's guaranteed to work, anecdotally, at least sometimes:
Live in a big house and send your kids to a nice school, but roster them on truly hood (n.b. I mean real deal heart of the ghetto) travel sports teams. Only two requirements are as follows:
(1) that the team must be decently coached and
(2) practice field and home field must be in a genuinely scary neighborhood. Please don't assume I mean a run-of-the-mill bad neighborhood.
Ideally Pop Warner when younger and AAU BB by high school, but really anything other than lacrosse or fencing works. I personally was raised on hood travel baseball, and I am being 80% serious about this suggestion. Go Hurricanes.
Ain't no one gonna take this advice seriously on here. hn is the most NIMBY place on the internet especially when it comes to their own kids. MMW pearl clutching is imminent.
When math is racist, acronyms are White supremacy culture, and classics like Shakespeare are ditched due to "misogyny", it's no secret why homeschooling is becoming fashionable.
I have no idea how common this, I hadn’t much of this trend among tech weirdos before this article.
The one thought that I imagine is being told you’re “above average” and “destined to do great things” your whole life by your socially-deemed successful parents is just another set of probably unrealistic expectations placed on kids.
I try and homeschool my kid when they are home (from school). I say some of those things, but I also say, when we are fixing a clogged drain by disassembling the plumbing. "You could be a plumber, lots of hard problem solving and you are not afraid to get dirty". You can have high expectations that they live an actualized life w/o projecting your own life-arc desires on them.
If my kid turns out thoughtful, kind and a whole actualized person, then they are successful no matter what.
The problem with homeschooling is that rarely is someone so well rounded that they can supply the full spectrum of education that a child needs. Blackbody vs an RGB source emulating a full spectrum. We all have cognitive blindspots.
> The problem with homeschooling is that rarely is someone so well rounded that they can supply the full spectrum of education that a child needs. Blackbody vs an RGB source emulating a full spectrum. We all have cognitive blindspots.
While this is true, it's not like schools are teaching kids a full spectrum of knowledge either. In particular, a lot of practical skills are often not taught in modern schools - personal finance, cooking, basic home maintenance and construction ("shop class"), etc. How valuable some of this stuff is will depend on the child of course.
I agree with this, but IMO the more correct solution is to look for the gaps in learning from all sources and look to fill those instead of removing a massive chunk of education assuming one can do all of it better.
Well said. Heavy aside coming.
I think is another example of monotheistic cultures favoring linear narratives, rigid taxonomies and 1 to 1 causal chains. This is the world that we live, that we seek The Reason (singular) that something is the way it is. And if it isn't it the way we want, what ever is closer to the root of the taxonomy needs to get replaced.
My comment falls for the same reductionist trap it aims to expose.
I appreciate the try and the self-reflection my friend. To hope we can both appreciate truths we see in each other.
> How do you expect to change the world for the better when you’ve been taught from an early age, subconsciously or not, to hold most of the people around you in contempt? 4
Not everyone would recognize this, and be willing to call it out.
I wonder whether that came from the writer's religious homeschooling, and if so, whether it came from learning from decent people who taught and embodied the better Christian values? Or from a reaction to the distancing that can kinda be implicit (e.g., hints that people not in the religious group are a less-enlightened Other)? Or both?
This blog takes a very narrow view on the subject… more people are realizing how the school systems are and that education can be done in different and even sometimes better ways.
This is my take as well. A huge burst of new tooling appeared during covid because the traditional school system essentially disappeared.
That tooling isn't going to disappear just because schools are finally open again, and some of it is actually fairly compelling.
I'm in a large metro, and the schools near me are terrible. 1/10 and 2/10 scores are typical. All the traditional schools we're zoned for fall well into the bottom 10% of my state. We attended lots of public engagement meetings for these districts (everything from guided tours to district superintendent interviews to parent-teacher nights). My takeaway? These schools are struggling with kids who don't have housing, don't regularly eat, can't get transportation, and have parents who utterly disengaged or downright abusive.
They aren't trying to excel at education, they're trying to literally keep 20% of the kids alive and fed, and then scrape them over the failing line so they don't get their funding cut.
I have nothing but respect for the educators placed into those circumstances - seriously, it's an impossible job and they get paid peanuts for it.
But I also absolutely refuse to put my kids into that system. Full fucking stop. It's not a place to provide enrichment and growth.
But... that leaves us the spot where
1. We win a lotto and get placed into a charter school (which only rate marginally better than the default schools - 4/10 instead of 2/10).
2. We pay for private schools to the tune of $30k/kid/year, or nearly half a million US for our family over the course of my kids education.
3. We move.
4. We home school.
Prior to covid, I had basically already picked "move" as the answer when all my kids hit schooling age, but there's actually enough tooling now that we will likely consider group based (pod) home schooling first. Home schooling doesn't have the same reputation that it did prior to covid, and it's not just "religious fundies" or "anti-gov whackos" anymore. Those groups definitely still exist, but with online tooling - we have much better options to filter out the crazy folks and spread the load out so that kids get social interactions, have a real teacher (often with better credentials than the school teachers) and get 1 on 1 interactions from adults.
I think one factor is that technology makes it a lot easier to do.
There are lots of online resources, online courses, tutors who do remote tutoring (I do not think i could have found my daughter a Latin teacher locally very easily, for example), lots of courses both for conventional qualifications (my kids did (I)GCSEs - just as kids do in British schools, (except at schools they do them at 16, we spread them out with my older daughter doing her first when she was 11) and just to learn (e.g. MOOCs).
Probably correlates with remote work.
Another thought is the rise in school shootings.
Because I want my kids to succeed in reading, history, math, and science, and schools instead give them iPads and teach them <rest of answer self-censored in self-preservation, but you know exactly what goes here>
We are not able to homeschool our son. Two problems: 1) we don't have time - we both work so there is little time to prepare the material; 2) it is very difficult to teach one's own kids. It's a LOT easier for a teacher to do that at school.
But I do sit with him every night for 30 mins to go over alphabet and Math. I think I'll extend it to maybe 45 mins when he goes to primary, but anything longer than 1 hour is going to be harmful.
I think the risk of sexual abuse is the best argument for homeschooling, especially versus public schools.
“An estimated 10% of K–12 students will experience sexual misconduct by a school employee by the time they graduate from high school.”
https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/case-study-k-12-sch...
At least in the US the education system is so incredibly bad for anyone reasonably intelligent where homeschooling is an option it should be the clear preference. At least until high school.
You guys don't research demographic before real estate purchases? That must be why you find this new movement hard to understand. Have someone more plainly honest give you the details.
A book "Free to learn" by Peter Gray help us wit decision of homeschoolong our kids.
Our education system is broken.
No one seems to have mentioned AI/LLMs yet. Between Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and LLMs, if your child has curiosity, the resources to tutor have never been better.
Those are sources, and while curiosity is great most kids are focused on specific things not everything. Kids need direction and somebody them to focus on things they dont want to learn- like a kid who loves animals isnt going to learn math or how to write well, and a kid whos interested in history might not care at all about science.
Parents are no better at this unless they are incredible focused on utilizing a curriculum and addressing their own issues along the way- And even then, learning with other kids is incredibly helpful. Talking to a computer is not a replacement for a teacher (yet).
> Talking to a computer is not a replacement for a teacher (yet).
I agree. The limitless patience and non-judgement of a computer is very valuable in a learning context. LLMs won't be better than the best private tutors, but its very likely they'll be better than 80% of junior high through college teachers.
LLMs hallucinate and often provide incorrect answers. They're a fabulous tool if you're not necessarily looking a specific, correct, answer. But I'm not sure I would want my kids to use them as a tutor, without someone to vet the output.
That's a very good concern to have. Grounding[0] helps a lot with this and will continue to improve. I'll also add that I've had human teachers who were confidently wrong about things.
[0] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/facts-grounding-a-new-...
Nice, thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware of this, but certainly anticipated we'd continue to see improvement in this area. And I completely agree on teachers being wrong, usually without realizing it, but not always. :)
We get weekly summaries of our childrens curriculum from the school. I run it through chatgpt and get quality weekly study guides for reinforcement at home, its awesome.
interesting take. Heard of Synthesis? (hint: DARPA funded).
At the local elementary school, we are told the kids are being kept safer now thanks to being tracked by AI cameras.
Some parents, maybe especially those with insight into tech fact vs. tech marketing, may have reservations about "tutors" whose services (perhaps for free) come with the stipulation that they are free to record every bit of data about your kid and do with it as they please.
The're being silly, right? Because?
As everyone on HN knows: software is super safe, and the entities/corps controlling it, so, so benign. Data doubly so -- hacks basically never happen, am I right? No one cares about your kid?
Or?
> Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
When I hear a question like this, I think: "Seriously?"
If it's not obvious to you why no one wants to to go a typical modern public school you probably haven't been in one in a while.
Well, all of my kids went to school and they basically learned how to read and write and that’s it. Everything interesting they learned talking to me or watching dumb YouTube videos I suppose. I would have happily homeschooled my children, but I have to pay rent.
For most of history, homeschooling was the norm for those who could afford private tutors. We know how our current mass-production type education appeared, but what needs to be explained is how it surviving into the 21st century.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXhsutNKhec
Following is recent video of my homeschooled son that this community might appreciate. It gives an opportunity to tailor education and challenge kids potential.
Thankfully I live in a country with one of the best public school systems in the world leveraging its Catholic history, but it is something I have looked into, mainly because I think children are capable of so much more than what they learn in school and also the 'conditioning' aspect of schooling.
From what I know of the USA, all students are placed together in classrooms. Now I'm not sure if that's on the federal level or state level, but I cannot imagine the brightest students being held back by the weakest/misbehaving ones. Where I live we are placed into different grades, where students are grouped by their academic performance. There is no prejudice or superiority/inferiority associated with it and it just works.
I've only heard anecdotes from the Teachers sub on Reddit, but if that was my child in the USA I would homeschool 100%.
Because (USA perspective) government-provided schooling is shit, and getting shittier.
People whinge about Trump possibly abolishing the Department of Education, but maybe no DoE is better than the one we've got. Because between Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and whatever psychological experiment the education establishment has cooked up recently, I can't distinguish between the education system's serious proposals and sinister plots by a saboteur to undermine education from within.
What's really needed is a constitutional convention. Abolish and reboot the entire government, implement a multiparty parliamentary system with actually functional, corruption-resistant government agencies and bodies. Homeschooling is citizens' response to a state that's failed in its basic responsibilities.
For those who are not happy with the current state of social systems:
“We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”
- Voddie T. Baucham Jr. (possibly among others)
One of the tenants of collectivism seems to be to replace the parent-child relationship with a society-child relationship "for the good of society"
I grew up overseas. My K-12 was a hodgepodge of schools and tutors all over the world.
I am also "on the spectrum," which means that I'm a bully magnet (much better, these days, but it lasted far beyond grade school).
Had a number of other issues, that came to a head, when I was 18.
Dropped out of school, basically, in 11th grade, and got my GED, a bit before I would have graduated, if I had stayed.
Most of my education after that, was a redneck tech school, OJT, home experimenting, and a whole bunch of seminars and focused tech classes. Couple of math classes in college.
I did OK, but a hell of a lot of others, with similar backgrounds, did not.
I am ambivalent about homeschooling. I think it may do well, for some people, and not, for others. I know that there's a "Little Nazi" homeschooling program that's popular with the bedsheets-as-a-uniform crowd, but it might be possible to get a far better education, at home, than the best prep school could give you.
Somewhat tangential, but a big part of math proficiency is varied repetition (eg, Kumon's practice sheets where you repeat the same operation with different numbers) and you can almost just make these yourself now.
Our three kids are in hybrid homeschool / traditional classroom school. What critics of homeschooling don’t seem to get is that homeschoolers find their own cohorts. And those cohorts have kids of different ages. And that means my kids interact with adults, older kids, younger kids, and kids their own age all the time. They learn nuances to social interaction that aren’t available to their counterparts who are locked in with their peers and tend to think their age group is the only one that matters. Sorry, that’s not the real world. In the real world you actually have a myriad of ages to interact with. Is everyone at your work the same age and place in their career development? Of course not.
What about other sources of diversity? Guess what, they are in sports and other community groups too. In fact, by avoiding the time suckers in traditional school, you’d be surprised to see just how quickly the kids can zip through their curriculum and join more extracurricular activities with meaningful social interactions. You mean school isn’t the only place to learn social interaction? Yup.
It’s time we put to death the idea that homeschooling is detrimental to social development. It’s utter nonsense. My wife has taught music at every grade level and in every school type imaginable and anecdotally the homeschooled kids are by far the most confident, socially capable of the bunch.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. I think as parents we have many possibilities to teach values to our kids without homeschooling them. In my view they should learn how to integrate in average society no matter if it is a perfect public schooling system or not. When it comes to values, parents still have a lot space to guide them through live without having full control. As long as the public school system only bends and doesn't break them I think it is a good way to show them how average society works. If they decide not to be high-end tech people later on, it will be much easier for them to flow with the average masses.
We are homeschooling our two teenagers. We live in Ireland which has a pretty decent education system and has a high percentage of students going on to third level education.
The problem is that it is really bad at handling children who are neurodivergent. My daughter is autistic and my son has ADHD and they just stuggled to fit in at school. They were filled with anxiety and the supports for them just weren't there. Spending on special needs supports is pitifully low despite Ireland being so cash rich right now.
So now we homeschool them and they are doing grand learning at their own pace.
But it's not just that that makes me favour home schooling. For me one of the biggest issues with state education pretty much everywhere the world over is the idea that at a certain age a child should have reached a certain academic standard and if they haven't then that is seen as a failure or at the very least a problem. This is complete and utter nonsense. We all learn at different speeds, some pick up knowledge early, some pick it up later. What matters is that by the time they leave school they are in possession of most of the life skills they need.
I also have issue with what is taught and how it is taught. Most subjects are taught with a focus on rote. Children are told to learn things, but aren't really told WHY they should learn things. That why bit is so important to help a childs mind develop.
For me there is also a bit of a morality issue. If you go an look at a school curriculum there will nearly always be something that you as a parent do not agree with. For me its the idea of teaching children that there only option in life after education is to get a job, be a good worker and keep going until retirement. I don't subscribe to that idea, I believe there are alternative life pathways. The problem is that if I send my children to a state school they will be forced to learn and accept things I fundamentally disagree with and that to me is morally dubious.
For those comparing school to prison, please confirm that you have experience with both.
Classrooms need to cater to lowest common denominator by necessity so can kinda see a desire to do this.
But not convinced it’s possible to emulate the social interaction part diy
I think a lot of home schooling is a culture war issue as well. A quick look at Libs of TikTok will show some of the teachers that some parents would like to avoid.
Do you think Tiktok reflect reality?
Then we need to ban social media altogether...
I think it reflects the reality that specific groupthink is both tolerated and encouraged in school while other groupthink is harshly penalised.
When the allowed groupthink in question only has support among a minority of the population you can't be too surprised when the rest try to avoid it.
It absolutely reflects reality in that school teachers are statistically way more liberal than the population average: https://www.pacificresearch.org/why-are-teachers-mostly-libe... .
These are actual videos that teachers have put on tiktok themselves. Some of it may be performative, but even the fact that they think putting something like that on tiktok is a good idea, speaks to their professional qualities.
Especially the ones who keep sneaking furry propaganda into elementary school.
I have many teachers in both my immediate and extended family. All of the ones who aren't retired say the same thing: the quality of parents is in the absolute shitter in two major aspects: parents don't want to teach their children anything they see as "the school's job" such as how to read or work on anything with their children at home. The second way is discipline. They instill no values of discipline or respect for the rights of others in their children. The "back of the room peanut gallery" that was one in ten or one in twenty children when I was young has grown to one in three. These are kids who've never seen negative consequences for anything they've ever done and steadfastly believe that will continue into their adulthood.
As usual, it depends. My time in public schools (K through 7th grade in various places in the southeast US) was a mixed bag. Newport News, VA with all the kids of engineers and naval officers? Awesome. I loved school. Most other places? Meh. Rural western Virginia? Terrible. Bullied until I finally snapped and left someone half conscious on the playground (and the football coaches watched as I handed out that beating). I was homeschooled from 8th grade until I left for college at the suggestion of the teachers in the school because they were running out of classes at the high school for me when I was in 7th grade.
I was fortunate to have parents that are extremely well educated and my homeschooling gave me an education that is simply unavailable in a school. Not many kids have sat on the back deck in the Appalachians with their father, learning how to read Virgil in Latin.
There were lots of other homeschoolers in our county who were all religious nuts. Fortunately Virginia requires you to come in and take standardized tests every couple years to see if you're at grade level if you're homeschooling, so the worst cases got corrected. The school district also proctored my AP tests for me, even though they weren't classes the school offered.
My kids are in public school. The public schools where I live are excellent and actually deal with bullying. My kids would rather not go to school, but they're not being traumatized and they're getting a good education and have lots of friends. There's a major emphasis on social-emotional learning, which turns out to be heavily correlated with later performance. Our biggest problem is in high school with parents pressure cooking their kids to try to go to places like Harvard or Yale. I do what I can to counsel the kids and get them off that path. My own kids are firmly convinced that they're going to guaranteed admission state schools, and don't have to try to build a ridiculous resume in high school.
Schools don't have to be horrible. They just have a history of being poorly run in many places.
Most parents are worse teachers than the average teacher. Most parents can't afford the time/money to teach their kids. This is a passion project for the 1%.
And no, educational videos on YouTube are not a replacement for a curriculum. We saw that during COVID where the attainment of children worsened.
There are bad schools and bad teachers. The solution is not bulldozing the entire system and replacing it with something worse.
This is like saying people should self-diagnose and medicate because there's a few dodgy hospitals and doctors.
Many reasons.
Bad influence from other students
Bad policies for phone use
Bad teachers
Strange curricula influenced by ideology
Aggressive low performing immigrants from other cultures (Europe)
The last point will get me downvoted from people who can not handle the truth.
>Aggressive low performing immigrants from other cultures (Europe)
Elaborate?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...
USA is 18th and eight of the countries above it are European. The fifteen below it have a comparable score to the USA. That is 23 European countries that are either above or around the same performance (or slightly lower) as the USA. Unless you mean Eastern Europe, which seems like a strange thing to single out
I am not so much worried, what position you are in. I am more worried if you are rising or sinking. The countries I was thinking in Europe are...sinking in the school rankings.
Feel free to use google translate for this example: https://weltwoche.ch/daily/wiener-schulleiter-provoziert-mit...
The problem: There are cultures that highly value education. Chinese for example. And then there are cultures where education either has much less value, or a different definition (e.g. considered highly educated if a person has memorized the complete Quran).
DEI. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The "inclusion" is a problem with some cultures. They bluntly reject being "included". They considered their culture as highly superior and want to include you into their culture. At the same time, they are not able to understand why their countries are shitholes and believe that the wealth and success of Western countries is just by chance and luck and culture has no play in that.
For starters:
* Rule of law
* open society
* women rights
* Democracy
* Market Economy
* strict separation of church and state
* No tribal culture
* Freedom is speech.
* And don't marry your cousin. Your cousin may be good-looking but trust me, inbreeding won't make you smarter.
I have been looking at homeschooling because of the 2 Sigma Problem.
But a lot of the resources to help people homeschooling are weird christian nonsense.
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The school system has long stopped being effective and is being replaced by better systems that are evolving spontaneously
Because the education system is garbage;
because the parents are idiots;
because of the paranoid delusions about Them and What They Are Doing;
because the kids (and in many cases the teachers) are awful human beings that people (idiots or not) don't want their kids to be around several hours a day every day;
because of school shootings and other forms of violence;
because the value in this is no longer clear to anyone;
because the only people demonstrating "leadership" in this matter are leading outraged mobs around to prop up themselves and their power structures rather than anything productive.
Or, in our case, our youngest has autism and ADHD and was unable to be successful in the "not homeschool" environment (for numerous reasons), so we removed him from it.
Because no one’s ever heard of a
“Home-school Shooting”
They watched Aella interviewed by Friedman?
Mostly religious fanaticism.
It sucks, my sons went to catholic schools, and now an independent Catholic high school. The new breed of “evangelical style” Catholics are starting to appear. They are more political and reactionary in terms of religious politics/practice.
Where infrastructure doesn’t exist, homeschools and stuff like “classical education” are gaining traction.
Homeschooling is fashionable because public schools are terrible, and private schools are expensive.
No tech bro theories of exceptionalism and "anti-mediocrity" necessary.
Occam would be proud.
I went to school and I check all of those items on his traits list.
Tech people were bullied in school. It wasn’t worth it.
the mandatory part of mandatory education is the very source that rots this society. what's happening in schools run by the "western enlightened democratic" powers that be is outrageous.
liberating education would be a major blow to the social engineers running the matrix -- or at least that's what i think when i'm optimistic... maybe these days they could easily compensate through the screens.
and if you have an urge to argue with this, then first read John Taylor Gatto's essays to understand what's going on. after that we can discuss the specifics.
I’m not sure why it is becoming fashionable, but the reality of parents homeschooling children, who are functionally illiterate and never finished high school, is a recipe for disaster.
One important function that public school offers to society is protection for children. Teachers are mandatory reporters, and so are many school staff. Parents are not.
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Anecdotally, those around me that are homeschooling are doing it for one of two reasons:
1) Right-wing disgust over woke issues.
2) Fear of school shootings.
That's coming from a non-tech middle/lower-middle class setting. 20-30 years ago, when I was in school, most of the homeschoolers seemed (again anecdotally) to be based on religion or some other idiosyncratic reasoning rather than the reasons I cited above.
> 2) Fear of school shootings.
I would add:
3) Fear of fear of school shootings.
The active shooter drills and other security measures that American kids go through in some schools are positively dystopian. Even if the chances of a school shooting are statistically very low, the measures put in place to prevent them are probably not good for kids' psychological well being.
Honestly a school shooting drill was probably near the bottom of the causes of psychological problems when I was in school.
I have some friends who are Christian but left wing (their kids would come over to play and draw pictures about helping poor people.) The dad teaches CS at a small Catholic college, mom stayed home and educated their kids.
The "disgust over woke issues" existed in some form 30 years ago when people were homeschooling but it had not hardened into the constellation it is in now. Back then you could get folks like that to talk articulately about how they disagreed with secular values, introduce a word like "woke" and now people talk past each other, at best, if they talk at all.
I miss the days when young earth fundamentalist Christianity tinged with racism was my most compelling ideological opponent.
Personally I see it as bad theology as much or more so than bad science.
I mean, how do you reconcile the idea that "God is great" (Muslim slogan but how you can not believe that as a theist?) with the idea that the world is just 6000 years old and he sits on the throne and is obsessed with Jewish people as opposed to the scientific picture that the world is at least 13 billion years old, 'his image' is inscribed into the molecular structure of our cells, which implies God is a lot bigger than that.
Join the military! :D
I'm a product of department of defense school system. My parents were lower class, I received a world class education. My mom taught me to read and count before kindergarten, mostly via playing card games with her. I was in NC at that time, and they thought I was a savant!
Overall, my experience was good, some bullying of course, but at that time administrators held the ultimate key which was we will first tell your parents, and then subsequently your parents commanding officer, which would result in work disciplinary action. When I lived in Japan, there were a couple kids that were bad enough to get that to trigger. Stupid stuff like huffing air freshener, or just beating the hell out of people.
My short stint in NJ public school was ok, but it lacked the rigor/structure of the DoDDs school. I ended up at a good engineering university, but had a good amount of debt.
In Philadelphia, public schools are essentially DMZs, with private schools for kids that want to do things with their lives. This sounds harsh, but our tax system reflects this, as well as our disrepair of public school buildings (lead, abestos).
My Dad gave up his best years to the military and his body suffered, but it was certainly not for nothing. He retired at 42, with a pension after 20y in USMC. Healthcare is taken care of.
It's hard to say whether it is the escalating cost of schools which are commodifying it "It's so expensive I shouldn't have to xyz", leading to low parental involvement (maybe that is normal?), or continuous concierge service for helicopter parents as well. My friend who is a teacher has an entire class of students exploiting the IEP system to get extra time on exams, less choices in multiple choice, less reading, landscape rather than portrait tests (yes this is real), and other things that absolutely blow up her ability to be efficient at anything in the class room. I'm sure there is an argument to be made in favor of this, but it cannot operate in this way. At her school (Allentown, PA) the inmates are running the asylum due to administrators treating parents as "customers" and the parents as "the service provider". It is a sad state of affairs. In my world, parents ALWAYS sided with the teacher no matter what, which meant you had no chance at causing a problem in that way.
I don't know if there is a good solution on the horizon. I think the overwork of parents, combined with the exploitation of the school for better marks is a sick system. Only private systems seem to be able to surf this in a meaningful way because they can remove bad actors.
cite: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defen...
It's difficult to understand the hostility some people have toward homeschooling. Even if someone doesn't care for it, it is bizarre to insist on others not doing it (in some cases, governments insist so much that it is illegal to homeschool). Of course, parents are the primary educators of the their own children. They may delegate that responsibility to others for certain subjects, domains, or scope, but the authority rests with them. The decision of how to educate is also a prudential one. For the rest of this post, I will use "education" in the narrower sense of what would fall within the scope of the school.
That being said, you cannot categorically judge either homeschooling or "institutionalized" education, as the quality entirely depends on the concrete situation. Both can be done poorly or done well. There may be aspects here and there that set them apart, where one is better than the other, but on the whole, in principle, both can be done well or poorly. Both can fail or harm the child.
Of course, to be able to evaluate the quality of education requires that we first have at least a sense, if not a definition, of what education is and what it is for. Immediately, this is where the trouble starts.
If you ask most people today what education is about, the most common answer I would expect is "to prepare you for a job". Primary education is to prepare you for university, and university is for preparing you for a job. Interestingly, this is not the traditional mission of education, which is perhaps best embodied by the classical liberal arts taught in the trivium and quadrivium. Their aim was to free the human person as a human person, and a human person is a rational animal. The classical notion of freedom is the ability to be what you are — human, i.e., a rational animal — which is quite different from the modern notion of being able to do whatever you want. This classical notion of freedom is the reason for the liberal in liberal arts. Now, the modern concept of rationality also differs from the classical, so even here we have divergence.
The point is that the liberal arts were distinguished from the servile arts. It is the teaching of the servile arts that would prepare you for the job. While the gains of a liberal arts education translate into benefits in all things, they were not per se for the sake of specialized work. Their value was not instrumental, even if they do have downstream benefits for the instrumental. This is like the difference between theory and practice. One seeks understanding, the other seeks to achieve some kind of subordinate or secondary good.
Now, as to why homeschooling is becoming more attractive, we need to consider the reality of education as it actually is today. I don't want to turn this into an essay, but a few big motivations are:
* the poor quality of education
* the alienating and hostile nature of many schools
* the hostile ideological presuppositions of an education system, often insinuated rather than explicitly commanded
As to how effective homeschooling is at correcting for these faults, that will depend on the particular situation, more or less. From what I understand, homeschooling parents will often meet with other homeschooling parents and draw from curricula that already exist for this purpose. Sometimes these parents decide to found school themselves (as we are seeing in some cases with the rising interest in classical education).
Since most schools are designed to craft meat-based robots, like https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... those who try to be humans try to give their progeny a human future...
Common core math? ?
Training kids to sabotage their mathematical ability to "level the playing field" is the most asinine thing I've ever seen and I'm disgusted it's still being taught.
The moment I read the title I knew exactly how the comment section was going to look like. I was not disappointed.
I wonder if typical HNers ever get aware of what a spectacle they make of themselves and their self-important narcissistic tomfoolery.
/Captain Hypocrisy enters the chat
Yeah, big "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people" vibes, as expected.
This is such a narrow view of homeschooling as to be idiotic.
> That voice likes to say: You should just homeschool them. Opt out of interacting with average people, because average people will only damage your kids.
The author makes a statement about why they think people prefer homeschooling, and yet they do not mention having spoken to a single currently homeschooling parent to ask why they homeschool. This is like me writing an article about some group I'm not a part of (say, farmers) and saying "why don't they all get organic certified? As far as I can tell it's because most farmers don't like nature."
tl;dr: this is a completely uninformed tirade from someone who unfortunately had a bad experience with their religious upbringing, which involved homeschooling, and is generalizing the negative emotions towards all homeschoolers whatever their reason for opting out of school. Ironically this article that's ostensibly criticizing homeschooling parents as snobs is dripping with disdain and condescension.
The reductive & random assumption that people opt out of school they object to the students is baffling to me. Does it not occur to the author that people take issue with institutionalization of their kids in school? It's not the other children, it's the one-size-fits-all meat grinder of school most secular homeschool parents object to.
Bonus: The footnotes are hilarious. The footnote to their argument that people homeschool because they're snobs is:
> I don’t think I’m straw-manning, because I’m pretty sure someone is going to highlight the “opt out of interacting with average people” quote on Twitter/X and say “this, but unironically.”
"I don't think I'm inventing a weak interlocutor to argue against because I've invented another imaginary person on twitter who agrees with the first imaginary person I created" I'm honestly laughing reading this.
I went to public school as did my wife. That's why we homeschool. It was a terrible experience overall; all these kids in a totally unnatural environment wasting time. I say unnatural, because generally if someone is tormenting you daily you can get away from that person. Even at a job, you could quit and find another job. In school, you are trapped with your tormentor(s) and constantly forced to take part in social hierarchies you have no interest in being part of. I was a loser through middle school which was not fun, then in high school I was not engaged so I became bored and lazy. When I had an engaging class (like mens choir, german, spanish or woodshop; even though another kid did intentionally burn me with a hot bit off the drill press among other antics) or I was able to be creative, I put a lot of effort in and it felt rewarding. But mostly I look back and say "what a massing f*cking waste of time that was." Not only did I not spend my time doing something better, it destroyed much of my natural curiosity and creativity.
We homeschooled our two older kids, the eldest is now in their second year of an extremely competitive engineering university program. She wanted to go to Uni so she took some online classes to prep then enrolled in school in grade 9. That was completely different from my experience in large part because she chose to go to school, so she had no one to blame for "why do I have to be here?" like I did. She owned her own choices & succeeded.
As for "what about socialization" that is the most laughable part to me. Sure I learned "socialization" in school: kill or be killed. I learned to be a mean, cynical, jaded child who could survive in that institutional environment. My children were free to spend full days socializing with other kids when we got together, and met frequently at libraries & parks with other homeschool kids, as well as engaging in extracurriculars. And if they're having a spat with another kid? That's fine, they can take a break for a bit then reconnect with them later; no need to force them together daily.
The funniest thing to me about "what about socialization" is that when I was in school & chatted with a friend in class, guess what I was always told? "Do that on your own time, you don't come to school to socialize." Ha. But seriously, avoiding the maladaptive "socialization" of what I think can fairly be called "industrial schooling" is one of the biggest perks of homeschooling.
The extracurriculars were easier too because they were not already tired from an early wakeup and full day of school! My younger kids who are now in regular school now are absolutely fried after a day at school + extracurriculars.
The amount of energy I spend now supporting school for my younger kids is crazy. Stressful mornings harrying sleepy kids out of bed and out the door, kids upset over bullying and inequity in the classroom, begging for designer clothes (where did that come from?), getting them to do their homework, oh and then there's "teaching my kids shit they were supposed to learn in school but the teacher didn't teach them" i.e. I'm having to "homeschool" them in addition to school. Sooo many conflicts spring from school. Having my kids in school often feels like more work that homeschooling rather than less.
Academics are easy. Tons of free online resources + Outschool where you can pay a teacher for one-off classes. My older kids took the 8 week essay writing class then breezed through high school english. When younger, if they wanted to play iPad I'd say "do 30m khan academy then you can do 30m iPad." Regular trips to the library & read to them... it's really not hard to cover academics through middle school, then if they want to go to high school, go ahead. Or apprentice, or focus on something else.
If you have any questions about homeschooling from a veteran parent who's also had kids in public school, let me know.
arguments from article - >Pro-homeschooling: At school, you’re in danger of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
>Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home.
Sure, but the parents choosing to homeschool are either the ones abusing or not (obviously they could have an abusive uncle but the parents tend not to think of this) if Not, then its not a counter-argument because they know it's not and they do not know about the school. If abusing the know it and they might prefer to homeschool for that reason.
>Pro-homeschooling: Kids learn faster one-on-one; Bloom’s 2-sigma problem is undefeated.
>Anti-homeschooling: Kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence can fall through the cracks without professional involvement.
many kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence need more 1 on 1, and will also be more likely to get all the other negative school interactions that are arguments against schools.
>Here’s what I think is really going on.
I heard Elon Musk homeschooled his kids, anyway if you have the money, it's a status symbol.
Also about lousy school environment anecdotes going around here - I went to high school in Utah, where I heard a teacher tell the class that A.D meant After Noah, and B.C meant Before Christ. I WIN! Oh wait...
Both of my children were Home Schooled until High School (technically 7th and 9th grade). They've been students at a private school and now one attends an excellent private High School and one attends the 4th best High School in my state.
They are straight-A students (lowest grade: 94%; History -- my Daughter). They are shocked that they attend school for 7 hours a day and there are kids who "struggle" while they finish their homework on the ride home, don't study, and get the grades they get. They are in advanced classes and both have had a perfect score in Math all three years. Mom and I are also divorced and have been since they were 2 and 4. They make friends easily but struggled when they were Home Schooled because they have less exposure to kids their age. They were given the choice when my son hit 9th grade "continue or attend Public School or a school we can afford). They didn't want to miss out on "The High School Experience" but both, enthusiastically, want to Home School their own kids one day.
They aren't unique/gifted. There are plenty of students at their schools who do as well as they do and were not Home Schooled. The difference, though, is they "did school" in a given weekday for never longer than 1.5 hours. Most days were 30 minutes. September-April with summers off and that was it.
Religion was not a factor in our choice. My son's ASD Type 1 diagnosis played a role, the way Math was taught to me played a role, the arrogant belief that I could do better and the fact that my ex-wife didn't work played a role. Mostly, talking to other Home Schooling parents and their children and "wanting my kids to be like that" was the primary factor. Watching a 13-year-old speak intelligently and with confidence about a subject they understand and actually expect an adult to listen to them is kind of crazy, especially when they really are intelligent and should be listened to.
In a decade of Home Schooling, I have talked at length with hundreds of families and their children who took that path (various conferences, Home School events at local businesses, and extra-curricular activities done "during the school day" for Home School kids). I've observed a few things: All of them teach as much as we did. None of them will admit to it until their kids are in college or they decide to send them to traditional schools and "their child's education is validated by someone else." Nobody who is actively Home Schooling will admit to an outsider that their children get 1-1.5 hours of education a week day because you'll call CPS on us. All of their children are about a year or two ahead of children "their grade" despite this minimal amount of lesson time.
I read over and over and over again about how Home Schooled children are ignorant, don't believe in evolution, believe the world is flat, their parents don't actually "teach them" -- I have no doubt those children exist and I haven't seen them because the Home Schooled families I encounter attend conferences, belong to groups (we didn't), and care about their child's education. I live in a state that, at one point, had the largest number of practicing Home School families (not sure where it is, today) and the most liberal rules around it -- literally "take them out of school"; that's it.
Everybody seems "to know some invented Home Schooled child" who had some kind of major life problem. I usually challenge for specifics and it's always turned out the kid doesn't exist. Knowing any child who is Home Schooled is unusual. But knowing the one child validates your choice to NOT Home School, the statistics of which make them extremely rare, and you find they're parroting some anecdote they heard. My daughter's school[0] has about 1,700 students in it. Her last had about 500. I have asked every single one of her teachers, her counselors and several teachers they don't have "have you ever had a Home Schooled kid in your class, before?" I'd guess 40 educators and some staff/administrators. There's exactly one who had exactly one child in her class at her last job who was Home Schooled. He was an excellent student. And this in a state that has a lot of Home Schooled students. Judging by Facebook, you'd think there's one hiding around every corner peeing in people's Cheerios.
I suspect it's people feeling (needlessly) insecure about the choices they made for their own child and feeling threatened by the fact that I chose differently. I don't encourage people to choose to Home School. It's not for everyone -- for starters, you can't do it with two full-time working parents and that means it's simply not an option for most people. However, this topic very rarely came up without judgement from everyone who didn't Home School about what a dangerous choice I made when I was still Home Schooling. It's a lot more fun, now, since I can point to their success.
Yes, some Home Schooled kids struggle/drop out of college or can't hold down a job. Certainly none of us have met a kid who drank his way through Freshman year of College, or was ill-prepared by their public school and failed out. And we came from High Schools where everyone received a degree, too. Studies continually affirm the success of Home Schooled students, yet "everyone knows some Flat Earther child from Home Schooled parents." Children fail in every type of education. They fail less in Private schools and Home Schools. They fail more in Public school (largely because of "everyone goes there, including children in extremely difficult life circumstances"). The problem is that these wrong impressions of Home Schooled kids turn into laws that ban or curtail the freedom to have the choice of Home Education.
I know if I had chosen a more traditional route, my kids would have had the same probability of success. I would have been deeply involved in their education whether or not I was the one teaching them and that's how you get successful students in traditional education, too. While it might be nice to stand on some high horse, claim that "I just love my children more than you did", pretend that all of this was some massive sacrifice and I'm some super-parent by comparison to all of you who went the traditional route, that would be a self-aggrandizing lie. I paid for and followed curriculum. It was easy. The only challenging part of it is that "your kids will argue, yell and cry at you when they struggle"; they won't do that with a stranger.
With all of the extra non-lesson time they had, it was probably easier for them to excel. But I don't look down on people for not making that choice. Quite the opposite, everyone looked down on me for the entire duration that I was a Home Schooling Dad. It's silly.
And I'd do it all over again if given the choice for one reason alone: My kids are incredible self-learners and that was the one thing that I was very intentional about. Both of them have the confidence that "nothing is beyond their ability to learn" and that it's a simple matter of finding the right information, studying and practicing. My daughter is a shining example of this: She has learned to plays Guitar, Drums, Bass, and Piano (some proficiently, some she's well on her way). She has never had a lesson. She can read music and tabs and she can sit down and compose as well as learn to play anything she wants to learn to play on Guitar, Bass and Drums. She's getting there with Piano, but it's a much more difficult instrument and she just started last Summer with that one; she's got a few years behind her on the others. But I bought her a full sized weighted-key MIDI piano last summer and I had 15 years of lessons, competitions and study in that instrument as a child/teenager, so I have a good understanding of typical progress in learning it. She took it to Mom's and decided she didn't want to take it back and forth but brought it back here over Christmas break. I listened to her practicing and had to walk into her room to make sure it was actually her playing rather than the computer playing back some MIDI file. In three months she's as far along as I was after 5-6 years of lessons. She doesn't even realize how well she's playing; nobody told her it was unusual for her to be able to play some of the things she's playing at her skill level. A teacher would have never had her playing those things. She just went ahead blissfully unaware of the fact that it's extremely hard to play some of the things she's learned to play and that probably made the biggest difference of all. She wanted to play it, so she sat down and learned how to play it, never getting discouraged over the fact that "you don't learn something like that until year 5." Her technique (fingering ... stop snickering) is even correct.
Both of my children love to learn new things, just like me. Except, I didn't learn that about myself until formal education was over. They have always known that about themselves.
[0] My son attends a private school that is very small and the results were the same but less surprising to me.
Most of the people I know that homeschool their kids do it because they don’t want their kids to get vaccines that schools require them to have.
wtf is going on here? This is one of the most toxic comment sections I've ever seen. Do people really think this way?
We all now are getting bullied every hour by a near 80 year old sociopath
I’m glad I learned in school how to deal with bullies
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Schools are the place most people experience physical violence in their entire lives.
I went to public school (not in SF) but the only "wokeness" was historically accurate — erm — history classes. We didn't have books banned in the library or English courses either.
The lack of physical safety is a product of policy (or rejection of) by the same people whining about "wokeness".
Learning about systematic racism has been relabeled as Critical Race Theory, and suddenly teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre or how banks used to discriminate against minorities for lending is considered extremism and "woke". Growing up, learning this stuff in history books, was just normal and made sense in order for us to avoid repeating these mistakes.
Yeah, I took advanced placement history and government. Things were taught clearly, factually and without bias.
Students aren't going to benefit from hiding inconvenient truths about this country's history and founding. We certainly don't need religion forced into classrooms either.
> suddenly teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre or how banks used to discriminate against minorities for lending is considered extremism and "woke".
No, these things were taught to me in school and I’ve never heard anyone consider historical facts like this to be CRT except people railing against conservatives (ironically demonstrating their own ignorance of what CRT is).
What’s problematic about CRT is its postmodern view that liberalism is inadequate (or worse) at eliminating racism; downplaying objectivity in favor of “lived experience” that can supposedly never be truly understood by white people; rejecting colorblindness out of hand; advocating segregation of minorities in the name of “safe spaces”; regularly and unscientifically trumpeting the existence and scope of unconscious bias; emphasizing intersectionality to the point of essentialism.
The famous Smithsonian “Assumptions of Whiteness” infographic (https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rationa...) is an example of these concepts infesting a mainstream cultural educational entity. There’s room to critique current racial discourse and advocate for changing models, but to state that the scientific method and “objective, rational linear thinking” are white values, implying that whites have a monopoly on science or that minorities are less capable at it, is obviously derived from critical theory, and is (I think unquestionably) horrifically racist. When there is any sign of these viewpoints seeping from higher academia into elementary schools, it’s perfectly natural for parents to become concerned.
Thanks for taking the time to explain this.
The “what’s taught in schools isn’t CRT” argument reminds me of the “motte and bailey” argument tactics.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stop_WOKE_Act
"The Stop WOKE Act, also known as the Stop Wrongs to Our Kids and Employees Act and redubbed the Individual Freedom Act, is a Florida state law which prohibited schools and businesses from teaching certain concepts related to race, gender, racism, and privilege. In addition to that, it prohibits Florida educational institutions and businesses from discussing whether race, gender, and systemic racism intersect with various social systems, including legal, healthcare, education, and so forth. Penalties would include disciplinary action, including job termination, and loss of public funding for state schools.[1][2]
After passing both chambers of the Republican-controlled Florida Legislature along party lines, it was signed by Governor Ron DeSantis on April 22, 2022, and entered into effect on July 1.[3] Intended by DeSantis to "fight back" against "woke indoctrination" and critical race theory"
You may not have personally been impacted but this is a real occurring to our schools (and workplaces) under the scapegoat of "CRT" and being "Woke". The Stop Woke Act is just one of many examples.
The lack of physical safety is caused by many things, and I doubt you can lay the blame on people complaining about wokeness. There are bullys, drug dealers, gangs, normal hormonal teenagers fighting, interpersonal drama, romance, poverty. All sorts of things influencing the violence.
I was referring to complacency as it relates to guns and the horrific violence inflicted with said guns.
Bullies are everywhere. One runs X. You deal with them.
I never saw any drug dealers or gangs and the rest of what you’re describing sounds like what I’d expect as a normal part of growing up.
One of our many societal shortcomings (or outright failures) is that we treat poverty as a moral failing, not with any sort of kindness, interest in understanding the root cause(s) or meaningful attempts to address the issue.
> we treat poverty as a moral failing
I don’t think we do this consistently, and to the extent “we” do, it’s because we’ve lost the distinction between the working and striving poor vs the poor that consistently make poor choices no matter how much help you would give them.
> Bullies are everywhere. One runs X. You deal with them.
Elon Musk yells at people, I knew bullies in High school that would put people into the hospital. There is a big difference between being yelled at and getting hit with a baseball bat.
> I never saw any drug dealers or gangs
Congratulations on not growing up in poverty. This is the reality for a large portion of America.
big right wing swing for tech?
Alvin Toffler called it back in the 70s (in Future Shock); in there, he thought educated elites would move towards homeschooling, nothing political on his analysis at least (that may match current trend?)
There's nothing inherently right-wing about homeschooling. You could just as easily homeschool as left-wing parents who don't want your kids immersed in an environment where other kids judge them by what brands they're wearing, and where the teachers all subscribe to the capitalist view of how society should function.
It's true that homeschooling has been more prevalent among the right wing, but there are lots of people who do it for lots of reasons. We did it when our local elementary school was bottom third in the state. My wife called up the vice principal, and asked why we should put our kids in their school. He said that their school could toughen up our kids. We decided that "tough" wasn't our main goal for our daughters, and we noped out of that school.
The USA is going backwards in many, many areas and is no longer in the top of any important indices so this fits the bill.
Public school education is a shit show in many western countries. I'm not in the USA but all the talk about private schools and lotteries is very real. The only thing we don't have is charter schools leaching public funds.
The USA is ranked below most other western public school systems so I don’t think you can conclude “the US are doing bad because all western countries are”. It’s just a matter of priorities and the US prioritizes defense over education.
Wasn't there a time in the 70s/80s when the USA prioritized education and STEM specifically for the MIC and the cold war?
Are those education metrics even measuring the correct things? Many other countries have higher scores of educational achievement, and yet on average we ignorant Americans go on to be more productive and more innovative than any other major developed country. Just to pick one example, the USA develops about 80% of the new prescription drugs every year. Does it really matter if we can't integrate a function or remember when the Civil War started?
American exceptionalism is one hell of a drug, I think this denial is one of the reasons why you are impotent to fixing any one of your numerous glaring issues like education, health care, housing, infrastructure, etc.
>Pro-homeschooling: At school, you’re in danger of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home. And the risk gets bigger if you eliminate outside influences that might notice when something’s wrong.
You’d have to be an idiot to think that this argument could be used in a conversation about homeschooling with any particular potential homeschooler.
Answer to question: because public schooling is becoming a place of indoctrination/brainwashing (particularly of woke mentality), rather than a place of learning. This is very apparent in America, but even happens in outside places like England - kids as young as 7 are being taught and groomed with unnecessary sex and sexual ideas, when that age is meant for innocent play and exploration.
I know a few parents who've taken objection to this. They would rather have their children be properly taught, rather than be taken advantage of for their high impressionableness.
Educational merits aside, this is part of a broader trend of losing or dismantling the few “public” parts of our society we have left. People simply don’t want to be forced to interact with others in the physical world, especially others not like them. They certainly don’t want to be asked to trust a stranger for any reason, unless there’s an app to mediate the trust.
The bad news is that there are 8 billion of us and more every day. There’s not enough space or resources for us to isolate ourselves. It can’t end well.