I can't say my public school experience was great, I was bullied and didn't really click with the popular kids, but being around a cross section of actual American kids in my age group (my school district mixed middle class with lower class neighborhoods) helped me shape my worldview and learn to deal with people who didn't look or talk like me. I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people. I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
My kids are not school age yet, and I am not sure on if I will home school or not. But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling. There is the neighborhood kids, you have sports and clubs kids can join, religious groups.
Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day. Some people "homeschooling" I know are groups of parents getting together to educate their children together in small groups of ~5 kids to share the responsibility, and hiring a tutor to fill in the gaps. Monday they go John's house, his mom has a philosophy degree and teaches them. tuesday they go to Janes house, her dad is a Mathematician and teaches them. etc.
I used to work at a YMCA, and the local homeschool group asked us to do a PE class, which I taught.
I had the kids doing swimming, rock climbing, and all kinds of traditional PE games.
I worked with "normal" kids most of the time, and I will say the homeschool kids stuck out. They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part. And they were disproportionately ahead of their peers academically--though I think that's probably a selection bias for the parents seeking out homeschool PE classes.
This was in the early 2000s, before Facebook. I'm sure the avenues to connect have only grown with social media.
> They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part.
This is another argument that "by age" is not the best way to find one's academic or social peers.
Some people in 2nd grade should be in high school. Some people in high school should be in 2nd grade. (And, academically, sometimes that's different by subject; some people need to be in 2nd grade math and high-school reading.)
I was a TA/lab-assistant at the community college I was attending. I spent a lot of time talking to and helping out people, universally older than me, who had gotten out of high school and needed to figure out where in a multi-year curriculum of remedial math they should start.
Diversity of peers is generally a win. Children aren't supposed to be learning how to act based on what other children are doing - it is a crowd where no-one has any idea how to behave. Kids by nature are supposed to be developing in the company of adults.
Assuming you are in the US, consider that your perspective may be influenced by the modern (since second half 20th century) education system which so strictly stratifies by age. It actually is much stranger to me that we would expect peers to be exact age. There is a lot to learn from older kids, or even other (non-teacher, non-parent) adults.
Per HN's Comment Guidelines, I'd assume that Josh meant sorting students by both physical age and subject skill levels. The physical/emotional differences between 2nd graders and HS kids are obvious enough.
OTOH, one of my grandmothers spent her education career in a one room school house, teaching all subjects to grades 1-8. With the right social context, it can work very well.
It was a small town, in the early 1900's. Everybody knew everybody, including the kids - who freely roamed the town when not doing chores or such.
I'd agree that it was very good for the kids' social development...but "foster a sense of community", in the present-day context, sounds like an express ticket to expecting far too much from it.
Under 18, the mind is closer to those +/- a few years from you, developmentally (and generally speaking). At least, that's what the know-it-alls were telling me when I was listening. Both pro and con home-school "zealots". Age peers is a thing
Peers in what sense? There are clearly examples of kids that are both erudite many years beyond their age and kids that excel in technical subjects well beyond their years. Clearly a distribution exists and it’s wider than +/- a few years even if that covers 1 or even 2 standard deviations.
For what it’s worth I’ve even met adults who can’t regulate and control their emotional reactions. They often have a prison background which either caused it or why they ended up in prison.
I think you completely missed the point I was trying to make. Age peers are an illusion and only appears like a thing because most people follow a standard distribution; but this does nothing for the people who are further away from the mean.
Yeah, I routinely took classes with students 3–8 years older than me before going to college. "Age peers" are an illusion. However:
1. I mostly only cared about school w.r.t learning. For most kids, school is primarily a place to socialize.
2. If it took you two years to achieve the same level as what took someone else ten years (going with the 2nd vs. 10th grade example from a few comments up), I don't think you're going to get an appropriate pacing by just moving into the same class as them...
Maybe you missed when I said "generally". However you seem to be aware of standard distribution (ie generally) and then go on to talk about the edges (again).
I'm not missing your point at all. I'm talking generally and you're just stating (the obvious) that curves (spectrum?) exist and that some (~30%?) are outside the middle of the bell. Neat.
Since we agree there is a range of personalities and intelligence, maybe we agree that wide exposure to others (such as classmates) is, generally, a good thing.
I had the mind of a home-schooled child in the body of a public-school student. Never clicked with peers until college, to be frank. Perhaps I could have made actual friends in high school if I gave up on associating with students of higher social status.
15+ years ago, that might have been the case. Now, you might find some friends in the 3-8 year old range, but then the kids just...don't do things anymore. In both suburban neighborhoods I've lived in the past 10 years, there are basically zero middle school or high school kids doing anything except playing video games and messing around on their phones from the comfort of home. School is quite literally the only social interaction most of these kids get aside from their parents, and if they didn't go to school, they'd just spend more time playing video games or on their phones.
Outside of the coasts or university towns, there aren't any "mathematicians" with kids just waiting around to form homeschooling groups with you.
My cousin homeschooled her kids, who are now finished with college. I know they're capable of using phones (one's a programmer), but I've never seen them pull one out. They're social and love playing board games, and I suspect that comes from their parents. They also socialized with other homeschooled kids, because they were part of lots of homeschooling groups.
The kids in public school are there by default; the homeschooling parents are actively choosing to raise their kids differently, and, from what I've seen, they're more likely to interact with their kids instead of letting them go terminally online or play video games.
this is just wild to make some blanked statement about kids that are homeschooled and screen time compared to kids that go to school based on one example. probably 99.97% homeschooled kids spend more time staring at the screens than kids that go to school (if not more)
The previous neighborhood I lived in, had around 100 townhomes, very secluded. I never saw kids outside other than walking from the bus stop. However my current neighborhood, which is a development of 15 houses, 11 of which have children. The kids are almost all doing things outside every day. Caveat: everyone in my neighborhood is college educated (mix of engineers, professors, finance, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and some other stuff) pretty sociable, and we (the parents) all seem to independently be anti smart phone, tv, etc. high school age kids do seem to go outside less, but theyre all 2 or 3 sport kids, and pretty busy academically.
The US (especially the vast bulk of suburbia) is incredibly varied in quantity of these.
Some areas have them. Ironically, for all their faults, Florida master planned developments do better than most, and the west has a surfeit of natural land.
Others are an endless sea of kid-unfriendly private businesses and/or income-gated spaces, locked behind access to an automobile.
At some point the US, especially east coast suburban US, forgot that roaming kids need somewhere to roam...
I think it’s mostly phones, social media etc… My 20 year younger sister grew up in the same house I did with almost zero changes within walking distance.
Her and her friends never played outside. Me and my friends and my brother (7 years younger than me) and my other sister’s (4 years younger younger) friends lived outside in the summer.
> In both suburban neighborhoods I've lived in the past 10 years, there are basically zero middle school or high school kids doing anything except playing video games and messing around on their phones from the comfort of home.
While perhaps not uncommon, these sound like massively dysfunctional neighborhoods.
Everytime I see these kinds of arguments, it sounds like someone desperately trying to argue that a park playground is almost as entertaining for kids as an amusement park. Your example of 5 kids socializing with each other is definitely better than 1 kid at home. It’s also definitely worse than learning to socialize in a school of 500 kids each day. This is undeniable unless you have an argument of how a pool of 500 kids would somehow have less diversity of personality, thought, languages, physical features, intelligence, etc.
The way I look at it if I were to end up homeschooling my kid wouldn't socialize with the ~5 kids in the co-op.
* co-op
* Ballet
* Fencing
* Gymnastics
* Math Circle
* Church / Fellowship
* Neighbors
* Family & Friends
That easily adds up to 50 children their age.
But my thinking isn't really about the numbers of socialization. Public school academics move at a glacial pace. They don't have a sufficient rigor, lack a decent education in mathematics, neglect the classics and philosophy, and have started to neglect the western canon in favor of contemporary literature which is poorly written and offers little value. There are also, even in the best schools, trouble students that disrupt classrooms.
Or just because math is awesome and knowing more is just great knowledge to obtain.
For some reason people think having an education is only valuable if it is traded for money. For example I think an educated wife and a mom who never earns a single dollar from an employer is incredibly value to her family.
I hope my daughters get a robust liberal arts education and then just get married young and have kids and be homemakers.
I hope they’ll have more options than I did. I never wanted to be a SWE working in social media, but grad school in pure math showed me I wasn’t good enough. A common story.
your kids will have amazing opportunities just because you are obviously a kick ass parent. but I don’t think squeezing two years of math in 6 months will do anything
As a bright student who was never challenged in K-12, I can unequivocally state that this ultimately hurt me in the long run. I seriously didn't know how to study and didn't care to try learning when I actually needed it in some of my undergrad courses.
For example, when I took trigonometry in high school I did none of the homework, showed up to the tests and aced them. That led me to getting a C in that class (kindly the teacher advanced me to pre-calc, but forced me to retake trig as well). That's basically the attitude I had throughout high school and undergrad. I'm positive I could have amounted to more earlier in life (only years later did I return to academia to earn my PhD in CS after tiring of industry).
You can't forget the projects that are supposed to teach you that you're really gonna regret it if you don't have good study habits that you skate through fine without developing those habits. Causes all future teachers to lose credibility.
same-ish for me but times are different now. kids these days have all the knowledge in the world at their fingertips and it is really up to the kids (with a little guidance :) )
>This is undeniable unless you have an argument of how a pool of 500 kids would somehow have less diversity of personality, thought, languages, physical features, intelligence, etc.
I have such an argument - have you considered the amount of forced social conformity in a public school versus a community of homeschooled people? Humans are weird in a way that 'public school culture' tries to paper over.
What social conformity is forced by schools these days ? Only one I can really remember was we had specific uniforms for PE (basically just gym shorts and a tshirt)
Every actual human with lived experience in society knows, that real life is much more diverse than school. In school, there’s at best a few cliques and mostly a single social hierarchy. After school, even during student years, but even more so when entering the workforce, there’s incredible variety of social hierarchies to climb, skills to learn and excel within, and career paths to take.
Everyone will eventually be exposed to some form of forced social conformity. You cannot shield your children from it forever. It is better that they experience it now and you do your job as the parent to teach them how to handle it appropriately.
“Humans are weird in a way that 'public school culture' tries to paper over.”
I went to a public school as did the vast majority of the world’s population today. Genuinely curious… Are you saddened by what you view as a lack of diversity and creativity in the world and do you blame that on public schools?
Schools have athletic kids and within that, groups interested in different sports. And within each sport, subgroups of kids who become close friends. All of that also applies to kids interested in musical instruments, art, computers, board games and on and on. Some kids are nice, some are assholes, and everything in between. You make it sound like public school systems output an army of clones. No. Your friend group changes over time as you meet others, as your interests/views change, and as other people change. You're constantly immersed amongst all the other groups and you learn to tolerate some, love some, and hate some. All of this learning is tremendously stifled if you’re talking about a kid learning to socialize in a group of 5 instead of 500.
Aside from individualism, there has to be conformity as well. That’s part of learning to socialize and function in the real world for later as an adult. Conforming is also just human nature stemming from wanting to be accepted in a group. We all naturally learned to balance conformity and individualism when we were thrown into the public school system. By home schooling, you’re saying no, I don’t have the confidence that my child can do it on their own, even if 99% of the world has done so.
Since you said you're genuinely curious - the answer to your first question is no. I'm grateful for what diversity and creativity does exist - and I recognize that even with public schools in the mix, it's more than what existed for most of human history. But public schools have certainly been a retarding force in the generally positive developments we've seen since my grandfathers' time.
Incidentally, they're only a little bit older than that, so we shouldn't pretend they're some deeply tested social technology.
I went to a school of about 50 kids, and I often wished I’d been at a school of 500 or more kids, but looking back I’m very glad my family didn’t opt for the school of 5000 kids.
At 50 kids, if you were social you definitely had friends (not just acquaintances) from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. At 50 kids, you could play sports on the official team if you wanted to and showed up and didn’t slack off. You knew everyone and there were no cliques, that would have been ridiculous with 50 kids.
I could go on, but those are just a few things (IMO good things) you get in a tiny school that you probably wouldn’t have at 500 kids and surely not at 5000.
I find it strange that you don’t hear of more homeschooling groups pulling together to create something like the 50-kid school.
But it may be much better than dealing with the problems that come with having 500 "random" kids to socialize / interact with. Everything's a tradeoff.
I think quality over quantity matters. There was no one at my academic level at the public school, but two lived at my house. If you're worried about social skills, why do you expect an open admissions school to be able to train your children better than a more curated social group? You could say, "I don't trust parents to actually give their children experiences that would be beneficial, because maybe the parents are bigots or something," which like, sure is true. Lots of parents are like that. But they already pretty much have free reign to put their child in the local Bible Bootcamp instead of the public high school, so you're not really preventing this bad thing from happening, but you are preventing a lot of parents who would give their children a better experience than the local vaudeville show.
Except you don't interact with a meaningful section of those 500 kids you get stuck most of the day with a small % all the same age as you and told not to talk to each other.
It's going to depend greatly on your geo location and socioeconomic circumstances, but a homeschooled kid who interacts a lot in the neighbourhood (big "if", IME; those kids all have a lot of school friends) is still going to miss out on broader social, cultural, racial and financial exposure. Example: my white, middle-class kids have a lot of people exactly like them in community groups and sports clubs, but lots of eastern european & asian immigrants in their school classes. This is super-important in elementary school when they're far less aware and insular about interacting with people who are "different" IMO
The venn diagram of 'homeschooled' and 'goes to church regularly' is not quite a circle but its not far off. Moderate to large churches also provide a great deal of socialization in this same way. Cross-socio-economic, racial, and other bases, all with a shared value system that creates a localized high trust environment that affords a greater degree of freedom for child autonomy.
You don't need a degree in math to teach children age-appropriate math topics. Teachers don't become teachers just because they have a degree in that subject, they have been taught the methods on how to teach. Having prior knowledge of the subject is almost irrelevant. Teaching is really just applying solid methods on how to build knowledge from the most basic concepts as well as having the patience in dealing with humans who are not fully formed in their emotions.
I have a math degree. I have been volunteer tutoring high school kids in math for 9 years. When a student comes to me for help I can always tell if their teacher has math anxiety. They teach the students extremely rigid methods and refuse to allow alternative approaches to solve the problems. They enforce this with grading and penalize students who don't toe the line.
Some of the methods these teachers use are incredibly awkward, bespoke approaches that baffle me for their obtuseness. It's incredibly frustrating to deal with and it has a negative effect on the students.
My approach has always been to try to find the method that makes the most sense to the student, and work with them on that. I don't have any issues adapting my style to the student's needs. I only struggle when the spectre of one of those bad math teachers looms over our shoulders.
There isn't. That's why homeschooling is taking off. People invest absolutely everything into their childrens' future. They're tired of seeing that investment wasted by subpar teaching and dysfunctional schools.
Why do 3rd grade math Teachers' Edition books have an answer key in them, I asked a 3rd grade teacher. She replied that many of the teachers couldn't do arithmetic.
It's a funny joke, but I'd be very surprised if that held at any grade school math level.
Someone would have to be numerically illiterate (with a college degree!) to be unable to do grade school math they've been teaching for multiple years.
Year 1, possible. But eventually it rubs off on even the teacher.
Most people suck at math. Those who don't suck usually have many well-paying jobs available for them. There are lots of schools, so many math teachers are needed.
Put these numbers together, and you realize that there is no way to have math teachers who are actually good at math. The numbers just don't add up.
An interesting thing about 3rd grade math - I was taught long division. When implementing the standard C library for the PC, I implemented the same algorithm in assembler, and then again for the floating point divide emulator.
> Having prior knowledge of the subject is almost irrelevant. Teaching is really just applying solid methods on how to build knowledge from the most basic concepts as well as having the patience in dealing with humans who are not fully formed in their emotions.
I would disagree with this. Those are necessary but not sufficient. It is necessary to have enough knowledge and joy from the subject to convey that to students.
My father has a PhD in physics and couldn't really teach me math past seventh grade. On the other hand, my father has a PhD in physics and ran out of math to teach me around seventh grade.
There is no such thing as “the neighborhood kids” anymore. Having any kind of social circle for your children is going to require your facilitation and effort… a lot of it. It’ll be extra hard without the common bond of shared activity.
Not knocking what sounds like your choice to homeschool, just sharing something that has changed from my youth.
There are in fact neighborhood kids. It only takes a couple of families deciding to restrict phones and video games and support their kids in spending real time together. We’ve done this in our neighborhood and it’s great. It just has to be intentional now, where it was the default before all these screens.
Having a degree in philosophy or mathematics or whatever does not automatically make someone a good teacher. Teaching - particularly with young children - is a skill that is almost orthogonal to subject knowledge.
> Teaching ability is an innate feature of human beings.
Distribution seems to follow a bell curve - you’ll usually find the people with exceptional teaching ability harnessing that aptitude in a professional setting.
All features in humans follow a bell curve. Viva la difference!
Pretty much all humans can run. Yes, some have exceptional talent at it, and some can barely walk. But the vast majority can run reasonably well. Exceptional talent at teaching is certainly not required for routine learning.
Besides, you can buy the workbooks for every level of math, and work it through with the critters. There's no special skill needed. I don't recall any teachers of mine at any level who had any apparent special skill at it.
Except for Feynman. I attended one of his lectures. It was amazing! Feynman was at the extreme end of the bell curve, that's for sure.
> At my university, I was taught by professors and grad students, none of whom had a teaching degree.
Professors and grad students may well have done a course on how to lecture. It is obligatory and/or an easy way to pick up credits in many PhD programs. In any event, grad students teaching badly, because the department has allowed the more competent faculty to put their teaching burden on grad students, is a common complaint about US universities.
> But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
As person who was homeschooled in a large homeschooling community, no, I now believe at a fundamental level that not only is it not possible to adequately difference homeschooled children, it very much defeats the updated-but- always it is not possible to "get good socialization". There are two issues: the gross tonnage of exposure to other people is just not possible in homeschooling, and, there's a fundamental difference between the kinds of socialization.
I believe there is value in being forced into socializing with people you may not like. I did not experience what one might call "involuntary socialization" until my first job out of college. It took me a very long time to learn how to exist comfortably in a world where not everyone would agree with me, like me, see me as an equal, or treat me with respect.
In institutional education environments and in jobs, you don't get a choice who you have around you. You have to learn how to deal with that. Taking the kids to karate class doesn't teach them that because most everyone at karate class wants to be there.
Any voluntary socialization arrangement is--by definition--a self-selection into a group with at least one point of commonality: you are so there for the thing, the activity.
Involuntary socialization arrangements expose you to others where your overlapping demographic is nothing more than just geographic circumstance. Many people don't learn how to deal with that in public schools: it's where antisocial behavior comes from. But *every" homeschooled kid will miss that lesson completely.
> Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day.
I would argue if your kid stays home all day you're not better than a school so why would you bother? I know zero homeschoolers keeping their kids locked up at home
John Jane Mary set up is incredibly idealized. In a big city I have not been able to find anyone willing to commit to anything except one off play dates in a museum which has nothing to do with actual education.
> But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling.
Absolutely. I was homeschooled and in my state (Illinois) the laws work out such that homeschool students can enroll in public school classes if the school has space for them. That's how I socialized. So I got at least a modicrum of socialization (especially once I started band) but wasn't dragged down by the mediocre education at our local public schools.
Which is how the vast majority of the world is and how most of America is. I mean, it's not bad to be around people with different ideas or backgrounds, but it is also not some great requirement.
I highly doubt the kind of people who homeschool their kids for popular/narrative reasons have enough cognitive or social capability to make all that happen.
Part of "socializing" is observing that one's parents aren't the absolute authority in the world. Parents sometimes butt heads with teachers, coaches etc. No home schooling scenario can provide this experience. I think it leads to enhanced levels of narcissism in both students and parents.
As the parent of a small child, there is a very noticeable difference in social skills that develop immediately as a result of my child being in a daycare interacting with other children of a similar age. Compared to my friends' same age children who are mostly staying at home and babysat by a grandparent.
(as a disclaimer, the daycare has very good teachers/caregivers from what I can tell so I'm sure that's part of it as well)
Daycare quality is a spectrum, the same way as babysitting at home. My smaller one just started daycare, and we settled for one that actually does stuff with the kids (forest school style). But I can tell you, we've visited lots of places that are basically just making sure the kids are not dead by the time you pick them up. Same for babysitting with grandparents; there's the hyper-social grandpa style that's always doing something, and the couchpotato with +10k hours on Cocomelon.
Yes, I'll admit that my sample size for comparison is relatively small so I'm mostly offering anecdotal evidence. And I totally agree on the quality of daycares being a spectrum. Just like how one single, good teacher who actually cares can really change a student's school experience (even if the school itself is not that great).
I hear this a lot, and it may be true, but I am very skeptical that it matters.
The statistics about home-schooled children don't support the idea that they have horribly inaccurate models of the world guided mostly by religious thinking.
Or if they do it doesn't seem to affect life achievement in any important way.
Instead home-schooled children are typically more advanced at graduation and have higher lifetime achievement metrics than their public school counterparts.
As an athiest, and a bayesian, it's difficult for me to worry about other peoples religious beliefs that don't seem to negatively affect them or me. Especially when there is propaganda taught in the public schools that does warp the students' world views in ways that harms them and me.
> The statistics about home-schooled children don't support the idea that they have horribly inaccurate models of the world guided mostly by religious thinking.
I'd be surprised if any such statistics exist. I've seen studies about the reasons parents choose to homeschool, and various outcomes of homeschooled kids versus public school kids, but none about what particular beliefs homeschooled kids have regarding, say, the age of the Earth.
Homeschoolers tend to outperform their regular school peers. But I think parental involvement is a significant differential and is probably contributing to the outcomes.
"In study after study, the homeschooled have scored, on average, at the 65th to 80th percentile on standardized academic achievement tests in the United States and Canada, compared to the public school average of the 50th percentile."[1]
"Descriptive analysis reveals homeschool students possess higher ACT scores, grade point averages (GPAs) and graduation rates when compared to traditionally-educated students."[2]
That doesn’t control for socioeconomic background.
Yes, homeschooled kids do better than the average. The average is also dragged down by the country deciding that if your parents are poor you should starve.
Please check the work of howard zinn or event just watch one of his talks. The entire curriculum is structured to support an ideological narrative more than to provide an honest historical or ethical platform of understanding.
Propaganda being the incorporation of political ideology into much of the lesson plan - even when banned.
Whatever it is, public schools are an absolute failure. But that could be attributed to the immigration in the US over the last half decade. North Carolina lost like 20% of their student base following mass ICE raids.
Many teachers around me have mentioned how the portion of non-English speakers has dramatically increased and is causing significant degradation to their effectiveness in the classroom and the outcomes.
I can give a very simple example - in my high school history class, the cold war was presented as a conflict between communism and democracy - despite the fact that on an economic field the conflict was clearly between communism and capitalism, while on a political field proponents of both systems were happy to subvert the democratic process whenever someone had the audacity to vote for the wrong economic system.
Ooh, as I was typing I thought of a better example - remember the four food groups? eight to twelve servings of grains per day? Less obviously propaganda, though I'd argue the farm lobbies pushing it count. But harms in terms of its link to obesity and heart disease are pretty damn stark.
Given that school children are a huge captive audience of future consumers/voters/employees it would be incredibly strange if the curriculum wasn't the target of all kinds of special interest groups that aren't perfectly aligned with public interest.
> Maybe focus on keeping the conversation productive
I didn't and don't want to have this conversation. Technically, I didn't even ask alphazard what they meant, and in any case, I didn't ask anyone else what alphazard meant, as if someone else could magically interpret alphazard's cryptic remark any better than I could, which they can't, as proved by the multiple different unsolicited answers I received.
I was perhaps morbidly curious what the atheist was objecting to in public schools when they nonetheless seemed perfectly fine with conservative religious homeschooling.
technically North Korea has had elected leaders since the founding. They have elections in North Korea. Doesn’t make me convinced North Korea isn’t a communist dictatorship.
That has been the case for a long time, and I guess something about the current generation of parents has gotten them to act more on it. My dad came from a very religious family and they all did private religious schools for their early grade school years. Then they went to public for high school years.
If I had to guess, its maybe something about the demise of church life that has gotten religious parents to just pull back entirely. It wasn't that uncommon for public schools to make nods toward Christian ideals/lifestyles before like the 90s, but now that stuff just doesn't happen anymore.
> It wasn't that uncommon for public schools to make nods toward Christian ideals/lifestyles before like the 90s, but now that stuff just doesn't happen anymore.
Schools should absolutely teach Christian mythology and history, and Greek mythology and history, and Egyptian mythology and history, alongside many other subjects. But to the extent that they used to make "nods" towards "this is the cultural default we defer to", nope.
Why? How does this benefit the students, except in understanding allusions in books and poetry? Or is that the goal, in which case, sure, but I think Eastern mythologies should be included too.
Same reason for studying literature, in addition to understanding the pervasive allusions and effects throughout society. And yes, of course; that list was an example, not a comprehensive list.
States are saying that schools have to post the 10 commandments and when teachers put up a poster about “everyone is welcomed here” showing kids of different colors it’s “too woke”.
Which is funny since I (a Black guy) went to a mostly White Christian school in the 80s where they sung “Jesus loves the little children - red and yellow black and white they are all precious in his site”.
> States are saying that schools have to post the 10 commandments
Yeah that definitely seems against the First Amendment (and Texas' equivalent in their Bill of Rights). I feel like the world makes more sense if you read the First Amendment as a treaty between the Christian sects that were executing one another in the colonies for heresy, rather than y'know what it literally says.
> when teachers put up a poster about “everyone is welcomed here” showing kids of different colors it’s “too woke”.
Keep gang signs out of the classroom. In places where university rivalries are high, teachers are also asked to keep ensignia off their doors. It's the same here. "Everyone is welcomed here" (without a cross) is now a callsign for "registered Democrat". Imagine if a teacher put a big "don't trample on me" sign with a snake... I feel like that would send a message other than, "be respectful in class."
> "Everyone is welcome here" is now a callsign for "registered Democrat".
Maybe it's suspicious that this phrase is able to distinguish Republicans from Democrats, but the point isn't the virtue of the parties, it's that it's one of the most common phrases people choose to use to distinguish themselves as Democrats. If you don't want one teacher walking around with a MAGA hat, but don't have the political power to just ban them from schools, you have to make a treaty like, "we'll ban rainbow capes and MAGA hats."
Banning rainbow caps and Pride is completely different than showing kids of different colors playing together holding hands and showing a kid in a wheelchair.
This is the exact poster - even more innocuous than I thought
You have yet to address or even acknowledge the focus of both my comments: this phrase is a common means of signalling party affiliation. I feel like you need to improve in how you approach these kind of discussions, because you're getting nowhere in convincing me when you come across as not even understanding my argument.
If your goal is different, maybe to just socially stigmatize people opposed to worlds you prefer, well I guess you're doing fine with that, but you do see how that's problematic at creating consensus, right? And how, the sane reaction is for me to faux-politely call you a shill or a clown. I don't think this is actually your goal (which is why I deleted my previous reply, it was unnecessarily mean unless this is your goal), I just don't think you've really built up your debate toolbox yet.
Saying we don’t hate people because of the color of their skin was something that conservatives said with Reagan through Bush 2 when he spoke in solidarity with American Muslims after 9/11.
If we ban any symbol that might be used as politics we should ban the American flag in classrooms since that now has become a symbol of the MAGA movement. Defending banning a poster showing hands of people of different colors is just as non sensical - there were no pride colors on the poster, no pro immigration signaling nothing.
I bet you a paycheck they would have banned a multi racial group picture of kids just playing together because it was “too woke”.
In fact, there is a long history of states being triggered showing people of multiple races actually getting along
Talking about the greatness of America has been a theme among Democrats from FDR to JFK, when they spoke about defending and spreading American cultural values like democracy and freedom. It goes back even further to the 1840s with James K. Polk and Manifest Destiny. Banning the MAGA hat in the classroom isn't about political signalling - it's just straight out America hate.
Do you see how silly you sound? Look, here's my issue with you: I've told you my reasons to oppose MAGA hats and welcome posters in the classroom. You refuse to believe those are my reasons. You're calling me a liar, saying I must secretly be withholding some racist motivated reasoning. I get that there are America haters who want to ban MAGA hats, and racists who want to ban these posters. But you're talking to me, not them. If you can only refute people who collectively share two brain cells, then you're probably just wrong on your position.
MAGA was introduced by Trump and is a symbol of Trump. I didn’t argue that they shouldn’t ban “Hope” even though Hope was also something that wasn’t political before Obama. It was clearly partisan for Obama.
MAGA is not speaking to “American greatness”. It’s whining that America isn’t great any more because of among others gays and skinny jeans wearing west coast elite - ie making it great “again”
The idea of America not already being “great” was something that no Democrat could have said. We have been drinking the Kool Aid of American exceptionalism for a century.
If you listen to almost anyone in the MAGA camp, it meant “those evil minorities like the secret Muslim trying to bring Sharia law and those Hatians eating pets took over America and now it’s a crime ridden country infested by immigrants”
You still have yet to actually reply to me and my argument. As I said earlier, you need to improve at this skill if you want to actually convince people their position is wrong.
1. That showing different colored hands raised with a heart in it is “too political” - again they were not holding hands, no Pride symbols (that you brought up)
2. That MAGA isn’t political?
I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m saying that a certain contingent of conservatives have always been triggered about the thought that the US is not just White people and even more triggered with the thought of people of various races getting along. It’s especially prevalent in a post MAGA takeover of the Republican Party.
Neither of those are my position. If you're not trying to convince me I'm wrong, that's fine, just realize that Idaho is a one-party state and the Republican Party has the power there to do what they think is right. The only way to influence that is to convince enough people that banning these posters is not right, which I thought was your goal, but I guess political commentary has its own purpose.
I’m the last person to try to convince racists not to be racists (referring to Idaho politicians - not you). I’ve lived an entire life ignoring them and living my best life. That’s a lost cause.
That’s like trying to convince people that a man didn’t rise from the dead after three days and the only way that he will come back to take them to heaven is if the government protects Isreal - yea that is what evangelicals think.
Hell I had a house built in an infamous “sundown town” (where the outskirts were still conservative but more traditional conservative)
I won't pretend to know where you live or what those people's desires are but I definitely started homeschooling after the last US administration took moral volatility to new standards. The principles taught in schools just did not align anymore with what was common sense when I was in school and what I believe in. Now before you judge, I'm not looking for a fight. My wife and I have both master-degree educations in CS and law and our four kids have been to public school in the US and abroad, they've been to an evangelical christian school, and now that we've decided to homeschool for two years, we're not likely to take them back. The traditional school aspects take up 2-3h per day at most, then comes the school of life: raising and caring for animals and plants, fixing the truck or other engineersy activities and of course plenty of fun activities outside of the too-busy-to-be-fun times. My kids have learned of historic events such as Jamestown, Gettysburg or Mount St. Helens at the actual site of the event, they've been to most of the national parks and the fear of being socially-disconnected is not more than a fear before you start. Heck, thanks to Starlink they can even talk to their friends while we're driving through a desert.
Now let me also say that preparing the curriculum, ordering the materials etc. takes a lot of effort and discipline. It's definitely almost a full time job and I'm blessed with an amazing wife that's gifted in all that but the reward is more than worth it. Also, if you're thinking about it, many states have home school support programs and put you in touch with other home schoolers in the area.
So, to be clear, you pulled your children out of public school because students were being educated to accept other people who do not adhere to their own set of religious and cultural beliefs, in a country founded on freedom of religion?
And now instead of learning science in a lab and socializing, they are forced to maintain your farm?
You're forgetting an important distinction: Freedom of religion amongst various Christian denominations. Failure to recognize this as a historical fact leads to back to the original point of public education being a morality platform and not an objective educative platform.
"the last US administration took moral volatility to new standards" I have no idea what this means. Can you explain it?
" The principles taught in schools just did not align anymore with what was common sense when I was in school and what I believe in."
Please explain in more detail what you mean by this. You old do you think the earth is? In my experience most home schoolers are young earth creationists.
The public school experience in the U.S. depends so much on your ZIP Code. I attended the best public schools in my state while my wife attended the worst in the same state. I am genuinely pro-public school, but there is a point where the benefit of being around different people is overshadowed by distractions and low standards. My wife had to be diagnosed with a learning disability in college to receive test accommodations when she discovered that you cannot stay after class indefinitely to finish an exam. Her teachers never raised any concerns about her taking 50% as long with exams compared to the other students, and she was the valedictorian of her huge urban high school. The lack of concern is bizarre until you consider that her teachers were preoccupied with students graduating and showing up to class. Many of her classmates ended up getting pregnant, and the school had a large daycare for the children of high school students.
My wife didn't end up taking the SAT or ACT because she attended a relatively strong local university with a full-ride scholarship and a test-optional policy. The MCAT exam initially denied her request for accommodations because she was only diagnosed with a learning disability in college. We successfully appealed by writing an essay arguing that my wife wasn't diagnosed with a learning disability in K-12 because her schools sucked (we submitted documentation that proved that her schools tested among the worst in the state, her elementary school was literally the worst in the entire state, when she was a student), and her teachers had much bigger concerns than why the smart, studious kid takes a long time to complete exams.
If the wife had gone to the K-12 school system that I attended, her learning disability would have been addressed in elementary school, and she would have been spared much angst. I was a very poor reader in early elementary school, and received almost daily one-on-one attention at my school from instructional aides and volunteers (mostly highly educated parents and grandparents) for years. I received a perfect score on the ACT reading section in high school.
> The schools also get more funding if the students perform poorly.
that's such a weird policy.
The teachers can produce poorly performing students easily (without much effort i might add), but cannot do that very same for well performing students (even with effort). The incentive to produce poor performing students to get more funding means it's misaligned with the student's best interests.
Schools and students _should_ be incentivized to perform well, and funding ought to be a portion of that incentive.
Yup. I've taken adult lessons in things, and I don't continue to buy lessons if the coach is unable to teach me. But in the public schools, watch what happens if you suggest merit pay. Shields up, Mr Sulu!
Instead, teacher pay is based on years of service and how many credentials you have.
(This is kind of a joke, because while the Hengshui school system is much more meritocratic, including in teacher salaries, it's also infamous for a stressful school environment. It's not really a joke though. While there are problems with the long hours, it's definitely better than whatever America has going on.)
Part of the issue with merit pay is if it's tied to simple metrics like grades, those metrics will get inflated without raising the things those metrics were meant to measure.
but grades that are external to the school could be used as the metric - something the school cannot tamper with themselves. Grades like "international baccalaureate assessments" or some sort of university entrance exams.
The set of ZIP codes to geographical school assignment is neither 1:1 nor onto. Actually,
(just kidding)
I agree that school assignment is highly variable. I'm glad your wife managed to get her appeal approved. It's unfortunate she even had to go through that process to begin with.
I was homeschooled until high school. I couldn’t agree with you more. The value that the socialization the public school offers is underestimated.
Learning activities with other homeschooled kids is ok but not enough. A tight-knit neighborhood of friends is huge, but not enough. You need to develop a thick skin and a sense of self-assurance.
I have no counterfactual of course, but I think much of the social anxiety I’ve had to unlearn as a young adult came from homeschooling. And I had great circumstances
I was horribly bullied in high school. It was really bad.
The worst part was being ostracized. The school had anti-bullying policies, but they don’t force anyone to be your friend.
Strangely, I was elected to lots of student government office, and held leadership in lots of clubs.
Maybe my memory is just off, but I don’t think so.
I think I was really good connecting with the grownups who ran the school, so they made sure I got leadership positions.
I was always much better at being the kid in class the teacher liked - same with principals, etc.
Probably one of the reasons the other kids didn’t like me - but that went over my head.
I think it’s really easy to overestimate how important the socialization in public schools is. We go to so many movies where the plot is based on the dynamics of public high school, we assume it’s normal.
We see so much of terrible stuff downplaid like it doesn’t matter. Just rewatched Back to the Future which laughingly brushes off every kind of violence as long as it’s done at the prom.
As someone else who was homeschooled except the last three grades, I also agree. Additionally, the effect is multiplied if the kid in question lives in a rural or semi-rural area rather than a suburb or city.
For the majority of my adult life I’ve been playing catchup. Even now, barreling towards 40, there’s aspects of social capabilities where I come up quite short relative to my peers.
If I’m ever to be a parent, I won’t homeschool. Depending the circumstances I might not send my kids to public school, but their schooling situation will at minimum involve social exposure comparable to that of public school.
> Even now, barreling towards 40, there’s aspects of social capabilities where I come up quite short relative to my peers.
I identify with your post as a rural kid who mostly didn't socialize with classmates after school. I went to public school, and I'm 40 now. I think the human experience is that you are inevitably going to encounter social situations where you feel outmatched or simply don't belong. I do agree with making sure your kids experience public school, but I think that's about the bare minimum of what you can offer your kids.
Yeah, there are always going to be outliers, that can't be avoided. The problem lies with the kid never having been given the opportunity in the first place.
> The value that the socialization the public school offers is underestimated.
The basically only social skill that school teaches is hating other people (other students, teachers) so much that from the deepest of your heart you wish them to be dead.
Clearly a valuable skill, but not the kind that most parents would desire their children to get.
That was definitely not my public school experience. I've had loads of issues but without public school I probably would be so extremely depressed and anxious, I'm not sure I'd be here today. I wouldn't have lots of important friendships, I wouldn't have my fiancé, and I'd have missed out on lots of experiences that I find were fundamental to shaping who I am now.
And despite all that, school was still really hard on me. I had a bunch of mean teachers, subjects I was miserable at and would cry about (Foreign language French still haunts my dreams...) and of course I was bullied as well for being kind of a weirdo. :) I wouldn't trade it for homeschooling. I know that if I didn't have those experiences at school, I would probably have different experiences that would have shaped me differently. But in the end, I'm still glad I went through all that though.
There are some skills taught in that realm. From personal experience, I have learned to recognize trouble by gait and eyes alone. I get that people get different experiences, but I could have done without that knowledge.
I remember one politician once responding in an off-hand manner as to why they are focusing on prisons and not day cares, to which he responded: 'well, there is still a change I may end up in prison'. Naturally, I did not realize then how optimistic that remark was.
> I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
The older I get, the more I think that helping your kids avoid interactions with others who aren't with the program is for the best.
Ideally your children's friends should be people that you think are good kids, kids that you would go to bat for.
Then when you are teaching your kids to compromise and play nice and forgive, you can legitimately feel good about it.
I think my default assumption about a negative interaction with a public school random would be that they are basically a wild animal to be avoided.
The world is messy for all sorts of reasons, that may not be the way anyone would like it to be but it's the way it is, and imo it's best to learn it when the stakes are low rather than when they're later voting against other classes because they were never exposed to people from them early on, or they're being taken advantage of at work or in an adult relationship.
I wouldn't fault someone for wanting to situate their kids among peers and adults that help them grow at a similar level rather than hinder it, but I think it's also best to be a guiding hand rather than a applicant tracking system when it comes to the non-academic side
There are certainly tradeoffs, but it's not all negative. In my experience, what it boils down to is that home-schooled kids tend to have more experience with adults and less experience dealing with a wide variety of other kids, particularly assholes.
When I was a kid in public school, there was no shortage of assholes and I definitely would have preferred to not have to deal with them. OTOH, I don't doubt that there is also some value in that experience, not to mention interacting with all the other people. Also, we didn't have social media or semi-regular school shootings when I was a kid. So yeah.. to me, it's not at all obvious which set of tradeoffs is preferable nowadays.
What happens to asshole kids? Do they become regular adults or asshole adults? Do they become soldiers or prisonners never to be seen again by normies? Do they even reach adulthood? Are they even a stable group or were we all asshole kids to some other kids?
Dunno, maybe all of the above? Believe it or not, I didn't really keep in touch with them.
My point was that kids are disproportionately likely to treat other kids badly, especially when adults aren't around. That kind of situation is common at school, but much less common at home, unless the parents choose to allow it.
I think it's an important development milestone to learn that people don't want to be their friends, and the longing for human connection might be a good moderating force in their life. I was a really pessimistic teenager, which I received plenty of feedback on, and have worked against my own nature to become a more positive and cheery adult.
In my personal experience, the asshole kids overlapped greatly with the popular kids in a Venn diagram sense. People, in general, did want to be their friends.
I think that a lot of the assholes behaved that way because they were naturally charismatic and people wanted to be their friends despite their being assholes. They were never socially punished for their behavior because they could turn on the charm at will. In other words, they were assholes because they could afford to be.
In my experience they become regular adults. Whatever made them an asshole is still there, but they've either learned to deal with it or the context has changed such that there's no point in being that kind of asshole anymore. Nobody's perfect, and adolescence is rough in the best of times.
Looking back at the assholes of my youth, they run the gamut. Some seem like lovely adults, and are very successful. Some are just like they were and are very successful. Some others crashed out completely. The more brash, upfront assholes and the clever assholes seem to have done better than the sneering, malicious assholes.
And we were (almost) all assholes sometimes, but there's definitely a class of kids who were assholes most of the time.
> Do they become soldiers or prisonners never to be seen again by normies?
Not necessarily those two exact options, but yes. Adults are free to self-segregate. Even in K–12, once the option for tracking into advanced classes is available, everyone's social lives improve.
You're forgetting that public school also exposes you to more adult assholes, including ones with direct power over you that can screw you over for no reason.
It's important to know how and when to advocate for yourself and others, when to escalate through proper channels and when to escalate outside of proper channels, and when to back down and let them be an asshole because they're frankly not worth your time.
In particular, learning "pretend to lose now, win later" is a useful skill. But I think there are healthier ways to learn that skill than on a live-fire course.
All over this discussion, the big negative has nothing to do with missing out on stellar education, skill development, or expert teachers. Instead, it’s the perpetual handwringing that homeschooled kids won’t be Properly Socialized, i.e., be exposed to and have to endure mistreatment, disruption, and sometimes assault from other maladjusted, cruel, or even mentally ill peers — because that’s “the real world.”
This is not the W for the government schools that proponents seem to think it is.
On reddit, they all believe that site has chased away the libertarians and nonconformists enough that they're no longer careful to keep the quiet parts to themselves: they want homeschooling banned so that the government can conduct surveillance on parents and instill the proper philosophical values to to the children.
A common justification for group projects was, "you have to learn how to work with people, even people who will not work." Yeah no, that's not the case. People get filtered through a much finer sieve when they're older.
But that's absolutely the case. You get on a project and someone falls ill or has to take care of someone ill. Or they're shit at their job. Or they're just not as dedicated as you. It doesn't matter if they get fired or accommodated, you have to get it done. You will be punished in some what for not getting it done, whether that is directly or indirectly. Group projects exist in any job with collaboration. You rarely get to choose your group unlike in school and at least proving someone is a slacker has a high chance of impact in school. It's not always the case at all at work.
People discount school rituals, but they happen a lot. Pop quizzes happen all the time within my career. You don't always get to say, "I'll get back to you" as much as we all wish that was true.
This is the most common myths about homeschooling. In reality, the kids at public school sit at a desk most of the time. They don't get to socialize. Most activities are structured. Homeschoolers have CO-OPs, field trips, weekly PE visits, real interactions with adults, and actual free time. They are the most socialized kids in the US. The diversity in the homeschool relationships is quite large which you can see when a homeschooler has discussions with adults while their public school peers just quietly talk amongst themselves.
Growing up, homeschool kids were absolutely weird as hell. Sure, some turn out fine, but it's very hard to do right, and requires parents putting their kids outside of everyone's comfort zone, which is... uncomfortable, so it rarely happens.
The homeschooled neighbor kid from a super religious family absolutely went off the deep end at 18. Many such cases.
You're straw-manning the worst public school experience against the best possible homeschool experience.
> They are the most socialized kids in the US.
Bullshit. You know how I know? Because on average parents are terrible at exposing their kids to Things Not Like Them and Things They Don't Approve Of.
There are great homeschooling parents and crazy ones, but maybe it's not the worst idea to give kids a few hours a day outside their family-approved bubble?
Just in case it's the latter.
Or am I mistaken and all homeschooling in the US requires the child's consent?
I don’t disagree with your final statement, but they’re also not wrong.
Growing up it was well-known that homeschool kids were strange, intelligent in some ways, and completely inept in most ways that mattered.
People who desire to completely shield their children are just as detrimental to their children’s development as those who over-expose. However, in my purely anecdotal experience, the ones who were over-exposed were better off than the former.
And the middle road led to better outcomes overall.
Where were you and others encountering these homeschooled kids if they were locked up in their cosseted homes in which they were apparently never socialized?
As another reply pointed out, maybe these kids are “weird” in some way, maybe they are not. We don’t have more than anecdotes here. More importantly, and to the point of my first reply, we don’t know the motives of their parents. The GP was engaged in mind reading. Certainly, the motives are manifold. One motive may be, “I’m going to home school my kid because he’s weird and won’t do well in a public school.” We don’t know which way the causal arrow points.
>Growing up it was well-known that homeschool kids were strange,
Growing up, it was well-known that in highschool that there was always a small subset of students who were strange. It was so cliche that more than a few sitcoms were founded on that very premise. You could walk up to any stranger age 40 or older, say "you know those weird kids in high school" and they could almost certainly rattle off the list of names even today.
This is because in any large group of kids, some significant percentage of them will be weirdos. Thinking that this is somehow a result of homeschooling is more than simply fallacious, it reveals a prejudice of yours.
Paul Graham pointed out that public school is a weird and degenerate microcosm that isn't much like the real social world at all.
> I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.
> When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage.
> ...If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie...Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.
Assuming that's a negative experience for you, that's worth trying to fix. I'm pushing 60 and most of my career has not been like that. You don't need to put up with it.
A big part of that for me was fixing my own social anxiety. But even before I managed that, I found groups that didn't feel that way. Later I worked someplace for a while that was kind of a throwback, but then I changed jobs and it was fine.
Perhaps unlike in some ways, but some aspects of school life persist in so-called adult life, e.g., jocks, nerds, freaks, party animals, slackers, and teacher’s pets are all still around — now with zeros on the end.
And PG didn't deny that. He just said the dynamic is very different when the group is larger, doing things that matter, and needs people who can get the right answers.
> I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
We already have this problem with the population at large, only a tiny minority of whom got homeschooled.
Right here on HN you can read daily accounts of severe introversion and social anxiety. You can see that out in public, at work, among friends and family. Many Americans, children and adults, take medications (licit and otherwise) to cope with anxiety and things like ADHD. Many Americans self-diagnose as "on the spectrum" and "introverted."
Do you have any evidence to support the idea that homeschooled children suffer more from these common afflictions?
So this part of your education was entirely self-guided? And you're worried if children don't see fights and just sort of 'figure out' how to deal with them on their own they won't develop properly?
> I was bullied [...] learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
So the institution valued popularity to the point of allowing you to be abused because you didn't possess it. Another self-guided lesson.
I can never understand why people defend schools. They're terrible environments for learning. We clearly need a school setting for book learning and an _entirely separate_ one for social learning. This seems easily surmountable.
This is a common sentiment, but how much do you really know about the counterfactual?
It's not obvious to me that you would have been unable to deal with people who didn't look like you if you had been homeschooled.
It also seems to me that a lot of public school environments surely contain kids who look different from each other, form cliques based on physical appearance, and learn to base how they treat people largely on physical appearance.
Speaking of bullying, high school caused me to greatly overestimate how important unarmed combat would be to my future success in life.
It's nice to not worry about it on the rare occasion that I go to sketchy places, but it also highlights that dealing with a cross section of our country's population is not necessarily relevant to the kind of life we build when we can choose our peers.
> I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
Most research does not support the idea that homeschooling inherently creates social bubbles or makes children unable to interact with others. Studies generally find that homeschooled children perform as well as or better than traditionally schooled peers on standardized social skills measures and often participate actively in community groups, sports, etc. Long term studies of adults who were homeschooled also show no meaningful deficits in life outcomes or social functioning. The main caveat is that homeschooling varies widely: children in highly isolated or restrictive environments may have fewer opportunities to practice mainstream social norms, but this is a function of the specific homeschooling approach, not homeschooling as a whole. Overall, the literature suggests that social problems arise from lack of social exposure not from homeschooling itself.
I had a similar experience growing up to what you describe, but in my adult life I ended up living around all upper middle class and wealthy people and I don’t think my earlier experiences have really been very relevant or helpful. So I think it might depend on what the child’s expected adult environment will be like? Like do we need to be around or interact with the sort of people you need to stay away from or watch your mouth around?
Edit: if I had to bet (don't know any research), schools nowadays are the main producers of intolerance, with the indoctrination and teaching kids to only respect civil discourse, ideas and opinions if they agree with the mainstream world model.
The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman. Other factors seem to play a much larger factor in the things you are (rightfully!) concerned about. As long as the parents have "the will to have nice things" (to refer to Patrick McKenzie's concept), then these are very surmountable problems.
Respectfully,
A grateful dad who was homeschooled and who will homeschool.
P.S. Of course I will do some things differently than my parents, but it was an amazing gift and I had an extremely vibrant and stimulating time, including with
peers (and adults!) outside of my parents' network who pushed me, challenged me, thought very differently than me, etc.
>The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman.
How do you do that? Seems like it would be impossible to replicate the experience of learning to navigate daily social interactions in a mixed group of people, especially when it comes to dealing with conflict.
Easy - homeschooling may include but does not require "in the home" any more than "homework" is required to be done in your house.
I was homeschooled and have homeschooled my three kids. Never has that meant "only at home and only with my family". My kids have been in co-op classes, taken classes from Art or Technical instruction centers (piano lessons, voice classes, programming, robotics), enrolled in community classes via private institutions and the local JC (cooking classes, performing arts) and been enrolled in independent study charter public schools which have some in-person classes. And in high school they start taking in-person JC courses.
There is lots of regular exposure to a variety of other people in all of that!
> especially when it comes to dealing with conflict.
What makes you think school is a good environment for that? Kids can be very cruel to each other with often the most societally maladapted dominating for reasons that have no bearing in real life.
Popular misconception of homeschooling. At least in my experience. We homeschool our children. We do a couple of hours a day of curriculum. The rest is being a member of a few homeschool coops. Parents are close, yet it's big enough that there are still "groups". Kids are making friends and socializing in a much more fruitful way than the chambers of public school. There's play, then there's exploration. We go on nature walks and clean ups, the theater, the naval base, we have soccer, gymnastics, and jiu jitsu, we go to the museums, libraries, and recycling plant.
Our kids have friends. We have made friends (tough at our age). And our kids are 1-2 years above their peers on diagnostics.
> I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people.
Unfortunately this encourages people to have a blind eye regarding bullying.
I would be much more happy if more people intervened against bullies and liars. Maybe we'd have better people in politics today if 40 years ago schools punished bullies and liars and sent them to have their behavioral problems addressed.
There is some realy valid things to consider here.
The thing it leaves me wondering is how many kids from elementary through high school a child really keeps in touch with, and if college is currently the place where many students finally get to start to be themselves.
>I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
It's always felt like a quirk of biology, in the same way that most people are now too fat. (ie, we didn't evolve in an era with constant excess calories and for the most part we can't cope with the situation) In that same way, people engage in this vicious fight for status between middle school and high school, only to be whisked away to colleges and then whisked away to wherever the jobs are; the fight for status never mattered and you can reinvent yourself in ways which would have never been possible in our ancient kin groups. But, we just cannot stop fighting for that status, and don't even give it much though. It's a huge waste of energy.
> I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
This is generally not true, as far as popularity correlates to having better social skills and a better understanding of social dynamics. Not saying income is the sole definition of success, but here is one study that found that teenagers with more friends earned more as adults: https://www.nber.org/papers/w27337
What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?
Maybe it's:
- the terrible educational state of the school system?
- the fact that device and social media addiction is a prevalent and growing problem that they don't want their kids brains rotted by?
- they want to provide their kids an education based on experiential and project based learning rather than filling out worksheets?
- they don't want their kids to be forced to wait for the slowest / least interested kids in class to catch up before moving on to more challenging material?
I’m sure these motivations do play out in some circles. However, every single homeschooler I know personally, and I know quite a few, does so because they want their children to have a very specific kind of religious education. Often the way this plays out is that they homeschool for a while, transition to a denominational school, and then depending on the family they may stay there or make a second transition to public school around 9th grade.
I think this tendency is heavily dependent on where you live. We have great public schools that will track advanced children aggressively if the parents push for it, so the motivations you list are unusual in my area.
Religion is definitely a big motivator. My perception though is other motivations have been on the increase, especially since the pandemic. One other group attracted to homeschooling is the hippie-type who thinks school is some kind of diabolical machine designed to crush kids' souls. Since the pandemic there's also been a big surge in the "I don't trust vaccines" group (which already had a good deal of overlap with the hippie group).
I have a feeling a really large percentage of homeschooling is about religious separatism and political separatism, and not about academic performance. Yes, you'll hear HN commenters sing the praises of homeschooling because this site is going to be disproportionately represented by the group doing it for actual educational reasons.
Also, we HN commenters typically see the success stories around us at work, not the failure stories. We all know that guy on the QA team who's a genius and credits his success to homeschooling, but we don't know the countless numbers of grown adults who are trapped as housewives who can't get a job because they never learned 5th grade multiplication.
Both were certainly major motivating factors for my parents’ choice to homeschool me in the 90s. Quality of education was a concern too, but it very much took a back seat to the other two.
The overwhelming majority of other homeschooling parents they had contact with also held separatist motivations.
That may be so, especially if you add a sort of "cultural separatism" (a la the hippies I mentioned). An odd thing I see recently too is people who seem to believe they're making various choices for educational reasons, but it's not clear if the education they're moving to is any better. They just do it because they perceive their child as being unhappy or stifled somehow. There seem to be, for instance, more and more parents who believe their kid is unusually smart and should be on some kind of fast track or not have to do certain things, even when there's little objective evidence of the kid's abilities.
Vague "educational reasons" is always the noble-sounding excuse they use, but often if you dig deeper they'll admit it's more about the various forms of separatism.
Sometimes you don't have to dig. A ton of moms in my wife's church group permanently pulled their kids out of public school in recent years, and they will openly admit that it's about keeping their kids away from "those" people, where the definition of "those" runs the gamut.
I don't want the separatism, but I also want the ability to give my kids a decent education. There ought to be some way to determine which is which. Do you have any ideas?
We did the homeschool thing for one year after most kids went back to school after COVID. My wife has underlying medical conditions that made her quite concerned about catching it before the vaccine rollout. We did a few of the homeschool group organized field trips and I got to briefly meet some of the parents. Overall I can't say much about the kids, they seemed fine. The parents were friendly, but when I asked about the curriculum they almost invariably suggested PragerU material, which makes me concerned for their children's future.
Not sure why you're being down voted. I'm sure there are some folks homeschooling because of things like racism, but that has always existed just like evangelical christians have always been big into homeschooling.
If there is a big uptake, it's likely due to the ever present threat of school shootings coupled with all the things you said above. I have to teach my kid a lot outside of school and they go to what is considered a good one. The only reason I send them is my spouse and I work and my kid needs to learn social skills. If I won the lottery, I'd homeschool them myself and do it for a few other families as well so that my kid can get the social aspect too.
It's insightful how they said segregation and financial means and you immediately went to racism.
There is certainly some level of segregating the children from families who have the means to "dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children" and children from families that don't have those means.
> What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?
A lot of the people I know who do homeschool (the extreme majority of families I know) have openly said the reasons why they're choosing to homeschool is because they don't want their kids exposed to the other "cultures" in their area whether that be immigrants, other religions, or LGBT people.
One family I know was thinking about pulling their kids out of public school because the choir was going to sing "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" and was worried this was indoctrinating their child into another religion. Forget the fact the rest of that holiday choir event was filled with Christian holiday tunes and what that means for the non-Christians that have a right to go to the school, that wasn't a concern at all.
Not all families, I agree. I've known a few outliers who actually are exceptional teachers and think they'll do a better job teaching the kids than the local schools (and they're probably right). But they're definitely the outliers around me. Most that I've personally known are not like that, and rely on just giving their kids workbooks with extreme religious bent to figure things out on their own.
I agree its not always "racism", but ultimately the main reason is still largely the same. They don't think their kids should mingle with the "others". Its the exact same logic of black school segregation during Jim Crow.
Sometimes for good reason. Observe what happened to people who tried to approach Sentinel island. That may seem extreme, but it's not my point. It's is that cultures are different and some are detrimental to the people of some other culture's wellbeing.
I saw a study a while back - don't have the link handy - that while homeschooled kids of all ethnicities showed improved education outcomes compared to their public-school counterparts, African American kids improved the most. Not really surprising if they would otherwise be going to the worst schools!
The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against this concept. Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.
Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.
Modern academic life is only well suited to a small percent of the population. Those children who are truly happy and excelling in that setting.
So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at? Forced mass education was a good idea for developing societies, but personalized education has been possible for at least a decade now, at a fraction of the cost.
And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
* It's fascinating to watch the points on my comment go up and down a ton. Very controversial issue. I believe it highlights pressure from social and political structures in society, and/or personal experiences. They vary so much.
My general experience is that homeschool children have self esteem and confidence issues precisely because they've been around 'hand picked' people... forever.
They've never experienced assholes, or people who think their personality is grating, or whatever. Thick skin needs to be built up, to a degree. I'm not saying bullying is good, but being exposed to the unwashed masses definitely can be.
I watched my kids becoming a median of their classmates. After changing to a private school it was noticeable after a month - different lexicon, mimics, attitude.
It's not thick skin they are developing around assholes, it's them incorporating that behavior to some degree. There was nothing I could do to change that - talks, good example, nothing worked, only surrounding change.
And I grew up among median kids till I was 19 and never did adjust to the median (neither did my group of friends foinf to the same school). My younger brother however did.
There are kids who will have the tendency to adjust to others and there are kids who don't. This has to do with the self-confidence they bring with them before they enter their first day of school, friends they have/had outside school and it is not necessarily a thing a parent can always control in a predictable manner.
For all we know in your case it could even be that your kid learned they have to follow the others in private school and then applied that lesson in the next one. What I am saying here is that having learned the lesson "you need to adjust to your peers" is the problem, not that the peers are the "wrong" ones.
I mean… the issue is you have incredibly well educated kids that have an awkward time dealing with assholes.
Given the state of our education system, that seems like an obviously worthwhile trade off. Especially for parents in underperforming school districts and even entire regions.
I think this is analogous to diseases and vaccines. You don't immunize a child by exposing it to the pathogen, but to a modified version of it that poses no threat to their health, but still allows their immune system to recognize and produce anti bodies.
The same applies to teaching "street smarts" to kids. You don't do it by throwing them in a hostile environment where they'll be prey to hostile people without having any defenses built up first.
> Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.
Not your problem to fix for sure - but it is your problem to equip your child to comfortably weather. There are bad influences out in the world and they generally have outsized effects on their social and professional scenes. In fact, the kind of curated, limited community you're advocating for is one where bad influences thrive.
> So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at?
I certainly agree the degree is whatever - but I think you're really under-valuing the social-gauntlet aspect of school. You will have classmates who kind of (or really) suck. You will need to do your work anyway. You will be incentivized to learn perseverance and a self-centered locus of control. These are valuable skills that only come from actual exposure to bad influences.
Someone who's perfect in perfect conditions is going to struggle because the world is not perfect. The aims you highlight here make me think less of homeschooling than I did before.
The problem is that what constitutes “healthy” varies so greatly between individuals (especially these days) that it barely carries any objective meaning, and the odds are heavily against any one person’s definition being correct.
If I put myself in the shoes of a parent, I wouldn’t trust myself on the matter enough that I’d feel good shaping my childrens’ entire world to match it. It’s such a wildly difficult thing to get right, and I’d rather they get a glimpse of the world through wide variety of viewpoints and hope they’ll use the values I’ve instilled in them to construct their own view.
> hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children
Unless you can magically guarantee (or have enough money to fund their whole life) your children will never have to interact with "problem" people, they will need to learn to deal with those people one way or another. And it's better to do so in a low-stakes situation like school.
Childhood and youth are anything but “low‐stakes.” The social experiences I faced in public school were far worse than even the worst parts of my adult life. The direction I was headed was one of dark cynicism and misanthropy thanks to the bullying I faced and the lack of care from the adults in the system. When I switched to homeschooling, I began interacting with rational adults (my parents’ friends) and in turn learned what functioning human relationships look like. My ability to weather the difficult storms of adulthood in a healthy way came from the social growth I gained through homeschooling, not the regressive “socialization” that public school inflicted on me.
I had exactly the same experience. I was in a public school full of assholes and teachers that couldn't care less about any bullying taking place. Those few years were probably the worse years of my life.
I grew significantly and became a different person when I was moved to a different school.
I still think it taught me a lot about the world and how people really are. I really lost a lot of faith in humanity in those few years and still see the world as cynical in which all people are in it for themselves.
Did it make me stronger? Maybe. But also I wish I could see the world more positively as a lot of people that have been shielded from those experiences seem to do.
On the opposite end of the spectrum I grew up near a Mormon family whom exclusively homeschooled their children. Their 'homeschooling' mostly consisted of using the older children to assist and babysit the younger children as they had about ten or so children, and naturally could not equally provide schooling for such a wide range of needs.
They were a nice family, but when I was in community college I had a chance to talk with one of the eldest who was there getting her GED. Last I recall, she held some resentment towards her parents because she was held back fairly significantly by her upbringing. Well, except for the fact that they were wealthy which helps smooth some of the problems.
The trouble I have with this line of argument is that, at least for male children, the skills one learns for dealing with 'problem' people in school (IE skills one would learn in an MMA gym) are not relevant for dealing with problem people afterwards.
Children's world view is shaped early on. They shouldn't have to suffer just because poor, violent, should-have-been-aborteds are legally required to go to public schools. Children should experience carefree happiness at least once, in their formative years so they know happiness is possible.
They can be avoided later in life just like they can be avoided in public schools. Freedom to choose was established 50 years ago, sorry if you dislike it.
> homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one?
...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?
I think your view is a very black and white one. Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there.
The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe. Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do.
I can not conceive of a worse way to teach a kid how to behave in Adult social settings than to throw them into a group of other kids who have just as little experience as they do and then expect the group to "figure it out". This is not to say that there aren't some homeschooling parents who practice a form of extreme isolation which produces what I would regard as an equally bad outcome as public school. But by the numbers from people who have studied this the evidence indicates homeschooling produces the best outcomes for social adjustment in Adulthood.
Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement which means the child learns how to socialize not from other children but from watching how the adults they are around handle interactions.
> I can not conceive of a worse way to teach a kid how to behave in Adult social settings than to throw them into a group of other kids who have just as little experience as they do and then expect the group to "figure it out".
You are aware of teachers, yes?
> Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement
Everything I've read shows that putting absolutely all else aside, parental involvement is key to a child's success. So perhaps the reason your by the numbers evidence shows home schooling to be better is simply because it's a self-selecting group of involved parents.
Counterpoint from my own experience having been previously homeschooled all the way to college: My parents went the extra mile to ensure I was constantly immersed in large group settings with other homeschoolers. Field trips, co-op classes, sports, and general high-quality social time. There were of course bad eggs as in any group setting, but with an important difference: if it ever got bad, it was possible to leave, and we did on occasion. In my mind, that's far more in keeping with the "real world" than the seeming entrapment of public schooling that offers little recourse for when social experiences sour. In the real world, you have the freedom to leave a toxic job or social group far more so than public school.
In addition to peer socialization and mobility, the flexibility in scheduling allowed me to work a day job through my high school years, exposing me to yet more real-world experience. The constant interaction with adults and folks from other walks of life was a huge boon that allowed me to function as a well-adjusted adult right out of the gate. The high-school drama that people suffer and then bring with them into adulthood is very disappointing and seemingly unnecessary.
^^^ That's my experience interacting with healthily homeschooled children-now-adults. On average they seemed to have so much less trauma than me and my peers, and less "subconscious" issues to deal as adults.
"..a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?"
School isn't their only exposure to life. You will get exposure to other people and non-healthy people outside of school.
"Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in th"
When I was a kid, I was exposed to kids that should have been in prison..and many of them ended up there. My life probably would have been better if they weren't there.
"My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there."
This can still be done with home schooling.
"The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe."
I disagree. If someone is hostile and aggressive all the time, I wouldn't be around them as an adult. I hand pick my friends, and you probably do too. I also still get exposed to the assholes of the world.
"Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do."
If you are at work and someone is sexually harassing all of the women there or generally causing issues for everyone around them (preventing most other people from getting their work done). Do you think they should stay, so everyone can learn to be around them?
You seem to think everyone is a reasonable person that might just have a few issues. This is far from the truth and many times, public schools will just keep these kids there, preventing everyone around them from learning.
> ...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?
It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public. "The real world" is highly filtered social circles and freedom of association. The idea that it's somehow an automatic good to force healthy kids to mix with everyone who happens to show up, regardless of whether they have severe behavioral or social issues, is pretty questionable.
> My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there.
You can expose your kids to different cultures without leaving them wide open to everything else. It's not a binary. The point is that home schooling lets you pick and choose.
> It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public.
I'm baffled by this. Many workplaces? Mass transit? Walking down the sidewalk? At a concert? Buying groceries? True, there don't all expose you to the full sweep of human existence at once but, in aggregate, it seems pretty similar to what you'd encounter at most public schools. What if they want a career in a hospital, or law enforcement, or social services, ... the list goes on.
You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble, but it seems to me they need to be prepared for a future where they encounter all kinds of people. I'm sure this can be compatible with homeschooling but I can't see how it's not generally a disadvantage. (Though perhaps onerous clearly outweighed by other advantages, depending on the situation.)
The closest social equivalency to public school socialization I can think of is prison. You're stuck there for N hours per day with limited or zero control over what other people you're around. Maybe parts of military training might also be similar.
That's the kind of thing that is very much not like the "real world." It's more than just being "exposed" to less optimal peers (like you would on a bus), it's an entirely different social experience.
> Most workplaces are highly filtered. The whole interview process is specifically geared towards filtering out undesirable people.
This just isn't true or is born from a standpoint of extreme luck. Like have you genuinely paid attention to the people you work with? Coworkers, CEOs, the stuff people say in slack channels or the things people gossip about at work? The only way I think someone can genuinely hold an opinion like this is by being so unaware of what workplace politics that they are unaware that most workplaces are like Highschool 2. Even the professional ones. Especially the professional ones.
It's absolutely undeniable that interviewing is meant to filter out undesirable behavior. What in the world do you think it is? So many people cannot just walk in and start working next to you, very few will be selected.
You are pointing out behavior that is different, but not undesirable. Which is not being discussed. i.e., kids who distrust other kids learning is undesirable. As would people who create hostile work environments, or are inefficient, or unreliable, or don't have the right connections.
In my place of work people nearly universally went to top end universities, a much larger proportion than the normal population have phds. you think that's random? And more locally if you work on a sales team you are going to be hired to work directly with people that have certain shared traits that make them effective sellers. It's so obvious that interviewing is an active filter I'm not even sure what to do to convince someone that thinks otherwise.
I'm not sure how you equate any of that to workplace politics or gossip. Even if it was relevant, the fact that it is not a perfectly effective filter doesn't make it not a filter.
You don’t have to sit side-by-side rubbing shoulders and squabbling with rabble for 12 years in order to understand and deal with it, just like you don’t have to wrestle with gators for 12 years to learn respect for nature.
> You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble
I think it's telling that the other responses seem to focus on exactly this; the idea that their child will exist in a class apart from the rabble, and will not have to interact with them.
It seems to speak to two very different views of community. On the one hand, there is community as a collection of all the people in a space: people who share local resources, frequent the same local businesses, and have the same local concerns. On the other, there is a community of choice: people who share the same social class, and possibly the same religion or cultural beliefs. I think it's fair to say that you can have both, but trying to say that you can belong solely to the communities you choose and treat everyone else as beneath notice sounds quite problematic, and it will absolutely not give children a correct or complete view of the world.
Isn't this exactly what society is built on though? Mutually beneficial interactions borne of choice, not compulsion? And isn't it the sane, rational thing to do to oppose people who compel you to join their community?
> No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public
I think "forced" is doing a lot of work there. No, you're not forced to work alongside someone problematic. But quitting your job is quite an escalation to deal with the issue. Same with a troublesome neighbor. To say nothing of public transit, taking flights, interacting with other drivers on the road...
It absolutely is. If you are well equipped to navigate the adult world, you place yourself in hand-picked groups of people. I do not work with, socialize with, or live near a random sample of the population, and I highly doubt most people reading this thread do either!
Yeah but how do you LEARN the ability to do that? To keep that practice always in your mental backburner, and remembering how important it is? Why, you learn it by seeing the impacts from those succumbed to negative influences they surrounded themselves with!
You can't learn the application of hand-picking your people and environments if you don't first see the outcomes when such application is neglected, and understanding its importance from there. If you have the hand-picking done for you as well, you risk not learning the ability to do it yourself. Or how to handle the situations where you can't.
> ...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?
It's much closer to the real world though, isn't it? Your child is likely going to live most of their life in similar communities to them, not a wide cross section of the public.
I think your reading is very black and white. Add some leeway to what I say. Hand-picked obviously doesn't mean all friends go through a psych screening on a daily basis, or that you have to helicopter-parent and tell your kids who to be friends with...
> or you have to helicopter-parent and tell your kids who to be friends with...
Isn't that essentially what you're describing, though? You literally talked about "healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children". No, you don't have to tell them who to be friends with... but you've pre-selected the pool of potential friends, so there's no instruction necessary.
I get that on one hand, such regulation is one of the reasons some parents do so, but the wide diversity of "oversight" is challenging.
In Washington, homeschooled students still have to occasionally connect at an actual school, or do some baseline testing.
In Louisiana, you just tell the state "we're homeschooling" and the state is "have fun with that" and the child is essentially off the grid.
Not for nothing, instances of child abuse/CSA in many correlates with the laxness of educational oversight in home schooling.
> And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom.
For all your anecdotes my step daughter has plenty too. 10th graders who are barely literate, cannot do elementary math. Who when asked about their homeschool regime talk of waking at 10, 10.30, playing Fortnite or going on Tiktok for a few hours, and occasionally logging into some website to pretend like they've been working, or doing some mind numbingly simple exercise to show "participation".
> Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom.
Exactly. Notice how, when people complain about the "deranged ideologies" that teachers are teaching their kids, they either 1. stop short of actually naming those ideologies or 2. spout fever dreams that are statistically vanishingly rare.
Where I live the schools are quite good and the homeschoolers are fundamental religious families who won’t send their kids to schools where gay pride flags are allowed.
I’d pull our child out of school if the standards dropped but I think the majority of homeschoolers align with out of the mainstream poltical / religious views.
If schools are problematic or have kids that are problematic, wouldn't it make more sense to focus on investing in them to make them better, adding resources to support difficult kids, to help parents who are not doing well? As opposed to disengaging from them?
It is pretty hard for one parent to change things for the better, even if just for their child in one classroom. The administration and teachers have so many other things to deal with. It's much harder to change the entire school culture. You can volunteer, and you should!, but you still won't make as large an impact on your child's education as you would hope. In some ways, this is good, because there are lots of crazy parents out there who you don't want making impacts on your child's education, but it's also bad if you're not that crazy parent.
If the school system is damaging kids, it’s good to work to improve it, but you won't see results (if any—effecting systemic change is hard) until after your kids have already graduated, facing irreversible damage in the process.
If you’re willing to homeschool well, the positive impact on your kids is immediate.
> Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one?
A gardener who understands that after that short grace period that plant will have to grow amongst those sick and hostile ones essentially and not only that, it will have to form a thriving ecosystem with them.
I get the idea of wanting to protect your child at all cost and wanting the best possible education for them. Rarely have I found that former students with over-protective parents that put them down a funnel of other kids from the same social and ideological background have really thrived. And I work in university level education meaning I get to see first hand what is usually the first phase in a persons life where they can decide for themselves how to do it. The people with self-confidence and stable roots who make the best, are usually those who "have seen it all", while those with alternative schooling backgrounds are either completely in their own world (often with rude awekenings) or constant feelings of inadequacy and comparison with others. That is anecdotal evidence by one educator, so details may matter.
Aside from those individual aspects, there absolutely is a societal aspect to that. If gated communities are the solution, then your society has to be in what is already a pretty dystopian position. Having those isolated silos mean in a world of isolated social media silos, we give our kids even less possibility to experience the reality of other members of the society we expect them to repair.
That shoulders them with an impossible task. My deep believe is that the goal of education is to prepare people for their life, but also to give them the tools to make the world they are sent into a better place. That requires a healthy dose of "knowing what is", especily if what is, is ugly.
>> Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one?
> A gardener who understands that after that short grace period that plant will have to grow amongst those sick and hostile ones essentially and not only that, it will have to form a thriving ecosystem with them.
If, on the other hand, the gardener knows from experience that the flower will be suffocated, then it's pointless at best and cruel at worst.
He is a real rightoid based on other comments. HN disappointed me today, since you're the only one who noticed, others silently tolerate this behavior.
> Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.
I'm sure they exist, they may even exist as the majority, I will say for my part the homeschooled kids I knew through my church growing up were not any of these things. I would quite literally use the opposite of both those to describe them.
I'm not saying they represent the majority but they do exist and they were not well adjusted IMHO.
As with many topics I feel like "Yes, if you want to devote yourself fully to X thing you can do much better than Y professional", the problem is, again from my own experience, the people I knew who homeschooled their children were not professionals, they were not capable, and their children suffered for it. I want to stress, I fully believe it is possible for certain people with certain mentors/teachers to do better outside of the public (or private) school system. I just also believe that the odds of most people (making that decision for their children) to meet that bar are low. I also think that some of the better homeschooled experiences that I've seen are simply a super-private school by another name (various parents being or being subject experts and taking turns teaching coupled with many "field trip"-type trips with other homeschooled kids).
> there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Wait till you hear what the parents believe... I don't agree with everything taught or the way it's taught but being exposed to other types of people and ways of thinking is critical. I can guarantee you that had my parents been able to, they would have shielded me from a great number of ways of thinking. I worry that many homeschooled children grow up in a small echo chamber (we all live in echo chambers of difference sizes).
Can public school suck? Absolutely and I acknowledge that homeschooling might be the answer for some people, but only if you can afford to pay (with time or money) to educate your children completely which is almost certainly going to require working with other homeschooler parents to, essentially, build your own school. If you can bring in tutors/mentors/teachers that you vet and agree with and expose them to the world and new ideas/experiences then yeah, you are probably going to have good outcomes. If you plop them in front of a computer to follow a curriculum just to shield them from the "evils" of the world, well, I think you are going to have a bad time. Obviously there is a whole range of people in between those 2 extremes, I just feel that, on average, people trend towards the lower end of that spectrum.
Interesting song and I do agree with many points. For many years I've complained about lack of teaching basic skills (everything from home ec to budgeting and more), many of which I heard in this song. I think there was a little of the baby going out with the bathwater but overall I enjoyed it.
The one that exists with problem children and opinions you don’t like.
As a parent I get the impulse to remove my children from any potential harm but the real world has sharp edges. They need to be confident in that world not just smothered.
And really as the person who used the term it’s really up to you to define what you mean.
Can you pick even a single person that will agree with you on everything? You could be around 10 if your identical twins and there’d still be conflict.
Why is it more „natural” if the school does the picking? Besides, parents can’t command anyone to join. It’s not The Truman Show.
Is marriage not “real life” because you chose your partner? Does you choosing prevent disagreement, struggle, pain and growth? I don’t think so.
Why would I let anyone brainwash my kids with opinions that I don't like? Why do my kids have to be bullied by these problem children?
> As a parent
I guess you still want them to go to a good school, not a ghetto one. And most likely you don't want them to be brainwashed with ideas that you personally don't like.
> The one that exists with problem children and opinions you don’t like.
That's just not true though. Your job isn't going to force you to interact with people who disrupt the environment constantly. Those people are fired and removed from the group.
In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave.
In the military, say, you don't get that option.
In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while.
So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.)
> In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave.
Agreed! And that is exactly what home-schooling families are doing. Choosing to leave a dysfunctional environment.
> In the military, say, you don't get that option.
Yep, and other government institutions, like prison. I don't think those are what anyone would call a typical life environment though.
> In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while.
That's another dysfunctional environment, and also what the police are for.
> So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.)
You're right, you can't. The world has a lot of dysfunctional environments, and I agree that people need to learn how to deal with them. Knowingly forcing your child to be in one of those environments full-time for many years seems like a pretty horrible way to teach them that though, bordering on abusive.
And, to be clear, EVERY workplace will have people you don't like. Every. Single. One. No exceptions.
Kids needs to be taught resiliency and healthy mindsets, to a degree. They need to learn to live and let go, to learn their value isn't derived from what people think of them, to learn that embarrassment is self inflicted.
You just can't do that if you're only around people who don't challenge you. If you're in a nice, cushy, social bubble, you will develop self esteem and confidence issues.
Hilariously wrong. One who thinks such is either so overwhelmingly privileged he has never had to actually work to survive, or is a part of said "problem children" without self-awareness.
My job isn’t the totality of my life and you have very strange ideas about how quickly disruptive people actually get fired. You get plenty of unfiltered interaction in life. If anything I’d say the sort of thing you describe sounds more like an insular cult. Although even there you get misanthropic people, abuse and so on.
> My job isn’t the totality of my life and you have very strange ideas about how quickly disruptive people actually get fired. You get plenty of unfiltered interaction in life.
In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up? The only instances I can think of are other government-run institutions like the military or prison, and I don't think anyone would argue those are standard modes of "real life".
> If anything I’d say the sort of thing you describe sounds more like an insular cult.
> In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up?
Holding literally any job ever? I was a software engineer and I frequently had to interact with a wide range of folks for the sake of my professional career. QA, contractors, internal and external teams. I was paid to do so, unless you argue that I have the option to quit or something in which my response is I need to in fact eat and have stable income.
I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before.
We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.
We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.
But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
> Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
And this is only just now being investigated as a cause of harm. When I went to public high school, the bullying happened at school and stayed there. Kids now, their bullies follow them home, and since most of the social interaction now happens online instead of in-person, it's way more damaging to mental health than the classic caricature of a schoolyard bully. The most I had to compare myself to were my peers in my school, not the entire globe of influencers and fake instagram.
There has been a complete erosion of boundaries. The threat is constant, you can't escape it, and kids are in a state of hyper-vigilance, always online or else they miss a crucial social interaction in group chat, or need to constantly check if a damaging photo, post, or rumor gets publicly posted to the internet while they were asleep.
Not only that, teens are losing the ability to read human emotion, so misunderstandings escalate rapidly. In person communication now becomes too intense, and only increases anxiety and isolation, despite being hyperconnected.
I suppose there are few talented, hard working people who want to teach, and they command a premium. Education is expensive and underfunded.
As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money.
By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.
Expensive yes. Underfunded depends on where you are.
San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student.
I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.
Nearly every time we try to fix this problem with money it fails. The problem is not money. All else being equal there is little to no correlation between spend and outcome. Money get's touted by schools and politicatians as a way of pretending to care but not actually do any of the work to improve outcomes.
What does tend to correlate with money and also correlates with outcomes is parental involvement. Solving that problem requires societal and economic change in a district though not giving the school more money.
I would argue spending less money would actually improve things.
Ultimately it’s a culture problem. America’s attitude toward problems is nothing if not “throw more money at the problem and hope it gets better.” See also, healthcare, military spending, college sports, etc.
cost per student is higher for high school students. So if you take an average across all grades for public schools and then compare that to specific cost per grade at private schools, of course private schools are going to look relatively cheaper for younger students.
I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house. That $200k gets eaten up pretty quick by things like security, janitorial, building maintenance, support staff like principals, librarians, guidance counselors etc etc. If you’re meaning to include total cost for the full time employees (the teachers) in the list, then the salaries are a lot less attractive once you’re done covering benefits, etc.
I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot. The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k. Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond.
My point is that it's hard to point at some issue of inefficient public bureaucracy, because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper. I would also argue they wouldn't try, because their goal is a good education, or at least better than the public alternative (that only spends $28k per kid).
"I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house."
I was generous in my estimate for each of the line items. I chose a one room school house as an example because it's easy to grok, and anything larger would be cheaper due to economies of scale.
"I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot."
Although I have only one child (in 4th grade), I think about schools a lot, too.
"The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k."
This $28k number is false. Most parochial schools charge about $12k. Here is a breakdown by grade level of the number of parochial schools in SF that serve that grade level, and the median tuition among those schools for that grade:
# Median sticker price
Pre-K 7 $16,610
K 29 $11,530
1 29 $11,530
2 29 $11,175
3 29 $11,175
4 29 $11,175
5 29 $11,175
6 30 $11,519
7 30 $11,519
8 30 $11,519
9 4 $31,725
10 4 $31,725
11 4 $31,725
12 4 $31,725
"Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond."
This 'usually start in the $40k range' is also false. For each of the grades K-5, 33-39% of non-parochial schools in SF charge less than $40k. For each of the grades 6-8, 30% of non-parochial schools in SF charge less than $40k.
"because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper"
Non-parochial private schools don't typically price based on cost. The schools that have high demand (due to parents and student population) can charge more. So they don't need to manage their costs tightly. And they can spend lots of money on marketing.
Moreover, not all students pay sticker price. So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.
"because their goal is a good education"
Their goal is happy customers (parents). Different schools achieve this in different ways. Some parents choose a school not based on the expected quality of education but based on the expected networking opportunities for themselves and for their child.
I was generous in my estimate for each of the line items. I chose a one room school house as an example because it's easy to grok, and anything larger would be cheaper due to economies of scale.
I would argue that economies of scale don't apply to education in the same way they apply to other businesses at large. Sure, you theoretically get the benefits of scale with central organization, buildings, centralized services, etc, but once you get to the classrooms themselves most of the cost simply scales linearly with the number of students.
This $28k number is false. Most parochial schools charge about $12k.
I'm not sure what we're talking about here anymore. You're using K-8 as the dominating factor for this gotcha a few times in this thread. There are more K-8 parochial schools, yes. "Most parochial schools charge about $12k" is true, unless you're talking about high school. Exactly 1 parochial school is less than $30k (SF Christian, at $16k). From there (limited to religious schools):
- Sacred Heart ($31k)
- Archbishop Riordan ($32k)
- Saint Ignatius ($34.6)
- Sacred Heart ($60k)
- Jewish Community School ($65k)
I might have missed some in here since I'm going by names, but given that SF Christian is the cheapest private high school on SF Chronicle's list[1] I don't think that matters for my point.
You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate, and structure most of your argument around the cheapest schools (K-8). Mea culpa on my end, though: you are correct that when I was saying "cheapest I've seen," there was an unfair modifier of "cheapest schools on my personal spreadsheet" which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to. You're absolutely correct that there are cheaper parochial schools available as long as you only need K-8.
Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school (again, referencing SF Chronicle's data). I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.
So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.
Sure, that's fair! But we're not talking about income, we're talking about average cost per kid. We can't actually know the details under the hood, but again, those schools specifically in your list are usually subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway.
You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate
The reason for this is simple and not nefarious:
- I don't have access to data that would allow me to apportion total SFUSD costs to individual school types
- When considering schools with vastly different prices (and different scales), the median is a much more informative measure than the mean (which could be skewed by an unusually expensive or inexpensive school with a tiny student population).
Another reason for using median is that I was responding to your comments which talked about general price levels ('tuition for those schools is roughly', 'usually start in the $40k range'). You were not talking about averages, but typical prices or minimum (starting) prices. The mean prices have no bearing on the truth or falsity of those claims.
Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private high schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school
If we look only at non-parochial schools, the means are even higher (e.g. $39k for 5th grade, $41k for 8th grade, $59k for 12th grade).
those schools specifically in your list are subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant when we look at the sticker price for non-parochial schools, we should assume their average revenue per student is less than the sticker price, and the average cost per student is less than or equal to the average revenue per student.
I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.
My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded?
which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to
If we limit the discussion to only those schools we'd be willing to send our kids to, then that would rule out almost all SFUSD schools, which kind of defeats the point of the discussion!
BTW In case you want to see the SF Chronicle data in a form that's more personalized (showing the schools nearest to you first, filterable by grade levels and price and type), I made a tool to do that: https://tools.encona.com/schoolfinder
My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded?
Your original point was not that it's "not underfunded," it was that it's overfunded (and substantially so, based on other comments). Your top(ish) comment on this thread to the $28k per student average:
I'm saying it's a lot.
My only argument here is that I don't think $28k is unreasonable, particularly when viewed against the cost of private alternatives.
then that would rule out almost all SFUSD schools, which kind of defeats the point of the discussion!
We go to our attendance area SFUSD school and love it. There are plenty of SFUSD and private schools that would not be on our list, be it for academic reasons or logistical.
I made a tool to do that
Cool, I dig it! Annoying, unsolicited feature request would be to allow addresses or zip codes rather than requiring geolocation :)
My only argument here is that I don't think $28k is unreasonable, particularly when viewed against the cost of private alternatives.
OK, so we agree SFUSD is not underfunded?
We go to our attendance area SFUSD school and love it.
That's great! At my attendance area school, two thirds of students are behind grade level in math, and there's no opportunity to be grouped with kids in other grades.
Annoying, unsolicited feature request would be to allow addresses or zip codes rather than requiring geolocation :)
If this is for privacy, don't worry, it's all front end code and your location isn't sent to the server. (You can check the network tab or just look at the code.)
Yes, it was extremely clear that your position is that it’s overfunded.
OK, so we agree SFUSD is not underfunded?
No, we don’t, I just wasn’t trying to make that point. There’s absolutely debates to be had about SFUSD, including how they spend their budget (personally I would make big cuts at the central office and redistribute to the schools), but the thought that $28k/kid is too much in SF just isn’t grounded in reality.
two thirds of students are behind grade level in math, and there's no opportunity to be grouped with kids in other grades.
This type of broad statement is true, but also obscures the realities of the student population SFUSD is mandated to serve. That high level number includes special education, non-English speakers, etc. Generally speaking, the data for kids with a similar socioeconomic background to the one I suspect your kids have are doing fine in SFUSD, particularly in K-8.
For example, a low key popular school with “bad scores,” Flynn[1]. ~30% of the student population met or exceeded the standard for math. That number jumps to 65.4% for kids with college-educated parents, and 81.3% for grad school. Race is an unfortunate proxy here, but it’s 70.8% for white students.
Not trying to convince you to send your kid to public school, of course, just calling out that there’s nuance required when comparing outcomes and what can work for families.
personally I would make big cuts at the central office and redistribute to the schools
Amen.
That number jumps to 65.4% for kids with college-educated parents, and 81.3% for grad school.
Do you think those kids are learning primarily due to their experience at school, or because their parents teach them? Anecdotally, whenever I've walked past Kumon centers during the weekend they seem busy, and when I was driving the other day I noticed Russian School of Math has added a new location.
Rahim, you should have a blog or other website where you write about your experience with schooling in the Bay Area. Considering that schools here have insisted that exothermic reactions produce oxygen and wood, I am not particularly inspired by them. There's no substitute for the actual experiences of parents here.
I have only one child so my direct experience is very limited. Much of what I know (or think I know!) is from looking at data, conversations with parents, conversations with SFUSD employees, and with educators.
San Francisco schooling district spends upwards of $1B a year to educate 55k students. About 85% of the budget goes to salary and benefits (excluding pensions). Of that, 75% goes to educators and the rest for other staff.
Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.
It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.
With a budget of $28k per student, and 21 students per classroom, that’s $588k per classroom.
Now, granted, some of that goes on building upkeep, cleaning, supplies, heating, pensions, managers etc - but if $588k per classroom doesn’t let you pay enough to attract teachers there’s something very suspicious going on.
I don’t buy that argument, there’s no reason a teacher in San Francisco can’t live in Oakland or Berkeley, or a teacher in NYC couldn’t live in NJ. You don’t have a human right to live in the most expensive real estate on Earth.
GP didn't say anything about it being a human right. You seem to be strawmanning their argument.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.
Yeah, screw the teachers, they should just have a longer commute, who cares about them? /s
I always want to laugh when I hear people complain about finding near-minimum-wage workers in a HCOL area. They can't seem to grasp that commuting is not free, it may feel free to them at their income level but transportation costs money (gas, car maintenance, insurance or bus, etc) and time. I'm not saying teaching is a minimum wage job but it's not a high earning one either, paying them as low as we do _and_ also asking them to have a longer commute is just absurd.
Jackson Hole residents complaining about "poor service" in stores and restaurants in town, because shocker, servers can't afford to live in Jackson Hole. And unlike even SF or NY (which may not be perfect but have at least functional transport), there's no easy way to travel from the next town, an hour away or more.
Residents have started banding together to rent coaches to bus people in, which seems the most reasonable solution, after all, no poors in town, still, and it doesn't hurt the residents that service industry employees in their town have a three hour commute. /s
It got so bad in Atherton, CA, that the school had to build accommodation for teachers in the school itself. Next step, they can do janitorial work for extra money!
If an average class has 20 students it's $560k per year. If an average student gets 1000 hours of schooling per year you can pay 200$/hour and you have spent only just above 1/3 of your budget.
It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".
It’s because this is a very simplified view of a classroom. What is presented above is the best case scenario, not a realistic one. For example, there’s no consideration of costs associated with any sort of handicapped student, or student with special education needs.
Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.
Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.
$28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us?
Teacher (all-in cost): $150k
Teaching assistant: $100k
Rent for commercial space in SF (~1,200 sq ft): $60k
Curriculum, books, supplies: $23k
Technology (22 Chromebooks, projector, software): $18k
Field trips and enrichment: $10k
Utilities, internet, insurance: $27k
Furniture and equipment: $20k
Admin/legal/accounting: $8k
Total: $416k
That leaves $200k unspent.
AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist.
If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).
The big thing you’re missing is special education, and to a lesser extent English Language Learners. School districts are obligated to teach every student, some of whom cost the district dramatically more than they receive from the state.
Your admin costs are also low - you need to account for each teacher being coached and managed, running school operations and front desk, facilities management, finance, IT, etc.
Also this is an area where first principles analysis is likely to lead you astray - I’d recommend starting with SFUSD’s public budget to understand what their cost structure is.
You're recommending I look at SFUSD's public budget when:
- that budget is how I was able to calculate per-pupil spend
- in another comment you admitted to having 'no idea' where the $28k/year number came from, suggesting to me that you haven't looked at the budget yourself
The granularity in SFUSD's published budget is not sufficient to analyze what is useful and what is waste.
I did some research into this - the public budget is actually reasonably detailed. The biggest gap between your analysis and the actual expenditures are the SFUSD faces much higher facilities costs, higher admin cost due to Teacher coaching, and specialized programs for English language learners and special education
Any specialized teaching: art, languages, in high school I understand they have a different teacher for each subject, a librarian, a substitute teacher on sick days, an individual aide for one of the kids to represent the special education budget…
But I remember you previously and you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.
you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.
Providing for my child's educational needs is my job as a parent, not the job of the government 'school system'.
But if the government is going to operate schools and demand that we all pay for those schools, I'd prefer it if those schools were run for the benefit of students (and specifically to maximize academic achievement) and not for the benefit of government employees.
> Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.
> The competition for the best teachers should be fierce.
Our nation needs something on the order of millions of teachers. Competition for the best teachers would work great, if you needed exactly 1 extraordinary teacher. Or even if you needed a dozen. But when you need 40 teachers or more per school district... you're going to end up with alot of mediocre teachers, and more than a few godawful ones.
And, I suspect, that the thing not even extraordinary teachers can do is give a shit. Some teachers give a shit about some students, a few give a shit about many/most students, but even those few will falter in a career that lasts long enough.
Any why do they even want this silver bullet anyway, as impossible as it is? Why would you want a trillion dollar boondoggle that can't possibly ever work? The answer for that is downright frightening.
And yet, somehow, there are around a million much higher-quality professors. Yes, you need 5x as many teachers. But you don't find 1 in 5 are at the level of a median professor. You should actually expect more than 1 in 5, given they require less vocational training. There is something fundamentally wrong when you move from tertiary to secondary education, but it isn't an issue of supply and demand.
>And yet, somehow, there are around a million much higher-quality professors.
Are we talking about the same country? Most of those professors don't even teach if they can help it. Their job is to bring in grant money to the university. The others are paid hourly wages to be adjuncts, and I'm not certain it's accurate to say that they're "much higher-quality". But if it were, then perhaps that's your problem... the million k12 teachers you need are all teaching secondary education in temp positions for temp pay.
Education should be well funded but in many school districts the problem is waste and inefficiency rather than lack of funding. Huge amounts are paid to administrators and consultants who do nothing to improve student outcomes, or even make them worse. Generally there is little correlation between funding per student and results.
> As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated
No question. No teacher cares more about my child's education than I do.
Really, though, the biggest factor is just being their parent. When they're young, the vast majority of the time you can basically read their mind. When you're teaching your child, you almost instinctively know how well they're understanding things. I was never deliberate about it, I didn't look for things, I never had to. I was able to pace my delivery very tightly with their ability to consume and it was the most natural thing imaginable.
That, and having a class size of two, meant Home Schooling was "30-45 minutes Monday-Friday September to mid-April with generous vacations." And that's not "30-45 minutes but we also went to a museum, the library, co-ops (we did, briefly), and all kinds of other learning activities" (I'm sure I lied and said I did those things), that was 30-45 minutes, do some chores (we don't live on a farm, it's the same stuff most kids do), and play video games.
Parenting-wise, the only elements we were more strict with was we limited "watching a TV show or video content" to an hour (two, on occasion, for movies) a day ... and we were quite rigorous with that. But they could play pretty much any video game they wanted (within reason, but probably far less restrictive than most parents outside of Hacker News). And they didn't get mobile devices until 13 and 15. There was no reason. They had/have computers.
My goal was simply "to teach them at home better than they could get at school and to make them self-learners along the way." I wasn't looking for genius spelling bee winners.
They've been in Public School (since the start of HS for my son, 7th grade for my daughter) for four years. Those 30-45 minute sessions that -- not once -- involved taking a test resulted in them being straight-A students. The first test they took, a placement test, resulted in them landing in advanced classes.
They finish their home work at school (my son works way ahead because he's bored). They study for nothing outside of midterms and finals (and they only do that out of paranoia, it's not really needed).
The majority of the time they were Home Schooled, Mom and I were divorced (and it wasn't "amicable" for the majority of that, it was ... ugly). And while that was hard, actually home schooling the children was not. It was awesome. I'd have been a lot less stressed in the earlier years if I'd have known how easy it was.
It was "get good curriculum, follow it, don't move on until they understand it to what a teacher would grade an 'A'". You do the latter because you have to; anything else is debt and the only one who pays that debt is the you. Your kids will just sob through it. Outside of budgeting because you're likely down to one income, the rest was all upside.
Of these, most are easily handled. I am in a midsized city and there are plenty of groups that offer music, robotics & engineering, speech & drama, etc. focused towards homeschooled students. That, plus the rise in homeschool "pods"/co-ops means socialization and activities are very available to students & parents who want them.
Sports might be the challenge. Many US states have athletic associations that handle most K-12 sports, and they require enrollment in an accredited member school. I am aware of several homeschool specific athletic associations in my area, but all are targeted towards religious homeschoolers. Not certain what secular alternatives would exist, but soccer is very popular & there are plenty of competitive academies that operate outside the school ecosystem.
I know several homeschooled students who played varsity sports for their local high school (the one that they would have been attending). I'm not sure about the universality of that, but that's an option for at least some people.
I think it's patchwork & has changed over time. When I was at high school one of my friends who was homeschooled competed with me on our academic team. His older (and far more athletically gifted brother ;-)) lettered in several varsity sports. But now that state's athletic association explicitly says no to homeschool students.
Besides big ones like soccer that you mention, more niche sports are often partially or totally outside of school systems.
Fencing for example, is usually clustered around external clubs. Very few high schools will have fencing teams, and in a lot of cities even the high schools that do have fencing teams will be kind of a joke compared to the club teams.
This comment made me curious so I did some research. Of the sports offered by my local school district (in the top 30 for enrollment in the country), I can find an alternative for homeschoolers that offer competitive opportunities for every sport but bowling and football.
Of the others, there are either homeschool alternatives that are explicitly secular or at least not overtly religious, or there are competitive clubs. All the schools have track & field, but there is a large homeschool league. And the district has a few schools with pools and a few more with swim teams that practice at the city pools, but the local swim club is the one turning out the Olympians – but even then, it also seems to have plenty of offerings for kids who won't set a world butterfly record. Football, I imagine, is just so popular that the private/public schools take all the players.
My kids do Taekwondo and church youth groups. My eldest did not want to do robotics but he does run the Dungeons and Dragons group at our library. We do music as a family. My daughter does choir. My son has done drama but declined to participate this year. They have been homeschooled their entire lives. All three of them received something I did not, the ability to converse with adults from a young age. This is of course anecdotal so YMMV but I would love to see a study on the conversational skills of homeschooled students.
Anecdotally, homeschooled children often speak and behave more like adults.
Whether this is a positive or negative thing depends on the situation. Being precocious is something adults might think positively about (though not in all situations) but it's not something other kids usually admire.
I think you are right that this is situational. I can understand it potentially hindering relationships with other like aged children who are traditionally educated. I can only say that I like my kids a lot, which is nice as a parent.
Homeschoolers form co-ops. A local one here does ballroom dance, tennis, basketball. There is often a youth symphony option in mid- to large-sized cities.
For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.
Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.
Depending on where you live there are many options. In my school district home school kids can join any club or team offered by the public school system where you reside. Additionally there are numerous non-school related clubs and activities all over the place. My kids could play music with the local school district, with a musical education non-profit that is prolific in our area, or ( where they do play music ) with private lessons that have group classes, bands, and performance opportunities.
To me, this question highlights the whole problem: This is not what schools are for.
Yes, it's great if they provide these things, but it's a distant secondary concern. I'd rather my kid get a great education and miss out on these things, than get a poor education but have access to all these.
But of course, as others have pointed out, it's a false dichotomy. You can have both.
There are tons of clubs for such things. My kids are in a homeschool music program (and learning piano and, until recently, bagpipes); half of my kids are playing competitive sports via homeschool programs that compete with other high schools; one is getting his certification as a welder (as part of a State program that pays for it if one is still in high school). Because class times and locations are more flexible this opens up far more possibilities for extra curricular activities.
i'm sure many others will reply as well but there's lots of extracurricular options for homeschoolers as well as social engagements. It's kind of like a shadow school system, there's associations and groups and other organizations built around home schooled children. My wife and I considered it but we have managed to navigate our public school situation well enough without me, or my wife, having to quit working.
I went to public schools but still did that sort of thing through the YMCA and our church. At the middle school level and lower, most of those types of activities are community based rather than centered around the school, though that varies by area.
Remote learning has also built many methods for success, and absolutely nobody even consulted them before implementing their ad hoc systems for Covid. There are entire online public schools and their staff were just ignored.
And what ensures they utilize those methods, exactly? Many states you, as a kid are 100% educationally off the grid the moments say "We're homeschooling".
COVID forced remote learning to be adopted very broadly, without the usual self-selection effect of families that choose to homeschool when they have a choice. So the observations from COVID don't really support any stronger claim than saying that homeschooling can be done badly.
This argument has not kept up with the reality of the public school system. The homeschooled cohort my children are associated with have problems associating with public school children of the same age... but the problem doesn't lie on the homeschooler's side, it lies 100% on the publicly-schooled children's side! The public school attendees are noticeably less mature for the same age and less able to deal with anything other than the highly-specific and unrealistic environment of public schools rather than the rest of the world. The homeschoolers have trouble stepping down their social expectations to levels the public school attendees can meet.
We have a few reasons unrelated to socialization [1] to do home schooling but one of the reasons I don't want to send them back is precisely the regression in "socialization" I would expect.
30 years ago, this probably was a decent argument, but the bar of "at least as socialized as a public school attendee" has gone way down in the meantime.
[1]: I guess before anyone asks, one of my children is deaf-blind and while the people in the system did their best and I have not much criticism of the people, the reality is still that I was able to more precisely accommodate that child than the system was able to. This ends up being a pretty big stopper for a return to the public school system for that child.
Judgment and sense are not earned... they are taught. Tell me how teachers demand any less than total respect from domineered children? Maybe Pink Floyd had no basis for Another Brick In The Wall? I would ask who is more qualified than their parents to instill in their children judgement and sense? You might argue that there are morally bankrupt parents but I would counter that there are morally bankrupt teachers and a parent has more incentive to raise their child than a stranger does.
Absolutely agreed. There is likely a much higher proportion of unfit parents vs unfit teachers (though the latter category is a non zero number). There is also an economic element to this scenario. My spouse can stay home with the kids while I go to work, this is not at all common in our modern day and age. There are tremendous sacrifices that a family must make to do this and I think that anyone wanting to homeschool because it will be 'easier' is setting themselves up for hurt. Much like the folks who get into programming because the pay is good... It won't be what you think.
Even if the parents are quite good, I think most humans require a wide variety of inputs and relationships to form their judgement and sense around. No family is capable of providing the broad range of experiences required to form good judgement and sense: that requires some unconstrained experience with the world, seeing much more than what a curated family experience can make happen.
You're just outsourcing the authority you accept to some other group of adults and institutions. They don't have some special moral high ground that makes them better than a child's own parents and non-school social circle. If you care about your kids and have self confidence in your own character, why wouldn't you hold yourself up over strangers?
If the child sees nothing but their parents they have no parallax view to assess and learn for themselves. At a public school they will experience many adult teachers & see which they respect for which reasons. Not respecting your teachers but having to get along anyway is also a thing. It just seems horrific to restrict a child to a single relationship that the parents have such control over. Monstrous.
I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization. They'll have to deal with those folks when they hit the real world too.
I.e. disassociating from those people? Isn’t that what homeschooling does inherently? It’s more likely that kids will pick up bad behaviors than they will learn to “deal with” those kinds of people.
> I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization.
It is, but do we have any studies showing how well school kids are at this? From what I've seen, most kids in school do not learn those skills.
Homeschooling doesn't mean the kid stays at home all the time. We homeschool and my kid has classes and different activities all week, interacts with friends and teams. It has worked very well for us given our lifestyle. I would understand it's not for everyone.
My kids get more socialization than me. Our parish homeschool group has daily activities. Monday is two hour playgroup. Tuesday is extracurricular classes at the parish. Wednesday is catechesis and play time. Thursday is free. Friday she does a day long camp with an outdoor education program (not parish based). All added up, she spends more time with kids than I did and doing more interesting things
We homeschooled. When we wanted to socialize our kids, we shoved them into the restroom and beat them up for their lunch money.
I kid, but there's a real point: So much of the socialization is bad.
More: Kids aren't going to be kids forever. Does socialization with a bunch of other kids prepare them for the adult society that they're going to go into?
This is my perspective too. A bunch of 11 year olds raising your 11 year old doesn't always result in preferable outcomes. I think the other part of it is that a lot of people have this sort of idea that homeschooling means sitting in your kid in the basement in front of their homework and never seeing the light of day. Obviously that's not accurate.
As a parent, your view of socialization being "good" or "bad" is heavily distorted. I think of socialization (I am a parent) as a neutral activity, sometimes a skill, although I really don't think it's needed as we live in a mostly secluded society in the US, and verbal communication has been supplanted by electronic means.
Well it should, yes, given that socialization is the result of shared social experiences.
Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences that create bonds with people (whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)
These are real social dynamics that actually exist in adult life, and I suspect people who are totally blindsided by them are maladapted
> Kids (and teachers) generally don't deal with bullies well
Are there studies on whether bullying is higher in lightly supervised versus moderately supervised groups? Or mixed-age versus single-age groups?
Scouting is lightly-supervised mixed-age groups. If an older kid bullied a younger kid, that resulted in adults reading them the riot act. But if a younger kid bullied a younger kid, the two sort of wound up sorting it out until someone threw a punch or pissed off an older kid. (For being annoying.) That second dynamic was, to my memory, unique to mixed-age groups.
If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society.
> Why would you need to learn to deal with bullies?
Because bullying is an extreme example of a common human power dynamic.
> If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society
Fair enough. I was thinking exclusively of non-violent bullying. (It may get physical. But in a roughhousing way. Not one intended to cause pain or injury.)
Homeschooled does not mean "completely isolated." My kids are in bands, sports teams, and numerous extracurricular activities both with other home schoolers as well as with public schoolers. Also, homeschooled kids are far less reliant on their same-aged peer group for socialization; my kids talk with people in public regardless of their age (something which surprises some adults).
Who’s to say that they wouldn’t be more socialized, not less?
It used to be folk wisdom that beating your kids built character, teachers would even slap kids with a ruler back in the 1950s. Could you say the same about bullies, cliques, popularity contests, and all the other performative nonsense that goes on in public schools?
Maybe it’s all bullshit and giving kids a safe environment to learn at their own pace without all these distractions makes them better equipped for the modern world?
> It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.
Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.
I suspect there is a lot of selection bias in that data. My hypothesis is that the homeschooled folks who take the ACT are more likely to do well on the ACT than the homeschooled folks who don't.
My Title 1 school made the ACT available to all students for free (on one specific date). A lot of kids who were unprepared for the ACT took it because, why not?
I would say the interesting thing is the sudden increase over the last 5 years. Presumably, the number of Americans who think they can KO a grizzly bear is a lizardman constant situation in the surveys over time. But the number of people homeschooling is recently skyrocketing.
An acquaintance of mine fought (got mauled by) a grizzly bear a month ago. He went to the ICU (since released), but the bear got shot and died. It was a pyrric victory, but he did win the fight.
"fun" story and all, but the statistic in question is about people believing they could beat a bear in a fight with their bare hands, not with firearms.
I’ve watched people on YouTube make all sorts of amazing things, and they make it look easy. Which leads to thoughts of “hey, that’s easy, I could do that”.
> But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
“And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.”
Take it from someone who was homeschooled from pre-k through high school, you will absolutely not provide a better social environment.
I was so unprepared to handle the social dynamics in casual, educational or professional that it took years and years of active work to put myself in a position where it wasn’t an absolute detriment to my success. I have no doubt you can educate your children well, it’s every other aspect of humanity that is typically missed out on and can lead to unintended consequences.
I had the opposite experience. I was home schooled from 2nd grade through high school, but I didn't just spend all my time alone with parents. My family was part of a home-school co-op, I played in the local youth symphony, and I had a job working at the local university when I was 16 and taking college classes there. I also have a large extended family.
I didn't really have much trouble adjusting to living on campus at college, and I've never had issues with interpersonal stuff at work or school.
Of my closest friends when I was in high school, the one with the best social skills had been home schooling since I met him when he was 10. However, he did participate in extracurricular activities at the local public school, like a computer club in middle school and then theater in high school. The only area he was really lagging at age 18 was in math, but that reversed a few years later and now he has a STEM PhD and has been teaching at a large state school for the past decade and a half.
I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.
I dunno. I think I could spin a narrative where public middle school dynamics (that is, bullied quite a bit) created issues for me that hampered my ability to succeed in social settings.
I don't really think that way in general, but I guess I'd just want to point out that the spectrum isn't "good socialization in public school" to "bad/no socialization in homeschooling".
Sounds like you had a hard time transitioning. Sorry for that.
I don't believe it's a magic pill by any means. But I've known many recently home schooled kids and they seem a lot more mature than their public school peers. So I think we have a decent shot at having similar results.
Seeming mature to an adult isn't the thing in question though, is it? Not feeling or appearing awkward when interacting on their own in their 20s is what is being criticized. The anecdotal evidence you present doesn't include home schooled children in their 20s as far as I can tell.
Homeschooled kids have much more flexible schedules which can allow them to do things in the community during the daytime that are not available to kids who have to go to school in-person full time.
This can include volunteer work or part time jobs working with the public and interacting with people of all ages.
Why do you think you being forced into a monoculture of only kids your own age would help your interaction with others when you're in your 20s? 25 year olds don't behave anything like teenagers.
Because I've met several homeschooled adults over the years, and talking to them that's something most of them had in common when explaining the impact it had on their life. Looking for more objective data I found this one source that seems to be written by people not already convinced of the desirability of homescooling [1], forgive me for being skeptical of the objectivity of places called "national home education research institute". Overall it paints a more positive picture than I had expected, but also highlights it's limitations.
From those slides (I did have to open them via google, the direct link didn't seem to work):
Discussion
• Evidence from this study and others suggest that homeschoolers may not
be a socially isolated group
• Instead, homeschoolers in these samples seem to have peer networks
and social connections that arise in conventional and unconventional
social settings and they report being well-connected later in life
• It is important to note that although this study contributes to the
literature, it has methodological limitations (e.g. small sample, self-reports)
One could say this is where the free market of schooling comes into play. Does it make more economic sense for businesses to choose those with social skills learnt from home schooling, or ones who have not been home schooled? Definitely curious to see where this goes.
If only it was actually a free market. Republicans are actively kneecapping public education so they can pump money to the schools that are free to to discriminate and kick out underperforming kids
That's probably true in a lot of cases for K-5. But I don't think any two people could teach a child with the same robustness as a the ~15 teachers most kids have during middle school/junior high, let alone provide things like labs, workshops, extracurriculars, etc. With high school that gap goes from big to enormous.
I've done all 3 of public/private/homeschool with my kids. My daughter's (public) HS chemistry class had exactly one lab that we couldn't do at home. The physics lab had zero. Bio is a bit harder since they had e.g. hundreds of pre-mounted slides for examples of various things. We also lack a biology major in our near-family.
For extracurriculars: there are club youth sports aplenty, a youth orchestra, band, choir and drum & bugle group. There are participate in various academic competitions (mathletes, model UN &c.). It's definitely harder since there's no "club rush" like in public school, but these things are available (and the total cost is rather less than a non-parochial private school, though subtracting out lost salary for the parent doing the teaching reverses that for the more affordable options[1])
1: It's completely possible to spend more than a private university tuition on private high schools where I live, but the ones not subsidized by the Roman Catholic Church start in the low $20,000s
This just assumes the median education for 6-12 is any good. Also, a lot of labs, workshops, and extracurriculars can be easily found elsewhere - a lot of these have groups specifically for homeschoolers.
My schools were good, just an middle class CA suburb, but still good, especially our high school. And we had moderately impressive facilities and equipment that we could certainly not recreate at home. And of the roughly 30 teachers I had in high school, maybe 5 or 6 were really impressive - mostly in advanced classes - and they made all the difference. They were very smart, some of them overeducated, and they represented an entirely different type of adult in my life that I desperately needed, given the ultra-hierarchical nature of most family units.
> And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.
Citation needed.
Every perspective I've heard personally - and mirrored in comments here as well - from the non parent side of things, is quite negative in terms of learning how to behave and socialize with your peers. To you the children might seem polite and servile, and you might see this as something positive - as you state in another comment - but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
I know a ton of home-schooled kids and this is far from universal.
Yes, kids who were home-schooled because their parents didn't want secular society interfering with them raising their kids in a niche religion are more likely to experience this. Even in those cases, however, I found that the kids adapted rather quickly.
In most other cases[1], the parents were explicitly worried about their kids' socialization, and found many opportunities for the kids to interact with other kids their age (e.g. typical after school activities like sports or such).
Many of the kids I know who were both home-schooled and socially awkward started in public school and were pulled due to bullying &c. To say that the home-schooling stunted their social growth is a counterfactual; it's just as easy to see them ending up worse off.
For the most part, I would say that socializing in public school vs. homeschooling is a bit like communication with in-person companies versus remote; in the former it just "happens" to some degree, sometimes well, sometimes poorly; in the latter it requires intentional work to happen, but can still happen.
1: A notable exception is one person I know who was homeschooled by parents, with a father that traveled a lot for work and took his family with him. She was often in situations where she had fewer than 5 kids around close to her age who also spoke English.
>but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
Citation needed.
If you put your kids in homeschooling and provide no other outlet for socialization then sure, they'll be socially awkward.
My brother and I were homeschooled, but we were also heavily involved in our community. We were at the local park playing sports 3-4 times per week, we did various summer camps, we had a few other homeschool families that we'd setup playdates with. Our parents would sometimes joke that we barely ever home! And, unsurprisingly, we had no problems with socializing or making friends later in life.
Was it the same kind of socialization you get from going to public school? No, but I consider that a feature :)
One of the key issues in school is classroom size. A teacher with 30 kids is handicapped as a teacher compared to one with a smaller class.
Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.
Grade retention ('holding kids back') has additionally dropped significantly since the average HNer has gone to school. I remember going to school where one of my peers went to sixth grade with his brother two years older than him. But now, we give out social promotions.
That might've worked if we funded schools & gave students who fell behind significant interventions & 1x1 attention, but that's not what happened. One of my friends has a very bright and talented fifth grader in a class with multiple students who can barely read or write. Guess who gets the most attention from educators? Which group the teachers structure the class for?
That's also 4 entirely different curriculums which need to be taught. I volunteer taught CS for about 10 years, and the first year I taught a new class- and this was a single class for high school kids- I always found I was much better at it the second and third time around. I taught about 4 different courses, of varying difficulty- intro to programming with SNAP, "CS Principles" which had a little bit of everything from (very) basic networking to html and a bit of javascript, Javascript/Python, and then the final boss... AP CS in Java, which is a very difficult class.
I find it difficult to wrap my head around you can make it work teaching the entire curriculum for 4 different grades encompassing reading/writing, math, history, science, art, music, etc... I guess its potentially compensated for by the fact that they are all getting very individualized attention, but thats spreading a parent very thin.
Especially when we are talking about high school levels, where you can even potentially go into AP courses- no way a single parent can teach college level calculus, History, CS, etc... effectively.
For all the flaws of our public education system, I don't see how this can work better.
I used to think this way, but some experiences made me realize it's not so cut and dry.
When you have a class size over 20, teachers are forced to be a lot more systematic, which can improve the effectiveness of their teaching. Good teachers make heavy use of social proof. When I tried to teach my kid at home, it was a struggle. But when the kid is around his peers in a classroom, and they are going along with the teacher, he naturally falls in line with no cajoling, etc.
If there were only 5 students, the likelihood he'll just go along with things is much lower.
Yep, that's definitely true. That being said, figuring out which approach to take requires paying attention (which you did), there's no guarantee that any two people (or any one person at two times) will be in the same cohort.
Did you make a schedule of regularly switching off with other families of four? In other words, those parents teach your kids and you teach their kids? Otherwise I'm not sure how you'd tackle confirmation bias creeping up in all kinds of ways.
I was homeschooled and I got a fairly strong education.
What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.
For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.
> I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.
Any idea how many were affected terribly in school? I'm in touch with my high school classmates. Almost half of them blame the school experience to lifelong problems.
Nobody is saying public high school is worse than homeschooling. They are saying that if you want to claim homeschooling is bad for kids, you have to put in the work to show that it causes problems at a higher rate than the public school system.
I was homeschooled and got a good education, and am now a happy, well adjusted adult. You can't just generalize; you have to consider the individuals and methods involved to judge what the best approach is.
We can actually. It's called theory of probability and statistics, which is probably "forgotten" by these amazing self-appointed homeschoolers. A few rare successes of homeschoolers doesn't mean this practice is good on average, and vice versa the rare failures of the public education system doesn't mean that it is bad on average.
Most times I look this up, I see stuff like "[t]he home-educated typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests".
Looking at the replies, I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores but social development and preparing kids for society outside the house. It definitely requires considerably more, active attention from parents. Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades and ensure that they're maintaining an active social life but I think the difficulty of nailing that as you go-your-own-way is apparent.
>I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores
>Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades
This reads as an inconsistency.
As for the social stuff - as I commented elsewhere, it's not hard to make a case that public school is bad for socialization as well. Which isn't to say that public school isn't irredeemable in that way, just that it's not like one or the other is an obviously correct choice.
Yeah, that study has been debunked or countered by "... among home-educated students applying for college", and the proportion of home schooled kids who apply for college versus those in the traditional education system is far lower, i.e. this is very self-selecting.
This comment is so disingenuous. Few and rare?? Why would you frame it like this? Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.
They're not more likely to get into college as a whole. In fact, they apply to college a lot less. But in that subset, against public education as a whole, then yes, they do better.
You may want to look wider afield than homeschooling advocacy and lobbyist groups for your stats.
> It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children wen parents think they can do as well or better.
I home schooled my children up to High School (and they are very, very successful students). That statement, right there, was the reason, but there was no ambiguity involved. I absolutely knew I could have happier children who were natural self-learners who wouldn't struggle in school when that time came if I did it myself.
It took a lot of research on my end to get to that conclusion but I would have been just as good ignoring it and listening to the experience of a friend I made who home schooled all seven of her children, or talking to her kids. I did both; research led me to talk to her and her husband, talking to them confirmed I was making the right choice.
Though I am Christian, it had absolutely nothing to do with religion (we taught the same science everyone else received; no "the Earth is 15,000 years old" or whatever nonsense). I even think there's reasonable evangelical arguments to be made that Christians should put their children in traditional schools, so this wasn't a faith choice for me. I loved High School and I went to a large High School. So "bullying" and the like had nothing to do with it.
Had I not attended Public School, I probably wouldn't be doing what I love for a living and it was a couple of amazing teachers that went to bat for me, creating classes that didn't exist and letting me take HS classes while I was in Middle School, so when I say "I know I can do better" that's doesn't come with "because the public school system and the teachers are garbage." There's problems, there, for sure -- but my kids live in the #4 district and attend the #1 public High School in that district. It's a pretty fantastic school, the kids are friendly and I'm fine with it all around. I didn't think they'd do poorly regardless of how they were schooled, I just knew I could do better.
That's not arrogance; I think the vast majority of parents could do better.
It's because, as a parent, when they're young you can basically read their mind. That's an advantage a teacher doesn't get. You don't even have to "notice" that they're struggling or that they "know it cold and are bored", you just pace things on instinct and you deliver knowledge very close to the actual rate they can easily ingest it.
The other advantage that would be hard to replicate is class size. I had a class of two. Two different grades, but all that meant was my daughter got a preview of (and often just ended up learning completely) whatever she had to do and whatever her brother was learning and her brother got a review every day.
You can pretty much take out every other advantage of Home Schooling. Just those two result in a 6-7 hour whiteboard directed lesson and busy work time down to 45 minutes/child (really ... 30 most of the time). That also gave us a September to mid-April school year with generous vacations (otherwise we'd finish in February).
It wasn't my goal to make genius, spelling-bee winners, or to put them years ahead of public school students. The latter absolutely happened, but we were only ever doing a single grade per year in every subject with pretty formal home school curriculum. There was just a lot of extra time to screw around exploring things beyond the books.
I wanted them to learn better than they would in school and I wanted them to be able to be self-directed in learning. They are successful beyond my expectations in both areas.
They've been in Public School, now, for four years. My son hasn't taken work home from school in ... really ... four years. Homework is assigned, he just finishes it. My daughter is the same way. Outside of midterms and finals (out of fear/paranoia, not necessity), they do not touch schoolwork at home.
Despite not having taken a "real test" in their lives until enrollment, they placed in advanced classes. Despite them never receiving an independently graded assignment (or even one that had a grade written on it[0]), they both have a 4.0 GPA. My daughter had perfect scores in half of her classes last year.
They are happy kids who aren't stressed out at school (because those 45 minute daily sessions, apparently, covered a lot of ground -- my son still talks about things "he did in, like, 7th Grade, Dad!"
Really, though, forget all of the other reasons. It's worth doing it just for the relationship you form with your kids and that they form with their siblings. My teenagers don't act like teenagers. They act like happy young adults (because they are).
It wasn't hard. I did the majority of it with my ex- wife (through a high-conflict divorce and high-conflict early years ... that was hard ... worth it, though).
[0] You don't let your kids rack up debt by learning something less than very proficiently because you're the one that has to pay that debt when the later lesson comes that builds on that part, so yeah, they "got all As" in Home School ... because I don't like misery.
I'll gladly stand up my 7 homeschooled kids next to any public school kids.
All tested above grade level on state mandatory testing throughout their schooling.
Two graduated early (some with college credits).
My adult children (4 sons, ages 19-25) have gainful employment, living on their own (2 own their own homes), and standing on their own. One is married (I got a grandkid!), all have friends, communities they're involved in, and are healthy (physically and mentally).
None take prescription meds nor struggle with anxiety or depression.
Poor public school kids... I hope they can find help for the damage they suffered. <grin>
And yet there are many homeschooling parents in this discussion thread (including a single-income dad of 9 whose kids are homeschooled). But I'm quite aware that I'm the exception on HN.
I've been working from home for nearly 2 decades and have flexible hours.
My wife handles the majority of the grade school years (basic reading/writing/maths) and I teach most of the middle and high school.
They've always been involved in co-ops, church activities, and get plenty of socialization. They're emotionally mature, civically responsible, and others focused. We take them when we volunteer at local non-profits, whether that's sorting clothes at the local thrift store or picking up trash at a local park. An example of service becomes a lifestyle of generosity. It makes for great kids and even greater adults.
Put the time and work in to your kids. Nothing else will provide greater dividends.
None chose to go to college so far. The kind of work they wanted to do didn't require it so they didn't. If they had wanted to be medical doctors, lawyers, or some kind of physical engineer, I'm sure they could have gotten into a good college and found a good job for that.
One is a commercial sheet metal worker and owns his own home.
Another is a Linux sysadmin and owns his own home and has a spouse and a child.
Another is a restaurant equipment repairman and rents.
Finally, my 19 year old just started his airplane mechanic apprenticeship and rents.
My other three are still in school and living in our family home.
The thought at you need college degree to find meaningful employment or to live a joyful life is simply false so I don't consider it a metric for homeschooling success.
I teach my kids how to learn and encourage them to get out there and be productive doing work they enjoy and raising their own families.
Success in my book means they can function as an adult, stand on their own financially, find a good spouse, and bring me some awesome grandkids to spoil.
I don't have a college degree but I make plenty to raise 7 kids while working from home. I got to be there for all their first steps and struggles through Algebra 2 and everything in between. I wouldn't trade working from home and homeschooling for anything. It's been very fulfilling.
Given they are sufficiently successful to be living on their own, married, and some with their own homes, whether they went to college is probably an inappropriate yardstick of success. I mean, be real. If a 25 year old is married and owns a home, but doesn't have a BSc are they a failure? What are we doing here.
Assuming you are Mormon, is home schooling sort of another form of virtue signaling Mormon families employ or is it more of a way to ensure your families don't get excluded? Like, did you really have a choice in the matter once you realized you either go full Mormon or leave the church entirely?
Mormons aren't the only people with large families. Ultra-conservative Jews, Muslims, and many Christians have large families. What I don't think I've ever seen is a couple who is non-religious or atheist and has a large family.
Protestant Christian and most of my Christian brothers and sisters look at how many kids I have and that we homeschool and think I'm a little crazy (just like most non-Christians). I'd say probably 1/3 of the families in our church homeschool though. It's a wonderful community to be a part of and if I sent my remaining kids to public school, I wouldn't be asked to leave.
I'll take the L but it still sorta maps to where I was going with the Mormon angle.
I've been around Mormons, not a religion scholar, but it seems plausible to me the same "one upsmanship" mormons have with missions, large paternalistic families, avoiding "outsiders" (see: homeschooling), etc are common in other religious communities. Like maybe the protestant Christian one you are in?
My daughter is in college now, but we used a variety of private, part-time, and homeschooling approaches prior to that. One thing is that there are a lot of resources (e.g. independent teachers for subjects you don't know, co-ops for socializing, etc.), and the more people are doing it, the more true that becomes. My parents were both public school teachers, and yet we found ourselves home- and alternative-schooling our daughter. Public schools don't really seem to have a strategy for dealing with the situation, other than complaining about it.
If you are offering a free service, that is quite time-intensive, and increasing numbers of people choose to not use it, then there should be more introspection going on. If it's happening in public education, I'm not able to see evidence of it.
Seattle schools have that issue.
After covid a bunch of kids were moved to private schools, and SPS (the organism in charge of school) complained and blamed parents on having money and not wanting to mix with the riff raff and other bs.
When they actually asked the parents why their children weren't returning after covid, it was because SPS decided to axe the advance/gifted programs they had for kids, among other educational quality things.
The children that never came back were children who would have taken advantage of those programs, and parents decided to go pay to win instead to get those programs back in private schools, as it becomes a compounding advantage in today's competitive world.
SPS is still using the stupid hippie approach about children magically learning how to read with pictures and guesses, instead of phonics, and some numbers for reading are worst than Mississippi, which went hard into phonics and overwhelmingly improved their numbers.
WA is a clear example that spending a ton of money doesn't improve educational outcomes, you also have to do things that work.
I feel this pain. I grew up in what I thought were great public schools and am a big believer that public school is a fundamental institution that should raise the floor for society. Now I'm raising kids in Seattle and it's a constant struggle to get the kinds of educational programs and opportunities for my kids that I took for granted when I was in public school and just assumed would still be around when I was an adult. For lack of a better way to phrase it, I feel like I am exactly the kind of parent SPS should want to keep in its system - a strong believer in public education with the means to support the schools, yet sometimes I feel like they are actively driving families like mine out of school system with their decisions.
This is exactly right. I had a kid in Seattle schools during this time and this is exactly how I saw it happen and and Seattle schools were a major reason I left Seattle.
This might have been our experience from our bubble, but are these examples representative of the overall pattern? I suspect for every 1 kid pulled out of public school because of academic reasons like gifted programs, there are 10 pulled out due to religious reasons or vaccines or the gamut of anti-government reasons.
Nobody's saying they shouldn't be allowed to. We're just speculating about the reasons and I don't know if there's really any hard data showing which reasons are more prevalent.
The evidence shows that the gifted program is just racist. It's not surprising that the descendants of Europeans do better on European cultural artifacts like math and science, canonical western literature. "Gifted" is an apt name. They are students that have been gifted cultural knowledge before others so they can pretend to be special.
I'd argue that most "gifted" students are inherently dumber since they uncritically believe and internalize whatever BS their parents feed them.
It's understandable that parents have desire to how power over their children, but at some point the state needs to step in and recognize child abuse for what it is.
> It's not surprising that the descendants of Europeans do better on European cultural artifacts like math and science
Granted, our current global math and science traditions are European, but math and science in and of themselves are absolutely not European. They are universal. As in, you could literally be raised on a different planet by a different species and math would still be math, physics would still be physics.
If this is true, and I’m not saying it isn’t or that there isn’t an element of truth to it, how do you explain how heavily Asian children are featured in gifted child programs?
I do get it if gifted kid programs in music only does Classical, but no jazz (especially in US would consider this a bit odd), but Maths and Science are purely European cultural inventions now, WTF? Is this a troll? You go blaming others from racist just ending up saying something incredibly racist yourself?
Honesrly, read on some history of mathematics and science. We ”Europeans” did not invent them. No single culture did.
> then there should be more introspection going on
This assumes that the blame obviously lies with the schools. Basically everyone I know that homeschools does it because they disapprove of tolerance. Should the introspection lead schools to embrace segregation again? It is going to be hard to bring people with such wildly different viewpoints together in harmony.
Most of the homeschoolers I know in Austin were basically hippies who found the public schools to be too authoritarian and intolerant of diversity (for example, banning dyed hair). I don't know which homeschoolers you were seeing, but it doesn't match what I saw here.
Didn't homeschool here but started a charter school instead. Some of our neighbors did homeschool and I have mixed feelings about it. Some did very well, some not so well; but of course the same can be said of all of the kids in the area no matter which way they went.
A few things I'll note:
- educational spending has almost zero correlation with outcomes
- the number one indicator of educational success is parental involvement
- homeschooling and charter schools tend to attract the outliers from both ends. The smart who are underserved where they are and the kids with problems whose parents are involved enough to search for solutions.
- the real losers are those whose parents can't or won't get involved and who aren't succeeding on their own
In the current educational environment, teachers are often viewed as babysitters whose job is to educate children "correctly" and parents are only there to ensure that "correctly" matches their expectations. In the "good old days" when parents and teachers beat children regularly, at least they were unified in their expectations that children would listen to and obey teachers and not disrupt class. Now it is more common to see underpaid teachers without any support confronted by angry parents when their children misbehave and fail to actually learn.
This is the _most_ important thing. Parents keeping a laser eye on their kids' performance in school, and having their own standards that the school must live up to, regardless of what commitees and boards and suits and academics and "experts" say. Even if it's just a standard for math competence. If the school isn't up to the mark, either pull up the school for it, or switch schools, or after school classes if it's an isolated problem. Many would be surprised at how many parents either can't(common in first generation educated) or won't do this.
> Spending has no correlation with success
In a setting where more spending is for more labour (when the labour is not done by parents/family) this is not true. Primary schools giving individual attention to students for example will do better than those with 100 students a class. But in most cases, more spending leads to more unnecessary flashy stuff. So in the real world, what you are saying is true.
Charter schools like yours are also sorely needed in america where math standards are absolutely woeful compared to RoW.
Yeah I think the context matters a lot there. I’m assuming it means “on a state by state basis”, which is true. But within my state, at least, family income, outside spending, and property tax revenues correlate very strongly with outcomes.
I've seen that too, but to my understanding it is less about the money and more about the parent participation. Wealthy school districts don't have any problem with finding volunteers for all sorts of activities, because one of the parents is frequently a stay-at-home parent.
This is true, but it’s also true that the money buys all of those extra activities and services. At my kids’ school, the garden program, music program, arts program, and teachers aides are all funded by the PTA. The field trips are funded by the students families so must be calibrated to their budgets. There are also volunteers associated with all of those programs, but they wouldn’t exist without the money.
A few (much wealthier) towns over, the district wide PTA raises millions of dollars yearly to support additional programs and facilities, and the district can offer higher salaries because of the larger tax base. Again, lots of parent involvement, but there’s also more to be involved in.
- Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.
- With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching.
It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it's comparatively much easier to pull your kids out and homeschool them.
This is very anecdotal. Here in the south, the "controversial, left-ish values" would be a breath of fresh air vs what is being taught here
> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass
This is no child left behind in action, which was implemented during W's term
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
^ This is the micromanagement that a ton of people claim to hate and get in their way on this site when folks are complaining about daily standups.
IMO, if you're worried about the quality of your kid's education then you'll either need to send them to a private or home school, which will stunt them socially because life isn't just one big private school or home, or encourage curiosity and learning at home to supplement their rote learning from school
> Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.
I'm thinking this is fairly new. When I was in school, if I got bad grades or got in trouble at school, I got in trouble at home too. My parents were absolutely not calling the teachers complaining about grades. When I had trouble learning multiplication facts, they sat me down with flash cards every night until I had learned them, they didn't blame the teacher. This was in the 1970s/80s. This seemed pretty normal based on what I remember. When/why did it change?
I think parents are trying to maximize the perceived value of their child at the expense of their real value. I also think various media (especially the internet) have lowered trust in primary/secondary education, leading to more parents feeling justified in "taking matters into their own hands". You kind of see that attitude in this thread (its not wholly unjustified).
One example is in high school I had an excellent literature class that also covered a lot of philosophy. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the various philosophies we studied were the philosophies that are often foundational for Marxism, atheism, and general left of center academia. Probably the best class I had in high school but I wish it had also covered things on both sides, or been more transparent that it was in fact biased.
It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way. Very little of it has anything to do with the family of political ideologies despite sharing a similar name. The question of God's existence is also fundamental to the history of philosophy. It's not particularly shocking that a course might cover people like Lucretius, Bentham, or Russell.
Most philosophy surveys will also include some of the other sides, which you might not even recognize as such. Descartes and Aquinas are fixtures, and Heidegger (notoriously conservative and also a literal Nazi) often features in university level classes. The point isn't to indoctrinate you with any of these viewpoints, it's to teach you how to analyze their arguments and think for yourself.
All of continental philosophy since at least Hegel is intellectual bankrupt and it is a miscarriage of education to seriously teach it as anything more than a footnote that needs to be left in the dustbin of history.
Dialectical Materialism is literally brainrot and the damage it has done to human history is unfathomable.
I read the parent as saying that the course covered these at all, not as complaining that nothing else was presented.
But continuing on that train, what would you want from mentioning alternatives to a theoretical framework? A framework is just a different way to look at the world that you can discard if it's not useful.
To give a programming analogy, if a course does a module on JavaScript exclusively with react, they're not teaching that vue, angular, or svelte don't exist and you should only use react. It's much more likely a statement that react is common and useful for people to be familiar with when they go into the outside world. Covering the long list of alternate frameworks, many of which the teacher will have never actually used in a serious way, is both difficult to do in a useful manner and takes away from the limited time available to cover what they can with sufficient depth.
Yes that’s correct. We didn’t cover things such as Locke or Hume, Adam smith, etc…
Also we didn’t directly cover Marxism or atheist philosophy, my point was that the selected philosophies were the ones that just happened to all be related to that side of the aisle. Again, very good class, just using it as an example of hidden bias that I didn’t see until later
Bit of a shame that it didn't directly cover Marx. Many of Marx's works are reactions to and critiques of people like Adam Smith. I think Marx even calls him delusional at one point.
Locke probably wouldn't have come up, but 19th century European philosophers were all influenced massively by Locke and Marx is extremely European. Marx isn't on a different side from them, just a large part of an even larger conversation.
Is the problem that right-of-center philosophy literature is generally too religious or obviously political? Your "later I realized" sounds like cover for the teacher.
Difficult to say without knowing what part of the world history of literature was covered, but it is somewhat difficult not to somehow discuss Marx in some way, since the anti-capitalist socialism has politically been a large factor shaping the major modernist art movements as a response eother for or against. But if it was say modernist literature and there was jo TS Eliot’s conservatism, it would strike me a bit odd.
Leftist academic thought has however had huge influence on modern art movements. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out why that might be.
"Both" sides? If you suggest Marxism is one side, what is the other? Also, it's hard to take such a vague comment at face value when you consider the long list of Marx's influences. For example, there are right and young Hegelians...
I do think there is too much politicization in education, but this also stuck out to me. Marx was a synthesis of Hegel with Adam Smith (And a lot of Ricardo) You absolutely have many people taking those same ideas and going right. Even Das Kapital isn't really "Left Wing" per se as it is more trying to explain how labor is treated in an industrialized economies, its the communist manifesto where Marx takes those ideas and starts synthesizing with Hegel and making ideas of what should happen.
I have had more teachers actively advocating voting for right wing parties than left wing parties. And once had someone in biology class tell me that he thinks that evolution and creation by god are equal and we should try to merge those theories. And I live in a very secular part of Europe.
But hey, both you and I are telling anecdotes. The only conclusion for me is that public school exposes you to people that do not think like you or your parents. Something, we are less and less exposed to. If that is good, anyone has to answer for themselves.
Don't agree with this. Marx's Capital is filled with basic mathematical analyses. I don't agree with his labor theory of value, but I do think algebra is good.
From the Conservative part of my social group, the main one applicable here is pushing elementary school kids to identify as trans. Because young children are very impressionable, and it is forbidden for staff to push back on on it at all, despite the science saying "there is absolutely no such thing as trans before age 12, and much possibility of social trauma from attempting it".
Left-ish people tend to say "this doesn't happen in the real world, it's made up for internet arguments" - and I even said that for a while on this and a few other subjects - but that denial cannot survive extensive contact with the real world.
Name some examples of school systems "pushing" kids to identify as trans. The name of the school and individual teacher, plus the wording that counts as "pushing" would be fine. You say this is happening in the real world, so surely you can point to a few examples.
They use teaching resources like the "Genderbread Person", which pushes the harmful and oppressive social construct of gender in a child-like way, describing women and men in terms of sexist stereotypes rather than sex.
To avoid arguments about the definition of "be", the clear conclusion is that if it exists it's indistinguishable prior to that age, so any claims before that age can only be considered noise.
It's critical to remember that "reality has a liberal bias" does not mean "literally every detail of things liberals say is reality".
Lots of examples, gender identity and requiring ethnic studies (focusing on white male privilege, settler/colonial, putting groups into binary oppressor/oppressed). Also issues with requiring those classes vs not.
You've identified examples of values, but you have forgotten to link them to the left, forgotten to show if they are controversial and, probably most importantly, forgotten to show how schools are borderline pushing indoctrination of them.
These are two indisputable facts about our world, if you disagree you are wrong and anti-science:
1. Gender is a social construct
2. Whiteness is a social construct and in particular has been used as a bludgeon against minority "non-whites" in the United States for a very long time
If you do not believe these things you are the problem. You lack education. You lack critical thinking. You are brainwashed.
Both of these social constructs must be challenged. The first is used to oppress women and girls primarily, and the second underpins racist oppression.
Of course, I agree. But in the context of education if you reject the above (which MANY people on HN do) then you're delusional. There is nothing nice I have to say about it, and I know how dearly the HN crowd loves to clutch their pearls about the tone. It is akin to believing the world is flat, a broken ideology that should not be entertained.
Once you accept the simple facts as above, then you can finally explore the consequences.
I am very curious too, I’ve asked this to other friends who have mentioned the same thing and the only concrete answer I have got so far was teaching the theory of evolution and climate change.
It's usually evolution or sex or race or something like that.
One of my friends was home schooled. It was at least partly about religious values, but I think it was also partly about him being a bit of a strange kid and getting along better at home. He went back to public schools in middle school, and that was real rough but I think he was happy by the time he got to high school.
I'm sure there are many reasons to home school, but the one I hear about most is religious.
Not a GP and I don't know if any of these qualifies as "left-ish" (which is very US specific IMHO), but as I understand, the education all over the western culture is destroyed by few really simple and really crazy (for me) ideas:
Actually no. The problem comes from society. If you think that kids should be responsible for anything, you are a bad person. If you think that kids should be punished if they do something really bad, you are a monster.
Here we had a case teenagers bullying their teacher – abused her verbally during school, posted deepfake revenge porn into internet, stole stuff from her garden etc. She cried for help and the case was investigated by commission that included people from people from ministry of education, police and psychologists. But the commission concluded that she was the problem – she lacked the skills to build a trusting relationship with kids.
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
I'm not sure remote schooling during the pandemic is very representative of day to day teaching in school. At least that's the impression I got from my teacher friends back then.
Another nebulous but I think VERY observable factor would be the extent to which "parents are, and expected to be, involved in their kids school stuff."
Anecdotally, but I bet you see a lot of it, I can count on one, maybe two hands the number of times my parents went to anything at the school to see me do a thing. And for my kids, there's something just about every other week.
I'm not sure how your first thing much factors in? I haven't seen any data but I'd be VERY surprised if e.g. a survey of homeschoolers would cite to a lot of "making bad students pass" and "lefty indoctrination."
> In fact, several states will soon require displaying the 10 commandments in public school classrooms, which seems pretty “right-ish” to me.
That tells you way more about the (current) politics of the local government than it does about the politics of the median teacher. It might actually indicate the opposite - no one would go to the effort of mandating pride flags at the school I went to, seeing as they were already hung in every single classroom.
The right has reduced left-ish values to like the basics of humanity; essentially if schools are not actively teaching hate then they are leftist. I don't think the U.S. really has a liberal / leftist culture at all compared to Europe.
Did anyone argue that you are not allowed to teach your kids your own values? It seems to me, the question is more: do you want to raise your kids without ever exposing them to values that are not your own? Opinion Bubbles have been increasing for a long time, do we really want to grow them even more? Social media is full of people left and right that seem to have no idea about the opinions and realities at the other end of the spectrum.
Is this not possible while exposing children to a variety of view points from different sources or does it require that children are not exposed to certain perspectives at all?
The original comment makes a very bold claim of "indoctrination" of an entirely undefined set of values.
There has been no evidence that exposing children to this (undefined and buzzwordy) set of values means that they can't be raised according to other values.
I find this idea pretty wild to encounter on HN which is generally focused on open source and widely available information so that people can educate themselves is suddenly gone in a puff of smoke and some buzzwords when talking about educating the most curious minds in the world.
Define the values. Cite sources that this is "indoctrination" and not simply exposing viewpoints. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion.
> Define the values. Cite sources that this is "indoctrination" and not simply exposing viewpoints. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion.
They're never going to do this, because it's not actually happening, at least not to a significant degree. They will keep their wording vague, not show examples, and basically just repeat variations of "Trust me, bro.. this indoctrination is happening. It's clear as day. You need to see the real world, bro."
I expected this comment coming into the thread. I would just like to point out that there is a huge range of options between those two extremes!
If is entirely possible to teach up a child to be curious AND well rounded in the basics (see also concepts of Trivarium and Quadrivium, sorry can't link the references atm).
When a social failure happens at a public school - a child fails a class, drugs are found, a teenager gets pregnant, there’s a fight - most people don't question the public school system itself. But when a social failure happens to a homeschooler, we wonder if the system of _homeschooling_ is broken.
In reality, stories of homeschooling failure are probably no more common than stories of failure in public high school, they're simply more attention-grabbing.
I wish there was another word other than homeschooling for “the parents who are trying to hide the fact that their teenager can’t read.”
Because it’s a real group but yea we are in a co-op that’s a wonderful balance between being in a classroom and being at home more than he would be with public school.
I think this is likely because people (accurately, in my opinion) attribute behavioral problems with kids to the level and quality of involvement of the parents at home, so it would be bizarre to attribute a child getting caught with drugs at school to the public school system itself.
Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning. I don’t think we’re talking about remote ranch situations where you either do online school or have to send them to boarding school.
So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
We’ve homeschooled all our kids up to 8th grade. Our oldest is now a sophomore at the public high school but will start attending community college next year, paid for by the school district.
Most of the adults you see at the various group things are stay-at-home moms. Most. Some stay-at-home dads. Some of the moms have part-time jobs. I don’t recall any dads with part-time jobs. But many dads are present while also working full-time. You get into a rhythm, have a schedule, etc. and you can work it out. My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
> My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
FWIW, my experience is that the dynamic at play in these situations is that women who run their own businesses or otherwise have high-powered careers tend to have a constellation of personality traits that is significantly shifted vs. those of stay at home moms, plus their daily lives are very different, so they don't really fit in. Saying that without value judgement, just an observation.
Wait... you homeschool your kids and yet you write "...and [they] are jealous that she does both." No, they are ENVIOUS: one envies what they don't have and are jealous of what they have.
Anecdotally, I know of one child who was homeschooled recently. The mother is a single mother, of modest middle-class means. There was a homeschooling group nearby with a few volunteer mothers handling most of the logistics and teaching. This particular mother did not have to give up her job. It does stretch the definition of "homeschooling" a bit when it's a neighbor teaching in a neighbor's home, but they made it work.
It only requires that one parent has enough free hours to assign coursework. They don't have to exit the workforce, and don't necessarily need to directly supervise learning (but of course some of this is necessary for K-5).
I think a lot of how homeschooling can work, along with much of median/lower household income life in general, is misunderstood.
Great news if true. "Staying home" is working and it's great that more people are finding it possible to work for themselves and their families rather than an employer who doesn't care about them. I think it was just a temporary blip where 100% of people worked for someone else and had to somehow then pay for or do their own work too.
> Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning.
There are at least two good answers to this:
1. The first is a via a home-schooling collective. With as few as 5 families, one can easily do a once-per-week rotation of home schooling responsibilities. Also note that the formal education part of this can be done fairly comfortably in 4 hours (even down to 2 hours with 1-1 instruction). As such, all that is needed is a 4-day a week job, or a job with a flex schedule who can do work on the weekend. I know one family that does something like this.
2. The second is to have a tutor do the instruction. For folks who are high earners, paying a tutor who can come in for 2-3 hours a day costs about the same as a mid-tier private school. Child care would still need to be covered, but that’s usually cheaper than a tutor.
So it’s doable, but either time or money will need to be sacrificed. I don’t think that’s a surprise.
That said, below are some things about home schooling that I’ve learned over the years from people who have done it:
- When done well, it’s probably close to an ideal education. When done poorly, it can mess up the kid, and many of these kids are very vocal about how bad it can be. Obviously there will be a whole range of outcomes between these extremes. Just be aware that it’s not necessarily a panacea, and it’s not necessarily an ideological cesspit.
- There is a ton of support for home schoolers in some communities, especially for socialization and specialization. Many people do not realize this.
- That said, some (perhaps many) home school parents are just ideological extremists — extreme beliefs, extreme (sometimes illegal) lifestyles, etc.
- A good litmus test of where a home school parent is on the thoughtful-extremist continuum is to ask them why they homeschool their kids. The thoughtful parents can rattle off dozens of learning opportunities that their kids have had that don’t exist or barely exist at normal schools. The less of these types of specifics they talk about, the more likely they are to have ideological reasons that they may or may not openly discuss.
- For folks who want a good learning environment for their kid, I strongly recommend a good Montessori school. I emphasize “good”, because some of them stray far from the Montessori ideals. This just requires a small amount of research and some observation. All that said, a good Montessori school almost always sets up a kid to be a solid person and life-long learner. Note that some kids absolutely hate the Montessori style, and you will know this in about a day or two. I will go out on a limb and say most of these kids will need special attention in home school contexts as well (imho).
> So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
I don’t think so.
Most of the people I know who home school are already stay at home parents (mostly mothers, but one dad), or they have plenty of disposable income to throw at the problem via tutors and home school support services.
I will also say that some parents absolutely punt on the education part, and they can do their part (often negligently) while doing a full time work-from-home job — think handing out some work sheets and pointing their kid(s) to an online learning environment with very little scaffolding. There are some kids who respond well to this, but most don’t.
Or there could be absolutely no force or coercion involved: the mutual desire for him to work and her to stay home and raise and homeschool could have been how they met in the first place. You're not going to find people wanting that life on Tinder or Hinge or whatever people use for finding one another these days but it's easy if you want that kind of life.
Why do you assume wives just want to work and many wouldn't jump at the chance to be able to stay home with their children, and also socialize with other friends outside of some office job environment?
that’s a great fantasy but when you consider, statistically, how many marriages end in divorce - that’s a foolish plan. EVERYONE thinks their marriage is different or special.
Maybe working part time is OK, you at least have some job history. But no work history for 10+ years? Great ways to put all your eggs into 1 basket and potentially end up a poor single mom. And i say this as a husband and father.
Optionality has costs. If you live your life like it's going to go astray, then you miss out on a lot of the upside if it doesn't go astray (such as by being a stay at home mom, if that's what you actually want to do). The statistic that 50% of marriages end in divorce is often bandied about, but it also means that 50% don't. Which means that going all-in on your marriage is a completely reasonable thing to do.
what you say is true. But consider, the “cost” of going back part time is not very big. It’s not very stressful, and _greatly_ reduces long term risk.
Your take is a bit like saying in the year 2000 “i believe Apple is an amazing company, i’ll go ALL IN with my life savings”. If you’re right the you think you’re a genius. But what if you were wrong? What if apple turned out like IBM? Then you’d look back and think “how could i have been so stupid? so naive”.
It's a really bad analogy. And the "cost" of working part time for someone who doesn't want or need to work is literally every single hour they spend working. If they're working 20 hours per week, that's 20 hours per week spent doing something they don't want or need to do. It's a huge cost.
Great. What if the spouse dies? Or they just stop paying and move to a different country because they’re a jerk? Or they lose their job and can’t support you in the future?
There’s a dozen ways relying on the courts can go wrong. Something to consider in a pro and con list.
Unrelated, if during the marriage the primary breadwinner loses their job and struggles to get back on their feet, the stay at home mom won’t be able to help pay a mortgage with 10 year old skills, as an example.
I have zero problems with stay at home moms. My mom was one and i LOVED spending lots of time with her growing up. But i think many people don’t have an HONEST conversation here that considers the worst case. It’s worth talking about. That’s all i can say. And it might be different if you have a village to support you if needed. Not everyone is blessed with that.
In my immigrant mom’s tragic case, she never really got her foot into the workforce because she wanted to stay home. Because of that her english skills never truly developed. My father became somewhat abusive toward her when i was a young teen. Even threatened to withhold her “allowance” sometimes. Could she have left if she wanted to? No. Legally yes, but practically? Nope. Chained to the marriage basically.
If your wife wanted to stay home with the kids and not work, you would have forced her into the rat race or given her what she wants? It is not a foolish plan to confidently honor your vows and act accordingly. Condemning a wife who wants to raise her children as best as possible and to enjoy herself, to working for the man in some corporate gig and then blaming it on her need for work experience once you guys get divorced is dystopian nonsense. Just be a good husband and father, ya know? You do not have to saddle yourself with the problems of others which you yourself don't have out of some statistical optimality calculation. Just take control of your life. I say this as a father and husband.
"I know you wanted to stay home honey, and yes we have enough money and yes it would be good for the kids... but you have to think of your resume and work experience, we might get divorced someday. This very achievable situation is simply a fantasy" lol. My wife would be horrified and incredibly sad if I treated her this way.
If you approach it like that then sure LOL. Hilarious honestly. We also haven’t even discussed being eligible for social security and how that would play into finances post divorce.
Anyway the conversation would be more like this:
“hey, you know you can do whatever you want and i’ll 100% support your decision. We’re a team. And your contributions as a stay at home mom would be very much valued. But I also don’t want to take away your independence, and I want to make sure you’re not screwed if (god forbid) our marriage ever ends up in divorce. Have you considered working part time? If that’s still too much then OK - i’ll support your decision. Think about it.”
Basically:
- i support you 100% because we’re a team.
- don’t ever feel like i’m “asking” you to stay home with the kids.
- god forbid we end up divorced, don’t “complain” afterward that i wasn’t looking out for your best interest or i didn’t warn you of the worst case outcome.
but all of this is kind of moot anyway. If someone dreamed of being a stay at home mom since like 10, then that’s different. That’s supporting a dream. But it’s unethical for me to not inform someone of the possible downsides and have a conversation about it.
A lot of people are offering opinions on homeschooling. I'll throw in one anecdote from my past. I played tennis with a kid who was homeschooled through middle school but was sent to high school so he could graduate with a diploma instead of a GED, because this seems to be something that colleges care about. He was awkward for a couple weeks but basically adapted to high school and we quickly forgot he was homeschooled. The only thing that occasionally reminded us he was homeschooled was that he was better prepared for high school academics than we were and got good grades.
So for everyone saying that homeschooled kids aren't well adjusted or have bad social skills, I'll offer the counterpoint that they might appear unadjusted at first, but humans can usually adapt to new environments, so homeschooled kids have a pretty good chance at acting "normal" a short time after leaving homeschool. Don't judge someone's awkwardness the first time you meet them, let them adjust a bit and see if they can assimilate.
My experience though is that every homeschooled kid I met in university over a decade ago was very socially awkward. Not necessarily a problem I guess, they performed fine at academics.
Did you make a point to interrogate all the non–socially awkward people you met at university to determine if they were homeschooled or not? Yeah, thought not.
When I was in university, there were several instances where people who’d known me for weeks or months found out for the first time that I’d been homeschooled, and expressed their surprise. (Surprise that I was “normal,” I guess, and not a social basket case, as the prevailing stereotype of homeschoolers seems to be.) They simply never thought to ask.
In fact there were even a couple of friends who surprised me by turning out to be homeschooled—when I should have known better than to assume one’s schooling background. But when society spends your entire childhood hammering you with untrue stereotypes about what you are (I heard well‐meaning “But what about socialization?” countless times growing up), some of it is bound to stick.
The problem with public schools is that they are free and required (essentually). That is a bad combination.
There is really nothing intrinsically good about the average public school. Many are filled with kids that aren't there to learn. From the attitudes seen in this forum, that seems to be OK, because school is paradoxically about "socializing", while most here report being bullied.
As noticed here many home schoolers have religious reasons for their choice. The reason is simple, "Don't send your children to Ceasar and then be upset when they come home as Romans".
> Many are filled with kids that aren't there to learn.
That's on the kid, not contingent on whether school is public.
> most here report being bullied.
Anecdotes like this are not worth much. What do the stats say?
> There is really nothing intrinsically good about the average public school.
Schools don't just socialize, though that is also important. Whether they succeed at educating well depends on more than one factor, but policy & curriculum is clearly one. Kids are better prepared in some countries than others, still through public systems.
If people want to homeschool, let them. Public school should still be assessed accurately.
Homeschooling is growing and will continue to grow because it is a cheaper alternative to private school (for people whose incomes aren't so high that the loss of one income eclipses the savings of not paying for private school, e.g. most people). The growth of homeschooling is probably highly correlated with the disconnect and distrust people have with public school. Public school already has an advantage, it's literally free. So it has to have noticeable problems people feel like they can resolve at home, for people to want to leave it behind
That depends. Often it means one parent stays home to educate and watch the kids, otherwise, someone else has to, and that usually costs money. If a wife otherwise would bring home a decent salary, then it isn't cheaper.
As somebody that suffered through public school as a gifted kid, I wish I had been homeschooled. Almost everything positive that happened in my education was because of family, not due to the school. School was hell on earth for me, and I imagine it's the same for most other "neurodivergent" kids who are high IQ. Given what I know from my own kid, there's no surprise to me why more people are opting to home school. For my daughter we kept her in public school because the district we moved to had magnet programs, and that's what she wanted so she could be with her friends from the neighborhood, but not every school district cares about gifted kids and will happily put a child with a 150 IQ trying to read 6-8 grade levels above their peers in the same room with a child with an 80 IQ child who has a violence problem and consider that an acceptable outcome as long as nobody calls the police.
It is in fact the best outcome, because education is just a ranking game, and it's not like you will end up ranked lower in your school. Also, since the point of education is to help people learn, your calmer presence and pro-learning attitude may rub off on the worst students, and their chance of ending up jobless and in prison will go down!
It might be the best outcome for society, but it's not the best outcome for the people. I experienced severe violence directed at my person for most of my life and it caused lifelong trauma. I was further punished for defending myself, expected to just allow people to harm me. During school I was beaten many times, had bones broken, was stabbed with a pocket knife, and had numerous other things happen. Unlike the kids from the bad homes who exacted that violence against me, I didn't get my trauma from home I got it from school.
I have a 176 IQ, I'm now a highly paid professional who has made significant contributions to both open source software and to the invention of technologies that power the cloud. Obviously things worked out for me regardless of my circumstances. Most of the kids I went to school with are dead, in jail, or homeless drug addicts, so my presence certainly didn't fix that. If forcing me to be with them in school saved just one of them from a life of crime and drugs, was it worth forcing me to experience torture for no reason of my own making for my formative years? I would say no. Society is not more important than the individual, you must balance individual and social values against one another without taking either into preference.
I have no problem with spiteful bullies ending up in jail or dead after school, ultimately. It seems just and karmic.
Sorry, I should make it more clear when I'm being sarcastic. I tried to juxtapose these two clauses as close as I could:
> (1) education is just a ranking game
> (2) since the point of education is to help people learn
I feel like people who actually believe your situation was for the best must have a certain level of cognitive dissonance. Either that, or they just don't actually care about you and feel alright with hurting you for a chance of a slight gain for the people they do care about.
It's also a pretty hard sell to claim these kinds of situations are the best for society. If you could produce 2x as many billionaires by expelling the bottom 10% of the population from the education system (and imprisoning them for life), that would be better for society (financially). It might be worse for social reasons, but I kind of find that hard to believe.
This is why I think empathy doesn't scale. It's much easier to point people's empathy towards the person who is ruining their own life, and many others' at school, because they won't have a happy future. It's much harder to point people's empathy towards someone who will likely be successful in the future, even if they're being beat, stabbed, and abused in the present. Especially if they're not even being physically abused, just imprisoned for half their waking hours in a classroom. Empathy is great in very small groups, but not when you're setting policy for hundreds of kids in a school, thousands in the city, or millions across the state. At that point, empathy just ends up hijacked by the worst actors to redirect attention and resources to their own pet causes.
Obviously there is some serious nuance here - there are of course edge cases and serious reasons for considering home schooling.
But as a general principle, encouraging kids further and further out of (group) human contact seems like an obviously terrible idea to me. We're already doing it with (lack of) play spaces, "no ball games", insane screen times (which equates to less "real" face to face time) amongst teens, awkward kids who can't even engage with a stranger under any circumstances - and meanwhile isolation and loneliness is on the increase, fear continues to rise about even letting your kid walk down the street to the shops, etc...
School is hard, as are parts of life. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult, it's not always what you want it to be, you get shouted at sometimes and big kids get their way and you don't get asked on the football team. Honestly, and sorry, but - a big part of growing up is learning how to deal with things. If kids don't, and you as a parent don't help them deal with the bumps, you and they will be building unrealistic expectations about how good this life is going to be, and they'll spend all their time sad or "triggered" or afraid, or isolated, or unable to join in. They'll get more scared, more isolated, more depressed. This is not what any parent wants.
This - of course and x1000 - need to be done with massive quantities of love and compassion. This isn't some Victorian hellscape I'm advocating here. Real bullying is real. Sometimes adults need to weigh in. Kids will find school hard.
But loving your kids is NOT giving them everything they want. It's teaching them how to navigate things that are difficult and awkward and - ultimately - helping them become robust adults.
I disagree with your premise that homeschooling pushes kids out of group human contact. People who attend public school often assume that kids who attend homeschool literally sit at home all day...which is just not...real?
It was the predominant notion when I was a homeschooled kid 30 years ago, and for most of them there is no argument or evidence that will convince them otherwise.
State-run education is their orthodoxy, and anything that challenges that is tantamount to heresy.
No, I totally get it. If you're home schooled maybe you get out to see a few kids, go do some lessons in a forest classroom or whatever. All good. But it's still not the dynamic, varied (sometimes uncomfortable) environment of school classrooms, corridors, playtimes, etc.
Again, to re-iterate, I don't want kids to be uncomfortable as a norm, but bashing up against other groups, cultures, opinions - finding your friends, finding people you dislike, learning how to work with social cues - all of this is important grounding for later life. What do you spend your life doing? Bashing up against other groups, cultures, opinions.
I also can't help but notice that amongst our friends who homeschool there is a very strong correlation between parents who didn't go to school and their kids not going to school. Around us this rarely seems to be about some kind of positive choice, mainly it's parent exudes strong "I didn't like school" vibes and kid picks it up and runs with it.
Creating silos where you closet away and attempt to "protect" people from the outside world has never, ever been good. Social Media (should) have taught us that.
Ah, yes. The "normal people" canard. It's very tiresome. I refer you to a prior comment of mine and the ensuing chain from the usual HN homeschooling merry-go-round a year ago [0].
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>> You can also learn outside of school, too.
> As someone who spent time in all three, I felt that my academic time was utterly wasted in public school. Sure, "learning outside" is always available, but that doesn't regain the time served in government mandated kid-prison.
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>> No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal people. That's a lifelong skill.
> It taught me the necessity of being as viciously crass as my new classmates in order to fit in. If you consider that normal, then let it be known that I'm perfectly fine sticking with abnormal people thank you very much. I am perfectly content learning the lessons of Lord of the Flies by reading, and not by getting thrown into a small re-enactment of it.
> Though I suppose public middle school psychology was useful when I was an internment camp guard in southern Iraq. I'll grant you that.
The most common form of homeschooling is, I believe, in the form of co-ops. Where groups of parents get their kids together in class room like settings to teach them together. They don't go to school, they might meet at a church, or library or a home, but they are socializing. I know people who homeschool and between church, youth fellowship, co-op classes, fencing, swimming, basketball, neighborhood kids, family, etc. they have extremely active social lives.
I was homeschooled up until college. I was part of a non-religious (maybe vaguely pagan) homeschooler community. I eased into college by taking a couple courses per semester at my local community college for two years around the end of high school, and also some online AP courses from my local school district. Overall I am happy with my experience. I had an abundance of time to pursue my own interests (e.g. reading, programming), since I only did ~1 hour of dedicated schoolwork per day. Among my peers, I ended up probably in the top 10% academically (close to straight As in college) and bottom 10% socially (I kept my homeschooler friends, but don't feel like I could call any of my college acquaintances "friends"). To this day I struggle with being comfortable and non-awkward around strangers and acquaintances, but I feel like I'm improving.
Happy to share more anecdotes if people have questions.
I used to teach high school. The amount of time I spent doing crap work was insane. It was necessary. If you don’t remind students 100 times what the assignments are, they won’t do them.
You also have to spend an insane amount of time with the lowest performers, because with enough attention, they can improve dramatically.
But this creates tradeoffs. Should I neglect the students doing best?
One on one instruction is the best kind. It’s generally reserved for doctoral students.
I also tried homeschooling by eldest. It didn’t work.
well if we just apply the bell curve here, on average children will be pretty average (shocker) so those should be left on their own and discover their own niche while bad performers should get extra attention so they can keep up with the rest and with the gifted (if they actually want to) given the opportunity to explore higher level subjects.
so in the end we give attention to gifted and the struggling since there's very little you can do to children who are already decent and are capable of keeping up at most they lack discipline or motivation.
Gifted and average students who aren’t given attention become poor performers quickly.
Gifted students especially.
Students who learn ahead don’t want to be told: “ok you have the material, so I’ll ignore you for a bit.” They want more. They want their questions answered, even if the questions aren’t part of the lesson plan.
Nobody wants to be told “we aren’t studying that today.”
You really can’t starve the rest of the class to cater to poor performers.
teaching independent learning is also a very valuable skill, most average people can do it especially the gifted ones as long as they are given the resources to do so and general skills taught in the first 8 grades since realistically I caught up by 10th grade while being a very poor performer in the first 8 (mostly due to lack of effort and generally being very stupid as a kid).
also there is very little excuse now with how advanced AI is getting at being able to explain subjects, it's all coming down to motivation, environment and the ability to use these tools in the first place - children struggle to use computers since we see it as a given, but to someone who didn't grow up with the incremental advancements it can seem very overwhelming.
that's mostly a context limitation with hallucinations sprinkled in, but they are currently good at understanding existing problems and how to solve them as long as they're not college-level or above since at that point they tend to fall apart due to complex interaction between different subjects and number percision overload esp when it comes to matricies.
I suspect, but can’t prove, that model trainers deliberately steer models away from creating tests and worksheets.
The reason being that when a human asks a written question: “who president of the US in 1962?” it’s very likely to be a part of a worksheet.
Novels don’t contain many questions like that, nor do non fiction. They’re mostly paragraphs. Most text is mostly paragraphs.
Naked question usually means worksheet. AIs know this, so their if you ask it a question like: “who president in 1962?” It responds which the most likely next sentence, a related question: “How was the Cuban Missile resolved?”
So there’s a huge discrepancy between the next most likely sentence based on training, and what a user likely wants. If I ask, “Who was president in 1962?” I don’t want another question, nor does anyone else.
But that’s what the training data provides.
So model trainers have to bias it away from worksheets. This isn’t hard to do, and is a normal part of model training.
I’ve personally seen this behavior in poorly parameterized or trained models. They love answering questions by assuming they are in worksheets. It’s a huge pain.
Interestingly it never happens with top-line models like ChatGPT.
Carefully hyperparameterizatiin helps, but I think you’ll have to adjust the weights too. But that likely makes it harder to make actual worksheets.
This is just a guess. But I suspect models are weighted to discount pedagogical materials because of how different they are from what the users often expect.
This is the result of more propaganda and brainwashing than education in schools. We should have left the politics out of the schools, after we got the prayers banned. But I guess some people will stop at nothing.
Group home schooling in a shared building is becoming a huge new trend in home schooling, far more resource and time efficient and pools the resources of the parents and allows the group to hire someone to do the group homeschooling.
I really enjoyed teaching my kids during covid, and they got a bug jump ahead compared to the kids who just played video games while the schools were closed. We only did 3-4 hours a day but it was fun, and I could really see the changes.
I don't mind the idea of teaching 10 kids, my way, and in and environment I can control. The thought of teaching 35 kids, mired in bureaucracy, is a nightmare.
I like this analogy. At a Walmart I'm more likely to find a good deal, and will encounter people who I wouldn't at home/work/friends, yet I prefer the idea of a farmers' market.
Anecdotally, our family would not survive without homeschooling. I wouldn’t say we are a common situation, 4 kids who each have different learning challenges. I don’t think public education or their peers in those institutions would have been very merciful to them.
I believe that for kids have parents willing to provide it, home education (especially when tailored to the child) is always going to outperform other forms of education. There are trade-offs, and those trade-offs have become easier to deal with in the last 10 years even. Our kids each get the amount of socialization that works for them, have volunteer opportunities and community groups, etc.
The main reason it works, though, is that my wife is willing and our finances support her to do it full-time. I know there are plenty of families where both spouses can work while homeschooling, but for our particular needs that would never work out.
> 4 kids who each have different learning challenges. I don’t think public education or their peers in those institutions would have been very merciful to them.
You are likely correct, if their experiences were to be anything like mine growing up. It was somewhat traumatic, honestly. I had learning and behavioral issues that I didn't know until I was an adult.
As a silver-lining, I suppose I also have to be somewhat thankful for what I learned. I feel somewhat well prepared to navigate the social and occupational issues that arise in workplaces because, despite my challenges, the working world is just as merciless if not worse.
I'm the only person in my (large) family to go to university. In fact I went "all the way" and have a PhD. There's no way I could have been home schooled by my parents, they simply don't have a deep enough understanding of things beyond maybe age 10 for me. But, interestingly, it was my dad who taught me HTML, not school, and that's what I've ended up doing as a career. My dad never took HTML, or programming in general, that far, but it certainly set me on my way.
In a way this is a return to older times when children would learn the trades of their parents. I think that's great, but I do wonder how kids will acquire the broader education. Knowing how to program is really only a small part of what makes me valuable.
School was hell on earth for me. Openly racist kids (I'm mixed race wo I was more or less not as strongly affected, but we had one kid of certain heritage that was being harassed on an hourly base, think of south park Cartman multiplied by 10) with teachers never doing anything about it, borderline maniac kids that would attack anyone randomly, teachers not caring. Sure, nowadays it's different, but for me school has leas to me not exploring some of my personality traits and basically being afraid of people and disassociating with society on a way of 'them vs me'. Sure, I'm talking about 20% of "bad" characters, but when 20% does this and the rest kind of pretends it's normal, you get the idea of what "normal" is in the society. But, being honest. I have to admit that having that experience gave me the understanding that what society nowadays "tries to pretend it is" is just hiding it's true face, because only in school people are actually honest and sincere. So in this sense, I understand that going to school to get to know the true face of our society is definitely useful for individuals, but it causes overall harm to society as it contributes to it's separation
I was public schooled Kindergarten, homeschooled 1st-5th, and public schooled 6-12th grade. My wife was 100% homeschooled. I think it was a good mix for me. And in retrospect, I think it was good I was public schooled for at least some of high school, because I'm not sure my math education would have been as good if I was homeschooled during that period (my parents aren't math people).
But I am a math person, and we are homeschooling our 2 boys. My 12-year-old is able to understand mathematical concept and scientific topics that many high schoolers are never even exposed to. My wife does a great job with many other subjects as well. And we have many great homeschooling parents who group together to teach things they are specialized in (like construction, art, etc). Our homeschool group also has a lot of social time for the kids to just play together (mostly outside). It's awesome.
I think the quality of the education depends on the teachers. And a big part of being a good teacher is caring. Hopefully the parents will care more about their kids than any other teacher would. Additionally, we are in the golden age of homeschooling resources (mostly online).
I appreciate you sharing -- specifically because my kids were Home Schooled until High School and attend Public High School, now.
I feel the same way about the value of early-years Home School and mainstream High School. Mom and I had agreed that we'd let them pick once they hit High School. That coincided with the end of the COVID lockdowns, so being lonely like everyone else, they picked Public School. Prior to COVID, I'd have put money on them remaining Home Schooled.
I did exactly the same things with my kids with regard to advanced math/science topics. Actual "sit down and learn time" was spent 80% on Math/Science and 20% on everything else. And I've found some things benefit being introduced way younger. Things like the theory of relativity are "accepted as fact" more easily when they don't stand in the face of 15-years of observation. It can be understood with cartoons and when the topic is studied -- in depth -- later, they're not having to start from "how, on Earth, does that make any sense?!"
I attended an objectively good public school system in California. There was very little political slant pushed by teachers except a far left slant in my journalism class. Thankfully we had many AP and honors classes which allowed motivated and competent students to thrive. I personally found myself disliking most normal classes because some students seemed unmotivated or incompetent and I didn’t like to be around those types of people. In scouting I met many homeschooled boys who didn’t seem very well socialized but their parents were always affluent, intelligent, mature and stable people who supported their boys. On one occasion a homeschooled kid didn’t want to be so he ran away for a few days and all the parents grilled us for clues as to where he may have gone. He ended up going to public high school with me the last two years and I think he made friends there. Another boy was homeschooled because he never managed to make friends and was quite annoying and quick to anger. He left out scout troop because he failed to adapt to the group and threw a knife at me! In college I met kids who went to ineffective public schools and they were very obviously much less competent than the people in my high school and heavily at a disadvantage. Based on my observations all children raised under homeschool were socially awkward but far more intelligent than the average public school kid.
After moving out of state I observed that public schools make a really big difference in outcomes, I found that the people that came out of Portland Public Schools (PPS) were palpably less intelligent and also learned that group exams were sometimes taken! Also there were always needles, homeless camps, public drug use and fires around Portland schools. In these cases I think homeschooling (or groupschooling) would provide better outcomes.
I went public schools growing up and never imagined homeschooling as an option when I eventually had children of my own, but my kid was not the same in their school after the pandemic. Coupled with how ideologically focused the public schools in my state have become over the last few years, homeschooling them was an easy decision.
Interesting to see this topic being discussed on HN; I'm curious if any homeschooling parents here have kids who WANT to learn computer programming. I haven't pushed my kids to do any of the things that I loved doing growing up (or what I do now). If any homeschooled kids are getting into programming was it as a result of playing with something like Scratch or did they dive directly into writing Python or JavaScript?
It hurts me so bad to have to say this (as someone who has been a life-long technologist with higher degrees in CS and CE): Pushing kids towards STEM careers is only going to end in disappointment. Medicine, sure, but engineering and programming? I don't think it's ever coming back to what it was here in the states. We took that golden goose out back and chopped its head clean off.
I am not suggesting pushing in any direction; it was more a realization that one of my kids said they wanted to learn to program I'm not sure what the best first step would be (learning straight C like I did a long time ago probably isn't he best starting point) and I was curious if anyone else had ideas.
Unsurprisingly this thread has become a battleground on the merits of homeschooling.
Something to keep in mind: "Homeschool" is a useless descriptor. It covers a spectrum from complete educational neglect to world class private tutoring. It includes cohorts almost indistinguishable from school, and cohorts that engage in cultish indoctrination.
Any criticism you might have for your idea of homeschool, there exists a type of homeschooling that addresses that criticism, and there will be someone in the replies ready to tell you about it.
I am an advocate of homeschooling but also know the importance of social contact for kids, so always wondering how hard would it be to create local clubs for kids where they learn mainly about economy, liberty and social relations sprinkled with some astronomy, history, biology, math and whatever personal interest of their parents like sports or arts? I'd be happy to pay for a private institution like that
- The numbers on reported satisfaction are taken at face value. But they are influenced by some biases.
-- Survivors Bias contributes to the satisfaction rates of homeschooling; It's hard to get into homeschooling but easy to get out of. As a result, those satisfied keep doing it while those dissatisfied with the public system are less likely to change.
I went to college with a few homeschooled kids. They were by far the least capable of "normal" social interaction. Some were quite book smart, but they had trouble communicating with others, so they couldn't demonstrate it.
Also a fun side effect, they mispronounced a lot of words that they had only ever seen in books but never heard out loud. One of them was self-aware enough to ask us to correct him.
>> they mispronounced a lot of words that they had only ever seen in books but never heard out loud
I did that as a kid. Still do. I read more than I talk. Nothing wrong with that.
The flip side would be people who misspell words or get phrases wrong because they've never seen them in books, they've only heard them out loud. They talk more than they read. Nothing wrong with that.
Although both of those might be a clue as to what type of vocations would make someone happy.
I do that too. What am I supposed to do? Nobody said the word "ephemeral" to me as a child. I have since learnt the OED includes pronunciation so I look words up if I remember, but sometimes I don't.
When I recently switched jobs, one of my requirements was I had to remain remote, for at least the next few years, so I could remain at home and help with my children's education. I don't think there is enough money in the world to convince me to change back to public education. Aside from the benefits everyone mentions like a much better education, having so much extra time with my children is a priceless gift that I wish we as a society could give everyone.
Also its given me the chance to learn things that I missed during my primary and secondary educations. Going through each proof in Euclid's Elements again has been a lot of fun, and its been long enough that I have forgotten most of them, so the thrill of discovery is real for me too.
If you can make it work, you should make it work, even if that means moving to a lower CoL area, there are a lot of small towns in the US that have excellent amenities, and are great places to raise a family.
How do you make up for the resulting drop in interaction with other kids? I had a boss who did this with his children as well - it seemed as though his solution was to use PE credits to have his kids attend sports with other kids.
My kids are part of a co-op where they meet once a week and in this co-op they share some elements of their curriculum with everyone else, they spend one day going over the weeks assignments along with 8-10 classmates, and then during the week they are at home doing their work. As they have aged their school work now has a lot of collaborative elements, so my oldest is actually meeting with kids from his co-op almost daily to go over group projects and assignments.
Additionally they have a lot of extra curricular activities they participate in ( sports, music, church youth group), that also gives them a lot of socialization time with others.
Sounds like a wonderful setup. Have the kids ever shown a desire for public school? My brother is homeschooling his kids to start, but the oldest just asked to start going to public, so he sent her.
No, my wife and I discussed putting them into traditional school as they got older, but now that they are older, they have all strongly requested to remain in their homeschool co-op. I think the biggest reason is they have a good group of friends that they connect with, and have been their class mates for multiple years. So there is a strong desire to continue in the program with people they know.
The most popular argument against homeschooling appears to be "the world sucks, so we should make kids worlds suck so they're prepared for it", which is absolutely an abusive way to think and those who use this argument need to sit and think about what it means, then be ashamed.
Not exactly. More like, "The world can suck major at times, so we should make sure kids are prepared to deal with it when confronted." It's kinda like teaching kids to look both ways when crossing the street. Ideally, drivers are looking out for pedestrians, but if that doesn't happen and a pedestrian isn't prepared for it, well, people can get killed.
No one should be ashamed for teaching their kids to exist in a world that isn't always as loving as we all wish it was.
We tried homeschooling a few times. We were honest with ourselves and determined we were not that great at it. Sure, we could improve. But one of the primary factors in where we chose to live was the school district. Fortunately it has worked out well. Of course there’s always something to deal with- you have to advocate for your kids.
It’s basically public daycare for a lot of people. Including us.
The social aspect is important for us. The idea of having to find other people with kids for activities sounds exhausting. We’re a gang of neuro-spicy introverts. My social circle is comprised of people I’ve been friends with for 25+ years. All from my school days.
I dealt with a lot of bullshit at school. But overall a net gain.
If you break the teacher’s unions, things would become dramatically better. Teachers unions are extremely powerful and poorly aligned with the mission of maximally educating as many children as possible.
For anyone reading this the following context would be helpful:
1. Home schooling does not necessarily (and in most cases) does not mean a kid learning at home with parents. It only means parents have arranged for adequen learning through alternative means.
2. In many cases, multiple parents and their kids come together and take responsibility of their kids education. They may rent spaces, they may hire teachers and so on.
3. In many cases you have to satisfy government penpushers that you are doing a good job of this.
It's worth noting the "Two Sigma" problem on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) - "the educational phenomenon that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment".
This topic is such a basket case. “Homeschooling” in the US is a word that has come to mean “not enrolled in an accredited school” and can mean anything from being the Duggars to “my 4yo audits classes at MIT” or “we have an unaccredited private school that is identical to any other private school except for not being subject to laws”.
Advocating for homeschooling is simply advocating for absolutely no regulation on schooling, which is fine for the Zuckerbergs and will condemn children like the Duggars.
home schooling is a very very priviledged concept to begin with so it's not surprising that there is quite a lot of hate for it.
as a former child I think home schooling is better in every way if there is a supporting environment built around it, but I also think public schooling introduces a lot of variety that is not seen in private or home schooling be it for better or worse, although my time in public school was rough and failed me in many ways I still wouldn't have it any other way.
Be curious how they got their numbers. Because I had to fill out intent to homeschool forms for my 4 kids that are over 10, but they’re all at a classical Christian school, but there is one home day a week so it technically is considered homeschool by the state. So if they pull from those types of forms it could be there are a lot of kids who are at schools but look like they’re homeschooling from the numbers.
There are 13 years required (K-12) in the US. The way non-compliance is peanlized varies depending on the state.
Education in the US is a complicated subject given the "extreme individualistic American culture" as you say. That will be present in the teachers and school districts, and the lesson plans can/will differ greatly between teachers and school districts for getting students to the general standard.
As a Canadian, all I can say after reading all of this is: WTF? I can't understand why anyone would want to keep their children at home instead of sending them to school, and how the government could fail so badly that so many people want to avoid public schools. We are so similar and yet so different
The short answer is people stopped caring about metrics measuring learning, and instead how easy they were to game to support their politics, or make them look like a better teacher or superintendent.
Everyone wants to make generalizations, but all this really means is lots of families find homeschooling to be the best choice. What factors into that can vary wildly.
This is totally unsurprising, given that, in some parts of the country, public schools teach controversial ideas about gender.
Also, I see a lot of people arguing that exposure to “bad” kids is a point in favor of public schools, which seems insane to me. Growing up with a friend group of good kids is probably the biggest predictor of what a child’s adult life will look like.
I have a counter view. I think a parent needs to educate their kids as well. So, while kids may learn about controversial gender topics one needs to be able to have an intelligent discussion on why as a family don’t subscribe to those. Encourage children to have a mind of their own and argue intelligently and hold their ground. It doesn’t come from shying away from public forums.
As to the last point - one of the biggest benefits of exposure to “bad” kids is knowing whom to stay away from and making independent decisions on that. Parents are not going to be around to guide children forever. They need to learn to make their own choices.
Unless you live in a school district that’s really not that great I would never recommend homeschooling. Cloistering into echo chambers is not healthy.
NY state just signed a bill to include ChatGPT in their learning and planning. Previously there were deals to bring in Google hardware for students.
Of course people are fleeing public schooling when we’re selling the kids to big tech for laptops and services that require network connection to write a word document, enable cheating, and their data sold for profit without consent.
People might be fleeing public schooling because lawmakers are dictating what happens in the classroom. There are lots of good teachers who struggle with the resources given to them and the constraints imposed on them.
At home, parents can be flexible. They can let their kids use AI when appropriate or discourage its use. They don't have to wait for legislators to get involved. If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it instead of waiting for some committee to evaluate it.
> If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it
How do you know if the math book is great if there hasn’t been consensus about it. The problem isn’t the committee that will always be there in some form. The problem is the politics the committee is used for. If the committee were to prioritize and offload their specific requirements for review instead of requiring substantial analysis twice then the school system would be just as quick.
Homeschooling does not hit record numbers, that is that people tend to herd, herding is done because they prefer natural herding as a byproduct of evolution. Not because it's something from bible, do not believe those lies. Herding is a natural byproduct of evolution. believe Darwin
Every normal school kid who interacted with a home school kid will recall what the problem is with homeschooling. I would never want to raise a little weirdo like the weirdo home schoolers I knew.
"I got to spend time with my kids when they still wanted to spend time with me. Now as teenagers in no longer cool, but that's ok. I got my time with them and that makes me happy"
Every time I hear the “What about socialization?” argument from some childless person on SSRIs, I am reminded how dishonest some people are. If they even liked (let alone cared for) children, they would have had their own.
Well here is what the result was of public school for my 3 kids:
1 kid: one year behind but doing very well
1 kid: two years behind and not doing so well (in fact can't continue to academia unless things change drastically, in other words, will lose at least 1-2 more years if she does go to academia)
1 kid: two years behind and doing pretty well
This is the result of 9-11 years of public schooling. I feel like all 3 have very suboptimal outcomes, including the one doing very well.
I must say I am also getting very irritated by the "indoctrination". That was fine, if occasionally crazy, during the COVID years when the indoctrination was pretty progressive. Sometimes batshit insane, but let's say "well intentioned". Pro-climate claims ... that were bullshit, but at least pro-climate and generally positive and pro-humanity. Now one of their teachers is openly racist (in a class with 33% immigrants), and even though most keep it more subtle than him, this is a general trend.
So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
I know a teacher who said one of their colleagues adamantly believes the moon landing was faked.
>So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
Look up school ratings in your area and move is by far your best bet if you wish to continue public school. There is also the difficult truth that maybe your kids are the problem, but again school shopping could help with that depending on what programs they have.
I've already used some "adult" exams where someone fucked up and forgot to set minimum ages and got my kids through them perfectly fine. The kids are not the problem, or at least, having them pass the normal exams at the normal age for those exams is possible. The schools simply aren't doing it.
The issue with that approach is that it's a lot of work, and I would love an alternative. But I don't have an alternative.
I agree with you, but I could easily convince myself otherwise with the right context or motivation.
> Well funded public education is a bedrock of fair equal society
First we have to decide what a fair equal society is, and then decide that this is what we want, and then demonstrate that spending on public education helps to achieve this.
People I've spoken to about education who do not see it as I do will disagree with me on all three points.
Colin Powell [valued][1] (paywall) his public school education.
Homeschool should be illegal, full stop. Enabling a parent, especially one who thinks that home schooling is a good idea, to indoctrinate a future citizen is beyond idiocy.
“Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
> When asked if they are satisfied with their children's education, public school parents consistently rank last after parents who choose private schools, homeschooling, and charter schools. Importantly, among all parents of school-age children, homeschooling enjoys a 70 percent favorability rating.
This is not surprising: homeschoolers are extremely confident in their own teaching abilities and extremely cynical about the abilities of others.
> Closures also gave parents a chance to experience public schools' competence with remote learning, and many were unimpressed. They have also been unhappy with the poor quality and often politicized lessons taught to their children that infuriatingly blend declining learning outcomes with indoctrination.
Why would a parent compare a novel learning environment to the pre-covid experience? Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home - do they use the internet at all?
> Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home
They probably imagine they'll never encounter political topics from a perspective of which said parents do not approve. And they're probably not wrong to believe that.
Only parents of privilege are given choice though. Parents who are struggling are not. And then when it comes to vote on fixing classrooms, paying teachers what they are worth, etc, there's a great bulk of people who would rather just not because it doesn't effect them.
Except many many parents have been shown to not be able to decide what's actually best for their kids, or don't care, or have actually harmful ideas.
And maybe those kids aren't their property and society has decided that the rights of the child to their own wellbeing may actually trump "parents decide whats best" when and if those parents are very much not?
I follow Asim too! A very interesting case study indeed. The boy learned to code and started working full-time for his startup.
What's really great is all the kids seem to be very well rounded and come off as pretty confident on their own. This can be seen in the videos on the YT channel.
Finishing "school" several years early is the biggest plus for me. Imagine being done with high school by the age of 14. The possibilities are endless. Learn languages, travel, learn real tangible skills, join various bootcamps.
Your kid can have so much "life" experience by the time they turn 18-20.
As someone from a country where public school is the norm, private school less so and homeschooling the absolute exception, these threads are always wild to read. It really shows how deeply individualistic and polarized the USA is. Sure, let's make homeschooling the norm, problematic kids will be the only ones who fill the ranks of public schools, gifted kids or the ones from religious zealots will all live in their bubbles, then what? Snow Crash is your destination?
> gifted kids or the ones from religious zealots will all live in their bubbles
If you’ve read this thread, then you know most homeschoolers dispute that they live in a bubble.
> Sure, let's make homeschooling the norm, problematic kids will be the only ones who fill the ranks of public schools
I don’t see anyone in this thread advocating that. But I did see several arguing that homeschooling should be illegal. And homeschooling is illegal in countries like Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Part of homeschoolers’ outspokenness against the usual tired stereotypes is because there’s real risk of governments prohibiting home education even in situations when it would be superior to the local public schools.
Homeschooling is becoming an epidemic and a major reason is --- SPORTS. From my experience, it is growing for all the wrong reasons and I have not come across ONE family doing it properly and in a matter I would consider better for the kid.
I have a 15yo son who plays sports and for the past 5 years, homeschooling has been a way to "red-shirt" kids - hold them back a year or two then re-entering them into public schools into grades behind their age. Literally purposely holding back their kids so they can be older as freshman.
A major problem with boys because of puberty, size etc around this age. The difference between a 14yo and a 16yo, or 16/18yo can be quite large at times. My son had a freshman on his team last year that could drive and had a mustache playing vs these tiny incoming freshman, it was so comical. He was 16 1/2 as a freshman. And the parents were on the sideline acting like their kid was the next coming of Aaron Judge. It REALLY hurts the rest of us playing the rules and taking education seriously when our kids are trying to make a team.
I've known several of these parents and they all are the same. They haphazardly put them into the bare min online courses, still go to work all day and stick them in front of computers to expect them to self teach for a few years. The moms would be stay-home types that didn't seem much educated themselves. The kids are spoiled entitled types who think they are top athletes already and would jokingly be calling my son at 11a telling him they are done already for the day and headed to the gym and playing Fortnite.
Now this is just MY circle, I am not saying there aren't very serious and capable parents out there really homeschooling and giving their kids a better education than public school, but I haven't met any in maybe roughly 10 I know. Most of them seemed to also be MAGA types poo-pooing public education and how they are brainwashing kids. It is really despicable that this is most likely happening ALL across America.
Education and manipulation aside, I would also think this isn't good the kids mental and social health as well. They already are on devices doom-scrolling enough nowadays, do we really want them hermits too now?
I applaud anyone putting in huge effort to home school a kid properly and with true care and teaching. But the image of them at a desk being taught by a real smart/educated parent following a true curriculum all day and on a schedule I imagine is ultra rare. And we are going to pay a price for this in the long run. Or not, GPT will just help them along to properly write that email for them when they are adults in a corporate world.
I thought you were going to go in a different direction with that: recruiting. In States where home schoolers can play on public school sports teams there are cases where the family gets an apartment and one parent and the kid establishes residency for the purpose of being in a particular school district. A notable case in recent-ish history was someone called Tim Tebow in Jacksonville, FLA. It's not a common thing though, far less of a complaint-magnet than the Catholic schools who "recruit" players from all over a city or even region to come be a starter on their football/basketball team...
You should not be downvoted for telling the truth about your experiences! I have witnessed the same things. Kids being held back a grade so they can excel in sports! It is so ridiculously self-serving and narcissistic that it is crazy to witness. And the emphasis on sports at my son's high school is beyond ridiculous.
The dads especially need to get back to basics and stop these obsessions they have about their kids being athletic superstars. It's bad for EVERYONE. And starting kids at like 5 years old in sports is just stupid.
I've met so many of these narcissistic dad types that I think they are either a) living vicariously though their sons as an ego thing or b) seriously think they are sitting on a winning lottery ticket and their kids will make pro. So they obsessively push the kids so they don't "waste their opportunity" and/or "don't make mistake I did and not take it seriously".
I have even felt that urge with my son at times when he was making Little League All-star teams each year and considered top 5 player in the league. But then you realize they are only 9-12 years old and playing on a mini field! So I relished in him just having FUN. It was so hard to be around those obsessive Dads when I was having fun practices.
How many are now home schooled for religious reasons? It seems like many are pulling their kids out of public schools, for "woke" reasons rather than for a deep pedagogical pursuit, and I worry these kids aren't actually learning at the level they should be.
I can understand why. When we first moved to our upper midwest state, the district we bought a house in was ranked like #2 in the state overall and has fallen considerably. I have watched with my own two eyes the decline in the past 20 years here. The neighboring district, which was teetering when we first moved here in 2006, fell over completely and remains fallen. That one had a cycle of failed superintendents, all of whom required a buyout to get rid of, which further impoverished that district. Our realtor, who had been a teacher in that district, slyly tried to push us into that one, but we didn't fall for it. Our daughter made it through the more acclaimed district pretty well, our son, however, got tripped up in the decline:
We ended up moving our son to yet a third district after 2nd grade. Why? Because the principal he had in his elementary school mishandled an incident where three boys of another ethnicity shoved and kicked my son to the ground. The principal, in her infinite wisdom, made my son apologize to his attackers, I guess because he is white? We didn't press the matter, why bother? The handwriting was on the wall. We put in the work to open enroll him in another district, instead. Those are the options that many more rural communities lack.
Our current district is a bit further of a drive and that makes him/us feel like he is not really a part of that community. Nonetheless, it has done well for him and I will just come right out and say it's because it is less diverse and more affluent. It is not without its problems--mainly being far too sports-centric than the district my daughter attended, and generally a bit snobby and "affluenza"-ish, but no overt violence to speak of hardly.
One time we were leaving a football game one time and happened upon a family presenting their daughter with a brand new Range Rover, complete with a bow, in the school parking lot. Puke-o-rama! Why would you do that except to show off consumption and appearance of wealth to everyone else? Luckily, not that common, but you get the picture.
The good thing is, we had options and exercised them, but I wish we hadn't needed to, because we like our community and wanted to support it and the local families nearer to us. Every choice we made to get something we also had to give up something else. I think that's the same with homeschooling, too--I don't personally think it's a good idea, but it's not up to me how someone else chooses to educate their kids and I understand about only having certain options. My son is doing very well, now in high school, but he can never make a sports team because the competition is beyond ridiculous. Even tennis he got on some low rung team because there were a couple of superstar 7th graders who filled up JV and Varsity slots! It felt like a sort-of "old boy" situation because my son is pretty decent at tennis and beat one of those younger guys every time he played him. Forget football or basketball, you have to be pretty much college material to be on those teams. Hockey, same. My daughter never cared about sports, so we weren't prepared for that battle at all.
Getting children through school and into adulthood is not for the faint of heart.
This is so stupid on so many levels, I don't even get silicon valley engineers can envision this stuff for their own kids. Or maybe they don't care. Whatever.
> Recent estimates put the total homeschooling population at about 6 percent of students across the United States, compared to about 3 percent pre-pandemic.
One thing that concerns me about many pro-homeschooling comments is a kind of tear-down-the-schools attitude, as if schools were hopeless and irredeemable, despite the fact they're still educating 94% of students even at today's elevated homeschooling rate. Of course there are problems with schools, but on the other hand there are countless success stories, or at least countless non-failure stories, and educational outcomes tend to depend crucially on local factors, the location of the school and its socioeconomic environment.
I suspect that the vast majority of parents have neither the desire nor the capability to homeschool their kids. I certainly can't imagine my own parents doing it. In a sense, homeschooling is a luxury of the few. The absolute numbers can increase, but I don't think homeschooling can scale to the entire population. So whatever problems may exist in the schools, we have to confront and solve them, not just abandon them and pretend homeschooling is a societal solution. You might claim that hundreds of years ago, everyone was homeschooled, but I don't want to turn back the societal clock hundreds of years.
Another concern I have is the religious and/or political motivation of many homeschoolers. If homeschooling were just about educational outcomes for children, then we shouldn't expect homeschoolers to be disproportionately conservative in religious and/or political beliefs, yet my impression is that they are. It's certainly suspicious to me. And though I've had no involvement with K-12 education since I was in school myself, I've had a lot of involvement in higher education, first as an undergrad, then as a PhD student and lecturer. Frankly, the horror stories and conspiracy theories about left-wing indoctrination at universities are ridiculous and not based on fact or experience. So I'm quite skeptical of similar claims about K-12, especially since I saw none of that in my own childhood. (I recall being forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, for all the good that did.) There's a type of person who's set off if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" and consider that to be an act of war against them. There are still a lot of parents in the United States who reject biological evolution and would prefer that it not be taught in schools at all, or at least to be taught as "controversial."
I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children. There is no law or social imperative that children must be taught a secular view point. At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently. Honestly, I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion. It has become a belief system of it's own, and I for one fear the coming crusades :)
I say live and let live, parents should be free to teach their kids whatever belief system they want without political interference. Much to the dismay of the left (and I say this, being a left leaning moderate... I know, bad word today), kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children, full stop. The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism, is only putting fuel to the fire in this surge in global fascism. At the risk of sounding too kumbaya'ish, we all just need to accept each other and recognize the real enemies to society is a global loss of empathy and the rise of transactionalism. Now that is something I could really get behind, forced empathy courses! :)
> I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children.
I didn't claim that they don't have a right. I just claimed to be skeptical of the idea that the primary motivation for homeschooling was educational outcomes rather than ideological outcomes.
> At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently.
If only they believed differently. ;-) It's no coincidence that children tend to adopt the same beliefs as their parents, no matter the country or region.
> I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion.
The last 20 years? The First Amendment of the US Constitution begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". The principle of separation of church and state is more than 200 years old.
> kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children
I don't know what label you'd want to put on me, but I would say that kids do not belong to anyone. I find the notion of ownership to be noxious, practically slavery. We have a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves (yet), but that doesn't mean children are simply the personal property and playthings of the parents. I think it's a disservice to a child to place them in a bubble and shield them from anything the parents don't happen to like.
> The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism
"they are their parents children" is not individualism, or certainly not individualism from the child's perspective.
Morover, from what I've seen and heard from homeschoolers themselves, they do tend to form, or indeed come from, specific communitites, and are not simply "lone wolf" homeschooling parents.
Homeschooling makes zero sense unless one or both parents are independently wealthy and already excellent academic communicators and there are firm, minimum subject milestones set by the state that must be achieved and reported on. Instead, it's being widely abused much like the anti-vaxx movement to opt out of society, norms, and replace education and healthcare with religion. And then it begs credulity why they are so many kids dying and losing their immune systems (IA because measles attacks the immune system) from an entirely preventable disease that has a safe and effective vaccine that was previously mandatory for everyone. And then it follow: what good is there in allowing some parents to selectively opt their kids out of society, a fundamental right of passage, and an essential public good to ensure socialization and universal education. Division of labor, specialization of trade for most means sending kids to properly funded, staffed, and sensible curricula public schools so the parents are freed up to earn more and make the family's life better.
There are some parents who might be Yale law grads who might not be rich who opt for some homeschooling given the right situation, but these are the outliers and I'm okay with these, while most aren't.
I Homeschooled both of my children from birth to 7th and 9th grade, respectively. The state I live in had, at the time (might still), zero regulation around Home Schooling. I have met hundreds of home schooling families and children (as well as hired one), all wonderful people. A lot of them chose to do so for one or two common reasons (religion and learning disability seem, unscientifically, to be the most common).
I'm a bit of a unique case in that "it really should have been an unbelievable mess": this was done, almost entirely, while divorced from Mom. And we were not "amicable" through much of it. It was a decision we had both committed to before the kids were born and stuck with after the divorce. I have two children, not 4+ (maybe that's just my experience, but the first family I talked to about this had 7). I didn't do it for religious reasons, bullying reasons, "I hate teachers or public schools" reasons or because I wanted my children to win a bunch of spelling bees. I did it after researching options and concluding that I could educate my two children better than any other option available to them and I could do so without them spending all day in books. I believed I was taught arithmetic in a manner that made it harder for me to understand Algebra[0], and I didn't feel I was ever encouraged or otherwise directed "to learn skills and subjects on my own." The top two, though, were "I wanted self-learners" and I, my son and my daughter are diagnosed ASD (type 1); Mom probably is, too, but getting a diagnosis as an adult is combinations of difficult/pointless.
After the early years (probably 4th grade on, earlier for my youngest), the average Home School day became 45 minutes of book/traditional learning work (often less) from Home School curriculum, usually another 45 minutes of self-directed study and for the most part the rest of the day was for themselves to direct (with restrictions; video games were limited to creative and some other specific titles but our children had far more freedom than most). We did weekday only (with a lot of vacation) and September-April. There was simply no way to make the materials go any longer.
They did not take tests (at least, not in the way they're taken at school) until they took their first test in 7th and 9th grade. We, like most Home School parents, started off trying to "replicate school approaches" at home and discovered most of them exist because of schools. My favorite is "grades." If someone asked, "4.0". And they'd assume it's "because I'm Dad" and assume I'm grading lax. I'm not grading at all. We work on the material until it is learned above proficiently. And as a parent Home Schooling, that is the only path to success that doesn't involve misery because if you let them have a mulligan on something, it'll be built upon later and you and they will drown. You need grades in mainstream school, you need "pass/fail" with an "A" being the bar for passing in Home Schools.
I didn't admit most of this in the past, especially not the "45 minute" bit. I straight up lied about it to anyone who wasn't a Home School parent. I had family and friends actively discouraging me every single year that I did this. I admit it, now, because they're top students in their mainstream school and have been since day 1.
My children, like everyone else's, got lonely after the COVID lockdowns and we'd always told them they can decide what to do when my oldest reaches High School. It was sad, suddenly every kid is home but nobody's allowed to play together and even if they could, all of their peers were spending the whole day trying to replicate a classroom via video-calls. My kids were lonely, bored, and unhappy. The day-time Home School activities (that most people are completely unaware of) had been tried up for two years and didn't seem to be coming back. So we put them in Public Schools and lucked out that Mom was located the #4 district and the #1 High School in that district. It's been four years; my son is a Senior.
That first test taking experience landed them in accelerated courses. They started with and have continued to have a 4.0 GPA. They get the homework done at school. They might study for mid-terms and finals. My daughter, last year, I think had half of her classes with every single point earned. They've bested me in every imaginable way (I had a rocking 2.5 GPA in High School). They take school very seriously, but every year they've had a portion of the class that's been review from things we did in Home School.
If it seems unbelievable that I'd get these results on so little time, have a conversation with other Home School parents (assuming their children have some external validation to their education, otherwise we all lie). Consider that I have two children, not 20. You can basically read your own child's mind up until they reach their teens (much longer if they spend most of their time around you instead of peers at school). Being able to read your student's mind is an incredibly unfair advantage. It's not even that "you notice more quickly when you're going to slow or they're not understanding" it's that you anticipate it. I knew what parts of math I would have to slow down with for my son, they were different for my daughter (long division was daily fits with tears and all for a few weeks). Most of the time, with learning, there's a lot of burst/buffer/stall cycles and the sending and receiving end take a long time to figure out when one is in a sub-optimal state. We didn't do rigorous lesson plans (that's for keeping a class full of kids on the same page), we let them dictate how fast or slow we moved based on how much or little they struggle.
I hesitate to say "Just because we only spent 45 minutes in the books doesn't mean we didn't spend the rest of the day learning in other ways" but if you saw how a day was conducted, you'd conclude we didn't. My kids were enrolled in extra-curricular activities, but probably fewer than most mainstream school kids. They had weekly random activities that would be considered "field trips" in school. We were probably more strict than most parents with some things, because we could be: my kids received their first mobile phones at, I think, 13 and 15. We allowed no more than two hours per day of "watching a video, television show or movie." But (outside of inappropriate content) they were mostly unrestricted with which video games they could play and they played plenty (my daughter can slaughter me in just about everything, but I stopped playing for a decade while they were young). My daughter has taught herself to read music, guitar tabs and play Guitar, Bass, Piano and she sings. I played piano for 15 years and she's learned in a year what it took me five with formal lessons. She's taught herself to paint. My son is mini-me, computers, 3D printers, CNC, programming and any other electronic toy.
The reason I didn't do it for, though, turned out to be the reason I'm most thankful that I accepted the minor sacrifice: I wouldn't have had the arrogance to pray for the closeness and kind of relationship I have with my kids, today. I know my parents dreaded going to parent-teacher conferences. Those are my favorite!
[0] And, unintentionally favored an approach that ended up becoming Common Core math in my state, which is just loathed by parents ... which is too bad, because it worked very well for my own kids.
Homeschooling, and more generally schooling, and more generally raising kids. They're hot-button topics that bring out the strong opinions and searing anecdotes, and the resulting "discussion" always seems to be depressingly useless. (I won't exempt this comment from that criticism.)
I'm just going to say that "homeschooling" is not a single thing and it's useless to pretend it is. In fact, "public school" is not a single thing and it's mostly useless to pretend it is.
I went to public school. My kids were a combination of public primary school, home schooling, and local community colleges. That experience gives me... well, very little in terms of predicting or understanding what others' experiences were like.
50-kid public schools (the size I went to) can be great for interacting with a diverse group of people -- like, actually interacting with them, not just attending the same school as them. It's also common for "diverse" in this case to mean "kids from a range of socioeconomic situations who are 95% the same race or religion" -- most small schools draw upon a small rural population that is often pretty homogeneous. (That was my experience.)
500-kid public schools naturally have much more diversity in total, but are totally random in terms of what an individual kid will actually experience. It's common for the kids to rigidly stratify themselves. It doesn't matter if there's a kid of a different color from you in your math class if you're surrounded by people like you and he's surrounded by people like him. Athletics are better at mixing people (by forcing a different stratification!), but it's easy to avoid having to deal with "them" even there if you don't want to.
Home schooling varies even more.
Yet that whole argument is also pushing a narrative of "good" vs "bad": being forced together with diverse people is good, so environments where that happens are better! But that's not true either, there are tradeoffs. I'll describe it in terms of stereotypes: public school kids get more exposure and experience with a wider range of kids their age. Home schooled kids get more exposure and experience with adults and kids of other ages. (I'm not saying either of these is universally true, but just go with it for now.) Which is better? You can argue that it's critical to survive the social pressure cooker of traditional schooling because you'll have to handle the same situations as an adult. But you can also argue that if you look at what's happening in public schools, those kids may be good at dealing with each other but they're often failing when faced with the real world. They depend on the collective consciousness that comes from being surrounded by similar-aged people physically and electronically, they're helpless when the responsibility is no longer diffused and they are actually the one and only person who can solve a situation, and they have a sense of entitlement that anything hard is unfair. The stereotypical homeschooled kid is vastly more prepared for many life situations.
A former teacher of the year, Gatto became very influential in early homeschooling movements.
Parents or potential parents interested in education and schooling might also want to read Maria Montessori, and John Holt's books "How Children Fail" and "How Children Learn."
We as a species actually know quite a bit about raising children, socialization, and education. I think we get duped by our surrounding society and government institutions hijacking those goals in service of control, indoctrination, conformity, and maintaining class and power structures. Schools serve just as much, if not more, to prepare children to work as "productive" members of a capitalist culture, to do what they get told, as they do to teach our kids anything or help them learn to get along with other people. Call me an anarchist or Marxist, I don't care.
I haven’t read the whole thread but thought I’d share my experience having been homeschooled 12 grades.
My parents started homeschooling me because the public schools near where they lived then were supposedly subpar (Miami in the mid 80s, I have no idea if what they believed is true). When they moved to Michigan in 89 they continued homeschooling me and later my younger sister because they’d gotten used to it and a big court case had just been won (or was shortly after we moved) making it officially legal there.
I never complained because I did have a good social group through church, the neighborhood, and a strong homeschool group in the area that organized weekly park days, some coop classes with professional teachers, but more than any of that it gave me so much freedom.
My mom did a good job teaching me by 4th or 5th grade how to teach myself given course material, the library, and her or my dad when I needed more. She did standardized testing for us every year and I was able to complete 12th grade just before turning 17. They pushed me to use the local community college for math and science by 14 because they didn’t feel equipped with more advanced topics. They got me into summer science camps at the college I ended up attending and getting my undergrad at.
Every family I knew in the group were doing it for different reasons and did things differently but shared tips, curriculum, and really their lives with us. It was a very tight knit community despite spanning over 600 square miles. Some probably got stronger educations and more opportunities, for many different reasons, socioeconomic and others. As I remember most were well adjusted and successful as adults.
I mentioned freedom above and I’ll end on that. Once I’d been taught how to teach myself the sky was the limit. I had the opportunity to focus 4 hours straight on school work and then to work with my dad at construction sites, swinging a hammer, eventually part of a crew of 4 every afternoon building houses or whatever. That started at age 12. By 14 I wrote my first business plan with a friend, raised $10k from family and private investors, and started my first business (VRcade in Jackson MI, summer of 96). By 16 I had an IT consultancy. I don’t think I’d have had as many opportunities like that if I’d been at the local highschool from 7:30-2:30pm every day. I had friends at the school and a few of them worked service jobs after school but that was pretty rare.
So what did I do for my two kids? We chose public (charter) school for them but we got super involved. My wife and I volunteer there a few hours a week, teaching gardening and helping where needed. Neither of us felt we had the patience or skills to be full time educators and Covid proved that out when the kids were home for 6 months. I’m still not sure what magic my mom used to teach me how to teach myself. The important thing is we found our community at the school and amazing teachers, many of whom have been there 1-3 decades.
I am trying to instill the values and initiative my parents (both entrepreneurs) empowered me with. We’ve been paying for instruction for our 11yo at a (unofficial) trade school for a few years and now the same school pays them to help with instruction when they have big beginner classes. My youngest is leaning more towards tech like me and is super into games so I’m going to try and stretch my generalist programming skills to empower them in that arena.
All this to say I think it’s ok to have many ways to do things and find the way that fits your family. I really appreciate public schools because many wouldn’t have the opportunity for an education otherwise and I try to contribute back to that as much as I can even though it wasn’t my experience. And I support those who have chosen homeschooling and figured out how to make it work. Private schools I’m a little more meh on but I’ll do my best not to judge, lol.
Homeschooling comes up fairly often on HN, usually eliciting the same kinds of comments. Commenters repeat the same old tropes, generalize from anecdotes, and project individual experiences onto other people.
I raised and homeschooled three children. One of my daughters homeschooled from second grade to the time she started college. My other two children decided to attend public school at various ages, and then mixed that with homeschooling because I didn't force them to attend school.
Infants have obvious personality tendencies. Some seem curious and outgoing, others afraid and nervous. Some babies seem happy and comfortable with other people, and some recoil and cry when approached. They don't start as blank slates. The family environment, siblings, peers, and the school environment can exacerbate innate tendencies or push children to change. A shy child may withdraw and develop social anxiety at school, or turn more extroverted and confident. Personality traits change throughout our lives, and that happens faster and often more dramatically in young children.
"School," "homeschooling," and "socialization" don't describe specific or uniform experiences, though people use those terms as if they do. Some children have loving and nurturing home environments, some suffer abuse. Some children attend well-funded and staffed schools, others spend their years in a prison-like environment with the emphasis on crowd control. Some teachers have a talent for teaching and subject mastery, they can inspire children to learn. Others seem resentful, incompetent, disengaged, even cruel. General statements about public schools, teachers, and the process of socialization don't mean anything because of huge variations across broad spectrums in multiple dimensions.
When asked, teachers will cite parental engagement as the most important determinant of student success. Many, probably most, parents use school (starting with infant daycare) as a place to park their kids while they work, trusting strangers they rarely meet to raise their children. When you watch a classroom of children interact with the teacher and each other you can pick out the kids who have involved parents and those who don't. Of course most parents have no choice for economic reasons. Homeschooled kids tend to come from two-parent middle (I'd say upper middle) class families for that reason -- few families can afford to have one or both parents lose so much work time. Several studies of homeschooled children implicate family socio-economic status and income in the success of the children, already advantaged compared to the majority of public school kids.
Parents take a wide range of approaches to raising children, generally with little or no training or preparation. You have a child and suddenly you have complete responsibility for another human being, making decisions on the fly, subjected to conflicting advice and guidance. That other human being has their own personality, will, requirements, and eventually desires and opinions, and you have to discover those and adapt to them because children don't come with labels or documentation. Some parents pay little attention to their kids, often because the parents have too many economic, relationship, or other problems of their own. Some parents treat their kids as extensions of themselves, a chance for a do-over, version 2.0, and will start prepping their child for the future the parent wishes they had regardless of the child's inclinations and desires. Some parents want to control their children, usually in the name of protecting their child from the world. Parents who don't recognize and respect their children as separate individuals can do a lot of damage, both in socialization and in academics, and you see the results with both schooled and homeschooled children.
In fifteen years of homeschooling my own children I spent a lot of time with other homeschooling parents. The terms "homeschooling parent" and "homeschooler" refer to such a broad spectrum of motivations and approaches that they doesn't usefully describe anything at all. Some parents want to raise their children in a faith tradition (I met fundamentalist Christian parents, Mormons, Muslims, Jews). Some parents want to raise their children with no faith tradition (secular homeschoolers), but then push their own woo-woo and new-agey beliefs on their kids (opposition to vaccines, mindfulness, astrology, homeopathy, "Indigo children," etc.). Both religious and secular homeschoolers can indoctrinate and control their children, and put their own beliefs, desires, frustrations, and fantasies into their kids' heads. I call that another form of not respecting the child as an individual.
The socialization topic comes up so much when talking about homeschooling that I have to say something about it. Whether schooled or homeschooled, children get exposed to adults, other children, and peers their own age. Each child will react and adapt to their specific circumstances according to their personality. Nothing inherently prevents homeschooled kids from enjoying a rich social life, but parents often restrict social activities, and with whom their kids socialize. Nothing inherent about the school environment magically "socializes" kids. Some children thrive in the school environment, others graduate or drop out with emotional trauma. Some schools offer more stable and safe environments than others, largely a function of ZIP Code in the USA.
Homeschooling at its best takes parental engagement to the extreme: parents take complete control over, and responsibility for, their child's education both academically and socially. Parents might get good results from the right schools if they engage with the teachers and pick the right school (thus the popularity of private schools). Parents who recognize and respect the individuality of their children, and don't treat them as clones or property, who actively take part in educating their child (whether at home or school), have a good chance at raising a well-adjusted and functional adult. The less the parents engage and take responsibility, the less the parents respect their children as discrete individuals, the more likely they will raise a child with academic failings and maladjusted personalities.
Look at the results all around us, the products of public schooling and disengaged parenting. Homeschooled kids may have the same problems, but in my experience that happens less often, especially if you exclude the large number of religious fundamentalist homeschoolers in America.
Specifically for the HN crowd (to which I belong)... people who work in the software profession that cannot measure what we call productivity, a profession that cannot agree on "best practices" around even trivial things like indenting, should step back and take a more humble approach to opining and lecturing about parenting, education, and homeschooling. No one knows the right or best way to raise children, or how to "properly" educate them. Instead we have a lot of opinions and traditions and government-imposed rules, some useful and some bullshit. As parents we have to sift through all of that and make decisions on the fly that can dramatically affect our children for the rest of their lives. We can't refactor away a bully, a cruel teacher, neglect, or the effects of expecting an iPad to substitute for attention and care.
I was homeschooled as a child, from 1st through 12th grade, in a large homeschooling community from the late 1980s through the 1990s. I started college in 2000.
I heard all the stories about how homeschooled kids get better standardized test scores and generally enter college with fewer remedial courses, better academic outcomes, etc. I heard all the arguments that "actually, we do socialize, because we can still do Scouts and sports and blah blah blah."
It was all horse shit.
I do not know a single homeschooling family that did not have an issue with the parents eventually slacking off on checking up that the kids were doing the work. And, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the kids just skipped doing any work for most of the year. There would be a mad scramble at the end of the year to concoct a fraudulent portfolio to present to the state-required evaluator. And when the dust settled and all the spankings were done and all the tears were dried, new promises were made to not do it next year. New threats were made that you could "get up at 6am and get on that bus."
It took me until my 40s to realize it wasn't my fault. The people who were the responsible party--i.e. my parents--stopped acting responsibly. The person who is so incapable of being responsible that the state won't even let them drink, drive, or vote (all activities infinitely easier than trying to teach yourself)--i.e. my self--was the one who had all the blame lumped on him.
This wasn't a unique experience. I think maybe 1 kid out of the 30 I knew did not have this experience at least once in their homeschooling life. That one kid was perhaps the smartest, most mature of us; or perhaps she just feared her parents the most. She's also dead now, having killed herself in her early 30s.
For me, it was 4 times.
It was incredibly traumatizing. I lived the first 20 years of my adult life believing I was fundamentally a dishonest and untrustworthy person, and therefore unworthy of anything, especially love and career success. What I was was an irresponsible kid, aka "a kid", who had practically no supervision.
Every parent always said publicly they were doing it for academic reasons. In private, amongst themselves, the true reasons came out: sequestration away from "unauthorized" religious, political, and social ideas. And it always, always leaned right. We couldn't go to school because they were Teaching Evolution As If It's Fact When It's Just A Theory At That School. We couldn't go to school because Ever Since The Immigrants Started Moving Here To Take All The Apple Picking Jobs The Crime Has Been Through The Roof At That School (what the local family practice doctor cared about apple picking jobs, I could never figure out as a child). We couldn't go to school because They're Teaching Homosexuality Is Not An Abomination At That School.
Meanwhile, every single child I grew up with had to face a cliff moment where they had to decide if our collective experience was abusive. The few of us who said yes managed to get through college without dropping out, get moved away from home, get through rounds of suicidal ideation, self-medicating, therapy, antidepressants, and maybe eventually coming to terms and having happy productive lives.
Or they said no, it was fine, and they now live in poverty, have broken homes, still-active alcoholism, or are dead from suicide.
My own mother might be developing dementia and doesn't seem to recall at all things my sister and I agree we remember clearly. Things I've heard my friends repeat in their own stories. Things they've said their own parents also deny. I grew up incredibly lonely. My parents not only sequestered my sister and I from our municipal community, but also to some extent from our homeschooling community, because the one silver lining about my own particular experience was that my parents were not religious zealots. I grew up in constant fear of the State taking me away from my parents just because my mother took me to the grocery store during school hours (a thing my mother asserted could happen, so I better behave to not draw attention to us). I grew up believing society was going to collapse at any time. I grew up believing I was certainly going to Hell because, even though my parents claimed to be religious, we didn't go to church.
To this day, despite the intellectual knowledge that I'm really no different than anyone else, I still cannot shake the feeling that I'm always the outsider looking in, always the interloper trying to masquerade inside, and decode the secret workings of, the social groups I'm in.
This is incredibly difficult for me to talk about. There are many things I still cannot talk about, so please resist the online commentator urge to infer things about my current relationships.
I see people today talking about "we're thinking of homeschooling our children." Not just online, but in my own community, too. I want to scream at them that they have no idea what a gigantic mistake they are entering into. Even assuming they can avoid the dishonest reasoning for why they are doing it, even assuming they will perfectly execute an educational plan for their children over the course of 12 years, they are at the vet least forcing an outsider's complex on their children.
Yes, parents who send their children to public school could still be abusive. Yes, children who do go to public school also develop outsider complexes and plenty of other mental health issues. But at least the child will have a better chance to see that there are alternatives. At least the child will have a better chance to learn that they are a member of a shared society. At least the child will have a better chance to become independent from their parents.
You might actually be referring to yourself. Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.
I think the point is that part of having a functioning society (civic life, engagement, tolerance of others) is having people mix together. School is one of the prime places where that happens.
If you allow a lot of people to pull away from that "forced" engagement with others then you start to stress a lot of societal bonds.
I don't know a single homeschooler that sits at home all day long. They work in family businesses, participate in bands, sports, and co-ops. Many belong to churches where families come from all different strata: our church has surgeons, line cooks, programmers, self-employed handymen, disabled vets. They interact with everyone—including kids. They do things like "kid markets" where they have a business. They watch their parents learn how the house works and how to manage finances.
There is no forced engagement—in fact the peer pressure is often completely gone. They are in an environment (their family) where they are much freer to be themselves.
The best functioning society that I experienced was when 90% of the people were (presbyterian) Christians. We replaced that with something very, very disfunctional.
the purpose of education is largely opposite of indocrination (plus few other things). if your kid is being educated is such an environment you should move (or pay for private education).
I get where you're coming from but I think your statement is a bit naive.
Education systems as we know them today are absolutely about indoctrination in so many ways. Capitalism, love of country, views on family units, beauty and aaesthetics, what has cultural value and what does not etc etc. Not to mention many school systems just straight up having classes on religion, allowing armed forces into schools to recruit and the like.
Whether you're worried about left wing or right wing indoctrination, it still holds true. All kids are being indoctrinated every time they go to school same as every time they watch TV.
Exactly. Which history lessons get taught, which books get assigned as reading, which clubs are available, etc. Even if they are taught to be critical of the assignments they get, if the selection is limited enough, kids will not have the breadth of knowledge to even see the alternatives.
I pay a lot of money for my 12-year to not be in the system you are describing and am grateful I can provide this for her more than I am grateful for just about anything else
100%. The school and the Internet are the two places children can encounter opinions different from their parents’ for the first time. With an increase in homeschooling and recent pushes to ban social media for children, it’s clear that critical thinking is going to suffer most. I still have not met someone who was homeschooled who was remotely thankful for it.
Honestly, support for these policies that benefit, more than anyone else, abusive parents, makes me suspicious of people’s motives.
Hello! My parents were early homeschooling pioneers, and I never had any conventional schooling. I think it suited me very well, and I'm glad my parents did it. I am solidly middle-aged now, but nothing I've seen or heard in all these years has given me the impression that I missed out on any experience worth having.
My guess is that this is related to the conservative attacks on education in the U.S., and it's especially insidious because, again I'm guessing, it's mostly liberal minded people who are buying into home schooling in part due to anti-education right wing propaganda. I live in Santa Cruz county, would not be surprised if we had one of the highest home school rates in the country. It feels like a combination of constant anti-education propaganda and the "snowflake syndrome" where parents think their kids are too special to be treated the same as other students in a classroom.
I don't feel better prepared to teach at home than someone who actually went to college for the various topics covered in high school. How can I know all I need to teach about math, chemistry, english, physics, etc, etc, etc when I already have to learn so much for my own work? I think parents that think they can do a better job are delusional.
Maybe the school _environment_ that a child has access isn't great, right? But I don't think that says anything about teachers.
In California, a teacher without a chemistry degree can teach high school chemistry after passing the CSET Chemistry subtest. This requires less depth of knowledge than AP Chemistry.
Elementary Education and Pedagogy are "sciences" with an even poorer replication rate than Sociology and Psychology.
Nobody educated to teach is actually qualified to do so by virtue of said education. Teaching is largely a personality-driven and experience-acquired skill.
At school, one teacher lectures to maybe 30 students. If all they did was give individual attention student by student, each would get maybe 10 minutes a day.
The first 10 minutes of your home-school day you've beat that statistic.
After two or three hours, you're up to a month of class time.
Of course they don't do that; they just lecture. Which is something you can get online (Khan Academy).
It's all about the homework and tutoring, baby.
All you have to do is learn along with your home student, and validate their learning experience. Helps if you catch on quicker, but not even necessary.
homeschooled kids are literally competing against kids from other countries that are being schooled on calculus, geometry, statistics, algebra with practical chemistry, physics and biology lessons. This is not going to end well 15 yrs down the line
Lots of colleges offer laboratory science classes for homeschooled children. AOPS wipes the floor with any math education you’d get at a public school. Most US national laboratories have on-site programs for school-aged kids and homeschoolers have equal standing for attending.
You think avoiding these things are why people are thinking about homeschooling?!
In San Francisco where I live the public school system made the decision to not offer algebra until later for egalitarian reasons. Basically since they couldn't bring up the students that faired poorly in math, they delayed the subject for everybody. Along the same lines, they took the one high school dedicated to the highest achieving students and turned it into a lottery system rather than something earned.
Yes, of course you're right, kids will be competing on all those subjects. But the idea that public institutions are somehow the safeguards of fundamental academic achievement is just out of touch.
Of course, San Francisco public school's embrace of socialist/egalitarian drive identity politics is just one example of public education failure. Elsewhere in the US in these times, other school districts are being turned effectively into seminaries because the other political side has other doctrinal objectives. In neither case is learning how to think or how the world really works is important.
they create the feeling of belonging to something, a group, a social circle. you cannot recreate that at home. you ll see what happens after a decade going along this path. The feelings of being an orderly part of a group and partaking in group stuff cannot be recreated at home
You know, I'm relatively social and I don't even go to school let alone a public school! How do I manage it? I engage with social groups in other ways.
Homeschooling doesn't necessitate going into a dark room somewhere and closing/locking the door. Sure, some may do that... but majority simply don't. Suggesting that there aren't paths to good socialization outside of public school is just rationalizing a position and ignoring the reality that many home schoolers don't operate in isolation. We're a social species and we tend to seek out others. This is even true for homeschoolers who can collaborate or engage in all manner of social opportunities that exist amongst a coalition of homeschoolers or they can take advantage of the social activities which are available in most communities of any size. Again, we're social creatures and we'll give into that impulse. To suggest that has to be nurtured by a public institution or is somehow unavailable outside of a public school just isn't credible on its face.
As others have said all up and down the thread, you take measures to build that social circle and interaction. And I can tell you from direct personal experience... a public school offers positive interaction opportunities to some, but wholly negative and even damaging to others... public schools absolutely offer a social experience. Whether that's good or bad in my experience is at best a case-by-case call.
LLM's have revolutionized the way people learn and utilize what they have learned. The future is 8 year old material science lads doing chemistry in their step-mother's RV
I've had to re-learn math skills long forgotten to help my kids with their school work. It's been an interesting experience.
The expectations for home schooling are different and are, in some ways, aimed more towards reality. My son finishes the bulk of his work in an hour most days and then has time for 2 instruments, learning C++, Rust, and Python, community/church participation and more.
> Once an alternative way to educate children, homeschooling is now an increasingly popular and mainstream option.
TFA does not even begin to grapple with the single most important issue, which is who is actually doing the homeschooling.
This is only an option for certain families, with parents with enough bandwidth and knowhow to do this effectively. That excludes many tens of millions of Americans.
I think this is really about class, race, and religious segregation. Families can do what they want, of course, but this framing makes it sound like failing schools are the whole problem and I don't think that's the whole story.
I can't say my public school experience was great, I was bullied and didn't really click with the popular kids, but being around a cross section of actual American kids in my age group (my school district mixed middle class with lower class neighborhoods) helped me shape my worldview and learn to deal with people who didn't look or talk like me. I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people. I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
My kids are not school age yet, and I am not sure on if I will home school or not. But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling. There is the neighborhood kids, you have sports and clubs kids can join, religious groups.
Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day. Some people "homeschooling" I know are groups of parents getting together to educate their children together in small groups of ~5 kids to share the responsibility, and hiring a tutor to fill in the gaps. Monday they go John's house, his mom has a philosophy degree and teaches them. tuesday they go to Janes house, her dad is a Mathematician and teaches them. etc.
I used to work at a YMCA, and the local homeschool group asked us to do a PE class, which I taught.
I had the kids doing swimming, rock climbing, and all kinds of traditional PE games.
I worked with "normal" kids most of the time, and I will say the homeschool kids stuck out. They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part. And they were disproportionately ahead of their peers academically--though I think that's probably a selection bias for the parents seeking out homeschool PE classes.
This was in the early 2000s, before Facebook. I'm sure the avenues to connect have only grown with social media.
> They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part.
This is another argument that "by age" is not the best way to find one's academic or social peers.
Some people in 2nd grade should be in high school. Some people in high school should be in 2nd grade. (And, academically, sometimes that's different by subject; some people need to be in 2nd grade math and high-school reading.)
I was a TA/lab-assistant at the community college I was attending. I spent a lot of time talking to and helping out people, universally older than me, who had gotten out of high school and needed to figure out where in a multi-year curriculum of remedial math they should start.
This is one of the most insane comments I’ve ever read on a hackernews story. Age is very much important when finding one’s social peers as a child.
Diversity of peers is generally a win. Children aren't supposed to be learning how to act based on what other children are doing - it is a crowd where no-one has any idea how to behave. Kids by nature are supposed to be developing in the company of adults.
Assuming you are in the US, consider that your perspective may be influenced by the modern (since second half 20th century) education system which so strictly stratifies by age. It actually is much stranger to me that we would expect peers to be exact age. There is a lot to learn from older kids, or even other (non-teacher, non-parent) adults.
Per HN's Comment Guidelines, I'd assume that Josh meant sorting students by both physical age and subject skill levels. The physical/emotional differences between 2nd graders and HS kids are obvious enough.
OTOH, one of my grandmothers spent her education career in a one room school house, teaching all subjects to grades 1-8. With the right social context, it can work very well.
It seems like a great way to foster a sense of community.
Our peers are more than people our age. They are the people older and younger than us too.
> It seems like a great way...
It was a small town, in the early 1900's. Everybody knew everybody, including the kids - who freely roamed the town when not doing chores or such.
I'd agree that it was very good for the kids' social development...but "foster a sense of community", in the present-day context, sounds like an express ticket to expecting far too much from it.
:) Perhaps.
Why?
Take a second to think through why it might be bad for a 2nd grader to seek high schoolers as social peers.
Take a second to think through why it might be great for a fourth grader to seek out college-aged people as social mentors (with the right barriers).
That was me.
With your condescending broad-speak.
Under 18, the mind is closer to those +/- a few years from you, developmentally (and generally speaking). At least, that's what the know-it-alls were telling me when I was listening. Both pro and con home-school "zealots". Age peers is a thing
Peers in what sense? There are clearly examples of kids that are both erudite many years beyond their age and kids that excel in technical subjects well beyond their years. Clearly a distribution exists and it’s wider than +/- a few years even if that covers 1 or even 2 standard deviations.
For what it’s worth I’ve even met adults who can’t regulate and control their emotional reactions. They often have a prison background which either caused it or why they ended up in prison.
Age. I said "age peers"
I think you completely missed the point I was trying to make. Age peers are an illusion and only appears like a thing because most people follow a standard distribution; but this does nothing for the people who are further away from the mean.
Yeah, I routinely took classes with students 3–8 years older than me before going to college. "Age peers" are an illusion. However:
1. I mostly only cared about school w.r.t learning. For most kids, school is primarily a place to socialize.
2. If it took you two years to achieve the same level as what took someone else ten years (going with the 2nd vs. 10th grade example from a few comments up), I don't think you're going to get an appropriate pacing by just moving into the same class as them...
Maybe you missed when I said "generally". However you seem to be aware of standard distribution (ie generally) and then go on to talk about the edges (again).
I'm not missing your point at all. I'm talking generally and you're just stating (the obvious) that curves (spectrum?) exist and that some (~30%?) are outside the middle of the bell. Neat.
Since we agree there is a range of personalities and intelligence, maybe we agree that wide exposure to others (such as classmates) is, generally, a good thing.
> I'm sure the avenues to connect have only grown with social media.
The rise of social media has led to a massive increase in lonelyness and alienation of young people, not the contrary.
I had the mind of a home-schooled child in the body of a public-school student. Never clicked with peers until college, to be frank. Perhaps I could have made actual friends in high school if I gave up on associating with students of higher social status.
15+ years ago, that might have been the case. Now, you might find some friends in the 3-8 year old range, but then the kids just...don't do things anymore. In both suburban neighborhoods I've lived in the past 10 years, there are basically zero middle school or high school kids doing anything except playing video games and messing around on their phones from the comfort of home. School is quite literally the only social interaction most of these kids get aside from their parents, and if they didn't go to school, they'd just spend more time playing video games or on their phones.
Outside of the coasts or university towns, there aren't any "mathematicians" with kids just waiting around to form homeschooling groups with you.
My cousin homeschooled her kids, who are now finished with college. I know they're capable of using phones (one's a programmer), but I've never seen them pull one out. They're social and love playing board games, and I suspect that comes from their parents. They also socialized with other homeschooled kids, because they were part of lots of homeschooling groups.
The kids in public school are there by default; the homeschooling parents are actively choosing to raise their kids differently, and, from what I've seen, they're more likely to interact with their kids instead of letting them go terminally online or play video games.
this is just wild to make some blanked statement about kids that are homeschooled and screen time compared to kids that go to school based on one example. probably 99.97% homeschooled kids spend more time staring at the screens than kids that go to school (if not more)
You’re doing the same thing, except with even less anecdata
exactly :)
The previous neighborhood I lived in, had around 100 townhomes, very secluded. I never saw kids outside other than walking from the bus stop. However my current neighborhood, which is a development of 15 houses, 11 of which have children. The kids are almost all doing things outside every day. Caveat: everyone in my neighborhood is college educated (mix of engineers, professors, finance, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and some other stuff) pretty sociable, and we (the parents) all seem to independently be anti smart phone, tv, etc. high school age kids do seem to go outside less, but theyre all 2 or 3 sport kids, and pretty busy academically.
It's also a question of accessible public spaces.
The US (especially the vast bulk of suburbia) is incredibly varied in quantity of these.
Some areas have them. Ironically, for all their faults, Florida master planned developments do better than most, and the west has a surfeit of natural land.
Others are an endless sea of kid-unfriendly private businesses and/or income-gated spaces, locked behind access to an automobile.
At some point the US, especially east coast suburban US, forgot that roaming kids need somewhere to roam...
I think it’s mostly phones, social media etc… My 20 year younger sister grew up in the same house I did with almost zero changes within walking distance.
Her and her friends never played outside. Me and my friends and my brother (7 years younger than me) and my other sister’s (4 years younger younger) friends lived outside in the summer.
> In both suburban neighborhoods I've lived in the past 10 years, there are basically zero middle school or high school kids doing anything except playing video games and messing around on their phones from the comfort of home.
While perhaps not uncommon, these sound like massively dysfunctional neighborhoods.
Everytime I see these kinds of arguments, it sounds like someone desperately trying to argue that a park playground is almost as entertaining for kids as an amusement park. Your example of 5 kids socializing with each other is definitely better than 1 kid at home. It’s also definitely worse than learning to socialize in a school of 500 kids each day. This is undeniable unless you have an argument of how a pool of 500 kids would somehow have less diversity of personality, thought, languages, physical features, intelligence, etc.
The way I look at it if I were to end up homeschooling my kid wouldn't socialize with the ~5 kids in the co-op.
* co-op
* Ballet
* Fencing
* Gymnastics
* Math Circle
* Church / Fellowship
* Neighbors
* Family & Friends
That easily adds up to 50 children their age.
But my thinking isn't really about the numbers of socialization. Public school academics move at a glacial pace. They don't have a sufficient rigor, lack a decent education in mathematics, neglect the classics and philosophy, and have started to neglect the western canon in favor of contemporary literature which is poorly written and offers little value. There are also, even in the best schools, trouble students that disrupt classrooms.
In my neighborhood:
* there is no co-op. Meeting another homeschooler is a whole day affair due to traffic
* ballet and other extracurricular are fine, but always after school hours when traffic is terrible
* math circle is so oversubscribed you have to test to get into it
* neighbors’ kids are locked in school all day and then doing their custom extracurricular. We never see them.
* family & friends, we have none.
Nonetheless we homeschool. We can cover 2 years of math and reading in 6 months.
and what does “covering 2 years of math and reading in 6 months” do for you? getting ready to send your kids to 9-5 grind when they are 12?
Or just because math is awesome and knowing more is just great knowledge to obtain.
For some reason people think having an education is only valuable if it is traded for money. For example I think an educated wife and a mom who never earns a single dollar from an employer is incredibly value to her family.
I hope my daughters get a robust liberal arts education and then just get married young and have kids and be homemakers.
I hope they’ll have more options than I did. I never wanted to be a SWE working in social media, but grad school in pure math showed me I wasn’t good enough. A common story.
your kids will have amazing opportunities just because you are obviously a kick ass parent. but I don’t think squeezing two years of math in 6 months will do anything
As a bright student who was never challenged in K-12, I can unequivocally state that this ultimately hurt me in the long run. I seriously didn't know how to study and didn't care to try learning when I actually needed it in some of my undergrad courses.
For example, when I took trigonometry in high school I did none of the homework, showed up to the tests and aced them. That led me to getting a C in that class (kindly the teacher advanced me to pre-calc, but forced me to retake trig as well). That's basically the attitude I had throughout high school and undergrad. I'm positive I could have amounted to more earlier in life (only years later did I return to academia to earn my PhD in CS after tiring of industry).
You can't forget the projects that are supposed to teach you that you're really gonna regret it if you don't have good study habits that you skate through fine without developing those habits. Causes all future teachers to lose credibility.
same-ish for me but times are different now. kids these days have all the knowledge in the world at their fingertips and it is really up to the kids (with a little guidance :) )
It means they can get to the fun stuff that much faster. Speed run grinding the basics.
When do you work to pay for your life? And have time for your self?
>This is undeniable unless you have an argument of how a pool of 500 kids would somehow have less diversity of personality, thought, languages, physical features, intelligence, etc.
I have such an argument - have you considered the amount of forced social conformity in a public school versus a community of homeschooled people? Humans are weird in a way that 'public school culture' tries to paper over.
What social conformity is forced by schools these days ? Only one I can really remember was we had specific uniforms for PE (basically just gym shorts and a tshirt)
not the school administration, other students.
So, good training for exactly the same pressures they'll face as adults?
I’m not against public schools, but pretending the social pressures are anywhere near similar is wrong.
Kids are assholes in a way that would get most adults fired or imprisoned.
There are social pressures to conform, but you don’t get called names for wearing off brand shoes the way kids were when I was in grade school.
They are the same pressures. They occur in the same proportions.
Children are just really bad at it so it is extremely obvious. The rituals do not disappear when you turn 18. They do not disappear when you turn 98.
> They are the same pressures. They occur in the same proportions.
That's one hell of a claim to make:
Have you really had work environments where half your co-workers refused to talk to you? For months, if not years?
Have you ever been shoved down to the ground and punched repeatedly?
Have you ever had a co-worker chase you with a knife?
Have you ever had a co-worker set off a bomb to get out of work early?
Have you ever had a co-worker steal your wallet?
I can safely say I saw all of these going to public school, and have never encountered any of that behavior in the office.
Children are really good at this. Adults stop trying for various reasons.
Probably AI generated.
Every actual human with lived experience in society knows, that real life is much more diverse than school. In school, there’s at best a few cliques and mostly a single social hierarchy. After school, even during student years, but even more so when entering the workforce, there’s incredible variety of social hierarchies to climb, skills to learn and excel within, and career paths to take.
Zero comparison to school.
If “the rituals” are so subtle that I don’t notice them then it’s not the same pressure then is it?
well today’s parents do just about everything except prepare their children for adulthood
Everyone will eventually be exposed to some form of forced social conformity. You cannot shield your children from it forever. It is better that they experience it now and you do your job as the parent to teach them how to handle it appropriately.
“Humans are weird in a way that 'public school culture' tries to paper over.”
I went to a public school as did the vast majority of the world’s population today. Genuinely curious… Are you saddened by what you view as a lack of diversity and creativity in the world and do you blame that on public schools?
Schools have athletic kids and within that, groups interested in different sports. And within each sport, subgroups of kids who become close friends. All of that also applies to kids interested in musical instruments, art, computers, board games and on and on. Some kids are nice, some are assholes, and everything in between. You make it sound like public school systems output an army of clones. No. Your friend group changes over time as you meet others, as your interests/views change, and as other people change. You're constantly immersed amongst all the other groups and you learn to tolerate some, love some, and hate some. All of this learning is tremendously stifled if you’re talking about a kid learning to socialize in a group of 5 instead of 500.
Aside from individualism, there has to be conformity as well. That’s part of learning to socialize and function in the real world for later as an adult. Conforming is also just human nature stemming from wanting to be accepted in a group. We all naturally learned to balance conformity and individualism when we were thrown into the public school system. By home schooling, you’re saying no, I don’t have the confidence that my child can do it on their own, even if 99% of the world has done so.
Since you said you're genuinely curious - the answer to your first question is no. I'm grateful for what diversity and creativity does exist - and I recognize that even with public schools in the mix, it's more than what existed for most of human history. But public schools have certainly been a retarding force in the generally positive developments we've seen since my grandfathers' time.
Incidentally, they're only a little bit older than that, so we shouldn't pretend they're some deeply tested social technology.
I went to a school of about 50 kids, and I often wished I’d been at a school of 500 or more kids, but looking back I’m very glad my family didn’t opt for the school of 5000 kids.
At 50 kids, if you were social you definitely had friends (not just acquaintances) from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. At 50 kids, you could play sports on the official team if you wanted to and showed up and didn’t slack off. You knew everyone and there were no cliques, that would have been ridiculous with 50 kids.
I could go on, but those are just a few things (IMO good things) you get in a tiny school that you probably wouldn’t have at 500 kids and surely not at 5000.
I find it strange that you don’t hear of more homeschooling groups pulling together to create something like the 50-kid school.
My son is in a co-op with around that number of kids, but that's total (through HS).
The co-op I was in 30 years ago was a bit smaller but sounds like it's still going strong (no clue how big it is these days though).
So there definitely are homeschooling co-ops around that size. I do wonder what the average size of a co-op is though
But it may be much better than dealing with the problems that come with having 500 "random" kids to socialize / interact with. Everything's a tradeoff.
Yeah, wouldn’t want kids to learn how to deal with problems.
Dealing with adult problems shouldn't be something kids have to learn, as long as the problems scale with their development that's not a problem
I think quality over quantity matters. There was no one at my academic level at the public school, but two lived at my house. If you're worried about social skills, why do you expect an open admissions school to be able to train your children better than a more curated social group? You could say, "I don't trust parents to actually give their children experiences that would be beneficial, because maybe the parents are bigots or something," which like, sure is true. Lots of parents are like that. But they already pretty much have free reign to put their child in the local Bible Bootcamp instead of the public high school, so you're not really preventing this bad thing from happening, but you are preventing a lot of parents who would give their children a better experience than the local vaudeville show.
Except you don't interact with a meaningful section of those 500 kids you get stuck most of the day with a small % all the same age as you and told not to talk to each other.
It's going to depend greatly on your geo location and socioeconomic circumstances, but a homeschooled kid who interacts a lot in the neighbourhood (big "if", IME; those kids all have a lot of school friends) is still going to miss out on broader social, cultural, racial and financial exposure. Example: my white, middle-class kids have a lot of people exactly like them in community groups and sports clubs, but lots of eastern european & asian immigrants in their school classes. This is super-important in elementary school when they're far less aware and insular about interacting with people who are "different" IMO
The venn diagram of 'homeschooled' and 'goes to church regularly' is not quite a circle but its not far off. Moderate to large churches also provide a great deal of socialization in this same way. Cross-socio-economic, racial, and other bases, all with a shared value system that creates a localized high trust environment that affords a greater degree of freedom for child autonomy.
You don't need a degree in math to teach children age-appropriate math topics. Teachers don't become teachers just because they have a degree in that subject, they have been taught the methods on how to teach. Having prior knowledge of the subject is almost irrelevant. Teaching is really just applying solid methods on how to build knowledge from the most basic concepts as well as having the patience in dealing with humans who are not fully formed in their emotions.
I have a math degree. I have been volunteer tutoring high school kids in math for 9 years. When a student comes to me for help I can always tell if their teacher has math anxiety. They teach the students extremely rigid methods and refuse to allow alternative approaches to solve the problems. They enforce this with grading and penalize students who don't toe the line.
Some of the methods these teachers use are incredibly awkward, bespoke approaches that baffle me for their obtuseness. It's incredibly frustrating to deal with and it has a negative effect on the students.
My approach has always been to try to find the method that makes the most sense to the student, and work with them on that. I don't have any issues adapting my style to the student's needs. I only struggle when the spectre of one of those bad math teachers looms over our shoulders.
I wish there was a way to filter out those dumb-dumbs from the teaching profession. Stop ruining students’ future math ability.
There isn't. That's why homeschooling is taking off. People invest absolutely everything into their childrens' future. They're tired of seeing that investment wasted by subpar teaching and dysfunctional schools.
There is, but lowering standards is a cheap trick to get a bonus/promotion.
Why do 3rd grade math Teachers' Edition books have an answer key in them, I asked a 3rd grade teacher. She replied that many of the teachers couldn't do arithmetic.
It's a funny joke, but I'd be very surprised if that held at any grade school math level.
Someone would have to be numerically illiterate (with a college degree!) to be unable to do grade school math they've been teaching for multiple years.
Year 1, possible. But eventually it rubs off on even the teacher.
Sadly it's not a joke.
Most people suck at math. Those who don't suck usually have many well-paying jobs available for them. There are lots of schools, so many math teachers are needed.
Put these numbers together, and you realize that there is no way to have math teachers who are actually good at math. The numbers just don't add up.
It's funny, but not a joke.
An interesting thing about 3rd grade math - I was taught long division. When implementing the standard C library for the PC, I implemented the same algorithm in assembler, and then again for the floating point divide emulator.
> Having prior knowledge of the subject is almost irrelevant. Teaching is really just applying solid methods on how to build knowledge from the most basic concepts as well as having the patience in dealing with humans who are not fully formed in their emotions.
I would disagree with this. Those are necessary but not sufficient. It is necessary to have enough knowledge and joy from the subject to convey that to students.
My father has a PhD in physics and couldn't really teach me math past seventh grade. On the other hand, my father has a PhD in physics and ran out of math to teach me around seventh grade.
There is no such thing as “the neighborhood kids” anymore. Having any kind of social circle for your children is going to require your facilitation and effort… a lot of it. It’ll be extra hard without the common bond of shared activity.
Not knocking what sounds like your choice to homeschool, just sharing something that has changed from my youth.
There are in fact neighborhood kids. It only takes a couple of families deciding to restrict phones and video games and support their kids in spending real time together. We’ve done this in our neighborhood and it’s great. It just has to be intentional now, where it was the default before all these screens.
Having a degree in philosophy or mathematics or whatever does not automatically make someone a good teacher. Teaching - particularly with young children - is a skill that is almost orthogonal to subject knowledge.
Teaching ability is an innate feature of human beings.
My parents taught me a lot of things. Neither had a teaching degree.
At my university, I was taught by professors and grad students, none of whom had a teaching degree.
> Teaching ability is an innate feature of human beings.
Distribution seems to follow a bell curve - you’ll usually find the people with exceptional teaching ability harnessing that aptitude in a professional setting.
All features in humans follow a bell curve. Viva la difference!
Pretty much all humans can run. Yes, some have exceptional talent at it, and some can barely walk. But the vast majority can run reasonably well. Exceptional talent at teaching is certainly not required for routine learning.
Besides, you can buy the workbooks for every level of math, and work it through with the critters. There's no special skill needed. I don't recall any teachers of mine at any level who had any apparent special skill at it.
Except for Feynman. I attended one of his lectures. It was amazing! Feynman was at the extreme end of the bell curve, that's for sure.
Let me add to that Herb Sutter. He is very very good at explaining things.
> At my university, I was taught by professors and grad students, none of whom had a teaching degree.
Professors and grad students may well have done a course on how to lecture. It is obligatory and/or an easy way to pick up credits in many PhD programs. In any event, grad students teaching badly, because the department has allowed the more competent faculty to put their teaching burden on grad students, is a common complaint about US universities.
Maybe that's a new thing, because I've never heard of it.
I have recommended to professionals that they take a public speaking course, but those were not part of any degree program.
> Maybe that's a new thing, because I've never heard of it.
You mentioned in another post attending a lecture from Feynman. I think you might be a few decades behind modern academia.
> I think you might be a few decades behind modern academia.
Definitely. And I've seen no evidence there's been any improvement. More like things have gotten worse.
I think what makes you a good teacher is mostly a personality trait.
Prior knowledge of the subject is just a cherry on top.
> But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
As person who was homeschooled in a large homeschooling community, no, I now believe at a fundamental level that not only is it not possible to adequately difference homeschooled children, it very much defeats the updated-but- always it is not possible to "get good socialization". There are two issues: the gross tonnage of exposure to other people is just not possible in homeschooling, and, there's a fundamental difference between the kinds of socialization.
I believe there is value in being forced into socializing with people you may not like. I did not experience what one might call "involuntary socialization" until my first job out of college. It took me a very long time to learn how to exist comfortably in a world where not everyone would agree with me, like me, see me as an equal, or treat me with respect.
In institutional education environments and in jobs, you don't get a choice who you have around you. You have to learn how to deal with that. Taking the kids to karate class doesn't teach them that because most everyone at karate class wants to be there.
Any voluntary socialization arrangement is--by definition--a self-selection into a group with at least one point of commonality: you are so there for the thing, the activity.
Involuntary socialization arrangements expose you to others where your overlapping demographic is nothing more than just geographic circumstance. Many people don't learn how to deal with that in public schools: it's where antisocial behavior comes from. But *every" homeschooled kid will miss that lesson completely.
> Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day.
I would argue if your kid stays home all day you're not better than a school so why would you bother? I know zero homeschoolers keeping their kids locked up at home
John Jane Mary set up is incredibly idealized. In a big city I have not been able to find anyone willing to commit to anything except one off play dates in a museum which has nothing to do with actual education.
> But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling.
Absolutely. I was homeschooled and in my state (Illinois) the laws work out such that homeschool students can enroll in public school classes if the school has space for them. That's how I socialized. So I got at least a modicrum of socialization (especially once I started band) but wasn't dragged down by the mediocre education at our local public schools.
It sounds like school with extra steps.
And control over who else is in it.
Yeah but this is basically people with the same social circle and religion etc...
Which is how the vast majority of the world is and how most of America is. I mean, it's not bad to be around people with different ideas or backgrounds, but it is also not some great requirement.
I highly doubt the kind of people who homeschool their kids for popular/narrative reasons have enough cognitive or social capability to make all that happen.
I would have gotten a vasectomy if I knew my kid had to go through this kind of childhood
Part of "socializing" is observing that one's parents aren't the absolute authority in the world. Parents sometimes butt heads with teachers, coaches etc. No home schooling scenario can provide this experience. I think it leads to enhanced levels of narcissism in both students and parents.
Why would you think homeschooled children have no teachers or coaches for their parents to butt heads with? I assure you this is not the case
I guess you aren't married. Lol.
“Good socializaron experience” is the exact opposite of “religious groups”. Said as someone who went to a private Christian school for 7 years.
As the parent of a small child, there is a very noticeable difference in social skills that develop immediately as a result of my child being in a daycare interacting with other children of a similar age. Compared to my friends' same age children who are mostly staying at home and babysat by a grandparent.
(as a disclaimer, the daycare has very good teachers/caregivers from what I can tell so I'm sure that's part of it as well)
Daycare quality is a spectrum, the same way as babysitting at home. My smaller one just started daycare, and we settled for one that actually does stuff with the kids (forest school style). But I can tell you, we've visited lots of places that are basically just making sure the kids are not dead by the time you pick them up. Same for babysitting with grandparents; there's the hyper-social grandpa style that's always doing something, and the couchpotato with +10k hours on Cocomelon.
Yes, I'll admit that my sample size for comparison is relatively small so I'm mostly offering anecdotal evidence. And I totally agree on the quality of daycares being a spectrum. Just like how one single, good teacher who actually cares can really change a student's school experience (even if the school itself is not that great).
In my opinion, grandparents are the worst. They completely spoil them.
Or have bad habits like playing shovelware games on their phones.
Every human being should have the experience of unconditional, unadulterated love from someone else. But not 24 by 7.
In the rural areas that I've lived in, it's mostly about a strong desire to supplant science and history with religious ideas and principles.
I hear this a lot, and it may be true, but I am very skeptical that it matters. The statistics about home-schooled children don't support the idea that they have horribly inaccurate models of the world guided mostly by religious thinking. Or if they do it doesn't seem to affect life achievement in any important way. Instead home-schooled children are typically more advanced at graduation and have higher lifetime achievement metrics than their public school counterparts.
As an athiest, and a bayesian, it's difficult for me to worry about other peoples religious beliefs that don't seem to negatively affect them or me. Especially when there is propaganda taught in the public schools that does warp the students' world views in ways that harms them and me.
> The statistics about home-schooled children don't support the idea that they have horribly inaccurate models of the world guided mostly by religious thinking.
I'd be surprised if any such statistics exist. I've seen studies about the reasons parents choose to homeschool, and various outcomes of homeschooled kids versus public school kids, but none about what particular beliefs homeschooled kids have regarding, say, the age of the Earth.
Homeschoolers tend to outperform their regular school peers. But I think parental involvement is a significant differential and is probably contributing to the outcomes.
In what and citation needed.
"In study after study, the homeschooled have scored, on average, at the 65th to 80th percentile on standardized academic achievement tests in the United States and Canada, compared to the public school average of the 50th percentile."[1]
"Descriptive analysis reveals homeschool students possess higher ACT scores, grade point averages (GPAs) and graduation rates when compared to traditionally-educated students."[2]
[1]https://www.educacaodomiciliar.fe.unicamp.br/sites/www.educa...
[2]https://eric.ed.gov/?id=EJ893891
That doesn’t control for socioeconomic background.
Yes, homeschooled kids do better than the average. The average is also dragged down by the country deciding that if your parents are poor you should starve.
> Especially when there is propaganda taught in the public schools that does warp the students' world views in ways that harms them and me.
This sentence caused a record needle scratch sound in my head.
I'm afraid to ask what you mean, and it seems like you might be afraid to say, because it's a bit bizarre to drop that line with no explanation.
Please check the work of howard zinn or event just watch one of his talks. The entire curriculum is structured to support an ideological narrative more than to provide an honest historical or ethical platform of understanding.
> Please check the work of howard zinn
Somehow I don't think you and alphazard are talking about the same things.
Propaganda being the incorporation of political ideology into much of the lesson plan - even when banned.
Whatever it is, public schools are an absolute failure. But that could be attributed to the immigration in the US over the last half decade. North Carolina lost like 20% of their student base following mass ICE raids.
Many teachers around me have mentioned how the portion of non-English speakers has dramatically increased and is causing significant degradation to their effectiveness in the classroom and the outcomes.
I can give a very simple example - in my high school history class, the cold war was presented as a conflict between communism and democracy - despite the fact that on an economic field the conflict was clearly between communism and capitalism, while on a political field proponents of both systems were happy to subvert the democratic process whenever someone had the audacity to vote for the wrong economic system.
Ooh, as I was typing I thought of a better example - remember the four food groups? eight to twelve servings of grains per day? Less obviously propaganda, though I'd argue the farm lobbies pushing it count. But harms in terms of its link to obesity and heart disease are pretty damn stark.
Given that school children are a huge captive audience of future consumers/voters/employees it would be incredibly strange if the curriculum wasn't the target of all kinds of special interest groups that aren't perfectly aligned with public interest.
> remember the four food groups?
LOL this cannot be a serious reason for homeschooling. You're trolling me, right? Please tell me you're trolling me.
You're tempting me to start doing just that. Maybe focus on keeping the conversation productive in keeping with HN's community guidelines.
> Maybe focus on keeping the conversation productive
I didn't and don't want to have this conversation. Technically, I didn't even ask alphazard what they meant, and in any case, I didn't ask anyone else what alphazard meant, as if someone else could magically interpret alphazard's cryptic remark any better than I could, which they can't, as proved by the multiple different unsolicited answers I received.
I was perhaps morbidly curious what the atheist was objecting to in public schools when they nonetheless seemed perfectly fine with conservative religious homeschooling.
> remember the four food groups?
1. Calories
2. Carcinogens
3. Caffeine
4. Cholesterol
Stalin wasn't elected. Neither was Gorbachev.
North Vietnam's leaders were. So was Iran's.
The notion of being "elected" when you have a gun pointed at you at the ballot casting is silly.
You always know the elections are shams when the communist candidate gets 95% of the vote.
technically North Korea has had elected leaders since the founding. They have elections in North Korea. Doesn’t make me convinced North Korea isn’t a communist dictatorship.
That has been the case for a long time, and I guess something about the current generation of parents has gotten them to act more on it. My dad came from a very religious family and they all did private religious schools for their early grade school years. Then they went to public for high school years.
If I had to guess, its maybe something about the demise of church life that has gotten religious parents to just pull back entirely. It wasn't that uncommon for public schools to make nods toward Christian ideals/lifestyles before like the 90s, but now that stuff just doesn't happen anymore.
> It wasn't that uncommon for public schools to make nods toward Christian ideals/lifestyles before like the 90s, but now that stuff just doesn't happen anymore.
Schools should absolutely teach Christian mythology and history, and Greek mythology and history, and Egyptian mythology and history, alongside many other subjects. But to the extent that they used to make "nods" towards "this is the cultural default we defer to", nope.
Why? How does this benefit the students, except in understanding allusions in books and poetry? Or is that the goal, in which case, sure, but I think Eastern mythologies should be included too.
Same reason for studying literature, in addition to understanding the pervasive allusions and effects throughout society. And yes, of course; that list was an example, not a comprehensive list.
Take this thought, apply it to your favorite non-Western country and tell me where you end up.
States are saying that schools have to post the 10 commandments and when teachers put up a poster about “everyone is welcomed here” showing kids of different colors it’s “too woke”.
Which is funny since I (a Black guy) went to a mostly White Christian school in the 80s where they sung “Jesus loves the little children - red and yellow black and white they are all precious in his site”.
> States are saying that schools have to post the 10 commandments
Yeah that definitely seems against the First Amendment (and Texas' equivalent in their Bill of Rights). I feel like the world makes more sense if you read the First Amendment as a treaty between the Christian sects that were executing one another in the colonies for heresy, rather than y'know what it literally says.
> when teachers put up a poster about “everyone is welcomed here” showing kids of different colors it’s “too woke”.
Keep gang signs out of the classroom. In places where university rivalries are high, teachers are also asked to keep ensignia off their doors. It's the same here. "Everyone is welcomed here" (without a cross) is now a callsign for "registered Democrat". Imagine if a teacher put a big "don't trample on me" sign with a snake... I feel like that would send a message other than, "be respectful in class."
How is telling kids it’s okay if you’re not White like the rest of the kids or you’re in a wheelchair a Democratic talking point?
Read what I wrote:
> "Everyone is welcome here" is now a callsign for "registered Democrat".
Maybe it's suspicious that this phrase is able to distinguish Republicans from Democrats, but the point isn't the virtue of the parties, it's that it's one of the most common phrases people choose to use to distinguish themselves as Democrats. If you don't want one teacher walking around with a MAGA hat, but don't have the political power to just ban them from schools, you have to make a treaty like, "we'll ban rainbow capes and MAGA hats."
Banning rainbow caps and Pride is completely different than showing kids of different colors playing together holding hands and showing a kid in a wheelchair.
This is the exact poster - even more innocuous than I thought
https://www.idahoednews.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Every...
It was originally a stand against hate
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/the-story-behind-the-all...
Do I need to emphasize that this was the sentiment that was repeated when I was in a Christian conservative mostly White private school in the 80s?
You have yet to address or even acknowledge the focus of both my comments: this phrase is a common means of signalling party affiliation. I feel like you need to improve in how you approach these kind of discussions, because you're getting nowhere in convincing me when you come across as not even understanding my argument.
If your goal is different, maybe to just socially stigmatize people opposed to worlds you prefer, well I guess you're doing fine with that, but you do see how that's problematic at creating consensus, right? And how, the sane reaction is for me to faux-politely call you a shill or a clown. I don't think this is actually your goal (which is why I deleted my previous reply, it was unnecessarily mean unless this is your goal), I just don't think you've really built up your debate toolbox yet.
Saying we don’t hate people because of the color of their skin was something that conservatives said with Reagan through Bush 2 when he spoke in solidarity with American Muslims after 9/11.
If we ban any symbol that might be used as politics we should ban the American flag in classrooms since that now has become a symbol of the MAGA movement. Defending banning a poster showing hands of people of different colors is just as non sensical - there were no pride colors on the poster, no pro immigration signaling nothing.
I bet you a paycheck they would have banned a multi racial group picture of kids just playing together because it was “too woke”.
In fact, there is a long history of states being triggered showing people of multiple races actually getting along
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/02/05/sesame-str...
It’s not about political signaling - it’s straight out racism
Talking about the greatness of America has been a theme among Democrats from FDR to JFK, when they spoke about defending and spreading American cultural values like democracy and freedom. It goes back even further to the 1840s with James K. Polk and Manifest Destiny. Banning the MAGA hat in the classroom isn't about political signalling - it's just straight out America hate.
Do you see how silly you sound? Look, here's my issue with you: I've told you my reasons to oppose MAGA hats and welcome posters in the classroom. You refuse to believe those are my reasons. You're calling me a liar, saying I must secretly be withholding some racist motivated reasoning. I get that there are America haters who want to ban MAGA hats, and racists who want to ban these posters. But you're talking to me, not them. If you can only refute people who collectively share two brain cells, then you're probably just wrong on your position.
MAGA was introduced by Trump and is a symbol of Trump. I didn’t argue that they shouldn’t ban “Hope” even though Hope was also something that wasn’t political before Obama. It was clearly partisan for Obama.
MAGA is not speaking to “American greatness”. It’s whining that America isn’t great any more because of among others gays and skinny jeans wearing west coast elite - ie making it great “again”
The idea of America not already being “great” was something that no Democrat could have said. We have been drinking the Kool Aid of American exceptionalism for a century.
If you listen to almost anyone in the MAGA camp, it meant “those evil minorities like the secret Muslim trying to bring Sharia law and those Hatians eating pets took over America and now it’s a crime ridden country infested by immigrants”
You still have yet to actually reply to me and my argument. As I said earlier, you need to improve at this skill if you want to actually convince people their position is wrong.
What position is that?
1. That showing different colored hands raised with a heart in it is “too political” - again they were not holding hands, no Pride symbols (that you brought up)
2. That MAGA isn’t political?
I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m saying that a certain contingent of conservatives have always been triggered about the thought that the US is not just White people and even more triggered with the thought of people of various races getting along. It’s especially prevalent in a post MAGA takeover of the Republican Party.
Neither of those are my position. If you're not trying to convince me I'm wrong, that's fine, just realize that Idaho is a one-party state and the Republican Party has the power there to do what they think is right. The only way to influence that is to convince enough people that banning these posters is not right, which I thought was your goal, but I guess political commentary has its own purpose.
I’m the last person to try to convince racists not to be racists (referring to Idaho politicians - not you). I’ve lived an entire life ignoring them and living my best life. That’s a lost cause.
That’s like trying to convince people that a man didn’t rise from the dead after three days and the only way that he will come back to take them to heaven is if the government protects Isreal - yea that is what evangelicals think.
Hell I had a house built in an infamous “sundown town” (where the outskirts were still conservative but more traditional conservative)
Yeah this one:
https://youtu.be/WErjPmFulQ0?si=BpsfzQXo0HP2AXLB
And completely ignored the looks I got every time I walked out of my house.
I won't pretend to know where you live or what those people's desires are but I definitely started homeschooling after the last US administration took moral volatility to new standards. The principles taught in schools just did not align anymore with what was common sense when I was in school and what I believe in. Now before you judge, I'm not looking for a fight. My wife and I have both master-degree educations in CS and law and our four kids have been to public school in the US and abroad, they've been to an evangelical christian school, and now that we've decided to homeschool for two years, we're not likely to take them back. The traditional school aspects take up 2-3h per day at most, then comes the school of life: raising and caring for animals and plants, fixing the truck or other engineersy activities and of course plenty of fun activities outside of the too-busy-to-be-fun times. My kids have learned of historic events such as Jamestown, Gettysburg or Mount St. Helens at the actual site of the event, they've been to most of the national parks and the fear of being socially-disconnected is not more than a fear before you start. Heck, thanks to Starlink they can even talk to their friends while we're driving through a desert.
Now let me also say that preparing the curriculum, ordering the materials etc. takes a lot of effort and discipline. It's definitely almost a full time job and I'm blessed with an amazing wife that's gifted in all that but the reward is more than worth it. Also, if you're thinking about it, many states have home school support programs and put you in touch with other home schoolers in the area.
So, to be clear, you pulled your children out of public school because students were being educated to accept other people who do not adhere to their own set of religious and cultural beliefs, in a country founded on freedom of religion?
And now instead of learning science in a lab and socializing, they are forced to maintain your farm?
What an good job you are doing!
You're forgetting an important distinction: Freedom of religion amongst various Christian denominations. Failure to recognize this as a historical fact leads to back to the original point of public education being a morality platform and not an objective educative platform.
"the last US administration took moral volatility to new standards" I have no idea what this means. Can you explain it?
" The principles taught in schools just did not align anymore with what was common sense when I was in school and what I believe in."
Please explain in more detail what you mean by this. You old do you think the earth is? In my experience most home schoolers are young earth creationists.
That is exactly what I've seen, to keep kids in their brainwashing bubble.
Where I live in the Midwest that is absolutely the case. The homeschool "groups" are almost all religiously oriented in some way.
Lived in the Midwest too when I was younger, wasn't till I grew up that I saw how religiously linked it all was.
You are light gray but creating a bubble is actual expressed reason for many home schoolers like with young earth creationists.
I mean in the inner city science is supplanted as well like when they close down stem schools because too many Asians or something.
[dead]
The public school experience in the U.S. depends so much on your ZIP Code. I attended the best public schools in my state while my wife attended the worst in the same state. I am genuinely pro-public school, but there is a point where the benefit of being around different people is overshadowed by distractions and low standards. My wife had to be diagnosed with a learning disability in college to receive test accommodations when she discovered that you cannot stay after class indefinitely to finish an exam. Her teachers never raised any concerns about her taking 50% as long with exams compared to the other students, and she was the valedictorian of her huge urban high school. The lack of concern is bizarre until you consider that her teachers were preoccupied with students graduating and showing up to class. Many of her classmates ended up getting pregnant, and the school had a large daycare for the children of high school students.
My wife didn't end up taking the SAT or ACT because she attended a relatively strong local university with a full-ride scholarship and a test-optional policy. The MCAT exam initially denied her request for accommodations because she was only diagnosed with a learning disability in college. We successfully appealed by writing an essay arguing that my wife wasn't diagnosed with a learning disability in K-12 because her schools sucked (we submitted documentation that proved that her schools tested among the worst in the state, her elementary school was literally the worst in the entire state, when she was a student), and her teachers had much bigger concerns than why the smart, studious kid takes a long time to complete exams.
If the wife had gone to the K-12 school system that I attended, her learning disability would have been addressed in elementary school, and she would have been spared much angst. I was a very poor reader in early elementary school, and received almost daily one-on-one attention at my school from instructional aides and volunteers (mostly highly educated parents and grandparents) for years. I received a perfect score on the ACT reading section in high school.
> her teachers were preoccupied with students graduating and showing up to class
That's because the attendance rate is the driver of state funds to the schools.
The schools also get more funding if the students perform poorly.
> The schools also get more funding if the students perform poorly.
that's such a weird policy.
The teachers can produce poorly performing students easily (without much effort i might add), but cannot do that very same for well performing students (even with effort). The incentive to produce poor performing students to get more funding means it's misaligned with the student's best interests.
Schools and students _should_ be incentivized to perform well, and funding ought to be a portion of that incentive.
> that's such a weird policy
Yup. I've taken adult lessons in things, and I don't continue to buy lessons if the coach is unable to teach me. But in the public schools, watch what happens if you suggest merit pay. Shields up, Mr Sulu!
Instead, teacher pay is based on years of service and how many credentials you have.
We could all learn from Hengshui.
(This is kind of a joke, because while the Hengshui school system is much more meritocratic, including in teacher salaries, it's also infamous for a stressful school environment. It's not really a joke though. While there are problems with the long hours, it's definitely better than whatever America has going on.)
Part of the issue with merit pay is if it's tied to simple metrics like grades, those metrics will get inflated without raising the things those metrics were meant to measure.
but grades that are external to the school could be used as the metric - something the school cannot tamper with themselves. Grades like "international baccalaureate assessments" or some sort of university entrance exams.
Now the school will do everything possible to convince their crap students to leave before those exams!
The set of ZIP codes to geographical school assignment is neither 1:1 nor onto. Actually,
(just kidding)
I agree that school assignment is highly variable. I'm glad your wife managed to get her appeal approved. It's unfortunate she even had to go through that process to begin with.
I was homeschooled until high school. I couldn’t agree with you more. The value that the socialization the public school offers is underestimated.
Learning activities with other homeschooled kids is ok but not enough. A tight-knit neighborhood of friends is huge, but not enough. You need to develop a thick skin and a sense of self-assurance.
I have no counterfactual of course, but I think much of the social anxiety I’ve had to unlearn as a young adult came from homeschooling. And I had great circumstances
I was horribly bullied in high school. It was really bad.
The worst part was being ostracized. The school had anti-bullying policies, but they don’t force anyone to be your friend.
Strangely, I was elected to lots of student government office, and held leadership in lots of clubs.
Maybe my memory is just off, but I don’t think so.
I think I was really good connecting with the grownups who ran the school, so they made sure I got leadership positions.
I was always much better at being the kid in class the teacher liked - same with principals, etc.
Probably one of the reasons the other kids didn’t like me - but that went over my head.
I think it’s really easy to overestimate how important the socialization in public schools is. We go to so many movies where the plot is based on the dynamics of public high school, we assume it’s normal.
We see so much of terrible stuff downplaid like it doesn’t matter. Just rewatched Back to the Future which laughingly brushes off every kind of violence as long as it’s done at the prom.
And I've always felt that most of my social anxiety came from public school. Maybe we were both just prone to it.
(I unlearned it too, but it took quite a while.)
As someone else who was homeschooled except the last three grades, I also agree. Additionally, the effect is multiplied if the kid in question lives in a rural or semi-rural area rather than a suburb or city.
For the majority of my adult life I’ve been playing catchup. Even now, barreling towards 40, there’s aspects of social capabilities where I come up quite short relative to my peers.
If I’m ever to be a parent, I won’t homeschool. Depending the circumstances I might not send my kids to public school, but their schooling situation will at minimum involve social exposure comparable to that of public school.
> Even now, barreling towards 40, there’s aspects of social capabilities where I come up quite short relative to my peers.
I identify with your post as a rural kid who mostly didn't socialize with classmates after school. I went to public school, and I'm 40 now. I think the human experience is that you are inevitably going to encounter social situations where you feel outmatched or simply don't belong. I do agree with making sure your kids experience public school, but I think that's about the bare minimum of what you can offer your kids.
Yeah, there are always going to be outliers, that can't be avoided. The problem lies with the kid never having been given the opportunity in the first place.
> The value that the socialization the public school offers is underestimated.
The basically only social skill that school teaches is hating other people (other students, teachers) so much that from the deepest of your heart you wish them to be dead.
Clearly a valuable skill, but not the kind that most parents would desire their children to get.
That was definitely not my public school experience. I've had loads of issues but without public school I probably would be so extremely depressed and anxious, I'm not sure I'd be here today. I wouldn't have lots of important friendships, I wouldn't have my fiancé, and I'd have missed out on lots of experiences that I find were fundamental to shaping who I am now.
And despite all that, school was still really hard on me. I had a bunch of mean teachers, subjects I was miserable at and would cry about (Foreign language French still haunts my dreams...) and of course I was bullied as well for being kind of a weirdo. :) I wouldn't trade it for homeschooling. I know that if I didn't have those experiences at school, I would probably have different experiences that would have shaped me differently. But in the end, I'm still glad I went through all that though.
There are some skills taught in that realm. From personal experience, I have learned to recognize trouble by gait and eyes alone. I get that people get different experiences, but I could have done without that knowledge.
If you ever end up incarcerated this will be invaluable:)
I remember one politician once responding in an off-hand manner as to why they are focusing on prisons and not day cares, to which he responded: 'well, there is still a change I may end up in prison'. Naturally, I did not realize then how optimistic that remark was.
Teachers holding classroom votes where everyone counted equally is foundational to my contempt for universal suffrage.
> I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
The older I get, the more I think that helping your kids avoid interactions with others who aren't with the program is for the best. Ideally your children's friends should be people that you think are good kids, kids that you would go to bat for. Then when you are teaching your kids to compromise and play nice and forgive, you can legitimately feel good about it. I think my default assumption about a negative interaction with a public school random would be that they are basically a wild animal to be avoided.
The world is messy for all sorts of reasons, that may not be the way anyone would like it to be but it's the way it is, and imo it's best to learn it when the stakes are low rather than when they're later voting against other classes because they were never exposed to people from them early on, or they're being taken advantage of at work or in an adult relationship.
I wouldn't fault someone for wanting to situate their kids among peers and adults that help them grow at a similar level rather than hinder it, but I think it's also best to be a guiding hand rather than a applicant tracking system when it comes to the non-academic side
> when they're later voting against other classes because they were never exposed to people from them early on
If you think homeschooling makes kids grow up to be prejudiced, you should just say that, instead of insinuating it.
There are certainly tradeoffs, but it's not all negative. In my experience, what it boils down to is that home-schooled kids tend to have more experience with adults and less experience dealing with a wide variety of other kids, particularly assholes.
When I was a kid in public school, there was no shortage of assholes and I definitely would have preferred to not have to deal with them. OTOH, I don't doubt that there is also some value in that experience, not to mention interacting with all the other people. Also, we didn't have social media or semi-regular school shootings when I was a kid. So yeah.. to me, it's not at all obvious which set of tradeoffs is preferable nowadays.
What happens to asshole kids? Do they become regular adults or asshole adults? Do they become soldiers or prisonners never to be seen again by normies? Do they even reach adulthood? Are they even a stable group or were we all asshole kids to some other kids?
Dunno, maybe all of the above? Believe it or not, I didn't really keep in touch with them.
My point was that kids are disproportionately likely to treat other kids badly, especially when adults aren't around. That kind of situation is common at school, but much less common at home, unless the parents choose to allow it.
I think it's an important development milestone to learn that people don't want to be their friends, and the longing for human connection might be a good moderating force in their life. I was a really pessimistic teenager, which I received plenty of feedback on, and have worked against my own nature to become a more positive and cheery adult.
This is a strange claim.
In my personal experience, the asshole kids overlapped greatly with the popular kids in a Venn diagram sense. People, in general, did want to be their friends.
I think that a lot of the assholes behaved that way because they were naturally charismatic and people wanted to be their friends despite their being assholes. They were never socially punished for their behavior because they could turn on the charm at will. In other words, they were assholes because they could afford to be.
In my experience they become regular adults. Whatever made them an asshole is still there, but they've either learned to deal with it or the context has changed such that there's no point in being that kind of asshole anymore. Nobody's perfect, and adolescence is rough in the best of times.
Some become President of the United States. Others probably grow out of it?
Looking back at the assholes of my youth, they run the gamut. Some seem like lovely adults, and are very successful. Some are just like they were and are very successful. Some others crashed out completely. The more brash, upfront assholes and the clever assholes seem to have done better than the sneering, malicious assholes.
And we were (almost) all assholes sometimes, but there's definitely a class of kids who were assholes most of the time.
> Do they become soldiers or prisonners never to be seen again by normies?
Not necessarily those two exact options, but yes. Adults are free to self-segregate. Even in K–12, once the option for tracking into advanced classes is available, everyone's social lives improve.
The ones from my school mostly became good for nothing's or went to jail.
You're forgetting that public school also exposes you to more adult assholes, including ones with direct power over you that can screw you over for no reason.
It's important to know how and when to advocate for yourself and others, when to escalate through proper channels and when to escalate outside of proper channels, and when to back down and let them be an asshole because they're frankly not worth your time.
In particular, learning "pretend to lose now, win later" is a useful skill. But I think there are healthier ways to learn that skill than on a live-fire course.
All over this discussion, the big negative has nothing to do with missing out on stellar education, skill development, or expert teachers. Instead, it’s the perpetual handwringing that homeschooled kids won’t be Properly Socialized, i.e., be exposed to and have to endure mistreatment, disruption, and sometimes assault from other maladjusted, cruel, or even mentally ill peers — because that’s “the real world.”
This is not the W for the government schools that proponents seem to think it is.
On reddit, they all believe that site has chased away the libertarians and nonconformists enough that they're no longer careful to keep the quiet parts to themselves: they want homeschooling banned so that the government can conduct surveillance on parents and instill the proper philosophical values to to the children.
A common justification for group projects was, "you have to learn how to work with people, even people who will not work." Yeah no, that's not the case. People get filtered through a much finer sieve when they're older.
But that's absolutely the case. You get on a project and someone falls ill or has to take care of someone ill. Or they're shit at their job. Or they're just not as dedicated as you. It doesn't matter if they get fired or accommodated, you have to get it done. You will be punished in some what for not getting it done, whether that is directly or indirectly. Group projects exist in any job with collaboration. You rarely get to choose your group unlike in school and at least proving someone is a slacker has a high chance of impact in school. It's not always the case at all at work.
People discount school rituals, but they happen a lot. Pop quizzes happen all the time within my career. You don't always get to say, "I'll get back to you" as much as we all wish that was true.
Actually as an adult you do choose your group. At will employment is an amazing thing
This is the most common myths about homeschooling. In reality, the kids at public school sit at a desk most of the time. They don't get to socialize. Most activities are structured. Homeschoolers have CO-OPs, field trips, weekly PE visits, real interactions with adults, and actual free time. They are the most socialized kids in the US. The diversity in the homeschool relationships is quite large which you can see when a homeschooler has discussions with adults while their public school peers just quietly talk amongst themselves.
Growing up, homeschool kids were absolutely weird as hell. Sure, some turn out fine, but it's very hard to do right, and requires parents putting their kids outside of everyone's comfort zone, which is... uncomfortable, so it rarely happens.
The homeschooled neighbor kid from a super religious family absolutely went off the deep end at 18. Many such cases.
This ability to so confidently assert things from your own dreamland with no regard to the real world is amazing. Were you also homeschooled?
You're straw-manning the worst public school experience against the best possible homeschool experience.
> They are the most socialized kids in the US.
Bullshit. You know how I know? Because on average parents are terrible at exposing their kids to Things Not Like Them and Things They Don't Approve Of.
There are great homeschooling parents and crazy ones, but maybe it's not the worst idea to give kids a few hours a day outside their family-approved bubble?
Just in case it's the latter.
Or am I mistaken and all homeschooling in the US requires the child's consent?
How many conservatives do you socialize with regularly?
Regularly? About 10. (That's 3 MAGA and 7 more traditional conservatives)
Follow up question: how many people do you socialize with regularly in total?
> Bullshit. You know how I know?
<provides unsubstantiated and only tangentially related opinion>
People should be able to bypass public schools if they want.
I don’t disagree with your final statement, but they’re also not wrong. Growing up it was well-known that homeschool kids were strange, intelligent in some ways, and completely inept in most ways that mattered. People who desire to completely shield their children are just as detrimental to their children’s development as those who over-expose. However, in my purely anecdotal experience, the ones who were over-exposed were better off than the former. And the middle road led to better outcomes overall.
Where were you and others encountering these homeschooled kids if they were locked up in their cosseted homes in which they were apparently never socialized?
As another reply pointed out, maybe these kids are “weird” in some way, maybe they are not. We don’t have more than anecdotes here. More importantly, and to the point of my first reply, we don’t know the motives of their parents. The GP was engaged in mind reading. Certainly, the motives are manifold. One motive may be, “I’m going to home school my kid because he’s weird and won’t do well in a public school.” We don’t know which way the causal arrow points.
>Growing up it was well-known that homeschool kids were strange,
Growing up, it was well-known that in highschool that there was always a small subset of students who were strange. It was so cliche that more than a few sitcoms were founded on that very premise. You could walk up to any stranger age 40 or older, say "you know those weird kids in high school" and they could almost certainly rattle off the list of names even today.
This is because in any large group of kids, some significant percentage of them will be weirdos. Thinking that this is somehow a result of homeschooling is more than simply fallacious, it reveals a prejudice of yours.
Paul Graham pointed out that public school is a weird and degenerate microcosm that isn't much like the real social world at all.
> I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.
> When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage.
> ...If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie...Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.
https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html?viewfullsite=1
Probably like 90% of the time it feel like I'm perpetually in high school and it never really ended.
Assuming that's a negative experience for you, that's worth trying to fix. I'm pushing 60 and most of my career has not been like that. You don't need to put up with it.
A big part of that for me was fixing my own social anxiety. But even before I managed that, I found groups that didn't feel that way. Later I worked someplace for a while that was kind of a throwback, but then I changed jobs and it was fine.
Id probably describe it as neutral.
Perhaps unlike in some ways, but some aspects of school life persist in so-called adult life, e.g., jocks, nerds, freaks, party animals, slackers, and teacher’s pets are all still around — now with zeros on the end.
And PG didn't deny that. He just said the dynamic is very different when the group is larger, doing things that matter, and needs people who can get the right answers.
In fact, those sterotypes and type-casts get even more extreme, and often they are enflamed by the very groups that claim to be the most egalitarian.
> I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
We already have this problem with the population at large, only a tiny minority of whom got homeschooled.
Right here on HN you can read daily accounts of severe introversion and social anxiety. You can see that out in public, at work, among friends and family. Many Americans, children and adults, take medications (licit and otherwise) to cope with anxiety and things like ADHD. Many Americans self-diagnose as "on the spectrum" and "introverted."
Do you have any evidence to support the idea that homeschooled children suffer more from these common afflictions?
> I frequently saw fights, so I learned
So this part of your education was entirely self-guided? And you're worried if children don't see fights and just sort of 'figure out' how to deal with them on their own they won't develop properly?
> I was bullied [...] learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
So the institution valued popularity to the point of allowing you to be abused because you didn't possess it. Another self-guided lesson.
I can never understand why people defend schools. They're terrible environments for learning. We clearly need a school setting for book learning and an _entirely separate_ one for social learning. This seems easily surmountable.
This is a common sentiment, but how much do you really know about the counterfactual?
It's not obvious to me that you would have been unable to deal with people who didn't look like you if you had been homeschooled.
It also seems to me that a lot of public school environments surely contain kids who look different from each other, form cliques based on physical appearance, and learn to base how they treat people largely on physical appearance.
Speaking of bullying, high school caused me to greatly overestimate how important unarmed combat would be to my future success in life.
It's nice to not worry about it on the rare occasion that I go to sketchy places, but it also highlights that dealing with a cross section of our country's population is not necessarily relevant to the kind of life we build when we can choose our peers.
> I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
Most research does not support the idea that homeschooling inherently creates social bubbles or makes children unable to interact with others. Studies generally find that homeschooled children perform as well as or better than traditionally schooled peers on standardized social skills measures and often participate actively in community groups, sports, etc. Long term studies of adults who were homeschooled also show no meaningful deficits in life outcomes or social functioning. The main caveat is that homeschooling varies widely: children in highly isolated or restrictive environments may have fewer opportunities to practice mainstream social norms, but this is a function of the specific homeschooling approach, not homeschooling as a whole. Overall, the literature suggests that social problems arise from lack of social exposure not from homeschooling itself.
I had a similar experience growing up to what you describe, but in my adult life I ended up living around all upper middle class and wealthy people and I don’t think my earlier experiences have really been very relevant or helpful. So I think it might depend on what the child’s expected adult environment will be like? Like do we need to be around or interact with the sort of people you need to stay away from or watch your mouth around?
>cross section of actual American kids
So many factors have led this to be a major liability for young people now. School is not what it was 20 years ago.
Empirical research [1] [2] shows that your worry is unfounded.
[1] Homeschooled Children’s Social Skills: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED573486.pdf
[2] Homeschooling and the Question of Socialization Revisited: https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socia...
Edit: if I had to bet (don't know any research), schools nowadays are the main producers of intolerance, with the indoctrination and teaching kids to only respect civil discourse, ideas and opinions if they agree with the mainstream world model.
The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman. Other factors seem to play a much larger factor in the things you are (rightfully!) concerned about. As long as the parents have "the will to have nice things" (to refer to Patrick McKenzie's concept), then these are very surmountable problems.
Respectfully, A grateful dad who was homeschooled and who will homeschool.
P.S. Of course I will do some things differently than my parents, but it was an amazing gift and I had an extremely vibrant and stimulating time, including with peers (and adults!) outside of my parents' network who pushed me, challenged me, thought very differently than me, etc.
>The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman.
How do you do that? Seems like it would be impossible to replicate the experience of learning to navigate daily social interactions in a mixed group of people, especially when it comes to dealing with conflict.
Easy - homeschooling may include but does not require "in the home" any more than "homework" is required to be done in your house.
I was homeschooled and have homeschooled my three kids. Never has that meant "only at home and only with my family". My kids have been in co-op classes, taken classes from Art or Technical instruction centers (piano lessons, voice classes, programming, robotics), enrolled in community classes via private institutions and the local JC (cooking classes, performing arts) and been enrolled in independent study charter public schools which have some in-person classes. And in high school they start taking in-person JC courses.
There is lots of regular exposure to a variety of other people in all of that!
Just redefine homeschooling to include enrollment at schools and community colleges, tada.
> especially when it comes to dealing with conflict.
What makes you think school is a good environment for that? Kids can be very cruel to each other with often the most societally maladapted dominating for reasons that have no bearing in real life.
> I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
Popularity is not an exclusively American concept. Just as public school broadened your horizons, so will traveling (or living) abroad.
Too many CO2 emissions for that to be practical for the billions of people who don't have public transit access to another nation.
not if you send em by boat
Popular misconception of homeschooling. At least in my experience. We homeschool our children. We do a couple of hours a day of curriculum. The rest is being a member of a few homeschool coops. Parents are close, yet it's big enough that there are still "groups". Kids are making friends and socializing in a much more fruitful way than the chambers of public school. There's play, then there's exploration. We go on nature walks and clean ups, the theater, the naval base, we have soccer, gymnastics, and jiu jitsu, we go to the museums, libraries, and recycling plant.
Our kids have friends. We have made friends (tough at our age). And our kids are 1-2 years above their peers on diagnostics.
Not sure what would cause someone to downvote my post without reply. Guess they're upset about their own performance and/or that of their kids.
> I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people.
Unfortunately this encourages people to have a blind eye regarding bullying.
I would be much more happy if more people intervened against bullies and liars. Maybe we'd have better people in politics today if 40 years ago schools punished bullies and liars and sent them to have their behavioral problems addressed.
Fully agree. The foundation of education is learning how the world actually is, not how we wish it would be.
There is some realy valid things to consider here.
The thing it leaves me wondering is how many kids from elementary through high school a child really keeps in touch with, and if college is currently the place where many students finally get to start to be themselves.
>I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
It's always felt like a quirk of biology, in the same way that most people are now too fat. (ie, we didn't evolve in an era with constant excess calories and for the most part we can't cope with the situation) In that same way, people engage in this vicious fight for status between middle school and high school, only to be whisked away to colleges and then whisked away to wherever the jobs are; the fight for status never mattered and you can reinvent yourself in ways which would have never been possible in our ancient kin groups. But, we just cannot stop fighting for that status, and don't even give it much though. It's a huge waste of energy.
> I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
This is generally not true, as far as popularity correlates to having better social skills and a better understanding of social dynamics. Not saying income is the sole definition of success, but here is one study that found that teenagers with more friends earned more as adults: https://www.nber.org/papers/w27337
Except homeschooled people I know are lovely and well adjusted.
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My public school experience was that the ones beating up other kids were usually the jerks.
If you can afford it! "Grass-roots segregation hits records numbers" would be an equally fitting title.
What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?
Maybe it's:
I’m sure these motivations do play out in some circles. However, every single homeschooler I know personally, and I know quite a few, does so because they want their children to have a very specific kind of religious education. Often the way this plays out is that they homeschool for a while, transition to a denominational school, and then depending on the family they may stay there or make a second transition to public school around 9th grade.
I think this tendency is heavily dependent on where you live. We have great public schools that will track advanced children aggressively if the parents push for it, so the motivations you list are unusual in my area.
Religion is definitely a big motivator. My perception though is other motivations have been on the increase, especially since the pandemic. One other group attracted to homeschooling is the hippie-type who thinks school is some kind of diabolical machine designed to crush kids' souls. Since the pandemic there's also been a big surge in the "I don't trust vaccines" group (which already had a good deal of overlap with the hippie group).
I have a feeling a really large percentage of homeschooling is about religious separatism and political separatism, and not about academic performance. Yes, you'll hear HN commenters sing the praises of homeschooling because this site is going to be disproportionately represented by the group doing it for actual educational reasons.
Also, we HN commenters typically see the success stories around us at work, not the failure stories. We all know that guy on the QA team who's a genius and credits his success to homeschooling, but we don't know the countless numbers of grown adults who are trapped as housewives who can't get a job because they never learned 5th grade multiplication.
Both were certainly major motivating factors for my parents’ choice to homeschool me in the 90s. Quality of education was a concern too, but it very much took a back seat to the other two.
The overwhelming majority of other homeschooling parents they had contact with also held separatist motivations.
That may be so, especially if you add a sort of "cultural separatism" (a la the hippies I mentioned). An odd thing I see recently too is people who seem to believe they're making various choices for educational reasons, but it's not clear if the education they're moving to is any better. They just do it because they perceive their child as being unhappy or stifled somehow. There seem to be, for instance, more and more parents who believe their kid is unusually smart and should be on some kind of fast track or not have to do certain things, even when there's little objective evidence of the kid's abilities.
Vague "educational reasons" is always the noble-sounding excuse they use, but often if you dig deeper they'll admit it's more about the various forms of separatism.
Sometimes you don't have to dig. A ton of moms in my wife's church group permanently pulled their kids out of public school in recent years, and they will openly admit that it's about keeping their kids away from "those" people, where the definition of "those" runs the gamut.
I don't want the separatism, but I also want the ability to give my kids a decent education. There ought to be some way to determine which is which. Do you have any ideas?
We did the homeschool thing for one year after most kids went back to school after COVID. My wife has underlying medical conditions that made her quite concerned about catching it before the vaccine rollout. We did a few of the homeschool group organized field trips and I got to briefly meet some of the parents. Overall I can't say much about the kids, they seemed fine. The parents were friendly, but when I asked about the curriculum they almost invariably suggested PragerU material, which makes me concerned for their children's future.
Not sure why you're being down voted. I'm sure there are some folks homeschooling because of things like racism, but that has always existed just like evangelical christians have always been big into homeschooling.
If there is a big uptake, it's likely due to the ever present threat of school shootings coupled with all the things you said above. I have to teach my kid a lot outside of school and they go to what is considered a good one. The only reason I send them is my spouse and I work and my kid needs to learn social skills. If I won the lottery, I'd homeschool them myself and do it for a few other families as well so that my kid can get the social aspect too.
It's insightful how they said segregation and financial means and you immediately went to racism.
There is certainly some level of segregating the children from families who have the means to "dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children" and children from families that don't have those means.
You can't use the word segregation wrt people and then pretend it's surprising or unreasonable when someone assumes you're talking about racism.
They used the phrase "If you can afford it." The charitable assumption would have been that the segregation was tied to income.
I never said it was surprising or unreasonable, I said it was insightful. Your comment is further digging in on that point.
> What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?
A lot of the people I know who do homeschool (the extreme majority of families I know) have openly said the reasons why they're choosing to homeschool is because they don't want their kids exposed to the other "cultures" in their area whether that be immigrants, other religions, or LGBT people.
One family I know was thinking about pulling their kids out of public school because the choir was going to sing "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" and was worried this was indoctrinating their child into another religion. Forget the fact the rest of that holiday choir event was filled with Christian holiday tunes and what that means for the non-Christians that have a right to go to the school, that wasn't a concern at all.
Not all families, I agree. I've known a few outliers who actually are exceptional teachers and think they'll do a better job teaching the kids than the local schools (and they're probably right). But they're definitely the outliers around me. Most that I've personally known are not like that, and rely on just giving their kids workbooks with extreme religious bent to figure things out on their own.
> they don't want their kids exposed to the other "cultures" in their area whether that be immigrants, other religions, or LGBT people.
Culture is distinct from race. Some cultures advocate for the destruction of others. Some don't.
I agree its not always "racism", but ultimately the main reason is still largely the same. They don't think their kids should mingle with the "others". Its the exact same logic of black school segregation during Jim Crow.
Sometimes for good reason. Observe what happened to people who tried to approach Sentinel island. That may seem extreme, but it's not my point. It's is that cultures are different and some are detrimental to the people of some other culture's wellbeing.
I saw a study a while back - don't have the link handy - that while homeschooled kids of all ethnicities showed improved education outcomes compared to their public-school counterparts, African American kids improved the most. Not really surprising if they would otherwise be going to the worst schools!
Are they going to spend huge amounts of time & money?
I'd be willing to bet that we'll hear some stories about how they outsourced the effort to AI
The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against this concept. Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.
Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.
Modern academic life is only well suited to a small percent of the population. Those children who are truly happy and excelling in that setting.
So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at? Forced mass education was a good idea for developing societies, but personalized education has been possible for at least a decade now, at a fraction of the cost. And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Here's a famous song on the topic for those who know how to "chew the meat from the cud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE...
* It's fascinating to watch the points on my comment go up and down a ton. Very controversial issue. I believe it highlights pressure from social and political structures in society, and/or personal experiences. They vary so much.
My general experience is that homeschool children have self esteem and confidence issues precisely because they've been around 'hand picked' people... forever.
They've never experienced assholes, or people who think their personality is grating, or whatever. Thick skin needs to be built up, to a degree. I'm not saying bullying is good, but being exposed to the unwashed masses definitely can be.
I watched my kids becoming a median of their classmates. After changing to a private school it was noticeable after a month - different lexicon, mimics, attitude.
It's not thick skin they are developing around assholes, it's them incorporating that behavior to some degree. There was nothing I could do to change that - talks, good example, nothing worked, only surrounding change.
And I grew up among median kids till I was 19 and never did adjust to the median (neither did my group of friends foinf to the same school). My younger brother however did.
There are kids who will have the tendency to adjust to others and there are kids who don't. This has to do with the self-confidence they bring with them before they enter their first day of school, friends they have/had outside school and it is not necessarily a thing a parent can always control in a predictable manner.
For all we know in your case it could even be that your kid learned they have to follow the others in private school and then applied that lesson in the next one. What I am saying here is that having learned the lesson "you need to adjust to your peers" is the problem, not that the peers are the "wrong" ones.
Underrated comment because I have seen exactly the same thing. Us as parents don't have as much nurture on our kids as we would like to think.
It's false to think that you can only learn to handle assholes if you experience them at a young tender age.
I mean… the issue is you have incredibly well educated kids that have an awkward time dealing with assholes.
Given the state of our education system, that seems like an obviously worthwhile trade off. Especially for parents in underperforming school districts and even entire regions.
I think this is analogous to diseases and vaccines. You don't immunize a child by exposing it to the pathogen, but to a modified version of it that poses no threat to their health, but still allows their immune system to recognize and produce anti bodies.
The same applies to teaching "street smarts" to kids. You don't do it by throwing them in a hostile environment where they'll be prey to hostile people without having any defenses built up first.
> Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.
Not your problem to fix for sure - but it is your problem to equip your child to comfortably weather. There are bad influences out in the world and they generally have outsized effects on their social and professional scenes. In fact, the kind of curated, limited community you're advocating for is one where bad influences thrive.
> So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at?
I certainly agree the degree is whatever - but I think you're really under-valuing the social-gauntlet aspect of school. You will have classmates who kind of (or really) suck. You will need to do your work anyway. You will be incentivized to learn perseverance and a self-centered locus of control. These are valuable skills that only come from actual exposure to bad influences.
Someone who's perfect in perfect conditions is going to struggle because the world is not perfect. The aims you highlight here make me think less of homeschooling than I did before.
The problem is that what constitutes “healthy” varies so greatly between individuals (especially these days) that it barely carries any objective meaning, and the odds are heavily against any one person’s definition being correct.
If I put myself in the shoes of a parent, I wouldn’t trust myself on the matter enough that I’d feel good shaping my childrens’ entire world to match it. It’s such a wildly difficult thing to get right, and I’d rather they get a glimpse of the world through wide variety of viewpoints and hope they’ll use the values I’ve instilled in them to construct their own view.
> hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children
Unless you can magically guarantee (or have enough money to fund their whole life) your children will never have to interact with "problem" people, they will need to learn to deal with those people one way or another. And it's better to do so in a low-stakes situation like school.
Childhood and youth are anything but “low‐stakes.” The social experiences I faced in public school were far worse than even the worst parts of my adult life. The direction I was headed was one of dark cynicism and misanthropy thanks to the bullying I faced and the lack of care from the adults in the system. When I switched to homeschooling, I began interacting with rational adults (my parents’ friends) and in turn learned what functioning human relationships look like. My ability to weather the difficult storms of adulthood in a healthy way came from the social growth I gained through homeschooling, not the regressive “socialization” that public school inflicted on me.
I had exactly the same experience. I was in a public school full of assholes and teachers that couldn't care less about any bullying taking place. Those few years were probably the worse years of my life.
I grew significantly and became a different person when I was moved to a different school.
I still think it taught me a lot about the world and how people really are. I really lost a lot of faith in humanity in those few years and still see the world as cynical in which all people are in it for themselves.
Did it make me stronger? Maybe. But also I wish I could see the world more positively as a lot of people that have been shielded from those experiences seem to do.
On the opposite end of the spectrum I grew up near a Mormon family whom exclusively homeschooled their children. Their 'homeschooling' mostly consisted of using the older children to assist and babysit the younger children as they had about ten or so children, and naturally could not equally provide schooling for such a wide range of needs.
They were a nice family, but when I was in community college I had a chance to talk with one of the eldest who was there getting her GED. Last I recall, she held some resentment towards her parents because she was held back fairly significantly by her upbringing. Well, except for the fact that they were wealthy which helps smooth some of the problems.
The trouble I have with this line of argument is that, at least for male children, the skills one learns for dealing with 'problem' people in school (IE skills one would learn in an MMA gym) are not relevant for dealing with problem people afterwards.
What makes you think homeschool kids never deal with assholes?
Assholes are a dime a dozen. Homeschooling doesn’t exempt your kids from learning how to deal with them.
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What you define here is isolation from the real world. There seems to be a misunderstanding of your understanding of misunderstanding.
Children's world view is shaped early on. They shouldn't have to suffer just because poor, violent, should-have-been-aborteds are legally required to go to public schools. Children should experience carefree happiness at least once, in their formative years so they know happiness is possible.
> They shouldn't have to suffer just because poor, violent, should-have-been-aborteds are legally required to go to public schools.
Yikes! Good thing these people, whom you so clearly despise, will cease to exist after school and will never have to be dealt with in regular life.
I guess the rise in homeschooling is not surprising when we openly view our fellow civilians as inherently poor/violent and shouldn't exist.
They can be avoided later in life just like they can be avoided in public schools. Freedom to choose was established 50 years ago, sorry if you dislike it.
> homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one?
...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?
I think your view is a very black and white one. Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there.
The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe. Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do.
I can not conceive of a worse way to teach a kid how to behave in Adult social settings than to throw them into a group of other kids who have just as little experience as they do and then expect the group to "figure it out". This is not to say that there aren't some homeschooling parents who practice a form of extreme isolation which produces what I would regard as an equally bad outcome as public school. But by the numbers from people who have studied this the evidence indicates homeschooling produces the best outcomes for social adjustment in Adulthood.
Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement which means the child learns how to socialize not from other children but from watching how the adults they are around handle interactions.
[Edited for clarity in some sentences]
> I can not conceive of a worse way to teach a kid how to behave in Adult social settings than to throw them into a group of other kids who have just as little experience as they do and then expect the group to "figure it out".
You are aware of teachers, yes?
> Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement
Everything I've read shows that putting absolutely all else aside, parental involvement is key to a child's success. So perhaps the reason your by the numbers evidence shows home schooling to be better is simply because it's a self-selecting group of involved parents.
Teachers at a school do not fill the same role that homeschooling parents do in theses situations.
Counterpoint from my own experience having been previously homeschooled all the way to college: My parents went the extra mile to ensure I was constantly immersed in large group settings with other homeschoolers. Field trips, co-op classes, sports, and general high-quality social time. There were of course bad eggs as in any group setting, but with an important difference: if it ever got bad, it was possible to leave, and we did on occasion. In my mind, that's far more in keeping with the "real world" than the seeming entrapment of public schooling that offers little recourse for when social experiences sour. In the real world, you have the freedom to leave a toxic job or social group far more so than public school.
In addition to peer socialization and mobility, the flexibility in scheduling allowed me to work a day job through my high school years, exposing me to yet more real-world experience. The constant interaction with adults and folks from other walks of life was a huge boon that allowed me to function as a well-adjusted adult right out of the gate. The high-school drama that people suffer and then bring with them into adulthood is very disappointing and seemingly unnecessary.
^^^ That's my experience interacting with healthily homeschooled children-now-adults. On average they seemed to have so much less trauma than me and my peers, and less "subconscious" issues to deal as adults.
"..a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?"
School isn't their only exposure to life. You will get exposure to other people and non-healthy people outside of school.
"Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in th"
When I was a kid, I was exposed to kids that should have been in prison..and many of them ended up there. My life probably would have been better if they weren't there.
"My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there."
This can still be done with home schooling.
"The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe."
I disagree. If someone is hostile and aggressive all the time, I wouldn't be around them as an adult. I hand pick my friends, and you probably do too. I also still get exposed to the assholes of the world.
"Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do."
If you are at work and someone is sexually harassing all of the women there or generally causing issues for everyone around them (preventing most other people from getting their work done). Do you think they should stay, so everyone can learn to be around them?
You seem to think everyone is a reasonable person that might just have a few issues. This is far from the truth and many times, public schools will just keep these kids there, preventing everyone around them from learning.
It's also a burden to the teachers and staff.
> ...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?
It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public. "The real world" is highly filtered social circles and freedom of association. The idea that it's somehow an automatic good to force healthy kids to mix with everyone who happens to show up, regardless of whether they have severe behavioral or social issues, is pretty questionable.
> My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there.
You can expose your kids to different cultures without leaving them wide open to everything else. It's not a binary. The point is that home schooling lets you pick and choose.
> It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public.
I'm baffled by this. Many workplaces? Mass transit? Walking down the sidewalk? At a concert? Buying groceries? True, there don't all expose you to the full sweep of human existence at once but, in aggregate, it seems pretty similar to what you'd encounter at most public schools. What if they want a career in a hospital, or law enforcement, or social services, ... the list goes on.
You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble, but it seems to me they need to be prepared for a future where they encounter all kinds of people. I'm sure this can be compatible with homeschooling but I can't see how it's not generally a disadvantage. (Though perhaps onerous clearly outweighed by other advantages, depending on the situation.)
The closest social equivalency to public school socialization I can think of is prison. You're stuck there for N hours per day with limited or zero control over what other people you're around. Maybe parts of military training might also be similar.
That's the kind of thing that is very much not like the "real world." It's more than just being "exposed" to less optimal peers (like you would on a bus), it's an entirely different social experience.
Home schooled kids walk down sidewalks, go to concerts, go grocery shopping.
Most workplaces are highly filtered. The whole interview process is specifically geared towards filtering out undesirable people.
> Most workplaces are highly filtered. The whole interview process is specifically geared towards filtering out undesirable people.
This just isn't true or is born from a standpoint of extreme luck. Like have you genuinely paid attention to the people you work with? Coworkers, CEOs, the stuff people say in slack channels or the things people gossip about at work? The only way I think someone can genuinely hold an opinion like this is by being so unaware of what workplace politics that they are unaware that most workplaces are like Highschool 2. Even the professional ones. Especially the professional ones.
It's absolutely undeniable that interviewing is meant to filter out undesirable behavior. What in the world do you think it is? So many people cannot just walk in and start working next to you, very few will be selected.
You are pointing out behavior that is different, but not undesirable. Which is not being discussed. i.e., kids who distrust other kids learning is undesirable. As would people who create hostile work environments, or are inefficient, or unreliable, or don't have the right connections.
In my place of work people nearly universally went to top end universities, a much larger proportion than the normal population have phds. you think that's random? And more locally if you work on a sales team you are going to be hired to work directly with people that have certain shared traits that make them effective sellers. It's so obvious that interviewing is an active filter I'm not even sure what to do to convince someone that thinks otherwise.
I'm not sure how you equate any of that to workplace politics or gossip. Even if it was relevant, the fact that it is not a perfectly effective filter doesn't make it not a filter.
You don’t have to sit side-by-side rubbing shoulders and squabbling with rabble for 12 years in order to understand and deal with it, just like you don’t have to wrestle with gators for 12 years to learn respect for nature.
> You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble
I think it's telling that the other responses seem to focus on exactly this; the idea that their child will exist in a class apart from the rabble, and will not have to interact with them.
It seems to speak to two very different views of community. On the one hand, there is community as a collection of all the people in a space: people who share local resources, frequent the same local businesses, and have the same local concerns. On the other, there is a community of choice: people who share the same social class, and possibly the same religion or cultural beliefs. I think it's fair to say that you can have both, but trying to say that you can belong solely to the communities you choose and treat everyone else as beneath notice sounds quite problematic, and it will absolutely not give children a correct or complete view of the world.
Isn't this exactly what society is built on though? Mutually beneficial interactions borne of choice, not compulsion? And isn't it the sane, rational thing to do to oppose people who compel you to join their community?
> No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public
I think "forced" is doing a lot of work there. No, you're not forced to work alongside someone problematic. But quitting your job is quite an escalation to deal with the issue. Same with a troublesome neighbor. To say nothing of public transit, taking flights, interacting with other drivers on the road...
It absolutely is. If you are well equipped to navigate the adult world, you place yourself in hand-picked groups of people. I do not work with, socialize with, or live near a random sample of the population, and I highly doubt most people reading this thread do either!
Yeah but how do you LEARN the ability to do that? To keep that practice always in your mental backburner, and remembering how important it is? Why, you learn it by seeing the impacts from those succumbed to negative influences they surrounded themselves with!
You can't learn the application of hand-picking your people and environments if you don't first see the outcomes when such application is neglected, and understanding its importance from there. If you have the hand-picking done for you as well, you risk not learning the ability to do it yourself. Or how to handle the situations where you can't.
I agree as someone homeschooled til college. I'm 30 and only just started taking it seriously when sussing out new groups
> ...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?
It's much closer to the real world though, isn't it? Your child is likely going to live most of their life in similar communities to them, not a wide cross section of the public.
If you can’t hand pick your kids experiences through life, why does everyone worry about what school district they live in?
I think your reading is very black and white. Add some leeway to what I say. Hand-picked obviously doesn't mean all friends go through a psych screening on a daily basis, or that you have to helicopter-parent and tell your kids who to be friends with...
> or you have to helicopter-parent and tell your kids who to be friends with...
Isn't that essentially what you're describing, though? You literally talked about "healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children". No, you don't have to tell them who to be friends with... but you've pre-selected the pool of potential friends, so there's no instruction necessary.
I get that on one hand, such regulation is one of the reasons some parents do so, but the wide diversity of "oversight" is challenging.
In Washington, homeschooled students still have to occasionally connect at an actual school, or do some baseline testing.
In Louisiana, you just tell the state "we're homeschooling" and the state is "have fun with that" and the child is essentially off the grid.
Not for nothing, instances of child abuse/CSA in many correlates with the laxness of educational oversight in home schooling.
> And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom.
For all your anecdotes my step daughter has plenty too. 10th graders who are barely literate, cannot do elementary math. Who when asked about their homeschool regime talk of waking at 10, 10.30, playing Fortnite or going on Tiktok for a few hours, and occasionally logging into some website to pretend like they've been working, or doing some mind numbingly simple exercise to show "participation".
> Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom.
Exactly. Notice how, when people complain about the "deranged ideologies" that teachers are teaching their kids, they either 1. stop short of actually naming those ideologies or 2. spout fever dreams that are statistically vanishingly rare.
Where I live the schools are quite good and the homeschoolers are fundamental religious families who won’t send their kids to schools where gay pride flags are allowed.
I’d pull our child out of school if the standards dropped but I think the majority of homeschoolers align with out of the mainstream poltical / religious views.
If schools are problematic or have kids that are problematic, wouldn't it make more sense to focus on investing in them to make them better, adding resources to support difficult kids, to help parents who are not doing well? As opposed to disengaging from them?
It is pretty hard for one parent to change things for the better, even if just for their child in one classroom. The administration and teachers have so many other things to deal with. It's much harder to change the entire school culture. You can volunteer, and you should!, but you still won't make as large an impact on your child's education as you would hope. In some ways, this is good, because there are lots of crazy parents out there who you don't want making impacts on your child's education, but it's also bad if you're not that crazy parent.
If the school system is damaging kids, it’s good to work to improve it, but you won't see results (if any—effecting systemic change is hard) until after your kids have already graduated, facing irreversible damage in the process.
If you’re willing to homeschool well, the positive impact on your kids is immediate.
> Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one?
A gardener who understands that after that short grace period that plant will have to grow amongst those sick and hostile ones essentially and not only that, it will have to form a thriving ecosystem with them.
I get the idea of wanting to protect your child at all cost and wanting the best possible education for them. Rarely have I found that former students with over-protective parents that put them down a funnel of other kids from the same social and ideological background have really thrived. And I work in university level education meaning I get to see first hand what is usually the first phase in a persons life where they can decide for themselves how to do it. The people with self-confidence and stable roots who make the best, are usually those who "have seen it all", while those with alternative schooling backgrounds are either completely in their own world (often with rude awekenings) or constant feelings of inadequacy and comparison with others. That is anecdotal evidence by one educator, so details may matter.
Aside from those individual aspects, there absolutely is a societal aspect to that. If gated communities are the solution, then your society has to be in what is already a pretty dystopian position. Having those isolated silos mean in a world of isolated social media silos, we give our kids even less possibility to experience the reality of other members of the society we expect them to repair.
That shoulders them with an impossible task. My deep believe is that the goal of education is to prepare people for their life, but also to give them the tools to make the world they are sent into a better place. That requires a healthy dose of "knowing what is", especily if what is, is ugly.
>> Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one?
> A gardener who understands that after that short grace period that plant will have to grow amongst those sick and hostile ones essentially and not only that, it will have to form a thriving ecosystem with them.
If, on the other hand, the gardener knows from experience that the flower will be suffocated, then it's pointless at best and cruel at worst.
> increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
You really might want to explain that further. At face value, that sounds like parroted right-wing rhetoric.
He is a real rightoid based on other comments. HN disappointed me today, since you're the only one who noticed, others silently tolerate this behavior.
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> Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.
I'm sure they exist, they may even exist as the majority, I will say for my part the homeschooled kids I knew through my church growing up were not any of these things. I would quite literally use the opposite of both those to describe them.
I'm not saying they represent the majority but they do exist and they were not well adjusted IMHO.
As with many topics I feel like "Yes, if you want to devote yourself fully to X thing you can do much better than Y professional", the problem is, again from my own experience, the people I knew who homeschooled their children were not professionals, they were not capable, and their children suffered for it. I want to stress, I fully believe it is possible for certain people with certain mentors/teachers to do better outside of the public (or private) school system. I just also believe that the odds of most people (making that decision for their children) to meet that bar are low. I also think that some of the better homeschooled experiences that I've seen are simply a super-private school by another name (various parents being or being subject experts and taking turns teaching coupled with many "field trip"-type trips with other homeschooled kids).
> there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Wait till you hear what the parents believe... I don't agree with everything taught or the way it's taught but being exposed to other types of people and ways of thinking is critical. I can guarantee you that had my parents been able to, they would have shielded me from a great number of ways of thinking. I worry that many homeschooled children grow up in a small echo chamber (we all live in echo chambers of difference sizes).
Can public school suck? Absolutely and I acknowledge that homeschooling might be the answer for some people, but only if you can afford to pay (with time or money) to educate your children completely which is almost certainly going to require working with other homeschooler parents to, essentially, build your own school. If you can bring in tutors/mentors/teachers that you vet and agree with and expose them to the world and new ideas/experiences then yeah, you are probably going to have good outcomes. If you plop them in front of a computer to follow a curriculum just to shield them from the "evils" of the world, well, I think you are going to have a bad time. Obviously there is a whole range of people in between those 2 extremes, I just feel that, on average, people trend towards the lower end of that spectrum.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE...
Interesting song and I do agree with many points. For many years I've complained about lack of teaching basic skills (everything from home ec to budgeting and more), many of which I heard in this song. I think there was a little of the baby going out with the bathwater but overall I enjoyed it.
> song
Yea, the guy later made a video clarifying he never meant to throw the baby out, just the bathwater.
I mean you’re literally explaining how your home schooled kids are separated from the real world.
Public school doesn't really represent "the real world" for everyone anyway
If you go to university and into a professional career you end up in a different bubble of people than say going into trades
Define "real world".
The one that exists with problem children and opinions you don’t like.
As a parent I get the impulse to remove my children from any potential harm but the real world has sharp edges. They need to be confident in that world not just smothered.
And really as the person who used the term it’s really up to you to define what you mean.
Can you pick even a single person that will agree with you on everything? You could be around 10 if your identical twins and there’d still be conflict.
Why is it more „natural” if the school does the picking? Besides, parents can’t command anyone to join. It’s not The Truman Show.
Is marriage not “real life” because you chose your partner? Does you choosing prevent disagreement, struggle, pain and growth? I don’t think so.
Why would I let anyone brainwash my kids with opinions that I don't like? Why do my kids have to be bullied by these problem children?
> As a parent
I guess you still want them to go to a good school, not a ghetto one. And most likely you don't want them to be brainwashed with ideas that you personally don't like.
> The one that exists with problem children and opinions you don’t like.
That's just not true though. Your job isn't going to force you to interact with people who disrupt the environment constantly. Those people are fired and removed from the group.
In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave.
In the military, say, you don't get that option.
In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while.
So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.)
> In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave.
Agreed! And that is exactly what home-schooling families are doing. Choosing to leave a dysfunctional environment.
> In the military, say, you don't get that option.
Yep, and other government institutions, like prison. I don't think those are what anyone would call a typical life environment though.
> In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while.
That's another dysfunctional environment, and also what the police are for.
> So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.)
You're right, you can't. The world has a lot of dysfunctional environments, and I agree that people need to learn how to deal with them. Knowingly forcing your child to be in one of those environments full-time for many years seems like a pretty horrible way to teach them that though, bordering on abusive.
Public school is not dysfunctional, per se.
And, to be clear, EVERY workplace will have people you don't like. Every. Single. One. No exceptions.
Kids needs to be taught resiliency and healthy mindsets, to a degree. They need to learn to live and let go, to learn their value isn't derived from what people think of them, to learn that embarrassment is self inflicted.
You just can't do that if you're only around people who don't challenge you. If you're in a nice, cushy, social bubble, you will develop self esteem and confidence issues.
Exactly. Adults don't tolerate the same B.S. children are forced into.
Hilariously wrong. One who thinks such is either so overwhelmingly privileged he has never had to actually work to survive, or is a part of said "problem children" without self-awareness.
My job isn’t the totality of my life and you have very strange ideas about how quickly disruptive people actually get fired. You get plenty of unfiltered interaction in life. If anything I’d say the sort of thing you describe sounds more like an insular cult. Although even there you get misanthropic people, abuse and so on.
> My job isn’t the totality of my life and you have very strange ideas about how quickly disruptive people actually get fired. You get plenty of unfiltered interaction in life.
In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up? The only instances I can think of are other government-run institutions like the military or prison, and I don't think anyone would argue those are standard modes of "real life".
> If anything I’d say the sort of thing you describe sounds more like an insular cult.
Name calling isn't an argument.
> In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up?
Holding literally any job ever? I was a software engineer and I frequently had to interact with a wide range of folks for the sake of my professional career. QA, contractors, internal and external teams. I was paid to do so, unless you argue that I have the option to quit or something in which my response is I need to in fact eat and have stable income.
> In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up?
Have you heard of customer service?
> In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up?
I was a paramedic. Every single day.
Anywhere you happen to be in public essentially.
I also didn’t call you names just stated that your description sounded cult like.
If your environment is so controlled to not have a good mix of people in it then that sounds even more cult like!
the only intellectually honest takeaway is, it's extremely difficult to know much of depth about children you've never met.
there's was a famous paper written by a former school teacher which advocated for home schooling ? I been trying to find it ever since
I don't agree with all of Piotr's writings, but here's an extensive list of famous educators, maybe yours is among them.
John Locke, John Holt, Peter Green, and:
https://supermemo.guru/wiki/The_Greatest_Minds_in_History_Op...
https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Tom_Durrie
I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before.
We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.
We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.
But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
Home schooling has answers for ALL of that.
> Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
And this is only just now being investigated as a cause of harm. When I went to public high school, the bullying happened at school and stayed there. Kids now, their bullies follow them home, and since most of the social interaction now happens online instead of in-person, it's way more damaging to mental health than the classic caricature of a schoolyard bully. The most I had to compare myself to were my peers in my school, not the entire globe of influencers and fake instagram.
There has been a complete erosion of boundaries. The threat is constant, you can't escape it, and kids are in a state of hyper-vigilance, always online or else they miss a crucial social interaction in group chat, or need to constantly check if a damaging photo, post, or rumor gets publicly posted to the internet while they were asleep.
Not only that, teens are losing the ability to read human emotion, so misunderstandings escalate rapidly. In person communication now becomes too intense, and only increases anxiety and isolation, despite being hyperconnected.
And that's just barely touching the surface.
I suppose there are few talented, hard working people who want to teach, and they command a premium. Education is expensive and underfunded.
As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money.
By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.
San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student.
I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.
Are you saying that's a lot or a little? Tuition for most (non-religious) competitive private schools in San Francisco is easily twice that amount.
Nearly every time we try to fix this problem with money it fails. The problem is not money. All else being equal there is little to no correlation between spend and outcome. Money get's touted by schools and politicatians as a way of pretending to care but not actually do any of the work to improve outcomes.
What does tend to correlate with money and also correlates with outcomes is parental involvement. Solving that problem requires societal and economic change in a district though not giving the school more money.
I would argue spending less money would actually improve things.
Ultimately it’s a culture problem. America’s attitude toward problems is nothing if not “throw more money at the problem and hope it gets better.” See also, healthcare, military spending, college sports, etc.
For each of the grades K-12, here is the % of non-religious private schools in San Francisco that charge $56k or more:
cost per student is higher for high school students. So if you take an average across all grades for public schools and then compare that to specific cost per grade at private schools, of course private schools are going to look relatively cheaper for younger students.
I'm saying it's a lot. See my other comment here for my reasoning:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008035
I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house. That $200k gets eaten up pretty quick by things like security, janitorial, building maintenance, support staff like principals, librarians, guidance counselors etc etc. If you’re meaning to include total cost for the full time employees (the teachers) in the list, then the salaries are a lot less attractive once you’re done covering benefits, etc.
I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot. The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k. Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond.
My point is that it's hard to point at some issue of inefficient public bureaucracy, because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper. I would also argue they wouldn't try, because their goal is a good education, or at least better than the public alternative (that only spends $28k per kid).
Moreover, not all students pay sticker price. So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.
Their goal is happy customers (parents). Different schools achieve this in different ways. Some parents choose a school not based on the expected quality of education but based on the expected networking opportunities for themselves and for their child.You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate, and structure most of your argument around the cheapest schools (K-8). Mea culpa on my end, though: you are correct that when I was saying "cheapest I've seen," there was an unfair modifier of "cheapest schools on my personal spreadsheet" which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to. You're absolutely correct that there are cheaper parochial schools available as long as you only need K-8.
Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school (again, referencing SF Chronicle's data). I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.
Sure, that's fair! But we're not talking about income, we're talking about average cost per kid. We can't actually know the details under the hood, but again, those schools specifically in your list are usually subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway.[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2025/sf-bay-area-privat...
- I don't have access to data that would allow me to apportion total SFUSD costs to individual school types
- When considering schools with vastly different prices (and different scales), the median is a much more informative measure than the mean (which could be skewed by an unusually expensive or inexpensive school with a tiny student population).
Another reason for using median is that I was responding to your comments which talked about general price levels ('tuition for those schools is roughly', 'usually start in the $40k range'). You were not talking about averages, but typical prices or minimum (starting) prices. The mean prices have no bearing on the truth or falsity of those claims.
If we look only at non-parochial schools, the means are even higher (e.g. $39k for 5th grade, $41k for 8th grade, $59k for 12th grade). Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant when we look at the sticker price for non-parochial schools, we should assume their average revenue per student is less than the sticker price, and the average cost per student is less than or equal to the average revenue per student. My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded? If we limit the discussion to only those schools we'd be willing to send our kids to, then that would rule out almost all SFUSD schools, which kind of defeats the point of the discussion!BTW In case you want to see the SF Chronicle data in a form that's more personalized (showing the schools nearest to you first, filterable by grade levels and price and type), I made a tool to do that: https://tools.encona.com/schoolfinder
(But I do think it's overfunded.)
OK, so we agree SFUSD is not underfunded? That's great! At my attendance area school, two thirds of students are behind grade level in math, and there's no opportunity to be grouped with kids in other grades. If this is for privacy, don't worry, it's all front end code and your location isn't sent to the server. (You can check the network tab or just look at the code.)Yes, it was extremely clear that your position is that it’s overfunded.
No, we don’t, I just wasn’t trying to make that point. There’s absolutely debates to be had about SFUSD, including how they spend their budget (personally I would make big cuts at the central office and redistribute to the schools), but the thought that $28k/kid is too much in SF just isn’t grounded in reality. This type of broad statement is true, but also obscures the realities of the student population SFUSD is mandated to serve. That high level number includes special education, non-English speakers, etc. Generally speaking, the data for kids with a similar socioeconomic background to the one I suspect your kids have are doing fine in SFUSD, particularly in K-8.For example, a low key popular school with “bad scores,” Flynn[1]. ~30% of the student population met or exceeded the standard for math. That number jumps to 65.4% for kids with college-educated parents, and 81.3% for grad school. Race is an unfortunate proxy here, but it’s 70.8% for white students.
Not trying to convince you to send your kid to public school, of course, just calling out that there’s nuance required when comparing outcomes and what can work for families.
[1] https://caaspp-elpac.ets.org/caaspp/DashViewReportSB?ps=true...
If the religious institution does a better job at roughly the same cost-point then it's probably not the money that is making the difference.
No, it’s the selection process of parents and children.
And, it's worth noting, the uh...deselection process. Private schools can kick kids out, public schools cannot.
Public schools can't legally kick kids out, but SFUSD has shown it can drive parents away.
Rahim, you should have a blog or other website where you write about your experience with schooling in the Bay Area. Considering that schools here have insisted that exothermic reactions produce oxygen and wood, I am not particularly inspired by them. There's no substitute for the actual experiences of parents here.
I have only one child so my direct experience is very limited. Much of what I know (or think I know!) is from looking at data, conversations with parents, conversations with SFUSD employees, and with educators.
$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco because of the insane cost of housing and everything else.
How does housing cost affect the cost for a school to educate a student? Are you saying it's the cost of paying for the school's real-estate?
San Francisco schooling district spends upwards of $1B a year to educate 55k students. About 85% of the budget goes to salary and benefits (excluding pensions). Of that, 75% goes to educators and the rest for other staff.
Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.
It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.
With a budget of $28k per student, and 21 students per classroom, that’s $588k per classroom.
Now, granted, some of that goes on building upkeep, cleaning, supplies, heating, pensions, managers etc - but if $588k per classroom doesn’t let you pay enough to attract teachers there’s something very suspicious going on.
I don’t buy that argument, there’s no reason a teacher in San Francisco can’t live in Oakland or Berkeley, or a teacher in NYC couldn’t live in NJ. You don’t have a human right to live in the most expensive real estate on Earth.
GP didn't say anything about it being a human right. You seem to be strawmanning their argument.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.
Well I guess SF public school students don't have a human right to get good teachers either then.
The price of SF real estate affects the price of real estate in Oakland and Berkeley. So it's still a relevant input variable.
Yeah, screw the teachers, they should just have a longer commute, who cares about them? /s
I always want to laugh when I hear people complain about finding near-minimum-wage workers in a HCOL area. They can't seem to grasp that commuting is not free, it may feel free to them at their income level but transportation costs money (gas, car maintenance, insurance or bus, etc) and time. I'm not saying teaching is a minimum wage job but it's not a high earning one either, paying them as low as we do _and_ also asking them to have a longer commute is just absurd.
Keep that argument going.
Jackson Hole residents complaining about "poor service" in stores and restaurants in town, because shocker, servers can't afford to live in Jackson Hole. And unlike even SF or NY (which may not be perfect but have at least functional transport), there's no easy way to travel from the next town, an hour away or more.
Residents have started banding together to rent coaches to bus people in, which seems the most reasonable solution, after all, no poors in town, still, and it doesn't hurt the residents that service industry employees in their town have a three hour commute. /s
It got so bad in Atherton, CA, that the school had to build accommodation for teachers in the school itself. Next step, they can do janitorial work for extra money!
High housing cost means teachers need higher salaries to account for either their higher cost of living or the extra commute
If an average class has 20 students it's $560k per year. If an average student gets 1000 hours of schooling per year you can pay 200$/hour and you have spent only just above 1/3 of your budget.
It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".
It’s because this is a very simplified view of a classroom. What is presented above is the best case scenario, not a realistic one. For example, there’s no consideration of costs associated with any sort of handicapped student, or student with special education needs.
Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.
Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.
The most recent $790,000,000 in 2024.
> the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance
What kind of maintenance do you think is expensive compared to a budget of $560k per room, per year?
Very possibly. All I'm saying is you can't just compare dollar figures per student without considering where the dollars are spent.
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$28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us?
That leaves $200k unspent.AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist.
If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).
The big thing you’re missing is special education, and to a lesser extent English Language Learners. School districts are obligated to teach every student, some of whom cost the district dramatically more than they receive from the state.
Your admin costs are also low - you need to account for each teacher being coached and managed, running school operations and front desk, facilities management, finance, IT, etc.
Also this is an area where first principles analysis is likely to lead you astray - I’d recommend starting with SFUSD’s public budget to understand what their cost structure is.
You're recommending I look at SFUSD's public budget when:
- that budget is how I was able to calculate per-pupil spend
- in another comment you admitted to having 'no idea' where the $28k/year number came from, suggesting to me that you haven't looked at the budget yourself
The granularity in SFUSD's published budget is not sufficient to analyze what is useful and what is waste.
I did some research into this - the public budget is actually reasonably detailed. The biggest gap between your analysis and the actual expenditures are the SFUSD faces much higher facilities costs, higher admin cost due to Teacher coaching, and specialized programs for English language learners and special education
Finally, I have no idea where people are getting $28k/year; most schools in CA operate on closer to $14k-$16k per pupil
To get the number, you just need to divide two numbers: SFUSD's budget and the number of students.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711345
As the son of a teacher and a friend of several teachers, you're way underestimating their workload.
I estimated that a class of 22 children would require one full time teacher and one full time teaching assistant.
What am I missing? My table has $200k left over so we could add another full time teacher at $150k?
Any specialized teaching: art, languages, in high school I understand they have a different teacher for each subject, a librarian, a substitute teacher on sick days, an individual aide for one of the kids to represent the special education budget…
But I remember you previously and you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.
But if the government is going to operate schools and demand that we all pay for those schools, I'd prefer it if those schools were run for the benefit of students (and specifically to maximize academic achievement) and not for the benefit of government employees.
In WA the state spends around 20k$ per student, people still say it's underfunded.
> Education is expensive and underfunded.
Always makes me think of The West Wing scene:
> Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.
Video (sorry for the burned in subs, should be queued up): https://youtu.be/IzV09gESyh0?t=39
> The competition for the best teachers should be fierce.
Our nation needs something on the order of millions of teachers. Competition for the best teachers would work great, if you needed exactly 1 extraordinary teacher. Or even if you needed a dozen. But when you need 40 teachers or more per school district... you're going to end up with alot of mediocre teachers, and more than a few godawful ones.
And, I suspect, that the thing not even extraordinary teachers can do is give a shit. Some teachers give a shit about some students, a few give a shit about many/most students, but even those few will falter in a career that lasts long enough.
Any why do they even want this silver bullet anyway, as impossible as it is? Why would you want a trillion dollar boondoggle that can't possibly ever work? The answer for that is downright frightening.
And yet, somehow, there are around a million much higher-quality professors. Yes, you need 5x as many teachers. But you don't find 1 in 5 are at the level of a median professor. You should actually expect more than 1 in 5, given they require less vocational training. There is something fundamentally wrong when you move from tertiary to secondary education, but it isn't an issue of supply and demand.
>And yet, somehow, there are around a million much higher-quality professors.
Are we talking about the same country? Most of those professors don't even teach if they can help it. Their job is to bring in grant money to the university. The others are paid hourly wages to be adjuncts, and I'm not certain it's accurate to say that they're "much higher-quality". But if it were, then perhaps that's your problem... the million k12 teachers you need are all teaching secondary education in temp positions for temp pay.
Education should be well funded but in many school districts the problem is waste and inefficiency rather than lack of funding. Huge amounts are paid to administrators and consultants who do nothing to improve student outcomes, or even make them worse. Generally there is little correlation between funding per student and results.
Really, though, the biggest factor is just being their parent. When they're young, the vast majority of the time you can basically read their mind. When you're teaching your child, you almost instinctively know how well they're understanding things. I was never deliberate about it, I didn't look for things, I never had to. I was able to pace my delivery very tightly with their ability to consume and it was the most natural thing imaginable.
That, and having a class size of two, meant Home Schooling was "30-45 minutes Monday-Friday September to mid-April with generous vacations." And that's not "30-45 minutes but we also went to a museum, the library, co-ops (we did, briefly), and all kinds of other learning activities" (I'm sure I lied and said I did those things), that was 30-45 minutes, do some chores (we don't live on a farm, it's the same stuff most kids do), and play video games.
Parenting-wise, the only elements we were more strict with was we limited "watching a TV show or video content" to an hour (two, on occasion, for movies) a day ... and we were quite rigorous with that. But they could play pretty much any video game they wanted (within reason, but probably far less restrictive than most parents outside of Hacker News). And they didn't get mobile devices until 13 and 15. There was no reason. They had/have computers.
My goal was simply "to teach them at home better than they could get at school and to make them self-learners along the way." I wasn't looking for genius spelling bee winners.
They've been in Public School (since the start of HS for my son, 7th grade for my daughter) for four years. Those 30-45 minute sessions that -- not once -- involved taking a test resulted in them being straight-A students. The first test they took, a placement test, resulted in them landing in advanced classes.
They finish their home work at school (my son works way ahead because he's bored). They study for nothing outside of midterms and finals (and they only do that out of paranoia, it's not really needed).
The majority of the time they were Home Schooled, Mom and I were divorced (and it wasn't "amicable" for the majority of that, it was ... ugly). And while that was hard, actually home schooling the children was not. It was awesome. I'd have been a lot less stressed in the earlier years if I'd have known how easy it was.
It was "get good curriculum, follow it, don't move on until they understand it to what a teacher would grade an 'A'". You do the latter because you have to; anything else is debt and the only one who pays that debt is the you. Your kids will just sob through it. Outside of budgeting because you're likely down to one income, the rest was all upside.
Is there an answer for athletics, music, robotics, and all the other after school teams? How does that work?
Of these, most are easily handled. I am in a midsized city and there are plenty of groups that offer music, robotics & engineering, speech & drama, etc. focused towards homeschooled students. That, plus the rise in homeschool "pods"/co-ops means socialization and activities are very available to students & parents who want them.
Sports might be the challenge. Many US states have athletic associations that handle most K-12 sports, and they require enrollment in an accredited member school. I am aware of several homeschool specific athletic associations in my area, but all are targeted towards religious homeschoolers. Not certain what secular alternatives would exist, but soccer is very popular & there are plenty of competitive academies that operate outside the school ecosystem.
I know several homeschooled students who played varsity sports for their local high school (the one that they would have been attending). I'm not sure about the universality of that, but that's an option for at least some people.
I think it's patchwork & has changed over time. When I was at high school one of my friends who was homeschooled competed with me on our academic team. His older (and far more athletically gifted brother ;-)) lettered in several varsity sports. But now that state's athletic association explicitly says no to homeschool students.
Besides big ones like soccer that you mention, more niche sports are often partially or totally outside of school systems.
Fencing for example, is usually clustered around external clubs. Very few high schools will have fencing teams, and in a lot of cities even the high schools that do have fencing teams will be kind of a joke compared to the club teams.
This comment made me curious so I did some research. Of the sports offered by my local school district (in the top 30 for enrollment in the country), I can find an alternative for homeschoolers that offer competitive opportunities for every sport but bowling and football.
Of the others, there are either homeschool alternatives that are explicitly secular or at least not overtly religious, or there are competitive clubs. All the schools have track & field, but there is a large homeschool league. And the district has a few schools with pools and a few more with swim teams that practice at the city pools, but the local swim club is the one turning out the Olympians – but even then, it also seems to have plenty of offerings for kids who won't set a world butterfly record. Football, I imagine, is just so popular that the private/public schools take all the players.
My kids do Taekwondo and church youth groups. My eldest did not want to do robotics but he does run the Dungeons and Dragons group at our library. We do music as a family. My daughter does choir. My son has done drama but declined to participate this year. They have been homeschooled their entire lives. All three of them received something I did not, the ability to converse with adults from a young age. This is of course anecdotal so YMMV but I would love to see a study on the conversational skills of homeschooled students.
Anecdotally, homeschooled children often speak and behave more like adults.
Whether this is a positive or negative thing depends on the situation. Being precocious is something adults might think positively about (though not in all situations) but it's not something other kids usually admire.
I think you are right that this is situational. I can understand it potentially hindering relationships with other like aged children who are traditionally educated. I can only say that I like my kids a lot, which is nice as a parent.
Homeschoolers form co-ops. A local one here does ballroom dance, tennis, basketball. There is often a youth symphony option in mid- to large-sized cities.
For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.
Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.
Depending on where you live there are many options. In my school district home school kids can join any club or team offered by the public school system where you reside. Additionally there are numerous non-school related clubs and activities all over the place. My kids could play music with the local school district, with a musical education non-profit that is prolific in our area, or ( where they do play music ) with private lessons that have group classes, bands, and performance opportunities.
To me, this question highlights the whole problem: This is not what schools are for.
Yes, it's great if they provide these things, but it's a distant secondary concern. I'd rather my kid get a great education and miss out on these things, than get a poor education but have access to all these.
But of course, as others have pointed out, it's a false dichotomy. You can have both.
There are tons of clubs for such things. My kids are in a homeschool music program (and learning piano and, until recently, bagpipes); half of my kids are playing competitive sports via homeschool programs that compete with other high schools; one is getting his certification as a welder (as part of a State program that pays for it if one is still in high school). Because class times and locations are more flexible this opens up far more possibilities for extra curricular activities.
Often, yes. Where I live, home-schooled kids can participate in extracurriculars offered by the public schools.
i'm sure many others will reply as well but there's lots of extracurricular options for homeschoolers as well as social engagements. It's kind of like a shadow school system, there's associations and groups and other organizations built around home schooled children. My wife and I considered it but we have managed to navigate our public school situation well enough without me, or my wife, having to quit working.
Of that list my kids' top-rated K-8 public school only offers music. Everything else is done privately.
I went to public schools but still did that sort of thing through the YMCA and our church. At the middle school level and lower, most of those types of activities are community based rather than centered around the school, though that varies by area.
Covid showed me that on the average home schooling (or at least remote learning) leaves kids extremely under developed.
The stunted social and academic skills were pretty apparent in retrospect once the schools reopened.
Remote learning. You didn't see homeschooling, which is a very different thing, you saw remote learning.
The homeschooling crowd has developed methods over the years to compensate. The COVID remote learning cohort did not, and suffered for it.
Remote learning has also built many methods for success, and absolutely nobody even consulted them before implementing their ad hoc systems for Covid. There are entire online public schools and their staff were just ignored.
Have they?
And what ensures they utilize those methods, exactly? Many states you, as a kid are 100% educationally off the grid the moments say "We're homeschooling".
What happened to students who were in schools that closed was terrible. But it wasn't anything close to homeschooling.
COVID forced remote learning to be adopted very broadly, without the usual self-selection effect of families that choose to homeschool when they have a choice. So the observations from COVID don't really support any stronger claim than saying that homeschooling can be done badly.
How are you thinking about the socialization aspects of homeschooling vs not?
I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers so I’m curious how you thought about it.
This argument has not kept up with the reality of the public school system. The homeschooled cohort my children are associated with have problems associating with public school children of the same age... but the problem doesn't lie on the homeschooler's side, it lies 100% on the publicly-schooled children's side! The public school attendees are noticeably less mature for the same age and less able to deal with anything other than the highly-specific and unrealistic environment of public schools rather than the rest of the world. The homeschoolers have trouble stepping down their social expectations to levels the public school attendees can meet.
We have a few reasons unrelated to socialization [1] to do home schooling but one of the reasons I don't want to send them back is precisely the regression in "socialization" I would expect.
30 years ago, this probably was a decent argument, but the bar of "at least as socialized as a public school attendee" has gone way down in the meantime.
[1]: I guess before anyone asks, one of my children is deaf-blind and while the people in the system did their best and I have not much criticism of the people, the reality is still that I was able to more precisely accommodate that child than the system was able to. This ends up being a pretty big stopper for a return to the public school system for that child.
Having put 2 kids (10th and 8th grade now) through a couple school options…the socialization in schools is pretty bad.
Kids from home schooling families we know are as polite or substantially more polite than those in the school system.
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Judgment and sense are not earned... they are taught. Tell me how teachers demand any less than total respect from domineered children? Maybe Pink Floyd had no basis for Another Brick In The Wall? I would ask who is more qualified than their parents to instill in their children judgement and sense? You might argue that there are morally bankrupt parents but I would counter that there are morally bankrupt teachers and a parent has more incentive to raise their child than a stranger does.
> I would ask who is more qualified than their parents to instill in their children judgement and sense?
That largely depends on the parents. Many are _wildly_ unfit for this.
Absolutely agreed. There is likely a much higher proportion of unfit parents vs unfit teachers (though the latter category is a non zero number). There is also an economic element to this scenario. My spouse can stay home with the kids while I go to work, this is not at all common in our modern day and age. There are tremendous sacrifices that a family must make to do this and I think that anyone wanting to homeschool because it will be 'easier' is setting themselves up for hurt. Much like the folks who get into programming because the pay is good... It won't be what you think.
Even if the parents are quite good, I think most humans require a wide variety of inputs and relationships to form their judgement and sense around. No family is capable of providing the broad range of experiences required to form good judgement and sense: that requires some unconstrained experience with the world, seeing much more than what a curated family experience can make happen.
You're just outsourcing the authority you accept to some other group of adults and institutions. They don't have some special moral high ground that makes them better than a child's own parents and non-school social circle. If you care about your kids and have self confidence in your own character, why wouldn't you hold yourself up over strangers?
If the child sees nothing but their parents they have no parallax view to assess and learn for themselves. At a public school they will experience many adult teachers & see which they respect for which reasons. Not respecting your teachers but having to get along anyway is also a thing. It just seems horrific to restrict a child to a single relationship that the parents have such control over. Monstrous.
I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization. They'll have to deal with those folks when they hit the real world too.
I.e. disassociating from those people? Isn’t that what homeschooling does inherently? It’s more likely that kids will pick up bad behaviors than they will learn to “deal with” those kinds of people.
> I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization.
It is, but do we have any studies showing how well school kids are at this? From what I've seen, most kids in school do not learn those skills.
Hopefully they learn how to deal with them instead of picking up their communication style.
Homeschooling doesn't mean the kid stays at home all the time. We homeschool and my kid has classes and different activities all week, interacts with friends and teams. It has worked very well for us given our lifestyle. I would understand it's not for everyone.
My kids get more socialization than me. Our parish homeschool group has daily activities. Monday is two hour playgroup. Tuesday is extracurricular classes at the parish. Wednesday is catechesis and play time. Thursday is free. Friday she does a day long camp with an outdoor education program (not parish based). All added up, she spends more time with kids than I did and doing more interesting things
Oh I see - I guess I hadn’t thought of homeschooling that way (in a group with extracurriculars).
I always thought of it as parent / tutor + kid = almost all interactions.
Thanks.
We homeschooled. When we wanted to socialize our kids, we shoved them into the restroom and beat them up for their lunch money.
I kid, but there's a real point: So much of the socialization is bad.
More: Kids aren't going to be kids forever. Does socialization with a bunch of other kids prepare them for the adult society that they're going to go into?
This is my perspective too. A bunch of 11 year olds raising your 11 year old doesn't always result in preferable outcomes. I think the other part of it is that a lot of people have this sort of idea that homeschooling means sitting in your kid in the basement in front of their homework and never seeing the light of day. Obviously that's not accurate.
As a parent, your view of socialization being "good" or "bad" is heavily distorted. I think of socialization (I am a parent) as a neutral activity, sometimes a skill, although I really don't think it's needed as we live in a mostly secluded society in the US, and verbal communication has been supplanted by electronic means.
Well it should, yes, given that socialization is the result of shared social experiences.
Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences that create bonds with people (whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)
These are real social dynamics that actually exist in adult life, and I suspect people who are totally blindsided by them are maladapted
> Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences
It also teaches you to deal with bullies. That said, we had homeschooled kids in my Boy Scouts troop. They learned how to deal with bullies just fine.
Kids (and teachers) generally don't deal with bullies well.
It really just results in them continuing to being bullied, or reacting badly and getting blamed themselves.
> Kids (and teachers) generally don't deal with bullies well
Are there studies on whether bullying is higher in lightly supervised versus moderately supervised groups? Or mixed-age versus single-age groups?
Scouting is lightly-supervised mixed-age groups. If an older kid bullied a younger kid, that resulted in adults reading them the riot act. But if a younger kid bullied a younger kid, the two sort of wound up sorting it out until someone threw a punch or pissed off an older kid. (For being annoying.) That second dynamic was, to my memory, unique to mixed-age groups.
Why would you need to learn to deal with bullies?
If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society.
> Why would you need to learn to deal with bullies?
Because bullying is an extreme example of a common human power dynamic.
> If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society
Fair enough. I was thinking exclusively of non-violent bullying. (It may get physical. But in a roughhousing way. Not one intended to cause pain or injury.)
>(whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)
Watch it, you almost said "rescuer" there.
Homeschooled does not mean "completely isolated." My kids are in bands, sports teams, and numerous extracurricular activities both with other home schoolers as well as with public schoolers. Also, homeschooled kids are far less reliant on their same-aged peer group for socialization; my kids talk with people in public regardless of their age (something which surprises some adults).
Who’s to say that they wouldn’t be more socialized, not less?
It used to be folk wisdom that beating your kids built character, teachers would even slap kids with a ruler back in the 1950s. Could you say the same about bullies, cliques, popularity contests, and all the other performative nonsense that goes on in public schools?
Maybe it’s all bullshit and giving kids a safe environment to learn at their own pace without all these distractions makes them better equipped for the modern world?
>I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers
Can you perhaps enlighten us and define "socialize" without the use of tautology?
> It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.
This is why it's useful to look up stats when we have them.
For example, homeschooled students do better on the ACT than public school kids.
https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info...
Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.
I suspect there is a lot of selection bias in that data. My hypothesis is that the homeschooled folks who take the ACT are more likely to do well on the ACT than the homeschooled folks who don't.
Isn't that true of public school kids who do/don't take the ACT as well?
My Title 1 school made the ACT available to all students for free (on one specific date). A lot of kids who were unprepared for the ACT took it because, why not?
We didn't have that at my school. Unless it's super widespread, it's probably not what's behind the different test results.
This is some fascinating insight. Do you think that the things being compared are [homeschooling] and [fighting grizzlies]?
I would say the interesting thing is the sudden increase over the last 5 years. Presumably, the number of Americans who think they can KO a grizzly bear is a lizardman constant situation in the surveys over time. But the number of people homeschooling is recently skyrocketing.
Given the subject of the thread and the comment I replied to: yes?
An acquaintance of mine fought (got mauled by) a grizzly bear a month ago. He went to the ICU (since released), but the bear got shot and died. It was a pyrric victory, but he did win the fight.
"fun" story and all, but the statistic in question is about people believing they could beat a bear in a fight with their bare hands, not with firearms.
I think the implication of the question is that one doesn't have a firearm
What a horrible story to share.
I didn't see it as horrible. I saw it as a story of human triumph. And good fortune.
That’s not a great example though, is it?
I’ve seen many kids, including my own older ones, who have gone through the school system and others who haven’t.
I’ve watched people on YouTube make all sorts of amazing things, and they make it look easy. Which leads to thoughts of “hey, that’s easy, I could do that”.
> But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
What's the reason?
I think we could teach them as well as the school does. And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.
“And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.”
Take it from someone who was homeschooled from pre-k through high school, you will absolutely not provide a better social environment. I was so unprepared to handle the social dynamics in casual, educational or professional that it took years and years of active work to put myself in a position where it wasn’t an absolute detriment to my success. I have no doubt you can educate your children well, it’s every other aspect of humanity that is typically missed out on and can lead to unintended consequences.
I had the opposite experience. I was home schooled from 2nd grade through high school, but I didn't just spend all my time alone with parents. My family was part of a home-school co-op, I played in the local youth symphony, and I had a job working at the local university when I was 16 and taking college classes there. I also have a large extended family.
I didn't really have much trouble adjusting to living on campus at college, and I've never had issues with interpersonal stuff at work or school.
Your anecdote is not universal; neither is mine.
Of my closest friends when I was in high school, the one with the best social skills had been home schooling since I met him when he was 10. However, he did participate in extracurricular activities at the local public school, like a computer club in middle school and then theater in high school. The only area he was really lagging at age 18 was in math, but that reversed a few years later and now he has a STEM PhD and has been teaching at a large state school for the past decade and a half.
I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.
I dunno. I think I could spin a narrative where public middle school dynamics (that is, bullied quite a bit) created issues for me that hampered my ability to succeed in social settings.
I don't really think that way in general, but I guess I'd just want to point out that the spectrum isn't "good socialization in public school" to "bad/no socialization in homeschooling".
Sounds like you had a hard time transitioning. Sorry for that.
I don't believe it's a magic pill by any means. But I've known many recently home schooled kids and they seem a lot more mature than their public school peers. So I think we have a decent shot at having similar results.
Seeming mature to an adult isn't the thing in question though, is it? Not feeling or appearing awkward when interacting on their own in their 20s is what is being criticized. The anecdotal evidence you present doesn't include home schooled children in their 20s as far as I can tell.
Homeschooled kids have much more flexible schedules which can allow them to do things in the community during the daytime that are not available to kids who have to go to school in-person full time.
This can include volunteer work or part time jobs working with the public and interacting with people of all ages.
Why do you think you being forced into a monoculture of only kids your own age would help your interaction with others when you're in your 20s? 25 year olds don't behave anything like teenagers.
Because I've met several homeschooled adults over the years, and talking to them that's something most of them had in common when explaining the impact it had on their life. Looking for more objective data I found this one source that seems to be written by people not already convinced of the desirability of homescooling [1], forgive me for being skeptical of the objectivity of places called "national home education research institute". Overall it paints a more positive picture than I had expected, but also highlights it's limitations.
[1] http://hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Taubman/PEPG/conf...
From those slides (I did have to open them via google, the direct link didn't seem to work):
It is weird how adults are looking at children and assessing their social abilities. You would need to ask the children’s peers what they think.
It doesn’t but they seem on a trajectory for adulthood that appears just fine compared to to others.
One could say this is where the free market of schooling comes into play. Does it make more economic sense for businesses to choose those with social skills learnt from home schooling, or ones who have not been home schooled? Definitely curious to see where this goes.
If only it was actually a free market. Republicans are actively kneecapping public education so they can pump money to the schools that are free to to discriminate and kick out underperforming kids
That's probably true in a lot of cases for K-5. But I don't think any two people could teach a child with the same robustness as a the ~15 teachers most kids have during middle school/junior high, let alone provide things like labs, workshops, extracurriculars, etc. With high school that gap goes from big to enormous.
I've done all 3 of public/private/homeschool with my kids. My daughter's (public) HS chemistry class had exactly one lab that we couldn't do at home. The physics lab had zero. Bio is a bit harder since they had e.g. hundreds of pre-mounted slides for examples of various things. We also lack a biology major in our near-family.
For extracurriculars: there are club youth sports aplenty, a youth orchestra, band, choir and drum & bugle group. There are participate in various academic competitions (mathletes, model UN &c.). It's definitely harder since there's no "club rush" like in public school, but these things are available (and the total cost is rather less than a non-parochial private school, though subtracting out lost salary for the parent doing the teaching reverses that for the more affordable options[1])
1: It's completely possible to spend more than a private university tuition on private high schools where I live, but the ones not subsidized by the Roman Catholic Church start in the low $20,000s
This just assumes the median education for 6-12 is any good. Also, a lot of labs, workshops, and extracurriculars can be easily found elsewhere - a lot of these have groups specifically for homeschoolers.
My schools were good, just an middle class CA suburb, but still good, especially our high school. And we had moderately impressive facilities and equipment that we could certainly not recreate at home. And of the roughly 30 teachers I had in high school, maybe 5 or 6 were really impressive - mostly in advanced classes - and they made all the difference. They were very smart, some of them overeducated, and they represented an entirely different type of adult in my life that I desperately needed, given the ultra-hierarchical nature of most family units.
> And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.
Citation needed.
Every perspective I've heard personally - and mirrored in comments here as well - from the non parent side of things, is quite negative in terms of learning how to behave and socialize with your peers. To you the children might seem polite and servile, and you might see this as something positive - as you state in another comment - but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
I know a ton of home-schooled kids and this is far from universal.
Yes, kids who were home-schooled because their parents didn't want secular society interfering with them raising their kids in a niche religion are more likely to experience this. Even in those cases, however, I found that the kids adapted rather quickly.
In most other cases[1], the parents were explicitly worried about their kids' socialization, and found many opportunities for the kids to interact with other kids their age (e.g. typical after school activities like sports or such).
Many of the kids I know who were both home-schooled and socially awkward started in public school and were pulled due to bullying &c. To say that the home-schooling stunted their social growth is a counterfactual; it's just as easy to see them ending up worse off.
For the most part, I would say that socializing in public school vs. homeschooling is a bit like communication with in-person companies versus remote; in the former it just "happens" to some degree, sometimes well, sometimes poorly; in the latter it requires intentional work to happen, but can still happen.
1: A notable exception is one person I know who was homeschooled by parents, with a father that traveled a lot for work and took his family with him. She was often in situations where she had fewer than 5 kids around close to her age who also spoke English.
>but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
Citation needed.
If you put your kids in homeschooling and provide no other outlet for socialization then sure, they'll be socially awkward.
My brother and I were homeschooled, but we were also heavily involved in our community. We were at the local park playing sports 3-4 times per week, we did various summer camps, we had a few other homeschool families that we'd setup playdates with. Our parents would sometimes joke that we barely ever home! And, unsurprisingly, we had no problems with socializing or making friends later in life.
Was it the same kind of socialization you get from going to public school? No, but I consider that a feature :)
One of the key issues in school is classroom size. A teacher with 30 kids is handicapped as a teacher compared to one with a smaller class.
Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.
Grade retention ('holding kids back') has additionally dropped significantly since the average HNer has gone to school. I remember going to school where one of my peers went to sixth grade with his brother two years older than him. But now, we give out social promotions.
That might've worked if we funded schools & gave students who fell behind significant interventions & 1x1 attention, but that's not what happened. One of my friends has a very bright and talented fifth grader in a class with multiple students who can barely read or write. Guess who gets the most attention from educators? Which group the teachers structure the class for?
That's also 4 entirely different curriculums which need to be taught. I volunteer taught CS for about 10 years, and the first year I taught a new class- and this was a single class for high school kids- I always found I was much better at it the second and third time around. I taught about 4 different courses, of varying difficulty- intro to programming with SNAP, "CS Principles" which had a little bit of everything from (very) basic networking to html and a bit of javascript, Javascript/Python, and then the final boss... AP CS in Java, which is a very difficult class.
I find it difficult to wrap my head around you can make it work teaching the entire curriculum for 4 different grades encompassing reading/writing, math, history, science, art, music, etc... I guess its potentially compensated for by the fact that they are all getting very individualized attention, but thats spreading a parent very thin.
Especially when we are talking about high school levels, where you can even potentially go into AP courses- no way a single parent can teach college level calculus, History, CS, etc... effectively.
For all the flaws of our public education system, I don't see how this can work better.
I used to think this way, but some experiences made me realize it's not so cut and dry.
When you have a class size over 20, teachers are forced to be a lot more systematic, which can improve the effectiveness of their teaching. Good teachers make heavy use of social proof. When I tried to teach my kid at home, it was a struggle. But when the kid is around his peers in a classroom, and they are going along with the teacher, he naturally falls in line with no cajoling, etc.
If there were only 5 students, the likelihood he'll just go along with things is much lower.
Yep, that's definitely true. That being said, figuring out which approach to take requires paying attention (which you did), there's no guarantee that any two people (or any one person at two times) will be in the same cohort.
Did you make a schedule of regularly switching off with other families of four? In other words, those parents teach your kids and you teach their kids? Otherwise I'm not sure how you'd tackle confirmation bias creeping up in all kinds of ways.
It also has its own problems that haven't even been quantified yet.
If you think that homeschooling is a panacea, I guess we're all about to f*ck around and find out...
I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.
I was homeschooled and I got a fairly strong education.
What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.
For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.
> I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.
Any idea how many were affected terribly in school? I'm in touch with my high school classmates. Almost half of them blame the school experience to lifelong problems.
Everyone from my public high school class is now rich and happy. My anecdote is just as good as yours.
Nobody is saying public high school is worse than homeschooling. They are saying that if you want to claim homeschooling is bad for kids, you have to put in the work to show that it causes problems at a higher rate than the public school system.
> Everyone
Did you grow up in Scarsdale or Palo Alto?
And just as good/bad as the top level comment, which is my point.
I was homeschooled and got a good education, and am now a happy, well adjusted adult. You can't just generalize; you have to consider the individuals and methods involved to judge what the best approach is.
What works for one might not work for another one. Can't generalize.
We can actually. It's called theory of probability and statistics, which is probably "forgotten" by these amazing self-appointed homeschoolers. A few rare successes of homeschoolers doesn't mean this practice is good on average, and vice versa the rare failures of the public education system doesn't mean that it is bad on average.
Most times I look this up, I see stuff like "[t]he home-educated typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests".
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#Academic
Looking at the replies, I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores but social development and preparing kids for society outside the house. It definitely requires considerably more, active attention from parents. Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades and ensure that they're maintaining an active social life but I think the difficulty of nailing that as you go-your-own-way is apparent.
>I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores
>Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades
This reads as an inconsistency.
As for the social stuff - as I commented elsewhere, it's not hard to make a case that public school is bad for socialization as well. Which isn't to say that public school isn't irredeemable in that way, just that it's not like one or the other is an obviously correct choice.
Yeah, that study has been debunked or countered by "... among home-educated students applying for college", and the proportion of home schooled kids who apply for college versus those in the traditional education system is far lower, i.e. this is very self-selecting.
This comment is so disingenuous. Few and rare?? Why would you frame it like this? Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:text=r...
https://chewv.org/college-preparation/college-admissions/?ut...
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/?utm_sourc...
They're not more likely to get into college as a whole. In fact, they apply to college a lot less. But in that subset, against public education as a whole, then yes, they do better.
You may want to look wider afield than homeschooling advocacy and lobbyist groups for your stats.
If you've got the statistics to validate your point, show them. If not... pot, meet kettle.
How so?
It took a lot of research on my end to get to that conclusion but I would have been just as good ignoring it and listening to the experience of a friend I made who home schooled all seven of her children, or talking to her kids. I did both; research led me to talk to her and her husband, talking to them confirmed I was making the right choice.
Though I am Christian, it had absolutely nothing to do with religion (we taught the same science everyone else received; no "the Earth is 15,000 years old" or whatever nonsense). I even think there's reasonable evangelical arguments to be made that Christians should put their children in traditional schools, so this wasn't a faith choice for me. I loved High School and I went to a large High School. So "bullying" and the like had nothing to do with it.
Had I not attended Public School, I probably wouldn't be doing what I love for a living and it was a couple of amazing teachers that went to bat for me, creating classes that didn't exist and letting me take HS classes while I was in Middle School, so when I say "I know I can do better" that's doesn't come with "because the public school system and the teachers are garbage." There's problems, there, for sure -- but my kids live in the #4 district and attend the #1 public High School in that district. It's a pretty fantastic school, the kids are friendly and I'm fine with it all around. I didn't think they'd do poorly regardless of how they were schooled, I just knew I could do better.
That's not arrogance; I think the vast majority of parents could do better.
It's because, as a parent, when they're young you can basically read their mind. That's an advantage a teacher doesn't get. You don't even have to "notice" that they're struggling or that they "know it cold and are bored", you just pace things on instinct and you deliver knowledge very close to the actual rate they can easily ingest it.
The other advantage that would be hard to replicate is class size. I had a class of two. Two different grades, but all that meant was my daughter got a preview of (and often just ended up learning completely) whatever she had to do and whatever her brother was learning and her brother got a review every day.
You can pretty much take out every other advantage of Home Schooling. Just those two result in a 6-7 hour whiteboard directed lesson and busy work time down to 45 minutes/child (really ... 30 most of the time). That also gave us a September to mid-April school year with generous vacations (otherwise we'd finish in February).
It wasn't my goal to make genius, spelling-bee winners, or to put them years ahead of public school students. The latter absolutely happened, but we were only ever doing a single grade per year in every subject with pretty formal home school curriculum. There was just a lot of extra time to screw around exploring things beyond the books.
I wanted them to learn better than they would in school and I wanted them to be able to be self-directed in learning. They are successful beyond my expectations in both areas.
They've been in Public School, now, for four years. My son hasn't taken work home from school in ... really ... four years. Homework is assigned, he just finishes it. My daughter is the same way. Outside of midterms and finals (out of fear/paranoia, not necessity), they do not touch schoolwork at home.
Despite not having taken a "real test" in their lives until enrollment, they placed in advanced classes. Despite them never receiving an independently graded assignment (or even one that had a grade written on it[0]), they both have a 4.0 GPA. My daughter had perfect scores in half of her classes last year.
They are happy kids who aren't stressed out at school (because those 45 minute daily sessions, apparently, covered a lot of ground -- my son still talks about things "he did in, like, 7th Grade, Dad!"
Really, though, forget all of the other reasons. It's worth doing it just for the relationship you form with your kids and that they form with their siblings. My teenagers don't act like teenagers. They act like happy young adults (because they are).
It wasn't hard. I did the majority of it with my ex- wife (through a high-conflict divorce and high-conflict early years ... that was hard ... worth it, though).
[0] You don't let your kids rack up debt by learning something less than very proficiently because you're the one that has to pay that debt when the later lesson comes that builds on that part, so yeah, they "got all As" in Home School ... because I don't like misery.
==It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.==
I think it also says something about the parents who think they can do as well or better.
Well, they tend to be right. Outcomes for homeschooled children are broadly significantly better than government schooled children.
Also, just FYI, to quote someone you prefix the text with ">".
Poor kids :( . Hope the damage won't be lasting for them, at least they did went to proper schools previously and have some basics taught.
I'll gladly stand up my 7 homeschooled kids next to any public school kids.
All tested above grade level on state mandatory testing throughout their schooling.
Two graduated early (some with college credits).
My adult children (4 sons, ages 19-25) have gainful employment, living on their own (2 own their own homes), and standing on their own. One is married (I got a grandkid!), all have friends, communities they're involved in, and are healthy (physically and mentally).
None take prescription meds nor struggle with anxiety or depression.
Poor public school kids... I hope they can find help for the damage they suffered. <grin>
we are discussing on HN. The population of commenters here is likely very different than the homeschooling population.
And yet there are many homeschooling parents in this discussion thread (including a single-income dad of 9 whose kids are homeschooled). But I'm quite aware that I'm the exception on HN.
> 7 homeschooled kids
Wow that's a lot, how did you manage?
God provides every day and I'm very grateful.
I've been working from home for nearly 2 decades and have flexible hours.
My wife handles the majority of the grade school years (basic reading/writing/maths) and I teach most of the middle and high school.
They've always been involved in co-ops, church activities, and get plenty of socialization. They're emotionally mature, civically responsible, and others focused. We take them when we volunteer at local non-profits, whether that's sorting clothes at the local thrift store or picking up trash at a local park. An example of service becomes a lifestyle of generosity. It makes for great kids and even greater adults.
Put the time and work in to your kids. Nothing else will provide greater dividends.
Only seven? :-)
(My wife and I have had 9.)
You didn’t mention how many went to college
None chose to go to college so far. The kind of work they wanted to do didn't require it so they didn't. If they had wanted to be medical doctors, lawyers, or some kind of physical engineer, I'm sure they could have gotten into a good college and found a good job for that.
One is a commercial sheet metal worker and owns his own home.
Another is a Linux sysadmin and owns his own home and has a spouse and a child.
Another is a restaurant equipment repairman and rents.
Finally, my 19 year old just started his airplane mechanic apprenticeship and rents.
My other three are still in school and living in our family home.
The thought at you need college degree to find meaningful employment or to live a joyful life is simply false so I don't consider it a metric for homeschooling success.
I teach my kids how to learn and encourage them to get out there and be productive doing work they enjoy and raising their own families.
Success in my book means they can function as an adult, stand on their own financially, find a good spouse, and bring me some awesome grandkids to spoil.
I don't have a college degree but I make plenty to raise 7 kids while working from home. I got to be there for all their first steps and struggles through Algebra 2 and everything in between. I wouldn't trade working from home and homeschooling for anything. It's been very fulfilling.
Now where's my grandkids! <grin>
Given they are sufficiently successful to be living on their own, married, and some with their own homes, whether they went to college is probably an inappropriate yardstick of success. I mean, be real. If a 25 year old is married and owns a home, but doesn't have a BSc are they a failure? What are we doing here.
OP is free to chose their metrics. I wouldn’t trade education for a home personally. I think it’s interesting how they chose their metrics.
Assuming you are Mormon, is home schooling sort of another form of virtue signaling Mormon families employ or is it more of a way to ensure your families don't get excluded? Like, did you really have a choice in the matter once you realized you either go full Mormon or leave the church entirely?
Mormons aren't the only people with large families. Ultra-conservative Jews, Muslims, and many Christians have large families. What I don't think I've ever seen is a couple who is non-religious or atheist and has a large family.
We have a neighbor down the street that is non-religious that has 5 kids (public school). Maybe that's not 'large' in your book though.
God says children are a blessing and I know it to be true. I'm grateful for all the children he gave me (7).
Catholics aren't so much anymore but used to be the same. My parents both had 5 siblings growing up.
Not all Catholics, just the ones who go to the traditional Latin Mass. :-)
Not sure if you are disputing something I didn't say but yes, you are correct.
Bad assumption on your part. I'm not Mormon.
Protestant Christian and most of my Christian brothers and sisters look at how many kids I have and that we homeschool and think I'm a little crazy (just like most non-Christians). I'd say probably 1/3 of the families in our church homeschool though. It's a wonderful community to be a part of and if I sent my remaining kids to public school, I wouldn't be asked to leave.
I'll take the L but it still sorta maps to where I was going with the Mormon angle.
I've been around Mormons, not a religion scholar, but it seems plausible to me the same "one upsmanship" mormons have with missions, large paternalistic families, avoiding "outsiders" (see: homeschooling), etc are common in other religious communities. Like maybe the protestant Christian one you are in?
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My daughter is in college now, but we used a variety of private, part-time, and homeschooling approaches prior to that. One thing is that there are a lot of resources (e.g. independent teachers for subjects you don't know, co-ops for socializing, etc.), and the more people are doing it, the more true that becomes. My parents were both public school teachers, and yet we found ourselves home- and alternative-schooling our daughter. Public schools don't really seem to have a strategy for dealing with the situation, other than complaining about it.
If you are offering a free service, that is quite time-intensive, and increasing numbers of people choose to not use it, then there should be more introspection going on. If it's happening in public education, I'm not able to see evidence of it.
Seattle schools have that issue. After covid a bunch of kids were moved to private schools, and SPS (the organism in charge of school) complained and blamed parents on having money and not wanting to mix with the riff raff and other bs. When they actually asked the parents why their children weren't returning after covid, it was because SPS decided to axe the advance/gifted programs they had for kids, among other educational quality things. The children that never came back were children who would have taken advantage of those programs, and parents decided to go pay to win instead to get those programs back in private schools, as it becomes a compounding advantage in today's competitive world. SPS is still using the stupid hippie approach about children magically learning how to read with pictures and guesses, instead of phonics, and some numbers for reading are worst than Mississippi, which went hard into phonics and overwhelmingly improved their numbers. WA is a clear example that spending a ton of money doesn't improve educational outcomes, you also have to do things that work.
I feel this pain. I grew up in what I thought were great public schools and am a big believer that public school is a fundamental institution that should raise the floor for society. Now I'm raising kids in Seattle and it's a constant struggle to get the kinds of educational programs and opportunities for my kids that I took for granted when I was in public school and just assumed would still be around when I was an adult. For lack of a better way to phrase it, I feel like I am exactly the kind of parent SPS should want to keep in its system - a strong believer in public education with the means to support the schools, yet sometimes I feel like they are actively driving families like mine out of school system with their decisions.
This is exactly right. I had a kid in Seattle schools during this time and this is exactly how I saw it happen and and Seattle schools were a major reason I left Seattle.
This might have been our experience from our bubble, but are these examples representative of the overall pattern? I suspect for every 1 kid pulled out of public school because of academic reasons like gifted programs, there are 10 pulled out due to religious reasons or vaccines or the gamut of anti-government reasons.
People are allowed to pull their kids out for religious reasons.
Nobody's saying they shouldn't be allowed to. We're just speculating about the reasons and I don't know if there's really any hard data showing which reasons are more prevalent.
But that number used to be 0.25 to 10 or something.
It's clearly a growth not led by religious people, but by people who are charred from their experiences with public school systems
This is why I didn't move back to Seattle, but stayed in the nearby communities.
The evidence shows that the gifted program is just racist. It's not surprising that the descendants of Europeans do better on European cultural artifacts like math and science, canonical western literature. "Gifted" is an apt name. They are students that have been gifted cultural knowledge before others so they can pretend to be special.
I'd argue that most "gifted" students are inherently dumber since they uncritically believe and internalize whatever BS their parents feed them. It's understandable that parents have desire to how power over their children, but at some point the state needs to step in and recognize child abuse for what it is.
> It's not surprising that the descendants of Europeans do better on European cultural artifacts like math and science
Granted, our current global math and science traditions are European, but math and science in and of themselves are absolutely not European. They are universal. As in, you could literally be raised on a different planet by a different species and math would still be math, physics would still be physics.
If this is true, and I’m not saying it isn’t or that there isn’t an element of truth to it, how do you explain how heavily Asian children are featured in gifted child programs?
So, math and science are racist now?
Also, asians do best in those programs, not European descendants.
Projecting a bit much are we? It would be nice if you let your racism out of the discussion.
I do get it if gifted kid programs in music only does Classical, but no jazz (especially in US would consider this a bit odd), but Maths and Science are purely European cultural inventions now, WTF? Is this a troll? You go blaming others from racist just ending up saying something incredibly racist yourself?
Honesrly, read on some history of mathematics and science. We ”Europeans” did not invent them. No single culture did.
> then there should be more introspection going on
This assumes that the blame obviously lies with the schools. Basically everyone I know that homeschools does it because they disapprove of tolerance. Should the introspection lead schools to embrace segregation again? It is going to be hard to bring people with such wildly different viewpoints together in harmony.
“Disapprove of tolerance” is such a ridiculous straw man is genuinely quite amusing.
Most of the homeschoolers I know in Austin were basically hippies who found the public schools to be too authoritarian and intolerant of diversity (for example, banning dyed hair). I don't know which homeschoolers you were seeing, but it doesn't match what I saw here.
Didn't homeschool here but started a charter school instead. Some of our neighbors did homeschool and I have mixed feelings about it. Some did very well, some not so well; but of course the same can be said of all of the kids in the area no matter which way they went.
A few things I'll note:
In the current educational environment, teachers are often viewed as babysitters whose job is to educate children "correctly" and parents are only there to ensure that "correctly" matches their expectations. In the "good old days" when parents and teachers beat children regularly, at least they were unified in their expectations that children would listen to and obey teachers and not disrupt class. Now it is more common to see underpaid teachers without any support confronted by angry parents when their children misbehave and fail to actually learn.> parental involvement
This is the _most_ important thing. Parents keeping a laser eye on their kids' performance in school, and having their own standards that the school must live up to, regardless of what commitees and boards and suits and academics and "experts" say. Even if it's just a standard for math competence. If the school isn't up to the mark, either pull up the school for it, or switch schools, or after school classes if it's an isolated problem. Many would be surprised at how many parents either can't(common in first generation educated) or won't do this.
> Spending has no correlation with success
In a setting where more spending is for more labour (when the labour is not done by parents/family) this is not true. Primary schools giving individual attention to students for example will do better than those with 100 students a class. But in most cases, more spending leads to more unnecessary flashy stuff. So in the real world, what you are saying is true.
Charter schools like yours are also sorely needed in america where math standards are absolutely woeful compared to RoW.
I am really really skeptical of the first bullet point.
Yeah I think the context matters a lot there. I’m assuming it means “on a state by state basis”, which is true. But within my state, at least, family income, outside spending, and property tax revenues correlate very strongly with outcomes.
I've seen that too, but to my understanding it is less about the money and more about the parent participation. Wealthy school districts don't have any problem with finding volunteers for all sorts of activities, because one of the parents is frequently a stay-at-home parent.
This is true, but it’s also true that the money buys all of those extra activities and services. At my kids’ school, the garden program, music program, arts program, and teachers aides are all funded by the PTA. The field trips are funded by the students families so must be calibrated to their budgets. There are also volunteers associated with all of those programs, but they wouldn’t exist without the money.
A few (much wealthier) towns over, the district wide PTA raises millions of dollars yearly to support additional programs and facilities, and the district can offer higher salaries because of the larger tax base. Again, lots of parent involvement, but there’s also more to be involved in.
Do you have a blog or any work where you talk about what you did to start a charter school?
Anecdotally, two factors at work here:
- Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.
- With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching.
It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it's comparatively much easier to pull your kids out and homeschool them.
This is very anecdotal. Here in the south, the "controversial, left-ish values" would be a breath of fresh air vs what is being taught here
> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass
This is no child left behind in action, which was implemented during W's term
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
^ This is the micromanagement that a ton of people claim to hate and get in their way on this site when folks are complaining about daily standups.
IMO, if you're worried about the quality of your kid's education then you'll either need to send them to a private or home school, which will stunt them socially because life isn't just one big private school or home, or encourage curiosity and learning at home to supplement their rote learning from school
Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.
Name the left values; don't beat around the bush.
Observing remote education is not good visibility into pre-covid teaching.
I think we have a responsibility to have educated citizens.
> Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.
I'm thinking this is fairly new. When I was in school, if I got bad grades or got in trouble at school, I got in trouble at home too. My parents were absolutely not calling the teachers complaining about grades. When I had trouble learning multiplication facts, they sat me down with flash cards every night until I had learned them, they didn't blame the teacher. This was in the 1970s/80s. This seemed pretty normal based on what I remember. When/why did it change?
I think parents are trying to maximize the perceived value of their child at the expense of their real value. I also think various media (especially the internet) have lowered trust in primary/secondary education, leading to more parents feeling justified in "taking matters into their own hands". You kind of see that attitude in this thread (its not wholly unjustified).
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One example is in high school I had an excellent literature class that also covered a lot of philosophy. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the various philosophies we studied were the philosophies that are often foundational for Marxism, atheism, and general left of center academia. Probably the best class I had in high school but I wish it had also covered things on both sides, or been more transparent that it was in fact biased.
It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way. Very little of it has anything to do with the family of political ideologies despite sharing a similar name. The question of God's existence is also fundamental to the history of philosophy. It's not particularly shocking that a course might cover people like Lucretius, Bentham, or Russell.
Most philosophy surveys will also include some of the other sides, which you might not even recognize as such. Descartes and Aquinas are fixtures, and Heidegger (notoriously conservative and also a literal Nazi) often features in university level classes. The point isn't to indoctrinate you with any of these viewpoints, it's to teach you how to analyze their arguments and think for yourself.
All of continental philosophy since at least Hegel is intellectual bankrupt and it is a miscarriage of education to seriously teach it as anything more than a footnote that needs to be left in the dustbin of history.
Dialectical Materialism is literally brainrot and the damage it has done to human history is unfathomable.
> It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way
The complaint was that the alternative wasn't discussed.
I read the parent as saying that the course covered these at all, not as complaining that nothing else was presented.
But continuing on that train, what would you want from mentioning alternatives to a theoretical framework? A framework is just a different way to look at the world that you can discard if it's not useful.
To give a programming analogy, if a course does a module on JavaScript exclusively with react, they're not teaching that vue, angular, or svelte don't exist and you should only use react. It's much more likely a statement that react is common and useful for people to be familiar with when they go into the outside world. Covering the long list of alternate frameworks, many of which the teacher will have never actually used in a serious way, is both difficult to do in a useful manner and takes away from the limited time available to cover what they can with sufficient depth.
It's philosophy, not catechism, you're not expected to leave the class believing everything you read.
Yes that’s correct. We didn’t cover things such as Locke or Hume, Adam smith, etc…
Also we didn’t directly cover Marxism or atheist philosophy, my point was that the selected philosophies were the ones that just happened to all be related to that side of the aisle. Again, very good class, just using it as an example of hidden bias that I didn’t see until later
Bit of a shame that it didn't directly cover Marx. Many of Marx's works are reactions to and critiques of people like Adam Smith. I think Marx even calls him delusional at one point.
Locke probably wouldn't have come up, but 19th century European philosophers were all influenced massively by Locke and Marx is extremely European. Marx isn't on a different side from them, just a large part of an even larger conversation.
Is the problem that right-of-center philosophy literature is generally too religious or obviously political? Your "later I realized" sounds like cover for the teacher.
Difficult to say without knowing what part of the world history of literature was covered, but it is somewhat difficult not to somehow discuss Marx in some way, since the anti-capitalist socialism has politically been a large factor shaping the major modernist art movements as a response eother for or against. But if it was say modernist literature and there was jo TS Eliot’s conservatism, it would strike me a bit odd.
Leftist academic thought has however had huge influence on modern art movements. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out why that might be.
"Both" sides? If you suggest Marxism is one side, what is the other? Also, it's hard to take such a vague comment at face value when you consider the long list of Marx's influences. For example, there are right and young Hegelians...
I do think there is too much politicization in education, but this also stuck out to me. Marx was a synthesis of Hegel with Adam Smith (And a lot of Ricardo) You absolutely have many people taking those same ideas and going right. Even Das Kapital isn't really "Left Wing" per se as it is more trying to explain how labor is treated in an industrialized economies, its the communist manifesto where Marx takes those ideas and starts synthesizing with Hegel and making ideas of what should happen.
I have had more teachers actively advocating voting for right wing parties than left wing parties. And once had someone in biology class tell me that he thinks that evolution and creation by god are equal and we should try to merge those theories. And I live in a very secular part of Europe.
But hey, both you and I are telling anecdotes. The only conclusion for me is that public school exposes you to people that do not think like you or your parents. Something, we are less and less exposed to. If that is good, anyone has to answer for themselves.
Don't agree with this. Marx's Capital is filled with basic mathematical analyses. I don't agree with his labor theory of value, but I do think algebra is good.
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> pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values
Which values? I haven't gone to school in a long time.
From the Conservative part of my social group, the main one applicable here is pushing elementary school kids to identify as trans. Because young children are very impressionable, and it is forbidden for staff to push back on on it at all, despite the science saying "there is absolutely no such thing as trans before age 12, and much possibility of social trauma from attempting it".
Left-ish people tend to say "this doesn't happen in the real world, it's made up for internet arguments" - and I even said that for a while on this and a few other subjects - but that denial cannot survive extensive contact with the real world.
Name some examples of school systems "pushing" kids to identify as trans. The name of the school and individual teacher, plus the wording that counts as "pushing" would be fine. You say this is happening in the real world, so surely you can point to a few examples.
They use teaching resources like the "Genderbread Person", which pushes the harmful and oppressive social construct of gender in a child-like way, describing women and men in terms of sexist stereotypes rather than sex.
Why age 12?
Age 12 happens to be the cutoff used in the scientific studies.
And the conclusion to draw from that is that one absolutely cannot be trans under the age of 12?
To avoid arguments about the definition of "be", the clear conclusion is that if it exists it's indistinguishable prior to that age, so any claims before that age can only be considered noise.
It's critical to remember that "reality has a liberal bias" does not mean "literally every detail of things liberals say is reality".
> the clear conclusion is that if it exists it's indistinguishable prior to that age
How is that clear? How would we know if it's indistinguishable if your studies didn't even look?
The whole point is that the studies explicitly did look, and found a negative result.
Lots of examples, gender identity and requiring ethnic studies (focusing on white male privilege, settler/colonial, putting groups into binary oppressor/oppressed). Also issues with requiring those classes vs not.
You've identified examples of values, but you have forgotten to link them to the left, forgotten to show if they are controversial and, probably most importantly, forgotten to show how schools are borderline pushing indoctrination of them.
Each of those is well within public knowledge.
In other words, "Trust me, bro!"
Literally nobody forces groups into a good/bad binary more than conservatives. What an embarrassing lack of self awareness
(source: I went to a conservative christian school)
These are two indisputable facts about our world, if you disagree you are wrong and anti-science:
1. Gender is a social construct
2. Whiteness is a social construct and in particular has been used as a bludgeon against minority "non-whites" in the United States for a very long time
If you do not believe these things you are the problem. You lack education. You lack critical thinking. You are brainwashed.
Both of these social constructs must be challenged. The first is used to oppress women and girls primarily, and the second underpins racist oppression.
Of course, I agree. But in the context of education if you reject the above (which MANY people on HN do) then you're delusional. There is nothing nice I have to say about it, and I know how dearly the HN crowd loves to clutch their pearls about the tone. It is akin to believing the world is flat, a broken ideology that should not be entertained.
Once you accept the simple facts as above, then you can finally explore the consequences.
Gender is obvious and unchangeable. Everything else is a mental health issue, and truly sad.
I am very curious too, I’ve asked this to other friends who have mentioned the same thing and the only concrete answer I have got so far was teaching the theory of evolution and climate change.
It's usually evolution or sex or race or something like that.
One of my friends was home schooled. It was at least partly about religious values, but I think it was also partly about him being a bit of a strange kid and getting along better at home. He went back to public schools in middle school, and that was real rough but I think he was happy by the time he got to high school.
I'm sure there are many reasons to home school, but the one I hear about most is religious.
Not a GP and I don't know if any of these qualifies as "left-ish" (which is very US specific IMHO), but as I understand, the education all over the western culture is destroyed by few really simple and really crazy (for me) ideas:
- Kids are never responsible for anything.
- Teachers are responsible for everything.
That's a parenting problem though, not an education problem, right?
Actually no. The problem comes from society. If you think that kids should be responsible for anything, you are a bad person. If you think that kids should be punished if they do something really bad, you are a monster.
Here we had a case teenagers bullying their teacher – abused her verbally during school, posted deepfake revenge porn into internet, stole stuff from her garden etc. She cried for help and the case was investigated by commission that included people from people from ministry of education, police and psychologists. But the commission concluded that she was the problem – she lacked the skills to build a trusting relationship with kids.
I'm very curious about this as well, GP, please.
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
I'm not sure remote schooling during the pandemic is very representative of day to day teaching in school. At least that's the impression I got from my teacher friends back then.
Another nebulous but I think VERY observable factor would be the extent to which "parents are, and expected to be, involved in their kids school stuff."
Anecdotally, but I bet you see a lot of it, I can count on one, maybe two hands the number of times my parents went to anything at the school to see me do a thing. And for my kids, there's something just about every other week.
The other factor is not removing the bottom _% of hugely disruptive and violent children from schools.
I'm not sure how your first thing much factors in? I haven't seen any data but I'd be VERY surprised if e.g. a survey of homeschoolers would cite to a lot of "making bad students pass" and "lefty indoctrination."
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> In fact, several states will soon require displaying the 10 commandments in public school classrooms, which seems pretty “right-ish” to me.
That tells you way more about the (current) politics of the local government than it does about the politics of the median teacher. It might actually indicate the opposite - no one would go to the effort of mandating pride flags at the school I went to, seeing as they were already hung in every single classroom.
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Do privilege walks count? Which seem to foster victim mentality?
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The right has reduced left-ish values to like the basics of humanity; essentially if schools are not actively teaching hate then they are leftist. I don't think the U.S. really has a liberal / leftist culture at all compared to Europe.
yeah, it would be crazy if people were allowed to raise their own children with their own values. we can’t have that.
Did anyone argue that you are not allowed to teach your kids your own values? It seems to me, the question is more: do you want to raise your kids without ever exposing them to values that are not your own? Opinion Bubbles have been increasing for a long time, do we really want to grow them even more? Social media is full of people left and right that seem to have no idea about the opinions and realities at the other end of the spectrum.
Is this not possible while exposing children to a variety of view points from different sources or does it require that children are not exposed to certain perspectives at all?
The original comment makes a very bold claim of "indoctrination" of an entirely undefined set of values.
There has been no evidence that exposing children to this (undefined and buzzwordy) set of values means that they can't be raised according to other values.
I find this idea pretty wild to encounter on HN which is generally focused on open source and widely available information so that people can educate themselves is suddenly gone in a puff of smoke and some buzzwords when talking about educating the most curious minds in the world.
Define the values. Cite sources that this is "indoctrination" and not simply exposing viewpoints. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion.
> Define the values. Cite sources that this is "indoctrination" and not simply exposing viewpoints. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion.
They're never going to do this, because it's not actually happening, at least not to a significant degree. They will keep their wording vague, not show examples, and basically just repeat variations of "Trust me, bro.. this indoctrination is happening. It's clear as day. You need to see the real world, bro."
I expected this comment coming into the thread. I would just like to point out that there is a huge range of options between those two extremes!
If is entirely possible to teach up a child to be curious AND well rounded in the basics (see also concepts of Trivarium and Quadrivium, sorry can't link the references atm).
> there is a huge range of options between those two extremes!
Which two extremes would those be?
Presumably the extremes of left and right?
(Which are, of course, far more similar than people that identify with either extreme would ever admit).
When a social failure happens at a public school - a child fails a class, drugs are found, a teenager gets pregnant, there’s a fight - most people don't question the public school system itself. But when a social failure happens to a homeschooler, we wonder if the system of _homeschooling_ is broken.
In reality, stories of homeschooling failure are probably no more common than stories of failure in public high school, they're simply more attention-grabbing.
The problem is that homeschooling is extremely bimodal (and the split at least used to be pretty even). It tends to be either very good or very bad.
In particular, the "unschooling" approach (not always named such) is almost universally terrible.
But most of the homeschooled kids I know now are in healthy co-ops with defined curricula and socialization.
I think that’s right…
I wish there was another word other than homeschooling for “the parents who are trying to hide the fact that their teenager can’t read.”
Because it’s a real group but yea we are in a co-op that’s a wonderful balance between being in a classroom and being at home more than he would be with public school.
The adults I know who are most against homeschooling today are the ones who were homeschooled themselves. Maybe it's just a pendulum.
I was homeschooled. I'm doing the same with my children.
The person who you are replying to is stating a different implication: hates homeschooling -> was homeschooled
You are saying: was homeschooled -> likes it and will do the same with his/her kids
The adults I know who are most against public school went to public schools themselves.
The adults I know most against college went to college themselves.
The adults I know most against private high schools went to private high schools themselves.
Being really negative about your own education is an American tradition!
I think this is likely because people (accurately, in my opinion) attribute behavioral problems with kids to the level and quality of involvement of the parents at home, so it would be bizarre to attribute a child getting caught with drugs at school to the public school system itself.
Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning. I don’t think we’re talking about remote ranch situations where you either do online school or have to send them to boarding school.
So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
We’ve homeschooled all our kids up to 8th grade. Our oldest is now a sophomore at the public high school but will start attending community college next year, paid for by the school district.
Most of the adults you see at the various group things are stay-at-home moms. Most. Some stay-at-home dads. Some of the moms have part-time jobs. I don’t recall any dads with part-time jobs. But many dads are present while also working full-time. You get into a rhythm, have a schedule, etc. and you can work it out. My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
> My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
FWIW, my experience is that the dynamic at play in these situations is that women who run their own businesses or otherwise have high-powered careers tend to have a constellation of personality traits that is significantly shifted vs. those of stay at home moms, plus their daily lives are very different, so they don't really fit in. Saying that without value judgement, just an observation.
Wait... you homeschool your kids and yet you write "...and [they] are jealous that she does both." No, they are ENVIOUS: one envies what they don't have and are jealous of what they have.
Sorry, couldn't let that one slide! :-)
That's not true. Who told you that?
Product of homeschooling no doubt. Technically correct, but missing the forest for the trees re: colloquial usage.
Interesting point. I know of one home-schooling family—and the wife quit her career to homeschool.
Is this family well off financially? Of course they are. I suspect the data on homeschoolers is going to reflect a generally affluent slant.
Anecdotally, I know of one child who was homeschooled recently. The mother is a single mother, of modest middle-class means. There was a homeschooling group nearby with a few volunteer mothers handling most of the logistics and teaching. This particular mother did not have to give up her job. It does stretch the definition of "homeschooling" a bit when it's a neighbor teaching in a neighbor's home, but they made it work.
Yea, that does stretch it. At some point, it becomes less "homeschooling" and more "an unlicensed private school." Uber for Schools?
It only requires that one parent has enough free hours to assign coursework. They don't have to exit the workforce, and don't necessarily need to directly supervise learning (but of course some of this is necessary for K-5).
I think a lot of how homeschooling can work, along with much of median/lower household income life in general, is misunderstood.
Source: Was homeschooled by a mom who worked.
Yes, it (effectively) requires a parent to stay home, at least 90% of the time.
But that has happened for a long time, at a rate high enough that you wouldn't need to see resignations to increase homeschooling.
Great news if true. "Staying home" is working and it's great that more people are finding it possible to work for themselves and their families rather than an employer who doesn't care about them. I think it was just a temporary blip where 100% of people worked for someone else and had to somehow then pay for or do their own work too.
> Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning.
There are at least two good answers to this:
1. The first is a via a home-schooling collective. With as few as 5 families, one can easily do a once-per-week rotation of home schooling responsibilities. Also note that the formal education part of this can be done fairly comfortably in 4 hours (even down to 2 hours with 1-1 instruction). As such, all that is needed is a 4-day a week job, or a job with a flex schedule who can do work on the weekend. I know one family that does something like this.
2. The second is to have a tutor do the instruction. For folks who are high earners, paying a tutor who can come in for 2-3 hours a day costs about the same as a mid-tier private school. Child care would still need to be covered, but that’s usually cheaper than a tutor.
So it’s doable, but either time or money will need to be sacrificed. I don’t think that’s a surprise.
That said, below are some things about home schooling that I’ve learned over the years from people who have done it:
- When done well, it’s probably close to an ideal education. When done poorly, it can mess up the kid, and many of these kids are very vocal about how bad it can be. Obviously there will be a whole range of outcomes between these extremes. Just be aware that it’s not necessarily a panacea, and it’s not necessarily an ideological cesspit.
- There is a ton of support for home schoolers in some communities, especially for socialization and specialization. Many people do not realize this.
- That said, some (perhaps many) home school parents are just ideological extremists — extreme beliefs, extreme (sometimes illegal) lifestyles, etc.
- A good litmus test of where a home school parent is on the thoughtful-extremist continuum is to ask them why they homeschool their kids. The thoughtful parents can rattle off dozens of learning opportunities that their kids have had that don’t exist or barely exist at normal schools. The less of these types of specifics they talk about, the more likely they are to have ideological reasons that they may or may not openly discuss.
- For folks who want a good learning environment for their kid, I strongly recommend a good Montessori school. I emphasize “good”, because some of them stray far from the Montessori ideals. This just requires a small amount of research and some observation. All that said, a good Montessori school almost always sets up a kid to be a solid person and life-long learner. Note that some kids absolutely hate the Montessori style, and you will know this in about a day or two. I will go out on a limb and say most of these kids will need special attention in home school contexts as well (imho).
> So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
I don’t think so.
Most of the people I know who home school are already stay at home parents (mostly mothers, but one dad), or they have plenty of disposable income to throw at the problem via tutors and home school support services.
I will also say that some parents absolutely punt on the education part, and they can do their part (often negligently) while doing a full time work-from-home job — think handing out some work sheets and pointing their kid(s) to an online learning environment with very little scaffolding. There are some kids who respond well to this, but most don’t.
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"Meaning husband is likely forces wife to never work and socialize, while taking care of kids and all home cleaning and maintenance"
"so the real motivation is to isolate his family"
Are you drunk ?
Or there could be absolutely no force or coercion involved: the mutual desire for him to work and her to stay home and raise and homeschool could have been how they met in the first place. You're not going to find people wanting that life on Tinder or Hinge or whatever people use for finding one another these days but it's easy if you want that kind of life.
Why do you assume wives just want to work and many wouldn't jump at the chance to be able to stay home with their children, and also socialize with other friends outside of some office job environment?
that’s a great fantasy but when you consider, statistically, how many marriages end in divorce - that’s a foolish plan. EVERYONE thinks their marriage is different or special.
Maybe working part time is OK, you at least have some job history. But no work history for 10+ years? Great ways to put all your eggs into 1 basket and potentially end up a poor single mom. And i say this as a husband and father.
Optionality has costs. If you live your life like it's going to go astray, then you miss out on a lot of the upside if it doesn't go astray (such as by being a stay at home mom, if that's what you actually want to do). The statistic that 50% of marriages end in divorce is often bandied about, but it also means that 50% don't. Which means that going all-in on your marriage is a completely reasonable thing to do.
what you say is true. But consider, the “cost” of going back part time is not very big. It’s not very stressful, and _greatly_ reduces long term risk.
Your take is a bit like saying in the year 2000 “i believe Apple is an amazing company, i’ll go ALL IN with my life savings”. If you’re right the you think you’re a genius. But what if you were wrong? What if apple turned out like IBM? Then you’d look back and think “how could i have been so stupid? so naive”.
It's a really bad analogy. And the "cost" of working part time for someone who doesn't want or need to work is literally every single hour they spend working. If they're working 20 hours per week, that's 20 hours per week spent doing something they don't want or need to do. It's a huge cost.
and the cost IF you become a single mom at 40, and you’re unemployable? How would we quantify that cost?
We can agree to disagree. :) Hope you at least appreciated my different perspective.
The vast majority of courts award spousal support for this exact reason.
Post-divorce, the vast majority of stay-at-home moms with limited recent work history are supported by court edict.
Great. What if the spouse dies? Or they just stop paying and move to a different country because they’re a jerk? Or they lose their job and can’t support you in the future?
There’s a dozen ways relying on the courts can go wrong. Something to consider in a pro and con list.
Unrelated, if during the marriage the primary breadwinner loses their job and struggles to get back on their feet, the stay at home mom won’t be able to help pay a mortgage with 10 year old skills, as an example.
I have zero problems with stay at home moms. My mom was one and i LOVED spending lots of time with her growing up. But i think many people don’t have an HONEST conversation here that considers the worst case. It’s worth talking about. That’s all i can say. And it might be different if you have a village to support you if needed. Not everyone is blessed with that.
In my immigrant mom’s tragic case, she never really got her foot into the workforce because she wanted to stay home. Because of that her english skills never truly developed. My father became somewhat abusive toward her when i was a young teen. Even threatened to withhold her “allowance” sometimes. Could she have left if she wanted to? No. Legally yes, but practically? Nope. Chained to the marriage basically.
If your wife wanted to stay home with the kids and not work, you would have forced her into the rat race or given her what she wants? It is not a foolish plan to confidently honor your vows and act accordingly. Condemning a wife who wants to raise her children as best as possible and to enjoy herself, to working for the man in some corporate gig and then blaming it on her need for work experience once you guys get divorced is dystopian nonsense. Just be a good husband and father, ya know? You do not have to saddle yourself with the problems of others which you yourself don't have out of some statistical optimality calculation. Just take control of your life. I say this as a father and husband.
"I know you wanted to stay home honey, and yes we have enough money and yes it would be good for the kids... but you have to think of your resume and work experience, we might get divorced someday. This very achievable situation is simply a fantasy" lol. My wife would be horrified and incredibly sad if I treated her this way.
If you approach it like that then sure LOL. Hilarious honestly. We also haven’t even discussed being eligible for social security and how that would play into finances post divorce.
Anyway the conversation would be more like this:
“hey, you know you can do whatever you want and i’ll 100% support your decision. We’re a team. And your contributions as a stay at home mom would be very much valued. But I also don’t want to take away your independence, and I want to make sure you’re not screwed if (god forbid) our marriage ever ends up in divorce. Have you considered working part time? If that’s still too much then OK - i’ll support your decision. Think about it.”
Basically:
- i support you 100% because we’re a team.
- don’t ever feel like i’m “asking” you to stay home with the kids.
- god forbid we end up divorced, don’t “complain” afterward that i wasn’t looking out for your best interest or i didn’t warn you of the worst case outcome.
but all of this is kind of moot anyway. If someone dreamed of being a stay at home mom since like 10, then that’s different. That’s supporting a dream. But it’s unethical for me to not inform someone of the possible downsides and have a conversation about it.
A lot of people are offering opinions on homeschooling. I'll throw in one anecdote from my past. I played tennis with a kid who was homeschooled through middle school but was sent to high school so he could graduate with a diploma instead of a GED, because this seems to be something that colleges care about. He was awkward for a couple weeks but basically adapted to high school and we quickly forgot he was homeschooled. The only thing that occasionally reminded us he was homeschooled was that he was better prepared for high school academics than we were and got good grades.
So for everyone saying that homeschooled kids aren't well adjusted or have bad social skills, I'll offer the counterpoint that they might appear unadjusted at first, but humans can usually adapt to new environments, so homeschooled kids have a pretty good chance at acting "normal" a short time after leaving homeschool. Don't judge someone's awkwardness the first time you meet them, let them adjust a bit and see if they can assimilate.
My experience though is that every homeschooled kid I met in university over a decade ago was very socially awkward. Not necessarily a problem I guess, they performed fine at academics.
Did you make a point to interrogate all the non–socially awkward people you met at university to determine if they were homeschooled or not? Yeah, thought not.
When I was in university, there were several instances where people who’d known me for weeks or months found out for the first time that I’d been homeschooled, and expressed their surprise. (Surprise that I was “normal,” I guess, and not a social basket case, as the prevailing stereotype of homeschoolers seems to be.) They simply never thought to ask.
In fact there were even a couple of friends who surprised me by turning out to be homeschooled—when I should have known better than to assume one’s schooling background. But when society spends your entire childhood hammering you with untrue stereotypes about what you are (I heard well‐meaning “But what about socialization?” countless times growing up), some of it is bound to stick.
The problem with public schools is that they are free and required (essentually). That is a bad combination.
There is really nothing intrinsically good about the average public school. Many are filled with kids that aren't there to learn. From the attitudes seen in this forum, that seems to be OK, because school is paradoxically about "socializing", while most here report being bullied.
As noticed here many home schoolers have religious reasons for their choice. The reason is simple, "Don't send your children to Ceasar and then be upset when they come home as Romans".
> Many are filled with kids that aren't there to learn.
That's on the kid, not contingent on whether school is public.
> most here report being bullied.
Anecdotes like this are not worth much. What do the stats say?
> There is really nothing intrinsically good about the average public school.
Schools don't just socialize, though that is also important. Whether they succeed at educating well depends on more than one factor, but policy & curriculum is clearly one. Kids are better prepared in some countries than others, still through public systems.
If people want to homeschool, let them. Public school should still be assessed accurately.
>That's on the kid, not contingent on whether school is public.
Yes and no. The interest of the kid to learn is on the kid/family, for sure.
However, the fact that a kid who has no interest in learning is forced to go to public school is a function of how public schools operate.
Again, free and required is a bad model. They should either be free and selective or, less ideally, available and costly.
You're assuming that school is decidedly negative if at the outset a kid doesn't "have an interest" in learning. I disagree.
> Again, free and required is a bad model. They should either be free and selective or, less ideally, available and costly.
This is a good way to ensure the most vulnerable members of your society don't get educated. But I suppose that might be a feature to some people.
Educated or babysat?
100%
Homeschooling is growing and will continue to grow because it is a cheaper alternative to private school (for people whose incomes aren't so high that the loss of one income eclipses the savings of not paying for private school, e.g. most people). The growth of homeschooling is probably highly correlated with the disconnect and distrust people have with public school. Public school already has an advantage, it's literally free. So it has to have noticeable problems people feel like they can resolve at home, for people to want to leave it behind
> it is a cheaper alternative to private school
That depends. Often it means one parent stays home to educate and watch the kids, otherwise, someone else has to, and that usually costs money. If a wife otherwise would bring home a decent salary, then it isn't cheaper.
I literally said in my comment, for people who don't make so much that the loss of one spouse income is so much more than the cost of school
You edited your comment, and also, this:
> e.g. most people
Is false.
Subtract the costs of daycare, summer camps, etc., etc. from that salary, and "decent" can become a pretty high bar.
https://www.childcareaware.org/families/cost-child-care/help... . In my country daycare is subsidized. Notwithstanding, it's not that high of a bar. Two-income households still bring in more net money despite expenses.
There is no "etc etc" in this context, we're talking about watching the kids while parents work.
As somebody that suffered through public school as a gifted kid, I wish I had been homeschooled. Almost everything positive that happened in my education was because of family, not due to the school. School was hell on earth for me, and I imagine it's the same for most other "neurodivergent" kids who are high IQ. Given what I know from my own kid, there's no surprise to me why more people are opting to home school. For my daughter we kept her in public school because the district we moved to had magnet programs, and that's what she wanted so she could be with her friends from the neighborhood, but not every school district cares about gifted kids and will happily put a child with a 150 IQ trying to read 6-8 grade levels above their peers in the same room with a child with an 80 IQ child who has a violence problem and consider that an acceptable outcome as long as nobody calls the police.
It is in fact the best outcome, because education is just a ranking game, and it's not like you will end up ranked lower in your school. Also, since the point of education is to help people learn, your calmer presence and pro-learning attitude may rub off on the worst students, and their chance of ending up jobless and in prison will go down!
It might be the best outcome for society, but it's not the best outcome for the people. I experienced severe violence directed at my person for most of my life and it caused lifelong trauma. I was further punished for defending myself, expected to just allow people to harm me. During school I was beaten many times, had bones broken, was stabbed with a pocket knife, and had numerous other things happen. Unlike the kids from the bad homes who exacted that violence against me, I didn't get my trauma from home I got it from school.
I have a 176 IQ, I'm now a highly paid professional who has made significant contributions to both open source software and to the invention of technologies that power the cloud. Obviously things worked out for me regardless of my circumstances. Most of the kids I went to school with are dead, in jail, or homeless drug addicts, so my presence certainly didn't fix that. If forcing me to be with them in school saved just one of them from a life of crime and drugs, was it worth forcing me to experience torture for no reason of my own making for my formative years? I would say no. Society is not more important than the individual, you must balance individual and social values against one another without taking either into preference.
I have no problem with spiteful bullies ending up in jail or dead after school, ultimately. It seems just and karmic.
Sorry, I should make it more clear when I'm being sarcastic. I tried to juxtapose these two clauses as close as I could:
> (1) education is just a ranking game
> (2) since the point of education is to help people learn
I feel like people who actually believe your situation was for the best must have a certain level of cognitive dissonance. Either that, or they just don't actually care about you and feel alright with hurting you for a chance of a slight gain for the people they do care about.
It's also a pretty hard sell to claim these kinds of situations are the best for society. If you could produce 2x as many billionaires by expelling the bottom 10% of the population from the education system (and imprisoning them for life), that would be better for society (financially). It might be worse for social reasons, but I kind of find that hard to believe.
This is why I think empathy doesn't scale. It's much easier to point people's empathy towards the person who is ruining their own life, and many others' at school, because they won't have a happy future. It's much harder to point people's empathy towards someone who will likely be successful in the future, even if they're being beat, stabbed, and abused in the present. Especially if they're not even being physically abused, just imprisoned for half their waking hours in a classroom. Empathy is great in very small groups, but not when you're setting policy for hundreds of kids in a school, thousands in the city, or millions across the state. At that point, empathy just ends up hijacked by the worst actors to redirect attention and resources to their own pet causes.
Obviously there is some serious nuance here - there are of course edge cases and serious reasons for considering home schooling.
But as a general principle, encouraging kids further and further out of (group) human contact seems like an obviously terrible idea to me. We're already doing it with (lack of) play spaces, "no ball games", insane screen times (which equates to less "real" face to face time) amongst teens, awkward kids who can't even engage with a stranger under any circumstances - and meanwhile isolation and loneliness is on the increase, fear continues to rise about even letting your kid walk down the street to the shops, etc...
School is hard, as are parts of life. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult, it's not always what you want it to be, you get shouted at sometimes and big kids get their way and you don't get asked on the football team. Honestly, and sorry, but - a big part of growing up is learning how to deal with things. If kids don't, and you as a parent don't help them deal with the bumps, you and they will be building unrealistic expectations about how good this life is going to be, and they'll spend all their time sad or "triggered" or afraid, or isolated, or unable to join in. They'll get more scared, more isolated, more depressed. This is not what any parent wants.
This - of course and x1000 - need to be done with massive quantities of love and compassion. This isn't some Victorian hellscape I'm advocating here. Real bullying is real. Sometimes adults need to weigh in. Kids will find school hard.
But loving your kids is NOT giving them everything they want. It's teaching them how to navigate things that are difficult and awkward and - ultimately - helping them become robust adults.
I was homeschooled and my son is homeschooled.
I disagree with your premise that homeschooling pushes kids out of group human contact. People who attend public school often assume that kids who attend homeschool literally sit at home all day...which is just not...real?
It was the predominant notion when I was a homeschooled kid 30 years ago, and for most of them there is no argument or evidence that will convince them otherwise.
State-run education is their orthodoxy, and anything that challenges that is tantamount to heresy.
No, I totally get it. If you're home schooled maybe you get out to see a few kids, go do some lessons in a forest classroom or whatever. All good. But it's still not the dynamic, varied (sometimes uncomfortable) environment of school classrooms, corridors, playtimes, etc.
Again, to re-iterate, I don't want kids to be uncomfortable as a norm, but bashing up against other groups, cultures, opinions - finding your friends, finding people you dislike, learning how to work with social cues - all of this is important grounding for later life. What do you spend your life doing? Bashing up against other groups, cultures, opinions.
I also can't help but notice that amongst our friends who homeschool there is a very strong correlation between parents who didn't go to school and their kids not going to school. Around us this rarely seems to be about some kind of positive choice, mainly it's parent exudes strong "I didn't like school" vibes and kid picks it up and runs with it.
Creating silos where you closet away and attempt to "protect" people from the outside world has never, ever been good. Social Media (should) have taught us that.
Ah, yes. The "normal people" canard. It's very tiresome. I refer you to a prior comment of mine and the ensuing chain from the usual HN homeschooling merry-go-round a year ago [0].
--
>> You can also learn outside of school, too.
> As someone who spent time in all three, I felt that my academic time was utterly wasted in public school. Sure, "learning outside" is always available, but that doesn't regain the time served in government mandated kid-prison.
---
>> No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal people. That's a lifelong skill.
> It taught me the necessity of being as viciously crass as my new classmates in order to fit in. If you consider that normal, then let it be known that I'm perfectly fine sticking with abnormal people thank you very much. I am perfectly content learning the lessons of Lord of the Flies by reading, and not by getting thrown into a small re-enactment of it.
> Though I suppose public middle school psychology was useful when I was an internment camp guard in southern Iraq. I'll grant you that.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/context?id=42249295
The most common form of homeschooling is, I believe, in the form of co-ops. Where groups of parents get their kids together in class room like settings to teach them together. They don't go to school, they might meet at a church, or library or a home, but they are socializing. I know people who homeschool and between church, youth fellowship, co-op classes, fencing, swimming, basketball, neighborhood kids, family, etc. they have extremely active social lives.
I was homeschooled up until college. I was part of a non-religious (maybe vaguely pagan) homeschooler community. I eased into college by taking a couple courses per semester at my local community college for two years around the end of high school, and also some online AP courses from my local school district. Overall I am happy with my experience. I had an abundance of time to pursue my own interests (e.g. reading, programming), since I only did ~1 hour of dedicated schoolwork per day. Among my peers, I ended up probably in the top 10% academically (close to straight As in college) and bottom 10% socially (I kept my homeschooler friends, but don't feel like I could call any of my college acquaintances "friends"). To this day I struggle with being comfortable and non-awkward around strangers and acquaintances, but I feel like I'm improving.
Happy to share more anecdotes if people have questions.
I used to teach high school. The amount of time I spent doing crap work was insane. It was necessary. If you don’t remind students 100 times what the assignments are, they won’t do them.
You also have to spend an insane amount of time with the lowest performers, because with enough attention, they can improve dramatically.
But this creates tradeoffs. Should I neglect the students doing best?
One on one instruction is the best kind. It’s generally reserved for doctoral students.
I also tried homeschooling by eldest. It didn’t work.
Its insane more parents don’t homeschool.
well if we just apply the bell curve here, on average children will be pretty average (shocker) so those should be left on their own and discover their own niche while bad performers should get extra attention so they can keep up with the rest and with the gifted (if they actually want to) given the opportunity to explore higher level subjects.
so in the end we give attention to gifted and the struggling since there's very little you can do to children who are already decent and are capable of keeping up at most they lack discipline or motivation.
Gifted and average students who aren’t given attention become poor performers quickly.
Gifted students especially.
Students who learn ahead don’t want to be told: “ok you have the material, so I’ll ignore you for a bit.” They want more. They want their questions answered, even if the questions aren’t part of the lesson plan.
Nobody wants to be told “we aren’t studying that today.”
You really can’t starve the rest of the class to cater to poor performers.
teaching independent learning is also a very valuable skill, most average people can do it especially the gifted ones as long as they are given the resources to do so and general skills taught in the first 8 grades since realistically I caught up by 10th grade while being a very poor performer in the first 8 (mostly due to lack of effort and generally being very stupid as a kid).
also there is very little excuse now with how advanced AI is getting at being able to explain subjects, it's all coming down to motivation, environment and the ability to use these tools in the first place - children struggle to use computers since we see it as a given, but to someone who didn't grow up with the incremental advancements it can seem very overwhelming.
AI is very bad at developing curricular materials.
that's mostly a context limitation with hallucinations sprinkled in, but they are currently good at understanding existing problems and how to solve them as long as they're not college-level or above since at that point they tend to fall apart due to complex interaction between different subjects and number percision overload esp when it comes to matricies.
I suspect it’s not just a context limit.
I suspect, but can’t prove, that model trainers deliberately steer models away from creating tests and worksheets.
The reason being that when a human asks a written question: “who president of the US in 1962?” it’s very likely to be a part of a worksheet.
Novels don’t contain many questions like that, nor do non fiction. They’re mostly paragraphs. Most text is mostly paragraphs.
Naked question usually means worksheet. AIs know this, so their if you ask it a question like: “who president in 1962?” It responds which the most likely next sentence, a related question: “How was the Cuban Missile resolved?”
So there’s a huge discrepancy between the next most likely sentence based on training, and what a user likely wants. If I ask, “Who was president in 1962?” I don’t want another question, nor does anyone else.
But that’s what the training data provides.
So model trainers have to bias it away from worksheets. This isn’t hard to do, and is a normal part of model training.
I’ve personally seen this behavior in poorly parameterized or trained models. They love answering questions by assuming they are in worksheets. It’s a huge pain.
Interestingly it never happens with top-line models like ChatGPT.
Carefully hyperparameterizatiin helps, but I think you’ll have to adjust the weights too. But that likely makes it harder to make actual worksheets.
This is just a guess. But I suspect models are weighted to discount pedagogical materials because of how different they are from what the users often expect.
This is the result of more propaganda and brainwashing than education in schools. We should have left the politics out of the schools, after we got the prayers banned. But I guess some people will stop at nothing.
When the hell did praying get banned?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_prayer_in_the_United_St...
Yes, it makes it clear that students explicitly have the right to pray in school. That's why I'm confused.
They were talking about brainwashing, clearly they meant school-organized prayer.
What's banned is the school cannot require students to pray.
It's not just the indoctrination, declining curriculum, and lowering of classroom standards.
American classrooms now come with risk of being shot, pervasive drug influence, cyber-bullying, etc.
Like why would I subject my kid to all these arbitrary hurdles
Group home schooling in a shared building is becoming a huge new trend in home schooling, far more resource and time efficient and pools the resources of the parents and allows the group to hire someone to do the group homeschooling.
I really enjoyed teaching my kids during covid, and they got a bug jump ahead compared to the kids who just played video games while the schools were closed. We only did 3-4 hours a day but it was fun, and I could really see the changes.
I don't mind the idea of teaching 10 kids, my way, and in and environment I can control. The thought of teaching 35 kids, mired in bureaucracy, is a nightmare.
This sounds like a private school (probably with less oversight/regulation). What are the key differences?
Control over what happens there
so like... a school?
In the same sense that a farmers’ market is like Walmart, sure.
I like this analogy. At a Walmart I'm more likely to find a good deal, and will encounter people who I wouldn't at home/work/friends, yet I prefer the idea of a farmers' market.
Anecdotally, our family would not survive without homeschooling. I wouldn’t say we are a common situation, 4 kids who each have different learning challenges. I don’t think public education or their peers in those institutions would have been very merciful to them.
I believe that for kids have parents willing to provide it, home education (especially when tailored to the child) is always going to outperform other forms of education. There are trade-offs, and those trade-offs have become easier to deal with in the last 10 years even. Our kids each get the amount of socialization that works for them, have volunteer opportunities and community groups, etc.
The main reason it works, though, is that my wife is willing and our finances support her to do it full-time. I know there are plenty of families where both spouses can work while homeschooling, but for our particular needs that would never work out.
> 4 kids who each have different learning challenges. I don’t think public education or their peers in those institutions would have been very merciful to them.
You are likely correct, if their experiences were to be anything like mine growing up. It was somewhat traumatic, honestly. I had learning and behavioral issues that I didn't know until I was an adult.
As a silver-lining, I suppose I also have to be somewhat thankful for what I learned. I feel somewhat well prepared to navigate the social and occupational issues that arise in workplaces because, despite my challenges, the working world is just as merciless if not worse.
I'm the only person in my (large) family to go to university. In fact I went "all the way" and have a PhD. There's no way I could have been home schooled by my parents, they simply don't have a deep enough understanding of things beyond maybe age 10 for me. But, interestingly, it was my dad who taught me HTML, not school, and that's what I've ended up doing as a career. My dad never took HTML, or programming in general, that far, but it certainly set me on my way.
In a way this is a return to older times when children would learn the trades of their parents. I think that's great, but I do wonder how kids will acquire the broader education. Knowing how to program is really only a small part of what makes me valuable.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Joshua
School was hell on earth for me. Openly racist kids (I'm mixed race wo I was more or less not as strongly affected, but we had one kid of certain heritage that was being harassed on an hourly base, think of south park Cartman multiplied by 10) with teachers never doing anything about it, borderline maniac kids that would attack anyone randomly, teachers not caring. Sure, nowadays it's different, but for me school has leas to me not exploring some of my personality traits and basically being afraid of people and disassociating with society on a way of 'them vs me'. Sure, I'm talking about 20% of "bad" characters, but when 20% does this and the rest kind of pretends it's normal, you get the idea of what "normal" is in the society. But, being honest. I have to admit that having that experience gave me the understanding that what society nowadays "tries to pretend it is" is just hiding it's true face, because only in school people are actually honest and sincere. So in this sense, I understand that going to school to get to know the true face of our society is definitely useful for individuals, but it causes overall harm to society as it contributes to it's separation
I was public schooled Kindergarten, homeschooled 1st-5th, and public schooled 6-12th grade. My wife was 100% homeschooled. I think it was a good mix for me. And in retrospect, I think it was good I was public schooled for at least some of high school, because I'm not sure my math education would have been as good if I was homeschooled during that period (my parents aren't math people).
But I am a math person, and we are homeschooling our 2 boys. My 12-year-old is able to understand mathematical concept and scientific topics that many high schoolers are never even exposed to. My wife does a great job with many other subjects as well. And we have many great homeschooling parents who group together to teach things they are specialized in (like construction, art, etc). Our homeschool group also has a lot of social time for the kids to just play together (mostly outside). It's awesome.
I think the quality of the education depends on the teachers. And a big part of being a good teacher is caring. Hopefully the parents will care more about their kids than any other teacher would. Additionally, we are in the golden age of homeschooling resources (mostly online).
Be very careful what your outsource to others.
I appreciate you sharing -- specifically because my kids were Home Schooled until High School and attend Public High School, now.
I feel the same way about the value of early-years Home School and mainstream High School. Mom and I had agreed that we'd let them pick once they hit High School. That coincided with the end of the COVID lockdowns, so being lonely like everyone else, they picked Public School. Prior to COVID, I'd have put money on them remaining Home Schooled.
I did exactly the same things with my kids with regard to advanced math/science topics. Actual "sit down and learn time" was spent 80% on Math/Science and 20% on everything else. And I've found some things benefit being introduced way younger. Things like the theory of relativity are "accepted as fact" more easily when they don't stand in the face of 15-years of observation. It can be understood with cartoons and when the topic is studied -- in depth -- later, they're not having to start from "how, on Earth, does that make any sense?!"
I attended an objectively good public school system in California. There was very little political slant pushed by teachers except a far left slant in my journalism class. Thankfully we had many AP and honors classes which allowed motivated and competent students to thrive. I personally found myself disliking most normal classes because some students seemed unmotivated or incompetent and I didn’t like to be around those types of people. In scouting I met many homeschooled boys who didn’t seem very well socialized but their parents were always affluent, intelligent, mature and stable people who supported their boys. On one occasion a homeschooled kid didn’t want to be so he ran away for a few days and all the parents grilled us for clues as to where he may have gone. He ended up going to public high school with me the last two years and I think he made friends there. Another boy was homeschooled because he never managed to make friends and was quite annoying and quick to anger. He left out scout troop because he failed to adapt to the group and threw a knife at me! In college I met kids who went to ineffective public schools and they were very obviously much less competent than the people in my high school and heavily at a disadvantage. Based on my observations all children raised under homeschool were socially awkward but far more intelligent than the average public school kid. After moving out of state I observed that public schools make a really big difference in outcomes, I found that the people that came out of Portland Public Schools (PPS) were palpably less intelligent and also learned that group exams were sometimes taken! Also there were always needles, homeless camps, public drug use and fires around Portland schools. In these cases I think homeschooling (or groupschooling) would provide better outcomes.
I went public schools growing up and never imagined homeschooling as an option when I eventually had children of my own, but my kid was not the same in their school after the pandemic. Coupled with how ideologically focused the public schools in my state have become over the last few years, homeschooling them was an easy decision.
Interesting to see this topic being discussed on HN; I'm curious if any homeschooling parents here have kids who WANT to learn computer programming. I haven't pushed my kids to do any of the things that I loved doing growing up (or what I do now). If any homeschooled kids are getting into programming was it as a result of playing with something like Scratch or did they dive directly into writing Python or JavaScript?
It hurts me so bad to have to say this (as someone who has been a life-long technologist with higher degrees in CS and CE): Pushing kids towards STEM careers is only going to end in disappointment. Medicine, sure, but engineering and programming? I don't think it's ever coming back to what it was here in the states. We took that golden goose out back and chopped its head clean off.
I am not suggesting pushing in any direction; it was more a realization that one of my kids said they wanted to learn to program I'm not sure what the best first step would be (learning straight C like I did a long time ago probably isn't he best starting point) and I was curious if anyone else had ideas.
Unsurprisingly this thread has become a battleground on the merits of homeschooling.
Something to keep in mind: "Homeschool" is a useless descriptor. It covers a spectrum from complete educational neglect to world class private tutoring. It includes cohorts almost indistinguishable from school, and cohorts that engage in cultish indoctrination.
Any criticism you might have for your idea of homeschool, there exists a type of homeschooling that addresses that criticism, and there will be someone in the replies ready to tell you about it.
I am an advocate of homeschooling but also know the importance of social contact for kids, so always wondering how hard would it be to create local clubs for kids where they learn mainly about economy, liberty and social relations sprinkled with some astronomy, history, biology, math and whatever personal interest of their parents like sports or arts? I'd be happy to pay for a private institution like that
I'm pretty sure you just described a public school
I was going to say! Dude just re-invented "school."
This is not a good article.
An example:
- The numbers on reported satisfaction are taken at face value. But they are influenced by some biases.
-- Survivors Bias contributes to the satisfaction rates of homeschooling; It's hard to get into homeschooling but easy to get out of. As a result, those satisfied keep doing it while those dissatisfied with the public system are less likely to change.
etc etc
I went to college with a few homeschooled kids. They were by far the least capable of "normal" social interaction. Some were quite book smart, but they had trouble communicating with others, so they couldn't demonstrate it.
Also a fun side effect, they mispronounced a lot of words that they had only ever seen in books but never heard out loud. One of them was self-aware enough to ask us to correct him.
>> they mispronounced a lot of words that they had only ever seen in books but never heard out loud
I did that as a kid. Still do. I read more than I talk. Nothing wrong with that.
The flip side would be people who misspell words or get phrases wrong because they've never seen them in books, they've only heard them out loud. They talk more than they read. Nothing wrong with that.
Although both of those might be a clue as to what type of vocations would make someone happy.
I do that too. What am I supposed to do? Nobody said the word "ephemeral" to me as a child. I have since learnt the OED includes pronunciation so I look words up if I remember, but sometimes I don't.
When I recently switched jobs, one of my requirements was I had to remain remote, for at least the next few years, so I could remain at home and help with my children's education. I don't think there is enough money in the world to convince me to change back to public education. Aside from the benefits everyone mentions like a much better education, having so much extra time with my children is a priceless gift that I wish we as a society could give everyone.
Also its given me the chance to learn things that I missed during my primary and secondary educations. Going through each proof in Euclid's Elements again has been a lot of fun, and its been long enough that I have forgotten most of them, so the thrill of discovery is real for me too.
If you can make it work, you should make it work, even if that means moving to a lower CoL area, there are a lot of small towns in the US that have excellent amenities, and are great places to raise a family.
How do you make up for the resulting drop in interaction with other kids? I had a boss who did this with his children as well - it seemed as though his solution was to use PE credits to have his kids attend sports with other kids.
My kids are part of a co-op where they meet once a week and in this co-op they share some elements of their curriculum with everyone else, they spend one day going over the weeks assignments along with 8-10 classmates, and then during the week they are at home doing their work. As they have aged their school work now has a lot of collaborative elements, so my oldest is actually meeting with kids from his co-op almost daily to go over group projects and assignments.
Additionally they have a lot of extra curricular activities they participate in ( sports, music, church youth group), that also gives them a lot of socialization time with others.
Sounds like a wonderful setup. Have the kids ever shown a desire for public school? My brother is homeschooling his kids to start, but the oldest just asked to start going to public, so he sent her.
No, my wife and I discussed putting them into traditional school as they got older, but now that they are older, they have all strongly requested to remain in their homeschool co-op. I think the biggest reason is they have a good group of friends that they connect with, and have been their class mates for multiple years. So there is a strong desire to continue in the program with people they know.
The most popular argument against homeschooling appears to be "the world sucks, so we should make kids worlds suck so they're prepared for it", which is absolutely an abusive way to think and those who use this argument need to sit and think about what it means, then be ashamed.
Not exactly. More like, "The world can suck major at times, so we should make sure kids are prepared to deal with it when confronted." It's kinda like teaching kids to look both ways when crossing the street. Ideally, drivers are looking out for pedestrians, but if that doesn't happen and a pedestrian isn't prepared for it, well, people can get killed.
No one should be ashamed for teaching their kids to exist in a world that isn't always as loving as we all wish it was.
We tried homeschooling a few times. We were honest with ourselves and determined we were not that great at it. Sure, we could improve. But one of the primary factors in where we chose to live was the school district. Fortunately it has worked out well. Of course there’s always something to deal with- you have to advocate for your kids.
It’s basically public daycare for a lot of people. Including us.
The social aspect is important for us. The idea of having to find other people with kids for activities sounds exhausting. We’re a gang of neuro-spicy introverts. My social circle is comprised of people I’ve been friends with for 25+ years. All from my school days.
I dealt with a lot of bullshit at school. But overall a net gain.
If you break the teacher’s unions, things would become dramatically better. Teachers unions are extremely powerful and poorly aligned with the mission of maximally educating as many children as possible.
For anyone reading this the following context would be helpful:
1. Home schooling does not necessarily (and in most cases) does not mean a kid learning at home with parents. It only means parents have arranged for adequen learning through alternative means.
2. In many cases, multiple parents and their kids come together and take responsibility of their kids education. They may rent spaces, they may hire teachers and so on.
3. In many cases you have to satisfy government penpushers that you are doing a good job of this.
It's worth noting the "Two Sigma" problem on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem) - "the educational phenomenon that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment".
This topic is such a basket case. “Homeschooling” in the US is a word that has come to mean “not enrolled in an accredited school” and can mean anything from being the Duggars to “my 4yo audits classes at MIT” or “we have an unaccredited private school that is identical to any other private school except for not being subject to laws”.
Advocating for homeschooling is simply advocating for absolutely no regulation on schooling, which is fine for the Zuckerbergs and will condemn children like the Duggars.
home schooling is a very very priviledged concept to begin with so it's not surprising that there is quite a lot of hate for it.
as a former child I think home schooling is better in every way if there is a supporting environment built around it, but I also think public schooling introduces a lot of variety that is not seen in private or home schooling be it for better or worse, although my time in public school was rough and failed me in many ways I still wouldn't have it any other way.
Be curious how they got their numbers. Because I had to fill out intent to homeschool forms for my 4 kids that are over 10, but they’re all at a classical Christian school, but there is one home day a week so it technically is considered homeschool by the state. So if they pull from those types of forms it could be there are a lot of kids who are at schools but look like they’re homeschooling from the numbers.
Asking as an non-US person: Is there mandatory education for children in the US?
I guess homeschooling fits well with extreme individualistic American culture, no surprises there.
There are 13 years required (K-12) in the US. The way non-compliance is peanlized varies depending on the state.
Education in the US is a complicated subject given the "extreme individualistic American culture" as you say. That will be present in the teachers and school districts, and the lesson plans can/will differ greatly between teachers and school districts for getting students to the general standard.
As a Canadian, all I can say after reading all of this is: WTF? I can't understand why anyone would want to keep their children at home instead of sending them to school, and how the government could fail so badly that so many people want to avoid public schools. We are so similar and yet so different
The short answer is people stopped caring about metrics measuring learning, and instead how easy they were to game to support their politics, or make them look like a better teacher or superintendent.
Yeah Canada is so weird in that sense. It's so North American in infrastructure but more European in culture.
Everyone wants to make generalizations, but all this really means is lots of families find homeschooling to be the best choice. What factors into that can vary wildly.
This is totally unsurprising, given that, in some parts of the country, public schools teach controversial ideas about gender.
Also, I see a lot of people arguing that exposure to “bad” kids is a point in favor of public schools, which seems insane to me. Growing up with a friend group of good kids is probably the biggest predictor of what a child’s adult life will look like.
I have a counter view. I think a parent needs to educate their kids as well. So, while kids may learn about controversial gender topics one needs to be able to have an intelligent discussion on why as a family don’t subscribe to those. Encourage children to have a mind of their own and argue intelligently and hold their ground. It doesn’t come from shying away from public forums.
As to the last point - one of the biggest benefits of exposure to “bad” kids is knowing whom to stay away from and making independent decisions on that. Parents are not going to be around to guide children forever. They need to learn to make their own choices.
Unless you live in a school district that’s really not that great I would never recommend homeschooling. Cloistering into echo chambers is not healthy.
NY state just signed a bill to include ChatGPT in their learning and planning. Previously there were deals to bring in Google hardware for students.
Of course people are fleeing public schooling when we’re selling the kids to big tech for laptops and services that require network connection to write a word document, enable cheating, and their data sold for profit without consent.
People might be fleeing public schooling because lawmakers are dictating what happens in the classroom. There are lots of good teachers who struggle with the resources given to them and the constraints imposed on them.
At home, parents can be flexible. They can let their kids use AI when appropriate or discourage its use. They don't have to wait for legislators to get involved. If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it instead of waiting for some committee to evaluate it.
> If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it
How do you know if the math book is great if there hasn’t been consensus about it. The problem isn’t the committee that will always be there in some form. The problem is the politics the committee is used for. If the committee were to prioritize and offload their specific requirements for review instead of requiring substantial analysis twice then the school system would be just as quick.
Homeschooling does not hit record numbers, that is that people tend to herd, herding is done because they prefer natural herding as a byproduct of evolution. Not because it's something from bible, do not believe those lies. Herding is a natural byproduct of evolution. believe Darwin
Parental egotism apparently is at record numbers too.
Every normal school kid who interacted with a home school kid will recall what the problem is with homeschooling. I would never want to raise a little weirdo like the weirdo home schoolers I knew.
Buddy of mine put it really well:
"I got to spend time with my kids when they still wanted to spend time with me. Now as teenagers in no longer cool, but that's ok. I got my time with them and that makes me happy"
Every time I hear the “What about socialization?” argument from some childless person on SSRIs, I am reminded how dishonest some people are. If they even liked (let alone cared for) children, they would have had their own.
Nice to see Reason posted here.
Well here is what the result was of public school for my 3 kids:
1 kid: one year behind but doing very well
1 kid: two years behind and not doing so well (in fact can't continue to academia unless things change drastically, in other words, will lose at least 1-2 more years if she does go to academia)
1 kid: two years behind and doing pretty well
This is the result of 9-11 years of public schooling. I feel like all 3 have very suboptimal outcomes, including the one doing very well.
I must say I am also getting very irritated by the "indoctrination". That was fine, if occasionally crazy, during the COVID years when the indoctrination was pretty progressive. Sometimes batshit insane, but let's say "well intentioned". Pro-climate claims ... that were bullshit, but at least pro-climate and generally positive and pro-humanity. Now one of their teachers is openly racist (in a class with 33% immigrants), and even though most keep it more subtle than him, this is a general trend.
So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
Keep them going to public school and give up?
I know a teacher who said one of their colleagues adamantly believes the moon landing was faked.
>So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
Look up school ratings in your area and move is by far your best bet if you wish to continue public school. There is also the difficult truth that maybe your kids are the problem, but again school shopping could help with that depending on what programs they have.
I've already used some "adult" exams where someone fucked up and forgot to set minimum ages and got my kids through them perfectly fine. The kids are not the problem, or at least, having them pass the normal exams at the normal age for those exams is possible. The schools simply aren't doing it.
The issue with that approach is that it's a lot of work, and I would love an alternative. But I don't have an alternative.
Starve the beast, vilify it for being weak, then kill it.
This is another item high on the “in the future we will all have been against this” list.
Well funded public education is a bedrock of fair equal society (which is why the right attacks it ever since its invention).
Public education isn’t perfect but it is far better for individual and society than any alternative (including any religious run schools)
I agree with you, but I could easily convince myself otherwise with the right context or motivation.
> Well funded public education is a bedrock of fair equal society
First we have to decide what a fair equal society is, and then decide that this is what we want, and then demonstrate that spending on public education helps to achieve this.
People I've spoken to about education who do not see it as I do will disagree with me on all three points.
Colin Powell [valued][1] (paywall) his public school education.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221108214853/https://www.wsj.c...
Homeschool should be illegal, full stop. Enabling a parent, especially one who thinks that home schooling is a good idea, to indoctrinate a future citizen is beyond idiocy.
“Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”
> When asked if they are satisfied with their children's education, public school parents consistently rank last after parents who choose private schools, homeschooling, and charter schools. Importantly, among all parents of school-age children, homeschooling enjoys a 70 percent favorability rating.
This is not surprising: homeschoolers are extremely confident in their own teaching abilities and extremely cynical about the abilities of others.
> Closures also gave parents a chance to experience public schools' competence with remote learning, and many were unimpressed. They have also been unhappy with the poor quality and often politicized lessons taught to their children that infuriatingly blend declining learning outcomes with indoctrination.
Why would a parent compare a novel learning environment to the pre-covid experience? Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home - do they use the internet at all?
> Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home
They probably imagine they'll never encounter political topics from a perspective of which said parents do not approve. And they're probably not wrong to believe that.
Yes, but then their kid will become an adult and feel like they were kept in a snow globe. Even if the parents are right, its a foolish strategy!
No argument from me there. I’m observing, not advocating ;-)
At the end of the day, it's a form of school-choice where parents decide what's best for their kids which I strongly support.
Too bad for the kids though. You'd think their welfare would matter more than the parents having control.
Only parents of privilege are given choice though. Parents who are struggling are not. And then when it comes to vote on fixing classrooms, paying teachers what they are worth, etc, there's a great bulk of people who would rather just not because it doesn't effect them.
Except many many parents have been shown to not be able to decide what's actually best for their kids, or don't care, or have actually harmful ideas.
And maybe those kids aren't their property and society has decided that the rights of the child to their own wellbeing may actually trump "parents decide whats best" when and if those parents are very much not?
Honestly homeschooling does sound 1000000x better due to social media in schools being cancer for young children.
I follow this blog of an entrepreneur based in Malaysia, Asim Qureshi.
https://wonderyearsschool.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@asim-qureshi/videos
He has been documenting his children's homeschooling journey and I have to say the results are beyond amazing.
All of the kids were done with "high school" level education before the age of 15.
Daughters going to Oxford and Cambridge. They were accepted at 16 I think but the University told them they could not join until they turn 18.
I follow Asim too! A very interesting case study indeed. The boy learned to code and started working full-time for his startup.
What's really great is all the kids seem to be very well rounded and come off as pretty confident on their own. This can be seen in the videos on the YT channel.
Finishing "school" several years early is the biggest plus for me. Imagine being done with high school by the age of 14. The possibilities are endless. Learn languages, travel, learn real tangible skills, join various bootcamps.
Your kid can have so much "life" experience by the time they turn 18-20.
As someone from a country where public school is the norm, private school less so and homeschooling the absolute exception, these threads are always wild to read. It really shows how deeply individualistic and polarized the USA is. Sure, let's make homeschooling the norm, problematic kids will be the only ones who fill the ranks of public schools, gifted kids or the ones from religious zealots will all live in their bubbles, then what? Snow Crash is your destination?
> gifted kids or the ones from religious zealots will all live in their bubbles
If you’ve read this thread, then you know most homeschoolers dispute that they live in a bubble.
> Sure, let's make homeschooling the norm, problematic kids will be the only ones who fill the ranks of public schools
I don’t see anyone in this thread advocating that. But I did see several arguing that homeschooling should be illegal. And homeschooling is illegal in countries like Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Part of homeschoolers’ outspokenness against the usual tired stereotypes is because there’s real risk of governments prohibiting home education even in situations when it would be superior to the local public schools.
Homeschooling is becoming an epidemic and a major reason is --- SPORTS. From my experience, it is growing for all the wrong reasons and I have not come across ONE family doing it properly and in a matter I would consider better for the kid.
I have a 15yo son who plays sports and for the past 5 years, homeschooling has been a way to "red-shirt" kids - hold them back a year or two then re-entering them into public schools into grades behind their age. Literally purposely holding back their kids so they can be older as freshman.
A major problem with boys because of puberty, size etc around this age. The difference between a 14yo and a 16yo, or 16/18yo can be quite large at times. My son had a freshman on his team last year that could drive and had a mustache playing vs these tiny incoming freshman, it was so comical. He was 16 1/2 as a freshman. And the parents were on the sideline acting like their kid was the next coming of Aaron Judge. It REALLY hurts the rest of us playing the rules and taking education seriously when our kids are trying to make a team.
I've known several of these parents and they all are the same. They haphazardly put them into the bare min online courses, still go to work all day and stick them in front of computers to expect them to self teach for a few years. The moms would be stay-home types that didn't seem much educated themselves. The kids are spoiled entitled types who think they are top athletes already and would jokingly be calling my son at 11a telling him they are done already for the day and headed to the gym and playing Fortnite.
Now this is just MY circle, I am not saying there aren't very serious and capable parents out there really homeschooling and giving their kids a better education than public school, but I haven't met any in maybe roughly 10 I know. Most of them seemed to also be MAGA types poo-pooing public education and how they are brainwashing kids. It is really despicable that this is most likely happening ALL across America.
Education and manipulation aside, I would also think this isn't good the kids mental and social health as well. They already are on devices doom-scrolling enough nowadays, do we really want them hermits too now?
I applaud anyone putting in huge effort to home school a kid properly and with true care and teaching. But the image of them at a desk being taught by a real smart/educated parent following a true curriculum all day and on a schedule I imagine is ultra rare. And we are going to pay a price for this in the long run. Or not, GPT will just help them along to properly write that email for them when they are adults in a corporate world.
I thought you were going to go in a different direction with that: recruiting. In States where home schoolers can play on public school sports teams there are cases where the family gets an apartment and one parent and the kid establishes residency for the purpose of being in a particular school district. A notable case in recent-ish history was someone called Tim Tebow in Jacksonville, FLA. It's not a common thing though, far less of a complaint-magnet than the Catholic schools who "recruit" players from all over a city or even region to come be a starter on their football/basketball team...
You should not be downvoted for telling the truth about your experiences! I have witnessed the same things. Kids being held back a grade so they can excel in sports! It is so ridiculously self-serving and narcissistic that it is crazy to witness. And the emphasis on sports at my son's high school is beyond ridiculous.
The dads especially need to get back to basics and stop these obsessions they have about their kids being athletic superstars. It's bad for EVERYONE. And starting kids at like 5 years old in sports is just stupid.
I've met so many of these narcissistic dad types that I think they are either a) living vicariously though their sons as an ego thing or b) seriously think they are sitting on a winning lottery ticket and their kids will make pro. So they obsessively push the kids so they don't "waste their opportunity" and/or "don't make mistake I did and not take it seriously".
I have even felt that urge with my son at times when he was making Little League All-star teams each year and considered top 5 player in the league. But then you realize they are only 9-12 years old and playing on a mini field! So I relished in him just having FUN. It was so hard to be around those obsessive Dads when I was having fun practices.
How many are now home schooled for religious reasons? It seems like many are pulling their kids out of public schools, for "woke" reasons rather than for a deep pedagogical pursuit, and I worry these kids aren't actually learning at the level they should be.
I can understand why. When we first moved to our upper midwest state, the district we bought a house in was ranked like #2 in the state overall and has fallen considerably. I have watched with my own two eyes the decline in the past 20 years here. The neighboring district, which was teetering when we first moved here in 2006, fell over completely and remains fallen. That one had a cycle of failed superintendents, all of whom required a buyout to get rid of, which further impoverished that district. Our realtor, who had been a teacher in that district, slyly tried to push us into that one, but we didn't fall for it. Our daughter made it through the more acclaimed district pretty well, our son, however, got tripped up in the decline:
We ended up moving our son to yet a third district after 2nd grade. Why? Because the principal he had in his elementary school mishandled an incident where three boys of another ethnicity shoved and kicked my son to the ground. The principal, in her infinite wisdom, made my son apologize to his attackers, I guess because he is white? We didn't press the matter, why bother? The handwriting was on the wall. We put in the work to open enroll him in another district, instead. Those are the options that many more rural communities lack.
Our current district is a bit further of a drive and that makes him/us feel like he is not really a part of that community. Nonetheless, it has done well for him and I will just come right out and say it's because it is less diverse and more affluent. It is not without its problems--mainly being far too sports-centric than the district my daughter attended, and generally a bit snobby and "affluenza"-ish, but no overt violence to speak of hardly.
One time we were leaving a football game one time and happened upon a family presenting their daughter with a brand new Range Rover, complete with a bow, in the school parking lot. Puke-o-rama! Why would you do that except to show off consumption and appearance of wealth to everyone else? Luckily, not that common, but you get the picture.
The good thing is, we had options and exercised them, but I wish we hadn't needed to, because we like our community and wanted to support it and the local families nearer to us. Every choice we made to get something we also had to give up something else. I think that's the same with homeschooling, too--I don't personally think it's a good idea, but it's not up to me how someone else chooses to educate their kids and I understand about only having certain options. My son is doing very well, now in high school, but he can never make a sports team because the competition is beyond ridiculous. Even tennis he got on some low rung team because there were a couple of superstar 7th graders who filled up JV and Varsity slots! It felt like a sort-of "old boy" situation because my son is pretty decent at tennis and beat one of those younger guys every time he played him. Forget football or basketball, you have to be pretty much college material to be on those teams. Hockey, same. My daughter never cared about sports, so we weren't prepared for that battle at all.
Getting children through school and into adulthood is not for the faint of heart.
in USA?
This is so stupid on so many levels, I don't even get silicon valley engineers can envision this stuff for their own kids. Or maybe they don't care. Whatever.
> Recent estimates put the total homeschooling population at about 6 percent of students across the United States, compared to about 3 percent pre-pandemic.
One thing that concerns me about many pro-homeschooling comments is a kind of tear-down-the-schools attitude, as if schools were hopeless and irredeemable, despite the fact they're still educating 94% of students even at today's elevated homeschooling rate. Of course there are problems with schools, but on the other hand there are countless success stories, or at least countless non-failure stories, and educational outcomes tend to depend crucially on local factors, the location of the school and its socioeconomic environment.
I suspect that the vast majority of parents have neither the desire nor the capability to homeschool their kids. I certainly can't imagine my own parents doing it. In a sense, homeschooling is a luxury of the few. The absolute numbers can increase, but I don't think homeschooling can scale to the entire population. So whatever problems may exist in the schools, we have to confront and solve them, not just abandon them and pretend homeschooling is a societal solution. You might claim that hundreds of years ago, everyone was homeschooled, but I don't want to turn back the societal clock hundreds of years.
Another concern I have is the religious and/or political motivation of many homeschoolers. If homeschooling were just about educational outcomes for children, then we shouldn't expect homeschoolers to be disproportionately conservative in religious and/or political beliefs, yet my impression is that they are. It's certainly suspicious to me. And though I've had no involvement with K-12 education since I was in school myself, I've had a lot of involvement in higher education, first as an undergrad, then as a PhD student and lecturer. Frankly, the horror stories and conspiracy theories about left-wing indoctrination at universities are ridiculous and not based on fact or experience. So I'm quite skeptical of similar claims about K-12, especially since I saw none of that in my own childhood. (I recall being forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, for all the good that did.) There's a type of person who's set off if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" and consider that to be an act of war against them. There are still a lot of parents in the United States who reject biological evolution and would prefer that it not be taught in schools at all, or at least to be taught as "controversial."
I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children. There is no law or social imperative that children must be taught a secular view point. At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently. Honestly, I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion. It has become a belief system of it's own, and I for one fear the coming crusades :)
I say live and let live, parents should be free to teach their kids whatever belief system they want without political interference. Much to the dismay of the left (and I say this, being a left leaning moderate... I know, bad word today), kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children, full stop. The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism, is only putting fuel to the fire in this surge in global fascism. At the risk of sounding too kumbaya'ish, we all just need to accept each other and recognize the real enemies to society is a global loss of empathy and the rise of transactionalism. Now that is something I could really get behind, forced empathy courses! :)
> I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children.
I didn't claim that they don't have a right. I just claimed to be skeptical of the idea that the primary motivation for homeschooling was educational outcomes rather than ideological outcomes.
> At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently.
If only they believed differently. ;-) It's no coincidence that children tend to adopt the same beliefs as their parents, no matter the country or region.
> I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion.
The last 20 years? The First Amendment of the US Constitution begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". The principle of separation of church and state is more than 200 years old.
> kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children
I don't know what label you'd want to put on me, but I would say that kids do not belong to anyone. I find the notion of ownership to be noxious, practically slavery. We have a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves (yet), but that doesn't mean children are simply the personal property and playthings of the parents. I think it's a disservice to a child to place them in a bubble and shield them from anything the parents don't happen to like.
> The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism
"they are their parents children" is not individualism, or certainly not individualism from the child's perspective.
Morover, from what I've seen and heard from homeschoolers themselves, they do tend to form, or indeed come from, specific communitites, and are not simply "lone wolf" homeschooling parents.
Homeschooling makes zero sense unless one or both parents are independently wealthy and already excellent academic communicators and there are firm, minimum subject milestones set by the state that must be achieved and reported on. Instead, it's being widely abused much like the anti-vaxx movement to opt out of society, norms, and replace education and healthcare with religion. And then it begs credulity why they are so many kids dying and losing their immune systems (IA because measles attacks the immune system) from an entirely preventable disease that has a safe and effective vaccine that was previously mandatory for everyone. And then it follow: what good is there in allowing some parents to selectively opt their kids out of society, a fundamental right of passage, and an essential public good to ensure socialization and universal education. Division of labor, specialization of trade for most means sending kids to properly funded, staffed, and sensible curricula public schools so the parents are freed up to earn more and make the family's life better.
There are some parents who might be Yale law grads who might not be rich who opt for some homeschooling given the right situation, but these are the outliers and I'm okay with these, while most aren't.
I Homeschooled both of my children from birth to 7th and 9th grade, respectively. The state I live in had, at the time (might still), zero regulation around Home Schooling. I have met hundreds of home schooling families and children (as well as hired one), all wonderful people. A lot of them chose to do so for one or two common reasons (religion and learning disability seem, unscientifically, to be the most common).
I'm a bit of a unique case in that "it really should have been an unbelievable mess": this was done, almost entirely, while divorced from Mom. And we were not "amicable" through much of it. It was a decision we had both committed to before the kids were born and stuck with after the divorce. I have two children, not 4+ (maybe that's just my experience, but the first family I talked to about this had 7). I didn't do it for religious reasons, bullying reasons, "I hate teachers or public schools" reasons or because I wanted my children to win a bunch of spelling bees. I did it after researching options and concluding that I could educate my two children better than any other option available to them and I could do so without them spending all day in books. I believed I was taught arithmetic in a manner that made it harder for me to understand Algebra[0], and I didn't feel I was ever encouraged or otherwise directed "to learn skills and subjects on my own." The top two, though, were "I wanted self-learners" and I, my son and my daughter are diagnosed ASD (type 1); Mom probably is, too, but getting a diagnosis as an adult is combinations of difficult/pointless.
After the early years (probably 4th grade on, earlier for my youngest), the average Home School day became 45 minutes of book/traditional learning work (often less) from Home School curriculum, usually another 45 minutes of self-directed study and for the most part the rest of the day was for themselves to direct (with restrictions; video games were limited to creative and some other specific titles but our children had far more freedom than most). We did weekday only (with a lot of vacation) and September-April. There was simply no way to make the materials go any longer.
They did not take tests (at least, not in the way they're taken at school) until they took their first test in 7th and 9th grade. We, like most Home School parents, started off trying to "replicate school approaches" at home and discovered most of them exist because of schools. My favorite is "grades." If someone asked, "4.0". And they'd assume it's "because I'm Dad" and assume I'm grading lax. I'm not grading at all. We work on the material until it is learned above proficiently. And as a parent Home Schooling, that is the only path to success that doesn't involve misery because if you let them have a mulligan on something, it'll be built upon later and you and they will drown. You need grades in mainstream school, you need "pass/fail" with an "A" being the bar for passing in Home Schools.
I didn't admit most of this in the past, especially not the "45 minute" bit. I straight up lied about it to anyone who wasn't a Home School parent. I had family and friends actively discouraging me every single year that I did this. I admit it, now, because they're top students in their mainstream school and have been since day 1.
My children, like everyone else's, got lonely after the COVID lockdowns and we'd always told them they can decide what to do when my oldest reaches High School. It was sad, suddenly every kid is home but nobody's allowed to play together and even if they could, all of their peers were spending the whole day trying to replicate a classroom via video-calls. My kids were lonely, bored, and unhappy. The day-time Home School activities (that most people are completely unaware of) had been tried up for two years and didn't seem to be coming back. So we put them in Public Schools and lucked out that Mom was located the #4 district and the #1 High School in that district. It's been four years; my son is a Senior.
That first test taking experience landed them in accelerated courses. They started with and have continued to have a 4.0 GPA. They get the homework done at school. They might study for mid-terms and finals. My daughter, last year, I think had half of her classes with every single point earned. They've bested me in every imaginable way (I had a rocking 2.5 GPA in High School). They take school very seriously, but every year they've had a portion of the class that's been review from things we did in Home School.
If it seems unbelievable that I'd get these results on so little time, have a conversation with other Home School parents (assuming their children have some external validation to their education, otherwise we all lie). Consider that I have two children, not 20. You can basically read your own child's mind up until they reach their teens (much longer if they spend most of their time around you instead of peers at school). Being able to read your student's mind is an incredibly unfair advantage. It's not even that "you notice more quickly when you're going to slow or they're not understanding" it's that you anticipate it. I knew what parts of math I would have to slow down with for my son, they were different for my daughter (long division was daily fits with tears and all for a few weeks). Most of the time, with learning, there's a lot of burst/buffer/stall cycles and the sending and receiving end take a long time to figure out when one is in a sub-optimal state. We didn't do rigorous lesson plans (that's for keeping a class full of kids on the same page), we let them dictate how fast or slow we moved based on how much or little they struggle.
I hesitate to say "Just because we only spent 45 minutes in the books doesn't mean we didn't spend the rest of the day learning in other ways" but if you saw how a day was conducted, you'd conclude we didn't. My kids were enrolled in extra-curricular activities, but probably fewer than most mainstream school kids. They had weekly random activities that would be considered "field trips" in school. We were probably more strict than most parents with some things, because we could be: my kids received their first mobile phones at, I think, 13 and 15. We allowed no more than two hours per day of "watching a video, television show or movie." But (outside of inappropriate content) they were mostly unrestricted with which video games they could play and they played plenty (my daughter can slaughter me in just about everything, but I stopped playing for a decade while they were young). My daughter has taught herself to read music, guitar tabs and play Guitar, Bass, Piano and she sings. I played piano for 15 years and she's learned in a year what it took me five with formal lessons. She's taught herself to paint. My son is mini-me, computers, 3D printers, CNC, programming and any other electronic toy.
The reason I didn't do it for, though, turned out to be the reason I'm most thankful that I accepted the minor sacrifice: I wouldn't have had the arrogance to pray for the closeness and kind of relationship I have with my kids, today. I know my parents dreaded going to parent-teacher conferences. Those are my favorite!
[0] And, unintentionally favored an approach that ended up becoming Common Core math in my state, which is just loathed by parents ... which is too bad, because it worked very well for my own kids.
Homeschooling, and more generally schooling, and more generally raising kids. They're hot-button topics that bring out the strong opinions and searing anecdotes, and the resulting "discussion" always seems to be depressingly useless. (I won't exempt this comment from that criticism.)
I'm just going to say that "homeschooling" is not a single thing and it's useless to pretend it is. In fact, "public school" is not a single thing and it's mostly useless to pretend it is.
I went to public school. My kids were a combination of public primary school, home schooling, and local community colleges. That experience gives me... well, very little in terms of predicting or understanding what others' experiences were like.
50-kid public schools (the size I went to) can be great for interacting with a diverse group of people -- like, actually interacting with them, not just attending the same school as them. It's also common for "diverse" in this case to mean "kids from a range of socioeconomic situations who are 95% the same race or religion" -- most small schools draw upon a small rural population that is often pretty homogeneous. (That was my experience.)
500-kid public schools naturally have much more diversity in total, but are totally random in terms of what an individual kid will actually experience. It's common for the kids to rigidly stratify themselves. It doesn't matter if there's a kid of a different color from you in your math class if you're surrounded by people like you and he's surrounded by people like him. Athletics are better at mixing people (by forcing a different stratification!), but it's easy to avoid having to deal with "them" even there if you don't want to.
Home schooling varies even more.
Yet that whole argument is also pushing a narrative of "good" vs "bad": being forced together with diverse people is good, so environments where that happens are better! But that's not true either, there are tradeoffs. I'll describe it in terms of stereotypes: public school kids get more exposure and experience with a wider range of kids their age. Home schooled kids get more exposure and experience with adults and kids of other ages. (I'm not saying either of these is universally true, but just go with it for now.) Which is better? You can argue that it's critical to survive the social pressure cooker of traditional schooling because you'll have to handle the same situations as an adult. But you can also argue that if you look at what's happening in public schools, those kids may be good at dealing with each other but they're often failing when faced with the real world. They depend on the collective consciousness that comes from being surrounded by similar-aged people physically and electronically, they're helpless when the responsibility is no longer diffused and they are actually the one and only person who can solve a situation, and they have a sense of entitlement that anything hard is unfair. The stereotypical homeschooled kid is vastly more prepared for many life situations.
So which environment is "better"? mu
Obligatory post of John Taylor Gatto's article The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher:
https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20...
A former teacher of the year, Gatto became very influential in early homeschooling movements.
Parents or potential parents interested in education and schooling might also want to read Maria Montessori, and John Holt's books "How Children Fail" and "How Children Learn."
We as a species actually know quite a bit about raising children, socialization, and education. I think we get duped by our surrounding society and government institutions hijacking those goals in service of control, indoctrination, conformity, and maintaining class and power structures. Schools serve just as much, if not more, to prepare children to work as "productive" members of a capitalist culture, to do what they get told, as they do to teach our kids anything or help them learn to get along with other people. Call me an anarchist or Marxist, I don't care.
I haven’t read the whole thread but thought I’d share my experience having been homeschooled 12 grades.
My parents started homeschooling me because the public schools near where they lived then were supposedly subpar (Miami in the mid 80s, I have no idea if what they believed is true). When they moved to Michigan in 89 they continued homeschooling me and later my younger sister because they’d gotten used to it and a big court case had just been won (or was shortly after we moved) making it officially legal there.
I never complained because I did have a good social group through church, the neighborhood, and a strong homeschool group in the area that organized weekly park days, some coop classes with professional teachers, but more than any of that it gave me so much freedom.
My mom did a good job teaching me by 4th or 5th grade how to teach myself given course material, the library, and her or my dad when I needed more. She did standardized testing for us every year and I was able to complete 12th grade just before turning 17. They pushed me to use the local community college for math and science by 14 because they didn’t feel equipped with more advanced topics. They got me into summer science camps at the college I ended up attending and getting my undergrad at.
Every family I knew in the group were doing it for different reasons and did things differently but shared tips, curriculum, and really their lives with us. It was a very tight knit community despite spanning over 600 square miles. Some probably got stronger educations and more opportunities, for many different reasons, socioeconomic and others. As I remember most were well adjusted and successful as adults.
I mentioned freedom above and I’ll end on that. Once I’d been taught how to teach myself the sky was the limit. I had the opportunity to focus 4 hours straight on school work and then to work with my dad at construction sites, swinging a hammer, eventually part of a crew of 4 every afternoon building houses or whatever. That started at age 12. By 14 I wrote my first business plan with a friend, raised $10k from family and private investors, and started my first business (VRcade in Jackson MI, summer of 96). By 16 I had an IT consultancy. I don’t think I’d have had as many opportunities like that if I’d been at the local highschool from 7:30-2:30pm every day. I had friends at the school and a few of them worked service jobs after school but that was pretty rare.
So what did I do for my two kids? We chose public (charter) school for them but we got super involved. My wife and I volunteer there a few hours a week, teaching gardening and helping where needed. Neither of us felt we had the patience or skills to be full time educators and Covid proved that out when the kids were home for 6 months. I’m still not sure what magic my mom used to teach me how to teach myself. The important thing is we found our community at the school and amazing teachers, many of whom have been there 1-3 decades.
I am trying to instill the values and initiative my parents (both entrepreneurs) empowered me with. We’ve been paying for instruction for our 11yo at a (unofficial) trade school for a few years and now the same school pays them to help with instruction when they have big beginner classes. My youngest is leaning more towards tech like me and is super into games so I’m going to try and stretch my generalist programming skills to empower them in that arena.
All this to say I think it’s ok to have many ways to do things and find the way that fits your family. I really appreciate public schools because many wouldn’t have the opportunity for an education otherwise and I try to contribute back to that as much as I can even though it wasn’t my experience. And I support those who have chosen homeschooling and figured out how to make it work. Private schools I’m a little more meh on but I’ll do my best not to judge, lol.
Homeschooling comes up fairly often on HN, usually eliciting the same kinds of comments. Commenters repeat the same old tropes, generalize from anecdotes, and project individual experiences onto other people.
I raised and homeschooled three children. One of my daughters homeschooled from second grade to the time she started college. My other two children decided to attend public school at various ages, and then mixed that with homeschooling because I didn't force them to attend school.
Infants have obvious personality tendencies. Some seem curious and outgoing, others afraid and nervous. Some babies seem happy and comfortable with other people, and some recoil and cry when approached. They don't start as blank slates. The family environment, siblings, peers, and the school environment can exacerbate innate tendencies or push children to change. A shy child may withdraw and develop social anxiety at school, or turn more extroverted and confident. Personality traits change throughout our lives, and that happens faster and often more dramatically in young children.
"School," "homeschooling," and "socialization" don't describe specific or uniform experiences, though people use those terms as if they do. Some children have loving and nurturing home environments, some suffer abuse. Some children attend well-funded and staffed schools, others spend their years in a prison-like environment with the emphasis on crowd control. Some teachers have a talent for teaching and subject mastery, they can inspire children to learn. Others seem resentful, incompetent, disengaged, even cruel. General statements about public schools, teachers, and the process of socialization don't mean anything because of huge variations across broad spectrums in multiple dimensions.
When asked, teachers will cite parental engagement as the most important determinant of student success. Many, probably most, parents use school (starting with infant daycare) as a place to park their kids while they work, trusting strangers they rarely meet to raise their children. When you watch a classroom of children interact with the teacher and each other you can pick out the kids who have involved parents and those who don't. Of course most parents have no choice for economic reasons. Homeschooled kids tend to come from two-parent middle (I'd say upper middle) class families for that reason -- few families can afford to have one or both parents lose so much work time. Several studies of homeschooled children implicate family socio-economic status and income in the success of the children, already advantaged compared to the majority of public school kids.
Parents take a wide range of approaches to raising children, generally with little or no training or preparation. You have a child and suddenly you have complete responsibility for another human being, making decisions on the fly, subjected to conflicting advice and guidance. That other human being has their own personality, will, requirements, and eventually desires and opinions, and you have to discover those and adapt to them because children don't come with labels or documentation. Some parents pay little attention to their kids, often because the parents have too many economic, relationship, or other problems of their own. Some parents treat their kids as extensions of themselves, a chance for a do-over, version 2.0, and will start prepping their child for the future the parent wishes they had regardless of the child's inclinations and desires. Some parents want to control their children, usually in the name of protecting their child from the world. Parents who don't recognize and respect their children as separate individuals can do a lot of damage, both in socialization and in academics, and you see the results with both schooled and homeschooled children.
In fifteen years of homeschooling my own children I spent a lot of time with other homeschooling parents. The terms "homeschooling parent" and "homeschooler" refer to such a broad spectrum of motivations and approaches that they doesn't usefully describe anything at all. Some parents want to raise their children in a faith tradition (I met fundamentalist Christian parents, Mormons, Muslims, Jews). Some parents want to raise their children with no faith tradition (secular homeschoolers), but then push their own woo-woo and new-agey beliefs on their kids (opposition to vaccines, mindfulness, astrology, homeopathy, "Indigo children," etc.). Both religious and secular homeschoolers can indoctrinate and control their children, and put their own beliefs, desires, frustrations, and fantasies into their kids' heads. I call that another form of not respecting the child as an individual.
The socialization topic comes up so much when talking about homeschooling that I have to say something about it. Whether schooled or homeschooled, children get exposed to adults, other children, and peers their own age. Each child will react and adapt to their specific circumstances according to their personality. Nothing inherently prevents homeschooled kids from enjoying a rich social life, but parents often restrict social activities, and with whom their kids socialize. Nothing inherent about the school environment magically "socializes" kids. Some children thrive in the school environment, others graduate or drop out with emotional trauma. Some schools offer more stable and safe environments than others, largely a function of ZIP Code in the USA.
Homeschooling at its best takes parental engagement to the extreme: parents take complete control over, and responsibility for, their child's education both academically and socially. Parents might get good results from the right schools if they engage with the teachers and pick the right school (thus the popularity of private schools). Parents who recognize and respect the individuality of their children, and don't treat them as clones or property, who actively take part in educating their child (whether at home or school), have a good chance at raising a well-adjusted and functional adult. The less the parents engage and take responsibility, the less the parents respect their children as discrete individuals, the more likely they will raise a child with academic failings and maladjusted personalities.
Look at the results all around us, the products of public schooling and disengaged parenting. Homeschooled kids may have the same problems, but in my experience that happens less often, especially if you exclude the large number of religious fundamentalist homeschoolers in America.
Specifically for the HN crowd (to which I belong)... people who work in the software profession that cannot measure what we call productivity, a profession that cannot agree on "best practices" around even trivial things like indenting, should step back and take a more humble approach to opining and lecturing about parenting, education, and homeschooling. No one knows the right or best way to raise children, or how to "properly" educate them. Instead we have a lot of opinions and traditions and government-imposed rules, some useful and some bullshit. As parents we have to sift through all of that and make decisions on the fly that can dramatically affect our children for the rest of their lives. We can't refactor away a bully, a cruel teacher, neglect, or the effects of expecting an iPad to substitute for attention and care.
I was homeschooled as a child, from 1st through 12th grade, in a large homeschooling community from the late 1980s through the 1990s. I started college in 2000.
I heard all the stories about how homeschooled kids get better standardized test scores and generally enter college with fewer remedial courses, better academic outcomes, etc. I heard all the arguments that "actually, we do socialize, because we can still do Scouts and sports and blah blah blah."
It was all horse shit.
I do not know a single homeschooling family that did not have an issue with the parents eventually slacking off on checking up that the kids were doing the work. And, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the kids just skipped doing any work for most of the year. There would be a mad scramble at the end of the year to concoct a fraudulent portfolio to present to the state-required evaluator. And when the dust settled and all the spankings were done and all the tears were dried, new promises were made to not do it next year. New threats were made that you could "get up at 6am and get on that bus."
It took me until my 40s to realize it wasn't my fault. The people who were the responsible party--i.e. my parents--stopped acting responsibly. The person who is so incapable of being responsible that the state won't even let them drink, drive, or vote (all activities infinitely easier than trying to teach yourself)--i.e. my self--was the one who had all the blame lumped on him.
This wasn't a unique experience. I think maybe 1 kid out of the 30 I knew did not have this experience at least once in their homeschooling life. That one kid was perhaps the smartest, most mature of us; or perhaps she just feared her parents the most. She's also dead now, having killed herself in her early 30s.
For me, it was 4 times.
It was incredibly traumatizing. I lived the first 20 years of my adult life believing I was fundamentally a dishonest and untrustworthy person, and therefore unworthy of anything, especially love and career success. What I was was an irresponsible kid, aka "a kid", who had practically no supervision.
Every parent always said publicly they were doing it for academic reasons. In private, amongst themselves, the true reasons came out: sequestration away from "unauthorized" religious, political, and social ideas. And it always, always leaned right. We couldn't go to school because they were Teaching Evolution As If It's Fact When It's Just A Theory At That School. We couldn't go to school because Ever Since The Immigrants Started Moving Here To Take All The Apple Picking Jobs The Crime Has Been Through The Roof At That School (what the local family practice doctor cared about apple picking jobs, I could never figure out as a child). We couldn't go to school because They're Teaching Homosexuality Is Not An Abomination At That School.
Meanwhile, every single child I grew up with had to face a cliff moment where they had to decide if our collective experience was abusive. The few of us who said yes managed to get through college without dropping out, get moved away from home, get through rounds of suicidal ideation, self-medicating, therapy, antidepressants, and maybe eventually coming to terms and having happy productive lives.
Or they said no, it was fine, and they now live in poverty, have broken homes, still-active alcoholism, or are dead from suicide.
My own mother might be developing dementia and doesn't seem to recall at all things my sister and I agree we remember clearly. Things I've heard my friends repeat in their own stories. Things they've said their own parents also deny. I grew up incredibly lonely. My parents not only sequestered my sister and I from our municipal community, but also to some extent from our homeschooling community, because the one silver lining about my own particular experience was that my parents were not religious zealots. I grew up in constant fear of the State taking me away from my parents just because my mother took me to the grocery store during school hours (a thing my mother asserted could happen, so I better behave to not draw attention to us). I grew up believing society was going to collapse at any time. I grew up believing I was certainly going to Hell because, even though my parents claimed to be religious, we didn't go to church.
To this day, despite the intellectual knowledge that I'm really no different than anyone else, I still cannot shake the feeling that I'm always the outsider looking in, always the interloper trying to masquerade inside, and decode the secret workings of, the social groups I'm in.
This is incredibly difficult for me to talk about. There are many things I still cannot talk about, so please resist the online commentator urge to infer things about my current relationships.
I see people today talking about "we're thinking of homeschooling our children." Not just online, but in my own community, too. I want to scream at them that they have no idea what a gigantic mistake they are entering into. Even assuming they can avoid the dishonest reasoning for why they are doing it, even assuming they will perfectly execute an educational plan for their children over the course of 12 years, they are at the vet least forcing an outsider's complex on their children.
Yes, parents who send their children to public school could still be abusive. Yes, children who do go to public school also develop outsider complexes and plenty of other mental health issues. But at least the child will have a better chance to see that there are alternatives. At least the child will have a better chance to learn that they are a member of a shared society. At least the child will have a better chance to become independent from their parents.
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You might actually be referring to yourself. Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:text=r...
https://chewv.org/college-preparation/college-admissions/?ut...
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/?utm_sourc...
... for the much smaller subset of homeschooled kids who apply to college.
NHERI is a homeschool lobbyist org.
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All kids are indoctrinated. As parents do you want to have control of that or not?
With that attitude you might as well just tell parents that they shouldn't participate in society!
I think the point is that part of having a functioning society (civic life, engagement, tolerance of others) is having people mix together. School is one of the prime places where that happens.
If you allow a lot of people to pull away from that "forced" engagement with others then you start to stress a lot of societal bonds.
You're right. It's _one_ of the prime places.
I don't know a single homeschooler that sits at home all day long. They work in family businesses, participate in bands, sports, and co-ops. Many belong to churches where families come from all different strata: our church has surgeons, line cooks, programmers, self-employed handymen, disabled vets. They interact with everyone—including kids. They do things like "kid markets" where they have a business. They watch their parents learn how the house works and how to manage finances.
There is no forced engagement—in fact the peer pressure is often completely gone. They are in an environment (their family) where they are much freer to be themselves.
> I don't know a single homeschooler that sits at home all day long.
Well, you wouldn't, would you?
Sorry, not to detract from your other points, but I thought it was funny.
All of our planes came back with the wings shot up!
Sure, but I don’t like how society is functions. I don’t like the direction in which society is headed.
That is why my solution is to be selective in who I socialize with, find a like-minded partner, and have lots of children.
My intent is to create a new society and culture free of the rot that infects every public space today.
The best functioning society that I experienced was when 90% of the people were (presbyterian) Christians. We replaced that with something very, very disfunctional.
the purpose of education is largely opposite of indocrination (plus few other things). if your kid is being educated is such an environment you should move (or pay for private education).
I get where you're coming from but I think your statement is a bit naive.
Education systems as we know them today are absolutely about indoctrination in so many ways. Capitalism, love of country, views on family units, beauty and aaesthetics, what has cultural value and what does not etc etc. Not to mention many school systems just straight up having classes on religion, allowing armed forces into schools to recruit and the like.
Whether you're worried about left wing or right wing indoctrination, it still holds true. All kids are being indoctrinated every time they go to school same as every time they watch TV.
Exactly. Which history lessons get taught, which books get assigned as reading, which clubs are available, etc. Even if they are taught to be critical of the assignments they get, if the selection is limited enough, kids will not have the breadth of knowledge to even see the alternatives.
I pay a lot of money for my 12-year to not be in the system you are describing and am grateful I can provide this for her more than I am grateful for just about anything else
If the article was about how Muslim families home-school their kids, your comment would not be so greyed out...
(I'm not saying it's true for 1 religion and false for the other, but I'm betting a lot of people would think so...).
It's also how some of the population escapes getting broken by a one-size-fits-all education system. People need options.
100%. The school and the Internet are the two places children can encounter opinions different from their parents’ for the first time. With an increase in homeschooling and recent pushes to ban social media for children, it’s clear that critical thinking is going to suffer most. I still have not met someone who was homeschooled who was remotely thankful for it.
Honestly, support for these policies that benefit, more than anyone else, abusive parents, makes me suspicious of people’s motives.
Hello! My parents were early homeschooling pioneers, and I never had any conventional schooling. I think it suited me very well, and I'm glad my parents did it. I am solidly middle-aged now, but nothing I've seen or heard in all these years has given me the impression that I missed out on any experience worth having.
One could also say banning homeschooling is how a significant portion of the population gets indoctrinated by the state.
My guess is that this is related to the conservative attacks on education in the U.S., and it's especially insidious because, again I'm guessing, it's mostly liberal minded people who are buying into home schooling in part due to anti-education right wing propaganda. I live in Santa Cruz county, would not be surprised if we had one of the highest home school rates in the country. It feels like a combination of constant anti-education propaganda and the "snowflake syndrome" where parents think their kids are too special to be treated the same as other students in a classroom.
I don't feel better prepared to teach at home than someone who actually went to college for the various topics covered in high school. How can I know all I need to teach about math, chemistry, english, physics, etc, etc, etc when I already have to learn so much for my own work? I think parents that think they can do a better job are delusional.
Maybe the school _environment_ that a child has access isn't great, right? But I don't think that says anything about teachers.
In California, a teacher without a chemistry degree can teach high school chemistry after passing the CSET Chemistry subtest. This requires less depth of knowledge than AP Chemistry.
You do not need to know anything about the subject to teach high school subjects. You need to know stuff about teaching.
Elementary Education and Pedagogy are "sciences" with an even poorer replication rate than Sociology and Psychology.
Nobody educated to teach is actually qualified to do so by virtue of said education. Teaching is largely a personality-driven and experience-acquired skill.
At school, one teacher lectures to maybe 30 students. If all they did was give individual attention student by student, each would get maybe 10 minutes a day.
The first 10 minutes of your home-school day you've beat that statistic. After two or three hours, you're up to a month of class time.
Of course they don't do that; they just lecture. Which is something you can get online (Khan Academy).
It's all about the homework and tutoring, baby.
All you have to do is learn along with your home student, and validate their learning experience. Helps if you catch on quicker, but not even necessary.
homeschooled kids are literally competing against kids from other countries that are being schooled on calculus, geometry, statistics, algebra with practical chemistry, physics and biology lessons. This is not going to end well 15 yrs down the line
Lots of colleges offer laboratory science classes for homeschooled children. AOPS wipes the floor with any math education you’d get at a public school. Most US national laboratories have on-site programs for school-aged kids and homeschoolers have equal standing for attending.
Anyone who takes it seriously gives up nothing.
You think avoiding these things are why people are thinking about homeschooling?!
In San Francisco where I live the public school system made the decision to not offer algebra until later for egalitarian reasons. Basically since they couldn't bring up the students that faired poorly in math, they delayed the subject for everybody. Along the same lines, they took the one high school dedicated to the highest achieving students and turned it into a lottery system rather than something earned.
Yes, of course you're right, kids will be competing on all those subjects. But the idea that public institutions are somehow the safeguards of fundamental academic achievement is just out of touch.
Of course, San Francisco public school's embrace of socialist/egalitarian drive identity politics is just one example of public education failure. Elsewhere in the US in these times, other school districts are being turned effectively into seminaries because the other political side has other doctrinal objectives. In neither case is learning how to think or how the world really works is important.
they create the feeling of belonging to something, a group, a social circle. you cannot recreate that at home. you ll see what happens after a decade going along this path. The feelings of being an orderly part of a group and partaking in group stuff cannot be recreated at home
You know, I'm relatively social and I don't even go to school let alone a public school! How do I manage it? I engage with social groups in other ways.
Homeschooling doesn't necessitate going into a dark room somewhere and closing/locking the door. Sure, some may do that... but majority simply don't. Suggesting that there aren't paths to good socialization outside of public school is just rationalizing a position and ignoring the reality that many home schoolers don't operate in isolation. We're a social species and we tend to seek out others. This is even true for homeschoolers who can collaborate or engage in all manner of social opportunities that exist amongst a coalition of homeschoolers or they can take advantage of the social activities which are available in most communities of any size. Again, we're social creatures and we'll give into that impulse. To suggest that has to be nurtured by a public institution or is somehow unavailable outside of a public school just isn't credible on its face.
As others have said all up and down the thread, you take measures to build that social circle and interaction. And I can tell you from direct personal experience... a public school offers positive interaction opportunities to some, but wholly negative and even damaging to others... public schools absolutely offer a social experience. Whether that's good or bad in my experience is at best a case-by-case call.
Timmy’s job will be done by AI when he grows up, but at least he’ll have fun a social skills
Fantastic.
LLM's have revolutionized the way people learn and utilize what they have learned. The future is 8 year old material science lads doing chemistry in their step-mother's RV
You might be surprised. The studies say it's a primarily negative impact, especially in math and college attendance.
https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/the-test-score...
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I've had to re-learn math skills long forgotten to help my kids with their school work. It's been an interesting experience.
The expectations for home schooling are different and are, in some ways, aimed more towards reality. My son finishes the bulk of his work in an hour most days and then has time for 2 instruments, learning C++, Rust, and Python, community/church participation and more.
is "time for 2 instruments, learning C++, Rust, and Python" not schooling ?
He's still learning. Driven by what he loves. And this is on top of the "standard" stuff.
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> Once an alternative way to educate children, homeschooling is now an increasingly popular and mainstream option.
TFA does not even begin to grapple with the single most important issue, which is who is actually doing the homeschooling.
This is only an option for certain families, with parents with enough bandwidth and knowhow to do this effectively. That excludes many tens of millions of Americans.
I think this is really about class, race, and religious segregation. Families can do what they want, of course, but this framing makes it sound like failing schools are the whole problem and I don't think that's the whole story.