7 ms·

I don't always feel great about sending my kid to school, but until you can get a critical mass for some kind of alternative, the cost in social isolation for k

by cwyers 7y ago

I don't always feel great about sending my kid to school, but until you can get a critical mass for some kind of alternative, the cost in social isolation for keeping kids out of school seems way too high to me.

AlexB138 7y ago
I concur. We're heavily considering taking our children out of the school system and this is our primary blocker. We're doing research on it and it does seem like there are a number of social groups specifically geared toward solving this problem in our area. It seems like it is growing much more common, though a disproportionate number of the groups are still non-secular, which makes them a bad match for us.
- ksdale 7y ago
  We're going down this path as well and it's been a struggle to find secular options, but it is indeed growing much more common. I'd suggest that social development can be served by literally just playing with friends though. In our area, the YMCA offers sports basically the whole year, which is a good way for the kids to spend time in a structured group setting (and if you're lucky, you can even be the coach!), and my wife has found plenty of fellow homeschoolers and unschoolers on FB who are looking for some social interaction for their kids (we happen to live in a place that isn't particularly religious though). Relatedly, everyone just seems to agree that the socialization provided by school is good and necessary, and I'm not so sure that's true. It's been our experience that all of our friends and relatives, when they do complain about school, complain about bullying or kids otherwise misbehaving in a way that's stressful to the child in question. In addition, our experience on the playground has been that kids who are in school tend to be way more likely to be rude and aggressive. And I don't say this to suggest that school makes kids rude and aggressive, just that I have 4 kids and I have spent a lot of time around a lot of different kids and I've seen zero evidence that school provides positive socialization beyond what could be had by attending regular play groups.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Some homeschoolers say "When we worry about socialization for our kids, we grab them, drag them into the bathroom, and beat them up for their lunch money". That is, socialization in the public school system very much has a downside.
    - ksdale 7y ago
      Haha, I've never heard that before. I personally don't think socialization at public school has much to recommend it, but lots of people also have fond memories of their time in school, so I haven't found it productive to get really negative on it. I mostly just want to remove socialization as the deciding factor that makes parents keep their kids in school when they'd really rather do something else, because, as you say, socialization in public school very much has a downside, and I think at best, it's a wash compared to homeschool.
      - AstralStorm 7y ago
        It is silly to believe that bullies are just in school. School just provides a target rich environment for them. And if you shield kids too much such as by over structuring their life, they might be defenseless later on. It's a fine balance and requires care, care which neither schools nor homeschooling parents are likely to be able to provide. Not even specialists most likely. It's an open question.
adamnemecek 7y ago
Is socialization the main thing? I think you could setup a community for other parents who homeschool. Also, school is a terrible place to socialize.
- thrower123 7y ago
  Being terrible is part of the value of public school. Unless you happen to get yourself into the prison system, it is very likely that you will never encounter an environment as degrading, hostile, and illogical as a public school system. One is exposed to people of all different abilities and disabilities, in a way that one is almost never forced to cope with after the age of 18. Exposure to that full spectrum of humanity is valuable.
  - adamnemecek 7y ago
    Idk seems like a waste of time. Why not let kids get really good at things.
    - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
      Because some of them will get really good at hanging out on the street corner with their friends. We want our adults to be prepared for more than that. On the other hand, "being terrible" is also not exactly a great reason to stick kids in school...
    - thrower123 7y ago
      The ones that can will regardless. We could waste people's time considerably less than we currently do, but it would require a sober look at what people are capable of and tracking them into vocational training that matches their abilities much earlier than we do, rather than sticking our fingers in our ears and singing "lalala everyone should go to college."
      - adamnemecek 7y ago
        > The ones that can will regardless. This is really wrong attitude. Success sometimes depends on a small push at a particular time.
ChrisSD 7y ago
There is also a cost in learning. I'll doff my hat to parents who have the time, energy, resources and ability to teach their own kids a wide range of subjects but in practice this seems to be the exception. Most homeschooled kids I've known have been very behind their schooled peers.
- peterwoerner 7y ago
  I taught a couple of home school co-ops during school. I found that for this particular group, these kids basically didn't learn math, but were good writers, well read and eloquent speakers. My wife says that they were all incredible awkward to be around, so there may be something to the social thing.
  - siempreb 7y ago
    > so there may be something to the social thing You have a point there. In regular school you are forced to be 'social' or risk punishment. I put 'social' in quotes because I think what is considered social is subjective and mostly made up. But watching how people are treating one another in this world I'm not sure if that social component is really working out good. Homeschooled kids are definitely not as slavishly as the 'socially' drilled kids from regular school.
- siempreb 7y ago
  > Most homeschooled kids I've known have been very behind their schooled peers. Behind? In what? We are homeschooling our daughter. For her age she's amazing with computers, english and painting/drawing(which is her passion), and also unlike her peers at school she learned to enjoy life long learning and has become autodidact as well. She never learned the usual things taught at school like: forcing other people what to do, bullying, all day on social media, hate to learn, etc, etc..
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Might be a harsh wake up call in the future. Unfortunately world does not revolve around what you are or can do. Not even what you do. It is fundamentally unfair and it's just that different might makes right nowadays, rather than violence.
cwbrandsma 7y ago
My wife and I home school our kids. Homeschooling doesn't mean your kids never see other kids (unless you live really isolated lives anyway). We found other home school families, there are associations, my kids take classes with other kids (Chemistry, an English class), they still participate in sports (there are lots of club sports leagues, and you should be able to get your kid into any sport at their local high school district). Anyway, the socialization taught in school is often the wrong type of socialization. "here is how to talk and play only with kids your own age".
- hosteur 7y ago
  Would love to home school. Do you both work? Or only one of you?
  - cwbrandsma 7y ago
    My wife does not work. She wouldn't have made enough to pay for childcare anyway, plus this is what she really wanted to do in the first place (homeschool the kids). We also moved to a cheaper city where the cost of living is more affordable. We don't live in an expensive house, cars are used and payed for. You can make it work, but there are trade-offs. I will also mention: we have 5 kids. Oldest now in college, youngest in 4th grade.
nudpiedo 7y ago
And that is the main thing: socialization. Families in cities, specially now that most people rarely have more than 3 children and live relatively far from grandparents, the cost of not understanding how to behave with mid size groups of people or how to read social contexts is priceless, and most probably won't come easily from other channels since now doesn't seem that common to see children running in the streets freely.
leesec 7y ago
Don't know about your situation but my siblings and I were raised in a mostly homeschool environment and achieved constant socialization via homeschool groups ( spurred on or hosted by my Mother ), church, various small town activities, and the fact that there were 5 of us.
rayiner 7y ago
I don’t know if you remember school, but the social environment that exists in K-12 is deeply dysfunctional and I’m not convinced it prepares you well for socializing in real life. Children are antisocial and schools are an instance of the inmates running the asylum. Ben Sasse’s book “the Vanishing American Adult” points out that the modern child-centric school system is an extremely recent invention. Back in the day, children were socialized by hanging out around adults who could teach them how to be humans. If my wife and I cared more about our kids we’d home school them.
- Kalium 7y ago
  Having spent plenty of time in both, I think it's actually a depressingly good microcosm. You have a status hierarchy. Those at the top can be arbitrarily cruel to those at the bottom with minimal consequences so long as they don't cross the delinated brightlines. Everyone is obsessed with status and its markers, because it determines everything about your life - who you can talk to, who you can date, who you can work with, etc. The people who are supposed to be overseeing this and averting this mess generally have other concerns, limiting their ability and willingness to intercede. Really, the only changes are the time-horizon and how the social groups are sorted.
  - rayiner 7y ago
    Where do you live? This is not my experience with adulthood at all, especially once I left DC.
    - Kalium 7y ago
      A planet known as "Earth", among a species of jumped-up plains apes. I've found this to be a pretty apt generalization in literally every place I've lived, which at this point encompasses a half-dozen major cities spread out over several thousand miles.
      - rayiner 7y ago
        Have you tried getting away from highly educated people?
txsoftwaredev 7y ago
My wife and I home school. All three of our kids have plenty of friends, play dates at a park or science museum, sleep overs etc. There is nothing isolating about home schooling unless you choose to isolate your children.

by cwyers 7y ago

AlexB138 7y ago

I concur. We're heavily considering taking our children out of the school system and this is our primary blocker. We're doing research on it and it does seem like there are a number of social groups specifically geared toward solving this problem in our area. It seems like it is growing much more common, though a disproportionate number of the groups are still non-secular, which makes them a bad match for us.

ksdale 7y ago
We're going down this path as well and it's been a struggle to find secular options, but it is indeed growing much more common. I'd suggest that social development can be served by literally just playing with friends though. In our area, the YMCA offers sports basically the whole year, which is a good way for the kids to spend time in a structured group setting (and if you're lucky, you can even be the coach!), and my wife has found plenty of fellow homeschoolers and unschoolers on FB who are looking for some social interaction for their kids (we happen to live in a place that isn't particularly religious though). Relatedly, everyone just seems to agree that the socialization provided by school is good and necessary, and I'm not so sure that's true. It's been our experience that all of our friends and relatives, when they do complain about school, complain about bullying or kids otherwise misbehaving in a way that's stressful to the child in question. In addition, our experience on the playground has been that kids who are in school tend to be way more likely to be rude and aggressive. And I don't say this to suggest that school makes kids rude and aggressive, just that I have 4 kids and I have spent a lot of time around a lot of different kids and I've seen zero evidence that school provides positive socialization beyond what could be had by attending regular play groups.
- AnimalMuppet 7y ago
  Some homeschoolers say "When we worry about socialization for our kids, we grab them, drag them into the bathroom, and beat them up for their lunch money". That is, socialization in the public school system very much has a downside.
  - ksdale 7y ago
    Haha, I've never heard that before. I personally don't think socialization at public school has much to recommend it, but lots of people also have fond memories of their time in school, so I haven't found it productive to get really negative on it. I mostly just want to remove socialization as the deciding factor that makes parents keep their kids in school when they'd really rather do something else, because, as you say, socialization in public school very much has a downside, and I think at best, it's a wash compared to homeschool.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      It is silly to believe that bullies are just in school. School just provides a target rich environment for them. And if you shield kids too much such as by over structuring their life, they might be defenseless later on. It's a fine balance and requires care, care which neither schools nor homeschooling parents are likely to be able to provide. Not even specialists most likely. It's an open question.

adamnemecek 7y ago

Is socialization the main thing? I think you could setup a community for other parents who homeschool. Also, school is a terrible place to socialize.

thrower123 7y ago
Being terrible is part of the value of public school. Unless you happen to get yourself into the prison system, it is very likely that you will never encounter an environment as degrading, hostile, and illogical as a public school system. One is exposed to people of all different abilities and disabilities, in a way that one is almost never forced to cope with after the age of 18. Exposure to that full spectrum of humanity is valuable.
- adamnemecek 7y ago
  Idk seems like a waste of time. Why not let kids get really good at things.
  - AnimalMuppet 7y ago
    Because some of them will get really good at hanging out on the street corner with their friends. We want our adults to be prepared for more than that. On the other hand, "being terrible" is also not exactly a great reason to stick kids in school...
  - thrower123 7y ago
    The ones that can will regardless. We could waste people's time considerably less than we currently do, but it would require a sober look at what people are capable of and tracking them into vocational training that matches their abilities much earlier than we do, rather than sticking our fingers in our ears and singing "lalala everyone should go to college."
    - adamnemecek 7y ago
      > The ones that can will regardless. This is really wrong attitude. Success sometimes depends on a small push at a particular time.

ChrisSD 7y ago

There is also a cost in learning. I'll doff my hat to parents who have the time, energy, resources and ability to teach their own kids a wide range of subjects but in practice this seems to be the exception. Most homeschooled kids I've known have been very behind their schooled peers.

peterwoerner 7y ago
I taught a couple of home school co-ops during school. I found that for this particular group, these kids basically didn't learn math, but were good writers, well read and eloquent speakers. My wife says that they were all incredible awkward to be around, so there may be something to the social thing.
- siempreb 7y ago
  > so there may be something to the social thing You have a point there. In regular school you are forced to be 'social' or risk punishment. I put 'social' in quotes because I think what is considered social is subjective and mostly made up. But watching how people are treating one another in this world I'm not sure if that social component is really working out good. Homeschooled kids are definitely not as slavishly as the 'socially' drilled kids from regular school.
siempreb 7y ago
> Most homeschooled kids I've known have been very behind their schooled peers. Behind? In what? We are homeschooling our daughter. For her age she's amazing with computers, english and painting/drawing(which is her passion), and also unlike her peers at school she learned to enjoy life long learning and has become autodidact as well. She never learned the usual things taught at school like: forcing other people what to do, bullying, all day on social media, hate to learn, etc, etc..
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Might be a harsh wake up call in the future. Unfortunately world does not revolve around what you are or can do. Not even what you do. It is fundamentally unfair and it's just that different might makes right nowadays, rather than violence.

cwbrandsma 7y ago

My wife and I home school our kids. Homeschooling doesn't mean your kids never see other kids (unless you live really isolated lives anyway). We found other home school families, there are associations, my kids take classes with other kids (Chemistry, an English class), they still participate in sports (there are lots of club sports leagues, and you should be able to get your kid into any sport at their local high school district). Anyway, the socialization taught in school is often the wrong type of socialization. "here is how to talk and play only with kids your own age".

hosteur 7y ago
Would love to home school. Do you both work? Or only one of you?
- cwbrandsma 7y ago
  My wife does not work. She wouldn't have made enough to pay for childcare anyway, plus this is what she really wanted to do in the first place (homeschool the kids). We also moved to a cheaper city where the cost of living is more affordable. We don't live in an expensive house, cars are used and payed for. You can make it work, but there are trade-offs. I will also mention: we have 5 kids. Oldest now in college, youngest in 4th grade.

nudpiedo 7y ago

And that is the main thing: socialization. Families in cities, specially now that most people rarely have more than 3 children and live relatively far from grandparents, the cost of not understanding how to behave with mid size groups of people or how to read social contexts is priceless, and most probably won't come easily from other channels since now doesn't seem that common to see children running in the streets freely.

leesec 7y ago

Don't know about your situation but my siblings and I were raised in a mostly homeschool environment and achieved constant socialization via homeschool groups ( spurred on or hosted by my Mother ), church, various small town activities, and the fact that there were 5 of us.

rayiner 7y ago

I don’t know if you remember school, but the social environment that exists in K-12 is deeply dysfunctional and I’m not convinced it prepares you well for socializing in real life. Children are antisocial and schools are an instance of the inmates running the asylum. Ben Sasse’s book “the Vanishing American Adult” points out that the modern child-centric school system is an extremely recent invention. Back in the day, children were socialized by hanging out around adults who could teach them how to be humans. If my wife and I cared more about our kids we’d home school them.

Kalium 7y ago
Having spent plenty of time in both, I think it's actually a depressingly good microcosm. You have a status hierarchy. Those at the top can be arbitrarily cruel to those at the bottom with minimal consequences so long as they don't cross the delinated brightlines. Everyone is obsessed with status and its markers, because it determines everything about your life - who you can talk to, who you can date, who you can work with, etc. The people who are supposed to be overseeing this and averting this mess generally have other concerns, limiting their ability and willingness to intercede. Really, the only changes are the time-horizon and how the social groups are sorted.
- rayiner 7y ago
  Where do you live? This is not my experience with adulthood at all, especially once I left DC.
  - Kalium 7y ago
    A planet known as "Earth", among a species of jumped-up plains apes. I've found this to be a pretty apt generalization in literally every place I've lived, which at this point encompasses a half-dozen major cities spread out over several thousand miles.
    - rayiner 7y ago
      Have you tried getting away from highly educated people?

txsoftwaredev 7y ago

My wife and I home school. All three of our kids have plenty of friends, play dates at a park or science museum, sleep overs etc. There is nothing isolating about home schooling unless you choose to isolate your children.