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I think homeschooling is an excellent hack given the current constraints of the system. Homeschooled students can move at their own pace (which can be much quic

I think homeschooling is an excellent hack given the current constraints of the system. Homeschooled students can move at their own pace (which can be much quicker than the standard curriculum schedule) and take courses at community colleges that double as high school and college credit (or just college credit - but that’s still time and money saved). I’ve seen smart homeschool students graduate high school years early with GE college credits already earned. Another interesting hack is to go to Europe for college/grad school. My wife got a Master’s degree in 1 year in England, and could have spent only 2 more for a Ph.D. (And college there is often only 2 years.) Modern university-as-business institutions try to keep students enrolled for as long/late as possible, so any approach that potentially counters that is interesting.

fzeroracer 7y ago
Homeschooling as a 'hack' requires your family to be able to afford having one person become a teacher at home as their full time job essentially. For families working two full time jobs, this isn't really an option. In general that sort of thing would probably be better served going to highschool and taking community college classes on the side, which is what I did when I was growing up.
- duelingjello 7y ago
  Yes. This usually only works in an US household where one parent earns six-figures or more. Most people simply are too indentured to five-figure jobs (money and healthcare) to pull this off. What also works with theis having a city "efficiency" (tiny) dwelling for the working parent and a cheaper house/homestead in a suburban/rural area to raise a family. Preferably, in the office area on weekdays/commuting home for weekends and 50% telecommuting/50% office for 1 or 2 weeks at a time. For these folks who don't make $300k+, living in a big city full time would be unwise. For almost everyone, Commuting long distances in an ICE solo-occupant vehicle is unwise.
- cosmotic 7y ago
  Public schools employ eachers that teach at more-or-less the speed of the slowest student, where the time of the teacher is divided n-ways. If a student can learn more quickly than that of the slowest student in the public school or with anything-but-the-least-divided-attention, then the home-schooling adult would not need to be 'full-time'.
fossuser 7y ago
Is the socialization problem for homeschooling solved? Every kid I knew in University that had been homeschooled had pretty serious issues with social skills, something I suspect is just lack of exposure to enough peer social interaction to learn how to get good at them. To be fair this is a pretty small sample to draw conclusions from. I suppose there could also be a pretty strong selection bias at play where the only kids homeschooled in the current environment either have pre-existing issues or messed up family dynamics.
- bonecrusher2102 7y ago
  I think I'd have the same question. I have a friend who coached a club sport for high school students. They said that they saw, over their tenure, over 100 homeschooled kids come through their teams, and they can remember only a single one without significant social challenges. There are probably a few jobs out there that do not require the ability to interact successfully with bosses and peers, but I'd imagine they are few and far between. Looking at "success" in a given job holistically, I would be inclined to argue that "soft" or social skills make up a nontrivial portion of the requisite skillset.
  - nvahalik 7y ago
    I guess that depends on what you mean by 'social challenges'. What are the expectations? We participate in a homeschool community which gives weekly (if not more often) opportunities for both structured and unstructured (i.e. play) social interactions. Balance this with home-interactions between their siblings, kids in the neighborhood, and folks at our church, they interact with a pretty big array of people, and we end up getting to work with them on issues a lot more diligently and quickly. Our group has a wide range of social skillset folks. From kids who are very hard-to-manage to visible gifted and talented people. IMO, the "problem" only exists if you, as a parent, don't get involved in the raising of your children.
    - fossuser 7y ago
      I think in terms of time, weekly is a lot different than 8 hrs a day 5 times a week (plus more on the weekends or after school). In this comparison weekly is just the weekend piece. The cumulative time difference is dramatic.
bsder 7y ago
> I think homeschooling is an excellent hack given the current constraints of the system. Maybe you are the exception, but homeschooling is generally centered around religion and churns out students who are FAR worse academically than if they went through even a really poor public school.
- jtcruthers 7y ago
  I've never heard of that before. Many homeschooled kids I knew were very smart, but definitely lacked social skills. I've never heard of them having FAR worse educations, especially compared to bad public schools. "Really poor public schools" are an incredibly low bar. Socialization is a hard problem to fix. I know they try with after school sports/activities/clubs, but that's not quite the same as being around peers for 8+ hours a day. In non-homeschool, the children are around other children more than adults/parents.
  - cldellow 7y ago
    It might vary by location. I grew up in rural British Columbia and homeschooled for a year due to a family feud with the local grade six teacher. The other homeschooled kids I interacted with were homeschooled for religious reasons or so they could help on the farm. They were poorly socialized and poorly educated as best as my then eleven year old self could tell.
    - livueta 7y ago
      Yeah, +1 anecdata. I was homeschooled for a while and saw a lot of the other homeschooling families via the school district resource center thing, which even the real extremists interacted with at least some. From my perspective, it was broken into three major groups: religious conservatives concerned with the moral purity of their kids, upper-middle class professionals interested in accelerating their kids as much as possible, and a grab bag of students from various socioeconomic stripes who'd had trouble with the standard school system for various reasons. I was one of the second. My mom has advanced degrees in education. My dad's an attorney. I did fine, as did basically everybody else in that cohort. Even then, the impression my friends and I had was that the religious kids spent an awful lot of time on literal bible study and weren't so hot on "actual" education. These suspicions were borne out when it was time for the state standardized tests they wanted homeschooled kids to take - every kid from the second of those cohorts (and many from the third) blasted though them, while those from the first visibly struggled. The religiously-motivated cohort also managed to out-weird a bunch of kids who spent much of their time on mid-2000s 4chan as young teens, which is actually pretty impressive. Anyway, I agree that the reason a student is homeschooled (and by proxy the resources and pedagogical methods available to them) is a much better predictor of overall outcomes than a simple homeschooled/not binary. When there's such significant clustering in a category, trying to make judgments only utilizing knowledge/stereotypes regarding the category as a whole is a good way to be misled.
jtcruthers 7y ago
Well, why didn't my family think of packing up our bags and moving halfway across the world for my education? Interesting lil hack
- liveoneggs 7y ago
  What about your private tutors?
- theflyinghorse 7y ago
  The tone of the comment is a little harsh but the idea is right. Moving to another continent, to another country with different traditions, history, and culture is not a simple decision.
commandlinefan 7y ago
> take courses at community colleges I did that - in fact, I accumulated enough credits to complete a 2-year degree before I was old enough to have finished high school. On the whole, I don’t think it was a good thing and I wouldn’t recommend it. My GPA wasn’t exactly stellar (calculus really hurt my average), so I couldn’t use that credit to transfer to a great school. When you graduate, nobody cares how old you were when you took the classes (it wouldn’t even occur to them to ask): what matters is where you went to school and what your GPA was.
- jjeaff 7y ago
  Does anyone even ask for gpa unless it's a position meant to be filled by new college graduates?
  - commandlinefan 7y ago
    It stops mattering after about 5 years, being overtaken by where you've worked in the past - although there's a slight ripple effect there, since where you work right after college depends a bit on your GPA. I do wonder how big a difference really GPA makes in the long run, but a higher one is definitely better than a lower one ; )
    - jjeaff 7y ago
      I suspect it's like a lot of things. That first job ripple effect helps out in the beginning and then the differences between high and low gpa average out over time. Like kids in headstart or Pre-K programs. They start out ahead of their peers in kindergarten, bit those differences are completely gone by second or third grade.
hogFeast 7y ago
College isn't two years (some vocational courses are two years, that isn't college though). Not all MSc are 1 year. And you will still need 4/5 years for a PHd if you do a MSc (in almost no cases is one year of a MSc a substitute for one year of a PHd). Also, England's university system (three years, not two) is notorious for turning out unrounded graduates who are unable to think for themselves and know little outside of their subject area. The reason for a four-year degree is that you spend two years doing courses from other areas (inc. your own) and actually develop all the soft skills that are usually of vital importance in the work place. In particular, the ability to turn your hand to something new and manage is going to be very important going forwards. College is about precisely the opposite of learning as fast as you can. That isn't knowledge that is useful in the real world. You need experience, and understanding.
- dragonwriter 7y ago
  > College isn't two years (some vocational courses are two years, that isn't college though). An Associates degrees is college, and is normed at two years. > The reason for a four-year degree is that you spend two years doing courses from other areas (inc. your own) While some, especially liberal arts, four year degrees work that way, that's not really generally true except at the level of looseness in the meaning of “other areas (inc. your own)” where it is essentially tautologically true of any course of study. Many engineering programs, for instance, are intensely focussed on the central focus from day one.
  - learc83 7y ago
    >An Associates degrees is college, and is normed at two years It's not what people mean when they ask if you went to college though. >Many engineering programs, for instance, are intensely focussed on the central focus from day one. If they are accredited, they still have a substantial liberal arts component.
  - hogFeast 7y ago
    Read the post I replied to. It was about the UK. Three years in England. Four years in Scotland.
kody 7y ago
Not everyone can or should homeschool. My wife and I were both homeschooled our entire lives, and we are absolutely not going to homeschool our child. I think many homeschool parents vastly overestimate their ability to educate a child. I know mine did. It's hard work and you have to cover all the bases, including socialization, or you'll be responsible for some pretty important shortcomings in your kid's development. Yes, it was awesome being able to rush through my "boring" school work by lunch time so I could program computer games and read books all day. No, it wasn't awesome feeling totally incompetent while trying to talk to girls or make friends in college. Turns out, all those "dumb secular public schoolers" were pretty good at some things, like having fun together and bonding. I would not call homeschooling a "hack". It's an alternative system of education that takes a lot of hard work, a single-income-bearing parent, and enough awareness to fill the gaps that your child is losing by being at home all day, every day.
- _lacroix 7y ago
  Humans are social animals. Those silly side effects of school, "having fun together and bonding" with people outside of your family, are critical to growing up to be a well-adjusted adult who can maintain relationships and friendships - which are ultimately the things that make life worthwhile.

fzeroracer 7y ago

Homeschooling as a 'hack' requires your family to be able to afford having one person become a teacher at home as their full time job essentially. For families working two full time jobs, this isn't really an option. In general that sort of thing would probably be better served going to highschool and taking community college classes on the side, which is what I did when I was growing up.

duelingjello 7y ago
Yes. This usually only works in an US household where one parent earns six-figures or more. Most people simply are too indentured to five-figure jobs (money and healthcare) to pull this off. What also works with theis having a city "efficiency" (tiny) dwelling for the working parent and a cheaper house/homestead in a suburban/rural area to raise a family. Preferably, in the office area on weekdays/commuting home for weekends and 50% telecommuting/50% office for 1 or 2 weeks at a time. For these folks who don't make $300k+, living in a big city full time would be unwise. For almost everyone, Commuting long distances in an ICE solo-occupant vehicle is unwise.
cosmotic 7y ago
Public schools employ eachers that teach at more-or-less the speed of the slowest student, where the time of the teacher is divided n-ways. If a student can learn more quickly than that of the slowest student in the public school or with anything-but-the-least-divided-attention, then the home-schooling adult would not need to be 'full-time'.

fossuser 7y ago

Is the socialization problem for homeschooling solved? Every kid I knew in University that had been homeschooled had pretty serious issues with social skills, something I suspect is just lack of exposure to enough peer social interaction to learn how to get good at them. To be fair this is a pretty small sample to draw conclusions from. I suppose there could also be a pretty strong selection bias at play where the only kids homeschooled in the current environment either have pre-existing issues or messed up family dynamics.

bonecrusher2102 7y ago
I think I'd have the same question. I have a friend who coached a club sport for high school students. They said that they saw, over their tenure, over 100 homeschooled kids come through their teams, and they can remember only a single one without significant social challenges. There are probably a few jobs out there that do not require the ability to interact successfully with bosses and peers, but I'd imagine they are few and far between. Looking at "success" in a given job holistically, I would be inclined to argue that "soft" or social skills make up a nontrivial portion of the requisite skillset.
- nvahalik 7y ago
  I guess that depends on what you mean by 'social challenges'. What are the expectations? We participate in a homeschool community which gives weekly (if not more often) opportunities for both structured and unstructured (i.e. play) social interactions. Balance this with home-interactions between their siblings, kids in the neighborhood, and folks at our church, they interact with a pretty big array of people, and we end up getting to work with them on issues a lot more diligently and quickly. Our group has a wide range of social skillset folks. From kids who are very hard-to-manage to visible gifted and talented people. IMO, the "problem" only exists if you, as a parent, don't get involved in the raising of your children.
  - fossuser 7y ago
    I think in terms of time, weekly is a lot different than 8 hrs a day 5 times a week (plus more on the weekends or after school). In this comparison weekly is just the weekend piece. The cumulative time difference is dramatic.

bsder 7y ago

> I think homeschooling is an excellent hack given the current constraints of the system. Maybe you are the exception, but homeschooling is generally centered around religion and churns out students who are FAR worse academically than if they went through even a really poor public school.

jtcruthers 7y ago
I've never heard of that before. Many homeschooled kids I knew were very smart, but definitely lacked social skills. I've never heard of them having FAR worse educations, especially compared to bad public schools. "Really poor public schools" are an incredibly low bar. Socialization is a hard problem to fix. I know they try with after school sports/activities/clubs, but that's not quite the same as being around peers for 8+ hours a day. In non-homeschool, the children are around other children more than adults/parents.
- cldellow 7y ago
  It might vary by location. I grew up in rural British Columbia and homeschooled for a year due to a family feud with the local grade six teacher. The other homeschooled kids I interacted with were homeschooled for religious reasons or so they could help on the farm. They were poorly socialized and poorly educated as best as my then eleven year old self could tell.
  - livueta 7y ago
    Yeah, +1 anecdata. I was homeschooled for a while and saw a lot of the other homeschooling families via the school district resource center thing, which even the real extremists interacted with at least some. From my perspective, it was broken into three major groups: religious conservatives concerned with the moral purity of their kids, upper-middle class professionals interested in accelerating their kids as much as possible, and a grab bag of students from various socioeconomic stripes who'd had trouble with the standard school system for various reasons. I was one of the second. My mom has advanced degrees in education. My dad's an attorney. I did fine, as did basically everybody else in that cohort. Even then, the impression my friends and I had was that the religious kids spent an awful lot of time on literal bible study and weren't so hot on "actual" education. These suspicions were borne out when it was time for the state standardized tests they wanted homeschooled kids to take - every kid from the second of those cohorts (and many from the third) blasted though them, while those from the first visibly struggled. The religiously-motivated cohort also managed to out-weird a bunch of kids who spent much of their time on mid-2000s 4chan as young teens, which is actually pretty impressive. Anyway, I agree that the reason a student is homeschooled (and by proxy the resources and pedagogical methods available to them) is a much better predictor of overall outcomes than a simple homeschooled/not binary. When there's such significant clustering in a category, trying to make judgments only utilizing knowledge/stereotypes regarding the category as a whole is a good way to be misled.

jtcruthers 7y ago

Well, why didn't my family think of packing up our bags and moving halfway across the world for my education? Interesting lil hack

liveoneggs 7y ago
What about your private tutors?
theflyinghorse 7y ago
The tone of the comment is a little harsh but the idea is right. Moving to another continent, to another country with different traditions, history, and culture is not a simple decision.

commandlinefan 7y ago

> take courses at community colleges I did that - in fact, I accumulated enough credits to complete a 2-year degree before I was old enough to have finished high school. On the whole, I don’t think it was a good thing and I wouldn’t recommend it. My GPA wasn’t exactly stellar (calculus really hurt my average), so I couldn’t use that credit to transfer to a great school. When you graduate, nobody cares how old you were when you took the classes (it wouldn’t even occur to them to ask): what matters is where you went to school and what your GPA was.

jjeaff 7y ago
Does anyone even ask for gpa unless it's a position meant to be filled by new college graduates?
- commandlinefan 7y ago
  It stops mattering after about 5 years, being overtaken by where you've worked in the past - although there's a slight ripple effect there, since where you work right after college depends a bit on your GPA. I do wonder how big a difference really GPA makes in the long run, but a higher one is definitely better than a lower one ; )
  - jjeaff 7y ago
    I suspect it's like a lot of things. That first job ripple effect helps out in the beginning and then the differences between high and low gpa average out over time. Like kids in headstart or Pre-K programs. They start out ahead of their peers in kindergarten, bit those differences are completely gone by second or third grade.

hogFeast 7y ago

College isn't two years (some vocational courses are two years, that isn't college though). Not all MSc are 1 year. And you will still need 4/5 years for a PHd if you do a MSc (in almost no cases is one year of a MSc a substitute for one year of a PHd). Also, England's university system (three years, not two) is notorious for turning out unrounded graduates who are unable to think for themselves and know little outside of their subject area. The reason for a four-year degree is that you spend two years doing courses from other areas (inc. your own) and actually develop all the soft skills that are usually of vital importance in the work place. In particular, the ability to turn your hand to something new and manage is going to be very important going forwards. College is about precisely the opposite of learning as fast as you can. That isn't knowledge that is useful in the real world. You need experience, and understanding.

dragonwriter 7y ago
> College isn't two years (some vocational courses are two years, that isn't college though). An Associates degrees is college, and is normed at two years. > The reason for a four-year degree is that you spend two years doing courses from other areas (inc. your own) While some, especially liberal arts, four year degrees work that way, that's not really generally true except at the level of looseness in the meaning of “other areas (inc. your own)” where it is essentially tautologically true of any course of study. Many engineering programs, for instance, are intensely focussed on the central focus from day one.
- learc83 7y ago
  >An Associates degrees is college, and is normed at two years It's not what people mean when they ask if you went to college though. >Many engineering programs, for instance, are intensely focussed on the central focus from day one. If they are accredited, they still have a substantial liberal arts component.
- hogFeast 7y ago
  Read the post I replied to. It was about the UK. Three years in England. Four years in Scotland.

kody 7y ago

Not everyone can or should homeschool. My wife and I were both homeschooled our entire lives, and we are absolutely not going to homeschool our child. I think many homeschool parents vastly overestimate their ability to educate a child. I know mine did. It's hard work and you have to cover all the bases, including socialization, or you'll be responsible for some pretty important shortcomings in your kid's development. Yes, it was awesome being able to rush through my "boring" school work by lunch time so I could program computer games and read books all day. No, it wasn't awesome feeling totally incompetent while trying to talk to girls or make friends in college. Turns out, all those "dumb secular public schoolers" were pretty good at some things, like having fun together and bonding. I would not call homeschooling a "hack". It's an alternative system of education that takes a lot of hard work, a single-income-bearing parent, and enough awareness to fill the gaps that your child is losing by being at home all day, every day.

_lacroix 7y ago
Humans are social animals. Those silly side effects of school, "having fun together and bonding" with people outside of your family, are critical to growing up to be a well-adjusted adult who can maintain relationships and friendships - which are ultimately the things that make life worthwhile.