7 ms·

Just want to take exception to what you have said here. The issue is a matter of culture, not of access to teachers or the Internet. I home school my children

• Talanes 6y ago
  And I doubt you would have been able to achieve the same results if your wife was dead and you were working an essential job for minimum wage. "Culture" seems to be a byword for money here.
  • kansface 6y ago
    Negative, plenty of poor immigrants (and natives for that matter) instill a strong regard for education and personal responsibility including my own family.
    • tkzed49 6y ago
      And this still does not solve the problem of access to the internet (through which formal education is being delivered) or this idea of parents being able to both work to support their children and somehow replace this online formal instruction with homeschooling.
    • andrepd 6y ago
      No, not negative. It's an empirically proven fact that children of wealthy parents perform better in school. This is not up for debate.
      • jotakami 6y ago
        I don’t think anyone was denying that... What I read was a repudiation of the argument that on average poor children fare worse in school therefore a given child from a poor family will necessarily perform poorly. It is entirely possible for a poor child to outperform wealthy peers, and the behavior of that child’s parents or the culture at home may have a large effect on their performance.
      • kansface 6y ago
        > This is not up for debate. Is it because they are wealthy? Or how about, how much of the difference (not quantified here) is because of wealth? > "Culture" seems to be a byword for money here. is what I'm disputing, which would imply that money will solve our problems.
• empath75 6y ago
  How do you homeschool your kids with a full time job?
  • rfrey 6y ago
    Just get your live-in nanny to supervise homework, duh.
  • kleer001 6y ago
    Give 'em something to do in the morning. Make sure they've done it by the evening.
    • NortySpock 6y ago
      Daddy I don't know what to do on this page! The directions are confusing. Daddy I want to watch YouTube of DanTDM hooting like a monkey while playing Minecraft. Daddy why aren't you famous like DanTDM? Daddy multiplication is hard, can you do it for me? Etc. Looking forward to your one-size-fits-all response.
      • kleer001 6y ago
        Parent better. (Personally I doubt if many other two word directives are as resoundingly difficult. Maybe "Shave a yak." or "Solve P vs NP".)
        • alfiedotwtf 6y ago
          Lol. You obviously don’t have kids.
          • kleer001 6y ago
            What? Because I called it "resoundingly difficult"? Either way you asked for a "one-size-fits-all response". I thought you were being playful.
      • alfiedotwtf 6y ago
• avianlyric 6y ago
  This reads very closely to just blaming parents for not being good enough, and not raising good enough children. While I’m sure family culture is incredibly important, we shouldn’t forget that growing up in such a culture is an incredible privilege. One enabled by having moderately wealthy parents. Being moderately wealthy doesn’t mean having large saving or a fancy house. It means being able to provide 3 meals a day and clothes for your children. It means having enough time after work to pick up your kids, and read them a bedtime story. There are many people living in the western world who aren’t that wealthy. Who have children and work 3 jobs just to keep them fed. You may even be tempted to say that the parents are irresponsible for raising children without proper financial stability, but that doesn’t help the children they have. It just provides an excuse to ignore a real social problem.
  • kleer001 6y ago
    Some parents aren't good enough and aren't raising good children. Trouble is they're not to blame for the skills they don't have. What is to blame? Entropy. Plain old time degrading memory and skills and effort. It's almost as if a larger pattern of skill and memory retention would be useful. Something old and robust, yet flexible and humane.
    • seph-reed 6y ago
      It's been a long time since I decided that better parenting was probably the only world issue worth focusing on. I think it would trickle down into everything else. I'm not sure at what point the returns would be worth less than the effort, but given it has a 1.5 - 2.5 generation return rate, it's really hard to tell.
      • jotakami 6y ago
        This reminds me of the final sentence from Tragedy and Hope, the 1000-page history of the first half of the 20th century by the late Carroll Quigley: “Some things we clearly do not yet know, including the most important of all, which is how to bring up children to form them into mature, responsible adults, but on the whole we do know now, as we have already shown, that we can avoid continuing the horrors of 1914-1945, and on that basis alone we may be optimistic over our ability to go back to the tradition of our Western society and to resume its development along its old patterns of Inclusive Diversity.”
• duncan-donuts 6y ago
  The lack of basic internet access is problematic in this scenario. I don't know a single person who isn't receiving their assignments from their public school in any other way than through some web app. Our libraries are closed -- we can't just go there and ask them for the public school curriculum (not that they would have it any way). It's possible that the districts may have mailed out course work to people, but I don't know if that has happened or not. The city of Minneapolis has given free public access to WiFi so it seems unlikely that something would have been mailed out. I'm happy for you and your success with your children. It sounds like you've built a strong culture within your family. Not everyone is as fortunate to be in this position. Is that their fault? Maybe. Maybe not.
• kleer001 6y ago
  > We taught them discipline, to learn, to value education, and a love for knowledge; after that we could not keep them away from education. I'm curious as to your heuristics. Please point me towards your models.
  • kleer001 6y ago
    Not as a "pics or it didn't happen way", but in a "I'm genuinely interested, don't want to waste your time, and because I'm wanting to be a parent myself and it seems like an insurmountable task without some kind of time worn received wisdom even if the actual words seem cliche."
    • DiffEq 6y ago
      I didn't use this specific course, I came across it later, but pretty much everything in it I taught my children early on; My parents taught me some of these things when I was young but these are the skills to teach and practice: Learning How to Learn: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/ https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/ And we use the Trivium as the curriculum to guide them and we used this resource primarily to develop their curriculum: https://welltrainedmind.com/?v=7516fd43adaa https://welltrainedmind.com/?v=7516fd43adaa I will say this - I am excellent at math; even higher math such as Calculus. My wife is excellent with Grammar. So we are able to help them when they do run into some difficulty - but for the most part they can consume a subject on their own at this point. In terms of reading early on we checked out the hooked on phonics at the library. With Math I made them memorize their math tables and how to do math in their head with one of those "Mental math" books - also from the library. I also taught them some common ways to memorize things and had them from early age to memorize songs, scriptures, and poems. Learn these things early and there is no stopping a kid...
• sbarker 6y ago
  Do you worry about your children having large blind spots in pop-culture making it difficult to relate to peers later in life when discussing things and relating the childhood? I've wondered how music taste was going to continue with out FM, but just today my daughter had a google meet with her class where they have to have teams and discuss songs. Between tiktok, youtube, and dance class she did quite well. I imagine 13 year old boys will talk about fortnite how we talk about mario or zelda...
  • searchableguy 6y ago
    I don't think that's a huge problem. I almost had no interest in anything my classmates talked about but in the morning before going to school, I would open few trending pages and check up news for about 10-15 minutes and drop small hints to start conversation and let them continue since I lacked depth. Discussions are pretty cyclical and repetitive in nature. It's easy to pretend that you care about something superficial because deep down, people are also aware of it.
  • seneca 6y ago
    > Do you worry about your children having large blind spots in pop-culture I home school my children, and it's intentional that they wouldn't relate to people in a discussion of pop-culture. That's what we're very much trying to avoid. The difference is that you seem to think that's a bad thing, and my family intentionally sacrifices quite a lot to achieve it. My son has never even heard of tiktok, but he talks about the Illiad with his friends. I get how strange that sounds to someone who doesn't value the same things. We do worry that he may regret the decisions we've made later in life, but that's part of being a parent. Luckily the home-school community is larger than it used to be, and more secular, so he's not as isolated as home school families were in the past. There are plenty of like-minded families around that he'll be able to relate to.
  • DiffEq 6y ago
    What seneca said below is about what I think/experience too. Pop culture is just that = Pop Culture. It comes like a bubble and pops and is no more...I focus my children on the things that are lasting. By the way, I never played Mario or whatever other game that was. I know my peers did but we didn't have the money for such games.
• jinushaun 6y ago
  Survivorship bias. Being able to home school and choosing to home school is NOT the same as having it forced on you without any preparation. My guess is that you're a single income household. Others aren't so privileged.
• analog31 6y ago
  I come from the same culture. I know several homeschool families, thanks to my kids being involved in an activity that's also popular with the homeschool folks -- classical music lessons. What I've noticed is that highly focused and self disciplined parents raise highly focused and self disciplined children, whether homeschooled or school-schooled. I admire them. Meanwhile, there's the rest of us.
• andrepd 6y ago
  And I take exception to your extremely ignorant comment. >The issue is a matter of culture, not of access to teachers or the Internet. I home school my children and they have NO access to the Internet Leaving aside the part of "absolutely NO access to the Internet", which already puts a cult-like vibe on your whole comment, how can you say that? How can you say "access to teachers and resources doesn't matter"?? Your kids definitely have incredible access to resources (if not teachers, in the traditional sense), so I struggle to think how you can produce such an egregious affirmation! Some of these children from low income areas are subject to deprivations that you wouldn't even believe. Some of them have no mother or father, or no home, let alone a "positive family culture". They study in underfunded schools in a neglected and neglectful system. If you had even the slightest idea of what it was to be in their shoes... To go hungry to school. To hear your parents fighting as you try to concentrate for an important test. To be shivering with cold at night. To live surrounded with pervasive violence. To have your shit stolen all the time, having to be on your guard. To be bullied. To be engulfed in an inescapable, all-encompassing feeling of pure hopelessness. Maybe you do and you don't care? I'm not sure. >They were teaching themselves and pulling ahead of their peers years ago. >they also love to hunt, camp, hike and play baseball but they keep it in it's proper place. >My children are the way they are because of our family culture. Yes, I'm sure they're perfect little geniuses. Everybody in a cult is also perfect, according to the cult.
  • loteck 6y ago
    You have a bunch of interesting points in here all spoiled by your insistence that grandparent is running a cult.
    • andrepd 6y ago
      I did not say that, not literally of course.
  • DiffEq 6y ago
    Lets just say some of these things you claim I can't imagine - I have experienced myself as a child. So you are the ignorant one.
• centimeter 6y ago
  Intelligence, time preference, curiosity, and other characteristics that underly the behaviors you describe are strongly (genetically) heritable. It's probably not very dependent on (intentional) behaviors on the part of the parents. Blaming this on "culture" is an (optimistic) misunderstanding of the actual causal factors at play here - the reality is more depressing.
  • jotakami 6y ago
    Couldn’t agree more. Parents who score high on conscientiousness and are able to set up that kind of home environment are going to have kids with many of the same traits (on average).
• A4ET8a8uTh0 6y ago
  You may be an exception that tests the rule. I do not have children, but I simply cannot imagine having to go through this stuff right now ( especially seeing what my co-workers are going through ). I do not have the patience to explain things that seem obvious to me. In short, I would not make a good teacher. There is a reason as a society we came up with school as a means to optimize the process somewhat. I feel you may be a little too harsh though. You may say it is culture, but I would say it is the current situation people find themselves in. Not everyone has the knowledge, skills, time, opportunity and willpower to do what you do.
• wbronitsky 6y ago
  This is a racist dog whistle.
  • DiffEq 6y ago
    Is Thomas Sowell a racist?
• dang 6y ago
  We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010472 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010472.
• Press2forEN 6y ago
  You're getting criticized here but I agree. My family is not wealthy but we believe that education is the responsibility of the parents, and if they choose to contract it out, fine. And even though I have still had to go into work during this lockdown I've dedicated my time at home during the week to the education of my kids.
• MH15 6y ago
  Please do not take this as an attack on you or your character, but rather as a disagreement with your actions based on my experiences- What you are doing is wrong. While you may believe you hell your children by raising them in a way that suites your ideal of how they best should be formed, they will not be in this bubble forever. Expecting your children to be able to healthily transition to adult life is folly at best and negligent at worst. Homeschooling in many countries needs an increased level of regulation to ensure children are afforded a similar life and childhood as their peers.
  • DiffEq 6y ago
    They are not being raised in a bubble just because they have no access to the internet ( that time will come when it is useful to them) and besides that they are active in several sports including wrestling, baseball and piano/orchestra. They have plenty of peer time. And my oldest has a job at a meat processing plant....if you want to talk about right and wrong I think your focus needs to be on the horrendous public school system which amounts to not much more than an overpriced baby sitting service.