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I want to homeschool my future kids but it is still illegal in my country (illegal as in: if you attempt it, the government will arrest you and send the kids to

I want to homeschool my future kids but it is still illegal in my country (illegal as in: if you attempt it, the government will arrest you and send the kids to an orphanage) Thing is: public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit and are dangerous. Private schools are crazy expensive, and although they are more useful they still teach a lot of bullshit. Also the educational style of all schools here is outright awful, there is an article from 1950s I believe written by Richard Feynman and it still applies 100%

swiley 6y ago
As someone who was homeschooled and socialized almost exclusively with other homeschoolers as a kid, I was on the fence about it. Then I grew up and met people who went to public school. Holy cow I can’t believe people think it’s ok to put their kids through that! I can’t believe we collectively accept children being exposed to the violence and other problems that are pervasive there! It’s not surprising so many people become criminals now.
- TrackerFF 6y ago
  > I can’t believe we collectively accept children being exposed to the violence and other problems that are pervasive there! It’s not surprising so many people become criminals now. But on the flip-side, would you want to go your entire life without facing any conflicts? FWIW, I was bullied in middle school, and pretty much had to fight my way through. As in fist fighting. As an adult, I don't tolerate any bullshit - and have no problems saying so , if I'm ever in a situation. I'm not sure I'd be the same person, if I hadn't gone through the things I did (not saying that bullying or fighting is good, just that it molded me into a person with extremely low tolerance for BS and a$$holes)
  - Meekro 6y ago
    Some kids will "toughen up," others will spend the rest of their lives with anxiety disorders that could have been prevented if they'd had a safe environment. Many public schools straight-up don't care about violence in their halls, or are powerless to stop it. To say that a parent must send their kids there to be beaten is wrong.
  - potta_coffee 6y ago
    Kids were knifed and shot at my high school, which wasn't even in a city that's considered unsafe / high crime. There was a race war there too, in which dozens of kids brought baseball bats and put each other in the hospital. A kid was put stabbed with screwdriver and another kid was hit so hard in the head he had a seizure. These kinds of experiences led me to homeschool my own kids.
    - hevelvarik 6y ago
      I don’t know why school vouchers isn’t a wildly popular idea, with support crossing political lines. Allowing schools and schooling models to compete for students, and turning parents bodies into the customer is about as no-brainer a public policy as a public policy can get.
      - Viliam1234 6y ago
        I guess the reason is that some kids are so bright that schools would compete for them, most kids are average and the schools would compete for the vouchers, but... there are some kids everyone wants to avoid. For example, that kind that will stab their classmate the moment they get their hands on something sharp (and will find a creative solution even if all objects at school are perfectly soft and spherical). Maybe one percent of population are psychopaths, and they are all kids before they become adults. In other words, I would love to see a school system based on free association, but what about the kids no one wants to associate with? If you make the system such that one type of school can freely accept or reject students, but the other type must accept everyone, you just increased the density of the problematic kids in the second type of school, which creates a positive feedback loop because now more parents want to take their kids away from there. Yet another problem is that the density of population is different in different places. In a big city, you can have dozen schools in a walking distance, so it is easy to choose. Then you have places where choosing another school would require an hour of travel, so people would be quite angry if their child is rejected. Should we have different rules for different places? There are many great ideas, but it is difficult to set up the entire system so that none of its parts explodes. And sometimes removing pressure from one place means adding it to another.
      - 6y ago
  - tathougies 6y ago
    > But on the flip-side, would you want to go your entire life without facing any conflicts? This is a false dichotomy. It's not like you need to be exposed to drugs, violence, and sexual assault in order to 'face conflicts'. For 100% of children, simply disagreeing with a friend, fighting on the playground, etc is enough. Unfortunately, public school provides a lot of the former, and not exactly a lot of the latter.
    - TrackerFF 6y ago
      I think the vast majority of public schools don't have any problems with drugs, violence, or sexual assaults. I went to a pretty low-tier HS, and we never had any of that. The same type of HS where only 5%-10% of students to to college. But with that said - my initial thought is that at schools, at least you're forced to interact with people you may not want to interact with. Good or bad, at least it preps you for the professional work, where you can't choose the people you work with. I can only imagine that going your whole (juvenile and young adult) life with the option of being 100% selective on who you interact with, must have some bearing on what kind of person you become as an adult. I'm not saying that friends or family don't fight from time to time, but it's not really the same as dealing with strangers.
      - tathougies 6y ago
        > But with that said - my initial thought is that at schools, at least you're forced to interact with people you may not want to interact with. Good or bad, at least it preps you for the professional work, where you can't choose the people you work with. You're not wrong, but this is a misplaced worry, IMO. Homeschooled students are consistently shown to do just as well at work as non-homeschooled students. It is a myth that homeschooled students don't interact with others. Many take classes at the local college, many take part in homeschool 'co-ops', which are not fully schools, but give that kind of experience.
      - vertex-four 6y ago
        As a homeschooled kid, I learned to argue with evidence against people who believed utter nonsense. I then went to play with them after. Not being stuck in school doesn't mean you don't interact with people.
  - zbentley 6y ago
    If you thrive on adversity and school doesn't offer any it is easy (even for a kid) to seek it out. However, if you don't thrive on adversity and school doesn't provide a safe environment, you're screwed. There aren't many other choices. That's the issue. Nobody's saying that your experiences are bad, or that conflict is bad. But some folks don't "develop bullshit tolerance" from adverse experiences in school; they develop trauma.
- dx87 6y ago
  Crime rates have been dropping for a long time, and you're trying to say that schools are the reason people become criminals. This is honestly one of the most ignorant things I've read in a long time on this site. Maybe if you were allowed to socialize outside of your homeschooled bubble, you wouldn't have that opinion.
  - User23 6y ago
    The school to prison pipeline is still a major problem. Don’t insult the parent poster for caring about the poor statistical outcomes of urban public school students.
  - dang 6y ago
    Personal attacks are not ok on HN. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this here.
leotaku 6y ago
Could you possibly share what you mean by "bullshit"? I am genuinely interested in what that entails.
- mode80 6y ago
  "it's the stuff that life is too short for" http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html
- speeder 6y ago
  1. Typical stuff that they try to simplify science and thus teach stuff wrong, like the classical each area of tongue has a specific taste receptor thing. 2. Government heavily interfere with what is taught in classrooms regarding some subjects, most notoriously the government is quite heavy handed in anti-monarchy rethoric, I was actually shocked when I was in my 25s and started to find out a lot of stuff I learned as a kid were not just misrepresentations or wrong interpretation of things, but outright lies and propaganda, one interesting example: schooling here blame a lot of slavery on monarchy and nobility in general, meanwhile the monarchs actually wrote anti-slavery essays, and even made a deal with England at the time authorizing them to attack slaver ships, at some point the government even made it clearer, told England to treat all slavers as pirates, and gave them permission to even attack docked slaver ships freely. Also schools here teach government was "absolutist", but it wasn't, only reason monarch was letting england screw with ships, is because whenever he tried to make a law ending slavery, with nobility support, the liberals would vote AGAINST it (and mostly out of stupidity too, farms that stopped using slaves had bigger profits, maintaining the slaves was more expensive than paying the tiny wages they were paying to the immigrants). 3. Schooling here has a sort of mandatory political bias, not just as in... most teachers being left leaning (something kinda normal in most of western world), but as in the government explicity dictating that certain subjects need to base their theories on Antonio Gramsci, there is some infamous youtube videos where right-wing teachers argue against that with public officials, in one of the videos a teacher outright ask an official what about the parents rights to not have the kid be forced to learn that, and the official replies that the state knows best, that if they don't want their kids to be indoctrinated, they have to pull the kids from school, and face the consequences. 4. Schools here also teach a lot of useless stuff, with teachers insisting you will use all of it... but I guess this applies to most of the world.
rubidium 6y ago
If you were curious after reading this comment like I was, here’s the legality of homeschooling by country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_status_and_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_...
TrackerFF 6y ago
What do you consider "bullshit", and what makes you the authority on making such claims? I ask in good faith, not to mock you or anything - mostly because I've heard a wide range of similar claims. (I do think that the educational style of many public schools is horrendous though, as it follows the old factory-line model, where you try to fit all kids into some mold, and "educate" them as fast as possible. When the reality is that there's no one-size-its-all educational model. It's highly individual, and must be tailored / optimized for each pupil, if possible.)
- oh_sigh 6y ago
  OP appears to be from Brazil, which does have some big issues with school quality[0]: > Another problem for Brazil is that it is one of the few countries which does not have good basic educational statistics. Nevertheless, it is clear that too few children go to primary school. To make matters worse, more than a third of children repeat a grade at least once in primary or secondary school. This is particularly true for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This poor performance at school is linked to a high drop-out rate. Only 88.7% complete basic education and there are more than 600,000 primary age children are out of school. > For those who do remain at school, performance is poor, reflecting poor school quality. The OECD’s internationally respected PISA survey (Program for International Student Assessment) put Brazil near the bottom of the list of 65 countries taking part, making it comparable to Albania, Jordan and Tunisia. [0] https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/publication/brazil-perspectives-education#:~:text=Another%20problem%20for%20Brazil https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/publication/brazil-persp...
- searchableguy 6y ago
  You should email me to see my past school notes. They are self evident for how much bullshit school pushes but I think it might be a different experience than most people on here. I live in remote part of India. Most of what people do here is just write down from book to a notebook word to word. The books are horrible too (some published more than a decade ago in subjects where relevancy matters a lot) with no clarification or update from the teacher. Standard examination is not useful atleast on a school level. Many schools allow people to cheat openly and some of them even change the written answers of students (they tell them to leave it blank if you don't know the answers). This happens till 9th grade. After which, schools have less power over grading but they still get to hand out some marks which they will do for every poor student anyway. The cut off rate is extremely low to pass (around 33%). And it's also blurry because you have reservation (affirmative action based on your caste) so the end result is different for each person. To over simplify, take three variables. Assign 1x, 1.5x and 2x. Now calculate admission, job application (government), taxes, fees, etc rate for different people by multiplying by them. Most schools run an after school program or similar where they help you train for the exam. Although, most of it is just giving out a sample paper to what will come in the school exams. Pretty much most students will go there if the school is rich or if it is poor, then they directly go to tuition under subject teacher. Most schools in rural, suburban, etc are repurposed houses. As for teachers, mostly fresh college students, mothers and people who are waiting to clear their government exam or similar. The pay ranges anywhere from 4k-20k per month (upto $310). Periods are stacked in the most unproductive way possible. No breaks and are very short - 30-40 mins with too much subject/context switching. Majority of kids will be abused emotionally and physically at some point. Indian schools have a mentality of class punishment so you get punished for something you didn't do often. Typical physical abuse include beating palm of your hand with a wooden or metal ruler, making you stand outside with hands up in the air or sitting in a chicken position. There are of course some extreme corporal punishments. That includes stripping (only boys), making you run outside on the ground (45C+) for hours, telling other students to beat you for being bad and public shaming tactics. Kids are also indoctrinated with politics all the time. I mean, we have an hour long assembly to repeat how much we are proud of our country and india number one in the morning every day. Parents usually have no idea about their own kids and are toxic (reason - poverty). Given economic condition of India, income inequality, social mobility and unemployment. I don't think a reasonable person would wanna go through this. It's not like you are likely to have a first class life easily even if you somehow pushed your way through. I can expand more but that's the general overview.
DavidVoid 6y ago
> illegal as in: if you attempt it, the government will arrest you and send the kids to an orphanage If you repeatedly attempt it I presume? I highly doubt that they'd send your kids to an orphanage after the first offense. > public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit Bullshit such as what? (if I might ask) IMO, although homeschooling is great for some kids, the cons of legalizing it far outweigh the pros. One of the most important aspects of schools is to let kids interact with other kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. Homeschooling should be banned for the same reason that religious schools should be banned, i.e., to avoid abuse, indoctrination, and segregation of kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. If we want to allow brighter kids to learn faster then the focus should be on improving schools, not on abandoning them.
- lliamander 6y ago
  > IMO, although homeschooling is great for some kids, the cons of legalizing it far outweigh the pros. One of the most important aspects of schools is to let kids interact with other kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. Homeschooling should be banned for the same reason that religious schools should be banned, i.e., to avoid abuse, indoctrination, and segregation of kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. This statement both doesn't reflect the actual statistics around homeschool and private school outcomes, and makes the false assumption that public schools don't indoctrinate (let alone abuse) their students. > If we want to allow brighter kids to learn faster then the focus should be on improving schools, not on abandoning them. Keeping kids (and parents) trapped in a broken system in the hopes that someday the system will be fixed is pointlessly cruel. It also denies public schools one of the most important tools for facilitating improvement: competition.
mrfusion 6y ago
I’m really curious what country that is. But how about a starting a coop with other parents. Or starting your own private school?
naveen99 6y ago
How difficult is it to credential a private school ? Start your own...
- hevelvarik 6y ago
  Exactly. School vouchers. Let’s do it.
- SiVal 6y ago
  In California, it's very expensive and difficult. You can homeschool your own children subject to oversight and regulation, but if you want to offer schooling to children who aren't your own, the regulatory burden increases so much that you have to hire full-time staff to handle it, get specially zoned and inspected real estate, and numerous other things that effectively require you to charge a very high tuition and serve only the children of the relatively wealthy.

swiley 6y ago

As someone who was homeschooled and socialized almost exclusively with other homeschoolers as a kid, I was on the fence about it. Then I grew up and met people who went to public school. Holy cow I can’t believe people think it’s ok to put their kids through that! I can’t believe we collectively accept children being exposed to the violence and other problems that are pervasive there! It’s not surprising so many people become criminals now.

TrackerFF 6y ago
> I can’t believe we collectively accept children being exposed to the violence and other problems that are pervasive there! It’s not surprising so many people become criminals now. But on the flip-side, would you want to go your entire life without facing any conflicts? FWIW, I was bullied in middle school, and pretty much had to fight my way through. As in fist fighting. As an adult, I don't tolerate any bullshit - and have no problems saying so , if I'm ever in a situation. I'm not sure I'd be the same person, if I hadn't gone through the things I did (not saying that bullying or fighting is good, just that it molded me into a person with extremely low tolerance for BS and a$$holes)
- Meekro 6y ago
  Some kids will "toughen up," others will spend the rest of their lives with anxiety disorders that could have been prevented if they'd had a safe environment. Many public schools straight-up don't care about violence in their halls, or are powerless to stop it. To say that a parent must send their kids there to be beaten is wrong.
- potta_coffee 6y ago
  Kids were knifed and shot at my high school, which wasn't even in a city that's considered unsafe / high crime. There was a race war there too, in which dozens of kids brought baseball bats and put each other in the hospital. A kid was put stabbed with screwdriver and another kid was hit so hard in the head he had a seizure. These kinds of experiences led me to homeschool my own kids.
  - hevelvarik 6y ago
    I don’t know why school vouchers isn’t a wildly popular idea, with support crossing political lines. Allowing schools and schooling models to compete for students, and turning parents bodies into the customer is about as no-brainer a public policy as a public policy can get.
    - Viliam1234 6y ago
      I guess the reason is that some kids are so bright that schools would compete for them, most kids are average and the schools would compete for the vouchers, but... there are some kids everyone wants to avoid. For example, that kind that will stab their classmate the moment they get their hands on something sharp (and will find a creative solution even if all objects at school are perfectly soft and spherical). Maybe one percent of population are psychopaths, and they are all kids before they become adults. In other words, I would love to see a school system based on free association, but what about the kids no one wants to associate with? If you make the system such that one type of school can freely accept or reject students, but the other type must accept everyone, you just increased the density of the problematic kids in the second type of school, which creates a positive feedback loop because now more parents want to take their kids away from there. Yet another problem is that the density of population is different in different places. In a big city, you can have dozen schools in a walking distance, so it is easy to choose. Then you have places where choosing another school would require an hour of travel, so people would be quite angry if their child is rejected. Should we have different rules for different places? There are many great ideas, but it is difficult to set up the entire system so that none of its parts explodes. And sometimes removing pressure from one place means adding it to another.
    - 6y ago
- tathougies 6y ago
  > But on the flip-side, would you want to go your entire life without facing any conflicts? This is a false dichotomy. It's not like you need to be exposed to drugs, violence, and sexual assault in order to 'face conflicts'. For 100% of children, simply disagreeing with a friend, fighting on the playground, etc is enough. Unfortunately, public school provides a lot of the former, and not exactly a lot of the latter.
  - TrackerFF 6y ago
    I think the vast majority of public schools don't have any problems with drugs, violence, or sexual assaults. I went to a pretty low-tier HS, and we never had any of that. The same type of HS where only 5%-10% of students to to college. But with that said - my initial thought is that at schools, at least you're forced to interact with people you may not want to interact with. Good or bad, at least it preps you for the professional work, where you can't choose the people you work with. I can only imagine that going your whole (juvenile and young adult) life with the option of being 100% selective on who you interact with, must have some bearing on what kind of person you become as an adult. I'm not saying that friends or family don't fight from time to time, but it's not really the same as dealing with strangers.
    - tathougies 6y ago
      > But with that said - my initial thought is that at schools, at least you're forced to interact with people you may not want to interact with. Good or bad, at least it preps you for the professional work, where you can't choose the people you work with. You're not wrong, but this is a misplaced worry, IMO. Homeschooled students are consistently shown to do just as well at work as non-homeschooled students. It is a myth that homeschooled students don't interact with others. Many take classes at the local college, many take part in homeschool 'co-ops', which are not fully schools, but give that kind of experience.
    - vertex-four 6y ago
      As a homeschooled kid, I learned to argue with evidence against people who believed utter nonsense. I then went to play with them after. Not being stuck in school doesn't mean you don't interact with people.
- zbentley 6y ago
  If you thrive on adversity and school doesn't offer any it is easy (even for a kid) to seek it out. However, if you don't thrive on adversity and school doesn't provide a safe environment, you're screwed. There aren't many other choices. That's the issue. Nobody's saying that your experiences are bad, or that conflict is bad. But some folks don't "develop bullshit tolerance" from adverse experiences in school; they develop trauma.
dx87 6y ago
Crime rates have been dropping for a long time, and you're trying to say that schools are the reason people become criminals. This is honestly one of the most ignorant things I've read in a long time on this site. Maybe if you were allowed to socialize outside of your homeschooled bubble, you wouldn't have that opinion.
- User23 6y ago
  The school to prison pipeline is still a major problem. Don’t insult the parent poster for caring about the poor statistical outcomes of urban public school students.
- dang 6y ago
  Personal attacks are not ok on HN. Please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and don't do this here.

leotaku 6y ago

Could you possibly share what you mean by "bullshit"? I am genuinely interested in what that entails.

mode80 6y ago
"it's the stuff that life is too short for" http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html
speeder 6y ago
1. Typical stuff that they try to simplify science and thus teach stuff wrong, like the classical each area of tongue has a specific taste receptor thing. 2. Government heavily interfere with what is taught in classrooms regarding some subjects, most notoriously the government is quite heavy handed in anti-monarchy rethoric, I was actually shocked when I was in my 25s and started to find out a lot of stuff I learned as a kid were not just misrepresentations or wrong interpretation of things, but outright lies and propaganda, one interesting example: schooling here blame a lot of slavery on monarchy and nobility in general, meanwhile the monarchs actually wrote anti-slavery essays, and even made a deal with England at the time authorizing them to attack slaver ships, at some point the government even made it clearer, told England to treat all slavers as pirates, and gave them permission to even attack docked slaver ships freely. Also schools here teach government was "absolutist", but it wasn't, only reason monarch was letting england screw with ships, is because whenever he tried to make a law ending slavery, with nobility support, the liberals would vote AGAINST it (and mostly out of stupidity too, farms that stopped using slaves had bigger profits, maintaining the slaves was more expensive than paying the tiny wages they were paying to the immigrants). 3. Schooling here has a sort of mandatory political bias, not just as in... most teachers being left leaning (something kinda normal in most of western world), but as in the government explicity dictating that certain subjects need to base their theories on Antonio Gramsci, there is some infamous youtube videos where right-wing teachers argue against that with public officials, in one of the videos a teacher outright ask an official what about the parents rights to not have the kid be forced to learn that, and the official replies that the state knows best, that if they don't want their kids to be indoctrinated, they have to pull the kids from school, and face the consequences. 4. Schools here also teach a lot of useless stuff, with teachers insisting you will use all of it... but I guess this applies to most of the world.

rubidium 6y ago

If you were curious after reading this comment like I was, here’s the legality of homeschooling by country: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_status_and_statistics https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_...

TrackerFF 6y ago

What do you consider "bullshit", and what makes you the authority on making such claims? I ask in good faith, not to mock you or anything - mostly because I've heard a wide range of similar claims. (I do think that the educational style of many public schools is horrendous though, as it follows the old factory-line model, where you try to fit all kids into some mold, and "educate" them as fast as possible. When the reality is that there's no one-size-its-all educational model. It's highly individual, and must be tailored / optimized for each pupil, if possible.)

oh_sigh 6y ago
OP appears to be from Brazil, which does have some big issues with school quality[0]: > Another problem for Brazil is that it is one of the few countries which does not have good basic educational statistics. Nevertheless, it is clear that too few children go to primary school. To make matters worse, more than a third of children repeat a grade at least once in primary or secondary school. This is particularly true for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This poor performance at school is linked to a high drop-out rate. Only 88.7% complete basic education and there are more than 600,000 primary age children are out of school. > For those who do remain at school, performance is poor, reflecting poor school quality. The OECD’s internationally respected PISA survey (Program for International Student Assessment) put Brazil near the bottom of the list of 65 countries taking part, making it comparable to Albania, Jordan and Tunisia. [0] https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/publication/brazil-perspectives-education#:~:text=Another%20problem%20for%20Brazil https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/publication/brazil-persp...
searchableguy 6y ago
You should email me to see my past school notes. They are self evident for how much bullshit school pushes but I think it might be a different experience than most people on here. I live in remote part of India. Most of what people do here is just write down from book to a notebook word to word. The books are horrible too (some published more than a decade ago in subjects where relevancy matters a lot) with no clarification or update from the teacher. Standard examination is not useful atleast on a school level. Many schools allow people to cheat openly and some of them even change the written answers of students (they tell them to leave it blank if you don't know the answers). This happens till 9th grade. After which, schools have less power over grading but they still get to hand out some marks which they will do for every poor student anyway. The cut off rate is extremely low to pass (around 33%). And it's also blurry because you have reservation (affirmative action based on your caste) so the end result is different for each person. To over simplify, take three variables. Assign 1x, 1.5x and 2x. Now calculate admission, job application (government), taxes, fees, etc rate for different people by multiplying by them. Most schools run an after school program or similar where they help you train for the exam. Although, most of it is just giving out a sample paper to what will come in the school exams. Pretty much most students will go there if the school is rich or if it is poor, then they directly go to tuition under subject teacher. Most schools in rural, suburban, etc are repurposed houses. As for teachers, mostly fresh college students, mothers and people who are waiting to clear their government exam or similar. The pay ranges anywhere from 4k-20k per month (upto $310). Periods are stacked in the most unproductive way possible. No breaks and are very short - 30-40 mins with too much subject/context switching. Majority of kids will be abused emotionally and physically at some point. Indian schools have a mentality of class punishment so you get punished for something you didn't do often. Typical physical abuse include beating palm of your hand with a wooden or metal ruler, making you stand outside with hands up in the air or sitting in a chicken position. There are of course some extreme corporal punishments. That includes stripping (only boys), making you run outside on the ground (45C+) for hours, telling other students to beat you for being bad and public shaming tactics. Kids are also indoctrinated with politics all the time. I mean, we have an hour long assembly to repeat how much we are proud of our country and india number one in the morning every day. Parents usually have no idea about their own kids and are toxic (reason - poverty). Given economic condition of India, income inequality, social mobility and unemployment. I don't think a reasonable person would wanna go through this. It's not like you are likely to have a first class life easily even if you somehow pushed your way through. I can expand more but that's the general overview.

DavidVoid 6y ago

> illegal as in: if you attempt it, the government will arrest you and send the kids to an orphanage If you repeatedly attempt it I presume? I highly doubt that they'd send your kids to an orphanage after the first offense. > public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit Bullshit such as what? (if I might ask) IMO, although homeschooling is great for some kids, the cons of legalizing it far outweigh the pros. One of the most important aspects of schools is to let kids interact with other kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. Homeschooling should be banned for the same reason that religious schools should be banned, i.e., to avoid abuse, indoctrination, and segregation of kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. If we want to allow brighter kids to learn faster then the focus should be on improving schools, not on abandoning them.

lliamander 6y ago
> IMO, although homeschooling is great for some kids, the cons of legalizing it far outweigh the pros. One of the most important aspects of schools is to let kids interact with other kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. Homeschooling should be banned for the same reason that religious schools should be banned, i.e., to avoid abuse, indoctrination, and segregation of kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. This statement both doesn't reflect the actual statistics around homeschool and private school outcomes, and makes the false assumption that public schools don't indoctrinate (let alone abuse) their students. > If we want to allow brighter kids to learn faster then the focus should be on improving schools, not on abandoning them. Keeping kids (and parents) trapped in a broken system in the hopes that someday the system will be fixed is pointlessly cruel. It also denies public schools one of the most important tools for facilitating improvement: competition.

mrfusion 6y ago

I’m really curious what country that is. But how about a starting a coop with other parents. Or starting your own private school?

naveen99 6y ago

How difficult is it to credential a private school ? Start your own...

hevelvarik 6y ago
Exactly. School vouchers. Let’s do it.
SiVal 6y ago
In California, it's very expensive and difficult. You can homeschool your own children subject to oversight and regulation, but if you want to offer schooling to children who aren't your own, the regulatory burden increases so much that you have to hire full-time staff to handle it, get specially zoned and inspected real estate, and numerous other things that effectively require you to charge a very high tuition and serve only the children of the relatively wealthy.