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You might be confirming what I said rather than disprove it. If you're well educated and have plenty of time and desire to educate your children they'll do wel

You might be confirming what I said rather than disprove it. If you're well educated and have plenty of time and desire to educate your children they'll do well, school or not.

gregjor 6y ago
You have to consider the rather high failure rate of public schools in the US. Professional teachers cite lack of parent involvement as the number one reason for failure in the classroom. Homeschooling usually implies significant parental involvement, though some religious parents homeschool for their own reasons that I don’t agree with. I disagree that parents must have lots of education, because unschooling lets the child direct their interests, and it’s easy to find other parents, tutors, resources to fill in. Neither my wife nor I could teach music but two of our unschooled kids learned to play instruments competently, for example. Music lessons didn’t cost any more than paying for school sports equipment. I agree that unschooling and homeschooling require time and patience, but that’s true of raising children in general.
- jojobas 6y ago
  Imagine those kids on which the school fails without the school, at home or in the street 100% of the time. I had a very special physics teacher for a few years. I know for a fact my parents couldn't replace him however hard they tried (physics wasn't high on their priority list so they probably wouldn't try any harder than the "normal" standard). I could have been something else but I know I wouldn't be what I am.
  - gregjor 6y ago
    You’re talking about 12 years of day care. America already has a crisis of kids getting poor educations at school and going home to uninvolved parents, ending up on the street. Homeschoolers don’t cause that. Unschooling does not mean kids stuck at home or on the street. Your parents probably could have hired that special physics teacher as a tutor to supplement his likely terrible teacher’s salary. I wasn’t especially rich raising my kids and I could afford tutors, classes, activities for them. There’s a big community of homeschoolers who pitch in together to fill in the gaps. I used to give free programming classes to kids, other homeschooling parents taught music, sports, math, etc. The biggest misconception about homeschooling is that the children are isolated and deprived of social contact and access to adults who can teach and mentor them. That may be true for people in rural areas, and it’s certainly true for religious fundamentalists who keep their children out of a society they view as dangerous or immoral. But there’s a big world of secular homeschoolers (in the US, at least) and if my kids wanted to study physics — not my expertise — I could have found tutors and classes for them. They could have attended college classes as teenagers in Oregon at least.
  - anelson 6y ago
    I can somewhat relate to this. During my years as a homeschooled and then unschooled kid, I was very interested in chemistry, and then electrical engineering, and finally computer programming. My parents didn't have the faintest idea of the fundamentals of any of those disciplines, nor did they know anyone who did. The point of this approach to education isn't to say that teachers are unnecessary or that parents possess all of the knowledge that their children will need. It's that children have an innate curiosity that is woefully underutilized by conventional educational systems, which if encouraged can lead to the counter-intuitive result in which children teach themselves or seek out mentors on their own. In my particular case, we were a weekly fixture at our local small town library, which fed my curiosity about chemistry and to some extent electrical engineering. Thankfully dial-up ISPs started to pop up around the time I was getting seriously into computers, so I was able to download an freeware C compiler and...well I'm posting on HN so it's obvious how that turned out. Might I have had a similarly inspiring programming teacher at our local public school? I suppose it's possible. Might I have turned out just as intellectually curious and confident after years of public middle and high school? I doubt it but who knows. Was I in any way limited by the bounds of my parents' knowledge or ability to each? Not in the slightest.

You might be confirming what I said rather than disprove it. If you're well educated and have plenty of time and desire to educate your children they'll do well, school or not.

gregjor 6y ago

You have to consider the rather high failure rate of public schools in the US. Professional teachers cite lack of parent involvement as the number one reason for failure in the classroom. Homeschooling usually implies significant parental involvement, though some religious parents homeschool for their own reasons that I don’t agree with. I disagree that parents must have lots of education, because unschooling lets the child direct their interests, and it’s easy to find other parents, tutors, resources to fill in. Neither my wife nor I could teach music but two of our unschooled kids learned to play instruments competently, for example. Music lessons didn’t cost any more than paying for school sports equipment. I agree that unschooling and homeschooling require time and patience, but that’s true of raising children in general.

jojobas 6y ago
Imagine those kids on which the school fails without the school, at home or in the street 100% of the time. I had a very special physics teacher for a few years. I know for a fact my parents couldn't replace him however hard they tried (physics wasn't high on their priority list so they probably wouldn't try any harder than the "normal" standard). I could have been something else but I know I wouldn't be what I am.
- gregjor 6y ago
  You’re talking about 12 years of day care. America already has a crisis of kids getting poor educations at school and going home to uninvolved parents, ending up on the street. Homeschoolers don’t cause that. Unschooling does not mean kids stuck at home or on the street. Your parents probably could have hired that special physics teacher as a tutor to supplement his likely terrible teacher’s salary. I wasn’t especially rich raising my kids and I could afford tutors, classes, activities for them. There’s a big community of homeschoolers who pitch in together to fill in the gaps. I used to give free programming classes to kids, other homeschooling parents taught music, sports, math, etc. The biggest misconception about homeschooling is that the children are isolated and deprived of social contact and access to adults who can teach and mentor them. That may be true for people in rural areas, and it’s certainly true for religious fundamentalists who keep their children out of a society they view as dangerous or immoral. But there’s a big world of secular homeschoolers (in the US, at least) and if my kids wanted to study physics — not my expertise — I could have found tutors and classes for them. They could have attended college classes as teenagers in Oregon at least.
- anelson 6y ago
  I can somewhat relate to this. During my years as a homeschooled and then unschooled kid, I was very interested in chemistry, and then electrical engineering, and finally computer programming. My parents didn't have the faintest idea of the fundamentals of any of those disciplines, nor did they know anyone who did. The point of this approach to education isn't to say that teachers are unnecessary or that parents possess all of the knowledge that their children will need. It's that children have an innate curiosity that is woefully underutilized by conventional educational systems, which if encouraged can lead to the counter-intuitive result in which children teach themselves or seek out mentors on their own. In my particular case, we were a weekly fixture at our local small town library, which fed my curiosity about chemistry and to some extent electrical engineering. Thankfully dial-up ISPs started to pop up around the time I was getting seriously into computers, so I was able to download an freeware C compiler and...well I'm posting on HN so it's obvious how that turned out. Might I have had a similarly inspiring programming teacher at our local public school? I suppose it's possible. Might I have turned out just as intellectually curious and confident after years of public middle and high school? I doubt it but who knows. Was I in any way limited by the bounds of my parents' knowledge or ability to each? Not in the slightest.