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Pandemic homeschoolers who are not going back

118 points by alexrustic 5y ago

Dylovell 5y ago
I hate this title. Not a bad read though, and I guess it got me to click..
throwaway284534 5y ago
I say with full confidence that high school was a complete waste of time and sanity. It’s basically a four year prison, menial labor and all. Did you know that the pilgrims came to America on a ship named the Mayflower? Well there’s a test coming up and you’ll have to memorize that and several other factoids. More than half of the assignments were pointless trivia that aren’t applicable to any modern career path.
- lettergram 5y ago
  A friend of mine was home schooled and started college at 13. He graduated with a dual bachelors at 17 and a masters at 18. His parents gave him a choice at 13 what he wanted to do -- high school or college and he selected college. Frankly, it's astonishing how much of a waste of time high school is.
- the-dude 5y ago
  I had a wonderful 6 years in The Netherlands. Great teachers, great opportunities. Just walked into the 'teachers room' at lunch break and asked if I could use a microscope to inspect an UV-erasable EEPROM : Sure, go ahead. Wanted to write a program instead of doing the final physics experiment : Uhhh, well, why not
  - devn0ll 5y ago
    As a Dutchie as well: I Agree. And also this is, I think, the reason why the USA is so far behind the rest of the world at the moment (in regards to reality): An open, honest and factually based education.
    - AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
      Where are all of the USA's world-class innovators, engineers, scientists, and academics getting their education, then? The Netherlands school system is falling victim to the exact same controversies the USA and other systems around the world are facing... [0] [0] https://nltimes.nl/2021/06/03/netherlands-slammed-prioritizing-children-pandemic https://nltimes.nl/2021/06/03/netherlands-slammed-prioritizi...
      - devn0ll 5y ago
        Ah, now that I'm rereading my own comment I see I'm beeing a bit "flippant" (?). Please believe me I did not mean in that way. So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism, others spend 80% of their time on sports, something with greeting the flag every morning with a speech? A lot of time is spent on teaching how to make arguments (How to plead your case) instead of trying to work together in finding truth. And most of all: do not criticise, but a "do as told" mentality. Again: Sorry for that almost mean-spirited first comment of mine.
        PragmaticPulp 5y ago
        > So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism... The difference between the America as portrayed in sensationalized news headlines and the America I live in is vast. No, creationism isn't standard curriculum in high schools and no, students aren't spending 80% of their time on sports. When you see these things in news stories, their newsworthiness stems from the fact that it's abnormal, not because it's the norm. America has half the population of all of Europe and a similar amount of landmass. It's a big enough country that if you go looking, you're going to find pockets of weird culture. The mistake is to assume that when journalists highlight the worst of these, that it's actually representative of the norm. Judging the US by these stories would be similar to me judging your European education by some of the wild anecdotes my Romanian coworker relayed about his high school experience there. I suspect his experience has nothing to do with yours, naturally. However, when people read horror stories about bad US schools, they assume it applies to every single high school in the entire country for some reason.
  - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
    For what it’s worth, I had a great high school experience in the United States. Everyone I know in person also had a good high school experience. Teachers were very invested in student experiences and encouraged a lot of exploration and alternative activities like you experienced. We also had plenty of advanced AP classes that could be used as college credit and I even took some advanced classes at the local state university as part of my high school curriculum. We also had a lot of fun and the social environment was generally good. There were troublemakers and pockets of drama, of course, but it wasn’t the central theme of anyone’s experience. For some reason, the HN and Reddit bubbles seem to collect a lot of people who loathed high school education. Even in adulthood and traveling around the country I’ve never encountered as many negative stories about high school as I read on HN. Take what you read here with a grain of salt. There appears to be some significant selection bias going on in the stories.
    - the-dude 5y ago
      Thanks for your input!
  - agentwiggles 5y ago
    In high school chemistry, I was given the option to either take the final exam, or do a project involving experimentation. I built a potato gun and tested different fuels. It wasn't very scientifically rigorous (hard to measure how much fuel went into the firing chamber, distance measurements were sloppy, and we didn't take the weight of individual potato projectiles into account). But it was incredibly fun, and the report I produced earned me an A. That was probably the best "scientific" experience I had in all my years of schooling including college. Having to think about all the different variables really helped me grok the scientific process. We thought up ways that we could start to control things like fuel load and projectile weight and just generally had a blast.
- TimPC 5y ago
  My high school experience was fairly valuable in certain areas and a waste of time in others. The improvements to my writing and critical thinking were invaluable. Most of the specific knowledge ended up less so. I had a number of great teachers. My school had an enriched program that allowed teachers to get an elite class that they could teach towards and had the added benefit of vastly reducing behaviour problems and bullying in those classes. I think US schools are unusually dystopian compared to the worldwide experience. At least that’s the impression I get from hearing stories.
  - JackFr 5y ago
    > At least that’s the impression I get from hearing stories. You're getting the wrong impression. The vast majority of people have a high school experience which is wholly unremarkable in the telling which you don't hear about. Those with horrific experiences -- they've got a story to tell.
    - TimPC 5y ago
      Good to know. I’ll try and keep that in mind.
    - kayodelycaon 5y ago
      I'm one of the people with stories to tell and this is exactly correct. You only hear about deviations from the norm. Most of the people I know (outside of my bipolar support group) don't have much to say about their childhood.
  - Izkata 5y ago
    My (US) experience is pretty much the same as yours, though my main valuable topic was math (and math teachers as well, plus one teacher who only taught electives about life after school - resumes/job interviews and stuff like that). It seems to be highly variable and depend on the individual schools.
    - TimPC 5y ago
      I learnt a lot in Math and did well but didn’t feel there was anything in the curriculum I couldn’t have learned independently. English had a lot of subjectivity and soft-skills that required some external calibration for me.
- pupdogg 5y ago
  I concur. I can also say with confidence that both High School and College were a complete waste of time and money! I learned more on HN via discussions and informative links than going through a cookie-cutter curriculum in college. I also attribute my little success in business to my mentor and not college.
- dec0dedab0de 5y ago
  For me the value in high school was more about making friends than anything else. As far as the actual curriculum there was some value getting a taste of things I would never have really looked at otherwise. Accounting, wood working, and gourmet cooking have come in handy in my normal life. Oddly enough, nothing that I learned in computer classes has helped me.
  - b0afc375b5 5y ago
    Exactly, it is to my firm uneducated belief that school is 80% socializing and 20% education. Where people really learn is at home, doing homework.
    - dvdkon 5y ago
      Well, in that case I didn't learn much in high school, I avoided homework like the plague.
    - decasteve 5y ago
      I struggle with the "socialization" argument for school. It's an institutional environment systemically stratified by age. How in any way does this model community life outside of school? Compared to homeschooling in a class of one, school is a more social environment. Learning with only those your own age, taught almost exclusively by women between 25-50 (65 at most, but rarely)--is that not an odd way to structure a human environment? In my anecdotal experience, put a school age kid with a young toddler, or a senior over the age of 70, and an empathy switch gets turned on. This kind of socialization is undervalued.
- howaboutnope 5y ago
  > If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job. -- Noam Chomsky
  - brodouevencode 5y ago
    Off topic, but slowly realizing Noam is just a contrarian. Happen to agree with him on this one though.
    - TimTheTinker 5y ago
      People who courageously speak what they believe to be true despite the personal costs involved are essential to the preservation and advancement society - where would we be today without them?
    - howaboutnope 5y ago
      That's hardly doing him justice.. https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/ https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/ Call it a fluff piece, sure, there certainly isn't even an attempt of criticism in it, but it still matches all I ever witnessed from him.
- _jal 5y ago
  High school taught me a lot about what to avoid, and how to game bullshit systems. It taught me that, while I had no idea what I wanted, I did not want the life I was seeing kids around me trapped in to. So I learned to give gatekeepers what they wanted and got out of that crappy little sinkhole. Didn't learn much of anything academic, though.
- magicalhippo 5y ago
  I really struggled with the primary language class, Norwegian in my case. Especially the historical parts were a motivational black hole. I get that one should learn some basics, like that we had some famous writers like Ibsen, but I feel it should be sufficient for most people to know roughly which century he lived, not the exact years of his birth and death. If you want to become a historian you'll have plenty of time to memorize those details later. I also realized later that we spent very little time at practical writing. I mean sure we wrote stories and such, but very little of it were practically oriented. Yet that's what most people end up needing. Like, writing a report, or heck a letter/email regarding a specific topic. We also didn't spend much time on understanding and interpreting text. We had some poems we had to interpret, but I think we should have had more of it. And not just poems and such but also more technical texts. Again a very useful skill compared to knowing that Camilla Collett was the sister of Henrik Wergeland, and when exactly they lived. This became clear when I had to write reports, participated in discussions in newsgroups and emails etc, and later assignments at uni. Anyway, rant over.
- JTbane 5y ago
  Honestly agree, the only things of value I learned were algebra, grammar and maybe literature?
- dkarl 5y ago
  > Well there’s a test coming up and you’ll have to memorize that and several other factoids. More than half of the assignments were pointless trivia that aren’t applicable to any modern career path. I think you're processing your memories through an adult lens and forgetting that if you judge them by adult standards, teenagers are shallow, horrible people. Of course we shouldn't judge teenagers by adult standards, because it isn't fair (children of all ages are pretty shitty people by adult standards) but we have to keep in mind that our memories of high school are memories that were formed by teenagers. I have heard so many times adults saying to me "if only my teachers had taught me X, I would have been so shocked and engaged" where X is something that their long-suffering teachers did, in fact, teach year after year to generations of bored and indifferent students. In the United States, classic examples are US imperial rule of the Philippines, the Sedition Acts, the Tuskeegee experiments, and the slaughter, subjugation, and displacement of Native Americans, all subjects that were covered in my high school history class to the complete indifference of just about everybody. I can't imagine the feelings of a teacher with an adult understanding of these things having to cope year after year with the dismissive reactions of teenagers. They can stand in front of a class as long as they want trying to explain how our involvement in the Philippines and our actions against democratically elected rulers in other countries complicate our image of ourselves as champions of freedom and self-determination, or how even a nation whose patriotic myths are cloaked in rhetoric about freedom has repeatedly struggled to reconcile patriotism with freedom of speech, but to a teenager it's going to be "ugggghhhhh stop talking about stuff we don't care about and just tell us what dumb factoid we have to remember for the test." Why do you still remember that the ship was called the Mayflower? Well, for whatever reason that fact is pretty vivid to people of all ages and easy to remember, and so it is used as a reference point and an easy answer on tests. What your teachers really wanted you to remember was that the Pilgrims were deeply, devoutly religious even by the standards of their own time, and thought they had a covenant with God and a duty to create a society that would be a model for every other in the world (holy shit, how wild is that?) and this extremely early thread was woven into the myth of American exceptionalism that is part of the political rhetoric of every single presidential and congressional election to this day, with its significance still contested. But that's not what a teenager is going to take out of high school history class. What they're going to remember is 1) they didn't want to be there, and 2) it was stupid. Again, not to be harsh on teenagers. It's normal for them to be that way, and it's not fair to judge them by adult standards. And maybe this is a strong argument for abolishing high school as we know it. If kids hate it and resent it, and they forget all of the good stuff and only remember the useless stuff anyway, then why bother with it? If people find things like the Tuskeegee experiment and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire utterly stupid and meaningless in their teens and revelatory in their twenties, why do we dedicate so much time and effort to teaching them in their teens? Maybe we can do better.
geocrasher 5y ago
My wife and I pulled our kids out at age 10 and 13. The laws in Nevada are just like those in Texas: Write a letter, the kids are yours. The first thing we did was nothing, for about 6 months. Getting the kids out of the routine and mindset that school had put them in was vital to being able to teach them. My 10y/o son had the idea that his teachers knew more than my wife and I did "because they're older". He could have only got that idea at school because that's the polar opposite of what we taught at home. I worked full time, but my wife did not and she poured a lot of energy into teaching the kids. But we also did things that weren't schooling. We let the kids learn on their own the things they wanted to learn when they wanted to learn them. This was wonderful. My son picked up programming just for fun and didn't even tell me about it until after, when he had already lost interest and moved on. But that was okay, because I didn't expect him to be a programmer or anything else. I just wanted him to learn. Same for our daughter. They learned. They got GED's and that was that. They're both extremely well rounded adults now and didn't go through the agonies of public schooling.
- 88840-8855 5y ago
  And what are they doing now? What jobs do they have? How do they pay?
  - geocrasher 5y ago
    My son has a well paying job as a development manager at a company that builds batteries (Sorry- I don't know more- he doesn't say much about it) and my daughter has too many health problems to work full time and lives at home with me. In fact her health was one of the reasons we pulled her out. She was so far behind because of missing school that it was becoming a serious problem that the teachers were ill-equipped to handle.
  - motohagiography 5y ago
    While I am sure the question is sincere, it's notable that the question wasn't, "what businesses have they started," "what are they doing for passive income and investment," "what are they using for leverage," "how many people do they manage," "what university did they graduate from," "what products have they developed," "are they on the real estate ladder," etc. When you exit the system, the status and meaning it promises doesn't doesn't have the same value. If you got kids to the level of basic analysis / calculus, traveller level in a second language, and passable in the reasoning and comprehension skills of the LSAT, they would be smarter and more capable than most university undergrads. If you add physical competence hobbies to that where some of those skills get applied, you get even more differentiated. Teenagers get amateur pilot licenses, so they are plenty capable. A way to match home schooled kids with structured team or olympic sports and orchestra or dance programs would be a big opportunity. Maybe we're at the cusp of an edu-tech boom?
softwaredoug 5y ago
My fourth grader has had a hard time during the pandemic, with a lot of depression and anger. Once he could go back to school, his mood switched completely to his original self. But there are kids in his class in pretty marginal home situations. One kid came back completely different, with a lot of rage and anger. She was getting into fights. It was her first time back to any school (virtual or otherwise) in more than a year. Another came back and falls asleep in class. She stays up till midnight watching TV. I don't feel like public schools were truly weighing the risks to children's mental health when they kept schools closed. Childhood trauma has long term lasting health effects and can shorten lifespan by _decades_ (see the ACES study[1]) 1 - https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.html
- CharlesW 5y ago
  > My fourth grader has had a hard time during the pandemic, with a lot of depression and anger. Once he could go back to school, his mood switched completely to his original self. I had a similar experience with my kids. It's been a hard year for everyone. Your post focuses on the kids, but I don't think it's been any easier for teachers or parents. > I don't feel like public schools were truly weighing the risks to children's mental health when they kept schools closed. At least where I live, schools were never closed, we just switched to remote learning. And of course, that hand was initially forced and was constantly re-evaluated until in-person learning reached a level of acceptable risk again.
  - softwaredoug 5y ago
    Sorry I should have clarified, I meant "closed" as in "virtual". Which for a lot of families is effectively "closed" given how school is such a focus for social services and social/emotional learning.
- gilbetron 5y ago
  I would've been 100% ok during being at home the past year+ except for our middle schooler - he's doing ok, generally, but he's gained a lot of weight and is less happy than he was. I despise how our society handled education. Sure, we kept our kid isolated, but the majority of the country didn't, and so keeping kids out of schools didn't help, all we got out of it is a major mental health issue in our children that will last for years. Ventilation and masks, plus shutting down school for a couple of weeks if there is a significant outbreak, and we would've managed this crisis so much better. Instead you have half the country saying "fuck it" and sending kids to school no matter what, and the other half refusing to open schools at all but then letting kids playing with other kids in "pods" (when the also let kids be in multiple pods).
foolzcrow 5y ago
The test scores prove Homeschool is even better than private school. Homeschool saved my psychological health. I also wasnt taught to hate America or white people. So public schools now are basically how you raise a midwit that the gov can control easily.
- ubermonkey 5y ago
  >I also wasnt taught to hate America or white people. WAT.
- madcow2 5y ago
  > I also wasnt taught to hate America or white people Please elaborate...
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
- bildung 5y ago
  > The test scores prove Homeschool is even better than private school. In almost all studies I've read this could be completely explained by self selection, either of the parents opting for homeschooling (i.e. the share whose kids were better than average in school still were when homeschooled) or with unequal response rates (i.e. the parents whose kids had problems at home or the home had problems and thus opted the kids out of school didn't return the questionnaires). This phenomenon is quite common. For example our midwife told us home births have less complications than hospital births. Well yes, because complicated births usually either already start at the hospital or get transferred there once things get messy.
chmod600 5y ago
Public schools have been increasingly focused on politics. It's scary even if you agree with the general ideas. You hear kids repeating mantras and slogans with very little understanding. And it's all reinforced in popular culture/entertainment.
- speeder 5y ago
  private schools too! And not just in US. I am from Brazil, and I don't intend to put my kids in school if I can (here it is illegal to homeschool, prison time for parents and all, I am hoping to get out of the country if the needed laws don't pass when I have kids). And a good reason for it, is the amount of bullshit fed to me and my friends by the shovelfulls, when I was a teenager I believed all adults I knew except schoolteachers were evil, because they didn't like Mao, Stalin and Che Guevara, I was taught that Pol Pot was a hero, literally, only after I was out of the school system that I could finally learn what these people actaully did. Then over the years I picked more and more on what sort of stuff school taught me wrong, there were a few things in harder sciences, but when it is social stuff, school was a disaster, lie after a lie, sadly some of theses lies remain pervasive in society (for example many people in my country believe the monarchy was pro-slavery, despite documents that exist that show that the monarchs themselves wanted slavery abolished, and that when they DID abolish slavery, the coup that ended monarchy was sponsored by the biggest former slaveowners).
- madcow2 5y ago
  Yes, exactly this. My kids stay home, read up on their Q and the intellectual dark web, too!
  - scarmig 5y ago
    Public schools are luckily the places where students are protected from racist right wing conspiracies like QAnon, Shakespeare, and middle school algebra...
- icegreentea2 5y ago
  What type of mantras and slogans?
gfodor 5y ago
All schools are religious schools now it seems, so I expect a surge of alternative options for parents to educate their children.
- madcow2 5y ago
  > All schools are religious schools now How so?
  - gfodor 5y ago
    It’s not universal yet but many of the tenets of Theory being incorporated into public school programs are, within the frame of considerations of parents choosing an educational track for their children, akin to the same concerns (or benefits) when choosing to enroll them into private religious schools. Fortunately some states are banning taxpayer funded teaching of things like race-based guilt or complicity. In theory this would ban educational programs which incorporated tenets of white supremacy and other race-based illiberal ideologies, but in practice we can see the only programs that actually are being surfaced as likely affected by these restrictions (to the point of possibly having to cancel entire, active curricula) are the ones grounded in Theory.
    - madcow2 5y ago
      That entire comment reads as gibberish. > It’s not universal yet but many of the tenets of Theory being incorporated into public school programs are, within the frame of considerations of parents choosing an educational track for their children, akin to the same concerns (or benefits) when choosing to enroll them into private religious schools. > Fortunately some states are banning taxpayer funded teaching of things like race-based guilt or complicity. In theory this would ban educational programs which incorporated tenets of white supremacy and other race-based illiberal ideologies, but in practice we can see the only programs that actually are being surfaced as likely affected by these restrictions (to the point of possibly having to cancel entire, active curricula) are the ones grounded in Theory. What is this "Theory" you keep referring to?
Red_Tarsius 5y ago
If I were an American urbanite I would 100% homeschool my children too. Sending well-meaning kids to an inner city school should be considered a form of abuse.
- yohannparis 5y ago
  I am not an American, nor live in the USA anymore, but this comment made me sad. That the first thought of public school issues is not writing to your representatives and voting for better schooling of future generations; instead, to isolate your children's education. As a Frenchman, I noticed this feeling from USA citizens that the government is against you and there is nothing you can do about it. It was pernicious.
  - LeifCarrotson 5y ago
    As an American and a parent, there are two thoughts: To me it's obvious that the first thought should be for my child. I'm personally responsible for them, and I'm going to do what it takes to get them a quality education. The second thought, to write to my representatives and improve education for everyone, is still there. I volunteer at a makerspace downtown that provides computing resources to inner-city kids that don't have anywhere near the same resources as my outlying, high-performing suburban district with our labs and awesome teachers. I have no delusion that a single letter to my representative would fix the underlying systemic issues like racist redlined housing districts, the inequality of property taxes for school funding, and the penalizing of 'underperforming' school districts, and give my child a good education. Can I improve it? Sure! Fix it? Not for everyone, no, so I'll do what I can for my own child.
  - simon1ltd 5y ago
    The US government is toxic, and it is openly promoting racist policies and ideologies that are outright offensive. No, it can't be trusted with my kids future and education. It's necessary that it exists, and it can handle the basics (probably), but the government is not, and cannot, be a replacement for caring and involved parents. Any performance based comparison between school performance and life outcomes needs to include stats broken out by the homelife of the child. You could call it "Parental Responsibility" in most cases -- and that figure/statistic will represent most of the issues that everyone wants addressed. The thing is, it's the most impactful to the child, and it can't be meaningfully addressed without massive government control of family life. Parents are responsible for their children's education. Success in anything is a mix of effort, knowledge, ability and luck (I consider timing part of luck). I am going to give my children the best opportunities I can give them, within the bounds of my values and life experiences. It's irrational to believe the outcome of an education should be identical between children. Unless you remove parents and have children raised by institutions, then parental involvement will always have a major impact on academic performance. Strawman: If my child is interested in computers, and spends all their free time reading about and learning to program them, while their contemporaries choose to watch TV and play video games, should they be limited by what the "average" person in their class is able to do? Of course not! It's akin to the school district that noticed that not enough black kids were in a gifted class, so their solution was to get rid of the gifted class. That's insanity. Public schools should provide a solid education to children, and society needs to expect that the outcome of that will be based on the actual performance of the children and their circumstances. A school cannot fix everything that comes from single-parent households and broken families. It can (and should) try and help, but I think it's ridiculous to hold back other students that perform better because they have parental involvement that other children don't.
eplanit 5y ago
20 years ago, I saw home schooling as ill-informed and harmful to the kids. As time has passed and I've gained more insight as to what public schools have become, with the impact of the horrible teachers unions, and especially after this last year -- I applaud the capable parents who take this course.
linuxftw 5y ago
Public school is like public housing: You only use it if there are no viable alternatives. A few places here and there the rich have their own public school with carefully drawn districts to keep out the undesirables, but even those are communist propaganda wards. Public school is big business though. Lots of unions, lots of public employees, lots of text book manufacturing, whoever makes the desks, fixes the school buses, HVAC systems, you name it. Even if the education itself wasn't outright propaganda and otherwise dysfunctional, public schools are mental misery for many. Self-important, entitled, arrogant, but otherwise useless staff and teachers. Don't subject children to prison-like treatment.
- NoGravitas 5y ago
  > the rich have their own public school > communist propaganda wards I think you may not have an actually functional understanding of political theory.
  - linuxftw 5y ago
    I'm sure you've spent lots of money, possibly your parents, to be told what to think.
  - tclancy 5y ago
    Shush. I want to hear more about Big Desk and HVAC and other hidden truths about the world economy.
barney54 5y ago
The U.S. did a terrible disservice to children during the pandemic by closing schools (where COVID does that spread well) while keeping open bars and other places where COVID spreads much more easily. Many people treated it as if education is not that important.
MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago
Homeschooling is great if the children are brought up in a solid environment of proper socialization. Otherwise they end up becoming schizoids that can interact but are dull. Nothing is worse than letting a kid teach themselves about the world than letting them experience it first hand.
mapgrep 5y ago
We homeschool our kids in part because we encountered a homeschool community in Brooklyn that blew apart our preconceptions of homeschooling. What I had thought was mostly a tool for highly religious parents has become intellectually diverse and a lot of the people here do it to give their kids individualized attention and some of the freedom to explore they could only otherwise get in a private school. If you already have a parent at home full time (or full time between the two of you) — not uncommon due to the high cost of child care here — it’s a good way to arbitrage that into educational opportunity. There are groups and storefronts here where you can send kids to get a chance to socialize and tinker, work with their hands, run around (play groups) etc. Shout out to Apple Academy Bklyn which started for homeschoolers to have a workshop type place but also all kinds of little places where kids can tinker with tech, board games etc for example along 7th Ave (I think a lot of these started as after school places but we’re adopted by homeschoolers). Not saying it’s for everyone but it’s not the insular backwater I had subconsciously made it out to be in my head.
lootsauce 5y ago
I wanted to teach, I went to school to teach art. I wanted to change how the system worked. I saw so many things wrong with my experience, which was demonstrably well above average. In the end I found out I'm horrible at classroom management and great at programming and design. So I became a programmer and not a teacher. I have huge respect for the professional educators that can manage a classroom and raise the bar for the entire room every day. Now as a parent my wife and I decided, given my decent salary, that we would forego her income to focus on other aspects of our quality of life. Part of that is homeschooling our children. One way I frame homeschooling is a simple question. From your experience weigh the value of even a single day sitting under a tree reading a great book vs the value of a week in in an english classroom. Personally this captures the difference they are fundamental, qualitative differences. Homeschooling is an unfair advantage in a lot of ways. Not everyone can afford to do it. Society needs to provide universal education and when almost every family needs dual incomes schooling provides a secondary (arguably primary) service of child care. That however does not represent the only or best option for your kids. When I'm in a more negative mood I call schooling, of any sort, is a kind of institutionalization. That does not make it all bad, there are great social outcomes for submitting to that institutionalization. However there are other paths to just as good or better outcomes just not in a societally blanketing kind of way.
tcse_12 5y ago
Public education (I suppose all education really) can only ever be as good as a home environment for all but the most exceptional kids. You can throw all the money you want at an education but, ultimately, if that kid goes home to significant struggles with nourishment, housing, parent availability, parent interest, etc. it's going to be extremely difficult for them to succeed. I'd like to see more investment in the home and let it propagate through the rest of life. Access to good housing, healthcare, food and the like would go a huge way in stabilizing the home and providing a better foundation for parents to fill the gaps in public education.
hdctambien 5y ago
Reading threads about public school on HN and threads about WFH/in-person makes me wonder if there is a relationship between the people that are anti-public school and pro-WFH or if there is a dissonant-relationship between anti-public school and pro-in-person. I am pro-WFH and pro-public school. But my experience (public school student, public state university, 7 years public school teacher, 6 years in-office programmer, 4 years WFT programmer) is drastically different from many of the posts I read in these threads. If school is a "prison" full of incapable/ineffectual/communist teachers indoctrinating the "inmates"... what is an office? The routine of school is prison, but the routine of an office is good? Ineffectual teachers? What about ineffectual managers? Lefty teachers indoctrinating children? Corporations have convinced us that if the minimum wage increases or taxes go up then McDonalds and Apple will just close their doors and decide to go out of business rather than make a teeny bit less profit!
efa 5y ago
It's nice homeschoolers are now not just cultish reclusive white people.
lettergram 5y ago
I don't know how many people are willing to acknowledged this but... Many MANY of the conservative families I know are pulling out their kids. Simply put, they don't want Marxism centered around racism to be taught to their kids. Personally, I have to agree. My kids daycare was actively trying to put all the boys and girls in dresses and refuse to teach what genders are. We obviously teach basics of male vs female to our children, but this is ridiculous. During the pandemic I listened to my brother in laws (still in high school) 40 minute lecture. It was on how due to "white privilege" black Americans shouldn't have to pay taxes due to the fact they can't manage finances (this was a personal economics class). It was insanely racist and honestly not insightful. I asked my brother in law how often this occurs, he said "every day, almost every class, it's racist". At this point, all the parents I know are either oblivious to what's happening, moving kids to private schools or homeschooling.
- baryphonic 5y ago
  You're entirely correct. I'm guessing you'll get a commenter or two saying something about how critical race theory isn't really Marxism, as if that undermined your point. It doesn't. The toxic things being taught in the schools, which seem to me to be a transmogrified form of segregationism wherein woke whites must take up the woke white man's burden and be overlords for supposedly incapable blacks. Just as Bolshevik Marxists tended to be intellectuals from bourgeoisie families who regarded the proletariat as generally too stupid to be given power, so it is with the woke whites today.
- olivierestsage 5y ago
  Chiming in to tell you I agree before your comment likely disappears.
- herval 5y ago
  For the record, could you share with us what “Marxism” is?
graycat 5y ago
US society has some important applications, roles, etc. for versions of relatively independent self-learning. Soooo, maybe somewhere in the teaching and learning of K-12 there should be some emphasis, practice, role, encouragement, etc. for a start on self-learning. Examples: (1) At one time, and maybe significantly still, a huge fraction of learning about computer programming, and computing more generally, was just self learning. (2) At one time, the Web site of the math department at Princeton just stated that graduate courses were introductions to research by experts in their fields, that no courses were given for preparation for the Ph.D. qualifying exams, and that students were expected to prepare for the exams on their own. (3) Teachers who need to keep up in their fields and researchers who need to push their fields forward have to do some to a lot of the work via self learning. And it is easy to find more examples in owning a house, farm, etc.
gjsman-1000 5y ago
I am a full-time Software Developer at 19 years old with an Associate's Degree. Couldn't have done it without homeschool.
101001001001 5y ago
I used to be a diehard supporter of homeschooling. But then I experienced things in my life that revealed the nature of people and society. People are wildly different. But nobody realizes this because nobody really listens. People are different in much deeper and more deterministic ways than is commonly appreciated. There are specific metabolic pathways that are responsible for this. The answer is that for most people home schooling is a waste. They want and need to be in a toxic, petty environment. Intellectual development is wasted on them. It’s biology — not a choice for the parents or for the kids.
yoz-y 5y ago
Is there some documentary or a read that explains the american school system somehow? Reading the constant complaints about it (such as mountains of homework, suffering through classes and all that) is quite alien to me. Some classes were boring, sure, I slept through them. But for the most that was not the case and the load never seemed to be excessive. (studying in eastern, then western europe)
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  There is no one American system. Experiences can differ wildly by program or state or county.
- andrewzah 5y ago
  There is no one uniform experience, but there are some consistent problems. Severely underpaid teachers and a focus on testing leads to formulaic memorization of (what a lot of us thought) was drivel, just things to know and forget after the test. High school for me started very early (about 6:45/7 to catch the bus), so it was miserable. I did have some classes that were the exception, but for me all school did was try and beat the drive to learn out of me. In middle school I got punished for reading ahead in our assigned literature. We also had to deal with a powertripping principal for years. And that's to say nothing of the completely whitewashed US "history" we learned. I actually was homeschooled for a few years, so I have experience with both systems. The issues I had with homeschooling were the overly religious program my parents used, and the lack of socialization. I will never put my kid in a public or private school system, provided that I find a community for us to engage socially in, that we find a good curriculum that's not religious, and that either myself or my partner engages in it full-time.
jerry1979 5y ago
Side question: do homeschoolers have a relatively standardized set of copyleft books & materials that they can use to do their schooling?
- AnimalMuppet 5y ago
  No. Homeschooling is really diverse; there's no "relatively standard" anything. You may be able to find copyleft books and materials - I suspect they probably exist - but I don't know any specifics.
- dkhenry 5y ago
  Everyone in the homeschooling group my family attends generally pays for material, and then supplements with things that are free(ish). For example math for us is Saxon (paid), and then we will sometimes use Kahn (free) if the kids need extra practice, or if they need the material presented a different way.
  - jerry1979 5y ago
    Interesting. Sounds like you have a good thing going. If you don't mind me asking, what makes the paid material stand out as compared to Kahn?
    - dkhenry 5y ago
      The biggest thing is Saxon is a physical book, and it comes along with all the worksheets and tests and problem sets that we can copy and have them work on multiple times if needed. Specifically things like math facts and computations require a lot of practice, and they have these worksheets you do multiple times, timing yourself each time to show progress. Its really good to have that be able to be done physically with a pencil as the physical interaction really helps with retention. Also I greatly prefer the sequencing of Saxon, they do a lot of introduction work with coins and clocks, two things that are easy to get your hands on and that kids relate with well. Explaining fractions with a Quarter being a quarter of a dollar, and being 25 cents gives you a lot of discussion you can have. Then clocks are so useful for fractions ( half past the hour, quarter till ), especially since they are base 60 and not base 10. Also things like place value ( 1 vs 10's vs 100's ) and even angles are all related to real world physical objects the kids can touch. If it came down to it I think Kahn would give them a wonderful education and everything I have seen is well executed and wraps in a lot of the sequencing that I have seen work with my kids, but I do like Saxon enough to pay for it and use it as the primary source. The other piece is this thing called Institute for Excellence in Writing (https://iew.com/ https://iew.com/) it is honestly amazing. My kids know more about writing, and have a better grasp of the english language then I do thanks to that program.
germinalphrase 5y ago
I teach at the high school level in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area. Generally, it is a middle class community in which the basics are provided for (that said, there was obviously an uptick in family crises, job loss, transient housing, etc.) About twenty percent of my students handled the transition to distance education just fine. Many of these students told me they missed friends/clubs/etc, but enjoyed having greater control over their time (my district encouraged, but did not require, synchronous learning). The middle sixty percent were mixed, but generally plateaued in perceived achievement or struggled to keep motivated. Since going back to in-person about six weeks ago, the majority of these students are back on track. Achievement remains somewhat below a typical cohort, just a little less snappy and insightful with observations and arguments. So it goes. The bottom twenty percent were various flavors of missing. They did not or could not cope with the transition to distance learning. Some of these students were struggling prior to going online, but the reduction in structure and support pulled a lot of kids into this group that wouldn’t typically fail. No objective here. Just sharing.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  My teacher friends (younger age groups than yours) said essentially the same thing. Some fraction of students simply disappeared during remote learning and no amount of phone calls to their parents could get them back. On the other end of the spectrum, some students had stay at home parents with them for the entire duration and were doing just fine. Students in the middle were okay but would have done better in person. It seems the challenge now is that the most prepared students have gotten further ahead while the least prepared students fell further behind. Managing the increased divergence in coming years will be a challenge.
  - germinalphrase 5y ago
    “My teacher friends (younger age groups than yours) said essentially the same thing. Some fraction of students simply disappeared during remote learning and no amount of phone calls to their parents could get them back.” We were sending staff door to door everyday, but it is unclear how much of an impact that (or any of our other interventions) really made. A lot of these kids were depressed, anxious, unmoored. “It seems the challenge now is that the most prepared students have gotten further ahead while the least prepared students fell further behind. Managing the increased divergence in coming years will be a challenge.” Anxiety over that divergence is already building amongst the teaching staff.
javier10e6 5y ago
Maybe we all have to re-watch Good Will Hunting and understand the importance of "being there".
pnathan 5y ago
I was homeschooled k-11, then GED'd, went to college, came out with a Master's. My sibling did the same route, but ended up with a PhD from an Ivy. Neither of us recommend it; my sib is more antagonistic than I am. There are a number of conjoined factors, but it, as conventionally understood, is not a sufficient system for forming a child's development. People talk about "socialization" and "friends", those are subtly wrong. The key question is integration with society and understanding how it works. As a parent now of a 4yo, I am passionately planning to put him in public schools. I would STILL have yanked him into homeschool for 2020-2021 school year and sucked it up. Local public school districts were a cluster. Zoom school seems to be a hilariously bad idea for people who aren't like, e.g., my sib, who is incredibly disciplined and great at self teaching. Edit: Happy to answer questions; if it relates to things that might be disparaging to others or requires a very serious & thoughtful response, please just email me at my listed address in the profile.
- seattle_spring 5y ago
  > The key question is integration with society and understanding how it works. As a 3rd party observer to colleagues who have been homeschooled, this is right on the money with regard to their deficiencies. However, I don't know if it's strictly due to homeschooling, or because they also tend to have been raised with extremely religious and conservative values.
  - abnry 5y ago
    > The key question is integration with society and understanding how it works. What does this mean in particular? What does it mean to "integrate with society" and "understand how it works?"
    - pnathan 5y ago
      Those are great questions. The simplest way I can say is that homeschooling alienates from society, and you become an Other, in your own eyes and the eyes of others. The child become adult must reassimilate (with all the nuances and weight that word conveys) into broader society. That should give you the vector to look into - the question of assimilation and the other has been adequately discussed elsewhere.
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
codingdave 5y ago
One lesson we learned is that one of our kids has attention-deficit problems. They were not a concern at all in the schools because the classroom was managed in a way that worked for him. But at home during the pandemic, it was a disaster. It took us most of the year to figure out what was wrong, get plans in place, work with the remote teachers, and get even a semblance of a good education going. I'm not against homeschooling - I love it in theory. But people need to be prepared to adapt to the childrens' needs. What works for one person will not work for others, and you should know what you are getting into.
- bluefirebrand 5y ago
  This is a surprising anecdote to hear. Most public schooling I've heard of, certainly my own experience, was that classrooms are miserable for kids who are attention deficit.
  - codingdave 5y ago
    I heard that ADHD is challenging in classrooms, while ADD is easier. I can only speak to what we experienced, though. My child needed reminders and suggestions every 10 minutes, that kind of thing. As well as daily 1:1s with teachers to get help past roadblocks. I'm sure everyone has varying experiences.
  - mmaurizi 5y ago
    As someone who received medication for childhood ADHD, the highly managed classroom environment was never an issue, it was getting the homework done at home when I had to be self-motivated. Work-from-home during the pandemic has yielded similar issues with motivating myself to do work for my job (but to a lesser degree, as I've learned skills to cope over the years).
    - bluefirebrand 5y ago
      I don't know if I've ever heard of a public school classroom being called "highly managed" before, is the thing. They seem like chaos to me. Always someone whispering or goofing off or being disruptive. I figured that would be hard.
gnicholas 5y ago
> For instance, Berkeley Unified public schools, where Kolasi’s older daughters are enrolled, receive $19,471 per student. If you homeschool, you can get back a couple thousand dollars to be used on educational expenses. I don't know where the rest of the money goes. But I imagine that there would be a lot more homeschoolers if parents could recoup the full amount instead of just ~10%.
andrewclunn 5y ago
As usual, the best comments are the flagged / deleted ones.
dkhenry 5y ago
As a parent who has all three children fully home schooled now I can confidently say it is just the better way to educate children. The article slightly alludes to this, but homeschooling today is not the kids sitting at home independently going through workbooks, with limited interaction. The big revelation to me when we started this journey was that homeschooling can be done in groups, not on a day by day basis, but by aligning curriculum with other families and working independently you get this amazing interaction where the kids can relate to others doing the same work, they can have meetup's and group sessions on some regular basis, and they can still have a generally fully customized experience to meet the child learning exactly where they are. The most poignant example of the overwhelming benefit of homeschooling was when we found out that our son was really struggling with math. He was able to answer most problems, but was consistently getting basic things wrong. He never actually internalized the math he had learned and now in 5th grade he was struggling with not knowing things like math facts or order of operations, or anything of how to deal with fractions. In a traditional school he would likely be tracked into remedial math, and would spend the rest of his school time there. However by just spending more time on math each day he was able to quickly address his issues and start better understanding his new coursework. Same thing with reading for my daughter, she was a prolific reader, and quickly advanced to books she saw her older brother reading, but when we had her do school work she couldn't complete basic comprehension work for the age level books we were assigning. Well it turns out it wasn't that she didn't comprehend them, it was that she never learned how to communicate details, we spent six months having her read and explain very simple books, and quickly she was back up to speed and excelling in both reading and comprehension tasks. We wouldn't have been able to do either of these without dedicated and time consuming intervention. The exact kind of intervention you would never get in even the most dedicated public schools. The only place you can get that kind of prolonged dedicated attention is with parents at home. Add into this that we have been able to _vastly_ expand the scope and sequence of what our kids are learning because we can just firehose them as much new material as they can take and you quickly see that a child who is excited about learning, who is able to explore and discover, and isn't bound to an artificial school day, or school year, or school curriculum will learn so much more then their traditionally schooled counterparts. After this last year we are 100% sold on never sending our kids back to traditional school, it would be unloving and would be doing them a disservice. We decided that if it came down to it, we would rather move away from the extremely high cost of living world we live in today so we could be a one income household and give our kids the attention they deserve rather then let someone else try and raise them for us.
nikolay 5y ago
I am sad that my kids went to public schools in California - they are so brainwashed by the liberal agenda by teachers and peers that I won't be able to undo the harm with all the effort and money in the world. In 2021, homeschooling your kids is easy. I am actually planning to start an Orthodox Christian homeschooling coop in the coming months.
herbst 5y ago
This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I believe that if you can't afford to teach your kids yourself and live in a country with a bad schooling system (nearly all of them) you probably should not have kids.

118 points by alexrustic 5y ago

I hate this title. Not a bad read though, and I guess it got me to click..

I say with full confidence that high school was a complete waste of time and sanity. It’s basically a four year prison, menial labor and all. Did you know that the pilgrims came to America on a ship named the Mayflower? Well there’s a test coming up and you’ll have to memorize that and several other factoids. More than half of the assignments were pointless trivia that aren’t applicable to any modern career path.

lettergram 5y ago
A friend of mine was home schooled and started college at 13. He graduated with a dual bachelors at 17 and a masters at 18. His parents gave him a choice at 13 what he wanted to do -- high school or college and he selected college. Frankly, it's astonishing how much of a waste of time high school is.
the-dude 5y ago
I had a wonderful 6 years in The Netherlands. Great teachers, great opportunities. Just walked into the 'teachers room' at lunch break and asked if I could use a microscope to inspect an UV-erasable EEPROM : Sure, go ahead. Wanted to write a program instead of doing the final physics experiment : Uhhh, well, why not
- devn0ll 5y ago
  As a Dutchie as well: I Agree. And also this is, I think, the reason why the USA is so far behind the rest of the world at the moment (in regards to reality): An open, honest and factually based education.
  - AndrewUnmuted 5y ago
    Where are all of the USA's world-class innovators, engineers, scientists, and academics getting their education, then? The Netherlands school system is falling victim to the exact same controversies the USA and other systems around the world are facing... [0] [0] https://nltimes.nl/2021/06/03/netherlands-slammed-prioritizing-children-pandemic https://nltimes.nl/2021/06/03/netherlands-slammed-prioritizi...
    - devn0ll 5y ago
      Ah, now that I'm rereading my own comment I see I'm beeing a bit "flippant" (?). Please believe me I did not mean in that way. So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism, others spend 80% of their time on sports, something with greeting the flag every morning with a speech? A lot of time is spent on teaching how to make arguments (How to plead your case) instead of trying to work together in finding truth. And most of all: do not criticise, but a "do as told" mentality. Again: Sorry for that almost mean-spirited first comment of mine.
      - PragmaticPulp 5y ago
        > So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism... The difference between the America as portrayed in sensationalized news headlines and the America I live in is vast. No, creationism isn't standard curriculum in high schools and no, students aren't spending 80% of their time on sports. When you see these things in news stories, their newsworthiness stems from the fact that it's abnormal, not because it's the norm. America has half the population of all of Europe and a similar amount of landmass. It's a big enough country that if you go looking, you're going to find pockets of weird culture. The mistake is to assume that when journalists highlight the worst of these, that it's actually representative of the norm. Judging the US by these stories would be similar to me judging your European education by some of the wild anecdotes my Romanian coworker relayed about his high school experience there. I suspect his experience has nothing to do with yours, naturally. However, when people read horror stories about bad US schools, they assume it applies to every single high school in the entire country for some reason.
- PragmaticPulp 5y ago
  For what it’s worth, I had a great high school experience in the United States. Everyone I know in person also had a good high school experience. Teachers were very invested in student experiences and encouraged a lot of exploration and alternative activities like you experienced. We also had plenty of advanced AP classes that could be used as college credit and I even took some advanced classes at the local state university as part of my high school curriculum. We also had a lot of fun and the social environment was generally good. There were troublemakers and pockets of drama, of course, but it wasn’t the central theme of anyone’s experience. For some reason, the HN and Reddit bubbles seem to collect a lot of people who loathed high school education. Even in adulthood and traveling around the country I’ve never encountered as many negative stories about high school as I read on HN. Take what you read here with a grain of salt. There appears to be some significant selection bias going on in the stories.
  - the-dude 5y ago
    Thanks for your input!
- agentwiggles 5y ago
  In high school chemistry, I was given the option to either take the final exam, or do a project involving experimentation. I built a potato gun and tested different fuels. It wasn't very scientifically rigorous (hard to measure how much fuel went into the firing chamber, distance measurements were sloppy, and we didn't take the weight of individual potato projectiles into account). But it was incredibly fun, and the report I produced earned me an A. That was probably the best "scientific" experience I had in all my years of schooling including college. Having to think about all the different variables really helped me grok the scientific process. We thought up ways that we could start to control things like fuel load and projectile weight and just generally had a blast.
TimPC 5y ago
My high school experience was fairly valuable in certain areas and a waste of time in others. The improvements to my writing and critical thinking were invaluable. Most of the specific knowledge ended up less so. I had a number of great teachers. My school had an enriched program that allowed teachers to get an elite class that they could teach towards and had the added benefit of vastly reducing behaviour problems and bullying in those classes. I think US schools are unusually dystopian compared to the worldwide experience. At least that’s the impression I get from hearing stories.
- JackFr 5y ago
  > At least that’s the impression I get from hearing stories. You're getting the wrong impression. The vast majority of people have a high school experience which is wholly unremarkable in the telling which you don't hear about. Those with horrific experiences -- they've got a story to tell.
  - TimPC 5y ago
    Good to know. I’ll try and keep that in mind.
  - kayodelycaon 5y ago
    I'm one of the people with stories to tell and this is exactly correct. You only hear about deviations from the norm. Most of the people I know (outside of my bipolar support group) don't have much to say about their childhood.
- Izkata 5y ago
  My (US) experience is pretty much the same as yours, though my main valuable topic was math (and math teachers as well, plus one teacher who only taught electives about life after school - resumes/job interviews and stuff like that). It seems to be highly variable and depend on the individual schools.
  - TimPC 5y ago
    I learnt a lot in Math and did well but didn’t feel there was anything in the curriculum I couldn’t have learned independently. English had a lot of subjectivity and soft-skills that required some external calibration for me.
pupdogg 5y ago
I concur. I can also say with confidence that both High School and College were a complete waste of time and money! I learned more on HN via discussions and informative links than going through a cookie-cutter curriculum in college. I also attribute my little success in business to my mentor and not college.
dec0dedab0de 5y ago
For me the value in high school was more about making friends than anything else. As far as the actual curriculum there was some value getting a taste of things I would never have really looked at otherwise. Accounting, wood working, and gourmet cooking have come in handy in my normal life. Oddly enough, nothing that I learned in computer classes has helped me.
- b0afc375b5 5y ago
  Exactly, it is to my firm uneducated belief that school is 80% socializing and 20% education. Where people really learn is at home, doing homework.
  - dvdkon 5y ago
    Well, in that case I didn't learn much in high school, I avoided homework like the plague.
  - decasteve 5y ago
    I struggle with the "socialization" argument for school. It's an institutional environment systemically stratified by age. How in any way does this model community life outside of school? Compared to homeschooling in a class of one, school is a more social environment. Learning with only those your own age, taught almost exclusively by women between 25-50 (65 at most, but rarely)--is that not an odd way to structure a human environment? In my anecdotal experience, put a school age kid with a young toddler, or a senior over the age of 70, and an empathy switch gets turned on. This kind of socialization is undervalued.
howaboutnope 5y ago
> If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job. -- Noam Chomsky
- brodouevencode 5y ago
  Off topic, but slowly realizing Noam is just a contrarian. Happen to agree with him on this one though.
  - TimTheTinker 5y ago
    People who courageously speak what they believe to be true despite the personal costs involved are essential to the preservation and advancement society - where would we be today without them?
  - howaboutnope 5y ago
    That's hardly doing him justice.. https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/ https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/ Call it a fluff piece, sure, there certainly isn't even an attempt of criticism in it, but it still matches all I ever witnessed from him.
_jal 5y ago
High school taught me a lot about what to avoid, and how to game bullshit systems. It taught me that, while I had no idea what I wanted, I did not want the life I was seeing kids around me trapped in to. So I learned to give gatekeepers what they wanted and got out of that crappy little sinkhole. Didn't learn much of anything academic, though.
magicalhippo 5y ago
I really struggled with the primary language class, Norwegian in my case. Especially the historical parts were a motivational black hole. I get that one should learn some basics, like that we had some famous writers like Ibsen, but I feel it should be sufficient for most people to know roughly which century he lived, not the exact years of his birth and death. If you want to become a historian you'll have plenty of time to memorize those details later. I also realized later that we spent very little time at practical writing. I mean sure we wrote stories and such, but very little of it were practically oriented. Yet that's what most people end up needing. Like, writing a report, or heck a letter/email regarding a specific topic. We also didn't spend much time on understanding and interpreting text. We had some poems we had to interpret, but I think we should have had more of it. And not just poems and such but also more technical texts. Again a very useful skill compared to knowing that Camilla Collett was the sister of Henrik Wergeland, and when exactly they lived. This became clear when I had to write reports, participated in discussions in newsgroups and emails etc, and later assignments at uni. Anyway, rant over.
JTbane 5y ago
Honestly agree, the only things of value I learned were algebra, grammar and maybe literature?
dkarl 5y ago
> Well there’s a test coming up and you’ll have to memorize that and several other factoids. More than half of the assignments were pointless trivia that aren’t applicable to any modern career path. I think you're processing your memories through an adult lens and forgetting that if you judge them by adult standards, teenagers are shallow, horrible people. Of course we shouldn't judge teenagers by adult standards, because it isn't fair (children of all ages are pretty shitty people by adult standards) but we have to keep in mind that our memories of high school are memories that were formed by teenagers. I have heard so many times adults saying to me "if only my teachers had taught me X, I would have been so shocked and engaged" where X is something that their long-suffering teachers did, in fact, teach year after year to generations of bored and indifferent students. In the United States, classic examples are US imperial rule of the Philippines, the Sedition Acts, the Tuskeegee experiments, and the slaughter, subjugation, and displacement of Native Americans, all subjects that were covered in my high school history class to the complete indifference of just about everybody. I can't imagine the feelings of a teacher with an adult understanding of these things having to cope year after year with the dismissive reactions of teenagers. They can stand in front of a class as long as they want trying to explain how our involvement in the Philippines and our actions against democratically elected rulers in other countries complicate our image of ourselves as champions of freedom and self-determination, or how even a nation whose patriotic myths are cloaked in rhetoric about freedom has repeatedly struggled to reconcile patriotism with freedom of speech, but to a teenager it's going to be "ugggghhhhh stop talking about stuff we don't care about and just tell us what dumb factoid we have to remember for the test." Why do you still remember that the ship was called the Mayflower? Well, for whatever reason that fact is pretty vivid to people of all ages and easy to remember, and so it is used as a reference point and an easy answer on tests. What your teachers really wanted you to remember was that the Pilgrims were deeply, devoutly religious even by the standards of their own time, and thought they had a covenant with God and a duty to create a society that would be a model for every other in the world (holy shit, how wild is that?) and this extremely early thread was woven into the myth of American exceptionalism that is part of the political rhetoric of every single presidential and congressional election to this day, with its significance still contested. But that's not what a teenager is going to take out of high school history class. What they're going to remember is 1) they didn't want to be there, and 2) it was stupid. Again, not to be harsh on teenagers. It's normal for them to be that way, and it's not fair to judge them by adult standards. And maybe this is a strong argument for abolishing high school as we know it. If kids hate it and resent it, and they forget all of the good stuff and only remember the useless stuff anyway, then why bother with it? If people find things like the Tuskeegee experiment and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire utterly stupid and meaningless in their teens and revelatory in their twenties, why do we dedicate so much time and effort to teaching them in their teens? Maybe we can do better.

geocrasher 5y ago

My wife and I pulled our kids out at age 10 and 13. The laws in Nevada are just like those in Texas: Write a letter, the kids are yours. The first thing we did was nothing, for about 6 months. Getting the kids out of the routine and mindset that school had put them in was vital to being able to teach them. My 10y/o son had the idea that his teachers knew more than my wife and I did "because they're older". He could have only got that idea at school because that's the polar opposite of what we taught at home. I worked full time, but my wife did not and she poured a lot of energy into teaching the kids. But we also did things that weren't schooling. We let the kids learn on their own the things they wanted to learn when they wanted to learn them. This was wonderful. My son picked up programming just for fun and didn't even tell me about it until after, when he had already lost interest and moved on. But that was okay, because I didn't expect him to be a programmer or anything else. I just wanted him to learn. Same for our daughter. They learned. They got GED's and that was that. They're both extremely well rounded adults now and didn't go through the agonies of public schooling.

88840-8855 5y ago
And what are they doing now? What jobs do they have? How do they pay?
- geocrasher 5y ago
  My son has a well paying job as a development manager at a company that builds batteries (Sorry- I don't know more- he doesn't say much about it) and my daughter has too many health problems to work full time and lives at home with me. In fact her health was one of the reasons we pulled her out. She was so far behind because of missing school that it was becoming a serious problem that the teachers were ill-equipped to handle.
- motohagiography 5y ago
  While I am sure the question is sincere, it's notable that the question wasn't, "what businesses have they started," "what are they doing for passive income and investment," "what are they using for leverage," "how many people do they manage," "what university did they graduate from," "what products have they developed," "are they on the real estate ladder," etc. When you exit the system, the status and meaning it promises doesn't doesn't have the same value. If you got kids to the level of basic analysis / calculus, traveller level in a second language, and passable in the reasoning and comprehension skills of the LSAT, they would be smarter and more capable than most university undergrads. If you add physical competence hobbies to that where some of those skills get applied, you get even more differentiated. Teenagers get amateur pilot licenses, so they are plenty capable. A way to match home schooled kids with structured team or olympic sports and orchestra or dance programs would be a big opportunity. Maybe we're at the cusp of an edu-tech boom?

softwaredoug 5y ago

My fourth grader has had a hard time during the pandemic, with a lot of depression and anger. Once he could go back to school, his mood switched completely to his original self. But there are kids in his class in pretty marginal home situations. One kid came back completely different, with a lot of rage and anger. She was getting into fights. It was her first time back to any school (virtual or otherwise) in more than a year. Another came back and falls asleep in class. She stays up till midnight watching TV. I don't feel like public schools were truly weighing the risks to children's mental health when they kept schools closed. Childhood trauma has long term lasting health effects and can shorten lifespan by _decades_ (see the ACES study[1]) 1 - https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.html

CharlesW 5y ago
> My fourth grader has had a hard time during the pandemic, with a lot of depression and anger. Once he could go back to school, his mood switched completely to his original self. I had a similar experience with my kids. It's been a hard year for everyone. Your post focuses on the kids, but I don't think it's been any easier for teachers or parents. > I don't feel like public schools were truly weighing the risks to children's mental health when they kept schools closed. At least where I live, schools were never closed, we just switched to remote learning. And of course, that hand was initially forced and was constantly re-evaluated until in-person learning reached a level of acceptable risk again.
- softwaredoug 5y ago
  Sorry I should have clarified, I meant "closed" as in "virtual". Which for a lot of families is effectively "closed" given how school is such a focus for social services and social/emotional learning.
gilbetron 5y ago
I would've been 100% ok during being at home the past year+ except for our middle schooler - he's doing ok, generally, but he's gained a lot of weight and is less happy than he was. I despise how our society handled education. Sure, we kept our kid isolated, but the majority of the country didn't, and so keeping kids out of schools didn't help, all we got out of it is a major mental health issue in our children that will last for years. Ventilation and masks, plus shutting down school for a couple of weeks if there is a significant outbreak, and we would've managed this crisis so much better. Instead you have half the country saying "fuck it" and sending kids to school no matter what, and the other half refusing to open schools at all but then letting kids playing with other kids in "pods" (when the also let kids be in multiple pods).

foolzcrow 5y ago

The test scores prove Homeschool is even better than private school. Homeschool saved my psychological health. I also wasnt taught to hate America or white people. So public schools now are basically how you raise a midwit that the gov can control easily.

ubermonkey 5y ago
>I also wasnt taught to hate America or white people. WAT.
madcow2 5y ago
> I also wasnt taught to hate America or white people Please elaborate...
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
bildung 5y ago
> The test scores prove Homeschool is even better than private school. In almost all studies I've read this could be completely explained by self selection, either of the parents opting for homeschooling (i.e. the share whose kids were better than average in school still were when homeschooled) or with unequal response rates (i.e. the parents whose kids had problems at home or the home had problems and thus opted the kids out of school didn't return the questionnaires). This phenomenon is quite common. For example our midwife told us home births have less complications than hospital births. Well yes, because complicated births usually either already start at the hospital or get transferred there once things get messy.

chmod600 5y ago

Public schools have been increasingly focused on politics. It's scary even if you agree with the general ideas. You hear kids repeating mantras and slogans with very little understanding. And it's all reinforced in popular culture/entertainment.

speeder 5y ago
private schools too! And not just in US. I am from Brazil, and I don't intend to put my kids in school if I can (here it is illegal to homeschool, prison time for parents and all, I am hoping to get out of the country if the needed laws don't pass when I have kids). And a good reason for it, is the amount of bullshit fed to me and my friends by the shovelfulls, when I was a teenager I believed all adults I knew except schoolteachers were evil, because they didn't like Mao, Stalin and Che Guevara, I was taught that Pol Pot was a hero, literally, only after I was out of the school system that I could finally learn what these people actaully did. Then over the years I picked more and more on what sort of stuff school taught me wrong, there were a few things in harder sciences, but when it is social stuff, school was a disaster, lie after a lie, sadly some of theses lies remain pervasive in society (for example many people in my country believe the monarchy was pro-slavery, despite documents that exist that show that the monarchs themselves wanted slavery abolished, and that when they DID abolish slavery, the coup that ended monarchy was sponsored by the biggest former slaveowners).
madcow2 5y ago
Yes, exactly this. My kids stay home, read up on their Q and the intellectual dark web, too!
- scarmig 5y ago
  Public schools are luckily the places where students are protected from racist right wing conspiracies like QAnon, Shakespeare, and middle school algebra...
icegreentea2 5y ago
What type of mantras and slogans?

gfodor 5y ago

All schools are religious schools now it seems, so I expect a surge of alternative options for parents to educate their children.

madcow2 5y ago
> All schools are religious schools now How so?
- gfodor 5y ago
  It’s not universal yet but many of the tenets of Theory being incorporated into public school programs are, within the frame of considerations of parents choosing an educational track for their children, akin to the same concerns (or benefits) when choosing to enroll them into private religious schools. Fortunately some states are banning taxpayer funded teaching of things like race-based guilt or complicity. In theory this would ban educational programs which incorporated tenets of white supremacy and other race-based illiberal ideologies, but in practice we can see the only programs that actually are being surfaced as likely affected by these restrictions (to the point of possibly having to cancel entire, active curricula) are the ones grounded in Theory.
  - madcow2 5y ago
    That entire comment reads as gibberish. > It’s not universal yet but many of the tenets of Theory being incorporated into public school programs are, within the frame of considerations of parents choosing an educational track for their children, akin to the same concerns (or benefits) when choosing to enroll them into private religious schools. > Fortunately some states are banning taxpayer funded teaching of things like race-based guilt or complicity. In theory this would ban educational programs which incorporated tenets of white supremacy and other race-based illiberal ideologies, but in practice we can see the only programs that actually are being surfaced as likely affected by these restrictions (to the point of possibly having to cancel entire, active curricula) are the ones grounded in Theory. What is this "Theory" you keep referring to?

Red_Tarsius 5y ago

If I were an American urbanite I would 100% homeschool my children too. Sending well-meaning kids to an inner city school should be considered a form of abuse.

yohannparis 5y ago
I am not an American, nor live in the USA anymore, but this comment made me sad. That the first thought of public school issues is not writing to your representatives and voting for better schooling of future generations; instead, to isolate your children's education. As a Frenchman, I noticed this feeling from USA citizens that the government is against you and there is nothing you can do about it. It was pernicious.
- LeifCarrotson 5y ago
  As an American and a parent, there are two thoughts: To me it's obvious that the first thought should be for my child. I'm personally responsible for them, and I'm going to do what it takes to get them a quality education. The second thought, to write to my representatives and improve education for everyone, is still there. I volunteer at a makerspace downtown that provides computing resources to inner-city kids that don't have anywhere near the same resources as my outlying, high-performing suburban district with our labs and awesome teachers. I have no delusion that a single letter to my representative would fix the underlying systemic issues like racist redlined housing districts, the inequality of property taxes for school funding, and the penalizing of 'underperforming' school districts, and give my child a good education. Can I improve it? Sure! Fix it? Not for everyone, no, so I'll do what I can for my own child.
- simon1ltd 5y ago
  The US government is toxic, and it is openly promoting racist policies and ideologies that are outright offensive. No, it can't be trusted with my kids future and education. It's necessary that it exists, and it can handle the basics (probably), but the government is not, and cannot, be a replacement for caring and involved parents. Any performance based comparison between school performance and life outcomes needs to include stats broken out by the homelife of the child. You could call it "Parental Responsibility" in most cases -- and that figure/statistic will represent most of the issues that everyone wants addressed. The thing is, it's the most impactful to the child, and it can't be meaningfully addressed without massive government control of family life. Parents are responsible for their children's education. Success in anything is a mix of effort, knowledge, ability and luck (I consider timing part of luck). I am going to give my children the best opportunities I can give them, within the bounds of my values and life experiences. It's irrational to believe the outcome of an education should be identical between children. Unless you remove parents and have children raised by institutions, then parental involvement will always have a major impact on academic performance. Strawman: If my child is interested in computers, and spends all their free time reading about and learning to program them, while their contemporaries choose to watch TV and play video games, should they be limited by what the "average" person in their class is able to do? Of course not! It's akin to the school district that noticed that not enough black kids were in a gifted class, so their solution was to get rid of the gifted class. That's insanity. Public schools should provide a solid education to children, and society needs to expect that the outcome of that will be based on the actual performance of the children and their circumstances. A school cannot fix everything that comes from single-parent households and broken families. It can (and should) try and help, but I think it's ridiculous to hold back other students that perform better because they have parental involvement that other children don't.

eplanit 5y ago

20 years ago, I saw home schooling as ill-informed and harmful to the kids. As time has passed and I've gained more insight as to what public schools have become, with the impact of the horrible teachers unions, and especially after this last year -- I applaud the capable parents who take this course.

linuxftw 5y ago

Public school is like public housing: You only use it if there are no viable alternatives. A few places here and there the rich have their own public school with carefully drawn districts to keep out the undesirables, but even those are communist propaganda wards. Public school is big business though. Lots of unions, lots of public employees, lots of text book manufacturing, whoever makes the desks, fixes the school buses, HVAC systems, you name it. Even if the education itself wasn't outright propaganda and otherwise dysfunctional, public schools are mental misery for many. Self-important, entitled, arrogant, but otherwise useless staff and teachers. Don't subject children to prison-like treatment.

NoGravitas 5y ago
> the rich have their own public school > communist propaganda wards I think you may not have an actually functional understanding of political theory.
- linuxftw 5y ago
  I'm sure you've spent lots of money, possibly your parents, to be told what to think.
- tclancy 5y ago
  Shush. I want to hear more about Big Desk and HVAC and other hidden truths about the world economy.

barney54 5y ago

The U.S. did a terrible disservice to children during the pandemic by closing schools (where COVID does that spread well) while keeping open bars and other places where COVID spreads much more easily. Many people treated it as if education is not that important.

MeinBlutIstBlau 5y ago

Homeschooling is great if the children are brought up in a solid environment of proper socialization. Otherwise they end up becoming schizoids that can interact but are dull. Nothing is worse than letting a kid teach themselves about the world than letting them experience it first hand.

mapgrep 5y ago

We homeschool our kids in part because we encountered a homeschool community in Brooklyn that blew apart our preconceptions of homeschooling. What I had thought was mostly a tool for highly religious parents has become intellectually diverse and a lot of the people here do it to give their kids individualized attention and some of the freedom to explore they could only otherwise get in a private school. If you already have a parent at home full time (or full time between the two of you) — not uncommon due to the high cost of child care here — it’s a good way to arbitrage that into educational opportunity. There are groups and storefronts here where you can send kids to get a chance to socialize and tinker, work with their hands, run around (play groups) etc. Shout out to Apple Academy Bklyn which started for homeschoolers to have a workshop type place but also all kinds of little places where kids can tinker with tech, board games etc for example along 7th Ave (I think a lot of these started as after school places but we’re adopted by homeschoolers). Not saying it’s for everyone but it’s not the insular backwater I had subconsciously made it out to be in my head.

lootsauce 5y ago

I wanted to teach, I went to school to teach art. I wanted to change how the system worked. I saw so many things wrong with my experience, which was demonstrably well above average. In the end I found out I'm horrible at classroom management and great at programming and design. So I became a programmer and not a teacher. I have huge respect for the professional educators that can manage a classroom and raise the bar for the entire room every day. Now as a parent my wife and I decided, given my decent salary, that we would forego her income to focus on other aspects of our quality of life. Part of that is homeschooling our children. One way I frame homeschooling is a simple question. From your experience weigh the value of even a single day sitting under a tree reading a great book vs the value of a week in in an english classroom. Personally this captures the difference they are fundamental, qualitative differences. Homeschooling is an unfair advantage in a lot of ways. Not everyone can afford to do it. Society needs to provide universal education and when almost every family needs dual incomes schooling provides a secondary (arguably primary) service of child care. That however does not represent the only or best option for your kids. When I'm in a more negative mood I call schooling, of any sort, is a kind of institutionalization. That does not make it all bad, there are great social outcomes for submitting to that institutionalization. However there are other paths to just as good or better outcomes just not in a societally blanketing kind of way.

tcse_12 5y ago

Public education (I suppose all education really) can only ever be as good as a home environment for all but the most exceptional kids. You can throw all the money you want at an education but, ultimately, if that kid goes home to significant struggles with nourishment, housing, parent availability, parent interest, etc. it's going to be extremely difficult for them to succeed. I'd like to see more investment in the home and let it propagate through the rest of life. Access to good housing, healthcare, food and the like would go a huge way in stabilizing the home and providing a better foundation for parents to fill the gaps in public education.

hdctambien 5y ago

Reading threads about public school on HN and threads about WFH/in-person makes me wonder if there is a relationship between the people that are anti-public school and pro-WFH or if there is a dissonant-relationship between anti-public school and pro-in-person. I am pro-WFH and pro-public school. But my experience (public school student, public state university, 7 years public school teacher, 6 years in-office programmer, 4 years WFT programmer) is drastically different from many of the posts I read in these threads. If school is a "prison" full of incapable/ineffectual/communist teachers indoctrinating the "inmates"... what is an office? The routine of school is prison, but the routine of an office is good? Ineffectual teachers? What about ineffectual managers? Lefty teachers indoctrinating children? Corporations have convinced us that if the minimum wage increases or taxes go up then McDonalds and Apple will just close their doors and decide to go out of business rather than make a teeny bit less profit!

efa 5y ago

It's nice homeschoolers are now not just cultish reclusive white people.

lettergram 5y ago

I don't know how many people are willing to acknowledged this but... Many MANY of the conservative families I know are pulling out their kids. Simply put, they don't want Marxism centered around racism to be taught to their kids. Personally, I have to agree. My kids daycare was actively trying to put all the boys and girls in dresses and refuse to teach what genders are. We obviously teach basics of male vs female to our children, but this is ridiculous. During the pandemic I listened to my brother in laws (still in high school) 40 minute lecture. It was on how due to "white privilege" black Americans shouldn't have to pay taxes due to the fact they can't manage finances (this was a personal economics class). It was insanely racist and honestly not insightful. I asked my brother in law how often this occurs, he said "every day, almost every class, it's racist". At this point, all the parents I know are either oblivious to what's happening, moving kids to private schools or homeschooling.

baryphonic 5y ago
You're entirely correct. I'm guessing you'll get a commenter or two saying something about how critical race theory isn't really Marxism, as if that undermined your point. It doesn't. The toxic things being taught in the schools, which seem to me to be a transmogrified form of segregationism wherein woke whites must take up the woke white man's burden and be overlords for supposedly incapable blacks. Just as Bolshevik Marxists tended to be intellectuals from bourgeoisie families who regarded the proletariat as generally too stupid to be given power, so it is with the woke whites today.
olivierestsage 5y ago
Chiming in to tell you I agree before your comment likely disappears.
herval 5y ago
For the record, could you share with us what “Marxism” is?

graycat 5y ago

US society has some important applications, roles, etc. for versions of relatively independent self-learning. Soooo, maybe somewhere in the teaching and learning of K-12 there should be some emphasis, practice, role, encouragement, etc. for a start on self-learning. Examples: (1) At one time, and maybe significantly still, a huge fraction of learning about computer programming, and computing more generally, was just self learning. (2) At one time, the Web site of the math department at Princeton just stated that graduate courses were introductions to research by experts in their fields, that no courses were given for preparation for the Ph.D. qualifying exams, and that students were expected to prepare for the exams on their own. (3) Teachers who need to keep up in their fields and researchers who need to push their fields forward have to do some to a lot of the work via self learning. And it is easy to find more examples in owning a house, farm, etc.

gjsman-1000 5y ago

I am a full-time Software Developer at 19 years old with an Associate's Degree. Couldn't have done it without homeschool.

101001001001 5y ago

I used to be a diehard supporter of homeschooling. But then I experienced things in my life that revealed the nature of people and society. People are wildly different. But nobody realizes this because nobody really listens. People are different in much deeper and more deterministic ways than is commonly appreciated. There are specific metabolic pathways that are responsible for this. The answer is that for most people home schooling is a waste. They want and need to be in a toxic, petty environment. Intellectual development is wasted on them. It’s biology — not a choice for the parents or for the kids.

yoz-y 5y ago

Is there some documentary or a read that explains the american school system somehow? Reading the constant complaints about it (such as mountains of homework, suffering through classes and all that) is quite alien to me. Some classes were boring, sure, I slept through them. But for the most that was not the case and the load never seemed to be excessive. (studying in eastern, then western europe)

MattGaiser 5y ago
There is no one American system. Experiences can differ wildly by program or state or county.
andrewzah 5y ago
There is no one uniform experience, but there are some consistent problems. Severely underpaid teachers and a focus on testing leads to formulaic memorization of (what a lot of us thought) was drivel, just things to know and forget after the test. High school for me started very early (about 6:45/7 to catch the bus), so it was miserable. I did have some classes that were the exception, but for me all school did was try and beat the drive to learn out of me. In middle school I got punished for reading ahead in our assigned literature. We also had to deal with a powertripping principal for years. And that's to say nothing of the completely whitewashed US "history" we learned. I actually was homeschooled for a few years, so I have experience with both systems. The issues I had with homeschooling were the overly religious program my parents used, and the lack of socialization. I will never put my kid in a public or private school system, provided that I find a community for us to engage socially in, that we find a good curriculum that's not religious, and that either myself or my partner engages in it full-time.

jerry1979 5y ago

Side question: do homeschoolers have a relatively standardized set of copyleft books & materials that they can use to do their schooling?

AnimalMuppet 5y ago
No. Homeschooling is really diverse; there's no "relatively standard" anything. You may be able to find copyleft books and materials - I suspect they probably exist - but I don't know any specifics.
dkhenry 5y ago
Everyone in the homeschooling group my family attends generally pays for material, and then supplements with things that are free(ish). For example math for us is Saxon (paid), and then we will sometimes use Kahn (free) if the kids need extra practice, or if they need the material presented a different way.
- jerry1979 5y ago
  Interesting. Sounds like you have a good thing going. If you don't mind me asking, what makes the paid material stand out as compared to Kahn?
  - dkhenry 5y ago
    The biggest thing is Saxon is a physical book, and it comes along with all the worksheets and tests and problem sets that we can copy and have them work on multiple times if needed. Specifically things like math facts and computations require a lot of practice, and they have these worksheets you do multiple times, timing yourself each time to show progress. Its really good to have that be able to be done physically with a pencil as the physical interaction really helps with retention. Also I greatly prefer the sequencing of Saxon, they do a lot of introduction work with coins and clocks, two things that are easy to get your hands on and that kids relate with well. Explaining fractions with a Quarter being a quarter of a dollar, and being 25 cents gives you a lot of discussion you can have. Then clocks are so useful for fractions ( half past the hour, quarter till ), especially since they are base 60 and not base 10. Also things like place value ( 1 vs 10's vs 100's ) and even angles are all related to real world physical objects the kids can touch. If it came down to it I think Kahn would give them a wonderful education and everything I have seen is well executed and wraps in a lot of the sequencing that I have seen work with my kids, but I do like Saxon enough to pay for it and use it as the primary source. The other piece is this thing called Institute for Excellence in Writing (https://iew.com/ https://iew.com/) it is honestly amazing. My kids know more about writing, and have a better grasp of the english language then I do thanks to that program.

germinalphrase 5y ago

I teach at the high school level in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area. Generally, it is a middle class community in which the basics are provided for (that said, there was obviously an uptick in family crises, job loss, transient housing, etc.) About twenty percent of my students handled the transition to distance education just fine. Many of these students told me they missed friends/clubs/etc, but enjoyed having greater control over their time (my district encouraged, but did not require, synchronous learning). The middle sixty percent were mixed, but generally plateaued in perceived achievement or struggled to keep motivated. Since going back to in-person about six weeks ago, the majority of these students are back on track. Achievement remains somewhat below a typical cohort, just a little less snappy and insightful with observations and arguments. So it goes. The bottom twenty percent were various flavors of missing. They did not or could not cope with the transition to distance learning. Some of these students were struggling prior to going online, but the reduction in structure and support pulled a lot of kids into this group that wouldn’t typically fail. No objective here. Just sharing.

PragmaticPulp 5y ago
My teacher friends (younger age groups than yours) said essentially the same thing. Some fraction of students simply disappeared during remote learning and no amount of phone calls to their parents could get them back. On the other end of the spectrum, some students had stay at home parents with them for the entire duration and were doing just fine. Students in the middle were okay but would have done better in person. It seems the challenge now is that the most prepared students have gotten further ahead while the least prepared students fell further behind. Managing the increased divergence in coming years will be a challenge.
- germinalphrase 5y ago
  “My teacher friends (younger age groups than yours) said essentially the same thing. Some fraction of students simply disappeared during remote learning and no amount of phone calls to their parents could get them back.” We were sending staff door to door everyday, but it is unclear how much of an impact that (or any of our other interventions) really made. A lot of these kids were depressed, anxious, unmoored. “It seems the challenge now is that the most prepared students have gotten further ahead while the least prepared students fell further behind. Managing the increased divergence in coming years will be a challenge.” Anxiety over that divergence is already building amongst the teaching staff.

javier10e6 5y ago

Maybe we all have to re-watch Good Will Hunting and understand the importance of "being there".

pnathan 5y ago

I was homeschooled k-11, then GED'd, went to college, came out with a Master's. My sibling did the same route, but ended up with a PhD from an Ivy. Neither of us recommend it; my sib is more antagonistic than I am. There are a number of conjoined factors, but it, as conventionally understood, is not a sufficient system for forming a child's development. People talk about "socialization" and "friends", those are subtly wrong. The key question is integration with society and understanding how it works. As a parent now of a 4yo, I am passionately planning to put him in public schools. I would STILL have yanked him into homeschool for 2020-2021 school year and sucked it up. Local public school districts were a cluster. Zoom school seems to be a hilariously bad idea for people who aren't like, e.g., my sib, who is incredibly disciplined and great at self teaching. Edit: Happy to answer questions; if it relates to things that might be disparaging to others or requires a very serious & thoughtful response, please just email me at my listed address in the profile.

seattle_spring 5y ago
> The key question is integration with society and understanding how it works. As a 3rd party observer to colleagues who have been homeschooled, this is right on the money with regard to their deficiencies. However, I don't know if it's strictly due to homeschooling, or because they also tend to have been raised with extremely religious and conservative values.
- abnry 5y ago
  > The key question is integration with society and understanding how it works. What does this mean in particular? What does it mean to "integrate with society" and "understand how it works?"
  - pnathan 5y ago
    Those are great questions. The simplest way I can say is that homeschooling alienates from society, and you become an Other, in your own eyes and the eyes of others. The child become adult must reassimilate (with all the nuances and weight that word conveys) into broader society. That should give you the vector to look into - the question of assimilation and the other has been adequately discussed elsewhere.

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

codingdave 5y ago

One lesson we learned is that one of our kids has attention-deficit problems. They were not a concern at all in the schools because the classroom was managed in a way that worked for him. But at home during the pandemic, it was a disaster. It took us most of the year to figure out what was wrong, get plans in place, work with the remote teachers, and get even a semblance of a good education going. I'm not against homeschooling - I love it in theory. But people need to be prepared to adapt to the childrens' needs. What works for one person will not work for others, and you should know what you are getting into.

bluefirebrand 5y ago
This is a surprising anecdote to hear. Most public schooling I've heard of, certainly my own experience, was that classrooms are miserable for kids who are attention deficit.
- codingdave 5y ago
  I heard that ADHD is challenging in classrooms, while ADD is easier. I can only speak to what we experienced, though. My child needed reminders and suggestions every 10 minutes, that kind of thing. As well as daily 1:1s with teachers to get help past roadblocks. I'm sure everyone has varying experiences.
- mmaurizi 5y ago
  As someone who received medication for childhood ADHD, the highly managed classroom environment was never an issue, it was getting the homework done at home when I had to be self-motivated. Work-from-home during the pandemic has yielded similar issues with motivating myself to do work for my job (but to a lesser degree, as I've learned skills to cope over the years).
  - bluefirebrand 5y ago
    I don't know if I've ever heard of a public school classroom being called "highly managed" before, is the thing. They seem like chaos to me. Always someone whispering or goofing off or being disruptive. I figured that would be hard.

gnicholas 5y ago

> For instance, Berkeley Unified public schools, where Kolasi’s older daughters are enrolled, receive $19,471 per student. If you homeschool, you can get back a couple thousand dollars to be used on educational expenses. I don't know where the rest of the money goes. But I imagine that there would be a lot more homeschoolers if parents could recoup the full amount instead of just ~10%.

andrewclunn 5y ago

As usual, the best comments are the flagged / deleted ones.

dkhenry 5y ago

As a parent who has all three children fully home schooled now I can confidently say it is just the better way to educate children. The article slightly alludes to this, but homeschooling today is not the kids sitting at home independently going through workbooks, with limited interaction. The big revelation to me when we started this journey was that homeschooling can be done in groups, not on a day by day basis, but by aligning curriculum with other families and working independently you get this amazing interaction where the kids can relate to others doing the same work, they can have meetup's and group sessions on some regular basis, and they can still have a generally fully customized experience to meet the child learning exactly where they are. The most poignant example of the overwhelming benefit of homeschooling was when we found out that our son was really struggling with math. He was able to answer most problems, but was consistently getting basic things wrong. He never actually internalized the math he had learned and now in 5th grade he was struggling with not knowing things like math facts or order of operations, or anything of how to deal with fractions. In a traditional school he would likely be tracked into remedial math, and would spend the rest of his school time there. However by just spending more time on math each day he was able to quickly address his issues and start better understanding his new coursework. Same thing with reading for my daughter, she was a prolific reader, and quickly advanced to books she saw her older brother reading, but when we had her do school work she couldn't complete basic comprehension work for the age level books we were assigning. Well it turns out it wasn't that she didn't comprehend them, it was that she never learned how to communicate details, we spent six months having her read and explain very simple books, and quickly she was back up to speed and excelling in both reading and comprehension tasks. We wouldn't have been able to do either of these without dedicated and time consuming intervention. The exact kind of intervention you would never get in even the most dedicated public schools. The only place you can get that kind of prolonged dedicated attention is with parents at home. Add into this that we have been able to _vastly_ expand the scope and sequence of what our kids are learning because we can just firehose them as much new material as they can take and you quickly see that a child who is excited about learning, who is able to explore and discover, and isn't bound to an artificial school day, or school year, or school curriculum will learn so much more then their traditionally schooled counterparts. After this last year we are 100% sold on never sending our kids back to traditional school, it would be unloving and would be doing them a disservice. We decided that if it came down to it, we would rather move away from the extremely high cost of living world we live in today so we could be a one income household and give our kids the attention they deserve rather then let someone else try and raise them for us.

nikolay 5y ago

I am sad that my kids went to public schools in California - they are so brainwashed by the liberal agenda by teachers and peers that I won't be able to undo the harm with all the effort and money in the world. In 2021, homeschooling your kids is easy. I am actually planning to start an Orthodox Christian homeschooling coop in the coming months.

herbst 5y ago

This is going to be an unpopular opinion, but I believe that if you can't afford to teach your kids yourself and live in a country with a bad schooling system (nearly all of them) you probably should not have kids.