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My education was the inverse of this in many ways. I was home schooled through 6th grade, privately schooled through high school and went to a major public rese

My education was the inverse of this in many ways. I was home schooled through 6th grade, privately schooled through high school and went to a major public research university for undergrad. The biggest difference between my story and the OPs is simply the educator's expertise level. Not everyone has a parent who is a PhD in STEM while being extremely well versed in humanities at the same time. I was lucky to have a mom who was a kindergarten teacher. So my theory is that the mode of education's value is proportional (roughly speaking) to the quality of the educational resources within that institution. For normal folks like my parents, that meant the value was maximized while I was young and declined as my education advanced outside of their expertise. Had I needed to rely on my mom's calculus teaching skills to learn calculus I would have been missing out on those kids' competent calculus teacher mentioned in the article for example. Additionally, kids learn family culture over the full time they are in your household. Training kids to read and compute is trivial in importance compared to teaching them the value system you believe works well to make you a functioning adult in a complex and ambiguous world. Home schooling and public schooling alike are actually of secondary importance to this primary mission of parenting. Put differently, the OPs kids would have excelled regardless of their educational environment because their family culture inculcated them with high achieving standards. It's clear from the article that their success was never taken for granted or expected. They had to work hard for their admission to college and their family culture inspired them to rise to the occasion.

quacked 5y ago
You are absolutely dead-on with the paragraph about family culture. I will paraphrase a small essay written by a smart friend of mine who was educated at home: "Children naturally imitate people they respect. If they are raised by a parent who hunts, they will want to hunt. If they are raised by a parent who plays music, they will want to play music. The value system of the parent is thus communicated to the child via the productive interactions they share together. In a school system, children are hidden away from productive adults who love them and are instead exposed to a rotating cast of absenteeist teachers who cannot hope to give them serious one-on-one attention, which is necessary for personal development. At school, with hundreds of children kept in a holding pen with a total lack of personal role models, they look to the most charismatic children to learn value systems and methods of interaction. This explains the dichotomy between what homeschooled children consider "cool" (i.e. what would impress their family and lead to productive, exciting interactions with them) and what schooled children consider "cool" (i.e. what would impress the most charismatic children and lead to productive, exciting interactions with them.) This is also why homeschooled children tend to have a few close friends, good manners, and close relationships with adults. The fact of the matter is that children cannot raise each other. If they could, then school would be a good idea."
- f154hfds 5y ago
  My parents took a hands-on approach to education but they still knew when their resources were exhausted. At some point you 'graduate' your parents educational resources regardless of their expertise, few parents will attempt to home-educate college subjects for example. An engaged parent can sit alongside their kid and interpret the materials taught by the teacher in the classroom. They can be 'teaching' family culture while the teacher is teaching the curriculum. I will agree though that in order to succeed in the above as a parent you have to be aware of the importance of your role and be willing to take a hard stance sometimes when the teacher strays outside of their territory into value proscribing in ways you don't agree with.
  - quacked 5y ago
    I think the only mistake you're making is believing that school only teaches curriculum. That's true for adult schools where a fully-formed adult learns from an expert, but it's not true for primary schools, who teach children that are rapidly forming a model of reality every second of the day. The teacher isn't teaching things like how to interact with authority, how to behave in society, how to make friends, how to have self-esteem- they may lecture on those topics with words, but the actual learning of the culture that's taking place is coming from peers, not from the teacher. A professional educator leading a course isn't the problem, the model of putting your kid in school alongside hundreds of other kids for seven hours per day is the problem. My comment was geared towards asserting that "family culture" will necessarily conflict with "schoolkid culture" if your kids spend a lot of time at school.

quacked 5y ago

You are absolutely dead-on with the paragraph about family culture. I will paraphrase a small essay written by a smart friend of mine who was educated at home: "Children naturally imitate people they respect. If they are raised by a parent who hunts, they will want to hunt. If they are raised by a parent who plays music, they will want to play music. The value system of the parent is thus communicated to the child via the productive interactions they share together. In a school system, children are hidden away from productive adults who love them and are instead exposed to a rotating cast of absenteeist teachers who cannot hope to give them serious one-on-one attention, which is necessary for personal development. At school, with hundreds of children kept in a holding pen with a total lack of personal role models, they look to the most charismatic children to learn value systems and methods of interaction. This explains the dichotomy between what homeschooled children consider "cool" (i.e. what would impress their family and lead to productive, exciting interactions with them) and what schooled children consider "cool" (i.e. what would impress the most charismatic children and lead to productive, exciting interactions with them.) This is also why homeschooled children tend to have a few close friends, good manners, and close relationships with adults. The fact of the matter is that children cannot raise each other. If they could, then school would be a good idea."

f154hfds 5y ago
My parents took a hands-on approach to education but they still knew when their resources were exhausted. At some point you 'graduate' your parents educational resources regardless of their expertise, few parents will attempt to home-educate college subjects for example. An engaged parent can sit alongside their kid and interpret the materials taught by the teacher in the classroom. They can be 'teaching' family culture while the teacher is teaching the curriculum. I will agree though that in order to succeed in the above as a parent you have to be aware of the importance of your role and be willing to take a hard stance sometimes when the teacher strays outside of their territory into value proscribing in ways you don't agree with.
- quacked 5y ago
  I think the only mistake you're making is believing that school only teaches curriculum. That's true for adult schools where a fully-formed adult learns from an expert, but it's not true for primary schools, who teach children that are rapidly forming a model of reality every second of the day. The teacher isn't teaching things like how to interact with authority, how to behave in society, how to make friends, how to have self-esteem- they may lecture on those topics with words, but the actual learning of the culture that's taking place is coming from peers, not from the teacher. A professional educator leading a course isn't the problem, the model of putting your kid in school alongside hundreds of other kids for seven hours per day is the problem. My comment was geared towards asserting that "family culture" will necessarily conflict with "schoolkid culture" if your kids spend a lot of time at school.