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Home schooling can challenge our beliefs about education

36 points by mathgenius 3y ago

rgrieselhuber 3y ago
“Many British parents express surprise when they discover that they have a right to home-educate” It’s a sad statement that people are surprised that they have the “right” to educate their own children.
- cheschire 3y ago
  Why? It’s illegal in multiple countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_status_and_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_st...
  - k__ 3y ago
    I once read that a family from Germany tried to get asylum in the USA because they weren't allowed to homeschool in Germany. They didn't succeed.
    - xupybd 3y ago
      They did get asylum [1]. One of their daughters went on to marry one of 19 siblings from the show bringing up Bates[2]. 1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/27/german-home-schooling-family-asylum https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/27/german-home-sc... 2 https://fundamentalists.fandom.com/wiki/Lydia_Bates https://fundamentalists.fandom.com/wiki/Lydia_Bates
      - k__ 3y ago
        "Trace's father Gil Bates" lolwat?!
  - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
    It’s horrifying that homeschooling is considered child abuse multiple countries.
    - nibbleshifter 3y ago
      Not really. In many cases it cripples the child's social development. Which is child abuse.
      - johngladtj 3y ago
        And somehow the prison-scholar complex doesn't count?
        nibbleshifter 3y ago
        That doesn't exist in my country, we have a tiny prison population.
        johngladtj 3y ago
        Are you counting the children mandated to go to school as part of that population of prisoners?
      - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
        If that was truly the reason why, and not a convenient excuse, then governments would state mandate social activities and not take children from their parents, which would be just as abusive. Instead, it’s all about mandating government control over children.
      - xupybd 3y ago
        I know many home schooled children. I see no evidence of poor social development. In fact I see more emotional scars left by bad interactions at public schools than I do from homeschooling.
        3y ago
  - nonethewiser 3y ago
    That’s alarming
  - rgrieselhuber 3y ago
    Hence the quotes around “rights” — if you live in a country where rights are granted by a legal system, you have no rights at all, simply privilege in a will-to-power system.
- atoav 3y ago
  > It’s a sad statement that people are surprised that they have the “right” to educate their own children. I am not sure how this is handled around the world but in German speaking countries there is a "Schulpflicht"/compulsory education. So by that definition if you homeschool your children (by taking them out of the public school system) you not only have the right to educate them, you have the duty to do so. I am not sure how it is elsewhere, but the home schooled people I got to know fall into two categories: 1. Kids with rich parents who had the funds to get the right people 2. Kids with parents belonging to some religious sect that didn't want other kids to influence theirs Both of them can have true deficiencies when it comes to interacting with "regular people" in their lives after
  - xupybd 3y ago
    I remember a family that gained refugee status in America due to the inability to homeschool. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/27/german-home-schooling-family-asylum https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/27/german-home-sc...
    - atoav 3y ago
      Curious, I am not a German but from Austria (also German speaking, but a tenth of the sice and a different monarchic history for many centuries, so different in culture as well). Here it is possible to homeschool your kids, but you have to demonstrate to the school board that what the kids learn is comparable to what a public school delivers. Also, they can take that right away if they feel parents are not fulfilling their duty: https://hslda.org/post/austria https://hslda.org/post/austria
boerseth 3y ago
I've come to think a lot about home schooling. As I have grown up, taught myself a bunch of interesting things, and been exposed to different kinds of approaches and teachers, I've become pretty passionate about pedagogy. I realise I probably only see small parts of the picture, and like the article says, I would quickly come to respect teachers a lot more if I decided to have a go at it. Still, I wonder. The most obvious downside is probably that the social dimension of public schools is hard to replace. But imagine you're five friendly families, where the different parents have different academic strengths. You all decide to work 80%, and rotate from day to day which parent couple teaches the children. Wouldn't that be something?
- dbspin 3y ago
  You'll be pleased to hear it is something! There's a whole school system designed around this approach - parents as staff, non-directive learning, secular, democratic, no age stratification, school as an Ivan Illich style workshop for learning. They're called Sudbury Valley and they've been around since the 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School I actually made a radio documentary about one of these schools, Wicklow Sudbury in the South East of Ireland https://soundcloud.com/garethstack/the-free-school https://soundcloud.com/garethstack/the-free-school As someone who had a very rough experience of school (the social side being the worst part), it was inspiring to see a place where kids could truly be themselves and pursue their interests (often to levels far beyond their 'grade year' in traditional education).
- moi2388 3y ago
  And why not see which parents teach the best by measuring test results? And then have that person teach full time and the rest can work regular jobs again and oh wait it’s schools again isn’t it
  - ThunderSizzle 3y ago
    Let's also scale it up to hundreds upon hundreds of kids so now everyone is just a number. Let's add a school board that ignores parents, meaning parents no longer have any real say any more. Let's add a teachers union that protects bad teachers, even to the point of keeping pedophiles in schools. Let's close schools for 4 months so kids can work on the fields in the summer and forget everything when they return.
CrampusDestrus 3y ago
First, one should really think about where his beliefs about education come from. Then, once realized they basically come from nothing, you can throw them away and start anew
xupybd 3y ago
We will home school our children. They're not old enough but my wife is not planning to go back to work until all our children have completed their home schooling. We've seen friends do an amazing job and their children have done very well academically and socially. I have friends who work in our public school system. They tell me how hard it is. Most of their time is spent on a few problem kids. I respect what they do but think my wife can do better as she will be better resourced to teach when compared to one teacher with 30+ students. It's our dream to give our children the best we can. We might sacrifice on our income but we think it's worth it.
- sparrish 3y ago
  I commend you. My wife and I homeschool our 7 (3rd just graduated) and it's a lot of work but we've found it worthwhile. I sincerely hope will too. Homeschooling is not the right choice for every family but for those who are able, I encourage it. The biggest mistake we see new homeschooling families make is trying to replicate the public school experience (same class times, text books, tests, etc). I've never seen that succeed. Successful homeschooling is usually a very different dynamic and one of the greatest strengths is the ability to optimize everything to how the child learns best - while balancing that with time and effort constraints on the parents. I love seeing my kids get excited about a concept, historical figure, or skill. When it happens, we run down that road as far as want to go. Watching their faces shine as the light bulb comes on is priceless. Helping them learn how to learn is one of the greatest joys I've had as a dad.
Ambolia 3y ago
Public school is one of the few places and times in life where people are forced to be closed in a room with people they don't like at best, or suffer systematic violence at worst, with no chance to just leave. Would be funny to see workplaces try to implement some of the weird practices schools do, like shuffling people around into random groups that may have built zero social rapport and have zero idea of each other's skills, and make them complete a project in a few days.
- spacephysics 3y ago
  Being forced to be in a room and work with people who may not like you or you may not like I think is great for a developing child. It teaches resiliency, builds mental strength, and can develop strategies on how to work with people someone may not get along with. Taking out extreme bullying or worse, we need to stop sheltering the younger generation else they’ll, on average, become less able to handle stressors later in life. The key part of this equation, to my armchair thinking, is having parents who are active in teaching the child what strategies to employ in difficult situations, and teachers that mediate to ensure nothing gets out of hand.
  - bhgtopt 3y ago
    [flagged]
  - pelasaco 3y ago
    > The key part of this equation, to my armchair thinking, is having parents who are active in teaching the child what strategies to employ in difficult situations The parents are the crucial part. It's my job as parent to be active in my kids education. The school, is just part of that. Making sure, my kids is in the right school, in a safe environment, and enjoying the process, are my tasks too. As parents, you are people managing your kids in the school.
    - spacephysics 3y ago
      Fully agree. I went through a few school systems, from a wealthy public school to a less fortunate city public school. Each have their own problems, but common amongst them were parents that were either mentally absent, or physically absent. In these cases, kids either ended up doing drugs and racing cars on windy roads, sometimes crashing into trees while high. Or getting into gangs or violence and having a record before 18.
lucidguppy 3y ago
Its frustrating to realize we've been at this task of raising and educating children for the better part of 250,000 years and we still haven't got the knack of it.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- jtr1 3y ago
  Most countries have a public system to teach physics to teenagers for free. I’d say we’ve made a little progress.
- jaggederest 3y ago
  I think, as a species, we're in a pretty good place. Literacy rates are high, general knowledge is adequate. Mostly, from what I can tell, if children aren't mistreated, are encouraged and helped along the way, they end up pretty okay regardless of how we characterize the process involved. Humans come curious and inquisitive from the factory, we mostly just need to get out of the way and fill in any accidental omissions.
smitty1e 3y ago
While we're too busy to homeschooling, we love our children too much to do other than pay for tuition at a school that is committing acts of education on the kids. I have plenty of conversations about the TWO genders, and the truth that "form follows function". One hopes that the storm of folly raging in the culture consumes itself soonest.
- jtr1 3y ago
  Ah, now here are the homeschoolers I know. Cheers, hope your kids still talk to you when they’re grown.
  - smitty1e 3y ago
    I explicitly said we're NOT homeschooling, but go on.
    - jtr1 3y ago
      Ah don’t sell yourself short, it’s a state of mind as much as anything
      - smitty1e 3y ago
        The public school grooming? Straight up pathology.
        deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
        jtr1 3y ago
        You’re a perfect specimen of your type
        smitty1e 3y ago
        If one can succeed at being an honest man, that is enough.
20after4 3y ago
Home schooling was the best thing my parents did for my education and social development. Surprisingly, all they really had to do, is let me do basically whatever I was interested in. They would answer questions and provide resources for learning when I asked for them, but not a lot of structure or forced lesson plan. I think it worked out pretty well for me. I say this as a kindergarten dropout who attended college at age 16, managed a 3.89 GPA, and have a fairly successful career in software for the last 20 years. I am not particularly great at public speaking but I have absolutely no problem interacting socially. Public school can be hell for a lot of kids and it's unfortunate that so many are subjected to such a broken system.
- aeonik 3y ago
  Same here. I was only home schooled, part time, for science and math in 8th grade. I had failed algebra 2 years in a row and really falling behind. I had been to private school, public school, and a charter school. In one year of home schooling, my dad was able to get me from barely understanding functions to solving systems of equations, and also got me fluent in spreadsheets for data analysis. He was a Biochemistry undergrad, and he also got me to balancing stoichiometric equations by the end of the year. From my perspective it was really nice to move at my own pace. If I had trouble understanding something, we could slow down and really focus on things.
- xupybd 3y ago
  I'm someone who plans to homeschool and thinks it can work well I'm surprised so many claim it's not possible for home schooled children to develop socially. As a person who's been homeschooled how does it feel when people make the assertion that the schooling you had must cause socialization problems?
  - hutzlibu 3y ago
    I think no one claims it is not possible. The problem is, if you live somewhere, where everyone is going the normal way - then all the normal kids socialising will happen in school and you stay the outsider. You won't even see them most of the time, depending on the area. But when you are connected to a couple of families doing it close by and you do manage that the kids can actually learn and play together on a regular base, then there is no problem at all.
concordDance 3y ago
As someone who was homeschooled, my own experience was that its much more efficient in terms of learning per hour, you can get top marks in standardised tests averaging just a few hours a week. However, it requires parental effort to ensure proper socialisation (club involvement etc) and you probably should find other families doing something similar to socialize your children with.
criddell 3y ago
Those are some long paragraphs…
jtr1 3y ago
I was home schooled through my freshman year of high school. I have no intention of home schooling my children, but I’m always fascinated to listen to other adults in the process of talking themselves into it, because it gives me small a window into the headspace my parents and their peers were in when they made this consequential decision for their children. Some close friends are headed down this path, and while their reasoning is decidedly more secular, there are lingering echoes of the old Puritan impulse to flee from a fallen world. If you’re considering home schooling yourself, I would just encourage you to consider that, like any product with a passionate fan base, there is a powerful echo chamber built up to reinforce your decision, so don’t expect to get a full accounting of the pros and cons from people on the inside. I’d also suggest to folks who have never been homeschooled themselves to spend some time reading through the experiences of adults who were homeschooled. Your kids deserve for you to make as clear eyed of a decision as you can about this.
- jaggederest 3y ago
  Can you elaborate? I'm interested in what your experience has been like.
- voisin 3y ago
  > like any product with a passionate fan base, there is a powerful echo chamber built up to reinforce your decision, so don’t expect to get a full accounting of the pros and cons from people on the inside. This is no more true than for people who send their kids to regular school. All of society is streamlined to do this. As soon as you attempt to home school, the vast majority of people will tell you it is akin to child abuse and you might be lucky enough to know a few other homeschooling parents who tell you otherwise but their voices will pale in comparison to the cacophony from the other side. Make no mistake that it is a massive leap of faith - not some easy decision made in an echo chamber.
  - jtr1 3y ago
    My point is that there’s a selection bias among homeschool families. If you are talking them, you are talking to people who are very far along a path of commitment escalation who have a host of psychological incentives to validate their own decisions. I’m sure you’ve encountered many detractors. Your fortitude in tuning them out is a poor measure of the rigor of your decision-making. I will also say, in my experience with homeschool families, the lifestyle attracts a disproportionate number of narcissists, as it offers a high degree of control over a captive audience to people with an inflated sense of their own abilities. I’m not saying this is the case for you, and I’ve also certainly known many families who were motivated by special circumstances, individual needs, or just a desire for more freedom for kids who didn’t fit well into the public school system. I would assert that the former is the modal case, and that parents looking to homeschool should critically examine their motivations and abilities. Unfortunately, the people who most need that reflection are usually the least inclined towards it.
COGlory 3y ago
Anecdote; I was home schooled. I know/have met probably 100-200 homeschooled people, mostly as a kid, in a large Catholic group, although a couple as an adult when I was getting my PhD. The vast majority, probably > 90%, functioned just fine socially after reaching adulthood. The remainder were usually on the autism spectrum. I believe autistic children are probably over-represented among homeschoolers. This "homeschooling results in poor social skills" trope is absurd and needs to stop. There are a number of other problems with homeschooling, among a number of upsides as well. But barring Branch-Davidian type social isolation, social skills are just not an issue.
- voisin 3y ago
  > This "homeschooling results in poor social skills" trope is absurd and needs to stop. I think it will stop shortly. Thanks to COVID the vast majority of the western world got to see what a version of homeschooling could look like and perhaps unsurprisingly, many found it to be as good for the mind as WFH is for adults and chose to keep their children homeschooling post-COVID. I know a ton of people who have done this. Soon it will be seen as just another option for education without the social stigma.
  - viraptor 3y ago
    > vast majority of the western world got to see what a version of homeschooling could look like Did they? I've only heard of what the experience looked like in 3 schools really, but all of them were essentially "same program, more homework, fewer lessons, all online". That seems very different to an actual homeschooling situation.
    - fsagx 3y ago
      Indeed. The pandemic at-home schooling I witnessed was just a much worse version of regular school over zoom. It was very far removed from the homeschooling I was saw pre-Covid.
- kcplate 3y ago
  > This "homeschooling results in poor social skills" trope is absurd and needs to stop. There are a number of other problems with homeschooling, among a number of upsides as well. But barring Branch-Davidian type social isolation, social skills are just not an issue. I never understood that to be honest. Most of the people homeschooling their children that I know also participate in homeschooling groups where there is a lot of social interaction, as well as church/religious events etc. It maybe rather ideologically siloed, which can be a bit shocking when the child starts emerging from the silo, but that is different thing than having “poor social skills”.
drewcoo 3y ago
I would expect home schooling to be more concerned with beliefs and public schooling to be more concerned with truth because it's always done for personal reasons in contradiction to normative reality. I suppose I should feel reassured that home schooling does not challenge any truths? Here in the US too many years ago, my personal experience with friends that were home-schooled up until 7th or 9th grades in school was that they were: - nice, but not well-socialized (and high school was a terrible time to start socializing: having no established friends when everyone is in cliques!) - smart and interested, but had gaps in their academic knowledge beyond math and English (science, social science, the arts) - curious (not stunted by public schooling - a plus!), but less likely to question/distrust things, including other kids - often more religious than the rest of us, but with less exposure to different faiths
gorpy7 3y ago
It’s probably like mutual funds vs stock picking. some parents will do better and some will do worse. the child gains the interest money- if the parent is a bad stock then it’s bad in isolation… schools are predictably mediocre but public/visible. if the parent’s decision is driven by their own schooling experience and/or desire to change an aspect of society then i think it’s questionable to make the child an instrument of that.
ryandrake 3y ago
Home schooling is one of those topics where there seems to be a huge difference between theory and practice. The theory is great: You're the parent. You are motivated by educational outcome. You believe your children can get a better education than at public schools. You have the time, patience, and resources to do a better job at home. The outcome is better-educated kids who get to skip the (admittedly terrible) abuses of the public school system. For some homeschooled kids, the above is actually what happened. You'll find all their glowing reviews of home schooling in the comment section below. In practice, at least in the USA, it's different. By and large (with exceptions, obviously), you are motivated by religious separatism. You are not worried about the quality of the education, but the content. You see the public school system as uninvited ideology and home schooling as a loophole you can use to avoid it. The outcome is worse-educated kids who skipped entire subjects and are not even remotely prepared for higher education. My wife's "moms groups" are always pushing homeschooling, and the sales pitch is never the quality of education. It's always that you can avoid those nasty topics like sex ed and evolution and that you can use the Bible in all your classes. More recently, during and after COVID, the pitches also included avoiding "political indoctrination". I know multiple actual families who pulled their kids out of public school for religious and ideological reasons, but nobody who did so with a legitimate intention of providing a higher quality factual education. Obviously they exist and a few are posting here, but I'd be shocked if those were even 10% of cases. I'll never forget this clip[1] interviewing a homeschool family, where the poor kid looks mortified that she doesn't know even basic 2nd grade math, with her mom smugly laughing about it. These products of home schooling are not posting their success stories on HN. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyNzSW7I4qw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyNzSW7I4qw
- simonsarris 3y ago
  The practice is great too. Almost all studies and surveys done to date suggest that homeschoolers do better across pretty much every measured metric, and that this gap is widening over time to favor homeschooling even more. If you've ever heard about Bloom's 2-sigma problem, this should be unsurprising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem There are of course problems with survey data, but it's a huge mistake to think that homeschooling = the worst anecdotes you can find on TV. > By and large (with exceptions, obviously), you are motivated by religious separatism. This is not true. In the National Household Education Survey (2016), only 16% of homeschoolers said religious motivation was their primary reason, and only 5% moral education was their primary reason. Dissatisfaction with school academic quality and concern about environment at school were the two primary drivers.
friend_and_foe 3y ago
School in the US and broadly in the western model is based off of the Prussian national education model. It is not designed to educate your kids. It is designed to indoctrinate your kids. I say this without all the negative connotations associated with these words. It can be a positive thing, a state has to nation build to be successful, and for that they have to instill a uniform culture and ideology onto a probably very diverse population. But when you look at school in the US and you wonder why we aren't taught to do taxes, manage our finances, manage a household, why so many people graduate school without the ability to read well and whatever other problems you see, once you understand that the goal is not education, you'll get it. These problems are the result of a system as odds with itself because it is designed for indoctrination and some people try to use it to educate. It doesn't work well. I believe, with the internet and the revolution in information availability we have lived through and take for granted, school is basically obsolete and is a legacy system. I think homeschooling is the way to go. And you can actually educate your kids, instill them with your philosophy, create unique individuals, teach them critical thinking.

36 points by mathgenius 3y ago

“Many British parents express surprise when they discover that they have a right to home-educate” It’s a sad statement that people are surprised that they have the “right” to educate their own children.

cheschire 3y ago
Why? It’s illegal in multiple countries. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_status_and_statistics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_st...
- k__ 3y ago
  I once read that a family from Germany tried to get asylum in the USA because they weren't allowed to homeschool in Germany. They didn't succeed.
  - xupybd 3y ago
    They did get asylum [1]. One of their daughters went on to marry one of 19 siblings from the show bringing up Bates[2]. 1 https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/27/german-home-schooling-family-asylum https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/27/german-home-sc... 2 https://fundamentalists.fandom.com/wiki/Lydia_Bates https://fundamentalists.fandom.com/wiki/Lydia_Bates
    - k__ 3y ago
      "Trace's father Gil Bates" lolwat?!
- tourmalinetaco 3y ago
  It’s horrifying that homeschooling is considered child abuse multiple countries.
  - nibbleshifter 3y ago
    Not really. In many cases it cripples the child's social development. Which is child abuse.
    - johngladtj 3y ago
      And somehow the prison-scholar complex doesn't count?
      - nibbleshifter 3y ago
        That doesn't exist in my country, we have a tiny prison population.
        johngladtj 3y ago
        Are you counting the children mandated to go to school as part of that population of prisoners?
    - tourmalinetaco 3y ago
      If that was truly the reason why, and not a convenient excuse, then governments would state mandate social activities and not take children from their parents, which would be just as abusive. Instead, it’s all about mandating government control over children.
    - xupybd 3y ago
      I know many home schooled children. I see no evidence of poor social development. In fact I see more emotional scars left by bad interactions at public schools than I do from homeschooling.
      - 3y ago
- nonethewiser 3y ago
  That’s alarming
- rgrieselhuber 3y ago
  Hence the quotes around “rights” — if you live in a country where rights are granted by a legal system, you have no rights at all, simply privilege in a will-to-power system.
atoav 3y ago
> It’s a sad statement that people are surprised that they have the “right” to educate their own children. I am not sure how this is handled around the world but in German speaking countries there is a "Schulpflicht"/compulsory education. So by that definition if you homeschool your children (by taking them out of the public school system) you not only have the right to educate them, you have the duty to do so. I am not sure how it is elsewhere, but the home schooled people I got to know fall into two categories: 1. Kids with rich parents who had the funds to get the right people 2. Kids with parents belonging to some religious sect that didn't want other kids to influence theirs Both of them can have true deficiencies when it comes to interacting with "regular people" in their lives after
- xupybd 3y ago
  I remember a family that gained refugee status in America due to the inability to homeschool. https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/27/german-home-schooling-family-asylum https://www.theguardian.com/world/2010/jan/27/german-home-sc...
  - atoav 3y ago
    Curious, I am not a German but from Austria (also German speaking, but a tenth of the sice and a different monarchic history for many centuries, so different in culture as well). Here it is possible to homeschool your kids, but you have to demonstrate to the school board that what the kids learn is comparable to what a public school delivers. Also, they can take that right away if they feel parents are not fulfilling their duty: https://hslda.org/post/austria https://hslda.org/post/austria

boerseth 3y ago

I've come to think a lot about home schooling. As I have grown up, taught myself a bunch of interesting things, and been exposed to different kinds of approaches and teachers, I've become pretty passionate about pedagogy. I realise I probably only see small parts of the picture, and like the article says, I would quickly come to respect teachers a lot more if I decided to have a go at it. Still, I wonder. The most obvious downside is probably that the social dimension of public schools is hard to replace. But imagine you're five friendly families, where the different parents have different academic strengths. You all decide to work 80%, and rotate from day to day which parent couple teaches the children. Wouldn't that be something?

dbspin 3y ago
You'll be pleased to hear it is something! There's a whole school system designed around this approach - parents as staff, non-directive learning, secular, democratic, no age stratification, school as an Ivan Illich style workshop for learning. They're called Sudbury Valley and they've been around since the 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School I actually made a radio documentary about one of these schools, Wicklow Sudbury in the South East of Ireland https://soundcloud.com/garethstack/the-free-school https://soundcloud.com/garethstack/the-free-school As someone who had a very rough experience of school (the social side being the worst part), it was inspiring to see a place where kids could truly be themselves and pursue their interests (often to levels far beyond their 'grade year' in traditional education).
moi2388 3y ago
And why not see which parents teach the best by measuring test results? And then have that person teach full time and the rest can work regular jobs again and oh wait it’s schools again isn’t it
- ThunderSizzle 3y ago
  Let's also scale it up to hundreds upon hundreds of kids so now everyone is just a number. Let's add a school board that ignores parents, meaning parents no longer have any real say any more. Let's add a teachers union that protects bad teachers, even to the point of keeping pedophiles in schools. Let's close schools for 4 months so kids can work on the fields in the summer and forget everything when they return.

CrampusDestrus 3y ago

First, one should really think about where his beliefs about education come from. Then, once realized they basically come from nothing, you can throw them away and start anew

xupybd 3y ago

We will home school our children. They're not old enough but my wife is not planning to go back to work until all our children have completed their home schooling. We've seen friends do an amazing job and their children have done very well academically and socially. I have friends who work in our public school system. They tell me how hard it is. Most of their time is spent on a few problem kids. I respect what they do but think my wife can do better as she will be better resourced to teach when compared to one teacher with 30+ students. It's our dream to give our children the best we can. We might sacrifice on our income but we think it's worth it.

sparrish 3y ago
I commend you. My wife and I homeschool our 7 (3rd just graduated) and it's a lot of work but we've found it worthwhile. I sincerely hope will too. Homeschooling is not the right choice for every family but for those who are able, I encourage it. The biggest mistake we see new homeschooling families make is trying to replicate the public school experience (same class times, text books, tests, etc). I've never seen that succeed. Successful homeschooling is usually a very different dynamic and one of the greatest strengths is the ability to optimize everything to how the child learns best - while balancing that with time and effort constraints on the parents. I love seeing my kids get excited about a concept, historical figure, or skill. When it happens, we run down that road as far as want to go. Watching their faces shine as the light bulb comes on is priceless. Helping them learn how to learn is one of the greatest joys I've had as a dad.

Ambolia 3y ago

Public school is one of the few places and times in life where people are forced to be closed in a room with people they don't like at best, or suffer systematic violence at worst, with no chance to just leave. Would be funny to see workplaces try to implement some of the weird practices schools do, like shuffling people around into random groups that may have built zero social rapport and have zero idea of each other's skills, and make them complete a project in a few days.

spacephysics 3y ago
Being forced to be in a room and work with people who may not like you or you may not like I think is great for a developing child. It teaches resiliency, builds mental strength, and can develop strategies on how to work with people someone may not get along with. Taking out extreme bullying or worse, we need to stop sheltering the younger generation else they’ll, on average, become less able to handle stressors later in life. The key part of this equation, to my armchair thinking, is having parents who are active in teaching the child what strategies to employ in difficult situations, and teachers that mediate to ensure nothing gets out of hand.
- bhgtopt 3y ago
  [flagged]
- pelasaco 3y ago
  > The key part of this equation, to my armchair thinking, is having parents who are active in teaching the child what strategies to employ in difficult situations The parents are the crucial part. It's my job as parent to be active in my kids education. The school, is just part of that. Making sure, my kids is in the right school, in a safe environment, and enjoying the process, are my tasks too. As parents, you are people managing your kids in the school.
  - spacephysics 3y ago
    Fully agree. I went through a few school systems, from a wealthy public school to a less fortunate city public school. Each have their own problems, but common amongst them were parents that were either mentally absent, or physically absent. In these cases, kids either ended up doing drugs and racing cars on windy roads, sometimes crashing into trees while high. Or getting into gangs or violence and having a record before 18.

lucidguppy 3y ago

Its frustrating to realize we've been at this task of raising and educating children for the better part of 250,000 years and we still haven't got the knack of it.

deleted 3y ago
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jtr1 3y ago
Most countries have a public system to teach physics to teenagers for free. I’d say we’ve made a little progress.
jaggederest 3y ago
I think, as a species, we're in a pretty good place. Literacy rates are high, general knowledge is adequate. Mostly, from what I can tell, if children aren't mistreated, are encouraged and helped along the way, they end up pretty okay regardless of how we characterize the process involved. Humans come curious and inquisitive from the factory, we mostly just need to get out of the way and fill in any accidental omissions.

smitty1e 3y ago

While we're too busy to homeschooling, we love our children too much to do other than pay for tuition at a school that is committing acts of education on the kids. I have plenty of conversations about the TWO genders, and the truth that "form follows function". One hopes that the storm of folly raging in the culture consumes itself soonest.

jtr1 3y ago
Ah, now here are the homeschoolers I know. Cheers, hope your kids still talk to you when they’re grown.
- smitty1e 3y ago
  I explicitly said we're NOT homeschooling, but go on.
  - jtr1 3y ago
    Ah don’t sell yourself short, it’s a state of mind as much as anything
    - smitty1e 3y ago
      The public school grooming? Straight up pathology.
      - deleted 3y ago
        [deleted]
      - jtr1 3y ago
        You’re a perfect specimen of your type
        smitty1e 3y ago
        If one can succeed at being an honest man, that is enough.

20after4 3y ago

Home schooling was the best thing my parents did for my education and social development. Surprisingly, all they really had to do, is let me do basically whatever I was interested in. They would answer questions and provide resources for learning when I asked for them, but not a lot of structure or forced lesson plan. I think it worked out pretty well for me. I say this as a kindergarten dropout who attended college at age 16, managed a 3.89 GPA, and have a fairly successful career in software for the last 20 years. I am not particularly great at public speaking but I have absolutely no problem interacting socially. Public school can be hell for a lot of kids and it's unfortunate that so many are subjected to such a broken system.

aeonik 3y ago
Same here. I was only home schooled, part time, for science and math in 8th grade. I had failed algebra 2 years in a row and really falling behind. I had been to private school, public school, and a charter school. In one year of home schooling, my dad was able to get me from barely understanding functions to solving systems of equations, and also got me fluent in spreadsheets for data analysis. He was a Biochemistry undergrad, and he also got me to balancing stoichiometric equations by the end of the year. From my perspective it was really nice to move at my own pace. If I had trouble understanding something, we could slow down and really focus on things.
xupybd 3y ago
I'm someone who plans to homeschool and thinks it can work well I'm surprised so many claim it's not possible for home schooled children to develop socially. As a person who's been homeschooled how does it feel when people make the assertion that the schooling you had must cause socialization problems?
- hutzlibu 3y ago
  I think no one claims it is not possible. The problem is, if you live somewhere, where everyone is going the normal way - then all the normal kids socialising will happen in school and you stay the outsider. You won't even see them most of the time, depending on the area. But when you are connected to a couple of families doing it close by and you do manage that the kids can actually learn and play together on a regular base, then there is no problem at all.

concordDance 3y ago

As someone who was homeschooled, my own experience was that its much more efficient in terms of learning per hour, you can get top marks in standardised tests averaging just a few hours a week. However, it requires parental effort to ensure proper socialisation (club involvement etc) and you probably should find other families doing something similar to socialize your children with.

criddell 3y ago

Those are some long paragraphs…

jtr1 3y ago

I was home schooled through my freshman year of high school. I have no intention of home schooling my children, but I’m always fascinated to listen to other adults in the process of talking themselves into it, because it gives me small a window into the headspace my parents and their peers were in when they made this consequential decision for their children. Some close friends are headed down this path, and while their reasoning is decidedly more secular, there are lingering echoes of the old Puritan impulse to flee from a fallen world. If you’re considering home schooling yourself, I would just encourage you to consider that, like any product with a passionate fan base, there is a powerful echo chamber built up to reinforce your decision, so don’t expect to get a full accounting of the pros and cons from people on the inside. I’d also suggest to folks who have never been homeschooled themselves to spend some time reading through the experiences of adults who were homeschooled. Your kids deserve for you to make as clear eyed of a decision as you can about this.

jaggederest 3y ago
Can you elaborate? I'm interested in what your experience has been like.
voisin 3y ago
> like any product with a passionate fan base, there is a powerful echo chamber built up to reinforce your decision, so don’t expect to get a full accounting of the pros and cons from people on the inside. This is no more true than for people who send their kids to regular school. All of society is streamlined to do this. As soon as you attempt to home school, the vast majority of people will tell you it is akin to child abuse and you might be lucky enough to know a few other homeschooling parents who tell you otherwise but their voices will pale in comparison to the cacophony from the other side. Make no mistake that it is a massive leap of faith - not some easy decision made in an echo chamber.
- jtr1 3y ago
  My point is that there’s a selection bias among homeschool families. If you are talking them, you are talking to people who are very far along a path of commitment escalation who have a host of psychological incentives to validate their own decisions. I’m sure you’ve encountered many detractors. Your fortitude in tuning them out is a poor measure of the rigor of your decision-making. I will also say, in my experience with homeschool families, the lifestyle attracts a disproportionate number of narcissists, as it offers a high degree of control over a captive audience to people with an inflated sense of their own abilities. I’m not saying this is the case for you, and I’ve also certainly known many families who were motivated by special circumstances, individual needs, or just a desire for more freedom for kids who didn’t fit well into the public school system. I would assert that the former is the modal case, and that parents looking to homeschool should critically examine their motivations and abilities. Unfortunately, the people who most need that reflection are usually the least inclined towards it.

COGlory 3y ago

Anecdote; I was home schooled. I know/have met probably 100-200 homeschooled people, mostly as a kid, in a large Catholic group, although a couple as an adult when I was getting my PhD. The vast majority, probably > 90%, functioned just fine socially after reaching adulthood. The remainder were usually on the autism spectrum. I believe autistic children are probably over-represented among homeschoolers. This "homeschooling results in poor social skills" trope is absurd and needs to stop. There are a number of other problems with homeschooling, among a number of upsides as well. But barring Branch-Davidian type social isolation, social skills are just not an issue.

voisin 3y ago
> This "homeschooling results in poor social skills" trope is absurd and needs to stop. I think it will stop shortly. Thanks to COVID the vast majority of the western world got to see what a version of homeschooling could look like and perhaps unsurprisingly, many found it to be as good for the mind as WFH is for adults and chose to keep their children homeschooling post-COVID. I know a ton of people who have done this. Soon it will be seen as just another option for education without the social stigma.
- viraptor 3y ago
  > vast majority of the western world got to see what a version of homeschooling could look like Did they? I've only heard of what the experience looked like in 3 schools really, but all of them were essentially "same program, more homework, fewer lessons, all online". That seems very different to an actual homeschooling situation.
  - fsagx 3y ago
    Indeed. The pandemic at-home schooling I witnessed was just a much worse version of regular school over zoom. It was very far removed from the homeschooling I was saw pre-Covid.
kcplate 3y ago
> This "homeschooling results in poor social skills" trope is absurd and needs to stop. There are a number of other problems with homeschooling, among a number of upsides as well. But barring Branch-Davidian type social isolation, social skills are just not an issue. I never understood that to be honest. Most of the people homeschooling their children that I know also participate in homeschooling groups where there is a lot of social interaction, as well as church/religious events etc. It maybe rather ideologically siloed, which can be a bit shocking when the child starts emerging from the silo, but that is different thing than having “poor social skills”.

drewcoo 3y ago

I would expect home schooling to be more concerned with beliefs and public schooling to be more concerned with truth because it's always done for personal reasons in contradiction to normative reality. I suppose I should feel reassured that home schooling does not challenge any truths? Here in the US too many years ago, my personal experience with friends that were home-schooled up until 7th or 9th grades in school was that they were: - nice, but not well-socialized (and high school was a terrible time to start socializing: having no established friends when everyone is in cliques!) - smart and interested, but had gaps in their academic knowledge beyond math and English (science, social science, the arts) - curious (not stunted by public schooling - a plus!), but less likely to question/distrust things, including other kids - often more religious than the rest of us, but with less exposure to different faiths

gorpy7 3y ago

It’s probably like mutual funds vs stock picking. some parents will do better and some will do worse. the child gains the interest money- if the parent is a bad stock then it’s bad in isolation… schools are predictably mediocre but public/visible. if the parent’s decision is driven by their own schooling experience and/or desire to change an aspect of society then i think it’s questionable to make the child an instrument of that.

ryandrake 3y ago

Home schooling is one of those topics where there seems to be a huge difference between theory and practice. The theory is great: You're the parent. You are motivated by educational outcome. You believe your children can get a better education than at public schools. You have the time, patience, and resources to do a better job at home. The outcome is better-educated kids who get to skip the (admittedly terrible) abuses of the public school system. For some homeschooled kids, the above is actually what happened. You'll find all their glowing reviews of home schooling in the comment section below. In practice, at least in the USA, it's different. By and large (with exceptions, obviously), you are motivated by religious separatism. You are not worried about the quality of the education, but the content. You see the public school system as uninvited ideology and home schooling as a loophole you can use to avoid it. The outcome is worse-educated kids who skipped entire subjects and are not even remotely prepared for higher education. My wife's "moms groups" are always pushing homeschooling, and the sales pitch is never the quality of education. It's always that you can avoid those nasty topics like sex ed and evolution and that you can use the Bible in all your classes. More recently, during and after COVID, the pitches also included avoiding "political indoctrination". I know multiple actual families who pulled their kids out of public school for religious and ideological reasons, but nobody who did so with a legitimate intention of providing a higher quality factual education. Obviously they exist and a few are posting here, but I'd be shocked if those were even 10% of cases. I'll never forget this clip[1] interviewing a homeschool family, where the poor kid looks mortified that she doesn't know even basic 2nd grade math, with her mom smugly laughing about it. These products of home schooling are not posting their success stories on HN. 1: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyNzSW7I4qw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QyNzSW7I4qw

simonsarris 3y ago
The practice is great too. Almost all studies and surveys done to date suggest that homeschoolers do better across pretty much every measured metric, and that this gap is widening over time to favor homeschooling even more. If you've ever heard about Bloom's 2-sigma problem, this should be unsurprising. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem There are of course problems with survey data, but it's a huge mistake to think that homeschooling = the worst anecdotes you can find on TV. > By and large (with exceptions, obviously), you are motivated by religious separatism. This is not true. In the National Household Education Survey (2016), only 16% of homeschoolers said religious motivation was their primary reason, and only 5% moral education was their primary reason. Dissatisfaction with school academic quality and concern about environment at school were the two primary drivers.

friend_and_foe 3y ago

School in the US and broadly in the western model is based off of the Prussian national education model. It is not designed to educate your kids. It is designed to indoctrinate your kids. I say this without all the negative connotations associated with these words. It can be a positive thing, a state has to nation build to be successful, and for that they have to instill a uniform culture and ideology onto a probably very diverse population. But when you look at school in the US and you wonder why we aren't taught to do taxes, manage our finances, manage a household, why so many people graduate school without the ability to read well and whatever other problems you see, once you understand that the goal is not education, you'll get it. These problems are the result of a system as odds with itself because it is designed for indoctrination and some people try to use it to educate. It doesn't work well. I believe, with the internet and the revolution in information availability we have lived through and take for granted, school is basically obsolete and is a legacy system. I think homeschooling is the way to go. And you can actually educate your kids, instill them with your philosophy, create unique individuals, teach them critical thinking.