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>my experience home educated kids are better socialised, etc. Phew, gonna do a heavy disagree on that one. There is very little better for learning how to navi

>my experience home educated kids are better socialised, etc. Phew, gonna do a heavy disagree on that one. There is very little better for learning how to navigate and survive the brutality of human nature than school. Home schooled students almost always are not well equipped to deal with conflict or consensus building, in my experience.

robocat 2y ago
> Home schooled students almost always are not well equipped to deal with conflict or consensus building You imply that traditional schooling teaches this, but in my experience plenty of people never learn either skill and perhaps work is where we learn it. I've just been a fly-on-the-wall seeing 3x 20s women trying to resolve a significant conflict - they all seemed to have a horrific struggle because 2 of them were extreme conflict avoiders. I see the same issue in some 50s to 70s friends: an inability to deal with facts or conflicts leading to poor outcomes for themselves. Do most home schooled children lack intuititively learned social skills? Alternatively, some friends with great social skills had lots of siblings (I think that helps too).
K0balt 2y ago
Totally depends on what you mean by home schooling. If you mean socially isolated, you may have a good point. I have certainly seen this. But being home schooled can also mean that the kids learn to operate in the adult world, as children, but with expectations of others as adults and an implied sense that they also should strive to meet the bar of mature adult behavior. This happens when children exist in the world side by side with their parents, who have chosen to live a life (for the time being) that will provide a rich environment in which their children can mature. We didn’t have the resources to provide a high quality private education, so we uprooted, sold our stuff, packed up a cargo trailer and a van, and spent a decade getting by on a shoestring while doing the most interesting and challenging things we imagined we might achieve as a family. For the formative years of my children, that is what we did. From an early age, aside from their siblings, they interacted primarily with adults in their world, often from different cultures and speaking different languages, and often in situations where the stakes were high (intrinsic danger imposed by the natural environment and classical physics) . They learned to be a cohesive team, to handle responsibility within the range of their understanding, to seek and accept council, and to ignore immature behavior when it pops up in inappropriate times. This sometimes rugged beginning has served them quite well in their lives. I could never have provided them with the social foundations that they have today in a public school environment, and we didn’t have the money for a high-caliber private education.
- graemep 2y ago
  We did not go as far as you did, but did move house a lot, and lived in two countries. My kids interacted a lot with adults but they also interacted with a lot of kids too - including school going kids.
- idiotsecant 2y ago
  Living in a van seems like a less than ideal situation for kids.
  - K0balt 2y ago
    We travelled across the continent for a couple of months, , traded in the cargo trailer for a camper trailer along the way because camping was a pain in the “@&. We shipped our tools and supplies forward to the boatyard in Florida. Camping with 3 kids wasn’t bad, really, a lot of work but a lot of teaching opportunities. When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner. We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it. We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol. The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard) Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure. We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat it, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats. It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the bloat important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to bee overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits. I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education. It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed. The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat.
dgfitz 2y ago
I was home taught until 9th grade. People don’t believe me when I tell them. I’m “way too well-adjusted” to have been raised that way. Conflict isn’t an issue for me at all, and consensus-building is probably one of my strengths. I said all this to say, anecdotal opinions are just that, anecdotal, and opinions. The whole “homeschooled kids are weird” is a narrative that seems to have been politically driven, not based in reality.
- baq 2y ago
  Home schooling is a signal of at least somewhat off the rails parents where I’m from (not U.S.), if these folks have similar experiences what they’re really expressing is surprise that your parents were… normal… but still decided to homeschool their kids? Or that you turned out ‘normal’ despite your parents. You are a significant update to people’s posteriors.
  - graemep 2y ago
    Not true in the UK. I have met a good cross section of home educating parents in the UK through multiple means (HE classes and activities, online, dropping kids off at exams,...) and its definitely not true. There is a higher proportion of kids with mental health issues and special needs because of a lack of provision in schools. More social liberal than the population at large and more affluent. Maybe more of some religious groups.
eru 2y ago
Just because much of home schooling might be worse (I don't know), doesn't mean that existing schools are particularly good.

robocat 2y ago

> Home schooled students almost always are not well equipped to deal with conflict or consensus building You imply that traditional schooling teaches this, but in my experience plenty of people never learn either skill and perhaps work is where we learn it. I've just been a fly-on-the-wall seeing 3x 20s women trying to resolve a significant conflict - they all seemed to have a horrific struggle because 2 of them were extreme conflict avoiders. I see the same issue in some 50s to 70s friends: an inability to deal with facts or conflicts leading to poor outcomes for themselves. Do most home schooled children lack intuititively learned social skills? Alternatively, some friends with great social skills had lots of siblings (I think that helps too).

K0balt 2y ago

Totally depends on what you mean by home schooling. If you mean socially isolated, you may have a good point. I have certainly seen this. But being home schooled can also mean that the kids learn to operate in the adult world, as children, but with expectations of others as adults and an implied sense that they also should strive to meet the bar of mature adult behavior. This happens when children exist in the world side by side with their parents, who have chosen to live a life (for the time being) that will provide a rich environment in which their children can mature. We didn’t have the resources to provide a high quality private education, so we uprooted, sold our stuff, packed up a cargo trailer and a van, and spent a decade getting by on a shoestring while doing the most interesting and challenging things we imagined we might achieve as a family. For the formative years of my children, that is what we did. From an early age, aside from their siblings, they interacted primarily with adults in their world, often from different cultures and speaking different languages, and often in situations where the stakes were high (intrinsic danger imposed by the natural environment and classical physics) . They learned to be a cohesive team, to handle responsibility within the range of their understanding, to seek and accept council, and to ignore immature behavior when it pops up in inappropriate times. This sometimes rugged beginning has served them quite well in their lives. I could never have provided them with the social foundations that they have today in a public school environment, and we didn’t have the money for a high-caliber private education.

graemep 2y ago
We did not go as far as you did, but did move house a lot, and lived in two countries. My kids interacted a lot with adults but they also interacted with a lot of kids too - including school going kids.
idiotsecant 2y ago
Living in a van seems like a less than ideal situation for kids.
- K0balt 2y ago
  We travelled across the continent for a couple of months, , traded in the cargo trailer for a camper trailer along the way because camping was a pain in the “@&. We shipped our tools and supplies forward to the boatyard in Florida. Camping with 3 kids wasn’t bad, really, a lot of work but a lot of teaching opportunities. When we got to the boatyard, we spent the next two years living in our camper as we rebuilt a 50foot steel schooner. We didn’t have much cash, so we did all of the work ourselves and salvaged steel from where we could find it. We became great customers of the metal recyclers in the area lol. The most expensive thing was buying the epoxy based paint and the bottom paint. (And the 500 dollars a month for the boatyard) Other than that , thousands of grinding disks and maybe 20 harbor freight grinders lol.we found they would last through 4 or 5 brush replacements if you didn’t burn up the armatures by using brushes to the point of failure. We spent the next few years sailing the east coast and the Caribbean, central and northern South America. We would salvage contaminated fuel and filter it and treat it, and I did engine and electrical repair on other boats. It wasn’t a comfortable life, but it was full of opportunities to teach things about life, lots of skills, and independent thinking and action. Probably the bloat important lessons were in risk tolerance and risk management. It’s easy to bee overly risk averse in the modern world, or to limit your risk taking to avocational pursuits. I was happy to swallow the anchor when it was time for the kids to start building their social structures and to get started in more advanced levels of education. It was hard, and an enormous sacrifice for more than a decade, but I wouldn’t trade that experience for my kids for anything else that we could have realistically managed. The kids grew up in an adult world, but there were lots of other boat kids, and we often stopped for months at a time. When we would be in a place for more than a month or two, the kids would enroll in local schools, which we treated like social studies/ language class, managing primary curriculum on the boat.

dgfitz 2y ago

I was home taught until 9th grade. People don’t believe me when I tell them. I’m “way too well-adjusted” to have been raised that way. Conflict isn’t an issue for me at all, and consensus-building is probably one of my strengths. I said all this to say, anecdotal opinions are just that, anecdotal, and opinions. The whole “homeschooled kids are weird” is a narrative that seems to have been politically driven, not based in reality.

baq 2y ago
Home schooling is a signal of at least somewhat off the rails parents where I’m from (not U.S.), if these folks have similar experiences what they’re really expressing is surprise that your parents were… normal… but still decided to homeschool their kids? Or that you turned out ‘normal’ despite your parents. You are a significant update to people’s posteriors.
- graemep 2y ago
  Not true in the UK. I have met a good cross section of home educating parents in the UK through multiple means (HE classes and activities, online, dropping kids off at exams,...) and its definitely not true. There is a higher proportion of kids with mental health issues and special needs because of a lack of provision in schools. More social liberal than the population at large and more affluent. Maybe more of some religious groups.

eru 2y ago

Just because much of home schooling might be worse (I don't know), doesn't mean that existing schools are particularly good.