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I can't really know nor do I care to speculate on why it's becoming fashionable. But I'm a successful, well adjusted, homeschooled child from when it wasn't fas

• Ajedi32 2y ago
  The way kids learn to "deal with people" is by becoming more and more like them until they fit in. This can be a good thing or a bad thing, depending on the people in question.
• spandrew 2y ago
  This doesn't make sense to me. We all get better at a talent by practicing it. We make mistake. We watch others. We determine our own preferences for what we like/don't like. We learn, grow. Kids figure it out. How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better? You wouldn't get same exposure to the buttload of social interaction and scenarios in a closed system like that.
  • zaphar 2y ago
    Practice, with guidance is superior to practice without guidance. Homeschooling doesn't mean isolation in the average case. You get a lot of practice as a homeschooler. The primary difference is that your practice is both with other adults and children while supervised and also modeled directly to you in homeschooling by other adults while public school is primarily unsupervised and lacking in a modeled behavior to observe. The number one thing people would comment to my parents about me was that I was so comfortable socially in adult conversations and environments. I wasn't even in high school yet. I had adult level social skills by age 12. I didn't learn how to interact with people from other kids who had no idea how to either. I learned it from my parents and practiced what I learned with both other children and also adults. I'm only anecdotal evidence but a number of studies have backed up my own experience. A few links I had on hand can be found here. * Medlin, R. G. (2013). Homeschooling and the question of socialization revisited. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 284–297. https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socialization-2013.pdf https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socia... * Shyers, L. E. (1992). A comparison of social adjustment between home and traditionally schooled students. Home School Researcher https://archive.org/details/comparisonofsoci00shye https://archive.org/details/comparisonofsoci00shye * Taylor, J. W. (1986). Self-concept in home-schooling children. (Doctoral Dissertation). Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services. https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/726/ https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/726/
    • throw4847285 2y ago
      No offense, but the idea of having adult level social skills as a child is terrifying to me. Most of the people who I've encountered who describe themselves that way also talk about the burden of from a young age totally internalizing the idea of every interaction being a performance. Every interaction is a new opportunity to try and convince adults that you are worldly and smarter than other kids. That tends to mess you up. Of course, this is purely anecdotal.
      • zaphar 2y ago
        It didn't mess me up and I didn't treat any interaction as a peformance. They were just fun conversations.
        • throw4847285 2y ago
          Yeah, that's not fair to you at all, I'm sorry.
          • zaphar 2y ago
            No apologies necessary. You were just sharing your own personal experiences. I wasn't offended or hurt.
            • throw4847285 2y ago
              To be honest, I just saw a really phenomenal dark comedy routine about somebody who was adept at socializing with adults at 6 or 7 and I've been thinking a lot about that dynamic and the dark side of being a precocious kid. I wasn't that extreme, but I related to some of it, and then I ended up projecting that onto your description of home school kids. And yet, this guy wasn't home schooled. I think those are totally separate issues. Would be an interesting separate topic, though.
              • bgnn 2y ago
  • deltarholamda 2y ago
    You don't just stay home with your siblings. A major factor of how homeschooling works is homeschoolers have local organizations or co-ops where they do things together. And, yes, this is just reinventing some aspects of the public school system in the private sphere. But that is because parents, rightly or wrongly, feel they have zero influence over how the public school works, so they just sideload their own version. (I would say that the parents are right about having zero influence, as quite a lot of American public schools are so big and so bureaucratized that parents do not have a real voice without herculean effort.)
    • zaphar 2y ago
      The big difference about that reinvention is that there are way more parents present in those environments than the typical public school variant. So both good behaviors to observe are more visible and also interventions are significantly more frequent.
      • deltarholamda 2y ago
        It takes more effort to homeschool than farming it out to public schools, so you're naturally selecting for involved parents. To the detriment of public schools, it should be noted. It also skews the perspectives of homeschool parents into thinking "this is the best system, why doesn't everybody do it?" The answer is, of course, to take the good aspects of each system and make the public school system more viable again, but there are too many entrenched interests on both sides for this to be easy.
        • carlosjobim 2y ago
          > To the detriment of public schools, it should be noted. Yes, but what means of violence do you possess to be able to force these parents to be involved in the education of other people's children?
      • geye1234 2y ago
        There's also a variety of kids' ages at these events, so the younger can learn from the older (and parents can easily intervene if this isn't going well). And you know who your kids are interacting with: you know something about the families, or at least know someone who knows them, so the odds of malign influences are much lower.
  • bee_rider 2y ago
    I think it isn’t that unusual for homeschooling parents to form groups, you can do an art class together (otherwise hard to afford), start up some recurring social events, that sort of thing. K-12 school is sort of a weird social situation, right? You are mandated to be there (you can’t even quit or find a new job), your manager has the right/responsibility of in loco parentis, your co-workers can’t be fired and their only punishment for goofing off is that they might get nagged a bit, and your worst peers don’t care about that at all. I don’t think it is obviously good practice of grown up social skills. You can see the maladaptive behavior that sticks around after—office gossips, bullying, that sort of thing (I mean, that sort of behavior is present everywhere, but I’m pretty sure it is enhanced by the fact that these are strategies to win in the pressure cooker).
  • csa 2y ago
    > How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better? This is a very reductionist view of homeschooling. While some folks certainly do have this experience when homeschooled, a well-designed home schooling experience will have an abundance of social interactions with non-family members. Sports is an obvious one, but there are also many homeschool groups that engage in learning activities together.
  • flustercan 2y ago
    You get better at what you practice. If you practice unproductive social interactions and unhealthy coping skills all day, you will get better at unproductive social interactions and unhealthy coping skills.
  • Gormo 2y ago
    > We all get better at a talent by practicing it. Exactly. Which is why kids need to practice their social skills in environments that actually reflect how real-world societies functions, rather than being sequestered in an institution with utterly distorted, artificial social structure.
• arkh 2y ago
  > Teachers can't be expected to help 30+ children work through that. The big mystery is: how did teachers manage this miracle 50 or 80 years ago?
  • zaphar 2y ago
    Did they?
  • simonsarris 2y ago
    If you read something like Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, you realize that teachers didn't. In the middle+ class at least, the children's parents did that work by organizing specific extra-curriculars, such as dances, from a very young age. These ensured that the children learned manners, dated people of acceptable character or class, etc. That social infra is simply gone today. Parents don't have much of an interest, or are erroneously(!) assuming that teachers are supposed to do it, or used to do it. We are less class focused* today, which may be good, but certainly less manners and etiquette focused as well. * by that I mean like, if you are an American of German descent, you are not particularly worried if you child is dating an American of Irish descent, whereas you might have been in 1940. Similarly (and overlappingly) for Protestant/catholic etc etc. Not even what we typically think of as class today! We're so blind to a lot of that stuff now, we forget it existed, just like the other social infrastructure.
    • barbazoo 2y ago
      > That social infra is simply gone today. Parents don't have much of an interest, or are erroneously(!) assuming that teachers are supposed to do it, or used to do it. You might be missing the fact that back in the day there often used to be one parent working and one parent staying at home. Nowadays both parents need at least one job. Wealth inequality at it again.
• rbanffy 2y ago
  > Which is essentially what public school does. The school I went to had, luckily, excellent teachers. One of them, not sure if as a coordinated effort or not, was big on letting the class decide things and helping us form the social structures needed for that - structuring discussions, votes, rules, and so on. I suspect it was a reaction to the dictatorship time requirement of studying an idealized version of Brazil's political organization.
  • zaphar 2y ago
    There are definitely hero teachers and administrations in public schools. They aren't the norm though and it's a bit of a lottery whether your child will end up with one.
    • rbanffy 2y ago
      A first step is to properly fund public schools. Then one would need to better select teachers (which becomes an option if teaching pays better) and train them. Teachers need to be trained in teaching, not only their subject matters, and need to be kept updated.
      • zaphar 2y ago
        There are a lot of schools that get funded quite well and perform very poorly. It matters how you spend that money. The data on this is hard to properly interpret too since higher income parents tend to live in higher income areas which means better funded schools and those parents also tend to be more involved in their childrens academic and social success than lower income so the correlated variables get confusing. However I do agree that spending funds in ways that help a public school compete with private and/or homeschooling is a worthy goal. That means you need: 1. more teachers per student in the school. (More admin doesn't solve this. You need smaller class sizes). You'll never be able to afford the one-on-one ratio a homeschool family can achieve but you can certainly close the gap. 2. more focus on actually proven approaches to the basics of reading, writing, and arithmetic. (phonics, essay writing, literature analysis, and "old math") A lot of pseudo science has entered the class room over that last few decades. 3. fostering more parental involvement in their child's education. This is extremely difficult to improve but has the highest impact. One of the reasons homeschooling on average does better is because the parents are self selected for involvement. 4. holding kids to real standards and having consequences for not meeting those standards. Tricky to do politically but essential for kids to learn both social skills and academic skills.
• karaterobot 2y ago
  That actually sounds like a good way to teach kids how to deal with others. Just figure it out, in a safe environment with minimal consequences and some guard rails. I wouldn't expect a teacher to teach kids how to socialize, especially on an individual level, but rather to step in when necessary. Being in a big group of people you may not like is pretty much a description of life, and the goal is to learn to function and even thrive in that environment. I support home schooling too, but I don't think there's anything about it that naturally lends itself to learning this skill. Many homeschoolers manage it, but it takes extra work, whereas being in 'gen pop' teaches it as a side effect.
  • zaphar 2y ago
    Except the literature from studies on the subject suggest that homeschoolers on average do slightly better than public schoolers on this specific metric. The data suggests public school has worse outcomes.
    • karaterobot 2y ago
      I didn't say that home schooling produced poor social skills, and in fact said something like the opposite. My point was that traditional schooling was a perfectly fine way to learn social skills, as a side effect of being forced to socialize. If home schooled kids and traditionally-schooled kids have somewhat similar social skills, and (as you say) teachers in public schools aren't teaching these skills directly, how do you suppose kids are learning them?
  • tristor 2y ago
    > in a safe environment with minimal consequences and some guard rails The problem is that a public school, at least in the US, is /not/ a safe environment with minimal consequences, and it has effectively no guard rails. Your idea is a nice one, but it's not realistic, and reality is exactly why people are opting out of public schooling for their children.
• binary_slinger 2y ago
  > Homeschooling I firmly believe can be a more effective way to get exposure and learn how to deal with other people than a public school. In your homeschooling are you with other students or just your family members? > Public schools are training grounds for poor social skills. This statement doesn’t make sense to me.