11 ms·

I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before. We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools. We saw a stark diffe

• aidenn0 11mo ago
  > But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better. What's the reason?
  • jmathai 11mo ago
    I think we could teach them as well as the school does. And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.
    • Aboutplants 11mo ago
      “And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.” Take it from someone who was homeschooled from pre-k through high school, you will absolutely not provide a better social environment. I was so unprepared to handle the social dynamics in casual, educational or professional that it took years and years of active work to put myself in a position where it wasn’t an absolute detriment to my success. I have no doubt you can educate your children well, it’s every other aspect of humanity that is typically missed out on and can lead to unintended consequences.
      • Freedom2 11mo ago
        One could say this is where the free market of schooling comes into play. Does it make more economic sense for businesses to choose those with social skills learnt from home schooling, or ones who have not been home schooled? Definitely curious to see where this goes.
        • sanktanglia 11mo ago
          If only it was actually a free market. Republicans are actively kneecapping public education so they can pump money to the schools that are free to to discriminate and kick out underperforming kids
      • jmathai 11mo ago
        Sounds like you had a hard time transitioning. Sorry for that. I don't believe it's a magic pill by any means. But I've known many recently home schooled kids and they seem a lot more mature than their public school peers. So I think we have a decent shot at having similar results.
        • Voultapher 11mo ago
          Seeming mature to an adult isn't the thing in question though, is it? Not feeling or appearing awkward when interacting on their own in their 20s is what is being criticized. The anecdotal evidence you present doesn't include home schooled children in their 20s as far as I can tell.
          • jmathai 11mo ago
            It doesn’t but they seem on a trajectory for adulthood that appears just fine compared to to others.
          • QuercusMax 11mo ago
            Homeschooled kids have much more flexible schedules which can allow them to do things in the community during the daytime that are not available to kids who have to go to school in-person full time. This can include volunteer work or part time jobs working with the public and interacting with people of all ages. Why do you think you being forced into a monoculture of only kids your own age would help your interaction with others when you're in your 20s? 25 year olds don't behave anything like teenagers.
    • Voultapher 11mo ago
      > And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially. Citation needed. Every perspective I've heard personally - and mirrored in comments here as well - from the non parent side of things, is quite negative in terms of learning how to behave and socialize with your peers. To you the children might seem polite and servile, and you might see this as something positive - as you state in another comment - but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
      • indecisive_user 11mo ago
        >but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization. Citation needed. If you put your kids in homeschooling and provide no other outlet for socialization then sure, they'll be socially awkward. My brother and I were homeschooled, but we were also heavily involved in our community. We were at the local park playing sports 3-4 times per week, we did various summer camps, we had a few other homeschool families that we'd setup playdates with. Our parents would sometimes joke that we barely ever home! And, unsurprisingly, we had no problems with socializing or making friends later in life. Was it the same kind of socialization you get from going to public school? No, but I consider that a feature :)
      • aidenn0 11mo ago
        I know a ton of home-schooled kids and this is far from universal. Yes, kids who were home-schooled because their parents didn't want secular society interfering with them raising their kids in a niche religion are more likely to experience this. Even in those cases, however, I found that the kids adapted rather quickly. In most other cases[1], the parents were explicitly worried about their kids' socialization, and found many opportunities for the kids to interact with other kids their age (e.g. typical after school activities like sports or such). Many of the kids I know who were both home-schooled and socially awkward started in public school and were pulled due to bullying &c. To say that the home-schooling stunted their social growth is a counterfactual; it's just as easy to see them ending up worse off. For the most part, I would say that socializing in public school vs. homeschooling is a bit like communication with in-person companies versus remote; in the former it just "happens" to some degree, sometimes well, sometimes poorly; in the latter it requires intentional work to happen, but can still happen. 1: A notable exception is one person I know who was homeschooled by parents, with a father that traveled a lot for work and took his family with him. She was often in situations where she had fewer than 5 kids around close to her age who also spoke English.
    • standardUser 11mo ago
      That's probably true in a lot of cases for K-5. But I don't think any two people could teach a child with the same robustness as a the ~15 teachers most kids have during middle school/junior high, let alone provide things like labs, workshops, extracurriculars, etc. With high school that gap goes from big to enormous.
      • deleted 11mo ago
        [deleted]
      • SauntSolaire 11mo ago
        This just assumes the median education for 6-12 is any good. Also, a lot of labs, workshops, and extracurriculars can be easily found elsewhere - a lot of these have groups specifically for homeschoolers.
        • standardUser 11mo ago
          My schools were good, just an middle class CA suburb, but still good, especially our high school. And we had moderately impressive facilities and equipment that we could certainly not recreate at home. And of the roughly 30 teachers I had in high school, maybe 5 or 6 were really impressive - mostly in advanced classes - and they made all the difference. They were very smart, some of them overeducated, and they represented an entirely different type of adult in my life that I desperately needed, given the ultra-hierarchical nature of most family units.
      • aidenn0 11mo ago
        I've done all 3 of public/private/homeschool with my kids. My daughter's (public) HS chemistry class had exactly one lab that we couldn't do at home. The physics lab had zero. Bio is a bit harder since they had e.g. hundreds of pre-mounted slides for examples of various things. We also lack a biology major in our near-family. For extracurriculars: there are club youth sports aplenty, a youth orchestra, band, choir and drum & bugle group. There are participate in various academic competitions (mathletes, model UN &c.). It's definitely harder since there's no "club rush" like in public school, but these things are available (and the total cost is rather less than a non-parochial private school, though subtracting out lost salary for the parent doing the teaching reverses that for the more affordable options[1]) 1: It's completely possible to spend more than a private university tuition on private high schools where I live, but the ones not subsidized by the Roman Catholic Church start in the low $20,000s
• Esophagus4 11mo ago
  How are you thinking about the socialization aspects of homeschooling vs not? I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers so I’m curious how you thought about it.
  • jmathai 11mo ago
    Having put 2 kids (10th and 8th grade now) through a couple school options…the socialization in schools is pretty bad. Kids from home schooling families we know are as polite or substantially more polite than those in the school system.
    • jauntywundrkind 11mo ago
      [flagged]
      • PKop 11mo ago
        You're just outsourcing the authority you accept to some other group of adults and institutions. They don't have some special moral high ground that makes them better than a child's own parents and non-school social circle. If you care about your kids and have self confidence in your own character, why wouldn't you hold yourself up over strangers?
        • jauntywundrkind 11mo ago
          If the child sees nothing but their parents they have no parallax view to assess and learn for themselves. At a public school they will experience many adult teachers & see which they respect for which reasons. Not respecting your teachers but having to get along anyway is also a thing. It just seems horrific to restrict a child to a single relationship that the parents have such control over. Monstrous.
      • logical_proof 11mo ago
        Judgment and sense are not earned... they are taught. Tell me how teachers demand any less than total respect from domineered children? Maybe Pink Floyd had no basis for Another Brick In The Wall? I would ask who is more qualified than their parents to instill in their children judgement and sense? You might argue that there are morally bankrupt parents but I would counter that there are morally bankrupt teachers and a parent has more incentive to raise their child than a stranger does.
• mcphage 11mo ago
  > It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better. 6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.
  • jmathai 11mo ago
    That’s not a great example though, is it? I’ve seen many kids, including my own older ones, who have gone through the school system and others who haven’t.
    • mcphage 11mo ago
      I’ve watched people on YouTube make all sorts of amazing things, and they make it look easy. Which leads to thoughts of “hey, that’s easy, I could do that”.
  • Brendinooo 11mo ago
    This is why it's useful to look up stats when we have them. For example, homeschooled students do better on the ACT than public school kids. https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info-Brief-2015-2.pdf https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info... Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.
    • albedoa 11mo ago
      This is some fascinating insight. Do you think that the things being compared are [homeschooling] and [fighting grizzlies]?
      • missedthecue 11mo ago
        I would say the interesting thing is the sudden increase over the last 5 years. Presumably, the number of Americans who think they can KO a grizzly bear is a lizardman constant situation in the surveys over time. But the number of people homeschooling is recently skyrocketing.
• AnimalMuppet 11mo ago
  One of the key issues in school is classroom size. A teacher with 30 kids is handicapped as a teacher compared to one with a smaller class. Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.
  • 5f3cfa1a 11mo ago
    Grade retention ('holding kids back') has additionally dropped significantly since the average HNer has gone to school. I remember going to school where one of my peers went to sixth grade with his brother two years older than him. But now, we give out social promotions. That might've worked if we funded schools & gave students who fell behind significant interventions & 1x1 attention, but that's not what happened. One of my friends has a very bright and talented fifth grader in a class with multiple students who can barely read or write. Guess who gets the most attention from educators? Which group the teachers structure the class for?
  • BeetleB 11mo ago
    I used to think this way, but some experiences made me realize it's not so cut and dry. When you have a class size over 20, teachers are forced to be a lot more systematic, which can improve the effectiveness of their teaching. Good teachers make heavy use of social proof. When I tried to teach my kid at home, it was a struggle. But when the kid is around his peers in a classroom, and they are going along with the teacher, he naturally falls in line with no cajoling, etc. If there were only 5 students, the likelihood he'll just go along with things is much lower.
    • svieira 11mo ago
      Yep, that's definitely true. That being said, figuring out which approach to take requires paying attention (which you did), there's no guarantee that any two people (or any one person at two times) will be in the same cohort.
  • jancsika 11mo ago
    Did you make a schedule of regularly switching off with other families of four? In other words, those parents teach your kids and you teach their kids? Otherwise I'm not sure how you'd tackle confirmation bias creeping up in all kinds of ways.
• Atotalnoob 11mo ago
  I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.
  • anon7000 11mo ago
    I was homeschooled and I got a fairly strong education. What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids. For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.
  • pacomerh 11mo ago
    What works for one might not work for another one. Can't generalize.
    • Yizahi 11mo ago
      We can actually. It's called theory of probability and statistics, which is probably "forgotten" by these amazing self-appointed homeschoolers. A few rare successes of homeschoolers doesn't mean this practice is good on average, and vice versa the rare failures of the public education system doesn't mean that it is bad on average.
      • Brendinooo 11mo ago
        Most times I look this up, I see stuff like "[t]he home-educated typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests". https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#Academic https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#Academic
        • ribosometronome 11mo ago
          Looking at the replies, I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores but social development and preparing kids for society outside the house. It definitely requires considerably more, active attention from parents. Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades and ensure that they're maintaining an active social life but I think the difficulty of nailing that as you go-your-own-way is apparent.
• rich_sasha 11mo ago
  I suppose there are few talented, hard working people who want to teach, and they command a premium. Education is expensive and underfunded. As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money. By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.
  • rahimnathwani 11mo ago
    Education is expensive and underfunded. Expensive yes. Underfunded depends on where you are. San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student. I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.
    • triceratops 11mo ago
      $28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco because of the insane cost of housing and everything else.
      • SauntSolaire 11mo ago
        How does housing cost affect the cost for a school to educate a student? Are you saying it's the cost of paying for the school's real-estate?
        • ToValueFunfetti 11mo ago
          High housing cost means teachers need higher salaries to account for either their higher cost of living or the extra commute
        • connicpu 11mo ago
          It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.
• Yizahi 11mo ago
  Poor kids :( . Hope the damage won't be lasting for them, at least they did went to proper schools previously and have some basics taught.
  • sparrish 11mo ago
    I'll gladly stand up my 7 homeschooled kids next to any public school kids. All tested above grade level on state mandatory testing throughout their schooling. Two graduated early (some with college credits). My adult children (4 sons, ages 19-25) have gainful employment, living on their own (2 own their own homes), and standing on their own. One is married (I got a grandkid!), all have friends, communities they're involved in, and are healthy (physically and mentally). None take prescription meds nor struggle with anxiety or depression. Poor public school kids... I hope they can find help for the damage they suffered. <grin>
    • albedoa 11mo ago
      [flagged]
    • meroes 11mo ago
      You didn’t mention how many went to college
      • missedthecue 11mo ago
        Given they are sufficiently successful to be living on their own, married, and some with their own homes, whether they went to college is probably an inappropriate yardstick of success. I mean, be real. If a 25 year old is married and owns a home, but doesn't have a BSc are they a failure? What are we doing here.
        • meroes 11mo ago
          OP is free to chose their metrics. I wouldn’t trade education for a home personally. I think it’s interesting how they chose their metrics.
• 1970-01-01 11mo ago
  Is there an answer for athletics, music, robotics, and all the other after school teams? How does that work?
  • chasd00 11mo ago
    i'm sure many others will reply as well but there's lots of extracurricular options for homeschoolers as well as social engagements. It's kind of like a shadow school system, there's associations and groups and other organizations built around home schooled children. My wife and I considered it but we have managed to navigate our public school situation well enough without me, or my wife, having to quit working.
  • dkhenry 11mo ago
    Depending on where you live there are many options. In my school district home school kids can join any club or team offered by the public school system where you reside. Additionally there are numerous non-school related clubs and activities all over the place. My kids could play music with the local school district, with a musical education non-profit that is prolific in our area, or ( where they do play music ) with private lessons that have group classes, bands, and performance opportunities.
  • in_cahoots 11mo ago
    Of that list my kids' top-rated K-8 public school only offers music. Everything else is done privately.
  • 5f3cfa1a 11mo ago
    Of these, most are easily handled. I am in a midsized city and there are plenty of groups that offer music, robotics & engineering, speech & drama, etc. focused towards homeschooled students. That, plus the rise in homeschool "pods"/co-ops means socialization and activities are very available to students & parents who want them. Sports might be the challenge. Many US states have athletic associations that handle most K-12 sports, and they require enrollment in an accredited member school. I am aware of several homeschool specific athletic associations in my area, but all are targeted towards religious homeschoolers. Not certain what secular alternatives would exist, but soccer is very popular & there are plenty of competitive academies that operate outside the school ecosystem.
• jayd16 11mo ago
  Covid showed me that on the average home schooling (or at least remote learning) leaves kids extremely under developed. The stunted social and academic skills were pretty apparent in retrospect once the schools reopened.
  • BJones12 11mo ago
    Remote learning. You didn't see homeschooling, which is a very different thing, you saw remote learning. The homeschooling crowd has developed methods over the years to compensate. The COVID remote learning cohort did not, and suffered for it.
    • lazyasciiart 11mo ago
      Remote learning has also built many methods for success, and absolutely nobody even consulted them before implementing their ad hoc systems for Covid. There are entire online public schools and their staff were just ignored.
    • FireBeyond 11mo ago
      Have they? And what ensures they utilize those methods, exactly? Many states you, as a kid are 100% educationally off the grid the moments say "We're homeschooling".
  • Redster 11mo ago
    What happened to students who were in schools that closed was terrible. But it wasn't anything close to homeschooling.
  • wtallis 11mo ago
    COVID forced remote learning to be adopted very broadly, without the usual self-selection effect of families that choose to homeschool when they have a choice. So the observations from COVID don't really support any stronger claim than saying that homeschooling can be done badly.
• danesparza 11mo ago
  It also has its own problems that haven't even been quantified yet. If you think that homeschooling is a panacea, I guess we're all about to f*ck around and find out...
• thewebguyd 11mo ago
  > Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially. And this is only just now being investigated as a cause of harm. When I went to public high school, the bullying happened at school and stayed there. Kids now, their bullies follow them home, and since most of the social interaction now happens online instead of in-person, it's way more damaging to mental health than the classic caricature of a schoolyard bully. The most I had to compare myself to were my peers in my school, not the entire globe of influencers and fake instagram. There has been a complete erosion of boundaries. The threat is constant, you can't escape it, and kids are in a state of hyper-vigilance, always online or else they miss a crucial social interaction in group chat, or need to constantly check if a damaging photo, post, or rumor gets publicly posted to the internet while they were asleep. Not only that, teens are losing the ability to read human emotion, so misunderstandings escalate rapidly. In person communication now becomes too intense, and only increases anxiety and isolation, despite being hyperconnected. And that's just barely touching the surface.
• 5upplied_demand 11mo ago
  ==It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.== I think it also says something about the parents who think they can do as well or better.
  • seneca 11mo ago
    Well, they tend to be right. Outcomes for homeschooled children are broadly significantly better than government schooled children. Also, just FYI, to quote someone you prefix the text with ">".
• mdip 11mo ago
  > It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children wen parents think they can do as well or better. I home schooled my children up to High School (and they are very, very successful students). That statement, right there, was the reason, but there was no ambiguity involved. I absolutely knew I could have happier children who were natural self-learners who wouldn't struggle in school when that time came if I did it myself. It took a lot of research on my end to get to that conclusion but I would have been just as good ignoring it and listening to the experience of a friend I made who home schooled all seven of her children, or talking to her kids. I did both; research led me to talk to her and her husband, talking to them confirmed I was making the right choice. Though I am Christian, it had absolutely nothing to do with religion (we taught the same science everyone else received; no "the Earth is 15,000 years old" or whatever nonsense). I even think there's reasonable evangelical arguments to be made that Christians should put their children in traditional schools, so this wasn't a faith choice for me. I loved High School and I went to a large High School. So "bullying" and the like had nothing to do with it. Had I not attended Public School, I probably wouldn't be doing what I love for a living and it was a couple of amazing teachers that went to bat for me, creating classes that didn't exist and letting me take HS classes while I was in Middle School, so when I say "I know I can do better" that's doesn't come with "because the public school system and the teachers are garbage." There's problems, there, for sure -- but my kids live in the #4 district and attend the #1 public High School in that district. It's a pretty fantastic school, the kids are friendly and I'm fine with it all around. I didn't think they'd do poorly regardless of how they were schooled, I just knew I could do better. That's not arrogance; I think the vast majority of parents could do better. It's because, as a parent, when they're young you can basically read their mind. That's an advantage a teacher doesn't get. You don't even have to "notice" that they're struggling or that they "know it cold and are bored", you just pace things on instinct and you deliver knowledge very close to the actual rate they can easily ingest it. The other advantage that would be hard to replicate is class size. I had a class of two. Two different grades, but all that meant was my daughter got a preview of (and often just ended up learning completely) whatever she had to do and whatever her brother was learning and her brother got a review every day. You can pretty much take out every other advantage of Home Schooling. Just those two result in a 6-7 hour whiteboard directed lesson and busy work time down to 45 minutes/child (really ... 30 most of the time). That also gave us a September to mid-April school year with generous vacations (otherwise we'd finish in February). It wasn't my goal to make genius, spelling-bee winners, or to put them years ahead of public school students. The latter absolutely happened, but we were only ever doing a single grade per year in every subject with pretty formal home school curriculum. There was just a lot of extra time to screw around exploring things beyond the books. I wanted them to learn better than they would in school and I wanted them to be able to be self-directed in learning. They are successful beyond my expectations in both areas. They've been in Public School, now, for four years. My son hasn't taken work home from school in ... really ... four years. Homework is assigned, he just finishes it. My daughter is the same way. Outside of midterms and finals (out of fear/paranoia, not necessity), they do not touch schoolwork at home. Despite not having taken a "real test" in their lives until enrollment, they placed in advanced classes. Despite them never receiving an independently graded assignment (or even one that had a grade written on it[0]), they both have a 4.0 GPA. My daughter had perfect scores in half of her classes last year. They are happy kids who aren't stressed out at school (because those 45 minute daily sessions, apparently, covered a lot of ground -- my son still talks about things "he did in, like, 7th Grade, Dad!" Really, though, forget all of the other reasons. It's worth doing it just for the relationship you form with your kids and that they form with their siblings. My teenagers don't act like teenagers. They act like happy young adults (because they are). It wasn't hard. I did the majority of it with my ex- wife (through a high-conflict divorce and high-conflict early years ... that was hard ... worth it, though). [0] You don't let your kids rack up debt by learning something less than very proficiently because you're the one that has to pay that debt when the later lesson comes that builds on that part, so yeah, they "got all As" in Home School ... because I don't like misery.