9 ms·

Outschooling in the Bay Area

135 points by ahmadss 11y ago

sologoub 11y ago
That's a very interesting perspective that resonates with my own experience growing up. Although for a completely different reason (collapse of the Soviet system and with it the funding for good schools), parents in my neighborhood banded together to create a sort of private alternative to the state run monster that was imploding. While we still had traditional classrooms and a centralized place of learning, the groups were much smaller (10-15 kids) and the programs studied were very different from the state run schools. We covered all the basics in ~25% of the time and the rest was advanced or very creative. My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for. Not really useful right now, but is the very definition of cool when you are a kid! I've been pondering how to replicate some of these experiences for my future kids and this is definitely interesting.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  > My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for. Not really useful right now, but is the very definition of cool when you are a kid! I've seen programming situations where something close to that would be useful (maintenance of very old code).
  - sologoub 11y ago
    I don't remember the methodology all that well, but I think it's applicable to basic cryptology and NLP-type problems as well. For a 5th-grader though it was a great into to science.
- brc 11y ago
  I am sure there is a ton of interesting stories like this about self organisation when the state collapses, created by the end of the Soviet Union. I wonder if anyone has ever bothered to capture and document this type of emergent behaviour, and whether it most mostly cooperative and peaceful, or whether it tended to violence and confrontational. These types of widespread government changes are not that common, and I'm sure there are a lot of lessons to be gained.
  - selimthegrim 11y ago
    http://cluborlov.blogspot.com http://cluborlov.blogspot.com is run by one Dmitri Orlov, an ex-Soviet collapsarian similar to James Howard Kunstler. He basically did what you're asking for.
    - sologoub 11y ago
      That blog is probably as far away from positive experiences as one can be! Just wasted 10 minutes reading about the impending collapse of US... I'm pretty sure the original comment was meant to gather experiences of positive self-organization results and not doom'n'gloom rhetoric.
      - brc 11y ago
        Yes. One does not have to venture far to find a 'we're all ruined' article. I was more interested in finding small scale examples of how communities react when a central government essentially ceases to function. Not a preppers screed (i haven't looked at the link)
      - selimthegrim 11y ago
        http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2015/04/communities-that-abide-revisited.html http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2015/04/communities-that-abide... is a positive post (as is its prequel presumably)
    - LiweiZ 11y ago
      Looks interesting. Thanks for sharing.
- andyjdavis 11y ago
  >My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for. Not really useful right now, but is the very definition of cool when you are a kid! Not just when you're a kid. I'm 34 and that sounds awesome.
  - icebraining 11y ago
    As an adult, I find it cool too, but I can't think of a single kid I know that would be remotely interested in it. Half of them would probably be rolling their eyes before the second word.
    - sologoub 11y ago
      That's the talent of true educators, present things kids would normally ignore in a fascinating way.
      - thaumasiotes 11y ago
        This effect is hopelessly swamped by what kids are interested in. It exists, but it's just not strong enough to be helpful at any kind of scale.
        lfowles 11y ago
        You don't necessarily have to compete with what they are interested in. You have to compete with the boredom of sitting still at their desk for hours on end while doing trivial homework/reading assignments. _Everything_ is exciting at that point and may foster a lifelong addiction... hobby.
- thaumasiotes 11y ago
  > My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for I'm curious about that second point. Do you mean the same kind of vocabulary acquisition that people do in their own language all the time? (For example, a kid reading a book might learn some previously-unknown words that way, and everyone picks up spoken vocabulary by hearing it in use -- granted, picking up spoken vocabulary definitely doesn't meet the standard of "no spoken reference exists", but learning a word by its use in writing does meet that standard and is the same linguistic phenomenon.) Do you mean translating a document in a foreign language without any idea how that writing system was pronounced? I'm not aware of any writings for which the following are both true: 1. We can understand the writing. 2. We don't have any reference for what the pronunciation would have been. Cuneiform was used to write several different languages, most prominently Akkadian, which is a Semitic language closely related to Arabic and Hebrew. That helped in translating it. I don't know the language-family status of Sumerian, but it's written the same way, which is obviously helpful in pronouncing it. There are some rarer languages also written in cuneiform; for them we have decent information on their pronunciation, but we still don't really understand documents in those languages. Old Chinese was written in a script carrying no phonetic information, and its original pronunciation is a major problem today. But it left us rime tables, and there are lots of spoken references in its many modern descendants. So for example, we're pretty confident that 京, the second syllable of beijing/peking, originates as a velar ("k") sound, and the palatal ("j") sound of modern mandarin is an innovation. Ancient Egyptian held off translators for a long time, until someone realized it could be translated by reference to Coptic, for which phonetic information was preserved. Our phonetic understanding of Egyptian hieorglyphs is good enough that we've translated the names of foreign countries as written down in ancient inscriptions. Anyway, if that professor was talking about something in this second category, I'd love to hear more about it.
qsymmachus 11y ago
For various reasons, the mainstream regard homeschooling as a niche approach suitable only for the weird or the wealthy. That’s a prejudice that doesn’t reflect the reality of the growing movement I've observed in the Bay Area. I'd like to see the author back this claim up, rather than ask us to trust him. Homeschooling is a feasible choice for families where one parent does not have to work full time, which rules out many poorer families. This is a roundabout way of saying that the idea that homeschooling (or "outschooling") is the future is, frankly, a pipe dream. It is and always will be a niche option.
- batbomb 11y ago
  > I'd like to see the author back this claim up, rather than ask us to trust him. Homeschooling is a feasible choice for families where one parent does not have to work full time, which rules out many poorer families. In the Bay Area, this would likely rule out families with incomes below $90k and one or more kids, assuming they want at least a 2BR apartment.
  - qsymmachus 11y ago
    My impression is that Amir only had people like himself in mind when he wrote this article.
- danans 11y ago
  Before the modern system of mass schooling (whether private or public) came into being, in-home education, via tutors, tailored for individual childrens' needs was the norm for the aristocracy and the very wealthy commoners. Is it a big surprise that we're starting to see inklings of that again, given the growing gulf of inequality in the Bay Area? I'm sure it's wonderful if you can handle it logistically and financially. I do wonder, though, if hybrid approaches may be more accessible to the middle class.
- waterlesscloud 11y ago
  This assumes that the future will always be like the present. In the past, the methods of schooling and the number of parents at home has varied. I see no reason whatsoever to assume we have reached a situation which is permanent and will never change.
tswartz 11y ago
Kudos to Amir in explaining the outshooling movement so well. I always had a negative view of home-schooling, but his explanations of why more parents are doing it today made sense. In many cases, kids can learn a lot more and remain creative. The big drawback still is that one parent would need to stay home, but Amir did mention that this could be changing.
rayiner 11y ago
Somebody do this: Uber/TaskRabbit for homeschool teachers. I'd love to get together with ~10 sets of parents, have everyone kick in $15-20k/year each year, and maybe a place to host classes, and hire a bright, motivated teacher. The company would provide the core logistics/materials for passing the Common Core tests, and the teachers and parents would have the flexibility to design around that. It'd be cheaper than private school and less child abuse than subjecting your kids to the public school system.
- qsymmachus 11y ago
  > Have everyone kick in $15-20k/year each year > It'd be cheaper than private school That's comparable to the most expensive private schools
  - civilian 11y ago
    Yeah. Off the top of my head I know a private high school that cost 26k/yr, but you're correct when we look at all the data: http://www.privateschoolreview.com/tuition-stats/private-school-cost-by-state http://www.privateschoolreview.com/tuition-stats/private-sch... > The private elementary school average is $7,355 per year and the private high school average is $13,248 per year.
    - deleted 11y ago
      [deleted]
    - lqdc13 11y ago
      Wow that's 2x more expensive than my college was. I think some public schools are great as long as you tell the student that they are there to learn. This way it's completely free for the parent and the student learns to be self-motivated.
  - stickydink 11y ago
    $15-20k is definitely not comparable to "the most expensive private schools", in the Bay Area. A quick search shows up an informal ranking here: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/11/ranking-best-private-high-schools-bay-area-niche.html http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/11/ranking... The top 5 are all ~$40k, I didn't look much further than that. I think 15-20 is probably more the average cost?
pcmonk 11y ago
Having been homeschooled myself, I can attest to most of the advantages he describes. Personalized education is a very powerful thing, especially for what he calls "asynchronous learners".
sputknick 11y ago
I have homeschooled my kids for four years now, and I think this article does a great job at dispelling common myths. The "socialization" myth is the biggest, but if you look at homeschool teenagers, they are much more well socialized in interacting with adults in the real world. One point I would have liked to have seen: the number of homeschool parents who are former teachers. More than half of our homeschool friends are former teachers. This means these parents worked in the public school system, and when it came time to send there kids decided "nope, I'm not sending my kids through that system". As for startup ideas: I want MOOC aimed at younger kids. Right now the closest thing we have is Khan Academy, and it's pretty good, but a MOOC on a specific subject, with a series of videos, and questions, and interactive activities would be a big help.
- AnimalMuppet 11y ago
  Former teachers who homeschool their kids are like canaries in the coal mine. As for socialization: The best line I have heard is, "When we worry about our kids missing out on socialization, we grab them, drag them into the bathroom, and beat them up for their lunch money." That is: Yeah, kids in public school wind up having shared experiences with other such kids. The problem is that so many of those shared experiences are bad.
  - pbhjpbhj 11y ago
    >The problem is that so many of those shared experiences are bad. // A simple [or simplistic] answer to that is that bad experiences as well as good serve to educate; perhaps better to learn to give up your lunch money to save a beating so you know to give up your wallet to save being shot at a later date?? Generally though I agree that the socialisation objection to non-school learning is specious. You can be as poorly educated on useful social situations if you're school-based. The non-school educated kids I know are all part of some semi-organised groups that mean they socialise with kids and adults over a broad spectrum of ages (though mainly women at the groups, just like primary schools here in the UK). Now schools can do something about that to some extent - my kid's school fosters relationships across the ages of children present in the school, one of its better ambitions IMO. Bullying is an interesting issue; there are bullies in the world and at a sub-criminal level there's often nowhere to go to fix your interactions with them other than your own resourcefulness, something which can be usefully informed, I feel, by bad experiences in school. Of course just being educated otherwise than at school doesn't mean you can't be bullied, just not in school!
barry-cotter 11y ago
I'd say the thesis of the article is that homeschooling will become more popular and have a large impact on the development of instructional methods in public schools in the future. The first may be true, the second is not. The main factors militating against homeschooling are conformity, money and logistics. As homeschooling becomes ever more mainstream the weirdness hit people take for it will lessen. Money and logistics are the big things. For homeschooling, even unschooling, you need at least one responsible adult nearby and available, usually a SAHM. That means homeschooling is restricted to the upper middle class, people in rural areas with cheap housing or people who are really, really willing to sacrifice for it. If everyone around you is on two incomes and you're on one that better be an excellent income or you will need to sacrifice a lot. Homeschooling will have no effect on school instruction, none. The things mentioned in the article could almost all have been written any time since the 60's. The only exception is MOOCs, which are mostly equivalent to community college for high school students. Alfie Kohn and John Taylor Gatto have been beating the drum on how awful the overwhelming majority of schools are for decades to no effect. The Sudbury/Summer hill/democratic schools movement grew and then receded in the middle of last century. And what's the latest big thing in education? Ability tracking instead of age tracking, the smallest, least disruptive, obviously good change to the current system? No, it's No Child Left Behind. Just give up hope already. There will be no reform.
- mdevere 11y ago
  There won't be any policy-driven change in the education system of the kind that TED speakers would love to see. The system won't change meaningfully until the world around it changes first. That is to say, until private sector alternatives/supplements start making an impact in education without the help of the state. But that's entirely possible. The issue is that nobody has really built anything all that special for the education sector yet. The best we have are MOOCs, which are, for all their production values, just static resources and not a new way for a child to learn.
- capnhaddock 11y ago
  > That means homeschooling is restricted to the upper middle class, people in rural areas with cheap housing or people who are really, really willing to sacrifice for it. If everyone around you is on two incomes and you're on one that better be an excellent income or you will need to sacrifice a lot. Elizabeth Warren has written an excellent book describing the pitfalls of two-income families that send their children to public schools. It's called "The Two Income Trap". http://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-Going/dp/0465090907/ http://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-G... In it, she demonstrates that having two incomes isn't the advantage that you might intuitively think it is. Actually, having a single income and homeschooling (or outschooling) can make a family more resilient and flexible, for two main reasons: 1. A second income earner can be brought in if something happens to the employed spouse. Two-income families are already tapped out. 2. Location. If the family doesn't enroll their kids in a public school, they are free to live wherever they want, so long as the breadwinner can still commute. This cuts expenses way down. No longer do they have to compete with two-income earners for homes in a particular school district. So, while having a parent remain at home is certainly a different lifestyle, it isn't clearly something that can only work for the wealthy. I know many homeschooling families who would not be described as wealthy.
mdevere 11y ago
I run an education startup that has unexpectedly attracted a lot of homeschooled students/parents. The author asserts, "this is the community where experimentation ... to educational approaches is happening the fastest", and I am finding that to be true. The parents are more open-minded and the students are more self-driven. In fact, it feels likely to me that any dramatic change to the education system as a whole will start with the homeschool community, if it ever comes at all. So, my advice to other education entrepreneurs is that this is a good market to start with. The author's big conclusion - an impending unbundling of education - is really interesting to me. It aligns with my own prediction (and the basis for my startup), which is that students/parents will have a stronger say in who the right teacher is for them, for any given subject. And, with tools enabled by tech/internet, the best teachers will be able to scale up what they do and reach many thousands of students.
- zerop 11y ago
  What is the startup you run? Would like to know..
uiri 11y ago
I first became interested in homeschooling several years ago after a friend with six kids began homeschooling in San Francisco out of necessity - the public school system wanted to send each of her kids to a different school. Instead of hiring six Ubers each morning she decided to start homeschooling her kids herself. Can someone explain how something like this even happens? I'm used to a system which assigns you a school based on your address/space. If space constraints change, the child is generally not kicked out. Exceptions are usually made to space constraints so that younger siblings may attend the same school as their older siblings. I can understand an elementary, a middle and a high school but that is only three different schools.
- zem 11y ago
  sf has a school lottery [http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/03/17/anxious-parents-try-to-game-system-in-san-francisco-school-lottery http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/03/17/anxious-parents-try-to-g...]. it's supposed to give some weight towards keeping siblings together, but that evidently glitched in her case.
- praxulus 11y ago
  If your school is determined by your location, the houses near a great school become prohibitively expensive. That makes them as economically exclusive as private schools while keeping all the tax subsidies of a public school. I don't think San Francisco's solution is a particularly good one, but I do think it's a legitimate problem.
- joycey 11y ago
  Sometimes the district lines can change depending on what year you enter the school, which could split up siblings, but I'm pretty sure this is still the exception and not the norm.
- squidbot 11y ago
  That line interested me as well but for a different reason. Do schools in San Francisco not have an obligation to transport the children that are assigned to them? Actually, I just looked it up the SFUSD page and it appears they do, and they offer school buses as I suspected. So the rationale for homeschooling by this person seems, well, irrational. Why would she need to hire six cars when buses would come get the kids?
brc 11y ago
I have no prejudices against home schooling but it takes quite a leap of faith to take a kid out of regular schools and start with it. Particularly if the school is 'good enough' such that the kid is doing well, even though it's plainly obvious how inefficient the schooling is. The big issue for me is the vast difference between learning rates and attitude between kids, but the insistence on keeping them together on an arbitrary set of calendar dates of birth, rather than aptitude or interests. Some (most?) parents plainly don't care and are just happy to get the kids out of the house and in someone else's care. These kids are generally disruptive and are destined to have a low level of education. I see the need to keep trying with them despite the low achievement rate, yet at the same time I see the need to let motivated learners race ahead at their own speed. Throw in the murky issues of government funding, political interference in curriculum and entrenched power structures like teachers unions and school boards and it's not clear to me how a better model emerges from it all.
spiritplumber 11y ago
The problem with homeschooling is that in much of the country "homeschooling" = "Jesus rode a dinosaur and owned Exxon stock, and so should you" level of misinformation (I'm exaggerating, but only a little). I guess it's less of a factor in this neck of the woods.
- qstyk 11y ago
  I'm not sure what you're encountering, but I have yet to meet anyone that teaches that Jesus rode a dinosaur and owned Exxon stock, or anything remotely resembling it. One family comes to mind, where I have to question both their ability and motivation behind homeschooling, but that's out 100+ homeschool families we know. Even so, they're the parents, so it's their call. That said, the success is largely based on the parents' motivation. If they're out to provide a better customized, faith-based, talent-specific, or special-needs accommodating learning environment, that's radically different than doing it to brag about what a great parent a person is, due to the extra hardship. Beyond that, not everyone is qualified to do it, as it takes a certain skillset, education level, preparedness, and patience level that isn't ubiquitious. Some of that can be accomdated through homeschool enrichment classes, co-ops, and the aforementioned online learning.
  - mavrc 11y ago
    > I'm not sure what you're encountering, but I have yet to meet anyone that teaches that Jesus rode a dinosaur and owned Exxon stock, or anything remotely resembling it. I had the same reaction as the previous poster; I'm from rural Idaho, where in my experience with it, "homeschooling" is a transparent veil for "too fundamentalist for government-run schools" (which in Idaho, is terror at a very special level). I'm sure it's not that way everywhere, and I'm sure that not all rural homeschooling parents are doing so for religious reasons. But there are places like my hometown, where that is primarily the case.
    - kajecounterhack 11y ago
      ^ This. I have family that homeschools and it's for this reason, unfortunately. I also come from a fundamentalist background and almost all the families I know who homeschool do so to keep their kids away from the "ways of the world." A lot of these kids (anecdotally) ended up seeming pretty weird to me. I've always wondered though if it was the homeschooling or religious schooling that was the reason, though I'm inclined to believe the latter.
enupten 11y ago
"Normal schools can’t personalize the curriculum and so deal poorly with asynchronous learners." Couldn't agree more! Universities tend to be much worse in this aspect.
tlogan 11y ago
I have one point: * The reason why we have schools is that parents can go to work. Sad but true.
pbhjpbhj 11y ago
Is flexi-schooling heard of in USA? It is using a mixture of school based and non-school learning. In essence it is using a local school as a service rather than adopting its regime wholesale. Out-of-schooling or outschooling is called "education otherwise" (EO) in the UK following legislation referring to a parent's responsibility to ensure their child either attends school or gets a sufficient education otherwise than in school. I'm glad they've made the distinction with home-schooling, which EO people in the UK usually use to refer to mimicking school at home, having a "classroom" and a parent acting as a teacher. Most non-school based learning is referred to as "home-schooling" or "home education" by outsiders it seems and very little of it is actually home-schooling; this leads to a quite wrong view of kids who're getting educated outside of school as being shut-ins locked away from other kids and feeds in to the "not attending school means they lack socialisation" fallacy. We started flexi-schooling to some success but in the UK it's up to the individual headteacher (how's that for a centrally planned education system) to allow it or not and our's deferred to the governors who basically thought, and expressed, that the only way to learn anything is in a school. My wife and I are both graduates with science degrees working in our own creative business, she has a teaching qualification and we've both been leaders with kids organisations for many years; we work in a semi-teaching role and I've done IT education with individual adults. Apparently either of us could educate a class of 30 kids, we do on occassion (sometimes out of school), but educating our own child(ren) like that or a small group of EO kids is apparently impossible. Anyway, we did flexi-schooling for a year (1 day in 10 out of school, we wanted 1 in 5) without authorisation with the eldest child [ie in opposition to the school's expressed desire] - tests showed he was excelling despite the schools anticipation of abject educational demise. Then the government brought in fines for non-authorised absence from school. This has weighed heavy, if we had the funds we'd just continue - it's worth it - but we don't have funds and so we've been unable to continue with what we consider (and the evidence suggests) is the best paedagogical approach for this particular child. The legislation is intended to stop people from taking their children on holiday in school time and their is scope in the system to accommodate flexi-schooling - and legislative support in the Education Act (and to a lesser extent the ECHR). Were our child physically disabled, or indeed mentally challenged rather than excelling (just bright, not 'gifted' incidentally) it seems the school would have given greater concessions. Catering for those with exceptional needs is an area in which flexi-schooling is often accepted and used to great effect.
bronz 11y ago
Like many important things in America, children are neglected. Everybody gets divorced even if they have kids. And everybody works even if they have a spouse that works, even if they have kids. And we send our kids to public schools where they learn nothing besides how to be thick skinned. And we are surprised when the next generation is filled with even more stupid ass holes.
sago 11y ago
This is a staggering and damning indictment: "It only takes 2-3 hours of study per day to keep up with the regular school curriculum" The sheer waste of life that implies about children in 'regular school', let alone the staff that provide services for them, is staggering.
- hueving 11y ago
  A big component of school is just glorified daycare. Lots of lower income families send their kids to school mainly for that purpose.
  - eliben 11y ago
    Why just "lower income". Why do you think pretty much every working couple of parents sends their kids to school with afternoon activities until 5 PM. AFAIK this is extremely common in the bay area.
  - rmxt 11y ago
    Daycare or not, why is income relevant here? Rich or poor alike, daycare or learning alike, kids go to school for a multitude of reasons including socialization, applied skills (shoe-tying, sharing, etc.), and exposure to things besides television and iPads, none of which hinge on income.
    - hueving 11y ago
      Sorry, I should have clarified. Lower income people could not afford the cost of sending the children to daycare if schools actually sent students home after 3 hours each day. Where I grew up, school became the social safety net for children from low income backgrounds. If the temperature dropped to -10F, they would still not cancel school because the low income kids received better heat and better meals from the school. My point is that in many cases, school isn't nearly as much about learning as it is to have a safe and stable place for children from unstable households.
- kyberias 11y ago
  Ummm... isn't there more to school than the "official curriculum"? Kids learn to listen, talk, discuss, concentrate, present, read, write etc.
random854 11y ago
This is not directly relevant to the article, but I see people look at public/private school v. homeschool as if it's a zero-sum game. Many families are unable to have a parent stay home the entire day(whether due to money or due to the parent liking their career-who wants an unhappy, bored teacher all day?), but ideally "schooling" should be going on in the home as well as in school. In public school I learned little of value past socialization (I did have interaction with peers, something my family would not have been able to give me on a regular basis if I was homeschooled) but I learned a lot on my own time and was encouraged by my parents to do this. Most children who are too ahead of the public school curve to benefit from it are smart enough to teach themselves (with some help from parents in the evenings if needed.)

135 points by ahmadss 11y ago

That's a very interesting perspective that resonates with my own experience growing up. Although for a completely different reason (collapse of the Soviet system and with it the funding for good schools), parents in my neighborhood banded together to create a sort of private alternative to the state run monster that was imploding. While we still had traditional classrooms and a centralized place of learning, the groups were much smaller (10-15 kids) and the programs studied were very different from the state run schools. We covered all the basics in ~25% of the time and the rest was advanced or very creative. My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for. Not really useful right now, but is the very definition of cool when you are a kid! I've been pondering how to replicate some of these experiences for my future kids and this is definitely interesting.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
> My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for. Not really useful right now, but is the very definition of cool when you are a kid! I've seen programming situations where something close to that would be useful (maintenance of very old code).
- sologoub 11y ago
  I don't remember the methodology all that well, but I think it's applicable to basic cryptology and NLP-type problems as well. For a 5th-grader though it was a great into to science.
brc 11y ago
I am sure there is a ton of interesting stories like this about self organisation when the state collapses, created by the end of the Soviet Union. I wonder if anyone has ever bothered to capture and document this type of emergent behaviour, and whether it most mostly cooperative and peaceful, or whether it tended to violence and confrontational. These types of widespread government changes are not that common, and I'm sure there are a lot of lessons to be gained.
- selimthegrim 11y ago
  http://cluborlov.blogspot.com http://cluborlov.blogspot.com is run by one Dmitri Orlov, an ex-Soviet collapsarian similar to James Howard Kunstler. He basically did what you're asking for.
  - sologoub 11y ago
    That blog is probably as far away from positive experiences as one can be! Just wasted 10 minutes reading about the impending collapse of US... I'm pretty sure the original comment was meant to gather experiences of positive self-organization results and not doom'n'gloom rhetoric.
    - brc 11y ago
      Yes. One does not have to venture far to find a 'we're all ruined' article. I was more interested in finding small scale examples of how communities react when a central government essentially ceases to function. Not a preppers screed (i haven't looked at the link)
    - selimthegrim 11y ago
      http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2015/04/communities-that-abide-revisited.html http://cluborlov.blogspot.com/2015/04/communities-that-abide... is a positive post (as is its prequel presumably)
  - LiweiZ 11y ago
    Looks interesting. Thanks for sharing.
andyjdavis 11y ago
>My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for. Not really useful right now, but is the very definition of cool when you are a kid! Not just when you're a kid. I'm 34 and that sounds awesome.
- icebraining 11y ago
  As an adult, I find it cool too, but I can't think of a single kid I know that would be remotely interested in it. Half of them would probably be rolling their eyes before the second word.
  - sologoub 11y ago
    That's the talent of true educators, present things kids would normally ignore in a fascinating way.
    - thaumasiotes 11y ago
      This effect is hopelessly swamped by what kids are interested in. It exists, but it's just not strong enough to be helpful at any kind of scale.
      - lfowles 11y ago
        You don't necessarily have to compete with what they are interested in. You have to compete with the boredom of sitting still at their desk for hours on end while doing trivial homework/reading assignments. _Everything_ is exciting at that point and may foster a lifelong addiction... hobby.
thaumasiotes 11y ago
> My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for I'm curious about that second point. Do you mean the same kind of vocabulary acquisition that people do in their own language all the time? (For example, a kid reading a book might learn some previously-unknown words that way, and everyone picks up spoken vocabulary by hearing it in use -- granted, picking up spoken vocabulary definitely doesn't meet the standard of "no spoken reference exists", but learning a word by its use in writing does meet that standard and is the same linguistic phenomenon.) Do you mean translating a document in a foreign language without any idea how that writing system was pronounced? I'm not aware of any writings for which the following are both true: 1. We can understand the writing. 2. We don't have any reference for what the pronunciation would have been. Cuneiform was used to write several different languages, most prominently Akkadian, which is a Semitic language closely related to Arabic and Hebrew. That helped in translating it. I don't know the language-family status of Sumerian, but it's written the same way, which is obviously helpful in pronouncing it. There are some rarer languages also written in cuneiform; for them we have decent information on their pronunciation, but we still don't really understand documents in those languages. Old Chinese was written in a script carrying no phonetic information, and its original pronunciation is a major problem today. But it left us rime tables, and there are lots of spoken references in its many modern descendants. So for example, we're pretty confident that 京, the second syllable of beijing/peking, originates as a velar ("k") sound, and the palatal ("j") sound of modern mandarin is an innovation. Ancient Egyptian held off translators for a long time, until someone realized it could be translated by reference to Coptic, for which phonetic information was preserved. Our phonetic understanding of Egyptian hieorglyphs is good enough that we've translated the names of foreign countries as written down in ancient inscriptions. Anyway, if that professor was talking about something in this second category, I'd love to hear more about it.

qsymmachus 11y ago

For various reasons, the mainstream regard homeschooling as a niche approach suitable only for the weird or the wealthy. That’s a prejudice that doesn’t reflect the reality of the growing movement I've observed in the Bay Area. I'd like to see the author back this claim up, rather than ask us to trust him. Homeschooling is a feasible choice for families where one parent does not have to work full time, which rules out many poorer families. This is a roundabout way of saying that the idea that homeschooling (or "outschooling") is the future is, frankly, a pipe dream. It is and always will be a niche option.

batbomb 11y ago
> I'd like to see the author back this claim up, rather than ask us to trust him. Homeschooling is a feasible choice for families where one parent does not have to work full time, which rules out many poorer families. In the Bay Area, this would likely rule out families with incomes below $90k and one or more kids, assuming they want at least a 2BR apartment.
- qsymmachus 11y ago
  My impression is that Amir only had people like himself in mind when he wrote this article.
danans 11y ago
Before the modern system of mass schooling (whether private or public) came into being, in-home education, via tutors, tailored for individual childrens' needs was the norm for the aristocracy and the very wealthy commoners. Is it a big surprise that we're starting to see inklings of that again, given the growing gulf of inequality in the Bay Area? I'm sure it's wonderful if you can handle it logistically and financially. I do wonder, though, if hybrid approaches may be more accessible to the middle class.
waterlesscloud 11y ago
This assumes that the future will always be like the present. In the past, the methods of schooling and the number of parents at home has varied. I see no reason whatsoever to assume we have reached a situation which is permanent and will never change.

tswartz 11y ago

Kudos to Amir in explaining the outshooling movement so well. I always had a negative view of home-schooling, but his explanations of why more parents are doing it today made sense. In many cases, kids can learn a lot more and remain creative. The big drawback still is that one parent would need to stay home, but Amir did mention that this could be changing.

rayiner 11y ago

Somebody do this: Uber/TaskRabbit for homeschool teachers. I'd love to get together with ~10 sets of parents, have everyone kick in $15-20k/year each year, and maybe a place to host classes, and hire a bright, motivated teacher. The company would provide the core logistics/materials for passing the Common Core tests, and the teachers and parents would have the flexibility to design around that. It'd be cheaper than private school and less child abuse than subjecting your kids to the public school system.

qsymmachus 11y ago
> Have everyone kick in $15-20k/year each year > It'd be cheaper than private school That's comparable to the most expensive private schools
- civilian 11y ago
  Yeah. Off the top of my head I know a private high school that cost 26k/yr, but you're correct when we look at all the data: http://www.privateschoolreview.com/tuition-stats/private-school-cost-by-state http://www.privateschoolreview.com/tuition-stats/private-sch... > The private elementary school average is $7,355 per year and the private high school average is $13,248 per year.
  - deleted 11y ago
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  - lqdc13 11y ago
    Wow that's 2x more expensive than my college was. I think some public schools are great as long as you tell the student that they are there to learn. This way it's completely free for the parent and the student learns to be self-motivated.
- stickydink 11y ago
  $15-20k is definitely not comparable to "the most expensive private schools", in the Bay Area. A quick search shows up an informal ranking here: http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/11/ranking-best-private-high-schools-bay-area-niche.html http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/11/ranking... The top 5 are all ~$40k, I didn't look much further than that. I think 15-20 is probably more the average cost?

pcmonk 11y ago

Having been homeschooled myself, I can attest to most of the advantages he describes. Personalized education is a very powerful thing, especially for what he calls "asynchronous learners".

sputknick 11y ago

I have homeschooled my kids for four years now, and I think this article does a great job at dispelling common myths. The "socialization" myth is the biggest, but if you look at homeschool teenagers, they are much more well socialized in interacting with adults in the real world. One point I would have liked to have seen: the number of homeschool parents who are former teachers. More than half of our homeschool friends are former teachers. This means these parents worked in the public school system, and when it came time to send there kids decided "nope, I'm not sending my kids through that system". As for startup ideas: I want MOOC aimed at younger kids. Right now the closest thing we have is Khan Academy, and it's pretty good, but a MOOC on a specific subject, with a series of videos, and questions, and interactive activities would be a big help.

AnimalMuppet 11y ago
Former teachers who homeschool their kids are like canaries in the coal mine. As for socialization: The best line I have heard is, "When we worry about our kids missing out on socialization, we grab them, drag them into the bathroom, and beat them up for their lunch money." That is: Yeah, kids in public school wind up having shared experiences with other such kids. The problem is that so many of those shared experiences are bad.
- pbhjpbhj 11y ago
  >The problem is that so many of those shared experiences are bad. // A simple [or simplistic] answer to that is that bad experiences as well as good serve to educate; perhaps better to learn to give up your lunch money to save a beating so you know to give up your wallet to save being shot at a later date?? Generally though I agree that the socialisation objection to non-school learning is specious. You can be as poorly educated on useful social situations if you're school-based. The non-school educated kids I know are all part of some semi-organised groups that mean they socialise with kids and adults over a broad spectrum of ages (though mainly women at the groups, just like primary schools here in the UK). Now schools can do something about that to some extent - my kid's school fosters relationships across the ages of children present in the school, one of its better ambitions IMO. Bullying is an interesting issue; there are bullies in the world and at a sub-criminal level there's often nowhere to go to fix your interactions with them other than your own resourcefulness, something which can be usefully informed, I feel, by bad experiences in school. Of course just being educated otherwise than at school doesn't mean you can't be bullied, just not in school!

barry-cotter 11y ago

I'd say the thesis of the article is that homeschooling will become more popular and have a large impact on the development of instructional methods in public schools in the future. The first may be true, the second is not. The main factors militating against homeschooling are conformity, money and logistics. As homeschooling becomes ever more mainstream the weirdness hit people take for it will lessen. Money and logistics are the big things. For homeschooling, even unschooling, you need at least one responsible adult nearby and available, usually a SAHM. That means homeschooling is restricted to the upper middle class, people in rural areas with cheap housing or people who are really, really willing to sacrifice for it. If everyone around you is on two incomes and you're on one that better be an excellent income or you will need to sacrifice a lot. Homeschooling will have no effect on school instruction, none. The things mentioned in the article could almost all have been written any time since the 60's. The only exception is MOOCs, which are mostly equivalent to community college for high school students. Alfie Kohn and John Taylor Gatto have been beating the drum on how awful the overwhelming majority of schools are for decades to no effect. The Sudbury/Summer hill/democratic schools movement grew and then receded in the middle of last century. And what's the latest big thing in education? Ability tracking instead of age tracking, the smallest, least disruptive, obviously good change to the current system? No, it's No Child Left Behind. Just give up hope already. There will be no reform.

mdevere 11y ago
There won't be any policy-driven change in the education system of the kind that TED speakers would love to see. The system won't change meaningfully until the world around it changes first. That is to say, until private sector alternatives/supplements start making an impact in education without the help of the state. But that's entirely possible. The issue is that nobody has really built anything all that special for the education sector yet. The best we have are MOOCs, which are, for all their production values, just static resources and not a new way for a child to learn.
capnhaddock 11y ago
> That means homeschooling is restricted to the upper middle class, people in rural areas with cheap housing or people who are really, really willing to sacrifice for it. If everyone around you is on two incomes and you're on one that better be an excellent income or you will need to sacrifice a lot. Elizabeth Warren has written an excellent book describing the pitfalls of two-income families that send their children to public schools. It's called "The Two Income Trap". http://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-Going/dp/0465090907/ http://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-G... In it, she demonstrates that having two incomes isn't the advantage that you might intuitively think it is. Actually, having a single income and homeschooling (or outschooling) can make a family more resilient and flexible, for two main reasons: 1. A second income earner can be brought in if something happens to the employed spouse. Two-income families are already tapped out. 2. Location. If the family doesn't enroll their kids in a public school, they are free to live wherever they want, so long as the breadwinner can still commute. This cuts expenses way down. No longer do they have to compete with two-income earners for homes in a particular school district. So, while having a parent remain at home is certainly a different lifestyle, it isn't clearly something that can only work for the wealthy. I know many homeschooling families who would not be described as wealthy.

mdevere 11y ago

I run an education startup that has unexpectedly attracted a lot of homeschooled students/parents. The author asserts, "this is the community where experimentation ... to educational approaches is happening the fastest", and I am finding that to be true. The parents are more open-minded and the students are more self-driven. In fact, it feels likely to me that any dramatic change to the education system as a whole will start with the homeschool community, if it ever comes at all. So, my advice to other education entrepreneurs is that this is a good market to start with. The author's big conclusion - an impending unbundling of education - is really interesting to me. It aligns with my own prediction (and the basis for my startup), which is that students/parents will have a stronger say in who the right teacher is for them, for any given subject. And, with tools enabled by tech/internet, the best teachers will be able to scale up what they do and reach many thousands of students.

zerop 11y ago
What is the startup you run? Would like to know..

uiri 11y ago

I first became interested in homeschooling several years ago after a friend with six kids began homeschooling in San Francisco out of necessity - the public school system wanted to send each of her kids to a different school. Instead of hiring six Ubers each morning she decided to start homeschooling her kids herself. Can someone explain how something like this even happens? I'm used to a system which assigns you a school based on your address/space. If space constraints change, the child is generally not kicked out. Exceptions are usually made to space constraints so that younger siblings may attend the same school as their older siblings. I can understand an elementary, a middle and a high school but that is only three different schools.

zem 11y ago
sf has a school lottery [http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/03/17/anxious-parents-try-to-game-system-in-san-francisco-school-lottery http://ww2.kqed.org/news/2015/03/17/anxious-parents-try-to-g...]. it's supposed to give some weight towards keeping siblings together, but that evidently glitched in her case.
praxulus 11y ago
If your school is determined by your location, the houses near a great school become prohibitively expensive. That makes them as economically exclusive as private schools while keeping all the tax subsidies of a public school. I don't think San Francisco's solution is a particularly good one, but I do think it's a legitimate problem.
joycey 11y ago
Sometimes the district lines can change depending on what year you enter the school, which could split up siblings, but I'm pretty sure this is still the exception and not the norm.
squidbot 11y ago
That line interested me as well but for a different reason. Do schools in San Francisco not have an obligation to transport the children that are assigned to them? Actually, I just looked it up the SFUSD page and it appears they do, and they offer school buses as I suspected. So the rationale for homeschooling by this person seems, well, irrational. Why would she need to hire six cars when buses would come get the kids?

brc 11y ago

I have no prejudices against home schooling but it takes quite a leap of faith to take a kid out of regular schools and start with it. Particularly if the school is 'good enough' such that the kid is doing well, even though it's plainly obvious how inefficient the schooling is. The big issue for me is the vast difference between learning rates and attitude between kids, but the insistence on keeping them together on an arbitrary set of calendar dates of birth, rather than aptitude or interests. Some (most?) parents plainly don't care and are just happy to get the kids out of the house and in someone else's care. These kids are generally disruptive and are destined to have a low level of education. I see the need to keep trying with them despite the low achievement rate, yet at the same time I see the need to let motivated learners race ahead at their own speed. Throw in the murky issues of government funding, political interference in curriculum and entrenched power structures like teachers unions and school boards and it's not clear to me how a better model emerges from it all.

spiritplumber 11y ago

The problem with homeschooling is that in much of the country "homeschooling" = "Jesus rode a dinosaur and owned Exxon stock, and so should you" level of misinformation (I'm exaggerating, but only a little). I guess it's less of a factor in this neck of the woods.

qstyk 11y ago
I'm not sure what you're encountering, but I have yet to meet anyone that teaches that Jesus rode a dinosaur and owned Exxon stock, or anything remotely resembling it. One family comes to mind, where I have to question both their ability and motivation behind homeschooling, but that's out 100+ homeschool families we know. Even so, they're the parents, so it's their call. That said, the success is largely based on the parents' motivation. If they're out to provide a better customized, faith-based, talent-specific, or special-needs accommodating learning environment, that's radically different than doing it to brag about what a great parent a person is, due to the extra hardship. Beyond that, not everyone is qualified to do it, as it takes a certain skillset, education level, preparedness, and patience level that isn't ubiquitious. Some of that can be accomdated through homeschool enrichment classes, co-ops, and the aforementioned online learning.
- mavrc 11y ago
  > I'm not sure what you're encountering, but I have yet to meet anyone that teaches that Jesus rode a dinosaur and owned Exxon stock, or anything remotely resembling it. I had the same reaction as the previous poster; I'm from rural Idaho, where in my experience with it, "homeschooling" is a transparent veil for "too fundamentalist for government-run schools" (which in Idaho, is terror at a very special level). I'm sure it's not that way everywhere, and I'm sure that not all rural homeschooling parents are doing so for religious reasons. But there are places like my hometown, where that is primarily the case.
  - kajecounterhack 11y ago
    ^ This. I have family that homeschools and it's for this reason, unfortunately. I also come from a fundamentalist background and almost all the families I know who homeschool do so to keep their kids away from the "ways of the world." A lot of these kids (anecdotally) ended up seeming pretty weird to me. I've always wondered though if it was the homeschooling or religious schooling that was the reason, though I'm inclined to believe the latter.

enupten 11y ago

"Normal schools can’t personalize the curriculum and so deal poorly with asynchronous learners." Couldn't agree more! Universities tend to be much worse in this aspect.

tlogan 11y ago

I have one point: * The reason why we have schools is that parents can go to work. Sad but true.

pbhjpbhj 11y ago

Is flexi-schooling heard of in USA? It is using a mixture of school based and non-school learning. In essence it is using a local school as a service rather than adopting its regime wholesale. Out-of-schooling or outschooling is called "education otherwise" (EO) in the UK following legislation referring to a parent's responsibility to ensure their child either attends school or gets a sufficient education otherwise than in school. I'm glad they've made the distinction with home-schooling, which EO people in the UK usually use to refer to mimicking school at home, having a "classroom" and a parent acting as a teacher. Most non-school based learning is referred to as "home-schooling" or "home education" by outsiders it seems and very little of it is actually home-schooling; this leads to a quite wrong view of kids who're getting educated outside of school as being shut-ins locked away from other kids and feeds in to the "not attending school means they lack socialisation" fallacy. We started flexi-schooling to some success but in the UK it's up to the individual headteacher (how's that for a centrally planned education system) to allow it or not and our's deferred to the governors who basically thought, and expressed, that the only way to learn anything is in a school. My wife and I are both graduates with science degrees working in our own creative business, she has a teaching qualification and we've both been leaders with kids organisations for many years; we work in a semi-teaching role and I've done IT education with individual adults. Apparently either of us could educate a class of 30 kids, we do on occassion (sometimes out of school), but educating our own child(ren) like that or a small group of EO kids is apparently impossible. Anyway, we did flexi-schooling for a year (1 day in 10 out of school, we wanted 1 in 5) without authorisation with the eldest child [ie in opposition to the school's expressed desire] - tests showed he was excelling despite the schools anticipation of abject educational demise. Then the government brought in fines for non-authorised absence from school. This has weighed heavy, if we had the funds we'd just continue - it's worth it - but we don't have funds and so we've been unable to continue with what we consider (and the evidence suggests) is the best paedagogical approach for this particular child. The legislation is intended to stop people from taking their children on holiday in school time and their is scope in the system to accommodate flexi-schooling - and legislative support in the Education Act (and to a lesser extent the ECHR). Were our child physically disabled, or indeed mentally challenged rather than excelling (just bright, not 'gifted' incidentally) it seems the school would have given greater concessions. Catering for those with exceptional needs is an area in which flexi-schooling is often accepted and used to great effect.

bronz 11y ago

Like many important things in America, children are neglected. Everybody gets divorced even if they have kids. And everybody works even if they have a spouse that works, even if they have kids. And we send our kids to public schools where they learn nothing besides how to be thick skinned. And we are surprised when the next generation is filled with even more stupid ass holes.

sago 11y ago

This is a staggering and damning indictment: "It only takes 2-3 hours of study per day to keep up with the regular school curriculum" The sheer waste of life that implies about children in 'regular school', let alone the staff that provide services for them, is staggering.

hueving 11y ago
A big component of school is just glorified daycare. Lots of lower income families send their kids to school mainly for that purpose.
- eliben 11y ago
  Why just "lower income". Why do you think pretty much every working couple of parents sends their kids to school with afternoon activities until 5 PM. AFAIK this is extremely common in the bay area.
- rmxt 11y ago
  Daycare or not, why is income relevant here? Rich or poor alike, daycare or learning alike, kids go to school for a multitude of reasons including socialization, applied skills (shoe-tying, sharing, etc.), and exposure to things besides television and iPads, none of which hinge on income.
  - hueving 11y ago
    Sorry, I should have clarified. Lower income people could not afford the cost of sending the children to daycare if schools actually sent students home after 3 hours each day. Where I grew up, school became the social safety net for children from low income backgrounds. If the temperature dropped to -10F, they would still not cancel school because the low income kids received better heat and better meals from the school. My point is that in many cases, school isn't nearly as much about learning as it is to have a safe and stable place for children from unstable households.
kyberias 11y ago
Ummm... isn't there more to school than the "official curriculum"? Kids learn to listen, talk, discuss, concentrate, present, read, write etc.

random854 11y ago

This is not directly relevant to the article, but I see people look at public/private school v. homeschool as if it's a zero-sum game. Many families are unable to have a parent stay home the entire day(whether due to money or due to the parent liking their career-who wants an unhappy, bored teacher all day?), but ideally "schooling" should be going on in the home as well as in school. In public school I learned little of value past socialization (I did have interaction with peers, something my family would not have been able to give me on a regular basis if I was homeschooled) but I learned a lot on my own time and was encouraged by my parents to do this. Most children who are too ahead of the public school curve to benefit from it are smart enough to teach themselves (with some help from parents in the evenings if needed.)