My brother and I were homeschooled, but it was quite structured and we wrote the same provincial exams as every other grade 12 kid. My brother did the SAT as well. We had excellent scores. We both dropped out of college with near perfect GPAs. Today I'm a successful self-taught software engineer now starting a SaaS business. My brother is a famous sci fi author. He makes even more than I do. I think homeschooling let us learn whatever we wanted to learn without fear, and find our own path in life. Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places. So socially we had a lot to learn. I don't think that was a permanent disadvantage, but it was not a necessary drawback of homeschooling. I would recommend sports and other after school activities to add the social dimension into homeschooling.
This might work for outliers/higher IQ/elite people in the HN community, but consider this:
1. School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule.
2. Not everyone is self-motivated to learn. Children, at critical developmental ages, are more prone to be led astray than "follow their passions" (at this age, really?). They will more likely be manipulated by vices if not constantly monitored. Note: Even adults struggle to find their "passion", good for the lucky few.
3. Not all parents are good teachers. Usually, responsible families understand the value proposition- they wish their children have a better future- and education is the most assured/common ticket that provides these opportunities.
4. School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen. An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism. Ex: Nazi Germany and Mao's China burned books and persecuted the educated (1984 style).
Public schools, with all its flaws, are the best instruments to free the masses.
Knowledge is democratized power to avoid the corruption that absolute power entails.
> School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen. An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism.
Germany was among the most highly educated countries in the world in the 1930s. The Russian Revolution was an elite phenomenon. In a country of peasants the Revolution was of and by the intelligentsia. Whatever else you might say about them they weren’t uneducated.
The German ban on home schooling is explicitly to prevent the formation of parallel societies. It would be hard to be clearer that the purpose of the “education” system is indoctrination.
If you want to teach things the best and most efficient way to do so is explicitly. The enormous majority of people do not generalize learning beyond its context. Whether transfer of learning even exists is a hot topic in psychological research. It is certainly not a strong effect. If school was to teach critical thinking it should be doing so explicitly. It doesn’t and there’s little reason to believe it’s especially good at it.
School is excellent at inuring children to boredom, obeying authority and pointless busywork.
The point of our system is that (as much as is possible) education is not limited to the 'elites' and 'intelligentsia.' Rather, it is distributed in a (relatively) egalitarian fashion amongst not just those who call for war and revolution, but those who rot in the trenches and die upon the bayonet. School is excellent at building the cohesive fabric of a society, including teaching it's boredom, authority, and pointless busywork.
It's not perfect, but from the most remote deserts of Arizona to rural Appalachia, to Compton, to rural Colorado, our public school system chugs away.
By hood or by crook, or by underfunded inner-city/rural public school, we're teaching a hell of a lot of kids to read and write, multiply and divide. Skills that many parents can't teach on their own, and that most kids wouldn't go out of their way to learn if you left them alone.
I attended elementary through middle-school at a district too poor to offer a high-school chemistry class, and still learned my times tables and how to write a paragraph. I even went on to Community College, a state school, a state-school masters, and an MD on scholarship. Sure, I didn't get the chance to take AP classes, and I didn't have some fancy robotics class, but I just can't bring myself to bash the public school system that got me to where I am. Sure, I didn't get everything a kid growing up in Pasadena got, but California has a robust-enough public-education system through the Community Colleges and UC/Cal-State system that it wasn't a dealbreaker in the least.
I don't know what district you attended, but if you took nothing away other than 'boredom, authority, and pointless busywork,' I'm curious as to how exactly we are debating this point in written English.
I think it's a slap to the face of a lot of teachers doing their best, as well as their students, to say that kids in disadvantaged districts learn nothing other than how to sit still and listen to authority. I learned quite a bit, in fact.
> I think it's a slap to the face of a lot of teachers doing their best, as well as their students, to say that kids in disadvantaged districts learn nothing other than how to sit still and listen to authority
I have to agree. In fact, I was explicitly told as much by my high school Physics teacher after I openly said that I thought the school's "Excellence Program" wasn't particularly challenging.
His take was that he realized that it was easy for me, but there were some teachers who were trying as hard as they could to give the students a good education while the rest dismissed us as being a bunch of unreachable ghetto kids that they were wasting their time on. Sure, I was a 17 year-old punk kid but he was right: I was basically crapping on the people who were trying to make a difference and at the same time putting down a lot of my classmates who were working as hard as they could to get good grades, many of them in very difficult life circumstances.
I guess I don't have a point other than to say I agree with yours :-)
I do not feel I called him a name. I called out his pedantry, which I felt was an accurate use of the word given the wording he chose (specifically the "by hood or by crook").
He edited his post and added a lot of words that made it seem a lot less pedantic after the fact.
The original post I received was pretty bare bones originally and gave me a completely different impression than what is written now.
But I definitely overreacted to what was written, even originally.
--
"As bad as you make it sound, they are teaching kids stuff, even at less-than-wealthy school districts.
By hood or by crook, or by underfunded inner-city/rural public school, we're teaching a hell of a lot of kids to read and write.
I attended elementary through middle-school at a district too poor to offer a high-school chemistry class, and still learned my times tables and how to write a paragraph."
Calling names can mean different things, of course. The sense in which we use the term just means using pejorative labels. The phrase "your pedantry" in "that's a lot of words to support your pedantry" combines a personal pronoun with a pejorative, which is bad.
Don't worry about it too much—we appreciate your good intentions. It's just best to review one's comments and edit out anything that might come across as a swipe. (That's what I do.) Remember that comments are 1000x more likely to sound that way to readers—especially the particular reader being addressed—than to the person posting the comment.
Fair enough dude. I'm sorry you feel short-changed by the public school system. I'm sorry you weren't able to see the point of my anecdote. I'm sorry this conversation has become so confrontational. I don't think it needed to go that way.
Yeah that went south... but anyway, I think a better response is that you have no way of knowing if you succeeded because of public schooling, or in spite of it. And the same can be said of almost any human... we just don’t know how effective our current school system is compared to the vast diversity of alternative models that could exist. Sure, kids generally learn to read and perform arithmetic, but at what cost?
I don't think our system is the best, most effective, or even, in many cases anything above the bare minimum. There are probably a lot of interesting alternatives out there, and I would love to see some sort of change because I absolutely despised high school.
But, the bare minimum is good enough to get kids prepped to continue within the public higher-education system, and they can more-or-less take it from there.
Even if you go to a terrible high-school, it is generally functional enough for you to enter a community college, no SAT required. From community college, you can transfer to a good state school. The mechanism exists to take kids from mediocre schools, get the ones who are interested up-to-speed in a less chaotic environment, and put them into a state university, without them being super-geniuses or 1,000% intrinsically motivated or something.
It's not perfect, but it's a government program that gets millions and millions of kids who'd rather be playing Fortnite or hanging out at the skate park to at least learn the bare minimum in a somewhat standardized way.
The socioeconomic limitations on kids trying to progress through that system is a different thing, and that's a hurdle that I don't know that we have functional systems in place to deal with.
> School is excellent at building the cohesive fabric of a society, including teaching it's boredom, authority, and pointless busywork.
I have a feeling that pointless busywork always grows to however much people can bear, so maybe if school didn't condition people to be so tolerant of it, we'd have less of it.
I dunno, I haven't see a whole lot of bearing at the DMV, but there's not an epidemic of concerned citizens showing up with molotovs and burning their local branch to the ground. Minneapolis' third precinct, sure, they burned that sucker right to the ground. But not the DMV, the icon of pointless bureaucracy.
And no matter where I've gone, from Honduras to Pakistan, to Germany, to San Bernardino, folks have been waiting in lines for things, and doing stuff that didn't really matter.
Doing stuff that sucks seems to be an unfortunate consequence of social organization for all of us normal folks who can't pay to skip the line.
It seems to me that, to responsibly make a statement of that form, you would have to look at when the system was created and look at the motivations of the people who created it (or made significant changes to the system and its objectives). If we're talking about the compulsory education system, that means looking at when the compulsory education laws were first passed, and what was said by those advocating the laws (and, possibly, deciding if they were telling the truth and if they had additional motivations).
Can you honestly say you've looked into that? Do you even know when compulsory education laws were passed in your state (U.S. or otherwise)? I'm not really picking on you specifically—I had to look it up (1874 in California).
I stress this because, while ostensibly school is for "education", if you point out that it's not doing that nearly as well as it could, ten people will say "Well, really school is for X", and you'll get about five different values of X, some of which contradict each other. This is the hallmark of people making up rationalizations for something they truly don't understand.
(To take an example, even for something like compliance—I do imagine that employers use "suffered through school without getting kicked out" as a sign of compliance, but if you imagined an institution optimized for providing that signal, I suspect making it through one month of military boot camp is a stronger signal of that, and obviously way more efficient than spending 12 years in school. Or if you want compliance without that kind of physical stress, then some variant of extreme ascetic monk training would probably do it.)
Murray Rothbard says that compulsory education in Europe was first established by Protestant Reformation leaders—Martin Luther and his followers, and John Calvin—and that their primary motive was to promulgate their religious ideas and suppress religious heresy; and that the Calvinist Puritans brought this approach to America (starting with Massachusetts and more generally New England). "Only a year after its first set of particular laws, the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1642 enacted a compulsory literacy law for all children. ... In 1647, the colony followed up this law with the establishment of public schools. The major stress in the compulsory education was laid on the teaching of Calvinist-Puritan principles." Doing my own research, I verify that Massachusetts's 1647 laws[1] required that parents "once a week (at the least) catechize their children and servants in the grounds & principles of Religion" in the very next sentence after the requirement to "[e]nable them perfectly to read the English tongue".
As for what animated the educationists who successfully established compulsory public education in most of the American states in the mid-late 1800s, Rothbard describes it in the following link. Rothbard is an ideological libertarian, but he forms his arguments from plenty of primary and secondary sources which he cites. https://mises.org/library/education-free-and-compulsory-1/ht...
You've obviously looked into the history of the system to a deeper degree than I have. I not only appreciate the effort, but I respect your opinion as to my point.
Do you figure I'm making a good point, or do you disagree? If I'm wrong, what is the point of school? Why does every country do it?
Based on Rothbard's description... The educationists who pushed for it were not a completely homogeneous group, although they were reasonably well organized.
Some simply thought education was good and weren't bothered by the coercion.
Some subscribed to the absolutist State view going back to Luther and Calvin—people saying things like "in these schools the precepts of morality and religion should be inculcated, and habits of subordination and obedience be formed", "that a teacher must lead his students to accept the existing government", "the children belong to the State and not to their parents", etc.
And some had egalitarian aims along the lines of what you describe. "The vigorous championing of the public school's leveling role appeared again and again in the educationists' literature. Samuel Lewis particularly stressed that the common schools would take a diverse population and mold them into "one people;" Theodore Edson exulted that in such schools the good children must learn to mingle with the bad ones, as they will have to do in later life", and others are cited too.
Although you may be surprised at how far they go. Rothbard says that Owen and Wright—Wikipedia identifies them as utopian socialists—had very extreme plans involving the State raising all children away from their parents in a uniform environment, as the logical conclusion of making the childhoods of the rich and the poor be totally equal; those are the only two he cites advocating this, but he claims they were very influential, the essays published with approval by a great many newspapers, etc. Could be.
Back to what you said: The "including teaching it's boredom, authority, and pointless busywork"—well, authority yes, but the boredom and busywork seem pretty clearly not part of the original plan. I think that's an accident which has developed since then. Which brings me to this point:
Supposing that the above describes the state of affairs in the mid-1800s, a great deal of time has elapsed since then. Private companies with clear goals develop cancer (that is, pockets of people acting selfishly at the organization's expense and subverting the organization's usual methods of enforcing its objectives) on smaller timescales than that. You should expect some ... evolution.
Generally, I expect incentives to direct the evolution of an organization. If we consider the "customers" of an organization to be those who decide if it gets funding, then the customers of a public school are primarily the voters or the politicians they elect, not the students or the parents—except insofar as those can influence voters. (Also, sometimes a school is allocated funds proportional to the number of students, so students voting with their feet could be a force; on the other hand, switching schools involves hassle, losing one's entire social group, and likely a longer commute, so it's likely not used often.)
We might expect this to mean that schools would tend to implement policies that make things pleasant for school employees at the expense of students, as long as they can't be turned into public relations disasters. Continually increasing the homework load, starting school extra-early for teenagers despite decades of research about sleep schedules showing that's a bad idea, and assigning busywork (either in the sense of "literally to keep the students busy while the teacher can sit and relax", or in the sense of "make all 20 students do an extra 5 problems because of the 1-2 people who need the practice") are all examples of this. (Note that, for all these, opposition can be dismissed as "the complainers are lazy bums".) I've had a case where a teacher—a nice guy and a smart guy, I liked and respected him—told me that, if he made an exception to implement my request, he'd have 100 parents beating down his door with their own requests—so, keeping his negotiating position with parents was more important than designing a better program for his student (well, from his incentives, it was more important).
It could be worse. The book "Little Soldiers"—based on what I've read[1] about it—depicts what is apparently considered good practice in modern Chinese education. Students starting at age 3 are required to sit very still and do a delicate and pointless task over and over, and are yelled at whenever they mess up—all to establish "discipline" as early as possible. Parents are expected to fawn over the teachers and, under the table, to buy them gifts. This seems pretty clearly the end state of "optimized for school employees at the expense of students and parents" (well, I guess I could imagine it going even farther...). It seems American parents are more unruly and have a better negotiating position than that.
But generally, beware of ascribing purpose to any particular part of school. If the school was laid out in a coherent design by one person, and it's relatively young and small, and has good competition—then maybe you can expect most of it to be part of the plan. But public schools that have existed for a long time... When you experience busywork, it's not the taste of egalitarianism; it's the taste of organizational cancer.
Maybe if I limited my concept of the 'point' of school to more specifically describe the average incentives driving the average parent in the current decade to send their child through the formal education system, rather than homeschooling?
Would you then consider it possible to draw a link between that and a tractable concept of the 'point' of school.
I would probably refer to that as "the point of sending your kid to school". Note that this is different from "the point of running the school the way it's currently run" (which is how I would probably interpret the bare phrase "the point of school"), and also from "the point of maintaining compulsory education laws".
It may also be different from "why parents choose to send their kid to school", because parents' perception of their choices may be incorrect—I think it often is.
And, of course, it'll be different for different kids. You say "the average", but as some say, the average human has one ovary and one testicle; taking an average across disjoint groups may not make much sense. A high school diploma is one of the most cited reasons for going to high school (not K-8), but that would really only matter if the high school itself is a brand name, which is rare (you probably have to be rich, talented, or lucky to get in); otherwise a GED should work equally well for college. For the upper middle class trying to get into elite colleges, an upper middle class high school will offer plenty of extracurriculars with which students can pad their applications. For socially adept poor kids that manage to live in rich districts, mingling with the rich kids may be useful. For kids with terrible home environments, school may be a decent escape. For kids that fit well into the social environment and aren't bothered by all of school's problems, it may be fun, good for making friends, and even a decent educational option. I think most of the above groups don't overlap much (except the "socially adept poor kids" obviously "fit well into the social environment"), and forming a picture of school's "average target student" wouldn't look like a real student and would probably mislead more than enlighten.
For kids in reasonable home environments, who are irritated by school's problems, who have friends and sports or other group activities they do outside school, who have access to libraries and now the internet and Wikipedia and free online courses, which are getting better while school seems to get worse due to its cancer... it's probably not the best choice (the kid's individual traits like motivation and curiosity may be deciding factors here), and as trends proceed that will become more clearly and generally the case. Parents' impressions of the available options are probably decades out of date.
As for the incentives that face parents themselves: for many, public school is primarily publicly funded daycare; for some parents, there is no reason other than avoiding punishment from truancy laws. Honestly, I suspect the strongest motivators in practice are social conformity—not sending your kids to school would be shameful or weird, make you stick out and become a magnet for criticism—and ignorance of alternatives.
Most haven't heard of unschooling, and probably think homeschooling is for Christian fundamentalists who hate evolution, or for geniuses; those who know more still usually assume that it requires a parent to act like a full-time tutor, and haven't considered options like "set up books and textbooks and ask your child once a day what they learned and if they have any questions". Some have thought that far and think their child would never be productive without constant supervision; the homeschooling advocate's response is that your child has spent years being taught that "education" = "adults imposing boring unpleasant crap on you", and it may take many months for that to fade away, but their motivation should improve eventually; still, it seems possible to me that there's significant intrinsic individual variation in motivation and curiosity that would make the difference.
It is disappointing when adults assume the worst about their own children and knowingly condemn them to years of misery; they could be correct, but what a thing for a parent to believe... One can also ask: if you really believe that, then how do you expect them to do well in college or in a career? Maybe they assume the motivation will automatically improve as the frontal lobe finishes growing (which is possible), and that faking it until then will get them into a place where they might develop hitherto unseen qualities and do well. To which I merely sigh, shake my head, and say life should be so much better than that, and for many reasons it's worth the risk of trying it the right way.
I guess a counterexample would be that kids can leave if they want to. They have to be organized, and highly motivated, which is also kind of a measure of how prepared they are to function in the real world. They also have to prove that they have achieved the level of knowledge expected of a graduating high-school student.
Kids can take the California High School Proficiency Exam, leave high school at 16, do two years at a community college, and transfer out to a state school.
I wound up taking a bunch of community college classes at night, my high school accepted the credits, and let me leave a year early.
Only a handful of kids seem to actually follow-through with it, but it's totally doable if you're organized, willing to work, and really want out.
> Kids can take the California High School Proficiency Exam, leave high school at 16
Yep. Though I didn't do any college after that. I messed around with mathematics and programming for about 5 years, then made a serious effort to find a programming job, and have been working since then.
I didn't know about the CHSPE until 9th grade, though, when my sister told me about it (because she had a friend who used it too). Before then, my impression was that there was no feasible alternative to school. Certainly no one at school mentioned it.
Also, you're not allowed to take the CHSPE until either age 16 or in the second semester of 10th grade. Which strikes me as stupid. Seems to me that, if you manage to pass it at a younger age, then that is a stronger proof that you're smart/hardworking and shouldn't be stuck taking 9th grade or 8th grade or whatever. (I imagine most of my peer group could have passed it in 6th grade; it is really a test of basic minimum competency.)
I personally wasn't as intrinsically motivated to pursue a given field. I just wanted to get out and do something more interesting, discover the real world, and explore career options. I picked up Morris Kline's Calc, aaaaand then I put it back down and signed up for a class.
What would you attribute your deep intrinsic motivation to? It's admirable.
Thank you, let's see. One part is probably that I was brought up to admire great scientists—my dad gave me popular science books by Stephen Hawking ("The Universe in a Nutshell" in particular) at a young age, and some Feynman books, and such. (I remember "Black Holes, Wormholes, and Time Machines" by Jim al-Khalili from the library.) For a long time I figured I should become such a scientist myself.
Another is probably high self-opinion and wanting to prove I was the best. In elementary school, I entered the chess club; there was a five-week tournament (one game per week), and I studied chess books my mom gave me and by the end of the tournament was the strongest player in the school. (I only tied for first place in that tournament, but I had improved enough by the end that I believe I won all subsequent rematches against the guy I lost my first game to.) Upon entering middle school, I took a Mathcounts test to determine who would be on the school team, and I got the highest score in the school (which was actually kind of a fluke, because I had a friend who generally outperformed me at arithmetic-based contests and did so at the actual Mathcounts events—but I tended to beat him at proof contests later on). I did lots of math contests, and generally did "rather well". The pinnacle of that was qualifying for the math olympiad camp in 9th grade, from which the U.S. International Math Olympiad team is selected (although people below 12th grade have a lower bar, and aren't in the running for the team unless they've met the higher bar; my achievement isn't that impressive). So my self-opinion had some justification.
Regarding calculus textbooks, in the summer after 7th grade I went to one of my sisters and said, "You know, I've heard of this thing called calculus, but I don't know what it is"; she gave me my oldest sister's calculus textbook (Ostebee and Zorn), and I read through chapters, and did problems out of the the chapters until I figured I understood it, and moved onto the next chapter. (I didn't go through all the chapters—towards the end it did multidimensional stuff that just got boring.) With this as my sole calculus education, I later chose to take a calculus round of a math contest, and got a "decent" score (IIRC it might have been in the top 10%). :-)
So, for quite a long time, I wasn't actually sure that I'd ever met anyone who was smarter than me. (My abovementioned friend was certainly close, and was better at some things.) At the math olympiad camp, I did meet people who were clearly significantly better than me at math contests. I figured that a certain amount of that was due to drilling, which was something I didn't do (I mean, I went to math club and did whatever they put in front of me, but I didn't practice contests at home), which gave me a way to suspect that I might still be at least as smart as them. :-) I knew this was a self-serving line of thought, but I figured that, as long as I knew it was specious, it was harmless to indulge it and let it motivate me. I think Colin Percival is the clearest example of someone reasonably close to my age that I'd have to bow down to. (Though even then, if my education had been properly arranged, instead of wasting most of my K-10 years... Well, that is an experiment I hope to carry out multiple times in the next generation.)
The olympiad camp actually gave worksheets that they recommended we do throughout the year. I did not want to pursue that, or pure math in general (although I thought I was good, I didn't think I had a good chance of, say, proving the Riemann hypothesis, and anything less than that didn't seem worth it), and refocused on computer science. (I also had discovered Paul Graham's essays around 8th grade, Scheme in 9th grade, and took an AP CS class in 10th grade, whose curriculum included SICP—yeah, that teacher was pretty cool.) After leaving school, I did over 100 Project Euler problems, and did other "programming for math" stuff, although I drifted towards pure programming stuff (implementing languages, specifically).
Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not some kind of work-maniac like Isaac Newton. I've spent plenty of time playing computer games, and still do. But I have some reflexes that have served me well. (1) Whatever you're doing, do it well. If you're doing it well, see if you can do it even better. (2) Keep an eye out for opportunities to practice your skills. When I got irritated at repetitive Youtube comments, I used curl/egrep/sed/sort/uniq to count how many of them matched a particular format. When I felt frustrated about limitations in EV Nova or Civilization II or other games, I did some work towards reimplementing them myself—which, in the case of EV Nova, led me down a rabbit hole of researching real-time garbage collection, which occupied my productive efforts for some years. When I set an alarm clock, it is a shell command of the following form:
~> sleep (math "3600 * 8 - 600"); pelimusa
where "pelimusa" is a command that sets the computer volume (in case I muted it) and then plays a song[1] in a loop until I control-C it. (3) You should know how to do everything. If there's something you don't know how to do, it should irritate you a little or hurt your pride. (4) Don't do unnecessarily stupid things. Being smart means you can do very stupid things (which other people wouldn't even try, or think to try), and if this actually leads you to cause permanent damage to yourself or other terrible outcomes, then you really weren't smart in the ways that mattered, which is unacceptable.
I was in the weeds of implementing my idealized real-time GC in x64 assembly (which may have been a bad idea, but I had my reasons, and I didn't have anyone whose opinion I trusted advising me against it; at least I learned a lot), and eventually my family started putting pressure on me to start earning money. So I did. I got a referral to Google—which turned me down, by the way, which... lowered my opinion of them :-P—and then to a few other places. I've been working at a medium-sized Silicon Valley tech company since then.
Today, in my job, the things that motivate me are pride, curiosity, and lolz. Pride could be summarized as proving to myself that I'm the best (however I might choose to define it), and that those who have invested in me made the right choice. Curiosity is self-explanatory. Lolz is when I use absurd means (like overwriting executables in /usr, or piping "yes" into installation programs, or running "kill -STOP; kill -CONT" in a loop to slow down a program) because they're actually a very effective and quick path to what I want.
Beyond my job, I want to fix things for future generations, perhaps to prove that I'm right that there was a better way. John Holt tried to reform school, ran into the cancer (as well as the astonishingly common view that children are no damn good), and concluded you had to work outside school. Seems about right to me.
Civilization II has taught me that exponential growth is the most powerful strategy ever. If I can create several people like me, each of whom creates several more, and so on, then that can achieve a lot more than I might do myself. (I am being 70% serious.) Even if they're not as smart, raising them properly (i.e. no goddamn school, plus find them some cognitive peers, and generally have an intellectually rich household) may more than make up for that: the improved education and non-isolation (my social development was certainly hampered by growing up 99% around kids I couldn't relate to, which may have made the difference in my squandering some opportunities) and possibly improved motivation (having 6+ hours a day forcibly wasted is very demotivating). In the worst case, they'll still carry my genes and can try again with the next generation.
I encourage smart and motivated people to try this too. At some point we may figure out how to directly increase intelligence (that would be one of the projects I would hope a kid of mine tackles); for now, the most obviously workable approach is to find a suitable genius (with no severe mental health or personality issues) who is willing to give you their genetic material. That may take the form of marrying them, if you're lucky. Once you have the kids (plural; one of the easiest ways to have peers is to have them at home, although you can't guarantee they'll be friends), the default approach of unschooling seems best: buy good books and intellectually stimulating toys, help them meet friends, maybe experiment with 1:1 tutoring if you have the resources and they like it, support them in activities they seem interested in, but fundamentally just make sure they are fed and watered and loved, and trust to their natural curiosity and to luck. (There is going to be a large luck component. Another reason to have multiple kids.)
Looking at politics in the UK on both sides of the political spectrum it is very clear that the public education system here is completely failing.
In the general population there appears to be very little critical thinking, ability to regulate emotions, cost benefit analysis, consideration of opportunity cost, probabilistic thinking, nor even a rudimentary understanding of the scientific method, political and legal system.
You just recited the unwashed masses dogma. I don't really agree with you at all. The vast majority of british people I've interacted with, even the "uneducated", all have reasonable, well thought out opinions even if they don't always agree with my own. I think it's much better than you seem to suggest.
The real issue is with the politicians, and the fact we don't have proportional representation. There is a significant percentage of the population with no real representation. I do not relate with either Tories or Labor and I don't think either has my best interests at heart.
Nor do most voters. They have to keep FPTP because they know that otherwise, most people won't vote for them; the last 4 times the UK had nationwide elections held under a more proportional system, most voters voted for parties other than labour of the Conservatives.
> I don't think either has my best interests at heart.
2. everyone thinks proportional representation is excellent. the reason is usually a misunderstanding of the voting process. in reality it has drawbacks, same as first past the post. before the UK referendum a study was commissioned exploring the various types of voting. the conclusion was that all these systems have flaws and all these systems are similar. but the clarity and the definitive mandate a party gets from FPTP will make sure alternative voting will not be adopted anytime soon.
I don't buy the "FPTP gives strong government" argument. Even if we accept that FPTP gives the government "clarity and a definitive mandate" (a very dubious claim given the chaos of the last few years), what's so great about strong government? The whole point of democracy is to prevent the government from getting too strong; if we really wanted strong government we'd abolish parliament and go back to letting the monarch decide everything.
Many, many European countries have proportional systems in which it's very rare for one party to get a clear majority and governments are almost always coalitions. Would Norway, Sweden or the Netherlands really be better off under a system like FPTP that effectively disenfranchises a large majority of the electorate?
No we didn’t, that system wasn’t proportional representation by any definition, please do not make posts that are not true, other readers might be misled.
Agree with you that society as a whole would make better decisions with PR. And at least policy would be more representative and lead to less resentment. The 2019 GE would have resulted in Tory minority, avoiding socialism and putting a dampener on a Hard Brexit.
My description of the unwashed masses applies to plenty of highly educated people too.
To the list, I would also add that people don’t seem to look at root causes of problems. This can be seen very clearly in the dysfunctional housing market. High rents are the fault of greedy landlords. As if landlords can just choose the price irrespective of the market! And a common objection to building more housing is that it wouldn’t be affordable. Using that logic, there would have been no point in planting potatoes during the Irish potato famine because they would be too expensive.
Speaking as someone with two children in secondary education at a "bog standard comprehensive" in East London, I think you are entirely incorrect.
I am very pleased with the level of critical thinking and lively argument we get over the dining room table about the issues of the day. My youngest daughter hs just started GCSE history and sociology and I am being constantly schooled on the ills of society.
Reminder that the lag on education affecting society is huge. People aged 65 received their education from 1960 onwards! There are still people alive and voting from before the 1944 education act! (although not many)
I would more blame the newspapers and other media for poor understanding of issues, which is mostly deliberate on the part of the Murdoch press.
It really depends on what you compare with. Before the spread of public education, people were commonly believing in magic, witches and, based on that, could be sold on all sorts of non-sequiturs. Now, they're more or less aware of the scientific process, understand most basic concepts of natural sciences, know a bit of history, can write semi-coherently, have a bit more rigour in forming arguments etc. Of course, they aren't all Oxford-educated intellectuals but, to elevate a big fraction of population to that level, I'm guessing we would need a ton of 1-on-1 tutorships, which would be extremely costly.
Yeah, I won't deny that even the educated can be manipulated- look at our generation affected by corporate and political agendas.
Yes, totalitarian states have used education to indoctrinate masses to maintain order and power. Depends on who does the teaching and how it is taught, that is why critical thinking is key.
Given this prerequisite, is an educated population easier to be manipulated than an illiterate one?
> is an educated population easier to be manipulated than an illiterate one
Good question. Depends on how the education is done. If the education is done to instill the idea that one must "believe in science", instead of learning the facts and questioning them skeptically, if one is convinced that expressing dissent is harmful and akin to violence, if questioning the dominating framework is actively discouraged and dissenters are viciously attacked, if people are taught that there can be no honest disagreement, and any different of opinion is nothing but a power move in an oppression framework, if everybody is assigned their places and recommended opinions in advance, if they are instructed that any non-conforming opinion must be silenced and suppressed - then such "educated" people are much easier to manipulated than the illiterate ones.
An illiterate person knows they are illiterate - there's no way to hide that fact from themselves. They know there are places they must tread carefully for their knowledge has obvious limits. A mal-educated person thinks they know all the answers, and learned The Truth, and thus hold the keys to the universe. Moreover, they feel a moral duty to lord over lesser creatures and guide them to The Truth, for their own benefit. This is an ideal human brick for building the totalitarian barracks.
Obviously that depends. Here is another way to phrase your question:
You spend 10 years telling John some stuff every day for hours and Jane is someone you just met.
Which one is easier to lie to?
Sounds to me like it completely depends on a lot of different things, but if you know what lie you want to tell ahead of time: obviously John is easier to lie to.
That isn't obvious at all. Folks get smitten by people they've barely met. It doesn't take years to be tricked into joining a cult: You can convince folks in a matter of months.
John might be 10 years into your lies, but he also might have caught on. You use different lies with Jane, who might not know better, and she listens wholeheartedly and with good faith.
If John is an adult and Jane isn't, Jane is easier even with the age difference. This is simply because of lack of knowledge and experience.
If one has more access to the outside world than the other, they are less likely to believe your lies.
If John knows you have mental health problems that causes you to lie and Jane doesn't, Jane is easier to lie to.
Maybe John is more suspicious of people and the world. Maybe John just shuts up to appease you, like folks that avoid talking politics with their families simply don't want to deal with things.
Are you someone younger? DO you have authority over them?
There are so many things that affect whether or not you can lie to someone.
Here is an even better way to phrase the question with respect to schooling:
You spend 10 years telling John and Jane some stuff every day for hours. John also gets told stuff for hours by a third party while Jane gets all information from you. Which one is easier to lie to?
School adds a third party so that the child isn't reliant on things taught by their parents.
It is interesting because for me it was obvious that Jane will be the easiest to lie to by far. John knows you much better.
Usually psychopaths and sociopaths are always moving so people don't know who they are and they can fool them easily.
What you are saying is if someone does trust you, you can lie to her easier, which is true, but then you will loose the trust and bond that took a long time to get.
And the math schools concentrate on isn’t particular useful in the context of a modern society. So what that you once memorized a geometric proof long enough to take a test if you don’t understand how interest works and how credit card companies take advantage of you.
That some people need kidney dialysis is not an argument that everyone getting kidney dialysis is the only way to stay healthy.
If you can't learn from books or videos or online lectures or parents or tutors, I doubt generic schooling is really going to be able to help much either, but if it does great. People learn in different ways and different kids need different resources, but that's an argument against a one-size fits all public schooling system, not in favor.
I would like to point out that in our current world it would be very very difficult to end up illiterate under just about any circumstance. Reading and writing don’t need to be explicitly taught unless you are under extreme time pressure (like the need to get the pupils to be able to read their texts on their own so you can increase class sizes and decrease the cost of schooling).
> Yes, totalitarian states have used education to indoctrinate masses to maintain order and power. Depends on who does the teaching and how it is taught, that is why critical thinking is key.
None of the German Empire, Weimar Republic or Russian Empire were totalitarian states. If education is protective against indoctrination the effect is at best weak. A lively marketplace of ideas is no guard against organized thugs if the liberals are not willing to defend liberalism. Critical thinking is a red herring.
Weimar Republic was democracy, because WWI victors forced Germany into democracy. Weimar Republic was also failing mess, from start to end. With fights and screaming in parlament, with political murders, with attempted revolutions and with increasing violence in the streets. Germans themselves did not wanted democracy at any point. They have found loss in war humiliating and unfair.
Weimar Republic also had highly militarized civil service, comited to military values rather then to democracy.
Russian Empire was dictatorship to large extend. Not as much as communism, but it was not democracy with political freedoms. The little reforms they had were basically too little too late. There were little of such a thing as citizen right in most places. Peasants also had huge illiteracy rates.
The Russian empire was an absolute monarchy until 1905 that was definitely totalitarian by modern understanding. The subsequent semi-democratic government was ineffective.
The Russian Empire was authoritarian. It was not totalitarian under any definition of the term I’ve ever encountered. There was an extremely lively press, active intellectual life and real if toothless political opposition. It was absolutely nothing like under the Soviet boot.
> How did educated, liberal society respond to such terrorism? What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)? Though Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in terrorism, they aided the terrorists in any way they could. Kadets collected money for terrorists, turned their homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem. Kadet Party central committee member N. N. Shchepkin declared that the party did not regard terrorists as criminals at all, but as saints and martyrs. The official Kadet paper, Herald of the Party of People’s Freedom, never published an article condemning political assassination. The party leader, Paul Milyukov, declared that “all means are now legitimate . . . and all means should be tried.” When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”
Which is what is so depressing about "cancel culture" and radical redefinition of what is "hate speech". Liberals and the rational center are not defending those ideals which gave us our modern Western civilisation.
Even on this website, merely questioning the validity of some of the aspects of the politically correct zeitgeist will get your post flagged and hidden from public consumption.
Free speech as how some people like to define it now (anything can and should be said) was never an ideal, and certainly never reality.
It’s funny how the people complaining about “cancel culture” (usually a roundabout way of complaining you can’t say racist things anymore) are completely fine with twisting especially history to benefit themselves.
> usually a roundabout way of complaining you can’t say racist things anymore
As an external observer, this seems to me exactly the problem. Discourse is so polarized, that nobody can say "this thing that started as a reaction to overt racism has gone too far" without people replying "that just means you're racist".
The situation has come to where there are ridiculous abuses going on, and criticizing them is anathema because the initial purpose of the system being abused was to counter a bias.
Hell, even writing this comment, meta-analyzing the situation, I'm semi-afraid will have personal impact to me, which is pretty indicative of the problem.
A large part of it is signaling through terminology. If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one.
There are definitely people that are able to discuss certain social trends becoming a problem without using dogmatic terminology, which is where the conversation becomes interesting for all participants. As opposed to a horrifying journey plumbing the depths of polarised discourse.
American liberals runs the social networks almost everyone uses so whenever they decide to cancel stuff the whole world gets affected. Therefore it makes sense that many people all over the world learns to hate them and their cancel culture.
> If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one.
So you can't say "cancel culture has gone too far" without signaling you're right-wing? I'm not up to speed with the exact politics, but I've heard the term in non-right wing contexts.
Seems to me like that would make it impossible to talk about things, which is what I'm seeing. How would you talk about Twitter canceling people without using the term "cancel culture?
Am I the only person who found it ironic and meta that, in a thread about canceling people based on certain words and phrases, OP kind of tried to "cancel" your argument based on your use of the phrase "cancel culture". We are deep into the recursion now.
Well that's kind of the issue, right? There are some things you can't talk about because if you want to talk about them, it means you're a racist that just wants to legitimize racism.
Judging by the number of downvotes on a comment about this very thing, I'm not optimistic.
> School is excellent at inuring children to boredom, obeying authority and pointless busywork.
Which is an exact mirror of the professional world that most people will face later. School system is here to push a national narrative on people (which is not a bad point per se, as it builds cohesion), and prepare them to be mindless drone in a corporate environment. In short it serves society needs, not individuals.
Interesting you brought up the whole parallel societies thing. We have a few churches around us that have a bunch of people who do home schooling and "alternate" schooling, and this whole alternate society thing is really noticeable. The kids have friends and play and socialize, but it's an entirely different circle from the public school kids. The kids play video games but different ones, they watch TV and listen to music, but have a totally different concept of pop culture than the regular school kids. Like if I made a Spiderman or Harry Potter reference/joke they wouldn't get it at all, but they have their own memes that only they get. Feels kind of insular, like the Amish or one of those communities of immigrants who deliberately don't assimilate into the shared US cultural melting pot.
My above comment was directed at the two parent comments who were variously referring to public school conditioning as "indoctrination" or "social cohesion". Whatever you choose to call it, public schools (in the United States) do not teach critical thinking - quite the opposite.
Whether or not critical thinking is on the agenda for a homeschooled student depends entirely on the teacher and the curriculum.
The point of Germany being highly educated is overdone. The country was also heavily militarized, violent and generally massive mess. Hitler was not representing educated elite, quite the opposite. Part of that all was backslash against modernity, against arts etc.
In Russia, peasants were largely illiterate. As in, unable to read and write. The revolution did came from people who were able to read and write, obviously, it is kinda hard to coordinate without that. For that matter, monarchy was kept by educated people too, simply because you cant keep bureaucracy without writing.
But it was not some kind of great education they would have. And their propensity for violence had more to do with how violent Russia was even before then with anything education.
> The revolution did came from people who were able to read and write, obviously, it is kinda hard to coordinate without that.
The did much more than coordination. The intelligentsia was basically 100% responsible for the revolution in every aspect, starting from conceptualization (peasants would never come up with the idea of trying to apply Marxism to the real world and wouldn't even be able to imagine world other than the one in which tzar rules over them) through managing implementation to the post-revolution power capture. Peasants were merely ants, necessary for revolutionaries' plans to install themselves as new rulers of Russia (obviously, some of them had more lofty goals, but as usual the worst scoundrels quickly took over and the idealists were disposed of).
And very little of what they did would be possible without writing and reading. Peasants did not entered Russian politics in meaningful way at all. Simply, being illiterate to the point where you cant even improve on super behind farming also makes you pretty crappy at anything politics. Peasants attacked local rules here and there, then being bloodily suppressed wherever things got tight. That was it.
The monarchy, the military, the civil service, they were all "intelligentsia" too. "Liberal bourgeoisie" and capitalists were "intelligentsia" too. There were freaking 5 armies in Russia civil war. All 5 were led by people able to read and write. You all make it sound as if "intelligentsia" were uniformly Leninist or something. They were not, that is just the army that won. And I would be even super surprised if communists were the most educated of them all.
Yet also, the Russia monarchy was not exactly stable democratic functioning place until Lenin started revolution by the end of WWI out of nowhere.
I honestly hate when people who are supposedly against communist somehow adopt communist framing in completely absurd ways, down to blaming "intelligentsia" for whatever they perceive bad and down to attributing whole of Russian civil war to communists. I would really like to see someone use the term intelligentsia for like American journalist, teachers, or programmers. Lets all assume that all college educated people in American hold the same opinions. It is that stupid term.
Intelligentsia does not mean "educated people". For example, capitalists or the tzar's family were not part of Inteligentsia. A lof of the military officers weren't either.
> "As a status class, the intelligentsia includes artists, teachers and academics, writers, and the literary hommes de lettres.[3][4] Individual members of the intelligentsia are known as intellectuals."
I would love to see analysis under which Stalin was intellectual. And people I mentioned (except maybe programmers) are not.
> "In Russia, before the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), the term intelligentsia described the status class of educated people whose cultural capital (schooling, education, enlightenment) allowed them to assume practical political leadership."
Yeah, pretty much anyone able to participate in politics. Which literally means every person participating in Russian politics is intelligentsia by this definition. Notably, while not all officers and capitalists participated, those who did would be counted as intelligentsia. And they did participate and even achieved some.
> "In Eastern Europe, intellectuals were deprived of political influence and access to the effective levers of economic development; the intelligentsia were at the functional periphery of their societies."
Can confirm that intellectuals were hated by communists.
Calling communists intelligentsia is one way to delegitimize them, precisely because of their disdain for this class. That was strong political point and rhetoric, but fails when you then try to make it a point about impact of education on person.
> I would love to see analysis under which Stalin was intellectual
The Wikipedia article conflates intelligentsia with intellectuals, which I don't agree with (I'm Polish, so I have some long-ingrained intuitions regarding those terms). Stalin, as an educated non-wealthy person (he studied to become a priest), can easily be seen as someone who is a member of inteligentsia.
> Which literally means every person participating in Russian politics is intelligentsia by this definition.
Tzar family or many of the old aristocratic families were not a member of intelligentsia and would probably be offended by the association. The key factor of being in inteligentsia was (from Wiki): "people engaged in the complex mental labours". The higher classes didn't do any labor.
You argued that "intelligentsia does not mean educated people". Now you are classifying Stalin with finished elementary school at 16 and seminary studies as intelligentsia.
> The key factor of being in inteligentsia was (from Wiki): "people engaged in the complex mental labours".
Stalin was not engaged in the complex mental labors, outside of seminary he engaged in revolutionary politics basically.
The very same wikipedia has multiple definitions for inteligentsia - including specifically Russian one from pre-revolution I quoted. Which defines inteligentsia as people educated enough to engage in politics. Which does include Stalin and pretty much everyone else involved in Russian politics.
> Tzar family or many of the old aristocratic families were not a member of intelligentsia and would probably be offended by the association. The higher classes didn't do any labor.
I did not made that definition, wiki did.
Monarchy had more supporters then just Tzar and old aristocratic families. And again, old aristocratic families did actually engaged in ruling and leading. And then you have waste groups of lower aristocracy running smaller things. The country was under constant internal conflict and pressure. They did not done labor, they did politics a lot.
And group of people who had don't politics or who have been educated cant be reasonably reduced to "Stalin vs Tsar". Somehow, people pushing for reforms (too little too late success, but still) don't exist. Liberals dont exist. Capitalists dont exist or dont engage with politics. That is not even realistic. Monarchis trying for milder reforms dont exist.
This I can confirm from personal experience! I could read fluently before Kindergarden because my older sister taught me so, not by force, but because I asked what the big letters of luminous advertising on a supermarket meant. So it began :) And I learned to learn by reading everything I could get. By myself.
But: that probably won't work for everyone. Furthermore the question remains how to do that when both parents have to work to make ends meet? Maybe even multiple jobs, as it is common for many nowadays? Also one can't overgeneralize this, as there are good teachers and schools, and bad ones.
No matter what country or system or schooltype.
There is a lot of bias towards homeschoolers so the wild success stories often get touted to counteract the prejudice.
I was homeschooled but agree that it isn't for everyone, mainly because not everyone has the resources. It decidedly requires a middle class lifestyle. Also, parents need to have something of their life together beyond just financial resources.
But people overestimate the competence required of a parent to teach. Probably the biggest thing I learned was learning how to learn, and in particular, doing that on my own. So reading the textbook in college was hardly a shock. If my parents didn't understand a subject, they could learn it with me, or find the resources I needed (including community college, online courses).
Unschooling, however, I am not too sympathetic to. You need some structure.
> Unschooling, however, I am not too sympathetic to. You need some structure.
For most kids you probably need some structure. For some, unschooling certainly works well; for others it's another term for "school dropout". I personally was both homeschooled and unschooled, for different topics, and a high % of the smartest people I know were unschooled.
I really struggled to learn to read and write, even by grade five. So my parents took me out and my mom worked with me one-on-one intensively to learn phonics, which finally fixed that problem. Meanwhile, prior to that the biggest challenge I had in learning programming on my own is that I struggled to actually read the books I had on it. I think that unschooling taught me how to learn on my own, in a way that was very beneficial later in life.
Yet again, I'd say based on my experience taking relatively high-level, proof-based, math classes in university many years later, that for me the structured experience of university math worked much better than trying to learn those subjects on my own (which I had also tried!). Yet, for high school math, there hadn't been much difference (I did attend highschool).
I would say public schools are so much better than nothing. But they're not the best option by far.
Not everyone can do homeschooling, not everyone who can, will do it well. Many kids are not able to handle it either. But it can lead to much better outcomes. Like most things, general advice doesn't apply to everyone.
> School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen.
That's an interesting use of "purpose". That isn't what our system was specifically designed for (Prussian system adopted by the US) by the people who designed it.
They wrote heavily about how well their new education system instilled obedience and created good soldiers and workers. They were very proud of these good outcomes.
It's also not the actual measured outcomes of our current system. Hell, "critical thinking" is explicitly excluded from the curriculum by a chunk of the US.
The use of "purpose" to mean "thing we want it to be" isn't a critical type of thinking.
That sounds good in theory but research seems to suggest that homeschoolers overwhelmingly perform better on every single metric. Although I'll grant that there may be data bias in that smarter and more devoted parents are more likely to homeschool.
To be fair, it seems obvious that the education industry (those journals) would have a bias against homeschooling. Getting published by people who hate your message is just not likely.
Do academia (universities) and high/elementary school have such loyalty to each other? I thought that most colleges were quite friendly to homeschooled students.
Academia is (perversely) not incredibly enamored with novel systems from my experience. My theory was that it has something to do with most of the tenured professors being old and stubborn.
> That sounds good in theory but research seems to suggest that homeschoolers overwhelmingly perform better on every single metric.
Being homeschooled and unschooled myself, I got to see that first hand in other families. But I don't think it actually means that homeschooling/unschooling is universally better: plenty of people try it, find it doesn't work for them, and quit.
My best guess is it increases the variance of results more than the average, with some kids doing very well on it, and some very poorly. While that's good for society, it doesn't mean one can entirely replace the other.
Control for socioeconomic status and homeschooled kids tend to do worse in STEM subjects. Even your link which mostly doesn't control for SES and therefore is very biased says this. Therefore you can't say that it is better on every metric, if you think that STEM is important then homeschooling is bad.
> Qaqish (2007), on the other hand, examined the ACT math scores of college-bound students and found, while controlling for background variables, that the conventionally schooled performed slightly better than the home educated.
> School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen.
I'd say the plague of fake news shows that the current crop of educated population is not capable of critical thinking.
Now imagine how much worse it'd be if more people were homeschooled and not exposed to opposing views. If their only source of information was a parent who believed in strange conspiracy theories and only associated with friends and family who had similar views.
School's greatest purpose is putting kids in a room with a couple dozen other kids that they may disagree with or even hate, and forcing them to learn how to deal with their existence.
>Were you discussing high politics in the 5th grade or something?
Yes? We talked about the news and recent events in class around that time. It wasn't anything profound, but our classes definitely talked about it. This was also in the years following 9/11, so it was an unavoidable topic. We even had mock elections where we'd "vote" for real, current politicians.
If I'd only heard about the news and world happenings from home, I'd have a very different and far narrower view of things.
And it's not just politics. No clue why you assumed that. Schools put you in a room with kids from different backgrounds, different interests, different likes and dislikes. I see a lot of praise about homeschooling on HN, but the ones I've encountered (including cousins in my own family) mostly come from very isolated religious families seeking to shield their kids from the outside world. Maybe it's different for very wealthy people growing up in the valley or with other great resources provided to them, but most of the homeschooled people I've been around have had trouble acclimating to a world that isn't sanitized for their existence.
I'm not sure how you define "high politics", but certainly students discuss politics at younger ages than that. I would be surprised to find a school that doesn't include discussions on current events at pretty much every age level. Obviously the teachers had to be careful because even though they may feel strongly about an issue, most of them don't want to consciously bias the discussion.
I can even remember a teacher having us write a letter asking that a government facility in our region not be closed down because it would affect people in our class. I was probably in 3rd or 4th grade at the time. In 5th grade we had to write letters to soldiers fighting in the Gulf War - something that I have very mixed feelings about today because I do feel that supporting troops fighting in a war overseas is a highly political act.
Not sure why you were downvoted: the traction fake news, anti 5G, and anti vaccine movements get clearly show that there is an issue where critical thinking is concerned.
A thousand or so vocal Facebook users found on anti-mask groups were surveyed... Not exactly the epitome of representativity...
94% of them say they will refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19... Both educated and anti-science. Maybe their educational system failed them, or there are other important factors at play.
57% believe in a global Zionist conspiracy theory... 52% think the Illuminati are attempting to control the population...
Men are more likely to be anti mask in USA since in USA right wing tend to be anti science. In many areas of Europe right wing is more pro science than left wing though, so the roles becomes reversed.
I live in Europe and our right wing is taking clues from American right wing. They are more anti mask then average. The German demonstrations against masks were right wing for example.
Where were left wing people in Europe more strongly against masks then center or right?
Isn't German right wing in large parts religious so it is closer to USA than many other European right wing parties? I live in Sweden and right wing is much more pro mask here.
The only reason the right wing is pro-mask in Sweden is because it lets them be contrarian to the left-wing government. If the government had been requiring masks, the right-wing in Sweden would be against it.
Source? We do unschooling and know a lot of families who unschool and exactly zero of them are antivaxers or antimaskers. We tend to end up here exactly because we believe in the scientific method.
> School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge
But is it? There are many schools that fail spectacularly at the task, to the point of graduating people who are functionally illiterate. Maybe school alone is not enough for that.
> Not all parents are good teachers.
True. Unfortunately, even more teachers aren't good teachers. Out of all teachers I had, I have maybe one really great teacher I could name and two or three decent ones. The rest were nearly useless at best, and actively harmful at worst. And there were much more of those than good ones. Fortunately, school is not the only place one can find good teachers...
> School's purpose is not to teach obedience
Are you sure? Because everything I've heard about schools suggests it is. At least if we're talking about standard government-issue school, not special fancy educational project or independent private establishment.
> It is there to teach us critical thinking
Maybe in theory. In practice maybe 1% of teachers could deal with actual critical thinking from the students, and even less would like to. And most "critical thinking" education I've encountered was "question those other authorities in a way we prescribe to you as your only and true authority which you don't dare to question".
> An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism
Given the absolutely disastrous state of the American academia, I don't think this argument holds any water. Yes, Cultural Revolution despised educated people. But turns out there's more than one way to indoctrination and totalitarian thought control. And being educated in never letting a dissenting opinion to be heard is no better than being not educated at all, at least when we talk about preventing totalitarianism.
> 1. School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule.
NO ITS NOT! This is a lie. There were reports in 1960's when the congress asked for an experiment to different ways of teaching. The children taught in a 1 to 1 way performed enormously better compared to the rest. And one of the worst ways was to teach is in mass. When the results came, they buried the report after it wasn't in their favor.
Schools are only good for above average intelligence people. If you want no one to be left behind then you should teach those who're slightly disadvantaged in a dedicated manner in 1 to 1 classes.
You are not making a counterargument. The operating word is “masses”. 1-on-1 doesn’t scale. The political reality may be that support for schooling would crater if the report were widely known, but the alternative isn’t realistically “modern schools” vs. “1-on-1 tutoring”, but rather “modern schools” vs. “nothing”, or, optimistically, “modern schools” vs. “something not yet invented”.
Put 30 kids in front of a teacher for 8 hours - that's about 15 minutes of instructor attention per kid per day on average. If we assume that one on one sessions need to last 8 hours, then yeah the system doesn't scale; but more realistically the kid's educational needs could be met in a fraction of the time. One person can tutor dozens of kids a week if they do it full time, but even better you can tutor without doing it full time. Full time teachers are a limited resource and if yours isn't great at some or all of the job, you just have to suffer the consequences; but there is a massive pool of people who are capable of teaching a kid something, and the harm of a mediocre tutor is minimal and easily overcome.
One on one tutoring is already extremely widely employed, and plenty of platforms have popped up to help it effectively scale. Pretty much the only people who don't use it are those who can't afford it, a problem regular schooling would also face if not publicly paid for. It takes very little imagination to picture a system where people get vouchers to spend on tutoring services and a simple method for large numbers of people to qualify as tutors eligible to accept these vouchers.
Unless I'm mistaken, you're assuming one of two things:
1) 1-on-1 tutoring happens online. I would like evidence that this is effective, given the challenges this pandemic has put in evidence. Particularly, note that this is supposed to be aimed at all children, not just particularly motivated or interested ones that will sit quietly learning at their computer.
2) 1-on-1 tutoring does not happen online. In which case you either have to add the cost of getting the kids to the tutor (if the tutor stays put, maximizing their throughput) or getting the tutor to the kids (reducing their throughput and their student count).
Beyond that, modern schooling is an entire system that addresses many many problems in society including:
- Daycare for kids ages 5-18
- Logistics of getting kids to and from school (in the US)
- Logistics of providing shared facilities for things like experimental science classes .
- Logistics of providing shared access to higher level computing facilities than individual poor students can afford.
- For a nontrivial number of students, access to food during the day.
- Many more, because I am not an expert and I literally came up with this list off the top of my head.
Are these problems unsurmountable? Do they all need to be solved by the educational system? Maybe not. But imperfectly as it solves them, it does address them for now. You can't throw out a significant part of the public service provided by public education and claim you successfully replaced it.
I was envisioning primarily in person tutoring, which has been effectively done for a very long time. That said, online tutoring is an option that many can and would employ. That a few kids might need a different structure is a very good argument for the flexibility of tutoring.
We already transport students and people already commute to work. The money you currently pay to stick kids in your school district on a bus can be used to facilitate transportation for tutoring. Some tutoring services may provide a central location while others may bring the tutor to you, and you pick the one that works best for your family.
As for your other points:
Dedicated daycare facilities can be more efficiently set up if that is their only objective. Effectively teaching hundreds of students at the same time is impossible, so you need dozens of teachers and classrooms. But if your only concern is making sure they don't kill eachother, you can easily throw a few hundred kids in a gym or a plsyground and tell them to have fun with only a small handful of moderators - which is exactly what most schools do during recess. A good portion of the current school population probably doesn't even need such services (if your 18 year old needs to be babysat, they're going to have a very rough time at 19).
School creates the logistical problem of getting kids to and from school. Again, the bus you're already paying for can take people to a school or a shared learning center or a library or a tutor's office.
The money you are paying to maintain the school science lab can also be spent to support a community science lab. This building can be much smaller, less staffed, and more optimally configured than a full highschool
The money you spend to support a school computer lab can also be spent to support a community computer lab. In general this already exists at most public libraries. The same argument as for the science lab applies here.
The money you spend to support school lunches can also be spent on food programs.
When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, but a hammer is not the right tool for many jobs. Likewise when all you have is a school, every societal need related to children starts to look like a school problem, but that does not mean school actually solves those problems in an efficient way. It really does not take any great mental leaps to imagine services dedicated to solving individual problems being more efficient than something that was never originally intended to solve that problem.
You are casually suggesting restructuring the entire economy while minimizing a relatively small problem involved in that, which is deciding who has access to education and how.
Cite your source. Provide some sort of corroborating information, such as a link to the article, or a link to a an article about the article. If it's a Congressional Report, it is available on the web.
Chric Crawford's argument[1] is that video games can provide the same sort of interactivity which makes 1-on-1 teaching so effective. I don't agree with this argument, but it's a very interesting one.
"School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen"
Having worked in public education for 15+ years I wish it were true that the goal is to teacher critical thinking. Sadly from my experience it is more about teaching "compliance". Critical Thinking seems to be pushed more for undergrad + schooling these days.
Survival bias fills this thread with people for whom homeschooling worked. Consider that those didn't experience success might be under-represented in the dialogue you consume.
You seem to be implying that the home alternative of public schooling doesn't also accomplish these goals as well. Home schooling has a curriculum and standards just like public school does.
I'm not gonna blindly advocate for home schooling but I think anyone who cares enough about their kids' education to look into options other than public school probably also cares enough to pull it off if it's the option they wind up choosing.
>School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule.
The further your kids are from the mean student the crappier the job the public school situation will do. It's like the difference between registering a new car at the DMV and bringing in a pile of papers to prove chain of custody on some junk that's only able to be street legal through some arcane technicality. The first transaction is painless. The latter is not. When you ask the system to do something it's well practiced at doing you get shit service.
>School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen.
And if you think it's successful at that for any reasonable definition of "success" then you're clearly living in a different 2020 than I am.
Look through history, even before widespread government funded schooling everything was just as crap as it is today. You had just as many popuist leaders, pants on head retarded popular culture movements, witch hunts, all the same crap we have today. The only thing that's changed is that as society have become more advanced and richer we've become more able to avoid pain and violence.
Also, school is very much about obedience to an arbitrary system. They don't overtly state it but it's pretty damn obvious if you look at how the carrots and sticks are set up.
>An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism. Ex: Nazi Germany and Mao's China burned books and persecuted the educated (1984 style).
Sure. But it's pure lunacy to conflate what's good for society with what's good for any specific kid(s). There's definitely a lot of overlap but there's also a lot of non-overlap.
> School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen. An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism. Ex: Nazi Germany and Mao's China burned books and persecuted the educated (1984 style).
Frankly, this sounds absurd. Having just been through this educational enlightenment I can tell you that's definitely not what schools do. Higher education like a bachelor's or master, sure. Definitely, even. But high school? Not at all.
It's a lesson in rote memorisation of the _true truth_ which we know is true because _the teacher said it_. It is the opposite of critical thinking. And if I were a totalitarian vying for my own state I'd leave the high school system exactly as is, perhaps change the history books a bit.
What is the basis for thinking public education is the best option for education or for political freedom? Must that always be the case if it once was true?
Who would be letting a child go astray in a home education environment? Why would a reasonable parent in #3 not conclude that education can be provided via multiple potentially sources, including themselves and a good curriculum?
Why would you not say homeschooling disseminates knowledge, teaches critical thinking and aids democracy?
This whole conversation is about living in a western democracy. However, in various third world countries some alternatives to central ally-applied education are practiced, especially where geography makes it difficult and where it is politically acceptable. This is changing in some interesting ways, positively and negatively, as cellular connections proliferate.
Also, the idea of telling someone to homeschool, in a conversation about liberal arts and attitudes that’s mostly questions so far, is a good reminder that a coercive mindset isn’t easily set aside. Would ask you to consider how your education laid the ground for that.
Fascinating. Do you think things would've turned out differently for you and your brother had you attended public school? Private?
I went to a truly terrible rural public school and I see many areas where that has held me back. Success was something to be ashamed of there. Loserthink was king.
It's impossible to say of course. But I think at the least we would have led more conventional lives.
For myself, maybe a darker outcome. I was struggling with peer pressure and getting into trouble. The family that owned our house before lost their daughter to overdose. She went to my school. I wonder sometimes how my life could have been had things been slightly different and we hadn't changed to homeschooling (after grade 6 for me, 3 for my brother.)
I suspect it would depend a lot on whether you were allowed to accelerate academically, and the answer would likely have been "no" or "not much". You might take a look at the following study, and see if it rings true to the school you did experience, or to what you've heard from others you've met:
"The considerable majority of [the subjects: young people with 160+ IQs in Australia] who have [skipped 2 or more grades in K-12] report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relationships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with socialization. Several did not graduate from college or high school." https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf
I don't know if you're at the 160+ level, but SAT scores are something of a proxy for IQ, and the severity of the social and academic frustration due to mismatch with age-peers can be judged directly.
I am above average intelligence, but not 160 level. My hope when we started homeschooling was to complete the grades faster, but it was still school and didn't hold my interest enough for that. I ended up finishing later than normal, mostly because I got side tracked with my newfound passion for computer programming. I took two years before college to explore that, and went to college reluctantly. When I got there I soon realized I had gaps in my knowledge, but generally was ahead of the 4th year students assisting the professors. I didn't want to spend 4 years and a great deal of money pursuing just a piece of paper, and dropped out.
Community colleges can offer an alternative option, even in smaller suburban and semi-rural areas.
I hated high-school, but I took classes at the local community college every night, my high school accepted the credits, and I graduated high school a year-early with transferrable college credits.
My night-school experience gave me an opportunity to push my brain as far as I wanted, and it showed me what the 'real world' was like since my classmates were in their thirties, as opposed to the 'high-school world,' or whatever my eccentric parents would have cooked up.
The SATs have a ceiling well below four standard deviations above the mean. I’m skeptical that any test is properly calibrated at that level—-even with oversampling it’s very difficult to do properly.
Many IQ older IQ tests doesn't use 15 points per SD, so when you hear people talk about enormous IQ's like 160 it almost surely doesn't use a modern scale.
We do the same. Our homeschool community is rather large and we have sports (you name it we probably do it). We even compete with other public schools.
Were you home schooled by your mother or your father? And whoever was home schooling you, were they working either part time or full time? I am interested in homeschooling as well.
My mom stayed at home and my dad worked. But really because we could read well and follow the lessons, it wasn't a large burden for mom. She had a lot of reservations when we started, but soon realized she could handle it. I don't see how it would work if both parents are working, you'd need a nanny or something in that case.
If it's who the 'obvious' google search reveals, you've said too much already (and at least one the links that search gives reveals the family name directly).
I suspect the worry is in the other direction. Sure it is not difficult to figure out what the brother's pen name is. And if you know both his names, it is not hard to find connections between them.
The part that popular authors usually want to avoid is making it easy to go from the pen name to the IRL name if you don't have some specific guess or anything. Right now I don't think going in that is particularly easy. If the grandparent however has said the name here it would almost certainly have made it easier to get from the pen name to the IRL name.
I wanted this, I essentially begged for it for 12 years with no success. I didn't need any extra motivation to read or do math problems and I was way above my grade level in both, but had behavioral problems because I was so bored in school. I still ended up with very high SAT and ACT scores too, but eventually broke down toward the end of college and graduated on time but with a few bad grades. My parents would have lost their minds if I had dropped out during any of the first three years when I also had an A-average GPA.
The public schools I went to all had a gifted program in various forms, which most years was just one hour a week and taught topics that should have been available to every student in the school. Amazingly, the teacher showed us the structure of a URL in around 1994 when I was in first grade.
> it was quite structured and we wrote the same provincial exams as every other grade 12 kid
This has been touched upon elsewhere by other commenters. But to at least ask you personally, would you concede that if you were doing well on tests despite the absence of the kind of cramming / teaching-to-the-test that the average schooled student receives, you could have done any kind of education, and in many ways, there is nothing special at all about homeschooling? Or that if your structure re-enacts this teaching, but it's a lot less time than the average student, you definitely have a natural aptitude for test taking?
Are tests the only way we can robustly evaluate a kid's education, until they are 18? If so, will sports matter if you're getting bad test scores? What does?
Here's the crazier conclusion. That people finger parental income or cultural values as the biggest factors of education outcomes, and in reality test performance is mostly genetic. It might as well be, from a policy perspective, randomly assigned - God rolls a 100 sided dice when you're born, and if it's a 1 or a 2 all standardized tests are easy for you. If you roll the other 98 numbers, the best thing is to cram.
We don't need alternatives to traditional schooling. We need a way of evaluating kids that rewards genuine learning. Kids who are learning should be scoring poorly sometimes, and that's the exact opposite of how children are evaluated, and poor scores are the exact opposite of what most parents of high achievers want.
Earnest parents are really seeking true learning. On the flip side, parents who send their kids to cram school or kvetch about college admissions not being fair because colleges consider factors other than totally and utterly gameable, zero-learning standardized tests - they are the antagonists. They are ruining our education system, they make school look the way it does, they are seeking a completely worthless advantage for their children (high test scores in the absence of valuable learning via cram school) for some cynically, utterly selfish devotion to values like making money and buying expensive things. Values so primitive and debasing that human cultures around the world have refined, multi-thousand-year-old refutations of materialism - opposition to materialism (asceticism) may be the most mature philosophy of all of history, at least as dominant as family values and theism. And then, to rationalize all of this, they find the least privileged and disadvantaged families and blame them instead! All the while pretending that there's some sort of equivalence of shittiness in their situations, because of some fucking number like income, between their families and the Other. It's complete and total bullshit.
Some changes to the school system can help everyone live happier lives and learn more, like different children spending longer (or shorter) times in class.
But really, we have to throw out tests. Or invent a test so sophisticated that it avoids being gamed by cramming.
We have to get 300 million people to kind of internalize (or at least be vaguely familiar with) a small number of algorithms (constructing/reading a written sentence, long division, mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell).
That's the point of the broader education system, and that's all that really matters.
Kids who are curious will follow some weird path and do all kinds of cool shit, kids with money will follow some orchestrated path that makes their parents happy, and most kids will do some variant of a contrived path at a community college and/or state school.
So, who cares? None of it matters. It's 2020. There's no card catalog. There's no ENIAC in the basement that some dweeb wearing a pocket-protector gatekeeps. Feynman doesn't have to sign off on your lab time. HOPE is on DVD, K&R is free on PDF, some crazy guys in the bay are selling DIY CRISPR kits, 3D printers are $200, FPV drone racing is affordable, and Steam sales are so cheap it makes my head spin (they remade both RE1 and Half Life!!!). They sell 2600 at Barnes and Noble for god's sake.
You can buy Knuth on Amazon, Erickson is available on NoStarch, and Xorpd's Udemy course is like $20 bucks. If you're a curious person, that will keep you pretty busy until you build Ben Eater's 8-bit computer, and work your way through building Dave Gingery's entire machine shop, and finish the Coursera Bioinformatics specialization. Then you can discover trad climbing and spend a sabbatical at Yosemite Camp 4 planning how you're gonna free The Nose on El Cap. That will give you plenty of time to ponder your first FreeBSD device driver, which will give you technical skills to construct your first botnet that you sell to the FSB for enough to film your first music video at your crib in Quetzaltenango. If you're smart and curious, you're busy no matter what bullshit job you have to do or what bullshit tests you have to take.
Tests, no tests, who cares? The hackers hack, the lanyard guys swipe in at FAANG, the boring people stress about their tests, and the weirdos make a living playing online poker from a palapa in Thailand.
There is no question that tests are terrible, are gamed, and get in the way of actual learning. How to replace them with something better and still measure performance is an open question.
However I think the biggest benefits of homeschooling are being ale to get customized 1 on 1 attention, and learning how to learn. That is the meta skill of being self driven, self disciplined in acquiring new skills. A lot of people that go through the public school system seem afraid of that or unable to do that. They were the people most likely to wash out of college in the first year, because they couldn't deal with the relative lack of structure compared to high school.
If it's the same author I found based on a cursory search from your profile, then "famous" is a bit of a stretch.
> Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places
I got a similar feeling reading about Chris Paolini. Homeschooled, raised in a remote place. Fed a lot of his early life experiences, particularly travel, into his novels but felt alienated from other kids.
That's a bit rude. I did the same cursory search and realized my friends and I are big fans. Just because you don't recognize the name doesn't mean others don't.
My name is known in certain small circles, it doesn't make me famous. So just because you recognize the name, doesn't mean he's what one would classify as famous.
Well he's not JK Rowling famous, but he has sold over a million books which puts him in a pretty elite club author wise. Especially in sci fi, that's a lot. I'm very proud of my brother, he started down a very difficult career path and became very successful. All self taught.
Former publishing industry professional here. If he's broken the 1 million books mark, I wouldn't hesitate to call him famous. He's more successful than 99.99% of authors.
Makes me very happy you celebrate his success so openly. In my time in the industry, I saw a lot of fiction authors dismissed by their family/friends who worked in non-creative industries. Thanks for being one of the awesome relatives. :)
Perhaps I was the one stretching with my "cursory search", because I missed the pseudonym. A million sales is certainly "famous" from any reasonable standpoint.
I was homeschooled until the age of around 10, and then my family adopted a new approach called "lifestyle of learning", which is just another way of saying "unschooling".
Basically, I was allowed to skip schoolwork, as long as I was doing something productive.
I hated schoolwork, so I started spending all my spare time tinkering with stuff on the computer. I wasn't allowed to play video games (since they aren't productive), but I was allowed to BUILD video games. I was also allowed to build web sites and do programming.
By the age of 13, I was doing contract web development work, and by the age of 16, I was employed full time at a local web development company.
My parents wouldn't let me get a drivers license and car until I had at least passed the GED, so I spent a couple of months cramming for it by studying a 2 inch thick book about how to pass the GED. I passed it without too much trouble (I think I got a 98% in math, if I remember correctly).
My career has developed across multiple companies over the last 20 years, and I'm currently making around $150K a year as a software engineer. I never did go to college.
They took "unschooling" even further with my younger brother. He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10. He ended up having to cram for his GED to get a drivers license, too. He ultimately ended up getting a job as a waiter, then as bank teller, then put himself through college and got a degree. He now owns a house worth around $400K and has a career as a software engineer at the banking company that initially hired him as a teller.
TL;DR: "Unschooling" worked for my family because they combined it with at least a base of traditional education.
I can see homeschooling being potentially more interesting/engaging for a certain kind of student after the basics are out of the way, but this:
> He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10.
to me, is fucking terrifying.
All of the people I know who did better on their own than in a classroom were able to do so because they could gobble up half a library in a weekend. I think you need to be able to read abnormally well for this unschooling concept to work as intended, and so good reading skills is one of the few things that I absolutely would not compromise on.
Why? It takes 40 contact hours to teach a nine year old to read, according to John Taylor Gatto. You can teach all of primary school Math in the same time to a 12 year old. What’s the point of doing it earlier? There are little or no compounding gains from doing so. Countries that start teaching reading at 4 don’t do better than those that wait until 7. See France versus Germany or Finland.
The entire point of the zone of proximal development is that you can spend weeks teaching something to a six year old that a nine year old will pick up in an afternoon because they’re just more developed.
I taught a 5 year old to read to a 15 year old level in 20 contact hours for reference. Still room for improvement qualitatively but I think an observing scientist would say that they can read well, but not smoothly like an adult.
My teacher daughter was shocked she could read at 5,diring our first meeting she asked us : "do you know she can read?"
I replied, "yes I know", she followed up with a "like an adult" almost frightened haha.
Well I did tell her that she could read and write, I guess she was used of parents bullshitting on their kids achievements.
TV has been there as a main parenting tool from at least the 80s.
Unless your parents were mixing alcohol with your milk, you had better skills than this current era one.
I grew up in rural UK in the 70's - TV was only available for ~4 hours per day (total - no breakfast TV, no daytime TV, just in the evenings). And because of where we lived, half of that was in Welsh, which we didn't understand.
I watched maybe half an hour of TV per day, at most. And that would have been "educational" programs like Blue Peter. I remember coming home from school and waiting for TV to start broadcasting - staring at that weird test pattern with the girl and the clown head, willing it to start quicker. Though we did get The Clangers and Magic Roundabout, and weird stuff like The Tomorrow People that I never understood.
I spent my days riding my bike up and down the lane, building treehouses, rambling through the countryside, playing with Lego, plastic Airfix kits, all of that.
The non-intuitive thing about basic reading and math skills is this:
If you delay the learning, you learn it much more quickly.
So the (ordinary, with no developmental issues) kid who doesn't read until 10, can exceed his or her peers in just a couple years.
The very unfortunate corollary, however, is this:
The kid with developmental issues might go undiagnosed for a longer time than necessary, with long-lasting repercussions and follow-on effects. It's even possible to reinforce a mild issue and turn it into a larger one.
This then becomes a classical optimization problem. Optimize for the common case for broad benefit, or optimize for the rare case with significant negative effects. There is no right answer for everyone.
A friend of mine had children that went to Steiner schools and they weren't taught to read until they were 7, and he said they could read adult level books by 9.
It appears there's evidence that this is true in general[1] (though the author suggests they could go even faster if they updated their methods further)
I also remember reading in a Tony Buzan book his speculation that learning to read too early interfered with the, what he claims, is the natural eidetic memory potential in children. I don't have any of his books here to find the reference, unfortunately. Perhaps there's something in it, perhaps not.
I personally learned to read as early as I could recall (around four) but lacked much attention span to actually crack open a book then and found being read to more fun. Not as a matter of personal bragging but to point out that kids in absense of formal teaching methods may absorb many things.
Immersion learning is used and studied mostly for foreign languages but I wonder about how effective it proves in general for small children given vs trying to teach them actively and leaving them to observe it. It may be a fringe case technique when directly teaching them is ironically less effective or even more effective when it does work but unreliable.
I learned to read at a similar age, and quickly started reading (relatively) long, complex books. I have difficulty focusing on things, but I think the many hours spent on focused reading at an early age helped significantly; I would probably be in a much worse state now if not for that.
I think a safer approach would be "home after schooling" or to follow this new terminology "unafterschooling".
Basically give kids time for unstructured learning using the hours after school/after homework study time that are currently effectively used up toiling at zero sum, super structured activities strictly aimed at getting into college.
So you're going to send kids to 7 or so hours of being pressured into paying attention to stuff they're generally not that interested in learning, then some amount of time doing mostly make-work activities, and you expect them to be interested in exploring learning opportunities in the minimal remaining bits of time? (And for older grades, they're also getting up well before their bodies want to.)
Would you be able to sustain enough interest to really delve into something when you're that tired out?
Structured activities still work, because the motivation is largely external. I reserve judgement as to how good that is for the kids doing them, but I will agree that it's a workable setup.
IMHO, you can't go halfway. Either you fill up their time with supposedly educational/socializing opportunities, or you give them enough time and space to explore based on intrinsic motivation. With your "unafterschooling", your kids will naturally use it for playtime or zombie screen time. One, or possibly both, of those is likely to be the best possible use of that time, so that's ok; just don't expect them to pick up new skills when you've stacked the odds against it.
(Yes, I'm biased. I'm homeschooling -- not unschooling -- my kids, and there was a major readjustment period to get free of the "school attitude" before things started to click. We couldn't have done that when school was still in their headspace.)
High Schooler here. I've been teaching myself Vulkan and am writing a videogame, but I'm so exhausted on weekdays from my course-load that I only work on it on weekends and breaks. I wish I could put more time into it but trying to program after 6+ hours of school and then homework is a nightmare, and that code usually ends up being buggier than my normal output, with low productivity.
This is great, but I think, learning Vulkan and writing a video game can be hard within the same project. Don't burn out.
If you want a suggestion, I'd keep learning Vulkan on a side, but chose a higher-level graphics library for actually programming a game. Just to keep yourself interested and to see progress quicker. There are so many decisions and design choices in making a good game, so keeping graphics simple and small can give you more creative freedom. (If that's your final goal.)
I spent years of my precious spare time making games from junior high through college. Lost out on some social development, and made too many fan projects based on other people's IP.
I'd recommend trying to keep life balanced. If it refreshes you then enjoy. Just don't burn out on it or get stuck in perfectionism. Find that happy zone where you can feel productive or entertained or have something to share.
That's awesome - I think that would be the ideal as it pretty much replicates life after you graduate from college as a software engineer.
As the other two comments allude to, I think the keys are using it as a learning process to learn time management (i.e. avoid burn-out and over committing) and how to make it social (i.e. find other classmates to work on it with you).
I agree - homeschooling by parents who are able to, experienced and motivated is by far the best option. Not all parents have that ability/motivation.
I think the key is to not have it get into a 7 hours of structured school plus 4 hours of structured after school extracurriculars (i.e. sports, piano or any other competitive zero sum activities etc.) where an 'adult' is telling what activities to complete. Basically in such a schedule in no part of the day has the child done any activity where they thought for themselves.
Would much rather give them time in their remaining 4 hours to provide some structure on how to research an area/project for focus and create something self directed.
I would have thought this too until the pandemic forced my wife and I to see exactly what our first grader was “learning” at the 10/10 school. It was shockingly below his abilities, hyperbolically shocking. Forcing him to do that work and then expecting him to do actually enriching work is at best unfair. We’re trying to figure out what to do next but both private and homeschooling are asking a lot :p
I noticed the same thing. COVID and at-home-Zoom schooling has been an eye opener about the curriculum for my seven year old. When I have a work break, I occasionally sit in her learning area and watch. She's so bored as they again and again go over subjects she already mastered last year. She learned how to open another window and tile them, so now she does her entire slate of homework in parallel on the side while the class re-does single-digit addition because a few kids still don't know it.
Not sure how much of this are special challenges specific to remote learning and Zoom and how much of it is just that the curriculum has to be tailored towards the slowest learners.
Agreed, I would expect that early child literacy is pretty critical for this. Now once you get to age 10, you can pretty much just start reading random books (or anything really) and start picking up new vocab and grammar skills quickly, and probably turn out alright. But if you can't read period, that's not going to happen.
If anything, I would say the focus on unschooling when it comes to early childhood should be read early and read often. Interestingly, this seems to play into the larger controversy of intensive phonics instruction vs. the less structured "whole language approach."
>> He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10.
> to me, is fucking terrifying.
I could barely read at age 10, and I was in public school! That's why my parents took me out and homeschooled me. Which fixed the problem in a few months with intensive one-on-one phonics from my mom that the school system just wasn't going to do.
When is reading taught in the USA? In Europe, first grade is usually when you are 7 years old, so normally that's when it is taught. Sure, nowadays kids tend to learn it earlier but not through organized means.
My daughter started kindergarten this year and they are teaching reading. She’s 5, but she’s among the youngest in her grade, with the older kids having turned 6 already. Keep in mind this is all very simple books in the “See Spot Run” category of difficulty for the most part.
She actually had already started learning some reading at 4 when she was in preschool. It was mostly just sounding out letters but at that point kids can start to sound out simple words too. Preschool is elective though so plenty of kids won’t start that young.
…and I am fairly sure they had us reading short stories in first grade. (But only fairly certain; I could read short stories halfway through kindergarten, so that could be coloring my recollection.)
I was a pretty rubbish reader until 3rd or 4th grade when Legend of the Seven Stars came out for SNES and my sister eventually got tired of reading the dialogue for me. So that would put me in the 10 year old range.
Sibling of someone like you here -- I absolutely got fed up with reading Animal Crossing dialogue for my sister, and I maintain that's the only reason she finally learned to read.
Motivation is one thing -- necessity is another. If you need it (not just want; literally need it for some reason), you'll have a pretty strong motivation to acquire it. (Or give up. But that's where parental guidance comes in.)
My kids reading has really accelerated from playing Roblox. I mean they did read before but they’ve really taken off since. They use Siri to dictate and I surmise they read what she prints. It’s amazing.
Europe is quite diverse, where I'm from, kids are expected to be able to read at least a bit when starting the first grade of school at 7. Of course they practice and improve reading in first grade, and not every child can read on day 1, but the expectation is that for almost everyone the basics of reading should be taught already in preschool or at home before that.
I think you are right on one level, reading and reading comprehension is absolutely required for self driven learning (at least before youtube, and yeah, even with youtube.)
For what it's worth I didnt learn to read until I was 9 and by 11 had a college age reading level.
I think some of the later learners in reading (who were not disabled, or at least not traditionally disabled) might also have some other correlations.
> All of the people I know who did better on their own
> than in a classroom were able to do so because they
> could gobble up half a library in a weekend.
Can confirm. Small rural school (primary and middle), half of the teachers were not specialists on the subjects they taught. We were supposed to be learning English from the grade 4, but we had a "proper" English teacher for a year and then were taught by people who knew no English themselves.
But I read a lot and it helped. I managed to be among the best students onward: be it the secondary school or the university.
My take is: good teachers can motivate and inspire you a lot, but bad teachers can be ignored and should not hinder your education. I agree with Mark Twain here: "I have never let my schooling interfere with my education".
having met a ton of fully grown adults who have offspring, near as I can tell, most people are functionally illiterate. While they probably can read, most choose not to read anything longer than a tweet. I coach in a local sports league. I send an email at the beginning of each season with nice bulleted sections about schedules, uniforms, etc. After I send that email, I spend the next week answering questions to responses to replies from that email. All answers are in that email they are responding to.
TLDR - just because someone can read, doesn't mean they will, and my experience is that they won't.
> All answers are in that email they are responding to.
My gf works in inside technical sales for an industrial instruments rep/distributor, and therefore a large part of her job is passing information between customers and manufacturers while trying to keep both happy and process orders. On a good day, she probably is forced to send the same requests for information at least two or three times on average before finally getting an answer. People just refuse to read even extremely short emails asking for straightforward information like shipping addresses which simply must be provided to proceed with the order. I wouldn't last a month doing her job without losing my damn mind.
Your GF is a saint. This is a good place for AI to read the original email, and reply with snippets. If the AI isn't very good, it doesn't really matter because they probably aren't reading it anyways. :|
I'm sure some of the parents are just refusing to read your email carefully, but I think people also overestimate how clear their writing is. I do read written policies very carefully, but I often misinterpret things because I read more literally than the author expected. if it's something important (eg, specifications at work), I will rewrite the ambiguous passage in my own words and ask the author / person in charge if it's a correct interpretation. this annoys people sometimes, but it makes it not my fault if I misunderstand :)
this is actually a good example to demonstrate my point. you don't explicitly say when the first practice is, only that they recur every tuesday and friday. the "see you next tuesday!" strongly implies that the first practice is the tuesday that immediately follows, but the reader doesn't get this needed context until the very end of the email. I bet if you put something like "starting next tuesday (dd/mm/yyyy)" in the Practices section, you would get fewer of those questions.
all the information is there for an active reader to figure out what they need to do, but I can see how a linear reader (who isn't holding all the information in their head to begin with) could miss it. I had to reread the email to know exactly when the first practice would be. an extremely pedantic reader might be unsure whether "see you next tuesday!" refers to a second informational meeting or the first actual practice.
This is a great point. If I may, I get 2 types of questions on this specific point. "When is first practice?" which is a good question as you point out. I also get " when are practices" which is pretty clear unless they have poorly phrased "when is first practice" with this question and now we've both committed the same error.
the OP inferred that not reading until 10 was suboptimal. I argue that effectively, most people don't read in adulthood. So, if he's frightened by a 10yo not reading, he's in for a rude awakening when he gets to interface with adults.
Perhaps they are unrelated. perhaps I drew a wrong conclusion. But perhaps they aren't hurried, they are just lazy.
Are you really trying to draw an equivalence between laziness and illiteracy?
It's okay for an adult to be lazy. It's okay for a kid to be lazy. It's probably not great for a homeschooled kid to be lazy, but you can invent games and rewards and other incentives and make this work.
But it's irresponsible parenting to allow your homeschooled kid to be illiterate at 10. You're not going to convince me otherwise with comparisons to lazy parents not wanting to read your boring emails. It is so obviously not the same thing.
The whole concept behind unschooling is that you allow a child to find the things that they find interesting, and then allow them to voraciously teach themselves as much as they can, as fast as they can. This doesn't work at all if your kid can't read.
I've often found that laziness in reading is correlated with difficulties reading.
For example, I know a lot of people who say they are too lazy to watch a movie with subtitles. When you dig deeper, they then tell you that it's hard to follow the movie because they have to concentrate on the subtitles or that the subtitles go too fast. That shows that they are actually not very good readers and.
For the specific example of the OP. You might be right, it might just be laziness but those parents do take the time to reply to the email to ask for clarifications. So, either the email was ambiguous or a lot of people just have a hard time reading a block of text. In my experience, the later is often true.
That said I fully agree with you that allowing a home schooled kid to be illiterate at 10 is criminally irresponsible. Reading is the key to knowledge and any parent homeschooling their kids should make damn sure that their kid will learn to read and see the value in it.
> For example, I know a lot of people who say they are too lazy to watch a movie with subtitles. When you dig deeper, they then tell you that it's hard to follow the movie because they have to concentrate on the subtitles or that the subtitles go too fast. That shows that they are actually not very good readers and.
I have a minor quibble with this. I consider myself a "good" reader, at least as far as literal comprehension goes (I was never much good at literary analysis). I can understand pretty much any entry on cppreference. on the rare occasion I lost points on vocab/grammar quizzes in grade school, I was almost always able to persuade the teacher that they themselves were mistaken. FWIW (not a whole lot imo), I got an 800 on the critical reading section of the SAT.
I am however a very slow reader. I absolutely cannot keep up with the subtitles on a foreign film while also taking in the action of the scene. most of my friends in college could probably do a reading assignment in half the time it took me or less. perhaps this is just to protect my delicate ego, but I consider speed at reading words to be one of the least important parts of being a "good reader".
why can "a kid" be lazy, but not a "homeschooled kid?
What's the role of literacy if you don't use it? What's the use of literacy without engagement?
There are lots of ways to learn things without reading. While I personally taught my kids reading at an earlier age than 10 (they are also not home-schooled), I've also seen kids learn "late" but still learn as needed. I also see a ton of kids who can't read even though they were "taught it" early.
On a side note, Montessori methods for teaching are quite interesting in how they use materials to teach concepts most traditional schools rely on abstract ideas and worksheets. They don't need to read to do the Montessori materials, but worksheets certainly require some level of reading to understand what's to be done.
If an adult doesn't want to use their literacy, that's their choice, but the unschooling method requires that a kid be able to use their literacy to learn things that interest them at their own pace. A lazy child is going to need additional motivation for unschooling to be effective. An illiterate child is going to have an "at their own pace" that's close to zero.
If you're a parent, and you think you're homeschooling your kid with this "unschooling" method, and they still can't read at ten, then you, as a parent, need to drop the charade that unschooling is working for your kid and teach them how to fucking read, stat.
Note that missing from your assessment here is an honest analysis of the alternative. I.e. where would you and your brother have ended up if you had stayed in school and gone the traditional college path? You say you're making $150k now as a software engineer, but there's a damn good chance if you had stayed in school and gotten a CS degree in college you would be making a lot more than that now (and earlier in your career as well).
As others have mentioned, you also have to consider how few career paths offer the kind of "no formal training" entry bar that programming does. What if your brother had hated computers and realized at age 22 that he wanted to be a doctor? He'd be years behind his peers.
An honest comparison can't be made unless he gives up some details of what he's made throughout his life, and his geographic location for fair salary comparisons.
But... from a glance his outcome blows most college grads out of the water. Even compared to comp sci grads with good outcomes.
He was earning income at age 13 and full time income at age 16. The traditional school/college route will have you start work at maybe age 23. With debt.
For most geographic areas in the US, 150k is a serious salary, the apex. It would be hard to increase with paper/certs/degrees. Geography change may be the only reliable way to bump it, but then you'd have to subtract the increased housing costs (million dollar shacks) to compare.
The counterfactual is still useful to think about, because what works for the poster may not work for the modal person. There is a big self-selection problem—if the poster wasn't a successful software engineer, we wouldn't be hearing about their life on an HN post. We are also engaging with their comment, because they are exceptionl and have an interesting life story—who read this article but didn't comment? And whose comments were ignored because their story was less interesting?
This person is clearly successful, but the question is whether their unique schooling experience was causal to their success, and we honestly have no idea. This person may have been equally, or maybe even more successful had they did typical schooling and college. Or maybe not. We also don't know if this person's experience translates to other children—does everyone benefit? Or are there hundreds of less successful unschooled children for every one success?
I've noticed this with my son who has an ADHD diagnosis. Pre-covid I constantly heard from school, that he was not paying attention, getting distracted. But since Covid, his output has been phenomenal - his reading/math has improved, he does really well one on one, we have a nanny working with him,. And I've never seen him happier.
I know homeschool would benefit him immensely in the long run from an intellectual standpoint, but am afraid that he will miss out on all the social aspects.
> am afraid that he will miss out on all the social aspects.
Consider carefully and closely what those social aspects are. Check that your perception matches reality. For example, in the classroom, 90+% of the time students are supposed to be quiet, or to interact with the teacher (usually answering a question—in front of, but not with, the other students). Most of the social part of school is interacting with friends at recess and lunch, and sports and non-class activities.
Furthermore, the parts of school that are social are not necessarily good: for some people, they consist of being rejected or even bullied, and making them suffer that for years may lead to socially avoidant habits, anxiety, or other long-term issues.
As eloff suggests, sports and other activities are a good way to get good socialization. Since the activity is voluntary, all the kids can be expected to share at least one interest with your kid. Also, if your kid meets some people he likes, then what are called "play dates" (at young ages) or "hanging out" (at older ages) can lead to deep, long-term friendships.
I left high school at the end of tenth grade, but continued going to the math club and attending an after-school math contest class, and hanging around in the math department's common room with others who had a free period before that class. The school was happy to allow it because I was good at the contests, and it made the school look better to let me participate. I got about as much socialization from that as I did when actually attending school, and I was happy with that.
Can confirm, my social life improved when my parents started homeschooling me... mostly due to us finding a group of other homeschooling families whose children provided much higher quality socialization.
> the parts of school that are social are not necessarily good
Most definitely - however it's also worth bearing in mind that if you happen to fall into a more traditional life path afterwards, those social elements will rear their heads again.
The sink or swim mentality of school social interactions sadly mimics quite a lot of interactions post school as well. In an ideal world my shitty experience at school wouldn't have been relevant as an adult, but it has actually helped navigate quite a number of toxic situations.
As sad a world as it is, I'm (somewhat perversely) glad I was able to learn how to cope with those as a teen.
It's a good thing you responded well to that situation. But can you imagine others in your situation not learning the lessons you did, or learning to emulate the toxic behavior, or becoming withdrawn or callous or misanthropic, or otherwise developing bad coping methods?
It's very common for people who admit that school sucked, to then defend it by saying "it taught me to deal with it". I say, if you really wanted to teach that thing, you could probably come up with something way more safe, time-efficient, and pleasant. I mean, how many weeks would it take for someone to teach a course on "Common personality problems and sources of conflict in the workplace", or something, that would cover 80% of what you learned plus some things you didn't experience? Most of the time, when people claim school is good for a particular thing, you can quickly see that it's nowhere near optimized for that thing.
Oh most definitely - it's neither an efficient or ideal way to learn those things. Unless there's dedicated thought to teaching them though, it could be an issue as well.
I'm certainly not defending the way it worked out, but we focus on an idealised education from the perspective of the learner (i.e. curiosity, passion, zest for self improvement), it might not prepare them if they end up in more traditional scenarios. Fully support the notion of it being taught like a traditional subject, just that it's important those lessons don't get lost (which I can foresee happening).
If the light behind your eyes hasn't been diminished by the experiences at school, it's likely it'll be extinguished in less than ideal real-world scenarios. I'd hate to see the joy of someone who genuinely has a zest of learning and curiosity to be crushed the minute they come across the things a lot of us deal with on a daily basis.
Get him into sports or other after school group activities. Much healthier social environment than school anyway.
Lookup two sigma problem. Kids with a 1 on 1 tutor do two standard deviations better than school. That's an insane advantage if you can find a way to make it work.
He's doing soccer and parkour lessons. On top of that, we end up going to the park pretty much every day and play tennis/soccer. He loves his sports, and is very athletic in general.
I was homeschooled k-10th grade, after which I entered community college.
Certainly social contact and learning is something you want to encourage, but I would not let that hold you back from homeschooling your son if you feel it's working very well. It's complicated to do in the current situation, but playdates, sports, field trips with other homeschool kids, etc. go a long way. There are likely also co-op classes where your kid can meet other kids.
I'm still friends with dozens of kids I was homeschooled with. Most have had very good outcomes. I don't feel that the few who haven't would have done much, if any, better in a traditional school environment, but that's an educated guess.
> but am afraid that he will miss out on all the social aspects
Biggest boogeyman ever.
Just make sure he has a few kids he can maitain contact with an be sociable in clubs or in the neighborhood
All the "social aspects" you get from school is basically a bunch of kids you have no controll over, having a disproportionate effect on the moral and emotional growth, or stunting, of your child. And then add all the trauma burntout teachers can generate...
It sounds like you and your brother are highly intelligent and maybe didn't really need school to absorb the stuff you needed. I wonder how that approach would work with a more average child.
I was home schooled in grade school (1-6th) and went in Junior High. There was kind of like a large group of home schoolers, all of them tested very high. My test scores for a private Catholic School at the end 6th grade, they wanted to put me into Sophomore in High School. Thank god my parents understood socially it would have been hard.
There were 80 kids in my home school group that were in my grade, maybe half skipped a year when they went to school. That's a small sample size, but not that surprising as most home school parents highly value education.
Intelligence is not hereditary for the most part, and there's a huge environmental component to it. Clearly this household had the right mix of freedom and strictness to encourage development of creative intelligent thinking. Probably rubs off of adults with same attitudes. Of course it's not 100% I'm pretty sure if OP had more siblings one of them would be bound to be dumb as a rock.
"It's still mostly heritable" -- this statement is confusing to me. If we aren't sure what we're talking about in the first place, how are we sure "it" is heritable?
If you've heard 5-10 plausible meanings for "intelligence", and every one of them is heritable, then you can be pretty sure that "intelligence" is heritable even if you're not sure which particular meaning someone is using.
And the article says: "on average, psychological traits are extremely heritable, at around 50 per cent." It's hard to argue for a definition of "intelligence" that wouldn't be a psychological trait.
> If you've heard 5-10 plausible meanings for "intelligence", and every one of them is heritable, then you can be pretty sure that "intelligence" is heritable even if you're not sure which particular meaning someone is using.
What if you’ve heard definitions for intelligence that aren’t measured by IQ test scores and then someone uses IQ test scores to argue for the heritability of intelligence?
> And the article says: "on average, psychological traits are extremely heritable, at around 50 per cent." It's hard to argue for a definition of "intelligence" that wouldn't be a psychological trait.
Its equally hard to argue for an average of things which are not faithfully represented by numbers.
I'd be skeptical of a definition of intelligence that had no correlation with IQ scores. If you managed to put forth and defend such a definition, then that could turn into a valid objection; but that would then run into the "psychological trait heritability" prior.
> Its equally hard to argue for an average of things which are not faithfully represented by numbers.
How do you represent, say, extroversion with numbers? It's messy and any particular measure is probably not a good one, but what people do is come up with a list of questions like "Statement: I am excited when I go to a social event full of strangers; rate your agreement from 0 (Strongly Disagree) to 4 (Strongly Agree)", and add up the numbers to create a score. It's kind of arbitrary and has a lot of "noise" in it, but on the other hand there is enough signal that it is measuring something real. If you need to turn it into a binary classification, you choose a cutoff number, which will again be semi-arbitrary and make errors, but again can be good enough to draw useful conclusions. You can then apply that measure to, say, biological siblings who were both adopted, or (best) to identical twins separated at birth vs fraternal twins separated at birth, and see if genetic similarity correlates with similarity of your measure. From that kind of data, you can get a vague idea of heritability.
If the thing you're discussing isn't measured by existing tests, fine. If the thing you're discussing has a logical definition and is important, but you think there can be no tests to produce even a vague measure, then I would guess you just haven't tried very hard.
> I'd be skeptical of a definition of intelligence that had no correlation with IQ scores. If you managed to put forth and defend such a definition, then that could turn into a valid objection; but that would then run into the "psychological trait heritability" prior.
Its hard to measure a correlation between a set of numbers and a set of NaN’s. However the prior here is that 50% of psychological traits are not heritable, so our prior is that we have approximately equal chances of a trait being heritable or not. What is likely is that some aspects of intelligence are heritable and some are not, and if the statistics that indicate heritability are measuring anything, they are measuring that part of intelligence that is measured by tests AND is heritable. Which is obviously poor evidence for those being the only relevant aspects of intelligence.
> It's kind of arbitrary and has a lot of "noise" in it, but on the other hand there is enough signal that it is measuring something real.
The “something real” is “how people respond to tests”, the assertion that “how people respond to tests” is positively correlated with “extraversion” is a claim that needs evidence. Mere assertion is not sufficient.
> If you need to turn it into a binary classification, you choose a cutoff number, which will again be semi-arbitrary and make errors, but again can be good enough to draw useful conclusions.
The results of a research program are more often useful to the person who is credited with conducting the research than they are useful to the person who is concerned with making accurate predictions of the real world phenomena allegedly represented by tests.
> You can then apply that measure to, say, biological siblings who were both adopted, or (best) to identical twins separated at birth vs fraternal twins separated at birth, and see if genetic similarity correlates with similarity of your measure. From that kind of data, you can get a vague idea of heritability.
Yes, you can get a good idea of the heritability of how a person responds to tests. However the program you described does nothing to validate the responses on tests to any real-world phenomena.
> If the thing you're discussing isn't measured by existing tests, fine. If the thing you're discussing has a logical definition and is important, but you think there can be no tests to produce even a vague measure, then I would guess you just haven't tried very hard.
Perhaps one has tried hard enough to realize that the problem is less tractable than you suppose. One could also observe that “intelligence” is socially constructed and does not in fact have a logical definition that is based solely on objective factors.
> Intelligence is not hereditary for the most part, and there's a huge environmental component to it.
This isn’t true. Every psychological trait has a large heritable component. The lowest value I’ve ever seen for heritability of intelligence is on the order of 0.6 and 0.8 is just as common.
> Genetic Influence on Human
Psychological Traits
> There is now a large body of evidence that supports the conclusion that individual differences in most, if not all, reliably measured psychological traits, normal and abnormal, are substantively influenced by genetic factors. This fact has important implications for research and theory building in psychology, as evidence of genetic influence unleashes a cascade of questions regarding the sources of variance in such traits. A brief list of those questions is provided, and representative findings regarding genetic and environmental influences are presented for the domains of personality, intelligence, psycho- logical interests, psychiatric illnesses, and social attitudes. These findings are consistent with those reported for the traits of other species and for many human physical traits, suggesting that they may represent a general biological phenomenon.
...
> own positive correlation between tests of mental ability, the evidentiary base for the general intelligence factor. This value is typically about .30. The genetic correlation be- tween such tests is, however, much higher, typically closer to .80.
Source? I'm pretty sure intelligence is well over half hereditary. AFAIK, most of what we can do to increase people's intelligence is make sure they get proper nutrition as kids. Over that, we can at most spend lots of money on educational programs for really small increases in IQ (though of course education is not just about IQ).
> Heritability is a technical measure of how much of the variance in a quantitative trait (such as IQ) is associated with genetic differences, in a population with a certain distribution of genotypes and environments. Under some very strong simplifying assumptions, quantitative geneticists use it to calculate the changes to be expected from artificial or natural selection in a statistically steady environment. It says nothing about how much the over-all level of the trait is under genetic control, and it says nothing about how much the trait can change under environmental interventions.
In addition, heritability, what claims can be inferred from its measures, and the meaning of those claims in discussions like in this thread are also a tricky concept when investigated from a philosophical standpoint[0][1], and some measures (and of course proposed solutions) have been controversial among sociobiologists, evolutionary biologists, and philosophers alike.
If I had a lot more time I'd like to take a longer look at that link and make a list of all the fallacies and dark patterns it uses. As it I just managed to glance that it first sets up a narrow, technical definition of heritability which then proceeds to criticise. That's a pretty standard dark pattern.
Whatever his definition is, what we mean in this conversation is that smart parents tend to have smart children, and dumb parents tend to have dumb children, and that there's little one can do with the environment (besides minimum nutrition) to change that.
I'm sorry, but I meant a source other than a 2 hour video criticising a book. And before you say it's a good video, I actually tried watching it once. I think I got through about 30 minutes of saying nothing of substance when I gave up. I actually recommend the exercise - try rewatching and make a note when he actually makes an argument or references a source.
Right above my comment is another linking the wikipedia page on IQ heritability. That would be a good example of a source. Meta-studies are a good option. Longitudinal studies are a decent one. Single studies are usually useless, but they're at least a good starting point for a productive conversations.
Well, environmental components (such as the style of upbringing e.g. 'mix of freedom and strictness', and simply socioeconomic status, which affects quite a lot) are also quite heritable and shared between siblings, so we'd expect their intelligence to be even more correlated. However, intelligence is hereditary for the most part compared to that shared environment - for example, adoption studies show that the IQ scores of adopted children show higher correlations with the IQ scores of their biological parents than with those of their adopted parents.
Everyone seems to be quoting a lot but in the end it seems to converge to a handful (at least, I hope) studies with adopted children. I'll try to find the references before making judgements.
Until then, whether this is really useful or not, I want to mention that time and again my experience in academia is that topics like these where we really depend on the judgement of the investigators a lot need to be carefully evaluated. Academics have a tendency to over exaggerate significant beliefs from highly questionable data points from very few studies. I'll revert back after going through the literature best I can.
In addition to adoption studies, a lot of analysis of heredity can be (and has been) done in twin studies, comparing and contrasting the variation between twins and "ordinary" siblings; and fraternal vs identical twins.
You're right in that there is a limited number of studies, in part because you're looking at small populations and you don't get that many new adoption or twin cases each year. However, in that regard it's worth looking at equivalent studies worldwide who each have tested their local adopted or twin children; as far as I understand, these studies in different countries generally confirm the same or similar results, but I have not personally gone in detail to verify that.
What about careers other than software development though? I'm definitely not criticizing your choices at all, but its interesting to me that both your brother and yourself ended up doing software development.
Do you feel you would have a different option of "unschooling" if you had tried to be successful in a different career path?
I'd say for most students, the vast majority of time they spend in school, they're not learning anything. The content of curriculums are usually quite short and can be crammed in a few weeks by a dedicated and intelligent enough student. For students that need more time, they often disengage anyway and all the time in the world won't help them learn using the same techniques.
I used to be a math teacher, and when a student failed the final exam, I'd spend a few hours one on one, then they could take another exam. The students that pissed around all term and bombed the first attempt often quickly picked up most of it in the 1-1 sessions and passed the 2nd attempt. I jokingly suggested to my boss that maybe we should scrap classes and just divide up my hours on 1-1 sessions with every student for greater efficiency.
I think we know how to solve all education problems technically. It's just that the solutions are impractical. Sometimes personalized (expensive management) or require a smart and quick thinking teacher which doesn't scale well, or require hard work doing preparation which teachers don't have the time, motivation, or skill to do, or they are simply effective and leave the kids with nowhere to go while their parents are at work.
This sounds almost identical to how I was raised, even down to the age of transitioning between the two styles, and I was doing contract web development work by 13, too, before cramming for the GED and ranking 99th percentile in science. I'm now working in AI with a startup of my own.
I honestly can't say I've ever met (or even heard about) anyone with such a similar story -- care to chat sometime?
I went to public school and was fixing computers for $$ at age 12, doing web dev at 16 and running a company installing Ethernet cards in college students computers at 18. That was all outside of school.
That's impressive, and sounds like what I was thinking for my future children.
I just have no idea where to start. Got any resources for me to learn how to do these things for my children?
My story is similar to that of the parent comment and I would say the most important thing is to be supportive of the activities and interests that your future children are driven towards. If they're into computers, let them tinker with computers. If they like to take things apart, give them your old electrical components and teach them about electrical safety and soldering. If they like making things, show them some cool DIY videos on YouTube. Whatever it is, if they're into it and you support them, then all that time spent is practice doing something they love, regardless of whether or not it ends up being a career.
It's not that simple for the parent-teacher. For 90% of kids, their "interests" are video games, playing with toys, and TikTok if they're older. The hard part is getting your kids interested in things that can lead to an actual education. If you are waiting for your kids to become interested in History in order to teach it to them, most of them would never learn it. You have to do the hard work of making it interesting in the first place.
You're right that it's not that simple, but to be clear, my parents did teach me stuff like history and they did their best to make it interesting. It just so happened that I enjoyed some topics and activities more than others, and homeschooling can allow for more freedom to adjust to that than would be the case with a strict curriculum.
If you mean for entry level service level stuff, like high schoolers would take, I can't speak to it (I couldn't really find anything when I looked, but I think that was attributable to the general difficulty of finding a first job. No one asked me what high school I was attending/had attended), but for post-college, no one ever asked me about high school.
As to getting into college, I had to take the SATs, same as everyone. I did better than most. I started at community college (which I believe everyone should do, both because financially it makes sense, and because it helps acclimate you to the realities involved. For home/unschoolers, having deadlines and having to learn to 'work the system' are both necessary), then went to university. Graduated highest honors.
Ok, I was assuming the entire education was self-taught/unschooled. But in this case it was unschooled until the person chose to go to traditional college and get a certifiable degree.
I was wondering about someone who went the whole way without traditional schooling.
Ah, can't speak to that. Certainly, there are fields you can not work in without a degree, certification, or licensing, even if self-taught. But there are also plenty you can enter with only the knowledge you've learned on your own. Software is a good one; there are plenty of places that will hire a developer even without a degree.
Nerve-wracking because homeschooling teaches you nothing about career readiness without experience, but that's basically true whether or not you got to spend most of your childhood experimenting with things you actually end up enjoying. For me part of it was luck (lucky that someone took a chance on me and I grew into it from there), but looking back I think putting yourself into a position where you get to practice doing something you're actually passionate about will end up bleeding through into a natural progression/networking. For example, if programming is your hobby before it's your job, by the time you're wanting to interview for a job you will probably already be in some kind of club/group, local makerspace, have friends online who are into game mods, etc. to help get your foot in the door and that's all before you're even college-aged.
Assuming you a male, along with your brother, looking at IQ graphs there would be equivalent males on the dumb side, who arguably would be in prison right now if they did what you did.
Also without you at a normal school some students might be worse off. Not your problem of course, but it is at a societal level.
I'm not sure what you're describing by "a base of traditional education", because my definition would include learning to read pretty early. Do you mean taking the GED?
Exactly. Careers with a low barrier to entry will eventually settle on low wages. Despite what many believe, programming has a quite low barrier to entry. Supply was artificially suppressed because college was the only place someone would teach you to program, so programmers either had college degrees or were self-starters (comparatively rare).
But the trade schools are finally catching up to demand. The era of 160k dev jobs without very advanced/complementary skills/knowledge are quickly coming to an end.
I was homeschooled with my brother up until high school, and it was a mixed experience for me. Academically both myself and my brother were far, far above our peers in public school. The main difference was that especially with math, we had understanding of the material rather than just knowledge. Our parents flipped houses a lot so we'd often have to use our math skills regularly when helping out. How much area is a deck that's 15'x40' with a curved section at the end that has a 7.5' radius? Applied geometry was reinforced heavily. In addition we were able to do more community activities, which boosted our ability to talk with people older than us.
The disadvantage however was in our ability to socialize with our peers. The trope of homeschooled kids being weird is 100% true, and is a factor of a lack of a peer group to test social norms with. When you have an insular network your set of social norms only evolves around what's acceptable within your family. I personally struggled a lot with socializing and I wasn't really able to properly integrate until I was ~25 or so.
I disagree with Amanda's statement that you have to have faith in a child's wonder to facilitate their development. I would say the onus is on the parents to provide things to wonder about. This is a hard task, one that my mother worked endlessly on. It was a 50 hour a week job for her to educate us. Even with that though there are still the social downsides. For parents that are considering it, I would still recommend it, but know that you're taking on a significant responsibility and that you'll need to find after school programs for your kids to have a chance to socialize with other kids their age. This can be hard to find, especially in earlier years.
Exactly. Many parents just buy a homeschool "curriculum" and do an accelerated version of the public school lessons. Making various subjects interesting is a skill in itself for the parent-teacher. Young kids just want to play with their toys and friends for the most part.
Learning of (keyword of) concepts and ideas is fun but the reason schools exist is because most learning is a grind. Learning to draw well, learning a language, learning an instrument, and even learning math and logic require going through the grind of learning and repetition.
The grind is only harder if you don't have a good book or teacher because the practice you do could potentially be actively harmful (or useless).
Exploring is fun for children and adults. Being exposed to new things is always interesting. The grind is the hard part.
I think the question is how much of the grind is necessary. When our oldest kids were very little, we would work on the alphabet and numbers and track milestones carefully. At some point we realized that we could either grind hard at stuff they just didn't quite get, or we could wait a few months until they were older and just tell them stuff and they'd remember it. And obviously it wasn't quite that easy, but it felt kind of like magic at the time. When the kids were ready to learn, they just did, no grinding required.
Naturally, something like playing a musical instrument requires grinding (though it's not grinding if you like it!). But I think other than like, the times tables or the periodic table, there's almost nothing in school that inherently requires a grind. It just feels like a grind, because school is often unpleasant.
I think an average, literate adult could learn basically the entire American K-12 history curriculum in a few months of reading. Most of what passes for history in elementary school could be compressed into... what, a hundred pages, maybe? And high school is another thousand pages.
I think math is the same way. It's a 10 year grind to teach reluctant kids what could be taught to an eager adult in a few months.
I think we'd do much better to try to create eager adults, which I think unschooling is really well-suited to.
Yeah! Bit of a tangent: in my experience even the times table isn't inherently a grind, though at a higher level maybe arithmetic might have to be. When I was in school faced with memorizing the times table conventionally, I decided "this is silly and boring, what I'm gonna do instead is keep the table visible while I do arithmetic problems, and it'll get memorized automatically along the way", and that worked fine.
It's the same principle as learning touch-typing with the keyboard layout visible on a card in your field of view (not the same as looking down at the keyboard, which I agree is a bad habit that slows you down).
'It's a 10 year grind to teach reluctant kids what could be taught to an eager adult in a few months. I think we'd do much better to try to create eager adults'
It's only a 'grind' if you don't enjoy the process though, right? If you're getting good at doing something you love because you love doing it so much, I don't think 'grind' is a word you'd use to describe that time consuming process.
I think 'grind' is caused by a disconnect between what the learner is being made to do and what they want to do. Grind can therefore be reduced by providing people with the opportunity to study things that interest them, for instance by offering a broader range of educational 'tracks', or by reformulating lesson plans to make the material more interesting (explaining the real world applications or consequences of the subject matter.)
>It's only a 'grind' if you don't enjoy the process though, right?
That's the thing though, even with something you enjoy you will, or should hopefully, hit 'the grind'. That point where it gets hard and you force yourself to keep going even through.the parts you don't enjoy.
School forces you to do this, if you're teaching yourself something, you need to force yourself to do this.
I can't count the number of times i've heard someone say something like
'I tried learning/doing this new thing and it was fun for a bit but it ended up being way harder than I thought.'
And that's usually the point where they've given up or moved on.
But that's usually the point where learning breakthroughs happen and getting through the grind tends to cement those new facts or that new activity better.
That's usually the point where it starts being fun again too, until the next hump to grind through.
It's like an old nintendo game or something. One of those really hard ones that forces you to replay the same thing over and over again just to gain the tiniest bit of progress. Even though the game's probably fun, that's the point where people start throwing controllers and stuff. Yet when you get past those hard sections and make some progress. Suddenly, you feel good and have fun again.
Learning things is very much the same process. Even things you enjoy. The secret is to push yourself through the less fun parts.
Just quickly too, more of an aside, I feel like modern games lack this aspect and i think it's a big part of why many people complain about modern games. They don't stimulate and teach you through failure and repitition, there's usually no consequences, you have no breakthrough 'Aha I can do this now' moments, there's no learning or lessons to be had. Just mindless progression that never really feels like progress.
Good teacher can help to overcome barrier. Unfortunately there are not many good teachers. As other pointed out maybe one or two in public school.
I'm with you that practice is a king but blind struggle ruins passion. I've took salsa lessons for several years, drummed it wrong, have to unlearn bad practices. I've took guitar recently, overcome in a few months what could not in school (good enough instrument and youtube videos).
I've gotten good at a few things in life that required a "grind." The violin is the clearest example. Getting decent requires an hour or so a week -- you can generally fart around and play whatever's accessible to your skill level. Good requires an hour or two per day, of deliberate and focused practice. People don't play études for fun. Excellence requires several hours per day. Even Itzhak Perlman describes his practice regimen as tedious, and I once heard him say that he practices while watching TV, to alleviate the boredom. Paganini, on the other hand, played all day to forestall his father's physical abuse.
I was "good," for a time, but pursuit of excellence never met my cost benefit analysis
Surely the grind of learning to play a violin would be far worse if you disliked violins in the first place, right? If you force somebody who hates violins to practice playing one for hours a day, the grind would be intolerable and they'd probably hate their life. The people most likely to find the grind tolerable are the people who really want it.
> It's only a 'grind' if you don't enjoy the process though, right?
I'd summarize my answer as "no, it's still a 'grind'." To answer your followup, "yes, it can be even worse if you hate the basic act."
On a meta level: life sucks and involves hardship. There's value in grinding on things you hate. If you've only succeeded at things that you love, your success is quite likely fragile. Resiliency is developed by accepting, and grinding, your way to success at something you hate.
This is true on its face for anyone who's spent hours and hours trying to beat a tough level of a video game -- we even call it "grinding" (at least in some contexts, namely RPGs), and to some extent it's not really "fun," but it also has a satisfying and compulsive aspect that drives you onward despite the challenge. I can't recall public education ever stirring the same sort of feeling in me (and I did quite well in school).
Pleasure vs. satisfaction. Grinding is not pleasurable (in fact quite frustrating at times), but the satisfaction of completing the challenge may be more sustainable as a source of happiness.
Types of fun:
Type 1: Fun while performing the activity
Type 2: Bad while performing the activity, fun in hindsight
Type 3: Bad while performing the activity, bad in hindsight
I would argue that Type 2 is desirable but doesn't fit in this framework.
I'm of the opinion that while it's a necessary part of learning to repeat exercises to advance your skillset, school is much too focused on this element of learning, and in doing so to an unnecessarily rote extent (I suspect because it's the easiest way to try to get it done).
The problem is that this mishandling gives people a bad taste for associated activities, especially STEM subjects, and it's rare for people to subject themselves to what seems like an incredibly boring process when they're not being forced to. As such, most of the competency they may have been forced to gain is lost, along with potential passion.
Even repeating exercises can be fun when you understand the motivation behind it. For example, if you have a real passion for understanding Newtonian physics, the parts of calculus that might be 'rote' when unmotivated and part of a purely rote process can become some of the most enjoyable.
> and in doing so to an unnecessarily rote extent (I suspect because it's the easiest way to try to get it done)
That's likely part of it. I see another reason: I believe schools' incentives make them risk-averse. I think they have a stronger incentive to make one failing student do passably well than to make ten students go from doing well to doing very well.
I agree with everything else you said. I also found academic contests to be a good motivator to teach me to check my work.
I think the best way to think about grind, is to imagine "time spent grinding" as a scarce resource.
Your kid only has a very limited amount of it to spend; trying to make them grind more than that amount will be absolutely counter-productive and reduce grind "efficiency" to zero.
Which is exactly what schools do: they try to cram as much working, studying and focusing in a kid's daily life as they can, long past the point of diminishing returns; because they assume that a kid's attention is infinitely extensible, and they do very little to actually get their interest.
When you can order a kid to get into a room at set times and to look at a set piece of text and to listen to a single person for arbitrary amounts of times, there's very little to stop you from making every single day a grind a calling it a job well done.
The main benefit of homeschooling is that, if a kid isn't engaged by the teaching materials, you can see it immediately because they'll say so and ask to do something else.
It doesn't make them go through textbooks. But it doesn't stop them either, and often a decent textbook is the best way to learn about a subject.
As someone who chose to learn some subjects outside of school (usually years before they would have been taught), I tended to read textbooks my older siblings had used—did this for algebra, physics, and calculus—although I didn't do that many problems from the textbooks. (I also read lots of what might be called popular science books.) The article does say "[The McQueen] parents spurn curriculums, textbooks, tests and grades", but I know some unschoolers, and I suspect if I asked them, I would find that they read several textbooks.
One unschooling mom's website quotes (seemingly with approval) another unschooling mom's email on the subject. Ultimately it seems to be saying that, while textbooks shouldn't be the primary tool, they are a tool that is sometimes appropriate. https://sandradodd.com/school/textbooks
I think one of the things the pandemic exposed is how much time is wasted in class for discipline and "class management". Really, without it the quiet kids can pretty much get the regular curriculum in half the normal time.
I am sure unschooling works out well for some people. I appreciate giving students some flexibility, but I think there really is a standard core that most people should learn.
I went to a good engineering school for college, but they also require everyone to take 3 years of history, 3 years of english, 2 semesters of a foreign language, a psychology course, ...
If it was left up to me I would not have taken most of those classes, and I suffered through many of them, but I think they were an important part of my education, and I am glad I came out of school knowing more than the engineering that I would have picked for myself.
A lot of unschooling is predicated on the idea that if you're not forced to learn things, you will be more open to wanting to learn them.
Certainly, in my own life that has held true. I learned to read when I was a kid because I saw my parents doing it, and engaging in it taught me to love it. A lot of math I learned early on just as I was growing up (I figured out multiplication on my own, for instance). But by the time school started 'teaching' me things, I chafed at it. I hated being told what to learn, hated having to follow the classroom's pace, etc.
The same has held true in my adult life too; given a problem to solve or an interesting thing to explore I'll learn. Even things I -hated- in high school and college (such as foreign languages), I am engaging in learning on my own as an adult because I -want- to.
Given a better environment, most kids will want to learn. The problem is school forces it on kids, without investing in showing the kid why they would want to learn it in the first place (i.e., the reason "when will we ever use this?!" is so stereotypical)
This is a pretty horrible assumption to make and it's a bad idea to use yourself (or any HN commenter) as a good example of the general public with regard to learning curiosity. If you spend much time outside the tech bubble, I think you'll quickly find that the number of people who go out of their way to learn things in-depth instead of spending all their time on entertainment and social activities is a rather small percentage of the total population.
Of course the plural of anecdote isn't data. Never claimed it was.
"I think you'll quickly find (etc)" - I think you're thinking about this the wrong way. Who, exactly, are you evaluating? The average adult who grew up in the school system, who learned that 'learning' is all about being told stuff, and who now 'knows enough' to hold down their job and pursue whatever hobbies they have in what little spare time they have? Not sure that's representative of children, or how people grow up under a different system. And even there, you'd be surprised how often those adults still end up looking up information -that is of interest- to them.
I mean, heck, I'm one of those adults - outside of work what I learn is very little, because I don't have the energy. And yet, I still am curious, I still ask questions, I still read things. Certainly, I look for opportunities to learn things as -part- of my work. I am the HN crowd, sure, but I'm also a consummate gamer and waster of time. Heck, I'll even waste my time responding to HN comments. :P
Beyond that, for children, if you're just looking at kids who are already in school...yeah. No kidding. After 5-8 hours in school being 'taught' things, why they heck would someone spend their free time learning things outside of it? It's just like a job. But what about a kid who has hours of free time, and who sees, constantly, that there are people around them who 'know things', and they don't? They'll ask questions. Lots of questions. Encourage that, and you have learning.
I mean, I can't speak to you, the HN crowd at large, or people at large (nor can you), but I can say that given just the spare time the quarantine has given me, my unproductive pursuits very quickly ran dry (not for lack of them), and I've picked up learning a number of new things to fill the time. I don't think that's nearly as uncommon as you might think.
I've seen a bit of observational data that points at the hypothesis that one of the things that manifests as IQ is an increased need for intellectual stimulation. Googling for ""need for intellectual stimulation" iq" shows some authoritative people saying that they tend to coincide; I don't immediately see studies about it.
Now, I agree that school tends to squelch natural curiosity and such. I really can't say enough bad things about school.
Still, I can't shake the hypothesis that a decent amount of observational data connected to schooling and unschooling is done by smart people, looking at their social group (likely to also be smart) and at the kids of those in their social group (likely to have inherited smartness). John Holt formed some of his hypotheses teaching at a school with a minimum IQ cutoff (IIRC around 110-120) (researching, I think it was the Shady Hill school, the second one he taught at).
But at the very least, it seems to me that unschooling will work well with smart kids—the smarter, the better—and, furthermore, the smarter the kid is, the worse school will be adapted to them, so it seems pretty clear that, above some intelligence level, unschooling should be placed above school in the list of default recommendations (the specifics of the individual kid and the available schools would, of course, be used to tailor the default into the correct, but I am talking about the default). I don't know what level that should be, but I suspect it's something like 120-130 IQ.
Why is forcing people who don’t care about learning to do so any more moral than forcing nerds who don’t care about sports to do physical exercise? Most people have no intellectual interests, just as watching sports bores me. Exercise and learning both have pay offs in terms of physical and mental health and earning power respectively, for those who enjoy them and those who don’t.
Why is forcing people to read books they don’t care about good enough to warrant the intrusion on their autonomy necessary to get them to do so?
In my experience you have to forced to learn most things until they 'click'.
Some things click instantly and others take longer. While I was good at highschool math, matrices never clicked for me until almost 3rd year of university, when a good prof took the efforts to make it 'click'. I never felt like cooking until I began staying alone, gave it an honest (an necessary) try due to monetary requirements, and now it is my main hobby that I can't live without.
I understand that this argument can be use like the great filter, where if you don't like something it hasn't clicked yet, so keep going and it will click. But, for most things, we know 'click' checkpoints. For musical instruments, it tends to be the first song. For programming, it is your first repository. For math, it tends to be your first moment when a group of seemingly unrelated things fall into place to give you a neat derivation or when you find a visualization that works as an analogy 100% of the time.
The first few weeks of a lot of things are straight up miserable. (new Musical instruments and new languages being major examples of it). It is only after you have understood the basics can you start enjoying them.
> The problem is school forces it on kids, without investing in showing the kid why they would want to learn it in the first place
Absolutely. That investment is key to making forced learning work. Much like training wheels, once they can balance the topic on their own, you can stop trying to make it click, and the student will sustain their interest on their own.
> having to follow the classroom's pace
This is incredibly annoying. I remember binging the whole English textbook in the summer before the year started, then impatiently fidgeting or reading fantasy fiction novels under the table because the class felt that it went too slowly.
The “well rounded” education stops at college for me. It’s too expensive. If you want to take those courses, you go ahead and take them. But they aren’t necessary and shouldn’t be required.
> I went to a good engineering school for college, but they also require everyone to take 3 years of history, 3 years of english, 2 semesters of a foreign language, a psychology course, ...
I've always found that a fascinating difference between University in the USA and Australia.
In Australia I studied Software Engineering (Accredited by the Australian Institute of Engineers). From day one, every single course was strictly "on topic". Maths, Electronics, Programming, Computer theory, compilers, real time programming, Java, C++, Real Time Programming, Digital Electric Design, Data Comms, more Maths, Digital Signal and Image processing, Game Design, Personal Software Process, etc. etc.
In the four years I studied (plus another for a placement in the workforce) I never studied a single moment that wasn't directly Software Engineering. Not a single English or history or anything course.
My knowledge is very deep, but not nearly as broad as someone that took all those other courses.
My impression has always been that "unschooling" is mostly an indicator of wealth, and so it'll correlate well with future success.
If both parents have to work a regular day job, there's nobody at home to teach the kids so unschooling is not possible. And if only one parent stays at home, they will also yearn for some free time and push for getting the kids signed up for school.
The only situation where I can imagine the parents being enthusiastic about unschooling is if they are independently wealthy and can afford to spend lots of time with their kids, when other people would have to work. And obviously, plenty of personalized attention from the parents will make the kids learn a lot faster than your typical 1 teacher 30 students class.
Plus, once you assume that all unschooling parents are much wealthier than regular people, it kind of makes sense that they will have very different opinions about life in general, due to their very different experience of it. Regular folks will go to a public playground and complain about the dog shit there. Rich folks will just buy a playground for their backyard and hire a gardener to keep it tidy.
To outsiders, that wealth discrepancy would then look like a religion, because all of the unschoolers have a shared untypical worldview.
The NYT article claims that 'the psychologists Peter Gray and Gina Riley published a 2013 survey of about 230 unschooling families, they found “a wide range in terms of socioeconomic strata.”'.
I followed the link and the source is... flimsy at best. The lack of numbers here is conspicuous, especially when combined with the fact that most of the respondents were stay-at-home moms, not something super common among the American working-class.
I do not think the rise of this phenomenon is unrelated to the increasing number of affluent, young white parents raising their children in urban cores while remaining afraid of the school system.
I think it is not so much money, but more whether mom is content being stay at home mom being completely fully dedicated to family, being content being dependent on husband and without being independent source of income. That is situation that can get you quite trapped it the things go wrong.
It is also quite isolating situation, some women don't like basically working alone all the time or have own aspirations and dreams.
A lot of first hand experiences here have to be understood as survivorship bias. It's unlikely that "unsuccessful" unschoolers would wind up here.
I don't have a strong opinion either way but I was raised with a strong basic well rounded education and personally I feel it helped me. One thing that should be emphasized is that the material should be challenging enough as having it too easy leads to bad work habits.
I was homeschooled 1-5, private 6-8, public 9, homeschooled again 10-12.
A couple observations:
- homeschooling is efficient. I only needed a few hours per day of school.
- homeschooling is a religion for some people (who end up in articles) but there are lots of cool people.
- “homeschooling” is often way less “sitting at home with mother learning math” than people think. We took tons of trips, did cooperative school, took college classes. It’s funny to joke about never leaving the house, but most homeschool kids manage to be quite social.
- because it’s unusual, it succeeds with the right kid-parent relationship. My sister and mom made each other miserable and it didn’t work. There are lots of kids for whom homeschooling would be problematic.
I was "unschooled" for some years. I was near the top of my class at school (not because I was smart, just because I paid attention and worked hard), and hence my teachers gave up on me. Expending time on a kid who is likely to get A's without intervention does nothing to improve the school's metrics/ranking.
I would have been fine in a good private school but my parents weren't rich and couldn't afford the fees. Somehow I convinced my parents to let me educate myself, and at least for me it was successful. I finally had time to teach myself programming, which at the time was not taught in school.
Would I recommend it to others? Kids should try school first and see if they benefit from it. Some kids love school and do very well out of the system. However, if school is failing your kid, they might be better off without it.
I attended brick and mortar schools until 8th grade and then basically did zero actual school work because I was too busy starting my own business among other activities I found interesting. I eventually crammed for about 2 weeks to get my high school diploma at my mother's request, then I moved to Sweden for a while (on my own, as a teenager).
My school experience was abysmal and doing things my own way allowed me to actually learn stuff that would end up being useful. I'd not have made it half as far if I had gone the traditional route.
Currently 28 and satisfied with how things have played out so far.
When I moved I arranged to live with some folks I knew through my online esports adventures in Umeå. At the time, I was seriously consider living there permanently and moving my business there. I really enjoyed the place but between family and personal goals it just wasn't destined to be a permanent move the way I had hoped.
Interestingly (to me at least), I had gigabit internet in Umeå and I believe it only cost around 40 USD/m at the time (2011-ish). I didn't get gigabit again until I moved to Las Vegas and I'm currently paying around 3x that amount.
EDIT - Actually I have one big complaint. Trying to learn the language was impossible because every time I would attempt it people would notice I'm not a native speaker and instantly switch to English as if they had been waiting for that moment their entire lives. Lesson: Swedish people are an order of magnitude more considerate than the french folks I've met.
My dad said when he went to France for work (outside of Paris), they were no longer embarrassed by their poor English, once he shared his abysmal French.
I know an older German fellow who ran away from home as a child and ended up in France for quite some time. The way he tells it, the French would show no mercy as he would struggle to communicate. My personal experiences haven't been quite so terrible, thankfully.
My main concern with the thought of homeschooling / unschooling as a future parent: I feel fairly confident that I could get my kids far ahead of the standard school curriculum, with stronger fundamentals. But I think the school system serves more purpose than just education, and I'm not convinced my home would be a better school for everything else:
Making friends, learning multiple perspectives, learning conflict resolution, learning about diversity, making mistakes and dealing with failure, learning to deal with authority[0]. These are all lessons that I personally would attribute to going through a public education.
[0] Just to be clear, dealing with authority isn't the same as blind respect for authority. While school tries to teach you blind respect for authority, every student builds their own relationship with authority, probably in combination with the values they learn at home.
L. M. Sacasas on his mailing list and podcast, 'The Convivial Society' recently interviewed one of Ivan's close friends, Gov. Jerry Brown. I've found the mailing list really worthwhile to read, and has surely affected the way I think about technology.
Well we certainly have an opportunity to fix education but I doubt we will make the right changes because the public education system in the United States suffers the same problems the police system does.
Public Employee Unions. Whose first task is not to serve the people whom their members are supposed to work for. Just look at the demands some of these unions put up as required before going back to the classrooms! Some wanted changes to minimum wage, taxation, and more! Nothing related to education because they themselves have nothing to do with education other that there are teachers as their members.
It is well documented how teachers in good standing with the union can get out of schools they don't want to be in meaning if they don't like the neighborhood its too damn bad for the kids there. They can also avoid disciplinary actions and have their records protected from public view and in many districts have their records expunged within only a few years.
There are many great teachers out there but they are stuck in a system government by a political class masquerading as their union. A union which serves local politicians first and parents and students are so far down the list as to not be considered. Hence when it comes to bettering education their first response isn't how to do so but instead how to benefit their financial position
Most of the anecdotes here are quite illuminating. But I am interested to understand this from parenting perspective. How much of time and effort a homeschooling parent need to dedicate.
And I wonder whether there is a selection bias in the outcome. Are we looking at a sample of households that are already well off enough to spend dedicated time and resources on homeschooling? Does the family background improve the chances of success significantly? It is hard to separate these tightly coupled factors.
Here are two anecdotes from my life which oughta make you think about public schools.
1) I was born in USSR, in what is now Ukraine. I finished 5th grade there, in 1992. I skipped 4th grade, because of system conversion to 11-year system. I went to average public school and was a B (4) student. I moved to the U.S. and went to 6th grade in an average middle school. I coasted through 6th, 7th, and 8th grades on what I learned in my first four years of schooling. Only in high school did I see anything new math-wise.
2) In high school, I developed nearsightedness, I got a computer when I moved to U.S. In 10th grade, I started needing glasses, and I got behind in Physics class because I couldn't see the board. Eventually, my parents found out I needed glasses, and I got glasses. But I was about 3 months behind in Physics. So my dad sat down with me, after a day of work, and tutored me in Physics for probably an hour a night. Within 1-2 weeks, I was fully caught up on 3 months of "Magnet" high school physics.
Whenever you try to scale something up to millions, quality almost inevitably drops significantly.
Imagine the difference between a child getting the full 6 hours a day of public school versus just 2 hours a day of focused tutoring? The difference would be night and day.
Sounds like a bad idea to me, at least for most people. The reality is that if you want to be able to get a good job in an area you are interested in, you will need to be able to work with others, and get up on time, and work at a task you might not be as excited about. And you need to have a basic understanding of math, language, writing reports, etc. Most kids aren't going to learn any of that if they are free to sleep in and browse the web and learn whatever they want. Sure some kids might be motivated enough to learn that on their own, but based on what I have seen from my parents grade 5 class, most of them will just spend all day on Fortnight.
And maybe for some people it's OK to never learn those things, and be stuck working at lower skill jobs. That's legitimately an option, there are probably many people who are happy with a simpler life. But for me, I'm glad I went to a proper school and learned everything that I did there, and didn't have the opportunity to have a great career taken from me because I didn't go to a traditional school.
I find the reason for the family in the article to be pretty poor
Fear of school shootings and concern over “the racial bias in schools, the school-to-prison pipeline,” as well as many schools’ stunted curriculum in Black history, drove the McQueens to begin their experiment with at-home learning in 2015
Fear of school shootings is obviously a bad reason to avoid school given how many people die in car crashes each year, statistically the risk is negligible. And if you want more black history curriculum it's not hard to supliment it at home. I think you are much more likely to go to prison if you are uneducated. Racial bias concerns is a legitimate reason to avoid traditional schools though.
People need to stop turning their preferred X into replacements for the lack of religion. Apparently some people are just built to need this sort of thing and in absence of a compelling religion they turn whatever interests them into one, with all the obnoxious traits that made people go atheist in the first place.
Some of the most intelligent and exciting people I have worked with have been homeschooled. I would counter the idea that homeschooling/unschooling is like a religion by turning it around. The orthodoxy of public education in the US is a borderline cult. The institution is unassailable. Where I live levies are passed that raise taxes and the community has nothing to show for it. The union Is like the mob and once you are a “made man” it is nearly impossible to be fired. Administrators are paid more than senior engineers. People that work in this system absolutely abhor the idea of citizens having a choice over their own education. Returning tax money to the tax payer to fund their own education, even if it is a fraction of what the public school receives, is a source of vehement objection by the teachers union.
I don't like discussing this, because smart people completely turn their brains off when it comes to discussing it. Somehow homeschooling creates Lake Wobegone, a place where every child manages to be above average.
The reality is more homeschooling is completely unregulated in the majority of states, so people can do almost anything.
Most states require no formal education from the parents at all to teach. Many don't require any form of assessment or to keep a portfolio or records of education. Some have required subjects but no real enforcement of them being taught. Any form of standardized testing or auditing may not even be required. If you wanted to keep your kid at home and not educate them at all, you could easily do it in most states.
Would you really bet a system like we have now would provide better outcomes overall?
Exactly. I homeschooled through a trad-religious program for one year in 4th or 5th grade and it was unregulated at best. I recall we had to report only our final letter graded to the state, which of course were recorded and granted by the parents, not by the "accredited" school system.
I’m surprised this was printed. Usually NYT is negative, or at best tepid, towards homeschooling.
There’s a diverse set of homeschool/unschool lived experiences. There’s a diverse set of challenges and opportunities that change on a family by family, child by child basis. Homeschool proponents aren’t trying to take anything from you, they just want the option to do things their way, in the privacy of their own home at their own expense with their own labor. That’s all. I’m glad you had a great (normal?) school experience. I’m grateful for your concern about the children of homeschoolers. Please do not confuse your concern with the correctness of the school system for our child. It’s well established the US is a follower in school performance. That should be all the justification we need.
I attended public schools for 12 years and you could not be more right! If the school had put me alone in a room with some textbooks all day with the option to go outside and exercise occasionally, I would have vastly preferred that to the painful boredom of being forced to sit in a chair 8 hours a day without movement or socialization.
I personal experience I find home schooled friends are smarter and more educated than public schooled ones. Yeah you would say there may be correlation instead of causation. However, US public school system really leave me extremely unsatisfied. Would never send my kids to US public school.
Start w/ smart kids w/ relatively affluent parents and any educational strategy succeeds. The kids will do well no matter what. Start w/ less innately intelligent kids w/ uneducated, poor parents and that is where you see what really works. Virtually all studies/articles about unschooling/less schooling approaches and they don't control for this variable.
Show me homeschooling/unschooling/Waldorf/Montessori/Reggio works for poor kids w/ uneducated parents. Until then, I don't give a shit.
I have worked w/ a lot of autodidacts, including a couple better known ones in the software world. They all had professor parents and comfortable upbringings.
Something as important as education is always going to attract very strong emotion.
When you get into "state schooling", it is also almost a religion - thought shalt not question the teacher, thou shalt not question the dictats of the education establishment, etc.
This might work for outliers/higher IQ/elite people in the HN community, but consider this:
1. School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule.
2. Not everyone is self-motivated to learn. Children, at critical developmental ages, are more prone to be led astray than "follow their passions" (at this age, really?). They will more likely be manipulated by vices if not constantly monitored.
3. Not all parents are good teachers. Usually, responsible families understand the value proposition- they wish their children have a better future- and education is the ticket that provides these opportunities.
4. School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen.
Public schools, with all its flaws, are the best instruments to free the masses. Knowledge is democratized power to avoid the corruption that absolute power entails.
I'm surprised no comment so far mentioned four important aspects of traditional schooling that I believe should be repeated here:
1. More than just teaching the curriculum, schools are great for socializing with other children your age, learning how to share, how to deal with drama and to grow some empathy. Not to mention the benefits of getting used to rules, authorities and schedules.
2. Getting in contact with how other people live and with what others think, specially outside your family, can be enlightening sometimes. The handful of successful anecdotes shared here, besides falling as survival bias, don't represent cases of disfunctional families or families crazy towards subjects like religion, science, violence, racism or politics. For every happy family there is at least another one potentially raising sociopaths.
3. Many cases of child abuse are committed by family members, frequently by parents at their own home. Allowing children to miss school takes off from them the chance of a teacher noticing such abuses or at least teaching them the limits on their bodies and well being.
4. In some cases, and I'm not sure this applies to the US, schools are the best source of food for poor children (assuming it's free).
I understand that people in favor of home schooling are not saying that home schooling should be mandatory for everyone. So in this sense, only families able to provide a positive experience to children would try it. I'm afraid that when this rationale is even an option, families could wrongfully choose home schooling, sometimes with good intentions, sometimes not so much. And in the long run I'm afraid it could leat to less public funding for schools when people are pressured or at least influenced to try home schooling their kids.
I wonder whether maths really can be self-taught for more than about two generations. It has been known since the beginning of maths that it must be taught by teachers who understand the ideas to students who challenge the descriptions.
Yes, Math can be self-taught. I am a living example. I went through school, up to 10th grade (junior high school) with only getting minimum passing grades. I was worse at everything except History. That was the only thing that I liked. And even at History I was getting like medium grades, not the highest marks.
Then in the summer vacation between 10th grade and 11th grade I got hit with a hobby of Electronics. I read by mistake an old book, from 60's, that was in my father's book collection, of how to create a radio for short waves that was powered by a potato (the vegetable, not the sarcasm!). And I went down through that rabbit hole. I started to learn electronic components and what they do. That required Physics, which I knew nothing about it - so I started to learn Physics as well. Well, have you ever encountered Physics to be, in practice, applicable without Math? So I started to learn Math all by myself. Between ages of 16 to 18, while I was as Senior in high school I recovered all previous 10 years when I slacked worse than a worm. That allowed me to go to University where I got hit by another hobby - programming. Both these hobbies still stay with me to this day.
So yeah, I would argue not only is possible to learn Math all by yourself, but I'd say that doing so you actually learn it even better then when is forced upon you, even if you're good at it.
This is a good point, but I think it is relevant to ask whether most people learning math in school have the experience you describe. I certainly did not. My math education consisted purely of recitation of things I didn't fully understand, and I got very good grades all the way through.
When you say self-taught do you mean even without using a really good text? Or do you mean that it actually can't be taught without a teacher? If you are saying that math can't be taught without a good teacher I don't really see how that is "known".
Even if it requires a good teacher, does society benefit from forcing it on individuals at a time they don't want to learn it? Or would we be better served by making good teachers available to those who want to learn it, at the time they want to learn it?
I'd -love- to go through some of my college level math classes; both the ones I took, and the ones i didn't need to take. They weren't especially relevant then. They're slightly more now, but more than that, I'm -interested- now. But self-learning takes too much of an investment of time (when I run into something I don't know I have to research -that-, and it becomes this infinite process of diving down rabbit holes, rather than having someone who has gone before who can give me a sufficient answer to unblock me on my original question).
If anything, math is probably one of the easiest to self teach. The basics (which goes all the way up early university level) hasn't really changed in 100s of years, and learning resources are readily available, and you don't need any special equipment.
