Home schooling is a real burden on many parents who aren't professional teachers of course and are pulled in many directions.
One of the most exciting emerging trends in home schooling is to pool the resources of multiple home schooling parents.
It's simply not practical for parents to commit all the hours needed for full time home schooling 9 till 3:30PM every day. So home schooling parents can team up and share the load a little bit. This means the kids gather together at one parents house because many kids can learn from the person doing the teaching. "Grouped home schooling" also solves the usual criticism of home schooling which is the lack of social contact between kids.
Often as well it makes sense for the parents all to contribute a little money so that instead of the parents having to teach things that they are not expert in, the can pay as a group for someone with subject expertise to assist.
It can be problematic though gathering so many kids into one house for group home schooling, so another exciting development in modern home schooling is when a location is found somewhere in the community for it to happen. Often there's a room available at the church. Alternatively, if the parents pool an amount of money each then such a location can be leased long term and can be set up with desks and chairs for the kids to sit at.
When you combine all these forward looking advances in home schooling you can see that home schooling has come a long way since the 1970's when kids sat at the kitchen table with mum teaching the lessons.
>This means the kids gather together in one location because many kids can learn from the person doing the teaching.
>Often as well it makes sense for the parents all to contribute a little money so that instead of the parents having to teach things that they are not expert in, the can pay as a group for someone with subject expertise to assist.
>It can be problematic though gathering so many kids into one house for group home schooling, so another exciting development in modern home schooling is when a location is found somewhere in the community for it to happen. Again, if the parents pool an amount of money each then such a location can be leased long term and can be set up with desks and chairs for the kids to sit at.
This is tongue in cheek I presume, as it's sounding just like a regular school.
Something I heard a few years back put my life experience as a kid in perspective. At least for me, in the most important way possible, it doesn't sound like regular school at all.
The main deep life impacting characteristic of standard public schools is coerced unwelcome company. You're forced by law to be around the same bullies for 5, 10, even 12 years. The natural order with organic friendships (and indeed probably since antiquity) is that those who act as a bully or jerk get ostracized. It is both justice and instructive for those who get excluded from one circle and must rethink their social approach to possible get accepted in another. It is how socialization is supposed to work.
Parents won't force their kids to continue to be around others they dislike, schools are totally ok with the violation of right OTOH (basically if you have a right of free association you also have a right of non association btw).
> Parents won't force their kids to continue to be around others they dislike
Ha, you would be surprised. Parents will totally force kids to be around people they dislike. I mean my parents knew that I was bullied in my private, free association school. Even after one asshole pulled a knife on me and the school wouldn’t do a thing because he was from a rich family in my small town, they still decided to kept me in there because “it has good academic level/learning to deal with these people is good/kids will be kids/<insert other bullshit excuse>”.
But hey, maybe you are right and free association is good. After all they kicked me out because of absenteeism when I decided to bail out of school because it was living hell.
I see the importance of any argument I'm making on being the best bet for 95% of humans. No policy governing humans is ever going to make imperfect humans perfect, but policies can and do go to far to where they're a detriment to a huge percentage
It sounds like your parents were uncool or unreasonable and that sucks, sorry. But I think it's not objective to let it make you think all that was the norm as an adult.
My parents were religious nuts. But as an adult I realized how lucky I was. They actually don't have any personality defects such as powerlusting or being egotistical about respect, so as a kid I very definitely avoided all the worst experiences kids often go through growing up with just the minor annoyance of forced bible studies or church visits (in perspective really an annoyance at worst)
Exactly, while the appearance of a sufficiently modern homeschool can start to “rhyme” with public school for practical material reasons, in reality the underlying incentives are completely different.
For me, it was charter schools that saved the day. The charter school teachers couldn’t just sit on their ass like public school teachers when some little shit decided to try to ruin my day.
I don't get it. Why can't bullying exist in the group homeschool at church? It's functionally equivalent to a school. Are you making a brand new point about traditional homeschooling (parent-child) or replying to the OP in the thread?
As a child in a public school, you have no right to freedom of association, and no right to freedom from association. Your school chooses your classes, and the state will use violence to ensure you attend those classes, bully or not.
In home school, there is less people and more choice. There are no perverse incentives that value attendance over education and health.
It routinely happens in families and friends groups of parents (kids of parents friend bully the kid). It the setup described above, the kid have less choice over who friends will be.
Would "we must force parents to keep their kids in situations where they (the parents) believe the children are being abused, to make sure the kids grow up tougher than their parents desires would result in," be a solution anyone would actually want?
I think you're intentionally using term the abuse, in contrast to the words I used, to be inflammatory.
But yes, I think it's healthy for my children to experience more suffering than I, ceteris paribus, would permit them to experience, if I were omnipotent.
I'm using the word abuse because I am referring to abuse as distinct from the abstract kind of suffering that's impossible to have any opinions for or against because it might include hiking long-distance. ;)
I added the phrase "by another kid" so nobody would reply with that but it looks like it didn't work because... you might not have read to the end? :-P
Isn't the whole premise of this grouped home schooling that it makes life easier for the parents, at the expense of tying into some commitments? There surely can never be enough grouped home schooling setups in any given locality with the freedom to break existing commitments for a parent to easily swap between them. It seems like there is a strong incentive for a parent to stick to the status quo.
A) You absolutely have freedom of association in public school. There is statutory and empirical intolerance for bullying, to the point that libertarians have been complaining that there isn't enough due process for the alleged bullies.
Parents can also easily move kids to other classes to avoid unwelcome company.
B) There is, in practice, no meaningful freedom of association in the real world. Childhood is an appropriate time to learn skills to mitigate the downsides of that fact, including forcing bullies to suffer consequences.
> Parents can also easily move kids to other classes to avoid unwelcome company.
This is definitely not the case in the schools our kids go to. The class sizes/composition are shaped by the demands of the teacher's union, we recently learned.
We always thought that the parent survey the school sent out, asking about your child, was so that our kid could be put in a class with a teacher who would be compatible. Not so, we learned!
The information was used to create class cohorts that are evenly balanced, and only after this happens are cohorts assigned to teachers. But at this point in the process, the desires of 20 distinct families cannot be used to match students with teachers.
Instead of focusing on matching certain types of students (those who need more remedial work, those who need more advanced work, etc.) with teachers who are good at providing that type of learning, the school is focused on making sure that all of the teachers have the same class composition, so that none of them can claim to have a "worse" class than anyone else.
Haha no, I learned English as she is spoke at a California Distinguished School. They taught English using the whole language method, because learning grammar is literally unimportant to learning language. I’m sure you can see how good I learned in thirteen years of public school.
Funny, as a public-school attendee, I would expect the opposite given how many of my peers sailed through on cruise-control with crappy teachers who were sometimes dumber than the kids.
If a kid is a bully then the parents organizing the group can kick that kid out (as a last resort). Additionally if a child is being bullied they can tell their parents and the parents can take action directly, this can happen publicly but there's a lot of layers of administration making it non-trivial.
In a way the group homeschool can be thought of like a small private school, it's just simpler to handle personal problems in a small group.
It’s not a closed group. You can pull your kid out and put them in a different group. It’s not like public school where your kid is forced to go to the one school in your catchment area.
The parents also have the option of reorganizing the group to kick the bully’s parents out, along with the bully.
I think your article is less likely to have the investigation beginning with the post office and more likely to have affects of multiple regular people not being OK with something, and being present.
Such involved parents could never let anything happen arguments ignore how these things develop as less involved parents cargo cult. (You can't get much more blatant in a drop in actual involvement than the example in the article.)
These kinds of groups connecting themselves to actual home schooling will erode it by association.
1. What parent would approve of their kid getting bullied? What are you talking about?
2. If the parents care enough to homeschool, why would they not care about bullying?
3. Socially subservient to the bully's parents? This feels like a hopelessly contrived and niche edge case that is effectively meaningless because it would be so rare
4. I'm not convinced personal problems fester moreso in a closed group (see: armed forces), and further I'm not convinced homeschooling groups are closed in the first place
All this to say I don't think your argument has any merit and is based on convenient and unlikely hypotheticals.
No one that's going to the additional effort of finding and participating in this type of school is going to let their kid be a legitimate bully. That level of parental involvement is what's lacking from a bully's life.
Small, close communities are communities where the bonds between each participant is much stronger, making it costlier - both in terms of immediately broken relationships, and of backlash from the rest of the group - for people to sever it.
Word gets around, but not necessarily from the right people, and - if bad outcomes are not guaranteed - there is nevertheless a strong incentive for it to fall on deaf ears, stronger than it would be in a less tight-knit community.
Maybe your public school experience was mostly decent, but for a lot of people it's hell and it actively breeds misanthropy. You can learn to deal with stupid and difficult people without being exposed to soul poisoning doses of both.
Research shows that people learn well when there is the right amount of stress, and the right challenge. If the stress and challenge exceeds that amount it can quickly become destructive, which is what we see in your typical public school for any child who isn't primarily concerned with "fitting in."
At best, public school is useful. At worst, it's a massive waste of time and absolutely destructive to a young psyche. You can expose your children to that massive asymmetry, but it's not necessary, people who cared got along just fine before public education, it's really there to uplift the lowest common denominator.
"Fitting in" is no small thing. The world would be better today if more people had the ability to empathize with someone not-them, sufficiently adjust their own way of interacting to put others at ease, and generally be less abrasive and fragile.
And if we want to talk in absolutes...
At best, public school provides an opportunity to learn socialization that cannot be replicated in a home environment.
The problem with this "fitting in" narrative is that as adults we don't care about it so much, people enjoy meeting new and unusual people (as long as they're baseline socially functional), there's a huge social stigma against being bigoted so basically everyone views adult bullies as worthless assholes and the cops will arrest people for much less than bullies get away with on the school yard every day even in the face of repeated parental protest.
I would say that much of adult society still runs on "fitting in" (e.g. social groups, corporate hierarchies), ergo being able to do it deftly is a huge life skill.
There's definitely a stigma around adults engaging in specific types of bullying (physical) and bigotry (e.g. protected classes), but society as a whole rewards more subtle bullying (political power dynamics) and ignores subtle bigotry (e.g. caste, microaggression).
The point of socialization, and indeed bullying itself, in school is in no small party to teach everyone (bully and bullied) what acceptable and unacceptable forms are.
Absent that, you either get people who are worse bullies (because they never learned where the line was) or are fragile (because they never learned where the "I should/shouldn't be able to handle this uncomfortable thing" line is).
Getting knocked down then kicked every day at recess, cowering and begging for them to stop, solely because of the color of my skin, while children laughed at my misfortune, until the teacher eventually waddled over to save me was not, in fact, a great gift for me.
You can push anything to an extreme to make it bad. I'm sorry the adults around you failed you is all I can say. It doesn't mean school is a bad idea, or that going through moderate levels of crap doesn't build one's character. There's a point where adversity turns into actual abuse and that's when grown ups should support kids, either in school or in a pod or wherever.
Reality is mostly segregated. It's only in artificial environments where you have no recourse to avoid horrible people (or people that are horrible to you).
You probably was in the your tolerance margin to say that.
But I've been to 11 schools, including private ones and ones from very poor and violent places. And there are situation where the only lesson you learn is how much people can destroy you.
I can think of a guy who became a local bomber in my city who was homeschooled. He would put bombs into people's mailboxes or leave packages by their front door, my uncle's family knew them when they went to homecoming stuff together. He was eventually caught and arrested but idk homeschooling isn't for everyone.
I worry sometimes how these kids will struggle when they are faced with the real world.
Personally I loved going to a charter school and I was really excited we got to have extra large classes sometimes because you can't always fit all your friends in your grade in one class but for specific art classes we often tried too. My charter high school was really great, my college experience was definitely not... It was too small for one thing looking back now.
Also won't ostracizing a bully make them more destructive? I know a lot of them become suicidal after a while and more destructive (based on experience understanding those I know better) they did get better though, they just didn't know how to process what they were going through.
That doesn’t sound right. For all of human history bullies who were bigger and stronger made the rules. The weak were ostracized. If anything, what you’re doing in homeschooling is reverting away from the norm and creating a sheltered environment. This is a double edged sword, you can turn your kids into fragile beings incapable of dealing with a harsh world but at the same time they will probably have productive, predictable and carefree childhoods.
The best case scenario is to be rich enough so you can create a bubble for your kids that lasts from birth all the way to their graves. It’s very possible, all the wealthiest people do it.
Bullying as in age-segregated schooling doesn’t exist in the real world. Adults and older children police any antisocial children, and the community of adults polices itself (because they’re adults and have mental faculties children lack).
> The best case scenario is to be rich enough so you can create a bubble for your kids that lasts from birth all the way to their graves
You don't have to be extra rich for that. Just don't associate, that's the whole point. To avoid a bully it's enough to not go to the same building with him every weekday.
>> For all of human history bullies who were bigger and stronger made the rules.
It takes a unique character of not only being bigger and stronger, but also of being more generous and giving and sharing to become a leader or ruler. Leaders who were only bullies and cruel could maybe beat up or kill any individual man, but could not stand against a group and would be destroyed or ostracized if he was cruel enough to alienate a big enough group around him.
Definitely not advocating for bullying, just pointing out that you can’t harken back to antiquity and call homeschooling a continuation of that paradigm in this particular sense.
Firstly, what I said can be true in one scope of reference and what you say in another. It's not mutually exclusive.
I feel your perspective is more about lots of the world after the rise of nation states and dense civilization.
For me I'm actually thinking back to the Pirahãs tribe from Daniel Everett's book as how we realistically lived as tribes. Conflict might arise, but a group might split off and go live in an entirely different patch of forest permanently, at which point the conflict is done without fuss. Things can be much less pleasant with permanent settlements and all land being owned by someone else.
A couple, man and woman, possibly with children, might also do something like this and just reject the benefits of being part of a larger community as loners.
Not all conflict is existential, we all choose to live facing a certain amount but also have our limits. Kids have way less flexibility to make the call and it is the cause of much misery
I'm unsure if you're saying that coerced unwelcome company is a good or a bad thing. While kids can be mean, it's just a reflection of humans in general and this kind of behaviour doesn't go away when you block it out. People get more mature but there's a lot of similarity between how people act in high school and in the work place, it's just a lot more skillfully and subtly done. Exposing kids to this reality doesn't seem bad to me.
I really disagree with all the comments that make reference to reality - no that is not at all what "reality" is. The fact of the matter is that as an adult, I can draw a line in the sand and either leave a job or report someone who is making the workplace hostile. I can have arguments with friends, but I can also decide certain friendships are over because they've passed a reasonable max threshold for toxicity.
As a kid, you're repeatedly forced into situations where you dont have these same rights - in my experience. Schools try to trick you into
thinking they're arbitrators above the law. They incentivize victims sucking it up, because if you get punched in the face at school, both parties involved will be suspended. However, it didn't strike me until I was in my 20s - this is all a trick - I could call the cops and press charges instead. One of the deceptions of my childhood anyway. Assault is a crime, school is not a special jurisdiction outside US law.
The idea that anyone's circle of chosen friends is not reality to me is nuts, of course everyone faces some amount of conflict with friends. Why does it have to necessarily be conflict from someone you hate with all your being(at a public school) to train you for life? Someone who'll physically assault you? That seems like a made up arbitrary rule. I'm in my 40s and have yet to experience anything like what I did as a 11 year old in my adult life. what exact training for real life did I need that was so valuable to my future? etc.. School sucked!
> I can draw a line in the sand and either leave a job or report someone who is making the workplace hostile
Because you have the money and possibility of acquiring another job relatively quickly (I suppose, otherwise you would not give up your survival means for such a reason). Not an option for everyone.
> They incentivize victims sucking it up, because if you get punched in the face at school, both parties involved will be suspended.
This part is stupid, I agree. When I got beaten up at school, I punched back and explained it after. The perpetrator ended up going to juvenile prison at some point (for unrelated charges). I wasn't punished in any way since that was seen as an appropriate response. So we had different experiences.
> Because you have the money and possibility of acquiring another job relatively quickly (I suppose, otherwise you would not give up your survival means for such a reason). Not an option for everyone.
Workplace conflicts usually don’t involve assault. Lines are usually drawn by standing your ground, explaining one’s position and taking the chances and picking the battles. If it comes to getting assaulted one better be prepared.
If the manager doesn’t agree one might get fired, or it is time to look for options.
Nothing in life is a must, but there are consequences to everything and one better choose wisely. But then, the ability to make good judgements comes from experience and experience is gained by experiencing the consequences of decisions or choices one has made in the past, including bad ones.
Resigning, from a position of employment, or situations in life in general should not be the first option, at least not without considering the above.
> Exposing kids to this reality doesn't seem bad to me.
I hope your children don't get "exposed to this reality" in school, as you put it.
The sorts of harrassment that school bullies inflict on their victims is, to put it simply, not tolerated anywhere else. Why should it be tolerated when it happens in school, where the victims have no choice but to attend every day?
Is it good that children get bullied or ostracized? Obviously not. It is far preferable however to the alternative of never having experienced that humans can act like this. We're sometimes assholes to each other for poor animalistic reasons, and that's probably not going away in my lifetime. One should be prepared for other people to act like this.
> Why should it be tolerated when it happens in school, where the victims have no choice but to attend every day?
Since it's where they go to learn that this behaviour exists but is bad. You need to have lighter sanctions in order to teach people about behaviour without ruining their lives in the process.
In real life, you can choose not to associate with the same person or clique 8 hours a day 5 days a week for thirteen years. Worst case scenario would be in a job situation, but here's the thing: you can find a new job. You can't find a new school.
In public school, you can either report the abuse to an authority figure who has little or no ability to actually remedy the situation, or you can... sit there and suffer? Fight back? While outside of it, you have more ways to remedy a bad situation than "just make your abuser respect you."
> It is far preferable however to the alternative of never having experienced that humans can act like this.
Should we get our children bullied deliberately then? It is not necessary to be bullied to learn that humans can act like that. I've never been assaulted, for instance, but I know that it's possible and act accordingly.
Seems like a rather puerile form of bullying, no? With adults it looks much different. Mockery in front of peers, openly manipulative behavior, talking shit behind peoples' backs, etc etc
Is this literally about states that have poor math achievement, or is it along the lines of some states aren’t teaching math because <insert culture war things>? It’s become difficult to tell when a good faith discussion on public education is happening.
California is considering copying San Francisco's ban on teaching Algebra to 8th graders. So maybe more imagined than real, but real for a small number of people.
My experience is very old. I went to one of the most highly rated county school systems in the US. The quality of math instruction was horrible. It was called new math back in the 60’s. I think we are on at least the third iteration, new new new math. In grad school I finally had a good teacher.
Only some kids truly have an aptitude for mathematics anyway.
That's an absurdly strong and inaccurate statement that feeds into psychological walls that then get erected in the minds of the young and perpetuate ad infinitum. The psychological research here is very clear: stressing work, over some sort of ethereal innate 'talent', in ANY area makes a massive difference in skill attainment.
I don't have time this moment to get into this in any depth, and, it depends, of course, what specifically you mean by "truly have an aptitude", but, too many people have a view of math, in particular, as some kind of magical realm only "truly accessible" to a few. There's a lot that goes into forming the basis for skill in any domain - quite a lot of that likely reflects all sorts of extremely early life parameters and events prior, even, to acquisition of language. The "playing field" is never "level" in any pursuit. But, based on my own experiences and knowledge, there's a mysticism or whatever surrounding some subjects that's just bizarre, IMO.
I would personally, in light of what I've seen to date, draw a very direct analogy with the formation of an NBA player (as an example). Someone can start playing very young, become incredibly adept, and easily never get to the height, strength, etc. (typically) required to make it to NBA level. Nevertheless, these people go on to be trainers, coaches, announcers, etc. This is even more relevant in fields that aren't in the "tournament career" realm.
Often, what holds people back the most, is substantially unfounded statements like yours.
Anyone can learn mathematics. Not everybody wants to or would find it useful. I feel as if you're putting a large amount of words into my mouth which I never intended -- all I meant to say was that not learning mathematics to a high level is not that bad. Lots of people have perfectly meaningful lives knowing basically no mathematics beyond middle school level, having forgotten even high school maths.
For most people, sufficient effort can guarantee a productive carrer programming computers. The absolute maximum capacity (number of people doing a thing / total number of people) of professional basketball players is much lower, and so given the amount of interest in doing said profession you end up with criteria that are very out of line with the median as far as human traits go. The height requirements for instance are not ordinary human height requirements, they put most basketball players firmly in the top decile as far as height goes. Believe it or not, programmers are not anywhere near being that out of line with human averages (and are not collectively in the top decile of anything), and largely resemble other white collar professions demographically.
Its fair to say there is no such thing as innate ability to do math (at least to the level of the average mathematically inclined undergraduate, but I even suspect this applies furthr than that). There are definitely hard cutoffs to whether or not you will ever be allowed to play basketball professionally, regardless of the amount of effort you put in. Its very important that young people interested in computers and coming from all sorts of different environments understand that the topic is not gated biologically, and that they understand that fact as intuitively as professionals in the field. Poor education (or lack of education) is far too often equated with a lack of some kind of innate ability.
Can't really compare math with basketball. Basketball is enjoyed by millions, it is a sport that is easily accessible with a very low common denominator.
In order to truly enjoy math you have to have a particular kind of brain that you are indeed either born with or not.
Can't say that I did enjoy math that much because I've had horrible abusive teachers but even so I liked it somewhat because I was better at it than everyone in my class. I would just read the lesson from the text book and it clicked for me instantly, not even needing teachers most of the time.
I seriously doubt that literally everyone else just had mental blocks to pick up things as easily as I did. With hard work and private tutors they eventually could catch up indeed but I really doubt they enjoyed it or even needed that knowledge
True of course. I've seen estimates of about 10% (your link quotes 11%) of children (i.e., 90% of children don't have it) but the obvious question is on what basis what the diagnosis made? You can guarantee that only a few of those kids have had an MRI scan determining a brain structure indicative of a structural association with dyscalculia in the brain. Easy to jump to conclusions and miss many other possibilities which do not present apparently impassable barriers to learning maths.
No, its very different because kids do not receive their enire education at that one location, nor do they have to stick to their age group ragardless of their abilities and interests. Its not new either.
Most home educators use a mixture of ways of learning. The best is self teaching because it teaches study skills - learning how to learn is invaluable.
It us also very flexible. For thise familiar with the British system, my daughters did GCSEs in subjects including Latin and astronomy. They sat some subjects early (the older one got an a in physics at 9) which let them spread things out and is less stressful.
Socially they meet lots of people, of varied ages, in diferrent settings.
Except there is no language revolving around how you have to be there, expectations for it to form the core of your social experience, etc.
I was never homeschooled, and I think homeschooling is generally not a great idea. But there should be an alternative. Anything that doesn't have a pressure valve like that is screwed.
> It's simply not practical for parents to commit all the hours needed for full time home schooling 9 till 3:30PM every day
This is a “tell me you don’t homeschool without telling me you don’t homeschool”
No homeschooling family I ever met has set hours, and most spend far less time than that daily. Schoolwork takes a lot less time when you cut out the crowd control, distractions, “pledging allegiance” and other nonsense
One of the very first things i learned when i began homeschooling was that 9 to 3:30 schooling simply exists for parents work schedules. We can typically knock out our school day in 2 to 3 hours altogether. Granted, my kids are still elementary age
I'm not sure that's really true. 9 to 3:30 existed when housewives were the norm (which was only one or two generations ago). It's clearly not ideal for working parents because most jobs won't let you finish work at 3:30!
Also consider school holidays. How many jobs let you take 12 weeks of holiday a year?
I've asked loads of working parents how they deal with that and the answer is always "it's impossible, you have to use grandparents, scrounge together enough holiday, try to take unpaid leave, etc.".
The biggest problem with the setup you outlined is that the central government has no say in what is being taught to kids. So no matter how similar homeschooling will look to government-controlled schooling, people with power will never stop attacking it because of that crucial nuisance.
The “I don’t want the government perspective imposed on my children” is so funny to me as a homeschooling argument.
Go to schoolboard meetings. Talk to your kids and their teachers. Understand what your kids are learning. If you feel a perspective is missing, fill in the gaps. Your kids will be better off for seeing different perspectives, understanding basic argumentation, and coming to their own conclusions.
Oh this sounds like a lot of work? Well, the alternative, pulling them out of school and designing their entire education sounds like way more work than just being reasonably engaged?
The point is that there’s no reasonable - folks doing this have deeply expressed beliefs and if you disagree you’re evil. They only sound reasonable when speaking in general terms.
I was a school board president of a catholic school that for the most part aligns with state and professional standards and added faith and cultural material not appropriate in a secular school. The kids get a solid education -
We got “invaded” by some extremely conservative folks, funded by some organization who sought to move to a curriculum derived from a homeschool program where books centered (exclusively) around classic western texts. In the K-12 curriculum kids weren’t taught about Asia until WW2. Africa and India do not exist. They were also concerned with “woke” issues, like girls being allowed to wear pants.
We were able to “beat” them, but it damaged the institution.
> The point is that there’s no reasonable - folks doing this have deeply expressed beliefs and if you disagree you’re evil. They only sound reasonable when speaking in general terms.
This is such good point about why this conversation is so frustrating.
Because in the abstract, if good faith could be assumed, there's a discussion to be had here. GP responded to me here being like "well what if they were Russian or Chinese schools" -- which does make you have to acknowledge "ok fine, if my kid were in North Korea maybe I would be really worried about what the local public school was teaching."
And so you get duped into engaging on the merits. And then you dig just a tad deeper and find out that it's never a high-minded debate about pedagogy or state imposed perspective on like the role of the Federal Reserve or treatment of the Native Americans, it's always bat-shit stupid stuff about Creationism, banning woke books, and demagoguing over gays and trans people.
I will give you a concrete example if you want one. By focusing exclusively on the "great people" of the civil rights movement, the education most kids in the US are getting does not mention the roles in future movements which they are most likely to play. You get an "it's MLK and a handful of main characters, and thousands of extras in the crowd scenes" message from every textbook I've ever seen. No mention of the fact that there were, say, individual legal battles, much less what they were over or how they were won. Kids graduate high school thinking that their only two options are being an era-defining writer or passively reading tweets.
I always found it depressing that you learned the survey level of US History a half dozen times, each time noticing the inconvenient details filtered out. My favorite whipping boy for this is the Pilgrims, who transition from guys with funny hats who liked turkey and wrapped dead fish around corn to… something else.
One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t know what people actually know, and if they’ve been lured into nostalgia for some wonderful past that doesn’t exist, they get angry. The 1619 project controversy was a great example of that. The notion that people managed their human property like property and that people who escaped that system intermarried with runaway or released indentured servants is a “duh” concept.
All of this underscores why education is important, and why academic freedom is a critical component of it.
Uh have you even tried that or know anyone who has? If you have issues with the curriculum, its not getting changed. It’s often set at a state or federal level with a lot of committees and politics.
Thanks for clarifying. One problem with this approach is that it is purely additive. What if people want to avoid something being taught? Prior to a certain age, children don’t really understand things in a cold and analytic way. The things they are told shape their moral beliefs and personality (which is why religions are always very controlling of schooling). So, they aren’t really “choosing” in the adult sense, it becomes more of a RNG for whether they will pick up the state selected value system or yours. Of course once a person is old enough they can and should be exposed to everything, to build context.
You can’t raise children as if they’re little adults. They don’t have fully developed frontal cortexes until their late 20s: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-teen-brain-... (“The brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s. The part of the brain behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex, is one of the last parts to mature. This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions.”).
This is science. The very nature of the human animal is that children must be socialized, rather than merely presented information and allowed to make up their own minds: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8Y8R8Lo/
I remember my dad organized a group of parents to push for improvements to math and science teaching at our rural school district. Eventually that included lobbying state legislators to support distance learning, so that a group of a dozen schools could use shared services to teach or access advanced courses. My brother got to realize that - he took Calc 1 & 2, as well and intro to computer science at a state university about 100 miles away, in high school.
Passionate people with good ideas can always drive change.
This overestimates the degree to which (1) children are rational beings; and (2) parental influence determines children’s outcomes. In fact, the biggest influence comes from a child’s peers: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/a-matter-of-person...
That’s why families who can afford it send their kids to private school, where their children’s peers are carefully curated. If you can’t afford that, homeschool is a compelling alternative.
Does that line of thinking only apply to American public schools that teach values you like or would you suggest the same to Chinese, Russian and Iranian parents?
As someone who was homeschooled, I'm having a hard time coming up with an "infohazard" I avoided exposure to other than things like "the theory of evolution" or "the concept of sex" or "it turns out 'the slaves were treated quite well' isn't exactly true"
I'd imagine most info hazards come from the other kids and not the curriculum itself. Plenty of crude, incorrect, or even dangerous info coming from the other kids. Not that much different from how Hollywood portrays many topics (drugs, alcohol, sex, legal consequences, etc). So it's likely those ideas would be encountered even when homeschooling, possibly at a lower rate though.
What about the obsession with sex, sexuality, and dating in American schools, which the adults do nothing to discourage? If I had to identify one reason why poor Asians have vastly higher income mobility than poor white people, that’d be it. We literally have twice the bandwidth to focus on studying.
Explain this more to me. Presumably something so insidious you need to remove your child from even the possibility of being exposed to it. Perhaps, the existence of gay people?
The steelman version is something like the following chain of reasoning: (a) gender identity is something that everyone has that is distinct from sex, (b) with enough introspection, everyone can discover their true gender identity, (c) if you don't have a strongly felt gender identity, you need to introspect, (d) if introspection does not yield certainty then this suggests genderfluidity, or even worse that puberty ought be delayed until certainty is achieved.
Or how about: an AMAB child playing with a Barbie doll often is strongly suggestive that he might actually be trans.
Or how about: values like "being on time" or believing that a math problem has one correct answer are inherently white supremacist and racist.
That's not the steel man, that's a straw man where you just flipped the politics of the scenario.
Letting kids feel safe to introspect and question their gender expression is a good thing.
The implication that kids will be _systematically_ forced to delay puberty or undergo a transition they don't want is absurd and not a valid "chain of reasoning". Yes, I'm sure it has happened and could continue in rare instances because a) there are lots of crazy parents; b) it is a new, trending concept and people like fads. But that is really no different than other types of trauma parents and teachers give to kids across the political spectrum. You're going to have to do a lot more work to prove this is something likely to happen on a broad scale.
The fact that gender identity is now something kids are allowed to have means people will interrogate them about it. People may even attempt to coerce them (just like any other beliefs) and kids will likely change their minds over time. The ability to defend their beliefs, resist influence, have role models, receive reliable advice and mentorship, manage their relationships, make serious medical decisions, etc etc is all part of the equation. It's also not that big of a deal or the end of society.
I guess it comes down to how widespread you think the coercion that you mention is. I tend to believe the current rate of non-cis identification is at least an order of magnitude over the "natural" background rate, specifically because of a system of incentives and disincentives which have been set up. Being non-cis grants attention, care, affirmation, and deference from administrators. It is one of the few categories that administrators seem actually willing to go to the mat to protect from vicious bullying. Being cis means being boring, being tacitly oppressive, and not receiving as much attention, affirmation, or defense from administrators and teachers.
I view this all as a negative insofar as it nudges cis kids to identify as non-cis and start edging closer to risks to their mental and physical health as a result.
Maybe in 15 years this will look silly and we'll all know that 10% non-cis is totally normal and all these people will be able to live authentic lives.
But if in 15 years we reach the opposite discovery, my view is that we will have done a lot of damage to individuals and to systems along the way.
More like, learn how to evaluate those decisions and advocate for their own healthcare, which is something everyone needs to learn and practice in the US eventually.
Medical interventions for adolescents is always going to be controversial and no simple heuristic will solve it. Hopefully if kids are more comfortable expressing their identity and not comforming to traditional stereotypes then medical treatments will feel less necessary.
It's less rare than you might think, here are some statistics from US insurance claims, which is a lower bound as the wealthier may choose to pay privately:
Those numbers are still "rare" and don't tell us that kids are being coerced.
My assumption for now is that the increase is due to latent demand and wider awareness & acceptance. We need to see the steady state after a decade or so.
Several of my high school classmates (from the mid-2000s) started transitioning as soon as they could skip town and decide their own life. And it was clear they had known and wanted it for a long time prior.
Wow, that's a completely ridiculous strawman. My kids go to one of the most liberal school districts in the nation, and never once have they been told they need to "introspect their gender identity," let alone the absolutely absurd notion that "if they're not certain, they're genderfluid and/or need puberty blockers."
Literally the only thing along those lines that is taught is to respect other people's gender identity. This has been no harder for them to grasp than "Gay people exist and that's ok" was for my generation.
If you really believe that school districts out there are pushing puberty blockers, then your YouTube algorithm is probably feeding you a heck of a lot of crap.
Just to be clear: are you saying the argument is bad because these things are never taught, or are you saying that these things are good to teach actually?
That is a fair ask. To be honest, I am unwilling to devote to this discussion the time which would be required to research examples.
I will concede that if these things never happened, I personally would find the infohazard argument non-compelling, though others may have their own feared infohazards.
On the flip side, if hypothetically these were common ideas animating public school curricula and/or teacher behavior, would you consider that sufficient justification for homeschooling as being discussed here?
When it comes to public policy, I don't find myself particularly animated by hypotheticals. I think we have more than enough on our plate if we just pay attention to things that are actually happening in the large.
Would you please explain the math example? I was in school until last year (Germany tho) but I don't get it (the 4chan argument about percentages and races?)
The steelman argument for the subjectivity of math would be something like: the process of choosing how to represent/model a real world situation in mathematical terms may influence what conclusions can or will be reached under that model, because biased assumptions can sneak their way into the model.
To be clear, this is good knowledge and should be taught.
However, it is not an effective attack on the coherence of natural number arithmetic. We have to get students to a certain level of objective operational competence before they are ready to think about the subjectivity of mathematical modeling.
This is far more nuance than I remember in public schools. At a young age there is quite a bit of rote memorization of facts. Sure parents can supplement their child’s education, but at the end of the day the child will be forced to adopt the schools viewpoint on certain perspective as the “correct” answer — or suffer in their grades
Why shouldn’t the government have a say in what is taught to children? Children are not their parent’s property. These are future citizens and I would prefer that society has a say in what is taught to them. In a democratic system the government represents the will of the society.
You could have a point if the government operating at the local school level was the least bit competent let alone functional. And that’s the government, public schools are shockingly badly run. I have two in middle school and it’s one of the top magnets in DFW yet my wife and I still have to be on top of the school to the point we’ve hired an “advocate” for our kids. Basically, a consultant that makes sure the school keeps the law breaking to a minimum and the accommodations o e of our kids needs are actually made.
If we had the option we would gladly homeschool but we don’t so off to the zoo every day..
Ok but I’d rather my kids have be raised understanding and influenced by their parent’s perspective so that they will influence society along those similarly into adulthood.
Because children are not the government's property either, and society is not being asked for their opinion, so their will is not relevant. Society does not and will never care about any specific individual. The people who are ultimately responsible for the child (and therefore hold decision making authority) are the ones who caused it to be here. Pretending "society" holds that responsibility just means abdicating it entirely.
This hasn't been true in the U.S. for a century when the house reapportionment act was passed. Now the strongest voice the majority has is in the Senate. The body that was designed to give voice to the minority.
We were forced to homeschool our child due to Pandemic, and later, from desire for him to actually learn. It was eye opening! Schools are chaotic, and one of the biggest take aways for the child is conformity. In fact, I believe the entire institution of age based grades started in the militaristic state of Prussia. From the point of view of a state that needs soldiers, having standards and consistency is important. Individualism, and creativity are not very useful in a marching formation. And questioning authority, is equally frowned upon.
That depends on the state[0]. West Virginia appears to be the strictest, requiring homeschooled students to score above the median public school standardized assessment score.
> So no matter how similar homeschooling will look to government-controlled schooling, people with power will never stop attacking it because of that crucial nuisance.
Just like in Florida, where teachers now face felony charges for having the wrong book in the classroom (not as required reading, just having it in the classroom). Yup, that's people with power attacking home-schooling for sure.
"Any adult, not just a teacher, who knowingly provides a minor obscene material described in section 847.012(3), Florida Statues, could be prosecuted for a third-degree felony."
> The statute 847.012 [...] also forbids subjects of racial issues and sexual orientation [1]
> School officials in at least two counties, Manatee and Duval, have directed teachers this month to remove or wrap up their classroom libraries, according to records obtained by The Washington Post. The removals come in response to fresh guidance issued by the Florida Department of Education in mid-January, after the State Board of Education ruled that a law restricting the books a district may possess applies not only to schoolwide libraries but to teachers' classroom collections, too. [2]
So, the war is between state imposed ideology versus parental ideology, whatever the ideology might be?
What if parental ideology are whacky? What then? Yes, state ideology can be whacky as well, but at least it is in the public and in the open where that can be challenged on a field, instead of uncontested at home.
If parental ideology is whacky, one family suffers. If state ideology is whacky, million families suffer. Including those who didn’t consent.
What if someone can’t keep themselves healthy? Is it a good reason to regulate food consumption? What if someone is an alcoholic? Let’s introduce dry law?
It's also a ploy to avoid integrated schools, but I think we gave up on the Brown v. Board world a few decades ago.
e: Not saying this is the reason but it is certainly the subtextual reason in the southern urban school district I lived in that a lot of kids were homeschooled.
Home schooling isn't a 9 till 3:30PM everyday. It doesn't have to mimic the systematic school routine. It's far more flexible and beneficial for students that are being held back by school or falling behind.
So you’re saying that all the parent should each contribute a little bit of money and share responsibility for actually teaching. Heck, maybe they could even, oh, I dunno, eventually hire someone to do that teaching!
There’s nothing worth saving and more money just makes it even worse. The districts are incompetent, the school administrations are wildly incompetent and the teachers union is just ridiculous. There’s nothing in the public school system worth working on. Homeschool if you can or do your best to budget for private school.
Edit: my wife is a HS teacher of 15 years. Her and many of her teacher friends are leaving the industry. It’s just not fixable.
Think about it like work. A low level manager or individual contributor may be able to greatly change trajectory and outcomes for their small team but is unlikely to change anything for an entire global organization and the bureaucracy that comes with it. With enough successes at a low level then maybe those get recognized and the effects begin to trickle up. Or maybe not but at least you did the best you could for what you were directly responsible for.
This just sounds like school. I guess the difference is you can be very selective with what you teach and pick your own curriculum, especially if you’re a fundamentalist religious person and don’t agree with what most schools teach.
We are in our ninth year of homeschooling. My wife and I attended private and public schools and grew up with typical biases against homeschooling, e.g. they lack social skills. When we got married, we always assumed we'd send our kids to traditional schools.
What we learned, though, is that homeschooling has changed since we were in school. Back then, it was a niche, and the sort of parents who chose to homeschool usually existed on the fringe (and probably lacked social skills themselves).
Nowadays, there are a lot more "normal" families who choose to homeschool. Our family, and many others we've encountered, values and promotes social skills. Our kids attend co-ops, play sports, and do other activities with their peers.
And because the demographics of homeschoolers have changed, so too have the ways that they homeschool. It's not very surprising that there is more collaborative teaching, where parents remain the primary educators, but certain subjects are outsourced to co-ops, online sessions on Outschool, etc.
Speaking from experience, there were plenty of normal families who chose homeschooling decades ago. The problem is that the weird people make a lot of noise, and then homeschooling gets a reputation, which causes the self-aware normal folks to shy away from talking about homeschooling too publicly because they don't want to be associated with the negative stereotypes.
The trouble is, this can become a feedback loop, because the only way to dispel the stereotypes is if more normal folks speak up.
I've seen this same phenomenon affect other subcultures too, and I suspect there's probably a name for it, but I don't know what it is.
Be warned that I heard “homeschooling has changed since we were in school” in the early 2000s, from multiple parents who are now estranged from their adult children.
It hasn’t really changed that much - it’s just something parents like to tell themselves to avoid thinking about the experiences their children are missing.
If I had to guess, most of the original homeschoolers did it because they had strong, fringe religious beliefs. Then in your generations more secular parents started homeschooling but it was still a pretty highly self-selective group (a stay at home parent who didn’t mind staying at home most of the day teaching their kids, a belief they could do better at educating their kids even without the resources we have on the internet now to make it easier or the ability to use the internet to organize with other homeschooling parents, anecdotally a lot of either super-weirdo parents or hippy granola parents (more in unschooling)).
Now with the internet and WFH homeschooling is possible for many more parents than just those that don’t work fulltime and want to teach their kids full time, and it’s easier to create curricula, and easier to network and schedule things with other parents.
I do think there is probably a general problem of some pathologically bad parenting traits self-selecting much more than “normal” parents to homeschool: parents with control freak/micromanagement issues they subject their kids to, socially anxious parents who want to spend all their time at home with their family, parents with fringe/paranoid/extreme beliefs, having some kind of weird attachment or smothering issues they subject their kids to. Which isn’t a problem with homeschooling per se as much as it is selection bias in who chooses to homeschool.
That's interesting to hear, as someone living in a different country I always assume that the reason to homeschool is so you could give your children better education.
That's a common reason here, too. It's why I was homeschooled—my parents were perfectly content to send us to public school until we moved to another state and had a terrible local school.
OP's perception is because we also have a much larger conservative-Christian cohort than most other developed countries. As the grandparent points out, that leads to a large percentage of homeschoolers doing it for non-academic reasons, which skews stats and public perception.
> That's interesting to hear, as someone living in a different country I always assume that the reason to homeschool is so you could give your children better education.
The attitude I was raised with is that parents will always have to provide supplemental education but the socialization school provides is much more difficult to replace.
It sounds like you had a rough experience. I'm sorry about that. That said, for a lot of families homeschooling had changed by the late 90s and early 2000s. I was homeschooled around that time with my siblings, as were my wife and her family. We all still have great relationships with our parents, and our homeschool experiences were very far from the stereotypes.
We participated in many different co-ops. We took every AP class offered at the local high school. We're all functional adults with normal social lives.
It's obviously hard to come to any conclusions from warring anecdotes alone, but I thought it's worth sharing mine.
Strained relationships with adult children suck, but they're not a given when homeschooling, nor does sending your kids to public school necessarily save your relationship with your kids.
12/13 of the circle of homeschooling families that made up our socialization group in the 90s/00s have gone no contact with their parents now. Congrats on your success, it’s not the norm.
Not the norm within your social group, which was presumably mutually selected by your respective parents. That suggests that these families are not 13 independent data points, but rather a group of 13 families that all had similar predispositions and evolved along similar lines. I'd like to see the stats overall before coming to a conclusion about what the norm is.
OP took their anecdote and generalized it very broadly [0]. I shared my own anecdotes, explicitly acknowledging that it's "hard to come to any conclusions from warring anecdotes alone". OP responded saying that their anecdote is actually a collection of 13 anecdotes. I countered that 13 tightly related and completely non-random anecdotes do not turn into a usable stat.
Nowhere did I mean to imply OP's experience isn't a true homeschooling experience, just that it's not necessarily as representative as they believe it is and that more information is needed before generalizing either of our experiences is fair.
[0] "it hasn’t really changed that much - it’s just something parents like to tell themselves to avoid thinking about the experiences their children are missing"
When your child is coming home in tears every day because other children are mean, and the teachers and administrators won't do anything, and your child is sitting bored through bullshit indoctrination and being harangued for skipping brainless homework to write or make art or do any number of other things, feel free to sit down and tell them how valuable the public school system is, and how their suffering is stupid and they need to get over it.
This entire thread is why I think public schools and private schools are both really important and need investment. Homeschooling as well but that I see as a gap solution.
And the juvie outcome is so common that it makes up the most likely outcome from having a bad school experience? I think homeschooling may still be statistically worse
The tears eventually end with your child bringing a weapon to school or going hulk and slamming another kid's head on concrete like that viral meme you probably can remember, then getting suspended, getting put in Juvi, and having their life fucked up even worse.
Maybe have a look at the rise of school shootings, student suicides and children bringing weapons to school (to the degree that there are metal detectors in schools all over the place now). Kids were bringing knives to school to fend off bullies back when I went to school, and getting stabbed with uncomfortable frequency, and that was 30+ years ago in a halfway decent neighborhood.
Just because you can point to cases of homeschooling that's 10x worse than the average public school doesn't mean there aren't homeschooling environments that aren't much better, and public school environments that aren't MUCH MUCH worse.
If you think you made a meaningful statistical statement, your fundamental misunderstanding of language is a strike against any public school that graduated you.
The reality is that what homeschooling parents think is "right" is often extremely noxious and damaging. Again, not all of them sure, but a large portion.
> The reality is that what homeschooling parents think is "right" is often extremely noxious and damaging
Yeah, which is why it’s bad in aggregate. But that generally isn’t the case for parents that send their kids to normal school first and then pull them out when things aren’t working out for whichever reason.
If your idea of homeschooling is to sequester a child away from all human contact to try and indoctrinate them in some crazy belief, maybe. Plenty of homeschooled kids have homeschool play groups, athletics lessons and other non-compulsory classes which they're free to leave at any time if they don't like their peer group.
"your choice to homeschool me harmed me" doesnt have to mean the social skills alone. I never progressed in some academic areas as much as I would have liked until college/after college because my parents were not great teachers in those areas.
Did they know they were not good teachers in those areas? I'm sure they didnt. Did I know that at the time? Nope. Would public school have taught me that same subject better? Who knows but my peers seemed to generally have a better understand of it than I did.
yada yada road to hell is paved with good intentions.
I heard this “but we have homeschool play groups! It’s different!” in the 2000s from every single one of the parents for whom homeschool was a disaster. It’s funny hearing it fresh here.
I suspect this has more to do with your social circle, which given the density of homeschoolers is probably either hyper-religious, doomsday preppers or some other dysfunctional subculture, and I'm not surprised those children would grow up to hate their parents.
To be fair though, I'd imagine an hour or two a week of socialization is still quite insufficient. On the flip side, 10+ hours a day of socialization is unquestionably unnecessary, and forcing your kids to become conformists or get beat up/bullied/etc (which is the reality in public schools unless you live in a really rich neighborhood) in order to get a little more socialization time isn't a good tradeoff. There are a lot of non-school activities children can engage in to get peer socialization where the type of bullshit that occurs in public school doesn't fly, due to the adults that run those activities losing customers and having their livelihood threatened if they let kids be little cunts, unlike public schools.
Nope! My parents were secular parents avoiding a struggling inner-city public school system, hoping to have their children take advanced mathematics courses. Same with the rest of the group.
So I heard the same refrain from you that I heard from my parents and their peers, decades later from someone I don’t know, and your takeaway is that we must be in very different circumstances? Bud, you’re almost certainly reusing the same homeschooling materials and curriculum help my own parents did.
So if they weren't religious nutters why did you all go no-contact? Abuse is the only reason I've commonly heard for no-contact, with addiction and religious expulsion uncommon but present, were 12/13 of these families abusive or addicted? I'm just struggling to understand the relationship between the facts you've stated and the outcomes you've stated, I feel like I'm missing a lot of steps here. For reference, I am also no-contact and most of my friends are no-contact, most due to abuse, but we weren't homeschooled.
You've got a little bit of a self-selection bias going there. Your socialization group is no more likely to be the norm than the person you replied to.
I came here to write your comment and was thrilled to find it already here. As a homeschooled kid who considers myself damaged as a result, I completely agree. The OP comment is eerily similar to stuff my parents said in the 2000s-early 10s and were totally wrong about.
My parents weren't religious at all and were totally in it for academic enrichment. They were all about the "new wave of homeschooling": high-quality instructional material, study groups, plenty of socialization opportunities with other (homeschooled) kids. I turned out fine academically and probably do at least partially owe my career to it, but the social consequences for both me and my peers were severe.
The issue with playdates and study groups and the like is that the odds are good, but the goods are odd. Homeschooled kids playing with each other is an echo chamber of robotic parent-pleasers (for a while, until the break happens) who're incapable of tackling genuine social dynamics because their foremost, unbelievably deeply inculcated desire is parental praise. I feel it even now - peer approval is meaningless; only that pat on the back matters. This results in a weird simulacra of socialization: kids understand that they're supposed to have friends and social contact, but go through the motions of "this is friendship and social contact" without ever touching the real deal. Friends your parents select for you are fundamentally not real friends, and pretending they are fucks up one's ability to form genuine relationships for a long time.
Homeschooling is the ultimate egotistical project of attempting to form a living, human child - with the fractal of possible futures that implies - into a mirror of one's self. The typical liberal recognizes the abhorrence of that in a context of religious indoctrination, but is totally fine with it in a secular context. Fuck that. It's wrong for all the same reasons, and fundamentally negates the child's identity as a unique human. This is why I don't think better instructional material isn't a solution: the core problem is that one fleshed-out outlook on the nature of reality is way too little. Without multiple sources of approval and validation, it's way too easy to monopolize a kid's perspective. Again, this is realized in contexts of religious indoctrination but ignored outside of it - forcefully indoctrinating kids with a single perspective is wrong, full stop. And no, simply presenting alternative perspectives doesn't work; it'll inevitably be couched in the sort of condesencion that parents are unable to shed. Imagine your dad telling you about rock'n'roll culture: you're hardly likely to go from that to the Twisted Sister video.
Parents, of course, love this dynamic. The problem starts when those kids leave the nest and find that their parents' perspective is not the only one that matters.
The other angle is that, ime, parents who are themselves socially stunted, like mine, are unable to recognize this dynamic and insist that nothing is, or even could be, wrong. Like the parent comment, I've kept in touch with many of the kids I knew and this perspective is far from unique.
To the OP: I beg you, please don't do this. You will probably regret it for most of the rest of your life, and if you don't your kids will.
This is an extremely loaded topic as are many child raising related questions.
We have (mostly) homeschooled our kids. There are many forms of homeschooling. My kids didn't do study groups and instructional materials. We mostly did what's known as unschooling. But they ended up doing a mix of traditional schooling (with remote schools and then in person) and pursuing their own interests. I think it worked out well for them. One is in her last year of high-school (going to school full time now) and one has already graduated from university, has a job, is doing pretty well.
If I look at myself, I would say I consider myself partly damaged from going to school. I think many of my peers also have damage from the school system. It kills the desire to learn, there are negative social phenomena like bullying and other abusive situations. Many young people under peer pressure get introduced to substance abuse. There's even extremes like suicide. Schools are not a great environment for learning or for socializing. Some people do well, some people do very poorly.
> forcefully indoctrinating kids with a single perspective is wrong, full stop
Isn't this a great description of the school system? I totally agree by the way. Our kids had/have control over what they wanted to pursue.
I am sorry to hear of your experience. There are many things I wish my parents did differently. Parenting is hard and every person is different. Not going to school can be a better experience, at least in my opinion.
> I think it worked out well for them. One is in her last year of high-school (going to school full time now) and one has already graduated from university, has a job, is doing pretty well.
I don't think these are good markers for if home schooling worked or not. Being able to function in society is kind of the bare minimum positive outcome. I was able to go through my day to day just fine but had terrible social skills. Plenty of people have terrible social skills. But most of those people cant source them directly back to their schooling a decisions that were made for them.
> If I look at myself, I would say I consider myself partly damaged from going to school. I think many of my peers also have damage from the school system. It kills the desire to learn, there are negative social phenomena like bullying and other abusive situations. Many young people under peer pressure get introduced to substance abuse. There's even extremes like suicide. Schools are not a great environment for learning or for socializing. Some people do well, some people do very poorly.
Okay. So you may prevent some bullying and exposure to drugs for some years. But when the child is an adult they will almost certainly come into contact with those things. How are they going to respond? Have they learned how to deal with and handle difficult social situations? Have they been pressured by their peers to do something they know they shouldnt and had the confidence to say no?
It feels like the can is just getting kicked down the road. From my experience, many home school kids will go too far when experimenting as an adult because now they have the resources to do so and no accountability.
I would consider school to be an environment too artificial to learn good social skills. Home schooling shouldn't mean being isolated- ideally it means more realistic interactions with others.
I'm not the most social person myself, despite (because?) having gone to school, and neither is my wife. I'm sure there's many factors other than traditional school vs. not.
When you're an adult you are better equipped to deal with bad things in the real world. Your experiences as a child have an impact on that.
We were part of a local homeschooling group for many years and have seen many children go through it and are still in touch with those families. Haven't really seen the negative results you're describing. I feel there's a big difference between home schooling in the context of a supportive community vs. being isolated and there's also a big differences between various approaches to homeschooling, distance learning, unschooling and more. It's hard to say much without more data.
I don’t normally comment on this sort of thing (I don’t have kids, am not precisely “normal” (whatever that is) and dislike speaking publicly on sensitive topics, anonymous or otherwise), but this touched a nerve for some reason, so I’ll throw a couple of things out there for you to consider:
1. Parents are not the only ones who push their own desires and beliefs. Thought experiment: how many members of the group that decides the curriculum vote Republican or Independent? Scuttlebutt (unverified by me) is that most folks in US schools and on US school boards are Democrats. Regardless of one’s opinion on political matters, that (if true) would suggest a certain uniformity of thought, and the likely presence of a conscious or unconscious agenda that would then get passed on, deliberately or otherwise, in the resulting curriculum.
And that’s before we get to the general tendency of many groups (regardless of type) to naturally attract like-minded souls in the first place. I only used political affiliation as a visible indicator of the phenomenon (assuming that the rumors are true about Democrats and schools, which as I said, I don’t actually know ;), not to promote one or another party, and not to imply that it’s anywhere close to the only factor.
2. IMHO, schools, public or private, do not fix social issues, and in a certain subset of children, may actually create them. I say that as someone who was never homeschooled, and yet has significant issues socializing (though I’ve learned to hide that fact in public over the years, and have a good career). Your thoughts on friendship resonate with me to a degree, and school did not help it one iota. Probably made it worse, actually.
I won’t go into my personal opinion on “the right answer,” because it’s irrelevant in the end. I have no kids, and thus no skin in the game, nor do I actually know “the right answer.”
> 1. Parents are not the only ones who push their own desires and beliefs. Thought experiment: how many members of the group that decides the curriculum vote Republican or Independent? Scuttlebutt (unverified by me) is that most folks in US schools and on US school boards are Democrats. Regardless of one’s opinion on political matters, that (if true) would suggest a certain uniformity of thought, and the likely presence of a conscious or unconscious agenda that would then get passed on, deliberately or otherwise, in the resulting curriculum.
Have you taken a look at the news anytime in the past year? "Republicans don't have any influence on school curriculums" is a wild departure from easily observable reality, so much so that I think it kind of renders this comment beneath serious consideration.
Did you totally miss the part where I clearly indicated that I’ve not bothered to research and find out if it’s true? Hanging around schools to observe it firsthand would be pretty damned creepy at my age since I don’t work in education and don’t have kids. Nor do I pay much attention to the board elections for the same reason.
The fact that those running for board positions typically have their political affiliation next their name on the ballot, though, should tell you something.
Whether it be Republican or Democrat is entirely irrelevant to the point I was making. The fact is that almost all school boards likely do lean one way or another. They have agendas beyond education, either consciously or unconsciously. Those agendas will make their way into the curriculum, however subtly or overtly. Those agendas will be political, religious, and/or just plain personal.
Whether you agree with whatever agenda they have does not change that simple fact.
That agenda is being taught to impressionable children. Whether that’s good or not depends on who those people are, and what your own opinion of that agenda is, and whether your child is enrolled in a school using the resulting curriculum.
But there IS an agenda that they’re pushing, just as much as any homeschooling parent pushes their own.
And that is the ONLY point I was actually making.
There was no need to try to shame my political views or knowledge —- which you aren’t even aware of, because I never reveal such online since people are so damned irrational on such topics, and that irritates me.
Another wrong thing - virtually ALL school board elections have no political party affiliation. There is currently a crazy movement by the right to institute that, but for the most part it is not true.
As anyone who's been part of any bureaucracy knows, stated policy is often different than implemented practice. A lot of the issue with saying things like 'Republicans exercise control over school curriculums, thus the GOP is in charge of schools' misses the point that, regardless of the curriculum, the overwhelming majority of teachers vote democrat, which means -- again regardless of the curriculum --they will inject subtle bias.
Meanwhile states across the country are passing laws threatening teachers with firing or criminal penalties for teaching the "wrong" things, which exerts its own kind of influence which isn't subtle.
Well, as long as it's not a "majority" but instead a large minority of tens of millions or more then I guess it's not worth thinking about. What's more, as we all know, American government is structured in such a way that representatives of a minority of Americans are never able to force through unpopular measures.
> deeply inculcated desire is parental praise. I feel it even now - peer approval is meaningless; only that pat on the back matters
I ended up that way as a public school student. Perhaps my classmates were morons, but probably not. Just never was captivated by whatever inane camaraderie-building stunts they wanted.
This did change when I joined the marching band. The specialist instructors being barely out of high school themselves helped because the things they'd give you a gold sticker for suddenly were aligned with what my peers would want to see.
I appreciate your sharing your perspective, but you've made a few comments that I find extremely overgeneralized that I'd like to respond to. But first, I'll begin like you did: As a publicly-schooled kid who considers myself damaged as a result, I'm choosing to homeschool my children in order to try to protect them from the worst of that.
I got bullied pretty relentlessly (the goods are odd... and an easy target) and what little solace I could find was in doing my academic best, and receiving recognition and accolades from my parents and teachers. Thus I have also ended up a people-pleaser.
> Homeschooling is the ultimate egotistical project of attempting to form a living, human child [...] into a mirror of one's self.
Certainly for some, but that is not our goal and I am trying to be very mindful and cautious of that pitfall. I am trying to give my children the tools and skills that they will need in order to live fulfilling lives (by which I mean, able to keep themselves housed and fed, and with whatever calling or vocation or work pleases them most. I suppose that does carry a bit of my own projection with it, that it would be difficult to find life fulfilling if one is starving or without reliable shelter, but I feel that such beliefs are shared by enough of our society that the kids would receive them if they were in school as well). Will I make mistakes? Certainly. Will we be able to maintain a good relationship? I dearly hope so, but time will tell. Do I think the odds of us achieving those goals are higher than if we forced them into a school? Yes, I do.
The kids are involved in a number of extracurricular activities (mostly physical activities like biking and swimming and dance, but likely robotics at some point sooner rather than later) many of which include a range of kids with varying ages, many (most?) of whom are not homeschooled. Why wouldn't this expose them to different cultures, and provide them with other sources of approval and validation (friends, teammates, coaches, other parents)? Hopefully it will, even as that means I have to quash my desire to discourage them from hanging out with people whose views I don't necessarily agree with--just as I would if they were in school.
Anyway, in closing, to me it seems like the challenge is more one of helping kids, especially neurodiverse ones, learn how to navigate a variety of social dynamics and to be strong, independent persons who have a sense of personal identity and the skills to share that with other people but also to defend their boundaries when pushed... and that neither public school nor homeschool are necessarily good or bad at that (or perhaps, given our respective experiences, that both are bad at it ~wry grin~)
> Friends your parents select for you are fundamentally not real friends, and pretending they are fucks up one's ability to form genuine relationships for a long time.
I honestly completely disagree. Of all the friends from my school time, the only ones I keep in contact with, and realistically -- the only ones that ended up having their lives in order -- were the ones my parents selected and approved of. They were prescient in knowing how things were going to go.
The argument about lack of socialization from failure to attend public school might have some basis.
But thinking back, I came out of the public schools with some pretty anti social behaviors and attitudes that I picked up there. Being cool is so important at that age in that setting.
I often wonder what life would have been like had I been taken out say, age 12 or 13 and given a more solid education to match my natural inclinations away from the cruelty, the misbehavior and the general time wasting that characterizes much of public school in the US.
Kuddos to you for putting in the effort to give your kids the best possible real education. It has to be a lot of work.
Is public school really that cruel these days? I have a 10 year old, and everyone in her class seems so wholesome and... exceedingly tolerant for lack of a better phrase. Compared to when I was a 10 year old where public school was a Lord Of The Flies thunderdome with bullying, and shoving people into lockers, and fights, and in-groups and out-groups and nerds vs. jocks, all the cruel 80s stereotypes. Sure, there's the occasional story of extreme bullying that happens to make the news, but it seems like these are far outliers these days.
I see absolutely zero need to pull her out. The academics are ok--not what an expensive private school might offer, but they track well with what I was learning at that age. The social/institutional environment is much better than when I was a kid.
The few parents I know who homeschool (admittedly, mostly from my wife's church group) do so for religious separatism reasons, not for educational outcome. They object to public school on ideological grounds and perceived "indoctrination," not on the academics.
This is a good question, but how am I supposed to find out the answer with any real certainty short of exposing my kids to it? Not really a sane option. "Hey, kiddo, go dance on the minefield and see if there are any left" isn't my style of parenting.
> Sure, there's the occasional story of extreme bullying that happens to make the news, but it seems like these are far outliers these days.
It's quite possible that the extremes are just the ones that make the news. The low-intensity torment is in my opinion just as traumatizing, but unless some parent raises a big stink about it then it usually doesn't even rise to the level of neighborhood gossip.
It's probably impossible to generalize among all public schools. Some are and some aren't to various degrees depending on a thousand factors. The problem is more like, how do you realize if a particular public school class is bad and what are your practical options once you do.
I don't know about today and don't have kids. This was in the late 70's/ 80's. It was as you say, Lord of The Flies indeed. Good to hear maybe it has improved. Or maybe the bullying is all online now.
I'd like to point out, 10 years old isn't really in the thick of it yet. Might rethink your statement say, Junior year of high school.
Still lots of problems (more in middle and high school) but it’s easier to today to discover and move to where the schools are better. Homeschooling in areas with poor public schools tends to be focused on academics and a better environment although the desire to provide religious education exists everywhere. An area where few homeschooling families exist would probably have high graduation rates and low crime rates in its public schools.
That argument held sway with me for a long time, but not anymore.
Our kids get a decent amount of socialization through all the activities they're involved in, and when other kids find out they're homeschooled, their response is more often genuine surprise rather than "Oh, that figures."
The idea that kids learn social skills best by being thrown into a rigid, institutional environment surrounded by hundreds of other kids whose social skills are also far from developed is kinda silly, though. It's like saying criminals will reform themselves best by surrounding themselves with lots of other criminals.
One good thing about the rigid institutional environment, for better or worse, is that having exposure to that rigidity and institutional side of things can at least give kids some skills in the long run for navigating the anti-human organizations that form so much of our public and private sectors.
> Name another institution where inmates have to ask for permission to go to the toilet, besides school and jail.
Busy call centers, fast food restaurants.
Factories: assembly line workers.
Chemical plants: process operators.
I don't mean to be snarky but I think you would be surprised at the percentage of the population working jobs where they cannot simply leave their station without permission.
> Edit: or another institution where people can attack you and you can’t call police to help you.
The military: active duty personnel deployed to war zones.
That's a ridiculous statement and has nothing to do with the institution. We have decided as a society that the police shouldn't be involved in petty children's fights. Seems like the right call to me.
I met a couple homeschooled people in college. And both of those were really well read, well spoken and creative people. But they were _not_ used to the way we all get kicked in the head all the time. they were pretty confused, hurt, and withdrawn.
A relative is homeschooling their kids, and they’re not doing a great job of it academically, but those kids are some of the sweetest, most light hearted and caring kids I’ve ever been around.
I learned some socialization at public school, sure. I also learned what it was to have a bureaucracy just roll over you because nobody involved cared enough to notice you were there. Those kids will have that experience eventually, but I’m all for delaying it.
Being sweet or conforming to a parents/adults idea of what a good child should act like does not equate to good social skills. It means they understand how to act around adults, likely, because they are around their parents regularly and have that behavior engrained.
That has nothing to do with their ability to socialize with their peers. This is a pretty common home school kid issue. Great with adults. Not great with other kids. Adults don't care because they are well behaved and the kids dont know how to vocalize that they have difficulties socializing with others their age.
There is no and has never been any true evidence that home schooled kids are worse at socialization then the ones that go to a traditional school, at least as far as I can tell. It's a meme that people propagate because it is "common sense," but none of the studies I've looked at supports it.
The socialization argument is nonsense. Schools as factory farms came first -- with no regard for socialization -- then the socialization argument was made later to rationalize it.
Forcing kids (by constructing their environment in such a way) to have only relationships with kids that are precisely the same age as them is weird. Some healthy relationships with people who are a few years older in positive. Older kids/people need to be embedded in the social circle as role models. You get less bullying and should get faster social development. Homeschooling done right is more similar to how kids developed socially in our ancestral past (all the way up to a few hundred years ago). It's also more similar to how kids develop in much of the world outside of the West where larger family units are more tight knit.
Yeah things were much better when most people were illiterate but Protestants had to go and mess it up with their ideas that people should be able to read.
How much time does homeschooling take for you? Does it roughly equate to one full-time job? I have wanted to homeschool my kids but I am afraid I would have to quit my job or downshift to part-time.
And since they are different ages, I worry that if I taught them all at the same time, the curriculum would average into something too challenging for the younger and not challenging enough for the elder. How do you manage to meet all their needs at once?
I homeschool my two kids. I was worried about the time commitment at first, but it's honestly quite small. At most, I spend two hours in the morning for both kids. Typical mornings are an hour to an hour and a half. Some subjects like social studies we do together (my kids are two years apart). Others, like math or language arts, are per child (I usually have the other one read or practice piano when giving a one-on-one lesson). My wife does a lot of the supplemental activities like taking them to our co-op or to museums.
A lot of time in public schools is either wasted or simply a consequence of classes having ~30 students each. I also find that homeschool kids can be taught the discipline to work on their own after a lesson. I check the work in the evenings or before school starts in the morning.
I can understand why many people might not want to homeschool, but I find it's been a blessing for my kids & our family.
Motivated children can easily outpace public-schooled children with 3 or 4 days a week at 3 hours a day. They can be very self-directed, but the trouble with it is they go down rabbit holes and they'll excel at one or two subjects to the detriment of others.
My daughter would want to spend 6-10 hours a day on art, but wouldn't want to do her French or math homework. My son just told me that alef (in the Hebrew alphabet) was the symbol for Graham's number, but balks when I try to get him to memorize his multiplication tables.
> And since they are different ages, I worry that if I taught them all at the same time, the curriculum would average into something too challenging
If there is a subject where that is the case, I do not know what it would be. Once they're past the age of 7 or 8, most or all children are capable of what they would be at older ages. I don't think, for instance, that an 8 yr old learning to read is slower at it than one learning that for the first time at age 14.
For the record though, didn't get to teach my son to read. With his sister, I tried from age three on up... every few months I'd see if she was more agreeable to it, and she wanted nothing to do with it until sevenish. She could sound words out phonetically if I pushed from the start, but with a look on her face like I was pulling teeth with pliers. So I waited with my son until he was almost seven... and he could just read. I have no idea how. My wife claims she didn't, and his sister certainly didn't either.
I think, really, that public schools doing age segregation has more to do with them trying to perfectly homogenize the product they crank off the assembly line, than it does with making sure each student gets enough learning opportunity.
> If there is a subject where that is the case, I do not know what it would be. Once they're past the age of 7 or 8, most or all children are capable of what they would be at older ages. I don't think, for instance, that an 8 yr old learning to read is slower at it than one learning that for the first time at age 14.
From personal experience: I first encountered differential equations in highschool, while preparing for physics Olympiad. I could solve basic equations, but I didn't understand what I was doing and for example the damped oscillator equation was mistifying. Fast forward to university, in the first diffential equation class, everything made perfect sense and I found it super easy. There was probably at least two years between the two stories.
Most likely has nothing to do with age, but simply the fact that it was the second time you’ve encountered it. Your brain spent 2 years subconsciously processing it.
But then in the learning to read example, a 14 year old learning to read has seen a ton more letters around them (on billboards, book covers, phones, etc) so it should be easier for them to learn then for an 8 year old.
> My son just told me that alef (in the Hebrew alphabet) was the symbol for Graham's number, but balks when I try to get him to memorize his multiplication tables.
I, too, learned about Graham's number when the YouTube algorithm decided that I liked math videos.
The issue with learning like this, though, is that it's called "edutainment," and, while it scratches the same itch in our brains as learning, rarely actually produces learnings.
Ask him in a week what he remembers about Graham's number. I'd be impressed if he recalled much.
Also, if he had a good teacher, that teacher would have been able to push back when he was mixing up concepts. Aleph is not the symbol for Graham's number, rather it is the symbol for Cantor's orders of infinity.
> Aleph is not the symbol for Graham's number, rather it is the symbol for Cantor's orders of infinity.
So? We weren't doing math theory. Foreign language instead. He's allowed to entertain himself after his lessons are done, and he'll be familiar with that stuff when he does get there.
> Also, if he had a good teacher,
Sure. If he had one. The implication that there's any such teacher in public schools within 100 miles of us is absurd.
The way I’ve seen it is each kid usually has a grade-specific curriculum they are following. There can be cross-pollination on some topics/deep dives and extracurriculars that different ages will get different amounts out of, but the typical model isn’t ‘all the kids are in the same classroom learning the same thing synchronously’. Rather, you are switching between between each as they asynchronously progress in their individual lessons: Johnny needs help on this math lesson while Sally is making independent progress on vocabulary, and vice versa. Even if they are waiting sometimes, the dead weight loss is still way smaller than in 30-person typical classrooms.
> How much time does homeschooling take for you? Does it roughly equate to one full-time job?
It depends. I quit my job to homeschool my daughter so that she could practice and pursue her violin studies without the encumbrances of mainstream school. I suspect some could have done this and maintained some kind of a job; I couldn't. We spent much of the day either in school work, or practice, and then I'd prep tomorrow's material. Neither time nor energy was left at the end of the day.
Just as a counterpoint... I was homeschooled from 2nd grade until sophomore year of high school. I played sports the entire time (was the captain of various teams), had plenty of friends, and was pretty social. Even still, I felt like my social skills were significantly stunted when compared to others my age. It took a long time for me to feel comfortable just hanging out with others because most of my social time was spent doing activities.
Was in high school ~10 years ago and the other homeschool families we knew were a mix of farm/ultra religious low social skill homeschoolers and fairly normal folks with decent social skills.
TLDR: I think there is a social aspect of being in school that homeschool kids miss out on, regardless of how many extracurricular or sports they may do.
What do you mean by "social skills?" As an immigrant with parents who limited social activity with peers, growing up I felt handicapped by my social skills in some areas (particularly dating, which my parents discouraged up to the moment they started asking for grandchildren). Now I'm pushing 40 with three kids and a real job, I realized I had just learned a different set of social skills. Because I was always expected to converse with and participate in activities with adults, I had no trouble when it came to joining the workforce, interacting with bosses, etc. And whatever discomfort I had navigating the artificial social context of age-segregated school just didn't matter--it wasn't a valuable skill outside that unique context.
Same... was a 'weird' kid, but had no problem getting a job and keeping it, from a young age... a skill that seemed to escape many of my classmates. I loved talking to adults, and although 'normally' schooled, my parents -- due to them being immigrants -- had very different ideas compared to the mainstream
If it makes you feel better, I was public schooled, and a lot of the kids seemed to have really awful social skills. This kind of numb mindlessness. Not everyone, but it was too widespread. Something about sitting still doing nothing for 7 hours, surrounded by people but forbidden from interacting with them.
I'm sure there were many benefits but public schools don't seem to be doing great at socializing kids.
I have a bunch of siblings, all of us homeschooled. Between all of us, some are more "socialized" than others. You can't leave out the individual in this discussion.
In general, schools do a fine job. Do they do an exceptional job in every case? No. But most people who go to public schools end up with okay social skills. I really don't think the same can be said of home school kids. Or at least those same social skills will take dedicated work to develop and may not materialize until well into adulthood.
Not feeling comfortable could be question of time. You get comfortable when you go from kindergarten to 12th grade with the same kids. You know them well, because you've been in classes with a lot of them for 6-7 hours / day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year.
As I typed the above paragraph out, it actually makes me question. Is that really growing social skills if they're always surrounded by the same kids? For example, I moved to a different state between 8th grade and the start of high school. That experience helped me to understand what it's like to not have friends, how long it takes to make friends (2-3+ years), and how to interact with a lot of peers you don't know and who don't know you.
It was interesting when I went to college, and I found other students who were nice, but never really interested in being your friend because they went to the same college as many of their high school friends. Or they grew up near the college and had all their high school friends nearby still. I guess this latter point isn't really social skills, but it is something that I learned to be aware of.
> You get comfortable when you go from kindergarten to 12th grade with the same kids. You know them well, because you've been in classes with a lot of them for 6-7 hours / day, 5 days a week, 9 months a year.
I was public schooled and also felt uncomfortable sitting around hanging out, without a purpose or a goal or activity. May not be home schooling that is the cause - people are just different.
I feel that same way but I wouldnt lump that in with social skills. When I went to a public high school we didnt do a lot of sitting around and hanging out. We went to classes.
I went to regular school from K-12 and I also felt like my social skills were significantly stunted for a long time. Which is not to say that homeschooling can’t negatively impact your social skills, but that plenty of kids experience stunted social skills, social anxiety, awkwardness, introversion even with regular schooling.
Also as an adult I gotta say, in most ways it’s traditionally schooled kids who are “stunted” (immature, have mannerisms/beliefs/habits incompatible with the adult world) until they hit about 20-26 more so than homeschool kids. I’ve met homeschooled kids who probably considered themselves stunted, and in some ways (being sheltered) they were, but they were also significantly more “adult-like” and mature in other ways earlier than their peers. This is also true for a lot of traditionally schooled kids who are “late bloomers” IME.
I don't know if I would equate adult like with social skills. I was very comfortable talking to adults. I was a kid and knew how to behave fine. I was not comfortable talking to kids my own age who I didnt already know very well.
I would imagine any kid who is viewed as lacking social skills who attends a regular school would be worse off socially if they were home schooled. But I don't have any data to back that up other than knowing lots of home school kids.
I feel the exact same also homeschooled. It’s also interesting being in this thread with homeschooling parents - I remember hearing about how “homeschool groups provide the same level of socialization” back then, and it wasn’t any more true then than it is today. Schooled kids get 8 hours a day with peers and you get 1 if you’re lucky. Not the same.
Its actually hilarious that in another comment you say 'Today is the greatest time in the history of our species to be alive', but yet you can't overcome the fear of sending your kids out in public.
Everyone is going to parent their kid their own way but is it even possible to protect your kid from hanging out with "bad kids"? I was fairly sheltered. Religious family, didnt have my own car, had to tell my parents where I was going when I left the house, lived outside of town farish from anywhere else but I still had plenty of opportunities to hang out with bad kids and do bad things. I had my own set of morals and those prevented me from doing anything TOO stupid in high school.
I know a decent number of people who came from homeschooled or religious families who went absolutely wild their first two years of college because they had been so sheltered growing up. This was at a Christian university where you had to live on campus for your first two years, drugs/booze were banned, and you couldnt have people of the opposite sex in your dorm rooms.
TLDR: eventually your kids will interact with "bad kids". What are they going to do then?
Is it possible that some social traits that influenced your parents to favor home schooling are genetic? Some people feel socially stinted despite attending public school, they just don’t have an obvious scapegoat.
I'm aware that not every kid who goes to a regular school is going to have incredible social skills. Just like how every home school kid isnt going to have poor social skills.
But there is something to being surrounded by peers and having to interact with them day in and day out that you don't get from home schooling.
It’s arguable whether public schools provide positive socialization in the first place. I imagine it largely depends on the school, the teachers, the other students, and the individual, but plenty of people come out of public school with poor social skills or (in worse circumstances) anti-social behaviors. It’s not like public school inherently does better at this.
> It’s not like public school inherently does better at this
I don't think this is true. Take those same kids with poor social skills and home school them instead. They almost certainly wont have any better social skills. Meanwhile plenty of kids who did learn strong social skills by being around others in school would have worse social skills if you home schooled them.
I'm not saying regular schools get a 100 out of 100 on this. I'm saying they do a significantly better job at this than homeschooling does EVEN WHEN you add in measures like sports, group activities, ect that op mentioned doing.
There were a few things that led to us recognizing and adjusting our biases. But what led us to homeschool ourselves was pretty straightforward.
My wife was a teacher in private schools for about 7 years, and once our oldest was ready for kindergarten, we decided that she could either go out and teach other people's kids, or she could homeschool and teach her own kids.
If I could pry further, that doesn't seem a "straightforward" answer to me, it sounds a little pat. Both my wife and I are teachers, and have kids, and we don't have a problem "teaching other people's children" -- that's why we went into teaching.
I assume the cost of the children's formal education (private school might have discounts for employees, but they still probably have to pay some fees), plus possibly the lower salary of teachers might have been a factor. (also daycare costs for the kids not school going age yet)
If they are saving money by not paying school fees, and having to transport family and wife to the school/daycare everyday, and they are getting a professional qualified teacher at home, with a very favourable teacher : student ratio and unlimited teaching time....
well I can understand why they are willing to take the hit of losing the teacher-spouse's salary.
Do you have a separate "school" room? All the kids in one room, or separately? How many hours each day? How effective is your spouse in partitioning the "parent vs teacher" roles? How does your spouse manage to handle your kids in different "classes" (and thus education stages) at the same time?
I understand to Home-school in some US states, you are supposed to follow some sort of curriculum, how much flexibility do you have?
Homeschooler here, from the era before this modern trend. Definitely grew up around students with poor social skills -— and even started out that way myself! —- but I graduated university with honours in computer science and have a successful career in software engineering.
I could share lots of anecdotes in the reverse, but that’s really all they are. Either way, homeschooling wasn’t nonsense for me, and I’m choosing to continue that legacy with my children alongside this next generation of parents who believe homeschooling is the best option for their family.
Ironically, the data points in the exact opposite direction. Homeschool students perform better in almost every metric compared to public schools.
>replace formal education with the nonsense that is homeschool.
I don't count public school as a formal education. I think of it as a daycare subsidy to make more parents work.
My daughter (16) is homeschooled and volunteers at a local private school where she teaches English and Code (in Scratch). I volunteered at the same school last year. It's given me a real insight into how important parent involvement is in education, regardless of what method you choose.
I mean it greatly depends on the quality and dedication of the parents doing the homeschooling.
I never considered it for my kids because our public schools are pretty good, and I did not feel I had the experience or resources or time to do any better. But some people have more of a passion for it and find answers to those issues.
I'm sure there are kids who are poorly homeschooled, but your anecdote does not meany anything in the big picture. Shall I tell you about all the public-school kids I met who ended up flunking out of college?
This being HN, a site full of mostly successful folks, we are likely to only hear the anecdotal success stories of homeschooling posted here, and not the failure stories. For every gushing "I was homeschooled and I now run my own $50M company!" story, how many are not getting posted that amount to "I was homeschooled and the only book I read was the bible. I don't know 4th grade math, am unemployable and trapped as someone's housewife." Are there even published statistics about this?
The same could be said about regular public schools too, no? I know a number of people that went to a local religious school and they came out with excellent understanding of the bible and quickly married off and started having children rather than pursuing advanced education.
Would it be better if they had went to get an advanced education in the humanities and had excellent knowledge of Walden, anthropological studies of papua new guinea, and intersectional feminism? Most people are not studying mathematics, science or engineering in university. A good knowledge of the bible, outside of social signaling, is just as useful to most people's careers and lives as most of the things most people learn in advanced education.
The reason we moved our kids from Montessori to public school is to throw our lot in with the majority of society. It’s made me active in the PTA and school library because up close it’s hard to ignore the challenges staff deal with, and with skin in the game, I don’t have the time to wait for someone else to do it.
Hopefully the work we put into the shared system raises the tide for all families, so my children grow up within a healthier community. (It already feels great working with other parents on it.) I recognize that it may not be academically ideal for my own kids, but studies (no time to cite) have noted that socioeconomic status is a top indicator of academic success. They’ll be fine.
Thank you for sharing. Having gone through public schools for (parental) reasons not dissimilar to your own, I agree entirely about "skin in the game": a society that encourages its most privileged to turn away from public resources is not a healthy one, and not one where anybody's interests (including the privileged) are ultimately well served.
Well, I feel exactly the opposite. I used to think I would do that, that I would put skin in the game and send my children to public schools.
But after my first born arrived, I can't do that.
She's not an ideological trumping card, she's someone I want to provide with the better opportunities at life. And taking into account everything that's going on with society and the open hate against upper middle class (where I ended up due to my lower working class parents making a lot of effort to give me a good education) it's clear for me that public schools are not about making my child excel, but about forcing on her the idea that she needs to be numbed down to fit on some standard that's made to make everything fit the pace of the lowest common denominator.
Thank you, you are making a good choice, and as someone whose parents made a similar choice (sent me to an underperforming urban public school when they could have afforded private), I am very grateful to them now.
> socioeconomic status is a top indicator of academic success
Usually because you go to a better school, no? Smaller class sizes, better teachers, better outcome. If you intentionally go to a worse school, some of that effect should be negated.
“They have no oversight, no taxpayer accountability, no academic or curriculum standards,” said Beth Lewis, director of Save Our Schools Arizona, a public school advocacy group. “We don’t know what kids are learning.”
The irony is deep with this one.
It could be rephrased “They are not recognising our gatekeeper status nor participating in our bureaucratic processes and frankly that is just not fair. We especially object to our loss of exclusive access to tax payer funds. The idea that the tax payer themselves could have a direct say in how those funds are used in educating their children is just outrageous.”
" If we look at what goes on in other countries, the U.S. stands out as the anomaly. When other countries allow homeschooling, they regulate it much more strictly. They demand that parents show they are qualified to teach and that they turn in the curricula they plan to use. Other countries impose home-visit requirements, which are both a protection against child maltreatment and also a check on whether the parents are actually providing the education they say they are."
The Harvard Gazette: "A warning on homeschooling" https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...
France has very strict regulations regarding homeschooling, but i wouldn't consider that a win. The official program, whether in schools or in homeschooling still lacks many things and still contains various forms of historical propaganda for the horrors of the french Empire.
While private catholic schools that people pay thousands of euros for are silently allowed to spew homophobic/creationist propaganda, it's become much harder for anarchist parents to teach their kids at home or together.
Personally i still think anti-authoritarian schools (like Montessori) are much better than homeschooling, but i don't think war against homeschooling is a good thing, especially when it's done at the same time that public services are slowly being disfunded/dismantled to their slow and painful death.
classic (deliberate) oversight in all comparative political studies in the US: there are 180 other countries. of course YOUR country will always be an outlier compared to some other countries
I was homeschooled K-12. Even 15 years ago, my parents would say that they were like general contractors for my education. And it is really is true. I had a mix of co-op, community college, online, self-study, and parent-guided study for all my courses. This was more so for highschool and less so for primary or grade school, which was mostly directly taught by my mother. And as others have said, homeschooling is very, very time efficient. IIRC, during grade school I was done by lunch time (maybe one or two smaller things required).
“Eventually, something horrific is going to happen in one of these situations,” said Jen Garrison Stuber, advocacy chair the Washington Homeschool Organization. “A kid’s going to get killed, a kid’s going to get seriously injured or molested, because the safeguards that you have at a private school aren’t happening.”
Uhh, not that I'm a big homeschool advocate, but kids get molested and (now) killed all the time at public and private schools.
A very good point. Public and private schools for all of recorded history have countless examples of child abuse.
Kids die with alarming frequency in public schools. In 2022 there was an average of one shooting a week in US public schools.
Even if you decide that the risks are not that high of a kid actually dying, there's a very real chilling effect. There's now paranoia, stress, and an atmosphere of fear. These are not healthy things.
> In 2022 there was an average of one shooting a week in US public schools.
Not to downplay the tragedy of what we think of in terms of a school shooting…
But the claim you are making is NOT what we think of, a Covington or Coloumbine or Uvalde. That stat is a gun control talking point intentionally designed to mislead.
That list counts any shooting within a few blocks of a school, and at any time of day. There is one on that list that someone shot a cat at 3am. shooting + near school = school shooting
My city had a 16yo meet another student in the school parking lot late at night, over drugs of course, one was shot at and it’s now a school shooting on whatever sub-organization Michael Bloomberg is pushing at the moment (there are at least five I know of).
See my last paragraph. The chances of a kid dying is extremely low. The paranoia, fear, and desire to make it safer have caused many schools to feel like minimum security prisons.
I was told thought public school was invented, not to instruct, not to educate but to emancipate kids. Giving them a chance to see the world from a different perspective from their family. One might call it endoctrinement, yes, but if you are confronted to two concurrent belief systems, you are more likely to see them for what they are.
Historically schools were usually a way to do one of two things: provide a strong education (mostly in the humanities) to the upper class, and teach basic literary skills so that kids could read religious scriptures and then later, post Enlightenment, adequately participate in government and society (including basic arithmetic and non-religious literary skills). The first public schools in New England were motivated by the pre-Enlightenment attitude and public schools became more widespread with the post-Enlightenment attitude.
The idea of public schools as a way to enforce national unity (~WW1 when it became a priority in the US to de-italicize ethnic identities and loyalties) and teach kids skills that would set them up for nationally important jobs like those in science and technology (Cold War) was a much later phenomenon.
"liberal arts" dictionary definition is literally this.
It has fallen behind though because the folks in charge have lost this as a goal and there are so many out there with expensive useless degrees who have trouble navigating the world.
This sounds nice, but there's a huge correlation between belief systems of a family and those of their surrounding culture, and therefore those present at school.
If someone were instead to home-school their children, and use that as an opportunity to show their children different systems in different parts of their country or world, I think that would be far more effective.
- I was homeschooled from K-8 then went to regular school from 8-12
- I am a state certified middle school teacher in TX
- I taught 5th and 6th grade public school in TX and AK
- I've volunteered at a private democratic free school
- I've taught at the university level as a tutor and then as a assistant professor
American public schools use one of the worst pedagogical systems. If you do any research into the field, you are quickly confronted with uncomfortable realities like:
- Bloom's Two Sigma problem: "the educational phenomenon that the average student tutored one-to-one using mastery learning techniques performed two standard deviations better than students educated in a classroom environment." https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem
- democratic free school students earn more than their peers and graduate from college at a higher rate
- some of the most respected educators in America have walked away from the public school system calling it a "12-year jail sentence in which bad habits are the only curriculum truly learned" https://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html
It is true that some homeschoolers graduate with below average social skills - but the same is true for half of all public school students. Some homeschoolers test behind the public school average - just like half of public school students. On the other hand, luminaries of our field point out that one on one tutoring (which often happens with home schoolers) more often produces students significantly ahead of public school classrooms.
There just is no way to have a classroom as effective as one on one tutoring. A parent who cares and does their best to organize all the amazing and free resources can easily match the quality of classroom instruction. And it doesn't have to take 6+ hours a day. Plenty of homeschoolers test in the top 10% of their state with just an hour or two a day of effort. Even one hour a day per child can outpace a public school classroom.
Obviously homeschooling is not for every family. If you've got two working parents who commute, it might not work out without some kind of co-op or micro-school.
But if you are in the fence, homeschooling can be very effective. There's plenty of sports, meetups, co-ops, social events, and free online resources. It's possible to produce a fantastic education for your children without sending them to public school.
Public school should be thought of as the lowest common denominator to exceed, not the pinnacle to reach for. Don't do what my mom tried for a few months and set up desks and try to lecture. You aren't trying to remake a classroom with lectures and homework, you're providing a rich environment filled with intrinsic motivation. You're not trying to force your children to conform to the rigid and demotivational rules of public school, you're freeing them to follow their own interests. You aren't trying to make an educational cattle chute with easily graded standardized tests, you're letting them grow and never lose that sense of wonder, creativity, and critical thinking.
Additional resources on how children often need very little instruction at all:
Home schooling seems so harmful to socialization and such a vehicle for teaching ridiculous nonsense (or just not really teaching much of anything at all) that I think the countries that make it illegal have the right idea. It's even more egregious that some states are, apparently, actually throwing money at completely unregulated "micro-schools" where you are taught by someone with no qualifications whatsoever.
> They have no oversight, no taxpayer accountability, no academic or curriculum standards,” said Beth Lewis, director of Save Our Schools Arizona, a public school advocacy group. “We don’t know what kids are learning.
That's the point. As a homeschool parent I have to say; It's. None. Of. Your. Business. It's not the main reason we homeschool our 5 kids, but it's important to us still.
We've been doing this for a decade now, across 3 states. Nearly all of the homeschool families I've met (high double digits) are high achievers who are going to be just fine on their own without strangers telling them what to do with their children.
Sidebar because Washington Post; We lived in Washington for a few years. WA has particularly onerous requirements around education in general when compared to the rest of the country. I'd go as far as to say that they're completely bonkers.
> Sidebar because Washington Post; We lived in Washington for a few years. WA has particularly onerous requirements around education in general when compared to the rest of the country. I'd go as far as to say that they're completely bonkers.
Despite the location of WaPo's current owner, it's not named for Washington state.
If my wife and I were to put our 4 special needs kids into public school it would result in them having a bunch of unbelievably negative experiences:
- they would NOT receive a quality education or be taught to be self-learners.
- they would be passed along, even with failing grades, putting them further behind their peers, highlighted their differences and denying them their dignity.
- they would all end up in social situations that we ourselves would prefer to avoid. Not caused by their peers (though that can and does happen even in homeschooling families) but by the institutions that are responsible for public education
- we would spend just as much (if not more) time and effort fighting the system as we do just taking the reins.
If we want to get help for our kids, we literally have to pay thousands of dollars to get them each diagnosed with a mental handicap, because they aren’t cripple or have other readily-identifiable disabilities.
Still, we teach all of our kids as they’re capable that THEY are responsible for their own education. Anything else is a) a lie and b) setting them up for failure and a wrong sense of entitlement.
A good friend has two children, one with fairly severe autism and one with extra-strong interpersonal skills. They both go to the same school, but the kid with autism gets special care, including specialized teachers working with him. This is certainly not to say you are wrong! Rather, it's to point out the vast differences between one public school and another.
I have to remind myself sometimes that, even though my public school experience was pretty solid, I had a lot of things working in my favor, like living in a solidly middle-class liberal suburb, having access to lots of honors and AP classes and having several brilliant (and over-qualified) teachers in some departments. Most Americans do not get anything close to such a sweet deal out of their public schools.
Our kids have all been diagnosed with FASD, but in our state at least that isn’t enough to qualify for specialized care. Not that it matters a ton, because we would still be fighting the other bullet points. We can get scholarships through the state if we get our kids diagnosed with a mental handicap, and that costs around $3k per child and requires them to be evaluated intensively (which is more difficult for some of our kids than others). So that’s the path we are taking, because at least after the $3k much of the therapy they each need can be reimbursed through the state (up to a certain amount each year).
There are a ton of kids in this situation—-either adopted or in foster care, mom abused drugs and alcohol during the pregnancy, and even those of us who pay to adopt these kids from birth/early age (~$30k each for us) there is just very little support available. We are essentially doing the state a favor by not putting these kids into foster care or making them be the public school’s problem, and we don’t get repaid unless we happened to know about FASD, get a diagnosis and apply for an adoption subsidy BEFORE adopting them. It’s absurd.
> Home-schooled children have attended Ivy League schools and won national spelling bees. They have also been the victims of child abuse and severe neglect. Some are taught using the classics of ancient Greece, others with Nazi propaganda.
So ... just like kids in public school?
Somewhat orthogonal to the article: In my state a lot of people were forced to home-school during Covid, and a significant percentage of them continue to do so. They found the experience and outcomes a lot better than what they had been getting at the public school. I listened to their experiences on a local radio show, and was fairly disappointed with the home school curriculum - it was far more focused on alternative subjects not taught in schools, and quite a lot of the "usual" curriculum was omitted (very little math, for example, and if they did teach science, it was with a lot less rigor). It was almost 80-90% about "experiential learning" vs "book learning". I get the value of experiential learning and do agree public schools have too little of it, but I fear these kids are being cheated out of the possibility of getting into STEM - there's no way they can do anything in the hard sciences without some good foundations.
The other thing that always confounds me: Virtually every study out there shows that on average, by a certain age, home school kids outperform public school kids in most/all arenas (social, academic, etc). At worst they perform at the same level. The parents are very happy with the outcomes. I've known homeschooled kids that are easily 2 grades ahead of where they would be at a typical public school - and with no social shortcomings whatsoever, but they may be outliers as the parents were brilliant themselves.
So, both anecdotal and research shows it to be superior. Yet most adults I've met who were home schooled as a kid are unhappy with their parents' choice.[1] I suspect it is akin to how most people overvalue what they don't have, seeing only the benefits of what they've been deprived and not the downsides.
[1] Although as I write this, I realize I should account for the fact that many/most kids really hate their school experience - particularly high school. So perhaps the home schooled kids aren't any less satisfied with their education experience than typical public school kids.
> I've known homeschooled kids that are easily 2 grades ahead of where they would be at a typical public school - and with no social shortcomings whatsoever
For certain kids school is holding them up
But that’s the problem with a standardization. What are the odds that all kids need the same amount of time for all subjects
Initially everyone was home schooled. The school system is a feature & bug of scaling up
> But that’s the problem with a standardization. What are the odds that all kids need the same amount of time for all subjects
They acknowledge that, but it doesn't change the thought process, right? If I know my kids can learn 70% more than they do in public schools, and have all the skills/tools to provide it to them, I don't care about the reason schools are inefficient.
The sentiment that homeschooling parents has is that public schools time things to target below average students. That's wildly inefficient. Couple it with a reluctance to hold back students and it gets even more inefficient. I went to a private school. For certain key subjects (history, math, science, etc), if you failed just one subject you get held back and have to repeat the whole year. As a student, this was fantastic. It means if your class got stuck with a "troublemaker" who was poor academically and disruptive, you wouldn't have to put up with him for more than a year. He would either shape up eventually or keep failing till the parents pulled him out because it's too expensive.
They did give you a chance to do a makeup exam at the end of the summer. If you passed it, you'd get to go to the next year.
I don't find it insane at all. Well, perhaps for the lower grades, but once you're in the 5th or 6th grade, the kids are mature enough to handle it. As are their parents.
In my class, failures weren't that common - perhaps less than 5% of kids - although there was a sharp increase in the 9th grade, which is when the subjects get considerably more difficult (and I guess kids' hormones kick in).
Classroom instruction has to be at a pace that the slowest member of the class can follow. This inevitably leaves the brighter children frustrated, to say the least.
> I've known homeschooled kids that are easily 2 grades ahead of where they would be at a typical public school - and with no social shortcomings whatsoever, but they may be outliers as the parents were brilliant themselves.
I've never met a single person like this. I have met quite a few whose parents were dumber than stumps and had weird religious reasons for homeschooling their kids. The result was extremely poorly socialized, super-dumb kids who never progressed past the education level of their parents. They mostly moved to public school for high school because they wanted to play varsity sports, and they got their heads handed to them in class because they were several years behind their classmates. It's hard to learn in a class when you don't understand anything that the class is being taught and everyone thinks you're stupid to boot. One of them moved out of state immediately out of high school because he was so embarrassed at people's perception of him.
There’s no question that, in some cases, alternative school is worse for a child’s development than standard public school. I’ve personally seen children who were falling behind because their parents were not equipped to teach them in high school.
(2) it can sometimes be better.
Alternative school is higher variance than public school - the children who do poorly probably do worse while it can be spectacular for some children.
We shouldn’t ignore that a relatively large percentage of homeschooled kids emerge at or near genius level. For kids for whom homeschooling works, it really works.
(3) policy should encourage choice.
On average, the US public school system is mediocre by world standards and in some parts of the country it’s an utter failure. Parents should be trusted with the care and education of their children because they’re in the best position to know what their child needs. Certainly some regulation around that freedom is in order, but we should expect more competition to produce more growth from a policy standpoint.
Just like capitalism is the best-bad economic system we have, parent-choice is the best-bad educational system. Some parents will fail at their job and others will not. But centrally planned educational systems have massive problems, and parents must be allowed to opt out of those problems as their only real form of accountability.
(4) we should avoid drawing conclusions from individual stories.
When something bad happens at a public school - kid fails, someone gets shot, drugs are found, some one gets pregnant, there’s a fight - we accept those as being part of life, not a problem with public school. But when something bad happens to a homeschooler, we tend to wonder if the _system_ of homeschooling is broken. But the reality is that those stories are likely more surprising but probably not more common than the bad things which happen at a public high school.
In the story, someone is quoted as saying “Eventually, something horrific is going to happen in one of these situations.” Which may be true and I hope we can find a way to avoid anything bad happening to anyone. But let’s not forget how many horrific things happen every week in high schools across America. It is a false promise to say that simply going to a public high school would fix all the problems found in homeschooling.
Finally, if a parent wants to outsource the teaching of their child to a person who is operating out of a house, we should let them. The parent is the person most able to accurately assess their child’s needs, and it has to be their responsibility to make good choices for their children.
First, we need major educational reform in this country. That said, the problem is that school must (in order to scale) by definition teach at the middle kid of any and all classrooms. This means some are always lagging behind and some are always somewhat bored. At home, a dedicated parent can teach any child more effectively because they are getting individual attention and level setting. However, I'd argue the point of school and college is far far greater than the acquisition of knowledge. I'm fine with parents having the right to choose but like most things in life there are pros and cons and one size doesn't fit all.
I agree that school is more than just fact-stuffing.
Having been homeschooled myself for 8 years, one common misconception is that homeschoolers are nearly always alone. Homeschoolers spend significantly more time with others than the average person realizes.
You make some good points but "The parent is the person most able to accurately assess their child’s needs" feels like a really strong claim to make without any support. Evaluating a child's needs can really require the opinion of an expert and potentially require testing to evaluate things like learning disabilities or identify what the child is good at. I think it's reasonable to say that the final decision on a child's education belongs to the parent, but that doesn't mean they're actually a domain expert on parenting or education just because they had a kid. Becoming an educator requires lots of study.
My two siblings and I all dealt with different individual educational challenges and it was way beyond the ability of an ordinary parent - even well-educated ones like my parents - to be able to fully understand what was going on with us and how best to address it, so they had to bring in qualified experts to help figure stuff out. "everything begins and ends with the parent" is an opinion I've seen quite a few times and it really does not hold up from my PoV.
I can imagine maybe the majority of homeschooled children are "ordinary" with no unusual challenges, and in that case educating them at home (or at a trusted friend's home) is not a problem. But how many people are truly ordinary? Disabilities are way more common than most people think - depending on the statistics you trust, 10-25% of adults have some sort of disability.
Thanks for adding this context. My wording was ambiguous, and I think there’s broad agreement…responsibility rests with the parents but there are real needs which are outside of their skill to meet.
Certainly, trained specialists should play an important role at various points for all children.
As a parent and former child, I truly appreciate the work the author has done. If only I had such a creative environment during my childhood...
Discussing bullying here is off-topic, in my opinion. Bullies are seldom part of such creative environments unless forced. They will not focus on these creative topics; instead, they will seek a victim to establish dominance, which does not necessitate participation in communal creative activities.
I think what a lot of people are missing about school alternatives is that, while public school has a lot of failings (I had a pretty miserable religious and public school experience myself), it's pretty clear that none of the proposed alternatives work at scale. Charter schools aren't equipped for 1/4 of their kids to be totally impoverished. Micro schools aren't equipped for kids with wheelchairs, or the 20% of kids who learn reading in a totally weird way, etc.
Selection benefits these organizations tremendously (i.e. you can say "there's no ramp into my house, I'm sorry your kid in a wheelchair can't attend), but that clearly doesn't scale and worse, it leaves out all kinds of kids. It also deprives the attending kids of diversity.
It probably also dooms kids whose parents think benefit from this system to a substandard education. There's a quote in TFA from the proprietor of a micro school that's something like "[a child] wants to learn about the US and the constitution; who am I to tell her she has to learn about ancient Egypt?" Well don't ask me, ask Library for Kids [0] (TL;DR their phonetic alphabet prompted Greece to make their own, and the works written in Greek are the basis for western civilization).
The Netherlands established childrens' right to an education, which means that no matter what their parents think or believe, children will be educated in a way largely determined by professionals, but also subject to the democratic process. Why is this important? Because there are a lot of nuts parents out there who want their kids to learn pretty weird stuff, and in the aggregate that weirds society literally for generations, and at the individual can abuse kids in truly horrible ways (think about young girls born into cults).
I get that public school is lord of the flies and fails lots of kids, but this stuff isn't the answer. Education is massive and hard. We're not gonna fix it by subsidizing amateurs.
What did you all think was happening? Parents chose to hold their children back in subject areas they were weak in? Of course we delegate teaching certain topics to professionals.
The thing about those professionals, they know their continued employment is based on the merit of their work. You can fire your children's teacher(s) and hire better ones.
The article spends a long time on the fact that the “teachers” are not professionals and do not claim to be.
Most of the controversy would probably go away if there were accreditation boards for these courses, but there are not.
Also, much of the coursework is being offered by unregulated, gray market, for-profit platforms, and if you read HN at all, you already know this will end in enshitification.
There is a ton of information asymmetry in education. (The parents don’t sit through the classes, and the kids have no reference points), which means it will devolve into a “market for lemons” in the absent of regulation.
In this case I would say that the latency of finding out a method or microschool isn’t teaching in an effective way might be longer than I would like to see as a parent.
So that’s a small problem as this is all rapidly developing.
Except they have much more flexibility, up to individualization, in terms of curriculum content and pacing, teachers from potentially more varied backgrounds/main jobs besides teaching, and the ability to eject unruly and problematic kids that impact other kids’ abilities to focus and learn?
Yes but not only does it cost much less (financially, debatable with time) but it’s individualized. Not many private schools offer truly individualized education
There are nutty parents. There is a distinct risk they are able to „protect“ their children for longer from unwelcome but normal influences in a home and micro schools.
MicroSchooling I think is the best of all worlds. Kids get individual attention, teachers make a lot of money, parents get a great value on dollar spent on education.
Home schooling should be either illegal or extremely tightly regulated. I don't think that parents should have the right to avoid a state-authorised education
I was home schooled back in 2001. My parents didn't do the teaching, instead, we had a satellite dish that we installed to pick up some conservative right wing curriculum and recorded it on VHS tapes that I was supposed to watch.
I didn't actually watch most of it, I'd usually fast forward through it and spend my time watching local news channels instead. My real education at the time was coming from the hands on experiences I had in real life, which was far more useful (and less propaganda-filled) than any curriculum could have been.
Lol.. reading that article shows us how the establishment really wants to get rid of homeschooling and is afraid of it growing in one of the population.. they can hardly wait for some scandal in homeschooling so that they can exploit it as a crisis to shut down homeschooling
Why are people in the US so against public schools? I am someone who did not really enjoy “school” and found it anxiety inducing but I still see the benefits of it.
In public school you are forced to mingle with the people of your generation. The ones who will inevitably go on to run the country in whatever big or small way.
The objective of public school is to break down the regional identities of old and assimilate the youth into the “new” national identity. And what do we see in countries without functional public schools? Everything sucks. And there is no cohesion between peoples. I see it in the home country of my parents.
> The objective of public school is to break down the regional identities of old and assimilate the youth into the “new” national identity.
Having read a bit of history about how many modern national identities were constructed over the last three centuries, that's a disturbing sentence to see written so casually. Phrases like 'breaking down regional identities' and 'assimilating the youth into the "new" national identity' remind me of the forced assimilation of Sami peoples in Norway and Sweden or the historical efforts of French governments, both republican and monarchist, to ruthlessly crush regional languages in the name of a 'right' to common language.
A more accurate way to understand the purpose of public schooling might be: the objective of public school is to break down regional identities of old and forcibly assimilate the youth into the 'new' national identity so that, as adults, they will become a more compliant, fungible labor supply which is more easily legible to the state and elites.
That deeper purpose, which you either left unspoken or weren't aware of, is what many people in the US have against public schools. There are a lot of regional identities in America that don't have much in common with mine, but I'll stand should to shoulder with them against attitudes like yours and against the policies that follow from those attitudes. Doubly so in cases where their identities were crushed in the past, which is sadly common even in America.
I say it so casually because I also find it disturbing. Don't worry, we share similar views.
And yet, I went through public schooling, learned the "national" identity but I still retained my own unique identity and cultural practices taught at home by parents. And in the process, I forged a new identity, much like the settlers who immigrated to this country before me.
Is it because my parents did not embed the great insecurity into me? To reject everything taught from the onset because it may lead me astray? They did nothing like that. They told me to attend school, make friends, and learn new things. I learned both the good and the bad of the dominant society I lived in, simply by observing it for myself. And I became familiar with the archetypes of the elites and the poor.
> Why are people in the US so against public schools?
> Don't worry, we share similar views.
No, we clearly do not. If you held similar views to mine, you would not have posed the question, nor followed it with a false dilemma between breaking down regional identities and, "everything sucks. And there is no cohesion between peoples."
> And yet, I went through public schooling, learned the "national" identity but I still retained my own unique identity and cultural practices taught at home by parents.
To the extent that an American national identity exists, it is rooted in shared ideals and beliefs. Those ideals predate the system of public schooling devised by Prussian officer-aristocrats in the mid nineteenth century. Our ideals have certainly taken a beating under that system. Hopefully, they will also postdate it.
Given that you believe you learned the American national identity in a public school, I do wonder a bit about how well you understand that identity. Especially in light of your initial question, which implies a lack of understanding of why Americans might oppose a major institution.
You read too much into my initial post. I would not have been so blunt if it wasn't to point out the great irony of public schooling and its inception coinciding with modern nation states. I pose the hyperbole question because I see the greatest opposition to public schooling from Americans and religious peoples.
"everything sucks. And there is no cohesion between peoples."
Because at the same time I understand the brutal truth. The nations of today where this process of state centralization did not occur, or occurred under coercion from colonial powers are much worse off. And there people viewed as backwards or uncivilized unable to compete in the modern world, even though they admirably continue to resist modernity.
>"Given that you believe you learned the American national identity in a public school..."
I'm not American. I'm Canadian. And no I did not learn the national identity strictly through school, it was through the people I met at school. My peers, friends, etc. It was those interactions that were facilitated through the public school system.
Do you think we should do the same with adults? Many of these arguments are also used by proponents of military service.
The funny thing about school is that almost no adults would be willing to be subjected to it. Confined to a building every day for the best years of your life, required to study what the government decides should fill your head, and a persistent risk of being beaten up. Delightful.
Ultimately the main reason that schools exist in their present form is because they are economically useful. Parents need somewhere to park their kids, while they go to work. As a child I could never understand why adults would inflict the barbarism of school on their own children, were they not aware? As an adult it all makes a lot more sense.
>Do you think we should do the same with adults? Many of these arguments are also used by proponents of military service.
I'm well aware. There is an irony to the arguments I make, because I also detest the idea of forced erasure of identity.
Military service? No. I would be in favor of some 1-yr mandatory civil service. I believe its important to interact with all classes of the society you inhabit. How else can you gain true perspective if you only live in a bubble? Life is about being uncomfortable.
>The funny thing about school is that almost no adults would be willing to be subjected to it.
Its interesting you say this, because at the same time we see adults also long for their school days as they grow to hate the 40 hour work week. Now it could be that what they really long for is childhood and youth, but people also long for their college days as well. They long for the environment where they freely mingled with people of their age, and the camaraderie they established in their "shared suffering". They miss structured periods like "recess" and "lunch" or "gym class", even though as an adult you can do these things freely.
> How else can you gain true perspective if you only live in a bubble? Life is about being uncomfortable.
95% of the country has to deal with being uncomfortable, without any mandatory civil service. What privileged background do you come from where you do not realize this?
My sincere condolences to anyone who thinks their teenage years were or were supposed to be "the best years of your life".
As for the blanket cynicism disguised as analysis, you're wrong. Schools were not originally conceived of as a capitalist daycare system, even though people love to say that. It's first and foremost a capitalist training system, or at least socialization more generally. Daycare was not necessary for most people during the first hundred years or so of public schooling.
> Why are people in the US so against public schools?
Mostly, even homeschoolers, aren’t.
They either (and the latter is, I guess, a special case of the former, but worth calling out separately) think the existing public schools available to them are a failure in general or for the specific needs of their children that is unresolvable in time to adequately serve their children without being “against public schools” more generally (I’ve known people who work in public education and homeschool that are in this group with regard to their children’s specific needs), or they are ideologically opposed to education that isn’t guided by indoctrination in their particular religious/ideological beliefs and believe that the current public schools available to them are inadequate on those grounds.
I previously worked in the public schools, and in a museum education program that worked 90% with public school classes. My mom was a public school teacher before I was born. My sister, who I'm quite close to, still works in the public schools. We all went to public schools in my neighborhood. My middle child goes to a public school that I can see from my living room. There's no opposition to public school in my family.
When my oldest finished his public Montessori elementary school and went to the district's Highly Gifted school at age 12, it was a major step back for him. 40 minutes each way on the bus just to be at a school that was cookie-cutter and wasn't able to support his needs, particularly advanced math -- I don't think there's a single teacher in the building who even knows how to assess the gaps in his knowledge; they were trying to teach him what an exponent is when what he actually needed was to fill in gaps in calculus about techniques like Lagrange Multipliers. So he's home with me, because it's better for him. Public school was fine for him as a younger kid, and it's still good for other kids, but it's not a good fit for him now.
> The objective of public school is to break down the regional identities of old and assimilate the youth into the “new” national identity.
No thanks.
If it was sold as "the best education you're likely to be able to receive"... that'd be one thing. I might think that you were exaggerating and that the quality was lower than what's being sold, but I at least want that for my kids.
But I have zero interest for or against breaking down "regional identities". If it is just some social experiment, the government's attempt at engineering a culture, they can keep it.
I think with any discussion of public schools, it's highly dependent of where you reside and what wacky choices the administrators make.
The controversial "new math" here in California that delays algebra until 9th grade (~14 years of age) probably has caused a lot of parents with engineering backgrounds to reconsider.
> Why are people in the US so against public schools?
The sentiment is not universal - perhaps not even close to a majority. Most people in the US value public schools.
As to why people want to homeschool? The reasons are diverse and differ for everyone. Themes you'll see:
- Religious parents who object to some aspect of the public school system (anti-coed, against some of the indoctrination kids get, etc).
- Smart parents who realize public schools are very inefficient and cater to the worst students. They fear their kids will not get the quality education they themselves got, and feel they can teach at a more advanced level, in a more efficient manner. If you're very skilled in certain subjects (e.g. math), it is very scary to send your kids to an average school. The probability that they will be above average in whatever subject you are good at is fairly low.
- Along the same lines, people from other countries who are great at certain subjects because their home countries valued them but the current one doesn't. That's why schools like "Russian School of Mathematics" exist. Not everyone lives in a city that has one, so ... homeschool.
- Parents who believe schools are the source of anti-social behavior and vices, and don't want their kids to end up that way. Having seen kids who were home schooled, this really works.
- Along the same lines, stuff like bullying. Especially for those who grew up elsewhere, it seems insane how normalized bullying in schools is in the US. A lot of Americans view it as a rite of passage: You go to school so you can learn skills to stand up to bullies. For immigrants, all of this means your kid learns less (whether successful against the bullies or not).
- You have ideology X and simply value a lot of things not taught in school, and devalue what they do teach.
- Culture: I had a great education, but as I have gotten older, I realized that the school/teachers alone are not sufficient - you need to be in a culture that values what you are learning. Many immigrants (and even Americans) see American culture as anti-intellectual, and that impedes what they retain (even when they learn it and get A's). They may feel the public school teaches well enough, but fear their kids will be stunted because of the culture.
I once tutored some kids, and they did not know "basic" things like number of days in a year. It's not that they were dumb, or had not been taught it. It was just a random useless piece of knowledge. They learned it, passed the test, and forgot it. And no matter how hard I tried to make it relevant for them, it wouldn't be because it wasn't relevant in their home environment or amongst their peers.
Where I grew up, it was socially unacceptable not to know this, so everyone knew it, whether a top student or a barely passing one.
You can argue that this really isn't important to know, but now extend that to almost everything they teach - including arithmetic and other parts of math. I would teach them, they could clearly understand and learn it, they'd do their homework, and then forget it until they have to prepare for the tests. And then forget it again.
You won't progress far in math if you learn that way. And those who are interested in math are often shunned. I've lived in countries where basic arithmetic (including multiplication) is a basic skill everyone (who is literate), can do on paper. They may "suck" at math, have failed algebra, but even to their old age can do multiplication and other arithmetic with relative ease. Why? Because society will judge them as idiots if they can't. It doesn't matter that calculators are available.
Someone from that country will suddenly be concerned when they see how what is unacceptable where they come from has been normalized, and what is a bare minimum back home will cause you to be shunned.
Verizonmath[1] is very much a thing in the US. Verizon was definitely not an outlier. Every since it blew up in 2006, I've noticed it everywhere - I often take photos of proper ads from real companies advertising a price of 0.99 cents when they mean 99 cents. At yard sales, it's very common to see things advertised as 0.50 cents. Outside of places like HN, when I've pointed it out, I get push back - some percentage don't even see what is wrong, and the rest insist it's OK to list prices that way, even after acknowledging the mathematical error.
If you come from Eastern Europe, you probably don't want your kids thinking it's OK. If the teacher teaches it properly but all their fellow students think it's OK, chances are your kid will think it's OK.
"On a national basis in 2019–20, revenues from local property taxes comprised 37 percent of total revenues for public schools."
Schools often operate on a shoestring budget. 30% more or less often makes a difference between decently founded school and a disaster. I don't think you can deny that local property taxes funding shapes US education and its perception.
It all comes back to race in America, ever since schools were desegregated. And because in America school funding is local, rich zip codes have good schools and poor zip codes have bad schools (to a reasonable approximation). Instead of fixing this fundamental problem, bad schools are held up as "failures" and used to push bad policy.
Public schools require a lot of tax money and community involvement, and truly good public schools (say, Finland tier) require much more than billionaires are willing to pay. So we pretend public schools are fundamentally broken and push "school choice" which just drains resources from public schools even further in a negative feedback loop. We fracture the communities so that the wealthy experience one version of America and the poor experience an entirely different one. Rinse and repeat until the situation gets so bad like it has in Florida, and all the decent public school teachers are quitting en masse.
I don't think the story is quite that simple, for one: at least in my schooling experience, while it is true that property taxes help fund schools, most of the poor, bad-performing schools were allocated more $/student than the other schools once you account for federal funding.
There's also pretty inconclusive evidence that school funding actually is tied to performance all that strongly at all. Interventions tied to giving schools more funding generally do not improve the performance of the school.
>Interventions tied to giving schools more funding
The funding needs to be unconditional. What good teacher is gonna move across a state line and go work for a poor school that has a year of conditional funding tied to test scores? It's also absurd on its face to think money has no effect on the quality of instruction, the market works pretty well for everything else, but teachers don't respond to incentives? They, do, and research shows it: https://apps.urban.org/features/school-funding-do-poor-kids-... However, we don't do nearly enough to correct for the affects of poverty. Someone growing up in poverty needs a lot more education help than someone growing up in a middle class or upper class family (on average). Also, it's way, way more stressful to teach kids who are growing up in poverty than otherwise, but the salaries do not account for this. So the teachers who work at the poor schools are often working at their last choice school, even if the school nominally has the same level of funding. They're the teachers who couldn't get hired elsewhere, or were hired simply because the last teacher quit out of frustration (I don't want to begrudge teachers at poor schools, there's a lot who are very good at their jobs and who love their students, but this isn't enough to overcome systemic differences).
Carmel HS in Indiana is funded at $9.6k/pupil [0]. My urban school district (DC Public Schools) spent ~$22k/pupil [1].
> It's also absurd on its face to think money has no effect on the quality of instruction, the market works pretty well for everything else, but teachers don't respond to incentives
Schooling is not anywhere close to a market and public schools are not private enterprises. As I've shown above, my poor performing school district was much, much better funded than the Tiktok you linked - much of the problem is on how that many is spent and what is happening within the schools - inequality in funding is just not sufficient to explain gaps in performance. [2]
The paper underlying your second link (https://www.nber.org/papers/w22011) seems strong and potentially causal, I will read it with interest.
> However, we don't do nearly enough to correct for the affects of poverty. Someone growing up in poverty needs a lot more education help than someone growing up in a middle class or upper class family (on average). Also, it's way, way more stressful to teach kids who are growing up in poverty than otherwise, but the salaries do not account for this. So the teachers who work at the poor schools are often working at their last choice school, even if the school nominally has the same level of funding. They're the teachers who couldn't get hired elsewhere, or were hired simply because the last teacher quit out of frustration (I don't want to begrudge teachers at poor schools, there's a lot who are very good at their jobs and who love their students, but this isn't enough to overcome systemic differences).
This part I largely do agree with, I think salaries do try to account for this to some degree (public teachers where I lived made 6 figures often if they taught in schools like these) but not to a significant enough degree (we should be paying close to software engineer salaries IMO).
Carmel also has well over 5K students. It's probably one of the largest high schools in the U.S. Scale like that allows you to fund more niche amenities.
Synposis: Shitty Silly-Con valley company is selling "teaching homeschoolers" under the guise of "microschooling" and "guides" instead of proper teachers. Reading in any of these scam companies, and you'll find quickly that they are not schools, and these are not accredited teachers. But again, deregulation and demolishment of public sector structures and laws to further private interests IS the point, as we'll see.
The Prenda Fee - "The Prenda fee for the 2023-2024 school year is $2,199." (As in, each student's family pays this to Prenda)
The Guide Fee - "The guide fee is set by you as the guide and will vary from microschool to microschool." (AKA The Uber/AirBNB model of education, where the intermediates have no knowledge and all the risk.)
And some states allow redirecting funds from state education money to pay for this new scam. And this goes back to a previous post I commented on, https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37179921 . Now, we can add "Expensive Imaginary Scam Education".
In reality, send your children to public school, and use the money you'd waste on this scam to visit museums, universities, libraries, historical sites, and the like. BE the enriching force in your child's life.
This doesn't accurately reflect the reality of the situation. Atlanta Public Schools (my local district) spends $22k per student and average teacher pay is like $60k. Get 7 kids together and you can hire a teacher with 10s of thousand left over for other stuff. Or send your kid into a class room with 20-30 other kids.
Some of this is cheating by not dealing with the added expense of special needs kids. But a lot more of it is the explosion of administration and expenses not directly related to education.
It seems to be the trend in local government. Taxes get collected and the bureaucracy grabs the bulk of the dollars leading only a little of the value delivered back to the citizens. Schools are a prime example. 25 kids in a class room are consuming $1 million of tax dollars and less than 10% of that goes to the person educating them.
Like you call $2k bonkers but what do you think APS is consuming in administration to educate my kid?
>And some states allow redirecting funds from state education money to pay for this new scam.
My point is that their admin fee is significantly less than what my local school district spends per pupil in admin. So redirecting money from public schools to them is not a "scam". It'd be a significant savings if it were theoretically possible.
I started the article with the same skeptical mindset as you, and to be frank, I was in support of these by the time I finished it.
I can definitely see this being a disaster. I can also see it as becoming quite successful. Time will tell, but having more choices in education is better. Let those who can afford to experiment pay those fees. When I look at what people overpay for their cars, I'm going to guess this will have better returns than the vehicle will.
> In reality, send your children to public school, and use the money you'd waste on this scam to visit museums, universities, libraries, historical sites, and the like. BE the enriching force in your child's life.
A false dichotomy, don't you think? Someone sending their kids to these microschools are probably as likely to send their kids to museums, etc than those who send kids to public schools. In my anecdotal experience, they are more likely. In the old days (i.e. 10-20 years ago), sending kids to museums, libraries and field trips for education was heavily promoted by those advocating for homeschooling.
Is it really a scam if it helps kids fit in and learn? I have a pretty strong baseline bias against homeschool, but a lot of the testimonials in the article are pretty positive. For every fear people have of homeschools being dangerous or inadequate, it’s hard to look at public education as anything but that.
Please don't take HN threads into religious flamewar. It quickly becomes repetitive and then turns nasty. We're trying for something else here: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
We homeschool our four children, are religious, most of our friends homeschool, and this is nonsense.
We love the schedule flexibility of homeschooling, the ability to let our kids explore their own interests more, and most of all - we just love being with our kids and they get to have their siblings and parents all day.
> That's because teaching kids is super hard and real easy to mess up.
My concern is primarily around standards of education.
If you gave your kids wonderful educations with excellent curriculum, more power to you.
The issue I have is that's not universal. It's that I've seen far too many examples of children that are illiterate. Examples of lazy parents doing things like taking a walk in the park and saying "see, we did biology today!". Examples of parents that "oops, forgot to do school this week/month".
And, in the extreme, "girls don't need eduction, that's for boys".
Perhaps for you, education is not hard and that's wonderful. Truly. But what about for the parents and kids where it is hard?
A walk in the park, identifying plants, studying birds and other wildlife, can be "we did biology today". I went to school and I basically learnt zero biology in all 12 years of school. I didn't have a ton of interest and I didn't have good teachers. You learn very little at school in general which is something you find out in your first year of university.
I had to make up a final exam at school for a subject I didn't take. I covered the entire material for 2 years in a couple of weeks and passed the final. That's pretty much my experience of school- 2 weeks worth of material stretched over 2 years. A glorified daycare system. How can you teach a class of 25 young individuals where 90% couldn't care less, anything?
That said I agree this (EDIT: homeschooling) is not for everyone and not everyone does it for the right reasons.
And I don't think you can produce a single example that was homeschooled. Public education is notoriously inconsistent and frequently produces children that haven't met minimum educational requirements precisely because it lacks the individual attention kids need.
>>There are plenty of illiterate people in the US.
> And I don't think you can produce a single example that was homeschooled.
Yeah, I can. Multiple in fact. That's the reason for my initial comment. My experience here isn't exactly unique. Search this threads, there are others raised in these sorts of communities that have similar experiences.
You can find these people to if you like. Simply go attend a fundamentalist religion service and ask around their homeschooling programs. It's really not hard to find if you know where to look.
My ex was raised in the FLDS. They were taught to perform fellatio on bananas in school. Notice I didn't say homeschool because they set up their own private schools. Even so - she could read. Despite this, public schools have well-documented results by the score:
And the list goes on. Several of these articles cite a rate of about 20% of adults in the US being functionally illiterate, with about one third unable to read above a 5th-grade level.
If homeschooling produces better results than that, then I'm all for it. Again: Kids need individual attention which they can get more readily in a homeschool environment. In large institutional public education systems, they just get "passed along" as they may be one of 30+ students in a class, and one of 5+ classes a teacher has. Public school teachers don't have enough time in a week to spend one-on-one time with each of their students. In the 90s my high school had class sizes of 35+ and I'm sure it's worse now in some schools.
> And I don't think you can produce a single example that was homeschooled.
I'm on board with criticism of government schools, but home-schooling isn't perfect and I have seen examples where kids were kept uneducated, up to functionally illiterate.
Parents have a right to home-school their kids. There will be kids that come out poorly -- it's going to be _fewer_ than if they'd gone to government schools.
School is local in the US, so there’s no point in generalizing when discussing things like teacher salary.
That aside, a fantastic highly trained teacher with 30 students, isn’t likely to outperform a mediocre teacher devoting their full time to 1 or 2.
I wasn’t homeschooled myself but I did help my homeschooled younger (by 20 years) sister with math. If I had the time to devote 30 hours a week or so I’m fairly confident I could outperform even the best teacher teaching my own kids—-assuming they had 20+ full time students.
That’s completely wrong. The state with the absolute lowest average teacher salary is Mississippi. Average salary is $48k. Assuming 12
hour days for 190 days a year, that’s about 3x minimum wage.
There are many districts with much higher averages. Just one example. In a relatively low cost of living state, Fulton county GA—the county Atlanta is in—the starting salary is $56k, and $62k with a masters. It goes up every year from there.
Because that’s the number of days teachers are required to work in Georgia and many other states. School is 180 days and then they have 2 weeks worth of teacher work days etc..
This has nothing to do with the south. Take the highest minimum wage in the country, Washington D.C., at $17 an hour.
The state with the lowest paid teachers pay more than that even assuming 12 hour days.
A masters degree isn’t required, you just start out making a few thousand a year more if you have one. Each year the gap grows though so that it becomes more and more worth it.
Also $62k a year is the starting salary for a teacher with no experience, but it’s only slightly lower than the median salary for anyone with a masters degree.
Also in many states teachers get defined benefit pensions and other benefits which are far better than what nearly anyone in the private sector gets. In Georgia, teachers can retire with their full pension after only 30 years. I know many teachers who retire in their early 50s. 10 years before nearly anyone else.
Teaching is a hard job and they probably are underpaid for the value the provide, but this misconception about teachers making below minimum wage and Jen accounting for hours worked is just wrong. Also I know a ton of teachers and most of them aren’t working more than 45-50 hours a week during the school year after their first year or 2.
There’s plenty of teachers who I wouldn’t trust to teach any kid past 4th grade as well. I’m glad that public education exists, but I’m also glad there’s an opt out mechanism for people who don’t feel it’s working.
There will obviously be failures , but I don’t think it’s that hard for an average parent teaching 1-4 kids to outperform a trained teacher with 30.
My brother and I were homeschooled after a point, but it had nothing to do with this. We followed the same curriculum and wrote the same exams at the end of grade 12. We scored well above average and had no trouble getting into university. I was on the Dean’s list at university and my brother scored in the 97th percentile on the SATs.
I think it also depends on the kids. After about grade 4 my parents were mostly hands off with our schooling. We followed the program and phoned or emailed the teacher when we had questions. Our parents just made sure we were working. My mom helped us with our grammar and spelling. Some years we had trouble with that and got behind and had to work through the summer holidays.
Buy some kids just won’t work if you’re not right behind them every day making sure they work. Others would struggle with direction in that kind of environment.
My brother tried to homeschool his kids, but it didn’t work out.
This is anecdotal fallacy if the intent is to suggest homeschooling is suspect because such cases do occur. You can find equally strange cases in public schools.
I can't recall a single instance that this would not be applicable to growing up home schooled. Sample size of dozens of families. Seemed to be roughly the case to teenage me at the regional "events" as well. Could of course be my personal bubble.
Very few would admit such in public, but social and moral reasons were the overwhelming cause for most to home school. Education was an extreme secondary priority to the point of being not one at all in some families. Some kept the kids out of school to literally put them to work.
The sequestering from society is usually the point - for better or worse. This attracts the exact type of people you would expect it to.
Perhaps the situation is different 20 years later but based on my continued exposure to the "scene" I doubt it. I'd be amazed if the majority of folks are not engaging in home schooling for what amounts to religious reasons - however we want to define religion these days.
I obviously don't "know it". But I can say it's something I've witnessed a number of times.
It may be due to the fact that I live in Idaho which has extremely lax standards for homeschooling (which is why some of the cases I observed happened, people fleeing other states so they could avoid oversight on their kids education).
I will admit this is mostly just my own anecdotes. But, it's also the reasons given by a number of my family members and people from my former church that go down that route.
Please look up the family of Enoch Burke (and siblings) as of late and what his mother who home-schooled the whole family on the basis of religious ground has wrought lately.[0]
It does happen, how ever you wish to disparage others for factual statements.
> My main issue with homeschooling is mostly around the fact that it's generally done so parents can control and limit children's access to well accepted facts (such as evolution, age of the earth, or dinosaurs).
What is the problem with that? I am not aware of anything in the daily life that is dependent on the existence of macroevolution, the age of earth, or the history of dinosaurs.
So, I really deeply from my heart have a stance of "live and let live" concerning these topics. I might love science, but I am not a missionary or even an inquisitor for the "scientific truth".
I just have a problem with parents closing doors for their kids. A lot of early education is about kids finding their interests and passions. It's also about making for a well rounded society.
I don't care so much of a kid is like "I hate this dinosaur garbage" or whatever, but I feel awful for the kid that could have been a great paleontologist or biologist only to have that opportunity snuffed.
Sort of the same reason I'd hate for the kids to never be able to read. Sure, maybe there are jobs and people that live full lives never really needing to read anything. However, so much of the world is completely closed off to an illiterate person.
It's not that I'm trying to be a missionary per say, but rather that I believe that sparking knowledge in people is pretty much always a good thing.
> Interestingly, many people who argue this way are very hesitant to apply this argument to sparking knowledge about evangelical Christian theology.
I'm absolutely not hesitant for kids to be taught about evangelical christian theology. I don't think kids should be proselytized to by the state.
That is, I'm more than fine if kids study the bible as part of class. I'm less fine if kids are taught "The bible is the word of god and if you don't believe it you are going to hell".
To put it in another context, I'm perfectly fine if there was a class teaching about Hinduism in high school. I'm far less fine (and I'd think most people would be) if that class involved calling Christians heathens and requiring participation in Satsang.
> That is, I'm more than fine if kids study the bible as part of class. I'm less fine if kids are taught "The bible is the word of god and if you don't believe it you are going to hell".
> To put it in another context, I'm perfectly fine if there was a class teaching about Hinduism in high school. I'm far less fine (and I'd think most people would be) if that class involved calling Christians heathens and requiring participation in Satsang.
To play the devil's advocate: what you described in the last paragraph is exactly how I imagine that classes about evolutionary biology or earth history feel to evangelical Christians. :-)
> To play the devil's advocate: what you described in the last paragraph is exactly how I imagine that classes about evolutionary biology or earth history feel to evangelical Christians. :-)
Teaching a kid about evolutionary biology does not force them to believe it. Just the same as teaching a kid about Hinduism doesn't turn them into a Hindu. Or more extreme, just like teaching kids about harry potter doesn't turn them into wizards.
The more extreme evangelical christian (which to be clear, isn't broadly held) position is that "if my kids learn about this, they might reject the faith therefore they shouldn't learn about it." But that's a silly position. Just like it's silly to say "If kids learn about electricity they might reject Zeus".
Withholding information because it might damage faith is toxic.
I think there's an argument that not knowing anything about, say, dinosaurs, is probably fine. But "knowing" very wrong things about the age of the earth or evolution being real can lead to people making decisions that are terrible for everyone. Think antibiotic resistant bacteria as a simple example. And there's a real cost to society if there's some fraction of society that don't believe climate change could possible be real.
> Think antibiotic resistant bacteria as a simple example.
That is why I explicitly wrote "macroevolution" and not "evolution". The emergence antibiotic-resilient bacteria is a phenomenon of microevolution, whose existence is, as far as I am aware, much less controversial in evangelical Christian circles.
To my understanding, the offending topic in these evangelical Christian circles rather seems to be whether macroevolution and the formation of species can be suitably explained via undirected small microevolution over an insanely long time.
The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution sounds like nonsense. There's too much evidence for me to believe that evolution doesn't happen, at any scale. Evolution is clearly observable and foundational to biology.
Whereas Christian creation stories always felt like mythology, sounds human centric and made up. I read stuff like the Epic of Gilgamesh and realized that some stories in the bibles are based on older iterations written by ancient people.
> The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution sounds like nonsense.
It is nonsense through the lens of biology, but it's nonsense that's very ideologically convenient to certain demographics, which (perhaps paradoxically) means that terms to talk about the distinction become useful in some sociopolitical or anthropological contexts. For what it's worth, the very particular term for the religiously-motivated typology that accepts microevolution while rejecting macroevolution is baraminology.
Now I am reminded of the YouTube clickbait I loved, something like, “evolutionists will hate this video.” I thought I would, but in fact I saw a lot of great biology and science and was glad that they were teaching how life can change over time…
>
The distinction between macroevolution and microevolution sounds like nonsense.
Even from a biological perspective this distinction is not nonsense: couldn't there exist an additional mechanism that is not arbitrary mutation and survival/selection of the fittest, which could be an additionally important for the formation of species and macroevolution?
Candidates for such possible additional mechanisms have been proposed from biologists, such as Lamarckism or epigenetics (though the mainstream view in biology is these either could not be observed (Lamarckism) or are not considered to be important for macroevolution (epigenetics)).
This "couldn't there exist..." is doing a lot of work that I don't understand.
"Couldn't there exist different laws of gravity for big things like planets and small things like rocks, which explains why I've never seen rocks attracted to each other?"
Yes, there could in some alternative universe, but not in this one that we know of, and it's not necessary to explain why you don't notice rocks being attracted to each other.
There could exist some difference between "microevolution" and "macroevolution," but not in this universe that we know of, and it's not necessary to explain species.
The entire concept was made up by creationists to try to add a patina of science to their deeply-unscientific beliefs. And the problem with an unscientific world view is that science will never change your mind about things, you'll just decide what science to accept and which to not accept.
> "Couldn't there exist different laws of gravity for big things like planets and small things like rocks, which explains why I've never seen rocks attracted to each other?"
Something very related is a topic that is seriously discussed among physicists:
The problem with the existing theories of gravitation which seem to work quite well on the scale of solar systems is that there does seem to exist evidence that some observed data on the scale of galaxies might not be well-explainable by these theories. See
You should know and have a framework of understanding what is real, what is faith and what we don’t know.
That’s why education aspires to be more well rounded in most places.
All of this paternalism and hostility towards civil authority isn’t an expression of faith or aspirations towards the divine; it’s a means to exert control on earth to men.
That makes sense! Has implications for the age at which some, limited, sex ed should be introduced.
Wondering why I haven't seen this consideration raised before, in mainstream press. Nor read of any specific cases of abuse being exposed that way. Would be interested in references.
Here's some references I dug up. I've also read anecdotal reports about little girls and boys as young as 5 pointing at a sex education book (one that was banned in Florida) saying "my dad does this to me", here's one I was able to find: https://bookriot.com/sex-ed-books-protect-kids/ (ctrl-f This is me)
As a human person you have a right to education, regardless of whatever your parents might happen to think. School is there, in part, to ensure kids are exposed to thoughts, experiences, people, even those that parents might find objectionable.
A daughter of fundamentalist Muslim parents has the right to have an education, even if they think girls should not be educated.
A girl whose parents are "anti woke liberal gender ideology" still nonetheless has the right to learn how her own body works, how to protect herself, among a thousand other things.
I think that's a lazy take. It's not the facts, it's the worldview. Socializing children into your moral and religious worldview is something that's widely recognized as a human right: https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/... ("The States Parties to the present Covenant undertake to have respect for the liberty of parents and, when applicable, legal guardians to ensure the religious and moral education of their children in conformity with their own convictions.").
There's no fact I would not discuss with my kids. But as someone from an Asian country, I'm becoming increasingly wary of how teachers talk about certain facts--specifically, from an individualist, humanist perspective. I want my kids to understand that they're a cog in a machine, rowing with many other people to move forward a society, and have myriad reciprocal obligations to care what other people need, what they think, to respect their feelings, to allow them to save face, etc. I don't want them to grow up to be "muh freedoms!" Americans. I think a lot of cultural minorities—which these days includes Christians with orthodox beliefs—are in the same boat.
Homeschooling is, to a first approximation, the most individualistic approach to a child's education possible.
If your goal is to instill values of mutual cooperation, a sense of obligation, etc. in a pluralistic society, I'd think that you'd want to send them to a public school in a large city. That's what the last ~200 years of American immigrants and children of immigrants have more or less done.
> Homeschooling is, to a first approximation, the most individualistic approach to a child's education possible.
In a superficial way, sure. The dominant American culture is intensely individualist. So if you don’t want your kids to grow up that way, you need to buck conformity in that narrow sense.
> If your goal is to instill values of mutual cooperation, a sense of obligation, etc. in a pluralistic society, I'd think that you'd want to send them to a public school in a large city.
The prevailing culture in large city public schools turns those ideas on their head. The focus is on individual self-actualization, and questioning authority, hierarchy, elders, and norms. It’s about what society owes individuals (“rights”) instead of what individuals owe society. There’s a veneer of cooperation and obligation, but it’s framed in terms of what “privileged” (whites, the rich) owe everyone else, not what each individual owes society.
I'm not convinced. The historical argument made by homeschooling advocates is the exact opposite of the one that you're making now: that public schools excessively emphasize conformity (and the interests of the public rather than familial sphere) at the cost of each child's individuality.
> The prevailing culture in large city public schools turns those ideas on their head. The focus is on individual self-actualization, and questioning authority, hierarchy, and norms. It’s about what society owes individuals (“rights”) instead of what individuals owe society. There’s a veneer of cooperation and obligation, but it’s framed in terms of what “privileged” (whites, the rich) owe everyone else, not what each individual owes society.
This is a pundit's warped idea of what a public school looks like. I was in a public high school not too long ago (one that was and is 60% first-generation Americans), and never at any point did I get the sense (or to this day feel) like my education was intended to make me feel asymmetrically entitled.
And again: there's a sense in which this is far more true for private and home schooling, where the entire point is to eliminate the mutual network of obligations that exist between students, their parents, and the public's interest in favor of private, religious, or sectarian interests.
The prevailing culture in large city public schools turns those ideas on their head. The focus is on individual self-actualization, and questioning authority, hierarchy, elders, and norms. It’s about what society owes individuals (“rights”) instead of what individuals owe society. There’s a veneer of cooperation and obligation, but it’s framed in terms of what “privileged” (whites, the rich) owe everyone else, not what each individual owes society.
That is a very bizarre fantasy that sounds like something a Fox News talking head that has never been within 2000 feet of a public school would say.
I went to American public schools in the 1990s, in a very moderate county. Several teachers joined with the students to protest the county’s attempt to impose a dress code.
The teachers joining protest against dress code in no way implies "focus is on individual self-actualization, and questioning authority, hierarchy, elders, and norms. It’s about what society owes individuals (“rights”) instead of what individuals owe society. "
The protest can mean a lot of things, including the dress code itself being against the norms of the community. One does not need to focus on questioning authority to protest bad decisions.
Do you not have students complaining about dress codes in your country? It was the typical individualist dreck: “kids have a right to dress like slobs/express their inner selves and schools shouldn’t try to stop them.” It was not a protest to reinforce existing community standards against an aberrant decision.
> Do you not have students complaining about dress codes in your country?
What does that have to do with anything? Some dress codes are truly stupid, to the point they are literally ignored by both teachers and students. Which is just our chosen way to deal with it, usually. When there is clash, dress code violation is typically seen as something minor, so no reason to protest when you can kinda ignore it.
Frankly, organizing protest is so much work, that kids in your story come across as active people who take governance seriously.
I went to an extremely conservative school in an extremely conservative school district. We also had protests over dress codes, and it wasn't about the "right to dress like slobs." It was entirely about reinforcing existing community standards (i.e., freedom of expression through clothing) against an aberrant decision (a district-mandated dress code imposed by a newly-elected slate of neo-conservatives).
This is a very shallow understanding of "large city public schools" (is that a euphemism for something?). What you are taught is going to vary greatly depending on the teacher.
It's not like the kids get one teacher their whole life, every kid going through the public school system will have dozens of teachers and the affect of any single good or bad teacher averages out.
Could public schools be better? Yes, absolutely. We do not fund them enough, the fact that so many of my friends send their kids to private schools despite the enormous cost is testament to that. I have leaned on private schools myself for pre-K, transitional K, and earlier because its support is quite spotty across the USA.
> It's not like the kids get one teacher their whole life, every kid going through the public school system will have dozens of teachers and the affect of any single good or bad teacher averages out.
"averages out" - No, it may not.
I had the same teacher for 4th and 6th grade in elementary school. I thought she was great. A friend of mine _changed schools_ so she wouldn't have the teacher again, because the teacher had been verbally abusive to her. I never saw it, but it was a big deal to her.
A year later, I had a teacher who would _publicly_ ridicule and harass me. Sure, I only had to deal with that for one class and homeroom everyday for TEN MONTHS, no big deal, right?
My other teachers weren't like that. But one is enough.
My anecdotal experience as a parent is that there are far more teachers like that now. (The students are often worse, too, which may be one factor.) To write off abuse from a) persons in authority and b) government employees as "oh the kids will get over it" isn't just wrong, it's demeaning.
Teachers that harass students have no business being teachers at all. To the extent this is systemic, if a kid is stuck with an abusive parent who decides to homeschool, they get to deal with that their entire childhood. You can fire bad teachers but not bad parents.
Of course. I don’t begrudge mainstream Americans for socializing their kids (and school is a huge part of socialization) to follow their dreams and express their inner selves and not worry about what anyone else thinks. But that’s also not how many people want to raise their kid. So if you’re talking about why say a family might want to home school their kids, it’s not because “school might teach kids that dinosaurs existed,” as OP stated above.
Plenty of kids learn to read almost on their own, just by being read to some and getting very basic feedback from adults. Young minds are like a sponge, you just have to engage them and provide corrective feedback and they teach themselves. You only need to be a teaching ninja when you've been tasked when educating children who don't want to be there and aren't interested in what you have to say.
> You only need to be a teaching ninja when you've been tasked when educating children who don't want to be there and aren't interested in what you have to say.
Way to blame the child for teachers failure. Yep, even motivated interested kids needs actual teaching. But yeah if you don't provide they loose motivation and you can then blame them.
> But beyond that, I've known a fair number of homeschoolers that end up with illiterate children. That's because teaching kids is super hard and real easy to mess up.
Realistically speaking, a large portion of public school graduates are illiterate going off of test scores.
What I want is for kids to get the best education possible and to have as many opportunities as possible to further human knowledge.
You don't become a biologist if you think evolution is a hoax. Dinosaurs are simply cool as shit and I feel bad that kids are kept from them because of "Satan". And you'll have a hard time with geology or astrophysics if you are saddled with a belief in the young earth.
I certainly don't buy the "public education is indoctrinating our kids!!!" line. Do you really think teachers in red states like Idaho are trying to turn kids into communists?
What's telling is that's where you went in this discussion. All the sudden you think politics is involved because I thought illiterate children is a bad thing? Ok buddy.
Would you please stop posting in the flamewar style, regardless of how wrong someone is or you feel they are? If you keep this up, we're going to have to ban you, and we've already asked once.
> Homeschooling generally happens because parents don't like some aspect of public schooling and more often than not it's that general knowledge conflicts with a religious belief.
This is absolutely false. Did you read the article?
Parents didn't flock to homeschooling during the lockdowns because of religious ideology: they did it because they wanted their children to LEARN.
IME, the two biggest reasons parents chose homeschooling were a) government school academics are garbage and b) government schools were often unsafe.
The parents wanted a SAFE _EDUCATIONAL_ environment for their kids, rather than prisons which allowed students to assault one another while the teachers spent all of their energy trying to get the bottom 10% to meet the absurdly low minimum standards.
Your experience may be very different, but don't use your bigotry to defame millions of parents.
My wife's exposure to the daily habits of public schools in our area as part of her internships towards a degree in childhood education are a huge part of why we chose to homeschool. My experiences going through the public school system are another big part. Your explanation fits our scenario completely.
- options for people who don't want to expose their children to out-of-family ideas, to perpetuate family biases
- a completely unregulated market for children to go to a "school" with a few other kids, giving them small classrooms, BUT, no teacher with specialization or educational background. Would be extremely hit or miss, with little resource if it isn't working out.
- only for those who can afford it.
It just feels... it feels like people have completely given up on society and said fuck it, we'll make our own.
This is sad. The real solution is not to homeschool. It is to force ALL kids, regardless of age, location, and income to be forced into the same school system. Want to improve things? gotta make it better for everyone.
Edit to those who say "but mah freedum" -- So far evidence shows that societies that force all people into the same system, regardless of income, end up having systemic positive changes because every member of the society is invested into it. Look at Finland, they only set one thing up: rules for how kids are allowed to be selected for schools. Everything else was because all the wealthy people wanted their kids to get benefits, so everyone benefited.
In the US school funding is dependent on local municipalities, so some places have excellent education, and everyone who can't afford it is stuck with crap. This is why I dislike it. You either buy your way into a solid life, or you're fucked. The audience here tends to be high earners, at least for middle-class. Most of America cannot afford 10k per year for schooling, much less the significantly higher cost required.
> people have completely given up on society and said fuck it, we'll make our own.
Fwiw, this type of thinking played a pretty strong role in how America began (and in other social/moral movements). It's not always a bad thing.
> This is sad. The real solution is not to homeschool. It is to force ALL kids, regardless of age, location, and income to be forced into the same school system. Want to improve things? gotta make it better for everyone.
I get your point, but just to continue my analogy, King George might have said something similar in the late 1700s. A good general counter-narrative to this line of thinking is James Scott's "Seeing like a state" which documents the degree to which governments regiment society in ways that reduce social welfare.
I don't see it as social welfare, I see it as more "ensure everyone, ESPECIALLY the elite, are bought into the system". Otherwise we get conversations like we do today where "do we defund the education system" is a real convo. If those same people would have no choice but to send their kids to a defunded education system... we'll see change.
To add a bit more incentive, I'd say the children of any senator / congressman / local state legislature / governor / mayor / etc must attend school of that state. This will again ensure that people who make decisions and influence decisions are actually committed to the solution.
Again, not thinking about "how to rely on the government" but more along the lines of, "how do we make sure those in power / influence are as bought into the system and the solution of the system as the rest of us"
If everyone was forced to attend the same types of shitty public schools then it would just increase the market for private tutoring and supplemental education. The trend tends to be lowering the education standards to match the lower students instead of making standards more rigorous. This is why my kids attend charter schools.
I agree. This is why in Finland they made it law that nobody can not go to public education (a slight oversimplification). For exactly this reason. And they continue to diligently deny any attempts to game the system via strict court rulings. It even got to a point where kids wanted to swap schools due to them having less travel time, but the court said that this has the potential to lead to the wealthy using these exact arguments to send their kids to a local school which would be superior to other schools and thus defeat the entire point of the system. It is a lot of diligence but it is done for _exactly_ the reason you stated.
What I found interesting, is people look at the finnish education system and say "oh, if we did away with tests" or whatever... but the answer is, it has nothing to do with tests. It has everything to do with the thousands of small details that only get taken care of because the entire society is committed to making it work because _everyone_ is in it, so everyone has to fight for it, including the politicians who set policy and the elites.
> This is sad. The real solution is not to homeschool. It is to force ALL kids, regardless of age, location, and income to be forced into the same school system.
People are free to homeschool. And some decide to do it. But I understand that freedom is a word statists do not like: so even the freedom to homeschool should be taken away.
> This is sad.
What is really sad to me is the followers in the religion of the almighty state and their endless pursuit in taking away every little freedom that we have left.
>This is sad. The real solution is not to homeschool. It is to force ALL kids, regardless of age, location, and income to be forced into the same school system. Want to improve things? gotta make it better for everyone.
Not everyone's sole goal in life is to be an activist.
Hell, I left my home country because I didn't want to waste my life pursuing activism when I could just leave for a more ideologically agreeable place. I'd sooner just leave for yet another place than be told that I'm not allowed to avoid some problem without being an activist.
> The real solution is not to homeschool. It is to force ALL kids, regardless of age, location, and income to be forced into the same school system. Want to improve things? gotta make it better for everyone.
But what if there is a fundamental diversity in educational goals, that different sets of parents want to aim in different directions as “better”? How would you accommodate that?
Why should anyone else’s kids be any of my concern? The metropolitan areas (who have no answers for their own kids and therefore have not increased any socioeconomic situations) are now pushing into my district students who simply don’t care about education and have immediately pushed all perceived “weird” (not lower class urban culture) kids down the hierarchy via bullying. My district won’t even acknowledge this is explicitly a planned phenomena (the districts all come to an agreement) and so certainly won’t do anything to remedy the situation. They run their “everyone is the same and happy and everything is awesome” programs and people get pats on the back but come Monday the teacher is too busy trying to get these kids to not be disruptive to even get to the introductory curriculum much less an excellent lecture.
If every single actor in the bureaucracy is actively working against my interests and the interests of my immediate neighbors (who largely share my opinions) then why should I participate? They’re going to tax me anyway, how is that not enough for you? It’s my kid and I’ll do as I damn well please since I have the motivation to ensure their success and the school definitely doesn’t. People that want sweeping “force everyone to do this, see here’s a news article about Finland” are psychologically malformed in my opinion.
Nono, I do not advocate for a national association for schooling, similar to what we have today. I only advocate to force all people regardless of income, and living area, to have no choice in what school their child is sent to. That could mean distance, that could mean a lot of things. But basically we need to prevent rich kids from going to rich kids schools, and poor kids from going to poor kids schools. EVERYTHING ELSE will correct itself quickly, because when the rich want shit done, it gets done.
Hmm. But why? Why do we need to have one system for everyone to make em into one acceptable mold. Why can't people pick on their own? Why is the idea that 'system is fucked so I might as well do what is best for my family' not an acceptable one?
Because that's how we got the shit we have today. Look at our healthcare system. The wealthier you are, the more you can go "fuck it, I'll buy a wing in a hospital and never have to worry" meanwhile middle america has giant chunks of population who suffer with chronic pain for decades.
Obamacare was the first time that half of america was able to even go to a doctor to figure out wtf is wrong with them.
The point is that what you're saying IS ideal if you can afford it, but the second you cannot, you're stuck in the worst situation available.
The goal is NOT to create 1 education system, the goal is to force everyone to use the same system, and then variance occurs not because of rich vs poor, but because of intentional choice.
I kinda agree with the idea in abstract ( make things miserable for everyone and things will improve ), but it never really works like that in practice. Humans always find a way to fuck with ecisting system. It is a nice idea and maybe a way to scare some people into thinking a chunk of population had had enough. Me? I am not gonna sacrifice my kid to make a point.
I don't want to enter the argument with healthcare analogy.
I mean the same can be said of anything. This is why the fight for for liberty never ends, because every day is a day some jackass can get into power and start claiming elections are rigged.
liberty does not mean "100% freedom of decisions in all matters". We already accept that you cannot drive without the same basic rules of the road. We already restrict that I cannot buy a tank and drive it up park avenue fully loaded because I am wealthy enough to do it. Freedom is not an absence of restrictions, freedom is the society deciding what restrictions we want and having healthy debates on the efficacy of those restrictions, vs what dictatorial governments decide with no chance of debate, scrutiny, or follow-through.
This one we would collectively have to accept as a necessary limitation because it would improve many things, and specify exactly how far that limitation should extend. That's the point.
But you are complaining about what we have today. Who wants more of that? Forcing people into worse education systems will just make people find new ways to give their kids competitive advantages.
> Obamacare was the first time that half of america was able to even go to a doctor to figure out wtf is wrong with them
This is extremely hyperbolic and makes it seem like you get the majority of your “information” by skimming headlines.
Obamacare also forced my PCP and many similar doctors to fold their decades old practices and instead go work for large chain practices. Do you prefer only a small number of corporate owned medical practices to exist with no opportunity for competition from smaller groups.
I don't really "get" homeschooling. How can parents be knowledgeable in all the subjects that school teachers teach? There are also cases of parents homeschooling for the purpose of religiously or otherwise ideologically indoctrinating their children, something that does not often happen in public schools, both due to the curricula as well as heterogeneity of thought via socializing and sharing information with many other students.
I suppose the pro is that you can teach exactly what you want, but that's also a con, as above.
> How can parents be knowledgeable in all the subjects that school teachers teach?
Ask parents who home school. Also, just read the article.
> There are also cases of parents homeschooling for the purpose of religiously or otherwise ideologically indoctrinating their children, something that does not often happen in public schools,
At some level, it definitely happens in schools. People who deny it's happening have a worldview where what they teach is the "norm" or consider it "basic fact". Just ask any parent who has said something along the lines of "I don't want my school teaching my kids X. What does X have to do with education?" - replace X with anything in the social justice sphere.
It's not about what is taught to kids but about what kids retain.
And it seems that primary role of school when the bottom line is considered is keeping kids busy so their parents can work in peace. So there's really no strong objection if some parents want to opt out of this because not many will.
> How can parents be knowledgeable in all the subjects that school teachers teach?
Some surely can, especially autodidactic parents, but most can't. The vast majority of parents aren't going to be able to teach their kids geometry, algebra, or analytical thinking and writing skills. Institutional schooling is the only way most people can access that knowledge.
https://archive.ph/jY2ca