My kids are not school age yet, and I am not sure on if I will home school or not. But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling. There is the neighborhood kids, you have sports and clubs kids can join, religious groups.
Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day. Some people "homeschooling" I know are groups of parents getting together to educate their children together in small groups of ~5 kids to share the responsibility, and hiring a tutor to fill in the gaps. Monday they go John's house, his mom has a philosophy degree and teaches them. tuesday they go to Janes house, her dad is a Mathematician and teaches them. etc.
I used to work at a YMCA, and the local homeschool group asked us to do a PE class, which I taught.
I had the kids doing swimming, rock climbing, and all kinds of traditional PE games.
I worked with "normal" kids most of the time, and I will say the homeschool kids stuck out. They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part. And they were disproportionately ahead of their peers academically--though I think that's probably a selection bias for the parents seeking out homeschool PE classes.
This was in the early 2000s, before Facebook. I'm sure the avenues to connect have only grown with social media.
> They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part.
This is another argument that "by age" is not the best way to find one's academic or social peers.
Some people in 2nd grade should be in high school. Some people in high school should be in 2nd grade. (And, academically, sometimes that's different by subject; some people need to be in 2nd grade math and high-school reading.)
I was a TA/lab-assistant at the community college I was attending. I spent a lot of time talking to and helping out people, universally older than me, who had gotten out of high school and needed to figure out where in a multi-year curriculum of remedial math they should start.
Diversity of peers is generally a win. Children aren't supposed to be learning how to act based on what other children are doing - it is a crowd where no-one has any idea how to behave. Kids by nature are supposed to be developing in the company of adults.
Assuming you are in the US, consider that your perspective may be influenced by the modern (since second half 20th century) education system which so strictly stratifies by age. It actually is much stranger to me that we would expect peers to be exact age. There is a lot to learn from older kids, or even other (non-teacher, non-parent) adults.
Per HN's Comment Guidelines, I'd assume that Josh meant sorting students by both physical age and subject skill levels. The physical/emotional differences between 2nd graders and HS kids are obvious enough.
OTOH, one of my grandmothers spent her education career in a one room school house, teaching all subjects to grades 1-8. With the right social context, it can work very well.
It was a small town, in the early 1900's. Everybody knew everybody, including the kids - who freely roamed the town when not doing chores or such.
I'd agree that it was very good for the kids' social development...but "foster a sense of community", in the present-day context, sounds like an express ticket to expecting far too much from it.
Under 18, the mind is closer to those +/- a few years from you, developmentally (and generally speaking). At least, that's what the know-it-alls were telling me when I was listening. Both pro and con home-school "zealots". Age peers is a thing
Peers in what sense? There are clearly examples of kids that are both erudite many years beyond their age and kids that excel in technical subjects well beyond their years. Clearly a distribution exists and it’s wider than +/- a few years even if that covers 1 or even 2 standard deviations.
For what it’s worth I’ve even met adults who can’t regulate and control their emotional reactions. They often have a prison background which either caused it or why they ended up in prison.
I think you completely missed the point I was trying to make. Age peers are an illusion and only appears like a thing because most people follow a standard distribution; but this does nothing for the people who are further away from the mean.
Yeah, I routinely took classes with students 3–8 years older than me before going to college. "Age peers" are an illusion. However:
1. I mostly only cared about school w.r.t learning. For most kids, school is primarily a place to socialize.
2. If it took you two years to achieve the same level as what took someone else ten years (going with the 2nd vs. 10th grade example from a few comments up), I don't think you're going to get an appropriate pacing by just moving into the same class as them...
Maybe you missed when I said "generally". However you seem to be aware of standard distribution (ie generally) and then go on to talk about the edges (again).
I'm not missing your point at all. I'm talking generally and you're just stating (the obvious) that curves (spectrum?) exist and that some (~30%?) are outside the middle of the bell. Neat.
Since we agree there is a range of personalities and intelligence, maybe we agree that wide exposure to others (such as classmates) is, generally, a good thing.
I had the mind of a home-schooled child in the body of a public-school student. Never clicked with peers until college, to be frank. Perhaps I could have made actual friends in high school if I gave up on associating with students of higher social status.
15+ years ago, that might have been the case. Now, you might find some friends in the 3-8 year old range, but then the kids just...don't do things anymore. In both suburban neighborhoods I've lived in the past 10 years, there are basically zero middle school or high school kids doing anything except playing video games and messing around on their phones from the comfort of home. School is quite literally the only social interaction most of these kids get aside from their parents, and if they didn't go to school, they'd just spend more time playing video games or on their phones.
Outside of the coasts or university towns, there aren't any "mathematicians" with kids just waiting around to form homeschooling groups with you.
My cousin homeschooled her kids, who are now finished with college. I know they're capable of using phones (one's a programmer), but I've never seen them pull one out. They're social and love playing board games, and I suspect that comes from their parents. They also socialized with other homeschooled kids, because they were part of lots of homeschooling groups.
The kids in public school are there by default; the homeschooling parents are actively choosing to raise their kids differently, and, from what I've seen, they're more likely to interact with their kids instead of letting them go terminally online or play video games.
this is just wild to make some blanked statement about kids that are homeschooled and screen time compared to kids that go to school based on one example. probably 99.97% homeschooled kids spend more time staring at the screens than kids that go to school (if not more)
The previous neighborhood I lived in, had around 100 townhomes, very secluded. I never saw kids outside other than walking from the bus stop. However my current neighborhood, which is a development of 15 houses, 11 of which have children. The kids are almost all doing things outside every day. Caveat: everyone in my neighborhood is college educated (mix of engineers, professors, finance, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and some other stuff) pretty sociable, and we (the parents) all seem to independently be anti smart phone, tv, etc. high school age kids do seem to go outside less, but theyre all 2 or 3 sport kids, and pretty busy academically.
The US (especially the vast bulk of suburbia) is incredibly varied in quantity of these.
Some areas have them. Ironically, for all their faults, Florida master planned developments do better than most, and the west has a surfeit of natural land.
Others are an endless sea of kid-unfriendly private businesses and/or income-gated spaces, locked behind access to an automobile.
At some point the US, especially east coast suburban US, forgot that roaming kids need somewhere to roam...
I think it’s mostly phones, social media etc… My 20 year younger sister grew up in the same house I did with almost zero changes within walking distance.
Her and her friends never played outside. Me and my friends and my brother (7 years younger than me) and my other sister’s (4 years younger younger) friends lived outside in the summer.
> In both suburban neighborhoods I've lived in the past 10 years, there are basically zero middle school or high school kids doing anything except playing video games and messing around on their phones from the comfort of home.
While perhaps not uncommon, these sound like massively dysfunctional neighborhoods.
Everytime I see these kinds of arguments, it sounds like someone desperately trying to argue that a park playground is almost as entertaining for kids as an amusement park. Your example of 5 kids socializing with each other is definitely better than 1 kid at home. It’s also definitely worse than learning to socialize in a school of 500 kids each day. This is undeniable unless you have an argument of how a pool of 500 kids would somehow have less diversity of personality, thought, languages, physical features, intelligence, etc.
The way I look at it if I were to end up homeschooling my kid wouldn't socialize with the ~5 kids in the co-op.
* co-op
* Ballet
* Fencing
* Gymnastics
* Math Circle
* Church / Fellowship
* Neighbors
* Family & Friends
That easily adds up to 50 children their age.
But my thinking isn't really about the numbers of socialization. Public school academics move at a glacial pace. They don't have a sufficient rigor, lack a decent education in mathematics, neglect the classics and philosophy, and have started to neglect the western canon in favor of contemporary literature which is poorly written and offers little value. There are also, even in the best schools, trouble students that disrupt classrooms.
Or just because math is awesome and knowing more is just great knowledge to obtain.
For some reason people think having an education is only valuable if it is traded for money. For example I think an educated wife and a mom who never earns a single dollar from an employer is incredibly value to her family.
I hope my daughters get a robust liberal arts education and then just get married young and have kids and be homemakers.
I hope they’ll have more options than I did. I never wanted to be a SWE working in social media, but grad school in pure math showed me I wasn’t good enough. A common story.
your kids will have amazing opportunities just because you are obviously a kick ass parent. but I don’t think squeezing two years of math in 6 months will do anything
As a bright student who was never challenged in K-12, I can unequivocally state that this ultimately hurt me in the long run. I seriously didn't know how to study and didn't care to try learning when I actually needed it in some of my undergrad courses.
For example, when I took trigonometry in high school I did none of the homework, showed up to the tests and aced them. That led me to getting a C in that class (kindly the teacher advanced me to pre-calc, but forced me to retake trig as well). That's basically the attitude I had throughout high school and undergrad. I'm positive I could have amounted to more earlier in life (only years later did I return to academia to earn my PhD in CS after tiring of industry).
You can't forget the projects that are supposed to teach you that you're really gonna regret it if you don't have good study habits that you skate through fine without developing those habits. Causes all future teachers to lose credibility.
same-ish for me but times are different now. kids these days have all the knowledge in the world at their fingertips and it is really up to the kids (with a little guidance :) )
>This is undeniable unless you have an argument of how a pool of 500 kids would somehow have less diversity of personality, thought, languages, physical features, intelligence, etc.
I have such an argument - have you considered the amount of forced social conformity in a public school versus a community of homeschooled people? Humans are weird in a way that 'public school culture' tries to paper over.
What social conformity is forced by schools these days ? Only one I can really remember was we had specific uniforms for PE (basically just gym shorts and a tshirt)
Every actual human with lived experience in society knows, that real life is much more diverse than school. In school, there’s at best a few cliques and mostly a single social hierarchy. After school, even during student years, but even more so when entering the workforce, there’s incredible variety of social hierarchies to climb, skills to learn and excel within, and career paths to take.
Everyone will eventually be exposed to some form of forced social conformity. You cannot shield your children from it forever. It is better that they experience it now and you do your job as the parent to teach them how to handle it appropriately.
“Humans are weird in a way that 'public school culture' tries to paper over.”
I went to a public school as did the vast majority of the world’s population today. Genuinely curious… Are you saddened by what you view as a lack of diversity and creativity in the world and do you blame that on public schools?
Schools have athletic kids and within that, groups interested in different sports. And within each sport, subgroups of kids who become close friends. All of that also applies to kids interested in musical instruments, art, computers, board games and on and on. Some kids are nice, some are assholes, and everything in between. You make it sound like public school systems output an army of clones. No. Your friend group changes over time as you meet others, as your interests/views change, and as other people change. You're constantly immersed amongst all the other groups and you learn to tolerate some, love some, and hate some. All of this learning is tremendously stifled if you’re talking about a kid learning to socialize in a group of 5 instead of 500.
Aside from individualism, there has to be conformity as well. That’s part of learning to socialize and function in the real world for later as an adult. Conforming is also just human nature stemming from wanting to be accepted in a group. We all naturally learned to balance conformity and individualism when we were thrown into the public school system. By home schooling, you’re saying no, I don’t have the confidence that my child can do it on their own, even if 99% of the world has done so.
Since you said you're genuinely curious - the answer to your first question is no. I'm grateful for what diversity and creativity does exist - and I recognize that even with public schools in the mix, it's more than what existed for most of human history. But public schools have certainly been a retarding force in the generally positive developments we've seen since my grandfathers' time.
Incidentally, they're only a little bit older than that, so we shouldn't pretend they're some deeply tested social technology.
I went to a school of about 50 kids, and I often wished I’d been at a school of 500 or more kids, but looking back I’m very glad my family didn’t opt for the school of 5000 kids.
At 50 kids, if you were social you definitely had friends (not just acquaintances) from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. At 50 kids, you could play sports on the official team if you wanted to and showed up and didn’t slack off. You knew everyone and there were no cliques, that would have been ridiculous with 50 kids.
I could go on, but those are just a few things (IMO good things) you get in a tiny school that you probably wouldn’t have at 500 kids and surely not at 5000.
I find it strange that you don’t hear of more homeschooling groups pulling together to create something like the 50-kid school.
But it may be much better than dealing with the problems that come with having 500 "random" kids to socialize / interact with. Everything's a tradeoff.
I think quality over quantity matters. There was no one at my academic level at the public school, but two lived at my house. If you're worried about social skills, why do you expect an open admissions school to be able to train your children better than a more curated social group? You could say, "I don't trust parents to actually give their children experiences that would be beneficial, because maybe the parents are bigots or something," which like, sure is true. Lots of parents are like that. But they already pretty much have free reign to put their child in the local Bible Bootcamp instead of the public high school, so you're not really preventing this bad thing from happening, but you are preventing a lot of parents who would give their children a better experience than the local vaudeville show.
Except you don't interact with a meaningful section of those 500 kids you get stuck most of the day with a small % all the same age as you and told not to talk to each other.
It's going to depend greatly on your geo location and socioeconomic circumstances, but a homeschooled kid who interacts a lot in the neighbourhood (big "if", IME; those kids all have a lot of school friends) is still going to miss out on broader social, cultural, racial and financial exposure. Example: my white, middle-class kids have a lot of people exactly like them in community groups and sports clubs, but lots of eastern european & asian immigrants in their school classes. This is super-important in elementary school when they're far less aware and insular about interacting with people who are "different" IMO
The venn diagram of 'homeschooled' and 'goes to church regularly' is not quite a circle but its not far off. Moderate to large churches also provide a great deal of socialization in this same way. Cross-socio-economic, racial, and other bases, all with a shared value system that creates a localized high trust environment that affords a greater degree of freedom for child autonomy.
You don't need a degree in math to teach children age-appropriate math topics. Teachers don't become teachers just because they have a degree in that subject, they have been taught the methods on how to teach. Having prior knowledge of the subject is almost irrelevant. Teaching is really just applying solid methods on how to build knowledge from the most basic concepts as well as having the patience in dealing with humans who are not fully formed in their emotions.
I have a math degree. I have been volunteer tutoring high school kids in math for 9 years. When a student comes to me for help I can always tell if their teacher has math anxiety. They teach the students extremely rigid methods and refuse to allow alternative approaches to solve the problems. They enforce this with grading and penalize students who don't toe the line.
Some of the methods these teachers use are incredibly awkward, bespoke approaches that baffle me for their obtuseness. It's incredibly frustrating to deal with and it has a negative effect on the students.
My approach has always been to try to find the method that makes the most sense to the student, and work with them on that. I don't have any issues adapting my style to the student's needs. I only struggle when the spectre of one of those bad math teachers looms over our shoulders.
There isn't. That's why homeschooling is taking off. People invest absolutely everything into their childrens' future. They're tired of seeing that investment wasted by subpar teaching and dysfunctional schools.
Why do 3rd grade math Teachers' Edition books have an answer key in them, I asked a 3rd grade teacher. She replied that many of the teachers couldn't do arithmetic.
It's a funny joke, but I'd be very surprised if that held at any grade school math level.
Someone would have to be numerically illiterate (with a college degree!) to be unable to do grade school math they've been teaching for multiple years.
Year 1, possible. But eventually it rubs off on even the teacher.
An interesting thing about 3rd grade math - I was taught long division. When implementing the standard C library for the PC, I implemented the same algorithm in assembler, and then again for the floating point divide emulator.
> Having prior knowledge of the subject is almost irrelevant. Teaching is really just applying solid methods on how to build knowledge from the most basic concepts as well as having the patience in dealing with humans who are not fully formed in their emotions.
I would disagree with this. Those are necessary but not sufficient. It is necessary to have enough knowledge and joy from the subject to convey that to students.
My father has a PhD in physics and couldn't really teach me math past seventh grade. On the other hand, my father has a PhD in physics and ran out of math to teach me around seventh grade.
There is no such thing as “the neighborhood kids” anymore. Having any kind of social circle for your children is going to require your facilitation and effort… a lot of it. It’ll be extra hard without the common bond of shared activity.
Not knocking what sounds like your choice to homeschool, just sharing something that has changed from my youth.
There are in fact neighborhood kids. It only takes a couple of families deciding to restrict phones and video games and support their kids in spending real time together. We’ve done this in our neighborhood and it’s great. It just has to be intentional now, where it was the default before all these screens.
Having a degree in philosophy or mathematics or whatever does not automatically make someone a good teacher. Teaching - particularly with young children - is a skill that is almost orthogonal to subject knowledge.
> Teaching ability is an innate feature of human beings.
Distribution seems to follow a bell curve - you’ll usually find the people with exceptional teaching ability harnessing that aptitude in a professional setting.
All features in humans follow a bell curve. Viva la difference!
Pretty much all humans can run. Yes, some have exceptional talent at it, and some can barely walk. But the vast majority can run reasonably well. Exceptional talent at teaching is certainly not required for routine learning.
Besides, you can buy the workbooks for every level of math, and work it through with the critters. There's no special skill needed. I don't recall any teachers of mine at any level who had any apparent special skill at it.
Except for Feynman. I attended one of his lectures. It was amazing! Feynman was at the extreme end of the bell curve, that's for sure.
> At my university, I was taught by professors and grad students, none of whom had a teaching degree.
Professors and grad students may well have done a course on how to lecture. It is obligatory and/or an easy way to pick up credits in many PhD programs. In any event, grad students teaching badly, because the department has allowed the more competent faculty to put their teaching burden on grad students, is a common complaint about US universities.
> But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling.
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
As person who was homeschooled in a large homeschooling community, no, I now believe at a fundamental level that not only is it not possible to adequately difference homeschooled children, it very much defeats the updated-but- always it is not possible to "get good socialization". There are two issues: the gross tonnage of exposure to other people is just not possible in homeschooling, and, there's a fundamental difference between the kinds of socialization.
I believe there is value in being forced into socializing with people you may not like. I did not experience what one might call "involuntary socialization" until my first job out of college. It took me a very long time to learn how to exist comfortably in a world where not everyone would agree with me, like me, see me as an equal, or treat me with respect.
In institutional education environments and in jobs, you don't get a choice who you have around you. You have to learn how to deal with that. Taking the kids to karate class doesn't teach them that because most everyone at karate class wants to be there.
Any voluntary socialization arrangement is--by definition--a self-selection into a group with at least one point of commonality: you are so there for the thing, the activity.
Involuntary socialization arrangements expose you to others where your overlapping demographic is nothing more than just geographic circumstance. Many people don't learn how to deal with that in public schools: it's where antisocial behavior comes from. But *every" homeschooled kid will miss that lesson completely.
> Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day.
I would argue if your kid stays home all day you're not better than a school so why would you bother? I know zero homeschoolers keeping their kids locked up at home
John Jane Mary set up is incredibly idealized. In a big city I have not been able to find anyone willing to commit to anything except one off play dates in a museum which has nothing to do with actual education.
> But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling.
Absolutely. I was homeschooled and in my state (Illinois) the laws work out such that homeschool students can enroll in public school classes if the school has space for them. That's how I socialized. So I got at least a modicrum of socialization (especially once I started band) but wasn't dragged down by the mediocre education at our local public schools.
Which is how the vast majority of the world is and how most of America is. I mean, it's not bad to be around people with different ideas or backgrounds, but it is also not some great requirement.
I highly doubt the kind of people who homeschool their kids for popular/narrative reasons have enough cognitive or social capability to make all that happen.
Part of "socializing" is observing that one's parents aren't the absolute authority in the world. Parents sometimes butt heads with teachers, coaches etc. No home schooling scenario can provide this experience. I think it leads to enhanced levels of narcissism in both students and parents.
Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day. Some people "homeschooling" I know are groups of parents getting together to educate their children together in small groups of ~5 kids to share the responsibility, and hiring a tutor to fill in the gaps. Monday they go John's house, his mom has a philosophy degree and teaches them. tuesday they go to Janes house, her dad is a Mathematician and teaches them. etc.