Homeschooling hits record numbers

https://reason.com/2025/11/19/homeschooling-hits-record-numbers/

by bilsbie • 8 months ago

296 774 8 months ago

cc-d• 8 months ago

Fantastic.

LLM's have revolutionized the way people learn and utilize what they have learned. The future is 8 year old material science lads doing chemistry in their step-mother's RV

JohnHaugeland• 8 months ago

You might be surprised. The studies say it's a primarily negative impact, especially in math and college attendance.

https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/the-test-score...

jmathai6• 8 months ago

I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before.

We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.

We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.

But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.

That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.

Home schooling has answers for ALL of that.

aidenn03• 8 months ago

But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.

What's the reason?

jmathai6• 8 months ago

I think we could teach them as well as the school does. And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.

Esophagus42• 8 months ago

How are you thinking about the socialization aspects of homeschooling vs not?

I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers so I’m curious how you thought about it.

jmathai6• 8 months ago

Having put 2 kids (10th and 8th grade now) through a couple school options…the socialization in schools is pretty bad.

Kids from home schooling families we know are as polite or substantially more polite than those in the school system.

AnimalMuppet4• 8 months ago

We homeschooled. When we wanted to socialize our kids, we shoved them into the restroom and beat them up for their lunch money.

I kid, but there's a real point: So much of the socialization is bad.

More: Kids aren't going to be kids forever. Does socialization with a bunch of other kids prepare them for the adult society that they're going to go into?

anon2915• 8 months ago

My kids get more socialization than me. Our parish homeschool group has daily activities. Monday is two hour playgroup. Tuesday is extracurricular classes at the parish. Wednesday is catechesis and play time. Thursday is free. Friday she does a day long camp with an outdoor education program (not parish based). All added up, she spends more time with kids than I did and doing more interesting things

pacomerh2• 8 months ago

Homeschooling doesn't mean the kid stays at home all the time. We homeschool and my kid has classes and different activities all week, interacts with friends and teams. It has worked very well for us given our lifestyle. I would understand it's not for everyone.

jerf• 8 months ago

This argument has not kept up with the reality of the public school system. The homeschooled cohort my children are associated with have problems associating with public school children of the same age... but the problem doesn't lie on the homeschooler's side, it lies 100% on the publicly-schooled children's side! The public school attendees are noticeably less mature for the same age and less able to deal with anything other than the highly-specific and unrealistic environment of public schools rather than the rest of the world. The homeschoolers have trouble stepping down their social expectations to levels the public school attendees can meet.

We have a few reasons unrelated to socialization [1] to do home schooling but one of the reasons I don't want to send them back is precisely the regression in "socialization" I would expect.

30 years ago, this probably was a decent argument, but the bar of "at least as socialized as a public school attendee" has gone way down in the meantime.

[1]: I guess before anyone asks, one of my children is deaf-blind and while the people in the system did their best and I have not much criticism of the people, the reality is still that I was able to more precisely accommodate that child than the system was able to. This ends up being a pretty big stopper for a return to the public school system for that child.

oceanplexian3• 8 months ago

Who’s to say that they wouldn’t be more socialized, not less?

It used to be folk wisdom that beating your kids built character, teachers would even slap kids with a ruler back in the 1950s. Could you say the same about bullies, cliques, popularity contests, and all the other performative nonsense that goes on in public schools?

Maybe it’s all bullshit and giving kids a safe environment to learn at their own pace without all these distractions makes them better equipped for the modern world?

mikece10• 8 months ago

Homeschooled does not mean "completely isolated." My kids are in bands, sports teams, and numerous extracurricular activities both with other home schoolers as well as with public schoolers. Also, homeschooled kids are far less reliant on their same-aged peer group for socialization; my kids talk with people in public regardless of their age (something which surprises some adults).

NoMoreNicksLeft4• 8 months ago

I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers

Can you perhaps enlighten us and define "socialize" without the use of tautology?

mcphage2• 8 months ago

It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.

6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.

jmathai6• 8 months ago

That’s not a great example though, is it?

I’ve seen many kids, including my own older ones, who have gone through the school system and others who haven’t.

Brendinooo7• 8 months ago

This is why it's useful to look up stats when we have them.

For example, homeschooled students do better on the ACT than public school kids.

https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info...

Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.

BJones122• 8 months ago

An acquaintance of mine fought (got mauled by) a grizzly bear a month ago. He went to the ICU (since released), but the bear got shot and died. It was a pyrric victory, but he did win the fight.

AnimalMuppet4• 8 months ago

One of the key issues in school is classroom size. A teacher with 30 kids is handicapped as a teacher compared to one with a smaller class.

Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.

5f3cfa1a4• 8 months ago

Grade retention ('holding kids back') has additionally dropped significantly since the average HNer has gone to school. I remember going to school where one of my peers went to sixth grade with his brother two years older than him. But now, we give out social promotions.

That might've worked if we funded schools & gave students who fell behind significant interventions & 1x1 attention, but that's not what happened. One of my friends has a very bright and talented fifth grader in a class with multiple students who can barely read or write. Guess who gets the most attention from educators? Which group the teachers structure the class for?

BeetleB5• 8 months ago

I used to think this way, but some experiences made me realize it's not so cut and dry.

When you have a class size over 20, teachers are forced to be a lot more systematic, which can improve the effectiveness of their teaching. Good teachers make heavy use of social proof. When I tried to teach my kid at home, it was a struggle. But when the kid is around his peers in a classroom, and they are going along with the teacher, he naturally falls in line with no cajoling, etc.

If there were only 5 students, the likelihood he'll just go along with things is much lower.

jancsika• 8 months ago

Did you make a schedule of regularly switching off with other families of four? In other words, those parents teach your kids and you teach their kids? Otherwise I'm not sure how you'd tackle confirmation bias creeping up in all kinds of ways.

kevstev• 8 months ago

That's also 4 entirely different curriculums which need to be taught. I volunteer taught CS for about 10 years, and the first year I taught a new class- and this was a single class for high school kids- I always found I was much better at it the second and third time around. I taught about 4 different courses, of varying difficulty- intro to programming with SNAP, "CS Principles" which had a little bit of everything from (very) basic networking to html and a bit of javascript, Javascript/Python, and then the final boss... AP CS in Java, which is a very difficult class.

I find it difficult to wrap my head around you can make it work teaching the entire curriculum for 4 different grades encompassing reading/writing, math, history, science, art, music, etc... I guess its potentially compensated for by the fact that they are all getting very individualized attention, but thats spreading a parent very thin.

Especially when we are talking about high school levels, where you can even potentially go into AP courses- no way a single parent can teach college level calculus, History, CS, etc... effectively.

For all the flaws of our public education system, I don't see how this can work better.

Atotalnoob• 8 months ago

I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.

anon7000• 8 months ago

I was homeschooled and I got a fairly strong education.

What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.

For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.

pacomerh2• 8 months ago

What works for one might not work for another one. Can't generalize.

PKop2• 8 months ago

How so?

BeetleB5• 8 months ago

I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.

Any idea how many were affected terribly in school? I'm in touch with my high school classmates. Almost half of them blame the school experience to lifelong problems.

bigstrat20032• 8 months ago

I was homeschooled and got a good education, and am now a happy, well adjusted adult. You can't just generalize; you have to consider the individuals and methods involved to judge what the best approach is.

rich_sasha• 8 months ago

I suppose there are few talented, hard working people who want to teach, and they command a premium. Education is expensive and underfunded.

As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money.

By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.

rahimnathwani17• 8 months ago

  Education is expensive and underfunded.

Expensive yes. Underfunded depends on where you are.

San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student.

I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.

nradov• 8 months ago

Education should be well funded but in many school districts the problem is waste and inefficiency rather than lack of funding. Huge amounts are paid to administrators and consultants who do nothing to improve student outcomes, or even make them worse. Generally there is little correlation between funding per student and results.

joshstrange3• 8 months ago

Education is expensive and underfunded.

Always makes me think of The West Wing scene:

Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.

Video (sorry for the burned in subs, should be queued up): https://youtu.be/IzV09gESyh0?t=39

mdip4• 8 months ago

   > As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated

No question. No teacher cares more about my child's education than I do.

Really, though, the biggest factor is just being their parent. When they're young, the vast majority of the time you can basically read their mind. When you're teaching your child, you almost instinctively know how well they're understanding things. I was never deliberate about it, I didn't look for things, I never had to. I was able to pace my delivery very tightly with their ability to consume and it was the most natural thing imaginable.

That, and having a class size of two, meant Home Schooling was "30-45 minutes Monday-Friday September to mid-April with generous vacations." And that's not "30-45 minutes but we also went to a museum, the library, co-ops (we did, briefly), and all kinds of other learning activities" (I'm sure I lied and said I did those things), that was 30-45 minutes, do some chores (we don't live on a farm, it's the same stuff most kids do), and play video games.

Parenting-wise, the only elements we were more strict with was we limited "watching a TV show or video content" to an hour (two, on occasion, for movies) a day ... and we were quite rigorous with that. But they could play pretty much any video game they wanted (within reason, but probably far less restrictive than most parents outside of Hacker News). And they didn't get mobile devices until 13 and 15. There was no reason. They had/have computers.

My goal was simply "to teach them at home better than they could get at school and to make them self-learners along the way." I wasn't looking for genius spelling bee winners.

They've been in Public School (since the start of HS for my son, 7th grade for my daughter) for four years. Those 30-45 minute sessions that -- not once -- involved taking a test resulted in them being straight-A students. The first test they took, a placement test, resulted in them landing in advanced classes.

They finish their home work at school (my son works way ahead because he's bored). They study for nothing outside of midterms and finals (and they only do that out of paranoia, it's not really needed).

The majority of the time they were Home Schooled, Mom and I were divorced (and it wasn't "amicable" for the majority of that, it was ... ugly). And while that was hard, actually home schooling the children was not. It was awesome. I'd have been a lot less stressed in the earlier years if I'd have known how easy it was.

It was "get good curriculum, follow it, don't move on until they understand it to what a teacher would grade an 'A'". You do the latter because you have to; anything else is debt and the only one who pays that debt is the you. Your kids will just sob through it. Outside of budgeting because you're likely down to one income, the rest was all upside.

Yizahi2• 8 months ago

Poor kids :( . Hope the damage won't be lasting for them, at least they did went to proper schools previously and have some basics taught.

sparrish5• 8 months ago

I'll gladly stand up my 7 homeschooled kids next to any public school kids.

All tested above grade level on state mandatory testing throughout their schooling.

Two graduated early (some with college credits).

My adult children (4 sons, ages 19-25) have gainful employment, living on their own (2 own their own homes), and standing on their own. One is married (I got a grandkid!), all have friends, communities they're involved in, and are healthy (physically and mentally).

None take prescription meds nor struggle with anxiety or depression.

Poor public school kids... I hope they can find help for the damage they suffered. <grin>

1970-01-01• 8 months ago

Is there an answer for athletics, music, robotics, and all the other after school teams? How does that work?

chasd00• 8 months ago

i'm sure many others will reply as well but there's lots of extracurricular options for homeschoolers as well as social engagements. It's kind of like a shadow school system, there's associations and groups and other organizations built around home schooled children. My wife and I considered it but we have managed to navigate our public school situation well enough without me, or my wife, having to quit working.

dkhenry4• 8 months ago

Depending on where you live there are many options. In my school district home school kids can join any club or team offered by the public school system where you reside. Additionally there are numerous non-school related clubs and activities all over the place. My kids could play music with the local school district, with a musical education non-profit that is prolific in our area, or ( where they do play music ) with private lessons that have group classes, bands, and performance opportunities.

in_cahoots• 8 months ago

Of that list my kids' top-rated K-8 public school only offers music. Everything else is done privately.

5f3cfa1a4• 8 months ago

Of these, most are easily handled. I am in a midsized city and there are plenty of groups that offer music, robotics & engineering, speech & drama, etc. focused towards homeschooled students. That, plus the rise in homeschool "pods"/co-ops means socialization and activities are very available to students & parents who want them.

Sports might be the challenge. Many US states have athletic associations that handle most K-12 sports, and they require enrollment in an accredited member school. I am aware of several homeschool specific athletic associations in my area, but all are targeted towards religious homeschoolers. Not certain what secular alternatives would exist, but soccer is very popular & there are plenty of competitive academies that operate outside the school ecosystem.

SoftTalker2• 8 months ago

Often, yes. Where I live, home-schooled kids can participate in extracurriculars offered by the public schools.

logical_proof2• 8 months ago

My kids do Taekwondo and church youth groups. My eldest did not want to do robotics but he does run the Dungeons and Dragons group at our library. We do music as a family. My daughter does choir. My son has done drama but declined to participate this year. They have been homeschooled their entire lives. All three of them received something I did not, the ability to converse with adults from a young age. This is of course anecdotal so YMMV but I would love to see a study on the conversational skills of homeschooled students.

Mountain_Skies• 8 months ago

I went to public schools but still did that sort of thing through the YMCA and our church. At the middle school level and lower, most of those types of activities are community based rather than centered around the school, though that varies by area.

deltarholamda• 8 months ago

Homeschoolers form co-ops. A local one here does ballroom dance, tennis, basketball. There is often a youth symphony option in mid- to large-sized cities.

For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.

Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.

mikece10• 8 months ago

There are tons of clubs for such things. My kids are in a homeschool music program (and learning piano and, until recently, bagpipes); half of my kids are playing competitive sports via homeschool programs that compete with other high schools; one is getting his certification as a welder (as part of a State program that pays for it if one is still in high school). Because class times and locations are more flexible this opens up far more possibilities for extra curricular activities.

BeetleB5• 8 months ago

To me, this question highlights the whole problem: This is not what schools are for.

Yes, it's great if they provide these things, but it's a distant secondary concern. I'd rather my kid get a great education and miss out on these things, than get a poor education but have access to all these.

But of course, as others have pointed out, it's a false dichotomy. You can have both.

jayd16• 8 months ago

Covid showed me that on the average home schooling (or at least remote learning) leaves kids extremely under developed.

The stunted social and academic skills were pretty apparent in retrospect once the schools reopened.

BJones122• 8 months ago

Remote learning. You didn't see homeschooling, which is a very different thing, you saw remote learning.

The homeschooling crowd has developed methods over the years to compensate. The COVID remote learning cohort did not, and suffered for it.

Redster2• 8 months ago

What happened to students who were in schools that closed was terrible. But it wasn't anything close to homeschooling.

wtallis• 8 months ago

COVID forced remote learning to be adopted very broadly, without the usual self-selection effect of families that choose to homeschool when they have a choice. So the observations from COVID don't really support any stronger claim than saying that homeschooling can be done badly.

danesparza• 8 months ago

It also has its own problems that haven't even been quantified yet.

If you think that homeschooling is a panacea, I guess we're all about to f*ck around and find out...

thewebguyd• 8 months ago

Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.

And this is only just now being investigated as a cause of harm. When I went to public high school, the bullying happened at school and stayed there. Kids now, their bullies follow them home, and since most of the social interaction now happens online instead of in-person, it's way more damaging to mental health than the classic caricature of a schoolyard bully. The most I had to compare myself to were my peers in my school, not the entire globe of influencers and fake instagram.

There has been a complete erosion of boundaries. The threat is constant, you can't escape it, and kids are in a state of hyper-vigilance, always online or else they miss a crucial social interaction in group chat, or need to constantly check if a damaging photo, post, or rumor gets publicly posted to the internet while they were asleep.

Not only that, teens are losing the ability to read human emotion, so misunderstandings escalate rapidly. In person communication now becomes too intense, and only increases anxiety and isolation, despite being hyperconnected.

And that's just barely touching the surface.

5upplied_demand5• 8 months ago

==It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.==

I think it also says something about the parents who think they can do as well or better.

seneca5• 8 months ago

Well, they tend to be right. Outcomes for homeschooled children are broadly significantly better than government schooled children.

Also, just FYI, to quote someone you prefix the text with ">".

mdip4• 8 months ago

   > It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children wen parents think they can do as well or better.

I home schooled my children up to High School (and they are very, very successful students). That statement, right there, was the reason, but there was no ambiguity involved. I absolutely knew I could have happier children who were natural self-learners who wouldn't struggle in school when that time came if I did it myself.

It took a lot of research on my end to get to that conclusion but I would have been just as good ignoring it and listening to the experience of a friend I made who home schooled all seven of her children, or talking to her kids. I did both; research led me to talk to her and her husband, talking to them confirmed I was making the right choice.

Though I am Christian, it had absolutely nothing to do with religion (we taught the same science everyone else received; no "the Earth is 15,000 years old" or whatever nonsense). I even think there's reasonable evangelical arguments to be made that Christians should put their children in traditional schools, so this wasn't a faith choice for me. I loved High School and I went to a large High School. So "bullying" and the like had nothing to do with it.

Had I not attended Public School, I probably wouldn't be doing what I love for a living and it was a couple of amazing teachers that went to bat for me, creating classes that didn't exist and letting me take HS classes while I was in Middle School, so when I say "I know I can do better" that's doesn't come with "because the public school system and the teachers are garbage." There's problems, there, for sure -- but my kids live in the #4 district and attend the #1 public High School in that district. It's a pretty fantastic school, the kids are friendly and I'm fine with it all around. I didn't think they'd do poorly regardless of how they were schooled, I just knew I could do better.

That's not arrogance; I think the vast majority of parents could do better.

It's because, as a parent, when they're young you can basically read their mind. That's an advantage a teacher doesn't get. You don't even have to "notice" that they're struggling or that they "know it cold and are bored", you just pace things on instinct and you deliver knowledge very close to the actual rate they can easily ingest it.

The other advantage that would be hard to replicate is class size. I had a class of two. Two different grades, but all that meant was my daughter got a preview of (and often just ended up learning completely) whatever she had to do and whatever her brother was learning and her brother got a review every day.

You can pretty much take out every other advantage of Home Schooling. Just those two result in a 6-7 hour whiteboard directed lesson and busy work time down to 45 minutes/child (really ... 30 most of the time). That also gave us a September to mid-April school year with generous vacations (otherwise we'd finish in February).

It wasn't my goal to make genius, spelling-bee winners, or to put them years ahead of public school students. The latter absolutely happened, but we were only ever doing a single grade per year in every subject with pretty formal home school curriculum. There was just a lot of extra time to screw around exploring things beyond the books.

I wanted them to learn better than they would in school and I wanted them to be able to be self-directed in learning. They are successful beyond my expectations in both areas.

They've been in Public School, now, for four years. My son hasn't taken work home from school in ... really ... four years. Homework is assigned, he just finishes it. My daughter is the same way. Outside of midterms and finals (out of fear/paranoia, not necessity), they do not touch schoolwork at home.

Despite not having taken a "real test" in their lives until enrollment, they placed in advanced classes. Despite them never receiving an independently graded assignment (or even one that had a grade written on it[0]), they both have a 4.0 GPA. My daughter had perfect scores in half of her classes last year.

They are happy kids who aren't stressed out at school (because those 45 minute daily sessions, apparently, covered a lot of ground -- my son still talks about things "he did in, like, 7th Grade, Dad!"

Really, though, forget all of the other reasons. It's worth doing it just for the relationship you form with your kids and that they form with their siblings. My teenagers don't act like teenagers. They act like happy young adults (because they are).

It wasn't hard. I did the majority of it with my ex- wife (through a high-conflict divorce and high-conflict early years ... that was hard ... worth it, though).

[0] You don't let your kids rack up debt by learning something less than very proficiently because you're the one that has to pay that debt when the later lesson comes that builds on that part, so yeah, they "got all As" in Home School ... because I don't like misery.

csense• 8 months ago

Anecdotally, two factors at work here:

- Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.

- With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching.

It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it's comparatively much easier to pull your kids out and homeschool them.

biophysboy5• 8 months ago

Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.

Name the left values; don't beat around the bush.

Observing remote education is not good visibility into pre-covid teaching.

I think we have a responsibility to have educated citizens.

broof2• 8 months ago

One example is in high school I had an excellent literature class that also covered a lot of philosophy. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the various philosophies we studied were the philosophies that are often foundational for Marxism, atheism, and general left of center academia. Probably the best class I had in high school but I wish it had also covered things on both sides, or been more transparent that it was in fact biased.

SoftTalker2• 8 months ago

Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.

I'm thinking this is fairly new. When I was in school, if I got bad grades or got in trouble at school, I got in trouble at home too. My parents were absolutely not calling the teachers complaining about grades. When I had trouble learning multiplication facts, they sat me down with flash cards every night until I had learned them, they didn't blame the teacher. This was in the 1970s/80s. This seemed pretty normal based on what I remember. When/why did it change?

ponooqjoqo• 8 months ago

pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values

Which values? I haven't gone to school in a long time.

squigz6• 8 months ago

I'm very curious about this as well, GP, please.

VohuMana• 8 months ago

I am very curious too, I’ve asked this to other friends who have mentioned the same thing and the only concrete answer I have got so far was teaching the theory of evolution and climate change.

andrewmlevy• 8 months ago

Lots of examples, gender identity and requiring ethnic studies (focusing on white male privilege, settler/colonial, putting groups into binary oppressor/oppressed). Also issues with requiring those classes vs not.

obscurette2• 8 months ago

Not a GP and I don't know if any of these qualifies as "left-ish" (which is very US specific IMHO), but as I understand, the education all over the western culture is destroyed by few really simple and really crazy (for me) ideas:

- Kids are never responsible for anything.

- Teachers are responsible for everything.

o11c5• 8 months ago

From the Conservative part of my social group, the main one applicable here is pushing elementary school kids to identify as trans. Because young children are very impressionable, and it is forbidden for staff to push back on on it at all, despite the science saying "there is absolutely no such thing as trans before age 12, and much possibility of social trauma from attempting it".

Left-ish people tend to say "this doesn't happen in the real world, it's made up for internet arguments" - and I even said that for a while on this and a few other subjects - but that denial cannot survive extensive contact with the real world.

RandallBrown• 8 months ago

With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching

I'm not sure remote schooling during the pandemic is very representative of day to day teaching in school. At least that's the impression I got from my teacher friends back then.

ilikecakeandpie2• 8 months ago

This is very anecdotal. Here in the south, the "controversial, left-ish values" would be a breath of fresh air vs what is being taught here

Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass

This is no child left behind in action, which was implemented during W's term

With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching

^ This is the micromanagement that a ton of people claim to hate and get in their way on this site when folks are complaining about daily standups.

IMO, if you're worried about the quality of your kid's education then you'll either need to send them to a private or home school, which will stunt them socially because life isn't just one big private school or home, or encourage curiosity and learning at home to supplement their rote learning from school

jrm42• 8 months ago

I'm not sure how your first thing much factors in? I haven't seen any data but I'd be VERY surprised if e.g. a survey of homeschoolers would cite to a lot of "making bad students pass" and "lefty indoctrination."

jrm42• 8 months ago

Another nebulous but I think VERY observable factor would be the extent to which "parents are, and expected to be, involved in their kids school stuff."

Anecdotally, but I bet you see a lot of it, I can count on one, maybe two hands the number of times my parents went to anything at the school to see me do a thing. And for my kids, there's something just about every other week.

ahmeneeroe-v24• 8 months ago

The other factor is not removing the bottom _% of hugely disruptive and violent children from schools.

JSR_FDED• 8 months ago

Timmy’s job will be done by AI when he grows up, but at least he’ll have fun a social skills

ec2y• 8 months ago

Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning. I don’t think we’re talking about remote ranch situations where you either do online school or have to send them to boarding school.

So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?

stockresearcher2• 8 months ago

We’ve homeschooled all our kids up to 8th grade. Our oldest is now a sophomore at the public high school but will start attending community college next year, paid for by the school district.

Most of the adults you see at the various group things are stay-at-home moms. Most. Some stay-at-home dads. Some of the moms have part-time jobs. I don’t recall any dads with part-time jobs. But many dads are present while also working full-time. You get into a rhythm, have a schedule, etc. and you can work it out. My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.

toasterlovin• 8 months ago

My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.

FWIW, my experience is that the dynamic at play in these situations is that women who run their own businesses or otherwise have high-powered careers tend to have a constellation of personality traits that is significantly shifted vs. those of stay at home moms, plus their daily lives are very different, so they don't really fit in. Saying that without value judgement, just an observation.

mikece10• 8 months ago

Wait... you homeschool your kids and yet you write "...and [they] are jealous that she does both." No, they are ENVIOUS: one envies what they don't have and are jealous of what they have.

Sorry, couldn't let that one slide! :-)

tylervigen• 8 months ago

It only requires that one parent has enough free hours to assign coursework. They don't have to exit the workforce, and don't necessarily need to directly supervise learning (but of course some of this is necessary for K-5).

I think a lot of how homeschooling can work, along with much of median/lower household income life in general, is misunderstood.

Source: Was homeschooled by a mom who worked.

csa2• 8 months ago

Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning.

There are at least two good answers to this:

1. The first is a via a home-schooling collective. With as few as 5 families, one can easily do a once-per-week rotation of home schooling responsibilities. Also note that the formal education part of this can be done fairly comfortably in 4 hours (even down to 2 hours with 1-1 instruction). As such, all that is needed is a 4-day a week job, or a job with a flex schedule who can do work on the weekend. I know one family that does something like this.

2. The second is to have a tutor do the instruction. For folks who are high earners, paying a tutor who can come in for 2-3 hours a day costs about the same as a mid-tier private school. Child care would still need to be covered, but that’s usually cheaper than a tutor.

So it’s doable, but either time or money will need to be sacrificed. I don’t think that’s a surprise.

That said, below are some things about home schooling that I’ve learned over the years from people who have done it:

- When done well, it’s probably close to an ideal education. When done poorly, it can mess up the kid, and many of these kids are very vocal about how bad it can be. Obviously there will be a whole range of outcomes between these extremes. Just be aware that it’s not necessarily a panacea, and it’s not necessarily an ideological cesspit.

- There is a ton of support for home schoolers in some communities, especially for socialization and specialization. Many people do not realize this.

- That said, some (perhaps many) home school parents are just ideological extremists — extreme beliefs, extreme (sometimes illegal) lifestyles, etc.

- A good litmus test of where a home school parent is on the thoughtful-extremist continuum is to ask them why they homeschool their kids. The thoughtful parents can rattle off dozens of learning opportunities that their kids have had that don’t exist or barely exist at normal schools. The less of these types of specifics they talk about, the more likely they are to have ideological reasons that they may or may not openly discuss.

- For folks who want a good learning environment for their kid, I strongly recommend a good Montessori school. I emphasize “good”, because some of them stray far from the Montessori ideals. This just requires a small amount of research and some observation. All that said, a good Montessori school almost always sets up a kid to be a solid person and life-long learner. Note that some kids absolutely hate the Montessori style, and you will know this in about a day or two. I will go out on a limb and say most of these kids will need special attention in home school contexts as well (imho).

So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?

I don’t think so.

Most of the people I know who home school are already stay at home parents (mostly mothers, but one dad), or they have plenty of disposable income to throw at the problem via tutors and home school support services.

I will also say that some parents absolutely punt on the education part, and they can do their part (often negligently) while doing a full time work-from-home job — think handing out some work sheets and pointing their kid(s) to an online learning environment with very little scaffolding. There are some kids who respond well to this, but most don’t.

paulddraper• 8 months ago

Yes, it (effectively) requires a parent to stay home, at least 90% of the time.

But that has happened for a long time, at a rate high enough that you wouldn't need to see resignations to increase homeschooling.

JKCalhoun• 8 months ago

Interesting point. I know of one home-schooling family—and the wife quit her career to homeschool.

Is this family well off financially? Of course they are. I suspect the data on homeschoolers is going to reflect a generally affluent slant.

gred2• 8 months ago

Anecdotally, I know of one child who was homeschooled recently. The mother is a single mother, of modest middle-class means. There was a homeschooling group nearby with a few volunteer mothers handling most of the logistics and teaching. This particular mother did not have to give up her job. It does stretch the definition of "homeschooling" a bit when it's a neighbor teaching in a neighbor's home, but they made it work.

globular-toast3• 8 months ago

Great news if true. "Staying home" is working and it's great that more people are finding it possible to work for themselves and their families rather than an employer who doesn't care about them. I think it was just a temporary blip where 100% of people worked for someone else and had to somehow then pay for or do their own work too.

vivzkestrel2• 8 months ago

homeschooled kids are literally competing against kids from other countries that are being schooled on calculus, geometry, statistics, algebra with practical chemistry, physics and biology lessons. This is not going to end well 15 yrs down the line

stockresearcher2• 8 months ago

Lots of colleges offer laboratory science classes for homeschooled children. AOPS wipes the floor with any math education you’d get at a public school. Most US national laboratories have on-site programs for school-aged kids and homeschoolers have equal standing for attending.

Anyone who takes it seriously gives up nothing.

sbuttgereit2• 8 months ago

You think avoiding these things are why people are thinking about homeschooling?!

In San Francisco where I live the public school system made the decision to not offer algebra until later for egalitarian reasons. Basically since they couldn't bring up the students that faired poorly in math, they delayed the subject for everybody. Along the same lines, they took the one high school dedicated to the highest achieving students and turned it into a lottery system rather than something earned.

Yes, of course you're right, kids will be competing on all those subjects. But the idea that public institutions are somehow the safeguards of fundamental academic achievement is just out of touch.

Of course, San Francisco public school's embrace of socialist/egalitarian drive identity politics is just one example of public education failure. Elsewhere in the US in these times, other school districts are being turned effectively into seminaries because the other political side has other doctrinal objectives. In neither case is learning how to think or how the world really works is important.

vivzkestrel2• 8 months ago

they create the feeling of belonging to something, a group, a social circle. you cannot recreate that at home. you ll see what happens after a decade going along this path. The feelings of being an orderly part of a group and partaking in group stuff cannot be recreated at home

biophysboy5• 8 months ago

When asked if they are satisfied with their children's education, public school parents consistently rank last after parents who choose private schools, homeschooling, and charter schools. Importantly, among all parents of school-age children, homeschooling enjoys a 70 percent favorability rating.

This is not surprising: homeschoolers are extremely confident in their own teaching abilities and extremely cynical about the abilities of others.

Closures also gave parents a chance to experience public schools' competence with remote learning, and many were unimpressed. They have also been unhappy with the poor quality and often politicized lessons taught to their children that infuriatingly blend declining learning outcomes with indoctrination.

Why would a parent compare a novel learning environment to the pre-covid experience? Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home - do they use the internet at all?

jen202• 8 months ago

Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home

They probably imagine they'll never encounter political topics from a perspective of which said parents do not approve. And they're probably not wrong to believe that.

biophysboy5• 8 months ago

Yes, but then their kid will become an adult and feel like they were kept in a snow globe. Even if the parents are right, its a foolish strategy!

Scottn12• 8 months ago

Homeschooling is becoming an epidemic and a major reason is --- SPORTS. From my experience, it is growing for all the wrong reasons and I have not come across ONE family doing it properly and in a matter I would consider better for the kid.

I have a 15yo son who plays sports and for the past 5 years, homeschooling has been a way to "red-shirt" kids - hold them back a year or two then re-entering them into public schools into grades behind their age. Literally purposely holding back their kids so they can be older as freshman.

A major problem with boys because of puberty, size etc around this age. The difference between a 14yo and a 16yo, or 16/18yo can be quite large at times. My son had a freshman on his team last year that could drive and had a mustache playing vs these tiny incoming freshman, it was so comical. He was 16 1/2 as a freshman. And the parents were on the sideline acting like their kid was the next coming of Aaron Judge. It REALLY hurts the rest of us playing the rules and taking education seriously when our kids are trying to make a team.

I've known several of these parents and they all are the same. They haphazardly put them into the bare min online courses, still go to work all day and stick them in front of computers to expect them to self teach for a few years. The moms would be stay-home types that didn't seem much educated themselves. The kids are spoiled entitled types who think they are top athletes already and would jokingly be calling my son at 11a telling him they are done already for the day and headed to the gym and playing Fortnite.

Now this is just MY circle, I am not saying there aren't very serious and capable parents out there really homeschooling and giving their kids a better education than public school, but I haven't met any in maybe roughly 10 I know. Most of them seemed to also be MAGA types poo-pooing public education and how they are brainwashing kids. It is really despicable that this is most likely happening ALL across America.

Education and manipulation aside, I would also think this isn't good the kids mental and social health as well. They already are on devices doom-scrolling enough nowadays, do we really want them hermits too now?

I applaud anyone putting in huge effort to home school a kid properly and with true care and teaching. But the image of them at a desk being taught by a real smart/educated parent following a true curriculum all day and on a schedule I imagine is ultra rare. And we are going to pay a price for this in the long run. Or not, GPT will just help them along to properly write that email for them when they are adults in a corporate world.

mikece10• 8 months ago

I thought you were going to go in a different direction with that: recruiting. In States where home schoolers can play on public school sports teams there are cases where the family gets an apartment and one parent and the kid establishes residency for the purpose of being in a particular school district. A notable case in recent-ish history was someone called Tim Tebow in Jacksonville, FLA. It's not a common thing though, far less of a complaint-magnet than the Catholic schools who "recruit" players from all over a city or even region to come be a starter on their football/basketball team...

lisbbb3• 8 months ago

You should not be downvoted for telling the truth about your experiences! I have witnessed the same things. Kids being held back a grade so they can excel in sports! It is so ridiculously self-serving and narcissistic that it is crazy to witness. And the emphasis on sports at my son's high school is beyond ridiculous.

The dads especially need to get back to basics and stop these obsessions they have about their kids being athletic superstars. It's bad for EVERYONE. And starting kids at like 5 years old in sports is just stupid.

Scottn12• 8 months ago

I've met so many of these narcissistic dad types that I think they are either a) living vicariously though their sons as an ego thing or b) seriously think they are sitting on a winning lottery ticket and their kids will make pro. So they obsessively push the kids so they don't "waste their opportunity" and/or "don't make mistake I did and not take it seriously".

I have even felt that urge with my son at times when he was making Little League All-star teams each year and considered top 5 player in the league. But then you realize they are only 9-12 years old and playing on a mini field! So I relished in him just having FUN. It was so hard to be around those obsessive Dads when I was having fun practices.

spwa42• 8 months ago

Well here is what the result was of public school for my 3 kids:

1 kid: one year behind but doing very well

1 kid: two years behind and not doing so well (in fact can't continue to academia unless things change drastically, in other words, will lose at least 1-2 more years if she does go to academia)

1 kid: two years behind and doing pretty well

This is the result of 9-11 years of public schooling. I feel like all 3 have very suboptimal outcomes, including the one doing very well.

I must say I am also getting very irritated by the "indoctrination". That was fine, if occasionally crazy, during the COVID years when the indoctrination was pretty progressive. Sometimes batshit insane, but let's say "well intentioned". Pro-climate claims ... that were bullshit, but at least pro-climate and generally positive and pro-humanity. Now one of their teachers is openly racist (in a class with 33% immigrants), and even though most keep it more subtle than him, this is a general trend.

So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.

Keep them going to public school and give up?

ApolloFortyNine• 8 months ago

I know a teacher who said one of their colleagues adamantly believes the moon landing was faked.

So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.

Look up school ratings in your area and move is by far your best bet if you wish to continue public school. There is also the difficult truth that maybe your kids are the problem, but again school shopping could help with that depending on what programs they have.

spwa42• 8 months ago

I've already used some "adult" exams where someone fucked up and forgot to set minimum ages and got my kids through them perfectly fine. The kids are not the problem, or at least, having them pass the normal exams at the normal age for those exams is possible. The schools simply aren't doing it.

The issue with that approach is that it's a lot of work, and I would love an alternative. But I don't have an alternative.

andrewstuart• 8 months ago

Group home schooling in a shared building is becoming a huge new trend in home schooling, far more resource and time efficient and pools the resources of the parents and allows the group to hire someone to do the group homeschooling.

dfxm123• 8 months ago

This sounds like a private school (probably with less oversight/regulation). What are the key differences?

PKop2• 8 months ago

Control over what happens there

jay_kyburz2• 8 months ago

I really enjoyed teaching my kids during covid, and they got a bug jump ahead compared to the kids who just played video games while the schools were closed. We only did 3-4 hours a day but it was fun, and I could really see the changes.

I don't mind the idea of teaching 10 kids, my way, and in and environment I can control. The thought of teaching 35 kids, mired in bureaucracy, is a nightmare.

ikrenji• 8 months ago

so like... a school?

bentley5• 8 months ago

In the same sense that a farmers’ market is like Walmart, sure.

nxm• 8 months ago

At the end of the day, it's a form of school-choice where parents decide what's best for their kids which I strongly support.

cosmicgadget• 8 months ago

Too bad for the kids though. You'd think their welfare would matter more than the parents having control.

russdill3• 8 months ago

Only parents of privilege are given choice though. Parents who are struggling are not. And then when it comes to vote on fixing classrooms, paying teachers what they are worth, etc, there's a great bulk of people who would rather just not because it doesn't effect them.

FireBeyond8• 8 months ago

Except many many parents have been shown to not be able to decide what's actually best for their kids, or don't care, or have actually harmful ideas.

And maybe those kids aren't their property and society has decided that the rights of the child to their own wellbeing may actually trump "parents decide whats best" when and if those parents are very much not?

gtirloni• 8 months ago

I don't feel better prepared to teach at home than someone who actually went to college for the various topics covered in high school. How can I know all I need to teach about math, chemistry, english, physics, etc, etc, etc when I already have to learn so much for my own work? I think parents that think they can do a better job are delusional.

Maybe the school _environment_ that a child has access isn't great, right? But I don't think that says anything about teachers.

rahimnathwani17• 8 months ago

In California, a teacher without a chemistry degree can teach high school chemistry after passing the CSET Chemistry subtest. This requires less depth of knowledge than AP Chemistry.

jeffbee2• 8 months ago

You do not need to know anything about the subject to teach high school subjects. You need to know stuff about teaching.

JoeAltmaier• 8 months ago

At school, one teacher lectures to maybe 30 students. If all they did was give individual attention student by student, each would get maybe 10 minutes a day.

The first 10 minutes of your home-school day you've beat that statistic. After two or three hours, you're up to a month of class time.

Of course they don't do that; they just lecture. Which is something you can get online (Khan Academy).

It's all about the homework and tutoring, baby.

All you have to do is learn along with your home student, and validate their learning experience. Helps if you catch on quicker, but not even necessary.

arevno2• 8 months ago

Elementary Education and Pedagogy are "sciences" with an even poorer replication rate than Sociology and Psychology.

Nobody educated to teach is actually qualified to do so by virtue of said education. Teaching is largely a personality-driven and experience-acquired skill.

dkhenry4• 8 months ago

When I recently switched jobs, one of my requirements was I had to remain remote, for at least the next few years, so I could remain at home and help with my children's education. I don't think there is enough money in the world to convince me to change back to public education. Aside from the benefits everyone mentions like a much better education, having so much extra time with my children is a priceless gift that I wish we as a society could give everyone.

Also its given me the chance to learn things that I missed during my primary and secondary educations. Going through each proof in Euclid's Elements again has been a lot of fun, and its been long enough that I have forgotten most of them, so the thrill of discovery is real for me too.

If you can make it work, you should make it work, even if that means moving to a lower CoL area, there are a lot of small towns in the US that have excellent amenities, and are great places to raise a family.

kulahan2• 8 months ago

How do you make up for the resulting drop in interaction with other kids? I had a boss who did this with his children as well - it seemed as though his solution was to use PE credits to have his kids attend sports with other kids.

dkhenry4• 8 months ago

My kids are part of a co-op where they meet once a week and in this co-op they share some elements of their curriculum with everyone else, they spend one day going over the weeks assignments along with 8-10 classmates, and then during the week they are at home doing their work. As they have aged their school work now has a lot of collaborative elements, so my oldest is actually meeting with kids from his co-op almost daily to go over group projects and assignments.

Additionally they have a lot of extra curricular activities they participate in ( sports, music, church youth group), that also gives them a lot of socialization time with others.

lapcat6• 8 months ago

Recent estimates put the total homeschooling population at about 6 percent of students across the United States, compared to about 3 percent pre-pandemic.

One thing that concerns me about many pro-homeschooling comments is a kind of tear-down-the-schools attitude, as if schools were hopeless and irredeemable, despite the fact they're still educating 94% of students even at today's elevated homeschooling rate. Of course there are problems with schools, but on the other hand there are countless success stories, or at least countless non-failure stories, and educational outcomes tend to depend crucially on local factors, the location of the school and its socioeconomic environment.

I suspect that the vast majority of parents have neither the desire nor the capability to homeschool their kids. I certainly can't imagine my own parents doing it. In a sense, homeschooling is a luxury of the few. The absolute numbers can increase, but I don't think homeschooling can scale to the entire population. So whatever problems may exist in the schools, we have to confront and solve them, not just abandon them and pretend homeschooling is a societal solution. You might claim that hundreds of years ago, everyone was homeschooled, but I don't want to turn back the societal clock hundreds of years.

Another concern I have is the religious and/or political motivation of many homeschoolers. If homeschooling were just about educational outcomes for children, then we shouldn't expect homeschoolers to be disproportionately conservative in religious and/or political beliefs, yet my impression is that they are. It's certainly suspicious to me. And though I've had no involvement with K-12 education since I was in school myself, I've had a lot of involvement in higher education, first as an undergrad, then as a PhD student and lecturer. Frankly, the horror stories and conspiracy theories about left-wing indoctrination at universities are ridiculous and not based on fact or experience. So I'm quite skeptical of similar claims about K-12, especially since I saw none of that in my own childhood. (I recall being forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, for all the good that did.) There's a type of person who's set off if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" and consider that to be an act of war against them. There are still a lot of parents in the United States who reject biological evolution and would prefer that it not be taught in schools at all, or at least to be taught as "controversial."

account1984• 8 months ago

I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children. There is no law or social imperative that children must be taught a secular view point. At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently. Honestly, I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion. It has become a belief system of it's own, and I for one fear the coming crusades :)

I say live and let live, parents should be free to teach their kids whatever belief system they want without political interference. Much to the dismay of the left (and I say this, being a left leaning moderate... I know, bad word today), kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children, full stop. The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism, is only putting fuel to the fire in this surge in global fascism. At the risk of sounding too kumbaya'ish, we all just need to accept each other and recognize the real enemies to society is a global loss of empathy and the rise of transactionalism. Now that is something I could really get behind, forced empathy courses! :)

lapcat6• 8 months ago

I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children.

I didn't claim that they don't have a right. I just claimed to be skeptical of the idea that the primary motivation for homeschooling was educational outcomes rather than ideological outcomes.

At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently.

If only they believed differently. ;-) It's no coincidence that children tend to adopt the same beliefs as their parents, no matter the country or region.

I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion.

The last 20 years? The First Amendment of the US Constitution begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". The principle of separation of church and state is more than 200 years old.

kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children

I don't know what label you'd want to put on me, but I would say that kids do not belong to anyone. I find the notion of ownership to be noxious, practically slavery. We have a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves (yet), but that doesn't mean children are simply the personal property and playthings of the parents. I think it's a disservice to a child to place them in a bubble and shield them from anything the parents don't happen to like.

The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism

"they are their parents children" is not individualism, or certainly not individualism from the child's perspective.

Morover, from what I've seen and heard from homeschoolers themselves, they do tend to form, or indeed come from, specific communitites, and are not simply "lone wolf" homeschooling parents.

rossdavidh2• 8 months ago

My daughter is in college now, but we used a variety of private, part-time, and homeschooling approaches prior to that. One thing is that there are a lot of resources (e.g. independent teachers for subjects you don't know, co-ops for socializing, etc.), and the more people are doing it, the more true that becomes. My parents were both public school teachers, and yet we found ourselves home- and alternative-schooling our daughter. Public schools don't really seem to have a strategy for dealing with the situation, other than complaining about it.

If you are offering a free service, that is quite time-intensive, and increasing numbers of people choose to not use it, then there should be more introspection going on. If it's happening in public education, I'm not able to see evidence of it.

Izikiel435• 8 months ago

Seattle schools have that issue. After covid a bunch of kids were moved to private schools, and SPS (the organism in charge of school) complained and blamed parents on having money and not wanting to mix with the riff raff and other bs. When they actually asked the parents why their children weren't returning after covid, it was because SPS decided to axe the advance/gifted programs they had for kids, among other educational quality things. The children that never came back were children who would have taken advantage of those programs, and parents decided to go pay to win instead to get those programs back in private schools, as it becomes a compounding advantage in today's competitive world. SPS is still using the stupid hippie approach about children magically learning how to read with pictures and guesses, instead of phonics, and some numbers for reading are worst than Mississippi, which went hard into phonics and overwhelmingly improved their numbers. WA is a clear example that spending a ton of money doesn't improve educational outcomes, you also have to do things that work.

ahmeneeroe-v24• 8 months ago

This is exactly right. I had a kid in Seattle schools during this time and this is exactly how I saw it happen and and Seattle schools were a major reason I left Seattle.

adamredwoods2• 8 months ago

This is why I didn't move back to Seattle, but stayed in the nearby communities.

bluesummers5651• 8 months ago

I feel this pain. I grew up in what I thought were great public schools and am a big believer that public school is a fundamental institution that should raise the floor for society. Now I'm raising kids in Seattle and it's a constant struggle to get the kinds of educational programs and opportunities for my kids that I took for granted when I was in public school and just assumed would still be around when I was an adult. For lack of a better way to phrase it, I feel like I am exactly the kind of parent SPS should want to keep in its system - a strong believer in public education with the means to support the schools, yet sometimes I feel like they are actively driving families like mine out of school system with their decisions.

casey2• 8 months ago

The evidence shows that the gifted program is just racist. It's not surprising that the descendants of Europeans do better on European cultural artifacts like math and science, canonical western literature. "Gifted" is an apt name. They are students that have been gifted cultural knowledge before others so they can pretend to be special.

I'd argue that most "gifted" students are inherently dumber since they uncritically believe and internalize whatever BS their parents feed them. It's understandable that parents have desire to how power over their children, but at some point the state needs to step in and recognize child abuse for what it is.

rootusrootus3• 8 months ago

then there should be more introspection going on

This assumes that the blame obviously lies with the schools. Basically everyone I know that homeschools does it because they disapprove of tolerance. Should the introspection lead schools to embrace segregation again? It is going to be hard to bring people with such wildly different viewpoints together in harmony.

bengale• 8 months ago

“Disapprove of tolerance” is such a ridiculous straw man is genuinely quite amusing.

rossdavidh2• 8 months ago

Most of the homeschoolers I know in Austin were basically hippies who found the public schools to be too authoritarian and intolerant of diversity (for example, banning dyed hair). I don't know which homeschoolers you were seeing, but it doesn't match what I saw here.

dclaw• 8 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Joshua

kylehotchkiss2• 8 months ago

I can't say my public school experience was great, I was bullied and didn't really click with the popular kids, but being around a cross section of actual American kids in my age group (my school district mixed middle class with lower class neighborhoods) helped me shape my worldview and learn to deal with people who didn't look or talk like me. I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people. I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.

I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.

gred2• 8 months ago

I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.

Popularity is not an exclusively American concept. Just as public school broadened your horizons, so will traveling (or living) abroad.

zdragnar2• 8 months ago

Too many CO2 emissions for that to be practical for the billions of people who don't have public transit access to another nation.

Redster2• 8 months ago

The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman. Other factors seem to play a much larger factor in the things you are (rightfully!) concerned about. As long as the parents have "the will to have nice things" (to refer to Patrick McKenzie's concept), then these are very surmountable problems.

Respectfully, A grateful dad who was homeschooled and who will homeschool.

P.S. Of course I will do some things differently than my parents, but it was an amazing gift and I had an extremely vibrant and stimulating time, including with peers (and adults!) outside of my parents' network who pushed me, challenged me, thought very differently than me, etc.

valar_m• 8 months ago

The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman.

How do you do that? Seems like it would be impossible to replicate the experience of learning to navigate daily social interactions in a mixed group of people, especially when it comes to dealing with conflict.

swannodette• 8 months ago

If you can afford it! "Grass-roots segregation hits records numbers" would be an equally fitting title.

nlavezzo2• 8 months ago

What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?

Maybe it's:

  - the terrible educational state of the school system?

  - the fact that device and social media addiction is a prevalent and growing problem that they don't want their kids brains rotted by?

  - they want to provide their kids an education based on experiential and project based learning rather than filling out worksheets? 

  - they don't want their kids to be forced to wait for the slowest / least interested kids in class to catch up before moving on to more challenging material?

noboostforyou2• 8 months ago

As the parent of a small child, there is a very noticeable difference in social skills that develop immediately as a result of my child being in a daycare interacting with other children of a similar age. Compared to my friends' same age children who are mostly staying at home and babysat by a grandparent.

(as a disclaimer, the daycare has very good teachers/caregivers from what I can tell so I'm sure that's part of it as well)

mtrovo• 8 months ago

Daycare quality is a spectrum, the same way as babysitting at home. My smaller one just started daycare, and we settled for one that actually does stuff with the kids (forest school style). But I can tell you, we've visited lots of places that are basically just making sure the kids are not dead by the time you pick them up. Same for babysitting with grandparents; there's the hyper-social grandpa style that's always doing something, and the couchpotato with +10k hours on Cocomelon.

mordnis• 8 months ago

In my opinion, grandparents are the worst. They completely spoil them.

ahmeneeroe-v24• 8 months ago

cross section of actual American kids

So many factors have led this to be a major liability for young people now. School is not what it was 20 years ago.

ecshafer6• 8 months ago

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.

skeeter2020• 8 months ago

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

andyjohnson0• 8 months ago

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.

sejje• 8 months ago

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.

wildzzz• 8 months ago

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.

TaupeRanger2• 8 months ago

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.

drivebyhooting3• 8 months ago

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.

bena• 8 months ago

It sounds like school with extra steps.

MarkMarine• 8 months ago

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.

dboreham• 8 months ago

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.

raw_anon_11118• 8 months ago

“Good socializaron experience” is the exact opposite of “religious groups”. Said as someone who went to a private Christian school for 7 years.

prng20212• 8 months ago

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.

singpolyma33• 8 months ago

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

bdangubic7• 8 months ago

I would have gotten a vasectomy if I knew my kid had to go through this kind of childhood

dartharva3• 8 months ago

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.

moron4hire4• 8 months ago

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.

gbin• 8 months ago

Yeah but this is basically people with the same social circle and religion etc...

MarsIronPI2• 8 months ago

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.

j45• 8 months ago

There is some realy valid things to consider here.

The thing it leaves me wondering is how many kids from elementary through high school a child really keeps in touch with, and if college is currently the place where many students finally get to start to be themselves.

usefulcat2• 8 months ago

There are certainly tradeoffs, but it's not all negative. In my experience, what it boils down to is that home-schooled kids tend to have more experience with adults and less experience dealing with a wide variety of other kids, particularly assholes.

When I was a kid in public school, there was no shortage of assholes and I definitely would have preferred to not have to deal with them. OTOH, I don't doubt that there is also some value in that experience, not to mention interacting with all the other people. Also, we didn't have social media or semi-regular school shootings when I was a kid. So yeah.. to me, it's not at all obvious which set of tradeoffs is preferable nowadays.

BobaFloutist2• 8 months ago

You're forgetting that public school also exposes you to more adult assholes, including ones with direct power over you that can screw you over for no reason.

It's important to know how and when to advocate for yourself and others, when to escalate through proper channels and when to escalate outside of proper channels, and when to back down and let them be an asshole because they're frankly not worth your time.

ghssds• 8 months ago

What happens to asshole kids? Do they become regular adults or asshole adults? Do they become soldiers or prisonners never to be seen again by normies? Do they even reach adulthood? Are they even a stable group or were we all asshole kids to some other kids?

gbacon2• 8 months ago

All over this discussion, the big negative has nothing to do with missing out on stellar education, skill development, or expert teachers. Instead, it’s the perpetual handwringing that homeschooled kids won’t be Properly Socialized, i.e., be exposed to and have to endure mistreatment, disruption, and sometimes assault from other maladjusted, cruel, or even mentally ill peers — because that’s “the real world.”

This is not the W for the government schools that proponents seem to think it is.

OneLeggedCat• 8 months ago

In the rural areas that I've lived in, it's mostly about a strong desire to supplant science and history with religious ideas and principles.

satvikpendem2• 8 months ago

That is exactly what I've seen, to keep kids in their brainwashing bubble.

alphazard2• 8 months ago

I hear this a lot, and it may be true, but I am very skeptical that it matters. The statistics about home-schooled children don't support the idea that they have horribly inaccurate models of the world guided mostly by religious thinking. Or if they do it doesn't seem to affect life achievement in any important way. Instead home-schooled children are typically more advanced at graduation and have higher lifetime achievement metrics than their public school counterparts.

As an athiest, and a bayesian, it's difficult for me to worry about other peoples religious beliefs that don't seem to negatively affect them or me. Especially when there is propaganda taught in the public schools that does warp the students' world views in ways that harms them and me.

TheGRS• 8 months ago

That has been the case for a long time, and I guess something about the current generation of parents has gotten them to act more on it. My dad came from a very religious family and they all did private religious schools for their early grade school years. Then they went to public for high school years.

If I had to guess, its maybe something about the demise of church life that has gotten religious parents to just pull back entirely. It wasn't that uncommon for public schools to make nods toward Christian ideals/lifestyles before like the 90s, but now that stuff just doesn't happen anymore.

_blk• 8 months ago

I won't pretend to know where you live or what those people's desires are but I definitely started homeschooling after the last US administration took moral volatility to new standards. The principles taught in schools just did not align anymore with what was common sense when I was in school and what I believe in. Now before you judge, I'm not looking for a fight. My wife and I have both master-degree educations in CS and law and our four kids have been to public school in the US and abroad, they've been to an evangelical christian school, and now that we've decided to homeschool for two years, we're not likely to take them back. The traditional school aspects take up 2-3h per day at most, then comes the school of life: raising and caring for animals and plants, fixing the truck or other engineersy activities and of course plenty of fun activities outside of the too-busy-to-be-fun times. My kids have learned of historic events such as Jamestown, Gettysburg or Mount St. Helens at the actual site of the event, they've been to most of the national parks and the fear of being socially-disconnected is not more than a fear before you start. Heck, thanks to Starlink they can even talk to their friends while we're driving through a desert.

Now let me also say that preparing the curriculum, ordering the materials etc. takes a lot of effort and discipline. It's definitely almost a full time job and I'm blessed with an amazing wife that's gifted in all that but the reward is more than worth it. Also, if you're thinking about it, many states have home school support programs and put you in touch with other home schoolers in the area.

anon2915• 8 months ago

I mean in the inner city science is supplanted as well like when they close down stem schools because too many Asians or something.

alphazard2• 8 months ago

I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.

The older I get, the more I think that helping your kids avoid interactions with others who aren't with the program is for the best. Ideally your children's friends should be people that you think are good kids, kids that you would go to bat for. Then when you are teaching your kids to compromise and play nice and forgive, you can legitimately feel good about it. I think my default assumption about a negative interaction with a public school random would be that they are basically a wild animal to be avoided.

brailsafe2• 8 months ago

The world is messy for all sorts of reasons, that may not be the way anyone would like it to be but it's the way it is, and imo it's best to learn it when the stakes are low rather than when they're later voting against other classes because they were never exposed to people from them early on, or they're being taken advantage of at work or in an adult relationship.

I wouldn't fault someone for wanting to situate their kids among peers and adults that help them grow at a similar level rather than hinder it, but I think it's also best to be a guiding hand rather than a applicant tracking system when it comes to the non-academic side

jfreds• 8 months ago

I was homeschooled until high school. I couldn’t agree with you more. The value that the socialization the public school offers is underestimated.

Learning activities with other homeschooled kids is ok but not enough. A tight-knit neighborhood of friends is huge, but not enough. You need to develop a thick skin and a sense of self-assurance.

I have no counterfactual of course, but I think much of the social anxiety I’ve had to unlearn as a young adult came from homeschooling. And I had great circumstances

pyuser5836• 8 months ago

I was horribly bullied in high school. It was really bad.

The worst part was being ostracized. The school had anti-bullying policies, but they don’t force anyone to be your friend.

Strangely, I was elected to lots of student government office, and held leadership in lots of clubs.

Maybe my memory is just off, but I don’t think so.

I think I was really good connecting with the grownups who ran the school, so they made sure I got leadership positions.

I was always much better at being the kid in class the teacher liked - same with principals, etc.

Probably one of the reasons the other kids didn’t like me - but that went over my head.

I think it’s really easy to overestimate how important the socialization in public schools is. We go to so many movies where the plot is based on the dynamics of public high school, we assume it’s normal.

We see so much of terrible stuff downplaid like it doesn’t matter. Just rewatched Back to the Future which laughingly brushes off every kind of violence as long as it’s done at the prom.

cosmic_cheese4• 8 months ago

As someone else who was homeschooled except the last three grades, I also agree. Additionally, the effect is multiplied if the kid in question lives in a rural or semi-rural area rather than a suburb or city.

For the majority of my adult life I’ve been playing catchup. Even now, barreling towards 40, there’s aspects of social capabilities where I come up quite short relative to my peers.

If I’m ever to be a parent, I won’t homeschool. Depending the circumstances I might not send my kids to public school, but their schooling situation will at minimum involve social exposure comparable to that of public school.

DennisP4• 8 months ago

And I've always felt that most of my social anxiety came from public school. Maybe we were both just prone to it.

(I unlearned it too, but it took quite a while.)

inetknght• 8 months ago

I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people.

Unfortunately this encourages people to have a blind eye regarding bullying.

I would be much more happy if more people intervened against bullies and liars. Maybe we'd have better people in politics today if 40 years ago schools punished bullies and liars and sent them to have their behavioral problems addressed.

DennisP4• 8 months ago

Paul Graham pointed out that public school is a weird and degenerate microcosm that isn't much like the real social world at all.

I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.
When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage.
...If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie...Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.

https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html?viewfullsite=1

gbacon2• 8 months ago

Perhaps unlike in some ways, but some aspects of school life persist in so-called adult life, e.g., jocks, nerds, freaks, party animals, slackers, and teacher’s pets are all still around — now with zeros on the end.

tayo423• 8 months ago

Probably like 90% of the time it feel like I'm perpetually in high school and it never really ended.

perrygeo• 8 months ago

Fully agree. The foundation of education is learning how the world actually is, not how we wish it would be.

calmbell• 8 months ago

The public school experience in the U.S. depends so much on your ZIP Code. I attended the best public schools in my state while my wife attended the worst in the same state. I am genuinely pro-public school, but there is a point where the benefit of being around different people is overshadowed by distractions and low standards. My wife had to be diagnosed with a learning disability in college to receive test accommodations when she discovered that you cannot stay after class indefinitely to finish an exam. Her teachers never raised any concerns about her taking 50% as long with exams compared to the other students, and she was the valedictorian of her huge urban high school. The lack of concern is bizarre until you consider that her teachers were preoccupied with students graduating and showing up to class. Many of her classmates ended up getting pregnant, and the school had a large daycare for the children of high school students.

My wife didn't end up taking the SAT or ACT because she attended a relatively strong local university with a full-ride scholarship and a test-optional policy. The MCAT exam initially denied her request for accommodations because she was only diagnosed with a learning disability in college. We successfully appealed by writing an essay arguing that my wife wasn't diagnosed with a learning disability in K-12 because her schools sucked (we submitted documentation that proved that her schools tested among the worst in the state, her elementary school was literally the worst in the entire state, when she was a student), and her teachers had much bigger concerns than why the smart, studious kid takes a long time to complete exams.

If the wife had gone to the K-12 school system that I attended, her learning disability would have been addressed in elementary school, and she would have been spared much angst. I was a very poor reader in early elementary school, and received almost daily one-on-one attention at my school from instructional aides and volunteers (mostly highly educated parents and grandparents) for years. I received a perfect score on the ACT reading section in high school.

linkregister• 8 months ago

The set of ZIP codes to geographical school assignment is neither 1:1 nor onto. Actually,

(just kidding)

I agree that school assignment is highly variable. I'm glad your wife managed to get her appeal approved. It's unfortunate she even had to go through that process to begin with.

WalterBright12• 8 months ago

her teachers were preoccupied with students graduating and showing up to class

That's because the attendance rate is the driver of state funds to the schools.

The schools also get more funding if the students perform poorly.

tshaddox2• 8 months ago

This is a common sentiment, but how much do you really know about the counterfactual?

It's not obvious to me that you would have been unable to deal with people who didn't look like you if you had been homeschooled.

It also seems to me that a lot of public school environments surely contain kids who look different from each other, form cliques based on physical appearance, and learn to base how they treat people largely on physical appearance.

rayiner• 8 months ago

Except homeschooled people I know are lovely and well adjusted.

pfannkuchen• 8 months ago

I had a similar experience growing up to what you describe, but in my adult life I ended up living around all upper middle class and wealthy people and I don’t think my earlier experiences have really been very relevant or helpful. So I think it might depend on what the child’s expected adult environment will be like? Like do we need to be around or interact with the sort of people you need to stay away from or watch your mouth around?

typeofhuman4• 8 months ago

Popular misconception of homeschooling. At least in my experience. We homeschool our children. We do a couple of hours a day of curriculum. The rest is being a member of a few homeschool coops. Parents are close, yet it's big enough that there are still "groups". Kids are making friends and socializing in a much more fruitful way than the chambers of public school. There's play, then there's exploration. We go on nature walks and clean ups, the theater, the naval base, we have soccer, gymnastics, and jiu jitsu, we go to the museums, libraries, and recycling plant.

Our kids have friends. We have made friends (tough at our age). And our kids are 1-2 years above their peers on diagnostics.

typeofhuman4• 8 months ago

Not sure what would cause someone to downvote my post without reply. Guess they're upset about their own performance and/or that of their kids.

hn_throwaway_99• 8 months ago

I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.

This is generally not true, as far as popularity correlates to having better social skills and a better understanding of social dynamics. Not saying income is the sole definition of success, but here is one study that found that teenagers with more friends earned more as adults: https://www.nber.org/papers/w27337

themafia• 8 months ago

I frequently saw fights, so I learned

So this part of your education was entirely self-guided? And you're worried if children don't see fights and just sort of 'figure out' how to deal with them on their own they won't develop properly?

I was bullied [...] learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.

So the institution valued popularity to the point of allowing you to be abused because you didn't possess it. Another self-guided lesson.

I can never understand why people defend schools. They're terrible environments for learning. We clearly need a school setting for book learning and an _entirely separate_ one for social learning. This seems easily surmountable.

phyzix5761• 8 months ago

I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.

Most research does not support the idea that homeschooling inherently creates social bubbles or makes children unable to interact with others. Studies generally find that homeschooled children perform as well as or better than traditionally schooled peers on standardized social skills measures and often participate actively in community groups, sports, etc. Long term studies of adults who were homeschooled also show no meaningful deficits in life outcomes or social functioning. The main caveat is that homeschooling varies widely: children in highly isolated or restrictive environments may have fewer opportunities to practice mainstream social norms, but this is a function of the specific homeschooling approach, not homeschooling as a whole. Overall, the literature suggests that social problems arise from lack of social exposure not from homeschooling itself.

gregjor3• 8 months ago

I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.

We already have this problem with the population at large, only a tiny minority of whom got homeschooled.

Right here on HN you can read daily accounts of severe introversion and social anxiety. You can see that out in public, at work, among friends and family. Many Americans, children and adults, take medications (licit and otherwise) to cope with anxiety and things like ADHD. Many Americans self-diagnose as "on the spectrum" and "introverted."

Do you have any evidence to support the idea that homeschooled children suffer more from these common afflictions?

eucyclos10• 8 months ago

Speaking of bullying, high school caused me to greatly overestimate how important unarmed combat would be to my future success in life.

It's nice to not worry about it on the rare occasion that I go to sketchy places, but it also highlights that dealing with a cross section of our country's population is not necessarily relevant to the kind of life we build when we can choose our peers.

jhawk28• 8 months ago

This is the most common myths about homeschooling. In reality, the kids at public school sit at a desk most of the time. They don't get to socialize. Most activities are structured. Homeschoolers have CO-OPs, field trips, weekly PE visits, real interactions with adults, and actual free time. They are the most socialized kids in the US. The diversity in the homeschool relationships is quite large which you can see when a homeschooler has discussions with adults while their public school peers just quietly talk amongst themselves.

ethbr16• 8 months ago

You're straw-manning the worst public school experience against the best possible homeschool experience.

They are the most socialized kids in the US.

Bullshit. You know how I know? Because on average parents are terrible at exposing their kids to Things Not Like Them and Things They Don't Approve Of.

There are great homeschooling parents and crazy ones, but maybe it's not the worst idea to give kids a few hours a day outside their family-approved bubble?

Just in case it's the latter.

Or am I mistaken and all homeschooling in the US requires the child's consent?

dartharva3• 8 months ago

This ability to so confidently assert things from your own dreamland with no regard to the real world is amazing. Were you also homeschooled?

rozap• 8 months ago

Growing up, homeschool kids were absolutely weird as hell. Sure, some turn out fine, but it's very hard to do right, and requires parents putting their kids outside of everyone's comfort zone, which is... uncomfortable, so it rarely happens.

The homeschooled neighbor kid from a super religious family absolutely went off the deep end at 18. Many such cases.

everdrive• 8 months ago

I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.

It's always felt like a quirk of biology, in the same way that most people are now too fat. (ie, we didn't evolve in an era with constant excess calories and for the most part we can't cope with the situation) In that same way, people engage in this vicious fight for status between middle school and high school, only to be whisked away to colleges and then whisked away to wherever the jobs are; the fight for status never mattered and you can reinvent yourself in ways which would have never been possible in our ancient kin groups. But, we just cannot stop fighting for that status, and don't even give it much though. It's a huge waste of energy.

rmbyrro2• 8 months ago

Empirical research [1] [2] shows that your worry is unfounded.

[1] Homeschooled Children’s Social Skills: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED573486.pdf

[2] Homeschooling and the Question of Socialization Revisited: https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socia...

Edit: if I had to bet (don't know any research), schools nowadays are the main producers of intolerance, with the indoctrination and teaching kids to only respect civil discourse, ideas and opinions if they agree with the mainstream world model.

seec2• 8 months ago

In my opinion you are just more likely to run into bad influences that not only won't bring value but might as well send you a pretty bad path. The socialisation aspect of school is very largely bullshit, just like the diversity propaganda nonsense. There are actually studies on this is you want to look it up. Homeschooled children, do better in social settings later in life, not worse.

homeonthemtn• 8 months ago

Buddy of mine put it really well:

"I got to spend time with my kids when they still wanted to spend time with me. Now as teenagers in no longer cool, but that's ok. I got my time with them and that makes me happy"

GaryBluto• 8 months ago

Nice to see Reason posted here.

righthand2• 8 months ago

NY state just signed a bill to include ChatGPT in their learning and planning. Previously there were deals to bring in Google hardware for students.

Of course people are fleeing public schooling when we’re selling the kids to big tech for laptops and services that require network connection to write a word document, enable cheating, and their data sold for profit without consent.

jimmar• 8 months ago

People might be fleeing public schooling because lawmakers are dictating what happens in the classroom. There are lots of good teachers who struggle with the resources given to them and the constraints imposed on them.

At home, parents can be flexible. They can let their kids use AI when appropriate or discourage its use. They don't have to wait for legislators to get involved. If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it instead of waiting for some committee to evaluate it.

righthand2• 8 months ago

If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it

How do you know if the math book is great if there hasn’t been consensus about it. The problem isn’t the committee that will always be there in some form. The problem is the politics the committee is used for. If the committee were to prioritize and offload their specific requirements for review instead of requiring substantial analysis twice then the school system would be just as quick.

dmje2• 8 months ago

Obviously there is some serious nuance here - there are of course edge cases and serious reasons for considering home schooling.

But as a general principle, encouraging kids further and further out of (group) human contact seems like an obviously terrible idea to me. We're already doing it with (lack of) play spaces, "no ball games", insane screen times (which equates to less "real" face to face time) amongst teens, awkward kids who can't even engage with a stranger under any circumstances - and meanwhile isolation and loneliness is on the increase, fear continues to rise about even letting your kid walk down the street to the shops, etc...

School is hard, as are parts of life. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult, it's not always what you want it to be, you get shouted at sometimes and big kids get their way and you don't get asked on the football team. Honestly, and sorry, but - a big part of growing up is learning how to deal with things. If kids don't, and you as a parent don't help them deal with the bumps, you and they will be building unrealistic expectations about how good this life is going to be, and they'll spend all their time sad or "triggered" or afraid, or isolated, or unable to join in. They'll get more scared, more isolated, more depressed. This is not what any parent wants.

This - of course and x1000 - need to be done with massive quantities of love and compassion. This isn't some Victorian hellscape I'm advocating here. Real bullying is real. Sometimes adults need to weigh in. Kids will find school hard.

But loving your kids is NOT giving them everything they want. It's teaching them how to navigate things that are difficult and awkward and - ultimately - helping them become robust adults.

iambateman3• 8 months ago

I was homeschooled and my son is homeschooled.

I disagree with your premise that homeschooling pushes kids out of group human contact. People who attend public school often assume that kids who attend homeschool literally sit at home all day...which is just not...real?

snerbles2• 8 months ago

It was the predominant notion when I was a homeschooled kid 30 years ago, and for most of them there is no argument or evidence that will convince them otherwise.

State-run education is their orthodoxy, and anything that challenges that is tantamount to heresy.

ecshafer6• 8 months ago

The most common form of homeschooling is, I believe, in the form of co-ops. Where groups of parents get their kids together in class room like settings to teach them together. They don't go to school, they might meet at a church, or library or a home, but they are socializing. I know people who homeschool and between church, youth fellowship, co-op classes, fencing, swimming, basketball, neighborhood kids, family, etc. they have extremely active social lives.

hereme8887• 8 months ago

The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against this concept. Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.

Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.

Modern academic life is only well suited to a small percent of the population. Those children who are truly happy and excelling in that setting.

So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at? Forced mass education was a good idea for developing societies, but personalized education has been possible for at least a decade now, at a fraction of the cost. And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.

Here's a famous song on the topic for those who know how to "chew the meat from the cud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE...

* It's fascinating to watch the points on my comment go up and down a ton. Very controversial issue. I believe it highlights pressure from social and political structures in society, and/or personal experiences. They vary so much.

meheleventyone4• 8 months ago

I mean you’re literally explaining how your home schooled kids are separated from the real world.

hereme8887• 8 months ago

Define "real world".

superconduct123• 8 months ago

Public school doesn't really represent "the real world" for everyone anyway

If you go to university and into a professional career you end up in a different bubble of people than say going into trades

afavour4• 8 months ago

homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one?

...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?

I think your view is a very black and white one. Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there.

The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe. Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do.

hereme8887• 8 months ago

I think your reading is very black and white. Add some leeway to what I say. Hand-picked obviously doesn't mean all friends go through a psych screening on a daily basis, or that you have to helicopter-parent and tell your kids who to be friends with...

seneca5• 8 months ago

...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?

It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public. "The real world" is highly filtered social circles and freedom of association. The idea that it's somehow an automatic good to force healthy kids to mix with everyone who happens to show up, regardless of whether they have severe behavioral or social issues, is pretty questionable.

My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there.

You can expose your kids to different cultures without leaving them wide open to everything else. It's not a binary. The point is that home schooling lets you pick and choose.

billy99k• 8 months ago

"..a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?"

School isn't their only exposure to life. You will get exposure to other people and non-healthy people outside of school.

"Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in th"

When I was a kid, I was exposed to kids that should have been in prison..and many of them ended up there. My life probably would have been better if they weren't there.

"My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there."

This can still be done with home schooling.

"The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe."

I disagree. If someone is hostile and aggressive all the time, I wouldn't be around them as an adult. I hand pick my friends, and you probably do too. I also still get exposed to the assholes of the world.

"Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do."

If you are at work and someone is sexually harassing all of the women there or generally causing issues for everyone around them (preventing most other people from getting their work done). Do you think they should stay, so everyone can learn to be around them?

You seem to think everyone is a reasonable person that might just have a few issues. This is far from the truth and many times, public schools will just keep these kids there, preventing everyone around them from learning.

It's also a burden to the teachers and staff.

MrDrMcCoy• 8 months ago

Counterpoint from my own experience having been previously homeschooled all the way to college: My parents went the extra mile to ensure I was constantly immersed in large group settings with other homeschoolers. Field trips, co-op classes, sports, and general high-quality social time. There were of course bad eggs as in any group setting, but with an important difference: if it ever got bad, it was possible to leave, and we did on occasion. In my mind, that's far more in keeping with the "real world" than the seeming entrapment of public schooling that offers little recourse for when social experiences sour. In the real world, you have the freedom to leave a toxic job or social group far more so than public school.

In addition to peer socialization and mobility, the flexibility in scheduling allowed me to work a day job through my high school years, exposing me to yet more real-world experience. The constant interaction with adults and folks from other walks of life was a huge boon that allowed me to function as a well-adjusted adult right out of the gate. The high-school drama that people suffer and then bring with them into adulthood is very disappointing and seemingly unnecessary.

zaphar4• 8 months ago

I can not conceive of a worse way to teach a kid how to behave in Adult social settings than to throw them into a group of other kids who have just as little experience as they do and then expect the group to "figure it out". This is not to say that there aren't some homeschooling parents who practice a form of extreme isolation which produces what I would regard as an equally bad outcome as public school. But by the numbers from people who have studied this the evidence indicates homeschooling produces the best outcomes for social adjustment in Adulthood.

Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement which means the child learns how to socialize not from other children but from watching how the adults they are around handle interactions.

[Edited for clarity in some sentences]

emtel• 8 months ago

It absolutely is. If you are well equipped to navigate the adult world, you place yourself in hand-picked groups of people. I do not work with, socialize with, or live near a random sample of the population, and I highly doubt most people reading this thread do either!

programjames21• 8 months ago

...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?

It's much closer to the real world though, isn't it? Your child is likely going to live most of their life in similar communities to them, not a wide cross section of the public.

MisterMower5• 8 months ago

If you can’t hand pick your kids experiences through life, why does everyone worry about what school district they live in?

dzonga• 8 months ago

there's was a famous paper written by a former school teacher which advocated for home schooling ? I been trying to find it ever since

hereme8887• 8 months ago

I don't agree with all of Piotr's writings, but here's an extensive list of famous educators, maybe yours is among them.

John Locke, John Holt, Peter Green, and:

https://supermemo.guru/wiki/The_Greatest_Minds_in_History_Op...

https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Tom_Durrie

joshstrange3• 8 months ago

Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.

I'm sure they exist, they may even exist as the majority, I will say for my part the homeschooled kids I knew through my church growing up were not any of these things. I would quite literally use the opposite of both those to describe them.

I'm not saying they represent the majority but they do exist and they were not well adjusted IMHO.

As with many topics I feel like "Yes, if you want to devote yourself fully to X thing you can do much better than Y professional", the problem is, again from my own experience, the people I knew who homeschooled their children were not professionals, they were not capable, and their children suffered for it. I want to stress, I fully believe it is possible for certain people with certain mentors/teachers to do better outside of the public (or private) school system. I just also believe that the odds of most people (making that decision for their children) to meet that bar are low. I also think that some of the better homeschooled experiences that I've seen are simply a super-private school by another name (various parents being or being subject experts and taking turns teaching coupled with many "field trip"-type trips with other homeschooled kids).

there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.

Wait till you hear what the parents believe... I don't agree with everything taught or the way it's taught but being exposed to other types of people and ways of thinking is critical. I can guarantee you that had my parents been able to, they would have shielded me from a great number of ways of thinking. I worry that many homeschooled children grow up in a small echo chamber (we all live in echo chambers of difference sizes).

Can public school suck? Absolutely and I acknowledge that homeschooling might be the answer for some people, but only if you can afford to pay (with time or money) to educate your children completely which is almost certainly going to require working with other homeschooler parents to, essentially, build your own school. If you can bring in tutors/mentors/teachers that you vet and agree with and expose them to the world and new ideas/experiences then yeah, you are probably going to have good outcomes. If you plop them in front of a computer to follow a curriculum just to shield them from the "evils" of the world, well, I think you are going to have a bad time. Obviously there is a whole range of people in between those 2 extremes, I just feel that, on average, people trend towards the lower end of that spectrum.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE...

Interesting song and I do agree with many points. For many years I've complained about lack of teaching basic skills (everything from home ec to budgeting and more), many of which I heard in this song. I think there was a little of the baby going out with the bathwater but overall I enjoyed it.

hereme8887• 8 months ago

song

Yea, the guy later made a video clarifying he never meant to throw the baby out, just the bathwater.

FireBeyond8• 8 months ago

I get that on one hand, such regulation is one of the reasons some parents do so, but the wide diversity of "oversight" is challenging.

In Washington, homeschooled students still have to occasionally connect at an actual school, or do some baseline testing.

In Louisiana, you just tell the state "we're homeschooling" and the state is "have fun with that" and the child is essentially off the grid.

Not for nothing, instances of child abuse/CSA in many correlates with the laxness of educational oversight in home schooling.

And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.

Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom.

For all your anecdotes my step daughter has plenty too. 10th graders who are barely literate, cannot do elementary math. Who when asked about their homeschool regime talk of waking at 10, 10.30, playing Fortnite or going on Tiktok for a few hours, and occasionally logging into some website to pretend like they've been working, or doing some mind numbingly simple exercise to show "participation".

ryandrake9• 8 months ago

Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom.

Exactly. Notice how, when people complain about the "deranged ideologies" that teachers are teaching their kids, they either 1. stop short of actually naming those ideologies or 2. spout fever dreams that are statistically vanishingly rare.

bgnn3• 8 months ago

What you define here is isolation from the real world. There seems to be a misunderstanding of your understanding of misunderstanding.

gosub1003• 8 months ago

Children's world view is shaped early on. They shouldn't have to suffer just because poor, violent, should-have-been-aborteds are legally required to go to public schools. Children should experience carefree happiness at least once, in their formative years so they know happiness is possible.

aeturnum• 8 months ago

Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.

Not your problem to fix for sure - but it is your problem to equip your child to comfortably weather. There are bad influences out in the world and they generally have outsized effects on their social and professional scenes. In fact, the kind of curated, limited community you're advocating for is one where bad influences thrive.

So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at?

I certainly agree the degree is whatever - but I think you're really under-valuing the social-gauntlet aspect of school. You will have classmates who kind of (or really) suck. You will need to do your work anyway. You will be incentivized to learn perseverance and a self-centered locus of control. These are valuable skills that only come from actual exposure to bad influences.

Someone who's perfect in perfect conditions is going to struggle because the world is not perfect. The aims you highlight here make me think less of homeschooling than I did before.

array_key_first2• 8 months ago

My general experience is that homeschool children have self esteem and confidence issues precisely because they've been around 'hand picked' people... forever.

They've never experienced assholes, or people who think their personality is grating, or whatever. Thick skin needs to be built up, to a degree. I'm not saying bullying is good, but being exposed to the unwashed masses definitely can be.

scoofy• 8 months ago

I mean… the issue is you have incredibly well educated kids that have an awkward time dealing with assholes.

Given the state of our education system, that seems like an obviously worthwhile trade off. Especially for parents in underperforming school districts and even entire regions.

oxag3n• 8 months ago

I watched my kids becoming a median of their classmates. After changing to a private school it was noticeable after a month - different lexicon, mimics, attitude.

It's not thick skin they are developing around assholes, it's them incorporating that behavior to some degree. There was nothing I could do to change that - talks, good example, nothing worked, only surrounding change.

rmbyrro2• 8 months ago

I think this is analogous to diseases and vaccines. You don't immunize a child by exposing it to the pathogen, but to a modified version of it that poses no threat to their health, but still allows their immune system to recognize and produce anti bodies.

The same applies to teaching "street smarts" to kids. You don't do it by throwing them in a hostile environment where they'll be prey to hostile people without having any defenses built up first.

gosub1003• 8 months ago

It's false to think that you can only learn to handle assholes if you experience them at a young tender age.

codingdave• 8 months ago

increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.

You really might want to explain that further. At face value, that sounds like parroted right-wing rhetoric.

AlexeyBelov• 8 months ago

He is a real rightoid based on other comments. HN disappointed me today, since you're the only one who noticed, others silently tolerate this behavior.

cosmic_cheese4• 8 months ago

The problem is that what constitutes “healthy” varies so greatly between individuals (especially these days) that it barely carries any objective meaning, and the odds are heavily against any one person’s definition being correct.

If I put myself in the shoes of a parent, I wouldn’t trust myself on the matter enough that I’d feel good shaping my childrens’ entire world to match it. It’s such a wildly difficult thing to get right, and I’d rather they get a glimpse of the world through wide variety of viewpoints and hope they’ll use the values I’ve instilled in them to construct their own view.

subpixel• 8 months ago

Where I live the schools are quite good and the homeschoolers are fundamental religious families who won’t send their kids to schools where gay pride flags are allowed.

I’d pull our child out of school if the standards dropped but I think the majority of homeschoolers align with out of the mainstream poltical / religious views.

Nextgrid• 8 months ago

hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children

Unless you can magically guarantee (or have enough money to fund their whole life) your children will never have to interact with "problem" people, they will need to learn to deal with those people one way or another. And it's better to do so in a low-stakes situation like school.

bentley5• 8 months ago

Childhood and youth are anything but “low‐stakes.” The social experiences I faced in public school were far worse than even the worst parts of my adult life. The direction I was headed was one of dark cynicism and misanthropy thanks to the bullying I faced and the lack of care from the adults in the system. When I switched to homeschooling, I began interacting with rational adults (my parents’ friends) and in turn learned what functioning human relationships look like. My ability to weather the difficult storms of adulthood in a healthy way came from the social growth I gained through homeschooling, not the regressive “socialization” that public school inflicted on me.

eucyclos10• 8 months ago

The trouble I have with this line of argument is that, at least for male children, the skills one learns for dealing with 'problem' people in school (IE skills one would learn in an MMA gym) are not relevant for dealing with problem people afterwards.

MisterMower5• 8 months ago

What makes you think homeschool kids never deal with assholes?

Assholes are a dime a dozen. Homeschooling doesn’t exempt your kids from learning how to deal with them.

atoav2• 8 months ago

Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one?

A gardener who understands that after that short grace period that plant will have to grow amongst those sick and hostile ones essentially and not only that, it will have to form a thriving ecosystem with them.

I get the idea of wanting to protect your child at all cost and wanting the best possible education for them. Rarely have I found that former students with over-protective parents that put them down a funnel of other kids from the same social and ideological background have really thrived. And I work in university level education meaning I get to see first hand what is usually the first phase in a persons life where they can decide for themselves how to do it. The people with self-confidence and stable roots who make the best, are usually those who "have seen it all", while those with alternative schooling backgrounds are either completely in their own world (often with rude awekenings) or constant feelings of inadequacy and comparison with others. That is anecdotal evidence by one educator, so details may matter.

Aside from those individual aspects, there absolutely is a societal aspect to that. If gated communities are the solution, then your society has to be in what is already a pretty dystopian position. Having those isolated silos mean in a world of isolated social media silos, we give our kids even less possibility to experience the reality of other members of the society we expect them to repair.

That shoulders them with an impossible task. My deep believe is that the goal of education is to prepare people for their life, but also to give them the tools to make the world they are sent into a better place. That requires a healthy dose of "knowing what is", especily if what is, is ugly.

synecdoche4• 8 months ago

> Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one?
A gardener who understands that after that short grace period that plant will have to grow amongst those sick and hostile ones essentially and not only that, it will have to form a thriving ecosystem with them.

If, on the other hand, the gardener knows from experience that the flower will be suffocated, then it's pointless at best and cruel at worst.

class3shock• 8 months ago

If schools are problematic or have kids that are problematic, wouldn't it make more sense to focus on investing in them to make them better, adding resources to support difficult kids, to help parents who are not doing well? As opposed to disengaging from them?

bentley5• 8 months ago

If the school system is damaging kids, it’s good to work to improve it, but you won't see results (if any—effecting systemic change is hard) until after your kids have already graduated, facing irreversible damage in the process.

If you’re willing to homeschool well, the positive impact on your kids is immediate.

programjames21• 8 months ago

It is pretty hard for one parent to change things for the better, even if just for their child in one classroom. The administration and teachers have so many other things to deal with. It's much harder to change the entire school culture. You can volunteer, and you should!, but you still won't make as large an impact on your child's education as you would hope. In some ways, this is good, because there are lots of crazy parents out there who you don't want making impacts on your child's education, but it's also bad if you're not that crazy parent.

jcpst• 8 months ago

We tried homeschooling a few times. We were honest with ourselves and determined we were not that great at it. Sure, we could improve. But one of the primary factors in where we chose to live was the school district. Fortunately it has worked out well. Of course there’s always something to deal with- you have to advocate for your kids.

It’s basically public daycare for a lot of people. Including us.

The social aspect is important for us. The idea of having to find other people with kids for activities sounds exhausting. We’re a gang of neuro-spicy introverts. My social circle is comprised of people I’ve been friends with for 25+ years. All from my school days.

I dealt with a lot of bullshit at school. But overall a net gain.

tristor2• 8 months ago

As somebody that suffered through public school as a gifted kid, I wish I had been homeschooled. Almost everything positive that happened in my education was because of family, not due to the school. School was hell on earth for me, and I imagine it's the same for most other "neurodivergent" kids who are high IQ. Given what I know from my own kid, there's no surprise to me why more people are opting to home school. For my daughter we kept her in public school because the district we moved to had magnet programs, and that's what she wanted so she could be with her friends from the neighborhood, but not every school district cares about gifted kids and will happily put a child with a 150 IQ trying to read 6-8 grade levels above their peers in the same room with a child with an 80 IQ child who has a violence problem and consider that an acceptable outcome as long as nobody calls the police.

programjames21• 8 months ago

It is in fact the best outcome, because education is just a ranking game, and it's not like you will end up ranked lower in your school. Also, since the point of education is to help people learn, your calmer presence and pro-learning attitude may rub off on the worst students, and their chance of ending up jobless and in prison will go down!

tristor2• 8 months ago

It might be the best outcome for society, but it's not the best outcome for the people. I experienced severe violence directed at my person for most of my life and it caused lifelong trauma. I was further punished for defending myself, expected to just allow people to harm me. During school I was beaten many times, had bones broken, was stabbed with a pocket knife, and had numerous other things happen. Unlike the kids from the bad homes who exacted that violence against me, I didn't get my trauma from home I got it from school.

I have a 176 IQ, I'm now a highly paid professional who has made significant contributions to both open source software and to the invention of technologies that power the cloud. Obviously things worked out for me regardless of my circumstances. Most of the kids I went to school with are dead, in jail, or homeless drug addicts, so my presence certainly didn't fix that. If forcing me to be with them in school saved just one of them from a life of crime and drugs, was it worth forcing me to experience torture for no reason of my own making for my formative years? I would say no. Society is not more important than the individual, you must balance individual and social values against one another without taking either into preference.

I have no problem with spiteful bullies ending up in jail or dead after school, ultimately. It seems just and karmic.

iambateman3• 8 months ago

When a social failure happens at a public school - a child fails a class, drugs are found, a teenager gets pregnant, there’s a fight - most people don't question the public school system itself. But when a social failure happens to a homeschooler, we wonder if the system of _homeschooling_ is broken.

In reality, stories of homeschooling failure are probably no more common than stories of failure in public high school, they're simply more attention-grabbing.

rootusrootus3• 8 months ago

The adults I know who are most against homeschooling today are the ones who were homeschooled themselves. Maybe it's just a pendulum.

gallamine• 8 months ago

I was homeschooled. I'm doing the same with my children.

pyuser5836• 8 months ago

The adults I know who are most against public school went to public schools themselves.

The adults I know most against college went to college themselves.

The adults I know most against private high schools went to private high schools themselves.

Being really negative about your own education is an American tradition!

brendoelfrendo2• 8 months ago

I think this is likely because people (accurately, in my opinion) attribute behavioral problems with kids to the level and quality of involvement of the parents at home, so it would be bizarre to attribute a child getting caught with drugs at school to the public school system itself.

o11c5• 8 months ago

The problem is that homeschooling is extremely bimodal (and the split at least used to be pretty even). It tends to be either very good or very bad.

In particular, the "unschooling" approach (not always named such) is almost universally terrible.

But most of the homeschooled kids I know now are in healthy co-ops with defined curricula and socialization.

iambateman3• 8 months ago

I think that’s right…

I wish there was another word other than homeschooling for “the parents who are trying to hide the fact that their teenager can’t read.”

Because it’s a real group but yea we are in a co-op that’s a wonderful balance between being in a classroom and being at home more than he would be with public school.

mikece10• 8 months ago

Interesting to see this topic being discussed on HN; I'm curious if any homeschooling parents here have kids who WANT to learn computer programming. I haven't pushed my kids to do any of the things that I loved doing growing up (or what I do now). If any homeschooled kids are getting into programming was it as a result of playing with something like Scratch or did they dive directly into writing Python or JavaScript?

lisbbb3• 8 months ago

It hurts me so bad to have to say this (as someone who has been a life-long technologist with higher degrees in CS and CE): Pushing kids towards STEM careers is only going to end in disappointment. Medicine, sure, but engineering and programming? I don't think it's ever coming back to what it was here in the states. We took that golden goose out back and chopped its head clean off.

mikece10• 8 months ago

I am not suggesting pushing in any direction; it was more a realization that one of my kids said they wanted to learn to program I'm not sure what the best first step would be (learning straight C like I did a long time ago probably isn't he best starting point) and I was curious if anyone else had ideas.

hamdingers• 8 months ago

Unsurprisingly this thread has become a battleground on the merits of homeschooling.

Something to keep in mind: "Homeschool" is a useless descriptor. It covers a spectrum from complete educational neglect to world class private tutoring. It includes cohorts almost indistinguishable from school, and cohorts that engage in cultish indoctrination.

Any criticism you might have for your idea of homeschool, there exists a type of homeschooling that addresses that criticism, and there will be someone in the replies ready to tell you about it.

jordanpg• 8 months ago

Once an alternative way to educate children, homeschooling is now an increasingly popular and mainstream option.

TFA does not even begin to grapple with the single most important issue, which is who is actually doing the homeschooling.

This is only an option for certain families, with parents with enough bandwidth and knowhow to do this effectively. That excludes many tens of millions of Americans.

I think this is really about class, race, and religious segregation. Families can do what they want, of course, but this framing makes it sound like failing schools are the whole problem and I don't think that's the whole story.

eagsalazar2• 8 months ago

Starve the beast, vilify it for being weak, then kill it.

4fterd4rk• 8 months ago

Every normal school kid who interacted with a home school kid will recall what the problem is with homeschooling. I would never want to raise a little weirdo like the weirdo home schoolers I knew.

totallykvothe2• 8 months ago

The most popular argument against homeschooling appears to be "the world sucks, so we should make kids worlds suck so they're prepared for it", which is absolutely an abusive way to think and those who use this argument need to sit and think about what it means, then be ashamed.

jimt1234• 8 months ago

Not exactly. More like, "The world can suck major at times, so we should make sure kids are prepared to deal with it when confronted." It's kinda like teaching kids to look both ways when crossing the street. Ideally, drivers are looking out for pedestrians, but if that doesn't happen and a pedestrian isn't prepared for it, well, people can get killed.

No one should be ashamed for teaching their kids to exist in a world that isn't always as loving as we all wish it was.

satvikpendem2• 8 months ago

How many are now home schooled for religious reasons? It seems like many are pulling their kids out of public schools, for "woke" reasons rather than for a deep pedagogical pursuit, and I worry these kids aren't actually learning at the level they should be.

Kuyawa• 8 months ago

I am an advocate of homeschooling but also know the importance of social contact for kids, so always wondering how hard would it be to create local clubs for kids where they learn mainly about economy, liberty and social relations sprinkled with some astronomy, history, biology, math and whatever personal interest of their parents like sports or arts? I'd be happy to pay for a private institution like that

incognito124• 8 months ago

I'm pretty sure you just described a public school

ryandrake9• 8 months ago

I was going to say! Dude just re-invented "school."

ranbato• 8 months ago

Didn't homeschool here but started a charter school instead. Some of our neighbors did homeschool and I have mixed feelings about it. Some did very well, some not so well; but of course the same can be said of all of the kids in the area no matter which way they went.

A few things I'll note:

  - educational spending has almost zero correlation with outcomes
  - the number one indicator of educational success is parental involvement
  - homeschooling and charter schools tend to attract the outliers from both ends.  The smart who are underserved where they are and the kids with problems whose parents are involved enough to search for solutions.
  - the real losers are those whose parents can't or won't get involved and who aren't succeeding on their own

In the current educational environment, teachers are often viewed as babysitters whose job is to educate children "correctly" and parents are only there to ensure that "correctly" matches their expectations. In the "good old days" when parents and teachers beat children regularly, at least they were unified in their expectations that children would listen to and obey teachers and not disrupt class. Now it is more common to see underpaid teachers without any support confronted by angry parents when their children misbehave and fail to actually learn.

oceansky• 8 months ago

I am really really skeptical of the first bullet point.

el_benhameen2• 8 months ago

Yeah I think the context matters a lot there. I’m assuming it means “on a state by state basis”, which is true. But within my state, at least, family income, outside spending, and property tax revenues correlate very strongly with outcomes.

arjie2• 8 months ago

Do you have a blog or any work where you talk about what you did to start a charter school?

porridgeraisin• 8 months ago

parental involvement

This is the _most_ important thing. Parents keeping a laser eye on their kids' performance in school, and having their own standards that the school must live up to, regardless of what commitees and boards and suits and academics and "experts" say. Even if it's just a standard for math competence. If the school isn't up to the mark, either pull up the school for it, or switch schools, or after school classes if it's an isolated problem. Many would be surprised at how many parents either can't(common in first generation educated) or won't do this.

Spending has no correlation with success

In a setting where more spending is for more labour (when the labour is not done by parents/family) this is not true. Primary schools giving individual attention to students for example will do better than those with 100 students a class. But in most cases, more spending leads to more unnecessary flashy stuff. So in the real world, what you are saying is true.

Charter schools like yours are also sorely needed in america where math standards are absolutely woeful compared to RoW.

pyuser5836• 8 months ago

I used to teach high school. The amount of time I spent doing crap work was insane. It was necessary. If you don’t remind students 100 times what the assignments are, they won’t do them.

You also have to spend an insane amount of time with the lowest performers, because with enough attention, they can improve dramatically.

But this creates tradeoffs. Should I neglect the students doing best?

One on one instruction is the best kind. It’s generally reserved for doctoral students.

I also tried homeschooling by eldest. It didn’t work.

Its insane more parents don’t homeschool.

kachapopopow4• 8 months ago

well if we just apply the bell curve here, on average children will be pretty average (shocker) so those should be left on their own and discover their own niche while bad performers should get extra attention so they can keep up with the rest and with the gifted (if they actually want to) given the opportunity to explore higher level subjects.

so in the end we give attention to gifted and the struggling since there's very little you can do to children who are already decent and are capable of keeping up at most they lack discipline or motivation.

pyuser5836• 8 months ago

Gifted and average students who aren’t given attention become poor performers quickly.

Gifted students especially.

Students who learn ahead don’t want to be told: “ok you have the material, so I’ll ignore you for a bit.” They want more. They want their questions answered, even if the questions aren’t part of the lesson plan.

Nobody wants to be told “we aren’t studying that today.”

You really can’t starve the rest of the class to cater to poor performers.

whatsupdog2• 8 months ago

This is the result of more propaganda and brainwashing than education in schools. We should have left the politics out of the schools, after we got the prayers banned. But I guess some people will stop at nothing.

russdill3• 8 months ago

When the hell did praying get banned?

whatsupdog2• 8 months ago

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/School_prayer_in_the_United_St...

bgnn3• 8 months ago

Asking as an non-US person: Is there mandatory education for children in the US?

I guess homeschooling fits well with extreme individualistic American culture, no surprises there.

lconnell962• 8 months ago

There are 13 years required (K-12) in the US. The way non-compliance is peanlized varies depending on the state.

Education in the US is a complicated subject given the "extreme individualistic American culture" as you say. That will be present in the teachers and school districts, and the lesson plans can/will differ greatly between teachers and school districts for getting students to the general standard.

nightshift1• 8 months ago

As a Canadian, all I can say after reading all of this is: WTF? I can't understand why anyone would want to keep their children at home instead of sending them to school, and how the government could fail so badly that so many people want to avoid public schools. We are so similar and yet so different

programjames21• 8 months ago

The short answer is people stopped caring about metrics measuring learning, and instead how easy they were to game to support their politics, or make them look like a better teacher or superintendent.

bgnn3• 8 months ago

Yeah Canada is so weird in that sense. It's so North American in infrastructure but more European in culture.

rimbo789• 8 months ago

This is another item high on the “in the future we will all have been against this” list.

Well funded public education is a bedrock of fair equal society (which is why the right attacks it ever since its invention).

Public education isn’t perfect but it is far better for individual and society than any alternative (including any religious run schools)

MathMonkeyMan4• 8 months ago

I agree with you, but I could easily convince myself otherwise with the right context or motivation.

Well funded public education is a bedrock of fair equal society

First we have to decide what a fair equal society is, and then decide that this is what we want, and then demonstrate that spending on public education helps to achieve this.

People I've spoken to about education who do not see it as I do will disagree with me on all three points.

Colin Powell [valued][1] (paywall) his public school education.

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20221108214853/https://www.wsj.c...

jedberg• 8 months ago

I went to college with a few homeschooled kids. They were by far the least capable of "normal" social interaction. Some were quite book smart, but they had trouble communicating with others, so they couldn't demonstrate it.

Also a fun side effect, they mispronounced a lot of words that they had only ever seen in books but never heard out loud. One of them was self-aware enough to ask us to correct him.

rufus_foreman• 8 months ago

> they mispronounced a lot of words that they had only ever seen in books but never heard out loud

I did that as a kid. Still do. I read more than I talk. Nothing wrong with that.

The flip side would be people who misspell words or get phrases wrong because they've never seen them in books, they've only heard them out loud. They talk more than they read. Nothing wrong with that.

Although both of those might be a clue as to what type of vocations would make someone happy.

globular-toast3• 8 months ago

I do that too. What am I supposed to do? Nobody said the word "ephemeral" to me as a child. I have since learnt the OED includes pronunciation so I look words up if I remember, but sometimes I don't.

kachapopopow4• 8 months ago

home schooling is a very very priviledged concept to begin with so it's not surprising that there is quite a lot of hate for it.

as a former child I think home schooling is better in every way if there is a supporting environment built around it, but I also think public schooling introduces a lot of variety that is not seen in private or home schooling be it for better or worse, although my time in public school was rough and failed me in many ways I still wouldn't have it any other way.

lazyasciiart7• 8 months ago

This topic is such a basket case. “Homeschooling” in the US is a word that has come to mean “not enrolled in an accredited school” and can mean anything from being the Duggars to “my 4yo audits classes at MIT” or “we have an unaccredited private school that is identical to any other private school except for not being subject to laws”.

Advocating for homeschooling is simply advocating for absolutely no regulation on schooling, which is fine for the Zuckerbergs and will condemn children like the Duggars.

parsimo2010• 8 months ago

A lot of people are offering opinions on homeschooling. I'll throw in one anecdote from my past. I played tennis with a kid who was homeschooled through middle school but was sent to high school so he could graduate with a diploma instead of a GED, because this seems to be something that colleges care about. He was awkward for a couple weeks but basically adapted to high school and we quickly forgot he was homeschooled. The only thing that occasionally reminded us he was homeschooled was that he was better prepared for high school academics than we were and got good grades.

So for everyone saying that homeschooled kids aren't well adjusted or have bad social skills, I'll offer the counterpoint that they might appear unadjusted at first, but humans can usually adapt to new environments, so homeschooled kids have a pretty good chance at acting "normal" a short time after leaving homeschool. Don't judge someone's awkwardness the first time you meet them, let them adjust a bit and see if they can assimilate.

presentation• 8 months ago

My experience though is that every homeschooled kid I met in university over a decade ago was very socially awkward. Not necessarily a problem I guess, they performed fine at academics.

bentley5• 8 months ago

Did you make a point to interrogate all the non–socially awkward people you met at university to determine if they were homeschooled or not? Yeah, thought not.

When I was in university, there were several instances where people who’d known me for weeks or months found out for the first time that I’d been homeschooled, and expressed their surprise. (Surprise that I was “normal,” I guess, and not a social basket case, as the prevailing stereotype of homeschoolers seems to be.) They simply never thought to ask.

In fact there were even a couple of friends who surprised me by turning out to be homeschooled—when I should have known better than to assume one’s schooling background. But when society spends your entire childhood hammering you with untrue stereotypes about what you are (I heard well‐meaning “But what about socialization?” countless times growing up), some of it is bound to stick.

hatthew• 8 months ago

I was homeschooled up until college. I was part of a non-religious (maybe vaguely pagan) homeschooler community. I eased into college by taking a couple courses per semester at my local community college for two years around the end of high school, and also some online AP courses from my local school district. Overall I am happy with my experience. I had an abundance of time to pursue my own interests (e.g. reading, programming), since I only did ~1 hour of dedicated schoolwork per day. Among my peers, I ended up probably in the top 10% academically (close to straight As in college) and bottom 10% socially (I kept my homeschooler friends, but don't feel like I could call any of my college acquaintances "friends"). To this day I struggle with being comfortable and non-awkward around strangers and acquaintances, but I feel like I'm improving.

Happy to share more anecdotes if people have questions.

lisbbb3• 8 months ago

I can understand why. When we first moved to our upper midwest state, the district we bought a house in was ranked like #2 in the state overall and has fallen considerably. I have watched with my own two eyes the decline in the past 20 years here. The neighboring district, which was teetering when we first moved here in 2006, fell over completely and remains fallen. That one had a cycle of failed superintendents, all of whom required a buyout to get rid of, which further impoverished that district. Our realtor, who had been a teacher in that district, slyly tried to push us into that one, but we didn't fall for it. Our daughter made it through the more acclaimed district pretty well, our son, however, got tripped up in the decline:

We ended up moving our son to yet a third district after 2nd grade. Why? Because the principal he had in his elementary school mishandled an incident where three boys of another ethnicity shoved and kicked my son to the ground. The principal, in her infinite wisdom, made my son apologize to his attackers, I guess because he is white? We didn't press the matter, why bother? The handwriting was on the wall. We put in the work to open enroll him in another district, instead. Those are the options that many more rural communities lack.

Our current district is a bit further of a drive and that makes him/us feel like he is not really a part of that community. Nonetheless, it has done well for him and I will just come right out and say it's because it is less diverse and more affluent. It is not without its problems--mainly being far too sports-centric than the district my daughter attended, and generally a bit snobby and "affluenza"-ish, but no overt violence to speak of hardly.

One time we were leaving a football game one time and happened upon a family presenting their daughter with a brand new Range Rover, complete with a bow, in the school parking lot. Puke-o-rama! Why would you do that except to show off consumption and appearance of wealth to everyone else? Luckily, not that common, but you get the picture.

The good thing is, we had options and exercised them, but I wish we hadn't needed to, because we like our community and wanted to support it and the local families nearer to us. Every choice we made to get something we also had to give up something else. I think that's the same with homeschooling, too--I don't personally think it's a good idea, but it's not up to me how someone else chooses to educate their kids and I understand about only having certain options. My son is doing very well, now in high school, but he can never make a sports team because the competition is beyond ridiculous. Even tennis he got on some low rung team because there were a couple of superstar 7th graders who filled up JV and Varsity slots! It felt like a sort-of "old boy" situation because my son is pretty decent at tennis and beat one of those younger guys every time he played him. Forget football or basketball, you have to be pretty much college material to be on those teams. Hockey, same. My daughter never cared about sports, so we weren't prepared for that battle at all.

Getting children through school and into adulthood is not for the faint of heart.

krautburglar• 8 months ago

Every time I hear the “What about socialization?” argument from some childless person on SSRIs, I am reminded how dishonest some people are. If they even liked (let alone cared for) children, they would have had their own.

nphardon• 8 months ago

My guess is that this is related to the conservative attacks on education in the U.S., and it's especially insidious because, again I'm guessing, it's mostly liberal minded people who are buying into home schooling in part due to anti-education right wing propaganda. I live in Santa Cruz county, would not be surprised if we had one of the highest home school rates in the country. It feels like a combination of constant anti-education propaganda and the "snowflake syndrome" where parents think their kids are too special to be treated the same as other students in a classroom.

NooneAtAll3• 8 months ago

in USA?

GOD_Over_Djinn• 8 months ago

This is totally unsurprising, given that, in some parts of the country, public schools teach controversial ideas about gender.

Also, I see a lot of people arguing that exposure to “bad” kids is a point in favor of public schools, which seems insane to me. Growing up with a friend group of good kids is probably the biggest predictor of what a child’s adult life will look like.

orochimaaru• 8 months ago

I have a counter view. I think a parent needs to educate their kids as well. So, while kids may learn about controversial gender topics one needs to be able to have an intelligent discussion on why as a family don’t subscribe to those. Encourage children to have a mind of their own and argue intelligently and hold their ground. It doesn’t come from shying away from public forums.

As to the last point - one of the biggest benefits of exposure to “bad” kids is knowing whom to stay away from and making independent decisions on that. Parents are not going to be around to guide children forever. They need to learn to make their own choices.

Unless you live in a school district that’s really not that great I would never recommend homeschooling. Cloistering into echo chambers is not healthy.

gregjor3• 8 months ago

Homeschooling comes up fairly often on HN, usually eliciting the same kinds of comments. Commenters repeat the same old tropes, generalize from anecdotes, and project individual experiences onto other people.

I raised and homeschooled three children. One of my daughters homeschooled from second grade to the time she started college. My other two children decided to attend public school at various ages, and then mixed that with homeschooling because I didn't force them to attend school.

Infants have obvious personality tendencies. Some seem curious and outgoing, others afraid and nervous. Some babies seem happy and comfortable with other people, and some recoil and cry when approached. They don't start as blank slates. The family environment, siblings, peers, and the school environment can exacerbate innate tendencies or push children to change. A shy child may withdraw and develop social anxiety at school, or turn more extroverted and confident. Personality traits change throughout our lives, and that happens faster and often more dramatically in young children.

"School," "homeschooling," and "socialization" don't describe specific or uniform experiences, though people use those terms as if they do. Some children have loving and nurturing home environments, some suffer abuse. Some children attend well-funded and staffed schools, others spend their years in a prison-like environment with the emphasis on crowd control. Some teachers have a talent for teaching and subject mastery, they can inspire children to learn. Others seem resentful, incompetent, disengaged, even cruel. General statements about public schools, teachers, and the process of socialization don't mean anything because of huge variations across broad spectrums in multiple dimensions.

When asked, teachers will cite parental engagement as the most important determinant of student success. Many, probably most, parents use school (starting with infant daycare) as a place to park their kids while they work, trusting strangers they rarely meet to raise their children. When you watch a classroom of children interact with the teacher and each other you can pick out the kids who have involved parents and those who don't. Of course most parents have no choice for economic reasons. Homeschooled kids tend to come from two-parent middle (I'd say upper middle) class families for that reason -- few families can afford to have one or both parents lose so much work time. Several studies of homeschooled children implicate family socio-economic status and income in the success of the children, already advantaged compared to the majority of public school kids.

Parents take a wide range of approaches to raising children, generally with little or no training or preparation. You have a child and suddenly you have complete responsibility for another human being, making decisions on the fly, subjected to conflicting advice and guidance. That other human being has their own personality, will, requirements, and eventually desires and opinions, and you have to discover those and adapt to them because children don't come with labels or documentation. Some parents pay little attention to their kids, often because the parents have too many economic, relationship, or other problems of their own. Some parents treat their kids as extensions of themselves, a chance for a do-over, version 2.0, and will start prepping their child for the future the parent wishes they had regardless of the child's inclinations and desires. Some parents want to control their children, usually in the name of protecting their child from the world. Parents who don't recognize and respect their children as separate individuals can do a lot of damage, both in socialization and in academics, and you see the results with both schooled and homeschooled children.

In fifteen years of homeschooling my own children I spent a lot of time with other homeschooling parents. The terms "homeschooling parent" and "homeschooler" refer to such a broad spectrum of motivations and approaches that they doesn't usefully describe anything at all. Some parents want to raise their children in a faith tradition (I met fundamentalist Christian parents, Mormons, Muslims, Jews). Some parents want to raise their children with no faith tradition (secular homeschoolers), but then push their own woo-woo and new-agey beliefs on their kids (opposition to vaccines, mindfulness, astrology, homeopathy, "Indigo children," etc.). Both religious and secular homeschoolers can indoctrinate and control their children, and put their own beliefs, desires, frustrations, and fantasies into their kids' heads. I call that another form of not respecting the child as an individual.

The socialization topic comes up so much when talking about homeschooling that I have to say something about it. Whether schooled or homeschooled, children get exposed to adults, other children, and peers their own age. Each child will react and adapt to their specific circumstances according to their personality. Nothing inherently prevents homeschooled kids from enjoying a rich social life, but parents often restrict social activities, and with whom their kids socialize. Nothing inherent about the school environment magically "socializes" kids. Some children thrive in the school environment, others graduate or drop out with emotional trauma. Some schools offer more stable and safe environments than others, largely a function of ZIP Code in the USA.

Homeschooling at its best takes parental engagement to the extreme: parents take complete control over, and responsibility for, their child's education both academically and socially. Parents might get good results from the right schools if they engage with the teachers and pick the right school (thus the popularity of private schools). Parents who recognize and respect the individuality of their children, and don't treat them as clones or property, who actively take part in educating their child (whether at home or school), have a good chance at raising a well-adjusted and functional adult. The less the parents engage and take responsibility, the less the parents respect their children as discrete individuals, the more likely they will raise a child with academic failings and maladjusted personalities.

Look at the results all around us, the products of public schooling and disengaged parenting. Homeschooled kids may have the same problems, but in my experience that happens less often, especially if you exclude the large number of religious fundamentalist homeschoolers in America.

Specifically for the HN crowd (to which I belong)... people who work in the software profession that cannot measure what we call productivity, a profession that cannot agree on "best practices" around even trivial things like indenting, should step back and take a more humble approach to opining and lecturing about parenting, education, and homeschooling. No one knows the right or best way to raise children, or how to "properly" educate them. Instead we have a lot of opinions and traditions and government-imposed rules, some useful and some bullshit. As parents we have to sift through all of that and make decisions on the fly that can dramatically affect our children for the rest of their lives. We can't refactor away a bully, a cruel teacher, neglect, or the effects of expecting an iPad to substitute for attention and care.

karakoram• 8 months ago

I follow this blog of an entrepreneur based in Malaysia, Asim Qureshi.

https://wonderyearsschool.com/

https://www.youtube.com/@asim-qureshi/videos

He has been documenting his children's homeschooling journey and I have to say the results are beyond amazing.

All of the kids were done with "high school" level education before the age of 15.

Daughters going to Oxford and Cambridge. They were accepted at 16 I think but the University told them they could not join until they turn 18.

skx001• 8 months ago

I follow Asim too! A very interesting case study indeed. The boy learned to code and started working full-time for his startup.

What's really great is all the kids seem to be very well rounded and come off as pretty confident on their own. This can be seen in the videos on the YT channel.

Finishing "school" several years early is the biggest plus for me. Imagine being done with high school by the age of 14. The possibilities are endless. Learn languages, travel, learn real tangible skills, join various bootcamps.

Your kid can have so much "life" experience by the time they turn 18-20.

twodave• 8 months ago

Anecdotally, our family would not survive without homeschooling. I wouldn’t say we are a common situation, 4 kids who each have different learning challenges. I don’t think public education or their peers in those institutions would have been very merciful to them.

I believe that for kids have parents willing to provide it, home education (especially when tailored to the child) is always going to outperform other forms of education. There are trade-offs, and those trade-offs have become easier to deal with in the last 10 years even. Our kids each get the amount of socialization that works for them, have volunteer opportunities and community groups, etc.

The main reason it works, though, is that my wife is willing and our finances support her to do it full-time. I know there are plenty of families where both spouses can work while homeschooling, but for our particular needs that would never work out.

hirvi74• 8 months ago

4 kids who each have different learning challenges. I don’t think public education or their peers in those institutions would have been very merciful to them.

You are likely correct, if their experiences were to be anything like mine growing up. It was somewhat traumatic, honestly. I had learning and behavioral issues that I didn't know until I was an adult.

As a silver-lining, I suppose I also have to be somewhat thankful for what I learned. I feel somewhat well prepared to navigate the social and occupational issues that arise in workplaces because, despite my challenges, the working world is just as merciless if not worse.

deadeye3• 8 months ago

The problem with public schools is that they are free and required (essentually). That is a bad combination.

There is really nothing intrinsically good about the average public school. Many are filled with kids that aren't there to learn. From the attitudes seen in this forum, that seems to be OK, because school is paradoxically about "socializing", while most here report being bullied.

As noticed here many home schoolers have religious reasons for their choice. The reason is simple, "Don't send your children to Ceasar and then be upset when they come home as Romans".

lanfeust65• 8 months ago

Many are filled with kids that aren't there to learn.

That's on the kid, not contingent on whether school is public.

most here report being bullied.

Anecdotes like this are not worth much. What do the stats say?

There is really nothing intrinsically good about the average public school.

Schools don't just socialize, though that is also important. Whether they succeed at educating well depends on more than one factor, but policy & curriculum is clearly one. Kids are better prepared in some countries than others, still through public systems.

If people want to homeschool, let them. Public school should still be assessed accurately.

deadeye3• 8 months ago

That's on the kid, not contingent on whether school is public.

Yes and no. The interest of the kid to learn is on the kid/family, for sure.

However, the fact that a kid who has no interest in learning is forced to go to public school is a function of how public schools operate.

Again, free and required is a bad model. They should either be free and selective or, less ideally, available and costly.

aprilthird20213• 8 months ago

100%

Homeschooling is growing and will continue to grow because it is a cheaper alternative to private school (for people whose incomes aren't so high that the loss of one income eclipses the savings of not paying for private school, e.g. most people). The growth of homeschooling is probably highly correlated with the disconnect and distrust people have with public school. Public school already has an advantage, it's literally free. So it has to have noticeable problems people feel like they can resolve at home, for people to want to leave it behind

lanfeust65• 8 months ago

it is a cheaper alternative to private school

That depends. Often it means one parent stays home to educate and watch the kids, otherwise, someone else has to, and that usually costs money. If a wife otherwise would bring home a decent salary, then it isn't cheaper.

gregjor3• 8 months ago

Obligatory post of John Taylor Gatto's article The Seven-Lesson Schoolteacher:

https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20...

A former teacher of the year, Gatto became very influential in early homeschooling movements.

Parents or potential parents interested in education and schooling might also want to read Maria Montessori, and John Holt's books "How Children Fail" and "How Children Learn."

We as a species actually know quite a bit about raising children, socialization, and education. I think we get duped by our surrounding society and government institutions hijacking those goals in service of control, indoctrination, conformity, and maintaining class and power structures. Schools serve just as much, if not more, to prepare children to work as "productive" members of a capitalist culture, to do what they get told, as they do to teach our kids anything or help them learn to get along with other people. Call me an anarchist or Marxist, I don't care.

elif2• 8 months ago

It's not just the indoctrination, declining curriculum, and lowering of classroom standards.

American classrooms now come with risk of being shot, pervasive drug influence, cyber-bullying, etc.

Like why would I subject my kid to all these arbitrary hurdles

soufron• 8 months ago

This is so stupid on so many levels, I don't even get silicon valley engineers can envision this stuff for their own kids. Or maybe they don't care. Whatever.

angelgonzales• 8 months ago

I attended an objectively good public school system in California. There was very little political slant pushed by teachers except a far left slant in my journalism class. Thankfully we had many AP and honors classes which allowed motivated and competent students to thrive. I personally found myself disliking most normal classes because some students seemed unmotivated or incompetent and I didn’t like to be around those types of people. In scouting I met many homeschooled boys who didn’t seem very well socialized but their parents were always affluent, intelligent, mature and stable people who supported their boys. On one occasion a homeschooled kid didn’t want to be so he ran away for a few days and all the parents grilled us for clues as to where he may have gone. He ended up going to public high school with me the last two years and I think he made friends there. Another boy was homeschooled because he never managed to make friends and was quite annoying and quick to anger. He left out scout troop because he failed to adapt to the group and threw a knife at me! In college I met kids who went to ineffective public schools and they were very obviously much less competent than the people in my high school and heavily at a disadvantage. Based on my observations all children raised under homeschool were socially awkward but far more intelligent than the average public school kid. After moving out of state I observed that public schools make a really big difference in outcomes, I found that the people that came out of Portland Public Schools (PPS) were palpably less intelligent and also learned that group exams were sometimes taken! Also there were always needles, homeless camps, public drug use and fires around Portland schools. In these cases I think homeschooling (or groupschooling) would provide better outcomes.

next_xibalba3• 8 months ago

If you break the teacher’s unions, things would become dramatically better. Teachers unions are extremely powerful and poorly aligned with the mission of maximally educating as many children as possible.

ahmadtbk• 8 months ago

Honestly homeschooling does sound 1000000x better due to social media in schools being cancer for young children.

none2585• 8 months ago

Homeschool should be illegal, full stop. Enabling a parent, especially one who thinks that home schooling is a good idea, to indoctrinate a future citizen is beyond idiocy.

temp123789246• 8 months ago

“Two gin-scented tears trickled down the sides of his nose. But it was all right, everything was all right, the struggle was finished. He had won the victory over himself. He loved Big Brother.”

calebm2• 8 months ago

I was public schooled Kindergarten, homeschooled 1st-5th, and public schooled 6-12th grade. My wife was 100% homeschooled. I think it was a good mix for me. And in retrospect, I think it was good I was public schooled for at least some of high school, because I'm not sure my math education would have been as good if I was homeschooled during that period (my parents aren't math people).

But I am a math person, and we are homeschooling our 2 boys. My 12-year-old is able to understand mathematical concept and scientific topics that many high schoolers are never even exposed to. My wife does a great job with many other subjects as well. And we have many great homeschooling parents who group together to teach things they are specialized in (like construction, art, etc). Our homeschool group also has a lot of social time for the kids to just play together (mostly outside). It's awesome.

I think the quality of the education depends on the teachers. And a big part of being a good teacher is caring. Hopefully the parents will care more about their kids than any other teacher would. Additionally, we are in the golden age of homeschooling resources (mostly online).

Be very careful what your outsource to others.

mdip4• 8 months ago

I appreciate you sharing -- specifically because my kids were Home Schooled until High School and attend Public High School, now.

I feel the same way about the value of early-years Home School and mainstream High School. Mom and I had agreed that we'd let them pick once they hit High School. That coincided with the end of the COVID lockdowns, so being lonely like everyone else, they picked Public School. Prior to COVID, I'd have put money on them remaining Home Schooled.

I did exactly the same things with my kids with regard to advanced math/science topics. Actual "sit down and learn time" was spent 80% on Math/Science and 20% on everything else. And I've found some things benefit being introduced way younger. Things like the theory of relativity are "accepted as fact" more easily when they don't stand in the face of 15-years of observation. It can be understood with cartoons and when the topic is studied -- in depth -- later, they're not having to start from "how, on Earth, does that make any sense?!"

mdip4• 8 months ago

I Homeschooled both of my children from birth to 7th and 9th grade, respectively. The state I live in had, at the time (might still), zero regulation around Home Schooling. I have met hundreds of home schooling families and children (as well as hired one), all wonderful people. A lot of them chose to do so for one or two common reasons (religion and learning disability seem, unscientifically, to be the most common).

I'm a bit of a unique case in that "it really should have been an unbelievable mess": this was done, almost entirely, while divorced from Mom. And we were not "amicable" through much of it. It was a decision we had both committed to before the kids were born and stuck with after the divorce. I have two children, not 4+ (maybe that's just my experience, but the first family I talked to about this had 7). I didn't do it for religious reasons, bullying reasons, "I hate teachers or public schools" reasons or because I wanted my children to win a bunch of spelling bees. I did it after researching options and concluding that I could educate my two children better than any other option available to them and I could do so without them spending all day in books. I believed I was taught arithmetic in a manner that made it harder for me to understand Algebra[0], and I didn't feel I was ever encouraged or otherwise directed "to learn skills and subjects on my own." The top two, though, were "I wanted self-learners" and I, my son and my daughter are diagnosed ASD (type 1); Mom probably is, too, but getting a diagnosis as an adult is combinations of difficult/pointless.

After the early years (probably 4th grade on, earlier for my youngest), the average Home School day became 45 minutes of book/traditional learning work (often less) from Home School curriculum, usually another 45 minutes of self-directed study and for the most part the rest of the day was for themselves to direct (with restrictions; video games were limited to creative and some other specific titles but our children had far more freedom than most). We did weekday only (with a lot of vacation) and September-April. There was simply no way to make the materials go any longer.

They did not take tests (at least, not in the way they're taken at school) until they took their first test in 7th and 9th grade. We, like most Home School parents, started off trying to "replicate school approaches" at home and discovered most of them exist because of schools. My favorite is "grades." If someone asked, "4.0". And they'd assume it's "because I'm Dad" and assume I'm grading lax. I'm not grading at all. We work on the material until it is learned above proficiently. And as a parent Home Schooling, that is the only path to success that doesn't involve misery because if you let them have a mulligan on something, it'll be built upon later and you and they will drown. You need grades in mainstream school, you need "pass/fail" with an "A" being the bar for passing in Home Schools.

I didn't admit most of this in the past, especially not the "45 minute" bit. I straight up lied about it to anyone who wasn't a Home School parent. I had family and friends actively discouraging me every single year that I did this. I admit it, now, because they're top students in their mainstream school and have been since day 1.

My children, like everyone else's, got lonely after the COVID lockdowns and we'd always told them they can decide what to do when my oldest reaches High School. It was sad, suddenly every kid is home but nobody's allowed to play together and even if they could, all of their peers were spending the whole day trying to replicate a classroom via video-calls. My kids were lonely, bored, and unhappy. The day-time Home School activities (that most people are completely unaware of) had been tried up for two years and didn't seem to be coming back. So we put them in Public Schools and lucked out that Mom was located the #4 district and the #1 High School in that district. It's been four years; my son is a Senior.

That first test taking experience landed them in accelerated courses. They started with and have continued to have a 4.0 GPA. They get the homework done at school. They might study for mid-terms and finals. My daughter, last year, I think had half of her classes with every single point earned. They've bested me in every imaginable way (I had a rocking 2.5 GPA in High School). They take school very seriously, but every year they've had a portion of the class that's been review from things we did in Home School.

If it seems unbelievable that I'd get these results on so little time, have a conversation with other Home School parents (assuming their children have some external validation to their education, otherwise we all lie). Consider that I have two children, not 20. You can basically read your own child's mind up until they reach their teens (much longer if they spend most of their time around you instead of peers at school). Being able to read your student's mind is an incredibly unfair advantage. It's not even that "you notice more quickly when you're going to slow or they're not understanding" it's that you anticipate it. I knew what parts of math I would have to slow down with for my son, they were different for my daughter (long division was daily fits with tears and all for a few weeks). Most of the time, with learning, there's a lot of burst/buffer/stall cycles and the sending and receiving end take a long time to figure out when one is in a sub-optimal state. We didn't do rigorous lesson plans (that's for keeping a class full of kids on the same page), we let them dictate how fast or slow we moved based on how much or little they struggle.

I hesitate to say "Just because we only spent 45 minutes in the books doesn't mean we didn't spend the rest of the day learning in other ways" but if you saw how a day was conducted, you'd conclude we didn't. My kids were enrolled in extra-curricular activities, but probably fewer than most mainstream school kids. They had weekly random activities that would be considered "field trips" in school. We were probably more strict than most parents with some things, because we could be: my kids received their first mobile phones at, I think, 13 and 15. We allowed no more than two hours per day of "watching a video, television show or movie." But (outside of inappropriate content) they were mostly unrestricted with which video games they could play and they played plenty (my daughter can slaughter me in just about everything, but I stopped playing for a decade while they were young). My daughter has taught herself to read music, guitar tabs and play Guitar, Bass, Piano and she sings. I played piano for 15 years and she's learned in a year what it took me five with formal lessons. She's taught herself to paint. My son is mini-me, computers, 3D printers, CNC, programming and any other electronic toy.

The reason I didn't do it for, though, turned out to be the reason I'm most thankful that I accepted the minor sacrifice: I wouldn't have had the arrogance to pray for the closeness and kind of relationship I have with my kids, today. I know my parents dreaded going to parent-teacher conferences. Those are my favorite!

[0] And, unintentionally favored an approach that ended up becoming Common Core math in my state, which is just loathed by parents ... which is too bad, because it worked very well for my own kids.

calebm2• 8 months ago

It's worth noting the "Two Sigma" problem on this topic (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_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".

jonmagic• 8 months ago

I haven’t read the whole thread but thought I’d share my experience having been homeschooled 12 grades.

My parents started homeschooling me because the public schools near where they lived then were supposedly subpar (Miami in the mid 80s, I have no idea if what they believed is true). When they moved to Michigan in 89 they continued homeschooling me and later my younger sister because they’d gotten used to it and a big court case had just been won (or was shortly after we moved) making it officially legal there.

I never complained because I did have a good social group through church, the neighborhood, and a strong homeschool group in the area that organized weekly park days, some coop classes with professional teachers, but more than any of that it gave me so much freedom.

My mom did a good job teaching me by 4th or 5th grade how to teach myself given course material, the library, and her or my dad when I needed more. She did standardized testing for us every year and I was able to complete 12th grade just before turning 17. They pushed me to use the local community college for math and science by 14 because they didn’t feel equipped with more advanced topics. They got me into summer science camps at the college I ended up attending and getting my undergrad at.

Every family I knew in the group were doing it for different reasons and did things differently but shared tips, curriculum, and really their lives with us. It was a very tight knit community despite spanning over 600 square miles. Some probably got stronger educations and more opportunities, for many different reasons, socioeconomic and others. As I remember most were well adjusted and successful as adults.

I mentioned freedom above and I’ll end on that. Once I’d been taught how to teach myself the sky was the limit. I had the opportunity to focus 4 hours straight on school work and then to work with my dad at construction sites, swinging a hammer, eventually part of a crew of 4 every afternoon building houses or whatever. That started at age 12. By 14 I wrote my first business plan with a friend, raised $10k from family and private investors, and started my first business (VRcade in Jackson MI, summer of 96). By 16 I had an IT consultancy. I don’t think I’d have had as many opportunities like that if I’d been at the local highschool from 7:30-2:30pm every day. I had friends at the school and a few of them worked service jobs after school but that was pretty rare.

So what did I do for my two kids? We chose public (charter) school for them but we got super involved. My wife and I volunteer there a few hours a week, teaching gardening and helping where needed. Neither of us felt we had the patience or skills to be full time educators and Covid proved that out when the kids were home for 6 months. I’m still not sure what magic my mom used to teach me how to teach myself. The important thing is we found our community at the school and amazing teachers, many of whom have been there 1-3 decades.

I am trying to instill the values and initiative my parents (both entrepreneurs) empowered me with. We’ve been paying for instruction for our 11yo at a (unofficial) trade school for a few years and now the same school pays them to help with instruction when they have big beginner classes. My youngest is leaning more towards tech like me and is super into games so I’m going to try and stretch my generalist programming skills to empower them in that arena.

All this to say I think it’s ok to have many ways to do things and find the way that fits your family. I really appreciate public schools because many wouldn’t have the opportunity for an education otherwise and I try to contribute back to that as much as I can even though it wasn’t my experience. And I support those who have chosen homeschooling and figured out how to make it work. Private schools I’m a little more meh on but I’ll do my best not to judge, lol.

mostertoaster2• 8 months ago

Be curious how they got their numbers. Because I had to fill out intent to homeschool forms for my 4 kids that are over 10, but they’re all at a classical Christian school, but there is one home day a week so it technically is considered homeschool by the state. So if they pull from those types of forms it could be there are a lot of kids who are at schools but look like they’re homeschooling from the numbers.

moron4hire4• 8 months ago

I was homeschooled as a child, from 1st through 12th grade, in a large homeschooling community from the late 1980s through the 1990s. I started college in 2000.

I heard all the stories about how homeschooled kids get better standardized test scores and generally enter college with fewer remedial courses, better academic outcomes, etc. I heard all the arguments that "actually, we do socialize, because we can still do Scouts and sports and blah blah blah."

It was all horse shit.

I do not know a single homeschooling family that did not have an issue with the parents eventually slacking off on checking up that the kids were doing the work. And, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the kids just skipped doing any work for most of the year. There would be a mad scramble at the end of the year to concoct a fraudulent portfolio to present to the state-required evaluator. And when the dust settled and all the spankings were done and all the tears were dried, new promises were made to not do it next year. New threats were made that you could "get up at 6am and get on that bus."

It took me until my 40s to realize it wasn't my fault. The people who were the responsible party--i.e. my parents--stopped acting responsibly. The person who is so incapable of being responsible that the state won't even let them drink, drive, or vote (all activities infinitely easier than trying to teach yourself)--i.e. my self--was the one who had all the blame lumped on him.

This wasn't a unique experience. I think maybe 1 kid out of the 30 I knew did not have this experience at least once in their homeschooling life. That one kid was perhaps the smartest, most mature of us; or perhaps she just feared her parents the most. She's also dead now, having killed herself in her early 30s.

For me, it was 4 times.

It was incredibly traumatizing. I lived the first 20 years of my adult life believing I was fundamentally a dishonest and untrustworthy person, and therefore unworthy of anything, especially love and career success. What I was was an irresponsible kid, aka "a kid", who had practically no supervision.

Every parent always said publicly they were doing it for academic reasons. In private, amongst themselves, the true reasons came out: sequestration away from "unauthorized" religious, political, and social ideas. And it always, always leaned right. We couldn't go to school because they were Teaching Evolution As If It's Fact When It's Just A Theory At That School. We couldn't go to school because Ever Since The Immigrants Started Moving Here To Take All The Apple Picking Jobs The Crime Has Been Through The Roof At That School (what the local family practice doctor cared about apple picking jobs, I could never figure out as a child). We couldn't go to school because They're Teaching Homosexuality Is Not An Abomination At That School.

Meanwhile, every single child I grew up with had to face a cliff moment where they had to decide if our collective experience was abusive. The few of us who said yes managed to get through college without dropping out, get moved away from home, get through rounds of suicidal ideation, self-medicating, therapy, antidepressants, and maybe eventually coming to terms and having happy productive lives.

Or they said no, it was fine, and they now live in poverty, have broken homes, still-active alcoholism, or are dead from suicide.

My own mother might be developing dementia and doesn't seem to recall at all things my sister and I agree we remember clearly. Things I've heard my friends repeat in their own stories. Things they've said their own parents also deny. I grew up incredibly lonely. My parents not only sequestered my sister and I from our municipal community, but also to some extent from our homeschooling community, because the one silver lining about my own particular experience was that my parents were not religious zealots. I grew up in constant fear of the State taking me away from my parents just because my mother took me to the grocery store during school hours (a thing my mother asserted could happen, so I better behave to not draw attention to us). I grew up believing society was going to collapse at any time. I grew up believing I was certainly going to Hell because, even though my parents claimed to be religious, we didn't go to church.

To this day, despite the intellectual knowledge that I'm really no different than anyone else, I still cannot shake the feeling that I'm always the outsider looking in, always the interloper trying to masquerade inside, and decode the secret workings of, the social groups I'm in.

This is incredibly difficult for me to talk about. There are many things I still cannot talk about, so please resist the online commentator urge to infer things about my current relationships.

I see people today talking about "we're thinking of homeschooling our children." Not just online, but in my own community, too. I want to scream at them that they have no idea what a gigantic mistake they are entering into. Even assuming they can avoid the dishonest reasoning for why they are doing it, even assuming they will perfectly execute an educational plan for their children over the course of 12 years, they are at the vet least forcing an outsider's complex on their children.

Yes, parents who send their children to public school could still be abusive. Yes, children who do go to public school also develop outsider complexes and plenty of other mental health issues. But at least the child will have a better chance to see that there are alternatives. At least the child will have a better chance to learn that they are a member of a shared society. At least the child will have a better chance to become independent from their parents.

seec2• 8 months ago

I very much disagree with your point of view. If you have authoritarian parents with narrow world views, being exposed to other ways of thinking/living in school will only raise your expectations and create resentment against the parents which will generally make things worse for you. And if you are a slacker (and the parents lets you slack) being in class isn't that useful. If you are smart enough you'll get by, doing nothing. But the moment you'll be required to actually put some effort the lack of work will show up and by then it will be too late. On the other hand you could get an early warning if you avoid the hard stuff being homeschooled and it's generally more effective when you figure out stuff yourself, not being spoon fed in a lecture.

And by being at home, time can at least be used for self-guided exploration that are likely to be more useful than whatever they decided to teach in the current era at school (outside of language/math/science later on it's all thinly disguised propaganda anyway). If you are focused on the same things as everyone else at the same time you are not actually building strength around your interests/characters, the only purpose is to make you fit a basic template so you can be "useful" in the labor market. The idea of public school is to make a tool out of you, before anything else.

What you are complaining about is having shitty parents, which is a problem with bad outcomes, regardless if you go to public school or not. And even if you are successful at public school, there is little chance those parents will pay for later studies, so you are mostly setting yourself up for disappointment. You might as well learn to figure out stuff on you own, because you'll need that skill more than anything else when it will be time to leave your shitty parents.

I understand the frustration that comes from the feeling of having "missed something" but I can assure you that unless you were leaving in a very good school district (aka rich, which doesn't seem the case) you really didn't miss anything. Most of the real learning is done outside of school, inside school is mostly endoctrinement.

moron4hire4• 8 months ago

Everything you've said regarding self-directed study is completely possible for children attending p the institutional education system. Nothing is stopping parents from supplementally teaching their children. Any effort a parent is willing to put into teaching their own children is effort that can be exerted regardless of participation in institutional education. If you choose to homeschool your children, you are discarding that floor. The only reason people choose to discard that floor is because they see that floor as actively harmful. We do not need to labor under any pretention that their evaluation of that harm is correct.

You do your children no favors teaching them they exist outside of the greater social dynamic. You teach them that the society in which they live, which they cannot escape and they must deal with for the majority of their lives without their parents, is not good enough for them. That might be fine for the rich and famous who have a completely different society they can count on to provide opportunity and support for their children, but it doesn't work for the rest of us who have to scrape a living together on our own ability to communicate our value.

You speak of indoctrination. Homeschooling is nothing but indoctrination to the parents ideology. If your ideology is so great, you shouldn't need to sequester your children away from society to convince them it is right. Children are born without prejudice. If they are receiving bad information in public school, it is trivial to teach them otherwise because children inherently trust their parents. Even children who grow up in the most abusive of homes have a hard time coming to terms with the abuse and discarding what their parents did to them. Homeschooling exploits that inherent trust to swing the indoctrination pendulum in the opposite direction.

You say that my experience was due to having abusive parents. Yes. Yes, that is absolutely correct. It takes abusive parents to choose to homeschool their children. By choosing to homeschool your children, you prove yourself an arrogant, self-centered person. Everything that follows thereafter is an extension of that.

burnt-resistor• 8 months ago

Homeschooling makes zero sense unless one or both parents are independently wealthy and already excellent academic communicators and there are firm, minimum subject milestones set by the state that must be achieved and reported on. Instead, it's being widely abused much like the anti-vaxx movement to opt out of society, norms, and replace education and healthcare with religion. And then it begs credulity why they are so many kids dying and losing their immune systems (IA because measles attacks the immune system) from an entirely preventable disease that has a safe and effective vaccine that was previously mandatory for everyone. And then it follow: what good is there in allowing some parents to selectively opt their kids out of society, a fundamental right of passage, and an essential public good to ensure socialization and universal education. Division of labor, specialization of trade for most means sending kids to properly funded, staffed, and sensible curricula public schools so the parents are freed up to earn more and make the family's life better.

There are some parents who might be Yale law grads who might not be rich who opt for some homeschooling given the right situation, but these are the outliers and I'm okay with these, while most aren't.

aiauthoritydev• 8 months ago

For anyone reading this the following context would be helpful:

1. Home schooling does not necessarily (and in most cases) does not mean a kid learning at home with parents. It only means parents have arranged for adequen learning through alternative means.

2. In many cases, multiple parents and their kids come together and take responsibility of their kids education. They may rent spaces, they may hire teachers and so on.

3. In many cases you have to satisfy government penpushers that you are doing a good job of this.

globular-toast3• 8 months ago

I'm the only person in my (large) family to go to university. In fact I went "all the way" and have a PhD. There's no way I could have been home schooled by my parents, they simply don't have a deep enough understanding of things beyond maybe age 10 for me. But, interestingly, it was my dad who taught me HTML, not school, and that's what I've ended up doing as a career. My dad never took HTML, or programming in general, that far, but it certainly set me on my way.

In a way this is a return to older times when children would learn the trades of their parents. I think that's great, but I do wonder how kids will acquire the broader education. Knowing how to program is really only a small part of what makes me valuable.

simgt• 8 months ago

As someone from a country where public school is the norm, private school less so and homeschooling the absolute exception, these threads are always wild to read. It really shows how deeply individualistic and polarized the USA is. Sure, let's make homeschooling the norm, problematic kids will be the only ones who fill the ranks of public schools, gifted kids or the ones from religious zealots will all live in their bubbles, then what? Snow Crash is your destination?

bentley5• 8 months ago

gifted kids or the ones from religious zealots will all live in their bubbles

If you’ve read this thread, then you know most homeschoolers dispute that they live in a bubble.

Sure, let's make homeschooling the norm, problematic kids will be the only ones who fill the ranks of public schools

I don’t see anyone in this thread advocating that. But I did see several arguing that homeschooling should be illegal. And homeschooling is illegal in countries like Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Part of homeschoolers’ outspokenness against the usual tired stereotypes is because there’s real risk of governments prohibiting home education even in situations when it would be superior to the local public schools.

harddrivereque• 8 months ago

School was hell on earth for me. Openly racist kids (I'm mixed race wo I was more or less not as strongly affected, but we had one kid of certain heritage that was being harassed on an hourly base, think of south park Cartman multiplied by 10) with teachers never doing anything about it, borderline maniac kids that would attack anyone randomly, teachers not caring. Sure, nowadays it's different, but for me school has leas to me not exploring some of my personality traits and basically being afraid of people and disassociating with society on a way of 'them vs me'. Sure, I'm talking about 20% of "bad" characters, but when 20% does this and the rest kind of pretends it's normal, you get the idea of what "normal" is in the society. But, being honest. I have to admit that having that experience gave me the understanding that what society nowadays "tries to pretend it is" is just hiding it's true face, because only in school people are actually honest and sincere. So in this sense, I understand that going to school to get to know the true face of our society is definitely useful for individuals, but it causes overall harm to society as it contributes to it's separation

Garlef• 8 months ago

This is not a good article.

An example:

- The numbers on reported satisfaction are taken at face value. But they are influenced by some biases.

-- Survivors Bias contributes to the satisfaction rates of homeschooling; It's hard to get into homeschooling but easy to get out of. As a result, those satisfied keep doing it while those dissatisfied with the public system are less likely to change.

etc etc

etothet• 8 months ago

I went public schools growing up and never imagined homeschooling as an option when I eventually had children of my own, but my kid was not the same in their school after the pandemic. Coupled with how ideologically focused the public schools in my state have become over the last few years, homeschooling them was an easy decision.

sfink• 8 months ago

Homeschooling, and more generally schooling, and more generally raising kids. They're hot-button topics that bring out the strong opinions and searing anecdotes, and the resulting "discussion" always seems to be depressingly useless. (I won't exempt this comment from that criticism.)

I'm just going to say that "homeschooling" is not a single thing and it's useless to pretend it is. In fact, "public school" is not a single thing and it's mostly useless to pretend it is.

I went to public school. My kids were a combination of public primary school, home schooling, and local community colleges. That experience gives me... well, very little in terms of predicting or understanding what others' experiences were like.

50-kid public schools (the size I went to) can be great for interacting with a diverse group of people -- like, actually interacting with them, not just attending the same school as them. It's also common for "diverse" in this case to mean "kids from a range of socioeconomic situations who are 95% the same race or religion" -- most small schools draw upon a small rural population that is often pretty homogeneous. (That was my experience.)

500-kid public schools naturally have much more diversity in total, but are totally random in terms of what an individual kid will actually experience. It's common for the kids to rigidly stratify themselves. It doesn't matter if there's a kid of a different color from you in your math class if you're surrounded by people like you and he's surrounded by people like him. Athletics are better at mixing people (by forcing a different stratification!), but it's easy to avoid having to deal with "them" even there if you don't want to.

Home schooling varies even more.

Yet that whole argument is also pushing a narrative of "good" vs "bad": being forced together with diverse people is good, so environments where that happens are better! But that's not true either, there are tradeoffs. I'll describe it in terms of stereotypes: public school kids get more exposure and experience with a wider range of kids their age. Home schooled kids get more exposure and experience with adults and kids of other ages. (I'm not saying either of these is universally true, but just go with it for now.) Which is better? You can argue that it's critical to survive the social pressure cooker of traditional schooling because you'll have to handle the same situations as an adult. But you can also argue that if you look at what's happening in public schools, those kids may be good at dealing with each other but they're often failing when faced with the real world. They depend on the collective consciousness that comes from being surrounded by similar-aged people physically and electronically, they're helpless when the responsibility is no longer diffused and they are actually the one and only person who can solve a situation, and they have a sense of entitlement that anything hard is unfair. The stereotypical homeschooled kid is vastly more prepared for many life situations.

So which environment is "better"? mu

bentt• 8 months ago

Everyone wants to make generalizations, but all this really means is lots of families find homeschooling to be the best choice. What factors into that can vary wildly.

FatherOfCurses• 8 months ago

Parental egotism apparently is at record numbers too.

Homeschooling hits record numbers

Related Stories