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Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

• neuroelectron 2y ago
  Common core math? ? Training kids to sabotage their mathematical ability to "level the playing field" is the most asinine thing I've ever seen and I'm disgusted it's still being taught.
• 11101010001100 2y ago
  For those comparing school to prison, please confirm that you have experience with both.
• aurareturn 2y ago
  Having gone through the San Francisco public schooling system, I would never send my kids there. I'd rather home school them if I lived in San Francisco, or if I have money, send them to private school.
  • cratermoon 2y ago
    > I would never send my kids there. Why not, what's wrong with it? What could you do better at home, or what could private schools do better?
    • klooney 2y ago
      The lottery is pretty rough on people, and a lot of the schools are not amazing.
      • cratermoon 2y ago
        What's "not amazing" about them?
        • Slava_Propanei 2y ago
          [dead]
        • deleted 2y ago
          [deleted]
    • yodsanklai 2y ago
      Don't know why this is downvoted, seems like a reasonable question. I don't know much about SF or public schools in the US. Are they all bad? do we have data comparing public/private schools in these areas?
      • rahimnathwani 2y ago
        Public and private schools don't take the same tests, so we don't have good days to compare the schools. Even if we did, it would be hard to disentangle the impact of selection bias. You could look at college acceptances or similar, but those aren't unbiased either, as colleges look at estimates of class rank, not just absolute performance.
    • unstyledcontent 2y ago
      I read thst San Francisco decided not to offer Algebra until high school so no one would feel left behind. One of those dystopian decisions that emerged from a well intentioned DEI initiative. A decision that defies logic and surprise didn't help. That would be enough of a red flag for me. https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-teaching/ https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-...
      • zetazzed 2y ago
        Algebra in 8th grade is back this year. https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/2024-03-15-sfusd-announces-pilot-schools-algebra-1-8th-grade-2024-25#:~:text=The%20San%20Francisco%20Board%20of,the%202024%2D25%20school%20year https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/.... I have no other knowledge to vouch for SFUSD either way though.
        • bluGill 2y ago
          my son is in pre algebra in 6th grade. I assume that mean algebra next year. I'm glad his fifth grade teacher realized he knew it all early in the year and moved him to sixth grade math early.
        • rahimnathwani 2y ago
          It's not fully back. Read the fine print.
    • nineplay 2y ago
      I wonder the same thing, I have friends who send their kids there and are happy with it. Not surprisingly for SF, most of the parents are educated with good incomes and expect their kids to go to college. That has its own set of downsides of course, but you could do a lot worse.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • aurareturn 2y ago
      You could literally live next to a school and there’s a chance your kids can’t go there. There are many kids from low income, broken families who are just really bad students. Bullies. Disruptive. Disrespectful to teachers. It was hell going through public schools in SF.
      • cratermoon 2y ago
        So it's "opt out of being around average people", then?
        • typewithrhythm 2y ago
          Average people aim to provide a good a start for their kids as possible; average aims to avoid public school if possible. You now only have a set of people defined by behaviour or ability too poor for private, parents who don't care, or ones with no options... Basically it's opting out of being around the dregs
          • cratermoon 2y ago
            Am I correct in reading this as you saying poor people and the ones with no options are "dregs"?
            • aurareturn 2y ago
              I'm not sure what your point is. All parents want to send their kids to the best schools. They buy expensive real estate for this reason. There is a very clear, unspoken reason why parents want to avoid poor areas for schools. SF has a lottery system. This means all kids in the city are mixed. Unfortunately, my experience was absolutely horrible for learning.
        • aurareturn 2y ago
          I wish they were average.
        • resonious 2y ago
  • nradov 2y ago
    This is one of the main reasons why there are more dogs than children in SF. There are some good public schools but parents don't want to deal with the vagaries of the lottery system so they move out to other school districts.
    • loughnane 2y ago
      Same thing in Boston.
• cratermoon 2y ago
  The headline is somewhat begging the question, but the author's key observation is on point: People homeschooling their kids are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, going for "opt out of being around average people".
  • dingnuts 2y ago
    I found this explanation extremely unsatisfying considering that you could make the same choice and put your child into private education if you're a successful tech person. I know families that homeschool and I like to read articles like this one to see if anyone "gets it." So far, no hits. They're opting out of mediocre instruction and government-mandated values enforcement ("DEI" in its public school curricula form); the other kids are irrelevant. The homeschoolers I know are average and have lots of social activities with average peers in their community.
    • cratermoon 2y ago
      If you look around and see "government-mandated values enforcement ("DEI" in its public school curricula form)", I already fear for your children, whether you home school them or not.
      • superq 2y ago
        You fear for other people's kids.. over politics?
  • ARandomerDude 2y ago
    Increasing the quantity and quality of good influences on your children is just good parenting. If I know there's a kid down the street who seems like he will grow up to be a criminal, and another kid who seems like he'll grow up to be a kind, hard-working, well adjusted person, there is a 100% guarantee I will encourage my kids to play with the second kid, not the first.
    • nineplay 2y ago
• hn_throwaway_99 2y ago
  I thought this was a really bad article. "Suddenly"?? I've heard many tech parents go full bore into homeschooling for at least about 2 decades now. Also, for the particular issues she talks about (e.g. social isolation), essentially all of the tech parents I know that are into home schooling put a ton of effort into having a really rich social environment, e.g. either through "group schooling" or lots of outside activities.
  • WillPostForFood 2y ago
    Covid and the school shutdowns, did create a real boost in the homeschooling. Exacerbated by the particularly draconian shutdowns and masking in areas where there are a lot of tech workers like the Bay Area.
    • zdragnar 2y ago
      I think it merely made parents aware of what was already happening. My nephew texted my brother during his lunch break to ask for more credits for his switch account. My brother asked why play games instead of talking or hanging out with others. My nephew sent back a video of the lunch room: every single student had their eyes glued to a digital device of some sort. The experience kids have in schools isn't what we as adults went through - a common thing for every generation - but when you can get more interaction and socialization via home school networks and groups of motivated parents, it is hard to argue against it.
      • vel0city 2y ago
        Hearing accounts like this where apparently kids bring game consoles to school as a regular thing further makes me support schools having technology lockers.
        • andyferris 2y ago
          Does the US really not do that yet? That's crazy. My children have school laptops for work and need to lock their phones up upon arrival until departure. You couldn't bring in a Switch, period. Sometimes they look at YouTube videos or play web games etc at lunch time on the laptop, but AFAICT they've been discouraging that more and more.
• code_for_monkey 2y ago
  big right wing swing for tech?
  • AnimalMuppet 2y ago
    There's nothing inherently right-wing about homeschooling. You could just as easily homeschool as left-wing parents who don't want your kids immersed in an environment where other kids judge them by what brands they're wearing, and where the teachers all subscribe to the capitalist view of how society should function. It's true that homeschooling has been more prevalent among the right wing, but there are lots of people who do it for lots of reasons. We did it when our local elementary school was bottom third in the state. My wife called up the vice principal, and asked why we should put our kids in their school. He said that their school could toughen up our kids. We decided that "tough" wasn't our main goal for our daughters, and we noped out of that school.
  • kristianbrigman 2y ago
    Alvin Toffler called it back in the 70s (in Future Shock); in there, he thought educated elites would move towards homeschooling, nothing political on his analysis at least (that may match current trend?)
• epicureanideal 2y ago
  [flagged]
  • mandibles 2y ago
    Schools are the place most people experience physical violence in their entire lives.
  • cdme 2y ago
    I went to public school (not in SF) but the only "wokeness" was historically accurate — erm — history classes. We didn't have books banned in the library or English courses either. The lack of physical safety is a product of policy (or rejection of) by the same people whining about "wokeness".
    • Salgat 2y ago
      Learning about systematic racism has been relabeled as Critical Race Theory, and suddenly teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre or how banks used to discriminate against minorities for lending is considered extremism and "woke". Growing up, learning this stuff in history books, was just normal and made sense in order for us to avoid repeating these mistakes.
      • cdme 2y ago
        Yeah, I took advanced placement history and government. Things were taught clearly, factually and without bias. Students aren't going to benefit from hiding inconvenient truths about this country's history and founding. We certainly don't need religion forced into classrooms either.
      • pogeys 2y ago
        > suddenly teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre or how banks used to discriminate against minorities for lending is considered extremism and "woke". No, these things were taught to me in school and I’ve never heard anyone consider historical facts like this to be CRT except people railing against conservatives (ironically demonstrating their own ignorance of what CRT is). What’s problematic about CRT is its postmodern view that liberalism is inadequate (or worse) at eliminating racism; downplaying objectivity in favor of “lived experience” that can supposedly never be truly understood by white people; rejecting colorblindness out of hand; advocating segregation of minorities in the name of “safe spaces”; regularly and unscientifically trumpeting the existence and scope of unconscious bias; emphasizing intersectionality to the point of essentialism. The famous Smithsonian “Assumptions of Whiteness” infographic (https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rational-thinking-hard-work-are-white-values-1518333 https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rationa...) is an example of these concepts infesting a mainstream cultural educational entity. There’s room to critique current racial discourse and advocate for changing models, but to state that the scientific method and “objective, rational linear thinking” are white values, implying that whites have a monopoly on science or that minorities are less capable at it, is obviously derived from critical theory, and is (I think unquestionably) horrifically racist. When there is any sign of these viewpoints seeping from higher academia into elementary schools, it’s perfectly natural for parents to become concerned.
• ausbah 2y ago
  I have no idea how common this, I hadn’t much of this trend among tech weirdos before this article. The one thought that I imagine is being told you’re “above average” and “destined to do great things” your whole life by your socially-deemed successful parents is just another set of probably unrealistic expectations placed on kids.
  • sitkack 2y ago
    I try and homeschool my kid when they are home (from school). I say some of those things, but I also say, when we are fixing a clogged drain by disassembling the plumbing. "You could be a plumber, lots of hard problem solving and you are not afraid to get dirty". You can have high expectations that they live an actualized life w/o projecting your own life-arc desires on them. If my kid turns out thoughtful, kind and a whole actualized person, then they are successful no matter what. The problem with homeschooling is that rarely is someone so well rounded that they can supply the full spectrum of education that a child needs. Blackbody vs an RGB source emulating a full spectrum. We all have cognitive blindspots.
    • AlexandrB 2y ago
      > The problem with homeschooling is that rarely is someone so well rounded that they can supply the full spectrum of education that a child needs. Blackbody vs an RGB source emulating a full spectrum. We all have cognitive blindspots. While this is true, it's not like schools are teaching kids a full spectrum of knowledge either. In particular, a lot of practical skills are often not taught in modern schools - personal finance, cooking, basic home maintenance and construction ("shop class"), etc. How valuable some of this stuff is will depend on the child of course.
      • vel0city 2y ago
        I agree with this, but IMO the more correct solution is to look for the gaps in learning from all sources and look to fill those instead of removing a massive chunk of education assuming one can do all of it better.
• carlosdp 2y ago
  > Here are some things I struggle with at age 32: > - Social awkwardness and anxiety > - Difficulty in forming IRL friendships > - Impatience with the idea of connecting on a meaningful level with other people: who needs ‘em? > - An abiding sense of detachment from reality I'm the same age and have the same things, and I went to traditional school K through university. Idk if that has much to do with how you were schooled, or at least not being home schooled doesn't just magically fix that.
  • sitkack 2y ago
    Those are all symptoms of ADHD. I am reluctant to point that out, but I see this a lot. I'd like to respond with a small footnote. Or wait until the comment drops below the fold. Alas, I cannot. :)
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • PaulHoule 2y ago
      Also schizotypy which maybe 5% of people have and gets DXed basically 0% of the time. It's a developmental disability which will make you a target for relentless bullying which will screw you up much more than you need to be screwed up. You should be reluctant to DX ADHD, everybody seems to have it because it's promoted by an addictive pill industry, it's almost as fashionable as gluten intolerance used to be or autism is these days. #notactuallyautistic
      • sitkack 2y ago
        Interesting. I read the wiki article and the mayo clinic page on it. School uniforms are not uniformly a bad idea I think. We as a civilization should really focus on removing bullying as memetic virus. It has knock on effects that are larger than we realize, like most forms of harm. I think most people seem to have it, because I think most people do to some degree, most things are a spectrum. We simply aren't prepared for the world we have accidentally created for ourselves. I personally don't find the pills addictive. Speaking of which, this quite long video, "Dopamine Expert: <clickbait redacted>" is quite good, esp if you are a fan of neurology and neuropsychology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6xbXOp7wDA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6xbXOp7wDA
• diogenescynic 2y ago
  Probably correlates with remote work.
  • diogenescynic 2y ago
    Another thought is the rise in school shootings.
• bitcoin_anon 2y ago
  School is the industrialization of childhood.
  • greesil 2y ago
    Help help I'm being repressed
  • MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
    civilization is the industrialization of society
  • attila-lendvai 2y ago
    yeah, and child labor was not banned, but made mandatory and pointless.
• x187463 2y ago
  Anecdotally, those around me that are homeschooling are doing it for one of two reasons: 1) Right-wing disgust over woke issues. 2) Fear of school shootings. That's coming from a non-tech middle/lower-middle class setting. 20-30 years ago, when I was in school, most of the homeschoolers seemed (again anecdotally) to be based on religion or some other idiosyncratic reasoning rather than the reasons I cited above.
  • AlexandrB 2y ago
    > 2) Fear of school shootings. I would add: 3) Fear of fear of school shootings. The active shooter drills and other security measures that American kids go through in some schools are positively dystopian. Even if the chances of a school shooting are statistically very low, the measures put in place to prevent them are probably not good for kids' psychological well being.
    • Validark 2y ago
      Honestly a school shooting drill was probably near the bottom of the causes of psychological problems when I was in school.
  • PaulHoule 2y ago
    I have some friends who are Christian but left wing (their kids would come over to play and draw pictures about helping poor people.) The dad teaches CS at a small Catholic college, mom stayed home and educated their kids. The "disgust over woke issues" existed in some form 30 years ago when people were homeschooling but it had not hardened into the constellation it is in now. Back then you could get folks like that to talk articulately about how they disagreed with secular values, introduce a word like "woke" and now people talk past each other, at best, if they talk at all.
    • MathMonkeyMan 2y ago
      I miss the days when young earth fundamentalist Christianity tinged with racism was my most compelling ideological opponent.
• nosefurhairdo 2y ago
  I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. The reading/math skills are so dismal, any student who learns at home is bored as hell. Private schools are outrageously expensive. Homeschooling is becoming the pragmatic choice.
  • PaulHoule 2y ago
    It's a situation like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model where "voice" never works.
    • disqard 2y ago
      TIL, thank you for sharing that. Btw, I'm trying hard to think of places (today) where "Voice" works. For instance, in a corporate setting, I can personally attest that it does not. Perhaps there are some "small-scale" contexts where it does work (HOA?)
  • msluyter 2y ago
    | Private schools are outrageously expensive. Yes, and... In states where property taxes fund schools, there are basically two ways to pay for a good school: a) go to a private school, b) live in a school zone with high real estate values. At various points my wife and I calculated that 8 years at ~25k/yr tuition would work out to about the same as the ~200k house price delta we'd have to pay to move to a better school zone. And I suppose option #3 is rationing, which is how some schools do it (our daughter is in a gifted academy where admission is limited via lottery.)
    • cloverich 2y ago
      I did the same math comparing portland with suburb schools (around portland and seattle) and came to the same conclusion. But one other thought is when the money goes to the mortgage, you get to keep the wealth after (assuming you sell to downsize at some point).
• jazzyjackson 2y ago
  Homeschooling is seeing a surge in popularity, its not just tech people or high status people. IME it's a lack of trust, sending your kids to be raised by strangers. I grew up in a small town and some of my teachers were basically neighbors. For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools which might serve a thousand students from 4 different towns it's placed somewhat equidistant to, ie, in the middle of nowhere
  • netdevphoenix 2y ago
    The irony of this is that you rely on strangers for critical stuff like ensuring you don't get electrocuted or burned at home or even ensuring that the water that you drink won't make you ill or that your car is a good enough condition to not lead you to a fatal crash. Any of these affects your close relatives. What makes education different?
    • AlexandrB 2y ago
      I think there's a broad perception that education professionals are ideologically captured by the left. It's hard to know how true this is, but individuals like "libsoftiktok" have made a career out of stoking that fire. Also, unlike your other examples of strangers working on things, there's not really a feedback loop of review and rework where mistakes can be corrected. If your child gets a bad education, that's time lost that's really hard to recover and can set them back for life. Edit: To add, the "ideological capture" perception is important because of what education is. When you're dealing with an electrician, it doesn't matter who they vote for because electricity works the same way regardless. Teachers don't just regurgitate information but promote a set of values and expectations in their classroom so their personal opinions can matter a lot. And that's not even getting into teachers who explicitly try to teach students their worldview.
    • brightball 2y ago
      It's not different. If the water you drink is having problems, you'd have campaigns over it, protests, people trying to get it resolved and potentially lawsuits. People would band together to do whatever they could to fix the problem that they see. Education is seeing the exact same thing. Parents see a lot of problems. They are going to school board and council meetings, people are campaigning on solving the issue and people are taking whatever measures are in their power to fix it...like home schooling. When people see problems, they want to fix them. It's exactly the same thing.
• MichaelRo 2y ago
  Well, I went through through the public school system from rural (hamlet) kindergarten till big city university and I say ... it's OK as a default baseline but if one wants some resemblance of competitiveness and performance from their kids, one cannot avoid private tutoring. If that is done by the parents / family, then it's almost like home schooling. But I don't like home schooling because the kid is left out of the system and the studies are not recognized. At some point they will have to take traumatizing equivalence tests, which can be entirely avoided by playing along - go to a public school, or in my kid's case, a private school which follows the same curricula. But I stress again, even with private school, there's no replacement for private tutoring if you want your kid to succeed in life.
  • ahmeneeroe-v2 2y ago
    Great point about private tutoring, I agree. The equivalence tests are going to be country/US-state specific though. Many do not require such tests at all.
• unstyledcontent 2y ago
  I think as a professional in tech, it's frightening and obvious how behind schools are in keeping up with the modern world. I'm not talking about having ipads. AI will be he most significant technology humanity has experiences. We need to pivot toward an educational model that enhances creativity and cooperative communication but I just don't see that happening. It's still the bucket model of learn this don't ask questions, kids are a bucket and they need to be filled up by knowledge. It's outdated NOW, with absolutely no indication there will be significant changes.
• PaulHoule 2y ago
  Circumstances can drag you into it. I had trouble in the public schools because of bullying linked to my schizotypy (then undiagnosed despite what I'm told later was an exceptionally good psych eval for the late 1970s) They were going to drug me so my parents took me out for two years, I skipped three and was successful in high school. (In the single year my parents were able private school I was treated as I had some rights and dignity) My son struggled in elementary school in a different way. Our school got labeled as a "persistently dangerous school" because we had an principal who, unlike others in the district, filled out the paperwork honestly (and got fired for it.) I lost faith in the superintendent when he first words in a meeting were "we're going to appeal it" as opposed to something like "we're going to do everything in our power to make this school safe". I was active in the PTA (maybe the only dude; that same superintendent was dismissive of my wanting to be active in my son's education at the same time he welcomed the mother of a 'special' child who could call the state and light a fire under his ass to do so) and was very impressed with the teachers for one year, but the next year they seemed disorganized and the precipitating incident was when my son made a horribly violent doodle and the teacher wrote "Great!" with an underline on it. We didn't take him back the next day and kept him out for two years. We couldn't get him on a good reading program but we got him far above grade level on math with Kahn Academy. (As an adult circumstances got him interested in reading, now he's reading The Economist every week, books on chess openings, psych textbooks I loan him, etc.) We never quite filled out the paperwork but two years later we slotted him into middle school where he was successful.
• thinkingtoilet 2y ago
  We are in an age where people who watch a youtube video think they know more than the experts. Being a good teacher is a skill and understanding childhood development is something that requires proper education. I'm not saying there is never a good reason to home-school your kid, but most people who do it are unqualified and from my limited experience the kids who are home schooled have huge holes in their education. Surprisingly, they do seem to be fine socially which is what you hear many people worry about.
  • hokumguru 2y ago
    I'm so worried for those parents raising children outside of school without degrees in childhood development! Think of all the unqualified parenting time happening without skilled teachers to supervise!
    • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
      Teachers are mostly very uneducated and ineffective at teaching itself and the subjects they teach. I don’t think spending time to get an education degree or certification means much. Parents care for their children more than any random teacher, especially ones that resist performance measurements to judge their effectiveness. I would expect the average parent to be FAR more effective just based on that care.
      • presentation 2y ago
        But good teachers can make a huge difference, it's a shame identifying them is a black art and so few people get that access.
      • TrackerFF 2y ago
        I went to a rural public school, underfunded as they come, and my HS math teacher is still in the top 3 of all teachers / instructors I've had throughout my life. If my parents were to teach me math, I simply wouldn't be working in a STEM-field today. The majority of my teachers were good. The dynamic was completely different compared to being around my parents. Leave the teaching to the professionals.
• daft_pink 2y ago
  Personally, I have high functioning autism. I would do terrible at interpersonal relationships, but then get near perfect scores on all the tests. Teachers would anticipate that I would be terrible and then when I got perfect scores on all the tests, they would be pissed off. I think there are a lot of tech people that are neurodivergent and had terrible experiences in school and would love to avoid my child having that experience. Also, I’m not super happy about the extreme views on race, sex and religion that are going through the school system. I would like the opportunity to teach a more moderate view. I feel like people who don’t have kids who make comments about this trully don’t understand many parents perspectives on this. Also, when you are a parent, you find that you have to move to specific areas to get good schooling and homeschooling would allow you to live where you want to and not pay and go through the application for private school. It’s interesting that everything in this article that’s anti-homeschool relies on the parents not doing something correctly, which I think most people just assume they correct for that. I’m not worried about abusing my own kids, because I’m not going to abuse them. Honestly, my mom was a teacher and she was anti-homeschool and many of the anti-homeschool bullet points were provided by the union and I think she just wanted to get full funding for the school and the state wouldn’t provide funding to the school when the homeschoolers didn’t show up and wasn’t really caught up in those arguments. However, my wife is never going to homeschool our kids or allow me to do it, so it’s just not going to happen.
  • PaulHoule 2y ago
    My son's district has a black superintendent and at least one black principal but otherwise black (and other) kids don't get to see the example of black teachers (and learn school is a "white thing you wouldn't understand" the same way that boys come to the conclusion that school is for girls when they don't see any male teachers -- the problem here is representation-ism that stops at the very top, if they do get a black teacher they get promoted out of the ranks immediately) When my son was in middle school he was quite inspired by a curriculum unit on the Harlem Renaissance and liked the school's black principal. Later on he felt the attitude about gender (man vs women as opposed to something else) was very oppressive and that it contributed to him and other students falling victim to incel ideology and sometimes body dysmorphia. Today he struggles to talk to girls not because he's afraid of being rejected but because he's afraid of being reported.
• Slava_Propanei 2y ago
  [dead]
• vodou 2y ago
  One thing I've never understood with homeschooling: How come parents think they have the competence to be a teacher? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
  • nataliste 2y ago
    One thing I've never understood with public schooling: How come teachers think they have the competence to be in loco parentis? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
    • bigstrat2003 2y ago
      > How come teachers think they have the competence to be in loco parentis? Multiple members of my wife's family are teachers in the local public school system. From what they have told me: they don't want to be in that place. Parents demand it of them, despite their strong attempts to push back and say "hey this one is your job as the parent to solve". So that's the reason in at least some cases, although probably not all.
    • defrost 2y ago
      Here in this country it's not teachers that assess their own compentence to be educators, it's their mentors that guide and grade them through a university Bachelor of Education Course and their first year trials of "live" teaching in the wild.
  • evantbyrne 2y ago
    Depends on the parents because a lot of them are more than qualified. The typical education major isn't exactly a scholar, but that is also true of most people.
  • ecshafer 2y ago
    I had numerous teachers that won local and regional teacher of the year awards that were, too put it bluntly, terrible at teaching. The actual pedagogical education that teachers receive is not good, and when you look at the rigor in their degree programs it would be found extremely wanting compared to just about any hard science degree program. There are numerous examples of pedagogical research being neglected to be included in programs for dogmatic reasons, and the usage of such methods like whole word reading over phonics would indicate large scale failure. Anecdotally, if I were to stack rank my education in k-12 based on quality of teacher, it would essentially be all professors followed by k-12 teachers, with those receiving more teacher instruction being lower on the list. I was once instructed by a history teacher, to not use examples on a history essay that we didn't learn in class, because she had to look them up. I find it incredibly easy to believe that I can teach my children better than the average teacher.
• sam_lowry_ 2y ago
  They watched Aella interviewed by Friedman?
• spiderfarmer 2y ago
  The USA is going backwards in many, many areas and is no longer in the top of any important indices so this fits the bill.
  • morkalork 2y ago
    Public school education is a shit show in many western countries. I'm not in the USA but all the talk about private schools and lotteries is very real. The only thing we don't have is charter schools leaching public funds.
    • spiderfarmer 2y ago
      The USA is ranked below most other western public school systems so I don’t think you can conclude “the US are doing bad because all western countries are”. It’s just a matter of priorities and the US prioritizes defense over education.
      • morkalork 2y ago
        Wasn't there a time in the 70s/80s when the USA prioritized education and STEM specifically for the MIC and the cold war?
      • nradov 2y ago
        Are those education metrics even measuring the correct things? Many other countries have higher scores of educational achievement, and yet on average we ignorant Americans go on to be more productive and more innovative than any other major developed country. Just to pick one example, the USA develops about 80% of the new prescription drugs every year. Does it really matter if we can't integrate a function or remember when the Civil War started?
        • lyu07282 2y ago
          American exceptionalism is one hell of a drug, I think this denial is one of the reasons why you are impotent to fixing any one of your numerous glaring issues like education, health care, housing, infrastructure, etc.
• xnx 2y ago
  No one seems to have mentioned AI/LLMs yet. Between Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and LLMs, if your child has curiosity, the resources to tutor have never been better.
  • cloverich 2y ago
    We get weekly summaries of our childrens curriculum from the school. I run it through chatgpt and get quality weekly study guides for reinforcement at home, its awesome.
  • wrenky 2y ago
    Those are sources, and while curiosity is great most kids are focused on specific things not everything. Kids need direction and somebody them to focus on things they dont want to learn- like a kid who loves animals isnt going to learn math or how to write well, and a kid whos interested in history might not care at all about science. Parents are no better at this unless they are incredible focused on utilizing a curriculum and addressing their own issues along the way- And even then, learning with other kids is incredibly helpful. Talking to a computer is not a replacement for a teacher (yet).
    • xnx 2y ago
      > Talking to a computer is not a replacement for a teacher (yet). I agree. The limitless patience and non-judgement of a computer is very valuable in a learning context. LLMs won't be better than the best private tutors, but its very likely they'll be better than 80% of junior high through college teachers.
  • lif 2y ago
    interesting take. Heard of Synthesis? (hint: DARPA funded). At the local elementary school, we are told the kids are being kept safer now thanks to being tracked by AI cameras. Some parents, maybe especially those with insight into tech fact vs. tech marketing, may have reservations about "tutors" whose services (perhaps for free) come with the stipulation that they are free to record every bit of data about your kid and do with it as they please. The're being silly, right? Because? As everyone on HN knows: software is super safe, and the entities/corps controlling it, so, so benign. Data doubly so -- hacks basically never happen, am I right? No one cares about your kid? Or?
• ohm 2y ago
  Most of the people I know that homeschool their kids do it because they don’t want their kids to get vaccines that schools require them to have.
• ruthmarx 2y ago
  At least in the US the education system is so incredibly bad for anyone reasonably intelligent where homeschooling is an option it should be the clear preference. At least until high school.
• red-iron-pine 2y ago
  * smart tech folks who value education not seeing education value in local schools * chronically underfunded public schools based on local property taxes, fewer programs, etc. * good private schools aren't cheap * political axes to grind esp. by the right to defund the Dept. of Education, and create curriculums that don't sell well (e.g. bibles in school, pro-oil & gas slants, etc.)
• formerphotoj 2y ago
  This "shouldn't" be surprising. Smart people seeing a wider perspective, seeing the limits of mass-schooling and top-down curricula, seeing other social challenges, and seeing a better option? I live in Seattle; there's a reason it's one of the top metros with per capita private school enrollment and if it weren't for tech incomes, I'd expect homeschooling and homeschooling collectives to thrive. Comments here about neurodiversity needs are also on point.
  • tobinfekkes 2y ago
    I live in the Seattle metro, and tomorrow morning is the first day of class for our homeschool co-op, where I'm teaching software engineering to high schoolers.
    • cosmic_quanta 2y ago
      I'd love to read about your experience doing this!
      • tobinfekkes 2y ago
        It's a wonderful experience! I taught my first class in 2012, one for 6-8th grades, and one for 9-12 grades and then off-and-on through the years as needs arose. It's a lovely time in their lives when computers are still "unknown" and a little magical, and they're learning about Minecraft or Roblox. They love to see how things work, but especially, how to create things. So much of the grown-up internet is about endless passive consumption, so it's great to plant little seeds about how to use computers creatively and constructively and see where they run with it. Not everything has to be in an app, or behind a login, or from scrolling, or watching. We can just open up Notepad++ and create something. When they understand and master that, we move on to terminal or VS Code, or whatever works best for their trajectory. We take a journey from electrons to gates to binary to bytes to characters to files to folders to ports to IP addresses to routers to HTTP to servers and back again. It's fun to see them piece together a mental model for how all this previously-invisible stuff actually works. It's very complex when stacked together as a whole, but each individual layer is rather simple and straightforward. I have the career I do, and life that my family does, because nearly 25 years ago, one of the mom's in this same homeschool co-op taught an HTML/CSS class, and a "build your own computer" class. We scrounged some parts together from a Seattle PC recycler and built our own Linux boxes, then played little games or built websites. I'm endlessly grateful for the time and experience she invested into me at a very young age.
• kkfx 2y ago
  Since most schools are designed to craft meat-based robots, like https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-useful-idiot-capitalism/615031/ https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... those who try to be humans try to give their progeny a human future...
• prakashrj 2y ago
  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXhsutNKhec https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXhsutNKhec Following is recent video of my homeschooled son that this community might appreciate. It gives an opportunity to tailor education and challenge kids potential.
• dmitrygr 2y ago
  Because I want my kids to succeed in reading, history, math, and science, and schools instead give them iPads and teach them <rest of answer self-censored in self-preservation, but you know exactly what goes here>
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  The actual title of the article is: "Why are tech people suddenly so into homeschooling?" which is not exactly the same as "becoming fashionable". Why not use the original title?
  • j16sdiz 2y ago
    dang edited it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706248 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706248
• insane_dreamer 2y ago
  Economics plays into this too. Housing in good school districts is often much more expensive, and private schools are ridiculously expensive. COVID is another factor. Anecdotal of course, but I've only met two home schooled families since moving to our present city 3 years ago, and one of them started out of necessity during the pandemic and found that it worked well and so never went back -- but they're a one income family so one parent has the time (the only way it works, IMO, unless you co-op with another family or two, which can work if you're friends). I must say I was very impressed with their kids.
  • bluGill 2y ago
    Where I live all the districts have the same funding per student across the entire MSA. The inner city schools still do much worse.
    • insane_dreamer 2y ago
      The economic situation of the parents is a greater factor than the funding of the school IMO
      • bluGill 2y ago
        I agree but many keep claiming that inner city schools just lack money despite evidence otherwise.
  • blackeyeblitzar 2y ago
    In Seattle schools have double the budget compared to the years ago, and spend more than 25K per student each year. The schools are worse than ever, which has convinced me that funding isn’t the problem. This might be a local issue though, with a very ideological school district that has ignored the basics of education.
    • rahimnathwani 2y ago
      SF: 27k
• rayiner 2y ago
  American schools just aren’t very good. I remember when I was in third or fourth grade, my mom flipping out about why we were spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math. To this day, my mom, who grew up in Bangladesh but got a classic British education from a tutor, is more well read in western literature than I am (Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Socrates, Plato, etc.) As far as I can tell, private school doesn’t even fix the problem. My kids go to a pretty expensive private school and it’s not rigorous or challenging—the main benefit is that the kids are better behaved so there is less chaos and distraction.
  • myheartisinohio 2y ago
    Western literature is bad because it was written by cis white men. Native Americans lived here and had an advanced society that was way better and it didn't have capitalism. /s
  • Terr_ 2y ago
    > spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math After a bunch of years overseas, I returned to the US to complete my last two years of high school. I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
    • braincat31415 2y ago
      My daughter's middle school science class spent a month and a half chewing through water and rock cycle. I don't think geology is in her future.
    • rayiner 2y ago
      The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization. They don’t learn anything substantive about the founding U.S. cultures (big differences between Puritans and Jamestown settlers). They don’t study European history as a required course so they know almost nothing about how the modern world came to be (Westphalian nation states, etc). And they learn almost no world history beyond ancient civilizations (native Americans, ancient Egyptians, etc). I spend $33,000 a year on my daughter’s education and she was telling me about some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe—but she has no idea what the Magna Carta is, or what the political structure was of the UK that we declared independence from, who Plato is, etc. My mom was more educated as a girl in a desperately poor Muslim country in the 1950s than my daughter in an affluent DC region private school.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• woodruffw 2y ago
  > These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people. It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way. "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives. Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
  • bdangubic 2y ago
    "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives. if by “deal with” you mean serving them fries on their way to a ski trip, perhaps :)
    • syndicatedjelly 2y ago
      I like to think you mean that the so-called “elites” end up studying some useless degree and only can get jobs as trust-fund burger stand employees, serving fries to the “dummies” who chose to work hard and become wealthy the old-fashioned way
      • briHass 2y ago
        It was a reference to 'Good Will Hunting'. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's first movie.
        • riffraff 2y ago
          Both Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had movies before that. It was Damon's breakthrough for sure tho.
      • scotty79 2y ago
        > who chose to work hard and become wealthy the old-fashioned way That's so last century. Now about as real as Santa. Now you can only get wealthy by inheritance or gambling. Even if it means gambling with you health you still need to win for it to amount to anything. There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now. I'm not sure if there ever was.
• 23B1 2y ago
  Because public education has become a vector for propaganda. Because we spend more per student but with awful results. Because our brightest don't become schoolteachers. Because education is years if not decades behind the skills curve. Because big, powerful teachers unions make change impossible. Because parents have spared the rod and spoiled the child.
  • aappleby 2y ago
    I don't think I've ever heard "big powerful unions" and "teachers" in the same sentence before.
    • 23B1 2y ago
      The NEA is the largest union in the United States.
      • NoGravitas 2y ago
        But also not functionally a union. Teachers are actually represented by their state affiliate, and whether or not they can collectively bargain (the sine qua non of being a union) varies from state to state. Personally, I've lived in several states, but none in which the state Education Association was able to collectively bargain for its members.
        • PaulHoule 2y ago
          Every K-12 teacher I've known (male and female) has had times when they've come home crying from the stress. (workload, the kids you care about and can't help, ...) The NEA does something about pay and tenure but when it comes to protecting teachers emotionally forget about it. Roughly half of the people who get a teaching certificate at their own expense discover it is a job that they can't stand to do.
        • 23B1 2y ago
          State affiliates acting at the behest of a national union is a functional union, and have been effective in collectively bargaining for members since the 1970s.
• Gabriel54 2y ago
  As someone who once heard, in 11th grade pre-calculus, that pi is a rational number equal to 22/7, I cannot be so surprised that many parents would choose to homeschool their children. Most parents have no idea what is going on in their childrens' schools.
• yowayb 2y ago
  Somewhat tangential, but a big part of math proficiency is varied repetition (eg, Kumon's practice sheets where you repeat the same operation with different numbers) and you can almost just make these yourself now.
• giarc 2y ago
  I feel like there should be a different word for those that "home school" their child by hiring a private teacher and they learn in the house. For me, homeschooling means one of the parents (often the mother) teaches the child(ren) in their home. I know many teachers, and they have a very specific set of skills on how to teach. I wouldn't expect any old parent to know this and I suspect home school kids are worse off for it? But I'm happy to be pointed to evidence on the contrary.
  • jordanpg 2y ago
    Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Who is physically doing the homeschooling? The rich tech people? Their spouses? It sounds like what he is criticizing is just extra-private private schooling or something like that. As distinct from homeschooling by parents, which is the more… eclectic version the author grew up with.
• ergonaught 2y ago
  Because the education system is garbage; because the parents are idiots; because of the paranoid delusions about Them and What They Are Doing; because the kids (and in many cases the teachers) are awful human beings that people (idiots or not) don't want their kids to be around several hours a day every day; because of school shootings and other forms of violence; because the value in this is no longer clear to anyone; because the only people demonstrating "leadership" in this matter are leading outraged mobs around to prop up themselves and their power structures rather than anything productive. Or, in our case, our youngest has autism and ADHD and was unable to be successful in the "not homeschool" environment (for numerous reasons), so we removed him from it.
• tonymet 2y ago
  My school district in south WA is a representative example. Outcomes in math & English have been poor and continue declining. Attendance has dropped by > 30% despite mild population growth. Cost / student are among the highest, and due to the lacking attendance, deficits have led to staff cuts, leading to worsening outcomes. A death spiral. To many, schools are perceived to be costly, unsafe indoctrination centers that push left-leaning agendas. Extended covid lockdowns were a huge betrayal. You only have one chance to raise your kids, and the competition is getting tougher every year. Homeschooling in the area has tripled. Some of the criticism is justified, some isn’t. But with failures on the academic outcomes, safety, and subjective failures on the ideology – the onus is on public schools to win back trust. You can shame the homeschoolers , but that won’t bring them back. Time will tell if they succeed, but compared to public schools, the bar is so low that odds are in the homeschoolers favor. Especially if their parents care enough to do it.
• s0kr8s 2y ago
  The author's thesis is that the rise in home-schooling is driven by a desire to "opt out of being around average people," and he implies that he is not home-schooling his own children in part because he himself was home-schooled and believes that may have contributed to his own struggles with social stress. However, given his self-description, it seems there is a decent chance he would have struggled with social stressors regardless of what education setting he was in, possibly even more so if he had been exposed to bullying or excessive social stressors in a more traditional public education setting. Exposing oneself to just the right dose of poison in order to develop immunity is a delicate science. When I was younger, I was also taught to believe that nurture always triumphs over nature, but as I got older and eventually had my own kids, I found out that nature was winning way more of those battles than I first realized.
  • bjt 2y ago
    Judging by the name and picture, I'm pretty sure Forrest Brazeal is a he.
    • s0kr8s 2y ago
      Excellent point. Comment updated for accuracy.
    • pkkkzip 2y ago
      We live in a social climate where we can't even assert ourselves of someone's gender based on their name out of fear from a very local special interest group that has far reaches into public education system and this is another big reason why parents who can't afford private school opt for home schooling. The fact that parent had to edit their comment and could not call a man a he answers the article's question very well.
      • tdeck 2y ago
        This is word salad. What does it mean to "assert yourself" of someone else's gender?
• Spooky23 2y ago
  Mostly religious fanaticism. It sucks, my sons went to catholic schools, and now an independent Catholic high school. The new breed of “evangelical style” Catholics are starting to appear. They are more political and reactionary in terms of religious politics/practice. Where infrastructure doesn’t exist, homeschools and stuff like “classical education” are gaining traction.
• knighthack 2y ago
  Answer to question: because public schooling is becoming a place of indoctrination/brainwashing (particularly of woke mentality), rather than a place of learning. This is very apparent in America, but even happens in outside places like England - kids as young as 7 are being taught and groomed with unnecessary sex and sexual ideas, when that age is meant for innocent play and exploration. I know a few parents who've taken objection to this. They would rather have their children be properly taught, rather than be taken advantage of for their high impressionableness.
• protocolture 2y ago
  I have been looking at homeschooling because of the 2 Sigma Problem. But a lot of the resources to help people homeschooling are weird christian nonsense.
  • gnkyfrg 2y ago
    [dead]
• dartharva 2y ago
  The moment I read the title I knew exactly how the comment section was going to look like. I was not disappointed. I wonder if typical HNers ever get aware of what a spectacle they make of themselves and their self-important narcissistic tomfoolery.
  • pixxel 2y ago
    /Captain Hypocrisy enters the chat
  • NoGravitas 2y ago
    Yeah, big "I don't know how to explain to you that you should care about other people" vibes, as expected.
• ripped_britches 2y ago
  This piece makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims. Just because you are putting a child in a siloed environment doesn’t mean you’re teaching them that everyone else is beneath them. If you are homeschooling and not teaching humility, kindness, etc then you’re doing it wrong. - parent of 6 homeschooled kids
  • tetris11 2y ago
    There is still an implicit "othering" of other children. They are in one camp and yours are in another. If they have any semblance of imagination as kids do, they will dream up reasons beyond the one you gave them
    • synecdoche 2y ago
      In what way is the ”othering” different than what children otherwise do, apart from being in different kind of schools? As you wrote children (or more generally) people can make up all sorts of reasons for that.
    • elpatokamo 2y ago
      Our two kids are homeschooled and are generally equally excited to play with all their friends (some homeschooled, some in regular public school, some in private school). I have yet to see or hear any "othering" of their friends. In fact, I'd say the breadth of different social situations they are exposed to makes the "othering" less likely.
      • nprateem 2y ago
        Ever thought it might be the other way round? I'd send my kids private, but no way would I isolate them with home schooling. You're meant to do that on evenings and weekends anyway.
        • elpatokamo 2y ago
          Yeah, the whole "maladjusted home school kid" is a thing we were cognizant of when making this decision. To your second point: I think the best predictor of success in any education setting is intentionality and involvement from the parents. That said, with home school you get nights and weekends AND days to spend in whatever way is most optimal for your kids.
• ConspiracyFact 2y ago
  >Pro-homeschooling: At school, you’re in danger of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home. And the risk gets bigger if you eliminate outside influences that might notice when something’s wrong. You’d have to be an idiot to think that this argument could be used in a conversation about homeschooling with any particular potential homeschooler.
• nopmike 2y ago
  wtf is going on here? This is one of the most toxic comment sections I've ever seen. Do people really think this way?
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• dismalaf 2y ago
  Homeschooling is becoming fashionable because school systems have become shittier... Teachers are unable to discipline kids, there's zero consequences for kids who are disruptive, instead of failing kids school systems are dumbing down the curriculum, there's also massive institutional biases... Plus it's more or less a golden age for homeschooling: there's more resources available than ever.
• nelox 2y ago
  I’m not sure why it is becoming fashionable, but the reality of parents homeschooling children, who are functionally illiterate and never finished high school, is a recipe for disaster.
• anovikov 2y ago
  Homeschooling doesn't scale, this is why it's not a solution for everyone. I can't see a fundamental drawback to it, like there are none in say, private jets: only problem is that neither can be applied to any sizeable minority, let alone not to the majority, of people. But if you can do it, do it. The need for socialisation and being able to get along with the average had any meaning for as long as we had any hope for the "society" thing. Now it is obvious that there is no society (and it is arguable whether one really ever existed, maybe only for short periods in times of grave crises).
  • temptemptemp111 2y ago
    [dead]
• thr0waway001 2y ago
  Not sure about fashionable, but rather: 1) Private school is expensive as hell. 2) Yet, public school sucks. Most normies don't wanna learn and the system doesn't reward nor incentivize the smart, initiated students who want to excel. There are many normies that teachers just gotta essentially ... just babysit. And God forbid that a teacher stands up for themselves. Then some Karen has go and destroy that teacher and their career.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• jstoiko 2y ago
  Homeschooling often gets confused with self-directed education, aka “unschooling”. These are not the same. The former tends to replicate school and requires a teacher, usually a parent. It’s basically school with added/paced/altered/enriched curriculum at the cost of socialization, although that can be compensated with other forms of peer groups, especially in urban area. Comparing this method versus school A or school B is pretty much like comparing school A and B as two schools can be as different as any given school and homeschool. The latter is what John Holt referred to as homeschooling but is based on self-determination theory and has an abundance of science to support it. Neuroscience backs this theory too, I think the rate at which active learning learns is somewhere around x20 faster than passive learning (ie “teaching”). Very serious folks like John Holt, Peter Gray, or Akilah Richards to name a few have dedicated their life work to supporting self-directed education as a superior form of education. What Peter Gray’s research shows shows is that outcomes are basically the same except for life satisfaction and psychological outcomes. In essence, it leads to same rates of secondary education, jobs and socio-economical outcomes, except an unschooled child makes for a much happier adult later on. Sadly, because the majority of people went through contemporary schooling or some version of it, people’s biases makes people not want to hear this. I’m not sure what the OP’s circle looks like but I would be surprised if none of those so called “techs pro-homeschooling” are only doing the school at home version without having stumbled upon any of the science around self-directed.
  • presentation 2y ago
    Can you cite some of these claims, to guide someone like myself who has never heard of any of these things?
    • jstoiko 2y ago
      https://www.self-directed.org/resources/research https://www.self-directed.org/resources/research
  • whyenot 2y ago
    > abundance of science to support it A few citations would be helpful.
• wisty 2y ago
  People are getting disillusioned by education; partly because of politics, but also because there's a good reason not to trust the experts. Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see. If a doctor or nurse or scientist says something is "evidence based", it works (most of the time). If a teacher or teaching academic says "evidence based", they mean they have some kind of evidence behind it, like in that Simpson's episode ('Well, your honor, we've got plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are 'kinds' of evidence.') Teaching as an academic discipline has been basically spun out of whole cloth. Universities didn't (really) study education until governments told them to teach it, so they got a ragtag bunch of PhD thesis done, and the best way to do this is to use a very "philosophical" approach, and a very thin actual evidence base. Then they have to teach this to student teachers, most of whom are not really equipped to assess evidence. Then the student teachers who are great at the kind of essays that any student teacher can "engage with" will end up being the next generation of professors. Schools are run by teachers (who are badly trained) and politicians the public service (which generally defers to the universities). Yes there is a more conservative "evidence based" movement, but even it is nowhere near good enough.
  • rTX5CMRXIfFG 2y ago
    [flagged]
    • wisty 2y ago
      Please try to be civil. I mentioned phonics, do you agree with what I said on it or not?
      • zhdc1 2y ago
        Reintroduction of phonics has been pushed - hard - by academia.
        • wisty 2y ago
• solfox 2y ago
  One important function that public school offers to society is protection for children. Teachers are mandatory reporters, and so are many school staff. Parents are not.
  • shadowbanned-00 2y ago
    [dead]
• DiggyJohnson 2y ago
  Comment I was replying to was deleted so I will repost as a top level comment without additional context: ---- I agree this is probably the biggest tradeoff, but attention all parents, there's a cunning and affordable solution to the challenge of spoiling versus opportunity. It's guaranteed to work, anecdotally, at least sometimes: Live in a big house and send your kids to a nice school, but roster them on truly hood (n.b. I mean real deal heart of the ghetto) travel sports teams. Only two requirements are as follows: (1) that the team must be decently coached and (2) practice field and home field must be in a genuinely scary neighborhood. Please don't assume I mean a run-of-the-mill bad neighborhood. Ideally Pop Warner when younger and AAU BB by high school, but really anything other than lacrosse or fencing works. I personally was raised on hood travel baseball, and I am being 80% serious about this suggestion. Go Hurricanes.
  • almostgotcaught 2y ago
    Ain't no one gonna take this advice seriously on here. hn is the most NIMBY place on the internet especially when it comes to their own kids. MMW pearl clutching is imminent.
• bigbacaloa 2y ago
  [dead]
• Glyptodon 2y ago
  It's true that there has always been a sizeable chunk of religion motivated home schoolers, historically there was a long tail with motivations and efficacy that was all over the map. One thing that's really common is for parents to try it when they feel that the local system is failing their kids in some way and the family economics supporting are acceptable. There are also many permutations - it wasn't uncommon when I was younger for parents to do it through middle school, but have their kids attend high school because they felt that it was the point where socialization became important in a way that couldn't be handled effectively with home school. Obviously there's a huge range of efficacy, too. That said, I think you have to ask why are charter schools and vouchers (not just home school) becoming even more fashionable despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large? And a lot of it is because society has gotten more and more zero sum and it's going to increasingly self cannibalize. Which is not that far off from the writer's premise.
  • derektank 2y ago
    >despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large? You don't find the experience of New Orleans following their conversion to a complete charter system in 2005 (10 percentage point gain in college acceptance rates, improvements on standardized tests by about a third of a standard deviation) to be meaningful evidence? https://news.tulane.edu/news/new-orleans-reforms-boost-student-performance https://news.tulane.edu/news/new-orleans-reforms-boost-stude...
    • Glyptodon 2y ago
      What you see with that result is way more complicated than just "charter schools working."
    • ubertaco 2y ago
      Congratulations to Louisiana on improving from 50th-ranked state in education to...50th-ranked state in education?
• Over2Chars 2y ago
  Homeschooling is fashionable because public schools are terrible, and private schools are expensive. No tech bro theories of exceptionalism and "anti-mediocrity" necessary. Occam would be proud.
• froh 2y ago
  I find looking beyond the rim of your own plate such an inspiring thing when it comes to schooling. Germany for example prohibits home schooling. don't breed detached extremists. however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O. but then on the upside again, you will go to school for at least 13 years if you get _any_ kind of qualified professional education. China has one (1) math text book for 1.4bn people. France has competitive cognitive Tests (Concours) to enter highest education. maybe a problem is that everybody went to school so everyone thinks they are experts. it's hard to evolve schooling. like steering a super tanker. slooow. too slow for four year election cycles.
  • notTooFarGone 2y ago
    >however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O As a German that's the first time I hear that. Do you mean Schülerpraktikum? That's usually at age 14. Never heard anyone doing that at age 9.
    • qdl 2y ago
      I guess he is talking about the three school types you can go to after elementary
      • froh 2y ago
        or four (adding Gesamtschule) but yes, the what she's talking about.
    • deleted 2y ago
      [deleted]
    • ohthehugemanate 2y ago
      They're talking about the division between Gymnasium, Realschule, and Hauptschule. It's actually state to state nowadays whether they have separate schools or Gesamtschulen, but I understand even in Gesamtschulen, in many Bundesländer there's some internal separation. Where are you in DE, that this is unknown to you? In Köln just 15 years ago I knew parents who had the horror scenario: a 4th grade teacher who quietly believed that girls shouldn't go to university. They switched their daughter schools that year.
• poppels90 2y ago
  I went to school and I check all of those items on his traits list.
• prmoustache 2y ago
  > Why are tech people suddenly so into homeschooling? Are they? I mean statistically. Or is that just an observation from some random articles about a handful of freaks? > and let me tell you, at no time were my six siblings and I considered the cool kids on the block. I don't want to defend homeschooling but in my experience, the cool kids on the block tend to end badly. These are the girls that end up pregnant at 16 or in relationships with abuse partners, the boys that end up in addiction and a career of jumping from shitty jobs to shitty jobs. Having said that it is nice to be able to develop social skills. I used to be super shy and had to force myself to grow a more sociable person and I am glad I had to force myself doing that by going to school.
• yosito 2y ago
  I don't have kids, but if I did, there's not a snowball's chance in hell I'd let a state educate them, with the possible exception of the Nordic countries.
• techterrier 2y ago
  My 9 y/o getting shot at school isnt something I want on my risk register.
  • irjustin 2y ago
    that's the primary reason you homeschool? isn't there easier ways to manage this particular risk?
    • drivebyhooting 2y ago
      Suggest some?
  • TrackerFF 2y ago
    You might want to calculate the probabilities on that. The majority of kids are shot in or around their home, not school.
• dijit 2y ago
  OK I guess I’m going to go against the deluge of comments here; And give an appreciable reason instead of denigrating those who might choose this. The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school. I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country. However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life. For the entirety of my young life, school was a prison. With inmates who would beat you, Emotionally abuse you, the “wardens” did not want to be there either, and did not care how the other inmates treated you… sometimes doubling down on the behaviour themselves. - The comparison is further solidified by 6-foot galvanised steel bars surrounding the complex, and that I visited an actual psychiatric prison not long after and the cafeteria, recreational grounds, rooms, etc; were identical to those of my school. Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education. It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning, Everything that got me through school was things that my mother taught me- And as a consequence, I was always top of my class. I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent. and for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children- The ostracised, are learning to be helpless and to be victims- They are not learning to “socialise” more. If anything it is probably more harmful for those people to be exposed to more people until they’ve had time to form on their own.
  • Nursie 2y ago
    I think you're right to start by saying this isn't universal worldwide, or even within Britain. You describe hell. But I don't believe that your experience is dominant or even that common in the UK. Which generation are you from?
    • dijit 2y ago
      I’m 35 now, so, millennial; for additional context I was brought up in a city called Coventry which is a city that was in decline during that period. (just like most of the north of the UK following Thatcher’s closing of the mines). As a consequence of this experience, though, I saw that I wasn’t exactly entirely unique either, as there were other children treated as I was and we sought each other out. So I know that while my experience is not universal: that it is at least shared by a handful of people within my schools alone. - I would hazard to guess more outside of my school have these experiences too.
• bill_joy_fanboy 2y ago
  > Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable? When I hear a question like this, I think: "Seriously?" If it's not obvious to you why no one wants to to go a typical modern public school you probably haven't been in one in a while.
• moktonar 2y ago
  The school system has long stopped being effective and is being replaced by better systems that are evolving spontaneously
• ImPleadThe5th 2y ago
  Come from a family of teachers. From what I hear, it really feels like parents are more willing to homeschool than to be engaged with their children's education. You thinking your kid needs some additional sauce to not be "average". Rad, teach them that at home. What about sending your kid to school prevents you from doing that? I'm not saying school is perfect. But lately Parents care more than students about getting an "A" and if not it's the "Damn Teacher's" fault. They want to protect their kids from the discomfort of not doing well in school. When they should be working with their student to help develop their talents.
• woodpanel 2y ago
  It's becoming fashionable outside the US as well. And the core reason is that public schools deteriorate. Public school systems sucks at diversity. It demands parents and students to endure diversity (i.e. putting kids from all walks of life into a single class), while it delivers zero itself, i.e. refusing to diversify its offerings as affluent kids from high-iq parents need different schooling than the fresh foreign refugee-arrival from a war-torn country. Teachers Unions make sure to deflct any "market pressure" from teachers and these unions' political arms (i.e. left-leaning progressive parties) rake in extra profits because they can cry wolf about the bad state of education or worsening abilities for poorer people to rise through the ranks via merit. Crocodile Tears.
• entropyneur 2y ago
  I think the author is simply wrong is their assumption. I'm pro-homeschooling, more or less fit the described profile and I don't see a slightest problem with my kid interacting with average people nor do I have contempt for them. The problem I see though is with putting the child into a non-voluntary community. Those tend to be toxic and prison-like. Also, the school education is not crap because it's done by average or designed for the average. It's crap because it objectively can't adapt to an individual kid's pace. There's just no way around teaching kids in huge groups that doesn't involve everyone working as a teacher. Maybe AI will help here.
• somename9 2y ago
  I think the risk of sexual abuse is the best argument for homeschooling, especially versus public schools. “An estimated 10% of K–12 students will experience sexual misconduct by a school employee by the time they graduate from high school.” https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/case-study-k-12-school-employee-sexual-misconduct-lessons-learned-title-ix https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/case-study-k-12-sch...
• dr_dshiv 2y ago
  I loved public school (class of 99). I still miss the style of learning. Can you imagine going deep on a topic for 50 minutes then switching? AP classes got double periods. I found it so refreshing and I learned a ton. Eg, science, math, study hall, lunch, Spanish, History, Art, English… in a single day? I loved it. What worked for me was studying for tests — and the harder the classes you took, the less homework there was (or it wasn’t required). I had a great history teacher, occasionally good math & English teachers, a great art teacher, and mediocre science teachers. The science TEXTBOOKS were fabulous — you could just read through those things and become a genius. No more textbooks these days — it’s all some pdf segment to download. Bummer for my kids. These days, there are way fewer tests, so my kids always freak when they have tests. I thought tests were great! Just one focused period to perform and then move on. Homework and projects were a big problem for me, because I could never start early enough — it was always a last minute dash. Maybe that trained me to produce fast output, though. Kids were sometimes awful, but there was no way I was going to be popular so I just did my nerd thing. There were enough of us. They had a great drama program which I loved — I did every play and musical I could. And they even had a speech and debate club — so I competed at “extemporaneous” speech—when I went to state competitions, they got the students all together to clap me out like they’d do for the football team. That was unnecessary and funny for the nerd. My kids don’t get these kinds of opportunities, I fear. I was pretty lucky.
• xivzgrev 2y ago
  I turned out OK in public school, but I was held back at different points, particularly in math, because I (and a few others) were too far ahead of the other kids. We literally had to repeat an entire year of content at one point. Kudos to the teachers who enabled & fostered that, but shame on the school system for not continuing to support. I'm pretty sure one of my classmates gave up on academics at that moment (he never really excelled again like he used to). I'd like my kids to be free to follow their curiosities. It's definitely work to homeschool but for us, it may be worth it.
• gadders 2y ago
  I think a lot of home schooling is a culture war issue as well. A quick look at Libs of TikTok will show some of the teachers that some parents would like to avoid.
  • karles 2y ago
    Do you think Tiktok reflect reality? Then we need to ban social media altogether...
    • logicchains 2y ago
      It absolutely reflects reality in that school teachers are statistically way more liberal than the population average: https://www.pacificresearch.org/why-are-teachers-mostly-liberal/ https://www.pacificresearch.org/why-are-teachers-mostly-libe... .
    • gadders 2y ago
      These are actual videos that teachers have put on tiktok themselves. Some of it may be performative, but even the fact that they think putting something like that on tiktok is a good idea, speaks to their professional qualities.
    • lelanthran 2y ago
      I think it reflects the reality that specific groupthink is both tolerated and encouraged in school while other groupthink is harshly penalised. When the allowed groupthink in question only has support among a minority of the population you can't be too surprised when the rest try to avoid it.
  • BeFlatXIII 2y ago
    Especially the ones who keep sneaking furry propaganda into elementary school.
• JodieBenitez 2y ago
  Schools where I live is a race to the bottom where the best pupils are limited by the worst. No wonder homeschooling is becoming fashionable.
• ensocode 2y ago
  Thanks for the interesting discussion. I think as parents we have many possibilities to teach values to our kids without homeschooling them. In my view they should learn how to integrate in average society no matter if it is a perfect public schooling system or not. When it comes to values, parents still have a lot space to guide them through live without having full control. As long as the public school system only bends and doesn't break them I think it is a good way to show them how average society works. If they decide not to be high-end tech people later on, it will be much easier for them to flow with the average masses.
• TheSpiceIsLife 2y ago
  Because no one’s ever heard of a “Home-school Shooting”
• nmeofthestate 2y ago
  "Social awkwardness and anxiety Difficulty in forming IRL friendships Impatience with the idea of connecting on a meaningful level with other people: who needs ‘em? An abiding sense of detachment from reality" I can tell you from personal experience, going to school doesn't prevent this.
  • racl101 2y ago
    Certainly doesn't guarantee a better outcome that's for sure. This seems more like something that needs to come from good parenting.
• Havoc 2y ago
  Classrooms need to cater to lowest common denominator by necessity so can kinda see a desire to do this. But not convinced it’s possible to emulate the social interaction part diy
• lo_zamoyski 2y ago
  It's difficult to understand the hostility some people have toward homeschooling. Even if someone doesn't care for it, it is bizarre to insist on others not doing it (in some cases, governments insist so much that it is illegal to homeschool). Of course, parents are the primary educators of the their own children. They may delegate that responsibility to others for certain subjects, domains, or scope, but the authority rests with them. The decision of how to educate is also a prudential one. For the rest of this post, I will use "education" in the narrower sense of what would fall within the scope of the school. That being said, you cannot categorically judge either homeschooling or "institutionalized" education, as the quality entirely depends on the concrete situation. Both can be done poorly or done well. There may be aspects here and there that set them apart, where one is better than the other, but on the whole, in principle, both can be done well or poorly. Both can fail or harm the child. Of course, to be able to evaluate the quality of education requires that we first have at least a sense, if not a definition, of what education is and what it is for. Immediately, this is where the trouble starts. If you ask most people today what education is about, the most common answer I would expect is "to prepare you for a job". Primary education is to prepare you for university, and university is for preparing you for a job. Interestingly, this is not the traditional mission of education, which is perhaps best embodied by the classical liberal arts taught in the trivium and quadrivium. Their aim was to free the human person as a human person, and a human person is a rational animal. The classical notion of freedom is the ability to be what you are — human, i.e., a rational animal — which is quite different from the modern notion of being able to do whatever you want. This classical notion of freedom is the reason for the liberal in liberal arts. Now, the modern concept of rationality also differs from the classical, so even here we have divergence. The point is that the liberal arts were distinguished from the servile arts. It is the teaching of the servile arts that would prepare you for the job. While the gains of a liberal arts education translate into benefits in all things, they were not per se for the sake of specialized work. Their value was not instrumental, even if they do have downstream benefits for the instrumental. This is like the difference between theory and practice. One seeks understanding, the other seeks to achieve some kind of subordinate or secondary good. Now, as to why homeschooling is becoming more attractive, we need to consider the reality of education as it actually is today. I don't want to turn this into an essay, but a few big motivations are: * the poor quality of education * the alienating and hostile nature of many schools * the hostile ideological presuppositions of an education system, often insinuated rather than explicitly commanded As to how effective homeschooling is at correcting for these faults, that will depend on the particular situation, more or less. From what I understand, homeschooling parents will often meet with other homeschooling parents and draw from curricula that already exist for this purpose. Sometimes these parents decide to found school themselves (as we are seeing in some cases with the rising interest in classical education).
• attila-lendvai 2y ago
  the mandatory part of mandatory education is the very source that rots this society. what's happening in schools run by the "western enlightened democratic" powers that be is outrageous. liberating education would be a major blow to the social engineers running the matrix -- or at least that's what i think when i'm optimistic... maybe these days they could easily compensate through the screens. and if you have an urge to argue with this, then first read John Taylor Gatto's essays to understand what's going on. after that we can discuss the specifics.
• Beijinger 2y ago
  Many reasons. Bad influence from other students Bad policies for phone use Bad teachers Strange curricula influenced by ideology Aggressive low performing immigrants from other cultures (Europe) The last point will get me downvoted from people who can not handle the truth.
  • Argonaut998 2y ago
    >Aggressive low performing immigrants from other cultures (Europe) Elaborate? https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scores-by-country https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor... USA is 18th and eight of the countries above it are European. The fifteen below it have a comparable score to the USA. That is 23 European countries that are either above or around the same performance (or slightly lower) as the USA. Unless you mean Eastern Europe, which seems like a strange thing to single out
    • Beijinger 2y ago
      I am not so much worried, what position you are in. I am more worried if you are rising or sinking. The countries I was thinking in Europe are...sinking in the school rankings. Feel free to use google translate for this example: https://weltwoche.ch/daily/wiener-schulleiter-provoziert-mit-aussage-zu-auslaendern-die-mehrheitsgesellschaft-die-tuerkisch-arabische-mehrheitsgesellschaft-integriert-die-oesterreicher-gar-nicht-so-schlecht-in-ihre-kul/ https://weltwoche.ch/daily/wiener-schulleiter-provoziert-mit... The problem: There are cultures that highly value education. Chinese for example. And then there are cultures where education either has much less value, or a different definition (e.g. considered highly educated if a person has memorized the complete Quran). DEI. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion The "inclusion" is a problem with some cultures. They bluntly reject being "included". They considered their culture as highly superior and want to include you into their culture. At the same time, they are not able to understand why their countries are shitholes and believe that the wealth and success of Western countries is just by chance and luck and culture has no play in that. For starters: * Rule of law * open society * women rights * Democracy * Market Economy * strict separation of church and state * No tribal culture * Freedom is speech. * And don't marry your cousin. Your cousin may be good-looking but trust me, inbreeding won't make you smarter.
• _heimdall 2y ago
  I know quite a few people who have started homeschooling their kids in recent years, including one who stopped homeschooling their kiss last year and will be pulling their kids back out of school this spring. The most common reasons I hear are either that the public schools they are zoned for are terrible, mainly complaints over safety and/or drugs. The other common reason is just not seeing the value in the education being provided, often complaining of teacher quality or the design of a school system modelled after a program meant to churn out good factory workers.
• neilv 2y ago
  > How do you expect to change the world for the better when you’ve been taught from an early age, subconsciously or not, to hold most of the people around you in contempt? 4 Not everyone would recognize this, and be willing to call it out. I wonder whether that came from the writer's religious homeschooling, and if so, whether it came from learning from decent people who taught and embodied the better Christian values? Or from a reaction to the distancing that can kinda be implicit (e.g., hints that people not in the religious group are a less-enlightened Other)? Or both?
• naasking 2y ago
  > Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable? Because public education has gotten progressively worse.
• deleted 2y ago
  [deleted]
• infecto 2y ago
  I did not catch any data that quantified if this is truly becoming fashionable. From what I know in US stats, homeschooling definitely had a run during covid but its already going down and even at its peak was barely measurable compared to students in public/private. It would be nice if he quantified where this idea comes from before going into the rant.
• philipwhiuk 2y ago
  Most parents are worse teachers than the average teacher. Most parents can't afford the time/money to teach their kids. This is a passion project for the 1%. And no, educational videos on YouTube are not a replacement for a curriculum. We saw that during COVID where the attainment of children worsened. There are bad schools and bad teachers. The solution is not bulldozing the entire system and replacing it with something worse. This is like saying people should self-diagnose and medicate because there's a few dodgy hospitals and doctors.
• habosa 2y ago
  Educational merits aside, this is part of a broader trend of losing or dismantling the few “public” parts of our society we have left. People simply don’t want to be forced to interact with others in the physical world, especially others not like them. They certainly don’t want to be asked to trust a stranger for any reason, unless there’s an app to mediate the trust. The bad news is that there are 8 billion of us and more every day. There’s not enough space or resources for us to isolate ourselves. It can’t end well.
• Argonaut998 2y ago
  Thankfully I live in a country with one of the best public school systems in the world leveraging its Catholic history, but it is something I have looked into, mainly because I think children are capable of so much more than what they learn in school and also the 'conditioning' aspect of schooling. From what I know of the USA, all students are placed together in classrooms. Now I'm not sure if that's on the federal level or state level, but I cannot imagine the brightest students being held back by the weakest/misbehaving ones. Where I live we are placed into different grades, where students are grouped by their academic performance. There is no prejudice or superiority/inferiority associated with it and it just works. I've only heard anecdotes from the Teachers sub on Reddit, but if that was my child in the USA I would homeschool 100%.
• ChrisMarshallNY 2y ago
  I grew up overseas. My K-12 was a hodgepodge of schools and tutors all over the world. I am also "on the spectrum," which means that I'm a bully magnet (much better, these days, but it lasted far beyond grade school). Had a number of other issues, that came to a head, when I was 18. Dropped out of school, basically, in 11th grade, and got my GED, a bit before I would have graduated, if I had stayed. Most of my education after that, was a redneck tech school, OJT, home experimenting, and a whole bunch of seminars and focused tech classes. Couple of math classes in college. I did OK, but a hell of a lot of others, with similar backgrounds, did not. I am ambivalent about homeschooling. I think it may do well, for some people, and not, for others. I know that there's a "Little Nazi" homeschooling program that's popular with the bedsheets-as-a-uniform crowd, but it might be possible to get a far better education, at home, than the best prep school could give you.
• bryanrasmussen 2y ago
  arguments from article - >Pro-homeschooling: At school, you’re in danger of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse. >Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home. Sure, but the parents choosing to homeschool are either the ones abusing or not (obviously they could have an abusive uncle but the parents tend not to think of this) if Not, then its not a counter-argument because they know it's not and they do not know about the school. If abusing the know it and they might prefer to homeschool for that reason. >Pro-homeschooling: Kids learn faster one-on-one; Bloom’s 2-sigma problem is undefeated. >Anti-homeschooling: Kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence can fall through the cracks without professional involvement. many kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence need more 1 on 1, and will also be more likely to get all the other negative school interactions that are arguments against schools. >Here’s what I think is really going on. I heard Elon Musk homeschooled his kids, anyway if you have the money, it's a status symbol. Also about lousy school environment anecdotes going around here - I went to high school in Utah, where I heard a teacher tell the class that A.D meant After Noah, and B.C meant Before Christ. I WIN! Oh wait...
• nedt 2y ago
  My kid has a really hard time learning from me. It's resistance and stress for both of us. After all my role is to be a parent so naturally I'm a friend and a foe. Much more than a teacher. But I also don't have a big problem with that. Obviously he also has his challenges in school. It's a public school but in Austria, so it ain't that bad. But there is also the saying that you aren't learning for school, you are learning for life. So you aren't just learning for your subject, you are also learning to get along with people, how to avoid conflicts, how to manipulate a bit and how to trick some of the systems. All of that is not so much possible in homeschooling. People do know that around here and it's more of a distrust into the system that might parents want to get their kids not taught in school in recent years, while their thinking behind the distrust does make them very bad teachers overall.
• zaphar 2y ago
  I can't really know nor do I care to speculate on why it's becoming fashionable. But I'm a successful, well adjusted, homeschooled child from when it wasn't fashionable. This comment stood out to me: "Opt out of interacting with average people." And my immediate thought was: "I can't imagine a less effective or worse way teach kids how to deal with people, average or not, than to throw them into a pool of similarly untrained people and telling them to just "figure it out". Which is essentially what public school does. Teachers can't be expected to help 30+ children work through that. They don't distribute across the pool of students in a way that can be effective for that. Homeschooling I firmly believe can be a more effective way to get exposure and learn how to deal with other people than a public school. Public schools are training grounds for poor social skills.
  • spandrew 2y ago
    This doesn't make sense to me. We all get better at a talent by practicing it. We make mistake. We watch others. We determine our own preferences for what we like/don't like. We learn, grow. Kids figure it out. How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better? You wouldn't get same exposure to the buttload of social interaction and scenarios in a closed system like that.
    • zaphar 2y ago
      Practice, with guidance is superior to practice without guidance. Homeschooling doesn't mean isolation in the average case. You get a lot of practice as a homeschooler. The primary difference is that your practice is both with other adults and children while supervised and also modeled directly to you in homeschooling by other adults while public school is primarily unsupervised and lacking in a modeled behavior to observe. The number one thing people would comment to my parents about me was that I was so comfortable socially in adult conversations and environments. I wasn't even in high school yet. I had adult level social skills by age 12. I didn't learn how to interact with people from other kids who had no idea how to either. I learned it from my parents and practiced what I learned with both other children and also adults. I'm only anecdotal evidence but a number of studies have backed up my own experience. A few links I had on hand can be found here. * Medlin, R. G. (2013). Homeschooling and the question of socialization revisited. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 284–297. https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socialization-2013.pdf https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socia... * Shyers, L. E. (1992). A comparison of social adjustment between home and traditionally schooled students. Home School Researcher https://archive.org/details/comparisonofsoci00shye https://archive.org/details/comparisonofsoci00shye * Taylor, J. W. (1986). Self-concept in home-schooling children. (Doctoral Dissertation). Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services. https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/726/ https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/726/
• Scubabear68 2y ago
  So we chose private school over home schooling, for both time reasons, educational reasons, and social reasons. But the important thing is we choose to take our kids out of public school. The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year. We did not like what we saw. A few teachers were really good. Many never bothered to show up, “class” was a note to do homework or something. Others were just plain terrible teachers who didn’t know their subjects well and couldn’t really teach. More and more our district was also relying on computers and software to make tactically replace books and teachers, and not surprisingly that did not work so well. Yes, remote learning and covid and all that was a shock to everyone, and all schools took a hit during that time. But this was a window directly into schools, and seeing how well yours did in the face of adversity. The truth is, at least for our school district here in NJ in the US, schools suck in massive amounts of money, give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it. There has also been the constant creep over the years to turn schools into social welfare systems. This is well intentioned, but in reality is just another bureaucratic money suck. I could go on. But in short, home schooling and private schools both have risen in popularity because Covid revealed just how bad many public schools in the US have become.
  • e12e 2y ago
    > give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it. Seems like a bit of a non sequitur? If anything one could hope that a gym teacher would value play and movement over chaining kids to a desk all day?
    • Scubabear68 2y ago
      In NJ, the School Superintendent is effectively the CEO of the district. Many of them had advanced degrees in education, management, and finance. They control tens or hundreds of millions of dollars. Ours has a BA in health, was a gym teacher then an admin person, eventually a principal and then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring. He has been a total disaster because he lacks leadership skills, does not understand finance and hides behind the hodgepodge of technical jargon that public education has become.
• mitch-crn 2y ago
  “He climaxed his teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. Later that year he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall called “An Evening With John Taylor Gatto,” which launched a career of public speaking in the area of school reform, which has taken Gatto over a million and a half miles in all fifty states and seven foreign countries." http://crn.hopto.org/archives/john-t-gatto/ http://crn.hopto.org/archives/john-t-gatto/
• mensetmanusman 2y ago
  Tech people were bullied in school. It wasn’t worth it.
• throwpoaster 2y ago
  In conversations like this, I often find it clarifying to ask if your interlocutors have children. Nothing strips away ideology like a screaming baby.
  • jppope 2y ago
    Underrated comment here
• snickmy 2y ago
  I have a theory that is grounded on no-scientific evidence whats-so-ever. This applies only to the 2-5y population. 1) kids in nursery get sick a whole lot, and is not always just 'building up their immunitary system', it really is a one-two punch of constant illness that drugs for months on, with little to no recovery mechanisms. This is truer in bigger city with a higher turnover of the class cohort 2) a lot of the socialization aspect of nursery is overrated. Parallel play is a thing, and the need for socialization doesn't require a whole 8 hours. There are plenty of other opportunities to socialize. Especially in higher density areas, where institutions are more involved in creating moments for kids to socialize. 3) the cost of central group based nursery has skyrocket. (just empiric evidence), at the same time there is an increasing supply of 20-something-y-old that don't want a nursery job, but are happy to do a more flexible working hour in a less 'stressful' enviroment (aka less children, more home based). The combination of the 3 things has made homeschooling a lot more interesting for parents.
• hersko 2y ago
  As someone who sends their kids to private school for religious reasons, the idea of public school is wild to me. You have to send to a specific school based on location? Teacher's unions who strong arm schools into not being able to fire bad teachers? I really don't understand why school vouchers aren't more popular. Parents need to have the ability to choose where to send their kids. They have much more agency in private schools where they are the people paying salaries. I think the best way to fix the education system would be a voucher based system where the vouchers would be X dollars which would cover public and some private schools, but parents would have the option of choosing where to send their kids and if they want to spend more to send to better schools. Make schools compete for students. There should also be some standard homeschooling kit or some sort of national resources that enabled parents to homeschool more easily.
  • pokstad 2y ago
    I send my kids to a public school which I love, but I agree about vouchers. Giving more control to parents is important as these school districts become more monolithic and unions become more powerful.
• markus_zhang 2y ago
  We are not able to homeschool our son. Two problems: 1) we don't have time - we both work so there is little time to prepare the material; 2) it is very difficult to teach one's own kids. It's a LOT easier for a teacher to do that at school. But I do sit with him every night for 30 mins to go over alphabet and Math. I think I'll extend it to maybe 45 mins when he goes to primary, but anything longer than 1 hour is going to be harmful.
• raintrees 2y ago
  For those who are not happy with the current state of social systems: “We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.” - Voddie T. Baucham Jr. (possibly among others) One of the tenants of collectivism seems to be to replace the parent-child relationship with a society-child relationship "for the good of society"
• frogpelt 2y ago
  Homeschooling is another way to protect your kids from social media. If they aren't subjected to forced hang outs with kids who are all on social media, it becomes much easier to control their access to it (or rather its access to them).
• dkhenry 2y ago
  I don't think this article is a good faith analysis of Homeschooling. Clearly the author was home schooled and had some concerns with how they were instructed. With that in mind the arguments that are brought up are very much ignoring the breath of options that are all covered under "homeschool". There is far more diversity in the home school world beyond academic overachiever and religious fundamentalist. Fundamentally home school allows children to be taught in a way that is appropriate for them, and with the speed and oversight they require. Something that you can't really do in a corporate school setting. All three of my children learn at different paces, and require different amounts of involvement. They all require much more involvement then they ever got at traditional schools, and they have at times progressed through their coursework much faster or much slower then the "average" pace. It is true that if you have a child that is a academic prodigy they will greatly benefit from homeschooling, and its true that keeping your children in your home can allow you to be the greatest influence in their moral and social instruction, but its also true that even "average" students will probably do better with 1-1 instruction from a parent who is well equipped then they will with a teacher who might be better trained, but is ill equipped to actually instruct each individual pupil. As for the main point that somehow this is some form of elitism where homeschool families don't want their kids around the common rabble. The homeschool families I know range from households where both parents hold post secondary degree's, to ones where the parents got GED's, and the career expectations are suitably broad for the kids being schooled. This stands in stark contrast to traditional school which ranks its self on how many kids go to 4 year colleges, and looks down on anyone who would join a trade, or be a home maker. This is literally my biggest complaint with school in the Bay Area. If your kid didn't get into Berkeley or Stanford your household was perceived to be a failure, and if they had any desire to do something other then be a Product Manager at a FAANG then they were going to be forced to live at home forever or move to another state.
• shw1n 2y ago
  As someone who had both good and really bad times in schools, works in tech, and is considering it for our kids, some thoughts: Never once did I want my kid to “not be around mediocre”, it’s the extremes I want to filter. Part of the reason we’re considering private school is to avoid the bullies/wannabe gangbangers who don’t care if they end up in jail that made my own life miserable. Similarly, our concern is with the other extreme, anxiety-ridden, high-expectations “has to change the world” is not what we want his social culture to be. A group of kids that enjoy learning, understand the employee/entrepreneurial trade-off but may still opt for a 9-5 is what we’re after. A friend of mine half-jokingly suggested “the cheapest private school” to balance this out, and actually seems like a half-decent solution. Like with general life consequences, we want them to experience as much variance on their own while avoiding extreme swings with long-term negative repercussions (horrific injury, jail, dangerous drugs). This is just one facet among many for us.
  • Wowfunhappy 2y ago
    There are private schools which have more and less competitive environments, it just depends. I'm not convinced that filtering by tuition cost will necessarily get you what you want, you'd want to research the individual school and talk to families and so on.
    • shw1n 2y ago
      This makes sense and is probably what we’d do. The “cheapest private school” suggestion was also a response to avoiding another culture we wanted to avoid: entitled rich kid The idea was that a tuition filter might help here, but that was purely off my friend’s experience as I have none with private school.
• exabrial 2y ago
  Loaded question: in order to answer you have to agree with the premise. Homeschooling is not "fashionable", it's out of necessity.
• zombiwoof 2y ago
  We all now are getting bullied every hour by a near 80 year old sociopath I’m glad I learned in school how to deal with bullies
• bluecalm 2y ago
  Because public school system sucks, invites abuse from both other children and the teachers and is designed for the lowest common denominator. It's not rocket science that parents who have means to give their kids something better do so. It's like asking why rich people eat better food, do sports, go to better schools and are healthier: it's because they can afford a better services.
• DoubleGlazing 2y ago
  We are homeschooling our two teenagers. We live in Ireland which has a pretty decent education system and has a high percentage of students going on to third level education. The problem is that it is really bad at handling children who are neurodivergent. My daughter is autistic and my son has ADHD and they just stuggled to fit in at school. They were filled with anxiety and the supports for them just weren't there. Spending on special needs supports is pitifully low despite Ireland being so cash rich right now. So now we homeschool them and they are doing grand learning at their own pace. But it's not just that that makes me favour home schooling. For me one of the biggest issues with state education pretty much everywhere the world over is the idea that at a certain age a child should have reached a certain academic standard and if they haven't then that is seen as a failure or at the very least a problem. This is complete and utter nonsense. We all learn at different speeds, some pick up knowledge early, some pick it up later. What matters is that by the time they leave school they are in possession of most of the life skills they need. I also have issue with what is taught and how it is taught. Most subjects are taught with a focus on rote. Children are told to learn things, but aren't really told WHY they should learn things. That why bit is so important to help a childs mind develop. For me there is also a bit of a morality issue. If you go an look at a school curriculum there will nearly always be something that you as a parent do not agree with. For me its the idea of teaching children that there only option in life after education is to get a job, be a good worker and keep going until retirement. I don't subscribe to that idea, I believe there are alternative life pathways. The problem is that if I send my children to a state school they will be forced to learn and accept things I fundamentally disagree with and that to me is morally dubious.
• nyarlathotep_ 2y ago
  IME, poor quality of education at a shocking number of schools, even in "good areas". Granted, I grew up in a rural place, and from a social perspective my school years were pretty good (high school was great, it was literally like movies that were popular at the time in the 2000s). I have many friends that I still talk to very often that I've known for the better part of 20-30 years. Seems like this experience isn't the norm here. I suspect my experience is both a function of time and place. Those positives aside, the "education" I received through high-school was incredibly poor. I'm absolutely blown away when I see kids today taking programming classes in high school or calculus or "AP Stats" or any of this stuff. I'd not even heard of "Mechanical Engineering" until some friends picked that as a college major my senior year, to say nothing of programming as a vocation. Granted this was 20-odd years ago, but considering the low quality, any parent that wants their kids to aspire to "more" in an equivalent position today would have to either: - pay loads for a private school - spend substantial time giving their kids supplementary education outside of school (barring the naturally curious and ambitious). Given time and energy constraints, such a proposal doesn't even seem feasible) It's pretty obvious to me why you'd want to homeschool today, given experiences like this and the boundless high-quality material instantly available online and elsewhere. Socialization is the other concern.
  • beezlebroxxxxxx 2y ago
    America hasn't really taken public education seriously in a long time. That's funding for schools, serious academic standards, building more schools so class sizes stay reasonable, and insisting on having rules in place to make sure classes are not disrupted. People either just want to throw money at the problem or lower standards or make sure rich communities have good schools and poorer communities get what they "deserve" (ie. "you don't make enough/your house is not worth enough, so your school's quality will/should suck"). The way that civic pride, communities, and public education, were all tied together has withered away in the last 4-5 decades. Now, access to good, serious, education is a zero-sum game.
• seitgeist 2y ago
  These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people. I agree in part and disagree in part: Agree - they're absolutely "hacking" education for their kids. The 1:1 student/teacher ratio and the ability to custom tailor almost every part of the curriculum are the biggest selling points--and that's true whether it comes from a desire to give their kids the best they can, or a desire to micromanage and control every aspect of their lives. Disagree - I think it's less about "average people" overall and more about opting out of learning from and being trained by what can feel like a gachapon of teachers and administrators in public (and to a lesser extent, private) schools. It probably seems to them like, "If I wouldn't hire this person to work at my company, why would I 'hire' them to do the much more critical task of preparing my child for their future?" None of the arguments convince anyone. Homeschooling remains what it was in the creationism-and-spelling-bee days: an ideological choice. In other words... Windows = public school Mac = private school Linux = homeschool
  • racl101 2y ago
    And TempleOS?
• swiftcoder 2y ago
  The problem with homeschooling is it's pretty much a crapshoot whether you end up in a weird religious environment or an abusive environment, with a long-shot chance of ending up in a fun constructive environment with lots of personalised attention and the opportunity to travel the world. Of course, this is pretty much the same set of dice you roll when you spawn into a traditional school system, except you roll with disadvantage when it comes to the long-shot. I don't know, I was fortunate enough to roll the long shot, and it worked out pretty well for me. Though I will echo the article's note that forming emotional attachments continues to be a bitch if you didn't have a large peer group at a young age...
  • kajumix 2y ago
    Why do you imply that the fun, constructive environment for homeschooling a long shot, but the weird religious or abusive environment is more of the norm?
    • swiftcoder 2y ago
      Well, normal, boring people tend to send their kids to school, so your chances of a normal, boring homeschooling experience are pretty slim. And even the most well-intentioned of counter cultural folks don't always excel at parenting, never mind educating. I've met a fair number of other homeschooled folks over the years who had a great childhood, but I've met more for whom the lack of community/government oversight meant their parents could get away with things we wouldn't generally countenance (be that actual abuse, various forms of religious indoctrination, or just plain old "unschooling" - aka "ignore the kids till they go away").
      • graemep 2y ago
        > Well, normal, boring people tend to send their kids to school, so your chances of a normal, boring homeschooling experience are pretty slim. Depends what you mean by normal. My experience is kids get more freedom, meet a wide range of people, and generally get a much better education. Maybe it is different here in the UK. > And even the most well-intentioned of counter cultural folks don't always excel at parenting, never mind educating. The home ed community in the UK does have a lot of hippie types in it, but even if I do not see eye to eye with them I think their kids are mostly a lot better educated than the average school child. > hings we wouldn't generally countenance (be that actual abuse, which also happens to school going kids. it happens more often to school going kids (and as far as I can see from stats, home ed kids are at lower risk - more likely to be investigated, less likely to have action taken). On top of that there is a fair amount of abuse in schools. > just plain old "unschooling" - aka "ignore the kids till they go away"). that is not what unschooling is. Unschorling parents can make a great deal of effort, its just that they let kids decide what they want to learn and facilitate it.
• sequoia 2y ago
  I went to public school as did my wife. That's why we homeschool. It was a terrible experience overall; all these kids in a totally unnatural environment wasting time. I say unnatural, because generally if someone is tormenting you daily you can get away from that person. Even at a job, you could quit and find another job. In school, you are trapped with your tormentor(s) and constantly forced to take part in social hierarchies you have no interest in being part of. I was a loser through middle school which was not fun, then in high school I was not engaged so I became bored and lazy. When I had an engaging class (like mens choir, german, spanish or woodshop; even though another kid did intentionally burn me with a hot bit off the drill press among other antics) or I was able to be creative, I put a lot of effort in and it felt rewarding. But mostly I look back and say "what a massing f*cking waste of time that was." Not only did I not spend my time doing something better, it destroyed much of my natural curiosity and creativity. We homeschooled our two older kids, the eldest is now in their second year of an extremely competitive engineering university program. She wanted to go to Uni so she took some online classes to prep then enrolled in school in grade 9. That was completely different from my experience in large part because she chose to go to school, so she had no one to blame for "why do I have to be here?" like I did. She owned her own choices & succeeded. As for "what about socialization" that is the most laughable part to me. Sure I learned "socialization" in school: kill or be killed. I learned to be a mean, cynical, jaded child who could survive in that institutional environment. My children were free to spend full days socializing with other kids when we got together, and met frequently at libraries & parks with other homeschool kids, as well as engaging in extracurriculars. And if they're having a spat with another kid? That's fine, they can take a break for a bit then reconnect with them later; no need to force them together daily. The funniest thing to me about "what about socialization" is that when I was in school & chatted with a friend in class, guess what I was always told? "Do that on your own time, you don't come to school to socialize." Ha. But seriously, avoiding the maladaptive "socialization" of what I think can fairly be called "industrial schooling" is one of the biggest perks of homeschooling. The extracurriculars were easier too because they were not already tired from an early wakeup and full day of school! My younger kids who are now in regular school now are absolutely fried after a day at school + extracurriculars. The amount of energy I spend now supporting school for my younger kids is crazy. Stressful mornings harrying sleepy kids out of bed and out the door, kids upset over bullying and inequity in the classroom, begging for designer clothes (where did that come from?), getting them to do their homework, oh and then there's "teaching my kids shit they were supposed to learn in school but the teacher didn't teach them" i.e. I'm having to "homeschool" them in addition to school. Sooo many conflicts spring from school. Having my kids in school often feels like more work that homeschooling rather than less. Academics are easy. Tons of free online resources + Outschool where you can pay a teacher for one-off classes. My older kids took the 8 week essay writing class then breezed through high school english. When younger, if they wanted to play iPad I'd say "do 30m khan academy then you can do 30m iPad." Regular trips to the library & read to them... it's really not hard to cover academics through middle school, then if they want to go to high school, go ahead. Or apprentice, or focus on something else. If you have any questions about homeschooling from a veteran parent who's also had kids in public school, let me know.
• idunnoman1222 2y ago
  Well, all of my kids went to school and they basically learned how to read and write and that’s it. Everything interesting they learned talking to me or watching dumb YouTube videos I suppose. I would have happily homeschooled my children, but I have to pay rent.
• apeescape 2y ago
  I'm a native Finn and went to a public school here in Finland in the 00s. My overall experience was good, though of course I didn't always enjoy it. I liked some teachers more than others. I learned a lot and was bored a lot. I was subjected to the occasional bullying (who wasn't?) but I never felt truly unsafe. I also got along well with most people most of the time. I had to overcome my shyness to give presentations to my classmates. I got to know people from different socio-economic backgrounds. While navigating through childhood and puberty I made a lot of mistakes, as did all other kids, but ultimately it was a good childhood, and in hindsight I am really glad I wasn't homeschooled (not that it's common here anyway). Without the social connections I made and social skills I learned, I undoubtedly would've had a very different kind of life, and not in a better way I think.
• turtlebits 2y ago
  Maybe I'm a crappy adult, but I lack the patience, empathy, emotion regulation skills that I feel good teachers have. I would rather send my kids to a private school than try to homeschool them myself. Thankfully, the public schools in the the area I choose to live in are excellent. We do augment at home with tutors and extracurricular learning.
• madhadron 2y ago
  As usual, it depends. My time in public schools (K through 7th grade in various places in the southeast US) was a mixed bag. Newport News, VA with all the kids of engineers and naval officers? Awesome. I loved school. Most other places? Meh. Rural western Virginia? Terrible. Bullied until I finally snapped and left someone half conscious on the playground (and the football coaches watched as I handed out that beating). I was homeschooled from 8th grade until I left for college at the suggestion of the teachers in the school because they were running out of classes at the high school for me when I was in 7th grade. I was fortunate to have parents that are extremely well educated and my homeschooling gave me an education that is simply unavailable in a school. Not many kids have sat on the back deck in the Appalachians with their father, learning how to read Virgil in Latin. There were lots of other homeschoolers in our county who were all religious nuts. Fortunately Virginia requires you to come in and take standardized tests every couple years to see if you're at grade level if you're homeschooling, so the worst cases got corrected. The school district also proctored my AP tests for me, even though they weren't classes the school offered. My kids are in public school. The public schools where I live are excellent and actually deal with bullying. My kids would rather not go to school, but they're not being traumatized and they're getting a good education and have lots of friends. There's a major emphasis on social-emotional learning, which turns out to be heavily correlated with later performance. Our biggest problem is in high school with parents pressure cooking their kids to try to go to places like Harvard or Yale. I do what I can to counsel the kids and get them off that path. My own kids are firmly convinced that they're going to guaranteed admission state schools, and don't have to try to build a ridiculous resume in high school. Schools don't have to be horrible. They just have a history of being poorly run in many places.
• graemep 2y ago
  I think one factor is that technology makes it a lot easier to do. There are lots of online resources, online courses, tutors who do remote tutoring (I do not think i could have found my daughter a Latin teacher locally very easily, for example), lots of courses both for conventional qualifications (my kids did (I)GCSEs - just as kids do in British schools, (except at schools they do them at 16, we spread them out with my older daughter doing her first when she was 11) and just to learn (e.g. MOOCs).
• cogman10 2y ago
  I'm a huge supporter of public education. I think it's one of the most important things for the government to fund. And, unfortunately, that's part of what's moving me towards homeschooling my child. We've not 100% decided on it yet. However, we are on the brink. The issue we have is our school is underfunded and our child has special needs. Their day in class, from what we've observed, is primarily just daycare with no actual schooling. Even though they are on the border of being severe, they have no interaction with their peers which is a major reason we wanted them in school in the first place. The end result is they are spending a very large amount of time watching youtube or sitting in a corner. The issue is our school district and our state does not want to fund public schools. They want to find ways to send money to private schools. The end result is the salaries for everyone involved are pitiful. Everyone that deals with my kid at school works 2 jobs. Some of them are making more money at mcdonalds than at school. And, surprise, the end result is even if they want to find staffers they can't find them. Our district further bans parents from volunteering. So even though my wife is a SAHM, she can't lend a hand in my child's school to make up the staffing problem and improve my kid's education. All of this has pushed us towards wanting to homeschool. Which really sucks because I don't think that's the ideal education for my child. I worry that we'll have gaps in the education we try to give them. I worry that they won't get to socialize with any peers. I worry that they will ultimately get left behind. But school isn't providing what we want.
• rossdavidh 2y ago
  So, I don't claim to have Big Data on this, but I homeschooled my child, and one of the most common things in homeschooling I saw was that people used co-ops. Thus, the kids are around other kids, and the parent doesn't have to know everything. In my case, I chose it because the public schools in my part of town (low income) were low achieving, and proto-fascist in their policies on being able to control your own appearance. They had both state level (Texas, conservative) and city-level (Austin, progressive) political influences, the worst elements of both. Just my own experience, but it doesn't much match what the article describes.
• temptemptemp111 2y ago
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• w1 2y ago
  Most people here would be good homeschooling parents. This site doesn’t represent the world at large. I was personally homeschooled, and while I ended up with a positive outcome, I cannot say the same thing for any of my peers (other kids I met through homeschooling groups.) There were many children that, in retrospect, were suffering from abuse or neglect that the structure of school could have prevented, or at least a mandatory reporter could have caught. For more anecdotes, take a look at r/homeschoolrecovery (which is nearly 1/6th the size of r/homeschooling.) Many of the stories there are so gut-wrenchingly bleak. Any margin improvement in educational outcomes hardly seems worth it given some of the pain described there.
• mdip 2y ago
  Both of my children were Home Schooled until High School (technically 7th and 9th grade). They've been students at a private school and now one attends an excellent private High School and one attends the 4th best High School in my state. They are straight-A students (lowest grade: 94%; History -- my Daughter). They are shocked that they attend school for 7 hours a day and there are kids who "struggle" while they finish their homework on the ride home, don't study, and get the grades they get. They are in advanced classes and both have had a perfect score in Math all three years. Mom and I are also divorced and have been since they were 2 and 4. They make friends easily but struggled when they were Home Schooled because they have less exposure to kids their age. They were given the choice when my son hit 9th grade "continue or attend Public School or a school we can afford). They didn't want to miss out on "The High School Experience" but both, enthusiastically, want to Home School their own kids one day. They aren't unique/gifted. There are plenty of students at their schools who do as well as they do and were not Home Schooled. The difference, though, is they "did school" in a given weekday for never longer than 1.5 hours. Most days were 30 minutes. September-April with summers off and that was it. Religion was not a factor in our choice. My son's ASD Type 1 diagnosis played a role, the way Math was taught to me played a role, the arrogant belief that I could do better and the fact that my ex-wife didn't work played a role. Mostly, talking to other Home Schooling parents and their children and "wanting my kids to be like that" was the primary factor. Watching a 13-year-old speak intelligently and with confidence about a subject they understand and actually expect an adult to listen to them is kind of crazy, especially when they really are intelligent and should be listened to. In a decade of Home Schooling, I have talked at length with hundreds of families and their children who took that path (various conferences, Home School events at local businesses, and extra-curricular activities done "during the school day" for Home School kids). I've observed a few things: All of them teach as much as we did. None of them will admit to it until their kids are in college or they decide to send them to traditional schools and "their child's education is validated by someone else." Nobody who is actively Home Schooling will admit to an outsider that their children get 1-1.5 hours of education a week day because you'll call CPS on us. All of their children are about a year or two ahead of children "their grade" despite this minimal amount of lesson time. I read over and over and over again about how Home Schooled children are ignorant, don't believe in evolution, believe the world is flat, their parents don't actually "teach them" -- I have no doubt those children exist and I haven't seen them because the Home Schooled families I encounter attend conferences, belong to groups (we didn't), and care about their child's education. I live in a state that, at one point, had the largest number of practicing Home School families (not sure where it is, today) and the most liberal rules around it -- literally "take them out of school"; that's it. Everybody seems "to know some invented Home Schooled child" who had some kind of major life problem. I usually challenge for specifics and it's always turned out the kid doesn't exist. Knowing any child who is Home Schooled is unusual. But knowing the one child validates your choice to NOT Home School, the statistics of which make them extremely rare, and you find they're parroting some anecdote they heard. My daughter's school[0] has about 1,700 students in it. Her last had about 500. I have asked every single one of her teachers, her counselors and several teachers they don't have "have you ever had a Home Schooled kid in your class, before?" I'd guess 40 educators and some staff/administrators. There's exactly one who had exactly one child in her class at her last job who was Home Schooled. He was an excellent student. And this in a state that has a lot of Home Schooled students. Judging by Facebook, you'd think there's one hiding around every corner peeing in people's Cheerios. I suspect it's people feeling (needlessly) insecure about the choices they made for their own child and feeling threatened by the fact that I chose differently. I don't encourage people to choose to Home School. It's not for everyone -- for starters, you can't do it with two full-time working parents and that means it's simply not an option for most people. However, this topic very rarely came up without judgement from everyone who didn't Home School about what a dangerous choice I made when I was still Home Schooling. It's a lot more fun, now, since I can point to their success. Yes, some Home Schooled kids struggle/drop out of college or can't hold down a job. Certainly none of us have met a kid who drank his way through Freshman year of College, or was ill-prepared by their public school and failed out. And we came from High Schools where everyone received a degree, too. Studies continually affirm the success of Home Schooled students, yet "everyone knows some Flat Earther child from Home Schooled parents." Children fail in every type of education. They fail less in Private schools and Home Schools. They fail more in Public school (largely because of "everyone goes there, including children in extremely difficult life circumstances"). The problem is that these wrong impressions of Home Schooled kids turn into laws that ban or curtail the freedom to have the choice of Home Education. I know if I had chosen a more traditional route, my kids would have had the same probability of success. I would have been deeply involved in their education whether or not I was the one teaching them and that's how you get successful students in traditional education, too. While it might be nice to stand on some high horse, claim that "I just love my children more than you did", pretend that all of this was some massive sacrifice and I'm some super-parent by comparison to all of you who went the traditional route, that would be a self-aggrandizing lie. I paid for and followed curriculum. It was easy. The only challenging part of it is that "your kids will argue, yell and cry at you when they struggle"; they won't do that with a stranger. With all of the extra non-lesson time they had, it was probably easier for them to excel. But I don't look down on people for not making that choice. Quite the opposite, everyone looked down on me for the entire duration that I was a Home Schooling Dad. It's silly. And I'd do it all over again if given the choice for one reason alone: My kids are incredible self-learners and that was the one thing that I was very intentional about. Both of them have the confidence that "nothing is beyond their ability to learn" and that it's a simple matter of finding the right information, studying and practicing. My daughter is a shining example of this: She has learned to plays Guitar, Drums, Bass, and Piano (some proficiently, some she's well on her way). She has never had a lesson. She can read music and tabs and she can sit down and compose as well as learn to play anything she wants to learn to play on Guitar, Bass and Drums. She's getting there with Piano, but it's a much more difficult instrument and she just started last Summer with that one; she's got a few years behind her on the others. But I bought her a full sized weighted-key MIDI piano last summer and I had 15 years of lessons, competitions and study in that instrument as a child/teenager, so I have a good understanding of typical progress in learning it. She took it to Mom's and decided she didn't want to take it back and forth but brought it back here over Christmas break. I listened to her practicing and had to walk into her room to make sure it was actually her playing rather than the computer playing back some MIDI file. In three months she's as far along as I was after 5-6 years of lessons. She doesn't even realize how well she's playing; nobody told her it was unusual for her to be able to play some of the things she's playing at her skill level. A teacher would have never had her playing those things. She just went ahead blissfully unaware of the fact that it's extremely hard to play some of the things she's learned to play and that probably made the biggest difference of all. She wanted to play it, so she sat down and learned how to play it, never getting discouraged over the fact that "you don't learn something like that until year 5." Her technique (fingering ... stop snickering) is even correct. Both of my children love to learn new things, just like me. Except, I didn't learn that about myself until formal education was over. They have always known that about themselves. [0] My son attends a private school that is very small and the results were the same but less surprising to me.
• t0bia_s 2y ago
  A book "Free to learn" by Peter Gray help us wit decision of homeschoolong our kids. Our education system is broken.
• koinedad 2y ago
  This blog takes a very narrow view on the subject… more people are realizing how the school systems are and that education can be done in different and even sometimes better ways.
  • horsawlarway 2y ago
    This is my take as well. A huge burst of new tooling appeared during covid because the traditional school system essentially disappeared. That tooling isn't going to disappear just because schools are finally open again, and some of it is actually fairly compelling. I'm in a large metro, and the schools near me are terrible. 1/10 and 2/10 scores are typical. All the traditional schools we're zoned for fall well into the bottom 10% of my state. We attended lots of public engagement meetings for these districts (everything from guided tours to district superintendent interviews to parent-teacher nights). My takeaway? These schools are struggling with kids who don't have housing, don't regularly eat, can't get transportation, and have parents who utterly disengaged or downright abusive. They aren't trying to excel at education, they're trying to literally keep 20% of the kids alive and fed, and then scrape them over the failing line so they don't get their funding cut. I have nothing but respect for the educators placed into those circumstances - seriously, it's an impossible job and they get paid peanuts for it. But I also absolutely refuse to put my kids into that system. Full fucking stop. It's not a place to provide enrichment and growth. But... that leaves us the spot where 1. We win a lotto and get placed into a charter school (which only rate marginally better than the default schools - 4/10 instead of 2/10). 2. We pay for private schools to the tune of $30k/kid/year, or nearly half a million US for our family over the course of my kids education. 3. We move. 4. We home school. Prior to covid, I had basically already picked "move" as the answer when all my kids hit schooling age, but there's actually enough tooling now that we will likely consider group based (pod) home schooling first. Home schooling doesn't have the same reputation that it did prior to covid, and it's not just "religious fundies" or "anti-gov whackos" anymore. Those groups definitely still exist, but with online tooling - we have much better options to filter out the crazy folks and spread the load out so that kids get social interactions, have a real teacher (often with better credentials than the school teachers) and get 1 on 1 interactions from adults.
• golemiprague 2y ago
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• jcarrano 2y ago
  For most of history, homeschooling was the norm for those who could afford private tutors. We know how our current mass-production type education appeared, but what needs to be explained is how it surviving into the 21st century.
• WalterBright 2y ago
  > I can’t help but notice that history’s richest and most successful people have raised some pretty unpleasant kids. Could that be because newspapers like to report on those and people like to read stories about how awful rich kids are? There are plenty of unpleasant kids from modest backgrounds. It's just that their tales are boring.
• pempem 2y ago
  While I appreciate the author's perspective, esp as someone who experienced homeschooling, I think here in the US we often forget what these efforts have cost, their real value and who is lobbying against them. Universal education, for all children in a nation, is an incredibly recent thing. Its also essential for real participation in a democracy which requires, at minimum, an understanding of the governing body and at maximum whatever we're slogging through now. Could the curriculum be better? Definitely. You know who is stopping that? Shit politicians. We need better ones because no matter what you think, they aren't going away, Education has also continuously and purposefully been underfunded and politicized by the political right and intermittently eviscerated by corrupt players on the left and right. This is on purpose. The rise of homeschooling is directly correlated with how much funding public schools have lost, the lack of safety and how difficult it is to operate successfully. You now send the kid to school and get cut with a thousand small asks for cash when we could just revise how taxes are collected and distributed. Put out a gun ban. We don't need metal detectors, and cops and clear backpacks and active shooter drills and teacher trainings and and and. We need LESS GUNS and most americans agree but private industry is limiting us. The rise of homeschooling is correlated with how many people are concerned about the politicization of schools, their libraries, their teachers, their cirruculum. We keep having presidents who appoint leaders to the department of education who do not believe in education being available for all citizens. Schools continue to expand their mission to feeding kids who can't be fed. To programs for kids who can't be home. No one seems as focused on fixing why there are so many hungry kids instead focusing on a 'lunch account' and the debt of middle schoolers. This is all intensely documented and yet another example of cutting a public good. A public good by the way, that made America a place that everyone in the world wanted to go. Yes, I got picked on in school and was bored in my classroom. Yes it could have been better. This though, this is a concerted effort to get us to divest once again, just like we are from net neutrality, the post office, the EEOC etc.
• sequoia 2y ago
  This is such a narrow view of homeschooling as to be idiotic. > That voice likes to say: You should just homeschool them. Opt out of interacting with average people, because average people will only damage your kids. The author makes a statement about why they think people prefer homeschooling, and yet they do not mention having spoken to a single currently homeschooling parent to ask why they homeschool. This is like me writing an article about some group I'm not a part of (say, farmers) and saying "why don't they all get organic certified? As far as I can tell it's because most farmers don't like nature." tl;dr: this is a completely uninformed tirade from someone who unfortunately had a bad experience with their religious upbringing, which involved homeschooling, and is generalizing the negative emotions towards all homeschoolers whatever their reason for opting out of school. Ironically this article that's ostensibly criticizing homeschooling parents as snobs is dripping with disdain and condescension. The reductive & random assumption that people opt out of school they object to the students is baffling to me. Does it not occur to the author that people take issue with institutionalization of their kids in school? It's not the other children, it's the one-size-fits-all meat grinder of school most secular homeschool parents object to. Bonus: The footnotes are hilarious. The footnote to their argument that people homeschool because they're snobs is: > I don’t think I’m straw-manning, because I’m pretty sure someone is going to highlight the “opt out of interacting with average people” quote on Twitter/X and say “this, but unironically.” "I don't think I'm inventing a weak interlocutor to argue against because I've invented another imaginary person on twitter who agrees with the first imaginary person I created" I'm honestly laughing reading this.
• anarticle 2y ago
  Join the military! :D I'm a product of department of defense school system. My parents were lower class, I received a world class education. My mom taught me to read and count before kindergarten, mostly via playing card games with her. I was in NC at that time, and they thought I was a savant! Overall, my experience was good, some bullying of course, but at that time administrators held the ultimate key which was we will first tell your parents, and then subsequently your parents commanding officer, which would result in work disciplinary action. When I lived in Japan, there were a couple kids that were bad enough to get that to trigger. Stupid stuff like huffing air freshener, or just beating the hell out of people. My short stint in NJ public school was ok, but it lacked the rigor/structure of the DoDDs school. I ended up at a good engineering university, but had a good amount of debt. In Philadelphia, public schools are essentially DMZs, with private schools for kids that want to do things with their lives. This sounds harsh, but our tax system reflects this, as well as our disrepair of public school buildings (lead, abestos). My Dad gave up his best years to the military and his body suffered, but it was certainly not for nothing. He retired at 42, with a pension after 20y in USMC. Healthcare is taken care of. It's hard to say whether it is the escalating cost of schools which are commodifying it "It's so expensive I shouldn't have to xyz", leading to low parental involvement (maybe that is normal?), or continuous concierge service for helicopter parents as well. My friend who is a teacher has an entire class of students exploiting the IEP system to get extra time on exams, less choices in multiple choice, less reading, landscape rather than portrait tests (yes this is real), and other things that absolutely blow up her ability to be efficient at anything in the class room. I'm sure there is an argument to be made in favor of this, but it cannot operate in this way. At her school (Allentown, PA) the inmates are running the asylum due to administrators treating parents as "customers" and the parents as "the service provider". It is a sad state of affairs. In my world, parents ALWAYS sided with the teacher no matter what, which meant you had no chance at causing a problem in that way. I don't know if there is a good solution on the horizon. I think the overwork of parents, combined with the exploitation of the school for better marks is a sick system. Only private systems seem to be able to surf this in a meaningful way because they can remove bad actors. cite: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defense-department.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defen...
• causi 2y ago
  I have many teachers in both my immediate and extended family. All of the ones who aren't retired say the same thing: the quality of parents is in the absolute shitter in two major aspects: parents don't want to teach their children anything they see as "the school's job" such as how to read or work on anything with their children at home. The second way is discipline. They instill no values of discipline or respect for the rights of others in their children. The "back of the room peanut gallery" that was one in ten or one in twenty children when I was young has grown to one in three. These are kids who've never seen negative consequences for anything they've ever done and steadfastly believe that will continue into their adulthood.
• anonfordays 2y ago
  When math is racist, acronyms are White supremacy culture, and classics like Shakespeare are ditched due to "misogyny", it's no secret why homeschooling is becoming fashionable.
• jokethrowaway 2y ago
  I've considered homeschooling but ultimately decided against it because: A - It's illegal where I live, you have to jump hoops to do it B - I think an extra opportunity for socialising with kids is worth a bit of pain - we wouldn't have the energy for organising alternatives and also take care of the kids education C - By sending kids to a nice private school you get rid of a lot of problems of public school: unmotivated / openly hostile and punishing teachers, classmates with bad behaviour disrupting class, immigrant classmates who don't speak the language and / or create gang of people from the same country to gang up on kids (exactly like in prison) When I went to school things weren't as bad as today and kids were not getting stabbed in public school, still it felt like a prison because of the slow learning pace and because everyone learns at a different pace and wants to learn about different things. School is simply the wrong idea for the majority of boys, it's just a silly machine that print mindless employees. The strongest reason for not sending them to school is the latest EU mandatory gender theory / sexual education propaganda being taught to kids in school since last year. Ultimately I decided that years of socialisation with peers trumps a few lessons about political BS; I'm confident I can teach them to distrust authority and teach them that they cannot trust blindly everything they hear in school or on the newspaper. My friends who pursued illegal homeschooling are quite happy, they even found a teacher who is teaching kids illegally in someone's home, and by grouping the kids together across multiple families they have a soft school experience.
• TinkersW 2y ago
  I went to a public school and regarded it as prison, no bullying went on, but the system is not designed to educate, it is designed to instill obedience, and the pace of learning is dictated primarily by mediocrity of the teachers(I had a rare great 5th grade teacher so this is why I think the the teachers more so than the students abilities dictates the results). People recommending private school: these do not exist in all locations, try finding a good one in a rural area It seems standards in public schools have only fallen since I attended, and based on how social media is trending, we seem to be getting dumber and less informed. I could never force a child to attend public school in the US, unless it happened to be one of the rare good ones I hear exist. If we ever get something like what is described in "The Diamond Age" perhaps that will help solve the school problem.
• wetpaws 2y ago
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• bitwize 2y ago
  Because (USA perspective) government-provided schooling is shit, and getting shittier. People whinge about Trump possibly abolishing the Department of Education, but maybe no DoE is better than the one we've got. Because between Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and whatever psychological experiment the education establishment has cooked up recently, I can't distinguish between the education system's serious proposals and sinister plots by a saboteur to undermine education from within. What's really needed is a constitutional convention. Abolish and reboot the entire government, implement a multiparty parliamentary system with actually functional, corruption-resistant government agencies and bodies. Homeschooling is citizens' response to a state that's failed in its basic responsibilities.
• someonehere 2y ago
  Public schools in the US are dependent on federal and state money. Play ball or lose the money. Often the people making the decisions in congressional settings and DOE have personal agendas or money greasing their wheels. Remember the hubbub on Common Core? Teach common core or lose money. Cruise. Around YouTube for older videos and connect the dots on how Common Core was a money grab that set us back a bit. Go to local schools and see how school boards tie their ideology to how schools and classrooms are run to get that money. For years in San Francisco you enroll in the school lottery and hope you get to send your kid to the school close enough to you. Otherwise you spend 45 minutes each way to drop them off at school. On top of that classrooms cater to the lowest performing student. What parents with money wind up doing is sending their kids to Kumon like learning centers to fix the gap the classroom has in pushing their kid to be engaged with learning. With everything else schools are also penalized for suspending or expelling students so teachers have to find creative ways to keep the bad apples away from everyone else. For context I have family and friends working in public schools across differ states. There’s a reason people want to abolish the DOE and return curriculum back to the local school districts or the state. I went to an ok school district and didn’t experience any of the problems today’s kids seem to face in school. People got suspended or expelled for being bad. Classrooms didn’t show political or biological ideology to the students.
• Mave83 2y ago
  As a German family, we opted out of the system to gain back freedom as a family. With regular school, you are bound to external schedules like vacation, when you have to get up,... We learned, that it's around 1 hour per day to achieve what kids learn during most of the day in regular schools. Doing homeschooling therefore is much more efficient time wise. in addition, we can train our kids to be self and critical thinking, something that does not exist in regular schools. There are more reasons to consider, but these are our most important factors.
• EatDevSlay 2y ago
  You guys don't research demographic before real estate purchases? That must be why you find this new movement hard to understand. Have someone more plainly honest give you the details.
• jmuncaster 2y ago
  Our three kids are in hybrid homeschool / traditional classroom school. What critics of homeschooling don’t seem to get is that homeschoolers find their own cohorts. And those cohorts have kids of different ages. And that means my kids interact with adults, older kids, younger kids, and kids their own age all the time. They learn nuances to social interaction that aren’t available to their counterparts who are locked in with their peers and tend to think their age group is the only one that matters. Sorry, that’s not the real world. In the real world you actually have a myriad of ages to interact with. Is everyone at your work the same age and place in their career development? Of course not. What about other sources of diversity? Guess what, they are in sports and other community groups too. In fact, by avoiding the time suckers in traditional school, you’d be surprised to see just how quickly the kids can zip through their curriculum and join more extracurricular activities with meaningful social interactions. You mean school isn’t the only place to learn social interaction? Yup. It’s time we put to death the idea that homeschooling is detrimental to social development. It’s utter nonsense. My wife has taught music at every grade level and in every school type imaginable and anecdotally the homeschooled kids are by far the most confident, socially capable of the bunch.
• simonebrunozzi 2y ago
  I am a father of a young kid and I am deeply interested in homeschooling; however, I am mostly intrigued by a "small group" homeschooling, rather than just having my kid alone, at home, learning things without friends around. Is there anything being done on this front that you think it's interesting?