I can't say my public school experience was great, I was bullied and didn't really click with the popular kids, but being around a cross section of actual American kids in my age group (my school district mixed middle class with lower class neighborhoods) helped me shape my worldview and learn to deal with people who didn't look or talk like me. I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people. I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
My kids are not school age yet, and I am not sure on if I will home school or not. But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling. There is the neighborhood kids, you have sports and clubs kids can join, religious groups.
Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day. Some people "homeschooling" I know are groups of parents getting together to educate their children together in small groups of ~5 kids to share the responsibility, and hiring a tutor to fill in the gaps. Monday they go John's house, his mom has a philosophy degree and teaches them. tuesday they go to Janes house, her dad is a Mathematician and teaches them. etc.
I used to work at a YMCA, and the local homeschool group asked us to do a PE class, which I taught.
I had the kids doing swimming, rock climbing, and all kinds of traditional PE games.
I worked with "normal" kids most of the time, and I will say the homeschool kids stuck out. They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part. And they were disproportionately ahead of their peers academically--though I think that's probably a selection bias for the parents seeking out homeschool PE classes.
This was in the early 2000s, before Facebook. I'm sure the avenues to connect have only grown with social media.
> They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part.
This is another argument that "by age" is not the best way to find one's academic or social peers.
Some people in 2nd grade should be in high school. Some people in high school should be in 2nd grade. (And, academically, sometimes that's different by subject; some people need to be in 2nd grade math and high-school reading.)
I was a TA/lab-assistant at the community college I was attending. I spent a lot of time talking to and helping out people, universally older than me, who had gotten out of high school and needed to figure out where in a multi-year curriculum of remedial math they should start.
15+ years ago, that might have been the case. Now, you might find some friends in the 3-8 year old range, but then the kids just...don't do things anymore. In both suburban neighborhoods I've lived in the past 10 years, there are basically zero middle school or high school kids doing anything except playing video games and messing around on their phones from the comfort of home. School is quite literally the only social interaction most of these kids get aside from their parents, and if they didn't go to school, they'd just spend more time playing video games or on their phones.
Outside of the coasts or university towns, there aren't any "mathematicians" with kids just waiting around to form homeschooling groups with you.
My cousin homeschooled her kids, who are now finished with college. I know they're capable of using phones (one's a programmer), but I've never seen them pull one out. They're social and love playing board games, and I suspect that comes from their parents. They also socialized with other homeschooled kids, because they were part of lots of homeschooling groups.
The kids in public school are there by default; the homeschooling parents are actively choosing to raise their kids differently, and, from what I've seen, they're more likely to interact with their kids instead of letting them go terminally online or play video games.
It's going to depend greatly on your geo location and socioeconomic circumstances, but a homeschooled kid who interacts a lot in the neighbourhood (big "if", IME; those kids all have a lot of school friends) is still going to miss out on broader social, cultural, racial and financial exposure. Example: my white, middle-class kids have a lot of people exactly like them in community groups and sports clubs, but lots of eastern european & asian immigrants in their school classes. This is super-important in elementary school when they're far less aware and insular about interacting with people who are "different" IMO
There is no such thing as “the neighborhood kids” anymore. Having any kind of social circle for your children is going to require your facilitation and effort… a lot of it. It’ll be extra hard without the common bond of shared activity.
Not knocking what sounds like your choice to homeschool, just sharing something that has changed from my youth.
You don't need a degree in math to teach children age-appropriate math topics. Teachers don't become teachers just because they have a degree in that subject, they have been taught the methods on how to teach. Having prior knowledge of the subject is almost irrelevant. Teaching is really just applying solid methods on how to build knowledge from the most basic concepts as well as having the patience in dealing with humans who are not fully formed in their emotions.
> Having prior knowledge of the subject is almost irrelevant. Teaching is really just applying solid methods on how to build knowledge from the most basic concepts as well as having the patience in dealing with humans who are not fully formed in their emotions.
I would disagree with this. Those are necessary but not sufficient. It is necessary to have enough knowledge and joy from the subject to convey that to students.
John Jane Mary set up is incredibly idealized. In a big city I have not been able to find anyone willing to commit to anything except one off play dates in a museum which has nothing to do with actual education.
Having a degree in philosophy or mathematics or whatever does not automatically make someone a good teacher. Teaching - particularly with young children - is a skill that is almost orthogonal to subject knowledge.
Part of "socializing" is observing that one's parents aren't the absolute authority in the world. Parents sometimes butt heads with teachers, coaches etc. No home schooling scenario can provide this experience. I think it leads to enhanced levels of narcissism in both students and parents.
The public school experience in the U.S. depends so much on your ZIP Code. I attended the best public schools in my state while my wife attended the worst in the same state. I am genuinely pro-public school, but there is a point where the benefit of being around different people is overshadowed by distractions and low standards. My wife had to be diagnosed with a learning disability in college to receive test accommodations when she discovered that you cannot stay after class indefinitely to finish an exam. Her teachers never raised any concerns about her taking 50% as long with exams compared to the other students, and she was the valedictorian of her huge urban high school. The lack of concern is bizarre until you consider that her teachers were preoccupied with students graduating and showing up to class. Many of her classmates ended up getting pregnant, and the school had a large daycare for the children of high school students.
My wife didn't end up taking the SAT or ACT because she attended a relatively strong local university with a full-ride scholarship and a test-optional policy. The MCAT exam initially denied her request for accommodations because she was only diagnosed with a learning disability in college. We successfully appealed by writing an essay arguing that my wife wasn't diagnosed with a learning disability in K-12 because her schools sucked (we submitted documentation that proved that her schools tested among the worst in the state, her elementary school was literally the worst in the entire state, when she was a student), and her teachers had much bigger concerns than why the smart, studious kid takes a long time to complete exams.
If the wife had gone to the K-12 school system that I attended, her learning disability would have been addressed in elementary school, and she would have been spared much angst. I was a very poor reader in early elementary school, and received almost daily one-on-one attention at my school from instructional aides and volunteers (mostly highly educated parents and grandparents) for years. I received a perfect score on the ACT reading section in high school.
I hear this a lot, and it may be true, but I am very skeptical that it matters.
The statistics about home-schooled children don't support the idea that they have horribly inaccurate models of the world guided mostly by religious thinking.
Or if they do it doesn't seem to affect life achievement in any important way.
Instead home-schooled children are typically more advanced at graduation and have higher lifetime achievement metrics than their public school counterparts.
As an athiest, and a bayesian, it's difficult for me to worry about other peoples religious beliefs that don't seem to negatively affect them or me. Especially when there is propaganda taught in the public schools that does warp the students' world views in ways that harms them and me.
> The statistics about home-schooled children don't support the idea that they have horribly inaccurate models of the world guided mostly by religious thinking.
I'd be surprised if any such statistics exist. I've even studies about the reasons parents choose to homeschool, and various outcomes of homeschooled kids versus public school kids, but none about what particular beliefs homeschooled kids have regarding, say, the age of the Earth.
That has been the case for a long time, and I guess something about the current generation of parents has gotten them to act more on it. My dad came from a very religious family and they all did private religious schools for their early grade school years. Then they went to public for high school years.
If I had to guess, its maybe something about the demise of church life that has gotten religious parents to just pull back entirely. It wasn't that uncommon for public schools to make nods toward Christian ideals/lifestyles before like the 90s, but now that stuff just doesn't happen anymore.
> It wasn't that uncommon for public schools to make nods toward Christian ideals/lifestyles before like the 90s, but now that stuff just doesn't happen anymore.
Schools should absolutely teach Christian mythology and history, and Greek mythology and history, and Egyptian mythology and history, alongside many other subjects. But to the extent that they used to make "nods" towards "this is the cultural default we defer to", nope.
As the parent of a small child, there is a very noticeable difference in social skills that develop immediately as a result of my child being in a daycare interacting with other children of a similar age. Compared to my friends' same age children who are mostly staying at home and babysat by a grandparent.
(as a disclaimer, the daycare has very good teachers/caregivers from what I can tell so I'm sure that's part of it as well)
Daycare quality is a spectrum, the same way as babysitting at home. My smaller one just started daycare, and we settled for one that actually does stuff with the kids (forest school style). But I can tell you, we've visited lots of places that are basically just making sure the kids are not dead by the time you pick them up. Same for babysitting with grandparents; there's the hyper-social grandpa style that's always doing something, and the couchpotato with +10k hours on Cocomelon.
Yes, I'll admit that my sample size for comparison is relatively small so I'm mostly offering anecdotal evidence. And I totally agree on the quality of daycares being a spectrum. Just like how one single, good teacher who actually cares can really change a student's school experience (even if the school itself is not that great).
I was homeschooled until high school. I couldn’t agree with you more. The value that the socialization the public school offers is underestimated.
Learning activities with other homeschooled kids is ok but not enough. A tight-knit neighborhood of friends is huge, but not enough. You need to develop a thick skin and a sense of self-assurance.
I have no counterfactual of course, but I think much of the social anxiety I’ve had to unlearn as a young adult came from homeschooling. And I had great circumstances
I was horribly bullied in high school. It was really bad.
The worst part was being ostracized. The school had anti-bullying policies, but they don’t force anyone to be your friend.
Strangely, I was elected to lots of student government office, and held leadership in lots of clubs.
Maybe my memory is just off, but I don’t think so.
I think I was really good connecting with the grownups who ran the school, so they made sure I got leadership positions.
I was always much better at being the kid in class the teacher liked - same with principals, etc.
Probably one of the reasons the other kids didn’t like me - but that went over my head.
I think it’s really easy to overestimate how important the socialization in public schools is. We go to so many movies where the plot is based on the dynamics of public high school, we assume it’s normal.
We see so much of terrible stuff downplaid like it doesn’t matter. Just rewatched Back to the Future which laughingly brushes off every kind of violence as long as it’s done at the prom.
> The value that the socialization the public school offers is underestimated.
The basically only social skill that school teaches is hating other people (other students, teachers) so much that from the deepest of your heart you wish them to be dead.
Clearly a valuable skill, but not the kind that most parents would desire their children to get.
There are some skills taught in that realm. From personal experience, I have learned to recognize trouble by gait and eyes alone. I get that people get different experiences, but I could have done without that knowledge.
As someone else who was homeschooled except the last three grades, I also agree. Additionally, the effect is multiplied if the kid in question lives in a rural or semi-rural area rather than a suburb or city.
For the majority of my adult life I’ve been playing catchup. Even now, barreling towards 40, there’s aspects of social capabilities where I come up quite short relative to my peers.
If I’m ever to be a parent, I won’t homeschool. Depending the circumstances I might not send my kids to public school, but their schooling situation will at minimum involve social exposure comparable to that of public school.
This is a common sentiment, but how much do you really know about the counterfactual?
It's not obvious to me that you would have been unable to deal with people who didn't look like you if you had been homeschooled.
It also seems to be that a lot of public school environments surely contain kids who look different from each other, form cliques based on physical appearance, and learn to base how they treat people largely on physical appearance.
Paul Graham pointed out that public school is a weird and degenerate microcosm that isn't much like the real social world at all.
> I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.
> When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage.
> ...If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie...Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.
Perhaps unlike in some ways, but some aspects of school life persist in so-called adult life, e.g., jocks, nerds, freaks, party animals, slackers, and teacher’s pets are all still around — now with zeros on the end.
> I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
The older I get, the more I think that helping your kids avoid interactions with others who aren't with the program is for the best.
Ideally your children's friends should be people that you think are good kids, kids that you would go to bat for.
Then when you are teaching your kids to compromise and play nice and forgive, you can legitimately feel good about it.
I think my default assumption about a negative interaction with a public school random would be that they are basically a wild animal to be avoided.
The world is messy for all sorts of reasons, that may not be the way anyone would like it to be but it's the way it is, and imo it's best to learn it when the stakes are low rather than when they're later voting against other classes because they were never exposed to people from them early on, or they're being taken advantage of at work or in an adult relationship.
I wouldn't fault someone for wanting to situate their kids among peers and adults that help them grow at a similar level rather than hinder it, but I think it's also best to be a guiding hand rather than a applicant tracking system when it comes to the non-academic side
There are certainly tradeoffs, but it's not all negative. In my experience, what it boils down to is that home-schooled kids tend to have more experience with adults and less experience dealing with a wide variety of other kids, particularly assholes.
When I was a kid in public school, there was no shortage of assholes and I definitely would have preferred to not have to deal with them. OTOH, I don't doubt that there is also some value in that experience, not to mention interacting with all the other people. Also, we didn't have social media or semi-regular school shootings when I was a kid. So yeah.. to me, it's not at all obvious which set of tradeoffs is preferable nowadays.
What happens to asshole kids? Do they become regular adults or asshole adults? Do they become soldiers or prisonners never to be seen again by normies? Do they even reach adulthood? Are they even a stable group or were we all asshole kids to some other kids?
Dunno, maybe all of the above? Believe it or not, I didn't really keep in touch with them.
My point was that kids are disproportionately likely to treat other kids badly, especially when adults aren't around. That kind of situation is common at school, but much less common at home, unless the parents choose to allow it.
I think it's an important development milestone to learn that people don't want to be their friends, and the longing for human connection might be a good moderating force in their life. I was a really pessimistic teenager, which I received plenty of feedback on, and have worked against my own nature to become a more positive and cheery adult.
In my personal experience, the asshole kids overlapped greatly with the popular kids in a Venn diagram sense. People, in general, did want to be their friends.
Looking back at the assholes of my youth, they run the gamut. Some seem like lovely adults, and are very successful. Some are just like they were and are very successful. Some others crashed out completely. The more brash, upfront assholes and the clever assholes seem to have done better than the sneering, malicious assholes.
And we were (almost) all assholes sometimes, but there's definitely a class of kids who were assholes most of the time.
You're forgetting that public school also exposes you to more adult assholes, including ones with direct power over you that can screw you over for no reason.
It's important to know how and when to advocate for yourself and others, when to escalate through proper channels and when to escalate outside of proper channels, and when to back down and let them be an asshole because they're frankly not worth your time.
In particular, learning "pretend to lose now, win later" is a useful skill. But I think there are healthier ways to learn that skill than on a live-fire course.
The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman. Other factors seem to play a much larger factor in the things you are (rightfully!) concerned about. As long as the parents have "the will to have nice things" (to refer to Patrick McKenzie's concept), then these are very surmountable problems.
Respectfully,
A grateful dad who was homeschooled and who will homeschool.
P.S. Of course I will do some things differently than my parents, but it was an amazing gift and I had an extremely vibrant and stimulating time, including with
peers (and adults!) outside of my parents' network who pushed me, challenged me, thought very differently than me, etc.
>The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman.
How do you do that? Seems like it would be impossible to replicate the experience of learning to navigate daily social interactions in a mixed group of people, especially when it comes to dealing with conflict.
Easy - homeschooling may include but does not require "in the home" any more than "homework" is required to be done in your house.
I was homeschooled and have homeschooled my three kids. Never has that meant "only at home and only with my family". My kids have been in co-op classes, taken classes from Art or Technical instruction centers (piano lessons, voice classes, programming, robotics), enrolled in community classes via private institutions and the local JC (cooking classes, performing arts) and been enrolled in independent study charter public schools which have some in-person classes. And in high school they start taking in-person JC courses.
There is lots of regular exposure to a variety of other people in all of that!
> I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people.
Unfortunately this encourages people to have a blind eye regarding bullying.
I would be much more happy if more people intervened against bullies and liars. Maybe we'd have better people in politics today if 40 years ago schools punished bullies and liars and sent them to have their behavioral problems addressed.
What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?
Maybe it's:
- the terrible educational state of the school system?
- the fact that device and social media addiction is a prevalent and growing problem that they don't want their kids brains rotted by?
- they want to provide their kids an education based on experiential and project based learning rather than filling out worksheets?
- they don't want their kids to be forced to wait for the slowest / least interested kids in class to catch up before moving on to more challenging material?
I’m sure these motivations do play out in some circles. However, every single homeschooler I know personally, and I know quite a few, does so because they want their children to have a very specific kind of religious education. Often the way this plays out is that they homeschool for a while, transition to a denominational school, and then depending on the family they may stay there or make a second transition to public school around 9th grade.
I think this tendency is heavily dependent on where you live. We have great public schools that will track advanced children aggressively if the parents push for it, so the motivations you list are unusual in my area.
Religion is definitely a big motivator. My perception though is other motivations have been on the increase, especially since the pandemic. One other group attracted to homeschooling is the hippie-type who thinks school is some kind of diabolical machine designed to crush kids' souls. Since the pandemic there's also been a big surge in the "I don't trust vaccines" group (which already had a good deal of overlap with the hippie group).
I have a feeling a really large percentage of homeschooling is about religious separatism and political separatism, and not about academic performance. Yes, you'll hear HN commenters sing the praises of homeschooling because this site is going to be disproportionately represented by the group doing it for actual educational reasons.
Also, we HN commenters typically see the success stories around us at work, not the failure stories. We all know that guy on the QA team who's a genius and credits his success to homeschooling, but we don't know the countless numbers of grown adults who are trapped as housewives who can't get a job because they never learned 5th grade multiplication.
Both were certainly major motivating factors for my parents’ choice to homeschool me in the 90s. Quality of education was a concern too, but it very much took a back seat to the other two.
The overwhelming majority of other homeschooling parents they had contact with also held separatist motivations.
That may be so, especially if you add a sort of "cultural separatism" (a la the hippies I mentioned). An odd thing I see recently too is people who seem to believe they're making various choices for educational reasons, but it's not clear if the education they're moving to is any better. They just do it because they perceive their child as being unhappy or stifled somehow. There seem to be, for instance, more and more parents who believe their kid is unusually smart and should be on some kind of fast track or not have to do certain things, even when there's little objective evidence of the kid's abilities.
Vague "educational reasons" is always the noble-sounding excuse they use, but often if you dig deeper they'll admit it's more about the various forms of separatism.
Sometimes you don't have to dig. A ton of moms in my wife's church group permanently pulled their kids out of public school in recent years, and they will openly admit that it's about keeping their kids away from "those" people, where the definition of "those" runs the gamut.
We did the homeschool thing for one year after most kids went back to school after COVID. My wife has underlying medical conditions that made her quite concerned about catching it before the vaccine rollout. We did a few of the homeschool group organized field trips and I got to briefly meet some of the parents. Overall I can't say much about the kids, they seemed fine. The parents were friendly, but when I asked about the curriculum they almost invariably suggested PragerU material, which makes me concerned for their children's future.
Not sure why you're being down voted. I'm sure there are some folks homeschooling because of things like racism, but that has always existed just like evangelical christians have always been big into homeschooling.
If there is a big uptake, it's likely due to the ever present threat of school shootings coupled with all the things you said above. I have to teach my kid a lot outside of school and they go to what is considered a good one. The only reason I send them is my spouse and I work and my kid needs to learn social skills. If I won the lottery, I'd homeschool them myself and do it for a few other families as well so that my kid can get the social aspect too.
It's insightful how they said segregation and financial means and you immediately went to racism.
There is certainly some level of segregating the children from families who have the means to "dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children" and children from families that don't have those means.
> What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?
A lot of the people I know who do homeschool (the extreme majority of families I know) have openly said the reasons why they're choosing to homeschool is because they don't want their kids exposed to the other "cultures" in their area whether that be immigrants, other religions, or LGBT people.
One family I know was thinking about pulling their kids out of public school because the choir was going to sing "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" and was worried this was indoctrinating their child into another religion. Forget the fact the rest of that holiday choir event was filled with Christian holiday tunes and what that means for the non-Christians that have a right to go to the school, that wasn't a concern at all.
Not all families, I agree. I've known a few outliers who actually are exceptional teachers and think they'll do a better job teaching the kids than the local schools (and they're probably right). But they're definitely the outliers around me. Most that I've personally known are not like that, and rely on just giving their kids workbooks with extreme religious bent to figure things out on their own.
There is some realy valid things to consider here.
The thing it leaves me wondering is how many kids from elementary through high school a child really keeps in touch with, and if college is currently the place where many students finally get to start to be themselves.
The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against this concept. Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.
Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.
Modern academic life is only well suited to a small percent of the population. Those children who are truly happy and excelling in that setting.
So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at? Forced mass education was a good idea for developing societies, but personalized education has been possible for at least a decade now, at a fraction of the cost.
And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
* It's fascinating to watch the points on my comment go up and down a ton. Very controversial issue. I believe it highlights pressure from social and political structures in society, and/or personal experiences. They vary so much.
My general experience is that homeschool children have self esteem and confidence issues precisely because they've been around 'hand picked' people... forever.
They've never experienced assholes, or people who think their personality is grating, or whatever. Thick skin needs to be built up, to a degree. I'm not saying bullying is good, but being exposed to the unwashed masses definitely can be.
The problem is that what constitutes “healthy” varies so greatly between individuals (especially these days) that it barely carries any objective meaning, and the odds are heavily against any one person’s definition being correct.
If I put myself in the shoes of a parent, I wouldn’t trust myself on the matter enough that I’d feel good shaping my childrens’ entire world to match it. It’s such a wildly difficult thing to get right, and I’d rather they get a glimpse of the world through wide variety of viewpoints and hope they’ll use the values I’ve instilled in them to construct their own view.
> Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.
Not your problem to fix for sure - but it is your problem to equip your child to comfortably weather. There are bad influences out in the world and they generally have outsized effects on their social and professional scenes. In fact, the kind of curated, limited community you're advocating for is one where bad influences thrive.
> So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at?
I certainly agree the degree is whatever - but I think you're really under-valuing the social-gauntlet aspect of school. You will have classmates who kind of (or really) suck. You will need to do your work anyway. You will be incentivized to learn perseverance and a self-centered locus of control. These are valuable skills that only come from actual exposure to bad influences.
Someone who's perfect in perfect conditions is going to struggle because the world is not perfect. The aims you highlight here make me think less of homeschooling than I did before.
> hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children
Unless you can magically guarantee (or have enough money to fund their whole life) your children will never have to interact with "problem" people, they will need to learn to deal with those people one way or another. And it's better to do so in a low-stakes situation like school.
Where I live the schools are quite good and the homeschoolers are fundamental religious families who won’t send their kids to schools where gay pride flags are allowed.
I’d pull our child out of school if the standards dropped but I think the majority of homeschoolers align with out of the mainstream poltical / religious views.
> homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one?
...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?
I think your view is a very black and white one. Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there.
The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe. Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do.
I can not conceive of a worse way to teach a kid how to behave in Adult social settings than to throw them into a group of other kids who have just as little experience as they do and then expect the group to "figure it out". This is not to say that there aren't some homeschooling parents who practice a form of extreme isolation which produces what I would regard as an equally bad outcome as public school. But by the numbers from people who have studied this the evidence indicates homeschooling produces the best outcomes for social adjustment in Adulthood.
Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement which means the child learns how to socialize not from other children but from watching how the adults they are around handle interactions.
> I can not conceive of a worse way to teach a kid how to behave in Adult social settings than to throw them into a group of other kids who have just as little experience as they do and then expect the group to "figure it out".
You are aware of teachers, yes?
> Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement
Everything I've read shows that putting absolutely all else aside, parental involvement is key to a child's success. So perhaps the reason your by the numbers evidence shows home schooling to be better is simply because it's a self-selecting group of involved parents.
Counterpoint from my own experience having been previously homeschooled all the way to college: My parents went the extra mile to ensure I was constantly immersed in large group settings with other homeschoolers. Field trips, co-op classes, sports, and general high-quality social time. There were of course bad eggs as in any group setting, but with an important difference: if it ever got bad, it was possible to leave, and we did on occasion. In my mind, that's far more in keeping with the "real world" than the seeming entrapment of public schooling that offers little recourse for when social experiences sour. In the real world, you have the freedom to leave a toxic job or social group far more so than public school.
In addition to peer socialization and mobility, the flexibility in scheduling allowed me to work a day job through my high school years, exposing me to yet more real-world experience. The constant interaction with adults and folks from other walks of life was a huge boon that allowed me to function as a well-adjusted adult right out of the gate. The high-school drama that people suffer and then bring with them into adulthood is very disappointing and seemingly unnecessary.
^^^ That's my experience interacting with healthily homeschooled children-now-adults. On average they seemed to have so much less trauma than me and my peers, and less "subconscious" issues to deal as adults.
It absolutely is. If you are well equipped to navigate the adult world, you place yourself in hand-picked groups of people. I do not work with, socialize with, or live near a random sample of the population, and I highly doubt most people reading this thread do either!
Yeah but how do you LEARN the ability to do that? To keep that practice always in your mental backburner, and remembering how important it is? Why, you learn it by seeing the impacts from those succumbed to negative influences they surrounded themselves with!
You can't learn the application of hand-picking your people and environments if you don't first see the outcomes when such application is neglected, and understanding its importance from there. If you have the hand-picking done for you as well, you risk not learning the ability to do it yourself. Or how to handle the situations where you can't.
"..a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?"
School isn't their only exposure to life. You will get exposure to other people and non-healthy people outside of school.
"Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in th"
When I was a kid, I was exposed to kids that should have been in prison..and many of them ended up there. My life probably would have been better if they weren't there.
"My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there."
This can still be done with home schooling.
"The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe."
I disagree. If someone is hostile and aggressive all the time, I wouldn't be around them as an adult. I hand pick my friends, and you probably do too. I also still get exposed to the assholes of the world.
"Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do."
If you are at work and someone is sexually harassing all of the women there or generally causing issues for everyone around them (preventing most other people from getting their work done). Do you think they should stay, so everyone can learn to be around them?
You seem to think everyone is a reasonable person that might just have a few issues. This is far from the truth and many times, public schools will just keep these kids there, preventing everyone around them from learning.
> ...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?
It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public. "The real world" is highly filtered social circles and freedom of association. The idea that it's somehow an automatic good to force healthy kids to mix with everyone who happens to show up, regardless of whether they have severe behavioral or social issues, is pretty questionable.
> My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there.
You can expose your kids to different cultures without leaving them wide open to everything else. It's not a binary. The point is that home schooling lets you pick and choose.
> It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public.
I'm baffled by this. Many workplaces? Mass transit? Walking down the sidewalk? At a concert? Buying groceries? True, there don't all expose you to the full sweep of human existence at once but, in aggregate, it seems pretty similar to what you'd encounter at most public schools. What if they want a career in a hospital, or law enforcement, or social services, ... the list goes on.
You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble, but it seems to me they need to be prepared for a future where they encounter all kinds of people. I'm sure this can be compatible with homeschooling but I can't see how it's not generally a disadvantage. (Though perhaps onerous clearly outweighed by other advantages, depending on the situation.)
The closest social equivalency to public school socialization I can think of is prison. You're stuck there for N hours per day with limited or zero control over what other people you're around. Maybe parts of military training might also be similar.
That's the kind of thing that is very much not like the "real world." It's more than just being "exposed" to less optimal peers (like you would on a bus), it's an entirely different social experience.
You don’t have to sit side-by-side rubbing shoulders and squabbling with rabble for 12 years in order to understand and deal with it, just like you don’t have to wrestle with gators for 12 years to learn respect for nature.
> You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble
I think it's telling that the other responses seem to focus on exactly this; the idea that their child will exist in a class apart from the rabble, and will not have to interact with them.
It seems to speak to two very different views of community. On the one hand, there is community as a collection of all the people in a space: people who share local resources, frequent the same local businesses, and have the same local concerns. On the other, there is a community of choice: people who share the same social class, and possibly the same religion or cultural beliefs. I think it's fair to say that you can have both, but trying to say that you can belong solely to the communities you choose and treat everyone else as beneath notice sounds quite problematic, and it will absolutely not give children a correct or complete view of the world.
> No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public
I think "forced" is doing a lot of work there. No, you're not forced to work alongside someone problematic. But quitting your job is quite an escalation to deal with the issue. Same with a troublesome neighbor. To say nothing of public transit, taking flights, interacting with other drivers on the road...
I think your reading is very black and white. Add some leeway to what I say. Hand-picked obviously doesn't mean all friends go through a psych screening on a daily basis, or that you have to helicopter-parent and tell your kids who to be friends with...
> or you have to helicopter-parent and tell your kids who to be friends with...
Isn't that essentially what you're describing, though? You literally talked about "healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children". No, you don't have to tell them who to be friends with... but you've pre-selected the pool of potential friends, so there's no instruction necessary.
I get that on one hand, such regulation is one of the reasons some parents do so, but the wide diversity of "oversight" is challenging.
In Washington, homeschooled students still have to occasionally connect at an actual school, or do some baseline testing.
In Louisiana, you just tell the state "we're homeschooling" and the state is "have fun with that" and the child is essentially off the grid.
Not for nothing, instances of child abuse/CSA in many correlates with the laxness of educational oversight in home schooling.
> And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom.
For all your anecdotes my step daughter has plenty too. 10th graders who are barely literate, cannot do elementary math. Who when asked about their homeschool regime talk of waking at 10, 10.30, playing Fortnite or going on Tiktok for a few hours, and occasionally logging into some website to pretend like they've been working, or doing some mind numbingly simple exercise to show "participation".
> Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom.
Exactly. Notice how, when people complain about the "deranged ideologies" that teachers are teaching their kids, they either 1. stop short of actually naming those ideologies or 2. spout fever dreams that are statistically vanishingly rare.
The one that exists with problem children and opinions you don’t like.
As a parent I get the impulse to remove my children from any potential harm but the real world has sharp edges. They need to be confident in that world not just smothered.
And really as the person who used the term it’s really up to you to define what you mean.
> The one that exists with problem children and opinions you don’t like.
That's just not true though. Your job isn't going to force you to interact with people who disrupt the environment constantly. Those people are fired and removed from the group.
In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave.
In the military, say, you don't get that option.
In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while.
So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.)
> In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave.
Agreed! And that is exactly what home-schooling families are doing. Choosing to leave a dysfunctional environment.
> In the military, say, you don't get that option.
Yep, and other government institutions, like prison. I don't think those are what anyone would call a typical life environment though.
> In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while.
That's another dysfunctional environment, and also what the police are for.
> So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.)
You're right, you can't. The world has a lot of dysfunctional environments, and I agree that people need to learn how to deal with them. Knowingly forcing your child to be in one of those environments full-time for many years seems like a pretty horrible way to teach them that though, bordering on abusive.
And, to be clear, EVERY workplace will have people you don't like. Every. Single. One. No exceptions.
Kids needs to be taught resiliency and healthy mindsets, to a degree. They need to learn to live and let go, to learn their value isn't derived from what people think of them, to learn that embarrassment is self inflicted.
You just can't do that if you're only around people who don't challenge you. If you're in a nice, cushy, social bubble, you will develop self esteem and confidence issues.
My job isn’t the totality of my life and you have very strange ideas about how quickly disruptive people actually get fired. You get plenty of unfiltered interaction in life. If anything I’d say the sort of thing you describe sounds more like an insular cult. Although even there you get misanthropic people, abuse and so on.
> My job isn’t the totality of my life and you have very strange ideas about how quickly disruptive people actually get fired. You get plenty of unfiltered interaction in life.
In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up? The only instances I can think of are other government-run institutions like the military or prison, and I don't think anyone would argue those are standard modes of "real life".
> If anything I’d say the sort of thing you describe sounds more like an insular cult.
> Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.
I'm sure they exist, they may even exist as the majority, I will say for my part the homeschooled kids I knew through my church growing up were not any of these things. I would quite literally use the opposite of both those to describe them.
I'm not saying they represent the majority but they do exist and they were not well adjusted IMHO.
As with many topics I feel like "Yes, if you want to devote yourself fully to X thing you can do much better than Y professional", the problem is, again from my own experience, the people I knew who homeschooled their children were not professionals, they were not capable, and their children suffered for it. I want to stress, I fully believe it is possible for certain people with certain mentors/teachers to do better outside of the public (or private) school system. I just also believe that the odds of most people (making that decision for their children) to meet that bar are low. I also think that some of the better homeschooled experiences that I've seen are simply a super-private school by another name (various parents being or being subject experts and taking turns teaching coupled with many "field trip"-type trips with other homeschooled kids).
> there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Wait till you hear what the parents believe... I don't agree with everything taught or the way it's taught but being exposed to other types of people and ways of thinking is critical. I can guarantee you that had my parents been able to, they would have shielded me from a great number of ways of thinking. I worry that many homeschooled children grow up in a small echo chamber (we all live in echo chambers of difference sizes).
Can public school suck? Absolutely and I acknowledge that homeschooling might be the answer for some people, but only if you can afford to pay (with time or money) to educate your children completely which is almost certainly going to require working with other homeschooler parents to, essentially, build your own school. If you can bring in tutors/mentors/teachers that you vet and agree with and expose them to the world and new ideas/experiences then yeah, you are probably going to have good outcomes. If you plop them in front of a computer to follow a curriculum just to shield them from the "evils" of the world, well, I think you are going to have a bad time. Obviously there is a whole range of people in between those 2 extremes, I just feel that, on average, people trend towards the lower end of that spectrum.
Interesting song and I do agree with many points. For many years I've complained about lack of teaching basic skills (everything from home ec to budgeting and more), many of which I heard in this song. I think there was a little of the baby going out with the bathwater but overall I enjoyed it.
Homeschooling does not hit record numbers, that is that people tend to herd, herding is done because they prefer natural herding as a byproduct of evolution. Not because it's something from bible, do not believe those lies. Herding is a natural byproduct of evolution. believe Darwin
Didn't homeschool here but started a charter school instead. Some of our neighbors did homeschool and I have mixed feelings about it. Some did very well, some not so well; but of course the same can be said of all of the kids in the area no matter which way they went.
A few things I'll note:
- educational spending has almost zero correlation with outcomes
- the number one indicator of educational success is parental involvement
- homeschooling and charter schools tend to attract the outliers from both ends. The smart who are underserved where they are and the kids with problems whose parents are involved enough to search for solutions.
- the real losers are those whose parents can't or won't get involved and who aren't succeeding on their own
In the current educational environment, teachers are often viewed as babysitters whose job is to educate children "correctly" and parents are only there to ensure that "correctly" matches their expectations. In the "good old days" when parents and teachers beat children regularly, at least they were unified in their expectations that children would listen to and obey teachers and not disrupt class. Now it is more common to see underpaid teachers without any support confronted by angry parents when their children misbehave and fail to actually learn.
My daughter is in college now, but we used a variety of private, part-time, and homeschooling approaches prior to that. One thing is that there are a lot of resources (e.g. independent teachers for subjects you don't know, co-ops for socializing, etc.), and the more people are doing it, the more true that becomes. My parents were both public school teachers, and yet we found ourselves home- and alternative-schooling our daughter. Public schools don't really seem to have a strategy for dealing with the situation, other than complaining about it.
If you are offering a free service, that is quite time-intensive, and increasing numbers of people choose to not use it, then there should be more introspection going on. If it's happening in public education, I'm not able to see evidence of it.
Seattle schools have that issue.
After covid a bunch of kids were moved to private schools, and SPS (the organism in charge of school) complained and blamed parents on having money and not wanting to mix with the riff raff and other bs.
When they actually asked the parents why their children weren't returning after covid, it was because SPS decided to axe the advance/gifted programs they had for kids, among other educational quality things.
The children that never came back were children who would have taken advantage of those programs, and parents decided to go pay to win instead to get those programs back in private schools, as it becomes a compounding advantage in today's competitive world.
SPS is still using the stupid hippie approach about children magically learning how to read with pictures and guesses, instead of phonics, and some numbers for reading are worst than Mississippi, which went hard into phonics and overwhelmingly improved their numbers.
WA is a clear example that spending a ton of money doesn't improve educational outcomes, you also have to do things that work.
This is exactly right. I had a kid in Seattle schools during this time and this is exactly how I saw it happen and and Seattle schools were a major reason I left Seattle.
This might have been our experience from our bubble, but are these examples representative of the overall pattern? I suspect for every 1 kid pulled out of public school because of academic reasons like gifted programs, there are 10 pulled out due to religious reasons or vaccines or the gamut of anti-government reasons.
Nobody's saying they shouldn't be allowed to. We're just speculating about the reasons and I don't know if there's really any hard data showing which reasons are more prevalent.
I feel this pain. I grew up in what I thought were great public schools and am a big believer that public school is a fundamental institution that should raise the floor for society. Now I'm raising kids in Seattle and it's a constant struggle to get the kinds of educational programs and opportunities for my kids that I took for granted when I was in public school and just assumed would still be around when I was an adult. For lack of a better way to phrase it, I feel like I am exactly the kind of parent SPS should want to keep in its system - a strong believer in public education with the means to support the schools, yet sometimes I feel like they are actively driving families like mine out of school system with their decisions.
> then there should be more introspection going on
This assumes that the blame obviously lies with the schools. Basically everyone I know that homeschools does it because they disapprove of tolerance. Should the introspection lead schools to embrace segregation again? It is going to be hard to bring people with such wildly different viewpoints together in harmony.
When a social failure happens at a public school - a child fails a class, drugs are found, a teenager gets pregnant, there’s a fight - most people don't question the public school system itself. But when a social failure happens to a homeschooler, we wonder if the system of _homeschooling_ is broken.
In reality, stories of homeschooling failure are probably no more common than stories of failure in public high school, they're simply more attention-grabbing.
I think this is likely because people (accurately, in my opinion) attribute behavioral problems with kids to the level and quality of involvement of the parents at home, so it would be bizarre to attribute a child getting caught with drugs at school to the public school system itself.
I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before.
We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.
We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.
But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
> Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
And this is only just now being investigated as a cause of harm. When I went to public high school, the bullying happened at school and stayed there. Kids now, their bullies follow them home, and since most of the social interaction now happens online instead of in-person, it's way more damaging to mental health than the classic caricature of a schoolyard bully. The most I had to compare myself to were my peers in my school, not the entire globe of influencers and fake instagram.
There has been a complete erosion of boundaries. The threat is constant, you can't escape it, and kids are in a state of hyper-vigilance, always online or else they miss a crucial social interaction in group chat, or need to constantly check if a damaging photo, post, or rumor gets publicly posted to the internet while they were asleep.
Not only that, teens are losing the ability to read human emotion, so misunderstandings escalate rapidly. In person communication now becomes too intense, and only increases anxiety and isolation, despite being hyperconnected.
I suppose there are few talented, hard working people who want to teach, and they command a premium. Education is expensive and underfunded.
As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money.
By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.
Expensive yes. Underfunded depends on where you are.
San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student.
I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.
cost per student is higher for high school students. So if you take an average across all grades for public schools and then compare that to specific cost per grade at private schools, of course private schools are going to look relatively cheaper for younger students.
Nearly every time we try to fix this problem with money it fails. The problem is not money. All else being equal there is little to no correlation between spend and outcome. Money get's touted by schools and politicatians as a way of pretending to care but not actually do any of the work to improve outcomes.
What does tend to correlate with money and also correlates with outcomes is parental involvement. Solving that problem requires societal and economic change in a district though not giving the school more money.
I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house. That $200k gets eaten up pretty quick by things like security, janitorial, building maintenance, support staff like principals, librarians, guidance counselors etc etc. If you’re meaning to include total cost for the full time employees (the teachers) in the list, then the salaries are a lot less attractive once you’re done covering benefits, etc.
I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot. The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k. Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond.
My point is that it's hard to point at some issue of inefficient public bureaucracy, because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper. I would also argue they wouldn't try, because their goal is a good education, or at least better than the public alternative (that only spends $28k per kid).
"I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house."
I was generous in my estimate for each of the line items. I chose a one room school house as an example because it's easy to grok, and anything larger would be cheaper due to economies of scale.
"I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot."
Although I have only one child (in 4th grade), I think about schools a lot, too.
"The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k."
This $28k number is false. Most parochial schools charge about $12k. Here is a breakdown by grade level of the number of parochial schools in SF that serve that grade level, and the median tuition among those schools for that grade:
# Median sticker price
Pre-K 7 $16,610
K 29 $11,530
1 29 $11,530
2 29 $11,175
3 29 $11,175
4 29 $11,175
5 29 $11,175
6 30 $11,519
7 30 $11,519
8 30 $11,519
9 4 $31,725
10 4 $31,725
11 4 $31,725
12 4 $31,725
"Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond."
This 'usually start in the $40k range' is also false. For each of the grades K-5, 33-39% of non-parochial schools in SF charge less than $40k. For each of the grades 6-8, 30% of non-parochial schools in SF charge less than $40k.
"because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper"
Non-parochial private schools don't typically price based on cost. The schools that have high demand (due to parents and student population) can charge more. So they don't need to manage their costs tightly. And they can spend lots of money on marketing.
Moreover, not all students pay sticker price. So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.
"because their goal is a good education"
Their goal is happy customers (parents). Different schools achieve this in different ways. Some parents choose a school not based on the expected quality of education but based on the expected networking opportunities for themselves and for their child.
I was generous in my estimate for each of the line items. I chose a one room school house as an example because it's easy to grok, and anything larger would be cheaper due to economies of scale.
I would argue that economies of scale don't apply to education in the same way they apply to other businesses at large. Sure, you theoretically get the benefits of scale with central organization, buildings, centralized services, etc, but once you get to the classrooms themselves most of the cost simply scales linearly with the number of students.
This $28k number is false. Most parochial schools charge about $12k.
I'm not sure what we're talking about here anymore. You're using K-8 as the dominating factor for this gotcha a few times in this thread. There are more K-8 parochial schools, yes. "Most parochial schools charge about $12k" is true, unless you're talking about high school. Exactly 1 parochial school is less than $30k (SF Christian, at $16k). From there (limited to religious schools):
- Sacred Heart ($31k)
- Archbishop Riordan ($32k)
- Saint Ignatius ($34.6)
- Sacred Heart ($60k)
- Jewish Community School ($65k)
I might have missed some in here since I'm going by names, but given that SF Christian is the cheapest private high school on SF Chronicle's list[1] I don't think that matters for my point.
You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate, and structure most of your argument around the cheapest schools (K-8). Mea culpa on my end, though: you are correct that when I was saying "cheapest I've seen," there was an unfair modifier of "cheapest schools on my personal spreadsheet" which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to. You're absolutely correct that there are cheaper parochial schools available as long as you only need K-8.
Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school (again, referencing SF Chronicle's data). I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.
So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.
Sure, that's fair! But we're not talking about income, we're talking about average cost per kid. We can't actually know the details under the hood, but again, those schools specifically in your list are usually subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway.
You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate
The reason for this is simple and not nefarious:
- I don't have access to data that would allow me to apportion total SFUSD costs to individual school types
- When considering schools with vastly different prices (and different scales), the median is a much more informative measure than the mean (which could be skewed by an unusually expensive or inexpensive school with a tiny student population).
Another reason for using median is that I was responding to your comments which talked about general price levels ('tuition for those schools is roughly', 'usually start in the $40k range'). You were not talking about averages, but typical prices or minimum (starting) prices. The mean prices have no bearing on the truth or falsity of those claims.
Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private high schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school
If we look only at non-parochial schools, the means are even higher (e.g. $39k for 5th grade, $41k for 8th grade, $59k for 12th grade).
those schools specifically in your list are subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway
Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant when we look at the sticker price for non-parochial schools, we should assume their average revenue per student is less than the sticker price, and the average cost per student is less than or equal to the average revenue per student.
I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.
My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded?
which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to
If we limit the discussion to only those schools we'd be willing to send our kids to, then that would rule out almost all SFUSD schools, which kind of defeats the point of the discussion!
BTW In case you want to see the SF Chronicle data in a form that's more personalized (showing the schools nearest to you first, filterable by grade levels and price and type), I made a tool to do that: https://tools.encona.com/schoolfinder
San Francisco schooling district spends upwards of $1B a year to educate 55k students. About 85% of the budget goes to salary and benefits (excluding pensions). Of that, 75% goes to educators and the rest for other staff.
Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.
It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.
With a budget of $28k per student, and 21 students per classroom, that’s $588k per classroom.
Now, granted, some of that goes on building upkeep, cleaning, supplies, heating, pensions, managers etc - but if $588k per classroom doesn’t let you pay enough to attract teachers there’s something very suspicious going on.
I don’t buy that argument, there’s no reason a teacher in San Francisco can’t live in Oakland or Berkeley, or a teacher in NYC couldn’t live in NJ. You don’t have a human right to live in the most expensive real estate on Earth.
GP didn't say anything about it being a human right. You seem to be strawmanning their argument.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.
Yeah, screw the teachers, they should just have a longer commute, who cares about them? /s
I always want to laugh when I hear people complain about finding near-minimum-wage workers in a HCOL area. They can't seem to grasp that commuting is not free, it may feel free to them at their income level but transportation costs money (gas, car maintenance, insurance or bus, etc) and time. I'm not saying teaching is a minimum wage job but it's not a high earning one either, paying them as low as we do _and_ also asking them to have a longer commute is just absurd.
Jackson Hole residents complaining about "poor service" in stores and restaurants in town, because shocker, servers can't afford to live in Jackson Hole. And unlike even SF or NY (which may not be perfect but have at least functional transport), there's no easy way to travel from the next town, an hour away or more.
Residents have started banding together to rent coaches to bus people in, which seems the most reasonable solution, after all, no poors in town, still, and it doesn't hurt the residents that service industry employees in their town have a three hour commute. /s
It got so bad in Atherton, CA, that the school had to build accommodation for teachers in the school itself. Next step, they can do janitorial work for extra money!
If an average class has 20 students it's $560k per year. If an average student gets 1000 hours of schooling per year you can pay 200$/hour and you have spent only just above 1/3 of your budget.
It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".
It’s because this is a very simplified view of a classroom. What is presented above is the best case scenario, not a realistic one. For example, there’s no consideration of costs associated with any sort of handicapped student, or student with special education needs.
Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.
Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.
$28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us?
Teacher (all-in cost): $150k
Teaching assistant: $100k
Rent for commercial space in SF (~1,200 sq ft): $60k
Curriculum, books, supplies: $23k
Technology (22 Chromebooks, projector, software): $18k
Field trips and enrichment: $10k
Utilities, internet, insurance: $27k
Furniture and equipment: $20k
Admin/legal/accounting: $8k
Total: $416k
That leaves $200k unspent.
AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist.
If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).
The big thing you’re missing is special education, and to a lesser extent English Language Learners. School districts are obligated to teach every student, some of whom cost the district dramatically more than they receive from the state.
Your admin costs are also low - you need to account for each teacher being coached and managed, running school operations and front desk, facilities management, finance, IT, etc.
Also this is an area where first principles analysis is likely to lead you astray - I’d recommend starting with SFUSD’s public budget to understand what their cost structure is.
You're recommending I look at SFUSD's public budget when:
- that budget is how I was able to calculate per-pupil spend
- in another comment you admitted to having 'no idea' where the $28k/year number came from, suggesting to me that you haven't looked at the budget yourself
The granularity in SFUSD's published budget is not sufficient to analyze what is useful and what is waste.
Any specialized teaching: art, languages, in high school I understand they have a different teacher for each subject, a librarian, a substitute teacher on sick days, an individual aide for one of the kids to represent the special education budget…
But I remember you previously and you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.
you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.
Providing for my child's educational needs is my job as a parent, not the job of the government 'school system'.
But if the government is going to operate schools and demand that we all pay for those schools, I'd prefer it if those schools were run for the benefit of students (and specifically to maximize academic achievement) and not for the benefit of government employees.
> Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.
Education should be well funded but in many school districts the problem is waste and inefficiency rather than lack of funding. Huge amounts are paid to administrators and consultants who do nothing to improve student outcomes, or even make them worse. Generally there is little correlation between funding per student and results.
Remote learning has also built many methods for success, and absolutely nobody even consulted them before implementing their ad hoc systems for Covid. There are entire online public schools and their staff were just ignored.
COVID forced remote learning to be adopted very broadly, without the usual self-selection effect of families that choose to homeschool when they have a choice. So the observations from COVID don't really support any stronger claim than saying that homeschooling can be done badly.
Of these, most are easily handled. I am in a midsized city and there are plenty of groups that offer music, robotics & engineering, speech & drama, etc. focused towards homeschooled students. That, plus the rise in homeschool "pods"/co-ops means socialization and activities are very available to students & parents who want them.
Sports might be the challenge. Many US states have athletic associations that handle most K-12 sports, and they require enrollment in an accredited member school. I am aware of several homeschool specific athletic associations in my area, but all are targeted towards religious homeschoolers. Not certain what secular alternatives would exist, but soccer is very popular & there are plenty of competitive academies that operate outside the school ecosystem.
I know several homeschooled students who played varsity sports for their local high school (the one that they would have been attending). I'm not sure about the universality of that, but that's an option for at least some people.
I think it's patchwork & has changed over time. When I was at high school one of my friends who was homeschooled competed with me on our academic team. His older (and far more athletically gifted brother ;-)) lettered in several varsity sports. But now that state's athletic association explicitly says no to homeschool students.
Besides big ones like soccer that you mention, more niche sports are often partially or totally outside of school systems.
Fencing for example, is usually clustered around external clubs. Very few high schools will have fencing teams, and in a lot of cities even the high schools that do have fencing teams will be kind of a joke compared to the club teams.
This comment made me curious so I did some research. Of the sports offered by my local school district (in the top 30 for enrollment in the country), I can find an alternative for homeschoolers that offer competitive opportunities for every sport but bowling and football.
Of the others, there are either homeschool alternatives that are explicitly secular or at least not overtly religious, or there are competitive clubs. All the schools have track & field, but there is a large homeschool league. And the district has a few schools with pools and a few more with swim teams that practice at the city pools, but the local swim club is the one turning out the Olympians – but even then, it also seems to have plenty of offerings for kids who won't set a world butterfly record. Football, I imagine, is just so popular that the private/public schools take all the players.
My kids do Taekwondo and church youth groups. My eldest did not want to do robotics but he does run the Dungeons and Dragons group at our library. We do music as a family. My daughter does choir. My son has done drama but declined to participate this year. They have been homeschooled their entire lives. All three of them received something I did not, the ability to converse with adults from a young age. This is of course anecdotal so YMMV but I would love to see a study on the conversational skills of homeschooled students.
Anecdotally, homeschooled children often speak and behave more like adults.
Whether this is a positive or negative thing depends on the situation. Being precocious is something adults might think positively about (though not in all situations) but it's not something other kids usually admire.
I think you are right that this is situational. I can understand it potentially hindering relationships with other like aged children who are traditionally educated. I can only say that I like my kids a lot, which is nice as a parent.
Homeschoolers form co-ops. A local one here does ballroom dance, tennis, basketball. There is often a youth symphony option in mid- to large-sized cities.
For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.
Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.
To me, this question highlights the whole problem: This is not what schools are for.
Yes, it's great if they provide these things, but it's a distant secondary concern. I'd rather my kid get a great education and miss out on these things, than get a poor education but have access to all these.
But of course, as others have pointed out, it's a false dichotomy. You can have both.
Depending on where you live there are many options. In my school district home school kids can join any club or team offered by the public school system where you reside. Additionally there are numerous non-school related clubs and activities all over the place. My kids could play music with the local school district, with a musical education non-profit that is prolific in our area, or ( where they do play music ) with private lessons that have group classes, bands, and performance opportunities.
There are tons of clubs for such things. My kids are in a homeschool music program (and learning piano and, until recently, bagpipes); half of my kids are playing competitive sports via homeschool programs that compete with other high schools; one is getting his certification as a welder (as part of a State program that pays for it if one is still in high school). Because class times and locations are more flexible this opens up far more possibilities for extra curricular activities.
i'm sure many others will reply as well but there's lots of extracurricular options for homeschoolers as well as social engagements. It's kind of like a shadow school system, there's associations and groups and other organizations built around home schooled children. My wife and I considered it but we have managed to navigate our public school situation well enough without me, or my wife, having to quit working.
I went to public schools but still did that sort of thing through the YMCA and our church. At the middle school level and lower, most of those types of activities are community based rather than centered around the school, though that varies by area.
This argument has not kept up with the reality of the public school system. The homeschooled cohort my children are associated with have problems associating with public school children of the same age... but the problem doesn't lie on the homeschooler's side, it lies 100% on the publicly-schooled children's side! The public school attendees are noticeably less mature for the same age and less able to deal with anything other than the highly-specific and unrealistic environment of public schools rather than the rest of the world. The homeschoolers have trouble stepping down their social expectations to levels the public school attendees can meet.
We have a few reasons unrelated to socialization [1] to do home schooling but one of the reasons I don't want to send them back is precisely the regression in "socialization" I would expect.
30 years ago, this probably was a decent argument, but the bar of "at least as socialized as a public school attendee" has gone way down in the meantime.
[1]: I guess before anyone asks, one of my children is deaf-blind and while the people in the system did their best and I have not much criticism of the people, the reality is still that I was able to more precisely accommodate that child than the system was able to. This ends up being a pretty big stopper for a return to the public school system for that child.
Homeschooled does not mean "completely isolated." My kids are in bands, sports teams, and numerous extracurricular activities both with other home schoolers as well as with public schoolers. Also, homeschooled kids are far less reliant on their same-aged peer group for socialization; my kids talk with people in public regardless of their age (something which surprises some adults).
I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization. They'll have to deal with those folks when they hit the real world too.
I.e. disassociating from those people? Isn’t that what homeschooling does inherently? It’s more likely that kids will pick up bad behaviors than they will learn to “deal with” those kinds of people.
> I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization.
It is, but do we have any studies showing how well school kids are at this? From what I've seen, most kids in school do not learn those skills.
Homeschooling doesn't mean the kid stays at home all the time. We homeschool and my kid has classes and different activities all week, interacts with friends and teams. It has worked very well for us given our lifestyle. I would understand it's not for everyone.
Who’s to say that they wouldn’t be more socialized, not less?
It used to be folk wisdom that beating your kids built character, teachers would even slap kids with a ruler back in the 1950s. Could you say the same about bullies, cliques, popularity contests, and all the other performative nonsense that goes on in public schools?
Maybe it’s all bullshit and giving kids a safe environment to learn at their own pace without all these distractions makes them better equipped for the modern world?
My kids get more socialization than me. Our parish homeschool group has daily activities. Monday is two hour playgroup. Tuesday is extracurricular classes at the parish. Wednesday is catechesis and play time. Thursday is free. Friday she does a day long camp with an outdoor education program (not parish based). All added up, she spends more time with kids than I did and doing more interesting things
We homeschooled. When we wanted to socialize our kids, we shoved them into the restroom and beat them up for their lunch money.
I kid, but there's a real point: So much of the socialization is bad.
More: Kids aren't going to be kids forever. Does socialization with a bunch of other kids prepare them for the adult society that they're going to go into?
This is my perspective too. A bunch of 11 year olds raising your 11 year old doesn't always result in preferable outcomes. I think the other part of it is that a lot of people have this sort of idea that homeschooling means sitting in your kid in the basement in front of their homework and never seeing the light of day. Obviously that's not accurate.
As a parent, your view of socialization being "good" or "bad" is heavily distorted. I think of socialization (I am a parent) as a neutral activity, sometimes a skill, although I really don't think it's needed as we live in a mostly secluded society in the US, and verbal communication has been supplanted by electronic means.
Well it should, yes, given that socialization is the result of shared social experiences.
Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences that create bonds with people (whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)
These are real social dynamics that actually exist in adult life, and I suspect people who are totally blindsided by them are maladapted
> Kids (and teachers) generally don't deal with bullies well
Are there studies on whether bullying is higher in lightly supervised versus moderately supervised groups? Or mixed-age versus single-age groups?
Scouting is lightly-supervised mixed-age groups. If an older kid bullied a younger kid, that resulted in adults reading them the riot act. But if a younger kid bullied a younger kid, the two sort of wound up sorting it out until someone threw a punch or pissed off an older kid. (For being annoying.) That second dynamic was, to my memory, unique to mixed-age groups.
If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society.
> Why would you need to learn to deal with bullies?
Because bullying is an extreme example of a common human power dynamic.
> If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society
Fair enough. I was thinking exclusively of non-violent bullying. (It may get physical. But in a roughhousing way. Not one intended to cause pain or injury.)
> But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
“And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.”
Take it from someone who was homeschooled from pre-k through high school, you will absolutely not provide a better social environment.
I was so unprepared to handle the social dynamics in casual, educational or professional that it took years and years of active work to put myself in a position where it wasn’t an absolute detriment to my success. I have no doubt you can educate your children well, it’s every other aspect of humanity that is typically missed out on and can lead to unintended consequences.
I had the opposite experience. I was home schooled from 2nd grade through high school, but I didn't just spend all my time alone with parents. My family was part of a home-school co-op, I played in the local youth symphony, and I had a job working at the local university when I was 16 and taking college classes there. I also have a large extended family.
I didn't really have much trouble adjusting to living on campus at college, and I've never had issues with interpersonal stuff at work or school.
Of my closest friends when I was in high school, the one with the best social skills had been home schooling since I met him when he was 10. However, he did participate in extracurricular activities at the local public school, like a computer club in middle school and then theater in high school. The only area he was really lagging at age 18 was in math, but that reversed a few years later and now he has a STEM PhD and has been teaching at a large state school for the past decade and a half.
I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.
I dunno. I think I could spin a narrative where public middle school dynamics (that is, bullied quite a bit) created issues for me that hampered my ability to succeed in social settings.
I don't really think that way in general, but I guess I'd just want to point out that the spectrum isn't "good socialization in public school" to "bad/no socialization in homeschooling".
Sounds like you had a hard time transitioning. Sorry for that.
I don't believe it's a magic pill by any means. But I've known many recently home schooled kids and they seem a lot more mature than their public school peers. So I think we have a decent shot at having similar results.
Seeming mature to an adult isn't the thing in question though, is it? Not feeling or appearing awkward when interacting on their own in their 20s is what is being criticized. The anecdotal evidence you present doesn't include home schooled children in their 20s as far as I can tell.
Homeschooled kids have much more flexible schedules which can allow them to do things in the community during the daytime that are not available to kids who have to go to school in-person full time.
This can include volunteer work or part time jobs working with the public and interacting with people of all ages.
Why do you think you being forced into a monoculture of only kids your own age would help your interaction with others when you're in your 20s? 25 year olds don't behave anything like teenagers.
Because I've met several homeschooled adults over the years, and talking to them that's something most of them had in common when explaining the impact it had on their life. Looking for more objective data I found this one source that seems to be written by people not already convinced of the desirability of homescooling [1], forgive me for being skeptical of the objectivity of places called "national home education research institute". Overall it paints a more positive picture than I had expected, but also highlights it's limitations.
One could say this is where the free market of schooling comes into play. Does it make more economic sense for businesses to choose those with social skills learnt from home schooling, or ones who have not been home schooled? Definitely curious to see where this goes.
If only it was actually a free market. Republicans are actively kneecapping public education so they can pump money to the schools that are free to to discriminate and kick out underperforming kids
That's probably true in a lot of cases for K-5. But I don't think any two people could teach a child with the same robustness as a the ~15 teachers most kids have during middle school/junior high, let alone provide things like labs, workshops, extracurriculars, etc. With high school that gap goes from big to enormous.
I've done all 3 of public/private/homeschool with my kids. My daughter's (public) HS chemistry class had exactly one lab that we couldn't do at home. The physics lab had zero. Bio is a bit harder since they had e.g. hundreds of pre-mounted slides for examples of various things. We also lack a biology major in our near-family.
For extracurriculars: there are club youth sports aplenty, a youth orchestra, band, choir and drum & bugle group. There are participate in various academic competitions (mathletes, model UN &c.). It's definitely harder since there's no "club rush" like in public school, but these things are available (and the total cost is rather less than a non-parochial private school, though subtracting out lost salary for the parent doing the teaching reverses that for the more affordable options[1])
1: It's completely possible to spend more than a private university tuition on private high schools where I live, but the ones not subsidized by the Roman Catholic Church start in the low $20,000s
This just assumes the median education for 6-12 is any good. Also, a lot of labs, workshops, and extracurriculars can be easily found elsewhere - a lot of these have groups specifically for homeschoolers.
> And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.
Citation needed.
Every perspective I've heard personally - and mirrored in comments here as well - from the non parent side of things, is quite negative in terms of learning how to behave and socialize with your peers. To you the children might seem polite and servile, and you might see this as something positive - as you state in another comment - but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
I know a ton of home-schooled kids and this is far from universal.
Yes, kids who were home-schooled because their parents didn't want secular society interfering with them raising their kids in a niche religion are more likely to experience this. Even in those cases, however, I found that the kids adapted rather quickly.
In most other cases[1], the parents were explicitly worried about their kids' socialization, and found many opportunities for the kids to interact with other kids their age (e.g. typical after school activities like sports or such).
Many of the kids I know who were both home-schooled and socially awkward started in public school and were pulled due to bullying &c. To say that the home-schooling stunted their social growth is a counterfactual; it's just as easy to see them ending up worse off.
For the most part, I would say that socializing in public school vs. homeschooling is a bit like communication with in-person companies versus remote; in the former it just "happens" to some degree, sometimes well, sometimes poorly; in the latter it requires intentional work to happen, but can still happen.
1: A notable exception is one person I know who was homeschooled by parents, with a father that traveled a lot for work and took his family with him. She was often in situations where she had fewer than 5 kids around close to her age who also spoke English.
>but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
Citation needed.
If you put your kids in homeschooling and provide no other outlet for socialization then sure, they'll be socially awkward.
My brother and I were homeschooled, but we were also heavily involved in our community. We were at the local park playing sports 3-4 times per week, we did various summer camps, we had a few other homeschool families that we'd setup playdates with. Our parents would sometimes joke that we barely ever home! And, unsurprisingly, we had no problems with socializing or making friends later in life.
Was it the same kind of socialization you get from going to public school? No, but I consider that a feature :)
> I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.
Any idea how many were affected terribly in school? I'm in touch with my high school classmates. Almost half of them blame the school experience to lifelong problems.
I was homeschooled and I got a fairly strong education.
What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.
For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.
We can actually. It's called theory of probability and statistics, which is probably "forgotten" by these amazing self-appointed homeschoolers. A few rare successes of homeschoolers doesn't mean this practice is good on average, and vice versa the rare failures of the public education system doesn't mean that it is bad on average.
Most times I look this up, I see stuff like "[t]he home-educated typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests".
Looking at the replies, I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores but social development and preparing kids for society outside the house. It definitely requires considerably more, active attention from parents. Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades and ensure that they're maintaining an active social life but I think the difficulty of nailing that as you go-your-own-way is apparent.
>I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores
>Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades
This reads as an inconsistency.
As for the social stuff - as I commented elsewhere, it's not hard to make a case that public school is bad for socialization as well. Which isn't to say that public school isn't irredeemable in that way, just that it's not like one or the other is an obviously correct choice.
Yeah, that study has been debunked or countered by "... among home-educated students applying for college", and the proportion of home schooled kids who apply for college versus those in the traditional education system is far lower, i.e. this is very self-selecting.
This comment is so disingenuous. Few and rare?? Why would you frame it like this? Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.
They're not more likely to get into college as a whole. In fact, they apply to college a lot less. But in that subset, against public education as a whole, then yes, they do better.
You may want to look wider afield than homeschooling advocacy and lobbyist groups for your stats.
One of the key issues in school is classroom size. A teacher with 30 kids is handicapped as a teacher compared to one with a smaller class.
Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.
Grade retention ('holding kids back') has additionally dropped significantly since the average HNer has gone to school. I remember going to school where one of my peers went to sixth grade with his brother two years older than him. But now, we give out social promotions.
That might've worked if we funded schools & gave students who fell behind significant interventions & 1x1 attention, but that's not what happened. One of my friends has a very bright and talented fifth grader in a class with multiple students who can barely read or write. Guess who gets the most attention from educators? Which group the teachers structure the class for?
That's also 4 entirely different curriculums which need to be taught. I volunteer taught CS for about 10 years, and the first year I taught a new class- and this was a single class for high school kids- I always found I was much better at it the second and third time around. I taught about 4 different courses, of varying difficulty- intro to programming with SNAP, "CS Principles" which had a little bit of everything from (very) basic networking to html and a bit of javascript, Javascript/Python, and then the final boss... AP CS in Java, which is a very difficult class.
I find it difficult to wrap my head around you can make it work teaching the entire curriculum for 4 different grades encompassing reading/writing, math, history, science, art, music, etc... I guess its potentially compensated for by the fact that they are all getting very individualized attention, but thats spreading a parent very thin.
Especially when we are talking about high school levels, where you can even potentially go into AP courses- no way a single parent can teach college level calculus, History, CS, etc... effectively.
For all the flaws of our public education system, I don't see how this can work better.
Did you make a schedule of regularly switching off with other families of four? In other words, those parents teach your kids and you teach their kids? Otherwise I'm not sure how you'd tackle confirmation bias creeping up in all kinds of ways.
I used to think this way, but some experiences made me realize it's not so cut and dry.
When you have a class size over 20, teachers are forced to be a lot more systematic, which can improve the effectiveness of their teaching. Good teachers make heavy use of social proof. When I tried to teach my kid at home, it was a struggle. But when the kid is around his peers in a classroom, and they are going along with the teacher, he naturally falls in line with no cajoling, etc.
If there were only 5 students, the likelihood he'll just go along with things is much lower.
Yep, that's definitely true. That being said, figuring out which approach to take requires paying attention (which you did), there's no guarantee that any two people (or any one person at two times) will be in the same cohort.
> It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.
Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.
I suspect there is a lot of selection bias in that data. My hypothesis is that the homeschooled folks who take the ACT are more likely to do well on the ACT than the homeschooled folks who don't.
My Title 1 school made the ACT available to all students for free (on one specific date). A lot of kids who were unprepared for the ACT took it because, why not?
I would say the interesting thing is the sudden increase over the last 5 years. Presumably, the number of Americans who think they can KO a grizzly bear is a lizardman constant situation in the surveys over time. But the number of people homeschooling is recently skyrocketing.
An acquaintance of mine fought (got mauled by) a grizzly bear a month ago. He went to the ICU (since released), but the bear got shot and died. It was a pyrric victory, but he did win the fight.
I’ve watched people on YouTube make all sorts of amazing things, and they make it look easy. Which leads to thoughts of “hey, that’s easy, I could do that”.
I'll gladly stand up my 7 homeschooled kids next to any public school kids.
All tested above grade level on state mandatory testing throughout their schooling.
Two graduated early (some with college credits).
My adult children (4 sons, ages 19-25) have gainful employment, living on their own (2 own their own homes), and standing on their own. One is married (I got a grandkid!), all have friends, communities they're involved in, and are healthy (physically and mentally).
None take prescription meds nor struggle with anxiety or depression.
Poor public school kids... I hope they can find help for the damage they suffered. <grin>
Given they are sufficiently successful to be living on their own, married, and some with their own homes, whether they went to college is probably an inappropriate yardstick of success. I mean, be real. If a 25 year old is married and owns a home, but doesn't have a BSc are they a failure? What are we doing here.
And yet there are many homeschooling parents in this discussion thread (including a single-income dad of 9 whose kids are homeschooled). But I'm quite aware that I'm the exception on HN.
Assuming you are Mormon, is home schooling sort of another form of virtue signaling Mormon families employ or is it more of a way to ensure your families don't get excluded? Like, did you really have a choice in the matter once you realized you either go full Mormon or leave the church entirely?
Protestant Christian and most of my Christian brothers and sisters look at how many kids I have and that we homeschool and think I'm a little crazy (just like most non-Christians). I'd say probably 1/3 of the families in our church homeschool though. It's a wonderful community to be a part of and if I sent my remaining kids to public school, I wouldn't be asked to leave.
Mormons aren't the only people with large families. Ultra-conservative Jews, Muslims, and many Christians have large families. What I don't think I've ever seen is a couple who is non-religious or atheist and has a large family.
Every time I hear the “What about socialization?” argument from some childless person on SSRIs, I am reminded how dishonest some people are. If they even liked (let alone cared for) children, they would have had their own.
A lot of people are offering opinions on homeschooling. I'll throw in one anecdote from my past. I played tennis with a kid who was homeschooled through middle school but was sent to high school so he could graduate with a diploma instead of a GED, because this seems to be something that colleges care about. He was awkward for a couple weeks but basically adapted to high school and we quickly forgot he was homeschooled. The only thing that occasionally reminded us he was homeschooled was that he was better prepared for high school academics than we were and got good grades.
So for everyone saying that homeschooled kids aren't well adjusted or have bad social skills, I'll offer the counterpoint that they might appear unadjusted at first, but humans can usually adapt to new environments, so homeschooled kids have a pretty good chance at acting "normal" a short time after leaving homeschool. Don't judge someone's awkwardness the first time you meet them, let them adjust a bit and see if they can assimilate.
- Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.
- With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching.
It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it's comparatively much easier to pull your kids out and homeschool them.
This is very anecdotal. Here in the south, the "controversial, left-ish values" would be a breath of fresh air vs what is being taught here
> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass
This is no child left behind in action, which was implemented during W's term
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
^ This is the micromanagement that a ton of people claim to hate and get in their way on this site when folks are complaining about daily standups.
IMO, if you're worried about the quality of your kid's education then you'll either need to send them to a private or home school, which will stunt them socially because life isn't just one big private school or home, or encourage curiosity and learning at home to supplement their rote learning from school
> Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.
I'm thinking this is fairly new. When I was in school, if I got bad grades or got in trouble at school, I got in trouble at home too. My parents were absolutely not calling the teachers complaining about grades. When I had trouble learning multiplication facts, they sat me down with flash cards every night until I had learned them, they didn't blame the teacher. This was in the 1970s/80s. This seemed pretty normal based on what I remember. When/why did it change?
I think parents are trying to maximize the perceived value of their child at the expense of their real value. I also think various media (especially the internet) have lowered trust in primary/secondary education, leading to more parents feeling justified in "taking matters into their own hands". You kind of see that attitude in this thread (its not wholly unjustified).
One example is in high school I had an excellent literature class that also covered a lot of philosophy. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the various philosophies we studied were the philosophies that are often foundational for Marxism, atheism, and general left of center academia. Probably the best class I had in high school but I wish it had also covered things on both sides, or been more transparent that it was in fact biased.
It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way. Very little of it has anything to do with the family of political ideologies despite sharing a similar name. The question of God's existence is also fundamental to the history of philosophy. It's not particularly shocking that a course might cover people like Lucretius, Bentham, or Russell.
Most philosophy surveys will also include some of the other sides, which you might not even recognize as such. Descartes and Aquinas are fixtures, and Heidegger (notoriously conservative and also a literal Nazi) often features in university level classes. The point isn't to indoctrinate you with any of these viewpoints, it's to teach you how to analyze their arguments and think for yourself.
I read the parent as saying that the course covered these at all, not as complaining that nothing else was presented.
But continuing on that train, what would you want from mentioning alternatives to a theoretical framework? A framework is just a different way to look at the world that you can discard if it's not useful.
To give a programming analogy, if a course does a module on JavaScript exclusively with react, they're not teaching that vue, angular, or svelte don't exist and you should only use react. It's much more likely a statement that react is common and useful for people to be familiar with when they go into the outside world. Covering the long list of alternate frameworks, many of which the teacher will have never actually used in a serious way, is both difficult to do in a useful manner and takes away from the limited time available to cover what they can with sufficient depth.
"Both" sides? If you suggest Marxism is one side, what is the other? Also, it's hard to take such a vague comment at face value when you consider the long list of Marx's influences. For example, there are right and young Hegelians...
I do think there is too much politicization in education, but this also stuck out to me. Marx was a synthesis of Hegel with Adam Smith (And a lot of Ricardo) You absolutely have many people taking those same ideas and going right. Even Das Kapital isn't really "Left Wing" per se as it is more trying to explain how labor is treated in an industrialized economies, its the communist manifesto where Marx takes those ideas and starts synthesizing with Hegel and making ideas of what should happen.
I have had more teachers actively advocating voting for right wing parties than left wing parties. And once had someone in biology class tell me that he thinks that evolution and creation by god are equal and we should try to merge those theories. And I live in a very secular part of Europe.
But hey, both you and I are telling anecdotes. The only conclusion for me is that public school exposes you to people that do not think like you or your parents. Something, we are less and less exposed to. If that is good, anyone has to answer for themselves.
Don't agree with this. Marx's Capital is filled with basic mathematical analyses. I don't agree with his labor theory of value, but I do think algebra is good.
From the Conservative part of my social group, the main one applicable here is pushing elementary school kids to identify as trans. Because young children are very impressionable, and it is forbidden for staff to push back on on it at all, despite the science saying "there is absolutely no such thing as trans before age 12, and much possibility of social trauma from attempting it".
Left-ish people tend to say "this doesn't happen in the real world, it's made up for internet arguments" - and I even said that for a while on this and a few other subjects - but that denial cannot survive extensive contact with the real world.
Name some examples of school systems "pushing" kids to identify as trans. The name of the school and individual teacher, plus the wording that counts as "pushing" would be fine. You say this is happening in the real world, so surely you can point to a few examples.
To avoid arguments about the definition of "be", the clear conclusion is that if it exists it's indistinguishable prior to that age, so any claims before that age can only be considered noise.
It's critical to remember that "reality has a liberal bias" does not mean "literally every detail of things liberals say is reality".
Lots of examples, gender identity and requiring ethnic studies (focusing on white male privilege, settler/colonial, putting groups into binary oppressor/oppressed). Also issues with requiring those classes vs not.
You've identified examples of values, but you have forgotten to link them to the left, forgotten to show if they are controversial and, probably most importantly, forgotten to show how schools are borderline pushing indoctrination of them.
These are two indisputable facts about our world, if you disagree you are wrong and anti-science:
1. Gender is a social construct
2. Whiteness is a social construct and in particular has been used as a bludgeon against minority "non-whites" in the United States for a very long time
If you do not believe these things you are the problem. You lack education. You lack critical thinking. You are brainwashed.
I am very curious too, I’ve asked this to other friends who have mentioned the same thing and the only concrete answer I have got so far was teaching the theory of evolution and climate change.
Not a GP and I don't know if any of these qualifies as "left-ish" (which is very US specific IMHO), but as I understand, the education all over the western culture is destroyed by few really simple and really crazy (for me) ideas:
Actually no. The problem comes from society. If you think that kids should be responsible for anything, you are a bad person. If you think that kids should be punished if they do something really bad, you are a monster.
Here we had a case teenagers bullying their teacher – abused her verbally during school, posted deepfake revenge porn into internet, stole stuff from her garden etc. She cried for help and the case was investigated by commission that included people from people from ministry of education, police and psychologists. But the commission concluded that she was the problem – she lacked the skills to build a trusting relationship with kids.
Another nebulous but I think VERY observable factor would be the extent to which "parents are, and expected to be, involved in their kids school stuff."
Anecdotally, but I bet you see a lot of it, I can count on one, maybe two hands the number of times my parents went to anything at the school to see me do a thing. And for my kids, there's something just about every other week.
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
I'm not sure remote schooling during the pandemic is very representative of day to day teaching in school. At least that's the impression I got from my teacher friends back then.
I'm not sure how your first thing much factors in? I haven't seen any data but I'd be VERY surprised if e.g. a survey of homeschoolers would cite to a lot of "making bad students pass" and "lefty indoctrination."
> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.
As someone who was in public education less than 10 years ago, the last part plainly untrue. In fact, several states will soon require displaying the 10 commandments in public school classrooms, which seems pretty “right-ish” to me.
Homeschooling is a symptom of the atomization of American society - affluent people are retreating into their bunkers in suburbia and withdrawing from civil society based on a shared psychosis regarding “critical race theory” and “wokeness”, neither of which are taught in public schools.
> In fact, several states will soon require displaying the 10 commandments in public school classrooms, which seems pretty “right-ish” to me.
That tells you way more about the (current) politics of the local government than it does about the politics of the median teacher. It might actually indicate the opposite - no one would go to the effort of mandating pride flags at the school I went to, seeing as they were already hung in every single classroom.
Why would hanging pride flags in every room be comparable to showing the ten commandments in every room? A poster of the commandments is promoting religion in a secular school, and the flag promotes human rights for queer people. Why would a pride flag be controversial to anyone who isn’t a religious zealot?
Did anyone argue that you are not allowed to teach your kids your own values? It seems to me, the question is more: do you want to raise your kids without ever exposing them to values that are not your own? Opinion Bubbles have been increasing for a long time, do we really want to grow them even more? Social media is full of people left and right that seem to have no idea about the opinions and realities at the other end of the spectrum.
Is this not possible while exposing children to a variety of view points from different sources or does it require that children are not exposed to certain perspectives at all?
The original comment makes a very bold claim of "indoctrination" of an entirely undefined set of values.
There has been no evidence that exposing children to this (undefined and buzzwordy) set of values means that they can't be raised according to other values.
I find this idea pretty wild to encounter on HN which is generally focused on open source and widely available information so that people can educate themselves is suddenly gone in a puff of smoke and some buzzwords when talking about educating the most curious minds in the world.
Define the values. Cite sources that this is "indoctrination" and not simply exposing viewpoints. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion.
> Define the values. Cite sources that this is "indoctrination" and not simply exposing viewpoints. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion.
They're never going to do this, because it's not actually happening, at least not to a significant degree. They will keep their wording vague, not show examples, and basically just repeat variations of "Trust me, bro.. this indoctrination is happening. It's clear as day. You need to see the real world, bro."
I expected this comment coming into the thread. I would just like to point out that there is a huge range of options between those two extremes!
If is entirely possible to teach up a child to be curious AND well rounded in the basics (see also concepts of Trivarium and Quadrivium, sorry can't link the references atm).
I was homeschooled up until college. I was part of a non-religious (maybe vaguely pagan) homeschooler community. I eased into college by taking a couple courses per semester at my local community college for two years around the end of high school, and also some online AP courses from my local school district. Overall I am happy with my experience. I had an abundance of time to pursue my own interests (e.g. reading, programming), since I only did ~1 hour of dedicated schoolwork per day. Among my peers, I ended up probably in the top 10% academically (close to straight As in college) and bottom 10% socially (I kept my homeschooler friends, but don't feel like I could call any of my college acquaintances "friends"). To this day I struggle with being comfortable and non-awkward around strangers and acquaintances, but I feel like I'm improving.
Happy to share more anecdotes if people have questions.
Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning. I don’t think we’re talking about remote ranch situations where you either do online school or have to send them to boarding school.
So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
We’ve homeschooled all our kids up to 8th grade. Our oldest is now a sophomore at the public high school but will start attending community college next year, paid for by the school district.
Most of the adults you see at the various group things are stay-at-home moms. Most. Some stay-at-home dads. Some of the moms have part-time jobs. I don’t recall any dads with part-time jobs. But many dads are present while also working full-time. You get into a rhythm, have a schedule, etc. and you can work it out. My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
> My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
FWIW, my experience is that the dynamic at play in these situations is that women who run their own businesses or otherwise have high-powered careers tend to have a constellation of personality traits that is significantly shifted vs. those of stay at home moms, plus their daily lives are very different, so they don't really fit in. Saying that without value judgement, just an observation.
Wait... you homeschool your kids and yet you write "...and [they] are jealous that she does both." No, they are ENVIOUS: one envies what they don't have and are jealous of what they have.
Anecdotally, I know of one child who was homeschooled recently. The mother is a single mother, of modest middle-class means. There was a homeschooling group nearby with a few volunteer mothers handling most of the logistics and teaching. This particular mother did not have to give up her job. It does stretch the definition of "homeschooling" a bit when it's a neighbor teaching in a neighbor's home, but they made it work.
It only requires that one parent has enough free hours to assign coursework. They don't have to exit the workforce, and don't necessarily need to directly supervise learning (but of course some of this is necessary for K-5).
I think a lot of how homeschooling can work, along with much of median/lower household income life in general, is misunderstood.
> Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning.
There are at least two good answers to this:
1. The first is a via a home-schooling collective. With as few as 5 families, one can easily do a once-per-week rotation of home schooling responsibilities. Also note that the formal education part of this can be done fairly comfortably in 4 hours (even down to 2 hours with 1-1 instruction). As such, all that is needed is a 4-day a week job, or a job with a flex schedule who can do work on the weekend. I know one family that does something like this.
2. The second is to have a tutor do the instruction. For folks who are high earners, paying a tutor who can come in for 2-3 hours a day costs about the same as a mid-tier private school. Child care would still need to be covered, but that’s usually cheaper than a tutor.
So it’s doable, but either time or money will need to be sacrificed. I don’t think that’s a surprise.
That said, below are some things about home schooling that I’ve learned over the years from people who have done it:
- When done well, it’s probably close to an ideal education. When done poorly, it can mess up the kid, and many of these kids are very vocal about how bad it can be. Obviously there will be a whole range of outcomes between these extremes. Just be aware that it’s not necessarily a panacea, and it’s not necessarily an ideological cesspit.
- There is a ton of support for home schoolers in some communities, especially for socialization and specialization. Many people do not realize this.
- That said, some (perhaps many) home school parents are just ideological extremists — extreme beliefs, extreme (sometimes illegal) lifestyles, etc.
- A good litmus test of where a home school parent is on the thoughtful-extremist continuum is to ask them why they homeschool their kids. The thoughtful parents can rattle off dozens of learning opportunities that their kids have had that don’t exist or barely exist at normal schools. The less of these types of specifics they talk about, the more likely they are to have ideological reasons that they may or may not openly discuss.
- For folks who want a good learning environment for their kid, I strongly recommend a good Montessori school. I emphasize “good”, because some of them stray far from the Montessori ideals. This just requires a small amount of research and some observation. All that said, a good Montessori school almost always sets up a kid to be a solid person and life-long learner. Note that some kids absolutely hate the Montessori style, and you will know this in about a day or two. I will go out on a limb and say most of these kids will need special attention in home school contexts as well (imho).
> So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
I don’t think so.
Most of the people I know who home school are already stay at home parents (mostly mothers, but one dad), or they have plenty of disposable income to throw at the problem via tutors and home school support services.
I will also say that some parents absolutely punt on the education part, and they can do their part (often negligently) while doing a full time work-from-home job — think handing out some work sheets and pointing their kid(s) to an online learning environment with very little scaffolding. There are some kids who respond well to this, but most don’t.
This is the result of more propaganda and brainwashing than education in schools. We should have left the politics out of the schools, after we got the prayers banned. But I guess some people will stop at nothing.
I went to college with a few homeschooled kids. They were by far the least capable of "normal" social interaction. Some were quite book smart, but they had trouble communicating with others, so they couldn't demonstrate it.
Also a fun side effect, they mispronounced a lot of words that they had only ever seen in books but never heard out loud. One of them was self-aware enough to ask us to correct him.
>> they mispronounced a lot of words that they had only ever seen in books but never heard out loud
I did that as a kid. Still do. I read more than I talk. Nothing wrong with that.
The flip side would be people who misspell words or get phrases wrong because they've never seen them in books, they've only heard them out loud. They talk more than they read. Nothing wrong with that.
Although both of those might be a clue as to what type of vocations would make someone happy.
Obviously there is some serious nuance here - there are of course edge cases and serious reasons for considering home schooling.
But as a general principle, encouraging kids further and further out of (group) human contact seems like an obviously terrible idea to me. We're already doing it with (lack of) play spaces, "no ball games", insane screen times (which equates to less "real" face to face time) amongst teens, awkward kids who can't even engage with a stranger under any circumstances - and meanwhile isolation and loneliness is on the increase, fear continues to rise about even letting your kid walk down the street to the shops, etc...
School is hard, as are parts of life. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult, it's not always what you want it to be, you get shouted at sometimes and big kids get their way and you don't get asked on the football team. Honestly, and sorry, but - a big part of growing up is learning how to deal with things. If kids don't, and you as a parent don't help them deal with the bumps, you and they will be building unrealistic expectations about how good this life is going to be, and they'll spend all their time sad or "triggered" or afraid, or isolated, or unable to join in. They'll get more scared, more isolated, more depressed. This is not what any parent wants.
This - of course and x1000 - need to be done with massive quantities of love and compassion. This isn't some Victorian hellscape I'm advocating here. Real bullying is real. Sometimes adults need to weigh in. Kids will find school hard.
But loving your kids is NOT giving them everything they want. It's teaching them how to navigate things that are difficult and awkward and - ultimately - helping them become robust adults.
I disagree with your premise that homeschooling pushes kids out of group human contact. People who attend public school often assume that kids who attend homeschool literally sit at home all day...which is just not...real?
It was the predominant notion when I was a homeschooled kid 30 years ago, and for most of them there is no argument or evidence that will convince them otherwise.
State-run education is their orthodoxy, and anything that challenges that is tantamount to heresy.
The most common form of homeschooling is, I believe, in the form of co-ops. Where groups of parents get their kids together in class room like settings to teach them together. They don't go to school, they might meet at a church, or library or a home, but they are socializing. I know people who homeschool and between church, youth fellowship, co-op classes, fencing, swimming, basketball, neighborhood kids, family, etc. they have extremely active social lives.
I used to teach high school. The amount of time I spent doing crap work was insane. It was necessary. If you don’t remind students 100 times what the assignments are, they won’t do them.
You also have to spend an insane amount of time with the lowest performers, because with enough attention, they can improve dramatically.
But this creates tradeoffs. Should I neglect the students doing best?
One on one instruction is the best kind. It’s generally reserved for doctoral students.
I also tried homeschooling by eldest. It didn’t work.
well if we just apply the bell curve here, on average children will be pretty average (shocker) so those should be left on their own and discover their own niche while bad performers should get extra attention so they can keep up with the rest and with the gifted (if they actually want to) given the opportunity to explore higher level subjects.
so in the end we give attention to gifted and the struggling since there's very little you can do to children who are already decent and are capable of keeping up at most they lack discipline or motivation.
I am an advocate of homeschooling but also know the importance of social contact for kids, so always wondering how hard would it be to create local clubs for kids where they learn mainly about economy, liberty and social relations sprinkled with some astronomy, history, biology, math and whatever personal interest of their parents like sports or arts? I'd be happy to pay for a private institution like that
Interesting to see this topic being discussed on HN; I'm curious if any homeschooling parents here have kids who WANT to learn computer programming. I haven't pushed my kids to do any of the things that I loved doing growing up (or what I do now). If any homeschooled kids are getting into programming was it as a result of playing with something like Scratch or did they dive directly into writing Python or JavaScript?
It hurts me so bad to have to say this (as someone who has been a life-long technologist with higher degrees in CS and CE): Pushing kids towards STEM careers is only going to end in disappointment. Medicine, sure, but engineering and programming? I don't think it's ever coming back to what it was here in the states. We took that golden goose out back and chopped its head clean off.
There are 13 years required (K-12) in the US. The way non-compliance is peanlized varies depending on the state.
Education in the US is a complicated subject given the "extreme individualistic American culture" as you say. That will be present in the teachers and school districts, and the lesson plans can/will differ greatly between teachers and school districts for getting students to the general standard.
Unsurprisingly this thread has become a battleground on the merits of homeschooling.
Something to keep in mind: "Homeschool" is a useless descriptor. It covers a spectrum from complete educational neglect to world class private tutoring. It includes cohorts almost indistinguishable from school, and cohorts that engage in cultish indoctrination.
Any criticism you might have for your idea of homeschool, there exists a type of homeschooling that addresses that criticism, and there will be someone in the replies ready to tell you about it.
This topic is such a basket case. “Homeschooling” in the US is a word that has come to mean “not enrolled in an accredited school” and can mean anything from being the Duggars to “my 4yo audits classes at MIT” or “we have an unaccredited private school that is identical to any other private school except for not being subject to laws”.
Advocating for homeschooling is simply advocating for absolutely no regulation on schooling, which is fine for the Zuckerbergs and will condemn children like the Duggars.
home schooling is a very very priviledged concept to begin with so it's not surprising that there is quite a lot of hate for it.
as a former child I think home schooling is better in every way if there is a supporting environment built around it, but I also think public schooling introduces a lot of variety that is not seen in private or home schooling be it for better or worse, although my time in public school was rough and failed me in many ways I still wouldn't have it any other way.
When I recently switched jobs, one of my requirements was I had to remain remote, for at least the next few years, so I could remain at home and help with my children's education. I don't think there is enough money in the world to convince me to change back to public education. Aside from the benefits everyone mentions like a much better education, having so much extra time with my children is a priceless gift that I wish we as a society could give everyone.
Also its given me the chance to learn things that I missed during my primary and secondary educations. Going through each proof in Euclid's Elements again has been a lot of fun, and its been long enough that I have forgotten most of them, so the thrill of discovery is real for me too.
If you can make it work, you should make it work, even if that means moving to a lower CoL area, there are a lot of small towns in the US that have excellent amenities, and are great places to raise a family.
How do you make up for the resulting drop in interaction with other kids? I had a boss who did this with his children as well - it seemed as though his solution was to use PE credits to have his kids attend sports with other kids.
My kids are part of a co-op where they meet once a week and in this co-op they share some elements of their curriculum with everyone else, they spend one day going over the weeks assignments along with 8-10 classmates, and then during the week they are at home doing their work. As they have aged their school work now has a lot of collaborative elements, so my oldest is actually meeting with kids from his co-op almost daily to go over group projects and assignments.
Additionally they have a lot of extra curricular activities they participate in ( sports, music, church youth group), that also gives them a lot of socialization time with others.
Sounds like a wonderful setup. Have the kids ever shown a desire for public school? My brother is homeschooling his kids to start, but the oldest just asked to start going to public, so he sent her.
No, my wife and I discussed putting them into traditional school as they got older, but now that they are older, they have all strongly requested to remain in their homeschool co-op. I think the biggest reason is they have a good group of friends that they connect with, and have been their class mates for multiple years. So there is a strong desire to continue in the program with people they know.
Every normal school kid who interacted with a home school kid will recall what the problem is with homeschooling. I would never want to raise a little weirdo like the weirdo home schoolers I knew.
We tried homeschooling a few times. We were honest with ourselves and determined we were not that great at it. Sure, we could improve. But one of the primary factors in where we chose to live was the school district. Fortunately it has worked out well. Of course there’s always something to deal with- you have to advocate for your kids.
It’s basically public daycare for a lot of people. Including us.
The social aspect is important for us. The idea of having to find other people with kids for activities sounds exhausting. We’re a gang of neuro-spicy introverts. My social circle is comprised of people I’ve been friends with for 25+ years. All from my school days.
I dealt with a lot of bullshit at school. But overall a net gain.
I can understand why. When we first moved to our upper midwest state, the district we bought a house in was ranked like #2 in the state overall and has fallen considerably. I have watched with my own two eyes the decline in the past 20 years here. The neighboring district, which was teetering when we first moved here in 2006, fell over completely and remains fallen. That one had a cycle of failed superintendents, all of whom required a buyout to get rid of, which further impoverished that district. Our realtor, who had been a teacher in that district, slyly tried to push us into that one, but we didn't fall for it. Our daughter made it through the more acclaimed district pretty well, our son, however, got tripped up in the decline:
We ended up moving our son to yet a third district after 2nd grade. Why? Because the principal he had in his elementary school mishandled an incident where three boys of another ethnicity shoved and kicked my son to the ground. The principal, in her infinite wisdom, made my son apologize to his attackers, I guess because he is white? We didn't press the matter, why bother? The handwriting was on the wall. We put in the work to open enroll him in another district, instead. Those are the options that many more rural communities lack.
Our current district is a bit further of a drive and that makes him/us feel like he is not really a part of that community. Nonetheless, it has done well for him and I will just come right out and say it's because it is less diverse and more affluent. It is not without its problems--mainly being far too sports-centric than the district my daughter attended, and generally a bit snobby and "affluenza"-ish, but no overt violence to speak of hardly.
One time we were leaving a football game one time and happened upon a family presenting their daughter with a brand new Range Rover, complete with a bow, in the school parking lot. Puke-o-rama! Why would you do that except to show off consumption and appearance of wealth to everyone else? Luckily, not that common, but you get the picture.
The good thing is, we had options and exercised them, but I wish we hadn't needed to, because we like our community and wanted to support it and the local families nearer to us. Every choice we made to get something we also had to give up something else. I think that's the same with homeschooling, too--I don't personally think it's a good idea, but it's not up to me how someone else chooses to educate their kids and I understand about only having certain options. My son is doing very well, now in high school, but he can never make a sports team because the competition is beyond ridiculous. Even tennis he got on some low rung team because there were a couple of superstar 7th graders who filled up JV and Varsity slots! It felt like a sort-of "old boy" situation because my son is pretty decent at tennis and beat one of those younger guys every time he played him. Forget football or basketball, you have to be pretty much college material to be on those teams. Hockey, same. My daughter never cared about sports, so we weren't prepared for that battle at all.
Getting children through school and into adulthood is not for the faint of heart.
The most popular argument against homeschooling appears to be "the world sucks, so we should make kids worlds suck so they're prepared for it", which is absolutely an abusive way to think and those who use this argument need to sit and think about what it means, then be ashamed.
Not exactly. More like, "The world can suck major at times, so we should make sure kids are prepared to deal with it when confronted." It's kinda like teaching kids to look both ways when crossing the street. Ideally, drivers are looking out for pedestrians, but if that doesn't happen and a pedestrian isn't prepared for it, well, people can get killed.
No one should be ashamed for teaching their kids to exist in a world that isn't always as loving as we all wish it was.
Group home schooling in a shared building is becoming a huge new trend in home schooling, far more resource and time efficient and pools the resources of the parents and allows the group to hire someone to do the group homeschooling.
I really enjoyed teaching my kids during covid, and they got a bug jump ahead compared to the kids who just played video games while the schools were closed. We only did 3-4 hours a day but it was fun, and I could really see the changes.
I don't mind the idea of teaching 10 kids, my way, and in and environment I can control. The thought of teaching 35 kids, mired in bureaucracy, is a nightmare.
As somebody that suffered through public school as a gifted kid, I wish I had been homeschooled. Almost everything positive that happened in my education was because of family, not due to the school. School was hell on earth for me, and I imagine it's the same for most other "neurodivergent" kids who are high IQ. Given what I know from my own kid, there's no surprise to me why more people are opting to home school. For my daughter we kept her in public school because the district we moved to had magnet programs, and that's what she wanted so she could be with her friends from the neighborhood, but not every school district cares about gifted kids and will happily put a child with a 150 IQ trying to read 6-8 grade levels above their peers in the same room with a child with an 80 IQ child who has a violence problem and consider that an acceptable outcome as long as nobody calls the police.
How many are now home schooled for religious reasons? It seems like many are pulling their kids out of public schools, for "woke" reasons rather than for a deep pedagogical pursuit, and I worry these kids aren't actually learning at the level they should be.
> When asked if they are satisfied with their children's education, public school parents consistently rank last after parents who choose private schools, homeschooling, and charter schools. Importantly, among all parents of school-age children, homeschooling enjoys a 70 percent favorability rating.
This is not surprising: homeschoolers are extremely confident in their own teaching abilities and extremely cynical about the abilities of others.
> Closures also gave parents a chance to experience public schools' competence with remote learning, and many were unimpressed. They have also been unhappy with the poor quality and often politicized lessons taught to their children that infuriatingly blend declining learning outcomes with indoctrination.
Why would a parent compare a novel learning environment to the pre-covid experience? Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home - do they use the internet at all?
> Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home
They probably imagine they'll never encounter political topics from a perspective of which said parents do not approve. And they're probably not wrong to believe that.
Only parents of privilege are given choice though. Parents who are struggling are not. And then when it comes to vote on fixing classrooms, paying teachers what they are worth, etc, there's a great bulk of people who would rather just not because it doesn't effect them.
NY state just signed a bill to include ChatGPT in their learning and planning. Previously there were deals to bring in Google hardware for students.
Of course people are fleeing public schooling when we’re selling the kids to big tech for laptops and services that require network connection to write a word document, enable cheating, and their data sold for profit without consent.
People might be fleeing public schooling because lawmakers are dictating what happens in the classroom. There are lots of good teachers who struggle with the resources given to them and the constraints imposed on them.
At home, parents can be flexible. They can let their kids use AI when appropriate or discourage its use. They don't have to wait for legislators to get involved. If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it instead of waiting for some committee to evaluate it.
> If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it
How do you know if the math book is great if there hasn’t been consensus about it. The problem isn’t the committee that will always be there in some form. The problem is the politics the committee is used for. If the committee were to prioritize and offload their specific requirements for review instead of requiring substantial analysis twice then the school system would be just as quick.
Homeschooling is becoming an epidemic and a major reason is --- SPORTS. From my experience, it is growing for all the wrong reasons and I have not come across ONE family doing it properly and in a matter I would consider better for the kid.
I have a 15yo son who plays sports and for the past 5 years, homeschooling has been a way to "red-shirt" kids - hold them back a year or two then re-entering them into public schools into grades behind their age. Literally purposely holding back their kids so they can be older as freshman.
A major problem with boys because of puberty, size etc around this age. The difference between a 14yo and a 16yo, or 16/18yo can be quite large at times. My son had a freshman on his team last year that could drive and had a mustache playing vs these tiny incoming freshman, it was so comical. He was 16 1/2 as a freshman. And the parents were on the sideline acting like their kid was the next coming of Aaron Judge. It REALLY hurts the rest of us playing the rules and taking education seriously when our kids are trying to make a team.
I've known several of these parents and they all are the same. They haphazardly put them into the bare min online courses, still go to work all day and stick them in front of computers to expect them to self teach for a few years. The moms would be stay-home types that didn't seem much educated themselves. The kids are spoiled entitled types who think they are top athletes already and would jokingly be calling my son at 11a telling him they are done already for the day and headed to the gym and playing Fortnite.
Now this is just MY circle, I am not saying there aren't very serious and capable parents out there really homeschooling and giving their kids a better education than public school, but I haven't met any in maybe roughly 10 I know. Most of them seemed to also be MAGA types poo-pooing public education and how they are brainwashing kids. It is really despicable that this is most likely happening ALL across America.
Education and manipulation aside, I would also think this isn't good the kids mental and social health as well. They already are on devices doom-scrolling enough nowadays, do we really want them hermits too now?
I applaud anyone putting in huge effort to home school a kid properly and with true care and teaching. But the image of them at a desk being taught by a real smart/educated parent following a true curriculum all day and on a schedule I imagine is ultra rare. And we are going to pay a price for this in the long run. Or not, GPT will just help them along to properly write that email for them when they are adults in a corporate world.
I thought you were going to go in a different direction with that: recruiting. In States where home schoolers can play on public school sports teams there are cases where the family gets an apartment and one parent and the kid establishes residency for the purpose of being in a particular school district. A notable case in recent-ish history was someone called Tim Tebow in Jacksonville, FLA. It's not a common thing though, far less of a complaint-magnet than the Catholic schools who "recruit" players from all over a city or even region to come be a starter on their football/basketball team...
You should not be downvoted for telling the truth about your experiences! I have witnessed the same things. Kids being held back a grade so they can excel in sports! It is so ridiculously self-serving and narcissistic that it is crazy to witness. And the emphasis on sports at my son's high school is beyond ridiculous.
The dads especially need to get back to basics and stop these obsessions they have about their kids being athletic superstars. It's bad for EVERYONE. And starting kids at like 5 years old in sports is just stupid.
"I got to spend time with my kids when they still wanted to spend time with me. Now as teenagers in no longer cool, but that's ok. I got my time with them and that makes me happy"
Well here is what the result was of public school for my 3 kids:
1 kid: one year behind but doing very well
1 kid: two years behind and not doing so well (in fact can't continue to academia unless things change drastically, in other words, will lose at least 1-2 more years if she does go to academia)
1 kid: two years behind and doing pretty well
This is the result of 9-11 years of public schooling. I feel like all 3 have very suboptimal outcomes, including the one doing very well.
I must say I am also getting very irritated by the "indoctrination". That was fine, if occasionally crazy, during the COVID years when the indoctrination was pretty progressive. Sometimes batshit insane, but let's say "well intentioned". Pro-climate claims ... that were bullshit, but at least pro-climate and generally positive and pro-humanity. Now one of their teachers is openly racist (in a class with 33% immigrants), and even though most keep it more subtle than him, this is a general trend.
So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
I know a teacher who said one of their colleagues adamantly believes the moon landing was faked.
>So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
Look up school ratings in your area and move is by far your best bet if you wish to continue public school. There is also the difficult truth that maybe your kids are the problem, but again school shopping could help with that depending on what programs they have.
> Recent estimates put the total homeschooling population at about 6 percent of students across the United States, compared to about 3 percent pre-pandemic.
One thing that concerns me about many pro-homeschooling comments is a kind of tear-down-the-schools attitude, as if schools were hopeless and irredeemable, despite the fact they're still educating 94% of students even at today's elevated homeschooling rate. Of course there are problems with schools, but on the other hand there are countless success stories, or at least countless non-failure stories, and educational outcomes tend to depend crucially on local factors, the location of the school and its socioeconomic environment.
I suspect that the vast majority of parents have neither the desire nor the capability to homeschool their kids. I certainly can't imagine my own parents doing it. In a sense, homeschooling is a luxury of the few. The absolute numbers can increase, but I don't think homeschooling can scale to the entire population. So whatever problems may exist in the schools, we have to confront and solve them, not just abandon them and pretend homeschooling is a societal solution. You might claim that hundreds of years ago, everyone was homeschooled, but I don't want to turn back the societal clock hundreds of years.
Another concern I have is the religious and/or political motivation of many homeschoolers. If homeschooling were just about educational outcomes for children, then we shouldn't expect homeschoolers to be disproportionately conservative in religious and/or political beliefs, yet my impression is that they are. It's certainly suspicious to me. And though I've had no involvement with K-12 education since I was in school myself, I've had a lot of involvement in higher education, first as an undergrad, then as a PhD student and lecturer. Frankly, the horror stories and conspiracy theories about left-wing indoctrination at universities are ridiculous and not based on fact or experience. So I'm quite skeptical of similar claims about K-12, especially since I saw none of that in my own childhood. (I recall being forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, for all the good that did.) There's a type of person who's set off if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" and consider that to be an act of war against them. There are still a lot of parents in the United States who reject biological evolution and would prefer that it not be taught in schools at all, or at least to be taught as "controversial."
I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children. There is no law or social imperative that children must be taught a secular view point. At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently. Honestly, I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion. It has become a belief system of it's own, and I for one fear the coming crusades :)
I say live and let live, parents should be free to teach their kids whatever belief system they want without political interference. Much to the dismay of the left (and I say this, being a left leaning moderate... I know, bad word today), kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children, full stop. The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism, is only putting fuel to the fire in this surge in global fascism. At the risk of sounding too kumbaya'ish, we all just need to accept each other and recognize the real enemies to society is a global loss of empathy and the rise of transactionalism. Now that is something I could really get behind, forced empathy courses! :)
> I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children.
I didn't claim that they don't have a right. I just claimed to be skeptical of the idea that the primary motivation for homeschooling was educational outcomes rather than ideological outcomes.
> At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently.
If only they believed differently. ;-) It's no coincidence that children tend to adopt the same beliefs as their parents, no matter the country or region.
> I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion.
The last 20 years? The First Amendment of the US Constitution begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". The principle of separation of church and state is more than 200 years old.
> kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children
I don't know what label you'd want to put on me, but I would say that kids do not belong to anyone. I find the notion of ownership to be noxious, practically slavery. We have a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves (yet), but that doesn't mean children are simply the personal property and playthings of the parents. I think it's a disservice to a child to place them in a bubble and shield them from anything the parents don't happen to like.
> The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism
"they are their parents children" is not individualism, or certainly not individualism from the child's perspective.
Morover, from what I've seen and heard from homeschoolers themselves, they do tend to form, or indeed come from, specific communitites, and are not simply "lone wolf" homeschooling parents.
> Once an alternative way to educate children, homeschooling is now an increasingly popular and mainstream option.
TFA does not even begin to grapple with the single most important issue, which is who is actually doing the homeschooling.
This is only an option for certain families, with parents with enough bandwidth and knowhow to do this effectively. That excludes many tens of millions of Americans.
I think this is really about class, race, and religious segregation. Families can do what they want, of course, but this framing makes it sound like failing schools are the whole problem and I don't think that's the whole story.
I don't feel better prepared to teach at home than someone who actually went to college for the various topics covered in high school. How can I know all I need to teach about math, chemistry, english, physics, etc, etc, etc when I already have to learn so much for my own work? I think parents that think they can do a better job are delusional.
Maybe the school _environment_ that a child has access isn't great, right? But I don't think that says anything about teachers.
Elementary Education and Pedagogy are "sciences" with an even poorer replication rate than Sociology and Psychology.
Nobody educated to teach is actually qualified to do so by virtue of said education. Teaching is largely a personality-driven and experience-acquired skill.
In California, a teacher without a chemistry degree can teach high school chemistry after passing the CSET Chemistry subtest. This requires less depth of knowledge than AP Chemistry.
At school, one teacher lectures to maybe 30 students. If all they did was give individual attention student by student, each would get maybe 10 minutes a day.
The first 10 minutes of your home-school day you've beat that statistic.
After two or three hours, you're up to a month of class time.
Of course they don't do that; they just lecture. Which is something you can get online (Khan Academy).
It's all about the homework and tutoring, baby.
All you have to do is learn along with your home student, and validate their learning experience. Helps if you catch on quicker, but not even necessary.
homeschooled kids are literally competing against kids from other countries that are being schooled on calculus, geometry, statistics, algebra with practical chemistry, physics and biology lessons. This is not going to end well 15 yrs down the line
Lots of colleges offer laboratory science classes for homeschooled children. AOPS wipes the floor with any math education you’d get at a public school. Most US national laboratories have on-site programs for school-aged kids and homeschoolers have equal standing for attending.
You think avoiding these things are why people are thinking about homeschooling?!
In San Francisco where I live the public school system made the decision to not offer algebra until later for egalitarian reasons. Basically since they couldn't bring up the students that faired poorly in math, they delayed the subject for everybody. Along the same lines, they took the one high school dedicated to the highest achieving students and turned it into a lottery system rather than something earned.
Yes, of course you're right, kids will be competing on all those subjects. But the idea that public institutions are somehow the safeguards of fundamental academic achievement is just out of touch.
Of course, San Francisco public school's embrace of socialist/egalitarian drive identity politics is just one example of public education failure. Elsewhere in the US in these times, other school districts are being turned effectively into seminaries because the other political side has other doctrinal objectives. In neither case is learning how to think or how the world really works is important.
I think the point is that part of having a functioning society (civic life, engagement, tolerance of others) is having people mix together. School is one of the prime places where that happens.
If you allow a lot of people to pull away from that "forced" engagement with others then you start to stress a lot of societal bonds.
I don't know a single homeschooler that sits at home all day long. They work in family businesses, participate in bands, sports, and co-ops. Many belong to churches where families come from all different strata: our church has surgeons, line cooks, programmers, self-employed handymen, disabled vets. They interact with everyone—including kids. They do things like "kid markets" where they have a business. They watch their parents learn how the house works and how to manage finances.
There is no forced engagement—in fact the peer pressure is often completely gone. They are in an environment (their family) where they are much freer to be themselves.
the purpose of education is largely opposite of indocrination (plus few other things). if your kid is being educated is such an environment you should move (or pay for private education).
I get where you're coming from but I think your statement is a bit naive.
Education systems as we know them today are absolutely about indoctrination in so many ways. Capitalism, love of country, views on family units, beauty and aaesthetics, what has cultural value and what does not etc etc. Not to mention many school systems just straight up having classes on religion, allowing armed forces into schools to recruit and the like.
Whether you're worried about left wing or right wing indoctrination, it still holds true. All kids are being indoctrinated every time they go to school same as every time they watch TV.
Exactly. Which history lessons get taught, which books get assigned as reading, which clubs are available, etc. Even if they are taught to be critical of the assignments they get, if the selection is limited enough, kids will not have the breadth of knowledge to even see the alternatives.
I pay a lot of money for my 12-year to not be in the system you are describing and am grateful I can provide this for her more than I am grateful for just about anything else
100%. The school and the Internet are the two places children can encounter opinions different from their parents’ for the first time. With an increase in homeschooling and recent pushes to ban social media for children, it’s clear that critical thinking is going to suffer most. I still have not met someone who was homeschooled who was remotely thankful for it.
Honestly, support for these policies that benefit, more than anyone else, abusive parents, makes me suspicious of people’s motives.
LLM's have revolutionized the way people learn and utilize what they have learned. The future is 8 year old material science lads doing chemistry in their step-mother's RV
I've had to re-learn math skills long forgotten to help my kids with their school work. It's been an interesting experience.
The expectations for home schooling are different and are, in some ways, aimed more towards reality. My son finishes the bulk of his work in an hour most days and then has time for 2 instruments, learning C++, Rust, and Python, community/church participation and more.
I can't say my public school experience was great, I was bullied and didn't really click with the popular kids, but being around a cross section of actual American kids in my age group (my school district mixed middle class with lower class neighborhoods) helped me shape my worldview and learn to deal with people who didn't look or talk like me. I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people. I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
My kids are not school age yet, and I am not sure on if I will home school or not. But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling. There is the neighborhood kids, you have sports and clubs kids can join, religious groups.
Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day. Some people "homeschooling" I know are groups of parents getting together to educate their children together in small groups of ~5 kids to share the responsibility, and hiring a tutor to fill in the gaps. Monday they go John's house, his mom has a philosophy degree and teaches them. tuesday they go to Janes house, her dad is a Mathematician and teaches them. etc.
I used to work at a YMCA, and the local homeschool group asked us to do a PE class, which I taught.
I had the kids doing swimming, rock climbing, and all kinds of traditional PE games.
I worked with "normal" kids most of the time, and I will say the homeschool kids stuck out. They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part. And they were disproportionately ahead of their peers academically--though I think that's probably a selection bias for the parents seeking out homeschool PE classes.
This was in the early 2000s, before Facebook. I'm sure the avenues to connect have only grown with social media.
> They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part.
This is another argument that "by age" is not the best way to find one's academic or social peers.
Some people in 2nd grade should be in high school. Some people in high school should be in 2nd grade. (And, academically, sometimes that's different by subject; some people need to be in 2nd grade math and high-school reading.)
I was a TA/lab-assistant at the community college I was attending. I spent a lot of time talking to and helping out people, universally older than me, who had gotten out of high school and needed to figure out where in a multi-year curriculum of remedial math they should start.
15+ years ago, that might have been the case. Now, you might find some friends in the 3-8 year old range, but then the kids just...don't do things anymore. In both suburban neighborhoods I've lived in the past 10 years, there are basically zero middle school or high school kids doing anything except playing video games and messing around on their phones from the comfort of home. School is quite literally the only social interaction most of these kids get aside from their parents, and if they didn't go to school, they'd just spend more time playing video games or on their phones.
Outside of the coasts or university towns, there aren't any "mathematicians" with kids just waiting around to form homeschooling groups with you.
My cousin homeschooled her kids, who are now finished with college. I know they're capable of using phones (one's a programmer), but I've never seen them pull one out. They're social and love playing board games, and I suspect that comes from their parents. They also socialized with other homeschooled kids, because they were part of lots of homeschooling groups.
The kids in public school are there by default; the homeschooling parents are actively choosing to raise their kids differently, and, from what I've seen, they're more likely to interact with their kids instead of letting them go terminally online or play video games.
It's going to depend greatly on your geo location and socioeconomic circumstances, but a homeschooled kid who interacts a lot in the neighbourhood (big "if", IME; those kids all have a lot of school friends) is still going to miss out on broader social, cultural, racial and financial exposure. Example: my white, middle-class kids have a lot of people exactly like them in community groups and sports clubs, but lots of eastern european & asian immigrants in their school classes. This is super-important in elementary school when they're far less aware and insular about interacting with people who are "different" IMO
There is no such thing as “the neighborhood kids” anymore. Having any kind of social circle for your children is going to require your facilitation and effort… a lot of it. It’ll be extra hard without the common bond of shared activity.
Not knocking what sounds like your choice to homeschool, just sharing something that has changed from my youth.
You don't need a degree in math to teach children age-appropriate math topics. Teachers don't become teachers just because they have a degree in that subject, they have been taught the methods on how to teach. Having prior knowledge of the subject is almost irrelevant. Teaching is really just applying solid methods on how to build knowledge from the most basic concepts as well as having the patience in dealing with humans who are not fully formed in their emotions.
> Having prior knowledge of the subject is almost irrelevant. Teaching is really just applying solid methods on how to build knowledge from the most basic concepts as well as having the patience in dealing with humans who are not fully formed in their emotions.
I would disagree with this. Those are necessary but not sufficient. It is necessary to have enough knowledge and joy from the subject to convey that to students.
John Jane Mary set up is incredibly idealized. In a big city I have not been able to find anyone willing to commit to anything except one off play dates in a museum which has nothing to do with actual education.
Having a degree in philosophy or mathematics or whatever does not automatically make someone a good teacher. Teaching - particularly with young children - is a skill that is almost orthogonal to subject knowledge.
I think what makes you a good teacher is mostly a personality trait.
Prior knowledge of the subject is just a cherry on top.
It sounds like school with extra steps.
And control over who else is in it.
Part of "socializing" is observing that one's parents aren't the absolute authority in the world. Parents sometimes butt heads with teachers, coaches etc. No home schooling scenario can provide this experience. I think it leads to enhanced levels of narcissism in both students and parents.
The public school experience in the U.S. depends so much on your ZIP Code. I attended the best public schools in my state while my wife attended the worst in the same state. I am genuinely pro-public school, but there is a point where the benefit of being around different people is overshadowed by distractions and low standards. My wife had to be diagnosed with a learning disability in college to receive test accommodations when she discovered that you cannot stay after class indefinitely to finish an exam. Her teachers never raised any concerns about her taking 50% as long with exams compared to the other students, and she was the valedictorian of her huge urban high school. The lack of concern is bizarre until you consider that her teachers were preoccupied with students graduating and showing up to class. Many of her classmates ended up getting pregnant, and the school had a large daycare for the children of high school students.
My wife didn't end up taking the SAT or ACT because she attended a relatively strong local university with a full-ride scholarship and a test-optional policy. The MCAT exam initially denied her request for accommodations because she was only diagnosed with a learning disability in college. We successfully appealed by writing an essay arguing that my wife wasn't diagnosed with a learning disability in K-12 because her schools sucked (we submitted documentation that proved that her schools tested among the worst in the state, her elementary school was literally the worst in the entire state, when she was a student), and her teachers had much bigger concerns than why the smart, studious kid takes a long time to complete exams.
If the wife had gone to the K-12 school system that I attended, her learning disability would have been addressed in elementary school, and she would have been spared much angst. I was a very poor reader in early elementary school, and received almost daily one-on-one attention at my school from instructional aides and volunteers (mostly highly educated parents and grandparents) for years. I received a perfect score on the ACT reading section in high school.
In the rural areas that I've lived in, it's mostly about a strong desire to supplant science and history with religious ideas and principles.
I hear this a lot, and it may be true, but I am very skeptical that it matters. The statistics about home-schooled children don't support the idea that they have horribly inaccurate models of the world guided mostly by religious thinking. Or if they do it doesn't seem to affect life achievement in any important way. Instead home-schooled children are typically more advanced at graduation and have higher lifetime achievement metrics than their public school counterparts.
As an athiest, and a bayesian, it's difficult for me to worry about other peoples religious beliefs that don't seem to negatively affect them or me. Especially when there is propaganda taught in the public schools that does warp the students' world views in ways that harms them and me.
> The statistics about home-schooled children don't support the idea that they have horribly inaccurate models of the world guided mostly by religious thinking.
I'd be surprised if any such statistics exist. I've even studies about the reasons parents choose to homeschool, and various outcomes of homeschooled kids versus public school kids, but none about what particular beliefs homeschooled kids have regarding, say, the age of the Earth.
That has been the case for a long time, and I guess something about the current generation of parents has gotten them to act more on it. My dad came from a very religious family and they all did private religious schools for their early grade school years. Then they went to public for high school years.
If I had to guess, its maybe something about the demise of church life that has gotten religious parents to just pull back entirely. It wasn't that uncommon for public schools to make nods toward Christian ideals/lifestyles before like the 90s, but now that stuff just doesn't happen anymore.
> It wasn't that uncommon for public schools to make nods toward Christian ideals/lifestyles before like the 90s, but now that stuff just doesn't happen anymore.
Schools should absolutely teach Christian mythology and history, and Greek mythology and history, and Egyptian mythology and history, alongside many other subjects. But to the extent that they used to make "nods" towards "this is the cultural default we defer to", nope.
That is exactly what I've seen, to keep kids in their brainwashing bubble.
Where I live in the Midwest that is absolutely the case. The homeschool "groups" are almost all religiously oriented in some way.
As the parent of a small child, there is a very noticeable difference in social skills that develop immediately as a result of my child being in a daycare interacting with other children of a similar age. Compared to my friends' same age children who are mostly staying at home and babysat by a grandparent.
(as a disclaimer, the daycare has very good teachers/caregivers from what I can tell so I'm sure that's part of it as well)
Daycare quality is a spectrum, the same way as babysitting at home. My smaller one just started daycare, and we settled for one that actually does stuff with the kids (forest school style). But I can tell you, we've visited lots of places that are basically just making sure the kids are not dead by the time you pick them up. Same for babysitting with grandparents; there's the hyper-social grandpa style that's always doing something, and the couchpotato with +10k hours on Cocomelon.
Yes, I'll admit that my sample size for comparison is relatively small so I'm mostly offering anecdotal evidence. And I totally agree on the quality of daycares being a spectrum. Just like how one single, good teacher who actually cares can really change a student's school experience (even if the school itself is not that great).
In my opinion, grandparents are the worst. They completely spoil them.
Or have bad habits like playing shovelware games on their phones.
I was homeschooled until high school. I couldn’t agree with you more. The value that the socialization the public school offers is underestimated.
Learning activities with other homeschooled kids is ok but not enough. A tight-knit neighborhood of friends is huge, but not enough. You need to develop a thick skin and a sense of self-assurance.
I have no counterfactual of course, but I think much of the social anxiety I’ve had to unlearn as a young adult came from homeschooling. And I had great circumstances
I was horribly bullied in high school. It was really bad.
The worst part was being ostracized. The school had anti-bullying policies, but they don’t force anyone to be your friend.
Strangely, I was elected to lots of student government office, and held leadership in lots of clubs.
Maybe my memory is just off, but I don’t think so.
I think I was really good connecting with the grownups who ran the school, so they made sure I got leadership positions.
I was always much better at being the kid in class the teacher liked - same with principals, etc.
Probably one of the reasons the other kids didn’t like me - but that went over my head.
I think it’s really easy to overestimate how important the socialization in public schools is. We go to so many movies where the plot is based on the dynamics of public high school, we assume it’s normal.
We see so much of terrible stuff downplaid like it doesn’t matter. Just rewatched Back to the Future which laughingly brushes off every kind of violence as long as it’s done at the prom.
> The value that the socialization the public school offers is underestimated.
The basically only social skill that school teaches is hating other people (other students, teachers) so much that from the deepest of your heart you wish them to be dead.
Clearly a valuable skill, but not the kind that most parents would desire their children to get.
There are some skills taught in that realm. From personal experience, I have learned to recognize trouble by gait and eyes alone. I get that people get different experiences, but I could have done without that knowledge.
And I've always felt that most of my social anxiety came from public school. Maybe we were both just prone to it.
(I unlearned it too, but it took quite a while.)
As someone else who was homeschooled except the last three grades, I also agree. Additionally, the effect is multiplied if the kid in question lives in a rural or semi-rural area rather than a suburb or city.
For the majority of my adult life I’ve been playing catchup. Even now, barreling towards 40, there’s aspects of social capabilities where I come up quite short relative to my peers.
If I’m ever to be a parent, I won’t homeschool. Depending the circumstances I might not send my kids to public school, but their schooling situation will at minimum involve social exposure comparable to that of public school.
This is a common sentiment, but how much do you really know about the counterfactual?
It's not obvious to me that you would have been unable to deal with people who didn't look like you if you had been homeschooled.
It also seems to be that a lot of public school environments surely contain kids who look different from each other, form cliques based on physical appearance, and learn to base how they treat people largely on physical appearance.
Paul Graham pointed out that public school is a weird and degenerate microcosm that isn't much like the real social world at all.
> I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.
> When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage.
> ...If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie...Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.
https://paulgraham.com/nerds.html?viewfullsite=1
Perhaps unlike in some ways, but some aspects of school life persist in so-called adult life, e.g., jocks, nerds, freaks, party animals, slackers, and teacher’s pets are all still around — now with zeros on the end.
> I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
The older I get, the more I think that helping your kids avoid interactions with others who aren't with the program is for the best. Ideally your children's friends should be people that you think are good kids, kids that you would go to bat for. Then when you are teaching your kids to compromise and play nice and forgive, you can legitimately feel good about it. I think my default assumption about a negative interaction with a public school random would be that they are basically a wild animal to be avoided.
The world is messy for all sorts of reasons, that may not be the way anyone would like it to be but it's the way it is, and imo it's best to learn it when the stakes are low rather than when they're later voting against other classes because they were never exposed to people from them early on, or they're being taken advantage of at work or in an adult relationship.
I wouldn't fault someone for wanting to situate their kids among peers and adults that help them grow at a similar level rather than hinder it, but I think it's also best to be a guiding hand rather than a applicant tracking system when it comes to the non-academic side
There are certainly tradeoffs, but it's not all negative. In my experience, what it boils down to is that home-schooled kids tend to have more experience with adults and less experience dealing with a wide variety of other kids, particularly assholes.
When I was a kid in public school, there was no shortage of assholes and I definitely would have preferred to not have to deal with them. OTOH, I don't doubt that there is also some value in that experience, not to mention interacting with all the other people. Also, we didn't have social media or semi-regular school shootings when I was a kid. So yeah.. to me, it's not at all obvious which set of tradeoffs is preferable nowadays.
What happens to asshole kids? Do they become regular adults or asshole adults? Do they become soldiers or prisonners never to be seen again by normies? Do they even reach adulthood? Are they even a stable group or were we all asshole kids to some other kids?
Dunno, maybe all of the above? Believe it or not, I didn't really keep in touch with them.
My point was that kids are disproportionately likely to treat other kids badly, especially when adults aren't around. That kind of situation is common at school, but much less common at home, unless the parents choose to allow it.
I think it's an important development milestone to learn that people don't want to be their friends, and the longing for human connection might be a good moderating force in their life. I was a really pessimistic teenager, which I received plenty of feedback on, and have worked against my own nature to become a more positive and cheery adult.
This is a strange claim.
In my personal experience, the asshole kids overlapped greatly with the popular kids in a Venn diagram sense. People, in general, did want to be their friends.
Some become President of the United States. Others probably grow out of it?
Looking back at the assholes of my youth, they run the gamut. Some seem like lovely adults, and are very successful. Some are just like they were and are very successful. Some others crashed out completely. The more brash, upfront assholes and the clever assholes seem to have done better than the sneering, malicious assholes.
And we were (almost) all assholes sometimes, but there's definitely a class of kids who were assholes most of the time.
You're forgetting that public school also exposes you to more adult assholes, including ones with direct power over you that can screw you over for no reason.
It's important to know how and when to advocate for yourself and others, when to escalate through proper channels and when to escalate outside of proper channels, and when to back down and let them be an asshole because they're frankly not worth your time.
In particular, learning "pretend to lose now, win later" is a useful skill. But I think there are healthier ways to learn that skill than on a live-fire course.
Fully agree. The foundation of education is learning how the world actually is, not how we wish it would be.
Except homeschooled people I know are lovely and well adjusted.
The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman. Other factors seem to play a much larger factor in the things you are (rightfully!) concerned about. As long as the parents have "the will to have nice things" (to refer to Patrick McKenzie's concept), then these are very surmountable problems.
Respectfully, A grateful dad who was homeschooled and who will homeschool.
P.S. Of course I will do some things differently than my parents, but it was an amazing gift and I had an extremely vibrant and stimulating time, including with peers (and adults!) outside of my parents' network who pushed me, challenged me, thought very differently than me, etc.
>The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman.
How do you do that? Seems like it would be impossible to replicate the experience of learning to navigate daily social interactions in a mixed group of people, especially when it comes to dealing with conflict.
Easy - homeschooling may include but does not require "in the home" any more than "homework" is required to be done in your house.
I was homeschooled and have homeschooled my three kids. Never has that meant "only at home and only with my family". My kids have been in co-op classes, taken classes from Art or Technical instruction centers (piano lessons, voice classes, programming, robotics), enrolled in community classes via private institutions and the local JC (cooking classes, performing arts) and been enrolled in independent study charter public schools which have some in-person classes. And in high school they start taking in-person JC courses.
There is lots of regular exposure to a variety of other people in all of that!
Just redefine homeschooling to include enrollment at schools and community colleges, tada.
> I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people.
Unfortunately this encourages people to have a blind eye regarding bullying.
I would be much more happy if more people intervened against bullies and liars. Maybe we'd have better people in politics today if 40 years ago schools punished bullies and liars and sent them to have their behavioral problems addressed.
>cross section of actual American kids
So many factors have led this to be a major liability for young people now. School is not what it was 20 years ago.
> I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
Popularity is not an exclusively American concept. Just as public school broadened your horizons, so will traveling (or living) abroad.
Too many CO2 emissions for that to be practical for the billions of people who don't have public transit access to another nation.
not if you send em by boat
If you can afford it! "Grass-roots segregation hits records numbers" would be an equally fitting title.
What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?
Maybe it's:
I’m sure these motivations do play out in some circles. However, every single homeschooler I know personally, and I know quite a few, does so because they want their children to have a very specific kind of religious education. Often the way this plays out is that they homeschool for a while, transition to a denominational school, and then depending on the family they may stay there or make a second transition to public school around 9th grade.
I think this tendency is heavily dependent on where you live. We have great public schools that will track advanced children aggressively if the parents push for it, so the motivations you list are unusual in my area.
Religion is definitely a big motivator. My perception though is other motivations have been on the increase, especially since the pandemic. One other group attracted to homeschooling is the hippie-type who thinks school is some kind of diabolical machine designed to crush kids' souls. Since the pandemic there's also been a big surge in the "I don't trust vaccines" group (which already had a good deal of overlap with the hippie group).
I have a feeling a really large percentage of homeschooling is about religious separatism and political separatism, and not about academic performance. Yes, you'll hear HN commenters sing the praises of homeschooling because this site is going to be disproportionately represented by the group doing it for actual educational reasons.
Also, we HN commenters typically see the success stories around us at work, not the failure stories. We all know that guy on the QA team who's a genius and credits his success to homeschooling, but we don't know the countless numbers of grown adults who are trapped as housewives who can't get a job because they never learned 5th grade multiplication.
Both were certainly major motivating factors for my parents’ choice to homeschool me in the 90s. Quality of education was a concern too, but it very much took a back seat to the other two.
The overwhelming majority of other homeschooling parents they had contact with also held separatist motivations.
That may be so, especially if you add a sort of "cultural separatism" (a la the hippies I mentioned). An odd thing I see recently too is people who seem to believe they're making various choices for educational reasons, but it's not clear if the education they're moving to is any better. They just do it because they perceive their child as being unhappy or stifled somehow. There seem to be, for instance, more and more parents who believe their kid is unusually smart and should be on some kind of fast track or not have to do certain things, even when there's little objective evidence of the kid's abilities.
Vague "educational reasons" is always the noble-sounding excuse they use, but often if you dig deeper they'll admit it's more about the various forms of separatism.
Sometimes you don't have to dig. A ton of moms in my wife's church group permanently pulled their kids out of public school in recent years, and they will openly admit that it's about keeping their kids away from "those" people, where the definition of "those" runs the gamut.
We did the homeschool thing for one year after most kids went back to school after COVID. My wife has underlying medical conditions that made her quite concerned about catching it before the vaccine rollout. We did a few of the homeschool group organized field trips and I got to briefly meet some of the parents. Overall I can't say much about the kids, they seemed fine. The parents were friendly, but when I asked about the curriculum they almost invariably suggested PragerU material, which makes me concerned for their children's future.
Not sure why you're being down voted. I'm sure there are some folks homeschooling because of things like racism, but that has always existed just like evangelical christians have always been big into homeschooling.
If there is a big uptake, it's likely due to the ever present threat of school shootings coupled with all the things you said above. I have to teach my kid a lot outside of school and they go to what is considered a good one. The only reason I send them is my spouse and I work and my kid needs to learn social skills. If I won the lottery, I'd homeschool them myself and do it for a few other families as well so that my kid can get the social aspect too.
It's insightful how they said segregation and financial means and you immediately went to racism.
There is certainly some level of segregating the children from families who have the means to "dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children" and children from families that don't have those means.
You can't use the word segregation wrt people and then pretend it's surprising or unreasonable when someone assumes you're talking about racism.
> What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?
A lot of the people I know who do homeschool (the extreme majority of families I know) have openly said the reasons why they're choosing to homeschool is because they don't want their kids exposed to the other "cultures" in their area whether that be immigrants, other religions, or LGBT people.
One family I know was thinking about pulling their kids out of public school because the choir was going to sing "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" and was worried this was indoctrinating their child into another religion. Forget the fact the rest of that holiday choir event was filled with Christian holiday tunes and what that means for the non-Christians that have a right to go to the school, that wasn't a concern at all.
Not all families, I agree. I've known a few outliers who actually are exceptional teachers and think they'll do a better job teaching the kids than the local schools (and they're probably right). But they're definitely the outliers around me. Most that I've personally known are not like that, and rely on just giving their kids workbooks with extreme religious bent to figure things out on their own.
Are they going to spend huge amounts of time & money?
I'd be willing to bet that we'll hear some stories about how they outsourced the effort to AI
There is some realy valid things to consider here.
The thing it leaves me wondering is how many kids from elementary through high school a child really keeps in touch with, and if college is currently the place where many students finally get to start to be themselves.
The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against this concept. Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.
Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.
Modern academic life is only well suited to a small percent of the population. Those children who are truly happy and excelling in that setting.
So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at? Forced mass education was a good idea for developing societies, but personalized education has been possible for at least a decade now, at a fraction of the cost. And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Here's a famous song on the topic for those who know how to "chew the meat from the cud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE...
* It's fascinating to watch the points on my comment go up and down a ton. Very controversial issue. I believe it highlights pressure from social and political structures in society, and/or personal experiences. They vary so much.
My general experience is that homeschool children have self esteem and confidence issues precisely because they've been around 'hand picked' people... forever.
They've never experienced assholes, or people who think their personality is grating, or whatever. Thick skin needs to be built up, to a degree. I'm not saying bullying is good, but being exposed to the unwashed masses definitely can be.
The problem is that what constitutes “healthy” varies so greatly between individuals (especially these days) that it barely carries any objective meaning, and the odds are heavily against any one person’s definition being correct.
If I put myself in the shoes of a parent, I wouldn’t trust myself on the matter enough that I’d feel good shaping my childrens’ entire world to match it. It’s such a wildly difficult thing to get right, and I’d rather they get a glimpse of the world through wide variety of viewpoints and hope they’ll use the values I’ve instilled in them to construct their own view.
> Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.
Not your problem to fix for sure - but it is your problem to equip your child to comfortably weather. There are bad influences out in the world and they generally have outsized effects on their social and professional scenes. In fact, the kind of curated, limited community you're advocating for is one where bad influences thrive.
> So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at?
I certainly agree the degree is whatever - but I think you're really under-valuing the social-gauntlet aspect of school. You will have classmates who kind of (or really) suck. You will need to do your work anyway. You will be incentivized to learn perseverance and a self-centered locus of control. These are valuable skills that only come from actual exposure to bad influences.
Someone who's perfect in perfect conditions is going to struggle because the world is not perfect. The aims you highlight here make me think less of homeschooling than I did before.
> hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children
Unless you can magically guarantee (or have enough money to fund their whole life) your children will never have to interact with "problem" people, they will need to learn to deal with those people one way or another. And it's better to do so in a low-stakes situation like school.
What you define here is isolation from the real world. There seems to be a misunderstanding of your understanding of misunderstanding.
Where I live the schools are quite good and the homeschoolers are fundamental religious families who won’t send their kids to schools where gay pride flags are allowed.
I’d pull our child out of school if the standards dropped but I think the majority of homeschoolers align with out of the mainstream poltical / religious views.
> homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one?
...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?
I think your view is a very black and white one. Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there.
The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe. Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do.
I can not conceive of a worse way to teach a kid how to behave in Adult social settings than to throw them into a group of other kids who have just as little experience as they do and then expect the group to "figure it out". This is not to say that there aren't some homeschooling parents who practice a form of extreme isolation which produces what I would regard as an equally bad outcome as public school. But by the numbers from people who have studied this the evidence indicates homeschooling produces the best outcomes for social adjustment in Adulthood.
Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement which means the child learns how to socialize not from other children but from watching how the adults they are around handle interactions.
[Edited for clarity in some sentences]
> I can not conceive of a worse way to teach a kid how to behave in Adult social settings than to throw them into a group of other kids who have just as little experience as they do and then expect the group to "figure it out".
You are aware of teachers, yes?
> Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement
Everything I've read shows that putting absolutely all else aside, parental involvement is key to a child's success. So perhaps the reason your by the numbers evidence shows home schooling to be better is simply because it's a self-selecting group of involved parents.
Teachers at a school do not fill the same role that homeschooling parents do in theses situations.
Counterpoint from my own experience having been previously homeschooled all the way to college: My parents went the extra mile to ensure I was constantly immersed in large group settings with other homeschoolers. Field trips, co-op classes, sports, and general high-quality social time. There were of course bad eggs as in any group setting, but with an important difference: if it ever got bad, it was possible to leave, and we did on occasion. In my mind, that's far more in keeping with the "real world" than the seeming entrapment of public schooling that offers little recourse for when social experiences sour. In the real world, you have the freedom to leave a toxic job or social group far more so than public school.
In addition to peer socialization and mobility, the flexibility in scheduling allowed me to work a day job through my high school years, exposing me to yet more real-world experience. The constant interaction with adults and folks from other walks of life was a huge boon that allowed me to function as a well-adjusted adult right out of the gate. The high-school drama that people suffer and then bring with them into adulthood is very disappointing and seemingly unnecessary.
^^^ That's my experience interacting with healthily homeschooled children-now-adults. On average they seemed to have so much less trauma than me and my peers, and less "subconscious" issues to deal as adults.
It absolutely is. If you are well equipped to navigate the adult world, you place yourself in hand-picked groups of people. I do not work with, socialize with, or live near a random sample of the population, and I highly doubt most people reading this thread do either!
Yeah but how do you LEARN the ability to do that? To keep that practice always in your mental backburner, and remembering how important it is? Why, you learn it by seeing the impacts from those succumbed to negative influences they surrounded themselves with!
You can't learn the application of hand-picking your people and environments if you don't first see the outcomes when such application is neglected, and understanding its importance from there. If you have the hand-picking done for you as well, you risk not learning the ability to do it yourself. Or how to handle the situations where you can't.
"..a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?"
School isn't their only exposure to life. You will get exposure to other people and non-healthy people outside of school.
"Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in th"
When I was a kid, I was exposed to kids that should have been in prison..and many of them ended up there. My life probably would have been better if they weren't there.
"My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there."
This can still be done with home schooling.
"The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe."
I disagree. If someone is hostile and aggressive all the time, I wouldn't be around them as an adult. I hand pick my friends, and you probably do too. I also still get exposed to the assholes of the world.
"Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do."
If you are at work and someone is sexually harassing all of the women there or generally causing issues for everyone around them (preventing most other people from getting their work done). Do you think they should stay, so everyone can learn to be around them?
You seem to think everyone is a reasonable person that might just have a few issues. This is far from the truth and many times, public schools will just keep these kids there, preventing everyone around them from learning.
It's also a burden to the teachers and staff.
> ...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?
It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public. "The real world" is highly filtered social circles and freedom of association. The idea that it's somehow an automatic good to force healthy kids to mix with everyone who happens to show up, regardless of whether they have severe behavioral or social issues, is pretty questionable.
> My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there.
You can expose your kids to different cultures without leaving them wide open to everything else. It's not a binary. The point is that home schooling lets you pick and choose.
> It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public.
I'm baffled by this. Many workplaces? Mass transit? Walking down the sidewalk? At a concert? Buying groceries? True, there don't all expose you to the full sweep of human existence at once but, in aggregate, it seems pretty similar to what you'd encounter at most public schools. What if they want a career in a hospital, or law enforcement, or social services, ... the list goes on.
You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble, but it seems to me they need to be prepared for a future where they encounter all kinds of people. I'm sure this can be compatible with homeschooling but I can't see how it's not generally a disadvantage. (Though perhaps onerous clearly outweighed by other advantages, depending on the situation.)
Home schooled kids walk down sidewalks, go to concerts, go grocery shopping.
Most workplaces are highly filtered. The whole interview process is specifically geared towards filtering out undesirable people.
The closest social equivalency to public school socialization I can think of is prison. You're stuck there for N hours per day with limited or zero control over what other people you're around. Maybe parts of military training might also be similar.
That's the kind of thing that is very much not like the "real world." It's more than just being "exposed" to less optimal peers (like you would on a bus), it's an entirely different social experience.
You don’t have to sit side-by-side rubbing shoulders and squabbling with rabble for 12 years in order to understand and deal with it, just like you don’t have to wrestle with gators for 12 years to learn respect for nature.
> You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble
I think it's telling that the other responses seem to focus on exactly this; the idea that their child will exist in a class apart from the rabble, and will not have to interact with them.
It seems to speak to two very different views of community. On the one hand, there is community as a collection of all the people in a space: people who share local resources, frequent the same local businesses, and have the same local concerns. On the other, there is a community of choice: people who share the same social class, and possibly the same religion or cultural beliefs. I think it's fair to say that you can have both, but trying to say that you can belong solely to the communities you choose and treat everyone else as beneath notice sounds quite problematic, and it will absolutely not give children a correct or complete view of the world.
> No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public
I think "forced" is doing a lot of work there. No, you're not forced to work alongside someone problematic. But quitting your job is quite an escalation to deal with the issue. Same with a troublesome neighbor. To say nothing of public transit, taking flights, interacting with other drivers on the road...
I think your reading is very black and white. Add some leeway to what I say. Hand-picked obviously doesn't mean all friends go through a psych screening on a daily basis, or that you have to helicopter-parent and tell your kids who to be friends with...
> or you have to helicopter-parent and tell your kids who to be friends with...
Isn't that essentially what you're describing, though? You literally talked about "healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children". No, you don't have to tell them who to be friends with... but you've pre-selected the pool of potential friends, so there's no instruction necessary.
> increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
You really might want to explain that further. At face value, that sounds like parroted right-wing rhetoric.
I get that on one hand, such regulation is one of the reasons some parents do so, but the wide diversity of "oversight" is challenging.
In Washington, homeschooled students still have to occasionally connect at an actual school, or do some baseline testing.
In Louisiana, you just tell the state "we're homeschooling" and the state is "have fun with that" and the child is essentially off the grid.
Not for nothing, instances of child abuse/CSA in many correlates with the laxness of educational oversight in home schooling.
> And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom.
For all your anecdotes my step daughter has plenty too. 10th graders who are barely literate, cannot do elementary math. Who when asked about their homeschool regime talk of waking at 10, 10.30, playing Fortnite or going on Tiktok for a few hours, and occasionally logging into some website to pretend like they've been working, or doing some mind numbingly simple exercise to show "participation".
> Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom.
Exactly. Notice how, when people complain about the "deranged ideologies" that teachers are teaching their kids, they either 1. stop short of actually naming those ideologies or 2. spout fever dreams that are statistically vanishingly rare.
I mean you’re literally explaining how your home schooled kids are separated from the real world.
Define "real world".
The one that exists with problem children and opinions you don’t like.
As a parent I get the impulse to remove my children from any potential harm but the real world has sharp edges. They need to be confident in that world not just smothered.
And really as the person who used the term it’s really up to you to define what you mean.
> The one that exists with problem children and opinions you don’t like.
That's just not true though. Your job isn't going to force you to interact with people who disrupt the environment constantly. Those people are fired and removed from the group.
Exactly. Adults don't tolerate the same B.S. children are forced into.
In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave.
In the military, say, you don't get that option.
In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while.
So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.)
> In functional workplaces, yes. In dysfunctional ones, sometimes you have to leave.
Agreed! And that is exactly what home-schooling families are doing. Choosing to leave a dysfunctional environment.
> In the military, say, you don't get that option.
Yep, and other government institutions, like prison. I don't think those are what anyone would call a typical life environment though.
> In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while.
That's another dysfunctional environment, and also what the police are for.
> So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.)
You're right, you can't. The world has a lot of dysfunctional environments, and I agree that people need to learn how to deal with them. Knowingly forcing your child to be in one of those environments full-time for many years seems like a pretty horrible way to teach them that though, bordering on abusive.
Public school is not dysfunctional, per se.
And, to be clear, EVERY workplace will have people you don't like. Every. Single. One. No exceptions.
Kids needs to be taught resiliency and healthy mindsets, to a degree. They need to learn to live and let go, to learn their value isn't derived from what people think of them, to learn that embarrassment is self inflicted.
You just can't do that if you're only around people who don't challenge you. If you're in a nice, cushy, social bubble, you will develop self esteem and confidence issues.
My job isn’t the totality of my life and you have very strange ideas about how quickly disruptive people actually get fired. You get plenty of unfiltered interaction in life. If anything I’d say the sort of thing you describe sounds more like an insular cult. Although even there you get misanthropic people, abuse and so on.
> My job isn’t the totality of my life and you have very strange ideas about how quickly disruptive people actually get fired. You get plenty of unfiltered interaction in life.
In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up? The only instances I can think of are other government-run institutions like the military or prison, and I don't think anyone would argue those are standard modes of "real life".
> If anything I’d say the sort of thing you describe sounds more like an insular cult.
Name calling isn't an argument.
> In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up?
Have you heard of customer service?
Anywhere you happen to be in public essentially.
I also didn’t call you names just stated that your description sounded cult like.
If your environment is so controlled to not have a good mix of people in it then that sounds even more cult like!
> In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up?
I was a paramedic. Every single day.
> Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.
I'm sure they exist, they may even exist as the majority, I will say for my part the homeschooled kids I knew through my church growing up were not any of these things. I would quite literally use the opposite of both those to describe them.
I'm not saying they represent the majority but they do exist and they were not well adjusted IMHO.
As with many topics I feel like "Yes, if you want to devote yourself fully to X thing you can do much better than Y professional", the problem is, again from my own experience, the people I knew who homeschooled their children were not professionals, they were not capable, and their children suffered for it. I want to stress, I fully believe it is possible for certain people with certain mentors/teachers to do better outside of the public (or private) school system. I just also believe that the odds of most people (making that decision for their children) to meet that bar are low. I also think that some of the better homeschooled experiences that I've seen are simply a super-private school by another name (various parents being or being subject experts and taking turns teaching coupled with many "field trip"-type trips with other homeschooled kids).
> there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Wait till you hear what the parents believe... I don't agree with everything taught or the way it's taught but being exposed to other types of people and ways of thinking is critical. I can guarantee you that had my parents been able to, they would have shielded me from a great number of ways of thinking. I worry that many homeschooled children grow up in a small echo chamber (we all live in echo chambers of difference sizes).
Can public school suck? Absolutely and I acknowledge that homeschooling might be the answer for some people, but only if you can afford to pay (with time or money) to educate your children completely which is almost certainly going to require working with other homeschooler parents to, essentially, build your own school. If you can bring in tutors/mentors/teachers that you vet and agree with and expose them to the world and new ideas/experiences then yeah, you are probably going to have good outcomes. If you plop them in front of a computer to follow a curriculum just to shield them from the "evils" of the world, well, I think you are going to have a bad time. Obviously there is a whole range of people in between those 2 extremes, I just feel that, on average, people trend towards the lower end of that spectrum.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE...
Interesting song and I do agree with many points. For many years I've complained about lack of teaching basic skills (everything from home ec to budgeting and more), many of which I heard in this song. I think there was a little of the baby going out with the bathwater but overall I enjoyed it.
> song
Yea, the guy later made a video clarifying he never meant to throw the baby out, just the bathwater.
there's was a famous paper written by a former school teacher which advocated for home schooling ? I been trying to find it ever since
I don't agree with all of Piotr's writings, but here's an extensive list of famous educators, maybe yours is among them.
John Locke, John Holt, Peter Green, and:
https://supermemo.guru/wiki/The_Greatest_Minds_in_History_Op...
https://supermemo.guru/wiki/Tom_Durrie
Homeschooling does not hit record numbers, that is that people tend to herd, herding is done because they prefer natural herding as a byproduct of evolution. Not because it's something from bible, do not believe those lies. Herding is a natural byproduct of evolution. believe Darwin
Didn't homeschool here but started a charter school instead. Some of our neighbors did homeschool and I have mixed feelings about it. Some did very well, some not so well; but of course the same can be said of all of the kids in the area no matter which way they went.
A few things I'll note:
In the current educational environment, teachers are often viewed as babysitters whose job is to educate children "correctly" and parents are only there to ensure that "correctly" matches their expectations. In the "good old days" when parents and teachers beat children regularly, at least they were unified in their expectations that children would listen to and obey teachers and not disrupt class. Now it is more common to see underpaid teachers without any support confronted by angry parents when their children misbehave and fail to actually learn.I am really really skeptical of the first bullet point.
My daughter is in college now, but we used a variety of private, part-time, and homeschooling approaches prior to that. One thing is that there are a lot of resources (e.g. independent teachers for subjects you don't know, co-ops for socializing, etc.), and the more people are doing it, the more true that becomes. My parents were both public school teachers, and yet we found ourselves home- and alternative-schooling our daughter. Public schools don't really seem to have a strategy for dealing with the situation, other than complaining about it.
If you are offering a free service, that is quite time-intensive, and increasing numbers of people choose to not use it, then there should be more introspection going on. If it's happening in public education, I'm not able to see evidence of it.
Seattle schools have that issue. After covid a bunch of kids were moved to private schools, and SPS (the organism in charge of school) complained and blamed parents on having money and not wanting to mix with the riff raff and other bs. When they actually asked the parents why their children weren't returning after covid, it was because SPS decided to axe the advance/gifted programs they had for kids, among other educational quality things. The children that never came back were children who would have taken advantage of those programs, and parents decided to go pay to win instead to get those programs back in private schools, as it becomes a compounding advantage in today's competitive world. SPS is still using the stupid hippie approach about children magically learning how to read with pictures and guesses, instead of phonics, and some numbers for reading are worst than Mississippi, which went hard into phonics and overwhelmingly improved their numbers. WA is a clear example that spending a ton of money doesn't improve educational outcomes, you also have to do things that work.
This is exactly right. I had a kid in Seattle schools during this time and this is exactly how I saw it happen and and Seattle schools were a major reason I left Seattle.
This might have been our experience from our bubble, but are these examples representative of the overall pattern? I suspect for every 1 kid pulled out of public school because of academic reasons like gifted programs, there are 10 pulled out due to religious reasons or vaccines or the gamut of anti-government reasons.
People are allowed to pull their kids out for religious reasons.
Nobody's saying they shouldn't be allowed to. We're just speculating about the reasons and I don't know if there's really any hard data showing which reasons are more prevalent.
I feel this pain. I grew up in what I thought were great public schools and am a big believer that public school is a fundamental institution that should raise the floor for society. Now I'm raising kids in Seattle and it's a constant struggle to get the kinds of educational programs and opportunities for my kids that I took for granted when I was in public school and just assumed would still be around when I was an adult. For lack of a better way to phrase it, I feel like I am exactly the kind of parent SPS should want to keep in its system - a strong believer in public education with the means to support the schools, yet sometimes I feel like they are actively driving families like mine out of school system with their decisions.
This is why I didn't move back to Seattle, but stayed in the nearby communities.
> then there should be more introspection going on
This assumes that the blame obviously lies with the schools. Basically everyone I know that homeschools does it because they disapprove of tolerance. Should the introspection lead schools to embrace segregation again? It is going to be hard to bring people with such wildly different viewpoints together in harmony.
When a social failure happens at a public school - a child fails a class, drugs are found, a teenager gets pregnant, there’s a fight - most people don't question the public school system itself. But when a social failure happens to a homeschooler, we wonder if the system of _homeschooling_ is broken.
In reality, stories of homeschooling failure are probably no more common than stories of failure in public high school, they're simply more attention-grabbing.
The problem is that homeschooling is extremely bimodal (and the split at least used to be pretty even). It tends to be either very good or very bad.
In particular, the "unschooling" approach (not always named such) is almost universally terrible.
But most of the homeschooled kids I know now are in healthy co-ops with defined curricula and socialization.
The adults I know who are most against homeschooling today are the ones who were homeschooled themselves. Maybe it's just a pendulum.
I was homeschooled. I'm doing the same with my children.
The person who you are replying to is stating a different implication: hates homeschooling -> was homeschooled
You are saying: was homeschooled -> likes it and will do the same with his/her kids
The adults I know who are most against public school went to public schools themselves.
The adults I know most against college went to college themselves.
The adults I know most against private high schools went to private high schools themselves.
Being really negative about your own education is an American tradition!
I think this is likely because people (accurately, in my opinion) attribute behavioral problems with kids to the level and quality of involvement of the parents at home, so it would be bizarre to attribute a child getting caught with drugs at school to the public school system itself.
I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before.
We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.
We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.
But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
Home schooling has answers for ALL of that.
> Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
And this is only just now being investigated as a cause of harm. When I went to public high school, the bullying happened at school and stayed there. Kids now, their bullies follow them home, and since most of the social interaction now happens online instead of in-person, it's way more damaging to mental health than the classic caricature of a schoolyard bully. The most I had to compare myself to were my peers in my school, not the entire globe of influencers and fake instagram.
There has been a complete erosion of boundaries. The threat is constant, you can't escape it, and kids are in a state of hyper-vigilance, always online or else they miss a crucial social interaction in group chat, or need to constantly check if a damaging photo, post, or rumor gets publicly posted to the internet while they were asleep.
Not only that, teens are losing the ability to read human emotion, so misunderstandings escalate rapidly. In person communication now becomes too intense, and only increases anxiety and isolation, despite being hyperconnected.
And that's just barely touching the surface.
I suppose there are few talented, hard working people who want to teach, and they command a premium. Education is expensive and underfunded.
As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money.
By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.
San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student.
I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.
Are you saying that's a lot or a little? Tuition for most (non-religious) competitive private schools in San Francisco is easily twice that amount.
For each of the grades K-12, here is the % of non-religious private schools in San Francisco that charge $56k or more:
cost per student is higher for high school students. So if you take an average across all grades for public schools and then compare that to specific cost per grade at private schools, of course private schools are going to look relatively cheaper for younger students.
Nearly every time we try to fix this problem with money it fails. The problem is not money. All else being equal there is little to no correlation between spend and outcome. Money get's touted by schools and politicatians as a way of pretending to care but not actually do any of the work to improve outcomes.
What does tend to correlate with money and also correlates with outcomes is parental involvement. Solving that problem requires societal and economic change in a district though not giving the school more money.
I'm saying it's a lot. See my other comment here for my reasoning:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008035
I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house. That $200k gets eaten up pretty quick by things like security, janitorial, building maintenance, support staff like principals, librarians, guidance counselors etc etc. If you’re meaning to include total cost for the full time employees (the teachers) in the list, then the salaries are a lot less attractive once you’re done covering benefits, etc.
I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot. The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k. Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond.
My point is that it's hard to point at some issue of inefficient public bureaucracy, because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper. I would also argue they wouldn't try, because their goal is a good education, or at least better than the public alternative (that only spends $28k per kid).
Moreover, not all students pay sticker price. So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.
Their goal is happy customers (parents). Different schools achieve this in different ways. Some parents choose a school not based on the expected quality of education but based on the expected networking opportunities for themselves and for their child.You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate, and structure most of your argument around the cheapest schools (K-8). Mea culpa on my end, though: you are correct that when I was saying "cheapest I've seen," there was an unfair modifier of "cheapest schools on my personal spreadsheet" which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to. You're absolutely correct that there are cheaper parochial schools available as long as you only need K-8.
Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school (again, referencing SF Chronicle's data). I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.
Sure, that's fair! But we're not talking about income, we're talking about average cost per kid. We can't actually know the details under the hood, but again, those schools specifically in your list are usually subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway.[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2025/sf-bay-area-privat...
- I don't have access to data that would allow me to apportion total SFUSD costs to individual school types
- When considering schools with vastly different prices (and different scales), the median is a much more informative measure than the mean (which could be skewed by an unusually expensive or inexpensive school with a tiny student population).
Another reason for using median is that I was responding to your comments which talked about general price levels ('tuition for those schools is roughly', 'usually start in the $40k range'). You were not talking about averages, but typical prices or minimum (starting) prices. The mean prices have no bearing on the truth or falsity of those claims.
If we look only at non-parochial schools, the means are even higher (e.g. $39k for 5th grade, $41k for 8th grade, $59k for 12th grade). Sorry, I should have been clearer. I meant when we look at the sticker price for non-parochial schools, we should assume their average revenue per student is less than the sticker price, and the average cost per student is less than or equal to the average revenue per student. My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded? If we limit the discussion to only those schools we'd be willing to send our kids to, then that would rule out almost all SFUSD schools, which kind of defeats the point of the discussion!BTW In case you want to see the SF Chronicle data in a form that's more personalized (showing the schools nearest to you first, filterable by grade levels and price and type), I made a tool to do that: https://tools.encona.com/schoolfinder
If the religious institution does a better job at roughly the same cost-point then it's probably not the money that is making the difference.
No, it’s the selection process of parents and children.
And, it's worth noting, the uh...deselection process. Private schools can kick kids out, public schools cannot.
Public schools can't legally kick kids out, but SFUSD has shown it can drive parents away.
$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco because of the insane cost of housing and everything else.
How does housing cost affect the cost for a school to educate a student? Are you saying it's the cost of paying for the school's real-estate?
San Francisco schooling district spends upwards of $1B a year to educate 55k students. About 85% of the budget goes to salary and benefits (excluding pensions). Of that, 75% goes to educators and the rest for other staff.
Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.
It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.
With a budget of $28k per student, and 21 students per classroom, that’s $588k per classroom.
Now, granted, some of that goes on building upkeep, cleaning, supplies, heating, pensions, managers etc - but if $588k per classroom doesn’t let you pay enough to attract teachers there’s something very suspicious going on.
I don’t buy that argument, there’s no reason a teacher in San Francisco can’t live in Oakland or Berkeley, or a teacher in NYC couldn’t live in NJ. You don’t have a human right to live in the most expensive real estate on Earth.
GP didn't say anything about it being a human right. You seem to be strawmanning their argument.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.
The price of SF real estate affects the price of real estate in Oakland and Berkeley. So it's still a relevant input variable.
Yeah, screw the teachers, they should just have a longer commute, who cares about them? /s
I always want to laugh when I hear people complain about finding near-minimum-wage workers in a HCOL area. They can't seem to grasp that commuting is not free, it may feel free to them at their income level but transportation costs money (gas, car maintenance, insurance or bus, etc) and time. I'm not saying teaching is a minimum wage job but it's not a high earning one either, paying them as low as we do _and_ also asking them to have a longer commute is just absurd.
Keep that argument going.
Jackson Hole residents complaining about "poor service" in stores and restaurants in town, because shocker, servers can't afford to live in Jackson Hole. And unlike even SF or NY (which may not be perfect but have at least functional transport), there's no easy way to travel from the next town, an hour away or more.
Residents have started banding together to rent coaches to bus people in, which seems the most reasonable solution, after all, no poors in town, still, and it doesn't hurt the residents that service industry employees in their town have a three hour commute. /s
It got so bad in Atherton, CA, that the school had to build accommodation for teachers in the school itself. Next step, they can do janitorial work for extra money!
High housing cost means teachers need higher salaries to account for either their higher cost of living or the extra commute
If an average class has 20 students it's $560k per year. If an average student gets 1000 hours of schooling per year you can pay 200$/hour and you have spent only just above 1/3 of your budget.
It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".
It’s because this is a very simplified view of a classroom. What is presented above is the best case scenario, not a realistic one. For example, there’s no consideration of costs associated with any sort of handicapped student, or student with special education needs.
Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.
Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.
The most recent $790,000,000 in 2024.
> the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance
What kind of maintenance do you think is expensive compared to a budget of $560k per room, per year?
Very possibly. All I'm saying is you can't just compare dollar figures per student without considering where the dollars are spent.
$28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us?
That leaves $200k unspent.AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist.
If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).
The big thing you’re missing is special education, and to a lesser extent English Language Learners. School districts are obligated to teach every student, some of whom cost the district dramatically more than they receive from the state.
Your admin costs are also low - you need to account for each teacher being coached and managed, running school operations and front desk, facilities management, finance, IT, etc.
Also this is an area where first principles analysis is likely to lead you astray - I’d recommend starting with SFUSD’s public budget to understand what their cost structure is.
You're recommending I look at SFUSD's public budget when:
- that budget is how I was able to calculate per-pupil spend
- in another comment you admitted to having 'no idea' where the $28k/year number came from, suggesting to me that you haven't looked at the budget yourself
The granularity in SFUSD's published budget is not sufficient to analyze what is useful and what is waste.
Finally, I have no idea where people are getting $28k/year; most schools in CA operate on closer to $14k-$16k per pupil
To get the number, you just need to divide two numbers: SFUSD's budget and the number of students.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41711345
As the son of a teacher and a friend of several teachers, you're way underestimating their workload.
I estimated that a class of 22 children would require one full time teacher and one full time teaching assistant.
What am I missing? My table has $200k left over so we could add another full time teacher at $150k?
Any specialized teaching: art, languages, in high school I understand they have a different teacher for each subject, a librarian, a substitute teacher on sick days, an individual aide for one of the kids to represent the special education budget…
But I remember you previously and you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.
But if the government is going to operate schools and demand that we all pay for those schools, I'd prefer it if those schools were run for the benefit of students (and specifically to maximize academic achievement) and not for the benefit of government employees.
In WA the state spends around 20k$ per student, people still say it's underfunded.
> Education is expensive and underfunded.
Always makes me think of The West Wing scene:
> Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.
Video (sorry for the burned in subs, should be queued up): https://youtu.be/IzV09gESyh0?t=39
Education should be well funded but in many school districts the problem is waste and inefficiency rather than lack of funding. Huge amounts are paid to administrators and consultants who do nothing to improve student outcomes, or even make them worse. Generally there is little correlation between funding per student and results.
Covid showed me that on the average home schooling (or at least remote learning) leaves kids extremely under developed.
The stunted social and academic skills were pretty apparent in retrospect once the schools reopened.
Remote learning. You didn't see homeschooling, which is a very different thing, you saw remote learning.
The homeschooling crowd has developed methods over the years to compensate. The COVID remote learning cohort did not, and suffered for it.
Remote learning has also built many methods for success, and absolutely nobody even consulted them before implementing their ad hoc systems for Covid. There are entire online public schools and their staff were just ignored.
What happened to students who were in schools that closed was terrible. But it wasn't anything close to homeschooling.
COVID forced remote learning to be adopted very broadly, without the usual self-selection effect of families that choose to homeschool when they have a choice. So the observations from COVID don't really support any stronger claim than saying that homeschooling can be done badly.
Is there an answer for athletics, music, robotics, and all the other after school teams? How does that work?
Of these, most are easily handled. I am in a midsized city and there are plenty of groups that offer music, robotics & engineering, speech & drama, etc. focused towards homeschooled students. That, plus the rise in homeschool "pods"/co-ops means socialization and activities are very available to students & parents who want them.
Sports might be the challenge. Many US states have athletic associations that handle most K-12 sports, and they require enrollment in an accredited member school. I am aware of several homeschool specific athletic associations in my area, but all are targeted towards religious homeschoolers. Not certain what secular alternatives would exist, but soccer is very popular & there are plenty of competitive academies that operate outside the school ecosystem.
I know several homeschooled students who played varsity sports for their local high school (the one that they would have been attending). I'm not sure about the universality of that, but that's an option for at least some people.
I think it's patchwork & has changed over time. When I was at high school one of my friends who was homeschooled competed with me on our academic team. His older (and far more athletically gifted brother ;-)) lettered in several varsity sports. But now that state's athletic association explicitly says no to homeschool students.
Besides big ones like soccer that you mention, more niche sports are often partially or totally outside of school systems.
Fencing for example, is usually clustered around external clubs. Very few high schools will have fencing teams, and in a lot of cities even the high schools that do have fencing teams will be kind of a joke compared to the club teams.
This comment made me curious so I did some research. Of the sports offered by my local school district (in the top 30 for enrollment in the country), I can find an alternative for homeschoolers that offer competitive opportunities for every sport but bowling and football.
Of the others, there are either homeschool alternatives that are explicitly secular or at least not overtly religious, or there are competitive clubs. All the schools have track & field, but there is a large homeschool league. And the district has a few schools with pools and a few more with swim teams that practice at the city pools, but the local swim club is the one turning out the Olympians – but even then, it also seems to have plenty of offerings for kids who won't set a world butterfly record. Football, I imagine, is just so popular that the private/public schools take all the players.
My kids do Taekwondo and church youth groups. My eldest did not want to do robotics but he does run the Dungeons and Dragons group at our library. We do music as a family. My daughter does choir. My son has done drama but declined to participate this year. They have been homeschooled their entire lives. All three of them received something I did not, the ability to converse with adults from a young age. This is of course anecdotal so YMMV but I would love to see a study on the conversational skills of homeschooled students.
Anecdotally, homeschooled children often speak and behave more like adults.
Whether this is a positive or negative thing depends on the situation. Being precocious is something adults might think positively about (though not in all situations) but it's not something other kids usually admire.
I think you are right that this is situational. I can understand it potentially hindering relationships with other like aged children who are traditionally educated. I can only say that I like my kids a lot, which is nice as a parent.
Homeschoolers form co-ops. A local one here does ballroom dance, tennis, basketball. There is often a youth symphony option in mid- to large-sized cities.
For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.
Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.
To me, this question highlights the whole problem: This is not what schools are for.
Yes, it's great if they provide these things, but it's a distant secondary concern. I'd rather my kid get a great education and miss out on these things, than get a poor education but have access to all these.
But of course, as others have pointed out, it's a false dichotomy. You can have both.
Depending on where you live there are many options. In my school district home school kids can join any club or team offered by the public school system where you reside. Additionally there are numerous non-school related clubs and activities all over the place. My kids could play music with the local school district, with a musical education non-profit that is prolific in our area, or ( where they do play music ) with private lessons that have group classes, bands, and performance opportunities.
There are tons of clubs for such things. My kids are in a homeschool music program (and learning piano and, until recently, bagpipes); half of my kids are playing competitive sports via homeschool programs that compete with other high schools; one is getting his certification as a welder (as part of a State program that pays for it if one is still in high school). Because class times and locations are more flexible this opens up far more possibilities for extra curricular activities.
Often, yes. Where I live, home-schooled kids can participate in extracurriculars offered by the public schools.
i'm sure many others will reply as well but there's lots of extracurricular options for homeschoolers as well as social engagements. It's kind of like a shadow school system, there's associations and groups and other organizations built around home schooled children. My wife and I considered it but we have managed to navigate our public school situation well enough without me, or my wife, having to quit working.
Of that list my kids' top-rated K-8 public school only offers music. Everything else is done privately.
I went to public schools but still did that sort of thing through the YMCA and our church. At the middle school level and lower, most of those types of activities are community based rather than centered around the school, though that varies by area.
How are you thinking about the socialization aspects of homeschooling vs not?
I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers so I’m curious how you thought about it.
This argument has not kept up with the reality of the public school system. The homeschooled cohort my children are associated with have problems associating with public school children of the same age... but the problem doesn't lie on the homeschooler's side, it lies 100% on the publicly-schooled children's side! The public school attendees are noticeably less mature for the same age and less able to deal with anything other than the highly-specific and unrealistic environment of public schools rather than the rest of the world. The homeschoolers have trouble stepping down their social expectations to levels the public school attendees can meet.
We have a few reasons unrelated to socialization [1] to do home schooling but one of the reasons I don't want to send them back is precisely the regression in "socialization" I would expect.
30 years ago, this probably was a decent argument, but the bar of "at least as socialized as a public school attendee" has gone way down in the meantime.
[1]: I guess before anyone asks, one of my children is deaf-blind and while the people in the system did their best and I have not much criticism of the people, the reality is still that I was able to more precisely accommodate that child than the system was able to. This ends up being a pretty big stopper for a return to the public school system for that child.
Homeschooled does not mean "completely isolated." My kids are in bands, sports teams, and numerous extracurricular activities both with other home schoolers as well as with public schoolers. Also, homeschooled kids are far less reliant on their same-aged peer group for socialization; my kids talk with people in public regardless of their age (something which surprises some adults).
Having put 2 kids (10th and 8th grade now) through a couple school options…the socialization in schools is pretty bad.
Kids from home schooling families we know are as polite or substantially more polite than those in the school system.
I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization. They'll have to deal with those folks when they hit the real world too.
I.e. disassociating from those people? Isn’t that what homeschooling does inherently? It’s more likely that kids will pick up bad behaviors than they will learn to “deal with” those kinds of people.
> I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization.
It is, but do we have any studies showing how well school kids are at this? From what I've seen, most kids in school do not learn those skills.
Hopefully they learn how to deal with them instead of picking up their communication style.
Homeschooling doesn't mean the kid stays at home all the time. We homeschool and my kid has classes and different activities all week, interacts with friends and teams. It has worked very well for us given our lifestyle. I would understand it's not for everyone.
Who’s to say that they wouldn’t be more socialized, not less?
It used to be folk wisdom that beating your kids built character, teachers would even slap kids with a ruler back in the 1950s. Could you say the same about bullies, cliques, popularity contests, and all the other performative nonsense that goes on in public schools?
Maybe it’s all bullshit and giving kids a safe environment to learn at their own pace without all these distractions makes them better equipped for the modern world?
My kids get more socialization than me. Our parish homeschool group has daily activities. Monday is two hour playgroup. Tuesday is extracurricular classes at the parish. Wednesday is catechesis and play time. Thursday is free. Friday she does a day long camp with an outdoor education program (not parish based). All added up, she spends more time with kids than I did and doing more interesting things
Oh I see - I guess I hadn’t thought of homeschooling that way (in a group with extracurriculars).
I always thought of it as parent / tutor + kid = almost all interactions.
Thanks.
We homeschooled. When we wanted to socialize our kids, we shoved them into the restroom and beat them up for their lunch money.
I kid, but there's a real point: So much of the socialization is bad.
More: Kids aren't going to be kids forever. Does socialization with a bunch of other kids prepare them for the adult society that they're going to go into?
This is my perspective too. A bunch of 11 year olds raising your 11 year old doesn't always result in preferable outcomes. I think the other part of it is that a lot of people have this sort of idea that homeschooling means sitting in your kid in the basement in front of their homework and never seeing the light of day. Obviously that's not accurate.
As a parent, your view of socialization being "good" or "bad" is heavily distorted. I think of socialization (I am a parent) as a neutral activity, sometimes a skill, although I really don't think it's needed as we live in a mostly secluded society in the US, and verbal communication has been supplanted by electronic means.
Well it should, yes, given that socialization is the result of shared social experiences.
Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences that create bonds with people (whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)
These are real social dynamics that actually exist in adult life, and I suspect people who are totally blindsided by them are maladapted
> Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences
It also teaches you to deal with bullies. That said, we had homeschooled kids in my Boy Scouts troop. They learned how to deal with bullies just fine.
Kids (and teachers) generally don't deal with bullies well.
It really just results in them continuing to being bullied, or reacting badly and getting blamed themselves.
> Kids (and teachers) generally don't deal with bullies well
Are there studies on whether bullying is higher in lightly supervised versus moderately supervised groups? Or mixed-age versus single-age groups?
Scouting is lightly-supervised mixed-age groups. If an older kid bullied a younger kid, that resulted in adults reading them the riot act. But if a younger kid bullied a younger kid, the two sort of wound up sorting it out until someone threw a punch or pissed off an older kid. (For being annoying.) That second dynamic was, to my memory, unique to mixed-age groups.
Why would you need to learn to deal with bullies?
If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society.
> Why would you need to learn to deal with bullies?
Because bullying is an extreme example of a common human power dynamic.
> If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society
Fair enough. I was thinking exclusively of non-violent bullying. (It may get physical. But in a roughhousing way. Not one intended to cause pain or injury.)
>(whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)
Watch it, you almost said "rescuer" there.
> But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
What's the reason?
I think we could teach them as well as the school does. And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.
“And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.”
Take it from someone who was homeschooled from pre-k through high school, you will absolutely not provide a better social environment. I was so unprepared to handle the social dynamics in casual, educational or professional that it took years and years of active work to put myself in a position where it wasn’t an absolute detriment to my success. I have no doubt you can educate your children well, it’s every other aspect of humanity that is typically missed out on and can lead to unintended consequences.
I had the opposite experience. I was home schooled from 2nd grade through high school, but I didn't just spend all my time alone with parents. My family was part of a home-school co-op, I played in the local youth symphony, and I had a job working at the local university when I was 16 and taking college classes there. I also have a large extended family.
I didn't really have much trouble adjusting to living on campus at college, and I've never had issues with interpersonal stuff at work or school.
Your anecdote is not universal; neither is mine.
Of my closest friends when I was in high school, the one with the best social skills had been home schooling since I met him when he was 10. However, he did participate in extracurricular activities at the local public school, like a computer club in middle school and then theater in high school. The only area he was really lagging at age 18 was in math, but that reversed a few years later and now he has a STEM PhD and has been teaching at a large state school for the past decade and a half.
I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.
I dunno. I think I could spin a narrative where public middle school dynamics (that is, bullied quite a bit) created issues for me that hampered my ability to succeed in social settings.
I don't really think that way in general, but I guess I'd just want to point out that the spectrum isn't "good socialization in public school" to "bad/no socialization in homeschooling".
Sounds like you had a hard time transitioning. Sorry for that.
I don't believe it's a magic pill by any means. But I've known many recently home schooled kids and they seem a lot more mature than their public school peers. So I think we have a decent shot at having similar results.
Seeming mature to an adult isn't the thing in question though, is it? Not feeling or appearing awkward when interacting on their own in their 20s is what is being criticized. The anecdotal evidence you present doesn't include home schooled children in their 20s as far as I can tell.
Homeschooled kids have much more flexible schedules which can allow them to do things in the community during the daytime that are not available to kids who have to go to school in-person full time.
This can include volunteer work or part time jobs working with the public and interacting with people of all ages.
Why do you think you being forced into a monoculture of only kids your own age would help your interaction with others when you're in your 20s? 25 year olds don't behave anything like teenagers.
Because I've met several homeschooled adults over the years, and talking to them that's something most of them had in common when explaining the impact it had on their life. Looking for more objective data I found this one source that seems to be written by people not already convinced of the desirability of homescooling [1], forgive me for being skeptical of the objectivity of places called "national home education research institute". Overall it paints a more positive picture than I had expected, but also highlights it's limitations.
[1] http://hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Taubman/PEPG/conf...
It doesn’t but they seem on a trajectory for adulthood that appears just fine compared to to others.
It is weird how adults are looking at children and assessing their social abilities. You would need to ask the children’s peers what they think.
One could say this is where the free market of schooling comes into play. Does it make more economic sense for businesses to choose those with social skills learnt from home schooling, or ones who have not been home schooled? Definitely curious to see where this goes.
If only it was actually a free market. Republicans are actively kneecapping public education so they can pump money to the schools that are free to to discriminate and kick out underperforming kids
That's probably true in a lot of cases for K-5. But I don't think any two people could teach a child with the same robustness as a the ~15 teachers most kids have during middle school/junior high, let alone provide things like labs, workshops, extracurriculars, etc. With high school that gap goes from big to enormous.
I've done all 3 of public/private/homeschool with my kids. My daughter's (public) HS chemistry class had exactly one lab that we couldn't do at home. The physics lab had zero. Bio is a bit harder since they had e.g. hundreds of pre-mounted slides for examples of various things. We also lack a biology major in our near-family.
For extracurriculars: there are club youth sports aplenty, a youth orchestra, band, choir and drum & bugle group. There are participate in various academic competitions (mathletes, model UN &c.). It's definitely harder since there's no "club rush" like in public school, but these things are available (and the total cost is rather less than a non-parochial private school, though subtracting out lost salary for the parent doing the teaching reverses that for the more affordable options[1])
1: It's completely possible to spend more than a private university tuition on private high schools where I live, but the ones not subsidized by the Roman Catholic Church start in the low $20,000s
This just assumes the median education for 6-12 is any good. Also, a lot of labs, workshops, and extracurriculars can be easily found elsewhere - a lot of these have groups specifically for homeschoolers.
> And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.
Citation needed.
Every perspective I've heard personally - and mirrored in comments here as well - from the non parent side of things, is quite negative in terms of learning how to behave and socialize with your peers. To you the children might seem polite and servile, and you might see this as something positive - as you state in another comment - but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
I know a ton of home-schooled kids and this is far from universal.
Yes, kids who were home-schooled because their parents didn't want secular society interfering with them raising their kids in a niche religion are more likely to experience this. Even in those cases, however, I found that the kids adapted rather quickly.
In most other cases[1], the parents were explicitly worried about their kids' socialization, and found many opportunities for the kids to interact with other kids their age (e.g. typical after school activities like sports or such).
Many of the kids I know who were both home-schooled and socially awkward started in public school and were pulled due to bullying &c. To say that the home-schooling stunted their social growth is a counterfactual; it's just as easy to see them ending up worse off.
For the most part, I would say that socializing in public school vs. homeschooling is a bit like communication with in-person companies versus remote; in the former it just "happens" to some degree, sometimes well, sometimes poorly; in the latter it requires intentional work to happen, but can still happen.
1: A notable exception is one person I know who was homeschooled by parents, with a father that traveled a lot for work and took his family with him. She was often in situations where she had fewer than 5 kids around close to her age who also spoke English.
>but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
Citation needed.
If you put your kids in homeschooling and provide no other outlet for socialization then sure, they'll be socially awkward.
My brother and I were homeschooled, but we were also heavily involved in our community. We were at the local park playing sports 3-4 times per week, we did various summer camps, we had a few other homeschool families that we'd setup playdates with. Our parents would sometimes joke that we barely ever home! And, unsurprisingly, we had no problems with socializing or making friends later in life.
Was it the same kind of socialization you get from going to public school? No, but I consider that a feature :)
It also has its own problems that haven't even been quantified yet.
If you think that homeschooling is a panacea, I guess we're all about to f*ck around and find out...
I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.
> I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.
Any idea how many were affected terribly in school? I'm in touch with my high school classmates. Almost half of them blame the school experience to lifelong problems.
Everyone from my public high school class is now rich and happy. My anecdote is just as good as yours.
> Everyone
Did you grow up in Scarsdale or Palo Alto?
And just as good/bad as the top level comment, which is my point.
I was homeschooled and I got a fairly strong education.
What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.
For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.
How so?
What works for one might not work for another one. Can't generalize.
We can actually. It's called theory of probability and statistics, which is probably "forgotten" by these amazing self-appointed homeschoolers. A few rare successes of homeschoolers doesn't mean this practice is good on average, and vice versa the rare failures of the public education system doesn't mean that it is bad on average.
Most times I look this up, I see stuff like "[t]he home-educated typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests".
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#Academic
Looking at the replies, I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores but social development and preparing kids for society outside the house. It definitely requires considerably more, active attention from parents. Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades and ensure that they're maintaining an active social life but I think the difficulty of nailing that as you go-your-own-way is apparent.
>I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores
>Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades
This reads as an inconsistency.
As for the social stuff - as I commented elsewhere, it's not hard to make a case that public school is bad for socialization as well. Which isn't to say that public school isn't irredeemable in that way, just that it's not like one or the other is an obviously correct choice.
Yeah, that study has been debunked or countered by "... among home-educated students applying for college", and the proportion of home schooled kids who apply for college versus those in the traditional education system is far lower, i.e. this is very self-selecting.
This comment is so disingenuous. Few and rare?? Why would you frame it like this? Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:text=r...
https://chewv.org/college-preparation/college-admissions/?ut...
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/?utm_sourc...
They're not more likely to get into college as a whole. In fact, they apply to college a lot less. But in that subset, against public education as a whole, then yes, they do better.
You may want to look wider afield than homeschooling advocacy and lobbyist groups for your stats.
If you've got the statistics to validate your point, show them. If not... pot, meet kettle.
One of the key issues in school is classroom size. A teacher with 30 kids is handicapped as a teacher compared to one with a smaller class.
Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.
Grade retention ('holding kids back') has additionally dropped significantly since the average HNer has gone to school. I remember going to school where one of my peers went to sixth grade with his brother two years older than him. But now, we give out social promotions.
That might've worked if we funded schools & gave students who fell behind significant interventions & 1x1 attention, but that's not what happened. One of my friends has a very bright and talented fifth grader in a class with multiple students who can barely read or write. Guess who gets the most attention from educators? Which group the teachers structure the class for?
That's also 4 entirely different curriculums which need to be taught. I volunteer taught CS for about 10 years, and the first year I taught a new class- and this was a single class for high school kids- I always found I was much better at it the second and third time around. I taught about 4 different courses, of varying difficulty- intro to programming with SNAP, "CS Principles" which had a little bit of everything from (very) basic networking to html and a bit of javascript, Javascript/Python, and then the final boss... AP CS in Java, which is a very difficult class.
I find it difficult to wrap my head around you can make it work teaching the entire curriculum for 4 different grades encompassing reading/writing, math, history, science, art, music, etc... I guess its potentially compensated for by the fact that they are all getting very individualized attention, but thats spreading a parent very thin.
Especially when we are talking about high school levels, where you can even potentially go into AP courses- no way a single parent can teach college level calculus, History, CS, etc... effectively.
For all the flaws of our public education system, I don't see how this can work better.
Did you make a schedule of regularly switching off with other families of four? In other words, those parents teach your kids and you teach their kids? Otherwise I'm not sure how you'd tackle confirmation bias creeping up in all kinds of ways.
I used to think this way, but some experiences made me realize it's not so cut and dry.
When you have a class size over 20, teachers are forced to be a lot more systematic, which can improve the effectiveness of their teaching. Good teachers make heavy use of social proof. When I tried to teach my kid at home, it was a struggle. But when the kid is around his peers in a classroom, and they are going along with the teacher, he naturally falls in line with no cajoling, etc.
If there were only 5 students, the likelihood he'll just go along with things is much lower.
Yep, that's definitely true. That being said, figuring out which approach to take requires paying attention (which you did), there's no guarantee that any two people (or any one person at two times) will be in the same cohort.
> It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.
This is why it's useful to look up stats when we have them.
For example, homeschooled students do better on the ACT than public school kids.
https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info...
Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.
I suspect there is a lot of selection bias in that data. My hypothesis is that the homeschooled folks who take the ACT are more likely to do well on the ACT than the homeschooled folks who don't.
Isn't that true of public school kids who do/don't take the ACT as well?
My Title 1 school made the ACT available to all students for free (on one specific date). A lot of kids who were unprepared for the ACT took it because, why not?
We didn't have that at my school. Unless it's super widespread, it's probably not what's behind the different test results.
This is some fascinating insight. Do you think that the things being compared are [homeschooling] and [fighting grizzlies]?
I would say the interesting thing is the sudden increase over the last 5 years. Presumably, the number of Americans who think they can KO a grizzly bear is a lizardman constant situation in the surveys over time. But the number of people homeschooling is recently skyrocketing.
Given the subject of the thread and the comment I replied to: yes?
An acquaintance of mine fought (got mauled by) a grizzly bear a month ago. He went to the ICU (since released), but the bear got shot and died. It was a pyrric victory, but he did win the fight.
I think the implication of the question is that one doesn't have a firearm
What a horrible story to share.
I didn't see it as horrible. I saw it as a story of human triumph. And good fortune.
That’s not a great example though, is it?
I’ve seen many kids, including my own older ones, who have gone through the school system and others who haven’t.
I’ve watched people on YouTube make all sorts of amazing things, and they make it look easy. Which leads to thoughts of “hey, that’s easy, I could do that”.
==It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.==
I think it also says something about the parents who think they can do as well or better.
Well, they tend to be right. Outcomes for homeschooled children are broadly significantly better than government schooled children.
Also, just FYI, to quote someone you prefix the text with ">".
Poor kids :( . Hope the damage won't be lasting for them, at least they did went to proper schools previously and have some basics taught.
I'll gladly stand up my 7 homeschooled kids next to any public school kids.
All tested above grade level on state mandatory testing throughout their schooling.
Two graduated early (some with college credits).
My adult children (4 sons, ages 19-25) have gainful employment, living on their own (2 own their own homes), and standing on their own. One is married (I got a grandkid!), all have friends, communities they're involved in, and are healthy (physically and mentally).
None take prescription meds nor struggle with anxiety or depression.
Poor public school kids... I hope they can find help for the damage they suffered. <grin>
You didn’t mention how many went to college
Given they are sufficiently successful to be living on their own, married, and some with their own homes, whether they went to college is probably an inappropriate yardstick of success. I mean, be real. If a 25 year old is married and owns a home, but doesn't have a BSc are they a failure? What are we doing here.
OP is free to chose their metrics. I wouldn’t trade education for a home personally. I think it’s interesting how they chose their metrics.
> 7 homeschooled kids
Wow that's a lot, how did you manage?
Only seven? :-)
(My wife and I have had 9.)
we are discussing on HN. The population of commenters here is likely very different than the homeschooling population.
And yet there are many homeschooling parents in this discussion thread (including a single-income dad of 9 whose kids are homeschooled). But I'm quite aware that I'm the exception on HN.
Assuming you are Mormon, is home schooling sort of another form of virtue signaling Mormon families employ or is it more of a way to ensure your families don't get excluded? Like, did you really have a choice in the matter once you realized you either go full Mormon or leave the church entirely?
Bad assumption on your part. I'm not Mormon.
Protestant Christian and most of my Christian brothers and sisters look at how many kids I have and that we homeschool and think I'm a little crazy (just like most non-Christians). I'd say probably 1/3 of the families in our church homeschool though. It's a wonderful community to be a part of and if I sent my remaining kids to public school, I wouldn't be asked to leave.
Mormons aren't the only people with large families. Ultra-conservative Jews, Muslims, and many Christians have large families. What I don't think I've ever seen is a couple who is non-religious or atheist and has a large family.
We have a neighbor down the street that is non-religious that has 5 kids (public school). Maybe that's not 'large' in your book though.
God says children are a blessing and I know it to be true. I'm grateful for all the children he gave me (7).
Catholics aren't so much anymore but used to be the same. My parents both had 5 siblings growing up.
Not all Catholics, just the ones who go to the traditional Latin Mass. :-)
Not sure if you are disputing something I didn't say but yes, you are correct.
Every time I hear the “What about socialization?” argument from some childless person on SSRIs, I am reminded how dishonest some people are. If they even liked (let alone cared for) children, they would have had their own.
A lot of people are offering opinions on homeschooling. I'll throw in one anecdote from my past. I played tennis with a kid who was homeschooled through middle school but was sent to high school so he could graduate with a diploma instead of a GED, because this seems to be something that colleges care about. He was awkward for a couple weeks but basically adapted to high school and we quickly forgot he was homeschooled. The only thing that occasionally reminded us he was homeschooled was that he was better prepared for high school academics than we were and got good grades.
So for everyone saying that homeschooled kids aren't well adjusted or have bad social skills, I'll offer the counterpoint that they might appear unadjusted at first, but humans can usually adapt to new environments, so homeschooled kids have a pretty good chance at acting "normal" a short time after leaving homeschool. Don't judge someone's awkwardness the first time you meet them, let them adjust a bit and see if they can assimilate.
Anecdotally, two factors at work here:
- Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.
- With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching.
It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it's comparatively much easier to pull your kids out and homeschool them.
This is very anecdotal. Here in the south, the "controversial, left-ish values" would be a breath of fresh air vs what is being taught here
> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass
This is no child left behind in action, which was implemented during W's term
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
^ This is the micromanagement that a ton of people claim to hate and get in their way on this site when folks are complaining about daily standups.
IMO, if you're worried about the quality of your kid's education then you'll either need to send them to a private or home school, which will stunt them socially because life isn't just one big private school or home, or encourage curiosity and learning at home to supplement their rote learning from school
Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.
Name the left values; don't beat around the bush.
Observing remote education is not good visibility into pre-covid teaching.
I think we have a responsibility to have educated citizens.
> Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.
I'm thinking this is fairly new. When I was in school, if I got bad grades or got in trouble at school, I got in trouble at home too. My parents were absolutely not calling the teachers complaining about grades. When I had trouble learning multiplication facts, they sat me down with flash cards every night until I had learned them, they didn't blame the teacher. This was in the 1970s/80s. This seemed pretty normal based on what I remember. When/why did it change?
I think parents are trying to maximize the perceived value of their child at the expense of their real value. I also think various media (especially the internet) have lowered trust in primary/secondary education, leading to more parents feeling justified in "taking matters into their own hands". You kind of see that attitude in this thread (its not wholly unjustified).
One example is in high school I had an excellent literature class that also covered a lot of philosophy. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the various philosophies we studied were the philosophies that are often foundational for Marxism, atheism, and general left of center academia. Probably the best class I had in high school but I wish it had also covered things on both sides, or been more transparent that it was in fact biased.
It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way. Very little of it has anything to do with the family of political ideologies despite sharing a similar name. The question of God's existence is also fundamental to the history of philosophy. It's not particularly shocking that a course might cover people like Lucretius, Bentham, or Russell.
Most philosophy surveys will also include some of the other sides, which you might not even recognize as such. Descartes and Aquinas are fixtures, and Heidegger (notoriously conservative and also a literal Nazi) often features in university level classes. The point isn't to indoctrinate you with any of these viewpoints, it's to teach you how to analyze their arguments and think for yourself.
> It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way
The complaint was that the alternative wasn't discussed.
I read the parent as saying that the course covered these at all, not as complaining that nothing else was presented.
But continuing on that train, what would you want from mentioning alternatives to a theoretical framework? A framework is just a different way to look at the world that you can discard if it's not useful.
To give a programming analogy, if a course does a module on JavaScript exclusively with react, they're not teaching that vue, angular, or svelte don't exist and you should only use react. It's much more likely a statement that react is common and useful for people to be familiar with when they go into the outside world. Covering the long list of alternate frameworks, many of which the teacher will have never actually used in a serious way, is both difficult to do in a useful manner and takes away from the limited time available to cover what they can with sufficient depth.
It's philosophy, not catechism, you're not expected to leave the class believing everything you read.
"Both" sides? If you suggest Marxism is one side, what is the other? Also, it's hard to take such a vague comment at face value when you consider the long list of Marx's influences. For example, there are right and young Hegelians...
I do think there is too much politicization in education, but this also stuck out to me. Marx was a synthesis of Hegel with Adam Smith (And a lot of Ricardo) You absolutely have many people taking those same ideas and going right. Even Das Kapital isn't really "Left Wing" per se as it is more trying to explain how labor is treated in an industrialized economies, its the communist manifesto where Marx takes those ideas and starts synthesizing with Hegel and making ideas of what should happen.
I have had more teachers actively advocating voting for right wing parties than left wing parties. And once had someone in biology class tell me that he thinks that evolution and creation by god are equal and we should try to merge those theories. And I live in a very secular part of Europe.
But hey, both you and I are telling anecdotes. The only conclusion for me is that public school exposes you to people that do not think like you or your parents. Something, we are less and less exposed to. If that is good, anyone has to answer for themselves.
Don't agree with this. Marx's Capital is filled with basic mathematical analyses. I don't agree with his labor theory of value, but I do think algebra is good.
> pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values
Which values? I haven't gone to school in a long time.
From the Conservative part of my social group, the main one applicable here is pushing elementary school kids to identify as trans. Because young children are very impressionable, and it is forbidden for staff to push back on on it at all, despite the science saying "there is absolutely no such thing as trans before age 12, and much possibility of social trauma from attempting it".
Left-ish people tend to say "this doesn't happen in the real world, it's made up for internet arguments" - and I even said that for a while on this and a few other subjects - but that denial cannot survive extensive contact with the real world.
Name some examples of school systems "pushing" kids to identify as trans. The name of the school and individual teacher, plus the wording that counts as "pushing" would be fine. You say this is happening in the real world, so surely you can point to a few examples.
Why age 12?
Age 12 happens to be the cutoff used in the scientific studies.
And the conclusion to draw from that is that one absolutely cannot be trans under the age of 12?
To avoid arguments about the definition of "be", the clear conclusion is that if it exists it's indistinguishable prior to that age, so any claims before that age can only be considered noise.
It's critical to remember that "reality has a liberal bias" does not mean "literally every detail of things liberals say is reality".
> the clear conclusion is that if it exists it's indistinguishable prior to that age
How is that clear? How would we know if it's indistinguishable if your studies didn't even look?
The whole point is that the studies explicitly did look, and found a negative result.
Lots of examples, gender identity and requiring ethnic studies (focusing on white male privilege, settler/colonial, putting groups into binary oppressor/oppressed). Also issues with requiring those classes vs not.
You've identified examples of values, but you have forgotten to link them to the left, forgotten to show if they are controversial and, probably most importantly, forgotten to show how schools are borderline pushing indoctrination of them.
Each of those is well within public knowledge.
In other words, "Trust me, bro!"
Literally nobody forces groups into a good/bad binary more than conservatives. What an embarrassing lack of self awareness
(source: I went to a conservative christian school)
These are two indisputable facts about our world, if you disagree you are wrong and anti-science:
1. Gender is a social construct
2. Whiteness is a social construct and in particular has been used as a bludgeon against minority "non-whites" in the United States for a very long time
If you do not believe these things you are the problem. You lack education. You lack critical thinking. You are brainwashed.
I am very curious too, I’ve asked this to other friends who have mentioned the same thing and the only concrete answer I have got so far was teaching the theory of evolution and climate change.
Not a GP and I don't know if any of these qualifies as "left-ish" (which is very US specific IMHO), but as I understand, the education all over the western culture is destroyed by few really simple and really crazy (for me) ideas:
- Kids are never responsible for anything.
- Teachers are responsible for everything.
That's a parenting problem though, not an education problem, right?
Actually no. The problem comes from society. If you think that kids should be responsible for anything, you are a bad person. If you think that kids should be punished if they do something really bad, you are a monster.
Here we had a case teenagers bullying their teacher – abused her verbally during school, posted deepfake revenge porn into internet, stole stuff from her garden etc. She cried for help and the case was investigated by commission that included people from people from ministry of education, police and psychologists. But the commission concluded that she was the problem – she lacked the skills to build a trusting relationship with kids.
I'm very curious about this as well, GP, please.
Another nebulous but I think VERY observable factor would be the extent to which "parents are, and expected to be, involved in their kids school stuff."
Anecdotally, but I bet you see a lot of it, I can count on one, maybe two hands the number of times my parents went to anything at the school to see me do a thing. And for my kids, there's something just about every other week.
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
I'm not sure remote schooling during the pandemic is very representative of day to day teaching in school. At least that's the impression I got from my teacher friends back then.
The other factor is not removing the bottom _% of hugely disruptive and violent children from schools.
I'm not sure how your first thing much factors in? I haven't seen any data but I'd be VERY surprised if e.g. a survey of homeschoolers would cite to a lot of "making bad students pass" and "lefty indoctrination."
> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.
As someone who was in public education less than 10 years ago, the last part plainly untrue. In fact, several states will soon require displaying the 10 commandments in public school classrooms, which seems pretty “right-ish” to me.
Homeschooling is a symptom of the atomization of American society - affluent people are retreating into their bunkers in suburbia and withdrawing from civil society based on a shared psychosis regarding “critical race theory” and “wokeness”, neither of which are taught in public schools.
> In fact, several states will soon require displaying the 10 commandments in public school classrooms, which seems pretty “right-ish” to me.
That tells you way more about the (current) politics of the local government than it does about the politics of the median teacher. It might actually indicate the opposite - no one would go to the effort of mandating pride flags at the school I went to, seeing as they were already hung in every single classroom.
Why would hanging pride flags in every room be comparable to showing the ten commandments in every room? A poster of the commandments is promoting religion in a secular school, and the flag promotes human rights for queer people. Why would a pride flag be controversial to anyone who isn’t a religious zealot?
Do privilege walks count? Which seem to foster victim mentality?
> pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values
I wonder what sort of values they’re indoctrinating their kids with instead.
yeah, it would be crazy if people were allowed to raise their own children with their own values. we can’t have that.
Did anyone argue that you are not allowed to teach your kids your own values? It seems to me, the question is more: do you want to raise your kids without ever exposing them to values that are not your own? Opinion Bubbles have been increasing for a long time, do we really want to grow them even more? Social media is full of people left and right that seem to have no idea about the opinions and realities at the other end of the spectrum.
Is this not possible while exposing children to a variety of view points from different sources or does it require that children are not exposed to certain perspectives at all?
The original comment makes a very bold claim of "indoctrination" of an entirely undefined set of values.
There has been no evidence that exposing children to this (undefined and buzzwordy) set of values means that they can't be raised according to other values.
I find this idea pretty wild to encounter on HN which is generally focused on open source and widely available information so that people can educate themselves is suddenly gone in a puff of smoke and some buzzwords when talking about educating the most curious minds in the world.
Define the values. Cite sources that this is "indoctrination" and not simply exposing viewpoints. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion.
> Define the values. Cite sources that this is "indoctrination" and not simply exposing viewpoints. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion.
They're never going to do this, because it's not actually happening, at least not to a significant degree. They will keep their wording vague, not show examples, and basically just repeat variations of "Trust me, bro.. this indoctrination is happening. It's clear as day. You need to see the real world, bro."
I expected this comment coming into the thread. I would just like to point out that there is a huge range of options between those two extremes!
If is entirely possible to teach up a child to be curious AND well rounded in the basics (see also concepts of Trivarium and Quadrivium, sorry can't link the references atm).
> there is a huge range of options between those two extremes!
Which two extremes would those be?
Presumably the extremes of left and right?
(Which are, of course, far more similar than people that identify with either extreme would ever admit).
I was homeschooled up until college. I was part of a non-religious (maybe vaguely pagan) homeschooler community. I eased into college by taking a couple courses per semester at my local community college for two years around the end of high school, and also some online AP courses from my local school district. Overall I am happy with my experience. I had an abundance of time to pursue my own interests (e.g. reading, programming), since I only did ~1 hour of dedicated schoolwork per day. Among my peers, I ended up probably in the top 10% academically (close to straight As in college) and bottom 10% socially (I kept my homeschooler friends, but don't feel like I could call any of my college acquaintances "friends"). To this day I struggle with being comfortable and non-awkward around strangers and acquaintances, but I feel like I'm improving.
Happy to share more anecdotes if people have questions.
Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning. I don’t think we’re talking about remote ranch situations where you either do online school or have to send them to boarding school.
So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
We’ve homeschooled all our kids up to 8th grade. Our oldest is now a sophomore at the public high school but will start attending community college next year, paid for by the school district.
Most of the adults you see at the various group things are stay-at-home moms. Most. Some stay-at-home dads. Some of the moms have part-time jobs. I don’t recall any dads with part-time jobs. But many dads are present while also working full-time. You get into a rhythm, have a schedule, etc. and you can work it out. My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
> My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
FWIW, my experience is that the dynamic at play in these situations is that women who run their own businesses or otherwise have high-powered careers tend to have a constellation of personality traits that is significantly shifted vs. those of stay at home moms, plus their daily lives are very different, so they don't really fit in. Saying that without value judgement, just an observation.
Wait... you homeschool your kids and yet you write "...and [they] are jealous that she does both." No, they are ENVIOUS: one envies what they don't have and are jealous of what they have.
Sorry, couldn't let that one slide! :-)
That's not true. Who told you that?
Product of homeschooling no doubt. Technically correct, but missing the forest for the trees re: colloquial usage.
Interesting point. I know of one home-schooling family—and the wife quit her career to homeschool.
Is this family well off financially? Of course they are. I suspect the data on homeschoolers is going to reflect a generally affluent slant.
Anecdotally, I know of one child who was homeschooled recently. The mother is a single mother, of modest middle-class means. There was a homeschooling group nearby with a few volunteer mothers handling most of the logistics and teaching. This particular mother did not have to give up her job. It does stretch the definition of "homeschooling" a bit when it's a neighbor teaching in a neighbor's home, but they made it work.
Yea, that does stretch it. At some point, it becomes less "homeschooling" and more "an unlicensed private school." Uber for Schools?
It only requires that one parent has enough free hours to assign coursework. They don't have to exit the workforce, and don't necessarily need to directly supervise learning (but of course some of this is necessary for K-5).
I think a lot of how homeschooling can work, along with much of median/lower household income life in general, is misunderstood.
Source: Was homeschooled by a mom who worked.
Yes, it (effectively) requires a parent to stay home, at least 90% of the time.
But that has happened for a long time, at a rate high enough that you wouldn't need to see resignations to increase homeschooling.
> Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning.
There are at least two good answers to this:
1. The first is a via a home-schooling collective. With as few as 5 families, one can easily do a once-per-week rotation of home schooling responsibilities. Also note that the formal education part of this can be done fairly comfortably in 4 hours (even down to 2 hours with 1-1 instruction). As such, all that is needed is a 4-day a week job, or a job with a flex schedule who can do work on the weekend. I know one family that does something like this.
2. The second is to have a tutor do the instruction. For folks who are high earners, paying a tutor who can come in for 2-3 hours a day costs about the same as a mid-tier private school. Child care would still need to be covered, but that’s usually cheaper than a tutor.
So it’s doable, but either time or money will need to be sacrificed. I don’t think that’s a surprise.
That said, below are some things about home schooling that I’ve learned over the years from people who have done it:
- When done well, it’s probably close to an ideal education. When done poorly, it can mess up the kid, and many of these kids are very vocal about how bad it can be. Obviously there will be a whole range of outcomes between these extremes. Just be aware that it’s not necessarily a panacea, and it’s not necessarily an ideological cesspit.
- There is a ton of support for home schoolers in some communities, especially for socialization and specialization. Many people do not realize this.
- That said, some (perhaps many) home school parents are just ideological extremists — extreme beliefs, extreme (sometimes illegal) lifestyles, etc.
- A good litmus test of where a home school parent is on the thoughtful-extremist continuum is to ask them why they homeschool their kids. The thoughtful parents can rattle off dozens of learning opportunities that their kids have had that don’t exist or barely exist at normal schools. The less of these types of specifics they talk about, the more likely they are to have ideological reasons that they may or may not openly discuss.
- For folks who want a good learning environment for their kid, I strongly recommend a good Montessori school. I emphasize “good”, because some of them stray far from the Montessori ideals. This just requires a small amount of research and some observation. All that said, a good Montessori school almost always sets up a kid to be a solid person and life-long learner. Note that some kids absolutely hate the Montessori style, and you will know this in about a day or two. I will go out on a limb and say most of these kids will need special attention in home school contexts as well (imho).
> So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
I don’t think so.
Most of the people I know who home school are already stay at home parents (mostly mothers, but one dad), or they have plenty of disposable income to throw at the problem via tutors and home school support services.
I will also say that some parents absolutely punt on the education part, and they can do their part (often negligently) while doing a full time work-from-home job — think handing out some work sheets and pointing their kid(s) to an online learning environment with very little scaffolding. There are some kids who respond well to this, but most don’t.
This is the result of more propaganda and brainwashing than education in schools. We should have left the politics out of the schools, after we got the prayers banned. But I guess some people will stop at nothing.
When the hell did praying get banned?
I went to college with a few homeschooled kids. They were by far the least capable of "normal" social interaction. Some were quite book smart, but they had trouble communicating with others, so they couldn't demonstrate it.
Also a fun side effect, they mispronounced a lot of words that they had only ever seen in books but never heard out loud. One of them was self-aware enough to ask us to correct him.
>> they mispronounced a lot of words that they had only ever seen in books but never heard out loud
I did that as a kid. Still do. I read more than I talk. Nothing wrong with that.
The flip side would be people who misspell words or get phrases wrong because they've never seen them in books, they've only heard them out loud. They talk more than they read. Nothing wrong with that.
Although both of those might be a clue as to what type of vocations would make someone happy.
Obviously there is some serious nuance here - there are of course edge cases and serious reasons for considering home schooling.
But as a general principle, encouraging kids further and further out of (group) human contact seems like an obviously terrible idea to me. We're already doing it with (lack of) play spaces, "no ball games", insane screen times (which equates to less "real" face to face time) amongst teens, awkward kids who can't even engage with a stranger under any circumstances - and meanwhile isolation and loneliness is on the increase, fear continues to rise about even letting your kid walk down the street to the shops, etc...
School is hard, as are parts of life. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult, it's not always what you want it to be, you get shouted at sometimes and big kids get their way and you don't get asked on the football team. Honestly, and sorry, but - a big part of growing up is learning how to deal with things. If kids don't, and you as a parent don't help them deal with the bumps, you and they will be building unrealistic expectations about how good this life is going to be, and they'll spend all their time sad or "triggered" or afraid, or isolated, or unable to join in. They'll get more scared, more isolated, more depressed. This is not what any parent wants.
This - of course and x1000 - need to be done with massive quantities of love and compassion. This isn't some Victorian hellscape I'm advocating here. Real bullying is real. Sometimes adults need to weigh in. Kids will find school hard.
But loving your kids is NOT giving them everything they want. It's teaching them how to navigate things that are difficult and awkward and - ultimately - helping them become robust adults.
I was homeschooled and my son is homeschooled.
I disagree with your premise that homeschooling pushes kids out of group human contact. People who attend public school often assume that kids who attend homeschool literally sit at home all day...which is just not...real?
It was the predominant notion when I was a homeschooled kid 30 years ago, and for most of them there is no argument or evidence that will convince them otherwise.
State-run education is their orthodoxy, and anything that challenges that is tantamount to heresy.
The most common form of homeschooling is, I believe, in the form of co-ops. Where groups of parents get their kids together in class room like settings to teach them together. They don't go to school, they might meet at a church, or library or a home, but they are socializing. I know people who homeschool and between church, youth fellowship, co-op classes, fencing, swimming, basketball, neighborhood kids, family, etc. they have extremely active social lives.
I used to teach high school. The amount of time I spent doing crap work was insane. It was necessary. If you don’t remind students 100 times what the assignments are, they won’t do them.
You also have to spend an insane amount of time with the lowest performers, because with enough attention, they can improve dramatically.
But this creates tradeoffs. Should I neglect the students doing best?
One on one instruction is the best kind. It’s generally reserved for doctoral students.
I also tried homeschooling by eldest. It didn’t work.
Its insane more parents don’t homeschool.
well if we just apply the bell curve here, on average children will be pretty average (shocker) so those should be left on their own and discover their own niche while bad performers should get extra attention so they can keep up with the rest and with the gifted (if they actually want to) given the opportunity to explore higher level subjects.
so in the end we give attention to gifted and the struggling since there's very little you can do to children who are already decent and are capable of keeping up at most they lack discipline or motivation.
I am an advocate of homeschooling but also know the importance of social contact for kids, so always wondering how hard would it be to create local clubs for kids where they learn mainly about economy, liberty and social relations sprinkled with some astronomy, history, biology, math and whatever personal interest of their parents like sports or arts? I'd be happy to pay for a private institution like that
I'm pretty sure you just described a public school
I was going to say! Dude just re-invented "school."
Interesting to see this topic being discussed on HN; I'm curious if any homeschooling parents here have kids who WANT to learn computer programming. I haven't pushed my kids to do any of the things that I loved doing growing up (or what I do now). If any homeschooled kids are getting into programming was it as a result of playing with something like Scratch or did they dive directly into writing Python or JavaScript?
It hurts me so bad to have to say this (as someone who has been a life-long technologist with higher degrees in CS and CE): Pushing kids towards STEM careers is only going to end in disappointment. Medicine, sure, but engineering and programming? I don't think it's ever coming back to what it was here in the states. We took that golden goose out back and chopped its head clean off.
Asking as an non-US person: Is there mandatory education for children in the US?
I guess homeschooling fits well with extreme individualistic American culture, no surprises there.
There are 13 years required (K-12) in the US. The way non-compliance is peanlized varies depending on the state.
Education in the US is a complicated subject given the "extreme individualistic American culture" as you say. That will be present in the teachers and school districts, and the lesson plans can/will differ greatly between teachers and school districts for getting students to the general standard.
Unsurprisingly this thread has become a battleground on the merits of homeschooling.
Something to keep in mind: "Homeschool" is a useless descriptor. It covers a spectrum from complete educational neglect to world class private tutoring. It includes cohorts almost indistinguishable from school, and cohorts that engage in cultish indoctrination.
Any criticism you might have for your idea of homeschool, there exists a type of homeschooling that addresses that criticism, and there will be someone in the replies ready to tell you about it.
This topic is such a basket case. “Homeschooling” in the US is a word that has come to mean “not enrolled in an accredited school” and can mean anything from being the Duggars to “my 4yo audits classes at MIT” or “we have an unaccredited private school that is identical to any other private school except for not being subject to laws”.
Advocating for homeschooling is simply advocating for absolutely no regulation on schooling, which is fine for the Zuckerbergs and will condemn children like the Duggars.
home schooling is a very very priviledged concept to begin with so it's not surprising that there is quite a lot of hate for it.
as a former child I think home schooling is better in every way if there is a supporting environment built around it, but I also think public schooling introduces a lot of variety that is not seen in private or home schooling be it for better or worse, although my time in public school was rough and failed me in many ways I still wouldn't have it any other way.
When I recently switched jobs, one of my requirements was I had to remain remote, for at least the next few years, so I could remain at home and help with my children's education. I don't think there is enough money in the world to convince me to change back to public education. Aside from the benefits everyone mentions like a much better education, having so much extra time with my children is a priceless gift that I wish we as a society could give everyone.
Also its given me the chance to learn things that I missed during my primary and secondary educations. Going through each proof in Euclid's Elements again has been a lot of fun, and its been long enough that I have forgotten most of them, so the thrill of discovery is real for me too.
If you can make it work, you should make it work, even if that means moving to a lower CoL area, there are a lot of small towns in the US that have excellent amenities, and are great places to raise a family.
How do you make up for the resulting drop in interaction with other kids? I had a boss who did this with his children as well - it seemed as though his solution was to use PE credits to have his kids attend sports with other kids.
My kids are part of a co-op where they meet once a week and in this co-op they share some elements of their curriculum with everyone else, they spend one day going over the weeks assignments along with 8-10 classmates, and then during the week they are at home doing their work. As they have aged their school work now has a lot of collaborative elements, so my oldest is actually meeting with kids from his co-op almost daily to go over group projects and assignments.
Additionally they have a lot of extra curricular activities they participate in ( sports, music, church youth group), that also gives them a lot of socialization time with others.
Sounds like a wonderful setup. Have the kids ever shown a desire for public school? My brother is homeschooling his kids to start, but the oldest just asked to start going to public, so he sent her.
No, my wife and I discussed putting them into traditional school as they got older, but now that they are older, they have all strongly requested to remain in their homeschool co-op. I think the biggest reason is they have a good group of friends that they connect with, and have been their class mates for multiple years. So there is a strong desire to continue in the program with people they know.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Joshua
Every normal school kid who interacted with a home school kid will recall what the problem is with homeschooling. I would never want to raise a little weirdo like the weirdo home schoolers I knew.
We tried homeschooling a few times. We were honest with ourselves and determined we were not that great at it. Sure, we could improve. But one of the primary factors in where we chose to live was the school district. Fortunately it has worked out well. Of course there’s always something to deal with- you have to advocate for your kids.
It’s basically public daycare for a lot of people. Including us.
The social aspect is important for us. The idea of having to find other people with kids for activities sounds exhausting. We’re a gang of neuro-spicy introverts. My social circle is comprised of people I’ve been friends with for 25+ years. All from my school days.
I dealt with a lot of bullshit at school. But overall a net gain.
Nice to see Reason posted here.
I can understand why. When we first moved to our upper midwest state, the district we bought a house in was ranked like #2 in the state overall and has fallen considerably. I have watched with my own two eyes the decline in the past 20 years here. The neighboring district, which was teetering when we first moved here in 2006, fell over completely and remains fallen. That one had a cycle of failed superintendents, all of whom required a buyout to get rid of, which further impoverished that district. Our realtor, who had been a teacher in that district, slyly tried to push us into that one, but we didn't fall for it. Our daughter made it through the more acclaimed district pretty well, our son, however, got tripped up in the decline:
We ended up moving our son to yet a third district after 2nd grade. Why? Because the principal he had in his elementary school mishandled an incident where three boys of another ethnicity shoved and kicked my son to the ground. The principal, in her infinite wisdom, made my son apologize to his attackers, I guess because he is white? We didn't press the matter, why bother? The handwriting was on the wall. We put in the work to open enroll him in another district, instead. Those are the options that many more rural communities lack.
Our current district is a bit further of a drive and that makes him/us feel like he is not really a part of that community. Nonetheless, it has done well for him and I will just come right out and say it's because it is less diverse and more affluent. It is not without its problems--mainly being far too sports-centric than the district my daughter attended, and generally a bit snobby and "affluenza"-ish, but no overt violence to speak of hardly.
One time we were leaving a football game one time and happened upon a family presenting their daughter with a brand new Range Rover, complete with a bow, in the school parking lot. Puke-o-rama! Why would you do that except to show off consumption and appearance of wealth to everyone else? Luckily, not that common, but you get the picture.
The good thing is, we had options and exercised them, but I wish we hadn't needed to, because we like our community and wanted to support it and the local families nearer to us. Every choice we made to get something we also had to give up something else. I think that's the same with homeschooling, too--I don't personally think it's a good idea, but it's not up to me how someone else chooses to educate their kids and I understand about only having certain options. My son is doing very well, now in high school, but he can never make a sports team because the competition is beyond ridiculous. Even tennis he got on some low rung team because there were a couple of superstar 7th graders who filled up JV and Varsity slots! It felt like a sort-of "old boy" situation because my son is pretty decent at tennis and beat one of those younger guys every time he played him. Forget football or basketball, you have to be pretty much college material to be on those teams. Hockey, same. My daughter never cared about sports, so we weren't prepared for that battle at all.
Getting children through school and into adulthood is not for the faint of heart.
The most popular argument against homeschooling appears to be "the world sucks, so we should make kids worlds suck so they're prepared for it", which is absolutely an abusive way to think and those who use this argument need to sit and think about what it means, then be ashamed.
Not exactly. More like, "The world can suck major at times, so we should make sure kids are prepared to deal with it when confronted." It's kinda like teaching kids to look both ways when crossing the street. Ideally, drivers are looking out for pedestrians, but if that doesn't happen and a pedestrian isn't prepared for it, well, people can get killed.
No one should be ashamed for teaching their kids to exist in a world that isn't always as loving as we all wish it was.
This is another item high on the “in the future we will all have been against this” list.
Well funded public education is a bedrock of fair equal society (which is why the right attacks it ever since its invention).
Public education isn’t perfect but it is far better for individual and society than any alternative (including any religious run schools)
Group home schooling in a shared building is becoming a huge new trend in home schooling, far more resource and time efficient and pools the resources of the parents and allows the group to hire someone to do the group homeschooling.
This sounds like a private school (probably with less oversight/regulation). What are the key differences?
Control over what happens there
I really enjoyed teaching my kids during covid, and they got a bug jump ahead compared to the kids who just played video games while the schools were closed. We only did 3-4 hours a day but it was fun, and I could really see the changes.
I don't mind the idea of teaching 10 kids, my way, and in and environment I can control. The thought of teaching 35 kids, mired in bureaucracy, is a nightmare.
As somebody that suffered through public school as a gifted kid, I wish I had been homeschooled. Almost everything positive that happened in my education was because of family, not due to the school. School was hell on earth for me, and I imagine it's the same for most other "neurodivergent" kids who are high IQ. Given what I know from my own kid, there's no surprise to me why more people are opting to home school. For my daughter we kept her in public school because the district we moved to had magnet programs, and that's what she wanted so she could be with her friends from the neighborhood, but not every school district cares about gifted kids and will happily put a child with a 150 IQ trying to read 6-8 grade levels above their peers in the same room with a child with an 80 IQ child who has a violence problem and consider that an acceptable outcome as long as nobody calls the police.
How many are now home schooled for religious reasons? It seems like many are pulling their kids out of public schools, for "woke" reasons rather than for a deep pedagogical pursuit, and I worry these kids aren't actually learning at the level they should be.
> When asked if they are satisfied with their children's education, public school parents consistently rank last after parents who choose private schools, homeschooling, and charter schools. Importantly, among all parents of school-age children, homeschooling enjoys a 70 percent favorability rating.
This is not surprising: homeschoolers are extremely confident in their own teaching abilities and extremely cynical about the abilities of others.
> Closures also gave parents a chance to experience public schools' competence with remote learning, and many were unimpressed. They have also been unhappy with the poor quality and often politicized lessons taught to their children that infuriatingly blend declining learning outcomes with indoctrination.
Why would a parent compare a novel learning environment to the pre-covid experience? Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home - do they use the internet at all?
> Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home
They probably imagine they'll never encounter political topics from a perspective of which said parents do not approve. And they're probably not wrong to believe that.
Yes, but then their kid will become an adult and feel like they were kept in a snow globe. Even if the parents are right, its a foolish strategy!
At the end of the day, it's a form of school-choice where parents decide what's best for their kids which I strongly support.
Only parents of privilege are given choice though. Parents who are struggling are not. And then when it comes to vote on fixing classrooms, paying teachers what they are worth, etc, there's a great bulk of people who would rather just not because it doesn't effect them.
Too bad for the kids though. You'd think their welfare would matter more than the parents having control.
NY state just signed a bill to include ChatGPT in their learning and planning. Previously there were deals to bring in Google hardware for students.
Of course people are fleeing public schooling when we’re selling the kids to big tech for laptops and services that require network connection to write a word document, enable cheating, and their data sold for profit without consent.
People might be fleeing public schooling because lawmakers are dictating what happens in the classroom. There are lots of good teachers who struggle with the resources given to them and the constraints imposed on them.
At home, parents can be flexible. They can let their kids use AI when appropriate or discourage its use. They don't have to wait for legislators to get involved. If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it instead of waiting for some committee to evaluate it.
> If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it
How do you know if the math book is great if there hasn’t been consensus about it. The problem isn’t the committee that will always be there in some form. The problem is the politics the committee is used for. If the committee were to prioritize and offload their specific requirements for review instead of requiring substantial analysis twice then the school system would be just as quick.
Homeschooling is becoming an epidemic and a major reason is --- SPORTS. From my experience, it is growing for all the wrong reasons and I have not come across ONE family doing it properly and in a matter I would consider better for the kid.
I have a 15yo son who plays sports and for the past 5 years, homeschooling has been a way to "red-shirt" kids - hold them back a year or two then re-entering them into public schools into grades behind their age. Literally purposely holding back their kids so they can be older as freshman.
A major problem with boys because of puberty, size etc around this age. The difference between a 14yo and a 16yo, or 16/18yo can be quite large at times. My son had a freshman on his team last year that could drive and had a mustache playing vs these tiny incoming freshman, it was so comical. He was 16 1/2 as a freshman. And the parents were on the sideline acting like their kid was the next coming of Aaron Judge. It REALLY hurts the rest of us playing the rules and taking education seriously when our kids are trying to make a team.
I've known several of these parents and they all are the same. They haphazardly put them into the bare min online courses, still go to work all day and stick them in front of computers to expect them to self teach for a few years. The moms would be stay-home types that didn't seem much educated themselves. The kids are spoiled entitled types who think they are top athletes already and would jokingly be calling my son at 11a telling him they are done already for the day and headed to the gym and playing Fortnite.
Now this is just MY circle, I am not saying there aren't very serious and capable parents out there really homeschooling and giving their kids a better education than public school, but I haven't met any in maybe roughly 10 I know. Most of them seemed to also be MAGA types poo-pooing public education and how they are brainwashing kids. It is really despicable that this is most likely happening ALL across America.
Education and manipulation aside, I would also think this isn't good the kids mental and social health as well. They already are on devices doom-scrolling enough nowadays, do we really want them hermits too now?
I applaud anyone putting in huge effort to home school a kid properly and with true care and teaching. But the image of them at a desk being taught by a real smart/educated parent following a true curriculum all day and on a schedule I imagine is ultra rare. And we are going to pay a price for this in the long run. Or not, GPT will just help them along to properly write that email for them when they are adults in a corporate world.
I thought you were going to go in a different direction with that: recruiting. In States where home schoolers can play on public school sports teams there are cases where the family gets an apartment and one parent and the kid establishes residency for the purpose of being in a particular school district. A notable case in recent-ish history was someone called Tim Tebow in Jacksonville, FLA. It's not a common thing though, far less of a complaint-magnet than the Catholic schools who "recruit" players from all over a city or even region to come be a starter on their football/basketball team...
You should not be downvoted for telling the truth about your experiences! I have witnessed the same things. Kids being held back a grade so they can excel in sports! It is so ridiculously self-serving and narcissistic that it is crazy to witness. And the emphasis on sports at my son's high school is beyond ridiculous.
The dads especially need to get back to basics and stop these obsessions they have about their kids being athletic superstars. It's bad for EVERYONE. And starting kids at like 5 years old in sports is just stupid.
Buddy of mine put it really well:
"I got to spend time with my kids when they still wanted to spend time with me. Now as teenagers in no longer cool, but that's ok. I got my time with them and that makes me happy"
Well here is what the result was of public school for my 3 kids:
1 kid: one year behind but doing very well
1 kid: two years behind and not doing so well (in fact can't continue to academia unless things change drastically, in other words, will lose at least 1-2 more years if she does go to academia)
1 kid: two years behind and doing pretty well
This is the result of 9-11 years of public schooling. I feel like all 3 have very suboptimal outcomes, including the one doing very well.
I must say I am also getting very irritated by the "indoctrination". That was fine, if occasionally crazy, during the COVID years when the indoctrination was pretty progressive. Sometimes batshit insane, but let's say "well intentioned". Pro-climate claims ... that were bullshit, but at least pro-climate and generally positive and pro-humanity. Now one of their teachers is openly racist (in a class with 33% immigrants), and even though most keep it more subtle than him, this is a general trend.
So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
Keep them going to public school and give up?
I know a teacher who said one of their colleagues adamantly believes the moon landing was faked.
>So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
Look up school ratings in your area and move is by far your best bet if you wish to continue public school. There is also the difficult truth that maybe your kids are the problem, but again school shopping could help with that depending on what programs they have.
> Recent estimates put the total homeschooling population at about 6 percent of students across the United States, compared to about 3 percent pre-pandemic.
One thing that concerns me about many pro-homeschooling comments is a kind of tear-down-the-schools attitude, as if schools were hopeless and irredeemable, despite the fact they're still educating 94% of students even at today's elevated homeschooling rate. Of course there are problems with schools, but on the other hand there are countless success stories, or at least countless non-failure stories, and educational outcomes tend to depend crucially on local factors, the location of the school and its socioeconomic environment.
I suspect that the vast majority of parents have neither the desire nor the capability to homeschool their kids. I certainly can't imagine my own parents doing it. In a sense, homeschooling is a luxury of the few. The absolute numbers can increase, but I don't think homeschooling can scale to the entire population. So whatever problems may exist in the schools, we have to confront and solve them, not just abandon them and pretend homeschooling is a societal solution. You might claim that hundreds of years ago, everyone was homeschooled, but I don't want to turn back the societal clock hundreds of years.
Another concern I have is the religious and/or political motivation of many homeschoolers. If homeschooling were just about educational outcomes for children, then we shouldn't expect homeschoolers to be disproportionately conservative in religious and/or political beliefs, yet my impression is that they are. It's certainly suspicious to me. And though I've had no involvement with K-12 education since I was in school myself, I've had a lot of involvement in higher education, first as an undergrad, then as a PhD student and lecturer. Frankly, the horror stories and conspiracy theories about left-wing indoctrination at universities are ridiculous and not based on fact or experience. So I'm quite skeptical of similar claims about K-12, especially since I saw none of that in my own childhood. (I recall being forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, for all the good that did.) There's a type of person who's set off if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" and consider that to be an act of war against them. There are still a lot of parents in the United States who reject biological evolution and would prefer that it not be taught in schools at all, or at least to be taught as "controversial."
I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children. There is no law or social imperative that children must be taught a secular view point. At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently. Honestly, I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion. It has become a belief system of it's own, and I for one fear the coming crusades :)
I say live and let live, parents should be free to teach their kids whatever belief system they want without political interference. Much to the dismay of the left (and I say this, being a left leaning moderate... I know, bad word today), kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children, full stop. The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism, is only putting fuel to the fire in this surge in global fascism. At the risk of sounding too kumbaya'ish, we all just need to accept each other and recognize the real enemies to society is a global loss of empathy and the rise of transactionalism. Now that is something I could really get behind, forced empathy courses! :)
> I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children.
I didn't claim that they don't have a right. I just claimed to be skeptical of the idea that the primary motivation for homeschooling was educational outcomes rather than ideological outcomes.
> At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently.
If only they believed differently. ;-) It's no coincidence that children tend to adopt the same beliefs as their parents, no matter the country or region.
> I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion.
The last 20 years? The First Amendment of the US Constitution begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". The principle of separation of church and state is more than 200 years old.
> kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children
I don't know what label you'd want to put on me, but I would say that kids do not belong to anyone. I find the notion of ownership to be noxious, practically slavery. We have a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves (yet), but that doesn't mean children are simply the personal property and playthings of the parents. I think it's a disservice to a child to place them in a bubble and shield them from anything the parents don't happen to like.
> The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism
"they are their parents children" is not individualism, or certainly not individualism from the child's perspective.
Morover, from what I've seen and heard from homeschoolers themselves, they do tend to form, or indeed come from, specific communitites, and are not simply "lone wolf" homeschooling parents.
> Once an alternative way to educate children, homeschooling is now an increasingly popular and mainstream option.
TFA does not even begin to grapple with the single most important issue, which is who is actually doing the homeschooling.
This is only an option for certain families, with parents with enough bandwidth and knowhow to do this effectively. That excludes many tens of millions of Americans.
I think this is really about class, race, and religious segregation. Families can do what they want, of course, but this framing makes it sound like failing schools are the whole problem and I don't think that's the whole story.
I don't feel better prepared to teach at home than someone who actually went to college for the various topics covered in high school. How can I know all I need to teach about math, chemistry, english, physics, etc, etc, etc when I already have to learn so much for my own work? I think parents that think they can do a better job are delusional.
Maybe the school _environment_ that a child has access isn't great, right? But I don't think that says anything about teachers.
Elementary Education and Pedagogy are "sciences" with an even poorer replication rate than Sociology and Psychology.
Nobody educated to teach is actually qualified to do so by virtue of said education. Teaching is largely a personality-driven and experience-acquired skill.
In California, a teacher without a chemistry degree can teach high school chemistry after passing the CSET Chemistry subtest. This requires less depth of knowledge than AP Chemistry.
You do not need to know anything about the subject to teach high school subjects. You need to know stuff about teaching.
At school, one teacher lectures to maybe 30 students. If all they did was give individual attention student by student, each would get maybe 10 minutes a day.
The first 10 minutes of your home-school day you've beat that statistic. After two or three hours, you're up to a month of class time.
Of course they don't do that; they just lecture. Which is something you can get online (Khan Academy).
It's all about the homework and tutoring, baby.
All you have to do is learn along with your home student, and validate their learning experience. Helps if you catch on quicker, but not even necessary.
Timmy’s job will be done by AI when he grows up, but at least he’ll have fun a social skills
homeschooled kids are literally competing against kids from other countries that are being schooled on calculus, geometry, statistics, algebra with practical chemistry, physics and biology lessons. This is not going to end well 15 yrs down the line
Lots of colleges offer laboratory science classes for homeschooled children. AOPS wipes the floor with any math education you’d get at a public school. Most US national laboratories have on-site programs for school-aged kids and homeschoolers have equal standing for attending.
Anyone who takes it seriously gives up nothing.
You think avoiding these things are why people are thinking about homeschooling?!
In San Francisco where I live the public school system made the decision to not offer algebra until later for egalitarian reasons. Basically since they couldn't bring up the students that faired poorly in math, they delayed the subject for everybody. Along the same lines, they took the one high school dedicated to the highest achieving students and turned it into a lottery system rather than something earned.
Yes, of course you're right, kids will be competing on all those subjects. But the idea that public institutions are somehow the safeguards of fundamental academic achievement is just out of touch.
Of course, San Francisco public school's embrace of socialist/egalitarian drive identity politics is just one example of public education failure. Elsewhere in the US in these times, other school districts are being turned effectively into seminaries because the other political side has other doctrinal objectives. In neither case is learning how to think or how the world really works is important.
This is how a significant portion of the population gets radicalized by their parents. It needs to be shut down.
All kids are indoctrinated. As parents do you want to have control of that or not?
With that attitude you might as well just tell parents that they shouldn't participate in society!
I think the point is that part of having a functioning society (civic life, engagement, tolerance of others) is having people mix together. School is one of the prime places where that happens.
If you allow a lot of people to pull away from that "forced" engagement with others then you start to stress a lot of societal bonds.
You're right. It's _one_ of the prime places.
I don't know a single homeschooler that sits at home all day long. They work in family businesses, participate in bands, sports, and co-ops. Many belong to churches where families come from all different strata: our church has surgeons, line cooks, programmers, self-employed handymen, disabled vets. They interact with everyone—including kids. They do things like "kid markets" where they have a business. They watch their parents learn how the house works and how to manage finances.
There is no forced engagement—in fact the peer pressure is often completely gone. They are in an environment (their family) where they are much freer to be themselves.
> I don't know a single homeschooler that sits at home all day long.
Well, you wouldn't, would you?
Sorry, not to detract from your other points, but I thought it was funny.
All of our planes came back with the wings shot up!
Sure, but I don’t like how society is functions. I don’t like the direction in which society is headed.
That is why my solution is to be selective in who I socialize with, find a like-minded partner, and have lots of children.
My intent is to create a new society and culture free of the rot that infects every public space today.
the purpose of education is largely opposite of indocrination (plus few other things). if your kid is being educated is such an environment you should move (or pay for private education).
I get where you're coming from but I think your statement is a bit naive.
Education systems as we know them today are absolutely about indoctrination in so many ways. Capitalism, love of country, views on family units, beauty and aaesthetics, what has cultural value and what does not etc etc. Not to mention many school systems just straight up having classes on religion, allowing armed forces into schools to recruit and the like.
Whether you're worried about left wing or right wing indoctrination, it still holds true. All kids are being indoctrinated every time they go to school same as every time they watch TV.
Exactly. Which history lessons get taught, which books get assigned as reading, which clubs are available, etc. Even if they are taught to be critical of the assignments they get, if the selection is limited enough, kids will not have the breadth of knowledge to even see the alternatives.
I pay a lot of money for my 12-year to not be in the system you are describing and am grateful I can provide this for her more than I am grateful for just about anything else
If the article was about how Muslim families home-school their kids, your comment would not be so greyed out...
(I'm not saying it's true for 1 religion and false for the other, but I'm betting a lot of people would think so...).
It's also how some of the population escapes getting broken by a one-size-fits-all education system. People need options.
100%. The school and the Internet are the two places children can encounter opinions different from their parents’ for the first time. With an increase in homeschooling and recent pushes to ban social media for children, it’s clear that critical thinking is going to suffer most. I still have not met someone who was homeschooled who was remotely thankful for it.
Honestly, support for these policies that benefit, more than anyone else, abusive parents, makes me suspicious of people’s motives.
One could also say banning homeschooling is how a significant portion of the population gets indoctrinated by the state.
Fantastic.
LLM's have revolutionized the way people learn and utilize what they have learned. The future is 8 year old material science lads doing chemistry in their step-mother's RV
You might be surprised. The studies say it's a primarily negative impact, especially in math and college attendance.
https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/the-test-score...
More likely the future is a bunch of children not knowing jack shit and suffering other abuse.
I've had to re-learn math skills long forgotten to help my kids with their school work. It's been an interesting experience.
The expectations for home schooling are different and are, in some ways, aimed more towards reality. My son finishes the bulk of his work in an hour most days and then has time for 2 instruments, learning C++, Rust, and Python, community/church participation and more.
is "time for 2 instruments, learning C++, Rust, and Python" not schooling ?
He's still learning. Driven by what he loves. And this is on top of the "standard" stuff.
Starve the beast, vilify it for being weak, then kill it.