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Comment by Glyptodon | Hacker News Reader

Ah, so instead of fixing a system that does not meet their needs homeschoolers opt out and leave the less time and resource affluent to stew. How commendable and good for society.

I think the course presented illustrates well why democratic and republican societies should always prohibit private and home schooling.

Instead of opting out parents such as the writer would be forced to engage and reform and participate in change and help bettering things for society and not just themselves, because the differences in educational equity they'd otherwise beget are seeds sown on the path to social schisms, vast class divides, and the destruction of a system dependent on educated voters.

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What you call "social schism" I call liberty.

I think the universal availability of public schooling is, in general, a great good. But the idea of the government telling me that I can't home school my children makes my skin crawl. The US constitution correctly defines strictly limited roles for the government, and carves out huge spaces for individual liberty - liberty which is meaningless if I'm forced to allow the government to indoctrinate my children in ways that I may strongly disagree with.

Turn it around. Imagine that schools taught a sort of religious fundamentalism that you found abhorrent. Would you want the government to be able to force you to send your children there?

Making home schooling illegal turns the government into a master precisely when it should be a servant, and a jailer when it should be a helper.

>Imagine that schools taught a sort of religious fundamentalism that you found abhorrent.

Ironically, home schooling seems to be used for this purpose.

You left off the key next sentence: 'Would you want the government to be able to force you to send your children there?'

Home schooling permits parents to teach their children their values, which is their right as parents.

Public schooling forces all taxpayers to subsidise the teaching of values with which they may or may not agree; in some places, it also forces all parents to have their children taught values with which they may or may not agree.

>Home schooling permits parents to teach their children their values, which is their right as parents.

The public school system does not stop them from doing this, in any way shape or form.

>Public schooling forces all taxpayers to subsidize the teaching of values with which they may or may not agree

The public school system is built to be incredibly neutral, and in my opinion sometimes too neutral. So I'm not sure what "values" are being forced through the public school system.

Your primary duty as a parent is to your child, not "society".

"I think the course presented illustrates well why democratic and republican societies should always prohibit private and home schooling."

Any society that does such things is neither "democratic" nor "republican". It is totalitarian, pretty much by definition.

They're not your children, dude.

Then every society is totalitarian. The fact is that society already tells you how to raise your children and will remove them from you if need be.

There's a wide, wide range between (e.g.) beating your children and refusing to hand them over for state indoctrination. Pretending otherwise isn't a reasonable argument.

Indeed parents have a duty to their children. Clearly this cannot and should not mean that they're allowed to treat their children however they want or that they're allowed to educate them on what and how they want. There can be a space for them to make decisions but the rights of the children always have to take precedence.

It's only natural for the government to step in and determine exactly what this means. Allowing the government to do this without limits is problematic, so you balance that out with rights assigned to parents.

It's not an easy question to determine where the line should be drawn but I don't think it's really all that totalitarian to prohibit home schooling. It ensures that children are educated, that they socialize with other children, get confronted with different points of view and gives them the freedom and ability to safely explore the world and themselves in an environment where there parents have much less influence over their lives. It should not be forgotten that not all parents are included to provide that without force.

Parents may or may not make the best choices for their children; there are no guarantees there. When talking about government, though, it is guaranteed to make poor choices, and self-serving ones to boot.

What defense do free citizens have against the ambitions of a government, when they don't have the right to pull their children out of its clutches?

If you could prove that homeschooling is unhealthy or even worse than public schools, then you could have a point. But now you are just stating your opinion and suggesting that your opinion should be reinforced by the government.

The data shows that homeschoolers perform better than public school students not only academically, but also on measures of social, emotional and psychological development.

I'm a... victim, I guess... of this mindset. I didn't really start getting even a half decent mathematics or science education until college. If I didn't pick up programming as a hobby, IDK where I would be right now. Probably nowhere good, financially and perhaps otherwise. (Mind you, AFAICT private schools aren't typically much better, and there's less accountability and more personal cost to boot.)

I'm very conscious of what you're saying here and mostly agree with the negative effect of affluent people opting out of the education system. So I'll commit myself to improving the systems that my own kids would be in if I didn't have the time and money for alternatives. But I'm still unsure whether I'll actually send my own children to public schools. The cost to them will be real.

With respect, the idea that most parents could fix the system if they just tried is incredibly naive. I think most parents do the best that they can. If they feel that homeschooling is better for their children then they absolutely should pursue that option.

There are many friends I've seen do exactly that, but the efforts only seem to be particularly effective when localized. The educational system can be quite slow to change, likely requiring a more significant investment of energy to "fix society" than to direct that energy towards their own children.

Many school teachers and administrators get into the field specifically with the ambition to better the system. They spend their full-time attention on these issues, yet truly are at the mercy of government policies.

Do I agree that this is the appropriate way to go? No more than I agree with private schools (which I don't), but we're not all political activists, and even if we were, everyone's got their own issue and their own viewpoints. Where the author opts out of the system, another opts in and digs in; such is a fairly concept in free society.

op here .. no, in many case they have really tried to fix the system, work around it etc, before they have opted out.

Its never the first option to take children out of school.

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