Ask HN: Are you homeschooling your kids? Why? | Hacker News Reader

Ask HN: Are you homeschooling your kids? Why?

41 pointsshafyy33 comments

Yes.

- We have a smart son who is neuratypical. The combination of him being bored and sensorially overstimulated resulted in some really bad behavior. School wanted to treated him like a problem rather than a kid with some special needs. Once we started hearing suggestions to have him put on medication, we decided to homeschool. He's currently thriving, reading at several grade-levels higher than his current grade and doing mental math for fun.

- Our kids are well socialized. The "socialization" argument against homeschooling is mostly a joke. Kids don't learn how to behave in society from other kids, they learn how to behave from watching adults. Regardless, our kids have many friends and play sports and attend many activities. The fact that we as parents know exactly who they're spending time with every day is a huge positive factor of homeschooling. This is important to me. I was exposed to hardcore pornography and drugs before I was 10 years old, I want a better childhood than that for my children.

- We don't waste time. We have a class of 3 rather than 30. That means we can pack maximum education in and still have time for other things. When we were in regular school, we'd all get home at 5:30 - 6:00 and rush through dinner so that we could get through homework before bedtime. We weren't spending much time together as a family, and much of the homework was low-value, IMO. It was exhausting. Life is so much better for us now.

Thanks for your comment, really helpful. It's funny when you talk to an average person (who doesn't have homeschooling experience) they will point out the socialization as their main concern. But of course, it's not.

Total agree with your second point, what scenario in life are we in where all the people we socialise with are our own exact age? If anything, homeschooled children become naturally better at socialising because they're forced to make friends with people of different ages (both younger and older).

Note: there are definitely some weirdo homeschooling families that would be an exception to this!

Are you or your spouse stay-at-home? Does that make homeschooling easier?

Do you pair your kids with other homeschooled kids? If so, how did you find kids/parents with similar enough values that you were comfortable homeschooling your kids with them?

My spouse stays at home, which makes the whole thing possible. She's a champ, to be sure.

She's on a number of Facebook groups for homeschoolers and we've been able to meet other families that way. We've made a number of good friends through the groups and now we're even involved in putting together our own co-op.

I'll add a personal anecdote about homeschooling and social life. My parents didn't do a great job of exposing me to other children while I was being homeschooled. When I transitioned into public, I struggled for quite some time just learning social norms (family was different culture) and felt I did not fit in for at least a year. It scarred my personality a bit because I was afraid of being made fun of for doing the wrong things.

I don't know what would have happened with a normal social life, but I highly encourage people who homeschool to allow their children to socialize and play with other kids similar to public school.

Not yet, but I like the idea. There are two things stopping us from pulling the trigger at the moment:

Socialization. For us, this goes beyond the normal bit where your kids don't spend as much time interacting with other kids and learning how to live in a society. We live in France, so the local village school is the perfect chance to toss the kids in head first to a new language. Both are swimming nicely, so it'd be a shame to pull them out and lose that before they're fluent for life.

Stigma. In the US, it seems that homeschooling is what crazy bible people do to shelter their kids from the real world. I don't want to set our kids up for a lifetime of having to explain themselves to everybody they ever talk to about education.

But the upsides are pretty tempting. Work-wise, I've been 100% remote for a long time, so the only thing keeping us from traveling the world instead of living in a house is having the kids in school. I expect we'll try taking the kids out for an entire year before long and booking a one-way flight, just to see how well it works...

Few friends have experienced the "skip some school and live somewhere abroad with their family" when they were younger. It seemed to me that a full year out of four was fine, but more frequent travels could be distruptive.

I'm 34, and I think the number of conversations I've had where homeschooling came up could be counted on 2 hands, and all were entirely voluntary on my part. I was homeschooled 1st-12th. Any sense of not fitting in was gone by sophomore year of college, and I hear it's pretty normal for freshman to feel that way.

We are. My wife has to put in a ton of time to make it all work, but my kids are excelling and enthusiastic about learning now because of it. We ended up doing it because it turned out that teachers were either keeping kids busy with make-work, mollifying bullies until they could pass them on to someone else, or cramming for standardized tests. We just decided that we'd had enough one day, and thankfully right before our youngest even started.

Funny thing is, they tested as "gifted" (95-99th percentile in the county) but it turned out they were ~2 years behind where they should have been. They've been catching up, but the "D's get degrees" mentality is alive and well in K-12 too.

I did. Kids all grown now, doing fine. My oldest daughter hated going to school, asked to stay home, so we started there. Then we read up and got involved with other homeschoolers. I recommend John Holt's books, "Deschooling Society" by Ivan Ilich, and anything by John Taylor Gatto.

http://www.cantrip.org/gatto.html

Not sure how we would have managed if we both had to work, or for a single parent. I had a flexible job and schedule, my wife was a full-time mom, teacher, and social director. We didn't follow any curriculum, more like the Montessori model. All of my kids have high school diplomas (through community college), one has a BA, another still in college.

I went to private (Catholic) elementary school, then public schools. My wife went to public schools.

I've straddled and blurred the line between being in IT and an educator. I've seen home schooling go horribly wrong and incredibly right. From my observations of the few dozen families I've watched, it seems to mostly depend on the motivation of the parents, and how much time they're willing to put into it.

The ones that tend to go wrong are those parents whose primary motivation is to keep their children from learning things, usually on religious grounds. I'm not saying that parents who provide a religious education do a bad job, but if the goal is to avoid having kids learn certain basic level facts (like reproduction), they will have gaps. I've also seen where parents expect to throw their kid in front of a computer to do all their learning, which also goes bad. In these first few cases, I've seen situations that come close to neglect. A third path that can go either way are the single-issue families. This would be parents who want their child to focus on one specific talent in order to nurture it, like singing, dance, or a sport. In these cases, so long as there is other topics covered, the kids can turn out ok as well as be at the top of their field. There's also cases in this area that can look like abuse when the parent is a little too vested in their child's success.

The home-schooling stories that are super successful are usually where one parent (or ideally, both take turns) at turning every day activities into learning opportunities. One family took at least one trip per week to a museum, zoo, botanical garden, park, public government building, or conservation area. The kids had to research the location before the visit, write up a list of questions they had, had questions added by parents, find and record the answers during the visit, and write up a report afterwards. They would research an issue and write or visit government representatives to discuss the issue as a well-informed member of the public. In those families, it seemed the entire family was about daily and life-long learning. The parents also had the kids involved in a lot of outside activities like local plays, orchestras, sports. Just as busy as the public school kids, just a more holistic approach to learning.

We would consider it. My mother was a public school teacher. I have seen the impossibility of change there and honestly have no desire to support the schools or teacher's unions. They are not set up to produce excellence.

I would consider sending my child to a catholic school, like the one I grew up in. However, most catholic schools these days are not like my elementary school. They lack discipline and are basically public school proxies.

Most non-parochial schools would be out of our price range.

Thus home schooling is the only option left.

Will be. Was homeschooled myself. Several reasons:

1) I'm responsible for the raising and education of my children, and I'm not going to outsource the bulk of that to strangers.

2) Less time-consuming. From talking to my friends who have 2+ children in school it sounds like they spend about 1 hour per day on average driving their kids around to and from school (not counting extra-curricular activities, parent teacher conferences, homework help, etc...). My mom says her steady-state time expenditure was around 40 minutes per day for all 3 of us, mostly grading math and papers.

3) Way better outcomes. Homeschoolers average at the 87th percentile in national standardized testing, and homeschoolers whose parents make less than $35K still average in the 85th percentile. (http://www.topmastersineducation.com/homeschooled/) On the anecdotal level, I'm a former USAF pilot-turned drone guy, my brother is a successful artist, and my little sister is working on her PhD in Aerospace Engineering when she's not kicking all our asses at fantasy football.

4) Better socialization. Yeah, I said better. I admit that I'm less used to spending time with people my exact age than most of my peers, but I interact much better than they do with people younger than me and people older than me. Funny thing, it turns out once you're out of college, most of the rest of your life will be spent with people who aren't your exact age. Homeschooling prepares you for that way better than public schooling.

5) "The Underground History of American Education", by John Taylor Gatto. Just read it. It'll blow your mind, and it's well-supported. TL;DR, our school system was modeled on the Prussian system designed to build an army that could beat Napoleon's troops. It's designed to create obedient myrmidons who don't know how ignorant they truly are. Don't worry, I'm sure your school was different.

I think the social aspect will be extremely dependent on how much the parents put into that part. The majority of home-schooled kids (now adults) I know, were socially stunted because of it, but I don't believe this is as much a fault of homeschooling as it is a symptom of those particular families not putting enough effort into integrating social environments into part of the routine. That part comes for "free" in classroom-based education, but it doesn't meant they have a monopoly on it.

As a somewhat socially stunted adult that went to public school I've wondered if the parents having somewhat active social lives (mine didn't) was more important than socializing at school. Amongst friends that I know the parents of and that I went to school with there is a high correlation between their social skills and the time their parents spend socializing.

It's substantially more complicated than that.

I homeschooled my Twice Exceptional sons. They are both socially awkward and probably qualify for a diagnosis on the Autism Spectrum, though they don't have a formal diagnosis.

They did much better socially and were much happier with being removed from an environment that was very stressful for them. However, if you met them now and only knew that they were homeschooled and are obviously socially awkward, you could easily leap to the conclusion that they are socially awkward because they were homeschooled.

Additionally, there is a cultural element to any social outcome. There is a certain amount of being inculcated with the right behaviors for the setting. Being homeschooled means you lack some of the same context as the majority of people who attended school. So it's easy to read as socially awkward because you don't readily fit in, even if your social skills are actually better in some important ways.

Think of how immigrants tend to seem awkward and don't readily fit it. It has nothing to do with whether or not they have good social skills. They are just strangers in a strange land.

In my experience growing up the homeschooled kids were usually from very religious families who did not want their kids being social with the general population, so you have a point there. I wonder how a "regular" family that happens to homeschool their kid would differ.

But I mean, if their kids found spouses in the religious group, and had families, I find it difficult to classify them as socially stunted. Perhaps they would be socially stunted in mainstream culture, but one is forced to think they did just fine in their own.

I guess my point is that in my anecdotal experience, parents homeschooled kids to "protect" them from regular society. Ergo, they were very sheltered and only able to socialize within the church.

If it works for them, great, not hating - but I doubt that's what people in this thread mean when they talk about homeschooled kids having a normal, social life.

I know a few home schooled kids that are now adults. They're so far from being socially stunted.

The social aspects of school aren't always positive. Most adults that have difficulty interacting with other people tend to have had a bad time in school. I've seen a little bit of naivety from home schooled people but I've never seen someone full of hurt like I have from people from public school.

It's partly whether the parents take the time to make sure the kids are socialized, and partly selection bias. A lot of parents decide to homeschool their kids precisely because the kids are having a tough time in school socially, whether it's from bullying or from mild or severe developmental disorders. In my experience, a much higher percentage of homeschoolers enter homeschooling with dyslexia or autism than you see in the typical public school classroom.

A lot of parents choose to homeschool specifically because they don't want their child pidgeonholed and pipelined into special needs classrooms.

I was exposed to hardcore pornography and drugs in school, before I was ten, by other kids. I was beaten up lots of times and bullied and I lived in fear. Eventually I ended up being more of a fighter out of necessity. I guess that could be considered "free" integration into the social environment.

I'm currently reading Linchpin by Seth Godin so your fifth point resonates with me. In his book he points out that in many cases companies want to employee the cheapest labor possible and the best way to do this is to make jobs generic such that the people doing the jobs are easily replaceable.

> “If human beings are a natural resource for factories, then your goal as a factory owner is to get good ones, cheap. So captains of industry and government reorganized our society around this goal.”

He basically feels that this is what has lead to the government focusing so much on standardized testing. Basically just forcing schools to stamp out identical copies that can fill the generic jobs.

I haven't read that one, but Gatto is well worth a look. He has several books, but IMHO "Underground History" is by far the most interesting. He was a former NY State and NYC Public School Teacher of the Year, so knows of what he speaks.

If you want to get a no-cost idea of his viewpoint, read his "I quit, I think" letter, published on the op-ed page of the WSJ.

https://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/i-quit-i-think/

Recently I was inspired to, given a time travel story someone shared. They said "If you were to travel from 16th century to today, nothing would be recognizable except church and the school system". In that moment I realized the sad truth in that. So many critical life skills are taught poorly or in many cases not taught at all.

Purchasing land/property/home, credit, investing, financial literacy, emotional intelligence and the list continue -- these are all things that modern education neglects. I am pro-homeschool and advocate my 4 children travel and experience the world as much as possible.

I don't know where you live but schools barely existed in the 1500s.

I've been thoroughly impressed with both the public school systems in UK and Australia where my son has gone. They are greatly evolved places of learning even than when I was at school.

My university was founded in 1088 and is in continuous operation since then. Sure it is a great place to study but sometimes I ask myself if it really changed that much

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

Maybe ask the question how many of the current departments were in existence in 1088. I would say none of the below were there in 1088 - i would say only theology existed in 1088 since it was established by a pope

    Architecture - DA
    Cultural Heritage - DBC
    Chemistry "Giacomo Ciamician" - CHIM
    Industrial Chemistry "Toso Montanari" - CHIMIND
    Arts - DARvipem
    Pharmacy and Biotechnology - FaBiT
    Classical Philology and Italian Studies - FICLIT
    Philosophy and Communication Studies - FILCOM
    Physics and Astronomy - DIFA
    Computer Science and Engineering - DISI
    Civil, Chemical, Environmental, and Materials Engineering - DICAM
    Electrical, Electronic, and Information Engineering "Guglielmo Marconi" - DEI
    Industrial Engineering - DIN
    Interpreting and Translation - DIT
    Modern Languages, Literatures, and Cultures - LILEC
    Mathematics - MAT
    Experimental Medicine, Diagnostic Medicine and Specialty Medicine - DIMES
    Psychology - PSI
    Agricultural Sciences - DipSA
    Management - DiSA
    Biological, Geological, and Environmental Sciences - BiGeA
    Biomedical and Neuromotor Sciences - DIBINEM
    Education Studies "Giovanni Maria Bertin" - EDU
    Agricultural and Food Sciences - DISTAL
    Economics - DSE
    Legal Studies - DSG
    Medical and Surgical Sciences - DIMEC
    Veterinary Medical Sciences - DIMEVET
    Department for Life Quality Studies - QUVI
    Political and Social Sciences - SPS
    Statistical Sciences "Paolo Fortunati" - STAT
    Sociology and Business Law - SDE
    History and Cultures - DiSCi

The modern school system is largely a product of the late industrial revolution, not the high renaissance.

Exactly. People saying schools haven't changed for 1,000 years have no idea. The truth is that public schools haven't fundamentally changed since the 19th century.

We did.

It is difficult to make general comparisons based on my own kids. I am quite biased in this regard. But based on a couple of homeschool groups we have had, it would seem that the kids are much better at constructive engagement in conflict.

They need far less time in academic study, with better ability to use the skills that they learn.

Now that they are older, they are often crushed by the homework load. They get good marks in their academic work, but enjoy it far less. Like, a lot less.

Now, about homeschool groups: we have experience with remote, rural Rocky Mountains (western United States) and urban Florida. Out West, homeschool seems to be mostly "Save Our Kids from Bureaucratic Madness" with the occasional "Save Our Kids from a Godless, Earth-is-Round Cosmology" family. In Florida, it was all about Jesus.

Both populations had more "Vaccines Cause Brain Damage" than I would like.

They are in public school now, a hedge against our gamble on educating the kids ourselves. They have had fantastic music education, we could not have done that without help. Older kids socialize across age groups and grades more, so that's ok.

It's still hard. Kids are hard. Good luck.

What's the best way to find "secular" homeschooling groups. It's incredible how much of the stuff you find on the internet (usually blogging, homeschooling, religious moms) is in-your-face religious. I don't mind if people believe in God, but man...

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