Outschooling
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If you really look at the data, student outcomes essentially boil down to parents and the students themselves. We've see this with how standardized testing has gone over so poorly. The truth is that, outside of gaming the test system with essentially test prep style cramming, schools really have not been able to make any real meaningful changes to student outcomes.
Absolutely, schools can move the needle a bit in either direction, but outside of edge cases, I feel as though it may be a challenge to show the kind of outcome data that makes any EdTech product a must have in US education.
On a more purely technological basis integrating spaced repetition into instructional design would be a massive win. Imagine if people actually remembered what they’d been taught in school instead of having a hazy idea the US Civil War was somewhere in the 1800s.
Then sure.
If you have a single mother that works odd hours and can't do basic algebra, it's very unlikely you'll excel as a student. That isn't a judgement of anyone, that is just a fact based on the data we have.
How to prevent that situation is a different discussion, but does illustrate that resources may be better used fixing the root of the problem as opposed to putting all the effort and responsibility on education.
Also how do you go about socializing them? I've been considering it myself
1. we felt like time was passing too quickly and wanted to have them around, we wanted to be together basically.
2. with 3 kids my wife hasnt been able to work (her line of work is not well paying), so it made sense to start homeschooling vs private schooling.
3. I have issues with what public schools are now, hyper focused on testing, lack of critical thinking, no outdoor time.
The "socializing" concern is a farce imo. Granted we live in area with plenty of groups. Maybe a solo kid way out in the sticks will have problems. Our kids also regularly play with kids 2-5 years older or younger so things are different. Our kids have activities with other homeschool kids 4 days a week.
The schedule looks like this:
M: Outdoor Nature camp: think building fire with bow drills, axes, skinning animals, foraging for wild plants
T: Academic day at home then occasional horseback riding
W: Academic day at home, private music lessons, then playdate at friends house
TH: Homeschool meetup group: think art, music, dance, karate, extracurricular classes with a group of 100 kids and 10 teachers
FRI: another Homeschool meetup group: with various classes and open play
SAT: Climbing, iceskating, skiing, biking, something outdoors
Our life is a mellower version of "Captain Fantastic"
What are your estimated cost per year per child? (Including the aforementioned private teachers etc). It’d be interesting to compare that with the average expenditure per child in your local schooling district (it’s hard to compare directly due to hard to quantify factors like a parent staying home, but it’d still be interesting to see if it’s significantly more/less or not).
And as they often have large families, their children have a large number of sibiling so aren't lonely, so they presume it's all good. Which just leads to entire families of socially inept homeschoolers.
Whether or not religious people retain their views is not the benefit of socialisation - being able to function in everyday human society through direct experience of it, not a carefully curated and managed microscopic subset, that's the advantage.
I don't know of any studies (or if any could be performed, really) that demonstrate the social impact of public schools on students like this, or at least easily-identified outgroup kids. I know from anecdotal experience that in the public schools I attended that they (the semi-cultish religious kids who were not/no longer homeschooled) were not treated well, never successfully integrated socially, and disappeared from my radar very quickly after graduation. With hindsight I feel very badly about that now, and wish there some way to impact the systemic cliquish nature of public schools, especially high school. Unfortunately I lack a time machine for the kids of the past, and simply don't have answers for those going forward.
Either way, my suspicion is that public schools specifically do not offer the best (or even a much better) experience for socializing students.
As far as socialization, I’ve been asked this a hundred times: “so...like...how do you talk to people when you’re at home?” Now, I understand they mean well. But for someone who just implied their superior social capabilities, they sure seem rude and unsocialized. ;)
It turns out that humans are innately moral and social, outside of extreme situations.
Well that's not entirely fair. I know of several situations (including my own) where students were punished for fighting when attacked by other students. You can't say that's not "doing something", I guess.
But it does seem obvious that being forced to associate with brutes is unpleasant, demoralising and inconducive to academic learning. By the same token why not teach people to deal with pain by tapping them daily with hammers?
We also have to factor in also that many people will become brutes as a result of this forced association, like the way criminality incubates in prisons.
The way we learn to get along is through a combination of shared challenges and by trying to emulate people we admire. Not being locked up with Bane seven hours every day.
For one thing, setting aside how cruel it is, at 12 years+ the 'school bully learning method' is monstrously inefficient.
Btw, similar arguments are applied to most school subjects. For example, one is forced to take obsolete subject X because it is useful if one later wishes to study subject Y, which is in turn can be helpful if Z crops up in adult life, and so on.
Most sane adults would rather learn 'just in time' and to the precision and extent appropriate to the unique challenge they face. Yet, perhaps because of the enormous sunk cost of their own schooling, they become irrational about this where their children are concerned.
It sounds like a great setup, but it also seems difficult and expensive to me at first blush.
Based on that limited observation, I think that the socialism of homeschool kids depends on the kids and their parents in the same way as any other aspect of homeschooling: If the parents are reasonably social, they will find ways to get their kids involved in social things, and their kids will be social too.
If the parents are reclusive, or inclined to isolate themselves from mainstream society for whatever reason, this will also be reflected in their kids. What may seem like a negative outcome of homeschooling could just be a matter of kids resembling their parents. And it wouldn't shock me if genetics plays a role.
"Travel to Paris"
"Viking Art and History"
"Waldorf Form drawing"
"The History of Halloween"
They also get to see the instructor and interact with them and other kids.
Dumb question: Is that a field trip or just a "learn about Paris" lesson?
Right, but that's not clear. He listed it as a lesson/subject. It can be read as an actual trip, or a virtual trip.
You "believe"?
You don't know if your own kids went with you to Paris or not?
I call shenanigans. You're a duplicate account or otherwise working for OP's company.
Sheesh. This situation with YC funded companies getting dog and pony show coverage here with a bevy of fake accounts and special algorithmic preference is never going to stop. YC's so full of crap it's amazing. Bogus.
How much time do you spend as a parent teaching or overseeing homeschooling? Are you encouraging your kids to go to college? And if they did want to go to college do they realistically have the option to pick the school they want? Any state or country requirements you need to adhere to in terms of curriculum? Have your kids ever expressed an interest in going to school? I can see homeschooling work well for disciplines like math or programming but have any of your kids expressed interest in something like medicine or law where prestige matters a lot? Are kids really self motivated to learn anything? How much structure do you impose? Do you find that they do more projects and experiments as opposed to reading theoretical stuff?
Its a busy schedule for my wife, granted we have 3 kids. She also works part-time at their nature camp
> Are you encouraging your kids to go to college?
Depends. I plan on enrolling them at the local community college by age 14-15.
> And if they did want to go to college do they realistically have the option to pick the school they want?
I want them to attend community college then transfer, which is what I did and I transfered to a public ivy school
> Any state or country requirements you need to adhere to in terms of curriculum?
No requirements here in MI, depends on your state.
> Have your kids ever expressed an interest in going to school?
Nope.
> I can see homeschooling work well for disciplines like math or programming but have any of your kids expressed interest in something like medicine or law where prestige matters a lot?
Why would that matter? Top tier colleges are looking for/encouraging homeschool applicants because they are generally very independent thinkers and self-directed.
> Are kids really self motivated to learn anything?
Definitely. For example, my one daughter loves birds and is studying everything she can find about the local bird population. Kids are naturally very curious.
> How much structure do you impose?
This depends on the homeschooling family. We have a decent structure now but other families use no structure.
> Do you find that they do more projects and experiments as opposed to reading theoretical stuff?
50/50 I would say. They are still young so the reading is not like deep theory on anything yet.
I'd be curious as to why there is not an option to watch a recorded version with Outschool.
Most people who sign up don't actually want a certificate and aren't trying to complete. They are interested in the subject, watching some videos, move on. When you have class sizes with 1000-30,000 students, it's OK if 90% don't complete the certificate since many more did than in a brick and mortar school, yet it cost much less per student to deliver the class.
In online classes where you need to pay to get the certificate, it's been found that paid students have the same completion rate as brick and mortar university students.
https://www.afr.com/news/policy/education/fee-payments-lift-...
> Students in massive open online courses (MOOC) who pay a modest amount for a "verified certificate" are just as likely finish their course as regular university students, according to a new large-scale study of online education.
I think the benefit of the pre-recorded sessions like from Coursera and Khan Academy, is that one concern is unsupervised teacher-learner interaction could be problematic if its unclear how the teacher has been screened.
For instance is the teacher in live mode going to do anything inappropriate or try to initiate in person contact with the learner, etc.
A core counter argument to their base premise is that learning effectively is done in person, as part of a social group, in a physical space dedicated to learning, with hands on practice. It certainly seems to be the core takeaways of Waldorf/Montessori/constructionist/etc. approaches.
> When our kids were in school and struggled with a class/teacher/subject, we would get them a tutor to come to our home in the evenings.
In other words, there's a reason they paid the tutor to come in person, and not tutor over Skype or the phone.
The author speaks of their intent being to open up access to education, and replace the "outdated tech" of physical schools and classrooms. I need to be convinced that successful execution of this plan (and its inevitable percolation into policy if it makes financial sense - which I have no doubt it does, for a VC to take interest in it) won't result in a two tiered system, with students from poorer families getting free, public education over video lessons, and students from wealthier family being able to attend private, more expensive, in person schooling.
I'll refrain from posting the ages and names of his kids in the interest of privacy (you can figure it out with very light Googling), but his older children are in their late twenties, meaning they are nearly my age. When I was in high school "Skype tutoring" wasn't a thing, because reliable video chat didn't exist, and very little of my schoolwork used a computer for more than web processing. Isn't it a lot more likely that the sentence you are referencing is referring to that experience than evidence "in person" was the reason he paid for a tutor to come in person?
As someone who was homeschooled: it's extremely scary. I've missed out on social experiences and also on actual education and consider myself generally worse-off for it.
Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. How many homeschooling families are also anti-vaxxers or feed into anti-government paranoia? Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for.
- homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest
- homeschooling is at a systemic disadvantage because parents that care enough about their kid's education to take an active part in it have no voice in the public schooling system (my understanding of grandparent's point); in addition, they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it.
Am I misunderstanding?
I am not saying that homeschooling in practice is mostly undesirable. Instead, there can be undesirable elements to it. And those undesirable elements are neither common nor easy to spot.
Nor am I saying that it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who aren't going to act in their child's best interest. I certainly think there's an element of truth to it but don't think it's overwhelmingly the case.
My parents did have legitimate reasons to homeschool some of the family. But I think the legitimate issues were leveraged for, indeed, control. Then: I think they bit off more than they could chew (I have a big family); I don't think they realized just how much effort they volunteered of themselves. At the end of a year, they chose to dig their heels in and continue a broken implementation of homeschool and not addressing the problems that came up, instead of risking putting their kids back into school and losing a year or two in grades and having to answer to the State.
> they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it.
Yes. Maybe not everywhere but it certainly seemed to be the case when I was in California until moved '03.
The out is dual-enrollment, sometimes called running start or concurrent enrollment. In many locations it is free, leading to an AA degree. Because it is scheduled in the style of normal college, with classes chosen as you please, uneven progress is not a problem.
Consider also that the students bear some responsibility and can easily have disasters in public school. If the students choose to dig their heels in, refusing to study, that simply shuts down any kind of education. You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make it drink. Be careful about assuming your parents did worse than a public school would have done, even if things went badly. Some kids just refuse to learn.
To large extend, homeschooling movement was to large extend motivated politically and does attract fringe groups who want to avoid mainstream society. Avoidance of exposure of certain parts of history or sex ed or gender relationships or culture is strong motivation for many of those families.
It did not became popular in conservative christian male is head of household types randomly.
Homeschooling put me far ahead of my peers. I went back for middle school (6th grade) and skated through the next 3 years until I could take AP classes in high school. I am by no means exceptional nor were my parents great teachers. I think being able to go at my own pace allowed me to learn faster and more thoroughly than if I had been in a classroom.
I'd say there are a lot of upsides to home schooling if parents can swing it, and the downsides can be mitigated by a little extra effort on socializing.
Read Sasse’s “the vanishing American adult.” It’s got some great commentary on what’s wrong with modern school. We take kids, and instead of having them be around adults to socialize them, we let them loose on their own little child-dominated Lord of the Flies society.
I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children.
I am not at all convinced that this is true.
There's really no evidence for this. The only reason anyone believes this is because modern school is a living hell and if the suffering and misery doesn't serve some practical purpose, we'd all be depressed.
The truth is that there are plenty of people who are schooled privately that turn out just fine.
It certainly is, the book even beats you over the head with it when (spoiler warning I guess?) the warship shows up to rescue them at the end.
I do think the K-12 school doesn't particularly resemble adult life, and is a lot worse in most ways. For one thing, leaving bad situations isn't really an option, while at the same time anti-social behavior is more tolerated. Meanwhile you're doing a bunch of work on things that are quickly round-filed when you're done with them, year after year, and operating under a system that's strangely strict and dehumanizing considering how much shittiness it allows to go on. And I had a pretty good school experience, so this isn't coming from some place of special bitterness.
If you're only interested in social experiences then there's all the obvious answers: girlfriends, team memberships, or even just how to discover and talk to other people my age with similar interests. Standing up for myself is hard. Simply talking to people is hard. How to filter the words I say so that people don't take offense to me expressing an opinion.
If you want to expand your question, then also: art, business, chemistry, college, even joining the military required a high school diploma.
We often mistakenly think the grass is greener on the other side of the fence. I suggest to you that in the alternate history, with you in a public school, you also would not have had girlfriends. I sure didn't have any, despite being tall and slightly athletic.
The same goes for being able to filter words to not cause offense. One time, that got me fired! My public school education served me just as well as your education served you.
My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject. She had a teaching license up until a couple of years ago (they do expire after a while) and taught for several years before we had kids. Then, once they arrived, she decided this was a natural fit. Meanwhile, they're also plugged in with a local co-op with more than thirty kids that they meet up with several times a week.
Homeschooling can be used to keep kids out of the system and deny them a good education, but it can also be the platform for an elite education like no other. There's a reason the wealthiest families in American pay for private tutors and elite schools with tiny class sizes. Nothing beats one on one from a capable instructor.
As my kids grow older, they'll get one-on-one training in the arts, foreign language, and various extra-curricular skills like swimming, dance, etc. from instructors that we hire to assist them. They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school.
Honestly, if there is anything wrong with homeschooling itself, it's that it is only available to middle and upper class families.
Except for those whose parents also hire expert tutors. It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities.
When you consider how much homeschooling is by parents who are not themselves professional educators, I suspect a hybrid approach works better on average.
> It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities.
This is true and it's a lot of why we homeschool. There are peers that are getting similarly elite educations and just doing it slightly different ways. If I had a billion dollars, I would be paying for an elite, personal tutor to educate my children. I wouldn't be sending them to a public school. Homeschooling allows my wife and I to provide something analogous to that elite structure for our children, even though they are firmly middle class.
Untrue. Any teacher must be familiar with both the subject matter and basic pedagogy, regardless of whether they're teaching one student or many. Yes, there are additional skills necessary when teaching a larger class, but I think you drastically exaggerate how much of a teacher's job that is.
I think you are imagining a homeschool from the 1980s. My kids learn many aspects of the subject matter from sources like Khan Academy and Outschooling. The idea that the teacher needs to know the subject matter deeply in order to manage the child's education is obsolete.
If those allow you to outsource the entirety of your child's education, including personalization of the curriculum to individual needs, answering arbitrarily-deep questions about the subject matter, etc. then great, but I'm not sure I'd call that home schooling. That would be more like a (virtual) private school, with the same level of parental involvement. If you want to be more involved you need more training, simple as that, and the fact is that a lot of home-school parents don't even have an average education themselves.
Also remember, you're not the sample. You claim to have some expertise in data science. What do the data suggest, for a typical home-schooler and not just for you or the non-random sample of others in your neighborhood.
[1] https://www.responsiblehomeschooling.org/homeschooling-101/h...
[2] https://www.parentingscience.com/homeschooling-outcomes.html
People put a lot of stock in the intelligence of teachers, but consider it this way, most teachers choose a career that requires a 4 year degree plus certification that won't make enough to live comfortably or earn them over what a standard retail job makes much less pay their loans, this is something they think long and hard on (which is probably not much more than "I really like working with children") and make their decision on. It attracts the kind of people who think that's a good idea. Anyone more intelligent that wants to teach runs the numbers and decides against it except in rare cases. Any pedogogy those kinds of people learn isn't that advanced and can be picked up by most by reading a book on it over a month. These "professional" educators isn't exactly an advanced profession like that of a medical professional or a scientist, most of those people would struggle or fail out of such programs. The alternatives for most teachers is a communications degree, or sports/massage therapy. Altruism doesn't equate to being good at something, the proof is in the quality of education offered today.
Edit: They don't deserve contempt, but I'm saying if you increased teacher's salaries, the competition would be such the people that go for it now would simply unable to compete with the sudden competition based the altruistic motives plus pay. Altrustism only motivates you so much, doesn't last long when you're over worked and under paid and dealing with 30+ class sizes. Pedogogy be damned, you'd get people who would be able to actually teach kids on an individual level and demand more from administrators or have the conviction to walk out and move on to something else if they didn't.
Yeah, I know, it's not a "rational" choice by Randian standards. To some, that means they deserve contempt. To me, it suggests that they have other motivations that might deserve some respect.
Seriously, consider what you’re saying. You’re saying that people without an education in pedagogy are unable to teach. Most of the parents reading this probably taught their children how to read before they got to school. The overwhelming majority of college faculty never have any training in teaching. Many, many people tutor without ever getting an M.Ed.
You get better at teaching by teaching, same way you get better at painting by painting or playing music by playing music. You’ll get better faster if you’re paying closer attention to your students and what you’re doing and things like having someone watch your lessons and critique them or reviewing video of your lessons yourself afterwards helps enormously. If you want to be play violin an encyclopaedic grasp of music theory is less useful than another hundred hours playing until you get over 1,000 hours at minimum. Ed school lecturers and professors are not noted for their excellent teaching despite their presumably excellent grasp of theory.
My experience could be unusual, obviously, but what’s very unlikely to be wrong is the literature on the determinants of teacher quality which does not reliably find any effect distinguishable from zero for teacher training or for experience over six years.
You mean the significant majority of home schoolers, driving most of the agenda e.g. around certification and curriculum standards? Public schools are meant to ensure that every child can get a minimal level of education. Obviously it's great when people can do better, whether it's through regular public schools, charter schools, private schools, or home schooling. The problem is that when you open it up to just anyone without any kind of certification, testing, or oversight, it results in a form of neglect.
> it is only available to middle and upper class families
Sadly, no. That might describe the home schoolers you see, but "home schooling" which involves little or no actual schooling is also a common option for the (especially rural) poor. Some of my own first and second cousins grew up that way, and basically never recovered.
Also religion was obligatory up until few years ago after they changed the law that made people do extra work if they want to study religion.
https://duckduckgo.com/?q=trump+history+school+book&t=canoni...
About half the population would be offended by those textbooks. You're insisting on an equivalent education, which would mean teaching with that same bias. The whole point is to do otherwise.
One can find other examples in the way books treat the Vietnam war, the North American aboriginal population, LGBT, premarital sex, the causes of the Great Depression, unions, nationalized health care, the electoral college, the second amendment, Justice Clarence Thomas, Justice Ruth Ginsburg, and so many other political topics. History and sex-ed classes are deeply tied to politics.
You say that parents should be "not allowed to provide their children's with religious/libertarian dogma instead of an actual education", but many parents take the view that schools today are doing exactly that.
Please learn what "equivalent" means. Maybe get some help at your local public school. It doesn't mean "identical" with the same biases etc. It's entirely possible to define what would constitute an equivalent education even in a subject such as history (never mind neutral subjects such as math which you seem unwilling to talk about) without requiring the exact same interpretation. In fact, public schools try very hard to accommodate all manner of ideological biases, while home-schoolers are often very inimical to all beliefs except their own. By demonstrating that tendency, you make a good argument against unregulated home schooling.
My coworker's wife was a math major. She volunteered to help at her child's public school. (kind of surprised that this is allowed, actually) The teacher gave a math problem, "BLANK - 9 = 9", accepting both 9 and 0 as the only valid answers. My coworker's wife tried to correct this, claiming that 18 should be the only valid answer. The teacher insisted that 18 was incorrect because they hadn't covered 2-digit math yet!!!
This is not any sort of impoverished school, nor is it rural or urban, nor is it significantly non-white or immigrant or anything of the sort. It is borderline wealthy. Statistically, you'd expect it to be nearly the best America has to offer.
Nobody should want an equivalent to that.
I’ve never been able to forget that one. Okay, so people make mistakes. But temperatures are like a basic fact of everyday life. Do you really think water boils at 30 degrees hotter than it gets in a hot day? And do you trust these same people to teach your kids about World War II, the Constitution, evolution, climate change, etc?
Most of them get nasty when they are proven incorrect as well.
> My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject.
My parents told themselves the same thing. I apparently had top percentile test scores in several early years, particularly in math. Despite that, my parents completely failed to provide an education after choosing to homeschool.
> She had a teaching license up until a couple of years ago (they do expire after a while) and taught for several years before we had kids.
Neat! Not that it really matters, but I am curious: what did she teach?
> they're also plugged in with a local co-op with more than thirty kids that they meet up with several times a week.
That's also something my parents told themselves and others. Despite that, it wasn't exactly an honest statement. We met with other church members about once every week for about a month. Then about once every quarter of a year for about a year. Then basically never, while my parents fell deep into paranoia.
> it can also be the platform for an elite education like no other.
Yes, it can. But my experience brings with me a very skeptical mind.
> There's a reason the wealthiest families in American pay for private tutors and elite schools with tiny class sizes. Nothing beats one on one from a capable instructor.
While you're right in that there's a reason for private tutors and elite schools, I think you're wrong about your conclusion for the wealthy. I think wealthy parents don't want their children to associate with poor people who can't afford to hire their own private lessons. I think that's also a despicably-elitist action.
> They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school.
It's almost as if you're parroting the same things my parents said. Indeed, I walked away better equipped for computers than pretty much anyone I know. But that's more of a byproduct of spending years in front of a computer than anything that my parents actively tried to teach. Where I gained knowledge about computers there's also loss of other opportunities and knowledge.
> Honestly, if there is anything wrong with homeschooling itself, it's that it is only available to middle and upper class families.
You are wrong. I consider myself middle class. Almost all of my family are somewhere between poor and destitute.
I know some people who were homeschooled as kids (unschooled, in one case), and they turned out to be exceptional people. It seems pretty clear from interacting with them that their attitudes and abilities are a direct result of their schooling (and having parents who would be willing to school their kids in that way).
But I'm sure homeschooling can also turn out very badly if the parents aren't fully committed to doing it well.
But I do think there’s some signal in the fact that I’m dealing with the success cases of public and home schooling, and the homeschooled ones stand out as exceptional in that population.
What kinds of conclusions can reasonably be drawn from that, though, I don’t know.
My children are homeschooled in a major metro area not in Texas. We also have effectively zero oversight. But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has.
I understand that in rural areas this can mean that such children have all but disappeared from view, but where we live the school districts allow homeschool children to participate in afterschool activities (including competitive sports) and a recent change in state law allows for homeschool children to attend a class or two at the local school and then leave for the day, if that is something a parent wants. The park district offers many sports classes in the middle of the day for homeschool kids, forest preserves and state parks offer nature classes, and museums have science and art courses. Private businesses love us, they offer discounts to fill up time slots that would otherwise go empty. The public library is very welcoming and typically allows use of community rooms for free.
A public school classroom with 30+ children in it simply doesn't have the time to offer as much educational opportunity that our children get in half the time, allowing them so much time during the day for play, imagination, and reading or exploring topics of their own choice (we typically have 30-60 library books at home at any one point in time).
I don't think the question of 'whether oversight is a good idea' is usefully explored by piecemeal examples where everything went fine and the motivation of parents is genuine "interest in the success of our children".
This is not to say there is anything particularly wrong with homeschooling per se, I wouldn't accept that examining piecemeal cases where everything went fine would be a good way of inferring "whether oversight is a good idea" in the case of a church or business or academic institution either.
That's also, of course, true of those who send their kids to private school. I think that there's an excellent argument for vouchers which enable parents to allocate the funds that would have gone to a public school to a private school. There are some dangers (because once something is private, it can be advertised and the system can be gamed), but overall I think this is far better than our current 51%-of-parents-decide model.
I don't feel that it'd be a good idea to give homeschooling parents a similar voucher, but only because it's too ripe for abuse: an abusive parent could take the voucher and spend it, and not bother to educate his kids. I don't know how likely it is, but it's worrisome nonetheless.
With the voucher I probably would have added a condenser, nickel crucibles, a kiln, an extra digit on my balance, decent-sized platinum electrodes, and a spectrophotometer. Make it a big voucher and I'll get an electron microscope, an extreme-ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscope, and a DNA sequencer.
There are a ton of homeschool groups in our area too that organize activities where all of the kids get together. It is very active giving kids plenty of opportunity to socialize.
We don't homeschool for religious reasons. We do it because we want our kids to get the best possible education without all of the indoctrination and other crap that is pushed through the public education system. This is pretty much the reason most of the other homeschoolers that I engage with do it too. I think homeschooling has a bad rap because of the media and a few bad apples but at least from my experience, that portrayal is not the norm.
I went to an average public school, not like a specialized math-heavy school, which also existed.
Then I moved to the U.S. and started 6th grade, decent public school in a major city.
I went to ESL class instead of regular English. Some of the history stuff was new to me. I struggled with integrating and being bullied, though not too badly.
But as far as math and science goes, I was coasting up until 9th grade, when I started high school.
In 8th grade, I was added to the "gifted" program, which basically meant I spent one period a week hanging out with the other gifted kids doing I don't even remember what.
I've been told that while USSR designed its cirruculum to be passable by 80% of the students, in the U.S. it's designed to be passable by close to 100%. Which means that even if your child is smart, they'll be dragging along with the least capable 20% of the school population, doing busywork and being bored, wasting their time instead of learning all they could be at the most capable time of their life.
(Russia's current education system has been stripped and crippled, so it's on par or worse than U.S. now.)
They're a wonderful team. I've never seen a group of people with so much positive chemistry before; I've started asking more culture-centered questions in my interviews since then, now that I think about it.
I think it's the best kind of team to front an educational endeavour and it's one big reason I believe in them. It's easier to have a healthy classroom environment if the providing workplace is healthy too.
> Outschool (YC W16) Is Hiring a Senior Software Engineer in SF
I’m so glad for advanced services making more forms of schooling possible for people.
Just to throw some ice on some of the heat in the comments...
- homeschooling isn’t for everyone, but it works wonderfully for some. My sister hated it and I loved it. People are different and need different approaches to learning.
- some people who homeschool are religious, and some of them are “fundamentalist”. But most of the people I encountered were simply “religious.” There’s a difference. ;)
HN, what's your take on the above? Do you believe that there is any particular curriculum of subjects that students "need" to have studied to be prepared for doing well in the world they will be living in?
That's all. No, we mostly don't teach this stuff anymore.
For those going the college route, obviously the STEM prerequisites must be satisfied. This means AP Biology, AP Chemistry, AP Physics C (both halves), and AP Calculus BC.
Some ten years ago I was convinced that private schools had a right to exist, but that they should never impact the funding of public schools, not even indirectly.
Then I discovered that homeschooling was a thing in the US.
Now I tend to believe that private schools should not be allowed to exist. School is far too important as a social mixer and a way to educate well-rounded citizens to leave it to the whims of parents. Parents already have a large enough impact on their kids, to let them take over 100% of their time.
I also strongly believe that parents whose beliefs prevent their kids from getting the medical care they deserve (from refusing transfusions, to refusing vaccines) should get a hard look from social services.
In general I don't believe that parenthood trumps some things that as a society we consider basic human rights. I think most people would agree with me when it comes down to issues like violence, exploitation and child labor, but I think this should extend to the access to healthcare and to a secular education.
Public schools have a long way to go before they should be made mandatory. Until it is the very best solution for everyone, until it addresses every learning disability, the class sizes are smaller, teachers are paid better, classes track with a students ability and mental development and actually run in line with the latest in neuroscience and child development, have flexible hours so teenagers can sleep longer, put less on the kids when they go home so they have time for family activities and social interaction instead of 3-4 hrs of homework. Maybe when the solution isn't to medicate kids who don't learn by sitting still at a desk 6 hours a day with few breaks, elimination of recess and 20-30 minute lunch periods and few if any opportunities to "socialize" in the current schooling environment. When they teach problem solving and critical thinking, rather than rote memorizing for one standardized test at the end of year. If going to school was more like being an adult or put responsibilities on the student, like a college does, rather than treating the student population like they're in a low security prison. When it uses a system that wasn't developed for training factory workers and hasn't transitioned at all since then. When all the new money added to their budgets isn't siphoned up in administrative costs. When schools in many neighborhoods put kids in physical danger, involve gang activity and a good option simply isn't available to them because of their district. Then maybe we can talk about making it mandatory.
Even then, the most rich and privileged still would have loop holes for tutoring their kids for something other than factory work. We would still need exceptions for kids who for a variety of reasons, medical or otherwise need to be at home, students who travel or work in acting/performance. Kids who are on specialized career tracks in schools geared towards where its best they learn very young (perforamance arts and music, CS) to compete in a global market.
This idea that one education fits all is myopic and doesn't line up with the results that public schools produce thus far, and you want to take away any alternative.
It would be like if the only healthcare option in the US was the VA, and no one was allowed to seek healthcare else where because some people make bad health decisions and go to homeopathic healthcare providers.
Also blaming it on just conservatism is silly, the bluest most democratic districts have some of the worst problems and solutions. Administrators keep thinking more of the same and blanket solutions address the needs of every kid. They forget that children are individuals. If this were the case, schools in very liberal areas like D.C., Chicago, LA, etc would be amazing and all producing the very best students given their funding and that the school board would be incredibly liberal/progressive.
Talk to teachers, many of them that burn out or leave because of how bad its gotten home school their own kids because they've seen the sausage factory.
Addendum (how bad its really gotten):
https://www.dailyinfographic.com/homeschooling-by-the-number...
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/15/robots...
https://news.berkeley.edu/2018/03/29/social-jetlag/
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13086098
https://ideapod.com/born-creative-geniuses-education-system-...
https://nypost.com/2018/01/30/teen-suspended-for-inciting-vi...
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/9isnux/teacher_says_s...
https://www.greensboro.com/opinion/columns/christie-murphy-w...
https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/8smwb6/lawsuit_school...
https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/7p69uk/teacher_arre...
I recognize that there are some in the homeschool "community" who are ruining their children (imho). For the sake of freedom, I accept that there are terrible people in the world who should not have reproduced, but for me to have rights they must have them too.
Let me put it another way: most children who have some medical doctor in their extended family don't really need to be visited regularly by a pediatrician. That doesn't really imply that most people who refuse to take their kids to a doctor are in their right mind to do so: a lot of them have some weird belief that might put their kids life at risk. And even if they weren't a majority, but a tiny minority, the law needs to protect that tiny minority even if that means being a bit overbearing on people who have doctors in their families.
It creates greater harm putting good kids in with the bad then it does for the unfortunate but angry, hostile children. Same as it does putting a prisoner in for a non-violent crime with a bunch of felons, they're likely to come out a worse, more hardened criminal. You have this theory that it brings the other kids up, maybe slightly, but often it just brings everyone overall down. Collectivist mentality should be what's the greatest good.
Also societies that have good public schools (that are universally attended) like Finland, tend to have much less socioeconomic inequality in the following generations. That is: school is the solution to social inequality, not viceversa.
https://www.dailyinfographic.com/homeschooling-by-the-number...
If you want more research this [0] article has a good bibliography on the effects of socioeconomic diversity in schools
[0] https://repository.law.umich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article...
Let's NOT institute forced doctor visitations (with all the cost, overhead, bureaucracy, potential for fraud, etc) for all parents, EVEN THE EXEMPLARY ONES, to deal with that problem.
Instead, let's figure out if there are better ways to ensure that parents have the ability/means/understanding necessary to get their kids to checkups.
Do you think that being a teacher is easier than being a medical doctor?
I know somebody who is a primary school teacher in Northern France, on the border with Belgium (a disadvantaged area for France, but no worse than some parts of the American South), every single year she has to deal with medical or social issues that would have gone otherwise unnoticed: abusive families, contagious diseases that went unnoticed, kids who were not eating healthy at home...
My point is that it is often thanks to public schools that we don't need forced doctor (or god forbid social serivices) visitations.
What the hell does that matter?
Look, I'm not saying there isn't value to public education. And I'm not saying that educators don't provide a valuable and important service. But forcing public education as the panacea for finding all the ways parents fail their children is sub-optimal.
If you want to find abuses, diseases, malnutrition, etc, then let's mandate yearly doctor visits. I'd back that up WAY more than forced public education.
If you think that homeschooling is fine, but homedoctoring is crazy, then you think that being a teacher is a job that any idiot can do, while being a medical doctor requires a specific set of skills.
I'm not saying that all homeschooling parents are crazy and are doing a horrible job, I'm just saying that people have to study a bunch of stuff before becoming teachers, and even then they work as a team and have different specializations, I highly doubt that most people can do a better job than them on their first shot.
If it were reasonable to achieve "doctor" level results of medical care without being a doctor, then I would agree with you. The evidence shows otherwise. If I were getting poor results with my kids, they'd be back in public school.
But a single conscientious and patient parent working 1:1 with a child consistently over the course of years is going to beat out a string of generalist teachers managing a 30-student classroom almost every time.
It takes a teacher/class months of overhead at the beginning of each year just to get to know all of the students and figure out what their skills and preparation are. It takes hours of overhead every day coordinating big groups of students, some of whom don’t want to be in a setting that inherently compromises their autonomy and often disrespects them, even in the best case where the teacher is kind and progressive. Feedback on student work is delayed and sometimes mediocre because carefully examining the work of 30 students takes a huge amount of time and effort. Glaring student misconceptions and gaps in basic knowledge and skills are allowed to persist for years. Generally little support is given to help students get over psychological blocks related to particular subjects or activities. Students are frequently cruel to each-other and teachers are often unaware or don’t have the available bandwidth to deal with it.
There is a categorical difference between lecturing to a class of 30 vs. direct tutorial, and the latter is generally much, much easier and more pleasant for both teacher and pupil.
So, bear in mind, that doctor visit carries some risk and could even cause permanent damage.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_communal_child_rearing...
Literally zero evidence for this. On average, kids that are homeschooled walk away with higher levels achievement and fewer psychological issues than their traditionally schooled peers. They integrate just fine into society.
> I also strongly believe that parents whose beliefs prevent their kids from getting the medical care they deserve (from refusing transfusions, to refusing vaccines) should get a hard look from social services.
This has nothing to do with homeschooling since many of us homeschool for secular reasons and aren't teaching our children fundamentalism or denying them vaccines/healthcare.
> In general I don't believe that parenthood trumps some things that as a society we consider basic human rights.
You don't have kids. Not that it invalidates your opinion, but you don't. I, as a parent, adapt to society and obey society just like I, as an individual, obey the law. But I am still a parent if the social order breaks down and the government disappears. My responsibilities as a parent precede my responsibility to society. As long as society is not abusive, they mesh well and that isn't an issue. But saying that parenthood doesn't trump society is a slippery slope you really don't want to go down.
> I think most people would agree with me when it comes down to issues like violence, exploitation and child labor, but I think this should extend to the access to healthcare and to a secular education.
Healthcare makes sense, I suppose. But "secular education" assumes the education received in a homeschool context is not secular. On the contrary, many homeschoolers are secular homeschoolers, especially in the upper middle class.
I think you need to do more research on this before you start throwing out uninformed opinions.
There is plenty of evidence of the contrary though, that kids born in families with low income and educational achievement do much much better when they are in a socially diverse school as opposed to a ghetto. Sure maybe homeschooled kids are slightly better off, but that comes at a huge cost for all the kids who have a single parent who works three jobs that will never be able to afford to homeschool them.
> You don't have kids.
You don't know that.
> But I am still a parent if the social order breaks down and the government disappears.
Every day hundreds of thousands of parents "break down" and government takes over for them. Government breaking down is a much rarer event.
> "secular education"
If you don't like the distinction between secular and religious, you can take any other strong belief. What if my parents are flat earthers? What if they are holocaust deniers? What if they hold some very strong political opinion? Or even what if they are some staunch atheists? They will just create a bubble around their kids.
I was that kid, and putting other well off kids in my school did nothing to fix those issues. You're running on a theory with no evidence. Putting kids in a school just brings the kid down to the lowest common denominator, it doesn't have the opposite effect. High performing kids are likely to be picked on, even minority kids will get called out for "acting <insert racial stereotype>". It's works like cancer, not like vitamins. The negativity of the kids from horrible homes effects everyone, the positivity gets squashed by the system and social ostracization.
>If you don't like the distinction between secular and religious, you can take any other strong belief. What if my parents are flat earthers? What if they are holocaust deniers? What if they hold some very strong political opinion? Or even what if they are some staunch atheists? They will just create a bubble around their kids.
What if schools teach other misconceptions that get corrected in college. Like brontosauruses are a thing, or T-Rex's hunt prey. That the founding father's are practical holy figures and did no wrong. What if its a religious school district and they're the ones skirting past evolution, teaching bad concepts and you want to homeschool to correct it. What if you teach the kids secular stuff and the kid gets the politics and beliefs at home anyway and believes it because that's what their parents believe and have more influence over the values and beliefs that kid carries into life than a teacher ever can. You're running on a lot of assumptions that doesn't negate that fact that public schools largely suck, and even a half hearted attempt at home schooling has kids performing on average better than public schools because they suck so very much.
anecdata
> You're running on a theory with no evidence
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2012/apr/19/increa...
Here an article reporting on a study by the OECD, but I'm sure you'll be able to find more scholarly sources if you just took the time to research it.
The truth is homeschooling is almost exclusively an American (maybe I should say anglophone) phenomenon, in most of Western Europe homeschooling is just illegal or allowed in extreme cases and under very high scrutiny from the public school system, because data has shown that it does more harm than good.
Homeschooling is exclusively American because American schools are almost completely shit like most government provided services here and saying because German schools are good, American kids shouldn't homeschool is ignoring all the data that says US public schools are in trouble, on a steep decline and home schooling has for many, become their only viable alternative. Look at the colleges complaining about kids coming in who can't do basic problem solving or critical thinking. Anyway, I've linked this stuff so many times.
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/15/robots...
http://news.berkeley.edu/2018/03/29/social-jetlag/
https://quantblog.wordpress.com/2016/12/01/homeschooling-as-...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13086098
https://ideapod.com/born-creative-geniuses-education-system-...
If a school in someone's area is crap and not addressing their child's needs a parent ABSOLUTELY should have the RIGHT to pull their kid out and seek a better alternative. Saying home schools are bad because public schools should be good and use data that has nothing to do with test scores, performance later in life. The social thing has been debunked multiple times. Sending a kid to school to learn to socialize has the Lord of the Flies effect, learning to socialize in a school, not from adults. Home schoolers are typically seen as more mature than their peers.
https://reason.com/2019/01/22/homeschooling-produces-better-...
You're defending a dumpster fire with doctored data when their are news articles every day about how much trouble public schools and outdated the education system is, and using anecdotal out liars to prove home schooling is terrible. For every home schooler you show that had issues, I can show you an article about a kid who committed suicide because of bullying, who had a learning disability that can't be addressed in large classroom settings, who experience severe social anxiety because of the social hierarchy high school taught them about.
I had no idea there was a debate on the topic of T-Rex hunting. Here's an interesting Nature article that suggests that the T-Rex did hunt live prey: https://www.nature.com/news/tyrannosaurus-rex-hunted-for-liv...
You are proposing to offset economic inequality by degrading the education of the privileged. Your goal should be improve the education of the disadvantaged instead. Raise all boats, don't drain the lake. It's obvious that the United States could spend much more on education and do a much better job with the schools they have. Pinning any significant portion of the "huge cost" of the current system on middle class homeschoolers seems like sophistry intended to avoid the abuses of the hyper-capitalist, atomized system and ignores the actual problem.
> Every day hundreds of thousands of parents "break down" and government takes over for them. Government breaking down is a much rarer event.
This doesn't address the issue at hand. If a parent breaks down and the government steps in, that isn't incompatible with permitting homeschooling in non-abusive contexts.
> If you don't like the distinction between secular and religious, you can take any other strong belief. What if my parents are flat earthers? What if they are holocaust deniers? What if they hold some very strong political opinion? Or even what if they are some staunch atheists? They will just create a bubble around their kids.
If your parents are extremists of any sort, you're not going to mitigate their toxic influence or prevent them from harming a child by eliminating homeschooling. Most bad parents still send their kids to public school. Public school is not a remedy for abuse.
I think you're exaggerating the negative effects of sending almost everybody to public schools. Look at Scandinavia, France, Germany (or even southern European countries), the vast majority of people goes to public schools and it's not like the advancement of humanity has stopped there. A similar argument can be made for socialized medicine, a highly privatized system like the American one ends up being: more expensive, more iniquitous and less effective. If you really think that dismantling or undermining the public school system is not going to end like the medical system in the US, well I don't know how to convince you.
Fix public schooling in the US first, make it so it isn't so easy for home schoolers to out perform. Don't make kids guinea pigs while you figure out how to fix it. Then and only then can you level a critical eye on US home schoolers if the vast majority weren't doing a better job than public schools. If you're going to advocate for public school in the US, advocate in what ways that schools today by majority statistics are better than home schooling (socialization actually isn't one of them). Because all I see is a system that is 100 years out of date, anti-science (in terms of teaching methodology and pedagogy versus neuroscience and child development studies) and throwing money at problems that goes to the administrators not to teacher pay or reducing class sizes or anything substantial.
This is like people saying to fix the bus system before adding bus lanes that would increase congestion for cars. The system is broken because smarter kids or kids who come from more educated families are escaping it. The effect is that public schools in the US are becoming like public transportation in the US: only those who don't have any other option are using it.
It's clear to me that A) you don't have kids and don't have any experience with kids in school B) you led a very privileged life and had a better than average experience in school C) think smart kids should be held back or slowed down so the less fortunate kids can keep up and further dumb down and brain drain society because that's how it works in schools D) You're so ignorant on the subject you obviously are a victim of the public education system you're so adamant to defend.
Your analogy isn't worth addressing, its not even close to accurate. Its pointless to continue.
Yeah, no. Do you have any experience with the public school systems in the US, or are you just viewing this from Europe and engaging in some vigorous armchair analysis? The problems are manifold, and they're exacerbated by the fact that the school system is not nationally funded, but locally by local property taxes, so impoverished areas with stressed parents also get poorly funded schools.
I know some people who took part in Teach for America, and part of that experience was that they taught in some of the lowest performing schools. And one of their big takeaways was that the teachers in those classes couldn't maintain basic order, let alone teach effectively. Smart, well behaved kids aren't going to improve that situation, and it's going to seriously hamper their ability to get a good education if the teacher has to focus on keeping people in their seats instead of teaching.
Think about it. If they were serious about education, why are they not investing, Koch-style, in local politics? Why are they not funding candidates who will advocate for stronger school systems, better transportation, school lunches, etc?
This has nothing to do with kids. This has everything to do with extracting as much money as possible from the most anxious, which is incidentally the rapidly vanishing elbow of middle class in the ever-steepening power law curve of wealth distribution in the US.
You can always opt out of the crazy things that happen at public schools. After school, you can homeschool your kids. This way you can get the positives of both systems.
Education is complicated. We need to avoid comparing and optimization. It's idiotic to make a personal stance in education.