I would never send my kids to school (2017)

There is research into this - and it seems to work well for elementary school kids, with a minimum of homework for older students. (universities are different). Scandinavian countries do this and always score well. AT least here in Norway, they also do not hold elementary kids back, but work with them appropriately. There is more than one way of gauging development and progress.

There's a kernel of truth behind that one, FWIW. A growing body of evidence indicates that there can be too much of a good thing: Past a certain point, more homework actually hinders learning rather than helping it.

By way of analogy, it's not at all unlike how most weightlifting advice says to give your muscles a day of rest in between workout sessions.

e.g., I recently watched a talk where a researcher cited a study that found that putting kids in remedial literacy programs, with all their drilling and whatnot, seems to do more harm than good. The (deliberately over-simplified) impression I got was that, if you leave the kids alone instead of bothering them, you'll generally see a markedly bigger improvement through simple regression to the mean.

That this gets over-simiplified into a simple "homework bad" in the popular sphere is unfortunate. Sadly, nobody has yet figured out a way to inoculate science so that it can survive on Facebook.

Even in the 3rd world countries some teachers who know what they're doing have managed to organize schools that rely on competition as the admission process. That works pretty well for not losing potential Nobel Prize winners. Mass production of Nobel Prize winners would be just an act of violence towards the "more average" children.

Yes, if you look at extreme versions like the Soviet system it by and large did what it was supposed to do and produced for all it's other flaws a pretty solid amount of very well trained experts, and a very highly educated general populace. I'd include athletes from your list as well because they also tend to thrive in very rigid environments, artists and celebrities less so.

In my experience whenever I hear people talk about unschooling or free thought for their children it isn't about children at all but about the political beliefs of their parents. There's still this kind of 60s hippie or California 'free spirit' individualist attitude that also has a renaissance in 'hacker' circles. It seems to me more about the beliefs of a certain social class than generally about education.

I don't think schooling has much to do with people's failure or success as much as other factors that are either inherited genetically, financially, or socially. If you want high performers make sure they have the best genetics, come from secure families, have lots of money, and have a wealthy and powerful social network. Outside of that we have lottery winners and for those theorizing about to reproduce them is stupid as they are in fact lottery winners that won because of chance not for any good reasonable reason.

Product of the system doesn't sound right as even before schooling was common, there were some people who would rise to the top of the success ladder and some who would fall down. It is a fact of life that everyone is different and those difference allow some to be successful and others not. In fact, incomes have held stagnant through the rise of post secondary school popularity, indicating that schooling does not provide success (of the monetary kind). Mathematically, incomes need to be rising if people are making more money through attaining increasing levels of scholastic achievement when compared to people who lack such achievement. In reality, people continue to fall into the same income segments that they always would have, with some rising to the top, and others falling down.

What is well understood at this point is that people who are born into the right circumstances (genetics, family wealth, avoidance of illness/handicaps, etc.) are able to be more successful in what they do, be it school or other ventures. This is why you see a correlation between those successful entrepreneurs and success in school. Even Steve Jobs was successful in school, despite going about it in a non-traditional way. People are not successful because of school, people do well in school because they are successful.

Different environments for different people. A kid with ADHD will have serious problems in Montessori style school, even when medicated.

Not everyone needs to be a creative Nobel prize winner or otherwise prominent, as much as parents would like that.

The real trick is in finding potential ones and not breaking people in the process. Feeling like a reject for failing with assorted psychological issues or having trouble retraining. I'm taking here of the Chinese filter system.

We're going down this path as well and it's been a struggle to find secular options, but it is indeed growing much more common.

I'd suggest that social development can be served by literally just playing with friends though. In our area, the YMCA offers sports basically the whole year, which is a good way for the kids to spend time in a structured group setting (and if you're lucky, you can even be the coach!), and my wife has found plenty of fellow homeschoolers and unschoolers on FB who are looking for some social interaction for their kids (we happen to live in a place that isn't particularly religious though).

Relatedly, everyone just seems to agree that the socialization provided by school is good and necessary, and I'm not so sure that's true. It's been our experience that all of our friends and relatives, when they do complain about school, complain about bullying or kids otherwise misbehaving in a way that's stressful to the child in question.

In addition, our experience on the playground has been that kids who are in school tend to be way more likely to be rude and aggressive. And I don't say this to suggest that school makes kids rude and aggressive, just that I have 4 kids and I have spent a lot of time around a lot of different kids and I've seen zero evidence that school provides positive socialization beyond what could be had by attending regular play groups.

Being terrible is part of the value of public school. Unless you happen to get yourself into the prison system, it is very likely that you will never encounter an environment as degrading, hostile, and illogical as a public school system. One is exposed to people of all different abilities and disabilities, in a way that one is almost never forced to cope with after the age of 18. Exposure to that full spectrum of humanity is valuable.

I taught a couple of home school co-ops during school. I found that for this particular group, these kids basically didn't learn math, but were good writers, well read and eloquent speakers.

My wife says that they were all incredible awkward to be around, so there may be something to the social thing.

> Most homeschooled kids I've known have been very behind their schooled peers.

Behind? In what? We are homeschooling our daughter. For her age she's amazing with computers, english and painting/drawing(which is her passion), and also unlike her peers at school she learned to enjoy life long learning and has become autodidact as well. She never learned the usual things taught at school like: forcing other people what to do, bullying, all day on social media, hate to learn, etc, etc..

Would love to home school. Do you both work? Or only one of you?

Having spent plenty of time in both, I think it's actually a depressingly good microcosm. You have a status hierarchy. Those at the top can be arbitrarily cruel to those at the bottom with minimal consequences so long as they don't cross the delinated brightlines. Everyone is obsessed with status and its markers, because it determines everything about your life - who you can talk to, who you can date, who you can work with, etc.

The people who are supposed to be overseeing this and averting this mess generally have other concerns, limiting their ability and willingness to intercede.

Really, the only changes are the time-horizon and how the social groups are sorted.

Thank you. I toyed with the idea of having him accelerated, but emotionally he is so immature that the older kids will very quickly, to be honest rightfully, ostracize him. I have noticed he does get along better with older kids, maybe because they are more predictable for him, but I'm quite sure he is mature enough to handle the higher emotional expectations of older kids.

Thank you. This is an interesting idea. I will look to see if my area has something similar (SF Bay Area).

> "I didn't like it, it worked out badly for me, so it should be illegal for everyone"? That seems like a bit of an over-reaction.

It actually didn't work out that badly for me, I thought I made that clear. It worked out badly for most of the people I know, though.

I think it should be illegal because it's broadly unhealthy for society. It's part of a broader belief that the way to fix a suboptimal public education system is to make sure all parents have big incentives to invest time and resources to improve it, rather than for the wealthy to flee and create a system that works only for themselves and leave the public system and the remaining people it serves to wither on the vine.

> > There are always exceptions. > And yet you believe it should be illegal. It's going to be hard to make it illegal and still allow the exceptions, though.

Yes, despite the fact that some kids (such as myself) did OK under homeschooling, it should still be illegal. I also knew a kid who learned to drive a stick at age ten with no license, and he didn't die. He was an exception. Still a bad idea that should not be legal.

I feel fortunate in that most of the zany ideas I attached myself to in my late teens/early 20's were re: physics and mathematics. Because they could be pretty easily shown as nonsense with just a tiny bit more education and thought, like concretely, useless nonsense, for very straight forward easy to demonstrate reasons, I was able to later discard them without too much difficulty, and accept that I didn't actually have any Big Ideas about math and physics, ideas that were going to change the world.

If my Big Ideas about how the world works had been about something more difficult to prove or disprove, like sociology or psychology, I kind of think I would still believe them, because it's one thing to elaborate your maths to a logical contradiction on a couple of sheets of paper, and another to run a well-controlled experiment with thousands of subjects.

ditches need digging too. every us school i or my kids have been a part of has a gifted and talented program. two tier approach seems a reasonable compromise

Even here, there's a method to the madness. It may appear unstructured compared to the US.

Picking Finland as a model is problematic. Compared to the US, it's a small, socially homogenous country that speaks a language isolate.

A much better comparison is Canada, which demographically and socially is much closer to the United States but ranks even higher than Finland in education scores.

AFAIK from my contacts in Canada, their schooling system is very similar to the US, but had much better results.

You're right, there are some elements from the Agrarian Age, namely getting summers off to help with the harvest. But, if it's one thing I have learned, it's that anything can be disrupted!