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Comment by 35787 | Hacker News Reader

Public schools are a cancer. They are worse for your intellectual development than just being left alone. They actually damage your mind by suffocating you of free thought and experimentation. And in the name of doing this, they pile on the stress and expose you to viscous bullies. The kids run these schools now, they are closer to day-care centers or zoos than schools. The teachers just watch idly while their students succumb to the horrible circumstances that they are forced into. I know because it happened to me. American public schools in particular are a disgrace. And to top it all off they woke me up at 6AM 5.5 days a week which was never necessary and has been shown to be detrimental to students wellbeing. God damn if there is one thing in this world that I resent it is the mother fucking public schools. God fucking damn them.

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I'm sorry for your truly traumatizing experience, but you should know that not all public schools are like yours was.

There are a lot of public schools where students have great experiences on balance, but they tend to be in communities with resources, and importantly, involved parents, often via a PTA that is actively involved in keeping the school a safe place for children, usually with active anti-bullying programs and interventions.

Any school is ultimately an extension of the community it serves, and the problems and virtues of that community will manifest themselves in the school. For example, many wealthy private schools have severe problems with students who have access to high cost dangerous drugs. I personally know many people who have seen that phenomenon up close. Bullying can take place in these schools too, but be covered up by the fact that parents are paying very high tuition fees.

They’re the only place that most people will ever experience physical violence.

This is true for me. Public schools are so horrible that it drives me insane just to think about it. And people brush it off because of some vague notion that there’s no other choice. Look at billy eilish. She’s fantastic and very successful and she was homeschooled. Palmer luckey who founded oculus and is now worth something like 500 million dollars, homeschooled. “I can’t afford homeschooling. I have never even tried to assemble a budget or think critically about it but I just know it would be too expensive and would not work because nobody was ever successful after homeschooling. I guess I’ll just throw my child to the lions and hope they don’t become a shooter.”

Of course there are exceptions, but most homeschooled people I've met have displayed some sort of social deficiency. I wouldn't support a blanket statement that the solution is more home schooling.

Most homeschooled kids probably fall into religious zealot parent group or homeschooled because of obvious deficiencies displayed early on group. There is no intrinsic quality of homeschooling that makes kids deficient in any area. There is no reason why you can’t sign your kid up for little league and have him hanging out with other kids and adults. I’m just not convinced. And it wouldn’t matter anyway because literally anything is better than public school. If I have kids I will be forced to homeschool them.

I'd be very careful of making statements like that. Confirmation bias is a very dangerous thing. How many well adjusted home schooled people have you met without realizing or remembering they were home schooled?

You have to look at studies to have any hope of fairly evaluating the efficacy of home school.

You obviously haven't met many homeschooled people.

Homeschooling and the Question of Socialization Revisited

https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socia...

This article reviews recent research on homeschooled children’s socialization. The research indicates that homeschooling parents expect their children to respect and get along with people of diverse backgrounds, provide their children with a variety of social opportunities outside the family, and believe their children’s social skills are at least as good as those of other children. What homeschooled children think about their own social skills is less clear. Compared to children attending conventional schools, however, research suggest that they have higher quality friendships and better relationships with their parents and other adults. They are happy, optimistic, and satisfied with their lives. Their moral reasoning is at least as advanced as that of other children, and they may be more likely to act unselfishly. As adolescents, they have a strong sense of social responsibility and exhibit less emotional turmoil and problem behaviors than their peers. Those who go on to college are socially involved and open to new experiences. Adults who were homeschooled as children are civically engaged and functioning competently in every way measured so far. An alarmist view of homeschooling, therefore, is not supported by empirical research. It is suggested that future studies focus not on outcomes of socialization but on the process itself.

I had to look up this billy eilish and what is so fantastic about her?

Palmer - right.

I really enjoyed my public education, but I realize we happen to have very very good public schools in my city. I'm sorry your experience was so bad.

Thank you. But what really matters is not the well-being of individual people who fall through the cracks but the well-being of the whole country. Our public schools on the whole are simply not equipping people to be good citizens. Look at the average Americans knowledge of geography. We are an international embarrassment. How will people vote intelligently when they can’t even point to Germany on a map? It’s a very serious problem.

That was a highly negative recollection, sorry that you had such a bad experience. I was schooled through public in a poor urban district and it was rough but I learned a lot. I also taught science in very poor districts for years and most students liked school. Its akin to a job for kids, somewhat crushing to many but ultimately we do need to train and socialize and educate our populace. Home and private and charter schools all are important but public schools are essential to training our next generation.

I think you need some therapy dude.

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