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Comment by ilamont | Hacker News Reader

Remote K-12 education has given me a newfound respect for parents who effectively conduct home-schooling full time.

It also makes me realize how much kids are missing by not being in a classroom with their peers and a professional teacher.

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Was homeschooled, which was mostly a mixture of taking university classes from 12 onward in math/science + lots of motivated self study that was evaluated solely through dinner conversation with my dad. Ended up at Stanford for grad work in applied math. My dad was a PhD in philosophy though, and I was a very self driven kid. I think it's very family dependent, and the selection bias, as others stated, of who chooses to pursue it is the biggest factor.

Were you homeschooled before the age of 12?

I've always wondered what the learning outcomes were like for homeschooled kids vs. those that attended school (public or private). My assumption has been that homeschooling is less successful than sending the kids to school.

Generally speaking, what research I've seen mostly says that homeschooled children are more successful on various outcomes than average. However, homeschooling is hardly random and presumably means more parental involvement than average, among other differences that are probably fairly difficult to tease apart.

I feel like economic outcomes would be more aligned to socioeconomic factors than anything. The economic success of your parents determine your future more than your schooling for the most part. More telling would be measuring social skills.

Home schooled children generally get plenty of "socialization", it's just with adults rather than with large groups of children. All of the ones I know had social skills at or above average.

And yes, socioeconomic factors play a huge part in outcomes.

I find the "socialization" argument to be one of the weakest, honestly. Being able to "socialize" in a group of, say, second-graders with one teacher to 25 students is probably worse than useless; it's a pathologically bad socialization environment for spreading bad habits and incorrect expectations created only by the schooling environment in the first place. Unless you become a second-grade teacher, it'll never come up again, and you should actively not use a lot of the socialization skills you "learned" in that environment. While better than literally sitting in a room by yourself, I can't rate it above much else, and "sitting in a room by yourself" is not actually the alternative on offer. (After all, the parents aren't going to be able to stand that either, except in extremely pathological cases which are going to be pathological no matter what.)

If the schools were set up more like Montessori schools, this argument against homeschooling would carry a lot more weight. Age-based cohorts are pathologically bad environments, and if you look at history as a whole, a bizarre exception to the normal human environment. If it wasn't for the fact that the people arguing happened to grow up in that environment and thereby consider it normal, despite how abnormal it actually is, nobody would be arguing it's a good idea.

Its not the in class socializing, but out of class. Hanging out with your friends at lunch. In the halls. Walking to and from school. If you try socializing in class you get sent to the principle for being disruptive. Meeting kids your age in your area and seeing and talking with them every day is the social aspect, not class time.

I was educated montesorri until middle school, and while there was plenty of socializing it was ultimately detrimental imo. A couple of us including me had serious trouble getting assignments done with all the distractions and were always in the principles office as a result. One kid just had to work in a separate 'office' because he could not actually get his stuff done with his friends there in the class room available to talk all day. I didn't get my work ethic up until high school, didn't really apply myself until college, and to this day I struggle with self discipline and staying focused on the task at hand.

"I was educated montesorri until middle school, and while there was plenty of socializing it was ultimately detrimental imo."

So, you went from what I describe as a reasonable environment, where you did OK, to what I describe as a pathological environment where suddenly you had a lot of trouble, and apparently mostly (but not entirely) recovered when back out in a more reasonable environment.

This is basically what I would predict with my theory. You were damaged by entry into a pathological environment. How would you be if you had never been exposed to it? How much more damaged are those who never knew anything else?

I don't think your experienced is evidence against my point... it's evidence for.

You misunderstand socialization.

You're not learning explicit skills. You're learning implicit, semi or involuntary communicative behaviors. Similar to those not learnt by animals who cannot behave properly because they were not socialized when young.

But for humans it's more involved. We are essentially talking about a certain common cultural fabric and the problem is that if you don't fit that fabric, you will be at a disadvantage. Making friends, dating, interacting with coworkers - there's a critical window to keep your kids from turning into someone the average person would perceive as "weird". And the behaviors are subtle. Things like posture, voice tone, word pronunciation - I think "nerds" evoke a certain uncanny valley response in some people. That's a risk of homeschooling.

It may not be ideal but human nature is such that humans typically expect, on average, some degree of conformity. If personality and behavior are multidimensional vector, we're talking about an emergent clustering force, transmitted by socialization.

Edit: I speak from the experience of having spent years trying to catch up.

Socialization like any skill requires growth and needs to be developed. You don't give a 3 year old college level texts to learn to read.

You don't teach someone how to play baseball by forcing them to practice wrong technique for several years.

It's not just easing them in to socialization... it's giving them wrong socialization. We're all hot-to-trot about how important teachers are for all sorts of other skills both soft & hard, but it's apparently OK for kindergarteners to teach other kindergarteners how to socialize and it'll all be just the same as if they get good socialization the historically-normal way.

I was home-schooled from the 5th grade on. The amount of socialization I got was nil. I spent the entirety of that time utterly alone. It's been nearly 20 years and I still struggle with social stills. I'm strongly of the opinion that home-schooling your kids is one of the worst things you can do to them.

Based on the parents I've known who've homeschooled, I suspect the lack of socialization you describe must be at least a little exceptional. Not to minimize its impact, but it doesn't seem like a necessary consequence of the practice, going by what I've seen.

I wasn't home-schooled quite as long (5th-10th), but this was basically my experience too. We did go to outings with the local home-school group, but the local home-school group was 90% children with autism whose parents didn't feel the local school system handled special needs well.

I'd expect it to be strongly bimodal precisely because it's so self-selecting: You get the up-and-at-'em overachiever parents who can't bear the thought of their children being less-than-challenged at a school full of the kids of those who barely care, and the extremist parents who are so intense about their religion they can't bear the thought of their kids being out in the secular or even not-quite-as-religious world learning about stuff their dogma absolutely denies.

Maybe the children of the extremely religious parents don't make it into the studies.

As with all things in life, you get out of it what you put into it. Dedicated homeschoolers will often partner with other like-minded families for social experience and group work. Some do it to give their kids a heavily religious focused education, but not always.

One major benefit to homeschooling is the (potential for) constant focus- kids arent going to get lost in a room of 30 other kids with no personal attention or assistance; they aren't going to be sneaking out behind the shop to hang out with the rough crowd for a quick smoke, or bring vodka mixed with orange juice in a juice bottle in their backpack.

That isnt to say that they cant find ways to get into trouble, but with less pressure to fit in, they may find less reason to act out.

Of course, homeschooling is goung to have a hard time replicating the large groups with social pressures that schools have, so transitioning to, say, a large university or even the final years of high school may be difficult without preparation.

I have seen varying degrees of success along all of these spectrums, and would be reluctant to make any sort of blanket statement about "better" or "worse" without having a lot of insight into what local public schools are like to compare against.

Edit: for example, the public school where i grew up was great. Some public schools near where I live now are fundamentally rotten; black highschool students have a 30-something percent proficiency in either reading or maths, while white students fared marginally better in the low 60's or upper 50's... And these numbers are going down, not up, since earlier in the decade, in spite of it being a very left-leaning city with lots of talk over the years about improving education.

Learning outcomes or life outcomes?

For learning outcomes, I was behind for several years on the things I thought were boring (math), and spent lots of time reading about things that I was interested in (science, history, etc). In university once we got to the point where mastery involved understanding connected subjects, I was ahead.

I've been taught less about math than many of my peers, but recall a lot more of what I do know because I know why it matters. Which is why I work with data these days.

Homeschooled children consistently outperform publicly schooled children. There's plenty of verified sources out there from which to make your own conclusions, if you look.

Weighing in with a personal account for added authenticity with the acknowledgement of bias. I was homeschooled K-12, and my experience falls in line with what I've heard as the standard perspective: generally pretty average outcomes, possibly weighted toward greater academic success. High standardized test scores are normal. I'm surprised you've just assumed homeschooling is straight up less successful.

Depends a lot on the parents, can be very good or not. Let's say homeschooling is high variance outcomes, public education seeks homogenized outcomes.

>public education seeks homogenized outcomes

I'm not so sure it's actively seeking homogenized outcomes so much as prioritizing getting (most) students through at some fairly unambitious level over doing the most they can for top achievers even if that means lots of others get left behind.

There is incentive to push pupils up the bell curve to the mean, and incentive to push (the big heavy) bulk of the curve to the right, but much less incentive to push them down the other side.

Do you know the variance in homeschool outcomes or public education outcomes? Or are you just guessing? I'm going to make my own guess that the the outcome for public or home education heavily depends on the family environment.

It is quite evident in my experience. Has yours been different? If you want to read some eye opening stuff(it was for me), I suggest looking into the history of public education. Let's just say the American elites talked about this quite openly in the 18th century. Look into how Andrew Bell, impressed with the educational system in India, (particularly with it use in maintaining the caste system), went on to become a schoolteacher in America. His ideas do find plenty of expression up to this day. Unfortunately, of course.

That's a generally inaccurate assumption.

I was home schooled (never attended any standard school of any kind until I started college at age 14), have completed a very successful 20+ year military career, have a BSCS (MCL), MS (w/Honors) and another MS in progress, currently working as a senior engineer at a DOD contractor.

I know many others who have done the same or even far more. The school systems are not designed to reward or stimulate excellence.

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