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Comment by DiffEq | Hacker News Reader

Just want to take exception to what you have said here. The issue is a matter of culture, not of access to teachers or the Internet. I home school my children and they have NO access to the Internet, have had no other teachers except for myself and my wife and yet you would not find them shirking their educational opportunities like this. We taught them discipline, to learn, to value education, and a love for knowledge; after that we could not keep them away from education. They were teaching themselves and pulling ahead of their peers years ago. They used pencils, paper and books...libraries and the books in them. That is not to say they don't love the outdoors; they also love to hunt, camp, hike and play baseball but they keep it in it's proper place. My children are the way they are because of our family culture. If those children had such a culture then this would not be a problem. But the truth is that the parents hand their children over to the schools and then that is it. They are not involved in any other way...it is no wonder the children are the way they are.

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This reads very closely to just blaming parents for not being good enough, and not raising good enough children.

While I’m sure family culture is incredibly important, we shouldn’t forget that growing up in such a culture is an incredible privilege. One enabled by having moderately wealthy parents.

Being moderately wealthy doesn’t mean having large saving or a fancy house. It means being able to provide 3 meals a day and clothes for your children. It means having enough time after work to pick up your kids, and read them a bedtime story.

There are many people living in the western world who aren’t that wealthy. Who have children and work 3 jobs just to keep them fed. You may even be tempted to say that the parents are irresponsible for raising children without proper financial stability, but that doesn’t help the children they have. It just provides an excuse to ignore a real social problem.

Watch Captain Fantastic - one of my favorite movies.

What most kids really need: time, attention, and role models who instill the values mentioned above (intellectual curiosity, love of reading/learning, creativity, achievement.) Kids are pretty minimalist when it comes to money.

Thanks for removing the part of your comment that came off as "I haven't encountered this in my personal experience thus it must not be true." I agree with your assessment on "what kids really need."

Still relevant: the money-time connection is very real and doesn't have to be as extreme as "works 3 jobs to put food on the table" to have detrimental effects to kids. It's pretty hard to influence your kids' lives the more stressed and busy you are. Life circumstances can come from all kinds of places, from having to support more folks e.g grandparents in poor health, or from having kids with special needs, or from having mental health issues personally or a spouse with such issues, etc -- the list goes on. Also if you can't home school or private school and your local school districts are total garbage, your kids might pick up values you can't control very well.

In general the idea <that a parent's ability to instill values on their kids is fairly correlated with wealth/privilege> doesn't feel like a stretch.

> In general the idea <that a parent's ability to instill values on their kids is fairly correlated with wealth/privilege> doesn't feel like a stretch.

Wealth is one way to avoid a toxic culture - if your public high school is terrible you have the money to put them into a different school etc.

But you can have a great culture without wealth. In fact I’d argue a great culture is one of the building blocks of wealth.

> But you can have a great culture without wealth. In fact I’d argue a great culture is one of the building blocks of wealth.

That statement is true but also not at odds with the point you're responding to. The point is that if you start off with less, you need to work that much harder to build that culture. It's like picking how to allocate skill points in an RPG. If someone gets 40 skill points to spread along attack/defense/hp vs you who only get 10 (this is what a wealth gap does), you could allocate all of them to 1 dimension to have reasonable performance there, but it will come at a cost. And even then you won't beat someone who had the luxury of allocating all 40 points to the same thing, since they have more to begin with.

What really irks me is when folks worship the character with maxed out stats in every dimension and then for lesser characters they say "didn't grind enough" or "didn't optimize correctly." Maybe just acknowledge the truth of the matter, that folks with maxed out stats probably grinded a lot (yes yes, very admirable) but also started with a better dice roll. And if kids grow up with less education-centric culture or worse learning outcomes you can't just blame parents for not instilling that. Some parents can do more, that's guaranteed. Some parents can't, that's also for certain.

> It's like picking how to allocate skill points in an RPG

To stretch your analogy:

And then we try to make up for the skill points gap by throwing money at the unlucky and tell them to just buy some better items to make up for it.

And it doesn’t work.

> Some parents can do more, that's guaranteed. Some parents can't, that's also for certain.

But that’s the beauty - you don’t need everyone to be able to in order to build a better culture and a better future.

> And if kids grow up with less education-centric culture or worse learning outcomes you can't just blame parents for not instilling that.

In my culture that’s exactly what we do. It’s not always fair on the parents but in practice for the community it works a lot better than throwing money at the problem.

> And then we try to make up for the skill points gap by throwing money at the unlucky and tell them to just buy some better items to make up for it.

I didn't assert anything about how we allocate dollars to level the playing field for parents. Identifying a wealth gap doesn't mean the solution is to simply throw cash at the problem (though solutions _do_ require money). Pretty hard to fix family culture if parents can't afford to spend time with their kids.

> But that’s the beauty - you don’t need everyone to be able to in order to build a better culture and a better future.

You certainly have a way of responding to things that weren't asserted in the first place. The statement you were responding to was intended to illustrate why we should have empathy for those lower on the wealth ladder. "Culture" is loaded because it's easier to build education-centric culture the higher on the wealth ladder you are. Because time, emotional bandwidth, and money are deeply connected in reality.

Your statement that in your culture you blame parents for not instilling education-centric culture is the thing I totally disagree with. I don't think shaming parents is producing results the way you think it is, or producing a "better culture and a better future," as you would say. Nobody wants to live in a culture where you get blamed for things outside of your control. And you should probably recognize that there are limits to how parents affect their children even under "perfect" conditions. These aren't nice little math functions where input -> output, these are complex human beings we're talking about.

> You certainly have a way of responding to things that weren't asserted in the first place.

I thought we were having a discussion and not a point-counterpoint style debate.

> I don't think shaming parents is producing results the way you think it is, or producing a "better culture and a better future," as you would say.

My parents grew up with actual famine, high levels of pollution, horrible factory jobs etc. So did almost all of my uncles and aunties.

A minimum wage job at Walmart in the US would have provided a huge increase in quality of life for them.

Yet looking at their education levels they were still miles ahead of the bottom 25% of US high school graduates.

> And you should probably recognize that there are limits to how parents affect their children even under "perfect" conditions.

Of course - but we can’t really untangle the complexities involved except by trial and error.

I feel we have tried providing more money/funding in the US with overall poor outcomes.

I’m telling you about a method that has worked - for a different culture in a worse economic environment. Maybe the success is not from the shaming but in spite of it - but like I said it’s difficult to untangle.

I’m not even really promoting it as I still remember the pain from getting caned for getting poor results.

The characteristics you wrote require having a steady schedule with secure housing and food options, which are extremely highly correlated with stable income, which is extremely highly correlated with earning power. So effectively, kids need parents that make money.

Family culture that values education, responsibility, etc is not at all based on wealth. I grew up poor, both my parents worked two jobs - mainly we didn't have money because there were lots of kids and certain incidents that kind of took the financial wind out of us. I walked a long way to school and I can't not remember ever having a bed time story read to me or my brothers. I was always on the school lunch program. But education, discipline and responsibility was valued; the same for my wife's family. Discipline and Responsibility is free and in this country so is education, schooling may cost money, but education doesn't. Now as to their culture -- there is a problem in that the parents of these children are the children of parents that also did not value education...it is a perpetuating cycle. How to break it? This is our conundrum and thus far we have failed as it seems that all of our various efforts are doing nothing to reduce the decay.

> One enabled by having moderately wealthy parents.

It is a cultural problem and not a wealth problem.

My state spends >$10k per student per year on education.

Excluding my mortgage my expenses for each of my kids (food, transport, clothing, etc) is well under $10k/year.

If we redirected the money from schools to parents the vast majority of two parent households could afford to homeschool their kids.

And that’s not including all the additional spending we do on disadvantaged families.

I’m a little confused as to what you’re trying to say. You start with

> It is a cultural problem and not a wealth problem.

But then go on to explain how providing an extra $10k a year to families would make a big difference in being able to educate their children.

You also make the assumption that most people can comfortably earn enough to pay for their own living expenses without children. US minimum wage is far below the US’s living wage, strongly suggesting that there are many people who struggle to feed themselves, never mind additional children.

Also there are plenty of families out there that don’t have two parents. Do you suggest we simply ignore them?

> an extra $10k a year to families

That’s my point - it isn’t an extra $10k/year - thats what we currently give families per kid.

> Do you suggest we simply ignore them?

Is there a reason they can’t simply keep going to school?

Some parents aren't good enough and aren't raising good children. Trouble is they're not to blame for the skills they don't have. What is to blame? Entropy. Plain old time degrading memory and skills and effort. It's almost as if a larger pattern of skill and memory retention would be useful. Something old and robust, yet flexible and humane.

It's been a long time since I decided that better parenting was probably the only world issue worth focusing on. I think it would trickle down into everything else. I'm not sure at what point the returns would be worth less than the effort, but given it has a 1.5 - 2.5 generation return rate, it's really hard to tell.

This reminds me of the final sentence from Tragedy and Hope, the 1000-page history of the first half of the 20th century by the late Carroll Quigley:

“Some things we clearly do not yet know, including the most important of all, which is how to bring up children to form them into mature, responsible adults, but on the whole we do know now, as we have already shown, that we can avoid continuing the horrors of 1914-1945, and on that basis alone we may be optimistic over our ability to go back to the tradition of our Western society and to resume its development along its old patterns of Inclusive Diversity.”

Do you worry about your children having large blind spots in pop-culture making it difficult to relate to peers later in life when discussing things and relating the childhood? I've wondered how music taste was going to continue with out FM, but just today my daughter had a google meet with her class where they have to have teams and discuss songs. Between tiktok, youtube, and dance class she did quite well. I imagine 13 year old boys will talk about fortnite how we talk about mario or zelda...

I don't think that's a huge problem. I almost had no interest in anything my classmates talked about but in the morning before going to school, I would open few trending pages and check up news for about 10-15 minutes and drop small hints to start conversation and let them continue since I lacked depth. Discussions are pretty cyclical and repetitive in nature. It's easy to pretend that you care about something superficial because deep down, people are also aware of it.

> Do you worry about your children having large blind spots in pop-culture

I home school my children, and it's intentional that they wouldn't relate to people in a discussion of pop-culture. That's what we're very much trying to avoid. The difference is that you seem to think that's a bad thing, and my family intentionally sacrifices quite a lot to achieve it. My son has never even heard of tiktok, but he talks about the Illiad with his friends.

I get how strange that sounds to someone who doesn't value the same things. We do worry that he may regret the decisions we've made later in life, but that's part of being a parent. Luckily the home-school community is larger than it used to be, and more secular, so he's not as isolated as home school families were in the past. There are plenty of like-minded families around that he'll be able to relate to.

What seneca said below is about what I think/experience too. Pop culture is just that = Pop Culture. It comes like a bubble and pops and is no more...I focus my children on the things that are lasting. By the way, I never played Mario or whatever other game that was. I know my peers did but we didn't have the money for such games.

The lack of basic internet access is problematic in this scenario. I don't know a single person who isn't receiving their assignments from their public school in any other way than through some web app.

Our libraries are closed -- we can't just go there and ask them for the public school curriculum (not that they would have it any way). It's possible that the districts may have mailed out course work to people, but I don't know if that has happened or not. The city of Minneapolis has given free public access to WiFi so it seems unlikely that something would have been mailed out.

I'm happy for you and your success with your children. It sounds like you've built a strong culture within your family. Not everyone is as fortunate to be in this position. Is that their fault? Maybe. Maybe not.

And I doubt you would have been able to achieve the same results if your wife was dead and you were working an essential job for minimum wage. "Culture" seems to be a byword for money here.

Negative, plenty of poor immigrants (and natives for that matter) instill a strong regard for education and personal responsibility including my own family.

And this still does not solve the problem of access to the internet (through which formal education is being delivered) or this idea of parents being able to both work to support their children and somehow replace this online formal instruction with homeschooling.

No, not negative. It's an empirically proven fact that children of wealthy parents perform better in school. This is not up for debate.

I don’t think anyone was denying that...

What I read was a repudiation of the argument that on average poor children fare worse in school therefore a given child from a poor family will necessarily perform poorly. It is entirely possible for a poor child to outperform wealthy peers, and the behavior of that child’s parents or the culture at home may have a large effect on their performance.

> This is not up for debate.

Is it because they are wealthy? Or how about, how much of the difference (not quantified here) is because of wealth?

> "Culture" seems to be a byword for money here.

is what I'm disputing, which would imply that money will solve our problems.

I come from the same culture.

I know several homeschool families, thanks to my kids being involved in an activity that's also popular with the homeschool folks -- classical music lessons. What I've noticed is that highly focused and self disciplined parents raise highly focused and self disciplined children, whether homeschooled or school-schooled. I admire them. Meanwhile, there's the rest of us.

Survivorship bias.

Being able to home school and choosing to home school is NOT the same as having it forced on you without any preparation. My guess is that you're a single income household. Others aren't so privileged.

You may be an exception that tests the rule. I do not have children, but I simply cannot imagine having to go through this stuff right now ( especially seeing what my co-workers are going through ). I do not have the patience to explain things that seem obvious to me. In short, I would not make a good teacher. There is a reason as a society we came up with school as a means to optimize the process somewhat.

I feel you may be a little too harsh though. You may say it is culture, but I would say it is the current situation people find themselves in. Not everyone has the knowledge, skills, time, opportunity and willpower to do what you do.

Intelligence, time preference, curiosity, and other characteristics that underly the behaviors you describe are strongly (genetically) heritable. It's probably not very dependent on (intentional) behaviors on the part of the parents. Blaming this on "culture" is an (optimistic) misunderstanding of the actual causal factors at play here - the reality is more depressing.

Couldn’t agree more. Parents who score high on conscientiousness and are able to set up that kind of home environment are going to have kids with many of the same traits (on average).

Please do not take this as an attack on you or your character, but rather as a disagreement with your actions based on my experiences- What you are doing is wrong. While you may believe you hell your children by raising them in a way that suites your ideal of how they best should be formed, they will not be in this bubble forever. Expecting your children to be able to healthily transition to adult life is folly at best and negligent at worst. Homeschooling in many countries needs an increased level of regulation to ensure children are afforded a similar life and childhood as their peers.

They are not being raised in a bubble just because they have no access to the internet ( that time will come when it is useful to them) and besides that they are active in several sports including wrestling, baseball and piano/orchestra. They have plenty of peer time. And my oldest has a job at a meat processing plant....if you want to talk about right and wrong I think your focus needs to be on the horrendous public school system which amounts to not much more than an overpriced baby sitting service.

You're getting criticized here but I agree. My family is not wealthy but we believe that education is the responsibility of the parents, and if they choose to contract it out, fine. And even though I have still had to go into work during this lockdown I've dedicated my time at home during the week to the education of my kids.

We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23010472.

> We taught them discipline, to learn, to value education, and a love for knowledge; after that we could not keep them away from education.

I'm curious as to your heuristics. Please point me towards your models.

Not as a "pics or it didn't happen way", but in a "I'm genuinely interested, don't want to waste your time, and because I'm wanting to be a parent myself and it seems like an insurmountable task without some kind of time worn received wisdom even if the actual words seem cliche."

I didn't use this specific course, I came across it later, but pretty much everything in it I taught my children early on; My parents taught me some of these things when I was young but these are the skills to teach and practice:

Learning How to Learn: https://www.coursera.org/learn/learning-how-to-learn/

And we use the Trivium as the curriculum to guide them and we used this resource primarily to develop their curriculum:

https://welltrainedmind.com/?v=7516fd43adaa

I will say this - I am excellent at math; even higher math such as Calculus. My wife is excellent with Grammar. So we are able to help them when they do run into some difficulty - but for the most part they can consume a subject on their own at this point.

In terms of reading early on we checked out the hooked on phonics at the library. With Math I made them memorize their math tables and how to do math in their head with one of those "Mental math" books - also from the library. I also taught them some common ways to memorize things and had them from early age to memorize songs, scriptures, and poems.

Learn these things early and there is no stopping a kid...

How do you homeschool your kids with a full time job?

Give 'em something to do in the morning.

Make sure they've done it by the evening.

Daddy I don't know what to do on this page! The directions are confusing.

Daddy I want to watch YouTube of DanTDM hooting like a monkey while playing Minecraft.

Daddy why aren't you famous like DanTDM?

Daddy multiplication is hard, can you do it for me?

Etc.

Looking forward to your one-size-fits-all response.

This.

We’re only two weeks into the term, and it’s been hell. With kids in primary school, unless you spend hours with them in the morning, they won’t be able to follow the set instructions without a million questions. We’re now getting up early and doing 2 hours of school before we both start work, and then doing another hour after I finish work. It’s stressful as fuck, but it just blows my mind when I think of parents who don’t have the luxury of WFH or who can’t understand some of the shit that schools are sending home.

We’ve talked to multiple parents, and ALL have cried along with the kids because they’re not coping. Some have even sent their kids back to school because it was unsustainable.

Parent better.

(Personally I doubt if many other two word directives are as resoundingly difficult. Maybe "Shave a yak." or "Solve P vs NP".)

Lol. You obviously don’t have kids.

What? Because I called it "resoundingly difficult"?

Either way you asked for a "one-size-fits-all response". I thought you were being playful.

Early on, from maybe 5 to 9, it was more demanding but at this point (one is 16 and the other is 12) they "own" their education. They know what they have to do and they do it.

And I take exception to your extremely ignorant comment.

>The issue is a matter of culture, not of access to teachers or the Internet. I home school my children and they have NO access to the Internet

Leaving aside the part of "absolutely NO access to the Internet", which already puts a cult-like vibe on your whole comment, how can you say that? How can you say "access to teachers and resources doesn't matter"?? Your kids definitely have incredible access to resources (if not teachers, in the traditional sense), so I struggle to think how you can produce such an egregious affirmation!

Some of these children from low income areas are subject to deprivations that you wouldn't even believe. Some of them have no mother or father, or no home, let alone a "positive family culture". They study in underfunded schools in a neglected and neglectful system. If you had even the slightest idea of what it was to be in their shoes... To go hungry to school. To hear your parents fighting as you try to concentrate for an important test. To be shivering with cold at night. To live surrounded with pervasive violence. To have your shit stolen all the time, having to be on your guard. To be bullied. To be engulfed in an inescapable, all-encompassing feeling of pure hopelessness. Maybe you do and you don't care? I'm not sure.

>They were teaching themselves and pulling ahead of their peers years ago.

>they also love to hunt, camp, hike and play baseball but they keep it in it's proper place.

>My children are the way they are because of our family culture.

Yes, I'm sure they're perfect little geniuses. Everybody in a cult is also perfect, according to the cult.

You have a bunch of interesting points in here all spoiled by your insistence that grandparent is running a cult.

I did not say that, not literally of course.

Lets just say some of these things you claim I can't imagine - I have experienced myself as a child. So you are the ignorant one.

This is a racist dog whistle.

Is Thomas Sowell a racist?

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