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Comment by bgutierrez | Hacker News Reader

After homeschooling, I also have a hunger for learning. It is the hunger of someone that did not always get enough to eat as a child and isn't going to let calories go by uneaten. The hunger of someone who suspects others know how malnourished they were as a kid and is afraid to look skinny. A hunger that keeps them up at night, telling them to eat and eat until sleep seizes them, then wakes them up early in the morning, so they can eat again.

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Interesting. That wasn't my experience at all. Maybe hunger is the wrong word: love of learning is better.

I grew up to truly love learning and be excited for our weekly trips to the library to get more books. Then when I had access to the internet I spent so much time learning code and design. My parents taught me how to learn and then gave me access to whatever I needed (mostly just the library and a computer).

That's cool. I'm happy that some people had good homeschool experiences. I grew up in a house full of books and loved to read and it mostly turned out okay except for the constant feeling that I had never learned enough.

My point is only that homeschooling in the US has an enormous variety of outcomes. This should be expected, because there is very little oversight, even here in California where some of my siblings only acquired what education a reasonably bright child can acquire by cultural osmosis. If you think I'm exaggerating, it might because you've never had to explain to an intelligent 13-year-old that the '<', '/', and '>' they are learning to use for html can also mean less-than, division, and greater-than.

I see you are invested in a company catering to homeschoolers. I think it's fantastic that education is becoming easier and easier to come by. Homeschoolers need all the help they can get. As long as you are encouraging people to consider homeschooling, I hope you'll take a glance through r/HomeschoolRecovery and get a view of what happens when homeschooling goes wrong.

Public school also goes terribly bad. Graduation rates are problematic, the government’s own 2014 study on sexual abuse found that fully 10% of kids are abused at school, not counting abuse by other students including sexual abuse and bullying, some kids are promoted year to year without ever learning basic skills, many kids have to take remedial math and English in college to get up to speed, suicide rates of teens goes way down during the summer months compared to school months, schools teach to the test, funding is a a problem, California is 44th educationally in the nation, etc. As far as I can see, there is no epidemic of former homeschooled students on welfare or being any sort of drain on the state. Sure, there are bad outcomes... there are with any percentage of childhoods, period. But the advantages of homeschooling, the freedom of being able to choose with your child the kind of educational methods and resources one uses, including how learning happens, and making sure it doesn’t look like school (because that way doesn’t work for everyone), is what makes it amazing. Sure, it doesn’t look like school. It’s not supposed to, and that oversight you speak of is exactly what would kill it and make it Just like school. Which would be a problem because they don’t know what the hell they’re doing most do the time...not exactly the gold standard we should hold up as an example.

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