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Comment by tmaly | Hacker News Reader

"Classroom attendance removes children from the everyday world of Western culture and plunges them into an environment far more primitive, magical, and deadly serious."

I know it was written in 1970, but back then a family could still have one person working a good job on just a high school diploma. Today, grade school serves the primary purpose as a daycare for the kids so both parents can work.

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Families these days can still do it but they don’t because they are led to believe in paying for convenience and get into a cycle that turns everything in their life into something the market provides. The insidious thing is that once you get into debt it is very difficult to break this cycle.

This is very true. I know families where one parent stays home and others where both parents work. What surprised me is that there is no correlation between household income and whether or not one parent stays home (at least not in my admittedly small sample).

It’s hard to do unless one parent is comfortable with, capable of, and willing to spend years facilitating homeschooling (property near good schools is expensive). Then it’s still incredibly expensive in lost wages (and greater income insecurity/risk, which is even worse in the US due to how healthcare and retirement works, plus it probably ties the other partner to secure corporate jobs for healthcare if nothing else, and so limits upside available from riskier moves) compared with other options, unless you have several kids and the stay-at-home parent had fairly low earning potential.

I have to disagree with you on several points:

1. Schools are ranked by test scores mostly, which is 99% dependent on the education and income of the parents. Even then housing near schools with excellent test scores isn't expensive except in the most expensive cities in the US.

2. I totally agree about the healthcare system though it has become a lot better since ACA. Healthcare is still disgustingly expensive but at least you can still get it and if you have a normal middle income in a family with a couple kids then healthcare is essentially free.

3. Requiring two incomes is much riskier than just one. Of course living from one income and saving the other is the best, but most people don't do that, and it's harder to do if you are both working since it costs so much money to work. Not working is cheaper. Take a look at Elizabeth Warren’s book, The Two-Income Trap. It explains this paradox much better than I could.

1. Unless all the stuff about how important peers are to future success is BS then it’s still a very good thing to have your kid in good schools, even if the schools are mostly good because of who’s there rather than instruction quality.

2. Yeah ACA definitely helps, but it certainly seems like yet another program with aid cutoffs far too low, leading to a largish doldrums income zone of paying a lot for “coverage” with no subsidy, but still having enormous risk exposure and high copays discouraging normal care. Maybe some day our HC system will not suck.

3. A society with normalized single-worker households might spend less, but one operates on the norms and market(s) one finds oneself in. And anyway even income covering 90% of expenses (with things like savings and retirement temporarily cut to zero) is better than income covering 0% of expenses, so I still think two incomes is more secure even if earnings are very unequal or expenses are higher than they would be with one income.

[edit] oh I should add to #1 that in my cheap city if you use bad schools as the baseline, OK-school areas are about 1.5-2x the price for a similar house, and good-school areas are another 25-30% above the OK-schools price. Not considering the city proper, since housing prices there are weird and anyone with money and a house there doesn’t send their kids to those public schools, ever.

One parent staying at home is not synonymous with homeschooling, and there are certainly parts of the country where affordable housing and reasonably average public schools coexist.

While this is true, it's also true that significantly fewer families can do it now than could in 1970.

It's also true that the most predictable factor when it comes to student performance in school is household income.

Isn't IQ a significantly more predictive factor than income?

Eh, there are a lot of legitimate questions around the validity of IQ tests in general

Sure, but if they're predictive then by definition they're locally valid.

> It's also true that the most predictable factor when it comes to student performance in school is household income.

Assuming you mean predictive rather than predictable, the most predictive factor from what I've seen is parental educational attainment, not income or (to respond to a sibling comment) IQ.

As someone who absolutely want work and thus needs the kids somewhere during the day, the whole "school is just daycare" is crap.

My kids were at home and I worked during covid and the hell they learn more now that they are back in school. And while I still am working from home and they were actually quite cool during day, the learning effects of school are massive and massively appreciated - by both kids and me.

It would be easier and cheaper to have them in non school daycare. We don't do that, because primary reason for schools is not actually daycares.

You must have much better schools where you live compared to me.

Yes, the quality of education varies substantially from district to district, or even building to building, and is highly reliant on geography and local income in the United States.

It’s true only because you and your kids weren’t prepared and didn’t have time to think through the situation. Trying to replicate school at home is a recipe for disaster. Instead, think about what an education means to you and what you want your kids to be when they are 18 or so. Then design your years and days around that. Nobody can fault you for the result of the pandemic homeschooling experiment. Nobody was prepared. And you were trying to work from home at the same time. This last semester has pretty much just been a pause for most people.

My gut feeling is that this falls apart if you try to work in the current Western work culture and rent or pay a mortgage in the current land ownership culture (especially in a major city). The kind, pace and quality of work you would do whilst simultaneously homeschooling doesn’t mesh with the current work culture. I’m fairly sure that if you could successfully homeschool whilst working, you’d have to work/produce more on local problems; have a more blended work-life balance (mixing work and non-work more freely); deadlines likely would have to be longer; you’d probably want to priorities craft and quality over mass distribution.

I find these ideas appealing, but I think you need to rip the innards out of capitalism to achieve it.

I think if we had enough effort put into it like we mobilized with the Manhattan project, we could create some amazing supplemental online material.

We have incredible technology and a good understanding of psychology. Why could we not apply some Hollywood approach to creating amazing lessons that are engaging and fun to watch?

Our undestanding of psychology is not all that great.

But what we know is that kids are social emotional animals. The relationship with teacher and other kids matter a lot. Interactions matter a lot. Own activity matter a lot.

There are fun and engaging lessons to watch, if you know where to look. The above is missing.

I hate to be that guy, but who would pay for it? The barebones and dull textbooks we have now came about because their publishers chase government money.

I'm even less hopeful there's a profit from selling to individuals or homeschool groups.

The U.S. spends upwards of half a trillion dollars per year on K-12 education (an average of $215,000 per 30 students). That doesn't include college or what parents spend out of pocket on private schools, homeschooling, tutoring, etc. I think there's plenty of money to be made by someone with a great idea and high quality execution.

But ... my kids did not ended badly. It was no catastrophe. There is no blame on me.

I just found that teachers know what they do better and that school is giving my kids more then I assumed before.

I could put in a lot of effort to design and plan years and days around education. But it would be awful lot of work for not much benefit. While the schools can be improved in a lot ot ways, they are much less failures then some people love to make them be.

Also, I know what it is like to be stay at home mom, I simply don't want that. It is profoundly unhappy situation for me and consequently imperfect for whole familly. I don't want it for myself and my kids don't deserved depressed stay at home me.

Failure isn't a word that I would use to describe schools — They do an excellent job of doing what they are supposed to do. Like Illich says, a single model isn't work for everyone, but let's keep the models that work for the people who want them.

For what I'm looking for traditional school is a tremendous waste of time and energy. Primary school skills don't actually need to be taught in anyway that resembles teaching. They just sort of happen naturally when you go about the business of playing and interacting with other people and engaging with society. So, my kids can do the stuff they want during the day. It doesn't take really any effort on our part as parents, other than being around them all day, which — to be honest — sucks. But for us it's a tradeoff that's worth it.

I wish we had something like the Sudbury School where we lived. There's just not enough people — Except in a few pockets around the country — That want something different for their children.

My kids did not learned to read nor write just by interacting with world. Nor basic math.

I would have to consciously manipulate them into situations for them to "naturally" learn that. Same for stuff like vocabulary, foreign language, about nature or space. Or anything history. Or general what to do when accident happen that they learn in a school too. Naturally by playing they don't learn any of that unless I consciously set up situations.

> Today, grade school serves the primary purpose as a daycare for the kids so both parents can work.

I have not found this to be the case. I'm not a professional educator. I'm not going to do as good a job at educating my kids as an experienced teacher. Looking at what our kids are learning, I'm impressed by the curriculum, which at least in our district has kept up with changes in day to day life and professional expectations.

This is oft-repeated, but in my opinion, the question isn't whether you are a better educator than a professional educator, the question is can you teach your child better than a professional educator can teach 30? The answer may still be no, but I don't think it's nearly as clear cut.

My wife and I supplement our kids education at home. It is my opinion that kids are capable of a lot more. The school is catering to the lowest common denominator.

I totally agree that kids are capable of more than adults think they are most of the time. Districts are incentivized to increase standardized test scores, from what I have seen this has forced some level of change, ranging from bringing in additional educators at the class level to work with groups at different levels, to using web applications that will assess and create individualized curriculum.

Has the No Child Left Behind Act and the push for teaching to the test really benefited kids?

You'll almost certainly do a better job than {an experienced teacher} + {an environment full of kids who don't want to learn}.

Its essentially private tutoring. I think its a lot for many parents to do. Their willpower is depleted after a day at work.

> so both parents can work

today, many families find themselves in a position where they 'have to' work.

It could be 'lifestyle inflation' but it could also be the deeper specialization - and certain jobs needing that, but these skills erode before the worker is able to adapt to the next wave.

> Today, grade school serves the primary purpose as a daycare for the kids so both parents can work.

The current pandemic has exposed this fact undeniably and you can see a lot of educators are unhappy about that.

A number of friends in the legal profession have told me that's why private elementary schools have been much quicker to reduce or refund tuition. Colleges can make the argument they're providing "education" regardless of physical location, while most legal experts will argue that a private elementary school cannot continue to demand full tuition when a significant portion of their value proposition is childcare.

Online education does much less for small children then for adults. The difference between in person and online for small kids is massive.

And in online version, parent does a lot of the education part. The elementary school kid can care about itself, even happily if allowed tablet.

But won't learn even with zoom without parent.

I don’t think that anyone will be able to learn on Zoom. It sounds horrible.

You can learn, but it is just not the same. My daughter is doing her piano lessons over zoom now. If she was not able to read sheet music, it would not work.

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