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Comment by _skel | Hacker News Reader

School isn't just about education. It's also a social service.

School gets children out of the home, in some cases dangerous homes. It provides supervision for children whose parents would not be capable or willing of doing so -- rich kids get nannies, poor kids get left alone all day. It provides opportunities for socialization and puts kids in contact with adults who can serve as role models and alert authorities in cases of abuse.

The loss of these important social services matters a lot more than letting kids slip behind in math class by a year.

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This is very true in South Africa where millions of children get their main meal for the day at school.

Civil society had to go to court during lockdown to force the government to deliver the food!

Yeah, that's one that I forgot -- a lot of families are dependent on the free school lunch.

At least the school district in the suburb near Seattle that I live in has signs in front of the schools mentioning the lunch program is still providing food for such families and students in need.

School districts around Seattle often provide meal programs over the summer breaks too. Breakfast and Lunch.

A good number of children in the US also get their main meals at school. They quickly resumed serving them where I live even during lockdown.

One teacher in the UK actually delivered meals to kids personally during the lockdown.

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/uk/home-news/coronavirus-...

School also puts kids at the mercy of other kids who make fun of them or worse beat the shit out of them and break their glasses.

The one place most people will experience or witness violence at least once in their life is in a school. No one mentions all the people who feel safe at home, but suffer abuse and ostracization or ignored by teachers at school.

"Socialization", its like arguing people need food and then giving them dog food.

Given most modern school schedules, lack of recess, and lunch breaks being barely enough time to eat, I heard even what socialization does take place is being diminished.

School isn't the only and definitely not the best option for socialization.

At least in home school, they mostly learn socialization by and with adults, excluding extracurricular activities and co-ops.

Middle school was probably the only really violent time in my life. Several occasions I got the shit beaten thoroughly out of me and I was too scared to tell anyone about it because the fuckers threatened to just show up at my house or bus stop and beat me up even harder. I believed it. I often fantasized about bringing a gun to school and blowing them away, but knew I could never do it. It was fun to think about though as a kid.

Don't know whatever happened to those kids, but I hope they're in prison or dead, or just living shitty lives. I doubt they ever got better.

For me it was late middle, and first two years of high school. I actually had a guy wait in the hallways for me to pass by to terrorize me for one particular class. Another one I had to deal with on the bus when it got to be too much and I guess the bus driver observed enough of the constant abuse by this other kid that when the fight was over (I won), they didn't turn me in.

But I saw fights that were much worse, fights that ended in bleeding, cracked ribs and concussions, thankfully there was hospital across the road. This was in a rural region high school, in the 90s, I can only imagine what its like in places with actual gangs, today, etc.

The worse part about it is, you tell the teachers, they do nothing substantial, then you're a snitch. If you do the one thing likely to solve the problem, which is fight back, you're punished, and now the cops are called and you're likely arrested. Some kids eventually snap, and parents wonder why school shootings are a thing.

Don’t look them up. I remember hearing about someone who basically had their life thrown into crisis when they looked up their main bully and found out that he was rich, married to a beautiful woman, had three perfect-seeming children, etc.

What on earth is a "perfect-seeming" person?

A kid who is smiling and well behaved in a Facebook photo. Basically, the guy worked at a grocery store, was single, wasn’t an unhappy guy, but always thought karma had caught up to his bully. When he discovered that karma doesn’t exist it sent him into depression and rage.

"Public schools are literal prisons for children and the only time many people will ever encounter physical violence in their lives."

~Michael Malice

https://mobile.edweek.org/c.jsp?cid=25919951&bcid=25919951&r...

https://nypost.com/2018/01/30/teen-suspended-for-inciting-vi...

https://reason.com/2020/09/07/zoom-nerf-gun-school-cops-kid-...

They treat their students like it.

Give everyone vouchers and education will be 10 times better.

That will just splinter society further into divisive religious and other ideological tribes who can’t understand each other or even get along. We have some of this now but vouchers make it worse and drain the budgets of public schools. The money has to come from somewhere and it ends up coming from taxpayers. So then less taxpayer money is available to do actual helpful things.

Denmark ties education funds to each student, not the school district. They seem to be doing fine.

> Denmark ties education funds to each student, not the school district. They seem to be doing fine.

Lots of places don't, and are also doing fine.

That's because that particular feature is orthogonal to any real issue.

Or they have better governments.

When the problems in Detroit and LA subside maybe I would be with you on this point.

How does that work?

crickets...

I support vouchers because I support competition. However, even I’m skeptical things will get 10 times better.

Detroit LA Baltimore Chicago ect...

There's so much room for improvement.

That there is room for improvement does not prove that a particular method would cause the desired improvement.

There is considerable reason to believe almost all variability in school performance is due to factors unrelated to the actual school itself (predominantly, the socioeconomic background and environment of the students and degree of parental involvement), which explains why limited scale efforts which require active parental choice to engage always perform better than the baseline, but scaling those up to be the baseline usually fails to have the same results. Better schools are just the schools attended by the students that would do best whatever school they were in.

So, if you aren't directing the solution at the things outside of schools that drive school outcomes, I don't expect you are going to solve any problem with the schools.

"unrelated to the actual school itself"

Like corrupt administrations that siphon funds needed to fix buildings teaming with cockroaches.

https://www.freep.com/story/news/local/michigan/detroit/2016...

We can postulate how a top down approach might work but these students will still be suffering while we sort and continually monitor (we won't) the system.

Involving market forces and allowing parents to have say in where their children will be educated puts the power in the most effective hands for change.

The inflexibility of the current system is an issue, at least the ability to try different schools/home school options allows people to try everything until they find what works, more so they can find a school that works best for their child.

Just like remote learning, if I don't like K12, I can try another online school, same as I dump Netflix for Hulu. I'm not even geographically limited. If there is a teacher that specializes in teaching dyslexic students and I have a child that's dyslexic, I'm no longer limited that the teacher isn't in a school within 5-10 miles. The teacher can be in another state even technically as long as she's board certified in my state. There is also a geographic arbitrage advantage, if my school system doesn't pay teachers enough to live comfortably in my city, maybe the teachers can be hired where its cheaper to live. Or teach for NYC and live in rural NY state.

There was an interesting issue with the voucher system- most specifically, in areas with the voucher system, private schools are not held to the same standards as public schools. Ie. They are not tested the same for quality and they are not expected to have the same programs for special needs children.

Private and home schooled kids consistently outperform public schools by a GIANT margin. The quality of education, by say a Montessori school, compared to public is drastically different; from building self esteem, independence, critical thinking, creativity, socialization, etc.

Public schools, are derived from the Prussian system, its optimized to create obedient workers, its the lowest common denominator in education.

Arguements of equality in public schools are out the window too when you compare the funding and quality between poor counties and wealthy ones.

Its especially unjust that parents paying for private education pay twice, for public and private.

First, there is a massive selection effect going on here (motivated parents).

Second, let's see what happens if we fund private and public schools equivalently. Class sizes of 10 don't happen by accident.

Paying for private education "twice" is just part of rich people paying for the society that enabled them to become and stay rich.

It's really too bad that the only way we can be sure rich folk pay their fair share is to charge them twice for private education. Otherwise, my mother may not have felt it necessary to work the overnight shift at the local factory for decades in order to provide us with the basic necessities and a private school education.

Motivated Parents is everything. Focus your programs on that instead?

"Second, let's see what happens if we fund private and public schools equivalently."

Detroit get's $14k per student. Cost of living in Detroit is low and barely anyone who graduates is literate.

I don't think funding's the problem.

Cherry picking data can certainly show that private and home schooled kids do better on tests. It's easy to self select and paint a great picture.

US Public schools blow everyone else out of the water if you shave off the bottom 10%. The US problem with schooling is more and more a problem of equity. People need to understand that helping other kids isn't going to hurt their kids.

US taxpayers would rather throw money at prisons and police instead of education and social workers. I don't mean schools when I say education, I mean outreach to families and help getting them what they need.

"US Public schools blow everyone else out of the water if you shave off the bottom 10%."

Who is "everyone else?"

"US taxpayers would rather throw money at prisons and police instead of education and social workers."

Agreed. End the war on drugs and personal freedom. End the wars, bring every troop home, from everywhere. Cut the military budget.

"I mean outreach to families and help getting them what they need."

In 2019, we spend $90,960 per family of 4 on welfare. The money's there. Unaccountable bureaucracies waste money. This will never change.

A little dated, but here is a good citation. https://inequality.org/research/america-failing-schools/

Where is yours for that $90k BS. Sounds like a serious argument for just giving poor people cash.

"US Public schools blow everyone else out of the water if you shave off the bottom 10%."

Again, I don't know who you're referring to by "everyone else."

"Where is yours for that $90k BS."

Enjoy!

Federal Breakdown 2019 in Billions:

$59: EITC Refundable Tax Credits - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/020-0906

$29: Child Tax Credit - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/020-0922

$64: SNAP (Supplemental Nutrition Programs) - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/012-3505

$51: Housing Assistance - https://www.hud.gov/sites/dfiles/CFO/documents/3%20-%20FY19C...

$57: SSI (Disabled, blind or senior citizens) - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/028-0406

$31: Pell Grants - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/091-0200

$16: Temporary Assistance for Needy Families - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/075-1552

$23: Child Nutrition - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/012-3539

$12: Head Start - https://www.acf.hhs.gov/about/budget

$5: Job Training - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/016-0174 , https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/016-0181

$5: WIC (Women, Infants, and Children) - https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/wi...

$5: Child Care - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/075-1550 , https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/075-1534 ,

$4: LIHEAP (Utility bill help) - https://liheapch.acf.hhs.gov/Funding/funding.htm

$1: Lifeline (phone payment help) - https://www.usac.org/wp-content/uploads/about/documents/annu... Page 8

$409: Medicade - https://www.usaspending.gov/federal_account/075-0512

Total: $771 billion

People below the poverty line in 2019: 33.9 million - https://www.statista.com/statistics/233138/number-of-people-...

$771 billion / 33.9 million below poverty citizens = $22,743

$22,743 * Family of 4 = $90,972

THIS IS JUST FEDERAL SPENDING AND DOES NOT INCLUDE STATE AND LOCAL SPENDING!

Wow, just kind of threw the kitchen sink in there didn't you. Many if not most of those go to middle class and higher families. Pretty thanks for providing the details so we can all see how disingenuous this argument is.

Fair enough. Where are your numbers?

We live in western New York. My wife teaches in a private school and my daughter teaches in a charter school. The New York State Department of Education provides standards and direct support for high functioning special needs students and transportation to/from special classes for those with greater needs. The students in these two schools take the same standardized tests as those in the public schools. My wife teaches college level classes in Physics and Calculus to high school students with oversight from a local community college.

This is a great deal for the students because they enter the college of their choice with a better background than a typical student.

Yes, like I said, private schools are not held to the same standards. They get to use public services like support for high functioning special needs students while claiming more profit off those programs. Additionally they get to pick and choose people who attend these schools- I noticed you only specified "high functioning" for those schools. A public school doesn't get to choose between "high functioning" special needs students and "low functioning" ones.

Perhaps an increased voucher for special needs students is in order.

Society is disadvantaged when intelligent students aren't allowed to achieve their fullest potential. We need programs that allow students to independently work at their own pace. We'd have a ton more 15-16 year old's attending college.

This still doesn't allay the issue that private and charter schools have the ability to simply decline to take up students that are more difficult for them to teach.

Increasing the voucher for special needs students?

With your vouchers, is any school required to take a voucher required to take a student?

What if the student has a learning disability? In a smaller school, that will certainly take down the test scores - will three LD students ruin the school's reputation? How about people with down syndrome, for example?

What if the student requires major accommodations - for example, the student is quadriplegic? The big school systems currently take money from all students to help out with these expensive cases.

Will these private schools with vouchers be required to maintain the same standards as the public schools? For example, can a school discriminate via race or religion?

Most voucher advocates are really looking to take the easy students and dump the hard cases on a backstop underfunded public system. Then everyone will look at the public system and say, "see how much better the private system is!"

Because the private system does not take the hard cases.

You have a lot of questions. Denmark has money tied to the child and not the school district. Look into their system for more answers.

Everything is a process of improvement overtime. The reality is, we don't have all the answers ever. What matter's is how much things are improving overtime. I don't see that with public schools.

I could easily ask you a ton of questions on how to fix Detroit or LA schools.

Allowing competition fixes a lot of problems.

> Give everyone vouchers and education will be 10 times better.

This claim could desparately use evidence.

Denmark.

Denmark proves that vouchers are not incompatible, when combined with the other conditions which exist in Denmark, with good outcomes, but the other places that don't do it and also have good outcomes show that it is not necessary for good outcomes.

Good points. We just don't have that vacuum to test as gov's differ.

Market forces improve conditions. Motivations are realigned to the incentive of the parent's satisfaction with their kid's education. Service improves when you have competition.

Children can also be the victim of domestic violence and fighting among kids is not uncommon.

Just for the record and as "background", Michael Krechmer (now Malice) attended Stuyvesent High, which is ranked #25 in country:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stuyvesant_High_School

I still remember my first fight, it was at school in 2d grade in Seattle. I was a new kid, a jerk jumped me right in class for touching his chair. Luckily it was harmless. I was not bullied after probably because I was not small or completely friendless even though I was shy and quiet.

The next time was in 5th grade in Texas (new kid again -- I was the weirdo from Seattle). Also harmless. We didn't even get suspended or put on detention in those days.

The next time was in the Army defending someone who was being bullied by a racist. That was scary for me because I was so angry I could have really hurt someone. Luckily, cooler heads intervened.

Growing up, I heard stories from cousins that went to public school in the Chicago area. Major fights everyday. Though they managed to stay out of harms way.

Back in Seattle, my son got suspended for play fighting in middle school (zero tolerance) but otherwise he made it out without getting into any fights -- it helped that he was/is very tall and a popular athlete.

Onetime when I picked him up after a dance there was a horrible fight where a large girl was beating the shit out of a smaller girl with 100s of kids whooping it up around them. Crazy time.

Plenty of more stories from his time in bad schools in South Seattle. Scenes out of a movie bad. Most people can't imagine the out-control violent environment that exists in some US public schools. Even in cities like Seattle.

I can't imagine how bad it could be for kids forced to go to bad schools in big cities like Baltimore, Philly, Chicago, LA, DC, and such.

Want to tack this on.

"In Finland, where substantial physical activity is part of the school day, rates of ADHD are also very low. Meanwhile, in the U.S. children are asked to sit still for the majority of the day. Elementary school students often get only 15-20 minutes of recess a day, a far cry from the 60-90 minutes their parents had. Coincidentally, ADHD rates in the U.S. have gone up over the last 15 years. "

https://www.forbes.com/sites/alisonescalante/2020/08/11/rese...

A common joke in the home-school community is: "I was worried my kid was missing out on the socialization of public schools, so I beat him up and stole his lunch money".

People have very anachronistic views of home schooling. A generation ago it was fair to believe to was mostly ultra religious people wanting to shelter their children. These days, a large chunk of it is people that have no faith in public schools to educate their children, and people who want to avoid political influences that are creeping into public schools.

Or get involved with drugs.

> People have very anachronistic views of home schooling.

Yeah, those people have never set foot in a public school in the bible belt. Separation of church and state my ass.

Yeah, that's actually a great argument, and no matter what school you're kid is going to be exposed to the personal crackpot values, politics, and theories of any teacher, the more likely a teacher is to share their personal values the more likely they're not something. They often forget their job is purely to deliver content based on the curriculum and there is a boundary there they need to respect. i generally respect teachers, but I don't trust someone who got a 4 year degree and certification to take an underpaying job making less than an average college educated salary, and often requiring a breadwining spouse to live comfortably, to think rationally about something including their value systems. Yes, they may have done it for other reasons, but that's still an indicator of making major life decisions on emotional thinking and further contributes to the issue of underpaid teachers (they're not going to pay you more if there are plenty of teachers willing to work for that salary). I'm dubious and sceptical of the kind of person who reads The Secret, or relates everything in life to Harry Potter, but says all religion is dumb.

I've had one teacher tell my sister my mom was awful and was cheating on her taxes in front of the entire class humiliating her because my single mother, didn't get my sister a SS card, which at the time you didn't need until you paid into SS.

You don't have to like every parent, but ultimately the child is their responsiblity, the values of a child are up to a parent to pass on. Not the teacher's or the government's role. Outside of something that is actually inflicting harm, and you can hate religion but its not the worst thing in and of itself and bad parents don't need religion to mess a kid up.

I am a teacher. Would you trust me more if you viewed my underpaid work as a charitable donation to the society in which I live?

Would you pay 60% marginal tax to see class sizes halved, salaries doubled, but maybe also remove any sense of public duty from the role?

(One more: would you like to see complete commercialization of eduction, with real salary competition driving up wages, but with the state rather than the parent picking up the bill. Compare this with college education, where student loan companies pick up the bill — you can see where I’m going with that analogy.)

Not the OP, but I would be happy with teachers earning twice as much IF it went hand to hand with removing the worst teachers from the system. Unions will fight that with tooth and claw.

It is my experience that the worst 2-3 per cent of people can ruin entire institutions if left unchecked.

> IF it went hand to hand with removing the worst teachers from the system.

How will we decide who is the worst teacher? Peer review? Student review? Ask the parents which teacher's politics they dislike more?

I'm not saying it can't be done, but I am saying that it's unlikely to be done right.

That is a hard question, yes. There is no universal metric that would tell you that.

That said, it is not unique to schooling alone. Bosses around the world have to address this problem as well. IDK how Elon Musk runs his "no assholes policy" in SpaceX, but he seems to be successful. Ofc, maybe his approach isn't scalable, who knows.

Parental review sounds like the perfect way to judge teachers. Parents are the most invested and least affected by nepotism within the institution. They're also way more likely to be concerned about the outcome for the kids.

In general though parents should be the ones making decisions about their children. Teachers being judged by arbitrary beurocrats i.e. what we have now sounds obviously worse to me.

The whole political argument seems weak to me. I think most parents probably care about academics more than that to begin with, but if political homogeneity is important to a particular parent, why shouldn't that influence their vote?

Least affected by nepotism within the institution, sure, but obviously affected by their relationship with their kids. Surely that would create a bias in favor of teachers who are likely to give students good grades?

If the education is subpar, the particular skills and knowledge that were missed can probably be picked up later as needed, but poor grades can alter the trajectory of your life in ways that are harder to recover from. So I'd expect parents who care more about the best possible outcome for their children more than being conscientious (which I honestly assume is a majority) to prefer those.

Ehh, I'm not convinced. It would probably happen to some degree but the important exams are graded independently.

Ideally you'd let the kids choose, but their brains are unformed and probably bad on average at long term planning. So I will say parents choice - they are the people most likely to be making good decisions on the child's behalf.

Also - if it is impossible to detect bad teachers, then it is impossible to hire good teachers and therefore they are hiring at random. And parental choice can't be worse than random or that would be a signal we could use to pick the best teachers.

It's extremely easy to detect bad teachers if you're a child or a parent (or another teacher). It's hard to detect bad teachers if you're a beurocrat looking at grade tables.

I had a chemistry teacher who loved the school athletes and was confrontational to the nerds. So the first set of parents thought she was great and the second didn’t.

I will give you that teachers know who the other bad teachers are.

I don't think that's typical. Most bad teachers are just bad, across the board, and everyone knows it.

> I will give you that teachers know who the other bad teachers are.

Unless teachers happen to spend their days sitting around in other teachers' classrooms, I highly doubt that's the case.

Teaching is not collaborative work, and I would not be comfortable giving a peer review to someone who I never interacted with, outside my lunch break.

They do, however, have a pretty good idea of which other teachers they personally don't like.

> Teaching is not collaborative work, and I would not be comfortable giving a peer review to someone who I never interacted with, outside my lunch break.

This feels like an assumption to me.

My wife is a public school teacher. There has always been heavy collaboration between her and her colleagues, even more so now with remote learning. There are certainly unmotivated and lazy teachers and the other teachers know who they are.

Parents who choose also will pick based on their own politics- book banning was parent led.

Is the social contract that they are allowed to disagree with you, but you get to decide what their children think? I'd bet a dollar they didn't realise they signed up for that.

Parents are on average stupid. So are government officials. Centralising the power just means that when there is a bad official, everyone suffers. Just because the best alternative is still bad doesn't mean there is a great option here. All the choices have drawbacks.

I agree all choices have drawbacks. I'm merely pointing out that using parents to judge the quality of educators due to the political leanings of educators implies parents themselves aren't politically led. I don't know if an apolitical education is possible- how does one teach history or social studies?

I think if teachers were paid more they would feel a stronger sense of public duty. I don't think being paid less makes people feel more duty to their work.

That emotional passion for charity fades, it becomes another job, then you have burn out. Most professions that pay well, when the passion fades, you at least get paid enough to pursue other things in your free time to fill that lack of fulfilment.

The best teachers IME have always been retired professionals who are doing it kind of like a Walmart greeter, that to me is a great time to give back your time. But they seem to be better teachers because they've been something other than a teacher and also know their subject matter outside of theory assuming they teach in the same field they practiced professionally.

There's already enough money, and each additional tax I pay towards education, gets redirected a few years later. This is what happened with lottery money. Any additional taxes for education need to come with the caveat the taxes I'm already paying that going towards education now, don't get reassigned in the next budget and the money going towards education remains the same, and it was really a backdoor way to raise taxes for other things under the guise of "education".

Personally, I think we need to buy less bombs or pay less taxes on the federal level and more on the local level, pay teachers more but make it easier to fire the bad ones, the problem will solve itself. But most additional money seems to find its way going to the administration in public schools and universities, so I'd probably start by taking money away from administration.

What is your background to this comment, if you don’t mind me asking?

(I‘m “old”. I have a masters in CS, was a SWE for 15 years, took early retirement, then came out of retirement to teach.)

All my best teachers, including college, had practiced in the field. Actually your scenario is exactly what I was thinking about doing in old age given my CS teacher was math teacher that had done punch cards once in college. By the end of the class, I knew the programming language better than she did and was the one going around helping students with debugging.

My belief is that public schools are part of the foundation of a community.

If you're not part of them you're not invested in improving them. And, I don't mean improving them for your child's specific sake, but overall.

And, if you're not, you're not really invested in your community.

Private schooling and homeschooling are options that I view as opting for the privilege to be above or separate from the community that I live in. My values prioritized equity, and yours may be different.

>Private schooling and homeschooling are options that I view as opting for the privilege to be above or separate from the community that I live in

I'd wager that you're speaking from the privilege of living in a community where you don't have to worry about your kid being knived, shot or raped at school, otherwise you might have a different opinion. Not everybody has the income to support living in a safe community, and for those who don't, private schools are the only option to ensure their child experiences a reasonable level of safety.

> I'd wager that you're speaking from the privilege of living in a community where you don't have to worry about your kid being knived, shot or raped at school, otherwise you might have a different opinion.

Not that it makes a huge difference, but I'd wager that, outside the USA, that's almost unheard of in the developed world .

I know that doesn't make a lick of difference to an American who is in that situation, but surely it's a reflection of American society and culture, not the concept of public schooling in general.

> Not that it makes a huge difference, but I'd wager that, outside the USA, that's almost unheard of in the developed world .

Raped or shot, probably. Knives tend to get more common in Europe too, at least in the very diverse urban centers.

Maybe? Some criminals swap guns for knives in countries other than the US (though there's still plenty of criminals with guns too). The main difference is the culture though. Violent crimes are at least an order of magnitude less common in a lot of non-US countries. I'm all for gun laws but I don't think the weapon really changes the equation much.

Schools are the same. I don't think I've ever heard of someone being knifed in an Australian school. Even though theoretically anyone could do it. There's no security or anything, it just doesn't happen as often as in the US.

As an American, I think the tolerance for violence in American society is astonishingly high. I think that our high urban crime rates and our documented problems with police brutality are symptoms of the same disease. Certainly widespread gun ownership and latent racism are confounding factors, but I don't necessarily believe they're the driving force because they are a poor explanation for the violence we see in places like Baltimore and Chicago.

I've come to believe that there is something very wrong with our attitude towards violence, and yet it's not clear to me why we are different or how we got here, let alone what policy changes could address it.

For what it's worth, the USA is very commonly perceived overseas as an incredibly violent society.

It is and it isn't, it varies heavily on where you live. Most people never see or experience violence outside of schools. For all the talk on the news, I've never seen or met someone whose encountered violence lately.

It's certainly less common in Europe as well but not unheard of. I feel like we're slowly going towards the US, with the UK leading the way, but we're still quite far away.

There is a lot of violence in public schools in developed countries outside of the US.

I went to a public school in Australia in a relatively wealthy area and saw multiple gang beatings. One guy beaten so badly that he was knocked out cold for over ten minutes with people jumping on his head.

I know for a fact it's worse in less wealthy areas.

Australian public schools don't have shootings but there is enough to fuck up kid's development. They always descend into honor culture violence. I'm speculating but I do wonder if it's significant part of the problem that poor Black communities in the US face. These young boys thrown into a pit in a status game where they have to prove themselves and become brutalized in the process.

One solution to that is private schools where the staff are accountable to paying customers who won't stand for this violence. Low tier bureaucrats who can't get fired in public schools just don't care or can't stop it.

There are exceptional public schools with no violence, often they're selective, but they're rare.

Where is this level of brutal violence the expectation of public school? That sounds far more like an 80s movie.

At risk of oversharing and personalizing, we attend school in Brooklyn, at a school that prioritizes inclusion of non-native English speakers and kids on food assistance. A large percentage of our classroom's kids live in public housing. It's a safe room and building.

And, please don't kid yourself about private school buying your way out of the potential for traumatic experiences. Elite boarding schools don't have the best histories wrt sexual assault.

"you're not really invested in your community."

Even if I accept this conclusion without questioning, not being invested in your community is perfectly OK. Some people are not particularly 'communal' by nature, some hold views very different from the local standard etc.

Imagine that you are a pacifist in a community that holds militaristic views and they seep into the local school system.

This kind of closed minded, judgemental stuff is why people don't even bother trying to explain themselves and do what's right for them be it private or home schools.

I'll happily not be part of your community.

> If you're not part of them you're not invested in improving them.

You have little to no way to improve them. When the environment you live in is shit, the best way is to move, not to spend your life fighting to change your neighbors.

Raising good kids and protecting their mental health is contributing to the community. Throwing them to the wolves so they can become messed up is not.

I would agree with most of that. I'm not a collectivist, and have no interest in sacrificing my children's well-being for collectivist goals. I will do everything in my power to give them an advantage in life, equity is explicitly not my goal.

Interestingly, people involved in homeschooling tend to be very involved in volunteering. I myself volunteer more hours than I care to think about. However, they tend to be involved in sub-communities, not the public community as a whole. Based entirely on anecdotal experience, I would bet that they do more for their own communities than the general public on average, it's just focused outside the public sphere.

Then again, people who homeschool do like to paint the schools in worst way possible. They do like to think school is the worsets of the worst, even when it is not.

That is called having an opinion. It is not as if people homeschool for shits and giggles. Homeschooling costs a lot of time and energy, it would be easier not to do it.

Yeah and that opinion is heavily motivated and not necessary fair assessment of school nor attempt to fairly asses the school. Whether by wish to feel that you do the right thing or by religion or politics or whatever.

The comment I responded to was literally about common joke in home schooling community that is literally that. It is not even opinion, it is exaggeration meant to paint the schools as much worst that they are. The schools have issues with bullying, it does exist. But, very realistically, "the socialization in schools consist of kids beating each other and stealing lunches" is over the top.

It is over the top, but worst experiences tend to overshadow the rest. If someone beats you, odds are you won't forget that humiliation for a long time. Ideally, people should not get beaten in school at all, much like we do not tolerate the same in a regular workplace.

Some schools manage to prevent that, good for them. Those that cannot or are unwilling to do so, will end up as bad examples in conversations.

If we want to use the worst examples as the example to measure schooling by then I think the worst examples of home schooling should really be emphasized here. Wasn’t there a case recently where a white mother of adopted black children took and homeschooled her children after teachers tried to report possible abuse- and then the mother later went and killed her children and then herself? I believe that was the background to a popular image of a black child hugging a cop and looking into the camera with tears in his(the child’s) eyes.

Yes. But again, people who push for homeschooling were not all beaten not witnessed traumatic things. Quite often it is religious or political. Or living in group where it is normal.

Or sometimes having special needs kids - but these people don't need schools to be awful. They have that special need and tend to focus on that.

Many went through the school system, it is their very own experience that makes them skeptical.

I think you have causation backwards. Homeschooling is a huge burden on a family, people take that on because they have a low opinion of public schools, generally.

This is true.

Every time school is mentioned on HN it is all how hell holes schools are. And how pandemic shown school is just about childcare (and childcare is bad thing).

Meanwhile, back here in real world, my kids were super happy to return back to school. Their friends were super happy to return back to school. They look forward friends and they also prefer learning in school over learning at home.

Meanwhile, I as parent found out that school teaches kids better then I did, that the lessons were about more then I realized when looking at them.

And it is not like our local school was super top heavily praised one. It is one of those ordinary average ones in system that objectively struggles.

HN demographics lean pretty heavily towards the lower end of the school pecking order. See also pg's essay on the topic: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

I wonder if it is something US specific or not.

The very concept of 'popularity' is completely foreign to my experience. I don't think there was a thing such as a popular kid when I was at school or high school.

I personally enjoyed a lot going to school because I could spend time with my friends. I have never witnessed any violence apart from fights form time to time between two malse wanting to show who the strongest was. I was not in a privileged school.

it's not just a US specific thing, it's a generation specific thing.

The scenarios described in the GP link is a very late 70s-80s (Gen X) thing. 90s and early 00s high-schoolers had somewhat different experiences, but they know the trope since that's what was in movies. Schools today have a different concept of a "pecking order" - it's not that nerds aren't at the bottom anymore, it's that the whole concept changed.

Physical violence is down, it's moved to emotional and psychological attacks, which can be just as bad or worse.

This is just judging from my own experience, and my kids have a very different set of circumstances then I did.

I'm from Germany, and while some aspects of it might be US-specific, the concept generally isn't.

Went to mostly private schools in America and my home country and none of them were anything like this. I've seen some violence back home but not physical. Alcohol, drugs, general bad behavior etc were a much bigger problem and definitely the worst at one public school I briefly went to.

In every school I'd say like people hung out with like people. So the "popularity" would be limited to that in-group. Most of people who PG would call "nerds" had a clique of their own as far as I could tell.

Some people might have been broadly disliked though.

Sorry, bullshit. This is the basic human experience in any social group. I'm not American either and this is a universal experience.

Yeah, but I work as programmer in company where almost all employees are programmers. Quite a few are also the "I am technically technical type who is passionate" kind of people. Based on discussions I have, they dont have such trauma from school. Except one they dont recall about being bullied and that one studied humanities and worked in mostly non-technical position originally. He also never claimed his issues stemmed from being too smart (I wont repeat his analysis of why here, but he thinks reasons were different).

To large extend, even that essay does not strike me as something describing people I know or my experience. But it strikes me as very populist writing targeted at those who identify as outsiders. Something written by person who was obsessed by popularity and social position himself quite a lot. In our school, kids with good grades were not unpopular or hated. Good results in programming or math or literary competition did not made you outsider. I never perceived such abilities as social liability.

There was something like "unpopular" kid in our class, someone who don't have many friends. Not that everyone was friend with everyone. And I think that guys did to one what would be called verbal bullying now in one period. But in neither case it was really not because he was smarter then everyone. And none of these ended up in tech work and none was interested in tech.

> Meanwhile, back here in real world, my kids were super happy to return back to school.

It's almost as if not everyone on earth has the same experience, wow, fancy that.

That is your kids experience but it's demeaning to call it the "real world" given so many other kids have a completely different experience. My time in school was also hell on earth and I believe it did do some psychological damage.

People who have a mostly pleasant experience in school are unlikely to comment about it. I don't doubt some people had a god-awful experience, but you're hearing from the left tail of the distribution and not the hump.

As someone who was bullied as a kid, I am glad I went through it early on. I learned self confidence and standing up for myself.

Glad I learned about bullies before I hit the workforce, where I had to deal with narcissistic sociopaths—- adult versions of bullies.

The effects you list are accurate, but they don't really enforce your main point. Just because public schools do mobilize kids out of their bad homes (by making it a parent's legal responsibility) doesn't mean it exists for this purpose.

Schools are a place for kids to learn. It's not a place to get a meal, nor a solution to a bad home life. We ensure we provide these outcomes in schools today but that's only because society/govt has failed to get these things accomplished in a more appropriate manner.

The expansion of the scope of public schooling to include mitigating a broad range of social problems reminds me of how US police have been forced to deal with social issues that they are not really equipped to handle, such as, mental health, child welfare, drug addiction, other poverty adjacent problems, or the like.

There should be another agency directed to dealing with these out-of-scope issues. Because actual education efforts and funding gets diverted to dealing with the social issues rather than providing education.

Teachers can't handle bad homes. It requires different experience and expertise from, say, teaching chemistry.

> get left alone all day

This is called "benign neglect" and for me at least, it was an _essential_ part of my upbringing. I got to pursue stuff without interference. Nobody forced me to do sports, join clubs, study anything. After I came home from school I was completely on my own and did whatever the heck I wanted, from a very early age. Want to spend an afternoon soldering something? Fine. Fixing a moped? Go right ahead. Not doing anything at all? That's fine too.

> puts kids in contact with adults who can serve as role models

Do you have kids that attend public schools? God help us all if kids treat 80% of their teachers as "role models". One in five teachers my son is in contact with even remotely passes as a role model. Older guy, leads the school band. Everyone else couldn't give less of a shit even if they tried. And why give a shit? You can't be fired for not giving it anyway.

This was a part of my childhood too - mostly due to necessity of the fact that my Mom was a single Mom and if she wasn't at work, we didn't eat or have a roof over our heads. But I never felt like I was lacking for anything... I learned to manage my own boredom, find things to do that inspired me of my own doing. It forced me to forge my own destiny to a large extent.

I realize that this was largely left to chance and that not many kids are self motivated to do much and fall in with circles of friends that lead them down a bad path, but I guess I lucked out.

I don’t think it’s luck. Look at the Andy Griffith show for a glimpse of how children used to be treated close to a century ago. Look at small villages in many parts of the world. Children are basically given free reign to go and do what they want outside of specific times (school and nighttime).

When you give a child freedom, they generally explore, learn, and exercise. Sometimes they do stupid things, but I’d be surprised if heavily structured days for children is good for children.

> they generally explore, learn, and exercise

Not anymore. Now they watch YouTube and play games. 100% passive brain rot. Source: have a 16 year old son.

Well, school should be about education only.

Teachers definitely cannot handle domestic violence. They aren't trained nor prepared nor paid nearly enough to handle dangerous homes.

This.

I still can not understand how US citizens see home schooling as a good thing.

because a lot of public schools are horrible. All you need to know about my neighbourhood's elementary school (Bay Area, 20 min by bicycle from Apple's new campus) is that it has metal detector on entrance.

Why? Gang activity. In freaking elementary school. School rating is 4/10 if you are curious.

And a 3br house there is probably $1.4 million.

I'll just say that I paid $14,000 in property taxes alone last year

Lol Right there with ya buddy.

Can't they just suspend and subsequently expel all the students involved in gang activity and gang culture? What is the problem preventing people from fixing gang activity in elementary schools such as that one?

That would just institutionalize gang culture. Do you really think gangs really care about education? They care more about having active and indoctrinated members. You can be more active and can be easily manipulated if you don't go to school.

Home schooling works pretty well for affluent families who can afford to have one parent not working, or hire tutors. But that is not most families.

I love my children, but I dont want to stay at home homeschooling them. I really dont, I am very sure I would be quite unhappy with that. And I am very sure about that, because I did stayed home for some time why they were small and it was most depressive period of my life.

It is not just about money. Majority of guys here talking about home school as being money issue would not volunteered to leave their job to be stay at home parent long term. They just want somebody else to do it.

Very often homeschool families collaborate to provide social activities. Or they put their kids in community sports programs or other group activities. Homeshooling doesn't mean the kids never leave the house.

So true. I would even add that these social activities include kids of wide age ranges which is a much better way to prepare children to real life. Life is not composed of groups of people of similar ages.

Not to mention co-ops, flexibility (a parent is traveling some where for business, etc, take the kid and use it as a teaching opportunity, or its a nice day, nature walk this afternoon).

The amazing part is how much of a child (and the teacher's time) is wasted, especially as class sizes grow and resources are strained (https://greensboro.com/opinion/columns/christie-murphy-why-i...). Home schooling usually takes half the day to get through all the required curriculum, because of all the time saved not getting 30 students to be quiet, lack of interruptions, etc. So little is getting done now in schools kids are coming home with hours of homework. Not good at explaining a subject, or the kid is having trouble groking it from the material, pull up a video on Khan Academy, or Kurzgesagt, or even a presentation by an Ivy League professor (like CS50) or someone who is foremost in the field. Have a fellow homeschool parent whose an expert in a field, let them teach help. Want to teach your kid financial planning, investing, and how to do taxes, you can. One style or mode of learning isn't working, try another like Montessori, direct instruction, don't need to run it through an administration, school board, and state officials. In a school, few if any breaks are given with no concern for attention spans, or mental burnout, you have to DO THIS THING AT THIS TIME. If the kid wants to do his lesson in a fun way, like dress up as Batman, he can, as long as they're doing their lessons, etc.

https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/12/new-research-finds-th...

Are their parents who half ass it and their kid barely learns anything sure, but compared to the literacy rates most schools are producing they don't get to say much.

https://www.dailyinfographic.com/homeschooling-by-the-number...

It usually happens in families with one stay-at-home parent.

It turns out all RRR (reading/'riting/'rithmetics) and sciences can be squeezed into one or two days of intensive learning.

Having five free days a week is pretty awesome.

My wife was homeschooled, I went to public school. She decided to home school our three kids. I was skeptical at first.

I was absolutely shocked at how quickly they cover all their subjects, homework, etc. every week. My kids get 10x the amount of play time I got at their age. It's great. Makes me regret all those years I spent in public school.

I was homeschooled until grade 8. You get to spend a lot more time exploring your interests as a kid that way. I have absolutely no regrets about it.

Did you find it hard adjusting to grade 8?

Have you seen any news or media about their city schools? Practically jails but more rowdy.

You know why?

Because damn rules.

In good old times if a student told teacher to fuck off a teacher would've given a student a cuff on the nape and the conflict would've been resolved.

These days? Nope. You're not allowed to touch children. You're not allowed to yell at children. You can call parents at school and have another "he didn't do nothing" conversation.

So what you do? You introduce zero tolerance rules. You call the police. You turn school into prison where the same set of extremely strict rules is applied to each and every student.

And all of that could have been prevented by just one gentle slap!

Nah, other countries have non-jail schools without beating kids just fine.

> without beating kids

There's a pretty wide spectrum between: "Can't discipline kids that act up" and "Beating kids"

Kids need boundaries. It's literally what they spend a good portion of their time testing for. If you aren't allowed to provide boundaries for them, then they will flounder, which turns into a self-reinforcing cycle.

The only tool I remember teachers or schools having the ability to wield against students when I was in school was suspension or expulsion. Are US schools not allowed to suspend kids?

> Are US schools not allowed to suspend kids?

I've heard from some teacher acquaintances that it's highly discouraged because the parents tend to complain a lot and the kids view it as a free vacation from school.

It sounds like "try to ignore them" is basically the only recourse teachers have in some districts against disruptive or worse students.

There's also detention and "in-school suspension" (which is basically a big detention).

I think these punishments are commonly decided by administrators, not teachers. The teacher just reports them up the chain for misbehavior.

Suspension and expulsion are becoming embroiled in the anti-racism crusade due to some high-profile incidents, so blunt laws are being written to outlaw them altogether.

My dad was a public school teacher and his last year got a class of “sweat hogs.” Three students were extremely disruptive, regularly. He went to the principal and said he wanted all three out of his class or he’d quit. Next day two were suspended but the third wasn’t. He told the office he’s stay until noon to find a sub. Later that week, the third student was arrested for stealing an 18 wheeler and driving it across the state.

When I was in school 35-40 years ago (in the south) they would literally beat you in the butt with a board. One coach had a whole collection of different shaped paddles hanging on the wall which he would point out the first day of class.

It wasn't a joke either, I remember a guy showing me his butt with a big nasty purple bruise on it the shape of a board. I got paddled once but the teacher took it pretty easy and I just had a little red. He was a weird old guy and I think he mostly liked hitting bent over young boys with boards.

They could pretty much do it for any reason and some kids not popular with teachers were paddled pretty regularly. Shortly after my time this was discontinued and I was not at all sorry to see the practice go, but now we have gone too far the other way in my opinion. Calling the police on kids for minor infractions is way over the top. But some semblance of order has to be enforced or no one can learn.

I feel like you learned more about life back then (maybe in sort of a "Lord Of The Flies" way to be fair). Most everyone could do what they wanted after school without worrying about stranger danger and having adults hovering over them the whole time and there was a lot of freedom to explore. If you fucked up though, you got paddled and you might get beat up by a fellow kid without a lot of recourse to authorities. It was just a rougher time, but more free as well which probably sort of describes the history of humanity also come to think of it.

I don't know which is worse, then or now. It seems kids were more self confident and self reliant and less neurotic back then. But there were a lot more physical fights and odd kids had a really tough time and kids who came from rough situations often really got beat down by the system. Literally.

My wife and I homeschool our two daughters. It’s been a huge blessing.

AMA.

Where I come from (Germany), homeschooling is seen as a way to indoctrinate children to their parents religion.

What do you think about this?

It’s not your business?

This is HN. Discussion is kind of the whole point.

I agree.

While I’m definitely in the camp of “it’s none of the state’s business”, stating that and expecting it to change minds is... not a very well-informed approach.

Down-vote me if you’d like, but the opposite is also true, in many regards:

Where I come from (Germany), (public) schooling is seen as a way to indoctrinate children to their government’s political agenda (call it a religion if you like).

So as always, it depends: good parents, good home schooling. Bad parents, bad home schooling. Replace “parents” with “government” and you get the same message.

Edit: As a German myself I’d like to add that your question reflects an attitude of the socialist/communist German Democratic Republic (you also know it as “DDR”): family is nothing, government is all. You leave all thinking and your responsibilities to the political agenda and world view of your political “leaders”. Is that a world you’d like to live in (again)?

As I’m sure you can infer from my username, keeping our children out of state-run schools is a primary motivating factor for us.

> As I’m sure you can infer from my username

For the record, I've seen you reference your username before and I still don't entirely understand what the word means, though I did look it up at one point.

Anarcho-capitalism is a similar ideology to libertarianism, only more extreme. Proponents are called Anarcho-capitalists or "ancaps" for short. The idea seems to involve being able to start a private alternative to government (with your own private police force enforcing your own laws, etc.)

Yep - close enough for an overview.

Why don’t you move to Mexico where the cartels have already installed an anarcho-capitalist state?

Probably for a reason similar to that classic maxim “real communism has never been tried”.

Nah, not at all.

The closest thing to an “Ancap society” that has been implemented was probably the Icelandic Commonwealth. It lasted for a bit over three centuries.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icelandic_Commonwealth

Because it sounds funny to own recreational nukes or hire the McPolice but in reality you wouldn't want any of it.

Why do you feel so strongly about it that you have to derail the discussion with a cheap/petty jab that adds very little to the conversation? At least in this thread it was mostly civil and borne out of curiosity on the topic.

It's akin to me saying "Oh, such a lovely well-functioning government and society you have there that allows X-thousands of people to die of treatable medical issues every year and Y-thousands of people to be living on the streets homeless and without any assistance, and watches idly as millions die of malaria and hunger across the ocean".

You’re not wrong in your second paragraph. We should be doing a lot better than we are on so many fronts.

I expect it - it always happens in public discussion of extreme ideas. I either ignore it or use it as an opportunity to clarify my own thoughts on the subject and to share them with others who are reading the thread.

If I’m correct, my conviction is that my ideas will win in the end. That will require them to be spread to a public as a whole, and “cheap/petty jabs” draw eyes. This discussion honestly rather unlikely to change any minds, but if it does, I doubt it it will happen through throwing insults.

The fact that you yourself call it an extreme idea should be a dead giveaway that it probably isn't tenable. When designing a system always be sure to design from the perspective of the losers as well as the winners. Being a loser in an ancap world would be one of the shittiest lives one could imagine.

“Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice. Moderation in pursuit of justice is no virtue.”

“Extreme” only means that it’s outside what is currently in place and what is generally accepted. I’ve arrived at an extreme political position because that’s where logic has lead me, not because it is extreme. It gives me pause, but my position has been only reinforced by introspection and discussion with others.

> When designing a system always be sure to design from the perspective of the losers as well as the winners. Being a loser in an ancap world would be one of the shittiest lives one could imagine

I don’t disagree - but I would also point out that being a loser in our current system is no walk in the park, and that being poor isn’t the only way to lose. At least in the system I envision, there’s recourse against the dominant powers in more cases than there is today. If you have a serious dispute with the state... you’re pretty much out of luck.

A better way of framing the question would be "how is Mexico not the inevitable consequence of anarcho-capitalist systems?"

I'd love to hear the answer.

Another one that confuses me to no end is how anarcho-capitalism isn't a paradox? Capitalism is inherently authoritarian while anarchism is libertarian. They are opposite ends of the same spectrum.

Capitalism isn’t the most precise term to use, honestly - it’s an economic system, not a social system.

Capitalism is not in any way “inherently authoritarian”. That assertion is false on its face - it basically boils down to private ownership of property and voluntary exchange. The means through which those things are ensured is outside the scope of an economic system.

Capitalism as we have it today is inherently authoritarian. If you have no money you do whatever money tells you to do or suffer the consequences.

What we have today doesn’t define “Capitalism” - it’s a combination of political and social systems with a big helping of cultural biases thrown in.

Perhaps it is. We know it’s an inevitable consequence of the state in Mexico, though.

Mexico is a failed state, not a stateless society.

The cartels filled the vacuum left by the state. This is exactly my point. Have a look what ancap looks like in real life in the link below.

https://twitter.com/BNONews/status/1284577448332603392

I may differ from most ancaps in this respect, but I don’t think so - I don’t expect that we could flip a switch tomorrow, eliminate the state, and live in peace. In most places, it would be violent chaos.

The key thing to implement a stateless society is to change the root expectation that a central authority is a necessity. That happens over generations, piece by piece.

I don’t want to overthrow governments - I want them to wither away due to lack of interest.

Why the capitalist part?

It's a differentiator from "pure" anarchy (which is opposed to hierarchy in relationships) and the other more specific subsets like anarchy-communism (which rejects private property).

The idea that is shared is that individuals own themselves, and therefore own the product of themselves.

What would convince you that your world view is deeply wrong?

I'm an anarcho-capitalist as well. For me, there is nothing that could make the case that it's morally wrong because the premises are entirely moral and correct in my world-view. It basically starts with very few solid premises that (I think) most people would agree on, and builds an entire moral framework of rules on-top of those to define how human interaction should go.

Have a look here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anarcho-capitalism#Non-aggress...

The Non-Aggression Principle(NAP) is what it all boils down to. I would argue that a lot of the laws we have are just re-iterations or complex versions of the NAP.

This does mean some things "slip through" that we're used to as being laws/rules in our society, but I think that in the such a society, we would organize and solve them to a satisfactory degree using means that don't violate the basic rules as set down. There are huge volumes of people trying to solve them without violating the NAP and I think it's possible if we built a society slowly over time on such a framework that it would work.

Pragmatically, however, I know we won't be able to achieve it in the near future (or ever) without a "reset" or a "fresh start" that allows the idea to practice, be fleshed out, and hopefully flourish. It can't just be "slapped onto" our current society and hope things work out, that'll result in chaos and put us in apocalypse territory. This is also why I'm very disappointed with all the "outer-space" related laws and treaties that are basically disallowing the possibility for new societies to form without the old ways of doing things.

If your proposed system ended up leading to large amounts of suffering, worse than the current system, would that convince you it was less moral?

That would only work for consequentialists, which Ancaps are not, I believe.

Correct yes - The ends don't justify the means essentially.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/consequentialism/

Correct. Ancaps - well, Voluntaryists, if you want to be precise about it - are deontological libertarians.

Consequentialist libertarians seek to maximize individual Liberty. Deontological libertarians seek to minimize immoral actions.

I would feel very sad, and I would want to do something about it. But I would do so without breaking the NAP. Which means not taking other people's money/labor and letting some third-party spend it as they see fit under the guise of "reducing suffering", even though the goal is noble. I would spend my own money to the degree with which I'm comfortable and how strongly I feel.

This doesn't mean it's a "less moral" system. As a counter-example: Would putting surveillance cameras inside every house to prevent domestic violence be a "more moral" system just because it reduces more suffering? Where do we draw the line for which rights we're okay with violating in order to stop suffering? I just put it at a very non-arbitrary spot, which is the NAP.

I’m totally open to that - I reasoned my way into this position.

Imagine your police force is just a bunch of robots controlled via AI. The AI control problem is generally applicable to anything with the authority to project force. How do you make sure you build an AI that won't harm you?

Now think about swapping the AIs with humans. How do you make sure you build a private police force that won't harm you? You cannot earn trust with money because a private police force can just point their guns at you and take your money.

How is government any different in this respect? They do in fact take your money - taxation, enforced ultimately by men with guns.

At least in a private model, actors would care about reputation.

My family fled from the DDR regime back in the days.

I'm not saying public schools are the non plus ultra, I'm just saying that they are a good way to meet people from different backgrounds early on.

Also, I didn't have the impression all of my teachers were very "pro government". They were a very diverse bunch politically speaking.

I also find schools a good place to meet different people. However ask your parents if your teachers (even if not pro-DDR) were able to speak freely? Would you like to have teachers who speak through a mental/political filter?

"I'm just saying that they are a good way to meet people from different backgrounds early on."

Or hate the people your government tells you to hate.

Yeah, people are quick to point out extreme cases, but ignore the kids who come out of schools with socialization issues. Bad parenting is bad parenting. There are also just as many if not more students who come out of public schools undereducated, and struggle in life. It's weird how even though test scores are better with home school students, and its even seen as superior by Ivy leagues because it often produces the kind of qualities they seek.

https://www.businessinsider.com/homeschooling-is-the-new-pat...

https://ideapod.com/born-creative-geniuses-education-system-...

In a home school, you can dress as Batman if you want. https://www.weforum.org/agenda/2017/12/new-research-finds-th...

People post here all the time interesting new studies about child brain development, they put kids all in the same grade but studies show the brain develops vastly in 3-6 months at a young age and surprise, the kids that are born at the right time so they're the oldest in their class perform better on average. There are studies about the need for more sleep in adolescents, etc. Has schools adjusted to this new knowledge, assigning less homework, no, they run the same schedule they did 100 years ago.

https://news.berkeley.edu/2018/03/29/social-jetlag/

Instead of socializing in a Lord of the Flies environment, they're mostly socialized by and with adults. They've also become authoritarian environments closer to prisons.

https://reason.com/2020/09/07/zoom-nerf-gun-school-cops-kid-...

https://nypost.com/2018/01/30/teen-suspended-for-inciting-vi...

https://mobile.edweek.org/c.jsp?cid=25919951&bcid=25919951&r...

That Germany is not the USA?

Studies are almost unanimous. Homeschooled kids are more successful in college, get almost an entire extra point of GPA on average and earn more money than other kids.

You do you, and let others do what they want.

Homeschooling is really bad for STEM though, only reason it looks good is that so little of kids grades are based on STEM in school.

Look at the data, and then consider that home-schooled kids in general comes from more stable homes with higher wealth and better educated parents.

https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/the-homeschool-math-gap...

The data seems to be a data set of 74 homeschoolers. Not super compelling.

And yes I agree that being able to homeschool your kids is definitely a privilege, unfortunately.

Maybe we can at least meet half way and say that homeschooling absolutely doesn't create these mythical, supposedly antisocial weirdos then, and it is completely possible to have healthy well functioning homeschoolers.

I think everyone would have to admit that homeschooling can produce healthy well functioning adults, there are plenty of examples to point to. I think you'd also have to admit that it can produce antisocial weirdos.

I wouldn't admit either of those things, actually. Both are possible but neither certain and could also be false.

Perhaps the healthy, well functioning adults would have been so regardless of schooling. Perhaps the weirdos would have been so regardless of schooling. Perhaps schooling makes the difference for a proportion less than 100% of the students? How much less? Under what circumstances? Who could know with any confidence?

I honestly don't know how you could get clear evidence to say one way or the other as to schooling contribution to the causation of "weirdo-ness"

A school system produces the people who go through it. How much impact the school system had on them is obviously unclear. Whether they came out of it, however, is unambiguous. Therefore, since it is true that the school systems have produced at least one person of these types, it is also true that they can do so.

That is a meta study, the example with 74 homeschoolers was just one of the studies. Next time don't just read until you find a line you can attack and instantly stop there. Here is a more comprehensive excerpt:

> Frost and Morris (1988) found in a study of 74 Illinois homeschoolers that, controlling for family background variables, homeschoolers scored above average in all subjects but math. Wartes, similarly, found that homeschoolers in Washington state scored well above average in reading and vocabulary but slightly below average in math computation (Ray & Wartes, 1991). The HSLDA-sponsored studies also found that homeschoolers do comparatively less well in math than in language-based subjects (Ray, 1997a; Rudner, 1999). Likewise Belfield (2005), in a well-designed study that controlled for family background variables, found that homeschooled seniors taking the SAT scored slightly better than predicted on the SAT verbal and slightly worse on the SAT math. A similar study of ACT mathematics scores likewise found a slight mathematical disadvantage for homeschoolers (Quaqish, 2007). Given this persistent corroboration across two decades we might conclude, tentatively, that there may be at least a modest homeschooling effect on academic achievement—namely that it tends to improve students’ verbal and weaken their math capacities.

Most notably, look at the last sentence:

> Given this persistent corroboration across two decades we might conclude, tentatively, that there may be at least a modest homeschooling effect on academic achievement—namely that it tends to improve students’ verbal and weaken their math capacities.

This kind of info is not actually useful when weighing it up.

The homeschooling is only as good as you want to make it and are capable of making it. You can teach math and care about it? Might go great for your kids. You can't add but think it's ok if you just pray lots? Not so much. So many hard-to-identify confounding factors. Randomised trials these are not.

The correlations here just don't inform your decision.

You want something like: Probability of some particular kind of success given your reasons for doing it, resources and ability. This is an elusive thing to estimate even if the data were very much higher quality.

The other thing worth noting about these studies is they're old. 2007 is /ancient/ compared to the resources you have at your disposal now. The Khan Academy problem bank alone is likely to assist homeshcooling math score averages significantly. That one thing alone is a hell of a resource for homeschool teachers to learn what they need and for students. There are a stack of others too. Darwinian selection will likely pick a few winners that are just great too.

I have only pandemic homeschooled children. I have some reasons you don't care about for not doing it. People considering going that way can probably take a mountain of salt to the claim "Homeschooling is really bad for STEM..." made by username90. When dudul points out "The data ... [is] not super compelling" That seems like a very fair observation to me.

But nobody here is getting papers published, citatation metrics enhanced and so on.

In the absence of clear and compelling data, your prejudice about decisions concerning your family are better than those of some random stranger regardless of the robes of authority they wear.

I'm aware anecdotes don't hold up to data, but I'd like to share mine.

I attended a charter STEM higher school which I toured in its first year of operation and entered as a first year during its second year of operation where there weren't yet any students in the 12th grade. A lot of the students who were part of the first batch and even the second batch were formerly homeschooled and were involved at hearings to provide arguments for why the school should get its charter. I myself was coming from a gap year as I saw that I wasn't learning anything beneficial by continuing my education at my district's middle school. Maybe it's because it was specifically a STEM school, but nobody was any worse because they were homeschooled. I'd argue that's why students were more driven to pursue their projects.

Tangent that I edited out: As the school's reputation grew and began intaking more students from traditional backgrounds, I must admit that many alumni feel like the quality of the students went down. It seems like those weird home schooled kids who were weird enough to pursue their interests were the key to building the school's reputation, and that kids who had gone to traditional schools where disrespectful behavior existed were bringing that behavior with them. At my high school every teacher, even if they were phds, was referred to by their first names. We had no detention, as we didn't have any bad actors. We were trusted to spend 20% of our school hours collaborating on moonshot projects and went out to restaurants and businesses everyday during our hour long lunch breaks to learn to behave with our community. I took for granted my 4 years there as I didn't realize how unique of an experience it is to be part of a school startup.

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/15/robots...

https://ideapod.com/born-creative-geniuses-education-system-...

Public school is bad for STEM.

If two college educated parents teach them STEM, they'll do great.

Studies are sparse and far from unanimous on anything. https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/15582159.2017.1...

It definitely happens, without question from my perspective.

Personally, I don’t think it’s something government should try to “solve” - of _course_ parents want their children to share their views.

From a practical standpoint, it’s been difficult for us to find homeschooling communities that aren’t one of two extremes: new age/“hippie” or fundamentalist Christian. While my wife and I are Christian, it’s important to us for our children to get a thorough and well-rounded education. That entirely rules out a lot of resources for us, and we end up picking and choosing quite a bit. For instance, we’re using the Abeka math curriculum at the moment, but their science curriculum isn’t at all acceptable.

Anecdotally, this stereotype seems to exist in the United States as well.

When it comes to data, the 2016 National Household Education Survey by the National Center for Education Statistics shows that 51% of parents selected "A desire to provide religious instruction" as an "important" reason for homeschooling their children, and 67% selected "A desire to provide moral instruction" as an "important" reason for homeschooling [0, in bar plot form; 1, original data].

[0] https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/summaries/reas... [1] https://nces.ed.gov/pubs2017/2017102.pdf

Thanks for providing some numbers on this.

"A desire to provide moral instruction"

"Don't do drugs." "Sex is great, but you need to wait until you're ready to handle it because it has serious emotional and physical consequences as well. If you do though, use a condom." "Don't treat people that way."

Its disingenuous that state run schools don't have their own moral instruction as well. Although I can't find it but I remember a post where a student got in an argument because the teacher failed them for saying ethics and morality were two different things and the teacher argued it was the same. So I don't exactly trust them to do it either. Ultimately it is up to the parents to teach kids their values, not the state's.

The parents have the most influence on a child's values anyway, short of removing them from the home, not much changes there.

> Its disingenuous that state run schools don't have their own moral instruction as well.

No one is saying otherwise. The survey says that parents have a desire to provide moral instruction.

> Although I can't find it but I remember a post where a student got in an argument because the teacher failed them for saying ethics and morality were two different things and the teacher argued it was the same. So I don't exactly trust them to do it either.

Why generalize from what seems to be a single anecdote?

As opposed to having the school do it? To their belief system that maybe isn’t “religion” but is still based on a certain type of faith and moral opinion. Public schools are littered with teaching kids _what_ to think, not _how_ to think.

I get your point and in particular I understand Germany’s caution. But what is wrong with a parent teaching their child their morality through religion? Why is having the state control this less dangerous? Why is religion bad?

>Why is religion bad?

Take a look around this planet and oppression done in the name of religious superstition, but for a more charitable argument, even if religion is good, children deserve to have a diverse and secular upbringing if we care about the religious freedom of the child.

I'm also German, and here children are essentially mini-citizens, not some sort of property of their parents, with about as much autonomy as a mule. It's not about whether religion is good, it's about whether children have the right to be brought up, from an early age, in an impartial, dvierse and social environment, rather than being indoctrinated by their parents.

the US system doesn't treat children like citizens with autonomy and rights in their own right, but leaves them to the whim of their parents, regardless of what quality of education or values they can provide. That is incomprehensible to me,and I'd argue it actually harms the freedoms and rights of children and their autonomy. It's outright medieval to me to be honest.

>Take a look around this planet and oppression done in the name of religious superstition

I've sure you've heard the argument, but last century over a hundred million people were killed by atheist movements (Maoism, Stalinism), way more than were killed by any religion. And this century the most repressive governments (China, North Korea) are atheist too.

Religious people are also happier, statistically speaking (https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/01/31/are-religio...). So it can't be all bad if it's raising happier people.

I'm not sure how a totalitarian regime is atheist. It simply replaces gods with the supreme leader, who is like a god, but worse, since the supreme leader exists. Soviet communism was a religion 100%.

I think that attitude is completely bizarre.

That's a very old ignorant view. It probably was more true for a time, many parents didn't wanted their kids thinking Jesus rode dinosaurs, etc. But ultimately even then, in a few cases that didn't hold them back, they usually got into adult hood figured out their parents were likely full of crap in college, but because they also learned math and reading, and did often better, which is actually something needed practically and were successful as a result.

Many modern home school curriculums are secular are taken from the same ones or follow the same standards/guidelines schools use. Majority of home schoolers I know are secular, and want better options, especially those to meet the learning needs or styles of learning they themselves or their kids thrived in. They don't believe either because their own experience or what they've seen with their kid that kids learn best in a very rigid, sit down, and be quiet and listen model of instruction that was designed for factory workers and has barely changed in 100 years.

Also, there's nothing stopping a parent from putting a kid a private Catholic/Jewish/Orthodox/etc school, etc that will do the same. Parents can indoctrinate their kids, home school or not, into a religion, they have them on evenings and weekends where the ultra religious just take the kids to their religious institution 4-5 times a week.

I grew up religious and believing weird stuff. College also fixed that for me as did the internet. I still went to public schools.

Right, it barely matters, if anything the sheltering shocks the person so much when they are finally exposed, they question everything and usually end up distrusting or taking issues with the parent.

It's the other way around.

Prussian's realized when most conscripts were faced with war, they would pee their pants and run away.

"The Prussian mind, which carried the day, held a clear idea of what centralized schooling should deliver: 1) Obedient soldiers to the army; 2) Obedient workers for mines, factories, and farms; 3) Well-subordinated civil servants, trained in their function; 4) Well-subordinated clerks for industry; 5) Citizens who thought alike on most issues; 6) National uniformity in thought, word, and deed."

This horrifies me. More so that we do it here in the United States.

https://www.forcedschool.com/post/69947261758/the-prussian-m...

Their should be no government run schools. Give parents a voucher and let them decide.

Would you rather have citizens fight amongst themselves because their cultures are in conflict with each other?

Based on the levels of death caused by government brain washing the answer is pretty clear.

Well, yes.

Let me put it another way, for the purposes of illustrating the principle: “Of course we should have a shared culture. Here it is - _my_ culture. If it’s in conflict with yours, too bad, we’re going to make sure your children are indoctrinated into it from an early age by taking them out of the home for eight hours each day, five days per week.”

As a half German living in Germany my impression is the government make the people far too reliant on the it and the people mostly just go along with it. It’s the biggest criticism I have of the country. So many people I’ve met abdicate personal responsibilities because of the system.

Czech here. Guess who outlawed homeschooling in Germany (Reichsschulpflichtgesetz). Yes, it was him. No children outside state control. Unfortunately the modern German state likes this idea too.

We have homeschooling in CZ. Not many people use this option, but those who do usually do so because they see schools as inefficient. When I was a kid, at least a third, sometimes more than a half of every lesson was spent on various logistics, individual examination of pupils by the board, or simply disciplining the class. This is a very wasteful use of time, our most restricted life asset. In individual training, you can teach all the necessary stuff in three hours and then, for example, go for a hike.

In my experience homeschooled children are the most fit ones. They move around a lot, not being forced to sit (the worst position for a human body) for endless hours.

Coming from a similar socialist state, I don't see that time (logistics, individual examinations etc.) as wasted: I read lots of comic books under the table and played various individual/group games during that time :)

TBH I did exactly the same :-)

When I was still in school, all the homeschooled kids I met were incredibly weird and I thought the same thing. Then later I had a friend whose little sister was homeschooled and they did it right.

She was a part of some homeschooling group where the kids would get together frequently and the parents would takes turns leading different activities, often leveraging different parents' professions or special expertise. She was both well-socialized and had much more deep and engaging experiences than you can get in school.

Though you still end up with the problem of when and how to rejoin the normal world since you're so far ahead.

Homeschooling doesn’t always make kids weird — parents of weird kids often pull them out of school because of bullying or fears of bullying.

The other thing about this stereotype everyone remembers the one weird kid from home school. But its not like weird kids with socialization issues and social anxiety don't come out of public schools. Also no one factors that maybe the kid is being home schooled because they're weird. It's also possible they just have weird parents, and they're weird as a result, and school isn't going to save them from that.

There is probably a bias of people who choose to home school. The home schooled person I know was home schooled because their parents were deeply religious and didn't want a school teaching their child unapproved content but they also didn't have the skill or time to properly educate on things like math so they ended up far behind others.

How many people that homeschool are actually knowledgeable enough and have the free time to replace full time teachers.

I'm thinking that even if you are a competent "home teacher" you would still fall behind in areas that are outside your expertise. You'd need a collective of home teachers at which point all the perceived benefits of homeschooling disappear because you're handing your child to those weird teachers who aren't you.

At the elementary level, most people don't need child development courses to understand their own kids, its only needed to manage classrooms. So its not hard. But two college educated parents can run circles around professional teachers when you factor in the individualized focus given.

The problem is that homeschooling so often has lack oversight (as do private schools). There isn't always someone there making sure the kids are learning what they should be learning nor that they are getting together with other kids.

And you wind up with a few kids that do really well and others that struggle with science and still others that just don't get the help they need with stuff. It is easy to overlook a learning disability at a young age when you aren't trained to look for it.

We don't even have a program to test parents on the material they are teaching. In a perfect world, parents would have to pass testing a level or two ahead of their lessons and we'd have more short, standardized tests to make sure kids were learning what they should (no skipping out on sex education or evolution, for example).

Short, meaning once or twice a month for 15-60 minutes, depending on a child's age in addition to something akin to finals for older students.

One of the major problems of homeschooling is that there is undue influence by a single perspective of the parent teaching. There is no balanced opinion. I've known quite a few homeschooled kids that believe that their opinion, preached to them by their parent is the one true opinion, or fact. That's quite a problem when there's no oversight.

That said, having spent quite some time following families on the internet that have done this with their kids - including the Bucket List Family...

https://www.thebucketlistfamily.com/

and Logan LaPlante with his Hackschooling TED Talk...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=h11u3vtcpaY

To name just a couple of examples.

I have to say there are quite some advantages if it is done right, but not everyone is fortunate enough or has the background or passion to pursue this kind of schooling with their kids. It takes the kind of commitment that not many parents have.

So you're saying that homeschooled kids have the same variance in outcomes as kids that go to school?

https://www.educationdive.com/news/several-baltimore-schools...

The rich do it all the time.

I was home schooled all the way through high school. I often say my mom taught me to read and books taught me everything. I was a voracious reader of fiction and real books as a kid. Taught myself to program at 14. Taught myself enough to write an accounting program for my lawn care business from scratch to QBasic. I did graduate from a school-for-home-schoolers that the parents organized and got accepted to every college I applied to, choosing to go to the Georgia Institute of Technology for both a BS and MS. I had a fantastic experience. It wasn't until while at GA Tech that I first even heard a glimpse of this home schoolers are weird and mis-educated line.

Anyway, looking back I am sure that the outcome is based on what the student puts into it. My experience may not be common, but I do personally know many people from my homeschooler groups who have gone on to be very successful adults, engineers, parents, and more.

> I am sure that the outcome is based on what the student puts into it.

I strongly disagree with the idea that the outcome of child education depends on "what the student puts into it." A quality education shapes a child, instills a growth mindset, nurtures curiosity, encourages grit and perseverance, and meets the child where they're at. A barren garden is not the fault of the seeds.

This hits close to home for me as I am working with a child now who has been written off by his school and teachers as a "bad student." There is no such thing. He needs some extra support and coaching to learn some meta-strategies like asking for help when needed, planning, organization, and yes, diligence, but ultimately he wants to succeed and is capable of it, just like any other child. Children don't fail school. School fails children.

I appreciate your perspective as the father of an under 1 year old. She is our first and I have a lot of learning to do.

I was commenting on that my homeschooling experience was great. However, I have a small direct sample of myself and my siblings and some homeschooling group friends.

I'm guessing you never saw a kid get his head smashed on the ground during lunch.

That sounds more like daycare than school. Children don't need daycare. They should go to school to learn and at other times be out playing with other children. Teachers are supposed to be good at teaching, not good at looking after children. That's what the parents are for.

The point is that in practice not all parents do a good job.

But all schools do?

Yes. Schools do a better job than some parents. Think heroin addicts who beat their kids up every night. There's no equivalent of that in schools.

What difference is going to school going to make it they beat them up every night? Some schools are way worse than any good parents.

Teachers may notice and get authorities involved.

> Some schools are way worse than any good parents.

True, that’s the other side of the coin.

I think most parents lack the resources to do the school’s job though. So there’s not much of a choice anyway.

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