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Comment by eloff | Hacker News Reader

My brother and I were homeschooled, but it was quite structured and we wrote the same provincial exams as every other grade 12 kid. My brother did the SAT as well. We had excellent scores. We both dropped out of college with near perfect GPAs. Today I'm a successful self-taught software engineer now starting a SaaS business. My brother is a famous sci fi author. He makes even more than I do. I think homeschooling let us learn whatever we wanted to learn without fear, and find our own path in life. Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places. So socially we had a lot to learn. I don't think that was a permanent disadvantage, but it was not a necessary drawback of homeschooling. I would recommend sports and other after school activities to add the social dimension into homeschooling.

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This might work for outliers/higher IQ/elite people in the HN community, but consider this:

1. School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule.

2. Not everyone is self-motivated to learn. Children, at critical developmental ages, are more prone to be led astray than "follow their passions" (at this age, really?). They will more likely be manipulated by vices if not constantly monitored. Note: Even adults struggle to find their "passion", good for the lucky few.

3. Not all parents are good teachers. Usually, responsible families understand the value proposition- they wish their children have a better future- and education is the most assured/common ticket that provides these opportunities.

4. School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen. An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism. Ex: Nazi Germany and Mao's China burned books and persecuted the educated (1984 style).

Public schools, with all its flaws, are the best instruments to free the masses. Knowledge is democratized power to avoid the corruption that absolute power entails.

There is a lot of bias towards homeschoolers so the wild success stories often get touted to counteract the prejudice.

I was homeschooled but agree that it isn't for everyone, mainly because not everyone has the resources. It decidedly requires a middle class lifestyle. Also, parents need to have something of their life together beyond just financial resources.

But people overestimate the competence required of a parent to teach. Probably the biggest thing I learned was learning how to learn, and in particular, doing that on my own. So reading the textbook in college was hardly a shock. If my parents didn't understand a subject, they could learn it with me, or find the resources I needed (including community college, online courses).

Unschooling, however, I am not too sympathetic to. You need some structure.

> Unschooling, however, I am not too sympathetic to. You need some structure.

For most kids you probably need some structure. For some, unschooling certainly works well; for others it's another term for "school dropout". I personally was both homeschooled and unschooled, for different topics, and a high % of the smartest people I know were unschooled.

I really struggled to learn to read and write, even by grade five. So my parents took me out and my mom worked with me one-on-one intensively to learn phonics, which finally fixed that problem. Meanwhile, prior to that the biggest challenge I had in learning programming on my own is that I struggled to actually read the books I had on it. I think that unschooling taught me how to learn on my own, in a way that was very beneficial later in life.

Yet again, I'd say based on my experience taking relatively high-level, proof-based, math classes in university many years later, that for me the structured experience of university math worked much better than trying to learn those subjects on my own (which I had also tried!). Yet, for high school math, there hadn't been much difference (I did attend highschool).

Learning isn't one-size-fits-all.

I would say public schools are so much better than nothing. But they're not the best option by far.

Not everyone can do homeschooling, not everyone who can, will do it well. Many kids are not able to handle it either. But it can lead to much better outcomes. Like most things, general advice doesn't apply to everyone.

That sounds good in theory but research seems to suggest that homeschoolers overwhelmingly perform better on every single metric. Although I'll grant that there may be data bias in that smarter and more devoted parents are more likely to homeschool.

https://www.nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:te....

I just quickly checked its references: two journals that compromise a big chunk of the cited sources have very low impact factors.

Unless they are using a diff. metric for education journals or they are relatively new, I would not consider this a reliable report

1. https://www.resurchify.com/all_ranking_details_2.php?id=7414

2. https://academic-accelerator.com/Impact-Factor-IF/Peabody-Jo....

3. https://www.scijournal.org/articles/good-impact-factor#:~:te....

This is a better study: https://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?script=sci_arttext&pid=S010...

To be fair, it seems obvious that the education industry (those journals) would have a bias against homeschooling. Getting published by people who hate your message is just not likely.

Do academia (universities) and high/elementary school have such loyalty to each other? I thought that most colleges were quite friendly to homeschooled students.

People who teach future teachers would have a vested interest, and they would be the ones running the education journals.

Academia is (perversely) not incredibly enamored with novel systems from my experience. My theory was that it has something to do with most of the tenured professors being old and stubborn.

> That sounds good in theory but research seems to suggest that homeschoolers overwhelmingly perform better on every single metric.

Being homeschooled and unschooled myself, I got to see that first hand in other families. But I don't think it actually means that homeschooling/unschooling is universally better: plenty of people try it, find it doesn't work for them, and quit.

My best guess is it increases the variance of results more than the average, with some kids doing very well on it, and some very poorly. While that's good for society, it doesn't mean one can entirely replace the other.

> plenty of people try it, find it doesn't work for them, and quit.

This seems like it would lend itself to selection bias - only people for whom homeschooling is a good fit continue to pursue it.

Exactly my point!

Homeschooling/unschooling very likely works well for some (I think it worked well for me). But that doesn't mean it would work well on average.

Control for socioeconomic status and homeschooled kids tend to do worse in STEM subjects. Even your link which mostly doesn't control for SES and therefore is very biased says this. Therefore you can't say that it is better on every metric, if you think that STEM is important then homeschooling is bad.

> Qaqish (2007), on the other hand, examined the ACT math scores of college-bound students and found, while controlling for background variables, that the conventionally schooled performed slightly better than the home educated.

>It is there to teach us critical thinking

I believe the No Child Left Behind Act changed that.

Alas, often "no child left behind" also means "no child let ahead".

A one size fits all approach is something that should change.

How we change this, I don't know.

> School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen. An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism.

Germany was among the most highly educated countries in the world in the 1930s. The Russian Revolution was an elite phenomenon. In a country of peasants the Revolution was of and by the intelligentsia. Whatever else you might say about them they weren’t uneducated.

The German ban on home schooling is explicitly to prevent the formation of parallel societies. It would be hard to be clearer that the purpose of the “education” system is indoctrination.

If you want to teach things the best and most efficient way to do so is explicitly. The enormous majority of people do not generalize learning beyond its context. Whether transfer of learning even exists is a hot topic in psychological research. It is certainly not a strong effect. If school was to teach critical thinking it should be doing so explicitly. It doesn’t and there’s little reason to believe it’s especially good at it.

School is excellent at inuring children to boredom, obeying authority and pointless busywork.

Yeah, I won't deny that even the educated can be manipulated- look at our generation affected by corporate and political agendas.

Yes, totalitarian states have used education to indoctrinate masses to maintain order and power. Depends on who does the teaching and how it is taught, that is why critical thinking is key.

Given this prerequisite, is an educated population easier to be manipulated than an illiterate one?

> Yes, totalitarian states have used education to indoctrinate masses to maintain order and power. Depends on who does the teaching and how it is taught, that is why critical thinking is key.

None of the German Empire, Weimar Republic or Russian Empire were totalitarian states. If education is protective against indoctrination the effect is at best weak. A lively marketplace of ideas is no guard against organized thugs if the liberals are not willing to defend liberalism. Critical thinking is a red herring.

Which is what is so depressing about "cancel culture" and radical redefinition of what is "hate speech". Liberals and the rational center are not defending those ideals which gave us our modern Western civilisation.

Even on this website, merely questioning the validity of some of the aspects of the politically correct zeitgeist will get your post flagged and hidden from public consumption.

Free speech as how some people like to define it now (anything can and should be said) was never an ideal, and certainly never reality.

It’s funny how the people complaining about “cancel culture” (usually a roundabout way of complaining you can’t say racist things anymore) are completely fine with twisting especially history to benefit themselves.

> usually a roundabout way of complaining you can’t say racist things anymore

As an external observer, this seems to me exactly the problem. Discourse is so polarized, that nobody can say "this thing that started as a reaction to overt racism has gone too far" without people replying "that just means you're racist".

The situation has come to where there are ridiculous abuses going on, and criticizing them is anathema because the initial purpose of the system being abused was to counter a bias.

Hell, even writing this comment, meta-analyzing the situation, I'm semi-afraid will have personal impact to me, which is pretty indicative of the problem.

> Discourse is so polarized, that nobody can say

A large part of it is signaling through terminology. If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one.

There are definitely people that are able to discuss certain social trends becoming a problem without using dogmatic terminology, which is where the conversation becomes interesting for all participants. As opposed to a horrifying journey plumbing the depths of polarised discourse.

> If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one.

So you can't say "cancel culture has gone too far" without signaling you're right-wing? I'm not up to speed with the exact politics, but I've heard the term in non-right wing contexts.

Seems to me like that would make it impossible to talk about things, which is what I'm seeing. How would you talk about Twitter canceling people without using the term "cancel culture?

Am I the only person who found it ironic and meta that, in a thread about canceling people based on certain words and phrases, OP kind of tried to "cancel" your argument based on your use of the phrase "cancel culture". We are deep into the recursion now.

Well that's kind of the issue, right? There are some things you can't talk about because if you want to talk about them, it means you're a racist that just wants to legitimize racism.

Judging by the number of downvotes on a comment about this very thing, I'm not optimistic.

American liberals runs the social networks almost everyone uses so whenever they decide to cancel stuff the whole world gets affected. Therefore it makes sense that many people all over the world learns to hate them and their cancel culture.

Weimar Republic was democracy, because WWI victors forced Germany into democracy. Weimar Republic was also failing mess, from start to end. With fights and screaming in parlament, with political murders, with attempted revolutions and with increasing violence in the streets. Germans themselves did not wanted democracy at any point. They have found loss in war humiliating and unfair.

Weimar Republic also had highly militarized civil service, comited to military values rather then to democracy.

Russian Empire was dictatorship to large extend. Not as much as communism, but it was not democracy with political freedoms. The little reforms they had were basically too little too late. There were little of such a thing as citizen right in most places. Peasants also had huge illiteracy rates.

The Russian empire was an absolute monarchy until 1905 that was definitely totalitarian by modern understanding. The subsequent semi-democratic government was ineffective.

The Russian Empire was authoritarian. It was not totalitarian under any definition of the term I’ve ever encountered. There was an extremely lively press, active intellectual life and real if toothless political opposition. It was absolutely nothing like under the Soviet boot.

> How did educated, liberal society respond to such terrorism? What was the position of the Constitutional Democratic (Kadet) Party and its deputies in the Duma (the parliament set up in 1905)? Though Kadets advocated democratic, constitutional procedures, and did not themselves engage in terrorism, they aided the terrorists in any way they could. Kadets collected money for terrorists, turned their homes into safe houses, and called for total amnesty for arrested terrorists who pledged to continue the mayhem. Kadet Party central committee member N. N. Shchepkin declared that the party did not regard terrorists as criminals at all, but as saints and martyrs. The official Kadet paper, Herald of the Party of People’s Freedom, never published an article condemning political assassination. The party leader, Paul Milyukov, declared that “all means are now legitimate . . . and all means should be tried.” When asked to condemn terrorism, another liberal leader in the Duma, Ivan Petrunkevich, famously replied: “Condemn terror? That would be the moral death of the party!”

https://www.firstthings.com/article/2020/10/suicide-of-the-l...

Obviously that depends. Here is another way to phrase your question:

You spend 10 years telling John some stuff every day for hours and Jane is someone you just met.

Which one is easier to lie to?

Sounds to me like it completely depends on a lot of different things, but if you know what lie you want to tell ahead of time: obviously John is easier to lie to.

You hear something from someone who's been talking to you for 10 years, and from someone you've just met. Whose lie is easier to detect?

That isn't obvious at all. Folks get smitten by people they've barely met. It doesn't take years to be tricked into joining a cult: You can convince folks in a matter of months.

John might be 10 years into your lies, but he also might have caught on. You use different lies with Jane, who might not know better, and she listens wholeheartedly and with good faith.

If John is an adult and Jane isn't, Jane is easier even with the age difference. This is simply because of lack of knowledge and experience.

If one has more access to the outside world than the other, they are less likely to believe your lies.

If John knows you have mental health problems that causes you to lie and Jane doesn't, Jane is easier to lie to.

Maybe John is more suspicious of people and the world. Maybe John just shuts up to appease you, like folks that avoid talking politics with their families simply don't want to deal with things.

Are you someone younger? DO you have authority over them?

There are so many things that affect whether or not you can lie to someone.

It is interesting because for me it was obvious that Jane will be the easiest to lie to by far. John knows you much better.

Usually psychopaths and sociopaths are always moving so people don't know who they are and they can fool them easily.

What you are saying is if someone does trust you, you can lie to her easier, which is true, but then you will loose the trust and bond that took a long time to get.

Here is an even better way to phrase the question with respect to schooling:

You spend 10 years telling John and Jane some stuff every day for hours. John also gets told stuff for hours by a third party while Jane gets all information from you. Which one is easier to lie to?

School adds a third party so that the child isn't reliant on things taught by their parents.

What better way to manipulate a population than by “educating” them?

Yet if you don't know math, you can be ripped off. If you can't read the contract or understand law at all, you can be manipulated.

Which would be a compelling argument if there were no other way to learn math or law.

Indeed.

And the math schools concentrate on isn’t particular useful in the context of a modern society. So what that you once memorized a geometric proof long enough to take a test if you don’t understand how interest works and how credit card companies take advantage of you.

Not everyone can just learn on their own, and if your parents aren't real great at math or law or teaching, you really need school.

That some people need kidney dialysis is not an argument that everyone getting kidney dialysis is the only way to stay healthy.

If you can't learn from books or videos or online lectures or parents or tutors, I doubt generic schooling is really going to be able to help much either, but if it does great. People learn in different ways and different kids need different resources, but that's an argument against a one-size fits all public schooling system, not in favor.

> is an educated population easier to be manipulated than an illiterate one

Good question. Depends on how the education is done. If the education is done to instill the idea that one must "believe in science", instead of learning the facts and questioning them skeptically, if one is convinced that expressing dissent is harmful and akin to violence, if questioning the dominating framework is actively discouraged and dissenters are viciously attacked, if people are taught that there can be no honest disagreement, and any different of opinion is nothing but a power move in an oppression framework, if everybody is assigned their places and recommended opinions in advance, if they are instructed that any non-conforming opinion must be silenced and suppressed - then such "educated" people are much easier to manipulated than the illiterate ones.

An illiterate person knows they are illiterate - there's no way to hide that fact from themselves. They know there are places they must tread carefully for their knowledge has obvious limits. A mal-educated person thinks they know all the answers, and learned The Truth, and thus hold the keys to the universe. Moreover, they feel a moral duty to lord over lesser creatures and guide them to The Truth, for their own benefit. This is an ideal human brick for building the totalitarian barracks.

I would like to point out that in our current world it would be very very difficult to end up illiterate under just about any circumstance. Reading and writing don’t need to be explicitly taught unless you are under extreme time pressure (like the need to get the pupils to be able to read their texts on their own so you can increase class sizes and decrease the cost of schooling).

The point of our system is that (as much as is possible) education is not limited to the 'elites' and 'intelligentsia.' Rather, it is distributed in a (relatively) egalitarian fashion amongst not just those who call for war and revolution, but those who rot in the trenches and die upon the bayonet. School is excellent at building the cohesive fabric of a society, including teaching it's boredom, authority, and pointless busywork.

> School is excellent at building the cohesive fabric of a society, including teaching it's boredom, authority, and pointless busywork.

I have a feeling that pointless busywork always grows to however much people can bear, so maybe if school didn't condition people to be so tolerant of it, we'd have less of it.

I dunno, I haven't see a whole lot of bearing at the DMV, but there's not an epidemic of concerned citizens showing up with molotovs and burning their local branch to the ground. Minneapolis' third precinct, sure, they burned that sucker right to the ground. But not the DMV, the icon of pointless bureaucracy.

And no matter where I've gone, from Honduras to Pakistan, to Germany, to San Bernardino, folks have been waiting in lines for things, and doing stuff that didn't really matter.

Doing stuff that sucks seems to be an unfortunate consequence of social organization for all of us normal folks who can't pay to skip the line.

https://www.barrypopik.com/index.php/new_york_city/entry/the...

You must be mostly exposed to those areas where the schools get mid-to-high ratings. Education is absolutely limited based on income level.

At the lower income levels the only thing taught is boredom, authority, and pointless busywork.

As bad as you make it sound, they are teaching kids stuff, even at less-than-wealthy school districts.

Adult Literacy in the United States: https://nces.ed.gov/datapoints/2019179.asp

It's not perfect, but from the most remote deserts of Arizona to rural Appalachia, to Compton, to rural Colorado, our public school system chugs away.

By hood or by crook, or by underfunded inner-city/rural public school, we're teaching a hell of a lot of kids to read and write, multiply and divide. Skills that many parents can't teach on their own, and that most kids wouldn't go out of their way to learn if you left them alone.

I attended elementary through middle-school at a district too poor to offer a high-school chemistry class, and still learned my times tables and how to write a paragraph. I even went on to Community College, a state school, a state-school masters, and an MD on scholarship. Sure, I didn't get the chance to take AP classes, and I didn't have some fancy robotics class, but I just can't bring myself to bash the public school system that got me to where I am. Sure, I didn't get everything a kid growing up in Pasadena got, but California has a robust-enough public-education system through the Community Colleges and UC/Cal-State system that it wasn't a dealbreaker in the least.

I don't know what district you attended, but if you took nothing away other than 'boredom, authority, and pointless busywork,' I'm curious as to how exactly we are debating this point in written English.

I think it's a slap to the face of a lot of teachers doing their best, as well as their students, to say that kids in disadvantaged districts learn nothing other than how to sit still and listen to authority. I learned quite a bit, in fact.

> I think it's a slap to the face of a lot of teachers doing their best, as well as their students, to say that kids in disadvantaged districts learn nothing other than how to sit still and listen to authority

I have to agree. In fact, I was explicitly told as much by my high school Physics teacher after I openly said that I thought the school's "Excellence Program" wasn't particularly challenging.

His take was that he realized that it was easy for me, but there were some teachers who were trying as hard as they could to give the students a good education while the rest dismissed us as being a bunch of unreachable ghetto kids that they were wasting their time on. Sure, I was a 17 year-old punk kid but he was right: I was basically crapping on the people who were trying to make a difference and at the same time putting down a lot of my classmates who were working as hard as they could to get good grades, many of them in very difficult life circumstances.

I guess I don't have a point other than to say I agree with yours :-)

> The point of our system is ...

It seems to me that, to responsibly make a statement of that form, you would have to look at when the system was created and look at the motivations of the people who created it (or made significant changes to the system and its objectives). If we're talking about the compulsory education system, that means looking at when the compulsory education laws were first passed, and what was said by those advocating the laws (and, possibly, deciding if they were telling the truth and if they had additional motivations).

Can you honestly say you've looked into that? Do you even know when compulsory education laws were passed in your state (U.S. or otherwise)? I'm not really picking on you specifically—I had to look it up (1874 in California).

I stress this because, while ostensibly school is for "education", if you point out that it's not doing that nearly as well as it could, ten people will say "Well, really school is for X", and you'll get about five different values of X, some of which contradict each other. This is the hallmark of people making up rationalizations for something they truly don't understand.

(To take an example, even for something like compliance—I do imagine that employers use "suffered through school without getting kicked out" as a sign of compliance, but if you imagined an institution optimized for providing that signal, I suspect making it through one month of military boot camp is a stronger signal of that, and obviously way more efficient than spending 12 years in school. Or if you want compliance without that kind of physical stress, then some variant of extreme ascetic monk training would probably do it.)

Murray Rothbard says that compulsory education in Europe was first established by Protestant Reformation leaders—Martin Luther and his followers, and John Calvin—and that their primary motive was to promulgate their religious ideas and suppress religious heresy; and that the Calvinist Puritans brought this approach to America (starting with Massachusetts and more generally New England). "Only a year after its first set of particular laws, the Massachusetts Bay Colony in 1642 enacted a compulsory literacy law for all children. ... In 1647, the colony followed up this law with the establishment of public schools. The major stress in the compulsory education was laid on the teaching of Calvinist-Puritan principles." Doing my own research, I verify that Massachusetts's 1647 laws[1] required that parents "once a week (at the least) catechize their children and servants in the grounds & principles of Religion" in the very next sentence after the requirement to "[e]nable them perfectly to read the English tongue".

As for what animated the educationists who successfully established compulsory public education in most of the American states in the mid-late 1800s, Rothbard describes it in the following link. Rothbard is an ideological libertarian, but he forms his arguments from plenty of primary and secondary sources which he cites. https://mises.org/library/education-free-and-compulsory-1/ht...

[1] https://teachingamericanhistory.org/library/document/the-law...

You've obviously looked into the history of the system to a deeper degree than I have. I not only appreciate the effort, but I respect your opinion as to my point.

Do you figure I'm making a good point, or do you disagree? If I'm wrong, what is the point of school? Why does every country do it?

Again, curious to hear your thoughts.

Based on Rothbard's description... The educationists who pushed for it were not a completely homogeneous group, although they were reasonably well organized.

Some simply thought education was good and weren't bothered by the coercion.

Some subscribed to the absolutist State view going back to Luther and Calvin—people saying things like "in these schools the precepts of morality and religion should be inculcated, and habits of subordination and obedience be formed", "that a teacher must lead his students to accept the existing government", "the children belong to the State and not to their parents", etc.

And some had egalitarian aims along the lines of what you describe. "The vigorous championing of the public school's leveling role appeared again and again in the educationists' literature. Samuel Lewis particularly stressed that the common schools would take a diverse population and mold them into "one people;" Theodore Edson exulted that in such schools the good children must learn to mingle with the bad ones, as they will have to do in later life", and others are cited too.

Although you may be surprised at how far they go. Rothbard says that Owen and Wright—Wikipedia identifies them as utopian socialists—had very extreme plans involving the State raising all children away from their parents in a uniform environment, as the logical conclusion of making the childhoods of the rich and the poor be totally equal; those are the only two he cites advocating this, but he claims they were very influential, the essays published with approval by a great many newspapers, etc. Could be.

Back to what you said: The "including teaching it's boredom, authority, and pointless busywork"—well, authority yes, but the boredom and busywork seem pretty clearly not part of the original plan. I think that's an accident which has developed since then. Which brings me to this point:

Supposing that the above describes the state of affairs in the mid-1800s, a great deal of time has elapsed since then. Private companies with clear goals develop cancer (that is, pockets of people acting selfishly at the organization's expense and subverting the organization's usual methods of enforcing its objectives) on smaller timescales than that. You should expect some ... evolution.

Generally, I expect incentives to direct the evolution of an organization. If we consider the "customers" of an organization to be those who decide if it gets funding, then the customers of a public school are primarily the voters or the politicians they elect, not the students or the parents—except insofar as those can influence voters. (Also, sometimes a school is allocated funds proportional to the number of students, so students voting with their feet could be a force; on the other hand, switching schools involves hassle, losing one's entire social group, and likely a longer commute, so it's likely not used often.)

We might expect this to mean that schools would tend to implement policies that make things pleasant for school employees at the expense of students, as long as they can't be turned into public relations disasters. Continually increasing the homework load, starting school extra-early for teenagers despite decades of research about sleep schedules showing that's a bad idea, and assigning busywork (either in the sense of "literally to keep the students busy while the teacher can sit and relax", or in the sense of "make all 20 students do an extra 5 problems because of the 1-2 people who need the practice") are all examples of this. (Note that, for all these, opposition can be dismissed as "the complainers are lazy bums".) I've had a case where a teacher—a nice guy and a smart guy, I liked and respected him—told me that, if he made an exception to implement my request, he'd have 100 parents beating down his door with their own requests—so, keeping his negotiating position with parents was more important than designing a better program for his student (well, from his incentives, it was more important).

It could be worse. The book "Little Soldiers"—based on what I've read[1] about it—depicts what is apparently considered good practice in modern Chinese education. Students starting at age 3 are required to sit very still and do a delicate and pointless task over and over, and are yelled at whenever they mess up—all to establish "discipline" as early as possible. Parents are expected to fawn over the teachers and, under the table, to buy them gifts. This seems pretty clearly the end state of "optimized for school employees at the expense of students and parents" (well, I guess I could imagine it going even farther...). It seems American parents are more unruly and have a better negotiating position than that.

But generally, beware of ascribing purpose to any particular part of school. If the school was laid out in a coherent design by one person, and it's relatively young and small, and has good competition—then maybe you can expect most of it to be part of the plan. But public schools that have existed for a long time... When you experience busywork, it's not the taste of egalitarianism; it's the taste of organizational cancer.

[1] https://old.reddit.com/r/slatestarcodex/comments/cz48fp/litt... and the discussion at https://slatestarcodex.com/2020/01/22/book-review-review-lit...

Maybe if I limited my concept of the 'point' of school to more specifically describe the average incentives driving the average parent in the current decade to send their child through the formal education system, rather than homeschooling?

Would you then consider it possible to draw a link between that and a tractable concept of the 'point' of school.

I would probably refer to that as "the point of sending your kid to school". Note that this is different from "the point of running the school the way it's currently run" (which is how I would probably interpret the bare phrase "the point of school"), and also from "the point of maintaining compulsory education laws".

It may also be different from "why parents choose to send their kid to school", because parents' perception of their choices may be incorrect—I think it often is.

And, of course, it'll be different for different kids. You say "the average", but as some say, the average human has one ovary and one testicle; taking an average across disjoint groups may not make much sense. A high school diploma is one of the most cited reasons for going to high school (not K-8), but that would really only matter if the high school itself is a brand name, which is rare (you probably have to be rich, talented, or lucky to get in); otherwise a GED should work equally well for college. For the upper middle class trying to get into elite colleges, an upper middle class high school will offer plenty of extracurriculars with which students can pad their applications. For socially adept poor kids that manage to live in rich districts, mingling with the rich kids may be useful. For kids with terrible home environments, school may be a decent escape. For kids that fit well into the social environment and aren't bothered by all of school's problems, it may be fun, good for making friends, and even a decent educational option. I think most of the above groups don't overlap much (except the "socially adept poor kids" obviously "fit well into the social environment"), and forming a picture of school's "average target student" wouldn't look like a real student and would probably mislead more than enlighten.

For kids in reasonable home environments, who are irritated by school's problems, who have friends and sports or other group activities they do outside school, who have access to libraries and now the internet and Wikipedia and free online courses, which are getting better while school seems to get worse due to its cancer... it's probably not the best choice (the kid's individual traits like motivation and curiosity may be deciding factors here), and as trends proceed that will become more clearly and generally the case. Parents' impressions of the available options are probably decades out of date.

As for the incentives that face parents themselves: for many, public school is primarily publicly funded daycare; for some parents, there is no reason other than avoiding punishment from truancy laws. Honestly, I suspect the strongest motivators in practice are social conformity—not sending your kids to school would be shameful or weird, make you stick out and become a magnet for criticism—and ignorance of alternatives.

Most haven't heard of unschooling, and probably think homeschooling is for Christian fundamentalists who hate evolution, or for geniuses; those who know more still usually assume that it requires a parent to act like a full-time tutor, and haven't considered options like "set up books and textbooks and ask your child once a day what they learned and if they have any questions". Some have thought that far and think their child would never be productive without constant supervision; the homeschooling advocate's response is that your child has spent years being taught that "education" = "adults imposing boring unpleasant crap on you", and it may take many months for that to fade away, but their motivation should improve eventually; still, it seems possible to me that there's significant intrinsic individual variation in motivation and curiosity that would make the difference.

It is disappointing when adults assume the worst about their own children and knowingly condemn them to years of misery; they could be correct, but what a thing for a parent to believe... One can also ask: if you really believe that, then how do you expect them to do well in college or in a career? Maybe they assume the motivation will automatically improve as the frontal lobe finishes growing (which is possible), and that faking it until then will get them into a place where they might develop hitherto unseen qualities and do well. To which I merely sigh, shake my head, and say life should be so much better than that, and for many reasons it's worth the risk of trying it the right way.

I guess a counterexample would be that kids can leave if they want to. They have to be organized, and highly motivated, which is also kind of a measure of how prepared they are to function in the real world. They also have to prove that they have achieved the level of knowledge expected of a graduating high-school student.

Kids can take the California High School Proficiency Exam, leave high school at 16, do two years at a community college, and transfer out to a state school.

I wound up taking a bunch of community college classes at night, my high school accepted the credits, and let me leave a year early.

Only a handful of kids seem to actually follow-through with it, but it's totally doable if you're organized, willing to work, and really want out.

> Kids can take the California High School Proficiency Exam, leave high school at 16

Yep. Though I didn't do any college after that. I messed around with mathematics and programming for about 5 years, then made a serious effort to find a programming job, and have been working since then.

I didn't know about the CHSPE until 9th grade, though, when my sister told me about it (because she had a friend who used it too). Before then, my impression was that there was no feasible alternative to school. Certainly no one at school mentioned it.

Also, you're not allowed to take the CHSPE until either age 16 or in the second semester of 10th grade. Which strikes me as stupid. Seems to me that, if you manage to pass it at a younger age, then that is a stronger proof that you're smart/hardworking and shouldn't be stuck taking 9th grade or 8th grade or whatever. (I imagine most of my peer group could have passed it in 6th grade; it is really a test of basic minimum competency.)

I personally wasn't as intrinsically motivated to pursue a given field. I just wanted to get out and do something more interesting, discover the real world, and explore career options. I picked up Morris Kline's Calc, aaaaand then I put it back down and signed up for a class.

What would you attribute your deep intrinsic motivation to? It's admirable.

Thank you, let's see. One part is probably that I was brought up to admire great scientists—my dad gave me popular science books by Stephen Hawking ("The Universe in a Nutshell" in particular) at a young age, and some Feynman books, and such. (I remember "Black Holes, Wormholes, and Time Machines" by Jim al-Khalili from the library.) For a long time I figured I should become such a scientist myself.

Another is probably high self-opinion and wanting to prove I was the best. In elementary school, I entered the chess club; there was a five-week tournament (one game per week), and I studied chess books my mom gave me and by the end of the tournament was the strongest player in the school. (I only tied for first place in that tournament, but I had improved enough by the end that I believe I won all subsequent rematches against the guy I lost my first game to.) Upon entering middle school, I took a Mathcounts test to determine who would be on the school team, and I got the highest score in the school (which was actually kind of a fluke, because I had a friend who generally outperformed me at arithmetic-based contests and did so at the actual Mathcounts events—but I tended to beat him at proof contests later on). I did lots of math contests, and generally did "rather well". The pinnacle of that was qualifying for the math olympiad camp in 9th grade, from which the U.S. International Math Olympiad team is selected (although people below 12th grade have a lower bar, and aren't in the running for the team unless they've met the higher bar; my achievement isn't that impressive). So my self-opinion had some justification.

Regarding calculus textbooks, in the summer after 7th grade I went to one of my sisters and said, "You know, I've heard of this thing called calculus, but I don't know what it is"; she gave me my oldest sister's calculus textbook (Ostebee and Zorn), and I read through chapters, and did problems out of the the chapters until I figured I understood it, and moved onto the next chapter. (I didn't go through all the chapters—towards the end it did multidimensional stuff that just got boring.) With this as my sole calculus education, I later chose to take a calculus round of a math contest, and got a "decent" score (IIRC it might have been in the top 10%). :-)

So, for quite a long time, I wasn't actually sure that I'd ever met anyone who was smarter than me. (My abovementioned friend was certainly close, and was better at some things.) At the math olympiad camp, I did meet people who were clearly significantly better than me at math contests. I figured that a certain amount of that was due to drilling, which was something I didn't do (I mean, I went to math club and did whatever they put in front of me, but I didn't practice contests at home), which gave me a way to suspect that I might still be at least as smart as them. :-) I knew this was a self-serving line of thought, but I figured that, as long as I knew it was specious, it was harmless to indulge it and let it motivate me. I think Colin Percival is the clearest example of someone reasonably close to my age that I'd have to bow down to. (Though even then, if my education had been properly arranged, instead of wasting most of my K-10 years... Well, that is an experiment I hope to carry out multiple times in the next generation.)

The olympiad camp actually gave worksheets that they recommended we do throughout the year. I did not want to pursue that, or pure math in general (although I thought I was good, I didn't think I had a good chance of, say, proving the Riemann hypothesis, and anything less than that didn't seem worth it), and refocused on computer science. (I also had discovered Paul Graham's essays around 8th grade, Scheme in 9th grade, and took an AP CS class in 10th grade, whose curriculum included SICP—yeah, that teacher was pretty cool.) After leaving school, I did over 100 Project Euler problems, and did other "programming for math" stuff, although I drifted towards pure programming stuff (implementing languages, specifically).

Now, don't get me wrong. I'm not some kind of work-maniac like Isaac Newton. I've spent plenty of time playing computer games, and still do. But I have some reflexes that have served me well. (1) Whatever you're doing, do it well. If you're doing it well, see if you can do it even better. (2) Keep an eye out for opportunities to practice your skills. When I got irritated at repetitive Youtube comments, I used curl/egrep/sed/sort/uniq to count how many of them matched a particular format. When I felt frustrated about limitations in EV Nova or Civilization II or other games, I did some work towards reimplementing them myself—which, in the case of EV Nova, led me down a rabbit hole of researching real-time garbage collection, which occupied my productive efforts for some years. When I set an alarm clock, it is a shell command of the following form:

  ~> sleep (math "3600 * 8 - 600"); pelimusa

where "pelimusa" is a command that sets the computer volume (in case I muted it) and then plays a song[1] in a loop until I control-C it. (3) You should know how to do everything. If there's something you don't know how to do, it should irritate you a little or hurt your pride. (4) Don't do unnecessarily stupid things. Being smart means you can do very stupid things (which other people wouldn't even try, or think to try), and if this actually leads you to cause permanent damage to yourself or other terrible outcomes, then you really weren't smart in the ways that mattered, which is unacceptable.

I was in the weeds of implementing my idealized real-time GC in x64 assembly (which may have been a bad idea, but I had my reasons, and I didn't have anyone whose opinion I trusted advising me against it; at least I learned a lot), and eventually my family started putting pressure on me to start earning money. So I did. I got a referral to Google—which turned me down, by the way, which... lowered my opinion of them :-P—and then to a few other places. I've been working at a medium-sized Silicon Valley tech company since then.

Today, in my job, the things that motivate me are pride, curiosity, and lolz. Pride could be summarized as proving to myself that I'm the best (however I might choose to define it), and that those who have invested in me made the right choice. Curiosity is self-explanatory. Lolz is when I use absurd means (like overwriting executables in /usr, or piping "yes" into installation programs, or running "kill -STOP; kill -CONT" in a loop to slow down a program) because they're actually a very effective and quick path to what I want.

Beyond my job, I want to fix things for future generations, perhaps to prove that I'm right that there was a better way. John Holt tried to reform school, ran into the cancer (as well as the astonishingly common view that children are no damn good), and concluded you had to work outside school. Seems about right to me.

Civilization II has taught me that exponential growth is the most powerful strategy ever. If I can create several people like me, each of whom creates several more, and so on, then that can achieve a lot more than I might do myself. (I am being 70% serious.) Even if they're not as smart, raising them properly (i.e. no goddamn school, plus find them some cognitive peers, and generally have an intellectually rich household) may more than make up for that: the improved education and non-isolation (my social development was certainly hampered by growing up 99% around kids I couldn't relate to, which may have made the difference in my squandering some opportunities) and possibly improved motivation (having 6+ hours a day forcibly wasted is very demotivating). In the worst case, they'll still carry my genes and can try again with the next generation.

I encourage smart and motivated people to try this too. At some point we may figure out how to directly increase intelligence (that would be one of the projects I would hope a kid of mine tackles); for now, the most obviously workable approach is to find a suitable genius (with no severe mental health or personality issues) who is willing to give you their genetic material. That may take the form of marrying them, if you're lucky. Once you have the kids (plural; one of the easiest ways to have peers is to have them at home, although you can't guarantee they'll be friends), the default approach of unschooling seems best: buy good books and intellectually stimulating toys, help them meet friends, maybe experiment with 1:1 tutoring if you have the resources and they like it, support them in activities they seem interested in, but fundamentally just make sure they are fed and watered and loved, and trust to their natural curiosity and to luck. (There is going to be a large luck component. Another reason to have multiple kids.)

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XKs5mkEpWuU

The point of Germany being highly educated is overdone. The country was also heavily militarized, violent and generally massive mess. Hitler was not representing educated elite, quite the opposite. Part of that all was backslash against modernity, against arts etc.

In Russia, peasants were largely illiterate. As in, unable to read and write. The revolution did came from people who were able to read and write, obviously, it is kinda hard to coordinate without that. For that matter, monarchy was kept by educated people too, simply because you cant keep bureaucracy without writing.

But it was not some kind of great education they would have. And their propensity for violence had more to do with how violent Russia was even before then with anything education.

> The revolution did came from people who were able to read and write, obviously, it is kinda hard to coordinate without that.

The did much more than coordination. The intelligentsia was basically 100% responsible for the revolution in every aspect, starting from conceptualization (peasants would never come up with the idea of trying to apply Marxism to the real world and wouldn't even be able to imagine world other than the one in which tzar rules over them) through managing implementation to the post-revolution power capture. Peasants were merely ants, necessary for revolutionaries' plans to install themselves as new rulers of Russia (obviously, some of them had more lofty goals, but as usual the worst scoundrels quickly took over and the idealists were disposed of).

And very little of what they did would be possible without writing and reading. Peasants did not entered Russian politics in meaningful way at all. Simply, being illiterate to the point where you cant even improve on super behind farming also makes you pretty crappy at anything politics. Peasants attacked local rules here and there, then being bloodily suppressed wherever things got tight. That was it.

The monarchy, the military, the civil service, they were all "intelligentsia" too. "Liberal bourgeoisie" and capitalists were "intelligentsia" too. There were freaking 5 armies in Russia civil war. All 5 were led by people able to read and write. You all make it sound as if "intelligentsia" were uniformly Leninist or something. They were not, that is just the army that won. And I would be even super surprised if communists were the most educated of them all.

Yet also, the Russia monarchy was not exactly stable democratic functioning place until Lenin started revolution by the end of WWI out of nowhere.

I honestly hate when people who are supposedly against communist somehow adopt communist framing in completely absurd ways, down to blaming "intelligentsia" for whatever they perceive bad and down to attributing whole of Russian civil war to communists. I would really like to see someone use the term intelligentsia for like American journalist, teachers, or programmers. Lets all assume that all college educated people in American hold the same opinions. It is that stupid term.

Intelligentsia does not mean "educated people". For example, capitalists or the tzar's family were not part of Inteligentsia. A lof of the military officers weren't either.

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

> "As a status class, the intelligentsia includes artists, teachers and academics, writers, and the literary hommes de lettres.[3][4] Individual members of the intelligentsia are known as intellectuals."

I would love to see analysis under which Stalin was intellectual. And people I mentioned (except maybe programmers) are not.

> "In Russia, before the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), the term intelligentsia described the status class of educated people whose cultural capital (schooling, education, enlightenment) allowed them to assume practical political leadership."

Yeah, pretty much anyone able to participate in politics. Which literally means every person participating in Russian politics is intelligentsia by this definition. Notably, while not all officers and capitalists participated, those who did would be counted as intelligentsia. And they did participate and even achieved some.

> "In Eastern Europe, intellectuals were deprived of political influence and access to the effective levers of economic development; the intelligentsia were at the functional periphery of their societies."

Can confirm that intellectuals were hated by communists.

Calling communists intelligentsia is one way to delegitimize them, precisely because of their disdain for this class. That was strong political point and rhetoric, but fails when you then try to make it a point about impact of education on person.

> I would love to see analysis under which Stalin was intellectual

The Wikipedia article conflates intelligentsia with intellectuals, which I don't agree with (I'm Polish, so I have some long-ingrained intuitions regarding those terms). Stalin, as an educated non-wealthy person (he studied to become a priest), can easily be seen as someone who is a member of inteligentsia.

> Which literally means every person participating in Russian politics is intelligentsia by this definition.

Tzar family or many of the old aristocratic families were not a member of intelligentsia and would probably be offended by the association. The key factor of being in inteligentsia was (from Wiki): "people engaged in the complex mental labours". The higher classes didn't do any labor.

You argued that "intelligentsia does not mean educated people". Now you are classifying Stalin with finished elementary school at 16 and seminary studies as intelligentsia.

> The key factor of being in inteligentsia was (from Wiki): "people engaged in the complex mental labours".

Stalin was not engaged in the complex mental labors, outside of seminary he engaged in revolutionary politics basically.

The very same wikipedia has multiple definitions for inteligentsia - including specifically Russian one from pre-revolution I quoted. Which defines inteligentsia as people educated enough to engage in politics. Which does include Stalin and pretty much everyone else involved in Russian politics.

> Tzar family or many of the old aristocratic families were not a member of intelligentsia and would probably be offended by the association. The higher classes didn't do any labor.

I did not made that definition, wiki did.

Monarchy had more supporters then just Tzar and old aristocratic families. And again, old aristocratic families did actually engaged in ruling and leading. And then you have waste groups of lower aristocracy running smaller things. The country was under constant internal conflict and pressure. They did not done labor, they did politics a lot.

And group of people who had don't politics or who have been educated cant be reasonably reduced to "Stalin vs Tsar". Somehow, people pushing for reforms (too little too late success, but still) don't exist. Liberals dont exist. Capitalists dont exist or dont engage with politics. That is not even realistic. Monarchis trying for milder reforms dont exist.

Looking at politics in the UK on both sides of the political spectrum it is very clear that the public education system here is completely failing.

In the general population there appears to be very little critical thinking, ability to regulate emotions, cost benefit analysis, consideration of opportunity cost, probabilistic thinking, nor even a rudimentary understanding of the scientific method, political and legal system.

It really depends on what you compare with. Before the spread of public education, people were commonly believing in magic, witches and, based on that, could be sold on all sorts of non-sequiturs. Now, they're more or less aware of the scientific process, understand most basic concepts of natural sciences, know a bit of history, can write semi-coherently, have a bit more rigour in forming arguments etc. Of course, they aren't all Oxford-educated intellectuals but, to elevate a big fraction of population to that level, I'm guessing we would need a ton of 1-on-1 tutorships, which would be extremely costly.

You just recited the unwashed masses dogma. I don't really agree with you at all. The vast majority of british people I've interacted with, even the "uneducated", all have reasonable, well thought out opinions even if they don't always agree with my own. I think it's much better than you seem to suggest.

The real issue is with the politicians, and the fact we don't have proportional representation. There is a significant percentage of the population with no real representation. I do not relate with either Tories or Labor and I don't think either has my best interests at heart.

> I do not relate with either Tories or Labor

Nor do most voters. They have to keep FPTP because they know that otherwise, most people won't vote for them; the last 4 times the UK had nationwide elections held under a more proportional system, most voters voted for parties other than labour of the Conservatives.

> I don't think either has my best interests at heart.

Most people agree with you!

1. we already had a vote on proportional representation: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/2011_United_Kingdom_Alternat...

2. everyone thinks proportional representation is excellent. the reason is usually a misunderstanding of the voting process. in reality it has drawbacks, same as first past the post. before the UK referendum a study was commissioned exploring the various types of voting. the conclusion was that all these systems have flaws and all these systems are similar. but the clarity and the definitive mandate a party gets from FPTP will make sure alternative voting will not be adopted anytime soon.

I don't buy the "FPTP gives strong government" argument. Even if we accept that FPTP gives the government "clarity and a definitive mandate" (a very dubious claim given the chaos of the last few years), what's so great about strong government? The whole point of democracy is to prevent the government from getting too strong; if we really wanted strong government we'd abolish parliament and go back to letting the monarch decide everything.

Many, many European countries have proportional systems in which it's very rare for one party to get a clear majority and governments are almost always coalitions. Would Norway, Sweden or the Netherlands really be better off under a system like FPTP that effectively disenfranchises a large majority of the electorate?

No we didn’t, that system wasn’t proportional representation by any definition, please do not make posts that are not true, other readers might be misled.

> we already had a vote on proportional representation

No, because AV is not a proportional system

> in reality it has drawbacks

There are lots of proportional systems, so it does not make senser to say "it has drawbacks".

> all these systems are similar

That's not true either.

Agree with you that society as a whole would make better decisions with PR. And at least policy would be more representative and lead to less resentment. The 2019 GE would have resulted in Tory minority, avoiding socialism and putting a dampener on a Hard Brexit.

My description of the unwashed masses applies to plenty of highly educated people too.

To the list, I would also add that people don’t seem to look at root causes of problems. This can be seen very clearly in the dysfunctional housing market. High rents are the fault of greedy landlords. As if landlords can just choose the price irrespective of the market! And a common objection to building more housing is that it wouldn’t be affordable. Using that logic, there would have been no point in planting potatoes during the Irish potato famine because they would be too expensive.

Speaking as someone with two children in secondary education at a "bog standard comprehensive" in East London, I think you are entirely incorrect.

I am very pleased with the level of critical thinking and lively argument we get over the dining room table about the issues of the day. My youngest daughter hs just started GCSE history and sociology and I am being constantly schooled on the ills of society.

Reminder that the lag on education affecting society is huge. People aged 65 received their education from 1960 onwards! There are still people alive and voting from before the 1944 education act! (although not many)

I would more blame the newspapers and other media for poor understanding of issues, which is mostly deliberate on the part of the Murdoch press.

> School is excellent at inuring children to boredom, obeying authority and pointless busywork.

Which is an exact mirror of the professional world that most people will face later. School system is here to push a national narrative on people (which is not a bad point per se, as it builds cohesion), and prepare them to be mindless drone in a corporate environment. In short it serves society needs, not individuals.

> It would be hard to be clearer that the purpose of the “education” system is indoctrination.

You call it indoctrination. Someone else might equally call it social cohesion.

Call it what you want - it sure isn't critical thinking.

So homeschooling is "critical thinking" ?

My above comment was directed at the two parent comments who were variously referring to public school conditioning as "indoctrination" or "social cohesion". Whatever you choose to call it, public schools (in the United States) do not teach critical thinking - quite the opposite.

Whether or not critical thinking is on the agenda for a homeschooled student depends entirely on the teacher and the curriculum.

Tomato tomato

Interesting you brought up the whole parallel societies thing. We have a few churches around us that have a bunch of people who do home schooling and "alternate" schooling, and this whole alternate society thing is really noticeable. The kids have friends and play and socialize, but it's an entirely different circle from the public school kids. The kids play video games but different ones, they watch TV and listen to music, but have a totally different concept of pop culture than the regular school kids. Like if I made a Spiderman or Harry Potter reference/joke they wouldn't get it at all, but they have their own memes that only they get. Feels kind of insular, like the Amish or one of those communities of immigrants who deliberately don't assimilate into the shared US cultural melting pot.

This I can confirm personally. I could read fluently before Kindergarden because my older sister taught me so, not by force, but because I asked what the big letters of luminous advertising on a supermarket meant. So it began :) And I learned to learn by reading everything I could get. By myself.

But: that probably won't work for everyone. Furthermore the question remains how to do that when both parents have to work to make ends meet? Maybe even multiple jobs, as it is common for many nowadays? Also one can't overgeneralize this, as there are good teachers and schools, and bad ones. No matter what country or system or schooltype.

As always: it depends...

What is the basis for thinking public education is the best option for education or for political freedom? Must that always be the case if it once was true?

Who would be letting a child go astray in a home education environment? Why would a reasonable parent in #3 not conclude that education can be provided via multiple potentially sources, including themselves and a good curriculum?

Why would you not say homeschooling disseminates knowledge, teaches critical thinking and aids democracy?

Your aims are excellent here.

Compare the education system in 3rd world countries. Try telling their parents to do homeschooling and you will see how privileged we are.

This whole conversation is about living in a western democracy. However, in various third world countries some alternatives to central ally-applied education are practiced, especially where geography makes it difficult and where it is politically acceptable. This is changing in some interesting ways, positively and negatively, as cellular connections proliferate.

Also, the idea of telling someone to homeschool, in a conversation about liberal arts and attitudes that’s mostly questions so far, is a good reminder that a coercive mindset isn’t easily set aside. Would ask you to consider how your education laid the ground for that.

> Who would be letting a child go astray in a home education environment?

Several of my cousins' families.

> 1. School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule.

NO ITS NOT! This is a lie. There were reports in 1960's when the congress asked for an experiment to different ways of teaching. The children taught in a 1 to 1 way performed enormously better compared to the rest. And one of the worst ways was to teach is in mass. When the results came, they buried the report after it wasn't in their favor.

Schools are only good for above average intelligence people. If you want no one to be left behind then you should teach those who're slightly disadvantaged in a dedicated manner in 1 to 1 classes.

Do you happen to have that report somewhere? If it was buried, can you try to find it online? Where did you see it? Would love to examine it.

Education is of great importance to me, if this shift is a great alternative, I would not ignore the paradigm.

Note: I won't deny the effectiveness of 1-1 teaching (ex: private tutoring).

Cite your source. Provide some sort of corroborating information, such as a link to the article, or a link to a an article about the article. If it's a Congressional Report, it is available on the web.

Look up replies to my comment. You'll find them.

https://www.nifdi.org/what-is-di/di-vs-di.html https://www.nifdi.org/research/history-of-di-research/projec...

Are you referring to Blooms 2 sigma problem (https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bloom%27s_2_sigma_problem)?

While it did show that, that research was not done until the 80’s.

For the many people questioning this, I'm pretty sure you refer to Direct Instruction:

https://www.nifdi.org/what-is-di/di-vs-di.html

Research is available there if you click the "Research" tab. The main research seems to be Project Follow Through:

https://www.nifdi.org/research/history-of-di-research/projec...

You are not making a counterargument. The operating word is “masses”. 1-on-1 doesn’t scale. The political reality may be that support for schooling would crater if the report were widely known, but the alternative isn’t realistically “modern schools” vs. “1-on-1 tutoring”, but rather “modern schools” vs. “nothing”, or, optimistically, “modern schools” vs. “something not yet invented”.

It doesn't have to scale, it just has to be possible. I would argue that it is, especially given how many people are in jobs that just don't matter.

You are casually suggesting restructuring the entire economy while minimizing a relatively small problem involved in that, which is deciding who has access to education and how.

Put 30 kids in front of a teacher for 8 hours - that's about 15 minutes of instructor attention per kid per day on average. If we assume that one on one sessions need to last 8 hours, then yeah the system doesn't scale; but more realistically the kid's educational needs could be met in a fraction of the time. One person can tutor dozens of kids a week if they do it full time, but even better you can tutor without doing it full time. Full time teachers are a limited resource and if yours isn't great at some or all of the job, you just have to suffer the consequences; but there is a massive pool of people who are capable of teaching a kid something, and the harm of a mediocre tutor is minimal and easily overcome.

One on one tutoring is already extremely widely employed, and plenty of platforms have popped up to help it effectively scale. Pretty much the only people who don't use it are those who can't afford it, a problem regular schooling would also face if not publicly paid for. It takes very little imagination to picture a system where people get vouchers to spend on tutoring services and a simple method for large numbers of people to qualify as tutors eligible to accept these vouchers.

Unless I'm mistaken, you're assuming one of two things:

1) 1-on-1 tutoring happens online. I would like evidence that this is effective, given the challenges this pandemic has put in evidence. Particularly, note that this is supposed to be aimed at all children, not just particularly motivated or interested ones that will sit quietly learning at their computer.

2) 1-on-1 tutoring does not happen online. In which case you either have to add the cost of getting the kids to the tutor (if the tutor stays put, maximizing their throughput) or getting the tutor to the kids (reducing their throughput and their student count).

Beyond that, modern schooling is an entire system that addresses many many problems in society including:

- Daycare for kids ages 5-18

- Logistics of getting kids to and from school (in the US)

- Logistics of providing shared facilities for things like experimental science classes .

- Logistics of providing shared access to higher level computing facilities than individual poor students can afford.

- For a nontrivial number of students, access to food during the day.

- Many more, because I am not an expert and I literally came up with this list off the top of my head.

Are these problems unsurmountable? Do they all need to be solved by the educational system? Maybe not. But imperfectly as it solves them, it does address them for now. You can't throw out a significant part of the public service provided by public education and claim you successfully replaced it.

I was envisioning primarily in person tutoring, which has been effectively done for a very long time. That said, online tutoring is an option that many can and would employ. That a few kids might need a different structure is a very good argument for the flexibility of tutoring.

We already transport students and people already commute to work. The money you currently pay to stick kids in your school district on a bus can be used to facilitate transportation for tutoring. Some tutoring services may provide a central location while others may bring the tutor to you, and you pick the one that works best for your family.

As for your other points:

Dedicated daycare facilities can be more efficiently set up if that is their only objective. Effectively teaching hundreds of students at the same time is impossible, so you need dozens of teachers and classrooms. But if your only concern is making sure they don't kill eachother, you can easily throw a few hundred kids in a gym or a plsyground and tell them to have fun with only a small handful of moderators - which is exactly what most schools do during recess. A good portion of the current school population probably doesn't even need such services (if your 18 year old needs to be babysat, they're going to have a very rough time at 19).

School creates the logistical problem of getting kids to and from school. Again, the bus you're already paying for can take people to a school or a shared learning center or a library or a tutor's office.

The money you are paying to maintain the school science lab can also be spent to support a community science lab. This building can be much smaller, less staffed, and more optimally configured than a full highschool

The money you spend to support a school computer lab can also be spent to support a community computer lab. In general this already exists at most public libraries. The same argument as for the science lab applies here.

The money you spend to support school lunches can also be spent on food programs.

When all you have is a hammer, everything starts to look like a nail, but a hammer is not the right tool for many jobs. Likewise when all you have is a school, every societal need related to children starts to look like a school problem, but that does not mean school actually solves those problems in an efficient way. It really does not take any great mental leaps to imagine services dedicated to solving individual problems being more efficient than something that was never originally intended to solve that problem.

Chric Crawford's argument[1] is that video games can provide the same sort of interactivity which makes 1-on-1 teaching so effective. I don't agree with this argument, but it's a very interesting one.

1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kaBte1cBi5U

> School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen.

That's an interesting use of "purpose". That isn't what our system was specifically designed for (Prussian system adopted by the US) by the people who designed it.

They wrote heavily about how well their new education system instilled obedience and created good soldiers and workers. They were very proud of these good outcomes.

It's also not the actual measured outcomes of our current system. Hell, "critical thinking" is explicitly excluded from the curriculum by a chunk of the US.

The use of "purpose" to mean "thing we want it to be" isn't a critical type of thinking.

> School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen.

I'd say the plague of fake news shows that the current crop of educated population is not capable of critical thinking.

Not sure why you were downvoted: the traction fake news, anti 5G, and anti vaccine movements get clearly show that there is an issue where critical thinking is concerned.

I'm afraid that unschooling correlates to parents being antivac, anti 5G, etc.

Well, for example in France, the category where you can find the most antimask persons is high educated women in their 50s.

Source? In all statistics I have seen up to now, men were more likely to be antimask then women. So French women seems to be outliers.

https://jean-jaures.org/nos-productions/bas-les-masques-soci...

A thousand or so vocal Facebook users found on anti-mask groups were surveyed... Not exactly the epitome of representativity...

94% of them say they will refuse to be vaccinated against COVID-19... Both educated and anti-science. Maybe their educational system failed them, or there are other important factors at play.

57% believe in a global Zionist conspiracy theory... 52% think the Illuminati are attempting to control the population...

Men are more likely to be anti mask in USA since in USA right wing tend to be anti science. In many areas of Europe right wing is more pro science than left wing though, so the roles becomes reversed.

I live in Europe and our right wing is taking clues from American right wing. They are more anti mask then average. The German demonstrations against masks were right wing for example.

Where were left wing people in Europe more strongly against masks then center or right?

Isn't German right wing in large parts religious so it is closer to USA than many other European right wing parties? I live in Sweden and right wing is much more pro mask here.

The only reason the right wing is pro-mask in Sweden is because it lets them be contrarian to the left-wing government. If the government had been requiring masks, the right-wing in Sweden would be against it.

This says nothing about population of people who homeschool.

Realistically, homeschool is done overwhelmingly by women. If it was social norm, it would be expected from women and not from men.

So, I guess, if women would really overall more antimask and anti-vaccine and anti-science, it would show up generation later.

Source? We do unschooling and know a lot of families who unschool and exactly zero of them are antivaxers or antimaskers. We tend to end up here exactly because we believe in the scientific method.

Now imagine how much worse it'd be if more people were homeschooled and not exposed to opposing views. If their only source of information was a parent who believed in strange conspiracy theories and only associated with friends and family who had similar views.

School's greatest purpose is putting kids in a room with a couple dozen other kids that they may disagree with or even hate, and forcing them to learn how to deal with their existence.

Were you discussing high politics in the 5th grade or something? Because there's little opposing views in school up to say senior high school years!

So now school's purpose is no longer critical thinking but just socialisation with all social strata.

>Were you discussing high politics in the 5th grade or something?

Yes? We talked about the news and recent events in class around that time. It wasn't anything profound, but our classes definitely talked about it. This was also in the years following 9/11, so it was an unavoidable topic. We even had mock elections where we'd "vote" for real, current politicians.

If I'd only heard about the news and world happenings from home, I'd have a very different and far narrower view of things.

And it's not just politics. No clue why you assumed that. Schools put you in a room with kids from different backgrounds, different interests, different likes and dislikes. I see a lot of praise about homeschooling on HN, but the ones I've encountered (including cousins in my own family) mostly come from very isolated religious families seeking to shield their kids from the outside world. Maybe it's different for very wealthy people growing up in the valley or with other great resources provided to them, but most of the homeschooled people I've been around have had trouble acclimating to a world that isn't sanitized for their existence.

I'm not sure how you define "high politics", but certainly students discuss politics at younger ages than that. I would be surprised to find a school that doesn't include discussions on current events at pretty much every age level. Obviously the teachers had to be careful because even though they may feel strongly about an issue, most of them don't want to consciously bias the discussion.

I can even remember a teacher having us write a letter asking that a government facility in our region not be closed down because it would affect people in our class. I was probably in 3rd or 4th grade at the time. In 5th grade we had to write letters to soldiers fighting in the Gulf War - something that I have very mixed feelings about today because I do feel that supporting troops fighting in a war overseas is a highly political act.

> School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge

But is it? There are many schools that fail spectacularly at the task, to the point of graduating people who are functionally illiterate. Maybe school alone is not enough for that.

> Not all parents are good teachers.

True. Unfortunately, even more teachers aren't good teachers. Out of all teachers I had, I have maybe one really great teacher I could name and two or three decent ones. The rest were nearly useless at best, and actively harmful at worst. And there were much more of those than good ones. Fortunately, school is not the only place one can find good teachers...

> School's purpose is not to teach obedience

Are you sure? Because everything I've heard about schools suggests it is. At least if we're talking about standard government-issue school, not special fancy educational project or independent private establishment.

> It is there to teach us critical thinking

Maybe in theory. In practice maybe 1% of teachers could deal with actual critical thinking from the students, and even less would like to. And most "critical thinking" education I've encountered was "question those other authorities in a way we prescribe to you as your only and true authority which you don't dare to question".

> An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism

Given the absolutely disastrous state of the American academia, I don't think this argument holds any water. Yes, Cultural Revolution despised educated people. But turns out there's more than one way to indoctrination and totalitarian thought control. And being educated in never letting a dissenting opinion to be heard is no better than being not educated at all, at least when we talk about preventing totalitarianism.

Frankly, this sounds absurd. Having just been through this educational enlightenment I can tell you that's definitely not what schools do. Higher education like a bachelor's or master, sure. Definitely, even. But high school? Not at all.

It's a lesson in rote memorisation of the _true truth_ which we know is true because _the teacher said it_. It is the opposite of critical thinking. And if I were a totalitarian vying for my own state I'd leave the high school system exactly as is, perhaps change the history books a bit.

Schools teaching critical thinking? Hahahahahahahahah. Ok.

Disagree. In practice schools are a place where parents can offload their children while they are working. Covid underlined this.

You seem to be implying that the home alternative of public schooling doesn't also accomplish these goals as well. Home schooling has a curriculum and standards just like public school does.

I'm not gonna blindly advocate for home schooling but I think anyone who cares enough about their kids' education to look into options other than public school probably also cares enough to pull it off if it's the option they wind up choosing.

>School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule.

The further your kids are from the mean student the crappier the job the public school situation will do. It's like the difference between registering a new car at the DMV and bringing in a pile of papers to prove chain of custody on some junk that's only able to be street legal through some arcane technicality. The first transaction is painless. The latter is not. When you ask the system to do something it's well practiced at doing you get shit service.

>School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen.

And if you think it's successful at that for any reasonable definition of "success" then you're clearly living in a different 2020 than I am.

Look through history, even before widespread government funded schooling everything was just as crap as it is today. You had just as many popuist leaders, pants on head retarded popular culture movements, witch hunts, all the same crap we have today. The only thing that's changed is that as society have become more advanced and richer we've become more able to avoid pain and violence.

Also, school is very much about obedience to an arbitrary system. They don't overtly state it but it's pretty damn obvious if you look at how the carrots and sticks are set up.

>An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism. Ex: Nazi Germany and Mao's China burned books and persecuted the educated (1984 style).

Sure. But it's pure lunacy to conflate what's good for society with what's good for any specific kid(s). There's definitely a lot of overlap but there's also a lot of non-overlap.

Agreed with this!

Survival bias fills this thread with people for whom homeschooling worked. Consider that those didn't experience success might be under-represented in the dialogue you consume.

"School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen"

Having worked in public education for 15+ years I wish it were true that the goal is to teacher critical thinking. Sadly from my experience it is more about teaching "compliance". Critical Thinking seems to be pushed more for undergrad + schooling these days.

Fascinating. Do you think things would've turned out differently for you and your brother had you attended public school? Private?

I went to a truly terrible rural public school and I see many areas where that has held me back. Success was something to be ashamed of there. Loserthink was king.

It's impossible to say of course. But I think at the least we would have led more conventional lives.

For myself, maybe a darker outcome. I was struggling with peer pressure and getting into trouble. The family that owned our house before lost their daughter to overdose. She went to my school. I wonder sometimes how my life could have been had things been slightly different and we hadn't changed to homeschooling (after grade 6 for me, 3 for my brother.)

I suspect it would depend a lot on whether you were allowed to accelerate academically, and the answer would likely have been "no" or "not much". You might take a look at the following study, and see if it rings true to the school you did experience, or to what you've heard from others you've met:

"The considerable majority of [the subjects: young people with 160+ IQs in Australia] who have [skipped 2 or more grades in K-12] report high degrees of life satisfaction, have taken research degrees at leading universities, have professional careers, and report facilitative social and love relationships. Young people of equal abilities who accelerated by only 1 year or who have not been permitted acceleration have tended to enter less academically rigorous college courses, report lower levels of life satisfaction, and in many cases, experience significant difficulties with socialization. Several did not graduate from college or high school." https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ746290.pdf

I don't know if you're at the 160+ level, but SAT scores are something of a proxy for IQ, and the severity of the social and academic frustration due to mismatch with age-peers can be judged directly.

I am above average intelligence, but not 160 level. My hope when we started homeschooling was to complete the grades faster, but it was still school and didn't hold my interest enough for that. I ended up finishing later than normal, mostly because I got side tracked with my newfound passion for computer programming. I took two years before college to explore that, and went to college reluctantly. When I got there I soon realized I had gaps in my knowledge, but generally was ahead of the 4th year students assisting the professors. I didn't want to spend 4 years and a great deal of money pursuing just a piece of paper, and dropped out.

Community colleges can offer an alternative option, even in smaller suburban and semi-rural areas.

I hated high-school, but I took classes at the local community college every night, my high school accepted the credits, and I graduated high school a year-early with transferrable college credits.

My night-school experience gave me an opportunity to push my brain as far as I wanted, and it showed me what the 'real world' was like since my classmates were in their thirties, as opposed to the 'high-school world,' or whatever my eccentric parents would have cooked up.

The SATs have a ceiling well below four standard deviations above the mean. I’m skeptical that any test is properly calibrated at that level—-even with oversampling it’s very difficult to do properly.

Many IQ older IQ tests doesn't use 15 points per SD, so when you hear people talk about enormous IQ's like 160 it almost surely doesn't use a modern scale.

And in the past four years it has become government policy.

We do the same. Our homeschool community is rather large and we have sports (you name it we probably do it). We even compete with other public schools.

Thanks for sharing your experience.

Were you home schooled by your mother or your father? And whoever was home schooling you, were they working either part time or full time? I am interested in homeschooling as well.

My mom stayed at home and my dad worked. But really because we could read well and follow the lessons, it wasn't a large burden for mom. She had a lot of reservations when we started, but soon realized she could handle it. I don't see how it would work if both parents are working, you'd need a nanny or something in that case.

Would you mind revealing your brother's nom de plume (assuming he writes under one)?

I can't reveal that here because it's easy to identify me from my HN posts and thus tie his pen name to his real identity.

If it's who the 'obvious' google search reveals, you've said too much already (and at least one the links that search gives reveals the family name directly).

I suspect the worry is in the other direction. Sure it is not difficult to figure out what the brother's pen name is. And if you know both his names, it is not hard to find connections between them.

The part that popular authors usually want to avoid is making it easy to go from the pen name to the IRL name if you don't have some specific guess or anything. Right now I don't think going in that is particularly easy. If the grandparent however has said the name here it would almost certainly have made it easier to get from the pen name to the IRL name.

Do you mind naming the books your brother has written?

I wanted this, I essentially begged for it for 12 years with no success. I didn't need any extra motivation to read or do math problems and I was way above my grade level in both, but had behavioral problems because I was so bored in school. I still ended up with very high SAT and ACT scores too, but eventually broke down toward the end of college and graduated on time but with a few bad grades. My parents would have lost their minds if I had dropped out during any of the first three years when I also had an A-average GPA.

The public schools I went to all had a gifted program in various forms, which most years was just one hour a week and taught topics that should have been available to every student in the school. Amazingly, the teacher showed us the structure of a URL in around 1994 when I was in first grade.

> it was quite structured and we wrote the same provincial exams as every other grade 12 kid

This has been touched upon elsewhere by other commenters. But to at least ask you personally, would you concede that if you were doing well on tests despite the absence of the kind of cramming / teaching-to-the-test that the average schooled student receives, you could have done any kind of education, and in many ways, there is nothing special at all about homeschooling? Or that if your structure re-enacts this teaching, but it's a lot less time than the average student, you definitely have a natural aptitude for test taking?

Are tests the only way we can robustly evaluate a kid's education, until they are 18? If so, will sports matter if you're getting bad test scores? What does?

Here's the crazier conclusion. That people finger parental income or cultural values as the biggest factors of education outcomes, and in reality test performance is mostly genetic. It might as well be, from a policy perspective, randomly assigned - God rolls a 100 sided dice when you're born, and if it's a 1 or a 2 all standardized tests are easy for you. If you roll the other 98 numbers, the best thing is to cram.

We don't need alternatives to traditional schooling. We need a way of evaluating kids that rewards genuine learning. Kids who are learning should be scoring poorly sometimes, and that's the exact opposite of how children are evaluated, and poor scores are the exact opposite of what most parents of high achievers want.

Earnest parents are really seeking true learning. On the flip side, parents who send their kids to cram school or kvetch about college admissions not being fair because colleges consider factors other than totally and utterly gameable, zero-learning standardized tests - they are the antagonists. They are ruining our education system, they make school look the way it does, they are seeking a completely worthless advantage for their children (high test scores in the absence of valuable learning via cram school) for some cynically, utterly selfish devotion to values like making money and buying expensive things. Values so primitive and debasing that human cultures around the world have refined, multi-thousand-year-old refutations of materialism - opposition to materialism (asceticism) may be the most mature philosophy of all of history, at least as dominant as family values and theism. And then, to rationalize all of this, they find the least privileged and disadvantaged families and blame them instead! All the while pretending that there's some sort of equivalence of shittiness in their situations, because of some fucking number like income, between their families and the Other. It's complete and total bullshit.

Some changes to the school system can help everyone live happier lives and learn more, like different children spending longer (or shorter) times in class.

But really, we have to throw out tests. Or invent a test so sophisticated that it avoids being gamed by cramming.

There is no question that tests are terrible, are gamed, and get in the way of actual learning. How to replace them with something better and still measure performance is an open question.

However I think the biggest benefits of homeschooling are being ale to get customized 1 on 1 attention, and learning how to learn. That is the meta skill of being self driven, self disciplined in acquiring new skills. A lot of people that go through the public school system seem afraid of that or unable to do that. They were the people most likely to wash out of college in the first year, because they couldn't deal with the relative lack of structure compared to high school.

We have to get 300 million people to kind of internalize (or at least be vaguely familiar with) a small number of algorithms (constructing/reading a written sentence, long division, mitochondria is the powerhouse of the cell).

That's the point of the broader education system, and that's all that really matters.

Kids who are curious will follow some weird path and do all kinds of cool shit, kids with money will follow some orchestrated path that makes their parents happy, and most kids will do some variant of a contrived path at a community college and/or state school.

So, who cares? None of it matters. It's 2020. There's no card catalog. There's no ENIAC in the basement that some dweeb wearing a pocket-protector gatekeeps. Feynman doesn't have to sign off on your lab time. HOPE is on DVD, K&R is free on PDF, some crazy guys in the bay are selling DIY CRISPR kits, 3D printers are $200, FPV drone racing is affordable, and Steam sales are so cheap it makes my head spin (they remade both RE1 and Half Life!!!). They sell 2600 at Barnes and Noble for god's sake.

You can buy Knuth on Amazon, Erickson is available on NoStarch, and Xorpd's Udemy course is like $20 bucks. If you're a curious person, that will keep you pretty busy until you build Ben Eater's 8-bit computer, and work your way through building Dave Gingery's entire machine shop, and finish the Coursera Bioinformatics specialization. Then you can discover trad climbing and spend a sabbatical at Yosemite Camp 4 planning how you're gonna free The Nose on El Cap. That will give you plenty of time to ponder your first FreeBSD device driver, which will give you technical skills to construct your first botnet that you sell to the FSB for enough to film your first music video at your crib in Quetzaltenango. If you're smart and curious, you're busy no matter what bullshit job you have to do or what bullshit tests you have to take.

Tests, no tests, who cares? The hackers hack, the lanyard guys swipe in at FAANG, the boring people stress about their tests, and the weirdos make a living playing online poker from a palapa in Thailand.

The world turns.

> famous sci fi author

If it's the same author I found based on a cursory search from your profile, then "famous" is a bit of a stretch.

> Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places

I got a similar feeling reading about Chris Paolini. Homeschooled, raised in a remote place. Fed a lot of his early life experiences, particularly travel, into his novels but felt alienated from other kids.

> then "famous" is a bit of a stretch.

That's a bit rude. I did the same cursory search and realized my friends and I are big fans. Just because you don't recognize the name doesn't mean others don't.

My name is known in certain small circles, it doesn't make me famous. So just because you recognize the name, doesn't mean he's what one would classify as famous.

And the opposite is true too, which is my point. Maybe OPs circle is too tight.

Well he's not JK Rowling famous, but he has sold over a million books which puts him in a pretty elite club author wise. Especially in sci fi, that's a lot. I'm very proud of my brother, he started down a very difficult career path and became very successful. All self taught.

Former publishing industry professional here. If he's broken the 1 million books mark, I wouldn't hesitate to call him famous. He's more successful than 99.99% of authors.

Makes me very happy you celebrate his success so openly. In my time in the industry, I saw a lot of fiction authors dismissed by their family/friends who worked in non-creative industries. Thanks for being one of the awesome relatives. :)

It's great that you responded to something this rude in such a positive way.

> sold over a million books

Perhaps I was the one stretching with my "cursory search", because I missed the pseudonym. A million sales is certainly "famous" from any reasonable standpoint.

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