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My wife and I pulled our kids out at age 10 and 13. The laws in Nevada are just like those in Texas: Write a letter, the kids are yours.

The first thing we did was nothing, for about 6 months. Getting the kids out of the routine and mindset that school had put them in was vital to being able to teach them. My 10y/o son had the idea that his teachers knew more than my wife and I did "because they're older". He could have only got that idea at school because that's the polar opposite of what we taught at home.

I worked full time, but my wife did not and she poured a lot of energy into teaching the kids. But we also did things that weren't schooling. We let the kids learn on their own the things they wanted to learn when they wanted to learn them. This was wonderful. My son picked up programming just for fun and didn't even tell me about it until after, when he had already lost interest and moved on. But that was okay, because I didn't expect him to be a programmer or anything else. I just wanted him to learn. Same for our daughter. They learned. They got GED's and that was that.

They're both extremely well rounded adults now and didn't go through the agonies of public schooling.

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>> We let the kids learn on their own the things they wanted to learn when they wanted to learn them. This was wonderful.

I'm sure that it was. But good luck to them when they need to learn something important that isn't fun. There are times in every profession when you have to grind your way through something horrible. Want to be a lawyer? You will have to understand the rules of evidence regardless of what type of lawyer you want to be. Want to be a doctor? There will be anatomy that you will hate memorizing. There is something to be said for forcing kids to learn things they hate. It is necessary preparation for the important stuff that comes later, stuff they cannot learn from their parents. That's what advanced education is, learning something because an expert tells you to. Whether you enjoy every moment of it or not is beside the point. You can judge things once you become an expert.

I have to go away for a two-week training course on monday. It is going to be hell. Twelve days of memorizing stupid powerpoints about stuff I will probably never use. There will be tests at the end. I will pass them. My training at school/university, learning stuff I often hated, allows me to power through such things. I can sit in that chair hour after hour without drifting. Not everyone can do that. They work very different jobs. Their employer doesn't spend tens of thousands of dollars sending them to such courses.

Sure then maybe this won’t produce doctors or lawyers, but there are plenty of professions where mere intellect can suffice.

Ivy League schools for example are really good at producing the kind of people who can pass McKinseys first year deathmarch, but most of us don’t work there and don’t want deathmarches in general.

>> then maybe this won’t produce doctors or lawyers

Isn't that a decision that the children should be allowed to make for themselves once they are adults? School should give them sufficient resources for them to attack any profession, from soldier to priest, pilot to surgeon. Asking a child to make such choices, allowing them to forgo certain subjects, harms them in the long term. It limits their potential options.

A few years ago I read that "social media influencer" was a more desired trade amongst highschool kids than doctor/lawyer/fighter pilot. Such kids should not be allowed to make educational decisions.

Right now, "social media influencer" is a more realistic immediate job than doctor, lawyer, or fighter pilot.

To be a doctor, you need a 4 year college degree, then acceptance into a medical school, then pass the medical school courses and do N years of residency. The average medical school graduate has $200K of debt at that point.

To be a lawyer, you need blah blah blah law school, and then it turns out the USA has too many lawyers already... so the average entry-level lawyer makes $48K. Yes, really.

To be a social media influencer, you need about $2000 in startup costs and a lot of luck, as well as some degree of actual work. There are roughly a million people with 100,000+ followers on Instagram or YouTube or TikTok.

Interestingly, there are about a million lawyers and about a million doctors in the USA.

Finally, there are about 15,000 pilots in the US armed forces, but only about 2200 attack or fighter role aircraft.

In total: a kid with no particular educational affinity is making a reasonable immediate choice to pursue "social media influencer" over doctor/lawyer/fighter pilot. It's probably a terrible long-term career choice, but so is fighter pilot.

> To be a doctor, you need a 4 year college degree, then acceptance into a medical school, then pass the medical school courses and do N years of residency. The average medical school graduate has $200K of debt at that point.

It's not even that simple anymore. There's also the PGY1 year. There aren't nearly enough residencies to satisfy demand anymore. You might have to change specialties a few times before you land a residency. We're at the point where if you didn't go to medical school in the US, you're SOL. Even if you did, it's a struggle -- hope you went to a great medical school.

This at a time when we have higher demand for doctors than ever. Nobody wants to change the residency situation because the economics of it don't work out.

I don't disagree, but I think you're overlooking one thing.

There are more kids wanting to be social media influencers than there are doctors, lawyers, or fighter pilots. The chances aren't purely based on how much demand there is for a given job, but also on how much supply. For that one million spots competition is fiercer.

Because they can compete. For doctors and lawyers, entry tickets are a few hundred thousand in loans and years of education. For fighter pilots, it's millions of dollars of training and flight time supported by a military. For social media influencers, it's just a computer and a webcam, which they probably already have for school/work.

USAF pilots are also subject to a ten-year service commitment after they are rated for their aircraft type, which is usually around two years of training.

> It's probably a terrible long-term career choice, but so is fighter pilot.

If you're willing to accept the failure modes of non-fighter military pilot, non-pilot military officer, person with a college degree or person with some college (depending on when things go wrong) it's not a bad track. Lots of hedging. Then you can transition to a career in civilian aviation or management.

Compare that to something like enlisted Special Operations. Wash out of SEAL selection and you could be scraping barnacles off the side of a ship. Maybe you wash out of Special Forces selection and you end up in infantry. But then you decide you want to stop blowing stuff up, and the highlight of your resume is 4 years experience blowing stuff, with a minor in sweeping barracks. Failure modes aren't as nice.

Anecdotally, I dropped out of officer selection once I realized I'd rather kick in doors than be a paper pusher. Didn't meet many officers I admired, I wanted to be an NCO even though it's a less privileged position. Then I blew stuff up for 4 years, came back to a wrecked economy, did odd jobs, failed to start two businesses, sold cars, and taught myself web development. I basically went through every failure mode before finding my "thing". Now I make six figures in cloud engineering, have a house, family etc. Long story short but the "blowing things up" part was pretty interesting and a formative experience for me (not that I'd do it again; I've come to believe we're not blowing up the correct things / people).

One good thing about being an officer is that if you get high enough in the rankings you can help decide which people get blown up and how.

You don't make it into the higher echelons unless you conform to the desired ideology.

>> It's probably a terrible long-term career choice, but so is fighter pilot.

I'll mention that to one. It is a perfectly valid career choice even if you don't make it to an F-16 cockpit. Unlike failed civilian pilots a failed military pilot has their choice of other officer trades, from lawyer/doctor to tank commander. And no company will fault someone for failing out as a military pilot. The fact you were accepted into pilot training in the first place puts you ahead of most.

If the purpose of schooling is to ensure every child can be a potential doctor or lawyer then it has already failed in the past, and will continue failing far into the future.

Realistically, I don’t think all kids schooled in Montessori style “learn what you want when you want to learn” will fail at becoming doctors or lawyers if that’s their passion. It may detract from the number of people who make it through law school just because they heard lawyers make a lot of money.

But that’s realism, I was responding to the hypothetical of if this method of learning somehow destroys a human beings capacity to ever become a doctor or lawyer. That’s not very practical to say a schooling method will destroy all sense of delayed gratification. Personally, I think developing those life skills is orthogonal to intellectual education in the first place and are more akin to personal character which parents can build in their children without conjoining it with schoolwork.

>McKinseys first year deathmarch

You write that like everyone automatically has any idea what it is.

It'd be nice if someone expanded on the subject. I assume it's this McKinsey: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company

And infer they treat the new hires harshly?

I don't work at the top consulting firms (of which McKinsey is one) but the first year or 2 at any major financial or consulting institution is a bit of a meme as to what they go through in hopes of making it. The 80+ hour weeks working on pitch decks, next-morning deadlines, etc, aren't just a Hollywood meme. I've read some of the 600+ slide powerpoint decks that exist in consulting and finance, and I think I got interesting information out of the experience exactly once (Radio ads were a close #2 in advertising ROI against the internet back in mid 2010s, with TV and other mediums far behind.)

There's a few blogs around about it; this one seems less hyperbolic than your average news headline but does mention the hours: https://managementconsulted.com/interview-first-year-mckinse...

yes, a certain amount of discipline is required to get through boring, yet important, stuff in life. I'm really not sure US grade school does a great job instilling that virtue though. the material is generally a complete joke for any student of above-average intelligence. I'm no genius, but I did all my homework during the class before it was due and rarely studied for tests. I was in for a rude awakening when I got to college, which is a pretty common story.

I "learned to learn" during training in the military FWIW. The school system helped me with that skill, but it really took off in basic training and further in job-specific-training. A big part of that is the motivation during training...that if you fail, there are serious consequences, and you'll be stuck digging latrines until your term is complete.

Any ideas on how to instill that do-or-die mentality in people who haven't gone to the military?

Anything in the outdoors. Rock climbing. Either you learn these knots or you will die. Either you learn how to navigate, find the trail to the cabin, or you are going to spend the night in the rain. Either you remember to bring your gloves ore you are going to loose fingers. Either you learn to read and understand avalanche warnings or ... everything in the outdoors comes with a risk that focuses the mind.

> There is something to be said for forcing kids to learn things they hate.

There is also something to said for developing a kid’s sensitivity to and ownership of their individual intrinsic motivation. If using extrinsic motivation works for your kids, that’s great for you. Deciding on an approach for the child one rears out of concern for a lack of lawyers and doctors doesn’t sound like a sound decision process.

You’re comparing apples to oranges. There’s a big difference between wanting to learn and having to learn.

Someone wants to be a doctor? Great, soon they’ll realise that they need to learn anatomy, and they’ll do that if they’re sufficiently motivated! But most of school was, you have to learn something because an adult (and not very smart adult either ... most teachers aren’t experts, they just seem like that, to kids) said so.

I don’t care why Hamlet said something, I never did, I never will, I never needed that knowledge and never will, and to the extent that you can maybe learn some general life principles from such books, there are many other, better ways of learning that, including many better and more interesting books.

Even the employment course you’re taking, you want to take - you’re getting something out of it (a promotion, hopefully) - even though even in your reply there’s some amount of bitterness about having to learn it (“memorizing stupid powerpoints about stuff I will probably never use”) - now imagine being a child with much less independence and agency and multiply that feeling of dread by 1000x...

Learning Shakespeare has nothing to do with Shakespeare. It is taught is because doing so forces students to understand language. To read Shakespeare they must learn to examine language for nuance. By doing so they become better speakers regardless of whether they ever revisit the material.

But why Shakespeare, especially given that the consensus amongst schoolkids is that it's indecipherable (given the language difference to today)?

Shakespeare is taught...because Shakespeare has always been taught. It's recognized as important; to be fair, it is from an objective sense, but subjectively there is no reason to read it, nor even to watch it performed unless someone wants to.

You learn language by practicing language. You can read or watch anything and better understand the nuances of a language; even better to talk to people who speak it. English evolves because of the latter; Shakespeare doesn't.

Everyone who speaks a language other than English learned to do so without Shakespeare. I am unconvinced of the necessity of reading/watching Shakespeare unless someone wants to; it is but one means to an end.

If I were a highschool English teacher I would point the kids at more recent British works. I'd point them at Blackadder or Upstart Crow. Understanding that language, getting all the jokes, requires a degree of english comprehension that is probably slightly higher than the average highschool student. If I wanted to improve their spoken word while teaching them science, I'd assign them every single Attenborough or Brian Cox documentary.

Blackadder has crisp enunciation, helping make the humor more accessible.

Shakespeare is taught because Shakespeare is excellent. I disagree with the methods that are often used to "teach" literature (memorise this "official" interpretation, then spill these bullet points on the exam so the teacher is happy), but nobody can deny how brilliant it is. The mark of great art: they speak of things universal to the human condition, and transcend the time and space where they were produced. You are simply not a complete person if you do never read literature in your life.

> Everyone who speaks a language other than English learned to do so without Shakespeare

Well duh, they learn the masterpiece of whatever language they're learning. Be that Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Victor Hugo, or Luís de Camões.

Shakespeare is excellent, but it took me years - long past when I graduated from school - to recognize its excellence.

I place the blame here squarely on how it is presented in schools. First, it was dropped in abruptly, after years of focusing heavily on largely apoetic work like Old Yeller and Great Expectations. When poetry was introduced, it was typically dropped as part of some hermetically sealed unit, and all possibility of enjoyment was eradicated by analyzing each poem to death. [1] How are people supposed to learn to enjoy play on words when any hint of actual play has been surgically excised from the experience?

And then, since this is a class, there will be a test, and so you have to format the presentation in a manner that makes it more amenable to testing. This means that, if the play is a comedy, then you'll have to stop every few lines to have the teacher explain, in detail, why what you just read is funny.

Which it may not be, because performance comedy is all about presentation and timing, but we're not watching a performance, we're reading the text. Imagine encountering Spaceballs for the first time in script form, so that you're completely unable to associate any of the lines with the performances of John Candy or Rick Moranis. It won't be nearly as good. And having someone sitting over your shoulder repeatedly interrupting you to say, "Now, in the actual movie, this part is hilarious because..." only makes it less funny.

If the work being studied is a tragedy, well, it's a similar story, only in this case it is kind of funny because the tragedy has gone meta. Not that anyone sitting in the classroom is in a position to realize that. They're too focused on taking notes so they can remember details - especially details about the teacher's interpretation of the story - for the coming test. Because furiously scribbling in notebooks and trying to memorize every detail is an essential part of the way in which members of the groundling audience, literate and illiterate alike, experienced performances in the original Globe Theatre.

Ugh. It makes me irritated all over again just thinking about it. Primary and secondary education classes are seemingly predicated on the notion that the best place to study everyday human experience is in a cadaver lab. Largely only because the courses are being designed by people who sell scalpels and formaldehyde for a living.

[1] Exhibit A: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/01/...

This is also exacerbated by the didactic approaches people like OP (and most teachers) take, about why the students -should- enjoy Shakespeare.

I bet I would have liked it more in school (rather than much afterwards, when I became acquainted with the Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta, though props to the teachers who set up field trips there) if instead a teacher had said "Okay guys. We're watching a movie today. It's going to be a little hard to understand, but don't worry too much about it; it's less the words and more the performance. There won't be a test, but we will discuss it afterwards. I'll have subtitles on to help with understanding; it's kind of interesting to see how English has changed since this was made, but how it still has themes you'll recognize, and can still be emotionally charged even when you don't fully understand everything being said. It may be a little challenging given that, but I think you're up to it", and then put on Branagh's Hamlet.

I not only agree with your post but also want to heartily endorse the Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta.

They go to great lengths to ensure everyone in the audience understands e.g. that Romeo and Juliet has loads of raunchy humor. I’m confident I could attend a play I have never read and understand the emotional and plot bones of it at Shakespeare Tavern.

And in my experience their food only helps me in my understanding of the play! All for a quite modest price.

I’d have gotten a lot more out of Shakespeare if they started by going through a deep line-by-line analysis of all the oblique and double meanings of an annotated rap song on genius.com (nee rapgenius.com) and then said, “ok, now we are going to do the same thing to find all the clever double entendres, jokes and allusions in Shakespeare”

It's a masterpiece of classical literature, timeless and always relevant to whatever generation you belong to. When we did Macbeth and Julius Caesar in school, one of the requirements in the test was to write critical reasoning arguments for or against a topic.It really helped me build my reasoning. The teacher would also pit one half of the class against the other. It helped build my confidence and I ended up in speech and debate.

> most teachers aren’t experts, they just seem like that, to kids

Oof. That's cold. Not necessarily wrong, but cold. I mean, most software developers are not actually good at developing software, they just seem like that because they've only been asked to write the same CRUD app over and over again.

Teachers may not be "experts" like a PhD in a topic is an expert, but they are educated (Bachelors minimum, many states require a Masters eventually) but they are often experts in education.

It turns out just knowing a lot about a topic does not qualify you to teach it (see: many college professors). Effective teaching is a skill that lots of people think they have, but few actually do.

It doesn't really matter what Hamlet said. Literature is a class where you learn to express yourself and are exposed to how other people/cultures/times express themselves in a structured way.

And how would you know that you don't care about Hamlet unless you were made to read it?

You could live a successful life without reading any books ever (you could even be President of the United States!) but it would be much richer if you were exposed to ideas/topics that challenge you. And who knows where you could use that information. Heck, Bob Dylan made an entire career as a musician off of the AP English curriculum.

I can guarantee you that challenging someone who does not want to be challenged will not actually cause them to learn anything.

When I was a kid, two different years, the teachers had us read/read to us "Where the Red Fern Grows". At the time, I was reading fantasy from the adult section at the library (and was teased for it; both the fact I was reading for fun, and the subject matter). Literally the only thing I remember about that book is how much I hated it.

It's one thing I have to give Harry Potter, despite J. K. Rowling. It popularized fantasy enough that kids read on their own, and normalized reading books for fun in schools.

I don't disagree with you. When I was in school (and still now, really) if there wasn't a dragon or a spaceship on the cover, I wasn't interested in it. I remember more about Where the Red Fern Grows, but not much (a kid gets mail order dogs to hunt with and (spoilers) the dogs die ... because the dogs always die). The only thing I remember about Silas Marner is that he buried his money and it was stolen (not a spoiler, that's like chapter 1).

Something to know about English classes in particular (but also History and other liberal arts/non-science classes) is that isn't not about "the books", but critical thinking and discussion. In fact, it's likely that the mandated standards don't specify specific books to read. It turns out, though, that in a class of 30+ kids, it's easiest (or even possible) to have a critical discussion if everyone reads the same books at the same time.

Also, if the kids think they are being "taught the book" but the teacher is trying to teach "literary literacy" using "the book" as an example, that's when you get arguments like "I didn't learn anything!" and "This is a waste of my time!" and "This other book is better!". Those arguments are besides the point. You should have been talking about why the author made the literary decisions they made, what were the themes? Whose point of view was it told from? How was the book impactful (or not)?

These are the standards in Texas. Other states should have this information publicly available and I assume they will be very similar.

https://tea.texas.gov/sites/default/files/ch110c.pdf

For English II these are the skills a student should learn (notice no specific books are mentioned, but "traditional", "contemporary", "classical", and "diverse" are used to describe the books)

- The student develops oral language through listening, speaking, and discussion

- The student uses newly acquired vocabulary expressively

- The student reads grade-appropriate texts independently.

- The student is expected to self-select text and read independently for a sustained period of time.

- The student uses metacognitive skills to both develop and deepen comprehension of increasingly complex texts

- The student responds to an increasingly challenging variety of sources that are read, heard, or viewed

- The student recognizes and analyzes literary elements within and across increasingly complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse literary texts

- The student recognizes and analyzes genre-specific characteristics, structures, and purposes within and across increasingly complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse texts

- The student uses critical inquiry to analyze the authors' choices and how they influence and communicate meaning within a variety of texts.

- The student analyzes and applies author's craft purposefully in order to develop his or her own products and performances.

- The student uses the writing process recursively to compose multiple texts that are legible and use appropriate conventions

- The student uses genre characteristics and craft to compose multiple texts that are meaningful

- The student engages in both short-term and sustained recursive inquiry processes for a variety of purposes

Much like learning a foreign language is about more than learning vocabulary, but you can't learn how to talk in a restaurant if you don't know the restaurant related vocabulary. English class is about more than reading books, but you can't have those discussions if you haven't read the books. Or, it would be much more difficult to effectively "analyze literary elements" in a classroom setting with 30 kids that all ready 30 different books.

Sure, teachers can be better or worse (or very, very bad) at teaching the material, or conveying what is being taught. But if you view English class as equivalent to "sitting under a tree and reading a book" (that was another commenter's words, not yours) then you're missing the forest for the tree and it won't matter how good the teacher is, you will be fighting them the whole way (which is maybe your point about not being able to challenge someone that doesn't want to be challenged)

And as far as book selection goes... no one is getting fired for picking Where the Red Fern Grows - but watch out if you go the sci-fi/fantasy route. There are parents that will throw an absolute fit if a school had their kids reading anything with magic.

And yet nobody seems to complain about Homer, which not only includes magic, but also active worship of, and interaction with, pagan deities.

How much of it is what the parents are saying it is, and how much of it is really motivated by a tacit belief that school is only legitimate when it's stodgy?

I'm talking like second and third grades. Where the teacher literally was reading -to- us. We had copies of the book, we could follow along if we knew how and wanted to, but it most definitely was NOT trying to teach us literary criticism.

I think you'd be surprised at what they were trying to teach you. At least in Texas the 3rd grade standards are pretty much the same as the High School standards (for values of "complex" adjusted for grade level)

https://tea.texas.gov/sites/default/files/ch110a.pdf

- The student uses metacognitive skills to both develop and deepen comprehension of increasingly complex texts

- The student recognizes and analyzes literary elements within and across increasingly complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse literary texts

- The student recognizes and analyzes genre-specific characteristics, structures, and purposes within and across increasingly complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse texts

- The student uses critical inquiry to analyze the authors' choices and how they influence and communicate meaning within a variety of texts.

- The student analyzes and applies author's craft purposefully in order to develop his or her own products and performances

What 3rd grade you thought you were supposed to be learning and what the teacher was actually trying to teach you were not necessarily lined up.

Or, you went to a school with a particularly poor English department that just had you write book reports for books you didn't read for no reason other than that's what they always did. That's actually more likely than not.

I was a very, very bad math teacher at my first school (I was basically "playing school" and acting like I remembered my math teachers acted.. I had a CS/Math major, not an Education major. I knew the content, but not the pedagogy). The next school I taught at had structures in place that helped me understand what the actual goals of a teacher are and how to reach them. I improved drastically (and noticed the students and teachers at that school were better overall than my first school)

Reading the summary oh cool not a YA novel about hunting animals for fun yay

> I mean, most software developers are not actually good at developing software, they just seem like that because they've only been asked to write the same CRUD app over and over again.

That is not the slam dunk argument you seem to think it is.

In my experience, most developers with “10 years of experience” (who have worked in enterprise, at least) actually have one year of experience ten times.

I think that's exactly his argument?

Yes. That's also exactly why, when I look to hire software engineers and think about their compensation, I'm not looking for their years of experience, I'm looking for their years of progressive experience.

> I'm looking for their years of progressive experience

What signals do you find have helped you tease that out of something like a resume?

> Heck, Bob Dylan made an entire career as a musician off of the AP English curriculum.

I have no idea what you mean by that, can you explain?

I’ll take a stab at an answer: my understanding is that Dylan borrowed heavily from folktales, folklore, and the work of other balladiers. Checking myself, I see on his Wikipedia entry[0]:

“ The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough ... There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms ... but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.” -Bob Dylan, 1985

Exposure to stories with a range of emotions is part of the point of English class.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan

I read an article (or maybe a biography author interview on NPR) about how pretty much all of his double-meanings/literary references came from the honors English curriculum from his time in school (probably pre-80's Dylan).

However, now when I try to google for it I just find pages and pages of results about whether he deserved the Nobel prize or not.

I took it as a reference to his lyrics, for which "AP English" would make a pretty good tongue-in-cheek categorization of the style & content. Same with the text he writes for the back of his album covers. It's not the kind of thing I'd expect someone without exposure to and some affinity for that kind of thing (literature and poetry, that is) to invent spontaneously.

Shakespeare isn't about life lessons, it's more about analysis and understanding the nuance of the language. The difference between that an occupational training / brain dumps is that it has more long-term value. There's a reason education isn't just taking a bunch of occupational certifications.

As an anecdote, I've always been in tech roles; I dual-majored in History and Computer Science for reasons. Looking back at various roles I've had in my life's journey, the skill framework I learned studying and writing about Napoleonic warfare or the Silk Road, were just as essential as the framework in math and engineering on the CS part of my education, maybe more so.

100% agree with this. Education should not put everyone in a box and feed them all the possible information. Look at the Finnish model, there's a reason they have the best performance. I used to hate art when it was forced down my throat in school. Now that I can go to museums by myself and learn what I want, I love it.

And about "having to learn" stuff, I feel like it's more a justification the parent poster gave to themselves so they get over with it, not a real _need_ to learn something. What's the point of memorizing stuff you'll never use?

Wait a sec, I'm on your side with the criticism of public education thing but in saying that there are "many better and more interesting books" than Hamlet, what are you criticizing about the play, exactly?

I'm not sure this is a fair characterization of GP. He wrote that his wife poured lots of energy into schooling the kids, but also that they learned things on their own when they wanted to learn them. Certainly we should assume that the energy poured into their schooling involved discipline for the kids involved. I didn't get the impression that the kids were frolicking through the Austrian Alps behind Maria von Trapp as their teacher.

> There is something to be said for forcing kids to learn things they hate. It is necessary preparation for the important stuff that comes later, stuff they cannot learn from their parents. That's what advanced education is, learning something because an expert tells you to. Whether you enjoy every moment of it or not is beside the point. You can judge things once you become an expert.

I'm not sure what to make of this. How is "forcing" kids to learn things they hate "necessary" preparation for what comes later? Is it the only way to instill discipline?

I'd rather force my kids to do the productive, boring things like chores (washing and folding laundry, cleaning dishes, cleaning their room, cleaning their bathroom and playroom, taking care of the pets) which will instill the same discipline and delayed gratification without potentially making them hate learning and schooling at a young age when they are least emotionally prepared to handle it. Plus, if they're being challenged in school they'll have that experience of leaping into the unknown, which can be quite scary and requires discipline. I find it much more likely that homeschooling induces that challenge and discipline over public schools, where above-average kids are often bored and subject to authoritarian threats.

> I have to go away for a two-week training course on monday. It is going to be hell. Twelve days of memorizing stupid powerpoints about stuff I will probably never use. There will be tests at the end. I will pass them. My training at school/university, learning stuff I often hated, allows me to power through such things. I can sit in that chair hour after hour without drifting. Not everyone can do that. They work very different jobs. Their employer doesn't spend tens of thousands of dollars sending them to such courses.

I'm not sure why romanticizing or glorifying suffering and waste is somehow the raison d'être for public schooling. I've worked in toxic environments before where some of the employees, fully resigned to how toxic the place is, would make statements like, "not a lot of people could succeed in this environment." I got the hell out of each of those situations as soon as I could. In my opinion, I'd rather suffer for people like my kids or my wife or God or even to defend my community for which I am duty bound, but not for my employer.

Best of luck with that horrible upcoming training course.

This post has a fatal misconception that school teaches people to "learn how to learn". In your specific argument, it's the belief that forcing kids to master boring material will augment their ability to learn boring material in adulthood.

Cognitive psychology has consistently refuted this theory again and again. Transfer of learning is virtually non-existent.[1] When a student learns a topic he learns the very specific skills related to that topic. There's no spillover or improvement to the ability to learn other, even closely related, topics.

[1]https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/08/low_transfer_of.htm...

Anecdotally, I learned Japanese.

At a later date, I studied Hungarian in a cram school. Two of us learned Hungarian much faster than our classmates- we both had studied Japanese. Most of the students had also studied other languages. Something about learning languages that were so grammatically different from English seemed to help with building mental models and stop "translating" things back and forth from English- which made the language much easier to pick up.

Developing learning techniques does help in learning other things. Learning boring things however, I think that's always going to be hard for me.

I have a feeling this anecdote has more to do with the personality of people who have the drive, desire, and passion to self-study Japanese.

I disagree, a lot of learning a language is transferable, but not because it's 'learning how to learn', just because it's the same.

Grammars are largely described using the same system, with different languages using different parts of it (and more or less - Latin quite a lot; English quite little). Learning a second language (that's different enough) exposes you to more of the available grammatical constructs, so when you learn a third there's less that could possibly be new, and probably quite a bit of grammatical overlap with your first or second language.

But does this specific anecdote generalize to, for example, learning a language and then trying to learn linear algebra? I feel that was the point the GP was meaning to bring up. Languages are fundamentally similar to one another in many ways, so I would imagine there is less you can transfer to learning something where the framework of language-learning no longer applies.

When I was in highschool I had several books I had to read that I hated. So i learned to beat the system. I found several online reviews of the book, read those, and the re-wrote them in my own words. Ironically i learned more that way then when I read the books myself, as i would actually have to think of how to re-write the the essays in my own words. When I was reading the book and not liking it, then it would be like a lot of school info, get it in my head, and once the assignment / test was done, forget it all.

Your linked post from Bryan Caplan isn't compelling that transfer of learning is "virtually non-existent."

Anecdotally, I agree that a good deal of teaching does not produce learning that is durable or transfers.

That doesn't mean it isn't possible.

Enter Scott Carrell and James West's study at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) [0]. The title and abstract bury the lede and actually misdirect. It talks about professor evaluations, tenure, and teacher quality. The key findings from this study are about the type of pedagogy that create durable and transferable learning.

They compared pedagogical styles of teachers in first year calculus classes compared to how durable and transferable the knowledge was that cadets gained in each class. It was a totally unique environment that allowed for it to be randomized, controlled, and to study effects beyond one year. I have never seen a better study in education.

The tl;dr is that pedagogy that forces students to engage in desirable difficulties [1] produces learning that is more durable and can transfer to different domains. The catch is two-fold. Students rate this type of teaching poorly. They also get worse grades at first even though the long-term payoff is much better.

[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14081/w140...

[1] https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/...

People will figure it out.

For most normal kids, they just adapt. The problem is when kids have a problem that parents can't handle or don't understand. People miss this, because they (rightfully) have a tight emotional attachment to their children.

My kids go to a private school, and I'm a volunteer parent/peer advisor to help parents with various issues. One of the hardest conversations to have is when a child is struggling, and the right answer is for that child to be in public school where resources exist -- the financial model doesn't support having the support staff and specialist teachers. People feel strongly about small class sizes and other benefits of the private school, but that matters less if the child needs services.

That's fundamentally an issue with homeschooling. There's nobody to say "hey, we have a problem here" when Sally can't read, or Johnny doesn't understand geometry because Khan academy isn't working and mom can't explain it.

I mean, there's an absolutely ridiculous number of kids who can't do things to grade level in public schools, and grade level requirements aren't particularly ambitious for what a kid could learn, given their age.

"That's fundamentally an issue with homeschooling. There's nobody to say "hey, we have a problem here" when Sally can't read, or Johnny doesn't understand geometry because Khan academy isn't working and mom can't explain it."

Three things:

1. There are lots of private options for this, at least in any major metro.

2. From my experience with homeschoolers, the sheer amount of parent attention they tend to get lends itself towards figuring these things out (especially with help from a homeschooling community or the aforementioned private options).

3. From my experience as a public school teacher, most of the kids who needed services didn't get them, and I saw very few situations where the services seemed to make a significant difference (though there were some). I've seen more success stories around learning disabilities from homeschoolers than I have from kids at public schools (and in fact often the learning disability was a key impetus for the switch to homeschool).

So the question is, "compared to what?" Kids with strong parent advocates are likely to get what they need in whatever environment they're in. Kids without them aren't likely to, but there's selection bias against that in homeschool. Yes, one can have a great result with public school, and sometimes that's the right call for a family, but after my stint in the public schools I'm much more confident in a well-meaning parent figuring out the solution with a kid they spend lots of time with than I am in that same parent spending much less time with the kid and rolling the dice with public school specialists and support services.

> From my experience with homeschoolers, the sheer amount of parent attention they tend to get lends itself towards figuring these things out

It depends. Some parents focus homeschooling on religion. Or skip schooling so their 11 year old can focus on his baseball career and 3 travel teams. Or have no clue.

I've seen public school parents spend their time with their kids on making sure their kids don't believe anything that could challenge their religious or political beliefs, and many public school parents who encourage their kids to focus on sports alone to the exclusion of anything and everything else. Again -- compared to what?

I was homeschooled K-7 and again in 12th. I know lots of homeschool kids whose parents insulated them from the world (including mine, though less so than many) due to religion or just eccentricity. Almost all of us are successful, however, and very few stayed locked in that bubble. A key piece of that is because we became self-directed learners.

My wife and I are homeschooling our daughter. She's still pretty little, 7 1/2. She went to school for a year and then we started homeschooling, not because anything was particularly wrong at school but we just love spending time with her (and she with us) and our lives are flexible enough to do it.

In her first year at school, the teacher was incredibly effusive about her. We were interested in maths because before she went to school we had always thought that she struggled with anything to do with numbers, but the teacher reassured us that everything was fine. But within a week of us sitting down with her to do maths, it became very clear that she had absolutely no idea of even the most basic concepts around numbers, sequences, addition, or anything else. We asked her how she had managed to do the material that the teacher had shown us, and she looked a little sheepish and said: "well, we do all that in groups..."

I don't know how long she could have kept faking it in the school system. But at least in our case, our daughter was perfectly capable of playing the system and slipping through the cracks, in a way that was completely impossible with us one on one. We're lucky that we're educated and have resources etc, but our daughter will absolutely be better off getting the help that we can organise for her and the personalisation in her learning that we can offer than she would be in the school system.

> I'm sure that it was. But good luck to them when they need to learn something important that isn't fun.

At the end of the comment he says his sons are well rounded adults.

> I have to go away for a two-week training course on monday. It is going to be hell. Twelve days of memorizing stupid powerpoints about stuff I will probably never use.

No offense, but that sounds pretty miserable. I'm on my forties, with two kids, and never had to subject myself to such things. Life is too short for that.

> At the end of the comment he says his sons are well rounded adults.

While they are likely doing fine, parents usually aren't the correct people to ask, the kids could be withholding how much they've been struggling and even if they aren't no parent would objectively say if their kids didn't turn out into "well rounded adults", unless the parent truly hated their kids.

Parents like making their kids look better than they are.

Hah, you had a nice catch-22 in there: either I, as a parent, am oblivious to my kid's shortcomings, or I "truly hate them". Well, that's not how it works in real life.

I had an extremelysimilar upbringing, and I'm in senior tech management in a systemically-relevant bank now and will be retiring at 40 (in 1.5 years). I didn't need anyone's luck to learn and succeed. I had an end-goal, and I did what was necessary to get there. Drive is the decider, not compliance.

“That's what advanced education is, learning something because an expert tells you to.”

Many share this conception but it’s not a very useful model I would argue.

> You will have to understand the rules of evidence regardless of what type of lawyer you want to be.

This is the problem. We force everyone through a meat grinder with this paternalistic bullshit about being well-rounded. If and when it becomes necessary to know something, you learn it with more motivation and so it becomes easier to learn and remember. We need to stop force feeding people things that aren’t directly relevant or that they have no interest in.

Source: am also a lawyer and would say easily 1/2 of what is taught in law school was never used again and promptly forgotten after the exam. I am certain the same apples to doctors, architects, etc etc etc.

One complaint that I hear about the method you are describing is the the kid/teenager will naturally gravitate towards easier "mindless" activities such as video games/TV/YouTube.

Did you enforce discipline or did they have enough intellectual curiosity to learn stuff like calculus on their own?

Oh sure they had core stuff they had to do. But we also let them learn on their own.

The programming experience? Inside Minecraft with a mod called ComputerCraft that put an 8 bit computer that ran Lua inside of Minecraft.

Yeah that makes sense. Additionally, like some other commenter pointed out, did they ever suffer from limited interactions with people of their own age? My high school friends stayed my friends well into adulthood and I would've been much lonelier had I been homeschooled.

Nope. That's a misconception that's commonly used against homeschooling. There are homeschooling co-ops that organize field trips. We also associated regularly with our congregation with people of all ages that they were friends with. My 15 year old daughter's best friend was an 83 year old woman. They hung out all the time. It was amazing.

There are those examples of families who treat it like they're on a deserted island. They're doing it wrong. Thankfully, they are a very, very small minority.

I get these kinds of questions too and while I can’t speak for the person you’re replying to (my kids are younger) it’s the second answer. Kids naturally have a ton of intellectual curiosity which the school system. I do think there needs to be an adult with them, probably, it’s not like you could just leave them on their own for king stretches at a young age especially.

Although maybe you could. This talk has influenced my thinking since I saw it in Long Beach. https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the...

Your kids do! Likely lots to do with you! Cherish this.

I dropped out of school and I almost immediately got tired of low-effort activities. Games and TV are great as a respite from doing other things, but if you're a young person with an active mind you will quickly get bored doing that stuff all day.

My biggest problem was the sudden lack of a social sphere. High school was terrible, but I dramatically underestimated how important the social environment was.

The thing I wish most was that there were people to teach me challenging subjects. Left to my own devices I naturally gravitated to things I was already good at.

Speaking for myself (not a kid), I only start to gravitate toward those sorts of activities when I'm low grade burnt out. Especially if I'm burnt out from having to do something that feels difficult and pointless, but is also on a deadline and subject to performance assessment. Nothing wears your ability to concentrate down faster than having to to actually force yourself to concentrate for hours at a time.

I see the same thing in both my kids. They're both mentally engaged, skilled, perseverant problem solvers. . . except in the evenings after school. Then, they simply can't emotionally handle much beyond games/tv/youtube.

What worries me right now is that this situation may be setting up a bad psychological pattern that may stick with them for life: anything that takes work is, in some Pavlovian sense, associated with frustration and exhaustion, while pleasure is associated with brain candy. I don't think that that's their natural experience of life; it's something they're being taught by a regime that's dominated by report cards and standardized tests.

I'm personally not too keen on homeschooling. I did it for some time as a child, and I honestly think that the reduced social contact with my peers had consequences that also need to be considered. But I'd love to see schools become less bureaucratic. Teachers, in my experience, usually want to keep things fluid and engaging, and they know how to do it. What seems to get in their way are policies that the suits in office buildings develop, most of which are primarily designed to placate the anxieties of parents who are worried about their kids "falling behind" or whatever and want to see hard numbers proving that the school is doing a good job of producing kids that are all STEM and no roots, leaves or flowers.

The association of frustration and exhaustion with "productivity" is absolutely one of the most destructive forces for freedom and creativity.

Homeschool proponents always cherry pick the good parts. Some kids are naturally motivated to acquire skills, but most will play with toys or play outside when they're young, and then start doing more social media/gaming when they're older. There's no solution for this other than to prevent them from doing these things and actively force them to do "learning stuff". Homeschool is no different, no matter what anyone implies by selective storytelling.

Play time is extremely important for building curiosity and learning. Playing outside has massive health benefits too which will help with burnout down the road. Of course they need discipline too but I think schools leave barely any time for kids to be kids between classes, homework, and extra curricular.

Feynman is an example of somebody who practiced this. Done right play isn’t wasteful, it makes people want to dig deeper into something which is how discoveries are made.

"They're both extremely well rounded adults now"

What do they do? Did they get any schooling after the GED's?

This is great, but let's remember a bit of humbleness. It is an incredible luxury to have a full time adult at home like that. And it's no surprise that having a 2:1 child to adult ratio leads to good learning outcomes. I wish all kids could get the experience of small classes with a dedicated teacher. Public school systems are a symptom of chronic underfunding and mismanagement.

Did they go to college? What kind of jobs do they have?

I want to buck the system too but not sure what the long term consequences would be for the kids.

I am curious to read a study on this question. I would think that such a study would need to delineate between those who do homeschooling because of religious social conservatism, and those who do so because of a pragmatic belief that they can provide a better education.

That's probably a false dichotomy. I'd imagine many religious people who homeschool also pragmatically believe they can provide a better education.

No, but they could have, no problem. It just wasn't part of their goals.

I also want to mention that although we were/are a religious household, we did not do homeschooling at all because of religion. We did it so that the kids could get the best education possible.

And people might wonder about their ability, as a parent, to teach. Are they up to the task? The answer is simple: The person who has the most interest in a child is going to be the best teacher. And who has more interest than a parent who loves them?

If somebody wanting to do homeschooling is doing it because it's the "easy" way out, or because they are trying to "buck the system" for the sake of bucking the system, then DONT. Do it because it's what is best for your kids. It was best for ours, and the way we did it worked for them.

Before you decide anything at all, do tons of research. Talk to parents in your area who are homeschooling. Look for co-ops and home schooling groups on facebook etc. There are excellent resources available to you.

What did you do for socialization and interaction with other kids? Have a friend who homeschools and they struggle with that.

Eh. I'm skeptical of self-assessed "my idea went well, they like it, see?"

What about socialisation with peers? What about boring but necessary activities, if they only do what is fun? What about jobs?

It's "fun" that the first thing that people who don't know a thing about homeschooling state is socialisation.

Homeschooling doesn't mean living in a cage or away from others (well sometime it might, especially in some religious approach of it. Extreme cases are what people hear about and that might be the reason of those believes).

Kids can still go play with friends, do sports or any activity !

On a personal note, my wife and I homeschooled our kids between their 7 and 10 (mostly because we were traveling here and there), and now that they're back in the school system, they have no problem and have good marks.

It's way more easy to teach 2 kids (maybe we were lucky, as they're twins so are at the same class level) than 25 to 30. You can cover official curriculum pretty quick, and it leaves time to do other (fun) stuff.

It also misses the socialization problem at traditional schools where bullying is common and non-standard interests can be discouraged. It’s a parenting problem regardless of the school system.

My anecdotal experience tells me that homeschooled people have worse social skills than average. No amount of exposure to peers by a homeschooler is going to match the 8 hours a day, five days to week someone who goes to public schlol experiences.

Cool. Great. Glad it worked for you.

Now, let's tax the living daylights out of everybody over USD$1M, cut the military budget and put all that money back into the educational system, so the rest of the kids can have the same experience as you, then re-introduce your kids to public schooling.

The US already spends more on education per student than any country in the world except for Luxembourg, Austria and Norway. In postsecondary education, only Luxembourg spends more. If money (at the whole-system funding level) was the problem the problem would already be solved.

https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd

If the US is inefficient that people are still very far behind when it comes to average education compared to the rest of the world that spends less per student, you either need to spend a lot more or make sure it's effectively spent.

The argument that the US already spends a lot so nothing should be done feels loose at best.

>> If the US is inefficient that people are still very far behind

The US education system is not there to accelerate students, to lift them up. It is model the population to suit the needs of the country. That's why nearly every aspect of a child's life revolves around school, from how and when they eat to who they socialize with. The system is there to reinforce national ideas. Some of that is noble ("try hard and get ahead") and some of it is not ("money counts"). When viewed from that perspective it works very well: little ever seems to change from one generation to the next. Freedom through social stability.

Yet, some of the neighbourhoods and districts are so grossly underfunded, teachers have to put money out of their pocket for school supplies...

hmmmm

If your plumbing is leaking so badly that you can't get anything out of the upstairs faucet, you don't just crank up the water pressure.

I think the problem with that analysis of the problem is that education spending in the US is highly unequal. Some school districts spend much more than necessary, while some don't have the funding to afford textbooks or safe school buildings. The main cause of this is that schools are funded by local property taxes, which depend on local house values and local incomes. Poor areas can't afford good schools, which makes it harder for kids raised in those areas to escape from poverty. Consider the Corridor of Shame: http://projects.aljazeera.com/2014/south-carolina-schools/

It may well be the case that US aggregate education spending is plenty high – but unless it were centrally collected and equitably distributed (taking into account differences in cost of living, cost of real-estate, etc.) to produce equivalent average outcomes, that's not really relevant.

They've tried this with under-performing schools (typically in urban areas). Throwing money at a problem doesn't make it magically go away. What works is breaking up the school and divvying up the students/teachers among schools that aren't under-performing.

AKA dispersing concentrated poverty so that no one part of the system is overwhelmed.

this isn't really true. the difference in funding from property tax is smoothed out (or more!) at the state level in most US states. some of the poorest school districts (eg, baltimore) have the highest funding per student. they still produce abysmal outcomes.

At least in CA, and probably other liberal states, you have what is ironically called the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) that distributes funding equally, more or less, and tries to erase these advantages.

https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/

I think the distribution of good teachers and parents ability to devote time to the children have at least as large a role. The latter driving the former. I would think better teachers would tend to gravitate towards areas where they get support from the parents and the parents ensure homework is done, etc. This is just my opinion.

No, this isn't true, though it's a common misunderstanding. Most school districts receive funding from the state.

Generally, the underperforming schools spend more per student. For example, Stuyvesant, the premier math/science high school in New York, is among other lowest of public high schools in spending per student.

Underperforming schools typically have higher costs, like ESL and special needs courses, free lunch, police presence, though.

From your source: "The total government and private expenditures on education" It's not just public school. And the data includes preschool, which is notoriously expensive.

The US also spends more on defense than the next 10 nations... combined. But we never talk about cutting the defense budget.

Likely, it’s money at the parental level that is what is lacking most now, and the body of supporting research has become deafening. From benefits cliffs, to the broken poverty measure, to ballooning costs of housing, healthcare and college, to stagnant wages it’s getting harder and harder for a hard working family to maintain an existence above that of outright poverty.

>When critics insist that American teachers need to be held accountable for the poor performance of American school children, the teachers shoot back that they are being held accountable for the failure of American parents and taxpayers to take care of their children.

>When some of us point out that there has been no improvement in the performance of all high school students or of protected subgroups of students in the United States on NAEP measures of reading and mathematics in 30 years, they tell us we should consider ourselves lucky that we have teachers who have been able to hold student performance steady while the American people have been sending them students who get poorer and more isolated every year.

>…the U.S. spends much more per student on our schools than the countries with the best education performance. But it is also the case that other countries, with higher student performance and lower school spending per student, have smaller disparities in income between their wealthiest families and their poorest ones, and despite that, spend much more than we do on the support of families with young children on everything from child allowances to child care and early childhood education. From my vantage point, our budgets for children, families and schools, if you take everything into account, do very little about the enormous problems caused by concentrated poverty and racial segregation and then load all the problems that causes onto the schools.

>…It is a whole lot cheaper to do right by our children starting when mom is pregnant than it is to wait six years, when it is a whole lot harder to do what must be done to give these kids a chance in a world in which the skill threshold for earning a decent living is getting higher and higher.

-Marc Tucker

https://ncee.org/2019/12/child-poverty-and-its-impact-on-edu...

Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this makes a lot of sense. Not everyone can afford to stay home to teach their kids, because you wouldn't be able to feed them then. I agree that the education system all over the world is fucked up, but I don't advocate tearing it down, rather we should fund it better and more effectively, make sure the education people get is actually useful in the real world, not the fluff they currently teach.

$100 bucks to your favorite charity and two WaWa sandwiches says i'm getting downvoted cuz libertarians and liberals don't like the idea of re enforcing the public school system ( and the whole thing about taxing millionaires and billionaires )

What you're saying seems like a very liberal idea though, right?

Depends where they are from. In the UK, liberals are what are called conservatives in the US, when it comes to economic stuff.

Funding is often not the problem. I believe it is Boston that currently has the third highest per-pupil funding (around $16k per student) and third worst outcomes among large school systems.

I downvoted him because it sounds totalitarian and anti-parental-choice. A power grab by a failing education system, "If only we had more money we'd do things right!"

Hogwash. The industrial model of education can't be solved by throwing more money at it, and I'm suspicious of anyone who pretends there hasn't been enough money thrown already.

I feel like you're not reading my comment in a charitable light here. I explicitly said "fund it better and more effectively", not throwing more money at it. How is that a power grab?

I also didn't downvote your comment, I was explaining why I downvoted project2501b's. "Tax the living daylights" and "Put all that money" is absolutely the language of power-grabbing and money-grubbing. You may agree with them in theory, but in discourse they are absolutely making your side look bad.

Rereading your comment now I realize you were commenting about the comment project2501b made, not mine. Sorry for the confusion, I agree with you.

I think we should use the money to fund students and abolish the idea of government run schools. Every kid gets the same amount to be spent at a private school that suits their child’s needs. Schools could be smaller and give students the attention they need based on their abilities and interests.

The government would audit these schools to ensure kids are adequately learning. Existing government school building could be leased to private teaching organizations.

I know there's a difference in what you're saying, but I think this is basically the idea of charter schools.

In essence but we haven't really gotten anywhere near having a full market economy for schooling. We have seen voucher programs in certain areas but they have also been resisted by teachers unions, possibly affecting their effectiveness.

However, the longer term results of kids who received vouchers show higher graduation rates and college admissions, albeit not always and and generally mild. But there's also evidence that voucher programs have improved public schools as they face competition.

I think we if we really committed to it and abolished government schools then we would see market based schooling improve the quality of education across the board. We could also expand what "qualified education" means and get away from a single standardized test for math, english, etc and begin to assist kids in placing them into academies that will benefit them. For example, by 14 it might make sense to have schools that focus less on academics and more on trade skills. Kids could begin to learn useful skills like carpentry, plumbing, small business operations, etc. that give them a real chance at building a life for themselves. A free market of education would allow people to setup these types of schools and for parents and kids to choose to place into them to set themselves up for success in life.

We can't do this in today's monolithic public school system. We have essentially a one-sized fits all approach with some schools offering AP classes, although even those are being removed in the name of "equity". Putting all our kids into the same system with the same goal of competing with each other to get into the best universities isn't good for most people.

There's no such thing as a government-run school, at least not in the U.S. U.S. public schools are community-run. The local community sets the funding level, the local community provides the facilities, etc. The state may or may not provide additional funding. The state will also set minimum standards for graduation requirements, which apply to all students residing in the state.

Then you have the issue of accountability. Community-run schools are paid for via taxes - either income tax, property tax or a combination for both. Taxes demand representation - in the case of community-run schools the community votes for the school board members who in turn oversee the operations of the community schools. Where's my voice when my money is simply handed to someone to do with as they see fit? Good luck getting your school tax levies renewed in such an environment.

BTW, my state has been grappling with these issues for the past 15 years and it's a mess. A state law got passed saying the community funding must be made available to students for private schools and the results have been predictable. School levies are failing, and the private schools have been involved in scandal after scandal - the largest being a huge embezzlement scheme. A toss-out of the governor and key state legislators got the law reversed.

So we tried this alternative and it failed and failed hard.

The community is the local government/municipality and is controlled by the politicians elected to it. The state influences this as well. So the schools are "government run".

And yes the local community sets the funding level and where I live, which is quite affluent, the funding is huge and the schools are nice. But in many other places where property values are smaller and people can't afford high property taxes to fund schools, they can't spend the same per student. Yes, some money gets recycled from affluent communities to less so through the state, but the money spent per student is still far less.

I think it's more fair that every kid gets the same amount of money spent on them so kids from poor communities can access quality education that isn't a function of where they grow up. That their parents can send their kids to a school that suits their needs and ambitions. So you have more than representation - you have actual choice and schools will compete for your money that is given to you.

Lastly, not every community votes for their school board. There are some places where they are appointed by the mayor. Teachers unions hate this idea because it cripples them, but actual teachers would thrive and do better in this environment.

> I think it's more fair that every kid gets the same amount of money spent on them

Where does this money come from? The affluent communities don't mind the lion's share of their local taxes going to their community schools, but distribute it to everyone and they're not so interested in paying those taxes. They'd much rather reduce those taxes and invest the savings in their own children. So your problem isn't solved.

There are reasons these ideas have been volleyed about the past 20-30 years and we've made no progress. Add to that all the private charter school scandals we've endured and you have a big mess with no easy solutions in sight.

>There's no such thing as a government-run school, at least not in the U.S. U.S. public schools are community-run. The local community sets the funding level, the local community provides the facilities, etc.

That's a disingenuous slight of hand when (as you admit) the curriculums are set at the sate level.

Being locally funded or managed means squat when the hours in the school year are limited and you have to teach to someone else's priorities.

Government regulations != government-run

To claim otherwise is equivalent to claiming every single business is government-run due to there being regulations.

>To claim otherwise is equivalent to claiming every single business is government-run due to there being regulations.

That claim is a hell of a lot stronger than the one where the organizations run by municipal government employees executing on a state developed plan isn't a government run organization.

Are you going to tell us that USPS isn't government run because it's a privately chartered corporation that just to happens to be owned by the government and happens to have its product offerings highly regulated by government?

Public schools are government run for all practical purposes. Just not directly run on a day to day basis by the feds or state.

You've effectively combined the worst features of public school with the worst features of private school.

The government does audit schools, what do you think standardized tests are for? To assess whether or not the school is getting the students to the appropriate level.

And everything else sounds pretty much kind of like how it already is except with the conceit that what you're saying is in any way novel.

We need to stop focusing on students and start focusing on teachers and support staff. We all know the trope of the overworked teacher who does a shit ton of work off-hours, who buys supplies out of their own money.

That's the failure of the system right there. Classrooms don't need tablets as much as they need more bodies. Combine that with parent engagement is difficult in some communities due to all the poverty and what not. It's hard to get a parent working a night shift at their second job to a conference to explain to them what they already know, their child is failing and they need help with the material.

Help the school can't provide, because there's no one available to do it. Because everyone is overworked.

No amount of money will ever cure the problem because the stated goal of the system is almost the exact opposite of its actual intent.

I highly recommend Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto, a 3-time New York State teacher of the year, which presents a detailed analysis of this.

First off, because of Bloom's two sigma effect [0], public schools will never be able to match the experience of a good homeschool. Unless you're talking about class sizes of four, each headed by someone who has mastered the material, the level of achievement possible under homeschooling will, in general, vastly outstrip what a public school offers.

Second, you can't talk about school funding unless you talk about both administrative bloat and teacher's unions. As long as teachers can keep voting themselves raises and escaping even the most basic levels of accountability for their results, money will not solve the public school crises. And administrative employment has grown by 75% over less than a decade -- 10x the growth in teacher employment during the same time. [1]

So sure, you solve the bloat and local control issues, there's plenty of money for instruction and classroom resources.

0: https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/

1: https://www.educationnext.org/growth-administrative-staff-as...

And what are they doing now? What jobs do they have? How do they pay?

My son has a well paying job as a development manager at a company that builds batteries (Sorry- I don't know more- he doesn't say much about it) and my daughter has too many health problems to work full time and lives at home with me. In fact her health was one of the reasons we pulled her out. She was so far behind because of missing school that it was becoming a serious problem that the teachers were ill-equipped to handle.

While I am sure the question is sincere, it's notable that the question wasn't, "what businesses have they started," "what are they doing for passive income and investment," "what are they using for leverage," "how many people do they manage," "what university did they graduate from," "what products have they developed," "are they on the real estate ladder," etc.

When you exit the system, the status and meaning it promises doesn't doesn't have the same value. If you got kids to the level of basic analysis / calculus, traveller level in a second language, and passable in the reasoning and comprehension skills of the LSAT, they would be smarter and more capable than most university undergrads. If you add physical competence hobbies to that where some of those skills get applied, you get even more differentiated. Teenagers get amateur pilot licenses, so they are plenty capable.

A way to match home schooled kids with structured team or olympic sports and orchestra or dance programs would be a big opportunity. Maybe we're at the cusp of an edu-tech boom?

I certainly hope so. If we had to reinvent the education system today it would look nothing like the legacy system, which was constrained by having to co-locate information sources, instructors, and students. A big danger I see is that the legacy system so damages the reputation of education that there may not be enough demand for a better version.

Yeah, and how well can the fish climb a tree?

| They're both extremely well rounded adults now and didn't go through the agonies of public schooling.

That is just your opinion and bias. I can share my opinion and bias. My kids go to public schools and love it. We'd never even think about home schooling. Not that everything is perfect, but as long as they are happy, we're happy.

You know there's a sizeable minority of kids that are subjected to chronic torment and bullying in public (or private) schools, which effectively amounts to psychological torture? The teachers simply don't care, or most often don't even know about it. Homeschoolding is a much better option for these particular kids.

Your kids are probably fortunate or socially skilled enough to be outside of that group.

I'm not arguing with that and I totally understand. My comment was about "through the agonies of public schooling", generalizing about public schooling because their experience was not positive.

Right. Well it wasn't positive for my kids! And I'm not biased. My son and daughter are just as imperfect as they'd have been if we'd put them through school.

We did however save them from needlessly experiencing the problems they were already having.

So it's subjective. But isn't everything?

Source on sizable minority? Also the greater world, outside of school, provides just as much torture and hardship as there is within our schools. I’m not condoning bullying or normalizing being bullied (I was) but there’s something to be said about learning how horrible people can be to prepare for the real world, where they are even more horrible.

The source is my observations and experience. The same kid gets picked on day in and day out. All the torment is directed at the bottom 5 percent of the social ladder. Nonstop.

I don't believe the adult world provides as much torture. Aside from workplace backstabbing, people are much nicer as adults, even if it's all for show. And as an adult you can more easily remove yourself from relationships and surroundings that aren't working. Kids are more prone to social cruelty and you're mostly stuck in your environment without the ability to opt-out.

>> there's a sizeable minority of kids that are subjected to chronic torment and bullying in public (or private) schools

There's a group of people who were bullied at school, it's called "everyone". There are support groups for this, they meet every single day of the week at your local bar.

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