Bryan Caplan: Our Homeschooling Odyssey | Hacker News Reader

Bryan Caplan: Our Homeschooling Odyssey

econlib.org

29 pointstemp89647 comments

My education was the inverse of this in many ways. I was home schooled through 6th grade, privately schooled through high school and went to a major public research university for undergrad.

The biggest difference between my story and the OPs is simply the educator's expertise level. Not everyone has a parent who is a PhD in STEM while being extremely well versed in humanities at the same time. I was lucky to have a mom who was a kindergarten teacher.

So my theory is that the mode of education's value is proportional (roughly speaking) to the quality of the educational resources within that institution. For normal folks like my parents, that meant the value was maximized while I was young and declined as my education advanced outside of their expertise. Had I needed to rely on my mom's calculus teaching skills to learn calculus I would have been missing out on those kids' competent calculus teacher mentioned in the article for example.

Additionally, kids learn family culture over the full time they are in your household. Training kids to read and compute is trivial in importance compared to teaching them the value system you believe works well to make you a functioning adult in a complex and ambiguous world. Home schooling and public schooling alike are actually of secondary importance to this primary mission of parenting. Put differently, the OPs kids would have excelled regardless of their educational environment because their family culture inculcated them with high achieving standards. It's clear from the article that their success was never taken for granted or expected. They had to work hard for their admission to college and their family culture inspired them to rise to the occasion.

You are absolutely dead-on with the paragraph about family culture. I will paraphrase a small essay written by a smart friend of mine who was educated at home:

"Children naturally imitate people they respect. If they are raised by a parent who hunts, they will want to hunt. If they are raised by a parent who plays music, they will want to play music. The value system of the parent is thus communicated to the child via the productive interactions they share together.

In a school system, children are hidden away from productive adults who love them and are instead exposed to a rotating cast of absenteeist teachers who cannot hope to give them serious one-on-one attention, which is necessary for personal development. At school, with hundreds of children kept in a holding pen with a total lack of personal role models, they look to the most charismatic children to learn value systems and methods of interaction. This explains the dichotomy between what homeschooled children consider "cool" (i.e. what would impress their family and lead to productive, exciting interactions with them) and what schooled children consider "cool" (i.e. what would impress the most charismatic children and lead to productive, exciting interactions with them.) This is also why homeschooled children tend to have a few close friends, good manners, and close relationships with adults.

The fact of the matter is that children cannot raise each other. If they could, then school would be a good idea."

My parents took a hands-on approach to education but they still knew when their resources were exhausted. At some point you 'graduate' your parents educational resources regardless of their expertise, few parents will attempt to home-educate college subjects for example.

An engaged parent can sit alongside their kid and interpret the materials taught by the teacher in the classroom. They can be 'teaching' family culture while the teacher is teaching the curriculum.

I will agree though that in order to succeed in the above as a parent you have to be aware of the importance of your role and be willing to take a hard stance sometimes when the teacher strays outside of their territory into value proscribing in ways you don't agree with.

I think the only mistake you're making is believing that school only teaches curriculum. That's true for adult schools where a fully-formed adult learns from an expert, but it's not true for primary schools, who teach children that are rapidly forming a model of reality every second of the day.

The teacher isn't teaching things like how to interact with authority, how to behave in society, how to make friends, how to have self-esteem- they may lecture on those topics with words, but the actual learning of the culture that's taking place is coming from peers, not from the teacher. A professional educator leading a course isn't the problem, the model of putting your kid in school alongside hundreds of other kids for seven hours per day is the problem.

My comment was geared towards asserting that "family culture" will necessarily conflict with "schoolkid culture" if your kids spend a lot of time at school.

Nice to see someone living their research in their own life[1].

On a personal anecdotal parallel I went in and out of public and private schools growing up. My parents had to drive me to local high school campus so I could take geometry in 8th grade (I'd already done Algebra 1-2 and 3-4 in 5th and 6th grade at a private school which was basically run like Caplan's home schooling, a group of us did 4 hours of math a day together).

With my children now I've seen different schools work great and work terribly. We've moved kids between schools trying to match up needs of each child with the design of the program at the school.

My main macro observation (via 4 kids who are now adults and 1 who is in high school): For kids who know they want to be a specialist at a young age school is really hard for them.

If as a society we really believe in comparative economic advantage and each person working for their highest and best use then exchanging their earned dollars with specialists in other areas of their life then school is designed poorly for those who do choose to specialize, costing them years of advancement at a point when their brains are setup to build pathways more quickly.

[1] Caplan is a Princeton PhD and now tenured professor at GMU who is the author of "The Case Against Education" https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691174655/th...

Must be nice to be a tenured professor teaching a few hours a week with plenty of time to homeschool his kids.

It sounds like this parent did a decent job, and had their heart in the right place -- enhancing their child's education. In my experience this is the exception to the rule with homeschooling. I might have some blinders due to my personal experience though.

I and my 4 siblings were homeschooled K-12. My parents opted to homeschool so they could maintain control over what their children learned. Everything was taught through the lens of Fundamentalist Evangelical Christianity. History, Math, Science, Writing, Reading, everything.

My Mom is allergic to math and logic, and she never hid her distaste for those subjects. Calc-useless she would laughingly call it while she told me she couldn't help me with a math problem. Algebra was a fucking disaster until she found a VHS course that included a help line subscription for when we got stuck. And ohhh we would get stuck. It's hard to find motivation to learn something hard when the teacher mocks the very idea of the topic at every turn.

Sci-lience she'd say as she redirected me from an Encarta Encyclopedia entry on Evolution, and on to the Abecca Books "god made everything in one week and thats it" 'science' textbooks. It's hard to make friends with peers when you sound like a goddamn idiot saying things like "if the earth moved 10 inches away from the sun we would all die of cold!" with a straight face. No one wants to be the kid whose friend then stands on his chair, looks you cold in the eye, and says "I'm certainly not freezing here, 24 more inches away from the sun than you".

The concept of attending college was outright mocked, which is weird because both my parents have college degrees (they met in school), and my Dad even had a teaching degree (not that he ever used it). When I turned 18 there were vague overtures towards me maybe going to school, but no one did anything real to help make that happen, so I just didn't go. I'm lucky that my side hobby of slinging CSS was able to pivot into a real job (around 2004) otherwise I'd still be out working construction.

The result is grim. None of us can even prove we went to Highschool. None of us have attended an accredited college (some have gone to non accredited christian colleges, and the degrees are _not_ worth what was paid). This bit depends on the state you educate in, but in Minnesota a homeschool is technically a small private school. Schools are in charge of maintaining graduation records, there is no central reporting agency. My Mom and Dad are forever charged with proving we went to highschool, but the employers that do critical checks of this kind of information are not impressed or interested in "high school transcripts that look like your mom made it". I personally had a job offer for $130k rescinded after the background check was unable to verify my HS graduation, and even with a decade of proven work experience and multiple high-quality references HR was uninterested.

The linked article describes a level of homeschooling that I would have died to experience growing up. I was so hungry for real information but everything I was taught was so obviously filled with lies, and the teacher was unqualified and unassailable, a deadly combination for a curious, learning brain. How do we make sure homeschooling as a concept delivers more outcomes like OPs, and less like mine?

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