Hacker News Reader

>> What is it about teaching that makes people with no training think they can do better than trained professionals?

Teaching one or two students whose home situation supports you 100% is a much much less daunting proposition than trying to teach a class of 30 kids (or several such classes).

The idea that teaching things to your own children (which all humans have done forever) requires specialized training and credentials seems silly. But again, that's a very different job than being a school teacher, I think.

Public schools are a recent creation. Historically, few people were educated about anything outside their immediate needs, e.g. reading, writing, history, science, math, philosophy, etc.

If you were taught anything extra, it was from a private school or tutor -- the majority of humanity is clothed in ignorance.

Children were taught what they needed to survive, e.g. farming, fishing, etc.

My spouse homeschooled our daughter during the first school year of Covid, and it was challenging. You are completely reliant upon the materials you source, and there's no definitive curriculums.

Personally, I cannot realistically conceive of many people actually teaching their kids any science, literature, or critical thinking skills.

First: If you need help, get help. If you can't do it, stop trying to do it.

Second: There are communities (homeschool co-ops and such) that can help.

Third, though: Do not underestimate yourself. You know a lot of physics for a third-grader. You can teach that, even if you have to read the textbook right beside the student. (You may not be able to by high school, though.) And you have a great advantage. One of the key things in teaching is classroom size. The difference between a classroom of 30 and an classroom of 4 is massive.

I do not know how to teach physics to a 10th grade student. I don’t know the subject well enough to explain it. I don’t know it well enough to come up with insightful examples. I especially don’t know chemistry, biology, literature, and other topics well enough. It would be hubris to think that I and a bunch of other equally ignorant people can do a better job than trained professionals.

The help I need is provided by the public education system. The help is in sending my kids to public school.

Here’s an example that illustrates my position. Due to experience with teaching mathematics I know that it requires a lot of effort to convince a student that the reason 2x+3x is 5x is because of the distributive property. One could not possibly know this and why this is true without experience/knowledge. I haven’t the slightest idea of similar situations in other subjects. I know force is mass times acceleration but I have no idea how difficult a concept this is for new beginners because I have no experience with teaching this concept to beginners. I don’t know what examples to use when a student doesn’t grasp this concept.

> Due to experience with teaching mathematics I know that it requires a lot of effort to convince a student that the reason 2x+3x is 5x is because of the distributive property

pffft. Put two skittles next to three skittles and ask what the resulting summation is in terms of skittles.

I'm being a bit glib, but the reality seems to be that many smart people think teaching is trivial, a simple case of knowledge transfer. If you understand it, surely you can teach it to someone else.

My personal experience at uni suggests that truly brilliant people who understand topics perfectly can be Not Good at instilling understanding in others. It's a different skill imo.

Great example. It demonstrates you don’t know how to teach the subject. Your Skittles example won’t help with explaining how to add ax + bx. To generalize the concept of combining like terms we need to refer to the distributive property.

But it's not like I sit down and just invent the classes I do with my daughter. There are really good programs, which scaffold all this information and explain it to the kid (and often, coincidentally, to the parent too). For example, I know how to add, but would not know how to go systematically through all the cases and explain them to her. Fortunately the Singapore Math curriculum we use does all that and much much more, and I work through it with her.

Because the experience public school provides is an exceptionally low bar considering class sizes/ratios, commuting to and from school, etc. Also, we can pour resources into our kids public schools can’t or won’t. The data also shows homeschool outcomes to be at parity or superior to public school outcomes. We only have two kids though, and my partner is a stay at home parent. We also rely on Modulo, among other resources, for structuring education delivery.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/522078

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33204988

https://www.modulo.app/homeschool

Schools provide some of the most critical parts: consistent access to peers and a parent free learning environment. Both helped me break out of a cult-like group that my parents were knee deep into for decades.

Home schooling can have an academic advantage where parents are intelligent, well educated, above average in patience, and value education for their own kids.

IME it's more likely one of the home schooling parents had some bad experience(s) in traditional schools and are overreacting.

What you mention isn’t a schooling problem though, it’s a parents problem. And all children are free of their parents eventually. You can’t outrun bad or apathetic parenting regardless of venue, ask a public school teacher to confirm.

https://health.ucdavis.edu/children/patient-education/Positi...

https://www.rasmussen.edu/degrees/education/blog/parental-in...

If parents are a problem then homeschooling isn't going to help. Traditional school would, assuming the schools aren't complete garbage.

Sorry to hear you had a bad homeschooling experience and you disagree with the data with regards to success rates (there are roughly 3.7 million children being homeschooled currently in the US). It works for many, I’m sure there are folks it might not (you mentioned some sort of cult situation in your case; I don’t believe this is typical except perhaps if you consider religious reasons for homeschooling).

The average person with no training in teaching or education isn't going to do better than the average person with said training.

Your stats aren't all that meaningful for the following reasons. What percent of homeschooled kids meet the criteria for "structured homeschooling"? Without this information it's not a meaningful stat.

There is also selection bias going on. They tested reading, writing, arithmetic. Did they test algebra? Did they test biology? I'll bet a fair number would fail at questions regarding evolution or have a skewed view of historical facts.

Your question quickly progressed from polite inquiry to decidedly confrontational and personal. I kind of loved it. :) I'm sorry about what happened to your sister's disabled kids.

The general reason parents can confidently provide primary education is that a) good educational materials are easy to research and acquire, b) the benefit of education closely tailored to a child's strengths and weaknesses meets or exceeds the benefit of institutional pedagogical theory and classroom management skills.

In secondary education years, access to material and closely meeting needs still factors, but the parents' operating principle is increasingly about pulling in the best sources available. That often means community college or part-time high school classes.

There are also a lot of homeschool co-ops, pods, and other resource and skill-sharing arrangements. Lots of variety.

All your examples of authority figures are trained to be effective over a high volume of lower trust interactions with the general population, relying on professional incentives to perform. They are needed but they're most effective when complementing and backing up parents who cannot for whatever reason provide care, correction and education at home.

I suppose part of the consideration would be seeing how poorly so many public schools fare and how test scores continue to fall. And now, many schools don't even have textbooks because everything is digital. Even though we have studies showing how that has a negative impact on kids learning.

Is it the solution? I dunno, but public schools are getting worse by the year so I understand people trying something different.

Part of it is the statistics. I don't fault people for deciding to homeschool at this point as long as they make sure other needs besides education are addressed, because the data are there and it doesn't show conclusively that homeschooling is worse, though it doesn't show it's better either. If it was much worse on average, that would show. Also a common pitfall is homeschooling only out of protectiveness. That alone isn't a very good reason to homeschool - at least not before other options including going to another school or perhaps even moving are exhausted. Protectiveness can be the start of researching about homeschooling but people should have more reasons homeschooling is likely to work well for them other than just that it's safer before actually starting to homeschool IMO.

> What makes parents with no specialized training think they can do better than the public school system?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAzsJt1Q7Jc

lol

> What is it about teaching that makes people with no training think they can do better than trained professionals?

My guess is Dunning-Kruger effect and studies highlighting academic benefits from homeschooling.