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Comment by simfree | Hacker News Reader

Having been roomates with friends who were unschooled, it definitely made later life much more challenging. College was a lot of remedial mathematics catch-up, and the way they engaged with employers, potential partners and such was much different than most people.

Quality public education can serve children much better than unschooling or poorly performing private or public schooling.

Some areas just have very little choice though, the Catholic Schools are shit, the public schools are severely underfunded and decrepit, and unschooling starts to look reasonable, despite how it seems to have stunted my friends :(

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You might as well just say "quality" <educational type> and leave it at that. Then crack open Zen and the Art of Motorcycle and try to figure out what quality means.

I'd be curious how large your sample size of unschooled friends was and what sort of longitudinal observations you had on their whole lives.

> and the way they engaged with employers, potential partners and such was much different than most people

Could you elaborate on this a bit? I can imagine what might be different, but I'm curious what it was like in reality.

> the Catholic Schools are shit

Could you elaborate on this?

In many parts of the US, the most accessible (i.e. not as expensive) private schools are Catholic schools, dating back to a boom of Catholic immigrants who felt (and were sometimes right) that existing schools (public and private) were anti-Catholic. There are non-religious private schools in the US, but Catholic schools are everywhere.

Modern US Catholicism has, for a range of reasons, become very politically conservative (particularly in comparison to the Catholicism elsewhere in the Americas), and because Catholic schools are generally attended by the children of practicing Catholic parents whose conservative views shape their view of schooling, these private schools reflect those political views. As a result, if you aren't Catholic, many Catholic private schools are going to look like political and religious indoctrination.

I disagree, my problem with Catholic Schools is due to poor experience with the Jesuit ones I attended, they just were not staffing quality teachers (not surprising when they pay teachers $10k a year less than public schools) and each Archdiocese does things differently.

The Seattle Archdiocese has created a haven for spreading diseases unheard of in public schools by not encouraging or requiring vaccination of students. The other nearby archdiocese do not permit unvaccinated students to attend, and haven't had repeated outbreaks of once banished diseases.

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