For many home-schoolers, parents are no longer doing the teaching

If we do have online learning, maybe the need for schools goes away?

The main deep life impacting characteristic of standard public schools is coerced unwelcome company. You're forced by law to be around the same bullies for 5, 10, even 12 years. The natural order with organic friendships (and indeed probably since antiquity) is that those who act as a bully or jerk get ostracized. It is both justice and instructive for those who get excluded from one circle and must rethink their social approach to possible get accepted in another. It is how socialization is supposed to work.

Parents won't force their kids to continue to be around others they dislike, schools are totally ok with the violation of right OTOH (basically if you have a right of free association you also have a right of non association btw).

I was never homeschooled, and I think homeschooling is generally not a great idea. But there should be an alternative. Anything that doesn't have a pressure valve like that is screwed.

Most home educators use a mixture of ways of learning. The best is self teaching because it teaches study skills - learning how to learn is invaluable.

It us also very flexible. For thise familiar with the British system, my daughters did GCSEs in subjects including Latin and astronomy. They sat some subjects early (the older one got an a in physics at 9) which let them spread things out and is less stressful.

Socially they meet lots of people, of varied ages, in diferrent settings.

Schools could learn a lot from the tailor made nature of HE. They could be flexible. We neef to move on from mass produced education. https://pietersz.co.uk/2023/08/schools-failing-flexible-answ...

0: https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/current-policy...

e: Not saying this is the reason but it is certainly the subtextual reason in the southern urban school district I lived in that a lot of kids were homeschooled.

Go to schoolboard meetings. Talk to your kids and their teachers. Understand what your kids are learning. If you feel a perspective is missing, fill in the gaps. Your kids will be better off for seeing different perspectives, understanding basic argumentation, and coming to their own conclusions.

Oh this sounds like a lot of work? Well, the alternative, pulling them out of school and designing their entire education sounds like way more work than just being reasonably engaged?

What if parental ideology are whacky? What then? Yes, state ideology can be whacky as well, but at least it is in the public and in the open where that can be challenged on a field, instead of uncontested at home.

Just like in Florida, where teachers now face felony charges for having the wrong book in the classroom (not as required reading, just having it in the classroom). Yup, that's people with power attacking home-schooling for sure.

Also consider school holidays. How many jobs let you take 12 weeks of holiday a year?

I've asked loads of working parents how they deal with that and the answer is always "it's impossible, you have to use grandparents, scrounge together enough holiday, try to take unpaid leave, etc.".

Edit: my wife is a HS teacher of 15 years. Her and many of her teacher friends are leaving the industry. It’s just not fixable.

I see absolutely zero need to pull her out. The academics are ok--not what an expensive private school might offer, but they track well with what I was learning at that age. The social/institutional environment is much better than when I was a kid.

The few parents I know who homeschool (admittedly, mostly from my wife's church group) do so for religious separatism reasons, not for educational outcome. They object to public school on ideological grounds and perceived "indoctrination," not on the academics.

Our kids get a decent amount of socialization through all the activities they're involved in, and when other kids find out they're homeschooled, their response is more often genuine surprise rather than "Oh, that figures."

The idea that kids learn social skills best by being thrown into a rigid, institutional environment surrounded by hundreds of other kids whose social skills are also far from developed is kinda silly, though. It's like saying criminals will reform themselves best by surrounding themselves with lots of other criminals.

is it ?

Maybe it just comes down to personality

In my mind I was so uncool that the only way to win was not to play

I learned some socialization at public school, sure. I also learned what it was to have a bureaucracy just roll over you because nobody involved cared enough to notice you were there. Those kids will have that experience eventually, but I’m all for delaying it.

Forcing kids (by constructing their environment in such a way) to have only relationships with kids that are precisely the same age as them is weird. Some healthy relationships with people who are a few years older in positive. Older kids/people need to be embedded in the social circle as role models. You get less bullying and should get faster social development. Homeschooling done right is more similar to how kids developed socially in our ancestral past (all the way up to a few hundred years ago). It's also more similar to how kids develop in much of the world outside of the West where larger family units are more tight knit.

A lot of time in public schools is either wasted or simply a consequence of classes having ~30 students each. I also find that homeschool kids can be taught the discipline to work on their own after a lesson. I check the work in the evenings or before school starts in the morning.

I can understand why many people might not want to homeschool, but I find it's been a blessing for my kids & our family.

My daughter would want to spend 6-10 hours a day on art, but wouldn't want to do her French or math homework. My son just told me that alef (in the Hebrew alphabet) was the symbol for Graham's number, but balks when I try to get him to memorize his multiplication tables.

> And since they are different ages, I worry that if I taught them all at the same time, the curriculum would average into something too challenging

If there is a subject where that is the case, I do not know what it would be. Once they're past the age of 7 or 8, most or all children are capable of what they would be at older ages. I don't think, for instance, that an 8 yr old learning to read is slower at it than one learning that for the first time at age 14.

For the record though, didn't get to teach my son to read. With his sister, I tried from age three on up... every few months I'd see if she was more agreeable to it, and she wanted nothing to do with it until sevenish. She could sound words out phonetically if I pushed from the start, but with a look on her face like I was pulling teeth with pliers. So I waited with my son until he was almost seven... and he could just read. I have no idea how. My wife claims she didn't, and his sister certainly didn't either.

I think, really, that public schools doing age segregation has more to do with them trying to perfectly homogenize the product they crank off the assembly line, than it does with making sure each student gets enough learning opportunity.

It depends. I quit my job to homeschool my daughter so that she could practice and pursue her violin studies without the encumbrances of mainstream school. I suspect some could have done this and maintained some kind of a job; I couldn't. We spent much of the day either in school work, or practice, and then I'd prep tomorrow's material. Neither time nor energy was left at the end of the day.

As I typed the above paragraph out, it actually makes me question. Is that really growing social skills if they're always surrounded by the same kids? For example, I moved to a different state between 8th grade and the start of high school. That experience helped me to understand what it's like to not have friends, how long it takes to make friends (2-3+ years), and how to interact with a lot of peers you don't know and who don't know you.

It was interesting when I went to college, and I found other students who were nice, but never really interested in being your friend because they went to the same college as many of their high school friends. Or they grew up near the college and had all their high school friends nearby still. I guess this latter point isn't really social skills, but it is something that I learned to be aware of.

I'm sure there were many benefits but public schools don't seem to be doing great at socializing kids.

Also as an adult I gotta say, in most ways it’s traditionally schooled kids who are “stunted” (immature, have mannerisms/beliefs/habits incompatible with the adult world) until they hit about 20-26 more so than homeschool kids. I’ve met homeschooled kids who probably considered themselves stunted, and in some ways (being sheltered) they were, but they were also significantly more “adult-like” and mature in other ways earlier than their peers. This is also true for a lot of traditionally schooled kids who are “late bloomers” IME.

My wife was a teacher in private schools for about 7 years, and once our oldest was ready for kindergarten, we decided that she could either go out and teach other people's kids, or she could homeschool and teach her own kids.

We participated in many different co-ops. We took every AP class offered at the local high school. We're all functional adults with normal social lives.

It's obviously hard to come to any conclusions from warring anecdotes alone, but I thought it's worth sharing mine.

Strained relationships with adult children suck, but they're not a given when homeschooling, nor does sending your kids to public school necessarily save your relationship with your kids.

If I had to guess, most of the original homeschoolers did it because they had strong, fringe religious beliefs. Then in your generations more secular parents started homeschooling but it was still a pretty highly self-selective group (a stay at home parent who didn’t mind staying at home most of the day teaching their kids, a belief they could do better at educating their kids even without the resources we have on the internet now to make it easier or the ability to use the internet to organize with other homeschooling parents, anecdotally a lot of either super-weirdo parents or hippy granola parents (more in unschooling)).

Now with the internet and WFH homeschooling is possible for many more parents than just those that don’t work fulltime and want to teach their kids full time, and it’s easier to create curricula, and easier to network and schedule things with other parents.

I do think there is probably a general problem of some pathologically bad parenting traits self-selecting much more than “normal” parents to homeschool: parents with control freak/micromanagement issues they subject their kids to, socially anxious parents who want to spend all their time at home with their family, parents with fringe/paranoid/extreme beliefs, having some kind of weird attachment or smothering issues they subject their kids to. Which isn’t a problem with homeschooling per se as much as it is selection bias in who chooses to homeschool.

I came here to write your comment and was thrilled to find it already here. As a homeschooled kid who considers myself damaged as a result, I completely agree. The OP comment is eerily similar to stuff my parents said in the 2000s-early 10s and were totally wrong about.

My parents weren't religious at all and were totally in it for academic enrichment. They were all about the "new wave of homeschooling": high-quality instructional material, study groups, plenty of socialization opportunities with other (homeschooled) kids. I turned out fine academically and probably do at least partially owe my career to it, but the social consequences for both me and my peers were severe.

The issue with playdates and study groups and the like is that the odds are good, but the goods are odd. Homeschooled kids playing with each other is an echo chamber of robotic parent-pleasers (for a while, until the break happens) who're incapable of tackling genuine social dynamics because their foremost, unbelievably deeply inculcated desire is parental praise. I feel it even now - peer approval is meaningless; only that pat on the back matters. This results in a weird simulacra of socialization: kids understand that they're supposed to have friends and social contact, but go through the motions of "this is friendship and social contact" without ever touching the real deal. Friends your parents select for you are fundamentally not real friends, and pretending they are fucks up one's ability to form genuine relationships for a long time.

Homeschooling is the ultimate egotistical project of attempting to form a living, human child - with the fractal of possible futures that implies - into a mirror of one's self. The typical liberal recognizes the abhorrence of that in a context of religious indoctrination, but is totally fine with it in a secular context. Fuck that. It's wrong for all the same reasons, and fundamentally negates the child's identity as a unique human. This is why I don't think better instructional material isn't a solution: the core problem is that one fleshed-out outlook on the nature of reality is way too little. Without multiple sources of approval and validation, it's way too easy to monopolize a kid's perspective. Again, this is realized in contexts of religious indoctrination but ignored outside of it - forcefully indoctrinating kids with a single perspective is wrong, full stop. And no, simply presenting alternative perspectives doesn't work; it'll inevitably be couched in the sort of condesencion that parents are unable to shed. Imagine your dad telling you about rock'n'roll culture: you're hardly likely to go from that to the Twisted Sister video.

Parents, of course, love this dynamic. The problem starts when those kids leave the nest and find that their parents' perspective is not the only one that matters.

The other angle is that, ime, parents who are themselves socially stunted, like mine, are unable to recognize this dynamic and insist that nothing is, or even could be, wrong. Like the parent comment, I've kept in touch with many of the kids I knew and this perspective is far from unique.

To the OP: I beg you, please don't do this. You will probably regret it for most of the rest of your life, and if you don't your kids will.

Uhh, that isn't a "government rep." What kind of school did you go to?

classic (deliberate) oversight in all comparative political studies in the US: there are 180 other countries. of course YOUR country will always be an outlier compared to some other countries

While private catholic schools that people pay thousands of euros for are silently allowed to spew homophobic/creationist propaganda, it's become much harder for anarchist parents to teach their kids at home or together.

Personally i still think anti-authoritarian schools (like Montessori) are much better than homeschooling, but i don't think war against homeschooling is a good thing, especially when it's done at the same time that public services are slowly being disfunded/dismantled to their slow and painful death.

Not to downplay the tragedy of what we think of in terms of a school shooting…

But the claim you are making is NOT what we think of, a Covington or Coloumbine or Uvalde. That stat is a gun control talking point intentionally designed to mislead.

That list counts any shooting within a few blocks of a school, and at any time of day. There is one on that list that someone shot a cat at 3am. shooting + near school = school shooting

My city had a 16yo meet another student in the school parking lot late at night, over drugs of course, one was shot at and it’s now a school shooting on whatever sub-organization Michael Bloomberg is pushing at the moment (there are at least five I know of).

There are a ton of kids in this situation—-either adopted or in foster care, mom abused drugs and alcohol during the pregnancy, and even those of us who pay to adopt these kids from birth/early age (~$30k each for us) there is just very little support available. We are essentially doing the state a favor by not putting these kids into foster care or making them be the public school’s problem, and we don’t get repaid unless we happened to know about FASD, get a diagnosis and apply for an adoption subsidy BEFORE adopting them. It’s absurd.

They acknowledge that, but it doesn't change the thought process, right? If I know my kids can learn 70% more than they do in public schools, and have all the skills/tools to provide it to them, I don't care about the reason schools are inefficient.

The sentiment that homeschooling parents has is that public schools time things to target below average students. That's wildly inefficient. Couple it with a reluctance to hold back students and it gets even more inefficient. I went to a private school. For certain key subjects (history, math, science, etc), if you failed just one subject you get held back and have to repeat the whole year. As a student, this was fantastic. It means if your class got stuck with a "troublemaker" who was poor academically and disruptive, you wouldn't have to put up with him for more than a year. He would either shape up eventually or keep failing till the parents pulled him out because it's too expensive.

Having been homeschooled myself for 8 years, one common misconception is that homeschoolers are nearly always alone. Homeschoolers spend significantly more time with others than the average person realizes.

Certainly, trained specialists should play an important role at various points for all children.

Only five states get more than half of school funding from property taxes.

I previously worked in the public schools, and in a museum education program that worked 90% with public school classes. My mom was a public school teacher before I was born. My sister, who I'm quite close to, still works in the public schools. We all went to public schools in my neighborhood. My middle child goes to a public school that I can see from my living room. There's no opposition to public school in my family.

When my oldest finished his public Montessori elementary school and went to the district's Highly Gifted school at age 12, it was a major step back for him. 40 minutes each way on the bus just to be at a school that was cookie-cutter and wasn't able to support his needs, particularly advanced math -- I don't think there's a single teacher in the building who even knows how to assess the gaps in his knowledge; they were trying to teach him what an exponent is when what he actually needed was to fill in gaps in calculus about techniques like Lagrange Multipliers. So he's home with me, because it's better for him. Public school was fine for him as a younger kid, and it's still good for other kids, but it's not a good fit for him now.

I'm well aware. There is an irony to the arguments I make, because I also detest the idea of forced erasure of identity.

Military service? No. I would be in favor of some 1-yr mandatory civil service. I believe its important to interact with all classes of the society you inhabit. How else can you gain true perspective if you only live in a bubble? Life is about being uncomfortable.

>The funny thing about school is that almost no adults would be willing to be subjected to it.

Its interesting you say this, because at the same time we see adults also long for their school days as they grow to hate the 40 hour work week. Now it could be that what they really long for is childhood and youth, but people also long for their college days as well. They long for the environment where they freely mingled with people of their age, and the camaraderie they established in their "shared suffering". They miss structured periods like "recess" and "lunch" or "gym class", even though as an adult you can do these things freely.

As for the blanket cynicism disguised as analysis, you're wrong. Schools were not originally conceived of as a capitalist daycare system, even though people love to say that. It's first and foremost a capitalist training system, or at least socialization more generally. Daycare was not necessary for most people during the first hundred years or so of public schooling.

And yet, I went through public schooling, learned the "national" identity but I still retained my own unique identity and cultural practices taught at home by parents. And in the process, I forged a new identity, much like the settlers who immigrated to this country before me.

Is it because my parents did not embed the great insecurity into me? To reject everything taught from the onset because it may lead me astray? They did nothing like that. They told me to attend school, make friends, and learn new things. I learned both the good and the bad of the dominant society I lived in, simply by observing it for myself. And I became familiar with the archetypes of the elites and the poor.

There's also pretty inconclusive evidence that school funding actually is tied to performance all that strongly at all. Interventions tied to giving schools more funding generally do not improve the performance of the school.

If you homeschool, do you get that money back to spend on education?

To add a bit more incentive, I'd say the children of any senator / congressman / local state legislature / governor / mayor / etc must attend school of that state. This will again ensure that people who make decisions and influence decisions are actually committed to the solution.

Again, not thinking about "how to rely on the government" but more along the lines of, "how do we make sure those in power / influence are as bought into the system and the solution of the system as the rest of us"

If you'd please review https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html and stick to the rules when posting here, we'd appreciate it.

Obamacare was the first time that half of america was able to even go to a doctor to figure out wtf is wrong with them.

The point is that what you're saying IS ideal if you can afford it, but the second you cannot, you're stuck in the worst situation available.

The goal is NOT to create 1 education system, the goal is to force everyone to use the same system, and then variance occurs not because of rich vs poor, but because of intentional choice.