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Comment by LudwigNagasena | Hacker News Reader

The biggest problem with the setup you outlined is that the central government has no say in what is being taught to kids. So no matter how similar homeschooling will look to government-controlled schooling, people with power will never stop attacking it because of that crucial nuisance.

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The “I don’t want the government perspective imposed on my children” is so funny to me as a homeschooling argument.

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?

Uh have you even tried that or know anyone who has? If you have issues with the curriculum, its not getting changed. It’s often set at a state or federal level with a lot of committees and politics.

I am not suggesting parents change standardized curriculum every time they have a problem.

States set guidelines but Boards of Education choose curricula for their districts.

Given how deeply some of those guidelines reach into what's on each test, the curricula are often distinguished by how they describe the same things.

Are you suggesting that a single parent can meaningfully influence a public school curriculum? That is a ridiculous notion as far as I’m aware.

I’m saying you as a parent can talk to your kids and provide the missing perspective.

I do not endorse the parents of todays worlds almost continuous crusade to change school curriculum in the face of things they disagree with.

Provide context or alternative views to your kids where you feel is appropriate. Let them make their own choices.

Thanks for clarifying. One problem with this approach is that it is purely additive. What if people want to avoid something being taught? Prior to a certain age, children don’t really understand things in a cold and analytic way. The things they are told shape their moral beliefs and personality (which is why religions are always very controlling of schooling). So, they aren’t really “choosing” in the adult sense, it becomes more of a RNG for whether they will pick up the state selected value system or yours. Of course once a person is old enough they can and should be exposed to everything, to build context.

You can’t raise children as if they’re little adults. They don’t have fully developed frontal cortexes until their late 20s: https://www.nimh.nih.gov/health/publications/the-teen-brain-... (“The brain finishes developing and maturing in the mid-to-late 20s. The part of the brain behind the forehead, called the prefrontal cortex, is one of the last parts to mature. This area is responsible for skills like planning, prioritizing, and making good decisions.”).

This is science. The very nature of the human animal is that children must be socialized, rather than merely presented information and allowed to make up their own minds: https://www.tiktok.com/t/ZT8Y8R8Lo/

I think the GP is suggesting that you attempt to understand public school curricula before you begin attempting to torpedo your local school board.

The parent is not making that argument.

If you read carefully you’ll notice they recommend teaching your kids your alternate view yourself and exposing them to multiple view points.

Influence? Sure.

I remember my dad organized a group of parents to push for improvements to math and science teaching at our rural school district. Eventually that included lobbying state legislators to support distance learning, so that a group of a dozen schools could use shared services to teach or access advanced courses. My brother got to realize that - he took Calc 1 & 2, as well and intro to computer science at a state university about 100 miles away, in high school.

Passionate people with good ideas can always drive change.

What if it's not about missing perspectives, but exposure to infohazards?

Explain this more to me. Presumably something so insidious you need to remove your child from even the possibility of being exposed to it. Perhaps, the existence of gay people?

That's a strawman.

The steelman version is something like the following chain of reasoning: (a) gender identity is something that everyone has that is distinct from sex, (b) with enough introspection, everyone can discover their true gender identity, (c) if you don't have a strongly felt gender identity, you need to introspect, (d) if introspection does not yield certainty then this suggests genderfluidity, or even worse that puberty ought be delayed until certainty is achieved.

Or how about: an AMAB child playing with a Barbie doll often is strongly suggestive that he might actually be trans.

Or how about: values like "being on time" or believing that a math problem has one correct answer are inherently white supremacist and racist.

etc.

If this is the steel man god help this argument.

Just to be clear: are you saying the argument is bad because these things are never taught, or are you saying that these things are good to teach actually?

I see your "how about" and raise you a [citation needed].

That is a fair ask. To be honest, I am unwilling to devote to this discussion the time which would be required to research examples.

I will concede that if these things never happened, I personally would find the infohazard argument non-compelling, though others may have their own feared infohazards.

On the flip side, if hypothetically these were common ideas animating public school curricula and/or teacher behavior, would you consider that sufficient justification for homeschooling as being discussed here?

When it comes to public policy, I don't find myself particularly animated by hypotheticals. I think we have more than enough on our plate if we just pay attention to things that are actually happening in the large.

That's not the steel man, that's a straw man where you just flipped the politics of the scenario.

Letting kids feel safe to introspect and question their gender expression is a good thing.

The implication that kids will be _systematically_ forced to delay puberty or undergo a transition they don't want is absurd and not a valid "chain of reasoning". Yes, I'm sure it has happened and could continue in rare instances because a) there are lots of crazy parents; b) it is a new, trending concept and people like fads. But that is really no different than other types of trauma parents and teachers give to kids across the political spectrum. You're going to have to do a lot more work to prove this is something likely to happen on a broad scale.

The fact that gender identity is now something kids are allowed to have means people will interrogate them about it. People may even attempt to coerce them (just like any other beliefs) and kids will likely change their minds over time. The ability to defend their beliefs, resist influence, have role models, receive reliable advice and mentorship, manage their relationships, make serious medical decisions, etc etc is all part of the equation. It's also not that big of a deal or the end of society.

I guess it comes down to how widespread you think the coercion that you mention is. I tend to believe the current rate of non-cis identification is at least an order of magnitude over the "natural" background rate, specifically because of a system of incentives and disincentives which have been set up. Being non-cis grants attention, care, affirmation, and deference from administrators. It is one of the few categories that administrators seem actually willing to go to the mat to protect from vicious bullying. Being cis means being boring, being tacitly oppressive, and not receiving as much attention, affirmation, or defense from administrators and teachers.

I view this all as a negative insofar as it nudges cis kids to identify as non-cis and start edging closer to risks to their mental and physical health as a result.

Maybe in 15 years this will look silly and we'll all know that 10% non-cis is totally normal and all these people will be able to live authentic lives.

But if in 15 years we reach the opposite discovery, my view is that we will have done a lot of damage to individuals and to systems along the way.

> make serious medical decisions

Did you sneak that in by mistake? Kids shouldn't be making any serious medical decisions for obvious reasons. This is law in many countries.

More like, learn how to evaluate those decisions and advocate for their own healthcare, which is something everyone needs to learn and practice in the US eventually.

Medical interventions for adolescents is always going to be controversial and no simple heuristic will solve it. Hopefully if kids are more comfortable expressing their identity and not comforming to traditional stereotypes then medical treatments will feel less necessary.

It's less rare than you might think, here are some statistics from US insurance claims, which is a lower bound as the wealthier may choose to pay privately:

https://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-tran...

Note this includes surgery on girls as young as 13 years old, to remove their breasts.

Those numbers are still "rare" and don't tell us that kids are being coerced.

My assumption for now is that the increase is due to latent demand and wider awareness & acceptance. We need to see the steady state after a decade or so.

Several of my high school classmates (from the mid-2000s) started transitioning as soon as they could skip town and decide their own life. And it was clear they had known and wanted it for a long time prior.

> That's not the steel man, that's a straw man where you just flipped the politics of the scenario.

That’s just HN

Would you please explain the math example? I was in school until last year (Germany tho) but I don't get it (the 4chan argument about percentages and races?)

See for example a slide from education advocates which states that asserting "2 + 2 = 4" is "Covert White Supremacy".

https://twitter.com/HTheijsmeijer/status/1571174175162699778...

There was a huge popular discourse in 2020 specifically about whether 2 + 2 = 4. See e.g. Kareem Carr, who was a major participant: https://www.hsph.harvard.edu/biostatistics/2020/09/kareem-ca...

The steelman argument for the subjectivity of math would be something like: the process of choosing how to represent/model a real world situation in mathematical terms may influence what conclusions can or will be reached under that model, because biased assumptions can sneak their way into the model.

To be clear, this is good knowledge and should be taught.

However, it is not an effective attack on the coherence of natural number arithmetic. We have to get students to a certain level of objective operational competence before they are ready to think about the subjectivity of mathematical modeling.

Wow, that's a completely ridiculous strawman. My kids go to one of the most liberal school districts in the nation, and never once have they been told they need to "introspect their gender identity," let alone the absolutely absurd notion that "if they're not certain, they're genderfluid and/or need puberty blockers."

Literally the only thing along those lines that is taught is to respect other people's gender identity. This has been no harder for them to grasp than "Gay people exist and that's ok" was for my generation.

If you really believe that school districts out there are pushing puberty blockers, then your YouTube algorithm is probably feeding you a heck of a lot of crap.

As someone who was homeschooled, I'm having a hard time coming up with an "infohazard" I avoided exposure to other than things like "the theory of evolution" or "the concept of sex" or "it turns out 'the slaves were treated quite well' isn't exactly true"

My point exactly

I'd imagine most info hazards come from the other kids and not the curriculum itself. Plenty of crude, incorrect, or even dangerous info coming from the other kids. Not that much different from how Hollywood portrays many topics (drugs, alcohol, sex, legal consequences, etc). So it's likely those ideas would be encountered even when homeschooling, possibly at a lower rate though.

What about the obsession with sex, sexuality, and dating in American schools, which the adults do nothing to discourage? If I had to identify one reason why poor Asians have vastly higher income mobility than poor white people, that’d be it. We literally have twice the bandwidth to focus on studying.

School isn't just about studying?

That’s where you’re wrong. At least in a capitalistic, credentialist society like America is, school is all about studying, whether you want that to be the case or not: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2011/05/110505103345.h...

> infohazards

That would be, what, harmful social contagions like anorexia? Or dangerous explicit teachings like "the government is your friend"?

"The “I don’t want the government perspective imposed on my children” is so funny to me as a homeschooling argument."

I think it's more the bureaucracy (which is a form of government perspective), and in some cases the lack of quality.

Does that line of thinking only apply to American public schools that teach values you like or would you suggest the same to Chinese, Russian and Iranian parents?

The point is that there’s no reasonable - folks doing this have deeply expressed beliefs and if you disagree you’re evil. They only sound reasonable when speaking in general terms.

I was a school board president of a catholic school that for the most part aligns with state and professional standards and added faith and cultural material not appropriate in a secular school. The kids get a solid education -

We got “invaded” by some extremely conservative folks, funded by some organization who sought to move to a curriculum derived from a homeschool program where books centered (exclusively) around classic western texts. In the K-12 curriculum kids weren’t taught about Asia until WW2. Africa and India do not exist. They were also concerned with “woke” issues, like girls being allowed to wear pants.

We were able to “beat” them, but it damaged the institution.

> The point is that there’s no reasonable - folks doing this have deeply expressed beliefs and if you disagree you’re evil. They only sound reasonable when speaking in general terms.

This is such good point about why this conversation is so frustrating.

Because in the abstract, if good faith could be assumed, there's a discussion to be had here. GP responded to me here being like "well what if they were Russian or Chinese schools" -- which does make you have to acknowledge "ok fine, if my kid were in North Korea maybe I would be really worried about what the local public school was teaching."

And so you get duped into engaging on the merits. And then you dig just a tad deeper and find out that it's never a high-minded debate about pedagogy or state imposed perspective on like the role of the Federal Reserve or treatment of the Native Americans, it's always bat-shit stupid stuff about Creationism, banning woke books, and demagoguing over gays and trans people.

It's so depressing.

You’re right. Right wing mass movements are never about high minded anything. It’s all lizard brain stuff.

Get people angry about blather and they don’t notice their pockets getting picked.

The good news is that there’s a history of these type of trends through history, and these movements burn out.

Just substitute left wing for right wing and read it back. Its still true

Left wing usually has some other basis. But are equally dangerous and awful. Zealots suck.

I will give you a concrete example if you want one. By focusing exclusively on the "great people" of the civil rights movement, the education most kids in the US are getting does not mention the roles in future movements which they are most likely to play. You get an "it's MLK and a handful of main characters, and thousands of extras in the crowd scenes" message from every textbook I've ever seen. No mention of the fact that there were, say, individual legal battles, much less what they were over or how they were won. Kids graduate high school thinking that their only two options are being an era-defining writer or passively reading tweets.

That’s definitely a downside of K-12 education.

I always found it depressing that you learned the survey level of US History a half dozen times, each time noticing the inconvenient details filtered out. My favorite whipping boy for this is the Pilgrims, who transition from guys with funny hats who liked turkey and wrapped dead fish around corn to… something else.

One thing to keep in mind is that you don’t know what people actually know, and if they’ve been lured into nostalgia for some wonderful past that doesn’t exist, they get angry. The 1619 project controversy was a great example of that. The notion that people managed their human property like property and that people who escaped that system intermarried with runaway or released indentured servants is a “duh” concept.

All of this underscores why education is important, and why academic freedom is a critical component of it.

This overestimates the degree to which (1) children are rational beings; and (2) parental influence determines children’s outcomes. In fact, the biggest influence comes from a child’s peers: https://www.psychologytoday.com/intl/blog/a-matter-of-person...

That’s why families who can afford it send their kids to private school, where their children’s peers are carefully curated. If you can’t afford that, homeschool is a compelling alternative.

This is far more nuance than I remember in public schools. At a young age there is quite a bit of rote memorization of facts. Sure parents can supplement their child’s education, but at the end of the day the child will be forced to adopt the schools viewpoint on certain perspective as the “correct” answer — or suffer in their grades

Try looking at this through the lens of a Native American parent circa 1880, and you may understand a bit better how these people feel.

They’re wrong, but we can have sympathy for them, at least.

Why shouldn’t the government have a say in what is taught to children? Children are not their parent’s property. These are future citizens and I would prefer that society has a say in what is taught to them. In a democratic system the government represents the will of the society.

Ok but I’d rather my kids have be raised understanding and influenced by their parent’s perspective so that they will influence society along those similarly into adulthood.

Yep, the whole point for many homeschooling parents is isolation of kids and ideological inctrination.

We just don't think it is noble.

Democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what is for dinner.

This hasn't been true in the U.S. for a century when the house reapportionment act was passed. Now the strongest voice the majority has is in the Senate. The body that was designed to give voice to the minority.

Minor groups often have excess power from tie breaking between major factions.

You could have a point if the government operating at the local school level was the least bit competent let alone functional. And that’s the government, public schools are shockingly badly run. I have two in middle school and it’s one of the top magnets in DFW yet my wife and I still have to be on top of the school to the point we’ve hired an “advocate” for our kids. Basically, a consultant that makes sure the school keeps the law breaking to a minimum and the accommodations o e of our kids needs are actually made.

If we had the option we would gladly homeschool but we don’t so off to the zoo every day..

Because children are not the government's property either, and society is not being asked for their opinion, so their will is not relevant. Society does not and will never care about any specific individual. The people who are ultimately responsible for the child (and therefore hold decision making authority) are the ones who caused it to be here. Pretending "society" holds that responsibility just means abdicating it entirely.

That only makes sense if the government owns the people. Which is exactly backwards.

It’s not? The goverment is chosen by the people to execute the will of the majority.

The will of the majority is generally going to be that all children are taught in line with their views.

We were forced to homeschool our child due to Pandemic, and later, from desire for him to actually learn. It was eye opening! Schools are chaotic, and one of the biggest take aways for the child is conformity. In fact, I believe the entire institution of age based grades started in the militaristic state of Prussia. From the point of view of a state that needs soldiers, having standards and consistency is important. Individualism, and creativity are not very useful in a marching formation. And questioning authority, is equally frowned upon.

Scotland

That depends on the state[0]. West Virginia appears to be the strictest, requiring homeschooled students to score above the median public school standardized assessment score.

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

> So no matter how similar homeschooling will look to government-controlled schooling, people with power will never stop attacking it because of that crucial nuisance.

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.

Can you cite the text of the law which motivates your hypothetical felony?

"Any adult, not just a teacher, who knowingly provides a minor obscene material described in section 847.012(3), Florida Statues, could be prosecuted for a third-degree felony."

> The statute 847.012 [...] also forbids subjects of racial issues and sexual orientation [1]

> School officials in at least two counties, Manatee and Duval, have directed teachers this month to remove or wrap up their classroom libraries, according to records obtained by The Washington Post. The removals come in response to fresh guidance issued by the Florida Department of Education in mid-January, after the State Board of Education ruled that a law restricting the books a district may possess applies not only to schoolwide libraries but to teachers' classroom collections, too. [2]

1. https://www.firstcoastnews.com/article/news/verify/florida-t...

2. https://www.snopes.com/news/2023/02/01/felony-charges-unappr...

This is the full text: http://www.leg.state.fl.us/Statutes/index.cfm?App_mode=Displ...

There is no mention of “racial issues” or even sexual orientation here.

So, the war is between state imposed ideology versus parental ideology, whatever the ideology might be?

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.

If parental ideology is whacky, one family suffers. If state ideology is whacky, million families suffer. Including those who didn’t consent.

What if someone can’t keep themselves healthy? Is it a good reason to regulate food consumption? What if someone is an alcoholic? Let’s introduce dry law?

In a democratic system, people can change the government.

Homeschooled students are required to take standardized tests and meet certain scores.

It's also a ploy to avoid integrated schools, but I think we gave up on the Brown v. Board world a few decades ago.

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.

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