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Comment by silverpepsi | Hacker News Reader

Something I heard a few years back put my life experience as a kid in perspective. At least for me, in the most important way possible, it doesn't sound like regular school at all.

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).

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> Parents won't force their kids to continue to be around others they dislike

Ha, you would be surprised. Parents will totally force kids to be around people they dislike. I mean my parents knew that I was bullied in my private, free association school. Even after one asshole pulled a knife on me and the school wouldn’t do a thing because he was from a rich family in my small town, they still decided to kept me in there because “it has good academic level/learning to deal with these people is good/kids will be kids/<insert other bullshit excuse>”.

But hey, maybe you are right and free association is good. After all they kicked me out because of absenteeism when I decided to bail out of school because it was living hell.

I see the importance of any argument I'm making on being the best bet for 95% of humans. No policy governing humans is ever going to make imperfect humans perfect, but policies can and do go to far to where they're a detriment to a huge percentage

It sounds like your parents were uncool or unreasonable and that sucks, sorry. But I think it's not objective to let it make you think all that was the norm as an adult.

My parents were religious nuts. But as an adult I realized how lucky I was. They actually don't have any personality defects such as powerlusting or being egotistical about respect, so as a kid I very definitely avoided all the worst experiences kids often go through growing up with just the minor annoyance of forced bible studies or church visits (in perspective really an annoyance at worst)

Exactly, while the appearance of a sufficiently modern homeschool can start to “rhyme” with public school for practical material reasons, in reality the underlying incentives are completely different.

For me, it was charter schools that saved the day. The charter school teachers couldn’t just sit on their ass like public school teachers when some little shit decided to try to ruin my day.

I don't get it. Why can't bullying exist in the group homeschool at church? It's functionally equivalent to a school. Are you making a brand new point about traditional homeschooling (parent-child) or replying to the OP in the thread?

As a child in a public school, you have no right to freedom of association, and no right to freedom from association. Your school chooses your classes, and the state will use violence to ensure you attend those classes, bully or not.

In home school, there is less people and more choice. There are no perverse incentives that value attendance over education and health.

In home school, there is less people and more choice.

Choice for whom, the student or the teacher? The teachers are the ones with the agendas, in all senses of the word.

No parent's agenda is for their child to be kicked around by another kid.

It routinely happens in families and friends groups of parents (kids of parents friend bully the kid). It the setup described above, the kid have less choice over who friends will be.

School often serves as a release from parents' social machinations to let you find your own friends from a sampling of the general public.

Right, because children are never abused at home…

I added the phrase "by another kid" so nobody would reply with that but it looks like it didn't work because... you might not have read to the end? :-P

That other kid could well be a sibling

> No parent's agenda is for their child to be kicked around by another kid.

The consequence is that every parent, given a scenario where they feel their kid is being kicked around, will remove their kid from that situation.

That's not a healthy absolute either.

Would "we must force parents to keep their kids in situations where they (the parents) believe the children are being abused, to make sure the kids grow up tougher than their parents desires would result in," be a solution anyone would actually want?

I'd want that for my kids, because I think it'd be net-best for them.

Clearly, I'm not talking about extreme abuse.

But I am talking about more discomfort than I (as the parent) would want for the child in my ideal world.

Parenting is always wanting your child to suffer as little as possible. But a little suffering is good in the long run for the child.

Thus, the fundamental tension in letting parents be the ultimate arbiters of a child's experience.

You want your children to experience more abuse than you want them to experience?

I think you're intentionally using term the abuse, in contrast to the words I used, to be inflammatory.

But yes, I think it's healthy for my children to experience more suffering than I, ceteris paribus, would permit them to experience, if I were omnipotent.

I'm using the word abuse because I am referring to abuse as distinct from the abstract kind of suffering that's impossible to have any opinions for or against because it might include hiking long-distance. ;)

Where does a kid walking up to your kid and saying "That shirt looks dumb on you" once a week fall?

Pretty far north of some of the things that happen in the rougher of our public schools.

Isn't the whole premise of this grouped home schooling that it makes life easier for the parents, at the expense of tying into some commitments? There surely can never be enough grouped home schooling setups in any given locality with the freedom to break existing commitments for a parent to easily swap between them. It seems like there is a strong incentive for a parent to stick to the status quo.

A) You absolutely have freedom of association in public school. There is statutory and empirical intolerance for bullying, to the point that libertarians have been complaining that there isn't enough due process for the alleged bullies.

Parents can also easily move kids to other classes to avoid unwelcome company.

B) There is, in practice, no meaningful freedom of association in the real world. Childhood is an appropriate time to learn skills to mitigate the downsides of that fact, including forcing bullies to suffer consequences.

You know how good black / gray hat hackers are at circumventing the law or just don't even think about it?

Yeah, bullies generally aren't scared by "the rules" or by the fact that what they're doing is technically illegal either.

> Parents can also easily move kids to other classes to avoid unwelcome company.

This is definitely not the case in the schools our kids go to. The class sizes/composition are shaped by the demands of the teacher's union, we recently learned.

We always thought that the parent survey the school sent out, asking about your child, was so that our kid could be put in a class with a teacher who would be compatible. Not so, we learned!

The information was used to create class cohorts that are evenly balanced, and only after this happens are cohorts assigned to teachers. But at this point in the process, the desires of 20 distinct families cannot be used to match students with teachers.

Instead of focusing on matching certain types of students (those who need more remedial work, those who need more advanced work, etc.) with teachers who are good at providing that type of learning, the school is focused on making sure that all of the teachers have the same class composition, so that none of them can claim to have a "worse" class than anyone else.

> In home school, there is less people and more choice.

I think you meant "there are fewer people." Were you home schooled? Perhaps public school English would have been a better option.

Haha no, I learned English as she is spoke at a California Distinguished School. They taught English using the whole language method, because learning grammar is literally unimportant to learning language. I’m sure you can see how good I learned in thirteen years of public school.

> Were you home schooled?

Funny, as a public-school attendee, I would expect the opposite given how many of my peers sailed through on cruise-control with crappy teachers who were sometimes dumber than the kids.

If a kid is a bully then the parents organizing the group can kick that kid out (as a last resort). Additionally if a child is being bullied they can tell their parents and the parents can take action directly, this can happen publicly but there's a lot of layers of administration making it non-trivial.

In a way the group homeschool can be thought of like a small private school, it's just simpler to handle personal problems in a small group.

> If a kid is a bully then the parents organizing the group can kick that kid out

Or they can approve of the bullying. Or they can do nothing because they don’t care, or because they’re socially subservient to the bully’s parents.

It’s simpler to handle personal problems in a small group, it’s also easier for them to fester in a closed group.

It’s not a closed group. You can pull your kid out and put them in a different group. It’s not like public school where your kid is forced to go to the one school in your catchment area.

The parents also have the option of reorganizing the group to kick the bully’s parents out, along with the bully.

Private schools achieve that and have more ability to do so than homeschooling teacher as a service does.

This model isn't new and had problems before.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capturing_the_Friedmans

If I can find a news article about a public school teacher who molested children will you support shutting those down too?

I think your article is less likely to have the investigation beginning with the post office and more likely to have affects of multiple regular people not being OK with something, and being present.

Such involved parents could never let anything happen arguments ignore how these things develop as less involved parents cargo cult. (You can't get much more blatant in a drop in actual involvement than the example in the article.)

These kinds of groups connecting themselves to actual home schooling will erode it by association.

If I can find an article about a parent molesting a child, will you support sending them to public school?

1. What parent would approve of their kid getting bullied? What are you talking about?

2. If the parents care enough to homeschool, why would they not care about bullying?

3. Socially subservient to the bully's parents? This feels like a hopelessly contrived and niche edge case that is effectively meaningless because it would be so rare

4. I'm not convinced personal problems fester moreso in a closed group (see: armed forces), and further I'm not convinced homeschooling groups are closed in the first place

All this to say I don't think your argument has any merit and is based on convenient and unlikely hypotheticals.

It’s not unlikely that the bully is a child from a parent who organizes the groups…

No one that's going to the additional effort of finding and participating in this type of school is going to let their kid be a legitimate bully. That level of parental involvement is what's lacking from a bully's life.

That is laughably naïve. Plenty of parents think their little angel can do no wrong and will at best ignore evidence to the contrary.

While I do agree with you here, I do think the OP has a point. Homeschool parents are _involved_. Its a small, close community. Word gets around.

> Its a small, close community. Word gets around.

That describes lots of communities where abuse is epidemic.

Small, close communities are communities where the bonds between each participant is much stronger, making it costlier - both in terms of immediately broken relationships, and of backlash from the rest of the group - for people to sever it.

Word gets around, but not necessarily from the right people, and - if bad outcomes are not guaranteed - there is nevertheless a strong incentive for it to fall on deaf ears, stronger than it would be in a less tight-knit community.

Learning how to deal with adversity and dumb people was school's greatest gift. The world is full of both.

Maybe your public school experience was mostly decent, but for a lot of people it's hell and it actively breeds misanthropy. You can learn to deal with stupid and difficult people without being exposed to soul poisoning doses of both.

Can you? Because I don't think recent child development trends bear out children learning things in spite of being exposed to less of it.

If it sucked, and the requirement for it to happen is removed, it simply doesn't happen.

And the lessons that it taught remain unlearned.

Research shows that people learn well when there is the right amount of stress, and the right challenge. If the stress and challenge exceeds that amount it can quickly become destructive, which is what we see in your typical public school for any child who isn't primarily concerned with "fitting in."

At best, public school is useful. At worst, it's a massive waste of time and absolutely destructive to a young psyche. You can expose your children to that massive asymmetry, but it's not necessary, people who cared got along just fine before public education, it's really there to uplift the lowest common denominator.

"Fitting in" is no small thing. The world would be better today if more people had the ability to empathize with someone not-them, sufficiently adjust their own way of interacting to put others at ease, and generally be less abrasive and fragile.

And if we want to talk in absolutes...

At best, public school provides an opportunity to learn socialization that cannot be replicated in a home environment.

At worst, you get murdered.

The problem with this "fitting in" narrative is that as adults we don't care about it so much, people enjoy meeting new and unusual people (as long as they're baseline socially functional), there's a huge social stigma against being bigoted so basically everyone views adult bullies as worthless assholes and the cops will arrest people for much less than bullies get away with on the school yard every day even in the face of repeated parental protest.

I would say that much of adult society still runs on "fitting in" (e.g. social groups, corporate hierarchies), ergo being able to do it deftly is a huge life skill.

There's definitely a stigma around adults engaging in specific types of bullying (physical) and bigotry (e.g. protected classes), but society as a whole rewards more subtle bullying (political power dynamics) and ignores subtle bigotry (e.g. caste, microaggression).

The point of socialization, and indeed bullying itself, in school is in no small party to teach everyone (bully and bullied) what acceptable and unacceptable forms are.

Absent that, you either get people who are worse bullies (because they never learned where the line was) or are fragile (because they never learned where the "I should/shouldn't be able to handle this uncomfortable thing" line is).

Reality is mostly segregated. It's only in artificial environments where you have no recourse to avoid horrible people (or people that are horrible to you).

You probably was in the your tolerance margin to say that.

But I've been to 11 schools, including private ones and ones from very poor and violent places. And there are situation where the only lesson you learn is how much people can destroy you.

Getting knocked down then kicked every day at recess, cowering and begging for them to stop, solely because of the color of my skin, while children laughed at my misfortune, until the teacher eventually waddled over to save me was not, in fact, a great gift for me.

You can push anything to an extreme to make it bad. I'm sorry the adults around you failed you is all I can say. It doesn't mean school is a bad idea, or that going through moderate levels of crap doesn't build one's character. There's a point where adversity turns into actual abuse and that's when grown ups should support kids, either in school or in a pod or wherever.

For some kids, going to school is the only escape from their bullies.

For many it is opposite. Going to school means meeting with their bullies.

I can think of a guy who became a local bomber in my city who was homeschooled. He would put bombs into people's mailboxes or leave packages by their front door, my uncle's family knew them when they went to homecoming stuff together. He was eventually caught and arrested but idk homeschooling isn't for everyone.

I worry sometimes how these kids will struggle when they are faced with the real world.

Personally I loved going to a charter school and I was really excited we got to have extra large classes sometimes because you can't always fit all your friends in your grade in one class but for specific art classes we often tried too. My charter high school was really great, my college experience was definitely not... It was too small for one thing looking back now.

Also won't ostracizing a bully make them more destructive? I know a lot of them become suicidal after a while and more destructive (based on experience understanding those I know better) they did get better though, they just didn't know how to process what they were going through.

That just sounds like your schools suck. While I was _forced_ to be around the bullies. I was at the same time _forced_ to be around my friends.

And I think most importantly, forced to make friends. An invaluable life skill.

I understand freedom of association as going both ways. I don’t think there’s a need for the term “freedom of non association”.

That doesn’t sound right. For all of human history bullies who were bigger and stronger made the rules. The weak were ostracized. If anything, what you’re doing in homeschooling is reverting away from the norm and creating a sheltered environment. This is a double edged sword, you can turn your kids into fragile beings incapable of dealing with a harsh world but at the same time they will probably have productive, predictable and carefree childhoods.

The best case scenario is to be rich enough so you can create a bubble for your kids that lasts from birth all the way to their graves. It’s very possible, all the wealthiest people do it.

If you weren’t bullied growing up then maybe we can find some for you now, as you seem to be advocating this for kids.

Definitely not advocating for bullying, just pointing out that you can’t harken back to antiquity and call homeschooling a continuation of that paradigm in this particular sense.

> That doesn’t sound right. For all of human history bullies who were bigger and stronger made the rules. The weak were ostracized.

That requires more than a little bit of backup before using it as a basis for claiming that homeschooling is bad.

Bullying as in age-segregated schooling doesn’t exist in the real world. Adults and older children police any antisocial children, and the community of adults polices itself (because they’re adults and have mental faculties children lack).

> The best case scenario is to be rich enough so you can create a bubble for your kids that lasts from birth all the way to their graves

You don't have to be extra rich for that. Just don't associate, that's the whole point. To avoid a bully it's enough to not go to the same building with him every weekday.

>> For all of human history bullies who were bigger and stronger made the rules.

It takes a unique character of not only being bigger and stronger, but also of being more generous and giving and sharing to become a leader or ruler. Leaders who were only bullies and cruel could maybe beat up or kill any individual man, but could not stand against a group and would be destroyed or ostracized if he was cruel enough to alienate a big enough group around him.

Firstly, what I said can be true in one scope of reference and what you say in another. It's not mutually exclusive.

I feel your perspective is more about lots of the world after the rise of nation states and dense civilization.

For me I'm actually thinking back to the Pirahãs tribe from Daniel Everett's book as how we realistically lived as tribes. Conflict might arise, but a group might split off and go live in an entirely different patch of forest permanently, at which point the conflict is done without fuss. Things can be much less pleasant with permanent settlements and all land being owned by someone else.

A couple, man and woman, possibly with children, might also do something like this and just reject the benefits of being part of a larger community as loners.

Not all conflict is existential, we all choose to live facing a certain amount but also have our limits. Kids have way less flexibility to make the call and it is the cause of much misery

> For all of human history bullies who were bigger and stronger made the rules

This is why firearms and high explosives have been such blessings to humanity.

I'm unsure if you're saying that coerced unwelcome company is a good or a bad thing. While kids can be mean, it's just a reflection of humans in general and this kind of behaviour doesn't go away when you block it out. People get more mature but there's a lot of similarity between how people act in high school and in the work place, it's just a lot more skillfully and subtly done. Exposing kids to this reality doesn't seem bad to me.

> Exposing kids to this reality doesn't seem bad to me.

I hope your children don't get "exposed to this reality" in school, as you put it.

The sorts of harrassment that school bullies inflict on their victims is, to put it simply, not tolerated anywhere else. Why should it be tolerated when it happens in school, where the victims have no choice but to attend every day?

> The sorts of harrassment that school bullies inflict on their victims is, to put it simply, not tolerated anywhere else.

Workplace bullying is fairly common too, it just follows the corporate hierarchy.

If my co-worker gave me a wedgie or beat me up during our lunch break I would have them arrested.

Seems like a rather puerile form of bullying, no? With adults it looks much different. Mockery in front of peers, openly manipulative behavior, talking shit behind peoples' backs, etc etc

Is it good that children get bullied or ostracized? Obviously not. It is far preferable however to the alternative of never having experienced that humans can act like this. We're sometimes assholes to each other for poor animalistic reasons, and that's probably not going away in my lifetime. One should be prepared for other people to act like this.

> Why should it be tolerated when it happens in school, where the victims have no choice but to attend every day?

Since it's where they go to learn that this behaviour exists but is bad. You need to have lighter sanctions in order to teach people about behaviour without ruining their lives in the process.

In real life, you can choose not to associate with the same person or clique 8 hours a day 5 days a week for thirteen years. Worst case scenario would be in a job situation, but here's the thing: you can find a new job. You can't find a new school.

In public school, you can either report the abuse to an authority figure who has little or no ability to actually remedy the situation, or you can... sit there and suffer? Fight back? While outside of it, you have more ways to remedy a bad situation than "just make your abuser respect you."

> It is far preferable however to the alternative of never having experienced that humans can act like this.

Should we get our children bullied deliberately then? It is not necessary to be bullied to learn that humans can act like that. I've never been assaulted, for instance, but I know that it's possible and act accordingly.

I really disagree with all the comments that make reference to reality - no that is not at all what "reality" is. The fact of the matter is that as an adult, I can draw a line in the sand and either leave a job or report someone who is making the workplace hostile. I can have arguments with friends, but I can also decide certain friendships are over because they've passed a reasonable max threshold for toxicity.

As a kid, you're repeatedly forced into situations where you dont have these same rights - in my experience. Schools try to trick you into thinking they're arbitrators above the law. They incentivize victims sucking it up, because if you get punched in the face at school, both parties involved will be suspended. However, it didn't strike me until I was in my 20s - this is all a trick - I could call the cops and press charges instead. One of the deceptions of my childhood anyway. Assault is a crime, school is not a special jurisdiction outside US law.

The idea that anyone's circle of chosen friends is not reality to me is nuts, of course everyone faces some amount of conflict with friends. Why does it have to necessarily be conflict from someone you hate with all your being(at a public school) to train you for life? Someone who'll physically assault you? That seems like a made up arbitrary rule. I'm in my 40s and have yet to experience anything like what I did as a 11 year old in my adult life. what exact training for real life did I need that was so valuable to my future? etc.. School sucked!

> I can draw a line in the sand and either leave a job or report someone who is making the workplace hostile

Because you have the money and possibility of acquiring another job relatively quickly (I suppose, otherwise you would not give up your survival means for such a reason). Not an option for everyone.

> They incentivize victims sucking it up, because if you get punched in the face at school, both parties involved will be suspended.

This part is stupid, I agree. When I got beaten up at school, I punched back and explained it after. The perpetrator ended up going to juvenile prison at some point (for unrelated charges). I wasn't punished in any way since that was seen as an appropriate response. So we had different experiences.

> Because you have the money and possibility of acquiring another job relatively quickly (I suppose, otherwise you would not give up your survival means for such a reason). Not an option for everyone.

Workplace conflicts usually don’t involve assault. Lines are usually drawn by standing your ground, explaining one’s position and taking the chances and picking the battles. If it comes to getting assaulted one better be prepared.

If the manager doesn’t agree one might get fired, or it is time to look for options.

Nothing in life is a must, but there are consequences to everything and one better choose wisely. But then, the ability to make good judgements comes from experience and experience is gained by experiencing the consequences of decisions or choices one has made in the past, including bad ones.

Resigning, from a position of employment, or situations in life in general should not be the first option, at least not without considering the above.

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