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Comment by stevofolife | Hacker News Reader

I'm surprised to see that you think there is a clear dichotomy between what can only happen at school and at home when it comes to learning.

You'd be even more surprised to learn that learning can happen anywhere, anytime and from anyone in any kind of form.

Helping kids at home with school work as a parent is not only accessible to rich families. You should help your kids when they really need it regardless of your socioeconomic background.

Now if you're talking about personalized/paid tutors outside of school, then yes - it's much more accessible to richer families but there is fundamentally nothing wrong that. What you decide to do with your kids outside of school is your choice.

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A person’s “socioeconomic background” may dictate that they don’t have time to spend many of their vanishlingly rare non-working hours on being a teacher. I'm surprised to see you assume that everyone has this kind of time. I assure you that they do not.

Not everyone does but it's not something restricted to the rich like you said in your first comment. Growing up, my wife had a lot of help at home and she came from a middle class, dual income household. I came from an upper middle class household and my parents were so busy working so they could keep up with the Joneses that I never had any help whatsoever with my homework.

I'm not going to deny that schools can probably do better, but telling people you need to be rich to help your kids with school is, in my experience, not true. I think the bigger problem for many is relationship dynamics - most parents I know lack the patience to help their kids with homework.

> Not everyone does but it's not something restricted to the rich like you said in your first comment.

Very well; I grant it. Now, does that invalidate the rest of my point in any way? Some kids are still going to have a large advantage over other kids, whatever the cause. If teachers are aware of this, would this be a reasonable way for a teacher to handle education? To just dole out homework, and leave any help or not to the vagaries of chance depending on that kid’s home situation? And any kids getting help would probably getting this consistently over other kids, giving some a huge permanent advantage over a long period of time. Why would teachers do this? I chose, instead, to charitably assume that teachers meant for homework not to be done with assistance by parents or tutors. In which case “helping” would indeed be cheating.

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