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Comment by hn_throwaway_99 | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, there are a number of people out there who only want to teach their kids what's in the Bible. We should all be so lucky as to be a bunch of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidts.

Obviously I'm presenting an extreme example, but society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated. I'm not saying there are no problems with regulations, but I hate how the "deregulate everything!" crowd conveniently ignores the reasons those regulations were created in the first place.

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> there are a number of people out there who only want to teach their kids what's in the Bible

Not all homeschoolers are like this. There are plenty of other good reasons for parents not to want their kids to go to public schools.

> society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated

Yes, but for whose definition of "educated"? In the US, at least, the government was not supposed to decide that. Individual families and communities were. And, as I have posted elsewhere in this thread, the people who set up the US system of widespread, compulsory public education were quite explicit about what they meant by "educated", and that included plenty of things that any reasonable person would consider to be indoctrination, not education--and that was on purpose.

With the laws Florida is toying with around trans youth in education, you think people here would be more understanding of the desire to be able to give the government's regulations the finger.

Saying that the cost of giving persecuted minorities an out is "then we might not be able to persecute the minorities that I've decided actually deserve it" just feels fundamentally unconvincing.

If you just taught kids the Bible, at a minimum they would have amazing literacy skills.

I'm sure this varies by state, but where I live in MN home schooling parents have to register with the state and meet certain curriculum standards. Homeschooled students also have to take standardized tests and show certain standards of proficiency. The parents need to keep diligent records and be in regular communication with the school district. We have a lot of friends that homeschool (although we don't ourselves), and in general most homeschooled kids seem to be meeting or exceeding where their public- or private-schooled peers are at.

People are making a choice for their kids, whether they want the after effects of religious or public school 'brainwashing'. For many, its a clear cut choice, one way or the other.

It's weird to strip the kids of any agency or consideration, but you've phrased it well. People are making a choice for their kids -- parents don't own their kids, they have something akin to justified paternalism over them. Society should care whether parents are providing a base level of education and opportunity to these kids. It's pretty apparent from the discussion here who grew up around e.g. fundamentalist Mormons or Baptists where homeschool kids were often abused as a matter of 'doctrine' and those whose experience with homeschool kids is more like the Bay Area version of precocious children learning in nature.

> Society should care whether parents are providing a base level of education and opportunity to these kids.

And society should also care whether government-run public schools are doing this--not to mention whether they are indoctrinating children with values that many parents disagree with.

Society does care about that, hence why the public school standards are all public, school boards are elected, and there's broad democratic oversight.

The standards are public, yes, but that does not mean they are standards that a majority of the public agrees with. They are set by unelected bureaucrats.

School boards are elected, but I don't think "broad democractic oversight" is a fair description.

In any case, none of the things you mention prevented the US public school system from being explicitly set up to indoctrinate children, as explicitly described by the people who set it up. So to the extent that society in the US cares about educating children, it cares about educating them according to a particular political agenda that many people do not agree with. That is a major reason why homeschooling continues to increase in popularity.

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