Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

Comment by ryandrake | Hacker News Reader

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> You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when they happen because they are private.

You're also not going to hear about the homeschooling horrors from the typical HN demographic. Broadly, and obviously with exceptions, there are two groups of parents who choose to homeschool: 1. Parents who have an abundance of educational resources and time and do it to provide a higher quality of education, and 2. Parents who do it for religious separatism reasons because public school gets in the way of their indoctrination. Selection bias means you're going to see a lot of the outcomes from #1 posting here, and not a lot of #2.

For every example who was homeschooled with a high-quality curriculum, had great parent-run extracurriculars, socialized well, and so on, how many examples are invisibly stuck as someone's housewife who can't even be employed because their only textbook was the Bible, and they didn't learn anything past 3rd grade math? They're not posting their horror story here on HN.

Why do you presume that religious parents necessarily have bad outcomes homeschooling?

I have a relative who is deeply religious. I know I would not agree with her on, for example, evolution. But she is loving and devoted and her two daughters have received tons of time and investment from her in their education, far more than they would receive in a public school.

I obviously haven't, like, tested her kids, but they do seem smart and well adjusted. I'm not really worried about the limitations on their scientific learning — it's not ideal if they are skipping some evolutionary biology (I actually have no idea but I assume they are) but they are going to leave home, go to college in a very secular country and get to learn that stuff. I'm sure with the internet they are already widely exposed to what science has to say about e.g. the creation of the universe (which, honestly, how many high school students could walk you through?).

By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible" and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.

> By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible"

They’re pretty common, in fact. Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/

“The Bible is the only education you need” is a very common meme among evangelical Christians.

> and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.

Most states have almost no recourse to reject submitted curricula, no matter how specious they are. One influential homeschool association has a 24/7 legal hotline specifically for subverting these mild attempts at accountability.

>> By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible"

> Here’s a curriculum company that’ll gladly give you the tools: https://answersingenesis.org/homeschool-edition/

Contrary to your claim, the linked page implies nothing about the Bible being the "only textbook". It simply offers a set of Bible lessons for homeschoolers ("This exciting curriculum contains homeschool lessons that cover the entire Bible chronologically in four years…").

You misread the claim and are arguing against something I didn’t say.

While you only wrote that that website provides the "tools" it would have been very reasonable to infer from your comment that you were also implying that they agreed with Bible-alone teaching.

I would assume any kind of education that is dependent on strict adherence to a specific ideological doctrine, whose tolerance of free inquiry is similarly constrained, to underperform one without these limitations. This was my experience of attending public schools that were under the thumb of right wing religious nuts vs. attending a state university that was not. I learned much more at the latter than the former.

Not all religious parents who homeschool will have bad outcomes, but it's by far the largest demographic of people who fail to actually educate their children.

As for your last statement: in most states there's no oversight. Sure, parents have to file a curriculum that gets reviewed and approved. Parents jump through that hoop by downloading a curriculum and mailing it in. There's nobody checking that they actually follow any of that curriculum. There's no state-run testing as a check and balance.

Religious groups have broad discretion in curriculum in most states.

My kids went to a Catholic elementary school, where I was the school board president. A breakaway group tried to insert a “classical education” curriculum on the school, which is a popular trend in more right-wing Christian schools that was adopted from homeschool curriculum.

The biggest growth in private schooling is in this and similar curriculum. It’s attractive to more reactionary people as they can assert “local control” while using texts that are too old to be considered controversial.

Parents aren’t to blame necessarily, people want what’s good for their kids. But awful elements of society are abusing religion to achieve their social ends. In my case, I was accused of being a “Marxist” for not condemning a fundraiser that provided winter clothing for poor children, including migrants swooped up and shipped across the country. We’ve allowed people to be brainwashed by charlatans.

> A breakaway group tried to insert a “classical education” curriculum on the school, which is a popular trend in more right-wing Christian schools that was adopted from homeschool curriculum.

To be clear, a 'classical education' refers to a traditional form of education where you break up a child's education into grammar, logic, and rhetoric stages and then mainly use primary sources. There's nothing wrong with this system and it was likely the way many people, including Marx, were educated. The idea that this is 'right wing' is bonkers to me.

If your relative is so indoctrinated by neo-christian ideology that they believe in creationism over evolution, the question is more if they should raise children at all, much less educate them.

As an English speaker on this site, the odds are very high you are descended from someone who believed in creationism. I argue it is good our ancestors weren’t forcibly taken from our other ancestors ala Stalin, Mao etc. simply for being Christians as it was defined a few generations ago.

If you don’t like it, though, there are less successful countries in this world that still persecute people based on religious belief. You are free to try one out. See how it goes.

This is a weird argument.

I don’t agree with parent, but the reasons are vastly more nuanced than “your ancestors were religious so you’re wrong.” And that’s ignoring the even weirder swipe suggesting parent move to a different country.

Not a question of anyone being wrong. Having the opinion that my relative should have her children taken by the state might be repulsive to me but it is a statement of values, not something that can be refuted.

Instead I simply suggested a reflection: would you still feel this was a good thing to do if it was your great great grandparents having their children seized? Wouldn’t a great many of us have had our families broken?

Is there utility in believing in evolution over creationism in the average person’s life? If so, what is it?

I’m an atheist and evolutionary biology is my favorite field outside of CS, but unless you are personally working on figuring out how things actually work, I’m not sure how one belief over another benefits the average person.

The idea of believing things without evidence is a dangerous pattern to fall into. It may not matter as you say, if you don't see evolution as most likely correct, but if your mind is willing to accept things without proper evidence, you are going to be a shill.

Is assuming "mostly likely correct" things as an absolute fact not dangerous?

Evidence, when not absolute, is as useful as the lack of it.

People accept evolution without having a clue about it.

One should proportion belief to

1) The amount of evidence for a claim. 2) The grandiosity of the claim.

If you tell me you have a pet dog named "Spike" I probably would be willing to accept that with as little evidence as a picture of you holding a dog, found in your wallet [i might even take your word for it, if i knew you to be an otherwise mostly honest person]. Because, dogs exist and are plentiful, billions of people own dogs, and "Spike" is a common name. you may be fooling me (it may be the neighbors dog) but i'm still justified in the believe because the evidence rises to the claim.

If on the other hand you claim that you have a pink polka dotted flying dragon as as a pet named "Chester". I would be a fool to believe you. I have no evidence such a thing exists, or that people have them as pets. I would have to see it in person, and even then, i would need to get a report from teams of biologists/zoologists to be willing to accept the claim. It would require tons more evidence.

And yet, the claim STILL isn't _that_ preposterous. The dragon would be an animal, and i know animals exist. I know there are animals with scales, i know some animals fly. I even now there are some with wild coat patterns.

Now if you tell me you believe in an all powerful all knowing god who is responsible for why there is life? I have zero evidence, i have no experience like what you are describing. I've never been given evidence of a being outside of time and space. I don't know that that is even a thing. I don't know what all powerful is, or if that could exist? or all knowing? is that possible? I have no correlary to compare to. It's not like we know King Neptune exists, and while not infinitely powerful, is still pretty boss. Why would i believe that was the explanation for why there are creatures on this planet?

Evolution, on the other hand, has mounds of evidence. We have a powerful fossil record, We went thru a pandemic that shows the power of mutation. Even our own ability to drink milk. And yet even evolution isn't making all that fanciful of predictions. It doesn't claim to know your thoughts, or how you will die. So the evidence rises to claim. Do we know everything there is to know about evolution? Could we be wrong in some areas? Sure. But we are justified in accepting it.

I might agree in principle on what you're saying, although not on the conclusions or consequences.

However, I think you either have too high an opinion of how people go about their ideas and beliefs, or you trust too much in the power and protagonism of reasoning.

I'd bet a lot, if not most of the people, don't go as far as you described. They believe in evolution because that's what's believed right now, and they got taught that in school. Try having a critical conversation about evolution with the average Joe, see what you find out.

Truth is everyone has faith in something. I have faith in God, so I believe certain things that might not seem rational to someone. Other people have faith in science and scientists and teachers, so they believe certain things which definitely don't seem rational to me. They don't have proof, they don't understand the reasonings, they haven't seen evidence. They just have faith in "the experts". And so they believe.

Anyway, why is the idea of God being real _that_ preposterous?

it is preposterous because a) we have no known comps b) we have no evidence of the claims c) we have no reason to believe the claims are even possible.

as for trusting in experts, there's no question that that is problematic in the extreme. However, it comes back to how the evidence rises to the claim. Can a group of people be experts in a subject? How can we validate that? Can we verify that their are experts in how electrical wiring works? To a large degree we can. We have lots of evidence. Do they know everything, probably not, but i can have confidence that they are mostly correct. Can we verify there are experts in evolution? Again, i think we can. They have produced mountains of evidence. Do they know everything? No. But they are likely largely correct. Can we verify there are experts in God? What are the tests? How do we verify these experts?

You mention faith, and i have to ask, what good is faith? Is there anything you could _not_ believe, based on faith? If faith has no mechanism to filter out anything, does it tell you anything about what is true or likely true?

Again, I agree with several things you're saying, and because of that I insist in the presence of faith within what you're presenting.

There's usually low risk in trusting that a contractor is an expert in electrical wiring if they say so, and I usually trust plumbers or tradesmen to know their stuff and do their work. And how many times I've been wrong.

But my point is that most people don't go through this verification process, examining the credentials of scientists, taking a look at the evidencie, studies, papers, reasoning, etc. that backs up evolution. So it's not a rational belief. It's faith in other people, or a system.

If people did that, they would get to the conclusion that a lot of evidence points at the possibility of evolution being true. But by no means it's proven beyond doubt.

I don't know about your education or professional background, but from my side as a software engineer I very well understand that you can pile up evidence that will point you in a certain direction, and afterwards you might get that small 0.1% that will turn things completely around.

Regarding your questions about faith, I would not say that's how faith works. I have reasons behind what I have faith in. Right now I would not be able to switch my faith to something else just because.

Hebrews 11:1 - Now faith is confidence in what we hope for and assurance about what we do not see.

That something is not visible does not mean it doesn't make sense.

Could I be wrong? I guess I could, by definition, and I would be rejecting a scientific theory. Could you be wrong? What's the consequence of that?

One doesn't need to personally run experiments to reproduce science in order for the reproducibility of science to be effective at explaining the world. The fact that one can reproduce and observe is itself evidence. The great thing about the natural world is that we aren't required have to have faith in it, it exists as it is and if we want, we can pick it up and examine it. People don't have "faith" in science because science doesn't require it.

Unlike the natural world, the supernatural cannot be observed nor reproduced so it necessarily requires faith in order to function.

In more concrete terms: I don't know how my microwave oven works. I've never built one and don't have a degree in microwave oven technology. But I still don't need to have faith that it works--I can observe it working and if I wanted to, I could take it apart and observe its subcomponents working. I don't do this, but just the fact that I could means that I don't have to blindly believe in it or conjure up explanations about how it works.

>>I don't know about your education or professional background, but from my side as a software engineer I very well understand that you can pile up evidence that will point you in a certain direction, and afterwards you might get that small 0.1% that will turn things completely around.

you can still be justified in a belief if the prevailing evidence rises to the claim. We can be wrong about anything, and certainly in the mid 1800's people probably thought they knew how physics worked pretty well. They were wrong, of course, However, until evidence was produced that discounted their existing evidence, they were justified in that belief, and, it mostly worked for all intents and purposes for the tests they proposed/attempted, even tho quantum physics says something quite surprisingly different.

>> I would not be able to switch my faith to something else just because.

i don't doubt you. However, 9 billion people can use the process of faith to believe things, including things you think are horrendous. How do you discount their beliefs, while being confident in yours, if all you have is faith to discern the difference? If you are discerning a difference, that difference is coming from somewhere else, likely evidence and rationality. So the process of faith, itself, is not trustworthy, as i'm guessing you feel that at least half the planet is using faith and coming to the wrong conclusions.

A few friends shared with me some of the textbooks that their extremely religious sister uses to homeschool her children. They were hilarious! Extremely inaccurate and full of indoctrination garbage. Then we all realized that this is what these kids’ “education” amounts to… not as funny anymore. Maybe their only textbook isn’t the Bible, but that doesn’t mean it’s any good.

After her eldest child was bordering on middle school age and still completely illiterate, she wound up sending the lot back to public schools. Thank god, but I still feel awful for those kids.

(Mandatory “not all homeschoolers” of course.)

Much more important to worry about how well the kids understand math, and secondarily, physics (aka applied math!) and/or similarly math-using subjects (accounting, baking, chemistry, economics, programming, etc. etc. etc.) Those subjects are genuinely hard to master, and everyone should understand the basics because they're useful for so many careers.

As you say, learning the basics of evolution is something that can be done on your own in a weekend reading wikipedia. Similarly, you can learn the mainstream scientific explanations of how the universe was created from watching a few youtube videos. That's basically how I learned that stuff as an (atheist) homeschooled kid.

School seems to fail to teach the philosophy of science well anyway - skepticism, evidence, double-blind testing, etc. So I don't think evangelical homeschoolers are missing that much.

Science has basically no idea about how the universe started, and it’s worrying how many people think it does.

The good thing about science, tho, is it's open to learning what the answers are, rather than presuming them.

> I'm sure with the internet they are already widely exposed to what science has to say about e.g. the creation of the universe (which, honestly, how many high school students could walk you through?).

The current internet makes it very easy to self-select (intentionally or not) a bubble, and then never see anything outside of it (or only see one-sided takes you agree with about the “debate”). Given the algorithms major platforms use, I suspect it would be relatively easy to create a bubble in which evolution is never treated as real, and where dinosaur bones were planted to fool people.

> public school gets in the way of their indoctrination

Public schools themselves indoctrinate children--just with a different set of values than many parents have. The people who built the US system of widespread compulsory public schooling in the US were quite explicit about that being one of the primary purposes of the system. (So were the people who built the Prussian system that was referenced elsewhere in the thread.)

Assumptions about homeschooling are just a socially acceptable form of stereotyping. I was homeschooled and I'm a computational evolutionary biologist with a Ph.D from a reasonably well known state university.

Yale flew me out to interview for a biology graduate program. I had the credentials and test scores to be considered, but was turned down, quite possibly because of those stereotypes (based on the questions I got in the interview process).

Right. I've seen #1 in Silicon Valley. One homeschooled girl made it into Harvard. (Unfortunately, she died there in a horse accident.)

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