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Comment by biomcgary | Hacker News Reader

Did you notice that the article highlights the rise of homeschooling co-ops? This is intentional on the part of the homeschooling movement. It improves both socialization and educational opportunities (e.g., shared lab equipment).

Rather than pearl clutching about individual anecdotes or doubling down on government control, I think states should provide direct funding to homeschool co-ops in addition to direct funding to families. That money and its positive effects on socialization and educational development will only work if governments keep their noses out of the details (i.e., parallels arguments for UBI).

My son is autistic and non-verbal. The local public school program that he would be in is overwhelmed. We hire a speech language pathologist to tutor him 3-4 hours a day in our home. That is only possible because of Arizona's support for homeschooling families. Homeschooling is a great outlet when standardization fails.

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I was in a home-school coop about 25 years ago. We attended it a few times, until we stopped going. I was just a kid so I have no idea why we stopped. I remember it didn't help. I didn't know how to do any of the homework they assigned so I never did any (a practice that carried into high school). Since I never had tests or grades of any sort it didn't really matter.

Thanks for the additional details about your experience (and I'm sorry about them). Statistically, I'm slightly surprised that you were in a co-op that long ago. I was home-schooled a few years earlier and the notion of a co-op was just starting to be discussed.

There is a long tradition in this sort of thing in anarchist (and related) education. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-managed_social_center#Fre...

It's maybe not 100% what you're thinking of, but it's reasonably close.

> Since I never had tests or grades of any sort it didn't really matter.

I was homeschooled to grade 3, and just because my parents didn't give me tests or grades, it absolutely mattered.

I had to correctly solve, both verbally and in writing, enough questions at the end of the current chapter of the textbook, to a standard that satisfied them. For every subject of study. Every single day.

> just because my parents didn't give me tests or grades

> I had to correctly solve ... to a standard that satisfied them

In other words, you had tests and grades

A test is, by most people's general understanding, is a closed-book, timed, evaluation of competency.

A grade is a permanent record of a snapshot-in-time evaluation of your understanding of a material.

"Read the chapter, solve the problems in it, we'll go over your work later" is neither a test, nor a grade.

Historically oral exams were commonly used to test a student's proficiency, but they fell out of favor as the educational system scaled up.

I don't agree about the funding. UBI is a great idea because the conditions are clear: you have to be a person to get this money.

Government funded homeschool co-ops or government funded homeschool families... Not so much.

As someone who pays taxes under the expectation that the government will do its best to use the money to provide a consistent education for all, I have a limited set of options when it comes to influencing how it gets spent. There is opportunity to improve that situation, certainly, but it's not corrupt. We pay in together and we vote for people who will spend that money on our collective behalf.

I don't have kids, so presumably I won't have the option to redirect that money towards Newton and away from Chaucer (or you know, whatever politically motivated alteration I come up with). People who do have kids shouldn't get different options than I do w.r.t. how the money is spent.

If somebody wants to influence the curriculum that gets funded with tax dollars, they should have the same power to do so as all of the other taxpayers. It should not be coupled to their educational choices for their own kids.

So, in your view of UBI "you have to be a person to get this money" would extend to children? If so, that would be a great way to fund homeschooling.

I find it hard to imagine a path to a working UBI system which does not first provide more basic things like healthcare are education. Arbitrary spending money isn't exactly foundational in the hierarchy of needs. But if somebody manages to find such a path, sure, why not give UBI to children.

Expecting those children to then spend it on education seems like a stretch, but we're already playing what-if here, so why not?

But unless you have that plan in your back pocket, we're still in a world where scarcity is relevant. If some people want to repurpose the commons in support of their own non-common agendas, then it's up to the rest of us to oppose that.

Isn't the entire argument for UBI that arbitrary spending money is exactly the best way to provide for people's individual needs? Like a poor person might be healthy and not really need healthcare, but they do need somewhere safe to live.

And you'd give the money to the children's guardians, who can make those decisions on the children's behalf. Maybe they hire a tutor. Maybe they send their kids to a school. Maybe they use the money to offset a stay at home parent.

I don't think UBI makes sense for a variety of reasons, but that's the gist of it, no?

> Isn't the entire argument for UBI that arbitrary spending money is exactly the best way to provide for people's individual needs?

No. That's an argument used by the subset of UBI supporters who believe that UBI should displace all other social support including non-means-tested aid, but that's not the general case of UBI advocates (who generally advocate that UBI should displace means-tested benefits, but there's no general position on universal/unconditional non-cash programs alongside UBI.)

Support for universal (public single-payer or otherwise) health coverage of some kind among UBI supporters is pretty common, for instance.

The more general reason for UBI is the belief that multiple means-testing bureaucracies are duplicative of each other and thr tax system, and prone to adverse incentives due to too-quick clawback both in where it cuts in and in the ratio of aggregated benefit reductions for each increment of additional income.

@dragonwriter has it right as far as the pro-UBI position being a varied one. I recognize that mine is nonstandard.

In general, I prefer:

1. a functioning government

2. a UBI-enabled market

3. a malfunctioning government

It seems to me that the least violent way to kill off a government and bootstrap a new one in its place is to work towards a position where you can safely turn your back on the currency that the incumbent is minting. I view UBI a tool to make such a step more palatable. A safety net for transition times.

It still has to be backed by something, and I think the most likely candidate for that something is demonstrated success in other areas of DIY-government. If people can look around and see that the problems are getting solved, then maybe they'll have enough faith in a UBI system designed to let them safely quit the old ways and participate in building something new. This credibility would come from solving things like education and healthcare, which is why I say I have a hard time imagining a UBI system getting up and running in a community that does not have a grasp of those more immediate problems.

Without that initial success as a credibility-builder, the UBI-paved road to a functioning government will be indistinguishable from a ponzi scheme: here's some pretend thing for you to value.

If people truly have no faith in the existing government's ability to do government things, then their DIY efforts should be gathering steam to sideline that government, not angling for a slice of the tax bill from the very government that they've lost control of. If they get that slice they'll have become the very sort of corruption that they're objecting to.

If that's not an amount of work they're ready to stomach, then maybe they should rethink their disavowal of the existing channels in the first place and instead go participate in them.

> Rather than pearl clutching about individual anecdotes

> We hire a speech language pathologist to tutor him 3-4 hours a day in our home.

You have a good point. GP’s experience with home schooling was an anecdote whereas your experience with home schooling is not

> The local public school program that he would be in is overwhelmed.

Pay more taxes. Solve the problem for all people who run into it, not just the ones who can afford it.

Do you see any upper limit for how much you are willing to pay per student to have them educated in society?

The upper limit would be the expected total contribution to society that person would create in their lifetime.

We already pay more per student than literally any other socialist country. More so in the "bad schools". Money isn't the problem, it's "da culture".

What do you mean by “da culture”

Every time this line of thought comes up, I wonder where these people think the money is going. Perhaps to teacher salaries in very high cost-of-living areas? Perhaps to providing basic services to students (like breakfast and basic therapy) that their parents can't because, as a society, we've deemed the latter unworthy of a decent income, for whatever reason? Perhaps to maintaining failing infrastructure that was purposely neglected for decades?

I feel like they think that the money is given to the kids directly, who waste it on weed and the hippity hop albums or whatever. Call it what it is: racism and classism destroys their critical thinking capacity.

nah, its the administrative state where all the money is going. ie not to the kids or the teachers. same thing for college (private or public). professors salaries didnt go up. i wouldnt mind paying teachers more directly its just that the money gets sucked up before it touches them.

I've never seen proof of this, nor why it's any different for wealthy school districts where cost-per-student is nominally lower (parental investment notwithstanding).

But that's beside the point, because the notion is always brought up as a way to say that the students themselves are a lost cause.

anti-intellectualism and faux-intellectualism.

In 2019 the US was at 38% above average with four other countries above us: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

I think our educational outcomes are not in line with our spending because a part of our political apparatus is simultaneously trying to sabotage the program.

Isn't that just a private school where the parents are the teachers?

It depends on the co-op. Some meet every day, in which case yes it's effectively a private school. My kids used to attend a co-op that met once a week for hands-on, group learning activities. The rest of the time, they were doing their course work at home.

A homeschooling co-op is literally us just reinventing the wheel. A large enough co-op becomes a school system and a school system eventually adopts a standard curriculum.

People who do co-ops might not object to public schooling in principle but to the particular implementation that their locality has adopted. If co-ops becomes public schools with better management, all the better.

And if they become public schools with worse management and driven by crazy people.. what then?

Straw man, slippery slope, false dilemma, causal fallacy.. do they teach rhetoric and Aristotelian logic in public schools?

Parent post does not contain those fallacies.

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