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Comment by ARandomerDude | Hacker News Reader

Meanwhile, homeschooling my kids is going exactly the way I want. We have great curriculum, the kids work hard and we take our recess together. WFH + homeschool is amazing if your situation allows.

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Some parents may do homeschooling well, but most don't. Most use homeschooling as a way to isolate their kids from outside world views and prevent them from questioning what the parents believe. It's a way to indoctrinate kids into a specific viewpoint. Kids should be exposed to many different cultures and viewpoints so that they have a chance to develop their own viewpoints, improve critical thinking skills, and become independent thinkers.

The stats I've seen show that homeschooled students do substantially better on tests than their public school counterparts. I'm open to the possibility that those stats are wrong but you should at least address that if you're going to take the "homeschooling produces only indoctrination" line.

If most homeschoolers are flat-earthers teaching their children that fossils aren't real and are STILL crushing public schools on science, math and reading tests– then that is an embarrassing indictment of public schools.

Being able to pass a standardized test on a basic subject isn't the same thing as being able to think critically.

> being able to think critically.

That was strongly discouraged long ago when I was in school. Completely unheard of when my daughter was in school. Sounds like you're grasping at straws here; standardized test scores are pretty terrible but you're suggesting kids are able to think more critically now that they can't do arithmetic?

Arithmetic doesn't require any sort of critical thinking at all, so the point is moot. Advanced maths do, but those aren't usually taught in K-12; however, not getting those critical thinking skills young can make it more difficult in college to apply what you've learned to more complex problems. I'm speaking here as someone with a math degree who tutored college level mathematics for 3 years.

As to the other point, you're right that many teachers don't encourage critical thinking or individualism. That's a fault of those teachers, and of our society that tends to frown on questioning authority.

All that said, kids who only socialize with their own family and maybe their neighbors don't develop the skills that come with having their views challenged and needing to defend them.

>The stats I've seen show that homeschooled students do substantially better on tests than their public school counterparts.

Do those stats account for the fact that parents who choose to homeschool tend to care way more about their children compared to people who send their kids to public school?

If you take students of equivalent socioeconomic status, then no the homeschooled doesn't perform better on average. They tend to do better on social subjects and worse at STEM subjects, but on average the results are the same.

Shows that STEM education in school is the most important part of school since the rest you can learn better at home, so homeschooling is significantly worse at the most important part that the student wont just learn as an adult on their own later.

> If you take students of equivalent socioeconomic status, then no the homeschooled doesn't perform better on average.

Source? Documentation? Evidence?

There is plenty, just google and you find a lot. Why is this so hard to believe, it is fairly obvious that the moms that teach will teach better at subjects they like and worse at subjects they hate, and most moms hate math.

Here is an article writing by a homeschooling association where they noted this: https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/the-homeschool-math-gap...

Here is a result of home schooled kids being behind on science, they don't major in science in college nearly as much, the difference is a staggering 33% majoring in STEM for non homeschooled and just 13% for homeschooled: https://www.educacaodomiciliar.fe.unicamp.br/sites/www.educa...

So if you wish for your kids to have the best possible career potential don't homeschool, that greatly lowers their chances at a good STEM career.

You would've been right like 15 years ago, but it's changed a lot since then. I live in a place with a pretty sizeable homeschooling community. I didn't come here for that, coincidentally I want to do that for my children as well, it just worked out. Most of the homeschooled young people around here are better mannered, more decent, cleaner, less prone to behavioral problems, and have a larger knowledge base. The days when homeschooling == creationism are coming to an end. There's still a bit of that, but not asuch as you'd expect.

You're right that kids have to be exposed to different people and they need to learn critical thinking and to think for themselves. School does not teach them that, school teaches them that when the drug dog comes into the classroom they have no choice but to comply. School teaches them that they need go go along with social expectations unless they want to get bullied or shunned. School teaches them that it's cool to fight in the bathroom and put the video on TikTok. People teaching their own kids, well that depends on the parents. I can give my kids way better critical thinking skills than school can. Someone that thinks the world is 6000 years old maybe can't, but it has always been that way, we were just pretending it could be different, and what is staring us in the face right now is the reality that that just isn't true. Always and forever, kids will learn to the degree that their parents care about their learning, no number of behemoth institutions will change that.

I'm guessing this depends on the locality and the circles you run in. The homeschooling I know had solid curriculums, where involved in other social activities, and were more likely to think outside the box. Indoctrination happens at public schools too, so it's a situation by situation thing.

I totally agree. Whenever these homeschool threads start up, it's always HNers singing the praises of homeschooling because their exposure to it is always in the context of engaged parents wanting a higher quality education for them: the happy path case where homeschooling probably works well.

You're not going to hear a lot of HNers talk about the other side of homeschooling, which is when it's done for reasons of religious separatism (and lately, for political separatism reasons). You're not going to see those cases on HN because they are not going to be success stories.

I don't know which group is bigger, but they're different sides of the same "homeschooling" coin, and they both need to be talked about when you advocate for homeschooling.

Homeschooling is rare. The 2 homeschooled children I know we're absolutely brilliant, incredibly successful adults, and also very religious. Outside of a small area of biology, Creationism vs Evolution just isn't important to lifelong success or eusocial behaviour.

Unsurprising, I don't know any religious separatists who live on their family compound locked away from the larger world.

I'm not sure exactly what degree you mean by separatism. Most of the examples I know of did have a religious component as a factor, but they weren't cults or extremists. They still taught science, technology, etc and associated with people of different backgrounds.

I'm sure there are bad homeschools, just as there are bad public schools.

Public school does not teach kids to be independent thinkers.

How so? How is having your parents as the source of truth for all things making people think more independently?

How do you socialize your kids? Imo the most important part of elementary school is giving kids the space to work out their differences with each other. Just doing play dates or whatever doesnt really match the experience you get at school. There has to be some amount of non supervised interaction between kids who would rather not interact.

Yes, it's amazing what doubling or tripling funding can do for quality of education. I'm shocked that public schools have tried this obvious solution.

If you think that homeschoolers pay double or triple what school districts pay per pupil, you are very much unaware of the reality of homeschooling.

You'd probably have admins and technology suck up most of the funding. At least in the US, funding and outcomes don't have that much of a correlation. DC area schools have among the highest levels of funding per student and the worst outcomes as well.

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