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Comment by Cushman | Hacker News Reader

The way I've understood it, Khan isn't trying to disrupt the idea of teachers or schools per se, only alter it.

Basically, the traditional schooling model consists of "lectures" in class, where the teacher presents you with information for an hour, and homework, where you work on problems relating to that content alone in your own time.

Khan says, that's cocked up-- we should let students consume the raw informational content on their own time, where they can pause, rewind, and go over it as many times as they need to in order to understand it without disrupting anyone else, and then do "homework" in the classroom, where there's a focused environment that encourages exploration and somebody who can help each student with their individual difficulties.

Which has always struck me as a pretty straightforward, good-common-sense approach to at least try. Why is this concept so opaque to so many people?

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That approach (students working at their own pace) isn't very novel when you consider the fact that home-schooling has been around for a while.

Except that the notion of homeschooling is hugely co-opted by cultists who brainwash their kids. It's hard to get a serious dialogue on homeschooling going when most people equate it to a stand-in for Bible study and avoiding science education.

I've heard this said often enough, but most of the homeschoolers I actually know or know of indirectly are pretty lefty or libertarian. Most Christian extremists go to little private schools which are scattered all over the place.

There is actual data to look at here: http://nces.ed.gov/pubs2009/2009030.pdf

Desire to provide religious or moral instruction is at the TOP of the list of reasons people homeschool.

...among those who answered the survey.

This is a survey by the NHES, a government organization - do you think there is some reason for selection bias?

Here is the survey's remark on their estimation methodology:

"When applied to survey data, weights allow for the generation of national estimates from a sample of respondents. They also adjust for characteristics of the survey design, nonresponse, and noncoverage. However, biases may exist in the data if weighting procedures have not adequately adjusted for these issues. A large-scale bias study was conducted in conjunction with the 2007 data collection. Readers interested in the findings of the bias study, as well as detailed information on NHES survey methods, weighting, and response rates, can refer to the Data File User’s Manuals published online at http://nces.ed.gov/nhes ."

I think that the fact that the survey was conducted by a government organization and that the targets of the survey were families who had decided not to participate in government-run education, for one reason or another, makes a certain selection bias seem likely.

I'd expect a measure of homeschooling families to want nothing to do with the federal department of education.

I was homeschooled in 7th and 8th grade. It was totally because my parents thought I wasn't getting a good enough education. I still had hebrew school on sunday(jewish), but religion never entered my curriculum at home. I had a much greater focus on science & tech. (I had a programming "class" taught by my dad where I programmed micro-controllers)

edit: (actually... It wasn't a heavier focus on science & tech... it was just more intense in general... I had a hefty literature portion (I read many Dickens books...) and some sweet art history books)

I've no idea to what extent homeschooling has been co-opted by 'cultists', but I think it's a fair statement to say that families who engage in the practice do so out of some mistrust of the prevailing institutional model of education for one reason or another, and that it may be relatively likely that, for the same reasons, they're unwilling to allow their children's education to be the subject of some public 'dialogue'.

And unless I'm mistaken, home-schooled children tend to consistently outperform their public-schooled peers in testing, yes?

I'm sure if you had that kind of student-teacher ratio in normal schools students would perform better anyway.

A big part of a child's success in school has to do with parental involvement. Home schooled children, almost by definition, have highly involved parents. It would be interesting to compare home schooled children with regular children whose parents are actively involved in their education to see how that matched up.

Traditional schools are built on an industrial batch model where the goal is to get a certain percentage of the class to basic competency. So students are grouped in classes, taught for a semester, graded, and then moved on.

The Khan and homeschool model, in contrast is the mastery model. Students are individually taught at their own pace. They are not graded and pushed on. Instead they keep learning a topic until they know it. In traditional classroom education, the learning is variable while the time to learn is constant. Khan makes the learning constant and varies the time. Some students will learn faster than others, but all students learn to a high standard.

Khan is not just delivering a better classroom. He is offering a wholly different model of education.

To over-generalize: one-on-one teaching results in results that are about 2 standard deviations better than normal. Home schooling results are about 1 standard deviation better than normal.

This does not sound like an argument against home schooling. If it sounds unfair, that's kind of the point.

My issue with home schooling is the lack of variety and specialization. With only one teacher, the child just isn't going to be exposed to as many viewpoints as they would in a traditional school setting.

Homeschooling and un-schooling are actually quite varied. Un-schooling, specifically, is usually very specialized. Take Erik Demaine, for instance. He is the youngest professor in MIT's history - he was un-schooled until he entered college at 12. He specialized in mathematics because he loved it.

Homeschooling is still regulated by the state. Students must still pass certain tests, and often homeschoolers have a community of parents and children who get together to learn with each other at educational events geared specifically to their education. Both models have evolved, though they still have some cons. So, too, do public and private schools. Personally, I'd like to see us picking the best parts of various educational systems and putting them together.

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