Homeschooling hits record numbers
reason.com
reason.com
I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
Popularity is not an exclusively American concept. Just as public school broadened your horizons, so will traveling (or living) abroad.
Respectfully, A grateful dad who was homeschooled and who will homeschool.
P.S. Of course I will do some things differently than my parents, but it was an amazing gift and I had an extremely vibrant and stimulating time, including with peers (and adults!) outside of my parents' network who pushed me, challenged me, thought very differently than me, etc.
How do you do that? Seems like it would be impossible to replicate the experience of learning to navigate daily social interactions in a mixed group of people, especially when it comes to dealing with conflict.
I was homeschooled and have homeschooled my three kids. Never has that meant "only at home and only with my family". My kids have been in co-op classes, taken classes from Art or Technical instruction centers (piano lessons, voice classes, programming, robotics), enrolled in community classes via private institutions and the local JC (cooking classes, performing arts) and been enrolled in independent study charter public schools which have some in-person classes. And in high school they start taking in-person JC courses.
There is lots of regular exposure to a variety of other people in all of that!
What makes you think school is a good environment for that? Kids can be very cruel to each other with often the most societally maladapted dominating for reasons that have no bearing in real life.
Maybe it's:
- the terrible educational state of the school system?
- the fact that device and social media addiction is a prevalent and growing problem that they don't want their kids brains rotted by?
- they want to provide their kids an education based on experiential and project based learning rather than filling out worksheets?
- they don't want their kids to be forced to wait for the slowest / least interested kids in class to catch up before moving on to more challenging material?I'd be willing to bet that we'll hear some stories about how they outsourced the effort to AI
If there is a big uptake, it's likely due to the ever present threat of school shootings coupled with all the things you said above. I have to teach my kid a lot outside of school and they go to what is considered a good one. The only reason I send them is my spouse and I work and my kid needs to learn social skills. If I won the lottery, I'd homeschool them myself and do it for a few other families as well so that my kid can get the social aspect too.
I think this tendency is heavily dependent on where you live. We have great public schools that will track advanced children aggressively if the parents push for it, so the motivations you list are unusual in my area.
Also, we HN commenters typically see the success stories around us at work, not the failure stories. We all know that guy on the QA team who's a genius and credits his success to homeschooling, but we don't know the countless numbers of grown adults who are trapped as housewives who can't get a job because they never learned 5th grade multiplication.
Sometimes you don't have to dig. A ton of moms in my wife's church group permanently pulled their kids out of public school in recent years, and they will openly admit that it's about keeping their kids away from "those" people, where the definition of "those" runs the gamut.
The overwhelming majority of other homeschooling parents they had contact with also held separatist motivations.
There is certainly some level of segregating the children from families who have the means to "dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children" and children from families that don't have those means.
I never said it was surprising or unreasonable, I said it was insightful. Your comment is further digging in on that point.
A lot of the people I know who do homeschool (the extreme majority of families I know) have openly said the reasons why they're choosing to homeschool is because they don't want their kids exposed to the other "cultures" in their area whether that be immigrants, other religions, or LGBT people.
One family I know was thinking about pulling their kids out of public school because the choir was going to sing "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" and was worried this was indoctrinating their child into another religion. Forget the fact the rest of that holiday choir event was filled with Christian holiday tunes and what that means for the non-Christians that have a right to go to the school, that wasn't a concern at all.
Not all families, I agree. I've known a few outliers who actually are exceptional teachers and think they'll do a better job teaching the kids than the local schools (and they're probably right). But they're definitely the outliers around me. Most that I've personally known are not like that, and rely on just giving their kids workbooks with extreme religious bent to figure things out on their own.
Culture is distinct from race. Some cultures advocate for the destruction of others. Some don't.
(as a disclaimer, the daycare has very good teachers/caregivers from what I can tell so I'm sure that's part of it as well)
So many factors have led this to be a major liability for young people now. School is not what it was 20 years ago.
Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day. Some people "homeschooling" I know are groups of parents getting together to educate their children together in small groups of ~5 kids to share the responsibility, and hiring a tutor to fill in the gaps. Monday they go John's house, his mom has a philosophy degree and teaches them. tuesday they go to Janes house, her dad is a Mathematician and teaches them. etc.
Prior knowledge of the subject is just a cherry on top.
My parents taught me a lot of things. Neither had a teaching degree.
At my university, I was taught by professors and grad students, none of whom had a teaching degree.
Distribution seems to follow a bell curve - you’ll usually find the people with exceptional teaching ability harnessing that aptitude in a professional setting.
Pretty much all humans can run. Yes, some have exceptional talent at it, and some can barely walk. But the vast majority can run reasonably well. Exceptional talent at teaching is certainly not required for routine learning.
Besides, you can buy the workbooks for every level of math, and work it through with the critters. There's no special skill needed. I don't recall any teachers of mine at any level who had any apparent special skill at it.
Except for Feynman. I attended one of his lectures. It was amazing! Feynman was at the extreme end of the bell curve, that's for sure.
Professors and grad students may well have done a course on how to lecture. It is obligatory and/or an easy way to pick up credits in many PhD programs. In any event, grad students teaching badly, because the department has allowed the more competent faculty to put their teaching burden on grad students, is a common complaint about US universities.
I have recommended to professionals that they take a public speaking course, but those were not part of any degree program.
You mentioned in another post attending a lecture from Feynman. I think you might be a few decades behind modern academia.
Definitely. And I've seen no evidence there's been any improvement. More like things have gotten worse.
I had the kids doing swimming, rock climbing, and all kinds of traditional PE games.
I worked with "normal" kids most of the time, and I will say the homeschool kids stuck out. They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part. And they were disproportionately ahead of their peers academically--though I think that's probably a selection bias for the parents seeking out homeschool PE classes.
This was in the early 2000s, before Facebook. I'm sure the avenues to connect have only grown with social media.
This is another argument that "by age" is not the best way to find one's academic or social peers.
Some people in 2nd grade should be in high school. Some people in high school should be in 2nd grade. (And, academically, sometimes that's different by subject; some people need to be in 2nd grade math and high-school reading.)
I was a TA/lab-assistant at the community college I was attending. I spent a lot of time talking to and helping out people, universally older than me, who had gotten out of high school and needed to figure out where in a multi-year curriculum of remedial math they should start.
For what it’s worth I’ve even met adults who can’t regulate and control their emotional reactions. They often have a prison background which either caused it or why they ended up in prison.
1. I mostly only cared about school w.r.t learning. For most kids, school is primarily a place to socialize.
2. If it took you two years to achieve the same level as what took someone else ten years (going with the 2nd vs. 10th grade example from a few comments up), I don't think you're going to get an appropriate pacing by just moving into the same class as them...
I'm not missing your point at all. I'm talking generally and you're just stating (the obvious) that curves (spectrum?) exist and that some (~30%?) are outside the middle of the bell. Neat.
Since we agree there is a range of personalities and intelligence, maybe we agree that wide exposure to others (such as classmates) is, generally, a good thing.
That was me.
With your condescending broad-speak.
OTOH, one of my grandmothers spent her education career in a one room school house, teaching all subjects to grades 1-8. With the right social context, it can work very well.
Our peers are more than people our age. They are the people older and younger than us too.
It was a small town, in the early 1900's. Everybody knew everybody, including the kids - who freely roamed the town when not doing chores or such.
I'd agree that it was very good for the kids' social development...but "foster a sense of community", in the present-day context, sounds like an express ticket to expecting far too much from it.
The rise of social media has led to a massive increase in lonelyness and alienation of young people, not the contrary.
I would disagree with this. Those are necessary but not sufficient. It is necessary to have enough knowledge and joy from the subject to convey that to students.
Some of the methods these teachers use are incredibly awkward, bespoke approaches that baffle me for their obtuseness. It's incredibly frustrating to deal with and it has a negative effect on the students.
My approach has always been to try to find the method that makes the most sense to the student, and work with them on that. I don't have any issues adapting my style to the student's needs. I only struggle when the spectre of one of those bad math teachers looms over our shoulders.
Someone would have to be numerically illiterate (with a college degree!) to be unable to do grade school math they've been teaching for multiple years.
Year 1, possible. But eventually it rubs off on even the teacher.
An interesting thing about 3rd grade math - I was taught long division. When implementing the standard C library for the PC, I implemented the same algorithm in assembler, and then again for the floating point divide emulator.
Most people suck at math. Those who don't suck usually have many well-paying jobs available for them. There are lots of schools, so many math teachers are needed.
Put these numbers together, and you realize that there is no way to have math teachers who are actually good at math. The numbers just don't add up.
Outside of the coasts or university towns, there aren't any "mathematicians" with kids just waiting around to form homeschooling groups with you.
The kids in public school are there by default; the homeschooling parents are actively choosing to raise their kids differently, and, from what I've seen, they're more likely to interact with their kids instead of letting them go terminally online or play video games.
The US (especially the vast bulk of suburbia) is incredibly varied in quantity of these.
Some areas have them. Ironically, for all their faults, Florida master planned developments do better than most, and the west has a surfeit of natural land.
Others are an endless sea of kid-unfriendly private businesses and/or income-gated spaces, locked behind access to an automobile.
At some point the US, especially east coast suburban US, forgot that roaming kids need somewhere to roam...
Her and her friends never played outside. Me and my friends and my brother (7 years younger than me) and my other sister’s (4 years younger younger) friends lived outside in the summer.
While perhaps not uncommon, these sound like massively dysfunctional neighborhoods.
Not knocking what sounds like your choice to homeschool, just sharing something that has changed from my youth.
I have such an argument - have you considered the amount of forced social conformity in a public school versus a community of homeschooled people? Humans are weird in a way that 'public school culture' tries to paper over.
Kids are assholes in a way that would get most adults fired or imprisoned.
There are social pressures to conform, but you don’t get called names for wearing off brand shoes the way kids were when I was in grade school.
Children are just really bad at it so it is extremely obvious. The rituals do not disappear when you turn 18. They do not disappear when you turn 98.
Every actual human with lived experience in society knows, that real life is much more diverse than school. In school, there’s at best a few cliques and mostly a single social hierarchy. After school, even during student years, but even more so when entering the workforce, there’s incredible variety of social hierarchies to climb, skills to learn and excel within, and career paths to take.
Zero comparison to school.
That's one hell of a claim to make:
Have you really had work environments where half your co-workers refused to talk to you? For months, if not years?
Have you ever been shoved down to the ground and punched repeatedly?
Have you ever had a co-worker chase you with a knife?
Have you ever had a co-worker set off a bomb to get out of work early?
Have you ever had a co-worker steal your wallet?
I can safely say I saw all of these going to public school, and have never encountered any of that behavior in the office.
I went to a public school as did the vast majority of the world’s population today. Genuinely curious… Are you saddened by what you view as a lack of diversity and creativity in the world and do you blame that on public schools?
Schools have athletic kids and within that, groups interested in different sports. And within each sport, subgroups of kids who become close friends. All of that also applies to kids interested in musical instruments, art, computers, board games and on and on. Some kids are nice, some are assholes, and everything in between. You make it sound like public school systems output an army of clones. No. Your friend group changes over time as you meet others, as your interests/views change, and as other people change. You're constantly immersed amongst all the other groups and you learn to tolerate some, love some, and hate some. All of this learning is tremendously stifled if you’re talking about a kid learning to socialize in a group of 5 instead of 500.
Aside from individualism, there has to be conformity as well. That’s part of learning to socialize and function in the real world for later as an adult. Conforming is also just human nature stemming from wanting to be accepted in a group. We all naturally learned to balance conformity and individualism when we were thrown into the public school system. By home schooling, you’re saying no, I don’t have the confidence that my child can do it on their own, even if 99% of the world has done so.
Incidentally, they're only a little bit older than that, so we shouldn't pretend they're some deeply tested social technology.
At 50 kids, if you were social you definitely had friends (not just acquaintances) from very different socioeconomic backgrounds. At 50 kids, you could play sports on the official team if you wanted to and showed up and didn’t slack off. You knew everyone and there were no cliques, that would have been ridiculous with 50 kids.
I could go on, but those are just a few things (IMO good things) you get in a tiny school that you probably wouldn’t have at 500 kids and surely not at 5000.
I find it strange that you don’t hear of more homeschooling groups pulling together to create something like the 50-kid school.
The co-op I was in 30 years ago was a bit smaller but sounds like it's still going strong (no clue how big it is these days though).
So there definitely are homeschooling co-ops around that size. I do wonder what the average size of a co-op is though
* co-op
* Ballet
* Fencing
* Gymnastics
* Math Circle
* Church / Fellowship
* Neighbors
* Family & Friends
That easily adds up to 50 children their age.
But my thinking isn't really about the numbers of socialization. Public school academics move at a glacial pace. They don't have a sufficient rigor, lack a decent education in mathematics, neglect the classics and philosophy, and have started to neglect the western canon in favor of contemporary literature which is poorly written and offers little value. There are also, even in the best schools, trouble students that disrupt classrooms.
* there is no co-op. Meeting another homeschooler is a whole day affair due to traffic
* ballet and other extracurricular are fine, but always after school hours when traffic is terrible
* math circle is so oversubscribed you have to test to get into it
* neighbors’ kids are locked in school all day and then doing their custom extracurricular. We never see them.
* family & friends, we have none.
Nonetheless we homeschool. We can cover 2 years of math and reading in 6 months.
For example, when I took trigonometry in high school I did none of the homework, showed up to the tests and aced them. That led me to getting a C in that class (kindly the teacher advanced me to pre-calc, but forced me to retake trig as well). That's basically the attitude I had throughout high school and undergrad. I'm positive I could have amounted to more earlier in life (only years later did I return to academia to earn my PhD in CS after tiring of industry).
For some reason people think having an education is only valuable if it is traded for money. For example I think an educated wife and a mom who never earns a single dollar from an employer is incredibly value to her family.
I hope my daughters get a robust liberal arts education and then just get married young and have kids and be homemakers.
I would argue if your kid stays home all day you're not better than a school so why would you bother? I know zero homeschoolers keeping their kids locked up at home
In theory, there is no difference between theory and practice. In practice, there is.
As person who was homeschooled in a large homeschooling community, no, I now believe at a fundamental level that not only is it not possible to adequately difference homeschooled children, it very much defeats the updated-but- always it is not possible to "get good socialization". There are two issues: the gross tonnage of exposure to other people is just not possible in homeschooling, and, there's a fundamental difference between the kinds of socialization.
I believe there is value in being forced into socializing with people you may not like. I did not experience what one might call "involuntary socialization" until my first job out of college. It took me a very long time to learn how to exist comfortably in a world where not everyone would agree with me, like me, see me as an equal, or treat me with respect.
In institutional education environments and in jobs, you don't get a choice who you have around you. You have to learn how to deal with that. Taking the kids to karate class doesn't teach them that because most everyone at karate class wants to be there.
Any voluntary socialization arrangement is--by definition--a self-selection into a group with at least one point of commonality: you are so there for the thing, the activity.
Involuntary socialization arrangements expose you to others where your overlapping demographic is nothing more than just geographic circumstance. Many people don't learn how to deal with that in public schools: it's where antisocial behavior comes from. But *every" homeschooled kid will miss that lesson completely.
Absolutely. I was homeschooled and in my state (Illinois) the laws work out such that homeschool students can enroll in public school classes if the school has space for them. That's how I socialized. So I got at least a modicrum of socialization (especially once I started band) but wasn't dragged down by the mediocre education at our local public schools.
The thing it leaves me wondering is how many kids from elementary through high school a child really keeps in touch with, and if college is currently the place where many students finally get to start to be themselves.
When I was a kid in public school, there was no shortage of assholes and I definitely would have preferred to not have to deal with them. OTOH, I don't doubt that there is also some value in that experience, not to mention interacting with all the other people. Also, we didn't have social media or semi-regular school shootings when I was a kid. So yeah.. to me, it's not at all obvious which set of tradeoffs is preferable nowadays.
It's important to know how and when to advocate for yourself and others, when to escalate through proper channels and when to escalate outside of proper channels, and when to back down and let them be an asshole because they're frankly not worth your time.
In my personal experience, the asshole kids overlapped greatly with the popular kids in a Venn diagram sense. People, in general, did want to be their friends.
And we were (almost) all assholes sometimes, but there's definitely a class of kids who were assholes most of the time.
My point was that kids are disproportionately likely to treat other kids badly, especially when adults aren't around. That kind of situation is common at school, but much less common at home, unless the parents choose to allow it.
Not necessarily those two exact options, but yes. Adults are free to self-segregate. Even in K–12, once the option for tracking into advanced classes is available, everyone's social lives improve.
This is not the W for the government schools that proponents seem to think it is.
People discount school rituals, but they happen a lot. Pop quizzes happen all the time within my career. You don't always get to say, "I'll get back to you" as much as we all wish that was true.
As an athiest, and a bayesian, it's difficult for me to worry about other peoples religious beliefs that don't seem to negatively affect them or me. Especially when there is propaganda taught in the public schools that does warp the students' world views in ways that harms them and me.
I'd be surprised if any such statistics exist. I've seen studies about the reasons parents choose to homeschool, and various outcomes of homeschooled kids versus public school kids, but none about what particular beliefs homeschooled kids have regarding, say, the age of the Earth.
"Descriptive analysis reveals homeschool students possess higher ACT scores, grade point averages (GPAs) and graduation rates when compared to traditionally-educated students."[2]
[1]https://www.educacaodomiciliar.fe.unicamp.br/sites/www.educa...
Yes, homeschooled kids do better than the average. The average is also dragged down by the country deciding that if your parents are poor you should starve.
This sentence caused a record needle scratch sound in my head.
I'm afraid to ask what you mean, and it seems like you might be afraid to say, because it's a bit bizarre to drop that line with no explanation.
Whatever it is, public schools are an absolute failure. But that could be attributed to the immigration in the US over the last half decade. North Carolina lost like 20% of their student base following mass ICE raids.
Many teachers around me have mentioned how the portion of non-English speakers has dramatically increased and is causing significant degradation to their effectiveness in the classroom and the outcomes.
Somehow I don't think you and alphazard are talking about the same things.
Ooh, as I was typing I thought of a better example - remember the four food groups? eight to twelve servings of grains per day? Less obviously propaganda, though I'd argue the farm lobbies pushing it count. But harms in terms of its link to obesity and heart disease are pretty damn stark.
Given that school children are a huge captive audience of future consumers/voters/employees it would be incredibly strange if the curriculum wasn't the target of all kinds of special interest groups that aren't perfectly aligned with public interest.
LOL this cannot be a serious reason for homeschooling. You're trolling me, right? Please tell me you're trolling me.
I didn't and don't want to have this conversation. Technically, I didn't even ask alphazard what they meant, and in any case, I didn't ask anyone else what alphazard meant, as if someone else could magically interpret alphazard's cryptic remark any better than I could, which they can't, as proved by the multiple different unsolicited answers I received.
I was perhaps morbidly curious what the atheist was objecting to in public schools when they nonetheless seemed perfectly fine with conservative religious homeschooling.
1. Calories
2. Carcinogens
3. Caffeine
4. Cholesterol
If I had to guess, its maybe something about the demise of church life that has gotten religious parents to just pull back entirely. It wasn't that uncommon for public schools to make nods toward Christian ideals/lifestyles before like the 90s, but now that stuff just doesn't happen anymore.
Schools should absolutely teach Christian mythology and history, and Greek mythology and history, and Egyptian mythology and history, alongside many other subjects. But to the extent that they used to make "nods" towards "this is the cultural default we defer to", nope.
Which is funny since I (a Black guy) went to a mostly White Christian school in the 80s where they sung “Jesus loves the little children - red and yellow black and white they are all precious in his site”.
Yeah that definitely seems against the First Amendment (and Texas' equivalent in their Bill of Rights). I feel like the world makes more sense if you read the First Amendment as a treaty between the Christian sects that were executing one another in the colonies for heresy, rather than y'know what it literally says.
> when teachers put up a poster about “everyone is welcomed here” showing kids of different colors it’s “too woke”.
Keep gang signs out of the classroom. In places where university rivalries are high, teachers are also asked to keep ensignia off their doors. It's the same here. "Everyone is welcomed here" (without a cross) is now a callsign for "registered Democrat". Imagine if a teacher put a big "don't trample on me" sign with a snake... I feel like that would send a message other than, "be respectful in class."
> "Everyone is welcome here" is now a callsign for "registered Democrat".
Maybe it's suspicious that this phrase is able to distinguish Republicans from Democrats, but the point isn't the virtue of the parties, it's that it's one of the most common phrases people choose to use to distinguish themselves as Democrats. If you don't want one teacher walking around with a MAGA hat, but don't have the political power to just ban them from schools, you have to make a treaty like, "we'll ban rainbow capes and MAGA hats."
This is the exact poster - even more innocuous than I thought
https://www.idahoednews.org/wp-content/uploads/2025/03/Every...
It was originally a stand against hate
https://www.kare11.com/article/news/the-story-behind-the-all...
Do I need to emphasize that this was the sentiment that was repeated when I was in a Christian conservative mostly White private school in the 80s?
If your goal is different, maybe to just socially stigmatize people opposed to worlds you prefer, well I guess you're doing fine with that, but you do see how that's problematic at creating consensus, right? And how, the sane reaction is for me to faux-politely call you a shill or a clown. I don't think this is actually your goal (which is why I deleted my previous reply, it was unnecessarily mean unless this is your goal), I just don't think you've really built up your debate toolbox yet.
If we ban any symbol that might be used as politics we should ban the American flag in classrooms since that now has become a symbol of the MAGA movement. Defending banning a poster showing hands of people of different colors is just as non sensical - there were no pride colors on the poster, no pro immigration signaling nothing.
I bet you a paycheck they would have banned a multi racial group picture of kids just playing together because it was “too woke”.
In fact, there is a long history of states being triggered showing people of multiple races actually getting along
https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2023/02/05/sesame-str...
It’s not about political signaling - it’s straight out racism
Do you see how silly you sound? Look, here's my issue with you: I've told you my reasons to oppose MAGA hats and welcome posters in the classroom. You refuse to believe those are my reasons. You're calling me a liar, saying I must secretly be withholding some racist motivated reasoning. I get that there are America haters who want to ban MAGA hats, and racists who want to ban these posters. But you're talking to me, not them. If you can only refute people who collectively share two brain cells, then you're probably just wrong on your position.
MAGA is not speaking to “American greatness”. It’s whining that America isn’t great any more because of among others gays and skinny jeans wearing west coast elite - ie making it great “again”
The idea of America not already being “great” was something that no Democrat could have said. We have been drinking the Kool Aid of American exceptionalism for a century.
If you listen to almost anyone in the MAGA camp, it meant “those evil minorities like the secret Muslim trying to bring Sharia law and those Hatians eating pets took over America and now it’s a crime ridden country infested by immigrants”
1. That showing different colored hands raised with a heart in it is “too political” - again they were not holding hands, no Pride symbols (that you brought up)
2. That MAGA isn’t political?
I’m not trying to convince you of anything. I’m saying that a certain contingent of conservatives have always been triggered about the thought that the US is not just White people and even more triggered with the thought of people of various races getting along. It’s especially prevalent in a post MAGA takeover of the Republican Party.
That’s like trying to convince people that a man didn’t rise from the dead after three days and the only way that he will come back to take them to heaven is if the government protects Isreal - yea that is what evangelicals think.
Hell I had a house built in an infamous “sundown town” (where the outskirts were still conservative but more traditional conservative)
Yeah this one:
https://youtu.be/WErjPmFulQ0?si=BpsfzQXo0HP2AXLB
And completely ignored the looks I got every time I walked out of my house.
Now let me also say that preparing the curriculum, ordering the materials etc. takes a lot of effort and discipline. It's definitely almost a full time job and I'm blessed with an amazing wife that's gifted in all that but the reward is more than worth it. Also, if you're thinking about it, many states have home school support programs and put you in touch with other home schoolers in the area.
And now instead of learning science in a lab and socializing, they are forced to maintain your farm?
What an good job you are doing!
" The principles taught in schools just did not align anymore with what was common sense when I was in school and what I believe in."
Please explain in more detail what you mean by this. You old do you think the earth is? In my experience most home schoolers are young earth creationists.
The older I get, the more I think that helping your kids avoid interactions with others who aren't with the program is for the best. Ideally your children's friends should be people that you think are good kids, kids that you would go to bat for. Then when you are teaching your kids to compromise and play nice and forgive, you can legitimately feel good about it. I think my default assumption about a negative interaction with a public school random would be that they are basically a wild animal to be avoided.
I wouldn't fault someone for wanting to situate their kids among peers and adults that help them grow at a similar level rather than hinder it, but I think it's also best to be a guiding hand rather than a applicant tracking system when it comes to the non-academic side
If you think homeschooling makes kids grow up to be prejudiced, you should just say that, instead of insinuating it.
Absolutely not what I was insinuating.
I was suggesting that explicit isolation from potential peers that come from different levels of wealth or backgrounds based on pre-existing prejudice has the potential to reinforce those prejudices. I'd wager this would overwhelmingly come from private schools and suburbs, not homeschooling, but it's more of a matter of where the desire to control the exposure comes from if that's part of the reason.
So no, I was making no direct association between homeschooling and prejudice.
Learning activities with other homeschooled kids is ok but not enough. A tight-knit neighborhood of friends is huge, but not enough. You need to develop a thick skin and a sense of self-assurance.
I have no counterfactual of course, but I think much of the social anxiety I’ve had to unlearn as a young adult came from homeschooling. And I had great circumstances
The worst part was being ostracized. The school had anti-bullying policies, but they don’t force anyone to be your friend.
Strangely, I was elected to lots of student government office, and held leadership in lots of clubs.
Maybe my memory is just off, but I don’t think so.
I think I was really good connecting with the grownups who ran the school, so they made sure I got leadership positions.
I was always much better at being the kid in class the teacher liked - same with principals, etc.
Probably one of the reasons the other kids didn’t like me - but that went over my head.
I think it’s really easy to overestimate how important the socialization in public schools is. We go to so many movies where the plot is based on the dynamics of public high school, we assume it’s normal.
We see so much of terrible stuff downplaid like it doesn’t matter. Just rewatched Back to the Future which laughingly brushes off every kind of violence as long as it’s done at the prom.
For the majority of my adult life I’ve been playing catchup. Even now, barreling towards 40, there’s aspects of social capabilities where I come up quite short relative to my peers.
If I’m ever to be a parent, I won’t homeschool. Depending the circumstances I might not send my kids to public school, but their schooling situation will at minimum involve social exposure comparable to that of public school.
I identify with your post as a rural kid who mostly didn't socialize with classmates after school. I went to public school, and I'm 40 now. I think the human experience is that you are inevitably going to encounter social situations where you feel outmatched or simply don't belong. I do agree with making sure your kids experience public school, but I think that's about the bare minimum of what you can offer your kids.
(I unlearned it too, but it took quite a while.)
Unfortunately this encourages people to have a blind eye regarding bullying.
I would be much more happy if more people intervened against bullies and liars. Maybe we'd have better people in politics today if 40 years ago schools punished bullies and liars and sent them to have their behavioral problems addressed.
> I think the important thing about the real world is not that it's populated by adults, but that it's very large, and the things you do have real effects. That's what school, prison, and ladies-who-lunch all lack. The inhabitants of all those worlds are trapped in little bubbles where nothing they do can have more than a local effect. Naturally these societies degenerate into savagery. They have no function for their form to follow.
> When the things you do have real effects, it's no longer enough just to be pleasing. It starts to be important to get the right answers, and that's where nerds show to advantage.
> ...If I could go back and give my thirteen year old self some advice, the main thing I'd tell him would be to stick his head up and look around. I didn't really grasp it at the time, but the whole world we lived in was as fake as a Twinkie...Life in this twisted world is stressful for the kids. And not just for the nerds. Like any war, it's damaging even to the winners.
A big part of that for me was fixing my own social anxiety. But even before I managed that, I found groups that didn't feel that way. Later I worked someplace for a while that was kind of a throwback, but then I changed jobs and it was fine.
My wife didn't end up taking the SAT or ACT because she attended a relatively strong local university with a full-ride scholarship and a test-optional policy. The MCAT exam initially denied her request for accommodations because she was only diagnosed with a learning disability in college. We successfully appealed by writing an essay arguing that my wife wasn't diagnosed with a learning disability in K-12 because her schools sucked (we submitted documentation that proved that her schools tested among the worst in the state, her elementary school was literally the worst in the entire state, when she was a student), and her teachers had much bigger concerns than why the smart, studious kid takes a long time to complete exams.
If the wife had gone to the K-12 school system that I attended, her learning disability would have been addressed in elementary school, and she would have been spared much angst. I was a very poor reader in early elementary school, and received almost daily one-on-one attention at my school from instructional aides and volunteers (mostly highly educated parents and grandparents) for years. I received a perfect score on the ACT reading section in high school.
(just kidding)
I agree that school assignment is highly variable. I'm glad your wife managed to get her appeal approved. It's unfortunate she even had to go through that process to begin with.
That's because the attendance rate is the driver of state funds to the schools.
The schools also get more funding if the students perform poorly.
that's such a weird policy.
The teachers can produce poorly performing students easily (without much effort i might add), but cannot do that very same for well performing students (even with effort). The incentive to produce poor performing students to get more funding means it's misaligned with the student's best interests.
Schools and students _should_ be incentivized to perform well, and funding ought to be a portion of that incentive.
Yup. I've taken adult lessons in things, and I don't continue to buy lessons if the coach is unable to teach me. But in the public schools, watch what happens if you suggest merit pay. Shields up, Mr Sulu!
Instead, teacher pay is based on years of service and how many credentials you have.
(This is kind of a joke, because while the Hengshui school system is much more meritocratic, including in teacher salaries, it's also infamous for a stressful school environment. It's not really a joke though. While there are problems with the long hours, it's definitely better than whatever America has going on.)
It's not obvious to me that you would have been unable to deal with people who didn't look like you if you had been homeschooled.
It also seems to me that a lot of public school environments surely contain kids who look different from each other, form cliques based on physical appearance, and learn to base how they treat people largely on physical appearance.
Our kids have friends. We have made friends (tough at our age). And our kids are 1-2 years above their peers on diagnostics.
This is generally not true, as far as popularity correlates to having better social skills and a better understanding of social dynamics. Not saying income is the sole definition of success, but here is one study that found that teenagers with more friends earned more as adults: https://www.nber.org/papers/w27337
So this part of your education was entirely self-guided? And you're worried if children don't see fights and just sort of 'figure out' how to deal with them on their own they won't develop properly?
> I was bullied [...] learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
So the institution valued popularity to the point of allowing you to be abused because you didn't possess it. Another self-guided lesson.
I can never understand why people defend schools. They're terrible environments for learning. We clearly need a school setting for book learning and an _entirely separate_ one for social learning. This seems easily surmountable.
Most research does not support the idea that homeschooling inherently creates social bubbles or makes children unable to interact with others. Studies generally find that homeschooled children perform as well as or better than traditionally schooled peers on standardized social skills measures and often participate actively in community groups, sports, etc. Long term studies of adults who were homeschooled also show no meaningful deficits in life outcomes or social functioning. The main caveat is that homeschooling varies widely: children in highly isolated or restrictive environments may have fewer opportunities to practice mainstream social norms, but this is a function of the specific homeschooling approach, not homeschooling as a whole. Overall, the literature suggests that social problems arise from lack of social exposure not from homeschooling itself.
We already have this problem with the population at large, only a tiny minority of whom got homeschooled.
Right here on HN you can read daily accounts of severe introversion and social anxiety. You can see that out in public, at work, among friends and family. Many Americans, children and adults, take medications (licit and otherwise) to cope with anxiety and things like ADHD. Many Americans self-diagnose as "on the spectrum" and "introverted."
Do you have any evidence to support the idea that homeschooled children suffer more from these common afflictions?
It's nice to not worry about it on the rare occasion that I go to sketchy places, but it also highlights that dealing with a cross section of our country's population is not necessarily relevant to the kind of life we build when we can choose our peers.
> They are the most socialized kids in the US.
Bullshit. You know how I know? Because on average parents are terrible at exposing their kids to Things Not Like Them and Things They Don't Approve Of.
There are great homeschooling parents and crazy ones, but maybe it's not the worst idea to give kids a few hours a day outside their family-approved bubble?
Just in case it's the latter.
Or am I mistaken and all homeschooling in the US requires the child's consent?
<provides unsubstantiated and only tangentially related opinion>
People should be able to bypass public schools if they want.
Growing up, it was well-known that in highschool that there was always a small subset of students who were strange. It was so cliche that more than a few sitcoms were founded on that very premise. You could walk up to any stranger age 40 or older, say "you know those weird kids in high school" and they could almost certainly rattle off the list of names even today.
This is because in any large group of kids, some significant percentage of them will be weirdos. Thinking that this is somehow a result of homeschooling is more than simply fallacious, it reveals a prejudice of yours.
As another reply pointed out, maybe these kids are “weird” in some way, maybe they are not. We don’t have more than anecdotes here. More importantly, and to the point of my first reply, we don’t know the motives of their parents. The GP was engaged in mind reading. Certainly, the motives are manifold. One motive may be, “I’m going to home school my kid because he’s weird and won’t do well in a public school.” We don’t know which way the causal arrow points.
The homeschooled neighbor kid from a super religious family absolutely went off the deep end at 18. Many such cases.
It's always felt like a quirk of biology, in the same way that most people are now too fat. (ie, we didn't evolve in an era with constant excess calories and for the most part we can't cope with the situation) In that same way, people engage in this vicious fight for status between middle school and high school, only to be whisked away to colleges and then whisked away to wherever the jobs are; the fight for status never mattered and you can reinvent yourself in ways which would have never been possible in our ancient kin groups. But, we just cannot stop fighting for that status, and don't even give it much though. It's a huge waste of energy.
[1] Homeschooled Children’s Social Skills: https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED573486.pdf
[2] Homeschooling and the Question of Socialization Revisited: https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socia...
Edit: if I had to bet (don't know any research), schools nowadays are the main producers of intolerance, with the indoctrination and teaching kids to only respect civil discourse, ideas and opinions if they agree with the mainstream world model.
Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.
Modern academic life is only well suited to a small percent of the population. Those children who are truly happy and excelling in that setting.
So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at? Forced mass education was a good idea for developing societies, but personalized education has been possible for at least a decade now, at a fraction of the cost. And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Here's a famous song on the topic for those who know how to "chew the meat from the cud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE...
* It's fascinating to watch the points on my comment go up and down a ton. Very controversial issue. I believe it highlights pressure from social and political structures in society, and/or personal experiences. They vary so much.
As a parent I get the impulse to remove my children from any potential harm but the real world has sharp edges. They need to be confident in that world not just smothered.
And really as the person who used the term it’s really up to you to define what you mean.
That's just not true though. Your job isn't going to force you to interact with people who disrupt the environment constantly. Those people are fired and removed from the group.
In what environment are you, as an adult, forced to interact with everyone who happens to show up? The only instances I can think of are other government-run institutions like the military or prison, and I don't think anyone would argue those are standard modes of "real life".
> If anything I’d say the sort of thing you describe sounds more like an insular cult.
Name calling isn't an argument.
I also didn’t call you names just stated that your description sounded cult like.
If your environment is so controlled to not have a good mix of people in it then that sounds even more cult like!
I was a paramedic. Every single day.
Have you heard of customer service?
Holding literally any job ever? I was a software engineer and I frequently had to interact with a wide range of folks for the sake of my professional career. QA, contractors, internal and external teams. I was paid to do so, unless you argue that I have the option to quit or something in which my response is I need to in fact eat and have stable income.
In the military, say, you don't get that option.
In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while.
So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.)
Agreed! And that is exactly what home-schooling families are doing. Choosing to leave a dysfunctional environment.
> In the military, say, you don't get that option.
Yep, and other government institutions, like prison. I don't think those are what anyone would call a typical life environment though.
> In your neighborhood, you can move, but that's a fairly difficult and expensive step. When someone moves in whose kids want to be gang members, or who wants to verbally abuse people out jogging, or whatever other antisocial behavior, you have to deal with it, at least for a while.
That's another dysfunctional environment, and also what the police are for.
> So you can't completely avoid the brokenness of the real world. (Note well: I am not saying that throwing a six year old into the deep end is the best way to prepare kids for this.)
You're right, you can't. The world has a lot of dysfunctional environments, and I agree that people need to learn how to deal with them. Knowingly forcing your child to be in one of those environments full-time for many years seems like a pretty horrible way to teach them that though, bordering on abusive.
And, to be clear, EVERY workplace will have people you don't like. Every. Single. One. No exceptions.
Kids needs to be taught resiliency and healthy mindsets, to a degree. They need to learn to live and let go, to learn their value isn't derived from what people think of them, to learn that embarrassment is self inflicted.
You just can't do that if you're only around people who don't challenge you. If you're in a nice, cushy, social bubble, you will develop self esteem and confidence issues.
Why is it more „natural” if the school does the picking? Besides, parents can’t command anyone to join. It’s not The Truman Show.
Is marriage not “real life” because you chose your partner? Does you choosing prevent disagreement, struggle, pain and growth? I don’t think so.
> As a parent
I guess you still want them to go to a good school, not a ghetto one. And most likely you don't want them to be brainwashed with ideas that you personally don't like.
If you go to university and into a professional career you end up in a different bubble of people than say going into trades
...a healthy community hand-picked by parents is not "the real world" though, is it?
I think your view is a very black and white one. Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there.
The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe. Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do.
Isn't that essentially what you're describing, though? You literally talked about "healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children". No, you don't have to tell them who to be friends with... but you've pre-selected the pool of potential friends, so there's no instruction necessary.
Do not be deceived, bad company corrupts good morals.It very much is. No where else in life are people forced to mixed with the general unfiltered public. "The real world" is highly filtered social circles and freedom of association. The idea that it's somehow an automatic good to force healthy kids to mix with everyone who happens to show up, regardless of whether they have severe behavioral or social issues, is pretty questionable.
> My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there.
You can expose your kids to different cultures without leaving them wide open to everything else. It's not a binary. The point is that home schooling lets you pick and choose.
I think "forced" is doing a lot of work there. No, you're not forced to work alongside someone problematic. But quitting your job is quite an escalation to deal with the issue. Same with a troublesome neighbor. To say nothing of public transit, taking flights, interacting with other drivers on the road...
I'm baffled by this. Many workplaces? Mass transit? Walking down the sidewalk? At a concert? Buying groceries? True, there don't all expose you to the full sweep of human existence at once but, in aggregate, it seems pretty similar to what you'd encounter at most public schools. What if they want a career in a hospital, or law enforcement, or social services, ... the list goes on.
You might hope that your child will live a privileged existence unbothered by the rabble, but it seems to me they need to be prepared for a future where they encounter all kinds of people. I'm sure this can be compatible with homeschooling but I can't see how it's not generally a disadvantage. (Though perhaps onerous clearly outweighed by other advantages, depending on the situation.)
That's the kind of thing that is very much not like the "real world." It's more than just being "exposed" to less optimal peers (like you would on a bus), it's an entirely different social experience.
Most workplaces are highly filtered. The whole interview process is specifically geared towards filtering out undesirable people.
This just isn't true or is born from a standpoint of extreme luck. Like have you genuinely paid attention to the people you work with? Coworkers, CEOs, the stuff people say in slack channels or the things people gossip about at work? The only way I think someone can genuinely hold an opinion like this is by being so unaware of what workplace politics that they are unaware that most workplaces are like Highschool 2. Even the professional ones. Especially the professional ones.
You are pointing out behavior that is different, but not undesirable. Which is not being discussed. i.e., kids who distrust other kids learning is undesirable. As would people who create hostile work environments, or are inefficient, or unreliable, or don't have the right connections.
In my place of work people nearly universally went to top end universities, a much larger proportion than the normal population have phds. you think that's random? And more locally if you work on a sales team you are going to be hired to work directly with people that have certain shared traits that make them effective sellers. It's so obvious that interviewing is an active filter I'm not even sure what to do to convince someone that thinks otherwise.
I'm not sure how you equate any of that to workplace politics or gossip. Even if it was relevant, the fact that it is not a perfectly effective filter doesn't make it not a filter.
I think it's telling that the other responses seem to focus on exactly this; the idea that their child will exist in a class apart from the rabble, and will not have to interact with them.
It seems to speak to two very different views of community. On the one hand, there is community as a collection of all the people in a space: people who share local resources, frequent the same local businesses, and have the same local concerns. On the other, there is a community of choice: people who share the same social class, and possibly the same religion or cultural beliefs. I think it's fair to say that you can have both, but trying to say that you can belong solely to the communities you choose and treat everyone else as beneath notice sounds quite problematic, and it will absolutely not give children a correct or complete view of the world.
School isn't their only exposure to life. You will get exposure to other people and non-healthy people outside of school.
"Kids in public school are exposed to society at large, in both good and bad ways. My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in th"
When I was a kid, I was exposed to kids that should have been in prison..and many of them ended up there. My life probably would have been better if they weren't there.
"My kids are in class with others of different cultures and lived experience and I believe that enriches their lives. Despite, yes, there being some problematic kids in there."
This can still be done with home schooling.
"The sad reality of parenting is that you're never going to be able to hand-pick your child's experience all the way through life. Sooner or later they're going to be exposed to the "hostile flowers" you describe."
I disagree. If someone is hostile and aggressive all the time, I wouldn't be around them as an adult. I hand pick my friends, and you probably do too. I also still get exposed to the assholes of the world.
"Personally I think learning to be around those people and still thrive is a part of childhood that prepares you well for adulthood. It may be more valuable than some of the academic work kids do."
If you are at work and someone is sexually harassing all of the women there or generally causing issues for everyone around them (preventing most other people from getting their work done). Do you think they should stay, so everyone can learn to be around them?
You seem to think everyone is a reasonable person that might just have a few issues. This is far from the truth and many times, public schools will just keep these kids there, preventing everyone around them from learning.
It's also a burden to the teachers and staff.
In addition to peer socialization and mobility, the flexibility in scheduling allowed me to work a day job through my high school years, exposing me to yet more real-world experience. The constant interaction with adults and folks from other walks of life was a huge boon that allowed me to function as a well-adjusted adult right out of the gate. The high-school drama that people suffer and then bring with them into adulthood is very disappointing and seemingly unnecessary.
Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement which means the child learns how to socialize not from other children but from watching how the adults they are around handle interactions.
[Edited for clarity in some sentences]
You are aware of teachers, yes?
> Probably because well run homeschooling groups tend to have high parental involvement
Everything I've read shows that putting absolutely all else aside, parental involvement is key to a child's success. So perhaps the reason your by the numbers evidence shows home schooling to be better is simply because it's a self-selecting group of involved parents.
You can't learn the application of hand-picking your people and environments if you don't first see the outcomes when such application is neglected, and understanding its importance from there. If you have the hand-picking done for you as well, you risk not learning the ability to do it yourself. Or how to handle the situations where you can't.
It's much closer to the real world though, isn't it? Your child is likely going to live most of their life in similar communities to them, not a wide cross section of the public.
John Locke, John Holt, Peter Green, and:
https://supermemo.guru/wiki/The_Greatest_Minds_in_History_Op...
I'm sure they exist, they may even exist as the majority, I will say for my part the homeschooled kids I knew through my church growing up were not any of these things. I would quite literally use the opposite of both those to describe them.
I'm not saying they represent the majority but they do exist and they were not well adjusted IMHO.
As with many topics I feel like "Yes, if you want to devote yourself fully to X thing you can do much better than Y professional", the problem is, again from my own experience, the people I knew who homeschooled their children were not professionals, they were not capable, and their children suffered for it. I want to stress, I fully believe it is possible for certain people with certain mentors/teachers to do better outside of the public (or private) school system. I just also believe that the odds of most people (making that decision for their children) to meet that bar are low. I also think that some of the better homeschooled experiences that I've seen are simply a super-private school by another name (various parents being or being subject experts and taking turns teaching coupled with many "field trip"-type trips with other homeschooled kids).
> there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Wait till you hear what the parents believe... I don't agree with everything taught or the way it's taught but being exposed to other types of people and ways of thinking is critical. I can guarantee you that had my parents been able to, they would have shielded me from a great number of ways of thinking. I worry that many homeschooled children grow up in a small echo chamber (we all live in echo chambers of difference sizes).
Can public school suck? Absolutely and I acknowledge that homeschooling might be the answer for some people, but only if you can afford to pay (with time or money) to educate your children completely which is almost certainly going to require working with other homeschooler parents to, essentially, build your own school. If you can bring in tutors/mentors/teachers that you vet and agree with and expose them to the world and new ideas/experiences then yeah, you are probably going to have good outcomes. If you plop them in front of a computer to follow a curriculum just to shield them from the "evils" of the world, well, I think you are going to have a bad time. Obviously there is a whole range of people in between those 2 extremes, I just feel that, on average, people trend towards the lower end of that spectrum.
> https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE...
Interesting song and I do agree with many points. For many years I've complained about lack of teaching basic skills (everything from home ec to budgeting and more), many of which I heard in this song. I think there was a little of the baby going out with the bathwater but overall I enjoyed it.
Yea, the guy later made a video clarifying he never meant to throw the baby out, just the bathwater.
In Washington, homeschooled students still have to occasionally connect at an actual school, or do some baseline testing.
In Louisiana, you just tell the state "we're homeschooling" and the state is "have fun with that" and the child is essentially off the grid.
Not for nothing, instances of child abuse/CSA in many correlates with the laxness of educational oversight in home schooling.
> And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Ahh, this chestnut. A short jump to "teachers are training preschoolers to be furries and LGBT" and litterboxes in the classroom/bathroom.
For all your anecdotes my step daughter has plenty too. 10th graders who are barely literate, cannot do elementary math. Who when asked about their homeschool regime talk of waking at 10, 10.30, playing Fortnite or going on Tiktok for a few hours, and occasionally logging into some website to pretend like they've been working, or doing some mind numbingly simple exercise to show "participation".
Exactly. Notice how, when people complain about the "deranged ideologies" that teachers are teaching their kids, they either 1. stop short of actually naming those ideologies or 2. spout fever dreams that are statistically vanishingly rare.
Yikes! Good thing these people, whom you so clearly despise, will cease to exist after school and will never have to be dealt with in regular life.
I guess the rise in homeschooling is not surprising when we openly view our fellow civilians as inherently poor/violent and shouldn't exist.
I'm not sure how you are avoiding all of the people working at or frequenting coffee shops, the DMV, car mechanics, the grocery store, airports, or any other scary place where you might be forced to interact with real people. Not to mention co-workers, school parents, sports parents, family members, in-laws, and more whom you may have to spend your valuable time around.
Enjoy the life of avoidance.
Not your problem to fix for sure - but it is your problem to equip your child to comfortably weather. There are bad influences out in the world and they generally have outsized effects on their social and professional scenes. In fact, the kind of curated, limited community you're advocating for is one where bad influences thrive.
> So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at?
I certainly agree the degree is whatever - but I think you're really under-valuing the social-gauntlet aspect of school. You will have classmates who kind of (or really) suck. You will need to do your work anyway. You will be incentivized to learn perseverance and a self-centered locus of control. These are valuable skills that only come from actual exposure to bad influences.
Someone who's perfect in perfect conditions is going to struggle because the world is not perfect. The aims you highlight here make me think less of homeschooling than I did before.
They've never experienced assholes, or people who think their personality is grating, or whatever. Thick skin needs to be built up, to a degree. I'm not saying bullying is good, but being exposed to the unwashed masses definitely can be.
Given the state of our education system, that seems like an obviously worthwhile trade off. Especially for parents in underperforming school districts and even entire regions.
It's not thick skin they are developing around assholes, it's them incorporating that behavior to some degree. There was nothing I could do to change that - talks, good example, nothing worked, only surrounding change.
There are kids who will have the tendency to adjust to others and there are kids who don't. This has to do with the self-confidence they bring with them before they enter their first day of school, friends they have/had outside school and it is not necessarily a thing a parent can always control in a predictable manner.
For all we know in your case it could even be that your kid learned they have to follow the others in private school and then applied that lesson in the next one. What I am saying here is that having learned the lesson "you need to adjust to your peers" is the problem, not that the peers are the "wrong" ones.
The same applies to teaching "street smarts" to kids. You don't do it by throwing them in a hostile environment where they'll be prey to hostile people without having any defenses built up first.
You really might want to explain that further. At face value, that sounds like parroted right-wing rhetoric.
If I put myself in the shoes of a parent, I wouldn’t trust myself on the matter enough that I’d feel good shaping my childrens’ entire world to match it. It’s such a wildly difficult thing to get right, and I’d rather they get a glimpse of the world through wide variety of viewpoints and hope they’ll use the values I’ve instilled in them to construct their own view.
I’d pull our child out of school if the standards dropped but I think the majority of homeschoolers align with out of the mainstream poltical / religious views.
Unless you can magically guarantee (or have enough money to fund their whole life) your children will never have to interact with "problem" people, they will need to learn to deal with those people one way or another. And it's better to do so in a low-stakes situation like school.
I grew significantly and became a different person when I was moved to a different school.
I still think it taught me a lot about the world and how people really are. I really lost a lot of faith in humanity in those few years and still see the world as cynical in which all people are in it for themselves.
Did it make me stronger? Maybe. But also I wish I could see the world more positively as a lot of people that have been shielded from those experiences seem to do.
They were a nice family, but when I was in community college I had a chance to talk with one of the eldest who was there getting her GED. Last I recall, she held some resentment towards her parents because she was held back fairly significantly by her upbringing. Well, except for the fact that they were wealthy which helps smooth some of the problems.
Assholes are a dime a dozen. Homeschooling doesn’t exempt your kids from learning how to deal with them.
A gardener who understands that after that short grace period that plant will have to grow amongst those sick and hostile ones essentially and not only that, it will have to form a thriving ecosystem with them.
I get the idea of wanting to protect your child at all cost and wanting the best possible education for them. Rarely have I found that former students with over-protective parents that put them down a funnel of other kids from the same social and ideological background have really thrived. And I work in university level education meaning I get to see first hand what is usually the first phase in a persons life where they can decide for themselves how to do it. The people with self-confidence and stable roots who make the best, are usually those who "have seen it all", while those with alternative schooling backgrounds are either completely in their own world (often with rude awekenings) or constant feelings of inadequacy and comparison with others. That is anecdotal evidence by one educator, so details may matter.
Aside from those individual aspects, there absolutely is a societal aspect to that. If gated communities are the solution, then your society has to be in what is already a pretty dystopian position. Having those isolated silos mean in a world of isolated social media silos, we give our kids even less possibility to experience the reality of other members of the society we expect them to repair.
That shoulders them with an impossible task. My deep believe is that the goal of education is to prepare people for their life, but also to give them the tools to make the world they are sent into a better place. That requires a healthy dose of "knowing what is", especily if what is, is ugly.
> A gardener who understands that after that short grace period that plant will have to grow amongst those sick and hostile ones essentially and not only that, it will have to form a thriving ecosystem with them.
If, on the other hand, the gardener knows from experience that the flower will be suffocated, then it's pointless at best and cruel at worst.
If you’re willing to homeschool well, the positive impact on your kids is immediate.
We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.
We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.
But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
Home schooling has answers for ALL of that.
What's the reason?
Take it from someone who was homeschooled from pre-k through high school, you will absolutely not provide a better social environment. I was so unprepared to handle the social dynamics in casual, educational or professional that it took years and years of active work to put myself in a position where it wasn’t an absolute detriment to my success. I have no doubt you can educate your children well, it’s every other aspect of humanity that is typically missed out on and can lead to unintended consequences.
I don't believe it's a magic pill by any means. But I've known many recently home schooled kids and they seem a lot more mature than their public school peers. So I think we have a decent shot at having similar results.
This can include volunteer work or part time jobs working with the public and interacting with people of all ages.
Why do you think you being forced into a monoculture of only kids your own age would help your interaction with others when you're in your 20s? 25 year olds don't behave anything like teenagers.
[1] http://hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Taubman/PEPG/conf...
Discussion
• Evidence from this study and others suggest that homeschoolers may not
be a socially isolated group
• Instead, homeschoolers in these samples seem to have peer networks
and social connections that arise in conventional and unconventional
social settings and they report being well-connected later in life
• It is important to note that although this study contributes to the
literature, it has methodological limitations (e.g. small sample, self-reports)I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.
I don't really think that way in general, but I guess I'd just want to point out that the spectrum isn't "good socialization in public school" to "bad/no socialization in homeschooling".
I didn't really have much trouble adjusting to living on campus at college, and I've never had issues with interpersonal stuff at work or school.
Your anecdote is not universal; neither is mine.
Citation needed.
Every perspective I've heard personally - and mirrored in comments here as well - from the non parent side of things, is quite negative in terms of learning how to behave and socialize with your peers. To you the children might seem polite and servile, and you might see this as something positive - as you state in another comment - but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
Citation needed.
If you put your kids in homeschooling and provide no other outlet for socialization then sure, they'll be socially awkward.
My brother and I were homeschooled, but we were also heavily involved in our community. We were at the local park playing sports 3-4 times per week, we did various summer camps, we had a few other homeschool families that we'd setup playdates with. Our parents would sometimes joke that we barely ever home! And, unsurprisingly, we had no problems with socializing or making friends later in life.
Was it the same kind of socialization you get from going to public school? No, but I consider that a feature :)
Yes, kids who were home-schooled because their parents didn't want secular society interfering with them raising their kids in a niche religion are more likely to experience this. Even in those cases, however, I found that the kids adapted rather quickly.
In most other cases[1], the parents were explicitly worried about their kids' socialization, and found many opportunities for the kids to interact with other kids their age (e.g. typical after school activities like sports or such).
Many of the kids I know who were both home-schooled and socially awkward started in public school and were pulled due to bullying &c. To say that the home-schooling stunted their social growth is a counterfactual; it's just as easy to see them ending up worse off.
For the most part, I would say that socializing in public school vs. homeschooling is a bit like communication with in-person companies versus remote; in the former it just "happens" to some degree, sometimes well, sometimes poorly; in the latter it requires intentional work to happen, but can still happen.
1: A notable exception is one person I know who was homeschooled by parents, with a father that traveled a lot for work and took his family with him. She was often in situations where she had fewer than 5 kids around close to her age who also spoke English.
For extracurriculars: there are club youth sports aplenty, a youth orchestra, band, choir and drum & bugle group. There are participate in various academic competitions (mathletes, model UN &c.). It's definitely harder since there's no "club rush" like in public school, but these things are available (and the total cost is rather less than a non-parochial private school, though subtracting out lost salary for the parent doing the teaching reverses that for the more affordable options[1])
1: It's completely possible to spend more than a private university tuition on private high schools where I live, but the ones not subsidized by the Roman Catholic Church start in the low $20,000s
I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers so I’m curious how you thought about it.
Kids from home schooling families we know are as polite or substantially more polite than those in the school system.
It is, but do we have any studies showing how well school kids are at this? From what I've seen, most kids in school do not learn those skills.
I kid, but there's a real point: So much of the socialization is bad.
More: Kids aren't going to be kids forever. Does socialization with a bunch of other kids prepare them for the adult society that they're going to go into?
Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences that create bonds with people (whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)
These are real social dynamics that actually exist in adult life, and I suspect people who are totally blindsided by them are maladapted
It also teaches you to deal with bullies. That said, we had homeschooled kids in my Boy Scouts troop. They learned how to deal with bullies just fine.
It really just results in them continuing to being bullied, or reacting badly and getting blamed themselves.
Are there studies on whether bullying is higher in lightly supervised versus moderately supervised groups? Or mixed-age versus single-age groups?
Scouting is lightly-supervised mixed-age groups. If an older kid bullied a younger kid, that resulted in adults reading them the riot act. But if a younger kid bullied a younger kid, the two sort of wound up sorting it out until someone threw a punch or pissed off an older kid. (For being annoying.) That second dynamic was, to my memory, unique to mixed-age groups.
If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society.
Because bullying is an extreme example of a common human power dynamic.
> If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society
Fair enough. I was thinking exclusively of non-violent bullying. (It may get physical. But in a roughhousing way. Not one intended to cause pain or injury.)
Watch it, you almost said "rescuer" there.
I always thought of it as parent / tutor + kid = almost all interactions.
Thanks.
We have a few reasons unrelated to socialization [1] to do home schooling but one of the reasons I don't want to send them back is precisely the regression in "socialization" I would expect.
30 years ago, this probably was a decent argument, but the bar of "at least as socialized as a public school attendee" has gone way down in the meantime.
[1]: I guess before anyone asks, one of my children is deaf-blind and while the people in the system did their best and I have not much criticism of the people, the reality is still that I was able to more precisely accommodate that child than the system was able to. This ends up being a pretty big stopper for a return to the public school system for that child.
It used to be folk wisdom that beating your kids built character, teachers would even slap kids with a ruler back in the 1950s. Could you say the same about bullies, cliques, popularity contests, and all the other performative nonsense that goes on in public schools?
Maybe it’s all bullshit and giving kids a safe environment to learn at their own pace without all these distractions makes them better equipped for the modern world?
Can you perhaps enlighten us and define "socialize" without the use of tautology?
6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.
I’ve seen many kids, including my own older ones, who have gone through the school system and others who haven’t.
For example, homeschooled students do better on the ACT than public school kids.
https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info...
Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.
Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.
That might've worked if we funded schools & gave students who fell behind significant interventions & 1x1 attention, but that's not what happened. One of my friends has a very bright and talented fifth grader in a class with multiple students who can barely read or write. Guess who gets the most attention from educators? Which group the teachers structure the class for?
When you have a class size over 20, teachers are forced to be a lot more systematic, which can improve the effectiveness of their teaching. Good teachers make heavy use of social proof. When I tried to teach my kid at home, it was a struggle. But when the kid is around his peers in a classroom, and they are going along with the teacher, he naturally falls in line with no cajoling, etc.
If there were only 5 students, the likelihood he'll just go along with things is much lower.
I find it difficult to wrap my head around you can make it work teaching the entire curriculum for 4 different grades encompassing reading/writing, math, history, science, art, music, etc... I guess its potentially compensated for by the fact that they are all getting very individualized attention, but thats spreading a parent very thin.
Especially when we are talking about high school levels, where you can even potentially go into AP courses- no way a single parent can teach college level calculus, History, CS, etc... effectively.
For all the flaws of our public education system, I don't see how this can work better.
What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.
For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.
>Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades
This reads as an inconsistency.
As for the social stuff - as I commented elsewhere, it's not hard to make a case that public school is bad for socialization as well. Which isn't to say that public school isn't irredeemable in that way, just that it's not like one or the other is an obviously correct choice.
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:text=r...
https://chewv.org/college-preparation/college-admissions/?ut...
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/?utm_sourc...
You may want to look wider afield than homeschooling advocacy and lobbyist groups for your stats.
Any idea how many were affected terribly in school? I'm in touch with my high school classmates. Almost half of them blame the school experience to lifelong problems.
Did you grow up in Scarsdale or Palo Alto?
As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money.
By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.
Education is expensive and underfunded.
San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student.
I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.
I always want to laugh when I hear people complain about finding near-minimum-wage workers in a HCOL area. They can't seem to grasp that commuting is not free, it may feel free to them at their income level but transportation costs money (gas, car maintenance, insurance or bus, etc) and time. I'm not saying teaching is a minimum wage job but it's not a high earning one either, paying them as low as we do _and_ also asking them to have a longer commute is just absurd.
Jackson Hole residents complaining about "poor service" in stores and restaurants in town, because shocker, servers can't afford to live in Jackson Hole. And unlike even SF or NY (which may not be perfect but have at least functional transport), there's no easy way to travel from the next town, an hour away or more.
Residents have started banding together to rent coaches to bus people in, which seems the most reasonable solution, after all, no poors in town, still, and it doesn't hurt the residents that service industry employees in their town have a three hour commute. /s
It got so bad in Atherton, CA, that the school had to build accommodation for teachers in the school itself. Next step, they can do janitorial work for extra money!
Now, granted, some of that goes on building upkeep, cleaning, supplies, heating, pensions, managers etc - but if $588k per classroom doesn’t let you pay enough to attract teachers there’s something very suspicious going on.
there’s something very suspicious going on
Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.
It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".
Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.
Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.
What kind of maintenance do you think is expensive compared to a budget of $560k per room, per year?
there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones
The most recent $790,000,000 in 2024.
Teacher (all-in cost): $150k
Teaching assistant: $100k
Rent for commercial space in SF (~1,200 sq ft): $60k
Curriculum, books, supplies: $23k
Technology (22 Chromebooks, projector, software): $18k
Field trips and enrichment: $10k
Utilities, internet, insurance: $27k
Furniture and equipment: $20k
Admin/legal/accounting: $8k
Total: $416k
AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist.
If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).
What am I missing? My table has $200k left over so we could add another full time teacher at $150k?
But I remember you previously and you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.
you appear to want a school system that spends money on exactly what your child needs and nothing else.
But if the government is going to operate schools and demand that we all pay for those schools, I'd prefer it if those schools were run for the benefit of students (and specifically to maximize academic achievement) and not for the benefit of government employees.
Your admin costs are also low - you need to account for each teacher being coached and managed, running school operations and front desk, facilities management, finance, IT, etc.
- that budget is how I was able to calculate per-pupil spend
- in another comment you admitted to having 'no idea' where the $28k/year number came from, suggesting to me that you haven't looked at the budget yourself
The granularity in SFUSD's published budget is not sufficient to analyze what is useful and what is waste.
I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot. The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k. Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond.
My point is that it's hard to point at some issue of inefficient public bureaucracy, because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper. I would also argue they wouldn't try, because their goal is a good education, or at least better than the public alternative (that only spends $28k per kid).
"I think your reasoning is flawed, but fine...if the goal is to try and have the cheapest possible one room school house."
"I've got multiple kids, so I'll admit I think about schools here a lot."
"The absolute cheapest private schools I've seen in San Francisco are subsidized by religious institutions. The tuition for those schools per child is roughly $28k."
# Median sticker price
Pre-K 7 $16,610
K 29 $11,530
1 29 $11,530
2 29 $11,175
3 29 $11,175
4 29 $11,175
5 29 $11,175
6 30 $11,519
7 30 $11,519
8 30 $11,519
9 4 $31,725
10 4 $31,725
11 4 $31,725
12 4 $31,725
"Non religious private schools usually start in the $40k range and can easily get into the $50s and well beyond."
"because clearly private institutions aren't able to do it any cheaper"
Moreover, not all students pay sticker price. So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.
"because their goal is a good education"
I was generous in my estimate for each of the line items. I chose a one room school house as an example because it's easy to grok, and anything larger would be cheaper due to economies of scale.
This $28k number is false. Most parochial schools charge about $12k.
- Sacred Heart ($31k)
- Archbishop Riordan ($32k)
- Saint Ignatius ($34.6)
- Sacred Heart ($60k)
- Jewish Community School ($65k)
You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate, and structure most of your argument around the cheapest schools (K-8). Mea culpa on my end, though: you are correct that when I was saying "cheapest I've seen," there was an unfair modifier of "cheapest schools on my personal spreadsheet" which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to. You're absolutely correct that there are cheaper parochial schools available as long as you only need K-8.
Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school (again, referencing SF Chronicle's data). I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.
So looking at the sticker prices (which I've listed above) may give an inflated view of total income.
[1] https://www.sfchronicle.com/projects/2025/sf-bay-area-privat...
You started this thread with average cost per student across all SF public school students, which includes special needs, high school, etc, but move to median prices for debate
- I don't have access to data that would allow me to apportion total SFUSD costs to individual school types
- When considering schools with vastly different prices (and different scales), the median is a much more informative measure than the mean (which could be skewed by an unusually expensive or inexpensive school with a tiny student population).
Another reason for using median is that I was responding to your comments which talked about general price levels ('tuition for those schools is roughly', 'usually start in the $40k range'). You were not talking about averages, but typical prices or minimum (starting) prices. The mean prices have no bearing on the truth or falsity of those claims.
Using averages for private schools, which feels more applicable to your starting premise, private high schools in SF average $27k, $28k, and $52k, for elementary, middle, and high school
those schools specifically in your list are subsidized by a larger religious organization, so the sticker price doesn't truly reflect that cost anyway
I still feel comfortable with my original premise that averaging $28k per student across all of SFUSD students is not an absurd number.
which is limited to schools within a reasonable commute and that we'd be willing to send our kids to
BTW In case you want to see the SF Chronicle data in a form that's more personalized (showing the schools nearest to you first, filterable by grade levels and price and type), I made a tool to do that: https://tools.encona.com/schoolfinder
My original point in this subthread was that SFUSD is NOT underfunded. Do you believe it IS underfunded?
I'm saying it's a lot.
then that would rule out almost all SFUSD schools, which kind of defeats the point of the discussion!
I made a tool to do that
Your original point was not that it's "not underfunded," it was that it's overfunded
(But I do think it's overfunded.)
My only argument here is that I don't think $28k is unreasonable, particularly when viewed against the cost of private alternatives.
We go to our attendance area SFUSD school and love it.
Annoying, unsolicited feature request would be to allow addresses or zip codes rather than requiring geolocation :)
OK, so we agree SFUSD is not underfunded?
two thirds of students are behind grade level in math, and there's no opportunity to be grouped with kids in other grades.
For example, a low key popular school with “bad scores,” Flynn[1]. ~30% of the student population met or exceeded the standard for math. That number jumps to 65.4% for kids with college-educated parents, and 81.3% for grad school. Race is an unfortunate proxy here, but it’s 70.8% for white students.
Not trying to convince you to send your kid to public school, of course, just calling out that there’s nuance required when comparing outcomes and what can work for families.
[1] https://caaspp-elpac.ets.org/caaspp/DashViewReportSB?ps=true...
personally I would make big cuts at the central office and redistribute to the schools
That number jumps to 65.4% for kids with college-educated parents, and 81.3% for grad school.
What does tend to correlate with money and also correlates with outcomes is parental involvement. Solving that problem requires societal and economic change in a district though not giving the school more money.
Ultimately it’s a culture problem. America’s attitude toward problems is nothing if not “throw more money at the problem and hope it gets better.” See also, healthcare, military spending, college sports, etc.
"Tuition for most (non-religious) competitive private schools in San Francisco is easily twice that amount."
For each of the grades K-12, here is the % of non-religious private schools in San Francisco that charge $56k or more:
K: 0%
1: 0%
2: 0%
3: 0%
4: 0%
5: 0%
6: 3%
7: 3%
8: 3%
9: 71%
10: 71%
11: 71%
12: 71%Always makes me think of The West Wing scene:
> Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.
Video (sorry for the burned in subs, should be queued up): https://youtu.be/IzV09gESyh0?t=39
Our nation needs something on the order of millions of teachers. Competition for the best teachers would work great, if you needed exactly 1 extraordinary teacher. Or even if you needed a dozen. But when you need 40 teachers or more per school district... you're going to end up with alot of mediocre teachers, and more than a few godawful ones.
And, I suspect, that the thing not even extraordinary teachers can do is give a shit. Some teachers give a shit about some students, a few give a shit about many/most students, but even those few will falter in a career that lasts long enough.
Any why do they even want this silver bullet anyway, as impossible as it is? Why would you want a trillion dollar boondoggle that can't possibly ever work? The answer for that is downright frightening.
> As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated
Really, though, the biggest factor is just being their parent. When they're young, the vast majority of the time you can basically read their mind. When you're teaching your child, you almost instinctively know how well they're understanding things. I was never deliberate about it, I didn't look for things, I never had to. I was able to pace my delivery very tightly with their ability to consume and it was the most natural thing imaginable.
That, and having a class size of two, meant Home Schooling was "30-45 minutes Monday-Friday September to mid-April with generous vacations." And that's not "30-45 minutes but we also went to a museum, the library, co-ops (we did, briefly), and all kinds of other learning activities" (I'm sure I lied and said I did those things), that was 30-45 minutes, do some chores (we don't live on a farm, it's the same stuff most kids do), and play video games.
Parenting-wise, the only elements we were more strict with was we limited "watching a TV show or video content" to an hour (two, on occasion, for movies) a day ... and we were quite rigorous with that. But they could play pretty much any video game they wanted (within reason, but probably far less restrictive than most parents outside of Hacker News). And they didn't get mobile devices until 13 and 15. There was no reason. They had/have computers.
My goal was simply "to teach them at home better than they could get at school and to make them self-learners along the way." I wasn't looking for genius spelling bee winners.
They've been in Public School (since the start of HS for my son, 7th grade for my daughter) for four years. Those 30-45 minute sessions that -- not once -- involved taking a test resulted in them being straight-A students. The first test they took, a placement test, resulted in them landing in advanced classes.
They finish their home work at school (my son works way ahead because he's bored). They study for nothing outside of midterms and finals (and they only do that out of paranoia, it's not really needed).
The majority of the time they were Home Schooled, Mom and I were divorced (and it wasn't "amicable" for the majority of that, it was ... ugly). And while that was hard, actually home schooling the children was not. It was awesome. I'd have been a lot less stressed in the earlier years if I'd have known how easy it was.
It was "get good curriculum, follow it, don't move on until they understand it to what a teacher would grade an 'A'". You do the latter because you have to; anything else is debt and the only one who pays that debt is the you. Your kids will just sob through it. Outside of budgeting because you're likely down to one income, the rest was all upside.
All tested above grade level on state mandatory testing throughout their schooling.
Two graduated early (some with college credits).
My adult children (4 sons, ages 19-25) have gainful employment, living on their own (2 own their own homes), and standing on their own. One is married (I got a grandkid!), all have friends, communities they're involved in, and are healthy (physically and mentally).
None take prescription meds nor struggle with anxiety or depression.
Poor public school kids... I hope they can find help for the damage they suffered. <grin>
One is a commercial sheet metal worker and owns his own home.
Another is a Linux sysadmin and owns his own home and has a spouse and a child.
Another is a restaurant equipment repairman and rents.
Finally, my 19 year old just started his airplane mechanic apprenticeship and rents.
My other three are still in school and living in our family home.
The thought at you need college degree to find meaningful employment or to live a joyful life is simply false so I don't consider it a metric for homeschooling success.
I teach my kids how to learn and encourage them to get out there and be productive doing work they enjoy and raising their own families.
Success in my book means they can function as an adult, stand on their own financially, find a good spouse, and bring me some awesome grandkids to spoil.
I don't have a college degree but I make plenty to raise 7 kids while working from home. I got to be there for all their first steps and struggles through Algebra 2 and everything in between. I wouldn't trade working from home and homeschooling for anything. It's been very fulfilling.
Now where's my grandkids! <grin>
God says children are a blessing and I know it to be true. I'm grateful for all the children he gave me (7).
Protestant Christian and most of my Christian brothers and sisters look at how many kids I have and that we homeschool and think I'm a little crazy (just like most non-Christians). I'd say probably 1/3 of the families in our church homeschool though. It's a wonderful community to be a part of and if I sent my remaining kids to public school, I wouldn't be asked to leave.
I've been around Mormons, not a religion scholar, but it seems plausible to me the same "one upsmanship" mormons have with missions, large paternalistic families, avoiding "outsiders" (see: homeschooling), etc are common in other religious communities. Like maybe the protestant Christian one you are in?
Wow that's a lot, how did you manage?
(My wife and I have had 9.)
I've been working from home for nearly 2 decades and have flexible hours.
My wife handles the majority of the grade school years (basic reading/writing/maths) and I teach most of the middle and high school.
They've always been involved in co-ops, church activities, and get plenty of socialization. They're emotionally mature, civically responsible, and others focused. We take them when we volunteer at local non-profits, whether that's sorting clothes at the local thrift store or picking up trash at a local park. An example of service becomes a lifestyle of generosity. It makes for great kids and even greater adults.
Put the time and work in to your kids. Nothing else will provide greater dividends.
Sports might be the challenge. Many US states have athletic associations that handle most K-12 sports, and they require enrollment in an accredited member school. I am aware of several homeschool specific athletic associations in my area, but all are targeted towards religious homeschoolers. Not certain what secular alternatives would exist, but soccer is very popular & there are plenty of competitive academies that operate outside the school ecosystem.
Fencing for example, is usually clustered around external clubs. Very few high schools will have fencing teams, and in a lot of cities even the high schools that do have fencing teams will be kind of a joke compared to the club teams.
Of the others, there are either homeschool alternatives that are explicitly secular or at least not overtly religious, or there are competitive clubs. All the schools have track & field, but there is a large homeschool league. And the district has a few schools with pools and a few more with swim teams that practice at the city pools, but the local swim club is the one turning out the Olympians – but even then, it also seems to have plenty of offerings for kids who won't set a world butterfly record. Football, I imagine, is just so popular that the private/public schools take all the players.
Whether this is a positive or negative thing depends on the situation. Being precocious is something adults might think positively about (though not in all situations) but it's not something other kids usually admire.
For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.
Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.
Yes, it's great if they provide these things, but it's a distant secondary concern. I'd rather my kid get a great education and miss out on these things, than get a poor education but have access to all these.
But of course, as others have pointed out, it's a false dichotomy. You can have both.
The stunted social and academic skills were pretty apparent in retrospect once the schools reopened.
The homeschooling crowd has developed methods over the years to compensate. The COVID remote learning cohort did not, and suffered for it.
And what ensures they utilize those methods, exactly? Many states you, as a kid are 100% educationally off the grid the moments say "We're homeschooling".
If you think that homeschooling is a panacea, I guess we're all about to f*ck around and find out...
And this is only just now being investigated as a cause of harm. When I went to public high school, the bullying happened at school and stayed there. Kids now, their bullies follow them home, and since most of the social interaction now happens online instead of in-person, it's way more damaging to mental health than the classic caricature of a schoolyard bully. The most I had to compare myself to were my peers in my school, not the entire globe of influencers and fake instagram.
There has been a complete erosion of boundaries. The threat is constant, you can't escape it, and kids are in a state of hyper-vigilance, always online or else they miss a crucial social interaction in group chat, or need to constantly check if a damaging photo, post, or rumor gets publicly posted to the internet while they were asleep.
Not only that, teens are losing the ability to read human emotion, so misunderstandings escalate rapidly. In person communication now becomes too intense, and only increases anxiety and isolation, despite being hyperconnected.
And that's just barely touching the surface.
I think it also says something about the parents who think they can do as well or better.
Also, just FYI, to quote someone you prefix the text with ">".
> It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children wen parents think they can do as well or better.
It took a lot of research on my end to get to that conclusion but I would have been just as good ignoring it and listening to the experience of a friend I made who home schooled all seven of her children, or talking to her kids. I did both; research led me to talk to her and her husband, talking to them confirmed I was making the right choice.
Though I am Christian, it had absolutely nothing to do with religion (we taught the same science everyone else received; no "the Earth is 15,000 years old" or whatever nonsense). I even think there's reasonable evangelical arguments to be made that Christians should put their children in traditional schools, so this wasn't a faith choice for me. I loved High School and I went to a large High School. So "bullying" and the like had nothing to do with it.
Had I not attended Public School, I probably wouldn't be doing what I love for a living and it was a couple of amazing teachers that went to bat for me, creating classes that didn't exist and letting me take HS classes while I was in Middle School, so when I say "I know I can do better" that's doesn't come with "because the public school system and the teachers are garbage." There's problems, there, for sure -- but my kids live in the #4 district and attend the #1 public High School in that district. It's a pretty fantastic school, the kids are friendly and I'm fine with it all around. I didn't think they'd do poorly regardless of how they were schooled, I just knew I could do better.
That's not arrogance; I think the vast majority of parents could do better.
It's because, as a parent, when they're young you can basically read their mind. That's an advantage a teacher doesn't get. You don't even have to "notice" that they're struggling or that they "know it cold and are bored", you just pace things on instinct and you deliver knowledge very close to the actual rate they can easily ingest it.
The other advantage that would be hard to replicate is class size. I had a class of two. Two different grades, but all that meant was my daughter got a preview of (and often just ended up learning completely) whatever she had to do and whatever her brother was learning and her brother got a review every day.
You can pretty much take out every other advantage of Home Schooling. Just those two result in a 6-7 hour whiteboard directed lesson and busy work time down to 45 minutes/child (really ... 30 most of the time). That also gave us a September to mid-April school year with generous vacations (otherwise we'd finish in February).
It wasn't my goal to make genius, spelling-bee winners, or to put them years ahead of public school students. The latter absolutely happened, but we were only ever doing a single grade per year in every subject with pretty formal home school curriculum. There was just a lot of extra time to screw around exploring things beyond the books.
I wanted them to learn better than they would in school and I wanted them to be able to be self-directed in learning. They are successful beyond my expectations in both areas.
They've been in Public School, now, for four years. My son hasn't taken work home from school in ... really ... four years. Homework is assigned, he just finishes it. My daughter is the same way. Outside of midterms and finals (out of fear/paranoia, not necessity), they do not touch schoolwork at home.
Despite not having taken a "real test" in their lives until enrollment, they placed in advanced classes. Despite them never receiving an independently graded assignment (or even one that had a grade written on it[0]), they both have a 4.0 GPA. My daughter had perfect scores in half of her classes last year.
They are happy kids who aren't stressed out at school (because those 45 minute daily sessions, apparently, covered a lot of ground -- my son still talks about things "he did in, like, 7th Grade, Dad!"
Really, though, forget all of the other reasons. It's worth doing it just for the relationship you form with your kids and that they form with their siblings. My teenagers don't act like teenagers. They act like happy young adults (because they are).
It wasn't hard. I did the majority of it with my ex- wife (through a high-conflict divorce and high-conflict early years ... that was hard ... worth it, though).
[0] You don't let your kids rack up debt by learning something less than very proficiently because you're the one that has to pay that debt when the later lesson comes that builds on that part, so yeah, they "got all As" in Home School ... because I don't like misery.
If you are offering a free service, that is quite time-intensive, and increasing numbers of people choose to not use it, then there should be more introspection going on. If it's happening in public education, I'm not able to see evidence of it.
It's clearly a growth not led by religious people, but by people who are charred from their experiences with public school systems
I'd argue that most "gifted" students are inherently dumber since they uncritically believe and internalize whatever BS their parents feed them. It's understandable that parents have desire to how power over their children, but at some point the state needs to step in and recognize child abuse for what it is.
Also, asians do best in those programs, not European descendants.
Projecting a bit much are we? It would be nice if you let your racism out of the discussion.
Honesrly, read on some history of mathematics and science. We ”Europeans” did not invent them. No single culture did.
Granted, our current global math and science traditions are European, but math and science in and of themselves are absolutely not European. They are universal. As in, you could literally be raised on a different planet by a different species and math would still be math, physics would still be physics.
This assumes that the blame obviously lies with the schools. Basically everyone I know that homeschools does it because they disapprove of tolerance. Should the introspection lead schools to embrace segregation again? It is going to be hard to bring people with such wildly different viewpoints together in harmony.
A few things I'll note:
- educational spending has almost zero correlation with outcomes
- the number one indicator of educational success is parental involvement
- homeschooling and charter schools tend to attract the outliers from both ends. The smart who are underserved where they are and the kids with problems whose parents are involved enough to search for solutions.
- the real losers are those whose parents can't or won't get involved and who aren't succeeding on their own
A few (much wealthier) towns over, the district wide PTA raises millions of dollars yearly to support additional programs and facilities, and the district can offer higher salaries because of the larger tax base. Again, lots of parent involvement, but there’s also more to be involved in.
This is the _most_ important thing. Parents keeping a laser eye on their kids' performance in school, and having their own standards that the school must live up to, regardless of what commitees and boards and suits and academics and "experts" say. Even if it's just a standard for math competence. If the school isn't up to the mark, either pull up the school for it, or switch schools, or after school classes if it's an isolated problem. Many would be surprised at how many parents either can't(common in first generation educated) or won't do this.
> Spending has no correlation with success
In a setting where more spending is for more labour (when the labour is not done by parents/family) this is not true. Primary schools giving individual attention to students for example will do better than those with 100 students a class. But in most cases, more spending leads to more unnecessary flashy stuff. So in the real world, what you are saying is true.
Charter schools like yours are also sorely needed in america where math standards are absolutely woeful compared to RoW.
- Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.
- With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching.
It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it's comparatively much easier to pull your kids out and homeschool them.
Name the left values; don't beat around the bush.
Observing remote education is not good visibility into pre-covid teaching.
I think we have a responsibility to have educated citizens.
Most philosophy surveys will also include some of the other sides, which you might not even recognize as such. Descartes and Aquinas are fixtures, and Heidegger (notoriously conservative and also a literal Nazi) often features in university level classes. The point isn't to indoctrinate you with any of these viewpoints, it's to teach you how to analyze their arguments and think for yourself.
The complaint was that the alternative wasn't discussed.
But continuing on that train, what would you want from mentioning alternatives to a theoretical framework? A framework is just a different way to look at the world that you can discard if it's not useful.
To give a programming analogy, if a course does a module on JavaScript exclusively with react, they're not teaching that vue, angular, or svelte don't exist and you should only use react. It's much more likely a statement that react is common and useful for people to be familiar with when they go into the outside world. Covering the long list of alternate frameworks, many of which the teacher will have never actually used in a serious way, is both difficult to do in a useful manner and takes away from the limited time available to cover what they can with sufficient depth.
Also we didn’t directly cover Marxism or atheist philosophy, my point was that the selected philosophies were the ones that just happened to all be related to that side of the aisle. Again, very good class, just using it as an example of hidden bias that I didn’t see until later
Locke probably wouldn't have come up, but 19th century European philosophers were all influenced massively by Locke and Marx is extremely European. Marx isn't on a different side from them, just a large part of an even larger conversation.
Dialectical Materialism is literally brainrot and the damage it has done to human history is unfathomable.
But hey, both you and I are telling anecdotes. The only conclusion for me is that public school exposes you to people that do not think like you or your parents. Something, we are less and less exposed to. If that is good, anyone has to answer for themselves.
Leftist academic thought has however had huge influence on modern art movements. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out why that might be.
I'm thinking this is fairly new. When I was in school, if I got bad grades or got in trouble at school, I got in trouble at home too. My parents were absolutely not calling the teachers complaining about grades. When I had trouble learning multiplication facts, they sat me down with flash cards every night until I had learned them, they didn't blame the teacher. This was in the 1970s/80s. This seemed pretty normal based on what I remember. When/why did it change?
Which values? I haven't gone to school in a long time.
One of my friends was home schooled. It was at least partly about religious values, but I think it was also partly about him being a bit of a strange kid and getting along better at home. He went back to public schools in middle school, and that was real rough but I think he was happy by the time he got to high school.
I'm sure there are many reasons to home school, but the one I hear about most is religious.
1. Gender is a social construct
2. Whiteness is a social construct and in particular has been used as a bludgeon against minority "non-whites" in the United States for a very long time
If you do not believe these things you are the problem. You lack education. You lack critical thinking. You are brainwashed.
Once you accept the simple facts as above, then you can finally explore the consequences.
(source: I went to a conservative christian school)
- Kids are never responsible for anything.
- Teachers are responsible for everything.
Here we had a case teenagers bullying their teacher – abused her verbally during school, posted deepfake revenge porn into internet, stole stuff from her garden etc. She cried for help and the case was investigated by commission that included people from people from ministry of education, police and psychologists. But the commission concluded that she was the problem – she lacked the skills to build a trusting relationship with kids.
Left-ish people tend to say "this doesn't happen in the real world, it's made up for internet arguments" - and I even said that for a while on this and a few other subjects - but that denial cannot survive extensive contact with the real world.
It's critical to remember that "reality has a liberal bias" does not mean "literally every detail of things liberals say is reality".
How is that clear? How would we know if it's indistinguishable if your studies didn't even look?
I'm not sure remote schooling during the pandemic is very representative of day to day teaching in school. At least that's the impression I got from my teacher friends back then.
> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass
This is no child left behind in action, which was implemented during W's term
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
^ This is the micromanagement that a ton of people claim to hate and get in their way on this site when folks are complaining about daily standups.
IMO, if you're worried about the quality of your kid's education then you'll either need to send them to a private or home school, which will stunt them socially because life isn't just one big private school or home, or encourage curiosity and learning at home to supplement their rote learning from school
Anecdotally, but I bet you see a lot of it, I can count on one, maybe two hands the number of times my parents went to anything at the school to see me do a thing. And for my kids, there's something just about every other week.
In reality, stories of homeschooling failure are probably no more common than stories of failure in public high school, they're simply more attention-grabbing.
You are saying: was homeschooled -> likes it and will do the same with his/her kids
The adults I know most against college went to college themselves.
The adults I know most against private high schools went to private high schools themselves.
Being really negative about your own education is an American tradition!
In particular, the "unschooling" approach (not always named such) is almost universally terrible.
But most of the homeschooled kids I know now are in healthy co-ops with defined curricula and socialization.
I wish there was another word other than homeschooling for “the parents who are trying to hide the fact that their teenager can’t read.”
Because it’s a real group but yea we are in a co-op that’s a wonderful balance between being in a classroom and being at home more than he would be with public school.
So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
Most of the adults you see at the various group things are stay-at-home moms. Most. Some stay-at-home dads. Some of the moms have part-time jobs. I don’t recall any dads with part-time jobs. But many dads are present while also working full-time. You get into a rhythm, have a schedule, etc. and you can work it out. My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
FWIW, my experience is that the dynamic at play in these situations is that women who run their own businesses or otherwise have high-powered careers tend to have a constellation of personality traits that is significantly shifted vs. those of stay at home moms, plus their daily lives are very different, so they don't really fit in. Saying that without value judgement, just an observation.
Sorry, couldn't let that one slide! :-)
I think a lot of how homeschooling can work, along with much of median/lower household income life in general, is misunderstood.
Source: Was homeschooled by a mom who worked.
There are at least two good answers to this:
1. The first is a via a home-schooling collective. With as few as 5 families, one can easily do a once-per-week rotation of home schooling responsibilities. Also note that the formal education part of this can be done fairly comfortably in 4 hours (even down to 2 hours with 1-1 instruction). As such, all that is needed is a 4-day a week job, or a job with a flex schedule who can do work on the weekend. I know one family that does something like this.
2. The second is to have a tutor do the instruction. For folks who are high earners, paying a tutor who can come in for 2-3 hours a day costs about the same as a mid-tier private school. Child care would still need to be covered, but that’s usually cheaper than a tutor.
So it’s doable, but either time or money will need to be sacrificed. I don’t think that’s a surprise.
That said, below are some things about home schooling that I’ve learned over the years from people who have done it:
- When done well, it’s probably close to an ideal education. When done poorly, it can mess up the kid, and many of these kids are very vocal about how bad it can be. Obviously there will be a whole range of outcomes between these extremes. Just be aware that it’s not necessarily a panacea, and it’s not necessarily an ideological cesspit.
- There is a ton of support for home schoolers in some communities, especially for socialization and specialization. Many people do not realize this.
- That said, some (perhaps many) home school parents are just ideological extremists — extreme beliefs, extreme (sometimes illegal) lifestyles, etc.
- A good litmus test of where a home school parent is on the thoughtful-extremist continuum is to ask them why they homeschool their kids. The thoughtful parents can rattle off dozens of learning opportunities that their kids have had that don’t exist or barely exist at normal schools. The less of these types of specifics they talk about, the more likely they are to have ideological reasons that they may or may not openly discuss.
- For folks who want a good learning environment for their kid, I strongly recommend a good Montessori school. I emphasize “good”, because some of them stray far from the Montessori ideals. This just requires a small amount of research and some observation. All that said, a good Montessori school almost always sets up a kid to be a solid person and life-long learner. Note that some kids absolutely hate the Montessori style, and you will know this in about a day or two. I will go out on a limb and say most of these kids will need special attention in home school contexts as well (imho).
> So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
I don’t think so.
Most of the people I know who home school are already stay at home parents (mostly mothers, but one dad), or they have plenty of disposable income to throw at the problem via tutors and home school support services.
I will also say that some parents absolutely punt on the education part, and they can do their part (often negligently) while doing a full time work-from-home job — think handing out some work sheets and pointing their kid(s) to an online learning environment with very little scaffolding. There are some kids who respond well to this, but most don’t.
But that has happened for a long time, at a rate high enough that you wouldn't need to see resignations to increase homeschooling.
Is this family well off financially? Of course they are. I suspect the data on homeschoolers is going to reflect a generally affluent slant.
So for everyone saying that homeschooled kids aren't well adjusted or have bad social skills, I'll offer the counterpoint that they might appear unadjusted at first, but humans can usually adapt to new environments, so homeschooled kids have a pretty good chance at acting "normal" a short time after leaving homeschool. Don't judge someone's awkwardness the first time you meet them, let them adjust a bit and see if they can assimilate.
When I was in university, there were several instances where people who’d known me for weeks or months found out for the first time that I’d been homeschooled, and expressed their surprise. (Surprise that I was “normal,” I guess, and not a social basket case, as the prevailing stereotype of homeschoolers seems to be.) They simply never thought to ask.
In fact there were even a couple of friends who surprised me by turning out to be homeschooled—when I should have known better than to assume one’s schooling background. But when society spends your entire childhood hammering you with untrue stereotypes about what you are (I heard well‐meaning “But what about socialization?” countless times growing up), some of it is bound to stick.
I have a 176 IQ, I'm now a highly paid professional who has made significant contributions to both open source software and to the invention of technologies that power the cloud. Obviously things worked out for me regardless of my circumstances. Most of the kids I went to school with are dead, in jail, or homeless drug addicts, so my presence certainly didn't fix that. If forcing me to be with them in school saved just one of them from a life of crime and drugs, was it worth forcing me to experience torture for no reason of my own making for my formative years? I would say no. Society is not more important than the individual, you must balance individual and social values against one another without taking either into preference.
I have no problem with spiteful bullies ending up in jail or dead after school, ultimately. It seems just and karmic.
> (1) education is just a ranking game
> (2) since the point of education is to help people learn
I feel like people who actually believe your situation was for the best must have a certain level of cognitive dissonance. Either that, or they just don't actually care about you and feel alright with hurting you for a chance of a slight gain for the people they do care about.
It's also a pretty hard sell to claim these kinds of situations are the best for society. If you could produce 2x as many billionaires by expelling the bottom 10% of the population from the education system (and imprisoning them for life), that would be better for society (financially). It might be worse for social reasons, but I kind of find that hard to believe.
This is why I think empathy doesn't scale. It's much easier to point people's empathy towards the person who is ruining their own life, and many others' at school, because they won't have a happy future. It's much harder to point people's empathy towards someone who will likely be successful in the future, even if they're being beat, stabbed, and abused in the present. Especially if they're not even being physically abused, just imprisoned for half their waking hours in a classroom. Empathy is great in very small groups, but not when you're setting policy for hundreds of kids in a school, thousands in the city, or millions across the state. At that point, empathy just ends up hijacked by the worst actors to redirect attention and resources to their own pet causes.
There is really nothing intrinsically good about the average public school. Many are filled with kids that aren't there to learn. From the attitudes seen in this forum, that seems to be OK, because school is paradoxically about "socializing", while most here report being bullied.
As noticed here many home schoolers have religious reasons for their choice. The reason is simple, "Don't send your children to Ceasar and then be upset when they come home as Romans".
That's on the kid, not contingent on whether school is public.
> most here report being bullied.
Anecdotes like this are not worth much. What do the stats say?
> There is really nothing intrinsically good about the average public school.
Schools don't just socialize, though that is also important. Whether they succeed at educating well depends on more than one factor, but policy & curriculum is clearly one. Kids are better prepared in some countries than others, still through public systems.
If people want to homeschool, let them. Public school should still be assessed accurately.
Yes and no. The interest of the kid to learn is on the kid/family, for sure.
However, the fact that a kid who has no interest in learning is forced to go to public school is a function of how public schools operate.
Again, free and required is a bad model. They should either be free and selective or, less ideally, available and costly.
This is a good way to ensure the most vulnerable members of your society don't get educated. But I suppose that might be a feature to some people.
Homeschooling is growing and will continue to grow because it is a cheaper alternative to private school (for people whose incomes aren't so high that the loss of one income eclipses the savings of not paying for private school, e.g. most people). The growth of homeschooling is probably highly correlated with the disconnect and distrust people have with public school. Public school already has an advantage, it's literally free. So it has to have noticeable problems people feel like they can resolve at home, for people to want to leave it behind
That depends. Often it means one parent stays home to educate and watch the kids, otherwise, someone else has to, and that usually costs money. If a wife otherwise would bring home a decent salary, then it isn't cheaper.
There is no "etc etc" in this context, we're talking about watching the kids while parents work.
> e.g. most people
Is false.
But as a general principle, encouraging kids further and further out of (group) human contact seems like an obviously terrible idea to me. We're already doing it with (lack of) play spaces, "no ball games", insane screen times (which equates to less "real" face to face time) amongst teens, awkward kids who can't even engage with a stranger under any circumstances - and meanwhile isolation and loneliness is on the increase, fear continues to rise about even letting your kid walk down the street to the shops, etc...
School is hard, as are parts of life. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult, it's not always what you want it to be, you get shouted at sometimes and big kids get their way and you don't get asked on the football team. Honestly, and sorry, but - a big part of growing up is learning how to deal with things. If kids don't, and you as a parent don't help them deal with the bumps, you and they will be building unrealistic expectations about how good this life is going to be, and they'll spend all their time sad or "triggered" or afraid, or isolated, or unable to join in. They'll get more scared, more isolated, more depressed. This is not what any parent wants.
This - of course and x1000 - need to be done with massive quantities of love and compassion. This isn't some Victorian hellscape I'm advocating here. Real bullying is real. Sometimes adults need to weigh in. Kids will find school hard.
But loving your kids is NOT giving them everything they want. It's teaching them how to navigate things that are difficult and awkward and - ultimately - helping them become robust adults.
I disagree with your premise that homeschooling pushes kids out of group human contact. People who attend public school often assume that kids who attend homeschool literally sit at home all day...which is just not...real?
State-run education is their orthodoxy, and anything that challenges that is tantamount to heresy.
Again, to re-iterate, I don't want kids to be uncomfortable as a norm, but bashing up against other groups, cultures, opinions - finding your friends, finding people you dislike, learning how to work with social cues - all of this is important grounding for later life. What do you spend your life doing? Bashing up against other groups, cultures, opinions.
I also can't help but notice that amongst our friends who homeschool there is a very strong correlation between parents who didn't go to school and their kids not going to school. Around us this rarely seems to be about some kind of positive choice, mainly it's parent exudes strong "I didn't like school" vibes and kid picks it up and runs with it.
Creating silos where you closet away and attempt to "protect" people from the outside world has never, ever been good. Social Media (should) have taught us that.
--
>> You can also learn outside of school, too.
> As someone who spent time in all three, I felt that my academic time was utterly wasted in public school. Sure, "learning outside" is always available, but that doesn't regain the time served in government mandated kid-prison.
---
>> No it wasn't! You learned how to interact with normal people. That's a lifelong skill.
> It taught me the necessity of being as viciously crass as my new classmates in order to fit in. If you consider that normal, then let it be known that I'm perfectly fine sticking with abnormal people thank you very much. I am perfectly content learning the lessons of Lord of the Flies by reading, and not by getting thrown into a small re-enactment of it.
> Though I suppose public middle school psychology was useful when I was an internment camp guard in southern Iraq. I'll grant you that.
Happy to share more anecdotes if people have questions.
You also have to spend an insane amount of time with the lowest performers, because with enough attention, they can improve dramatically.
But this creates tradeoffs. Should I neglect the students doing best?
One on one instruction is the best kind. It’s generally reserved for doctoral students.
I also tried homeschooling by eldest. It didn’t work.
Its insane more parents don’t homeschool.
so in the end we give attention to gifted and the struggling since there's very little you can do to children who are already decent and are capable of keeping up at most they lack discipline or motivation.
Gifted students especially.
Students who learn ahead don’t want to be told: “ok you have the material, so I’ll ignore you for a bit.” They want more. They want their questions answered, even if the questions aren’t part of the lesson plan.
Nobody wants to be told “we aren’t studying that today.”
You really can’t starve the rest of the class to cater to poor performers.
also there is very little excuse now with how advanced AI is getting at being able to explain subjects, it's all coming down to motivation, environment and the ability to use these tools in the first place - children struggle to use computers since we see it as a given, but to someone who didn't grow up with the incremental advancements it can seem very overwhelming.
I suspect, but can’t prove, that model trainers deliberately steer models away from creating tests and worksheets.
The reason being that when a human asks a written question: “who president of the US in 1962?” it’s very likely to be a part of a worksheet.
Novels don’t contain many questions like that, nor do non fiction. They’re mostly paragraphs. Most text is mostly paragraphs.
Naked question usually means worksheet. AIs know this, so their if you ask it a question like: “who president in 1962?” It responds which the most likely next sentence, a related question: “How was the Cuban Missile resolved?”
So there’s a huge discrepancy between the next most likely sentence based on training, and what a user likely wants. If I ask, “Who was president in 1962?” I don’t want another question, nor does anyone else.
But that’s what the training data provides.
So model trainers have to bias it away from worksheets. This isn’t hard to do, and is a normal part of model training.
I’ve personally seen this behavior in poorly parameterized or trained models. They love answering questions by assuming they are in worksheets. It’s a huge pain.
Interestingly it never happens with top-line models like ChatGPT.
Carefully hyperparameterizatiin helps, but I think you’ll have to adjust the weights too. But that likely makes it harder to make actual worksheets.
This is just a guess. But I suspect models are weighted to discount pedagogical materials because of how different they are from what the users often expect.
I don't mind the idea of teaching 10 kids, my way, and in and environment I can control. The thought of teaching 35 kids, mired in bureaucracy, is a nightmare.
American classrooms now come with risk of being shot, pervasive drug influence, cyber-bullying, etc.
Like why would I subject my kid to all these arbitrary hurdles
I believe that for kids have parents willing to provide it, home education (especially when tailored to the child) is always going to outperform other forms of education. There are trade-offs, and those trade-offs have become easier to deal with in the last 10 years even. Our kids each get the amount of socialization that works for them, have volunteer opportunities and community groups, etc.
The main reason it works, though, is that my wife is willing and our finances support her to do it full-time. I know there are plenty of families where both spouses can work while homeschooling, but for our particular needs that would never work out.
You are likely correct, if their experiences were to be anything like mine growing up. It was somewhat traumatic, honestly. I had learning and behavioral issues that I didn't know until I was an adult.
As a silver-lining, I suppose I also have to be somewhat thankful for what I learned. I feel somewhat well prepared to navigate the social and occupational issues that arise in workplaces because, despite my challenges, the working world is just as merciless if not worse.
In a way this is a return to older times when children would learn the trades of their parents. I think that's great, but I do wonder how kids will acquire the broader education. Knowing how to program is really only a small part of what makes me valuable.
But I am a math person, and we are homeschooling our 2 boys. My 12-year-old is able to understand mathematical concept and scientific topics that many high schoolers are never even exposed to. My wife does a great job with many other subjects as well. And we have many great homeschooling parents who group together to teach things they are specialized in (like construction, art, etc). Our homeschool group also has a lot of social time for the kids to just play together (mostly outside). It's awesome.
I think the quality of the education depends on the teachers. And a big part of being a good teacher is caring. Hopefully the parents will care more about their kids than any other teacher would. Additionally, we are in the golden age of homeschooling resources (mostly online).
Be very careful what your outsource to others.
I feel the same way about the value of early-years Home School and mainstream High School. Mom and I had agreed that we'd let them pick once they hit High School. That coincided with the end of the COVID lockdowns, so being lonely like everyone else, they picked Public School. Prior to COVID, I'd have put money on them remaining Home Schooled.
I did exactly the same things with my kids with regard to advanced math/science topics. Actual "sit down and learn time" was spent 80% on Math/Science and 20% on everything else. And I've found some things benefit being introduced way younger. Things like the theory of relativity are "accepted as fact" more easily when they don't stand in the face of 15-years of observation. It can be understood with cartoons and when the topic is studied -- in depth -- later, they're not having to start from "how, on Earth, does that make any sense?!"
Also its given me the chance to learn things that I missed during my primary and secondary educations. Going through each proof in Euclid's Elements again has been a lot of fun, and its been long enough that I have forgotten most of them, so the thrill of discovery is real for me too.
If you can make it work, you should make it work, even if that means moving to a lower CoL area, there are a lot of small towns in the US that have excellent amenities, and are great places to raise a family.
Additionally they have a lot of extra curricular activities they participate in ( sports, music, church youth group), that also gives them a lot of socialization time with others.
Something to keep in mind: "Homeschool" is a useless descriptor. It covers a spectrum from complete educational neglect to world class private tutoring. It includes cohorts almost indistinguishable from school, and cohorts that engage in cultish indoctrination.
Any criticism you might have for your idea of homeschool, there exists a type of homeschooling that addresses that criticism, and there will be someone in the replies ready to tell you about it.
Also a fun side effect, they mispronounced a lot of words that they had only ever seen in books but never heard out loud. One of them was self-aware enough to ask us to correct him.
I did that as a kid. Still do. I read more than I talk. Nothing wrong with that.
The flip side would be people who misspell words or get phrases wrong because they've never seen them in books, they've only heard them out loud. They talk more than they read. Nothing wrong with that.
Although both of those might be a clue as to what type of vocations would make someone happy.
An example:
- The numbers on reported satisfaction are taken at face value. But they are influenced by some biases.
-- Survivors Bias contributes to the satisfaction rates of homeschooling; It's hard to get into homeschooling but easy to get out of. As a result, those satisfied keep doing it while those dissatisfied with the public system are less likely to change.
etc etc
No one should be ashamed for teaching their kids to exist in a world that isn't always as loving as we all wish it was.
It’s basically public daycare for a lot of people. Including us.
The social aspect is important for us. The idea of having to find other people with kids for activities sounds exhausting. We’re a gang of neuro-spicy introverts. My social circle is comprised of people I’ve been friends with for 25+ years. All from my school days.
I dealt with a lot of bullshit at school. But overall a net gain.
Advocating for homeschooling is simply advocating for absolutely no regulation on schooling, which is fine for the Zuckerbergs and will condemn children like the Duggars.
as a former child I think home schooling is better in every way if there is a supporting environment built around it, but I also think public schooling introduces a lot of variety that is not seen in private or home schooling be it for better or worse, although my time in public school was rough and failed me in many ways I still wouldn't have it any other way.
1. Home schooling does not necessarily (and in most cases) does not mean a kid learning at home with parents. It only means parents have arranged for adequen learning through alternative means.
2. In many cases, multiple parents and their kids come together and take responsibility of their kids education. They may rent spaces, they may hire teachers and so on.
3. In many cases you have to satisfy government penpushers that you are doing a good job of this.
I guess homeschooling fits well with extreme individualistic American culture, no surprises there.
Education in the US is a complicated subject given the "extreme individualistic American culture" as you say. That will be present in the teachers and school districts, and the lesson plans can/will differ greatly between teachers and school districts for getting students to the general standard.
Of course people are fleeing public schooling when we’re selling the kids to big tech for laptops and services that require network connection to write a word document, enable cheating, and their data sold for profit without consent.
At home, parents can be flexible. They can let their kids use AI when appropriate or discourage its use. They don't have to wait for legislators to get involved. If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it instead of waiting for some committee to evaluate it.
How do you know if the math book is great if there hasn’t been consensus about it. The problem isn’t the committee that will always be there in some form. The problem is the politics the committee is used for. If the committee were to prioritize and offload their specific requirements for review instead of requiring substantial analysis twice then the school system would be just as quick.
Also, I see a lot of people arguing that exposure to “bad” kids is a point in favor of public schools, which seems insane to me. Growing up with a friend group of good kids is probably the biggest predictor of what a child’s adult life will look like.
As to the last point - one of the biggest benefits of exposure to “bad” kids is knowing whom to stay away from and making independent decisions on that. Parents are not going to be around to guide children forever. They need to learn to make their own choices.
Unless you live in a school district that’s really not that great I would never recommend homeschooling. Cloistering into echo chambers is not healthy.
"I got to spend time with my kids when they still wanted to spend time with me. Now as teenagers in no longer cool, but that's ok. I got my time with them and that makes me happy"
1 kid: one year behind but doing very well
1 kid: two years behind and not doing so well (in fact can't continue to academia unless things change drastically, in other words, will lose at least 1-2 more years if she does go to academia)
1 kid: two years behind and doing pretty well
This is the result of 9-11 years of public schooling. I feel like all 3 have very suboptimal outcomes, including the one doing very well.
I must say I am also getting very irritated by the "indoctrination". That was fine, if occasionally crazy, during the COVID years when the indoctrination was pretty progressive. Sometimes batshit insane, but let's say "well intentioned". Pro-climate claims ... that were bullshit, but at least pro-climate and generally positive and pro-humanity. Now one of their teachers is openly racist (in a class with 33% immigrants), and even though most keep it more subtle than him, this is a general trend.
So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
Keep them going to public school and give up?
>So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
Look up school ratings in your area and move is by far your best bet if you wish to continue public school. There is also the difficult truth that maybe your kids are the problem, but again school shopping could help with that depending on what programs they have.
The issue with that approach is that it's a lot of work, and I would love an alternative. But I don't have an alternative.
This is not surprising: homeschoolers are extremely confident in their own teaching abilities and extremely cynical about the abilities of others.
> Closures also gave parents a chance to experience public schools' competence with remote learning, and many were unimpressed. They have also been unhappy with the poor quality and often politicized lessons taught to their children that infuriatingly blend declining learning outcomes with indoctrination.
Why would a parent compare a novel learning environment to the pre-covid experience? Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home - do they use the internet at all?
They probably imagine they'll never encounter political topics from a perspective of which said parents do not approve. And they're probably not wrong to believe that.
Well funded public education is a bedrock of fair equal society (which is why the right attacks it ever since its invention).
Public education isn’t perfect but it is far better for individual and society than any alternative (including any religious run schools)
> Well funded public education is a bedrock of fair equal society
First we have to decide what a fair equal society is, and then decide that this is what we want, and then demonstrate that spending on public education helps to achieve this.
People I've spoken to about education who do not see it as I do will disagree with me on all three points.
Colin Powell [valued][1] (paywall) his public school education.
[1]: https://web.archive.org/web/20221108214853/https://www.wsj.c...
And maybe those kids aren't their property and society has decided that the rights of the child to their own wellbeing may actually trump "parents decide whats best" when and if those parents are very much not?
https://wonderyearsschool.com/
https://www.youtube.com/@asim-qureshi/videos
He has been documenting his children's homeschooling journey and I have to say the results are beyond amazing.
All of the kids were done with "high school" level education before the age of 15.
Daughters going to Oxford and Cambridge. They were accepted at 16 I think but the University told them they could not join until they turn 18.
What's really great is all the kids seem to be very well rounded and come off as pretty confident on their own. This can be seen in the videos on the YT channel.
Finishing "school" several years early is the biggest plus for me. Imagine being done with high school by the age of 14. The possibilities are endless. Learn languages, travel, learn real tangible skills, join various bootcamps.
Your kid can have so much "life" experience by the time they turn 18-20.
If you’ve read this thread, then you know most homeschoolers dispute that they live in a bubble.
> Sure, let's make homeschooling the norm, problematic kids will be the only ones who fill the ranks of public schools
I don’t see anyone in this thread advocating that. But I did see several arguing that homeschooling should be illegal. And homeschooling is illegal in countries like Germany, Sweden, and the Netherlands. Part of homeschoolers’ outspokenness against the usual tired stereotypes is because there’s real risk of governments prohibiting home education even in situations when it would be superior to the local public schools.
I have a 15yo son who plays sports and for the past 5 years, homeschooling has been a way to "red-shirt" kids - hold them back a year or two then re-entering them into public schools into grades behind their age. Literally purposely holding back their kids so they can be older as freshman.
A major problem with boys because of puberty, size etc around this age. The difference between a 14yo and a 16yo, or 16/18yo can be quite large at times. My son had a freshman on his team last year that could drive and had a mustache playing vs these tiny incoming freshman, it was so comical. He was 16 1/2 as a freshman. And the parents were on the sideline acting like their kid was the next coming of Aaron Judge. It REALLY hurts the rest of us playing the rules and taking education seriously when our kids are trying to make a team.
I've known several of these parents and they all are the same. They haphazardly put them into the bare min online courses, still go to work all day and stick them in front of computers to expect them to self teach for a few years. The moms would be stay-home types that didn't seem much educated themselves. The kids are spoiled entitled types who think they are top athletes already and would jokingly be calling my son at 11a telling him they are done already for the day and headed to the gym and playing Fortnite.
Now this is just MY circle, I am not saying there aren't very serious and capable parents out there really homeschooling and giving their kids a better education than public school, but I haven't met any in maybe roughly 10 I know. Most of them seemed to also be MAGA types poo-pooing public education and how they are brainwashing kids. It is really despicable that this is most likely happening ALL across America.
Education and manipulation aside, I would also think this isn't good the kids mental and social health as well. They already are on devices doom-scrolling enough nowadays, do we really want them hermits too now?
I applaud anyone putting in huge effort to home school a kid properly and with true care and teaching. But the image of them at a desk being taught by a real smart/educated parent following a true curriculum all day and on a schedule I imagine is ultra rare. And we are going to pay a price for this in the long run. Or not, GPT will just help them along to properly write that email for them when they are adults in a corporate world.
The dads especially need to get back to basics and stop these obsessions they have about their kids being athletic superstars. It's bad for EVERYONE. And starting kids at like 5 years old in sports is just stupid.
I have even felt that urge with my son at times when he was making Little League All-star teams each year and considered top 5 player in the league. But then you realize they are only 9-12 years old and playing on a mini field! So I relished in him just having FUN. It was so hard to be around those obsessive Dads when I was having fun practices.
We ended up moving our son to yet a third district after 2nd grade. Why? Because the principal he had in his elementary school mishandled an incident where three boys of another ethnicity shoved and kicked my son to the ground. The principal, in her infinite wisdom, made my son apologize to his attackers, I guess because he is white? We didn't press the matter, why bother? The handwriting was on the wall. We put in the work to open enroll him in another district, instead. Those are the options that many more rural communities lack.
Our current district is a bit further of a drive and that makes him/us feel like he is not really a part of that community. Nonetheless, it has done well for him and I will just come right out and say it's because it is less diverse and more affluent. It is not without its problems--mainly being far too sports-centric than the district my daughter attended, and generally a bit snobby and "affluenza"-ish, but no overt violence to speak of hardly.
One time we were leaving a football game one time and happened upon a family presenting their daughter with a brand new Range Rover, complete with a bow, in the school parking lot. Puke-o-rama! Why would you do that except to show off consumption and appearance of wealth to everyone else? Luckily, not that common, but you get the picture.
The good thing is, we had options and exercised them, but I wish we hadn't needed to, because we like our community and wanted to support it and the local families nearer to us. Every choice we made to get something we also had to give up something else. I think that's the same with homeschooling, too--I don't personally think it's a good idea, but it's not up to me how someone else chooses to educate their kids and I understand about only having certain options. My son is doing very well, now in high school, but he can never make a sports team because the competition is beyond ridiculous. Even tennis he got on some low rung team because there were a couple of superstar 7th graders who filled up JV and Varsity slots! It felt like a sort-of "old boy" situation because my son is pretty decent at tennis and beat one of those younger guys every time he played him. Forget football or basketball, you have to be pretty much college material to be on those teams. Hockey, same. My daughter never cared about sports, so we weren't prepared for that battle at all.
Getting children through school and into adulthood is not for the faint of heart.
One thing that concerns me about many pro-homeschooling comments is a kind of tear-down-the-schools attitude, as if schools were hopeless and irredeemable, despite the fact they're still educating 94% of students even at today's elevated homeschooling rate. Of course there are problems with schools, but on the other hand there are countless success stories, or at least countless non-failure stories, and educational outcomes tend to depend crucially on local factors, the location of the school and its socioeconomic environment.
I suspect that the vast majority of parents have neither the desire nor the capability to homeschool their kids. I certainly can't imagine my own parents doing it. In a sense, homeschooling is a luxury of the few. The absolute numbers can increase, but I don't think homeschooling can scale to the entire population. So whatever problems may exist in the schools, we have to confront and solve them, not just abandon them and pretend homeschooling is a societal solution. You might claim that hundreds of years ago, everyone was homeschooled, but I don't want to turn back the societal clock hundreds of years.
Another concern I have is the religious and/or political motivation of many homeschoolers. If homeschooling were just about educational outcomes for children, then we shouldn't expect homeschoolers to be disproportionately conservative in religious and/or political beliefs, yet my impression is that they are. It's certainly suspicious to me. And though I've had no involvement with K-12 education since I was in school myself, I've had a lot of involvement in higher education, first as an undergrad, then as a PhD student and lecturer. Frankly, the horror stories and conspiracy theories about left-wing indoctrination at universities are ridiculous and not based on fact or experience. So I'm quite skeptical of similar claims about K-12, especially since I saw none of that in my own childhood. (I recall being forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, for all the good that did.) There's a type of person who's set off if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" and consider that to be an act of war against them. There are still a lot of parents in the United States who reject biological evolution and would prefer that it not be taught in schools at all, or at least to be taught as "controversial."
I say live and let live, parents should be free to teach their kids whatever belief system they want without political interference. Much to the dismay of the left (and I say this, being a left leaning moderate... I know, bad word today), kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children, full stop. The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism, is only putting fuel to the fire in this surge in global fascism. At the risk of sounding too kumbaya'ish, we all just need to accept each other and recognize the real enemies to society is a global loss of empathy and the rise of transactionalism. Now that is something I could really get behind, forced empathy courses! :)
I didn't claim that they don't have a right. I just claimed to be skeptical of the idea that the primary motivation for homeschooling was educational outcomes rather than ideological outcomes.
> At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently.
If only they believed differently. ;-) It's no coincidence that children tend to adopt the same beliefs as their parents, no matter the country or region.
> I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion.
The last 20 years? The First Amendment of the US Constitution begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". The principle of separation of church and state is more than 200 years old.
> kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children
I don't know what label you'd want to put on me, but I would say that kids do not belong to anyone. I find the notion of ownership to be noxious, practically slavery. We have a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves (yet), but that doesn't mean children are simply the personal property and playthings of the parents. I think it's a disservice to a child to place them in a bubble and shield them from anything the parents don't happen to like.
> The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism
"they are their parents children" is not individualism, or certainly not individualism from the child's perspective.
Morover, from what I've seen and heard from homeschoolers themselves, they do tend to form, or indeed come from, specific communitites, and are not simply "lone wolf" homeschooling parents.
There are some parents who might be Yale law grads who might not be rich who opt for some homeschooling given the right situation, but these are the outliers and I'm okay with these, while most aren't.
I'm a bit of a unique case in that "it really should have been an unbelievable mess": this was done, almost entirely, while divorced from Mom. And we were not "amicable" through much of it. It was a decision we had both committed to before the kids were born and stuck with after the divorce. I have two children, not 4+ (maybe that's just my experience, but the first family I talked to about this had 7). I didn't do it for religious reasons, bullying reasons, "I hate teachers or public schools" reasons or because I wanted my children to win a bunch of spelling bees. I did it after researching options and concluding that I could educate my two children better than any other option available to them and I could do so without them spending all day in books. I believed I was taught arithmetic in a manner that made it harder for me to understand Algebra[0], and I didn't feel I was ever encouraged or otherwise directed "to learn skills and subjects on my own." The top two, though, were "I wanted self-learners" and I, my son and my daughter are diagnosed ASD (type 1); Mom probably is, too, but getting a diagnosis as an adult is combinations of difficult/pointless.
After the early years (probably 4th grade on, earlier for my youngest), the average Home School day became 45 minutes of book/traditional learning work (often less) from Home School curriculum, usually another 45 minutes of self-directed study and for the most part the rest of the day was for themselves to direct (with restrictions; video games were limited to creative and some other specific titles but our children had far more freedom than most). We did weekday only (with a lot of vacation) and September-April. There was simply no way to make the materials go any longer.
They did not take tests (at least, not in the way they're taken at school) until they took their first test in 7th and 9th grade. We, like most Home School parents, started off trying to "replicate school approaches" at home and discovered most of them exist because of schools. My favorite is "grades." If someone asked, "4.0". And they'd assume it's "because I'm Dad" and assume I'm grading lax. I'm not grading at all. We work on the material until it is learned above proficiently. And as a parent Home Schooling, that is the only path to success that doesn't involve misery because if you let them have a mulligan on something, it'll be built upon later and you and they will drown. You need grades in mainstream school, you need "pass/fail" with an "A" being the bar for passing in Home Schools.
I didn't admit most of this in the past, especially not the "45 minute" bit. I straight up lied about it to anyone who wasn't a Home School parent. I had family and friends actively discouraging me every single year that I did this. I admit it, now, because they're top students in their mainstream school and have been since day 1.
My children, like everyone else's, got lonely after the COVID lockdowns and we'd always told them they can decide what to do when my oldest reaches High School. It was sad, suddenly every kid is home but nobody's allowed to play together and even if they could, all of their peers were spending the whole day trying to replicate a classroom via video-calls. My kids were lonely, bored, and unhappy. The day-time Home School activities (that most people are completely unaware of) had been tried up for two years and didn't seem to be coming back. So we put them in Public Schools and lucked out that Mom was located the #4 district and the #1 High School in that district. It's been four years; my son is a Senior.
That first test taking experience landed them in accelerated courses. They started with and have continued to have a 4.0 GPA. They get the homework done at school. They might study for mid-terms and finals. My daughter, last year, I think had half of her classes with every single point earned. They've bested me in every imaginable way (I had a rocking 2.5 GPA in High School). They take school very seriously, but every year they've had a portion of the class that's been review from things we did in Home School.
If it seems unbelievable that I'd get these results on so little time, have a conversation with other Home School parents (assuming their children have some external validation to their education, otherwise we all lie). Consider that I have two children, not 20. You can basically read your own child's mind up until they reach their teens (much longer if they spend most of their time around you instead of peers at school). Being able to read your student's mind is an incredibly unfair advantage. It's not even that "you notice more quickly when you're going to slow or they're not understanding" it's that you anticipate it. I knew what parts of math I would have to slow down with for my son, they were different for my daughter (long division was daily fits with tears and all for a few weeks). Most of the time, with learning, there's a lot of burst/buffer/stall cycles and the sending and receiving end take a long time to figure out when one is in a sub-optimal state. We didn't do rigorous lesson plans (that's for keeping a class full of kids on the same page), we let them dictate how fast or slow we moved based on how much or little they struggle.
I hesitate to say "Just because we only spent 45 minutes in the books doesn't mean we didn't spend the rest of the day learning in other ways" but if you saw how a day was conducted, you'd conclude we didn't. My kids were enrolled in extra-curricular activities, but probably fewer than most mainstream school kids. They had weekly random activities that would be considered "field trips" in school. We were probably more strict than most parents with some things, because we could be: my kids received their first mobile phones at, I think, 13 and 15. We allowed no more than two hours per day of "watching a video, television show or movie." But (outside of inappropriate content) they were mostly unrestricted with which video games they could play and they played plenty (my daughter can slaughter me in just about everything, but I stopped playing for a decade while they were young). My daughter has taught herself to read music, guitar tabs and play Guitar, Bass, Piano and she sings. I played piano for 15 years and she's learned in a year what it took me five with formal lessons. She's taught herself to paint. My son is mini-me, computers, 3D printers, CNC, programming and any other electronic toy.
The reason I didn't do it for, though, turned out to be the reason I'm most thankful that I accepted the minor sacrifice: I wouldn't have had the arrogance to pray for the closeness and kind of relationship I have with my kids, today. I know my parents dreaded going to parent-teacher conferences. Those are my favorite!
[0] And, unintentionally favored an approach that ended up becoming Common Core math in my state, which is just loathed by parents ... which is too bad, because it worked very well for my own kids.
https://selfdirectededucation.neocities.org/pdf/JTG%20The%20...
A former teacher of the year, Gatto became very influential in early homeschooling movements.
Parents or potential parents interested in education and schooling might also want to read Maria Montessori, and John Holt's books "How Children Fail" and "How Children Learn."
We as a species actually know quite a bit about raising children, socialization, and education. I think we get duped by our surrounding society and government institutions hijacking those goals in service of control, indoctrination, conformity, and maintaining class and power structures. Schools serve just as much, if not more, to prepare children to work as "productive" members of a capitalist culture, to do what they get told, as they do to teach our kids anything or help them learn to get along with other people. Call me an anarchist or Marxist, I don't care.
I'm just going to say that "homeschooling" is not a single thing and it's useless to pretend it is. In fact, "public school" is not a single thing and it's mostly useless to pretend it is.
I went to public school. My kids were a combination of public primary school, home schooling, and local community colleges. That experience gives me... well, very little in terms of predicting or understanding what others' experiences were like.
50-kid public schools (the size I went to) can be great for interacting with a diverse group of people -- like, actually interacting with them, not just attending the same school as them. It's also common for "diverse" in this case to mean "kids from a range of socioeconomic situations who are 95% the same race or religion" -- most small schools draw upon a small rural population that is often pretty homogeneous. (That was my experience.)
500-kid public schools naturally have much more diversity in total, but are totally random in terms of what an individual kid will actually experience. It's common for the kids to rigidly stratify themselves. It doesn't matter if there's a kid of a different color from you in your math class if you're surrounded by people like you and he's surrounded by people like him. Athletics are better at mixing people (by forcing a different stratification!), but it's easy to avoid having to deal with "them" even there if you don't want to.
Home schooling varies even more.
Yet that whole argument is also pushing a narrative of "good" vs "bad": being forced together with diverse people is good, so environments where that happens are better! But that's not true either, there are tradeoffs. I'll describe it in terms of stereotypes: public school kids get more exposure and experience with a wider range of kids their age. Home schooled kids get more exposure and experience with adults and kids of other ages. (I'm not saying either of these is universally true, but just go with it for now.) Which is better? You can argue that it's critical to survive the social pressure cooker of traditional schooling because you'll have to handle the same situations as an adult. But you can also argue that if you look at what's happening in public schools, those kids may be good at dealing with each other but they're often failing when faced with the real world. They depend on the collective consciousness that comes from being surrounded by similar-aged people physically and electronically, they're helpless when the responsibility is no longer diffused and they are actually the one and only person who can solve a situation, and they have a sense of entitlement that anything hard is unfair. The stereotypical homeschooled kid is vastly more prepared for many life situations.
So which environment is "better"? mu
My parents started homeschooling me because the public schools near where they lived then were supposedly subpar (Miami in the mid 80s, I have no idea if what they believed is true). When they moved to Michigan in 89 they continued homeschooling me and later my younger sister because they’d gotten used to it and a big court case had just been won (or was shortly after we moved) making it officially legal there.
I never complained because I did have a good social group through church, the neighborhood, and a strong homeschool group in the area that organized weekly park days, some coop classes with professional teachers, but more than any of that it gave me so much freedom.
My mom did a good job teaching me by 4th or 5th grade how to teach myself given course material, the library, and her or my dad when I needed more. She did standardized testing for us every year and I was able to complete 12th grade just before turning 17. They pushed me to use the local community college for math and science by 14 because they didn’t feel equipped with more advanced topics. They got me into summer science camps at the college I ended up attending and getting my undergrad at.
Every family I knew in the group were doing it for different reasons and did things differently but shared tips, curriculum, and really their lives with us. It was a very tight knit community despite spanning over 600 square miles. Some probably got stronger educations and more opportunities, for many different reasons, socioeconomic and others. As I remember most were well adjusted and successful as adults.
I mentioned freedom above and I’ll end on that. Once I’d been taught how to teach myself the sky was the limit. I had the opportunity to focus 4 hours straight on school work and then to work with my dad at construction sites, swinging a hammer, eventually part of a crew of 4 every afternoon building houses or whatever. That started at age 12. By 14 I wrote my first business plan with a friend, raised $10k from family and private investors, and started my first business (VRcade in Jackson MI, summer of 96). By 16 I had an IT consultancy. I don’t think I’d have had as many opportunities like that if I’d been at the local highschool from 7:30-2:30pm every day. I had friends at the school and a few of them worked service jobs after school but that was pretty rare.
So what did I do for my two kids? We chose public (charter) school for them but we got super involved. My wife and I volunteer there a few hours a week, teaching gardening and helping where needed. Neither of us felt we had the patience or skills to be full time educators and Covid proved that out when the kids were home for 6 months. I’m still not sure what magic my mom used to teach me how to teach myself. The important thing is we found our community at the school and amazing teachers, many of whom have been there 1-3 decades.
I am trying to instill the values and initiative my parents (both entrepreneurs) empowered me with. We’ve been paying for instruction for our 11yo at a (unofficial) trade school for a few years and now the same school pays them to help with instruction when they have big beginner classes. My youngest is leaning more towards tech like me and is super into games so I’m going to try and stretch my generalist programming skills to empower them in that arena.
All this to say I think it’s ok to have many ways to do things and find the way that fits your family. I really appreciate public schools because many wouldn’t have the opportunity for an education otherwise and I try to contribute back to that as much as I can even though it wasn’t my experience. And I support those who have chosen homeschooling and figured out how to make it work. Private schools I’m a little more meh on but I’ll do my best not to judge, lol.
I raised and homeschooled three children. One of my daughters homeschooled from second grade to the time she started college. My other two children decided to attend public school at various ages, and then mixed that with homeschooling because I didn't force them to attend school.
Infants have obvious personality tendencies. Some seem curious and outgoing, others afraid and nervous. Some babies seem happy and comfortable with other people, and some recoil and cry when approached. They don't start as blank slates. The family environment, siblings, peers, and the school environment can exacerbate innate tendencies or push children to change. A shy child may withdraw and develop social anxiety at school, or turn more extroverted and confident. Personality traits change throughout our lives, and that happens faster and often more dramatically in young children.
"School," "homeschooling," and "socialization" don't describe specific or uniform experiences, though people use those terms as if they do. Some children have loving and nurturing home environments, some suffer abuse. Some children attend well-funded and staffed schools, others spend their years in a prison-like environment with the emphasis on crowd control. Some teachers have a talent for teaching and subject mastery, they can inspire children to learn. Others seem resentful, incompetent, disengaged, even cruel. General statements about public schools, teachers, and the process of socialization don't mean anything because of huge variations across broad spectrums in multiple dimensions.
When asked, teachers will cite parental engagement as the most important determinant of student success. Many, probably most, parents use school (starting with infant daycare) as a place to park their kids while they work, trusting strangers they rarely meet to raise their children. When you watch a classroom of children interact with the teacher and each other you can pick out the kids who have involved parents and those who don't. Of course most parents have no choice for economic reasons. Homeschooled kids tend to come from two-parent middle (I'd say upper middle) class families for that reason -- few families can afford to have one or both parents lose so much work time. Several studies of homeschooled children implicate family socio-economic status and income in the success of the children, already advantaged compared to the majority of public school kids.
Parents take a wide range of approaches to raising children, generally with little or no training or preparation. You have a child and suddenly you have complete responsibility for another human being, making decisions on the fly, subjected to conflicting advice and guidance. That other human being has their own personality, will, requirements, and eventually desires and opinions, and you have to discover those and adapt to them because children don't come with labels or documentation. Some parents pay little attention to their kids, often because the parents have too many economic, relationship, or other problems of their own. Some parents treat their kids as extensions of themselves, a chance for a do-over, version 2.0, and will start prepping their child for the future the parent wishes they had regardless of the child's inclinations and desires. Some parents want to control their children, usually in the name of protecting their child from the world. Parents who don't recognize and respect their children as separate individuals can do a lot of damage, both in socialization and in academics, and you see the results with both schooled and homeschooled children.
In fifteen years of homeschooling my own children I spent a lot of time with other homeschooling parents. The terms "homeschooling parent" and "homeschooler" refer to such a broad spectrum of motivations and approaches that they doesn't usefully describe anything at all. Some parents want to raise their children in a faith tradition (I met fundamentalist Christian parents, Mormons, Muslims, Jews). Some parents want to raise their children with no faith tradition (secular homeschoolers), but then push their own woo-woo and new-agey beliefs on their kids (opposition to vaccines, mindfulness, astrology, homeopathy, "Indigo children," etc.). Both religious and secular homeschoolers can indoctrinate and control their children, and put their own beliefs, desires, frustrations, and fantasies into their kids' heads. I call that another form of not respecting the child as an individual.
The socialization topic comes up so much when talking about homeschooling that I have to say something about it. Whether schooled or homeschooled, children get exposed to adults, other children, and peers their own age. Each child will react and adapt to their specific circumstances according to their personality. Nothing inherently prevents homeschooled kids from enjoying a rich social life, but parents often restrict social activities, and with whom their kids socialize. Nothing inherent about the school environment magically "socializes" kids. Some children thrive in the school environment, others graduate or drop out with emotional trauma. Some schools offer more stable and safe environments than others, largely a function of ZIP Code in the USA.
Homeschooling at its best takes parental engagement to the extreme: parents take complete control over, and responsibility for, their child's education both academically and socially. Parents might get good results from the right schools if they engage with the teachers and pick the right school (thus the popularity of private schools). Parents who recognize and respect the individuality of their children, and don't treat them as clones or property, who actively take part in educating their child (whether at home or school), have a good chance at raising a well-adjusted and functional adult. The less the parents engage and take responsibility, the less the parents respect their children as discrete individuals, the more likely they will raise a child with academic failings and maladjusted personalities.
Look at the results all around us, the products of public schooling and disengaged parenting. Homeschooled kids may have the same problems, but in my experience that happens less often, especially if you exclude the large number of religious fundamentalist homeschoolers in America.
Specifically for the HN crowd (to which I belong)... people who work in the software profession that cannot measure what we call productivity, a profession that cannot agree on "best practices" around even trivial things like indenting, should step back and take a more humble approach to opining and lecturing about parenting, education, and homeschooling. No one knows the right or best way to raise children, or how to "properly" educate them. Instead we have a lot of opinions and traditions and government-imposed rules, some useful and some bullshit. As parents we have to sift through all of that and make decisions on the fly that can dramatically affect our children for the rest of their lives. We can't refactor away a bully, a cruel teacher, neglect, or the effects of expecting an iPad to substitute for attention and care.
I heard all the stories about how homeschooled kids get better standardized test scores and generally enter college with fewer remedial courses, better academic outcomes, etc. I heard all the arguments that "actually, we do socialize, because we can still do Scouts and sports and blah blah blah."
It was all horse shit.
I do not know a single homeschooling family that did not have an issue with the parents eventually slacking off on checking up that the kids were doing the work. And, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of the kids just skipped doing any work for most of the year. There would be a mad scramble at the end of the year to concoct a fraudulent portfolio to present to the state-required evaluator. And when the dust settled and all the spankings were done and all the tears were dried, new promises were made to not do it next year. New threats were made that you could "get up at 6am and get on that bus."
It took me until my 40s to realize it wasn't my fault. The people who were the responsible party--i.e. my parents--stopped acting responsibly. The person who is so incapable of being responsible that the state won't even let them drink, drive, or vote (all activities infinitely easier than trying to teach yourself)--i.e. my self--was the one who had all the blame lumped on him.
This wasn't a unique experience. I think maybe 1 kid out of the 30 I knew did not have this experience at least once in their homeschooling life. That one kid was perhaps the smartest, most mature of us; or perhaps she just feared her parents the most. She's also dead now, having killed herself in her early 30s.
For me, it was 4 times.
It was incredibly traumatizing. I lived the first 20 years of my adult life believing I was fundamentally a dishonest and untrustworthy person, and therefore unworthy of anything, especially love and career success. What I was was an irresponsible kid, aka "a kid", who had practically no supervision.
Every parent always said publicly they were doing it for academic reasons. In private, amongst themselves, the true reasons came out: sequestration away from "unauthorized" religious, political, and social ideas. And it always, always leaned right. We couldn't go to school because they were Teaching Evolution As If It's Fact When It's Just A Theory At That School. We couldn't go to school because Ever Since The Immigrants Started Moving Here To Take All The Apple Picking Jobs The Crime Has Been Through The Roof At That School (what the local family practice doctor cared about apple picking jobs, I could never figure out as a child). We couldn't go to school because They're Teaching Homosexuality Is Not An Abomination At That School.
Meanwhile, every single child I grew up with had to face a cliff moment where they had to decide if our collective experience was abusive. The few of us who said yes managed to get through college without dropping out, get moved away from home, get through rounds of suicidal ideation, self-medicating, therapy, antidepressants, and maybe eventually coming to terms and having happy productive lives.
Or they said no, it was fine, and they now live in poverty, have broken homes, still-active alcoholism, or are dead from suicide.
My own mother might be developing dementia and doesn't seem to recall at all things my sister and I agree we remember clearly. Things I've heard my friends repeat in their own stories. Things they've said their own parents also deny. I grew up incredibly lonely. My parents not only sequestered my sister and I from our municipal community, but also to some extent from our homeschooling community, because the one silver lining about my own particular experience was that my parents were not religious zealots. I grew up in constant fear of the State taking me away from my parents just because my mother took me to the grocery store during school hours (a thing my mother asserted could happen, so I better behave to not draw attention to us). I grew up believing society was going to collapse at any time. I grew up believing I was certainly going to Hell because, even though my parents claimed to be religious, we didn't go to church.
To this day, despite the intellectual knowledge that I'm really no different than anyone else, I still cannot shake the feeling that I'm always the outsider looking in, always the interloper trying to masquerade inside, and decode the secret workings of, the social groups I'm in.
This is incredibly difficult for me to talk about. There are many things I still cannot talk about, so please resist the online commentator urge to infer things about my current relationships.
I see people today talking about "we're thinking of homeschooling our children." Not just online, but in my own community, too. I want to scream at them that they have no idea what a gigantic mistake they are entering into. Even assuming they can avoid the dishonest reasoning for why they are doing it, even assuming they will perfectly execute an educational plan for their children over the course of 12 years, they are at the vet least forcing an outsider's complex on their children.
Yes, parents who send their children to public school could still be abusive. Yes, children who do go to public school also develop outsider complexes and plenty of other mental health issues. But at least the child will have a better chance to see that there are alternatives. At least the child will have a better chance to learn that they are a member of a shared society. At least the child will have a better chance to become independent from their parents.
And by being at home, time can at least be used for self-guided exploration that are likely to be more useful than whatever they decided to teach in the current era at school (outside of language/math/science later on it's all thinly disguised propaganda anyway). If you are focused on the same things as everyone else at the same time you are not actually building strength around your interests/characters, the only purpose is to make you fit a basic template so you can be "useful" in the labor market. The idea of public school is to make a tool out of you, before anything else.
What you are complaining about is having shitty parents, which is a problem with bad outcomes, regardless if you go to public school or not. And even if you are successful at public school, there is little chance those parents will pay for later studies, so you are mostly setting yourself up for disappointment. You might as well learn to figure out stuff on you own, because you'll need that skill more than anything else when it will be time to leave your shitty parents.
I understand the frustration that comes from the feeling of having "missed something" but I can assure you that unless you were leaving in a very good school district (aka rich, which doesn't seem the case) you really didn't miss anything. Most of the real learning is done outside of school, inside school is mostly endoctrinement.
You do your children no favors teaching them they exist outside of the greater social dynamic. You teach them that the society in which they live, which they cannot escape and they must deal with for the majority of their lives without their parents, is not good enough for them. That might be fine for the rich and famous who have a completely different society they can count on to provide opportunity and support for their children, but it doesn't work for the rest of us who have to scrape a living together on our own ability to communicate our value.
You speak of indoctrination. Homeschooling is nothing but indoctrination to the parents ideology. If your ideology is so great, you shouldn't need to sequester your children away from society to convince them it is right. Children are born without prejudice. If they are receiving bad information in public school, it is trivial to teach them otherwise because children inherently trust their parents. Even children who grow up in the most abusive of homes have a hard time coming to terms with the abuse and discarding what their parents did to them. Homeschooling exploits that inherent trust to swing the indoctrination pendulum in the opposite direction.
You say that my experience was due to having abusive parents. Yes. Yes, that is absolutely correct. It takes abusive parents to choose to homeschool their children. By choosing to homeschool your children, you prove yourself an arrogant, self-centered person. Everything that follows thereafter is an extension of that.
Maybe the school _environment_ that a child has access isn't great, right? But I don't think that says anything about teachers.
The first 10 minutes of your home-school day you've beat that statistic. After two or three hours, you're up to a month of class time.
Of course they don't do that; they just lecture. Which is something you can get online (Khan Academy).
It's all about the homework and tutoring, baby.
All you have to do is learn along with your home student, and validate their learning experience. Helps if you catch on quicker, but not even necessary.
Nobody educated to teach is actually qualified to do so by virtue of said education. Teaching is largely a personality-driven and experience-acquired skill.
Anyone who takes it seriously gives up nothing.
In San Francisco where I live the public school system made the decision to not offer algebra until later for egalitarian reasons. Basically since they couldn't bring up the students that faired poorly in math, they delayed the subject for everybody. Along the same lines, they took the one high school dedicated to the highest achieving students and turned it into a lottery system rather than something earned.
Yes, of course you're right, kids will be competing on all those subjects. But the idea that public institutions are somehow the safeguards of fundamental academic achievement is just out of touch.
Of course, San Francisco public school's embrace of socialist/egalitarian drive identity politics is just one example of public education failure. Elsewhere in the US in these times, other school districts are being turned effectively into seminaries because the other political side has other doctrinal objectives. In neither case is learning how to think or how the world really works is important.
Homeschooling doesn't necessitate going into a dark room somewhere and closing/locking the door. Sure, some may do that... but majority simply don't. Suggesting that there aren't paths to good socialization outside of public school is just rationalizing a position and ignoring the reality that many home schoolers don't operate in isolation. We're a social species and we tend to seek out others. This is even true for homeschoolers who can collaborate or engage in all manner of social opportunities that exist amongst a coalition of homeschoolers or they can take advantage of the social activities which are available in most communities of any size. Again, we're social creatures and we'll give into that impulse. To suggest that has to be nurtured by a public institution or is somehow unavailable outside of a public school just isn't credible on its face.
As others have said all up and down the thread, you take measures to build that social circle and interaction. And I can tell you from direct personal experience... a public school offers positive interaction opportunities to some, but wholly negative and even damaging to others... public schools absolutely offer a social experience. Whether that's good or bad in my experience is at best a case-by-case call.
LLM's have revolutionized the way people learn and utilize what they have learned. The future is 8 year old material science lads doing chemistry in their step-mother's RV
https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/the-test-score...
TFA does not even begin to grapple with the single most important issue, which is who is actually doing the homeschooling.
This is only an option for certain families, with parents with enough bandwidth and knowhow to do this effectively. That excludes many tens of millions of Americans.
I think this is really about class, race, and religious segregation. Families can do what they want, of course, but this framing makes it sound like failing schools are the whole problem and I don't think that's the whole story.