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Comment by Aboutplants | Hacker News Reader

“And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.”

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.

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I had the opposite experience. I was home schooled from 2nd grade through high school, but I didn't just spend all my time alone with parents. My family was part of a home-school co-op, I played in the local youth symphony, and I had a job working at the local university when I was 16 and taking college classes there. I also have a large extended family.

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.

Of my closest friends when I was in high school, the one with the best social skills had been home schooling since I met him when he was 10. However, he did participate in extracurricular activities at the local public school, like a computer club in middle school and then theater in high school. The only area he was really lagging at age 18 was in math, but that reversed a few years later and now he has a STEM PhD and has been teaching at a large state school for the past decade and a half.

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 dunno. I think I could spin a narrative where public middle school dynamics (that is, bullied quite a bit) created issues for me that hampered my ability to succeed in social settings.

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".

Sounds like you had a hard time transitioning. Sorry for that.

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.

Seeming mature to an adult isn't the thing in question though, is it? Not feeling or appearing awkward when interacting on their own in their 20s is what is being criticized. The anecdotal evidence you present doesn't include home schooled children in their 20s as far as I can tell.

It doesn’t but they seem on a trajectory for adulthood that appears just fine compared to to others.

Homeschooled kids have much more flexible schedules which can allow them to do things in the community during the daytime that are not available to kids who have to go to school in-person full time.

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.

Because I've met several homeschooled adults over the years, and talking to them that's something most of them had in common when explaining the impact it had on their life. Looking for more objective data I found this one source that seems to be written by people not already convinced of the desirability of homescooling [1], forgive me for being skeptical of the objectivity of places called "national home education research institute". Overall it paints a more positive picture than I had expected, but also highlights it's limitations.

[1] http://hks.harvard.edu/sites/default/files/Taubman/PEPG/conf...

From those slides (I did have to open them via google, the direct link didn't seem to work):

  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)

It is weird how adults are looking at children and assessing their social abilities. You would need to ask the children’s peers what they think.

One could say this is where the free market of schooling comes into play. Does it make more economic sense for businesses to choose those with social skills learnt from home schooling, or ones who have not been home schooled? Definitely curious to see where this goes.

If only it was actually a free market. Republicans are actively kneecapping public education so they can pump money to the schools that are free to to discriminate and kick out underperforming kids

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