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Comment by prng2021 | Hacker News Reader

prng2021

Everytime I see these kinds of arguments, it sounds like someone desperately trying to argue that a park playground is almost as entertaining for kids as an amusement park. Your example of 5 kids socializing with each other is definitely better than 1 kid at home. It’s also definitely worse than learning to socialize in a school of 500 kids each day. This is undeniable unless you have an argument of how a pool of 500 kids would somehow have less diversity of personality, thought, languages, physical features, intelligence, etc.

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The way I look at it if I were to end up homeschooling my kid wouldn't socialize with the ~5 kids in the co-op.

* 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.

In my neighborhood:

* 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.

and what does “covering 2 years of math and reading in 6 months” do for you? getting ready to send your kids to 9-5 grind when they are 12?

I hope they’ll have more options than I did. I never wanted to be a SWE working in social media, but grad school in pure math showed me I wasn’t good enough. A common story.

your kids will have amazing opportunities just because you are obviously a kick ass parent. but I don’t think squeezing two years of math in 6 months will do anything

As a bright student who was never challenged in K-12, I can unequivocally state that this ultimately hurt me in the long run. I seriously didn't know how to study and didn't care to try learning when I actually needed it in some of my undergrad courses.

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).

same-ish for me but times are different now. kids these days have all the knowledge in the world at their fingertips and it is really up to the kids (with a little guidance :) )

You can't forget the projects that are supposed to teach you that you're really gonna regret it if you don't have good study habits that you skate through fine without developing those habits. Causes all future teachers to lose credibility.

Or just because math is awesome and knowing more is just great knowledge to obtain.

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.

It means they can get to the fun stuff that much faster. Speed run grinding the basics.

When do you work to pay for your life? And have time for your self?

>This is undeniable unless you have an argument of how a pool of 500 kids would somehow have less diversity of personality, thought, languages, physical features, intelligence, etc.

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.

What social conformity is forced by schools these days ? Only one I can really remember was we had specific uniforms for PE (basically just gym shorts and a tshirt)

not the school administration, other students.

So, good training for exactly the same pressures they'll face as adults?

well today’s parents do just about everything except prepare their children for adulthood

I’m not against public schools, but pretending the social pressures are anywhere near similar is wrong.

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.

They are the same pressures. They occur in the same proportions.

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.

Probably AI generated.

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.

> They are the same pressures. They occur in the same proportions.

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.

If “the rituals” are so subtle that I don’t notice them then it’s not the same pressure then is it?

Children are really good at this. Adults stop trying for various reasons.

“Humans are weird in a way that 'public school culture' tries to paper over.”

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.

Since you said you're genuinely curious - the answer to your first question is no. I'm grateful for what diversity and creativity does exist - and I recognize that even with public schools in the mix, it's more than what existed for most of human history. But public schools have certainly been a retarding force in the generally positive developments we've seen since my grandfathers' time.

Incidentally, they're only a little bit older than that, so we shouldn't pretend they're some deeply tested social technology.

Everyone will eventually be exposed to some form of forced social conformity. You cannot shield your children from it forever. It is better that they experience it now and you do your job as the parent to teach them how to handle it appropriately.

I went to a school of about 50 kids, and I often wished I’d been at a school of 500 or more kids, but looking back I’m very glad my family didn’t opt for the school of 5000 kids.

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.

My son is in a co-op with around that number of kids, but that's total (through HS).

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

But it may be much better than dealing with the problems that come with having 500 "random" kids to socialize / interact with. Everything's a tradeoff.

Yeah, wouldn’t want kids to learn how to deal with problems.

Dealing with adult problems shouldn't be something kids have to learn, as long as the problems scale with their development that's not a problem

I think quality over quantity matters. There was no one at my academic level at the public school, but two lived at my house. If you're worried about social skills, why do you expect an open admissions school to be able to train your children better than a more curated social group? You could say, "I don't trust parents to actually give their children experiences that would be beneficial, because maybe the parents are bigots or something," which like, sure is true. Lots of parents are like that. But they already pretty much have free reign to put their child in the local Bible Bootcamp instead of the public high school, so you're not really preventing this bad thing from happening, but you are preventing a lot of parents who would give their children a better experience than the local vaudeville show.

Except you don't interact with a meaningful section of those 500 kids you get stuck most of the day with a small % all the same age as you and told not to talk to each other.

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