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Comment by AllegedAlec | Hacker News Reader

> We cannot possibly expect all parents to take proper care of their kids. This has never been the case and never will. That's why we have schools and other institutions that oversee our growth within society.

From both someone involved in raising kids as well as someone who knows a lot of teachers: none of the involved parties want that. Schools are at best for teaching, but never for raising.

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I feel like you must have a very restrictive definition of what constitutes “raising” kids if we’re omitting the place where they spend the majority of their waking hours and the people most of their social universe is based in.

We’ve had a live experiment with this during COVID and it’s pretty clear that kids raised solely at home by their parents fared way worse. Not just on academic metrics, but basic conflict resolution or social skills.

Raising almost all children in these government socialist barracks is so dystopian. What you call "worse" conflict resolution and social skills I call superior confidence and autonomy. People today are oversocialized.

Yes, Finn's and Swedes are the modern day clusterfu*ks of societies /s

This is one of those comments where I get your point, but have a couple of big "uhm actually"s :point-up: :nerd-face:

I wouldn't think that COVID is a good indicator as this was in no way typical home-schooling. The vast majority of kids were going to school "online," and not schooled by their parents. They were also largely confined indoors with their families all day and all evening.

I'm having trouble making my other point without slipping deep into trying to define "raising," so I'm just going to hit "reply" here.

I didn’t mean home schooling specifically but the assertion, and the general sentiment, that parental input is the only determinant that matters when it comes to the development of children into healthy and well-socialized adults. The family isn’t an island it’s something that exists within its society. The people in it also have communities outside the family—including complicated social groups, people coming from different cultural and subcultural norms, and complicated bureaucratic systems and institutions—that they have to learn to interact with an thrive under. School is a critical part of teaching and socializing them to navigate that even beyond the specific curricular stuff. And beyond school lots of other stuff kids interact with is having a hand in teaching them what to expect of society and what society expects of them.

I respectfully disagree. Yes, parents should raise their children as in be present in their lives and help them grow and shape themselves. However, schools with the rules, social engagements, and learning is also a form of raising. Teachers, especially in elementary school, are extremely influential for young kids. How teachers behave when somebody is bullied, how they handle questions, basically how they handle anything, forms the minds of young children.

Is it the sole responsibility of a school to ensure well raised (for whichever specific definition of “well”) children? No. However, they are a large factor in the raising of children.

School was an escape from my home life, but it could never fix my home life. As a child who had no ability to determine what constituted "normal" in order to escape my situation, the only real solution for my home life was for me to be born to different parents. I doubt any amount of legislation would have accomplished that.

That's why I think it was a huge mistake to make teachers mandatory reporters. The idea was that they'd report people neglecting or abusing their children, but what happened is the more egregious cases usually learned to just do a half-ass "home schooling" instead so the child never sees a mandatory reporter and then situation is even worse because now the kid has no escape, no access to doctors, etc.

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