Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tokenadult | Hacker News Reader

The Meditations of Marcus Aurelius has often been recommended to me as the source of the earliest pro-homeschooling quotation found in Western literature:

"From my grandfather's father, [I learned] to dispense with attendance at public schools, and to enjoy good teachers at home, and to recognize that on such things money should be eagerly spent."

http://learninfreedom.org/notable_quotes.html

That does reveal a cultural difference between East and West, as the oldest Chinese quotation to speak to the issue of family education of children (a much older quotation from Mencius) specifically claims that education of children by their own families is a bad idea, because injecting the teacher relationship into the family wrecks family relationships. I respectfully disagree with Mencius, having homeschooled my half-Eastern, half-Western children while living both in Taiwan and in the United States. It's interesting that Marcus Aurelius was already concerned about "public schools" at a time when "public schools" just meant "schools outside one's home" rather than "schools funded by taxes and operated by state employees."

It would pay to bear in mind what SORT of education occurre in roman schools: For the most part it was rote memorisation of the letters and the sounds they made to give literacy and very little else. A roman education was not a 'Greek education', rhetoric and logic were not taught.

Mike Duncan's 'a history of Rome' podcast was very informative on this and though Marcus Aurelius would have had private tutors for these things that is really what he was likely talking about when he says to have in the home

Did you mean Roman public education only taught basic literacy? For aristocrats, pupils were taught Greek and Greek literature early on since later republic era. Julia Caesar's mother went so far as to have a Greek slave accompanying Caesar from early childhood so he grew up bilingual. Marcus Aurelius was as comfortable in Greek as he was in Latin. His extensive training rhetorics is obvious from his writing. He wrote "Meditations" in Greek, because that was the language of philosophy.

I don't think the two quotations are incompatible. Aurelius seems to be advising that no penny should be spared on providing a good education (and thus prefers hiring a tutor for 1-on-1 tuition). The Chinese quotation advises against children being educated by their direct families. Presumably public education was better in China at the time (see my sibling poster about Roman schooling), so public schooling was the "best" alternative, whereas in Aurelius's time hiring private tutors was.

My main concern with home-schooling is that it sort of sets an upper bound to the child's learning of that which the parent knows. (although I'd guess it works quite well at younger ages provided the social contact with peers is still maintained in some way).

Well given you can't know what your family would be like, or your kids education levels would be without home schooling... your can't make too many meaningful observations.

From all the reading I've done on educational outcomes for kids, the number one predictor of educational outcome, is socio-economic status of the parents. Sometimes exceptional teachers can move kids outside of that, but most of the time, it's what (socio-economic) 'class' you are in, not classroom.

EDIT:

Surprisingly this doesn't hold true in Asia, their focus on education is amazing at bridging socio economic gaps (though the above observation still holds true, but to a much lesser degree).

There's something to be said of IITs and the way they've done a remarkable job of taking people out of extreme poverty and into (both Indian and American) upper middle classes.

The SATs have initially had this effect in the United States as well: they were initially fiercely opposed by the WASP elite as their immediate effect was to bring "undesirables" like Jews (and later Asians) into what were once the holiest of hollies (Ivy League universities, flag-ship state schools).

Today, however, SATs tend to be too susceptible to cramming: ironically the efforts at making SATs more culturally fair have turned them into reinforcements of existing class structure as now cramming and expensive tutoring become viable strategies.

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