Not to mention severely biased curricular, I'm sure HN kids would all know haskell by the time they were 9 but what about poetry , sports and history?
We always seem to analyze these things in terms of best case scenarios. "If we can get everyone to agree on the things I find important, then education will work!" But they never consider the flip side of this: that you may end up in a community where everyone votes to get science classes to "teach the controversy" or something. That's what happens when everyone gets a standardized experience: you have to rely on "compromise" (which in our democracy is usually the winner forcing the loser to do what they say for X years).
Right now trying to get computer science into schools is a monumental task because it requires us asking permission to get it in there. I have to go and make a case to the school board that these subjects should be added. Instead of an organic process where specialized schools started adding it based on demand, we instead often need these big binary switches.
I am OK with you providing your child with whatever education you think is important. Because I want to provide my child the education I think is important.
My problem isn't so much with parents who might teach their kids extra programming classes or whatever. It's with parents who may be incapable of (or unwilling to) teaching their kids anything (and therefor raise kids who are also incapable of teaching) or parents who will teach nothing but creationism/scientology or whatever. Or parents who would decide on some career they want their kids to follow and try and teach them everything around that without long term consideration. Plenty of parents would rather their kids be good at sports than math for example.
I would be concerned that we would see something of a return to a caste system since what parents would be most qualified to teach would be what they themselves do.
Environment is also important for teaching, some of the environments in low income parts of the UK would be environments unsuitable for learning. Loud noises, drug/alcohol abuse, domestic violence etc.
At least having a school gives kids somewhere they can go and at least have some chance of learning.
I can agree that if we are going to force other people's children to learn certain things then it might merit some big conversation but that's not what I want. Ironically, I think this very process has perpetuated the dilemma you fear: it encourages and perpetuates a culture of not worrying about your child's education and "leaving it up to the experts".
Secondly, having every parent teach their kid is not the only alternative to the public school system we have today. There are a spectrum of possibilities, from simply having less state/federal standards (I don't really care what Senator X from state that I have no representation in thinks about our education), to private schools. But, if we are focusing solely on "homeschooling", a friend of mine for example was "neighborhood-schooled". Each parent had a day with them, and each parent taught them what they were good at.
Responsible parents will make sure that their kids get a decent education by selecting a good school or by homeschooling.
The problem is, if a parent decides "I don't want my kid to bother learning math" then you completely close off a huge number of potential high-earning careers to the child.
Or worse, parents who are apathetic towards education and who's kids are unlikely to learn much of anything.
In other words, I would disagree that parents are necessarily better at selecting an education for their children.
This is especially important because education is important to social mobility. For example the potential for a kid brought up in some redneck park/council estate who goes to school and finds that they are good at math and goes on to become a programmer/banker or whatever.
2. Does everyone have to know everything? Isn't that a line between good parenting and bad parenting. If you think your kid will benefit from arts and history and what not, you will make sure they go through those courses. Why do you need someone else to force your kids to go through that curriculum? This just sounds like an implication that parents don't know what's good for their children, so we should trust what the experts have outlined for us.
Well, in the homeschool/online education setting, you still could and probably would consult education/career counselors for selection of syllabus.
I think it's important to have some general grounding in a variety of subjects. I certainly wouldn't rely on all parents (who themselves may have failed in education) to be able to choose a good balanced curriculum for their children.
Some homeschooling parents might say that (1) the numbers play in their favor (no teacher would argue that it's far easier to teach 2 kids than 20), (2) that teaching a kid how to teach himself is far more important than having a teacher with a vast array of knowledge, and (3) what with online classes and homeschool co-ops, it's entirely possible to "share the wealth" and get your kid tutoring where you're not especially knowledgeable
Forcing ill equipped parents into home-schooling by making the local schooling suck so hard that they have no choice would paint a different picture I think.
There are some great outcomes, but mostly from children who were homeschooled because they had parents who were quite passionate about education. In many cases the parents were big on constructivist learning theory and able to set up a good environment that cultivates this kind of self-directed learning. My own parents were pretty into that, but rather than home-schooling me, sent me to a Montessori school when I was young, and then regular public schools when older, supplemented with some extracurricular stuff like museums and computers on weekends (in the '80s, Logo tied in very explicitly to constructivist education). That worked out ok, and I feel I benefited from having both the school and the home environments. But I can certainly believe homeschooling would've turned out ok, too.
Another large group (in the U.S.) and with a very different profile are kids who are homeschooled because their parents are very passionate about politics and/or religion. This could be any kind of politics (e.g. homeschooling anarchists), but in practice the largest group are conservative Christians convinced that the public schools are indoctrinating their kids with liberal secularism. That does not turn out as well, and often produces extremely sheltered kids who live in an odd kind of parallel universe where they read only things written specifically for Christian homeschoolers (there is an entire niche industry supporting this). They go to social events, too, but generally social events with other Christian homeschoolers. I've met a few of them, and they have pretty negative views on homeschooling, and many think it shouldn't have been legal. Admittedly I met mostly the ones who broke free of it around college by refusing to attend a Christian college (which would be the expected next step).
So I have pretty mixed opinions; I think homeschooling can work if the parents are quite open-minded, and actively encourage the kids to explore lots of new ideas, not necessarily only ideas the parents themselves like. But I think it can be quite unhealthy for kids not to have an outlet a few hours a day away from their parents, in the case where the parents are more controlling. A public school assigning something provides a nice excuse for students to read things their parents don't like because hey, it's for school.
I'm not sure how it would turn out if it were neither of those two cases, but just parents who felt they had to do it because the local schools sucked too much, rather than out of any special passion for homeschooling.
A parent is perfectly capable of evaluating and deciding on a wide variety of curriculum even if they may not be knowledgeable enough to write a Chemistry book.
Disproportionately more parents in low income areas (where kids have worse prospects already) will have very poor education themselves (possibly struggling with basic reading skills) and also possibly additional problems with drug/alcohol abuse etc. Not the sort of people who will be skilled at choosing curriculum and enforcing study.
The other three are on the same trajectory. I understand that you essentially discounted HN parents as exceptions, but we are also part of a broader community and I see similar results with children whose parents have no clue as to what a HN is.
None of them know haskell, but the oldest is working through The Little Schemer.
> The oldest is 15, enjoys poetry, plays basketball competitively, likes to tinker with computers, reads history, does math, etc.
FWIW, that sounds like me at 15 and I regret having been homeschooled.
So ya, I might have some advantage in the EQ department, but I regret having blown my youth in school.
A poor education in sports may reduce potential profits of future pro-athletes and students looking for a scholarship.
For others, I'm not sure. Also, not knowing about poetry and history won't harm.
In fact, in term of opportunity costs, it might be a better move NOT to touch these subjects altogether to spend more time on things that matter, or at least on topics that matter a little bit more than these subjects.
Haskell may not be that popular at the moment, but that may change in the future (haskell-like language could emerge!) and still at the moment I'm sure there are paying jobs for people with haskell fluency than for people who are really really good in poetry and history.