Outschooling in the Bay Area
amir.io
amir.io
As for startup ideas: I want MOOC aimed at younger kids. Right now the closest thing we have is Khan Academy, and it's pretty good, but a MOOC on a specific subject, with a series of videos, and questions, and interactive activities would be a big help.
As for socialization: The best line I have heard is, "When we worry about our kids missing out on socialization, we grab them, drag them into the bathroom, and beat them up for their lunch money." That is: Yeah, kids in public school wind up having shared experiences with other such kids. The problem is that so many of those shared experiences are bad.
A simple [or simplistic] answer to that is that bad experiences as well as good serve to educate; perhaps better to learn to give up your lunch money to save a beating so you know to give up your wallet to save being shot at a later date??
Generally though I agree that the socialisation objection to non-school learning is specious. You can be as poorly educated on useful social situations if you're school-based. The non-school educated kids I know are all part of some semi-organised groups that mean they socialise with kids and adults over a broad spectrum of ages (though mainly women at the groups, just like primary schools here in the UK). Now schools can do something about that to some extent - my kid's school fosters relationships across the ages of children present in the school, one of its better ambitions IMO.
Bullying is an interesting issue; there are bullies in the world and at a sub-criminal level there's often nowhere to go to fix your interactions with them other than your own resourcefulness, something which can be usefully informed, I feel, by bad experiences in school.
Of course just being educated otherwise than at school doesn't mean you can't be bullied, just not in school!
As to your point about former teachers. My mom, who's a former teacher, decided to home school's my much younger sister last year. She's been much happier and more productive since then. She still spends time with other kids her age during archery practice, reading club etc...
However, she actually has time to read books that she likes after school instead of spending 2 hours a night on homework. She was literally spending almost 2 hours a night on homework in elementary school. The amount of stress her teachers put on her to perform on standardized tests was obscene.
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
"And that, I think, is the root of the problem. Nerds serve two masters. They want to be popular, certainly, but they want even more to be smart. And popularity is not something you can do in your spare time, not in the fiercely competitive environment of an American secondary school.
Alberti, arguably the archetype of the Renaissance Man, writes that "no art, however minor, demands less than total dedication if you want to excel in it." I wonder if anyone in the world works harder at anything than American school kids work at popularity. Navy SEALs and neurosurgery residents seem slackers by comparison. They occasionally take vacations; some even have hobbies. An American teenager may work at being popular every waking hour, 365 days a year."
And...
"Public school teachers are in much the same position as prison wardens. Wardens' main concern is to keep the prisoners on the premises. They also need to keep them fed, and as far as possible prevent them from killing one another. Beyond that, they want to have as little to do with the prisoners as possible, so they leave them to create whatever social organization they want. From what I've read, the society that the prisoners create is warped, savage, and pervasive, and it is no fun to be at the bottom of it.
In outline, it was the same at the schools I went to. The most important thing was to stay on the premises. While there, the authorities fed you, prevented overt violence, and made some effort to teach you something. But beyond that they didn't want to have too much to do with the kids. Like prison wardens, the teachers mostly left us to ourselves. And, like prisoners, the culture we created was barbaric."
A lot of parents get their kids involved in activities which aren't necessarily for the good of the child except to minimise e chances of falling to the bottom of the popularity ladder. A ton of effort and money is spent trying to fit in at school - and as most of us recall - it all simply vanished the minute you walk out the high school gates, in the same way a prisoners society is irrelevant the moment they are released back into the real world.
It really is madness.
http://amasci.com/we-nerds.html
Some interesting experimental science stuff, too (Mechanical superconductor-less maglev? Pretty nifty, although it doesn't scale up, and there's video to show that it works)
From my high school experience, popularity boils down to social awareness, and inversely, social ineptitude. It really has nothing to do with book smarts. It's not a zero sum game. You can be smart and popular. In fact most popular people are smart from my experience.
Most of the popular kids from my high school, 4 years later, are still popular, have really hot girlfriends/boyfriends, and are doing great things with their lives. The vast majority of the unpopular kids from my high school are still pretty weird and aren't doing so hot (although not nearly as weird as they were in high school).
I know it's not a popular thing to say but some people just get dealt a better hand than others.
The central point is that nerds don't become popular because they don't put the time in to be popular. They'd rather spend it on other things.
None of that is different to your comment. In fact you're agreeing by saying that it comes down to social awareness, which is essentially putting in the time to be popular.
I did.
> The central point is that nerds don't become popular because they don't put the time in to be popular. They'd rather spend it on other things.
I read the article. I disagree with his argument. Graham even admits his fallacy near the middle of the article, when he admits to desperately wanting to be popular. The "wanting to be smart more" deal is nothing more than pride, I'd say.
> In fact you're agreeing by saying that it comes down to social awareness, which is essentially putting in the time to be popular.
Nope. You don't get more social awareness from something like "putting in the time to be popular". It might work for something like programming but this is nothing like that. You get it from having a healthy, normal-ish mind and from constantly surrounding yourself with people who have social awareness. Some people simply don't have access to that.
That being said, we had 2 distinct cliques of popular/smart kids, both of these groups were in honors/AP classes. Group A was more popular. Group B less popular (but still more popular than the other various groups), but smarter. These groups started in 8th grade when the school separated the gifted program into 2 groups (I was in Group B btw).
Group A (with very few exceptions) partied through college and then married young. They ended up doing about as well as all the non-popular kids from high school.
Group B partied less, studied harder, married later, and is making much more money than Group A.
I think popularity predicts success to a point, i.e., popularity has diminishing returns. Group A cared too much about the rewards that came with being popular in high school, so they spent too much time maintaining their status. The kids in group B were popular enough to get by, but they worked harder on other things.
I think it's two camps, the socially aware people, and the socially inept people.
The socially inept people basically have some behavioral flaw that they themselves cannot see or understand. Usually it takes until way after high school to figure it out, like being in a dysfunctional household, or autism, or cerebral palsy, or something.
Then there's the normal kids. AKA group A and B in your comment.
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Anyway my conspiracy-theory-of-the-day, and why I posted that comment in the first place, is that homeschooling usually puts them into the socially inept camp.
Reason being, these kids are basically being 100% controlled by their parents. They only have exposure to two sets of ideals and beliefs (their parent's) for their entire upbringing. It'd only work if the parents were perfect and somehow treated their child as a true equal (or if they have like 10+ siblings or something). School mitigates that risk by having another "ground base", out of control of their parents, to turn to.
I think the whole "everything changes" thing happens because you move out of your parents house, not because HS ended.
This is the exact analogy I'm making when someone says that school prepares you socially for "real life". The only part of "real life" school socially prepares you for is prison, with pecking orders based on "popularity", physical traits and meanness of character.
Do you like the route that KA have taken?
For example, in elementary school, I would go to local public school for art and phys-ed classes in addition to coursework at home. I knew most of the kids at school, but I would spend half as much time sitting at a desk, leaving the afternoons to explore/learn whatever I wanted.
In high school, I would spend mornings taking classes at home, then go to the local university and earn dual-credits (high school + college), then go to a vocational technical school for the afternoon, and then go to sports practice at the local public high school. While peers would waste hours in study hall, I was spending my time at the local bookstore reading and learning how to code.
I'm one of 4 kids, and every one of us will have graduated high school with 20+ college credits. I also fully plan on homeschooling my kids in the future.
While we still had traditional classrooms and a centralized place of learning, the groups were much smaller (10-15 kids) and the programs studied were very different from the state run schools. We covered all the basics in ~25% of the time and the rest was advanced or very creative. My favorite was a visiting professor from MGU (Moscow State University) teaching 5th graders how to translate Babylonian Cuneiform, including how to infer meaning of writing that no spoken reference exists for. Not really useful right now, but is the very definition of cool when you are a kid!
I've been pondering how to replicate some of these experiences for my future kids and this is definitely interesting.
I've seen programming situations where something close to that would be useful (maintenance of very old code).
For a 5th-grader though it was a great into to science.
I'm pretty sure the original comment was meant to gather experiences of positive self-organization results and not doom'n'gloom rhetoric.
Not just when you're a kid. I'm 34 and that sounds awesome.
I'm curious about that second point. Do you mean the same kind of vocabulary acquisition that people do in their own language all the time? (For example, a kid reading a book might learn some previously-unknown words that way, and everyone picks up spoken vocabulary by hearing it in use -- granted, picking up spoken vocabulary definitely doesn't meet the standard of "no spoken reference exists", but learning a word by its use in writing does meet that standard and is the same linguistic phenomenon.)
Do you mean translating a document in a foreign language without any idea how that writing system was pronounced? I'm not aware of any writings for which the following are both true:
1. We can understand the writing.
2. We don't have any reference for what the pronunciation would have been.
Cuneiform was used to write several different languages, most prominently Akkadian, which is a Semitic language closely related to Arabic and Hebrew. That helped in translating it. I don't know the language-family status of Sumerian, but it's written the same way, which is obviously helpful in pronouncing it. There are some rarer languages also written in cuneiform; for them we have decent information on their pronunciation, but we still don't really understand documents in those languages.
Old Chinese was written in a script carrying no phonetic information, and its original pronunciation is a major problem today. But it left us rime tables, and there are lots of spoken references in its many modern descendants. So for example, we're pretty confident that 京, the second syllable of beijing/peking, originates as a velar ("k") sound, and the palatal ("j") sound of modern mandarin is an innovation.
Ancient Egyptian held off translators for a long time, until someone realized it could be translated by reference to Coptic, for which phonetic information was preserved. Our phonetic understanding of Egyptian hieorglyphs is good enough that we've translated the names of foreign countries as written down in ancient inscriptions.
Anyway, if that professor was talking about something in this second category, I'd love to hear more about it.
The author asserts, "this is the community where experimentation ... to educational approaches is happening the fastest", and I am finding that to be true. The parents are more open-minded and the students are more self-driven.
In fact, it feels likely to me that any dramatic change to the education system as a whole will start with the homeschool community, if it ever comes at all. So, my advice to other education entrepreneurs is that this is a good market to start with.
The author's big conclusion - an impending unbundling of education - is really interesting to me. It aligns with my own prediction (and the basis for my startup), which is that students/parents will have a stronger say in who the right teacher is for them, for any given subject. And, with tools enabled by tech/internet, the best teachers will be able to scale up what they do and reach many thousands of students.
Can someone explain how something like this even happens? I'm used to a system which assigns you a school based on your address/space. If space constraints change, the child is generally not kicked out. Exceptions are usually made to space constraints so that younger siblings may attend the same school as their older siblings. I can understand an elementary, a middle and a high school but that is only three different schools.
I don't think San Francisco's solution is a particularly good one, but I do think it's a legitimate problem.
Actually, I just looked it up the SFUSD page and it appears they do, and they offer school buses as I suspected. So the rationale for homeschooling by this person seems, well, irrational. Why would she need to hire six cars when buses would come get the kids?
For various reasons, the mainstream regard homeschooling as
a niche approach suitable only for the weird or the wealthy.
That’s a prejudice that doesn’t reflect the reality of the
growing movement I've observed in the Bay Area.
This is a roundabout way of saying that the idea that homeschooling (or "outschooling") is the future is, frankly, a pipe dream. It is and always will be a niche option.
In the Bay Area, this would likely rule out families with incomes below $90k and one or more kids, assuming they want at least a 2BR apartment.
Is it a big surprise that we're starting to see inklings of that again, given the growing gulf of inequality in the Bay Area?
I'm sure it's wonderful if you can handle it logistically and financially. I do wonder, though, if hybrid approaches may be more accessible to the middle class.
I am actually surprised that there only is one Sudbury school in the Bay Area (http://diablovalleyschool.org), given how well it fits with the sentiments here.
"So where did you graduate from?"
"Diablo Valley."
"... Whoa, you can probably beat up a deathclaw."
If we ever advance to the point where we agree to provide a basic minimum income, I expect the popularity of home schooling will explode. Since many people think that a basic minimum income is a likely consequence of automation, I think your use of always is incorrect.
Many of my friends' parents weren't engineers, and some would fall into the "poorer families" category, but they still decided that forgoing an extra salary to homeschool their kids was worth it. It's a very real trade-off, but given most people's level of spending, it's not that hard to cut down quite a bit while maintaining an excellent quality of life, if you have a good enough motivation.
I'd be surprised if there were many people who really wanted to homeschool but felt they could not because of finances. Some, I'm sure. *
Not wanting to homeschool in the first place is the bigger barrier.
* Homeschooling as a single parent, is, of course, tough. Some single parents do manage it.
The main factors militating against homeschooling are conformity, money and logistics. As homeschooling becomes ever more mainstream the weirdness hit people take for it will lessen. Money and logistics are the big things. For homeschooling, even unschooling, you need at least one responsible adult nearby and available, usually a SAHM. That means homeschooling is restricted to the upper middle class, people in rural areas with cheap housing or people who are really, really willing to sacrifice for it. If everyone around you is on two incomes and you're on one that better be an excellent income or you will need to sacrifice a lot.
Homeschooling will have no effect on school instruction, none. The things mentioned in the article could almost all have been written any time since the 60's. The only exception is MOOCs, which are mostly equivalent to community college for high school students.
Alfie Kohn and John Taylor Gatto have been beating the drum on how awful the overwhelming majority of schools are for decades to no effect. The Sudbury/Summer hill/democratic schools movement grew and then receded in the middle of last century.
And what's the latest big thing in education? Ability tracking instead of age tracking, the smallest, least disruptive, obviously good change to the current system? No, it's No Child Left Behind.
Just give up hope already. There will be no reform.
The system won't change meaningfully until the world around it changes first. That is to say, until private sector alternatives/supplements start making an impact in education without the help of the state. But that's entirely possible.
The issue is that nobody has really built anything all that special for the education sector yet. The best we have are MOOCs, which are, for all their production values, just static resources and not a new way for a child to learn.
Elizabeth Warren has written an excellent book describing the pitfalls of two-income families that send their children to public schools. It's called "The Two Income Trap".
http://www.amazon.com/Two-Income-Trap-Middle-Class-Parents-G...
In it, she demonstrates that having two incomes isn't the advantage that you might intuitively think it is. Actually, having a single income and homeschooling (or outschooling) can make a family more resilient and flexible, for two main reasons:
1. A second income earner can be brought in if something happens to the employed spouse. Two-income families are already tapped out.
2. Location. If the family doesn't enroll their kids in a public school, they are free to live wherever they want, so long as the breadwinner can still commute. This cuts expenses way down. No longer do they have to compete with two-income earners for homes in a particular school district.
So, while having a parent remain at home is certainly a different lifestyle, it isn't clearly something that can only work for the wealthy. I know many homeschooling families who would not be described as wealthy.
That's a very specious statement. The second income earner would have to begin a job search at a point when their secondary social network is weakest for that task.
In addition, the primary income rarely goes down due to accident. It is more likely that the primary income goes down due to a area effect: big employer goes under, depression in the general economy, etc. These will make it even harder for the second income to come online.
"It only takes 2-3 hours of study per day to keep up with the regular school curriculum"
The sheer waste of life that implies about children in 'regular school', let alone the staff that provide services for them, is staggering.
Where I grew up, school became the social safety net for children from low income backgrounds. If the temperature dropped to -10F, they would still not cancel school because the low income kids received better heat and better meals from the school.
My point is that in many cases, school isn't nearly as much about learning as it is to have a safe and stable place for children from unstable households.
> Have everyone kick in $15-20k/year each year
> It'd be cheaper than private school
> The private elementary school average is $7,355 per year and the private high school average is $13,248 per year.This way it's completely free for the parent and the student learns to be self-motivated.
A quick search shows up an informal ranking here:
http://www.bizjournals.com/sanfrancisco/blog/2014/11/ranking...
The top 5 are all ~$40k, I didn't look much further than that. I think 15-20 is probably more the average cost?
>> Have everyone kick in $15-20k/year each year
>> It'd be cheaper than private school
> That's comparable to the most expensive private schools
[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Public_school_%28United_Kingdom...
Our kids are enrolled in a charter school which helps with the state testing/state standards part and we pool resources with other homeschooling families to hire tutors and provide a classroom environment (<10 kids per class) for part of the week.
I was home schooled for a few years in the '80s, and even then we had a co-op and decent sized community where we got together regularly to learn from some bright teachers.
The big issue for me is the vast difference between learning rates and attitude between kids, but the insistence on keeping them together on an arbitrary set of calendar dates of birth, rather than aptitude or interests.
Some (most?) parents plainly don't care and are just happy to get the kids out of the house and in someone else's care. These kids are generally disruptive and are destined to have a low level of education. I see the need to keep trying with them despite the low achievement rate, yet at the same time I see the need to let motivated learners race ahead at their own speed.
Throw in the murky issues of government funding, political interference in curriculum and entrenched power structures like teachers unions and school boards and it's not clear to me how a better model emerges from it all.
Out-of-schooling or outschooling is called "education otherwise" (EO) in the UK following legislation referring to a parent's responsibility to ensure their child either attends school or gets a sufficient education otherwise than in school.
I'm glad they've made the distinction with home-schooling, which EO people in the UK usually use to refer to mimicking school at home, having a "classroom" and a parent acting as a teacher. Most non-school based learning is referred to as "home-schooling" or "home education" by outsiders it seems and very little of it is actually home-schooling; this leads to a quite wrong view of kids who're getting educated outside of school as being shut-ins locked away from other kids and feeds in to the "not attending school means they lack socialisation" fallacy.
We started flexi-schooling to some success but in the UK it's up to the individual headteacher (how's that for a centrally planned education system) to allow it or not and our's deferred to the governors who basically thought, and expressed, that the only way to learn anything is in a school. My wife and I are both graduates with science degrees working in our own creative business, she has a teaching qualification and we've both been leaders with kids organisations for many years; we work in a semi-teaching role and I've done IT education with individual adults. Apparently either of us could educate a class of 30 kids, we do on occassion (sometimes out of school), but educating our own child(ren) like that or a small group of EO kids is apparently impossible.
Anyway, we did flexi-schooling for a year (1 day in 10 out of school, we wanted 1 in 5) without authorisation with the eldest child [ie in opposition to the school's expressed desire] - tests showed he was excelling despite the schools anticipation of abject educational demise.
Then the government brought in fines for non-authorised absence from school. This has weighed heavy, if we had the funds we'd just continue - it's worth it - but we don't have funds and so we've been unable to continue with what we consider (and the evidence suggests) is the best paedagogical approach for this particular child. The legislation is intended to stop people from taking their children on holiday in school time and their is scope in the system to accommodate flexi-schooling - and legislative support in the Education Act (and to a lesser extent the ECHR).
Were our child physically disabled, or indeed mentally challenged rather than excelling (just bright, not 'gifted' incidentally) it seems the school would have given greater concessions. Catering for those with exceptional needs is an area in which flexi-schooling is often accepted and used to great effect.
* The reason why we have schools is that parents can go to work. Sad but true.
Couldn't agree more! Universities tend to be much worse in this aspect.
I guess it's less of a factor in this neck of the woods.
One family comes to mind, where I have to question both their ability and motivation behind homeschooling, but that's out 100+ homeschool families we know. Even so, they're the parents, so it's their call.
That said, the success is largely based on the parents' motivation. If they're out to provide a better customized, faith-based, talent-specific, or special-needs accommodating learning environment, that's radically different than doing it to brag about what a great parent a person is, due to the extra hardship.
Beyond that, not everyone is qualified to do it, as it takes a certain skillset, education level, preparedness, and patience level that isn't ubiquitious. Some of that can be accomdated through homeschool enrichment classes, co-ops, and the aforementioned online learning.
I had the same reaction as the previous poster; I'm from rural Idaho, where in my experience with it, "homeschooling" is a transparent veil for "too fundamentalist for government-run schools" (which in Idaho, is terror at a very special level). I'm sure it's not that way everywhere, and I'm sure that not all rural homeschooling parents are doing so for religious reasons. But there are places like my hometown, where that is primarily the case.
A lot of these kids (anecdotally) ended up seeming pretty weird to me. I've always wondered though if it was the homeschooling or religious schooling that was the reason, though I'm inclined to believe the latter.
So how do you meet homeschooling families? I'd expect that they are going to be self-segregating groups - where parents looking for materials on God Hates Fags are not in the same discussion as someone looking for a more advanced education for their kid - so it makes sense that if you are in the latter group, you don't know many in the former.