Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
(newsletter.goodtechthings.com)374 points by forrestbrazeal 3 months ago
374 points by forrestbrazeal 3 months ago
Exactly, this kind of BS "eduction" the teachers receive doesn't really equip teachers with the knowledge to teach anything beyond 12 years old.
I believe any subject teacher (i.e. mathematics, physics, english, etc.) should hold at least a bachelors in that subject alongside with a teaching/pedagogy degree. Every bad teacher I've had only had the teaching degree, the best teachers I've had only had a PhD in their subject. Not bad as in dislike - there were plenty of good, competent teachers whom I disliked.
I dislike this notion of "degrees" as proxies for the ability to get the job done. Why not just... interview people. Let them teach a class or two, and see how it goes. Just like with every other job.
> because there's a good reason not to trust the experts
I hate this. Where else do we get knowledge from if not experts and academics in their fields? That's how humans grow our collective knowledge. People learn, gather evidence, build knowledge and then share it. The people who have done the learning over many years are called "experts". Those are the people I want to learn from, no?
> conservative "evidence based" movement
Evidence should not be political. You can either prove something, or you cannot. It is neither conservative, nor liberal.
When the experts say that algebra should not be taught in 8th grade, and the experts say that guessing at words instead of sounding them out is a better way to learn to read, and the experts say that calc can be replaced with 'data science' which is actually just data literacy, and so on and so forth, I'm not really interested in how the precise definition of 'experts' actually refers to something about 'growing our collective knowledge'. I'm more interested in staying away from all that. It's a fun gotcha to say things like 'well evidence either is or isn't', but it doesn't change the material reality of who's doing what and what they're likely to be doing in the near future. Public schooling is fucked, the group of people saying 'listen to the experts' is the group of people making it worse, a lot of it is explicitly political, and your best options for guaranteeing that you avoid it are homeschooling or parochial school, regardless of what words and rhetoric can be said about it.
Don't forget the we can't teach the 4 operations in first year of primary school. Meanwhile, all the books from 1950 have them by lesson 2 and school was mandatory at that time.
We homeschooled our kid for a few months due to her marvelous classmates, teacher and director, she wrote and learnt more than 4 years worth of study in Switzerland. Unfortunately she is highly sociable and we couldn't give her the constant "stream of kids" all day long.
> your best options for guaranteeing that you avoid it are homeschooling
Accepting your premise that "public schooling is fucked" (I disagree) there's absolutely zero guarantee that homeschooling is any better for any particular child. It's a completely random chance whether your parent, or whichever potentially untrained person, is going to provide you with an education that sets you up for society, work and the wider world.
Public schools at least have defined curricula, governance structures, complaints procedures, _accountability_ in some form.
I think to avoid arguments on the term "experts", just replace every instance of it with "so-called experts".
There is a very simple rebuttal to this: In almost every high $$ trial the defense and prosecution will both call expert witnesses. These experts will then directly contradict and disagree with each other. Which of these experts should be trusted? It was an expert who testified that cigarettes are good for you, an expert who testified that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, and an expert who verified that Oxycontin is not addictive. Those are not the people you want to learn from, no.
We celebrate countless outsiders like Galileo and Darwin who have disrupted the consensus of "experts" and were considered highly political at the time. History simply does not defend the infallibility of "experts", and does support the idea that you should not blindly trust a person who claims expertise.
Everybody should look into the work of Philip Tetlock and consider reading his book Superforecasters. There is a mountain of scientific evidence to show that the more a person considers themselves an expert in a topic the more vulnerable they are to making assumptions and being proven wrong as time progresses.
Education theory is divided among educational progressive and conservatives, it doesn't entirely align with political parties.
Educational progressivism is actually more antiquated than conservatism - the classic progressives were 19th century while the conservatives were 20t century. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Progressive_education
> I hate this. Where else do we get knowledge from if not experts and academics in their fields?
Knowledge is generated via examination of reality itself. "Experts" are merely people who have conducted the most thorough examination of reality. Relying on them is a convenience to speed up acquisition of useful knowledge, but not a necessity.
The world is full of people claiming to be experts, but who are, variously:
* charlatans or hucksters evoking the outward trappings of expertise but lacking genuine understanding;
* people who may have valid knowledge in one area pretending to expertise in other areas;
* people who may have valid knowledge, but whose motivations are primarily driven either ideological commitment, pecuniary interests, rent-seeking, or other perverse incentives;
* and people who may have valid knowledge, but mistakenly conflate empirical knowledge with normative authority, and believe that knowing what "is" entitles them to make "ought" decisions for others.
Genuine experts in empirical fields should be in the business of presenting evidence and arguments that stand on their own merits, and empowering others to make better-informed decisions. Reliance on experts should be based entirely on the quality of the information they bring to the table, and not on trust per se.
Anyone who cites their own putative expertise as a reason for why they should not have to explain themselves or justify their conclusions -- or, especially, who cites expertise as a basis for claiming authority over others -- absolutely should not be trusted.
The combination of is-ought conflation and the expertise-as-authority mindset is both incredibly dangerous and extremely prevalent in our society today. People with domain knowledge in a technical field often mistakenly think they are qualified to universalize value judgments about normative matters that relate their empirical field, and think they are entitled to use force to impose those value judgments onto others.
When confronted with this sort of hubris, it's entirely understandable why some people choose to eschew involvement with these putative experts even if it means potentially having less reliable empirical information to work with.
Eventually and it was massively controversial within academia. There were studies that showed it worked, but studies are positivist and for many education academics, positivist is an insult. That's why it took literally generations and a political war to soak into academia at large after the science was uncontroversial.
What's wrong with phonics? Look-see as the only other alternative that I know of has awful results.
What did you have in mind?
My school district in south WA is a representative example. Outcomes in math & English have been poor and continue declining. Attendance has dropped by > 30% despite mild population growth. Cost / student are among the highest, and due to the lacking attendance, deficits have led to staff cuts, leading to worsening outcomes. A death spiral.
To many, schools are perceived to be costly, unsafe indoctrination centers that push left-leaning agendas. Extended covid lockdowns were a huge betrayal.
You only have one chance to raise your kids, and the competition is getting tougher every year. Homeschooling in the area has tripled.
Some of the criticism is justified, some isn’t. But with failures on the academic outcomes, safety, and subjective failures on the ideology – the onus is on public schools to win back trust.
You can shame the homeschoolers , but that won’t bring them back. Time will tell if they succeed, but compared to public schools, the bar is so low that odds are in the homeschoolers favor. Especially if their parents care enough to do it.
This "shouldn't" be surprising. Smart people seeing a wider perspective, seeing the limits of mass-schooling and top-down curricula, seeing other social challenges, and seeing a better option? I live in Seattle; there's a reason it's one of the top metros with per capita private school enrollment and if it weren't for tech incomes, I'd expect homeschooling and homeschooling collectives to thrive. Comments here about neurodiversity needs are also on point.
I live in the Seattle metro, and tomorrow morning is the first day of class for our homeschool co-op, where I'm teaching software engineering to high schoolers.
It's a wonderful experience! I taught my first class in 2012, one for 6-8th grades, and one for 9-12 grades and then off-and-on through the years as needs arose.
It's a lovely time in their lives when computers are still "unknown" and a little magical, and they're learning about Minecraft or Roblox. They love to see how things work, but especially, how to create things.
So much of the grown-up internet is about endless passive consumption, so it's great to plant little seeds about how to use computers creatively and constructively and see where they run with it. Not everything has to be in an app, or behind a login, or from scrolling, or watching. We can just open up Notepad++ and create something. When they understand and master that, we move on to terminal or VS Code, or whatever works best for their trajectory.
We take a journey from electrons to gates to binary to bytes to characters to files to folders to ports to IP addresses to routers to HTTP to servers and back again. It's fun to see them piece together a mental model for how all this previously-invisible stuff actually works. It's very complex when stacked together as a whole, but each individual layer is rather simple and straightforward.
I have the career I do, and life that my family does, because nearly 25 years ago, one of the mom's in this same homeschool co-op taught an HTML/CSS class, and a "build your own computer" class. We scrounged some parts together from a Seattle PC recycler and built our own Linux boxes, then played little games or built websites.
I'm endlessly grateful for the time and experience she invested into me at a very young age.
Note: Quotation marks are not suitable for marking emphasis.
Not arguing with your point, and point taken. The quotation marks suggest that I don't fully mean to mean the literal definition or understanding of the word quoted in the context you're reading. But I use quotes too often to equivocate. Thanks for the reminder.
It's becoming fashionable outside the US as well. And the core reason is that public schools deteriorate.
Public school systems sucks at diversity. It demands parents and students to endure diversity (i.e. putting kids from all walks of life into a single class), while it delivers zero itself, i.e. refusing to diversify its offerings as affluent kids from high-iq parents need different schooling than the fresh foreign refugee-arrival from a war-torn country.
Teachers Unions make sure to deflct any "market pressure" from teachers and these unions' political arms (i.e. left-leaning progressive parties) rake in extra profits because they can cry wolf about the bad state of education or worsening abilities for poorer people to rise through the ranks via merit. Crocodile Tears.
I have a theory that is grounded on no-scientific evidence whats-so-ever. This applies only to the 2-5y population.
1) kids in nursery get sick a whole lot, and is not always just 'building up their immunitary system', it really is a one-two punch of constant illness that drugs for months on, with little to no recovery mechanisms. This is truer in bigger city with a higher turnover of the class cohort
2) a lot of the socialization aspect of nursery is overrated. Parallel play is a thing, and the need for socialization doesn't require a whole 8 hours. There are plenty of other opportunities to socialize. Especially in higher density areas, where institutions are more involved in creating moments for kids to socialize.
3) the cost of central group based nursery has skyrocket. (just empiric evidence), at the same time there is an increasing supply of 20-something-y-old that don't want a nursery job, but are happy to do a more flexible working hour in a less 'stressful' enviroment (aka less children, more home based).
The combination of the 3 things has made homeschooling a lot more interesting for parents.
I think the author is simply wrong is their assumption. I'm pro-homeschooling, more or less fit the described profile and I don't see a slightest problem with my kid interacting with average people nor do I have contempt for them. The problem I see though is with putting the child into a non-voluntary community. Those tend to be toxic and prison-like.
Also, the school education is not crap because it's done by average or designed for the average. It's crap because it objectively can't adapt to an individual kid's pace. There's just no way around teaching kids in huge groups that doesn't involve everyone working as a teacher. Maybe AI will help here.
I went to a public school and regarded it as prison, no bullying went on, but the system is not designed to educate, it is designed to instill obedience, and the pace of learning is dictated primarily by mediocrity of the teachers(I had a rare great 5th grade teacher so this is why I think the the teachers more so than the students abilities dictates the results).
People recommending private school: these do not exist in all locations, try finding a good one in a rural area
It seems standards in public schools have only fallen since I attended, and based on how social media is trending, we seem to be getting dumber and less informed.
I could never force a child to attend public school in the US, unless it happened to be one of the rare good ones I hear exist.
If we ever get something like what is described in "The Diamond Age" perhaps that will help solve the school problem.
As someone who once heard, in 11th grade pre-calculus, that pi is a rational number equal to 22/7, I cannot be so surprised that many parents would choose to homeschool their children. Most parents have no idea what is going on in their childrens' schools.
“He climaxed his teaching career as New York State Teacher of the Year after being named New York City Teacher of the Year on three occasions. He quit teaching on the OP ED page of the Wall Street Journal in 1991 while still New York State Teacher of the Year, claiming that he was no longer willing to hurt children. Later that year he was the subject of a show at Carnegie Hall called “An Evening With John Taylor Gatto,” which launched a career of public speaking in the area of school reform, which has taken Gatto over a million and a half miles in all fifty states and seven foreign countries." http://crn.hopto.org/archives/john-t-gatto/
Well, I went through through the public school system from rural (hamlet) kindergarten till big city university and I say ... it's OK as a default baseline but if one wants some resemblance of competitiveness and performance from their kids, one cannot avoid private tutoring.
If that is done by the parents / family, then it's almost like home schooling. But I don't like home schooling because the kid is left out of the system and the studies are not recognized. At some point they will have to take traumatizing equivalence tests, which can be entirely avoided by playing along - go to a public school, or in my kid's case, a private school which follows the same curricula.
But I stress again, even with private school, there's no replacement for private tutoring if you want your kid to succeed in life.
Great point about private tutoring, I agree.
The equivalence tests are going to be country/US-state specific though. Many do not require such tests at all.
The problem with homeschooling is it's pretty much a crapshoot whether you end up in a weird religious environment or an abusive environment, with a long-shot chance of ending up in a fun constructive environment with lots of personalised attention and the opportunity to travel the world.
Of course, this is pretty much the same set of dice you roll when you spawn into a traditional school system, except you roll with disadvantage when it comes to the long-shot.
I don't know, I was fortunate enough to roll the long shot, and it worked out pretty well for me. Though I will echo the article's note that forming emotional attachments continues to be a bitch if you didn't have a large peer group at a young age...
> it's pretty much a crapshoot whether you end up in a weird religious environment or an abusive environment, with a long-shot chance of ending up in a fun constructive environment with lots of personalised attention and the opportunity to travel the world.
It's a crapshoot for the kid, but a parent who's considering homeschooling knows pretty well whether they are going to be the fundamentalist type or not. If they are, they likely aren't here reading this discussion.
I assume GP was considering the societal value of homeschooling. I.e., what (if any) bureaucratic checks should be in place to ensure the children are actually being educated (assuming that home schooling is legal at all).
There are a lot of types of fundamentalists. I don't know that being raised in some sort of AI Accelerationist Musk/Theil-adjacent Silicon Valley environment is necessarily going to go particularly well for the kid either...
My kids are enrolled in a homeschool parent partnership program (because its one of the few public montessori programs within an easy before-school-drive for our kids). My experience has been that the families attracted to that school fall into one of two categories:
1) Families who are skeptical of standard American public school methods and/or families who have recognized that standard public school methods don't work for their children's peculiarities. They treat the program (and especially the Montessori program) as like a school acceleration program.
2) Families who do not want the government dictating the terms of their children's education in any way shape or form. Within this latter category, the minority are active participants in their children's education, and the majority are the weirdly religious and/or abusive sorts.
The school's administration seems to cater to category 2, and expend a lot of time and effort to try to communicate that whatever requirement they're enforcing (like "your child must actually talk to, in-person, on the phone, or via video call, a teacher holding a state-issued teaching certificate at least once per 2 school weeks") is not a school requirement, but a state requirement, and failing to meet these minimum requirements will trigger a state investigation, not a school investigation. Its sort of unsettling to hear them belabor the point, but then, during the parent orientation where I was hearing that sort of thing, it seemed like most of the audience was not at all interested in suspending whatever they were doing (conversations, watching youtube videos, etc) while the principal was talking through that stuff. Like, its telling that the administration goes to great pains to say "we aren't holding you to the rules designed specifically to prevent child abuse and neglect, so don't send us your death threats or whatever", and most of the audience to that actual message of how to comply with those rules are themselves completely disengaged from the presentation of them.
I'm going to hazard a guess with zero grounding in data to attempt to answer that, caveat emptor. Please also note that even though these are my guesses, these assertions do not really reflect where I personally land on this. I'm not really sure what the breakdown is, but I think I can understand how someone gets to this point of view.
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In order for parents to choose homeschooling, some (but not all) must be present in the parents:
- a conviction that the herd choice of sending a child to school is wrong, and not just a little bit - the belief that you know education better than expert educators with many years of hard earned experience - relatedly, the belief that you are fully qualified to teach anything of importance, and that anything you can't teach is not of important - the ability to forgo the opportunity cost of an in-home full time tutor
Add these up and you will skew towards parents who either have extremely strong convictions (faith related or otherwise) and a mentality that presupposes that the parent is "right."
In the best case scenario, this is an extremely well educated/informed parent who knows enough to keep their pride at check and can handle their emotions well in the face of at times extremely frustrating circumstances, all well being under more financial strain than they would be if they weren't showing up every day to school. These people definitely exist, and I think most parents strive to be this for their children regardless of how they educate their child.
But the "average" human is not well informed, often makes rash and/or emotional decisions, and is struggling to make ends meet. Thus, the "average" parent that chooses homeschooling skews towards dogmatic thinking and/or a presumption of "I'm right and you're wrong" that over a period of a childhood easily leads to abuse, especially if the parents are struggling to make ends meet.
I guess there is a counter argument that people who choose to homeschool can "afford" to do so and thus are well resourced enough (financially or socially) to have a good shot of success, but even among the top 10% of earners you will be hard pressed to find parents that believe they can afford homeschooling.
> I guess there is a counter argument that people who choose to homeschool can "afford" to do so
I would say that the vast majority the quote-unquote "normal" homeschool parents I know are broke hippies/homesteaders/vanlife/wooden-sailboat types.
Definitely are rich folks who go down this path, but they tend to pay fancy private tutors and end up with something much more resembling a traditional education
Well, normal, boring people tend to send their kids to school, so your chances of a normal, boring homeschooling experience are pretty slim. And even the most well-intentioned of counter cultural folks don't always excel at parenting, never mind educating.
I've met a fair number of other homeschooled folks over the years who had a great childhood, but I've met more for whom the lack of community/government oversight meant their parents could get away with things we wouldn't generally countenance (be that actual abuse, various forms of religious indoctrination, or just plain old "unschooling" - aka "ignore the kids till they go away").
> Well, normal, boring people tend to send their kids to school, so your chances of a normal, boring homeschooling experience are pretty slim.
Depends what you mean by normal. My experience is kids get more freedom, meet a wide range of people, and generally get a much better education. Maybe it is different here in the UK.
> And even the most well-intentioned of counter cultural folks don't always excel at parenting, never mind educating.
The home ed community in the UK does have a lot of hippie types in it, but even if I do not see eye to eye with them I think their kids are mostly a lot better educated than the average school child.
> hings we wouldn't generally countenance (be that actual abuse,
which also happens to school going kids. it happens more often to school going kids (and as far as I can see from stats, home ed kids are at lower risk - more likely to be investigated, less likely to have action taken). On top of that there is a fair amount of abuse in schools.
> just plain old "unschooling" - aka "ignore the kids till they go away").
that is not what unschooling is. Unschorling parents can make a great deal of effort, its just that they let kids decide what they want to learn and facilitate it.
> Maybe it is different here in the UK.
Yes, I was originally homeschooled in the UK, and while a lot of the parents where pretty far out there, there was definitely a lower prevalence of weird religious cults and that sort of thing (than in the US).
> that is not what unschooling is
That's why I put "unschooling" in quotes. There are certainly folks doing ethical things under that banner, but the legitimacy of the term provides cover for a lot of folks who aren't doing the ethical thing.
mind sharing some of your experience regarding emotional attachments / social groups?
These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people.
I agree in part and disagree in part:
Agree - they're absolutely "hacking" education for their kids. The 1:1 student/teacher ratio and the ability to custom tailor almost every part of the curriculum are the biggest selling points--and that's true whether it comes from a desire to give their kids the best they can, or a desire to micromanage and control every aspect of their lives.
Disagree - I think it's less about "average people" overall and more about opting out of learning from and being trained by what can feel like a gachapon of teachers and administrators in public (and to a lesser extent, private) schools. It probably seems to them like, "If I wouldn't hire this person to work at my company, why would I 'hire' them to do the much more critical task of preparing my child for their future?"
None of the arguments convince anyone. Homeschooling remains what it was in the creationism-and-spelling-bee days: an ideological choice.
In other words...
Windows = public school
Mac = private school
Linux = homeschool> I can’t help but notice that history’s richest and most successful people have raised some pretty unpleasant kids.
Could that be because newspapers like to report on those and people like to read stories about how awful rich kids are?
There are plenty of unpleasant kids from modest backgrounds. It's just that their tales are boring.
Not sure about fashionable, but rather:
1) Private school is expensive as hell.
2) Yet, public school sucks. Most normies don't wanna learn and the system doesn't reward nor incentivize the smart, initiated students who want to excel. There are many normies that teachers just gotta essentially ... just babysit. And God forbid that a teacher stands up for themselves. Then some Karen has go and destroy that teacher and their career.
"Social awkwardness and anxiety Difficulty in forming IRL friendships Impatience with the idea of connecting on a meaningful level with other people: who needs ‘em? An abiding sense of detachment from reality"
I can tell you from personal experience, going to school doesn't prevent this.
I think as a professional in tech, it's frightening and obvious how behind schools are in keeping up with the modern world. I'm not talking about having ipads. AI will be he most significant technology humanity has experiences. We need to pivot toward an educational model that enhances creativity and cooperative communication but I just don't see that happening. It's still the bucket model of learn this don't ask questions, kids are a bucket and they need to be filled up by knowledge. It's outdated NOW, with absolutely no indication there will be significant changes.
I'm a native Finn and went to a public school here in Finland in the 00s. My overall experience was good, though of course I didn't always enjoy it. I liked some teachers more than others. I learned a lot and was bored a lot. I was subjected to the occasional bullying (who wasn't?) but I never felt truly unsafe. I also got along well with most people most of the time. I had to overcome my shyness to give presentations to my classmates. I got to know people from different socio-economic backgrounds. While navigating through childhood and puberty I made a lot of mistakes, as did all other kids, but ultimately it was a good childhood, and in hindsight I am really glad I wasn't homeschooled (not that it's common here anyway). Without the social connections I made and social skills I learned, I undoubtedly would've had a very different kind of life, and not in a better way I think.
I feel like there should be a different word for those that "home school" their child by hiring a private teacher and they learn in the house. For me, homeschooling means one of the parents (often the mother) teaches the child(ren) in their home.
I know many teachers, and they have a very specific set of skills on how to teach. I wouldn't expect any old parent to know this and I suspect home school kids are worse off for it? But I'm happy to be pointed to evidence on the contrary.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Who is physically doing the homeschooling? The rich tech people? Their spouses?
It sounds like what he is criticizing is just extra-private private schooling or something like that. As distinct from homeschooling by parents, which is the more… eclectic version the author grew up with.
In conversations like this, I often find it clarifying to ask if your interlocutors have children. Nothing strips away ideology like a screaming baby.
Most people here would be good homeschooling parents.
This site doesn’t represent the world at large.
I was personally homeschooled, and while I ended up with a positive outcome, I cannot say the same thing for any of my peers (other kids I met through homeschooling groups.) There were many children that, in retrospect, were suffering from abuse or neglect that the structure of school could have prevented, or at least a mandatory reporter could have caught.
For more anecdotes, take a look at r/homeschoolrecovery (which is nearly 1/6th the size of r/homeschooling.) Many of the stories there are so gut-wrenchingly bleak. Any margin improvement in educational outcomes hardly seems worth it given some of the pain described there.
So, I don't claim to have Big Data on this, but I homeschooled my child, and one of the most common things in homeschooling I saw was that people used co-ops. Thus, the kids are around other kids, and the parent doesn't have to know everything.
In my case, I chose it because the public schools in my part of town (low income) were low achieving, and proto-fascist in their policies on being able to control your own appearance. They had both state level (Texas, conservative) and city-level (Austin, progressive) political influences, the worst elements of both.
Just my own experience, but it doesn't much match what the article describes.
I turned out OK in public school, but I was held back at different points, particularly in math, because I (and a few others) were too far ahead of the other kids. We literally had to repeat an entire year of content at one point. Kudos to the teachers who enabled & fostered that, but shame on the school system for not continuing to support. I'm pretty sure one of my classmates gave up on academics at that moment (he never really excelled again like he used to).
I'd like my kids to be free to follow their curiosities. It's definitely work to homeschool but for us, it may be worth it.
I know quite a few people who have started homeschooling their kids in recent years, including one who stopped homeschooling their kiss last year and will be pulling their kids back out of school this spring.
The most common reasons I hear are either that the public schools they are zoned for are terrible, mainly complaints over safety and/or drugs. The other common reason is just not seeing the value in the education being provided, often complaining of teacher quality or the design of a school system modelled after a program meant to churn out good factory workers.
Public schools in the US are dependent on federal and state money. Play ball or lose the money. Often the people making the decisions in congressional settings and DOE have personal agendas or money greasing their wheels. Remember the hubbub on Common Core? Teach common core or lose money.
Cruise. Around YouTube for older videos and connect the dots on how Common Core was a money grab that set us back a bit.
Go to local schools and see how school boards tie their ideology to how schools and classrooms are run to get that money. For years in San Francisco you enroll in the school lottery and hope you get to send your kid to the school close enough to you. Otherwise you spend 45 minutes each way to drop them off at school. On top of that classrooms cater to the lowest performing student. What parents with money wind up doing is sending their kids to Kumon like learning centers to fix the gap the classroom has in pushing their kid to be engaged with learning.
With everything else schools are also penalized for suspending or expelling students so teachers have to find creative ways to keep the bad apples away from everyone else.
For context I have family and friends working in public schools across differ states. There’s a reason people want to abolish the DOE and return curriculum back to the local school districts or the state.
I went to an ok school district and didn’t experience any of the problems today’s kids seem to face in school. People got suspended or expelled for being bad. Classrooms didn’t show political or biological ideology to the students.
One thing I've never understood with homeschooling: How come parents think they have the competence to be a teacher? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
> Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
This applies equally to paid teachers, along with numerous downsides that don't apply to parents (i.e. being able to tailor education to a single individual, developing a relationship that lasts close to two decades, ability to slow down and speed up course material where necessary, and more). Paid teachers, contrary to semi-popular mythology, are not special and don't do anything that an average person couldn't do (they are not extra-"competent"). In the natural course of being a parent you learn how to interact, guide, and teach your children.
This argument also fails in many concrete situations. For example, where I grew up there is a decent homeschooling community made up of people with average levels of education, low to average income, and yet the kids perform very well academically and are well socialized. Saying that these parents are not competent because didn't get a badge (education-related degree) is absurd considering they do as well as the people who did get that badge.
Great, I'm sure you'll have no problem using the services of a self-taught doctor, lawyer, or engineer then. After all, why would they need to be taught by a professional?
Go spend some time in a classroom and get a fucking clue how much more there is to teaching than what your layman's view entails. You, and this disrespect for our educators and the potential of what we could be offering in our public schools is why we are the laughing stock of the developed world.
Teaching twenty kids of wildly different levels is always going to be harder that teaching a single kid, so parents have a great advantage by default.
Yes, there are educators who are so great they can teach all 20 kids amazingly well, but those are super rare. Most likely kids who are learn much faster or much slower than the rest will be left behind. If you child is in this group, it's better off to stay away from public school.
(It could have been much better if there were advanced classes, "magnet" schools, etc.. but in many states those programs are being cancelled and everyone is being forced into rigid programs.)
If you are blindly relying on certified professionals in soft fields such as general medicine and law you are in for a bad time.
At a minimum you need to use your judgement to vet good from bad practitioners in those fields.
Also "disrespect our educators" is so funny. Sorry, they're not that serious, mostly dumb. And we're not the laughingstock of the developed world, we are the rulers of the developed and undeveloped world
I'm a former public school teacher -- maybe I can explain.
There's a lot of competence necessary to teach two dozen kids with different backgrounds and mastery levels, even in the rare moments when 2-4 of them aren't actively trying to derail the entire class.
The base level of competence necessary to go through a curriculum with one/a few of your own children is much, much lower. Could I do better with one/a few of your children given as much time and attention? Pretty definitely. Can I do better if your kid is in my classroom? In most cases, no.
Sure, there are things I could explain or guide a kid through because of my background and skills that homeschooling parents can't (though it mostly just takes more time and effort), but there's a huge amount they can do because of their relationship, access, and ability to devote time and attention that I couldn't hope to. And with modern homeschooling resources, tutors/group microschooling, online courses and group study, etc., the deficits have never been easier to overcome.
Also, two underdiscussed points: 1. An untrained, literate adult probably needs less than two hours to help a kid through what they'd learn in an eight-hour day at school. That time can go to other things. If they're productive, great. If they're not, no huge loss.
2. People significantly overestimate the level of care and competence average teachers have. You remember some fantastic ones. If fantastic and caring was the norm, you were quite lucky.
I'm generally not a fan of home schooling in a lot of cases, part of what school does is expose you to a vertical slice of humanity, and you will almost certainly be dealing with that for the rest of your life.
HOWEVER... remember that "home schooled" doesn't mean "as a parent you are the only teacher" right? You can hire tutors, you can form teaching groups with other parents, you can use online resources, etc. If done WELL and with a sense of one's own limitations, and the need to socialize your child, homeschooling can work.
It's just unfortunate that so often homeschooling is used as a way to ensure that no outside influences interrupt a parent's particular brand of ideological indoctrination... although in the narrow case of tech parents, I suspect that's less of a driving force.
>Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
100%. But this also applies to people with degrees in education, teaching certs, and employment at your local school.
How do parents judge the ability of local teachers to be a good (pedagogical) teacher? If they discover a bad teacher, what is their recourse?
Agreed. Titles and credentials do not mean what they used to, in education and a lot of other fields.
Sufficient erosion in the meaning and value of 3rd party teaching credentials then diminishes the relative value of outsourcing the process vs. doing it in-house: literally.
We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids.
We think we have a relationship with our own child that allows us to understand what they need and how to communicate with them in a way that works for them. We think we have the time (assuming one parent is full time parenting) to give our child the attention they need to excel. And we believe that a combination of relationship and individual attention goes further in K–12 than any amount of formal training in education.
Not really—public school takes up 6+ hours of every day, and I'd like my kids to have self-directed time as well. If we tried to do some sort of after-school tutoring with mom that would deprive them of valuable time to choose their own stuff to work on.
And what would be the point? If we're right that their mom is better equipped to teach them than a teacher is (because of time to dedicate to them and a personal relationship and understanding) then what do we gain by having a teacher do it too?
(This isn't the thread for the socializing argument, because OP started with teacher qualifications. I'll just add that we are aware of that concern and have strong mitigations in place.)
Not really. There are only so many hours in the day. The time between school and bedtime is extremely limited and involves other time consuming activities such as after school sports and eating dinner.
I work on homework with my kid every day and after all those things it's not like we have time (or she has energy) to fill in holes in her at-school learning
>We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids.
While this is a good and rational awareness of one's own capabilities, as someone who grew up in Bible-belt homeschooling circles and saw a wide variance in approaches and effectiveness, the "homeschool co-op"/"homeschool group" model where one parent teaches one subject to many kids, classroom-style, is super common. See, for example, "Classical Conversations" [1], a pretty common one in my area, that leans on "parent as classroom teacher to many kids", without much in the way of prerequisite qualifications.
The same logic applies to teachers, and can be applied against your own question.
As an example i once lost a mark on a math test because when rounding to the nearest whole number, i put 3.0 as the answer. Wrong. 3 is a whole number, 3.0 is not i was told, and threatened with suspension on protest. That kind of thing sticks with you.
I agree with your sentiment however, i just dont think its a powerful retort.
> As an example i once lost a mark on a math test because when rounding to the nearest whole number, i put 3.0 as the answer. Wrong. 3 is a whole number, 3.0 is not i was told, and threatened with suspension on protest. That kind of thing sticks with you.
I got threatened with suspension on protest once. It was about the meaning of a word, but still.
Luckily, I'm a university brat, so I just waited a couple days until my dad was keeping me at his office, then I wandered down the hall, and I asked some professors for a detailed and referenced way to push back. I brought candy and tums, because that's what professors want from children who can't bring beer.
About a week later, I went in with a 30 page computer printed essay. As a nine year old. It had six phone numbers in the back, four to PhDs, which could be called for further detail if needed. It was addressed to both the teacher and the principal.
An opening note was "please look into how Marilyn vos Savant was treated when she explained the Monty Hall problem, when considering whether teachers are permitted to threaten students for disagreeing politely. Are you really so afraid of being incorrect?," written by an internationally renowned mathematician.
I was carrying an etymological breakdown that to this day I can barely read, stretching all the way back to the hypothetical proto-indo-european roots.
Professors don't like kids being threatened.
I did not hear about that teacher doing that again while I was in that school.
Well, you were technically wrong. Which is wrong. var wholeNumber = 3.0; - what type will be assumed for that value?
The class is mathematics. In mathematics, numbers do not have types.
You also shouldn't try to mention INT_MAX, negative zero, rounding error, or other computer science topics which do not exist in mathematics.
>>> a = 3.0
>>> b = 3
>>> type(a) == type(b)
False
For example, 10 / 3 = 3.333... right? We're then asked to round to the nearest whole number, and the answer should be 10 / 3 = 3. It is not correct to then say 10 / 3 = 3.0, because that is just wrong.
I'd end up siding with the teacher on this one. Just acknowledge you didn't understand what they were looking for and do better next time.
As someone who (almost!) has a PhD in mathematics I'm going to have to call you out on this point. You are thinking like an engineer and talking about precision, but this is mathematics, not engineering. We make no distinction between the "real" number 3, the "complex" number 3, and the "whole" number 3. The number 3 lives in each of these universes as the same object (so to speak) because these sets (whole, real, complex) numbers are included in one another. Writing 3.0 is a representation for 3 just as 2.9999... is a representation of 3. Perhaps the bigger question we should be asking here is what was the purpose of all of this discussion? I've seen such petty treatment by teachers all the time and it always discouraged me from pursuing math until I met professors in university who actually tried to teach us something interesting and beautiful about math. This question could have led in that direction actually with a discussion of different kinds of numbers but unfortunately many math teachers in the US are not capable of this, or are too discouraged by the other craziness in schools to have the energy for such conversations.
"Whole number" means that the mantissa is 0, and is not related to what some random programming language asserts in its representational type system.
Math terms like "whole number" are not defined in terms of the behavior of computer programming languages.
In math, not only are 3.0 and 3 the same thing, but also, so is 2.9999999...
.
> They weren't looking to see if you knew the arithmetic with that question, they wanted you to show you understood what they meant by "whole number" and understand you can't just leave arbitrary precision after rounding.
Can you show any math reference that supports this viewpoint? This goes against my college mathematics training.
.
> You didn't give the right answer
According to mathematics, 3.0 and 3 are the same thing (and so is the Roman numeral III, and so on.) So is 6/2.
It is deeply and profoundly incorrect to treat an answer as incorrect because the mantissa was written out.
The teacher is simply incorrect, as are you.
.
> Just acknowledge you didn't understand what they were looking for and do better next time.
If a teacher asks "what is the country north of Austria," in an English speaking school, and you write "Germany," and the teacher says "no, it's Allemande," they're just incorrect. It doesn't matter if the teacher is French. There are only two ways to look at this: either the correct answer is in the language of the school, or any international answer is acceptable.
A normal person would say "oh, ha ha, Germany and Allemande are the same place, let's just move forwards."
A person interested in defeating and winning, instead of teaching, might demand that the answer come in in some arbitrary incorrect format that they expected. That's a bad teacher who doesn't need to be listened to.
Yes, we know there's also some kid who is explaining to just do as teacher instructs, but no, we're there to learn information, not to learn to obey.
> adding that .0 implies a precision which is not correct. They weren't looking to see if you knew the arithmetic with that question, they wanted you to show you understood what they meant by "whole number" and understand you can't just leave arbitrary precision after rounding.
If you round 3.05 down to 3, 3.00 is not arbitrary precision, its explicit precision that's reflective of the rounding operation you did. I wasn't claiming that `type(3.0) == type(3)`. I was claiming that:
>>> round(3.0) == 3
True
I was homeschooled from 2nd - 8th grade. My elementary school was trying to put my brother on adderall and my class had sorted me into the "blue" group of readers (colors of the rainbow for reading ability). I apparently came home talking about how I was slow and it was okay because we all learn at our own pace.
Definitely not a great school! both my brother and I ended up going to college and getting engineering degrees, and had zero issues with academics in high school. My mom did a pretty okay job but it was absolute hell on her, I entered high school ahead on mathematics/history but pretty behind on writing and science. The science I dont blame my mom for, all the curriculum at the time was insanely religious, so the ones we could find were very dry.
That's like half your job as a parent: teaching your kids stuff ( the other half being: keeping them alive). You are THE most qualified person on the planet to teach your own kids anything.
This is exactly why I dislike the push to erode parental rights or attack homeschooling, which is happening in many blue states. Parents know best, not a civil worker (teachers) or bureaucrat or the “state”.
I am absolutely not the most qualified person on the planet to teach my kids quantum physics. I'm also absolutely not the most qualified person on the planet to teach them geology. Probably also not the most qualified person to teach them advanced biochemistry.
Well, maybe not best, but it's also not something I would advocate for taking away from parents. It's silly to pretend parents need a degree to teach their kids something when teaching their kids how to live life is half of the job.
Depends on the parents because a lot of them are more than qualified. The typical education major isn't exactly a scholar, but that is also true of most people.
> How come teachers think they have the competence to be in loco parentis?
Multiple members of my wife's family are teachers in the local public school system. From what they have told me: they don't want to be in that place. Parents demand it of them, despite their strong attempts to push back and say "hey this one is your job as the parent to solve". So that's the reason in at least some cases, although probably not all.
I had numerous teachers that won local and regional teacher of the year awards that were, too put it bluntly, terrible at teaching. The actual pedagogical education that teachers receive is not good, and when you look at the rigor in their degree programs it would be found extremely wanting compared to just about any hard science degree program. There are numerous examples of pedagogical research being neglected to be included in programs for dogmatic reasons, and the usage of such methods like whole word reading over phonics would indicate large scale failure.
Anecdotally, if I were to stack rank my education in k-12 based on quality of teacher, it would essentially be all professors followed by k-12 teachers, with those receiving more teacher instruction being lower on the list. I was once instructed by a history teacher, to not use examples on a history essay that we didn't learn in class, because she had to look them up.
I find it incredibly easy to believe that I can teach my children better than the average teacher.
The USA hasn’t had a healthy education system for decades, so parents who have gone through that system are a) not very well educated and b) think they can do better.
This is a weak argument. The US has a patchy K-12 system whose quality varies from abysmal to world-beating, depending on many factors. It has, indisputably, one of the world's best universities. Lots of people who have gone through the former but are also products of the latter. They can be very well educated, and do better than credentialed teachers (let's face it, the only difference is that; also a known fact that brighter, higher-IQ people do not gravitate toward K-12 teaching).
When I was in school for my master's degree some years ago, several of my classes were heavily populated by teachers (New York State requires teachers to have or get a master's degree within 5 years of being certified). All were humanities teachers (English, Social Studies, ect - no STEM). At least half of them had great difficulty simply writing a one page essay. With one or two exceptions, reading comprehension was absolutely abysmal. At least two of them were functionally illiterate (in a master's program!). All were certified teachers who were actively working in schools.
The fact is that in many places school standards have been so low and social promotion has been going on for so long that we now have people coming out of high school and college that have never achieved anything academically. Many of these people go into teaching (even when schools were academically rigorous, majoring in education was always regarded as one of the least challenging areas of study).
That isn't to say that there aren't good teachers, or that there aren't smart teachers - there certainly are. It is to say that having an education degree or a teacher's certificate does not mean that one is qualified to do anything.
Does this mean every parent is smart enough or cut out to properly home school their child? Of course not! What it means is that (many) schools have effectively failed as institutions and until they are improved many people are going to look for alternatives.
> It is to say that having an education degree or a teacher's certificate does not mean that one is qualified to do anything.
It absolutely does in Finland. It absolutely carried meaning when I was educated in my (non Finnish, non US) country.
What is revealed here is that a New York State teachers certificate doesn't mean much.
Educators are trained to teach any kid effectively. Parents have the much easier problem of teaching a handful of specific kids, who they've spent their entire lives with and share half their DNA.
Teachers in most countries are, at best, mid-wits with no practical or real world experience. I know teachers who barely passed math in high school who are now match teachers. It's like a basketball teacher who went to "Basketball Teaching School", who's never played basketball in his life, teaching kids how to play basketball.
The average public school teacher is somewhere in the average top 40-30% in intelligence/academic achievement. Anyone who's a top performer academically is going to be much more competent than the average public school teacher.
We haven't really decided what we're going to do with our kids. I personally think I'd enjoy homeschooling them, but I don't know what their preferences will be. Their mom would appreciate the break. That said,
1. Teachers develop skills in managing rooms of ~30 kids. I believe this is completely different from tutoring someone 1:1 and likely has very little overlap.
2. Part of my day job is already mentoring/teaching. I enjoy that part of my work. I've received feedback that I'm good at it. Actually when I was younger I thought I'd switch into teaching after building up some savings with programming. I've since heard/read enough about the realities of being a teacher that I can't imagine doing that job (especially with public school). Homeschooling or teaching a homeschool pod seems like the best way to actually be able to teach if that's your inclination.
3. The k-12 curriculum is not really much to cover. Schools move at a pace appropriate for the slower kids in the room. It doesn't seem like a high bar to beat, and most of what I've found looking into it indicates that homeschool parents generally do outperform schools with a fraction of the time spent.
3a. I've already been teaching my 3 year old phonics and reading when she's in the mood. She doesn't really have the attention to sit and focus for more than ~5 minutes, but that's okay, and it's still going alright. I expect she'll already be years ahead of the school curriculum before it's even time to start. So initial results have been promising and suggest I am indeed capable of teaching a child.
4. When it comes to more advanced/in-depth understanding, I don't expect teachers to have the background. Like just looking at the math education program at my alma mater, there's no requirement for real analysis or algebra. There's no requirement for science courses (physics, chemistry, etc.). All of the options in the math department except education require at least a minor in another STEM subject. It's no surprise that a common trope is that teachers (particularly math) don't know how to answer how something gets used in the real world, but that's insane to me as a status quo. There are tons of applications of pretty much any math you might learn before graduate level in pretty much any field you examine (conic sections stand out to me as a niche thing that we covered in high school. Not that they don't have applications to e.g. orbits, but they don't seem to apply to other fields, and I don't believe the connection to physics was made in my high school class anyway (presumably because math teachers where I grew up aren't required to learn physics)).
Honestly I think school is mostly more useful for socializing and something like arts/crafts that entail mess and require a bunch of energy to do at home, especially before high school/AP classes. The academic part seems trivial. Once you've reached that conclusion, it makes sense to ask whether there are alternatives that are better suited/are more aware of and aligned to their purpose as enrichment.
Good points. Your last paragraph suggests we really need a drastic rethink of how education works and where funding goes. Right now a one size fits all solution with no competition is what gets funded.
Hundred percent. They vastly underestimate teaching in the same way that people resorting to homeopaths for serious illnesses underestimates the training and knowledge doctors go through.
I'm a huge supporter of public education. I think it's one of the most important things for the government to fund.
And, unfortunately, that's part of what's moving me towards homeschooling my child. We've not 100% decided on it yet. However, we are on the brink.
The issue we have is our school is underfunded and our child has special needs. Their day in class, from what we've observed, is primarily just daycare with no actual schooling. Even though they are on the border of being severe, they have no interaction with their peers which is a major reason we wanted them in school in the first place. The end result is they are spending a very large amount of time watching youtube or sitting in a corner.
The issue is our school district and our state does not want to fund public schools. They want to find ways to send money to private schools. The end result is the salaries for everyone involved are pitiful. Everyone that deals with my kid at school works 2 jobs. Some of them are making more money at mcdonalds than at school. And, surprise, the end result is even if they want to find staffers they can't find them.
Our district further bans parents from volunteering. So even though my wife is a SAHM, she can't lend a hand in my child's school to make up the staffing problem and improve my kid's education.
All of this has pushed us towards wanting to homeschool. Which really sucks because I don't think that's the ideal education for my child. I worry that we'll have gaps in the education we try to give them. I worry that they won't get to socialize with any peers. I worry that they will ultimately get left behind. But school isn't providing what we want.
Homeschooling is becoming fashionable because school systems have become shittier... Teachers are unable to discipline kids, there's zero consequences for kids who are disruptive, instead of failing kids school systems are dumbing down the curriculum, there's also massive institutional biases...
Plus it's more or less a golden age for homeschooling: there's more resources available than ever.
The headline is somewhat begging the question, but the author's key observation is on point: People homeschooling their kids are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, going for "opt out of being around average people".
Increasing the quantity and quality of good influences on your children is just good parenting.
If I know there's a kid down the street who seems like he will grow up to be a criminal, and another kid who seems like he'll grow up to be a kind, hard-working, well adjusted person, there is a 100% guarantee I will encourage my kids to play with the second kid, not the first.
Average person _where_?
If the school is bad enough, then an average student there (because there are many more students than teachers) might not be a good influence.
There are schools in my state with <50% graduation rate, the average student there won't even finish the school.
I found this explanation extremely unsatisfying considering that you could make the same choice and put your child into private education if you're a successful tech person.
I know families that homeschool and I like to read articles like this one to see if anyone "gets it." So far, no hits.
They're opting out of mediocre instruction and government-mandated values enforcement ("DEI" in its public school curricula form); the other kids are irrelevant. The homeschoolers I know are average and have lots of social activities with average peers in their community.
If you look around and see "government-mandated values enforcement ("DEI" in its public school curricula form)", I already fear for your children, whether you home school them or not.
As someone who sends their kids to private school for religious reasons, the idea of public school is wild to me. You have to send to a specific school based on location? Teacher's unions who strong arm schools into not being able to fire bad teachers?
I really don't understand why school vouchers aren't more popular. Parents need to have the ability to choose where to send their kids. They have much more agency in private schools where they are the people paying salaries.
I think the best way to fix the education system would be a voucher based system where the vouchers would be X dollars which would cover public and some private schools, but parents would have the option of choosing where to send their kids and if they want to spend more to send to better schools. Make schools compete for students.
There should also be some standard homeschooling kit or some sort of national resources that enabled parents to homeschool more easily.
Schools where I live is a race to the bottom where the best pupils are limited by the worst. No wonder homeschooling is becoming fashionable.
I am a father of a young kid and I am deeply interested in homeschooling; however, I am mostly intrigued by a "small group" homeschooling, rather than just having my kid alone, at home, learning things without friends around.
Is there anything being done on this front that you think it's interesting?
Come from a family of teachers.
From what I hear, it really feels like parents are more willing to homeschool than to be engaged with their children's education.
You thinking your kid needs some additional sauce to not be "average". Rad, teach them that at home. What about sending your kid to school prevents you from doing that?
I'm not saying school is perfect. But lately Parents care more than students about getting an "A" and if not it's the "Damn Teacher's" fault.
They want to protect their kids from the discomfort of not doing well in school. When they should be working with their student to help develop their talents.
Homeschooling doesn't scale, this is why it's not a solution for everyone. I can't see a fundamental drawback to it, like there are none in say, private jets: only problem is that neither can be applied to any sizeable minority, let alone not to the majority, of people. But if you can do it, do it.
The need for socialisation and being able to get along with the average had any meaning for as long as we had any hope for the "society" thing. Now it is obvious that there is no society (and it is arguable whether one really ever existed, maybe only for short periods in times of grave crises).
While I appreciate the author's perspective, esp as someone who experienced homeschooling, I think here in the US we often forget what these efforts have cost, their real value and who is lobbying against them.
Universal education, for all children in a nation, is an incredibly recent thing. Its also essential for real participation in a democracy which requires, at minimum, an understanding of the governing body and at maximum whatever we're slogging through now. Could the curriculum be better? Definitely. You know who is stopping that? Shit politicians. We need better ones because no matter what you think, they aren't going away,
Education has also continuously and purposefully been underfunded and politicized by the political right and intermittently eviscerated by corrupt players on the left and right. This is on purpose. The rise of homeschooling is directly correlated with how much funding public schools have lost, the lack of safety and how difficult it is to operate successfully. You now send the kid to school and get cut with a thousand small asks for cash when we could just revise how taxes are collected and distributed. Put out a gun ban. We don't need metal detectors, and cops and clear backpacks and active shooter drills and teacher trainings and and and. We need LESS GUNS and most americans agree but private industry is limiting us.
The rise of homeschooling is correlated with how many people are concerned about the politicization of schools, their libraries, their teachers, their cirruculum.
We keep having presidents who appoint leaders to the department of education who do not believe in education being available for all citizens. Schools continue to expand their mission to feeding kids who can't be fed. To programs for kids who can't be home. No one seems as focused on fixing why there are so many hungry kids instead focusing on a 'lunch account' and the debt of middle schoolers.
This is all intensely documented and yet another example of cutting a public good. A public good by the way, that made America a place that everyone in the world wanted to go. Yes, I got picked on in school and was bored in my classroom. Yes it could have been better. This though, this is a concerted effort to get us to divest once again, just like we are from net neutrality, the post office, the EEOC etc.
I've considered homeschooling but ultimately decided against it because:
A - It's illegal where I live, you have to jump hoops to do it B - I think an extra opportunity for socialising with kids is worth a bit of pain - we wouldn't have the energy for organising alternatives and also take care of the kids education C - By sending kids to a nice private school you get rid of a lot of problems of public school: unmotivated / openly hostile and punishing teachers, classmates with bad behaviour disrupting class, immigrant classmates who don't speak the language and / or create gang of people from the same country to gang up on kids (exactly like in prison)
When I went to school things weren't as bad as today and kids were not getting stabbed in public school, still it felt like a prison because of the slow learning pace and because everyone learns at a different pace and wants to learn about different things. School is simply the wrong idea for the majority of boys, it's just a silly machine that print mindless employees.
The strongest reason for not sending them to school is the latest EU mandatory gender theory / sexual education propaganda being taught to kids in school since last year.
Ultimately I decided that years of socialisation with peers trumps a few lessons about political BS; I'm confident I can teach them to distrust authority and teach them that they cannot trust blindly everything they hear in school or on the newspaper.
My friends who pursued illegal homeschooling are quite happy, they even found a teacher who is teaching kids illegally in someone's home, and by grouping the kids together across multiple families they have a soft school experience.
I loved public school (class of 99). I still miss the style of learning. Can you imagine going deep on a topic for 50 minutes then switching? AP classes got double periods. I found it so refreshing and I learned a ton.
Eg, science, math, study hall, lunch, Spanish, History, Art, English… in a single day?
I loved it. What worked for me was studying for tests — and the harder the classes you took, the less homework there was (or it wasn’t required). I had a great history teacher, occasionally good math & English teachers, a great art teacher, and mediocre science teachers. The science TEXTBOOKS were fabulous — you could just read through those things and become a genius.
No more textbooks these days — it’s all some pdf segment to download. Bummer for my kids.
These days, there are way fewer tests, so my kids always freak when they have tests. I thought tests were great! Just one focused period to perform and then move on. Homework and projects were a big problem for me, because I could never start early enough — it was always a last minute dash. Maybe that trained me to produce fast output, though.
Kids were sometimes awful, but there was no way I was going to be popular so I just did my nerd thing. There were enough of us.
They had a great drama program which I loved — I did every play and musical I could. And they even had a speech and debate club — so I competed at “extemporaneous” speech—when I went to state competitions, they got the students all together to clap me out like they’d do for the football team. That was unnecessary and funny for the nerd.
My kids don’t get these kinds of opportunities, I fear. I was pretty lucky.
* smart tech folks who value education not seeing education value in local schools * chronically underfunded public schools based on local property taxes, fewer programs, etc. * good private schools aren't cheap * political axes to grind esp. by the right to defund the Dept. of Education, and create curriculums that don't sell well (e.g. bibles in school, pro-oil & gas slants, etc.)
My 9 y/o getting shot at school isnt something I want on my risk register.
I did not catch any data that quantified if this is truly becoming fashionable. From what I know in US stats, homeschooling definitely had a run during covid but its already going down and even at its peak was barely measurable compared to students in public/private. It would be nice if he quantified where this idea comes from before going into the rant.
Maybe I'm a crappy adult, but I lack the patience, empathy, emotion regulation skills that I feel good teachers have.
I would rather send my kids to a private school than try to homeschool them myself. Thankfully, the public schools in the the area I choose to live in are excellent. We do augment at home with tutors and extracurricular learning.
My kid has a really hard time learning from me. It's resistance and stress for both of us. After all my role is to be a parent so naturally I'm a friend and a foe. Much more than a teacher. But I also don't have a big problem with that.
Obviously he also has his challenges in school. It's a public school but in Austria, so it ain't that bad. But there is also the saying that you aren't learning for school, you are learning for life.
So you aren't just learning for your subject, you are also learning to get along with people, how to avoid conflicts, how to manipulate a bit and how to trick some of the systems. All of that is not so much possible in homeschooling.
People do know that around here and it's more of a distrust into the system that might parents want to get their kids not taught in school in recent years, while their thinking behind the distrust does make them very bad teachers overall.
Comment I was replying to was deleted so I will repost as a top level comment without additional context:
----
I agree this is probably the biggest tradeoff, but attention all parents, there's a cunning and affordable solution to the challenge of spoiling versus opportunity. It's guaranteed to work, anecdotally, at least sometimes:
Live in a big house and send your kids to a nice school, but roster them on truly hood (n.b. I mean real deal heart of the ghetto) travel sports teams. Only two requirements are as follows:
(1) that the team must be decently coached and
(2) practice field and home field must be in a genuinely scary neighborhood. Please don't assume I mean a run-of-the-mill bad neighborhood.
Ideally Pop Warner when younger and AAU BB by high school, but really anything other than lacrosse or fencing works. I personally was raised on hood travel baseball, and I am being 80% serious about this suggestion. Go Hurricanes.
Ain't no one gonna take this advice seriously on here. hn is the most NIMBY place on the internet especially when it comes to their own kids. MMW pearl clutching is imminent.
I have no idea how common this, I hadn’t much of this trend among tech weirdos before this article.
The one thought that I imagine is being told you’re “above average” and “destined to do great things” your whole life by your socially-deemed successful parents is just another set of probably unrealistic expectations placed on kids.
I try and homeschool my kid when they are home (from school). I say some of those things, but I also say, when we are fixing a clogged drain by disassembling the plumbing. "You could be a plumber, lots of hard problem solving and you are not afraid to get dirty". You can have high expectations that they live an actualized life w/o projecting your own life-arc desires on them.
If my kid turns out thoughtful, kind and a whole actualized person, then they are successful no matter what.
The problem with homeschooling is that rarely is someone so well rounded that they can supply the full spectrum of education that a child needs. Blackbody vs an RGB source emulating a full spectrum. We all have cognitive blindspots.
> The problem with homeschooling is that rarely is someone so well rounded that they can supply the full spectrum of education that a child needs. Blackbody vs an RGB source emulating a full spectrum. We all have cognitive blindspots.
While this is true, it's not like schools are teaching kids a full spectrum of knowledge either. In particular, a lot of practical skills are often not taught in modern schools - personal finance, cooking, basic home maintenance and construction ("shop class"), etc. How valuable some of this stuff is will depend on the child of course.
As a German family, we opted out of the system to gain back freedom as a family. With regular school, you are bound to external schedules like vacation, when you have to get up,... We learned, that it's around 1 hour per day to achieve what kids learn during most of the day in regular schools. Doing homeschooling therefore is much more efficient time wise. in addition, we can train our kids to be self and critical thinking, something that does not exist in regular schools.
There are more reasons to consider, but these are our most important factors.
> How do you expect to change the world for the better when you’ve been taught from an early age, subconsciously or not, to hold most of the people around you in contempt? 4
Not everyone would recognize this, and be willing to call it out.
I wonder whether that came from the writer's religious homeschooling, and if so, whether it came from learning from decent people who taught and embodied the better Christian values? Or from a reaction to the distancing that can kinda be implicit (e.g., hints that people not in the religious group are a less-enlightened Other)? Or both?
When math is racist, acronyms are White supremacy culture, and classics like Shakespeare are ditched due to "misogyny", it's no secret why homeschooling is becoming fashionable.
I think one factor is that technology makes it a lot easier to do.
There are lots of online resources, online courses, tutors who do remote tutoring (I do not think i could have found my daughter a Latin teacher locally very easily, for example), lots of courses both for conventional qualifications (my kids did (I)GCSEs - just as kids do in British schools, (except at schools they do them at 16, we spread them out with my older daughter doing her first when she was 11) and just to learn (e.g. MOOCs).
This is my take as well. A huge burst of new tooling appeared during covid because the traditional school system essentially disappeared.
That tooling isn't going to disappear just because schools are finally open again, and some of it is actually fairly compelling.
I'm in a large metro, and the schools near me are terrible. 1/10 and 2/10 scores are typical. All the traditional schools we're zoned for fall well into the bottom 10% of my state. We attended lots of public engagement meetings for these districts (everything from guided tours to district superintendent interviews to parent-teacher nights). My takeaway? These schools are struggling with kids who don't have housing, don't regularly eat, can't get transportation, and have parents who utterly disengaged or downright abusive.
They aren't trying to excel at education, they're trying to literally keep 20% of the kids alive and fed, and then scrape them over the failing line so they don't get their funding cut.
I have nothing but respect for the educators placed into those circumstances - seriously, it's an impossible job and they get paid peanuts for it.
But I also absolutely refuse to put my kids into that system. Full fucking stop. It's not a place to provide enrichment and growth.
But... that leaves us the spot where
1. We win a lotto and get placed into a charter school (which only rate marginally better than the default schools - 4/10 instead of 2/10).
2. We pay for private schools to the tune of $30k/kid/year, or nearly half a million US for our family over the course of my kids education.
3. We move.
4. We home school.
Prior to covid, I had basically already picked "move" as the answer when all my kids hit schooling age, but there's actually enough tooling now that we will likely consider group based (pod) home schooling first. Home schooling doesn't have the same reputation that it did prior to covid, and it's not just "religious fundies" or "anti-gov whackos" anymore. Those groups definitely still exist, but with online tooling - we have much better options to filter out the crazy folks and spread the load out so that kids get social interactions, have a real teacher (often with better credentials than the school teachers) and get 1 on 1 interactions from adults.
I think the risk of sexual abuse is the best argument for homeschooling, especially versus public schools.
“An estimated 10% of K–12 students will experience sexual misconduct by a school employee by the time they graduate from high school.”
https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/case-study-k-12-sch...
We are not able to homeschool our son. Two problems: 1) we don't have time - we both work so there is little time to prepare the material; 2) it is very difficult to teach one's own kids. It's a LOT easier for a teacher to do that at school.
But I do sit with him every night for 30 mins to go over alphabet and Math. I think I'll extend it to maybe 45 mins when he goes to primary, but anything longer than 1 hour is going to be harmful.
Those are sources, and while curiosity is great most kids are focused on specific things not everything. Kids need direction and somebody them to focus on things they dont want to learn- like a kid who loves animals isnt going to learn math or how to write well, and a kid whos interested in history might not care at all about science.
Parents are no better at this unless they are incredible focused on utilizing a curriculum and addressing their own issues along the way- And even then, learning with other kids is incredibly helpful. Talking to a computer is not a replacement for a teacher (yet).
> Talking to a computer is not a replacement for a teacher (yet).
I agree. The limitless patience and non-judgement of a computer is very valuable in a learning context. LLMs won't be better than the best private tutors, but its very likely they'll be better than 80% of junior high through college teachers.
LLMs hallucinate and often provide incorrect answers. They're a fabulous tool if you're not necessarily looking a specific, correct, answer. But I'm not sure I would want my kids to use them as a tutor, without someone to vet the output.
That's a very good concern to have. Grounding[0] helps a lot with this and will continue to improve. I'll also add that I've had human teachers who were confidently wrong about things.
[0] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/facts-grounding-a-new-...
Nice, thanks for sharing. I wasn't aware of this, but certainly anticipated we'd continue to see improvement in this area. And I completely agree on teachers being wrong, usually without realizing it, but not always. :)
interesting take. Heard of Synthesis? (hint: DARPA funded).
At the local elementary school, we are told the kids are being kept safer now thanks to being tracked by AI cameras.
Some parents, maybe especially those with insight into tech fact vs. tech marketing, may have reservations about "tutors" whose services (perhaps for free) come with the stipulation that they are free to record every bit of data about your kid and do with it as they please.
The're being silly, right? Because?
As everyone on HN knows: software is super safe, and the entities/corps controlling it, so, so benign. Data doubly so -- hacks basically never happen, am I right? No one cares about your kid?
Or?
> Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
When I hear a question like this, I think: "Seriously?"
If it's not obvious to you why no one wants to to go a typical modern public school you probably haven't been in one in a while.
People are getting disillusioned by education; partly because of politics, but also because there's a good reason not to trust the experts.
Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see.
If a doctor or nurse or scientist says something is "evidence based", it works (most of the time). If a teacher or teaching academic says "evidence based", they mean they have some kind of evidence behind it, like in that Simpson's episode ('Well, your honor, we've got plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are 'kinds' of evidence.')
Teaching as an academic discipline has been basically spun out of whole cloth. Universities didn't (really) study education until governments told them to teach it, so they got a ragtag bunch of PhD thesis done, and the best way to do this is to use a very "philosophical" approach, and a very thin actual evidence base. Then they have to teach this to student teachers, most of whom are not really equipped to assess evidence. Then the student teachers who are great at the kind of essays that any student teacher can "engage with" will end up being the next generation of professors.
Schools are run by teachers (who are badly trained) and politicians the public service (which generally defers to the universities). Yes there is a more conservative "evidence based" movement, but even it is nowhere near good enough.