Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
(newsletter.goodtechthings.com)369 points by forrestbrazeal 5 days ago
369 points by forrestbrazeal 5 days ago
> what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like
Well, you got to see what they were really like while they were in the midst of dealing with a traumatic global pandemic in their own personal lives while also trying to deal with an essential job that looked nothing like what they had trained for while trying to support a virtual classroom full of children who were also in the middle of a traumatic global pandemic.
Yes.
And many made it work in the face of adversity.
Many others did not make it work just due to bad luck or timing.
But districts like ours completely failed at it because the entire leadership is incompetent and teachers never got the support they needed from the administration to make it work (including monitoring teachers to ensure they were actually working).
> give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it.
Seems like a bit of a non sequitur? If anything one could hope that a gym teacher would value play and movement over chaining kids to a desk all day?
In NJ, the School Superintendent is effectively the CEO of the district.
Many of them had advanced degrees in education, management, and finance. They control tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.
Ours has a BA in health, was a gym teacher then an admin person, eventually a principal and then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring.
He has been a total disaster because he lacks leadership skills, does not understand finance and hides behind the hodgepodge of technical jargon that public education has become.
My old gym teacher also taught science because we just couldn't find another teacher, and was genuinely surprised to learn there were forms of matter smaller than atoms.
My health teacher was a "permanent substitute" situation where we just watched movies the whole semester and got A's.
One of my math teachers died and we just...never hired a replacement, so nobody learned anything that semester.
Bonus: my driver's education teacher was arrested for a DUI (but not terminated)
These situations were all in different schools in different US states, so the lack of quality control in admin that you describe definitely resonates.
"The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year."
This kind of myopyic outlook that conflates the then-traditional instruction period to the remote instruction paradigm greatly cheapens every other point of your argument.
None of the teaching staff that had to adapt to that period of time were trained to make that experience 1:1 for the prior expectations and to use that as a basis to judge their entire ability is petty as fuck.
GP mentioned they were totally incompetent in their subject areas. It doesn't matter what medium they are transferring information through if they have no information to transfer.
"I haven't been trained" is the refrain of the incompetent
I think you are seeing through the trend that many people disagree with you.
"millions of parents", "their schools" should be "me", "my school."
If your school isn't good, I recommend improving if for every other kid, who didn't pull the lottery ticket of affluent parents with flexible jobs.
School boards benefit from parents who care and are competent.
This is nonsensical advice. In San Francisco, the school board wants to delay learning algebra to 9th grade. I can't "improve" this place because it's not that the place just needs advice. It's because they have "experts" with "years of experience" that want to do different things. And I'm just a techie who thinks he knows everything.
No thanks. Not interested in spending years of my life arguing with morons who rejected the only gay guy applying to help because he was a White male (this isn't some right wing thing - it was real and explicitly the reason).
When people say "we don't need your help; we know what we're doing" then not helping is doing the right thing.
> When people say "we don't need your help; we know what we're doing" then not helping is doing the right thing.
Not helping is doing the only thing they allow you to do. But also, removing yourself from the consequences of their folly is a wise thing to do.
I had to rewrite my response a few time to remove all the curse words.
At least in NJ, you have no idea what you are talking about. Our school laws are completely broken. Just so you know I have spent about 300 hours a year for the past three years fighting with, dealing with, trying to improve our district.
The Hard-core History podcast had a very similar exchange.
American: well if your communist government is mistreating you, simply vote for a different president!
Cue a million responses just like yours showing how it just isn't possible.
The people you hear giving up today have tried to fix the system. It's rather insulting to insinuate otherwise.
We live in western central NJ so the options are pretty limited. There were only a handful to pick from, and there were roughly two price tiers: tier “A” was around $15,000 a year per student, tier “b” elite schools were $50,000 and up per student per year. Our choices were down to only three schools, one was out because it was all-boys, and we chose out of the other two based on meeting teachers and staff.
My family has lived in 4 states and 3 countries and the only time we ever homeschooled…was in NJ back in the early 2000s.
Curious, I'm also in NJ, which school district is this?
I can't really know nor do I care to speculate on why it's becoming fashionable. But I'm a successful, well adjusted, homeschooled child from when it wasn't fashionable. This comment stood out to me: "Opt out of interacting with average people."
And my immediate thought was: "I can't imagine a less effective or worse way teach kids how to deal with people, average or not, than to throw them into a pool of similarly untrained people and telling them to just "figure it out". Which is essentially what public school does. Teachers can't be expected to help 30+ children work through that. They don't distribute across the pool of students in a way that can be effective for that. Homeschooling I firmly believe can be a more effective way to get exposure and learn how to deal with other people than a public school.
Public schools are training grounds for poor social skills.
This doesn't make sense to me.
We all get better at a talent by practicing it. We make mistake. We watch others. We determine our own preferences for what we like/don't like. We learn, grow. Kids figure it out.
How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better? You wouldn't get same exposure to the buttload of social interaction and scenarios in a closed system like that.
Practice, with guidance is superior to practice without guidance. Homeschooling doesn't mean isolation in the average case. You get a lot of practice as a homeschooler. The primary difference is that your practice is both with other adults and children while supervised and also modeled directly to you in homeschooling by other adults while public school is primarily unsupervised and lacking in a modeled behavior to observe.
The number one thing people would comment to my parents about me was that I was so comfortable socially in adult conversations and environments. I wasn't even in high school yet. I had adult level social skills by age 12. I didn't learn how to interact with people from other kids who had no idea how to either. I learned it from my parents and practiced what I learned with both other children and also adults. I'm only anecdotal evidence but a number of studies have backed up my own experience. A few links I had on hand can be found here.
* Medlin, R. G. (2013). Homeschooling and the question of socialization revisited. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 284–297. https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socia...
* Shyers, L. E. (1992). A comparison of social adjustment between home and traditionally schooled students. Home School Researcher https://archive.org/details/comparisonofsoci00shye
* Taylor, J. W. (1986). Self-concept in home-schooling children. (Doctoral Dissertation). Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services. https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/726/
No offense, but the idea of having adult level social skills as a child is terrifying to me. Most of the people who I've encountered who describe themselves that way also talk about the burden of from a young age totally internalizing the idea of every interaction being a performance. Every interaction is a new opportunity to try and convince adults that you are worldly and smarter than other kids. That tends to mess you up. Of course, this is purely anecdotal.
You don't just stay home with your siblings. A major factor of how homeschooling works is homeschoolers have local organizations or co-ops where they do things together.
And, yes, this is just reinventing some aspects of the public school system in the private sphere. But that is because parents, rightly or wrongly, feel they have zero influence over how the public school works, so they just sideload their own version.
(I would say that the parents are right about having zero influence, as quite a lot of American public schools are so big and so bureaucratized that parents do not have a real voice without herculean effort.)
I really take issue with the position that parents have zero influence. Our children attend a "mediocre" public school in our US city. We simply talk to the teachers and administrators, and you would not believe the results. I always go into it thinking that we are whiny parents talking to an overworked staff, and the results are incredible.
For anyone who is considering homeschooling but isn't sure, there is a real middle ground: actually engage with your huge staff at the public school who are hungry for parent involvement because it seems like the parents don't care and the kids are just there for the babysitting.
Public schools work great, but you do have to remain engaged and be ready to problem solve. It's like homeschooling but you get a whole publicly funded (somewhat overworked but enthusiastic) support staff to accomplish educational goals for your child.
Yes of course schools vary but if approach ANYONE with a combative attitude they are likely to fight back, even if you're on the same side. Approach with sympathy, open communication, and the occasional set of hands in the classroom, and you can get the best for your child.
I think it isn’t that unusual for homeschooling parents to form groups, you can do an art class together (otherwise hard to afford), start up some recurring social events, that sort of thing.
K-12 school is sort of a weird social situation, right? You are mandated to be there (you can’t even quit or find a new job), your manager has the right/responsibility of in loco parentis, your co-workers can’t be fired and their only punishment for goofing off is that they might get nagged a bit, and your worst peers don’t care about that at all. I don’t think it is obviously good practice of grown up social skills. You can see the maladaptive behavior that sticks around after—office gossips, bullying, that sort of thing (I mean, that sort of behavior is present everywhere, but I’m pretty sure it is enhanced by the fact that these are strategies to win in the pressure cooker).
You get better at what you practice.
If you practice unproductive social interactions and unhealthy coping skills all day, you will get better at unproductive social interactions and unhealthy coping skills.
> How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better?
This is a very reductionist view of homeschooling.
While some folks certainly do have this experience when homeschooled, a well-designed home schooling experience will have an abundance of social interactions with non-family members.
Sports is an obvious one, but there are also many homeschool groups that engage in learning activities together.
> We all get better at a talent by practicing it.
Exactly. Which is why kids need to practice their social skills in environments that actually reflect how real-world societies functions, rather than being sequestered in an institution with utterly distorted, artificial social structure.
That actually sounds like a good way to teach kids how to deal with others. Just figure it out, in a safe environment with minimal consequences and some guard rails. I wouldn't expect a teacher to teach kids how to socialize, especially on an individual level, but rather to step in when necessary. Being in a big group of people you may not like is pretty much a description of life, and the goal is to learn to function and even thrive in that environment. I support home schooling too, but I don't think there's anything about it that naturally lends itself to learning this skill. Many homeschoolers manage it, but it takes extra work, whereas being in 'gen pop' teaches it as a side effect.
I didn't say that home schooling produced poor social skills, and in fact said something like the opposite. My point was that traditional schooling was a perfectly fine way to learn social skills, as a side effect of being forced to socialize. If home schooled kids and traditionally-schooled kids have somewhat similar social skills, and (as you say) teachers in public schools aren't teaching these skills directly, how do you suppose kids are learning them?
> in a safe environment with minimal consequences and some guard rails
The problem is that a public school, at least in the US, is /not/ a safe environment with minimal consequences, and it has effectively no guard rails. Your idea is a nice one, but it's not realistic, and reality is exactly why people are opting out of public schooling for their children.
> Which is essentially what public school does.
The school I went to had, luckily, excellent teachers. One of them, not sure if as a coordinated effort or not, was big on letting the class decide things and helping us form the social structures needed for that - structuring discussions, votes, rules, and so on. I suspect it was a reaction to the dictatorship time requirement of studying an idealized version of Brazil's political organization.
A first step is to properly fund public schools. Then one would need to better select teachers (which becomes an option if teaching pays better) and train them. Teachers need to be trained in teaching, not only their subject matters, and need to be kept updated.
If you read something like Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, you realize that teachers didn't. In the middle+ class at least, the children's parents did that work by organizing specific extra-curriculars, such as dances, from a very young age. These ensured that the children learned manners, dated people of acceptable character or class, etc.
That social infra is simply gone today. Parents don't have much of an interest, or are erroneously(!) assuming that teachers are supposed to do it, or used to do it. We are less class focused* today, which may be good, but certainly less manners and etiquette focused as well.
* by that I mean like, if you are an American of German descent, you are not particularly worried if you child is dating an American of Irish descent, whereas you might have been in 1940. Similarly (and overlappingly) for Protestant/catholic etc etc. Not even what we typically think of as class today! We're so blind to a lot of that stuff now, we forget it existed, just like the other social infrastructure.
> That social infra is simply gone today. Parents don't have much of an interest, or are erroneously(!) assuming that teachers are supposed to do it, or used to do it.
You might be missing the fact that back in the day there often used to be one parent working and one parent staying at home. Nowadays both parents need at least one job. Wealth inequality at it again.
> Homeschooling I firmly believe can be a more effective way to get exposure and learn how to deal with other people than a public school.
In your homeschooling are you with other students or just your family members?
> Public schools are training grounds for poor social skills.
This statement doesn’t make sense to me.
Personally, I have high functioning autism. I would do terrible at interpersonal relationships, but then get near perfect scores on all the tests.
Teachers would anticipate that I would be terrible and then when I got perfect scores on all the tests, they would be pissed off.
I think there are a lot of tech people that are neurodivergent and had terrible experiences in school and would love to avoid my child having that experience.
Also, I’m not super happy about the extreme views on race, sex and religion that are going through the school system. I would like the opportunity to teach a more moderate view. I feel like people who don’t have kids who make comments about this trully don’t understand many parents perspectives on this.
Also, when you are a parent, you find that you have to move to specific areas to get good schooling and homeschooling would allow you to live where you want to and not pay and go through the application for private school.
It’s interesting that everything in this article that’s anti-homeschool relies on the parents not doing something correctly, which I think most people just assume they correct for that. I’m not worried about abusing my own kids, because I’m not going to abuse them. Honestly, my mom was a teacher and she was anti-homeschool and many of the anti-homeschool bullet points were provided by the union and I think she just wanted to get full funding for the school and the state wouldn’t provide funding to the school when the homeschoolers didn’t show up and wasn’t really caught up in those arguments.
However, my wife is never going to homeschool our kids or allow me to do it, so it’s just not going to happen.
My son's district has a black superintendent and at least one black principal but otherwise black (and other) kids don't get to see the example of black teachers (and learn school is a "white thing you wouldn't understand" the same way that boys come to the conclusion that school is for girls when they don't see any male teachers -- the problem here is representation-ism that stops at the very top, if they do get a black teacher they get promoted out of the ranks immediately)
When my son was in middle school he was quite inspired by a curriculum unit on the Harlem Renaissance and liked the school's black principal.
Later on he felt the attitude about gender (man vs women as opposed to something else) was very oppressive and that it contributed to him and other students falling victim to incel ideology and sometimes body dysmorphia. Today he struggles to talk to girls not because he's afraid of being rejected but because he's afraid of being reported.
The support of trans ideology is destroying the progressive movement. What a shame because they’re driving people straight into the arms of fascists.
If support of trans folk is "Too far" for someone, they were already running towards fascism. There's nothing progressive about denying folks their gender identity, and to the extent that "Progressivism" is a force in America, it is better off without the Anti-trans contingent.
It's pretty standard for middle schools to hold assemblies discussing sexual harassment and healthy relationships, but they don't always do a great job communicating those concepts.
Back when I was in middle school about a decade ago, the principal got up on stage with a police officer and explained that sexual harassment is when you talk to a girl and she feels uncomfortable. He then went on to assert that the school had zero tolerance for sexual harassment, describe various authorities to whom victims could report instances of sexual harassment, and implore students not to risk their future by engaging in sexual harassment.
If you weren't super confident in your ability to predict or control other people's feelings, probably your takeaway from that assembly was that talking to girls was a risky thing to do.
> Also, I’m not super happy about the extreme views on race, sex and religion that are going through the school system.
Maybe I'm living under a rock; what extreme views are going through the school system?
You might be being facetious and trying to imply that the political views taught in school are actually moderate, but I'm going to take the question literally anyway.
One example is the idea that a bio man should and must be called a woman if they declare themselves to be so. Regardless of whether or not you agree, it is an extreme viewpoint that has only just now become acceptable to believe in terms of history.
> Maybe I'm living under a rock; what extreme views are going through the school system?
Not op and not taking a stance on any of these here, but:
1. Critical race theory (CRT)
2. Gender fluidity
3. Endorsement and use of Christianity/Bible in public schools
These are all hot-button issues in education today, at least in some states and districts.
No one is learning about Critical Race Theory anywhere other than law school (or possibly undergraduate sociology classes that pre-law students would be likely to take). It's a heterodox thread in legal scholarship. Whatever you think primary schoolers are learning about race, it's not Critical Race Theory.
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.
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?
Homeschooling is seeing a surge in popularity, its not just tech people or high status people.
IME it's a lack of trust, sending your kids to be raised by strangers. I grew up in a small town and some of my teachers were basically neighbors.
For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools which might serve a thousand students from 4 different towns it's placed somewhat equidistant to, ie, in the middle of nowhere
I know in my area they're doing consolidation of schools because there are fewer kids enrolled than when the schools were originally constructed. Even after some consolidation many schools are barely over 60% of their enrollment capacity which is estimated to go down almost another 10% in the next five years.
People haven't been having nearly as many kids for a while. Fewer kids means fewer students. Revenue to operate the building is tied to number of students; fewer students means less revenue to keep things operating satisfactorily.
When the majority of the homes surrounding the elementary are filled with retirees whose kids have moved elsewhere instead of young families it is no surprise the school closes.
> For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools
In my experience it's because schools are being treated as a business, and businesses are usually more efficient when there's consolidation of expenses. Why pay for 3 schools with 10 teachers each when you could instead consolidate classes and pay for 1 school with 15 teachers? To a business, the decision is purely made out of cost. Alas, a lot of governments have such tight budgets (for many legitimate and illegitimate reasons) that cost benefits outweigh the human benefits.
Depends on area. Portland schools have plenty of money but still struggle. Administration and retirement perks eat up most of the budget. In a sense its that they are not a business that leads to that kind of issue.
But ultimately its a complex issue. eg voucher systems would resolve the above issues, but create entirely new sets of problems which may be worse along the way.
Not sure if I agree with this. Schools are not exactly run by the government, rather local school districts.
My (not data based) impression of school levies is that they nearly always get approved by voters, even in tax-averse areas, so if there is a lack of funding, it is usually real, rather than through a misplaced need to be "efficient".
> Schools are not exactly run by the government, rather local school districts.
What gets approved by voters? Ahh, right, government services. How are those paid? By taxes. Who collects taxes? Governments, of course.
I don't know where you are in the world. In the US, public schools are funded by government money counted by number of students and their test scores. So more students = more funding, better scores = more funding. There are other kinds of schools, private schools and charter schools come to mind, with different funding types. But often those include additional costs to the parent on top of the taxes they already pay.
How do public schools get managed by the district? Again I'm not sure where you are, but here the public school administration gets voted in during government elections. The public education system's requirements are defined by law and, above the district level, managed by county or state education services.
> if there is a lack of funding, it is usually real, rather than through a misplaced need to be "efficient"
Don't get me wrong, I think efficiency has its place. But I think it is extremely easy for school administrators to end up in a business-first mindset instead of a serve-people-by-educating-them mindset.
The irony of this is that you rely on strangers for critical stuff like ensuring you don't get electrocuted or burned at home or even ensuring that the water that you drink won't make you ill or that your car is a good enough condition to not lead you to a fatal crash. Any of these affects your close relatives. What makes education different?
I think there's a broad perception that education professionals are ideologically captured by the left. It's hard to know how true this is, but individuals like "libsoftiktok" have made a career out of stoking that fire.
Also, unlike your other examples of strangers working on things, there's not really a feedback loop of review and rework where mistakes can be corrected. If your child gets a bad education, that's time lost that's really hard to recover and can set them back for life.
Edit: To add, the "ideological capture" perception is important because of what education is. When you're dealing with an electrician, it doesn't matter who they vote for because electricity works the same way regardless. Teachers don't just regurgitate information but promote a set of values and expectations in their classroom so their personal opinions can matter a lot. And that's not even getting into teachers who explicitly try to teach students their worldview.
It's not different.
If the water you drink is having problems, you'd have campaigns over it, protests, people trying to get it resolved and potentially lawsuits. People would band together to do whatever they could to fix the problem that they see.
Education is seeing the exact same thing. Parents see a lot of problems. They are going to school board and council meetings, people are campaigning on solving the issue and people are taking whatever measures are in their power to fix it...like home schooling.
When people see problems, they want to fix them. It's exactly the same thing.
Exactly right. Plenty of people have in-home systems to bring their municipal water to the quality that they want (e.g. filters, softeners). Many more even have wells because there is no municipal water.
Many people research safety ratings before purchasing a car as a proxy for how reliable a given manufacturer is at ensuring good outcomes in a crash.
It's really not that different.
I have some friends who live in area with the bad water quality... They end up drinking/cooking with store-bought water, instead of city-provided one from the tap.
When I need electrician/plumber/general contractor/etc..., I choose one based on recommendations and reviews.
If you know (say from conversations with other parents) that your local school is bad, why would you send your kids there? It is like choosing an electrician with bad reviews only because their office is next door to you, or living in bad-water area, drinking city water and getting sick every week.
The cost and timeline to evaluate quality is completely different; I can get multiple opinions for my possessions, and utilities are fairly objective to evaluate (and the cost to do so is small relative to the scale of the operation).
Schools are limited for choice, expert evaluation is limited, outcomes are potentially unclear... That's before you get into issues with the politics of a teacher or problem students.
It's pure economics. One large facility is cheaper in fixed cost terms than four smaller facilities. It's also cheaper in variable costs of staffing and other economies of scale like consumables. Lastly, the size of the large school means the cost of special features like a wood shop, kitchen, large theatre, art facilities, etc., are relatively smaller and thus more easily included in the whole package.
You're right that something is definitely lost. It's an externality that's forced on you and your children. There are compensations, but it's not an unambiguous win.
American schools just aren’t very good. I remember when I was in third or fourth grade, my mom flipping out about why we were spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math. To this day, my mom, who grew up in Bangladesh but got a classic British education from a tutor, is more well read in western literature than I am (Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Socrates, Plato, etc.)
As far as I can tell, private school doesn’t even fix the problem. My kids go to a pretty expensive private school and it’s not rigorous or challenging—the main benefit is that the kids are better behaved so there is less chaos and distraction.
> spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math
After a bunch of years overseas, I returned to the US to complete my last two years of high school.
I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization. They don’t learn anything substantive about the founding U.S. cultures (big differences between Puritans and Jamestown settlers). They don’t study European history as a required course so they know almost nothing about how the modern world came to be (Westphalian nation states, etc). And they learn almost no world history beyond ancient civilizations (native Americans, ancient Egyptians, etc).
I spend $33,000 a year on my daughter’s education and she was telling me about some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe—but she has no idea what the Magna Carta is, or what the political structure was of the UK that we declared independence from, who Plato is, etc. My mom was more educated as a girl in a desperately poor Muslim country in the 1950s than my daughter in an affluent DC region private school.
Not sure how it is today but in the late 90s it felt like we had a section about Nazis and WW2 every year in high school (in Germany). Yes, I get it, it's important - but it's not important to rehash it every year for 9 years.
That said, overall I was pretty happy with history class.
>The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization... some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe.
The Iroquois Confederacy. Irony.
> some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe
Do you mean the Great Law of the Haudenosaunee [1]? I.e., the constitution of the Iroquois Confederacy? The place where the founding fathers of the US got the idea of separation of powers? The form of government of one of the major regional powers at the time the US was formed? Don't know why your daughter's teachers would bother teaching her about that. Sure, it's awful if they were neglecting all those other things, but seriously, anyone learning American colonial-era history needs to learn about the Iroquois Confederacy.
> dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
And don't even start on how little is dedicated to explain slavery and the social and economic ramifications until the late 20th century. Or how the native people were actively suppressed during the expansion to the West, and how all that lead to some of the current social and economic structures around predominantly Native American groups.
My daughter's middle school science class spent a month and a half chewing through water and rock cycle. I don't think geology is in her future.
> I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
Really? I remember the Civil War being a unit (significantly less than a semester) in US History, which was one class in my sophomore year of high school.
I think that Native American history, the Civil War, and Geology are all reasonable subjects to cover in school.
I don't think OP disagrees, or their mother. I think it's more the time spent on such things. They might be worth a semester or two, but the world would be a much better place if we learnt a little about a lot, because to functionally understand one thing means to understand the links between things. I person would have a much deeper understanding of the American Civil war if they understood the British Empire at the time their competition with France to dominate the world stage, and how the US fits within that. Instead, the US seems to teach about the Civil War as if it were an independent conflict when not much happened before or after.
I believe early grade schools should be relatively broad in the subjects they teach. Not every child will be interested in math or science. And there's nothing wrong with that. I feel many parents don't agree, especially those from a technical background. A healthy society should have a diverse set of skills across many disciplines. Though I do believe if children are interested in furthering their study on a particular subject (not just math), there should ideally be opportunities from schools.
It’s shameful to not be interested in math and science—that’s like saying you’re not interested in reading. But putting that aside, the other subjects should be educational.
I remember what triggered my mom was us spending an inordinate amount of time making clay models of Native American villages. American kids shouldn’t graduate high school knowing more about the shapes of Native American houses than the conceptual underpinnings and history of their own civilization.
I believe there's value in learning about such topics such us how historical village buildings are created from a child's perspective. Regardless whether it's Native American, European, or African, etc. It allows us to reflect on what was built before and to understand what to avoid or improve in future development. Not to teach them the exact technical details, but to light a spark to those children inclined. We need people who are interested in such things to study it so future generations can understand where we have come from and how far we have gone. I believe it also allows us to appreciate that there are many peoples and countries today that still live this way and allow us to be empathetic or humbled by their way of living.
I believe math and science should be invested in but if I had a choice between a broad learning curriculum and a focused one, ill choose broad.
If you've ever watched a movie or listened to music, you'll be surprised to know not all of the artists are well versed in math or science. You may be surprised that many of the people, experiences, entertainment, and sports you absorb may not be math inclined either. I personally find value in that.
> It’s shameful to not be interested in math and science
What? Don't you know anyone who is not a nerd? I know many very fine people with no interest in either, and they have nothing to be ashamed of
> the main benefit is that the kids are better behaved so there is less chaos and distraction.
This is such a scam, unreal.
Private schools have a market with one of their distinguishing features being "kids don't openly flail around instead of paying attention"
They're only able to get away with "only" being marginally better cause the bar is so, so low.
(I'm not condemning you, it's just obscene the amount of effort and time required for kids to get even something that approaches a decent education)
Western literature is bad because it was written by cis white men. Native Americans lived here and had an advanced society that was way better and it didn't have capitalism. /s
I thought this was a really bad article. "Suddenly"?? I've heard many tech parents go full bore into homeschooling for at least about 2 decades now.
Also, for the particular issues she talks about (e.g. social isolation), essentially all of the tech parents I know that are into home schooling put a ton of effort into having a really rich social environment, e.g. either through "group schooling" or lots of outside activities.
It's really a blog post and if you read it that way (i.e. a personal story / take on the topic) then it's fine.
I've replaced the title with a somewhat more neutral question from the article. If there's a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, and preferably using representative language from the article), we can change it again.
Covid and the school shutdowns, did create a real boost in the homeschooling. Exacerbated by the particularly draconian shutdowns and masking in areas where there are a lot of tech workers like the Bay Area.
I think it merely made parents aware of what was already happening.
My nephew texted my brother during his lunch break to ask for more credits for his switch account. My brother asked why play games instead of talking or hanging out with others. My nephew sent back a video of the lunch room: every single student had their eyes glued to a digital device of some sort.
The experience kids have in schools isn't what we as adults went through - a common thing for every generation - but when you can get more interaction and socialization via home school networks and groups of motivated parents, it is hard to argue against it.
> My nephew sent back a video of the lunch room: every single student had their eyes glued to a digital device of some sort.
Wow, this just makes me intensely sad. We are ruining a generation of humans with these digital narcotics. Say what you want about being a Chicken Little, or that every generation looks at the next generation's behavior with some amount of trepidation ("MTV will corrupt your mind!"), but this feels pretty different to me. Humans are social creatures, and human children need lots of unstructured social play, and they need to be allowed to get bored, and we're killing all that.
Which is why so many districts are pushing for no mobile devices during the school day.
Completely agree, but it's not really like "tech homeschooling is a new thing" vs. the fact that public schools (I'd argue especially in the Bay Area, e.g. see the school board recall) got so bad during the pandemic that parents had huge motivation to find an alternative.
And the fact of the pandemic makes this article even worse in my opinion: "Gee, why would parents with means want to find an alternative when public schools had to go all remote for extended periods and were a shit show in general?"
> Here are some things I struggle with at age 32:
> - 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'm the same age and have the same things, and I went to traditional school K through university. Idk if that has much to do with how you were schooled, or at least not being home schooled doesn't just magically fix that.
Also schizotypy which maybe 5% of people have and gets DXed basically 0% of the time. It's a developmental disability which will make you a target for relentless bullying which will screw you up much more than you need to be screwed up.
You should be reluctant to DX ADHD, everybody seems to have it because it's promoted by an addictive pill industry, it's almost as fashionable as gluten intolerance used to be or autism is these days. #notactuallyautistic
Interesting. I read the wiki article and the mayo clinic page on it. School uniforms are not uniformly a bad idea I think. We as a civilization should really focus on removing bullying as memetic virus. It has knock on effects that are larger than we realize, like most forms of harm.
I think most people seem to have it, because I think most people do to some degree, most things are a spectrum. We simply aren't prepared for the world we have accidentally created for ourselves. I personally don't find the pills addictive. Speaking of which, this quite long video, "Dopamine Expert: <clickbait redacted>" is quite good, esp if you are a fan of neurology and neuropsychology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6xbXOp7wDA
One commenter proposed ADHD, the other high IQ.
My proposal: Forrest is just an average person guy, those who know him (but not how he feels about himself) may describe him as “well adjusted”. How Forrest feels is a reasonable response to a culture that rewards and incentivizes maladjustment.
Signed on behalf of
Los milenaristas milenarios de militante
This is due the author presumably having a really high IQ, not homeschooling. He would feel the same way with regular schooling.
This piece makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims.
Just because you are putting a child in a siloed environment doesn’t mean you’re teaching them that everyone else is beneath them.
If you are homeschooling and not teaching humility, kindness, etc then you’re doing it wrong.
- parent of 6 homeschooled kids
Our two kids are homeschooled and are generally equally excited to play with all their friends (some homeschooled, some in regular public school, some in private school).
I have yet to see or hear any "othering" of their friends. In fact, I'd say the breadth of different social situations they are exposed to makes the "othering" less likely.
In what way is the ”othering” different than what children otherwise do, apart from being in different kind of schools? As you wrote children (or more generally) people can make up all sorts of reasons for that.
I find looking beyond the rim of your own plate such an inspiring thing when it comes to schooling.
Germany for example prohibits home schooling. don't breed detached extremists. however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O. but then on the upside again, you will go to school for at least 13 years if you get _any_ kind of qualified professional education.
China has one (1) math text book for 1.4bn people.
France has competitive cognitive Tests (Concours) to enter highest education.
maybe a problem is that everybody went to school so everyone thinks they are experts. it's hard to evolve schooling. like steering a super tanker. slooow. too slow for four year election cycles.
”don't breed detached extremists”
This doesn’t follow. In addition, there are plenty who fit that description who did go to a state school.
well, the German constitutional court thinks it does follow, indeed, and they are much smarter than I am in their argument:
https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rk200...
In a nutshell, only schooling forces you to confront other beliefs in a way preparing you for life in a pluralistic society and thus schooling as such is a cornerstone in education.
private schools German flavor are okay because their curriculum has to comply and their final exams are state controlled.
So for example even if you went to some evangelical creationist belief system school, you'd have to understand and know evolution. And every student gets sex ed no matter if the parents think that's a bad idea, including contraceptives, abortion rights and all.
And likewise every student is confronted with the Hollerith machine planned systematic mass deportation and mass murder of 6 Mio Humans for having a "wrong" birth certificate, using scheduled, planned trains and scheduled, planned mass murder factories. And every student learns how that came to be and how a weak democracy was overturned into a mind control oppression state.
And that makes a _lot_ of sense.
Two points here:
1. Government schooling won't force you to confront other beliefs: it will deliver you a particular set of beliefs. Example: sex ed (which must, logically, be delivered from one or another moral perspective; there is no neutrality). Or history, which in many Anglo countries used to whitewash 19th-century crimes, and now goes to the other extreme of ignoring anything good.
Empirically, it is pretty clear that government schools do not produce, and are not designed to produce, children who are capable of examining things from multiple points of view.
2. Ultimately it's a philosophical question: who is ultimately responsible for the child's development? And, therefore, who has the right to make the final decision on this? The parents, or the state? That's obviously a much bigger question, but it will determine one's attitude to homeschooling.
> only schooling forces you to confront other beliefs in a way preparing you for life in a pluralistic society and thus schooling as such is a cornerstone in education
That's absolute nonsense.
Public schooling grooms you to fit into a rigid, calculated mould for society. You learn which is the right way and things to think, and which ones are wrong and you're not allowed to think, according to the current government in place. Your comment exudes precisely that.
On the flip side, a long history of multiple paths through public education has led to Germany being a country where there is no universal expectation that everyone should/must get at least an undergraduate degree, and so inflation (in terms of both price and dilution of value) of degrees is lower than in countries like the UK or especially the US.
An acknowledged, well-designed, and state-supported path to vocational education is very good; social mobility is important within such a system, and a lack of social mobility doesn't have to be baked in.
oh, I agree "Länderhoheit", state level control of curricula, was one of the weaker ideas in German education. East Germany got that that much better. Finland had sent envoys to East Germany and copied their system (not the curricula, mind you), to create their Pisa winning system in the 1980s...
> too slow for four year election cycles.
Maybe that's the problem: that education is so politicized. Yet another reason people opt to homeschool.
(For those of you who object so strenuously here to homeschooling, suppose MAGA were to remake public education they way they want it to be. Would you then not seriously consider homeschooling? I bet y'all would.)
I personally.think the solution to the maga craze and polarization is a proportional representation instead of first past the post. oh and control over individualized media and their individualized political campaigning, built on disinformation and bubbles.
has little to do with homeschooling or not.
>however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O
As a German that's the first time I hear that. Do you mean Schülerpraktikum? That's usually at age 14. Never heard anyone doing that at age 9.
They're talking about the division between Gymnasium, Realschule, and Hauptschule. It's actually state to state nowadays whether they have separate schools or Gesamtschulen, but I understand even in Gesamtschulen, in many Bundesländer there's some internal separation.
Where are you in DE, that this is unknown to you? In Köln just 15 years ago I knew parents who had the horror scenario: a 4th grade teacher who quietly believed that girls shouldn't go to university. They switched their daughter schools that year.
this is very reductive and really hyperbolic. Also hauptschule does not exist in most states anymore.
I also know enough people who did perfectly fine via Realschule to academics. Of course it's a decision with pretty much a single point of failure which is suboptimal, but don't act like it's predetermining your whole carrer.
Also a lot of countries have different goals, and most people when they think of optimization of schooling think of better outcomes at the top end, whereas administrators think of better outcomes at the bottom end. The difference between stimulating your smartest people enough that they become leading beacons of their field vs minimizing the amount of people that get left behind. In some places there's a mixed approach with magnet schools but there's many countries where that doesn't exist.
Not sure inspiring is the word I would hve picked :D
Overall it sounds a tad better than the US, but far from perfect.
Especially not accounting for different developmental speed of kids annoys me, although from what I heard it'd a bit better these days than in the 90s - e.g. even if they sent you to the Realschule instead of Gymnasium and at age 15 you decided you wanted to go to university they wouldn't make your life extra hard.
hehe, yes I absolutely agree partitioning schooling is a bad idea. It's much smarter to have shared learning and make a difference inside a class "Binnendifferenzierung" and it's also much smarter to create GATE gifted and talented programs (Hochbegabtenförderung) as enrichment and maybe after grade 8 or 9 as dedicated boarding schools.
> don't breed detached extremists.
There are plenty... Who's that Nazi kid with the face tattoos? I don't remember his name.
I'm saying your thesis is wrong. Public schooling doesn't prevent extremists and homeschooling doesn't breed extremists.
The author's thesis is that the rise in home-schooling is driven by a desire to "opt out of being around average people," and he implies that he is not home-schooling his own children in part because he himself was home-schooled and believes that may have contributed to his own struggles with social stress.
However, given his self-description, it seems there is a decent chance he would have struggled with social stressors regardless of what education setting he was in, possibly even more so if he had been exposed to bullying or excessive social stressors in a more traditional public education setting.
Exposing oneself to just the right dose of poison in order to develop immunity is a delicate science.
When I was younger, I was also taught to believe that nurture always triumphs over nature, but as I got older and eventually had my own kids, I found out that nature was winning way more of those battles than I first realized.
Judging by the name and picture, I'm pretty sure Forrest Brazeal is a he.
We live in a social climate where we can't even assert ourselves of someone's gender based on their name out of fear from a very local special interest group that has far reaches into public education system and this is another big reason why parents who can't afford private school opt for home schooling.
The fact that parent had to edit their comment and could not call a man a he answers the article's question very well.
Having gone through the San Francisco public schooling system, I would never send my kids there.
I'd rather home school them if I lived in San Francisco, or if I have money, send them to private school.
> I would never send my kids there.
Why not, what's wrong with it? What could you do better at home, or what could private schools do better?
I read thst San Francisco decided not to offer Algebra until high school so no one would feel left behind. One of those dystopian decisions that emerged from a well intentioned DEI initiative. A decision that defies logic and surprise didn't help. That would be enough of a red flag for me. https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-...
Algebra in 8th grade is back this year. https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/....
I have no other knowledge to vouch for SFUSD either way though.
You could literally live next to a school and there’s a chance your kids can’t go there.
There are many kids from low income, broken families who are just really bad students. Bullies. Disruptive. Disrespectful to teachers. It was hell going through public schools in SF.
So it's "opt out of being around average people", then?
I wonder the same thing, I have friends who send their kids there and are happy with it. Not surprisingly for SF, most of the parents are educated with good incomes and expect their kids to go to college. That has its own set of downsides of course, but you could do a lot worse.
Don't know why this is downvoted, seems like a reasonable question. I don't know much about SF or public schools in the US. Are they all bad? do we have data comparing public/private schools in these areas?
Public and private schools don't take the same tests, so we don't have good days to compare the schools. Even if we did, it would be hard to disentangle the impact of selection bias.
You could look at college acceptances or similar, but those aren't unbiased either, as colleges look at estimates of class rank, not just absolute performance.
Because public school system sucks, invites abuse from both other children and the teachers and is designed for the lowest common denominator.
It's not rocket science that parents who have means to give their kids something better do so.
It's like asking why rich people eat better food, do sports, go to better schools and are healthier: it's because they can afford a better services.
The actual title of the article is: "Why are tech people suddenly so into homeschooling?" which is not exactly the same as "becoming fashionable". Why not use the original title?
dang edited it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706248
IME, poor quality of education at a shocking number of schools, even in "good areas".
Granted, I grew up in a rural place, and from a social perspective my school years were pretty good (high school was great, it was literally like movies that were popular at the time in the 2000s). I have many friends that I still talk to very often that I've known for the better part of 20-30 years.
Seems like this experience isn't the norm here. I suspect my experience is both a function of time and place.
Those positives aside, the "education" I received through high-school was incredibly poor.
I'm absolutely blown away when I see kids today taking programming classes in high school or calculus or "AP Stats" or any of this stuff.
I'd not even heard of "Mechanical Engineering" until some friends picked that as a college major my senior year, to say nothing of programming as a vocation.
Granted this was 20-odd years ago, but considering the low quality, any parent that wants their kids to aspire to "more" in an equivalent position today would have to either: - pay loads for a private school - spend substantial time giving their kids supplementary education outside of school (barring the naturally curious and ambitious). Given time and energy constraints, such a proposal doesn't even seem feasible)
It's pretty obvious to me why you'd want to homeschool today, given experiences like this and the boundless high-quality material instantly available online and elsewhere.
Socialization is the other concern.
America hasn't really taken public education seriously in a long time. That's funding for schools, serious academic standards, building more schools so class sizes stay reasonable, and insisting on having rules in place to make sure classes are not disrupted. People either just want to throw money at the problem or lower standards or make sure rich communities have good schools and poorer communities get what they "deserve" (ie. "you don't make enough/your house is not worth enough, so your school's quality will/should suck").
The way that civic pride, communities, and public education, were all tied together has withered away in the last 4-5 decades. Now, access to good, serious, education is a zero-sum game.
We are in an age where people who watch a youtube video think they know more than the experts. Being a good teacher is a skill and understanding childhood development is something that requires proper education. I'm not saying there is never a good reason to home-school your kid, but most people who do it are unqualified and from my limited experience the kids who are home schooled have huge holes in their education. Surprisingly, they do seem to be fine socially which is what you hear many people worry about.
Studying the subject academically in any real capacity. Also, in the US, every teaching degree requires time in a classroom as a student teacher with an experienced teacher as your mentor.
Studying the subject academically in any real capacity.
Among current K-12 teachers in the United States, what would you estimate is the median number of academic/research papers related to education or adjacent fields that they have read in the past 24 months?
in the US, every teaching degree requires
> think they know more than the experts.
Ah, the experts. I have no sort of education in education at all. Why was I better (and still am) at helping mates learn and solve CS exercises at Uni than some of the expert and qualified teachers? A friend of mine recently started a CS course to pivot his professional career. When he doesn't understand what the teacher is on about, he comes to me for help.
I have huge respect for the concept of teachers, but sadly a lot of people are teachers because they didn't know what else to be.
> from my limited experience the kids who are home schooled have huge holes in their education
I don't want this to sound snarky at all, but I'd honestly be happy to provide you with real life cases that would broaden your experience and hopefully tilt your viewpoint.
Teachers are mostly very uneducated and ineffective at teaching itself and the subjects they teach. I don’t think spending time to get an education degree or certification means much. Parents care for their children more than any random teacher, especially ones that resist performance measurements to judge their effectiveness. I would expect the average parent to be FAR more effective just based on that care.
But good teachers can make a huge difference, it's a shame identifying them is a black art and so few people get that access.
I went to a rural public school, underfunded as they come, and my HS math teacher is still in the top 3 of all teachers / instructors I've had throughout my life. If my parents were to teach me math, I simply wouldn't be working in a STEM-field today.
The majority of my teachers were good. The dynamic was completely different compared to being around my parents.
Leave the teaching to the professionals.
Homeschooling often gets confused with self-directed education, aka “unschooling”. These are not the same.
The former tends to replicate school and requires a teacher, usually a parent. It’s basically school with added/paced/altered/enriched curriculum at the cost of socialization, although that can be compensated with other forms of peer groups, especially in urban area. Comparing this method versus school A or school B is pretty much like comparing school A and B as two schools can be as different as any given school and homeschool.
The latter is what John Holt referred to as homeschooling but is based on self-determination theory and has an abundance of science to support it. Neuroscience backs this theory too, I think the rate at which active learning learns is somewhere around x20 faster than passive learning (ie “teaching”). Very serious folks like John Holt, Peter Gray, or Akilah Richards to name a few have dedicated their life work to supporting self-directed education as a superior form of education. What Peter Gray’s research shows shows is that outcomes are basically the same except for life satisfaction and psychological outcomes. In essence, it leads to same rates of secondary education, jobs and socio-economical outcomes, except an unschooled child makes for a much happier adult later on.
Sadly, because the majority of people went through contemporary schooling or some version of it, people’s biases makes people not want to hear this.
I’m not sure what the OP’s circle looks like but I would be surprised if none of those so called “techs pro-homeschooling” are only doing the school at home version without having stumbled upon any of the science around self-directed.
Can you cite some of these claims, to guide someone like myself who has never heard of any of these things?
> Homeschooling often gets confused with self-directed education, aka “unschooling”. These are not the same.
There are also a lot of other approaches. Home education is a blanket term for every approach to education other than schools with class rooms.
I think my own approach was a hybrid. I expected academic progress (especially in English and maths, which are enablers for studying other things), but let the kids follow their interests too.
That’s right. And at the other end of that spectrum, there is what some refer to as “radical unschooling” which gives total agency to the child over the material they’ll learn. I know some radical unschoolers who’ve even ended-up in conventional schools because it was their decision. It may sound like a paradox but it happens, usually not more than a few years though, but again, depends on what’s available to them wherever they live, and also the friends/peers and what they are doing too. I think these choices come down to the child, parenting style and the environment in which the child evolves. There is no right or wrong in my opinion.
In his 2017 paper[1], Peter Gray goes in depth on all the different self-directed education approaches including some of the well-known self-directed “schools”, from Summerhill in the UK to Sudbury Valley in the U.S.
[1] https://cdn2.psychologytoday.com/assets/self-directed_ed.-pu...
> Why are tech people suddenly so into homeschooling?
Are they? I mean statistically. Or is that just an observation from some random articles about a handful of freaks?
> and let me tell you, at no time were my six siblings and I considered the cool kids on the block.
I don't want to defend homeschooling but in my experience, the cool kids on the block tend to end badly. These are the girls that end up pregnant at 16 or in relationships with abuse partners, the boys that end up in addiction and a career of jumping from shitty jobs to shitty jobs.
Having said that it is nice to be able to develop social skills. I used to be super shy and had to force myself to grow a more sociable person and I am glad I had to force myself doing that by going to school.
I don't think this article is a good faith analysis of Homeschooling. Clearly the author was home schooled and had some concerns with how they were instructed. With that in mind the arguments that are brought up are very much ignoring the breath of options that are all covered under "homeschool". There is far more diversity in the home school world beyond academic overachiever and religious fundamentalist.
Fundamentally home school allows children to be taught in a way that is appropriate for them, and with the speed and oversight they require. Something that you can't really do in a corporate school setting. All three of my children learn at different paces, and require different amounts of involvement. They all require much more involvement then they ever got at traditional schools, and they have at times progressed through their coursework much faster or much slower then the "average" pace.
It is true that if you have a child that is a academic prodigy they will greatly benefit from homeschooling, and its true that keeping your children in your home can allow you to be the greatest influence in their moral and social instruction, but its also true that even "average" students will probably do better with 1-1 instruction from a parent who is well equipped then they will with a teacher who might be better trained, but is ill equipped to actually instruct each individual pupil.
As for the main point that somehow this is some form of elitism where homeschool families don't want their kids around the common rabble. The homeschool families I know range from households where both parents hold post secondary degree's, to ones where the parents got GED's, and the career expectations are suitably broad for the kids being schooled. This stands in stark contrast to traditional school which ranks its self on how many kids go to 4 year colleges, and looks down on anyone who would join a trade, or be a home maker. This is literally my biggest complaint with school in the Bay Area. If your kid didn't get into Berkeley or Stanford your household was perceived to be a failure, and if they had any desire to do something other then be a Product Manager at a FAANG then they were going to be forced to live at home forever or move to another state.
As someone who had both good and really bad times in schools, works in tech, and is considering it for our kids, some thoughts:
Never once did I want my kid to “not be around mediocre”, it’s the extremes I want to filter.
Part of the reason we’re considering private school is to avoid the bullies/wannabe gangbangers who don’t care if they end up in jail that made my own life miserable.
Similarly, our concern is with the other extreme, anxiety-ridden, high-expectations “has to change the world” is not what we want his social culture to be.
A group of kids that enjoy learning, understand the employee/entrepreneurial trade-off but may still opt for a 9-5 is what we’re after.
A friend of mine half-jokingly suggested “the cheapest private school” to balance this out, and actually seems like a half-decent solution.
Like with general life consequences, we want them to experience as much variance on their own while avoiding extreme swings with long-term negative repercussions (horrific injury, jail, dangerous drugs). This is just one facet among many for us.
There are private schools which have more and less competitive environments, it just depends. I'm not convinced that filtering by tuition cost will necessarily get you what you want, you'd want to research the individual school and talk to families and so on.
This makes sense and is probably what we’d do.
The “cheapest private school” suggestion was also a response to avoiding another culture we wanted to avoid: entitled rich kid
The idea was that a tuition filter might help here, but that was purely off my friend’s experience as I have none with private school.
It's true that there has always been a sizeable chunk of religion motivated home schoolers, historically there was a long tail with motivations and efficacy that was all over the map.
One thing that's really common is for parents to try it when they feel that the local system is failing their kids in some way and the family economics supporting are acceptable.
There are also many permutations - it wasn't uncommon when I was younger for parents to do it through middle school, but have their kids attend high school because they felt that it was the point where socialization became important in a way that couldn't be handled effectively with home school.
Obviously there's a huge range of efficacy, too.
That said, I think you have to ask why are charter schools and vouchers (not just home school) becoming even more fashionable despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large? And a lot of it is because society has gotten more and more zero sum and it's going to increasingly self cannibalize.
Which is not that far off from the writer's premise.
> That said, I think you have to ask why are charter schools and vouchers (not just home school) becoming even more fashionable despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large?
People demanding it is evidence that political public education should adapt to that demand. It may or may not pay off, but this is how politics works, and education is politicized.
There is NO WAY that voters are going to see commentary like yours and be dissuaded -- that's just not how politics works. Have you ever changed someone's mind really on politics?
It would be much better to look at what's been motivating voters to demand vouchers / whatever else you don't approve of and see if you can satisfy their demands in some other way, such as reducing the politicization of education in other ways.
>despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large?
You don't find the experience of New Orleans following their conversion to a complete charter system in 2005 (10 percentage point gain in college acceptance rates, improvements on standardized tests by about a third of a standard deviation) to be meaningful evidence?
https://news.tulane.edu/news/new-orleans-reforms-boost-stude...
The population of New Orleans is less than 10% of the population of Louisiana. Also, I'm not aware of a single metric by which Louisiana is considered to be last place in K-12 education in 2024. State PISA scores are basically on par with California, spending per student is higher than Nevada. It's certainly no Massachusetts, I've seen it ranked around 40th out of 50 on different metrics, but I think you're revealing some ignorance in assuming Louisiana's school system is ranked last in the nation.
Circumstances can drag you into it.
I had trouble in the public schools because of bullying linked to my schizotypy (then undiagnosed despite what I'm told later was an exceptionally good psych eval for the late 1970s) They were going to drug me so my parents took me out for two years, I skipped three and was successful in high school. (In the single year my parents were able private school I was treated as I had some rights and dignity)
My son struggled in elementary school in a different way. Our school got labeled as a "persistently dangerous school" because we had an principal who, unlike others in the district, filled out the paperwork honestly (and got fired for it.) I lost faith in the superintendent when he first words in a meeting were "we're going to appeal it" as opposed to something like "we're going to do everything in our power to make this school safe".
I was active in the PTA (maybe the only dude; that same superintendent was dismissive of my wanting to be active in my son's education at the same time he welcomed the mother of a 'special' child who could call the state and light a fire under his ass to do so) and was very impressed with the teachers for one year, but the next year they seemed disorganized and the precipitating incident was when my son made a horribly violent doodle and the teacher wrote "Great!" with an underline on it. We didn't take him back the next day and kept him out for two years. We couldn't get him on a good reading program but we got him far above grade level on math with Kahn Academy. (As an adult circumstances got him interested in reading, now he's reading The Economist every week, books on chess openings, psych textbooks I loan him, etc.)
We never quite filled out the paperwork but two years later we slotted him into middle school where he was successful.
Economics plays into this too. Housing in good school districts is often much more expensive, and private schools are ridiculously expensive.
COVID is another factor. Anecdotal of course, but I've only met two home schooled families since moving to our present city 3 years ago, and one of them started out of necessity during the pandemic and found that it worked well and so never went back -- but they're a one income family so one parent has the time (the only way it works, IMO, unless you co-op with another family or two, which can work if you're friends). I must say I was very impressed with their kids.
In Seattle schools have double the budget compared to the years ago, and spend more than 25K per student each year. The schools are worse than ever, which has convinced me that funding isn’t the problem. This might be a local issue though, with a very ideological school district that has ignored the basics of education.
OK, but the issue I was bringing up has nothing to do with funding for schools.
I was responding to the part about housing being expensive near good schools, and the idea of good schools in general. Expensive housing and associated taxes often affect local school budgets, and those budgets are often stated as the reason the school is good. But my experience has been that the budgets don’t change school quality, it must be other factors. Sorry it may have been somewhat unrelated.
Not really. If you've grown up in Asia you're used to wearing a mask whenever you are feeling unwell or have a cold. We do that out of courtesy to others, and it makes a lot of sense (which is why the practice has continued at hospitals since COVID). My kids were both in elementary school during COVID and got used to it quickly and were just fine.
Many American parents did not consider masking their children to be OK. If you want to know one reason many more are homeschooling now: that's one reason. There's other related reasons too. All the covid reasons to homeschool:
- schools were closed for too long
- remote learning wasn't working
- forced masking of children when
schools reopened, both against
the children's and parents' will
- politicization of all things healthAll the assholes who chose to force masking -without evidence!- on children don't get to cry now when parents choose homeschooling.
(There was never any evidence of masking working. Fauci himself had written a paper about how masking didn't work in the Spanish Flu pandemic and instead caused problems. Today it's understood that masking never worked. There is no reputable science that shows masking working in any significant way, and certainly not enough to justify forcing captive audiences to wear the fucking mask. Never again.)
No sorry, this was full time whether sick or not. And if you're sick you just skip school. It was fucking cruel and wrong.
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.
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.
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.
So we chose private school over home schooling, for both time reasons, educational reasons, and social reasons.
But the important thing is we choose to take our kids out of public school. The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year.
We did not like what we saw. A few teachers were really good. Many never bothered to show up, “class” was a note to do homework or something. Others were just plain terrible teachers who didn’t know their subjects well and couldn’t really teach.
More and more our district was also relying on computers and software to make tactically replace books and teachers, and not surprisingly that did not work so well.
Yes, remote learning and covid and all that was a shock to everyone, and all schools took a hit during that time. But this was a window directly into schools, and seeing how well yours did in the face of adversity.
The truth is, at least for our school district here in NJ in the US, schools suck in massive amounts of money, give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it.
There has also been the constant creep over the years to turn schools into social welfare systems. This is well intentioned, but in reality is just another bureaucratic money suck.
I could go on. But in short, home schooling and private schools both have risen in popularity because Covid revealed just how bad many public schools in the US have become.