Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
(newsletter.goodtechthings.com)374 points by forrestbrazeal 3 months ago
374 points by forrestbrazeal 3 months ago
> These tech parents are hackers by nature
Why? Being in tech doesn't make you a hacker. Most people, even very talented engineers, are still happy to follow boss, do a 9 to 5, and don't really bend or break the rules... they don't go against the elite. They see themselves as the elite.
> Being in tech doesn't make you a hacker.
Agreed. "Tech" includes a lot of people who are not hackers.
It's worth pointing out though that the "hacker" types who go with the flow are in many cases doing so motivated by pragmatism and cynicism. They don't really believe in management or in the company or the product, but they gotta stick around until their shares vest or whatever.
Speaking for a friend.
> They don't really believe in management or in the company or the product, but they gotta stick around until their shares vest or whatever.
This is exactly what I’m referring to when I tell people that the tech industry changed and is no longer fulfilling.
> they don't go against the elite. They see themselves as the elite.
These are not the only two options. Deciding some people are "the elite" and defining people as being either part of that group or in opposition to it is your choice, but it is not the only choice.
I don't want my children to have to learn at the pace of the bottom quintile. Obviously average and less-than-average people exist. But I will _not_ be hamstringing my kids to placate the whims of the state or some "modern" moral standard. I know how harmful it is because I went through it.
Your perspective is valid, but I think its worth reconsidering some of the assumptions youre making. Assuming your child is above average may not always reflect reality. Being above average at a thing does not make you above average at all things. The public education system provides resources like gifted programs, AP courses, and extracurricular activities to challenge / engage students at all levels of above/below average. So if your kid is an advanced learner they can still thrive without being “hamstrung.” I think using terms like “hamstring” dismisses the value public education provides in fostering diversity of experiences, social skills, and engagement with peers.. things that cant be replicated in a homeschooling environment.
> The public education system provides resources like gifted programs, AP courses, and extracurricular activities to challenge / engage students at all levels of above/below average. So if your kid is an advanced learner they can still thrive without being “hamstrung.”
The issue is that some liberal schools of thought are pushing towards detracking in hopes of reducing inequality in a Harrison Bergeron sort of way. So public schools are not offering those advanced courses. E.g. California was going to remove 8th grade Algebra as an option, but thankfully there was enough backlash to stop this.
It's generally safe to assume your child will be above the bottom quintile for anything they care about. I went to a decent public school, and gifted programs, AP courses and extracurricular activities are lacking. Most students do not care about learning. I've talked to some people from Lexington High School (often considered the best public school in the US), and they had the same sentiment.
"I thought you guys usually have a bunch of olympiad medalists though; don't students care about academics at your school?"
"No, there's only really 10–15 of us who try, and hold up the rest of the school's reputation."
At Least in the northeast US, there are advanced courses or tracts a student can be placed in if they're above their peers. Is that not the case in your schools?
I am a strong supporter of public school, to the point I volunteer often and advocate for them.
"Whims of the state" -- I'd recommend you make sure to advocate for a strong department of education, which for its many activities is a facilitator of credentialing. It's fundamentally societal and operated politically and bureaucratically.
'"modern" moral standard" -- I agree, we should target humanist ideals only as they are sourced from naturalism, otherwise we have neomodern or otherwise misaligned religious tenets creep in as "values" when they're really misplaced. Some folks advocating pro-religious values in schooling are quite insidious -- using religious freedom (where people have a right to practice in their homes and even the public square) as an injection to favor their religion as the majority in an area, to the exclusion of people who do not believe as they do. It's quite sad to see the Constitution, written fundamentally by Deists who were motivated more by motives closer to religious existentialism than current triumphalism, be run so roughshod over!
If you meant something else by modern moral standard, my apologies, I simply see this common thought-terminating cliche in a lot of places and it falls apart with 2 seconds of introspection.
I think a better question is: How did the median get so much better over 150 years, and why can't it keep getting better?
150 years ago, the average person was illiterate, poorer (in all senses of the word) and less connected to the world around them. Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going? So the outlier, super special "phenom" today is the median of tomorrow.
> 150 years ago, the average person was illiterate
Not true in the case of the US, which famously adopted a culture of universal literacy earlier than the rest of the world. By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history; they took literacy very seriously for complicated historical reasons. Their book consumption per capita was also the highest in the world by a very large margin back in those days, which lends evidence.
It may or may not be relevant to your point, but at least in the US the idea that the average person was illiterate is ahistorical. They were the best read population in the world 150 years ago, and took some pride in that.
I was surprised to read this post. Thank you to share. From Wiki, I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
> By 1875, the U.S. literacy rate was approximately 80 percent.
> By 1900, the situation had improved somewhat, but 44% of black people remained illiterate.
> The gap in illiteracy between white and black adults continued to narrow through the 20th century, and in 1979, the rates were approximately equal.> By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today
But the states does have among the lowest literacy rate in the west. Less than 80% was considered literate in 2024, compared to almost 99% in the EU (with a range from 94% to almost 100%).
My read of history is that the puritans basically had universal literacy not that long after the printing press hit Europe. I believe America and Israel are unique among modern countries in being founded by people whose ancestors had achieved universal literacy in the 1500s.
No offence, but your comment is quite racist.
> literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history;
The rates only looked okay if you cut out at least 20% of thr population?
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Historical_racial_and_ethnic...
Yeah, it was okay in New England but many states had laws preventing slave education.
Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going?
Schooling didn’t fix all that. There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications… the list goes on and on and on. Some of these things contributed major improvements to the average person.
Advances in medicine and nutrition, for example, contributed to sharp declines in early childhood mortality and morbidity. Advances in reproductive health care (along with everything else) led to huge declines in birth rates. Smaller families have more resources and attention available for each child.
Other advances had less of an impact but still add up when combined. Widespread access to refrigeration improved nutrition and reduced spoilage, allowing increased consumption of meat. More meat means taller, stronger, healthier children.
On the other hand, schooling hasn’t improved all that much in 150 years. You can find lots of writing samples and old exams for schools from back then. The bigger difference is that children stay in school much longer and have less need to rapidly enter the workforce in order to support the family. This last factor is a product of many of the advances listed above.
> There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications…
You might say that's also a success of the schooling (and higher education) system - unless the people who produced these advances were all home schooled, which I somehow doubt...
I have this discussion with my wife who works at a school.
Children are required to be there. The school has to provide them with all manner of opportunities.
On the flip side, the school can't expect anything from the kids other than attendance. They don't really get to expect a certain level of behavior or performance. They can't relegate the bad actors (behavior or performance) away from those who wish to participate fully. Everyone has to be mixed together.
So you give a certain vocal minority that don't care about the education a heckler's veto. They are regularly disruptive and can't be removed.
Nobody has a solution for actually improving that group of student, but there are enough people involved in public education that demand these students be included in the process that they are trying to wreck.
I can not talk for the US, but in Sweden it was schooling. I think Sweden has better literacy rates earlier than the US, but I guess I really should compare this on a state level considering how the US works. I am pretty sure that it is a political goal not an economic one, this is obvious considering US black literacy levels took until 1979 to be comparable to whites. I would like to point out that the Danish nobility discussed but decided against keeping poor and oppressed farmers illiterate in the 18th century, so it is not really an issue of globalization.
> 150 years ago, the average person was illiterate, poorer (in all senses of the word) and less connected to the world around them. Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that.
Illiterate, yes, but likely better at other skills like milking cows and knowing which plants in the forest were edible. Less connected to the global world and culture, yes, but more connected to the hyper local environment around them. I don't know if the schooling "fixed" anything, it just created a new, national or global template for what a human being should be like.
It took way less than 100 years to eradicate illiteracy, and further improvement followed. However, as soon as a system is established, the forces that corrupt that system start acting, finding ways to exploit it to their own advantage. Then, as special interests (politics, unions) take over, the quality stagnates and then decays.
>Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going?
Schooling has fixed all that, and still works just fine. Just not in America, because that country is rapidly self-destructing. Schooling is still working fine in the rest of the world.
>Why can't it keep going?
Because an educated populace is harder for the ultrarich to control and abuse, because an educated populace with free time can revolt against those in power, and because as a consequence of those two things ultrarich conservatives have consolidated ownership of media and used it to defund education and convince the population that funding education is bad.
The irony of saying that while being uneducated enough to think anyone ever “defunded education.” https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/02/do-we-shortch...
You're delusional. Revolt always came from people with an empty stomach, not from the comfortable leisure class.
Plus, an "educated" populace is as easy or maybe even easier to control, it's willpower against all odds that characterizes the truly ungovernable.
The fact that you believe the ultra rich conspire to control and abuse the uneducated shows that you are part of that group of average people parents want their kids to stay away from.
I agree with this and that's why I think social media, mass media and so on exist.
However I'm curious as to why you attribute or limit this to 'conservatives' only. Is this really something exclusive or characteristic of the conservative side? At least where I am from it's the left that's more interventionist in regards to education rather than the right, that interventionism being used to make education more rigid and controlled by a biased government.
And the media is definitely not consolidated, you've got clearly two sides competing at a pretty equal level.
You are attacking a strawman. I think most people would agree that public schools 30 years ago were better than public schools 150 years ago. I find it much harder to believe that public schools today are better than they were 5, 10, 15, or 20 years ago.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you
A billion times this. School is not to train you on Math, English or Science. It's also to teach you how to cooperate, how to reach consensus, how to make decisions as a group, and so on.
These soft skills are absolutely critical to maintain a properly functioning society.
Schools used to do this, but the push for risk reduction, metrics, and rules has become so great that it no longer happens. There used to be thousands of student-run organizations in schools across the country. That wasn't a euphemism like it is now-there were no teachers or other adults involved. The kids running them did have to learn to cooperate and make decisions in a responsible way, or face the natural consequences of the group falling apart and social failure.
Now, such organizations are banned. The closest analogue is a "student" council, run by an adult, that might get to choose the color of the wallpaper at prom.
>It's also to teach you how to cooperate,
Cooperation requires shared goals. I can't cooperate with someone when we're not sharing goals. Young students don't have shared goals other than "survive in this classroom for 11 months out of a calendar year". So there's no lessons in cooperation.
>how to reach consensus,
Of what use is consensus, without shared goals? Sounds more like indoctrination.
>how to make decisions as a group,
Same as above.
>These soft skills are absolutely critical to maintain a properly functioning society.
These skills are actually being used to murder civilization/society, even as we speak. The current fertility rate is sub-replacement, but the children being indoctrinated in public schools are being indoctrinated to be even less fertile than that. Many will grow up to be and remain childless as adults, and as that happens, society will not replace those people who are dying of old age. Society then dies itself just decades later. Your society, such as it is, is absurdly dysfunctional. I suppose if one were to define "properly functioning" as "polite to a fault" or "as peaceful as cattle trudging down the slaughterhouse chute"...
why can't homeschooling involve the same attributes? genuine question. from what i've been seeing in modern trends, homeschooling doesn't literally mean you sit and your mother teaches you all day and then you "go home" by migrating to your bedroom. you're still in a small group with other children, all of whom likely still share characteristics where disagreements will naturally happen, and cooperation will need to occur to move forward. the way I see homeschooling is simply a parallel to the traditional public school path, but in smaller, more focused groups with a far more controlled environment. not seeing how this is inherently bad
I've tutored literally hundreds of homeschoolers at this point, mostly in the high school ages as their parents ran out of math ability. As a whole, they are far better socially adapted than the average teenager.
Sure, there is selection bias among those who get that far in math, and those who would seek out tutoring. But I had 9th graders coming to me already behaving well as adults. More often than not they were in charge of working things out with me, not their parents.
Every time one of these threads comes up I cringe, because virtually nobody here has worked with a large number of these kids. They just remember the one weird kid who stood out. If homeschoolers were to put forth the same arguments based on the one weird kid from public school, homeschooling would win by a landslide.
People say it's about socialization, but homeschoolers are out there doing it in a normal way all the time. Parent needs to go to the post office -- there is a class on that, and why. Everything can turn into a lesson and not just something taken care of by parents. They come out of this experience with far more adult level socialization and civic knowledge than the average kid, by a wide margin.
Who are kids in high school getting their social queues from? The drug dealers? The bully? The good kids in high school are typically well adjusted because of things taught to them not by their peers, but by their family and community outside of school.
Yes, homeschooling can be done poorly. But it is not inherently a poor education, and in my experience is far superior to the average experience at a public school. Some exceptions apply for those things which a large school may be able to have by aggregating sufficient students and resources toward (marching band, science classes, AP level courses).
I think kids copy what they see. If they spend disproportionate time with adults, they will often act mature for their age. That isn't always a good thing, because they do need to deal with other children eventually. Of course, this is not a universal rule, and it's hard to keep kids from getting influenced by TV and random other kids they will eventually see.
I really couldn’t learn that from my experience in american k-12. I was too stubborn, emotionally stunted, and usually ahead of my peers, so I’d isolate myself and learn what I was interested in. I taught myself to make music, install and use linux, to write c++, to develop games etc on my laptop during and outside of classes, and the only reason I was even able to do that much was the disinterest and disregard of most teachers. Maybe that environment wasn’t the right one for me, and if it wasn’t, then it makes me wonder how many other people are underserved.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
Seems like there's only something to lose from adjusting to their shittiness. Like Harrison Bergeron
And seeing the state of California trying to push math classes later because of "equity", seeing public schools dissolving gifted programs, it makes me think that privatization is the only way forward instead of trying to make amends with the current progressive stupidity
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
This is prejudice in the most basic sense: you literally don't know any of these things about the people you're surrounded by in a society. The person who rides the bus next to you could be a couch potato, or a talented artist, or something entirely different that simply isn't legible to you.
I don't know anything about California's math classes. I'm saying that, on a basic level, anybody who thinks this way about people they don't know is demonstrating the exact traits they're smugly claiming to be above.
I feel like you and the parents post are compatible views of the world that could be simultaneously held in the same brain without dissonance.
Reading your comment, it seems to focus on the individual. “The person” you know nothing about.
The parent comment seems to be Bayesian, the probability of “the person” being something.
I do think it’s possible to simultaneously believe that:
* every single person you meet in every possible circumstance might be an exceptional human
* your are more likely to encounter exceptional humans in specific circumstances and you can optimize for that
I believe this holds true regardless of your definition of exceptional.
A (maybe) obvious example: if you believe exceptional humans want to grow their own food and live on communes, you probably don’t want to live in the financial district of Manhattan. That would be a bad way to optimize for finding people who share your values.
Similarly you’re unlikely to find a thriving software developer community in Springfield Illinois. If you go to Springfield and assume everyone you meet can’t program, you’re going to be wrong - there are good programmers there. But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
learning how to be patient and tolerant regarding situations / people / things i do not like or think of as “beneath me”.
tends to lead to better decision making as one can respond, rather than knee jerk react to everything.
edit — also, i tend to find i can learn a lot more useful lessons from beginners.
in the beginners mind there are a lot of possibilities. in the expert’s mind (especially self proclaimed ones) there are few possibilities.
children are a great example of this.
When my car broke down in the middle of a DoorDash run, I walked to a nearby park and sat next to a homeless guy who was about my age. He was deaf; we talked via text on our phones about how we'd ended up on the same bench, and I shared some of my food. I learned from him how resilient someone can be, even under incredibly unfair circumstances, but more importantly, he got something to eat.
It's not all about you.
Exactly. It's not all about you. It's best for the community to encourage education, and dragging down students who actually care about education does the opposite.
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
The appearance of humility^[0]? I don't really see what there is to gain either.
[0]: Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, Section II, Paragraph 9
Well, one reason is that your assumption that they are all or mostly inferior is wrong.
Suppose you have a kid that you have reason to believe is at the 90th percentile. This isn't uncommon; it's one in ten kids.
The average kid at the average school is at the 50th percentile. Moreover, the speed of the class isn't even the speed of the average kid because then the 40th and 20th percentile kids would get left behind. To get out of this you'd need a school with a gifted program and enough 90th percentile kids to fill it, and many of them don't have one.
Humility is only considered a virtue because the vast majority of people rank their abilities too high. The GP is coming from an assumption that the person is ranked higher than those around them; humbling such a person makes the rankings even more inaccurate.
>"Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
Context is /everything/.
Dealing with "average" people as an adult means dealing with them under the boundaries, strictures, customs, and etiquette of adults in your society enforced, in some sense at least, by laws, and with people are are, at least in theory, bound to serve and protect who will come to your aid when those boundaries are broken.
Dealing with "average" people (really just the lowest quintile cause all the problems) for me in school resulted in multiple fractures, trips for stitches, and ultimately /my expulsion/ from one school district because I had the gall to hit back rather than just let some kid beat me to death while a teacher watched and did nothing.
I've been accused of all manner of things in other comment threads for my ardent desire to protect my children from what you think of as "average", and I'll happily take your words and savor them because it means my children will never be beaten, robbed, see a dead body at a bus stop on their way home for school, or any of the other horrible shit that happened to me because I had to be surrounded by the "average".
The entire point of my own economic mobility and gaining wealth was to create a better future for my children, and that /very much/ includes their education. You can take your exposure to the "average" a.k.a. unnecessary torture and shove it.
Exclusion of "average people" is fundamentally required for private property to exist, one of Humanity's best inventions. Few people enjoy private aspects of their life out in public. It is a completely natural and morally good thing to want your own space and to raise your kids your own way.
Your kids don't need to be exposed to the often violent whims of society's bottom quartile for 8 hours a day for more than a decade. It doesn't need to happen. It would be better if it did not. It is a net negative experience, whose main lesson is: avoid these people. That can be taught pretty quickly by a parent.
You missed the point: if you don't like how school work today, you need to improve the schools. If you are saving yourself, especially before helping others (because you have the means that others probably don't), you are the bad person in this situation, and you should reflect on your ethical position some time, preferably soon.
Your suggestion that the educational system, any meaningful part of it, is welcoming of constructive criticism of any kind is not compelling. The US government has put such enterprising parents on terrorist watch lists for speaking up at school board meetings.
If a system is specifically set up against you, runs poorly, and in a real sense hates you, you have the option to let it fail without you. It is the polite, and least conflict path to leave it to its failure, and to forge your own way.
On the other hand, listening to people who tell you that you are unethical, guilty of an *ism of some kind, or bad, does not have a good track record of success. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. What you suggest is specifically not going to happen on my part.
So you are saying that people should remain irrevocably loyal to institutions that have lost their trust, do not further their interests, and are not meaningfully accountable to them, out of some notion that the most important thing to them ought to be optimizing aggregate statistical metrics involving large numbers of strangers, at the expense of the actual direct social obligations and communities that are central to their own lives.
It's an interesting perspective, but I'm afraid it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of real-world human societies and how they hold together over time -- advancing that perspective will inevitably result in society fragmenting into factions that are increasingly at odds with each other, and ultimately collapsing.
Societies are not monolithic entities unto themselves that people somehow owe loyalty to. They're emergent patterns of people -- often with disparate interests and values -- cooperating with each other in pursuit of mutual benefit. Forcing people to be locked into monopolistic social relations that no longer offer those benefits to them is a sure-fire way to destroy society.
We'll be much better off when education in our society is offered by a wide range of approaches that adapt in a bottom-up way to the full diversity of that society, an not dominated by a politicized monopoly that tries to shoehorn everyone into a conformist model that is optimal for no one in particular.
> It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way.
Maybe that's not how society thinks? That's one person's opinion.
The well known adage of “buy the cheapest house you can afford in the most expensive neighborhood” is a sign that is what many think. The rat race to make sure your kids are in league with other parents of similar or higher stature is a huge contributor to home price dynamics.
Lol what? I've never heard that adage and it seems like really bad advice. Your neighbors aren't going to cut you a check at any point so what even is this.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
Yet it's not worth the cost of a slowed curriculum.
The main social skill I seem to have taken away from K–12 is "man, I fuckin' hate normies"
"Average" does a lot of heavy lifiting here. People who affluent try to avoid are dangerous, mentally scarred and physically sick people. And if that's who you call average then it's a testament to failure of society and our systems. That's what the affluent are trying to check out of. They are the only ones who can try.
Average people aren't the problem. It's the below average. And that low getting lower is indulged for some reason.
Exposure to Diverse Perspectives: Diverse classrooms can expose students to different viewpoints, problem-solving approaches, and ways of thinking. 1 This can broaden their understanding and enhance their critical thinking skills. 2 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262420245_Effects_o... Gurin (1999,college is significantly linked to
Thoroughly disagree, and I can draw on my experience of meeting average people to know that it wasn’t a universally valuable experience and I much prefer spending time around people that are more like myself. Perhaps that is what you meant by the valuable experience, to be disabused of my illusion that meeting average people was a good idea. Having learned that lesson I shouldn’t have to repeat it.
Also, I don’t have to deal with average people, I have apps that do that for me.
Having said that, two things can be true, I can prefer not to be around average people and I can be concerned for their lack of flourishing as I do prefer to live in more egalitarian society, especially one that can have better averages.
"Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
if by “deal with” you mean serving them fries on their way to a ski trip, perhaps :)
I like to think you mean that the so-called “elites” end up studying some useless degree and only can get jobs as trust-fund burger stand employees, serving fries to the “dummies” who chose to work hard and become wealthy the old-fashioned way
> who chose to work hard and become wealthy the old-fashioned way
That's so last century. Now about as real as Santa. Now you can only get wealthy by inheritance or gambling. Even if it means gambling with you health you still need to win for it to amount to anything. There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now. I'm not sure if there ever was.
> It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way
Optimism is the default state of non-broken children.
Sober realism is what's needed and required from adults.
Time to graduate - we have enough optimistic children running around with scissors already :)
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience
While true, it is true as like a side quest. Just because something is valuable doesn’t mean you should revolve your life around it.
> "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
What are you talking about?!
I'm a highly educated, "high class" (professional career) person, and I've been socially segregated from "average" people since high school (so, since I was 15). Literally primary school was the last time I ever interacted with "average" people in a meaningful way (beyond "hi, thanks" to the supermarket cashier/bank teller).
Society truly does segregate you by social class, and unless you truly seek different classes (which I don't really, I'm a geek so my interests are quite niche) you don't "normally" interact.
No wonder that "elitist" politicians are so removed from the "average" people (hint: Brexit, Trunmp). Thank god for Twitter, allowing to break social bubbles at least a little bit!
The fact that you don't personally meet with "average" people isn't the point. The point is that they exist, and they affect your existence, and they will not and cannot be made to disappear. The "average" people have to share resources with you, and in a way the resources cannot be segregated... unless we start building colonies in space, and send "non-average" people there or some similar dystopian project.
Someone comes in with a gripe that the bottom quintile imposes negative externalities on their education system. Your response is that the same people impose positive externalities when they grow up. These are not the same. If they were still imposing negative externalities when they grow up, I wouldn't want them to exist around me, and sending "non-average" people to space or some similar dystopian project [or jail] would be the correct game-theoretical response.
Trump isn't in any way "average". He's been more separated from "average" people than you have.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."
Nope. For some people it may be valuable. For me it was miserable, almost to the point of being deadly. It does not prepare you for adulthood or life or what have you in any meaningful sense (think about what would happen in your everyday life if someone e.g. decided you had insulted them somehow, and punched you. Think about how different your experience of that probably is to the average person. And then think about what that experience is like for a schoolkid). It's just a whole load of unnecessary suffering.
Your argument is similar to burning the house down, once you discover that you don't like the couch in the living room. Or, more realistically, arguing against taxation based on the idea that rich people avoid being taxed anyways, and it's only poor people who will get the short end of the stick. The school system isn't perfect, and is hard to improve due to many reasons, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't try. It has a purpose which is much more important than the suffering of any individual who goes through it. It's a shared good that can only be made better if everyone participates. When people who can contribute the most are allowed to be excluded, the whole thing becomes worthless. But, guess what, those who thought that they may be exempt from contributing to the public pool will inevitably find out that the public who was in this way deprived of a public good hates them, and will eventually come after them with pitchforks and torches.
> The school system isn't perfect, and is hard to improve due to many reasons, but this doesn't mean we shouldn't try.
The people you hear giving up today have tried to fix the system. It's a little insulting to insinuate otherwise. When I was in high school, I tried to start a CS club, but no one was interested. I helped run MATHCOUNTS at the local middle school, and we had five people show up on a good day (<1% of the student body). Most students don't care anymore, and why should they when you have to fight the school to take AP Biology as a freshman? Gifted programs are being eliminated in the name of equity, and common core standards are lower than they ever have been. A friend who immigrated in seventh grade said America's seventh grade math classes are years behind China's (and she went to a better school than me). How do you get years behind in seven years?!
I don't think it is possible to fix the education system. The student body has adopted an anti-learning culture, administrators are lowering standards to raise their metrics, and most teachers would be wholly unfit for an ideal classroom, let alone the ones they're supposed to oversee nowadays. I am all for "burning the house down". I think the best solution would be to fire everyone, raise salaries by 10x, and then hire back 10% as many people. After all, the professorship pyramid scheme has lots of PhDs who might be interested in teaching for $300K/year.
> It has a purpose which is much more important than the suffering of any individual who goes through it.
How bad would it have to get to change your mind about this? Suicide is already one of the biggest causes of death in young people, and the biggest known contributing factors are things that are determined by the school environment.
I'm all for paying taxes for the greater good. But I don't want anyone I care about to go through what I went through.
Learning how to co-exist with different sorts of people is definitely a valuable experience.
Trying to do that in an completely artificial institution that arbitrarily divides people into age cohorts in a way that resembles no organic social pattern and forces all social interaction to conform to bureaucratic rules is not just not a value experience, but in fact actively inhibits the above goal.
The kinds of social skills and expectations kids develop in a school environment often need to be unlearned entirely in order to function effectively in a complex and dynamic society.
For me, it wasn't the "stay away from average people" but "remove the bottom percenters", and that made schooling much better.
Out here, in my schooling, the first stage of schooling was an elementary school, from ~7-15yo (8 years), and by default, you're enrolled into the nearest school to your home. Sometimes there are ways to choose other schools, but all the other pupils there, are there, because it's their nearest school.
What that means is, that you have, in a same class group (~25 people) a wide distribution of capabilities but also mental states, behaviours, etc. From geniuses that contribute to the whole schooling experience, to kids who somehow manage to stay basically illiterate even after 8 years of schooling, and just cause problems for everyone else. What that means is, that many of the lectures are based around trying to get the lower percentiles to learn at least enough for a minimum passing grade, and the top percentiles are either bored or lose interest. + all the behavioural issues.
After you finished elementary school, your grades of the last few years (2? i forgot) are calculated, you do some standardized testing, the numbers are calculated by some formula, and you get a numeric score, that is then used to enroll into high schools (and in most cases, the top X candidates by that score get accepted to a school, depending on how many apply, and how many open spots (X) there are.
There are many high school options, but most of the smarter kids enroll to 'general' high schools (gymansiums) for the next 4 years (and then college), and even those have reputations for some being better, and others worse, even though they technically teach by the same teaching programme (same courses, same subjects,...). Why are some better? Because smarter kids apply, and you get a high school where ALL of the students are from the "top 20%" of elementary schoolers. That means that teachers don't have to waste their time on "illiterate" kids, there are less behaviour problems, if everyone in class understands the lecture relatively quickly, the teacher can add some extra "college level" lectures, etc. This, for better students, is a much better learning experience, both from school lecture experience, to general interactions with classmates (where you're not the only smart one in the class and have noone to help).
Add to this that smarter kids usually have smarter, more involved parents, and that means that also the teachers have to bring out their A-game, and not just bare minimum to get the kids a passing grade, because the grades and (another) standardized testing is then used to apply to colleges.
So yeah... some separation is not a bad thing.
TLDR: "staying away from averages" might sound stupid, but "removing the 'worst' students lets others perform better" is IMHO true.
> "Average" people are the norm
society has always been this way, from the hunter gatherer days, to middle ages - that's why people want to become part of the elite.
It's only recently that the average people have had the chance to become elites, rather than be born into it. But the desire to be elites, molded by evolutionary/darwinian pressure, is not gone, nor different, than in the past. Another word for it is "the human condition".
> It's only recently that the average people have had the chance to become elites, rather than be born into it.
It still mostly depends on being born into it. In the US your odds of going from impoverished to wealthy are extremely slim and socioeconomic mobility is among the worst compared to other developed countries. The US falls behind South Korea, Lithuania, Estonia, Singapore, Malta, and Slovenia, while the Nordic countries top the list.
Depending on the study, socioeconomic mobility in the US has either stagnated since the 1970s or actually declined. Average people have little hope of substantially improving the situation they were born into while the percentage of people born into wealth (but not the 1%) who slide downward in socioeconomic status grows. Wealth inequality continues to accelerate at an insane pace. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1962-_Net_personal_wealth...)
Just about everyone would like to be one of the "elites" but most people would be happy with a fair chance to meaningfully improve their lifestyle.
I know an extended family of third world impoverished immigrants who became middle class by basically all going to nursing school. It is almost a joke that all Filipinos become nurses, it's almost fool proof way to have at least a car, shitty apartment and decent food to eat. It's worth looking into for anyone who is stuck, none of it is particularly difficult to learn although it is hard work.
In the US your odds of going from impoverished to wealthy are extraordinarily good. I personally know dozens of examples, even excluding tech entirely. Social mobility is a term of art in economics and only weakly correlated with the ease of becoming wealthy. It doesn’t mean economic mobility.
Social mobility is a measure of relative rank change. In countries with compressed wage ranges, such as those you mention, “social mobility” is an artifact of the mathematics, it doesn’t mean you are meaningfully wealthier than the average person. You can double your household income in the US to above average and still not be “socially mobile”. Social mobility is not a meaningful measure for continent-sized economically diverse countries.
A person can go from the trailer park to being upper middle class in a place like Mississippi and it doesn’t count as socially mobile because you are being ranked against the household income of someone in Seattle, 3,000 km away. As far as the person in Mississippi is concerned, they are living the dream.
The opportunity to improve your standard of living in e.g. Europe pales in comparison to the opportunity to do so in the US. It won’t be classified as “socially mobile” in the US as an artifact of how the math works, but no one in the US cares.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXhsutNKhec
Following is recent video of my homeschooled son that this community might appreciate. It gives an opportunity to tailor education and challenge kids potential.
Well, all of my kids went to school and they basically learned how to read and write and that’s it. Everything interesting they learned talking to me or watching dumb YouTube videos I suppose. I would have happily homeschooled my children, but I have to pay rent.
Thankfully I live in a country with one of the best public school systems in the world leveraging its Catholic history, but it is something I have looked into, mainly because I think children are capable of so much more than what they learn in school and also the 'conditioning' aspect of schooling.
From what I know of the USA, all students are placed together in classrooms. Now I'm not sure if that's on the federal level or state level, but I cannot imagine the brightest students being held back by the weakest/misbehaving ones. Where I live we are placed into different grades, where students are grouped by their academic performance. There is no prejudice or superiority/inferiority associated with it and it just works.
I've only heard anecdotes from the Teachers sub on Reddit, but if that was my child in the USA I would homeschool 100%.
You guys don't research demographic before real estate purchases? That must be why you find this new movement hard to understand. Have someone more plainly honest give you the details.
For those who are not happy with the current state of social systems:
“We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”
- Voddie T. Baucham Jr. (possibly among others)
One of the tenants of collectivism seems to be to replace the parent-child relationship with a society-child relationship "for the good of society"
I grew up overseas. My K-12 was a hodgepodge of schools and tutors all over the world.
I am also "on the spectrum," which means that I'm a bully magnet (much better, these days, but it lasted far beyond grade school).
Had a number of other issues, that came to a head, when I was 18.
Dropped out of school, basically, in 11th grade, and got my GED, a bit before I would have graduated, if I had stayed.
Most of my education after that, was a redneck tech school, OJT, home experimenting, and a whole bunch of seminars and focused tech classes. Couple of math classes in college.
I did OK, but a hell of a lot of others, with similar backgrounds, did not.
I am ambivalent about homeschooling. I think it may do well, for some people, and not, for others. I know that there's a "Little Nazi" homeschooling program that's popular with the bedsheets-as-a-uniform crowd, but it might be possible to get a far better education, at home, than the best prep school could give you.
Because (USA perspective) government-provided schooling is shit, and getting shittier.
People whinge about Trump possibly abolishing the Department of Education, but maybe no DoE is better than the one we've got. Because between Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and whatever psychological experiment the education establishment has cooked up recently, I can't distinguish between the education system's serious proposals and sinister plots by a saboteur to undermine education from within.
What's really needed is a constitutional convention. Abolish and reboot the entire government, implement a multiparty parliamentary system with actually functional, corruption-resistant government agencies and bodies. Homeschooling is citizens' response to a state that's failed in its basic responsibilities.
Thanks for the interesting discussion. I think as parents we have many possibilities to teach values to our kids without homeschooling them. In my view they should learn how to integrate in average society no matter if it is a perfect public schooling system or not. When it comes to values, parents still have a lot space to guide them through live without having full control. As long as the public school system only bends and doesn't break them I think it is a good way to show them how average society works. If they decide not to be high-end tech people later on, it will be much easier for them to flow with the average masses.
I think it reflects the reality that specific groupthink is both tolerated and encouraged in school while other groupthink is harshly penalised.
When the allowed groupthink in question only has support among a minority of the population you can't be too surprised when the rest try to avoid it.
It absolutely reflects reality in that school teachers are statistically way more liberal than the population average: https://www.pacificresearch.org/why-are-teachers-mostly-libe... .
Especially the ones who keep sneaking furry propaganda into elementary school.
We are homeschooling our two teenagers. We live in Ireland which has a pretty decent education system and has a high percentage of students going on to third level education.
The problem is that it is really bad at handling children who are neurodivergent. My daughter is autistic and my son has ADHD and they just stuggled to fit in at school. They were filled with anxiety and the supports for them just weren't there. Spending on special needs supports is pitifully low despite Ireland being so cash rich right now.
So now we homeschool them and they are doing grand learning at their own pace.
But it's not just that that makes me favour home schooling. For me one of the biggest issues with state education pretty much everywhere the world over is the idea that at a certain age a child should have reached a certain academic standard and if they haven't then that is seen as a failure or at the very least a problem. This is complete and utter nonsense. We all learn at different speeds, some pick up knowledge early, some pick it up later. What matters is that by the time they leave school they are in possession of most of the life skills they need.
I also have issue with what is taught and how it is taught. Most subjects are taught with a focus on rote. Children are told to learn things, but aren't really told WHY they should learn things. That why bit is so important to help a childs mind develop.
For me there is also a bit of a morality issue. If you go an look at a school curriculum there will nearly always be something that you as a parent do not agree with. For me its the idea of teaching children that there only option in life after education is to get a job, be a good worker and keep going until retirement. I don't subscribe to that idea, I believe there are alternative life pathways. The problem is that if I send my children to a state school they will be forced to learn and accept things I fundamentally disagree with and that to me is morally dubious.
As usual, it depends. My time in public schools (K through 7th grade in various places in the southeast US) was a mixed bag. Newport News, VA with all the kids of engineers and naval officers? Awesome. I loved school. Most other places? Meh. Rural western Virginia? Terrible. Bullied until I finally snapped and left someone half conscious on the playground (and the football coaches watched as I handed out that beating). I was homeschooled from 8th grade until I left for college at the suggestion of the teachers in the school because they were running out of classes at the high school for me when I was in 7th grade.
I was fortunate to have parents that are extremely well educated and my homeschooling gave me an education that is simply unavailable in a school. Not many kids have sat on the back deck in the Appalachians with their father, learning how to read Virgil in Latin.
There were lots of other homeschoolers in our county who were all religious nuts. Fortunately Virginia requires you to come in and take standardized tests every couple years to see if you're at grade level if you're homeschooling, so the worst cases got corrected. The school district also proctored my AP tests for me, even though they weren't classes the school offered.
My kids are in public school. The public schools where I live are excellent and actually deal with bullying. My kids would rather not go to school, but they're not being traumatized and they're getting a good education and have lots of friends. There's a major emphasis on social-emotional learning, which turns out to be heavily correlated with later performance. Our biggest problem is in high school with parents pressure cooking their kids to try to go to places like Harvard or Yale. I do what I can to counsel the kids and get them off that path. My own kids are firmly convinced that they're going to guaranteed admission state schools, and don't have to try to build a ridiculous resume in high school.
Schools don't have to be horrible. They just have a history of being poorly run in many places.
Most parents are worse teachers than the average teacher. Most parents can't afford the time/money to teach their kids. This is a passion project for the 1%.
And no, educational videos on YouTube are not a replacement for a curriculum. We saw that during COVID where the attainment of children worsened.
There are bad schools and bad teachers. The solution is not bulldozing the entire system and replacing it with something worse.
This is like saying people should self-diagnose and medicate because there's a few dodgy hospitals and doctors.
I have many teachers in both my immediate and extended family. All of the ones who aren't retired say the same thing: the quality of parents is in the absolute shitter in two major aspects: parents don't want to teach their children anything they see as "the school's job" such as how to read or work on anything with their children at home. The second way is discipline. They instill no values of discipline or respect for the rights of others in their children. The "back of the room peanut gallery" that was one in ten or one in twenty children when I was young has grown to one in three. These are kids who've never seen negative consequences for anything they've ever done and steadfastly believe that will continue into their adulthood.
Many reasons.
Bad influence from other students
Bad policies for phone use
Bad teachers
Strange curricula influenced by ideology
Aggressive low performing immigrants from other cultures (Europe)
The last point will get me downvoted from people who can not handle the truth.
>Aggressive low performing immigrants from other cultures (Europe)
Elaborate?
https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/pisa-scor...
USA is 18th and eight of the countries above it are European. The fifteen below it have a comparable score to the USA. That is 23 European countries that are either above or around the same performance (or slightly lower) as the USA. Unless you mean Eastern Europe, which seems like a strange thing to single out
I am not so much worried, what position you are in. I am more worried if you are rising or sinking. The countries I was thinking in Europe are...sinking in the school rankings.
Feel free to use google translate for this example: https://weltwoche.ch/daily/wiener-schulleiter-provoziert-mit...
The problem: There are cultures that highly value education. Chinese for example. And then there are cultures where education either has much less value, or a different definition (e.g. considered highly educated if a person has memorized the complete Quran).
DEI. Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion
The "inclusion" is a problem with some cultures. They bluntly reject being "included". They considered their culture as highly superior and want to include you into their culture. At the same time, they are not able to understand why their countries are shitholes and believe that the wealth and success of Western countries is just by chance and luck and culture has no play in that.
For starters:
* Rule of law
* open society
* women rights
* Democracy
* Market Economy
* strict separation of church and state
* No tribal culture
* Freedom is speech.
* And don't marry your cousin. Your cousin may be good-looking but trust me, inbreeding won't make you smarter.
I have been looking at homeschooling because of the 2 Sigma Problem.
But a lot of the resources to help people homeschooling are weird christian nonsense.
Because the education system is garbage;
because the parents are idiots;
because of the paranoid delusions about Them and What They Are Doing;
because the kids (and in many cases the teachers) are awful human beings that people (idiots or not) don't want their kids to be around several hours a day every day;
because of school shootings and other forms of violence;
because the value in this is no longer clear to anyone;
because the only people demonstrating "leadership" in this matter are leading outraged mobs around to prop up themselves and their power structures rather than anything productive.
Or, in our case, our youngest has autism and ADHD and was unable to be successful in the "not homeschool" environment (for numerous reasons), so we removed him from it.
For those comparing school to prison, please confirm that you have experience with both.
Our three kids are in hybrid homeschool / traditional classroom school. What critics of homeschooling don’t seem to get is that homeschoolers find their own cohorts. And those cohorts have kids of different ages. And that means my kids interact with adults, older kids, younger kids, and kids their own age all the time. They learn nuances to social interaction that aren’t available to their counterparts who are locked in with their peers and tend to think their age group is the only one that matters. Sorry, that’s not the real world. In the real world you actually have a myriad of ages to interact with. Is everyone at your work the same age and place in their career development? Of course not.
What about other sources of diversity? Guess what, they are in sports and other community groups too. In fact, by avoiding the time suckers in traditional school, you’d be surprised to see just how quickly the kids can zip through their curriculum and join more extracurricular activities with meaningful social interactions. You mean school isn’t the only place to learn social interaction? Yup.
It’s time we put to death the idea that homeschooling is detrimental to social development. It’s utter nonsense. My wife has taught music at every grade level and in every school type imaginable and anecdotally the homeschooled kids are by far the most confident, socially capable of the bunch.
Because no one’s ever heard of a
“Home-school Shooting”
Mostly religious fanaticism.
It sucks, my sons went to catholic schools, and now an independent Catholic high school. The new breed of “evangelical style” Catholics are starting to appear. They are more political and reactionary in terms of religious politics/practice.
Where infrastructure doesn’t exist, homeschools and stuff like “classical education” are gaining traction.
Homeschooling is fashionable because public schools are terrible, and private schools are expensive.
No tech bro theories of exceptionalism and "anti-mediocrity" necessary.
Occam would be proud.
Tech people were bullied in school. It wasn’t worth it.
the mandatory part of mandatory education is the very source that rots this society. what's happening in schools run by the "western enlightened democratic" powers that be is outrageous.
liberating education would be a major blow to the social engineers running the matrix -- or at least that's what i think when i'm optimistic... maybe these days they could easily compensate through the screens.
and if you have an urge to argue with this, then first read John Taylor Gatto's essays to understand what's going on. after that we can discuss the specifics.
Anecdotally, those around me that are homeschooling are doing it for one of two reasons:
1) Right-wing disgust over woke issues.
2) Fear of school shootings.
That's coming from a non-tech middle/lower-middle class setting. 20-30 years ago, when I was in school, most of the homeschoolers seemed (again anecdotally) to be based on religion or some other idiosyncratic reasoning rather than the reasons I cited above.
> 2) Fear of school shootings.
I would add:
3) Fear of fear of school shootings.
The active shooter drills and other security measures that American kids go through in some schools are positively dystopian. Even if the chances of a school shooting are statistically very low, the measures put in place to prevent them are probably not good for kids' psychological well being.
I have some friends who are Christian but left wing (their kids would come over to play and draw pictures about helping poor people.) The dad teaches CS at a small Catholic college, mom stayed home and educated their kids.
The "disgust over woke issues" existed in some form 30 years ago when people were homeschooling but it had not hardened into the constellation it is in now. Back then you could get folks like that to talk articulately about how they disagreed with secular values, introduce a word like "woke" and now people talk past each other, at best, if they talk at all.
I miss the days when young earth fundamentalist Christianity tinged with racism was my most compelling ideological opponent.
Personally I see it as bad theology as much or more so than bad science.
I mean, how do you reconcile the idea that "God is great" (Muslim slogan but how you can not believe that as a theist?) with the idea that the world is just 6000 years old and he sits on the throne and is obsessed with Jewish people as opposed to the scientific picture that the world is at least 13 billion years old, 'his image' is inscribed into the molecular structure of our cells, which implies God is a lot bigger than that.
Since most schools are designed to craft meat-based robots, like https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... those who try to be humans try to give their progeny a human future...
Join the military! :D
I'm a product of department of defense school system. My parents were lower class, I received a world class education. My mom taught me to read and count before kindergarten, mostly via playing card games with her. I was in NC at that time, and they thought I was a savant!
Overall, my experience was good, some bullying of course, but at that time administrators held the ultimate key which was we will first tell your parents, and then subsequently your parents commanding officer, which would result in work disciplinary action. When I lived in Japan, there were a couple kids that were bad enough to get that to trigger. Stupid stuff like huffing air freshener, or just beating the hell out of people.
My short stint in NJ public school was ok, but it lacked the rigor/structure of the DoDDs school. I ended up at a good engineering university, but had a good amount of debt.
In Philadelphia, public schools are essentially DMZs, with private schools for kids that want to do things with their lives. This sounds harsh, but our tax system reflects this, as well as our disrepair of public school buildings (lead, abestos).
My Dad gave up his best years to the military and his body suffered, but it was certainly not for nothing. He retired at 42, with a pension after 20y in USMC. Healthcare is taken care of.
It's hard to say whether it is the escalating cost of schools which are commodifying it "It's so expensive I shouldn't have to xyz", leading to low parental involvement (maybe that is normal?), or continuous concierge service for helicopter parents as well. My friend who is a teacher has an entire class of students exploiting the IEP system to get extra time on exams, less choices in multiple choice, less reading, landscape rather than portrait tests (yes this is real), and other things that absolutely blow up her ability to be efficient at anything in the class room. I'm sure there is an argument to be made in favor of this, but it cannot operate in this way. At her school (Allentown, PA) the inmates are running the asylum due to administrators treating parents as "customers" and the parents as "the service provider". It is a sad state of affairs. In my world, parents ALWAYS sided with the teacher no matter what, which meant you had no chance at causing a problem in that way.
I don't know if there is a good solution on the horizon. I think the overwork of parents, combined with the exploitation of the school for better marks is a sick system. Only private systems seem to be able to surf this in a meaningful way because they can remove bad actors.
cite: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defen...
It's difficult to understand the hostility some people have toward homeschooling. Even if someone doesn't care for it, it is bizarre to insist on others not doing it (in some cases, governments insist so much that it is illegal to homeschool). Of course, parents are the primary educators of the their own children. They may delegate that responsibility to others for certain subjects, domains, or scope, but the authority rests with them. The decision of how to educate is also a prudential one. For the rest of this post, I will use "education" in the narrower sense of what would fall within the scope of the school.
That being said, you cannot categorically judge either homeschooling or "institutionalized" education, as the quality entirely depends on the concrete situation. Both can be done poorly or done well. There may be aspects here and there that set them apart, where one is better than the other, but on the whole, in principle, both can be done well or poorly. Both can fail or harm the child.
Of course, to be able to evaluate the quality of education requires that we first have at least a sense, if not a definition, of what education is and what it is for. Immediately, this is where the trouble starts.
If you ask most people today what education is about, the most common answer I would expect is "to prepare you for a job". Primary education is to prepare you for university, and university is for preparing you for a job. Interestingly, this is not the traditional mission of education, which is perhaps best embodied by the classical liberal arts taught in the trivium and quadrivium. Their aim was to free the human person as a human person, and a human person is a rational animal. The classical notion of freedom is the ability to be what you are — human, i.e., a rational animal — which is quite different from the modern notion of being able to do whatever you want. This classical notion of freedom is the reason for the liberal in liberal arts. Now, the modern concept of rationality also differs from the classical, so even here we have divergence.
The point is that the liberal arts were distinguished from the servile arts. It is the teaching of the servile arts that would prepare you for the job. While the gains of a liberal arts education translate into benefits in all things, they were not per se for the sake of specialized work. Their value was not instrumental, even if they do have downstream benefits for the instrumental. This is like the difference between theory and practice. One seeks understanding, the other seeks to achieve some kind of subordinate or secondary good.
Now, as to why homeschooling is becoming more attractive, we need to consider the reality of education as it actually is today. I don't want to turn this into an essay, but a few big motivations are:
* the poor quality of education
* the alienating and hostile nature of many schools
* the hostile ideological presuppositions of an education system, often insinuated rather than explicitly commanded
As to how effective homeschooling is at correcting for these faults, that will depend on the particular situation, more or less. From what I understand, homeschooling parents will often meet with other homeschooling parents and draw from curricula that already exist for this purpose. Sometimes these parents decide to found school themselves (as we are seeing in some cases with the rising interest in classical education).
Common core math? ?
Training kids to sabotage their mathematical ability to "level the playing field" is the most asinine thing I've ever seen and I'm disgusted it's still being taught.
This is such a narrow view of homeschooling as to be idiotic.
> That voice likes to say: You should just homeschool them. Opt out of interacting with average people, because average people will only damage your kids.
The author makes a statement about why they think people prefer homeschooling, and yet they do not mention having spoken to a single currently homeschooling parent to ask why they homeschool. This is like me writing an article about some group I'm not a part of (say, farmers) and saying "why don't they all get organic certified? As far as I can tell it's because most farmers don't like nature."
tl;dr: this is a completely uninformed tirade from someone who unfortunately had a bad experience with their religious upbringing, which involved homeschooling, and is generalizing the negative emotions towards all homeschoolers whatever their reason for opting out of school. Ironically this article that's ostensibly criticizing homeschooling parents as snobs is dripping with disdain and condescension.
The reductive & random assumption that people opt out of school they object to the students is baffling to me. Does it not occur to the author that people take issue with institutionalization of their kids in school? It's not the other children, it's the one-size-fits-all meat grinder of school most secular homeschool parents object to.
Bonus: The footnotes are hilarious. The footnote to their argument that people homeschool because they're snobs is:
> I don’t think I’m straw-manning, because I’m pretty sure someone is going to highlight the “opt out of interacting with average people” quote on Twitter/X and say “this, but unironically.”
"I don't think I'm inventing a weak interlocutor to argue against because I've invented another imaginary person on twitter who agrees with the first imaginary person I created" I'm honestly laughing reading this.
I went to public school as did my wife. That's why we homeschool. It was a terrible experience overall; all these kids in a totally unnatural environment wasting time. I say unnatural, because generally if someone is tormenting you daily you can get away from that person. Even at a job, you could quit and find another job. In school, you are trapped with your tormentor(s) and constantly forced to take part in social hierarchies you have no interest in being part of. I was a loser through middle school which was not fun, then in high school I was not engaged so I became bored and lazy. When I had an engaging class (like mens choir, german, spanish or woodshop; even though another kid did intentionally burn me with a hot bit off the drill press among other antics) or I was able to be creative, I put a lot of effort in and it felt rewarding. But mostly I look back and say "what a massing f*cking waste of time that was." Not only did I not spend my time doing something better, it destroyed much of my natural curiosity and creativity.
We homeschooled our two older kids, the eldest is now in their second year of an extremely competitive engineering university program. She wanted to go to Uni so she took some online classes to prep then enrolled in school in grade 9. That was completely different from my experience in large part because she chose to go to school, so she had no one to blame for "why do I have to be here?" like I did. She owned her own choices & succeeded.
As for "what about socialization" that is the most laughable part to me. Sure I learned "socialization" in school: kill or be killed. I learned to be a mean, cynical, jaded child who could survive in that institutional environment. My children were free to spend full days socializing with other kids when we got together, and met frequently at libraries & parks with other homeschool kids, as well as engaging in extracurriculars. And if they're having a spat with another kid? That's fine, they can take a break for a bit then reconnect with them later; no need to force them together daily.
The funniest thing to me about "what about socialization" is that when I was in school & chatted with a friend in class, guess what I was always told? "Do that on your own time, you don't come to school to socialize." Ha. But seriously, avoiding the maladaptive "socialization" of what I think can fairly be called "industrial schooling" is one of the biggest perks of homeschooling.
The extracurriculars were easier too because they were not already tired from an early wakeup and full day of school! My younger kids who are now in regular school now are absolutely fried after a day at school + extracurriculars.
The amount of energy I spend now supporting school for my younger kids is crazy. Stressful mornings harrying sleepy kids out of bed and out the door, kids upset over bullying and inequity in the classroom, begging for designer clothes (where did that come from?), getting them to do their homework, oh and then there's "teaching my kids shit they were supposed to learn in school but the teacher didn't teach them" i.e. I'm having to "homeschool" them in addition to school. Sooo many conflicts spring from school. Having my kids in school often feels like more work that homeschooling rather than less.
Academics are easy. Tons of free online resources + Outschool where you can pay a teacher for one-off classes. My older kids took the 8 week essay writing class then breezed through high school english. When younger, if they wanted to play iPad I'd say "do 30m khan academy then you can do 30m iPad." Regular trips to the library & read to them... it's really not hard to cover academics through middle school, then if they want to go to high school, go ahead. Or apprentice, or focus on something else.
If you have any questions about homeschooling from a veteran parent who's also had kids in public school, let me know.
arguments from article - >Pro-homeschooling: At school, you’re in danger of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
>Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home.
Sure, but the parents choosing to homeschool are either the ones abusing or not (obviously they could have an abusive uncle but the parents tend not to think of this) if Not, then its not a counter-argument because they know it's not and they do not know about the school. If abusing the know it and they might prefer to homeschool for that reason.
>Pro-homeschooling: Kids learn faster one-on-one; Bloom’s 2-sigma problem is undefeated.
>Anti-homeschooling: Kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence can fall through the cracks without professional involvement.
many kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence need more 1 on 1, and will also be more likely to get all the other negative school interactions that are arguments against schools.
>Here’s what I think is really going on.
I heard Elon Musk homeschooled his kids, anyway if you have the money, it's a status symbol.
Also about lousy school environment anecdotes going around here - I went to high school in Utah, where I heard a teacher tell the class that A.D meant After Noah, and B.C meant Before Christ. I WIN! Oh wait...
Both of my children were Home Schooled until High School (technically 7th and 9th grade). They've been students at a private school and now one attends an excellent private High School and one attends the 4th best High School in my state.
They are straight-A students (lowest grade: 94%; History -- my Daughter). They are shocked that they attend school for 7 hours a day and there are kids who "struggle" while they finish their homework on the ride home, don't study, and get the grades they get. They are in advanced classes and both have had a perfect score in Math all three years. Mom and I are also divorced and have been since they were 2 and 4. They make friends easily but struggled when they were Home Schooled because they have less exposure to kids their age. They were given the choice when my son hit 9th grade "continue or attend Public School or a school we can afford). They didn't want to miss out on "The High School Experience" but both, enthusiastically, want to Home School their own kids one day.
They aren't unique/gifted. There are plenty of students at their schools who do as well as they do and were not Home Schooled. The difference, though, is they "did school" in a given weekday for never longer than 1.5 hours. Most days were 30 minutes. September-April with summers off and that was it.
Religion was not a factor in our choice. My son's ASD Type 1 diagnosis played a role, the way Math was taught to me played a role, the arrogant belief that I could do better and the fact that my ex-wife didn't work played a role. Mostly, talking to other Home Schooling parents and their children and "wanting my kids to be like that" was the primary factor. Watching a 13-year-old speak intelligently and with confidence about a subject they understand and actually expect an adult to listen to them is kind of crazy, especially when they really are intelligent and should be listened to.
In a decade of Home Schooling, I have talked at length with hundreds of families and their children who took that path (various conferences, Home School events at local businesses, and extra-curricular activities done "during the school day" for Home School kids). I've observed a few things: All of them teach as much as we did. None of them will admit to it until their kids are in college or they decide to send them to traditional schools and "their child's education is validated by someone else." Nobody who is actively Home Schooling will admit to an outsider that their children get 1-1.5 hours of education a week day because you'll call CPS on us. All of their children are about a year or two ahead of children "their grade" despite this minimal amount of lesson time.
I read over and over and over again about how Home Schooled children are ignorant, don't believe in evolution, believe the world is flat, their parents don't actually "teach them" -- I have no doubt those children exist and I haven't seen them because the Home Schooled families I encounter attend conferences, belong to groups (we didn't), and care about their child's education. I live in a state that, at one point, had the largest number of practicing Home School families (not sure where it is, today) and the most liberal rules around it -- literally "take them out of school"; that's it.
Everybody seems "to know some invented Home Schooled child" who had some kind of major life problem. I usually challenge for specifics and it's always turned out the kid doesn't exist. Knowing any child who is Home Schooled is unusual. But knowing the one child validates your choice to NOT Home School, the statistics of which make them extremely rare, and you find they're parroting some anecdote they heard. My daughter's school[0] has about 1,700 students in it. Her last had about 500. I have asked every single one of her teachers, her counselors and several teachers they don't have "have you ever had a Home Schooled kid in your class, before?" I'd guess 40 educators and some staff/administrators. There's exactly one who had exactly one child in her class at her last job who was Home Schooled. He was an excellent student. And this in a state that has a lot of Home Schooled students. Judging by Facebook, you'd think there's one hiding around every corner peeing in people's Cheerios.
I suspect it's people feeling (needlessly) insecure about the choices they made for their own child and feeling threatened by the fact that I chose differently. I don't encourage people to choose to Home School. It's not for everyone -- for starters, you can't do it with two full-time working parents and that means it's simply not an option for most people. However, this topic very rarely came up without judgement from everyone who didn't Home School about what a dangerous choice I made when I was still Home Schooling. It's a lot more fun, now, since I can point to their success.
Yes, some Home Schooled kids struggle/drop out of college or can't hold down a job. Certainly none of us have met a kid who drank his way through Freshman year of College, or was ill-prepared by their public school and failed out. And we came from High Schools where everyone received a degree, too. Studies continually affirm the success of Home Schooled students, yet "everyone knows some Flat Earther child from Home Schooled parents." Children fail in every type of education. They fail less in Private schools and Home Schools. They fail more in Public school (largely because of "everyone goes there, including children in extremely difficult life circumstances"). The problem is that these wrong impressions of Home Schooled kids turn into laws that ban or curtail the freedom to have the choice of Home Education.
I know if I had chosen a more traditional route, my kids would have had the same probability of success. I would have been deeply involved in their education whether or not I was the one teaching them and that's how you get successful students in traditional education, too. While it might be nice to stand on some high horse, claim that "I just love my children more than you did", pretend that all of this was some massive sacrifice and I'm some super-parent by comparison to all of you who went the traditional route, that would be a self-aggrandizing lie. I paid for and followed curriculum. It was easy. The only challenging part of it is that "your kids will argue, yell and cry at you when they struggle"; they won't do that with a stranger.
With all of the extra non-lesson time they had, it was probably easier for them to excel. But I don't look down on people for not making that choice. Quite the opposite, everyone looked down on me for the entire duration that I was a Home Schooling Dad. It's silly.
And I'd do it all over again if given the choice for one reason alone: My kids are incredible self-learners and that was the one thing that I was very intentional about. Both of them have the confidence that "nothing is beyond their ability to learn" and that it's a simple matter of finding the right information, studying and practicing. My daughter is a shining example of this: She has learned to plays Guitar, Drums, Bass, and Piano (some proficiently, some she's well on her way). She has never had a lesson. She can read music and tabs and she can sit down and compose as well as learn to play anything she wants to learn to play on Guitar, Bass and Drums. She's getting there with Piano, but it's a much more difficult instrument and she just started last Summer with that one; she's got a few years behind her on the others. But I bought her a full sized weighted-key MIDI piano last summer and I had 15 years of lessons, competitions and study in that instrument as a child/teenager, so I have a good understanding of typical progress in learning it. She took it to Mom's and decided she didn't want to take it back and forth but brought it back here over Christmas break. I listened to her practicing and had to walk into her room to make sure it was actually her playing rather than the computer playing back some MIDI file. In three months she's as far along as I was after 5-6 years of lessons. She doesn't even realize how well she's playing; nobody told her it was unusual for her to be able to play some of the things she's playing at her skill level. A teacher would have never had her playing those things. She just went ahead blissfully unaware of the fact that it's extremely hard to play some of the things she's learned to play and that probably made the biggest difference of all. She wanted to play it, so she sat down and learned how to play it, never getting discouraged over the fact that "you don't learn something like that until year 5." Her technique (fingering ... stop snickering) is even correct.
Both of my children love to learn new things, just like me. Except, I didn't learn that about myself until formal education was over. They have always known that about themselves.
[0] My son attends a private school that is very small and the results were the same but less surprising to me.
Because public education has become a vector for propaganda.
Because we spend more per student but with awful results.
Because our brightest don't become schoolteachers.
Because education is years if not decades behind the skills curve.
Because big, powerful teachers unions make change impossible.
Because parents have spared the rod and spoiled the child.
But also not functionally a union. Teachers are actually represented by their state affiliate, and whether or not they can collectively bargain (the sine qua non of being a union) varies from state to state. Personally, I've lived in several states, but none in which the state Education Association was able to collectively bargain for its members.
I went to public school (not in SF) but the only "wokeness" was historically accurate — erm — history classes. We didn't have books banned in the library or English courses either.
The lack of physical safety is a product of policy (or rejection of) by the same people whining about "wokeness".
Learning about systematic racism has been relabeled as Critical Race Theory, and suddenly teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre or how banks used to discriminate against minorities for lending is considered extremism and "woke". Growing up, learning this stuff in history books, was just normal and made sense in order for us to avoid repeating these mistakes.
Yeah, I took advanced placement history and government. Things were taught clearly, factually and without bias.
Students aren't going to benefit from hiding inconvenient truths about this country's history and founding. We certainly don't need religion forced into classrooms either.
> suddenly teaching about the Tulsa Race Massacre or how banks used to discriminate against minorities for lending is considered extremism and "woke".
No, these things were taught to me in school and I’ve never heard anyone consider historical facts like this to be CRT except people railing against conservatives (ironically demonstrating their own ignorance of what CRT is).
What’s problematic about CRT is its postmodern view that liberalism is inadequate (or worse) at eliminating racism; downplaying objectivity in favor of “lived experience” that can supposedly never be truly understood by white people; rejecting colorblindness out of hand; advocating segregation of minorities in the name of “safe spaces”; regularly and unscientifically trumpeting the existence and scope of unconscious bias; emphasizing intersectionality to the point of essentialism.
The famous Smithsonian “Assumptions of Whiteness” infographic (https://www.newsweek.com/smithsonian-race-guidelines-rationa...) is an example of these concepts infesting a mainstream cultural educational entity. There’s room to critique current racial discourse and advocate for changing models, but to state that the scientific method and “objective, rational linear thinking” are white values, implying that whites have a monopoly on science or that minorities are less capable at it, is obviously derived from critical theory, and is (I think unquestionably) horrifically racist. When there is any sign of these viewpoints seeping from higher academia into elementary schools, it’s perfectly natural for parents to become concerned.
The lack of physical safety is caused by many things, and I doubt you can lay the blame on people complaining about wokeness. There are bullys, drug dealers, gangs, normal hormonal teenagers fighting, interpersonal drama, romance, poverty. All sorts of things influencing the violence.
I was referring to complacency as it relates to guns and the horrific violence inflicted with said guns.
Bullies are everywhere. One runs X. You deal with them.
I never saw any drug dealers or gangs and the rest of what you’re describing sounds like what I’d expect as a normal part of growing up.
One of our many societal shortcomings (or outright failures) is that we treat poverty as a moral failing, not with any sort of kindness, interest in understanding the root cause(s) or meaningful attempts to address the issue.
Alvin Toffler called it back in the 70s (in Future Shock); in there, he thought educated elites would move towards homeschooling, nothing political on his analysis at least (that may match current trend?)
There's nothing inherently right-wing about homeschooling. You could just as easily homeschool as left-wing parents who don't want your kids immersed in an environment where other kids judge them by what brands they're wearing, and where the teachers all subscribe to the capitalist view of how society should function.
It's true that homeschooling has been more prevalent among the right wing, but there are lots of people who do it for lots of reasons. We did it when our local elementary school was bottom third in the state. My wife called up the vice principal, and asked why we should put our kids in their school. He said that their school could toughen up our kids. We decided that "tough" wasn't our main goal for our daughters, and we noped out of that school.
The USA is going backwards in many, many areas and is no longer in the top of any important indices so this fits the bill.
The USA is ranked below most other western public school systems so I don’t think you can conclude “the US are doing bad because all western countries are”. It’s just a matter of priorities and the US prioritizes defense over education.
Are those education metrics even measuring the correct things? Many other countries have higher scores of educational achievement, and yet on average we ignorant Americans go on to be more productive and more innovative than any other major developed country. Just to pick one example, the USA develops about 80% of the new prescription drugs every year. Does it really matter if we can't integrate a function or remember when the Civil War started?
>Pro-homeschooling: At school, you’re in danger of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home. And the risk gets bigger if you eliminate outside influences that might notice when something’s wrong.
You’d have to be an idiot to think that this argument could be used in a conversation about homeschooling with any particular potential homeschooler.
Educational merits aside, this is part of a broader trend of losing or dismantling the few “public” parts of our society we have left. People simply don’t want to be forced to interact with others in the physical world, especially others not like them. They certainly don’t want to be asked to trust a stranger for any reason, unless there’s an app to mediate the trust.
The bad news is that there are 8 billion of us and more every day. There’s not enough space or resources for us to isolate ourselves. It can’t end well.
Answer to question: because public schooling is becoming a place of indoctrination/brainwashing (particularly of woke mentality), rather than a place of learning. This is very apparent in America, but even happens in outside places like England - kids as young as 7 are being taught and groomed with unnecessary sex and sexual ideas, when that age is meant for innocent play and exploration.
I know a few parents who've taken objection to this. They would rather have their children be properly taught, rather than be taken advantage of for their high impressionableness.
> 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.
It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way. "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."