The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against this concept. Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.
Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.
Modern academic life is only well suited to a small percent of the population. Those children who are truly happy and excelling in that setting.
So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at? Forced mass education was a good idea for developing societies, but personalized education has been possible for at least a decade now, at a fraction of the cost.
And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
I can't say my public school experience was great, I was bullied and didn't really click with the popular kids, but being around a cross section of actual American kids in my age group (my school district mixed middle class with lower class neighborhoods) helped me shape my worldview and learn to deal with people who didn't look or talk like me. I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people. I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
My kids are not school age yet, and I am not sure on if I will home school or not. But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling. There is the neighborhood kids, you have sports and clubs kids can join, religious groups.
Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day. Some people "homeschooling" I know are groups of parents getting together to educate their children together in small groups of ~5 kids to share the responsibility, and hiring a tutor to fill in the gaps. Monday they go John's house, his mom has a philosophy degree and teaches them. tuesday they go to Janes house, her dad is a Mathematician and teaches them. etc.
As the parent of a small child, there is a very noticeable difference in social skills that develop immediately as a result of my child being in a daycare interacting with other children of a similar age. Compared to my friends' same age children who are mostly staying at home and babysat by a grandparent.
(as a disclaimer, the daycare has very good teachers/caregivers from what I can tell so I'm sure that's part of it as well)
Daycare quality is a spectrum, the same way as babysitting at home. My smaller one just started daycare, and we settled for one that actually does stuff with the kids (forest school style). But I can tell you, we've visited lots of places that are basically just making sure the kids are not dead by the time you pick them up. Same for babysitting with grandparents; there's the hyper-social grandpa style that's always doing something, and the couchpotato with +10k hours on Cocomelon.
The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman. Other factors seem to play a much larger factor in the things you are (rightfully!) concerned about. As long as the parents have "the will to have nice things" (to refer to Patrick McKenzie's concept), then these are very surmountable problems.
Respectfully,
A grateful dad who was homeschooled and who will homeschool.
P.S. Of course I will do some things differently than my parents, but it was an amazing gift and I had an extremely vibrant and stimulating time, including with
peers (and adults!) outside of my parents' network who pushed me, challenged me, thought very differently than me, etc.
>The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman.
How do you do that? Seems like it would be impossible to replicate the experience of learning to navigate daily social interactions in a mixed group of people, especially when it comes to dealing with conflict.
What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?
Maybe it's:
- the terrible educational state of the school system?
- the fact that device and social media addiction is a prevalent and growing problem that they don't want their kids brains rotted by?
- they want to provide their kids an education based on experiential and project based learning rather than filling out worksheets?
- they don't want their kids to be forced to wait for the slowest / least interested kids in class to catch up before moving on to more challenging material?
Not sure why you're being down voted. I'm sure there are some folks homeschooling because of things like racism, but that has always existed just like evangelical christians have always been big into homeschooling.
If there is a big uptake, it's likely due to the ever present threat of school shootings coupled with all the things you said above. I have to teach my kid a lot outside of school and they go to what is considered a good one. The only reason I send them is my spouse and I work and my kid needs to learn social skills. If I won the lottery, I'd homeschool them myself and do it for a few other families as well so that my kid can get the social aspect too.
The fact that many of these guys who are in charge of America right now obviously did not get their ass kicked enough times in 8th grade is one of the biggest problems we face. Everyone should have a chance to learn that there are unpleasant consequences to being a jerk.
My daughter is in college now, but we used a variety of private, part-time, and homeschooling approaches prior to that. One thing is that there are a lot of resources (e.g. independent teachers for subjects you don't know, co-ops for socializing, etc.), and the more people are doing it, the more true that becomes. My parents were both public school teachers, and yet we found ourselves home- and alternative-schooling our daughter. Public schools don't really seem to have a strategy for dealing with the situation, other than complaining about it.
If you are offering a free service, that is quite time-intensive, and increasing numbers of people choose to not use it, then there should be more introspection going on. If it's happening in public education, I'm not able to see evidence of it.
Seattle schools have that issue.
After covid a bunch of kids were moved to private schools, and SPS (the organism in charge of school) complained and blamed parents on having money and not wanting to mix with the riff raff and other bs.
When they actually asked the parents why their children weren't returning after covid, it was because SPS decided to axe the advance/gifted programs they had for kids, among other educational quality things.
The children that never came back were children who would have taken advantage of those programs, and parents decided to go pay to win instead to get those programs back in private schools, as it becomes a compounding advantage in today's competitive world.
SPS is still using the stupid hippie approach about children magically learning how to read with pictures and guesses, instead of phonics, and some numbers for reading are worst than Mississippi, which went hard into phonics and overwhelmingly improved their numbers.
WA is a clear example that spending a ton of money doesn't improve educational outcomes, you also have to do things that work.
This is exactly right. I had a kid in Seattle schools during this time and this is exactly how I saw it happen and and Seattle schools were a major reason I left Seattle.
We tried homeschooling a few times. We were honest with ourselves and determined we were not that great at it. Sure, we could improve. But one of the primary factors in where we chose to live was the school district. Fortunately it has worked out well. Of course there’s always something to deal with- you have to advocate for your kids.
It’s basically public daycare for a lot of people. Including us.
The social aspect is important for us. The idea of having to find other people with kids for activities sounds exhausting. We’re a gang of neuro-spicy introverts. My social circle is comprised of people I’ve been friends with for 25+ years. All from my school days.
I dealt with a lot of bullshit at school. But overall a net gain.
Obviously there is some serious nuance here - there are of course edge cases and serious reasons for considering home schooling.
But as a general principle, encouraging kids further and further out of (group) human contact seems like an obviously terrible idea to me. We're already doing it with (lack of) play spaces, "no ball games", insane screen times (which equates to less "real" face to face time) amongst teens, awkward kids who can't even engage with a stranger under any circumstances - and meanwhile isolation and loneliness is on the increase, fear continues to rise about even letting your kid walk down the street to the shops, etc...
School is hard, as are parts of life. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult, it's not always what you want it to be, you get shouted at sometimes and big kids get their way and you don't get asked on the football team. Honestly, and sorry, but - a big part of growing up is learning how to deal with things. If kids don't, and you as a parent don't help them deal with the bumps, you and they will be building unrealistic expectations about how good this life is going to be, and they'll spend all their time sad or "triggered" or afraid, or isolated, or unable to join in. They'll get more scared, more isolated, more depressed. This is not what any parent wants.
This - of course and x1000 - need to be done with massive quantities of love and compassion. This isn't some Victorian hellscape I'm advocating here. Real bullying is real. Sometimes adults need to weigh in. Kids will find school hard.
But loving your kids is NOT giving them everything they want. It's teaching them how to navigate things that are difficult and awkward and - ultimately - helping them become robust adults.
I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before.
We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.
We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.
But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
> Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
And this is only just now being investigated as a cause of harm. When I went to public high school, the bullying happened at school and stayed there. Kids now, their bullies follow them home, and since most of the social interaction now happens online instead of in-person, it's way more damaging to mental health than the classic caricature of a schoolyard bully. The most I had to compare myself to were my peers in my school, not the entire globe of influencers and fake instagram.
There has been a complete erosion of boundaries. The threat is constant, you can't escape it, and kids are in a state of hyper-vigilance, always online or else they miss a crucial social interaction in group chat, or need to constantly check if a damaging photo, post, or rumor gets publicly posted to the internet while they were asleep.
Not only that, teens are losing the ability to read human emotion, so misunderstandings escalate rapidly. In person communication now becomes too intense, and only increases anxiety and isolation, despite being hyperconnected.
COVID forced remote learning to be adopted very broadly, without the usual self-selection effect of families that choose to homeschool when they have a choice. So the observations from COVID don't really support any stronger claim than saying that homeschooling can be done badly.
To me, this question highlights the whole problem: This is not what schools are for.
Yes, it's great if they provide these things, but it's a distant secondary concern. I'd rather my kid get a great education and miss out on these things, than get a poor education but have access to all these.
But of course, as others have pointed out, it's a false dichotomy. You can have both.
Of these, most are easily handled. I am in a midsized city and there are plenty of groups that offer music, robotics & engineering, speech & drama, etc. focused towards homeschooled students. That, plus the rise in homeschool "pods"/co-ops means socialization and activities are very available to students & parents who want them.
Sports might be the challenge. Many US states have athletic associations that handle most K-12 sports, and they require enrollment in an accredited member school. I am aware of several homeschool specific athletic associations in my area, but all are targeted towards religious homeschoolers. Not certain what secular alternatives would exist, but soccer is very popular & there are plenty of competitive academies that operate outside the school ecosystem.
Besides big ones like soccer that you mention, more niche sports are often partially or totally outside of school systems.
Fencing for example, is usually clustered around external clubs. Very few high schools will have fencing teams, and in a lot of cities even the high schools that do have fencing teams will be kind of a joke compared to the club teams.
Depending on where you live there are many options. In my school district home school kids can join any club or team offered by the public school system where you reside. Additionally there are numerous non-school related clubs and activities all over the place. My kids could play music with the local school district, with a musical education non-profit that is prolific in our area, or ( where they do play music ) with private lessons that have group classes, bands, and performance opportunities.
My kids do Taekwondo and church youth groups. My eldest did not want to do robotics but he does run the Dungeons and Dragons group at our library. We do music as a family. My daughter does choir. My son has done drama but declined to participate this year. They have been homeschooled their entire lives. All three of them received something I did not, the ability to converse with adults from a young age. This is of course anecdotal so YMMV but I would love to see a study on the conversational skills of homeschooled students.
Homeschoolers form co-ops. A local one here does ballroom dance, tennis, basketball. There is often a youth symphony option in mid- to large-sized cities.
For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.
Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.
There are tons of clubs for such things. My kids are in a homeschool music program (and learning piano and, until recently, bagpipes); half of my kids are playing competitive sports via homeschool programs that compete with other high schools; one is getting his certification as a welder (as part of a State program that pays for it if one is still in high school). Because class times and locations are more flexible this opens up far more possibilities for extra curricular activities.
i'm sure many others will reply as well but there's lots of extracurricular options for homeschoolers as well as social engagements. It's kind of like a shadow school system, there's associations and groups and other organizations built around home schooled children. My wife and I considered it but we have managed to navigate our public school situation well enough without me, or my wife, having to quit working.
I went to public schools but still did that sort of thing through the YMCA and our church. At the middle school level and lower, most of those types of activities are community based rather than centered around the school, though that varies by area.
I suppose there are few talented, hard working people who want to teach, and they command a premium. Education is expensive and underfunded.
As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money.
By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.
Expensive yes. Underfunded depends on where you are.
San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student.
I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.
San Francisco schooling district spends upwards of $1B a year to educate 55k students. About 85% of the budget goes to salary and benefits (excluding pensions). Of that, 75% goes to educators and the rest for other staff.
Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.
It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.
With a budget of $28k per student, and 21 students per classroom, that’s $588k per classroom.
Now, granted, some of that goes on building upkeep, cleaning, supplies, heating, pensions, managers etc - but if $588k per classroom doesn’t let you pay enough to attract teachers there’s something very suspicious going on.
I don’t buy that argument, there’s no reason a teacher in San Francisco can’t live in Oakland or Berkeley, or a teacher in NYC couldn’t live in NJ. You don’t have a human right to live in the most expensive real estate on Earth.
GP didn't say anything about it being a human right. You seem to be strawmanning their argument.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.
$28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us?
Teacher (all-in cost): $150k
Teaching assistant: $100k
Rent for commercial space in SF (~1,200 sq ft): $60k
Curriculum, books, supplies: $23k
Technology (22 Chromebooks, projector, software): $18k
Field trips and enrichment: $10k
Utilities, internet, insurance: $27k
Furniture and equipment: $20k
Admin/legal/accounting: $8k
Total: $416k
That leaves $200k unspent.
AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist.
If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).
If an average class has 20 students it's $560k per year. If an average student gets 1000 hours of schooling per year you can pay 200$/hour and you have spent only just above 1/3 of your budget.
It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".
It’s because this is a very simplified view of a classroom. What is presented above is the best case scenario, not a realistic one. For example, there’s no consideration of costs associated with any sort of handicapped student, or student with special education needs.
Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.
Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.
Education should be well funded but in many school districts the problem is waste and inefficiency rather than lack of funding. Huge amounts are paid to administrators and consultants who do nothing to improve student outcomes, or even make them worse. Generally there is little correlation between funding per student and results.
This argument has not kept up with the reality of the public school system. The homeschooled cohort my children are associated with have problems associating with public school children of the same age... but the problem doesn't lie on the homeschooler's side, it lies 100% on the publicly-schooled children's side! The public school attendees are noticeably less mature for the same age and less able to deal with anything other than the highly-specific and unrealistic environment of public schools rather than the rest of the world. The homeschoolers have trouble stepping down their social expectations to levels the public school attendees can meet.
We have a few reasons unrelated to socialization [1] to do home schooling but one of the reasons I don't want to send them back is precisely the regression in "socialization" I would expect.
30 years ago, this probably was a decent argument, but the bar of "at least as socialized as a public school attendee" has gone way down in the meantime.
[1]: I guess before anyone asks, one of my children is deaf-blind and while the people in the system did their best and I have not much criticism of the people, the reality is still that I was able to more precisely accommodate that child than the system was able to. This ends up being a pretty big stopper for a return to the public school system for that child.
Homeschooled does not mean "completely isolated." My kids are in bands, sports teams, and numerous extracurricular activities both with other home schoolers as well as with public schoolers. Also, homeschooled kids are far less reliant on their same-aged peer group for socialization; my kids talk with people in public regardless of their age (something which surprises some adults).
Homeschooling doesn't mean the kid stays at home all the time. We homeschool and my kid has classes and different activities all week, interacts with friends and teams. It has worked very well for us given our lifestyle. I would understand it's not for everyone.
I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization. They'll have to deal with those folks when they hit the real world too.
I.e. disassociating from those people? Isn’t that what homeschooling does inherently? It’s more likely that kids will pick up bad behaviors than they will learn to “deal with” those kinds of people.
> I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization.
It is, but do we have any studies showing how well school kids are at this? From what I've seen, most kids in school do not learn those skills.
Who’s to say that they wouldn’t be more socialized, not less?
It used to be folk wisdom that beating your kids built character, teachers would even slap kids with a ruler back in the 1950s. Could you say the same about bullies, cliques, popularity contests, and all the other performative nonsense that goes on in public schools?
Maybe it’s all bullshit and giving kids a safe environment to learn at their own pace without all these distractions makes them better equipped for the modern world?
My kids get more socialization than me. Our parish homeschool group has daily activities. Monday is two hour playgroup. Tuesday is extracurricular classes at the parish. Wednesday is catechesis and play time. Thursday is free. Friday she does a day long camp with an outdoor education program (not parish based). All added up, she spends more time with kids than I did and doing more interesting things
We homeschooled. When we wanted to socialize our kids, we shoved them into the restroom and beat them up for their lunch money.
I kid, but there's a real point: So much of the socialization is bad.
More: Kids aren't going to be kids forever. Does socialization with a bunch of other kids prepare them for the adult society that they're going to go into?
As a parent, your view of socialization being "good" or "bad" is heavily distorted. I think of socialization as an activity, sometimes a skill, although I really don't think it's needed as we live in a mostly secluded society in the US, and verbal communication has been supplanted by electronic means.
This is my perspective too. A bunch of 11 year olds raising your 11 year old doesn't always result in preferable outcomes. I think the other part of it is that a lot of people have this sort of idea that homeschooling means sitting in your kid in the basement in front of their homework and never seeing the light of day. Obviously that's not accurate.
Well it should, yes, given that socialization is the result of shared social experiences.
Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences that create bonds with people (whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)
These are real social dynamics that actually exist in adult life, and I suspect people who are totally blindsided by them are maladapted
If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society.
> Kids (and teachers) generally don't deal with bullies well
Are there studies on whether bullying is higher in lightly supervised versus moderately supervised groups? Or mixed-age versus single-age groups?
Scouting is lightly-supervised mixed-age groups. If an older kid bullied a younger kid, that resulted in adults reading them the riot act. But if a younger kid bullied a younger kid, the two sort of wound up sorting it out until someone threw a punch or pissed off an older kid. (For being annoying.) That second dynamic was, to my memory, unique to mixed-age groups.
> But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
“And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.”
Take it from someone who was homeschooled from pre-k through high school, you will absolutely not provide a better social environment.
I was so unprepared to handle the social dynamics in casual, educational or professional that it took years and years of active work to put myself in a position where it wasn’t an absolute detriment to my success. I have no doubt you can educate your children well, it’s every other aspect of humanity that is typically missed out on and can lead to unintended consequences.
I had the opposite experience. I was home schooled from 2nd grade through high school, but I didn't just spend all my time alone with parents. My family was part of a home-school co-op, I played in the local youth symphony, and I had a job working at the local university when I was 16 and taking college classes there. I also have a large extended family.
I didn't really have much trouble adjusting to living on campus at college, and I've never had issues with interpersonal stuff at work or school.
Of my closest friends when I was in high school, the one with the best social skills had been home schooling since I met him when he was 10. However, he did participate in extracurricular activities at the local public school, like a computer club in middle school and then theater in high school. The only area he was really lagging at age 18 was in math, but that reversed a few years later and now he has a STEM PhD and has been teaching at a large state school for the past decade and a half.
I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.
I dunno. I think I could spin a narrative where public middle school dynamics (that is, bullied quite a bit) created issues for me that hampered my ability to succeed in social settings.
I don't really think that way in general, but I guess I'd just want to point out that the spectrum isn't "good socialization in public school" to "bad/no socialization in homeschooling".
Sounds like you had a hard time transitioning. Sorry for that.
I don't believe it's a magic pill by any means. But I've known many recently home schooled kids and they seem a lot more mature than their public school peers. So I think we have a decent shot at having similar results.
Seeming mature to an adult isn't the thing in question though, is it? Not feeling or appearing awkward when interacting on their own in their 20s is what is being criticized. The anecdotal evidence you present doesn't include home schooled children in their 20s as far as I can tell.
Homeschooled kids have much more flexible schedules which can allow them to do things in the community during the daytime that are not available to kids who have to go to school in-person full time.
This can include volunteer work or part time jobs working with the public and interacting with people of all ages.
Why do you think you being forced into a monoculture of only kids your own age would help your interaction with others when you're in your 20s? 25 year olds don't behave anything like teenagers.
One could say this is where the free market of schooling comes into play. Does it make more economic sense for businesses to choose those with social skills learnt from home schooling, or ones who have not been home schooled? Definitely curious to see where this goes.
If only it was actually a free market. Republicans are actively kneecapping public education so they can pump money to the schools that are free to to discriminate and kick out underperforming kids
That's probably true in a lot of cases for K-5. But I don't think any two people could teach a child with the same robustness as a the ~15 teachers most kids have during middle school/junior high, let alone provide things like labs, workshops, extracurriculars, etc. With high school that gap goes from big to enormous.
This just assumes the median education for 6-12 is any good. Also, a lot of labs, workshops, and extracurriculars can be easily found elsewhere - a lot of these have groups specifically for homeschoolers.
> And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.
Citation needed.
Every perspective I've heard personally - and mirrored in comments here as well - from the non parent side of things, is quite negative in terms of learning how to behave and socialize with your peers. To you the children might seem polite and servile, and you might see this as something positive - as you state in another comment - but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
>but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
Citation needed.
If you put your kids in homeschooling and provide no other outlet for socialization then sure, they'll be socially awkward.
My brother and I were homeschooled, but we were also heavily involved in our community. We were at the local park playing sports 3-4 times per week, we did various summer camps, we had a few other homeschool families that we'd setup playdates with. Our parents would sometimes joke that we barely ever home! And, unsurprisingly, we had no problems with socializing or making friends later in life.
Was it the same kind of socialization you get from going to public school? No, but I consider that a feature :)
One of the key issues in school is classroom size. A teacher with 30 kids is handicapped as a teacher compared to one with a smaller class.
Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.
I used to think this way, but some experiences made me realize it's not so cut and dry.
When you have a class size over 20, teachers are forced to be a lot more systematic, which can improve the effectiveness of their teaching. Good teachers make heavy use of social proof. When I tried to teach my kid at home, it was a struggle. But when the kid is around his peers in a classroom, and they are going along with the teacher, he naturally falls in line with no cajoling, etc.
If there were only 5 students, the likelihood he'll just go along with things is much lower.
Grade retention ('holding kids back') has additionally dropped significantly since the average HNer has gone to school. I remember going to school where one of my peers went to sixth grade with his brother two years older than him. But now, we give out social promotions.
That might've worked if we funded schools & gave students who fell behind significant interventions & 1x1 attention, but that's not what happened. One of my friends has a very bright and talented fifth grader in a class with multiple students who can barely read or write. Guess who gets the most attention from educators? Which group the teachers structure the class for?
> It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.
Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.
I would say the interesting thing is the sudden increase over the last 5 years. Presumably, the number of Americans who think they can KO a grizzly bear is a lizardman constant situation in the surveys over time. But the number of people homeschooling is recently skyrocketing.
I suspect there is a lot of selection bias in that data. My hypothesis is that the homeschooled folks who take the ACT are more likely to do well on the ACT than the homeschooled folks who don't.
My Title 1 school made the ACT available to all students for free (on one specific date). A lot of kids who were unprepared for the ACT took it because, why not?
An acquaintance of mine fought (got mauled by) a grizzly bear a month ago. He went to the ICU (since released), but the bear got shot and died. It was a pyrric victory, but he did win the fight.
I’ve watched people on YouTube make all sorts of amazing things, and they make it look easy. Which leads to thoughts of “hey, that’s easy, I could do that”.
I was homeschooled and I got a fairly strong education.
What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.
For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.
> I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.
Any idea how many were affected terribly in school? I'm in touch with my high school classmates. Almost half of them blame the school experience to lifelong problems.
We can actually. It's called theory of probability and statistics, which is probably "forgotten" by these amazing self-appointed homeschoolers. A few rare successes of homeschoolers doesn't mean this practice is good on average, and vice versa the rare failures of the public education system doesn't mean that it is bad on average.
Most times I look this up, I see stuff like "[t]he home-educated typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests".
Looking at the replies, I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores but social development and preparing kids for society outside the house. It definitely requires considerably more, active attention from parents. Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades and ensure that they're maintaining an active social life but I think the difficulty of nailing that as you go-your-own-way is apparent.
>I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores
>Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades
This reads as an inconsistency.
As for the social stuff - as I commented elsewhere, it's not hard to make a case that public school is bad for socialization as well. Which isn't to say that public school isn't irredeemable in that way, just that it's not like one or the other is an obviously correct choice.
This comment is so disingenuous. Few and rare?? Why would you frame it like this? Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.
I'll gladly stand up my 7 homeschooled kids next to any public school kids.
All tested above grade level on state mandatory testing throughout their schooling.
Two graduated early (some with college credits).
My adult children (4 sons, ages 19-25) have gainful employment, living on their own (2 own their own homes), and standing on their own. One is married (I got a grandkid!), all have friends, communities they're involved in, and are healthy (physically and mentally).
None take prescription meds nor struggle with anxiety or depression.
Poor public school kids... I hope they can find help for the damage they suffered. <grin>
Assuming you are Mormon, is home schooling sort of another form of virtue signaling Mormon families employ or is it more of a way to ensure your families don't get excluded? Like, did you really have a choice in the matter once you realized you either go full Mormon or leave the church entirely?
Mormons aren't the only people with large families. Ultra-conservative Jews, Muslims, and many Christians have large families. What I don't think I've ever seen is a couple who is non-religious or atheist and has a large family.
Given they are sufficiently successful to be living on their own, married, and some with their own homes, whether they went to college is probably an inappropriate yardstick of success. I mean, be real. If a 25 year old is married and owns a home, but doesn't have a BSc are they a failure? What are we doing here.
And yet there are many homeschooling parents in this discussion thread (including a single-income dad of 9 whose kids are homeschooled). But I'm quite aware that I'm the exception on HN.
- Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.
- With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching.
It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it's comparatively much easier to pull your kids out and homeschool them.
This is very anecdotal. Here in the south, the "controversial, left-ish values" would be a breath of fresh air vs what is being taught here
> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass
This is no child left behind in action, which was implemented during W's term
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
^ This is the micromanagement that a ton of people claim to hate and get in their way on this site when folks are complaining about daily standups.
IMO, if you're worried about the quality of your kid's education then you'll either need to send them to a private or home school, which will stunt them socially because life isn't just one big private school or home, or encourage curiosity and learning at home to supplement their rote learning from school
Another nebulous but I think VERY observable factor would be the extent to which "parents are, and expected to be, involved in their kids school stuff."
Anecdotally, but I bet you see a lot of it, I can count on one, maybe two hands the number of times my parents went to anything at the school to see me do a thing. And for my kids, there's something just about every other week.
I'm not sure how your first thing much factors in? I haven't seen any data but I'd be VERY surprised if e.g. a survey of homeschoolers would cite to a lot of "making bad students pass" and "lefty indoctrination."
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
I'm not sure remote schooling during the pandemic is very representative of day to day teaching in school. At least that's the impression I got from my teacher friends back then.
> Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.
I'm thinking this is fairly new. When I was in school, if I got bad grades or got in trouble at school, I got in trouble at home too. My parents were absolutely not calling the teachers complaining about grades. When I had trouble learning multiplication facts, they sat me down with flash cards every night until I had learned them, they didn't blame the teacher. This was in the 1970s/80s. This seemed pretty normal based on what I remember. When/why did it change?
I think parents are trying to maximize the perceived value of their child at the expense of their real value. I also think various media (especially the internet) have lowered trust in primary/secondary education, leading to more parents feeling justified in "taking matters into their own hands". You kind of see that attitude in this thread (its not wholly unjustified).
One example is in high school I had an excellent literature class that also covered a lot of philosophy. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the various philosophies we studied were the philosophies that are often foundational for Marxism, atheism, and general left of center academia. Probably the best class I had in high school but I wish it had also covered things on both sides, or been more transparent that it was in fact biased.
"Both" sides? If you suggest Marxism is one side, what is the other? Also, it's hard to take such a vague comment at face value when you consider the long list of Marx's influences. For example, there are right and young Hegelians...
It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way. Very little of it has anything to do with the family of political ideologies despite sharing a similar name. The question of God's existence is also fundamental to the history of philosophy. It's not particularly shocking that a course might cover people like Lucretius, Bentham, or Russell.
Most philosophy surveys will also include some of the other sides, which you might not even recognize as such. Descartes and Aquinas are fixtures, and Heidegger (notoriously conservative and also a literal Nazi) often features in university level classes. The point isn't to indoctrinate you with any of these viewpoints, it's to teach you how to analyze their arguments and think for yourself.
Don't agree with this. Marx's Capital is filled with basic mathematical analyses. I don't agree with his labor theory of value, but I do think algebra is good.
I have had more teachers actively advocating voting for right wing parties than left wing parties. And once had someone in biology class tell me that he thinks that evolution and creation by god are equal and we should try to merge those theories. And I live in a very secular part of Europe.
But hey, both you and I are telling anecdotes. The only conclusion for me is that public school exposes you to people that do not think like you or your parents. Something, we are less and less exposed to. If that is good, anyone has to answer for themselves.
I am very curious too, I’ve asked this to other friends who have mentioned the same thing and the only concrete answer I have got so far was teaching the theory of evolution and climate change.
Not a GP and I don't know if any of these qualifies as "left-ish" (which is very US specific IMHO), but as I understand, the education all over the western culture is destroyed by few really simple and really crazy (for me) ideas:
Lots of examples, gender identity and requiring ethnic studies (focusing on white male privilege, settler/colonial, putting groups into binary oppressor/oppressed). Also issues with requiring those classes vs not.
> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.
As someone who was in public education less than 10 years ago, the last part plainly untrue. In fact, several states will soon require displaying the 10 commandments in public school classrooms, which seems pretty “right-ish” to me.
Homeschooling is a symptom of the atomization of American society - affluent people are retreating into their bunkers in suburbia and withdrawing from civil society based on a shared psychosis regarding “critical race theory” and “wokeness”, neither of which are taught in public schools.
> In fact, several states will soon require displaying the 10 commandments in public school classrooms, which seems pretty “right-ish” to me.
That tells you way more about the (current) politics of the local government than it does about the politics of the median teacher. It might actually indicate the opposite - no one would go to the effort of mandating pride flags at the school I went to, seeing as they were already hung in every single classroom.
I expected this comment coming into the thread. I would just like to point out that there is a huge range of options between those two extremes!
If is entirely possible to teach up a child to be curious AND well rounded in the basics (see also concepts of Trivarium and Quadrivium, sorry can't link the references atm).
Did anyone argue that you are not allowed to teach your kids your own values? It seems to me, the question is more: do you want to raise your kids without ever exposing them to values that are not your own? Opinion Bubbles have been increasing for a long time, do we really want to grow them even more? Social media is full of people left and right that seem to have no idea about the opinions and realities at the other end of the spectrum.
Is this not possible while exposing children to a variety of view points from different sources or does it require that children are not exposed to certain perspectives at all?
The original comment makes a very bold claim of "indoctrination" of an entirely undefined set of values.
There has been no evidence that exposing children to this (undefined and buzzwordy) set of values means that they can't be raised according to other values.
I find this idea pretty wild to encounter on HN which is generally focused on open source and widely available information so that people can educate themselves is suddenly gone in a puff of smoke and some buzzwords when talking about educating the most curious minds in the world.
Define the values. Cite sources that this is "indoctrination" and not simply exposing viewpoints. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion.
Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning. I don’t think we’re talking about remote ranch situations where you either do online school or have to send them to boarding school.
So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
We’ve homeschooled all our kids up to 8th grade. Our oldest is now a sophomore at the public high school but will start attending community college next year, paid for by the school district.
Most of the adults you see at the various group things are stay-at-home moms. Most. Some stay-at-home dads. Some of the moms have part-time jobs. I don’t recall any dads with part-time jobs. But many dads are present while also working full-time. You get into a rhythm, have a schedule, etc. and you can work it out. My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
Wait... you homeschool your kids and yet you write "...and [they] are jealous that she does both." No, they are ENVIOUS: one envies what they don't have and are jealous of what they have.
> My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
FWIW, my experience is that the dynamic at play in these situations is that women who run their own businesses or otherwise have high-powered careers tend to have a constellation of personality traits that is significantly shifted vs. those of stay at home moms, plus their daily lives are very different, so they don't really fit in. Saying that without value judgement, just an observation.
Anecdotally, I know of one child who was homeschooled recently. The mother is a single mother, of modest middle-class means. There was a homeschooling group nearby with a few volunteer mothers handling most of the logistics and teaching. This particular mother did not have to give up her job. It does stretch the definition of "homeschooling" a bit when it's a neighbor teaching in a neighbor's home, but they made it work.
It only requires that one parent has enough free hours to assign coursework. They don't have to exit the workforce, and don't necessarily need to directly supervise learning (but of course some of this is necessary for K-5).
I think a lot of how homeschooling can work, along with much of median/lower household income life in general, is misunderstood.
> Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning.
There are at least two good answers to this:
1. The first is a via a home-schooling collective. With as few as 5 families, one can easily do a once-per-week rotation of home schooling responsibilities. Also note that the formal education part of this can be done fairly comfortably in 4 hours (even down to 2 hours with 1-1 instruction). As such, all that is needed is a 4-day a week job, or a job with a flex schedule who can do work on the weekend. I know one family that does something like this.
2. The second is to have a tutor do the instruction. For folks who are high earners, paying a tutor who can come in for 2-3 hours a day costs about the same as a mid-tier private school. Child care would still need to be covered, but that’s usually cheaper than a tutor.
So it’s doable, but either time or money will need to be sacrificed. I don’t think that’s a surprise.
That said, below are some things about home schooling that I’ve learned over the years from people who have done it:
- When done well, it’s probably close to an ideal education. When done poorly, it can mess up the kid, and many of these kids are very vocal about how bad it can be. Obviously there will be a whole range of outcomes between these extremes. Just be aware that it’s not necessarily a panacea, and it’s not necessarily an ideological cesspit.
- There is a ton of support for home schoolers in some communities, especially for socialization and specialization. Many people do not realize this.
- That said, some (perhaps many) home school parents are just ideological extremists — extreme beliefs, extreme (sometimes illegal) lifestyles, etc.
- A good litmus test of where a home school parent is on the thoughtful-extremist continuum is to ask them why they homeschool their kids. The thoughtful parents can rattle off dozens of learning opportunities that their kids have had that don’t exist or barely exist at normal schools. The less of these types of specifics they talk about, the more likely they are to have ideological reasons that they may or may not openly discuss.
- For folks who want a good learning environment for their kid, I strongly recommend a good Montessori school. I emphasize “good”, because some of them stray far from the Montessori ideals. This just requires a small amount of research and some observation. All that said, a good Montessori school almost always sets up a kid to be a solid person and life-long learner. Note that some kids absolutely hate the Montessori style, and you will know this in about a day or two. I will go out on a limb and say most of these kids will need special attention in home school contexts as well (imho).
> So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
I don’t think so.
Most of the people I know who home school are already stay at home parents (mostly mothers, but one dad), or they have plenty of disposable income to throw at the problem via tutors and home school support services.
I will also say that some parents absolutely punt on the education part, and they can do their part (often negligently) while doing a full time work-from-home job — think handing out some work sheets and pointing their kid(s) to an online learning environment with very little scaffolding. There are some kids who respond well to this, but most don’t.
Homeschooling is often (not always) correlated to sect participation, isolationism and "traditionalism". Meaning husband is likely forces wife to never work and socialize, while taking care of kids and all home cleaning and maintenance. This control mania is likely what causes homeschooling too, because it is obvious that one person can't teach 10-16 years worth of advanced studies, so the real motivation is to isolate his family and keep them to the house and sect congregation building. Rudimentary slavery basically.
Why do you assume wives just want to work and many wouldn't jump at the chance to be able to stay home with their children, and also socialize with other friends outside of some office job environment?
that’s a great fantasy but when you consider, statistically, how many marriages end in divorce - that’s a foolish plan. EVERYONE thinks their marriage is different or special.
Maybe working part time is OK, you at least have some job history. But no work history for 10+ years? Great ways to put all your eggs into 1 basket and potentially end up a poor single mom. And i say this as a husband and father.
Optionality has costs. If you live your life like it's going to go astray, then you miss out on a lot of the upside if it doesn't go astray (such as by being a stay at home mom, if that's what you actually want to do). The statistic that 50% of marriages end in divorce is often bandied about, but it also means that 50% don't. Which means that going all-in on your marriage is a completely reasonable thing to do.
As somebody that suffered through public school as a gifted kid, I wish I had been homeschooled. Almost everything positive that happened in my education was because of family, not due to the school. School was hell on earth for me, and I imagine it's the same for most other "neurodivergent" kids who are high IQ. Given what I know from my own kid, there's no surprise to me why more people are opting to home school. For my daughter we kept her in public school because the district we moved to had magnet programs, and that's what she wanted so she could be with her friends from the neighborhood, but not every school district cares about gifted kids and will happily put a child with a 150 IQ in the same room with a child trying to read 6-8 grade levels above their peers with an 80 IQ child who has a violence problem and consider that an acceptable outcome as long as nobody calls the police.
When I recently switched jobs, one of my requirements was I had to remain remote, for at least the next few years, so I could remain at home and help with my children's education. I don't think there is enough money in the world to convince me to change back to public education. Aside from the benefits everyone mentions like a much better education, having so much extra time with my children is a priceless gift that I wish we as a society could give everyone.
Also its given me the chance to learn things that I missed during my primary and secondary educations. Going through each proof in Euclid's Elements again has been a lot of fun, and its been long enough that I have forgotten most of them, so the thrill of discovery is real for me too.
If you can make it work, you should make it work, even if that means moving to a lower CoL area, there are a lot of small towns in the US that have excellent amenities, and are great places to raise a family.
How do you make up for the resulting drop in interaction with other kids? I had a boss who did this with his children as well - it seemed as though his solution was to use PE credits to have his kids attend sports with other kids.
My kids are part of a co-op where they meet once a week and in this co-op they share some elements of their curriculum with everyone else, they spend one day going over the weeks assignments along with 8-10 classmates, and then during the week they are at home doing their work. As they have aged their school work now has a lot of collaborative elements, so my oldest is actually meeting with kids from his co-op almost daily to go over group projects and assignments.
Additionally they have a lot of extra curricular activities they participate in ( sports, music, church youth group), that also gives them a lot of socialization time with others.
Sounds like a wonderful setup. Have the kids ever shown a desire for public school? My brother is homeschooling his kids to start, but the oldest just asked to start going to public, so he sent her.
No, my wife and I discussed putting them into traditional school as they got older, but now that they are older, they have all strongly requested to remain in their homeschool co-op. I think the biggest reason is they have a good group of friends that they connect with, and have been their class mates for multiple years. So there is a strong desire to continue in the program with people they know.
Group home schooling in a shared building is becoming a huge new trend in home schooling, far more resource and time efficient and pools the resources of the parents and allows the group to hire someone to do the group homeschooling.
I really enjoyed teaching my kids during covid, and they got a bug jump ahead compared to the kids who just played video games while the schools were closed. We only did 3-4 hours a day but it was fun, and I could really see the changes.
I don't mind the idea of teaching 10 kids, my way, and in and environment I can control. The thought of teaching 35 kids, mired in bureaucracy, is a nightmare.
NY state just signed a bill to include ChatGPT in their learning and planning. Previously there were deals to bring in Google hardware for students.
Of course people are fleeing public schooling when we’re selling the kids to big tech for laptops and services that require network connection to write a word document, enable cheating, and their data sold for profit without consent.
People might be fleeing public schooling because lawmakers are dictating what happens in the classroom. There are lots of good teachers who struggle with the resources given to them and the constraints imposed on them.
At home, parents can be flexible. They can let their kids use AI when appropriate or discourage its use. They don't have to wait for legislators to get involved. If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it instead of waiting for some committee to evaluate it.
> When asked if they are satisfied with their children's education, public school parents consistently rank last after parents who choose private schools, homeschooling, and charter schools. Importantly, among all parents of school-age children, homeschooling enjoys a 70 percent favorability rating.
This is not surprising: homeschoolers are extremely confident in their own teaching abilities and extremely cynical about the abilities of others.
> Closures also gave parents a chance to experience public schools' competence with remote learning, and many were unimpressed. They have also been unhappy with the poor quality and often politicized lessons taught to their children that infuriatingly blend declining learning outcomes with indoctrination.
Why would a parent compare a novel learning environment to the pre-covid experience? Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home - do they use the internet at all?
> Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home
They probably imagine they'll never encounter political topics from a perspective of which said parents do not approve. And they're probably not wrong to believe that.
I don't feel better prepared to teach at home than someone who actually went to college for the various topics covered in high school. How can I know all I need to teach about math, chemistry, english, physics, etc, etc, etc when I already have to learn so much for my own work? I think parents that think they can do a better job are delusional.
Maybe the school _environment_ that a child has access isn't great, right? But I don't think that says anything about teachers.
At school, one teacher lectures to maybe 30 students. If all they did was give individual attention student by student, each would get maybe 10 minutes a day.
The first 10 minutes of your home-school day you've beat that statistic.
After two or three hours, you're up to a month of class time.
Of course they don't do that; they just lecture. Which is something you can get online (Khan Academy).
It's all about the homework and tutoring, baby.
All you have to do is learn along with your home student, and validate their learning experience. Helps if you catch on quicker, but not even necessary.
In California, a teacher without a chemistry degree can teach high school chemistry after passing the CSET Chemistry subtest. This requires less depth of knowledge than AP Chemistry.
Homeschooling is becoming an epidemic and a major reason is --- SPORTS. From my experience, it is growing for all the wrong reasons and I have not come across ONE family doing it properly and in a matter I would consider better for the kid.
I have a 15yo son who plays sports and for the past 5 years, homeschooling has been a way to "red-shirt" kids - hold them back a year or two then re-entering them into public schools into grades behind their age. Literally purposely holding back their kids so they can be older as freshman.
A major problem with boys because of puberty, size etc around this age. The difference between a 14yo and a 16yo, or 16/18yo can be quite large at times. My son had a freshman on his team last year that could drive and had a mustache playing vs these tiny incoming freshman, it was so comical. He was 16 1/2 as a freshman. And the parents were on the sideline acting like their kid was the next coming of Aaron Judge. It REALLY hurts the rest of us playing the rules and taking education seriously when our kids are trying to make a team.
I've known several of these parents and they all are the same. They haphazardly put them into the bare min online courses, still go to work all day and stick them in front of computers to expect them to self teach for a few years. The moms would be stay-home types that didn't seem much educated themselves. The kids are spoiled entitled types who think they are top athletes already and would jokingly be calling my son at 11a telling him they are done already for the day and headed to the gym and playing Fortnite.
Now this is just MY circle, I am not saying there aren't very serious and capable parents out there really homeschooling and giving their kids a better education than public school, but I haven't met any in maybe roughly 10 I know. Most of them seemed to also be MAGA types poo-pooing public education and how they are brainwashing kids. It is really despicable that this is most likely happening ALL across America.
Education and manipulation aside, I would also think this isn't good the kids mental and social health as well. They already are on devices doom-scrolling enough nowadays, do we really want them hermits too now?
I applaud anyone putting in huge effort to home school a kid properly and with true care and teaching. But the image of them at a desk being taught by a real smart/educated parent following a true curriculum all day and on a schedule I imagine is ultra rare. And we are going to pay a price for this in the long run. Or not, GPT will just help them along to properly write that email for them when they are adults in a corporate world.
"I got to spend time with my kids when they still wanted to spend time with me. Now as teenagers in no longer cool, but that's ok. I got my time with them and that makes me happy"
Well here is what the result was of public school for my 3 kids:
1 kid: one year behind but doing very well
1 kid: two years behind and not doing so well (in fact can't continue to academia unless things change drastically, in other words, will lose at least 1-2 more years if she does go to academia)
1 kid: two years behind and doing pretty well
This is the result of 9-11 years of public schooling. I feel like all 3 have very suboptimal outcomes, including the one doing very well.
I must say I am also getting very irritated by the "indoctrination". That was fine, if occasionally crazy, during the COVID years when the indoctrination was pretty progressive. Sometimes batshit insane, but let's say "well intentioned". Pro-climate claims ... that were bullshit, but at least pro-climate and generally positive and pro-humanity. Now one of their teachers is openly racist (in a class with 33% immigrants), and even though most keep it more subtle than him, this is a general trend.
So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
I know a teacher who said one of their colleagues adamantly believes the moon landing was faked.
>So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
Look up school ratings in your area and move is by far your best bet if you wish to continue public school. There is also the difficult truth that maybe your kids are the problem, but again school shopping could help with that depending on what programs they have.
> Recent estimates put the total homeschooling population at about 6 percent of students across the United States, compared to about 3 percent pre-pandemic.
One thing that concerns me about many pro-homeschooling comments is a kind of tear-down-the-schools attitude, as if schools were hopeless and irredeemable, despite the fact they're still educating 94% of students even at today's elevated homeschooling rate. Of course there are problems with schools, but on the other hand there are countless success stories, or at least countless non-failure stories, and educational outcomes tend to depend crucially on local factors, the location of the school and its socioeconomic environment.
I suspect that the vast majority of parents have neither the desire nor the capability to homeschool their kids. I certainly can't imagine my own parents doing it. In a sense, homeschooling is a luxury of the few. The absolute numbers can increase, but I don't think homeschooling can scale to the entire population. So whatever problems may exist in the schools, we have to confront and solve them, not just abandon them and pretend homeschooling is a societal solution. You might claim that hundreds of years ago, everyone was homeschooled, but I don't want to turn back the societal clock hundreds of years.
Another concern I have is the religious and/or political motivation of many homeschoolers. If homeschooling were just about educational outcomes for children, then we shouldn't expect homeschoolers to be disproportionately conservative in religious and/or political beliefs, yet my impression is that they are. It's certainly suspicious to me. And though I've had no involvement with K-12 education since I was in school myself, I've had a lot of involvement in higher education, first as an undergrad, then as a PhD student and lecturer. Frankly, the horror stories and conspiracy theories about left-wing indoctrination at universities are ridiculous and not based on fact or experience. So I'm quite skeptical of similar claims about K-12, especially since I saw none of that in my own childhood. (I recall being forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, for all the good that did.) There's a type of person who's set off if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" and consider that to be an act of war against them. There are still a lot of parents in the United States who reject biological evolution and would prefer that it not be taught in schools at all, or at least to be taught as "controversial."
I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children. There is no law or social imperative that children must be taught a secular view point. At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently. Honestly, I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion. It has become a belief system of it's own, and I for one fear the coming crusades :)
I say live and let live, parents should be free to teach their kids whatever belief system they want without political interference. Much to the dismay of the left (and I say this, being a left leaning moderate... I know, bad word today), kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children, full stop. The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism, is only putting fuel to the fire in this surge in global fascism. At the risk of sounding too kumbaya'ish, we all just need to accept each other and recognize the real enemies to society is a global loss of empathy and the rise of transactionalism. Now that is something I could really get behind, forced empathy courses! :)
> I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children.
I didn't claim that they don't have a right. I just claimed to be skeptical of the idea that the primary motivation for homeschooling was educational outcomes rather than ideological outcomes.
> At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently.
If only they believed differently. ;-) It's no coincidence that children tend to adopt the same beliefs as their parents, no matter the country or region.
> I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion.
The last 20 years? The First Amendment of the US Constitution begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". The principle of separation of church and state is more than 200 years old.
> kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children
I don't know what label you'd want to put on me, but I would say that kids do not belong to anyone. I find the notion of ownership to be noxious, practically slavery. We have a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves (yet), but that doesn't mean children are simply the personal property and playthings of the parents. I think it's a disservice to a child to place them in a bubble and shield them from anything the parents don't happen to like.
> The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism
"they are their parents children" is not individualism, or certainly not individualism from the child's perspective.
Morover, from what I've seen and heard from homeschoolers themselves, they do tend to form, or indeed come from, specific communitites, and are not simply "lone wolf" homeschooling parents.
Homeschool is great for parents who've turned against reality. You don't have to compete with facts. You can shape the kids reality according to your own delusions.
You might actually be referring to yourself. Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.
homeschooled kids are literally competing against kids from other countries that are being schooled on calculus, geometry, statistics, algebra with practical chemistry, physics and biology lessons. This is not going to end well 15 yrs down the line
Lots of colleges offer laboratory science classes for homeschooled children. AOPS wipes the floor with any math education you’d get at a public school. Most US national laboratories have on-site programs for school-aged kids and homeschoolers have equal standing for attending.
100%. The school and the Internet are the two places children can encounter opinions different from their parents’ for the first time. With an increase in homeschooling and recent pushes to ban social media for children, it’s clear that critical thinking is going to suffer most. I still have not met someone who was homeschooled who was remotely thankful for it.
Honestly, support for these policies that benefit, more than anyone else, abusive parents, makes me suspicious of people’s motives.
I think the point is that part of having a functioning society (civic life, engagement, tolerance of others) is having people mix together. School is one of the prime places where that happens.
If you allow a lot of people to pull away from that "forced" engagement with others then you start to stress a lot of societal bonds.
I don't know a single homeschooler that sits at home all day long. They work in family businesses, participate in bands, sports, and co-ops. Many belong to churches where families come from all different strata: our church has surgeons, line cooks, programmers, self-employed handymen, disabled vets. They interact with everyone—including kids. They do things like "kid markets" where they have a business. They watch their parents learn how the house works and how to manage finances.
There is no forced engagement—in fact the peer pressure is often completely gone. They are in an environment (their family) where they are much freer to be themselves.
the purpose of education is largely opposite of indocrination (plus few other things). if your kid is being educated is such an environment you should move (or pay for private education).
I get where you're coming from but I think your statement is a bit naive.
Education systems as we know them today are absolutely about indoctrination in so many ways. Capitalism, love of country, views on family units, beauty and aaesthetics, what has cultural value and what does not etc etc. Not to mention many school systems just straight up having classes on religion, allowing armed forces into schools to recruit and the like.
Whether you're worried about left wing or right wing indoctrination, it still holds true. All kids are being indoctrinated every time they go to school same as every time they watch TV.
Exactly. Which history lessons get taught, which books get assigned as reading, which clubs are available, etc. Even if they are taught to be critical of the assignments they get, if the selection is limited enough, kids will not have the breadth of knowledge to even see the alternatives.
I pay a lot of money for my 12-year to not be in the system you are describing and am grateful I can provide this for her more than I am grateful for just about anything else
LLM's have revolutionized the way people learn and utilize what they have learned. The future is 8 year old material science lads doing chemistry in their step-mother's RV
I've had to re-learn math skills long forgotten to help my kids with their school work. It's been an interesting experience.
The expectations for home schooling are different and are, in some ways, aimed more towards reality. My son finishes the bulk of his work in an hour most days and then has time for 2 instruments, learning C++, Rust, and Python, community/church participation and more.
The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against this concept. Your kids are a bad influence for whatever reason? Not my problem to fix.
Homeschoolers are some of the most resilient and well-behaved people I know.
Modern academic life is only well suited to a small percent of the population. Those children who are truly happy and excelling in that setting.
So much time and resources, to produce what exactly? A piece of paper and fancy picture to stare at? Forced mass education was a good idea for developing societies, but personalized education has been possible for at least a decade now, at a fraction of the cost. And to add insult to injury, there's an increasing torrent of deranged ideologies teachers and professors share with students.
Here's a famous song on the topic for those who know how to "chew the meat from the cud": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8xe6nLVXEC0&list=RD8xe6nLVXE...
I can't say my public school experience was great, I was bullied and didn't really click with the popular kids, but being around a cross section of actual American kids in my age group (my school district mixed middle class with lower class neighborhoods) helped me shape my worldview and learn to deal with people who didn't look or talk like me. I frequently saw fights, so I learned that you just stay away and watch your mouth around specific people. I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.
My kids are not school age yet, and I am not sure on if I will home school or not. But I do think its possible to get good socialization exposure while homeschooling. There is the neighborhood kids, you have sports and clubs kids can join, religious groups.
Plus not all homeschooling is just a student staying at home all day. Some people "homeschooling" I know are groups of parents getting together to educate their children together in small groups of ~5 kids to share the responsibility, and hiring a tutor to fill in the gaps. Monday they go John's house, his mom has a philosophy degree and teaches them. tuesday they go to Janes house, her dad is a Mathematician and teaches them. etc.
As the parent of a small child, there is a very noticeable difference in social skills that develop immediately as a result of my child being in a daycare interacting with other children of a similar age. Compared to my friends' same age children who are mostly staying at home and babysat by a grandparent.
(as a disclaimer, the daycare has very good teachers/caregivers from what I can tell so I'm sure that's part of it as well)
Daycare quality is a spectrum, the same way as babysitting at home. My smaller one just started daycare, and we settled for one that actually does stuff with the kids (forest school style). But I can tell you, we've visited lots of places that are basically just making sure the kids are not dead by the time you pick them up. Same for babysitting with grandparents; there's the hyper-social grandpa style that's always doing something, and the couchpotato with +10k hours on Cocomelon.
The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman. Other factors seem to play a much larger factor in the things you are (rightfully!) concerned about. As long as the parents have "the will to have nice things" (to refer to Patrick McKenzie's concept), then these are very surmountable problems.
Respectfully, A grateful dad who was homeschooled and who will homeschool.
P.S. Of course I will do some things differently than my parents, but it was an amazing gift and I had an extremely vibrant and stimulating time, including with peers (and adults!) outside of my parents' network who pushed me, challenged me, thought very differently than me, etc.
>The positives you experienced are very possible for a homeschooled student as well, and this seems to be a common boogieman.
How do you do that? Seems like it would be impossible to replicate the experience of learning to navigate daily social interactions in a mixed group of people, especially when it comes to dealing with conflict.
If you can afford it! "Grass-roots segregation hits records numbers" would be an equally fitting title.
What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?
Maybe it's:
Not sure why you're being down voted. I'm sure there are some folks homeschooling because of things like racism, but that has always existed just like evangelical christians have always been big into homeschooling.
If there is a big uptake, it's likely due to the ever present threat of school shootings coupled with all the things you said above. I have to teach my kid a lot outside of school and they go to what is considered a good one. The only reason I send them is my spouse and I work and my kid needs to learn social skills. If I won the lottery, I'd homeschool them myself and do it for a few other families as well so that my kid can get the social aspect too.
Are they going to spend huge amounts of time & money?
I'd be willing to bet that we'll hear some stories about how they outsourced the effort to AI
>cross section of actual American kids
So many factors have led this to be a major liability for young people now. School is not what it was 20 years ago.
The fact that many of these guys who are in charge of America right now obviously did not get their ass kicked enough times in 8th grade is one of the biggest problems we face. Everyone should have a chance to learn that there are unpleasant consequences to being a jerk.
> I learned that the BS American value of "popularity" doesn't translate into successful futures.
Popularity is not an exclusively American concept. Just as public school broadened your horizons, so will traveling (or living) abroad.
Too many CO2 emissions for that to be practical for the billions of people who don't have public transit access to another nation.
My daughter is in college now, but we used a variety of private, part-time, and homeschooling approaches prior to that. One thing is that there are a lot of resources (e.g. independent teachers for subjects you don't know, co-ops for socializing, etc.), and the more people are doing it, the more true that becomes. My parents were both public school teachers, and yet we found ourselves home- and alternative-schooling our daughter. Public schools don't really seem to have a strategy for dealing with the situation, other than complaining about it.
If you are offering a free service, that is quite time-intensive, and increasing numbers of people choose to not use it, then there should be more introspection going on. If it's happening in public education, I'm not able to see evidence of it.
Seattle schools have that issue. After covid a bunch of kids were moved to private schools, and SPS (the organism in charge of school) complained and blamed parents on having money and not wanting to mix with the riff raff and other bs. When they actually asked the parents why their children weren't returning after covid, it was because SPS decided to axe the advance/gifted programs they had for kids, among other educational quality things. The children that never came back were children who would have taken advantage of those programs, and parents decided to go pay to win instead to get those programs back in private schools, as it becomes a compounding advantage in today's competitive world. SPS is still using the stupid hippie approach about children magically learning how to read with pictures and guesses, instead of phonics, and some numbers for reading are worst than Mississippi, which went hard into phonics and overwhelmingly improved their numbers. WA is a clear example that spending a ton of money doesn't improve educational outcomes, you also have to do things that work.
This is exactly right. I had a kid in Seattle schools during this time and this is exactly how I saw it happen and and Seattle schools were a major reason I left Seattle.
This is why I didn't move back to Seattle, but stayed in the nearby communities.
We tried homeschooling a few times. We were honest with ourselves and determined we were not that great at it. Sure, we could improve. But one of the primary factors in where we chose to live was the school district. Fortunately it has worked out well. Of course there’s always something to deal with- you have to advocate for your kids.
It’s basically public daycare for a lot of people. Including us.
The social aspect is important for us. The idea of having to find other people with kids for activities sounds exhausting. We’re a gang of neuro-spicy introverts. My social circle is comprised of people I’ve been friends with for 25+ years. All from my school days.
I dealt with a lot of bullshit at school. But overall a net gain.
Obviously there is some serious nuance here - there are of course edge cases and serious reasons for considering home schooling.
But as a general principle, encouraging kids further and further out of (group) human contact seems like an obviously terrible idea to me. We're already doing it with (lack of) play spaces, "no ball games", insane screen times (which equates to less "real" face to face time) amongst teens, awkward kids who can't even engage with a stranger under any circumstances - and meanwhile isolation and loneliness is on the increase, fear continues to rise about even letting your kid walk down the street to the shops, etc...
School is hard, as are parts of life. It's uncomfortable, it's difficult, it's not always what you want it to be, you get shouted at sometimes and big kids get their way and you don't get asked on the football team. Honestly, and sorry, but - a big part of growing up is learning how to deal with things. If kids don't, and you as a parent don't help them deal with the bumps, you and they will be building unrealistic expectations about how good this life is going to be, and they'll spend all their time sad or "triggered" or afraid, or isolated, or unable to join in. They'll get more scared, more isolated, more depressed. This is not what any parent wants.
This - of course and x1000 - need to be done with massive quantities of love and compassion. This isn't some Victorian hellscape I'm advocating here. Real bullying is real. Sometimes adults need to weigh in. Kids will find school hard.
But loving your kids is NOT giving them everything they want. It's teaching them how to navigate things that are difficult and awkward and - ultimately - helping them become robust adults.
I do think Covid forced people to ask questions they hadn’t before.
We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.
We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.
But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
Home schooling has answers for ALL of that.
> Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
And this is only just now being investigated as a cause of harm. When I went to public high school, the bullying happened at school and stayed there. Kids now, their bullies follow them home, and since most of the social interaction now happens online instead of in-person, it's way more damaging to mental health than the classic caricature of a schoolyard bully. The most I had to compare myself to were my peers in my school, not the entire globe of influencers and fake instagram.
There has been a complete erosion of boundaries. The threat is constant, you can't escape it, and kids are in a state of hyper-vigilance, always online or else they miss a crucial social interaction in group chat, or need to constantly check if a damaging photo, post, or rumor gets publicly posted to the internet while they were asleep.
Not only that, teens are losing the ability to read human emotion, so misunderstandings escalate rapidly. In person communication now becomes too intense, and only increases anxiety and isolation, despite being hyperconnected.
And that's just barely touching the surface.
Covid showed me that on the average home schooling (or at least remote learning) leaves kids extremely under developed.
The stunted social and academic skills were pretty apparent in retrospect once the schools reopened.
Remote learning. You didn't see homeschooling, which is a very different thing, you saw remote learning.
The homeschooling crowd has developed methods over the years to compensate. The COVID remote learning cohort did not, and suffered for it.
What happened to students who were in schools that closed was terrible. But it wasn't anything close to homeschooling.
COVID forced remote learning to be adopted very broadly, without the usual self-selection effect of families that choose to homeschool when they have a choice. So the observations from COVID don't really support any stronger claim than saying that homeschooling can be done badly.
Is there an answer for athletics, music, robotics, and all the other after school teams? How does that work?
To me, this question highlights the whole problem: This is not what schools are for.
Yes, it's great if they provide these things, but it's a distant secondary concern. I'd rather my kid get a great education and miss out on these things, than get a poor education but have access to all these.
But of course, as others have pointed out, it's a false dichotomy. You can have both.
Of these, most are easily handled. I am in a midsized city and there are plenty of groups that offer music, robotics & engineering, speech & drama, etc. focused towards homeschooled students. That, plus the rise in homeschool "pods"/co-ops means socialization and activities are very available to students & parents who want them.
Sports might be the challenge. Many US states have athletic associations that handle most K-12 sports, and they require enrollment in an accredited member school. I am aware of several homeschool specific athletic associations in my area, but all are targeted towards religious homeschoolers. Not certain what secular alternatives would exist, but soccer is very popular & there are plenty of competitive academies that operate outside the school ecosystem.
Besides big ones like soccer that you mention, more niche sports are often partially or totally outside of school systems.
Fencing for example, is usually clustered around external clubs. Very few high schools will have fencing teams, and in a lot of cities even the high schools that do have fencing teams will be kind of a joke compared to the club teams.
Depending on where you live there are many options. In my school district home school kids can join any club or team offered by the public school system where you reside. Additionally there are numerous non-school related clubs and activities all over the place. My kids could play music with the local school district, with a musical education non-profit that is prolific in our area, or ( where they do play music ) with private lessons that have group classes, bands, and performance opportunities.
My kids do Taekwondo and church youth groups. My eldest did not want to do robotics but he does run the Dungeons and Dragons group at our library. We do music as a family. My daughter does choir. My son has done drama but declined to participate this year. They have been homeschooled their entire lives. All three of them received something I did not, the ability to converse with adults from a young age. This is of course anecdotal so YMMV but I would love to see a study on the conversational skills of homeschooled students.
Homeschoolers form co-ops. A local one here does ballroom dance, tennis, basketball. There is often a youth symphony option in mid- to large-sized cities.
For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.
Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.
There are tons of clubs for such things. My kids are in a homeschool music program (and learning piano and, until recently, bagpipes); half of my kids are playing competitive sports via homeschool programs that compete with other high schools; one is getting his certification as a welder (as part of a State program that pays for it if one is still in high school). Because class times and locations are more flexible this opens up far more possibilities for extra curricular activities.
Often, yes. Where I live, home-schooled kids can participate in extracurriculars offered by the public schools.
i'm sure many others will reply as well but there's lots of extracurricular options for homeschoolers as well as social engagements. It's kind of like a shadow school system, there's associations and groups and other organizations built around home schooled children. My wife and I considered it but we have managed to navigate our public school situation well enough without me, or my wife, having to quit working.
Of that list my kids' top-rated K-8 public school only offers music. Everything else is done privately.
I went to public schools but still did that sort of thing through the YMCA and our church. At the middle school level and lower, most of those types of activities are community based rather than centered around the school, though that varies by area.
I suppose there are few talented, hard working people who want to teach, and they command a premium. Education is expensive and underfunded.
As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money.
By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.
San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student.
I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.
$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco because of the insane cost of housing and everything else.
How does housing cost affect the cost for a school to educate a student? Are you saying it's the cost of paying for the school's real-estate?
San Francisco schooling district spends upwards of $1B a year to educate 55k students. About 85% of the budget goes to salary and benefits (excluding pensions). Of that, 75% goes to educators and the rest for other staff.
Cost of living is the primary driver for cost of education everywhere.
It affects the minimum viable salary for a teacher to even be able to live in the city where you want to hire them to work, same for all the other support staff that make a school function.
With a budget of $28k per student, and 21 students per classroom, that’s $588k per classroom.
Now, granted, some of that goes on building upkeep, cleaning, supplies, heating, pensions, managers etc - but if $588k per classroom doesn’t let you pay enough to attract teachers there’s something very suspicious going on.
I don’t buy that argument, there’s no reason a teacher in San Francisco can’t live in Oakland or Berkeley, or a teacher in NYC couldn’t live in NJ. You don’t have a human right to live in the most expensive real estate on Earth.
GP didn't say anything about it being a human right. You seem to be strawmanning their argument.
I think it's a reasonable expectation that even in HCOL places like SF or NYC, people in careers important to society should be able to live in the communities they serve.
High housing cost means teachers need higher salaries to account for either their higher cost of living or the extra commute
$28k per student is more than enough to run a school in San Francisco. Let's assume we cannot take advantage of the economies of scale available to SFUSD, and we're running a school with just one classroom: 22 7th graders. That would cost SFUSD $616k ($28k x 22). What would it cost us?
That leaves $200k unspent.AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist.
If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).
As the son of a teacher and a friend of several teachers, you're way underestimating their workload.
If an average class has 20 students it's $560k per year. If an average student gets 1000 hours of schooling per year you can pay 200$/hour and you have spent only just above 1/3 of your budget.
It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".
It’s because this is a very simplified view of a classroom. What is presented above is the best case scenario, not a realistic one. For example, there’s no consideration of costs associated with any sort of handicapped student, or student with special education needs.
Real world costs completely spiral out of control when you look at the actual system—for example, the buildings are all built during the rapid expansion of the country so are now old enough to need expensive maintenance, and there isn’t money or interest from the community to tear them down and build new ones.
Also something else that isn’t being covered is that involved parents are pulling their kids out for home schooling, and well behaved kids are increasingly being pulled out and put in charter sschools. This is leading to a rapid collapse of the school system. Public school is being left as a place for students who’s parents don’t care enough to do anything with them, or with enough behavioral or special needs that charter schools won’t handle them.
Very possibly. All I'm saying is you can't just compare dollar figures per student without considering where the dollars are spent.
In WA the state spends around 20k$ per student, people still say it's underfunded.
Education should be well funded but in many school districts the problem is waste and inefficiency rather than lack of funding. Huge amounts are paid to administrators and consultants who do nothing to improve student outcomes, or even make them worse. Generally there is little correlation between funding per student and results.
It also has its own problems that haven't even been quantified yet.
If you think that homeschooling is a panacea, I guess we're all about to f*ck around and find out...
How are you thinking about the socialization aspects of homeschooling vs not?
I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers so I’m curious how you thought about it.
This argument has not kept up with the reality of the public school system. The homeschooled cohort my children are associated with have problems associating with public school children of the same age... but the problem doesn't lie on the homeschooler's side, it lies 100% on the publicly-schooled children's side! The public school attendees are noticeably less mature for the same age and less able to deal with anything other than the highly-specific and unrealistic environment of public schools rather than the rest of the world. The homeschoolers have trouble stepping down their social expectations to levels the public school attendees can meet.
We have a few reasons unrelated to socialization [1] to do home schooling but one of the reasons I don't want to send them back is precisely the regression in "socialization" I would expect.
30 years ago, this probably was a decent argument, but the bar of "at least as socialized as a public school attendee" has gone way down in the meantime.
[1]: I guess before anyone asks, one of my children is deaf-blind and while the people in the system did their best and I have not much criticism of the people, the reality is still that I was able to more precisely accommodate that child than the system was able to. This ends up being a pretty big stopper for a return to the public school system for that child.
Homeschooled does not mean "completely isolated." My kids are in bands, sports teams, and numerous extracurricular activities both with other home schoolers as well as with public schoolers. Also, homeschooled kids are far less reliant on their same-aged peer group for socialization; my kids talk with people in public regardless of their age (something which surprises some adults).
Homeschooling doesn't mean the kid stays at home all the time. We homeschool and my kid has classes and different activities all week, interacts with friends and teams. It has worked very well for us given our lifestyle. I would understand it's not for everyone.
Having put 2 kids (10th and 8th grade now) through a couple school options…the socialization in schools is pretty bad.
Kids from home schooling families we know are as polite or substantially more polite than those in the school system.
I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization. They'll have to deal with those folks when they hit the real world too.
I.e. disassociating from those people? Isn’t that what homeschooling does inherently? It’s more likely that kids will pick up bad behaviors than they will learn to “deal with” those kinds of people.
Hopefully they learn how to deal with them instead of picking up their communication style.
> I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization.
It is, but do we have any studies showing how well school kids are at this? From what I've seen, most kids in school do not learn those skills.
Who’s to say that they wouldn’t be more socialized, not less?
It used to be folk wisdom that beating your kids built character, teachers would even slap kids with a ruler back in the 1950s. Could you say the same about bullies, cliques, popularity contests, and all the other performative nonsense that goes on in public schools?
Maybe it’s all bullshit and giving kids a safe environment to learn at their own pace without all these distractions makes them better equipped for the modern world?
My kids get more socialization than me. Our parish homeschool group has daily activities. Monday is two hour playgroup. Tuesday is extracurricular classes at the parish. Wednesday is catechesis and play time. Thursday is free. Friday she does a day long camp with an outdoor education program (not parish based). All added up, she spends more time with kids than I did and doing more interesting things
Oh I see - I guess I hadn’t thought of homeschooling that way (in a group with extracurriculars).
I always thought of it as parent / tutor + kid = almost all interactions.
Thanks.
We homeschooled. When we wanted to socialize our kids, we shoved them into the restroom and beat them up for their lunch money.
I kid, but there's a real point: So much of the socialization is bad.
More: Kids aren't going to be kids forever. Does socialization with a bunch of other kids prepare them for the adult society that they're going to go into?
As a parent, your view of socialization being "good" or "bad" is heavily distorted. I think of socialization as an activity, sometimes a skill, although I really don't think it's needed as we live in a mostly secluded society in the US, and verbal communication has been supplanted by electronic means.
This is my perspective too. A bunch of 11 year olds raising your 11 year old doesn't always result in preferable outcomes. I think the other part of it is that a lot of people have this sort of idea that homeschooling means sitting in your kid in the basement in front of their homework and never seeing the light of day. Obviously that's not accurate.
Well it should, yes, given that socialization is the result of shared social experiences.
Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences that create bonds with people (whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)
These are real social dynamics that actually exist in adult life, and I suspect people who are totally blindsided by them are maladapted
> Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences
It also teaches you to deal with bullies. That said, we had homeschooled kids in my Boy Scouts troop. They learned how to deal with bullies just fine.
Why would you need to learn to deal with bullies?
If you try that the modern world as an adult you get charged with aggravated assault, pick up a criminal record and then are weeded out from polite society.
Kids (and teachers) generally don't deal with bullies well.
It really just results in them continuing to being bullied, or reacting badly and getting blamed themselves.
> Kids (and teachers) generally don't deal with bullies well
Are there studies on whether bullying is higher in lightly supervised versus moderately supervised groups? Or mixed-age versus single-age groups?
Scouting is lightly-supervised mixed-age groups. If an older kid bullied a younger kid, that resulted in adults reading them the riot act. But if a younger kid bullied a younger kid, the two sort of wound up sorting it out until someone threw a punch or pissed off an older kid. (For being annoying.) That second dynamic was, to my memory, unique to mixed-age groups.
>(whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)
Watch it, you almost said "rescuer" there.
> But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
What's the reason?
I think we could teach them as well as the school does. And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.
“And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.”
Take it from someone who was homeschooled from pre-k through high school, you will absolutely not provide a better social environment. I was so unprepared to handle the social dynamics in casual, educational or professional that it took years and years of active work to put myself in a position where it wasn’t an absolute detriment to my success. I have no doubt you can educate your children well, it’s every other aspect of humanity that is typically missed out on and can lead to unintended consequences.
I had the opposite experience. I was home schooled from 2nd grade through high school, but I didn't just spend all my time alone with parents. My family was part of a home-school co-op, I played in the local youth symphony, and I had a job working at the local university when I was 16 and taking college classes there. I also have a large extended family.
I didn't really have much trouble adjusting to living on campus at college, and I've never had issues with interpersonal stuff at work or school.
Your anecdote is not universal; neither is mine.
Of my closest friends when I was in high school, the one with the best social skills had been home schooling since I met him when he was 10. However, he did participate in extracurricular activities at the local public school, like a computer club in middle school and then theater in high school. The only area he was really lagging at age 18 was in math, but that reversed a few years later and now he has a STEM PhD and has been teaching at a large state school for the past decade and a half.
I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.
I dunno. I think I could spin a narrative where public middle school dynamics (that is, bullied quite a bit) created issues for me that hampered my ability to succeed in social settings.
I don't really think that way in general, but I guess I'd just want to point out that the spectrum isn't "good socialization in public school" to "bad/no socialization in homeschooling".
Sounds like you had a hard time transitioning. Sorry for that.
I don't believe it's a magic pill by any means. But I've known many recently home schooled kids and they seem a lot more mature than their public school peers. So I think we have a decent shot at having similar results.
Seeming mature to an adult isn't the thing in question though, is it? Not feeling or appearing awkward when interacting on their own in their 20s is what is being criticized. The anecdotal evidence you present doesn't include home schooled children in their 20s as far as I can tell.
Homeschooled kids have much more flexible schedules which can allow them to do things in the community during the daytime that are not available to kids who have to go to school in-person full time.
This can include volunteer work or part time jobs working with the public and interacting with people of all ages.
Why do you think you being forced into a monoculture of only kids your own age would help your interaction with others when you're in your 20s? 25 year olds don't behave anything like teenagers.
It doesn’t but they seem on a trajectory for adulthood that appears just fine compared to to others.
It is weird how adults are looking at children and assessing their social abilities. You would need to ask the children’s peers what they think.
One could say this is where the free market of schooling comes into play. Does it make more economic sense for businesses to choose those with social skills learnt from home schooling, or ones who have not been home schooled? Definitely curious to see where this goes.
If only it was actually a free market. Republicans are actively kneecapping public education so they can pump money to the schools that are free to to discriminate and kick out underperforming kids
That's probably true in a lot of cases for K-5. But I don't think any two people could teach a child with the same robustness as a the ~15 teachers most kids have during middle school/junior high, let alone provide things like labs, workshops, extracurriculars, etc. With high school that gap goes from big to enormous.
This just assumes the median education for 6-12 is any good. Also, a lot of labs, workshops, and extracurriculars can be easily found elsewhere - a lot of these have groups specifically for homeschoolers.
> And more importantly, we can provide a better environment for them to mature socially.
Citation needed.
Every perspective I've heard personally - and mirrored in comments here as well - from the non parent side of things, is quite negative in terms of learning how to behave and socialize with your peers. To you the children might seem polite and servile, and you might see this as something positive - as you state in another comment - but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
>but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
Citation needed.
If you put your kids in homeschooling and provide no other outlet for socialization then sure, they'll be socially awkward.
My brother and I were homeschooled, but we were also heavily involved in our community. We were at the local park playing sports 3-4 times per week, we did various summer camps, we had a few other homeschool families that we'd setup playdates with. Our parents would sometimes joke that we barely ever home! And, unsurprisingly, we had no problems with socializing or making friends later in life.
Was it the same kind of socialization you get from going to public school? No, but I consider that a feature :)
One of the key issues in school is classroom size. A teacher with 30 kids is handicapped as a teacher compared to one with a smaller class.
Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.
I used to think this way, but some experiences made me realize it's not so cut and dry.
When you have a class size over 20, teachers are forced to be a lot more systematic, which can improve the effectiveness of their teaching. Good teachers make heavy use of social proof. When I tried to teach my kid at home, it was a struggle. But when the kid is around his peers in a classroom, and they are going along with the teacher, he naturally falls in line with no cajoling, etc.
If there were only 5 students, the likelihood he'll just go along with things is much lower.
Grade retention ('holding kids back') has additionally dropped significantly since the average HNer has gone to school. I remember going to school where one of my peers went to sixth grade with his brother two years older than him. But now, we give out social promotions.
That might've worked if we funded schools & gave students who fell behind significant interventions & 1x1 attention, but that's not what happened. One of my friends has a very bright and talented fifth grader in a class with multiple students who can barely read or write. Guess who gets the most attention from educators? Which group the teachers structure the class for?
> It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.
This is why it's useful to look up stats when we have them.
For example, homeschooled students do better on the ACT than public school kids.
https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info...
Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.
This is some fascinating insight. Do you think that the things being compared are [homeschooling] and [fighting grizzlies]?
I would say the interesting thing is the sudden increase over the last 5 years. Presumably, the number of Americans who think they can KO a grizzly bear is a lizardman constant situation in the surveys over time. But the number of people homeschooling is recently skyrocketing.
Given the subject of the thread and the comment I replied to: yes?
I suspect there is a lot of selection bias in that data. My hypothesis is that the homeschooled folks who take the ACT are more likely to do well on the ACT than the homeschooled folks who don't.
Isn't that true of public school kids who do/don't take the ACT as well?
My Title 1 school made the ACT available to all students for free (on one specific date). A lot of kids who were unprepared for the ACT took it because, why not?
We didn't have that at my school. Unless it's super widespread, it's probably not what's behind the different test results.
An acquaintance of mine fought (got mauled by) a grizzly bear a month ago. He went to the ICU (since released), but the bear got shot and died. It was a pyrric victory, but he did win the fight.
What a horrible story to share.
I didn't see it as horrible. I saw it as a story of human triumph. And good fortune.
That’s not a great example though, is it?
I’ve seen many kids, including my own older ones, who have gone through the school system and others who haven’t.
I’ve watched people on YouTube make all sorts of amazing things, and they make it look easy. Which leads to thoughts of “hey, that’s easy, I could do that”.
I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.
I was homeschooled and I got a fairly strong education.
What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.
For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.
> I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.
Any idea how many were affected terribly in school? I'm in touch with my high school classmates. Almost half of them blame the school experience to lifelong problems.
Everyone from my public high school class is now rich and happy. My anecdote is just as good as yours.
And just as good/bad as the top level comment, which is my point.
How so?
What works for one might not work for another one. Can't generalize.
We can actually. It's called theory of probability and statistics, which is probably "forgotten" by these amazing self-appointed homeschoolers. A few rare successes of homeschoolers doesn't mean this practice is good on average, and vice versa the rare failures of the public education system doesn't mean that it is bad on average.
Most times I look this up, I see stuff like "[t]he home-educated typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests".
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#Academic
Looking at the replies, I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores but social development and preparing kids for society outside the house. It definitely requires considerably more, active attention from parents. Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades and ensure that they're maintaining an active social life but I think the difficulty of nailing that as you go-your-own-way is apparent.
>I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores
>Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades
This reads as an inconsistency.
As for the social stuff - as I commented elsewhere, it's not hard to make a case that public school is bad for socialization as well. Which isn't to say that public school isn't irredeemable in that way, just that it's not like one or the other is an obviously correct choice.
This comment is so disingenuous. Few and rare?? Why would you frame it like this? Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:text=r...
https://chewv.org/college-preparation/college-admissions/?ut...
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/?utm_sourc...
If you've got the statistics to validate your point, show them. If not... pot, meet kettle.
Poor kids :( . Hope the damage won't be lasting for them, at least they did went to proper schools previously and have some basics taught.
I'll gladly stand up my 7 homeschooled kids next to any public school kids.
All tested above grade level on state mandatory testing throughout their schooling.
Two graduated early (some with college credits).
My adult children (4 sons, ages 19-25) have gainful employment, living on their own (2 own their own homes), and standing on their own. One is married (I got a grandkid!), all have friends, communities they're involved in, and are healthy (physically and mentally).
None take prescription meds nor struggle with anxiety or depression.
Poor public school kids... I hope they can find help for the damage they suffered. <grin>
Assuming you are Mormon, is home schooling sort of another form of virtue signaling Mormon families employ or is it more of a way to ensure your families don't get excluded? Like, did you really have a choice in the matter once you realized you either go full Mormon or leave the church entirely?
Mormons aren't the only people with large families. Ultra-conservative Jews, Muslims, and many Christians have large families. What I don't think I've ever seen is a couple who is non-religious or atheist and has a large family.
> 7 homeschooled kids
Wow that's a lot, how did you manage?
Only seven? :-)
(My wife and I have had 9.)
You didn’t mention how many went to college
Given they are sufficiently successful to be living on their own, married, and some with their own homes, whether they went to college is probably an inappropriate yardstick of success. I mean, be real. If a 25 year old is married and owns a home, but doesn't have a BSc are they a failure? What are we doing here.
we are discussing on HN. The population of commenters here is likely very different than the homeschooling population.
And yet there are many homeschooling parents in this discussion thread (including a single-income dad of 9 whose kids are homeschooled). But I'm quite aware that I'm the exception on HN.
Then everybody clapped.
Anecdotally, two factors at work here:
- Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.
- With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching.
It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it's comparatively much easier to pull your kids out and homeschool them.
This is very anecdotal. Here in the south, the "controversial, left-ish values" would be a breath of fresh air vs what is being taught here
> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass
This is no child left behind in action, which was implemented during W's term
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
^ This is the micromanagement that a ton of people claim to hate and get in their way on this site when folks are complaining about daily standups.
IMO, if you're worried about the quality of your kid's education then you'll either need to send them to a private or home school, which will stunt them socially because life isn't just one big private school or home, or encourage curiosity and learning at home to supplement their rote learning from school
Another nebulous but I think VERY observable factor would be the extent to which "parents are, and expected to be, involved in their kids school stuff."
Anecdotally, but I bet you see a lot of it, I can count on one, maybe two hands the number of times my parents went to anything at the school to see me do a thing. And for my kids, there's something just about every other week.
I'm not sure how your first thing much factors in? I haven't seen any data but I'd be VERY surprised if e.g. a survey of homeschoolers would cite to a lot of "making bad students pass" and "lefty indoctrination."
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
I'm not sure remote schooling during the pandemic is very representative of day to day teaching in school. At least that's the impression I got from my teacher friends back then.
The other factor is not removing the bottom _% of hugely disruptive and violent children from schools.
Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.
Name the left values; don't beat around the bush.
Observing remote education is not good visibility into pre-covid teaching.
I think we have a responsibility to have educated citizens.
> Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.
I'm thinking this is fairly new. When I was in school, if I got bad grades or got in trouble at school, I got in trouble at home too. My parents were absolutely not calling the teachers complaining about grades. When I had trouble learning multiplication facts, they sat me down with flash cards every night until I had learned them, they didn't blame the teacher. This was in the 1970s/80s. This seemed pretty normal based on what I remember. When/why did it change?
I think parents are trying to maximize the perceived value of their child at the expense of their real value. I also think various media (especially the internet) have lowered trust in primary/secondary education, leading to more parents feeling justified in "taking matters into their own hands". You kind of see that attitude in this thread (its not wholly unjustified).
One example is in high school I had an excellent literature class that also covered a lot of philosophy. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the various philosophies we studied were the philosophies that are often foundational for Marxism, atheism, and general left of center academia. Probably the best class I had in high school but I wish it had also covered things on both sides, or been more transparent that it was in fact biased.
"Both" sides? If you suggest Marxism is one side, what is the other? Also, it's hard to take such a vague comment at face value when you consider the long list of Marx's influences. For example, there are right and young Hegelians...
It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way. Very little of it has anything to do with the family of political ideologies despite sharing a similar name. The question of God's existence is also fundamental to the history of philosophy. It's not particularly shocking that a course might cover people like Lucretius, Bentham, or Russell.
Most philosophy surveys will also include some of the other sides, which you might not even recognize as such. Descartes and Aquinas are fixtures, and Heidegger (notoriously conservative and also a literal Nazi) often features in university level classes. The point isn't to indoctrinate you with any of these viewpoints, it's to teach you how to analyze their arguments and think for yourself.
> It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way
The complaint was that the alternative wasn't discussed.
Don't agree with this. Marx's Capital is filled with basic mathematical analyses. I don't agree with his labor theory of value, but I do think algebra is good.
I have had more teachers actively advocating voting for right wing parties than left wing parties. And once had someone in biology class tell me that he thinks that evolution and creation by god are equal and we should try to merge those theories. And I live in a very secular part of Europe.
But hey, both you and I are telling anecdotes. The only conclusion for me is that public school exposes you to people that do not think like you or your parents. Something, we are less and less exposed to. If that is good, anyone has to answer for themselves.
> pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values
Which values? I haven't gone to school in a long time.
I am very curious too, I’ve asked this to other friends who have mentioned the same thing and the only concrete answer I have got so far was teaching the theory of evolution and climate change.
Not a GP and I don't know if any of these qualifies as "left-ish" (which is very US specific IMHO), but as I understand, the education all over the western culture is destroyed by few really simple and really crazy (for me) ideas:
- Kids are never responsible for anything.
- Teachers are responsible for everything.
That's a parenting problem though, not an education problem, right?
Lots of examples, gender identity and requiring ethnic studies (focusing on white male privilege, settler/colonial, putting groups into binary oppressor/oppressed). Also issues with requiring those classes vs not.
I'm very curious about this as well, GP, please.
> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.
As someone who was in public education less than 10 years ago, the last part plainly untrue. In fact, several states will soon require displaying the 10 commandments in public school classrooms, which seems pretty “right-ish” to me.
Homeschooling is a symptom of the atomization of American society - affluent people are retreating into their bunkers in suburbia and withdrawing from civil society based on a shared psychosis regarding “critical race theory” and “wokeness”, neither of which are taught in public schools.
> In fact, several states will soon require displaying the 10 commandments in public school classrooms, which seems pretty “right-ish” to me.
That tells you way more about the (current) politics of the local government than it does about the politics of the median teacher. It might actually indicate the opposite - no one would go to the effort of mandating pride flags at the school I went to, seeing as they were already hung in every single classroom.
Do privilege walks count? Which seem to foster victim mentality?
> pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values
I wonder what sort of values they’re indoctrinating their kids with instead.
I expected this comment coming into the thread. I would just like to point out that there is a huge range of options between those two extremes!
If is entirely possible to teach up a child to be curious AND well rounded in the basics (see also concepts of Trivarium and Quadrivium, sorry can't link the references atm).
> there is a huge range of options between those two extremes!
Which two extremes would those be?
Presumably the extremes of left and right?
(Which are, of course, far more similar than people that identify with either extreme would ever admit).
yeah, it would be crazy if people were allowed to raise their own children with their own values. we can’t have that.
Did anyone argue that you are not allowed to teach your kids your own values? It seems to me, the question is more: do you want to raise your kids without ever exposing them to values that are not your own? Opinion Bubbles have been increasing for a long time, do we really want to grow them even more? Social media is full of people left and right that seem to have no idea about the opinions and realities at the other end of the spectrum.
Is this not possible while exposing children to a variety of view points from different sources or does it require that children are not exposed to certain perspectives at all?
The original comment makes a very bold claim of "indoctrination" of an entirely undefined set of values.
There has been no evidence that exposing children to this (undefined and buzzwordy) set of values means that they can't be raised according to other values.
I find this idea pretty wild to encounter on HN which is generally focused on open source and widely available information so that people can educate themselves is suddenly gone in a puff of smoke and some buzzwords when talking about educating the most curious minds in the world.
Define the values. Cite sources that this is "indoctrination" and not simply exposing viewpoints. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion.
Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning. I don’t think we’re talking about remote ranch situations where you either do online school or have to send them to boarding school.
So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
We’ve homeschooled all our kids up to 8th grade. Our oldest is now a sophomore at the public high school but will start attending community college next year, paid for by the school district.
Most of the adults you see at the various group things are stay-at-home moms. Most. Some stay-at-home dads. Some of the moms have part-time jobs. I don’t recall any dads with part-time jobs. But many dads are present while also working full-time. You get into a rhythm, have a schedule, etc. and you can work it out. My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
Wait... you homeschool your kids and yet you write "...and [they] are jealous that she does both." No, they are ENVIOUS: one envies what they don't have and are jealous of what they have.
Sorry, couldn't let that one slide! :-)
> My wife is fairly unusual in that she runs her own full-time business. Many moms don’t like her, presumably because they gave up their careers to do this and are jealous that she does both.
FWIW, my experience is that the dynamic at play in these situations is that women who run their own businesses or otherwise have high-powered careers tend to have a constellation of personality traits that is significantly shifted vs. those of stay at home moms, plus their daily lives are very different, so they don't really fit in. Saying that without value judgement, just an observation.
Interesting point. I know of one home-schooling family—and the wife quit her career to homeschool.
Is this family well off financially? Of course they are. I suspect the data on homeschoolers is going to reflect a generally affluent slant.
Anecdotally, I know of one child who was homeschooled recently. The mother is a single mother, of modest middle-class means. There was a homeschooling group nearby with a few volunteer mothers handling most of the logistics and teaching. This particular mother did not have to give up her job. It does stretch the definition of "homeschooling" a bit when it's a neighbor teaching in a neighbor's home, but they made it work.
Yes, it (effectively) requires a parent to stay home, at least 90% of the time.
But that has happened for a long time, at a rate high enough that you wouldn't need to see resignations to increase homeschooling.
It only requires that one parent has enough free hours to assign coursework. They don't have to exit the workforce, and don't necessarily need to directly supervise learning (but of course some of this is necessary for K-5).
I think a lot of how homeschooling can work, along with much of median/lower household income life in general, is misunderstood.
Source: Was homeschooled by a mom who worked.
> Lemme just question how home schooling is at all possible without one parent (statically more likely to be a woman) staying home to supervise the learning.
There are at least two good answers to this:
1. The first is a via a home-schooling collective. With as few as 5 families, one can easily do a once-per-week rotation of home schooling responsibilities. Also note that the formal education part of this can be done fairly comfortably in 4 hours (even down to 2 hours with 1-1 instruction). As such, all that is needed is a 4-day a week job, or a job with a flex schedule who can do work on the weekend. I know one family that does something like this.
2. The second is to have a tutor do the instruction. For folks who are high earners, paying a tutor who can come in for 2-3 hours a day costs about the same as a mid-tier private school. Child care would still need to be covered, but that’s usually cheaper than a tutor.
So it’s doable, but either time or money will need to be sacrificed. I don’t think that’s a surprise.
That said, below are some things about home schooling that I’ve learned over the years from people who have done it:
- When done well, it’s probably close to an ideal education. When done poorly, it can mess up the kid, and many of these kids are very vocal about how bad it can be. Obviously there will be a whole range of outcomes between these extremes. Just be aware that it’s not necessarily a panacea, and it’s not necessarily an ideological cesspit.
- There is a ton of support for home schoolers in some communities, especially for socialization and specialization. Many people do not realize this.
- That said, some (perhaps many) home school parents are just ideological extremists — extreme beliefs, extreme (sometimes illegal) lifestyles, etc.
- A good litmus test of where a home school parent is on the thoughtful-extremist continuum is to ask them why they homeschool their kids. The thoughtful parents can rattle off dozens of learning opportunities that their kids have had that don’t exist or barely exist at normal schools. The less of these types of specifics they talk about, the more likely they are to have ideological reasons that they may or may not openly discuss.
- For folks who want a good learning environment for their kid, I strongly recommend a good Montessori school. I emphasize “good”, because some of them stray far from the Montessori ideals. This just requires a small amount of research and some observation. All that said, a good Montessori school almost always sets up a kid to be a solid person and life-long learner. Note that some kids absolutely hate the Montessori style, and you will know this in about a day or two. I will go out on a limb and say most of these kids will need special attention in home school contexts as well (imho).
> So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
I don’t think so.
Most of the people I know who home school are already stay at home parents (mostly mothers, but one dad), or they have plenty of disposable income to throw at the problem via tutors and home school support services.
I will also say that some parents absolutely punt on the education part, and they can do their part (often negligently) while doing a full time work-from-home job — think handing out some work sheets and pointing their kid(s) to an online learning environment with very little scaffolding. There are some kids who respond well to this, but most don’t.
Homeschooling is often (not always) correlated to sect participation, isolationism and "traditionalism". Meaning husband is likely forces wife to never work and socialize, while taking care of kids and all home cleaning and maintenance. This control mania is likely what causes homeschooling too, because it is obvious that one person can't teach 10-16 years worth of advanced studies, so the real motivation is to isolate his family and keep them to the house and sect congregation building. Rudimentary slavery basically.
"Meaning husband is likely forces wife to never work and socialize, while taking care of kids and all home cleaning and maintenance"
"so the real motivation is to isolate his family"
Are you drunk ?
Why do you assume wives just want to work and many wouldn't jump at the chance to be able to stay home with their children, and also socialize with other friends outside of some office job environment?
that’s a great fantasy but when you consider, statistically, how many marriages end in divorce - that’s a foolish plan. EVERYONE thinks their marriage is different or special.
Maybe working part time is OK, you at least have some job history. But no work history for 10+ years? Great ways to put all your eggs into 1 basket and potentially end up a poor single mom. And i say this as a husband and father.
Optionality has costs. If you live your life like it's going to go astray, then you miss out on a lot of the upside if it doesn't go astray (such as by being a stay at home mom, if that's what you actually want to do). The statistic that 50% of marriages end in divorce is often bandied about, but it also means that 50% don't. Which means that going all-in on your marriage is a completely reasonable thing to do.
As somebody that suffered through public school as a gifted kid, I wish I had been homeschooled. Almost everything positive that happened in my education was because of family, not due to the school. School was hell on earth for me, and I imagine it's the same for most other "neurodivergent" kids who are high IQ. Given what I know from my own kid, there's no surprise to me why more people are opting to home school. For my daughter we kept her in public school because the district we moved to had magnet programs, and that's what she wanted so she could be with her friends from the neighborhood, but not every school district cares about gifted kids and will happily put a child with a 150 IQ in the same room with a child trying to read 6-8 grade levels above their peers with an 80 IQ child who has a violence problem and consider that an acceptable outcome as long as nobody calls the police.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Generation_Joshua
When I recently switched jobs, one of my requirements was I had to remain remote, for at least the next few years, so I could remain at home and help with my children's education. I don't think there is enough money in the world to convince me to change back to public education. Aside from the benefits everyone mentions like a much better education, having so much extra time with my children is a priceless gift that I wish we as a society could give everyone.
Also its given me the chance to learn things that I missed during my primary and secondary educations. Going through each proof in Euclid's Elements again has been a lot of fun, and its been long enough that I have forgotten most of them, so the thrill of discovery is real for me too.
If you can make it work, you should make it work, even if that means moving to a lower CoL area, there are a lot of small towns in the US that have excellent amenities, and are great places to raise a family.
How do you make up for the resulting drop in interaction with other kids? I had a boss who did this with his children as well - it seemed as though his solution was to use PE credits to have his kids attend sports with other kids.
My kids are part of a co-op where they meet once a week and in this co-op they share some elements of their curriculum with everyone else, they spend one day going over the weeks assignments along with 8-10 classmates, and then during the week they are at home doing their work. As they have aged their school work now has a lot of collaborative elements, so my oldest is actually meeting with kids from his co-op almost daily to go over group projects and assignments.
Additionally they have a lot of extra curricular activities they participate in ( sports, music, church youth group), that also gives them a lot of socialization time with others.
Sounds like a wonderful setup. Have the kids ever shown a desire for public school? My brother is homeschooling his kids to start, but the oldest just asked to start going to public, so he sent her.
No, my wife and I discussed putting them into traditional school as they got older, but now that they are older, they have all strongly requested to remain in their homeschool co-op. I think the biggest reason is they have a good group of friends that they connect with, and have been their class mates for multiple years. So there is a strong desire to continue in the program with people they know.
Group home schooling in a shared building is becoming a huge new trend in home schooling, far more resource and time efficient and pools the resources of the parents and allows the group to hire someone to do the group homeschooling.
This sounds like a private school (probably with less oversight/regulation). What are the key differences?
Control over what happens there
I really enjoyed teaching my kids during covid, and they got a bug jump ahead compared to the kids who just played video games while the schools were closed. We only did 3-4 hours a day but it was fun, and I could really see the changes.
I don't mind the idea of teaching 10 kids, my way, and in and environment I can control. The thought of teaching 35 kids, mired in bureaucracy, is a nightmare.
Nice to see Reason posted here.
NY state just signed a bill to include ChatGPT in their learning and planning. Previously there were deals to bring in Google hardware for students.
Of course people are fleeing public schooling when we’re selling the kids to big tech for laptops and services that require network connection to write a word document, enable cheating, and their data sold for profit without consent.
People might be fleeing public schooling because lawmakers are dictating what happens in the classroom. There are lots of good teachers who struggle with the resources given to them and the constraints imposed on them.
At home, parents can be flexible. They can let their kids use AI when appropriate or discourage its use. They don't have to wait for legislators to get involved. If there is a great math book, parents can just buy it instead of waiting for some committee to evaluate it.
Fascists are really showing up for this post. I wonder why...
At the end of the day, it's a form of school-choice where parents decide what's best for their kids which I strongly support.
> When asked if they are satisfied with their children's education, public school parents consistently rank last after parents who choose private schools, homeschooling, and charter schools. Importantly, among all parents of school-age children, homeschooling enjoys a 70 percent favorability rating.
This is not surprising: homeschoolers are extremely confident in their own teaching abilities and extremely cynical about the abilities of others.
> Closures also gave parents a chance to experience public schools' competence with remote learning, and many were unimpressed. They have also been unhappy with the poor quality and often politicized lessons taught to their children that infuriatingly blend declining learning outcomes with indoctrination.
Why would a parent compare a novel learning environment to the pre-covid experience? Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home - do they use the internet at all?
> Why would a parent think that their kid will never encounter political topics if they stay at home
They probably imagine they'll never encounter political topics from a perspective of which said parents do not approve. And they're probably not wrong to believe that.
Yes, but then their kid will become an adult and feel like they were kept in a snow globe. Even if the parents are right, its a foolish strategy!
I don't feel better prepared to teach at home than someone who actually went to college for the various topics covered in high school. How can I know all I need to teach about math, chemistry, english, physics, etc, etc, etc when I already have to learn so much for my own work? I think parents that think they can do a better job are delusional.
Maybe the school _environment_ that a child has access isn't great, right? But I don't think that says anything about teachers.
At school, one teacher lectures to maybe 30 students. If all they did was give individual attention student by student, each would get maybe 10 minutes a day.
The first 10 minutes of your home-school day you've beat that statistic. After two or three hours, you're up to a month of class time.
Of course they don't do that; they just lecture. Which is something you can get online (Khan Academy).
It's all about the homework and tutoring, baby.
All you have to do is learn along with your home student, and validate their learning experience. Helps if you catch on quicker, but not even necessary.
In California, a teacher without a chemistry degree can teach high school chemistry after passing the CSET Chemistry subtest. This requires less depth of knowledge than AP Chemistry.
You do not need to know anything about the subject to teach high school subjects. You need to know stuff about teaching.
Homeschooling is becoming an epidemic and a major reason is --- SPORTS. From my experience, it is growing for all the wrong reasons and I have not come across ONE family doing it properly and in a matter I would consider better for the kid.
I have a 15yo son who plays sports and for the past 5 years, homeschooling has been a way to "red-shirt" kids - hold them back a year or two then re-entering them into public schools into grades behind their age. Literally purposely holding back their kids so they can be older as freshman.
A major problem with boys because of puberty, size etc around this age. The difference between a 14yo and a 16yo, or 16/18yo can be quite large at times. My son had a freshman on his team last year that could drive and had a mustache playing vs these tiny incoming freshman, it was so comical. He was 16 1/2 as a freshman. And the parents were on the sideline acting like their kid was the next coming of Aaron Judge. It REALLY hurts the rest of us playing the rules and taking education seriously when our kids are trying to make a team.
I've known several of these parents and they all are the same. They haphazardly put them into the bare min online courses, still go to work all day and stick them in front of computers to expect them to self teach for a few years. The moms would be stay-home types that didn't seem much educated themselves. The kids are spoiled entitled types who think they are top athletes already and would jokingly be calling my son at 11a telling him they are done already for the day and headed to the gym and playing Fortnite.
Now this is just MY circle, I am not saying there aren't very serious and capable parents out there really homeschooling and giving their kids a better education than public school, but I haven't met any in maybe roughly 10 I know. Most of them seemed to also be MAGA types poo-pooing public education and how they are brainwashing kids. It is really despicable that this is most likely happening ALL across America.
Education and manipulation aside, I would also think this isn't good the kids mental and social health as well. They already are on devices doom-scrolling enough nowadays, do we really want them hermits too now?
I applaud anyone putting in huge effort to home school a kid properly and with true care and teaching. But the image of them at a desk being taught by a real smart/educated parent following a true curriculum all day and on a schedule I imagine is ultra rare. And we are going to pay a price for this in the long run. Or not, GPT will just help them along to properly write that email for them when they are adults in a corporate world.
Buddy of mine put it really well:
"I got to spend time with my kids when they still wanted to spend time with me. Now as teenagers in no longer cool, but that's ok. I got my time with them and that makes me happy"
Well here is what the result was of public school for my 3 kids:
1 kid: one year behind but doing very well
1 kid: two years behind and not doing so well (in fact can't continue to academia unless things change drastically, in other words, will lose at least 1-2 more years if she does go to academia)
1 kid: two years behind and doing pretty well
This is the result of 9-11 years of public schooling. I feel like all 3 have very suboptimal outcomes, including the one doing very well.
I must say I am also getting very irritated by the "indoctrination". That was fine, if occasionally crazy, during the COVID years when the indoctrination was pretty progressive. Sometimes batshit insane, but let's say "well intentioned". Pro-climate claims ... that were bullshit, but at least pro-climate and generally positive and pro-humanity. Now one of their teachers is openly racist (in a class with 33% immigrants), and even though most keep it more subtle than him, this is a general trend.
So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
Keep them going to public school and give up?
I know a teacher who said one of their colleagues adamantly believes the moon landing was faked.
>So if someone can please suggest what is the suggestion here? Keep working with public school? To be honest, the damage was done by their previous public school where the situation deteriorated to the point I had a fight with the principal, and their current school (since 1.5 years) is actually undoing part of the damage done there.
Look up school ratings in your area and move is by far your best bet if you wish to continue public school. There is also the difficult truth that maybe your kids are the problem, but again school shopping could help with that depending on what programs they have.
> Recent estimates put the total homeschooling population at about 6 percent of students across the United States, compared to about 3 percent pre-pandemic.
One thing that concerns me about many pro-homeschooling comments is a kind of tear-down-the-schools attitude, as if schools were hopeless and irredeemable, despite the fact they're still educating 94% of students even at today's elevated homeschooling rate. Of course there are problems with schools, but on the other hand there are countless success stories, or at least countless non-failure stories, and educational outcomes tend to depend crucially on local factors, the location of the school and its socioeconomic environment.
I suspect that the vast majority of parents have neither the desire nor the capability to homeschool their kids. I certainly can't imagine my own parents doing it. In a sense, homeschooling is a luxury of the few. The absolute numbers can increase, but I don't think homeschooling can scale to the entire population. So whatever problems may exist in the schools, we have to confront and solve them, not just abandon them and pretend homeschooling is a societal solution. You might claim that hundreds of years ago, everyone was homeschooled, but I don't want to turn back the societal clock hundreds of years.
Another concern I have is the religious and/or political motivation of many homeschoolers. If homeschooling were just about educational outcomes for children, then we shouldn't expect homeschoolers to be disproportionately conservative in religious and/or political beliefs, yet my impression is that they are. It's certainly suspicious to me. And though I've had no involvement with K-12 education since I was in school myself, I've had a lot of involvement in higher education, first as an undergrad, then as a PhD student and lecturer. Frankly, the horror stories and conspiracy theories about left-wing indoctrination at universities are ridiculous and not based on fact or experience. So I'm quite skeptical of similar claims about K-12, especially since I saw none of that in my own childhood. (I recall being forced to say the Pledge of Allegiance every day, for all the good that did.) There's a type of person who's set off if you say "Happy Holidays" instead of "Merry Christmas" and consider that to be an act of war against them. There are still a lot of parents in the United States who reject biological evolution and would prefer that it not be taught in schools at all, or at least to be taught as "controversial."
I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children. There is no law or social imperative that children must be taught a secular view point. At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently. Honestly, I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion. It has become a belief system of it's own, and I for one fear the coming crusades :)
I say live and let live, parents should be free to teach their kids whatever belief system they want without political interference. Much to the dismay of the left (and I say this, being a left leaning moderate... I know, bad word today), kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children, full stop. The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism, is only putting fuel to the fire in this surge in global fascism. At the risk of sounding too kumbaya'ish, we all just need to accept each other and recognize the real enemies to society is a global loss of empathy and the rise of transactionalism. Now that is something I could really get behind, forced empathy courses! :)
> I hear your viewpoint, but parents do have a right to teach their religious beliefs to their children.
I didn't claim that they don't have a right. I just claimed to be skeptical of the idea that the primary motivation for homeschooling was educational outcomes rather than ideological outcomes.
> At the end of the day, there are over 7 billion people in the world, it's okay if some of them believe differently.
If only they believed differently. ;-) It's no coincidence that children tend to adopt the same beliefs as their parents, no matter the country or region.
> I am more concerned that in the last 20 years we've progressed to the point where secularism has for some become as militantly evangelized as any religion.
The last 20 years? The First Amendment of the US Constitution begins, "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion". The principle of separation of church and state is more than 200 years old.
> kids are not the communities children, they are their parents children
I don't know what label you'd want to put on me, but I would say that kids do not belong to anyone. I find the notion of ownership to be noxious, practically slavery. We have a responsibility to take care of those who cannot take care of themselves (yet), but that doesn't mean children are simply the personal property and playthings of the parents. I think it's a disservice to a child to place them in a bubble and shield them from anything the parents don't happen to like.
> The shift towards enforced collectivism, away from individualism
"they are their parents children" is not individualism, or certainly not individualism from the child's perspective.
Morover, from what I've seen and heard from homeschoolers themselves, they do tend to form, or indeed come from, specific communitites, and are not simply "lone wolf" homeschooling parents.
Homeschool is great for parents who've turned against reality. You don't have to compete with facts. You can shape the kids reality according to your own delusions.
You might actually be referring to yourself. Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:text=r...
https://chewv.org/college-preparation/college-admissions/?ut...
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/?utm_sourc...
Timmy’s job will be done by AI when he grows up, but at least he’ll have fun a social skills
homeschooled kids are literally competing against kids from other countries that are being schooled on calculus, geometry, statistics, algebra with practical chemistry, physics and biology lessons. This is not going to end well 15 yrs down the line
Lots of colleges offer laboratory science classes for homeschooled children. AOPS wipes the floor with any math education you’d get at a public school. Most US national laboratories have on-site programs for school-aged kids and homeschoolers have equal standing for attending.
Anyone who takes it seriously gives up nothing.
This is how a significant portion of the population gets radicalized by their parents. It needs to be shut down.
100%. The school and the Internet are the two places children can encounter opinions different from their parents’ for the first time. With an increase in homeschooling and recent pushes to ban social media for children, it’s clear that critical thinking is going to suffer most. I still have not met someone who was homeschooled who was remotely thankful for it.
Honestly, support for these policies that benefit, more than anyone else, abusive parents, makes me suspicious of people’s motives.
One could also say banning homeschooling is how a significant portion of the population gets indoctrinated by the state.
All kids are indoctrinated. As parents do you want to have control of that or not?
With that attitude you might as well just tell parents that they shouldn't participate in society!
I think the point is that part of having a functioning society (civic life, engagement, tolerance of others) is having people mix together. School is one of the prime places where that happens.
If you allow a lot of people to pull away from that "forced" engagement with others then you start to stress a lot of societal bonds.
You're right. It's _one_ of the prime places.
I don't know a single homeschooler that sits at home all day long. They work in family businesses, participate in bands, sports, and co-ops. Many belong to churches where families come from all different strata: our church has surgeons, line cooks, programmers, self-employed handymen, disabled vets. They interact with everyone—including kids. They do things like "kid markets" where they have a business. They watch their parents learn how the house works and how to manage finances.
There is no forced engagement—in fact the peer pressure is often completely gone. They are in an environment (their family) where they are much freer to be themselves.
> I don't know a single homeschooler that sits at home all day long.
Well, you wouldn't, would you?
Sorry, not to detract from your other points, but I thought it was funny.
the purpose of education is largely opposite of indocrination (plus few other things). if your kid is being educated is such an environment you should move (or pay for private education).
I get where you're coming from but I think your statement is a bit naive.
Education systems as we know them today are absolutely about indoctrination in so many ways. Capitalism, love of country, views on family units, beauty and aaesthetics, what has cultural value and what does not etc etc. Not to mention many school systems just straight up having classes on religion, allowing armed forces into schools to recruit and the like.
Whether you're worried about left wing or right wing indoctrination, it still holds true. All kids are being indoctrinated every time they go to school same as every time they watch TV.
Exactly. Which history lessons get taught, which books get assigned as reading, which clubs are available, etc. Even if they are taught to be critical of the assignments they get, if the selection is limited enough, kids will not have the breadth of knowledge to even see the alternatives.
I pay a lot of money for my 12-year to not be in the system you are describing and am grateful I can provide this for her more than I am grateful for just about anything else
It's also how some of the population escapes getting broken by a one-size-fits-all education system. People need options.
Fantastic.
LLM's have revolutionized the way people learn and utilize what they have learned. The future is 8 year old material science lads doing chemistry in their step-mother's RV
You might be surprised. The studies say it's a primarily negative impact, especially in math and college attendance.
https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/the-test-score...
More likely the future is a bunch of children not knowing jack shit and suffering other abuse.
I've had to re-learn math skills long forgotten to help my kids with their school work. It's been an interesting experience.
The expectations for home schooling are different and are, in some ways, aimed more towards reality. My son finishes the bulk of his work in an hour most days and then has time for 2 instruments, learning C++, Rust, and Python, community/church participation and more.
is "time for 2 instruments, learning C++, Rust, and Python" not schooling ?
He's still learning. Driven by what he loves. And this is on top of the "standard" stuff.