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Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

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Re: Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

#61

Post by kennywinker »

actfrench wrote: post #41
kennywinker wrote: post #12

In my experience, both direct and indirect, homeschooling has the effect of concentrating a parent’s influence on their children’s lives / brain development / psychology, etc. Take that, and think about it, before you start. If you have unexamined issues like anger problems, fixations, avoidances, fears - those will have an impact on your child, and a bigger impact if you homeschool your child - purely on the basis o…

I think that in general parents concentrating brainpower on their kids would be a good thing ! And there are few things more enriching for your child (and their school or homeschool community) then getting involved in their education. A lot of research supports that parent involvement in education makes a bigger impact in a child’s education and the health of their school then any other factor. https://www.modulo.app…

> And there are few things more enriching for your child then getting involved in their education

That’s a pleasing statement that seems true, but ignores the millions of ways that parents can be a bad influence. Over pressuring, taking away agency, just being bad study partners, biasing data as it arrives, etc etc etc.

Everyone wants to believe they will be a good parent. But everyone will fuck it up in some way. One of the *good* things about traditional schooling is exposure to a lot of different influences. Bad and good. The bad teaches you to value the good, the good teaches you all the different ways that you can learn.

Re: Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

#62

Post by actfrench »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #48
hprotagonist wrote: post #14

What stops me is that the socialization and peer-group relationship skills that are obtained rapidly in a public school context are not replicatable at home. Neither are the skills learned in dealing with non-family adults, independence of task skills away from home, and much else besides in that vein. I would rather -- and do -- support the public school system in my (medium sized) city.

I personally have never found the "socialization" argument persuasive. Public school is, in fact, a highly artificial and non-representative environment. You have a group of kids, all within 12 months of the same age, and an authority figure to boss them around. As far as I know, that kind of "society" is not replicated anywhere , with the possible exception of military boot camp. Real societies have a mixture of peo…

Exactly this. Better have custom socialization, custom academics and custom childcare

Re: Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

#63

Post by verisimilidude »

Turing_Machine wrote: post #58
dyingkneepad wrote: post #30

Socialization. Going to school is not only about absorbing academical knowledge. It's about interacting with a broader group of people, learning how to behave, how to avoid common problems, etc. I would not be able to provide this to my kids. On top of that, the language we speak at home is not the language used by the school, or the rest of the country. There are a million problems that come with this: they would fo…

> It's about interacting with a broader group of people A cohort within 12 months in age, typically from the same neighborhood, is not a "broader group of people".

It's much broader than none.

Re: Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

#64

Post by gnicholas »

na85 wrote: post #36
hprotagonist wrote: post #14

What stops me is that the socialization and peer-group relationship skills that are obtained rapidly in a public school context are not replicatable at home. Neither are the skills learned in dealing with non-family adults, independence of task skills away from home, and much else besides in that vein. I would rather -- and do -- support the public school system in my (medium sized) city.

I was a camp counselor for many years in my teens and into my twenties. We could always-- always --tell which kids were the homeschooled kids.

Whatever selection biases there may have been in the past, homeschooling is becoming much more popular now. COVID and remote school pulled back the curtain on the type and amount of learning that is happening in public schools, and parents of all types are opting out of the system.

What we are seeing now is a seismic shift that will result in a much more mainstream population of homeschooled kids. I doubt it will be as easy to tell which kids were homeschooled in a decade.

Re: Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

#65

Post by swatcoder »

actfrench wrote: post #59
pawelmurias wrote: post #50

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I know a lot of people that are super heavily influenced by traumas inflicted by their parents. Homeschooling someone is a lot different then your average lifestyle (that possibly wasn't that different between the adopted families)

Are they less so traumatized by their parents when they go to school ?

Sure.

Along with respite, school gave me access to countless alternatives perspectives, influences, and people that would become part of my coping strategies.

I’m absolutely certain that home schooling is great for certain parents and certain children, but some kids are better off not being around their parents quite so much.

Re: Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

#66

Post by judah »

I was homeschooled and I credit much of my success in life to it. It taught me to think logically, taught me to honor my parents, taught me the value of tradition, morality, spirituality. It taught me the value of hard work, of loyalty, of kindness. It kept me out of vices that many of my public-schooled friends and peers got pulled into.

In my experience, homeschooling can create well-rounded, upright people at a ratio above traditional schooling. It insulates kids from many of the extreme elements and moores of society. Homeschooling is an excellent tool to pass on values from one generation to the next.

Lack of socialization is indeed a problem. Homeschooling parents need to make a big effort to get their kids in homeschooling groups and co-ops, youth sports, etc.

I have three kids myself now, but we send our them to private school rather than homeschool. What stops us from homeschooling is, my wife didn't feel like she had the skills to homeschool. She's not a teacher and feels she doesn't have the patience for it.

Re: Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

#67

Post by Turing_Machine »

verisimilidude wrote: post #63
Turing_Machine wrote: post #58

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's about interacting with a broader group of people A cohort within 12 months in age, typically from the same neighborhood, is not a "broader group of people".

It's much broader than none.

Because home schooled children never see anyone else at all?

I think you'll find that is not actually the case.

Also, I would argue that the distorted "society" produced by public schools is more harmful than beneficial.

Re: Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

#68

Post by actfrench »

sbuttgereit wrote: post #55

Well, it's available resources about building and delivering an effective curricula across subjects and time. I have found a number of homeschooling resources, but the best organized efforts tend to be from religious perspectives (not surprising). We're not religious. My being an atheist and my wife being best described as irreligious (doesn't identify with a religion and puts approximately zero thought into the ques…

I actually think I may have a potential solution for you on this one. It was clear to me when I started that sifting through religious curriculum to find secular stuff and making sure it was accurate and mastery-based was very hard and time-consuming for parehts.

Over the past three years, I’ve poured over thousands of resources in 50 different subjects to help families learn at home with kids. From these, I selected the best resources that were secular, accurate and mastery-based. I’ve also conducted dozens of intake interviews with parents helping them choose the best digital app, workbook, or nature-based curriculum for learning at home, that their child would love and fit their family’s needs. With our curriculum planner, you can answer a few questions about your child’s interests and your preferences around screen time, budget, etc and it will recommend core curriculum, math and literacy tools to support your child’s education

I’ve been iterating on it and find most people find it to be a helpful starting place

https://modulolearning.typeform.com/to/VBJmkLTu

Re: Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

#69

Post by somethoughts »

I'd welcome more tools to enable home after-schooling and home summer schooling.

A lot of the after school/summer school in person offerings are pretty expensive and usually pretty sports centric.

Full home schooling I feel could easily burn out even the most hard working parent - as there's little time for getting groceries, etc. done. And lack of socialization in the childs cohort is an issue.

I think more online tools for prepping for science fairs and other academic competitions would be great.

More tools like Khan academy would be great - I'd love it if there were resources that were able to introduce real biology, chemistry, physics prior to high school.

Re: Ask HN: If you’ve considered homeschooling, what’s stopping you?

#70

Post by gnicholas »

Glad to see people building in this space! One thing that would make us more likely to take the leap is a popular online community where 'everyone' goes to organize in-person events and meet kids with similar interests. I think there are enough similar homeschooling-curious families where I live (Silicon Valley), but I just don't know enough of them. If I knew 3x as many interested families, there's a good chance I'd have given homeschooling a try.

It would also be great to have some knowledge base-style articles about how to navigate the bureaucracy, how to get whatever funding is available, etc. I know this varies by jurisdiction, but presumably this could be crowdsourced and validated for many areas.

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