When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion • Hacker News Board

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#331

Post by PeterisP » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 3:07 PM UTC

ramraj07 wrote: post #165

PeterisP wrote: post #121

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Well, environmental components (such as the style of upbringing e.g. 'mix of freedom and strictness', and simply socioeconomic status, which affects quite a lot) are also quite heritable and shared between siblings, so we'd expect their intelligence to be even more correlated. However, intelligence is hereditary for the most part compared to that shared environment - for example, adoption studies show that the IQ sco…

Everyone seems to be quoting a lot but in the end it seems to converge to a handful (at least, I hope) studies with adopted children. I'll try to find the references before making judgements. Until then, whether this is really useful or not, I want to mention that time and again my experience in academia is that topics like these where we really depend on the judgement of the investigators a lot need to be carefully…

In addition to adoption studies, a lot of analysis of heredity can be (and has been) done in twin studies, comparing and contrasting the variation between twins and "ordinary" siblings; and fraternal vs identical twins.

You're right in that there is a limited number of studies, in part because you're looking at small populations and you don't get that many new adoption or twin cases each year. However, in that regard it's worth looking at equivalent studies worldwide who each have tested their local adopted or twin children; as far as I understand, these studies in different countries generally confirm the same or similar results, but I have not personally gone in detail to verify that.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#332

Post by jjk166 » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 3:16 PM UTC

afthonos wrote: post #227

absolutelyrad wrote: post #169

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 1. School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule. NO ITS NOT! This is a lie. There were reports in 1960's when the congress asked for an experiment to different ways of teaching. The children taught in a 1 to 1 way performed enormously better c…

You are not making a counterargument. The operating word is “masses”. 1-on-1 doesn’t scale. The political reality may be that support for schooling would crater if the report were widely known, but the alternative isn’t realistically “modern schools” vs. “1-on-1 tutoring”, but rather “modern schools” vs. “nothing”, or, optimistically, “modern schools” vs. “something not yet invented”.

Put 30 kids in front of a teacher for 8 hours - that's about 15 minutes of instructor attention per kid per day on average. If we assume that one on one sessions need to last 8 hours, then yeah the system doesn't scale; but more realistically the kid's educational needs could be met in a fraction of the time. One person can tutor dozens of kids a week if they do it full time, but even better you can tutor without doing it full time. Full time teachers are a limited resource and if yours isn't great at some or all of the job, you just have to suffer the consequences; but there is a massive pool of people who are capable of teaching a kid something, and the harm of a mediocre tutor is minimal and easily overcome.

One on one tutoring is already extremely widely employed, and plenty of platforms have popped up to help it effectively scale. Pretty much the only people who don't use it are those who can't afford it, a problem regular schooling would also face if not publicly paid for. It takes very little imagination to picture a system where people get vouchers to spend on tutoring services and a simple method for large numbers of people to qualify as tutors eligible to accept these vouchers.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#333

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 3:17 PM UTC

stavros wrote: post #262

krageon wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Discourse is so polarized, that nobody can say A large part of it is signaling through terminology. If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one. There are definitely people that are able to discuss certain social trends becoming a problem without using dogmatic terminology, which is where the conversation becom…

> If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one. So you can't say "cancel culture has gone too far" without signaling you're right-wing? I'm not up to speed with the exact politics, but I've heard the term in non-right wing contexts. Seems to me like that would make it impossible to talk about things, which is what…

Am I the only person who found it ironic and meta that, in a thread about canceling people based on certain words and phrases, OP kind of tried to "cancel" your argument based on your use of the phrase "cancel culture". We are deep into the recursion now.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#334

Post by StavrosK » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 3:20 PM UTC

ryandrake wrote: post #333

stavros wrote: post #262

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you use terms such as "cancel culture" and "liberals", it's pretty clear you're either a right-wing US citizen or someone who wishes they were one. So you can't say "cancel culture has gone too far" without signaling you're right-wing? I'm not up to speed with the exact politics, but I've heard the term in non-right wing contexts. Seems to me like that would make it impossible to talk about things, which is what…

Am I the only person who found it ironic and meta that, in a thread about canceling people based on certain words and phrases, OP kind of tried to "cancel" your argument based on your use of the phrase "cancel culture". We are deep into the recursion now.

Well that's kind of the issue, right? There are some things you can't talk about because if you want to talk about them, it means you're a racist that just wants to legitimize racism.

Judging by the number of downvotes on a comment about this very thing, I'm not optimistic.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#335

Post by ryandrake » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 3:30 PM UTC

hellisothers wrote: post #136

somethoughts wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think a safer approach would be "home after schooling" or to follow this new terminology "unafterschooling". Basically give kids time for unstructured learning using the hours after school/after homework study time that are currently effectively used up toiling at zero sum, super structured activities strictly aimed at getting into college.

I would have thought this too until the pandemic forced my wife and I to see exactly what our first grader was “learning” at the 10/10 school. It was shockingly below his abilities, hyperbolically shocking. Forcing him to do that work and then expecting him to do actually enriching work is at best unfair. We’re trying to figure out what to do next but both private and homeschooling are asking a lot :p

I noticed the same thing. COVID and at-home-Zoom schooling has been an eye opener about the curriculum for my seven year old. When I have a work break, I occasionally sit in her learning area and watch. She's so bored as they again and again go over subjects she already mastered last year. She learned how to open another window and tile them, so now she does her entire slate of homework in parallel on the side while the class re-does single-digit addition because a few kids still don't know it.

Not sure how much of this are special challenges specific to remote learning and Zoom and how much of it is just that the curriculum has to be tailored towards the slowest learners.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#336

Post by Broken_Hippo » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 3:35 PM UTC

jjk166 wrote: post #322

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #291

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yet if you don't know math, you can be ripped off. If you can't read the contract or understand law at all, you can be manipulated.

Which would be a compelling argument if there were no other way to learn math or law.

Not everyone can just learn on their own, and if your parents aren't real great at math or law or teaching, you really need school.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#337

Post by Foobar8568 » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 3:36 PM UTC

marcus_holmes wrote: post #234

Foobar8568 wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My teacher daughter was shocked she could read at 5,diring our first meeting she asked us : "do you know she can read?" I replied, "yes I know", she followed up with a "like an adult" almost frightened haha. Well I did tell her that she could read and write, I guess she was used of parents bullshitting on their kids achievements. Remove a screen and a kid can have crazy skills. Screens are really the opium of the peo…

I grew up before screens, and we didn't have crazy skills.

TV has been there as a main parenting tool from at least the 80s. Unless your parents were mixing alcohol with your milk, you had better skills than this current era one.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#338

Post by klyrs » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 4:01 PM UTC

calf wrote: post #261

klyrs wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've gotten good at a few things in life that required a "grind." The violin is the clearest example. Getting decent requires an hour or so a week -- you can generally fart around and play whatever's accessible to your skill level. Good requires an hour or two per day, of deliberate and focused practice. People don't play études for fun. Excellence requires several hours per day. Even Itzhak Perlman describes his pra…

> People don't play études for fun. I do. I wish I could play them well.

> I do.

Wow, I'm happy for you and only a little jealous.

I wish I could play them well, too. The sound and feeling of butchering them is what makes me dislike the experience.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#339

Post by jjk166 » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 4:18 PM UTC

Broken_Hippo wrote: post #336

jjk166 wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Which would be a compelling argument if there were no other way to learn math or law.

Not everyone can just learn on their own, and if your parents aren't real great at math or law or teaching, you really need school.

That some people need kidney dialysis is not an argument that everyone getting kidney dialysis is the only way to stay healthy.

If you can't learn from books or videos or online lectures or parents or tutors, I doubt generic schooling is really going to be able to help much either, but if it does great. People learn in different ways and different kids need different resources, but that's an argument against a one-size fits all public schooling system, not in favor.

Re: When You Get into Unschooling, It’s Almost Like a Religion

#340

Post by sharadov » Tue, Oct 20, 2020, 4:21 PM UTC

eloff wrote: post #82

sharadov wrote: post #45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've noticed this with my son who has an ADHD diagnosis. Pre-covid I constantly heard from school, that he was not paying attention, getting distracted. But since Covid, his output has been phenomenal - his reading/math has improved, he does really well one on one, we have a nanny working with him,. And I've never seen him happier. I know homeschool would benefit him immensely in the long run from an intellectual sta…

Get him into sports or other after school group activities. Much healthier social environment than school anyway. Lookup two sigma problem. Kids with a 1 on 1 tutor do two standard deviations better than school. That's an insane advantage if you can find a way to make it work.

He's doing soccer and parkour lessons. On top of that, we end up going to the park pretty much every day and play tennis/soccer. He loves his sports, and is very athletic in general.