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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?

#141

Post by triyambakam »

idle_zealot wrote: post #110
judah wrote: post #66

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 ra…

> taught me to honor my parents, taught me the value of tradition, morality, spirituality Those do not sound positive at all. It sounds like you were successfully sheltered from secular and liberal ideas by traditional and conservative parents, which matches with my preconceptions of homeschooling.

So you're saying that it's bad to have morals and a religion? That sounds very dogmatic.

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

#142

Post by bequanna »

ComradePhil wrote: post #121
ElijahLynn wrote: post #108

Social needs. Children need to learn how to be in relationship with others, it is the most fundamental need we have and is so important for the future of our planet. If I were to homeschool, it isn't about the learning, that is easy, it is about providing an environment where children can learn to co-exist with others. That can still be done with homeschool, but it will need to be intentional with daily activities th…

They need to learn how to be in relation to people who know and care about them, not other random kids (some of whom will be abused at home and hence abusive at school) and the teachers, some of whom will be extremely incompetent, emotionally abusive, pedophiles or all of that. There's absolutely no way sending a kid to school is better for their social life in any way.

Bingo. It seems like people ignore the huge social risks that sending kinds to public entails and write it off as something children should “learn to deal with”.

Do you know who your child is spending time with at school? I hope so, because they will likely have more influence over your child’s development than you.

If your children aren’t going to a highly selective, highly supervised school, good luck. It’s a crapshoot. Maybe they befriend “good” kids…maybe not.

For example, my nephew is 6 and was playing with a female classmate who (for whatever reason) is already using sexual language and her play is inappropriate. Should my young nephew just “learn to deal” with that?

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

#143

Post by cowmix »

I'm 50, live in AZ (where home schooling is very popular) -- I didn't homeschool my kids but many of my friends did. Here's what I have seen:

1) If you are non-religious, the canned curriculum, trade shows, support groups are very few and far between. You will be much more lonely than your religious home-schooling counterparts.

2) As your kids get older, it is harder and harder to give them a proper education. By the time your kids are in middle-school, subjects get harder for a parent (or pairs of parents) to cover in a way that does each subject justice.

In the end, most of my friends who home-schooled eventually sent their kids to middle-school and or high-school... and that timing seemed about right.

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

#144

Post by david927 »

dotdi wrote: post #10

I get this is targeted at the US, still I'm throwing this out there: my wife and I (with combined degrees in literature, molecular biology and computer science) would have seriously considered homeschooling. But we live in Germany, and it is absolutely illegal here.

My wife and I have one child and she requested homeschooling for high school.

So we moved from Europe to Idaho, where it's supported. (I'm American.) She's been doing a hybrid model of two classes a day at the local school and the rest on her own, and it's been incredibly successful. She's going into her senior year now and is looking at top universities like Harvard, Oxford and Yale. We couldn't be happier with the experience.

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

#146

Post by xpe »

triyambakam wrote: post #141
idle_zealot wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> taught me to honor my parents, taught me the value of tradition, morality, spirituality Those do not sound positive at all. It sounds like you were successfully sheltered from secular and liberal ideas by traditional and conservative parents, which matches with my preconceptions of homeschooling.

So you're saying that it's bad to have morals and a religion? That sounds very dogmatic.

No, the commenter is not saying that. And you probably know that?

The context is right there in the comment:

> It sounds like you were successfully sheltered from secular and liberal ideas by traditional and conservative parents

It is better to read the whole comment in context and reply charitably. See HN guidelines.

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

#147

Post by biomcgary »

kitsunesoba wrote: post #129
biomcgary wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife and I were both homeschooled (I also attended private and public schools at various times). With homeschooling, we had a lot of positive social interactions (4-H, history club, co-operative classes with other families, neighborhood kids) and essentially no negative ones. My experience in public schools was quite negative (as well as being educationally weak). Our third son is autistic (probably my genetics) a…

Yeah, I won’t deny that it can work well and produce well-rounded, socially capable adults, but it’s dependent on the parent(s) getting a lot right in doing it, which is anything but a given. Homeschooling isn’t a decision that should be taken lightly, and I think that parent(s) considering it should be honest with themselves in evaluating their ability to pull it off well.

Homeschooling does require a lot of commitment and consideration of your limitations as a parent. For example, I think there is value to cooperative homeschooling for some subjects (e.g., science, which requires equipment). Trying to "go it alone" for everything can be a bad idea. In addition, most states don't provide funding to school at home, so homeschooling parents also face an economic disadvantage.

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

#149

Post by [deleted] »

ShadowBear wrote: post #33

Homeschooling was detrimental to my own social development as a child, and that of my (many) siblings. Adjusting to college life made me nearly suicidal with hopelessness that I'd ever catch up either academically or socially, and none of my other siblings managed to successfully complete it. We're all doing much better now, but none of us would ever consider putting our own children through that kind of isolation lo…

[deleted]

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

#150

Post by concinds »

acover wrote: post #32
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…

How much can a parent even affect their children? I remember studies of adopted children showing it was little. Edit: this[0] is not the study but shows something similar > Adopted children resemble their adoptive parents slightly in early childhood but not at all in middle childhood or adolescence In contrast, during childhood and adolescence, adopted children become more like their biological parents, and to the sa…

Be extremely careful believing in the "it's mostly genetics, nurture is a minor factor" stuff. Most of these studies have surprisingly bad (or at least naive) methodologies, of the "we don't know what we don't know (but people like Taleb do)" kind (!).

See e.g. this study: https://elifesciences.org/articles/39725 (and that's for height, which is vastly lower-dimensional than emotional health or IQ)

Or an easier to read article: https://www.quantamagazine.org/new-turmoil-over-predicting-t...

Can also see this thread: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1163435285193076737 and this tweet: https://twitter.com/nntaleb/status/1476173796323246082. Nature-über-alles studies rely on relatively basic misunderstandings of the required math.

Of course if you want to read studies by biologists too, there's quite a few addressing the problems with twin studies (especially with high-dimensional outcomes like intelligence and emotional health). But to be clear, the problem with the nature-matters-a-lot studies isn't a biology problem; it's a math problem.

And the wider problem is that the "mostly nature not nurture" idea disincentivizes conscientious, careful parenting (since "it doesn't matter in the long run anyway").

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