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

As a kid, I attended mostly private school, but when public school-educated parents express concern that they wouldn't be able to competently teach standard middle school subjects, that sounds much more like an indictment of public schooling than of the at-home variety.

Prior to that the two biggest things stopping us were the assumption that children have to go to an 'official' school in order to get a diploma and go to college, and the challenge in finding good curriculum.

In my opinion, the good resources include Khan Academy, IXL, and Well Trained Mind, or at least that is what has worked for us.

Tools that would make homeschooling easier would be an assignment tracker by class/subject that was easy to use. Khan supports assigning work but it's rather labor intensive to administer. For example if I have assigned tasks in a class for the next eight weeks and the schedule slides by one week then it would be nice to be able to just move all the assignments in that class back one week instead of changing every individual assigned date separately (as Khan Academy currently requires). This could even be something as simple as making a list of assignments available as a spreadsheet.

Logical progression across the units in a class is important. The Khan Academy AP Physics curriculum is a good example of what not to do in that respect.

Any attempt by the instructor/course material at getting the student excited about learning should be avoided/removed.

Grammatical errors, typos, and misspellings should never be present in anything your company makes available to students or parents.

Personally I can say that I've learned a much greater depth about religion and spirituality outside of formal religious contacts.

Perhaps something about the organizational setup of religious-based and funded programs is counterproductive for skeptical minds who might otherwise be curious.

That's quite funny if you don't immediately recall that North Americans talk of 'graduating' school...

Anyway, do you fit this in alongside working (not as a home-teacher I mean) through some combination of relatively hands-off assignments etc. and evenings/weekends, or does it only work because you don't?

No.

This seems like an attempt at a wise phrase unfortunately mechanistically generated from some recursion and word substitution.

Please try to support the claim if you actually believe it.

Research classical liberalism, the scientific method, liberal arts, music, pedagogy, statistics, almost any field of study; they are not dogmatic in the same way that religion is.

You should read about the history of the homeschooling movement especially in the American south such as Georgia. It has been a sustained effort by conservatives to opt out of the educational system.

Perhaps you have some interesting angle on how state education is somehow parallel? But I highly doubt it. I see a computer scientist's mind at work trying to find a pattern -- a meta pattern perhaps -- to claim understanding. The problem is that I don't see any evidence that the claim has been examined up close. I don't see awareness of historical or educational context.

Tell me if I'm wrong. I see it very often here: Overconfidence without a grounded understanding.

Consider a simpler and rational explanation (for the USA at least): State-based education is funded largely because it is in the interest of the state to educate citizens to participate in government and exist in a pluralistic society. An effective education in democracy does not shelter people from the idea of religion but instead puts it in a context so that we can live together even though we may not have the same fundamental beliefs.