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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?

#381

Post by kwatsonafter »

Hamuko wrote: post #191
scifibestfi wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I went to public school and would argue it's a terrible place to be socialized. You are socialized by kids your age in an environment that's more akin to prison than the real world.

Don't worry, for most people, their workplace will feel like a prison as well.

It's kind of true. This isn't going to change in the future. Neoliberalism means, "if you're not 21st century valuable you're going to be 19th century poor" and this has me troubled. The conundrum for me is how you can develop an advanced society without advanced education. It seems like technology becomes a social stratifier despite the, "advantages" that they gain the poor. This has historical precedent-- so far technological advances have done a great deal to correct social imbalances (consider working class life in the 1850s) but they have also furthered that gap between the most and least powerful in society.

It seems that human culture closely follows power laws; it might be possible that, "elites" are a natural consequence of human existence. The question is how this will be managed in a world where elites have near absolute technical powers. It's worth thinking about I thinking about.

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

#382

Post by kwatsonafter »

Hamuko wrote: post #357
Godel_unicode wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Those people would do well to learn what the word “prison” means. Your 9 to 5 might suck, but let’s try and have some perspective…

School isn't a literal prison either if you're advocating for sticking with the literal definition of the world.

Pedagogist here-- I don't have the time to gather a huge amount of materials in regard to this but it's worth pointing out that schools actually are designed to be, "like prisons" do to socioeconomic forces that turn schools into, "learn how to job" facilities. It's a natural consequence of neoliberal capitalism. Look into Foucault's, "Discipline and Punish."

http://www.we-aggregate.org/piece/schools-and-prisons https://sputniksteve.wordpress.com/2017/05/07/schools-prison...

(Excuse the relatively, "non-scholar" links; I'll dig into the literature at a further date. It's worth exploring.)

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

#383

Post by _benj »

I was homeschooled and I truly believe it was a major factor to getting me where I am in life. With that said I’ve also seen homeschooling gone very wrong.

I think the major component of it being a great experience is the motivation of the parents for doing homeschooling. Teaching kids at home to intentionally keep them from society and indoctrinate them in some specific ideology, usually religious, can be very damaging, not necessarily because of the religion itself but because sooner or later the kid/adolescent/adult will meet the wider society and have no tools to deal with the diversity found in it. This, btw, doesn’t only happen in homeschooling but is how root of racism/sexism/etc are planted.

In my experience, and what I hope to accomplish when/if I get to homeschool is to create an space where the child can pursue her interests, nourish/encourage curiosity and use it to teach instead of ignoring it an teaching some other boring thing the kid has no interest in as sadly is often done in school just from the fact that a teacher can’t pursued the interest/curiosity of 30 students at the same time in one classroom.

Regarding the social aspect, there’s soccers, orchestra, martial arts, ymca swimming, inviting friends over often, 4h, Boy Scouts, and so many more opportunities to provide a place for the kid to socialize while hopefully minimizing the toxicity usually found in public schools.

This is by no means a critique of public schools, I think is a sad reality of our society that all we can afford for our kids is an assembly line education with very little space for diversity and with one size fits all measurements of success.

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

#384

Post by LudwigNagasena »

xpe wrote: post #373
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is too interesting and too nuanced to waste time trying to decipher a worldview obscured with wordplay.

> The world is too interesting and too nuanced to waste time trying to decipher a worldview obscured with wordplay. Ah, yes, classic self defense when one feels threatened. Interesting that you use wordplay to criticize wordplay. I've done it too. Everyone has. But it isn't really getting us anywhere. It is a good way to protect one's ego though. I'm sorry you don't understand it. I'm sorry if you perceived my quip a…

>My intent is for more people here to broaden their perspective. I see very strong signals have people been anchored in computer science but not philosophy or ethics or history. I see common tendencies for people to dig in. It is easier to defend oneself than to learn.

My nickname is an amalgamation of my two favorite thinkers: Ludwig Wittgenstein and Nagasena. They are from different time periods (20th century AD and 1st century BC) and philosophical traditions (Western philosophy and Buddhism). Both have very interesting philosophies especially in regards to linguistics. If you think that analyzing language won't get us anywhere, I highly suggest to read both of them.

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

#385

Post by LudwigNagasena »

xpe wrote: post #372
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #337

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The world is too interesting and too nuanced to waste time trying to decipher a worldview obscured with wordplay.

That does not mean it is obscured intentionally. quite the contrary -- if you read my comments I've explained my views in many different ways. I've put the effort in.

If you start with "L and P don't deny other viewpoints" and then you spend 3 paragraphs explaining why they do exactly that but you feel justified to say the opposite, it just sounds like needless obscurantism.

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

#386

Post by LudwigNagasena »

xpe wrote: post #374
LudwigNagasena wrote: post #328

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Quoted post unavailable.

Some people would say thank you for taking the time to explain. Others seem to belittle long answers. Which message do you want to convey? Something else? Do you want me to try again to distill it in a way that you can understand? If so, what effort have you put in to meet me halfway? Look I'm being direct with you, but I'm not upset or attacking you. I'm just seeing the standard patterns of online discussion, and I'…

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=31960344

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

#387

Post by tptacek »

bennysomething wrote: post #356
tptacek wrote: post #351

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You (or others reason this thread) would probably be interested in the most recent Serial podcast, "The Trojan Horse Affair", which centers on the intersection of religion and public schooling in Birmingham. Religious education is apparently technically a requirement in the UK as well (though, in many places, perhaps more observed in the breach). If you're Muslim in Birmingham, your public school is probably teaches…

That was the Blair governments terrible idea to give public funding to all religious schools. Coming from northern Ireland where segregation in schools is pretty fundamental to the divide, I couldn't believe the stupidity in implementing this in England.

I don't know what you're referring to here, but 51% of Wikipedians believe that religious education (of some form) is compulsory in all UK schools.

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

#388

Post by JJMcJ »

Barrin92 wrote: post #309
JJMcJ wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Public school socialization. Humiliated by teachers. Bullied by some people. Small circle of friends. Adults as the enemy. All the homeschooled kids I've met seem pleasant, polite, comfortable around other kids and around adults. Of course this is Northern California so elsewhere the story may be different. Oh, and homeschooling is forbidden in Germany, under a 1938 law. 1938. Get it? Nudge, nudge, wink, wink, elbow…

I'm German and I'm glad it's forbidden, and not since 1938 but since 1919, and it has its roots not in the Nazi era but in the Prussian system and the European humanist tradition of education which emphasized that education is not just about acquisition of skills, but about civic education, teaching students not just to be pupils but to be democratic citizens and active participants in public life.

And how did that work out for Germany?

More seriously the Prussian system was created after the Napoleonic Wars to ensure that Prussia had a large reasonably well educated population suitable for warfare and for industry.

That system was enforced in the USA later in the 19th Century.

Read http://www.johntaylorgatto.com/

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

#389

Post by anon291 »

xpe wrote: post #368
anon291 wrote: post #267

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yeah, he brought up religion for no particular reason. To be clear, when I say 'traditional' ideas, I mean those ideas that have captured the secular zeitgeist of generations before us. For example, the idea that the family is the foundational element of society today has religious connotations, but only because it is carried over from Roman times. The Romans achieved this conclusion through secular means. It's now a…

> Yeah, he brought up religion for no particular reason. You do not understand why it was mentioned. Then you claim you do. Then you write words that many would consider insulting. You can do better. Try.

Sorry what's insulting about what I wrote?

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

#390

Post by dang »

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.

Please don't take HN threads into ideological flamewar. It's not what this site is for, and it destroys what it is for.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

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