Anecdotally I have worked with many colleagues who were homeschooled. I suspect a correlation with home school children and programmers. Also, just met a ninth grader who enrolled at our local high school after being home schooled. He is programming Rust and taking Calculus with a bunch of seniors. Not sure if he is exceptional or simply was able to fast forward due to being homeschooled.
Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
101–110 of 1001 posts
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#102Earlier quoted context omitted.
This is just not the case. In many states it's nearly completely unregulated, and the home school lobby is working diligently to strip even those regulations.
You didn't answer his question - why are regulations on teaching your own children in your own home so necessary?
Stripping myself of my morals and ethics, sure. Maybe I don’t need to give a shit whether someone else’s kid has any future. I’d rather care.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#103Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is, and article hit pieces like this are exactly why it will continue to expand. Newsflash, there’s an actual large portion of the population that more and more doesn’t want what is taught to their children regulated by the government.
Yeah, there are a number of people out there who only want to teach their kids what's in the Bible. We should all be so lucky as to be a bunch of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidts. Obviously I'm presenting an extreme example, but society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated. I'm not saying there are no problems with regulations, but I hate how the "deregulate everything!" crowd con…
People are making a choice for their kids, whether they want the after effects of religious or public school 'brainwashing'. For many, its a clear cut choice, one way or the other.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#104If you home school, you don't get the money back. Public school is something like $12k/yr. That's a lot of money that you're essentially opting out of. For parents who do so for political or culture war reasons, that must seem profoundly unfair. To be driven out of the public schools means to be denied resources. Public schools using public money should be especially sensitive and as neutral as possible on political…
You've just made a strong case for a voucher type of program.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#105Earlier quoted context omitted.
It seems to me that the only relevant question here is how home schooling compares to public schools when it comes to “horror stories.” And there certainly aren’t a lack of public school horror stories…
There are plenty of 'public school' horror stories because these things are public and can be audited in a great number of cases. You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when they happen because they are private. Maybe you'll be a therapist and years later get to talk to one of these people how they are effectively crippled for the rest of their life. Or you'll be like me that grew up in a place that had a bu…
> You don't get to hear the homeschooling horrors when they happen because they are private.
You're also not going to hear about the homeschooling horrors from the typical HN demographic. Broadly, and obviously with exceptions, there are two groups of parents who choose to homeschool: 1. Parents who have an abundance of educational resources and time and do it to provide a higher quality of education, and 2. Parents who do it for religious separatism reasons because public school gets in the way of their indoctrination. Selection bias means you're going to see a lot of the outcomes from #1 posting here, and not a lot of #2.
For every example who was homeschooled with a high-quality curriculum, had great parent-run extracurriculars, socialized well, and so on, how many examples are invisibly stuck as someone's housewife who can't even be employed because their only textbook was the Bible, and they didn't learn anything past 3rd grade math? They're not posting their horror story here on HN.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#106When I moved into my current house about 10 years ago, the family next door home schooled. I'd never known any home schoolers before and definitely had some notions about how terrible it must be until I learned about it. This family was part of a home school group with other families. The kids went to different houses every day and had an instructor focus on 1 subject for half of the day, mixed in with free time, dep…
There are many home-schooling success stories, and also many home-schooling horror stories. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...
Almost exactly like public and private school!
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#107Earlier quoted context omitted.
It is, and article hit pieces like this are exactly why it will continue to expand. Newsflash, there’s an actual large portion of the population that more and more doesn’t want what is taught to their children regulated by the government.
Yeah, there are a number of people out there who only want to teach their kids what's in the Bible. We should all be so lucky as to be a bunch of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidts. Obviously I'm presenting an extreme example, but society at large has a vested interest in ensuring that children, broadly, are educated. I'm not saying there are no problems with regulations, but I hate how the "deregulate everything!" crowd con…
I'm sure this varies by state, but where I live in MN home schooling parents have to register with the state and meet certain curriculum standards. Homeschooled students also have to take standardized tests and show certain standards of proficiency. The parents need to keep diligent records and be in regular communication with the school district. We have a lot of friends that homeschool (although we don't ourselves), and in general most homeschooled kids seem to be meeting or exceeding where their public- or private-schooled peers are at.
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#108Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sure, that's one model. The underlying problem is the completely unregulated nature. Similarly, there is household in my neighborhood that home schools. The kids (all 8 of them) never leave the house. They have a 8ft. fence and 1 acre yard where I assume they get some outside time. No one visits. Only dad is allowed to talk to anyone and when he does it's extraordinarily weird.
Public schools are highly regulated, and are on average horrible. I'd bet a lot on parents caring more about their kids welfare than regulators.
There are many bad public schools - but it seems a bit hyperbolic to say the average public school is "horrible".
Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#109Feels like there is a big homeschooling article once every other week here and a whole slew of parents saying, "We homeschool and its great and our kids love it" and then a bunch of adults saying, "I was homeschooled and it was not great, and I did not love it" Regular schooling isn't ideal. But homeschooling is a pretty major reaction to that, and it shouldn't be done without serious consideration for the non-zero c…
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Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education
#110Earlier quoted context omitted.
There are many home-schooling success stories, and also many home-schooling horror stories. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/2020/05/law-school-pr...
Similarly, there are many public school horror stories. For example, despite spending $21k/student, making it the third-highest funded school system in the country, 23 Baltimore schools failed to produce a single student with basic math proficiency.[1] One of my friends went to a school where she was beaten every day and the teachers had totally given up and most of them did not teach. Unfortunately, we need much mor…
School is parents + school. I would say about 60% parenting and 40% school. If you don’t push your kid academically nothing is going to happen.
Peer groups matter. In “good” schools you’re optimizing the peer group. A good/bad school rating has little to do with teacher capability.