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Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

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Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#131

Post by eduction »

ryandrake wrote: post #105
pixl97 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Why do you presume that religious parents necessarily have bad outcomes homeschooling?

I have a relative who is deeply religious. I know I would not agree with her on, for example, evolution. But she is loving and devoted and her two daughters have received tons of time and investment from her in their education, far more than they would receive in a public school.

I obviously haven't, like, tested her kids, but they do seem smart and well adjusted. I'm not really worried about the limitations on their scientific learning — it's not ideal if they are skipping some evolutionary biology (I actually have no idea but I assume they are) but they are going to leave home, go to college in a very secular country and get to learn that stuff. I'm sure with the internet they are already widely exposed to what science has to say about e.g. the creation of the universe (which, honestly, how many high school students could walk you through?).

By the way, I don't think there is anyone homeschooling with the "only textbook is the Bible" and in most states you need to file a curriculum every year that gets reviewed and approved.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#132

Post by kashunstva »

chmod600 wrote: post #62

If 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…

> For parents who do so for political or culture war reasons, that must seem profoundly unfair.

I homeschooled my daughter for reasons other than culture wars or politics (she’s a violinist and public schools didn’t regard practice time as particularly important.)

But I never thought of public school funding as transactional. We did not take direct advantage of the benefit; but a reasonably well educated populace benefits me in a host of other ways. So I harboured no resentment when paying my public school levy.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#133

Post by doubled112 »

akira2501 wrote: post #120
burcs wrote: post #27

We're homeschooling our kids. I was pretty against it at first, but seeing our education system degrade to the state it is today, and being honest about my schooling experience definitely opened me up to it. I think the biggest argument for schooling is the socialization aspect of it. I don't know about the rest of you but I was bullied pretty relentlessly throughout grade school and it completely changed my personal…

> That's not the socialization that I want for my kids. On the other hand, I'd definitely want my children to be familiar with it. Bullying is not something isolated to schools. I've seen it in nearly every social and political situation that exists at nearly every age group. In my estimation people are getting worse at identifying it and collectively we're getting worse at punishing it.

Dealing with bullies is something you'll definitely see later in life.

I'm glad I learned how to shut it down quick or avoid it altogether earlier rather than later.

Being let out into the world thinking everybody loves you sounds like a terrifying idea too.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#134

Post by toomuchtodo »

orochimaaru wrote: post #110
Amezarak wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

So when do we start blaming parents instead of schools? And saying, “this is what you get, take it or leave it, you have to put effort in too”? Parents treat themselves as customers expecting a turnkey service, when instead they are stakeholders with their own book of work and responsibilities they need to be accountable for to deliver the environment and education their child will need to become a functioning member of society.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#135

Post by standardUser »

keiferski wrote: post #37
burcs wrote: post #27

We're homeschooling our kids. I was pretty against it at first, but seeing our education system degrade to the state it is today, and being honest about my schooling experience definitely opened me up to it. I think the biggest argument for schooling is the socialization aspect of it. I don't know about the rest of you but I was bullied pretty relentlessly throughout grade school and it completely changed my personal…

I think I have basically the same opinion. It's not so much that I believe homeschooling is amazing in-itself, but rather that the public education system has so clearly deteriorated that it seems borderline criminal to subject your kids to it. The question for me, personally, is private school vs. homeschooling. If you can avoid many of the downsides of public education via choosing the right private school (and bei…

I don't understand this talk about "the public education system". Every school and school district is going to be different. Some are great and others are not. I understand if you live in an area with middling-to-poor schools, but lots of people live near great public schools.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#136

Post by [deleted] »

seltzered_ wrote: post #130

"Many home-schooling families say they have re-created these communal functions through co-ops, or microschools, or Facebook. But such groups often cluster by shared ideology; home education’s rise has coincided with the fracturing of a nation unable to agree on the results of the last presidential election or how to fight a pandemic that has killed more than 1.1 million people." There was a vice documentary that sor…

[deleted]

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#137

Post by lapetitejort »

I was home-schooled until high school. Long story short, it was a disaster. I bordered on having no education at all, on top of no socialization. I'm so fortunate I got at least four years of public school. I still think I suffer to this day. For parents who are thinking of home schooling your kids: best of luck to you. If you succeed, maybe your kids will be smarter. If you fail, you could be setting your kids up for a lifetime of stunted socialization skills and poor work habits.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#138

Post by scythe »

keiferski wrote: post #19
CharlesW wrote: post #12

Earlier 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...

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…

Research on the question is limited. One review found weakly positive average outcomes for homeschooled children, although they performed worse in one interesting dimension: they were considered inferior military recruits.

https://www.educacaodomiciliar.fe.unicamp.br/sites/www.educa...

Selection effects create a "blind men and the elephant" problem when considering anecdotes about homeschoolers. Homeschool children who return to public school may do so because their parents lack the resources to homeschool them effectively, so they might perform worse (academically & socially) than the average homeschool child. But homeschool children who get jobs in the technology industry and post on Hacker News are probably more successful than the average. It remains for the reader to determine whether the lack of "success" of homeschool children who join the military, in contrast to homeschooler mean success elsewhere, is due to a selection effect or a psychological effect of homeschooling.

Re: Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education

#140

Post by klodolph »

keiferski wrote: post #67
pixl97 wrote: post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

Sure, I don't think anyone denies that there are some home schooling horror stories. But it really doesn't seem like most public schools do a great job either, so the question is if this broken system damages more people than one dominated by home schooling.

We have some insight into the answer to this, because public schooling is (more or less) a replacement for home schooling. Home schooling has an incredible amount of inequality built in to it. Affluent parents can hire instructors. Poor parents may not even be able to meet their children’s basic schooling needs, if it weren’t for public schools.

Obviously there’s a lot of middle ground between those two extremes, and the circumstances today don’t exactly match the circumstances of the mid-19th century, which is roughly when modern public schools started appearing in the US (based on the “Prussian model”).

There are a lot of different objectives that public schooling sets out to achieve. It can be too easy to focus on narrow sets of metrics like test scores, or collect a bunch of anecdotes about bad experiences in public schools (or bad experiences in homeschooling). IMO it’s probably a lot easier to fix this broken system rather than burn it to the ground and do homeschooling instead.

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