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Outschooling

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Re: Outschooling

#131

Post by analog31 »

charliesharding wrote: post #19
up_and_up wrote: post #16

My wife are secular homeschoolers and have homeschooled our 3 kids: 10,8,5 for 5 years. We use outschool regularly, its a great platform to introduce random topics. I would invest in it honestly. AMA I guess

What were the primary motivations for homeschooling? Cultural? Political? Quality? Access? Also how do you go about socializing them? I've been considering it myself

My kids are school-schooled, except for having learned to read at home. But they were in a music program that was popular among homeschool families, so we met a lot of those kids and their parents.

Based on that limited observation, I think that the socialism of homeschool kids depends on the kids and their parents in the same way as any other aspect of homeschooling: If the parents are reasonably social, they will find ways to get their kids involved in social things, and their kids will be social too.

If the parents are reclusive, or inclined to isolate themselves from mainstream society for whatever reason, this will also be reflected in their kids. What may seem like a negative outcome of homeschooling could just be a matter of kids resembling their parents. And it wouldn't shock me if genetics plays a role.

Re: Outschooling

#132

Post by rigorman »

michaelchisari wrote: post #27
up_and_up wrote: post #24

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My wife was from a very competitive school district which forced overachievement and I got beat up by bullies in a small town school. Besides the personal anecdotes, 1. we felt like time was passing too quickly and wanted to have them around, we wanted to be together basically. 2. with 3 kids my wife hasnt been able to work (her line of work is not well paying), so it made sense to start homeschooling vs private scho…

This seems extraordinarily well-balanced. I'm often skeptical of homeschooling (especially for religious or political reasons), but you've got a great curriculum and motivation.

Curious what about his description appealed to you?

Re: Outschooling

#133

Post by sanderjd »

up_and_up wrote: post #24
charliesharding wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What were the primary motivations for homeschooling? Cultural? Political? Quality? Access? Also how do you go about socializing them? I've been considering it myself

My wife was from a very competitive school district which forced overachievement and I got beat up by bullies in a small town school. Besides the personal anecdotes, 1. we felt like time was passing too quickly and wanted to have them around, we wanted to be together basically. 2. with 3 kids my wife hasnt been able to work (her line of work is not well paying), so it made sense to start homeschooling vs private scho…

Where do you live? Can you do all these things (hunting, foraging, riding horses, karate, climbing, ice skating, etc.) without paying? Does that mean you live on a bunch of land? How far do you have to drive for these things? How did you find these meetup groups?

It sounds like a great setup, but it also seems difficult and expensive to me at first blush.

Re: Outschooling

#134

Post by ericd »

inetknght wrote: post #86
camelNotation wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think this is a problem with homeschooling as much as with a subset of homeschoolers - particularly religious fundamentalists and anarchist types. My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject. She had a teaching license up until a couple of years ago (they do expire after a while) and taught for several years before we had kids. Then, once they arrived,…

You present one well-honored experience. I present a stark contrast to it. > My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject. My parents told themselves the same thing. I apparently had top percentile test scores in several early years, particularly in math. Despite that, my parents completely failed to provide an education after choosing to homeschool. > She had…

Sorry you had such a bad time of it.

I know some people who were homeschooled as kids (unschooled, in one case), and they turned out to be exceptional people. It seems pretty clear from interacting with them that their attitudes and abilities are a direct result of their schooling (and having parents who would be willing to school their kids in that way).

But I'm sure homeschooling can also turn out very badly if the parents aren't fully committed to doing it well.

Re: Outschooling

#135

Post by souprock »

eadmund wrote: post #129
inetknght wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> it's concerning that those actively involved parents are removed from the public school system. As someone who was homeschooled: it's extremely scary. I've missed out on social experiences and also on actual education and consider myself generally worse-off for it. Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. How many homeschooling families are also anti-vaxxers or feed into anti-govern…

> Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for. That's also, of course, true of those who send their kids to private school. I think that there's an excellent argument for vo…

I could really use a voucher for homeschooling. I've spent a lot on books, calculators, and even paper. (11 kids) I think I spent about $1000 to do chemistry labs.

With the voucher I probably would have added a condenser, nickel crucibles, a kiln, an extra digit on my balance, decent-sized platinum electrodes, and a spectrophotometer. Make it a big voucher and I'll get an electron microscope, an extreme-ultraviolet photoelectron spectroscope, and a DNA sequencer.

Re: Outschooling

#136

Post by EdwardDiego »

ultrarunner wrote: post #118
EdwardDiego wrote: post #66

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Congratulations on doing it right with regards to socialisation. Sadly, many homeschoolers (in my anecdotal experience) do it wrong - they tend to be the same ones who homeschool for religious reasons.

Also anecdotal, but I suspect that the religiously motivated homeschoolers were already going to suffer socially, homeschooled or not. The only way that government schools would have altered the outcome was by providing peers to challenge their (often poorly-supported) religious positions. Assuming the methodology bordered on bullying, I'm not sure that would necessarily lead to an outcome of better socialization. I…

In my experience (from moving in religious homeschooling circles) it's more that they're doing it to "save" their children from the "world" - so having them at home is them already doing the best by their children, so having accomplished that, they're less worried about ensuring regular socialisation.

And as they often have large families, their children have a large number of sibiling so aren't lonely, so they presume it's all good. Which just leads to entire families of socially inept homeschoolers.

Whether or not religious people retain their views is not the benefit of socialisation - being able to function in everyday human society through direct experience of it, not a carefully curated and managed microscopic subset, that's the advantage.

Re: Outschooling

#137

Post by ericd »

carlob wrote: post #73
surge wrote: post #69

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think you're looking at different school systems and using it to leverage criticisms of home schooling in the US. Fix public schooling in the US first, make it so it isn't so easy for home schoolers to out perform. Don't make kids guinea pigs while you figure out how to fix it. Then and only then can you level a critical eye on US home schoolers if the vast majority weren't doing a better job than public schools. I…

> Fix public schooling in the US first This is like people saying to fix the bus system before adding bus lanes that would increase congestion for cars. The system is broken because smarter kids or kids who come from more educated families are escaping it. The effect is that public schools in the US are becoming like public transportation in the US: only those who don't have any other option are using it.

>The system is broken because smarter kids or kids who come from more educated families are escaping it.

Yeah, no. Do you have any experience with the public school systems in the US, or are you just viewing this from Europe and engaging in some vigorous armchair analysis? The problems are manifold, and they're exacerbated by the fact that the school system is not nationally funded, but locally by local property taxes, so impoverished areas with stressed parents also get poorly funded schools.

I know some people who took part in Teach for America, and part of that experience was that they taught in some of the lowest performing schools. And one of their big takeaways was that the teachers in those classes couldn't maintain basic order, let alone teach effectively. Smart, well behaved kids aren't going to improve that situation, and it's going to seriously hamper their ability to get a good education if the teacher has to focus on keeping people in their seats instead of teaching.

Re: Outschooling

#138

Post by jonny_eh »

droithomme wrote: post #99
jonny_eh wrote: post #94

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> "Travel to Paris" Dumb question: Is that a field trip or just a "learn about Paris" lesson?

He's not the guy behind the startup in the OP, he's just a guy doing homeschooling sharing his own personal experience. He's saying that at one point they went to Paris, which is a very educational think to do. That's homeschooling. Then they also studied Viking stuff. Maybe it was even in Norway at Viking sites? That sort of thing. A reasonable response to what do you do that Khan Academy doesn't which was the quest…

> He's saying that at one point they went to Paris

Right, but that's not clear. He listed it as a lesson/subject. It can be read as an actual trip, or a virtual trip.

Re: Outschooling

#139

Post by mdaniel »

master-litty wrote: post #106

I interviewed with Outschool a few months ago, happy to see them here! They're a wonderful team. I've never seen a group of people with so much positive chemistry before; I've started asking more culture-centered questions in my interviews since then, now that I think about it. I think it's the best kind of team to front an educational endeavour and it's one big reason I believe in them. It's easier to have a healthy…

And perhaps related to this post, there was a YC "ad" a few links above this post saying:

> Outschool (YC W16) Is Hiring a Senior Software Engineer in SF

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=20048401

Re: Outschooling

#140

Post by killjoywashere »

Unless this results in better education outcomes spread across the entire population in the red states, this is effectively a bid to support the Republican agenda. This will follow the same pattern as standardized testing: those with the means will pursue the best investments. Those without will be left behind. And so the cycle of inequality worsens. This is "greed is good" politics.

Think about it. If they were serious about education, why are they not investing, Koch-style, in local politics? Why are they not funding candidates who will advocate for stronger school systems, better transportation, school lunches, etc?

This has nothing to do with kids. This has everything to do with extracting as much money as possible from the most anxious, which is incidentally the rapidly vanishing elbow of middle class in the ever-steepening power law curve of wealth distribution in the US.

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