Laura Deming, founder of the Longevity Fund, on being homeschooled

I'd rather have smart, passionate people with deep technical interests judge whether to fund my company than a dumb, lazy person who doesn't know math or science :)

I was homeschooled, and there are a wide range of homeschoolers in the US. Generally it breaks down into three categories: "religious", "hippie", or "academic".

It sounds like Laura was from academic branch, where her parents were probably very engaged, and thought they could do a better job than the school system--which is great.

My parents, and most of their friends who homeschooled were from the religious branch of the movement, which is fairly large in the US. Their main motivation was to basically prevent the school system from teaching us things they didn't approve of, like evolution, etc. Of course, we learned about evolution, but from a very different (and very incorrect) perspective.

Regardless, we still took standardized tests, and performed really well on them every year. Overall I did fine in college--aside from a few academic blind spots, and I'm doing fine as a programmer today. The social stuff was a steep learning curve once I hit college, but I made it.

I will say there are a number of people I know who didn't "make it out". College can be a really big jump for a lot of these kids.

> Why don't we see how valuable aging and death are?

Because they're horrific tragedies that we should be fighting tooth and nail until they're extinguished and nobody ever has to deal with them again. They should be consigned to the history books.

> Aging is a process of coming to terms with death.

Aging is a biological problem that we continue to debug. And nothing should make us "come to terms" with being obliterated. If someone is attacking you, you don't "come to terms" with your impending injury or death, you fight back.

When a problem has thus far been a seemingly immutable property of life, it can be difficult to envision a world where that property has been overcome. It can be difficult to even see it as a problem. And it's understandable that people's first instinct is to somehow justify the status quo, that there must be a good reason that 150,000 people die every day. One step towards solving the problem is to reset that expectation, to get people to recognize the problem as a problem rather than a "fact". In the meantime, progress will continue to be made by people who see it as a problem, but far too slowly without more widespread support. Every day longer it takes is 150,000 people lost.

What do you consider "bullshit", and what makes you the authority on making such claims?

I ask in good faith, not to mock you or anything - mostly because I've heard a wide range of similar claims.

(I do think that the educational style of many public schools is horrendous though, as it follows the old factory-line model, where you try to fit all kids into some mold, and "educate" them as fast as possible. When the reality is that there's no one-size-its-all educational model. It's highly individual, and must be tailored / optimized for each pupil, if possible.)

> illegal as in: if you attempt it, the government will arrest you and send the kids to an orphanage

If you repeatedly attempt it I presume? I highly doubt that they'd send your kids to an orphanage after the first offense.

> public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit

Bullshit such as what? (if I might ask)

IMO, although homeschooling is great for some kids, the cons of legalizing it far outweigh the pros. One of the most important aspects of schools is to let kids interact with other kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. Homeschooling should be banned for the same reason that religious schools should be banned, i.e., to avoid abuse, indoctrination, and segregation of kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds.

If we want to allow brighter kids to learn faster then the focus should be on improving schools, not on abandoning them.