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Outschooling

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Re: Outschooling

#31

Post by hawkesnest »

carlob wrote: post #22

I think this is going to be very controversial on the typical HN crowd: maybe too European, or too socialist. However here it goes. Some ten years ago I was convinced that private schools had a right to exist, but that they should never impact the funding of public schools, not even indirectly. Then I discovered that homeschooling was a thing in the US. Now I tend to believe that private schools should not be allowed…

My children receive a secular homeschool education. They score well on standardized tests, interact well with their peers in extracurricular activities, and have healthy and meaningful relationships with other children and adults in their lives.

I recognize that there are some in the homeschool "community" who are ruining their children (imho). For the sake of freedom, I accept that there are terrible people in the world who should not have reproduced, but for me to have rights they must have them too.

Re: Outschooling

#32

Post by harryh »

paulgb wrote: post #18
rayiner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What social experiences do you feel like you missed out on? Having teachers ignore you and spend 90% of their time dealing with problem kids? The petty drama? How many people look back fondly on K-12 and think “man, that was great?” Read Sasse’s “the vanishing American adult.” It’s got some great commentary on what’s wrong with modern school. We take kids, and instead of having them be around adults to socialize them…

Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children.

Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life.

I am not at all convinced that this is true.

See: http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Re: Outschooling

#33

Post by GuiA »

the_watcher wrote: post #8
GuiA wrote: post #6

Interesting blog post and theory. A core counter argument to their base premise is that learning effectively is done in person, as part of a social group, in a physical space dedicated to learning, with hands on practice. It certainly seems to be the core takeaways of Waldorf/Montessori/constructionist/etc. approaches. > When our kids were in school and struggled with a class/teacher/subject, we would get them a tuto…

> In other words, there's a reason they paid the tutor to come in person, and not tutor over Skype or the phone. I'll refrain from posting the ages and names of his kids in the interest of privacy (you can figure it out with very light Googling), but his older children are in their late twenties, meaning they are nearly my age. When I was in high school "Skype tutoring" wasn't a thing, because reliable video chat did…

I buy that it would be a combination of both factors. I don’t buy that it would be exclusively due to the lack of Skype (I assumed his kids had grown up in the last decade or so, but fair enough) because I myself have been paid tens of thousands of dollars tutoring students of fairly wealthy family when I was in grad school and not once was I asked to do it over Skype.

Re: Outschooling

#34

Post by camelNotation »

rootusrootus wrote: post #23
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,…

> They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school. Except for those whose parents also hire expert tutors. It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities. When you consider how much homeschooling is by parents who are not themselves professional educators, I suspect a hybrid approach works better on average.

Professional educators really only need the training and certification because they are dealing with students at scale. One on one teaching is not remotely the same as teaching in a classroom setting where you have to adapt to multiple learning styles and multiple achievement levels all while using standardized assessment techniques, detailed lesson planning, and classroom management skills. The vast majority of what composes an education degree is there because you are educating a large, diverse group. When it is just one teacher working one on one with a single student, a lot of that is irrelevant. The way you teach, the way you assess their progress, and the way you adapt to their needs is much more natural. And most of the principles that apply in both contexts can be learned on the fly.

> It's not like kids going to traditional schools can't also get additional educational opportunities.

This is true and it's a lot of why we homeschool. There are peers that are getting similarly elite educations and just doing it slightly different ways. If I had a billion dollars, I would be paying for an elite, personal tutor to educate my children. I wouldn't be sending them to a public school. Homeschooling allows my wife and I to provide something analogous to that elite structure for our children, even though they are firmly middle class.

Re: Outschooling

#35

Post by surge »

ryanobjc wrote: post #29
surge wrote: post #25

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have a very narrow view of home schooling and only the worse cases. Take a look at the worse outcomes of public schooling and the averages in performance of home school kids versus public school kids. The social anxiety and other issues of kids going through a modern high school versus kids who socialize with mostly adults and socialize in sports programs, co-ops, or groups and learn to be self driven in learning…

In America we've had decades of various people attacking public schools. So to look at the state of public schools and saying this is how things are, well you're ignoring a broad history of American conservatism taking objection to public schooling.

Right, so fix that first, don't tell people they have to go to a certain school while you spend another 30+ years figuring it out.

Also blaming it on just conservatism is silly, the bluest most democratic districts have some of the worst problems and solutions. Administrators keep thinking more of the same and blanket solutions address the needs of every kid. They forget that children are individuals. If this were the case, schools in very liberal areas like D.C., Chicago, LA, etc would be amazing and all producing the very best students given their funding and that the school board would be incredibly liberal/progressive.

Talk to teachers, many of them that burn out or leave because of how bad its gotten home school their own kids because they've seen the sausage factory.

Addendum (how bad its really gotten):

https://www.dailyinfographic.com/homeschooling-by-the-number...

https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/feb/15/robots...

https://news.berkeley.edu/2018/03/29/social-jetlag/

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13086098

https://ideapod.com/born-creative-geniuses-education-system-...

https://nypost.com/2018/01/30/teen-suspended-for-inciting-vi...

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/9isnux/teacher_says_s...

https://www.greensboro.com/opinion/columns/christie-murphy-w...

https://www.reddit.com/r/news/comments/8smwb6/lawsuit_school...

https://www.reddit.com/r/videos/comments/7p69uk/teacher_arre...

Re: Outschooling

#36

Post by adolph »

carlob wrote: post #22

I think this is going to be very controversial on the typical HN crowd: maybe too European, or too socialist. However here it goes. Some ten years ago I was convinced that private schools had a right to exist, but that they should never impact the funding of public schools, not even indirectly. Then I discovered that homeschooling was a thing in the US. Now I tend to believe that private schools should not be allowed…

Don't stop there, there's more to discover--keep going to the Kibbutz!

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_communal_child_rearing...

Re: Outschooling

#37

Post by camelNotation »

paulgb wrote: post #18
rayiner wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What social experiences do you feel like you missed out on? Having teachers ignore you and spend 90% of their time dealing with problem kids? The petty drama? How many people look back fondly on K-12 and think “man, that was great?” Read Sasse’s “the vanishing American adult.” It’s got some great commentary on what’s wrong with modern school. We take kids, and instead of having them be around adults to socialize them…

Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life. I always took Lord of the Flies as an allegory to adult society rather than a book about children.

> Dealing with petty drama in K-12 is good low-stakes practice for dealing with petty drama in adult life.

There's really no evidence for this. The only reason anyone believes this is because modern school is a living hell and if the suffering and misery doesn't serve some practical purpose, we'd all be depressed.

The truth is that there are plenty of people who are schooled privately that turn out just fine.

Re: Outschooling

#38

Post by momokoko »

I think EdTech forgets that student success has much less to do with schooling(home or otherwise). This is why education has bounced from trend to trend over the last 50 years. Because we constantly think we've found a silver bullet, but then after a decade or so, we realize it was once again correlation.

If you really look at the data, student outcomes essentially boil down to parents and the students themselves. We've see this with how standardized testing has gone over so poorly. The truth is that, outside of gaming the test system with essentially test prep style cramming, schools really have not been able to make any real meaningful changes to student outcomes.

Absolutely, schools can move the needle a bit in either direction, but outside of edge cases, I feel as though it may be a challenge to show the kind of outcome data that makes any EdTech product a must have in US education.

Re: Outschooling

#39

Post by jf »

GuiA wrote: post #5
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…

I can read your comment in several, slightly conflicting, ways: - homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest - homeschooling is at a systemic disadvantage because parents that care enough about their kid's education to take an active part in it have no voice in the public schooling system (my un…

As someone who was exclusively homeschooled (and glad of it) my read is mostly of the first interpretation: OP likely had authoritarian parents that used homeschooling as a method of control rather than a way to learn.

Re: Outschooling

#40

Post by notacoward »

camelNotation wrote: post #17
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…

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,…

> particularly religious fundamentalists and anarchist types.

You mean the significant majority of home schoolers, driving most of the agenda e.g. around certification and curriculum standards? Public schools are meant to ensure that every child can get a minimal level of education. Obviously it's great when people can do better, whether it's through regular public schools, charter schools, private schools, or home schooling. The problem is that when you open it up to just anyone without any kind of certification, testing, or oversight, it results in a form of neglect.

> it is only available to middle and upper class families

Sadly, no. That might describe the home schoolers you see, but "home schooling" which involves little or no actual schooling is also a common option for the (especially rural) poor. Some of my own first and second cousins grew up that way, and basically never recovered.

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