School is the industrialization of childhood.
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Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
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Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
#72Homeschooling is seeing a surge in popularity, its not just tech people or high status people. IME it's a lack of trust, sending your kids to be raised by strangers. I grew up in a small town and some of my teachers were basically neighbors. For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools which might serve a thousand stud…
The irony of this is that you rely on strangers for critical stuff like ensuring you don't get electrocuted or burned at home or even ensuring that the water that you drink won't make you ill or that your car is a good enough condition to not lead you to a fatal crash. Any of these affects your close relatives. What makes education different?
I think there's a broad perception that education professionals are ideologically captured by the left. It's hard to know how true this is, but individuals like "libsoftiktok" have made a career out of stoking that fire.
Also, unlike your other examples of strangers working on things, there's not really a feedback loop of review and rework where mistakes can be corrected. If your child gets a bad education, that's time lost that's really hard to recover and can set them back for life.
Edit: To add, the "ideological capture" perception is important because of what education is. When you're dealing with an electrician, it doesn't matter who they vote for because electricity works the same way regardless. Teachers don't just regurgitate information but promote a set of values and expectations in their classroom so their personal opinions can matter a lot. And that's not even getting into teachers who explicitly try to teach students their worldview.
Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
#73Homeschooling is seeing a surge in popularity, its not just tech people or high status people. IME it's a lack of trust, sending your kids to be raised by strangers. I grew up in a small town and some of my teachers were basically neighbors. For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools which might serve a thousand stud…
> For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools In my experience it's because schools are being treated as a business, and businesses are usually more efficient when there's consolidation of expenses. Why pay for 3 schools with 10 teachers each when you could instead consolidate classes and pay for 1 school with 15 teac…
Not sure if I agree with this. Schools are not exactly run by the government, rather local school districts.
My (not data based) impression of school levies is that they nearly always get approved by voters, even in tax-averse areas, so if there is a lack of funding, it is usually real, rather than through a misplaced need to be "efficient".
Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
#74Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids. We think we have a relationship with our own child that allows us to understand what they need and how to communicate with them in a way that works for them. We think we have the time (assuming one parent is full time parenting) to give our child the attention they need to excel. And we believe that a combinati…
You can do all that on top of a normal education.
If you do that, the normal education is redundant. You wouldn't put a university student in class to learn multiplication; it's an insulting waste of their time. Why would you do the same to a 10 year old who mastered it years ago?
Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
#75I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. The reading/math skills are so dismal, any student who learns at home is bored as hell. Private schools are outrageously expensive. Homeschooling is becoming the pragmatic choice.
There's also rising awareness among parents of neurodiversity while many schools are still stagnant and failing to correct.
I have ADHD. My wife doesn't, but most of her siblings do. Our kids do. Our kids love reading and love learning new things, and I know from my own experience that the fastest way to kill that love would be to send them to a public school that doesn't know how to work with ADHD brains.
There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom. This matches my experience, and I want better for my kids.
Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
#76Homeschooling is seeing a surge in popularity, its not just tech people or high status people. IME it's a lack of trust, sending your kids to be raised by strangers. I grew up in a small town and some of my teachers were basically neighbors. For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools which might serve a thousand stud…
The irony of this is that you rely on strangers for critical stuff like ensuring you don't get electrocuted or burned at home or even ensuring that the water that you drink won't make you ill or that your car is a good enough condition to not lead you to a fatal crash. Any of these affects your close relatives. What makes education different?
It's not different.
If the water you drink is having problems, you'd have campaigns over it, protests, people trying to get it resolved and potentially lawsuits. People would band together to do whatever they could to fix the problem that they see.
Education is seeing the exact same thing. Parents see a lot of problems. They are going to school board and council meetings, people are campaigning on solving the issue and people are taking whatever measures are in their power to fix it...like home schooling.
When people see problems, they want to fix them. It's exactly the same thing.
Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
#77Having gone through the San Francisco public schooling system, I would never send my kids there. I'd rather home school them if I lived in San Francisco, or if I have money, send them to private school.
> I would never send my kids there. Why not, what's wrong with it? What could you do better at home, or what could private schools do better?
You could literally live next to a school and there’s a chance your kids can’t go there.
There are many kids from low income, broken families who are just really bad students. Bullies. Disruptive. Disrespectful to teachers. It was hell going through public schools in SF.
Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
#78I thought this was a really bad article. "Suddenly"?? I've heard many tech parents go full bore into homeschooling for at least about 2 decades now. Also, for the particular issues she talks about (e.g. social isolation), essentially all of the tech parents I know that are into home schooling put a ton of effort into having a really rich social environment, e.g. either through "group schooling" or lots of outside act…
Covid and the school shutdowns, did create a real boost in the homeschooling. Exacerbated by the particularly draconian shutdowns and masking in areas where there are a lot of tech workers like the Bay Area.
Completely agree, but it's not really like "tech homeschooling is a new thing" vs. the fact that public schools (I'd argue especially in the Bay Area, e.g. see the school board recall) got so bad during the pandemic that parents had huge motivation to find an alternative.
And the fact of the pandemic makes this article even worse in my opinion: "Gee, why would parents with means want to find an alternative when public schools had to go all remote for extended periods and were a shit show in general?"
Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
#79The USA is going backwards in many, many areas and is no longer in the top of any important indices so this fits the bill.
Public school education is a shit show in many western countries. I'm not in the USA but all the talk about private schools and lotteries is very real. The only thing we don't have is charter schools leaching public funds.
The USA is ranked below most other western public school systems so I don’t think you can conclude “the US are doing bad because all western countries are”. It’s just a matter of priorities and the US prioritizes defense over education.
Re: Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
#80Earlier quoted context omitted.
We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids. We think we have a relationship with our own child that allows us to understand what they need and how to communicate with them in a way that works for them. We think we have the time (assuming one parent is full time parenting) to give our child the attention they need to excel. And we believe that a combinati…
You can do all that on top of a normal education.
Not really. There are only so many hours in the day. The time between school and bedtime is extremely limited and involves other time consuming activities such as after school sports and eating dinner.
I work on homework with my kid every day and after all those things it's not like we have time (or she has energy) to fill in holes in her at-school learning