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Homeschooling hits record numbers

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Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#771

Post by BeFlatXIII »

aleph_minus_one wrote: post #463
jfreds wrote: post #386

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I was homeschooled until high school. I couldn’t agree with you more. The value that the socialization the public school offers is underestimated. Learning activities with other homeschooled kids is ok but not enough. A tight-knit neighborhood of friends is huge, but not enough. You need to develop a thick skin and a sense of self-assurance. I have no counterfactual of course, but I think much of the social anxiety I…

[flagged]

Teachers holding classroom votes where everyone counted equally is foundational to my contempt for universal suffrage.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#772

Post by BeFlatXIII »

ghssds wrote: post #314
usefulcat wrote: post #305

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There are certainly tradeoffs, but it's not all negative. In my experience, what it boils down to is that home-schooled kids tend to have more experience with adults and less experience dealing with a wide variety of other kids, particularly assholes. When I was a kid in public school, there was no shortage of assholes and I definitely would have preferred to not have to deal with them. OTOH, I don't doubt that there…

What happens to asshole kids? Do they become regular adults or asshole adults? Do they become soldiers or prisonners never to be seen again by normies? Do they even reach adulthood? Are they even a stable group or were we all asshole kids to some other kids?

> Do they become soldiers or prisonners never to be seen again by normies?

Not necessarily those two exact options, but yes. Adults are free to self-segregate. Even in K–12, once the option for tracking into advanced classes is available, everyone's social lives improve.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#773

Post by rahimnathwani »

mmcclure wrote: post #643
rahimnathwani wrote: post #530

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your original point was not that it's "not underfunded," it was that it's overfunded Here's my original comment. I didn't say it was overfunded: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46007623 (But I do think it's overfunded.) My only argument here is that I don't think $28k is unreasonable, particularly when viewed against the cost of private alternatives. OK, so we agree SFUSD is not underfunded ? We go to our attend…

Yes, it was extremely clear that your position is that it’s overfunded. OK, so we agree SFUSD is not underfunded? No, we don’t, I just wasn’t trying to make that point. There’s absolutely debates to be had about SFUSD, including how they spend their budget (personally I would make big cuts at the central office and redistribute to the schools), but the thought that $28k/kid is too much in SF just isn’t grounded in re…

  personally I would make big cuts at the central office and redistribute to the schools
Amen.

  That number jumps to 65.4% for kids with college-educated parents, and 81.3% for grad school.
Do you think those kids are learning primarily due to their experience at school, or because their parents teach them? Anecdotally, whenever I've walked past Kumon centers during the weekend they seem busy, and when I was driving the other day I noticed Russian School of Math has added a new location.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#774

Post by mahogany »

only-one1701 wrote: post #567
JoshTriplett wrote: post #462

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> They're more awkward around kids their age, but far less awkward around adults. They know how to speak and act, in large part. This is another argument that "by age" is not the best way to find one's academic or social peers. Some people in 2nd grade should be in high school. Some people in high school should be in 2nd grade. (And, academically, sometimes that's different by subject; some people need to be in 2nd g…

This is one of the most insane comments I’ve ever read on a hackernews story. Age is very much important when finding one’s social peers as a child.

Assuming you are in the US, consider that your perspective may be influenced by the modern (since second half 20th century) education system which so strictly stratifies by age. It actually is much stranger to me that we would expect peers to be exact age. There is a lot to learn from older kids, or even other (non-teacher, non-parent) adults.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#775

Post by braaileb »

HaZeust wrote: post #458
emtel wrote: post #444

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It absolutely is. If you are well equipped to navigate the adult world, you place yourself in hand-picked groups of people. I do not work with, socialize with, or live near a random sample of the population, and I highly doubt most people reading this thread do either!

Yeah but how do you LEARN the ability to do that? To keep that practice always in your mental backburner, and remembering how important it is? Why, you learn it by seeing the impacts from those succumbed to negative influences they surrounded themselves with! You can't learn the application of hand-picking your people and environments if you don't first see the outcomes when such application is neglected, and underst…

I agree as someone homeschooled til college. I'm 30 and only just started taking it seriously when sussing out new groups

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#776

Post by rossdavidh »

rootusrootus wrote: post #325
rossdavidh wrote: post #131

My daughter is in college now, but we used a variety of private, part-time, and homeschooling approaches prior to that. One thing is that there are a lot of resources (e.g. independent teachers for subjects you don't know, co-ops for socializing, etc.), and the more people are doing it, the more true that becomes. My parents were both public school teachers, and yet we found ourselves home- and alternative-schooling…

> then there should be more introspection going on This assumes that the blame obviously lies with the schools. Basically everyone I know that homeschools does it because they disapprove of tolerance. Should the introspection lead schools to embrace segregation again? It is going to be hard to bring people with such wildly different viewpoints together in harmony.

Most of the homeschoolers I know in Austin were basically hippies who found the public schools to be too authoritarian and intolerant of diversity (for example, banning dyed hair). I don't know which homeschoolers you were seeing, but it doesn't match what I saw here.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#777

Post by WrongAssumption »

fzeroracer wrote: post #715
WrongAssumption wrote: post #370

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Home schooled kids walk down sidewalks, go to concerts, go grocery shopping. Most workplaces are highly filtered. The whole interview process is specifically geared towards filtering out undesirable people.

> Most workplaces are highly filtered. The whole interview process is specifically geared towards filtering out undesirable people. This just isn't true or is born from a standpoint of extreme luck. Like have you genuinely paid attention to the people you work with? Coworkers, CEOs, the stuff people say in slack channels or the things people gossip about at work? The only way I think someone can genuinely hold an opi…

It's absolutely undeniable that interviewing is meant to filter out undesirable behavior. What in the world do you think it is? So many people cannot just walk in and start working next to you, very few will be selected.

You are pointing out behavior that is different, but not undesirable. Which is not being discussed. i.e., kids who distrust other kids learning is undesirable. As would people who create hostile work environments, or are inefficient, or unreliable, or don't have the right connections.

In my place of work people nearly universally went to top end universities, a much larger proportion than the normal population have phds. you think that's random? And more locally if you work on a sales team you are going to be hired to work directly with people that have certain shared traits that make them effective sellers. It's so obvious that interviewing is an active filter I'm not even sure what to do to convince someone that thinks otherwise.

I'm not sure how you equate any of that to workplace politics or gossip. Even if it was relevant, the fact that it is not a perfectly effective filter doesn't make it not a filter.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#778

Post by gosub100 »

array_key_first wrote: post #448
hereme888 wrote: post #234

The biggest misunderstanding I hear year-over-year is homeschoolers are "not exposed to the real world". Isolation exists for some, but my extensive interaction with homeschoolers is they are immersed in healthy communities, hand-picked by parents to keep away problem children. Who would plant a flower next to a sick or hostile one? Parents of healthy children should give 0 s*ts of societal/political pressure against…

My general experience is that homeschool children have self esteem and confidence issues precisely because they've been around 'hand picked' people... forever. They've never experienced assholes, or people who think their personality is grating, or whatever. Thick skin needs to be built up, to a degree. I'm not saying bullying is good, but being exposed to the unwashed masses definitely can be.

It's false to think that you can only learn to handle assholes if you experience them at a young tender age.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#779

Post by MarsIronPI »

casey2 wrote: post #637
Izikiel43 wrote: post #187

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Seattle schools have that issue. After covid a bunch of kids were moved to private schools, and SPS (the organism in charge of school) complained and blamed parents on having money and not wanting to mix with the riff raff and other bs. When they actually asked the parents why their children weren't returning after covid, it was because SPS decided to axe the advance/gifted programs they had for kids, among other edu…

The evidence shows that the gifted program is just racist. It's not surprising that the descendants of Europeans do better on European cultural artifacts like math and science, canonical western literature. "Gifted" is an apt name. They are students that have been gifted cultural knowledge before others so they can pretend to be special. I'd argue that most "gifted" students are inherently dumber since they uncritica…

> It's not surprising that the descendants of Europeans do better on European cultural artifacts like math and science

Granted, our current global math and science traditions are European, but math and science in and of themselves are absolutely not European. They are universal. As in, you could literally be raised on a different planet by a different species and math would still be math, physics would still be physics.

Re: Homeschooling hits record numbers

#780

Post by chongli »

BeFlatXIII wrote: post #768
chongli wrote: post #595

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have a math degree. I have been volunteer tutoring high school kids in math for 9 years. When a student comes to me for help I can always tell if their teacher has math anxiety. They teach the students extremely rigid methods and refuse to allow alternative approaches to solve the problems. They enforce this with grading and penalize students who don't toe the line. Some of the methods these teachers use are incred…

I wish there was a way to filter out those dumb-dumbs from the teaching profession. Stop ruining students’ future math ability.

There isn't. That's why homeschooling is taking off. People invest absolutely everything into their childrens' future. They're tired of seeing that investment wasted by subpar teaching and dysfunctional schools.
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