Home schooling was the best thing my parents did for my education and social development. Surprisingly, all they really had to do, is let me do basically whatever I was interested in. They would answer questions and provide resources for learning when I asked for them, but not a lot of structure or forced lesson plan. I think it worked out pretty well for me. I say this as a kindergarten dropout who attended college at age 16, managed a 3.89 GPA, and have a fairly successful career in software for the last 20 years. I am not particularly great at public speaking but I have absolutely no problem interacting socially. Public school can be hell for a lot of kids and it's unfortunate that so many are subjected to such a broken system.
I was only home schooled, part time, for science and math in 8th grade. I had failed algebra 2 years in a row and really falling behind. I had been to private school, public school, and a charter school.
In one year of home schooling, my dad was able to get me from barely understanding functions to solving systems of equations, and also got me fluent in spreadsheets for data analysis.
He was a Biochemistry undergrad, and he also got me to balancing stoichiometric equations by the end of the year.
From my perspective it was really nice to move at my own pace. If I had trouble understanding something, we could slow down and really focus on things.
I'm someone who plans to homeschool and thinks it can work well I'm surprised so many claim it's not possible for home schooled children to develop socially.
As a person who's been homeschooled how does it feel when people make the assertion that the schooling you had must cause socialization problems?
I think no one claims it is not possible. The problem is, if you live somewhere, where everyone is going the normal way - then all the normal kids socialising will happen in school and you stay the outsider. You won't even see them most of the time, depending on the area.
But when you are connected to a couple of families doing it close by and you do manage that the kids can actually learn and play together on a regular base, then there is no problem at all.
I don't usually speak up about it but I feel that home schooling can be so beneficial (at least for some children) that I sometimes try to at least push back on the argument. The thing is, every situation is different and what works for some won't work for others, that is precisely the reason to consider home schooling - it allows far more flexibility than other options. Learning can be much more effective when it's self-directed, topics taken in an order and at a pace that is suited to the individual.
As for socializing, it definitely helps to know a few other home schooling families with kids of a similar age.
Public school is one of the few places and times in life where people are forced to be closed in a room with people they don't like at best, or suffer systematic violence at worst, with no chance to just leave.
Would be funny to see workplaces try to implement some of the weird practices schools do, like shuffling people around into random groups that may have built zero social rapport and have zero idea of each other's skills, and make them complete a project in a few days.
Being forced to be in a room and work with people who may not like you or you may not like I think is great for a developing child.
It teaches resiliency, builds mental strength, and can develop strategies on how to work with people someone may not get along with.
Taking out extreme bullying or worse, we need to stop sheltering the younger generation else they’ll, on average, become less able to handle stressors later in life.
The key part of this equation, to my armchair thinking, is having parents who are active in teaching the child what strategies to employ in difficult situations, and teachers that mediate to ensure nothing gets out of hand.
Working with people you don't get along with instead of daring to walk out and find a place where you'll work with people you enjoy working with might be an anti-skill though.
True, you need to have self-confidence and good self esteem to not put yourself through that.
I think verbally standing up for yourself builds that, and in a classroom environment it can be a way where you can’t escape and need stand up for yourself or others.
You don’t want to work with people who you don’t get along with, but at the same time, you shouldn’t let a couple people ruin an otherwise great workplace
(I understand there are times where even 1 person can taint an entire work experience, and it’s not straightforward to simply stand up for yourself due to inter work dynamics. And in those cases, finding a new department or job all together may be best course of action.)
I think sports, or martial arts, or just letting kids run free in a playground are better environments for that. Sitting in a class with a teacher setting the rules will ensure that only the most scheming or socially machiavelian kids have resources to apply or avoid violence.
I think the issue often is that this an accidental byproduct of the school experience for many.
There’s little or no intentional teaching of these things.
Definitely. I think there are times that schools are more valuable as social environments, teaching people how to act in society (to an extent), than some of the class material that is taught.
I would play soccer after school, and we had this one team mate who was home schooled.
Despite me being awkward and such, he didn’t get some social queues, and would either be mean or hurt kids not knowing the difference between joking around and poking fun, and just going too far.
Not nearly the case for all home schooled kids, but I think parents need to take extra attention to putting the child in social activities with their peers more so than a school-based parent would.
> The key part of this equation, to my armchair thinking, is having parents who are active in teaching the child what strategies to employ in difficult situations
The parents are the crucial part. It's my job as parent to be active in my kids education. The school, is just part of that. Making sure, my kids is in the right school, in a safe environment, and enjoying the process, are my tasks too. As parents, you are people managing your kids in the school.
Fully agree. I went through a few school systems, from a wealthy public school to a less fortunate city public school.
Each have their own problems, but common amongst them were parents that were either mentally absent, or physically absent.
In these cases, kids either ended up doing drugs and racing cars on windy roads, sometimes crashing into trees while high. Or getting into gangs or violence and having a record before 18.
You see it already in the elementary schools. In Germany, specifically, where you have different schools systems like and Hauptschule, Oberschule or Gymnasium, quite often kids that don't qualify to Gymnasium have parents that don't get involved in school topics, don't control home work, don't read with their kids, etc.
> like shuffling people around into random groups that may have built zero social rapport and have zero idea of each other's skills, and make them complete a project in a few days
That's not unusual. In a larger company that kind of thing happens every time a new project touches multiple teams. If you're involved in that project, you may get to work with people you've never seen before for a few weeks.
> Would be funny to see workplaces try to implement some of the weird practices schools do
The objective of a school (education/socialization) is totally different than a workplace. IMO Oranges x Apples comparison
> like shuffling people around into random groups that may have built zero social rapport and have zero idea of each other's skills, and make them complete a project in a few days.
Not everyone is software developer. You described exactly the working environment of police officers, doctors, civil servants or even people working in huge institutions like banks
Anecdote; I was home schooled. I know/have met probably 100-200 homeschooled people, mostly as a kid, in a large Catholic group, although a couple as an adult when I was getting my PhD.
The vast majority, probably > 90%, functioned just fine socially after reaching adulthood. The remainder were usually on the autism spectrum. I believe autistic children are probably over-represented among homeschoolers.
This "homeschooling results in poor social skills" trope is absurd and needs to stop. There are a number of other problems with homeschooling, among a number of upsides as well. But barring Branch-Davidian type social isolation, social skills are just not an issue.
> This "homeschooling results in poor social skills" trope is absurd and needs to stop. There are a number of other problems with homeschooling, among a number of upsides as well. But barring Branch-Davidian type social isolation, social skills are just not an issue.
I never understood that to be honest. Most of the people homeschooling their children that I know also participate in homeschooling groups where there is a lot of social interaction, as well as church/religious events etc. It maybe rather ideologically siloed, which can be a bit shocking when the child starts emerging from the silo, but that is different thing than having “poor social skills”.
> This "homeschooling results in poor social skills" trope is absurd and needs to stop.
I think it will stop shortly. Thanks to COVID the vast majority of the western world got to see what a version of homeschooling could look like and perhaps unsurprisingly, many found it to be as good for the mind as WFH is for adults and chose to keep their children homeschooling post-COVID. I know a ton of people who have done this. Soon it will be seen as just another option for education without the social stigma.
> vast majority of the western world got to see what a version of homeschooling could look like
Did they? I've only heard of what the experience looked like in 3 schools really, but all of them were essentially "same program, more homework, fewer lessons, all online". That seems very different to an actual homeschooling situation.
Indeed. The pandemic at-home schooling I witnessed was just a much worse version of regular school over zoom. It was very far removed from the homeschooling I was saw pre-Covid.
Home schooling is one of those topics where there seems to be a huge difference between theory and practice. The theory is great: You're the parent. You are motivated by educational outcome. You believe your children can get a better education than at public schools. You have the time, patience, and resources to do a better job at home. The outcome is better-educated kids who get to skip the (admittedly terrible) abuses of the public school system. For some homeschooled kids, the above is actually what happened. You'll find all their glowing reviews of home schooling in the comment section below.
In practice, at least in the USA, it's different. By and large (with exceptions, obviously), you are motivated by religious separatism. You are not worried about the quality of the education, but the content. You see the public school system as uninvited ideology and home schooling as a loophole you can use to avoid it. The outcome is worse-educated kids who skipped entire subjects and are not even remotely prepared for higher education.
My wife's "moms groups" are always pushing homeschooling, and the sales pitch is never the quality of education. It's always that you can avoid those nasty topics like sex ed and evolution and that you can use the Bible in all your classes. More recently, during and after COVID, the pitches also included avoiding "political indoctrination". I know multiple actual families who pulled their kids out of public school for religious and ideological reasons, but nobody who did so with a legitimate intention of providing a higher quality factual education. Obviously they exist and a few are posting here, but I'd be shocked if those were even 10% of cases.
I'll never forget this clip[1] interviewing a homeschool family, where the poor kid looks mortified that she doesn't know even basic 2nd grade math, with her mom smugly laughing about it. These products of home schooling are not posting their success stories on HN.
The practice is great too. Almost all studies and surveys done to date suggest that homeschoolers do better across pretty much every measured metric, and that this gap is widening over time to favor homeschooling even more. If you've ever heard about Bloom's 2-sigma problem, this should be unsurprising.
There are of course problems with survey data, but it's a huge mistake to think that homeschooling = the worst anecdotes you can find on TV.
> By and large (with exceptions, obviously), you are motivated by religious separatism.
This is not true. In the National Household Education Survey (2016), only 16% of homeschoolers said religious motivation was their primary reason, and only 5% moral education was their primary reason. Dissatisfaction with school academic quality and concern about environment at school were the two primary drivers.
Hence the quotes around “rights” — if you live in a country where rights are granted by a legal system, you have no rights at all, simply privilege in a will-to-power system.
I'd suggest that this perspective is tainted by the association in the United States between home schooling and religious separatism. Home schooling in Europe (and in some places in the US) is much more often about parents coming together to provide a safer, less structured, less authoritarian, more project based space for their kids to learn. Check out the unschooling movement - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Unschooling#:~:text=Unschoolin....
It’s also tainted by authoritarian regimes indoctrinating people to believe the only ones capable of teaching the children are the aforementioned regimes.
I know many home schooled children. I see no evidence of poor social development. In fact I see more emotional scars left by bad interactions at public schools than I do from homeschooling.
Careful about your experience representing a biased sample. For children who had poor social development likely resulted in less likelihood of knowing you at all.
If that was truly the reason why, and not a convenient excuse, then governments would state mandate social activities and not take children from their parents, which would be just as abusive.
Instead, it’s all about mandating government control over children.
In many cases public school cripples a child’s social development and leaves them with anxiety, shame, and other social hang ups for the rest of their life.
It's horrifying that parents decide to isolate their own children and ensure they are only exposed to that subset of knowledge that the parents themselves are comfortable with, in an attempt to mold them into their own likenesses.
I think the main problem might be that, ok, while there are possibly a lot of people who would try their best to give their kids an education, there’d probably also be a big percentage of people who wouldn’t bother at all.
So basically the kids would have no chances to learn, socialize and compete at all.
So
a) of course schools should be good and safe, but
b) people who homeschool should imho show that they put in the effort required to provide for a good education at least in some sense.
Otherwise some kids would live in squalor and would have no way out. I always thought that was the original motivation for general school duty, all cynicism about the actual implementation and its weaknesses aside.
The problem with homeschooling is that it makes it very easy to hide all kinds of child abuse. In government-run or at least government-audited schools, teachers (who are often mandatory reporters) have a chance to spot signs of sexual, emotional or physical abuse - children who are homeschooled have no one to turn to.
Additionally, government-run/-audited schools have a mandate to actually teach children science and facts, whereas homeschooling parents or religious cults often have absolutely zero requirements on what they have to teach their children - no requirements about even basic sexual education, biology, history, maths or ethics. These children often enough are so under-educated the only employment they can find is at some sort of religious cult.
> Additionally, government-run/-audited schools have a mandate to actually teach children science and facts,
There's mandates to teach what the government claims to be facts as facts.
Back in the 90s, it was regular curriculum to teach everyone to eat all the breads and pasta and to limit proteins and really limit fats. None of that was fact, but based on incomplete science and lobbying from the farm industry to continue a stable corn market.
Governments are not the authority on what is fact, science, or fiction. We saw that pretty plainly in 2020 when governments and scientists changed opinions on acceptable social practices based on political situations (eg. Church services were unacceptable, but BLM street parties, protests, and riots were acceptable)
Agreed. Allowing children to sleep at home is also very dangerous. Not to mention spending unsupervised time during their waking hours with parents and family members without regular government audits. Thank you for standing up for children.
I didn’t say any countries like that existed? Though it wouldn’t shock me.
OP said that “homeschooling without audits is child abuse”, and I was pointing out that that is disingenuous since a theoretical public school without audits would be even worse for children.
I agree that unaudited homeschooling can result in abuse, but the solution is not to ban homeschooling. It is to create a structure that supports an individual’s right to care for their children. That makes sure the child reaches certain age-dependent markers while giving the parent (and thus, the child) the freedom to explore the world how best suits them.
Your comment read a lot more like you were making a factual comparison rather than a theoretical argument…but I do agree that if schools were to theoretically not be audited then that would be bad.
I do find the second half of your post a lot more compelling though. That’s what you should have lead with in your earlier comment. :)
> It’s a sad statement that people are surprised that they have the “right” to educate their own children.
I am not sure how this is handled around the world but in German speaking countries there is a "Schulpflicht"/compulsory education.
So by that definition if you homeschool your children (by taking them out of the public school system) you not only have the right to educate them, you have the duty to do so.
I am not sure how it is elsewhere, but the home schooled people I got to know fall into two categories:
1. Kids with rich parents who had the funds to get the right people
2. Kids with parents belonging to some religious sect that didn't want other kids to influence theirs
Both of them can have true deficiencies when it comes to interacting with "regular people" in their lives after
Curious, I am not a German but from Austria (also German speaking, but a tenth of the sice and a different monarchic history for many centuries, so different in culture as well). Here it is possible to homeschool your kids, but you have to demonstrate to the school board that what the kids learn is comparable to what a public school delivers. Also, they can take that right away if they feel parents are not fulfilling their duty: https://hslda.org/post/austria
I've come to think a lot about home schooling. As I have grown up, taught myself a bunch of interesting things, and been exposed to different kinds of approaches and teachers, I've become pretty passionate about pedagogy. I realise I probably only see small parts of the picture, and like the article says, I would quickly come to respect teachers a lot more if I decided to have a go at it. Still, I wonder.
The most obvious downside is probably that the social dimension of public schools is hard to replace. But imagine you're five friendly families, where the different parents have different academic strengths. You all decide to work 80%, and rotate from day to day which parent couple teaches the children. Wouldn't that be something?
You'll be pleased to hear it is something! There's a whole school system designed around this approach - parents as staff, non-directive learning, secular, democratic, no age stratification, school as an Ivan Illich style workshop for learning. They're called Sudbury Valley and they've been around since the 1960s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sudbury_Valley_School
As someone who had a very rough experience of school (the social side being the worst part), it was inspiring to see a place where kids could truly be themselves and pursue their interests (often to levels far beyond their 'grade year' in traditional education).
My kids go to a primary school which operates a bit like this, in Melbourne. It's about 30 kids / 20 families ish (it's hard to practically scale consensus decision-making beyond certain limits).
It's operated as a parent-run co-op. It's also government funded which on the bright side means it has to meet all the relevant standards and regulations... with the downside that we have to meet those standards. The ever increasing admin burden from the education department is a problem.
The regulations are really designed for larger entities.
You have to be committed. There are a lot of meetings (far more than in a regular school), each family does "time on" once a week where parents come in and be part of the kids education. There's also rosters for cleaning, regular working bees and so on.
The coop employs some qualified teachers who work alongside the parents. They're amazing - and also an interesting source of tension, as the teachers have professional obligations / are bound to government curriculum, which often conflicts with how parents would prefer things be done.
It's a lot of work (and a lot of interpersonal work and conflict resolution), but absolutely worth it for our family so far.
>The most obvious downside is probably that the social dimension of public schools is hard to replace.
I bet it's not that hard to replace. There are opportunities for interactions outside of school. Sports teams are a common example.
There are many after school clubs that children can join to be exposed to other children.
If you only have one child I could see them having limited contact with children during their school day but often siblings provide lots of opportunities to learn how to get along with others.
And why not see which parents teach the best by measuring test results? And then have that person teach full time and the rest can work regular jobs again and oh wait it’s schools again isn’t it
Who would you like to teach you business: someone who actually founded their own business or an academic? Who would you like to teach you surgery, a surgeon or someone who was taught just enough book knowledge to be considered a teacher? Programming by someone who never programmed? Math by someone who never used math to solve a problem in their life?
There are good teachers out there but in general I'm skeptical. Ideally teachers should have at least some real-world knowledge before becoming teachers. Unfortunately where I live teachers are a licensed occupation and you need a 5 year degree for a job with very little pay, so that by itself filters out a ton of experts who might be willing to teach.
Well, I think it's clear that teaching is a separate skillset: one that, to excel in, requires a bunch of skills that are not common. Especially when teaching below, say, 8th grade, where most of what is being taught is relatively common knowledge, I think specialized teaching skills in the hands of a gifted teacher can outpace experts in their field. (Certainly some of the experts I know have trouble expressing their expertise even to other knowledgeable people in their field, let alone children)
That being said, I think in general most children learn like a sponge when given even a tiny bit of encouragement, so it may be moot.
I don't think teachers are necessarily the main problem with the education system. The one-to-many (20+) rote, fixed curriculum, unpersonalized, forced aspects are worse. Kids provably don't learn much in school.
Let's also scale it up to hundreds upon hundreds of kids so now everyone is just a number. Let's add a school board that ignores parents, meaning parents no longer have any real say any more.
Let's add a teachers union that protects bad teachers, even to the point of keeping pedophiles in schools.
Let's close schools for 4 months so kids can work on the fields in the summer and forget everything when they return.
Public school teachers are not required to be parents with children in that system, and their compensation and placement are not based predominantly on merit.
School in the US and broadly in the western model is based off of the Prussian national education model. It is not designed to educate your kids. It is designed to indoctrinate your kids.
I say this without all the negative connotations associated with these words. It can be a positive thing, a state has to nation build to be successful, and for that they have to instill a uniform culture and ideology onto a probably very diverse population.
But when you look at school in the US and you wonder why we aren't taught to do taxes, manage our finances, manage a household, why so many people graduate school without the ability to read well and whatever other problems you see, once you understand that the goal is not education, you'll get it. These problems are the result of a system as odds with itself because it is designed for indoctrination and some people try to use it to educate. It doesn't work well.
I believe, with the internet and the revolution in information availability we have lived through and take for granted, school is basically obsolete and is a legacy system. I think homeschooling is the way to go. And you can actually educate your kids, instill them with your philosophy, create unique individuals, teach them critical thinking.
As someone who was homeschooled, my own experience was that its much more efficient in terms of learning per hour, you can get top marks in standardised tests averaging just a few hours a week. However, it requires parental effort to ensure proper socialisation (club involvement etc) and you probably should find other families doing something similar to socialize your children with.
First, one should really think about where his beliefs about education come from. Then, once realized they basically come from nothing, you can throw them away and start anew
We will home school our children. They're not old enough but my wife is not planning to go back to work until all our children have completed their home schooling.
We've seen friends do an amazing job and their children have done very well academically and socially.
I have friends who work in our public school system. They tell me how hard it is. Most of their time is spent on a few problem kids. I respect what they do but think my wife can do better as she will be better resourced to teach when compared to one teacher with 30+ students.
It's our dream to give our children the best we can. We might sacrifice on our income but we think it's worth it.
I commend you. My wife and I homeschool our 7 (3rd just graduated) and it's a lot of work but we've found it worthwhile. I sincerely hope will too.
Homeschooling is not the right choice for every family but for those who are able, I encourage it.
The biggest mistake we see new homeschooling families make is trying to replicate the public school experience (same class times, text books, tests, etc). I've never seen that succeed. Successful homeschooling is usually a very different dynamic and one of the greatest strengths is the ability to optimize everything to how the child learns best - while balancing that with time and effort constraints on the parents.
I love seeing my kids get excited about a concept, historical figure, or skill. When it happens, we run down that road as far as want to go. Watching their faces shine as the light bulb comes on is priceless. Helping them learn how to learn is one of the greatest joys I've had as a dad.
I was home schooled through my freshman year of high school. I have no intention of home schooling my children, but I’m always fascinated to listen to other adults in the process of talking themselves into it, because it gives me small a window into the headspace my parents and their peers were in when they made this consequential decision for their children. Some close friends are headed down this path, and while their reasoning is decidedly more secular, there are lingering echoes of the old Puritan impulse to flee from a fallen world.
If you’re considering home schooling yourself, I would just encourage you to consider that, like any product with a passionate fan base, there is a powerful echo chamber built up to reinforce your decision, so don’t expect to get a full accounting of the pros and cons from people on the inside. I’d also suggest to folks who have never been homeschooled themselves to spend some time reading through the experiences of adults who were homeschooled. Your kids deserve for you to make as clear eyed of a decision as you can about this.
> like any product with a passionate fan base, there is a powerful echo chamber built up to reinforce your decision, so don’t expect to get a full accounting of the pros and cons from people on the inside.
This is no more true than for people who send their kids to regular school. All of society is streamlined to do this. As soon as you attempt to home school, the vast majority of people will tell you it is akin to child abuse and you might be lucky enough to know a few other homeschooling parents who tell you otherwise but their voices will pale in comparison to the cacophony from the other side. Make no mistake that it is a massive leap of faith - not some easy decision made in an echo chamber.
My point is that there’s a selection bias among homeschool families. If you are talking them, you are talking to people who are very far along a path of commitment escalation who have a host of psychological incentives to validate their own decisions. I’m sure you’ve encountered many detractors. Your fortitude in tuning them out is a poor measure of the rigor of your decision-making.
I will also say, in my experience with homeschool families, the lifestyle attracts a disproportionate number of narcissists, as it offers a high degree of control over a captive audience to people with an inflated sense of their own abilities.
I’m not saying this is the case for you, and I’ve also certainly known many families who were motivated by special circumstances, individual needs, or just a desire for more freedom for kids who didn’t fit well into the public school system.
I would assert that the former is the modal case, and that parents looking to homeschool should critically examine their motivations and abilities. Unfortunately, the people who most need that reflection are usually the least inclined towards it.
I would expect home schooling to be more concerned with beliefs and public schooling to be more concerned with truth because it's always done for personal reasons in contradiction to normative reality.
I suppose I should feel reassured that home schooling does not challenge any truths?
Here in the US too many years ago, my personal experience with friends that were home-schooled up until 7th or 9th grades in school was that they were:
- nice, but not well-socialized (and high school was a terrible time to start socializing: having no established friends when everyone is in cliques!)
- smart and interested, but had gaps in their academic knowledge beyond math and English (science, social science, the arts)
- curious (not stunted by public schooling - a plus!), but less likely to question/distrust things, including other kids
- often more religious than the rest of us, but with less exposure to different faiths
Its frustrating to realize we've been at this task of raising and educating children for the better part of 250,000 years and we still haven't got the knack of it.
I think, as a species, we're in a pretty good place. Literacy rates are high, general knowledge is adequate.
Mostly, from what I can tell, if children aren't mistreated, are encouraged and helped along the way, they end up pretty okay regardless of how we characterize the process involved. Humans come curious and inquisitive from the factory, we mostly just need to get out of the way and fill in any accidental omissions.
It’s probably like mutual funds vs stock picking. some parents will do better and some will do worse. the child gains the interest money- if the parent is a bad stock then it’s bad in isolation…
schools are predictably mediocre but public/visible.
if the parent’s decision is driven by their own schooling experience and/or desire to change an aspect of society then i think it’s questionable to make the child an instrument of that.
While we're too busy to homeschooling, we love our children too much to do other than pay for tuition at a school that is committing acts of education on the kids.
I have plenty of conversations about the TWO genders, and the truth that "form follows function".
One hopes that the storm of folly raging in the culture consumes itself soonest.
Oh get over yourself. You’re little more than a username to me, I don’t give a shit about your kids, other than a general one about how all kids deserve care and respect from their parents. That’s your job, not mine.
My point is that ideology cuts both ways and it’s very easy to lose sight of the sharp edges in your own when you are endlessly focused on your enemy’s. I grew up deep in your ideology and have seen it play all the way out not only in my own life, but in my entire community and communities like mine (and yours). All I’m saying is that force-feeding your own ideas has a way of backfiring in the long run.
Amabo te… quit being a goofball and go have a conversation with your kids instead of threatening strangers on hacker news.
