Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

The panopticon design was originally intended for schools too, as well as other institutions:

> Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums. He devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison, so the term now usually refers to that.

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon

Whether it’s friendly and encourages healthy development is another question.

I’m 35 now, so, millennial; for additional context I was brought up in a city called Coventry which is a city that was in decline during that period. (just like most of the north of the UK following Thatcher’s closing of the mines).

As a consequence of this experience, though, I saw that I wasn’t exactly entirely unique either, as there were other children treated as I was and we sought each other out. So I know that while my experience is not universal: that it is at least shared by a handful of people within my schools alone. - I would hazard to guess more outside of my school have these experiences too.

I'm 34, grew up in London, went to state primary school and private secondary school. dijit's account of schooling ressonates strongly with me.

> Being in tech doesn't make you a hacker.

Agreed. "Tech" includes a lot of people who are not hackers.

It's worth pointing out though that the "hacker" types who go with the flow are in many cases doing so motivated by pragmatism and cynicism. They don't really believe in management or in the company or the product, but they gotta stick around until their shares vest or whatever.

Speaking for a friend.

> 150 years ago, the average person was illiterate

Not true in the case of the US, which famously adopted a culture of universal literacy earlier than the rest of the world. By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history; they took literacy very seriously for complicated historical reasons. Their book consumption per capita was also the highest in the world by a very large margin back in those days, which lends evidence.

It may or may not be relevant to your point, but at least in the US the idea that the average person was illiterate is ahistorical. They were the best read population in the world 150 years ago, and took some pride in that.

Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going?

Schooling didn’t fix all that. There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications… the list goes on and on and on. Some of these things contributed major improvements to the average person.

Advances in medicine and nutrition, for example, contributed to sharp declines in early childhood mortality and morbidity. Advances in reproductive health care (along with everything else) led to huge declines in birth rates. Smaller families have more resources and attention available for each child.

Other advances had less of an impact but still add up when combined. Widespread access to refrigeration improved nutrition and reduced spoilage, allowing increased consumption of meat. More meat means taller, stronger, healthier children.

On the other hand, schooling hasn’t improved all that much in 150 years. You can find lots of writing samples and old exams for schools from back then. The bigger difference is that children stay in school much longer and have less need to rapidly enter the workforce in order to support the family. This last factor is a product of many of the advances listed above.

150 years ago people could absolutely read.

> schooling fixed all that

Not globalization, industrialization, and urbanization?

>less connected to the world around them

In what way do you mean this?

>Why can't it keep going?

Because an educated populace is harder for the ultrarich to control and abuse, because an educated populace with free time can revolt against those in power, and because as a consequence of those two things ultrarich conservatives have consolidated ownership of media and used it to defund education and convince the population that funding education is bad.

>Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going?

Schooling has fixed all that, and still works just fine. Just not in America, because that country is rapidly self-destructing. Schooling is still working fine in the rest of the world.

The well known adage of “buy the cheapest house you can afford in the most expensive neighborhood” is a sign that is what many think. The rat race to make sure your kids are in league with other parents of similar or higher stature is a huge contributor to home price dynamics.

"Expulsion works."

There really seems to be two kinds of public schools. One is willing to expel students who are violent and disruptive and this allows the students who are willing and able to learn to do so. The other refuses to expel violent and disruptive students and they make it nearly impossible for the willing and motivated students to actually learn.

After spending some time on the teachers subreddit I completely understand why so many people are choosing to homeschool. The amount of in-classroom abuse -- verbal and physical -- in addition to the entitled parents is shocking.

I have friends who were teachers in San Francisco unified School district who quit because students were literally attacking and breaking the bones of teachers and not being expelled.

It was a really hard choice for them because they were a bleeding heart liberal and wanted to use their PHD to help the underprivileged

> Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works.

Our local education superintendant _in_ _his_ _program_ _document_ is saying that he will go after any teacher attempting to impose discipline in a "community inappropriate manner".

So basically, nobody gets expelled.

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I'd add at least a 3rd group: Parents of kids with sensory (e.g. autism) or behavioral issues that are incompatible with learning at a school.

Certainly a biased view of religious home schoolers. Most of my religious friends who homeschool are college educated and many have postgraduate degrees. Some do disbelieve evolution, or at least disdain it a bit. Pretty much all of them are motivated people however. Of course that's just my little bubble.

There is another issue. Kids in the first group can get an incredible academic intellectual education, AND be emotionally and socially stunted. I have directly observed this, unfortunately. It also happens in very liberal, high-end, private schools.

A few weeks ago while giving a talk to some business school students, I was shocked to find most of the students and children of the faculty were homeschooled for K-12. This was a Baptist-affiliated university. I really had no clue this was so prevalent amongst evangelicals.

The way this is written seems to imply that religious people don't have similar (or the same) reasons as secular people.

There is also abusive parents who want their kids to be isolated and do not want social services to get involved.

It’s easier to see with kids who have stronger behavioral or learning needs.

I was a 3rd grade teachers aide and I saw the distinction first hand. A gifted child was given advanced textbooks and space to work at his own pace. The teacher didn’t really teach much, but the child was learning.

Conversely there was another kid who just got headphones to watch videos in the back of the room. I guess learn st his own pace, except the videos didn’t actually seem educational to me. I think it was mostly just done to keep him preoccupied.

>Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students

If you really believe this, then sue your school district. In my area, there was a district where parents believed high performers were not getting the necessary resources and through a combination of legal pressure and partnership with the school district, made it a priority in the same way that district had prioritized education for other specialized needs. Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.

This is exactly the point of the article.

I don’t want my kid in a classroom where everything has to be repeated in Spanish. It’s already this way for school meetings and it slows information sharing down to a crawl.

If there was mandatory English and Spanish in elementary school classrooms I would consider home schooling.

Outside of certain fields (skilled trades primarily) my children will not need to be proficient in Spanish to be successful in the United States. It’s a nice to have and should not slow down everything else.

The teachers in this school don't speak Spanish. The Spanish speaking children are struggling, and the rest of the kids cannot proceed at the same rate.

I'm not pretending to have solutions, and I'm certainly empathetic for all involved. Just stating the reality that this is a suboptimal learning environment.

My kid is in a program where they spend half the day, and learn half the subjects, in a language that most of the students didn’t initially speak at all. They pick it up and do quite well.

I think you missed the point of the parent, which is that ~1/4 of the students are dead weight at the cost of the rest of the class. It isn't "misguided" if their experience is different than yours.

If your outcome is students that are more capable at languages but less capable in virtually every other subject, is the result really "more capable and prepared students"? I'm not opposed to bilingualism but you're lying to yourself if you think this comes at zero cost to at least some students.

Forgive me, but with machine translation becoming nearly a solved problem — why would kids spend years of their lives learning new languages anymore? By the time they grow up, won't that be a rather useless skill — except perhaps in very nuanced contract negotiations?

> 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.

Doctors aren't sure if I have ADHD or Major Depression or Bipolar II (I've been diagnosed and attempted to be treated for all three), but this fits into my experience.

I was consistently frustrating to my high school teachers, because I was clearly learning the material, but I wouldn't do my homework, and I'd get bored during class, and as a result I would get bad grades. I don't think the teachers took any joy in giving me a bad grade, but they were kind of forced into it because I didn't really fit into the bureaucratic mold that they needed me to fit in.

This eventually led to me almost flunking out, and eventually dropping out of my first attempt at university. I did eventually finish my bachelors, but it was at Western Governors University (WGU), which feels almost tailor-made for the ADHD-brained people.

I'm not sure what the solution is, but the American GPA system still kind of gives me anxiety when I think about it.

ADD/ADHD was over-diagnosed for a long time. Why are you so sure all the people you mention have it vs other explanations? What is it you think makes ADHD brains special?

I did the same math comparing portland with suburb schools (around portland and seattle) and came to the same conclusion. But one other thought is when the money goes to the mortgage, you get to keep the wealth after (assuming you sell to downsize at some point).

IME private schools also tend to be in more expensive areas, so you will either still have to pay more for housing, or spend a lot of time and transportation costs to get between home and school. Plus friends from school will live further away.

And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district.

>In states where property taxes fund schools, ... b) live in a school zone with high real estate values

Here's some tangential anecdata.

I'm in Oregon, the county I live in pays for the local schools through property taxes. More than half of the tax goes to the schools if I recall.

Anyway, that's not the fun part. The fun part is one of the schools needs(wants?) a new roof. Sounds reasonable, here are the unreasonable parts: They want to raise funds with additional taxes, because they refuse to budget and earmark money for it. They also said they need(want?) several million dollars to do it. The taxes would also be used by the county to buy school-issued bonds from the school to fund the new roof, rather than directly using the tax dollars.

Unsurprisingly, the county measure to introduce that new tax failed during the election in November with a resounding laugh.

The entire way our schools are operated begs some very hard questions.

Yeah, I moved house recently. The #1 factor for picking the house was the good high school 500m away.

Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service.

We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively failing to teach kids for those few years. Meanwhile the public schools which can't be choosy will end up with fewer resources and have worse outcomes for the kids who have parents who can't afford private transportation to the few nicer, choosier voucher schools.

Even if there were more ways to "vote with your wallet" is abundantly clear that a lot of parents, respectively, (a) couldn't care less anyway, and (b) can't actually tell a good charter or voucher school from a bad one.

When the purpose of schooling is ensuring a civic floor amongst citizens the effectiveness of things like the home school co-ops mentioned can't come at the expense of population at large unless we wish to surrender the republican form of government for something else.

> A free market fixes anything

https://bitworking.org/news/2008/01/the-free-market-fairy/

TIL, thank you for sharing that.

Btw, I'm trying hard to think of places (today) where "Voice" works. For instance, in a corporate setting, I can personally attest that it does not.

Perhaps there are some "small-scale" contexts where it does work (HOA?)

What you see with that result is way more complicated than just "charter schools working."

https://www.self-directed.org/resources/research

They're talking about the division between Gymnasium, Realschule, and Hauptschule. It's actually state to state nowadays whether they have separate schools or Gesamtschulen, but I understand even in Gesamtschulen, in many Bundesländer there's some internal separation.

Where are you in DE, that this is unknown to you? In Köln just 15 years ago I knew parents who had the horror scenario: a 4th grade teacher who quietly believed that girls shouldn't go to university. They switched their daughter schools that year.

I guess he is talking about the three school types you can go to after elementary

The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization. They don’t learn anything substantive about the founding U.S. cultures (big differences between Puritans and Jamestown settlers). They don’t study European history as a required course so they know almost nothing about how the modern world came to be (Westphalian nation states, etc). And they learn almost no world history beyond ancient civilizations (native Americans, ancient Egyptians, etc).

I spend $33,000 a year on my daughter’s education and she was telling me about some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe—but she has no idea what the Magna Carta is, or what the political structure was of the UK that we declared independence from, who Plato is, etc. My mom was more educated as a girl in a desperately poor Muslim country in the 1950s than my daughter in an affluent DC region private school.

My daughter's middle school science class spent a month and a half chewing through water and rock cycle. I don't think geology is in her future.

> I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.

Really? I remember the Civil War being a unit (significantly less than a semester) in US History, which was one class in my sophomore year of high school.

Please try to be civil. I mentioned phonics, do you agree with what I said on it or not?

Depends on area. Portland schools have plenty of money but still struggle. Administration and retirement perks eat up most of the budget. In a sense its that they are not a business that leads to that kind of issue.

But ultimately its a complex issue. eg voucher systems would resolve the above issues, but create entirely new sets of problems which may be worse along the way.

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".

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.

The cost and timeline to evaluate quality is completely different; I can get multiple opinions for my possessions, and utilities are fairly objective to evaluate (and the cost to do so is small relative to the scale of the operation).

Schools are limited for choice, expert evaluation is limited, outcomes are potentially unclear... That's before you get into issues with the politics of a teacher or problem students.

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.

It's really not that different.

I have some friends who live in area with the bad water quality... They end up drinking/cooking with store-bought water, instead of city-provided one from the tap.

When I need electrician/plumber/general contractor/etc..., I choose one based on recommendations and reviews.

If you know (say from conversations with other parents) that your local school is bad, why would you send your kids there? It is like choosing an electrician with bad reviews only because their office is next door to you, or living in bad-water area, drinking city water and getting sick every week.

Excellent point. Comment updated for accuracy.

We live in a social climate where we can't even assert ourselves of someone's gender based on their name out of fear from a very local special interest group that has far reaches into public education system and this is another big reason why parents who can't afford private school opt for home schooling.

The fact that parent had to edit their comment and could not call a man a he answers the article's question very well.

> Today he struggles to talk to girls not because he's afraid of being rejected but because he's afraid of being reported.

Why would anyone be reported to any authority figure for speaking to girls?