Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?

The principal always told me "just walk away" and I said, "You fool, the bullies have legs".

The key thing that enables bullying is your being confined in a space with them. Bullying can leave scars that last a lifetime that will affect your employment, your relationships, your children, everything. Not least hearing complete crap from authorities primes you to distrust authorities unconditionally.

We pay for a private school, it's expensive yes and I know not accessible for all, but it's kind of the best of both worlds. You get to choose the school and it's a community vibe. It helps when the other kids, potential bullies, know your kid and know their parents talk to your parents. It also helps as the staff is acutely tuned in to things like this, and they have amazing ways of conflict resolutions. It's not difficult, it just requires some attention and thought. They reinforce golden rule type actions/behaviors/leading by example/etc. As an example, if one kid picks on another one, instead of detention - they will both be given a 'private talk' and then paired up on some activity. The result is, they were constructively scolded then had a chance to bond and become friends - and it works. It's never going to be fully eradicated, but it's amazing just how little there is and how supportive everyone is in trying to develop good humans.

They also assess the kids emotional maturity early on. Those that they feel are not ready to go from Kinder to 1st get a 'Primer' year. It's basically holding them back in Kinder but with a positive twist.

Tons of other benefits as the parents hold a lot of power (since we pay). But also, the quality of staff/teachers, and low ratios are quite a perk compared to our area's public schools which are poorly rated.

I went to public school myself, and while I was never bullied, I do think I was a target of bullies at some time. Any time I felt like someone was bullying me, I fought back and would often be disciplined under zero tolerance rules. That's how my parents taught me to deal with it, 'stand up for yourself boy' kind of thing. We've taught our kid not to hit and to be kind and he is, but that's exactly what I think would make him a huge target in a public school environment.

I forgot about the lack of personal property.

You couldn’t really own anything and had to prepare for anything nice to be stolen, or anything they looked dear to you (even if not nice) to be destroyed.

I heard of kids having their shoes stolen, but I never had that.

I’m sorry that happened to you, I hope you are doing better now. :(

This is a major reason (but far from the only reason) that we homeschool. Knowing what I know about the school system, about my own experience thereof, and about my kids' personalities, it would be grossly immoral for me to put them through it. The risk of long-term trauma would be too high.

There is some risk of their being isolated (but very low, since they are with other kids three days a week), and a slightly higher risk of missing chunks of learning (which we aim to mitigate in the obvious ways). But ultimately I'd rather my kids have a few gaps in their knowledge than be traumatized by the school system.

I grew up in Russia and I have a very similar experience emotionally, hating every second of my school life, but somehow I couldn't remember any particular horrors. It was just all so ridiculously sad and hopeless and boring, I couldn't stand listening unpassioned teachers talking about sili memorisation tasks the whole day and didn't feel like I fit socially either (even though I wasn't bullied) so it all felt like a torture.

Every public school I've been to has literally been built like a prison. Every student I ever met made the same comparison.

School was and remains a prison, that is why they build the gates so high.

Worse, its a prison with cult-like re-education towards elements of Marxism, without calling it that, in many cases. Its a spectrum so not all teachers are like that, but there are enough that it can be seen widely.

Most of this comes from teacher's followed recommendations made during conferences held by the National Teachers union, which has used many Marxism-based pedagogy while obscuring it.

These things are subtle to anyone who doesn't have some exposure to real life torture constructs, and how those constructs work (mechanism and means).

Schools are also failing to educate and provide people with the skills they need to succeed, the sole purpose for the school's centralized state-run existence.

The teachers exhibit qualities that any centralized system without a loss function has. They have no duty to investigate issues of performance with co-workers since absent an effective loss function (cutoff where you get fired), social standing and seniority become more important. In these types of collectivist systems, regardless of role, creating a hostile work environment hurts the group, and investigating issues creates a hostile work environment. They are all co-workers after all.

Social mental coercion also occurs towards the excellent teachers, since they make all the average teachers look bad. Those teachers then haze, backstab, and undermine in any way they can sabotaging and interfering while imposing social personal cost until the excellent leave, the ones that remain are the average, continually gravitating towards the least common denominator. In state-run institutions with free money, this becomes negative production value.

Sending and subjecting your children to brainwashing and torture is the greatest betrayal.

An example of one these subtle but effective techniques follows, its called the hot potato. It is one of many techniques.

A student is called out in front of the class and asked to answer a question, the question will be opinion based, and the teacher will reflect disapproval if answered incorrectly (in their opinion). These will be mixed in with fact questions to muddy the water so its unclear this is what they are doing.

This technique in pedagogy isolates the student called, making them anxious in front of their peers, often times because answering incorrectly has delayed be inevitable personal cost. At this age, they often don't have the biology to self-reflect or introspect to recognize the basis for why this is happening. They just feel anxious, and rightfully so.

The level of disapproval shown by the teacher results in driving two parallel processes. One that results in inducing bullying from the approval seeking students in that peer group, without the teacher needing to directly or explicitly take action. This bullying, or coercive shunning, is an ever present threat to the subject. The bullies having participated have (their own) consistency drive their efforts, with negative consequence. These are circular processes where both participants become the victim and perpetrator through induced behavior (as a result of structure).

Answering according to the torturer's opinion, forces inherent challenges of fighting your own psychology. It enables the consistency principle in psychology to warp the subjects mind over time (our identity largely remains consistent, which is based in this underlying cognitive bias we all have). What we write, and the words we use, even if we consciously don't agree with them will warp us towards agreement given sufficient repeated exposure and time.

You see this with used car salesmen when they ask innocuous, but carefully constructed questions seeking agreement, and once you answer (in any way but a specific way), they know they've got a sale excepting external factors.

The main principles of influence can be applied beneficially, or coercively. Robert Cialdini goes into these principles, and how they work.

Robert Lifton, and Joost Meerloo cover the reality of torture, how it actually works in their books written in the 1950s (with details from actual torture done by Mao, and the Nazi's).

The reality is, in the 1950s the limits of perception were found, and processes and techniques discovered that let you break and twist people. It started with torture, then a big issue with Cults, then it was used in AdTech and business process design to impose personal cost on the customer. It wasn't just used there, it spread widely, and its hard to find areas that have not in part been shaped by this to an individuals detriment.

The research was also not shared widely in whole either, its been repackaged to obscure the origins, such as conferences on pedagogy done by the Teacher's Union, or Game Design (within the Octalysis Frameworks), too many other places to count. The elements are there for those that know what to look for.

In general, all you really need to get this started are three elements for torture. Isolation, removal/lack of agency (unable to leave without causing loss, disadvantage or detriment), and cognitive dissonance; often where what is said isn't true, and loops back forcing the subject to engage in a endless loop of torture.

It caustically will break anyone down, and Social Media ensures Children can't limit exposure because of addiction triggers, and the lack of biology during Children's existing development to control addiction. The phone follows them everywhere they go, as it does for most of us. These things do break down everyone eventually, and quite a lot of the indoctrinated masses lack the ability to discern or recognize it is happening. Once broken and blinded you tend to stay blinded and broken excepting certain rare individuals.

Ironically, when people break down past a point they segment into the unresponsive dissasociate, or the psychotic seeking self annihilation. Two cohorts. The latter is often a semi-lucid state capable of planning. It seems to mirror objective characteristics seen in Active Shooters.

Rational thought under such psychological stress described breaks down fairly quickly.

You send your kids to school to receive the same tools that were provided to the parents in living a beneficial productive life. Many important tools are no longer taught, and in their place frameworks promoting inducement in false belief, practice, and ideology (towards nihilism) while blinding them to rational thought, have grown. You see this in the Woke cult, and many maoist/marxist inspired movements under adopted group names that change regularly to obscure and mislead.

These two things are why smart and intelligent parents are homeschooling. You don't send your children to Maoist re-education camps and expect them to be able to survive afterwards. The process destroys the individual psyche.

Even the intelligent may not know the process of what's happening, but they often more keenly discern and sense something being wrong and remove their kids from such environments, so long as they were paying attention and fulfilling their parental obligations (many today have or do not, unfortunately).

This was exactly my experience in the South too.

It's funny that society has the same issue - refusing to expel disruptive students, refusing to imprison or deport criminals, it's all the same.

Frustratingly, under pressure, Bridget Phillipson looks set to roll back most of those reforms.

It's not always anti aspiration. It's knowledge that the school system isn't doing anything for them.

Not being supported by the adults who pretend to be trustworthy is nearly as damaging as the bullying itself. Like you, I would be punished alongside the perpetrator even if I didn't throw a single punch or insult. This is extremely toxic because it completely breaks trust and causes children to lose faith in the system they're in, and they shut down. I know I did. I stopped telling anyone my problems because experience told me saying anything only lead to more shame.

The only true advice I could give to a child with bullying issues is physical violence - as fast as possible. It is sad. It doesn't take many humans to make school/life/work miserable.

> Worse, the punishment for being in a fight was the same whether you started it or you were just beaten up. If you made the fight get noticed, you got punished.

I'm not saying that this is anything close to optimal, but it should be noted that under this system (which is reminiscent of the way ancient Chinese criminal law worked, per Legal Systems Very Different from Ours[0]) people who get beat up should still report and take the punishment. Sure, you'll get punished for it once but you'll also build a solid reputation for not letting things slide, so it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to beat you up again.

[0] Except that the punishment back then for being involved in a crime (generally a theft or a swindle of some sort) was, guess what-- you got beat up.

I’m sorry you went through that.

I hope life has been kinder to you following this. :(

PTSD is misapplied quite a bit these days, though CPTSD (the C stands for complex) seems to be the most appropriate clinical definition for the kind of scattered traumatic damage people experience, especially from childhood.

Glad to know you've received the help that you needed and have been able to move on. I compartmentalized and put off working on my traumas for far longer than I should have. People underestimate how much a dysfunctional school environment can mess someone up even when the home environment is mostly healthy. I screwed up great relationships in large part because I still had trust issues and CPTSD triggers that I didn't even realize at the time.

No joke, I'd rather have only known the neighborhood kids growing up than have thousands of kids to socialize with while having fucked up things happen to me. So what if I wouldn't experience prom night? If it's not the right environment for me, then it's not worth it.

Also Grammar school (in the 1980s), I got lucky as I got in the 'express track' and did O-levels after 4 years not 5 so I went to uni at 17. Probably a good thing as some kids were total sh*ts and 5 years of them would have been awful

Wow, it seems like the UK education system is a very severe environment. Remember Anthony Hopkins saying the same thing about it being brutal, having received abuse from both the teachers and the other students.

Yeah, just from my perspective having gone through the US public schools, the schools here seem to be a lot more open and friendly (following the American stereotype). But at the same time, we probably have a lot lower standards in terms of learning, and also the US has a lot of variation in school quality.

I learned basically nothing in my k-12 public school but it was fun times.

Emotionally? It is really hard to top those times in high school.

It was the opposite of a prison for me. Like a garden of adolescent roses that had nothing to do with the real world other than the sweet smell of roses as an adolescent.

It is why I am glad to be child free. Anyone posting here is going to have a child that is better off than almost anyone who has ever lived.

I would suspect the best strategy in 2025 for anyone here is to not crush the creativity of the child. The only thing bad you can really do is to impose yourself too much on the child. The more hands off the better. The lighter the touch the better.

Yours skills are not what your child will need t+50 years.

It also says something about the quality of the "education" that you were able to (presumably) manage some sort of technical aspirations and career without the "required education".

I know the feeling.

> Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but ...

In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable.

Some of those screaming people probably cared about you and your future. Most of them just resented you, for highlighting the actual state of their society and schools. And perhaps making them doubt their own choices.

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.

In Missouri, high-school buildings use the same blueprints as state prisons. Why bother designing something custom? They serve the same purpose. They literally are prisons.

If a teenager fails to show up for school, a police officer will eventually show up to arrest their parents and place the teenager in the custody of a "foster family." Now both parent and teenager are imprisoned. And we are told this is freedom.

To make matters much much worse, children in state custody with the foster system are routinely exposed to all kinds of abuse. Many foster families operate like a profitable business where costs are minimized and care is entirely absent.

There's security checkpoints and police officers in bulletproof vests and carrying guns as well in some cases, because what if a school shooter shows up? Of course, when one does show up a hundred militarized police will show up and... do nothing, because what will the union do if one gets shot?

There were problems with the grammar school system as well.

They were created to provide a pathway to the middle class for bright children from working class families. But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.

Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".

In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.

For non-british readers; state-funded Grammar schools famously, were abolished.

(I’m being downvoted, but this just objective fact, and something my grandfather brings up commonly).

EDIT: according to a lot of HN comments; they still seem to exist but they aren't evenly distributed.

There certainly were none in my city.

Despite one being named a grammar school, it does not follow a grammar school curriculum: https://www.coventrypublicschools.org/schools/cgs

How messy.

"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.

> 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.

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

Administrators are constantly castigated for disciplinary actions, as the "throwing chairs" behavior is not evenly spread among the different cultures that students come from.

Different rates of suspensions leads to accusations of racism, and said accusations lead to Hail Mary attempts to make unequal rates equal, including forbidding any meaningful type of punishment for certain varieties of students.

If this sounds far fetched, public officials in Rotherham became objectively evil in their attempts to avoid racism accusations, "1400 children betrayed" is a extremely understated headline, if you want to learn more.

> Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem.

I don’t care whose problem it is, I’m not subjecting my kids to that kind of nonsense.

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.

> a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation

To have a great school district where housing isn't overly expensive is rare these days. I would have to guess it is hard to find a house in such a district unless you waive inpections and pay in cash.

> 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?

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.

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.

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

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.

Schools shouldn't teach neither evolution, nor creationism, nor any other origin story. Because it is something that doesn't matter at all – knowledge without value.

Worse is that the majority pupils around the world will be taught both the Abrahamic creation story, the origin of man according to evolution, and usually a third or even fourth creation story from local pre-Abrahamic mythology. In the same school and from the same teacher. Talk about confusion of the highest order!

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.

Those groups do overlap.

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.

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).

>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.

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.

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

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?)

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/

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.

There is a very big difference between a bilingual school and a school where half the kids don't understand the language that math is being taught in.

Perhaps you shouldn't have a knee jerk reaction of getting yourself irritated then. The GP clearly said 1/4 students don't speak English, not 1/4 students speak one more language besides English.

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?

Yes.

And many made it work in the face of adversity.

Many others did not make it work just due to bad luck or timing.

But districts like ours completely failed at it because the entire leadership is incompetent and teachers never got the support they needed from the administration to make it work (including monitoring teachers to ensure they were actually working).

In NJ, the School Superintendent is effectively the CEO of the district.

Many of them had advanced degrees in education, management, and finance. They control tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Ours has a BA in health, was a gym teacher then an admin person, eventually a principal and then we hired him out of desperation when covid hit and our superintendent was retiring.

He has been a total disaster because he lacks leadership skills, does not understand finance and hides behind the hodgepodge of technical jargon that public education has become.

GP mentioned they were totally incompetent in their subject areas. It doesn't matter what medium they are transferring information through if they have no information to transfer.

"I haven't been trained" is the refrain of the incompetent

I think you are seeing through the trend that many people disagree with you.

This is nonsensical advice. In San Francisco, the school board wants to delay learning algebra to 9th grade. I can't "improve" this place because it's not that the place just needs advice. It's because they have "experts" with "years of experience" that want to do different things. And I'm just a techie who thinks he knows everything.

No thanks. Not interested in spending years of my life arguing with morons who rejected the only gay guy applying to help because he was a White male (this isn't some right wing thing - it was real and explicitly the reason).

When people say "we don't need your help; we know what we're doing" then not helping is doing the right thing.

I had to rewrite my response a few time to remove all the curse words.

At least in NJ, you have no idea what you are talking about. Our school laws are completely broken. Just so you know I have spent about 300 hours a year for the past three years fighting with, dealing with, trying to improve our district.

The people you hear giving up today have tried to fix the system. It's rather insulting to insinuate otherwise.

We live in western central NJ so the options are pretty limited. There were only a handful to pick from, and there were roughly two price tiers: tier “A” was around $15,000 a year per student, tier “b” elite schools were $50,000 and up per student per year. Our choices were down to only three schools, one was out because it was all-boys, and we chose out of the other two based on meeting teachers and staff.

South Hunterdon School District.

The support of trans ideology is destroying the progressive movement. What a shame because they’re driving people straight into the arms of fascists.

> 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?

You might be being facetious and trying to imply that the political views taught in school are actually moderate, but I'm going to take the question literally anyway.

One example is the idea that a bio man should and must be called a woman if they declare themselves to be so. Regardless of whether or not you agree, it is an extreme viewpoint that has only just now become acceptable to believe in terms of history.

> Maybe I'm living under a rock; what extreme views are going through the school system?

Not op and not taking a stance on any of these here, but:

1. Critical race theory (CRT)

2. Gender fluidity

3. Endorsement and use of Christianity/Bible in public schools

These are all hot-button issues in education today, at least in some states and districts.

Practice, with guidance is superior to practice without guidance. Homeschooling doesn't mean isolation in the average case. You get a lot of practice as a homeschooler. The primary difference is that your practice is both with other adults and children while supervised and also modeled directly to you in homeschooling by other adults while public school is primarily unsupervised and lacking in a modeled behavior to observe.

The number one thing people would comment to my parents about me was that I was so comfortable socially in adult conversations and environments. I wasn't even in high school yet. I had adult level social skills by age 12. I didn't learn how to interact with people from other kids who had no idea how to either. I learned it from my parents and practiced what I learned with both other children and also adults. I'm only anecdotal evidence but a number of studies have backed up my own experience. A few links I had on hand can be found here.

* Medlin, R. G. (2013). Homeschooling and the question of socialization revisited. Peabody Journal of Education, 88(3), 284–297. https://www.stetson.edu/artsci/psychology/media/medlin-socia...

* Shyers, L. E. (1992). A comparison of social adjustment between home and traditionally schooled students. Home School Researcher https://archive.org/details/comparisonofsoci00shye

* Taylor, J. W. (1986). Self-concept in home-schooling children. (Doctoral Dissertation). Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Dissertation Services. https://digitalcommons.andrews.edu/dissertations/726/

You don't just stay home with your siblings. A major factor of how homeschooling works is homeschoolers have local organizations or co-ops where they do things together.

And, yes, this is just reinventing some aspects of the public school system in the private sphere. But that is because parents, rightly or wrongly, feel they have zero influence over how the public school works, so they just sideload their own version.

(I would say that the parents are right about having zero influence, as quite a lot of American public schools are so big and so bureaucratized that parents do not have a real voice without herculean effort.)

I think it isn’t that unusual for homeschooling parents to form groups, you can do an art class together (otherwise hard to afford), start up some recurring social events, that sort of thing.

K-12 school is sort of a weird social situation, right? You are mandated to be there (you can’t even quit or find a new job), your manager has the right/responsibility of in loco parentis, your co-workers can’t be fired and their only punishment for goofing off is that they might get nagged a bit, and your worst peers don’t care about that at all. I don’t think it is obviously good practice of grown up social skills. You can see the maladaptive behavior that sticks around after—office gossips, bullying, that sort of thing (I mean, that sort of behavior is present everywhere, but I’m pretty sure it is enhanced by the fact that these are strategies to win in the pressure cooker).

You get better at what you practice.

If you practice unproductive social interactions and unhealthy coping skills all day, you will get better at unproductive social interactions and unhealthy coping skills.

> How does staying at home with just your sibs fair better?

This is a very reductionist view of homeschooling.

While some folks certainly do have this experience when homeschooled, a well-designed home schooling experience will have an abundance of social interactions with non-family members.

Sports is an obvious one, but there are also many homeschool groups that engage in learning activities together.

> We all get better at a talent by practicing it.

Exactly. Which is why kids need to practice their social skills in environments that actually reflect how real-world societies functions, rather than being sequestered in an institution with utterly distorted, artificial social structure.

Except the literature from studies on the subject suggest that homeschoolers on average do slightly better than public schoolers on this specific metric. The data suggests public school has worse outcomes.

> in a safe environment with minimal consequences and some guard rails

The problem is that a public school, at least in the US, is /not/ a safe environment with minimal consequences, and it has effectively no guard rails. Your idea is a nice one, but it's not realistic, and reality is exactly why people are opting out of public schooling for their children.

There are definitely hero teachers and administrations in public schools. They aren't the norm though and it's a bit of a lottery whether your child will end up with one.

If you read something like Annie Dillard's An American Childhood, you realize that teachers didn't. In the middle+ class at least, the children's parents did that work by organizing specific extra-curriculars, such as dances, from a very young age. These ensured that the children learned manners, dated people of acceptable character or class, etc.

That social infra is simply gone today. Parents don't have much of an interest, or are erroneously(!) assuming that teachers are supposed to do it, or used to do it. We are less class focused* today, which may be good, but certainly less manners and etiquette focused as well.

* by that I mean like, if you are an American of German descent, you are not particularly worried if you child is dating an American of Irish descent, whereas you might have been in 1940. Similarly (and overlappingly) for Protestant/catholic etc etc. Not even what we typically think of as class today! We're so blind to a lot of that stuff now, we forget it existed, just like the other social infrastructure.

Did they?

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.

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.

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.

Not really ironic, though. There are aligned interests and effective incentive structures involved in all of your examples. And your examples pertain to very narrowly-focused, objectively measurable outcomes.

Education is massively different. It's not a simple one-off deliverable, like making sure wires are insulated or water is filtered. It's something that's has different success criteria for each person who consumes it. It overlaps significantly with normative considerations and subjective values. And the current infrastructure that provides it via public institutions is badly distorted by perverse incentives, ulterior motives, and dysfunctional mechanisms of accountability.

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.

> dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.

And don't even start on how little is dedicated to explain slavery and the social and economic ramifications until the late 20th century. Or how the native people were actively suppressed during the expansion to the West, and how all that lead to some of the current social and economic structures around predominantly Native American groups.

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.

I don't think OP disagrees, or their mother. I think it's more the time spent on such things. They might be worth a semester or two, but the world would be a much better place if we learnt a little about a lot, because to functionally understand one thing means to understand the links between things. I person would have a much deeper understanding of the American Civil war if they understood the British Empire at the time their competition with France to dominate the world stage, and how the US fits within that. Instead, the US seems to teach about the Civil War as if it were an independent conflict when not much happened before or after.

It’s shameful to not be interested in math and science—that’s like saying you’re not interested in reading. But putting that aside, the other subjects should be educational.

I remember what triggered my mom was us spending an inordinate amount of time making clay models of Native American villages. American kids shouldn’t graduate high school knowing more about the shapes of Native American houses than the conceptual underpinnings and history of their own civilization.

I think it merely made parents aware of what was already happening.

My nephew texted my brother during his lunch break to ask for more credits for his switch account. My brother asked why play games instead of talking or hanging out with others. My nephew sent back a video of the lunch room: every single student had their eyes glued to a digital device of some sort.

The experience kids have in schools isn't what we as adults went through - a common thing for every generation - but when you can get more interaction and socialization via home school networks and groups of motivated parents, it is hard to argue against it.

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?"

Also schizotypy which maybe 5% of people have and gets DXed basically 0% of the time. It's a developmental disability which will make you a target for relentless bullying which will screw you up much more than you need to be screwed up.

You should be reluctant to DX ADHD, everybody seems to have it because it's promoted by an addictive pill industry, it's almost as fashionable as gluten intolerance used to be or autism is these days. #notactuallyautistic

Our two kids are homeschooled and are generally equally excited to play with all their friends (some homeschooled, some in regular public school, some in private school).

I have yet to see or hear any "othering" of their friends. In fact, I'd say the breadth of different social situations they are exposed to makes the "othering" less likely.

In what way is the ”othering” different than what children otherwise do, apart from being in different kind of schools? As you wrote children (or more generally) people can make up all sorts of reasons for that.

well, the German constitutional court thinks it does follow, indeed, and they are much smarter than I am in their argument:

https://www.bundesverfassungsgericht.de/entscheidungen/rk200...

In a nutshell, only schooling forces you to confront other beliefs in a way preparing you for life in a pluralistic society and thus schooling as such is a cornerstone in education.

private schools German flavor are okay because their curriculum has to comply and their final exams are state controlled.

So for example even if you went to some evangelical creationist belief system school, you'd have to understand and know evolution. And every student gets sex ed no matter if the parents think that's a bad idea, including contraceptives, abortion rights and all.

And likewise every student is confronted with the Hollerith machine planned systematic mass deportation and mass murder of 6 Mio Humans for having a "wrong" birth certificate, using scheduled, planned trains and scheduled, planned mass murder factories. And every student learns how that came to be and how a weak democracy was overturned into a mind control oppression state.

And that makes a _lot_ of sense.

oh, I agree "Länderhoheit", state level control of curricula, was one of the weaker ideas in German education. East Germany got that that much better. Finland had sent envoys to East Germany and copied their system (not the curricula, mind you), to create their Pisa winning system in the 1980s...

I personally.think the solution to the maga craze and polarization is a proportional representation instead of first past the post. oh and control over individualized media and their individualized political campaigning, built on disinformation and bubbles.

has little to do with homeschooling or not.

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

as others said: Schullaufbahnentscheidung vierte Klasse (at the age of 9 years for most Students)

hehe, yes I absolutely agree partitioning schooling is a bad idea. It's much smarter to have shared learning and make a difference inside a class "Binnendifferenzierung" and it's also much smarter to create GATE gifted and talented programs (Hochbegabtenförderung) as enrichment and maybe after grade 8 or 9 as dedicated boarding schools.

could be worse, much worse. do you have something specific in mind?

yah, Prof. TikTok (and Dr. FB before that), personally targeting political views, that's magic. can't blame schooling for that. it's rather _despite_ schooling. and it happens worldwide (thus my wild guess about TikTok and similar media products)

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.