I think it's important for parents to realize that a lot of these choices are mostly about enjoyment and convenience, and they don't need to beat themselves up if they feel like they are failing because they can't put a square peg through a round hole.

Although, that said, I think one trend I do see is that successful people had the ability to move on when they were ready. I for one was lucky enough to get to go to college early (I hated high school). I can't think of how many kids had to be stuck in the system because they were forced into a timetable.

Thing is: public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit and are dangerous.

Private schools are crazy expensive, and although they are more useful they still teach a lot of bullshit.

Also the educational style of all schools here is outright awful, there is an article from 1950s I believe written by Richard Feynman and it still applies 100%

While homeschooling isn't the right fit for everyone, I was homeschooled and it had a huge impact on me. My habits now for constant learning, working to complete tasks quickly, building projects with my hands (remodeling, woodworking, etc), and my desire to start companies all came from the time and energy that my parents put into crafting a unique education for me.

I'm so excited to see more and more parents considering homeschooling their kids.

(not sure how to verify but that's the email associated w all my public stuff / twitter posts so hopefully that's enough)

I will never understand this attitude. Why don't we see how valuable aging and death are? How can we possibly reframe this as a "horror". The horror is this idea that personal identity can go on indefinitely. Aging is a process of coming to terms with death. None of this is being "tragically normalized". What's being normalized is the idea that we can have everything we want all the time forever without any spiritual or material costs.

I think the homeschooling is likely second to being rich in terms of her world view and success.

kind of a blunt take here but yeah, homeschooling will do that because its limited to what your parents know. Public schools work to immerse kids in a diverse environment with many people from many different walks of life. they work to build soft skills like empathy, listening, and conflict resolution. she says she taught herself "calculus and probability and statistics, and French literature and history" betraying her heritage. The wealthy are notorious francophiles (Fussell, Paul, "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System")

Homeschooling may have played a part in her success, but money likely played an even more prominent role in getting a twelve year old into UCSF and MIT from half a world away. The average homeschooled kid is much more likely to miss social cues, stumble through a difficult interaction with feckless ineptitude, or even parrot their parents own myopic stereotypes or falsehoods. Schools may teach "bullshit" to some, but they also arm kids with critical thinking skills. the conflicting role of educator, caregiver, and lawgiver projected by homeschool parents virtually guarantees kids will never rise to challenge the education theyre given. Theyll learn only what theyre told.

Homeschooling also just seems unsustainable. Modern society generally requires two parents to be working. Can an average family afford to homeschool their children? At least in the USA, most indications give a pretty firm "no."

That being said, I really enjoyed this article. People definitely should have more control over their education and how it relates to their own children's needs.

Good advice!

I don't particularly recommend it for anyone without substantial need. I would put genius-level children at that level. We weren't geniuses.

I can imagine an... alternative... schooling coop which would work well. But there are whole volumes of good behavior that I had to intake as a teen & young adult that homeschooling had no ability to teach me.

Parents of homeschooled kids don't notice, I think. Because this is about peer behavior and interaction. Not child-parent interaction.

I was under the impression that this runs contrary to current thinking.

i.e. Tell kids they're the best and they stop taking risks for fear of failure. Rather encourage effort & persistence.

Anyway...sometimes I think the whole elite private schooling model are the sweet spot. Actual effort goes into the teaching without the social isolation that (often) comes with home schooling.

Stay involved. That's what homeschooling (done well) forces you to do. Ask questions, allow failures, try (you WILL fail) to practice detachment, and understand that you do not.

What if advancement depends on the death of people with outdated ideas?

At school, after lectures, we have to do homework. It's a practice to get a deeper understanding of the knowledge. Then we have to take test. It's a validation of our understanding. People certainly cheat their ways through college. But if you are into learning, you can learn a lot.

Laura Deming mentioned that she had a hard time with entropy. I think this is because of not having a formal education. Entropy is an overloaded term. It means different things in different fields. In physics, it means one thing. In information theory, it means another thing. If Laura had gone to a university to study the concepts in different classes, she would have grasped the concepts. Laura is likely a generalist thinker, polymath. That's why she has a hard time digging into deep concepts. To really understand them, you need to practice (homework) and validate (test).

I work in cryptocurrency space. Vitalik is another generalist, polymath thinker. He makes some wild claims like quantum computer can break Proof of Work. If you study Computer Science, you'd see how dubious this claim is.

You don't know what you don't know.

Schools are good for teaching you what you don't know. Both Vitalik and Laura come out of the Thiel Fellowship. When you are young and got chosen by a billionaire, it may have gotten you hype up about your intellect. You buy into your billionaire's view. You think professors are idiots. Nowadays, social media give people a microphone. So they get even more indulgence. They see themselves already successful.

I think the young generation, like Laura and Vitalik, is talented. But they live in the fame bubble too early. Albert Einstein had this problem. He was an early achiever. He made his important discoveries when he was young. Those achievements became burden. He had a hard time with quantum mechanics. He spent endless time with the theory of everything. He was miserable in his later life.

I teach my kids at home after their public school time. When they grow up, I hope there're still good universities for them to go. Go to school, take some test, you'd see how much you really understand.

For instance, in Seattle there is a push from activists to introduce progressive politics into schoolrooms, to influence children's culture and values beyond what is appropriate. It started with the NAACP pressuring Seattle Public Schools to introduce ethnic studies into their K-12 curriculum (https://www.king5.com/article/news/education/seattle-school-...). Then the school board proposed converting subjects like math into propaganda channels for social justice politics (https://reason.com/2019/10/22/seattle-math-oppressive-cultur...). Now they're planning to include gender identity material as early as Kindergarten (https://mynorthwest.com/1676789/rantz-mandatory-sex-ed-kinde...). In each instance, I see that the parents' role is being overridden by the state, going far beyond the mandate of core education and clearly into the realm of controversial politics.

I am not trying to just single out Seattle or progressive politics, mind you. It's just what I'm most familiar with. In Arkansas some schools teach that the age of Earth is a controversial topic (http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...). And outside the US as well, governments use education as a means to undermine parents and steal away their children's minds, turning them into willing adopters of the government's values/culture/politics (https://www.hrw.org/report/2020/03/04/chinas-bilingual-educa...).

Homeschooling and school choice more broadly (like charter schools) are the antidote to having children propagandized. Homeschooling is generally very successful, to the point that it is viewed by some as a threat to public education (https://reason.com/2019/01/22/homeschooling-produces-better-...) and now there are activist researchers claiming that homeschooling is vector for child abuse despite evidence to the contrary (https://www.educationnext.org/harvard-law-professors-attack-...). I hope people take note and fight to retain their rights as parents.

Then I grew up and met people who went to public school. Holy cow I can’t believe people think it’s ok to put their kids through that! I can’t believe we collectively accept children being exposed to the violence and other problems that are pervasive there! It’s not surprising so many people become criminals now.

I ask in good faith, not to mock you or anything - mostly because I've heard a wide range of similar claims.

(I do think that the educational style of many public schools is horrendous though, as it follows the old factory-line model, where you try to fit all kids into some mold, and "educate" them as fast as possible. When the reality is that there's no one-size-its-all educational model. It's highly individual, and must be tailored / optimized for each pupil, if possible.)

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

If you repeatedly attempt it I presume? I highly doubt that they'd send your kids to an orphanage after the first offense.

> public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit

Bullshit such as what? (if I might ask)

IMO, although homeschooling is great for some kids, the cons of legalizing it far outweigh the pros. One of the most important aspects of schools is to let kids interact with other kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. Homeschooling should be banned for the same reason that religious schools should be banned, i.e., to avoid abuse, indoctrination, and segregation of kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds.

If we want to allow brighter kids to learn faster then the focus should be on improving schools, not on abandoning them.

I don’t mean they make kids into automatons, but there is a tendency to _tell_ kids this is right and that is wrong along ideological lines without allowing kids to discover those things for themselves.

I’m talking about things like tax policy, education, religion, government, etc.

For example, kids are indoctrinated to believe if they get good grades they can go to college and they’ll be set. That government is there to take care of you, that the education system is good, etc.

So these kids graduate, go to college, university and then wonder why after doing all that their humanities or business classes don’t land them jobs.

They should be allowed to discover more and question the whole system more. Some should be tracked for vocational schools rather than everyone expecting they are fit to work anywhere they desire... its unrealistic.

Who knows were these habits come from. There are many people who went to regular schools and share these exact same habits.

Because they're horrific tragedies that we should be fighting tooth and nail until they're extinguished and nobody ever has to deal with them again. They should be consigned to the history books.

> Aging is a process of coming to terms with death.

Aging is a biological problem that we continue to debug. And nothing should make us "come to terms" with being obliterated. If someone is attacking you, you don't "come to terms" with your impending injury or death, you fight back.

When a problem has thus far been a seemingly immutable property of life, it can be difficult to envision a world where that property has been overcome. It can be difficult to even see it as a problem. And it's understandable that people's first instinct is to somehow justify the status quo, that there must be a good reason that 150,000 people die every day. One step towards solving the problem is to reset that expectation, to get people to recognize the problem as a problem rather than a "fact". In the meantime, progress will continue to be made by people who see it as a problem, but far too slowly without more widespread support. Every day longer it takes is 150,000 people lost.

The important thing to remember, which I think all too many people forget, is that it is not a trick question."

http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified/

I love life (I've been fortunate to live in health and relative privilege) and would very much prefer an additional 150 years before eternal nothingness, assuming sound mind and body. It's not clear to me what spiritual downsides I would experience.

Is it wrong to repair someone's heart, brain, joints, skin, bones, kidneys, liver or muscles? If not, why is it wrong to prevent them degenerating in the first place?

It worries me that even now you have rich people that are 70 and are still trying to make more money abusing other people. Imagine if you could keep your wealth for 50 more years. Further more if money is the gateway to 50 more years. Money would be even more important than it is now.

I really don't want to significantly expand lifespans unless we can keep things fair for everybody.

Death is the greatest weakness of humanity, and to think otherwise is fatalist. We don't have to live eighty years at best and die. We can do better.

If everyone on this planet had solving death as their single-minded focus, we'd accomplish it within our lifetimes.

Attempting to preserve the status quo of aging and death is the same thing in a more roundabout way.

- Alzheimer's?

- Cancer?

- Arthritis?

Otherwise it's just crab bucket mentality.

Curious if this is something you have direct experience with/referencing a study or if you're just repeating the commonly held trope. I work at a school that has welcomed a large number of former home schoolers and I find your comment contrary to my experience with dozen of home school kids.

Additionally, describing public schools as a place where empathy, listening, and conflict resolution happens is counter to my experience working with public school districts. Genuinely interested to learn where you're coming from with your comment.

http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html

Also, homeschooling doesn't mean you can only learn from your parents. You can use any other resource that's available to you.

"The average homeschooled kid". Stereotypes. Hm.

You missed the next sentence which seems to contradict the argument you're making. There's absolutely no evidence that the author is missing "critical thinking skills". It sounds like the positive reinforcement from the father created an idea that anything is possible (which probably is missing from most people who go through the traditional education system).

No one is arguing that all homeschooling is great. It's going to depend on the teachers/parents. This seems like an example where it worked out really well.

Public schools are a reflection of the communities they're placed in and in much of rural America diversity isn't at play.

Astra Taylor's response to a critique (of the paywalled article below) demonstrates the nuance (https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/learning-in-...)

> I actually chose to go to public high school in Georgia for three years, where I saw the good and bad first hand. Unlike Goldstein, who glories in having “benefited from 13 years of public education in one of the most diverse and progressive school districts in the United States,” the school I attended was predominantly African-American and viciously segregated, with the white kids funneled into advanced and gifted courses while everyone else, the vast majority, languished. Thus, in my essay I ask, “Are schools social levelers or do they reinforce the class pyramid by tracking and sorting children from a young age?” Any honest progressive needs to admit the answer is both

Your take is kind of obvious, but it's too monolithic. There are certainly some of my old friends that match your description to the T: socially awkward, insular knowledge, holding onto their parent's religious extremes.

But they also have siblings that are polar opposites, for example one got a PhD in Evolutionary Bio (much to their parents ire).

I think you're absolutely right that money and class are at the center of this, 'yacht schooling' is definitely a thing and their experiences should not be extrapolated generally.

Paywalled, but these stories also worth a read and N+! is well worth the money. * https://nplusonemag.com/issue-33/essays/homeschool/ * https://nplusonemag.com/issue-13/essays/unschooling/

It sounds like Laura was from academic branch, where her parents were probably very engaged, and thought they could do a better job than the school system--which is great.

My parents, and most of their friends who homeschooled were from the religious branch of the movement, which is fairly large in the US. Their main motivation was to basically prevent the school system from teaching us things they didn't approve of, like evolution, etc. Of course, we learned about evolution, but from a very different (and very incorrect) perspective.

Regardless, we still took standardized tests, and performed really well on them every year. Overall I did fine in college--aside from a few academic blind spots, and I'm doing fine as a programmer today. The social stuff was a steep learning curve once I hit college, but I made it.

I will say there are a number of people I know who didn't "make it out". College can be a really big jump for a lot of these kids.

It's not for everyone, but I've met a lot more homeschooled people since, and I've never met someone who's wished they hadn't been.

My parents' goal for our (me and my siblings') educations was basically just to teach us how to think. They cared a lot more about what we were like at 25 than what we'd be like at 15. I found this to be super freeing, and something I valued a lot.

We didn't have much money growing up, and my dad worked 3 jobs so that my mom could stay home and homeschool us. My mom was actually a public school teacher, and wrote a paper in college on why homeschooling should be illegal. I have always loved her willingness to change her mind on that once she realized that public school wasn't the best fit for us.

My parents both sort of split the "education" responsibilities, and they really tried to empower us to view learning as a journey we could join them on vs. something that was compulsively forced upon us. So, whenever possible we would learn things from the "real world" vs. a textbook or classroom setting. I remember when we were learning about the pulmonary system, my mom convinced a local butcher to give her some cow lungs so that she could show us how inflating / deflating lungs worked. When we learned about the founding of America, she put us in a van and drove from Florida to all 13 colonies and visited all the historical sites.

I found the transition to traditional school and then a big public university with 50k students to be quite easy. I also played a lot of sports growing up, and I find that sports / music / other forms of community tend to give kids plenty of socialization, and the "homeschoolers are socially awkward" meme is a bit of a myth in most cases.

Anyways, it was hugely positive for me. It's not for everyone, and requires a specific type of parent with a specific type of motivations, but I think it can be incredible for many families.

An extremely intelligent friend of mine is one of those people, and he has hang ups about it.

Note that there are good home schooling experiences as well, but there may be some selection bias regarding the stories we typically hear.

The worst outcome I've seen has been my sister, who is in her thirties and rarely leaves my father's house.

Western culture (my personal background) has seen shifts in answers to this question over the past centuries... and not in isolation from other shifts in viewpoints about cultural interactions.

Are we going in a direction that is good? All I can say for sure is that it becomes increasingly easy for me to focus on myself and current times while ignoring children and what they will grow into, and increasingly harder for me to understand the reasons my parents, grandparents, etc thought and reasoned the way they did. Again, a slice of the world, but if my experience is widespread, that surely affects how decisions about education are currently being made.