Training kids to sabotage their mathematical ability to "level the playing field" is the most asinine thing I've ever seen and I'm disgusted it's still being taught.

> That voice likes to say: You should just homeschool them. Opt out of interacting with average people, because average people will only damage your kids.

The author makes a statement about why they think people prefer homeschooling, and yet they do not mention having spoken to a single currently homeschooling parent to ask why they homeschool. This is like me writing an article about some group I'm not a part of (say, farmers) and saying "why don't they all get organic certified? As far as I can tell it's because most farmers don't like nature."

tl;dr: this is a completely uninformed tirade from someone who unfortunately had a bad experience with their religious upbringing, which involved homeschooling, and is generalizing the negative emotions towards all homeschoolers whatever their reason for opting out of school. Ironically this article that's ostensibly criticizing homeschooling parents as snobs is dripping with disdain and condescension.

The reductive & random assumption that people opt out of school they object to the students is baffling to me. Does it not occur to the author that people take issue with institutionalization of their kids in school? It's not the other children, it's the one-size-fits-all meat grinder of school most secular homeschool parents object to.

Bonus: The footnotes are hilarious. The footnote to their argument that people homeschool because they're snobs is:

> I don’t think I’m straw-manning, because I’m pretty sure someone is going to highlight the “opt out of interacting with average people” quote on Twitter/X and say “this, but unironically.”

"I don't think I'm inventing a weak interlocutor to argue against because I've invented another imaginary person on twitter who agrees with the first imaginary person I created" I'm honestly laughing reading this.

We homeschooled our two older kids, the eldest is now in their second year of an extremely competitive engineering university program. She wanted to go to Uni so she took some online classes to prep then enrolled in school in grade 9. That was completely different from my experience in large part because she chose to go to school, so she had no one to blame for "why do I have to be here?" like I did. She owned her own choices & succeeded.

As for "what about socialization" that is the most laughable part to me. Sure I learned "socialization" in school: kill or be killed. I learned to be a mean, cynical, jaded child who could survive in that institutional environment. My children were free to spend full days socializing with other kids when we got together, and met frequently at libraries & parks with other homeschool kids, as well as engaging in extracurriculars. And if they're having a spat with another kid? That's fine, they can take a break for a bit then reconnect with them later; no need to force them together daily.

The funniest thing to me about "what about socialization" is that when I was in school & chatted with a friend in class, guess what I was always told? "Do that on your own time, you don't come to school to socialize." Ha. But seriously, avoiding the maladaptive "socialization" of what I think can fairly be called "industrial schooling" is one of the biggest perks of homeschooling.

The extracurriculars were easier too because they were not already tired from an early wakeup and full day of school! My younger kids who are now in regular school now are absolutely fried after a day at school + extracurriculars.

The amount of energy I spend now supporting school for my younger kids is crazy. Stressful mornings harrying sleepy kids out of bed and out the door, kids upset over bullying and inequity in the classroom, begging for designer clothes (where did that come from?), getting them to do their homework, oh and then there's "teaching my kids shit they were supposed to learn in school but the teacher didn't teach them" i.e. I'm having to "homeschool" them in addition to school. Sooo many conflicts spring from school. Having my kids in school often feels like more work that homeschooling rather than less.

Academics are easy. Tons of free online resources + Outschool where you can pay a teacher for one-off classes. My older kids took the 8 week essay writing class then breezed through high school english. When younger, if they wanted to play iPad I'd say "do 30m khan academy then you can do 30m iPad." Regular trips to the library & read to them... it's really not hard to cover academics through middle school, then if they want to go to high school, go ahead. Or apprentice, or focus on something else.

If you have any questions about homeschooling from a veteran parent who's also had kids in public school, let me know.

>Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home.

Sure, but the parents choosing to homeschool are either the ones abusing or not (obviously they could have an abusive uncle but the parents tend not to think of this) if Not, then its not a counter-argument because they know it's not and they do not know about the school. If abusing the know it and they might prefer to homeschool for that reason.

>Pro-homeschooling: Kids learn faster one-on-one; Bloom’s 2-sigma problem is undefeated.

>Anti-homeschooling: Kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence can fall through the cracks without professional involvement.

many kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence need more 1 on 1, and will also be more likely to get all the other negative school interactions that are arguments against schools.

>Here’s what I think is really going on.

I heard Elon Musk homeschooled his kids, anyway if you have the money, it's a status symbol.

Also about lousy school environment anecdotes going around here - I went to high school in Utah, where I heard a teacher tell the class that A.D meant After Noah, and B.C meant Before Christ. I WIN! Oh wait...

They are straight-A students (lowest grade: 94%; History -- my Daughter). They are shocked that they attend school for 7 hours a day and there are kids who "struggle" while they finish their homework on the ride home, don't study, and get the grades they get. They are in advanced classes and both have had a perfect score in Math all three years. Mom and I are also divorced and have been since they were 2 and 4. They make friends easily but struggled when they were Home Schooled because they have less exposure to kids their age. They were given the choice when my son hit 9th grade "continue or attend Public School or a school we can afford). They didn't want to miss out on "The High School Experience" but both, enthusiastically, want to Home School their own kids one day.

They aren't unique/gifted. There are plenty of students at their schools who do as well as they do and were not Home Schooled. The difference, though, is they "did school" in a given weekday for never longer than 1.5 hours. Most days were 30 minutes. September-April with summers off and that was it.

Religion was not a factor in our choice. My son's ASD Type 1 diagnosis played a role, the way Math was taught to me played a role, the arrogant belief that I could do better and the fact that my ex-wife didn't work played a role. Mostly, talking to other Home Schooling parents and their children and "wanting my kids to be like that" was the primary factor. Watching a 13-year-old speak intelligently and with confidence about a subject they understand and actually expect an adult to listen to them is kind of crazy, especially when they really are intelligent and should be listened to.

In a decade of Home Schooling, I have talked at length with hundreds of families and their children who took that path (various conferences, Home School events at local businesses, and extra-curricular activities done "during the school day" for Home School kids). I've observed a few things: All of them teach as much as we did. None of them will admit to it until their kids are in college or they decide to send them to traditional schools and "their child's education is validated by someone else." Nobody who is actively Home Schooling will admit to an outsider that their children get 1-1.5 hours of education a week day because you'll call CPS on us. All of their children are about a year or two ahead of children "their grade" despite this minimal amount of lesson time.

I read over and over and over again about how Home Schooled children are ignorant, don't believe in evolution, believe the world is flat, their parents don't actually "teach them" -- I have no doubt those children exist and I haven't seen them because the Home Schooled families I encounter attend conferences, belong to groups (we didn't), and care about their child's education. I live in a state that, at one point, had the largest number of practicing Home School families (not sure where it is, today) and the most liberal rules around it -- literally "take them out of school"; that's it.

Everybody seems "to know some invented Home Schooled child" who had some kind of major life problem. I usually challenge for specifics and it's always turned out the kid doesn't exist. Knowing any child who is Home Schooled is unusual. But knowing the one child validates your choice to NOT Home School, the statistics of which make them extremely rare, and you find they're parroting some anecdote they heard. My daughter's school[0] has about 1,700 students in it. Her last had about 500. I have asked every single one of her teachers, her counselors and several teachers they don't have "have you ever had a Home Schooled kid in your class, before?" I'd guess 40 educators and some staff/administrators. There's exactly one who had exactly one child in her class at her last job who was Home Schooled. He was an excellent student. And this in a state that has a lot of Home Schooled students. Judging by Facebook, you'd think there's one hiding around every corner peeing in people's Cheerios.

I suspect it's people feeling (needlessly) insecure about the choices they made for their own child and feeling threatened by the fact that I chose differently. I don't encourage people to choose to Home School. It's not for everyone -- for starters, you can't do it with two full-time working parents and that means it's simply not an option for most people. However, this topic very rarely came up without judgement from everyone who didn't Home School about what a dangerous choice I made when I was still Home Schooling. It's a lot more fun, now, since I can point to their success.

Yes, some Home Schooled kids struggle/drop out of college or can't hold down a job. Certainly none of us have met a kid who drank his way through Freshman year of College, or was ill-prepared by their public school and failed out. And we came from High Schools where everyone received a degree, too. Studies continually affirm the success of Home Schooled students, yet "everyone knows some Flat Earther child from Home Schooled parents." Children fail in every type of education. They fail less in Private schools and Home Schools. They fail more in Public school (largely because of "everyone goes there, including children in extremely difficult life circumstances"). The problem is that these wrong impressions of Home Schooled kids turn into laws that ban or curtail the freedom to have the choice of Home Education.

I know if I had chosen a more traditional route, my kids would have had the same probability of success. I would have been deeply involved in their education whether or not I was the one teaching them and that's how you get successful students in traditional education, too. While it might be nice to stand on some high horse, claim that "I just love my children more than you did", pretend that all of this was some massive sacrifice and I'm some super-parent by comparison to all of you who went the traditional route, that would be a self-aggrandizing lie. I paid for and followed curriculum. It was easy. The only challenging part of it is that "your kids will argue, yell and cry at you when they struggle"; they won't do that with a stranger.

With all of the extra non-lesson time they had, it was probably easier for them to excel. But I don't look down on people for not making that choice. Quite the opposite, everyone looked down on me for the entire duration that I was a Home Schooling Dad. It's silly.

And I'd do it all over again if given the choice for one reason alone: My kids are incredible self-learners and that was the one thing that I was very intentional about. Both of them have the confidence that "nothing is beyond their ability to learn" and that it's a simple matter of finding the right information, studying and practicing. My daughter is a shining example of this: She has learned to plays Guitar, Drums, Bass, and Piano (some proficiently, some she's well on her way). She has never had a lesson. She can read music and tabs and she can sit down and compose as well as learn to play anything she wants to learn to play on Guitar, Bass and Drums. She's getting there with Piano, but it's a much more difficult instrument and she just started last Summer with that one; she's got a few years behind her on the others. But I bought her a full sized weighted-key MIDI piano last summer and I had 15 years of lessons, competitions and study in that instrument as a child/teenager, so I have a good understanding of typical progress in learning it. She took it to Mom's and decided she didn't want to take it back and forth but brought it back here over Christmas break. I listened to her practicing and had to walk into her room to make sure it was actually her playing rather than the computer playing back some MIDI file. In three months she's as far along as I was after 5-6 years of lessons. She doesn't even realize how well she's playing; nobody told her it was unusual for her to be able to play some of the things she's playing at her skill level. A teacher would have never had her playing those things. She just went ahead blissfully unaware of the fact that it's extremely hard to play some of the things she's learned to play and that probably made the biggest difference of all. She wanted to play it, so she sat down and learned how to play it, never getting discouraged over the fact that "you don't learn something like that until year 5." Her technique (fingering ... stop snickering) is even correct.

Both of my children love to learn new things, just like me. Except, I didn't learn that about myself until formal education was over. They have always known that about themselves.

[0] My son attends a private school that is very small and the results were the same but less surprising to me.

I’m glad I learned in school how to deal with bullies

Because we spend more per student but with awful results.

Because our brightest don't become schoolteachers.

Because education is years if not decades behind the skills curve.

Because big, powerful teachers unions make change impossible.

Because parents have spared the rod and spoiled the child.

Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home. And the risk gets bigger if you eliminate outside influences that might notice when something’s wrong.

You’d have to be an idiot to think that this argument could be used in a conversation about homeschooling with any particular potential homeschooler.

The bad news is that there are 8 billion of us and more every day. There’s not enough space or resources for us to isolate ourselves. It can’t end well.

I know a few parents who've taken objection to this. They would rather have their children be properly taught, rather than be taken advantage of for their high impressionableness.

But not convinced it’s possible to emulate the social interaction part diy

The problem is that it is really bad at handling children who are neurodivergent. My daughter is autistic and my son has ADHD and they just stuggled to fit in at school. They were filled with anxiety and the supports for them just weren't there. Spending on special needs supports is pitifully low despite Ireland being so cash rich right now.

So now we homeschool them and they are doing grand learning at their own pace.

But it's not just that that makes me favour home schooling. For me one of the biggest issues with state education pretty much everywhere the world over is the idea that at a certain age a child should have reached a certain academic standard and if they haven't then that is seen as a failure or at the very least a problem. This is complete and utter nonsense. We all learn at different speeds, some pick up knowledge early, some pick it up later. What matters is that by the time they leave school they are in possession of most of the life skills they need.

I also have issue with what is taught and how it is taught. Most subjects are taught with a focus on rote. Children are told to learn things, but aren't really told WHY they should learn things. That why bit is so important to help a childs mind develop.

For me there is also a bit of a morality issue. If you go an look at a school curriculum there will nearly always be something that you as a parent do not agree with. For me its the idea of teaching children that there only option in life after education is to get a job, be a good worker and keep going until retirement. I don't subscribe to that idea, I believe there are alternative life pathways. The problem is that if I send my children to a state school they will be forced to learn and accept things I fundamentally disagree with and that to me is morally dubious.

I was fortunate to have parents that are extremely well educated and my homeschooling gave me an education that is simply unavailable in a school. Not many kids have sat on the back deck in the Appalachians with their father, learning how to read Virgil in Latin.

There were lots of other homeschoolers in our county who were all religious nuts. Fortunately Virginia requires you to come in and take standardized tests every couple years to see if you're at grade level if you're homeschooling, so the worst cases got corrected. The school district also proctored my AP tests for me, even though they weren't classes the school offered.

My kids are in public school. The public schools where I live are excellent and actually deal with bullying. My kids would rather not go to school, but they're not being traumatized and they're getting a good education and have lots of friends. There's a major emphasis on social-emotional learning, which turns out to be heavily correlated with later performance. Our biggest problem is in high school with parents pressure cooking their kids to try to go to places like Harvard or Yale. I do what I can to counsel the kids and get them off that path. My own kids are firmly convinced that they're going to guaranteed admission state schools, and don't have to try to build a ridiculous resume in high school.

Schools don't have to be horrible. They just have a history of being poorly run in many places.

And no, educational videos on YouTube are not a replacement for a curriculum. We saw that during COVID where the attainment of children worsened.

There are bad schools and bad teachers. The solution is not bulldozing the entire system and replacing it with something worse.

This is like saying people should self-diagnose and medicate because there's a few dodgy hospitals and doctors.

Bad influence from other students

Bad policies for phone use

Bad teachers

Strange curricula influenced by ideology

Aggressive low performing immigrants from other cultures (Europe)

The last point will get me downvoted from people who can not handle the truth.

But a lot of the resources to help people homeschooling are weird christian nonsense.

because the parents are idiots;

because of the paranoid delusions about Them and What They Are Doing;

because the kids (and in many cases the teachers) are awful human beings that people (idiots or not) don't want their kids to be around several hours a day every day;

because of school shootings and other forms of violence;

because the value in this is no longer clear to anyone;

because the only people demonstrating "leadership" in this matter are leading outraged mobs around to prop up themselves and their power structures rather than anything productive.

Or, in our case, our youngest has autism and ADHD and was unable to be successful in the "not homeschool" environment (for numerous reasons), so we removed him from it.

What about other sources of diversity? Guess what, they are in sports and other community groups too. In fact, by avoiding the time suckers in traditional school, you’d be surprised to see just how quickly the kids can zip through their curriculum and join more extracurricular activities with meaningful social interactions. You mean school isn’t the only place to learn social interaction? Yup.

It’s time we put to death the idea that homeschooling is detrimental to social development. It’s utter nonsense. My wife has taught music at every grade level and in every school type imaginable and anecdotally the homeschooled kids are by far the most confident, socially capable of the bunch.

“Home-school Shooting”

It sucks, my sons went to catholic schools, and now an independent Catholic high school. The new breed of “evangelical style” Catholics are starting to appear. They are more political and reactionary in terms of religious politics/practice.

Where infrastructure doesn’t exist, homeschools and stuff like “classical education” are gaining traction.

No tech bro theories of exceptionalism and "anti-mediocrity" necessary.

Occam would be proud.

liberating education would be a major blow to the social engineers running the matrix -- or at least that's what i think when i'm optimistic... maybe these days they could easily compensate through the screens.

and if you have an urge to argue with this, then first read John Taylor Gatto's essays to understand what's going on. after that we can discuss the specifics.

1) Right-wing disgust over woke issues.

2) Fear of school shootings.

That's coming from a non-tech middle/lower-middle class setting. 20-30 years ago, when I was in school, most of the homeschoolers seemed (again anecdotally) to be based on religion or some other idiosyncratic reasoning rather than the reasons I cited above.

I'm a product of department of defense school system. My parents were lower class, I received a world class education. My mom taught me to read and count before kindergarten, mostly via playing card games with her. I was in NC at that time, and they thought I was a savant!

Overall, my experience was good, some bullying of course, but at that time administrators held the ultimate key which was we will first tell your parents, and then subsequently your parents commanding officer, which would result in work disciplinary action. When I lived in Japan, there were a couple kids that were bad enough to get that to trigger. Stupid stuff like huffing air freshener, or just beating the hell out of people.

My short stint in NJ public school was ok, but it lacked the rigor/structure of the DoDDs school. I ended up at a good engineering university, but had a good amount of debt.

In Philadelphia, public schools are essentially DMZs, with private schools for kids that want to do things with their lives. This sounds harsh, but our tax system reflects this, as well as our disrepair of public school buildings (lead, abestos).

My Dad gave up his best years to the military and his body suffered, but it was certainly not for nothing. He retired at 42, with a pension after 20y in USMC. Healthcare is taken care of.

It's hard to say whether it is the escalating cost of schools which are commodifying it "It's so expensive I shouldn't have to xyz", leading to low parental involvement (maybe that is normal?), or continuous concierge service for helicopter parents as well. My friend who is a teacher has an entire class of students exploiting the IEP system to get extra time on exams, less choices in multiple choice, less reading, landscape rather than portrait tests (yes this is real), and other things that absolutely blow up her ability to be efficient at anything in the class room. I'm sure there is an argument to be made in favor of this, but it cannot operate in this way. At her school (Allentown, PA) the inmates are running the asylum due to administrators treating parents as "customers" and the parents as "the service provider". It is a sad state of affairs. In my world, parents ALWAYS sided with the teacher no matter what, which meant you had no chance at causing a problem in that way.

I don't know if there is a good solution on the horizon. I think the overwork of parents, combined with the exploitation of the school for better marks is a sick system. Only private systems seem to be able to surf this in a meaningful way because they can remove bad actors.

cite: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defen...

That being said, you cannot categorically judge either homeschooling or "institutionalized" education, as the quality entirely depends on the concrete situation. Both can be done poorly or done well. There may be aspects here and there that set them apart, where one is better than the other, but on the whole, in principle, both can be done well or poorly. Both can fail or harm the child.

Of course, to be able to evaluate the quality of education requires that we first have at least a sense, if not a definition, of what education is and what it is for. Immediately, this is where the trouble starts.

If you ask most people today what education is about, the most common answer I would expect is "to prepare you for a job". Primary education is to prepare you for university, and university is for preparing you for a job. Interestingly, this is not the traditional mission of education, which is perhaps best embodied by the classical liberal arts taught in the trivium and quadrivium. Their aim was to free the human person as a human person, and a human person is a rational animal. The classical notion of freedom is the ability to be what you are — human, i.e., a rational animal — which is quite different from the modern notion of being able to do whatever you want. This classical notion of freedom is the reason for the liberal in liberal arts. Now, the modern concept of rationality also differs from the classical, so even here we have divergence.

The point is that the liberal arts were distinguished from the servile arts. It is the teaching of the servile arts that would prepare you for the job. While the gains of a liberal arts education translate into benefits in all things, they were not per se for the sake of specialized work. Their value was not instrumental, even if they do have downstream benefits for the instrumental. This is like the difference between theory and practice. One seeks understanding, the other seeks to achieve some kind of subordinate or secondary good.

Now, as to why homeschooling is becoming more attractive, we need to consider the reality of education as it actually is today. I don't want to turn this into an essay, but a few big motivations are:

* the poor quality of education

* the alienating and hostile nature of many schools

* the hostile ideological presuppositions of an education system, often insinuated rather than explicitly commanded

As to how effective homeschooling is at correcting for these faults, that will depend on the particular situation, more or less. From what I understand, homeschooling parents will often meet with other homeschooling parents and draw from curricula that already exist for this purpose. Sometimes these parents decide to found school themselves (as we are seeing in some cases with the rising interest in classical education).

I wonder if typical HNers ever get aware of what a spectacle they make of themselves and their self-important narcissistic tomfoolery.

I mean, how do you reconcile the idea that "God is great" (Muslim slogan but how you can not believe that as a theist?) with the idea that the world is just 6000 years old and he sits on the throne and is obsessed with Jewish people as opposed to the scientific picture that the world is at least 13 billion years old, 'his image' is inscribed into the molecular structure of our cells, which implies God is a lot bigger than that.

To many, schools are perceived to be costly, unsafe indoctrination centers that push left-leaning agendas. Extended covid lockdowns were a huge betrayal.

You only have one chance to raise your kids, and the competition is getting tougher every year. Homeschooling in the area has tripled.

Some of the criticism is justified, some isn’t. But with failures on the academic outcomes, safety, and subjective failures on the ideology – the onus is on public schools to win back trust.

You can shame the homeschoolers , but that won’t bring them back. Time will tell if they succeed, but compared to public schools, the bar is so low that odds are in the homeschoolers favor. Especially if their parents care enough to do it.

Public school systems sucks at diversity. It demands parents and students to endure diversity (i.e. putting kids from all walks of life into a single class), while it delivers zero itself, i.e. refusing to diversify its offerings as affluent kids from high-iq parents need different schooling than the fresh foreign refugee-arrival from a war-torn country.

Teachers Unions make sure to deflct any "market pressure" from teachers and these unions' political arms (i.e. left-leaning progressive parties) rake in extra profits because they can cry wolf about the bad state of education or worsening abilities for poorer people to rise through the ranks via merit. Crocodile Tears.

1) kids in nursery get sick a whole lot, and is not always just 'building up their immunitary system', it really is a one-two punch of constant illness that drugs for months on, with little to no recovery mechanisms. This is truer in bigger city with a higher turnover of the class cohort

2) a lot of the socialization aspect of nursery is overrated. Parallel play is a thing, and the need for socialization doesn't require a whole 8 hours. There are plenty of other opportunities to socialize. Especially in higher density areas, where institutions are more involved in creating moments for kids to socialize.

3) the cost of central group based nursery has skyrocket. (just empiric evidence), at the same time there is an increasing supply of 20-something-y-old that don't want a nursery job, but are happy to do a more flexible working hour in a less 'stressful' enviroment (aka less children, more home based).

The combination of the 3 things has made homeschooling a lot more interesting for parents.

Also, the school education is not crap because it's done by average or designed for the average. It's crap because it objectively can't adapt to an individual kid's pace. There's just no way around teaching kids in huge groups that doesn't involve everyone working as a teacher. Maybe AI will help here.

People recommending private school: these do not exist in all locations, try finding a good one in a rural area

It seems standards in public schools have only fallen since I attended, and based on how social media is trending, we seem to be getting dumber and less informed.

I could never force a child to attend public school in the US, unless it happened to be one of the rare good ones I hear exist.

If we ever get something like what is described in "The Diamond Age" perhaps that will help solve the school problem.

If that is done by the parents / family, then it's almost like home schooling. But I don't like home schooling because the kid is left out of the system and the studies are not recognized. At some point they will have to take traumatizing equivalence tests, which can be entirely avoided by playing along - go to a public school, or in my kid's case, a private school which follows the same curricula.

But I stress again, even with private school, there's no replacement for private tutoring if you want your kid to succeed in life.

Of course, this is pretty much the same set of dice you roll when you spawn into a traditional school system, except you roll with disadvantage when it comes to the long-shot.

I don't know, I was fortunate enough to roll the long shot, and it worked out pretty well for me. Though I will echo the article's note that forming emotional attachments continues to be a bitch if you didn't have a large peer group at a young age...

I agree in part and disagree in part:

Agree - they're absolutely "hacking" education for their kids. The 1:1 student/teacher ratio and the ability to custom tailor almost every part of the curriculum are the biggest selling points--and that's true whether it comes from a desire to give their kids the best they can, or a desire to micromanage and control every aspect of their lives.

Disagree - I think it's less about "average people" overall and more about opting out of learning from and being trained by what can feel like a gachapon of teachers and administrators in public (and to a lesser extent, private) schools. It probably seems to them like, "If I wouldn't hire this person to work at my company, why would I 'hire' them to do the much more critical task of preparing my child for their future?"

None of the arguments convince anyone. Homeschooling remains what it was in the creationism-and-spelling-bee days: an ideological choice.

In other words...

  Windows = public school
  Mac     = private school
  Linux   = homeschool

Could that be because newspapers like to report on those and people like to read stories about how awful rich kids are?

There are plenty of unpleasant kids from modest backgrounds. It's just that their tales are boring.

1) Private school is expensive as hell.

2) Yet, public school sucks. Most normies don't wanna learn and the system doesn't reward nor incentivize the smart, initiated students who want to excel. There are many normies that teachers just gotta essentially ... just babysit. And God forbid that a teacher stands up for themselves. Then some Karen has go and destroy that teacher and their career.

I can tell you from personal experience, going to school doesn't prevent this.

I know many teachers, and they have a very specific set of skills on how to teach. I wouldn't expect any old parent to know this and I suspect home school kids are worse off for it? But I'm happy to be pointed to evidence on the contrary.

This site doesn’t represent the world at large.

I was personally homeschooled, and while I ended up with a positive outcome, I cannot say the same thing for any of my peers (other kids I met through homeschooling groups.) There were many children that, in retrospect, were suffering from abuse or neglect that the structure of school could have prevented, or at least a mandatory reporter could have caught.

For more anecdotes, take a look at r/homeschoolrecovery (which is nearly 1/6th the size of r/homeschooling.) Many of the stories there are so gut-wrenchingly bleak. Any margin improvement in educational outcomes hardly seems worth it given some of the pain described there.

In my case, I chose it because the public schools in my part of town (low income) were low achieving, and proto-fascist in their policies on being able to control your own appearance. They had both state level (Texas, conservative) and city-level (Austin, progressive) political influences, the worst elements of both.

Just my own experience, but it doesn't much match what the article describes.

I'd like my kids to be free to follow their curiosities. It's definitely work to homeschool but for us, it may be worth it.

The most common reasons I hear are either that the public schools they are zoned for are terrible, mainly complaints over safety and/or drugs. The other common reason is just not seeing the value in the education being provided, often complaining of teacher quality or the design of a school system modelled after a program meant to churn out good factory workers.

Cruise. Around YouTube for older videos and connect the dots on how Common Core was a money grab that set us back a bit.

Go to local schools and see how school boards tie their ideology to how schools and classrooms are run to get that money. For years in San Francisco you enroll in the school lottery and hope you get to send your kid to the school close enough to you. Otherwise you spend 45 minutes each way to drop them off at school. On top of that classrooms cater to the lowest performing student. What parents with money wind up doing is sending their kids to Kumon like learning centers to fix the gap the classroom has in pushing their kid to be engaged with learning.

With everything else schools are also penalized for suspending or expelling students so teachers have to find creative ways to keep the bad apples away from everyone else.

For context I have family and friends working in public schools across differ states. There’s a reason people want to abolish the DOE and return curriculum back to the local school districts or the state.

I went to an ok school district and didn’t experience any of the problems today’s kids seem to face in school. People got suspended or expelled for being bad. Classrooms didn’t show political or biological ideology to the students.

It's a lovely time in their lives when computers are still "unknown" and a little magical, and they're learning about Minecraft or Roblox. They love to see how things work, but especially, how to create things.

So much of the grown-up internet is about endless passive consumption, so it's great to plant little seeds about how to use computers creatively and constructively and see where they run with it. Not everything has to be in an app, or behind a login, or from scrolling, or watching. We can just open up Notepad++ and create something. When they understand and master that, we move on to terminal or VS Code, or whatever works best for their trajectory.

We take a journey from electrons to gates to binary to bytes to characters to files to folders to ports to IP addresses to routers to HTTP to servers and back again. It's fun to see them piece together a mental model for how all this previously-invisible stuff actually works. It's very complex when stacked together as a whole, but each individual layer is rather simple and straightforward.

I have the career I do, and life that my family does, because nearly 25 years ago, one of the mom's in this same homeschool co-op taught an HTML/CSS class, and a "build your own computer" class. We scrounged some parts together from a Seattle PC recycler and built our own Linux boxes, then played little games or built websites.

I'm endlessly grateful for the time and experience she invested into me at a very young age.

I would say that the vast majority the quote-unquote "normal" homeschool parents I know are broke hippies/homesteaders/vanlife/wooden-sailboat types.

Definitely are rich folks who go down this path, but they tend to pay fancy private tutors and end up with something much more resembling a traditional education

Depends what you mean by normal. My experience is kids get more freedom, meet a wide range of people, and generally get a much better education. Maybe it is different here in the UK.

> And even the most well-intentioned of counter cultural folks don't always excel at parenting, never mind educating.

The home ed community in the UK does have a lot of hippie types in it, but even if I do not see eye to eye with them I think their kids are mostly a lot better educated than the average school child.

> hings we wouldn't generally countenance (be that actual abuse,

which also happens to school going kids. it happens more often to school going kids (and as far as I can see from stats, home ed kids are at lower risk - more likely to be investigated, less likely to have action taken). On top of that there is a fair amount of abuse in schools.

> just plain old "unschooling" - aka "ignore the kids till they go away").

that is not what unschooling is. Unschorling parents can make a great deal of effort, its just that they let kids decide what they want to learn and facilitate it.

Because public education has gotten progressively worse.

And, unfortunately, that's part of what's moving me towards homeschooling my child. We've not 100% decided on it yet. However, we are on the brink.

The issue we have is our school is underfunded and our child has special needs. Their day in class, from what we've observed, is primarily just daycare with no actual schooling. Even though they are on the border of being severe, they have no interaction with their peers which is a major reason we wanted them in school in the first place. The end result is they are spending a very large amount of time watching youtube or sitting in a corner.

The issue is our school district and our state does not want to fund public schools. They want to find ways to send money to private schools. The end result is the salaries for everyone involved are pitiful. Everyone that deals with my kid at school works 2 jobs. Some of them are making more money at mcdonalds than at school. And, surprise, the end result is even if they want to find staffers they can't find them.

Our district further bans parents from volunteering. So even though my wife is a SAHM, she can't lend a hand in my child's school to make up the staffing problem and improve my kid's education.

All of this has pushed us towards wanting to homeschool. Which really sucks because I don't think that's the ideal education for my child. I worry that we'll have gaps in the education we try to give them. I worry that they won't get to socialize with any peers. I worry that they will ultimately get left behind. But school isn't providing what we want.

Plus it's more or less a golden age for homeschooling: there's more resources available than ever.

I really don't understand why school vouchers aren't more popular. Parents need to have the ability to choose where to send their kids. They have much more agency in private schools where they are the people paying salaries.

I think the best way to fix the education system would be a voucher based system where the vouchers would be X dollars which would cover public and some private schools, but parents would have the option of choosing where to send their kids and if they want to spend more to send to better schools. Make schools compete for students.

There should also be some standard homeschooling kit or some sort of national resources that enabled parents to homeschool more easily.

Is there anything being done on this front that you think it's interesting?

From what I hear, it really feels like parents are more willing to homeschool than to be engaged with their children's education.

You thinking your kid needs some additional sauce to not be "average". Rad, teach them that at home. What about sending your kid to school prevents you from doing that?

I'm not saying school is perfect. But lately Parents care more than students about getting an "A" and if not it's the "Damn Teacher's" fault.

They want to protect their kids from the discomfort of not doing well in school. When they should be working with their student to help develop their talents.

The need for socialisation and being able to get along with the average had any meaning for as long as we had any hope for the "society" thing. Now it is obvious that there is no society (and it is arguable whether one really ever existed, maybe only for short periods in times of grave crises).

Universal education, for all children in a nation, is an incredibly recent thing. Its also essential for real participation in a democracy which requires, at minimum, an understanding of the governing body and at maximum whatever we're slogging through now. Could the curriculum be better? Definitely. You know who is stopping that? Shit politicians. We need better ones because no matter what you think, they aren't going away,

Education has also continuously and purposefully been underfunded and politicized by the political right and intermittently eviscerated by corrupt players on the left and right. This is on purpose. The rise of homeschooling is directly correlated with how much funding public schools have lost, the lack of safety and how difficult it is to operate successfully. You now send the kid to school and get cut with a thousand small asks for cash when we could just revise how taxes are collected and distributed. Put out a gun ban. We don't need metal detectors, and cops and clear backpacks and active shooter drills and teacher trainings and and and. We need LESS GUNS and most americans agree but private industry is limiting us.

The rise of homeschooling is correlated with how many people are concerned about the politicization of schools, their libraries, their teachers, their cirruculum.

We keep having presidents who appoint leaders to the department of education who do not believe in education being available for all citizens. Schools continue to expand their mission to feeding kids who can't be fed. To programs for kids who can't be home. No one seems as focused on fixing why there are so many hungry kids instead focusing on a 'lunch account' and the debt of middle schoolers.

This is all intensely documented and yet another example of cutting a public good. A public good by the way, that made America a place that everyone in the world wanted to go. Yes, I got picked on in school and was bored in my classroom. Yes it could have been better. This though, this is a concerted effort to get us to divest once again, just like we are from net neutrality, the post office, the EEOC etc.

A - It's illegal where I live, you have to jump hoops to do it B - I think an extra opportunity for socialising with kids is worth a bit of pain - we wouldn't have the energy for organising alternatives and also take care of the kids education C - By sending kids to a nice private school you get rid of a lot of problems of public school: unmotivated / openly hostile and punishing teachers, classmates with bad behaviour disrupting class, immigrant classmates who don't speak the language and / or create gang of people from the same country to gang up on kids (exactly like in prison)

When I went to school things weren't as bad as today and kids were not getting stabbed in public school, still it felt like a prison because of the slow learning pace and because everyone learns at a different pace and wants to learn about different things. School is simply the wrong idea for the majority of boys, it's just a silly machine that print mindless employees.

The strongest reason for not sending them to school is the latest EU mandatory gender theory / sexual education propaganda being taught to kids in school since last year.

Ultimately I decided that years of socialisation with peers trumps a few lessons about political BS; I'm confident I can teach them to distrust authority and teach them that they cannot trust blindly everything they hear in school or on the newspaper.

My friends who pursued illegal homeschooling are quite happy, they even found a teacher who is teaching kids illegally in someone's home, and by grouping the kids together across multiple families they have a soft school experience.

Eg, science, math, study hall, lunch, Spanish, History, Art, English… in a single day?

I loved it. What worked for me was studying for tests — and the harder the classes you took, the less homework there was (or it wasn’t required). I had a great history teacher, occasionally good math & English teachers, a great art teacher, and mediocre science teachers. The science TEXTBOOKS were fabulous — you could just read through those things and become a genius.

No more textbooks these days — it’s all some pdf segment to download. Bummer for my kids.

These days, there are way fewer tests, so my kids always freak when they have tests. I thought tests were great! Just one focused period to perform and then move on. Homework and projects were a big problem for me, because I could never start early enough — it was always a last minute dash. Maybe that trained me to produce fast output, though.

Kids were sometimes awful, but there was no way I was going to be popular so I just did my nerd thing. There were enough of us.

They had a great drama program which I loved — I did every play and musical I could. And they even had a speech and debate club — so I competed at “extemporaneous” speech—when I went to state competitions, they got the students all together to clap me out like they’d do for the football team. That was unnecessary and funny for the nerd.

My kids don’t get these kinds of opportunities, I fear. I was pretty lucky.

I would rather send my kids to a private school than try to homeschool them myself. Thankfully, the public schools in the the area I choose to live in are excellent. We do augment at home with tutors and extracurricular learning.

Obviously he also has his challenges in school. It's a public school but in Austria, so it ain't that bad. But there is also the saying that you aren't learning for school, you are learning for life.

So you aren't just learning for your subject, you are also learning to get along with people, how to avoid conflicts, how to manipulate a bit and how to trick some of the systems. All of that is not so much possible in homeschooling.

People do know that around here and it's more of a distrust into the system that might parents want to get their kids not taught in school in recent years, while their thinking behind the distrust does make them very bad teachers overall.

----

I agree this is probably the biggest tradeoff, but attention all parents, there's a cunning and affordable solution to the challenge of spoiling versus opportunity. It's guaranteed to work, anecdotally, at least sometimes:

Live in a big house and send your kids to a nice school, but roster them on truly hood (n.b. I mean real deal heart of the ghetto) travel sports teams. Only two requirements are as follows:

(1) that the team must be decently coached and

(2) practice field and home field must be in a genuinely scary neighborhood. Please don't assume I mean a run-of-the-mill bad neighborhood.

Ideally Pop Warner when younger and AAU BB by high school, but really anything other than lacrosse or fencing works. I personally was raised on hood travel baseball, and I am being 80% serious about this suggestion. Go Hurricanes.

The one thought that I imagine is being told you’re “above average” and “destined to do great things” your whole life by your socially-deemed successful parents is just another set of probably unrealistic expectations placed on kids.

There are more reasons to consider, but these are our most important factors.

Yes, there are educators who are so great they can teach all 20 kids amazingly well, but those are super rare. Most likely kids who are learn much faster or much slower than the rest will be left behind. If you child is in this group, it's better off to stay away from public school.

(It could have been much better if there were advanced classes, "magnet" schools, etc.. but in many states those programs are being cancelled and everyone is being forced into rigid programs.)

How, by the lack of it?

A lot of people bet for home schooling because, not despite of, their perspective from inside a classroom.

At a minimum you need to use your judgement to vet good from bad practitioners in those fields.

Also "disrespect our educators" is so funny. Sorry, they're not that serious, mostly dumb. And we're not the laughingstock of the developed world, we are the rulers of the developed and undeveloped world

Not everyone would recognize this, and be willing to call it out.

I wonder whether that came from the writer's religious homeschooling, and if so, whether it came from learning from decent people who taught and embodied the better Christian values? Or from a reaction to the distancing that can kinda be implicit (e.g., hints that people not in the religious group are a less-enlightened Other)? Or both?

There are lots of online resources, online courses, tutors who do remote tutoring (I do not think i could have found my daughter a Latin teacher locally very easily, for example), lots of courses both for conventional qualifications (my kids did (I)GCSEs - just as kids do in British schools, (except at schools they do them at 16, we spread them out with my older daughter doing her first when she was 11) and just to learn (e.g. MOOCs).

“An estimated 10% of K–12 students will experience sexual misconduct by a school employee by the time they graduate from high school.”

https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/case-study-k-12-sch...

But I do sit with him every night for 30 mins to go over alphabet and Math. I think I'll extend it to maybe 45 mins when he goes to primary, but anything longer than 1 hour is going to be harmful.

When I hear a question like this, I think: "Seriously?"

If it's not obvious to you why no one wants to to go a typical modern public school you probably haven't been in one in a while.

It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way. "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.

Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."

Our education system is broken.

Following is recent video of my homeschooled son that this community might appreciate. It gives an opportunity to tailor education and challenge kids potential.

From what I know of the USA, all students are placed together in classrooms. Now I'm not sure if that's on the federal level or state level, but I cannot imagine the brightest students being held back by the weakest/misbehaving ones. Where I live we are placed into different grades, where students are grouped by their academic performance. There is no prejudice or superiority/inferiority associated with it and it just works.

I've only heard anecdotes from the Teachers sub on Reddit, but if that was my child in the USA I would homeschool 100%.

“We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”

- Voddie T. Baucham Jr. (possibly among others)

One of the tenants of collectivism seems to be to replace the parent-child relationship with a society-child relationship "for the good of society"

I am also "on the spectrum," which means that I'm a bully magnet (much better, these days, but it lasted far beyond grade school).

Had a number of other issues, that came to a head, when I was 18.

Dropped out of school, basically, in 11th grade, and got my GED, a bit before I would have graduated, if I had stayed.

Most of my education after that, was a redneck tech school, OJT, home experimenting, and a whole bunch of seminars and focused tech classes. Couple of math classes in college.

I did OK, but a hell of a lot of others, with similar backgrounds, did not.

I am ambivalent about homeschooling. I think it may do well, for some people, and not, for others. I know that there's a "Little Nazi" homeschooling program that's popular with the bedsheets-as-a-uniform crowd, but it might be possible to get a far better education, at home, than the best prep school could give you.

People whinge about Trump possibly abolishing the Department of Education, but maybe no DoE is better than the one we've got. Because between Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and whatever psychological experiment the education establishment has cooked up recently, I can't distinguish between the education system's serious proposals and sinister plots by a saboteur to undermine education from within.

What's really needed is a constitutional convention. Abolish and reboot the entire government, implement a multiparty parliamentary system with actually functional, corruption-resistant government agencies and bodies. Homeschooling is citizens' response to a state that's failed in its basic responsibilities.

At the local elementary school, we are told the kids are being kept safer now thanks to being tracked by AI cameras.

Some parents, maybe especially those with insight into tech fact vs. tech marketing, may have reservations about "tutors" whose services (perhaps for free) come with the stipulation that they are free to record every bit of data about your kid and do with it as they please.

The're being silly, right? Because?

As everyone on HN knows: software is super safe, and the entities/corps controlling it, so, so benign. Data doubly so -- hacks basically never happen, am I right? No one cares about your kid?

Or?

This is exactly what I’m referring to when I tell people that the tech industry changed and is no longer fulfilling.

You also shouldn't try to mention INT_MAX, negative zero, rounding error, or other computer science topics which do not exist in mathematics.

And what would be the point? If we're right that their mom is better equipped to teach them than a teacher is (because of time to dedicate to them and a personal relationship and understanding) then what do we gain by having a teacher do it too?

(This isn't the thread for the socializing argument, because OP started with teacher qualifications. I'll just add that we are aware of that concern and have strong mitigations in place.)

I work on homework with my kid every day and after all those things it's not like we have time (or she has energy) to fill in holes in her at-school learning

If the school is bad enough, then an average student there (because there are many more students than teachers) might not be a good influence.

There are schools in my state with <50% graduation rate, the average student there won't even finish the school.

You might say that's also a success of the schooling (and higher education) system - unless the people who produced these advances were all home schooled, which I somehow doubt...

The issue is that some liberal schools of thought are pushing towards detracking in hopes of reducing inequality in a Harrison Bergeron sort of way. So public schools are not offering those advanced courses. E.g. California was going to remove 8th grade Algebra as an option, but thankfully there was enough backlash to stop this.

"I thought you guys usually have a bunch of olympiad medalists though; don't students care about academics at your school?"

"No, there's only really 10–15 of us who try, and hold up the rest of the school's reputation."

Math terms like "whole number" are not defined in terms of the behavior of computer programming languages.

In math, not only are 3.0 and 3 the same thing, but also, so is 2.9999999...

.

> They weren't looking to see if you knew the arithmetic with that question, they wanted you to show you understood what they meant by "whole number" and understand you can't just leave arbitrary precision after rounding.

Can you show any math reference that supports this viewpoint? This goes against my college mathematics training.

.

> You didn't give the right answer

According to mathematics, 3.0 and 3 are the same thing (and so is the Roman numeral III, and so on.) So is 6/2.

It is deeply and profoundly incorrect to treat an answer as incorrect because the mantissa was written out.

The teacher is simply incorrect, as are you.

.

> Just acknowledge you didn't understand what they were looking for and do better next time.

If a teacher asks "what is the country north of Austria," in an English speaking school, and you write "Germany," and the teacher says "no, it's Allemande," they're just incorrect. It doesn't matter if the teacher is French. There are only two ways to look at this: either the correct answer is in the language of the school, or any international answer is acceptable.

A normal person would say "oh, ha ha, Germany and Allemande are the same place, let's just move forwards."

A person interested in defeating and winning, instead of teaching, might demand that the answer come in in some arbitrary incorrect format that they expected. That's a bad teacher who doesn't need to be listened to.

Yes, we know there's also some kid who is explaining to just do as teacher instructs, but no, we're there to learn information, not to learn to obey.

If you round 3.05 down to 3, 3.00 is not arbitrary precision, its explicit precision that's reflective of the rounding operation you did. I wasn't claiming that `type(3.0) == type(3)`. I was claiming that:

    >>> round(3.0) == 3
    True

They risk being able to function better in highly controlled environments with other kids that share the same background as them. Not optimal.

Becoming humble in front of people who suck is learning the wrong life lesson

If a system is specifically set up against you, runs poorly, and in a real sense hates you, you have the option to let it fail without you. It is the polite, and least conflict path to leave it to its failure, and to forge your own way.

On the other hand, listening to people who tell you that you are unethical, guilty of an *ism of some kind, or bad, does not have a good track record of success. The path to hell is paved with good intentions. What you suggest is specifically not going to happen on my part.

It's an interesting perspective, but I'm afraid it fundamentally misunderstands the nature of real-world human societies and how they hold together over time -- advancing that perspective will inevitably result in society fragmenting into factions that are increasingly at odds with each other, and ultimately collapsing.

Societies are not monolithic entities unto themselves that people somehow owe loyalty to. They're emergent patterns of people -- often with disparate interests and values -- cooperating with each other in pursuit of mutual benefit. Forcing people to be locked into monopolistic social relations that no longer offer those benefits to them is a sure-fire way to destroy society.

We'll be much better off when education in our society is offered by a wide range of approaches that adapt in a bottom-up way to the full diversity of that society, an not dominated by a politicized monopoly that tries to shoehorn everyone into a conformist model that is optimal for no one in particular.

The people you hear giving up today have tried to fix the system. It's a little insulting to insinuate otherwise. When I was in high school, I tried to start a CS club, but no one was interested. I helped run MATHCOUNTS at the local middle school, and we had five people show up on a good day (<1% of the student body). Most students don't care anymore, and why should they when you have to fight the school to take AP Biology as a freshman? Gifted programs are being eliminated in the name of equity, and common core standards are lower than they ever have been. A friend who immigrated in seventh grade said America's seventh grade math classes are years behind China's (and she went to a better school than me). How do you get years behind in seven years?!

I don't think it is possible to fix the education system. The student body has adopted an anti-learning culture, administrators are lowering standards to raise their metrics, and most teachers would be wholly unfit for an ideal classroom, let alone the ones they're supposed to oversee nowadays. I am all for "burning the house down". I think the best solution would be to fire everyone, raise salaries by 10x, and then hire back 10% as many people. After all, the professorship pyramid scheme has lots of PhDs who might be interested in teaching for $300K/year.

How bad would it have to get to change your mind about this? Suicide is already one of the biggest causes of death in young people, and the biggest known contributing factors are things that are determined by the school environment.

I'm all for paying taxes for the greater good. But I don't want anyone I care about to go through what I went through.

That's so last century. Now about as real as Santa. Now you can only get wealthy by inheritance or gambling. Even if it means gambling with you health you still need to win for it to amount to anything. There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now. I'm not sure if there ever was.

Reading your comment, it seems to focus on the individual. “The person” you know nothing about.

The parent comment seems to be Bayesian, the probability of “the person” being something.

I do think it’s possible to simultaneously believe that:

* every single person you meet in every possible circumstance might be an exceptional human

* your are more likely to encounter exceptional humans in specific circumstances and you can optimize for that

I believe this holds true regardless of your definition of exceptional.

A (maybe) obvious example: if you believe exceptional humans want to grow their own food and live on communes, you probably don’t want to live in the financial district of Manhattan. That would be a bad way to optimize for finding people who share your values.

Similarly you’re unlikely to find a thriving software developer community in Springfield Illinois. If you go to Springfield and assume everyone you meet can’t program, you’re going to be wrong - there are good programmers there. But if you want to live around people who know how to code, you don’t move to Springfield Illinois.

    > By 1875, the U.S. literacy rate was approximately 80 percent.

    > By 1900, the situation had improved somewhat, but 44% of black people remained illiterate.

    > The gap in illiteracy between white and black adults continued to narrow through the 20th century, and in 1979, the rates were approximately equal.

But the states does have among the lowest literacy rate in the west. Less than 80% was considered literate in 2024, compared to almost 99% in the EU (with a range from 94% to almost 100%).

Sounds like Americans were literate back then. I also suspect that most were _more_ connected to the world around them. Not the broader world, but the immediate world around them.

> literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history;

The rates only looked okay if you cut out at least 20% of thr population?

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

Yeah, it was okay in New England but many states had laws preventing slave education.

Plenty of teachers are bullies, including up until Uni.

Social mobility is a measure of relative rank change. In countries with compressed wage ranges, such as those you mention, “social mobility” is an artifact of the mathematics, it doesn’t mean you are meaningfully wealthier than the average person. You can double your household income in the US to above average and still not be “socially mobile”. Social mobility is not a meaningful measure for continent-sized economically diverse countries.

A person can go from the trailer park to being upper middle class in a place like Mississippi and it doesn’t count as socially mobile because you are being ranked against the household income of someone in Seattle, 3,000 km away. As far as the person in Mississippi is concerned, they are living the dream.

The opportunity to improve your standard of living in e.g. Europe pales in comparison to the opportunity to do so in the US. It won’t be classified as “socially mobile” in the US as an artifact of how the math works, but no one in the US cares.

The exact context was given. They wanted only whole numbers.

> Writing something like '10/3=3' is likely to trigger the mathematicians

Sure, when lacking the context of all answers should be rounded to the nearest whole number. But that was the context, and it's astounding so many people with alleged math backgrounds arguing things like intergers aren't a thing to understand.

The average kid at the average school is at the 50th percentile. Moreover, the speed of the class isn't even the speed of the average kid because then the 40th and 20th percentile kids would get left behind. To get out of this you'd need a school with a gifted program and enough 90th percentile kids to fill it, and many of them don't have one.

> The right answer they were looking for was 3, not 3.0. Adding that .0 implies a precision which is not correct.

In contemporary mathematics, 3 is 3.0 . Both 3 and 3.0 belong to the set of integers. There is no additional precision being demonstrated by adding a 0 at the end of the 3. This is simple notation, not refering to a new concept.

This is the bottom line; this right here.

We're being led to a second dark age ON PURPOSE.

Plus, an "educated" populace is as easy or maybe even easier to control, it's willpower against all odds that characterizes the truly ungovernable.

However I'm curious as to why you attribute or limit this to 'conservatives' only. Is this really something exclusive or characteristic of the conservative side? At least where I am from it's the left that's more interventionist in regards to education rather than the right, that interventionism being used to make education more rigid and controlled by a biased government.

And the media is definitely not consolidated, you've got clearly two sides competing at a pretty equal level.

And two sides at equal levels? Are you living in 1979? Local media is nearly all Sinclair. All the cable networks are owned by conservatives. Even traditionally liberal newspapers like the Washington Post are owned by rich assholes taking over the editorial board. And social media in the US is now dominated by two literal fascists.

No, mass of people cant. The thing you describe can happen and not affect the global stats only because it happens to few people in one relatively small location.

At some point, the masses say, "No." They realize that they're never getting a seat at that particular table, and turn from fighting over the charity spots to attempts at dismantling their exploitation. From there, you either get a robust public school system that provides a decent education for everyone, or a police state.

Suffice it to say, no one parent's dreams for their kids should come at the expense of another's.

Your original assertion "There's absolutely no way to earn wealth now" is ludicrous: was it possible a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago? Did anyone become wealthy through methods other than gambling or inheritance a month ago? a year ago? a decade ago? If even one person did, this disproves your assertion, unless you want to claim some as-yet-unmentioned recent change that made it possible then and impossible now.

Your supporting theory about gambling is only true if you define every single choice you make in life as a gamble to some extent, which is a weird way of thinking about the world.

As for the "you didn't build that" stuff & snark, I don't recall claiming I did anything all by myself, nor did I see anyone claim you have to do everything all by yourself to "earn wealth". Nice strawman.

as an outsider, i think cali’s schooling system is beyond fucked, mostly due to the focus on the bottom 25% of students. the middle and high achieving students are being neglected and leaving. positive feedback loop.

For CNN and MSNBC, no. Neither was every truly liberal in the global sense (like the Democratic Party, closer to centrist than anything else) and both have started drifting rightward in the last 4 years such that they're now roughly "American Centrist" with a slight left lean i.e. conservative in most of the rest of the world.

That attitude is prevalent in poor schools, but rare in rich schools and is properly dealt with by better educators that prefer wealthy schools with good salaries.

That sort of antagonism toward authority is incredibly disruptive in a community of People who want to achieve something.

Parents want to get their kids away from it for a reason. It's unhealthy. You're an example of the point. I don't mean any offense by it, just that it's easy to sniff out that you haven't experienced both sides of the coin so you reveal stubborn ignorance.

It inhibits learning and communicating. It's repulsive.

Mormons' affluence is in spite of their faith, not because of it. Utah also has more MLMs and scams than most others.

Having lived in a cult-like religion, I'd rather be less wealthy yet mentally well than 'socialized' into magical thinking and all the various idiotic garbage I was taught. Public schools are often one of the only ways kids can escape abusive, exploitive, or otherwise unhealthy circumstances.

6/2 is a whole number. 6/2 = 3. 3 is a whole number. They are equal. Usually, they are the exact same mathematical object. It is not merely that they share properties. They are literally definitionally the exact same thing (the same set in ZFC). "n is a whole number" is a proposition. It is true for n=6/2.

If a teacher is teaching that 6/2 is not an integer, unless they are in the middle of constructing the rationals and need to make a distinction between integers and equivalence classes of pairs of integers, then they are wrong. The very first thing you do after you're forced to make that distinction is you make it go away. They shouldn't be teaching the student to hyperfocus on a specific notation or format. That's a bad lesson to teach, and is something a real teacher will need to fix later. Actual mathematics professors are happy to let you write "let <christmas tree>∈ℝ". An intro proofs professor will definitely put something like "-3.999..., -6/2, -12/6, -5/5, 0, 5/5, 12/6, 6/2, 3.999..." on a number line to illustrate the point that these are just different ways to write the same thing. Fluidity in switching through and following different notations without getting distracted is a centrally important mathematical skill.

I grew some 1,500km north of the nearest city and got by .. still managed to hook up with Terrence Tao and Paul Erdős when I got to university and ran a math club. When one of my kids was ready for high school we got a house in the catchment of the only public school with an aviation program so they could build and fly a light aircraft.

> The issue is that you need the absence of children who would hold back the class,

I enjoyed going to school with hunter gathers in the Kimberley .. I don't feel they held me back, I did get to learn how to fish, to hunt, to swear in several languages.

Despite a lot fighting at high school, on and off the fooball field, I managed to pick up enough abstract algebra to work on CAYLEY/MAGMA which cracked a few quantum encryption candidates recently, enough linear algebra and calculas to author a geophysical processing suite, etc.

My gripe here is the parent post is an appeal to how "average" students are quite bad. But, there is no substantiation to that point. It is, instead, taken as a given in what is essentially a culture war talking point.

It would help if I wasn't exposed to so many parents that are convinced their kids are somehow gifted among gifted kids.

Here is the breakdown for Maryland: https://dls.maryland.gov/pubs/prod/NoPblTabPDF/2024PubSchool.... My county, Anne Arundel, received half the state funding of poorer counties. In terms of total funding, it’s below the median, but has above average schools for the state because school quality is more a function of the types of kids in the school moreso than funding.

Doubt it. In my province of Canada (Alberta), school is paid for by provincial taxes and money is distributed based on the amount of students.

That being said, since kids are assigned to schools based on proximity, it's still worthwhile being in a nicer neighbourhood since the kids will come from more affluent families...

The Puritans were always few in number and were demographically displaced by later immigration around the fishing industry in New England.

Pretty sure all teachers I had even in elementary school studied at least high school level algebra. In middle school and above they all had masters or better in mathematics.

> the distinction is not relevant

> I highly doubt that the teacher was making that distinction, or even aware it exists

> the teacher was making a distinction that does not exist

The distinction both exists and does not exist. Incredible.

> it would be highly inappropriate to go into that level of detail

The detail of a thing that does not exist, right?

> it's beyond the level of knowledge expected of a schoolteacher.

Right, the teacher is wrong because you wouldn't expect the schoolteacher to be smart enough to be right about it.

So, yes, maintenance is a significant portion of spend. The schools were allowed to get into really bad shape, physically, in a way that doesn't at all reflect on the enthusiasm or capability of students or teachers.

But it surely did happen -- IIRC, Adams and Jefferson were both noting in their correspondence how by the end of the 18th century most of the Puritan descendants had somehow become Unitarians.

I will send them to the school just because I want them to interact with other people of same age, and also learn how much stupid people is around, and show them it won't get any better later in life. But I do not expect, at all, that they will learn something useful.

My experience in school contrasts dramatically with my experience going through the scout movement. We had an active and healthy group. we would do 10 weekend camps a year and on those weekends I would hit the ground running when we arrived on friday evening and wouldn't stop until I was back in the van to go home on Sunday afternoon. I rose to the rank of troop leader, I won the youth of the year award, I would lead the campfires on the group weekends for 150 kids and their parents. I'm 49 and still in touch with the core group I went through the scout movement with, we're all lifelong friends. I probably would have killed myself if I didn't have Scouts.

https://laniakeabooks.org/books/letters-from-prison/part-1/#...

There’s so many classes that I want a refund on my wasted childhood time. Reading the “classics” in English, studying foreign language, Theology (Catholic schools), History (yes, History). I hated all these classes, didn’t learn much from them beyond what it took to pass the tests, then quickly forgot what they taught. Anything useful that would have come from those subjects I learned later, through alternate more enjoyable means (e.g. Assassin’s Creed was way more effective in teaching me the history those games covered).

> It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning

This is why I stuck with home educating up to GCSEs. I wanted my kids to enjoy learning and they do. They have a very wide range of interests and good academic results and IMO are better prepared for A levels and university than they would have been at school (even really good schools).

> find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work,

This is why we have so much after school stuff and breakfast clubs. Yes, it means some kids get fed in the morning, but a lot of them seem to get given junk food.

> for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children

IMO home education is better for socialisation. What skills do you learn from meeting the same group of people your own age in the same place everyday? My kids had more time to do things by themselves (anything from going to a shop to taking a bus to meet up with a friend). They did (between them) guides, dance, sea cadets, sailing, D & D, art classes, singing classes piano classes, drama, stage fighting and more. They had both remote (which develops a useful skill set these days) and face to face tutors at for some GCSE subjects. it would be really hard for kids tied by school hours plus home work to do as much.

> the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.

The chasing of metrics has been a disaster. My younger daughter is at sixth form college for A levels and it has deteriorated since her older sister went there. it is still good but they have become a lot more rigid and I feel they are less focused on students best interests and more on the metrics.

I went to one of the best schools in the UK (consistently top 10 academically), with no bullying problems, no corporal punishment (it had abolished it in Victorian times IIRC), excellent facilities - and I still think my kids had a better education than I did

Exit is probably the most powerful strategy to dealing with certain kinds of situations, and schools deny you that.

That self-learning approach served me well in school, work, and life to the present.

The plane geometry teacher was one of the worst. We had a disagreement: She thought that in her subject she was superior, a lot better than the students were (actually, not for long!), regarded the students as subordinates, and tried to intimidate us. So, I communicated with her only a few times but then was showing that I was better in the subject than she was. I.e., one reason I worked hard and DID learn well was to show up the teachers, show that they were NOT better, even in their own subject, and keep them from being nasty to me, trying to subordinate me.

Since my brother wanted me to go for the football team, I did. The coach was no help at all and treated me with contempt. I was not any good at football, didn't try self-learning, but the coach was no help. As part of dumping on me, the coach gave me an old helmet, not effective, unique on the team. One day another player gave his elbow to my head, and I hit the ground maybe a little hurt. In one word, the coach was a bully. To heck with that: I quit the team.

Institutional childcare in general is mostly this; a necessity driven by an economic imperative. Both parents must work. School is a continuation of that logic, although as the kids get older and more independent this becomes less important.

School for me was a gladiator academy. Useful for producing gladiators I suppose but at the expense of any genuine intellectual curiosity or love of learning. Thankfully I had an informal opportunity to stay after school when the budding gladiators all went home to torment small animals or whatever it was they did, when I could sit in peace and play on the school’s Apple II. That opened my eyes to an entirely different world, which I now have the privilege of inhabiting.

Some of my siblings liked school, and my parents were wise enough to make the homeschool/government school decision on a child by child basis. I’m very grateful that they had the courage to make that decision in my case against fierce opposition by all of polite society.

I've chosen not to have kids (my childhood experience of other kids being one contributing factor) but if I did I would not want them to be anywhere near a UK state school.

Funny enough, in the US, most states changed their methods of teaching (especially math) 10-20 years ago. And facebook is still filled with parents (although probably mostly grandparents) bitching about not understanding "common core math" without trying to understand it, and expressing how they learned via rote memorization and that is what we should use instead.

Hey this is more or less the universal experience world over. Be suspicious of anyone who says otherwise.

The problem is, when you allow homeschooling, a non-insignificant number of children will have to endure the same, just the wardens and torturers will be their own parents. There have been more than enough cults who actually promote that parents keep their children from "outside influence", and on top of that come the pedophiles, again especially in religious circles. Even private schools suffer from such issues, again mostly religious ones, but there also have been a fair share of scandals surrounding "ordinary" esoteric schools.

I would rather fight for government-run schools to have proper budgets for a high quality learning experience, adequate staff, modern curricula and teaching methods and actually sensible policies against bullying of all kinds than to allow systems to thrive that are even worse than what you went through.

Open an history book and look how it was before schooling was free and mandatory.

I do agree that the most recent spin on it is far from ideal and that the underlying goals seem to have shifted, but I can clearly and easily imagine an alternative way that doesn't involve home schooling.

The problem is the same as in many other industries, once you optimise everything to please the capitalistic beast we created you're set for personal hell

But I still am against home schooling. I still got social skills from going to public school that homeschooled kids lack. I still don't think your average parent is equipped to give their children a good education.

I have people I know who have homeschooled their kids. Without exception these people are narcissists with insane views who are using it as a way to indoctrinate their children into having the same worldview that they hold.

Homeschooling should be illegal. It is child abuse.

I believe in homeschooling but it isn't very fashionable here.

Now imagine that all that is true, except it's your home.

> give an appreciable reason

You might not have succeeded at that. You did a very good job at denigrating school though :)

Let me try to tell you my view: both homeschooling and schools have risks. A child can suffer mistreatment both at school and at home.

School however offers something that homeschooling can't: options. If you have a bad teacher, you will have another 4 which are average, and 1 or 2 which are actually decent. There will be bullies, yes, but you also have opportunities to make friends.

At home, all you have is a single adult. If that adult happens to be a psycho, there's no escape.

I say this as someone who suffered at school. My ADHD got completely unnoticed, being of the inattentive kind. I didn't know how to relate with others, I had no friends. I would pick up a book and read in a corner during recess. I got bullied. For me school was something I "endured", not something I enjoyed.

I also happen to be the elder of 4 children. My younger brothers and sister went to the same school I went to. They had different teachers, different co-students. All of them were happy at school, and they turned up just alright.

Now, my parents. My mum is ok (for someone who has raised 4 people) but my dad is a self-absorbed narcissist. My brothers and sister stopped talking to him 20 years ago. He doesn't know his own grandchildren. I still talk with him, but out of pity. There's no love left.

So yeah. I suffered at school. It happens. My siblings didn't. I think homeschooling with my mum would have been ok, she's decent. But homeschooling with my dad? I would be way worse than I am now.

So, there. Options.

If you're interested in some content that really helped me understand why I hated school so completely, I recommend "Dumbing Us Down: The Hidden Curriculum of Compulsory Schooling" by John Taylor Gatto, and "Free to Learn" by Peter Gray. Peter Gray also has a very nice blog called "Play Makes Us Human" at https://petergray.substack.com/

As a parent of a toddler, deciding on schooling options is one of the most serious decisions I'll have to make with my partner over the coming years and it terrifies me. Home schooling is a very attractive option from my perspective, but only due to lack of alternatives that offer the sort of nurturing and positive environment that I want my child to have.

You will also enter other communities, where again, you will find bullies.

God how I hate idea of "safe spaces".