OK I guess I’m going to go against the deluge of comments here; And give an appreciable reason instead of denigrating those who might choose this.
The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school.
I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country.
However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life. For the entirety of my young life, school was a prison. With inmates who would beat you, Emotionally abuse you, the “wardens” did not want to be there either, and did not care how the other inmates treated you… sometimes doubling down on the behaviour themselves. - The comparison is further solidified by 6-foot galvanised steel bars surrounding the complex, and that I visited an actual psychiatric prison not long after and the cafeteria, recreational grounds, rooms, etc; were identical to those of my school.
Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.
It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning, Everything that got me through school was things that my mother taught me- And as a consequence, I was always top of my class.
I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.
and for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children- The ostracised, are learning to be helpless and to be victims- They are not learning to “socialise” more. If anything it is probably more harmful for those people to be exposed to more people until they’ve had time to form on their own.
I hated school as well but I would still disagree on almost all points with you.
But I was lucky enough to go to a good public school, found many lifelong friends there, learned a ton of aside skills that help me now in my personal and professional life.
I think it’s really sad that more and more people opt out of society, either in school or elsewhere. I can understand it to some extent but I think everyone will come of poorer in the end if we all sit in our separate boxes, only thinking about ourselves and how we can profit more.
I’m usually optimistic about the future but this is a hella depressing trend.
I went to a state school in the North of England with a GCSE pass rate between 30-40% and this is a fair description of what it was like. At the time the performance of all schools was based on the percentage of students achieving at least a C including Maths and English, and as Goodhart’s law suggests this inevitably meant the school’s resources were optimised for getting students around the C grade borderline to pass while all other students didn’t get an education suited to their ability. The Gove reforms included changing how schools are assessed to a value-added measure, that I believe is commonly used in the United States, which has created the incentive for schools to focus on all students rather than just those near an arbitrary passing grade. The deeper underlying issue that’s harder to solve is the anti-aspirational culture that pervades through a lot of schools in deprived areas, in my experience most students didn’t really get the value a good education could bring to their lives and like the original comment treated it like internment rather than a route out of poverty.
I went to a school that had a lot of good teachers, and I learned a lot from them.
But when it came to bullies, the school was just as you described. Worse, the punishment for being in a fight was the same whether you started it or you were just beaten up. If you made the fight get noticed, you got punished. It was quite clear that they had no interest in stopping the fights, just in making sure they didn't get reported.
And on the bus, the driver didn't like my family because she once turned the bus around on our grass, tearing up a bunch of it, and my father was angry about that. In retaliation, she let bullies beat me up on the bus for years and turned a blind eye.
My education would probably have suffered if I was home schooled because both my parents were forced to work to make enough money to survive. And I'd be even more introverted than I am now.
But man, the bullying was bad.
> Worse, the punishment for being in a fight was the same whether you started it or you were just beaten up. If you made the fight get noticed, you got punished.
I'm not saying that this is anything close to optimal, but it should be noted that under this system (which is reminiscent of the way ancient Chinese criminal law worked, per Legal Systems Very Different from Ours[0]) people who get beat up should still report and take the punishment. Sure, you'll get punished for it once but you'll also build a solid reputation for not letting things slide, so it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to beat you up again.
[0] Except that the punishment back then for being involved in a crime (generally a theft or a swindle of some sort) was, guess what-- you got beat up.
> […] so it's highly unlikely that anyone will want to beat you up again.
That is, unfortunately, not how this works. The only ways to stop bullying are to be able to stand up to the bullies, which usually is not a realistic proposition (you wouldn't get bullied in the first place if you could) and can lead to further escalation (right on up to shootings or stabbings); to have a very, very empathic teacher who will put their foot down; or to have solid anti-bullying programs which use effective, proven methods to stamp out bullying.
Mind that nothing will deter a really determined bully, and getting punished because your victim spoke up instead of accepting the bully's power will escalate things from 'bullying just because you are available' to 'bullying because I now want you, and specifically, you, as miserable as you can be, all the time'.
I’m sorry you went through that.
I hope life has been kinder to you following this. :(
Generally speaking, yeah. Someone else mentioned the system preparing you for life later, and I can see where the bullies made me stronger as well.
I definitely don't condone all that as a way to get stronger, but at least I got something from it. Silver linings and all.
> forced internment for children
Where I live (U.S.), new schools are literally built like prisons... each wing is laid out from a central "observation area" for the administrators. It's just a panopticon design modeled after penitentiaries.
I was with my family in our new local high school. My dad and I were the only two who noticed the layout.
The panopticon design was originally intended for schools too, as well as other institutions:
> Bentham conceived the basic plan as being equally applicable to hospitals, schools, sanatoriums, and asylums. He devoted most of his efforts to developing a design for a panopticon prison, so the term now usually refers to that.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Panopticon
Whether it’s friendly and encourages healthy development is another question.
The criticism section of the Wikipedia article focuses on political aspects, but to me, the very idea of keeping someone feeling like they're always watched sounds like psychological torture.
In fairness if you’ve ever been bullied and corned out of view of the teachers, having someone seeing you may feel like a relief.
In Missouri, high-school buildings use the same blueprints as state prisons. Why bother designing something custom? They serve the same purpose. They literally are prisons.
If a teenager fails to show up for school, a police officer will eventually show up to arrest their parents and place the teenager in the custody of a "foster family." Now both parent and teenager are imprisoned. And we are told this is freedom.
To make matters much much worse, children in state custody with the foster system are routinely exposed to all kinds of abuse. Many foster families operate like a profitable business where costs are minimized and care is entirely absent.
> And we are told this is freedom.
I think we pretty much universally agree that mandatory schooling is preferable to the alternative, do you really think an illiterate populous is preferable? So yes actually that is freedom. Society guarantees that you will not be illiterate just because your parents were crack addicts, I think that's a good thing.
I don't think an illiterate populous is the alternative unless you think most people lack intrinsic motivation and also have families that don't value education. Seems extremely unlikely. Maybe you wouldn't have gone to school if you had a choice but most people would, if nothing else for free childcare.
> most people would
You are missing the point, "most" is not all, I don't think most people/families are like this at all, we don't do this for most people. I think you would be surprised about the number of low-income children in the US who will never see a classroom if we abandoned compulsory education. It is also an effective measure to increase equality and class mobility.
14 million children in the US are food insecure. 43 million people live in poverty, 12.9% [1]
You know how many people in the US are illiterate? 21% [2]
Do you think that number will increase or decrease if we got rid of compulsory education?
[1] https://www.nokidhungry.org/who-we-are/hunger-facts [2] https://www.thenationalliteracyinstitute.com/post/literacy-s...
I live in the UK now, but grew up in the US. My own experience is pretty similar.
I was also a highly sensitive kid so took the abuse pretty hard. I was bullied by both other kids _and_ by teachers. I still remember one teacher openly calling me weird in class and picking on me (I was very introverted and shy due to years of bullying/anxiety, which I guess made me "weird"). Both physical and mental abuse from other kids. One "highlight" was being openly sexually assaulted in PE class and the teacher didn't even care.
I was messed up psychologically for a very long time after my school experience. Extreme social anxiety, hyper sensitivity to criticism, constant feelings of anxiety and depression. It took a failed marriage and years of therapy until I was able to overcome most of this trauma and kind of start to live normally (in my 40s).
As a result, like you, I am incredibly cynical of schooling systems. I see my kids suffering in British schools (in secondary), and it really pains me. They loved primary where there were small classes and secondary just has completely sucked out the joy of school for them. I wish I could just retire from work and full time home school them.
I'm early 50s and went to school in the Republic of Ireland - late 70s, 80s. I really feel the same as the OP here. It felt like a daily prison, combined with huge amounts of memorisation for exams. (promptly forgotten)
Maybe a child could put up with the incarceration if it wasn't for the bullying on top of that too. No escape.
Aside: In the 70s the Headmaster had a cane that was used occasionally but at least that died out later.
But on a more optimistic note, I think there's some 'alternative schools' becoming more popular in Ireland now, like 'Forest School Ireland' etc... sounds more healthy anyway!
The kind of school you went to sounds very different from the grammar school that my working-class father went to in the 1960s and that helped him escape a life of asbestos-breathing drudgery in moribund shipyards.
There were problems with the grammar school system as well.
They were created to provide a pathway to the middle class for bright children from working class families. But the entrance exam was heavily biased in favour of children from middle class backgrounds.
Famously the first 11+ tests had questions like "Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do".
In later years, getting out of school tuition was the main way to prep for the 11+, which put grammar schools financially out of reach for a lot of working class families. It had basically become a parallel state funded education system for the middle class.
My parents were both grammar school kids with working class parents, who didn't get any special prep for the 11+ beyond what their state primary school gave them. Both were the first people in their families to go to university and both managed to get into Oxford (where they met!). There was definitely a sweet point period when the system did what it intended in that sense, but there was obviously the drawback that if you ended up in the comprehensive system, you were stuck there and you had a situation where children got labelled at a young age.
Obviously some areas still have grammar schools and the impression I get from people living in those areas is that to stand a fighting chance with the 11+, you need out of school tuition or for your parents to be educated enough and have time to tutor you yourself. House prices are also obviously high in grammar school areas too! I've seen recent 11+ papers and having bright children at state schools around that age who are at the top of their year academically, I think they would struggle with them without any preparation or tuition.
"Name the various types of servants in a household and what they do"
This is incredible...
For non-british readers; state-funded Grammar schools famously, were abolished.
(I’m being downvoted, but this just objective fact, and something my grandfather brings up commonly).
EDIT: according to a lot of HN comments; they still seem to exist but they aren't evenly distributed.
There certainly were none in my city.
Despite one being named a grammar school, it does not follow a grammar school curriculum: https://www.coventrypublicschools.org/schools/cgs
How messy.
No they weren’t. There are still many (163 according to a very quick google search) selective schools in the UK with entrance based on taking the 11+ exam.
Edit to clarify they are state funded and not private.
Just to confuse things, some former grammar schools turned into private schools but kept 'grammar' in their name.
But to confirm, there are still areas that have state grammar schools and have the 11 plus: Buckinghamshire, Essex and Kent spring to mind as the obvious ones in the South East.
This is just incorrect information.
> By the end of the 1980s, all of the grammar schools in Wales and most of those in England had closed or converted to comprehensive schools. Selection also disappeared from state-funded schools in Scotland in the same period.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grammar_school
There are private schools that call themselves grammar schools (paid schools, not state funded) and some grammar schools still exist in Northern Ireland.
But the system that defined what a grammar school is - has long since been abolished, and all free-access grammar schools were completely gone from my area before I was even born.
—-
EDIT: seems like the some state funded selective grammar schools exist but they are not exactly distributed evenly.
So, I am wrong; and this situation is actually significantly more class-enforcing than it used to be. Amazing.
Some counties in England still have state grammar schools and still follow the 11+ process. The 163 that the poster above you is referring to are state, selective, schools, rather than private grammar schools. There's a list linked in the Wikipedia page you linked: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammar_schools_in_Eng...
> all free-access grammar schools were completely gone from my area before I was even born.
That's because you lived in an area that didn't have the 11+ exam. I did, and I went to a state-funded grammar school in the 1990s. It's still there, famously.
I went to a state grammar school, graduating in 2012. They still exist. There's a map of them here: https://www.theexamcoach.tv/grammar-and-independent-schools/...
There are plenty free non-fee-paying Grammar schools all around London. There are some private fee paying schools that were historical Grammar schools and still have it in their name.
The only issue is that Grammar schools are super selective these days, based on my own experience there are at least 10 applicants for every single place, as well as multiple rounds of tests to filter out children. In the end it’s a lottery of sort too as local councils decide who is awarded a place.
My neighbours kid took the 11+ two years ago to go to a state funded selective school in Warwickshire. 4 of my friends went to a grammar school (slate funded) in the 2000s and that school still exists in the same form it did back then.
Most grammar schools are gone but there are far from none.
Key word being "most". I attended a state funded grammar school in the 2000s.
See: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_grammar_schools_in_Eng...
They are mostly gone from the UK, but Kent has a fully functioning, state-funded grammar school system.
this, for example, is a state grammar school
I have a friend who teaches at a state funded grammar, and that wikipedia article includes a whole section on Current British grammar schools, which are selective and state funded o_O
The vast bulk of councils in the UK abolished the 11+ system. It does still exist in some places. Unfortunately, the system was ditched by the Labour government of 1976. Our current Labour lot are trying to do the same thing to our private schooling system.
One of the past Labour governments decided that there should be no new grammar schools created. So the existing ones continued to function but, as some closed down, their number diminished.
There's one just down the road from me.
I've always assumed that the babies grown in test tubes and graded into alphas to epsilons in Huxley's "Brave New World" are simply a metaphor for children going throught the UK school system.
In that case the homeschooled are akin to the "savage" in the story.
EDIT: corrected spelling!
I've not encountered "Brave New World" but I love (and can see) the metaphor!
I grew up in the US, we're about the same age, and I went to a public school where I had a similar experience. More than anything else, I remember the crushing boredom and the feeling that time had slowed to a crawl. I wasn't beaten or abused, but I felt trapped in amber, and the school really was prison-like, just as you describe it. I've never hated anything so much in my life as I hated school.
So I escaped the prison. I dropped out at age 14 and went to work in a book warehouse at the age of 16. Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but to this day I consider it among the best decisions I've ever made.
Now I have young children of my own, and I'm not sure how I'm going to handle their education, but home schooling -- /w private professional tutoring and organized athletic activities -- looks like the best option. There's no way I'd subject them to public school.
> Everybody was screaming about how much I'd regret it, but ...
In a really healthy society, with really good schools, dropping out would (99%) be quite regrettable.
Some of those screaming people probably cared about you and your future. Most of them just resented you, for highlighting the actual state of their society and schools. And perhaps making them doubt their own choices.
That sucks and I really don't mean to well actually here.. but in that scenario - which doesn't sound like the default outcome of going to a public school anywhere - would this not be "just" a reason to go for homeschooling later, only after the system has provably failed (long-term).
Also maybe I have a false impression but I always thought people decided about homeschooling long before the kid(s) get to normal school age.
That said, I don't have a strong opinion here and I can see how it's useful in certain situations, but I guess might have hated it even more than I hated school (after a certain age, I liked it when I was little) - but also none of my parents went to university or something, so I was on my own in math etc after a certain point, so not sure how they would have even managed to get me to finishing.
My argument is that school experiences vary drastically, that everyone commenting before me was saying that homeschooling their children was egotistical, stupid and harmful.
When I, have a good reason why I might consider not sending my own kids to state school, because my experiences were so bad.
This is the first comment in the page, the first I read, and I can also say, I learned nothing (if anything lies, bad science and nonsense) in school. Coming from a very different country, lived in many others I know is not better in those places. I do not have time to really teach my kids, but I will be all the way by their side, as they go through the brain washing machine of school.
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.
I had a good experience in public K-8 (I went to a specialized STEM high school so I’ll leave that aside) but I didn’t learn anything. Public school is day care. My kids’ expensive private school is day care with better food.
"Chapter 1: Letters from Prison"
https://laniakeabooks.org/books/letters-from-prison/part-1/#...
34 year old who grew up on Guernsey (small island south and independent of Britain but with very much the same values) and went to a state-funded Grammar school for secondary and can't relate to all of this, but certainly most. The details are different but I agree that the education offered is subpar and the "socialisation" argument is bullshit. School left me feeling more isolated and alone than I've ever been.
If there's one thing I was surprised when I moved to the UK from Portugal were the number of stories work colleagues told about bullying in school. Although there were fights and stupid games in the schools I went to in Portugal there was never systematic bullying.
I think you're right to start by saying this isn't universal worldwide, or even within Britain.
You describe hell. But I don't believe that your experience is dominant or even that common in the UK. Which generation are you from?
It sounds like he is just describing being bullied in school and teachers not being great about it. Far from universal but also far from uncommon, in the UK or any country I have heard of. Bullying is a very common and documented problem in schools.
Even if bullying is common (say, every school or even every class experiences some bullying), that doesn't necessarily make it a very common experience for those who go through school (the majority of children in a class will neither be bullies nor bullied).
I’m 35 now, so, millennial; for additional context I was brought up in a city called Coventry which is a city that was in decline during that period. (just like most of the north of the UK following Thatcher’s closing of the mines).
As a consequence of this experience, though, I saw that I wasn’t exactly entirely unique either, as there were other children treated as I was and we sought each other out. So I know that while my experience is not universal: that it is at least shared by a handful of people within my schools alone. - I would hazard to guess more outside of my school have these experiences too.
I have some friends who teach in Cov, there are some particularly bad schools in the city sadly. Sorry to hear you went through one of them. The effective postcode lottery of schools has an awful affect on how the part of our lives plays out.
Yeah, Coventry is rough. This is a good anecdotal overview for anyone interested: https://www.amazon.co.uk/Watch-My-Back-Geoff-Thompson-ebook/...
Having said that, your experiences weren't a million miles from mine in the 80's in the crap end of Hampshire. Most of the violence there though was from other pupils, rather than teachers.
However, speaking to my daughter schools these days do tend to be kinder, gentler places than when I grew up. Fights seem to happen never rather than on a daily basis.
I'm around 11 years older than you.
I know my experience isn't especially portable as I went to a public school in the home counties, but not all of my friends did, and while I understand they experienced teachers with varying levels of competence and interest, none of them has described it in as harrowing terms as yours, and all came away with friends and a fairly decent education, albeit one that they probably had to have a bit more determination to get than I did.
My mum worked in various UK state schools as an assistant from around 2000-2010 and described serious budgetary problems throughout the system, and teachers trying their best in adversity. She also described the many obstacles in the way of getting the bad kids out of classrooms so they couldn't disrupt things so much. I have a friend who teaches at a grammar school, who is fairly intelligent and interested in his subject, and seems to teach well to kids who are interested, though again there seems to be little money to achieve anything.
I'm not claiming shitty, prison-like schools don't exist or trying to invalidate your experience, it was clearly terrible, but I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it.
I am often left confused by responses like this. I think it would be fair to suggest that some significant percentage of chidren suffer in schools or have harrowing experiences that they are going to carry with them through life until dealt with. If this is the case, why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn? I don't believe you are meaning to suggests that the situation as it stands doesn't need change, but that is nonetheless implicit in your statements.
From my position, saying: "I'd be wary of drawing too many wide-ranging conclusions about school education as a whole from it." Comes close to invalidating the experience of another.
Whether school is a net benefit (that can stand to be improved) or a net detriment (a system that needs to be uprooted and upended entirely) depends significantly on that "some significant percentage".
If the percentage is 10% of children suffering through school, that's a horrendous number, but still leaves school as an overall positive experience for the vast majority, even though significant work needs to be put it to fix its problems.
If the percentage is 50% of children suffering, then it's a crapshoot if your child will benefit or be deeply disturbed by school, and the whole system needs to be torn down and rebuilt from scratch.
One anecdotal experience can't help one decide which of these is the right approach. I'd venture a guess that, since most people are not clamoring for fundamental school system reforms, the experience of most voting adults has been largely positive or at least neutral in school.
The author paints a picture of schools as literal prison, as a place where children are forced to go to waste their time and be tortured. They invite the reader to conclude that the entire exercise is worthless and should be abandoned -
"Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education."
"I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. "
> why on earth should a conclusion about school _not_ be drawn?
It depends on the conclusion. If the conclusion is "school as a concept is so irredeemably bad that we should scrap schools entirely because of my experiences", I'm not sure it's supportable because of the lack of universality.
If the conclusion is "some schools have been run so poorly that students are left with lifelong emotional scars and little education to show for it, we need to do something about that", I'm all onboard.
Yet another person here who agrees with OP. I think you're vastly underestimating how common our experiences were. Vastly.
I'm 34, grew up in London, went to state primary school and private secondary school. dijit's account of schooling ressonates strongly with me.
40's, male, had a horrible experience at state secondary school in semi-rural Scotland. I now have young kids in primary, and I can see how shit the education aspect in particular is - my kids constantly complain about how boring it is, and one finds everything ridiculously easy. For example, he's been doing addition and subtraction up to ten at school for 3 years!?
I hated school too, but I'm not sure I would have learnt much at home. My parents both lack higher education and frankly haven't been able to keep up with me past the age of 12 or so. Home schooling might work for children of smart people to be accelerated into the exact same field as them. But it won't work for kids like me or those who just aren't good at whatever their parents do.
That may be less true than it was 20 years ago. Even free resources like Khan Academy can go a long ways in helping parents educate their kids beyond what they know themselves. And for parents willing to spend even a fraction of what the public school would spent on education, they can pick and choose curriculum, tutors, or even online live classes with teachers well beyond what they would have in their local high school.
That said, parents without much of an education themselves may tend to set the bar too low for their children, but that often appears to be an issue in the public school as well.
> I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work
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
This does prepare you to life though. More likely than not you will go to office. You will find yourselves with bullies, and again you can become a victim. Rather than feeling sorry about yourself, school prepares you to fight with bullies, to find inmates, to find friends. I think you could have not understand the life lessons.
You will also enter other communities, where again, you will find bullies.
God how I hate idea of "safe spaces".
So... you're either predator or prey?
In a way you're right, I worked in a consulting firm that seemed to have that mentality, and I did find bullies, and it seemed the only way to go forward was to become a bullying, lying cheat yourself.
Then I went on to work for a more civilised company that believed in people being decent and such, and discovered that you can actually coexist with people and foster growth without stepping on other people on your way.
If you think one can just "fight with bullies, find inmates, find friends" and everything will be alright, you're quite clueless to some experiences many people have gone through.
This is abhorrent. The feeling of safety underpins emotional well-being. What you advocate is only the repetition of past suffering. Without safety, what is left but fear?
Reality? And those safe spaces are built upon and upheld by others - who bully the other mean bullies to keep it that way. Every part of civilization is a energetic effort and if the civilization runs low on energy/supplybribery - the space closes with a thunderclap as the structure giveth.
I can agree with that, it's the best counter argument, at least. Though it's a weak one.
Cause there is certainly better ways to prepare a kid to the real tough life than having him to go through a prison. I can certainly see what the OP went through by relating to my own experience. I managed better, I was more often than not in the neutral ignored camp but I really see how bullies made life miserable to others, and how it could have been very different. These tensions didn't help me, it was just an issue I had to deal with, more or less successfully. But I really felt a liberation when I started my first job, though I've no rights to complain about my childhood.
Regular teaching is a thing of the past. Specific lessons tailored to a kid capacity through AI (let's give it a few more years) is the future. Most modern countries will certainly start swapping regular teaching within the 10 next years, the rest of the world will follow.
spending precious studying time on fighting and searching for transient "friendship"... yeah, that'll teach you about life. Nobody needs eggheads, boxers are in trend!
>You will find yourselves with bullies, and again you can become a victim.
I don't know what kind of places you've worked at, but everywhere I've worked if anyone behaved even 10% like the average high school bully they'd have been fired on the spot.
Adult bullies tend to be smarter about it. There are unfortunately plenty of ways to bully someone, without explicitly breaking any workplace rule.
Good grief, if the lack of caring for the kids, the indifference of the educators is now reframed as a virtue and core function of the failing school system I guess we are in deep trouble.
Nope, if I have to share an office with an ethnic gang that attacks co-workers because of their different ethnicity I will certainly not "deal with bullies" but leave the place.
I don’t know if this is satire or not, but all research shows bullying to be extremely harmful to youth.
Yes, and I think silly "tough guy" posturing and a lack of empathy as in that comment is one of the common consequences...
This is completely wrong as far as I can tell.
I have worked in 5 different companies, not one had any bullying. (Technically there was a one-off event involving a colleague and it was dealt with severely enough that it never happened again)
Lucky you. I've seen quite a bunch of the opposite. But then you do whatever you can to move on and find another job with a better atmosphere.
Sadly, it wasn't so easy as that with school.
> These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people.
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."
> These tech parents are hackers by nature
Why? Being in tech doesn't make you a hacker. Most people, even very talented engineers, are still happy to follow boss, do a 9 to 5, and don't really bend or break the rules... they don't go against the elite. They see themselves as the elite.
> Being in tech doesn't make you a hacker.
Agreed. "Tech" includes a lot of people who are not hackers.
It's worth pointing out though that the "hacker" types who go with the flow are in many cases doing so motivated by pragmatism and cynicism. They don't really believe in management or in the company or the product, but they gotta stick around until their shares vest or whatever.
Speaking for a friend.
> they don't go against the elite. They see themselves as the elite.
These are not the only two options. Deciding some people are "the elite" and defining people as being either part of that group or in opposition to it is your choice, but it is not the only choice.
I think a better question is: How did the median get so much better over 150 years, and why can't it keep getting better?
150 years ago, the average person was illiterate, poorer (in all senses of the word) and less connected to the world around them. Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going? So the outlier, super special "phenom" today is the median of tomorrow.
> 150 years ago, the average person was illiterate, poorer (in all senses of the word) and less connected to the world around them. Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that.
Illiterate, yes, but likely better at other skills like milking cows and knowing which plants in the forest were edible. Less connected to the global world and culture, yes, but more connected to the hyper local environment around them. I don't know if the schooling "fixed" anything, it just created a new, national or global template for what a human being should be like.
> 150 years ago, the average person was illiterate
Not true in the case of the US, which famously adopted a culture of universal literacy earlier than the rest of the world. By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today. It is one of the bright spots of American history; they took literacy very seriously for complicated historical reasons. Their book consumption per capita was also the highest in the world by a very large margin back in those days, which lends evidence.
It may or may not be relevant to your point, but at least in the US the idea that the average person was illiterate is ahistorical. They were the best read population in the world 150 years ago, and took some pride in that.
> By the mid-19th century, literacy rates among whites were not much different than they are today
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%).
Success itself could be to blame for the recent reversion.
I was surprised to read this post. Thank you to share. From Wiki, I found: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literacy_in_the_United_States
> 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.My read of history is that the puritans basically had universal literacy not that long after the printing press hit Europe. I believe America and Israel are unique among modern countries in being founded by people whose ancestors had achieved universal literacy in the 1500s.
Something like that. They believed it was important that everyone was literate enough to read and understand the Bible themselves, without it being filtered through a historically corrupt Church that engaged in selective representation and interpretation of the Bible for their own manipulative purposes. Basically, they wanted everyone to be able to go to the source to determine what was and wasn’t moral and Christian, instead of relying on assertions by self-interested third parties.
Regardless of if they achieved their religious objectives, that earnest mission to make every human soul capable of reading the Bible for themselves produced the social good of a literate population capable of reading prodigious amounts of non-Bible content.
It is an interesting consequence of how the religious wars in Europe spilled over into in the early Americas.
Like most social breakthroughs, this was coincident with a major technological breakthrough: the invention of the printing press.
I don't think that's particularly accurate for the US. Perhaps some of the Protestant settler communities were very literate, but I'm quite certain literacy would have been far lower by the time the country was actually founded, as slaves were imported and immigration from other communities picked up.
> and less connected to the world around them.
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.
No offence, but your comment is quite racist.
> 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.
Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going?
Schooling didn’t fix all that. There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications… the list goes on and on and on. Some of these things contributed major improvements to the average person.
Advances in medicine and nutrition, for example, contributed to sharp declines in early childhood mortality and morbidity. Advances in reproductive health care (along with everything else) led to huge declines in birth rates. Smaller families have more resources and attention available for each child.
Other advances had less of an impact but still add up when combined. Widespread access to refrigeration improved nutrition and reduced spoilage, allowing increased consumption of meat. More meat means taller, stronger, healthier children.
On the other hand, schooling hasn’t improved all that much in 150 years. You can find lots of writing samples and old exams for schools from back then. The bigger difference is that children stay in school much longer and have less need to rapidly enter the workforce in order to support the family. This last factor is a product of many of the advances listed above.
> There have been major advances throughout society in every area: medicine, nutrition, sanitation, manufacturing, electricity, refrigeration, printing, computing, telecommunications…
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...
Some were. Some would have made major advances whether they'd had a lot of formal schooling or not.
And many who had a lot of schooling learned to repeat, obey and sit still for 12-16 years.
And maybe had less initiative than they were born with. Maybe they learned to not question what they were told.
1. Thomas Edison Minimal formal education; mostly homeschooled by his mother. Edison was a voracious reader and learned through experimentation.
2. The Wright Brothers (Orville and Wilbur Wright) Neither completed high school. They learned through self-study, practical work, and their experiences running a bicycle repair shop.
3. Henry Ford Left school at 15 years old. Ford learned engineering and mechanics by working as an apprentice.
4. Michael Faraday Minimal formal schooling. Faraday worked as a bookbinder and educated himself through books and observation.
5. Benjamin Franklin Left school at age 10 due to financial constraints. Franklin was self-taught, primarily through reading and experimentation.
6. George Eastman Dropped out of school at age 14. Eastman learned accounting and photography on his own.
7. Elisha Otis Had little formal education and learned mechanics and engineering through work experience.
8. R. G. LeTourneau Dropped out of school in the sixth grade. He learned engineering through hands-on work and experimentation.
9. John D. Rockefeller Dropped out of high school to take a business course and learned through practical experience.
10. Philo Farnsworth Learned electronics and physics by reading and tinkering, despite being unable to afford college.
150 years ago people could absolutely read.
> schooling fixed all that
Not globalization, industrialization, and urbanization?
I can not talk for the US, but in Sweden it was schooling. I think Sweden has better literacy rates earlier than the US, but I guess I really should compare this on a state level considering how the US works. I am pretty sure that it is a political goal not an economic one, this is obvious considering US black literacy levels took until 1979 to be comparable to whites. I would like to point out that the Danish nobility discussed but decided against keeping poor and oppressed farmers illiterate in the 18th century, so it is not really an issue of globalization.
>less connected to the world around them
In what way do you mean this?
>Why can't it keep going?
Because an educated populace is harder for the ultrarich to control and abuse, because an educated populace with free time can revolt against those in power, and because as a consequence of those two things ultrarich conservatives have consolidated ownership of media and used it to defund education and convince the population that funding education is bad.
The irony of saying that while being uneducated enough to think anyone ever “defunded education.” https://www.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2020/02/do-we-shortch...
This isn't the slam dunk you think it is. The article indicates that money isn't evenly distributed, which explains the conservatives goal with vouchers and charter / private schools.
My SO taught at all 3 kinds of the school in the US, in urban and suburban areas. The pay is bad everywhere, but worst at the non-union schools. Only teachers left have no better options or believe in the religion or cause of teaching, and even they tend to leave such schools the moment they have enough experience better options. None of this is good for the kids at such schools.
The more affluent schools can afford to hire experts and keep them. I went to a rich(er) high school and had my choice among many specialty electives and advanced placement. My SO's poor highschool was something between prison and daycare. My friend's private school was a religious indoctrination factory. Home schooled friends were often academical average to great, all socially awkward well into adulthood, and many were taught conspiracies or outright lies as long as it fit their parents "biblical worldview".
Public school was an escape from a cult-like community for me. I'm grateful my parents were too poor to force me into an alternative until I was old enough to refuse.
>Because an educated populace is harder for the ultrarich to control and abuse,
This is the bottom line; this right here.
We're being led to a second dark age ON PURPOSE.
I agree with this and that's why I think social media, mass media and so on exist.
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.
Establishing standards for education and defunding public schools to siphon the funds to churches are not the same thing. Conservatives have been attacking and defunding educational standards and attacking the educated and the concept of education - hence the repeated claims of "liberal bias", the artificial cultural war against university, etc.
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.
My apologies for not being from (or exclusively referring to) the US of A.
From where I'm from I'd say yes, both sides at equal levels more or less, fairly favoured toward the left, but now changing a wee bit because the left went waaaaay too left.
Europe would now seem to be shifting towards the right at some levels, but from historically (recently at least) being fairly leftist.
Anyway, aren't CNN, MSNBC, The Guardian... overtly left-leaning?
At least where I’m from, the majority of homeschooled children are in conservative Christian (or Mormon) families, with a minority (but still notable) in super-left-wing hippy families. Very, very few in non-extreme families.
And that actually makes sense from a strictly logical point of view. The extremes are the ones who precisely don't want to conform to the status quo imposed by the alleged controlling higher powers.
As purely anecdotical data, where I'm from it's actually the opposite, majority hippies, vegan, alternative/free education advocates, etc, and a minority of mostly morally-concerned non-left-leaning (mainly religious) people, as well as specific cases of children with special needs that simply can't adapt to public education because of external reasons (bullies).
As a matter of fact, the hardcore religious right in my country have their own private education institutions, which are quite powerful themselves.
So even the (non-catholic) Christians who homeschool because of religious and moral convictions end up being moderate/center people trying to move away from both extremes.
You're delusional. Revolt always came from people with an empty stomach, not from the comfortable leisure class.
Plus, an "educated" populace is as easy or maybe even easier to control, it's willpower against all odds that characterizes the truly ungovernable.
So the best you can hope for, if mass control is what you want, is the combination of comfortably and leisurely uneducated people, isn't it?
>Over a 100 year old grind, schooling fixed all that. Why can't it keep going?
Schooling has fixed all that, and still works just fine. Just not in America, because that country is rapidly self-destructing. Schooling is still working fine in the rest of the world.
> 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."
If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
Seems like there's only something to lose from adjusting to their shittiness. Like Harrison Bergeron
And seeing the state of California trying to push math classes later because of "equity", seeing public schools dissolving gifted programs, it makes me think that privatization is the only way forward instead of trying to make amends with the current progressive stupidity
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
This is prejudice in the most basic sense: you literally don't know any of these things about the people you're surrounded by in a society. The person who rides the bus next to you could be a couch potato, or a talented artist, or something entirely different that simply isn't legible to you.
I don't know anything about California's math classes. I'm saying that, on a basic level, anybody who thinks this way about people they don't know is demonstrating the exact traits they're smugly claiming to be above.
I feel like you and the parents post are compatible views of the world that could be simultaneously held in the same brain without dissonance.
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.
I feel like you both got and missed the point, and it relies on your misuse of exceptional that doesn’t escape the original discussion:
Society needs and has exceptional people living in communes, in the financial district, in software development communities, and yes even in Springfield, Illinois.
Sharing your values or not does generally not correlate with exceptional.
If you are just looking for someone in your field to learn a trade from, well, great, but that is hardly the intent of primary education.
> If those people have worse habits, are less motivated, less educated, less cultured, what is there to gain from it?
learning how to be patient and tolerant regarding situations / people / things i do not like or think of as “beneath me”.
tends to lead to better decision making as one can respond, rather than knee jerk react to everything.
edit — also, i tend to find i can learn a lot more useful lessons from beginners.
in the beginners mind there are a lot of possibilities. in the expert’s mind (especially self proclaimed ones) there are few possibilities.
children are a great example of this.
Well, one reason is that your assumption that they are all or mostly inferior is wrong.
Suppose you have a kid that you have reason to believe is at the 90th percentile. This isn't uncommon; it's one in ten kids.
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 90th percentile of what?
sport?
english lit?
maths?
music?
socialising?
being the mother hen?
being a jock?
teaching everyone else things in the library?
class clown?
being the wacky one?
skateboarding?
acting?
rebelling?
looking after someone who has just been picked on by all the other kids?
schools introduce us to a wide range of children who are representative of the people we’re going to have to deal with later on in life.
not saying there aren’t alternatives.
but specialising for only the 90th percentile of one thing seems like a way to isolate someone later in life because they may not have learned how to deal with people who aren’t in the 90th percentile of that one thing.
and i say that as someone who hated my time at school and has struggled with the repercussions in later life.
i still learned a lot near the classroom tho.
Which seems to be an argument to move the child to a school with a gifted program rather than homeschool.
Many homes also lack numerous gifted children and specialist programs.
> Which seems to be an argument to move the child to a school with a gifted program rather than homeschool.
What if there isn't one within a reasonable distance, or your locality doesn't have school choice?
> Many homes also lack numerous gifted children and specialist programs.
The issue is that you need the absence of children who would hold back the class, not necessarily that you need the presence of other gifted children except insofar as you need to fill out the class, which is not an issue when the class size is one.
There are boarding schools, schools of the air, etc. Serious parents can move house for catchments, etc.
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.
Average people aren't the problem. It's the below average. And that low getting lower is indulged for some reason.
Exposure to Diverse Perspectives: Diverse classrooms can expose students to different viewpoints, problem-solving approaches, and ways of thinking. 1 This can broaden their understanding and enhance their critical thinking skills. 2 https://www.researchgate.net/publication/262420245_Effects_o... Gurin (1999,college is significantly linked to
> It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way.
Maybe that's not how society thinks? That's one person's opinion.
The well known adage of “buy the cheapest house you can afford in the most expensive neighborhood” is a sign that is what many think. The rat race to make sure your kids are in league with other parents of similar or higher stature is a huge contributor to home price dynamics.
Lol what? I've never heard that adage and it seems like really bad advice. Your neighbors aren't going to cut you a check at any point so what even is this.
It's about exposure to the way richer people think and access to the same community resources. Property taxes pay for schools. The best schools are in the richest communities.
> Property taxes pay for schools.
Are there any other countries that use a local-tax funding model for public schools? Most other nations that I know use a national funding model.
This is not true. Only half of public school spending comes from local taxes. The other half comes from state funds and offsets the local property tax differences.
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.
My country uses a national funding model but most people would still strongly prefer to go to a public school in an affluent neighborhood. Even if the funding is exactly the same, you are still much more likely to get more "desirable" classmates (fewer chance of migrants, drug use, etc. as well higher overall academic motivation, more involved parents who contribute to the school community, etc.).
I went to public schools near the city center and/or with a good reputation and I got a retrospectively insane proportion of wealthy schoolmates mixed with a few lower class ones. And an even more insane number of serious crimes: bribery (multiples), manslaughter, contraband, murder.
Baltimore is famous for its high per student funding of public schools ($21,000 per student in 2023). It's also famous for the terrible outcomes of its public school students.
Yeah but how is that funding actually applied?
You could throw an extreme amount of money at schools but require it be spent on specific initiatives. Things like resource officers, hiring someone with specific qualifications, and boatloads of staff training.
You can average that out to a per student basis and say "look we're spending so much on education" but if the money is going to train teachers how to deal with crisis situations like school shooters, it's not really being spent on educating the student. How that money actually gets allocated matters.
Your local private school also isn't going to cut you a check, and I've yet to meet anyone with money that had a hard time sniffing out aspirational neighbors. Not buying it.
The assumption is that upper class kids are more likely to have the types of behaviors and attitudes that you'd like your kids to adopt (e.g. getting a C or even a B is embarrassing/shameful, AP classes are table stakes, drug use bad, video games/tv limited, more likely to have intact households, expected to be polite/treat others respectfully) while lower class kids are more likely to have the types of behaviors and attitudes you'd like your kids to avoid (e.g. no point in applying yourself, parents have no idea what you're up to or how you're doing in school anyway, drug use normal or cool, kids raised by tv/computer/phone, family tree is more of a chain with random links sticking out, family yells at each other so loud the neighbors hear it). It's an attempt to manipulate the Overton window that your kid will encounter interacting with peers.
100% of the individuals that I've known who ended up either shot dead in the street or caught serious charges were from upper middle class, outright wealthy neighborhoods, or were keeping company with rich kids. Maybe my sample is badly skewed but around these parts all the wealthy are known for is buying their lunatic children out of trouble.
A related adage to present this succinctly, "you are the company you keep".
If you buy a cheap house in a good neighbourhood, you spend as little as possible on the building, and are mostly buying land. You are presumably buying a house because you think the land will increase in value.
It's related to "it's all about who you know"
it’s to make sure your kids go to the best school possible, and are surrounded by as many future successful people as possible. considering schools are funded based on tax revenue, it’s not the worst idea
Tax revenue is spread across all schools, at least in California.
Poor schools actually get more government funding per student.
This is why good school districts California usually have ties to non-governmental chairty parents associations that parents contribute directly.
It is also a huge part of why California passed prop 13. After property taxes we're separated from funding local schools, homeowners were simply much less willing to pay for taxes that won't go to their kid or community.
i doubt the adage is california specific, and likely came about before prop 13.
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.
I frequently hear people, mostly online, arguing that we should eliminate opportunities for smart children as a means to close the performance gap.
Not to forget that "Average" people are, in many ways, the foundation of any functioning society.
"Average" does a lot of heavy lifiting here. People who affluent try to avoid are dangerous, mentally scarred and physically sick people. And if that's who you call average then it's a testament to failure of society and our systems. That's what the affluent are trying to check out of. They are the only ones who can try.
Thoroughly disagree, and I can draw on my experience of meeting average people to know that it wasn’t a universally valuable experience and I much prefer spending time around people that are more like myself. Perhaps that is what you meant by the valuable experience, to be disabused of my illusion that meeting average people was a good idea. Having learned that lesson I shouldn’t have to repeat it.
Also, I don’t have to deal with average people, I have apps that do that for me.
Having said that, two things can be true, I can prefer not to be around average people and I can be concerned for their lack of flourishing as I do prefer to live in more egalitarian society, especially one that can have better averages.
people pretend to be this welcoming learned creatures but in reality it's still referral by people, who you know, like working with people that look like us etc
no better place to see that than in tech and HN
"Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.
if by “deal with” you mean serving them fries on their way to a ski trip, perhaps :)
I like to think you mean that the so-called “elites” end up studying some useless degree and only can get jobs as trust-fund burger stand employees, serving fries to the “dummies” who chose to work hard and become wealthy the old-fashioned way
> who chose to work hard and become wealthy the old-fashioned way
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.
It was a reference to 'Good Will Hunting'. Ben Affleck and Matt Damon's first movie.
Both Ben Affleck and Matt Damon had movies before that. It was Damon's breakthrough for sure tho.
> Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience
While true, it is true as like a side quest. Just because something is valuable doesn’t mean you should revolve your life around it.
> "Average" people are the norm
society has always been this way, from the hunter gatherer days, to middle ages - that's why people want to become part of the elite.
It's only recently that the average people have had the chance to become elites, rather than be born into it. But the desire to be elites, molded by evolutionary/darwinian pressure, is not gone, nor different, than in the past. Another word for it is "the human condition".
> It's only recently that the average people have had the chance to become elites, rather than be born into it.
It still mostly depends on being born into it. In the US your odds of going from impoverished to wealthy are extremely slim and socioeconomic mobility is among the worst compared to other developed countries. The US falls behind South Korea, Lithuania, Estonia, Singapore, Malta, and Slovenia, while the Nordic countries top the list.
Depending on the study, socioeconomic mobility in the US has either stagnated since the 1970s or actually declined. Average people have little hope of substantially improving the situation they were born into while the percentage of people born into wealth (but not the 1%) who slide downward in socioeconomic status grows. Wealth inequality continues to accelerate at an insane pace. (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:1962-_Net_personal_wealth...)
Just about everyone would like to be one of the "elites" but most people would be happy with a fair chance to meaningfully improve their lifestyle.
I know an extended family of third world impoverished immigrants who became middle class by basically all going to nursing school. It is almost a joke that all Filipinos become nurses, it's almost fool proof way to have at least a car, shitty apartment and decent food to eat. It's worth looking into for anyone who is stuck, none of it is particularly difficult to learn although it is hard work.
I'm going to guess that only a small number of impoverished immigrants manage to legally move to a developed country at all, but I wouldn't doubt that those who do could see their situation improve.
There's a lot of need for nurses which has made the job attractive, but it's worth noting that wages have been going down (https://www.incrediblehealth.com/wp-content/uploads/2024/01/...), they aren't especially higher than the money other workers make, and the actual working conditions for nurses have gotten worse. Telehealth also threatens to reduce both their wages and the number of (US) nurses we'll need in the future.
If people just want work, elder care seems like it'd be a safe bet for a while, but those wages and working conditions can be even worse.
lol
some days i get sad and then i log into HN to read about their take on eugenics and history and that cheers me up
Nursing can also pay extremely well, at least in California, and for those willing to travel.
In the US your odds of going from impoverished to wealthy are extraordinarily good. I personally know dozens of examples, even excluding tech entirely. Social mobility is a term of art in economics and only weakly correlated with the ease of becoming wealthy. It doesn’t mean economic mobility.
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.
If US had many people "going from impoverished to wealthy", its social mobility stats would be better. You are seeing few outliers, that is it.
You are demonstrating that you have no idea what “social mobility” means. It is a term of art in economics, it doesn’t mean what you think it means. Being “socially mobile” has nothing to do with your ability to change your standard of living.
In countries like the US, you can achieve enormous gains in income and still not be socially mobile by definition. Specifically, it has nothing to do with how easy it is to become wealthy, which is what most people incorrectly intuit it means.
High “social mobility” is worthless if it doesn’t come with a high standard of living.
> In countries like the US, you can achieve enormous gains in income and still not be socially mobile by definition.
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.
> 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."
Nope. For some people it may be valuable. For me it was miserable, almost to the point of being deadly. It does not prepare you for adulthood or life or what have you in any meaningful sense (think about what would happen in your everyday life if someone e.g. decided you had insulted them somehow, and punched you. Think about how different your experience of that probably is to the average person. And then think about what that experience is like for a schoolkid). It's just a whole load of unnecessary suffering.
> 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
Optimism is the default state of non-broken children.
Sober realism is what's needed and required from adults.
Time to graduate - we have enough optimistic children running around with scissors already :)
I live in a good area and have friends who work in a few different schools out here. Kids are throwing chairs at teachers. There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English. The reading/math skills are so dismal, any student who learns at home is bored as hell.
Private schools are outrageously expensive.
Homeschooling is becoming the pragmatic choice.
I'm curious where you live. My spouse and I selected the area we live in based on the school district when our kids were around pre-K age. We live in a district that isn't overly expensive to live, but has the best public schools in the state and are some of the top in the nation.
Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works. I've never heard a story like this and we've been in the district for 8+ years.
As for skills, my kids are probably 3 years ahead of where I was at the same age. Devices are not a huge component of their schooling, although I am on a parent board that's pushing back on SaaS creep. They're forced to have Google accounts which I'm proposing to remove and/or minimize. Math and reading programs are fantastic. Teachers are great. There have been one or two mediocre teachers but nothing to really complain about.
We also have great private options, but again, we moved to this district to take advantage of the public schools.
As an observation the homeschooled kids that participate in extracurricular activities along with the public school kids are definitely behind. Not only from a traditional education standpoint, but also social skills. It's always an awkward conversation when those parents engage in a conversation asking where our kids are at with respect to reading, math or science.
Our goal is to have our kids be the best version of them that they can be. If they're happier, healthier and better equipped than we were then I'll be happy. I look at a lot of parents who want their kids to be stars and it's painful. Modern day parenting has lost its way in US society on so many levels.
"Expulsion works."
There really seems to be two kinds of public schools. One is willing to expel students who are violent and disruptive and this allows the students who are willing and able to learn to do so. The other refuses to expel violent and disruptive students and they make it nearly impossible for the willing and motivated students to actually learn.
There are some rotten incentives at work here, as well as constraints that aren’t obvious from a parent or student’s point of view.
For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them. In practice, this means that expelling a student (short of some extreme situations) is a lengthy process of ass-covering. Even when administrators are doing the right thing, from the outside it can look like nothing is being done. Think HR putting you on a PIP.
Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education. And for what it’s worth, usually a child in crisis. For school staff, your role as an adult is to teach the child to participate in society with whatever limited influence you have. As a parent or classmate, of course, you have no reason to give a shit about some asshole kid, but the teacher has to.
And then, what does “violent and disruptive” actually mean? How much violence? No tolerance? What about a bullying victim who sticks up for themselves? Playground scuffle? At what point does the dial turn from teaching a child not to hit, to teaching a child that they are bad and do not belong? What about non (physically) violent bullying? What about children who are disruptive, but not violent (surely including a lot of those posting here about how their ADHD was misunderstood)?
Sometimes expulsion is the answer, even keeping in mind that every student expelled before 16 is just going to school someplace else. But the problems are more complex than people often realize.
> For example, CA schools have to publish statistics on suspensions and expulsions. So there’s an incentive for administrators to minimize them.
Are you sure administrators care? I live in Oakland, where some of the public schools have absolutely abysmal (academic) statistics. I haven't checked the expulsion statistics. I'm not sure anyone cares.
>Meanwhile, the “right thing” isn’t always so obvious. The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education.
They may have a right to an education, but they need to be at an alternative school with teachers equipped to handle their behavior and classmates who are in similar situations. If they’re going to ruin their classes for their classmates, those classmates shouldn’t be innocent, well-behaved students.
Which is where an expulsion often leads, similar to how adults unable to function in society are channeled into SSDI, homelessness, or prison in some combination.
There are unlikely to be many caring and constructive adults there though, for reasons that should be obvious.
They have a right to education much like one has the right to bear arms or publish a book. You can have it, but your rights end where you demand someone else give it to you involuntarily, particularly with violence.
Notably, the courts say children don’t have those rights.
Also, essentially not ‘the right to an education’ but rather a legal mandate to be educated. The specifics of which vary by state.
The “violent and disruptive” student is also a child with a right to an education.
See here's the thing. Not they don't. They forfeit that right by being violent and disruptive.
Literal children are incapable of forfeiting their rights by being "violent and disruptive", and it would be insane if they could because they can't possibly begin to understand what they'd be giving up. Clearly that right is sometimes taken from them anyway, but that's neither the fault or a failure of the child.
Often kids who get their right to education taken from them are failed by their parents and/or by the schools, but the blame cannot be placed on the child for that. Every child, excepting those with significant mental illness or intellectual limitation, can and should be successfully educated. Any educational system that is incapable of handling a child's tantrum or helping a child in crisis is a failed system.
What about the other children's right to education this being impinged by the disruptive students?
It isn't an either / or. Expelled children have to go somewhere. So you provide education / rehabilitation facilities where they hopefully manage to get their behaviour under control and can be brought back into mainstream education or stay in those institutions where they can at least get a bit of an education rather than just being left to roam the streets. Whether there's the appetite to fund that kind of institution properly is another matter.
This is what they did in my school district when I was growing up. You had 3 tiers. First tier is regular school. If you get expelled, you go to tier 2 which is a school for people who got expelled. If you get expelled from there, you go to tier 3 school, which is where all the really bad kids go. This worked pretty well, keeping in mind all the students' needs in mind.
They did away with that since I was young and now they just let the disruptive kids run rampant.
Keep in mind, you only have one chance really to get an education. If your learning is impeded by uncontrollable children, you now have a greater risk of life failure because you weren't able to learn the fundamentals, because a class of 30 was always being disrupted by one or two people. Say you didn't learn pre-Algebra well because of disruption; now you're behind when it comes to the higher level math for the rest of your school tenure and ultimately, life. These disruptions could have major long term consequences for other kids trying to learn.
Finally, teachers' average turnaround is 4 years last time I checked. That means there are very few veteran teachers available to show new teachers the ropes and how to manage a classroom full of teenage kids. Not that it matters, the new teachers will look for other careers within 4 years on average. The cycle continues.
> Literal children are incapable of forfeiting their rights by being "violent and disruptive"
They can. And do. We have 12-year-old "children" literally robbing stores around here.
If this happens, they should exercise their right to education from inside a locked institution.
sometimes i think im sheltered and i am but then i see stuff like this and feel good
Thank you for demonstrating the point that there are constraints and complications that are difficult to appreciate from the outside. The law generally disagrees with you.
And that really hasn't turned out very well. Letting the most disruptive students ruin the education of other students isn't fair at all to those students AND is pretty damn stupid when you consider how much tax money is spent educating those students and the harm to society from not educating them.
To be clear, I am not about to justify any sort of violence anywhere. That said...
Many violent and disruptive students were just kids with special needs. And I don't mean mental conditions or anything like that.
I mean a kid that would do WAY better if he was in a trade class doing something that motivates them, rather than being frustrated and forced to endure a rubbish secondary education, several hours crammed into a small room with other people and getting nowhere.
But of course that's more difficult to implement than a generic standardising/equalising pipeline of norm-conforming average citizen production.
When I was in high school there was a local school that was notorious. Apparently here the public schools were not allowed to expel kids if they would no longer have local options. This was the worst school, and thus the last place the kids would end up. So it was basically just a prison.
There's a big difference between someone with an IEP (usually massive trauma and mental illness also) doing things and a "regular" student doing them. Expelling a kid usually just means they move to a different school, and all expulsion is doing is moving the burden down the chain, usually from more affluent places where parents are equipped to complain, to less affluent ones. Particularly if the room destroying-violence kiddo's family don't have lawyers.
A big difference to whom?
When I judge an educational institution I could not care less why some child being significantly disruptive is tolerated, even slightly. That institution simply becomes a non starter for a place I might send my children.
Of course parents who don't care about such things, or don't have the luxury of being able to choose, would accept such things. As would those who themselves have 'problem children.' Now think about what this does to the quality of that institution over time.
It hardly matters to other students WHY a particular student is making it very hard for them to learn and using up all the teacher's time. Only that they ARE.
Why would a school expel students? They get money for each person sitting in the desk.
I have friends who were teachers in San Francisco unified School district who quit because students were literally attacking and breaking the bones of teachers and not being expelled.
It was a really hard choice for them because they were a bleeding heart liberal and wanted to use their PHD to help the underprivileged
After spending some time on the teachers subreddit I completely understand why so many people are choosing to homeschool. The amount of in-classroom abuse -- verbal and physical -- in addition to the entitled parents is shocking.
> Throwing chairs? That's a parent problem. Not sure why the district would put up with that. Expulsion works.
Our local education superintendant _in_ _his_ _program_ _document_ is saying that he will go after any teacher attempting to impose discipline in a "community inappropriate manner".
So basically, nobody gets expelled.
Homeschooling parents are divided into two separate groups. One is secular with college degrees who really want to give their children a better education than they could get in a school AND are able to do so.
The other group are very religious who don't want their children learning about evolution or many other secular things.
The only real issue I have with homeschooling in the US is that regulations vary wildly by state. Some states have so little enforcement that it is possible to teach a child essentially NOTHING by the time they are 18 and face no punishment for ruining that child's life.
I'd add at least a 3rd group: Parents of kids with sensory (e.g. autism) or behavioral issues that are incompatible with learning at a school.
That still falls under option 1.
I'd broaden the group to "kids who parents feel have been done wrong or failed by the local school and see home schooling as the best choice available." I don't think this group is quite as consistently college educated as group 1.
Certainly a biased view of religious home schoolers. Most of my religious friends who homeschool are college educated and many have postgraduate degrees. Some do disbelieve evolution, or at least disdain it a bit. Pretty much all of them are motivated people however. Of course that's just my little bubble.
The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. It always comes up in these discussions as a boogeyman anyway.
It's not necessarily just the idea of evolution itself, but rather that it's indicative of someone's willingness to continuously and actively reject all evidence in order to maintain the beliefs they've decided are true.
But highly educated people believe this too. There’s lots of wacky and unscientific, ideas out there that people believe because they come from Columbia University social science professors instead of the Bible. After the last several years I take back everything I said when I was younger and an atheist about religious people and not believing in evolution.
"The hard thing for a lot of people to accept is that belief or lack thereof of evolution has no impact on daily life at all. "
Not accepting it leads to a profoundly WRONG worldview that bleeds into everyday life in many ways.
Such as? I'm honestly and genuinely curious.
A few weeks ago while giving a talk to some business school students, I was shocked to find most of the students and children of the faculty were homeschooled for K-12. This was a Baptist-affiliated university. I really had no clue this was so prevalent amongst evangelicals.
The way this is written seems to imply that religious people don't have similar (or the same) reasons as secular people.
I suppose from their perspective they do but from my perspective they are just going to raise scientifically ignorant people. I was raised young earth creationist Lutheran and understand this world quite well.
On the other hand, my sister is a firm Creationist Christian, has a PhD and had a brilliant career in research (albeit nothing directly related to 'The Beginning of All Things').
Chances are she is less "scientifically ignorant" than many people around here, myself included.
Just like my sister's, yours is a specific case. It's sad that they didn't teach you Creation in a way that wouldn't cancel out Science, as Science itself is something profoundly Christian as well.
"O, Almighty God, I am thinking Thy thoughts after Thee!..." - Johannes Kepler
To be fair most high school graduates might recite the “right scientific facts” while having no basis for supporting them. The earth is 4 billion years old. Survival of the fittest drives evolution. Why? How do you know?
Basically just another form of indoctrination. Children are not taught science so much as science appreciation.
How old is the earth then? The Universe?
Under what circumstances would it matter? As long as people believe the earth is older than around 3,000 years they are going to have more of a problem with general background ignorance than their misconceptions about that specific fact.
If a group of people believing a random untrue fact is a threat, there are a vast number of threats out there. Far more than the school system can possibly deal with. Misidentifying the age of the earth is harmless compared to things like economic misconceptions and there aren't many school systems making a credible effort to correct those.
The neat thing about science is that all the explanations have to fit together. The explanation for why the sun shines so bright for so long can't contradict the explanation for why birds can fly. When you reject an explanation as fundamental as evolution and the ages of the earth you really put yourself at a disadvantage in understanding many other things.
I actually had a young earth creationist say that the sun doesn't use fusion and thus its lifespan is more in line with the creationist worldview and I responded with neutrinos emitted from the fusion reactions in the sun.
There is another issue. Kids in the first group can get an incredible academic intellectual education, AND be emotionally and socially stunted. I have directly observed this, unfortunately. It also happens in very liberal, high-end, private schools.
Those groups do overlap.
There is also abusive parents who want their kids to be isolated and do not want social services to get involved.
There's also rising awareness among parents of neurodiversity while many schools are still stagnant and failing to correct.
I have ADHD. My wife doesn't, but most of her siblings do. Our kids do. Our kids love reading and love learning new things, and I know from my own experience that the fastest way to kill that love would be to send them to a public school that doesn't know how to work with ADHD brains.
There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom. This matches my experience, and I want better for my kids.
> There's a saying that if you gave a scientist the job of designing a system to completely derail an ADHD brain, they'd come back with the typical public school classroom.
Doctors aren't sure if I have ADHD or Major Depression or Bipolar II (I've been diagnosed and attempted to be treated for all three), but this fits into my experience.
I was consistently frustrating to my high school teachers, because I was clearly learning the material, but I wouldn't do my homework, and I'd get bored during class, and as a result I would get bad grades. I don't think the teachers took any joy in giving me a bad grade, but they were kind of forced into it because I didn't really fit into the bureaucratic mold that they needed me to fit in.
This eventually led to me almost flunking out, and eventually dropping out of my first attempt at university. I did eventually finish my bachelors, but it was at Western Governors University (WGU), which feels almost tailor-made for the ADHD-brained people.
I'm not sure what the solution is, but the American GPA system still kind of gives me anxiety when I think about it.
> Western Governors University (WGU), which feels almost tailor-made for the ADHD-brained people
I would very much appreciate it if you could expand on this point a bit. What makes WGU particularly suited for folks with ADHD?
You pay per-term, not per class, and you can take as many classes as you'd like per term. You take one class at a time, and many classes can be finished after taking a test and/or completing a project.
I say it feels tailor-made for ADHD because it feels almost "gamified". It's addictive to see how many classes you can knock out in a week, and you can work at whatever pace you'd like.
Part of the reason I always did poorly in school is that I didn't like how slow everything went, but with WGU I can go whatever pace I want, and the faster I go, the more money I save. Since I'm an extremely impatient person, the fact that I was able to quickly go through the material while only having to focus on one course at a time was kind of game-changing to me.
I already had a decade of software engineering experience when I did WGU, so when I did the Computer Science degree on there I finished the entirety of it (having to start from scratch) in six months, for a grand total cost of around ~$4600.
WGU is hardly the fanciest school, but it's good enough, inexpensive, and most importantly it is fully accredited. If you always struggled with traditional universities, I recommend giving it a look.
> you can take as many classes as you'd like per term. You take one class at a time, and many classes can be finished after taking a test and/or completing a project.
Is it all based on self-guided learning? Because I can't see how this system could work with the classic system of bottom-up lectures accompanied by tutorials and exercise classes?
I have always loved the idea of a one class at a time model. I think Cornell has a program like this that I read about too.
ADD/ADHD was over-diagnosed for a long time. Why are you so sure all the people you mention have it vs other explanations? What is it you think makes ADHD brains special?
As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
It’s also debatable how over diagnosed ADHD is. The diagnosis criteria has certainly changed, but current literature estimates about 6% adults are believed to some degree of ADHD [1]—though many are high functioning and find ways to cope with varying degrees of success and difficulty.
0. https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371%2Fjourn...
Totally on board with your comments on disparagement, but there's been a rash of autism diagnoses in my daughter's school to the point where in some classes 20% of students have been diagnosed as autistic. I feel at that point people are diagnosing personality, and it's using the (UK) special educational needs system to force schools to pay attention to different learning styles. (My daughter's school is actually pretty good on that front if you point it out to the staff, so I'm not sure what's triggering it particularly in her school, but it may be to do with releasing government funding for extra classroom assistants).
ADHD and autism are diagnosed based on behaviors. This might work for cases at the more extreme end of the spectrum, but when it comes to trying to identify more mild cases, you are going to start seeing a lot of overlap in behaviors of the larger population. Couple that with extra funding for kids who can be said to have ADHD and autism, and you get a recipe for overdiagnosis.
Maybe it is worth it to try to make sure fewer kids with the issue slip through the cracks at the expense of diagnosing kids who don't actually have it. Maybe it's not, but it makes sense why it can happen.
> As someone with this condition, I think it may be helpful to note that while your comment may not be intended to be disparaging, it can be interpreted in such a way. A lot of neurodivergent folks or people experiencing mental health issues are commonly told their problems are imaginary, or aren’t a big deal. [0] It’s a pretty big sore spot.
Not my intention, but I was diagnosed as a kid when over-diagnosing did seem to be a trend, and I've become skeptical in these times of self IDing.
When I mentioned over-diagnosing it was more referring to the 90s, but I think a lot of adults who were diagnosed then may have been misdiagnosed and never checked.
My heart goes out to you. Misdiagnosis is just as bad (and sometimes worse) than not being diagnosed. I've known people who were diagnosed with ADHD with very bad outcomes because it later turned out that they had bipolar disorder; the wrong medical treatment literally ruined their life. At the same time, I've had periods in my life where I couldn't focus on important conversations with my partner because of a noisy bird nearby.
If you suspect you have a condition or someone is advocating for you to seek treatment, please seek a qualified psychiatrist who's specifically trained in diagnosis. Better yet, make sure they're in touch with your primary care provider [1]. Psychiatric assessment and diagnosis its own psychiatric specialty for a reason, but doctors with these qualifications are criminally difficult to get time with for a variety of reasons.
Both me and my little brother were diagnosed as kids also. Neither of us have it--we were just little shits.
There are many volumes on the subject, but I'm honestly tired of debating this with people who doubt ADHD is a thing. If you're legitimately curious, there are myriad sources out there about the differences in ADHD brains.
Suffice it to say that I'm sure. All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
"Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't. I just know that we don't work in the way that the world expects us to.
Thank you for answering.
I don't doubt the research, it's more I doubt how many diagnoses were accurate.
I was diagnosed with ADD as well, so I'm not being entrely dismissive. In this age of self ID I think there can be reason to be.
> All of the adults I'm thinking of have had serious interference with their daily lives in ways that rise to the level of a disability. I'm the only one of the set that has been able to build a steady career, and that's due to a lot of luck and due to developing an anxiety disorder that, while not at all fun, at least allows me to keep track of things that I used to miss.
If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?
> "Special" makes it sound like you think I think we're better. I don't.
Not my intention, I should have said unique or significantly different in the contexts you mentioned or something.
> If I may ask on this point, how would you distinguish ADHD from possibly being on the spectrum?
There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes—there's too much similarity and too many people with both to be a coincidence. But in the case of my family, most of us do just fine in reading social cues... when we're paying attention. Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.
> There's a lot of overlap there and my personal feeling is that they likely share similar causes
Autism and adhd definitely appear to share traits, and I suspect there's a shared cluster of genes affecting certain aspects of neural linking between regions of the brain. Even without shared genes it makes sense that a "networked system" of core brain functions would share similar behaviors if the parameters were tweaked in similar ways.
> Where we struggle is maintaining attention on things that don't interest us for long enough to meet employer or school expectations.
Yes, this is something I deal with as well.
It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.
I've wondered if I am on the spectrum also but I don't match a lot of the base/core traits, although I feel ADHD or ADD alone doesn't explain some of my, ahem, quirks either.
I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.
> It's interesting because as a kid I got diagnosed with ADD, and my sibling who was more physically hyperactive got diagnosed with ADHD. My parents thought, and thus I did also for a long time that the 'h' difference was due to his physical energy, but it seems unrelated.
These days they don't draw a distinction any more. There are different presentations of ADHD, but it's all the same disorder.
> I want to again stress there was no malice behind my question, just interest in trying to relate through my own experiences. Thank you again for answering.
No worries, sorry for reacting negatively! I've had a lot of people assume that ADHD is not a thing at all, and it gets exhausting having to explain it. I pattern matched on your comment too aggressively.
Why are you so confident that they shouldn't be confident?
Were you the downvote I got instantly after commenting, lol? I'm simply curious and that should be sufficient, I'm not really sure what it has to do with you though.
I've known people who were going to some of the top private schools in the U.S. who were still paying for weekend math classes because the schools weren't reaching them at their level.
Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students, and they're fine with them not learning anything in the class as long as as the teachers are hitting their goals. I imagine the same attitude is harming the other students as well, but it's especially easier to see with high performing students where their needs are often openly ignored.
It’s easier to see with kids who have stronger behavioral or learning needs.
I was a 3rd grade teachers aide and I saw the distinction first hand. A gifted child was given advanced textbooks and space to work at his own pace. The teacher didn’t really teach much, but the child was learning.
Conversely there was another kid who just got headphones to watch videos in the back of the room. I guess learn st his own pace, except the videos didn’t actually seem educational to me. I think it was mostly just done to keep him preoccupied.
>Unfortunately, most educators simply don't seem to care much about high performing students
If you really believe this, then sue your school district. In my area, there was a district where parents believed high performers were not getting the necessary resources and through a combination of legal pressure and partnership with the school district, made it a priority in the same way that district had prioritized education for other specialized needs. Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
If you really believe this, then sue your school district.
> If you really believe this, then sue your school district.
It’s very funny (in a depressing way) reading this sentence as a non-American.
> Don't blame the average teacher though - they are doing what they have budget for and what they've been directed from administration.
It's worth discussing the administrators and the budget (though our budget is much higher than the national average), but why should we reflexively dismiss concerns about the teachers? There are advanced students who only get acknowledged as such when the teachers tell them "don't do that, we haven't learned it yet."
There's a large difference between trying to engage advanced students with limited resources, and not trying to engage or even acknowledge advanced students at all.
>There are elementary school classrooms where ~1/4 students don't speak English.
This really gets my hackles up, because my kids grew up in schools with a 50% Spanish speaking population and my partner is a dual-language teacher in a district where Spanish, Russian, and I believe Vietnamese are all taught as first-languages in specialized classrooms. Your assertion around English is misguided. This isn't to say that we don't need to get our kids proficient in English (it is the lingua franca after all), but there's more here than meets the eye. In my area we are headed toward universal bilingual education, which I see as only a good thing. That means that it may take longer to reach full proficiency, but the overall outcome is more capable and prepared students.
This is exactly the point of the article.
I don’t want my kid in a classroom where everything has to be repeated in Spanish. It’s already this way for school meetings and it slows information sharing down to a crawl.
If there was mandatory English and Spanish in elementary school classrooms I would consider home schooling.
Outside of certain fields (skilled trades primarily) my children will not need to be proficient in Spanish to be successful in the United States. It’s a nice to have and should not slow down everything else.
The teachers in this school don't speak Spanish. The Spanish speaking children are struggling, and the rest of the kids cannot proceed at the same rate.
I'm not pretending to have solutions, and I'm certainly empathetic for all involved. Just stating the reality that this is a suboptimal learning environment.
this is the experience i see at our local schools. english as first language kids are bored and not challenged. the class is moving slower because half the kids are only learning english for the first time at school. “modern” progress ideology is to not separate the students by ability anymore and there’s less accelerated tracks
There is a very big difference between a bilingual school and a school where half the kids don't understand the language that math is being taught in.
My kid is in a program where they spend half the day, and learn half the subjects, in a language that most of the students didn’t initially speak at all. They pick it up and do quite well.
I think you missed the point of the parent, which is that ~1/4 of the students are dead weight at the cost of the rest of the class. It isn't "misguided" if their experience is different than yours.
If your outcome is students that are more capable at languages but less capable in virtually every other subject, is the result really "more capable and prepared students"? I'm not opposed to bilingualism but you're lying to yourself if you think this comes at zero cost to at least some students.
for kids in early development, their skill level in all the other subjects later will be essentially determined by their linguistic ability. math is a language. there is research that shows benefit to bilingual programs, but there has to more structure than just dumping esl kids in there with everyone else.
Forgive me, but with machine translation becoming nearly a solved problem — why would kids spend years of their lives learning new languages anymore? By the time they grow up, won't that be a rather useless skill — except perhaps in very nuanced contract negotiations?
You think it's useless to be able to communicate to someone directly without the use of an intermediary translation device?
Well, within 30 years or so AI will be better than humans at everything, so…
| Private schools are outrageously expensive.
Yes, and... In states where property taxes fund schools, there are basically two ways to pay for a good school: a) go to a private school, b) live in a school zone with high real estate values. At various points my wife and I calculated that 8 years at ~25k/yr tuition would work out to about the same as the ~200k house price delta we'd have to pay to move to a better school zone.
And I suppose option #3 is rationing, which is how some schools do it (our daughter is in a gifted academy where admission is limited via lottery.)
I did the same math comparing portland with suburb schools (around portland and seattle) and came to the same conclusion. But one other thought is when the money goes to the mortgage, you get to keep the wealth after (assuming you sell to downsize at some point).
More money in the mortgage principal you theoretically keep when you later downsize housing, but you also will probably spend a good bit more in taxes as well.
Yes, good to do the calculation properly before making the decision if its motivated primarily by finances; sometimes the outcome can be surprising. Ironically speaking specifically about Portland, you'll pay _less_ in taxes moving to e.g. Washington schools in addition to getting better schools. But I think this is likely a special case.
Yes, I definitely agree, YMMV, tax situations and school district quality vary greatly depending on specifics.
IME private schools also tend to be in more expensive areas, so you will either still have to pay more for housing, or spend a lot of time and transportation costs to get between home and school. Plus friends from school will live further away.
And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district.
> And of course many people don't have enough money for private school or to move to a good school district.
That's the whole point. Keeps out the riff-raff.
>In states where property taxes fund schools, ... b) live in a school zone with high real estate values
Here's some tangential anecdata.
I'm in Oregon, the county I live in pays for the local schools through property taxes. More than half of the tax goes to the schools if I recall.
Anyway, that's not the fun part. The fun part is one of the schools needs(wants?) a new roof. Sounds reasonable, here are the unreasonable parts: They want to raise funds with additional taxes, because they refuse to budget and earmark money for it. They also said they need(want?) several million dollars to do it. The taxes would also be used by the county to buy school-issued bonds from the school to fund the new roof, rather than directly using the tax dollars.
Unsurprisingly, the county measure to introduce that new tax failed during the election in November with a resounding laugh.
The entire way our schools are operated begs some very hard questions.
What you’re describing is the completely normal way of funding capital projects… they presumably need to fund the improvements at once (the roofing contractors aren’t going to be paid over the next 15 years) and tax payers won’t want a huge spike in taxes so the district will sell bonds with a ~15 year horizon, taxpayers can have slightly higher taxes for 15 years, and the funds are available for improvements on day one.
You seem to be under the impression that the school district has enough extra funding that they could just put tens of millions of dollars aside and complete the improvements as they come up, but can you imagine the shrieking that would erupt if they had a school board meeting and disclosed a capital improvement fund with millions of dollars in it? People would demand that their taxes be lowered post haste since it’s clear the schools don’t need all the money they’re being given.
Something like a new roof is an expense known literally years in advance. You know when something will be due for repair or replacement due to reaching the end of design and/or useful life. The proper way to handle that kind of expense is to set aside some money every year in the budget toward an earmarked fund until you have enough when time comes to buy a new roof.
So no, I (and clearly most of the voters) heartily rejected the new tax proposal. Fiscal discipline before any more or new taxes.
Also: There is no reasonable, commonly understandable way a new roof costs several million dollars. Forget where the money could come from, the demand itself is questionable. As a taxpayer I want to see the school's entire fiscal records, including data that might not be public, if they want that kind of money for what should be a regular maintenance job.
So basically you think taxes should have been set higher a long time ago so they would have a yearly surplus that could have been saved up to pay for a new roof?
I don't see why this is preferable to lower taxes that just cover operations and short term maintenance, with separate bond issues to play for things like new roofs which are expensive but only come up ever 20 to 30 years.
There is quite a bit of variability in how long a roof lasts, because it can be greatly affected by weather and climate and accidents. With the "save for it out of a surplus" approach you'd need enough surplus so that you'll be ready if it turns out your current roof needs replacing on the low side of the roof lifetime range.
But then what happens when you reach that and the roof turns out to actually still be fine? Do you just keep adding each years surplus to the roof fund? I bet taxpayers wouldn't like that. They'd want taxes to be lowered to get rid of the surplus.
But then when you do replace the roof you'd have to raise taxes back to what they were to start building the fund for the next roof. So you still end up with the pattern being higher taxes for several years after a roof is installed and then lower taxes from then until it is time for the next new roof.
That's the same pattern you end up with under the "use a bond issue to pay for a roof when needed" approach.
>So basically you think taxes should have been set higher a long time ago so they would have a yearly surplus that could have been saved up to pay for a new roof?
Yes.
Simply put: If you can't or won't budget+save for a known future expense, I'm not giving you money to pay for it when it comes knocking.
>But then what happens when you reach that and the roof turns out to actually still be fine?
Save what's in there for when the roof really hits end of usable life and either: A) Keep adding to the fund if it's justifiable, or B) Remove the line item from the budget and reduce or reallocate the budget accordingly.
We're not talking about RNGesus throwing down a randomass thunderbolt at the school and blasting a randomass hole through it on a randomass Thursday. We know reasonably when the roof will need replacing for an absolute fact, and at least a ballpark estimate how much it will cost.
Fiscal discipline goes a long way to convincing me to pay (more) taxes.
Lol never worked construction for government gigs? I was once hired on as a laborer for a city government funded arts building. The construction boss had to buy a very expensive and gawdy table from the mayor's kids. The government was paying themselves. It's likely 30% roof and 70% old boys network of hiring select people for favors.
I'm quite aware what the several million buckeroos are actually "needed" for, and I'm all the more vindicated in telling the school and county to get fucking bent.
Unfortunate that kids have to indirectly get caught in the crossfire, but such is life.
Our local schools, like many around the country, spooled up new permanent programs in response to the influx of COVID funding which they always knew to be temporary.
Now that the funding has gone away, they say they have a funding crisis, and will have to cut other things unless they can get the state to "adequately fund" them.
Yeah, I moved house recently. The #1 factor for picking the house was the good high school 500m away.
It's a situation like
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Exit,_Voice,_and_Loyalty_Model
where "voice" never works.
TIL, thank you for sharing that.
Btw, I'm trying hard to think of places (today) where "Voice" works. For instance, in a corporate setting, I can personally attest that it does not.
Perhaps there are some "small-scale" contexts where it does work (HOA?)
This seems to reflect a lot of what I hear about as well. Everything is too entrenched from a decision making standpoint for any one person to make a difference in reforms.
A free market fixes anything where people have the ability to "vote with their wallet" and simply stop paying for services which aren't meeting expectations when they find another that does. Things like employer sponsored health insurance are insulated from you choosing a different option for yourself and we get the situation that we currently have because of it.
Education is the same way but the only ways to vote with your wallet are...
1. Buy a house zoned for the school that you want.
2. Pay for private school.
3. Home school.
4. In some areas, school choice where you can choose from another of the available public options may be viable too.
The only long term solution here that has potential to fix things legislatively is a true school voucher program that would let you take the tax money assigned for your kids education and put it into whatever option you believed was actually best for their education.
This _should_ lead to a start-up like small business ecosystem with lots of small Montessori style schools especially for younger kids. Most likely a "neighborhood schools" model would pop up and parents would end up walking their kids to school again, even in suburban areas.
Most likely you would still see bigger options for high school still as teenagers crave more socialization. Sports would likely revolve more around communities than individual schools too.
You'd of course see some specialties. Schools advertising why they were the best option for your kids and then having to prove it in order to keep them. Yes, there would definitely be religious schools as there already are now.
My guess is that a lot of the current home school co-ops that are popular in my area would simply become suddenly funded because the parents involved as pretty happy with the model. I had a lot of biases against home schooling until I saw how these co-ops work and it's really effective. Basically just like a normal school small school with parents teaching different lessons on different days. Each parent's commitment is a half day a week to teach and they still do school plays, etc.
Voucher programs are just going to flood the "education market" with substandard schools teaching things like humans walked with dinosaurs a few thousand years ago before the great flood. They're going to extract profits from our tax dollars to give us a worse quality service.
We'll see a lot of new schools open up, spend a few years collecting profits, then get shut down for substandard quality after effectively failing to teach kids for those few years. Meanwhile the public schools which can't be choosy will end up with fewer resources and have worse outcomes for the kids who have parents who can't afford private transportation to the few nicer, choosier voucher schools.
Being able to read the Bible would be a big improvement on say the Baltimore school system, which spends $22,500 per year per student: https://www.city-journal.org/article/are-baltimore-students-... (“According to the 2022 NAEP test, only 10 percent of fourth-graders and 15 percent of eighth-graders in Baltimore’s public schools are proficient in reading.”)
Literally, madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran would be an upgrade.
Those numbers do not mean what you seem to think. 1st, proficiency on that test is a pretty high bar. There are kids making perfectly adequate progress who don’t score proficient. Second, average per-pupil costs are meaningless. Baltimore city pays for two of my kids’ educations. One costs the city about $8k (the money that a school gets for a kid with no extra needs). The other costs well over $100k, due to significant disabilities. Baltimore has a disproportionate number of kids with significant needs of some sort, including learning disabilities, extreme family poverty, and ESL learners. Those kids need extra resources. A voucher system isn’t going to change that.
So when we have anecdotes, we get told to look at the stats for objective facts. Alternatively, when we do have stats, we get told "no those numbers do not mean what you think they mean" as a way to dismiss the abysmal numbers. So which is it.
Let's face it, we all know it, just some of us are too scared to say it publicly. In large urban areas in America, there is a (large / huge / significant) portion of the school population that is illiterate, speaks non-functional english in the form of black-culture slang, the rest don't even speak english in an english-speaking country, and practically none of them are going to be functional adults that don't require assistance and handouts to survive.
>Those numbers do not mean what you seem to think
Those numbers are actually painting a rosier picture of what is actually happening in Baltimore and other cities. In 23 out of 150 school, zero students - none! - were proficient in math. Not a single student. There is simply no way to put lipstick on that pig.
>The Maryland State Department of Education recently released the 2022 state test results known as MCAP, Maryland Comprehensive Assessment Program.
>Baltimore City’s math scores were the lowest in the state. Just 7% of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, which means 93% could not do math at grade level.
>But that’s not all. WBFF combed through the scores at all 150 City Schools where the state math test was given. In 23 Baltimore City schools, there were zero students who tested proficient in math.
https://katv.com/news/nation-world/23-baltimore-schools-have...
In the other 127 schools, what percentage of students were proficient in math? How about other schools given the same test? It's hard to draw conclusions without context as to what an average or above average school scores in these tests.
>In the other 127 schools, what percentage of students were proficient in math?
Citywide the number was 7%. Better than 0 I suppose but still awful.
>Just 7% of third through eighth graders tested proficient in math, which means 93% could not do math at grade level.
How about outside the city? This is a statewide test, how are other areas doing?
Not saying they are useless but standardized tests only work for kids who take them seriously.
I recall taking these as a kid, and there were kids who would just fill in the bubbles. They would not even read the questions. They thought it was funny.
I tend to see big per student spending in public schools as suggestive that they've been loaded up with a disproportionate share of the kids with IEPs.
>madrassas in Pakistan that just teach the kids to read the Quran
I thought they were just teaching the sounds of the Quran. Like the Pakistani kids don't know any Arabic, and they don't learn to read or understand Arabic. They just memorize and recite the Arabic sounds of the Quran that they've been taught.
They usually do teach you to read Arabic, which is mostly the same script as Urdu. But you don't understand what you're reading which doesn't really make it any better.
They better not teach that. We all know dinosaurs aren't real!
I joke but religious education isn't all bad. One of my smartest friends in High School went to Santa Clara University and really liked it.
Many Catholic high schools are also among the highest performing in the country.
The claims around religious education are one of the biggest remaining examples of socially acceptable bigotry.
Or private equity owned schools. Imagine how bad product they could effectively deliver. The would not even teach humans walking with dinosaurs... As they would do bare minimum of teaching anything at all...
Why would parents send their children to those schools? Never mind who owns them; I would expect the kind of hypothetical schools you’re describing to go bankrupt quickly. Private equity is not in the business of losing money in predictable ways.
> As they would do bare minimum of teaching anything at all...
As compared to what again? Remind me how good government has been doing.
Schools are a state and local matter. So just because you might be frustrated with the government in your area ain't my effing problem. To chastise all public schools is a false narrative.
For one, you mean local government.
Two, then you wouldn’t be opposed to eliminating the dept of education then, right? I hope Trump follows through on his promise you seem to agree with.
Why would it give people worse education? Besides who are you or any of us to decide what is and isnt a good education for someone elses kids? It's not your job to police ideas.
Are you really arguing schools getting taxpayer money to teach kids humans walked with dinosaurs and all modern biology is a lie a good educational outcome?
Do you really not see how that's a bad outcome?
Do you not see that removing the funding from the regular public schools to go to teach that nonsense will lead to worse outcomes for those kids who can't leave those regular public schools?
Sure, maybe some students will potentially have some better outcomes if they manage to go to a good private charter school with their voucher that happens to be a decent one. For everyone else it's a worse outcome, unless you think it's a good thing to teach every animal alive today are direct descendants of the ark that was just a few thousand years ago.
Also, kiss special education funding goodbye. It won't be profitable to handle these students. They'll be trapped in those even more underfunded public schools. Hooray, great outcomes!
But those kids who are "being left behind" are good to have vouchers too. You don't think there will be small schools who want to take them?
I had a bunch of random teachers teach really dumb stuff while I was in public school. I don't believe those things, because I had parents who were involved in my education. It's never a good idea to leave your kids education to the whims of someone else.
Public school doesn't have some magic monopoly on good ideas. And private/voucher schools aren't going to have a monopoly on bad ones.
Why would the kids not be able to leave public schools? They will all have vouchers?
> You don't think there will be small schools who want to take them?
Spending a second of logic on it and thinking critically, there won't. Why would a school empowered to be choosy and subject to profit motivations choose the pricier students to specialize that reduce their rankings?
And why do you think a flood of schools arguing germ theory is a lie be a public good?
I went to religious private school and too had teachers who taught some bullshit things. Dinosaurs were fakes buried in the soil by the devil to test believers. Evolution is a lie by the government. And yet by personal experience I'm more learned than the average public school peer I know. I'm a somewhat special person though; I know many in my class that still believe without question. It's not a good thing for society overall to have such "knowledge".
As for why kids wouldn't be able to leave the public schools, some schools will be required to provide transportation. Others won't. Some will be able to be choosy, some won't. You see where this goes? Those schools which are choosey and don't provide transportation will end up selecting the most well off while those unable to be choosy and/or forced to provide transportation will be forced to shoulder those who aren't good performers who don't get into the choosy schools with a transit scholarship.
> I went to religious private school and too had teachers who taught some bullshit things... And yet by personal experience I'm more learned than the average public school peer I know.
Should that not give you pause about the general quality of the schools you're defending? Do you not see where parents might see you in fundie school learning about how man rode the dinosaurs alongside a public school kid that somehow knows even less than you about history or biology, and think "hmm maybe I'd like to find something else"?
> Should that not give you pause about the general quality of the schools you're defending?
No, because I've seen the average of the extremist schools which will grow with the voucher program and they're far worse than the negatives I experienced. Education like Eve gives Adam two apples, how many apples does Adam have; it doesn't matter Jesus will come soon here's another chapter of the KJV.
Except there's no reason to believe extremist schools should grow significantly. Most people aren't extremists (pretty much by definition). In fact, good schools are a usual top tier concern when looking at housing. Your worry about fly-by-night schools extracting profits and fleeing is also not particularly hard to solve: hold them liable for damages/a return of n years of voucher funds if the school fails to meet standards and require them to carry insurance or post a bond to prove they can meet their liability. High performing schools or new schools associated to people/organizations with a previous success record will have cheap premiums. Dodgy schools will have expensive premiums or will be uninsurable. Your worry about special ed is also not that complex: give higher funds for those kids to offset their higher cost.
Ok, so… you went to some self-described example a school you are complaining about, turned out great, and are upset that kids might not keep going to known-failing schools?
Maybe… there is more to school than facts? Maybe it’s about order and discipline and shared values too?
> Maybe… there is more to school than facts? Maybe it’s about order and discipline and shared values too?
Maybe status-quo bias is so powerful that people will see an institution that fails at literally everything it tries to do and instead of concluding that it's a failing institution they will pick some other random thing and decide the institution must actually be about that, because the idea that the institution is actually pointless is too horrible to contemplate.
I don’t think supporters of the existing American public school are in any position to lecture anyone about “outcomes.”
> Are you really arguing schools getting taxpayer money to teach kids humans walked with dinosaurs and all modern biology is a lie a good educational outcome?
I'll say yes. Most people I've seen who have gone through that type of schooling are good members of society. They work jobs, they pay taxes, they have friends, they often go on to higher education, they raise families, and they may be happier than the average person. The outcome is perfectly fine.
You are ignoring the externalities. We end up with an ignorant society that ultimately harms all of us. I hate to use a movie trope here, but we're barely a step above Idiocracy when it comes to the ability of the average American to function and make decisions. This ultimately becomes self destructive.
87% of kids attend public k-12, and secular and Catholic schools together make up the majority of private, so if we're barely a step above Idiocracy, it seems a bit silly to point at the "man rode the dinosaurs" people.
I went to a young earth creationist Christian school and it messed me up. Most of us had a hard time adjusting to life outside the Evangelical Christian bubble. It's really hard to connect to others when your identity is tied up in believing a lot of outlandish things and it's hard to love yourself because you're given a long list of crazy rules to follow. I was told that kissing someone before I was married would taint my soul and whoever I married would be disgusted by me if I did so. Most people I've kept in touch with regret going to that school and every queer person I know has been absolutely traumatized by the experience. I'm happy, and by your criteria, a good member of society but that was despite my school. It took a lot of therapy, personal growth, and finding a community of people who actually care about me to be happy.
Come on, be serious. In a huge country with 50M students attending primary/secondary school you can always dredge up a few horror stories but those are far from the typical case. On the scale of ways that schools damage kids, teaching them the unscientific mythology of certain Christian sects is hardly the worst. The Catholic church, which is one of the largest private school operators, has no official position on paleontology or evolution through natural selection.
> The Catholic church ... has no official position on paleontology or evolution through natural selection.
That's certainly an indictment.
I am serious. If you're thinking most of the families are chomping at the bit to repurpose tax dollars to Catholic schools you've clearly never interviewed the average homeschool family South of the Mason-Dixon. They don't even think Catholics are Christian; many would align a priest with Satan!
Most families I know who currently home school do so so to avoid vaccine requirements because germ theory/biology is a lie or because they're worried their kids will be exposed to the idea of the fossil record or that gay people exist in the world or put thoughts like dinosaurs died before humans into kids heads.
You're delusional if you think of these aren't major homeschooling points in the US. Willingly holding your nose to ignore the extreme stench of the anti-intellectualism the rest of the movement massively embodies.
This will be the outcome in an extreme majority of school districts. If anything, this recent election shows fundies vote. To them it's even more than life or death, it's eternal death to miss voting.
This would all be a solid argument if home schooled kids didn’t significantly outperform public school kids.
This isn't pure statistics though. This dataset is massively biased. And out performed on what, that 2+2=4 or that 2+2=Who know what except that God gives us our provision despite what our eyes see and logic tells us
Standardized testing
That’s a meaningless statistic. What matters is how each group respectively would do in the other format versus what they do in their present format.
Even if there were more ways to "vote with your wallet" is abundantly clear that a lot of parents, respectively, (a) couldn't care less anyway, and (b) can't actually tell a good charter or voucher school from a bad one.
When the purpose of schooling is ensuring a civic floor amongst citizens the effectiveness of things like the home school co-ops mentioned can't come at the expense of population at large unless we wish to surrender the republican form of government for something else.
You need to contrast suggested ideas to the current systems, not an idealized standard that the current system is nowhere near achieving.
For instance NAEP scores consistently demonstrate only about 25% of students achieve "basic" proficiency in math, reading is even worse. Its going to be difficult to do worse.
And I mean that very literally - some percent of people would become competent in e.g. basic math with 0 public education due to family or personal interests. I can't imagine it's "that" far from 25%.
> A free market fixes anything
Nothing magical about it. It’s pure economics and rational decision making. The institutions we complain about in this country every day are completely insulated from it. Everything else survives or fails on its own merits.
Supply and demand. It’s a natural law.
> Kids are throwing chairs at teachers.
I don’t know where you live, but kids (plural!) assaulting teachers like that would be very unusual. I have a lot of family and friends in elementary education and management. Stories like that are the kind of thing that get talked about for years if they happen, not something that happens enough to be referred to in the plural.
A family member who taught at a title 1 elementary schools encountered chair/desk throwing multiple times in the short time she was there. I think unfortunately YMMV greatly depending on the area where you live
Very expensive suburb of Seattle. I was shocked to hear this as well. Reported to me by my friend who is the school counselor and had to deal with these kids (plural) herself.
It’s good they had access to counseling and I hope she was able to help some of them. I don’t imagine most kids are born wanting to throw chairs at people. Something is going on at home.
The girl in the math class before me would beat the shit out of my desk like clockwork. She hated math, was violent, and very autistic, no apparent other issues nor even hate towards humans. Nothing could be done, just wait for the tantrum to end then take my seat.
Room destroyers are pretty common, but they usually have IEPs.
TBH there's no good choices for many - big mental health issues and trauma, no home or family support, and no real options: kids have to go somewhere, self contained classrooms are at capacity, there are worse kids in line to get put in facilities, and often you can't really do that unless parents push for it anyway.
Yeah, I know one kid that threw a chair in school. We use public education because I think it's good for kids to be independent at an early age. It can't be healthy to spend 16 years within bluetooth range of your parents at all times.
Private schools isn’t much better. Kids don’t learn much more, everything is just less chaotic because they can counsel out the ones who can’t behave.
So homeschooling is not just an ideological choice anymore
Ah, so you just opt out of being around average people. OK.
This piece makes a lot of unsubstantiated claims.
Just because you are putting a child in a siloed environment doesn’t mean you’re teaching them that everyone else is beneath them.
If you are homeschooling and not teaching humility, kindness, etc then you’re doing it wrong.
- parent of 6 homeschooled kids
There is still an implicit "othering" of other children. They are in one camp and yours are in another. If they have any semblance of imagination as kids do, they will dream up reasons beyond the one you gave them
In what way is the ”othering” different than what children otherwise do, apart from being in different kind of schools? As you wrote children (or more generally) people can make up all sorts of reasons for that.
I find looking beyond the rim of your own plate such an inspiring thing when it comes to schooling.
Germany for example prohibits home schooling. don't breed detached extremists. however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O. but then on the upside again, you will go to school for at least 13 years if you get _any_ kind of qualified professional education.
China has one (1) math text book for 1.4bn people.
France has competitive cognitive Tests (Concours) to enter highest education.
maybe a problem is that everybody went to school so everyone thinks they are experts. it's hard to evolve schooling. like steering a super tanker. slooow. too slow for four year election cycles.
Not sure inspiring is the word I would hve picked :D
Overall it sounds a tad better than the US, but far from perfect.
Especially not accounting for different developmental speed of kids annoys me, although from what I heard it'd a bit better these days than in the 90s - e.g. even if they sent you to the Realschule instead of Gymnasium and at age 15 you decided you wanted to go to university they wouldn't make your life extra hard.
”don't breed detached extremists”
This doesn’t follow. In addition, there are plenty who fit that description who did go to a state school.
On the flip side, a long history of multiple paths through public education has led to Germany being a country where there is no universal expectation that everyone should/must get at least an undergraduate degree, and so inflation (in terms of both price and dilution of value) of degrees is lower than in countries like the UK or especially the US.
An acknowledged, well-designed, and state-supported path to vocational education is very good; social mobility is important within such a system, and a lack of social mobility doesn't have to be baked in.
>however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O
As a German that's the first time I hear that. Do you mean Schülerpraktikum? That's usually at age 14. Never heard anyone doing that at age 9.
They're talking about the division between Gymnasium, Realschule, and Hauptschule. It's actually state to state nowadays whether they have separate schools or Gesamtschulen, but I understand even in Gesamtschulen, in many Bundesländer there's some internal separation.
Where are you in DE, that this is unknown to you? In Köln just 15 years ago I knew parents who had the horror scenario: a 4th grade teacher who quietly believed that girls shouldn't go to university. They switched their daughter schools that year.
I guess he is talking about the three school types you can go to after elementary
Also a lot of countries have different goals, and most people when they think of optimization of schooling think of better outcomes at the top end, whereas administrators think of better outcomes at the bottom end. The difference between stimulating your smartest people enough that they become leading beacons of their field vs minimizing the amount of people that get left behind. In some places there's a mixed approach with magnet schools but there's many countries where that doesn't exist.
> don't breed detached extremists.
There are plenty... Who's that Nazi kid with the face tattoos? I don't remember his name.
People are getting disillusioned by education; partly because of politics, but also because there's a good reason not to trust the experts.
Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see.
If a doctor or nurse or scientist says something is "evidence based", it works (most of the time). If a teacher or teaching academic says "evidence based", they mean they have some kind of evidence behind it, like in that Simpson's episode ('Well, your honor, we've got plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are 'kinds' of evidence.')
Teaching as an academic discipline has been basically spun out of whole cloth. Universities didn't (really) study education until governments told them to teach it, so they got a ragtag bunch of PhD thesis done, and the best way to do this is to use a very "philosophical" approach, and a very thin actual evidence base. Then they have to teach this to student teachers, most of whom are not really equipped to assess evidence. Then the student teachers who are great at the kind of essays that any student teacher can "engage with" will end up being the next generation of professors.
Schools are run by teachers (who are badly trained) and politicians the public service (which generally defers to the universities). Yes there is a more conservative "evidence based" movement, but even it is nowhere near good enough.
Exactly, this kind of BS "eduction" the teachers receive doesn't really equip teachers with the knowledge to teach anything beyond 12 years old.
I believe any subject teacher (i.e. mathematics, physics, english, etc.) should hold at least a bachelors in that subject alongside with a teaching/pedagogy degree. Every bad teacher I've had only had the teaching degree, the best teachers I've had only had a PhD in their subject. Not bad as in dislike - there were plenty of good, competent teachers whom I disliked.
Sorry but this is all radical relativist, anti-intellectual BS. It doesn’t matter how you’re getting schooled, you have no one else to learn from but experts. Who else did you have in mind, Joe Rogan and his podcast?
And you couldn’t even list one good reason not to trust experts. You’re too coy to say it outright, but you just don’t believe in science—and as with anyone who’s over-eager to point out its mistakes, you miss the fact that science is an approximation of the truth. It does make mistakes, scientists build upon those mistakes, and the repository of human knowledge gets better over time. No one says it’s perfect.
And no, schools are not run by teachers, geez
Please try to be civil. I mentioned phonics, do you agree with what I said on it or not?
What's wrong with phonics? Look-see as the only other alternative that I know of has awful results.
What did you have in mind?
Reintroduction of phonics has been pushed - hard - by academia.
> because there's a good reason not to trust the experts
I hate this. Where else do we get knowledge from if not experts and academics in their fields? That's how humans grow our collective knowledge. People learn, gather evidence, build knowledge and then share it. The people who have done the learning over many years are called "experts". Those are the people I want to learn from, no?
> conservative "evidence based" movement
Evidence should not be political. You can either prove something, or you cannot. It is neither conservative, nor liberal.
When the experts say that algebra should not be taught in 8th grade, and the experts say that guessing at words instead of sounding them out is a better way to learn to read, and the experts say that calc can be replaced with 'data science' which is actually just data literacy, and so on and so forth, I'm not really interested in how the precise definition of 'experts' actually refers to something about 'growing our collective knowledge'. I'm more interested in staying away from all that. It's a fun gotcha to say things like 'well evidence either is or isn't', but it doesn't change the material reality of who's doing what and what they're likely to be doing in the near future. Public schooling is fucked, the group of people saying 'listen to the experts' is the group of people making it worse, a lot of it is explicitly political, and your best options for guaranteeing that you avoid it are homeschooling or parochial school, regardless of what words and rhetoric can be said about it.
Personally, I have high functioning autism. I would do terrible at interpersonal relationships, but then get near perfect scores on all the tests.
Teachers would anticipate that I would be terrible and then when I got perfect scores on all the tests, they would be pissed off.
I think there are a lot of tech people that are neurodivergent and had terrible experiences in school and would love to avoid my child having that experience.
Also, I’m not super happy about the extreme views on race, sex and religion that are going through the school system. I would like the opportunity to teach a more moderate view. I feel like people who don’t have kids who make comments about this trully don’t understand many parents perspectives on this.
Also, when you are a parent, you find that you have to move to specific areas to get good schooling and homeschooling would allow you to live where you want to and not pay and go through the application for private school.
It’s interesting that everything in this article that’s anti-homeschool relies on the parents not doing something correctly, which I think most people just assume they correct for that. I’m not worried about abusing my own kids, because I’m not going to abuse them. Honestly, my mom was a teacher and she was anti-homeschool and many of the anti-homeschool bullet points were provided by the union and I think she just wanted to get full funding for the school and the state wouldn’t provide funding to the school when the homeschoolers didn’t show up and wasn’t really caught up in those arguments.
However, my wife is never going to homeschool our kids or allow me to do it, so it’s just not going to happen.
> Also, I’m not super happy about the extreme views on race, sex and religion that are going through the school system.
Maybe I'm living under a rock; what extreme views are going through the school system?
My son's district has a black superintendent and at least one black principal but otherwise black (and other) kids don't get to see the example of black teachers (and learn school is a "white thing you wouldn't understand" the same way that boys come to the conclusion that school is for girls when they don't see any male teachers -- the problem here is representation-ism that stops at the very top, if they do get a black teacher they get promoted out of the ranks immediately)
When my son was in middle school he was quite inspired by a curriculum unit on the Harlem Renaissance and liked the school's black principal.
Later on he felt the attitude about gender (man vs women as opposed to something else) was very oppressive and that it contributed to him and other students falling victim to incel ideology and sometimes body dysmorphia. Today he struggles to talk to girls not because he's afraid of being rejected but because he's afraid of being reported.
> Today he struggles to talk to girls not because he's afraid of being rejected but because he's afraid of being reported.
Why would anyone be reported to any authority figure for speaking to girls?
It's pretty standard for middle schools to hold assemblies discussing sexual harassment and healthy relationships, but they don't always do a great job communicating those concepts.
Back when I was in middle school about a decade ago, the principal got up on stage with a police officer and explained that sexual harassment is when you talk to a girl and she feels uncomfortable. He then went on to assert that the school had zero tolerance for sexual harassment, describe various authorities to whom victims could report instances of sexual harassment, and implore students not to risk their future by engaging in sexual harassment.
If you weren't super confident in your ability to predict or control other people's feelings, probably your takeaway from that assembly was that talking to girls was a risky thing to do.
I believe there is an SNL skit on this topic.
I know quite a few people who have started homeschooling their kids in recent years, including one who stopped homeschooling their kiss last year and will be pulling their kids back out of school this spring.
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.
American schools just aren’t very good. I remember when I was in third or fourth grade, my mom flipping out about why we were spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math. To this day, my mom, who grew up in Bangladesh but got a classic British education from a tutor, is more well read in western literature than I am (Tolstoy, Jules Verne, Socrates, Plato, etc.)
As far as I can tell, private school doesn’t even fix the problem. My kids go to a pretty expensive private school and it’s not rigorous or challenging—the main benefit is that the kids are better behaved so there is less chaos and distraction.
> spending so much time learning about native Americans and so little time learning math
After a bunch of years overseas, I returned to the US to complete my last two years of high school.
I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization. They don’t learn anything substantive about the founding U.S. cultures (big differences between Puritans and Jamestown settlers). They don’t study European history as a required course so they know almost nothing about how the modern world came to be (Westphalian nation states, etc). And they learn almost no world history beyond ancient civilizations (native Americans, ancient Egyptians, etc).
I spend $33,000 a year on my daughter’s education and she was telling me about some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe—but she has no idea what the Magna Carta is, or what the political structure was of the UK that we declared independence from, who Plato is, etc. My mom was more educated as a girl in a desperately poor Muslim country in the 1950s than my daughter in an affluent DC region private school.
I attended the best school district in my state, and the history education was absolutely miserable. Didn't cover either World War, but covered and re-covered early American history in a very boring, unrevealing way.
Not sure how it is today but in the late 90s it felt like we had a section about Nazis and WW2 every year in high school (in Germany). Yes, I get it, it's important - but it's not important to rehash it every year for 9 years.
That said, overall I was pretty happy with history class.
>The remarkable thing is that Americans don’t understand their own civilization... some supposed connection between the Constitution and some Indian tribe.
The Iroquois Confederacy. Irony.
My daughter's middle school science class spent a month and a half chewing through water and rock cycle. I don't think geology is in her future.
> I was shocked and dismayed by how much time (and stupid memorization-minutiae) was dedicated solely to the 4 years of the US Civil War.
Really? I remember the Civil War being a unit (significantly less than a semester) in US History, which was one class in my sophomore year of high school.
I think that Native American history, the Civil War, and Geology are all reasonable subjects to cover in school.
I believe early grade schools should be relatively broad in the subjects they teach. Not every child will be interested in math or science. And there's nothing wrong with that. I feel many parents don't agree, especially those from a technical background. A healthy society should have a diverse set of skills across many disciplines. Though I do believe if children are interested in furthering their study on a particular subject (not just math), there should ideally be opportunities from schools.
It’s shameful to not be interested in math and science—that’s like saying you’re not interested in reading. But putting that aside, the other subjects should be educational.
I remember what triggered my mom was us spending an inordinate amount of time making clay models of Native American villages. American kids shouldn’t graduate high school knowing more about the shapes of Native American houses than the conceptual underpinnings and history of their own civilization.
> It’s shameful to not be interested in math and science
What? Don't you know anyone who is not a nerd? I know many very fine people with no interest in either, and they have nothing to be ashamed of
Homeschooling is seeing a surge in popularity, its not just tech people or high status people.
IME it's a lack of trust, sending your kids to be raised by strangers. I grew up in a small town and some of my teachers were basically neighbors.
For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools which might serve a thousand students from 4 different towns it's placed somewhat equidistant to, ie, in the middle of nowhere
I know in my area they're doing consolidation of schools because there are fewer kids enrolled than when the schools were originally constructed. Even after some consolidation many schools are barely over 60% of their enrollment capacity which is estimated to go down almost another 10% in the next five years.
People haven't been having nearly as many kids for a while. Fewer kids means fewer students. Revenue to operate the building is tied to number of students; fewer students means less revenue to keep things operating satisfactorily.
When the majority of the homes surrounding the elementary are filled with retirees whose kids have moved elsewhere instead of young families it is no surprise the school closes.
> For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools
In my experience it's because schools are being treated as a business, and businesses are usually more efficient when there's consolidation of expenses. Why pay for 3 schools with 10 teachers each when you could instead consolidate classes and pay for 1 school with 15 teachers? To a business, the decision is purely made out of cost. Alas, a lot of governments have such tight budgets (for many legitimate and illegitimate reasons) that cost benefits outweigh the human benefits.
Depends on area. Portland schools have plenty of money but still struggle. Administration and retirement perks eat up most of the budget. In a sense its that they are not a business that leads to that kind of issue.
But ultimately its a complex issue. eg voucher systems would resolve the above issues, but create entirely new sets of problems which may be worse along the way.
Not sure if I agree with this. Schools are not exactly run by the government, rather local school districts.
My (not data based) impression of school levies is that they nearly always get approved by voters, even in tax-averse areas, so if there is a lack of funding, it is usually real, rather than through a misplaced need to be "efficient".
> Schools are not exactly run by the government, rather local school districts.
What gets approved by voters? Ahh, right, government services. How are those paid? By taxes. Who collects taxes? Governments, of course.
I don't know where you are in the world. In the US, public schools are funded by government money counted by number of students and their test scores. So more students = more funding, better scores = more funding. There are other kinds of schools, private schools and charter schools come to mind, with different funding types. But often those include additional costs to the parent on top of the taxes they already pay.
How do public schools get managed by the district? Again I'm not sure where you are, but here the public school administration gets voted in during government elections. The public education system's requirements are defined by law and, above the district level, managed by county or state education services.
> if there is a lack of funding, it is usually real, rather than through a misplaced need to be "efficient"
Don't get me wrong, I think efficiency has its place. But I think it is extremely easy for school administrators to end up in a business-first mindset instead of a serve-people-by-educating-them mindset.
The irony of this is that you rely on strangers for critical stuff like ensuring you don't get electrocuted or burned at home or even ensuring that the water that you drink won't make you ill or that your car is a good enough condition to not lead you to a fatal crash. Any of these affects your close relatives. What makes education different?
I think there's a broad perception that education professionals are ideologically captured by the left. It's hard to know how true this is, but individuals like "libsoftiktok" have made a career out of stoking that fire.
Also, unlike your other examples of strangers working on things, there's not really a feedback loop of review and rework where mistakes can be corrected. If your child gets a bad education, that's time lost that's really hard to recover and can set them back for life.
Edit: To add, the "ideological capture" perception is important because of what education is. When you're dealing with an electrician, it doesn't matter who they vote for because electricity works the same way regardless. Teachers don't just regurgitate information but promote a set of values and expectations in their classroom so their personal opinions can matter a lot. And that's not even getting into teachers who explicitly try to teach students their worldview.
The cost and timeline to evaluate quality is completely different; I can get multiple opinions for my possessions, and utilities are fairly objective to evaluate (and the cost to do so is small relative to the scale of the operation).
Schools are limited for choice, expert evaluation is limited, outcomes are potentially unclear... That's before you get into issues with the politics of a teacher or problem students.
> outcomes are potentially unclear
Same is true for home schooling
some people feel better when they think they're in control, despite the fact that the outcome could be even worse. The ability to have control gives the reassurance that the outcome is going to be acceptable (without evidence).
It's not different.
If the water you drink is having problems, you'd have campaigns over it, protests, people trying to get it resolved and potentially lawsuits. People would band together to do whatever they could to fix the problem that they see.
Education is seeing the exact same thing. Parents see a lot of problems. They are going to school board and council meetings, people are campaigning on solving the issue and people are taking whatever measures are in their power to fix it...like home schooling.
When people see problems, they want to fix them. It's exactly the same thing.
Exactly right. Plenty of people have in-home systems to bring their municipal water to the quality that they want (e.g. filters, softeners). Many more even have wells because there is no municipal water.
Many people research safety ratings before purchasing a car as a proxy for how reliable a given manufacturer is at ensuring good outcomes in a crash.
It's really not that different.
I have some friends who live in area with the bad water quality... They end up drinking/cooking with store-bought water, instead of city-provided one from the tap.
When I need electrician/plumber/general contractor/etc..., I choose one based on recommendations and reviews.
If you know (say from conversations with other parents) that your local school is bad, why would you send your kids there? It is like choosing an electrician with bad reviews only because their office is next door to you, or living in bad-water area, drinking city water and getting sick every week.
It's pure economics. One large facility is cheaper in fixed cost terms than four smaller facilities. It's also cheaper in variable costs of staffing and other economies of scale like consumables. Lastly, the size of the large school means the cost of special features like a wood shop, kitchen, large theatre, art facilities, etc., are relatively smaller and thus more easily included in the whole package.
You're right that something is definitely lost. It's an externality that's forced on you and your children. There are compensations, but it's not an unambiguous win.
The author's thesis is that the rise in home-schooling is driven by a desire to "opt out of being around average people," and he implies that he is not home-schooling his own children in part because he himself was home-schooled and believes that may have contributed to his own struggles with social stress.
However, given his self-description, it seems there is a decent chance he would have struggled with social stressors regardless of what education setting he was in, possibly even more so if he had been exposed to bullying or excessive social stressors in a more traditional public education setting.
Exposing oneself to just the right dose of poison in order to develop immunity is a delicate science.
When I was younger, I was also taught to believe that nurture always triumphs over nature, but as I got older and eventually had my own kids, I found out that nature was winning way more of those battles than I first realized.
Judging by the name and picture, I'm pretty sure Forrest Brazeal is a he.
Excellent point. Comment updated for accuracy.
We live in a social climate where we can't even assert ourselves of someone's gender based on their name out of fear from a very local special interest group that has far reaches into public education system and this is another big reason why parents who can't afford private school opt for home schooling.
The fact that parent had to edit their comment and could not call a man a he answers the article's question very well.
This is word salad. What does it mean to "assert yourself" of someone else's gender?
It means the user, a relatively recent account, is trawling for bites. The KKK in the username and the slant of many of their comments might hint at a touch of bad faith edge lording.
I thought this was a really bad article. "Suddenly"?? I've heard many tech parents go full bore into homeschooling for at least about 2 decades now.
Also, for the particular issues she talks about (e.g. social isolation), essentially all of the tech parents I know that are into home schooling put a ton of effort into having a really rich social environment, e.g. either through "group schooling" or lots of outside activities.
It's really a blog post and if you read it that way (i.e. a personal story / take on the topic) then it's fine.
I've replaced the title with a somewhat more neutral question from the article. If there's a better title (i.e. more accurate and neutral, and preferably using representative language from the article), we can change it again.
Covid and the school shutdowns, did create a real boost in the homeschooling. Exacerbated by the particularly draconian shutdowns and masking in areas where there are a lot of tech workers like the Bay Area.
I think it merely made parents aware of what was already happening.
My nephew texted my brother during his lunch break to ask for more credits for his switch account. My brother asked why play games instead of talking or hanging out with others. My nephew sent back a video of the lunch room: every single student had their eyes glued to a digital device of some sort.
The experience kids have in schools isn't what we as adults went through - a common thing for every generation - but when you can get more interaction and socialization via home school networks and groups of motivated parents, it is hard to argue against it.
> My nephew sent back a video of the lunch room: every single student had their eyes glued to a digital device of some sort.
Wow, this just makes me intensely sad. We are ruining a generation of humans with these digital narcotics. Say what you want about being a Chicken Little, or that every generation looks at the next generation's behavior with some amount of trepidation ("MTV will corrupt your mind!"), but this feels pretty different to me. Humans are social creatures, and human children need lots of unstructured social play, and they need to be allowed to get bored, and we're killing all that.
Which is why so many districts are pushing for no mobile devices during the school day.
Hearing accounts like this where apparently kids bring game consoles to school as a regular thing further makes me support schools having technology lockers.
Does the US really not do that yet? That's crazy. My children have school laptops for work and need to lock their phones up upon arrival until departure. You couldn't bring in a Switch, period. Sometimes they look at YouTube videos or play web games etc at lunch time on the laptop, but AFAICT they've been discouraging that more and more.
Completely agree, but it's not really like "tech homeschooling is a new thing" vs. the fact that public schools (I'd argue especially in the Bay Area, e.g. see the school board recall) got so bad during the pandemic that parents had huge motivation to find an alternative.
And the fact of the pandemic makes this article even worse in my opinion: "Gee, why would parents with means want to find an alternative when public schools had to go all remote for extended periods and were a shit show in general?"
> Here are some things I struggle with at age 32:
> - Social awkwardness and anxiety
> - Difficulty in forming IRL friendships
> - Impatience with the idea of connecting on a meaningful level with other people: who needs ‘em?
> - An abiding sense of detachment from reality
I'm the same age and have the same things, and I went to traditional school K through university. Idk if that has much to do with how you were schooled, or at least not being home schooled doesn't just magically fix that.
One commenter proposed ADHD, the other high IQ.
My proposal: Forrest is just an average person guy, those who know him (but not how he feels about himself) may describe him as “well adjusted”. How Forrest feels is a reasonable response to a culture that rewards and incentivizes maladjustment.
Signed on behalf of
Los milenaristas milenarios de militante
Those are all symptoms of ADHD. I am reluctant to point that out, but I see this a lot. I'd like to respond with a small footnote. Or wait until the comment drops below the fold. Alas, I cannot. :)
Also schizotypy which maybe 5% of people have and gets DXed basically 0% of the time. It's a developmental disability which will make you a target for relentless bullying which will screw you up much more than you need to be screwed up.
You should be reluctant to DX ADHD, everybody seems to have it because it's promoted by an addictive pill industry, it's almost as fashionable as gluten intolerance used to be or autism is these days. #notactuallyautistic
Interesting. I read the wiki article and the mayo clinic page on it. School uniforms are not uniformly a bad idea I think. We as a civilization should really focus on removing bullying as memetic virus. It has knock on effects that are larger than we realize, like most forms of harm.
I think most people seem to have it, because I think most people do to some degree, most things are a spectrum. We simply aren't prepared for the world we have accidentally created for ourselves. I personally don't find the pills addictive. Speaking of which, this quite long video, "Dopamine Expert: <clickbait redacted>" is quite good, esp if you are a fan of neurology and neuropsychology. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=R6xbXOp7wDA
Whether schizotypy is dimensional (you have more or less of it) or taxonic (you have it or you don't) is a primary controversy. One fact is that the 'schizogene' postulated by Meehl which would make it taxonic certainly does not exist or efforts to find it would have born fruit in the genomic age.
The dimensional view is personified by Gordon Claridge who edited a few conference proceedings which may be closer to the truth but fail to tell a compelling story. You might read these and walk away thinking "nothing more to see here folks"
This monograph
https://www.amazon.com/Schizotypy-Schizophrenia-View-Experim...
by Mark Lenzenweger tells a compelling story that might be less true. My life made 100% more sense the day it fell into my hands after decades of looking for answers.
I don't really like the DSM definition of STPD; today I could mark up my first psych eval with a highlighter and add a few symptoms I've experience sense and satisfy it, but as a person who reads about psychodiagnosis for fun I read it and missed it numerous times. (Also despite my condition causing me a lot of trouble, I don't feel like I'm really that ill.) If Lenzenweger is right, it could be diagnosed by an eye tracking test.
As for school uniforms I think they have some good points and some bad points. As a kid they might have done me some good but I probably would have been resistant, as I was to many things. And for bullying I'll share
https://www.amazon.com/Bullying-Social-Destruction-Laura-Mar...
and also
https://www.amazon.com/Sense-Honor-Bluejacket-Books/dp/15575...
written by USMC officer, journalist, novelist and US Senator Jim Webb which is a compelling but even-handed account of the role of hazing in promoting group cohesion that was recommended to me by one of his classmates from the Naval Academy one day when I was giving blood.
Reading it now, I am reminded of the importance of sleep. The only time I have experience "visual aberrations" is when I have been very sleep deprived. Items in my periphery would rotate, like my mind was attempting to dream. And then there is this description of one of the cases
> single male who works for the U.S. Postal Service, typically during the midnight shift.
People should be very very cautious about working swing shifts or night shifts.
https://time.com/3657434/night-work-early-death/
I am not that far in, but it looks to me like STPD is a precursor to full Schizophrenia, and that if caught early could avoid it entirely. This might be what the book says.
Oh the DSM, it seems chock full of ... spicey illinformed kinda right by accident correlation isn't causation kind things. After reading enough of it, I don't even see it anymore. I am sure there is still some phrenology in there.
Hazing as a bonding exercise is barbaric. I have seen scrapbooks of USN sailors that have crossed the Tropic of Cancer and Equator. Yeah, no.
Meehl's hypothesis is that some fraction of schizotypes, maybe 5-10% develop schizophrenia in early adulthood. I'm too old for that now.
It could be that I've compensated because my verbal intelligence is too high to measure. I got 800 verbal/760 math on the SAT and probably gave up 40 points to the line noise in my brain. I struggled to get more than 90% on math quizzes in high school because of that line noise but as my education progressed (physics PhD) I got better at not making mistakes on math. I've maxxed every verbal test and subscale I've taken.
I am worried that I won't be able to compensate so well when I am older; psychotic dementia would be a terrible burden on the people around me. I've seen people who aged well because they had good emotional habits, I can only hope I've got enough time to improve mine.
This is due the author presumably having a really high IQ, not homeschooling. He would feel the same way with regular schooling.
The actual title of the article is: "Why are tech people suddenly so into homeschooling?" which is not exactly the same as "becoming fashionable". Why not use the original title?
dang edited it: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42706248
Homeschooling often gets confused with self-directed education, aka “unschooling”. These are not the same.
The former tends to replicate school and requires a teacher, usually a parent. It’s basically school with added/paced/altered/enriched curriculum at the cost of socialization, although that can be compensated with other forms of peer groups, especially in urban area. Comparing this method versus school A or school B is pretty much like comparing school A and B as two schools can be as different as any given school and homeschool.
The latter is what John Holt referred to as homeschooling but is based on self-determination theory and has an abundance of science to support it. Neuroscience backs this theory too, I think the rate at which active learning learns is somewhere around x20 faster than passive learning (ie “teaching”). Very serious folks like John Holt, Peter Gray, or Akilah Richards to name a few have dedicated their life work to supporting self-directed education as a superior form of education. What Peter Gray’s research shows shows is that outcomes are basically the same except for life satisfaction and psychological outcomes. In essence, it leads to same rates of secondary education, jobs and socio-economical outcomes, except an unschooled child makes for a much happier adult later on.
Sadly, because the majority of people went through contemporary schooling or some version of it, people’s biases makes people not want to hear this.
I’m not sure what the OP’s circle looks like but I would be surprised if none of those so called “techs pro-homeschooling” are only doing the school at home version without having stumbled upon any of the science around self-directed.
Can you cite some of these claims, to guide someone like myself who has never heard of any of these things?
> abundance of science to support it
A few citations would be helpful.
It's true that there has always been a sizeable chunk of religion motivated home schoolers, historically there was a long tail with motivations and efficacy that was all over the map.
One thing that's really common is for parents to try it when they feel that the local system is failing their kids in some way and the family economics supporting are acceptable.
There are also many permutations - it wasn't uncommon when I was younger for parents to do it through middle school, but have their kids attend high school because they felt that it was the point where socialization became important in a way that couldn't be handled effectively with home school.
Obviously there's a huge range of efficacy, too.
That said, I think you have to ask why are charter schools and vouchers (not just home school) becoming even more fashionable despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large? And a lot of it is because society has gotten more and more zero sum and it's going to increasingly self cannibalize.
Which is not that far off from the writer's premise.
>despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large?
You don't find the experience of New Orleans following their conversion to a complete charter system in 2005 (10 percentage point gain in college acceptance rates, improvements on standardized tests by about a third of a standard deviation) to be meaningful evidence?
https://news.tulane.edu/news/new-orleans-reforms-boost-stude...
What you see with that result is way more complicated than just "charter schools working."
Having gone through the San Francisco public schooling system, I would never send my kids there.
I'd rather home school them if I lived in San Francisco, or if I have money, send them to private school.
This is one of the main reasons why there are more dogs than children in SF. There are some good public schools but parents don't want to deal with the vagaries of the lottery system so they move out to other school districts.
Same thing in Boston.
> I would never send my kids there.
Why not, what's wrong with it? What could you do better at home, or what could private schools do better?
I read thst San Francisco decided not to offer Algebra until high school so no one would feel left behind. One of those dystopian decisions that emerged from a well intentioned DEI initiative. A decision that defies logic and surprise didn't help. That would be enough of a red flag for me. https://priceonomics.com/why-did-san-francisco-schools-stop-...
Algebra in 8th grade is back this year. https://www.sfusd.edu/about-sfusd/sfusd-news/press-releases/....
I have no other knowledge to vouch for SFUSD either way though.
It's not fully back. Read the fine print.
my son is in pre algebra in 6th grade. I assume that mean algebra next year. I'm glad his fifth grade teacher realized he knew it all early in the year and moved him to sixth grade math early.
You could literally live next to a school and there’s a chance your kids can’t go there.
There are many kids from low income, broken families who are just really bad students. Bullies. Disruptive. Disrespectful to teachers. It was hell going through public schools in SF.
So it's "opt out of being around average people", then?
Average people aim to provide a good a start for their kids as possible; average aims to avoid public school if possible. You now only have a set of people defined by behaviour or ability too poor for private, parents who don't care, or ones with no options...
Basically it's opting out of being around the dregs
If the average student is a bully, disruptive, and disrespectful to teachers then I think I might actually opt out of being around average people if possible.
And what's so bad about it? Mind you, it's not just 'being around', but "being stuck with them for 30% of your life for years in a situation out of your control".
I wish they were average.
The lottery is pretty rough on people, and a lot of the schools are not amazing.
What's "not amazing" about them?
I wonder the same thing, I have friends who send their kids there and are happy with it. Not surprisingly for SF, most of the parents are educated with good incomes and expect their kids to go to college. That has its own set of downsides of course, but you could do a lot worse.
Don't know why this is downvoted, seems like a reasonable question. I don't know much about SF or public schools in the US. Are they all bad? do we have data comparing public/private schools in these areas?
Public and private schools don't take the same tests, so we don't have good days to compare the schools. Even if we did, it would be hard to disentangle the impact of selection bias.
You could look at college acceptances or similar, but those aren't unbiased either, as colleges look at estimates of class rank, not just absolute performance.
Come from a family of teachers.
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.
Economics plays into this too. Housing in good school districts is often much more expensive, and private schools are ridiculously expensive.
COVID is another factor. Anecdotal of course, but I've only met two home schooled families since moving to our present city 3 years ago, and one of them started out of necessity during the pandemic and found that it worked well and so never went back -- but they're a one income family so one parent has the time (the only way it works, IMO, unless you co-op with another family or two, which can work if you're friends). I must say I was very impressed with their kids.
Are private schools all that ridiculously expensive though? I'm enrolling my kid into University School (a private boys only school in Cleveland) and the tuition is like 30k$ per year.
Where I live all the districts have the same funding per student across the entire MSA. The inner city schools still do much worse.
The economic situation of the parents is a greater factor than the funding of the school IMO
I agree but many keep claiming that inner city schools just lack money despite evidence otherwise.
Masking children was fucking cruel.
Not really. If you've grown up in Asia you're used to wearing a mask whenever you are feeling unwell or have a cold. We do that out of courtesy to others, and it makes a lot of sense (which is why the practice has continued at hospitals since COVID). My kids were both in elementary school during COVID and got used to it quickly and were just fine.
In Seattle schools have double the budget compared to the years ago, and spend more than 25K per student each year. The schools are worse than ever, which has convinced me that funding isn’t the problem. This might be a local issue though, with a very ideological school district that has ignored the basics of education.
OK, but the issue I was bringing up has nothing to do with funding for schools.
I was responding to the part about housing being expensive near good schools, and the idea of good schools in general. Expensive housing and associated taxes often affect local school budgets, and those budgets are often stated as the reason the school is good. But my experience has been that the budgets don’t change school quality, it must be other factors. Sorry it may have been somewhat unrelated.
Yeah, fair point.
I don't know whether budgets change school quality, but there is a marked difference in most cities between schools with high and low performance outcomes as measured by test scores, graduation rates, etc. (not that test scores are the best measure of life in general, but they're what's available in terms of academic understanding). And if you look at the schools with high ratings and where they are located, you'll find that it correlates greatly with income, and even more so you'll find that schools with the lowest performance correlate greatly with low income. (These are averages; there are brilliant students at all these schools.)
Families with higher income have more resources and more ability to support their child's education (after school activities, tutoring, a more academically-oriented environment, and most importantly, the absence of financial stress on the family unit which can greatly affect children especially if the parents (or in many cases a single parent household) has to work multiple jobs just to put food on the table much less be able to handle much else.
I think it's really housing is expensive near good schools because people (with kids) want to live near good schools so it drives up the price.
I guess also people who buy their house based on education probably have a positive effect of the education in that area but I think it's more of a market effect of the school already being above average.
SF: 27k
> Why are tech people suddenly so into homeschooling?
Are they? I mean statistically. Or is that just an observation from some random articles about a handful of freaks?
> and let me tell you, at no time were my six siblings and I considered the cool kids on the block.
I don't want to defend homeschooling but in my experience, the cool kids on the block tend to end badly. These are the girls that end up pregnant at 16 or in relationships with abuse partners, the boys that end up in addiction and a career of jumping from shitty jobs to shitty jobs.
Having said that it is nice to be able to develop social skills. I used to be super shy and had to force myself to grow a more sociable person and I am glad I had to force myself doing that by going to school.
Circumstances can drag you into it.
I had trouble in the public schools because of bullying linked to my schizotypy (then undiagnosed despite what I'm told later was an exceptionally good psych eval for the late 1970s) They were going to drug me so my parents took me out for two years, I skipped three and was successful in high school. (In the single year my parents were able private school I was treated as I had some rights and dignity)
My son struggled in elementary school in a different way. Our school got labeled as a "persistently dangerous school" because we had an principal who, unlike others in the district, filled out the paperwork honestly (and got fired for it.) I lost faith in the superintendent when he first words in a meeting were "we're going to appeal it" as opposed to something like "we're going to do everything in our power to make this school safe".
I was active in the PTA (maybe the only dude; that same superintendent was dismissive of my wanting to be active in my son's education at the same time he welcomed the mother of a 'special' child who could call the state and light a fire under his ass to do so) and was very impressed with the teachers for one year, but the next year they seemed disorganized and the precipitating incident was when my son made a horribly violent doodle and the teacher wrote "Great!" with an underline on it. We didn't take him back the next day and kept him out for two years. We couldn't get him on a good reading program but we got him far above grade level on math with Kahn Academy. (As an adult circumstances got him interested in reading, now he's reading The Economist every week, books on chess openings, psych textbooks I loan him, etc.)
We never quite filled out the paperwork but two years later we slotted him into middle school where he was successful.
We are in an age where people who watch a youtube video think they know more than the experts. Being a good teacher is a skill and understanding childhood development is something that requires proper education. I'm not saying there is never a good reason to home-school your kid, but most people who do it are unqualified and from my limited experience the kids who are home schooled have huge holes in their education. Surprisingly, they do seem to be fine socially which is what you hear many people worry about.
What do you consider the "proper education"?
I'm so worried for those parents raising children outside of school without degrees in childhood development! Think of all the unqualified parenting time happening without skilled teachers to supervise!
Teachers are mostly very uneducated and ineffective at teaching itself and the subjects they teach. I don’t think spending time to get an education degree or certification means much. Parents care for their children more than any random teacher, especially ones that resist performance measurements to judge their effectiveness. I would expect the average parent to be FAR more effective just based on that care.
But good teachers can make a huge difference, it's a shame identifying them is a black art and so few people get that access.
I went to a rural public school, underfunded as they come, and my HS math teacher is still in the top 3 of all teachers / instructors I've had throughout my life. If my parents were to teach me math, I simply wouldn't be working in a STEM-field today.
The majority of my teachers were good. The dynamic was completely different compared to being around my parents.
Leave the teaching to the professionals.
As someone who once heard, in 11th grade pre-calculus, that pi is a rational number equal to 22/7, I cannot be so surprised that many parents would choose to homeschool their children. Most parents have no idea what is going on in their childrens' schools.
I feel like there should be a different word for those that "home school" their child by hiring a private teacher and they learn in the house. For me, homeschooling means one of the parents (often the mother) teaches the child(ren) in their home.
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.
Yeah, I was thinking the same thing. Who is physically doing the homeschooling? The rich tech people? Their spouses?
It sounds like what he is criticizing is just extra-private private schooling or something like that. As distinct from homeschooling by parents, which is the more… eclectic version the author grew up with.
Not sure about fashionable, but rather:
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 loved public school (class of 99). I still miss the style of learning. Can you imagine going deep on a topic for 50 minutes then switching? AP classes got double periods. I found it so refreshing and I learned a ton.
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.
the mandatory part of mandatory education is the very source that rots this society. what's happening in schools run by the "western enlightened democratic" powers that be is outrageous.
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.
I think as a professional in tech, it's frightening and obvious how behind schools are in keeping up with the modern world. I'm not talking about having ipads. AI will be he most significant technology humanity has experiences. We need to pivot toward an educational model that enhances creativity and cooperative communication but I just don't see that happening. It's still the bucket model of learn this don't ask questions, kids are a bucket and they need to be filled up by knowledge. It's outdated NOW, with absolutely no indication there will be significant changes.
Comment I was replying to was deleted so I will repost as a top level comment without additional context:
----
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.
Ain't no one gonna take this advice seriously on here. hn is the most NIMBY place on the internet especially when it comes to their own kids. MMW pearl clutching is imminent.
This "shouldn't" be surprising. Smart people seeing a wider perspective, seeing the limits of mass-schooling and top-down curricula, seeing other social challenges, and seeing a better option? I live in Seattle; there's a reason it's one of the top metros with per capita private school enrollment and if it weren't for tech incomes, I'd expect homeschooling and homeschooling collectives to thrive. Comments here about neurodiversity needs are also on point.
I live in the Seattle metro, and tomorrow morning is the first day of class for our homeschool co-op, where I'm teaching software engineering to high schoolers.
I think the author is simply wrong is their assumption. I'm pro-homeschooling, more or less fit the described profile and I don't see a slightest problem with my kid interacting with average people nor do I have contempt for them. The problem I see though is with putting the child into a non-voluntary community. Those tend to be toxic and prison-like.
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.
I turned out OK in public school, but I was held back at different points, particularly in math, because I (and a few others) were too far ahead of the other kids. We literally had to repeat an entire year of content at one point. Kudos to the teachers who enabled & fostered that, but shame on the school system for not continuing to support. I'm pretty sure one of my classmates gave up on academics at that moment (he never really excelled again like he used to).
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.
"Social awkwardness and anxiety Difficulty in forming IRL friendships Impatience with the idea of connecting on a meaningful level with other people: who needs ‘em? An abiding sense of detachment from reality"
I can tell you from personal experience, going to school doesn't prevent this.
Classrooms need to cater to lowest common denominator by necessity so can kinda see a desire to do this.
But not convinced it’s possible to emulate the social interaction part diy
School is the industrialization of childhood.
Help help I'm being repressed
civilization is the industrialization of society
Many reasons.
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.
The school system has long stopped being effective and is being replaced by better systems that are evolving spontaneously
Thanks for the interesting discussion. I think as parents we have many possibilities to teach values to our kids without homeschooling them. In my view they should learn how to integrate in average society no matter if it is a perfect public schooling system or not. When it comes to values, parents still have a lot space to guide them through live without having full control. As long as the public school system only bends and doesn't break them I think it is a good way to show them how average society works. If they decide not to be high-end tech people later on, it will be much easier for them to flow with the average masses.
I have no idea how common this, I hadn’t much of this trend among tech weirdos before this article.
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.
I try and homeschool my kid when they are home (from school). I say some of those things, but I also say, when we are fixing a clogged drain by disassembling the plumbing. "You could be a plumber, lots of hard problem solving and you are not afraid to get dirty". You can have high expectations that they live an actualized life w/o projecting your own life-arc desires on them.
If my kid turns out thoughtful, kind and a whole actualized person, then they are successful no matter what.
The problem with homeschooling is that rarely is someone so well rounded that they can supply the full spectrum of education that a child needs. Blackbody vs an RGB source emulating a full spectrum. We all have cognitive blindspots.
> The problem with homeschooling is that rarely is someone so well rounded that they can supply the full spectrum of education that a child needs. Blackbody vs an RGB source emulating a full spectrum. We all have cognitive blindspots.
While this is true, it's not like schools are teaching kids a full spectrum of knowledge either. In particular, a lot of practical skills are often not taught in modern schools - personal finance, cooking, basic home maintenance and construction ("shop class"), etc. How valuable some of this stuff is will depend on the child of course.
I agree with this, but IMO the more correct solution is to look for the gaps in learning from all sources and look to fill those instead of removing a massive chunk of education assuming one can do all of it better.
Well said. Heavy aside coming.
I think is another example of monotheistic cultures favoring linear narratives, rigid taxonomies and 1 to 1 causal chains. This is the world that we live, that we seek The Reason (singular) that something is the way it is. And if it isn't it the way we want, what ever is closer to the root of the taxonomy needs to get replaced.
My comment falls for the same reductionist trap it aims to expose.
I appreciate the try and the self-reflection my friend. To hope we can both appreciate truths we see in each other.
One important function that public school offers to society is protection for children. Teachers are mandatory reporters, and so are many school staff. Parents are not.
Well, I went through through the public school system from rural (hamlet) kindergarten till big city university and I say ... it's OK as a default baseline but if one wants some resemblance of competitiveness and performance from their kids, one cannot avoid private tutoring.
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.
Great point about private tutoring, I agree.
The equivalence tests are going to be country/US-state specific though. Many do not require such tests at all.
Schools where I live is a race to the bottom where the best pupils are limited by the worst. No wonder homeschooling is becoming fashionable.
I think a lot of home schooling is a culture war issue as well. A quick look at Libs of TikTok will show some of the teachers that some parents would like to avoid.
Do you think Tiktok reflect reality?
Then we need to ban social media altogether...
I think it reflects the reality that specific groupthink is both tolerated and encouraged in school while other groupthink is harshly penalised.
When the allowed groupthink in question only has support among a minority of the population you can't be too surprised when the rest try to avoid it.
These are actual videos that teachers have put on tiktok themselves. Some of it may be performative, but even the fact that they think putting something like that on tiktok is a good idea, speaks to their professional qualities.
It absolutely reflects reality in that school teachers are statistically way more liberal than the population average: https://www.pacificresearch.org/why-are-teachers-mostly-libe... .
One thing I've never understood with homeschooling: How come parents think they have the competence to be a teacher? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
> Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
This applies equally to paid teachers, along with numerous downsides that don't apply to parents (i.e. being able to tailor education to a single individual, developing a relationship that lasts close to two decades, ability to slow down and speed up course material where necessary, and more). Paid teachers, contrary to semi-popular mythology, are not special and don't do anything that an average person couldn't do (they are not extra-"competent"). In the natural course of being a parent you learn how to interact, guide, and teach your children.
This argument also fails in many concrete situations. For example, where I grew up there is a decent homeschooling community made up of people with average levels of education, low to average income, and yet the kids perform very well academically and are well socialized. Saying that these parents are not competent because didn't get a badge (education-related degree) is absurd considering they do as well as the people who did get that badge.
Great, I'm sure you'll have no problem using the services of a self-taught doctor, lawyer, or engineer then. After all, why would they need to be taught by a professional?
Go spend some time in a classroom and get a fucking clue how much more there is to teaching than what your layman's view entails. You, and this disrespect for our educators and the potential of what we could be offering in our public schools is why we are the laughing stock of the developed world.
Teaching twenty kids of wildly different levels is always going to be harder that teaching a single kid, so parents have a great advantage by default.
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.)
It is an objectively measurable fact (e.g. by test scores) that K-12 teaching, in the US, pays poorly, lacks prestige, and attracts far from the best and the brightest.
If you are blindly relying on certified professionals in soft fields such as general medicine and law you are in for a bad time.
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
I'm a former public school teacher -- maybe I can explain.
There's a lot of competence necessary to teach two dozen kids with different backgrounds and mastery levels, even in the rare moments when 2-4 of them aren't actively trying to derail the entire class.
The base level of competence necessary to go through a curriculum with one/a few of your own children is much, much lower. Could I do better with one/a few of your children given as much time and attention? Pretty definitely. Can I do better if your kid is in my classroom? In most cases, no.
Sure, there are things I could explain or guide a kid through because of my background and skills that homeschooling parents can't (though it mostly just takes more time and effort), but there's a huge amount they can do because of their relationship, access, and ability to devote time and attention that I couldn't hope to. And with modern homeschooling resources, tutors/group microschooling, online courses and group study, etc., the deficits have never been easier to overcome.
Also, two underdiscussed points: 1. An untrained, literate adult probably needs less than two hours to help a kid through what they'd learn in an eight-hour day at school. That time can go to other things. If they're productive, great. If they're not, no huge loss.
2. People significantly overestimate the level of care and competence average teachers have. You remember some fantastic ones. If fantastic and caring was the norm, you were quite lucky.
>Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
100%. But this also applies to people with degrees in education, teaching certs, and employment at your local school.
How do parents judge the ability of local teachers to be a good (pedagogical) teacher? If they discover a bad teacher, what is their recourse?
Agreed. Titles and credentials do not mean what they used to, in education and a lot of other fields.
Sufficient erosion in the meaning and value of 3rd party teaching credentials then diminishes the relative value of outsourcing the process vs. doing it in-house: literally.
We don't think we have the competence to be a teacher. We would never presume to teach someone else's kids.
We think we have a relationship with our own child that allows us to understand what they need and how to communicate with them in a way that works for them. We think we have the time (assuming one parent is full time parenting) to give our child the attention they need to excel. And we believe that a combination of relationship and individual attention goes further in K–12 than any amount of formal training in education.
You can do all that on top of a normal education.
If you do that, the normal education is redundant. You wouldn't put a university student in class to learn multiplication; it's an insulting waste of their time. Why would you do the same to a 10 year old who mastered it years ago?
Not really—public school takes up 6+ hours of every day, and I'd like my kids to have self-directed time as well. If we tried to do some sort of after-school tutoring with mom that would deprive them of valuable time to choose their own stuff to work on.
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.)
Not really. There are only so many hours in the day. The time between school and bedtime is extremely limited and involves other time consuming activities such as after school sports and eating dinner.
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
I teach my kids valuable lessons in the car, during dinner and on evening walks. But I’m not in a country that is starving their education system.
This is asinine.
Next time you're in the car, try teaching your kid about solving systems of equations where both are linear vs one is linear and the other is parabolic. It's a lot easier to sketch it out on scratch paper than to pontificate from the driver's seat.
Try talking about history, philosophy, literature, religion, sociology, or physics while driving. Audio books exist, after all.
that's not germane to this conversation. it's about parents without formal teaching certs working with their children to given them what they need to excel.
Sure those things (history/philosphy/etc) matter but in our society you still have to do well on math tests to do well in life.
As a parent you can teach them directly (homeschool) or augment a public school education, but the augmentation route needs to be done in slack time, which is tough.
The same logic applies to teachers, and can be applied against your own question.
As an example i once lost a mark on a math test because when rounding to the nearest whole number, i put 3.0 as the answer. Wrong. 3 is a whole number, 3.0 is not i was told, and threatened with suspension on protest. That kind of thing sticks with you.
I agree with your sentiment however, i just dont think its a powerful retort.
> As an example i once lost a mark on a math test because when rounding to the nearest whole number, i put 3.0 as the answer. Wrong. 3 is a whole number, 3.0 is not i was told, and threatened with suspension on protest. That kind of thing sticks with you.
I got threatened with suspension on protest once. It was about the meaning of a word, but still.
Luckily, I'm a university brat, so I just waited a couple days until my dad was keeping me at his office, then I wandered down the hall, and I asked some professors for a detailed and referenced way to push back. I brought candy and tums, because that's what professors want from children who can't bring beer.
About a week later, I went in with a 30 page computer printed essay. As a nine year old. It had six phone numbers in the back, four to PhDs, which could be called for further detail if needed. It was addressed to both the teacher and the principal.
An opening note was "please look into how Marilyn vos Savant was treated when she explained the Monty Hall problem, when considering whether teachers are permitted to threaten students for disagreeing politely. Are you really so afraid of being incorrect?," written by an internationally renowned mathematician.
I was carrying an etymological breakdown that to this day I can barely read, stretching all the way back to the hypothetical proto-indo-european roots.
Professors don't like kids being threatened.
I did not hear about that teacher doing that again while I was in that school.
Well, you were technically wrong. Which is wrong. var wholeNumber = 3.0; - what type will be assumed for that value?
The class is mathematics. In mathematics, numbers do not have types.
You also shouldn't try to mention INT_MAX, negative zero, rounding error, or other computer science topics which do not exist in mathematics.
Type theory comes from math. Numbers in math do in fact have types. Most of the time we ignore it but numbers in math have types. math also has the concept of max number rolling back to zero ogain something anyone who has studied types in math would know. Rounding error is studied in several different math fields.
negative zero isn't in any math I know of. It is only in obsolete computer science though.
>>> a = 3.0
>>> b = 3
>>> type(a) == type(b)
False
For example, 10 / 3 = 3.333... right? We're then asked to round to the nearest whole number, and the answer should be 10 / 3 = 3. It is not correct to then say 10 / 3 = 3.0, because that is just wrong.
I'd end up siding with the teacher on this one. Just acknowledge you didn't understand what they were looking for and do better next time.
As someone who (almost!) has a PhD in mathematics I'm going to have to call you out on this point. You are thinking like an engineer and talking about precision, but this is mathematics, not engineering. We make no distinction between the "real" number 3, the "complex" number 3, and the "whole" number 3. The number 3 lives in each of these universes as the same object (so to speak) because these sets (whole, real, complex) numbers are included in one another. Writing 3.0 is a representation for 3 just as 2.9999... is a representation of 3. Perhaps the bigger question we should be asking here is what was the purpose of all of this discussion? I've seen such petty treatment by teachers all the time and it always discouraged me from pursuing math until I met professors in university who actually tried to teach us something interesting and beautiful about math. This question could have led in that direction actually with a discussion of different kinds of numbers but unfortunately many math teachers in the US are not capable of this, or are too discouraged by the other craziness in schools to have the energy for such conversations.
> adding that .0 implies a precision which is not correct. 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.
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
It's incredible despite multiple additional individuals telling you that you're wrong you continue doubling down on it.
10 / 3 != 3.000000000000000000000000 no matter how many times you refute it. You should really learn to accept it and continue on and look deeper inside yourself into this. It's sad you still haven't learned this lesson from elementary education. Maybe they should have suspended you.
In no world does 10 / 3 = 3.0. This is just a falsehood as much as 2 + 2. = 5. I don't care about your large values of 2.
'10/3 = 3' is also false, and is something you put forward as true. Meanwhile, '10/3 ≈ 3' and '10/3 ≈ 3.0' are both equally true, as is '10/3 ≈ π' if you're in a pinch. Also true is that math is full of conventions, and it makes sense to use the conventions you feel are appropriate for what you're doing. Sometimes that might be significant figures, which I suppose you're alluding to. Other times, it might be propagation of uncertainty. Other times error tracking is not even relevant; you might just round the thing but also want to have all of your expressions be of the same type. For that matter, you may have 3: ℝ = 3.0: ℝ by definition. The other poster never gave any indication of whether or why some particular convention should apply.
Teachers not having the time to muse about such ideas and instead needing to package everything into a presentation appropriate for an entire room full of children is one of the more obvious failure modes of industrialized education.
"Whole number" means that the mantissa is 0, and is not related to what some random programming language asserts in its representational type system.
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.
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> 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.
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> 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.
> Can you show any math reference that supports this viewpoint? This goes against my college mathematics training.
> The word integer comes from the Latin integer meaning "whole" or (literally) "untouched", from in ("not") plus tangere ("to touch"). "Entire" derives from the same origin via the French word entier, which means both entire and integer.[9] Historically the term was used for a number that was a multiple of 1,[10][11] or to the whole part of a mixed number.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Integer
The question was to understand the idea of a "whole number" aka an integer.
It's very clear you're out of your element on this, and you have multiple people with an actual math background telling you the objection is somewhere between meaningless and wrong.
The takeaway from trying to really nail down a definition of "integers" (or anything, really) is going to be something along the lines of "if it quacks like a duck up to unique isomorphism, it's a duck". The encoding is not important and one frequently swaps among encodings when convenient. In any case, no one who knows any math is going to say to a child that 3 and 3.0 aren't interchangable outside of some extremely specific contexts. In fact that's not even encoding: it's notation. They can be literally equal, not just equivalent. Those particular contexts aren't ordained, and e.g. propagation of uncertainty is "better" than significant figures if you're doing engineering anyway.
Writing something like '10/3=3' is likely to trigger the mathematicians because lots of people get confused about what '=' is supposed to mean (and often use it to mean something like "next step indicator"). '3=3.0' not so much.
> outside of some extremely specific contexts.
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.
I was homeschooled from 2nd - 8th grade. My elementary school was trying to put my brother on adderall and my class had sorted me into the "blue" group of readers (colors of the rainbow for reading ability). I apparently came home talking about how I was slow and it was okay because we all learn at our own pace.
Definitely not a great school! both my brother and I ended up going to college and getting engineering degrees, and had zero issues with academics in high school. My mom did a pretty okay job but it was absolute hell on her, I entered high school ahead on mathematics/history but pretty behind on writing and science. The science I dont blame my mom for, all the curriculum at the time was insanely religious, so the ones we could find were very dry.
Depends on the parents because a lot of them are more than qualified. The typical education major isn't exactly a scholar, but that is also true of most people.
That's like half your job as a parent: teaching your kids stuff ( the other half being: keeping them alive). You are THE most qualified person on the planet to teach your own kids anything.
Well, maybe not best, but it's also not something I would advocate for taking away from parents. It's silly to pretend parents need a degree to teach their kids something when teaching their kids how to live life is half of the job.
This is exactly why I dislike the push to erode parental rights or attack homeschooling, which is happening in many blue states. Parents know best, not a civil worker (teachers) or bureaucrat or the “state”.
Alas, not every parent is well educated.
I had numerous teachers that won local and regional teacher of the year awards that were, too put it bluntly, terrible at teaching. The actual pedagogical education that teachers receive is not good, and when you look at the rigor in their degree programs it would be found extremely wanting compared to just about any hard science degree program. There are numerous examples of pedagogical research being neglected to be included in programs for dogmatic reasons, and the usage of such methods like whole word reading over phonics would indicate large scale failure.
Anecdotally, if I were to stack rank my education in k-12 based on quality of teacher, it would essentially be all professors followed by k-12 teachers, with those receiving more teacher instruction being lower on the list. I was once instructed by a history teacher, to not use examples on a history essay that we didn't learn in class, because she had to look them up.
I find it incredibly easy to believe that I can teach my children better than the average teacher.
The USA hasn’t had a healthy education system for decades, so parents who have gone through that system are a) not very well educated and b) think they can do better.
I'm generally not a fan of home schooling in a lot of cases, part of what school does is expose you to a vertical slice of humanity, and you will almost certainly be dealing with that for the rest of your life.
HOWEVER... remember that "home schooled" doesn't mean "as a parent you are the only teacher" right? You can hire tutors, you can form teaching groups with other parents, you can use online resources, etc. If done WELL and with a sense of one's own limitations, and the need to socialize your child, homeschooling can work.
It's just unfortunate that so often homeschooling is used as a way to ensure that no outside influences interrupt a parent's particular brand of ideological indoctrination... although in the narrow case of tech parents, I suspect that's less of a driving force.
> part of what school does is expose you to a vertical slice of humanity
I love that phrasing! I think I'm going to use it – thank you.
One thing I've never understood with public schooling: How come teachers think they have the competence to be in loco parentis? Just because you are educated doesn't mean you are a good (pedagogical) educator.
> How come teachers think they have the competence to be in loco parentis?
Multiple members of my wife's family are teachers in the local public school system. From what they have told me: they don't want to be in that place. Parents demand it of them, despite their strong attempts to push back and say "hey this one is your job as the parent to solve". So that's the reason in at least some cases, although probably not all.
Here in this country it's not teachers that assess their own compentence to be educators, it's their mentors that guide and grade them through a university Bachelor of Education Course and their first year trials of "live" teaching in the wild.
Educators are trained to teach any kid effectively. Parents have the much easier problem of teaching a handful of specific kids, who they've spent their entire lives with and share half their DNA.
The average public school teacher is somewhere in the average top 40-30% in intelligence/academic achievement. Anyone who's a top performer academically is going to be much more competent than the average public school teacher.
We haven't really decided what we're going to do with our kids. I personally think I'd enjoy homeschooling them, but I don't know what their preferences will be. Their mom would appreciate the break. That said,
1. Teachers develop skills in managing rooms of ~30 kids. I believe this is completely different from tutoring someone 1:1 and likely has very little overlap.
2. Part of my day job is already mentoring/teaching. I enjoy that part of my work. I've received feedback that I'm good at it. Actually when I was younger I thought I'd switch into teaching after building up some savings with programming. I've since heard/read enough about the realities of being a teacher that I can't imagine doing that job (especially with public school). Homeschooling or teaching a homeschool pod seems like the best way to actually be able to teach if that's your inclination.
3. The k-12 curriculum is not really much to cover. Schools move at a pace appropriate for the slower kids in the room. It doesn't seem like a high bar to beat, and most of what I've found looking into it indicates that homeschool parents generally do outperform schools with a fraction of the time spent.
3a. I've already been teaching my 3 year old phonics and reading when she's in the mood. She doesn't really have the attention to sit and focus for more than ~5 minutes, but that's okay, and it's still going alright. I expect she'll already be years ahead of the school curriculum before it's even time to start. So initial results have been promising and suggest I am indeed capable of teaching a child.
4. When it comes to more advanced/in-depth understanding, I don't expect teachers to have the background. Like just looking at the math education program at my alma mater, there's no requirement for real analysis or algebra. There's no requirement for science courses (physics, chemistry, etc.). All of the options in the math department except education require at least a minor in another STEM subject. It's no surprise that a common trope is that teachers (particularly math) don't know how to answer how something gets used in the real world, but that's insane to me as a status quo. There are tons of applications of pretty much any math you might learn before graduate level in pretty much any field you examine (conic sections stand out to me as a niche thing that we covered in high school. Not that they don't have applications to e.g. orbits, but they don't seem to apply to other fields, and I don't believe the connection to physics was made in my high school class anyway (presumably because math teachers where I grew up aren't required to learn physics)).
Honestly I think school is mostly more useful for socializing and something like arts/crafts that entail mess and require a bunch of energy to do at home, especially before high school/AP classes. The academic part seems trivial. Once you've reached that conclusion, it makes sense to ask whether there are alternatives that are better suited/are more aware of and aligned to their purpose as enrichment.
Good points. Your last paragraph suggests we really need a drastic rethink of how education works and where funding goes. Right now a one size fits all solution with no competition is what gets funded.
When I was in school for my master's degree some years ago, several of my classes were heavily populated by teachers (New York State requires teachers to have or get a master's degree within 5 years of being certified). All were humanities teachers (English, Social Studies, ect - no STEM). At least half of them had great difficulty simply writing a one page essay. With one or two exceptions, reading comprehension was absolutely abysmal. At least two of them were functionally illiterate (in a master's program!). All were certified teachers who were actively working in schools.
The fact is that in many places school standards have been so low and social promotion has been going on for so long that we now have people coming out of high school and college that have never achieved anything academically. Many of these people go into teaching (even when schools were academically rigorous, majoring in education was always regarded as one of the least challenging areas of study).
That isn't to say that there aren't good teachers, or that there aren't smart teachers - there certainly are. It is to say that having an education degree or a teacher's certificate does not mean that one is qualified to do anything.
Does this mean every parent is smart enough or cut out to properly home school their child? Of course not! What it means is that (many) schools have effectively failed as institutions and until they are improved many people are going to look for alternatives.
> It is to say that having an education degree or a teacher's certificate does not mean that one is qualified to do anything.
It absolutely does in Finland. It absolutely carried meaning when I was educated in my (non Finnish, non US) country.
What is revealed here is that a New York State teachers certificate doesn't mean much.
Hundred percent. They vastly underestimate teaching in the same way that people resorting to homeopaths for serious illnesses underestimates the training and knowledge doctors go through.
My 9 y/o getting shot at school isnt something I want on my risk register.
You might want to calculate the probabilities on that. The majority of kids are shot in or around their home, not school.
that's the primary reason you homeschool? isn't there easier ways to manage this particular risk?
Suggest some?
> Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable?
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.
* smart tech folks who value education not seeing education value in local schools * chronically underfunded public schools based on local property taxes, fewer programs, etc. * good private schools aren't cheap * political axes to grind esp. by the right to defund the Dept. of Education, and create curriculums that don't sell well (e.g. bibles in school, pro-oil & gas slants, etc.)
I don't have kids, but if I did, there's not a snowball's chance in hell I'd let a state educate them, with the possible exception of the Nordic countries.
Because the education system is garbage;
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.
I’m not sure why it is becoming fashionable, but the reality of parents homeschooling children, who are functionally illiterate and never finished high school, is a recipe for disaster.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LXhsutNKhec
Following is recent video of my homeschooled son that this community might appreciate. It gives an opportunity to tailor education and challenge kids potential.
Somewhat tangential, but a big part of math proficiency is varied repetition (eg, Kumon's practice sheets where you repeat the same operation with different numbers) and you can almost just make these yourself now.
Answer to question: because public schooling is becoming a place of indoctrination/brainwashing (particularly of woke mentality), rather than a place of learning. This is very apparent in America, but even happens in outside places like England - kids as young as 7 are being taught and groomed with unnecessary sex and sexual ideas, when that age is meant for innocent play and exploration.
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.
I have been looking at homeschooling because of the 2 Sigma Problem.
But a lot of the resources to help people homeschooling are weird christian nonsense.
No one seems to have mentioned AI/LLMs yet. Between Khan Academy, Wikipedia, and LLMs, if your child has curiosity, the resources to tutor have never been better.
LLMs hallucinate and often provide incorrect answers. They're a fabulous tool if you're not necessarily looking a specific, correct, answer. But I'm not sure I would want my kids to use them as a tutor, without someone to vet the output.
That's a very good concern to have. Grounding[0] helps a lot with this and will continue to improve. I'll also add that I've had human teachers who were confidently wrong about things.
[0] https://deepmind.google/discover/blog/facts-grounding-a-new-...
Those are sources, and while curiosity is great most kids are focused on specific things not everything. Kids need direction and somebody them to focus on things they dont want to learn- like a kid who loves animals isnt going to learn math or how to write well, and a kid whos interested in history might not care at all about science.
Parents are no better at this unless they are incredible focused on utilizing a curriculum and addressing their own issues along the way- And even then, learning with other kids is incredibly helpful. Talking to a computer is not a replacement for a teacher (yet).
> Talking to a computer is not a replacement for a teacher (yet).
I agree. The limitless patience and non-judgement of a computer is very valuable in a learning context. LLMs won't be better than the best private tutors, but its very likely they'll be better than 80% of junior high through college teachers.
We get weekly summaries of our childrens curriculum from the school. I run it through chatgpt and get quality weekly study guides for reinforcement at home, its awesome.
interesting take. Heard of Synthesis? (hint: DARPA funded).
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?
It's difficult to understand the hostility some people have toward homeschooling. Even if someone doesn't care for it, it is bizarre to insist on others not doing it (in some cases, governments insist so much that it is illegal to homeschool). Of course, parents are the primary educators of the their own children. They may delegate that responsibility to others for certain subjects, domains, or scope, but the authority rests with them. The decision of how to educate is also a prudential one. For the rest of this post, I will use "education" in the narrower sense of what would fall within the scope of the school.
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).
Because public education has become a vector for propaganda.
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.
I don't think I've ever heard "big powerful unions" and "teachers" in the same sentence before.
The NEA is the largest union in the United States.
Mostly religious fanaticism.
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.
It's becoming fashionable outside the US as well. And the core reason is that public schools deteriorate.
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.
Because no one’s ever heard of a
“Home-school Shooting”
Probably correlates with remote work.
Another thought is the rise in school shootings.
Homeschooling is fashionable because public schools are terrible, and private schools are expensive.
No tech bro theories of exceptionalism and "anti-mediocrity" necessary.
Occam would be proud.
They watched Aella interviewed by Friedman?
My school district in south WA is a representative example. Outcomes in math & English have been poor and continue declining. Attendance has dropped by > 30% despite mild population growth. Cost / student are among the highest, and due to the lacking attendance, deficits have led to staff cuts, leading to worsening outcomes. A death spiral.
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.
The headline is somewhat begging the question, but the author's key observation is on point: People homeschooling their kids are implicitly, and sometimes explicitly, going for "opt out of being around average people".
Increasing the quantity and quality of good influences on your children is just good parenting.
If I know there's a kid down the street who seems like he will grow up to be a criminal, and another kid who seems like he'll grow up to be a kind, hard-working, well adjusted person, there is a 100% guarantee I will encourage my kids to play with the second kid, not the first.
The poster above references the 'average person'. Do you think that the average person is not going to be a good influence?
Average person _where_?
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.
Depends if your kid is above or below average.
I found this explanation extremely unsatisfying considering that you could make the same choice and put your child into private education if you're a successful tech person.
I know families that homeschool and I like to read articles like this one to see if anyone "gets it." So far, no hits.
They're opting out of mediocre instruction and government-mandated values enforcement ("DEI" in its public school curricula form); the other kids are irrelevant. The homeschoolers I know are average and have lots of social activities with average peers in their community.
If you look around and see "government-mandated values enforcement ("DEI" in its public school curricula form)", I already fear for your children, whether you home school them or not.
You fear for other people's kids.. over politics?
Homeschooling doesn't scale, this is why it's not a solution for everyone. I can't see a fundamental drawback to it, like there are none in say, private jets: only problem is that neither can be applied to any sizeable minority, let alone not to the majority, of people. But if you can do it, do it.
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).
Homeschooling is becoming fashionable because school systems have become shittier... Teachers are unable to discipline kids, there's zero consequences for kids who are disruptive, instead of failing kids school systems are dumbing down the curriculum, there's also massive institutional biases...
Plus it's more or less a golden age for homeschooling: there's more resources available than ever.
Anecdotally, those around me that are homeschooling are doing it for one of two reasons:
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.
> 2) Fear of school shootings.
I would add:
3) Fear of fear of school shootings.
The active shooter drills and other security measures that American kids go through in some schools are positively dystopian. Even if the chances of a school shooting are statistically very low, the measures put in place to prevent them are probably not good for kids' psychological well being.
Honestly a school shooting drill was probably near the bottom of the causes of psychological problems when I was in school.
I have some friends who are Christian but left wing (their kids would come over to play and draw pictures about helping poor people.) The dad teaches CS at a small Catholic college, mom stayed home and educated their kids.
The "disgust over woke issues" existed in some form 30 years ago when people were homeschooling but it had not hardened into the constellation it is in now. Back then you could get folks like that to talk articulately about how they disagreed with secular values, introduce a word like "woke" and now people talk past each other, at best, if they talk at all.
I miss the days when young earth fundamentalist Christianity tinged with racism was my most compelling ideological opponent.
Most of the people I know that homeschool their kids do it because they don’t want their kids to get vaccines that schools require them to have.
At least in the US the education system is so incredibly bad for anyone reasonably intelligent where homeschooling is an option it should be the clear preference. At least until high school.
>Pro-homeschooling: At school, you’re in danger of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.
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.
wtf is going on here? This is one of the most toxic comment sections I've ever seen. Do people really think this way?
The moment I read the title I knew exactly how the comment section was going to look like. I was not disappointed.
I wonder if typical HNers ever get aware of what a spectacle they make of themselves and their self-important narcissistic tomfoolery.
/Captain Hypocrisy enters the chat
Since most schools are designed to craft meat-based robots, like https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/2020/08/i-was-usef... those who try to be humans try to give their progeny a human future...
big right wing swing for tech?
Alvin Toffler called it back in the 70s (in Future Shock); in there, he thought educated elites would move towards homeschooling, nothing political on his analysis at least (that may match current trend?)
There's nothing inherently right-wing about homeschooling. You could just as easily homeschool as left-wing parents who don't want your kids immersed in an environment where other kids judge them by what brands they're wearing, and where the teachers all subscribe to the capitalist view of how society should function.
It's true that homeschooling has been more prevalent among the right wing, but there are lots of people who do it for lots of reasons. We did it when our local elementary school was bottom third in the state. My wife called up the vice principal, and asked why we should put our kids in their school. He said that their school could toughen up our kids. We decided that "tough" wasn't our main goal for our daughters, and we noped out of that school.
Because I want my kids to succeed in reading, history, math, and science, and schools instead give them iPads and teach them <rest of answer self-censored in self-preservation, but you know exactly what goes here>
The USA is going backwards in many, many areas and is no longer in the top of any important indices so this fits the bill.
Public school education is a shit show in many western countries. I'm not in the USA but all the talk about private schools and lotteries is very real. The only thing we don't have is charter schools leaching public funds.
The USA is ranked below most other western public school systems so I don’t think you can conclude “the US are doing bad because all western countries are”. It’s just a matter of priorities and the US prioritizes defense over education.
Are those education metrics even measuring the correct things? Many other countries have higher scores of educational achievement, and yet on average we ignorant Americans go on to be more productive and more innovative than any other major developed country. Just to pick one example, the USA develops about 80% of the new prescription drugs every year. Does it really matter if we can't integrate a function or remember when the Civil War started?
American exceptionalism is one hell of a drug, I think this denial is one of the reasons why you are impotent to fixing any one of your numerous glaring issues like education, health care, housing, infrastructure, etc.
Wasn't there a time in the 70s/80s when the USA prioritized education and STEM specifically for the MIC and the cold war?