My brother and I were homeschooled, but it was quite structured and we wrote the same provincial exams as every other grade 12 kid. My brother did the SAT as well. We had excellent scores. We both dropped out of college with near perfect GPAs. Today I'm a successful self-taught software engineer now starting a SaaS business. My brother is a famous sci fi author. He makes even more than I do. I think homeschooling let us learn whatever we wanted to learn without fear, and find our own path in life. Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places. So socially we had a lot to learn. I don't think that was a permanent disadvantage, but it was not a necessary drawback of homeschooling. I would recommend sports and other after school activities to add the social dimension into homeschooling.
This might work for outliers/higher IQ/elite people in the HN community, but consider this:
1. School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule.
2. Not everyone is self-motivated to learn. Children, at critical developmental ages, are more prone to be led astray than "follow their passions" (at this age, really?). They will more likely be manipulated by vices if not constantly monitored. Note: Even adults struggle to find their "passion", good for the lucky few.
3. Not all parents are good teachers. Usually, responsible families understand the value proposition- they wish their children have a better future- and education is the most assured/common ticket that provides these opportunities.
4. School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen. An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism. Ex: Nazi Germany and Mao's China burned books and persecuted the educated (1984 style).
Public schools, with all its flaws, are the best instruments to free the masses.
Knowledge is democratized power to avoid the corruption that absolute power entails.
Fascinating. Do you think things would've turned out differently for you and your brother had you attended public school? Private?
I went to a truly terrible rural public school and I see many areas where that has held me back. Success was something to be ashamed of there. Loserthink was king.
We do the same. Our homeschool community is rather large and we have sports (you name it we probably do it). We even compete with other public schools.
Were you home schooled by your mother or your father? And whoever was home schooling you, were they working either part time or full time? I am interested in homeschooling as well.
I wanted this, I essentially begged for it for 12 years with no success. I didn't need any extra motivation to read or do math problems and I was way above my grade level in both, but had behavioral problems because I was so bored in school. I still ended up with very high SAT and ACT scores too, but eventually broke down toward the end of college and graduated on time but with a few bad grades. My parents would have lost their minds if I had dropped out during any of the first three years when I also had an A-average GPA.
The public schools I went to all had a gifted program in various forms, which most years was just one hour a week and taught topics that should have been available to every student in the school. Amazingly, the teacher showed us the structure of a URL in around 1994 when I was in first grade.
> it was quite structured and we wrote the same provincial exams as every other grade 12 kid
This has been touched upon elsewhere by other commenters. But to at least ask you personally, would you concede that if you were doing well on tests despite the absence of the kind of cramming / teaching-to-the-test that the average schooled student receives, you could have done any kind of education, and in many ways, there is nothing special at all about homeschooling? Or that if your structure re-enacts this teaching, but it's a lot less time than the average student, you definitely have a natural aptitude for test taking?
Are tests the only way we can robustly evaluate a kid's education, until they are 18? If so, will sports matter if you're getting bad test scores? What does?
Here's the crazier conclusion. That people finger parental income or cultural values as the biggest factors of education outcomes, and in reality test performance is mostly genetic. It might as well be, from a policy perspective, randomly assigned - God rolls a 100 sided dice when you're born, and if it's a 1 or a 2 all standardized tests are easy for you. If you roll the other 98 numbers, the best thing is to cram.
We don't need alternatives to traditional schooling. We need a way of evaluating kids that rewards genuine learning. Kids who are learning should be scoring poorly sometimes, and that's the exact opposite of how children are evaluated, and poor scores are the exact opposite of what most parents of high achievers want.
Earnest parents are really seeking true learning. On the flip side, parents who send their kids to cram school or kvetch about college admissions not being fair because colleges consider factors other than totally and utterly gameable, zero-learning standardized tests - they are the antagonists. They are ruining our education system, they make school look the way it does, they are seeking a completely worthless advantage for their children (high test scores in the absence of valuable learning via cram school) for some cynically, utterly selfish devotion to values like making money and buying expensive things. Values so primitive and debasing that human cultures around the world have refined, multi-thousand-year-old refutations of materialism - opposition to materialism (asceticism) may be the most mature philosophy of all of history, at least as dominant as family values and theism. And then, to rationalize all of this, they find the least privileged and disadvantaged families and blame them instead! All the while pretending that there's some sort of equivalence of shittiness in their situations, because of some fucking number like income, between their families and the Other. It's complete and total bullshit.
Some changes to the school system can help everyone live happier lives and learn more, like different children spending longer (or shorter) times in class.
But really, we have to throw out tests. Or invent a test so sophisticated that it avoids being gamed by cramming.
If it's the same author I found based on a cursory search from your profile, then "famous" is a bit of a stretch.
> Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places
I got a similar feeling reading about Chris Paolini. Homeschooled, raised in a remote place. Fed a lot of his early life experiences, particularly travel, into his novels but felt alienated from other kids.
I was homeschooled until the age of around 10, and then my family adopted a new approach called "lifestyle of learning", which is just another way of saying "unschooling".
Basically, I was allowed to skip schoolwork, as long as I was doing something productive.
I hated schoolwork, so I started spending all my spare time tinkering with stuff on the computer. I wasn't allowed to play video games (since they aren't productive), but I was allowed to BUILD video games. I was also allowed to build web sites and do programming.
By the age of 13, I was doing contract web development work, and by the age of 16, I was employed full time at a local web development company.
My parents wouldn't let me get a drivers license and car until I had at least passed the GED, so I spent a couple of months cramming for it by studying a 2 inch thick book about how to pass the GED. I passed it without too much trouble (I think I got a 98% in math, if I remember correctly).
My career has developed across multiple companies over the last 20 years, and I'm currently making around $150K a year as a software engineer. I never did go to college.
They took "unschooling" even further with my younger brother. He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10. He ended up having to cram for his GED to get a drivers license, too. He ultimately ended up getting a job as a waiter, then as bank teller, then put himself through college and got a degree. He now owns a house worth around $400K and has a career as a software engineer at the banking company that initially hired him as a teller.
TL;DR: "Unschooling" worked for my family because they combined it with at least a base of traditional education.
I can see homeschooling being potentially more interesting/engaging for a certain kind of student after the basics are out of the way, but this:
> He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10.
to me, is fucking terrifying.
All of the people I know who did better on their own than in a classroom were able to do so because they could gobble up half a library in a weekend. I think you need to be able to read abnormally well for this unschooling concept to work as intended, and so good reading skills is one of the few things that I absolutely would not compromise on.
Note that missing from your assessment here is an honest analysis of the alternative. I.e. where would you and your brother have ended up if you had stayed in school and gone the traditional college path? You say you're making $150k now as a software engineer, but there's a damn good chance if you had stayed in school and gotten a CS degree in college you would be making a lot more than that now (and earlier in your career as well).
As others have mentioned, you also have to consider how few career paths offer the kind of "no formal training" entry bar that programming does. What if your brother had hated computers and realized at age 22 that he wanted to be a doctor? He'd be years behind his peers.
I've noticed this with my son who has an ADHD diagnosis. Pre-covid I constantly heard from school, that he was not paying attention, getting distracted. But since Covid, his output has been phenomenal - his reading/math has improved, he does really well one on one, we have a nanny working with him,. And I've never seen him happier.
I know homeschool would benefit him immensely in the long run from an intellectual standpoint, but am afraid that he will miss out on all the social aspects.
It sounds like you and your brother are highly intelligent and maybe didn't really need school to absorb the stuff you needed. I wonder how that approach would work with a more average child.
What about careers other than software development though? I'm definitely not criticizing your choices at all, but its interesting to me that both your brother and yourself ended up doing software development.
Do you feel you would have a different option of "unschooling" if you had tried to be successful in a different career path?
I'd say for most students, the vast majority of time they spend in school, they're not learning anything. The content of curriculums are usually quite short and can be crammed in a few weeks by a dedicated and intelligent enough student. For students that need more time, they often disengage anyway and all the time in the world won't help them learn using the same techniques.
I used to be a math teacher, and when a student failed the final exam, I'd spend a few hours one on one, then they could take another exam. The students that pissed around all term and bombed the first attempt often quickly picked up most of it in the 1-1 sessions and passed the 2nd attempt. I jokingly suggested to my boss that maybe we should scrap classes and just divide up my hours on 1-1 sessions with every student for greater efficiency.
This sounds almost identical to how I was raised, even down to the age of transitioning between the two styles, and I was doing contract web development work by 13, too, before cramming for the GED and ranking 99th percentile in science. I'm now working in AI with a startup of my own.
I honestly can't say I've ever met (or even heard about) anyone with such a similar story -- care to chat sometime?
That's impressive, and sounds like what I was thinking for my future children.
I just have no idea where to start. Got any resources for me to learn how to do these things for my children?
Assuming you a male, along with your brother, looking at IQ graphs there would be equivalent males on the dumb side, who arguably would be in prison right now if they did what you did.
Also without you at a normal school some students might be worse off. Not your problem of course, but it is at a societal level.
I'm not sure what you're describing by "a base of traditional education", because my definition would include learning to read pretty early. Do you mean taking the GED?
I was homeschooled with my brother up until high school, and it was a mixed experience for me. Academically both myself and my brother were far, far above our peers in public school. The main difference was that especially with math, we had understanding of the material rather than just knowledge. Our parents flipped houses a lot so we'd often have to use our math skills regularly when helping out. How much area is a deck that's 15'x40' with a curved section at the end that has a 7.5' radius? Applied geometry was reinforced heavily. In addition we were able to do more community activities, which boosted our ability to talk with people older than us.
The disadvantage however was in our ability to socialize with our peers. The trope of homeschooled kids being weird is 100% true, and is a factor of a lack of a peer group to test social norms with. When you have an insular network your set of social norms only evolves around what's acceptable within your family. I personally struggled a lot with socializing and I wasn't really able to properly integrate until I was ~25 or so.
I disagree with Amanda's statement that you have to have faith in a child's wonder to facilitate their development. I would say the onus is on the parents to provide things to wonder about. This is a hard task, one that my mother worked endlessly on. It was a 50 hour a week job for her to educate us. Even with that though there are still the social downsides. For parents that are considering it, I would still recommend it, but know that you're taking on a significant responsibility and that you'll need to find after school programs for your kids to have a chance to socialize with other kids their age. This can be hard to find, especially in earlier years.
Learning of (keyword of) concepts and ideas is fun but the reason schools exist is because most learning is a grind. Learning to draw well, learning a language, learning an instrument, and even learning math and logic require going through the grind of learning and repetition.
The grind is only harder if you don't have a good book or teacher because the practice you do could potentially be actively harmful (or useless).
Exploring is fun for children and adults. Being exposed to new things is always interesting. The grind is the hard part.
I think the question is how much of the grind is necessary. When our oldest kids were very little, we would work on the alphabet and numbers and track milestones carefully. At some point we realized that we could either grind hard at stuff they just didn't quite get, or we could wait a few months until they were older and just tell them stuff and they'd remember it. And obviously it wasn't quite that easy, but it felt kind of like magic at the time. When the kids were ready to learn, they just did, no grinding required.
Naturally, something like playing a musical instrument requires grinding (though it's not grinding if you like it!). But I think other than like, the times tables or the periodic table, there's almost nothing in school that inherently requires a grind. It just feels like a grind, because school is often unpleasant.
I think an average, literate adult could learn basically the entire American K-12 history curriculum in a few months of reading. Most of what passes for history in elementary school could be compressed into... what, a hundred pages, maybe? And high school is another thousand pages.
I think math is the same way. It's a 10 year grind to teach reluctant kids what could be taught to an eager adult in a few months.
I think we'd do much better to try to create eager adults, which I think unschooling is really well-suited to.
It's only a 'grind' if you don't enjoy the process though, right? If you're getting good at doing something you love because you love doing it so much, I don't think 'grind' is a word you'd use to describe that time consuming process.
I think 'grind' is caused by a disconnect between what the learner is being made to do and what they want to do. Grind can therefore be reduced by providing people with the opportunity to study things that interest them, for instance by offering a broader range of educational 'tracks', or by reformulating lesson plans to make the material more interesting (explaining the real world applications or consequences of the subject matter.)
I'm of the opinion that while it's a necessary part of learning to repeat exercises to advance your skillset, school is much too focused on this element of learning, and in doing so to an unnecessarily rote extent (I suspect because it's the easiest way to try to get it done).
The problem is that this mishandling gives people a bad taste for associated activities, especially STEM subjects, and it's rare for people to subject themselves to what seems like an incredibly boring process when they're not being forced to. As such, most of the competency they may have been forced to gain is lost, along with potential passion.
Even repeating exercises can be fun when you understand the motivation behind it. For example, if you have a real passion for understanding Newtonian physics, the parts of calculus that might be 'rote' when unmotivated and part of a purely rote process can become some of the most enjoyable.
I think the best way to think about grind, is to imagine "time spent grinding" as a scarce resource.
Your kid only has a very limited amount of it to spend; trying to make them grind more than that amount will be absolutely counter-productive and reduce grind "efficiency" to zero.
Which is exactly what schools do: they try to cram as much working, studying and focusing in a kid's daily life as they can, long past the point of diminishing returns; because they assume that a kid's attention is infinitely extensible, and they do very little to actually get their interest.
When you can order a kid to get into a room at set times and to look at a set piece of text and to listen to a single person for arbitrary amounts of times, there's very little to stop you from making every single day a grind a calling it a job well done.
The main benefit of homeschooling is that, if a kid isn't engaged by the teaching materials, you can see it immediately because they'll say so and ask to do something else.
I think one of the things the pandemic exposed is how much time is wasted in class for discipline and "class management". Really, without it the quiet kids can pretty much get the regular curriculum in half the normal time.
I am sure unschooling works out well for some people. I appreciate giving students some flexibility, but I think there really is a standard core that most people should learn.
I went to a good engineering school for college, but they also require everyone to take 3 years of history, 3 years of english, 2 semesters of a foreign language, a psychology course, ...
If it was left up to me I would not have taken most of those classes, and I suffered through many of them, but I think they were an important part of my education, and I am glad I came out of school knowing more than the engineering that I would have picked for myself.
My impression has always been that "unschooling" is mostly an indicator of wealth, and so it'll correlate well with future success.
If both parents have to work a regular day job, there's nobody at home to teach the kids so unschooling is not possible. And if only one parent stays at home, they will also yearn for some free time and push for getting the kids signed up for school.
The only situation where I can imagine the parents being enthusiastic about unschooling is if they are independently wealthy and can afford to spend lots of time with their kids, when other people would have to work. And obviously, plenty of personalized attention from the parents will make the kids learn a lot faster than your typical 1 teacher 30 students class.
Plus, once you assume that all unschooling parents are much wealthier than regular people, it kind of makes sense that they will have very different opinions about life in general, due to their very different experience of it. Regular folks will go to a public playground and complain about the dog shit there. Rich folks will just buy a playground for their backyard and hire a gardener to keep it tidy.
To outsiders, that wealth discrepancy would then look like a religion, because all of the unschoolers have a shared untypical worldview.
A lot of first hand experiences here have to be understood as survivorship bias. It's unlikely that "unsuccessful" unschoolers would wind up here.
I don't have a strong opinion either way but I was raised with a strong basic well rounded education and personally I feel it helped me. One thing that should be emphasized is that the material should be challenging enough as having it too easy leads to bad work habits.
I was homeschooled 1-5, private 6-8, public 9, homeschooled again 10-12.
A couple observations:
- homeschooling is efficient. I only needed a few hours per day of school.
- homeschooling is a religion for some people (who end up in articles) but there are lots of cool people.
- “homeschooling” is often way less “sitting at home with mother learning math” than people think. We took tons of trips, did cooperative school, took college classes. It’s funny to joke about never leaving the house, but most homeschool kids manage to be quite social.
- because it’s unusual, it succeeds with the right kid-parent relationship. My sister and mom made each other miserable and it didn’t work. There are lots of kids for whom homeschooling would be problematic.
I was "unschooled" for some years. I was near the top of my class at school (not because I was smart, just because I paid attention and worked hard), and hence my teachers gave up on me. Expending time on a kid who is likely to get A's without intervention does nothing to improve the school's metrics/ranking.
I would have been fine in a good private school but my parents weren't rich and couldn't afford the fees. Somehow I convinced my parents to let me educate myself, and at least for me it was successful. I finally had time to teach myself programming, which at the time was not taught in school.
Would I recommend it to others? Kids should try school first and see if they benefit from it. Some kids love school and do very well out of the system. However, if school is failing your kid, they might be better off without it.
I attended brick and mortar schools until 8th grade and then basically did zero actual school work because I was too busy starting my own business among other activities I found interesting. I eventually crammed for about 2 weeks to get my high school diploma at my mother's request, then I moved to Sweden for a while (on my own, as a teenager).
My school experience was abysmal and doing things my own way allowed me to actually learn stuff that would end up being useful. I'd not have made it half as far if I had gone the traditional route.
Currently 28 and satisfied with how things have played out so far.
My main concern with the thought of homeschooling / unschooling as a future parent: I feel fairly confident that I could get my kids far ahead of the standard school curriculum, with stronger fundamentals. But I think the school system serves more purpose than just education, and I'm not convinced my home would be a better school for everything else:
Making friends, learning multiple perspectives, learning conflict resolution, learning about diversity, making mistakes and dealing with failure, learning to deal with authority[0]. These are all lessons that I personally would attribute to going through a public education.
[0] Just to be clear, dealing with authority isn't the same as blind respect for authority. While school tries to teach you blind respect for authority, every student builds their own relationship with authority, probably in combination with the values they learn at home.
L. M. Sacasas on his mailing list and podcast, 'The Convivial Society' recently interviewed one of Ivan's close friends, Gov. Jerry Brown. I've found the mailing list really worthwhile to read, and has surely affected the way I think about technology.
Well we certainly have an opportunity to fix education but I doubt we will make the right changes because the public education system in the United States suffers the same problems the police system does.
Public Employee Unions. Whose first task is not to serve the people whom their members are supposed to work for. Just look at the demands some of these unions put up as required before going back to the classrooms! Some wanted changes to minimum wage, taxation, and more! Nothing related to education because they themselves have nothing to do with education other that there are teachers as their members.
It is well documented how teachers in good standing with the union can get out of schools they don't want to be in meaning if they don't like the neighborhood its too damn bad for the kids there. They can also avoid disciplinary actions and have their records protected from public view and in many districts have their records expunged within only a few years.
There are many great teachers out there but they are stuck in a system government by a political class masquerading as their union. A union which serves local politicians first and parents and students are so far down the list as to not be considered. Hence when it comes to bettering education their first response isn't how to do so but instead how to benefit their financial position
Most of the anecdotes here are quite illuminating. But I am interested to understand this from parenting perspective. How much of time and effort a homeschooling parent need to dedicate.
And I wonder whether there is a selection bias in the outcome. Are we looking at a sample of households that are already well off enough to spend dedicated time and resources on homeschooling? Does the family background improve the chances of success significantly? It is hard to separate these tightly coupled factors.
Here are two anecdotes from my life which oughta make you think about public schools.
1) I was born in USSR, in what is now Ukraine. I finished 5th grade there, in 1992. I skipped 4th grade, because of system conversion to 11-year system. I went to average public school and was a B (4) student. I moved to the U.S. and went to 6th grade in an average middle school. I coasted through 6th, 7th, and 8th grades on what I learned in my first four years of schooling. Only in high school did I see anything new math-wise.
2) In high school, I developed nearsightedness, I got a computer when I moved to U.S. In 10th grade, I started needing glasses, and I got behind in Physics class because I couldn't see the board. Eventually, my parents found out I needed glasses, and I got glasses. But I was about 3 months behind in Physics. So my dad sat down with me, after a day of work, and tutored me in Physics for probably an hour a night. Within 1-2 weeks, I was fully caught up on 3 months of "Magnet" high school physics.
Whenever you try to scale something up to millions, quality almost inevitably drops significantly.
Imagine the difference between a child getting the full 6 hours a day of public school versus just 2 hours a day of focused tutoring? The difference would be night and day.
Sounds like a bad idea to me, at least for most people. The reality is that if you want to be able to get a good job in an area you are interested in, you will need to be able to work with others, and get up on time, and work at a task you might not be as excited about. And you need to have a basic understanding of math, language, writing reports, etc. Most kids aren't going to learn any of that if they are free to sleep in and browse the web and learn whatever they want. Sure some kids might be motivated enough to learn that on their own, but based on what I have seen from my parents grade 5 class, most of them will just spend all day on Fortnight.
And maybe for some people it's OK to never learn those things, and be stuck working at lower skill jobs. That's legitimately an option, there are probably many people who are happy with a simpler life. But for me, I'm glad I went to a proper school and learned everything that I did there, and didn't have the opportunity to have a great career taken from me because I didn't go to a traditional school.
I find the reason for the family in the article to be pretty poor
Fear of school shootings and concern over “the racial bias in schools, the school-to-prison pipeline,” as well as many schools’ stunted curriculum in Black history, drove the McQueens to begin their experiment with at-home learning in 2015
Fear of school shootings is obviously a bad reason to avoid school given how many people die in car crashes each year, statistically the risk is negligible. And if you want more black history curriculum it's not hard to supliment it at home. I think you are much more likely to go to prison if you are uneducated. Racial bias concerns is a legitimate reason to avoid traditional schools though.
People need to stop turning their preferred X into replacements for the lack of religion. Apparently some people are just built to need this sort of thing and in absence of a compelling religion they turn whatever interests them into one, with all the obnoxious traits that made people go atheist in the first place.
Some of the most intelligent and exciting people I have worked with have been homeschooled. I would counter the idea that homeschooling/unschooling is like a religion by turning it around. The orthodoxy of public education in the US is a borderline cult. The institution is unassailable. Where I live levies are passed that raise taxes and the community has nothing to show for it. The union Is like the mob and once you are a “made man” it is nearly impossible to be fired. Administrators are paid more than senior engineers. People that work in this system absolutely abhor the idea of citizens having a choice over their own education. Returning tax money to the tax payer to fund their own education, even if it is a fraction of what the public school receives, is a source of vehement objection by the teachers union.
I don't like discussing this, because smart people completely turn their brains off when it comes to discussing it. Somehow homeschooling creates Lake Wobegone, a place where every child manages to be above average.
The reality is more homeschooling is completely unregulated in the majority of states, so people can do almost anything.
Most states require no formal education from the parents at all to teach. Many don't require any form of assessment or to keep a portfolio or records of education. Some have required subjects but no real enforcement of them being taught. Any form of standardized testing or auditing may not even be required. If you wanted to keep your kid at home and not educate them at all, you could easily do it in most states.
Would you really bet a system like we have now would provide better outcomes overall?
I’m surprised this was printed. Usually NYT is negative, or at best tepid, towards homeschooling.
There’s a diverse set of homeschool/unschool lived experiences. There’s a diverse set of challenges and opportunities that change on a family by family, child by child basis. Homeschool proponents aren’t trying to take anything from you, they just want the option to do things their way, in the privacy of their own home at their own expense with their own labor. That’s all. I’m glad you had a great (normal?) school experience. I’m grateful for your concern about the children of homeschoolers. Please do not confuse your concern with the correctness of the school system for our child. It’s well established the US is a follower in school performance. That should be all the justification we need.
[+] [-] eloff|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mgh2|5 years ago|reply
1. School is probably the best public invention to systematically distribute knowledge to the masses. Some like to point out "dropouts", "self-taught" geniuses or the "lucky few" as models instead of exceptions to the rule.
2. Not everyone is self-motivated to learn. Children, at critical developmental ages, are more prone to be led astray than "follow their passions" (at this age, really?). They will more likely be manipulated by vices if not constantly monitored. Note: Even adults struggle to find their "passion", good for the lucky few.
3. Not all parents are good teachers. Usually, responsible families understand the value proposition- they wish their children have a better future- and education is the most assured/common ticket that provides these opportunities.
4. School's purpose is not to teach obedience or even getting a job. It is there to teach us critical thinking, and consequently, how to be a good citizen. An educated population is also less prone to fall into totalitarianism. Ex: Nazi Germany and Mao's China burned books and persecuted the educated (1984 style).
Public schools, with all its flaws, are the best instruments to free the masses. Knowledge is democratized power to avoid the corruption that absolute power entails.
[+] [-] saas_sam|5 years ago|reply
I went to a truly terrible rural public school and I see many areas where that has held me back. Success was something to be ashamed of there. Loserthink was king.
[+] [-] sigzero|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] jsnk|5 years ago|reply
Were you home schooled by your mother or your father? And whoever was home schooling you, were they working either part time or full time? I am interested in homeschooling as well.
[+] [-] BugWatch|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GHwirrr4|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 3131s|5 years ago|reply
The public schools I went to all had a gifted program in various forms, which most years was just one hour a week and taught topics that should have been available to every student in the school. Amazingly, the teacher showed us the structure of a URL in around 1994 when I was in first grade.
[+] [-] an_opabinia|5 years ago|reply
This has been touched upon elsewhere by other commenters. But to at least ask you personally, would you concede that if you were doing well on tests despite the absence of the kind of cramming / teaching-to-the-test that the average schooled student receives, you could have done any kind of education, and in many ways, there is nothing special at all about homeschooling? Or that if your structure re-enacts this teaching, but it's a lot less time than the average student, you definitely have a natural aptitude for test taking?
Are tests the only way we can robustly evaluate a kid's education, until they are 18? If so, will sports matter if you're getting bad test scores? What does?
Here's the crazier conclusion. That people finger parental income or cultural values as the biggest factors of education outcomes, and in reality test performance is mostly genetic. It might as well be, from a policy perspective, randomly assigned - God rolls a 100 sided dice when you're born, and if it's a 1 or a 2 all standardized tests are easy for you. If you roll the other 98 numbers, the best thing is to cram.
We don't need alternatives to traditional schooling. We need a way of evaluating kids that rewards genuine learning. Kids who are learning should be scoring poorly sometimes, and that's the exact opposite of how children are evaluated, and poor scores are the exact opposite of what most parents of high achievers want.
Earnest parents are really seeking true learning. On the flip side, parents who send their kids to cram school or kvetch about college admissions not being fair because colleges consider factors other than totally and utterly gameable, zero-learning standardized tests - they are the antagonists. They are ruining our education system, they make school look the way it does, they are seeking a completely worthless advantage for their children (high test scores in the absence of valuable learning via cram school) for some cynically, utterly selfish devotion to values like making money and buying expensive things. Values so primitive and debasing that human cultures around the world have refined, multi-thousand-year-old refutations of materialism - opposition to materialism (asceticism) may be the most mature philosophy of all of history, at least as dominant as family values and theism. And then, to rationalize all of this, they find the least privileged and disadvantaged families and blame them instead! All the while pretending that there's some sort of equivalence of shittiness in their situations, because of some fucking number like income, between their families and the Other. It's complete and total bullshit.
Some changes to the school system can help everyone live happier lives and learn more, like different children spending longer (or shorter) times in class.
But really, we have to throw out tests. Or invent a test so sophisticated that it avoids being gamed by cramming.
[+] [-] numakerg|5 years ago|reply
If it's the same author I found based on a cursory search from your profile, then "famous" is a bit of a stretch.
> Where I think it hurt was we didn't do any group social activities and lived in remote places
I got a similar feeling reading about Chris Paolini. Homeschooled, raised in a remote place. Fed a lot of his early life experiences, particularly travel, into his novels but felt alienated from other kids.
[+] [-] t0mbstone|5 years ago|reply
Basically, I was allowed to skip schoolwork, as long as I was doing something productive.
I hated schoolwork, so I started spending all my spare time tinkering with stuff on the computer. I wasn't allowed to play video games (since they aren't productive), but I was allowed to BUILD video games. I was also allowed to build web sites and do programming.
By the age of 13, I was doing contract web development work, and by the age of 16, I was employed full time at a local web development company.
My parents wouldn't let me get a drivers license and car until I had at least passed the GED, so I spent a couple of months cramming for it by studying a 2 inch thick book about how to pass the GED. I passed it without too much trouble (I think I got a 98% in math, if I remember correctly).
My career has developed across multiple companies over the last 20 years, and I'm currently making around $150K a year as a software engineer. I never did go to college.
They took "unschooling" even further with my younger brother. He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10. He ended up having to cram for his GED to get a drivers license, too. He ultimately ended up getting a job as a waiter, then as bank teller, then put himself through college and got a degree. He now owns a house worth around $400K and has a career as a software engineer at the banking company that initially hired him as a teller.
TL;DR: "Unschooling" worked for my family because they combined it with at least a base of traditional education.
[+] [-] ohazi|5 years ago|reply
> He didn't even learn how to read until he was around 10.
to me, is fucking terrifying.
All of the people I know who did better on their own than in a classroom were able to do so because they could gobble up half a library in a weekend. I think you need to be able to read abnormally well for this unschooling concept to work as intended, and so good reading skills is one of the few things that I absolutely would not compromise on.
[+] [-] mdorazio|5 years ago|reply
As others have mentioned, you also have to consider how few career paths offer the kind of "no formal training" entry bar that programming does. What if your brother had hated computers and realized at age 22 that he wanted to be a doctor? He'd be years behind his peers.
[+] [-] sharadov|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] joncp|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Goronmon|5 years ago|reply
Do you feel you would have a different option of "unschooling" if you had tried to be successful in a different career path?
[+] [-] lopmotr|5 years ago|reply
I used to be a math teacher, and when a student failed the final exam, I'd spend a few hours one on one, then they could take another exam. The students that pissed around all term and bombed the first attempt often quickly picked up most of it in the 1-1 sessions and passed the 2nd attempt. I jokingly suggested to my boss that maybe we should scrap classes and just divide up my hours on 1-1 sessions with every student for greater efficiency.
[+] [-] Digital28|5 years ago|reply
I honestly can't say I've ever met (or even heard about) anyone with such a similar story -- care to chat sometime?
[+] [-] hereme888|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Fumtumi|5 years ago|reply
I read your text and i would think you made it despite being home schooled and not because of it.
I assuming this because i was going to school but lazy and if i could go back, i would do things differently.
You don't even know what you missed and you don't even know where you could be today;
And while it did work for you well, it does sound that your brother struggled more .
[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] unknown|5 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] aaron695|5 years ago|reply
Also without you at a normal school some students might be worse off. Not your problem of course, but it is at a societal level.
[+] [-] lazyasciiart|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] walshemj|5 years ago|reply
Your going to be screened out by a liberal arts graduate with a 2:2 in HR
[+] [-] rvba|5 years ago|reply
What is much harder now due to tons of people doing those bootcamps.
[+] [-] jjcm|5 years ago|reply
I disagree with Amanda's statement that you have to have faith in a child's wonder to facilitate their development. I would say the onus is on the parents to provide things to wonder about. This is a hard task, one that my mother worked endlessly on. It was a 50 hour a week job for her to educate us. Even with that though there are still the social downsides. For parents that are considering it, I would still recommend it, but know that you're taking on a significant responsibility and that you'll need to find after school programs for your kids to have a chance to socialize with other kids their age. This can be hard to find, especially in earlier years.
[+] [-] mathnovice|5 years ago|reply
The grind is only harder if you don't have a good book or teacher because the practice you do could potentially be actively harmful (or useless).
Exploring is fun for children and adults. Being exposed to new things is always interesting. The grind is the hard part.
[+] [-] ksdale|5 years ago|reply
Naturally, something like playing a musical instrument requires grinding (though it's not grinding if you like it!). But I think other than like, the times tables or the periodic table, there's almost nothing in school that inherently requires a grind. It just feels like a grind, because school is often unpleasant.
I think an average, literate adult could learn basically the entire American K-12 history curriculum in a few months of reading. Most of what passes for history in elementary school could be compressed into... what, a hundred pages, maybe? And high school is another thousand pages.
I think math is the same way. It's a 10 year grind to teach reluctant kids what could be taught to an eager adult in a few months.
I think we'd do much better to try to create eager adults, which I think unschooling is really well-suited to.
[+] [-] bigbubba|5 years ago|reply
I think 'grind' is caused by a disconnect between what the learner is being made to do and what they want to do. Grind can therefore be reduced by providing people with the opportunity to study things that interest them, for instance by offering a broader range of educational 'tracks', or by reformulating lesson plans to make the material more interesting (explaining the real world applications or consequences of the subject matter.)
[+] [-] AQuantized|5 years ago|reply
The problem is that this mishandling gives people a bad taste for associated activities, especially STEM subjects, and it's rare for people to subject themselves to what seems like an incredibly boring process when they're not being forced to. As such, most of the competency they may have been forced to gain is lost, along with potential passion.
Even repeating exercises can be fun when you understand the motivation behind it. For example, if you have a real passion for understanding Newtonian physics, the parts of calculus that might be 'rote' when unmotivated and part of a purely rote process can become some of the most enjoyable.
[+] [-] PoignardAzur|5 years ago|reply
Your kid only has a very limited amount of it to spend; trying to make them grind more than that amount will be absolutely counter-productive and reduce grind "efficiency" to zero.
Which is exactly what schools do: they try to cram as much working, studying and focusing in a kid's daily life as they can, long past the point of diminishing returns; because they assume that a kid's attention is infinitely extensible, and they do very little to actually get their interest.
When you can order a kid to get into a room at set times and to look at a set piece of text and to listen to a single person for arbitrary amounts of times, there's very little to stop you from making every single day a grind a calling it a job well done.
The main benefit of homeschooling is that, if a kid isn't engaged by the teaching materials, you can see it immediately because they'll say so and ask to do something else.
[+] [-] LanceH|5 years ago|reply
This is neither an argument for or against traditional schools (or homeschools or unschooling).
[+] [-] 908B64B197|5 years ago|reply
I think one of the things the pandemic exposed is how much time is wasted in class for discipline and "class management". Really, without it the quiet kids can pretty much get the regular curriculum in half the normal time.
[+] [-] chrisBob|5 years ago|reply
I went to a good engineering school for college, but they also require everyone to take 3 years of history, 3 years of english, 2 semesters of a foreign language, a psychology course, ...
If it was left up to me I would not have taken most of those classes, and I suffered through many of them, but I think they were an important part of my education, and I am glad I came out of school knowing more than the engineering that I would have picked for myself.
[+] [-] fxtentacle|5 years ago|reply
If both parents have to work a regular day job, there's nobody at home to teach the kids so unschooling is not possible. And if only one parent stays at home, they will also yearn for some free time and push for getting the kids signed up for school.
The only situation where I can imagine the parents being enthusiastic about unschooling is if they are independently wealthy and can afford to spend lots of time with their kids, when other people would have to work. And obviously, plenty of personalized attention from the parents will make the kids learn a lot faster than your typical 1 teacher 30 students class.
Plus, once you assume that all unschooling parents are much wealthier than regular people, it kind of makes sense that they will have very different opinions about life in general, due to their very different experience of it. Regular folks will go to a public playground and complain about the dog shit there. Rich folks will just buy a playground for their backyard and hire a gardener to keep it tidy.
To outsiders, that wealth discrepancy would then look like a religion, because all of the unschoolers have a shared untypical worldview.
[+] [-] saberdancer|5 years ago|reply
I don't have a strong opinion either way but I was raised with a strong basic well rounded education and personally I feel it helped me. One thing that should be emphasized is that the material should be challenging enough as having it too easy leads to bad work habits.
[+] [-] iambateman|5 years ago|reply
A couple observations:
- homeschooling is efficient. I only needed a few hours per day of school. - homeschooling is a religion for some people (who end up in articles) but there are lots of cool people. - “homeschooling” is often way less “sitting at home with mother learning math” than people think. We took tons of trips, did cooperative school, took college classes. It’s funny to joke about never leaving the house, but most homeschool kids manage to be quite social. - because it’s unusual, it succeeds with the right kid-parent relationship. My sister and mom made each other miserable and it didn’t work. There are lots of kids for whom homeschooling would be problematic.
[+] [-] mantap|5 years ago|reply
I would have been fine in a good private school but my parents weren't rich and couldn't afford the fees. Somehow I convinced my parents to let me educate myself, and at least for me it was successful. I finally had time to teach myself programming, which at the time was not taught in school.
Would I recommend it to others? Kids should try school first and see if they benefit from it. Some kids love school and do very well out of the system. However, if school is failing your kid, they might be better off without it.
[+] [-] Proziam|5 years ago|reply
My school experience was abysmal and doing things my own way allowed me to actually learn stuff that would end up being useful. I'd not have made it half as far if I had gone the traditional route.
Currently 28 and satisfied with how things have played out so far.
[+] [-] helen___keller|5 years ago|reply
Making friends, learning multiple perspectives, learning conflict resolution, learning about diversity, making mistakes and dealing with failure, learning to deal with authority[0]. These are all lessons that I personally would attribute to going through a public education.
[0] Just to be clear, dealing with authority isn't the same as blind respect for authority. While school tries to teach you blind respect for authority, every student builds their own relationship with authority, probably in combination with the values they learn at home.
[+] [-] h0l0cube|5 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Deschooling_Society
L. M. Sacasas on his mailing list and podcast, 'The Convivial Society' recently interviewed one of Ivan's close friends, Gov. Jerry Brown. I've found the mailing list really worthwhile to read, and has surely affected the way I think about technology.
https://theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/remembering-illic...
[+] [-] Shivetya|5 years ago|reply
Public Employee Unions. Whose first task is not to serve the people whom their members are supposed to work for. Just look at the demands some of these unions put up as required before going back to the classrooms! Some wanted changes to minimum wage, taxation, and more! Nothing related to education because they themselves have nothing to do with education other that there are teachers as their members.
It is well documented how teachers in good standing with the union can get out of schools they don't want to be in meaning if they don't like the neighborhood its too damn bad for the kids there. They can also avoid disciplinary actions and have their records protected from public view and in many districts have their records expunged within only a few years.
There are many great teachers out there but they are stuck in a system government by a political class masquerading as their union. A union which serves local politicians first and parents and students are so far down the list as to not be considered. Hence when it comes to bettering education their first response isn't how to do so but instead how to benefit their financial position
[+] [-] xkgt|5 years ago|reply
And I wonder whether there is a selection bias in the outcome. Are we looking at a sample of households that are already well off enough to spend dedicated time and resources on homeschooling? Does the family background improve the chances of success significantly? It is hard to separate these tightly coupled factors.
[+] [-] forgotmypw17|5 years ago|reply
1) I was born in USSR, in what is now Ukraine. I finished 5th grade there, in 1992. I skipped 4th grade, because of system conversion to 11-year system. I went to average public school and was a B (4) student. I moved to the U.S. and went to 6th grade in an average middle school. I coasted through 6th, 7th, and 8th grades on what I learned in my first four years of schooling. Only in high school did I see anything new math-wise.
2) In high school, I developed nearsightedness, I got a computer when I moved to U.S. In 10th grade, I started needing glasses, and I got behind in Physics class because I couldn't see the board. Eventually, my parents found out I needed glasses, and I got glasses. But I was about 3 months behind in Physics. So my dad sat down with me, after a day of work, and tutored me in Physics for probably an hour a night. Within 1-2 weeks, I was fully caught up on 3 months of "Magnet" high school physics.
Whenever you try to scale something up to millions, quality almost inevitably drops significantly.
Imagine the difference between a child getting the full 6 hours a day of public school versus just 2 hours a day of focused tutoring? The difference would be night and day.
[+] [-] GhostVII|5 years ago|reply
And maybe for some people it's OK to never learn those things, and be stuck working at lower skill jobs. That's legitimately an option, there are probably many people who are happy with a simpler life. But for me, I'm glad I went to a proper school and learned everything that I did there, and didn't have the opportunity to have a great career taken from me because I didn't go to a traditional school.
I find the reason for the family in the article to be pretty poor
Fear of school shootings and concern over “the racial bias in schools, the school-to-prison pipeline,” as well as many schools’ stunted curriculum in Black history, drove the McQueens to begin their experiment with at-home learning in 2015
Fear of school shootings is obviously a bad reason to avoid school given how many people die in car crashes each year, statistically the risk is negligible. And if you want more black history curriculum it's not hard to supliment it at home. I think you are much more likely to go to prison if you are uneducated. Racial bias concerns is a legitimate reason to avoid traditional schools though.
[+] [-] colechristensen|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mberning|5 years ago|reply
[+] [-] Noos|5 years ago|reply
The reality is more homeschooling is completely unregulated in the majority of states, so people can do almost anything.
Most states require no formal education from the parents at all to teach. Many don't require any form of assessment or to keep a portfolio or records of education. Some have required subjects but no real enforcement of them being taught. Any form of standardized testing or auditing may not even be required. If you wanted to keep your kid at home and not educate them at all, you could easily do it in most states.
Would you really bet a system like we have now would provide better outcomes overall?
[+] [-] ryanmarsh|5 years ago|reply
There’s a diverse set of homeschool/unschool lived experiences. There’s a diverse set of challenges and opportunities that change on a family by family, child by child basis. Homeschool proponents aren’t trying to take anything from you, they just want the option to do things their way, in the privacy of their own home at their own expense with their own labor. That’s all. I’m glad you had a great (normal?) school experience. I’m grateful for your concern about the children of homeschoolers. Please do not confuse your concern with the correctness of the school system for our child. It’s well established the US is a follower in school performance. That should be all the justification we need.