[vwcx]

This is tangent, but your comment reminds me of this essay that floats around HN every so often about how limiting school is. Young children are absolutely capable of greatness beyond what we ever ask of them, and most of us are okay with them growing up in the rigid, ordained box of modern public schooling: https://map.simonsarris.com/p/school-is-not-enough

[watwut]

I prefer my kids going to school then being limited by what a single household can teach them. Modern schooling is way better then what conservative attacks on it claim. And I would strongly preferred to live in a country with functional public school system then one without it.

[ty6853]

The main conservative complaint is that without competition for your tax money, public schools are at best a democraticly controlled monopoly with captive consumers. Middle grounds like keeping public schools but let them compete with private ones, using vouchers, for whatever reason reaches this contrived argument of certain interests being scared that a parent may decide another school is a better pick for their child's voucher. If public schools are best parents will be happy to select them, so why not find out?

[andrepd]

Exactly. Education has a long long way to improve, but the alternative to mediocre public schooling is better public schooling, not homeschool which is even worse than a mediocre school.

[cosmic_cheese]

Yeah as someone who was homeschooled, I don’t know that I would ever attempt it myself. I’m simply not qualified to teach a whole lot beyond the most bare of basics, except in the narrow band representing my experience and interests. To act otherwise would constitute an embarrassing level of hubris on my part.

There’s a lot of good in modern schooling. It’s not perfect, but throwing out the baby with the bathwater as is so frequently proposed is not the solution here.

[theultdev]

I don't think you need to trust what "conservatives claim" when you see the test scores and literacy rates.

American public schooling is and has been broken for awhile.

[meroes]

My own experience is I went to an amazingly pre school. Like teachers invite students and their families for dinner at their own house, let kids do what they wanted during free time unless and until they actually did something bad. That freedom and trust created an environment where I taught myself how to ride bikes during preschool recesses. No teacher came running out to tell me the right way, they just watched. And they just had real bikes for preschoolers to use at their own comfort freely accessible. Needless to say by the time I got the first grade I had a hard time adapting.

I have no idea if the less restrained model works long term, I suspect not when society is so intermixed and rigid. I joined the STEM Pipeline (introduced by the NSF in the 1970s and continues to this day) like so many others.

[wisty]

This argument is immensely popular. It looks a bit like a warmed over Rousseau - just shake off the chains of the old fashioned education system, give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor, and they'll do pretty well.

Let's look at a few counterpoints:

- Biologically secondary knowledge are the things that it's proposed that humans haven't evolved to naturally of. Math writing, ect. The upper middle class academics who had their mommy and daddy teach them literacy and numeracy felt stifled by the "drill and kill" explicit teaching, and provably think they'd have "flourished" if they could follow their own heart and figured it all out themselves, but only because they were privatised to have effectively a private tutor. That doesn't scale.

- Motivation. Schools do OK at teaching the things that are a priority, as long as they aren't too progressive (the preogressive education movement is older than the more modern traditional approach, but progressive educators claim they are the hot new thing for some reason). Just look at something dead easy that lots of people want to do - learning a second language. How many people can be bothered without school? (And sure, schools suck at language teaching, but only because it's not a real priority).

Like critics of capitalism, the most strident critics of modern education often have a solution they are trying to sell and it's a solution that doesn't work very well at scale in the real world.

Could schools compress the curriculum, getting kids ready for uni by year 10, then putting 2 years of uni into years 11-12 (or the trade school equivalent) so unis don't need to teach the drab basics? Yeah, probably. Middle school could probably be done in half the time if it wasn't treated as a total joke since it doesn't count for anything.

But you can't cherry pick extremely privileged or exceptional people and expect that everyone can replicated their results

[zozbot234]

> give kids one on one guidance for 10 years with a great mentor

Aristocratic tutoring works. The whole issue with it is that it's not affordable except for some kind of extreme super elite, hence why the rest of us have to make do with mass education, supplemented with some very limited individual tutoring and "tiger parenting".

[11101010001100]

Yes, this is also somewhat obvious (speaking as a teacher).