School in general should be modularized so that you can pick your own path. It isn't necessary or sensible to think that every student will or should be at the same point in every subject. The predictable result is that some students are bored as they are held back while others become frustrated as they fall hopelessly behind. Usually the latter are punished (if not publicly shamed) with bad grades simply for having less experience with the material and/or taking longer to master it for the first time.
"Tracking" was supposed to mitigate this to some extent, but it tends to be a) used across the board for multiple subjects and b) used as a means of sorting students into winners (who are richly rewarded with status and additional opportunities) and losers (who are deprived of rewards and benefits rather than offered additional help and assistance.)
Universities use a modular approach to great effect: you can usually take any course (even graduate courses) if you've completed the prerequisites. And there are multiple ways of fulfilling graduation requirements.
A limitation of the university approach is that for a given course in a given term, everyone in the course is usually still in lock-step. Sometimes this is mitigated by offering multiple versions of a course with different time scales (usually an "accelerated" version for people who are familiar with the material and/or want to devote more time per week.)
I agree to an extent, but the purpose of primary education is to provide a foundation of knowledge. We already struggle with the general population understanding statistics they hear on the news, or knowing how the government works.
If most people opt out of basic math classes, society will be worse off.
A middle ground is requiring those courses but letting students choose when. Further to the obvious absurdity of everyone learning at the same speed, is the idea of everyone being equally interested and enthusiastic about every topic at the same time as everyone else. Let me go on a History shtick and then get my math together and then...
I don’t think that would necessarily work because some of the subjects deeply integrate with one another. For example, English and math have huge crossover because English classes are about being able to convey ideas and you need to have a strong grasp of English to succeed in, say, a statistics class.
I think if we could fine-tune instruction to skill levels, while still requiring a strong foundation in each subject, we would be much better off in the education scene.
There are school systems that does that — Alaska, for example. It was already impractical to get everyone growing up in the boonies to get to one place. Kids learn at their own pace, but you need to complete the required courses for graduation. Graduation can come earlier … or later.
(And then, there are the really radical departures — Unschooling, for example).
If you had given me an internet connection and freedom from school I would have taught myself. As I continue to do. One of my kids is the same. He doesn’t need school and shouldn’t have to go, as he grows older it will only hold him back.
I take you are responding to the “unschool” thing. What I was thinking of still have people acting as resources, and a curated learning environment. Maybe I was using the wrong term there.
i believe this correlation is more accidental than planned.
i doubt that there is anyone who can claim to know exactly how much schooling in your native language is necessary before you can successfully pass a statistics class.
i believe the reverse is true. taking a statistics class will advance your language skills, because you learn a lot more by application than by theory. and there is no reason that these language skills need to be learned in isolation before you can apply them.
so maybe this slows down your learning for a bit, but even that is hardly provable because of different learning speeds of each student which likely vary far more than than the variation that language classes or the lack thereof would introduce.
actually, the whole concept of classes for your native language doesn't make sense in this context. learning your native language permeates everything. you learn language in every class, be it math, biology, sports or whatever. a dedicated native language class at best fills in gaps such as learning grammar, linguistics and literature. but it is not, and should not be a prerequisite to learning anything else.
the situation is a bit different when the language being used to teach is not your native language. a certain foundation in the language is necessary before you can follow classes, so a number of language classes are a prerequisite in that case
Contrary to popular opinion, I actually found my English classes incredibly useful— all the way through English Comp for my University Core curriculum. They were less about learning grammar and whatnot (though they did teach to write more eloquently at the higher levels) and more about digesting information and thinking critically.
People love to wave English around as the most useless class of them all, but when taught correctly it’s really the most important. It influences how we consume media, how we write, and how we communicate with one another. All of those skills are incredibly important in all other classes and I think having a concentrated environment to learn them is valuable.
> ...but when taught correctly it’s really the most important.
I think this is the most important point in most discussions about education.
I feel that everyone I know has had classes or professors that they either really disliked or really liked, but I also feel that there is a strong chance that many of the cases were not due to them not simply enjoying the subject matter, but instead the content being taught poorly. No matter how well we optimize the selection and ordering of classes, it is of no use if the content is not taught well.
For what it's worth, I thought all of my English learning was pretty atrocious.
I think part of the problem is that we don't tell people why they're in school learning things. I certainly thought my English classes were useless not even two years ago. I'm sure you've heard the classic "when am I ever going to need to know about Hamlet in the real world?"
School, at least beyond elementary education, isn't about knowing all the arbitrary points that you learn. It about learning to learn. The problem, however, is that you can't simply teach people how to learn, so the content you cover in classes is simply a proxy for the real "meat" of education.
Some might argue that you can apply this by teaching only classes in a student's focus area, but I argue that being exposed to historical information, statistics, math, computer science, biology, etc. has made me a much more well-rounded human and I possess the skills necessary to understand just about any concept presented at a sub-journal level. That's a skill I've noticed not many have, and it has proven incredibly valuable.
oh, i didn't mean to devalue native language classes in general. apart from the issue that the value of any class depends on how it is taught, i merely wanted to criticize the suggested dependency to other classes.
case in point, digesting information and thinking critically are things that should be taught in all classes.
i actually find it problematic if a teacher expects that it is some other teachers job to teach any skills that are necessary in their own class.
this is just an unnecessary division of learning, when, as i believe, integrated learning should be more effective. this culminates in the concept of project based learning where the whole concept of subject classes disappears and is replaced with interdisciplinary projects that cover all skills necessary to complete a project.
This is a new movement of families who are setting goals for their children's education and picking and choosing classes, activities, tutors and skill shares to fill out those goals. As the movement grows, there will be a need for greater accountability and standards, which I think still can be fulfilled better through a Modular approach then a centralized education system. How great would it be if individual communities and families also had more authority over establishing the standards for this foundation of knowledge.
This just sounds like a more informal form of the private academy system in East Asian countries, where parents pick and choose different classes, activities, and tutors from the different private academy offerings. There are basically academies for most subjects, from art to science to sports to performance arts to languages, so a child's education and specialization can be individually tailored.
> If most people opt out of basic math classes, society will be worse off.
I doubt this. The overwhelming majority of people never use anything more complicated than algebra. Most people probably don’t even use algebra in an average year. And primary math instruction is an enormous waste of time. You can teach a twelve year old the entire primary math curriculum in well under a 100 hours. It would be great if we could make more of the population numerate but most Americans can’t name the three branches of government[1]. You’re not going to get them to learn statistics.
[1] Not a knock on Americans. The US has a great education system. People are people everywhere and most of them don’t care about nerd stuff that they find neither interesting nor useful.
Also not a knock on Americans. The US has many great things, but the education system isn't one of those. Sure, there are excellent educational and academic institutions in the US, but that alone doesn't make the country's education system great.
Switzerland has a great education system. There are almost no private schools because public schools do a great job. All universities are almost free and they are still among the top academic institutions globally (e.g., ETH). Furthermore, those who want to learn a trade early on can do apprenticeships combined with schooling instead of going to university and still have a great career. If they wish to go to university later, they can go to a university of applied sciences (Fachhochschule) or catch up on some requiremnts and go to a university.
One caveat: Reputation has a long lead time on reality. I think the US university system is no longer world-leading. It's still good, mind you, but it's no longer spectacular.
The best-known US institutions -- Harvard, MIT, Stanford, etc. -- are riding based on having been fantastic institutions in the sixties, eighties, nineties, and even early 00's. I think it will be decades before reputation catches reality, but at some point, it will happen.
It turns out massive endowments and fundraising didn't make schools better; they misaligned incentives, brought in the wrong types of people into leadership positions, brought in conflicts-of-interest, and led to all sorts of corruption.
The second-tier seem to still be doing okay -- the WPIs, Georgia Techs, state schools, and so on -- but the elites populate their faculty ranks, and you can see culture slowly creeping in.
More money doesn't always make things better. Go figure.
TL;DR: If you went to top-20 school, and you're asked for donations, donate to a local state school, an HBCU, an educational not-for-profit doing good work in your community, or elsewhere.
You are missing the forest for the trees. Quality wise, most American first and second tier universities provide largely similar levels of undergraduate education, with perhaps slightly differing rigor depending on the institution. The top 10 schools are uniquely able to provide strong networks, money, and access to opportunities that are not available to everyone else. That has very little to do with research output or its academic strength. You cannot buy old money. If academic rigor is the sole determinant of institution quality, then continental powerhouses like École Normale Supérieur and Science Po would be ranked on the same level as Stanford and Harvard.
PISA says America doesn't have a great education system. It used to. Personally, I think this is the greatest threat to American dominance.
And COVID19 in the US can be summarized as: Policymakers and citizens don't understand exponents, let alone differential equations.
A key reason that America doesn't have a great education system is exactly what you've expressed; people don't have any faith that America even COULD have a great education system. That's kinda across the board; America doesn't do big things anymore.
> PISA says America doesn't have a great education system. It used to. Personally, I think this is the greatest threat to American dominance.
US whites do better than whites in every country bar Estonia. US Asians do better than every country bar Singapore and the fake Chinese results. US Hispanics do much better than any Western Hemisphere Hispanophone nation. Looks pretty good.
> And COVID19 in the US can be summarized as: Policymakers and citizens don't understand exponents, let alone differential equations.
This does not make the US look particularly bad. Everywhere else in the Western world but Israel is run by clowns too. Even Australia and New Zealand have shown themselves clowns, with their incredibly botched vaccine regime.
With universities there are usually some basic requirements for graduation, which may include things like math and writing requirements (along with other requirements such as sciences, humanities, languages, etc.) but there is flexibility in how and when you fulfill them.
Yeah, universities get away with that because the students have already gone through primary education and already have the required foundation of knowledge.
Universities will require one class in a number of different fields to market themselves as liberal arts schools, but don't pretend like one algebra course gives a person all the math skills they will need in their life.
I don't know how this would produce less educated people.
The High School degree, like the higher education degree, should require a set of unit from various subjects to be completed. The only difference is how those classes are consumed by the student.
I fear that the high school degree will become (even more) a marker of the passage of time than one of a minimal level of educational mastery.
Let kids take what they’re interested in and put off what they’re not, so long as they eventually do it. What could possibly go wrong? In university, if you clown your schedule, you just don’t graduate until you sort it out. Are we going to have the backbone to do that to high school kids, especially if we find that wealthy, college-track kids manage the flexibility just fine while other students struggle to get the guidance to help them navigate the flexible schedule? I doubt we would.
Do US schools tend to not allow for the "university" style course selection? In mine, which is all I really know, I was allowed to double-up on certain subjects, e.g. biology and chemistry side-by-side such that I completed all required courses in three years rather than the traditional four.
This was possible while I was in high school -- I was able to take Bio, Chem, Physics, and Calculus in the same year.
However, this is no longer possible now for my younger siblings enrolling at the same public high school. Apparently the school now put much more strict limit on pre-requisite and what classes students can take at which year. There is now much less flexibility.
This is not due to significantly increased student body size , but mainly for "equity" in education outcomes -- i.e. holding back the advanced students to accommodate the less advanced students. It makes very little sense, but that is California!
This is fascinating, a parent can't rely on their own experience at a school they previously attended to estimate what to expect their own children would get from a given institution. Every generation always faces a new set of challenges, nothing formulaic to life.
If hours are available, you can do that. Many US schools fill your day with mandatory courses and it’s hard to get an open hour for that. My second high school had an 8-class day which did allow for that option, if the classes were available without conflict. My first had a 7-class day and as a freshman I was told I couldn’t take Spanish unless I wanted to skip lunch (which I didn’t).
Every school district can choose on its own what to do, so there's going to be intense variability and generalization is difficult.
For my school district, the general tendency is that you had a "core" of mandatory classes where your choice was at best "do you want the hard or easy version of the class", although math in particular was tracked somewhat more independently of grade level. In addition, there is a set of elective slots, and degree requirements might strongly push you to certain electives (in particular, foreign language elective requirements are probably pretty common).
Doubling-up on two sciences in one year wouldn't be normally possible, at least on the standard end-of-year sign-up-for-the-next-grade forms, but it is possible to do so if you bitch long and hard enough at a school counselor for special dispensation.
It's pretty typical to have flexibility in scheduling. Some classes are mandatory for a particular grade level, the rest is prerequisite-based.
At my local school, there was an extra early bird period in the morning if you wanted to take an extra class. We could also take classes from the local community college and have them count as both high school credit and college credit (today, the high school I went to has moved and is now sharing a property line with the community college, so it makes it very easy for students to go back and forth). My niece just graduated from high school two years ago and she's pretty close to finishing her bachelor's, because she had earned a lot of college credit already. For motivated students it really works out great.
My highschool was similar to my college - there was a collection of required courses that covered all subjects, and there were electives you could choose from.
In high school, the majority of your schedule was in required classes. In college, the vast majority was in major courses / electives.
This is called unschooling and has been around for decades. My friend is a big believer in unschooling. You basically just give kids resources and then let them learn whatever they are interested in.
There have been long term studies done on kids that grew up in unschooled households. They tended to do fine in college, but were no better or worse off. They tended to score slightly higher on emotional evaluations and also tended to be slightly more predisposed to entrepreneurship and the arts (and less interested in careers with more rigid structure like science and engineering).
I absolutely love the unschooling community and that approach to raising and educating children. However, I think this is a misnomer in many instances and a better word to describe a specific type of learning as necessary. As I understand it unschooling mostly applies to an approach that heavily emphasizes self-directed learning. In other cases, uschooling is a broad word which ranges from families who have no structure to their children's education to ones who have a full schedule with lots of academics. Modular Learning is an educational movement of parents who want greater flexibility, but also a rigorous and challenging education for their children which their composing through modules (tutors, learning apps, classes, skill shares) Modular learning doesn't preclude going to school either. In many cases, Modular learners go to school but complement that with afterschool activities, apps and tutors. The studies you refer to also show that families who use pure unschooling do mostly the same , but those with some structure do better academically. It's hard to really give credit to these studies because they apply to such a small sample of kids whose families are actively involved in their learning. More research is definitely needed.
Also, part of this is I think there's a need for a new word that is not a negative one, not anti-school, but pro-learning and pro-education. Homeschooling, unschooling deschooling and most of the terms I hear don't really define this innovative group of pioneers. I think words are important and the word should not be in opposition to something but proactive. If there's another word you think could work, I'd love to hear it.
If we just apply some of what we have learned about WFH in knowledge professions to, ironically, another knowledge profession (students), we can can easily see how physical attendance can be a distraction.
If a lot of kids are behind, or struggling, dealing with the social aspects of school (do you fit in? Do you have friends?) and rigor of work (wake up at 8am, power through a 8 hour a day, 40 min lunch break), then there’s no point in saddling them with that extra burden.
We don’t give kids the flexibility that we ourselves need to distance ourself and focus on things from time to time. When you don’t provide that, they will do what all of us do, disassociate and approach things in a ‘whatever, life sucks’ way.
I'd be interested to see the data on outcomes though. From the (fairly large) number of unschooling people I've met, the results seem to be much more extreme. People are either working upper-class white collar jobs or chronically unemployed.
As somebody who has read more than average about home education and unschooling and certainly contemplated it, but ultimately decided to send their children to school (and can see the pros and cons!), that is interesting. It must be hard to control for the type of parents who decide to unschool and I'm curious as to how they did that.
I guess there might also be a bias in terms of which types of children parents are inclined to home-educate, although I imagine most families do home-ed all their children. I sometimes wonder if mine had been the other way round if the decision might have gone the other way - I think school suits my oldest much more than my youngest.
The article is of interest to me, although it is a bit light on details.
I'm increasingly finding myself considering some form of alternate schooling for my children.
The public schools in my area are sub-par. Quality public schools exist, but are zoned and therefore my children are not permitted unless we move (expensive and non-desirable).
Private schools are absurdly expensive, we've decent public metrics in Australia and they're frequently no better than a decent public school. Worse, they're essentially universally dead set on trying to indoctrinate children into one cult or another.
My wife is a primary school teacher. She's incredibly hands on and is renowned for her ability to form relationships, and take a special interest in her students' wellbeing. She's demonstrated her ability to function independently, by taking existing resources and expanding them; having recently launched a small well-being book + play subscription for young children (https://mybookbag.com.au/).
I'm quite interested in teaching, hands-on learning and mentoring myself. I've worked from home for the last 7 years and will continue to do so.
I've a 3 year old daughter with Type 1 Diabetes, and I don't much trust her care to others, at least while she's too young to take a more active role in her own care.
I'm aware my situation is perhaps uniquely ideal for some form of "home schooling", and yet I'm still extremely hesitant to take the idea seriously. Socialisation is of course a concern, but I think it's more the stigma and also lack of data/oversight.
Is there anyone here with much experience in alternate education structures that has any insight to share?
I'm a father of 7 with 15-years of homeschooling experience.
It's true that the first mistake most homeschooling parents make is to try and recreate the public/private school system in their home. Few find success down that path.
The primary goal of schooling is to teach your children how to learn. If we provide them with the skills to learn whatever they'll need to be productive adults, they'll be more prepared for whatever the career market looks like when they're ready to join the workforce.
Yes, that looks mostly like Reading/Writing/Arithmetic as grade schoolers but there's so many more options once they reach Jr. and Sr. High School. Internships and apprenticeships can be incredibly valuable as well as entrepreneurial opportunities. My sons learned things running a mobile car detailing service than could have ever been taught them in a classroom setting.
There are opportunities for learning every day if we take the time to do share them with our children: grocery shopping, going to the bank, purchasing a vehicle, resolving a dispute with a neighbor.
Questions from kids are one of the best ways to teach them to learn, especially if you don't know the answer. What better example is there than when you get to reply "I don't know. Let's find out together."
We have 3 kids and have been home schooling for about 14 years, each of our three kids have different needs and completely different interests
I agree with your comment 100% - if we go on holiday/ vacation they have to help in understanding the trade off of what options we chosse based on the costs and the organisation eg transportation etc..
We also teach our kids to project manage their own educational and general activities (with costs)
yes they make mistakes, but they see the real world implications of the mistakes - from getting away with it, to having to cancel stuff (and still pay for it)
I made an account just to comment on homeschooling since I grew up homeschooled in the US and have a lot of opinions about it.
It's great if you have intelligent parents who know when to say "I don't know," but if you aren't an expert on a given subject, you should bring in a private tutor. This means that for most parents, once your kid hits highschool you can't teach them anything outside of whatever you have a bachelor's in, so to homeschool effectively you'd have to just pay for a bunch of private tutors for each subject and then you're not really homeschooling anymore.
Also, depriving your kid of the socialization they'd get from more traditional non-cult schools in the US is almost universally seen as bordering on child abuse by people who grew up homeschooled, so keep that in mind moving forward. Learning how to be likeable is already difficult enough for kids who have social opportunities all day every day. The stigma absolutely did not come out of nowhere. It's unfortunately common for homeschoolers to leave the house and present as if they have autism or some other social learning disability. For some reason it isn't taught as a learnable skill, but I think nearly everyone would agree that it takes practice. There will be obvious differences between a kid that practices 2 hours per day instead of 30 minutes a week.
Edit: I'd also caution anyone against giving too much credence to the stories of parents who homeschooled their children but were never homeschooled themselves. Parents and children often end up having wildly different perspectives on this subject.
> Learning how to be likeable is already difficult enough for kids who have social opportunities all day every day.
As someone else pointed out, it's not clear that school helps with this. The kid who went to school and didn't learn this is not at all an outlier. There are quite a few in every class. What would be interesting is if there is research to indicate which suffers more: The kid who doesn't learn this and has to go through school, or the homeschooled kid who doesn't learn this and doesn't have to deal with it in school.
Agreed on the tutor thing at high school, although for many homeschooled kids I know, it was usually one of:
1. Send kids to a regular high school (i.e. don't home school those years)
2. Lots of schools in this area have programs that allow homeschooled kids to attend classes in the areas their parents cannot teach. Of course, rules on this vary from state to state.
>As someone else pointed out, it's not clear that school helps with [learning how to be likeable]
The rebuttal to your point is so simple and obvious it's really hard to take you seriously. Socializing is a skill that can be practiced. If you have fewer opportunities to practice, you're less likely to get better. The children that are bad at socializing despite going to public school do not show that public school doesn't teach socializing, it means they didn't learn as much from their practice. For all you know, poorly-socialized public school children would have otherwise ended up living in their parents' basements until 45 or turned into serial killers if they were homeschooled. Public schooling doesn't need to guarantee good outcomes to be the more desirable choice.
The hard lesson I learned is that success in socializing as an adult is quite different from success in socializing in school. I don't make close friends with adults the way I did as a school kid. I had to unlearn a lot of my school life to succeed.
The school environment is a very artificial one, and not very comparable with much in the adult world. Those who stick to the rules learned there tend not to do well (also found out the hard way). For years I've tossed the idea in my head to write a blog post of all the life lessons one learns in school that lead to poor performance at work. Likewise, I'd like to write another post on all the lessons from school that often do translate to the work environment (because it was so ingrained in us), but which leads to suboptimal working conditions.
I can't obviously discount your experience, and my school experience was actually quite good - but just as you are aware of the downsides of home schooling, I'm aware of the downsides of schools.
If we go beyond anecdotes and to research, I believe most research is in favor of home schooling - both academically and socially.
There is no arguing with you people. The sort of things you miss out on if you're homeschooled are totally unimaginable to you so there isn't anything I can say that will change your stance unless you literally live through the experience. It has nothing to do with only comparing yourself to the median or upper quintile of public school socializers. The only way that position would seem reasonable to you is if you never met any homeschoolers or only talked to the parents, who obviously will be extremely hesitant to admit to mistakes because it makes them look bad.
There's also a huge and obvious problem with studying homeschooling. Part of the disadvantage is that each homeschool environment will be radically different because it's impossible to control for what a given home life is, the type of parent that would homeschool their child, and the sort of education they otherwise would have had if they weren't homeschooled. It's also really easy to track down all the homeschoolers that ended up going to college because that data is already gathered. It's a lot harder to track down all the homeschoolers that never left their parents basement or work the night shift at the 7/11 because they barely learned how to read, so you really can't say that "statistically" it's better or worse. Of course the data will be skewed so homeschoolers seem like higher performers.
I'll just add: It's a common mistake to compare yourself against people who are in the upper quintiles of the "other" category. When you compare your social skills with others, are you including the full spectrum of folks who go to school - including dropouts, etc?
> This means that for most parents, once your kid hits highschool you can't teach them anything outside of whatever you have a bachelor's in,
A bigger issue is that teaching (and teaching kids even moreso than adults) is itself a skill, and a skill lots of people with degrees don't have even in their degree field. The most successful homeschool parents I've known haven't used private tutors or been omnicompetent, but have been professional educators. Who, for those who weren't professional educators of children to start with, spent a lot of effort learning about child development abd childhood education to be successful at homeschooling.
if you haven't actually gone to school then how can you judge the benefits of the socialization it provides?
some of us prefer to socialize outside of school with kids that actually share our interests rather than being forced to interact with kids that we have nothing in common with.
school comes with bullying, peer pressure and a lot of other negatives in socialization that only the "normal" kids will get through relatively unscathed.
i count myself lucky that i only experienced mild bullying and being an outsider completely eliminated any issues of peer pressure for me as i simply had no need or desire to fit in.
there are plenty of other alternatives where you can socialize. be it boy/girl scouts, music classes, some sports or other activities.
of course, if you didn't get to participate in those either, then you really did miss out. i am sorry for that. your parents failed you at that point. however, if you think that school would have helped you, i would not be so sure about that.
To argue against your point that public school wouldn't have helped requires me to share really personal experiences. It's frustrating to be forced to share them over and over with people who probably won't take the time to actually learn from them.
I picked up social skills extremely quickly when I started college, but the first two years were absolutely abysmal to such a degree that I genuinely believed for a period that I had undiagnosed autism. I ended up turning out pretty gregarious and I'm probably average to above-average at making connections and coming off as normal by now, but an enormous amount of suffering could have been avoided. The social situations I was afforded as a child didn't provide nearly enough opportunity to learn and fail.
I had a glimpse of what the alternative would have been like because I got to take drivers' ed at a public school. You might think putting your kid in cub scouts or homeschool co-op is a substitute but it really isn't. If your kid only hangs out with homeschool kids they only get to see how the weird kids act. And if they're in cub scouts they're automatically at a disadvantage because a lot of the other kids are going to already know each other from school.
A lot of people like you come into the conversation asking to hear about the experiences of grown homeschooled children, but once they say something you don't like you suddenly turn into an expert on the subject because their lived experiences aren't representative of whatever you imagine homeschooling is like.
i don't think anyone's experience is representative of anything because everyone's experience is different. they are all anecdotes.
if we compare your and my story then apparently your homeschool experience matches my public school experience. how does that fit together?
i am not claiming that homeschooling would have been better for me, but only that it would not have been any worse.
it really depends on the individual character. maybe public school would have been better for you because it appears you are a social person, and all you lacked was an opportunity to learn those skills. i wasn't social to begin with, and what i needed was a group of equal peers. so yes, hanging out with other wierd kids would have been exactly what i needed, because i would have allowed me to make friends with someone. i could not get that from public school, because i was the only wierd kid there.
> school comes with bullying, peer pressure and a lot of other negatives in socialization that only the "normal" kids will get through relatively unscathed.
So does real life. People need experience dealing with these situations. IMO, it would be better to deal with them at school where you have parents & teachers to fall back on, rather than than waiting until you are an adult without nearly as much support.
parents are often helpless to deal with bullying in school because it depends on the teachers to actually do something about it.
all i learned about bullying in school is to distance myself from those idiots and subconsciously i probably also learned to avoid making friends. i don't see how that was helpful. i didn't experience real socialization until i entered university where i found actually like-minded individuals with common interest. and it's not true that there is less support when you are an adult. on the contrary. the friends i made in university were my support. i didn't have that before.
i am not complaining, my school experience wasn't that bad. but i seriously doubt that any form of home schooling would have been worse.
As an adult, you usually have the option of walking away.
> People need experience dealing with these situations.
I think kids need to be taught the kind of self-respect such that they know when it is appropriate to deploy a healthy "go fuck yourself". Not clear that state schooling does a great job of this - indeed, if it's teaching them anything, it seems to be you are going to get bullied and you have no choice butto put up with it.
We homeschooled. Whenever we worried about socialization, we grabbed our kids, dragged them into the bathroom, and beat them up for their lunch money.
I'm joking, but the point is, socialization in public school can take some horrible forms. (At least, it can in the US. Maybe schools in Australia are more sane.) That socialization isn't necessarily a good match for adult society, either, or even for university.
Socialization is still a concern. But socialize your children to adult society. They don't need to be socialized to public school society.
Throwaway for obvious reasons. I'd caution you against getting too smug about this outlook.
> Socialization is still a concern. But socialize your children to adult society. They don't need to be socialized to public school society.
I was homeschooled and my parents explicitly went for this approach. It's a great way of turning out a materially successful miserable loner; perfect adult-pleasers who've never had real friends. You may think you're only cutting them off from bullying or emojispeak or whatever, but what you're really eliminating are opportunities to learn the dynamics of peer relationships. And no, socialization with other homeschooled kids doesn't count.
Parents tend to vastly underestimate the importance of cultural fluency in the formation of peer relationships, and I think that's a tragic detriment to a lot of kids, especially the ones (like me) who internalize the sort of bullshit elitist attitudes that often inform non religious decisions to homeschool. And yes - my parents weren't religious and were highly educated on all the trendiest homeschooling topics.
I'm obviously fairly steamed about this and deeply personally biased, so take my words with a grain of salt. This isn't intended as a personal attack in any sense.
Have you grown up like this? I have. It's a lot more alienating than you think. In my case it was a religious upbringing with little outside cultural influences, and it does make it hard to interact and socialize with others.
You don't have shared experiences or languages. There's usually only a small amount of children who share what you experienced, and you don't always understand when they are joking, or how to deal with situations, or even what they are saying. And many times the kids you do know are weird or worse than those your parents think they are protecting you from.
It’s all anecdotal until we have some systematic way to study things.
I know plenty of homeschooled kids who are now perfectly happy, well adjusted adults. The only thing I can see that they have in common is a tendency to think for themselves.
Most of them are now homeschooling their kids. And their kids are also happy and well adjusted— much more so than the kids I went to school with.
(I’m a maladjusted product of mostly standard education, so take this with a grain of salt.)
If that's what their friends are talking about over the lunch table, then absolutely. Or, do you let your taste in music dictate your kids' social horizons?
And I'll reiterate: Just because "everyone is doing it" does not make it worth doing just to fit in.
I urge you to consider that fitting into the culture isn't worth it if the culture is bad. You may not see the culture's taste in music as bad, which is fair, but I am sure in other cultures (say in highly restrictive and conservative cultures) you'd be ashamed to be culturally literate (antebellum south? Jim Crow era?).
i am going to have to disagree. you make it sound like that becoming a loner is a better option than fitting in with the cardi b crowd. but that is a false alternative. if the cardi b crowd is not something you want to subject your kids to, then you need to provide an alternative community for them. you can't just cut them off from everyone just because you don't like their culture.
A film I really like on this topic is Class Dismissed. It shows the journey of two girls who leave school and it's really amazing to watch them relax, get more at ease with themselves and make friends over the course of the film.
My homeschooled kids can't communicate in emoji-talk, it's true. But they easily interact with both adults and other homeschooled children on both small-talk and meaningful conversational levels. That's more valuable in the long run.
I tutored home schooled kids for years (and many other kids and college students as well). I'm sure some of it is selection bias of those who reach out to a tutor in the first place, but I strongly disagree that homeschooled kids are socially stunted (agreeing with parent's comment). Rather, they seem to be quite capable of interacting at a far more mature level than their public school peers.
It works both ways. I am socially stunted and I went to public school in old country ( same issues really ). Sometimes I would argue it is because I went to public school, but my siblings are normal so maybe its just bad luck on my part.
> But socialize your children to adult society. They don't need to be socialized to public school society.
They don't need to be socialized to any particular public school society, but they do need to be socialized to the society of children. This is not adult society, and the difference is important. Sibling relationships are important but necessarily unusual, it's also necessary to go beyond this.
If you try to inculcate adult society only in your children, I think you are doing them a great disservice.
Most home schooling families I know of find others nearby and do group learning or activities on at least a semi-regular basis- plus joining local sport or acting or hobby clubs, or church groups. The image of a maladjusted home schooled kid who never met another child is something of a bad trope, I think. There are tons of resources and "toolkits" online.
As a first step, I would recommend looking up a local group (or at least one in your state, since requirements vary) and talk to parents who have already done it.
What city are you in? There are usually local groups on Facebook. Also, try positing on SEA homeschoolers and looking for others in your area. https://facebook.com/groups/seahomeschoolers
Also these:
llinois H.O.U.S.E
“Illinois HOUSE is a statewide network of support groups for people involved in homeschooling. We provide email and phone support about issues related to Illinois homeschooling. Common questions include how to withdraw a child from public school, what the school district needs from homeschooling families and how to deal with officials who ask for more than they’re entitled to receive. We have member groups throughout the Chicago suburban area and more spread across the state.”
Metro-East Secular Homeschoolers
“This is a group to make like-minded connections with other homeschoolers (or those considering homeschool!) in the Metro-East area.”
Pekin/Peoria Area (Illinois) Secular Homeschool Families
“Any PARENT/GUARDIAN of a child 5-18 that is homeschooling in the Pekin/Peoria area is welcome to join this group. Our purpose is to connect and support other secular homeschool families in the area.”
QCA Secular Homeschool Group
“QCA Secular Homeschoolers is primarily geared toward families who are homeschooling for reasons other than religion and who are looking for an alternative to religious homeschool groups.”
Secular Homeschoolers of Bloomington-Normal
“We are an inclusive homeschool group that respects and values diverse perspectives. Our purpose is to connect and support Bloomington-Normal area homeschooling families in a non-faith based group for field trips, shared lessons, book clubs, and online discussions.”
Westside H.O.U.S.E.
“We are an inclusive, non-sectarian network of homeschool families who meet to enjoy activities together, share experiences and lend support to one another. Our chapter serves families throughout Greater Chicago and the Western Suburbs.”
I was homeschooled from 4th grade on through high school ("graduated" in 04). This is my personal take on it--I don't think people should do it unless they or their partner can dedicate most of their time to it, especially if they have more than one child. It takes a tremendous amount of emotional resilience and dedication to do it right, and if you teach them into high school, you'll need outside help. I think someone up the comment chain said the same thing. This is pure anecdote, but what I can contribute is that I had a hard time being disciplined. My folks were not terribly disciplined themselves, so they struggled to pass on those skills. I had a hard time learning on my own unless it was especially interesting to me. I developed an interest in math as an adult, but as a kid I absolutely needed outside guidance as a teenager, I lacked the ability to learn it on my own and my parents couldn't help very much, so I fell behind[1]. I took some online classes, which definitely helped in some ways, but at that point I was already struggling. It set the stage for a lot of personal struggles later on.
If you can do all that, and you can plug your kiddo into frequent social activities for her emotional wellbeing (homeschooling can be terribly lonely, especially for a teenager!), then I think it's a good option.
[1]I get that other school options don't guarantee these things won't happen. I get that socially awkward people go to public school. I'm just saying that if you go this route, you'll have no one to blame but yourself if things go wrong. That might be a worthy risk if your other options suck.
EDIT: The guy with 15 years of homeschooling experience had it EXACTLY right--do not attempt to recreate the public school experience. My mom even went so far as to create a classroom with desks the first year, God bless her.
Thanks so much for the great feedback. There are lots of ways for children educated by their parents to get positive social experiences. In terms of data, there have not been that many extensive studies on opting out of school in particular. And it would be hard to use that to judge the experience because there are so many different ways parents do it and reasons parent do it. What you might want to look at is research around parent participation in learning, which has been shown to be a deciding factor in student success regardless of school or teacher quality. Here are some resources and data around that. I'm also happy to talk further if you'd like insights on how to support your child making friend and learning teaching strategies as a parent. My email is manisha@modulo.app https://www.modulo.app/learning/parent-engagement
Hi Benjamin, I'm the writer of the modular learning article and would be happy to speak to you (for free of course) and exchange ideas or answer questions as best I can. Please feel free to contact me at manisha[at]modulo.app I also tried to write a short piece about getting started with a modular learning approach based on how I've observed most parents do it successfully. My email is manisha[at]modulo.app if I can be of help. And this offer extends to any parent who is reading this and needs someone to talk to. modulo.app/all-resources/getting-started-with-modular-learning
I wonder the extent to which homeschool kids tend to develop the social and academic traits that resemble their parents. My kids were school-schooled, but the kids who were diligent, self disciplined, and academically inclined had parents who were professors and doctors -- fields that select for the same characteristics.
My kids were involved in music, which is a popular activity among homeschool families, so we got to know quite a few people that way, and socially, the kids resembled their parents. Kids with competitive parents, tended to be competitive, kids with laid back parents were laid back.
Sick burn, and all too true in my experiences as both student, homeschooler, and parent of traditionally schooled kids. “From what I’ve seen, the goal of school is to do an adequate job preparing our future workforce to do jobs that were relevant yesterday.”
A smol human of average intelligence can complete average U.S. grade school material by the time they're 13-15, at a reasonable pace, if they get individual instruction.
Imagine the advantage you get getting there 2-3 years ahead of most people.
> Imagine the advantage you get getting there 2-3 years ahead of most people.
IME, there isn't much. You get to college a few years early, it's a kind of awkward experience, and then life happens.
Some of my friends lost a year or two due to the adjustment.
Other friends ended up in boring low-risk careers and regret not being mature enough at graduation to know what they wanted to do (switching majors, grad school, starting a company, etc.)
In the best case you start the career that you would've had anyways 2-3 years earlier.
I've met a lot of people who got started on life early (you probably have too). Most look back on it as having no material effect on their lives. A few consider it the worst decision they ever made.
Some people imagine a huge financial difference, but retirement is a long game and other variables dominate. A $10K difference in your salary at your first position, or getting laid off at an unlucky time, or choosing to optimize for something other than income, or buying randomcoin at the right/wrong time, or having your rsus vest in the right quarters, etc. are all going to have a larger financial impact than an extra 2 years in the labor market over a 30+ year career.
I personally chose longer schooling because I loved school. Looking at people who graduated earlier I’m envious that they can start a family earlier. I don’t know about money, but with kids I think age is important (doubly so for women).
> Looking at people who graduated earlier I’m envious that they can start a family earlier.
Can they? You can start having kids as soon as you find a spouse. College is a great time to date with the intention of finding a spouse. Going to college at 15 can make finding a spouse early in life considerably more difficult.
Sounds like an advertisement. Knock the current system and then paint a rosy picture of something that is not widespread and has only been happening for maybe a year or two, with no long term results or implementation strategies.
Fascinating reading. We have two school age children, and two who are not yet school aged. We would like to home school, but have the same concern others here have articulated (and other HN posters have answered, partially) regarding socialization.
One concern I have is that an oft-given solution to socialization is "church," but we are not religious and do not plan to become so. This limits options somewhat, and also makes us unlike (our perception of) other home-school families.
Would be glad to hear other suggestions from others who might have had this experience (i.e., being non-religious homeschoolers).
If you just don’t religion, a small, local church might still be a good call, proving they’re amicable. Your kids are going to learn about religion one way or another. Look at this as an education into what religious people are really like.
I don't know a single homeschool parent that tries to replicate public education at home. Most go for something that falls under the Montesorri umbrella, which seems to work well.
I've heard good things about Montessori. I've also heard good things about classical education which is inspired by the trivium and quadrivium (there's actually a revival going on right now, I believe largely among Catholics[0]). The influence is Dewey is taken to be disastrous.
Different "modular", but it came to mind: years back I saw a paper proposing a modular medical training regime for India, intending to make it reentrant and incremental commitment. Core observation was there's overlap between training say a community health worker and a nurse, an advanced nurse and a doctor, an optometrist and an ophthalmologist. So rather than having training streams diverge early, there'd be courses in common. And rather than having to restart from scratch if switching streams, or returned from profession to school to upgrade, you could place out of parts. Sort of like US layered nursing credentials, but writ larger. Hypothesized societal benefits included lower latency demand-response, easier/faster scaling, and greater equity.
Imagine if modular, rather than pipeline, was the default societal approach to structuring education?
(A personal aside: I'm interested in exploratory discussion of transformative improvement of preK-13 science content/progressions/interactives, using extreme domain expertise and SER mashups. Science and engineering are a richly interwoven interdisciplinary tapestry - what if they were taught like that? If anyone knows of settings for such discussion, I'd love to hear of it - thanks! Bonus fun: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nUyVd1pO3nI 5-8-yr old picture book to vaccinate against natural selection misconceptions https://www.bu.edu/cdl/files/2017/10/Emmons_et_al-2017-Journ... )
Which understandably focuses on individual deployable innovations. Rather than on exploring mashups of multiple hard-to-deploy innovations, with interdependencies, regardless of how awesome their potential synergies.
For example, on better teaching of deep time, or genetics central dogma, or natural selection, separately. Rather than on say "if all of those, and more, were simultaneously done cutting-edge-research well or better, what possibilities might that open up for an evolution-rooted biology learning progression? How about in K-6?" Or "if we managed to successfully teach both size/scale down to atoms, and a novel atoms-up foundation, in K-2, neither of which have been done even in (quite unimpressive) research, what might a broad and modern material sciences preK-8 progression look like? Including atoms-dancing phonons, gels, multiscale structure, and so much more."
And instructors are understandably focused on the performance art of triage education of their students at hand, towards standardized exams and incremental outcomes, under severe resource constraints. And textbooks... sigh.
So there are few incentives for anyone to explore "what might this all look like, if it wasn't wretched". And the expertise requirements seem extreme - like "biology tome with a hundred authors" extreme, but with extensive collaboration also required, and for something much much smaller. There's hope, but it's non-trivial.
Whole-program learning progression rewrites in life-sciences professional education is perhaps the/a closest analogy. But even there, time and effort constraints severely restrict exploration. You can't afford to explore both how to successfully give med school graduate students a firm grasp of size, and how to use that to better teach physical biology. The absence of each denying incentive to the other. So basically neither happens, on a timescale of decades. But perhaps, if there were a clearer vision of what it might look like, of the payoff, there might be greater motivation to work towards it.
Andrew of Mixergy podcast recently had great guest and episode related to better schooling with Chrisman Frank, the founder of Synthesis.
Intro: If youve been a long-time listener you might have heard me complain about my education. So much so that a guest at one time told me to stop. But I still think there should be a better way. Another person who feels that way is Elon Musk. He hired someone to create a whole new curriculum for his kids. Well, todays guest got to see inside that program and he was so blown away by it that he created a company that kids outside of SpaceX can get access to.
In many ways, this is what modern homeschooling really is. Don't get me wrong. I know that many people who are dropping out of traditional school try to recreate school at home and that is a mistake. But many homeschoolers now follow this kind of model.
My family has been homeschooling for 15 years and my kids take science from one person, choir from another. The kids volunteer with me in the community and do a lot of following their interests along with their very basic requirements. Your grade is your age, not your academics so you go at your own pace for learning. We have had so much success with it that I recommend this approach highly.
I mean.. I generally agree with the position taken in the article, but it's pretty light on meaningful information or detail. Is the goal just to show a bunch of people that there are more options than they think?
Just a note: since writing this, several families have asked me how to get started with Modular Learning and make sure their child is on track socially, emotionally and academically. Here is a guide to get started. Please feel free to contact me if you have any questions or need support. manisha[at]modulo.app
https://www.modulo.app/all-resources/getting-started-with-mo...
I was part of a discussion few years ago where few people of a nearby university were very eager to implement modular learning, micro-credentials etc. They were discussing this in all earnest. Soon they realised that the logistics are just too much to handle this with the combinations that can happen with the modularisation and micro-credentials. And the evaluations becomes not just nightmarish but also very difficult to achieve.
The realisation was that this sounds very good on paper but is a nightmare in practice.
For most universities, their micro-degrees program are considered to be a revenue source. They do not issue those directly under the same brand as their main undergraduate college.
My church has a homeschool group and they have an open house every year where people sign up for classes independently offered by various tutors.
The tutors hold classes for multiple students
Technically it's homeschool because all children are out of the public school system and responsibility for their education has not been given to a private school.
But in reality, many kids take classes together with various tutors the church group organizes.
I was homeschooled two decades ago, and I had a similar experience: some core classes were delivered via satellite (and recorded into VHS tapes), other classes were taught at a church, some were taught in other families' homes, one class was taught in a private school, I was a part of afterschool clubs, had frequent field trips, and did a lot of self directed learning. The freedom for self directed learning was probably the number one benefit I got out of being "home"-schooled.
Despite the authors experience, she still percieves goal 1 and 2 in the wrong order. When the primary stake holder in schools the parents/voters make the biggest complaint the most is when its because a school is closed for a day, forcing them to leave work / miss thier tv show.
The second most important stakeholders, the government, set a standardised curriculum so they can have thier authorised inspectors report to the primary stakeholders the government school is either "excellent" or "outstanding"
The teachers the third, can talk, unionise, move to private education, they can try have high personal standards but they choose to not have a choice in improving the system of schooling, unless they are some religious school which has greater agency but they generally only utilise this to bolt on thier respective ideology.
the stakeholders of lowest importance, the children, get what thier given, and probably should be a bit more thankfull about it.
There are really only 3 subjects that matter math english And science in that order. Everything else is nice to have make you more well rounded but not strictly required. If you can create good engaging modules in any of those that’s all I really care about. The problem is that many have tried but I have found nothing out there that works well. I have a preschool age kid and nothing really is engaging
"Tracking" was supposed to mitigate this to some extent, but it tends to be a) used across the board for multiple subjects and b) used as a means of sorting students into winners (who are richly rewarded with status and additional opportunities) and losers (who are deprived of rewards and benefits rather than offered additional help and assistance.)
Universities use a modular approach to great effect: you can usually take any course (even graduate courses) if you've completed the prerequisites. And there are multiple ways of fulfilling graduation requirements.
A limitation of the university approach is that for a given course in a given term, everyone in the course is usually still in lock-step. Sometimes this is mitigated by offering multiple versions of a course with different time scales (usually an "accelerated" version for people who are familiar with the material and/or want to devote more time per week.)