Comment by PhaedrusV | Hacker News Reader

Comment by PhaedrusV | Hacker News Reader

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Will be. Was homeschooled myself. Several reasons:

1) I'm responsible for the raising and education of my children, and I'm not going to outsource the bulk of that to strangers.

2) Less time-consuming. From talking to my friends who have 2+ children in school it sounds like they spend about 1 hour per day on average driving their kids around to and from school (not counting extra-curricular activities, parent teacher conferences, homework help, etc...). My mom says her steady-state time expenditure was around 40 minutes per day for all 3 of us, mostly grading math and papers.

3) Way better outcomes. Homeschoolers average at the 87th percentile in national standardized testing, and homeschoolers whose parents make less than $35K still average in the 85th percentile. (http://www.topmastersineducation.com/homeschooled/) On the anecdotal level, I'm a former USAF pilot-turned drone guy, my brother is a successful artist, and my little sister is working on her PhD in Aerospace Engineering when she's not kicking all our asses at fantasy football.

4) Better socialization. Yeah, I said better. I admit that I'm less used to spending time with people my exact age than most of my peers, but I interact much better than they do with people younger than me and people older than me. Funny thing, it turns out once you're out of college, most of the rest of your life will be spent with people who aren't your exact age. Homeschooling prepares you for that way better than public schooling.

5) "The Underground History of American Education", by John Taylor Gatto. Just read it. It'll blow your mind, and it's well-supported. TL;DR, our school system was modeled on the Prussian system designed to build an army that could beat Napoleon's troops. It's designed to create obedient myrmidons who don't know how ignorant they truly are. Don't worry, I'm sure your school was different.

I think the social aspect will be extremely dependent on how much the parents put into that part. The majority of home-schooled kids (now adults) I know, were socially stunted because of it, but I don't believe this is as much a fault of homeschooling as it is a symptom of those particular families not putting enough effort into integrating social environments into part of the routine. That part comes for "free" in classroom-based education, but it doesn't meant they have a monopoly on it.

It's substantially more complicated than that.

I homeschooled my Twice Exceptional sons. They are both socially awkward and probably qualify for a diagnosis on the Autism Spectrum, though they don't have a formal diagnosis.

They did much better socially and were much happier with being removed from an environment that was very stressful for them. However, if you met them now and only knew that they were homeschooled and are obviously socially awkward, you could easily leap to the conclusion that they are socially awkward because they were homeschooled.

Additionally, there is a cultural element to any social outcome. There is a certain amount of being inculcated with the right behaviors for the setting. Being homeschooled means you lack some of the same context as the majority of people who attended school. So it's easy to read as socially awkward because you don't readily fit in, even if your social skills are actually better in some important ways.

Think of how immigrants tend to seem awkward and don't readily fit it. It has nothing to do with whether or not they have good social skills. They are just strangers in a strange land.

I know a few home schooled kids that are now adults. They're so far from being socially stunted.

The social aspects of school aren't always positive. Most adults that have difficulty interacting with other people tend to have had a bad time in school. I've seen a little bit of naivety from home schooled people but I've never seen someone full of hurt like I have from people from public school.

I was exposed to hardcore pornography and drugs in school, before I was ten, by other kids. I was beaten up lots of times and bullied and I lived in fear. Eventually I ended up being more of a fighter out of necessity. I guess that could be considered "free" integration into the social environment.

It's partly whether the parents take the time to make sure the kids are socialized, and partly selection bias. A lot of parents decide to homeschool their kids precisely because the kids are having a tough time in school socially, whether it's from bullying or from mild or severe developmental disorders. In my experience, a much higher percentage of homeschoolers enter homeschooling with dyslexia or autism than you see in the typical public school classroom.

A lot of parents choose to homeschool specifically because they don't want their child pidgeonholed and pipelined into special needs classrooms.

As a somewhat socially stunted adult that went to public school I've wondered if the parents having somewhat active social lives (mine didn't) was more important than socializing at school. Amongst friends that I know the parents of and that I went to school with there is a high correlation between their social skills and the time their parents spend socializing.

In my experience growing up the homeschooled kids were usually from very religious families who did not want their kids being social with the general population, so you have a point there. I wonder how a "regular" family that happens to homeschool their kid would differ.

But I mean, if their kids found spouses in the religious group, and had families, I find it difficult to classify them as socially stunted. Perhaps they would be socially stunted in mainstream culture, but one is forced to think they did just fine in their own.

I guess my point is that in my anecdotal experience, parents homeschooled kids to "protect" them from regular society. Ergo, they were very sheltered and only able to socialize within the church.

If it works for them, great, not hating - but I doubt that's what people in this thread mean when they talk about homeschooled kids having a normal, social life.

I'm currently reading Linchpin by Seth Godin so your fifth point resonates with me. In his book he points out that in many cases companies want to employee the cheapest labor possible and the best way to do this is to make jobs generic such that the people doing the jobs are easily replaceable.

> “If human beings are a natural resource for factories, then your goal as a factory owner is to get good ones, cheap. So captains of industry and government reorganized our society around this goal.”

He basically feels that this is what has lead to the government focusing so much on standardized testing. Basically just forcing schools to stamp out identical copies that can fill the generic jobs.

I haven't read that one, but Gatto is well worth a look. He has several books, but IMHO "Underground History" is by far the most interesting. He was a former NY State and NYC Public School Teacher of the Year, so knows of what he speaks.

If you want to get a no-cost idea of his viewpoint, read his "I quit, I think" letter, published on the op-ed page of the WSJ.

https://www.educationrevolution.org/blog/i-quit-i-think/

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