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* What justifies the laws that compelled my parents to send me to a place they knew (at some level) was hurting me?*

Benign paternalism which says "X% of students really dislike the experience of attending school. The average case for dropouts is 'totally $&$#ed.' We'll institutionalize them now because it is a darn sight cheaper than institutionalizing them later, permanently."

But isn't it a mistake to call it "benign paternalism"? It wasn't benign to me. Children, even though they aren't capable of fending for themselves apart from their parents, are still people. Isn't the entire point to do what's best for each child? Isn't it commonly understood that we're all different in positive ways, and that this is something to celebrate, rather than to blithely crush?

Benign paternalism means "we're not acting of malice", not that every well-off kid with great options and social support networks will have their heart sing hymns of praise at the notion of being forced to attend class every day.

It was an imposition on you to go to school. At the time, it may even have felt like a major imposition. You'll get over it. We imposed upon your time because e.g. a poor kid in your local inner city who prefers hanging to all that books n' shit would, with about 100% certainty, durably ruin their life given the option not to attend school. It is very hard to "get over" being poor, illiterate, with a criminal record, etc.

I didn't become the person I am today as a result of anyone else's effort but my own. No one took my exams for me, nor did they read my textbooks and do the mental work of integrating facts and diagrams and the like. No one made me love my wife, or decide to get married. No one else decided that I would learn or do anything that did me any good.

Why do you assume I was a well-off kid, or that I had great a social support network? There were a couple of times (early on) when my parents were flat-out broke. I didn't wear new clothes to school until I was thirteen.

Even the poor inner city kid has free choice. It is simply not true that all people will deterministically fail given the same adverse circumstances. Why did Michael Faraday rise to become a prominent physicist and chemist, despite his poor background and total lack of social support? At adulthood, despite whatever adverse conditions endured previously, all people are responsible for their own lives (excepting people who truly cannot help it, i.e., those with grave mental illnesses).

If you think social policy should be premised on the idea that any random person is likely to be Michael Faraday, there probably isn't much productive discussion about policy to be had with you. That doesn't make you wrong, just an intractable absolutist.

I don't think that any particular random person, given only that information and nothing more, is likely to be the next Faraday. But I know for a fact that it is possible for any person to be, and that the same can't be said for any other type of living entity (e.g., a dog).

And for the record, I am a contextual absolutist, which is something altogether different than an absolutist.

"contextual absolutist" - nice oxymoron, Einstein.

Seriously, it isn't an oxymoron. To claim certainty in a given context of knowledge is foundational for both philosophy and the special sciences (such as physics, chemistry, etc.) Contextual absolutism amounts to saying, "Given all the things I know (this is part of the context), I am absolutely certain of this conclusion. I am aware that it is possible that I might come across yet more facts that might cause me to revise or even abandon my conclusion, but right now, I know this much."

(To conclude that something is possible, or probable, and not yet certain is itself an example of this process.)

To use your example, people often claim that Newton was proven wrong by Einstein. But I disagree. Newton's context included observations of the local solar system, and depended on the instruments of his time. His system still works in the majority of situations encountered today. Because the context hasn't changed appreciably in those situations, we can apply his mechanics and claim that they are correct. Conversely, GPS and particle physics and the like are out of bounds, contextually. For that, you must understand relativity, which is another truth that is absolutely true in a still wider context.

Of course, there is a price to pay for relativity, which is extra computational and pedagogical complexity. Indeed, this alone is enough to keep Newton around for millennia to come. Remember that knowledge is not an end in itself, despite what some may say. All knowledge is a means to some end. We don't all know the same things, and we can't anyway.

Finally, how could we ever get to the point where we can appreciate relativity, or engineer systems where it is necessary to know about that if we were to simply discard Newton's theory as "false"? Science (and indeed all knowledge) is all about what some deride as mere "scaffolding." But I don't deride it - and that's why I'm a contextual absolutist.

IMO social policy should focus on the average case, but with easy-to-access exceptions dealing with the best and worst cases. Society is done a great disservice if gifted students are prevented from reaching their potential (thus preventing them from being as beneficial to society as they could) for the sake of the potential dropouts.

> I didn't become the person I am today as a result of anyone else's effort but my own.

Just as I'm not posting this reply as a result of anyone else's effort but my own (not).

> Even the poor inner city kid has free choice. ... At adulthood, ... all people are responsible for their own lives (excepting people who truly cannot help it, i.e., those with grave mental illnesses).

I used to think free will and personal responsibility were among the absolutes of the universe. These days I'm not nearly so sure. We know so little about why different people perceive the world, and choose behaviors, in such different ways. "Grave mental illness" seems to be just one end of a continuum.

I disagree. I would say something like, "I decided to drive 70 MPH instead of 65, or to drive over flying, or this particular route instead of the other one, which is more scenic, but slightly longer, etc."

I am not in any way saying that people don't reap the benefits of living in society with other people. But your ability to travel at 70 MPH came as a result of people thinking on their own first, which set the stage for productive exchanges between people on a team. The fact that this is a virtuous cycle often confuses people into thinking that thought is a collective activity. But it is not: while I have benefited immensely from people grading my exams and papers, in conversation, code reviews, pair programming (from an earlier career), etc., I still had to prepare for all of those things alone. Without independent thought, what value could I bring to the table?

I had a very similar, if not identical, experience only I went to a fairly poor elementary / middle school and a good high school. I finished school with a D average.. and managed to still get into a private college on the strength of my test scores and writing sample. I've since excelled at college and graduate school.

I spend a lot of time these days wondering if I should home school my children. I learned so much more at home than I did at school. I'd hate to give my children the type of experience I did in public school.

I spend a lot of time these days wondering if I should home school my children.

All four of my children have always been homeschooled until this week. My oldest is grown up, living on his own on his own dime while he finishes up his college degree program--or perhaps founds a start-up before finishing his degree. (He is an occasional participant here, mostly in threads different from the threads I post in.) My second son began attending our local public high school the day after United States Labor Day. So he is in his third day of classroom school as I type this. He commented last evening "I know it's only been two days, but I already notice that I can learn faster when I homeschooling than at school." He and my wife and I will continue to discuss what trade-offs are most important in making his educational plans. My third son was just driven by my wife this morning across our sprawling metropolitan area for a joint homeschoolers class on physics, taught by a Ph.D. physicist who takes time off from engineering and inventing work at a big corporation to teach the class. There are a lot of very interesting learning opportunities for homeschoolers these days.

After edit: I just saw this response to the submitted article that opened the thread here

http://www.parentatthehelm.com/6666/homeschooling-parent-res...

from a homeschooling parent with even more experience than I have. Her perspective is her own.

I can't imagine withholding from my children the type of experience I had in public school. For 8 hours a day I was away from home, among dozens of people my age. I had access to a pretty good library, far better than my small town's public library. I played a school-owned bassoon (these would typically cost over $3000) in our concert band, learned bass drum for marching band, got to go on band trips. I learned leadership and co-operation with a variety of different types of people--ranging from straight-A Mormon girls to poor white kids to Mexican wanna-be gangsters--in class, in band (especially during band camp), and as the eventual captain of the cross country team. I took cooking courses, got to make nitrocellulose in our reasonably well-outfitted science department, dissected pigs, and build my own cluster as an independent study project. All in the public school of my little town of 2,000 people, with around 60 in my graduating class.

Classes did not challenge me, but I buckled down, listened to lecture, did my homework in class, and read when there was nothing else to do. As everyone here is so fond of stating, if you're "too smart for school" you can teach yourself in the evenings or even during class--but don't rob your child of the opportunity to try new things, meet people, and for god's sake GET OUT OF THE FUCKING HOUSE FOR A WHILE.

I mentioned above, I went to a fairly good highschool. We didn't have classes on Thursdays in my highschool. Instead we were required to participate in an unpaid internships on Thursday. I volunteered at the local metropolitan "science center" where kids went for field trips and people visited. It was awesome... Almost every other volunteer was a home schooler. My best friend was home schooled (met in college) and he is a concert level pianist and extremely well rounded. Nationally home schoolers get together fairly often and have "home school reunions".

You are speaking like someone with little knowledge of and/or interaction with the homeschool population. You seem to have some severe misunderstandings about the homeschool community. I think you should alleviate this large hole in your knowledge before you berate a lifestyle you aren't familiar with.

I grew up in a small town, so you're right--there weren't many homeschoolers. I think there were two families in the area that homeschooled but later sent their kids to public school for high school. These kids were the stereotype of homeschooled kids: didn't really make friends, didn't interact well with people, got good grades. One was a very nice guy who I became friends with in cross country. Another seemed to be overtaken with the "preacher's son" thing, tended to do crazy stuff and act out once he finally broke away from the house. His sister was a strange, quiet girl who would wear her parka during indoor P.E. so she would get heat exhaustion and be allowed to sit down.

The nearest towns to mine were all about 40 minutes away, and not even the largest one had more than 20,000 people--not a big population to draw homeschoolers from. In the case of the homeschoolers I met, I definitely got the impression that their lives had been pretty well isolated, outside of church--religion being the reason they were homeschooled in the first place.

I appreciate the way public school throws you into a mix with a bunch of people you would not normally be around. Do homeschool kids sit in the back of the bus and have the weird dude show them how to make a marijuana pipe out of a pepsi can? When you're hanging with other homeschool kids, is there really that much opportunity to learn how to deal with macho cholo bullshit when all you want them to do is load the band truck? To me, it seems like it would generally be a very restricted community: deeply religious people who don't want their children polluted, and parents who are well-off and smart enough to do the teaching themselves.

I probably could have learned more academically being homeschooled, but at least where I grew up, public school was the only social game in town, and looking back I am glad I went. When I have kids, there will be serious consideration to homeschooling for a while, but I strongly believe that their first year or two of school and at least some of the middle/high school years should be spent at a public school.

In a small town the school system serves two primary purposes, neither of which are education. It's primarily a way to employ local people. The sports teams provide the main form of entertainment in the town outside of alcohol and television.

In many ways my scholastic experience mirrored yours, and it wasn't until years later that I learned our entire method of school education for k-12 is based on creating industrial factory workers.

Sit still, quietly do your work (which means memorization) and do your time (x hours per day for x days per week for x years), and you will get your degree, which would lead to a job working in a factory where you can do the same until retirement.

Our economy has changed, our culture has changed, and the schools are changing (I see that with my own daughter's experience), but for many people my age, we suffered through the change without support.

Now, the really big elephant in the room is the collegiate education system, which has become a system of paying exorbitant sums of money for a degree that will never pay for itself, for most students.

  which means memorization

I wonder, why do people have problem with this. The trend seems to be a desire to learn without puttint any effort into that. I doubt that's possible at all.

I agree. Memorization of basic facts creates the foundation upon which more abstract concepts can be understood and developed.

This is entirely true, but i've found that schools also focus on rote memorization of useless or nonfoundational facts.

For example, in third grade my class had to memorize the multiplication table up to 12x12, but we didn't have to memorize that multiplication is really just a shorthand for repeated addition, so by eighth grade there were kids in my class that didn't understand why I wrote 6x5 instead of 5+5+5+5+5+5 in certain cases; they were also amazed that I managed to get the right answer even though i didn't do the problem the right way. We also had to memorize the squares of every number up to 20, but we didn't have to memorize the fact that squaring is a shorthand for multiplication of some number by itself, so some kids in my class could tell you that 15 squared was 225, but had to use paper and pencil to tell you what 15*15 was. And don't even get me started on kids who knew that 9x7=63, but had to use pencil, paper, and long division to tell you that 63%9=7.

Memorization comes from understanding, not the other way around. If you memorize the alphabet - congrats you can sing a song. If you understand the alphabet - you can write a book, singing the song is a side effect.

I think your example here undermines your point. There's not much understanding to be had of the (roman/english) alphabet. You memorize 26 characters as a foundation from which to build words. It's essentially an arbitrary set without underlying logic.

A better example to express your point would be multiplication tables. Why memorize a list of multiplicands and their products rather than learn what multiplication means so that you can generate them on the fly and only memorize as a by-product of common use?

Memorization to pass a test is just data that you will discard once the need for retention has passed.

In order to learn something usefully, and be able to retain that knowledge for years to come, you must have a fundamental understanding of the underlying principles.

I have to agree. However, I had two teachers in high school who I still have great appreciation for.

They were completely hands off. No lectures or anything of that sort. They only provided problems for the students to solve. If you needed help, they would point you to the nearest computer with internet access. Failing that, a shelf of books. Not only did you have to learn the subject matter, but you had to learn how to learn. I took away far more from their classes than I did in any other. If we want our students to become brilliant engineers and scientists, we need to reduce the "education" and increase the learning.

As an aside, I distinctly remember one of them stating that school would become unnecessary in the future. The internet would provide everything required to learn as you see fit. I honestly believe that time is here. If you teach the kids how to learn, they will.

I had some good teachers in the mix as well. My favorite was a dorky (sorry, but he was) Economics and Government teacher who did two awesome things:

1. Brought in a financial broker who taught us how to read the stock pages

2. Ran for a local political office so we could see how the process really worked. He would talk about his debate experiences, his polling numbers and his platform to us in a completely matter-of-fact way, and this fascinated me to the political process. Probably the best nugget was the reality, which he brought up, was that while he tried his best to be charismatic, he just wasn't, and his efforts to get noticed as a candidate were effectively shouting in the wind. He was resoundingly defeated in the elections, just another no-name candidate in a sea of people who most voters have never heard of, but our class learned more about politics in one school year than decades of watching CNN.

"Yet my experience has led me to believe that K-12 didn't matter."

The reason for this is that the more wealthy and highly educated your parents are, the less you learn in school as a kid, even though you likely go to a better school. (Or, to be more precise, you learn roughly the same amount as low-SES kids in absolute terms, but it's a much smaller percentage of your total learning.)

The truth is that the public school system is not designed to cater to the outliers (both above & below average) in any meaningful way. You can blame this on the schools, but it seems to me that it's at least partially the result of practical considerations.

For example, how do you measure the knowledge someone possesses in a cost-effective way? Schools have settled on standardized tests; the worst method, except all the others. And this is hardly unique to schools - consider the typical software job interview questions. Once the end goal (passing tests) is in place, there is incentive for schools is to teach their students content that might show up on the test. If your interests align with this content, great, otherwise you're forced to slog through it anyways.

One solution I've heard is specializing sooner, but for many kids making the decision this early might prematurely lock them into a career they don't actually like or that has poor job prospects. Sure, some will be able to make the correct decision, but how do you decide who is able to do this? Standardized maturity tests?

I think the root problem is that to really make the right decision for each child there has to be constant involvement with the child's development from an individual educator. This kind of attention is not cheap and is the antithesis of the current CYA direction that educational institutions are taking.

One thing I really like as a developer is that I have the ability to work part-time and from home if I choose to. If I ever have children, I'll definitely do this so I can home school my kid. Public education is efficient at what it does, but not optimal compared to an alternative world that allows all children to have a specially tailored and flexible curriculum.

You are consistently drawing questionable conclusions from N=1 samples here, and in your follow up comments.

If you haven't met anyone with an experience somewhat like mine, ask around. My story isn't the common case, but I'm not the only one.

At any rate, what does that matter? Why should the interests of one child (or adult) necessarily conflict with that of any other, or group of them? Is the goal that everyone should flourish the most from wherever they start, or is it that they should end up with the most identical result possible, regardless of the individuals?

Edit: remember that a statistical approach is only valid in a certain context. For example, you only need evidence that a judge has taken bribes from the Mafia once to know that he's corrupt. There are other contexts where statistics are vital (in the special sciences, for example - I think of quantum probability, or statistical thermodynamics), but I don't believe that statistics properly enter into the fundamental science of philosophy and its branches (Plato, so far as I am aware, did not rely on statistical concepts to discover that there's such a thing as metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, and then politics). If statistics were a fundamental science (intellectually speaking), on what basis could we justify its correct uses vs. incorrect ones?