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Comment by alfor | Hacker News Reader

The goal of the education system is to flatten society.

Both of my kid have been homeschooled up until 5th grade. At home they used to do less than 20min per day of ’school’.

After a few month at school they now find the pace incredibly slow and they can’t stand the waiting they have to endure.

They both score 80-95% in all classes.

My son is learning programming and video editing and piano by himself, my daughter is writing small novels in a second language.

We didn’t teach them much at all, they mostly learn just by themselves.

They now want to go back to homeschooling so they don’t have to wait to learn nothing.

They might be a bit gifted, but I think that the main difference is that they didn’t go to school, they didn’t get used to waiting and learning at the same pace as everyone. I think that most kids a much more capable than we think.

Now I think that unschooling + a bit of tutoring would be incredibly powerful.

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Your general grandiose advice should come with plenty of warning labels. A lot of people try to do homeschooling but they neither have expertise, patience or discipline. For successful homeschooling, you need to be able to design each class, have experience in what works, able to design good tests and consistently have time to do everything by yourself. Majority of people don't have these skills which is why there exist teacher degrees and training. That is why experienced teachers do much better than inexperienced. The 1:1 with incompetent teacher is not better than 20:1 with experienced teacher, IMO.

It is dangerous and false to say that just having 1:1 interactions and just igniting interest would make everything better. In your case, likely your kids are fairly gifted and even downgraded teaching won't matter. But that is not the case with everyone. Most people should also not be looking for raising next Einstein but rather a well rounded and functioning individual.

>For successful homeschooling, you need to be able to design each class, have experience in what works, able to design good tests and consistently have time to do everything by yourself.

Or buy one of those homeschooling curriculums.

> you need to be able to design each class, have experience in what works, able to design good tests and consistently have time to do everything by yourself

As a former homeschooled kid, I can testify that I had neither class nor test until I first went to school at 14yo. My parents did "force" me to do about half an hour of reading, writing and basic math. I ended up with a master in engineering.

They also bought lots of child-level science books and brought me pretty much everywhere they went.

It does take some dedication but children are hard wired to learn.

It is quite common in homeschooling to develop exceptional abilities.

The education system is generic and with a ratio of 10-25 kids per teacher following the same pace there is a lot of time wasted on waiting and on discipline.

Kids don’t learn to self manage their interests, to follow their curiosity, they learn to follow the teacher.

It’s not all negative, they learn to interact with different personalities, to defend themselves verbally and physically, they make friends, they learn from other kids.

With homeschooling it can also be hard to find like minded parents and kids who are not at school in the week to meet.

Another way to think about it would be: imagine that most grocery store where run by the government, what would be the impact?

The goal of the public school system is to free up working parents from schooling kids, so they can, well, work.

It became an even more pressing need once women entered the workforce in full.

This became very evident during the pandemic, when so many parents suddenly had their kids at home during working hours.

If you can afford home schooling, awesome. Most can't.

I would hazard that families who could get by on a single income if they really wanted to are more common than highly gifted children.

I was homeschooled and did less than one hour of "study" per day until a was 14yo. 20mn seems quite likely.

I confirm that I found school very slow when I first went there, although I am happy I did since being at home with my mom all day long was becoming seriously boring (she decided to stay home when I was 1yo).

Getting used to middle school sure was a challenge but the academic part was fine. I did end up with a master in engineering.

The social side was more uncertain although, thinking back about it, I cannot decide whether I really was a weirdo or if that was just puberty kicking in. I certainly wasn't the most popular but I did have friends. I did sports and played music in a rock band (crappy but fun!), so...

Now, if I have a kid I am not sure I would homeschool her. Kids are hardwired to learn by they do need to be around an adult to learn by mimicking. It would require a serious lifestyle change.

I'd certainly be very interested in alternative schooling such as Montessori and the like though.

Don't misunderstand me: public school is great. It brings affordable education to everyone. It takes children off the streets. It makes society better.

But to be available to everyone, it is designed to be cheap and "industrial". Same content to everyone on the same rhythm, with very little variation. It is not difficult to understand that it cannot be optimum to every child.

>They might be a bit gifted, but I think that the main difference is that they didn’t go to school, they didn’t get used to waiting and learning at the same pace as everyone. I think that most kids a much more capable than we think.

This is far from a foregone conclusion and could lead to some bad consequences if, for example, we made school run five times as fast for everyone without checking to see which students would keep up with it.

Homeschooling sounds too cruel to me, I would have hated it to spend my time with my parents instead of the friends at school.

Surely, the state sponsored education is also a formation but what I found was that teachers are people too(from all kind of backgrounds and ideologies). Therefore, you don't actually get your kids grown by the design of the government. The teachers do the magic.

In proper countries, where education is primarily education and not propaganda, they tend to appreciate that different kids have different learning pace and needs and you often have options for appropriate education.

There's this contrarian singer who famously homeschooled his daughter, later said it was a huge mistake to do it because she grew up to be too naive to function in the society. Who is going to break the heart of your kids? How they are going to learn to cope with it? Who is going to lie to them and how they are going to learn how to spot a lie? Who is going to be unfair to your kids and how they are going to learn to make it right?

I can't see homeschooling my kids unless the country I'm in turns into a crazy dictatorship with propaganda as a primary objective in the school.

Be interesting to see what the isolation does to them. After all, they'll eventually have to live and get along with all those "slow-learners".

We Live In A Society™

Not if they go to college and then get a mentally difficult/highly filtered (not the same thing) job. They could be surrounded by peers for the rest of their lives.

What are the best approaches for teaching homeschooled children how to work together in groups? Or does that just come naturally as children enter society as adults?

I’d be curious to hear the experience of those who homeschool as parents as well as those who were homeschooled as children.

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