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Comment by fullshark | Hacker News Reader

You can always find someone claiming what people want to believe, market forces for ideas in action. "Kids don't need to be in school, learning from home is just as good" was something a lot of people seriously claimed and believed because everyone wanted to believe it for a 3-12 month period for example.

It would be great if we didn't have to stress about a lot of the things that cause us stress wouldn't it?

Edit: I meant zoom classroom meetings in my example which is what schooling became when the pandemic started, not homeschooling with a motivated parent, emphasis on motivated.

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Learning from home would be better for a lot of children who eventually go on to work from home. In an era of Uber, personal computer phones and apple watches, children have way less autonomy than they should. When I was 5 years old, I could roam my village from home to market on my own or with my cousins. Modern schools are way too jail like. It will be a sad day when they start putting artificially intelligent children in straightjackets. atleast they can roam free on twitter today.

I would argue learning from home wouldn’t be “just as good” but would often times actually be better. Especially in todays climate where academics are taking a back seat to other priorities. I find it strange you chose that as the topic, care to elaborate why you think that?

I chose it because I found it illustrative, given the whiplash we experienced on the merits of it in the last 2 years. There's now a lot of people writing papers about learning loss and how children have fallen behind. The vast majority of parents I believe agree that learning from home was clearly inferior in a multitude of ways.

And yet you want to debate it, so I guess it's also illustrative of my main point, that if people want to believe something, they will slice and dice data or subjectively add/remove nuance and skepticism to key evidence in order to reach desired conclusions.

Ohhhhhhh, I see. You are talking about distance learning and I thought you were talking about home schooling. So no need to debate as I agree distance learning is garbage for most kids and most teachers.

Yeah didn't occur to me to use "distance learning" instead of "homeschooling" and I caused some confusion, my mistake.

It seems like the research suggests that homeschooled students do better than public school taught students, but I wonder if there is a standard definition for homeschooled student? I'm imagining a parent with a small chalkboard and three children learning their ABC's and I don't think that's it. I could teach my kid computer science and math, but if they needed AP English or Chemistry, I'd probably need some help. Also, after reading 'educated', I wonder how the research may be biased towards parents who are comfortable enough with the system to allow their kids to be included in the research.

Sorry I didn't mean a motivated homeschooling parent in my example, I meant calling into a classroom zoom meeting, which is what school was for the majority of children for 3-12 months during the pandemic.

I ultimately believe school quality is largely driven by teacher quality, and some homeschooling parents are high quality teachers, and therefore can deliver good results for their children.

Motivated reasoning is a hell of a drug.

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