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Comment by tw04 | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but ultimately when kids receive vastly different childhood educations, it will eventually fracture society because we're all starting from a completely different set of beliefs. Even if some schools are "better" or "worse" for the most part they have similar curriculum. As time goes on and that curriculum diverges, it'll make the political fractures in society today seem like a walk in the park IMO.

The social aspect of schooling is just as important as the educational part of it. There's a reason growing up when we had home schooled kids that joined for their high school years, they were the "weird kids" - they just had absolutely no idea how to interact socially with their peers. And for some folks that carries on to adulthood.

Disclaimer: my parents were public school teachers, and seeing the system deteriorate feels like a travesty. The number of parents who think school is daycare is disheartening to say the least.

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Is diversity of thought and culture not a good thing?

Sure it could make politics more polarized, but hopefully that will result in greater diversity of governments under which one can choose to live. Anything that gets us away from a monoculture and a single world-government is a good thing in my mind.

In theory, society should be robust to differing beliefs: allow people to segregate into communities with shared beliefs and self-govern. Use higher levels of government sparingly to resolve conflicts and where coordination is necessary and general consensus exists that the thing you are coordinating is desired.

In practice, people have trouble not butting into each other's lives. If we're going to try to force a shared belief on everyone, it should be to fix that.

Segregating everyone into insular pockets of the like-minded just feeds ignorance, intolerance, and group-think. We shouldn't force beliefs on everyone, but we should reject ignoring facts or replacing them with beliefs.

There's a lot to be said for giving all children a baseline level of education based on fact so that everyone understands the world and the large problems we have and so they will know how to work together to face them.

The kids who are only ever taught that the world is 6,000 years old and flat, that women are inferior, that evolution is a lie, that global warming isn't real, or that gay people cause hurricanes are going to be at a substantial disadvantage in many areas of their lives and they will hinder efforts to resolve conflicts, to coordinate when necessary, and to reach general consensus.

If we accept that as justification, then we should actually be running re-education camps for adults.

And what if I want my kids to go to a school where they’re encouraged to think for themselves? To be interestingly wrong rather than boringly correct?

I really don’t think the facts you give as examples are that important when it comes to equipping a child with the skills they need for a lifetime. They’ll be faced with a different set of facts later in life anyways. The foundation of an education needs to be a little deeper than “not my enemy’s political views.”

Society would be robust to differing beliefs even if we had homogenous public schooling, but complete independence in education _will_ lead to underperforming workers and it's in opposition to what a world power needs to maintain its dominance in the global economy in the long-run.

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