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Comment by frithsun | Hacker News Reader

I'm a homeschool parent, and we wouldn't have it any other way for our family.

But one thing I've learned is that most homeschool parents are even worse than public school and the risk of permanently harming your child through neglect is dreadfully real.

Most of the flattering literature for unschooling is, as with the link, a case where the parents and child are naturally gifted and curious, and they credit whatever they ended up doing with the kid's relative success.

Even gifted and curious kids run into situations where some structured learning that won't be immediately rewarding needs to happen. There needs to be an adult paying attention and intervening, even in the best cases.

Every parent should have the right to homeschool. But from what I've seen, most parents should go ahead and trust American public schools, which are actually very competitive with the best in the world after adjusting for the familiar, stubborn demographic realities.

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> But one thing I've learned is that most homeschool parents are even worse than public school and the risk of permanently harming your child through neglect is dreadfully real.

Right. Here in the UK it is an unusual thing but I think the majority of homeschoolers who are not doing so for reasons of child ill health or significant neurodiversity are, unfortunately, irresponsible or ignorant.

I am not saying that I believe it is impossible for a child to be homeschooled well, especially by well-to-do parents who can hire tutors, but what I find is that those parents usually believe one or more other extremely outlying thing —- antivax, sovereign citizen, fear of radio frequencies, or extreme religion —- that is a kind of intellectual abuse, and is at odds with the kind of basic pedagogical commitment that is needed to make education work. Kids mostly cannot learn effectively from people who do not spend time thinking about the business of teaching.

Some of the “homeschooling circles” around majority wealthy towns like the one I live in are just unbelievably silly people who are raising admittedly charming, polite, but borderline uneducated children who will have to rely on their parents’ networking skills to get anywhere in life and who are in for a shock at which doors do not open for them.

I bristle a little bit at the characterization of "antivax, sovereign citizen, fear of radio frequencies, or extreme religion" as intellectual abuse.

But I seem to have the same opinion as you do about homeschooling. I am biased by a small sample size of people I know who have homeschooled. Too many of them did so because it was too hard to get their kids up, fed, dressed, and on the bus each morning. Or because one of the public school teachers voted for a particular politician. I have seen very few parents who I felt were competent to teach any subject at a high school level. I have seen a few homeschoolers who wisely depend on co-ops with subject experts. But mostly I have seen what I consider to be failures.

To be fair, the failures I have seen in homeschool are not particularly worse than the failures I have seen in public school. I can't say if the two realities would be different if they swapped. It's just that I have seen great successes in public school and not so much from homeschools.

My own children have been successful in public school. To achieve the same level of success in homeschool would have taken a personal effort from their parents that I am skeptical would have occurred. As it is, they got two bright, well-educated parents to help them understand what the public schools were teaching and to explain dissenting opinions about antivaxing, radio frequencies, extreme religion, etc. :-) In my experience, public school education with active, involved parents is better than active, involved parents alone. At least in the schools my children attended. I admit ignorance to all but a handful of pretty decent public schools. But it is awesome that my children can spend five hours a week learning propaganda about Jefferson and Marx and then I can spend another three hours over dinners to add in John Locke and our local city council. And I lack the structure of the curriculum the school provides. So we can critique and disagree and agree and reinforce and still move through a complete semester of topics because we aren't depending on me to provide the framework and the 95% of things we actually agree on. It's ok if we rabbit hole a bit because the professional teacher will change the subject tomorrow and keep things moving.

> I bristle a little bit at the characterization of "antivax, sovereign citizen, fear of radio frequencies, or extreme religion" as intellectual abuse.

Oh, bristle away! I accept I am being contentious. But I grew up with several friends (even at a mainstream school) whose parents were in these categories (not so much fear of RF, that’s newer).

Some of this stuff takes a hell of a lot of unpicking in later life; I know two adults who grew up in a common-enough minority religion who consider what they were taught to think to be profoundly damaging to their long-term intellectual, social and mental wellbeing.

To pick up on one thing to agree with: I think it’s enormously important for children to have exposure to professional teachers. To people who know how teaching works, how to adapt it, how to moderate and meta-moderate learning.

> Some of this stuff takes a hell of a lot of unpicking in later life; I know two adults who grew up in a common-enough minority religion who consider what they were taught to think to be profoundly damaging to their long-term intellectual, social and mental wellbeing.

But how do they function as a member of society? Are they hard workers? Polite? Clean up after themselves? Can you trust them not to steal something you left unsecured?

Many people don't need religion and the fear of eternal punishment to show up for work and not steal things.

Also considering how much wages have not kept up with inflation, as the rich owners take more and more, perhaps we need workers who are less polite and more confrontational.

Wages aren't keeping pace in housing, education and medical care. It's not owner greed that's makes those industries different from others.

Of course it's great for the kids in families where there is enough wealth for one parent, who is highly educated.

The studies that claim homeschooling is better are of laughably poor quality in terms of basic research methodology, and make no effort to adjust for factors like socioeconomic conditions in the household or even the education level of the parents.

Guess who funds most of the research into homeschooling? Homeschooling organizations.

It gets worse. A lot of the studies compare tests in school that are standardized or written by professional educators...to tests produced and graded by the parent of the home-schooled kid:

https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/parenting-translator...

Even Brian Ray's daughter says homeschooling doesn't work:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/education/2023/12/11/brian-ra...

Things are even worse in religious private/charter schools. The vast majority of Yeshivas are turning out students who fail to meet New York's equivalency standards:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_York_Hasidic_education_con...

That's impressive given religious schools don't have to accommodate special needs students (ranging from physical disabilities to learning disabilities) which are incredibly expensive, can boot out students who are simply difficult to teach, and can boot out students who have disciplinary issues, disrupting their peers.

When religious schools that are allowed to cherrypick the cheapest-to-teach, brightest students end up producing kids who fail the floor (minimum state standards) that is astounding.

> Of course it's great for the kids in families where there is enough wealth for one parent, who is highly educated

That's still pretty useful information if you're in that demographic though, right? Seems like the OP author and their readership might be, so it's reasonable for them to report their experiences for others like them (who might be overrepresented on this forum, for example) to ponder.

I think your anecdotal experience with homeschooling is skewing your perspective about how bad public schools are on average. Statistics show that, on average, home school students outperform public school systems, for example on the ACT: https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info.... According to a Harvard study, home school students also do better on various measures of well being: https://www.wsj.com/articles/home-schoolers-schooling-are-do...

That's not a study...that's an opinion article published by a conservative-leaning news outlet.

Chen hasn't published in four years, and I don't see a single paper title that seems relevant: https://scholar.google.com/citations?hl=en&user=J_LdHBIAAAAJ

"More likely to attend religious services with their parents" was one of their criteria for well-being. Another was the likelihood of attending religious services in adulthood. That's an absurd yardstick for well-being.

The same two authors produced another opinion piece for the WSJ that basically says "marriage makes women happier": https://www.thecollegefix.com/harvard-scholars-marriage-make...

The center where she works ( https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu ), here are two of their upcoming 'workshops':

> World Congress on Moral Injury, Trauma, Spirituality, and Healing

> Early Christianity and Flourishing Workshops

Here's the staff directory for the "institute" at Harvard where the study was done: https://hfh.fas.harvard.edu/our-people

Notice that a rather large number of people in the department came from a religious university or have degrees that are related to religion?

Chen's bio includes:

> Her other work and interests include a) social disparity in the distribution of well-being; b) the biological and behavioral mechanisms linking childhood familial experiences to health in adulthood; c) the influences of religious participation on individuals’ subsequent health and well-being.

The article is discussing a Harvard study showing better outcomes for homeschooled children.

And what’s your point about the researchers having a focus on religion? Religion is a major aspect of human society and a proper subject of academic study.

There's no good methodology for discerning whether homeschooling is good or bad because there's no ethical way to construct any research that would be illuminating.

It's an impenetrable nest of variables, confounds, and actors who are deeply invested in their side of the argument on all sides.

As an American with American attitudes, I believe parents should have that right unless there's real neglect going on.

> I'm a homeschool parent, and we wouldn't have it any other way for our family. But one thing I've learned is that most homeschool parents are even worse than public school and the risk of permanently harming your child through neglect is dreadfully real.

This more or less sums of my feelings on the subject as well. A properly home schooled kid is likely to excel to incomparable levels to the same kid in the lowest-common-denominator setting the public schooling system as become. If taught correctly and intensely. Unfortunately home schooling tends to self-select for many parents who have the worst possible intentions.

When I was home schooled my parents were extremely actively in the local home schooling groups. There might have been exactly one other family there that were in it for the actual better/accelerated education vs. indoctrination and shielding kids from reality/greater society. The community is also absolutely rife full of outright child abuse excused and swept under the rug in the name of religiosity and minding your own business.

I have very mixed feelings on the subject. On one hand, my home schooling until 5th grade likely got my all the way through high school in terms of academics. On the other hand, it certainly put me so far behind my peers socially I never really caught up to this day. This wasn't due to lack of trying or effort on my parents - it was due to the socializing being with a very specific segment of the population.

Of course every group and area is wildly different. That's kind of the point of home schooling. If I had another kid I would consider it strongly, but with a whole heck of a lot of professional support. I wouldn't even remotely consider it without having either an unlimited amount of time or a very high budget to augment what I can not realistically teach effectively.

> trust American public schools, which are actually very competitive with the best in the world

Patent nonsense. Absolute rubbish. There are kids in mud huts in India, right outside the lower middle class home I grew up in, with no proper electricity or water supply, who would outcompete the American public school kid in every STEM metric. Kids over here pass shoddy 5-pointer AP calc exams and don't even know basic trig.They have to take remedial calc as freshmen. I know, I taught them as a TA. Best in the world ?!

That is not just true dude.

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