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Comment by Atotalnoob | Hacker News Reader

I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.

I was homeschooled and I got a fairly strong education.

What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.

For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.

> I was homeschooled and it affected me terribly. Please don’t do it.

Any idea how many were affected terribly in school? I'm in touch with my high school classmates. Almost half of them blame the school experience to lifelong problems.

Everyone from my public high school class is now rich and happy. My anecdote is just as good as yours.

Nobody is saying public high school is worse than homeschooling. They are saying that if you want to claim homeschooling is bad for kids, you have to put in the work to show that it causes problems at a higher rate than the public school system.

> Everyone

Did you grow up in Scarsdale or Palo Alto?

And just as good/bad as the top level comment, which is my point.

I was homeschooled and got a good education, and am now a happy, well adjusted adult. You can't just generalize; you have to consider the individuals and methods involved to judge what the best approach is.

What works for one might not work for another one. Can't generalize.

We can actually. It's called theory of probability and statistics, which is probably "forgotten" by these amazing self-appointed homeschoolers. A few rare successes of homeschoolers doesn't mean this practice is good on average, and vice versa the rare failures of the public education system doesn't mean that it is bad on average.

Most times I look this up, I see stuff like "[t]he home-educated typically score 15 to 25 percentile points above public-school students on standardized academic achievement tests".

https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#Academic

Looking at the replies, I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores but social development and preparing kids for society outside the house. It definitely requires considerably more, active attention from parents. Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades and ensure that they're maintaining an active social life but I think the difficulty of nailing that as you go-your-own-way is apparent.

>I do not think the general complaint is that homeschooling is bad for test scores

>Perhaps some of these people here have both the time to be hold down a decent career and also tutor their child in multiple curricula that haven't been important to them in decades

This reads as an inconsistency.

As for the social stuff - as I commented elsewhere, it's not hard to make a case that public school is bad for socialization as well. Which isn't to say that public school isn't irredeemable in that way, just that it's not like one or the other is an obviously correct choice.

Yeah, that study has been debunked or countered by "... among home-educated students applying for college", and the proportion of home schooled kids who apply for college versus those in the traditional education system is far lower, i.e. this is very self-selecting.

Where was it debunked?

This comment is so disingenuous. Few and rare?? Why would you frame it like this? Homeschoolers are better educated, more likely to get into college, and have better socialization skills than their publicly educated peers.

https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:text=r...

https://chewv.org/college-preparation/college-admissions/?ut...

https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/?utm_sourc...

They're not more likely to get into college as a whole. In fact, they apply to college a lot less. But in that subset, against public education as a whole, then yes, they do better.

You may want to look wider afield than homeschooling advocacy and lobbyist groups for your stats.

If you've got the statistics to validate your point, show them. If not... pot, meet kettle.

How so?

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