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Comment by alphazard | Hacker News Reader

> I worry this move to homeschooling and micromanaging children's social lives just creates bubbles and makes children incapable of interacting with those outside of them.

The older I get, the more I think that helping your kids avoid interactions with others who aren't with the program is for the best. Ideally your children's friends should be people that you think are good kids, kids that you would go to bat for. Then when you are teaching your kids to compromise and play nice and forgive, you can legitimately feel good about it. I think my default assumption about a negative interaction with a public school random would be that they are basically a wild animal to be avoided.

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The world is messy for all sorts of reasons, that may not be the way anyone would like it to be but it's the way it is, and imo it's best to learn it when the stakes are low rather than when they're later voting against other classes because they were never exposed to people from them early on, or they're being taken advantage of at work or in an adult relationship.

I wouldn't fault someone for wanting to situate their kids among peers and adults that help them grow at a similar level rather than hinder it, but I think it's also best to be a guiding hand rather than a applicant tracking system when it comes to the non-academic side

> when they're later voting against other classes because they were never exposed to people from them early on

If you think homeschooling makes kids grow up to be prejudiced, you should just say that, instead of insinuating it.

> If you think homeschooling makes kids grow up to be prejudiced, you should just say that, instead of insinuating it.

Absolutely not what I was insinuating.

I was suggesting that explicit isolation from potential peers that come from different levels of wealth or backgrounds based on pre-existing prejudice has the potential to reinforce those prejudices. I'd wager this would overwhelmingly come from private schools and suburbs, not homeschooling, but it's more of a matter of where the desire to control the exposure comes from if that's part of the reason.

So no, I was making no direct association between homeschooling and prejudice.

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