[wonko1]

It's clear that he was lucky to have a school teacher who inspired him from an early age and effected his world view significantly.

I guess he got lucky, but as a parent I worry about this. He points out that most educational establishments don't encourage individual exploration, and that was my experience too.

Makes me consider home schooling, but that seems like a less than ideal solution too. Do we just have to rely on luck?

[timClicks]

There is no ideal solution. Everything is a guess. If you are the kind of person who cares about the consequences, you will be right most of the time.

Hopefully that provides some level of reassurance.

[scalio]

Parents are more important than schools, because things the parents fuck up in their kids' education are nearly impossible for the school to reverse. The reverse isn't true, though. The disenchantment with education a child experiences through shitty curricula or teachers can fairly easily be counteracted by the parents by engaging the kid. Which takes a lot of time and love, which is probably why so few do it.

I'm not a fan of homeschooling because normal school is usually a great place for kids to learn society. So much stuff happens at a school that can never be recreated by dragging your kids to clubs or events. All the fighting, the teasing, the friction, but also the playing. I've had a couple truly horrible teachers, but I've also had a couple truly great ones. The former taught me how to deal with authoritarian assholes while the latter have advanced me humanistically.

If you want to help your kids, stick'em in a stink normal school with stink normal people, and fascinate them privately.

[Turing_Machine]

I'm not a fan of homeschooling because normal school is usually a great place for kids to learn society.

It's a great place for them to learn a completely artificial society designed by 19th century Prussian educators to train proles to become good factory workers. Modern society? Or any real society? Not so much.

There is no natural society that consists solely of a group of peers all within 12 months of age, under the control of an arbitrary authority figure, where every activity is controlled by a bell. The only thing that's remotely similar is military boot camp (that may be why this model appealed to the Prussians so much). Even prison has more diversity of perspectives, ages, etc.

[clusmore]

From Surely You're Joking, Mr. Feynman, it seems Richard Feynman too was inspired at a young age and developed a very strong sense of curiosity of the world and how things work. In Feynman's case, though, the inspiration came from his father, but he wasn't home-schooled.