[speeder]

I want to homeschool my future kids but it is still illegal in my country (illegal as in: if you attempt it, the government will arrest you and send the kids to an orphanage)

Thing is: public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit and are dangerous.

Private schools are crazy expensive, and although they are more useful they still teach a lot of bullshit.

Also the educational style of all schools here is outright awful, there is an article from 1950s I believe written by Richard Feynman and it still applies 100%

[swiley]

As someone who was homeschooled and socialized almost exclusively with other homeschoolers as a kid, I was on the fence about it.

Then I grew up and met people who went to public school. Holy cow I can’t believe people think it’s ok to put their kids through that! I can’t believe we collectively accept children being exposed to the violence and other problems that are pervasive there! It’s not surprising so many people become criminals now.

[TrackerFF]

> I can’t believe we collectively accept children being exposed to the violence and other problems that are pervasive there! It’s not surprising so many people become criminals now.

But on the flip-side, would you want to go your entire life without facing any conflicts?

FWIW, I was bullied in middle school, and pretty much had to fight my way through. As in fist fighting. As an adult, I don't tolerate any bullshit - and have no problems saying so , if I'm ever in a situation. I'm not sure I'd be the same person, if I hadn't gone through the things I did (not saying that bullying or fighting is good, just that it molded me into a person with extremely low tolerance for BS and a$$holes)

[potta_coffee]

Kids were knifed and shot at my high school, which wasn't even in a city that's considered unsafe / high crime. There was a race war there too, in which dozens of kids brought baseball bats and put each other in the hospital. A kid was put stabbed with screwdriver and another kid was hit so hard in the head he had a seizure. These kinds of experiences led me to homeschool my own kids.

[hevelvarik]

I don’t know why school vouchers isn’t a wildly popular idea, with support crossing political lines. Allowing schools and schooling models to compete for students, and turning parents bodies into the customer is about as no-brainer a public policy as a public policy can get.

[Viliam1234]

I guess the reason is that some kids are so bright that schools would compete for them, most kids are average and the schools would compete for the vouchers, but... there are some kids everyone wants to avoid. For example, that kind that will stab their classmate the moment they get their hands on something sharp (and will find a creative solution even if all objects at school are perfectly soft and spherical). Maybe one percent of population are psychopaths, and they are all kids before they become adults.

In other words, I would love to see a school system based on free association, but what about the kids no one wants to associate with? If you make the system such that one type of school can freely accept or reject students, but the other type must accept everyone, you just increased the density of the problematic kids in the second type of school, which creates a positive feedback loop because now more parents want to take their kids away from there.

Yet another problem is that the density of population is different in different places. In a big city, you can have dozen schools in a walking distance, so it is easy to choose. Then you have places where choosing another school would require an hour of travel, so people would be quite angry if their child is rejected. Should we have different rules for different places?

There are many great ideas, but it is difficult to set up the entire system so that none of its parts explodes. And sometimes removing pressure from one place means adding it to another.

[swiley]

Vouchers just created another form of regulatory capture. Better would be to decouple schools from zip codes and allow parents to send their kids to whatever schools they wanted.

This would crash a lot of overinflated realistate markets though. God forbid we actually take care of children and have a rational housing market.

[klmadfejno]

I don't doubt your experiences, but I find it hard to believe that it wasn't considered a safe area. That seems tautologically impossible.

[Meekro]

Some kids will "toughen up," others will spend the rest of their lives with anxiety disorders that could have been prevented if they'd had a safe environment.

Many public schools straight-up don't care about violence in their halls, or are powerless to stop it. To say that a parent must send their kids there to be beaten is wrong.

[zbentley]

If you thrive on adversity and school doesn't offer any it is easy (even for a kid) to seek it out.

However, if you don't thrive on adversity and school doesn't provide a safe environment, you're screwed. There aren't many other choices.

That's the issue. Nobody's saying that your experiences are bad, or that conflict is bad. But some folks don't "develop bullshit tolerance" from adverse experiences in school; they develop trauma.

[tathougies]

> But on the flip-side, would you want to go your entire life without facing any conflicts?

This is a false dichotomy. It's not like you need to be exposed to drugs, violence, and sexual assault in order to 'face conflicts'. For 100% of children, simply disagreeing with a friend, fighting on the playground, etc is enough. Unfortunately, public school provides a lot of the former, and not exactly a lot of the latter.

[TrackerFF]

I think the vast majority of public schools don't have any problems with drugs, violence, or sexual assaults. I went to a pretty low-tier HS, and we never had any of that. The same type of HS where only 5%-10% of students to to college.

But with that said - my initial thought is that at schools, at least you're forced to interact with people you may not want to interact with. Good or bad, at least it preps you for the professional work, where you can't choose the people you work with.

I can only imagine that going your whole (juvenile and young adult) life with the option of being 100% selective on who you interact with, must have some bearing on what kind of person you become as an adult.

I'm not saying that friends or family don't fight from time to time, but it's not really the same as dealing with strangers.

[tathougies]

> But with that said - my initial thought is that at schools, at least you're forced to interact with people you may not want to interact with. Good or bad, at least it preps you for the professional work, where you can't choose the people you work with.

You're not wrong, but this is a misplaced worry, IMO. Homeschooled students are consistently shown to do just as well at work as non-homeschooled students. It is a myth that homeschooled students don't interact with others. Many take classes at the local college, many take part in homeschool 'co-ops', which are not fully schools, but give that kind of experience.

[vertex-four]

As a homeschooled kid, I learned to argue with evidence against people who believed utter nonsense. I then went to play with them after. Not being stuck in school doesn't mean you don't interact with people.

[gregjor]

Homeschooled does not mean “confined to home.” Most of us have made friends and dealt with strangers since we got out of school. Spend some time with homeschoolers before forming incorrect theories about how they spend their time.

[TrackerFF]

What do you consider "bullshit", and what makes you the authority on making such claims?

I ask in good faith, not to mock you or anything - mostly because I've heard a wide range of similar claims.

(I do think that the educational style of many public schools is horrendous though, as it follows the old factory-line model, where you try to fit all kids into some mold, and "educate" them as fast as possible. When the reality is that there's no one-size-its-all educational model. It's highly individual, and must be tailored / optimized for each pupil, if possible.)

[oh_sigh]

OP appears to be from Brazil, which does have some big issues with school quality[0]:

> Another problem for Brazil is that it is one of the few countries which does not have good basic educational statistics. Nevertheless, it is clear that too few children go to primary school. To make matters worse, more than a third of children repeat a grade at least once in primary or secondary school. This is particularly true for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This poor performance at school is linked to a high drop-out rate. Only 88.7% complete basic education and there are more than 600,000 primary age children are out of school.

> For those who do remain at school, performance is poor, reflecting poor school quality. The OECD’s internationally respected PISA survey (Program for International Student Assessment) put Brazil near the bottom of the list of 65 countries taking part, making it comparable to Albania, Jordan and Tunisia.

[0] https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/publication/brazil-persp...

[searchableguy]

You should email me to see my past school notes. They are self evident for how much bullshit school pushes but I think it might be a different experience than most people on here. I live in remote part of India.

Most of what people do here is just write down from book to a notebook word to word. The books are horrible too (some published more than a decade ago in subjects where relevancy matters a lot) with no clarification or update from the teacher. Standard examination is not useful atleast on a school level. Many schools allow people to cheat openly and some of them even change the written answers of students (they tell them to leave it blank if you don't know the answers). This happens till 9th grade. After which, schools have less power over grading but they still get to hand out some marks which they will do for every poor student anyway. The cut off rate is extremely low to pass (around 33%). And it's also blurry because you have reservation (affirmative action based on your caste) so the end result is different for each person.

To over simplify, take three variables. Assign 1x, 1.5x and 2x. Now calculate admission, job application (government), taxes, fees, etc rate for different people by multiplying by them.

Most schools run an after school program or similar where they help you train for the exam. Although, most of it is just giving out a sample paper to what will come in the school exams. Pretty much most students will go there if the school is rich or if it is poor, then they directly go to tuition under subject teacher.

Most schools in rural, suburban, etc are repurposed houses.

As for teachers, mostly fresh college students, mothers and people who are waiting to clear their government exam or similar. The pay ranges anywhere from 4k-20k per month (upto $310).

Periods are stacked in the most unproductive way possible. No breaks and are very short - 30-40 mins with too much subject/context switching.

Majority of kids will be abused emotionally and physically at some point. Indian schools have a mentality of class punishment so you get punished for something you didn't do often. Typical physical abuse include beating palm of your hand with a wooden or metal ruler, making you stand outside with hands up in the air or sitting in a chicken position. There are of course some extreme corporal punishments. That includes stripping (only boys), making you run outside on the ground (45C+) for hours, telling other students to beat you for being bad and public shaming tactics.

Kids are also indoctrinated with politics all the time. I mean, we have an hour long assembly to repeat how much we are proud of our country and india number one in the morning every day.

Parents usually have no idea about their own kids and are toxic (reason - poverty).

Given economic condition of India, income inequality, social mobility and unemployment. I don't think a reasonable person would wanna go through this. It's not like you are likely to have a first class life easily even if you somehow pushed your way through.

I can expand more but that's the general overview.

[rubidium]

If you were curious after reading this comment like I was, here’s the legality of homeschooling by country:

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_...

[mrfusion]

I’m really curious what country that is. But how about a starting a coop with other parents. Or starting your own private school?

[leotaku]

Could you possibly share what you mean by "bullshit"? I am genuinely interested in what that entails.

[mode80]

"it's the stuff that life is too short for" http://www.paulgraham.com/vb.html

[speeder]

1. Typical stuff that they try to simplify science and thus teach stuff wrong, like the classical each area of tongue has a specific taste receptor thing.

2. Government heavily interfere with what is taught in classrooms regarding some subjects, most notoriously the government is quite heavy handed in anti-monarchy rethoric, I was actually shocked when I was in my 25s and started to find out a lot of stuff I learned as a kid were not just misrepresentations or wrong interpretation of things, but outright lies and propaganda, one interesting example: schooling here blame a lot of slavery on monarchy and nobility in general, meanwhile the monarchs actually wrote anti-slavery essays, and even made a deal with England at the time authorizing them to attack slaver ships, at some point the government even made it clearer, told England to treat all slavers as pirates, and gave them permission to even attack docked slaver ships freely. Also schools here teach government was "absolutist", but it wasn't, only reason monarch was letting england screw with ships, is because whenever he tried to make a law ending slavery, with nobility support, the liberals would vote AGAINST it (and mostly out of stupidity too, farms that stopped using slaves had bigger profits, maintaining the slaves was more expensive than paying the tiny wages they were paying to the immigrants).

3. Schooling here has a sort of mandatory political bias, not just as in... most teachers being left leaning (something kinda normal in most of western world), but as in the government explicity dictating that certain subjects need to base their theories on Antonio Gramsci, there is some infamous youtube videos where right-wing teachers argue against that with public officials, in one of the videos a teacher outright ask an official what about the parents rights to not have the kid be forced to learn that, and the official replies that the state knows best, that if they don't want their kids to be indoctrinated, they have to pull the kids from school, and face the consequences.

4. Schools here also teach a lot of useless stuff, with teachers insisting you will use all of it... but I guess this applies to most of the world.

[DavidVoid]

But do you really think allowing homeschooling would improve any of this on a societal scale?

Sure, some people will do an excellent job at educating their kids, but many will indoctrinate them even more than the public school system ever would.

[speeder]

Even then...

If a lot of parents indoctrinate the kids to be conservative religious.

Another group indoctrinate their kids to be far-left.

Another group is anti-science.

Another pro-science...

When all these people vote, you still end up with politicians that actually represent the society.

Now if everyone is mandatorily indoctrinated in schools that teach whatever the government wants, would that be a true democracy? What happens when actual science turns to be anti-government, do you think the government would remain pro-science?

[mwfunk]

That's why education has to try to be as objective and apolitical as possible, and when the two are at odds, choose objectivity. And accept that it's never going to be perfect. Nobody is ever going to agree on where that sweet spot is and there will always be segments of the population who vociferously disagree with how some things are taught, but as long as there's a critical mass of educators making good faith efforts to achieve those ideals, the result will be imperfect but better than kids being taught random things (whatever their parents want to indoctrinate them with) by random people who aren't professional educators (the parents doing the teaching). I'm not arguing against homeschooling here, just arguing against the nihilism expressed by the parent post. I'm fine with homeschooling as long as there are educational standards and it's not just parents who want to brainwash their kids.

FWIW I was partially educated in American public schools and got no shortage of what many would consider to be anti-government messaging, at least in the sense of being encouraged to think critically on my own and taught about all sorts of occasions where people's moral convictions went against government policies so they protested or went into government or whatever to change it for the better. I also got no shortage of focus on all of the ways in which America did terrible things in the past: Native American genocide, slavery, Japanese internment camps during WW2, Jim Crow laws, etc. The focus was always on why those things were bad, how they got changed, and how understanding those things helps us perceive normalized shittiness in the present day so we can fix it and make things better. Nothing's ever completely fixed, history is just an endless process of things (usually) getting marginally better over time in the aggregate.

I'm sure there are lots of shitty schools with shitty teachers that teach blind obedience and tribalism, but those are shitty schools with shitty teachers and they need funding and improvement, rather than throw our hands up in the air and say there are no standards and no truth and everyone just believe whatever. If nothing else, education at least needs to expose people to a range of things they wouldn't be exposed to if left to their own devices, and help students learn critical thinking so they can make their own rational choices about things.

Also it's not like parents give up all rights to educate their kids when they don't homeschool them. They can teach their kids all they want about whatever they want, including things that contradict what's taught in class, for better or worse.

[naveen99]

How difficult is it to credential a private school ? Start your own...

[SiVal]

In California, it's very expensive and difficult. You can homeschool your own children subject to oversight and regulation, but if you want to offer schooling to children who aren't your own, the regulatory burden increases so much that you have to hire full-time staff to handle it, get specially zoned and inspected real estate, and numerous other things that effectively require you to charge a very high tuition and serve only the children of the relatively wealthy.

[hevelvarik]

Exactly. School vouchers. Let’s do it.

[DavidVoid]

> illegal as in: if you attempt it, the government will arrest you and send the kids to an orphanage

If you repeatedly attempt it I presume? I highly doubt that they'd send your kids to an orphanage after the first offense.

> public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit

Bullshit such as what? (if I might ask)

IMO, although homeschooling is great for some kids, the cons of legalizing it far outweigh the pros. One of the most important aspects of schools is to let kids interact with other kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. Homeschooling should be banned for the same reason that religious schools should be banned, i.e., to avoid abuse, indoctrination, and segregation of kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds.

If we want to allow brighter kids to learn faster then the focus should be on improving schools, not on abandoning them.

[lliamander]

> IMO, although homeschooling is great for some kids, the cons of legalizing it far outweigh the pros. One of the most important aspects of schools is to let kids interact with other kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. Homeschooling should be banned for the same reason that religious schools should be banned, i.e., to avoid abuse, indoctrination, and segregation of kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds.

This statement both doesn't reflect the actual statistics around homeschool and private school outcomes, and makes the false assumption that public schools don't indoctrinate (let alone abuse) their students.

> If we want to allow brighter kids to learn faster then the focus should be on improving schools, not on abandoning them.

Keeping kids (and parents) trapped in a broken system in the hopes that someday the system will be fixed is pointlessly cruel. It also denies public schools one of the most important tools for facilitating improvement: competition.