[pnathan]

I was homeschooled: k-11. I have a graduate degree. My sibling has a similar path. The academics I received as a homeschooler were, frankly, probably 90th percentile, maybe more. Yet, simply going to a good school district with good teachers and supportive parents would, in all likelihood, have given me similar outcomes. And now, looking back twenty-plus years later, I don't think that it produced a materially different effect than others of my age group. Certainly my family's homeschooling did wonders for our academics; others in the homeschool group variously finished high school or did minor college. Nothing remarkable. Just like the public school kids - some did great, some did ok, some scraped by.

Barring some _exceptionally_ unusual cases - lets say 4th std dev cases, I feel, sharply, that homeschooling is a bad idea.

On a broad social level, it removes expected bodies of knowledge suitable for having a useful society; on an individual level, it leaves them in a bad place for interacting with peers. I also believe that most parents are not qualified to actually supervise modern education past a certain grade level- being a parent is a remarkably easy thing to start doing, after all.

The social interaction is a profound and subtle problem. There's this thing about dealing with the mass of peers that homeschooling doesn't teach - but the work world and other situations require. This is not going to come with homeschooling.

I also note, in passing, that I am assuming that parents are _trying_ to do exceptional education and are not trying to play particularly ideological games. In other words, something roughly analogous to normal schooling goals. However. This assumption does not hold true in much of homeschooling discourse. Much of homeschooling is an explicit religious approach; some of the homeschooling curricula and groups are actually a religious-political project attempting to build political power with an alternative education system outside. So discussions of homeschooling have to address that elephant in the room.

Also in passing, any homeschooling policy worth its salt should ensure that children are simply not being educationally or personally neglected; those cases do exist, unfortunately.

tl;dr: don't homeschool. take it from a former homeschooled kid. send the kid to a good public school, please.

[ARandomerDude]

The glaring deficiency of public school is the inability to train your child's character for most of the day. You hope that the teachers and students have similar values to you. Some do, many don't.

I want my children to be honest, thoughtful, compassionate, diligent, respectful, and courageous. These aren't society's values today so I homeschool.

[Gigachad]

This is why the majority of homeschool parents do it. It’s borderline control freak behaviour if not over the line most of the time. Usually to force some kind of religious beliefs on their kids and keep them away from any kids with other opinions.

[Eleison23]

People, especially parents, with religious faith do not view it this way. It is not "force" to hand down our faith and inculcate our children with values based on loving God and loving neighbor. Only viewed from the outside does this appear to have some kind of coercivity or violence associated with it. On the contrary, we view this as the most precious gift we can give to a child.

I endured more than my fair share of childhood trauma. Yet, my adoptive parents presented me in church for baptism and the other sacraments. We attended Mass on a regular basis. We were sent to Catholic school and taught to cherish high moral standards for ourselves and our friends. I rejected this all for over 11 years, but I came to see the wisdom and value in such an upbringing. Now I accept the Christian faith voluntarily, with free will; there is no force or coercion or violence involved.

[ausbah]

sure it's not coercive or violent in most cases, but that's all you get in a religious household. a child may not like going to church, prayer, the thought of a higher power, etc. but that's all they'll be getting. maybe that wasn't the case for you, but at least in all the cases I know of there isn't really room for deviation beyond a certain bounds

participation in the rituals is mandatory, lack of belief is not optional, and heaven forbid something fundamental about you cross the line (i.e. try being gay or transgender in a religious household). that little word "inculcate" puts it pretty well - indoctrination by forced repetition. you view it as passing a gift along, some bearing the end of the gift view it as torment

[watwut]

> People, especially parents, with religious faith do not view it this way. It is not "force" to hand down our faith and inculcate our children with values based on loving God and loving neighbor.

If it involves more then negligible amount of spanking in the "how to train your baby" style or emotional manipulation, it absolutely is coercive.

As in, there is such a thing as healthy amount of teaching your faith. There is also religious based abuse. And then there is someone saying "glaring deficiency of public school is the inability to train your child's character for most of the day" which do suggest overbearing amount of it.

[Eleison23]

I have no idea what sort of connection can be made between spanking and the Christian faith, other than your own negative perceptions from outside.

[watwut]

One connection is how to train your baby books I mentioned. The foundation most popular book is named "To Train Up a Child". They are literal Christian child raising books that teach how to property spank. These and similar books/approaches are recommended inside fundamentalist circles, unknow or controversial outside them. Christians openly advocating for these approaches is just normal in more fundamental circles (by which I mean I personally knew such people and they are not even all that much fundamentalist, just tilted that way).

[ausbah]

you don't recognize there's any sort of historical pattern between religion, at least w the more extremist parts, and punitive punishments? conversion therapy, Indian boarding schools, child wilderness camps, Catholic sex abuse scandals are just a few that pop to mind

[sfink]

> This is why the majority of homeschool parents do it.

I strongly doubt that. It may have been true at some point, I don't know. It was certainly my stereotype growing up several decades ago. But now that I'm homeschooling and in contact with numerous other homeschooling families, I haven't really seen it. At all.

Other areas could certainly be different. Here, in the SF Bay Area, it's mostly about parents who see their kids just not thriving in one way or another at traditional school, and not really having any effective levers to do something about it while staying within the system. So yeah, there's an element of control, but only of the environment and opportunities available. Especially today, I'm skeptical that controlling the landscape of their peers' opinions is even possible. I guess it is for younger kids, when you could restrict their access to devices for anything but academic purposes. But generally there's just too much stuff to be doing in your own life and setting up and managing the kids' classes and activities—it'd be tough to micromanage their beliefs and values or whatever even if you wanted to. It's not that different from traditional schooling in the end.

[pnathan]

> I want my children to be honest, thoughtful, compassionate, diligent, respectful, and courageous. These aren't society's values today so I homeschool.

The number of people who have good values who don't homeschool demonstrates that it is not required.

[matheweis]

It’s rather surprising to me that, despite what was an apparently net positive outcome for you and your immediate family, you would have such a negative opinion of homeschooling.

For the others reading the thread (relevant bits of which are linked in the article) consistently shows that on average homeschooled students perform several percentage points higher on academic achievement tests, and a moreover a majority of studies on social development of show positive outcomes for homeschoolers compared to traditional schools. For minorities the net positives are apparently even more profound; the same article mentions a > 20% increase in academic achievement test scores for black students.

Yes, there are good and there are bad situations in all kinds of school, public and private and homeschool alike, but the data appears to be overwhelmingly in favor of homeschooling when compared to a public school.

[watwut]

Some of those are rosy studies designed to be rosy tho. As in, many of those studies are are as independent as cigarette company paying for research on smoking and health. Also, a lot of effort goes into insulating religious homeschooling families from any independent sight at all.

The elephants in the room he mentions is very real thing too. Fair amount of homeschooling is explicitly social/political project. It is meant to shape both how family structure looks like (who is head of the house) and also meant to create young people that change larger society into religious one. ( Partly you can see it when you listen to homeschoolers talking about public school or even non religious people in general - frankly they often sound like aliens who got the idea from movies. )

[baud147258]

Though why the fact some people might choose homeschooling with wrong goals in mind should prevent you from choosing to homeschool your own children, with your own goals and methods, which will be different from what other homeschooling parents would choose?

[PebblesRox]

Yeah, I've noticed a trend in HN homeschooling comment threads where discussion on the personal choice of whether or not to homeschool gets tangled up with discussion about homeschooling on a policy/societal level.

There are some broad concerns about homeschooling that are not relevant to individual decisions. E.g. I don't care that some homeschooling parents use it as a cover for abuse/neglect because I'm not an abusive/neglectful parent. For my child, that's not a risk factor. And as you point out, it's the same for motivational factors.

[pnathan]

> apparently net positive outcome for you and your immediate family

My point is I don't think it was net positive. I'd estimate a net negative. I actually think I spent 10 years overcoming serious limits in post-homeschooling areas in social areas. Now, 20 years after I finished homeschool, I don't see any difference in the end between now-peers and myself, even comparing with the homeschool group I was involved in (as I mentioned, I'm on the upper end of "society's success" with that group... most were far less academic than my family).

[jph00]

Having not gone through it yourself, you may have an overly-rosy view of school.

Personally, I hated school, and I think it had a strongly net negative impact on me. It's not for everyone.

[pnathan]

In my teens, I had public school friends who succeeded, some who failed. Some who abused the system. The textbooks were lousy as a rule, stuffed with low-entropy material and images. Teachers varied, wildly. Some bad. Some good.

What I learned then and over time is the difference parents make for someone who cares. Looking back, that was a critical difference why my family had great academic success and other families - same homeschool group, my friends - struggled. My parents expected academic performance. Not just "doing ok", but "knowing". Some years ago, my dad laughed that they were "Tiger Parents", around the time Dr. Chua's book came out.

I do think that my generation - late 70s - late 80s kids - is reaching an age and life stage where we can reflect on our homeschooling and assess whether it was good or bad, not just looking at the "k-12" time but holistically and how it affected our course of life.

I actually loved _being_ homeschooled, at the time. It's only as I've aged that I've grown more and more negative about it.

anyway, peace.

[BeFlatXIII]

I agree about the point where most parents aren't qualified to supervise homeschooling past an elementary age, but I don't agree with the conclusion about social interactions. Traditional schooling is ineffective at teaching healthy coping mechanisms. My interactions with peers in the workplace and college were nothing like my peers in high school: perhaps filtering out the bottom 50% of the population made socializing with peers worthwhile.

[gnicholas]

> tl;dr: don't homeschool. take it from a former homeschooled kid. send the kid to a good public school, please.

This is a bit of a false dichotomy. Wealthy people can send their kids to good public/private schools because they can afford to live places with access. But less-wealthy people may not have the option.

The social interaction piece is interesting, and may be addressed by the fact that there is massive growth in homeschooling right now. It's also easier to connect/coordinate with other families (remote or local, based on interests/age). Not a bad idea for a startup, actually!

[pnathan]

I'm keenly aware that some public school districts do really badly. E.g., Albequerque PS has 75% of kids under grade level in math - one reason why we didn't move there!

On the policy level, removing the option to legally homeschool without some sort of court order would be my choice to start improving that; to force alignment between wealthy and poor (the wealthy don't get the option to shrug and send their kid to a good charter/private school - they have to work to improve the district). There are other angles around funding that are well known to be problematic.

I don't believe that a million homeschoolers all doing things differently is the right thing for society or for learning interaction. The point I am trying to make is that "dealing with the Public is an important skill that you don't get when its just your little clan"

[sfink]

Yeah, but it also requires some degree of wealth to homeschool. Two parents working full time, or a single parent working full time, are going to be hard-pressed to set up a decent homeschooling environment. You can rely on the "non-location based charter school"'s curriculum and staff quite a bit, but then (1) you won't be that different from traditional schooling, and (2) they can't provide all-day supervision or anything close (for younger ages when it's necessary).

[gnicholas]

Parents of rambunctious kids definitely have additional challenges. But I’d point out that even if the curriculum from a non-location based charter is the same, you can move your kid ahead (or behind) in whatever subjects. We’ve tried getting that flexibility in our public school (which is supposedly very good and in the heart of SV) and it has been incredibly challenging.

It made me wonder: how much more would my kid know if I’d spent all this time (that I spent talking to the school) just teaching her directly?