[labster]

As a child in a public school, you have no right to freedom of association, and no right to freedom from association. Your school chooses your classes, and the state will use violence to ensure you attend those classes, bully or not.

In home school, there is less people and more choice. There are no perverse incentives that value attendance over education and health.

[jbigelow76]

In home school, there is less people and more choice.

Choice for whom, the student or the teacher? The teachers are the ones with the agendas, in all senses of the word.

[whatshisface]

No parent's agenda is for their child to be kicked around by another kid.

[watwut]

It routinely happens in families and friends groups of parents (kids of parents friend bully the kid). It the setup described above, the kid have less choice over who friends will be.

[cma]

School often serves as a release from parents' social machinations to let you find your own friends from a sampling of the general public.

[ethbr1]

> No parent's agenda is for their child to be kicked around by another kid.

The consequence is that every parent, given a scenario where they feel their kid is being kicked around, will remove their kid from that situation.

That's not a healthy absolute either.

[whatshisface]

Would "we must force parents to keep their kids in situations where they (the parents) believe the children are being abused, to make sure the kids grow up tougher than their parents desires would result in," be a solution anyone would actually want?

[ethbr1]

I'd want that for my kids, because I think it'd be net-best for them.

Clearly, I'm not talking about extreme abuse.

But I am talking about more discomfort than I (as the parent) would want for the child in my ideal world.

Parenting is always wanting your child to suffer as little as possible. But a little suffering is good in the long run for the child.

Thus, the fundamental tension in letting parents be the ultimate arbiters of a child's experience.

[whatshisface]

You want your children to experience more abuse than you want them to experience?

[Jka9rhnDJos]

Right, because children are never abused at home…

[whatshisface]

I added the phrase "by another kid" so nobody would reply with that but it looks like it didn't work because... you might not have read to the end? :-P

[likesprivacy]

That other kid could well be a sibling

[tweetle_beetle]

Isn't the whole premise of this grouped home schooling that it makes life easier for the parents, at the expense of tying into some commitments? There surely can never be enough grouped home schooling setups in any given locality with the freedom to break existing commitments for a parent to easily swap between them. It seems like there is a strong incentive for a parent to stick to the status quo.

[smt88]

A) You absolutely have freedom of association in public school. There is statutory and empirical intolerance for bullying, to the point that libertarians have been complaining that there isn't enough due process for the alleged bullies.

Parents can also easily move kids to other classes to avoid unwelcome company.

B) There is, in practice, no meaningful freedom of association in the real world. Childhood is an appropriate time to learn skills to mitigate the downsides of that fact, including forcing bullies to suffer consequences.

[HeWhoLurksLate]

You know how good black / gray hat hackers are at circumventing the law or just don't even think about it?

Yeah, bullies generally aren't scared by "the rules" or by the fact that what they're doing is technically illegal either.

[gnicholas]

> Parents can also easily move kids to other classes to avoid unwelcome company.

This is definitely not the case in the schools our kids go to. The class sizes/composition are shaped by the demands of the teacher's union, we recently learned.

We always thought that the parent survey the school sent out, asking about your child, was so that our kid could be put in a class with a teacher who would be compatible. Not so, we learned!

The information was used to create class cohorts that are evenly balanced, and only after this happens are cohorts assigned to teachers. But at this point in the process, the desires of 20 distinct families cannot be used to match students with teachers.

Instead of focusing on matching certain types of students (those who need more remedial work, those who need more advanced work, etc.) with teachers who are good at providing that type of learning, the school is focused on making sure that all of the teachers have the same class composition, so that none of them can claim to have a "worse" class than anyone else.

[tp34]

> In home school, there is less people and more choice.

I think you meant "there are fewer people." Were you home schooled? Perhaps public school English would have been a better option.

[labster]

Haha no, I learned English as she is spoke at a California Distinguished School. They taught English using the whole language method, because learning grammar is literally unimportant to learning language. I’m sure you can see how good I learned in thirteen years of public school.

[bavell]

> Were you home schooled?

Funny, as a public-school attendee, I would expect the opposite given how many of my peers sailed through on cruise-control with crappy teachers who were sometimes dumber than the kids.