Homeschooling Hits Record Numbers
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As homeschooling hits record numbers, the debate rages on about its merits, with some envisioning a future where kids are empowered to explore complex subjects like material science at a tender age, while others warn of potential downsides, such as knowledge gaps and abuse. Parents who have taken the homeschooling route share their experiences, with some noting that re-learning long-forgotten math skills has been a valuable experience, while others point to the limitations of parental teaching, particularly in subjects that require specialized expertise. The discussion highlights the complex motivations behind the surge in homeschooling, from dissatisfaction with traditional schooling to a desire to provide a better social environment, with some commenters questioning the assumption that parents can provide a superior socialization experience. Amidst the divergent views, a common thread emerges: the COVID-19 pandemic has prompted many parents to reevaluate their children's education and seek alternative paths.
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LLM's have revolutionized the way people learn and utilize what they have learned. The future is 8 year old material science lads doing chemistry in their step-mother's RV
The expectations for home schooling are different and are, in some ways, aimed more towards reality. My son finishes the bulk of his work in an hour most days and then has time for 2 instruments, learning C++, Rust, and Python, community/church participation and more.
https://responsiblehomeschooling.org/research/the-test-score...
We have sent our kids to private, poor quality and top rated schools.
We saw a stark difference between the poor quality and higher cost options. No surprise.
But the reason we are considering home schooling our younger kids was surprising. It says something about a system dedicated to teaching children when parents think they can do as well or better.
That’s just education. The social situation in schools is ludicrous. Phones, social media, etc. what a terrible environment we adults have created for kids to learn both educationally and socially.
Home schooling has answers for ALL of that.
What's the reason?
Take it from someone who was homeschooled from pre-k through high school, you will absolutely not provide a better social environment. I was so unprepared to handle the social dynamics in casual, educational or professional that it took years and years of active work to put myself in a position where it wasn’t an absolute detriment to my success. I have no doubt you can educate your children well, it’s every other aspect of humanity that is typically missed out on and can lead to unintended consequences.
I'd say a lot depends on both the quality of the schooling and maybe even more depends on the person's natural inclinations. He wouldn't have had time for all the reading he did as a teenager if he weren't home schooled, but he'd probably still have been in theater and still have been very open and curious life-long learner as an adult.
I don't really think that way in general, but I guess I'd just want to point out that the spectrum isn't "good socialization in public school" to "bad/no socialization in homeschooling".
I don't believe it's a magic pill by any means. But I've known many recently home schooled kids and they seem a lot more mature than their public school peers. So I think we have a decent shot at having similar results.
I didn't really have much trouble adjusting to living on campus at college, and I've never had issues with interpersonal stuff at work or school.
Your anecdote is not universal; neither is mine.
For extracurriculars: there are club youth sports aplenty, a youth orchestra, band, choir and drum & bugle group. There are participate in various academic competitions (mathletes, model UN &c.). It's definitely harder since there's no "club rush" like in public school, but these things are available (and the total cost is rather less than a non-parochial private school, though subtracting out lost salary for the parent doing the teaching reverses that for the more affordable options[1])
1: It's completely possible to spend more than a private university tuition on private high schools where I live, but the ones not subsidized by the Roman Catholic Church start in the low $20,000s
Citation needed.
Every perspective I've heard personally - and mirrored in comments here as well - from the non parent side of things, is quite negative in terms of learning how to behave and socialize with your peers. To you the children might seem polite and servile, and you might see this as something positive - as you state in another comment - but you are likely setting them up for life of social awkwardness and ostracization.
I imagine part of the benefit of schooling is to socialize children with their peers so I’m curious how you thought about it.
Kids from home schooling families we know are as polite or substantially more polite than those in the school system.
It is, but do we have any studies showing how well school kids are at this? From what I've seen, most kids in school do not learn those skills.
I kid, but there's a real point: So much of the socialization is bad.
More: Kids aren't going to be kids forever. Does socialization with a bunch of other kids prepare them for the adult society that they're going to go into?
Experiencing bullying is (unironically) one of those shared social experiences that create bonds with people (whether as victim, perpetrator, or witness)
These are real social dynamics that actually exist in adult life, and I suspect people who are totally blindsided by them are maladapted
I always thought of it as parent / tutor + kid = almost all interactions.
Thanks.
We have a few reasons unrelated to socialization [1] to do home schooling but one of the reasons I don't want to send them back is precisely the regression in "socialization" I would expect.
30 years ago, this probably was a decent argument, but the bar of "at least as socialized as a public school attendee" has gone way down in the meantime.
[1]: I guess before anyone asks, one of my children is deaf-blind and while the people in the system did their best and I have not much criticism of the people, the reality is still that I was able to more precisely accommodate that child than the system was able to. This ends up being a pretty big stopper for a return to the public school system for that child.
Can you perhaps enlighten us and define "socialize" without the use of tautology?
It used to be folk wisdom that beating your kids built character, teachers would even slap kids with a ruler back in the 1950s. Could you say the same about bullies, cliques, popularity contests, and all the other performative nonsense that goes on in public schools?
Maybe it’s all bullshit and giving kids a safe environment to learn at their own pace without all these distractions makes them better equipped for the modern world?
6% of American think they can beat a grizzly bear in a fight. That says absolutely nothing about the bear, and says a lot about how misinformed people are.
I’ve seen many kids, including my own older ones, who have gone through the school system and others who haven’t.
For example, homeschooled students do better on the ACT than public school kids.
https://www.act.org/content/dam/act/unsecured/documents/Info...
Obviously the schooling venue itself isn't the only factor here, but if you think homeschooling a kid is worth an analogy to fighting grizzlies, might be worth a reframe.
Let's say your family has four kids. As a family, that's large. But as a classroom size, it's really small. That gives you an advantage as a homeschooler over a public school teacher.
When you have a class size over 20, teachers are forced to be a lot more systematic, which can improve the effectiveness of their teaching. Good teachers make heavy use of social proof. When I tried to teach my kid at home, it was a struggle. But when the kid is around his peers in a classroom, and they are going along with the teacher, he naturally falls in line with no cajoling, etc.
If there were only 5 students, the likelihood he'll just go along with things is much lower.
That might've worked if we funded schools & gave students who fell behind significant interventions & 1x1 attention, but that's not what happened. One of my friends has a very bright and talented fifth grader in a class with multiple students who can barely read or write. Guess who gets the most attention from educators? Which group the teachers structure the class for?
I find it difficult to wrap my head around you can make it work teaching the entire curriculum for 4 different grades encompassing reading/writing, math, history, science, art, music, etc... I guess its potentially compensated for by the fact that they are all getting very individualized attention, but thats spreading a parent very thin.
Especially when we are talking about high school levels, where you can even potentially go into AP courses- no way a single parent can teach college level calculus, History, CS, etc... effectively.
For all the flaws of our public education system, I don't see how this can work better.
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#:~:text=r...
https://chewv.org/college-preparation/college-admissions/?ut...
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/?utm_sourc...
https://nheri.org/research-facts-on-homeschooling/#Academic
What matters is your parents and how you nurture your kids and provide opportunities for them. It’s easy for homeschooling to be bad… if you don’t give a shit about your kids.
For socializing, the key part is making sure kids are involved in a lot of social activities. I never went to public school, but found my groove socially pretty quickly in college, because I had a lot of opportunities for strong friendships. I was working part time in high school too, so got some exposure to pop culture.
Any idea how many were affected terribly in school? I'm in touch with my high school classmates. Almost half of them blame the school experience to lifelong problems.
As a parent/carer you probably are much more motivated than an underpaid teacher who wanted to do something else anyway, and you don't have to motivate yourself with money.
By extension, IME, motivated and talented teachers in any school (good or bad) can do wonders. There just aren't that many. And as you say, school environment tends to be a race to the bottom - if Johnny can watch Tiktok during maths, I'll do the same.
San Francisco's school district has an annual operating budget that equates to $28k per student.
I've heard people in San Francisco say that schools here are underfunded. When I ask them how much we spend per student per year, their guess is usually less than half of the actual amount.
AND ... these numbers are deliberately conservative. Teachers work ~40 weeks per year, not 52, so the $150k all-in is really $3,750/week - very competitive for SF. The $18k technology budget assumes replacing every Chromebook annually, but they last 3-5 years, so amortized cost is more like $5k/year. The rent estimate of $5k/month assumes market-rate commercial space, but you could find cheaper options in underutilized buildings or negotiate with a church/community center. Furniture lasts decades, not one year. The $1k per student for curriculum and supplies is also high - you're not buying new textbooks every year, and open-source curricula exist.
If you were trying to minimize costs rather than be conservative, you could probably run this one room school house for $350k/year ($16k/student/year).
It feels like there is more to the story that "$28k doesn't go as far in San Francisco".
What does tend to correlate with money and also correlates with outcomes is parental involvement. Solving that problem requires societal and economic change in a district though not giving the school more money.
Ultimately it’s a culture problem. America’s attitude toward problems is nothing if not “throw more money at the problem and hope it gets better.” See also, healthcare, military spending, college sports, etc.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46008035
For each of the grades K-12, here is the % of non-religious private schools in San Francisco that charge $56k or more:
Always makes me think of The West Wing scene:
> Education is the silver bullet. Education is everything. We don't need little changes, we need gigantic, monumental changes. Schools should be palaces. The competition for the best teachers should be fierce. They should be making six-figure salaries. Schools should be incredibly expensive for government and absolutely free of charge to its citizens, just like national defense. That's my position. I just haven't figured out how to do it yet.
Video (sorry for the burned in subs, should be queued up): https://youtu.be/IzV09gESyh0?t=39
Our nation needs something on the order of millions of teachers. Competition for the best teachers would work great, if you needed exactly 1 extraordinary teacher. Or even if you needed a dozen. But when you need 40 teachers or more per school district... you're going to end up with alot of mediocre teachers, and more than a few godawful ones.
And, I suspect, that the thing not even extraordinary teachers can do is give a shit. Some teachers give a shit about some students, a few give a shit about many/most students, but even those few will falter in a career that lasts long enough.
Any why do they even want this silver bullet anyway, as impossible as it is? Why would you want a trillion dollar boondoggle that can't possibly ever work? The answer for that is downright frightening.
Are we talking about the same country? Most of those professors don't even teach if they can help it. Their job is to bring in grant money to the university. The others are paid hourly wages to be adjuncts, and I'm not certain it's accurate to say that they're "much higher-quality". But if it were, then perhaps that's your problem... the million k12 teachers you need are all teaching secondary education in temp positions for temp pay.
Really, though, the biggest factor is just being their parent. When they're young, the vast majority of the time you can basically read their mind. When you're teaching your child, you almost instinctively know how well they're understanding things. I was never deliberate about it, I didn't look for things, I never had to. I was able to pace my delivery very tightly with their ability to consume and it was the most natural thing imaginable.
That, and having a class size of two, meant Home Schooling was "30-45 minutes Monday-Friday September to mid-April with generous vacations." And that's not "30-45 minutes but we also went to a museum, the library, co-ops (we did, briefly), and all kinds of other learning activities" (I'm sure I lied and said I did those things), that was 30-45 minutes, do some chores (we don't live on a farm, it's the same stuff most kids do), and play video games.
Parenting-wise, the only elements we were more strict with was we limited "watching a TV show or video content" to an hour (two, on occasion, for movies) a day ... and we were quite rigorous with that. But they could play pretty much any video game they wanted (within reason, but probably far less restrictive than most parents outside of Hacker News). And they didn't get mobile devices until 13 and 15. There was no reason. They had/have computers.
My goal was simply "to teach them at home better than they could get at school and to make them self-learners along the way." I wasn't looking for genius spelling bee winners.
They've been in Public School (since the start of HS for my son, 7th grade for my daughter) for four years. Those 30-45 minute sessions that -- not once -- involved taking a test resulted in them being straight-A students. The first test they took, a placement test, resulted in them landing in advanced classes.
They finish their home work at school (my son works way ahead because he's bored). They study for nothing outside of midterms and finals (and they only do that out of paranoia, it's not really needed).
The majority of the time they were Home Schooled, Mom and I were divorced (and it wasn't "amicable" for the majority of that, it was ... ugly). And while that was hard, actually home schooling the children was not. It was awesome. I'd have been a lot less stressed in the earlier years if I'd have known how easy it was.
It was "get good curriculum, follow it, don't move on until they understand it to what a teacher would grade an 'A'". You do the latter because you have to; anything else is debt and the only one who pays that debt is the you. Your kids will just sob through it. Outside of budgeting because you're likely down to one income, the rest was all upside.
Sports might be the challenge. Many US states have athletic associations that handle most K-12 sports, and they require enrollment in an accredited member school. I am aware of several homeschool specific athletic associations in my area, but all are targeted towards religious homeschoolers. Not certain what secular alternatives would exist, but soccer is very popular & there are plenty of competitive academies that operate outside the school ecosystem.
Fencing for example, is usually clustered around external clubs. Very few high schools will have fencing teams, and in a lot of cities even the high schools that do have fencing teams will be kind of a joke compared to the club teams.
Whether this is a positive or negative thing depends on the situation. Being precocious is something adults might think positively about (though not in all situations) but it's not something other kids usually admire.
Yes, it's great if they provide these things, but it's a distant secondary concern. I'd rather my kid get a great education and miss out on these things, than get a poor education but have access to all these.
But of course, as others have pointed out, it's a false dichotomy. You can have both.
For STEM-type stuff, see if there's a nearby Civil Air Patrol squadron. That alone has tons of extracurricular stuff: search and rescue, help with earning a pilot license, robotics, drill and ceremony.
Homeschooling is not for everybody, but if you go down that route there's a lot of support.
The stunted social and academic skills were pretty apparent in retrospect once the schools reopened.
The homeschooling crowd has developed methods over the years to compensate. The COVID remote learning cohort did not, and suffered for it.
And what ensures they utilize those methods, exactly? Many states you, as a kid are 100% educationally off the grid the moments say "We're homeschooling".
I think it also says something about the parents who think they can do as well or better.
Also, just FYI, to quote someone you prefix the text with ">".
And this is only just now being investigated as a cause of harm. When I went to public high school, the bullying happened at school and stayed there. Kids now, their bullies follow them home, and since most of the social interaction now happens online instead of in-person, it's way more damaging to mental health than the classic caricature of a schoolyard bully. The most I had to compare myself to were my peers in my school, not the entire globe of influencers and fake instagram.
There has been a complete erosion of boundaries. The threat is constant, you can't escape it, and kids are in a state of hyper-vigilance, always online or else they miss a crucial social interaction in group chat, or need to constantly check if a damaging photo, post, or rumor gets publicly posted to the internet while they were asleep.
Not only that, teens are losing the ability to read human emotion, so misunderstandings escalate rapidly. In person communication now becomes too intense, and only increases anxiety and isolation, despite being hyperconnected.
And that's just barely touching the surface.
If you think that homeschooling is a panacea, I guess we're all about to f*ck around and find out...
It took a lot of research on my end to get to that conclusion but I would have been just as good ignoring it and listening to the experience of a friend I made who home schooled all seven of her children, or talking to her kids. I did both; research led me to talk to her and her husband, talking to them confirmed I was making the right choice.
Though I am Christian, it had absolutely nothing to do with religion (we taught the same science everyone else received; no "the Earth is 15,000 years old" or whatever nonsense). I even think there's reasonable evangelical arguments to be made that Christians should put their children in traditional schools, so this wasn't a faith choice for me. I loved High School and I went to a large High School. So "bullying" and the like had nothing to do with it.
Had I not attended Public School, I probably wouldn't be doing what I love for a living and it was a couple of amazing teachers that went to bat for me, creating classes that didn't exist and letting me take HS classes while I was in Middle School, so when I say "I know I can do better" that's doesn't come with "because the public school system and the teachers are garbage." There's problems, there, for sure -- but my kids live in the #4 district and attend the #1 public High School in that district. It's a pretty fantastic school, the kids are friendly and I'm fine with it all around. I didn't think they'd do poorly regardless of how they were schooled, I just knew I could do better.
That's not arrogance; I think the vast majority of parents could do better.
It's because, as a parent, when they're young you can basically read their mind. That's an advantage a teacher doesn't get. You don't even have to "notice" that they're struggling or that they "know it cold and are bored", you just pace things on instinct and you deliver knowledge very close to the actual rate they can easily ingest it.
The other advantage that would be hard to replicate is class size. I had a class of two. Two different grades, but all that meant was my daughter got a preview of (and often just ended up learning completely) whatever she had to do and whatever her brother was learning and her brother got a review every day.
You can pretty much take out every other advantage of Home Schooling. Just those two result in a 6-7 hour whiteboard directed lesson and busy work time down to 45 minutes/child (really ... 30 most of the time). That also gave us a September to mid-April school year with generous vacations (otherwise we'd finish in February).
It wasn't my goal to make genius, spelling-bee winners, or to put them years ahead of public school students. The latter absolutely happened, but we were only ever doing a single grade per year in every subject with pretty formal home school curriculum. There was just a lot of extra time to screw around exploring things beyond the books.
I wanted them to learn better than they would in school and I wanted them to be able to be self-directed in learning. They are successful beyond my expectations in both areas.
They've been in Public School, now, for four years. My son hasn't taken work home from school in ... really ... four years. Homework is assigned, he just finishes it. My daughter is the same way. Outside of midterms and finals (out of fear/paranoia, not necessity), they do not touch schoolwork at home.
Despite not having taken a "real test" in their lives until enrollment, they placed in advanced classes. Despite them never receiving an independently graded assignment (or even one that had a grade written on it[0]), they both have a 4.0 GPA. My daughter had perfect scores in half of her classes last year.
They are happy kids who aren't stressed out at school (because those 45 minute daily sessions, apparently, covered a lot of ground -- my son still talks about things "he did in, like, 7th Grade, Dad!"
Really, though, forget all of the other reasons. It's worth doing it just for the relationship you form with your kids and that they form with their siblings. My teenagers don't act like teenagers. They act like happy young adults (because they are).
It wasn't hard. I did the majority of it with my ex- wife (through a high-conflict divorce and high-conflict early years ... that was hard ... worth it, though).
[0] You don't let your kids rack up debt by learning something less than very proficiently because you're the one that has to pay that debt when the later lesson comes that builds on that part, so yeah, they "got all As" in Home School ... because I don't like misery.
- Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.
- With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching.
It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it's comparatively much easier to pull your kids out and homeschool them.
Name the left values; don't beat around the bush.
Observing remote education is not good visibility into pre-covid teaching.
I think we have a responsibility to have educated citizens.
Most philosophy surveys will also include some of the other sides, which you might not even recognize as such. Descartes and Aquinas are fixtures, and Heidegger (notoriously conservative and also a literal Nazi) often features in university level classes. The point isn't to indoctrinate you with any of these viewpoints, it's to teach you how to analyze their arguments and think for yourself.
The complaint was that the alternative wasn't discussed.
Dialectical Materialism is literally brainrot and the damage it has done to human history is unfathomable.
But hey, both you and I are telling anecdotes. The only conclusion for me is that public school exposes you to people that do not think like you or your parents. Something, we are less and less exposed to. If that is good, anyone has to answer for themselves.
Leftist academic thought has however had huge influence on modern art movements. I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out why that might be.
I'm thinking this is fairly new. When I was in school, if I got bad grades or got in trouble at school, I got in trouble at home too. My parents were absolutely not calling the teachers complaining about grades. When I had trouble learning multiplication facts, they sat me down with flash cards every night until I had learned them, they didn't blame the teacher. This was in the 1970s/80s. This seemed pretty normal based on what I remember. When/why did it change?
Which values? I haven't gone to school in a long time.
One of my friends was home schooled. It was at least partly about religious values, but I think it was also partly about him being a bit of a strange kid and getting along better at home. He went back to public schools in middle school, and that was real rough but I think he was happy by the time he got to high school.
I'm sure there are many reasons to home school, but the one I hear about most is religious.
1. Gender is a social construct
2. Whiteness is a social construct and in particular has been used as a bludgeon against minority "non-whites" in the United States for a very long time
If you do not believe these things you are the problem. You lack education. You lack critical thinking. You are brainwashed.
Once you accept the simple facts as above, then you can finally explore the consequences.
(source: I went to a conservative christian school)
- Kids are never responsible for anything.
- Teachers are responsible for everything.
Here we had a case teenagers bullying their teacher – abused her verbally during school, posted deepfake revenge porn into internet, stole stuff from her garden etc. She cried for help and the case was investigated by commission that included people from people from ministry of education, police and psychologists. But the commission concluded that she was the problem – she lacked the skills to build a trusting relationship with kids.
Left-ish people tend to say "this doesn't happen in the real world, it's made up for internet arguments" - and I even said that for a while on this and a few other subjects - but that denial cannot survive extensive contact with the real world.
Anecdotally, but I bet you see a lot of it, I can count on one, maybe two hands the number of times my parents went to anything at the school to see me do a thing. And for my kids, there's something just about every other week.
> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass
This is no child left behind in action, which was implemented during W's term
> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching
^ This is the micromanagement that a ton of people claim to hate and get in their way on this site when folks are complaining about daily standups.
IMO, if you're worried about the quality of your kid's education then you'll either need to send them to a private or home school, which will stunt them socially because life isn't just one big private school or home, or encourage curiosity and learning at home to supplement their rote learning from school
I'm not sure remote schooling during the pandemic is very representative of day to day teaching in school. At least that's the impression I got from my teacher friends back then.
With that attitude you might as well just tell parents that they shouldn't participate in society!
Also its given me the chance to learn things that I missed during my primary and secondary educations. Going through each proof in Euclid's Elements again has been a lot of fun, and its been long enough that I have forgotten most of them, so the thrill of discovery is real for me too.
If you can make it work, you should make it work, even if that means moving to a lower CoL area, there are a lot of small towns in the US that have excellent amenities, and are great places to raise a family.
Additionally they have a lot of extra curricular activities they participate in ( sports, music, church youth group), that also gives them a lot of socialization time with others.
If you are offering a free service, that is quite time-intensive, and increasing numbers of people choose to not use it, then there should be more introspection going on. If it's happening in public education, I'm not able to see evidence of it.
This assumes that the blame obviously lies with the schools. Basically everyone I know that homeschools does it because they disapprove of tolerance. Should the introspection lead schools to embrace segregation again? It is going to be hard to bring people with such wildly different viewpoints together in harmony.
So I’m genuinely wondering if there’s a corresponding exit from the workplace or other demographic trends allowing/pushing this boom in home schooling to happen?
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