Did you notice that the article highlights the rise of homeschooling co-ops? This is intentional on the part of the homeschooling movement. It improves both socialization and educational opportunities (e.g., shared lab equipment).

Rather than pearl clutching about individual anecdotes or doubling down on government control, I think states should provide direct funding to homeschool co-ops in addition to direct funding to families. That money and its positive effects on socialization and educational development will only work if governments keep their noses out of the details (i.e., parallels arguments for UBI).

My son is autistic and non-verbal. The local public school program that he would be in is overwhelmed. We hire a speech language pathologist to tutor him 3-4 hours a day in our home. That is only possible because of Arizona's support for homeschooling families. Homeschooling is a great outlet when standardization fails.

I was in a home-school coop about 25 years ago. We attended it a few times, until we stopped going. I was just a kid so I have no idea why we stopped. I remember it didn't help. I didn't know how to do any of the homework they assigned so I never did any (a practice that carried into high school). Since I never had tests or grades of any sort it didn't really matter.

Thanks for the additional details about your experience (and I'm sorry about them). Statistically, I'm slightly surprised that you were in a co-op that long ago. I was home-schooled a few years earlier and the notion of a co-op was just starting to be discussed.

There is a long tradition in this sort of thing in anarchist (and related) education. For example https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-managed_social_center#Fre...

It's maybe not 100% what you're thinking of, but it's reasonably close.

> Since I never had tests or grades of any sort it didn't really matter.

I was homeschooled to grade 3, and just because my parents didn't give me tests or grades, it absolutely mattered.

I had to correctly solve, both verbally and in writing, enough questions at the end of the current chapter of the textbook, to a standard that satisfied them. For every subject of study. Every single day.

> just because my parents didn't give me tests or grades

> I had to correctly solve ... to a standard that satisfied them

In other words, you had tests and grades

A test is, by most people's general understanding, is a closed-book, timed, evaluation of competency.

A grade is a permanent record of a snapshot-in-time evaluation of your understanding of a material.

"Read the chapter, solve the problems in it, we'll go over your work later" is neither a test, nor a grade.

Historically oral exams were commonly used to test a student's proficiency, but they fell out of favor as the educational system scaled up.

I don't agree about the funding. UBI is a great idea because the conditions are clear: you have to be a person to get this money.

Government funded homeschool co-ops or government funded homeschool families... Not so much.

As someone who pays taxes under the expectation that the government will do its best to use the money to provide a consistent education for all, I have a limited set of options when it comes to influencing how it gets spent. There is opportunity to improve that situation, certainly, but it's not corrupt. We pay in together and we vote for people who will spend that money on our collective behalf.

I don't have kids, so presumably I won't have the option to redirect that money towards Newton and away from Chaucer (or you know, whatever politically motivated alteration I come up with). People who do have kids shouldn't get different options than I do w.r.t. how the money is spent.

If somebody wants to influence the curriculum that gets funded with tax dollars, they should have the same power to do so as all of the other taxpayers. It should not be coupled to their educational choices for their own kids.

So, in your view of UBI "you have to be a person to get this money" would extend to children? If so, that would be a great way to fund homeschooling.

I find it hard to imagine a path to a working UBI system which does not first provide more basic things like healthcare are education. Arbitrary spending money isn't exactly foundational in the hierarchy of needs. But if somebody manages to find such a path, sure, why not give UBI to children.

Expecting those children to then spend it on education seems like a stretch, but we're already playing what-if here, so why not?

But unless you have that plan in your back pocket, we're still in a world where scarcity is relevant. If some people want to repurpose the commons in support of their own non-common agendas, then it's up to the rest of us to oppose that.

Isn't the entire argument for UBI that arbitrary spending money is exactly the best way to provide for people's individual needs? Like a poor person might be healthy and not really need healthcare, but they do need somewhere safe to live.

And you'd give the money to the children's guardians, who can make those decisions on the children's behalf. Maybe they hire a tutor. Maybe they send their kids to a school. Maybe they use the money to offset a stay at home parent.

I don't think UBI makes sense for a variety of reasons, but that's the gist of it, no?

> Isn't the entire argument for UBI that arbitrary spending money is exactly the best way to provide for people's individual needs?

No. That's an argument used by the subset of UBI supporters who believe that UBI should displace all other social support including non-means-tested aid, but that's not the general case of UBI advocates (who generally advocate that UBI should displace means-tested benefits, but there's no general position on universal/unconditional non-cash programs alongside UBI.)

Support for universal (public single-payer or otherwise) health coverage of some kind among UBI supporters is pretty common, for instance.

The more general reason for UBI is the belief that multiple means-testing bureaucracies are duplicative of each other and thr tax system, and prone to adverse incentives due to too-quick clawback both in where it cuts in and in the ratio of aggregated benefit reductions for each increment of additional income.

@dragonwriter has it right as far as the pro-UBI position being a varied one. I recognize that mine is nonstandard.

In general, I prefer:

1. a functioning government

2. a UBI-enabled market

3. a malfunctioning government

It seems to me that the least violent way to kill off a government and bootstrap a new one in its place is to work towards a position where you can safely turn your back on the currency that the incumbent is minting. I view UBI a tool to make such a step more palatable. A safety net for transition times.

It still has to be backed by something, and I think the most likely candidate for that something is demonstrated success in other areas of DIY-government. If people can look around and see that the problems are getting solved, then maybe they'll have enough faith in a UBI system designed to let them safely quit the old ways and participate in building something new. This credibility would come from solving things like education and healthcare, which is why I say I have a hard time imagining a UBI system getting up and running in a community that does not have a grasp of those more immediate problems.

Without that initial success as a credibility-builder, the UBI-paved road to a functioning government will be indistinguishable from a ponzi scheme: here's some pretend thing for you to value.

If people truly have no faith in the existing government's ability to do government things, then their DIY efforts should be gathering steam to sideline that government, not angling for a slice of the tax bill from the very government that they've lost control of. If they get that slice they'll have become the very sort of corruption that they're objecting to.

If that's not an amount of work they're ready to stomach, then maybe they should rethink their disavowal of the existing channels in the first place and instead go participate in them.

> Rather than pearl clutching about individual anecdotes

> We hire a speech language pathologist to tutor him 3-4 hours a day in our home.

You have a good point. GP’s experience with home schooling was an anecdote whereas your experience with home schooling is not

> The local public school program that he would be in is overwhelmed.

Pay more taxes. Solve the problem for all people who run into it, not just the ones who can afford it.

Do you see any upper limit for how much you are willing to pay per student to have them educated in society?

The upper limit would be the expected total contribution to society that person would create in their lifetime.

In 2019 the US was at 38% above average with four other countries above us: https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd/education-exp...

I think our educational outcomes are not in line with our spending because a part of our political apparatus is simultaneously trying to sabotage the program.

What do you mean by “da culture”

Every time this line of thought comes up, I wonder where these people think the money is going. Perhaps to teacher salaries in very high cost-of-living areas? Perhaps to providing basic services to students (like breakfast and basic therapy) that their parents can't because, as a society, we've deemed the latter unworthy of a decent income, for whatever reason? Perhaps to maintaining failing infrastructure that was purposely neglected for decades?

I feel like they think that the money is given to the kids directly, who waste it on weed and the hippity hop albums or whatever. Call it what it is: racism and classism destroys their critical thinking capacity.

nah, its the administrative state where all the money is going. ie not to the kids or the teachers. same thing for college (private or public). professors salaries didnt go up. i wouldnt mind paying teachers more directly its just that the money gets sucked up before it touches them.

I've never seen proof of this, nor why it's any different for wealthy school districts where cost-per-student is nominally lower (parental investment notwithstanding).

But that's beside the point, because the notion is always brought up as a way to say that the students themselves are a lost cause.

anti-intellectualism and faux-intellectualism.

Isn't that just a private school where the parents are the teachers?

It depends on the co-op. Some meet every day, in which case yes it's effectively a private school. My kids used to attend a co-op that met once a week for hands-on, group learning activities. The rest of the time, they were doing their course work at home.

A homeschooling co-op is literally us just reinventing the wheel. A large enough co-op becomes a school system and a school system eventually adopts a standard curriculum.

People who do co-ops might not object to public schooling in principle but to the particular implementation that their locality has adopted. If co-ops becomes public schools with better management, all the better.

And if they become public schools with worse management and driven by crazy people.. what then?

Straw man, slippery slope, false dilemma, causal fallacy.. do they teach rhetoric and Aristotelian logic in public schools?

Parent post does not contain those fallacies.

> a lifetime of stunted socialization skills and poor work habits.

The joke's on you, I wasn't home-schooled and I still got both of those.

This is comment I was looking for. Any number of circumstances can lead to the same outcome, question is what does one do going forward?

Is your username related to the actual program out of Toronto?

No, I'm not Canadian and have no idea what program you're talking about.

I mean, this cuts both ways. One of the most consistent predictors of success in public school is parental involvement.

The only school I ever went to that was good for socialization was community college. Tbh, for learning too. I basically learned all of math, from arithmetic up, as an adult at community college, to compensate for learning nothing and getting pushed through all of the grade levels at public school.

I wish they had community colleges where I live now lol.

Exactly. There are involved parents whose kids are going to thrive in the public school. There are uninvolved parents whose kids are going to do poorly no matter where they are.

So the question becomes "should more taxes be spent to disproportionately favours kids whose parents are uninvolved, in the hopes that they reach the same outcome as kids of the involved parents?"

If a school system is organized around providing each child with the same investment of education and expecting some to make use of that investment more than others, then answer would be no. If it is organized around trying to get the same outcome from each child regardless of how much it costs, the answer is yes.

My siblings and I were homeschooled up to about middle school. My mother had three years of college but no degree and taught all four of us at once. For financial reasons we all ended up going to public school at around late elementary/middle school and we were miles ahead of everyone from an academic standpoint. There were definitely some social issues integrating which didn't take long but I think our parents could have done a better job exposing us to "normal" kids and not moving around so much. YMMV.

For real. It's telling that the kids don't jump in here to defend the practice, hardly ever (also homeschooled, education was great, socialization was absolutely problematic despite doing all the homeschool group things.)

That's BS. I was unschooled (except for paying my way for my associate's degree when I was 13), and I wouldn't put a kid through school. The freedom let me get my first coding job at 17, and I was freelancing well before that. I got to do what I wanted, and I would be crippled if I was stuck in the thought patterns that public school entails.

Socialization was hard, mostly because the other kids my age were really, well, dumb. I am still friends with every good friend I had back then. I noticed plenty of problems with other homeschoolers, but nowhere near as bad as the school kids I knew. They were growing up either stressed beyond belief, addicted to drugs, or promiscuous. Occasionally all three. Compared to my religious fundamentalist friend who is now a happily married mechanical engineer, their "enhanced socialization" is worthless.

It's not like kids learn anything in school anymore. Our test scores are nationally tanking, the only reason to get good grades is to get into a better school which will probably not teach you anything valuable, and real knowledge is increasingly devalued. I was raised and taught that knowledge is its own reward, and if you're smart and good at learning, you can do anything you put your mind to.

Guess what? It's true.

You can say it until you're blue in the face, point out how obviously true it is, and they can't see it. They'll invent excuses why you're wrong.

What are you working on?

Was in e-commerce, got burned out doing meaningless work, so now I'm working at a pro-farm non-profit. I get to be self-directed and smart.

Tech for ag? I think that's an underserved market, although not totally neglected, of course.

Tech for community ag advocacy. Much more people-focused, product engineering type work. Great stuff.

You must be skipping over all of the comments on this thread where homeschooled kids do exactly that.

Hi. I was homeschooled. I graduated university top of my class, have a high-skill high-paying job, think more critically (about everything including religion) than most people that I know, and overall I enjoy my life very much. I'm homeschooling my kids.

Pretty similar background here. Maybe successfully homeschooled adults are just hesitant to dive into this sort of discussion anecdote first?

Given the stigma that many people still associate, we probably learned not to talk about it, maybe even subconsciously.

You should be hesitant.

Agreed: generally speaking, diving into any discussion anecdote-first is unhelpful and should be avoided.

It's a pity that some people will take a collection of anecdotes as data and treat a lack of countering anecdotes as conclusive proof.

Yeah that’s what I was trying to imply.

There's a selection bias where people who are happy and well-adjusted don't spend their lives picking fights on comment forums.

> It's telling that the kids don't jump in here to defend the practice, hardly ever...

Homeschooled kids are a minority, and therefore formerly-homeschooled adults are a minority too. More of a minority, even (since the rate of homeschooling was lower when we were growing up). It's not "telling", it's simply the fact that not a ton of people exist to give a defense.

For my part I was homeschooled and had a great experience. My parents were able to challenge me in ways that the local public school wasn't willing to, and they made consistent efforts to make sure I had social exposure to other kids. I don't believe I am lacking in any way because my parents homeschooled me - in fact, if anything I believe it was the better option for me.

And I think you need to remember that the other side of the coin exists too. My wife went to public school, and was bullied by other kids. She has social anxiety and other issues to this day (she's 42 years old) as a result. That doesn't mean public schools are all bad, of course, but people need to stop ignoring the downsides of public school when they compare the two paradigms.

Counterpoint - why don't we see defense of homeschooling at the same rate of attacks? Even if they are rare, there are several posters here that have experienced bad home schools. If they are at least 50:50, shouldn't we expect the same rate of defense? That we don't see that is telling.

Being bullied sucks and has huge negative impacts. I am glad though, that I have the tools and experience to identify that happening now that I am an adult. A homeschooled me might not, and then suffer much more in the adult sphere. Negative interactions are something kids have to learn to deal with. It's not pretty or fair or even safe, but neither is the world.

My sense is that we do see defense at approximately the same rate as attacks (if not higher), but the attacks stand out more because negative emotions weigh more than positive ones. Even if we didn't see equal rates, that would be expected for the same reason: someone who hates that their parents homeschooled them is far more likely to get on and post a scathing comment than someone who loved the experience.

Companies have to bribe and cajole customers to leave positive reviews because otherwise the few people with disastrous experiences will be the only ones who bother to review at all. There's no equivalent pro-homeschool lobby begging people to get on and defend homeschooling on Hacker News.

This is the classic problem solved by Bayes: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HZGCoVF3YvM there just aren't that many homeschooled people to provide a defense.

I'm another successful homeschooled-until-college adult, but homeschooling isn't that common now and it was even less popular when I was growing up.

EDIT: unless you were mentioning defense of homeschooling given they were homeschooled. I would assume most people on HN who were homeschooled had a decent education/homeschooling experience.

Since we're simply in speculation land, perhaps happy homeschooled adults are less screen-obsessed than those who went to 'normal' school or those poorly homeschooled and thus have better things to do with their life?

> Negative interactions are something kids have to learn to deal with. It's not pretty or fair or even safe, but neither is the world.

Completely agree. If someone assaults you in real life, you should learn that you need to file charges to ensure your assaulter goes to jail. Not sit quietly in the corner while your abuser gets a talking to.

> If someone assaults you in real life, you should learn that you need to file charges to ensure your assaulter goes to jail.

If someone assaults me I have to become a public prosecutor?

Victims, qua victims, can file a police report. But only the state can file criminal charges, and whether they will or won't depends on, well, lots of things outside of the control of thr victim.

> Completely agree. If someone assaults you in real life, you should learn that you need to file charges to ensure your assaulter goes to jail. Not sit quietly in the corner while your abuser gets a talking to.

Filing charges to make sure your assaulter goes to jail is a fantasy for many people and situations. Just like in school, justice is not always going to happen. Sorry.

Also, should we through 10 year old bullies in jail? 15? What’s the line?

My siblings and I were all home schooled until college. We all have advanced degrees, families, and high paying professional jobs. My socialization was great. There is barely a memory of mine growing up were my siblings and I weren't out with friends in the neighborhood. Home school isn't for everyone and neither is public school. Personally I wouldn't trade my experience for anything.

Almost everyone I knew who was homeschooled had no noticeable social problems. Most had successful careers and marriages. Of course the fact that I knew them meant their parents were allowing them into a variety of social situations.

You and I have matching stories, unfortunately. I've made a point of sending my sons to public school for this reason. Now, of course this also means that I shopped for a district that aligned with my expectations. But would never want a repeat of my own experience.

I think being accountable for your work to a person who isn't in your family is actually an important thing to learn. It also turns out, parents aren't really qualified to be teachers just because they believe that they are.

Good education vs bad/no education

You'll find this in public schools too.

I’m sorry for you bad experience, but statistically kids do better when homeschooled. It’s not like public school as some minimal level they’re assured to bring kids up to.

Citation needed.

Beyond studies by the National Home Education Research Institute, that is. The three leading studies by homeschooling advocates looked at "homeschooled students who went to college" and how they did at school versus public schooled students at college, and ignored the fact that the percentage of homeschooled students who went to college was much smaller (why?) than for public schools.

My guess for the college admission situation is at least partially because, until recently, a lot of public and private colleges essentially refused to recognize homeschooling as a way to get an education, so your chance of getting admitted was almost zero at a ton of schools. This lead a lot of people (myself included) to essentially join something that's legally an accredited private school, but functionally homeschooling, but you take your exams at a central place at a central time. For statistical purposes, I was private schooled, because that was what I needed to do to make it into college. Actually fully homeschooled people went to community college and then tried and often failed to transfer.

For reference I had to take several SAT subject tests to get into college ~20 years ago, the homeschooling co-op I was a part of did get accredited while I was attending so I think those tests weren't a requirement for other kids who went through an accredited co-op.

I was curious to know what sort of studies had been done in that regard, I didn't notice anything mentioned by the article, though admittedly I only skimmed the 2nd half. FWIW I don't think I've ever met or known of anyone being home schooled in Australia, though I'm sure it must happen.

(Educationally)

The majority of my schooling was at home as well, and while education was mostly ok (with some notable highs and lows) my parents found it difficult to make the scheduling work for socialization (in part due to my semi-rural hometown — any activities meant a considerable drive), and so that was largely absent.

I’ve done alright for myself and have even managed to rank among top achievers in my family, but it’s felt like I’ve been stuck playing catchup in various ways throughout my adult life. Now in my mid-30s, in some aspects I feel that I’m where I should’ve been in my mid-20s.

With that in mind I wouldn’t say I’m against homeschooling necessarily, but I think it’s crucial for parents to consider if they really have the time available to make it as complete as it needs to be. If there’s any doubt at all it might not be a great idea.

You write pretty well based on these few sentences. I have found that nothing improved my writing more than reading authors I liked and being aware of (in some cases adopting or imitating elements of) their writing styles. Did you read a lot on your own?

Pretty much everything I know I picked up in community college about six years after graduating high school with a 2.6 GPA. I like to think I'm a smart and empathetic person. I would love to meet the person who got to use those innate skills at a young age instead of having to dredge up whatever remained after a decade of neglect.

I think this is a highly individualized question depending on the circumstances.

I'd qualify as smart depending on the metric. I actually went to a private school (the public schools in the area were complete garbage and out of control - bomb threats, drugs, etc at the middle school level). It really wasn't that challenging and most of my useful knowledge beyond the basic read/write/math is self taught. Most of the stuff I learned in college was never used. Using those innate skills at a young age produced nothing tangible. I won't achieve any real success in life even though I checked all the boxes when I was younger - smart, good grades, extracurriculars, family, religion, went to college, etc.

Really all any good school or parent can do that is helpful is teach their kids to want to learn and how to self-teach. Most schools are terrible at this and just want to hit test scores and follow procedures/regulations (learning environment can be atrocious). I'd say most parents are average at this.

The real question is, what do you think would be different and why can't you achieve that now?

I will second this. I went to a normal parochial school and my wife went to a normal public school and we both agree that our higher-than-average educational outcomes were due to self-teaching and tons of parental tutoring.

Sorry that happened to you, but thankfully you're in a small minority with that outcome.

People socialised for thousands, in fact hundreds of thousands of years before schools were invented.

I went to school and got beat up, colour me sceptical about school as a mechanism for socialisation.

Socialization is broader than just between peers. It's how the individual develops a relationship to society as a whole. The public school system is the primary way the state socializes kids. You learn the difference between the public and private spheres (the school vs the family), how the two relate, and how they relate to the broader community. Some are better served by it than others but on the whole it's a very good thing.

Yeah I can't say I ever experienced the values of the state at school, unless the values of the state are "survival of the fittest" and "might makes right".

Actually, you might be on to something!

You believe in a false god you call "the state" and "society". These things don't exist, only people exist.

Public schools are operated with the purpose of breaking the spirit of the children of the underclass so that they become obedient workers or soldiers. That's why the education part is so lacking and the obedience training so focused. Children are schooled in having no liberty of time, no liberty of movement and no liberty of thought. Perfect for a soldier or industrial or corporate worker.

On the contrary a successful adult is characterized by having liberty of her time, liberty of her movement and liberty of her thought.

The purpose of state schools is to create failed human beings, because they are needed to serve the rulers.

Schools are specifically made to break communities by separating children by age, leaving their main influence to be a few teachers, instead of having dynamic interactions with adults of all different types.

No institution has been more damaging to humanity than state schools.

> The public school system is the primary way the state socializes kids

They aren't the state's kids. The school can help parents in things like socialisation, as far as they deem it appropriate, but I think the state raising kids is totally the wrong mindset.

> the state socializes kids.

that's sometimes called indoctrination.

> The public school system is the primary way the state socializes kids.

Public schools socialises kids like McDonald's feeds a society.

I prefer homegrown tomatoes.

Socialisation here means "learn to accept arbitrary hierarchies and petty injustices as the natural state of the world," not "learn to respect other people as human beings." In fairness, the former probably maps better to the real world.

People lived in tribes, close knit towns, or cities with public areas.

Now a very large portion of us live in detached homes, far away from any groups of children.

This is a political problem with political solutions.

People were not educated by any modern sense back then

Were they actually socialized for thousands of years? The average (sub)urban school in the US teaches more kids every day than the average person would have come in contact with in their entire lives, often ten times over. Most people were subsistence farmers and didn't travel very far from their little village in their entire life.

Arguably any period of history where the majority of people lived as subsistence farmers and rarely interacted with others not part of the household was an anomaly though, and very different to how pre-agricultural societies lived.

It's very likely just a US thing. You go to Europe, you see villages (as in groups of houses) and agricultural fields extending out from each village. While US, I believe it's isolated houses surrounded by farmland.

Oh I suspect it was quite common in much of Europe for fairly long periods too, when there very limited options for travel for vast majority of people, who were in fact farmers. Yes, the farms were small, but most of your energy went into tending those, and interactions with those even only a km or so away was possibly often only once a week. I don't think it's an environment most people would thrive in though.

I seriously doubt it since isolated families would have to worry about marauders, thieves, being in they way of some oncoming army, etc and being within a community buffers against that. America you had more space, less density of people, more recent movement of peoples, so probably they didn't have to worry about such things.

The average medieval subsistence farmer probably had ~10000 people living within 6 miles of them. People tended to live in areas with fertile land, and the land could easily support 100-200 people per square mile.

Teaching about the world isn't the same as socialisation. Having said that, they did learn about their world.

there are obviously lots of kids that had a very bad homeschooling, and also lots of kids that had very bad public schooling. many kids are bullied so badly at school that they commit suicide, and many more develop antisocial habits there. the question is whether those issues are better or worse with homeschooling, and a single anecdote doesn't help us with that.

I see a lot of single anecdotes and see no reason not to include mine.

Neither does the balance fallacy.

I was home-schooled and thought it was amazing. I then studied education and worked as a public middle school teacher. I definitely will co-op or home-school my kids unless they want to go to school.

In middle school I was beaten to the point where my jaw was wired shut. Nothing happened to the kid that did it and I had to be in his class for 2 years. Anything can have a bad outcome.

so kind of like public school then?