There are definitely people who are not curious. And there are even more people that lack access to support structures that allow them to fulfill their potential. (Sometimes, to keep myself grounded I go into a subreddit for dissatisfied grown homeschoolers; it is a never-ending flow of reminders of how horribly a certain class of parents can handle the responsibility of raising their kids.)
But I also think that one should beware of the inverse of the typical mind fallacy. By which I mean, that it is easy to subscribe solutions to other people that one would never accept for oneself, and that it might be good to think about if they do not experience the same thing as you would. In this context: there is a sizeable subpopulation that can not handle self-directed learning. Yet, though school is probably an improvement for them, is it actually the best solution? I would assume that the population that would fail at self-directed learning has a fairly large overlap with the population that fails in school, and that experiences the highest level of conflict with the system. So a solution that constrains their freedom, which someone with a curious mind dislikes, they dislike too.
I think this group needs self-determination too. Though they might not be able to make as many decisions on their own as high-achievers – they might need help with determining where to allocate their time, where to find resources, how to apply for grants, whatever – they still benefit from being included in the decision-making. If nothing else, it makes them feel respected, which I think is crucial if a person is to learn effectively.
So: I think we can get better outcomes by decentralizing more responsibility to the learner. But: I want the state to do regular check-ins to see that kids are doing ok. And if they are not progressing on a normal curve—say, they haven’t learned to read by 11 or so—they get extra support, more resources, but also more people that help them make decisions. But even at this juncture, they do not lose their autonomy, they are still respected as an equal part of the decision-making process. Though, I can imagine a sloping field, where you gradually lose autonomy the worse your progress is.
The technical details of how to do check-ins in a way that allows you to catch kids that fare ill, while not limiting the freedom of those that can handle it, are a bit tricky. But it’s doable.
The subreddit for dissatisfied grown homeschoolers, you meant HomeschoolRecovery, right?
As I am reading it now, I will make some notes here. (Different paragraphs are from different comments; this is not one long text.)
Being home schooled isn’t a big deal if you are in a 2-parent household that can afford to have one of the parents employed full time as your private teacher (in addition to being able to afford taking you all over the place to supplement learning, socialize, etc). Single parent households or households where both parents are forced to work because of the economics might not have this luxury.
My mom just kind of wrote off evolution as silly whenever she talked about it- “They believe monkeys turned into people, isn’t that silly?”- instead of actually explaining it.
my mom put me into a kind of “private homeschool” when i was 12 which was basically a bunch of kids hanging out all day, doing nothing, while the parents paid for what they called “private school with a homeschool environment” i did zero work, learned nothing and hated every minute of it.
Remember that awkward part of your life when you experienced your first crush? And you kind of made an idiot out of yourself because you weren’t sure how to act around them? That’s okay. You were a teenager. Everyone has awkward moments during their teens. Okay, now imagine going through that same experience, but when you’re twenty-one and supposedly old enough to know better.
I wasn’t homeschooled but my roommate my junior year of college was. Her parents didn’t believe in sex education and had sheltered her greatly up until this point (she had just transferred from a community college where she lived at home). She somehow made it to age 22 without having ANY idea of what sex was and I ended up having to give her the birds and the bees talk her second week in the dorms.
the only things I knew about sex were the absolute basics from a Christian biology textbook. It went into great detail about what happens on a cellular level (the molecular processes of making sperm, eggs, etc) but virtually nothing about the act itself. I didn’t know what an erection was until I was 20.
I was socially isolated and extremely far behind on my education (didn’t learn how to multiply and divide until 7th grade). This was all due to my mom being a control freak and general manipulator.
This reminds me of a friend of a friend, he was brainwashed by his mother and actually thought he was a mathematical genius, and was told that he would be a great engineer by his mother. He also got to skip standardized testing required for homeschool kids at the end of the year, and apparently it was because his grandmother was a teacher and could sign off that he passed. That kid was 16 and was just covering long division
My mother isolated us and had an emotionally incestuous/codependent relationship with me. I knew really well how to act to the outside world of adults that we’d encounter at church, etc, but didn’t have any friends my own age from 12 −22. My mother thought friends were unnecessary and ultimately a bad influence on children.
I fell behind in math. It’s hard to learn something when nobody around you understands it.
homeschooling allows sexually abusive, neglectful, and/or violent parents to prevent their children from having any contact with mandated reporters, which prevents them from getting reported. Bruises don’t get seen. Blank or concerning medical histories go unexamined. Weight loss and complaints of hunger go unnoticed.
My Mom is deeply religious and focused her teaching around the bible and areas she was interested in. For example, we did the “Egypt unit” 3-4 times. We studied rome and did latin because that was ‘classical learning’. Guess what we didn’t study? Music. PE. Anything my parents weren’t already knowledgeable on or skilled in we didn’t learn.
When I was 16 I passed a test to get into community college at 16. When I got there, I was blown away. My writing skills were terrible. My math skills were barely present. I remember crying in front of blackboards in science labs because I couldn’t do algebra. The first time I took an in class test I had a panic attack because I had never taken tests like this before in my life.
I remember when reading books growing up (specifically classics like Steinback, Uncle Toms Cabin, To Kill a Mockingbird, Scarlet Letter etc) my mom would “proof” them and white out any language she deemed vulgar or maybe passages with sensuality.
I had been homeschooled all of my life, severely sheltered and neglected by my parents. To put into perspective my lack of education, I taught myself how to read and 8 months ago, someone asked me what 5×5 is and I thought ‘Wait.… What does ‘times’ mean?′ I am 17.
I spent 9-12th grade thinking I sucked at math and that I hated it, turns out despite my mother having a degree in accounting she wasn’t actually good at teaching it.
My parents were horrible at teaching math. They “tried” for years to teach me fractions and failed. But I actually did develop the “teach yourself” work ethic and tried to learn every day. I found some very friendly guy on youtube who taught me fractions and basic algebra. Then I switched over to Khan Academy once I finished all his math videos. Crazy how you can go from “He must have some mental disability” to getting A’s in all your calculus and statistics classes.
one of the most painful things to me is looking back on all those lonely, empty years. what makes it worse, is as a child and adolescent it often isn’t clear to you that the way you are being raised is the main barrier to you having friends and people around. I remember spending hours as a small child writing up “plans” to get people to like me and to have friends, totally oblivious to the fact that there simply wasn’t the opportunity for it.
I absolutely hated christian science textbooks. I had an interest in biology and could never get a few paragraphs before “these facts can only mean ONE thing: that an almighty CREATOR designed the world in HIS image. Proverbs says...” there was no break. Even though I was a christian back then, I felt so aggravated by it after years of derailing my reading to shove bible verses down my throat. If I wanted to read the bible....I’d pick up the bible.
Something else I noticed about this mentality of “teacher and parent”: my parents ensured they were the ONLY authority in my lives, even going as far as badmouthing individuals who are teachers or youth leaders of different kinds. Only THEY knew what was correct, only THEY could make decisions. It came to the point that I had authority issues and was exceedingly rude or angry to others in positions of power as a child. I had not known how to work in a group, be respectful, accept criticism, and follow directions. I even hit other kids in those precious few moments I was with others. As an adult I just cry when I receive criticisms now, so...progress? When your home becomes your school, you literally have no break from that environment. Home stops being comforting, or some place that you look forward to returning to for relief when you’re away. The longer you stay in, the more it becomes a prison. I used to even call it stuff like that as a teenager...”oh, after the grocery store I will go back home to my cell”.
“you’re too naive and immature for X” can I make efforts to learn more about the world and mature? “No”
Our parents cared and did a lot for the first few months/years of homeschooling, but gradually got burned out and eventually switched to what they described as “unschooling”.
For the balance, many homeschoolers have a completely different experience. On the other hand, many kids in the school system have experience like this:
The problem is that the administration literally does nothing to stop bullying. Kids bullied me all the time in middle school and high school, but the teachers just told me to ignore it. They claimed that kids only bullied me to see my reaction, and that if I stopped reacting to it, they would stop bullying me. Some people even said that the bullying was my own fault because I kept reacting to it. But no matter how many times I told them that it was impossible to ignore, they kept acting like I wasn’t trying hard enough. I begged them to suspend the bullies, but they never did. The worst was the people who said that I would have to deal with bullying in the real world. But the bullying only ever happened in school, never in the real world.
As a summary, I’d say the main problem is that (at least as described in homeschooling in USA) there is very little accountability; the parents can do literally anything and there is no consequence. Many homeschooling parents intentionally cut off their children from the “decentralized knowledge system” that you described in the article.
Yes, that’s the one! That’s the downside of the increased variance caused by decentralization. And the upside is someone like JS Mill sitting next to his father translating Greek at four.
There need to be subtle controls to sort the one from the other – and maybe that’s a bit of a pipe dream since these controls would need to be done by human beings. In the same way as the steel man version of education is a pipe dream because it needs to be implemented by human beings.
The accountability is tricky: too little and you end up with the quotes above; too much and you end up forcing everyone to follow the same plan, whether at home or in learning centers or schools, leaving no room for innovation and individual needs. Parts of the US have tended toward the first error, Europe has tended toward the second. I have less insight into other parts of the globe.
And the upside is someone like JS Mill sitting next to his father translating Greek at four.
Technically, this is perfectly legal even in countries without homeschooling. The actual suffering only starts at six. :D
The accountability is tricky: too little and you end up with the quotes above; too much and you end up forcing everyone to follow the same plan
My first idea was to give kids exams at the end of each year, and allow homeschooling to those who overall results are not worse than the average results of kids who attend school. Because, intuitively, they don’t do worse than the school system on average. At the same time, the kids would get feedback on their abilities. It would be flexible—the better the school system, the more difficult to avoid it, but that’s kinda okay then; and the worse the school system, the easier to avoid it. It would also allow smart kids to follow their own plan, because doing worse in a subject or two is allowed as long as you excel in the remaining ones.
This does not account for the type of abuse that is unrelated to educational outcomes. Also, social skills.
It also does not account for innate differences in intelligence, or learning disabilities. Kids who are retarded or dyslexic would have to attend school. Kids with high intelligence, mostly neglected by their parents but still with some access to online education, could pass the tests… low below their personal potential, but still barely above the population average.
How about a compromise? A month or two of mandatory school at the beginning of every year, then allow homeschooling for the rest of the year. Exams at the end of the year. Though I suspect this might actually make everyone unhappy.
Alternatively, some kind of mandatory “socialization that is not school” for homeschoolers, one or two months every year. Maybe mixed up with the exams somehow. Like, kids would be together, with some teachers, just talking about what they learned at home previously, then write some exams. (Logistical problem, what about those teachers who only have a job one or two months every year? Maybe we could use summer holidays for this? But homeschoolers also want some summer vacation.)
For example: looking at kids that teach themselves to read, my impression is that the timing of literacy follows a normal distribution with the median at about 8 years. There are several upsides to learning reading on your own. And kids that learn at 10 or so do not seem to become weaker readers. So check-ins would have to be sensitive that kids develop at different speeds. Implementing reading tests at 6 or 7 would lead the majority to have to learn reading through coercion, which I think we should limit. I’d rather see a test at 10 or so, to catch kids that are on the later part of the bell curve.
If you do frequent and comprehensive tests, then you turn homes into schools, instead of allowing them to be a part of the learning system. I think tests need to be limited to the most crucial skills, likely just arithmetic and reading. Adding more tests limits the time kids can spend diversifying into their unique interests, and seeing after their individual needs.
Edit: I think portfolios are enough to determine if a kid is developing. If the portfolio doesn’t help the evaluator judge how the kid is doing, one can do diagnostic tests. And admission to University should to a large degree be reserved for students that perform well on a standardized aptitude test; that tends to be fairer to disadvantaged groups.
And socialization is usually not a problem, but one needs ways of catching the kids that do end up. I’m not sure how to make that fine-grained enough. Mandatory two-month socialization seems a bit too coarse, though of course better than what we see in countries that allow no freedom from schooling. And I have no better solution for how to catch the kids from homeschooling recovery right of the bat.
But I think the most important thing is for kids to have someone outside the family that spends time with them and get a feeling for their growth and situation. That can probably catch a lot of problems, without being logistically hard or overly controlling.
This is something I think about a lot too.
There are definitely people who are not curious. And there are even more people that lack access to support structures that allow them to fulfill their potential. (Sometimes, to keep myself grounded I go into a subreddit for dissatisfied grown homeschoolers; it is a never-ending flow of reminders of how horribly a certain class of parents can handle the responsibility of raising their kids.)
But I also think that one should beware of the inverse of the typical mind fallacy. By which I mean, that it is easy to subscribe solutions to other people that one would never accept for oneself, and that it might be good to think about if they do not experience the same thing as you would. In this context: there is a sizeable subpopulation that can not handle self-directed learning. Yet, though school is probably an improvement for them, is it actually the best solution? I would assume that the population that would fail at self-directed learning has a fairly large overlap with the population that fails in school, and that experiences the highest level of conflict with the system. So a solution that constrains their freedom, which someone with a curious mind dislikes, they dislike too.
I think this group needs self-determination too. Though they might not be able to make as many decisions on their own as high-achievers – they might need help with determining where to allocate their time, where to find resources, how to apply for grants, whatever – they still benefit from being included in the decision-making. If nothing else, it makes them feel respected, which I think is crucial if a person is to learn effectively.
So: I think we can get better outcomes by decentralizing more responsibility to the learner. But: I want the state to do regular check-ins to see that kids are doing ok. And if they are not progressing on a normal curve—say, they haven’t learned to read by 11 or so—they get extra support, more resources, but also more people that help them make decisions. But even at this juncture, they do not lose their autonomy, they are still respected as an equal part of the decision-making process. Though, I can imagine a sloping field, where you gradually lose autonomy the worse your progress is.
The technical details of how to do check-ins in a way that allows you to catch kids that fare ill, while not limiting the freedom of those that can handle it, are a bit tricky. But it’s doable.
The subreddit for dissatisfied grown homeschoolers, you meant HomeschoolRecovery, right?
As I am reading it now, I will make some notes here. (Different paragraphs are from different comments; this is not one long text.)
For the balance, many homeschoolers have a completely different experience. On the other hand, many kids in the school system have experience like this:
As a summary, I’d say the main problem is that (at least as described in homeschooling in USA) there is very little accountability; the parents can do literally anything and there is no consequence. Many homeschooling parents intentionally cut off their children from the “decentralized knowledge system” that you described in the article.
Yes, that’s the one! That’s the downside of the increased variance caused by decentralization. And the upside is someone like JS Mill sitting next to his father translating Greek at four.
There need to be subtle controls to sort the one from the other – and maybe that’s a bit of a pipe dream since these controls would need to be done by human beings. In the same way as the steel man version of education is a pipe dream because it needs to be implemented by human beings.
The accountability is tricky: too little and you end up with the quotes above; too much and you end up forcing everyone to follow the same plan, whether at home or in learning centers or schools, leaving no room for innovation and individual needs. Parts of the US have tended toward the first error, Europe has tended toward the second. I have less insight into other parts of the globe.
Technically, this is perfectly legal even in countries without homeschooling. The actual suffering only starts at six. :D
My first idea was to give kids exams at the end of each year, and allow homeschooling to those who overall results are not worse than the average results of kids who attend school. Because, intuitively, they don’t do worse than the school system on average. At the same time, the kids would get feedback on their abilities. It would be flexible—the better the school system, the more difficult to avoid it, but that’s kinda okay then; and the worse the school system, the easier to avoid it. It would also allow smart kids to follow their own plan, because doing worse in a subject or two is allowed as long as you excel in the remaining ones.
This does not account for the type of abuse that is unrelated to educational outcomes. Also, social skills.
It also does not account for innate differences in intelligence, or learning disabilities. Kids who are retarded or dyslexic would have to attend school. Kids with high intelligence, mostly neglected by their parents but still with some access to online education, could pass the tests… low below their personal potential, but still barely above the population average.
How about a compromise? A month or two of mandatory school at the beginning of every year, then allow homeschooling for the rest of the year. Exams at the end of the year. Though I suspect this might actually make everyone unhappy.
Alternatively, some kind of mandatory “socialization that is not school” for homeschoolers, one or two months every year. Maybe mixed up with the exams somehow. Like, kids would be together, with some teachers, just talking about what they learned at home previously, then write some exams. (Logistical problem, what about those teachers who only have a job one or two months every year? Maybe we could use summer holidays for this? But homeschoolers also want some summer vacation.)
I think that is too heavy-handed.
For example: looking at kids that teach themselves to read, my impression is that the timing of literacy follows a normal distribution with the median at about 8 years. There are several upsides to learning reading on your own. And kids that learn at 10 or so do not seem to become weaker readers. So check-ins would have to be sensitive that kids develop at different speeds. Implementing reading tests at 6 or 7 would lead the majority to have to learn reading through coercion, which I think we should limit. I’d rather see a test at 10 or so, to catch kids that are on the later part of the bell curve.
If you do frequent and comprehensive tests, then you turn homes into schools, instead of allowing them to be a part of the learning system. I think tests need to be limited to the most crucial skills, likely just arithmetic and reading. Adding more tests limits the time kids can spend diversifying into their unique interests, and seeing after their individual needs.
Edit: I think portfolios are enough to determine if a kid is developing. If the portfolio doesn’t help the evaluator judge how the kid is doing, one can do diagnostic tests. And admission to University should to a large degree be reserved for students that perform well on a standardized aptitude test; that tends to be fairer to disadvantaged groups.
And socialization is usually not a problem, but one needs ways of catching the kids that do end up. I’m not sure how to make that fine-grained enough. Mandatory two-month socialization seems a bit too coarse, though of course better than what we see in countries that allow no freedom from schooling. And I have no better solution for how to catch the kids from homeschooling recovery right of the bat.
But I think the most important thing is for kids to have someone outside the family that spends time with them and get a feeling for their growth and situation. That can probably catch a lot of problems, without being logistically hard or overly controlling.