I strong-disagreed since I don’t think any of your listed criticisms are reasonable. The implied premise is that homeschooling is deviant in a way that justifies a lot of government scrutiny, when really parents have a natural right to educate their children the way they want (with government intervention being reasonable in extreme cases that pass a high bar of scrutiny).
In particular, I think that outside of an existing norm where most students go to public school, the things you listed would be obviously unjust. Do you think that parents who fail a criminal background check shouldn’t be allowed to educate their own children (given that they still have custody of their children), or that a CPS investigation should make some kind of intermediate judgment of “not abusive but not worthy to educate the children without state intervention”?
If we were under a different education regime like universal school vouchers, or just totally unfunded private education, do you think it would be reasonable to have parents’ freedom to educate their children restricted for reasons like the ones you gave, or to introduce mandatory public schooling just for this kind of monitoring?
Something like what you describe would maybe even be my ideal too (I’m hedging because I don’t have super informed views on this). But I don’t understand how my position of “let’s make sure we don’t miss out on low-cost, low-downside ways of safeguarding children (who btw are people too and didn’t consent to be born, especially not in cases where their parents lack empathy or treat children as not people) from severe abuse” is committed to having to answer this hypotethical. I feel like all my position needs to argue for is that some children have parents/caretakers where it would worse if they had 100% control and no accountability than if the children also spend some time outside the household in public school. This can hold true even if we grant that mandatory public school is itself abusive to children who don’t want to be there.
This can hold true even if we grant that mandatory public school is itself abusive to children
My point doesn’t have anything to do with the relevant merits of public vs homeschool. My point is that your listed interventions aren’t reasonable because they involve too much government intrusion into a parent’s freedom to educate his children how he wants, for reasons based on dubious and marginal “safeguarding” grounds. My example of a different education regime was to consider a different status quo that makes the intrusiveness more clear.
I feel like all my position needs to argue for is that some children have parents/caretakers where it would be worse if they had 100% control and no accountability than if the children also spend some time outside the household in public school [emphasis mine]
This might be the crux: I’m saying that this position isn’t based on any reasonable principle of government intrusion on people’s lives. The government shouldn’t intrude on basic parenting rights with a ton of surveillance just to see whether it can make what it thinks is a marginal improvement.
More concretely, do you think parents should have to pass a criminal background check (assuming this is what you meant by “background check”) in order to homeschool, even if they retain custody of their children otherwise?
Re-reading your previous reply, I noticed this:
So, what you could do to get some of the monitoring back: have homeschooling with (e.g.) yearly check-ins with the affected children from a social worker. I don’t know the details, but my guess is that some states have this and others don’t.
No states use this policy and it doesn’t make sense that parents should have to submit to yearly inspections of their parenting practices. It only makes sense from the point of view where homeschooling is highly deviant and basically impermissible without special dispensation, and where the government has the authority to decide in very specific terms what composes children’s educations.
More concretely, do you think parents should have to pass a criminal background check (assuming this is what you meant by “background check”) in order to homeschool, even if they retain custody of their children otherwise?
I don’t really understand why you’re asking me about this more intrusive and less-obviously-cost-effective intervention, when one of the examples I spelled out above was a lower-effort, less intrusive, less controversial version of this sort of proposal.
I wrote above:
Like, even if yearly check-ins for everyone turn out to be too expensive, you could at least check if people who sign their kid up for homeschooling already have a history of neglect and abuse, so that you can add regular monitoring if that turns out to be the case. (Note that such background checks are a low-effort action where the article claims no state is doing it so far.)
(In case this wasn’t clear, by “regular monitoring” I mean stuff like “have a social worker talk to the kids.”)
To make this more vivid, if someone is, e.g., a step dad with a history of child sexual abuse, or there’s been a previous substantiated complaint about child neglect or physical abuse in some household, then yeah, it’s probably a bad idea if parents with such track records can pull children out of public schools and thereby avoid all outside accountability for the next decade or so, possibly putting their children in a situation where no one would notice if they deteriorated/showed worsening signs of severe abuse. Sure, you’re right that the question of custody plays into that. You probably agree that there are some cases where custody should be taken away. With children in school, there’s quite a bit of “opportunity for noticing surface” for people potentially noticing and checking in if something seems really off. With children in completely unregulated homeschooling environments, there could be all the way down to zero noticing surface (like, maybe the evil grandma locked the children into a dark basement for the last two years and no one outside the household would know). All I’m saying is: The households that opt for potential high isolation, they should get compensatory check ins.
I even flagged that it may be too much effort to hire enough social workers to visit all the relevant households, so I proposed the option that maybe no one needs to check in yearly if Kelsey Piper and her friends are jointly homeschooling their kids, and instead, monitoring resources could get concentrated on cases where there’s a higher prior of severe abuse and neglect.
Again, I don’t see how that isn’t reasonable.
Habryka claims I display a missing mood of not understanding how costly marginal regulation can be. In turn, I for sure feel like the people I’ve been arguing with display something weird. I wouldn’t call it a missing mood, but more like a missing ambition to make things as good as they can be, think in nuances, and not demonize (and write off without closer inspection) all possible regulation just because it’s common for regulation to go too far?
In my comments thus far, I’ve been almost exclusively focused on preventing severe abuse and too much isolation.
Something else I’m unsure about, but not necessarily a hill I want to die on given that government resources aren’t unlimited, is the question of whether kids should have a right to “something at least similarly good as voluntary public school education.” I’m not sure if this can be done cost-effectively, but if the state had a lot money that they’re not otherwise using in better ways, then I think it would be pretty good to have standardized tests for homeschooled kids every now and then, maybe every two to three years. One of them could be an IQ test, the other an abilities test. If the kid has an IQ that suggests that they could learn things well but they seem super behind other children of their age, and you ask them if they want to learn and they say yes with enthusiasm, then that’s suggestive of the parents doing an inadequate job, in which case you could put them on homeschooling probation and/or force them to allow their child to go to public school?
Something else I’m unsure about, but not necessarily a hill I want to die on given that government resources aren’t unlimited, is the question of whether kids should have a right to “something at least similarly good as voluntary public school education.”
This seems like it would punish variance a lot, and de-facto therefore be a huge tax on homeschooling. Some public schools are extremely bad, if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as the worst public schools, the costs of homeschooling increase a lot, constituting effectively a tax on homeschooling.
Maybe you mean “a right to an education at least as good as the worst public school education”, but my guess is the worst public school education is so bad that these would already be covered by almost any reasonable approach to human rights (like, my guess is it already involves continuous ongoing threats of violence, being lied to, frequent physical violence, etc.).
Huh, it grammatically reads fine to me. I am assuming the first paragraph reads fine, so I’ll clarify just the second.
In my first paragraph I said that making sure that most reasonable interpretations of “a right to an education at least as good as voluntary public school education” would put undue cost on homeschooling. In my second paragraph I then suggested one reading that does not plausibly incur that cost, which is a right to an education at least better than the worst voluntary public school education. However, it appears to me that students already have a right to an education at least better than the worst voluntary public school education, as I am sure the worst public school education violates many straightforward human rights and would be prosecutable under current law (just nobody is bothering to do that), suggesting that adding an additional right with such a low threshold wouldn’t really make any difference.
Ugh, this is totally my fault, but I did mean “first paragraph”. (Second paragraph of the comment, of which the first paragraph is the quote… yeah, I know; I wouldn’t have figured it out either…)
What I am saying is: yeah, your second paragraph makes sense. But… aren’t you just describing exactly the same thing that you, in your first paragraph, said would be bad?
Like… you say that “if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as the worst public schools”, this would be bad, would put an undue cost on homeschooling, etc. But then you say that “a right to an education at least as good as the worst public school education” would be fine, but meaningless in practice.
But…
… aren’t those the same thing??
if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as the worst public schools
a right to an education at least as good as the worst public school education
What’s the difference? You can’t just be leaning on the “greater than” vs. “greater than or equal to” distinction here… right? (Because that’s obviously a trivial difference!) Other than that, are these two scenarios not literally, exactly the same? What am I not seeing here?
Ah, oops, now I get it. Yes, I what I wrote sure didn’t make any sense. In my first paragraph I meant to write something like “if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as bad or average public schools, the costs of homeschooling increase a lot, constituting effectively a tax on homeschooling” and then in my second paragraph I meant to strengthen it into “the very worst public school”. I did sure write the same clarifiers in each paragraph, being very confusing.
I strong-disagreed since I don’t think any of your listed criticisms are reasonable. The implied premise is that homeschooling is deviant in a way that justifies a lot of government scrutiny, when really parents have a natural right to educate their children the way they want (with government intervention being reasonable in extreme cases that pass a high bar of scrutiny).
In particular, I think that outside of an existing norm where most students go to public school, the things you listed would be obviously unjust. Do you think that parents who fail a criminal background check shouldn’t be allowed to educate their own children (given that they still have custody of their children), or that a CPS investigation should make some kind of intermediate judgment of “not abusive but not worthy to educate the children without state intervention”?
If we were under a different education regime like universal school vouchers, or just totally unfunded private education, do you think it would be reasonable to have parents’ freedom to educate their children restricted for reasons like the ones you gave, or to introduce mandatory public schooling just for this kind of monitoring?
Thanks for elaborating, that’s helpful.
Something like what you describe would maybe even be my ideal too (I’m hedging because I don’t have super informed views on this). But I don’t understand how my position of “let’s make sure we don’t miss out on low-cost, low-downside ways of safeguarding children (who btw are people too and didn’t consent to be born, especially not in cases where their parents lack empathy or treat children as not people) from severe abuse” is committed to having to answer this hypotethical. I feel like all my position needs to argue for is that some children have parents/caretakers where it would worse if they had 100% control and no accountability than if the children also spend some time outside the household in public school. This can hold true even if we grant that mandatory public school is itself abusive to children who don’t want to be there.
My point doesn’t have anything to do with the relevant merits of public vs homeschool. My point is that your listed interventions aren’t reasonable because they involve too much government intrusion into a parent’s freedom to educate his children how he wants, for reasons based on dubious and marginal “safeguarding” grounds. My example of a different education regime was to consider a different status quo that makes the intrusiveness more clear.
This might be the crux: I’m saying that this position isn’t based on any reasonable principle of government intrusion on people’s lives. The government shouldn’t intrude on basic parenting rights with a ton of surveillance just to see whether it can make what it thinks is a marginal improvement.
More concretely, do you think parents should have to pass a criminal background check (assuming this is what you meant by “background check”) in order to homeschool, even if they retain custody of their children otherwise?
Re-reading your previous reply, I noticed this:
No states use this policy and it doesn’t make sense that parents should have to submit to yearly inspections of their parenting practices. It only makes sense from the point of view where homeschooling is highly deviant and basically impermissible without special dispensation, and where the government has the authority to decide in very specific terms what composes children’s educations.
I don’t really understand why you’re asking me about this more intrusive and less-obviously-cost-effective intervention, when one of the examples I spelled out above was a lower-effort, less intrusive, less controversial version of this sort of proposal.
I wrote above:
(In case this wasn’t clear, by “regular monitoring” I mean stuff like “have a social worker talk to the kids.”)
To make this more vivid, if someone is, e.g., a step dad with a history of child sexual abuse, or there’s been a previous substantiated complaint about child neglect or physical abuse in some household, then yeah, it’s probably a bad idea if parents with such track records can pull children out of public schools and thereby avoid all outside accountability for the next decade or so, possibly putting their children in a situation where no one would notice if they deteriorated/showed worsening signs of severe abuse. Sure, you’re right that the question of custody plays into that. You probably agree that there are some cases where custody should be taken away. With children in school, there’s quite a bit of “opportunity for noticing surface” for people potentially noticing and checking in if something seems really off. With children in completely unregulated homeschooling environments, there could be all the way down to zero noticing surface (like, maybe the evil grandma locked the children into a dark basement for the last two years and no one outside the household would know). All I’m saying is: The households that opt for potential high isolation, they should get compensatory check ins.
I even flagged that it may be too much effort to hire enough social workers to visit all the relevant households, so I proposed the option that maybe no one needs to check in yearly if Kelsey Piper and her friends are jointly homeschooling their kids, and instead, monitoring resources could get concentrated on cases where there’s a higher prior of severe abuse and neglect.
Again, I don’t see how that isn’t reasonable.
Habryka claims I display a missing mood of not understanding how costly marginal regulation can be. In turn, I for sure feel like the people I’ve been arguing with display something weird. I wouldn’t call it a missing mood, but more like a missing ambition to make things as good as they can be, think in nuances, and not demonize (and write off without closer inspection) all possible regulation just because it’s common for regulation to go too far?
In my comments thus far, I’ve been almost exclusively focused on preventing severe abuse and too much isolation.
Something else I’m unsure about, but not necessarily a hill I want to die on given that government resources aren’t unlimited, is the question of whether kids should have a right to “something at least similarly good as voluntary public school education.” I’m not sure if this can be done cost-effectively, but if the state had a lot money that they’re not otherwise using in better ways, then I think it would be pretty good to have standardized tests for homeschooled kids every now and then, maybe every two to three years. One of them could be an IQ test, the other an abilities test. If the kid has an IQ that suggests that they could learn things well but they seem super behind other children of their age, and you ask them if they want to learn and they say yes with enthusiasm, then that’s suggestive of the parents doing an inadequate job, in which case you could put them on homeschooling probation and/or force them to allow their child to go to public school?
This seems like it would punish variance a lot, and de-facto therefore be a huge tax on homeschooling. Some public schools are extremely bad, if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as the worst public schools, the costs of homeschooling increase a lot, constituting effectively a tax on homeschooling.
Maybe you mean “a right to an education at least as good as the worst public school education”, but my guess is the worst public school education is so bad that these would already be covered by almost any reasonable approach to human rights (like, my guess is it already involves continuous ongoing threats of violence, being lied to, frequent physical violence, etc.).
Er… I think you maybe got the adjectives mixed up in a bit? As written, your second paragraph doesn’t make any sense.
Did you perhaps mean… “good” / “as bad as the best”…? But that is also weird… yeah, I don’t understand what you had in mind there. Clarify, please?
Huh, it grammatically reads fine to me. I am assuming the first paragraph reads fine, so I’ll clarify just the second.
In my first paragraph I said that making sure that most reasonable interpretations of “a right to an education at least as good as voluntary public school education” would put undue cost on homeschooling. In my second paragraph I then suggested one reading that does not plausibly incur that cost, which is a right to an education at least better than the worst voluntary public school education. However, it appears to me that students already have a right to an education at least better than the worst voluntary public school education, as I am sure the worst public school education violates many straightforward human rights and would be prosecutable under current law (just nobody is bothering to do that), suggesting that adding an additional right with such a low threshold wouldn’t really make any difference.
Hope that helps!
Ugh, this is totally my fault, but I did mean “first paragraph”. (Second paragraph of the comment, of which the first paragraph is the quote… yeah, I know; I wouldn’t have figured it out either…)
What I am saying is: yeah, your second paragraph makes sense. But… aren’t you just describing exactly the same thing that you, in your first paragraph, said would be bad?
Like… you say that “if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as the worst public schools”, this would be bad, would put an undue cost on homeschooling, etc. But then you say that “a right to an education at least as good as the worst public school education” would be fine, but meaningless in practice.
But…
… aren’t those the same thing??
What’s the difference? You can’t just be leaning on the “greater than” vs. “greater than or equal to” distinction here… right? (Because that’s obviously a trivial difference!) Other than that, are these two scenarios not literally, exactly the same? What am I not seeing here?
Ah, oops, now I get it. Yes, I what I wrote sure didn’t make any sense. In my first paragraph I meant to write something like “if no home schoolers are allowed to be as bad as bad or average public schools, the costs of homeschooling increase a lot, constituting effectively a tax on homeschooling” and then in my second paragraph I meant to strengthen it into “the very worst public school”. I did sure write the same clarifiers in each paragraph, being very confusing.