It seems that the regulations in the Czech Republic are actually legally “workable”, i.e. it’s possible to teach kids close to self-directed without having to do a lot of “compulsory curriculum” (i.e. my estimate is <5%). It also seems there is a “subculture” of families doing this and I managed to get to some people who know how to deal with this.
My conclusion is that there is no simple answer.
I don’t aim for a simple answer and I do not expect there is some. But as I said, the current system seems so broken that just answering “try not to harm” is a good substitution question. Also, it doesn’t really seem that kids would learn [and retain] that much [useful knowledge] compared to “watching youtube videos”.
I have concluded that school reproduces more than knowledge. It reproduces culture.
It does so indeed, but that culture doesn’t seem to be very worthwhile to me. I am rather tempted to risk this one, as the main thing it signals doesn’t seem to be that problematic to pick up later. I.e. homeschooled kids doesn’t seem to have issues when they want to switch to formal education, and at “worst” they pay a year or two of whatever-made-them-happy-or-stronger-in-other-ways for that (again, e.g. watching videos :-) ). I have read/heard this claim quite a lot, and I am less and less convinced that this aspect of schooling is positive.
I also think that some other benefits can be supplied in other ways and even more effectively. For example a good social network—it’s vastly superior/efficient to learn a few networking skills and just infiltrate e.g. some organizations, events or groups with a “good network”. It’s unlikely that it’s your random class that is “good social network”, and e.g. I have literally 0 friends from my primary and secondary school (I have a lot from university though—but anyone can do the uni I did if they want).
The other aspect is that you and I might have good ideas about which curriculum would be best
That kind of links to my previous answer. I am coming to a conclusion that the skills I would like to convey are rather very generic, blurry and meta. I want to teach her how to understand herself, her motivation, discipline, emotions, reasoning, goals and drive, how to understand other minds and how to model the world. I want her to understand how she can learn by herself whatever she wants to learn. It really seems to me that if we don’t want to learn something, then we should rather not learn it as we are not going to remember that anyway. And given the right tools and meta knowledge, we can learn almost everything in much shorter times than the “most common” path. Therefore, I don’t really care that much about the “object-level” curriculum. I think (but that’s still subject to a research) that the concepts important to me can be taught via mostly arbitrary picks in the real world (like nature or engineering) or just going outside and explicitly talk about that person kicking that soda machine. And I can’t imagine how these skills would not be useful or universal to time, at least on ~15 years from now scale, as they seem to be useful since eternity. I can imagine my job going obsolete—but I would use exactly these skills to find and learn something else which would be the best in that time for me.
Hi. Thanks a lot for a really nice write-up.
It seems that the regulations in the Czech Republic are actually legally “workable”, i.e. it’s possible to teach kids close to self-directed without having to do a lot of “compulsory curriculum” (i.e. my estimate is <5%). It also seems there is a “subculture” of families doing this and I managed to get to some people who know how to deal with this.
I don’t aim for a simple answer and I do not expect there is some. But as I said, the current system seems so broken that just answering “try not to harm” is a good substitution question. Also, it doesn’t really seem that kids would learn [and retain] that much [useful knowledge] compared to “watching youtube videos”.
It does so indeed, but that culture doesn’t seem to be very worthwhile to me. I am rather tempted to risk this one, as the main thing it signals doesn’t seem to be that problematic to pick up later. I.e. homeschooled kids doesn’t seem to have issues when they want to switch to formal education, and at “worst” they pay a year or two of whatever-made-them-happy-or-stronger-in-other-ways for that (again, e.g. watching videos :-) ). I have read/heard this claim quite a lot, and I am less and less convinced that this aspect of schooling is positive.
I also think that some other benefits can be supplied in other ways and even more effectively. For example a good social network—it’s vastly superior/efficient to learn a few networking skills and just infiltrate e.g. some organizations, events or groups with a “good network”. It’s unlikely that it’s your random class that is “good social network”, and e.g. I have literally 0 friends from my primary and secondary school (I have a lot from university though—but anyone can do the uni I did if they want).
That kind of links to my previous answer. I am coming to a conclusion that the skills I would like to convey are rather very generic, blurry and meta. I want to teach her how to understand herself, her motivation, discipline, emotions, reasoning, goals and drive, how to understand other minds and how to model the world. I want her to understand how she can learn by herself whatever she wants to learn. It really seems to me that if we don’t want to learn something, then we should rather not learn it as we are not going to remember that anyway. And given the right tools and meta knowledge, we can learn almost everything in much shorter times than the “most common” path. Therefore, I don’t really care that much about the “object-level” curriculum. I think (but that’s still subject to a research) that the concepts important to me can be taught via mostly arbitrary picks in the real world (like nature or engineering) or just going outside and explicitly talk about that person kicking that soda machine. And I can’t imagine how these skills would not be useful or universal to time, at least on ~15 years from now scale, as they seem to be useful since eternity. I can imagine my job going obsolete—but I would use exactly these skills to find and learn something else which would be the best in that time for me.