Homeschooling is like growing your own food (or doing any other activity where you don’t take advantage of division of labor): if you enjoy it, have time for it and are good at it, it’s worth trying. Otherwise it’s useless frustration.
I couldn’t agree more about division of labor in general, but with the current state of the public school system, I do not trust them to do a good job of teaching anything.
I do not have the time or patience for it, and probably am not good at it, but fortunately my partner would be the one teaching.
I do not trust them to do a good job of teaching anything.
Good compared to what? Compared to other developed countries, compared to what they could do if they spent their resources more wisely, compared to what you could do homeschooling your kid?
A lot of the criticism of US schools is based on the first two criteria, but the third one should be the one that matters for you—even if they do a crappy job compared to Europe or Canada, they might still do a better job than you on your own, especially if you take into account things like learning to get along with peers.
(That being said, I don’t know enough about either your situation or even US schools (I live in France), I’m just wary of the jump from “schools are bad” to “I can do better than schools”)
Student achievement in US schools compared to e.g. Finnish schools is to a large extent a reflection of the much greater inequality in the US. If you’re a middle class parent and you’re not living in a high-poverty neighborhood, your kid will be totally fine going to public school.
I agree that 3 standard deviations of improvement of a random person is a lot to ask for. However, I can easily see that someone with built in potential to be 3 sd above average could be brought down to near average by the wrong system.
My expectation of my children’s potential is very dependent on how heritable intelligence is, and I admittedly do not know much about that.
Given the Bloom two sigma phenomenom it would not surprise me if unschooling + 1 hour tuition per day beat regular school. And if you read Lesswrong there’s a reasonable p() that an hour of a grad student’s time isn’t that expensive.
I googled the “Bloom two sigma phenomenom” and… correct me if I am wrong, but I parsed it as:
“If we keep teaching students each lesson until they understand, and only then move to the next lesson (as opposed to, I guess, moving ahead at predetermined time intervals), they will be at top 2 percent of all students”.
What exactly is the lesson here? The weaker form seems to be—if students don’t understand their lessons, it really makes a difference at tests. (I guess this is not a big surprise.) The stronger form seems to be—in standard education, more than 90% of students don’t understand the lessons. Which suggests that of the money given to education, the huge majority is wasted. Okay, not wasted completely; “worse than those who really understand” does not necessarily mean “understands nothing”. But still… I wonder how much additional money would be needed to give decent education to everyone, and how much would the society benefit from that.
Based on my experience as a former teacher, the biggest problem is that many students just don’t cooperate and do everything they can to disrupt the lesson. (In homeschool and private tutoring, you don’t have these classmates!) And in many schools teachers are completely helpless about that, because the rules don’t allow them to make anything that could really help. Any attempt to make education more efficient would have to deal with the disruptive students; perhaps to remove them from the main stream. And the remaining ones should learn until they understand. Perhaps with some option for the smarter ones to move ahead faster.
Are you kidding? Did you go to school? Teaching material to a class of 10 (let alone 20 or 50) K-12 kids, selected only by location and socio-economic class, is a ridiculously overconstrained problem. To give one of the main problems: for each concept you teach, you have to choose how long to explain it and give examples. If you move on, then any kid who didn’t really get it will become very lost for the rest of the year (I’m thinking of technical subjects, where you have long dependent chains of concepts). If you keep dropping kids, then everyone gets lost. If you wait until everyone gets it, then you go absurdly slow. My little brother has been “learning” basic arithmetic in his (small, private) school for six years.
Not sure what exactly in my comment you are objecting to so vehemently. The issues you describe are exactly the same as with any mass production, including food.
If we are talking about babysitting, then of course I agree—much more efficient to have one person babysit 15 kids.
If we are talking about learning, then I am vehemently objecting to “a normal education is just/almost as good as homeschooling”.
The point of the example I gave (mastery learning vs. speed in the classroom) was that you can’t mass produce education in the naive way. Taking advantage of division of labor in this context would mean hiring tutors.
Homeschooling is like growing your own food (or doing any other activity where you don’t take advantage of division of labor): if you enjoy it, have time for it and are good at it, it’s worth trying. Otherwise it’s useless frustration.
I couldn’t agree more about division of labor in general, but with the current state of the public school system, I do not trust them to do a good job of teaching anything.
I do not have the time or patience for it, and probably am not good at it, but fortunately my partner would be the one teaching.
Good compared to what? Compared to other developed countries, compared to what they could do if they spent their resources more wisely, compared to what you could do homeschooling your kid?
A lot of the criticism of US schools is based on the first two criteria, but the third one should be the one that matters for you—even if they do a crappy job compared to Europe or Canada, they might still do a better job than you on your own, especially if you take into account things like learning to get along with peers.
(That being said, I don’t know enough about either your situation or even US schools (I live in France), I’m just wary of the jump from “schools are bad” to “I can do better than schools”)
Student achievement in US schools compared to e.g. Finnish schools is to a large extent a reflection of the much greater inequality in the US. If you’re a middle class parent and you’re not living in a high-poverty neighborhood, your kid will be totally fine going to public school.
What does “totally fine” mean? I wouldn’t describe 99% of the population as “totally fine” in terms of education and rational thought.
I don’t think a system that can promise you 3 standard deviations of improvement has been invented. Look at twin studies.
I agree that 3 standard deviations of improvement of a random person is a lot to ask for. However, I can easily see that someone with built in potential to be 3 sd above average could be brought down to near average by the wrong system.
My expectation of my children’s potential is very dependent on how heritable intelligence is, and I admittedly do not know much about that.
As far as I know, most estimates point to around 50% genetic, but parenting style doesn’t explain much of the remaining 50%
See this: http://infoproc.blogspot.fr/2009/11/mystery-of-nonshared-environment.html
Given the Bloom two sigma phenomenom it would not surprise me if unschooling + 1 hour tuition per day beat regular school. And if you read Lesswrong there’s a reasonable p() that an hour of a grad student’s time isn’t that expensive.
I googled the “Bloom two sigma phenomenom” and… correct me if I am wrong, but I parsed it as:
“If we keep teaching students each lesson until they understand, and only then move to the next lesson (as opposed to, I guess, moving ahead at predetermined time intervals), they will be at top 2 percent of all students”.
What exactly is the lesson here? The weaker form seems to be—if students don’t understand their lessons, it really makes a difference at tests. (I guess this is not a big surprise.) The stronger form seems to be—in standard education, more than 90% of students don’t understand the lessons. Which suggests that of the money given to education, the huge majority is wasted. Okay, not wasted completely; “worse than those who really understand” does not necessarily mean “understands nothing”. But still… I wonder how much additional money would be needed to give decent education to everyone, and how much would the society benefit from that.
Based on my experience as a former teacher, the biggest problem is that many students just don’t cooperate and do everything they can to disrupt the lesson. (In homeschool and private tutoring, you don’t have these classmates!) And in many schools teachers are completely helpless about that, because the rules don’t allow them to make anything that could really help. Any attempt to make education more efficient would have to deal with the disruptive students; perhaps to remove them from the main stream. And the remaining ones should learn until they understand. Perhaps with some option for the smarter ones to move ahead faster.
Are you kidding? Did you go to school? Teaching material to a class of 10 (let alone 20 or 50) K-12 kids, selected only by location and socio-economic class, is a ridiculously overconstrained problem. To give one of the main problems: for each concept you teach, you have to choose how long to explain it and give examples. If you move on, then any kid who didn’t really get it will become very lost for the rest of the year (I’m thinking of technical subjects, where you have long dependent chains of concepts). If you keep dropping kids, then everyone gets lost. If you wait until everyone gets it, then you go absurdly slow. My little brother has been “learning” basic arithmetic in his (small, private) school for six years.
Not sure what exactly in my comment you are objecting to so vehemently. The issues you describe are exactly the same as with any mass production, including food.
If we are talking about babysitting, then of course I agree—much more efficient to have one person babysit 15 kids.
If we are talking about learning, then I am vehemently objecting to “a normal education is just/almost as good as homeschooling”.
The point of the example I gave (mastery learning vs. speed in the classroom) was that you can’t mass produce education in the naive way. Taking advantage of division of labor in this context would mean hiring tutors.