I say with full confidence that high school was a complete waste of time and sanity. It’s basically a four year prison, menial labor and all.
Did you know that the pilgrims came to America on a ship named the Mayflower? Well there’s a test coming up and you’ll have to memorize that and several other factoids. More than half of the assignments were pointless trivia that aren’t applicable to any modern career path.
As a Dutchie as well: I Agree. And also this is, I think, the reason why the USA is so far behind the rest of the world at the moment (in regards to reality): An open, honest and factually based education.
Ah, now that I'm rereading my own comment I see I'm beeing a bit "flippant" (?). Please believe me I did not mean in that way.
So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism, others spend 80% of their time on sports, something with greeting the flag every morning with a speech?
A lot of time is spent on teaching how to make arguments (How to plead your case) instead of trying to work together in finding truth.
And most of all: do not criticise, but a "do as told" mentality.
Again: Sorry for that almost mean-spirited first comment of mine.
> So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism...
The difference between the America as portrayed in sensationalized news headlines and the America I live in is vast.
No, creationism isn't standard curriculum in high schools and no, students aren't spending 80% of their time on sports. When you see these things in news stories, their newsworthiness stems from the fact that it's abnormal, not because it's the norm.
America has half the population of all of Europe and a similar amount of landmass. It's a big enough country that if you go looking, you're going to find pockets of weird culture. The mistake is to assume that when journalists highlight the worst of these, that it's actually representative of the norm.
Judging the US by these stories would be similar to me judging your European education by some of the wild anecdotes my Romanian coworker relayed about his high school experience there.
I suspect his experience has nothing to do with yours, naturally. However, when people read horror stories about bad US schools, they assume it applies to every single high school in the entire country for some reason.
For what it’s worth, I had a great high school experience in the United States. Everyone I know in person also had a good high school experience. Teachers were very invested in student experiences and encouraged a lot of exploration and alternative activities like you experienced. We also had plenty of advanced AP classes that could be used as college credit and I even took some advanced classes at the local state university as part of my high school curriculum. We also had a lot of fun and the social environment was generally good. There were troublemakers and pockets of drama, of course, but it wasn’t the central theme of anyone’s experience.
For some reason, the HN and Reddit bubbles seem to collect a lot of people who loathed high school education. Even in adulthood and traveling around the country I’ve never encountered as many negative stories about high school as I read on HN.
Take what you read here with a grain of salt. There appears to be some significant selection bias going on in the stories.
In high school chemistry, I was given the option to either take the final exam, or do a project involving experimentation.
I built a potato gun and tested different fuels. It wasn't very scientifically rigorous (hard to measure how much fuel went into the firing chamber, distance measurements were sloppy, and we didn't take the weight of individual potato projectiles into account). But it was incredibly fun, and the report I produced earned me an A.
That was probably the best "scientific" experience I had in all my years of schooling including college. Having to think about all the different variables really helped me grok the scientific process. We thought up ways that we could start to control things like fuel load and projectile weight and just generally had a blast.
My high school experience was fairly valuable in certain areas and a waste of time in others. The improvements to my writing and critical thinking were invaluable. Most of the specific knowledge ended up less so. I had a number of great teachers. My school had an enriched program that allowed teachers to get an elite class that they could teach towards and had the added benefit of vastly reducing behaviour problems and bullying in those classes. I think US schools are unusually dystopian compared to the worldwide experience. At least that’s the impression I get from hearing stories.
> At least that’s the impression I get from hearing stories.
You're getting the wrong impression. The vast majority of people have a high school experience which is wholly unremarkable in the telling which you don't hear about. Those with horrific experiences -- they've got a story to tell.
I'm one of the people with stories to tell and this is exactly correct.
You only hear about deviations from the norm. Most of the people I know (outside of my bipolar support group) don't have much to say about their childhood.
My (US) experience is pretty much the same as yours, though my main valuable topic was math (and math teachers as well, plus one teacher who only taught electives about life after school - resumes/job interviews and stuff like that). It seems to be highly variable and depend on the individual schools.
I learnt a lot in Math and did well but didn’t feel there was anything in the curriculum I couldn’t have learned independently. English had a lot of subjectivity and soft-skills that required some external calibration for me.
I concur. I can also say with confidence that both High School and College were a complete waste of time and money! I learned more on HN via discussions and informative links than going through a cookie-cutter curriculum in college. I also attribute my little success in business to my mentor and not college.
For me the value in high school was more about making friends than anything else. As far as the actual curriculum there was some value getting a taste of things I would never have really looked at otherwise. Accounting, wood working, and gourmet cooking have come in handy in my normal life. Oddly enough, nothing that I learned in computer classes has helped me.
I struggle with the "socialization" argument for school. It's an institutional environment systemically stratified by age. How in any way does this model community life outside of school?
Compared to homeschooling in a class of one, school is a more social environment. Learning with only those your own age, taught almost exclusively by women between 25-50 (65 at most, but rarely)--is that not an odd way to structure a human environment?
In my anecdotal experience, put a school age kid with a young toddler, or a senior over the age of 70, and an empathy switch gets turned on. This kind of socialization is undervalued.
> If you quietly accept and go along no matter what your feelings are, ultimately you internalize what you're saying, because it's too hard to believe one thing and say another. I can see it very strikingly in my own background. Go to any elite university and you are usually speaking to very disciplined people, people who have been selected for obedience. And that makes sense. If you've resisted the temptation to tell the teacher, "You're an asshole," which maybe he or she is, and if you don't say, "That's idiotic," when you get a stupid assignment, you will gradually pass through the required filters. You will end up at a good college and eventually with a good job.
People who courageously speak what they believe to be true despite the personal costs involved are essential to the preservation and advancement society - where would we be today without them?
High school taught me a lot about what to avoid, and how to game bullshit systems.
It taught me that, while I had no idea what I wanted, I did not want the life I was seeing kids around me trapped in to. So I learned to give gatekeepers what they wanted and got out of that crappy little sinkhole.
I really struggled with the primary language class, Norwegian in my case. Especially the historical parts were a motivational black hole.
I get that one should learn some basics, like that we had some famous writers like Ibsen, but I feel it should be sufficient for most people to know roughly which century he lived, not the exact years of his birth and death. If you want to become a historian you'll have plenty of time to memorize those details later.
I also realized later that we spent very little time at practical writing. I mean sure we wrote stories and such, but very little of it were practically oriented. Yet that's what most people end up needing. Like, writing a report, or heck a letter/email regarding a specific topic.
We also didn't spend much time on understanding and interpreting text. We had some poems we had to interpret, but I think we should have had more of it. And not just poems and such but also more technical texts. Again a very useful skill compared to knowing that Camilla Collett was the sister of Henrik Wergeland, and when exactly they lived.
This became clear when I had to write reports, participated in discussions in newsgroups and emails etc, and later assignments at uni.
A friend of mine was home schooled and started college at 13. He graduated with a dual bachelors at 17 and a masters at 18.
His parents gave him a choice at 13 what he wanted to do -- high school or college and he selected college. Frankly, it's astonishing how much of a waste of time high school is.
> Well there’s a test coming up and you’ll have to memorize that and several other factoids. More than half of the assignments were pointless trivia that aren’t applicable to any modern career path.
I think you're processing your memories through an adult lens and forgetting that if you judge them by adult standards, teenagers are shallow, horrible people. Of course we shouldn't judge teenagers by adult standards, because it isn't fair (children of all ages are pretty shitty people by adult standards) but we have to keep in mind that our memories of high school are memories that were formed by teenagers. I have heard so many times adults saying to me "if only my teachers had taught me X, I would have been so shocked and engaged" where X is something that their long-suffering teachers did, in fact, teach year after year to generations of bored and indifferent students.
In the United States, classic examples are US imperial rule of the Philippines, the Sedition Acts, the Tuskeegee experiments, and the slaughter, subjugation, and displacement of Native Americans, all subjects that were covered in my high school history class to the complete indifference of just about everybody. I can't imagine the feelings of a teacher with an adult understanding of these things having to cope year after year with the dismissive reactions of teenagers. They can stand in front of a class as long as they want trying to explain how our involvement in the Philippines and our actions against democratically elected rulers in other countries complicate our image of ourselves as champions of freedom and self-determination, or how even a nation whose patriotic myths are cloaked in rhetoric about freedom has repeatedly struggled to reconcile patriotism with freedom of speech, but to a teenager it's going to be "ugggghhhhh stop talking about stuff we don't care about and just tell us what dumb factoid we have to remember for the test."
Why do you still remember that the ship was called the Mayflower? Well, for whatever reason that fact is pretty vivid to people of all ages and easy to remember, and so it is used as a reference point and an easy answer on tests. What your teachers really wanted you to remember was that the Pilgrims were deeply, devoutly religious even by the standards of their own time, and thought they had a covenant with God and a duty to create a society that would be a model for every other in the world (holy shit, how wild is that?) and this extremely early thread was woven into the myth of American exceptionalism that is part of the political rhetoric of every single presidential and congressional election to this day, with its significance still contested. But that's not what a teenager is going to take out of high school history class. What they're going to remember is 1) they didn't want to be there, and 2) it was stupid.
Again, not to be harsh on teenagers. It's normal for them to be that way, and it's not fair to judge them by adult standards. And maybe this is a strong argument for abolishing high school as we know it. If kids hate it and resent it, and they forget all of the good stuff and only remember the useless stuff anyway, then why bother with it? If people find things like the Tuskeegee experiment and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire utterly stupid and meaningless in their teens and revelatory in their twenties, why do we dedicate so much time and effort to teaching them in their teens? Maybe we can do better.
My wife and I pulled our kids out at age 10 and 13. The laws in Nevada are just like those in Texas: Write a letter, the kids are yours.
The first thing we did was nothing, for about 6 months. Getting the kids out of the routine and mindset that school had put them in was vital to being able to teach them. My 10y/o son had the idea that his teachers knew more than my wife and I did "because they're older". He could have only got that idea at school because that's the polar opposite of what we taught at home.
I worked full time, but my wife did not and she poured a lot of energy into teaching the kids. But we also did things that weren't schooling. We let the kids learn on their own the things they wanted to learn when they wanted to learn them. This was wonderful. My son picked up programming just for fun and didn't even tell me about it until after, when he had already lost interest and moved on. But that was okay, because I didn't expect him to be a programmer or anything else. I just wanted him to learn. Same for our daughter. They learned. They got GED's and that was that.
They're both extremely well rounded adults now and didn't go through the agonies of public schooling.
My son has a well paying job as a development manager at a company that builds batteries (Sorry- I don't know more- he doesn't say much about it) and my daughter has too many health problems to work full time and lives at home with me. In fact her health was one of the reasons we pulled her out. She was so far behind because of missing school that it was becoming a serious problem that the teachers were ill-equipped to handle.
While I am sure the question is sincere, it's notable that the question wasn't, "what businesses have they started," "what are they doing for passive income and investment," "what are they using for leverage," "how many people do they manage," "what university did they graduate from," "what products have they developed," "are they on the real estate ladder," etc.
When you exit the system, the status and meaning it promises doesn't doesn't have the same value. If you got kids to the level of basic analysis / calculus, traveller level in a second language, and passable in the reasoning and comprehension skills of the LSAT, they would be smarter and more capable than most university undergrads. If you add physical competence hobbies to that where some of those skills get applied, you get even more differentiated. Teenagers get amateur pilot licenses, so they are plenty capable.
A way to match home schooled kids with structured team or olympic sports and orchestra or dance programs would be a big opportunity. Maybe we're at the cusp of an edu-tech boom?
I certainly hope so. If we had to reinvent the education system today it would look nothing like the legacy system, which was constrained by having to co-locate information sources, instructors, and students. A big danger I see is that the legacy system so damages the reputation of education that there may not be enough demand for a better version.
One complaint that I hear about the method you are describing is the the kid/teenager will naturally gravitate towards easier "mindless" activities such as video games/TV/YouTube.
Did you enforce discipline or did they have enough intellectual curiosity to learn stuff like calculus on their own?
Yeah that makes sense. Additionally, like some other commenter pointed out, did they ever suffer from limited interactions with people of their own age? My high school friends stayed my friends well into adulthood and I would've been much lonelier had I been homeschooled.
Nope. That's a misconception that's commonly used against homeschooling. There are homeschooling co-ops that organize field trips. We also associated regularly with our congregation with people of all ages that they were friends with. My 15 year old daughter's best friend was an 83 year old woman. They hung out all the time. It was amazing.
There are those examples of families who treat it like they're on a deserted island. They're doing it wrong. Thankfully, they are a very, very small minority.
I get these kinds of questions too and while I can’t speak for the person you’re replying to (my kids are younger) it’s the second answer. Kids naturally have a ton of intellectual curiosity which the school system. I do think there needs to be an adult with them, probably, it’s not like you could just leave them on their own for king stretches at a young age especially.
I dropped out of school and I almost immediately got tired of low-effort activities. Games and TV are great as a respite from doing other things, but if you're a young person with an active mind you will quickly get bored doing that stuff all day.
My biggest problem was the sudden lack of a social sphere. High school was terrible, but I dramatically underestimated how important the social environment was.
The thing I wish most was that there were people to teach me challenging subjects. Left to my own devices I naturally gravitated to things I was already good at.
Speaking for myself (not a kid), I only start to gravitate toward those sorts of activities when I'm low grade burnt out. Especially if I'm burnt out from having to do something that feels difficult and pointless, but is also on a deadline and subject to performance assessment. Nothing wears your ability to concentrate down faster than having to to actually force yourself to concentrate for hours at a time.
I see the same thing in both my kids. They're both mentally engaged, skilled, perseverant problem solvers. . . except in the evenings after school. Then, they simply can't emotionally handle much beyond games/tv/youtube.
What worries me right now is that this situation may be setting up a bad psychological pattern that may stick with them for life: anything that takes work is, in some Pavlovian sense, associated with frustration and exhaustion, while pleasure is associated with brain candy. I don't think that that's their natural experience of life; it's something they're being taught by a regime that's dominated by report cards and standardized tests.
I'm personally not too keen on homeschooling. I did it for some time as a child, and I honestly think that the reduced social contact with my peers had consequences that also need to be considered. But I'd love to see schools become less bureaucratic. Teachers, in my experience, usually want to keep things fluid and engaging, and they know how to do it. What seems to get in their way are policies that the suits in office buildings develop, most of which are primarily designed to placate the anxieties of parents who are worried about their kids "falling behind" or whatever and want to see hard numbers proving that the school is doing a good job of producing kids that are all STEM and no roots, leaves or flowers.
Homeschool proponents always cherry pick the good parts. Some kids are naturally motivated to acquire skills, but most will play with toys or play outside when they're young, and then start doing more social media/gaming when they're older. There's no solution for this other than to prevent them from doing these things and actively force them to do "learning stuff". Homeschool is no different, no matter what anyone implies by selective storytelling.
Play time is extremely important for building curiosity and learning. Playing outside has massive health benefits too which will help with burnout down the road. Of course they need discipline too but I think schools leave barely any time for kids to be kids between classes, homework, and extra curricular.
Feynman is an example of somebody who practiced this. Done right play isn’t wasteful, it makes people want to dig deeper into something which is how discoveries are made.
Now, let's tax the living daylights out of everybody over USD$1M, cut the military budget and put all that money back into the educational system, so the rest of the kids can have the same experience as you, then re-introduce your kids to public schooling.
The US already spends more on education per student than any country in the world except for Luxembourg, Austria and Norway. In postsecondary education, only Luxembourg spends more. If money (at the whole-system funding level) was the problem the problem would already be solved.
If the US is inefficient that people are still very far behind when it comes to average education compared to the rest of the world that spends less per student, you either need to spend a lot more or make sure it's effectively spent.
The argument that the US already spends a lot so nothing should be done feels loose at best.
>> If the US is inefficient that people are still very far behind
The US education system is not there to accelerate students, to lift them up. It is model the population to suit the needs of the country. That's why nearly every aspect of a child's life revolves around school, from how and when they eat to who they socialize with. The system is there to reinforce national ideas. Some of that is noble ("try hard and get ahead") and some of it is not ("money counts"). When viewed from that perspective it works very well: little ever seems to change from one generation to the next. Freedom through social stability.
I think the problem with that analysis of the problem is that education spending in the US is highly unequal. Some school districts spend much more than necessary, while some don't have the funding to afford textbooks or safe school buildings. The main cause of this is that schools are funded by local property taxes, which depend on local house values and local incomes. Poor areas can't afford good schools, which makes it harder for kids raised in those areas to escape from poverty. Consider the Corridor of Shame: http://projects.aljazeera.com/2014/south-carolina-schools/
It may well be the case that US aggregate education spending is plenty high – but unless it were centrally collected and equitably distributed (taking into account differences in cost of living, cost of real-estate, etc.) to produce equivalent average outcomes, that's not really relevant.
They've tried this with under-performing schools (typically in urban areas). Throwing money at a problem doesn't make it magically go away. What works is breaking up the school and divvying up the students/teachers among schools that aren't under-performing.
this isn't really true. the difference in funding from property tax is smoothed out (or more!) at the state level in most US states. some of the poorest school districts (eg, baltimore) have the highest funding per student. they still produce abysmal outcomes.
At least in CA, and probably other liberal states, you have what is ironically called the Local Control Funding Formula (LCFF) that distributes funding equally, more or less, and tries to erase these advantages.
I think the distribution of good teachers and parents ability to devote time to the children have at least as large a role. The latter driving the former. I would think better teachers would tend to gravitate towards areas where they get support from the parents and the parents ensure homework is done, etc. This is just my opinion.
No, this isn't true, though it's a common misunderstanding. Most school districts receive funding from the state.
Generally, the underperforming schools spend more per student. For example, Stuyvesant, the premier math/science high school in New York, is among other lowest of public high schools in spending per student.
Underperforming schools typically have higher costs, like ESL and special needs courses, free lunch, police presence, though.
From your source: "The total government and private expenditures on education" It's not just public school. And the data includes preschool, which is notoriously expensive.
Likely, it’s money at the parental level that is what is lacking most now, and the body of supporting research has become deafening. From benefits cliffs, to the broken poverty measure, to ballooning costs of housing, healthcare and college, to stagnant wages it’s getting harder and harder for a hard working family to maintain an existence above that of outright poverty.
>When critics insist that American teachers need to be held accountable for the poor performance of American school children, the teachers shoot back that they are being held accountable for the failure of American parents and taxpayers to take care of their children.
>When some of us point out that there has been no improvement in the performance of all high school students or of protected subgroups of students in the United States on NAEP measures of reading and mathematics in 30 years, they tell us we should consider ourselves lucky that we have teachers who have been able to hold student performance steady while the American people have been sending them students who get poorer and more isolated every year.
>…the U.S. spends much more per student on our schools than the countries with the best education performance. But it is also the case that other countries, with higher student performance and lower school spending per student, have smaller disparities in income between their wealthiest families and their poorest ones, and despite that, spend much more than we do on the support of families with young children on everything from child allowances to child care and early childhood education. From my vantage point, our budgets for children, families and schools, if you take everything into account, do very little about the enormous problems caused by concentrated poverty and racial segregation and then load all the problems that causes onto the schools.
>…It is a whole lot cheaper to do right by our children starting when mom is pregnant than it is to wait six years, when it is a whole lot harder to do what must be done to give these kids a chance in a world in which the skill threshold for earning a decent living is getting higher and higher.
Not sure why you're getting downvoted, this makes a lot of sense. Not everyone can afford to stay home to teach their kids, because you wouldn't be able to feed them then. I agree that the education system all over the world is fucked up, but I don't advocate tearing it down, rather we should fund it better and more effectively, make sure the education people get is actually useful in the real world, not the fluff they currently teach.
$100 bucks to your favorite charity and two WaWa sandwiches says i'm getting downvoted cuz libertarians and liberals don't like the idea of re enforcing the public school system ( and the whole thing about taxing millionaires and billionaires )
Funding is often not the problem. I believe it is Boston that currently has the third highest per-pupil funding (around $16k per student) and third worst outcomes among large school systems.
I downvoted him because it sounds totalitarian and anti-parental-choice. A power grab by a failing education system, "If only we had more money we'd do things right!"
Hogwash. The industrial model of education can't be solved by throwing more money at it, and I'm suspicious of anyone who pretends there hasn't been enough money thrown already.
I feel like you're not reading my comment in a charitable light here. I explicitly said "fund it better and more effectively", not throwing more money at it. How is that a power grab?
I also didn't downvote your comment, I was explaining why I downvoted project2501b's. "Tax the living daylights" and "Put all that money" is absolutely the language of power-grabbing and money-grubbing. You may agree with them in theory, but in discourse they are absolutely making your side look bad.
I think we should use the money to fund students and abolish the idea of government run schools. Every kid gets the same amount to be spent at a private school that suits their child’s needs. Schools could be smaller and give students the attention they need based on their abilities and interests.
The government would audit these schools to ensure kids are adequately learning. Existing government school building could be leased to private teaching organizations.
In essence but we haven't really gotten anywhere near having a full market economy for schooling. We have seen voucher programs in certain areas but they have also been resisted by teachers unions, possibly affecting their effectiveness.
However, the longer term results of kids who received vouchers show higher graduation rates and college admissions, albeit not always and and generally mild. But there's also evidence that voucher programs have improved public schools as they face competition.
I think we if we really committed to it and abolished government schools then we would see market based schooling improve the quality of education across the board. We could also expand what "qualified education" means and get away from a single standardized test for math, english, etc and begin to assist kids in placing them into academies that will benefit them. For example, by 14 it might make sense to have schools that focus less on academics and more on trade skills. Kids could begin to learn useful skills like carpentry, plumbing, small business operations, etc. that give them a real chance at building a life for themselves. A free market of education would allow people to setup these types of schools and for parents and kids to choose to place into them to set themselves up for success in life.
We can't do this in today's monolithic public school system. We have essentially a one-sized fits all approach with some schools offering AP classes, although even those are being removed in the name of "equity". Putting all our kids into the same system with the same goal of competing with each other to get into the best universities isn't good for most people.
There's no such thing as a government-run school, at least not in the U.S. U.S. public schools are community-run. The local community sets the funding level, the local community provides the facilities, etc. The state may or may not provide additional funding. The state will also set minimum standards for graduation requirements, which apply to all students residing in the state.
Then you have the issue of accountability. Community-run schools are paid for via taxes - either income tax, property tax or a combination for both. Taxes demand representation - in the case of community-run schools the community votes for the school board members who in turn oversee the operations of the community schools. Where's my voice when my money is simply handed to someone to do with as they see fit? Good luck getting your school tax levies renewed in such an environment.
BTW, my state has been grappling with these issues for the past 15 years and it's a mess. A state law got passed saying the community funding must be made available to students for private schools and the results have been predictable. School levies are failing, and the private schools have been involved in scandal after scandal - the largest being a huge embezzlement scheme. A toss-out of the governor and key state legislators got the law reversed.
So we tried this alternative and it failed and failed hard.
The community is the local government/municipality and is controlled by the politicians elected to it. The state influences this as well. So the schools are "government run".
And yes the local community sets the funding level and where I live, which is quite affluent, the funding is huge and the schools are nice. But in many other places where property values are smaller and people can't afford high property taxes to fund schools, they can't spend the same per student. Yes, some money gets recycled from affluent communities to less so through the state, but the money spent per student is still far less.
I think it's more fair that every kid gets the same amount of money spent on them so kids from poor communities can access quality education that isn't a function of where they grow up. That their parents can send their kids to a school that suits their needs and ambitions. So you have more than representation - you have actual choice and schools will compete for your money that is given to you.
Lastly, not every community votes for their school board. There are some places where they are appointed by the mayor. Teachers unions hate this idea because it cripples them, but actual teachers would thrive and do better in this environment.
> I think it's more fair that every kid gets the same amount of money spent on them
Where does this money come from? The affluent communities don't mind the lion's share of their local taxes going to their community schools, but distribute it to everyone and they're not so interested in paying those taxes. They'd much rather reduce those taxes and invest the savings in their own children. So your problem isn't solved.
There are reasons these ideas have been volleyed about the past 20-30 years and we've made no progress. Add to that all the private charter school scandals we've endured and you have a big mess with no easy solutions in sight.
>There's no such thing as a government-run school, at least not in the U.S. U.S. public schools are community-run. The local community sets the funding level, the local community provides the facilities, etc.
That's a disingenuous slight of hand when (as you admit) the curriculums are set at the sate level.
Being locally funded or managed means squat when the hours in the school year are limited and you have to teach to someone else's priorities.
>To claim otherwise is equivalent to claiming every single business is government-run due to there being regulations.
That claim is a hell of a lot stronger than the one where the organizations run by municipal government employees executing on a state developed plan isn't a government run organization.
Are you going to tell us that USPS isn't government run because it's a privately chartered corporation that just to happens to be owned by the government and happens to have its product offerings highly regulated by government?
Public schools are government run for all practical purposes. Just not directly run on a day to day basis by the feds or state.
You've effectively combined the worst features of public school with the worst features of private school.
The government does audit schools, what do you think standardized tests are for? To assess whether or not the school is getting the students to the appropriate level.
And everything else sounds pretty much kind of like how it already is except with the conceit that what you're saying is in any way novel.
We need to stop focusing on students and start focusing on teachers and support staff. We all know the trope of the overworked teacher who does a shit ton of work off-hours, who buys supplies out of their own money.
That's the failure of the system right there. Classrooms don't need tablets as much as they need more bodies. Combine that with parent engagement is difficult in some communities due to all the poverty and what not. It's hard to get a parent working a night shift at their second job to a conference to explain to them what they already know, their child is failing and they need help with the material.
Help the school can't provide, because there's no one available to do it. Because everyone is overworked.
First off, because of Bloom's two sigma effect [0], public schools will never be able to match the experience of a good homeschool. Unless you're talking about class sizes of four, each headed by someone who has mastered the material, the level of achievement possible under homeschooling will, in general, vastly outstrip what a public school offers.
Second, you can't talk about school funding unless you talk about both administrative bloat and teacher's unions. As long as teachers can keep voting themselves raises and escaping even the most basic levels of accountability for their results, money will not solve the public school crises. And administrative employment has grown by 75% over less than a decade -- 10x the growth in teacher employment during the same time. [1]
So sure, you solve the bloat and local control issues, there's plenty of money for instruction and classroom resources.
>> We let the kids learn on their own the things they wanted to learn when they wanted to learn them. This was wonderful.
I'm sure that it was. But good luck to them when they need to learn something important that isn't fun. There are times in every profession when you have to grind your way through something horrible. Want to be a lawyer? You will have to understand the rules of evidence regardless of what type of lawyer you want to be. Want to be a doctor? There will be anatomy that you will hate memorizing. There is something to be said for forcing kids to learn things they hate. It is necessary preparation for the important stuff that comes later, stuff they cannot learn from their parents. That's what advanced education is, learning something because an expert tells you to. Whether you enjoy every moment of it or not is beside the point. You can judge things once you become an expert.
I have to go away for a two-week training course on monday. It is going to be hell. Twelve days of memorizing stupid powerpoints about stuff I will probably never use. There will be tests at the end. I will pass them. My training at school/university, learning stuff I often hated, allows me to power through such things. I can sit in that chair hour after hour without drifting. Not everyone can do that. They work very different jobs. Their employer doesn't spend tens of thousands of dollars sending them to such courses.
Sure then maybe this won’t produce doctors or lawyers, but there are plenty of professions where mere intellect can suffice.
Ivy League schools for example are really good at producing the kind of people who can pass McKinseys first year deathmarch, but most of us don’t work there and don’t want deathmarches in general.
>> then maybe this won’t produce doctors or lawyers
Isn't that a decision that the children should be allowed to make for themselves once they are adults? School should give them sufficient resources for them to attack any profession, from soldier to priest, pilot to surgeon. Asking a child to make such choices, allowing them to forgo certain subjects, harms them in the long term. It limits their potential options.
A few years ago I read that "social media influencer" was a more desired trade amongst highschool kids than doctor/lawyer/fighter pilot. Such kids should not be allowed to make educational decisions.
Right now, "social media influencer" is a more realistic immediate job than doctor, lawyer, or fighter pilot.
To be a doctor, you need a 4 year college degree, then acceptance into a medical school, then pass the medical school courses and do N years of residency. The average medical school graduate has $200K of debt at that point.
To be a lawyer, you need blah blah blah law school, and then it turns out the USA has too many lawyers already... so the average entry-level lawyer makes $48K. Yes, really.
To be a social media influencer, you need about $2000 in startup costs and a lot of luck, as well as some degree of actual work. There are roughly a million people with 100,000+ followers on Instagram or YouTube or TikTok.
Interestingly, there are about a million lawyers and about a million doctors in the USA.
Finally, there are about 15,000 pilots in the US armed forces, but only about 2200 attack or fighter role aircraft.
In total: a kid with no particular educational affinity is making a reasonable immediate choice to pursue "social media influencer" over doctor/lawyer/fighter pilot. It's probably a terrible long-term career choice, but so is fighter pilot.
> To be a doctor, you need a 4 year college degree, then acceptance into a medical school, then pass the medical school courses and do N years of residency. The average medical school graduate has $200K of debt at that point.
It's not even that simple anymore. There's also the PGY1 year. There aren't nearly enough residencies to satisfy demand anymore. You might have to change specialties a few times before you land a residency. We're at the point where if you didn't go to medical school in the US, you're SOL. Even if you did, it's a struggle -- hope you went to a great medical school.
This at a time when we have higher demand for doctors than ever. Nobody wants to change the residency situation because the economics of it don't work out.
I don't disagree, but I think you're overlooking one thing.
There are more kids wanting to be social media influencers than there are doctors, lawyers, or fighter pilots. The chances aren't purely based on how much demand there is for a given job, but also on how much supply. For that one million spots competition is fiercer.
Because they can compete. For doctors and lawyers, entry tickets are a few hundred thousand in loans and years of education. For fighter pilots, it's millions of dollars of training and flight time supported by a military. For social media influencers, it's just a computer and a webcam, which they probably already have for school/work.
USAF pilots are also subject to a ten-year service commitment after they are rated for their aircraft type, which is usually around two years of training.
> It's probably a terrible long-term career choice, but so is fighter pilot.
If you're willing to accept the failure modes of non-fighter military pilot, non-pilot military officer, person with a college degree or person with some college (depending on when things go wrong) it's not a bad track. Lots of hedging. Then you can transition to a career in civilian aviation or management.
Compare that to something like enlisted Special Operations. Wash out of SEAL selection and you could be scraping barnacles off the side of a ship. Maybe you wash out of Special Forces selection and you end up in infantry. But then you decide you want to stop blowing stuff up, and the highlight of your resume is 4 years experience blowing stuff, with a minor in sweeping barracks. Failure modes aren't as nice.
Anecdotally, I dropped out of officer selection once I realized I'd rather kick in doors than be a paper pusher. Didn't meet many officers I admired, I wanted to be an NCO even though it's a less privileged position. Then I blew stuff up for 4 years, came back to a wrecked economy, did odd jobs, failed to start two businesses, sold cars, and taught myself web development. I basically went through every failure mode before finding my "thing". Now I make six figures in cloud engineering, have a house, family etc. Long story short but the "blowing things up" part was pretty interesting and a formative experience for me (not that I'd do it again; I've come to believe we're not blowing up the correct things / people).
>> It's probably a terrible long-term career choice, but so is fighter pilot.
I'll mention that to one. It is a perfectly valid career choice even if you don't make it to an F-16 cockpit. Unlike failed civilian pilots a failed military pilot has their choice of other officer trades, from lawyer/doctor to tank commander. And no company will fault someone for failing out as a military pilot. The fact you were accepted into pilot training in the first place puts you ahead of most.
If the purpose of schooling is to ensure every child can be a potential doctor or lawyer then it has already failed in the past, and will continue failing far into the future.
Realistically, I don’t think all kids schooled in Montessori style “learn what you want when you want to learn” will fail at becoming doctors or lawyers if that’s their passion. It may detract from the number of people who make it through law school just because they heard lawyers make a lot of money.
But that’s realism, I was responding to the hypothetical of if this method of learning somehow destroys a human beings capacity to ever become a doctor or lawyer. That’s not very practical to say a schooling method will destroy all sense of delayed gratification. Personally, I think developing those life skills is orthogonal to intellectual education in the first place and are more akin to personal character which parents can build in their children without conjoining it with schoolwork.
I don't work at the top consulting firms (of which McKinsey is one) but the first year or 2 at any major financial or consulting institution is a bit of a meme as to what they go through in hopes of making it. The 80+ hour weeks working on pitch decks, next-morning deadlines, etc, aren't just a Hollywood meme. I've read some of the 600+ slide powerpoint decks that exist in consulting and finance, and I think I got interesting information out of the experience exactly once (Radio ads were a close #2 in advertising ROI against the internet back in mid 2010s, with TV and other mediums far behind.)
yes, a certain amount of discipline is required to get through boring, yet important, stuff in life. I'm really not sure US grade school does a great job instilling that virtue though. the material is generally a complete joke for any student of above-average intelligence. I'm no genius, but I did all my homework during the class before it was due and rarely studied for tests. I was in for a rude awakening when I got to college, which is a pretty common story.
I "learned to learn" during training in the military FWIW. The school system helped me with that skill, but it really took off in basic training and further in job-specific-training. A big part of that is the motivation during training...that if you fail, there are serious consequences, and you'll be stuck digging latrines until your term is complete.
Anything in the outdoors. Rock climbing. Either you learn these knots or you will die. Either you learn how to navigate, find the trail to the cabin, or you are going to spend the night in the rain. Either you remember to bring your gloves ore you are going to loose fingers. Either you learn to read and understand avalanche warnings or ... everything in the outdoors comes with a risk that focuses the mind.
> There is something to be said for forcing kids to learn things they hate.
There is also something to said for developing a kid’s sensitivity to and ownership of their individual intrinsic motivation. If using extrinsic motivation works for your kids, that’s great for you. Deciding on an approach for the child one rears out of concern for a lack of lawyers and doctors doesn’t sound like a sound decision process.
You’re comparing apples to oranges. There’s a big difference between wanting to learn and having to learn.
Someone wants to be a doctor? Great, soon they’ll realise that they need to learn anatomy, and they’ll do that if they’re sufficiently motivated! But most of school was, you have to learn something because an adult (and not very smart adult either ... most teachers aren’t experts, they just seem like that, to kids) said so.
I don’t care why Hamlet said something, I never did, I never will, I never needed that knowledge and never will, and to the extent that you can maybe learn some general life principles from such books, there are many other, better ways of learning that, including many better and more interesting books.
Even the employment course you’re taking, you want to take - you’re getting something out of it (a promotion, hopefully) - even though even in your reply there’s some amount of bitterness about having to learn it (“memorizing stupid powerpoints about stuff I will probably never use”) - now imagine being a child with much less independence and agency and multiply that feeling of dread by 1000x...
Learning Shakespeare has nothing to do with Shakespeare. It is taught is because doing so forces students to understand language. To read Shakespeare they must learn to examine language for nuance. By doing so they become better speakers regardless of whether they ever revisit the material.
But why Shakespeare, especially given that the consensus amongst schoolkids is that it's indecipherable (given the language difference to today)?
Shakespeare is taught...because Shakespeare has always been taught. It's recognized as important; to be fair, it is from an objective sense, but subjectively there is no reason to read it, nor even to watch it performed unless someone wants to.
You learn language by practicing language. You can read or watch anything and better understand the nuances of a language; even better to talk to people who speak it. English evolves because of the latter; Shakespeare doesn't.
Everyone who speaks a language other than English learned to do so without Shakespeare. I am unconvinced of the necessity of reading/watching Shakespeare unless someone wants to; it is but one means to an end.
If I were a highschool English teacher I would point the kids at more recent British works. I'd point them at Blackadder or Upstart Crow. Understanding that language, getting all the jokes, requires a degree of english comprehension that is probably slightly higher than the average highschool student. If I wanted to improve their spoken word while teaching them science, I'd assign them every single Attenborough or Brian Cox documentary.
Shakespeare is taught because Shakespeare is excellent. I disagree with the methods that are often used to "teach" literature (memorise this "official" interpretation, then spill these bullet points on the exam so the teacher is happy), but nobody can deny how brilliant it is. The mark of great art: they speak of things universal to the human condition, and transcend the time and space where they were produced. You are simply not a complete person if you do never read literature in your life.
> Everyone who speaks a language other than English learned to do so without Shakespeare
Well duh, they learn the masterpiece of whatever language they're learning. Be that Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Victor Hugo, or Luís de Camões.
Shakespeare is excellent, but it took me years - long past when I graduated from school - to recognize its excellence.
I place the blame here squarely on how it is presented in schools. First, it was dropped in abruptly, after years of focusing heavily on largely apoetic work like Old Yeller and Great Expectations. When poetry was introduced, it was typically dropped as part of some hermetically sealed unit, and all possibility of enjoyment was eradicated by analyzing each poem to death. [1] How are people supposed to learn to enjoy play on words when any hint of actual play has been surgically excised from the experience?
And then, since this is a class, there will be a test, and so you have to format the presentation in a manner that makes it more amenable to testing. This means that, if the play is a comedy, then you'll have to stop every few lines to have the teacher explain, in detail, why what you just read is funny.
Which it may not be, because performance comedy is all about presentation and timing, but we're not watching a performance, we're reading the text. Imagine encountering Spaceballs for the first time in script form, so that you're completely unable to associate any of the lines with the performances of John Candy or Rick Moranis. It won't be nearly as good. And having someone sitting over your shoulder repeatedly interrupting you to say, "Now, in the actual movie, this part is hilarious because..." only makes it less funny.
If the work being studied is a tragedy, well, it's a similar story, only in this case it is kind of funny because the tragedy has gone meta. Not that anyone sitting in the classroom is in a position to realize that. They're too focused on taking notes so they can remember details - especially details about the teacher's interpretation of the story - for the coming test. Because furiously scribbling in notebooks and trying to memorize every detail is an essential part of the way in which members of the groundling audience, literate and illiterate alike, experienced performances in the original Globe Theatre.
Ugh. It makes me irritated all over again just thinking about it. Primary and secondary education classes are seemingly predicated on the notion that the best place to study everyday human experience is in a cadaver lab. Largely only because the courses are being designed by people who sell scalpels and formaldehyde for a living.
This is also exacerbated by the didactic approaches people like OP (and most teachers) take, about why the students -should- enjoy Shakespeare.
I bet I would have liked it more in school (rather than much afterwards, when I became acquainted with the Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta, though props to the teachers who set up field trips there) if instead a teacher had said "Okay guys. We're watching a movie today. It's going to be a little hard to understand, but don't worry too much about it; it's less the words and more the performance. There won't be a test, but we will discuss it afterwards. I'll have subtitles on to help with understanding; it's kind of interesting to see how English has changed since this was made, but how it still has themes you'll recognize, and can still be emotionally charged even when you don't fully understand everything being said. It may be a little challenging given that, but I think you're up to it", and then put on Branagh's Hamlet.
I not only agree with your post but also want to heartily endorse the Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta.
They go to great lengths to ensure everyone in the audience understands e.g. that Romeo and Juliet has loads of raunchy humor. I’m confident I could attend a play I have never read and understand the emotional and plot bones of it at Shakespeare Tavern.
And in my experience their food only helps me in my understanding of the play! All for a quite modest price.
I’d have gotten a lot more out of Shakespeare if they started by going through a deep line-by-line analysis of all the oblique and double meanings of an annotated rap song on genius.com (nee rapgenius.com) and then said, “ok, now we are going to do the same thing to find all the clever double entendres, jokes and allusions in Shakespeare”
It's a masterpiece of classical literature, timeless and always relevant to whatever generation you belong to.
When we did Macbeth and Julius Caesar in school, one of the requirements in the test was to write critical reasoning arguments for or against a topic.It really helped me build my reasoning. The teacher would also pit one half of the class against the other. It helped build my confidence and I ended up in speech and debate.
> most teachers aren’t experts, they just seem like that, to kids
Oof. That's cold. Not necessarily wrong, but cold. I mean, most software developers are not actually good at developing software, they just seem like that because they've only been asked to write the same CRUD app over and over again.
Teachers may not be "experts" like a PhD in a topic is an expert, but they are educated (Bachelors minimum, many states require a Masters eventually) but they are often experts in education.
It turns out just knowing a lot about a topic does not qualify you to teach it (see: many college professors). Effective teaching is a skill that lots of people think they have, but few actually do.
It doesn't really matter what Hamlet said. Literature is a class where you learn to express yourself and are exposed to how other people/cultures/times express themselves in a structured way.
And how would you know that you don't care about Hamlet unless you were made to read it?
You could live a successful life without reading any books ever (you could even be President of the United States!) but it would be much richer if you were exposed to ideas/topics that challenge you. And who knows where you could use that information. Heck, Bob Dylan made an entire career as a musician off of the AP English curriculum.
I can guarantee you that challenging someone who does not want to be challenged will not actually cause them to learn anything.
When I was a kid, two different years, the teachers had us read/read to us "Where the Red Fern Grows". At the time, I was reading fantasy from the adult section at the library (and was teased for it; both the fact I was reading for fun, and the subject matter). Literally the only thing I remember about that book is how much I hated it.
It's one thing I have to give Harry Potter, despite J. K. Rowling. It popularized fantasy enough that kids read on their own, and normalized reading books for fun in schools.
I don't disagree with you. When I was in school (and still now, really) if there wasn't a dragon or a spaceship on the cover, I wasn't interested in it. I remember more about Where the Red Fern Grows, but not much (a kid gets mail order dogs to hunt with and (spoilers) the dogs die ... because the dogs always die). The only thing I remember about Silas Marner is that he buried his money and it was stolen (not a spoiler, that's like chapter 1).
Something to know about English classes in particular (but also History and other liberal arts/non-science classes) is that isn't not about "the books", but critical thinking and discussion. In fact, it's likely that the mandated standards don't specify specific books to read. It turns out, though, that in a class of 30+ kids, it's easiest (or even possible) to have a critical discussion if everyone reads the same books at the same time.
Also, if the kids think they are being "taught the book" but the teacher is trying to teach "literary literacy" using "the book" as an example, that's when you get arguments like "I didn't learn anything!" and "This is a waste of my time!" and "This other book is better!". Those arguments are besides the point. You should have been talking about why the author made the literary decisions they made, what were the themes? Whose point of view was it told from? How was the book impactful (or not)?
These are the standards in Texas. Other states should have this information publicly available and I assume they will be very similar.
For English II these are the skills a student should learn (notice no specific books are mentioned, but "traditional", "contemporary", "classical", and "diverse" are used to describe the books)
- The student develops oral language through listening, speaking, and discussion
- The student uses newly acquired vocabulary expressively
- The student reads grade-appropriate texts independently.
- The student is expected to self-select text and read independently for a sustained period of time.
- The student uses metacognitive skills to both develop and deepen comprehension of increasingly complex texts
- The student responds to an increasingly challenging variety of sources that are read, heard, or viewed
- The student recognizes and analyzes literary elements within and across increasingly complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse literary texts
- The student recognizes and analyzes genre-specific characteristics, structures, and purposes within and across increasingly complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse texts
- The student uses critical inquiry to analyze the authors' choices and how they influence and communicate meaning within a variety of texts.
- The student analyzes and applies author's craft purposefully in order to develop his or her own products and performances.
- The student uses the writing process recursively to compose multiple texts that are legible and use appropriate conventions
- The student uses genre characteristics and craft to compose multiple texts that are meaningful
- The student engages in both short-term and sustained recursive inquiry processes for a variety of purposes
Much like learning a foreign language is about more than learning vocabulary, but you can't learn how to talk in a restaurant if you don't know the restaurant related vocabulary. English class is about more than reading books, but you can't have those discussions if you haven't read the books. Or, it would be much more difficult to effectively "analyze literary elements" in a classroom setting with 30 kids that all ready 30 different books.
And as far as book selection goes... no one is getting fired for picking Where the Red Fern Grows - but watch out if you go the sci-fi/fantasy route. There are parents that will throw an absolute fit if a school had their kids reading anything with magic.
And yet nobody seems to complain about Homer, which not only includes magic, but also active worship of, and interaction with, pagan deities.
How much of it is what the parents are saying it is, and how much of it is really motivated by a tacit belief that school is only legitimate when it's stodgy?
I'm talking like second and third grades. Where the teacher literally was reading -to- us. We had copies of the book, we could follow along if we knew how and wanted to, but it most definitely was NOT trying to teach us literary criticism.
I think you'd be surprised at what they were trying to teach you. At least in Texas the 3rd grade standards are pretty much the same as the High School standards (for values of "complex" adjusted for grade level)
- The student uses metacognitive skills to both develop and deepen comprehension of increasingly complex texts
- The student recognizes and analyzes literary elements within and across increasingly
complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse literary texts
- The student recognizes and analyzes genre-specific characteristics, structures, and purposes within and across increasingly complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse texts
- The student uses critical inquiry to analyze the authors' choices and how they influence and communicate meaning within a variety of texts.
- The student analyzes and applies author's craft purposefully in order to develop his or her own products and performances
What 3rd grade you thought you were supposed to be learning and what the teacher was actually trying to teach you were not necessarily lined up.
Or, you went to a school with a particularly poor English department that just had you write book reports for books you didn't read for no reason other than that's what they always did. That's actually more likely than not.
I was a very, very bad math teacher at my first school (I was basically "playing school" and acting like I remembered my math teachers acted.. I had a CS/Math major, not an Education major. I knew the content, but not the pedagogy). The next school I taught at had structures in place that helped me understand what the actual goals of a teacher are and how to reach them. I improved drastically (and noticed the students and teachers at that school were better overall than my first school)
> I mean, most software developers are not actually good at developing software, they just seem like that because they've only been asked to write the same CRUD app over and over again.
That is not the slam dunk argument you seem to think it is.
In my experience, most developers with “10 years of experience” (who have worked in enterprise, at least) actually have one year of experience ten times.
Yes. That's also exactly why, when I look to hire software engineers and think about their compensation, I'm not looking for their years of experience, I'm looking for their years of progressive experience.
>Teachers may not be "experts" like a PhD in a topic is an expert, but they are educated (Bachelors minimum, many states require a Masters eventually) but they are often experts in education.
If they were experts in education, presumably they would know how to do education.
I’ll take a stab at an answer: my understanding is that Dylan borrowed heavily from folktales, folklore, and the work of other balladiers.
Checking myself, I see on his Wikipedia entry[0]:
“ The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough ... There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms ... but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.” -Bob Dylan, 1985
Exposure to stories with a range of emotions is part of the point of English class.
I read an article (or maybe a biography author interview on NPR) about how pretty much all of his double-meanings/literary references came from the honors English curriculum from his time in school (probably pre-80's Dylan).
However, now when I try to google for it I just find pages and pages of results about whether he deserved the Nobel prize or not.
I took it as a reference to his lyrics, for which "AP English" would make a pretty good tongue-in-cheek categorization of the style & content. Same with the text he writes for the back of his album covers. It's not the kind of thing I'd expect someone without exposure to and some affinity for that kind of thing (literature and poetry, that is) to invent spontaneously.
Shakespeare isn't about life lessons, it's more about analysis and understanding the nuance of the language. The difference between that an occupational training / brain dumps is that it has more long-term value. There's a reason education isn't just taking a bunch of occupational certifications.
As an anecdote, I've always been in tech roles; I dual-majored in History and Computer Science for reasons. Looking back at various roles I've had in my life's journey, the skill framework I learned studying and writing about Napoleonic warfare or the Silk Road, were just as essential as the framework in math and engineering on the CS part of my education, maybe more so.
100% agree with this. Education should not put everyone in a box and feed them all the possible information. Look at the Finnish model, there's a reason they have the best performance. I used to hate art when it was forced down my throat in school. Now that I can go to museums by myself and learn what I want, I love it.
And about "having to learn" stuff, I feel like it's more a justification the parent poster gave to themselves so they get over with it, not a real _need_ to learn something. What's the point of memorizing stuff you'll never use?
Wait a sec, I'm on your side with the criticism of public education thing but in saying that there are "many better and more interesting books" than Hamlet, what are you criticizing about the play, exactly?
I'm not sure this is a fair characterization of GP. He wrote that his wife poured lots of energy into schooling the kids, but also that they learned things on their own when they wanted to learn them. Certainly we should assume that the energy poured into their schooling involved discipline for the kids involved. I didn't get the impression that the kids were frolicking through the Austrian Alps behind Maria von Trapp as their teacher.
> There is something to be said for forcing kids to learn things they hate. It is necessary preparation for the important stuff that comes later, stuff they cannot learn from their parents. That's what advanced education is, learning something because an expert tells you to. Whether you enjoy every moment of it or not is beside the point. You can judge things once you become an expert.
I'm not sure what to make of this. How is "forcing" kids to learn things they hate "necessary" preparation for what comes later? Is it the only way to instill discipline?
I'd rather force my kids to do the productive, boring things like chores (washing and folding laundry, cleaning dishes, cleaning their room, cleaning their bathroom and playroom, taking care of the pets) which will instill the same discipline and delayed gratification without potentially making them hate learning and schooling at a young age when they are least emotionally prepared to handle it. Plus, if they're being challenged in school they'll have that experience of leaping into the unknown, which can be quite scary and requires discipline. I find it much more likely that homeschooling induces that challenge and discipline over public schools, where above-average kids are often bored and subject to authoritarian threats.
> I have to go away for a two-week training course on monday. It is going to be hell. Twelve days of memorizing stupid powerpoints about stuff I will probably never use. There will be tests at the end. I will pass them. My training at school/university, learning stuff I often hated, allows me to power through such things. I can sit in that chair hour after hour without drifting. Not everyone can do that. They work very different jobs. Their employer doesn't spend tens of thousands of dollars sending them to such courses.
I'm not sure why romanticizing or glorifying suffering and waste is somehow the raison d'être for public schooling. I've worked in toxic environments before where some of the employees, fully resigned to how toxic the place is, would make statements like, "not a lot of people could succeed in this environment." I got the hell out of each of those situations as soon as I could. In my opinion, I'd rather suffer for people like my kids or my wife or God or even to defend my community for which I am duty bound, but not for my employer.
Best of luck with that horrible upcoming training course.
This post has a fatal misconception that school teaches people to "learn how to learn". In your specific argument, it's the belief that forcing kids to master boring material will augment their ability to learn boring material in adulthood.
Cognitive psychology has consistently refuted this theory again and again. Transfer of learning is virtually non-existent.[1] When a student learns a topic he learns the very specific skills related to that topic. There's no spillover or improvement to the ability to learn other, even closely related, topics.
At a later date, I studied Hungarian in a cram school. Two of us learned Hungarian much faster than our classmates- we both had studied Japanese. Most of the students had also studied other languages. Something about learning languages that were so grammatically different from English seemed to help with building mental models and stop "translating" things back and forth from English- which made the language much easier to pick up.
Developing learning techniques does help in learning other things. Learning boring things however, I think that's always going to be hard for me.
I disagree, a lot of learning a language is transferable, but not because it's 'learning how to learn', just because it's the same.
Grammars are largely described using the same system, with different languages using different parts of it (and more or less - Latin quite a lot; English quite little). Learning a second language (that's different enough) exposes you to more of the available grammatical constructs, so when you learn a third there's less that could possibly be new, and probably quite a bit of grammatical overlap with your first or second language.
But does this specific anecdote generalize to, for example, learning a language and then trying to learn linear algebra? I feel that was the point the GP was meaning to bring up. Languages are fundamentally similar to one another in many ways, so I would imagine there is less you can transfer to learning something where the framework of language-learning no longer applies.
When I was in highschool I had several books I had to read that I hated. So i learned to beat the system. I found several online reviews of the book, read those, and the re-wrote them in my own words. Ironically i learned more that way then when I read the books myself, as i would actually have to think of how to re-write the the essays in my own words. When I was reading the book and not liking it, then it would be like a lot of school info, get it in my head, and once the assignment / test was done, forget it all.
Your linked post from Bryan Caplan isn't compelling that transfer of learning is "virtually non-existent."
Anecdotally, I agree that a good deal of teaching does not produce learning that is durable or transfers.
That doesn't mean it isn't possible.
Enter Scott Carrell and James West's study at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) [0]. The title and abstract bury the lede and actually misdirect. It talks about professor evaluations, tenure, and teacher quality. The key findings from this study are about the type of pedagogy that create durable and transferable learning.
They compared pedagogical styles of teachers in first year calculus classes compared to how durable and transferable the knowledge was that cadets gained in each class. It was a totally unique environment that allowed for it to be randomized, controlled, and to study effects beyond one year. I have never seen a better study in education.
The tl;dr is that pedagogy that forces students to engage in desirable difficulties [1] produces learning that is more durable and can transfer to different domains. The catch is two-fold. Students rate this type of teaching poorly. They also get worse grades at first even though the long-term payoff is much better.
For most normal kids, they just adapt. The problem is when kids have a problem that parents can't handle or don't understand. People miss this, because they (rightfully) have a tight emotional attachment to their children.
My kids go to a private school, and I'm a volunteer parent/peer advisor to help parents with various issues. One of the hardest conversations to have is when a child is struggling, and the right answer is for that child to be in public school where resources exist -- the financial model doesn't support having the support staff and specialist teachers. People feel strongly about small class sizes and other benefits of the private school, but that matters less if the child needs services.
That's fundamentally an issue with homeschooling. There's nobody to say "hey, we have a problem here" when Sally can't read, or Johnny doesn't understand geometry because Khan academy isn't working and mom can't explain it.
I mean, there's an absolutely ridiculous number of kids who can't do things to grade level in public schools, and grade level requirements aren't particularly ambitious for what a kid could learn, given their age.
"That's fundamentally an issue with homeschooling. There's nobody to say "hey, we have a problem here" when Sally can't read, or Johnny doesn't understand geometry because Khan academy isn't working and mom can't explain it."
Three things:
1. There are lots of private options for this, at least in any major metro.
2. From my experience with homeschoolers, the sheer amount of parent attention they tend to get lends itself towards figuring these things out (especially with help from a homeschooling community or the aforementioned private options).
3. From my experience as a public school teacher, most of the kids who needed services didn't get them, and I saw very few situations where the services seemed to make a significant difference (though there were some). I've seen more success stories around learning disabilities from homeschoolers than I have from kids at public schools (and in fact often the learning disability was a key impetus for the switch to homeschool).
So the question is, "compared to what?" Kids with strong parent advocates are likely to get what they need in whatever environment they're in. Kids without them aren't likely to, but there's selection bias against that in homeschool. Yes, one can have a great result with public school, and sometimes that's the right call for a family, but after my stint in the public schools I'm much more confident in a well-meaning parent figuring out the solution with a kid they spend lots of time with than I am in that same parent spending much less time with the kid and rolling the dice with public school specialists and support services.
> From my experience with homeschoolers, the sheer amount of parent attention they tend to get lends itself towards figuring these things out
It depends. Some parents focus homeschooling on religion. Or skip schooling so their 11 year old can focus on his baseball career and 3 travel teams. Or have no clue.
I've seen public school parents spend their time with their kids on making sure their kids don't believe anything that could challenge their religious or political beliefs, and many public school parents who encourage their kids to focus on sports alone to the exclusion of anything and everything else. Again -- compared to what?
I was homeschooled K-7 and again in 12th. I know lots of homeschool kids whose parents insulated them from the world (including mine, though less so than many) due to religion or just eccentricity. Almost all of us are successful, however, and very few stayed locked in that bubble. A key piece of that is because we became self-directed learners.
My wife and I are homeschooling our daughter. She's still pretty little, 7 1/2. She went to school for a year and then we started homeschooling, not because anything was particularly wrong at school but we just love spending time with her (and she with us) and our lives are flexible enough to do it.
In her first year at school, the teacher was incredibly effusive about her. We were interested in maths because before she went to school we had always thought that she struggled with anything to do with numbers, but the teacher reassured us that everything was fine. But within a week of us sitting down with her to do maths, it became very clear that she had absolutely no idea of even the most basic concepts around numbers, sequences, addition, or anything else. We asked her how she had managed to do the material that the teacher had shown us, and she looked a little sheepish and said: "well, we do all that in groups..."
I don't know how long she could have kept faking it in the school system. But at least in our case, our daughter was perfectly capable of playing the system and slipping through the cracks, in a way that was completely impossible with us one on one. We're lucky that we're educated and have resources etc, but our daughter will absolutely be better off getting the help that we can organise for her and the personalisation in her learning that we can offer than she would be in the school system.
> I'm sure that it was. But good luck to them when they need to learn something important that isn't fun.
At the end of the comment he says his sons are well rounded adults.
> I have to go away for a two-week training course on monday. It is going to be hell. Twelve days of memorizing stupid powerpoints about stuff I will probably never use.
No offense, but that sounds pretty miserable. I'm on my forties, with two kids, and never had to subject myself to such things. Life is too short for that.
> At the end of the comment he says his sons are well rounded adults.
While they are likely doing fine, parents usually aren't the correct people to ask, the kids could be withholding how much they've been struggling and even if they aren't no parent would objectively say if their kids didn't turn out into "well rounded adults", unless the parent truly hated their kids.
Parents like making their kids look better than they are.
Hah, you had a nice catch-22 in there: either I, as a parent, am oblivious to my kid's shortcomings, or I "truly hate them". Well, that's not how it works in real life.
I had an extremelysimilar upbringing, and I'm in senior tech management in a systemically-relevant bank now and will be retiring at 40 (in 1.5 years). I didn't need anyone's luck to learn and succeed. I had an end-goal, and I did what was necessary to get there. Drive is the decider, not compliance.
> You will have to understand the rules of evidence regardless of what type of lawyer you want to be.
This is the problem. We force everyone through a meat grinder with this paternalistic bullshit about being well-rounded. If and when it becomes necessary to know something, you learn it with more motivation and so it becomes easier to learn and remember. We need to stop force feeding people things that aren’t directly relevant or that they have no interest in.
Source: am also a lawyer and would say easily 1/2 of what is taught in law school was never used again and promptly forgotten after the exam. I am certain the same apples to doctors, architects, etc etc etc.
| They're both extremely well rounded adults now and didn't go through the agonies of public schooling.
That is just your opinion and bias. I can share my opinion and bias. My kids go to public schools and love it. We'd never even think about home schooling. Not that everything is perfect, but as long as they are happy, we're happy.
You know there's a sizeable minority of kids that are subjected to chronic torment and bullying in public (or private) schools, which effectively amounts to psychological torture? The teachers simply don't care, or most often don't even know about it. Homeschoolding is a much better option for these particular kids.
Your kids are probably fortunate or socially skilled enough to be outside of that group.
I'm not arguing with that and I totally understand. My comment was about "through the agonies of public schooling", generalizing about public schooling because their experience was not positive.
Right. Well it wasn't positive for my kids! And I'm not biased. My son and daughter are just as imperfect as they'd have been if we'd put them through school.
We did however save them from needlessly experiencing the problems they were already having.
Source on sizable minority? Also the greater world, outside of school, provides just as much torture and hardship as there is within our schools. I’m not condoning bullying or normalizing being bullied (I was) but there’s something to be said about learning how horrible people can be to prepare for the real world, where they are even more horrible.
The source is my observations and experience. The same kid gets picked on day in and day out. All the torment is directed at the bottom 5 percent of the social ladder. Nonstop.
I don't believe the adult world provides as much torture. Aside from workplace backstabbing, people are much nicer as adults, even if it's all for show. And as an adult you can more easily remove yourself from relationships and surroundings that aren't working. Kids are more prone to social cruelty and you're mostly stuck in your environment without the ability to opt-out.
>> there's a sizeable minority of kids that are subjected to chronic torment and bullying in public (or private) schools
There's a group of people who were bullied at school, it's called "everyone". There are support groups for this, they meet every single day of the week at your local bar.
I am curious to read a study on this question. I would think that such a study would need to delineate between those who do homeschooling because of religious social conservatism, and those who do so because of a pragmatic belief that they can provide a better education.
No, but they could have, no problem. It just wasn't part of their goals.
I also want to mention that although we were/are a religious household, we did not do homeschooling at all because of religion. We did it so that the kids could get the best education possible.
And people might wonder about their ability, as a parent, to teach. Are they up to the task? The answer is simple: The person who has the most interest in a child is going to be the best teacher. And who has more interest than a parent who loves them?
If somebody wanting to do homeschooling is doing it because it's the "easy" way out, or because they are trying to "buck the system" for the sake of bucking the system, then DONT. Do it because it's what is best for your kids. It was best for ours, and the way we did it worked for them.
Before you decide anything at all, do tons of research. Talk to parents in your area who are homeschooling. Look for co-ops and home schooling groups on facebook etc. There are excellent resources available to you.
It's "fun" that the first thing that people who don't know a thing about homeschooling state is socialisation.
Homeschooling doesn't mean living in a cage or away from others (well sometime it might, especially in some religious approach of it. Extreme cases are what people hear about and that might be the reason of those believes).
Kids can still go play with friends, do sports or any activity !
On a personal note, my wife and I homeschooled our kids between their 7 and 10 (mostly because we were traveling here and there), and now that they're back in the school system, they have no problem and have good marks.
It's way more easy to teach 2 kids (maybe we were lucky, as they're twins so are at the same class level) than 25 to 30. You can cover official curriculum pretty quick, and it leaves time to do other (fun) stuff.
It also misses the socialization problem at traditional schools where bullying is common and non-standard interests can be discouraged. It’s a parenting problem regardless of the school system.
My anecdotal experience tells me that homeschooled people have worse social skills than average. No amount of exposure to peers by a homeschooler is going to match the 8 hours a day, five days to week someone who goes to public schlol experiences.
This is great, but let's remember a bit of humbleness. It is an incredible luxury to have a full time adult at home like that. And it's no surprise that having a 2:1 child to adult ratio leads to good learning outcomes. I wish all kids could get the experience of small classes with a dedicated teacher. Public school systems are a symptom of chronic underfunding and mismanagement.
My fourth grader has had a hard time during the pandemic, with a lot of depression and anger. Once he could go back to school, his mood switched completely to his original self.
But there are kids in his class in pretty marginal home situations. One kid came back completely different, with a lot of rage and anger. She was getting into fights. It was her first time back to any school (virtual or otherwise) in more than a year. Another came back and falls asleep in class. She stays up till midnight watching TV.
I don't feel like public schools were truly weighing the risks to children's mental health when they kept schools closed. Childhood trauma has long term lasting health effects and can shorten lifespan by _decades_ (see the ACES study[1])
> My fourth grader has had a hard time during the pandemic, with a lot of depression and anger. Once he could go back to school, his mood switched completely to his original self.
I had a similar experience with my kids. It's been a hard year for everyone. Your post focuses on the kids, but I don't think it's been any easier for teachers or parents.
> I don't feel like public schools were truly weighing the risks to children's mental health when they kept schools closed.
At least where I live, schools were never closed, we just switched to remote learning. And of course, that hand was initially forced and was constantly re-evaluated until in-person learning reached a level of acceptable risk again.
Sorry I should have clarified, I meant "closed" as in "virtual". Which for a lot of families is effectively "closed" given how school is such a focus for social services and social/emotional learning.
I would've been 100% ok during being at home the past year+ except for our middle schooler - he's doing ok, generally, but he's gained a lot of weight and is less happy than he was. I despise how our society handled education. Sure, we kept our kid isolated, but the majority of the country didn't, and so keeping kids out of schools didn't help, all we got out of it is a major mental health issue in our children that will last for years.
Ventilation and masks, plus shutting down school for a couple of weeks if there is a significant outbreak, and we would've managed this crisis so much better.
Instead you have half the country saying "fuck it" and sending kids to school no matter what, and the other half refusing to open schools at all but then letting kids playing with other kids in "pods" (when the also let kids be in multiple pods).
Yep a lot of irrational behavior around Covid driven by both ends of the partisan divide. Either you live in camp “Covid doesn’t exist” or the other “keep things closed at all costs”. And lots of social pressure to not advocate the obvious, rational approach. Advocate for sane approach to in person school in our town and you can get yelled out for being a kooky anti masker.
> Sure, we kept our kid isolated, but the majority of the country didn't
You didn't have to keep your child isolated - did you expect nothing bad to happen if you took this course of action?
Sorry to suggest this, but it really seems like you are the cause of your kid's difficulties.
> sending kids to school no matter what
Why is this not the default in your household? What is more important than your child's growth and mental development? They would have handled getting sick just fine, like kids always do every time there's a bad seasonal respiratory virus out there.
In September of 2020, around me all of the private schools were open for in person learning 5 days a week, all of the public schools were online only.
Later in the school year, public schools moved to a modal of 1/2 the class being in person and 1/2 the class being online for any given day except for Monday where all students were online only.
Finally, a few weeks before the end of the year, public schools allowed all students to return to class for the entire week.
Private schools did not see major outbreaks of Covid. Teachers at private schools were no more likely to get Covid than the general population.
This generation of kids will pay a heavy price for these school shutdowns.
The test scores prove Homeschool is even better than private school. Homeschool saved my psychological health. I also wasnt taught to hate America or white people. So public schools now are basically how you raise a midwit that the gov can control easily.
> The test scores prove Homeschool is even better than private school.
In almost all studies I've read this could be completely explained by self selection, either of the parents opting for homeschooling (i.e. the share whose kids were better than average in school still were when homeschooled) or with unequal response rates (i.e. the parents whose kids had problems at home or the home had problems and thus opted the kids out of school didn't return the questionnaires).
This phenomenon is quite common. For example our midwife told us home births have less complications than hospital births. Well yes, because complicated births usually either already start at the hospital or get transferred there once things get messy.
Public schools have been increasingly focused on politics. It's scary even if you agree with the general ideas. You hear kids repeating mantras and slogans with very little understanding. And it's all reinforced in popular culture/entertainment.
Public schools are luckily the places where students are protected from racist right wing conspiracies like QAnon, Shakespeare, and middle school algebra...
Things like "We are Tito's and Tito is ours", or "Little pioneers we are a real army" or "The
People, the Party, the Youth, the Army." Oh wait, wrong country :)
It doesn't really matter. Schools should be educating. Often, politics is just the easiest way for bad teachers to get by -- all they have to do is repeat whatever is fashionable at the time.
It acts as a shield because, no matter how useless the teacher is as an educator, any criticism of them becomes political criticism.
Here's a leaked resource guide for teachers and educators in the NY area. Notice the "Early childhood" folder. There's a lot of pressure to integrate this kind of activism into the curriculum throughout the school year.
https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1LGslwJwhXvpVnDgw0uC-...
I definitely think that no single activism group or "area" should get an outsized influence in education. Certainly it would be irresponsible for teachers or school boards to simply take an given activists group's curriculum or material and apply them as is.
While I understand the hesitancy, especially in the early childhood context, I do wonder what you how educators should approach topical things like black lives matter?
I received the link months ago from another source who attended related workshops. The leak part is letting parents know that this is going on at all. After all people can't google an unknown unknown. But it's amazing how non-chalant they are about their indocrination efforts.
I am from Brazil, and I don't intend to put my kids in school if I can (here it is illegal to homeschool, prison time for parents and all, I am hoping to get out of the country if the needed laws don't pass when I have kids).
And a good reason for it, is the amount of bullshit fed to me and my friends by the shovelfulls, when I was a teenager I believed all adults I knew except schoolteachers were evil, because they didn't like Mao, Stalin and Che Guevara, I was taught that Pol Pot was a hero, literally, only after I was out of the school system that I could finally learn what these people actaully did.
Then over the years I picked more and more on what sort of stuff school taught me wrong, there were a few things in harder sciences, but when it is social stuff, school was a disaster, lie after a lie, sadly some of theses lies remain pervasive in society (for example many people in my country believe the monarchy was pro-slavery, despite documents that exist that show that the monarchs themselves wanted slavery abolished, and that when they DID abolish slavery, the coup that ended monarchy was sponsored by the biggest former slaveowners).
And this is new? I’m sure schools weren’t political hotbeds during civil rights politics, Vietnamese war protests, etc. Some states are required to teach creationism, and many mandate students stand for a daily ritual of the pledge of allegiance. We are only a few decades removed from requiring prayer in public schools. As a government entity everything a public school does is political and it has never not been so.
I think you underestimate how often the kids are passing along political mantras and overestimate how often teachers are. Go look at GenZ TikTok and how it is massively political and in such a way that there is no chance teachers are driving it.
I assure you kids don’t care about the quietly muttered opinion of their social studies teacher but are much more informed by their siblings, peers, and parents. The opinions get shared at school and absorbed by developing minds that don’t handle politics with much nuance largely because the relevant history of politics is never taught to them in school, cutting off at Vietnam War at the latest. And why is recent history eschewed in favor of covering the 1780s in boring detail? The desire to keep politics out of schools. And to some extent, the desire of Texas purchasers of textbooks to promote a reactionary view of the country. Covering the AIDS epidemic just leads to complaints about making Reagan out to be a villain or that teachers are corrupting kids with homosexualism. If kids repeat dumb slogans, can we blame them when they don’t have a knowledge of any modern political history except what they’ve gleaned from their parents cable news of choice?
It’s not universal yet but many of the tenets of Theory being incorporated into public school programs are, within the frame of considerations of parents choosing an educational track for their children, akin to the same concerns (or benefits) when choosing to enroll them into private religious schools.
Fortunately some states are banning taxpayer funded teaching of things like race-based guilt or complicity. In theory this would ban educational programs which incorporated tenets of white supremacy and other race-based illiberal ideologies, but in practice we can see the only programs that actually are being surfaced as likely affected by these restrictions (to the point of possibly having to cancel entire, active curricula) are the ones grounded in Theory.
> It’s not universal yet but many of the tenets of Theory being incorporated into public school programs are, within the frame of considerations of parents choosing an educational track for their children, akin to the same concerns (or benefits) when choosing to enroll them into private religious schools.
> Fortunately some states are banning taxpayer funded teaching of things like race-based guilt or complicity. In theory this would ban educational programs which incorporated tenets of white supremacy and other race-based illiberal ideologies, but in practice we can see the only programs that actually are being surfaced as likely affected by these restrictions (to the point of possibly having to cancel entire, active curricula) are the ones grounded in Theory.
If I were an American urbanite I would 100% homeschool my children too. Sending well-meaning kids to an inner city school should be considered a form of abuse.
I am not an American, nor live in the USA anymore, but this comment made me sad.
That the first thought of public school issues is not writing to your representatives and voting for better schooling of future generations; instead, to isolate your children's education.
As a Frenchman, I noticed this feeling from USA citizens that the government is against you and there is nothing you can do about it. It was pernicious.
As an American and a parent, there are two thoughts: To me it's obvious that the first thought should be for my child. I'm personally responsible for them, and I'm going to do what it takes to get them a quality education.
The second thought, to write to my representatives and improve education for everyone, is still there. I volunteer at a makerspace downtown that provides computing resources to inner-city kids that don't have anywhere near the same resources as my outlying, high-performing suburban district with our labs and awesome teachers. I have no delusion that a single letter to my representative would fix the underlying systemic issues like racist redlined housing districts, the inequality of property taxes for school funding, and the penalizing of 'underperforming' school districts, and give my child a good education.
Can I improve it? Sure! Fix it? Not for everyone, no, so I'll do what I can for my own child.
The US government is toxic, and it is openly promoting racist policies and ideologies that are outright offensive. No, it can't be trusted with my kids future and education. It's necessary that it exists, and it can handle the basics (probably), but the government is not, and cannot, be a replacement for caring and involved parents.
Any performance based comparison between school performance and life outcomes needs to include stats broken out by the homelife of the child. You could call it "Parental Responsibility" in most cases -- and that figure/statistic will represent most of the issues that everyone wants addressed. The thing is, it's the most impactful to the child, and it can't be meaningfully addressed without massive government control of family life.
Parents are responsible for their children's education. Success in anything is a mix of effort, knowledge, ability and luck (I consider timing part of luck).
I am going to give my children the best opportunities I can give them, within the bounds of my values and life experiences.
It's irrational to believe the outcome of an education should be identical between children. Unless you remove parents and have children raised by institutions, then parental involvement will always have a major impact on academic performance.
Strawman: If my child is interested in computers, and spends all their free time reading about and learning to program them, while their contemporaries choose to watch TV and play video games, should they be limited by what the "average" person in their class is able to do? Of course not!
It's akin to the school district that noticed that not enough black kids were in a gifted class, so their solution was to get rid of the gifted class. That's insanity.
Public schools should provide a solid education to children, and society needs to expect that the outcome of that will be based on the actual performance of the children and their circumstances. A school cannot fix everything that comes from single-parent households and broken families. It can (and should) try and help, but I think it's ridiculous to hold back other students that perform better because they have parental involvement that other children don't.
At least 80% of the best public high schools in the US are urban [1]. You’ll also notice that many of the most urban of them have well over 1000 students while the best of the suburban ones are generally only a few hundred students.
The worst schools in urban areas (just like the worst schools in rural and suburban areas) need to be dramatically improved, but you do not help the situation by claiming all urban schools are terrible.
EDIT - If you have a California-centric view, it might be a little more understandable. Look at that list and you see that Los Angeles and San Francisco have 1 school each on the list. New York City has 12, Miami-Dade has 6, Chicago has 5, Houston and Dallas 4 each.
The majority of those schools are suburban, not urban.
It should also be noted that nearly all of them are "public" in name only. The BASIS schools, for instance, where my kids attend, are Charter schools, where parents are not technically required to, but shamed mercilessly into, "donating" what is effectively slightly discounted private school tuition.
Nearly every one of those nationally ranked urban high schools are magnet schools, which in no way are representative of those school systems in general.
As an example in New York annually about 30,000 kids take the specialized high school acceptance test, and about 800-850 are offered admission to Stuyvesant HS, one of the most elite. It is not the same experience of a neighborhood high school in a poor neighborhood.
If I were emperor (*), I would ban anyone from homeschooling or private school, with exceptions only for kids with special needs.
Every time a parent who cares about their child’s education pulls them out of public school, that’s one less parent who might otherwise be involved enough to improve the public school situation. You end up with public schools containing only the children of parents who are unable to afford the time or money for other options, only the teachers who can’t get jobs at private schools/tutors, etc etc.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for everyone to think “public schools are bad, I’m going to send my kid somewhere else.” I really wish we’d focus that energy towards making public schools better.
* It would probably take an emperor to do this, because there’s no way such a law would pass in the US today.
Education is about more than just your particular children. We all benefit from a society where people are better educated. (A more informed electorate creates a better society.) If the act of pulling your kid from school causes that school to get just a little bit worse, you’re making society just a little bit worse as a result.
There’s a similar reason why, in countries that have state-funded health care, you’re not allowed to seek out private doctors or private insurance. The point is to not allow the rich to siphon the best resources away from everyone else. (This is obviously very anti-capitalist, but I think for some institutions like medicine and education, it may make sense.)
I have kids. The reason I bring it up with an “If I were emperor” qualifier, is that for an individual, it doesn’t make sense to keep your child in a failing public school if you can afford to pull them out. It would take a unified effort of banning all private education, for it to actually improve things. I’m aware it’s a pipe dream right now, and as long as private schools exist, it still makes sense for individuals to use them.
It’s similar to the tragedy of the commons… people acting in their own self-interests (better education for my child) create a situation that is worse than if we had a collective strategy (we all get a decent education, and get to share a better, more educated society.)
There would ideally be no “better school districts”, because they would receive the same (population-adjusted) funding, and teachers would be paid similarly enough that schools couldn’t unfairly attract the best teachers. Getting rid of all private/charter schools can help with that. So can centralizing the school funding (so that richer districts can’t somehow secure more funding for their school.)
History has shown that the world burns because of some fanatic trying to impose their theory of utopia which overrides human nature. People caring first about their own family, then their extended family, then their neighborhood, then city, etc, in radiating zones of decreasing concern is a required part of human nature and does not cause the world to burn.
Me spending more time with my child doesn't take away from what other children receive. If I wasn't working with my child, then I certainly wouldn't be working with all of them in place of that.
The moral and educational formation of children is the right of parents. Your authoritarian attack on the family isn't representative of most people's views.
And if everyone pulled their kids out of public school, virtually all of those children would be better off, with very few exceptions. Punting one's offspring to daycare and public schools so that both parents can work is the real tragedy of the commons.
I don't know whether virtually all will be better off. But like people realizing that with the interent they no longer need to be in the office, many are realizing their kids no longer need to be in a physical school building.
There are just many resources out there on the internet to have excellent course materials and information delivered straight to your home, together with all sorts of physical activities and clubs available for recreation and group events, and there are big advantages to being able to learn at your own pace in a safe and non-disruptive environment taught by someone with a strong commitment to your well-being. Given all these advantages, the bar is pretty low for when customized learning exceeds the factory-style and heavily politicized education given at schools, especially given the current dysfunctional state of educational pedagogy in the U.S and the fact that unlike in other nations, the U.S. tends to draw teachers from the lowest scoring college graduates. The situation is very different in other nations, but in the U.S., education majors tend to be selected from the bottom of the barrel of the college graduate pool.
That said, the reason why most homeschoolers are much better off today is because parents who care about education and have the wherewithal to tutor their child self-select to homeschool. If everyone did it, you would find that a lot of parents can't spend the time to do it and need the school as a babysitter. Or they don't have the wherewithal to do it due to their own lack of education. So homeschooling is generally done by parents with above average education and income which is why it's so successful in the U.S. Make everyone do it, and those outcomes would change quite a bit.
> That said, the reason why most homeschoolers are much better off today is because parents who care about education and have the wherewithal to tutor their child self-select to homeschool.
If you believe in the growth mindset, you necessarily have to reject this idea that homeschoolers are a gifted bunch whose success cannot be replicated.
> And if everyone pulled their kids out of public school, virtually all of those children would be better off
Except for the children who aren’t able to be pulled out of public school. They would be far worse off.
If you’re advocating getting rid of public schools as an institution, what are you replacing it with? Just not educating kids at all if their parents can’t afford it? Do you view education as a right or a privilege? Would you at least agree that society is better off if everyone is educated, or do you think it’s just a perk that you can go without?
My right to educate my children to the best of my ability trumps your desire to hold them back for some imagined benefit that might accrue to their classmates.
Your plan is just crab bucket mentality dressed up in egalitarianism's clothing.
I can make a concrete difference for my kids. I can't move the needle for the school district.
By the way, to those who are saying that your first responsibility is to your own kids, I agree, even if you put them in public school. It's still your responsibility.
Pay attention to how they're doing in school. If they're struggling, help them. You may not know as much as the teacher, but you're a functioning adult with access to the internet, and you can work with them one-on-one. If they need it, do that.
Pay attention to how they're doing emotionally. If public school is destroying them, you should know. When your kid says something like "Every day when I get ready for school, my stomach hurts", listen. (In our case, it was getting ready for private school, but it still was a giant red flag.) Do what you have to to either get them out or to help them survive.
Pay attention to what they're being taught. If they're getting propaganda - from either side - then give them balance. Teach them how to examine positions critically, not just to swallow whatever they're told.
It's your responsibility as a parent. Don't just hand them to a school and walk away.
You imply that a parent in a public school has a lot of power to make the school better, which is questionable. If the poor outcomes are due not to a lack of resources but to the preferences of the administrators and teachers, you as a parent will be SOL.
20 years ago, I saw home schooling as ill-informed and harmful to the kids. As time has passed and I've gained more insight as to what public schools have become, with the impact of the horrible teachers unions, and especially after this last year -- I applaud the capable parents who take this course.
Public school is like public housing: You only use it if there are no viable alternatives. A few places here and there the rich have their own public school with carefully drawn districts to keep out the undesirables, but even those are communist propaganda wards.
Public school is big business though. Lots of unions, lots of public employees, lots of text book manufacturing, whoever makes the desks, fixes the school buses, HVAC systems, you name it.
Even if the education itself wasn't outright propaganda and otherwise dysfunctional, public schools are mental misery for many. Self-important, entitled, arrogant, but otherwise useless staff and teachers. Don't subject children to prison-like treatment.
The U.S. did a terrible disservice to children during the pandemic by closing schools (where COVID does that spread well) while keeping open bars and other places where COVID spreads much more easily. Many people treated it as if education is not that important.
Homeschooling is great if the children are brought up in a solid environment of proper socialization. Otherwise they end up becoming schizoids that can interact but are dull. Nothing is worse than letting a kid teach themselves about the world than letting them experience it first hand.
We homeschool our kids in part because we encountered a homeschool community in Brooklyn that blew apart our preconceptions of homeschooling. What I had thought was mostly a tool for highly religious parents has become intellectually diverse and a lot of the people here do it to give their kids individualized attention and some of the freedom to explore they could only otherwise get in a private school. If you already have a parent at home full time (or full time between the two of you) — not uncommon due to the high cost of child care here — it’s a good way to arbitrage that into educational opportunity.
There are groups and storefronts here where you can send kids to get a chance to socialize and tinker, work with their hands, run around (play groups) etc. Shout out to Apple Academy Bklyn which started for homeschoolers to have a workshop type place but also all kinds of little places where kids can tinker with tech, board games etc for example along 7th Ave (I think a lot of these started as after school places but we’re adopted by homeschoolers).
Not saying it’s for everyone but it’s not the insular backwater I had subconsciously made it out to be in my head.
I wanted to teach, I went to school to teach art. I wanted to change how the system worked. I saw so many things wrong with my experience, which was demonstrably well above average. In the end I found out I'm horrible at classroom management and great at programming and design. So I became a programmer and not a teacher. I have huge respect for the professional educators that can manage a classroom and raise the bar for the entire room every day. Now as a parent my wife and I decided, given my decent salary, that we would forego her income to focus on other aspects of our quality of life. Part of that is homeschooling our children.
One way I frame homeschooling is a simple question. From your experience weigh the value of even a single day sitting under a tree reading a great book vs the value of a week in in an english classroom. Personally this captures the difference they are fundamental, qualitative differences.
Homeschooling is an unfair advantage in a lot of ways. Not everyone can afford to do it. Society needs to provide universal education and when almost every family needs dual incomes schooling provides a secondary
(arguably primary) service of child care. That however does not represent the only or best option for your kids. When I'm in a more negative mood I call schooling, of any sort, is a kind of institutionalization. That does not make it all bad, there are great social outcomes for submitting to that institutionalization. However there are other paths to just as good or better outcomes just not in a societally blanketing kind of way.
Public education (I suppose all education really) can only ever be as good as a home environment for all but the most exceptional kids. You can throw all the money you want at an education but, ultimately, if that kid goes home to significant struggles with nourishment, housing, parent availability, parent interest, etc. it's going to be extremely difficult for them to succeed. I'd like to see more investment in the home and let it propagate through the rest of life. Access to good housing, healthcare, food and the like would go a huge way in stabilizing the home and providing a better foundation for parents to fill the gaps in public education.
Reading threads about public school on HN and threads about WFH/in-person makes me wonder if there is a relationship between the people that are anti-public school and pro-WFH or if there is a dissonant-relationship between anti-public school and pro-in-person.
I am pro-WFH and pro-public school. But my experience (public school student, public state university, 7 years public school teacher, 6 years in-office programmer, 4 years WFT programmer) is drastically different from many of the posts I read in these threads.
If school is a "prison" full of incapable/ineffectual/communist teachers indoctrinating the "inmates"... what is an office?
The routine of school is prison, but the routine of an office is good? Ineffectual teachers? What about ineffectual managers? Lefty teachers indoctrinating children? Corporations have convinced us that if the minimum wage increases or taxes go up then McDonalds and Apple will just close their doors and decide to go out of business rather than make a teeny bit less profit!
I don't know how many people are willing to acknowledged this but...
Many MANY of the conservative families I know are pulling out their kids. Simply put, they don't want Marxism centered around racism to be taught to their kids.
Personally, I have to agree.
My kids daycare was actively trying to put all the boys and girls in dresses and refuse to teach what genders are. We obviously teach basics of male vs female to our children, but this is ridiculous.
During the pandemic I listened to my brother in laws (still in high school) 40 minute lecture. It was on how due to "white privilege" black Americans shouldn't have to pay taxes due to the fact they can't manage finances (this was a personal economics class). It was insanely racist and honestly not insightful. I asked my brother in law how often this occurs, he said "every day, almost every class, it's racist".
At this point, all the parents I know are either oblivious to what's happening, moving kids to private schools or homeschooling.
You're entirely correct. I'm guessing you'll get a commenter or two saying something about how critical race theory isn't really Marxism, as if that undermined your point. It doesn't.
The toxic things being taught in the schools, which seem to me to be a transmogrified form of segregationism wherein woke whites must take up the woke white man's burden and be overlords for supposedly incapable blacks. Just as Bolshevik Marxists tended to be intellectuals from bourgeoisie families who regarded the proletariat as generally too stupid to be given power, so it is with the woke whites today.
US society has some important applications, roles, etc. for versions of relatively independent self-learning. Soooo, maybe somewhere in the teaching and learning of K-12 there should be some emphasis, practice, role, encouragement, etc. for a start on self-learning.
Examples:
(1) At one time, and maybe significantly still, a huge fraction of learning about computer programming, and computing more generally, was just self learning.
(2) At one time, the Web site of the math department at Princeton just stated that graduate courses were introductions to research by experts in their fields, that no courses were given for preparation for the Ph.D. qualifying exams, and that students were expected to prepare for the exams on their own.
(3) Teachers who need to keep up in their fields and researchers who need to push their fields forward have to do some to a lot of the work via self learning.
And it is easy to find more examples in owning a house, farm, etc.
I used to be a diehard supporter of homeschooling. But then I experienced things in my life that revealed the nature of people and society. People are wildly different. But nobody realizes this because nobody really listens. People are different in much deeper and more deterministic ways than is commonly appreciated. There are specific metabolic pathways that are responsible for this. The answer is that for most people home schooling is a waste. They want and need to be in a toxic, petty environment. Intellectual development is wasted on them. It’s biology — not a choice for the parents or for the kids.
Is there some documentary or a read that explains the american school system somehow? Reading the constant complaints about it (such as mountains of homework, suffering through classes and all that) is quite alien to me.
Some classes were boring, sure, I slept through them. But for the most that was not the case and the load never seemed to be excessive. (studying in eastern, then western europe)
There is no one uniform experience, but there are some consistent problems.
Severely underpaid teachers and a focus on testing leads to formulaic memorization of (what a lot of us thought) was drivel, just things to know and forget after the test. High school for me started very early (about 6:45/7 to catch the bus), so it was miserable. I did have some classes that were the exception, but for me all school did was try and beat the drive to learn out of me. In middle school I got punished for reading ahead in our assigned literature. We also had to deal with a powertripping principal for years.
And that's to say nothing of the completely whitewashed US "history" we learned.
I actually was homeschooled for a few years, so I have experience with both systems. The issues I had with homeschooling were the overly religious program my parents used, and the lack of socialization.
I will never put my kid in a public or private school system, provided that I find a community for us to engage socially in, that we find a good curriculum that's not religious, and that either myself or my partner engages in it full-time.
Everyone in the homeschooling group my family attends generally pays for material, and then supplements with things that are free(ish). For example math for us is Saxon (paid), and then we will sometimes use Kahn (free) if the kids need extra practice, or if they need the material presented a different way.
The biggest thing is Saxon is a physical book, and it comes along with all the worksheets and tests and problem sets that we can copy and have them work on multiple times if needed. Specifically things like math facts and computations require a lot of practice, and they have these worksheets you do multiple times, timing yourself each time to show progress. Its really good to have that be able to be done physically with a pencil as the physical interaction really helps with retention. Also I greatly prefer the sequencing of Saxon, they do a lot of introduction work with coins and clocks, two things that are easy to get your hands on and that kids relate with well. Explaining fractions with a Quarter being a quarter of a dollar, and being 25 cents gives you a lot of discussion you can have. Then clocks are so useful for fractions ( half past the hour, quarter till ), especially since they are base 60 and not base 10. Also things like place value ( 1 vs 10's vs 100's ) and even angles are all related to real world physical objects the kids can touch.
If it came down to it I think Kahn would give them a wonderful education and everything I have seen is well executed and wraps in a lot of the sequencing that I have seen work with my kids, but I do like Saxon enough to pay for it and use it as the primary source.
The other piece is this thing called Institute for Excellence in Writing (https://iew.com/) it is honestly amazing. My kids know more about writing, and have a better grasp of the english language then I do thanks to that program.
I teach at the high school level in the suburbs of a major metropolitan area. Generally, it is a middle class community in which the basics are provided for (that said, there was obviously an uptick in family crises, job loss, transient housing, etc.)
About twenty percent of my students handled the transition to distance education just fine. Many of these students told me they missed friends/clubs/etc, but enjoyed having greater control over their time (my district encouraged, but did not require, synchronous learning).
The middle sixty percent were mixed, but generally plateaued in perceived achievement or struggled to keep motivated. Since going back to in-person about six weeks ago, the majority of these students are back on track. Achievement remains somewhat below a typical cohort, just a little less snappy and insightful with observations and arguments. So it goes.
The bottom twenty percent were various flavors of missing. They did not or could not cope with the transition to distance learning. Some of these students were struggling prior to going online, but the reduction in structure and support pulled a lot of kids into this group that wouldn’t typically fail.
My teacher friends (younger age groups than yours) said essentially the same thing. Some fraction of students simply disappeared during remote learning and no amount of phone calls to their parents could get them back. On the other end of the spectrum, some students had stay at home parents with them for the entire duration and were doing just fine. Students in the middle were okay but would have done better in person.
It seems the challenge now is that the most prepared students have gotten further ahead while the least prepared students fell further behind. Managing the increased divergence in coming years will be a challenge.
“My teacher friends (younger age groups than yours) said essentially the same thing. Some fraction of students simply disappeared during remote learning and no amount of phone calls to their parents could get them back.”
We were sending staff door to door everyday, but it is unclear how much of an impact that (or any of our other interventions) really made. A lot of these kids were depressed, anxious, unmoored.
“It seems the challenge now is that the most prepared students have gotten further ahead while the least prepared students fell further behind. Managing the increased divergence in coming years will be a challenge.”
Anxiety over that divergence is already building amongst the teaching staff.
I have a good friend that is a High School Vice Principal and she more or less said the same thing. The top 20% handled it well with only a handful having issues (Any issues got worked out), the middle 60% was hit or miss with some students improving and some doing worse (The school had to be flexible but firm in its expectations). However, what she said about the bottom 20% was pretty shocking. A lot of them would just disappear unless the school staff was chasing them down 5 days a week. Many of the bottom 20% just disappeared and no one at the school knows where they are. The school calls, texts and emails (If they have email) but they never hear from anyone.
It made her realize that High School is just glorified babysitters for a lot of kids. Just a place to warehouse 30% - 40% teenagers until they are 18 with the hope that the school can get the basics into their heads before they are unleashed into the world.
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[ 4.5 ms ] story [ 408 ms ] threadJust walked into the 'teachers room' at lunch break and asked if I could use a microscope to inspect an UV-erasable EEPROM :
Sure, go ahead.
Wanted to write a program instead of doing the final physics experiment :
Uhhh, well, why not
The Netherlands school system is falling victim to the exact same controversies the USA and other systems around the world are facing... [0]
[0] https://nltimes.nl/2021/06/03/netherlands-slammed-prioritizi...
So what point am I making: I've read that schools are teaching creationism, others spend 80% of their time on sports, something with greeting the flag every morning with a speech?
A lot of time is spent on teaching how to make arguments (How to plead your case) instead of trying to work together in finding truth.
And most of all: do not criticise, but a "do as told" mentality.
Again: Sorry for that almost mean-spirited first comment of mine.
The difference between the America as portrayed in sensationalized news headlines and the America I live in is vast.
No, creationism isn't standard curriculum in high schools and no, students aren't spending 80% of their time on sports. When you see these things in news stories, their newsworthiness stems from the fact that it's abnormal, not because it's the norm.
America has half the population of all of Europe and a similar amount of landmass. It's a big enough country that if you go looking, you're going to find pockets of weird culture. The mistake is to assume that when journalists highlight the worst of these, that it's actually representative of the norm.
Judging the US by these stories would be similar to me judging your European education by some of the wild anecdotes my Romanian coworker relayed about his high school experience there.
I suspect his experience has nothing to do with yours, naturally. However, when people read horror stories about bad US schools, they assume it applies to every single high school in the entire country for some reason.
For some reason, the HN and Reddit bubbles seem to collect a lot of people who loathed high school education. Even in adulthood and traveling around the country I’ve never encountered as many negative stories about high school as I read on HN.
Take what you read here with a grain of salt. There appears to be some significant selection bias going on in the stories.
I built a potato gun and tested different fuels. It wasn't very scientifically rigorous (hard to measure how much fuel went into the firing chamber, distance measurements were sloppy, and we didn't take the weight of individual potato projectiles into account). But it was incredibly fun, and the report I produced earned me an A.
That was probably the best "scientific" experience I had in all my years of schooling including college. Having to think about all the different variables really helped me grok the scientific process. We thought up ways that we could start to control things like fuel load and projectile weight and just generally had a blast.
You're getting the wrong impression. The vast majority of people have a high school experience which is wholly unremarkable in the telling which you don't hear about. Those with horrific experiences -- they've got a story to tell.
You only hear about deviations from the norm. Most of the people I know (outside of my bipolar support group) don't have much to say about their childhood.
Compared to homeschooling in a class of one, school is a more social environment. Learning with only those your own age, taught almost exclusively by women between 25-50 (65 at most, but rarely)--is that not an odd way to structure a human environment?
In my anecdotal experience, put a school age kid with a young toddler, or a senior over the age of 70, and an empathy switch gets turned on. This kind of socialization is undervalued.
-- Noam Chomsky
https://www.salon.com/2012/06/17/when_chomsky_wept/
Call it a fluff piece, sure, there certainly isn't even an attempt of criticism in it, but it still matches all I ever witnessed from him.
It taught me that, while I had no idea what I wanted, I did not want the life I was seeing kids around me trapped in to. So I learned to give gatekeepers what they wanted and got out of that crappy little sinkhole.
Didn't learn much of anything academic, though.
I get that one should learn some basics, like that we had some famous writers like Ibsen, but I feel it should be sufficient for most people to know roughly which century he lived, not the exact years of his birth and death. If you want to become a historian you'll have plenty of time to memorize those details later.
I also realized later that we spent very little time at practical writing. I mean sure we wrote stories and such, but very little of it were practically oriented. Yet that's what most people end up needing. Like, writing a report, or heck a letter/email regarding a specific topic.
We also didn't spend much time on understanding and interpreting text. We had some poems we had to interpret, but I think we should have had more of it. And not just poems and such but also more technical texts. Again a very useful skill compared to knowing that Camilla Collett was the sister of Henrik Wergeland, and when exactly they lived.
This became clear when I had to write reports, participated in discussions in newsgroups and emails etc, and later assignments at uni.
Anyway, rant over.
His parents gave him a choice at 13 what he wanted to do -- high school or college and he selected college. Frankly, it's astonishing how much of a waste of time high school is.
I think you're processing your memories through an adult lens and forgetting that if you judge them by adult standards, teenagers are shallow, horrible people. Of course we shouldn't judge teenagers by adult standards, because it isn't fair (children of all ages are pretty shitty people by adult standards) but we have to keep in mind that our memories of high school are memories that were formed by teenagers. I have heard so many times adults saying to me "if only my teachers had taught me X, I would have been so shocked and engaged" where X is something that their long-suffering teachers did, in fact, teach year after year to generations of bored and indifferent students.
In the United States, classic examples are US imperial rule of the Philippines, the Sedition Acts, the Tuskeegee experiments, and the slaughter, subjugation, and displacement of Native Americans, all subjects that were covered in my high school history class to the complete indifference of just about everybody. I can't imagine the feelings of a teacher with an adult understanding of these things having to cope year after year with the dismissive reactions of teenagers. They can stand in front of a class as long as they want trying to explain how our involvement in the Philippines and our actions against democratically elected rulers in other countries complicate our image of ourselves as champions of freedom and self-determination, or how even a nation whose patriotic myths are cloaked in rhetoric about freedom has repeatedly struggled to reconcile patriotism with freedom of speech, but to a teenager it's going to be "ugggghhhhh stop talking about stuff we don't care about and just tell us what dumb factoid we have to remember for the test."
Why do you still remember that the ship was called the Mayflower? Well, for whatever reason that fact is pretty vivid to people of all ages and easy to remember, and so it is used as a reference point and an easy answer on tests. What your teachers really wanted you to remember was that the Pilgrims were deeply, devoutly religious even by the standards of their own time, and thought they had a covenant with God and a duty to create a society that would be a model for every other in the world (holy shit, how wild is that?) and this extremely early thread was woven into the myth of American exceptionalism that is part of the political rhetoric of every single presidential and congressional election to this day, with its significance still contested. But that's not what a teenager is going to take out of high school history class. What they're going to remember is 1) they didn't want to be there, and 2) it was stupid.
Again, not to be harsh on teenagers. It's normal for them to be that way, and it's not fair to judge them by adult standards. And maybe this is a strong argument for abolishing high school as we know it. If kids hate it and resent it, and they forget all of the good stuff and only remember the useless stuff anyway, then why bother with it? If people find things like the Tuskeegee experiment and the Triangle Shirtwaist fire utterly stupid and meaningless in their teens and revelatory in their twenties, why do we dedicate so much time and effort to teaching them in their teens? Maybe we can do better.
The first thing we did was nothing, for about 6 months. Getting the kids out of the routine and mindset that school had put them in was vital to being able to teach them. My 10y/o son had the idea that his teachers knew more than my wife and I did "because they're older". He could have only got that idea at school because that's the polar opposite of what we taught at home.
I worked full time, but my wife did not and she poured a lot of energy into teaching the kids. But we also did things that weren't schooling. We let the kids learn on their own the things they wanted to learn when they wanted to learn them. This was wonderful. My son picked up programming just for fun and didn't even tell me about it until after, when he had already lost interest and moved on. But that was okay, because I didn't expect him to be a programmer or anything else. I just wanted him to learn. Same for our daughter. They learned. They got GED's and that was that.
They're both extremely well rounded adults now and didn't go through the agonies of public schooling.
When you exit the system, the status and meaning it promises doesn't doesn't have the same value. If you got kids to the level of basic analysis / calculus, traveller level in a second language, and passable in the reasoning and comprehension skills of the LSAT, they would be smarter and more capable than most university undergrads. If you add physical competence hobbies to that where some of those skills get applied, you get even more differentiated. Teenagers get amateur pilot licenses, so they are plenty capable.
A way to match home schooled kids with structured team or olympic sports and orchestra or dance programs would be a big opportunity. Maybe we're at the cusp of an edu-tech boom?
Did you enforce discipline or did they have enough intellectual curiosity to learn stuff like calculus on their own?
The programming experience? Inside Minecraft with a mod called ComputerCraft that put an 8 bit computer that ran Lua inside of Minecraft.
There are those examples of families who treat it like they're on a deserted island. They're doing it wrong. Thankfully, they are a very, very small minority.
Although maybe you could. This talk has influenced my thinking since I saw it in Long Beach. https://www.ted.com/talks/sugata_mitra_build_a_school_in_the...
My biggest problem was the sudden lack of a social sphere. High school was terrible, but I dramatically underestimated how important the social environment was.
The thing I wish most was that there were people to teach me challenging subjects. Left to my own devices I naturally gravitated to things I was already good at.
I see the same thing in both my kids. They're both mentally engaged, skilled, perseverant problem solvers. . . except in the evenings after school. Then, they simply can't emotionally handle much beyond games/tv/youtube.
What worries me right now is that this situation may be setting up a bad psychological pattern that may stick with them for life: anything that takes work is, in some Pavlovian sense, associated with frustration and exhaustion, while pleasure is associated with brain candy. I don't think that that's their natural experience of life; it's something they're being taught by a regime that's dominated by report cards and standardized tests.
I'm personally not too keen on homeschooling. I did it for some time as a child, and I honestly think that the reduced social contact with my peers had consequences that also need to be considered. But I'd love to see schools become less bureaucratic. Teachers, in my experience, usually want to keep things fluid and engaging, and they know how to do it. What seems to get in their way are policies that the suits in office buildings develop, most of which are primarily designed to placate the anxieties of parents who are worried about their kids "falling behind" or whatever and want to see hard numbers proving that the school is doing a good job of producing kids that are all STEM and no roots, leaves or flowers.
Feynman is an example of somebody who practiced this. Done right play isn’t wasteful, it makes people want to dig deeper into something which is how discoveries are made.
Now, let's tax the living daylights out of everybody over USD$1M, cut the military budget and put all that money back into the educational system, so the rest of the kids can have the same experience as you, then re-introduce your kids to public schooling.
https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cmd
The argument that the US already spends a lot so nothing should be done feels loose at best.
The US education system is not there to accelerate students, to lift them up. It is model the population to suit the needs of the country. That's why nearly every aspect of a child's life revolves around school, from how and when they eat to who they socialize with. The system is there to reinforce national ideas. Some of that is noble ("try hard and get ahead") and some of it is not ("money counts"). When viewed from that perspective it works very well: little ever seems to change from one generation to the next. Freedom through social stability.
hmmmm
It may well be the case that US aggregate education spending is plenty high – but unless it were centrally collected and equitably distributed (taking into account differences in cost of living, cost of real-estate, etc.) to produce equivalent average outcomes, that's not really relevant.
https://www.cde.ca.gov/fg/aa/lc/
Generally, the underperforming schools spend more per student. For example, Stuyvesant, the premier math/science high school in New York, is among other lowest of public high schools in spending per student.
Underperforming schools typically have higher costs, like ESL and special needs courses, free lunch, police presence, though.
>When critics insist that American teachers need to be held accountable for the poor performance of American school children, the teachers shoot back that they are being held accountable for the failure of American parents and taxpayers to take care of their children.
>When some of us point out that there has been no improvement in the performance of all high school students or of protected subgroups of students in the United States on NAEP measures of reading and mathematics in 30 years, they tell us we should consider ourselves lucky that we have teachers who have been able to hold student performance steady while the American people have been sending them students who get poorer and more isolated every year.
>…the U.S. spends much more per student on our schools than the countries with the best education performance. But it is also the case that other countries, with higher student performance and lower school spending per student, have smaller disparities in income between their wealthiest families and their poorest ones, and despite that, spend much more than we do on the support of families with young children on everything from child allowances to child care and early childhood education. From my vantage point, our budgets for children, families and schools, if you take everything into account, do very little about the enormous problems caused by concentrated poverty and racial segregation and then load all the problems that causes onto the schools.
>…It is a whole lot cheaper to do right by our children starting when mom is pregnant than it is to wait six years, when it is a whole lot harder to do what must be done to give these kids a chance in a world in which the skill threshold for earning a decent living is getting higher and higher.
-Marc Tucker
https://ncee.org/2019/12/child-poverty-and-its-impact-on-edu...
Hogwash. The industrial model of education can't be solved by throwing more money at it, and I'm suspicious of anyone who pretends there hasn't been enough money thrown already.
The government would audit these schools to ensure kids are adequately learning. Existing government school building could be leased to private teaching organizations.
aaah, the libertarians have arrived.
i'll step on snek just fine, thanks.
However, the longer term results of kids who received vouchers show higher graduation rates and college admissions, albeit not always and and generally mild. But there's also evidence that voucher programs have improved public schools as they face competition.
I think we if we really committed to it and abolished government schools then we would see market based schooling improve the quality of education across the board. We could also expand what "qualified education" means and get away from a single standardized test for math, english, etc and begin to assist kids in placing them into academies that will benefit them. For example, by 14 it might make sense to have schools that focus less on academics and more on trade skills. Kids could begin to learn useful skills like carpentry, plumbing, small business operations, etc. that give them a real chance at building a life for themselves. A free market of education would allow people to setup these types of schools and for parents and kids to choose to place into them to set themselves up for success in life.
We can't do this in today's monolithic public school system. We have essentially a one-sized fits all approach with some schools offering AP classes, although even those are being removed in the name of "equity". Putting all our kids into the same system with the same goal of competing with each other to get into the best universities isn't good for most people.
Then you have the issue of accountability. Community-run schools are paid for via taxes - either income tax, property tax or a combination for both. Taxes demand representation - in the case of community-run schools the community votes for the school board members who in turn oversee the operations of the community schools. Where's my voice when my money is simply handed to someone to do with as they see fit? Good luck getting your school tax levies renewed in such an environment.
BTW, my state has been grappling with these issues for the past 15 years and it's a mess. A state law got passed saying the community funding must be made available to students for private schools and the results have been predictable. School levies are failing, and the private schools have been involved in scandal after scandal - the largest being a huge embezzlement scheme. A toss-out of the governor and key state legislators got the law reversed.
So we tried this alternative and it failed and failed hard.
And yes the local community sets the funding level and where I live, which is quite affluent, the funding is huge and the schools are nice. But in many other places where property values are smaller and people can't afford high property taxes to fund schools, they can't spend the same per student. Yes, some money gets recycled from affluent communities to less so through the state, but the money spent per student is still far less.
I think it's more fair that every kid gets the same amount of money spent on them so kids from poor communities can access quality education that isn't a function of where they grow up. That their parents can send their kids to a school that suits their needs and ambitions. So you have more than representation - you have actual choice and schools will compete for your money that is given to you.
Lastly, not every community votes for their school board. There are some places where they are appointed by the mayor. Teachers unions hate this idea because it cripples them, but actual teachers would thrive and do better in this environment.
Where does this money come from? The affluent communities don't mind the lion's share of their local taxes going to their community schools, but distribute it to everyone and they're not so interested in paying those taxes. They'd much rather reduce those taxes and invest the savings in their own children. So your problem isn't solved.
There are reasons these ideas have been volleyed about the past 20-30 years and we've made no progress. Add to that all the private charter school scandals we've endured and you have a big mess with no easy solutions in sight.
That's a disingenuous slight of hand when (as you admit) the curriculums are set at the sate level.
Being locally funded or managed means squat when the hours in the school year are limited and you have to teach to someone else's priorities.
To claim otherwise is equivalent to claiming every single business is government-run due to there being regulations.
That claim is a hell of a lot stronger than the one where the organizations run by municipal government employees executing on a state developed plan isn't a government run organization.
Are you going to tell us that USPS isn't government run because it's a privately chartered corporation that just to happens to be owned by the government and happens to have its product offerings highly regulated by government?
Public schools are government run for all practical purposes. Just not directly run on a day to day basis by the feds or state.
The government does audit schools, what do you think standardized tests are for? To assess whether or not the school is getting the students to the appropriate level.
And everything else sounds pretty much kind of like how it already is except with the conceit that what you're saying is in any way novel.
We need to stop focusing on students and start focusing on teachers and support staff. We all know the trope of the overworked teacher who does a shit ton of work off-hours, who buys supplies out of their own money.
That's the failure of the system right there. Classrooms don't need tablets as much as they need more bodies. Combine that with parent engagement is difficult in some communities due to all the poverty and what not. It's hard to get a parent working a night shift at their second job to a conference to explain to them what they already know, their child is failing and they need help with the material.
Help the school can't provide, because there's no one available to do it. Because everyone is overworked.
I highly recommend Dumbing Us Down, by John Taylor Gatto, a 3-time New York State teacher of the year, which presents a detailed analysis of this.
Second, you can't talk about school funding unless you talk about both administrative bloat and teacher's unions. As long as teachers can keep voting themselves raises and escaping even the most basic levels of accountability for their results, money will not solve the public school crises. And administrative employment has grown by 75% over less than a decade -- 10x the growth in teacher employment during the same time. [1]
So sure, you solve the bloat and local control issues, there's plenty of money for instruction and classroom resources.
0: https://nintil.com/bloom-sigma/
1: https://www.educationnext.org/growth-administrative-staff-as...
I'm sure that it was. But good luck to them when they need to learn something important that isn't fun. There are times in every profession when you have to grind your way through something horrible. Want to be a lawyer? You will have to understand the rules of evidence regardless of what type of lawyer you want to be. Want to be a doctor? There will be anatomy that you will hate memorizing. There is something to be said for forcing kids to learn things they hate. It is necessary preparation for the important stuff that comes later, stuff they cannot learn from their parents. That's what advanced education is, learning something because an expert tells you to. Whether you enjoy every moment of it or not is beside the point. You can judge things once you become an expert.
I have to go away for a two-week training course on monday. It is going to be hell. Twelve days of memorizing stupid powerpoints about stuff I will probably never use. There will be tests at the end. I will pass them. My training at school/university, learning stuff I often hated, allows me to power through such things. I can sit in that chair hour after hour without drifting. Not everyone can do that. They work very different jobs. Their employer doesn't spend tens of thousands of dollars sending them to such courses.
Ivy League schools for example are really good at producing the kind of people who can pass McKinseys first year deathmarch, but most of us don’t work there and don’t want deathmarches in general.
Isn't that a decision that the children should be allowed to make for themselves once they are adults? School should give them sufficient resources for them to attack any profession, from soldier to priest, pilot to surgeon. Asking a child to make such choices, allowing them to forgo certain subjects, harms them in the long term. It limits their potential options.
A few years ago I read that "social media influencer" was a more desired trade amongst highschool kids than doctor/lawyer/fighter pilot. Such kids should not be allowed to make educational decisions.
To be a doctor, you need a 4 year college degree, then acceptance into a medical school, then pass the medical school courses and do N years of residency. The average medical school graduate has $200K of debt at that point.
To be a lawyer, you need blah blah blah law school, and then it turns out the USA has too many lawyers already... so the average entry-level lawyer makes $48K. Yes, really.
To be a social media influencer, you need about $2000 in startup costs and a lot of luck, as well as some degree of actual work. There are roughly a million people with 100,000+ followers on Instagram or YouTube or TikTok.
Interestingly, there are about a million lawyers and about a million doctors in the USA.
Finally, there are about 15,000 pilots in the US armed forces, but only about 2200 attack or fighter role aircraft.
In total: a kid with no particular educational affinity is making a reasonable immediate choice to pursue "social media influencer" over doctor/lawyer/fighter pilot. It's probably a terrible long-term career choice, but so is fighter pilot.
It's not even that simple anymore. There's also the PGY1 year. There aren't nearly enough residencies to satisfy demand anymore. You might have to change specialties a few times before you land a residency. We're at the point where if you didn't go to medical school in the US, you're SOL. Even if you did, it's a struggle -- hope you went to a great medical school.
This at a time when we have higher demand for doctors than ever. Nobody wants to change the residency situation because the economics of it don't work out.
There are more kids wanting to be social media influencers than there are doctors, lawyers, or fighter pilots. The chances aren't purely based on how much demand there is for a given job, but also on how much supply. For that one million spots competition is fiercer.
If you're willing to accept the failure modes of non-fighter military pilot, non-pilot military officer, person with a college degree or person with some college (depending on when things go wrong) it's not a bad track. Lots of hedging. Then you can transition to a career in civilian aviation or management.
Compare that to something like enlisted Special Operations. Wash out of SEAL selection and you could be scraping barnacles off the side of a ship. Maybe you wash out of Special Forces selection and you end up in infantry. But then you decide you want to stop blowing stuff up, and the highlight of your resume is 4 years experience blowing stuff, with a minor in sweeping barracks. Failure modes aren't as nice.
I'll mention that to one. It is a perfectly valid career choice even if you don't make it to an F-16 cockpit. Unlike failed civilian pilots a failed military pilot has their choice of other officer trades, from lawyer/doctor to tank commander. And no company will fault someone for failing out as a military pilot. The fact you were accepted into pilot training in the first place puts you ahead of most.
Realistically, I don’t think all kids schooled in Montessori style “learn what you want when you want to learn” will fail at becoming doctors or lawyers if that’s their passion. It may detract from the number of people who make it through law school just because they heard lawyers make a lot of money.
But that’s realism, I was responding to the hypothetical of if this method of learning somehow destroys a human beings capacity to ever become a doctor or lawyer. That’s not very practical to say a schooling method will destroy all sense of delayed gratification. Personally, I think developing those life skills is orthogonal to intellectual education in the first place and are more akin to personal character which parents can build in their children without conjoining it with schoolwork.
You write that like everyone automatically has any idea what it is.
And infer they treat the new hires harshly?
There's a few blogs around about it; this one seems less hyperbolic than your average news headline but does mention the hours: https://managementconsulted.com/interview-first-year-mckinse...
There is also something to said for developing a kid’s sensitivity to and ownership of their individual intrinsic motivation. If using extrinsic motivation works for your kids, that’s great for you. Deciding on an approach for the child one rears out of concern for a lack of lawyers and doctors doesn’t sound like a sound decision process.
Someone wants to be a doctor? Great, soon they’ll realise that they need to learn anatomy, and they’ll do that if they’re sufficiently motivated! But most of school was, you have to learn something because an adult (and not very smart adult either ... most teachers aren’t experts, they just seem like that, to kids) said so.
I don’t care why Hamlet said something, I never did, I never will, I never needed that knowledge and never will, and to the extent that you can maybe learn some general life principles from such books, there are many other, better ways of learning that, including many better and more interesting books.
Even the employment course you’re taking, you want to take - you’re getting something out of it (a promotion, hopefully) - even though even in your reply there’s some amount of bitterness about having to learn it (“memorizing stupid powerpoints about stuff I will probably never use”) - now imagine being a child with much less independence and agency and multiply that feeling of dread by 1000x...
Shakespeare is taught...because Shakespeare has always been taught. It's recognized as important; to be fair, it is from an objective sense, but subjectively there is no reason to read it, nor even to watch it performed unless someone wants to.
You learn language by practicing language. You can read or watch anything and better understand the nuances of a language; even better to talk to people who speak it. English evolves because of the latter; Shakespeare doesn't.
Everyone who speaks a language other than English learned to do so without Shakespeare. I am unconvinced of the necessity of reading/watching Shakespeare unless someone wants to; it is but one means to an end.
> Everyone who speaks a language other than English learned to do so without Shakespeare
Well duh, they learn the masterpiece of whatever language they're learning. Be that Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Victor Hugo, or Luís de Camões.
I place the blame here squarely on how it is presented in schools. First, it was dropped in abruptly, after years of focusing heavily on largely apoetic work like Old Yeller and Great Expectations. When poetry was introduced, it was typically dropped as part of some hermetically sealed unit, and all possibility of enjoyment was eradicated by analyzing each poem to death. [1] How are people supposed to learn to enjoy play on words when any hint of actual play has been surgically excised from the experience?
And then, since this is a class, there will be a test, and so you have to format the presentation in a manner that makes it more amenable to testing. This means that, if the play is a comedy, then you'll have to stop every few lines to have the teacher explain, in detail, why what you just read is funny.
Which it may not be, because performance comedy is all about presentation and timing, but we're not watching a performance, we're reading the text. Imagine encountering Spaceballs for the first time in script form, so that you're completely unable to associate any of the lines with the performances of John Candy or Rick Moranis. It won't be nearly as good. And having someone sitting over your shoulder repeatedly interrupting you to say, "Now, in the actual movie, this part is hilarious because..." only makes it less funny.
If the work being studied is a tragedy, well, it's a similar story, only in this case it is kind of funny because the tragedy has gone meta. Not that anyone sitting in the classroom is in a position to realize that. They're too focused on taking notes so they can remember details - especially details about the teacher's interpretation of the story - for the coming test. Because furiously scribbling in notebooks and trying to memorize every detail is an essential part of the way in which members of the groundling audience, literate and illiterate alike, experienced performances in the original Globe Theatre.
Ugh. It makes me irritated all over again just thinking about it. Primary and secondary education classes are seemingly predicated on the notion that the best place to study everyday human experience is in a cadaver lab. Largely only because the courses are being designed by people who sell scalpels and formaldehyde for a living.
[1] Exhibit A: https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2017/01/...
I bet I would have liked it more in school (rather than much afterwards, when I became acquainted with the Shakespeare Tavern in Atlanta, though props to the teachers who set up field trips there) if instead a teacher had said "Okay guys. We're watching a movie today. It's going to be a little hard to understand, but don't worry too much about it; it's less the words and more the performance. There won't be a test, but we will discuss it afterwards. I'll have subtitles on to help with understanding; it's kind of interesting to see how English has changed since this was made, but how it still has themes you'll recognize, and can still be emotionally charged even when you don't fully understand everything being said. It may be a little challenging given that, but I think you're up to it", and then put on Branagh's Hamlet.
They go to great lengths to ensure everyone in the audience understands e.g. that Romeo and Juliet has loads of raunchy humor. I’m confident I could attend a play I have never read and understand the emotional and plot bones of it at Shakespeare Tavern.
And in my experience their food only helps me in my understanding of the play! All for a quite modest price.
Oof. That's cold. Not necessarily wrong, but cold. I mean, most software developers are not actually good at developing software, they just seem like that because they've only been asked to write the same CRUD app over and over again.
Teachers may not be "experts" like a PhD in a topic is an expert, but they are educated (Bachelors minimum, many states require a Masters eventually) but they are often experts in education.
It turns out just knowing a lot about a topic does not qualify you to teach it (see: many college professors). Effective teaching is a skill that lots of people think they have, but few actually do.
It doesn't really matter what Hamlet said. Literature is a class where you learn to express yourself and are exposed to how other people/cultures/times express themselves in a structured way.
And how would you know that you don't care about Hamlet unless you were made to read it?
You could live a successful life without reading any books ever (you could even be President of the United States!) but it would be much richer if you were exposed to ideas/topics that challenge you. And who knows where you could use that information. Heck, Bob Dylan made an entire career as a musician off of the AP English curriculum.
When I was a kid, two different years, the teachers had us read/read to us "Where the Red Fern Grows". At the time, I was reading fantasy from the adult section at the library (and was teased for it; both the fact I was reading for fun, and the subject matter). Literally the only thing I remember about that book is how much I hated it.
It's one thing I have to give Harry Potter, despite J. K. Rowling. It popularized fantasy enough that kids read on their own, and normalized reading books for fun in schools.
Something to know about English classes in particular (but also History and other liberal arts/non-science classes) is that isn't not about "the books", but critical thinking and discussion. In fact, it's likely that the mandated standards don't specify specific books to read. It turns out, though, that in a class of 30+ kids, it's easiest (or even possible) to have a critical discussion if everyone reads the same books at the same time.
Also, if the kids think they are being "taught the book" but the teacher is trying to teach "literary literacy" using "the book" as an example, that's when you get arguments like "I didn't learn anything!" and "This is a waste of my time!" and "This other book is better!". Those arguments are besides the point. You should have been talking about why the author made the literary decisions they made, what were the themes? Whose point of view was it told from? How was the book impactful (or not)?
These are the standards in Texas. Other states should have this information publicly available and I assume they will be very similar.
https://tea.texas.gov/sites/default/files/ch110c.pdf
For English II these are the skills a student should learn (notice no specific books are mentioned, but "traditional", "contemporary", "classical", and "diverse" are used to describe the books)
- The student develops oral language through listening, speaking, and discussion
- The student uses newly acquired vocabulary expressively
- The student reads grade-appropriate texts independently.
- The student is expected to self-select text and read independently for a sustained period of time.
- The student uses metacognitive skills to both develop and deepen comprehension of increasingly complex texts
- The student responds to an increasingly challenging variety of sources that are read, heard, or viewed
- The student recognizes and analyzes literary elements within and across increasingly complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse literary texts
- The student recognizes and analyzes genre-specific characteristics, structures, and purposes within and across increasingly complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse texts
- The student uses critical inquiry to analyze the authors' choices and how they influence and communicate meaning within a variety of texts.
- The student analyzes and applies author's craft purposefully in order to develop his or her own products and performances.
- The student uses the writing process recursively to compose multiple texts that are legible and use appropriate conventions
- The student uses genre characteristics and craft to compose multiple texts that are meaningful
- The student engages in both short-term and sustained recursive inquiry processes for a variety of purposes
Much like learning a foreign language is about more than learning vocabulary, but you can't learn how to talk in a restaurant if you don't know the restaurant related vocabulary. English class is about more than reading books, but you can't have those discussions if you haven't read the books. Or, it would be much more difficult to effectively "analyze literary elements" in a classroom setting with 30 kids that all ready 30 different books.
Sure, teachers can ...
How much of it is what the parents are saying it is, and how much of it is really motivated by a tacit belief that school is only legitimate when it's stodgy?
https://tea.texas.gov/sites/default/files/ch110a.pdf
- The student uses metacognitive skills to both develop and deepen comprehension of increasingly complex texts
- The student recognizes and analyzes literary elements within and across increasingly complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse literary texts
- The student recognizes and analyzes genre-specific characteristics, structures, and purposes within and across increasingly complex traditional, contemporary, classical, and diverse texts
- The student uses critical inquiry to analyze the authors' choices and how they influence and communicate meaning within a variety of texts.
- The student analyzes and applies author's craft purposefully in order to develop his or her own products and performances
What 3rd grade you thought you were supposed to be learning and what the teacher was actually trying to teach you were not necessarily lined up.
Or, you went to a school with a particularly poor English department that just had you write book reports for books you didn't read for no reason other than that's what they always did. That's actually more likely than not.
I was a very, very bad math teacher at my first school (I was basically "playing school" and acting like I remembered my math teachers acted.. I had a CS/Math major, not an Education major. I knew the content, but not the pedagogy). The next school I taught at had structures in place that helped me understand what the actual goals of a teacher are and how to reach them. I improved drastically (and noticed the students and teachers at that school were better overall than my first school)
That is not the slam dunk argument you seem to think it is.
In my experience, most developers with “10 years of experience” (who have worked in enterprise, at least) actually have one year of experience ten times.
What signals do you find have helped you tease that out of something like a resume?
If they were experts in education, presumably they would know how to do education.
I have no idea what you mean by that, can you explain?
“ The thing about rock'n'roll is that for me anyway it wasn't enough ... There were great catch-phrases and driving pulse rhythms ... but the songs weren't serious or didn't reflect life in a realistic way. I knew that when I got into folk music, it was more of a serious type of thing. The songs are filled with more despair, more sadness, more triumph, more faith in the supernatural, much deeper feelings.” -Bob Dylan, 1985
Exposure to stories with a range of emotions is part of the point of English class.
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Dylan
However, now when I try to google for it I just find pages and pages of results about whether he deserved the Nobel prize or not.
As an anecdote, I've always been in tech roles; I dual-majored in History and Computer Science for reasons. Looking back at various roles I've had in my life's journey, the skill framework I learned studying and writing about Napoleonic warfare or the Silk Road, were just as essential as the framework in math and engineering on the CS part of my education, maybe more so.
And about "having to learn" stuff, I feel like it's more a justification the parent poster gave to themselves so they get over with it, not a real _need_ to learn something. What's the point of memorizing stuff you'll never use?
> There is something to be said for forcing kids to learn things they hate. It is necessary preparation for the important stuff that comes later, stuff they cannot learn from their parents. That's what advanced education is, learning something because an expert tells you to. Whether you enjoy every moment of it or not is beside the point. You can judge things once you become an expert.
I'm not sure what to make of this. How is "forcing" kids to learn things they hate "necessary" preparation for what comes later? Is it the only way to instill discipline?
I'd rather force my kids to do the productive, boring things like chores (washing and folding laundry, cleaning dishes, cleaning their room, cleaning their bathroom and playroom, taking care of the pets) which will instill the same discipline and delayed gratification without potentially making them hate learning and schooling at a young age when they are least emotionally prepared to handle it. Plus, if they're being challenged in school they'll have that experience of leaping into the unknown, which can be quite scary and requires discipline. I find it much more likely that homeschooling induces that challenge and discipline over public schools, where above-average kids are often bored and subject to authoritarian threats.
> I have to go away for a two-week training course on monday. It is going to be hell. Twelve days of memorizing stupid powerpoints about stuff I will probably never use. There will be tests at the end. I will pass them. My training at school/university, learning stuff I often hated, allows me to power through such things. I can sit in that chair hour after hour without drifting. Not everyone can do that. They work very different jobs. Their employer doesn't spend tens of thousands of dollars sending them to such courses.
I'm not sure why romanticizing or glorifying suffering and waste is somehow the raison d'être for public schooling. I've worked in toxic environments before where some of the employees, fully resigned to how toxic the place is, would make statements like, "not a lot of people could succeed in this environment." I got the hell out of each of those situations as soon as I could. In my opinion, I'd rather suffer for people like my kids or my wife or God or even to defend my community for which I am duty bound, but not for my employer.
Best of luck with that horrible upcoming training course.
Cognitive psychology has consistently refuted this theory again and again. Transfer of learning is virtually non-existent.[1] When a student learns a topic he learns the very specific skills related to that topic. There's no spillover or improvement to the ability to learn other, even closely related, topics.
[1]https://www.econlib.org/archives/2012/08/low_transfer_of.htm...
At a later date, I studied Hungarian in a cram school. Two of us learned Hungarian much faster than our classmates- we both had studied Japanese. Most of the students had also studied other languages. Something about learning languages that were so grammatically different from English seemed to help with building mental models and stop "translating" things back and forth from English- which made the language much easier to pick up.
Developing learning techniques does help in learning other things. Learning boring things however, I think that's always going to be hard for me.
Grammars are largely described using the same system, with different languages using different parts of it (and more or less - Latin quite a lot; English quite little). Learning a second language (that's different enough) exposes you to more of the available grammatical constructs, so when you learn a third there's less that could possibly be new, and probably quite a bit of grammatical overlap with your first or second language.
Anecdotally, I agree that a good deal of teaching does not produce learning that is durable or transfers.
That doesn't mean it isn't possible.
Enter Scott Carrell and James West's study at the United States Air Force Academy (USAFA) [0]. The title and abstract bury the lede and actually misdirect. It talks about professor evaluations, tenure, and teacher quality. The key findings from this study are about the type of pedagogy that create durable and transferable learning.
They compared pedagogical styles of teachers in first year calculus classes compared to how durable and transferable the knowledge was that cadets gained in each class. It was a totally unique environment that allowed for it to be randomized, controlled, and to study effects beyond one year. I have never seen a better study in education.
The tl;dr is that pedagogy that forces students to engage in desirable difficulties [1] produces learning that is more durable and can transfer to different domains. The catch is two-fold. Students rate this type of teaching poorly. They also get worse grades at first even though the long-term payoff is much better.
[0] https://www.nber.org/system/files/working_papers/w14081/w140...
[1] https://bjorklab.psych.ucla.edu/wp-content/uploads/sites/13/...
For most normal kids, they just adapt. The problem is when kids have a problem that parents can't handle or don't understand. People miss this, because they (rightfully) have a tight emotional attachment to their children.
My kids go to a private school, and I'm a volunteer parent/peer advisor to help parents with various issues. One of the hardest conversations to have is when a child is struggling, and the right answer is for that child to be in public school where resources exist -- the financial model doesn't support having the support staff and specialist teachers. People feel strongly about small class sizes and other benefits of the private school, but that matters less if the child needs services.
That's fundamentally an issue with homeschooling. There's nobody to say "hey, we have a problem here" when Sally can't read, or Johnny doesn't understand geometry because Khan academy isn't working and mom can't explain it.
Three things:
1. There are lots of private options for this, at least in any major metro.
2. From my experience with homeschoolers, the sheer amount of parent attention they tend to get lends itself towards figuring these things out (especially with help from a homeschooling community or the aforementioned private options).
3. From my experience as a public school teacher, most of the kids who needed services didn't get them, and I saw very few situations where the services seemed to make a significant difference (though there were some). I've seen more success stories around learning disabilities from homeschoolers than I have from kids at public schools (and in fact often the learning disability was a key impetus for the switch to homeschool).
So the question is, "compared to what?" Kids with strong parent advocates are likely to get what they need in whatever environment they're in. Kids without them aren't likely to, but there's selection bias against that in homeschool. Yes, one can have a great result with public school, and sometimes that's the right call for a family, but after my stint in the public schools I'm much more confident in a well-meaning parent figuring out the solution with a kid they spend lots of time with than I am in that same parent spending much less time with the kid and rolling the dice with public school specialists and support services.
It depends. Some parents focus homeschooling on religion. Or skip schooling so their 11 year old can focus on his baseball career and 3 travel teams. Or have no clue.
I was homeschooled K-7 and again in 12th. I know lots of homeschool kids whose parents insulated them from the world (including mine, though less so than many) due to religion or just eccentricity. Almost all of us are successful, however, and very few stayed locked in that bubble. A key piece of that is because we became self-directed learners.
In her first year at school, the teacher was incredibly effusive about her. We were interested in maths because before she went to school we had always thought that she struggled with anything to do with numbers, but the teacher reassured us that everything was fine. But within a week of us sitting down with her to do maths, it became very clear that she had absolutely no idea of even the most basic concepts around numbers, sequences, addition, or anything else. We asked her how she had managed to do the material that the teacher had shown us, and she looked a little sheepish and said: "well, we do all that in groups..."
I don't know how long she could have kept faking it in the school system. But at least in our case, our daughter was perfectly capable of playing the system and slipping through the cracks, in a way that was completely impossible with us one on one. We're lucky that we're educated and have resources etc, but our daughter will absolutely be better off getting the help that we can organise for her and the personalisation in her learning that we can offer than she would be in the school system.
At the end of the comment he says his sons are well rounded adults.
> I have to go away for a two-week training course on monday. It is going to be hell. Twelve days of memorizing stupid powerpoints about stuff I will probably never use.
No offense, but that sounds pretty miserable. I'm on my forties, with two kids, and never had to subject myself to such things. Life is too short for that.
While they are likely doing fine, parents usually aren't the correct people to ask, the kids could be withholding how much they've been struggling and even if they aren't no parent would objectively say if their kids didn't turn out into "well rounded adults", unless the parent truly hated their kids.
Parents like making their kids look better than they are.
Many share this conception but it’s not a very useful model I would argue.
This is the problem. We force everyone through a meat grinder with this paternalistic bullshit about being well-rounded. If and when it becomes necessary to know something, you learn it with more motivation and so it becomes easier to learn and remember. We need to stop force feeding people things that aren’t directly relevant or that they have no interest in.
Source: am also a lawyer and would say easily 1/2 of what is taught in law school was never used again and promptly forgotten after the exam. I am certain the same apples to doctors, architects, etc etc etc.
What do they do? Did they get any schooling after the GED's?
That is just your opinion and bias. I can share my opinion and bias. My kids go to public schools and love it. We'd never even think about home schooling. Not that everything is perfect, but as long as they are happy, we're happy.
Your kids are probably fortunate or socially skilled enough to be outside of that group.
We did however save them from needlessly experiencing the problems they were already having.
So it's subjective. But isn't everything?
I don't believe the adult world provides as much torture. Aside from workplace backstabbing, people are much nicer as adults, even if it's all for show. And as an adult you can more easily remove yourself from relationships and surroundings that aren't working. Kids are more prone to social cruelty and you're mostly stuck in your environment without the ability to opt-out.
There's a group of people who were bullied at school, it's called "everyone". There are support groups for this, they meet every single day of the week at your local bar.
I want to buck the system too but not sure what the long term consequences would be for the kids.
I also want to mention that although we were/are a religious household, we did not do homeschooling at all because of religion. We did it so that the kids could get the best education possible.
And people might wonder about their ability, as a parent, to teach. Are they up to the task? The answer is simple: The person who has the most interest in a child is going to be the best teacher. And who has more interest than a parent who loves them?
If somebody wanting to do homeschooling is doing it because it's the "easy" way out, or because they are trying to "buck the system" for the sake of bucking the system, then DONT. Do it because it's what is best for your kids. It was best for ours, and the way we did it worked for them.
Before you decide anything at all, do tons of research. Talk to parents in your area who are homeschooling. Look for co-ops and home schooling groups on facebook etc. There are excellent resources available to you.
What about socialisation with peers? What about boring but necessary activities, if they only do what is fun? What about jobs?
Homeschooling doesn't mean living in a cage or away from others (well sometime it might, especially in some religious approach of it. Extreme cases are what people hear about and that might be the reason of those believes).
Kids can still go play with friends, do sports or any activity !
On a personal note, my wife and I homeschooled our kids between their 7 and 10 (mostly because we were traveling here and there), and now that they're back in the school system, they have no problem and have good marks.
It's way more easy to teach 2 kids (maybe we were lucky, as they're twins so are at the same class level) than 25 to 30. You can cover official curriculum pretty quick, and it leaves time to do other (fun) stuff.
But there are kids in his class in pretty marginal home situations. One kid came back completely different, with a lot of rage and anger. She was getting into fights. It was her first time back to any school (virtual or otherwise) in more than a year. Another came back and falls asleep in class. She stays up till midnight watching TV.
I don't feel like public schools were truly weighing the risks to children's mental health when they kept schools closed. Childhood trauma has long term lasting health effects and can shorten lifespan by _decades_ (see the ACES study[1])
1 - https://www.cdc.gov/violenceprevention/aces/index.html
I had a similar experience with my kids. It's been a hard year for everyone. Your post focuses on the kids, but I don't think it's been any easier for teachers or parents.
> I don't feel like public schools were truly weighing the risks to children's mental health when they kept schools closed.
At least where I live, schools were never closed, we just switched to remote learning. And of course, that hand was initially forced and was constantly re-evaluated until in-person learning reached a level of acceptable risk again.
Ventilation and masks, plus shutting down school for a couple of weeks if there is a significant outbreak, and we would've managed this crisis so much better.
Instead you have half the country saying "fuck it" and sending kids to school no matter what, and the other half refusing to open schools at all but then letting kids playing with other kids in "pods" (when the also let kids be in multiple pods).
You didn't have to keep your child isolated - did you expect nothing bad to happen if you took this course of action?
Sorry to suggest this, but it really seems like you are the cause of your kid's difficulties.
> sending kids to school no matter what
Why is this not the default in your household? What is more important than your child's growth and mental development? They would have handled getting sick just fine, like kids always do every time there's a bad seasonal respiratory virus out there.
Later in the school year, public schools moved to a modal of 1/2 the class being in person and 1/2 the class being online for any given day except for Monday where all students were online only.
Finally, a few weeks before the end of the year, public schools allowed all students to return to class for the entire week.
Private schools did not see major outbreaks of Covid. Teachers at private schools were no more likely to get Covid than the general population.
This generation of kids will pay a heavy price for these school shutdowns.
WAT.
Please elaborate...
In almost all studies I've read this could be completely explained by self selection, either of the parents opting for homeschooling (i.e. the share whose kids were better than average in school still were when homeschooled) or with unequal response rates (i.e. the parents whose kids had problems at home or the home had problems and thus opted the kids out of school didn't return the questionnaires).
This phenomenon is quite common. For example our midwife told us home births have less complications than hospital births. Well yes, because complicated births usually either already start at the hospital or get transferred there once things get messy.
It acts as a shield because, no matter how useless the teacher is as an educator, any criticism of them becomes political criticism.
I definitely think that no single activism group or "area" should get an outsized influence in education. Certainly it would be irresponsible for teachers or school boards to simply take an given activists group's curriculum or material and apply them as is.
While I understand the hesitancy, especially in the early childhood context, I do wonder what you how educators should approach topical things like black lives matter?
I am from Brazil, and I don't intend to put my kids in school if I can (here it is illegal to homeschool, prison time for parents and all, I am hoping to get out of the country if the needed laws don't pass when I have kids).
And a good reason for it, is the amount of bullshit fed to me and my friends by the shovelfulls, when I was a teenager I believed all adults I knew except schoolteachers were evil, because they didn't like Mao, Stalin and Che Guevara, I was taught that Pol Pot was a hero, literally, only after I was out of the school system that I could finally learn what these people actaully did.
Then over the years I picked more and more on what sort of stuff school taught me wrong, there were a few things in harder sciences, but when it is social stuff, school was a disaster, lie after a lie, sadly some of theses lies remain pervasive in society (for example many people in my country believe the monarchy was pro-slavery, despite documents that exist that show that the monarchs themselves wanted slavery abolished, and that when they DID abolish slavery, the coup that ended monarchy was sponsored by the biggest former slaveowners).
I think you underestimate how often the kids are passing along political mantras and overestimate how often teachers are. Go look at GenZ TikTok and how it is massively political and in such a way that there is no chance teachers are driving it.
I assure you kids don’t care about the quietly muttered opinion of their social studies teacher but are much more informed by their siblings, peers, and parents. The opinions get shared at school and absorbed by developing minds that don’t handle politics with much nuance largely because the relevant history of politics is never taught to them in school, cutting off at Vietnam War at the latest. And why is recent history eschewed in favor of covering the 1780s in boring detail? The desire to keep politics out of schools. And to some extent, the desire of Texas purchasers of textbooks to promote a reactionary view of the country. Covering the AIDS epidemic just leads to complaints about making Reagan out to be a villain or that teachers are corrupting kids with homosexualism. If kids repeat dumb slogans, can we blame them when they don’t have a knowledge of any modern political history except what they’ve gleaned from their parents cable news of choice?
How so?
Fortunately some states are banning taxpayer funded teaching of things like race-based guilt or complicity. In theory this would ban educational programs which incorporated tenets of white supremacy and other race-based illiberal ideologies, but in practice we can see the only programs that actually are being surfaced as likely affected by these restrictions (to the point of possibly having to cancel entire, active curricula) are the ones grounded in Theory.
> It’s not universal yet but many of the tenets of Theory being incorporated into public school programs are, within the frame of considerations of parents choosing an educational track for their children, akin to the same concerns (or benefits) when choosing to enroll them into private religious schools.
> Fortunately some states are banning taxpayer funded teaching of things like race-based guilt or complicity. In theory this would ban educational programs which incorporated tenets of white supremacy and other race-based illiberal ideologies, but in practice we can see the only programs that actually are being surfaced as likely affected by these restrictions (to the point of possibly having to cancel entire, active curricula) are the ones grounded in Theory.
What is this "Theory" you keep referring to?
That the first thought of public school issues is not writing to your representatives and voting for better schooling of future generations; instead, to isolate your children's education.
As a Frenchman, I noticed this feeling from USA citizens that the government is against you and there is nothing you can do about it. It was pernicious.
The second thought, to write to my representatives and improve education for everyone, is still there. I volunteer at a makerspace downtown that provides computing resources to inner-city kids that don't have anywhere near the same resources as my outlying, high-performing suburban district with our labs and awesome teachers. I have no delusion that a single letter to my representative would fix the underlying systemic issues like racist redlined housing districts, the inequality of property taxes for school funding, and the penalizing of 'underperforming' school districts, and give my child a good education.
Can I improve it? Sure! Fix it? Not for everyone, no, so I'll do what I can for my own child.
Any performance based comparison between school performance and life outcomes needs to include stats broken out by the homelife of the child. You could call it "Parental Responsibility" in most cases -- and that figure/statistic will represent most of the issues that everyone wants addressed. The thing is, it's the most impactful to the child, and it can't be meaningfully addressed without massive government control of family life.
Parents are responsible for their children's education. Success in anything is a mix of effort, knowledge, ability and luck (I consider timing part of luck).
I am going to give my children the best opportunities I can give them, within the bounds of my values and life experiences.
It's irrational to believe the outcome of an education should be identical between children. Unless you remove parents and have children raised by institutions, then parental involvement will always have a major impact on academic performance.
Strawman: If my child is interested in computers, and spends all their free time reading about and learning to program them, while their contemporaries choose to watch TV and play video games, should they be limited by what the "average" person in their class is able to do? Of course not!
It's akin to the school district that noticed that not enough black kids were in a gifted class, so their solution was to get rid of the gifted class. That's insanity.
Public schools should provide a solid education to children, and society needs to expect that the outcome of that will be based on the actual performance of the children and their circumstances. A school cannot fix everything that comes from single-parent households and broken families. It can (and should) try and help, but I think it's ridiculous to hold back other students that perform better because they have parental involvement that other children don't.
The worst schools in urban areas (just like the worst schools in rural and suburban areas) need to be dramatically improved, but you do not help the situation by claiming all urban schools are terrible.
EDIT - If you have a California-centric view, it might be a little more understandable. Look at that list and you see that Los Angeles and San Francisco have 1 school each on the list. New York City has 12, Miami-Dade has 6, Chicago has 5, Houston and Dallas 4 each.
[1] https://www.usnews.com/education/best-high-schools/national-...
It should also be noted that nearly all of them are "public" in name only. The BASIS schools, for instance, where my kids attend, are Charter schools, where parents are not technically required to, but shamed mercilessly into, "donating" what is effectively slightly discounted private school tuition.
As an example in New York annually about 30,000 kids take the specialized high school acceptance test, and about 800-850 are offered admission to Stuyvesant HS, one of the most elite. It is not the same experience of a neighborhood high school in a poor neighborhood.
Every time a parent who cares about their child’s education pulls them out of public school, that’s one less parent who might otherwise be involved enough to improve the public school situation. You end up with public schools containing only the children of parents who are unable to afford the time or money for other options, only the teachers who can’t get jobs at private schools/tutors, etc etc.
It becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy for everyone to think “public schools are bad, I’m going to send my kid somewhere else.” I really wish we’d focus that energy towards making public schools better.
* It would probably take an emperor to do this, because there’s no way such a law would pass in the US today.
There’s a similar reason why, in countries that have state-funded health care, you’re not allowed to seek out private doctors or private insurance. The point is to not allow the rich to siphon the best resources away from everyone else. (This is obviously very anti-capitalist, but I think for some institutions like medicine and education, it may make sense.)
It’s similar to the tragedy of the commons… people acting in their own self-interests (better education for my child) create a situation that is worse than if we had a collective strategy (we all get a decent education, and get to share a better, more educated society.)
Me spending more time with my child doesn't take away from what other children receive. If I wasn't working with my child, then I certainly wouldn't be working with all of them in place of that.
And if everyone pulled their kids out of public school, virtually all of those children would be better off, with very few exceptions. Punting one's offspring to daycare and public schools so that both parents can work is the real tragedy of the commons.
There are just many resources out there on the internet to have excellent course materials and information delivered straight to your home, together with all sorts of physical activities and clubs available for recreation and group events, and there are big advantages to being able to learn at your own pace in a safe and non-disruptive environment taught by someone with a strong commitment to your well-being. Given all these advantages, the bar is pretty low for when customized learning exceeds the factory-style and heavily politicized education given at schools, especially given the current dysfunctional state of educational pedagogy in the U.S and the fact that unlike in other nations, the U.S. tends to draw teachers from the lowest scoring college graduates. The situation is very different in other nations, but in the U.S., education majors tend to be selected from the bottom of the barrel of the college graduate pool.
That said, the reason why most homeschoolers are much better off today is because parents who care about education and have the wherewithal to tutor their child self-select to homeschool. If everyone did it, you would find that a lot of parents can't spend the time to do it and need the school as a babysitter. Or they don't have the wherewithal to do it due to their own lack of education. So homeschooling is generally done by parents with above average education and income which is why it's so successful in the U.S. Make everyone do it, and those outcomes would change quite a bit.
If you believe in the growth mindset, you necessarily have to reject this idea that homeschoolers are a gifted bunch whose success cannot be replicated.
Except for the children who aren’t able to be pulled out of public school. They would be far worse off.
If you’re advocating getting rid of public schools as an institution, what are you replacing it with? Just not educating kids at all if their parents can’t afford it? Do you view education as a right or a privilege? Would you at least agree that society is better off if everyone is educated, or do you think it’s just a perk that you can go without?
Your plan is just crab bucket mentality dressed up in egalitarianism's clothing.
By the way, to those who are saying that your first responsibility is to your own kids, I agree, even if you put them in public school. It's still your responsibility.
Pay attention to how they're doing in school. If they're struggling, help them. You may not know as much as the teacher, but you're a functioning adult with access to the internet, and you can work with them one-on-one. If they need it, do that.
Pay attention to how they're doing emotionally. If public school is destroying them, you should know. When your kid says something like "Every day when I get ready for school, my stomach hurts", listen. (In our case, it was getting ready for private school, but it still was a giant red flag.) Do what you have to to either get them out or to help them survive.
Pay attention to what they're being taught. If they're getting propaganda - from either side - then give them balance. Teach them how to examine positions critically, not just to swallow whatever they're told.
It's your responsibility as a parent. Don't just hand them to a school and walk away.
Public school is big business though. Lots of unions, lots of public employees, lots of text book manufacturing, whoever makes the desks, fixes the school buses, HVAC systems, you name it.
Even if the education itself wasn't outright propaganda and otherwise dysfunctional, public schools are mental misery for many. Self-important, entitled, arrogant, but otherwise useless staff and teachers. Don't subject children to prison-like treatment.
> communist propaganda wards
I think you may not have an actually functional understanding of political theory.
There are groups and storefronts here where you can send kids to get a chance to socialize and tinker, work with their hands, run around (play groups) etc. Shout out to Apple Academy Bklyn which started for homeschoolers to have a workshop type place but also all kinds of little places where kids can tinker with tech, board games etc for example along 7th Ave (I think a lot of these started as after school places but we’re adopted by homeschoolers).
Not saying it’s for everyone but it’s not the insular backwater I had subconsciously made it out to be in my head.
One way I frame homeschooling is a simple question. From your experience weigh the value of even a single day sitting under a tree reading a great book vs the value of a week in in an english classroom. Personally this captures the difference they are fundamental, qualitative differences.
Homeschooling is an unfair advantage in a lot of ways. Not everyone can afford to do it. Society needs to provide universal education and when almost every family needs dual incomes schooling provides a secondary (arguably primary) service of child care. That however does not represent the only or best option for your kids. When I'm in a more negative mood I call schooling, of any sort, is a kind of institutionalization. That does not make it all bad, there are great social outcomes for submitting to that institutionalization. However there are other paths to just as good or better outcomes just not in a societally blanketing kind of way.
I am pro-WFH and pro-public school. But my experience (public school student, public state university, 7 years public school teacher, 6 years in-office programmer, 4 years WFT programmer) is drastically different from many of the posts I read in these threads.
If school is a "prison" full of incapable/ineffectual/communist teachers indoctrinating the "inmates"... what is an office?
The routine of school is prison, but the routine of an office is good? Ineffectual teachers? What about ineffectual managers? Lefty teachers indoctrinating children? Corporations have convinced us that if the minimum wage increases or taxes go up then McDonalds and Apple will just close their doors and decide to go out of business rather than make a teeny bit less profit!
Many MANY of the conservative families I know are pulling out their kids. Simply put, they don't want Marxism centered around racism to be taught to their kids.
Personally, I have to agree.
My kids daycare was actively trying to put all the boys and girls in dresses and refuse to teach what genders are. We obviously teach basics of male vs female to our children, but this is ridiculous.
During the pandemic I listened to my brother in laws (still in high school) 40 minute lecture. It was on how due to "white privilege" black Americans shouldn't have to pay taxes due to the fact they can't manage finances (this was a personal economics class). It was insanely racist and honestly not insightful. I asked my brother in law how often this occurs, he said "every day, almost every class, it's racist".
At this point, all the parents I know are either oblivious to what's happening, moving kids to private schools or homeschooling.
The toxic things being taught in the schools, which seem to me to be a transmogrified form of segregationism wherein woke whites must take up the woke white man's burden and be overlords for supposedly incapable blacks. Just as Bolshevik Marxists tended to be intellectuals from bourgeoisie families who regarded the proletariat as generally too stupid to be given power, so it is with the woke whites today.
Examples:
(1) At one time, and maybe significantly still, a huge fraction of learning about computer programming, and computing more generally, was just self learning.
(2) At one time, the Web site of the math department at Princeton just stated that graduate courses were introductions to research by experts in their fields, that no courses were given for preparation for the Ph.D. qualifying exams, and that students were expected to prepare for the exams on their own.
(3) Teachers who need to keep up in their fields and researchers who need to push their fields forward have to do some to a lot of the work via self learning.
And it is easy to find more examples in owning a house, farm, etc.
Some classes were boring, sure, I slept through them. But for the most that was not the case and the load never seemed to be excessive. (studying in eastern, then western europe)
Severely underpaid teachers and a focus on testing leads to formulaic memorization of (what a lot of us thought) was drivel, just things to know and forget after the test. High school for me started very early (about 6:45/7 to catch the bus), so it was miserable. I did have some classes that were the exception, but for me all school did was try and beat the drive to learn out of me. In middle school I got punished for reading ahead in our assigned literature. We also had to deal with a powertripping principal for years.
And that's to say nothing of the completely whitewashed US "history" we learned.
I actually was homeschooled for a few years, so I have experience with both systems. The issues I had with homeschooling were the overly religious program my parents used, and the lack of socialization.
I will never put my kid in a public or private school system, provided that I find a community for us to engage socially in, that we find a good curriculum that's not religious, and that either myself or my partner engages in it full-time.
You may be able to find copyleft books and materials - I suspect they probably exist - but I don't know any specifics.
If it came down to it I think Kahn would give them a wonderful education and everything I have seen is well executed and wraps in a lot of the sequencing that I have seen work with my kids, but I do like Saxon enough to pay for it and use it as the primary source.
The other piece is this thing called Institute for Excellence in Writing (https://iew.com/) it is honestly amazing. My kids know more about writing, and have a better grasp of the english language then I do thanks to that program.
About twenty percent of my students handled the transition to distance education just fine. Many of these students told me they missed friends/clubs/etc, but enjoyed having greater control over their time (my district encouraged, but did not require, synchronous learning).
The middle sixty percent were mixed, but generally plateaued in perceived achievement or struggled to keep motivated. Since going back to in-person about six weeks ago, the majority of these students are back on track. Achievement remains somewhat below a typical cohort, just a little less snappy and insightful with observations and arguments. So it goes.
The bottom twenty percent were various flavors of missing. They did not or could not cope with the transition to distance learning. Some of these students were struggling prior to going online, but the reduction in structure and support pulled a lot of kids into this group that wouldn’t typically fail.
No objective here. Just sharing.
It seems the challenge now is that the most prepared students have gotten further ahead while the least prepared students fell further behind. Managing the increased divergence in coming years will be a challenge.
We were sending staff door to door everyday, but it is unclear how much of an impact that (or any of our other interventions) really made. A lot of these kids were depressed, anxious, unmoored.
“It seems the challenge now is that the most prepared students have gotten further ahead while the least prepared students fell further behind. Managing the increased divergence in coming years will be a challenge.”
Anxiety over that divergence is already building amongst the teaching staff.
I think my daughter did ok, but we have a stay-at-home mom. Most aren't so lucky.