If you really look at the data, student outcomes essentially boil down to parents and the students themselves. We've see this with how standardized testing has gone over so poorly. The truth is that, outside of gaming the test system with essentially test prep style cramming, schools really have not been able to make any real meaningful changes to student outcomes.
Absolutely, schools can move the needle a bit in either direction, but outside of edge cases, I feel as though it may be a challenge to show the kind of outcome data that makes any EdTech product a must have in US education.
On a more purely technological basis integrating spaced repetition into instructional design would be a massive win. Imagine if people actually remembered what they’d been taught in school instead of having a hazy idea the US Civil War was somewhere in the 1800s.
Then sure.
If you have a single mother that works odd hours and can't do basic algebra, it's very unlikely you'll excel as a student. That isn't a judgement of anyone, that is just a fact based on the data we have.
How to prevent that situation is a different discussion, but does illustrate that resources may be better used fixing the root of the problem as opposed to putting all the effort and responsibility on education.
Also how do you go about socializing them? I've been considering it myself
1. we felt like time was passing too quickly and wanted to have them around, we wanted to be together basically.
2. with 3 kids my wife hasnt been able to work (her line of work is not well paying), so it made sense to start homeschooling vs private schooling.
3. I have issues with what public schools are now, hyper focused on testing, lack of critical thinking, no outdoor time.
The "socializing" concern is a farce imo. Granted we live in area with plenty of groups. Maybe a solo kid way out in the sticks will have problems. Our kids also regularly play with kids 2-5 years older or younger so things are different. Our kids have activities with other homeschool kids 4 days a week.
The schedule looks like this:
M: Outdoor Nature camp: think building fire with bow drills, axes, skinning animals, foraging for wild plants
T: Academic day at home then occasional horseback riding
W: Academic day at home, private music lessons, then playdate at friends house
TH: Homeschool meetup group: think art, music, dance, karate, extracurricular classes with a group of 100 kids and 10 teachers
FRI: another Homeschool meetup group: with various classes and open play
SAT: Climbing, iceskating, skiing, biking, something outdoors
Our life is a mellower version of "Captain Fantastic"
Based on that limited observation, I think that the socialism of homeschool kids depends on the kids and their parents in the same way as any other aspect of homeschooling: If the parents are reasonably social, they will find ways to get their kids involved in social things, and their kids will be social too.
If the parents are reclusive, or inclined to isolate themselves from mainstream society for whatever reason, this will also be reflected in their kids. What may seem like a negative outcome of homeschooling could just be a matter of kids resembling their parents. And it wouldn't shock me if genetics plays a role.
How much time do you spend as a parent teaching or overseeing homeschooling? Are you encouraging your kids to go to college? And if they did want to go to college do they realistically have the option to pick the school they want? Any state or country requirements you need to adhere to in terms of curriculum? Have your kids ever expressed an interest in going to school? I can see homeschooling work well for disciplines like math or programming but have any of your kids expressed interest in something like medicine or law where prestige matters a lot? Are kids really self motivated to learn anything? How much structure do you impose? Do you find that they do more projects and experiments as opposed to reading theoretical stuff?
Its a busy schedule for my wife, granted we have 3 kids. She also works part-time at their nature camp
> Are you encouraging your kids to go to college?
Depends. I plan on enrolling them at the local community college by age 14-15.
> And if they did want to go to college do they realistically have the option to pick the school they want?
I want them to attend community college then transfer, which is what I did and I transfered to a public ivy school
> Any state or country requirements you need to adhere to in terms of curriculum?
No requirements here in MI, depends on your state.
> Have your kids ever expressed an interest in going to school?
Nope.
> I can see homeschooling work well for disciplines like math or programming but have any of your kids expressed interest in something like medicine or law where prestige matters a lot?
Why would that matter? Top tier colleges are looking for/encouraging homeschool applicants because they are generally very independent thinkers and self-directed.
> Are kids really self motivated to learn anything?
Definitely. For example, my one daughter loves birds and is studying everything she can find about the local bird population. Kids are naturally very curious.
> How much structure do you impose?
This depends on the homeschooling family. We have a decent structure now but other families use no structure.
> Do you find that they do more projects and experiments as opposed to reading theoretical stuff?
50/50 I would say. They are still young so the reading is not like deep theory on anything yet.
I'd be curious as to why there is not an option to watch a recorded version with Outschool.
Most people who sign up don't actually want a certificate and aren't trying to complete. They are interested in the subject, watching some videos, move on. When you have class sizes with 1000-30,000 students, it's OK if 90% don't complete the certificate since many more did than in a brick and mortar school, yet it cost much less per student to deliver the class.
In online classes where you need to pay to get the certificate, it's been found that paid students have the same completion rate as brick and mortar university students.
https://www.afr.com/news/policy/education/fee-payments-lift-...
> Students in massive open online courses (MOOC) who pay a modest amount for a "verified certificate" are just as likely finish their course as regular university students, according to a new large-scale study of online education.
I think the benefit of the pre-recorded sessions like from Coursera and Khan Academy, is that one concern is unsupervised teacher-learner interaction could be problematic if its unclear how the teacher has been screened.
For instance is the teacher in live mode going to do anything inappropriate or try to initiate in person contact with the learner, etc.
A core counter argument to their base premise is that learning effectively is done in person, as part of a social group, in a physical space dedicated to learning, with hands on practice. It certainly seems to be the core takeaways of Waldorf/Montessori/constructionist/etc. approaches.
> When our kids were in school and struggled with a class/teacher/subject, we would get them a tutor to come to our home in the evenings.
In other words, there's a reason they paid the tutor to come in person, and not tutor over Skype or the phone.
The author speaks of their intent being to open up access to education, and replace the "outdated tech" of physical schools and classrooms. I need to be convinced that successful execution of this plan (and its inevitable percolation into policy if it makes financial sense - which I have no doubt it does, for a VC to take interest in it) won't result in a two tiered system, with students from poorer families getting free, public education over video lessons, and students from wealthier family being able to attend private, more expensive, in person schooling.
I'll refrain from posting the ages and names of his kids in the interest of privacy (you can figure it out with very light Googling), but his older children are in their late twenties, meaning they are nearly my age. When I was in high school "Skype tutoring" wasn't a thing, because reliable video chat didn't exist, and very little of my schoolwork used a computer for more than web processing. Isn't it a lot more likely that the sentence you are referencing is referring to that experience than evidence "in person" was the reason he paid for a tutor to come in person?
As someone who was homeschooled: it's extremely scary. I've missed out on social experiences and also on actual education and consider myself generally worse-off for it.
Consider: Texas permits homeschooling and has effectively zero oversight. How many homeschooling families are also anti-vaxxers or feed into anti-government paranoia? Especially consider the bitterness of such parents whose taxes pay into the school system but those same taxes aren't utilized for homeschooling families: so it's literally the government taking money to pay for a service for all citizens -- except you, you're not getting what you paid for.
My wife and I homeschool, but we have our kids pushing well beyond their grade level in every subject. She had a teaching license up until a couple of years ago (they do expire after a while) and taught for several years before we had kids. Then, once they arrived, she decided this was a natural fit. Meanwhile, they're also plugged in with a local co-op with more than thirty kids that they meet up with several times a week.
Homeschooling can be used to keep kids out of the system and deny them a good education, but it can also be the platform for an elite education like no other. There's a reason the wealthiest families in American pay for private tutors and elite schools with tiny class sizes. Nothing beats one on one from a capable instructor.
As my kids grow older, they'll get one-on-one training in the arts, foreign language, and various extra-curricular skills like swimming, dance, etc. from instructors that we hire to assist them. They'll walk away from this better equipped than any of their peers in traditional school.
Honestly, if there is anything wrong with homeschooling itself, it's that it is only available to middle and upper class families.
My children are homeschooled in a major metro area not in Texas. We also have effectively zero oversight. But what does it signify? We have an interest in the success of our children that is far greater than any interest a government has.
I understand that in rural areas this can mean that such children have all but disappeared from view, but where we live the school districts allow homeschool children to participate in afterschool activities (including competitive sports) and a recent change in state law allows for homeschool children to attend a class or two at the local school and then leave for the day, if that is something a parent wants. The park district offers many sports classes in the middle of the day for homeschool kids, forest preserves and state parks offer nature classes, and museums have science and art courses. Private businesses love us, they offer discounts to fill up time slots that would otherwise go empty. The public library is very welcoming and typically allows use of community rooms for free.
A public school classroom with 30+ children in it simply doesn't have the time to offer as much educational opportunity that our children get in half the time, allowing them so much time during the day for play, imagination, and reading or exploring topics of their own choice (we typically have 30-60 library books at home at any one point in time).
Homeschooling put me far ahead of my peers. I went back for middle school (6th grade) and skated through the next 3 years until I could take AP classes in high school. I am by no means exceptional nor were my parents great teachers. I think being able to go at my own pace allowed me to learn faster and more thoroughly than if I had been in a classroom.
I'd say there are a lot of upsides to home schooling if parents can swing it, and the downsides can be mitigated by a little extra effort on socializing.
Read Sasse’s “the vanishing American adult.” It’s got some great commentary on what’s wrong with modern school. We take kids, and instead of having them be around adults to socialize them, we let them loose on their own little child-dominated Lord of the Flies society.
That's also, of course, true of those who send their kids to private school. I think that there's an excellent argument for vouchers which enable parents to allocate the funds that would have gone to a public school to a private school. There are some dangers (because once something is private, it can be advertised and the system can be gamed), but overall I think this is far better than our current 51%-of-parents-decide model.
I don't feel that it'd be a good idea to give homeschooling parents a similar voucher, but only because it's too ripe for abuse: an abusive parent could take the voucher and spend it, and not bother to educate his kids. I don't know how likely it is, but it's worrisome nonetheless.
- homeschooling is in practice mostly undesirable, because it overwhelmingly attracts people with fringe beliefs who are not going to act in their child's best interest
- homeschooling is at a systemic disadvantage because parents that care enough about their kid's education to take an active part in it have no voice in the public schooling system (my understanding of grandparent's point); in addition, they contribute as much as other taxpayers to the public school system while not getting anything for it.
Am I misunderstanding?
There are a ton of homeschool groups in our area too that organize activities where all of the kids get together. It is very active giving kids plenty of opportunity to socialize.
We don't homeschool for religious reasons. We do it because we want our kids to get the best possible education without all of the indoctrination and other crap that is pushed through the public education system. This is pretty much the reason most of the other homeschoolers that I engage with do it too. I think homeschooling has a bad rap because of the media and a few bad apples but at least from my experience, that portrayal is not the norm.
I went to an average public school, not like a specialized math-heavy school, which also existed.
Then I moved to the U.S. and started 6th grade, decent public school in a major city.
I went to ESL class instead of regular English. Some of the history stuff was new to me. I struggled with integrating and being bullied, though not too badly.
But as far as math and science goes, I was coasting up until 9th grade, when I started high school.
In 8th grade, I was added to the "gifted" program, which basically meant I spent one period a week hanging out with the other gifted kids doing I don't even remember what.
I've been told that while USSR designed its cirruculum to be passable by 80% of the students, in the U.S. it's designed to be passable by close to 100%. Which means that even if your child is smart, they'll be dragging along with the least capable 20% of the school population, doing busywork and being bored, wasting their time instead of learning all they could be at the most capable time of their life.
(Russia's current education system has been stripped and crippled, so it's on par or worse than U.S. now.)
They're a wonderful team. I've never seen a group of people with so much positive chemistry before; I've started asking more culture-centered questions in my interviews since then, now that I think about it.
I think it's the best kind of team to front an educational endeavour and it's one big reason I believe in them. It's easier to have a healthy classroom environment if the providing workplace is healthy too.
> Outschool (YC W16) Is Hiring a Senior Software Engineer in SF
I’m so glad for advanced services making more forms of schooling possible for people.
Just to throw some ice on some of the heat in the comments...
- homeschooling isn’t for everyone, but it works wonderfully for some. My sister hated it and I loved it. People are different and need different approaches to learning.
- some people who homeschool are religious, and some of them are “fundamentalist”. But most of the people I encountered were simply “religious.” There’s a difference. ;)
HN, what's your take on the above? Do you believe that there is any particular curriculum of subjects that students "need" to have studied to be prepared for doing well in the world they will be living in?
That's all. No, we mostly don't teach this stuff anymore.
For those going the college route, obviously the STEM prerequisites must be satisfied. This means AP Biology, AP Chemistry, AP Physics C (both halves), and AP Calculus BC.
Some ten years ago I was convinced that private schools had a right to exist, but that they should never impact the funding of public schools, not even indirectly.
Then I discovered that homeschooling was a thing in the US.
Now I tend to believe that private schools should not be allowed to exist. School is far too important as a social mixer and a way to educate well-rounded citizens to leave it to the whims of parents. Parents already have a large enough impact on their kids, to let them take over 100% of their time.
I also strongly believe that parents whose beliefs prevent their kids from getting the medical care they deserve (from refusing transfusions, to refusing vaccines) should get a hard look from social services.
In general I don't believe that parenthood trumps some things that as a society we consider basic human rights. I think most people would agree with me when it comes down to issues like violence, exploitation and child labor, but I think this should extend to the access to healthcare and to a secular education.
I recognize that there are some in the homeschool "community" who are ruining their children (imho). For the sake of freedom, I accept that there are terrible people in the world who should not have reproduced, but for me to have rights they must have them too.
Let me put it another way: most children who have some medical doctor in their extended family don't really need to be visited regularly by a pediatrician. That doesn't really imply that most people who refuse to take their kids to a doctor are in their right mind to do so: a lot of them have some weird belief that might put their kids life at risk. And even if they weren't a majority, but a tiny minority, the law needs to protect that tiny minority even if that means being a bit overbearing on people who have doctors in their families.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kibbutz_communal_child_rearing...
Literally zero evidence for this. On average, kids that are homeschooled walk away with higher levels achievement and fewer psychological issues than their traditionally schooled peers. They integrate just fine into society.
> I also strongly believe that parents whose beliefs prevent their kids from getting the medical care they deserve (from refusing transfusions, to refusing vaccines) should get a hard look from social services.
This has nothing to do with homeschooling since many of us homeschool for secular reasons and aren't teaching our children fundamentalism or denying them vaccines/healthcare.
> In general I don't believe that parenthood trumps some things that as a society we consider basic human rights.
You don't have kids. Not that it invalidates your opinion, but you don't. I, as a parent, adapt to society and obey society just like I, as an individual, obey the law. But I am still a parent if the social order breaks down and the government disappears. My responsibilities as a parent precede my responsibility to society. As long as society is not abusive, they mesh well and that isn't an issue. But saying that parenthood doesn't trump society is a slippery slope you really don't want to go down.
> I think most people would agree with me when it comes down to issues like violence, exploitation and child labor, but I think this should extend to the access to healthcare and to a secular education.
Healthcare makes sense, I suppose. But "secular education" assumes the education received in a homeschool context is not secular. On the contrary, many homeschoolers are secular homeschoolers, especially in the upper middle class.
I think you need to do more research on this before you start throwing out uninformed opinions.
There is plenty of evidence of the contrary though, that kids born in families with low income and educational achievement do much much better when they are in a socially diverse school as opposed to a ghetto. Sure maybe homeschooled kids are slightly better off, but that comes at a huge cost for all the kids who have a single parent who works three jobs that will never be able to afford to homeschool them.
> You don't have kids.
You don't know that.
> But I am still a parent if the social order breaks down and the government disappears.
Every day hundreds of thousands of parents "break down" and government takes over for them. Government breaking down is a much rarer event.
> "secular education"
If you don't like the distinction between secular and religious, you can take any other strong belief. What if my parents are flat earthers? What if they are holocaust deniers? What if they hold some very strong political opinion? Or even what if they are some staunch atheists? They will just create a bubble around their kids.
Public schools have a long way to go before they should be made mandatory. Until it is the very best solution for everyone, until it addresses every learning disability, the class sizes are smaller, teachers are paid better, classes track with a students ability and mental development and actually run in line with the latest in neuroscience and child development, have flexible hours so teenagers can sleep longer, put less on the kids when they go home so they have time for family activities and social interaction instead of 3-4 hrs of homework. Maybe when the solution isn't to medicate kids who don't learn by sitting still at a desk 6 hours a day with few breaks, elimination of recess and 20-30 minute lunch periods and few if any opportunities to "socialize" in the current schooling environment. When they teach problem solving and critical thinking, rather than rote memorizing for one standardized test at the end of year. If going to school was more like being an adult or put responsibilities on the student, like a college does, rather than treating the student population like they're in a low security prison. When it uses a system that wasn't developed for training factory workers and hasn't transitioned at all since then. When all the new money added to their budgets isn't siphoned up in administrative costs. When schools in many neighborhoods put kids in physical danger, involve gang activity and a good option simply isn't available to them because of their district. Then maybe we can talk about making it mandatory.
Even then, the most rich and privileged still would have loop holes for tutoring their kids for something other than factory work. We would still need exceptions for kids who for a variety of reasons, medical or otherwise need to be at home, students who travel or work in acting/performance. Kids who are on specialized career tracks in schools geared towards where its best they learn very young (perforamance arts and music, CS) to compete in a global market.
This idea that one education fits all is myopic and doesn't line up with the results that public schools produce thus far, and you want to take away any alternative.
It would be like if the only healthcare option in the US was the VA, and no one was allowed to seek healthcare else where because some people make bad health decisions and go to homeopathic healthcare providers.
Think about it. If they were serious about education, why are they not investing, Koch-style, in local politics? Why are they not funding candidates who will advocate for stronger school systems, better transportation, school lunches, etc?
This has nothing to do with kids. This has everything to do with extracting as much money as possible from the most anxious, which is incidentally the rapidly vanishing elbow of middle class in the ever-steepening power law curve of wealth distribution in the US.
You can always opt out of the crazy things that happen at public schools. After school, you can homeschool your kids. This way you can get the positives of both systems.
Education is complicated. We need to avoid comparing and optimization. It's idiotic to make a personal stance in education.
