SS Radio #42: Homeschooling: Apprenticeship for Adulthood

[mitchless]

THIS is the core article of faith around which many in a certain slice of American politics form all the rest of their opinions.

You may deride this as an article of faith, but it has proven to be true over and over again. This makes it a very powerful heuristic. The key challenge is that public education is a broken system with no prospect of improvement. Regardless of the motives of the individual teachers and administrators, the systemic incentives do not and cannot align with the needs of individual students. The feedback mechanisms necessary to change this do not exist. Narrow, focused interests have captured all feedback channels and turn the system to their own interests.

This is the natural result any time a system is centralized and monopolized. The loudest voice gets the attention, without regard for wider and dispersed voices.

In reality "government" is very open construct that human beings have been trying to get right since we have existed as a species - or, at the very least, since we have organized ourselves in groups larger than a few dozen.

Indeed it has. And in the 20th century we have regressed to older, more oppressive forms of government.

IF you want all the benefits of such organization, you are going to have to also participate in the effort to improve things as a member of a collective -- you often are not going to like it and you will do a lot of cursing, but the alternative is, at its heart, A LIE.

What, exactly, is the lie? That individuals can make most decisions for themselves? That moral, responsible adults can generally get along without someone in an ivory tower telling them how to interact?

Or are you rejecting some unspecified straw-man of anarchy?

Now, grow up, pay your taxes, argue for your candidates, vote -- and live with the outcomes until you can vote, again. You are one amongst many and you are fundamentally not an island sufficient unto yourself -- that is so, no matter how much it sometimes sucks.

Being one amongst many means that the many get to insist upon rules that impact only those involved? Or does the fact that all decisions have externalities justify a collective veto? Should every decision be up for a vote of the community?

(Don't get me wrong, in reality, I think there is often an intense beauty in our coming together for a common cause. And I count several public school teachers as tremendous positive influences in my life and largely unsung for their daily heroism. But I also know any human system is messy as shit and I still reserve judgement on the overall "goodness" of our species...)

Perhaps I have misinterpreted your intentions, but equating government to "coming together for a common cause" is a category error. And that is the entire point of homeschooling: we are building alternative and competing institutions to a failing, government-monopolized institution. We work together with tools and people that enable us to better educate our children, and they get far more focused time than they ever could receive in a public school -- focused time being that white whale so many experts insist demand smaller class sizes and more funds.

[JFord]

My wife and I both attended public school and are both children of public school teachers. We made the decision this year to move our kids from public school to a university model school where they spend two days a week in a small classroom setting (about 10 kids in each class) and the other three days home schooling. It would be difficult to explain how liberating this decision has been for our family and how much more time we have together as a family now that we're not enslaved to the government system.

My wife and I did much the same thing when we enrolled our daughter in a similar program. It’s a structured, online school called Stanford Online High School. It’s schooling is at home, but technically is not “homeschooling“. She has formal classes that are managed with software similar to Skype but geared to emulating a normal classroom situation. Class-size is small, they are given scheduled lectures as in any other class, and they have collaborative projects like at any other school.

Rapport with instructors (most of whom are affiliated with Stanford University) is excellent. This is so at least for my daughter since she takes advantage of her teachers' online office hours every week. She would usually get what was essentially private, weekly tutoring as few students ever took advantage of it.

The course work can be as basic or as advanced as desired although all classes are challenging. Her classes generally only meet for 15 or so hours a week and her class schedules are extremely flexible as the school has to accommodate kids from all over the world in all time zones. The rest of her time is hers.

Most of the kids who go to SOHS are high performers academically and they’re able to supplement their academic experience with other non-traditional methods such as additional university classes. One of her (freakishly smart) schoolmates joined a graduate level study group at Cal Tech which her father drove him to several times a week. He has co-authored academic papers and even presented some of the groups cutting edge work at a conference in nanotechnology. My daughter was able to take advanced classes in mathmatics (which her instructors call “maths” like the British). She’s taken multivariate calculus, and linear algebre. Now as a senior she’s taking differential equations, advanced logic, and number theory. None of this would have been possible in a public school setting. She’s taken economics courses including a “reading” class which would be typical for an upper division or graduate leveel college course.

What’s interesting is that many of the kids are NOT academically inclined. Her best friend attends so she can pursue her love of ballet. She is able to spend over 20 hours per week doing this (more when she's gearing up for a performance). Other kids do it out of a love of sports. Several classmates are Olympics-bound. One of her classmates is a successful child actor some of you may have seen.

The students do have a PE requirement which my daughter fulfilled through jiu-jitsu classes three or more times a week. When Rener Gracie first learned why she was enrolling in his school, his response was “Dang! Why couldn’t I do PE this way!”

Home schooling is not easy as I'm sure Nick and his wife can tell you. We tried it with our daughter for six months years ago and for various reasons we sucked at it. The point in this overly long post is that even for parents who aren't able to take on the incredible responsibility of designing and teaching a curriculum for their homeschooled child, there are other good options to achieve the objectives of getting your kids out of government schools. Quality, tailored academics, outside interests, and enhanced family life were all advantages we were able to reap. Schools like SOHS are not cheap but are cheaper than other brick and mortar private schools...and they're out there.

[Yngvi]

IF you want all the benefits of such organization, you are going to have to also participate in the effort to improve things as a member of a collective...

I already have reaped the benefits of government schools and I do not wish it on any of the other units of the great, all-knowing collective.

[tallison]

Sometimes collective efforts make sense. Don’t be mindless in your political affiliations/vocabulary.

[Mark Rippetoe]

You're right, Tallison. When the time comes to annex the EU, it will be a collective effort.

[Dave Longley]

Just an excellent podcast. Nick was exceedingly good at putting his views and points across.

I’ve always said that I’m not raising kids, I’m raising adults. What kind of adults do I want to raise?

Self sufficient, inquisitive, respectful and friendly, amongst other things. School seems to want to create punctual automata.

It sounds ridiculous but my wife and I have pretty much just left them alone to get on with it. We facilitate their learning, providing resources and encouragement and so on. Like Nick, we didn’t formally teach them to read. They figured it out. It was amazing to witness because (as Nick said) you hope it’s true but there’s always that trepidation. Then one day, holy shit, they’re reading.

Kids are learning machines and if you just let them get on with it, they’ll figure it out. We have the same approach with food: they can eat whatever they want, whenever they want. Results? Healthy kids at a healthy weight.

I could go on all day about how just allowing that natural curiosity to express itself is incredibly beneficial for the kind of learning we all want. My favourite example is my eldest son was obsesssd with Godzilla and Kaiju. He then discovered King Kong, asking me if he was real. This then sparked an interest in finding out the largest ape ever, which took him into all the apes, time periods, ice ages, geology, evolution and the history of humans.

All of that came from watching Godzilla. He was 6 at the time.

Kids don’t waste time. They’re always learning.