I know a lot of homeschoolers. Some had great experiences. Some had truly terrible experiences. But regardless, they turned into functional, developed adults at about the same rate as publicly schooled kids.
I think it's important for parents to realize that a lot of these choices are mostly about enjoyment and convenience, and they don't need to beat themselves up if they feel like they are failing because they can't put a square peg through a round hole.
Although, that said, I think one trend I do see is that successful people had the ability to move on when they were ready. I for one was lucky enough to get to go to college early (I hated high school). I can't think of how many kids had to be stuck in the system because they were forced into a timetable.
Honestly timetable isn't bad if your school stops abusing you.
Stop punishing kids. Stop grading them like factory workers or defective products. Stop putting them all in one classroom. Change their course work to be more interactive and make an environment where people can naturally be social...
I follow this Japanese light novel where they simulate real world in a school setting. The school campus has everything - malls, bars, gaming areas, hair saloons, library, parks and everything else you would visit outside the campus. Students are given monthly allowance based on the performance of their classes and live inside the campus until graduation on their own. I wonder how feasible it would be to create something like that.
People who think that getting bullied or living in a toxic place when you have no experience in dealing with it is great make me sad. Not everyone has a decent life at home (some have dysfunctional families). For those people, it's misery on top of misery. And then there are folks with autism, bipolar and ADHD.
I was dealing with both. Broken for 2 years now. I don't have any goals, dreams or plans that I had before. Now I have to fight against pessimism at every point and is getting harder to socialize each passing days.
I have a different outlook on life now that people find very controversial or against their moral compass. But I can justify it. The disconnection keeps growing even if you quit.
Life gets better motto stings and disconnect me from others because I can't remember a single nice memory that isn't reading something obscure on the internet or communicating with other internet dwellers.
I have to ask people how they feel about something, what their thought process is and why/how. I can't understand it. I have difficulty understanding your common moral compass. I am not joking when I tell you to explain small gestures and facial expressions. And I feel sad too. I just can't show it always. I don't need to cry or look dead serious to say something serious.
It sounds like you are going through some tough things.
> I have a different outlook on life now that people find very controversial or against their moral compass. But I can justify it. The disconnection keeps growing even if you quit.
> Life gets better motto stings and disconnect me from others because I can't remember a single nice memory that isn't reading something obscure on the internet or communicating with other internet dwellers.
I am not sure if this is the right thing to say or not, but it seems like you may be stuck in a negative feedback loop. You are getting validation from people on the internet, and it is creating resentment for people in real life.
It sounds like the novel is about the nostalgia of a time in our lives when we were forced to spend time with others. I think that is a pretty familiar sentiment for a lot of people.
>I have to ask people how they feel about something, what their thought process is and why/how. I can't understand it. I have difficulty understanding your common moral compass. I am not joking when I tell you to explain small gestures and facial expressions. And I feel sad too. I just can't show it always. I don't need to cry or look dead serious to say something serious.
That's really rough, and I'm sorry you have to go through it. There are people out there that are understanding, and I hope you're able to find them sooner than later. I also hope you're able to find more things that bring you joy.
My family become dysfunctional, dreams up to death shattered, all the sacrifice for nothing. Several last years was living in horror.
Each day I strive not to become a zombie. It is easy to live in fantasies, dreams, movies, there is no exit there.
My way out is to resolve inner conflict by singing. Start from some truth - we cry when hurt, sometime can stop it, sometimes not. But there is a need. So find some really private place - forest, bathroom - and try to allow that voice. One note would be enough. It will sound awful. Do not be hard on yourself. It is mismatch between reality and expectations that hurts. No need to push it harder. Thoughts stream through mind, all the lies and unjustice, I try to not interfere. Finally there is a match between thoughts and reality - pain and support. Hours later it sounds like lullaby and I can finally see beautiful forest around.
> functional, developed adults at about the same rate
This is the part where I'm going to need some academical research. I really don't know either way - but I wouldn't take your word for it (Of course you could be researching this subject for years but you have only presented me with anecdotal evidence, which can be explained by selection bias).
I want to homeschool my future kids but it is still illegal in my country (illegal as in: if you attempt it, the government will arrest you and send the kids to an orphanage)
Thing is: public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit and are dangerous.
Private schools are crazy expensive, and although they are more useful they still teach a lot of bullshit.
Also the educational style of all schools here is outright awful, there is an article from 1950s I believe written by Richard Feynman and it still applies 100%
As someone who was homeschooled and socialized almost exclusively with other homeschoolers as a kid, I was on the fence about it.
Then I grew up and met people who went to public school. Holy cow I can’t believe people think it’s ok to put their kids through that! I can’t believe we collectively accept children being exposed to the violence and other problems that are pervasive there! It’s not surprising so many people become criminals now.
> I can’t believe we collectively accept children being exposed to the violence and other problems that are pervasive there! It’s not surprising so many people become criminals now.
But on the flip-side, would you want to go your entire life without facing any conflicts?
FWIW, I was bullied in middle school, and pretty much had to fight my way through. As in fist fighting. As an adult, I don't tolerate any bullshit - and have no problems saying so , if I'm ever in a situation. I'm not sure I'd be the same person, if I hadn't gone through the things I did (not saying that bullying or fighting is good, just that it molded me into a person with extremely low tolerance for BS and a$$holes)
What do you consider "bullshit", and what makes you the authority on making such claims?
I ask in good faith, not to mock you or anything - mostly because I've heard a wide range of similar claims.
(I do think that the educational style of many public schools is horrendous though, as it follows the old factory-line model, where you try to fit all kids into some mold, and "educate" them as fast as possible. When the reality is that there's no one-size-its-all educational model. It's highly individual, and must be tailored / optimized for each pupil, if possible.)
OP appears to be from Brazil, which does have some big issues with school quality[0]:
> Another problem for Brazil is that it is one of the few countries which does not have good basic educational statistics. Nevertheless, it is clear that too few children go to primary school. To make matters worse, more than a third of children repeat a grade at least once in primary or secondary school. This is particularly true for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This poor performance at school is linked to a high drop-out rate. Only 88.7% complete basic education and there are more than 600,000 primary age children are out of school.
> For those who do remain at school, performance is poor, reflecting poor school quality. The OECD’s internationally respected PISA survey (Program for International Student Assessment) put Brazil near the bottom of the list of 65 countries taking part, making it comparable to Albania, Jordan and Tunisia.
You should email me to see my past school notes. They are self evident for how much bullshit school pushes but I think it might be a different experience than most people on here. I live in remote part of India.
Most of what people do here is just write down from book to a notebook word to word. The books are horrible too (some published more than a decade ago in subjects where relevancy matters a lot) with no clarification or update from the teacher. Standard examination is not useful atleast on a school level. Many schools allow people to cheat openly and some of them even change the written answers of students (they tell them to leave it blank if you don't know the answers). This happens till 9th grade. After which, schools have less power over grading but they still get to hand out some marks which they will do for every poor student anyway. The cut off rate is extremely low to pass (around 33%). And it's also blurry because you have reservation (affirmative action based on your caste) so the end result is different for each person.
To over simplify, take three variables. Assign 1x, 1.5x and 2x. Now calculate admission, job application (government), taxes, fees, etc rate for different people by multiplying by them.
Most schools run an after school program or similar where they help you train for the exam. Although, most of it is just giving out a sample paper to what will come in the school exams. Pretty much most students will go there if the school is rich or if it is poor, then they directly go to tuition under subject teacher.
Most schools in rural, suburban, etc are repurposed houses.
As for teachers, mostly fresh college students, mothers and people who are waiting to clear their government exam or similar. The pay ranges anywhere from 4k-20k per month (upto $310).
Periods are stacked in the most unproductive way possible. No breaks and are very short - 30-40 mins with too much subject/context switching.
Majority of kids will be abused emotionally and physically at some point. Indian schools have a mentality of class punishment so you get punished for something you didn't do often. Typical physical abuse include beating palm of your hand with a wooden or metal ruler, making you stand outside with hands up in the air or sitting in a chicken position. There are of course some extreme corporal punishments. That includes stripping (only boys), making you run outside on the ground (45C+) for hours, telling other students to beat you for being bad and public shaming tactics.
Kids are also indoctrinated with politics all the time. I mean, we have an hour long assembly to repeat how much we are proud of our country and india number one in the morning every day.
Parents usually have no idea about their own kids and are toxic (reason - poverty).
Given economic condition of India, income inequality, social mobility and unemployment. I don't think a reasonable person would wanna go through this. It's not like you are likely to have a first class life easily even if you somehow pushed your way through.
I can expand more but that's the general overview.
1. Typical stuff that they try to simplify science and thus teach stuff wrong, like the classical each area of tongue has a specific taste receptor thing.
2. Government heavily interfere with what is taught in classrooms regarding some subjects, most notoriously the government is quite heavy handed in anti-monarchy rethoric, I was actually shocked when I was in my 25s and started to find out a lot of stuff I learned as a kid were not just misrepresentations or wrong interpretation of things, but outright lies and propaganda, one interesting example: schooling here blame a lot of slavery on monarchy and nobility in general, meanwhile the monarchs actually wrote anti-slavery essays, and even made a deal with England at the time authorizing them to attack slaver ships, at some point the government even made it clearer, told England to treat all slavers as pirates, and gave them permission to even attack docked slaver ships freely. Also schools here teach government was "absolutist", but it wasn't, only reason monarch was letting england screw with ships, is because whenever he tried to make a law ending slavery, with nobility support, the liberals would vote AGAINST it (and mostly out of stupidity too, farms that stopped using slaves had bigger profits, maintaining the slaves was more expensive than paying the tiny wages they were paying to the immigrants).
3. Schooling here has a sort of mandatory political bias, not just as in... most teachers being left leaning (something kinda normal in most of western world), but as in the government explicity dictating that certain subjects need to base their theories on Antonio Gramsci, there is some infamous youtube videos where right-wing teachers argue against that with public officials, in one of the videos a teacher outright ask an official what about the parents rights to not have the kid be forced to learn that, and the official replies that the state knows best, that if they don't want their kids to be indoctrinated, they have to pull the kids from school, and face the consequences.
4. Schools here also teach a lot of useless stuff, with teachers insisting you will use all of it... but I guess this applies to most of the world.
In California, it's very expensive and difficult. You can homeschool your own children subject to oversight and regulation, but if you want to offer schooling to children who aren't your own, the regulatory burden increases so much that you have to hire full-time staff to handle it, get specially zoned and inspected real estate, and numerous other things that effectively require you to charge a very high tuition and serve only the children of the relatively wealthy.
> illegal as in: if you attempt it, the government will arrest you and send the kids to an orphanage
If you repeatedly attempt it I presume?
I highly doubt that they'd send your kids to an orphanage after the first offense.
> public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit
Bullshit such as what? (if I might ask)
IMO, although homeschooling is great for some kids, the cons of legalizing it far outweigh the pros.
One of the most important aspects of schools is to let kids interact with other kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds.
Homeschooling should be banned for the same reason that religious schools should be banned, i.e., to avoid abuse, indoctrination, and segregation of kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds.
If we want to allow brighter kids to learn faster then the focus should be on improving schools, not on abandoning them.
> IMO, although homeschooling is great for some kids, the cons of legalizing it far outweigh the pros. One of the most important aspects of schools is to let kids interact with other kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. Homeschooling should be banned for the same reason that religious schools should be banned, i.e., to avoid abuse, indoctrination, and segregation of kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds.
This statement both doesn't reflect the actual statistics around homeschool and private school outcomes, and makes the false assumption that public schools don't indoctrinate (let alone abuse) their students.
> If we want to allow brighter kids to learn faster then the focus should be on improving schools, not on abandoning them.
Keeping kids (and parents) trapped in a broken system in the hopes that someday the system will be fixed is pointlessly cruel. It also denies public schools one of the most important tools for facilitating improvement: competition.
Such a great interview. It's fascinating to see how different education styles can have such a big impact.
While homeschooling isn't the right fit for everyone, I was homeschooled and it had a huge impact on me. My habits now for constant learning, working to complete tasks quickly, building projects with my hands (remodeling, woodworking, etc), and my desire to start companies all came from the time and energy that my parents put into crafting a unique education for me.
I'm so excited to see more and more parents considering homeschooling their kids.
One of the biggest advantages as well as disadvantage of homeschooling I think would be limiting the amount of school induced brainwashing.
I don’t mean they make kids into automatons, but there is a tendency to _tell_ kids this is right and that is wrong along ideological lines without allowing kids to discover those things for themselves.
I’m talking about things like tax policy, education, religion, government, etc.
For example, kids are indoctrinated to believe if they get good grades they can go to college and they’ll be set. That government is there to take care of you, that the education system is good, etc.
So these kids graduate, go to college, university and then wonder why after doing all that their humanities or business classes don’t land them jobs.
They should be allowed to discover more and question the whole system more. Some should be tracked for vocational schools rather than everyone expecting they are fit to work anywhere they desire... its unrealistic.
I feel like this would be a strong argument against homeschooling (and private religious schools for that matter). Because if they're home-schooled then they'll get exposed to fewer people from different social backgrounds than themselves, and that would reasonably reduce the amount of "brainwashing".
After homeschooling, I also have a hunger for learning. It is the hunger of someone that did not always get enough to eat as a child and isn't going to let calories go by uneaten. The hunger of someone who suspects others know how malnourished they were as a kid and is afraid to look skinny. A hunger that keeps them up at night, telling them to eat and eat until sleep seizes them, then wakes them up early in the morning, so they can eat again.
Interesting. That wasn't my experience at all. Maybe hunger is the wrong word: love of learning is better.
I grew up to truly love learning and be excited for our weekly trips to the library to get more books. Then when I had access to the internet I spent so much time learning code and design. My parents taught me how to learn and then gave me access to whatever I needed (mostly just the library and a computer).
> My habits now for constant learning, working to complete tasks quickly, building projects with my hands (remodeling, woodworking, etc), and my desire to start companies all came from the time and energy that my parents put into crafting a unique education for me.
Who knows were these habits come from. There are many people who went to regular schools and share these exact same habits.
Hi guys! This is Laura :) - everyone here is really cool and I can't believe this made the front page of HN so just wanted to drop my email here in case anyone wants to catch up on longevity stuff or other cool science discussion - ldeming.www@gmail.com. Sorry, I just really love geeking out and this seemed like a good place to find more thought buddies. Anyway, I love talking about most interesting things (physics / how computers work / all the stuff I don't know) so if you're down for it drop me a line!
(not sure how to verify but that's the email associated w all my public stuff / twitter posts so hopefully that's enough)
There seems to be research exploring links between blood sugar regulation (diabetes) and aging. I guess that shows up in metformin <-> aging correlations/links.
Do you have pointers to research linking liver function to diabetes and perhaps to aging research.
It’s known that non alcoholic fatty liver is common in people who will develop type 2 diabetes. But the link is not well understood. (There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on how the two are linked?).
Any solid references would be helpful, I’ve only found older nature reviews from 2006 and 2010. Maybe that’s the state of understanding but curious to get any additional pointers.
Thanks! Do you have a list of which simple interventions have the most data behind (ex: metformin, resveratrol?), and which long shots have the most potentials (ex: rejuvenating stem cells by expressing Yamanaka factors, then reinjecting them, as bone marrow transplants have shown the new cells find their way in about every tissue)
Given that her family inherited the Murphy Oil fortune (Tulane's Department of Medicine is named after them), it's not that surprising she would have exemplary homeschooling resources
Come off it, she had access to a research lab at age 12! Even she said it's extraordinary.
> I really felt like I got a cheat code to life early on. It was like being Ben Franklin’s daughter or something... When I first met Cynthia Kenyon... I was 12. She very kindly offered for me to just work in her lab as a normal intern,
> But with longevity and other deeply existential problems, the horror of what’s happening has been tragically normalized.
I will never understand this attitude. Why don't we see how valuable aging and death are? How can we possibly reframe this as a "horror". The horror is this idea that personal identity can go on indefinitely. Aging is a process of coming to terms with death. None of this is being "tragically normalized". What's being normalized is the idea that we can have everything we want all the time forever without any spiritual or material costs.
> Why don't we see how valuable aging and death are?
Because they're horrific tragedies that we should be fighting tooth and nail until they're extinguished and nobody ever has to deal with them again. They should be consigned to the history books.
> Aging is a process of coming to terms with death.
Aging is a biological problem that we continue to debug. And nothing should make us "come to terms" with being obliterated. If someone is attacking you, you don't "come to terms" with your impending injury or death, you fight back.
When a problem has thus far been a seemingly immutable property of life, it can be difficult to envision a world where that property has been overcome. It can be difficult to even see it as a problem. And it's understandable that people's first instinct is to somehow justify the status quo, that there must be a good reason that 150,000 people die every day. One step towards solving the problem is to reset that expectation, to get people to recognize the problem as a problem rather than a "fact". In the meantime, progress will continue to be made by people who see it as a problem, but far too slowly without more widespread support. Every day longer it takes is 150,000 people lost.
From an individual perspective I don't think there should be any doubt that solving death is a fantastic goal. It's the threat that is poses to the system, threats to which we have no better tool than death.
Old age and death is still the number one tool for solving:
- empires and tyrants
- outdated societal opinions and prejudices (racism/sexism/etc)
- locked in privilege and wealth
- ossification of social roles
- stagnation within fields and industry ("Science progresses one funeral at a time")
We have no truly effective tools for these problems, except wait for people to die. I'd be much more supportive of ending aging if we had anything that worked.
I worry about what immortality would do to our legal system, moral judgments and overall progress. If a life is immortal then life preservation actually becomes priceless in a non-hyperbolic way. And that means it really does outweigh everything else -- including wellbeing and the cost-benefit of taking risks gets very lopsided. People could still do risky things individually, but any business that had inherent risks would be very difficult to do on any scale. And that includes way more businesses than just the unpopular ones. Think human drug trials, eg.
Or at least that line of thinking becomes very difficult to resist. I still want to promote the research, but like AI progress I hope we think about the second-order effects sufficiently along the way.
One of the cliches around progress in certain fields is that it requires the death of those unwilling to change. Would immortality slow down progress in those fields? Would we have to place more "term limits" on those in authority (whether political or in organizations).
Until we go fully digital this makes no sense. Brains develop in a specific way. We become more wise during our lifetime but we keep getting worse at learning. It's not as easy as "let's fix dying neurons". Society without death would be quite retarded compared to the one we have. Retarded i.e. one that is learning much slower.
You and your beloved ones are going to die. Just accept it. This is as big of a fact as gravity given our scientific understanding. It's not about magic cure. It's just that on long enough time probability of your pattern being destroyed goes to one, whether you are a living organism, a program or some handy-wavy. That's just physics.
And if you really want to fight biology, why put longevity over decreasing suffering? So far, I would argue, artificial lifespan extension increased physical suffering despite enormous progress that we made in terms of multiple forms anesthesiology.
I find this kind of outlook very confusing. Don't you think that assuming life to be an engineering problem is a very strong assumption? Seems a bit above my pay grade to me ...
They aren't going to cure death in your lifetime. you will almost certainly die of something. if you think it's healthier not to come to terms with that... well, you're entitled, but I think you'll be disappointed
This sort of leaves out the reality that decomposing bodies are a critical part of the ecosystem, and that eliminating death in humans would have huge ecological consequences beyond just the nutrients of decomposing bodies. If/when you have reasonable solutions for overpopulation, massive resource consumption by advanced societies, and pollution, then we can talk about longevity.
"If a young child falls on the train tracks, it is good to save them, and if a 45-year-old suffers from a debilitating disease, it is good to cure them. If you have a logical turn of mind, you are bound to ask whether this is a special case of a general ethical principle which says “Life is good, death is bad; health is good, sickness is bad.” If so – and here we enter into controversial territory – we can follow this general principle to a surprising new conclusion: If a 95-year-old is threatened by death from old age, it would be good to drag them from those train tracks, if possible. And if a 120-year-old is starting to feel slightly sickly, it would be good to restore them to full vigor, if possible. With current technology it is not possible. But if the technology became available in some future year – given sufficiently advanced medical nanotechnology, or such other contrivances as future minds may devise – would you judge it a good thing, to save that life, and stay that debility?
The important thing to remember, which I think all too many people forget, is that it is not a trick question."
> if a 120-year-old is starting to feel slightly sickly, it would be good to restore them to full vigor, if possible
That is far from clear. It is even far from clear that this is true all else being equal, and all else is definitely not equal. Extending longevity exacerbates the strain on global resources caused by overpopulation -- most notably at the moment, the capacity of the planet to absorb carbon emissions, but that's a detail. Exponential growth is not sustainable on a finite planet. If carbon weren't the limiting factor, it would be something else.
But we humans were designed to die. Our evolutionary purpose is to raise children to the point where they are able to have children of their own. A longer lifespan than that doesn't advance our reproductive fitness, and so we're not designed to live any longer than that. So even if we could tweak our bodies to live longer, it is not a foregone conclusion that this would be healthy for our minds and souls.
I think one big problem I see is that there becomes no need for younger generations. It’ll all be old people. If you have low turnover then there is little change —society stagnates.
If people had discovered 3x lifespans and birth rates were thirded in the 1900s, we’d be living near-ossified lifestyles (and other things) from back then.
Also, the longer you live the more mental trauma there is to deal with. One lifetime is enough. As it is we have enough people who slowly decline and go crazy.
Agreed... “people shouldn’t live forever... except for me” seems to be a popular sentiment, but it’s along the lines of “people shouldn’t get this or that freedom/resource... except for me.”
Could you describe what you think the spiritual and mental costs are?
I love life (I've been fortunate to live in health and relative privilege) and would very much prefer an additional 150 years before eternal nothingness, assuming sound mind and body. It's not clear to me what spiritual downsides I would experience.
The only reason we exist is because our genes "wish" to remain immortal. Not dying is the fullest realization of our biological (and likely only empirically valid) purpose. Science also suggests that consciousness ceases with death. It seems strictly preferable to exist as opposed to not exist. Looked at this way, pursuing immortality is utterly rational. In fact, it's surprising this isn't our highest current priority.
"Genes" remaining immortal is quite distinct from an organism remaining immortal. I would say that death+reproduction is a better solution to preserving genes than immortality.
Ageing in particular is hugely expensive (most medicine is spent on the old and the old cannot work effectively) and causes incalculably huge ammounts of suffering (COVID-19? War? Racist killings? Rape pandemics? Drug addiction? None cause as much suffering as ageing).
Is it wrong to repair someone's heart, brain, joints, skin, bones, kidneys, liver or muscles? If not, why is it wrong to prevent them degenerating in the first place?
I think “the idea that we can have everything we want all the time” has been normalized for Peter Thiel (et al), so he’s working on the “forever” aspect.
It worries me that even now you have rich people that are 70 and are still trying to make more money abusing other people. Imagine if you could keep your wealth for 50 more years. Further more if money is the gateway to 50 more years. Money would be even more important than it is now.
I really don't want to significantly expand lifespans unless we can keep things fair for everybody.
> Death is the greatest weakness of humanity, and to think otherwise is fatalist. We don't have to live eighty years at best and die. We can do better.
Science advances one funeral at a time. ~ Max Planck
I'd add to that that it's not only science that advances in this way.
If someone has been artificially kept alive beyond their natural lifespan, and you had the power to reverse the effect such that they instantly died, would that be ethical?
Attempting to preserve the status quo of aging and death is the same thing in a more roundabout way.
If you don't believe progress can be made, then don't worry about others who strive to make it. Worst case they're wrong. Best case, you're wrong and the whole world moves upward.
The article also describes her as a scientist and I'm struggling to figure out why. According to Wikipedia she did lab assistant work at ages 12-13 but dropped out of university after accepting a $100,000 Thiel Fellowship to become a venture capitalist. If she does any actual longevity research work I haven't been able to find it.
Yes exactly. Anyone rich can be a scientist with the right PR. This us the postmodern dystopia we live in. (Alternatively, always has been like that, in some sense.)
>I grew up homeschooled in NZ with a hilariously small amount of context for what the real world was like.
kind of a blunt take here but yeah, homeschooling will do that because its limited to what your parents know. Public schools work to immerse kids in a diverse environment with many people from many different walks of life. they work to build soft skills like empathy, listening, and conflict resolution. she says she taught herself "calculus and probability and statistics, and French literature and history" betraying her heritage. The wealthy are notorious francophiles (Fussell, Paul, "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System")
Homeschooling may have played a part in her success, but money likely played an even more prominent role in getting a twelve year old into UCSF and MIT from half a world away. The average homeschooled kid is much more likely to miss social cues, stumble through a difficult interaction with feckless ineptitude, or even parrot their parents own myopic stereotypes or falsehoods. Schools may teach "bullshit" to some, but they also arm kids with critical thinking skills. the conflicting role of educator, caregiver, and lawgiver projected by homeschool parents virtually guarantees kids will never rise to challenge the education theyre given. Theyll learn only what theyre told.
"The average homeschooled kid is much more likely to miss social cues, stumble through a difficult interaction with feckless ineptitude, or even parrot their parents own myopic stereotypes or falsehoods."
Curious if this is something you have direct experience with/referencing a study or if you're just repeating the commonly held trope. I work at a school that has welcomed a large number of former home schoolers and I find your comment contrary to my experience with dozen of home school kids.
Additionally, describing public schools as a place where empathy, listening, and conflict resolution happens is counter to my experience working with public school districts. Genuinely interested to learn where you're coming from with your comment.
As a homeschooling parent, we hear this trope all the time and it has not been borne out by our experience at all. My wife and I probably both have above-average social skills, but our kids are all well-spoken, empathetic, and kind for their ages, and we tend to have to help them unlearn the social "skills" they learn from their friends who go to public school.
And we're not really sticklers when it comes to behavior, we mostly just want them to not be rude and to think about other people when they do things that impact other people, and we have not found that kids who attend public school are especially likely to possess those qualities. (I also went to public school and spent a good part of my early adulthood unlearning crappy social behavior that was learned in school).
Isolating kids is bad, but modern schools are a very weird, artificial (and often unpleasant) social environment. Many of the social skills you learn in them are useless or even harmful:
> The average homeschooled kid is much more likely to miss social cues, stumble through a difficult interaction with feckless ineptitude, or even parrot their parents own myopic stereotypes or falsehoods.
> I grew up homeschooled in NZ with a hilariously small amount of context for what the real world was like. In retrospect, it was totally ideal.
You missed the next sentence which seems to contradict the argument you're making. There's absolutely no evidence that the author is missing "critical thinking skills". It sounds like the positive reinforcement from the father created an idea that anything is possible (which probably is missing from most people who go through the traditional education system).
No one is arguing that all homeschooling is great. It's going to depend on the teachers/parents. This seems like an example where it worked out really well.
> I actually chose to go to public high school in Georgia for three years, where I saw the good and bad first hand. Unlike Goldstein, who glories in having “benefited from 13 years of public education in one of the most diverse and progressive school districts in the United States,” the school I attended was predominantly African-American and viciously segregated, with the white kids funneled into advanced and gifted courses while everyone else, the vast majority, languished. Thus, in my essay I ask, “Are schools social levelers or do they reinforce the class pyramid by tracking and sorting children from a young age?” Any honest progressive needs to admit the answer is both
Your take is kind of obvious, but it's too monolithic. There are certainly some of my old friends that match your description to the T: socially awkward, insular knowledge, holding onto their parent's religious extremes.
But they also have siblings that are polar opposites, for example one got a PhD in Evolutionary Bio (much to their parents ire).
I think you're absolutely right that money and class are at the center of this, 'yacht schooling' is definitely a thing and their experiences should not be extrapolated generally.
Exactly—one anecdote about homeschooling doesn’t apply generally. In the US, the average homeschooled kid is likely to be raised in a very religious family with little to no science education.
The fact that homeschoolers in the US are likely to be religious also tells you nothing about homeschooling if done by someone who's not particularly religious and cares about science.
There are statistics out there about the academic performance of homeschoolers, and all the evidence out there shows that they have better academic performance than public school kids.
Readit News
I think it's important for parents to realize that a lot of these choices are mostly about enjoyment and convenience, and they don't need to beat themselves up if they feel like they are failing because they can't put a square peg through a round hole.
Although, that said, I think one trend I do see is that successful people had the ability to move on when they were ready. I for one was lucky enough to get to go to college early (I hated high school). I can't think of how many kids had to be stuck in the system because they were forced into a timetable.
Stop punishing kids. Stop grading them like factory workers or defective products. Stop putting them all in one classroom. Change their course work to be more interactive and make an environment where people can naturally be social...
I follow this Japanese light novel where they simulate real world in a school setting. The school campus has everything - malls, bars, gaming areas, hair saloons, library, parks and everything else you would visit outside the campus. Students are given monthly allowance based on the performance of their classes and live inside the campus until graduation on their own. I wonder how feasible it would be to create something like that.
People who think that getting bullied or living in a toxic place when you have no experience in dealing with it is great make me sad. Not everyone has a decent life at home (some have dysfunctional families). For those people, it's misery on top of misery. And then there are folks with autism, bipolar and ADHD.
I was dealing with both. Broken for 2 years now. I don't have any goals, dreams or plans that I had before. Now I have to fight against pessimism at every point and is getting harder to socialize each passing days.
I have a different outlook on life now that people find very controversial or against their moral compass. But I can justify it. The disconnection keeps growing even if you quit.
Life gets better motto stings and disconnect me from others because I can't remember a single nice memory that isn't reading something obscure on the internet or communicating with other internet dwellers.
I have to ask people how they feel about something, what their thought process is and why/how. I can't understand it. I have difficulty understanding your common moral compass. I am not joking when I tell you to explain small gestures and facial expressions. And I feel sad too. I just can't show it always. I don't need to cry or look dead serious to say something serious.
> I have a different outlook on life now that people find very controversial or against their moral compass. But I can justify it. The disconnection keeps growing even if you quit.
> Life gets better motto stings and disconnect me from others because I can't remember a single nice memory that isn't reading something obscure on the internet or communicating with other internet dwellers.
I am not sure if this is the right thing to say or not, but it seems like you may be stuck in a negative feedback loop. You are getting validation from people on the internet, and it is creating resentment for people in real life.
It sounds like the novel is about the nostalgia of a time in our lives when we were forced to spend time with others. I think that is a pretty familiar sentiment for a lot of people.
That's really rough, and I'm sorry you have to go through it. There are people out there that are understanding, and I hope you're able to find them sooner than later. I also hope you're able to find more things that bring you joy.
Each day I strive not to become a zombie. It is easy to live in fantasies, dreams, movies, there is no exit there.
My way out is to resolve inner conflict by singing. Start from some truth - we cry when hurt, sometime can stop it, sometimes not. But there is a need. So find some really private place - forest, bathroom - and try to allow that voice. One note would be enough. It will sound awful. Do not be hard on yourself. It is mismatch between reality and expectations that hurts. No need to push it harder. Thoughts stream through mind, all the lies and unjustice, I try to not interfere. Finally there is a match between thoughts and reality - pain and support. Hours later it sounds like lullaby and I can finally see beautiful forest around.
It is hard to describe, previous attempt https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=23269320
This is the part where I'm going to need some academical research. I really don't know either way - but I wouldn't take your word for it (Of course you could be researching this subject for years but you have only presented me with anecdotal evidence, which can be explained by selection bias).
Thing is: public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit and are dangerous.
Private schools are crazy expensive, and although they are more useful they still teach a lot of bullshit.
Also the educational style of all schools here is outright awful, there is an article from 1950s I believe written by Richard Feynman and it still applies 100%
Then I grew up and met people who went to public school. Holy cow I can’t believe people think it’s ok to put their kids through that! I can’t believe we collectively accept children being exposed to the violence and other problems that are pervasive there! It’s not surprising so many people become criminals now.
But on the flip-side, would you want to go your entire life without facing any conflicts?
FWIW, I was bullied in middle school, and pretty much had to fight my way through. As in fist fighting. As an adult, I don't tolerate any bullshit - and have no problems saying so , if I'm ever in a situation. I'm not sure I'd be the same person, if I hadn't gone through the things I did (not saying that bullying or fighting is good, just that it molded me into a person with extremely low tolerance for BS and a$$holes)
Dead Comment
I ask in good faith, not to mock you or anything - mostly because I've heard a wide range of similar claims.
(I do think that the educational style of many public schools is horrendous though, as it follows the old factory-line model, where you try to fit all kids into some mold, and "educate" them as fast as possible. When the reality is that there's no one-size-its-all educational model. It's highly individual, and must be tailored / optimized for each pupil, if possible.)
> Another problem for Brazil is that it is one of the few countries which does not have good basic educational statistics. Nevertheless, it is clear that too few children go to primary school. To make matters worse, more than a third of children repeat a grade at least once in primary or secondary school. This is particularly true for students from disadvantaged backgrounds. This poor performance at school is linked to a high drop-out rate. Only 88.7% complete basic education and there are more than 600,000 primary age children are out of school.
> For those who do remain at school, performance is poor, reflecting poor school quality. The OECD’s internationally respected PISA survey (Program for International Student Assessment) put Brazil near the bottom of the list of 65 countries taking part, making it comparable to Albania, Jordan and Tunisia.
[0] https://www.copenhagenconsensus.com/publication/brazil-persp...
Most of what people do here is just write down from book to a notebook word to word. The books are horrible too (some published more than a decade ago in subjects where relevancy matters a lot) with no clarification or update from the teacher. Standard examination is not useful atleast on a school level. Many schools allow people to cheat openly and some of them even change the written answers of students (they tell them to leave it blank if you don't know the answers). This happens till 9th grade. After which, schools have less power over grading but they still get to hand out some marks which they will do for every poor student anyway. The cut off rate is extremely low to pass (around 33%). And it's also blurry because you have reservation (affirmative action based on your caste) so the end result is different for each person.
To over simplify, take three variables. Assign 1x, 1.5x and 2x. Now calculate admission, job application (government), taxes, fees, etc rate for different people by multiplying by them.
Most schools run an after school program or similar where they help you train for the exam. Although, most of it is just giving out a sample paper to what will come in the school exams. Pretty much most students will go there if the school is rich or if it is poor, then they directly go to tuition under subject teacher.
Most schools in rural, suburban, etc are repurposed houses.
As for teachers, mostly fresh college students, mothers and people who are waiting to clear their government exam or similar. The pay ranges anywhere from 4k-20k per month (upto $310).
Periods are stacked in the most unproductive way possible. No breaks and are very short - 30-40 mins with too much subject/context switching.
Majority of kids will be abused emotionally and physically at some point. Indian schools have a mentality of class punishment so you get punished for something you didn't do often. Typical physical abuse include beating palm of your hand with a wooden or metal ruler, making you stand outside with hands up in the air or sitting in a chicken position. There are of course some extreme corporal punishments. That includes stripping (only boys), making you run outside on the ground (45C+) for hours, telling other students to beat you for being bad and public shaming tactics.
Kids are also indoctrinated with politics all the time. I mean, we have an hour long assembly to repeat how much we are proud of our country and india number one in the morning every day.
Parents usually have no idea about their own kids and are toxic (reason - poverty).
Given economic condition of India, income inequality, social mobility and unemployment. I don't think a reasonable person would wanna go through this. It's not like you are likely to have a first class life easily even if you somehow pushed your way through.
I can expand more but that's the general overview.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Homeschooling_international_...
2. Government heavily interfere with what is taught in classrooms regarding some subjects, most notoriously the government is quite heavy handed in anti-monarchy rethoric, I was actually shocked when I was in my 25s and started to find out a lot of stuff I learned as a kid were not just misrepresentations or wrong interpretation of things, but outright lies and propaganda, one interesting example: schooling here blame a lot of slavery on monarchy and nobility in general, meanwhile the monarchs actually wrote anti-slavery essays, and even made a deal with England at the time authorizing them to attack slaver ships, at some point the government even made it clearer, told England to treat all slavers as pirates, and gave them permission to even attack docked slaver ships freely. Also schools here teach government was "absolutist", but it wasn't, only reason monarch was letting england screw with ships, is because whenever he tried to make a law ending slavery, with nobility support, the liberals would vote AGAINST it (and mostly out of stupidity too, farms that stopped using slaves had bigger profits, maintaining the slaves was more expensive than paying the tiny wages they were paying to the immigrants).
3. Schooling here has a sort of mandatory political bias, not just as in... most teachers being left leaning (something kinda normal in most of western world), but as in the government explicity dictating that certain subjects need to base their theories on Antonio Gramsci, there is some infamous youtube videos where right-wing teachers argue against that with public officials, in one of the videos a teacher outright ask an official what about the parents rights to not have the kid be forced to learn that, and the official replies that the state knows best, that if they don't want their kids to be indoctrinated, they have to pull the kids from school, and face the consequences.
4. Schools here also teach a lot of useless stuff, with teachers insisting you will use all of it... but I guess this applies to most of the world.
If you repeatedly attempt it I presume? I highly doubt that they'd send your kids to an orphanage after the first offense.
> public schools here outright suck, teach lots of bullshit
Bullshit such as what? (if I might ask)
IMO, although homeschooling is great for some kids, the cons of legalizing it far outweigh the pros. One of the most important aspects of schools is to let kids interact with other kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds. Homeschooling should be banned for the same reason that religious schools should be banned, i.e., to avoid abuse, indoctrination, and segregation of kids from different (social, economic, religious, etc.) backgrounds.
If we want to allow brighter kids to learn faster then the focus should be on improving schools, not on abandoning them.
This statement both doesn't reflect the actual statistics around homeschool and private school outcomes, and makes the false assumption that public schools don't indoctrinate (let alone abuse) their students.
> If we want to allow brighter kids to learn faster then the focus should be on improving schools, not on abandoning them.
Keeping kids (and parents) trapped in a broken system in the hopes that someday the system will be fixed is pointlessly cruel. It also denies public schools one of the most important tools for facilitating improvement: competition.
While homeschooling isn't the right fit for everyone, I was homeschooled and it had a huge impact on me. My habits now for constant learning, working to complete tasks quickly, building projects with my hands (remodeling, woodworking, etc), and my desire to start companies all came from the time and energy that my parents put into crafting a unique education for me.
I'm so excited to see more and more parents considering homeschooling their kids.
I don’t mean they make kids into automatons, but there is a tendency to _tell_ kids this is right and that is wrong along ideological lines without allowing kids to discover those things for themselves.
I’m talking about things like tax policy, education, religion, government, etc.
For example, kids are indoctrinated to believe if they get good grades they can go to college and they’ll be set. That government is there to take care of you, that the education system is good, etc.
So these kids graduate, go to college, university and then wonder why after doing all that their humanities or business classes don’t land them jobs.
They should be allowed to discover more and question the whole system more. Some should be tracked for vocational schools rather than everyone expecting they are fit to work anywhere they desire... its unrealistic.
I grew up to truly love learning and be excited for our weekly trips to the library to get more books. Then when I had access to the internet I spent so much time learning code and design. My parents taught me how to learn and then gave me access to whatever I needed (mostly just the library and a computer).
Who knows were these habits come from. There are many people who went to regular schools and share these exact same habits.
(not sure how to verify but that's the email associated w all my public stuff / twitter posts so hopefully that's enough)
Do you have pointers to research linking liver function to diabetes and perhaps to aging research.
It’s known that non alcoholic fatty liver is common in people who will develop type 2 diabetes. But the link is not well understood. (There doesn’t seem to be a consensus on how the two are linked?).
Any solid references would be helpful, I’ve only found older nature reviews from 2006 and 2010. Maybe that’s the state of understanding but curious to get any additional pointers.
Asking for a friend :)
> I really felt like I got a cheat code to life early on. It was like being Ben Franklin’s daughter or something... When I first met Cynthia Kenyon... I was 12. She very kindly offered for me to just work in her lab as a normal intern,
who do you think does the homeschooling?
I will never understand this attitude. Why don't we see how valuable aging and death are? How can we possibly reframe this as a "horror". The horror is this idea that personal identity can go on indefinitely. Aging is a process of coming to terms with death. None of this is being "tragically normalized". What's being normalized is the idea that we can have everything we want all the time forever without any spiritual or material costs.
Because they're horrific tragedies that we should be fighting tooth and nail until they're extinguished and nobody ever has to deal with them again. They should be consigned to the history books.
> Aging is a process of coming to terms with death.
Aging is a biological problem that we continue to debug. And nothing should make us "come to terms" with being obliterated. If someone is attacking you, you don't "come to terms" with your impending injury or death, you fight back.
When a problem has thus far been a seemingly immutable property of life, it can be difficult to envision a world where that property has been overcome. It can be difficult to even see it as a problem. And it's understandable that people's first instinct is to somehow justify the status quo, that there must be a good reason that 150,000 people die every day. One step towards solving the problem is to reset that expectation, to get people to recognize the problem as a problem rather than a "fact". In the meantime, progress will continue to be made by people who see it as a problem, but far too slowly without more widespread support. Every day longer it takes is 150,000 people lost.
Old age and death is still the number one tool for solving: - empires and tyrants
- outdated societal opinions and prejudices (racism/sexism/etc)
- locked in privilege and wealth
- ossification of social roles
- stagnation within fields and industry ("Science progresses one funeral at a time")
We have no truly effective tools for these problems, except wait for people to die. I'd be much more supportive of ending aging if we had anything that worked.
Or at least that line of thinking becomes very difficult to resist. I still want to promote the research, but like AI progress I hope we think about the second-order effects sufficiently along the way.
One of the cliches around progress in certain fields is that it requires the death of those unwilling to change. Would immortality slow down progress in those fields? Would we have to place more "term limits" on those in authority (whether political or in organizations).
You and your beloved ones are going to die. Just accept it. This is as big of a fact as gravity given our scientific understanding. It's not about magic cure. It's just that on long enough time probability of your pattern being destroyed goes to one, whether you are a living organism, a program or some handy-wavy. That's just physics.
And if you really want to fight biology, why put longevity over decreasing suffering? So far, I would argue, artificial lifespan extension increased physical suffering despite enormous progress that we made in terms of multiple forms anesthesiology.
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The important thing to remember, which I think all too many people forget, is that it is not a trick question."
http://yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified/
That is far from clear. It is even far from clear that this is true all else being equal, and all else is definitely not equal. Extending longevity exacerbates the strain on global resources caused by overpopulation -- most notably at the moment, the capacity of the planet to absorb carbon emissions, but that's a detail. Exponential growth is not sustainable on a finite planet. If carbon weren't the limiting factor, it would be something else.
But we humans were designed to die. Our evolutionary purpose is to raise children to the point where they are able to have children of their own. A longer lifespan than that doesn't advance our reproductive fitness, and so we're not designed to live any longer than that. So even if we could tweak our bodies to live longer, it is not a foregone conclusion that this would be healthy for our minds and souls.
If people had discovered 3x lifespans and birth rates were thirded in the 1900s, we’d be living near-ossified lifestyles (and other things) from back then.
Also, the longer you live the more mental trauma there is to deal with. One lifetime is enough. As it is we have enough people who slowly decline and go crazy.
I love life (I've been fortunate to live in health and relative privilege) and would very much prefer an additional 150 years before eternal nothingness, assuming sound mind and body. It's not clear to me what spiritual downsides I would experience.
Is it wrong to repair someone's heart, brain, joints, skin, bones, kidneys, liver or muscles? If not, why is it wrong to prevent them degenerating in the first place?
It worries me that even now you have rich people that are 70 and are still trying to make more money abusing other people. Imagine if you could keep your wealth for 50 more years. Further more if money is the gateway to 50 more years. Money would be even more important than it is now.
I really don't want to significantly expand lifespans unless we can keep things fair for everybody.
Death is the greatest weakness of humanity, and to think otherwise is fatalist. We don't have to live eighty years at best and die. We can do better.
If everyone on this planet had solving death as their single-minded focus, we'd accomplish it within our lifetimes.
This is a particularly advanced form of wishful thinking.
Science advances one funeral at a time. ~ Max Planck
I'd add to that that it's not only science that advances in this way.
Attempting to preserve the status quo of aging and death is the same thing in a more roundabout way.
- Alzheimer's?
- Cancer?
- Arthritis?
Otherwise it's just crab bucket mentality.
I think the homeschooling is likely second to being rich in terms of her world view and success.
kind of a blunt take here but yeah, homeschooling will do that because its limited to what your parents know. Public schools work to immerse kids in a diverse environment with many people from many different walks of life. they work to build soft skills like empathy, listening, and conflict resolution. she says she taught herself "calculus and probability and statistics, and French literature and history" betraying her heritage. The wealthy are notorious francophiles (Fussell, Paul, "Class: A Guide Through the American Status System")
Homeschooling may have played a part in her success, but money likely played an even more prominent role in getting a twelve year old into UCSF and MIT from half a world away. The average homeschooled kid is much more likely to miss social cues, stumble through a difficult interaction with feckless ineptitude, or even parrot their parents own myopic stereotypes or falsehoods. Schools may teach "bullshit" to some, but they also arm kids with critical thinking skills. the conflicting role of educator, caregiver, and lawgiver projected by homeschool parents virtually guarantees kids will never rise to challenge the education theyre given. Theyll learn only what theyre told.
Curious if this is something you have direct experience with/referencing a study or if you're just repeating the commonly held trope. I work at a school that has welcomed a large number of former home schoolers and I find your comment contrary to my experience with dozen of home school kids.
Additionally, describing public schools as a place where empathy, listening, and conflict resolution happens is counter to my experience working with public school districts. Genuinely interested to learn where you're coming from with your comment.
And we're not really sticklers when it comes to behavior, we mostly just want them to not be rude and to think about other people when they do things that impact other people, and we have not found that kids who attend public school are especially likely to possess those qualities. (I also went to public school and spent a good part of my early adulthood unlearning crappy social behavior that was learned in school).
http://www.paulgraham.com/nerds.html
Also, homeschooling doesn't mean you can only learn from your parents. You can use any other resource that's available to you.
> Nor, as far as I can tell, is the problem so bad in most other countries.
So why is this a distinctly American problem? If we understand the answer to that question, might that help us solve the problem?
"The average homeschooled kid". Stereotypes. Hm.
You missed the next sentence which seems to contradict the argument you're making. There's absolutely no evidence that the author is missing "critical thinking skills". It sounds like the positive reinforcement from the father created an idea that anything is possible (which probably is missing from most people who go through the traditional education system).
No one is arguing that all homeschooling is great. It's going to depend on the teachers/parents. This seems like an example where it worked out really well.
Public schools are a reflection of the communities they're placed in and in much of rural America diversity isn't at play.
Astra Taylor's response to a critique (of the paywalled article below) demonstrates the nuance (https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/learning-in-...)
> I actually chose to go to public high school in Georgia for three years, where I saw the good and bad first hand. Unlike Goldstein, who glories in having “benefited from 13 years of public education in one of the most diverse and progressive school districts in the United States,” the school I attended was predominantly African-American and viciously segregated, with the white kids funneled into advanced and gifted courses while everyone else, the vast majority, languished. Thus, in my essay I ask, “Are schools social levelers or do they reinforce the class pyramid by tracking and sorting children from a young age?” Any honest progressive needs to admit the answer is both
Your take is kind of obvious, but it's too monolithic. There are certainly some of my old friends that match your description to the T: socially awkward, insular knowledge, holding onto their parent's religious extremes.
But they also have siblings that are polar opposites, for example one got a PhD in Evolutionary Bio (much to their parents ire).
I think you're absolutely right that money and class are at the center of this, 'yacht schooling' is definitely a thing and their experiences should not be extrapolated generally.
Paywalled, but these stories also worth a read and N+! is well worth the money. * https://nplusonemag.com/issue-33/essays/homeschool/ * https://nplusonemag.com/issue-13/essays/unschooling/