Homeschooling hits record numbers

Anecdotally, two factors at work here:

- Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.

- With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching.

It's hard to fix the US education system by political means. If you have the ability to do so, it's comparatively much easier to pull your kids out and homeschool them.

> pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values

I wonder what sort of values they’re indoctrinating their kids with instead.

I expected this comment coming into the thread. I would just like to point out that there is a huge range of options between those two extremes!

If is entirely possible to teach up a child to be curious AND well rounded in the basics (see also concepts of Trivarium and Quadrivium, sorry can't link the references atm).

> there is a huge range of options between those two extremes!

Which two extremes would those be?

Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.

Name the left values; don't beat around the bush.

Observing remote education is not good visibility into pre-covid teaching.

I think we have a responsibility to have educated citizens.

> pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values

Which values? I haven't gone to school in a long time.

> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching

I'm not sure remote schooling during the pandemic is very representative of day to day teaching in school. At least that's the impression I got from my teacher friends back then.

One example is in high school I had an excellent literature class that also covered a lot of philosophy. It wasn’t until later that I realized that the various philosophies we studied were the philosophies that are often foundational for Marxism, atheism, and general left of center academia. Probably the best class I had in high school but I wish it had also covered things on both sides, or been more transparent that it was in fact biased.

I'm very curious about this as well, GP, please.

> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass, and pushing borderline indoctrination of controversial, left-ish values.

As someone who was in public education less than 10 years ago, the last part plainly untrue. In fact, several states will soon require displaying the 10 commandments in public school classrooms, which seems pretty “right-ish” to me.

Homeschooling is a symptom of the atomization of American society - affluent people are retreating into their bunkers in suburbia and withdrawing from civil society based on a shared psychosis regarding “critical race theory” and “wokeness”, neither of which are taught in public schools.

yeah, it would be crazy if people were allowed to raise their own children with their own values. we can’t have that.

Presumably the extremes of left and right?

> Parents side with their kids all the time in pass/fail battles; they're not objective.

I'm thinking this is fairly new. When I was in school, if I got bad grades or got in trouble at school, I got in trouble at home too. My parents were absolutely not calling the teachers complaining about grades. When I had trouble learning multiplication facts, they sat me down with flash cards every night until I had learned them, they didn't blame the teacher. This was in the 1970s/80s. This seemed pretty normal based on what I remember. When/why did it change?

I am very curious too, I’ve asked this to other friends who have mentioned the same thing and the only concrete answer I have got so far was teaching the theory of evolution and climate change.

> In fact, several states will soon require displaying the 10 commandments in public school classrooms, which seems pretty “right-ish” to me.

That tells you way more about the (current) politics of the local government than it does about the politics of the median teacher. It might actually indicate the opposite - no one would go to the effort of mandating pride flags at the school I went to, seeing as they were already hung in every single classroom.

It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way. Very little of it has anything to do with the family of political ideologies despite sharing a similar name. The question of God's existence is also fundamental to the history of philosophy. It's not particularly shocking that a course might cover people like Lucretius, Bentham, or Russell.

Most philosophy surveys will also include some of the other sides, which you might not even recognize as such. Descartes and Aquinas are fixtures, and Heidegger (notoriously conservative and also a literal Nazi) often features in university level classes. The point isn't to indoctrinate you with any of these viewpoints, it's to teach you how to analyze their arguments and think for yourself.

I think parents are trying to maximize the perceived value of their child at the expense of their real value. I also think various media (especially the internet) have lowered trust in primary/secondary education, leading to more parents feeling justified in "taking matters into their own hands". You kind of see that attitude in this thread (its not wholly unjustified).

I have had more teachers actively advocating voting for right wing parties than left wing parties. And once had someone in biology class tell me that he thinks that evolution and creation by god are equal and we should try to merge those theories. And I live in a very secular part of Europe.

But hey, both you and I are telling anecdotes. The only conclusion for me is that public school exposes you to people that do not think like you or your parents. Something, we are less and less exposed to. If that is good, anyone has to answer for themselves.

Lots of examples, gender identity and requiring ethnic studies (focusing on white male privilege, settler/colonial, putting groups into binary oppressor/oppressed). Also issues with requiring those classes vs not.

(Which are, of course, far more similar than people that identify with either extreme would ever admit).

Don't agree with this. Marx's Capital is filled with basic mathematical analyses. I don't agree with his labor theory of value, but I do think algebra is good.

Did anyone argue that you are not allowed to teach your kids your own values? It seems to me, the question is more: do you want to raise your kids without ever exposing them to values that are not your own? Opinion Bubbles have been increasing for a long time, do we really want to grow them even more? Social media is full of people left and right that seem to have no idea about the opinions and realities at the other end of the spectrum.

Not a GP and I don't know if any of these qualifies as "left-ish" (which is very US specific IMHO), but as I understand, the education all over the western culture is destroyed by few really simple and really crazy (for me) ideas:

- Kids are never responsible for anything.

- Teachers are responsible for everything.

This is very anecdotal. Here in the south, the "controversial, left-ish values" would be a breath of fresh air vs what is being taught here

> Schools have stopped educating in favor of test metrics, making sure the worst students pass

This is no child left behind in action, which was implemented during W's term

> With remote education during the pandemic, people have more visibility into their school's day-to-day teaching

^ This is the micromanagement that a ton of people claim to hate and get in their way on this site when folks are complaining about daily standups.

IMO, if you're worried about the quality of your kid's education then you'll either need to send them to a private or home school, which will stunt them socially because life isn't just one big private school or home, or encourage curiosity and learning at home to supplement their rote learning from school

I'm not sure how your first thing much factors in? I haven't seen any data but I'd be VERY surprised if e.g. a survey of homeschoolers would cite to a lot of "making bad students pass" and "lefty indoctrination."

Is this not possible while exposing children to a variety of view points from different sources or does it require that children are not exposed to certain perspectives at all?

The original comment makes a very bold claim of "indoctrination" of an entirely undefined set of values.

There has been no evidence that exposing children to this (undefined and buzzwordy) set of values means that they can't be raised according to other values.

I find this idea pretty wild to encounter on HN which is generally focused on open source and widely available information so that people can educate themselves is suddenly gone in a puff of smoke and some buzzwords when talking about educating the most curious minds in the world.

Define the values. Cite sources that this is "indoctrination" and not simply exposing viewpoints. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion.

That's a parenting problem though, not an education problem, right?

Another nebulous but I think VERY observable factor would be the extent to which "parents are, and expected to be, involved in their kids school stuff."

Anecdotally, but I bet you see a lot of it, I can count on one, maybe two hands the number of times my parents went to anything at the school to see me do a thing. And for my kids, there's something just about every other week.

The other factor is not removing the bottom _% of hugely disruptive and violent children from schools.

> It's pretty hard to touch philosophy without covering marxism in some way

The complaint was that the alternative wasn't discussed.

Do privilege walks count? Which seem to foster victim mentality?

"Both" sides? If you suggest Marxism is one side, what is the other? Also, it's hard to take such a vague comment at face value when you consider the long list of Marx's influences. For example, there are right and young Hegelians...

Why would hanging pride flags in every room be comparable to showing the ten commandments in every room? A poster of the commandments is promoting religion in a secular school, and the flag promotes human rights for queer people. Why would a pride flag be controversial to anyone who isn’t a religious zealot?

These are two indisputable facts about our world, if you disagree you are wrong and anti-science:

1. Gender is a social construct

2. Whiteness is a social construct and in particular has been used as a bludgeon against minority "non-whites" in the United States for a very long time

If you do not believe these things you are the problem. You lack education. You lack critical thinking. You are brainwashed.

You've identified examples of values, but you have forgotten to link them to the left, forgotten to show if they are controversial and, probably most importantly, forgotten to show how schools are borderline pushing indoctrination of them.

I do think there is too much politicization in education, but this also stuck out to me. Marx was a synthesis of Hegel with Adam Smith (And a lot of Ricardo) You absolutely have many people taking those same ideas and going right. Even Das Kapital isn't really "Left Wing" per se as it is more trying to explain how labor is treated in an industrialized economies, its the communist manifesto where Marx takes those ideas and starts synthesizing with Hegel and making ideas of what should happen.

Actually no. The problem comes from society. If you think that kids should be responsible for anything, you are a bad person. If you think that kids should be punished if they do something really bad, you are a monster.

Here we had a case teenagers bullying their teacher – abused her verbally during school, posted deepfake revenge porn into internet, stole stuff from her garden etc. She cried for help and the case was investigated by commission that included people from people from ministry of education, police and psychologists. But the commission concluded that she was the problem – she lacked the skills to build a trusting relationship with kids.

I read the parent as saying that the course covered these at all, not as complaining that nothing else was presented.

But continuing on that train, what would you want from mentioning alternatives to a theoretical framework? A framework is just a different way to look at the world that you can discard if it's not useful.

To give a programming analogy, if a course does a module on JavaScript exclusively with react, they're not teaching that vue, angular, or svelte don't exist and you should only use react. It's much more likely a statement that react is common and useful for people to be familiar with when they go into the outside world. Covering the long list of alternate frameworks, many of which the teacher will have never actually used in a serious way, is both difficult to do in a useful manner and takes away from the limited time available to cover what they can with sufficient depth.

From the Conservative part of my social group, the main one applicable here is pushing elementary school kids to identify as trans. Because young children are very impressionable, and it is forbidden for staff to push back on on it at all, despite the science saying "there is absolutely no such thing as trans before age 12, and much possibility of social trauma from attempting it".

Left-ish people tend to say "this doesn't happen in the real world, it's made up for internet arguments" - and I even said that for a while on this and a few other subjects - but that denial cannot survive extensive contact with the real world.

It's philosophy, not catechism, you're not expected to leave the class believing everything you read.

Why age 12?

Each of those is well within public knowledge.

In other words, "Trust me, bro!"

Name some examples of school systems "pushing" kids to identify as trans. The name of the school and individual teacher, plus the wording that counts as "pushing" would be fine. You say this is happening in the real world, so surely you can point to a few examples.

Literally nobody forces groups into a good/bad binary more than conservatives. What an embarrassing lack of self awareness

(source: I went to a conservative christian school)

> Define the values. Cite sources that this is "indoctrination" and not simply exposing viewpoints. Then maybe we can have a productive discussion.

They're never going to do this, because it's not actually happening, at least not to a significant degree. They will keep their wording vague, not show examples, and basically just repeat variations of "Trust me, bro.. this indoctrination is happening. It's clear as day. You need to see the real world, bro."

Age 12 happens to be the cutoff used in the scientific studies.

And the conclusion to draw from that is that one absolutely cannot be trans under the age of 12?

To avoid arguments about the definition of "be", the clear conclusion is that if it exists it's indistinguishable prior to that age, so any claims before that age can only be considered noise.

It's critical to remember that "reality has a liberal bias" does not mean "literally every detail of things liberals say is reality".

> the clear conclusion is that if it exists it's indistinguishable prior to that age

How is that clear? How would we know if it's indistinguishable if your studies didn't even look?

The whole point is that the studies explicitly did look, and found a negative result.

Gender is obvious and unchangeable. Everything else is a mental health issue, and truly sad.

Yes that’s correct. We didn’t cover things such as Locke or Hume, Adam smith, etc…

Also we didn’t directly cover Marxism or atheist philosophy, my point was that the selected philosophies were the ones that just happened to all be related to that side of the aisle. Again, very good class, just using it as an example of hidden bias that I didn’t see until later

All of continental philosophy since at least Hegel is intellectual bankrupt and it is a miscarriage of education to seriously teach it as anything more than a footnote that needs to be left in the dustbin of history.

Dialectical Materialism is literally brainrot and the damage it has done to human history is unfathomable.

Bit of a shame that it didn't directly cover Marx. Many of Marx's works are reactions to and critiques of people like Adam Smith. I think Marx even calls him delusional at one point.

Locke probably wouldn't have come up, but 19th century European philosophers were all influenced massively by Locke and Marx is extremely European. Marx isn't on a different side from them, just a large part of an even larger conversation.

It's usually evolution or sex or race or something like that.

One of my friends was home schooled. It was at least partly about religious values, but I think it was also partly about him being a bit of a strange kid and getting along better at home. He went back to public schools in middle school, and that was real rough but I think he was happy by the time he got to high school.

I'm sure there are many reasons to home school, but the one I hear about most is religious.

The right has reduced left-ish values to like the basics of humanity; essentially if schools are not actively teaching hate then they are leftist. I don't think the U.S. really has a liberal / leftist culture at all compared to Europe.