Why are tech people suddenly so into homeschooling?

I have my suspicions

It’s pretty disorienting to me that smart people, secular people, particularly people in tech, view homeschooling as a high-status option now.

I was homeschooled for 13 years, from kindergarten all the way through 12th grade—you can tell that about me because I have essentially the same skill stack as Rapunzel from Tangled—and let me tell you, at no time were my six siblings and I considered the cool kids on the block.

“Homeschooled”, according to Lindsay Lohan in Mean Girls, historically meant one of two things, and I was both of them:

• An academic freak who wins spelling bees.¹ I was a two-time National Spelling Bee finalist in 2005-06. ESPN’s John Marvel once said he liked my odds for two reasons: 1) I was homeschooled and 2) I had a name he couldn’t pronounce.

• A religious freak who believes in young-earth creationism. The earth is thankfully old enough to have forgotten the full-length country-western musical I wrote in high school called “Creation vs Evolution: The West of the Story”.

Pictured: Natalie Portman and me, both having a good day

Mean Girls goes on to make sure we understand that Cady Heron (Lohan’s character) defies homeschooler stereotypes: she’s a well-traveled, broadly well-adjusted child homeschooled mainly out of necessity (her parents are roving scientists or something) rather than ideology. She’s an acceptable homeschooler - a unicorn!

I don’t think a movie with this setup would make any sense today. Homeschooling is high-status now. My children’s generation is full of Cady Herons.

But why?

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The tactical arguments for and against homeschooling all cancel each other out.

Pro-homeschooling: At school, you’re in danger of physical, emotional, and sexual abuse.

Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home. And the risk gets bigger if you eliminate outside influences that might notice when something’s wrong.

Pro-homeschooling: Kids learn faster one-on-one; Bloom’s 2-sigma problem is undefeated.

Anti-homeschooling: Kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence can fall through the cracks without professional involvement. Also, it’s really hard to teach your kids everything they need to know, consistently, year after year, all by yourself. And really, really expensive.

Pro-homeschooling: We homeschooled a family of seven on one income of $25k.

Anti-homeschooling: Homeschoolers don’t get enough social interaction.²

Pro-homeschooling: Yes we do.

None of the arguments convince anyone. Homeschooling remains what it was in the creationism-and-spelling-bee days: an ideological choice.

So why’s it becoming so fashionable?

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Here’s what I think is really going on.

These tech parents are hackers by nature, and I think they’re convinced that in homeschooling they’ve happened on the ultimate life hack: just opt out of being around average people.³

Religious convictions or not, that’s really the key motivator for homeschooling. Opt out of interacting with average people. Opt out of sitting in a classroom that proceeds at the average person’s speed. Opt out of socializing with losers, bullies, and malcontents. Opt out of living in a cramped city school district. Opt out - eventually - of formalized higher education, then out of a 9-to-5 job; don’t conform to the system, build your own.

In a vacuum, every one of these desires makes complete sense. History’s richest and most successful people have always tended to raise their kids this way, they just called it “tutoring” or “doing the grand tour of Europe” or something.

But I can’t help but notice that history’s richest and most successful people have raised some pretty unpleasant kids.

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I’m a homeschooling success story by most external measures. I did well on the SAT, I have a rewarding career, I’m not on drugs, etc. It should be noted that I’m also, as far as I know, more or less neurotypical.

Here are some things I struggle with at age 32:

• Social awkwardness and anxiety

• Difficulty in forming IRL friendships

• Impatience with the idea of connecting on a meaningful level with other people: who needs ‘em?

• An abiding sense of detachment from reality

This is not very bad, to be honest. I’m a perfectly functional person who is kind of arrogant and a little bit sad.

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The weird thing is that the smart tech people I know are mostly pretty egalitarian. They have little respect for mediocre-elitism, for traditional credentials, for master’s degrees and vice presidencies. While they may have made their own money working for Facebook or Google, they love the idea of entrepreneurship. They don’t want their kids to chase the guidance counselor’s status quo idea of prestige; they want their kids to Do Great Work. To change the world.

So, in preparation, they homeschool. They teach their undoubtedly above-average kids all sorts of valuable lessons, but the most fundamental one they are teaching is implicit: you can opt out of dealing with average people, because they will only hold you back.

Hang on a minute.

How do you expect to change the world for the better when you’ve been taught from an early age, subconsciously or not, to hold most of the people around you in contempt?⁴

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I have three kids. And nothing stresses me out more than knowing they are exposed to stressors. There’s a voice inside me that cries out to shelter them from apathetic teachers and negative peer pressure and embarrassing public failures.

That voice likes to say: You should just homeschool them. Opt out of interacting with average people, because average people will only damage your kids.

But I’m raising human beings, not hothouse flowers. Within reason, and with parental support, some of the less-than-ideal things that happen at school are the stressors that help kids grow.

It’s not that you can’t build that resilience in other ways. I know people who seem to be doing a great job homeschooling. They make great efforts to keep their kids grounded in the community—clubs, teams, camps, volunteering—while maintaining flexibility with their specific mode of education. They are amazing people but they always seem to be running uphill.

For now, my kids are in school. So far, they seem to be able to spell just fine.

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1. The spelling girl being parodied by Tina Fey’s script—uncharitably, I’ve always thought—appears to be Rebecca Sealfon, who was the first homeschooler to win the Scripps National Spelling Bee and famously screamed the letters of her winning word “like she was on fire”. Rebecca and I both later worked at Google, though we didn’t quite overlap.

2. I was the valedictorian of my high school class. My ten-year reunion took place in 2020, at the height of pandemic lockdown. Nobody thought of canceling it. Attendance (me) was 100%.

3. I don’t think I’m straw-manning, because I’m pretty sure someone is going to highlight the “opt out of interacting with average people” quote on Twitter/X and say “this, but unironically.”

4. Robert Caro’s “The Power Broker”, frequently mistaken for inspirational reading, is a 1,000-page tragedy on this subject.