Firstly, I totally agree with Rob here (and the others), like yikes, get a life.
Secondly, I went to public school, and had ALL of your emotional issues, and then some, so that is a big fat zero.
Thirdly, we homeschooled our kids and they not only were highly socialized (like, geez, where do you get the idea that all homeschooled children are locked in a dungeon somewhere??), but my son was self-taught in computing and is currently making 5x what I earned as a Senior Research Engineer with 8 years of college to boot. Go figure.
Fourthly, seems like you have an atrabilious attitude about your life. (That word was the one previous to your winning spelling bee word, "plethora")
Fifthly, Home Schooling has been a BIG 'thing' in the U.S. since, like, 1985. (prior to that, it was still a 'thing', but politically much more difficult)
Wow. Quite the bold tirade there, Forrest. Let me just say: I’m thrilled to see you’ve based your entire manifesto on the laughably narrow premise that the only reason tech people homeschool is so they can “opt out of average people.” How profound! Certainly a sweeping generalization is the best way to prove your intellectual rigor. You do realize it’s possible to want a more flexible, creative, or personalized education for your children without harboring a burning hatred for “the masses,” right? Homeschooling parents—tech or otherwise—tend to be about as fixated on squashing the rabble as they are on teaching trigonometry to their preschoolers. (Hint: not so much.)
But do go on. I’m sure your questionable recollections of “Creation vs Evolution: The West of the Story” are absolutely pivotal to understanding modern homeschooling trends. And your oh-so-scandalous time as a Spelling Bee champ? Clearly the apex of human achievement, and apparently the root of your assumption that everyone else is forging the same tortured path to homeschool weirdness. News flash: not everyone is frantically shielding their kids from commoners or worshipping 7-day creation timelines. Some of us—brace yourself—just want a better system than “sit, memorize, regurgitate, repeat.” But hey, keep telling yourself it’s all about a legion of socially inept techies cackling in their bunkers, teaching their future geniuses to sneer at the peasants. Whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess.
Having watched my wife wrangle her class of 3-5yo who were at home, doing 'school' (over MS Teams) during COVID I'm a little surprised that there's not some kind of (tech enabled) platform emerged to provide a hybrid of old skool and home school.
I'm also depressingly sure that the leadership vacuums we see in tech (and all over the place elsewhere) track back to kids being told to sit down, shut up, and do as they're told. The present school system seems well adapted to the needs of 19th century factory owners, but pretty poorly aligned to today's world and work.
The interest in homeschooling goes beyond tech workers. It’s a broader trend that is accelerating given the disruption that COVID brought schools a few years ago.
Education itself is needing a rethink given how technology has evolved, just like all institutions and industries. Remember traditional American Public schools (primary and secondary) are just a version of the British system that dates back about 200 years. What underpins the system is uniformity of knowledge and memorizing a static group of facts and rules. While that approach served many generations, it’s unclear how it functions or prepares students in 2025. What is the value of memorizing facts when search engines that are far more accurate and always in hand?
Will the public school system be able to reinvent itself over the next 10-20 years? Not sure, but I hope that we provide the investment needed given that we have 70 million children of school age in the US. If not, homeschooling is one alternative model for families that I’d expect to see continue to grow. It’s not immune to the change dynamics that are impacting the rest of society.
Agree public school is in need of a rethink, but change is hard. Especially since teachers are pretty much isolated in their classrooms. No im not bashing teachers I think they are hero’s with a very difficult job. Try teaching 20-30 kids of different abilities and interests the same thing in a 45 minute period.
I went for my Masters in Math Education, wants to teach Computer Science but you couldn’t get certified in that. My one professor was Robert Davis who started one of the main new math programs (teaching kids how to create math for themselves rather than how to calculate) in the late 50’s/60’s. He went from teaching math at MIT to helping teachers and kids taking “remedial” math classes.
He was amazing!!! One reason was he had a deep understanding of Mathematics and the underlying principles. I asked why did the program not take off. The response I got was, that even if all the people who graduated with a degree in math went to teach there wouldn’t be enough math teachers.
Anyhow, it's simple. Tech people, which you think are intelligent but are usually behind the social curve big time, are realizing public schools are garbage. They teach garbage in public schools. Especially in California. 64 gender garbage... The religion of communism.
I appreciate any writing that mentions both _The Power Broker_ and Bloom's 2-sigma problem!
I think a lot these days of Ivan Illych's "Tools for Conviviality"[0] and "Deschooling Society"[1].
He articulates an idea of skills-based 'learning webs', where the people with the skill make themselves discoverable to those that might want that skill.
Learning ensues.
I hope my kid gets to learn lots, when still a kid, but I also hope they are able to keep some of the best parts of that time alive into adulthood. Thus, I don't want to trample to "learning experience" with the high degree of coercion and control that I happened to experience as a kid being homeschooled, and I know many others experience in public schools.
Opt out of being around average people, or being in an average education system? I live in an affluent area and our schools are well resourced, but by and large the parents complain about the quality of education.
It's not that teachers are bad, but we certainly have a high rate of turnover and job dissatisfaction. I think the larger issue is the curriculum itself. It teaches to a test and targets the metrics that make a school seem good on paper. Test Scores: 92nd percentile; College Readiness: 72nd percentile.
It perplexes me that parents opt to either send their kids to private school or opt for homeschooling. The folks I've talked to cite two reasons. First issues with the school administration. Second the volume of busy, inconsequential work in public school. For homeschoolers particularly, the DIY decision is more of a time hack than anything.
If you can hit all the education marks demanded by the state without the busy work, you've freed up an enormous amount of time for learning other things or other activities.
Yeah, I really was going for not having to deal with average people when I chose to pull mourchild out of public school. The inability of the school to do anything about bullying of our neuro-diverse child, which is losing all confidence and was expressing suicidal thoughts because of the bullying was never a problem for us.
I saw this linked on Hacker News. Thanks for sharing your story and your outlook! Strange seeing just how polarized this is in the comments though.
I get that 'traditional' education was focused to get the population just enough skill to work in factories and outside of the family land. I agree that the system should be updated for the current conditions that demand more than that.
I believe that school isn't just about learning to memorize facts and that socialization plays a large role. AI and search engine culture don't provide real knowledge because learning is more about making associations and familiarizing students with what is possible.
I'm skeptical that parents that aren't trained educators can do a better job than professionals. Also there is a toll on one partner that needs to take on the role of full-time teacher in addition to a myriad of other parenting tasks.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2023 married couples have a 49.7% rate of both members working. I can't generalize that every one of those marriages NEEDS to have both members working but even if it's one in two that means that 25% of the population can't afford to do home schooling.
So, while home schooling may work in some cases it still doesn't provide a solution to to a significant part of the population. Some parents didn't sign up to be teachers (or aren't suited to it) and it's a huge duplication of effort that is already provided by existing schools.
I get that it might work in your family and that good outcomes are possible but on the whole we are be better off with a tax funded public system.
We've been considering homeschooling. My concerns are primarily ideological. The lightbulb moment for me was bookstore day at my kids day care (he was 3 at the time). As I waited for him go get ready, I took a look at the books for sale.
> 90% were driving a political message (I actually counted). That was the moment that I realized how pervasive the ideological message was being driven and I live in a very red state.
Now I don't ostensibly have objections to the messages themselves. People can believe what they want. However, I have an allergic reaction to other pushing their opinions into my innocent children's heads. A message that is confirmed to be being delivered at scale.
Childhood is a time for elemental and universal themes. Stories about adventure and discovery that focus on the core virtues (honesty, temperance, justice, enginuity, and fair play). These are the concepts that children should focus on. Not very specific messages often proposing self-destructive messages (like humans are bad because they are runing the earth). Children are innocent of the wider political conflict and we should endeavor to preserve that innocence as long as possible.
That day, I became suspicious of the educational system and the more I've learned since, the more I've become biased against the status quo. There does need to be a rethink and some accountability.
I had to look up what straw manning means. The points you made are all valid. We've tried both approaches and seen the good and bad sides of each. Ultimately, I think the time and love my wife has put into our children is probably the most significant factor.
Interesting thoughts. As someone who was homeschooled, I can attest to the struggles of being post-homeschooled. But even so, we have decided to homeschool our 3 kiddos and are loving it! 😀
1. Classrooms don't run at the average person's speed. They run at the speed of the *group*, which is (a) set by maybe the 25th percentile, and (b) would be slower than one-on-one speed even if everybody were exactly "average", just because groups inherently go slower than individuals.
2. I went to regular schools. I wasn't even allowed to skip grades, quite explicitly because my parents wanted me to "socalize within my age group and learn to relate to the average person". That meant that everybody around me, except maybe in certain accelerated programs, seemed like a complete idiot [on edit: and I was acutely aware that I was being bored out of my mind because of their speed limitations]. Which was really alienating. I ended up with pretty much the personality type you describe for yourself, plus a *really serious, blatant, open* contempt for the average person that took a decade or two to *mostly* shed. Familiarity breeds contempt, or something.
3. My kid went to regular schools; she needed the structure. It was best for *her*. *I* would have been better off locked in a library alone. Which was more or less what I sought out when I wasn't in school. In only a handful of courses did schools teach me anything I couldn't have learned faster and better on my own... and in fact I knew the other stuff before they started trying to teach it. Had I homeschooled my kid, I could have taught her the stuff that *did* benefit from interactive teaching both faster and more deeply than schools were able to teach it to *me* . Moral: *people vary*.
4. Who cares about changing the world? It's more about not being stuck in an environment full of pointless busy work.
Literally lol’d at “…undoubtedly above-average kids.” Reminds me of Lake Wobegon from A Prairie Home Companion where all the children are above average.
We homeschooled our 4 kids. One through 12 grade the other three to 9th grade then to school. My wife brought up the idea and since I was always bored in school I thought why not. There are many ways to homeschool (we took the mostly unschooled approach letting kids follow their own interest and using those as learning vehicles) and many reasons to homeschool. Our kids have turned out fine. Besides all going to college and doing well, one other benefit is they grew up together and have strong bonds (not that that can’t happen if your kids go to school and I’m probably biased , but they seem to have better relationships). They also had to teach each other, which helps a lot in learning.
Other BIG benefit is you can go on vacation when rates are lower and places like Disney are less crowded).
Biggest questions we got, was how do you make sure they socialize? I’d respond by saying “ Yeah, that’s a problem. They have too many group activities with homeschooled and non-homeschooled kids.” They all seem to socialize well annd have friends, even my introverted son.
It’s a personal choice and many possible reasons for doing it (some good some not so good). It’s also is NOT easy and a lot of work.
Firstly, I totally agree with Rob here (and the others), like yikes, get a life.
Secondly, I went to public school, and had ALL of your emotional issues, and then some, so that is a big fat zero.
Thirdly, we homeschooled our kids and they not only were highly socialized (like, geez, where do you get the idea that all homeschooled children are locked in a dungeon somewhere??), but my son was self-taught in computing and is currently making 5x what I earned as a Senior Research Engineer with 8 years of college to boot. Go figure.
Fourthly, seems like you have an atrabilious attitude about your life. (That word was the one previous to your winning spelling bee word, "plethora")
Fifthly, Home Schooling has been a BIG 'thing' in the U.S. since, like, 1985. (prior to that, it was still a 'thing', but politically much more difficult)
Wow. Quite the bold tirade there, Forrest. Let me just say: I’m thrilled to see you’ve based your entire manifesto on the laughably narrow premise that the only reason tech people homeschool is so they can “opt out of average people.” How profound! Certainly a sweeping generalization is the best way to prove your intellectual rigor. You do realize it’s possible to want a more flexible, creative, or personalized education for your children without harboring a burning hatred for “the masses,” right? Homeschooling parents—tech or otherwise—tend to be about as fixated on squashing the rabble as they are on teaching trigonometry to their preschoolers. (Hint: not so much.)
But do go on. I’m sure your questionable recollections of “Creation vs Evolution: The West of the Story” are absolutely pivotal to understanding modern homeschooling trends. And your oh-so-scandalous time as a Spelling Bee champ? Clearly the apex of human achievement, and apparently the root of your assumption that everyone else is forging the same tortured path to homeschool weirdness. News flash: not everyone is frantically shielding their kids from commoners or worshipping 7-day creation timelines. Some of us—brace yourself—just want a better system than “sit, memorize, regurgitate, repeat.” But hey, keep telling yourself it’s all about a legion of socially inept techies cackling in their bunkers, teaching their future geniuses to sneer at the peasants. Whatever helps you sleep at night, I guess.
This is the most ChatGPT reply I've read in awhile.
Wow, your response was sarcastic enough that it actually sounds like it was written by a homeschooler. (I was also homeschooled)
Obviously AI generated reply.
Having watched my wife wrangle her class of 3-5yo who were at home, doing 'school' (over MS Teams) during COVID I'm a little surprised that there's not some kind of (tech enabled) platform emerged to provide a hybrid of old skool and home school.
I'm also depressingly sure that the leadership vacuums we see in tech (and all over the place elsewhere) track back to kids being told to sit down, shut up, and do as they're told. The present school system seems well adapted to the needs of 19th century factory owners, but pretty poorly aligned to today's world and work.
The interest in homeschooling goes beyond tech workers. It’s a broader trend that is accelerating given the disruption that COVID brought schools a few years ago.
Education itself is needing a rethink given how technology has evolved, just like all institutions and industries. Remember traditional American Public schools (primary and secondary) are just a version of the British system that dates back about 200 years. What underpins the system is uniformity of knowledge and memorizing a static group of facts and rules. While that approach served many generations, it’s unclear how it functions or prepares students in 2025. What is the value of memorizing facts when search engines that are far more accurate and always in hand?
Will the public school system be able to reinvent itself over the next 10-20 years? Not sure, but I hope that we provide the investment needed given that we have 70 million children of school age in the US. If not, homeschooling is one alternative model for families that I’d expect to see continue to grow. It’s not immune to the change dynamics that are impacting the rest of society.
Agree public school is in need of a rethink, but change is hard. Especially since teachers are pretty much isolated in their classrooms. No im not bashing teachers I think they are hero’s with a very difficult job. Try teaching 20-30 kids of different abilities and interests the same thing in a 45 minute period.
I went for my Masters in Math Education, wants to teach Computer Science but you couldn’t get certified in that. My one professor was Robert Davis who started one of the main new math programs (teaching kids how to create math for themselves rather than how to calculate) in the late 50’s/60’s. He went from teaching math at MIT to helping teachers and kids taking “remedial” math classes.
He was amazing!!! One reason was he had a deep understanding of Mathematics and the underlying principles. I asked why did the program not take off. The response I got was, that even if all the people who graduated with a degree in math went to teach there wouldn’t be enough math teachers.
Waffle much?
Anyhow, it's simple. Tech people, which you think are intelligent but are usually behind the social curve big time, are realizing public schools are garbage. They teach garbage in public schools. Especially in California. 64 gender garbage... The religion of communism.
I appreciate any writing that mentions both _The Power Broker_ and Bloom's 2-sigma problem!
I think a lot these days of Ivan Illych's "Tools for Conviviality"[0] and "Deschooling Society"[1].
He articulates an idea of skills-based 'learning webs', where the people with the skill make themselves discoverable to those that might want that skill.
Learning ensues.
I hope my kid gets to learn lots, when still a kid, but I also hope they are able to keep some of the best parts of that time alive into adulthood. Thus, I don't want to trample to "learning experience" with the high degree of coercion and control that I happened to experience as a kid being homeschooled, and I know many others experience in public schools.
[0]: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/253076.Tools_for_Conviviality
[1] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/223403.Deschooling_Society
Opt out of being around average people, or being in an average education system? I live in an affluent area and our schools are well resourced, but by and large the parents complain about the quality of education.
It's not that teachers are bad, but we certainly have a high rate of turnover and job dissatisfaction. I think the larger issue is the curriculum itself. It teaches to a test and targets the metrics that make a school seem good on paper. Test Scores: 92nd percentile; College Readiness: 72nd percentile.
It perplexes me that parents opt to either send their kids to private school or opt for homeschooling. The folks I've talked to cite two reasons. First issues with the school administration. Second the volume of busy, inconsequential work in public school. For homeschoolers particularly, the DIY decision is more of a time hack than anything.
If you can hit all the education marks demanded by the state without the busy work, you've freed up an enormous amount of time for learning other things or other activities.
Yeah, I really was going for not having to deal with average people when I chose to pull mourchild out of public school. The inability of the school to do anything about bullying of our neuro-diverse child, which is losing all confidence and was expressing suicidal thoughts because of the bullying was never a problem for us.
I saw this linked on Hacker News. Thanks for sharing your story and your outlook! Strange seeing just how polarized this is in the comments though.
I get that 'traditional' education was focused to get the population just enough skill to work in factories and outside of the family land. I agree that the system should be updated for the current conditions that demand more than that.
I believe that school isn't just about learning to memorize facts and that socialization plays a large role. AI and search engine culture don't provide real knowledge because learning is more about making associations and familiarizing students with what is possible.
I'm skeptical that parents that aren't trained educators can do a better job than professionals. Also there is a toll on one partner that needs to take on the role of full-time teacher in addition to a myriad of other parenting tasks.
The Bureau of Labor Statistics reports that in 2023 married couples have a 49.7% rate of both members working. I can't generalize that every one of those marriages NEEDS to have both members working but even if it's one in two that means that 25% of the population can't afford to do home schooling.
So, while home schooling may work in some cases it still doesn't provide a solution to to a significant part of the population. Some parents didn't sign up to be teachers (or aren't suited to it) and it's a huge duplication of effort that is already provided by existing schools.
I get that it might work in your family and that good outcomes are possible but on the whole we are be better off with a tax funded public system.
https://www.bls.gov/news.release/famee.nr0.htm
We've been considering homeschooling. My concerns are primarily ideological. The lightbulb moment for me was bookstore day at my kids day care (he was 3 at the time). As I waited for him go get ready, I took a look at the books for sale.
> 90% were driving a political message (I actually counted). That was the moment that I realized how pervasive the ideological message was being driven and I live in a very red state.
Now I don't ostensibly have objections to the messages themselves. People can believe what they want. However, I have an allergic reaction to other pushing their opinions into my innocent children's heads. A message that is confirmed to be being delivered at scale.
Childhood is a time for elemental and universal themes. Stories about adventure and discovery that focus on the core virtues (honesty, temperance, justice, enginuity, and fair play). These are the concepts that children should focus on. Not very specific messages often proposing self-destructive messages (like humans are bad because they are runing the earth). Children are innocent of the wider political conflict and we should endeavor to preserve that innocence as long as possible.
That day, I became suspicious of the educational system and the more I've learned since, the more I've become biased against the status quo. There does need to be a rethink and some accountability.
I had to look up what straw manning means. The points you made are all valid. We've tried both approaches and seen the good and bad sides of each. Ultimately, I think the time and love my wife has put into our children is probably the most significant factor.
Interesting thoughts. As someone who was homeschooled, I can attest to the struggles of being post-homeschooled. But even so, we have decided to homeschool our 3 kiddos and are loving it! 😀
1. Classrooms don't run at the average person's speed. They run at the speed of the *group*, which is (a) set by maybe the 25th percentile, and (b) would be slower than one-on-one speed even if everybody were exactly "average", just because groups inherently go slower than individuals.
2. I went to regular schools. I wasn't even allowed to skip grades, quite explicitly because my parents wanted me to "socalize within my age group and learn to relate to the average person". That meant that everybody around me, except maybe in certain accelerated programs, seemed like a complete idiot [on edit: and I was acutely aware that I was being bored out of my mind because of their speed limitations]. Which was really alienating. I ended up with pretty much the personality type you describe for yourself, plus a *really serious, blatant, open* contempt for the average person that took a decade or two to *mostly* shed. Familiarity breeds contempt, or something.
3. My kid went to regular schools; she needed the structure. It was best for *her*. *I* would have been better off locked in a library alone. Which was more or less what I sought out when I wasn't in school. In only a handful of courses did schools teach me anything I couldn't have learned faster and better on my own... and in fact I knew the other stuff before they started trying to teach it. Had I homeschooled my kid, I could have taught her the stuff that *did* benefit from interactive teaching both faster and more deeply than schools were able to teach it to *me* . Moral: *people vary*.
4. Who cares about changing the world? It's more about not being stuck in an environment full of pointless busy work.
Literally lol’d at “…undoubtedly above-average kids.” Reminds me of Lake Wobegon from A Prairie Home Companion where all the children are above average.
We homeschooled our 4 kids. One through 12 grade the other three to 9th grade then to school. My wife brought up the idea and since I was always bored in school I thought why not. There are many ways to homeschool (we took the mostly unschooled approach letting kids follow their own interest and using those as learning vehicles) and many reasons to homeschool. Our kids have turned out fine. Besides all going to college and doing well, one other benefit is they grew up together and have strong bonds (not that that can’t happen if your kids go to school and I’m probably biased , but they seem to have better relationships). They also had to teach each other, which helps a lot in learning.
Other BIG benefit is you can go on vacation when rates are lower and places like Disney are less crowded).
Biggest questions we got, was how do you make sure they socialize? I’d respond by saying “ Yeah, that’s a problem. They have too many group activities with homeschooled and non-homeschooled kids.” They all seem to socialize well annd have friends, even my introverted son.
It’s a personal choice and many possible reasons for doing it (some good some not so good). It’s also is NOT easy and a lot of work.