Show HN: Great Books Homeschool beta program (opens in new tab)

>> What is it about teaching that makes people with no training think they can do better than trained professionals?

Teaching one or two students whose home situation supports you 100% is a much much less daunting proposition than trying to teach a class of 30 kids (or several such classes).

The idea that teaching things to your own children (which all humans have done forever) requires specialized training and credentials seems silly. But again, that's a very different job than being a school teacher, I think.

First: If you need help, get help. If you can't do it, stop trying to do it.

Second: There are communities (homeschool co-ops and such) that can help.

Third, though: Do not underestimate yourself. You know a lot of physics for a third-grader. You can teach that, even if you have to read the textbook right beside the student. (You may not be able to by high school, though.) And you have a great advantage. One of the key things in teaching is classroom size. The difference between a classroom of 30 and an classroom of 4 is massive.

Because the experience public school provides is an exceptionally low bar considering class sizes/ratios, commuting to and from school, etc. Also, we can pour resources into our kids public schools can’t or won’t. The data also shows homeschool outcomes to be at parity or superior to public school outcomes. We only have two kids though, and my partner is a stay at home parent. We also rely on Modulo, among other resources, for structuring education delivery.

https://www.eurekalert.org/news-releases/522078

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33204988

https://www.modulo.app/homeschool

Your question quickly progressed from polite inquiry to decidedly confrontational and personal. I kind of loved it. :) I'm sorry about what happened to your sister's disabled kids.

The general reason parents can confidently provide primary education is that a) good educational materials are easy to research and acquire, b) the benefit of education closely tailored to a child's strengths and weaknesses meets or exceeds the benefit of institutional pedagogical theory and classroom management skills.

In secondary education years, access to material and closely meeting needs still factors, but the parents' operating principle is increasingly about pulling in the best sources available. That often means community college or part-time high school classes.

There are also a lot of homeschool co-ops, pods, and other resource and skill-sharing arrangements. Lots of variety.

All your examples of authority figures are trained to be effective over a high volume of lower trust interactions with the general population, relying on professional incentives to perform. They are needed but they're most effective when complementing and backing up parents who cannot for whatever reason provide care, correction and education at home.

I suppose part of the consideration would be seeing how poorly so many public schools fare and how test scores continue to fall. And now, many schools don't even have textbooks because everything is digital. Even though we have studies showing how that has a negative impact on kids learning.

Is it the solution? I dunno, but public schools are getting worse by the year so I understand people trying something different.

Part of it is the statistics. I don't fault people for deciding to homeschool at this point as long as they make sure other needs besides education are addressed, because the data are there and it doesn't show conclusively that homeschooling is worse, though it doesn't show it's better either. If it was much worse on average, that would show. Also a common pitfall is homeschooling only out of protectiveness. That alone isn't a very good reason to homeschool - at least not before other options including going to another school or perhaps even moving are exhausted. Protectiveness can be the start of researching about homeschooling but people should have more reasons homeschooling is likely to work well for them other than just that it's safer before actually starting to homeschool IMO.

> What makes parents with no specialized training think they can do better than the public school system?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rAzsJt1Q7Jc

> What is it about teaching that makes people with no training think they can do better than trained professionals?

My guess is Dunning-Kruger effect and studies highlighting academic benefits from homeschooling.

This feels less like an sincere question for OP than it does an uninformed attack on homeschooling in general. You start with a phrase OP used to describe their target audience, imply that there is no such homeschool family, and then tangent off into unrelated attacks that show a strong lack of nuance.

Yes, there are families that homeschool for the wrong reasons. But there are plenty of others (as your own cited stats show) who choose to homeschool because the public education system kinda sucks. Those families (my own included) are very conscientious about addressing the known weaknesses of homeschooling through co-ops and other tools.

Don't dismiss too easily the real needs to homeschool for some people.

I have a friend whose child had some learning disability. The school district's "solution" was to put them in the disabled class with an overwhelmed teacher and call it a day. Homeschooling allowed the parent to ensure their child had a full education at a pace the child could handle.

Another friend had a gifted child who was pretty bored. Homeschooling let the child plow through the material at a more challenging pace and then continue to challenge themselves with material no high school would have taught.

Homeschooling is an alternative that some people pretty much have to take for their children's sake. Homeschooling is harder for the parents than regular schooling and is not a decision taken lightly.

> and no social connection

I've seen great benefits come out of home schooling co-ops. You get the ability to have your child learn at their pace and study subjects they find interesting (to a certain extent, obviously), the added benefit of a little less labor on the part of individual parents, and a social group of kiddos that are following a similar path.

"Mostly" is not everyone, and frankly I tend to forget the religious weirdos even exist. All the homeschooling families I knew were doing it because the local schools sucked; even those with "gifted and talented" programs couldn't keep up.

If this scratches an itch for some homeschoolers, it's valid and useful. There will always be others for whom it is not interesting, but so what?

Thanks, this is helpful to hear. It's interesting that one of the main pieces of feedback we get is about pricing. Some people say that it is overpriced, others that we should be charging more.

To answer your question, we have quite a bit of original content and functionality beyond the book lists and transcripts. And based on my experience assembling customized homeschooling curricula for my kids, the book curation in itself is a major value add. If it saves the parent just a few hours of research time, or connects the student with just a few resources beyond what parents could find on their own, it would be worth the cost for many families.

The main differentiator in a homeschooling curriculum is what the student will spend his/her time doing and reading, and optimizing this seems like it would be worth paying for a service rather than relying on free book lists from the internet. That's our hypothesis, anyway.

I looked for a sample unit and couldn't find one. Does indeed seem expensive, even if it's pretty good by the standards of such things.

There's also the famous Harvard Classics, or the 5-Foot Shelf, sold as a kind of primary-sources curriculum, complete with a reading plan:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harvard_Classics

A Great List of Great Book Lists:

http://sonic.net/~rteeter/greatbks.html

[EDIT] On this:

> Also, almost all of these books are old enough that their copyrights have expired so you can download them for free from the Gutenberg e-library: https://gutenberg.org/

I'd caution readers to also evaluate in-copyright editions, especially in the case of works in translation. Used books are cheap and it's worth getting the best possible translation (however one chooses to evaluate that) if one is going to spend hours with it.

And:

> One feature I've wished for is some way to format these free books and make them more reader-friendly. That would save future readers time to do it themselves. I would pay for something like that.

Standard Ebooks?

https://standardebooks.org

Not comprehensive, but they've got a lot.

There is also a set of study guides that go with the old Britannica Great Books set called "The Great Ideas Program"! Somewhat hard to find nowadays though.

Thanks for this detailed feedback!

Re introducing reading separately from writing, this is recommended in The Well-Trained Mind and A Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading and worked well with my two sons. Both learned to read fluently at age four, but needed a couple years beyond that to develop the fine motor skills and attention span needed to form letters well. That said, many kids are ready to write at an earlier age and we try to make it easy for parents to edit the default curriculum and do things like move the first-grade writing component to kindergarten. The main point is that learning to read doesn't need to be coupled with writing.

The typo and awkward phrasing you mentioned are fixed now. :)

> I find this strange. I have a lot of penmanship homework from my two years (!!) of kindergarten and first grade.

I'll have to see if I can find the studies, but a lot of researchers have been finding that rushing to introduce kids to things doesn't make a great impact and in fact sometimes holds them back from lifetime achievement. (This does not apply to true prodigies.) Off the top of my head, some researchers have found that penmanship isn't that useful at an age where fine motor skills still need a lot of development, and the Soviet union found that waiting an extra 2-3 years to introduce children to math resulted in better, faster, more confident math students.

Dog whistle? I don’t follow.

That's a good idea. Maybe we can include some screenshots in the homepage or How It Works page to give visitors a better idea of what it looks like when you create an account and generate curricula.

Yes, this is a secular curriculum. It's intended to address a bit of a market gap in that respect as well.

We actually do include Life of Fred as an optional supplement for elementary grades and an alternative core curriculum for high school. My seven-year-old loves it!

"Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind" is a book without much facts or evidence. Other books by the author would likely be somewhere around. So, not a great book, but more like a story book.

Though I assume they just slapped some book covers on the website in hurry.

Thanks! I am familiar with some of these and a big fan of The Well-Trained Mind.

Our curriculum uses "Great Books" in a broader sense of quality fiction and nonfiction literature, which includes classical Western literature but also lots of modern and non-Western books.