Having been roomates with friends who were unschooled, it definitely made later life much more challenging. College was a lot of remedial mathematics catch-up, and the way they engaged with employers, potential partners and such was much different than most people.

Quality public education can serve children much better than unschooling or poorly performing private or public schooling.

Some areas just have very little choice though, the Catholic Schools are shit, the public schools are severely underfunded and decrepit, and unschooling starts to look reasonable, despite how it seems to have stunted my friends :(

> the Catholic Schools are shit

Could you elaborate on this?

In many parts of the US, the most accessible (i.e. not as expensive) private schools are Catholic schools, dating back to a boom of Catholic immigrants who felt (and were sometimes right) that existing schools (public and private) were anti-Catholic. There are non-religious private schools in the US, but Catholic schools are everywhere.

Modern US Catholicism has, for a range of reasons, become very politically conservative (particularly in comparison to the Catholicism elsewhere in the Americas), and because Catholic schools are generally attended by the children of practicing Catholic parents whose conservative views shape their view of schooling, these private schools reflect those political views. As a result, if you aren't Catholic, many Catholic private schools are going to look like political and religious indoctrination.

I disagree, my problem with Catholic Schools is due to poor experience with the Jesuit ones I attended, they just were not staffing quality teachers (not surprising when they pay teachers $10k a year less than public schools) and each Archdiocese does things differently.

The Seattle Archdiocese has created a haven for spreading diseases unheard of in public schools by not encouraging or requiring vaccination of students. The other nearby archdiocese do not permit unvaccinated students to attend, and haven't had repeated outbreaks of once banished diseases.

BYU is a great place if you want an oxy addiction.

> and the way they engaged with employers, potential partners and such was much different than most people

Could you elaborate on this a bit? I can imagine what might be different, but I'm curious what it was like in reality.

You might as well just say "quality" <educational type> and leave it at that. Then crack open Zen and the Art of Motorcycle and try to figure out what quality means.

I'd be curious how large your sample size of unschooled friends was and what sort of longitudinal observations you had on their whole lives.

How do you weigh that against the risk of public school, peer pressure, bullying, drug & sex culture, and a middling career as a corporate drone?

I don’t think it’s as cut and dried as you make it out to be. There are risks on both paths. All kids are unique and what works for one may not work for another.

I’m going to try to go the unschooling route, and see how it goes.

> peer pressure, bullying, drug & sex culture, and a middling career as a corporate drone?

Unschooling doesn’t make those disappear. I knew plenty of homeschooled kids that had sex and kids before 18, who drank and did drugs, and I’m pretty sure all of them are in middling careers as corporate drones.

While that is true, and there are always exceptions to the rule, being older and more mature when you’re exposed to those things definitely helps.

So many of these kids are on-line, like, a lot… there is no world where they are any more or less mature when they encounter these things.

Unschooling is how you become a grandma at 36 like congressperson boebert.

I don't think this will be a popular opinion, but IMHO learning how to deal with those things is a valuable thing that schooling provides.

There will be plenty of peer pressure, bullying, drug and sex culture in their adult life, unless they are going straight from unschooling to off-grid subsistence farming.

Weird as it sounds, the earlier you come in contact with many human pathologies the better.

You might not want to be a corporate drone, being socialized differently to almost everyone is just another extreme.

Socializing is fine, but school just seems about the worst possible expression of it.

Depends. Out of five schools I went to, one was crap. Schools also cycle between getting core groups of people who care, becoming good, getting reputation for being good and attracting people who don't care and stopping being good.

Still, I'd say there's way more consistency between schools than between unorthodox parents.

Bullying is _much_ worse in school than in your later life in my experience. Yes, you can still get terrible people that gang up on someone in an office, but it's much less common than in school.

Most people who are behaving like sociopaths in middle school appear to grow out of it and lead normal lives.

These kinds of arguments come up a lot when it comes to homeschooling. But would anyone follow the same logic when picking a school? There are certainly nice schools that don't have too many of these problems. Are these bad choices then? Should one find the most ghetto public school? If your country has only nice schools, how about sending your kids to a rougher country?

The school should match your future life. If you expect your kids to be sheltered for the rest of their lives, go ahead and homeschool.

Let's not forget the potentially large offsetting negative impacts from schooling! Violence, abusive peers and teachers, disinterested teachers and systems leading to wasted years and loss for love of learning, I could go on. And I don't think you mean "externalities" though you might.

> ...loss for love of learning...

I'm still quite irritated, decades later, that the end result of my high school Honors English program was to take entire groups of people who clearly loved reading, and teach them to hate books. I kept in touch with a range of them, and almost none of us read a book for fun, for a decade after high school - because HS Honors English taught us that we couldn't properly understand a book unless we sliced it into tiny pieces, analyzed all the literary metaphors, and generally we weren't any good at that anyway, only the English Teacher could properly appreciate the book. And don't you dare read ahead of the assigned section!

I don't remember the plots of stuff I read, but I remember that grass was green to symbolize new life, rebirth, hope, etc. And I learned to bullshit.

It was miserable. And after four years, nobody touched books again outside requirements. It was awful.

I remember being friends with a playwright in college. This one play we basically came up with over a few beers and laughs. It was an instant classic and did well in the theater.

So many people analyses the hell out of it. I’ll never forget after the first show when someone asked afterwords, “I love how X is such a metaphor for Y.” My friend just stared at them and said, “it isn’t a metaphor for anything, it’s just an obvious consequence of betraying your friends.”

I HATE that crap. Just enjoy it for what is, entertainment.

I asked one of my English teachers, after a particularly (IMO) tortured analysis of something about people like Hemmingway who say things like, "I sit down with a typewriter, bottle of whiskey, and tell stories."

Her response was, "Oh, well, that's why they're great writers - they do all this without even having to think about it!"

I had a high school teacher who did that with Shakespeare. More's the pity. Fortunately, it didn't decrease the enjoyment and entertainment I get from reading for pleasure, just the books that were part of the curriculum.

Don't forget the parents who are not usually qualified to teach and will lie to kids to make them believe the same thing as them.

Exactly, a massive aspect of public / traditional schooling is anti-socialization.

There's a lot of athletics but where are the hard sciences, the literature, math, etc?

There’s a plugin for those now