No surprise hearing this & no disagreement (derogatory). Kids are super easy to corner into particular domineereed ways.

Being polite & respectful is a skill that's good to have for many reasons. Sure!

But generally it feels like a huge disadvantage to me, bordering abuse, to see kids that accept authority as such. Here on Hacker News I think especially the long old idea of "Question Authority" should be strong. Adults don't always earn their authority, and especially in home-schooled environments I think kids are super abused into forced arch forms of "respect" and behavior that aren't genuine, aren't earned, and which are detrimental to the human spirit that we ought be engendering.

Reciprocally sure there are a lot of bad behaviors kids can pick up too. It just seems so convenient and false to me to just suppress the inconvenient signals, to deny having to form judgement. To see adults doing that feels crazy beyond measure. Judgement & sense must be earned.

You're just outsourcing the authority you accept to some other group of adults and institutions. They don't have some special moral high ground that makes them better than a child's own parents and non-school social circle. If you care about your kids and have self confidence in your own character, why wouldn't you hold yourself up over strangers?

If the child sees nothing but their parents they have no parallax view to assess and learn for themselves. At a public school they will experience many adult teachers & see which they respect for which reasons. Not respecting your teachers but having to get along anyway is also a thing. It just seems horrific to restrict a child to a single relationship that the parents have such control over. Monstrous.

Judgment and sense are not earned... they are taught. Tell me how teachers demand any less than total respect from domineered children? Maybe Pink Floyd had no basis for Another Brick In The Wall? I would ask who is more qualified than their parents to instill in their children judgement and sense? You might argue that there are morally bankrupt parents but I would counter that there are morally bankrupt teachers and a parent has more incentive to raise their child than a stranger does.

> I would ask who is more qualified than their parents to instill in their children judgement and sense?

That largely depends on the parents. Many are _wildly_ unfit for this.

Absolutely agreed. There is likely a much higher proportion of unfit parents vs unfit teachers (though the latter category is a non zero number). There is also an economic element to this scenario. My spouse can stay home with the kids while I go to work, this is not at all common in our modern day and age. There are tremendous sacrifices that a family must make to do this and I think that anyone wanting to homeschool because it will be 'easier' is setting themselves up for hurt. Much like the folks who get into programming because the pay is good... It won't be what you think.

Even if the parents are quite good, I think most humans require a wide variety of inputs and relationships to form their judgement and sense around. No family is capable of providing the broad range of experiences required to form good judgement and sense: that requires some unconstrained experience with the world, seeing much more than what a curated family experience can make happen.

I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization. They'll have to deal with those folks when they hit the real world too.

I.e. disassociating from those people? Isn’t that what homeschooling does inherently? It’s more likely that kids will pick up bad behaviors than they will learn to “deal with” those kinds of people.

Hopefully they learn how to deal with them instead of picking up their communication style.

> I've always thought that learning how to deal with people who are not as polite, and even kids that are downright scary, is an important aspect of socialization.

It is, but do we have any studies showing how well school kids are at this? From what I've seen, most kids in school do not learn those skills.