Is Home School the Perfect Environment for Learning?

By Scott Morris

Probably, but let me define my terms before explaining my answer. 

First, the term “homeschooling” has been used many different ways but almost always has a connotation similar to 10 year old bag of sour patch kids. So tempting, but so wrong at the same time. 

But there is no other term to use either: home learning (most people just hear “homeschooling), learning at home (is this different?), alternative education (too broad, does this include delinquent kids?) and the list goes on. 

So Homeschooling it is. Homeschooling defines what most parents want to do as a response to a list of grievances against the public system. And while I had no great problems when I went to public school, it didn’t do me any favors either. The inefficiency, the one size fits all, its embroilment in politics, and its constant pressure cooker atmosphere, all create a machine that spits kids out after 12 years with less than basic academic skills, but a mind that has difficulty solving real world problems. 

At first glance, homeschooling doesn't seem to have the solutions either. Last year, the comedian John Oliver explained that homeschooling has a potentially “high ceiling but maybe no floor at all.” Among others he highlighted the questions we need to have answered: no structure to see what kids are learning, isolation from other children, and worst of all no structure to protect the worst parents from abusing their kids far away from the public eye.  

Let’s continue to work on these issues with the most vulnerable while focussing on why homeschooling is probably the best environment we will ever have for kids to succeed and learn at the highest levels. The reason it is so sound is because our brain was built to learn in the family environment. And when we optimize learning to get as close to that original environment, we have the greatest learning for the greatest amount of outcomes. Let me list just three things that seem to be critical for all learning:

Feeling Safe: when our brains, especially as children feel unsafe, we struggle to learn. A perfect example of this is a study that was done a few years ago called the “Candle Problem,” in which two groups of people were asked to solve a problem of attaching a candle to the wall with only a few tools. One group was simply asked to solve the problem, while the other was told they would get a monetary reward if they solve the problem under a time constraint. Just that little pressure on the group with the time constraint caused them to have a great amount of difficulty getting to the solution. Imagine what then could happen to children trying to learn with the constant, unending social and academic pressures of public school. Now to say that somehow the public school is better at keeping our kids more safe than the family doesn’t stand up to the science. Humans have a built in system of hormones and chemicals that cause parents to want to love and protect children, and no amount of social engineering can create that same feeling in the school, despite how many teachers love their students (which I certainly do).

Access to the Best Stuff: Kids need access to the best available people and tools to learn, be creative and problem solve. The human mind has evolved over thousands of years to manipulate its environment and take advantage of what others know and do. Kids learn quickly from adults, but also from their own peers, studies show. When we limit children to old and tired technologies and keep them from adults and others that have knowledge and skills, kids are kept from so many possibilities that come with creative thinking. 

Freedom to Learn: Just look at the catastrophic effects of authoritarianism of the 20th century to see how damaging limiting freedom can be. When humans are free to pursue their interests, something beautiful happens in the brain: we create solutions to problems, we seek understanding of our world, we improve systems around us, and we treat learning as perhaps the greatest human quality. On the other hand, when we are forced, coerced, limited, or abused, the human mind reacts poorly and learning halts.

The Real Reason Homeschool is the Greatest Environment Today: We are now in a different time in all the history of the world. Artificial Intelligences are on the verge of taking on huge amounts of human qualities. It is about to and currently can take on more and more teacher duties. It is now possibleto have personalized education that tailors itself to each one of us. I can pull out my phone right now and train an AI model to know me, my interests, my successes and ask it to provide me with learning best suited to my particular skills and values. And these models are likely to get better and better and becoming the best teachers, never getting frustrated with me, never getting tired, never thinking about anything but my education, and always finding new ways to inspire me.

When we think about the chemical and hormonal advantage that parents have to protect and love their children (again with caveats that we catch the parents that are bad apples) and combine that with the continued advantages of personalized education. 

Some Reasons why it May not be the Best: We can imagine a bad environment for homeschool. Think of the reasons why homeschooling might not help the student and right now reasons abound. Let’s just start with what I mentioned earlier: what are they even learning? Oliver brings up in his monologue that the three top publishers for homeschool curricula have all published works with concerning ideas, such as teaching and illustrating (a truly hilarious image) that men and dinosaurs lived together…in harmony. 

But it gets darker, Oliver says, when we consider that dozens of states have no control over convicted parents from taking their children out of school and then abusing them. This is extremely concerning and calls into question even the possibility of homeschooling as a viable education system. 

But are these things enough to cause us to block all homeschooling from happening. No, just as much as throwing away the hammer though it may cause harm when used improperly.

Let’s put the right programs in place to protect children because we’ve got a lot to do to make homeschool the greatest environment for learning that humans have ever seen.