Homeschooling

Educating children at home rather than in an institutional school. The practical argument made for it divides cleanly into three claims, and the sources in this wiki make all three separately.

The claim about institutions. Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Society (1971) is the root text: schooling had become a substitute for learning, and the institution had replaced the activity. John Holt made the case before him, John Taylor Gatto after. The modern version of the argument is that Illich was right and simply early — the internet supplies the resources his model needed, so what is missing is “the cultural permission to use them differently” (@flowidealism).

The claim about pacing. The concrete mechanism most often cited is not better content but the removal of a shared clock. A mastery-gated knowledge graph spanning 3,000 math topics from 4th grade to university level lets a student move at whatever rate they can demonstrate mastery — which is how “a third-grader can complete six years’ worth of math in a single year” (@ninja_maths).

The claim about outcomes. NHERI research is cited for homeschool students scoring 15–25 percentile points higher on standardized tests, with roughly 78% of peer-reviewed studies favouring them, against a homeschooling participation rate of about 7.8% of American children (@markjquann). ⚠️ Treat the first two figures carefully: NHERI is an advocacy organisation and homeschool test-score comparisons carry a severe selection problem, since the families who choose it differ systematically from those who do not. The participation figure is the least contested.

What changed in 2026: the curriculum became writable. The most-engaged item in the corpus on this subject is a father asking Claude to build his daughter an app that reads live keystrokes off the family piano, shows sheet notes and a key view, and ends in a Guitar Hero game with progressively harder songs (@RG_Leachman). Jason Crawford’s reply names the shift: “Parents empowered to create apps for their kids. We’re entering a golden age of custom software” (@jasoncrawford). This is a different argument from the other three — not that home beats school, but that the unit of curriculum has dropped to one child.

The tooling actually named, as distinct from the arguments: Factorio for automation, Kerbal Space Program for aerospace, Turing Complete for electronics and the Zachtronics games for computer science (@eurochallenges) — screen time redirected rather than rationed; and for younger children, Khan Academy Kids, ScratchJr, Starfall, ChessKid, LogicLike and a dozen more (@baba_Omoloro).

Saved tweets

• October 11th, 2026: Today I learned about the… (tweet) — the All Souls College fellowship exam, whose general paper asks single open questions (“Defend ghosting.”, “Does a pope matter?”).
• May 5th, 2020: 1 like = 1 take… (tweet)
• April 19th, 2020: Lol, homeschooled kids get more… (tweet)

Where this appears

• Homeschooling Parents - What is the… (tweet)
• I Spent 20 Years Teaching… (tweet)