THANK YOU!!

I'd strongly disagree with this. Since becoming serious about my faith as a 15 year old from a non-christian background, my life and my friend group has gotten progressively better. I had an existential crisis that helped bring me to faith - basically what is the point of anything if there's nothing beyond this world of matter? I've not had one since, as I don't believe this world of matter is all there is.

Yeah... Don't read philosophy. Don't seek truth.

And if you do, you better have a new game plan for happiness and your friend group.

How about the truth that most communities are built around some kind of nonsense, and maybe you can deal with a bit of nonsense to enjoy the benefits of community?

I can't think of a way to feel more hollow like the OP describes. Not making any claims or suggestions for others just pointing out how different that would make me feel compared to the suggestion. Different strokes for different folks apparently.

Having spent several years unexpectedly alone after a big breakup in my mid twenties, I'd also highly recommend getting involved in a church, even if it's just to serve others in some practical way organized by the church. Most churches have plenty of need in "care" ministries like bringing meals (and conversation) to people who are homebound, or in the hospital. One cool thing our church does is organize volunteers to help with teaching English as a second language to refugees living in our community.

Do enough of these kinds of things and not only will you connect with those you serve, but also with those serving others out of love. These are good people to be connected to, especially since you'll become more like them over time.

Absolutely. I have one friend who also goes out and does stuff on his own. Not things organized by the church we attend. He volunteers at a soup kitchen every Sunday. Honestly there are so many things you can do to help others. I find this is the best way to get out of the self pity loneliness loop. Help others and make yourself a benefit to society. It gives us purpose and you gain more than you give typically.

100%. I never was excited about having a kid but it's totally amazing to be helping a little human that you love to figure out the world and grow into a good person.

People can obviously make the opposite choice, but I'd encourage anyone that's never been around good little kids as an adult, to find a way to be around them in a helpful or fun role for a while. Volunteer at a youth group, sports camp, coding class, whatever. Or just be an "uncle" to some of your friends' kids. My volunteering at a church youth group in my early 20's probably gave me the nudge I needed.

I coached a sports team for 6-10 year olds during the summers as a college student and agree that there are some incredible kids who are a joy to mentor and be around.

But probably my biggest concern with having kids of my own is that you can't really choose their personalities. Even the best parents can end up with kids who are frankly much less enjoyable to be around.

This is absolutely not our experience, but we've been intentional about joining communities / activities that involve lots of in-person time together. Church is a huge one (especially joining small groups / service groups), but we also do 4H (they have them in urban areas too!), and my wife started an educational co-op with cool field trips, and we organize neighborhood events like caroling at retirement homes, a pre trick or treating party, and a New Year's party for kids.

Community isn't the default that everyone's forced into anymore, but if you are intentional about it, you'll find lots of other people are feeling the same way and are happy to join in.

Same boat, with 4 kids between church and co-op we barely have enough time for the amount of friends we have. Finding a good church might be a challenge for people but it’s worth the time and research, we just moved to be closer to a good one.

There are in fact neighborhood kids. It only takes a couple of families deciding to restrict phones and video games and support their kids in spending real time together. We’ve done this in our neighborhood and it’s great. It just has to be intentional now, where it was the default before all these screens.

What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?

Maybe it's:

  - the terrible educational state of the school system?

  - the fact that device and social media addiction is a prevalent and growing problem that they don't want their kids brains rotted by?

  - they want to provide their kids an education based on experiential and project based learning rather than filling out worksheets? 

  - they don't want their kids to be forced to wait for the slowest / least interested kids in class to catch up before moving on to more challenging material?

I’m sure these motivations do play out in some circles. However, every single homeschooler I know personally, and I know quite a few, does so because they want their children to have a very specific kind of religious education. Often the way this plays out is that they homeschool for a while, transition to a denominational school, and then depending on the family they may stay there or make a second transition to public school around 9th grade.

I think this tendency is heavily dependent on where you live. We have great public schools that will track advanced children aggressively if the parents push for it, so the motivations you list are unusual in my area.

Religion is definitely a big motivator. My perception though is other motivations have been on the increase, especially since the pandemic. One other group attracted to homeschooling is the hippie-type who thinks school is some kind of diabolical machine designed to crush kids' souls. Since the pandemic there's also been a big surge in the "I don't trust vaccines" group (which already had a good deal of overlap with the hippie group).

I have a feeling a really large percentage of homeschooling is about religious separatism and political separatism, and not about academic performance. Yes, you'll hear HN commenters sing the praises of homeschooling because this site is going to be disproportionately represented by the group doing it for actual educational reasons.

Also, we HN commenters typically see the success stories around us at work, not the failure stories. We all know that guy on the QA team who's a genius and credits his success to homeschooling, but we don't know the countless numbers of grown adults who are trapped as housewives who can't get a job because they never learned 5th grade multiplication.

Both were certainly major motivating factors for my parents’ choice to homeschool me in the 90s. Quality of education was a concern too, but it very much took a back seat to the other two.

The overwhelming majority of other homeschooling parents they had contact with also held separatist motivations.

That may be so, especially if you add a sort of "cultural separatism" (a la the hippies I mentioned). An odd thing I see recently too is people who seem to believe they're making various choices for educational reasons, but it's not clear if the education they're moving to is any better. They just do it because they perceive their child as being unhappy or stifled somehow. There seem to be, for instance, more and more parents who believe their kid is unusually smart and should be on some kind of fast track or not have to do certain things, even when there's little objective evidence of the kid's abilities.

Vague "educational reasons" is always the noble-sounding excuse they use, but often if you dig deeper they'll admit it's more about the various forms of separatism.

Sometimes you don't have to dig. A ton of moms in my wife's church group permanently pulled their kids out of public school in recent years, and they will openly admit that it's about keeping their kids away from "those" people, where the definition of "those" runs the gamut.

I don't want the separatism, but I also want the ability to give my kids a decent education. There ought to be some way to determine which is which. Do you have any ideas?

We did the homeschool thing for one year after most kids went back to school after COVID. My wife has underlying medical conditions that made her quite concerned about catching it before the vaccine rollout. We did a few of the homeschool group organized field trips and I got to briefly meet some of the parents. Overall I can't say much about the kids, they seemed fine. The parents were friendly, but when I asked about the curriculum they almost invariably suggested PragerU material, which makes me concerned for their children's future.

Not sure why you're being down voted. I'm sure there are some folks homeschooling because of things like racism, but that has always existed just like evangelical christians have always been big into homeschooling.

If there is a big uptake, it's likely due to the ever present threat of school shootings coupled with all the things you said above. I have to teach my kid a lot outside of school and they go to what is considered a good one. The only reason I send them is my spouse and I work and my kid needs to learn social skills. If I won the lottery, I'd homeschool them myself and do it for a few other families as well so that my kid can get the social aspect too.

It's insightful how they said segregation and financial means and you immediately went to racism.

There is certainly some level of segregating the children from families who have the means to "dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children" and children from families that don't have those means.

You can't use the word segregation wrt people and then pretend it's surprising or unreasonable when someone assumes you're talking about racism.

They used the phrase "If you can afford it." The charitable assumption would have been that the segregation was tied to income.

I never said it was surprising or unreasonable, I said it was insightful. Your comment is further digging in on that point.

> What leads you to believe the reason parents are willing to dedicate huge amounts of their time and money to homeschool their children is racism?

A lot of the people I know who do homeschool (the extreme majority of families I know) have openly said the reasons why they're choosing to homeschool is because they don't want their kids exposed to the other "cultures" in their area whether that be immigrants, other religions, or LGBT people.

One family I know was thinking about pulling their kids out of public school because the choir was going to sing "Dreidel, Dreidel, Dreidel" and was worried this was indoctrinating their child into another religion. Forget the fact the rest of that holiday choir event was filled with Christian holiday tunes and what that means for the non-Christians that have a right to go to the school, that wasn't a concern at all.

Not all families, I agree. I've known a few outliers who actually are exceptional teachers and think they'll do a better job teaching the kids than the local schools (and they're probably right). But they're definitely the outliers around me. Most that I've personally known are not like that, and rely on just giving their kids workbooks with extreme religious bent to figure things out on their own.

> they don't want their kids exposed to the other "cultures" in their area whether that be immigrants, other religions, or LGBT people.

Culture is distinct from race. Some cultures advocate for the destruction of others. Some don't.

I agree its not always "racism", but ultimately the main reason is still largely the same. They don't think their kids should mingle with the "others". Its the exact same logic of black school segregation during Jim Crow.

Sometimes for good reason. Observe what happened to people who tried to approach Sentinel island. That may seem extreme, but it's not my point. It's is that cultures are different and some are detrimental to the people of some other culture's wellbeing.

I saw a study a while back - don't have the link handy - that while homeschooled kids of all ethnicities showed improved education outcomes compared to their public-school counterparts, African American kids improved the most. Not really surprising if they would otherwise be going to the worst schools!

Are they going to spend huge amounts of time & money?

I'd be willing to bet that we'll hear some stories about how they outsourced the effort to AI

Some of my favorites recently for intellectually engaging Christian thinking are "The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God" podcast (first season is the best), and the book "Reasonable Faith" by William Lane Craig.

Interesting looking book, but it seems a bit too meta for what I'm looking for. I'm not really looking for an argument for Christianity, but rather arguments from Christianity on modernity. Or did I not understand the role of that book?

If you're interested in some of the classic intellectual / philosophical arguments for faith (albeit from a Christian perspective) you should check out "Reasonable Faith" by William Lane Craig.

I'm a non-believer, but I do think that is one of the best apologetic books that are out there. It's a bit of a tome and does get a bit slow at points, but I appreciate his attempt at depth and breadth and one can't do that without writing a pretty damn big book. I think everyone should read it (along with books from the other side as well, especially Richard Dawkins (for biology and some philosophy), Bart Ehrman (for Biblical scholarship and some philosophy), Robert Sapolsky (for Neurology/Neuroscience), Lawrence Krauss (Physics), and Robert Wright).

I do wish Craig had reframed from the personal shots he takes at various atheist/agnostic writers (which clearly cross into ad hominem at many points) but he is by far the most interesting defender of faith out there (IMHO). In his defense I think he was playing along with the at times very incendiary approach taken by Dawkin's and many other "new atheists" so it's not like he started the brawl :-). I think he's way too confident in Anselm's Ontological argument, but he has clearly studied it a whole lot more than me so I don't hold a strong conviction there.

HN has never made me cry before, but here I am crying. This is really a wonderful article and discussion. Makes me appreciate this community even more.