LastWeekTonight
3 HN recommenders · recommended in 3 months, 2023–2025
24:25 · 8M views · Oct 9, 2023
John Oliver's Last Week Tonight segment on homeschooling, focusing on how little regulation exists in many US states. It covers states where a one-time declaration removes children from any oversight.
HN commenters use it as a researched, eye-opening reference whenever homeschooling oversight comes up.
6 comments from Hacker News
John Oliver did an eye opening bit on homeschooling: this video The lack of regulation is concerning. What's truly disturbing is how easily it is for children to fall through the cracks when there are no teachers to report possible abuse. Frightening.
Here's your chance to get up to speed -> John Oliver breaking it down in a lot more researched detail: this video
John Oliver did a great segment on the issues with home schooling in the modern age a few weeks ago. this video
> And yet home-schooled students widely outperform government-schooled students, both during homeschooling and in college GPAs. I'd love to see your citations on that. Because my impression is that, precisely because of the lack of regulation in many states, homeschooling has bimodal outcomes. Some children turn out better (read: those of wealthy, educated parents with extra time to spend on educating) while some children turn out much worse than even the worst public schools (read: kids of religious/political-indoctrination parents and/or ones of limited socioeconomic means/time). At minimum, it seems pretty reasonable to have homeschooled kids take the same milestone tests as public school kids, in order to objectively measure if their teachers are doing the job well. You know, considering (a) it's a decision children aren't empowered to make for themselves, (b) there are a lot of crazy-as-fuck parents out there, and (c) it's something that will define the rest of kids' lives. "Oops, my bad" in the event of poor outcomes won't put Humpty Dumpty back together again. Ref to start: this video
Very much so. Watching the Last Week Tonight segment ( this video ) on this recently, in a startling number of states, a one time declaration that you're homeschooling effectively drops the kids out of the system with zero oversight from that point on. You get things like a Christian family whose "curriculum" for their daughters was: listen to classical music, bible listening 20 minutes/day, handwriting, bible memorization, exercise 15/day (not great so far, but wait for it): clean room 6/week, fold laundry 5/week, clean living room 5/week, clear off bar 6/week, tidy shelves in dining room 3/week, tidy stereo cabinet 2/week, clean brown cupboard in pantry 5/week, clean storeroom 1/week, tidy blue chest, dust piano, clean and vacuum, clean hallway, make bed...