Physicist Amok

I happened across this post on homeschooling. Go, watch the video and be disturbed. I can’t be bothered.

I was homeschooled from the eighth grade until I went off to college, and it’s people like this who made it very uncomfortable for me. I come from way back in rural Virginia where most of the homeschoolers were like this.

On the other hand, my parents read classics at Cambridge, my father did further graduate work in structural engineering. They gave me a wonderful education: Latin, Greek, French, Italian, history, music, mathematics, physics, chemistry (we had a friend who was a chemistry professor at UNC Chapel Hill who oversaw that one). I went off to college, did the physics BS in about a year and a half, spent the next year doing almost all the requirements for a masters in math (I didn’t want to do abstract algebra, which I now regret), and then spent a year studying under a theorist who had passed Landau’s theoretical minimum, before wandering off to do my PhD here at the Rockefeller University.

The public schools where I was were simply incapable of imparting anything like this. Last time I checked they didn’t even offer calculus, algebra was still taught by the cheerleading coach, and the only foreign language was Spanish.

Many people claim that going to school is important for socialization. This is backwards. My classmates were stupid, brutish, and cruel. It took me years to recover socially, and only because I spent those years in the company of well adjusted, tolerant people.

Let me end with a quote from Feynman:

“I think, however, that there isn’t any solution to this problem of education other than to realize that the best teaching can be done only when there is a direct individual relationship between a student and a good teacher — a situation in which the student discusses ideas, thinks about the things, and talks about the things. It is impossible to learn very much by simply sitting in a lecture, or even by simply doing the problems that are assigned. But in our modern times we have so many students to teach that we have to try to find some substitute for the ideal. Perhaps my lectures can make some contribution. Perhaps in some small place where there are individual teachers and students, they may get some inspiration or some ideas from the lectures. Perhaps they will have fun thinking them through — or going on to develop some of the ideas further.”