Homeschooling: Last Week Tonight with John Oliver (HBO)
Why Hacker News recommends it
HN commenters use it as a researched, eye-opening reference whenever homeschooling oversight comes up.
What it is
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.
Recommended by 3 HN commenters across 2 different months, 2023 to 2025.
What Hacker News said
Recommends nickthegreek · 2023-10 · on “Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education”
John Oliver did a great segment on the issues with home schooling in the modern age a few weeks ago. [this video]
Recommends rbobby · 2023-12 · on “Why Is the Press Attacking Home Schoolers?”
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.
Recommends silverbax88 · 2023-12 · on “Why Is the Press Attacking Home Schoolers?”
Here's your chance to get up to speed -> John Oliver breaking it down in a lot more researched detail: [this video]
Cites FireBeyond · 2023-10 · on “Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education”
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 bl
Cites Justsignedup · 2023-10 · on “Home schooling's rise from fringe to fastest-growing form of education”
Homeschooling _can_ work. But the likelihood of it working well is pretty low. You literally have a teacher wife who is homeschooling the kids. For most people homeschooling = not schooling. Very heavily used by the hassidic community here in nyc to prevent girls from having any education. I linked to [this video] as a top level post, but just to give you some ideas. This is John Oliver's take on it.
Cites ethbr1 · 2025-10 · on “Today is when the Amazon brain drain sent AWS down the spout”
> 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