I own about 15 hectares of agricultural land in SE Asia and recently have given up on our manual battle against weeds and have temporarily opted to go for herbicides.

We are presently planting a new batch of trees and the weeds have grown faster than our farmhands ability to keep up and have strangled our saplings. Hopefully after the trees have matured, the amount of sunlight hitting the ground would reduce and this should in turn reduce the weeds ability to grow.

I am fortunate in that I can support the farming from other income sources, but a typical debt ridden farmer in this region would be completely unable to do so.

But using herbicide makes me a bit sad, from a lush biodiverse field we now have something I would describe as a barren wasteland minus our monocrop.

I wish there was another way.

I'm Homeschooling my kids because schools are inefficient and I owe most of what I use to make a living by participating in open source communities. The post-internet homeschool movement presently is a bit like the free software or homebrew computer movement of the 1980s, just getting started and accessible to the privileged, but we're all building a future where all can participate and finding the right approach.

Children should be free to explore, learn, play, and be productive in things that matter to them.

That sounds great, but when they become 8 years old I can virtually guarantee that "things that matter to them" are going to be video games, YouTube personalities, and whatever version of TikTok/Instagram exists at that time (more for teenagers). The issue isn't "letting them explore", because they will simply go to the easiest dopamine hit available (outside rare exceptions, as most of us "nerds" might've done some programming instead). You can't truly educate children by leaving them to their own devices (though it is still important for them to have significant free time in their lives). That has been true since ancient times. Humans have always known this, which is why we have never done otherwise.

Also for reference, the model I'm using for my family: https://wonderyearsschool.com/

This is why I homeschool my kids. I think as geeks we've solved the problem of learning, look at all the stuff we've built by figuring out how to learn by ourselves. We don't really need schools for this function anymore.

You can't homeschool social skills though.

Humanity was socializing long before public schools existed, and by no means does the present public school system have a monopoly on teaching social skills.

Statistically, home schools produce outstanding educational outcomes compared to public schools on standardized tests, so public education proponents insist that they compensate for this by providing better "socialization". This claim is conveniently difficult to refute with hard data since "socialization" is harder to quantify, but it doesn't prove public schooling produces better socialization outcomes.

To the contrary, homeschooling is so effective at education because it's taylored to a particular student's developmental level in each area, including socialization. Home educators have tremendous schedule flexibility, and in many areas, large co-op resources, presenting endless opportunities for friendship, teamwork, conflict, community service, and time to develop their own interests (programming? theater?) with other like minded students. For instance, while day-school students are stuck in a room not interacting with one another, a nine year old home schooled student may attend day rehearsals for a play at the local university, volunteer at a local food bank, or build robots with their FRC team, all before playing little league baseball after the day school students become available. These opportunities don't just lock students into same age groups all day for 10 years, but allow time for them to participate in the real world community outside with a broad range of both peers and adults.

The diversity of opportunities for homeschool students often results in a student whose social experience and civic responsibility is as outstanding as their standardized test scores. You can absolutely homeschool social skills.

English isn't my first language, so I naturally thought of homeschooling as keeping kids at home during the day while others are at school. If kids do social activities outside the home during "homeschooling" then that's obviously different than the type of homeschooling where the kids only interact with their guardian(s)/teacher(s).

This whole article was about how public schools resulted in a socially maladjusted kid who was brought back from the brink by his mother at home.

That’s what Sudbury schools are for.

I've commissioning beefy machines on Google Cloud and using Xpra to output the application windows to my notebook. The advantage over other solutions is that it's responsive and you don't need the full desktop.