I don’t think that’s it. School sucks, and my school was 11 years of pure hell, I don’t argue that, but locking a child with a parent and giving parents even more control over their life is not a solution
Can there be good homeschooling you think? I would think you’d want to prevent the horror stories while not preventing people from providing their own superior option to public school.
Unless parents really go out of their way to prove otherwise, parental relationships are by default inherently adversary. So while I can assume the possibility of good homeschooling, that’s one to one thousand chance. If parents are actually good, if they still find ways for a child to socialize and see worldviews different from parental ones, and if they can ensure education on a level compatible to public school on all topics
by default inherently adversary
I’m sorry you’ve found this. You think parents will usually be in competition against their children, not wanting what’s best for them?
As for the second part, I absolutely agree. I’ve just found that that is generally the case from homeschoolers I’ve met.
Yeah, I believe parents most of the time want not what the best for child, but what’s best for the image of the child they’ve built, and what’s the best for their own ego to convince themselves that “I’m such a good parent!”
Raising your kids is ultimately about preparing them to be full productive adults that can seek fulfillment and provide a net good to the world once they’re adults.
I don’t see any way you could create a microcosm in your home (any home) and meet that goal or not severely hamper your kid from meeting that goal.
Homeschool isn’t only at home, though. My kids, and all of the other homeschooled kids I know are out at some activity, museum or educational “thing” at least twice a week. Depending on their age, they can also volunteer or work somewhere that interests them. For example, my oldest loves reading, so she volunteers at the library once a week, where she gets to meet people of all ages.
Also, it’s much easier to travel when you’re homeschooling. You can go pretty much anywhere anytime as you don’t have to be back home before school starts. As an example, we recently came back from a year on our sailboat traveling up and down the US East coast and the Bahamas. My kids spoke a different language (we’re not anglophone), tasted different foods, met people from all the places we saw, but also from all over the world (you tend to meet a lot of other travelers when you travel), saw incredibly diverse fauna and flora, made friends incredibly quickly, etc. How’s that for a microcosm?
Homeschooling’s biggest misconception is that it’s at home, when in reality, it’s wherever you are. It’s like remote work for kids.
But Museums aren’t what school prepares kids for once they’re adults. It’s the conflict with lots of other kinds of people and learning how to navigate that in my opinion.
You’re not wrong but you picked “museum” and ignored “volunteering at library” where they meet many kinds of people, learn to help them with their problems, learn to navigate an office environment, etc.
Sounds great until they get to university and have the culture shock realizing not everybody else grew up on a sailboat traveling the coast.
Why would they expect that? I’ve not seen any culture shock at college from homeschoolers, except perhaps being surprised at the amount of shenanigans that are gotten up to.
Kind of a poor take. “Don’t have an amazing first part of your life because the rest won’t be equally amazing.”
The gist here is that not all homeschooling is equal. Yes, you have homeschooling that’s designed to facilitate raising your kid to be an idealogue and and ignoramus, but there’s also homeschool intended to be a true alternative to public school sites. I ended up homeschooling my kids for a few years because they both had really bad ADHD and both were too young to be medicated. In my first’s case, the school refused to assess for it (because it would cost money and resources (money) if she did have it) and just allowed her to flounder. Like, the teacher just got to the point of ignoring her in class. When we tried to talk about what to do, the teacher pulled her aside and said “okay, [child], I need you to focus in class from now on, can you do that?” Ah, yes, just focus. Quality education from our taxpayer funded institutions.
Anyway, homeschooling was hell for me, turns out I really don’t like being a teacher, and it was tough on everyone, but I’m confident that my first at least learned more than she would have in public school over that same time period.
I can totally see homeschooling as an alternative to the failings of the US school system, but I don’t think you can recreate the variety in a public school setting where everybody from the community is there. It’s not a want to thing it’s a can’t thing – I’m not sure you can have the scope of awareness yourself to expose your kid to everything to properly prepare them.
I have ADHD too and was only diagnosed in my 30s, so I feel for you and your kids – Make sure they know it can be part of their superpower too ;)
Why not? There’s plenty of activities for homeschoolers(at least near here) with group co-op for one day a week, plus several clubs and group activities like sports, PE, and robotics.
for homeschoolers
I suppose if the kids in a community being homeschooled are representative of the rest of the kids, sure, but I doubt that’s happening, though I don’t know.
I am glad I went to public school after starting at private school because of all of the exposure to ‘the real world’ and all the kinds of people in it.
All the homeschoolers I’ve met (I’ve met a lot) have had a homeschool group. Some have been more active than others, but co-op one day a week is usually the bare minimum.
But I guess if there were homeschoolers locked at home 24-7, I probably wouldn’t meet them.
Are American schools really that horrible?
Not just American ones.
My kids seem to be doing ok. I mean they’re not crazy about studying and homework and they have the odd complaint about a teacher, but they made great friends, they have pretty good teachers overall. It’s probably not the same everywhere or for everyone but I don’t think they’d be happy stuck in the house with me every day.
They’d probably prefer spending time with a parent who loves them over having to listen to an unmotivated teacher who should’ve retired 20 years ago drone at them.
They’d probably prefer spending time with kids their own age with similar interests, bonding over dissatisfaction with the unmotivated teachers. I had an awkward and unpopular adolescence, and even then I enjoyed the socialization I did get in public school much more than my brief stint with homeschooling.
Is school the only place where they can bond with other children?
Of course not, but is there another option with similar regularity and exposure to such a wide variety of people? It’s a societal microcosm.
I’m sorry, sounds like you had some bad experiences at school. I won’t say there are no teachers like that but by and large my kids’ teachers are pretty decent. During parent-teacher meetings they mostly seem to be pretty aware of who’s who and what’s going on in class.
I’m sure there are places where it’s much worse though. It can be tough for kids.
My “friends” used to frame me and get me into trouble with teachers. And I wouldn’t rat on them because they were my “friends”. Not saying the teachers should have realized this, but there’s a lot going on that they don’t know about.
parent who loves them
As a queer person, haha, you’re funny
Tolerant parents exist. In a public school, you are all but guaranteed to deal with bigots.
I’d rather not give more power to intolerant ones. The more I talk to other queer people and their relationships with parents, the more I become an unironical family abolitionist
Trans mom here. We do exist and can break the cycle.
We homeschooled and some of the first GNC examples I saw were teens and adult kids of other homeschooling parents.
I had a blast in public school. Great friends great teachers, sure a few sucked but that’s life. Every homeschool kid I know that wound up in public school eventually was weird af at first, but usually came around after a while. Being locked up with only your parents usually with them feeding you extreme religious BS is horrible for a child. Homeschool should be illegal, most parents are too dumb to be teachers.
Extreme religious bullshit? Dude, not all of us are American evangelicals.
They probably would, but that wouldn’t prepare them for a life of listening to college lectures, corporate meetings, boring social events, etc that “drone at them.” Giving a kid an unrealistic view of what adult life is and encouraging dependent personality disorder doesn’t sound that healthy to me. For me, school absolutely made me do stuff I didn’t want to do, and now in my 30s I see that’s pretty much the definition of being an “adult”
They can attend lectures outside of school. Homeschool doesn’t mean locking them in a room.
Even if they’d rather hear an unqualified religious crazy teach them (they don’t), that doesn’t make it a good idea. Children would prefer to spend all day playing video games, so I don’t know if preference is the measure to use here.
Who said anything about religion?
A good 80% of home schooling is done so religious crazies can shelter their children from anything that disagrees with their holy book.
Maybe in your neck of the woods, but around here, it’s a minority. I’d say about 40% homeschool because institutional school doesn’t have enough services for their special-needs kids (ADHD, hyperactivity, giftedness, dyslexia, etc.), about another 30% do it just out of conviction that there’s another way that kids can learn (especially the whole unschooling movement, but there’s also Montessori, project-based learning, etc.) and there’s no alternative school around, the other ~30% is a mix of family circumstances, bad experiences with schools (bullying especially) and yes, religious zealots. The law was drastically tightened a few years ago, mostly because of these religious zealots, so they aren’t very popular here.
COVID also changed that landscape a lot; a lot of anti-vax and anti-maskers started homeschooling when institutional schools started mandating these things, but most of these parents soon realized it was much more work than they thought and returned their kids at school as soon as the mandated were dropped.
A lot of parents don’t love their kids. And a lot of parents love their kids but still end up treating them like shit.
Fuck yes. At the time, I was glad my school didn’t have much violence. When my trans egg started to crack, and I was a male shaving his legs and painting his toenails… Well, no one accepted me, nor hated me either. I dropped out and took a year of homeschooling, and studying alone and cycling everyday was a wonderfup break. But that backing off into more dependence on my parents fucked up my life for a while anyways.
Mine definitely weren’t when I graduated in 2016. Towards the end there, I legit spent most of the day just sitting in the band hall with a handful of 360 controllers playing games (mostly Duck Game) on my laptop with friends and passersby. Virtual classes, concurrent college classes, and a travel hour pretty much gave me free reign to fuck around most of the week because I wasn’t required to be in class except on specific days for those classes. Never got physically bullied, even had a middle-school verbal bully apologize to me. I saw plenty of people come out as LGBT comfortably, I saw football players compliment the marching band, it really wasn’t that bad unless you were one of those people who got into fights, stole shit, and tried to sell drugs.
I have no doubt that schools can be hellholes, but I wouldn’t say it’s a given.
Yes. In my experience it was frequently a Lord of the Flies situation. I had hour long bus rides in my rural district where the only adult was busy driving. Knowing teenagers you can probably imagine how the freaks and geeks got treated.
Kids in America are so fucking cruel. We’re taught pretty much from the get-go that it’s everyone for themselves, and the only thing that keeps it from turning into Lord of the Flies is the school’s culpability if one kid kills another.
Yeah. I was relentlessly bullied throughout school, and it only ended when I went to a different school district. The teachers did absolutely nothing and whenever they did notice something they ruled it a “double fault”.
Homeschool is so creepy and weird.
Because you only hear about shitty experiences.
Dang I guess my parents were creepy and weird for not wanting me to go to a school that would probably do a worse job teaching me full of teachers and kids who would judge me for not conforming to their religion 😔
School is secular my friend. Your parents (usually) aren’t if they are homeschooling. Nobody cares about your religion, this is a perfect example of the bs that homeschool kids are fed. The world isn’t out to get you.
My family is all atheists, and people in Utah and the south are pretty likely to care about that. They certainly did when I was growing up, and it’s still not uncommon for people to make fun of atheists or think less of them. My parents homeschooled me partly to avoid religion indoctrination, not every part of the world thinks there shouldn’t be bibles (or books of Mormon) in classrooms
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Why? Do you think they don’t get out?
That’s part of it, another problem is that everyone is wrong sometimes, and there’s no one there to correct your parents. It also makes it really easy for parents to brainwash their kids.
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I don’t think bullying is that common among adults.
You’d be surprised
That guy sounds like a pretty poor teacher and a bad environment to learn in.
So close…
I got bullied pretty bad as a kid but homeschooling seems way worse
Doesn’t really answer the question, though …
It is a stupid question. School is not the only place where you can socialize.
It’s a blatantly reasonable question about fundamental logistics of homeschooling. Equally valid are “how did you set up the lesson plans” or “how are you supplementing teaching in areas you are weak in”
Where do homeschooled kids socialize, though?
Conferences, Discord, camps, extracurricular activities they find interesting and sign up for, etc.
There are absolutely awful homeschooling parents out there but it really is up to the home in question doing the schooling. My Mom would, every semester, find text books covering the topics you normally have in school, and then some, and make a weekly plan out of it. I was given the plan, the books, and an essay to have written about topics presented by the end of the week. It was encouraged to cross topics, so for example I might read Tom Sawyer, then read a history book about the real steamships that were on the Mississippi, then the steam power that moved the ships and the science behind that. Not every parent can or will do that, but I just mean to say like, not all homeschooling parents are making antisocial disorganized idiots with no work ethic. I’m only anticisocial and disorganized.
Yea the people in this thread who think homeschooling should be banned have no idea what they’re talking about. If I’d gone to public school as a kid I would’ve gotten bullied for being neurodivergent and being an atheist in a very mormon place; I would’ve gotten fed conservative mormon propaganda; and would’ve either had teachers that wouldn’t know how to teach me, been in special ed when i didn’t really need it, or tbh probably both.
I do wish I’d gotten more opportunities to socialize as a kid, but at most points in my childhood school would’ve been hell, so Idk if that would’ve been better for me in the long run. I wound up going to public school part time for high school, which imo should be an option for everyone. I got to take some electives that would’ve been hard/impossible for my mom to teach me without having to sit through all the unnecessary shit you have to do in school. Banning homeschooling would be stupid, there’s other ways for kids to learn hot to socialize and a lot of shit the school just does a shit job of teaching from what I’ve seen and heard
Buddy no one is making fun of atheists 😂 i was very vocal about my atheism when the topic arose. The sad reality is that the vast majority of homeschooled kids are homeschooled because the school system is far too secular for the extremely religious. They wanna pump that religion in while they are young and make sure no one is there to second guess the bs they feed their own kids. Every kid I know that was homeschooled was so because their parents were extremely religious. There’s no shame in being a atheist and it’s kinda hard to make fun of someone for not believing in something lol even if they try to it’s not like anything they could say could land on you.
Kids literally did make fun of me, and some even stopped being friends with me after learning I was an atheist. If you think nobody cares about that you probably grew up in a place that wasn’t as majorly religious as Utah or a lot of other US states. It may not matter to most people wherever you live, but a lot of people in a lot of places think less of atheists and treat them worse for it. Things seem better nowadays in some places, but at this point I’m afraid too many edgy right wing atheists were too obnoxious about stupid shit for society’s treatment of atheists to be taken seriously for a while. It’s still perfectly acceptable to mock someone for being an atheist, or say that we can’t appreciate nature or beauty or even have feelings, and if you say anything about it you’ll just be made fun of more.
I know a shit ton of US homeschooling is for shitty religious reasons, Idk the exact numbers but I know lots of kids do get shitty educations and social lives being homeschooled. More should be done to make sure parents actually have to be qualified to be decent teachers who won’t indoctrinate their children with anti-science or bigoted ideologies while failing to teach them important things. But in a lot of places it’s the schools that are pushing that onto kids, and a lot of schools are otherwise unable to accommodate for every kid. I can’t support banning homeschooling anywhere that has those problems, and even then it’s probably the best way for some kids to learn, assuming their parents are good teachers
So, I reckon your parents didn’t solve the “how does a homeschooled child get properly socialized” issue?
No, not fully, but I was pretty active in our church growing up. That has its own issues but I definitely hung out with outer kids my own age, older and younger kids, old people, and people with mental and physical disabilities multiple hours a day multiple days a week.
Yeah, I’d assume that’s the main socialization for most homeschooled kids in the US, but that’s like a whole other can of worms. Though I guess not every church is full of raging fundamentalists and/or rapists.
I’m sorry this is so long, but I’ve put a lot of thought into this matter over the years, so I implore you to consider this decision very carefully before actually doing it.
Good homeschooling isn’t impossible, but my main issue with homeschooling is that many, perhaps most parents are either incapable or unwilling to put in the huge amount of effort that would be required to rival or surpass a typical public school education. I don’t want this to seem like a personal attack, it just seems like a lot of parents thinking about homeschooling don’t realize just how difficult it would actually be to do well. They bite off more than they can chew and the only one who really suffers for it is the kid. Your options for a decent home education are basically total personal dedication, treating it like an unpaid 60 hour a week job, or being wealthy enough that you can pay for private tutoring to free your time up. Otherwise, it would be a very difficult undertaking. The following questions are mostly rhetorical, just some things to think about:
Are you able to spend the time to do it right? 6-7 hours of actual hands-on instruction, 5 days a week? That much time would of course require a stay-at-home parent, something many or most families can’t afford to do. In addition, will you still have time to be able to homeschool as well as run necessary non-schooling errands in the same day? Things like grocery shopping, going to the doctor, cooking lunch/dinner, doing things after school, etc. This 6-7 hours also does not count towards any time you’ll have to spend outside of lessons, such as reviewing teaching materials, reviewing your child’s study materials, designing overall course curriculums, designing a daily lesson plan for each subject, physically setting up lessons/experiments, creating assignments/tests, grading assignments/tests, taking your kid to do extracurriculars, etc., so it’s more like 10-12+ hours per day. And if you were planning on just downloading all that stuff online or pulling it right out of a homeschooling book, that’s perhaps not even as good as what those unmotivated teachers you complain about would’ve done (which are actually pretty few and far between, in my experience). One of the best advantages of homeschooling is that it can be catered to your kid individually, but over-reliance on premade materials can have many parents delivering a cookie-cutter experience regardless.
Schools also have plenty of specialized staff because they know it would be impossible for one teacher to do everything by themselves in an effective way. What’s your plan to ensure you can cover each topic as well as a group of people who largely specializes in teaching that subject? Do you actually know the material well enough to teach it in the first place? Many parents simply aren’t informed enough on a given topic to teach a whole unit on the subject, and you might have to try to answer some pretty advanced questions.
Is this what your kid actually wants in the first place, or is it what you want for your kid? You seem to be under the impression that your kid would choose homeschool over public, but is that really true? Sure, it’s anecdotal, but everyone I’ve known who’s been homeschooled says that it was a net negative experience for them and that they’d have been much better off just staying in public school. They missed seeing their friends everyday, they felt they hadn’t learned as much as their peers and struggled in college, they felt their parents had dropped the ball in general. At the same time, it would have saved their parents a lot of time, money, and prevented an unfavorable result. That saved time, energy, and money could then in turn benefit the child by providing better rested parents who have the time and resources to go out and do fun things with them. It’s definitely still possible to have a great relationship with your kid even if they’re in public school, and they may benefit from the space it affords.
What is your plan to ensure adequate socialization of your child? I’ve known several homeschooled kids and they were all noticeably a bit socially stunted. I’d hope in addition to all the schooling you do, you can frequently still find time to take them to the park, enroll them in a sport or club of some kind, and otherwise provide many opportunities for them to make new friends/hang out with old ones.
Overall, homeschooling isn’t inherently bad, but I haven’t personally ever seen it done well. Providing a place full of love and support for your child is commendable, but I don’t know if the love of a parent alone is automatically a good replacement for a thorough education by a whole team of instructors alongside their peers. You admit that homeschooling has a bad reputation “because you only hear about shitty experiences,” but this seems like a good opportunity to quote another one of your comments, “So close…” I’m not saying good homeschooling doesn’t exist, but if we only hear about bad experiences, perhaps that should lend credit to how hard it is to do well and how many fail despite trying.
Public school gives better education, but if the goal is indoctrination and total control of the child, homeschooling comes out on top.
I’m not sure what the split is between controlling vs misguided parents. Have there been any studies on that?
I agree with your point overall, but kids don’t get 6-7 hours of ‘hands on’ instruction 5 days a week at school.
Thinking back to my own school days, elementary was something like 8:30-3:30 and high school was something like 7:30-2:30. That’s 7 hours in total, but yeah, if you include a 15 minute break in the morning, a 5 minute passing period, and a half-hour lunch, it’s only a little over 6 hours. I don’t recall elementary school well enough to remember a typical day’s schedule, but it was probably slightly less. I think you could still call 6+ hours with a few breaks 7 hours, though. Also, most kids do attend school 5 days a week.
My definition of “hands-on” is what you’d see in a typical public high school, with a teacher personally leading the lesson and guiding discussion, often using supplementary materials to help illustrate their point. This may include the occasional experiment and field trip. I meant specifically that the instructor needs to be hands-on, as in physically being there to teach the student, but hands-on learning for one’s child is also important, of course. Perhaps I should have included a point on multimodal learning and developing diverse lessons that will stimulate a child’s curiosity in a variety of ways. My intention was to differentiate the typical style of teaching from the very common form of “homeschooling” where the parent gives their kid a textbook and leaves them alone for the next 4 hours, patting themselves on the back for another good day of teaching. Even a boring PowerPoint lecture would be better than that. Homeschooling affords the opportunity to learn in unconventional ways, so to waste it all by spending every moment inside reading from a book would be a real shame.
Was home schooled because my mom couldn’t afford to send me to a decent school. I really don’t recommend it. When I did it, I also believed in that whole “why would I want to go to school where kids are mean and bully each other” shit. And while I think kids are cruel and school is shit, I do not recommend doing home schooling at all. It just fucked me up.
Granted this is anecdotal but I was homeschooled k-12 and it messed me up in a lot of ways. I had to spend most of my twenties learning things that your average person would have learned in their teens if not earlier.
I was also homeschooled, but not exclusively (we moved school districts a bit and some of them were awful). I know I missed enough to have some social impairments and anxieties, and there’s a lot I don’t know about people and what I had to learn was hard. But I also think maybe I’m also undiagnosed in some things that makes that harder anyway.
But what I really wanted to ask is: even though we had to learn what we did in a less intuitive way later in life, I still feel like I learned more academically than most public school kids I knew, and I also knew how to learn better than other people, even today. Is this something you would agree with about yourself, or do you feel it was a net negative on your development for you to be homeschooled?
Yeah, taking parenting advice from someone going by the name xxxSexMan69xxx is how you end up on a list.
Also, the guy on the left has a valid point and the other one is just an ass.
The fact that homeschooling is legal in one of the leading nations is just purely insane and super creepy
