What are your opinions on homeschooling?
My opinion: Both have pros and cons.
I have heard that homeschooled kids are often better academically and more intelligent compared to average students. But they have bad social skills and have a lot of anxiety.
In normal school, you might have better social skills for sure. And you might grow up good if you don’t get influenced by the rotten people at school and if you don’t get into drugs or stuff due to peer pressure. But that’s IF YOU DON’T GET INTO THESE. If you get into these, good luck getting outta these. And there’s the concern of getting bullied too…
So I personally think homeschooling might be a better choice.
i feel homeschooling marked me for life as an unsociable person.
every homeschooled person i know has expressed similar dismay.
i wish my parents public schooled me and put the efforts they put into homeschooling into giving me a decent home life, rather than being exhausted all the time.
i was decent at math and that was my saving grace. my siblings are dumb as rocks. we were considered smart at our homeschool co-op. one person i knew couldn’t go to community college because they couldn’t pass remedial classes.
a lot of my classes were useless nonsense - i wasted a lot of time on religious history and Latin.
a stable homelife with a solid education on avoidable pitfalls, life planning, assistance finding out what passions to chase and how to get there, and putting money towards college rather than homeschooling would far outweigh any benefits, if any, that homeschooling offers.
if “peer pressure to so drugs” is such a concern for a middle schooler, i can guarantee you that its going to be worse for a homeschooled kid becoming an adult and escaping helicopter parenting.
I had very similar experiences. Let me know if you ever want to talk about it, but I’m also unsociable so I will understand perfectly if you never do, and may even be relieved.
You get it.
Nope, no…
Don’t do it.
Kids will say thank you.
It’s a good way not to get your kids indocrinated at school, but then there has to be a big compensation for a healthy social life with their peers to develop their social skills.
You should only do it if absolutely necessary (no nearby schools, mental reasons, etc.) otherwise, if a kid can handle being in a school building, they should go. Staying homeschooled, especially starting at a young age, can cause major developmental issues and anti-socialness.
It’s your ignorance and ego convincing you to do a disservice to your children.
It’s a great idea if you’re a billionaire and have a diverse team of qualified teachers to manage the schooling of your child(ren) at your home, you can spend more time with them and keep them guarded from kidnappings.
For everyone else it’s usually a disaster, and they find out that teaching isn’t just a matter of babysitting and reading a few textbooks with them, it’s actually hundreds of years of knowledge distilled into design, practices and pedagogy - none of which your average homeschooling parent knows much about. Then they give up homeschooling after 2-3 years and bring a kid back to grade/primary school or high school who has now been set back multiple years behind their peers.
Then… there’s also the abuse that goes on outside of the view of the government-supervised schooling system (with mandatory reporting laws, welfare checks, etc).
The parent must be intelligent, well read, a good teacher and not an extremist. The kid also needs to be forced into a ton of socializing events/leagues/sports. I still think a public or private school system would probably lead to a better adult. When I say better adult, I strictly mean their ability to function in society/socially.
The parent must be intelligent, well read, a good teacher and not an extremist.
And they must be self-reflected enough that homeschooling poses a severe risk of stunting your childs development, however well-intentioned. So in theory, if they were intelligent, well read, a good teacher and not an extremist, they’d send their children to school.
I don’t disagree
I’ve never met anyone homeschooled who wasn’t a fucking idiot.
I was homeschooled for several years. I hope I don’t qualify lol
I don’t recommend it either though.
I had some really good friends in high school who were home schooled for k-10, then they did high school like normal.
They were a little eccentric but had a really good foundation. They were in a home school group thing, so they also socialized and different parents would teach different subjects.
So it can be done outside the religious weirdo parents situation.
In most cases, it is good only as an additional help for the main studying in the school/college.
This is very much the best approach, help your kids along when they need it, but don’t make it the main source of their knowledge, anything else they should have the freedom to explore further on their own or ask for help to get there
I think it is a good idea as long as a general national academic path is followed so the learning we are doing has the basic fundamentals. Socialization needs to occur as well so home-schooling should be offset by community events to get those tykes used to the social messes that can be created and how to handle them stoically.
It’s a private solution to a social problem, so by that definition antisocial. We need better and more humane schools for every child, not people retreating to private cocoons.
We need the ambition to completely rethink schooling, as part of deep social reform: https://jacobin.com/2020/06/red-vienna-children-childcare-public-health
Homeschooling is a great way to completely fuck up your kids. My wife and I both have Masters degree so we consider ourselves well educated, but we have always recognized that we do not have the depth and width of knowledge that our kid needed to exposed to. Also we always recognized that teaching requires dedication and skill sets we do not have.
I am not even going to comment on the lack of socialization the kid will miss out on.
The only reasons any parent home schools a kid is because the parents are wack jobs or terrified.
In the vast majority of cases, homeschooling is a method of abuse. Kids have a right to be educated with their peers.
What if they don’t want to be? (For reasons such as getting bullied or an overall bad environment at school)
I only have anecdotal evidence of what homeschooled people are like. I’m sure there’s a ton of nuance and some homeschooled children are probably taught by extremely intelligent, capable parents and some homeschooled children are probably taught by people who are barely even qualified to be a parent much less a teacher.
That being said… Every homeschooled person I’ve ever met has been what can only be described as “off”. These people become adults with very skewed social skills and even worse, their sense of humor is not completely stunted. I think a well-rounded person needs to be exposed to the rest of the world and the people in it starting from kindergarten, and homeschooling cannot reproduce that.
The strangest person I’ve ever met was homeschooled, it was a really sad case. He was an only child home-schooled by fundamentalist christian parents, and didn’t have much interaction with peers his age until he was in college. Zebulon (yes that was his name) could not hold a simple conversation, and clearly had less education than most grade-schoolers. Talking to him was worse than talking to a child, he would babble or ignore everything you said and change the subject completely. I hope he’s overcome that and is doing better now.
This is the kind of thing that honestly makes me a bit shocked that homeschooling is something anyone would expose their child to (bar extreme circumstances). I can’t imagine how bad it would be for a kid to lose the by far most important arena for socialisation during extended parts of their childhood. Like, that’s tantamount to abuse. There’s no other situation where we would allow someone to more or less completely prevent their child from having any interaction with their peers.
Of course, as with anything, there can be circumstances where otherwise extreme or unacceptable things can be justified, I’m not considering those situations here.
I grew up in a cult that was big on home schooling so they could socially isolate their kids and keep them from getting any influence from outside the cult. It’s good for kids to be exposed to people from different back grounds and who have different opinions. You will never, never, never be able to replicate the interactions and social learning experiences they will have at home. It’s borderline child abuse in my opinion.
Organizations like the homeschool legal defense association basically exist to protect child abusers.
