Anecdotally, most current or former homeschooled kids I meet seem pretty socially awkward. I wonder if It’s because the miss-out on the opportunity to learn how to socialize properly as children. But maybe I’m being too critical, idk.
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Former homeschooled kid here. Everything I’m about to say is personal experience but I’ve known many other homeschooled people throughout my life.
With homeschooling you get out what you put in. If the parents take the time to really dial in to the child’s learning needs and set up adequate socialization through after school activities or meetups with other homeschoolers I truly believe it is one of if not the best option for raising a child.
That being said, most of the people choosing to homeschool are not doing it to give their kids the best. Many are narcissistic conservatives who deny modern science and homeschool not to teach the child but to indoctrinate. They don’t consider mental health important. They don’t consider friends important. They consider the kid learning the Bible and toughening up important. The parents are often social outcasts themselves because of their more strict beliefs.
Homeschooling is not a problem and doesn’t result in anything directly, it’s the people choosing to homeschool not being equipped to do it properly. In my experience the kind of parent who would choose homeschooling is likely to produce a social awkward kid even if they don’t homeschool.
TL:DR - Homeschooling good. Most everyone who chooses homeschooling bad. Hug your kids.
This… I remember one of our neighbors finally letting their homeschooled kid go to public school and play with us. We had to teach him how to run. I remember my young mind being baffled by this. He was incredibly naïve and overly trusting so he got bullied mercilessly and beat up at recess. His mother did him no favors by being really nasty with us when we went over to take him fishing, exploring, etc. We moved away and i wonder what happened to him… he was a gentle soul.
Aw that’s so rough on the poor guy, it likely did him a world of good moving forward that he had friends like you to open his eyes, even if it was a short time.
I had the reverse happen where I was teaching the public school kids that you could climb trees. I’m sure it wasn’t mindblowing for them, but they had just never thought about it before. We were like 13 at the time.
I have friends in the old country who do homeschooling. They’re the kind who do it for good reasons. The amount of controls, checks and justifications the parents have to go through constantly is huge. Constantly prove the teaching methods, program, environment, everything. So there are ways to permit homeschooling that seem better it seems.
I was homeschooled by such parents as you describe, and I still have social difficulties in my 30’s because of it. I also wasn’t hugged at all, but I don’t think that alone would have fixed it 😛
I had a wonderful experience too, my parents really put their heart and soul into me and my siblings and we had a local homeschooling group larger than one of the nearby schools that did minimum weekly outings and the like.
I’m an electrical engineer now, my sisters are lawyers, bankers, and concert pianists, my brothers are studying for medical doctorate and running a forge, and many of my friends are in similar places.
Just to add my voice to yours, it’s absolutely all about what you put into it. I have deep lifelong friendships from my homeschooling days, the heavy intent our parents had on the social aspect was imperative. I joined after school activities by the local high-schools later on and met some great public school friends.
The natural flow of learning time-wise vs the rigidity of public school is a studied and proven to be far more conducive to education, as well, and I wish public schools would learn this.
Mine and my siblings’ and friends’ experience was amazing compared to most if not all of my public school friends, and it was all thanks to our parents pouring their lives into giving us all of the knowledge and environments we needed. It can definitely not go this way, if the parent isn’t actively providing those environments, but it is and always will be an issue of the tool being used incorrectly.
Just need to correct one small thing.
I had a wonderful experience too
My experience was absolutely terrible and I would have been better off in a public school. My parents were proof of why homeschooling is the wrong choice 99% of the time
Yeah the ones I know only see Facebook news (pushed by Russian bots and right wing propoganda) about how public schools are evil and bad and you should definitely send your child to private religious school (who definitely won’t rape them) or home school them to install horrible values to ensure they grow up to vote regressive .
Its bad man.
Wonderful day!
And again… I am sorry, but why not just read about it, like… professional researches from both modern and ancient times, existing centuries… Why ask people to invest their priceless finite life time to, again, respond with a yet another set of written messages for the case of multiple investigations/analyses around the planet?
It’s an incredibly responsible question for the parents/supervisors, and there are serious researches done for it. The answer affects the whole future of the child/person they will depend on all their ongoing life… and, hopefully, their own children…A school is not a home, in general, I believe. One of main the main reason a school is exists is - socialization. That is, gaining skills of creating social connections, learn to educate yourself and deal with interruptions and distractions in social environments with so different people, worldviews, and beliefs, in attempt to find yourself and your own identity alongside other people.
Since isn’t the most important reason for these to help a person to socialize and get used to crowded or accompanied environments, to respect, care, tolerate, or live and do their research within other ultimately infinitely magnificent unique people?
It’s for the parents/family to decide, since every single child/person is different.
I do normally stand against “homeschooling” (“wetdrying”) and push towards a socialized organization like University, School, Kindergarten etc.The following is an excerpt from earlier discussions I’ve just found in personal notes:
Socialization process has a significant impact on learning, which is a basic requirement for both the organization and the role performance of the newcomer to the organization. It is considered very important for a new member to socialize organizationally and professionally. This paper focuses on revealing the process of organizational and professional socialization of academicians.
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Friendships can positively impact students’ academic performance and grade point average (GPA) by providing emotional support and reducing stress, thereby leading to improved focus and better concentration on studies.
Peer connections and friendships often result in collaborative learning and the exchange of academic ideas, improving comprehension and retention of course materials, ultimately leading to higher GPAs…
Academic success is assessed by gauging academic performance in the form of grade point average (GPA), test scores, and overall academic achievement, as well as the measurement of academic motivation and the level of persistence among students in school or college.
Forming friendships with their peers is an important aspect of adolescents’ and young adults’ lives, and significant research has been conducted on how friends impact academic performance and motivation. Specifically, academic achievement and motivation have been found to positively correlate with belonging to a peer group.
Currently, young people’s need for a sense of community is particularly high, leading individuals to spend more time with their friends, feel more comfortable around friends than they do with family, and worry about how their friends will perceive them and how the local social milieu will view them.
Researchers’ concerns about how social networking sites affect different aspects of life, including education, are not surprising. Academic achievement has been linked favorably to social connections or peer interactions in the past.
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Of course, in a large population, there are going to be some success stories. But we have zero evidence that, on average, homeschooled students are doing well. There’s actually no way to learn how they do on average because homeschoolers don’t exist as a visible population due to the lack of regulation.
There are claims being made in what is really junk social science that homeschooled students do just as well as kids in regular schools. But there is no justification for those claims. People making those claims are looking at a subset of the most successful homeschooled students.
They’re looking at the ones who actually apply to college and go to college, and are assessing how they do in college compared to kids coming from public schools. Those studies tell us nothing about how well homeschoolers do on average.
Source: Harvard
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Most of the time when I overheard these women talking about their educational choice, and why they were doing it, the reasons seemed to have one thing in common.
Can you guess what it was? Fear.
Related: Why homeschooling is bad for kids (Debunking the myths…)
Depends heavily on the parents. I had a few cousins who were home schooled for primary school so up until 10yr and they were 100% different to interact with and at the time I thought they were nerdy. But looking back it was because they were better socially developed and more mature than my friends and I. They were far more polite to kids (we were all polite to adults), smarter on topics we learnt in school (they didnt know about stuff like fighting and stealing from the local dairy and couldnt even ride a bike or swim) and more empathetic because they spent most of their time interacting with adults who’d correct bad behaviors while my friends and I would be socializing with kids unsupervised for most of the day.
But we all turned out fine and had good upbringings.
It works best as an addition to, rather than replacement for, public schooling.
Just in case, homework != homeschooling. Homework is one of the most important/mandatory part of general common school process, I believe, that lets a person some private time to realize and memorize the subject in their own pace, and prepare for following public discussions and development.
No, I’m talking about parents educating their children on academic topics outside of school hours. This is especially useful for very gifted children who may benefit from advanced martial; or for children with learning differences that may need additional instruction on topics other kids grasp intuitively; or for children with special interests that fall outside of what school has time to cover.
But it’s my firm belief that the more schools fall into the trap of “teaching to the test” the more important it is that parents take an active role in teaching history, civics, philosophy, art, and practical skills, all subjects that more and more schools are leaving behind.
I see. Thank you! That makes sense. This probably also proves my point of belief highlighting a school as a system mainly not for education but socialization in education. A system to educate in society and learn critical/common skills to socialize while learning together - realizing/educating together.
It’s bad for kids. Like, objectively proven to be bad.
While I can imagine all the nightmare scenarios, I’ve known a number of homeschooled kids who grew up with distinct advantages. There are flaws with public school too, as I’m sure you’re aware. At the end of the day, the problems surrounding proper education of children from wildly different situations are not solved with identical tactics.
Do you have links to back this up? The only thing I’ve seen that’s been proven to be bad is how homeschooling is usually done, especially in America.
This is a subtle but important distinction. Homeschooling is not the problem. The lack of oversight and regulation is the problem. The lack of proper structure is the problem.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not defending it and do think It’s the wrong choice 99 times out of 100. But saying homeschooling in and of itself is the problem isn’t right.
In my eyes, the two biggest problems are teaching competence and socialization. It’s possible for a parent to adequately cover a wide range of subjects if they’re quite intelligent themselves and they have good materials, but school teachers specialize in a few subjects and have plenty of experience teaching. Sure, a parent might have specific issues with parts of a curriculum, or think it isn’t suitable for their child’s intelligence, but that can be covered with spot checks and home study.
The bigger problem seems to be socialization. Sure, there are meetups and extracurriculars, but I don’t think that can really replace being around.dozens or hundreds of students your own age, navigating social situations shoulder-to-shoulder with your peers. These are critical skills, arguably more important than the bulk of the actual school curriculum, and it’s much more difficult to build them later. We are social creatures, and we learn best through immersion. Like you, most of the homeschooled kids I knew were socially awkward.
I think much better than homeschooling is supplementing schoolwork with individualized study.
so I did one year of a homeschool co-op where we only had class on Fridays and the rest of the week was homework. I fucking LOVED IT.
Now, this particular program was pretty mediocre in terms of educational quality, mainly because it was religious nutjob oriented. I had the good fortune that my mom is a natural at teaching and I already knew how to learn stuff from the internet fairly well for a 7th grader in 2007 (identifying quality sources, etc.)
the main benefit to me was a VERY MUCH APPRECIATED escape from being mercilessly bullied at the traditional (well, also private religious, but still in-person daily) school I had been at for 5 years. Just being able to hit a hard reset on the group of kids I went to school with was already a huge social boost, and additionally, I only had to socially interact one day a week so even bad days weren’t completely overwhelming.
If I hadn’t had my mom to ensure I was actually learning stuff, maybe it wouldn’t have been worth it. But fortunately I had her, so my educational progress didn’t completely capsize and I finally started making some progress learning how to interact with kids my age somewhat normally, instead of just isolating myself
TL;DR one type of home schooling is a co-op that meets weekly or so, and that could have a lot of benefits if your kid is socially stunted from being bullied into oblivion
Depends on the where and why.
In the Netherlands because you think it’s inadequate? No, the public education system there is exceptional, this is objectively the wrong position.
In the Deep South in the US because you feel the education system is inadequate, racist, corrupted by christofascism, and designed for failure? Based, there are plenty of good homeschool co-ops for parents with the same gripes.
In the Deep South because you think it isn’t loony enough and you want your kid to be a raging lunatic like you? Go fuck yourself. Seriously. Stop having children.
You. You’re funny, and accurate. I like you.
Homeschool co-ops. You’re hilarious. Next you’ll suggest people vote or strike their way out of the fascism.
It’s surprisingly effective resistance, given that undoing fascism begins with education.
I think it is economically disadvantageous to occupy more people than is necessary to perform education activities. On average, trained professionals will do a better job at most things.
School is socialization for kids.
Homeschooling doesn’t give you that.
I was homeschooled k-12 because my parents didn’t want me to learn about evolution and “communism”. I didn’t have any close friends ever growing up because there was just no opportunity for that. I didn’t have extended participation with other kids on a daily basis like I would’ve gotten if I was in a real school. At best I had some playtime outside of school hours with a few of my neighbors and there was things like Boy Scouts and tennis club. But it wasn’t enough. It really stunted the development of my social skills. Throughout my 20s I was I having to learn a lot about how to make and maintain friendships and just like socialize and talk to people and date and such, things that most people would’ve done in their tweens and teens.
I guess one nice perk was I never really had to deal with bullying as a kid? But then when I encountered bullies as an adult (terrible roommates, colleagues, coworkers etc) I didn’t have the skills to deal with them well.
I’m in my mid 30s now, and I still struggle with socializing but I’m better at it. I’ve been in a relationship for 4 years and I’m relatively content with my life at least.
Very bad. Kids should all get equal education and barely and parents can properly provide a good enviorment and ways and knowledge to teach
It is illegal here, parents are required to send their children to school for a minimum of nine years.
This is to protect the interests of the child, Sweden has several laws that are focused on the child’s rights over the parent’s authority.
I have read arguments from people in the US who homeschool their kids about how it is the parent’s right to manage their children’s education.
But to me that just seems wrong, in Sweden children have the right to a high quality education that follows a proper plan and is done by professional teachers, it is the duty of the parents to make sure the children attends their education.
Homeschooling means that the government can’t verify that the education the children receive is up to standards set by the department of education.
Just about all education in Sweden is free to Swedes and EU citizens, so there is zero financial reason to do homeschooling over regular schooling here.
Homeschooling means that the government can’t verify that the education the children receive is up to standards set by the department of education.
Well… They do tests. They’re sent to outside test centers so no one can cheat for them and mask their incompetence or something. Doesn’t everyone periodically run tests to ensure they’re on track?
not really. i did the ACT and maybe one other state regulated test and i was homeschooled my entire life.
I was homeschooled in the US and no such testing was required, and it still is not required in my state. I think it absolutely should be required if homeschooling is going to continue to be allowed.
You mean the national tests?
Sure, we have those, they take place in your normal school at the same time all over the country.
Ok, say a child is homeschooled for five years, and then fails a national test, that means that they have effectively lost a lot of their best time to learn, and they need to retake the subjects to catch up.
Proper schooling allows for students with special needs to get extra help.
I was one of those students, I was on the spectrum of having light autism, possibly some ADHD/ADD and similar stuff, I got an assistant teacher in school for several years, and even went to a smaller class specifically tailored towards students with my kind of mental issues, as I grew up I became more independent and learned to live with my difficulties, these days I don’t consider myself to have any real problems from my earlier diagnosis, and can even use them to my advantage.
I got the help I needed, when I needed it, while attending mostly normal classes and getting socialize with fellow students.
The socializing part was hugely important for my development, without that I would not have been able to go as far as I have.
When I look at homeschooling, I see it as parents denying their children a proper education, often to force their own warped worldview onto their children, this obviously comes from someone who experienced a well functioning school, even if I was bullied at times.
TL;DR: Testing only shows the result of time spent in education, it can’t catch students as they are about to fall through the cracks as a proper teacher can during lessons, this means that a homeschooled student that fails the test has lost a lot of opportunities to get extra help during their schooling.
You say this but I know someone homeschooled for years who learned next to nothing and is ruined for life because instead of having lessons for hours every day, he played videogames. You’re suggesting he could not have gotten away with that, but he certainly did.
In the US, the quality of schools varies drastically based on where you live. There’s no guarantee that kids are getting a good education unfortunately
True
But there is more or less a guarantee that kids that are being homeschooled are not getting a good education.
The Swedish school system didn’t pop up out of thin air either. Of course you’ll have to invest in the system for it to work.
we don’t have national education policy.
education is 90% determined by the town or city you live in. even states have minimal influence over local districts.
schools in the same district, and schools a few kim apart, can have wildly different standards and outcomes.
the only major factor is basically, how wealthy your zipcodes/parents were. that is the overwhelming determination of your educational outcome, because richer parents value education more than non-rich parents.
in poorer communities, education is seen negatively and it’s actively discouraged.
the only major factor is basically, how wealthy your zipcodes/parents were. that is the overwhelming determination of your educational outcome, because richer parents value education more than non-rich parents.
in poorer communities, education is seen negatively and it’s actively discouraged.
I think you’re about to be visited in the night by three ghosts.
Right. Then you’d have to start by making a national education policy. I’m not saying it will be easy (Sweden did by no means get it perfect right away, nor is it perfect now) but unless you start somewhere you won’t ever get to a better place.
Anytime we do that things get way worse than they were previously. No Child Left Behind accelerated the destruction of our education system by basically punishing poor schools for being poor. Our Federal government should get out of education policy entire. It should provide funds for school construction and infrastructure.
Yeah, no, with that NIMBY attitude nothing will ever get done. You really think the rest of the developed world got to were they are without some chafing along the way? It’s almost as if you don’t want shit to get better with that typical American defeatist mentality.
No. Education works best from the bottom up. Parents are the biggest factor, not teachers or schools.
right but we have a significant portion of the population trying to privatize it, which by design makes it unequal
I’ve heard that before, and would be a fan of making it illegal in America as well, there’s a strong argument that doing so would improve the quality of American schools significantly.
The idea being that if rich children go to public schools then the rich will be more focused on improving public school instead of attempting to defund it
Your books have the same propaganda filtered down from the US and Israel as most of the EU right? And a kinda weird section on WWII like in Switzerland?
Do try to remember even though your government is relatively competent it is not really your interests or that of your children those institutions serve. It’s still rich old men who want valuable workers.
Don’t believe me, visit Brussels or an Ikea. You seem too comfortable with your education system.
Americans value individual choices over collective responsibilities.
Homeschooling her is predominantly for those who fell they are not a part of our mainstream culture or that culture is corrupting. A lot of religious and other minority belief groups practice it.
I was not home schooled but I wish I had been (but not by some crazy religious conservative family). I hated school from grade 6 onward. The social situation was absolute hell and the teachers barely cared at all. I dropped out at age 16 and finished high school in my 30s, then got into university and got my degree before 40.
My local public library runs programs every day for parents who homeschool their kids. They have librarians trained in ECE and they do all kinds of cool stuff. Everything from teaching kids how to research stuff in the library, to running science experiments, building stuff with 3D printers, exploring art and painting and poetry books, building robots and writing code to control them, learning about cultures and history and archaeology through loads of great books for kids.
Lots of kids attend these programs and they get to socialize with each other while learning cool stuff. It’s of course still on their parents to teach them how to read and write and do math, but all of the inspiration and resources are provided by the library (yes, including books on how to write essays and letters and all kinds of math and science books with problems and instruction covering the full school curriculum).
I think there’s a time and a place for home schooling, and a lot of it depends on the parents actually putting the effort into it.
I used to work with a guy who homeschooled his kids. For them, it was probably the best option for them. He wasnt the brightest bulb out there, but he did have pretty decent common sense, and was self-aware enough to know that he wasn’t up to doing their lessons himself.
He also had some physical and mental health issues, and his wife was basically in the same boat and was pretty much totally unable to work. Their housing situation wasn’t exactly secure, he made shit money, he often found himself out of work, and they had to move a few times over the 5 years I worked with him, usually couldn’t afford to have a car etc.
So he had his kids enrolled in some sort of online homeschool/cyber charter school thing. And that probably gave them a bit of stability they wouldn’t have had otherwise if they were constantly moving and needing to change schools. Probably also spared them from some bullying and such they would have gotten at schools for being poor.
And he did his best to make sure they were out socializing with other kids and experiencing the world to the best of his abilities. He wasn’t keeping them isolated. If he could have afforded to live in a better neighborhood I suspect he would have been the type to let them run loose around the neighborhood as long as their school work and chores and such were done. And he certainly wasn’t controlling them or telling them what to think outside of basic morality, he definitely was no saint in his youth and was a proud weirdo.
I’m not much of a kid-person, so I’m probably not the best one to make this judgement, but the couple of times I met them they seemed about as bright, happy, and well-adjusted as any kid out there.
On the flip side, my high school actually had a kid who was homeschooled who was caught planning a school shooting (on us.) His parents had pulled him out of our district to be home schooled because of “bullying,” I never met the guy myself, he was a couple years younger than me, but from my friends who did know him, I get the impression that he was basically Cartman. He was severely overweight, but this is America, we had plenty of fat kids and overall didn’t have a significant bullying problem, the reason people didn’t like him was because he was a totally-unlikeable, racist, misogynistic asshole, and really if any kid ever deserved bullying it was probably him.
And I don’t think we can exactly place the blame on home schooling, since the root problem with him started before that, and it’s probably his parents to blame (some wild stuff came out about what his parents would do for him/let him do, it was a really weird case of somehow being both totally interested in supervising their child while also being major helicopter parents,) but i think that sort of isolation certainly didn’t help.
