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’d have had an unarguably better life if I’d gotten into drugs with my friends in middle school. Which is to illustrate that I’m an outlier. Homeschooling sets your children up for failure. Most homeschooling programs out there are flat out bad. If you decide to do it, contact your local school district for reliable curriculum. They (professional educators) can point you in the right direction far better than the internet.

I’m surprised by the amount of unfounded and uninformed opinions, whether for or against, that have a lot of upvotes. Then there are people who have been homeschooled, homeschool their kids, or work with homeschooled kids and commented to share information. Those have far less upvotes. Wtf. Listen to other people’s experiences.

Most homeschool teachers have no business raising kids, let alone teaching them.

We were homeschooled.

Not the “religious nut” kind of homeschooling though. I wasn’t even aware that was a thing growing up. Our parents actually raised us totally atheist, so almost the opposite!

Personally I’m glad we were homeschooled, our parents actually did teach us well and we learned all the academic stuff you’d expect us to learn. (The state we grew up in also has a system of “you take yearly state-run standardized tests to make sure you’re actually being taught stuff”, which probably helps. But like, I don’t think that was the only reason our parents taught us well, I’m pretty sure they actually cared, too.)

The downside of all that is that it helped our parents keep us isolated. But honestly, I’ll take that over the bullying (and indoctrination) we’ve heard of public school having. Public school sounds like hell.

– Frost

It is super great for indoctrinating your children. If you are driven and dedicated to learning, it can be great. Depends on your teachers and resources though.

I have two homeschooled nieces. Their biggest strength is that they “like to dance”. Honesty, these girls are screwed and the world is going to grind then up as soon as they have to survive on their own.

Let your kids learn from professionals. This is like you expecting to be able to be a good accountant with no training.

Let your kids learn about social pressure and stress with easy it’s problems, don’t let their first experiences be as an adult with no coping skills.

Parents overestimate their ability to be a good teacher.

I’ll just leave you with this.

It depends on a lot of factors, but it boils down to two things: Is the parent treating it with the importance it deserves? (Note this includes not doing it alone) And does the kid have the temperament for it?

I’ve worked with two people who were homeschooled. Both were smart, but well behind in their social development. And just very odd, off-putting people. When one of them wanted your attention, he’d just stand there silently waiting for you to notice him. Sometimes you’d turn around and there he was. The other proudly announced in a staff meeting that he was going to appear in a porn movie.

In America (and i fear this has spread to other countries), people like Mary Pride have pushed for homeschooling in addition to basically starting the quiverful movement.

The idea is, you keep kids out of school so they are only allowed to learn your far right views, and you have as many kids as possible so you can 1) force the woman to stay at home and 2) have older kids forced to parent and teach younger kids.

You then involve the kids in politics as early as possible so by the time they are adults, they have already made inroads to working with far right politicians.

Some of those kids end up a certain version of smart, but the priorities are different. They might heavily focus on speech debate, both from a religious and a political point of view. On the “good” end of the spectrum, the kids end up truly charismatic and persuasive, and on the “bad” end, it’s basically tiny ben shapiros who just gish gallop you at any chance they get.

Often, but not always, girls are completely neglected since “they only need to learn how to run a home”. Oftentimes kids are abused, and homeschooling is a way to hide that from authorities.

To contrast with all of this, I think there situations where we should be more flexible with homeschooling. If a parent has expertise in a topic, they should be able to cover like a couple classes or something. I knew homeschooling kids who came to public school for a class or two, but I didn’t know any kids who were homeschooling for a class or two.

People in this thread are saying it’s dumb to think you can teach better than a teacher, but if it’s between 1:1 tutoring and being in a class of 30, you have a big step up.

Personally, I found math classes trivially easy basically up until i was like 17. Math classes till then mostly just focused on teaching how to accurately and repeatably do all the things that calculators do perfectly. I could rant about how math is taught a lot, but I won’t. If I had 1 on 1 teaching on a more diverse range of math topics, I could have learned way more. We should be helping parents/kids do that if they can.

Parents may hate the idea of the public school system because everything is government-approved and streamlined. However, it isn’t like those same parents have a better idea in how to educate their children on their own, on top of everything else they have to do as a parent.

Also, 9 times out of 10, homeschooling involves lots and lots of religious brainwashing.

Awesome if well informed educated parents are doing it because the schools are underfunded and class rooms to crowded. Absolute dog shit if it’s Billy Bob and his wife both of who haven’t learned anything since the 3rd grade are doing it because Jesus isn’t being taught.

It’s a tool parents have to improve their child’s education, but it can also be abused to damage the child’s education. The state has an interest in regulating it and making sure children receiving it are still meeting educational benchmarks.

I think it works best in tandem with public schooling rather than as a replacement, but I know most people talk about it strictly as an opposing option.

It should be illegal or heavily restricted, as it is in many countries already.

1. The kid doesn’t get what’s easily the most important aspect of school (even more important than the curriculum), socialization.
2. The kid gets an education from someone who likely has no qualifications whatsoever, and is more than likely homeschooling for fundamentalist religious reasons.

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.