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.
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)
Nope, no…
Don’t do it.
Kids will say thank you.
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.
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
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.
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
The studies that show that homeschooled kids perform better academically are actually flawed. Adults who were homeschooled are much less likely to finish higher education and statistically have lower incomes than adults who attended school.
I have to object to using income level as metric of success.
My landlord doesn’t accept thoughts and prayers.
Being poor sucks. But above fairly low baseline, income level signifies antisocial tendencies more than hard work, education, or intelligence.
But why wouldn’t you want your child to have the highest chance of having enough money to survive, or the best chance of getting a job they want? I know so many homeschooled kids who ended up working for exploitative employers or doing really hard labor for really shitty pay because they weren’t educated enough (both academically and in life skills) to get jobs doing anything else. To just be like “well, you don’t need money to be happy or do well in life so I’m going to give my child a subpar education” in this economy is just naive at best and cruel at worst.
You’ve got a bit of circular reasoning going on there: Homeschool is inferior because it leads to lower income averages but then income matters so much that an education that doesn’t increase it as much must be inferior.
Look, I’m not a homeschooling stan. I just don’t like bad logic or incentivizing antisocial behaviors. We probably agree on, like, 99% of this and my nitpick about half a sentence is a blip comparatively.
Homeschooling is an antisocial behavior. Most parents who homeschool are doing so because they want their child isolated from the public school system and away from “the world”. They want to be the only influence in their child’s life and they want to solely shape the outcome of who their child is. That’s antisocial as fuck and incredibly unhealthy for the kid, but the parents don’t care as long as they get what they want.
Homeschooling feels like an act of hubris. The idea that you and your partner know the same or more about education than trainer professionals is crazy. Each teacher has at least a college degree, most have a master’s and they all go through yearly refreshers on how to best teach on top of their on the job experience. How can one (or two) people do more than that?
On top of that your child will be exposed in their home life to things you know and think are important to understand. School can show them things you know you don’t know as well as things you don’t know you don’t know. I want my daughter to know things I don’t know and to expand her worldview beyond mine. Homeschooling limits their knowledge that what I know. (Which is usually the point to shelter a child from scary ideas which is not doing them any favors).
Can homeschooling be okay? Sometimes but not often enough and most people who do it aren’t prepared or qualified to do it
I think you are underestimating how many of these “professionals” are just reading the material out loud without much comprehension on their part.
Homeschooling is an act of hubris if you’re trying to stack up against a real educator. But I’ve had like 5 real educators in my public school career.
I was homeschooled until 8th grade, when I was put into public school. Good take.
I learned so much more when I was homeschooled. I was a reader, so I could get all of my work done myself in about 4 hours per day. It was great, honestly.
I stand by the statement that public school doesn’t teach you how to learn, it teaches you how to follow instructions. I would even go so far as to say that public school killed my love for learning.
Out of all my teachers, I had maybe a handful that were passionate about learning. I’m super grateful for my 8th grade English teacher, who did an in-depth unit on the Holocaust and had us meet a survivor. I first heard the “First they came for the socialists…” quote in her class. I don’t think I could have ever been prepared for today if it weren’t for that.
My 10th grade English teacher as well, who was a friend and guide in the right direction, despite the fact that I was an antagonistic right-wing little shit.
Which leads into your point about peer pressure. My school was 93% white, and the attitude matched. I had racist friends. Hell, I was saying racist shit all the time with absolutely no bearing on what the fuck I was really doing, other than following the lead of my shitheel friends.
It’s also hard to avoid getting crushed by the system. I remember one time, somebody said a swear word in the back of my computer class and nobody snitched so the teacher collectively punished us by making us write 100 (completely unrelated to the class) word definitions 3 times each. I complained to the principal, and he chuckled and said, “I’m going to back the teacher.”
I won the election for Student Council President in 10th grade against the son of the woman in charge of Student Council, and they literally just ran the whole thing without me. Then, I tried out for the Radio program and didn’t get selected over the leagues of thickly-accented rednecks who read out loud at the speed of one word every 2 seconds.
So, I started smoking pot and went back to being homeschooled, also taking classes at the community college.
So yeah, you’re pretty spot-on.
But you’re also right about the socialization aspect. I would not be at the level of socialization that I am now without just going through the shit in public school. If the system were fixed, public school would be the better option. Right now, the way we educate is primarily the problem. These kids sit around so unstimulated that they’re already trying to numb themselves with drugs. It’s fucking ridiculous.
I think that the solution is homeschool co-ops, but even those aren’t perfect. I went to a co-op that was extremely religious and incorporated that into the science lessons, for instance.
I’m talking from a US perspective, but I work in an education adjacent field that reviews a lot of homeschool student’s academic records from across the country. IMO, there are two types of homeschoolers. There’s the students who are truly brilliant living in a part of the country that doesn’t value education, and they’re practically forced into homeschooling (or a popular online program like Stanford Online High School) in order to receive an actual education that could challenge them. They do get less socialization than their traditional schooled peers, but they’d get mercilessly bullied at a traditional school so it’s hard to say how much value that socialization has.
The other type are the religious fundies. I have even more hands-on experience with this style, as some of my cousins were homeschooled in this manner. IMO, this shit should be illegal. It’s accepted because someone is typically monitoring these students’ academic progress, but I can say with confidence that Republican states are letting a lot of shit slide. It’s religious indoctrination at a level beyond what you would even find at a religious private school. Typically, these students are better socialized than the other homeschool students, though with the caveat that all their socialization happens in religious settings.
I got homeschooled. One thing I think a lot of people don’t know is that there are computerized curriculum that leaves you perfectly capable of passing standardized testing. I actually took dual credit for my last year and did college English and History. So obviously being homeschooled worked well for me.
I also grew up in the church and the only reason I’m grateful for it is because, despite now not being a Christian, it did counter-balance what others have rightly pointed out that parents must make an effort to socialize their kid outside the family if it’s at all possible. Ans regularly. Which is another thing people don’t know: there are also programs designed to get homeschooled kids together and help make up for this.
So let me say as a homeschooled Christian kid who was still smart enough to deconstruct my faith and my father’s conservative politics and who thrived in their brief time in a college environment that I am clealry not a dumb ass. I now also work at a local ISP where my job is to de-escalate the most frustrated and angry customers, and while I primarily do this via email, I am even better at it on the phone. So I am clearly not lacking social skills.
My personal assessment is that homeachooling is a perfectly viable option. And I fully believe it should be a right, because especially in America’s current administration I think we all should be able to easily see why having no alternative to state-provided education could easily be turned against us.
It also turns out that I’m undiagnosed auDHD, so being homeschooled and being able to work at my own pace was probably one of the few reasons I did as well as I did in school because I didn’t have to rage against my neurodivergence.
On the flipside, however, I also believe there’s entirely too few guard rails, and it does lead to a lot of severely illprepared parents fucking their kids up. I’m lucky that (at least while crowing up) my parents took me and my sisters’ education very seriously.
I think there needs to be an arm of the Department of Education that helps prepare parents for homeschooling and requires regular visits to homeschooling locations to ensure that they are actually being educated and that they’re capable of passing standardized tests. Oh, and computerized curriculum should be required.
Bad idea. Fertile ground for abuse, intentional or otherwise. As others have said, it’s hubris to think one or two untrained adults can do professional grade teaching.
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.
It should be illegal or heavily restricted, as it is in many countries already.
- The kid doesn’t get what’s easily the most important aspect of school (even more important than the curriculum), socialization.
- The kid gets an education from someone who likely has no qualifications whatsoever, and is more than likely homeschooling for fundamentalist religious reasons.
I mean there are a lot of aspects to this. Homeschooling allows abusers to totally isolate children from society. If you have an abused or neglected child the teachers who are mandatory reporters may be the first to see and intervene. Parents maybe totally unwilling or unable to teach their children see the unschooling phenomenon. This leaves their children totally unprepared for life or years behind their peers academically.
On the other side of the coin you have schools that teach to test and rote memorization as opposed to critical thinking and deep understanding of subjects. They seem to turn knowledge from a wonder to be sought to a job to be avoided. The schools themselves are more about training people to submit to top down authority and tolerate a workday then education. Depending on the school they operate as school to prison pipe lines locking students into caracal systems.
That people homeschool shows the failing of our education system and society. I have wondered about the social aspect as we live in a deeply violent and domineering society. Are homeschools mass shooter or abusers at a higher per capita ratewhen controlled for other factors. That is to say if the lack of social skills don’t manifest as antisocial behavior it shouldn’t be a problem. I certainly am underwhelmed by the social tendencies of many Americans even the charming ones.
