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.
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.
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.
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 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’ll go against the grain here. It’s not as much, to me, about whether homeschooling is good or bad. I think it has the potential to be really good and really bad for the kid, depending on the parents.
But people who say, “kids won’t get socialization” if they are homeschooled seem to think that tossing all our socially-unformed people into one location, with little socially-formed supervision, is automatically going to teach the former group how to socialize with others in a healthy manner. It’s not. It just creates trauma for kids all around. Child on child abuse.
Not only that, but you strip kids of agency by putting them in a building where they can’t leave, controlling their movements by a bell, assessing and grading their performance by “objective” measurements, subjecting them to authoritarian teachers – it’s all so degrading and the opposite of what id consider a healthy learning environment.
If schools had more adults integrated into student activities – all the activities – sitting at lunch, class, band, whatever, – removing the barrier of superiority, removing lettered grading system, paying more teachers more, maybe id consider it. But as the school system is in the US (or, at the very least, my locality) now, id never want to send my kid
Edit: obviously not all schools are like this. But they are in my city. Id have to move to a more affluent town to be able to trust the school system.
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.
- 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 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 school, at home. It’s borderline child abuse in my opinion.
Organizations like the homeschool legal defense association basically exist to protect child abusers.
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.
