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 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.

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 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.

Generally, I think it’s hubris for someone to think they can educate their kids better than a professional that’s trained for half-a-decade or more. And the most-common fear, that schools are “indoctrinating” kids, is easily countered: just be fucking involved in their lives.

That being said, the real world is always more compicated than theory. Parents should have a right to choose this path, coupled with a responsibility to adhere to the same educational standards as professionals.

First off, not all homeschooling is equal. On the one hand you have completely isolated, unstructured tutoring without any oversight by the local education board, and on the other you have organized remote learning and hybrid programs where the kids have a set curriculum and do their work online.

My daughter does the latter. She meets her homeroom teacher online with a bunch of other kids every day, and they meet up for group events and field trips once a month or so. She also meets up once a week with a local homeschooling group where they spend the morning studying then play together in the afternoon. She’s an outgoing, enthusiastic kid who loves making new friends despite the fact that she does get less social interaction with other kids than if she went to regular public school.

The reason we decided to homeschool is because we were traveling a lot when she was very young and we got used to the flexibility of not being tied down to vacations during regular school holidays. It has allowed us to take her on trips that she wouldn’t have been able to had she been stuck to the normal public school schedule.

That said, it’s not for everyone. Homeschooling properly is a full time job and you need to be very diligent and patient. However, I’ve seen it work first-hand, so don’t let people with no actual experience of homeschooling tell you that every homeschool kid is going to turn out a socially awkward pariah. Check out the options available where you live and see if it might be a good fit for your family situation.

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.

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.

In practice, it functions almost exclusively as a way for Christian fascists to abuse and control their children

In the vast majority of cases, homeschooling is a method of abuse. Kids have a right to be educated with their peers.

the two people I dated who were homeschooled were not better academically.

They both in fact, lacked everyday knowledge and life skills. Niether went to college and worked remedial jobs like home depot and dog daycare (which is fine but) One thought you had to take a boat to Rhode Island (we border this state) and could not file simple paper work with his doctor at 24 and needed help to complete the task. The other (who I only dated for a few weeks) was kind of rapey and believed in flat earth theory, and open carried into my home (with a small child) without permission. neither were intellectually disabled, and the lack of real education was completely obvious.

nah.

if done right sure, but in my little expierence, we’re 2/2 these folks are less bright than my public school peers.

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

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’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.

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.