The trouble is, this can become a feedback loop, because the only way to dispel the stereotypes is if more normal folks speak up.
I've seen this same phenomenon affect other subcultures too, and I suspect there's probably a name for it, but I don't know what it is.
Homeschooling generally happens because parents don't like some aspect of public schooling and more often than not it's that general knowledge conflicts with a religious belief.
It may be due to the fact that I live in Idaho which has extremely lax standards for homeschooling (which is why some of the cases I observed happened, people fleeing other states so they could avoid oversight on their kids education).
I will admit this is mostly just my own anecdotes. But, it's also the reasons given by a number of my family members and people from my former church that go down that route.
It does happen, how ever you wish to disparage others for factual statements.
Very few would admit such in public, but social and moral reasons were the overwhelming cause for most to home school. Education was an extreme secondary priority to the point of being not one at all in some families. Some kept the kids out of school to literally put them to work.
The sequestering from society is usually the point - for better or worse. This attracts the exact type of people you would expect it to.
Perhaps the situation is different 20 years later but based on my continued exposure to the "scene" I doubt it. I'd be amazed if the majority of folks are not engaging in home schooling for what amounts to religious reasons - however we want to define religion these days.
There's no fact I would not discuss with my kids. But as someone from an Asian country, I'm becoming increasingly wary of how teachers talk about certain facts--specifically, from an individualist, humanist perspective. I want my kids to understand that they're a cog in a machine, rowing with many other people to move forward a society, and have myriad reciprocal obligations to care what other people need, what they think, to respect their feelings, to allow them to save face, etc. I don't want them to grow up to be "muh freedoms!" Americans. I think a lot of people are in the same boat.
If your goal is to instill values of mutual cooperation, a sense of obligation, etc. in a pluralistic society, I'd think that you'd want to send them to a public school in a large city. That's what the last ~200 years of American immigrants and children of immigrants have more or less done.
In a superficial way, sure. The dominant American culture is intensely individualist. So if you don’t want your kids to grow up that way, you need to buck conformity in that narrow sense.
> If your goal is to instill values of mutual cooperation, a sense of obligation, etc. in a pluralistic society, I'd think that you'd want to send them to a public school in a large city.
The prevailing culture in large city public schools turns those ideas on their head. The focus is on individual self-actualization, and questioning authority, hierarchy, elders, and norms. It’s about what society owes individuals (“rights”) instead of what individuals owe society. There’s a veneer of cooperation and obligation, but it’s framed in terms of what “privileged” (whites, the rich) owe everyone else, not what each individual owes society.
> The prevailing culture in large city public schools turns those ideas on their head. The focus is on individual self-actualization, and questioning authority, hierarchy, and norms. It’s about what society owes individuals (“rights”) instead of what individuals owe society. There’s a veneer of cooperation and obligation, but it’s framed in terms of what “privileged” (whites, the rich) owe everyone else, not what each individual owes society.
This is a pundit's warped idea of what a public school looks like. I was in a public high school not too long ago (one that was and is 60% first-generation Americans), and never at any point did I get the sense (or to this day feel) like my education was intended to make me feel asymmetrically entitled.
And again: there's a sense in which this is far more true for private and home schooling, where the entire point is to eliminate the mutual network of obligations that exist between students, their parents, and the public's interest in favor of private, religious, or sectarian interests.
And that's why you home-school: you don't want the education that your children receive depend on the school's choice of the teacher for your child.
Could public schools be better? Yes, absolutely. We do not fund them enough, the fact that so many of my friends send their kids to private schools despite the enormous cost is testament to that. I have leaned on private schools myself for pre-K, transitional K, and earlier because its support is quite spotty across the USA.
"averages out" - No, it may not.
I had the same teacher for 4th and 6th grade in elementary school. I thought she was great. A friend of mine _changed schools_ so she wouldn't have the teacher again, because the teacher had been verbally abusive to her. I never saw it, but it was a big deal to her.
A year later, I had a teacher who would _publicly_ ridicule and harass me. Sure, I only had to deal with that for one class and homeroom everyday for TEN MONTHS, no big deal, right?
My other teachers weren't like that. But one is enough.
My anecdotal experience as a parent is that there are far more teachers like that now. (The students are often worse, too, which may be one factor.) To write off abuse from a) persons in authority and b) government employees as "oh the kids will get over it" isn't just wrong, it's demeaning.
That is a very bizarre fantasy that sounds like something a Fox News talking head that has never been within 2000 feet of a public school would say.
And what does Fox News have to do with anything?
The protest can mean a lot of things, including the dress code itself being against the norms of the community. One does not need to focus on questioning authority to protest bad decisions.
Also, I am not American.
What does that have to do with anything? Some dress codes are truly stupid, to the point they are literally ignored by both teachers and students. Which is just our chosen way to deal with it, usually. When there is clash, dress code violation is typically seen as something minor, so no reason to protest when you can kinda ignore it.
Frankly, organizing protest is so much work, that kids in your story come across as active people who take governance seriously.
Heck, I'd even say that after essential skills like reading are mastered, homeschooling can lead to great results.
A lot of that depends on the motivation (or lack thereof) of the parents.
Buy some kids just won’t work if you’re not right behind them every day making sure they work. Others would struggle with direction in that kind of environment.
My brother tried to homeschool his kids, but it didn’t work out.
What I want is for kids to get the best education possible and to have as many opportunities as possible to further human knowledge.
You don't become a biologist if you think evolution is a hoax. Dinosaurs are simply cool as shit and I feel bad that kids are kept from them because of "Satan". And you'll have a hard time with geology or astrophysics if you are saddled with a belief in the young earth.
I certainly don't buy the "public education is indoctrinating our kids!!!" line. Do you really think teachers in red states like Idaho are trying to turn kids into communists?
What's telling is that's where you went in this discussion. All the sudden you think politics is involved because I thought illiterate children is a bad thing? Ok buddy.
Sure you do. You are a saint. You posted an agenda ridden comment here because you care about children. That much was obvious.
> You don't become a biologist if you think evolution is a hoax.
What are you doing here if you are a 'biologist'?
> Dinosaurs are simply cool as shit and I feel bad that kids are kept from them because of "Satan".
And yet the guy who claimed the 'Satan' nonsense eventually found out about dinosaurs.
> I certainly don't buy the "public education is indoctrinating our kids!!!" line.
As a product of public education, I can say it does. And if you study the history of modern public education ( starting from germany ), you'll find out that it was created for indoctrination.
> Do you really think teachers in red states like Idaho are trying to turn kids into communists?
Yes. Isn't that why idaho is a hotbed of home schooling?
> What's telling is that's where you went in this discussion. All the sudden you think politics is involved because I thought illiterate children is a bad thing? Ok buddy.
I told you not to bother. I'm an atheist. What do you think my politics is? I know what yours is.
You are transparent to me. I can see through you. I know you because I was you not too long ago. I even predicted your response. Pathetic.
I proclaim you 'Patron Saint of Education'. Certainly you care about children more than their mothers and fathers. Certainly you care about their education more than their mothers and fathers.
Edit: Strange how you say you know so many homeschooled illiterate children and yet you haven't mentioned contacting the authorities to help these children. You must really care about children and their education.
We love the schedule flexibility of homeschooling, the ability to let our kids explore their own interests more, and most of all - we just love being with our kids and they get to have their siblings and parents all day.
> That's because teaching kids is super hard and real easy to mess up.
Forgive me, but this is just absurd.
Reading this from outeide the US, it's bizarre to me that people don't want a professional, trained teacher who can do a better job than they could.
That aside, a fantastic highly trained teacher with 30 students, isn’t likely to outperform a mediocre teacher devoting their full time to 1 or 2.
I wasn’t homeschooled myself but I did help my homeschooled younger (by 20 years) sister with math. If I had the time to devote 30 hours a week or so I’m fairly confident I could outperform even the best teacher teaching my own kids—-assuming they had 20+ full time students.
A lot of parents that homeschool aren’t, and I sure as hell wouldn’t trust them to teach my kid anything past grade 4.
There will obviously be failures , but I don’t think it’s that hard for an average parent teaching 1-4 kids to outperform a trained teacher with 30.
I bet there isn’t a single US public school district where teacher pay keeps pace with minimum wage when divided by the number of hours spent working.
There are many districts with much higher averages. Just one example. In a relatively low cost of living state, Fulton county GA—the county Atlanta is in—the starting salary is $56k, and $62k with a masters. It goes up every year from there.
Also: $62k/yr for a job requiring a masters degree is utterly criminal.
This has nothing to do with the south. Take the highest minimum wage in the country, Washington D.C., at $17 an hour.
The state with the lowest paid teachers pay more than that even assuming 12 hour days.
A masters degree isn’t required, you just start out making a few thousand a year more if you have one. Each year the gap grows though so that it becomes more and more worth it.
Also $62k a year is the starting salary for a teacher with no experience, but it’s only slightly lower than the median salary for anyone with a masters degree.
Also in many states teachers get defined benefit pensions and other benefits which are far better than what nearly anyone in the private sector gets. In Georgia, teachers can retire with their full pension after only 30 years. I know many teachers who retire in their early 50s. 10 years before nearly anyone else.
There are plenty of illiterate people in the US. Evidently teaching kids is, in fact, easy to mess up.
And I don't think you can produce a single example that was homeschooled. Public education is notoriously inconsistent and frequently produces children that haven't met minimum educational requirements precisely because it lacks the individual attention kids need.
> And I don't think you can produce a single example that was homeschooled.
Yeah, I can. Multiple in fact. That's the reason for my initial comment. My experience here isn't exactly unique. Search this threads, there are others raised in these sorts of communities that have similar experiences.
You can find these people to if you like. Simply go attend a fundamentalist religion service and ask around their homeschooling programs. It's really not hard to find if you know where to look.
https://www.nuroretention.com/blog/officials-80-percent-of-r...
https://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=121374...
https://foxbaltimore.com/news/project-baltimore/baltimore-ci...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/i-couldnt-even-read-the...
https://phdessay.com/can-illiterate-students-graduate-from-h...
https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answer-sheet/wp/2016/11/...
https://www.highschoolcube.com/the-high-rate-of-functional-i...
And the list goes on. Several of these articles cite a rate of about 20% of adults in the US being functionally illiterate, with about one third unable to read above a 5th-grade level.
If homeschooling produces better results than that, then I'm all for it. Again: Kids need individual attention which they can get more readily in a homeschool environment. In large institutional public education systems, they just get "passed along" as they may be one of 30+ students in a class, and one of 5+ classes a teacher has. Public school teachers don't have enough time in a week to spend one-on-one time with each of their students. In the 90s my high school had class sizes of 35+ and I'm sure it's worse now in some schools.
I'm on board with criticism of government schools, but home-schooling isn't perfect and I have seen examples where kids were kept uneducated, up to functionally illiterate.
Parents have a right to home-school their kids. There will be kids that come out poorly -- it's going to be _fewer_ than if they'd gone to government schools.
If you gave your kids wonderful educations with excellent curriculum, more power to you.
The issue I have is that's not universal. It's that I've seen far too many examples of children that are illiterate. Examples of lazy parents doing things like taking a walk in the park and saying "see, we did biology today!". Examples of parents that "oops, forgot to do school this week/month".
And, in the extreme, "girls don't need eduction, that's for boys".
Perhaps for you, education is not hard and that's wonderful. Truly. But what about for the parents and kids where it is hard?
> But what about for the parents and kids where it is hard?
If it’s too hard, then public school is right there for you take advantage of. I went to public school and it was just fine.
I had to make up a final exam at school for a subject I didn't take. I covered the entire material for 2 years in a couple of weeks and passed the final. That's pretty much my experience of school- 2 weeks worth of material stretched over 2 years. A glorified daycare system. How can you teach a class of 25 young individuals where 90% couldn't care less, anything?
That said I agree this (EDIT: homeschooling) is not for everyone and not everyone does it for the right reasons.
If your government school gave your kids wonderful educations with excellent curriculum, more power to you.
The issue I have is that's not universal. It's that I've seen far too many examples of high school graduates that are illiterate.
What is the problem with that? I am not aware of anything in the daily life that is dependent on the existence of macroevolution, the age of earth, or the history of dinosaurs.
So, I really deeply from my heart have a stance of "live and let live" concerning these topics. I might love science, but I am not a missionary or even an inquisitor for the "scientific truth".
That is why I explicitly wrote "macroevolution" and not "evolution". The emergence antibiotic-resilient bacteria is a phenomenon of microevolution, which is, as far as I am aware, much less controversial in evangelical Christian circles.
Whereas Christian creation stories always felt like mythology, sounds human centric and made up. I read stuff like the Epic of Gilgamesh and realized that some stories in the bibles are based on older iterations written by ancient people.
It is nonsense through the lens of biology, but it's nonsense that's very ideologically convenient to certain demographics, which (perhaps paradoxically) means that terms to talk about the distinction become useful in some sociopolitical or anthropological contexts. For what it's worth, the very particular term for the religiously-motivated typology that accepts microevolution while rejecting macroevolution is baraminology.
Even from a biological perspective this distinction is not nonsense: couldn't there exist an additional mechanism that is not arbitrary mutation and survival/selection of the fittest, which could be an additionally important for the formation of species and macroevolution?
Candidates for such possible additional mechanisms have been proposed from biologists, such as Lamarckism or epigenetics (though the mainstream view in biology is these either could not be observed (Lamarckism) or are not considered to be important for macroevolution (epigenetics)).
"Couldn't there exist different laws of gravity for big things like planets and small things like rocks, which explains why I've never seen rocks attracted to each other?"
Yes, there could in some alternative universe, but not in this one that we know of, and it's not necessary to explain why you don't notice rocks being attracted to each other.
There could exist some difference between "microevolution" and "macroevolution," but not in this universe that we know of, and it's not necessary to explain species.
The entire concept was made up by creationists to try to add a patina of science to their deeply-unscientific beliefs. And the problem with an unscientific world view is that science will never change your mind about things, you'll just decide what science to accept and which to not accept.
Something very related is a topic that is seriously discussed among physicists:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics
The problem with the existing theories of gravitation which seem to work quite well on the scale of solar systems is that there does seem to exist evidence that some observed data on the scale of galaxies might not be well-explainable by these theories. See
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modified_Newtonian_dynamics#Ob...
Very recently new evidence for MOND came up:
> https://phys.org/news/2023-08-smoking-gun-evidence-gravity-g...
> https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37051241
See also:
> https://tritonstation.com/2023/08/02/is-ngc-1277-a-problem-f...
That’s why education aspires to be more well rounded in most places.
All of this paternalism and hostility towards civil authority isn’t an expression of faith or aspirations towards the divine; it’s a means to exert control on earth to men.
I don't care so much of a kid is like "I hate this dinosaur garbage" or whatever, but I feel awful for the kid that could have been a great paleontologist or biologist only to have that opportunity snuffed.
Sort of the same reason I'd hate for the kids to never be able to read. Sure, maybe there are jobs and people that live full lives never really needing to read anything. However, so much of the world is completely closed off to an illiterate person.
It's not that I'm trying to be a missionary per say, but rather that I believe that sparking knowledge in people is pretty much always a good thing.
Written text is of course something that occurs very often in daily life.
> but rather that I believe that sparking knowledge in people is pretty much always a good thing.
Interestingly, many people who argue this way are very hesitant to apply this argument to sparking knowledge about evangelical Christian theology.
I'm absolutely not hesitant for kids to be taught about evangelical christian theology. I don't think kids should be proselytized to by the state.
That is, I'm more than fine if kids study the bible as part of class. I'm less fine if kids are taught "The bible is the word of god and if you don't believe it you are going to hell".
To put it in another context, I'm perfectly fine if there was a class teaching about Hinduism in high school. I'm far less fine (and I'd think most people would be) if that class involved calling Christians heathens and requiring participation in Satsang.
> To put it in another context, I'm perfectly fine if there was a class teaching about Hinduism in high school. I'm far less fine (and I'd think most people would be) if that class involved calling Christians heathens and requiring participation in Satsang.
To play the devil's advocate: what you described in the last paragraph is exactly how I imagine that classes about evolutionary biology or earth history feel to evangelical Christians. :-)
Teaching a kid about evolutionary biology does not force them to believe it. Just the same as teaching a kid about Hinduism doesn't turn them into a Hindu. Or more extreme, just like teaching kids about harry potter doesn't turn them into wizards.
The more extreme evangelical christian (which to be clear, isn't broadly held) position is that "if my kids learn about this, they might reject the faith therefore they shouldn't learn about it." But that's a silly position. Just like it's silly to say "If kids learn about electricity they might reject Zeus".
Withholding information because it might damage faith is toxic.
The chief difference between evolution and intelligent design is that one actually happened.
> It's not that I'm trying to be a missionary per say
Spoken - or rather, written - like someone who doesn't read much.
Wondering why I haven't seen this consideration raised before, in mainstream press. Nor read of any specific cases of abuse being exposed that way. Would be interested in references.
https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/apr/16/sexual-abu...
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6283686/
https://info.primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/review/sexual-educa...
Even China started pushing comprehensive sex education nationwide due to high rates of rural child sex abuse: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9406756/
A daughter of fundamentalist Muslim parents has the right to have an education, even if they think girls should not be educated.
A girl whose parents are "anti woke liberal gender ideology" still nonetheless has the right to learn how her own body works, how to protect herself, among a thousand other things.
Etc etc.
Do you think it's evil to force parents to teach their kids to read?
This is absolutely false. Did you read the article?
Parents didn't flock to homeschooling during the lockdowns because of religious ideology: they did it because they wanted their children to LEARN.
IME, the two biggest reasons parents chose homeschooling were a) government school academics are garbage and b) government schools were often unsafe.
The parents wanted a SAFE _EDUCATIONAL_ environment for their kids, rather than prisons which allowed students to assault one another while the teachers spent all of their energy trying to get the bottom 10% to meet the absurdly low minimum standards.
Your experience may be very different, but don't use your bigotry to defame millions of parents.
> You only need to be a teaching ninja when you've been tasked when educating children who don't want to be there and aren't interested in what you have to say.
Way to blame the child for teachers failure. Yep, even motivated interested kids needs actual teaching. But yeah if you don't provide they loose motivation and you can then blame them.
Realistically speaking, a large portion of public school graduates are illiterate going off of test scores.
We detached this subthread from https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=37274958.
And since they are different ages, I worry that if I taught them all at the same time, the curriculum would average into something too challenging for the younger and not challenging enough for the elder. How do you manage to meet all their needs at once?
A lot of time in public schools is either wasted or simply a consequence of classes having ~30 students each. I also find that homeschool kids can be taught the discipline to work on their own after a lesson. I check the work in the evenings or before school starts in the morning.
I can understand why many people might not want to homeschool, but I find it's been a blessing for my kids & our family.
My daughter would want to spend 6-10 hours a day on art, but wouldn't want to do her French or math homework. My son just told me that alef (in the Hebrew alphabet) was the symbol for Graham's number, but balks when I try to get him to memorize his multiplication tables.
> And since they are different ages, I worry that if I taught them all at the same time, the curriculum would average into something too challenging
If there is a subject where that is the case, I do not know what it would be. Once they're past the age of 7 or 8, most or all children are capable of what they would be at older ages. I don't think, for instance, that an 8 yr old learning to read is slower at it than one learning that for the first time at age 14.
For the record though, didn't get to teach my son to read. With his sister, I tried from age three on up... every few months I'd see if she was more agreeable to it, and she wanted nothing to do with it until sevenish. She could sound words out phonetically if I pushed from the start, but with a look on her face like I was pulling teeth with pliers. So I waited with my son until he was almost seven... and he could just read. I have no idea how. My wife claims she didn't, and his sister certainly didn't either.
I think, really, that public schools doing age segregation has more to do with them trying to perfectly homogenize the product they crank off the assembly line, than it does with making sure each student gets enough learning opportunity.
From personal experience: I first encountered differential equations in highschool, while preparing for physics Olympiad. I could solve basic equations, but I didn't understand what I was doing and for example the damped oscillator equation was mistifying. Fast forward to university, in the first diffential equation class, everything made perfect sense and I found it super easy. There was probably at least two years between the two stories.
Most likely has nothing to do with age, but simply the fact that it was the second time you’ve encountered it. Your brain spent 2 years subconsciously processing it.
In what sense is that a form of "trouble"? How is it different from any other educational system?
I, too, learned about Graham's number when the YouTube algorithm decided that I liked math videos.
The issue with learning like this, though, is that it's called "edutainment," and, while it scratches the same itch in our brains as learning, rarely actually produces learnings.
Ask him in a week what he remembers about Graham's number. I'd be impressed if he recalled much.
Also, if he had a good teacher, that teacher would have been able to push back when he was mixing up concepts. Aleph is not the symbol for Graham's number, rather it is the symbol for Cantor's orders of infinity.
So? We weren't doing math theory. Foreign language instead. He's allowed to entertain himself after his lessons are done, and he'll be familiar with that stuff when he does get there.
> Also, if he had a good teacher,
Sure. If he had one. The implication that there's any such teacher in public schools within 100 miles of us is absurd.
It depends. I quit my job to homeschool my daughter so that she could practice and pursue her violin studies without the encumbrances of mainstream school. I suspect some could have done this and maintained some kind of a job; I couldn't. We spent much of the day either in school work, or practice, and then I'd prep tomorrow's material. Neither time nor energy was left at the end of the day.
But thinking back, I came out of the public schools with some pretty anti social behaviors and attitudes that I picked up there. Being cool is so important at that age in that setting.
I often wonder what life would have been like had I been taken out say, age 12 or 13 and given a more solid education to match my natural inclinations away from the cruelty, the misbehavior and the general time wasting that characterizes much of public school in the US.
Kuddos to you for putting in the effort to give your kids the best possible real education. It has to be a lot of work.
I see absolutely zero need to pull her out. The academics are ok--not what an expensive private school might offer, but they track well with what I was learning at that age. The social/institutional environment is much better than when I was a kid.
The few parents I know who homeschool (admittedly, mostly from my wife's church group) do so for religious separatism reasons, not for educational outcome. They object to public school on ideological grounds and perceived "indoctrination," not on the academics.
I'd like to point out, 10 years old isn't really in the thick of it yet. Might rethink your statement say, Junior year of high school.
This is a good question, but how am I supposed to find out the answer with any real certainty short of exposing my kids to it? Not really a sane option. "Hey, kiddo, go dance on the minefield and see if there are any left" isn't my style of parenting.
> Sure, there's the occasional story of extreme bullying that happens to make the news, but it seems like these are far outliers these days.
It's quite possible that the extremes are just the ones that make the news. The low-intensity torment is in my opinion just as traumatizing, but unless some parent raises a big stink about it then it usually doesn't even rise to the level of neighborhood gossip.
Our kids get a decent amount of socialization through all the activities they're involved in, and when other kids find out they're homeschooled, their response is more often surprise than "Oh, that figures."
The idea that kids learn social skills best by being thrown into a rigid, institutional environment surrounded by hundreds of other kids whose social skills are also far from developed is kinda silly, though. It's like saying criminals will reform themselves best by surrounding themselves with lots of other criminals.
Name another institution where inmates have to ask for permission to go to the toilet, besides school and jail.
Edit: or another institution where people can attack you and you can’t call police to help you.
Busy call centers, fast food restaurants. Factories: assembly line workers. Chemical plants: process operators.
I don't mean to be snarky but I think you would be surprised at the percentage of the population working jobs where they cannot simply leave their station without permission.
> Edit: or another institution where people can attack you and you can’t call police to help you.
The military: active duty personnel deployed to war zones.
It's disturbingly common.
is it ?
Maybe it just comes down to personality
In my mind I was so uncool that the only way to win was not to play
I mean, if you are thinking about it in those terms it sounds like it was pretty important.
I learned some socialization at public school, sure. I also learned what it was to have a bureaucracy just roll over you because nobody involved cared enough to notice you were there. Those kids will have that experience eventually, but I’m all for delaying it.
That has nothing to do with their ability to socialize with their peers. This is a pretty common home school kid issue. Great with adults. Not great with other kids. Adults don't care because they are well behaved and the kids dont know how to vocalize that they have difficulties socializing with others their age.
Forcing kids (by constructing their environment in such a way) to have only relationships with kids that are precisely the same age as them is weird. Some healthy relationships with people who are a few years older in positive. Older kids/people need to be embedded in the social circle as role models. You get less bullying and should get faster social development. Homeschooling done right is more similar to how kids developed socially in our ancestral past (all the way up to a few hundred years ago). It's also more similar to how kids develop in much of the world outside of the West where larger family units are more tight knit.
Try finding adults who were homeschooled who speak fondly of the experience.
Social skills is such a red-herring. People were social long before school. It’s instinctual.
Every homeschooler I met in college was just short of flunking out. College isn’t “out school” or whatever we’re calling the homeopathic education these days.
The education system needs to be reformed, but every homeschooler is about as well equipped for the real world as the people in the poorest school-districts, of the poorest cities, of the poorest states.
I could share lots of anecdotes in the reverse, but that’s really all they are. Either way, homeschooling wasn’t nonsense for me, and I’m choosing to continue that legacy with my children alongside this next generation of parents who believe homeschooling is the best option for their family.
There is some good research, but be wary. A lot of the research is done by pro-homeschooling institutions.
I never considered it for my kids because our public schools are pretty good, and I did not feel I had the experience or resources or time to do any better. But some people have more of a passion for it and find answers to those issues.
I'm sure there are kids who are poorly homeschooled, but your anecdote does not meany anything in the big picture. Shall I tell you about all the public-school kids I met who ended up flunking out of college?
>replace formal education with the nonsense that is homeschool.
I don't count public school as a formal education. I think of it as a daycare subsidy to make more parents work.
My daughter (16) is homeschooled and volunteers at a local private school where she teaches English and Code (in Scratch). I volunteered at the same school last year. It's given me a real insight into how important parent involvement is in education, regardless of what method you choose.
Was in high school ~10 years ago and the other homeschool families we knew were a mix of farm/ultra religious low social skill homeschoolers and fairly normal folks with decent social skills.
TLDR: I think there is a social aspect of being in school that homeschool kids miss out on, regardless of how many extracurricular or sports they may do.
As I typed the above paragraph out, it actually makes me question. Is that really growing social skills if they're always surrounded by the same kids? For example, I moved to a different state between 8th grade and the start of high school. That experience helped me to understand what it's like to not have friends, how long it takes to make friends (2-3+ years), and how to interact with a lot of peers you don't know and who don't know you.
It was interesting when I went to college, and I found other students who were nice, but never really interested in being your friend because they went to the same college as many of their high school friends. Or they grew up near the college and had all their high school friends nearby still. I guess this latter point isn't really social skills, but it is something that I learned to be aware of.
Or you get to deeply hate these children ...
I'm sure there were many benefits but public schools don't seem to be doing great at socializing kids.
I'm aware that not every kid who goes to a regular school is going to have incredible social skills. Just like how every home school kid isnt going to have poor social skills.
But there is something to being surrounded by peers and having to interact with them day in and day out that you don't get from home schooling.
As a parent, I have no say over who these “peers” are, how they treat my child, or what BS they try to push on them.
As someone who was surrounded by some pretty bad kids during High School I am very comfortable with my children not getting that experience.
As someone who was surrounded by some pretty bad kids during High School I am very comfortable with my children not getting that experience.
I know a decent number of people who came from homeschooled or religious families who went absolutely wild their first two years of college because they had been so sheltered growing up. This was at a Christian university where you had to live on campus for your first two years, drugs/booze were banned, and you couldnt have people of the opposite sex in your dorm rooms.
TLDR: eventually your kids will interact with "bad kids". What are they going to do then?
I don't think this is true. Take those same kids with poor social skills and home school them instead. They almost certainly wont have any better social skills. Meanwhile plenty of kids who did learn strong social skills by being around others in school would have worse social skills if you home schooled them.
I'm not saying regular schools get a 100 out of 100 on this. I'm saying they do a significantly better job at this than homeschooling does EVEN WHEN you add in measures like sports, group activities, ect that op mentioned doing.
Also as an adult I gotta say, in most ways it’s traditionally schooled kids who are “stunted” (immature, have mannerisms/beliefs/habits incompatible with the adult world) until they hit about 20-26 more so than homeschool kids. I’ve met homeschooled kids who probably considered themselves stunted, and in some ways (being sheltered) they were, but they were also significantly more “adult-like” and mature in other ways earlier than their peers. This is also true for a lot of traditionally schooled kids who are “late bloomers” IME.
I would imagine any kid who is viewed as lacking social skills who attends a regular school would be worse off socially if they were home schooled. But I don't have any data to back that up other than knowing lots of home school kids.
My wife was a teacher in private schools for about 7 years, and once our oldest was ready for kindergarten, we decided that she could either go out and teach other people's kids, or she could homeschool and teach her own kids.
If they are saving money by not paying school fees, and having to transport family and wife to the school/daycare everyday, and they are getting a professional qualified teacher at home, with a very favourable teacher : student ratio and unlimited teaching time....
well I can understand why they are willing to take the hit of losing the teacher-spouse's salary.
Be warned that I heard “homeschooling has changed since we were in school” in the early 2000s, from multiple parents who are now estranged from their adult children.
It hasn’t really changed that much - it’s just something parents like to tell themselves to avoid thinking about the experiences their children are missing.
We participated in many different co-ops. We took every AP class offered at the local high school. We're all functional adults with normal social lives.
It's obviously hard to come to any conclusions from warring anecdotes alone, but I thought it's worth sharing mine.
Strained relationships with adult children suck, but they're not a given when homeschooling, nor does sending your kids to public school necessarily save your relationship with your kids.
OP took their anecdote and generalized it very broadly [0]. I shared my own anecdotes, explicitly acknowledging that it's "hard to come to any conclusions from warring anecdotes alone". OP responded saying that their anecdote is actually a collection of 13 anecdotes. I countered that 13 tightly related and completely non-random anecdotes do not turn into a usable stat.
Nowhere did I mean to imply OP's experience isn't a true homeschooling experience, just that it's not necessarily as representative as they believe it is and that more information is needed before generalizing either of our experiences is fair.
[0] "it hasn’t really changed that much - it’s just something parents like to tell themselves to avoid thinking about the experiences their children are missing"
The reality is that what homeschooling parents think is "right" is often extremely noxious and damaging. Again, not all of them sure, but a large portion.
Yeah, which is why it’s bad in aggregate. But that generally isn’t the case for parents that send their kids to normal school first and then pull them out when things aren’t working out for whichever reason.
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Let's end this conversation here, this is devolving into useless banter.
To be fair though, I'd imagine an hour or two a week of socialization is still quite insufficient. On the flip side, 10+ hours a day of socialization is unquestionably unnecessary, and forcing your kids to become conformists or get beat up/bullied/etc (which is the reality in public schools unless you live in a really rich neighborhood) in order to get a little more socialization time isn't a good tradeoff. There are a lot of non-school activities children can engage in to get peer socialization where the type of bullshit that occurs in public school doesn't fly, due to the adults that run those activities losing customers and having their livelihood threatened if they let kids be little cunts, unlike public schools.
So I heard the same refrain from you that I heard from my parents and their peers, decades later from someone I don’t know, and your takeaway is that we must be in very different circumstances? Bud, you’re almost certainly reusing the same homeschooling materials and curriculum help my own parents did.
Did they know they were not good teachers in those areas? I'm sure they didnt. Did I know that at the time? Nope. Would public school have taught me that same subject better? Who knows but my peers seemed to generally have a better understand of it than I did.
yada yada road to hell is paved with good intentions.
If I had to guess, most of the original homeschoolers did it because they had strong, fringe religious beliefs. Then in your generations more secular parents started homeschooling but it was still a pretty highly self-selective group (a stay at home parent who didn’t mind staying at home most of the day teaching their kids, a belief they could do better at educating their kids even without the resources we have on the internet now to make it easier or the ability to use the internet to organize with other homeschooling parents, anecdotally a lot of either super-weirdo parents or hippy granola parents (more in unschooling)).
Now with the internet and WFH homeschooling is possible for many more parents than just those that don’t work fulltime and want to teach their kids full time, and it’s easier to create curricula, and easier to network and schedule things with other parents.
I do think there is probably a general problem of some pathologically bad parenting traits self-selecting much more than “normal” parents to homeschool: parents with control freak/micromanagement issues they subject their kids to, socially anxious parents who want to spend all their time at home with their family, parents with fringe/paranoid/extreme beliefs, having some kind of weird attachment or smothering issues they subject their kids to. Which isn’t a problem with homeschooling per se as much as it is selection bias in who chooses to homeschool.
What a ridiculous thing to say. Nobody does that.
OP's perception is because we also have a much larger conservative-Christian cohort than most other developed countries. As the grandparent points out, that leads to a large percentage of homeschoolers doing it for non-academic reasons, which skews stats and public perception.
The attitude I was raised with is that parents will always have to provide supplemental education but the socialization school provides is much more difficult to replace.
I came here to write your comment and was thrilled to find it already here. As a homeschooled kid who considers myself damaged as a result, I completely agree. The OP comment is eerily similar to stuff my parents said in the 2000s-early 10s and were totally wrong about.
My parents weren't religious at all and were totally in it for academic enrichment. They were all about the "new wave of homeschooling": high-quality instructional material, study groups, plenty of socialization opportunities with other (homeschooled) kids. I turned out fine academically and probably do at least partially owe my career to it, but the social consequences for both me and my peers were severe.
The issue with playdates and study groups and the like is that the odds are good, but the goods are odd. Homeschooled kids playing with each other is an echo chamber of robotic parent-pleasers (for a while, until the break happens) who're incapable of tackling genuine social dynamics because their foremost, unbelievably deeply inculcated desire is parental praise. I feel it even now - peer approval is meaningless; only that pat on the back matters. This results in a weird simulacra of socialization: kids understand that they're supposed to have friends and social contact, but go through the motions of "this is friendship and social contact" without ever touching the real deal. Friends your parents select for you are fundamentally not real friends, and pretending they are fucks up one's ability to form genuine relationships for a long time.
Homeschooling is the ultimate egotistical project of attempting to form a living, human child - with the fractal of possible futures that implies - into a mirror of one's self. The typical liberal recognizes the abhorrence of that in a context of religious indoctrination, but is totally fine with it in a secular context. Fuck that. It's wrong for all the same reasons, and fundamentally negates the child's identity as a unique human. This is why I don't think better instructional material isn't a solution: the core problem is that one fleshed-out outlook on the nature of reality is way too little. Without multiple sources of approval and validation, it's way too easy to monopolize a kid's perspective. Again, this is realized in contexts of religious indoctrination but ignored outside of it - forcefully indoctrinating kids with a single perspective is wrong, full stop. And no, simply presenting alternative perspectives doesn't work; it'll inevitably be couched in the sort of condesencion that parents are unable to shed. Imagine your dad telling you about rock'n'roll culture: you're hardly likely to go from that to the Twisted Sister video.
Parents, of course, love this dynamic. The problem starts when those kids leave the nest and find that their parents' perspective is not the only one that matters.
The other angle is that, ime, parents who are themselves socially stunted, like mine, are unable to recognize this dynamic and insist that nothing is, or even could be, wrong. Like the parent comment, I've kept in touch with many of the kids I knew and this perspective is far from unique.
1. Parents are not the only ones who push their own desires and beliefs. Thought experiment: how many members of the group that decides the curriculum vote Republican or Independent? Scuttlebutt (unverified by me) is that most folks in US schools and on US school boards are Democrats. Regardless of one’s opinion on political matters, that (if true) would suggest a certain uniformity of thought, and the likely presence of a conscious or unconscious agenda that would then get passed on, deliberately or otherwise, in the resulting curriculum.
And that’s before we get to the general tendency of many groups (regardless of type) to naturally attract like-minded souls in the first place. I only used political affiliation as a visible indicator of the phenomenon (assuming that the rumors are true about Democrats and schools, which as I said, I don’t actually know ;), not to promote one or another party, and not to imply that it’s anywhere close to the only factor.
2. IMHO, schools, public or private, do not fix social issues, and in a certain subset of children, may actually create them. I say that as someone who was never homeschooled, and yet has significant issues socializing (though I’ve learned to hide that fact in public over the years, and have a good career). Your thoughts on friendship resonate with me to a degree, and school did not help it one iota. Probably made it worse, actually.
I won’t go into my personal opinion on “the right answer,” because it’s irrelevant in the end. I have no kids, and thus no skin in the game, nor do I actually know “the right answer.”
Just some food for thought.
Have you taken a look at the news anytime in the past year? "Republicans don't have any influence on school curriculums" is a wild departure from easily observable reality, so much so that I think it kind of renders this comment beneath serious consideration.
The fact that those running for board positions typically have their political affiliation next their name on the ballot, though, should tell you something.
Whether it be Republican or Democrat is entirely irrelevant to the point I was making. The fact is that almost all school boards likely do lean one way or another. They have agendas beyond education, either consciously or unconsciously. Those agendas will make their way into the curriculum, however subtly or overtly. Those agendas will be political, religious, and/or just plain personal.
Whether you agree with whatever agenda they have does not change that simple fact.
That agenda is being taught to impressionable children. Whether that’s good or not depends on who those people are, and what your own opinion of that agenda is, and whether your child is enrolled in a school using the resulting curriculum.
But there IS an agenda that they’re pushing, just as much as any homeschooling parent pushes their own.
And that is the ONLY point I was actually making.
There was no need to try to shame my political views or knowledge —- which you aren’t even aware of, because I never reveal such online since people are so damned irrational on such topics, and that irritates me.
Oh. Then why do you think you have anything worth saying on a topic you freely admit complete ignorance of?
I got bullied pretty relentlessly (the goods are odd... and an easy target) and what little solace I could find was in doing my academic best, and receiving recognition and accolades from my parents and teachers. Thus I have also ended up a people-pleaser.
> Homeschooling is the ultimate egotistical project of attempting to form a living, human child [...] into a mirror of one's self.
Certainly for some, but that is not our goal and I am trying to be very mindful and cautious of that pitfall. I am trying to give my children the tools and skills that they will need in order to live fulfilling lives (by which I mean, able to keep themselves housed and fed, and with whatever calling or vocation or work pleases them most. I suppose that does carry a bit of my own projection with it, that it would be difficult to find life fulfilling if one is starving or without reliable shelter, but I feel that such beliefs are shared by enough of our society that the kids would receive them if they were in school as well). Will I make mistakes? Certainly. Will we be able to maintain a good relationship? I dearly hope so, but time will tell. Do I think the odds of us achieving those goals are higher than if we forced them into a school? Yes, I do.
The kids are involved in a number of extracurricular activities (mostly physical activities like biking and swimming and dance, but likely robotics at some point sooner rather than later) many of which include a range of kids with varying ages, many (most?) of whom are not homeschooled. Why wouldn't this expose them to different cultures, and provide them with other sources of approval and validation (friends, teammates, coaches, other parents)? Hopefully it will, even as that means I have to quash my desire to discourage them from hanging out with people whose views I don't necessarily agree with--just as I would if they were in school.
Anyway, in closing, to me it seems like the challenge is more one of helping kids, especially neurodiverse ones, learn how to navigate a variety of social dynamics and to be strong, independent persons who have a sense of personal identity and the skills to share that with other people but also to defend their boundaries when pushed... and that neither public school nor homeschool are necessarily good or bad at that (or perhaps, given our respective experiences, that both are bad at it ~wry grin~)
We have (mostly) homeschooled our kids. There are many forms of homeschooling. My kids didn't do study groups and instructional materials. We mostly did what's known as unschooling. But they ended up doing a mix of traditional schooling (with remote schools and then in person) and pursuing their own interests. I think it worked out well for them. One is in her last year of high-school (going to school full time now) and one has already graduated from university, has a job, is doing pretty well.
If I look at myself, I would say I consider myself partly damaged from going to school. I think many of my peers also have damage from the school system. It kills the desire to learn, there are negative social phenomena like bullying and other abusive situations. Many young people under peer pressure get introduced to substance abuse. There's even extremes like suicide. Schools are not a great environment for learning or for socializing. Some people do well, some people do very poorly.
> forcefully indoctrinating kids with a single perspective is wrong, full stop
Isn't this a great description of the school system? I totally agree by the way. Our kids had/have control over what they wanted to pursue.
I am sorry to hear of your experience. There are many things I wish my parents did differently. Parenting is hard and every person is different. Not going to school can be a better experience, at least in my opinion.
I don't think these are good markers for if home schooling worked or not. Being able to function in society is kind of the bare minimum positive outcome. I was able to go through my day to day just fine but had terrible social skills. Plenty of people have terrible social skills. But most of those people cant source them directly back to their schooling a decisions that were made for them.
> If I look at myself, I would say I consider myself partly damaged from going to school. I think many of my peers also have damage from the school system. It kills the desire to learn, there are negative social phenomena like bullying and other abusive situations. Many young people under peer pressure get introduced to substance abuse. There's even extremes like suicide. Schools are not a great environment for learning or for socializing. Some people do well, some people do very poorly.
Okay. So you may prevent some bullying and exposure to drugs for some years. But when the child is an adult they will almost certainly come into contact with those things. How are they going to respond? Have they learned how to deal with and handle difficult social situations? Have they been pressured by their peers to do something they know they shouldnt and had the confidence to say no?
It feels like the can is just getting kicked down the road. From my experience, many home school kids will go too far when experimenting as an adult because now they have the resources to do so and no accountability.
I'm not the most social person myself, despite (because?) having gone to school, and neither is my wife. I'm sure there's many factors other than traditional school vs. not.
When you're an adult you are better equipped to deal with bad things in the real world. Your experiences as a child have an impact on that.
We were part of a local homeschooling group for many years and have seen many children go through it and are still in touch with those families. Haven't really seen the negative results you're describing. I feel there's a big difference between home schooling in the context of a supportive community vs. being isolated and there's also a big differences between various approaches to homeschooling, distance learning, unschooling and more. It's hard to say much without more data.
I didn't explore it at depth but at least better than pure speculation.
I honestly completely disagree. Of all the friends from my school time, the only ones I keep in contact with, and realistically -- the only ones that ended up having their lives in order -- were the ones my parents selected and approved of. They were prescient in knowing how things were going to go.
I ended up that way as a public school student. Perhaps my classmates were morons, but probably not. Just never was captivated by whatever inane camaraderie-building stunts they wanted.
This did change when I joined the marching band. The specialist instructors being barely out of high school themselves helped because the things they'd give you a gold sticker for suddenly were aligned with what my peers would want to see.
Do you have a separate "school" room? All the kids in one room, or separately? How many hours each day? How effective is your spouse in partitioning the "parent vs teacher" roles? How does your spouse manage to handle your kids in different "classes" (and thus education stages) at the same time?
I understand to Home-school in some US states, you are supposed to follow some sort of curriculum, how much flexibility do you have?
What we learned, though, is that homeschooling has changed since we were in school. Back then, it was a niche, and the sort of parents who chose to homeschool usually existed on the fringe (and probably lacked social skills themselves).
Nowadays, there are a lot more "normal" families who choose to homeschool. Our family, and many others we've encountered, values and promotes social skills. Our kids attend co-ops, play sports, and do other activities with their peers.
And because the demographics of homeschoolers have changed, so too have the ways that they homeschool. It's not very surprising that there is more collaborative teaching, where parents remain the primary educators, but certain subjects are outsourced to co-ops, online sessions on Outschool, etc.