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.
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.