I'm curious - would you say the same thing if it was a kid in rural, bible-thumping Arkansas with secular, scientifically-educated parents who want him to learn about evolution without interference?

It's easy to forget that sometimes whole communities of people - sometimes millions of them - have values different from ours. And that there are people like us who are minorities in those communities. You can't protect the rights of those minorities without also protecting the rights of minorities within our communities, as strange as their beliefs may be.

Good point, I definitely agree that the rights of minorities need to be protected. Some problems with this idea are with defining what are rights and what constitutes child abuse, and what to do about abuse.

The extremes of social isolation that some of these kids endure falls on the abusive side of the line for me. I don't know what to do about that, it's a hard problem. Becoming less socially acceptable to behave that way among American adults seems like a reasonable step in the right direction.

To answer your question, I think it would also be best for the scientist parents children to interact socially with other local children in rural, bible-thumping Arkansas. If they wanted to home school their kids that is their decision to make. Humans are social animals however and a reasonable amount of real world social interaction is important.

The whole article rings true with my personal experiences, but I'd like to make it very clear that this has nothing to do with religion. Secular households are perfectly capable of making similar mistakes.

Homeschooling ensures that if your family has issues, kids will be exposed to them 24/7, without the time spent elsewhere such as school. It effectively removes all checks and balances and leaves everything up to the parents, who can easily mess up.

Particularly re: lack of socializing, I like to think of it as overoptimizing for IQ instead of EQ. It works, but as the kid you'll regret it down the road.

I've never understood the mentality that leads to homeschooling. When so many people are terrified at becoming parents/at being new parents because they've just been entrusted with a life and they're afraid to screw up, where do parents find the confidence in themselves to believe that they should be responsible for the totality of a child's exposure to other people and knowledge? At least a school experience allows for new ideas, experiences, role models, and environments.

E: Not to disrespect any parents who have decided to homeschool, of course. I was homeschooled before I was old enough to start preschool, and my brother was homeschooled for a year during, I think, middle school. It's a decision my own parents made, too, for a period.

For my parents and many of their friends the primary motivation was along this line of thinking. I'm not saying this is a totally fair or accurate line of thought but it is the line of thinking that leads one to decide to homeschool.

I can take my child's education into my own hands and probably make a few mistakes along the way but at least I care deeply about my child and have a trusting relationship with my child. Children are resilant and the real things a child should learn through K-12 has more to do with character, the ability to learn, follow-through, complete a problem, read for comprehension, etc... Things that don't require a degree or certificate to effectively teach.

Alternatively, I can trust their education to the State, to underfunded schools, to teachers (some of whom are great but some of whom are in place purely because of a broken system) who may care a little bit but have to split their care and attention between 20-80 other kids none of whom are their own, to an educational system which has long been optimized in the wrong directions and for the wrong reasons.

Personally, I don't think that public school is worthless, I just think there are plenty of benefits to homeschooling that are well worth considering. Even just removing the in-effeciencies that have to exist in a system like public school, frees up so much time and energy for self-exploration, additional time to focus on things like music and technology which are underemphasized in a school "system". Additionally, if the parents do a good job of exposing their kids to an appropriate amount of socialization it removes some of the distraction of the constant social element in a school system. AKA, it's easier to focus on learning when you aren't distracted by the bully sitting behind you or the cute girl across from you. For me, I just hung out with the bully and cute girl after I was done learning.

I do think some mix of learning with social is good but there are plenty of ways to do that, again in more ideal ratios.

Experience with the public schools is what has made me consider homeschooling my daughter. Her first grade teacher had terrible communication skills, seemed constantly stressed, and there was a huge focus on standardized testing this year which led to lots of repetition of skills students had already mastered (this was the area's honors magnet school). My daughter was bored and eventually uncooperative. I honestly feel she could have learned more studying only an hour a day at home. On the other hand, the kids in her class were terrific on those occasions where they were given a chance to interact, and the school also had an arts class rotation that she loved. But if next year is much like this year, it's going to be a tough call.

If you live in any sort of city, I'm sure that there are classes for art/math/science, etc.

I definitely think that for a relatively self motivated student, homeschooling works very well.

For us it was the realization that our kids did a ridiculous amount of learning before age 4 without school, and we thought free of the distractions of school and prescribed, regimented curriculum, they could continue at that pace.

It turned out they could, and they did.

If you're religious, then the confidence comes from a belief in a higher set of principles.

Or, if you're terrifically smart, then the confidence obviously comes from that.

Or, if you're a hippy, the confidence comes from a fuck-it-all attitude.

In my experience, these are the three main groups that homeschool.

As someone who was also homeschooled in Georgia (but was in the city of Atlanta), I don't really understand how most parents seem to believe that educating their children isn't their sole responsibility.

Sure, their kids' teachers are supposed to expose them to knowledge but the parents are ultimately responsible.

Perhaps one of the most important lessons I learned (other than how to teach myself) was the idea of personal responsibility.

That probably messed me up for life since now I'm fairly libertarian and also kept going to school until I got my PhD, but that's a different story.