But why wouldn't you want your child to have the highest chance of having enough money to survive, or the best chance of getting a job they want? I know so many homeschooled kids who ended up working for exploitative employers or doing really hard labor for really shitty pay because they weren't educated enough (both academically and in life skills) to get jobs doing anything else. To just be like "well, you don't need money to be happy or do well in life so I'm going to give my child a subpar education" in this economy is just naive at best and cruel at worst.

You've got a bit of circular reasoning going on there: Homeschool is inferior because it leads to lower income averages but then income matters so much that an education that doesn't increase it as much must be inferior.

Look, I'm not a homeschooling stan. I just don't like bad logic or incentivizing antisocial behaviors. We probably agree on, like, 99% of this and my nitpick about half a sentence is a blip comparatively.

It is super great for indoctrinating your children. If you are driven and dedicated to learning, it can be great. Depends on your teachers and resources though.

We were homeschooled.

Not the "religious nut" kind of homeschooling though. I wasn't even aware that was a thing growing up. Our parents actually raised us totally atheist, so almost the opposite!

Personally I'm glad we were homeschooled, our parents actually did teach us well and we learned all the academic stuff you'd expect us to learn. (The state we grew up in also has a system of "you take yearly state-run standardized tests to make sure you're actually being taught stuff", which probably helps. But like, I don't think that was the only reason our parents taught us well, I'm pretty sure they actually cared, too.)

The downside of all that is that it helped our parents keep us isolated. But honestly, I'll take that over the bullying (and indoctrination) we've heard of public school having. Public school sounds like hell.

-- Frost

Homeschooling is an antisocial behavior. Most parents who homeschool are doing so because they want their child isolated from the public school system and away from "the world". They want to be the only influence in their child's life and they want to solely shape the outcome of who their child is. That's antisocial as fuck and incredibly unhealthy for the kid, but the parents don't care as long as they get what they want.

Most homeschool teachers have no business raising kids, let alone teaching them.

I'm surprised by the amount of unfounded and uninformed opinions, whether for or against, that have a lot of upvotes. Then there are people who have been homeschooled, homeschool their kids, or work with homeschooled kids and commented to share information. Those have far less upvotes. Wtf. Listen to other people's experiences.

I'd have had an unarguably better life if I'd gotten into drugs with my friends in middle school. Which is to illustrate that I'm an outlier. Homeschooling sets your children up for failure. Most homeschooling programs out there are flat out bad. If you decide to do it, contact your local school district for reliable curriculum. They (professional educators) can point you in the right direction far better than the internet.

i feel homeschooling marked me for life as an unsociable person.

every homeschooled person i know has expressed similar dismay.

i wish my parents public schooled me and put the efforts they put into homeschooling into giving me a decent home life, rather than being exhausted all the time.

i was decent at math and that was my saving grace. my siblings are dumb as rocks. we were considered smart at our homeschool co-op. one person i knew couldn't go to community college because they couldn't pass remedial classes.

a lot of my classes were useless nonsense - i wasted a lot of time on religious history and Latin.

a stable homelife with a solid education on avoidable pitfalls, life planning, assistance finding out what passions to chase and how to get there, and putting money towards college rather than homeschooling would far outweigh any benefits, if any, that homeschooling offers.

if "peer pressure to do drugs" is such a concern for a middle schooler, i can guarantee you that its going to be worse for a homeschooled kid becoming an adult and escaping helicopter parenting.

Public school is definitely hell and also like prison

You might be right about that

Makes sense

Parents overestimate their ability to be a good teacher.

i have a friend who has her EdE. her profession before she had kids was teaching PhDs how to teach their collegiate classes better. She had kids and decided to homeschool them. That lasted four years. Why? One simple truth: She is not an elementary educator. She is a graduate educator. One of the smartest people i know, all her kids are brilliant. They could probably graduate high school when they turn 12 if they did homeschooling, but instead they are getting to be children and it only took her 4 years to realize how important that is.

It's banned in a lot of European countries AFAIK.

Should be banned in every country with decent public education. Unless you have a formal education background you have no business formally educating anyone. Everyone has stories of things their parents taught them that turned out to be total bullshit and they only found out because they went to actual school.

Then you've heard wrong.

Never been to prison, huh?

I was homeschooled for several years. I hope I don't qualify lol

I don't recommend it either though.

An excellent form of inculcation.

Generally negative.

I think its a better than nothing kind of option for some families living in remote places or living very itinerant lifestyles

But in general, I think its just a way for parents to keep their kids as indoctrinated into their fucked up beliefs as they can.

Also, growing up I knew many homeschooled kids through boyscouts, and they were almost always socially stunted, and often intellectually behind because their parents were barely teaching them anything.

We all know the homeschool kids are the weird ones. But being honest, I totally get that some kids might benefit from a year of homeschooling if they're struggling socially. Everybody's different yeah, not everyone fits into the same box.

Depends on the parents. Lotta nutjobs and alot of lazy people and both amount to kids getting an inferior education. But committed to putting in the work, with the time to due so, and good resources in your community to assist you, because you're unhappy with the quality of public education and/or the amount of propaganda kids are forced to sit thru? Good for you, home school away.

Homeschooled kids do things like base their opinions on, "I have heard" instead of citing empirical proof from rigorous sources.

I would not say "often" better academically. It's up to the resources the parents have. Poor families doing homeschooling end up poorly educated, wealthy educated families are more able to educate. Humans already did this up until the advent of modern public education systems.

In a public school, the idea is that both the rich family and the poor family are offered the same education, and this is better for society as a whole. I will agree that public education isn't perfect and could be improved in almost every way, but opting for private education is leaving your child's future up to random chance as dictated by your social status.

At some point you will try to socialize your homeschooled kid. If you live in a rough community where drugs, gangs, and teen pregnancies are relatively common, you won't be able to avoid the same influences you're trying to avoid in public schools. Except now it will be all they know.

IMO exposure to a larger population of people in a public school gives kids more reference for all the kinds of people in society, and control over who they want to interact with. Then it's the parent's job to make them feel empowered (not pressured) to make the best choice they have available.

I was homeschooled K-12 and never went to college, so home school is literally all I know and I have thoughts.

1. Motivation matters - I was home schooled for religious reasons by parents who were themselves educated but wholly unqualified to teach a single child much less 4 kids. They homeschooled us primarily to avoid the indoctrination of the secular world, where the lies of evolution and gay baby killers reigned supreme. Thus, I was not well educated and didn’t realize it until I got into the work force. I have been battling crippling imposter syndrome ever since I realized how deficient my education was - I’m still in the process of understanding the scope of that deficiency
2. oversight is not optional. In my situation, we were homeschooled without any government involvement or oversight in any way. My parents told me at the time that this was how the laws in my state worked but they also told me to stay away from Truant Officers so I think they were lying. I had no sense of equivalency or where I stood compared to my peers until I was in the process of testing out to get my GED (because weirdly, prospective employees weren’t keen to accept the “diploma” my dad had printed from MS Word) that I saw my percentile rank in various subject
3. Unless you are an educator, don’t try to run a curriculum. If you’re going to homeschool, pay a tutor. If you can’t pay a tutor, probably don’t home school

I know that last bit sounds extreme and I don’t think my home school experience is typical so take it with a grain of salt.

Edit: none of this even addresses the social impacts, which are intense if not mitigated with a lot of sports and group activities, etc

I had very similar experiences. Let me know if you ever want to talk about it, but I’m also unsociable so I will understand perfectly if you never do, and may even be relieved.

You get it.

Thanks for the comment

Actually thank you for the question. I’m still processing a lot of this stuff so in many ways writing it out ended up being to my benefit more than yours.

Growing up, everyone felt pity for them, as they grew up sheltered and not very well educated. In modern times, I feel like this has been magnified significantly.

I'd only do it if your kid was getting the absolute shit kicked out of them at school(s). Social media makes it extremely easy to get chain-bullied at multiple schools even with a transfer or two.