I have two homeschooled nieces. Their biggest strength is that they “like to dance”. Honesty, these girls are screwed and the world is going to grind then up as soon as they have to survive on their own.

Let your kids learn from professionals. This is like you expecting to be able to be a good accountant with no training.

Let your kids learn about social pressure and stress with easy it’s problems, don’t let their first experiences be as an adult with no coping skills.

Parents overestimate their ability to be a good teacher.

I’ll just leave you with this.

Parents may hate the idea of the public school system because everything is government-approved and streamlined. However, it isn’t like those same parents have a better idea in how to educate their children on their own, on top of everything else they have to do as a parent.

Also, 9 times out of 10, homeschooling involves lots and lots of religious brainwashing.

I’ve worked with two people who were homeschooled. Both were smart, but well behind in their social development. And just very odd, off-putting people. When one of them wanted your attention, he’d just stand there silently waiting for you to notice him. Sometimes you’d turn around and there he was. The other proudly announced in a staff meeting that he was going to appear in a porn movie.

In America (and i fear this has spread to other countries), people like Mary Pride have pushed for homeschooling in addition to basically starting the quiverful movement.

The idea is, you keep kids out of school so they are only allowed to learn your far right views, and you have as many kids as possible so you can 1) force the woman to stay at home and 2) have older kids forced to parent and teach younger kids.

You then involve the kids in politics as early as possible so by the time they are adults, they have already made inroads to working with far right politicians.

Some of those kids end up a certain version of smart, but the priorities are different. They might heavily focus on speech debate, both from a religious and a political point of view. On the “good” end of the spectrum, the kids end up truly charismatic and persuasive, and on the “bad” end, it’s basically tiny ben shapiros who just gish gallop you at any chance they get.

Often, but not always, girls are completely neglected since “they only need to learn how to run a home”. Oftentimes kids are abused, and homeschooling is a way to hide that from authorities.

To contrast with all of this, I think there situations where we should be more flexible with homeschooling. If a parent has expertise in a topic, they should be able to cover like a couple classes or something. I knew homeschooling kids who came to public school for a class or two, but I didn’t know any kids who were homeschooling for a class or two.

People in this thread are saying it’s dumb to think you can teach better than a teacher, but if it’s between 1:1 tutoring and being in a class of 30, you have a big step up.

Personally, I found math classes trivially easy basically up until i was like 17. Math classes till then mostly just focused on teaching how to accurately and repeatably do all the things that calculators do perfectly. I could rant about how math is taught a lot, but I won’t. If I had 1 on 1 teaching on a more diverse range of math topics, I could have learned way more. We should be helping parents/kids do that if they can.

It depends on a lot of factors, but it boils down to two things: Is the parent treating it with the importance it deserves? (Note this includes not doing it alone) And does the kid have the temperament for it?

Awesome if well informed educated parents are doing it because the schools are underfunded and class rooms to crowded. Absolute dog shit if it’s Billy Bob and his wife both of who haven’t learned anything since the 3rd grade are doing it because Jesus isn’t being taught.

I’m talking from a US perspective, but I work in an education adjacent field that reviews a lot of homeschool student’s academic records from across the country. IMO, there are two types of homeschoolers. There’s the students who are truly brilliant living in a part of the country that doesn’t value education, and they’re practically forced into homeschooling (or a popular online program like Stanford Online High School) in order to receive an actual education that could challenge them. They do get less socialization than their traditional schooled peers, but they’d get mercilessly bullied at a traditional school so it’s hard to say how much value that socialization has.

The other type are the religious fundies. I have even more hands-on experience with this style, as some of my cousins were homeschooled in this manner. IMO, this shit should be illegal. It’s accepted because someone is typically monitoring these students’ academic progress, but I can say with confidence that Republican states are letting a lot of shit slide. It’s religious indoctrination at a level beyond what you would even find at a religious private school. Typically, these students are better socialized than the other homeschool students, though with the caveat that all their socialization happens in religious settings.

It should be illegal or heavily restricted, as it is in many countries already.

1. The kid doesn’t get what’s easily the most important aspect of school (even more important than the curriculum), socialization.
2. The kid gets an education from someone who likely has no qualifications whatsoever, and is more than likely homeschooling for fundamentalist religious reasons.

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

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

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

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

I grew up in a cult that was big on home schooling so they could socially isolate their kids and keep them from getting any influence from outside the cult. It’s good for kids to be exposed to people from different back grounds and who have different opinions. You will never, never, never be able to replicate the interactions and social learning experiences they will have at school, at home. It’s borderline child abuse in my opinion.

Homeschooling is a great way to completely fuck up your kids. My wife and I both have Masters degree so we consider ourselves well educated, but we have always recognized that we do not have the depth and width of knowledge that our kid needed to exposed to. Also we always recognized that teaching requires dedication and skill sets we do not have.

I am not even going to comment on the lack of socialization the kid will miss out on.

The only reasons any parent home schools a kid is because the parents are wack jobs or terrified.

It’s a tool parents have to improve their child’s education, but it can also be abused to damage the child’s education. The state has an interest in regulating it and making sure children receiving it are still meeting educational benchmarks.

I think it works best in tandem with public schooling rather than as a replacement, but I know most people talk about it strictly as an opposing option.

I got homeschooled. One thing I think a lot of people don’t know is that there are computerized curriculum that leaves you perfectly capable of passing standardized testing. I actually took dual credit for my last year and did college English and History. So obviously being homeschooled worked well for me.

I also grew up in the church and the only reason I’m grateful for it is because, despite now not being a Christian, it did counter-balance what others have rightly pointed out that parents must make an effort to socialize their kid outside the family if it’s at all possible. Ans regularly. Which is another thing people don’t know: there are also programs designed to get homeschooled kids together and help make up for this.

So let me say as a homeschooled Christian kid who was still smart enough to deconstruct my faith and my father’s conservative politics and who thrived in their brief time in a college environment that I am clealry not a dumb ass. I now also work at a local ISP where my job is to de-escalate the most frustrated and angry customers, and while I primarily do this via email, I am even better at it on the phone. So I am clearly not lacking social skills.

My personal assessment is that homeachooling is a perfectly viable option. And I fully believe it should be a right, because especially in America’s current administration I think we all should be able to easily see why having no alternative to state-provided education could easily be turned against us.

It also turns out that I’m undiagnosed auDHD, so being homeschooled and being able to work at my own pace was probably one of the few reasons I did as well as I did in school because I didn’t have to rage against my neurodivergence.

On the flipside, however, I also believe there’s entirely too few guard rails, and it does lead to a lot of severely illprepared parents fucking their kids up. I’m lucky that (at least while crowing up) my parents took me and my sisters’ education very seriously.

I think there needs to be an arm of the Department of Education that helps prepare parents for homeschooling and requires regular visits to homeschooling locations to ensure that they are actually being educated and that they’re capable of passing standardized tests. Oh, and computerized curriculum should be required.

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

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

I only have anecdotal evidence of what homeschooled people are like. I’m sure there’s a ton of nuance and some homeschooled children are probably taught by extremely intelligent, capable parents and some homeschooled children are probably taught by people who are barely even qualified to be a parent much less a teacher.

That being said… Every homeschooled person I’ve ever met has been what can only be described as “off”. These people become adults with very skewed social skills and even worse, their sense of humor is completely stunted. I think a well-rounded person needs to be exposed to the rest of the world and the people in it starting from kindergarten, and homeschooling cannot reproduce that.