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 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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Then you've heard wrong.

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 to 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.

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.

An excellent form of inculcation.

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

Generally negative.

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.

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 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 them 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 kid 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.

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.

Nope, no..

Don't do it.

Kids will say thank you.

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.

You should only do it if absolutely necessary (no nearby schools, mental reasons, etc.) otherwise, if a kid can handle being in a school building, they should go. Staying homeschooled, especially starting at a young age, can cause major developmental issues and anti-socialness.

I've never met anyone homeschooled who wasn't a fucking idiot.

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.

Homeschooling can't give kids social interaction, which is just as important as the material. You can always tutor your kids in addition to what happens in school if you think the quality is low.

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.

It’s your ignorance and ego convincing you to do a disservice to your children.

Where I live, every principal is assigned a list of homeschooled children in their district and monitors their progress. If they are diligent, it seems to work out well. I know several well-adjusted, lovely children who have been homeschooled.

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

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.

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.

In the vast majority of cases, homeschooling is a method of abuse. Kids have a right to be educated with their peers.

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.

In practice, it functions almost exclusively as a way for Christian fascists to abuse and control their children

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.

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.

I'll go against the grain here. It's not as much, to me, about whether homeschooling is good or bad. I think it has the potential to be really good and really bad for the kid, depending on the parents.

But people who say, "kids won't get socialization" if they are homeschooled seem to think that tossing all our socially-unformed people into one location, with little socially-formed supervision, is automatically going to teach the former group how to socialize with others in a healthy manner. It's not. It just creates trauma for kids all around. Child on child abuse.

Not only that, but you strip kids of agency by putting them in a building where they can't leave, controlling their movements by a bell, assessing and grading their performance by "objective" measurements, subjecting them to authoritarian teachers -- it's all so degrading and the opposite of what id consider a healthy learning environment.

If schools had more adults integrated into student activities -- all the activities -- sitting at lunch, class, band, whatever, -- removing the barrier of superiority, removing lettered grading system, paying more teachers more, maybe id consider it. But as the school system is in the US (or, at the very least, my locality) now, id never want to send my kid

Edit: obviously not all schools are like this. But they are in my city. Id have to move to a more affluent town to be able to trust the school system.

Kids generally benefit more from 1-on-1 instruction and smaller classes. Some neurodivergent kids might need a more relaxed structure than schools can provide. But generally, most parents are not able to teach higher level classes (like, past age 7) effectively. Really you would be better off paying to send them to a school with smaller classes.

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.