My wife was a republican and I am a democrat, both centrists, anti-Trump, and fully vaccinated. She was diagnosed with ALS in 2017 and I retired to care for her in 2018. We sold the house and lived in an RV for four years. Our two boys were home schooled during this time. My wife died last November and the boys and I now have an apartment. They just finished 4 months of public school with all As.
My sympathy and respect @sishoch, sympathy of course for your loss, and respect for your accomplishment despite an objectively rough situation.
So, it sounds like she had her wild phase in high school, not college.
My wife and I, both bleeding-heart progressives, homeschool our kids, currently 7th and 5th graders. We’ve done it since they started school. My wife’s a children’s librarian/elementary media specialist by trade, so that’s been helpful. They’ve been part of a four-family homeschool group for six years, and each of the other families are probably even more liberal than us.
Our kids love it and have active social lives and do lots of extracurriculars. We own a seasonal business, so our winters are free to give our kids one-on-one attention, tailor their studies toward their interests, and they exude confidence because they’ve never been bullied for their quirks, and they are still “kids” because they don’t sit all day with a bunch of teens and pre-teens trying to act five years older than they should. They’ve also taken responsibility for parts of the family business, so during the summer they’re learning aspects of running a business while getting paid.
My son’s also on the spectrum, so this has been great for him.
My sister-who-no-longer-speaks-to-me was (and so far as I know) is still liberal and homeschooled both her boys.
Liberal homeschool types are definitely a minority, but they do exist.
As per always, the religious-cult homeschoolers get all the press, and the general public once again is convinced of the unacceptable weirdness of the homeschooling scene. In reality it is very mixed, with the only common denominator being strong reasons to not go the public school route. The reasons vary wildly., and so do the results.
That’s similar to what happened with us. We moved to rural IL and finished the year at the local public school, which was so far behind (e.g. reading along with an audio version of Charlotte’s Web in 4th grade). The intent was to eventually move again, so we home schooled for two years before moving.
We did go to some HS meetup on invitation of our homeschooling violin teacher. It fit the righty religious stereotype. I don’t remember what prompted it but a parent remarked, “It’s not like we’re a bunch of weird Quakers or something.” The violin teacher was mortified, but our family of weird Quakers thought it was pretty funny.
I’m progressive left liberal. I voted for Elizabeth Warren in the 2020 primaries, if that gives any idea.
My daughters asked to be homeschooled through high school, because they didn’t like high school. I supported them in that, remembering how much I had loathed high school. So we got them good tutors and they got their GEDs.
My cousin home schools her children, they’re about middle school age. I don’t think the family is particularly liberal or Christian-Right leaning, the solution was home schooling because 1)For the parents, job wise, they weren’t staying put long enough for the school year and 2) not wanting to agree to medication/therapy that may have been mandated for public school attendance, in one child’s case.(She felt she could do better without ADHD meds for her child, for example.) I don’t know if ant- vaxx is an issue. They travel a LOT and are a tight family.
In the UK I know of far more hippie parents who homeschool than rightwingers, although that’s likely to due to have more to do with who I know. I used to work in a zoo which got a lot of homeschool groupds through, but then it was evolution themed…
I’ve seen some appalling attempts at it; an ex’s little sister (former step sister, technically)-supposedly homeschooled- didn’t even know all the letters by the age of 12 because no-one had bothered taking the time to teach her. IIRC her mother wound up taking her out the country to live on a remote farm somewhere in Eastern Europe because the authorities were starting to take notice and try and force her to actually attempt some form of education. The kid did eventually learn to read, but I’m not sure if she wound up with any formal qualifications.
My sister is extremely liberal; she home-schooled her daughter from about 6th grade to 10th grade.
The choice to home-school her daughter had nothing to do with politics or philosophy, and everything to do with the fact that her daughter wasn’t thriving in the public school – she has a learning disability that the school did little to address or accommodate, and she was regularly teased and bullied by her classmates (and, again, the school did nothing to try to stop it).
My sister has no training in education, and so, she did a lot of research online, and joined several online support groups for home-schooling parents. She did report that most of the other parents in those groups were, indeed, conservative/fundamentalist Christians, which was playing a big role in what those parents were choosing to focus on in their kids’ education.
Honestly I think this is 95% of it. Homeschooled kids, when reported on in the news, are almost always some form of outlier, whether from poor education, religious cranks, or (rarely) super-high performers. That’s what makes it news.
Otherwise the huge variation and circumstances fly below the radar of public perception.
I once worked with a cyber security expert who was homeschooled through high school. She was from northern Idaho, so she was conservative on some issues, like guns and national defense. But she was liberal on most others. She was Christian, but married a Jewish guy (also a cyber security expert).
I once wrote for radio personality Bob Rivers. He and his wife were homeschooling their two young sons. Like many homeschoolers, they took their kids to daily “play dates”, to provide the social interaction absent from homeschooling. Bob and I had many writing sessions at the playground, while his boys rode swingsets and climbed jungle gyms with other homeschooled kids. Bob’s politics were hard to peg. He was kind of a blend of liberal and libertarian. Very focused on business and his career, but definitely not conservative on social and cultural issues.
I have also personally known several Christian parents who HSed their children, but they used a secular curriculum because they were doing it for other reasons. The library I volunteer at also has a regular meeting called “Secular Homeschoolers.”
As a knitter, I knew the woman who owned the yarn store in my old town, and she said she never realized the lunatic-fringe HSers existed in our area until some of them started bringing their kids, specifically the girls, to her store for “socialization.” As a rule, these kids knew the Bible inside and out, and that was about it; they didn’t know basic math, didn’t have an age-appropriate knowledge of current events, etc. She’s a devout Christian herself (now widowed; she never had children) but her store is totally non-religious.
(And about socialization? What if you have a child who was like me, and that was just another way to increase the number of kids who bullied or excluded your child? Sometimes, it doesn’t matter one way or another.)
My sister is in NC and has been homeschooling her kid for several years now. They are involved in a variety of programs in the area for homeschooled kids to provide socialization and educational opportunities that a parent cannot typically provide on their own. Neither my sister nor my nibling would abide any program that would be uncomfortable to someone who leans pretty far left (from an American point of view, at least). It probably helps that they live in a university town.
Kinda neat story how it happened. My nibling has long been labeled as gifted, and my sister and her husband had been discussing whether or not homeschooling would be a better fit. At some point, shortly after beginning the school year at a new school, the kiddo got wind of this discussion, and was of the opinion that this was a weighty matter that deserved due consideration. A few days later, my sister gets a call from the school:
“:sigh:”
My sister, who can recognize her child’s exasperated sigh anywhere, “Hello? Sweetie? Is everything all right?”
A long pause, and then another sigh, followed by “Well…”
“What is it?”
“:sigh: They’re doing… they’re doing fractions.”
Within days, the kid was taken out of the school and signed up for homeschooling, with programs designed to challenge and support the gifted student.
I am so proud of my sister, and so jealous of the kid.
I definitely lean left and I am homeschooling. We live in a fairly red state and the pro-Trump, anti-science crowd is gaining ground. We are also very rural and our tiny local school had a very unconcerned attitude about Covid from the beginning and and propagated enough factually inaccurate information to make me think these are not people who should be in charge of educating my child. We also have another family member living with is who has health conditions that increase her risk of a more severe illness so when the school actively encouraged parents to stop masking their children even during a surge of local cases we were done.
ETA
We would probably go back to school if we could move but that isn’t an option and we are quite happy to have avoided Covid so far.
The late Mrs. and I homeschooled both our boys for reasons that had nothing to do with politics. The older one hated doing the repetitive schoolwork; he felt that as long as he could pass the tests (and he could) why do the daily assignments? We felt that as long as we were having to stand over him to get him to do this stuff, why not just homeschool him? Especially as the school he was in was doing nothing to help him. Just trying to get a conference with any of his teachers was an uphill climb. One guy blew off an appointment we made with him two weeks in advance because he was coaching a Little League game.
We’re liberals who homeschool (though the homeschooling of our 3 kids is 99.94% finished at this point). It wasn’t politics or religion, and we’re in a decent school district, but teaching seemed to be going so well as the first kid approached first grade that we decided to take a run at it. As it turned out, two of our kids had issues that benefited from additional attention, so that was helpful. There are of course negatives to homeschooling as well, but that’s a topic for a different thread.
We live in Massachusetts, so the homeschoolers we’ve interacted were about 80% liberal, 10% Libertarian, 10% conservative. We didn’t come across many strongly fundamentalist families, but they tended to opt out of participating with the larger social circle of homeschoolers. I suspect in other states they make up the bulk of co-ops or social groups.
Interesting! I wondered how this compared to the approximate breakdown of the state as a whole, so I did a quick Google search, and discovered that Massachusetts is widely considered to be the most left-leaning state in the U.S. (I use the word “discovered” loosely–if I had to take a guess at the most liberal state, I would have gone with Massachusetts.)
Maserschmidt, how would you say the politics of the average homeschooling family in Massachusetts compares to the politics of the average parent who sends their kids to public school?
Yes, because of severe social anxiety. I could be wrong, but I would assume anxious children who have trouble with school attendance (who have involved parents) would be more likely to be liberal. Not saying because of being liberal or that this route of accommodation is better, but I think feelings-based comforting strategies (some might say coddling) are more liberal than not. As opposed to say “you’re doing this because I said so, pull yourself by your bootstraps, it’s all in your head, get over yourself” parenting style . Also, probably being part of bullied identity groups, at least openly. Homeschooling is often the last resort for bullied kids, kids who have panic attacks, etc. They have things like IEPs, 504 accommodations and so on, but a lot of those things are rarely followed and don’t work. If your kid is scared to go to school because they are bullied, they will threaten the parents with CPS visits and prosecution.