My kids are homeschooled. We just don’t think the public schools do a good job of educating many kids.
A few comments on this:
I really don’t blame the educators. I think they are underpaid and overworked. You could not pay me enough to do their job.
One group of people that I do blame is the parents of many of the students. They do such a crappy job raising their kids that the teachers spend an inordinate percent of their time dealing with behavior issues. In the meantime, my kids get exposed to their behavior.
Trying to teach students with such a wide gamut of knowledge and abilities is very difficult. Schools have to teach everyone which means the slower kids are left behind and the smarter kids are bored.
Homeschool benefits:
Our kids spend less time doing school because they get to learn at their pace.
My wife gets to work on their issues individually.
There are many more resources available now than there was decades ago.
We love our home school community which has really great kids in it. Meeting and talking with those kids is the best sales pitch for homeschooling I have ever seen.
Homeschool drawbacks:
They do get less broad socialization. This is good and bad. I don’t mind them missing out on being exposed to a lot of the bad things, but sometimes the cruelty of school CAN help you. You know those funny quirks/oddities that kids have? Those are mocked/beaten out of you by your peers. This can be too hard and cause emotion problems or it can also make you less quirky (more “normal”). Parents can try to hammer out oddities, but it just isn’t the same.
There is less competition. Competition and peer pressure can drive self improvement (in the right crowd). When I was in school there was a bit of competition among the kids that actually cared about their education. Get a 70 on a test? You wanted to hide your paper and you feel ashamed. Grades mean nothing to my kids because we don’t them give many and they have no frame of reference.
My state does require yearly testing for homeschooled kids. They have to stay above a certain percentile or they will be forced to go to school. I support this. I am sure there are wacky parents out there teaching their kids next to nothing and that is wrong. My kids are always way above this threshold and so it is not a problem.
If there are grammar/spelling issues in this post, please note that my wife teaches English and she is much better than I am!
So this costs our family tens of thousand of dollars a year (with #3 being the big one). We are blessed that we can get by with one salary, but it is more difficult. We could live a different lifestyle if my wife worked and the kids went to public school. But there are more important things in life than money.
It’s true that black kids aren’t bused in from out of state to provide diversity. But in comparison to other spaces where people interact socially, I believe public schools are far more integrated and diverse than almost any other such space. I’m having trouble finding stats on it (mostly the stats compare public schools of today to those of thirty years ago, with depressing results), but I think I’ve seen such stats before.
Certainly homeschool spaces aren’t as integrated as public schools, at least that’s my impression.
With respect, I’ve been working in public schools for the past sixteen years, and heavily involved in political work around public schools; I don’t think my glasses are rosy.
That’s not how I see this benefit. It’s not “get your quirks beaten out of you,” but the opposite: it’s “learn to live and let live alongside people who are different from you.”
If all you see is your family’s way of doing things–or the way of like-minded families–then you can really easily decide there’s One Right Way. It’s easy to infer that those Other People aren’t as good. If you’re living and working and learning every day alongside people whose underlying cultural strategies are very different from yours, then your developing brain is going to have an easier time thinking, “Oh, cool, that’s not how my family does it, but that’s how other families do it.”
I don’t know how you effectively instill that bone-deep knowledge of and appreciation for diverse culture in a homogeneous school setting.
There’s homogeneous and then there’s homogeneous. No, you won’t necessarily turn into a raging , xenophobic racist. I’m going to give a somewhat silly example. Up until 8th grade, I went to a school that was 100% white and Catholic. But that didn’t mean every family did everything the same way. Lots of things got done differently - this family ate every single meal around a dining room table, this other family ate front of the TV , in a third family, everyone ate at different times.
If I only associate with my family or the children of like- minded families, I might grow up thinking the Right Way is to all eat dinner around the dining room table at the same time because that’s what I’ve always seen , no matter whose house I was in. Later on - maybe in high school or maybe later, I encounter someone whose family did it differently. They all eat at different times. They are also different from me in some way - maybe a different race, maybe a different religion , maybe they’re from New Jersey and I’m from New York. I decide (maybe subconsciously) They’re Doing It Wrong because of the difference and they aren’t as good because of it.
It’s less xenophobic racist and more " Sheldon sees someone loading the dishwasher wrong" but it’s better for the kid if they understand that people do things differently and different isn’t the same as wrong or “not as good”.
Am I missing something here, or are you seriously arguing that we need to sand off all of the irregularities and uniqueness of each individual so that they all become more “normal”, for some unstated (and bizarre) reason? Annnnd the last thing I as a parent (or educator, which I was for 20 years) would want to do would be to “hammer out oddities”.
I know that if the school system isn’t rigorously dealing with bullies and such I would yank my kids out in a heartbeat. [=unmarried with no kids note]
I have a Facebook friend whose 10-year-old son has been HSed since the beginning of COVID, and he’s done so well, they’ve kept doing it. She works during the day, her husband works in the evening, and they’ve found that he’s a better teacher so he gives the lessons. Their son has dysgraphia, and has made a lot of improvements although that might just be him getting older.
Also, they had actually considered doing this anyway because they are areligious (what some people call “nones” nowadays) and were concerned when he went to a B&M school about how they would handle things like him getting invited to church, or being told that his parents are going to hell, that kind of thing. However, children who are raised around other people are going to encounter variations of that anyway.
So far, they have used a virtual public school approved by the state of Michigan.
Parents can access this help with enough time, money and desire, but they aren’t required to in a lot of states. Teachers are required to learn how to teach, and required to learn what to teach…and if they “crash” while trying to do these things at least they don’t take their students down with them.
There are a lot of articles comparing HS vs traditional schooling regarding getting kids into colleges (and a heckuva lot of noise from the pro-HS crowd), but I am having trouble finding anything reliable on long-term outcomes. I suspect in the long run HS kids end-up aligned to traditionally schooled kids in terms of career paths, salaries, and other success measures. If that’s the case and everything eventually evens out then there isn’t much harm in the HS trend, IMHO - it just adds a layer of diversity to society. I did not HS my kids and would not have if given the choice over again. However, if there is any data suggesting HS kids are out- or under-performing their peers in adulthood then I think the discussion will be interesting.
Before my brother and his wife had their kids, in the mid 1990s, they lived in Kansas City, and Houston, TX and in both cities, they met TEACHERS who HSed! The public schools really were that bad, and the private schools were very expensive, had long waiting lists, and/or were really no better. Also, for a while in KCMO, they had the highest per capita education budget for any major city in the U.S. What accounted for this? Well, one thing was that if a child didn’t show up to school, the school district would send a taxi, at school expense, to pick up the kids, so you guessed it - a lot of parents simply didn’t get their kids to school on time because they knew a cab would come by to pick them up.
(I’ve told the following story before, but I’m going to tell it again.)
More recently, when I lived in rural Illinois, we had a craft store whose owner, a devout Christian herself who ran a totally secular store, had no idea that people like the following existed in our area until the kids started coming there “for socialization.” These kids knew the Bible inside and out and that was pretty much it; they didn’t know basic math, didn’t have an age-appropriate knowledge of current events, etc. When one of my nieces had to be HSed due to some issues the school district couldn’t address, she said to me, “Make sure she at least knows how to read!” I told her that wasn’t going to be an issue.
I mentioned earlier in this thread that my brother-in-law was a high school biology teacher for many years, and that he and my sister homeschooled their daughter, my niece.
You really think it’s OK for other kids to mock or beat a child’s differences out of them? What if they’re doing this for something the child cannot change (skin color, sexuality, disability, etc.?)
As a person whose childhood “socialization” was little more than “increasing the number of people who didn’t like me”, and parents in endless denial, I hope you never have to deal with this with your own kids, if only for the kids’ sake.
Here is an article from a woman who has been to over 20 homeschool conferences:
She went to them with the intent of selling a program that teaches young women how to empower themselves. What she got was an education as to what a lot of homeschooling is really about. As you read this, remember that her purpose was to sell her product, not seek out bad examples to write an article about.
Public schools work well for some large percentage of children, IF those schools are well-funded. Of course this is rarely the case any more.
There’s a substantial number of kids who won’t do well in any public school. Anyone who isn’t average will struggle, whether they are so bright they are bored to death, or have a learning disability, or have otherwise have something different about them which causes their peers to torture them. Yes, torture! If you have never been the victim of such physical attacks, humiliation, or shunning, you cannot speak to how it can scar a person for the rest of their life. The poster who mentioned ‘rubbing off the quirks’ must be such a non-victim, otherwise they could never had said that.
Public schools are the institution of last resort – all children are required to attend, unless they can afford another option. But they do not have the resources to support all needs. So those at the edges of the norms always get the short end of the stick. That, I think, is the reason many people homeschool their ‘different’ children.
Religious extremists who homeschool are really a wholly separate group. Lumping them together with the (often highly educated) concerned parents who are trying to find the best way to support their children’s education makes for confusion.
Maybe these days. When I was a young student in the early 90s homeschooling was a relatively new and unknown phenomenon, and the internet did not exist. Homeschool conferences and curriculum fairs were the way for the homeschooling-curious and newly committed to find out how it worked and see what sort of materials were available (far fewer than there are today). It offered people doing a new and highly questionable thing support and community.
When my wife and I were just about to start with our oldest, we went to a large area one I had gone to with my mom when I was young, but we found the speakers unhelpful and the selection of vendors limited (pretty sure it was much bigger back in the day). We haven’t been back since. I think that with the internet and broader acceptance of the approach to education that homeschooling has largely moved beyond the need for the conference.