Totally agree. Fortunately, none of the homeschoolers I’m familiar with have any difficulty in that area. First, find some homeschoolers that “can’t master the daily newspaper”, and then we can talk about what to do with them.
I wasn’t posting that to denigrate homeschooling; again, I have no problem with it at all. (I have problems with particular versions of it, but I have problems with particular versions of puppies, moms, and apple pies, too.) I was just responding to what I saw as an implication that a minimal level of skill in teaching is something we should accept, because teaching doesn’t really require much skill. Part of my lifelong rant is that we should drastically raise the standards for teachers, and raise pay, self-determination, and status commensurately.
I’ve seen people do this well, and when they do it results in kids that are very gifted…however I’ve seen it done bad. Where I live there is a governing body in the public schools that go out and ‘assess and consult’ if things aren’t followed through, I understand that there are requirements and consequences for parents. In some places there are no gouverning bodies and that sucks.
If I had been stuck in a place where the neighborhood school was dangerous and drug-ridden I may have considered it, but my kids schools have been pretty good.
What’s wrong with homeschooling? Why, the zombie indoctrination of course.
I had a handful of homeschooling friends in high school; the nature of the sport I did was often intense and led some to homeschool. They seemed to have enough social interaction and seemed smart enough. But I didn’t know them well.
In college I dated a guy for 1 1/2 years who was homeschooled up until college save for a semester he decided to “try” public school.
Educationally he was smart and very well rounded. His parents were secular and both college educated (musician and nurse) so knowledge wise he was perfectly fine. He did a year or so of college credits at the local community college.
However, he had problems most other people do not. For example, his immune system was shit because he wasn’t exposed to germs much. He would often get over-stimulated or overwhelmed with schoolwork and life; he would need to take a break and expected his professors and everyone else to hold his hand in doing so (he went to a small, liberal arts college so it worked). It took him 4 years to graduate in spite of his 1 to 1/2 years worth of incoming creidts from CC. He would often struggle with being laughed at or teased by well-established and definitely well-meaning friends. He would blow up and scream and clearly have anxiety issues that were in no way genetic but all due to his upbringing.
He had a wonderful internship one summer (in a good company in his field) that he up and quit because the work wasn’t “emotionally or intellectually stimulating enough”. WTF? Internships very rarely are satisfying in those ways; they’re a foot in the door, dude. And he ran back home into mummy and daddy’s arms without so much as a reprimand - except from me, who told him this was what the Real World was like. He often expected people to answer to his every whim, to cater to his needs and to think about what kind of emotional and intellectual satisfaction he was getting out of their interactions. In essence, he was not mature not self-sufficient.
It was very evident that his homeschool education was 100% at fault for not preparing him for The Real World. From what I understand, he’s still having issues adjusting to the real world in terms of cooking, cleaning, maintaining an apartment, exercising, doing a good job at work (he asks lots of questions and is a general PITA seemingly). School is not just for education; you get a lot of socialization and learn how to navigate public life as well as deal with external factors (like teasing, bullying and so forth). An education in office politics and multitasking and self-sufficiency starts in school and it’s tough if not impossible to develop those skills later in life.
I am not a big fan of home schooling for many of the same reasons as listed here, but at one time I did homeschool my teenage son. Our problem was with his special needs. The school and teachers just didn’t step up to the plate as far as he was concerned. They are overwhelmed with 45 or more kids to a class with about a fourth of those with 504 plans. He actually did better academically with homeschool than with the public school. The problem was that I couldn’t get him out of his pajamas. At. All. He be came an isolated grizzly bear. I figured that failing grades were better than simmering teenage isolation.
I wanted to keep my teenage daughter home, but she wanted to be in high school with her friends, a decision she now regrets. The schools around here are basically just big ‘one size of education fits all’ warehouses. If you can’t fit into their prepackaged curriculum, then too bad for you. My daughter is bored, frustrated, and disheartend from watching kids sell pot in class, watching the pregnant girls realize that Johnny Perfect is now Johnny Douchebag, being unable to use the bathroom because of either filth or vandalism, not being able to do homework on a computer with anything more recent than Windows 97, and having to clean rat urine and feces off of her desk every morning. Drug sniffing dogs, bomb threats, textbooks with semen sticking the pages together.
It just makes her tired, sad, and want to give up. Sort of the antithesis of school, don’t cha’ think?
I can see what you’re saying, except that in this day and age don’t we all know at least a couple of man-boys like this who don’t have homeschooling to blame? They got socialized in the public school system, and still ended up unable to deal with the real world. Failure-to-launch seems to be a broader cultural phenomenon, and I’ve been hearing lack-of-intellectual-stimulation as an excuse for it since the early eighties, when homeschooling was all but unheard of.
Also endemic are personality problems produced by common maladaptive responses to the social pressures in the public school system. Socialization isn’t a magic self-working process. A kid isn’t necessarily going to get just the right amount of humiliation, demoralization and learned-helplessness that will reliably churn out a perfectly-tempered adult. What the system will do for your child is a crapshoot, though I can see the advantage to parents of having someone to blame beside themselves.
I’m not saying homeschooling wasn’t this individual’s problem. It just doesn’t sound that different from how many people who aren’t homeschooled turn out.
True, I definitely know what you’re talking about, failure to launch for boys in particular. I think he would have had smaller, minor issues because he was an only child of much older parents. But to the degree with which he had them was astounding (and IMHO caused by homeschooling) when compared to his intellect and generally very kind and outgoing personality.
So I would amend the “100% at fault” to “80% at fault”, since being an only child of older and very doting parents no doubt had something to do with it too.
The argument that teaching is something that requires an expert, and so cannot be trusted to parents, is disingenuous at best, and dangerous at worst. By that logic, children should be taken from their parents at birth and reared by state-approved, officially sanctioned child-development “experts” who know the “right” way to bring up a child. Kids spend only a small percentage of their time in school; if their parents can’t be trusted, they should be turned over to the State, because after all, the State has “experts” who know what’s best.
I know many people who have homeschooled their kids, and many people who were homeschooled. I have yet to meet any who were any less educated or any more nutty than the average clown with a public school education. Most of them shade a little above average for their age, and most of them went on to college (those who have reached college age, that is; some are still young). It amazes me that in the year 2011 there can still be so many un-informed, misguided people who feel there’s some bizarre “cult-like” stigma attached to home schooling. Yes, some people who choose to home school are wackos. But guess what: there are lots and lots of wackos who are members of school boards, school administrations, social service groups, and teachers’ associations, too. Home schooling isn’t a fringe phenomenon anymore; millions of people in all parts of the country are home schooling these days. They do it for a great variety of reasons, and “I’m a wacko!” is only one of them.