Why is homeschooling becoming fashionable? (opens in new tab)

The context, though, I am British. I grew up in Britain. I went to British school.

I can’t speak universally about my experience, (even within all of Britain), because it’s my experience which is in one small area of the country.

However, school, for me, was by far the single worst mandatory system I have been exposed to in my life. For the entirety of my young life, school was a prison. With inmates who would beat you, Emotionally abuse you, the “wardens” did not want to be there either, and did not care how the other inmates treated you… sometimes doubling down on the behaviour themselves. - The comparison is further solidified by 6-foot galvanised steel bars surrounding the complex, and that I visited an actual psychiatric prison not long after and the cafeteria, recreational grounds, rooms, etc; were identical to those of my school.

Education? You probably mean repeating exercises in rote? You likely mean memorisation? That’s not education.

It took becoming an adult to learn for myself that I enjoyed learning. My school was not learning, Everything that got me through school was things that my mother taught me- And as a consequence, I was always top of my class.

I find it hard to think of school as anything more than forced internment for children while their parents go to work, with exercises designed to keep you busy more than to give a functional understanding. I would not be surprised if this feeling is shared among many of my generation and social class, the endless chasing of metrics has made even the tiniest amount of joy that could exist in school- Non-existent.

and for those saying it was good for socialisation with other children- The ostracised, are learning to be helpless and to be victims- They are not learning to “socialise” more. If anything it is probably more harmful for those people to be exposed to more people until they’ve had time to form on their own.

Private schools are outrageously expensive.

Homeschooling is becoming the pragmatic choice.

But the important thing is we choose to take our kids out of public school. The trigger was Covid, but what really happened was suddenly millions of parents could directly see what their schools and teachers were like because we watched our kids work remotely all day for a year.

We did not like what we saw. A few teachers were really good. Many never bothered to show up, “class” was a note to do homework or something. Others were just plain terrible teachers who didn’t know their subjects well and couldn’t really teach.

More and more our district was also relying on computers and software to make tactically replace books and teachers, and not surprisingly that did not work so well.

Yes, remote learning and covid and all that was a shock to everyone, and all schools took a hit during that time. But this was a window directly into schools, and seeing how well yours did in the face of adversity.

The truth is, at least for our school district here in NJ in the US, schools suck in massive amounts of money, give them to largely incompetent people (to whit, our school superintendent started his career as a gym teacher), who unsurprisingly waste a lot of it.

There has also been the constant creep over the years to turn schools into social welfare systems. This is well intentioned, but in reality is just another bureaucratic money suck.

I could go on. But in short, home schooling and private schools both have risen in popularity because Covid revealed just how bad many public schools in the US have become.

Teachers would anticipate that I would be terrible and then when I got perfect scores on all the tests, they would be pissed off.

I think there are a lot of tech people that are neurodivergent and had terrible experiences in school and would love to avoid my child having that experience.

Also, I’m not super happy about the extreme views on race, sex and religion that are going through the school system. I would like the opportunity to teach a more moderate view. I feel like people who don’t have kids who make comments about this trully don’t understand many parents perspectives on this.

Also, when you are a parent, you find that you have to move to specific areas to get good schooling and homeschooling would allow you to live where you want to and not pay and go through the application for private school.

It’s interesting that everything in this article that’s anti-homeschool relies on the parents not doing something correctly, which I think most people just assume they correct for that. I’m not worried about abusing my own kids, because I’m not going to abuse them. Honestly, my mom was a teacher and she was anti-homeschool and many of the anti-homeschool bullet points were provided by the union and I think she just wanted to get full funding for the school and the state wouldn’t provide funding to the school when the homeschoolers didn’t show up and wasn’t really caught up in those arguments.

However, my wife is never going to homeschool our kids or allow me to do it, so it’s just not going to happen.

And my immediate thought was: "I can't imagine a less effective or worse way teach kids how to deal with people, average or not, than to throw them into a pool of similarly untrained people and telling them to just "figure it out". Which is essentially what public school does. Teachers can't be expected to help 30+ children work through that. They don't distribute across the pool of students in a way that can be effective for that. Homeschooling I firmly believe can be a more effective way to get exposure and learn how to deal with other people than a public school.

Public schools are training grounds for poor social skills.

IME it's a lack of trust, sending your kids to be raised by strangers. I grew up in a small town and some of my teachers were basically neighbors.

For some reason outside my understanding, a lot of small towns have shuttered the school in walking distance and moved to "consolidated" schools which might serve a thousand students from 4 different towns it's placed somewhat equidistant to, ie, in the middle of nowhere

As far as I can tell, private school doesn’t even fix the problem. My kids go to a pretty expensive private school and it’s not rigorous or challenging—the main benefit is that the kids are better behaved so there is less chaos and distraction.

Also, for the particular issues she talks about (e.g. social isolation), essentially all of the tech parents I know that are into home schooling put a ton of effort into having a really rich social environment, e.g. either through "group schooling" or lots of outside activities.

> - Social awkwardness and anxiety

> - Difficulty in forming IRL friendships

> - Impatience with the idea of connecting on a meaningful level with other people: who needs ‘em?

> - An abiding sense of detachment from reality

I'm the same age and have the same things, and I went to traditional school K through university. Idk if that has much to do with how you were schooled, or at least not being home schooled doesn't just magically fix that.

Just because you are putting a child in a siloed environment doesn’t mean you’re teaching them that everyone else is beneath them.

If you are homeschooling and not teaching humility, kindness, etc then you’re doing it wrong.

- parent of 6 homeschooled kids

Germany for example prohibits home schooling. don't breed detached extremists. however Germany thinks binning kids into handcrafts, simple office jobs and academia at age nine (!) is a brilliant idea o-O. but then on the upside again, you will go to school for at least 13 years if you get _any_ kind of qualified professional education.

China has one (1) math text book for 1.4bn people.

France has competitive cognitive Tests (Concours) to enter highest education.

maybe a problem is that everybody went to school so everyone thinks they are experts. it's hard to evolve schooling. like steering a super tanker. slooow. too slow for four year election cycles.

However, given his self-description, it seems there is a decent chance he would have struggled with social stressors regardless of what education setting he was in, possibly even more so if he had been exposed to bullying or excessive social stressors in a more traditional public education setting.

Exposing oneself to just the right dose of poison in order to develop immunity is a delicate science.

When I was younger, I was also taught to believe that nurture always triumphs over nature, but as I got older and eventually had my own kids, I found out that nature was winning way more of those battles than I first realized.

I'd rather home school them if I lived in San Francisco, or if I have money, send them to private school.

It's not rocket science that parents who have means to give their kids something better do so.

It's like asking why rich people eat better food, do sports, go to better schools and are healthier: it's because they can afford a better services.

Granted, I grew up in a rural place, and from a social perspective my school years were pretty good (high school was great, it was literally like movies that were popular at the time in the 2000s). I have many friends that I still talk to very often that I've known for the better part of 20-30 years.

Seems like this experience isn't the norm here. I suspect my experience is both a function of time and place.

Those positives aside, the "education" I received through high-school was incredibly poor.

I'm absolutely blown away when I see kids today taking programming classes in high school or calculus or "AP Stats" or any of this stuff.

I'd not even heard of "Mechanical Engineering" until some friends picked that as a college major my senior year, to say nothing of programming as a vocation.

Granted this was 20-odd years ago, but considering the low quality, any parent that wants their kids to aspire to "more" in an equivalent position today would have to either: - pay loads for a private school - spend substantial time giving their kids supplementary education outside of school (barring the naturally curious and ambitious). Given time and energy constraints, such a proposal doesn't even seem feasible)

It's pretty obvious to me why you'd want to homeschool today, given experiences like this and the boundless high-quality material instantly available online and elsewhere.

Socialization is the other concern.

I had trouble in the public schools because of bullying linked to my schizotypy (then undiagnosed despite what I'm told later was an exceptionally good psych eval for the late 1970s) They were going to drug me so my parents took me out for two years, I skipped three and was successful in high school. (In the single year my parents were able private school I was treated as I had some rights and dignity)

My son struggled in elementary school in a different way. Our school got labeled as a "persistently dangerous school" because we had an principal who, unlike others in the district, filled out the paperwork honestly (and got fired for it.) I lost faith in the superintendent when he first words in a meeting were "we're going to appeal it" as opposed to something like "we're going to do everything in our power to make this school safe".

I was active in the PTA (maybe the only dude; that same superintendent was dismissive of my wanting to be active in my son's education at the same time he welcomed the mother of a 'special' child who could call the state and light a fire under his ass to do so) and was very impressed with the teachers for one year, but the next year they seemed disorganized and the precipitating incident was when my son made a horribly violent doodle and the teacher wrote "Great!" with an underline on it. We didn't take him back the next day and kept him out for two years. We couldn't get him on a good reading program but we got him far above grade level on math with Kahn Academy. (As an adult circumstances got him interested in reading, now he's reading The Economist every week, books on chess openings, psych textbooks I loan him, etc.)

We never quite filled out the paperwork but two years later we slotted him into middle school where he was successful.

The former tends to replicate school and requires a teacher, usually a parent. It’s basically school with added/paced/altered/enriched curriculum at the cost of socialization, although that can be compensated with other forms of peer groups, especially in urban area. Comparing this method versus school A or school B is pretty much like comparing school A and B as two schools can be as different as any given school and homeschool.

The latter is what John Holt referred to as homeschooling but is based on self-determination theory and has an abundance of science to support it. Neuroscience backs this theory too, I think the rate at which active learning learns is somewhere around x20 faster than passive learning (ie “teaching”). Very serious folks like John Holt, Peter Gray, or Akilah Richards to name a few have dedicated their life work to supporting self-directed education as a superior form of education. What Peter Gray’s research shows shows is that outcomes are basically the same except for life satisfaction and psychological outcomes. In essence, it leads to same rates of secondary education, jobs and socio-economical outcomes, except an unschooled child makes for a much happier adult later on.

Sadly, because the majority of people went through contemporary schooling or some version of it, people’s biases makes people not want to hear this.

I’m not sure what the OP’s circle looks like but I would be surprised if none of those so called “techs pro-homeschooling” are only doing the school at home version without having stumbled upon any of the science around self-directed.

Are they? I mean statistically. Or is that just an observation from some random articles about a handful of freaks?

> and let me tell you, at no time were my six siblings and I considered the cool kids on the block.

I don't want to defend homeschooling but in my experience, the cool kids on the block tend to end badly. These are the girls that end up pregnant at 16 or in relationships with abuse partners, the boys that end up in addiction and a career of jumping from shitty jobs to shitty jobs.

Having said that it is nice to be able to develop social skills. I used to be super shy and had to force myself to grow a more sociable person and I am glad I had to force myself doing that by going to school.

One thing that's really common is for parents to try it when they feel that the local system is failing their kids in some way and the family economics supporting are acceptable.

There are also many permutations - it wasn't uncommon when I was younger for parents to do it through middle school, but have their kids attend high school because they felt that it was the point where socialization became important in a way that couldn't be handled effectively with home school.

Obviously there's a huge range of efficacy, too.

That said, I think you have to ask why are charter schools and vouchers (not just home school) becoming even more fashionable despite there being little to no evidence that they generate any broad improvements in the base level of education in the population at large? And a lot of it is because society has gotten more and more zero sum and it's going to increasingly self cannibalize.

Which is not that far off from the writer's premise.

Fundamentally home school allows children to be taught in a way that is appropriate for them, and with the speed and oversight they require. Something that you can't really do in a corporate school setting. All three of my children learn at different paces, and require different amounts of involvement. They all require much more involvement then they ever got at traditional schools, and they have at times progressed through their coursework much faster or much slower then the "average" pace.

It is true that if you have a child that is a academic prodigy they will greatly benefit from homeschooling, and its true that keeping your children in your home can allow you to be the greatest influence in their moral and social instruction, but its also true that even "average" students will probably do better with 1-1 instruction from a parent who is well equipped then they will with a teacher who might be better trained, but is ill equipped to actually instruct each individual pupil.

As for the main point that somehow this is some form of elitism where homeschool families don't want their kids around the common rabble. The homeschool families I know range from households where both parents hold post secondary degree's, to ones where the parents got GED's, and the career expectations are suitably broad for the kids being schooled. This stands in stark contrast to traditional school which ranks its self on how many kids go to 4 year colleges, and looks down on anyone who would join a trade, or be a home maker. This is literally my biggest complaint with school in the Bay Area. If your kid didn't get into Berkeley or Stanford your household was perceived to be a failure, and if they had any desire to do something other then be a Product Manager at a FAANG then they were going to be forced to live at home forever or move to another state.

Never once did I want my kid to “not be around mediocre”, it’s the extremes I want to filter.

Part of the reason we’re considering private school is to avoid the bullies/wannabe gangbangers who don’t care if they end up in jail that made my own life miserable.

Similarly, our concern is with the other extreme, anxiety-ridden, high-expectations “has to change the world” is not what we want his social culture to be.

A group of kids that enjoy learning, understand the employee/entrepreneurial trade-off but may still opt for a 9-5 is what we’re after.

A friend of mine half-jokingly suggested “the cheapest private school” to balance this out, and actually seems like a half-decent solution.

Like with general life consequences, we want them to experience as much variance on their own while avoiding extreme swings with long-term negative repercussions (horrific injury, jail, dangerous drugs). This is just one facet among many for us.

COVID is another factor. Anecdotal of course, but I've only met two home schooled families since moving to our present city 3 years ago, and one of them started out of necessity during the pandemic and found that it worked well and so never went back -- but they're a one income family so one parent has the time (the only way it works, IMO, unless you co-op with another family or two, which can work if you're friends). I must say I was very impressed with their kids.

Phonics and memorising times tables in schools should be as controversial as hand washing in hospitals, but they aren't, and that's just the tip of the iceberg that a very average layperson can see.

If a doctor or nurse or scientist says something is "evidence based", it works (most of the time). If a teacher or teaching academic says "evidence based", they mean they have some kind of evidence behind it, like in that Simpson's episode ('Well, your honor, we've got plenty of hearsay and conjecture. Those are 'kinds' of evidence.')

Teaching as an academic discipline has been basically spun out of whole cloth. Universities didn't (really) study education until governments told them to teach it, so they got a ragtag bunch of PhD thesis done, and the best way to do this is to use a very "philosophical" approach, and a very thin actual evidence base. Then they have to teach this to student teachers, most of whom are not really equipped to assess evidence. Then the student teachers who are great at the kind of essays that any student teacher can "engage with" will end up being the next generation of professors.

Schools are run by teachers (who are badly trained) and politicians the public service (which generally defers to the universities). Yes there is a more conservative "evidence based" movement, but even it is nowhere near good enough.

To many, schools are perceived to be costly, unsafe indoctrination centers that push left-leaning agendas. Extended covid lockdowns were a huge betrayal.

You only have one chance to raise your kids, and the competition is getting tougher every year. Homeschooling in the area has tripled.

Some of the criticism is justified, some isn’t. But with failures on the academic outcomes, safety, and subjective failures on the ideology – the onus is on public schools to win back trust.

You can shame the homeschoolers , but that won’t bring them back. Time will tell if they succeed, but compared to public schools, the bar is so low that odds are in the homeschoolers favor. Especially if their parents care enough to do it.

Public school systems sucks at diversity. It demands parents and students to endure diversity (i.e. putting kids from all walks of life into a single class), while it delivers zero itself, i.e. refusing to diversify its offerings as affluent kids from high-iq parents need different schooling than the fresh foreign refugee-arrival from a war-torn country.

Teachers Unions make sure to deflct any "market pressure" from teachers and these unions' political arms (i.e. left-leaning progressive parties) rake in extra profits because they can cry wolf about the bad state of education or worsening abilities for poorer people to rise through the ranks via merit. Crocodile Tears.

1) kids in nursery get sick a whole lot, and is not always just 'building up their immunitary system', it really is a one-two punch of constant illness that drugs for months on, with little to no recovery mechanisms. This is truer in bigger city with a higher turnover of the class cohort

2) a lot of the socialization aspect of nursery is overrated. Parallel play is a thing, and the need for socialization doesn't require a whole 8 hours. There are plenty of other opportunities to socialize. Especially in higher density areas, where institutions are more involved in creating moments for kids to socialize.

3) the cost of central group based nursery has skyrocket. (just empiric evidence), at the same time there is an increasing supply of 20-something-y-old that don't want a nursery job, but are happy to do a more flexible working hour in a less 'stressful' enviroment (aka less children, more home based).

The combination of the 3 things has made homeschooling a lot more interesting for parents.

Also, the school education is not crap because it's done by average or designed for the average. It's crap because it objectively can't adapt to an individual kid's pace. There's just no way around teaching kids in huge groups that doesn't involve everyone working as a teacher. Maybe AI will help here.

People recommending private school: these do not exist in all locations, try finding a good one in a rural area

It seems standards in public schools have only fallen since I attended, and based on how social media is trending, we seem to be getting dumber and less informed.

I could never force a child to attend public school in the US, unless it happened to be one of the rare good ones I hear exist.

If we ever get something like what is described in "The Diamond Age" perhaps that will help solve the school problem.

If that is done by the parents / family, then it's almost like home schooling. But I don't like home schooling because the kid is left out of the system and the studies are not recognized. At some point they will have to take traumatizing equivalence tests, which can be entirely avoided by playing along - go to a public school, or in my kid's case, a private school which follows the same curricula.

But I stress again, even with private school, there's no replacement for private tutoring if you want your kid to succeed in life.

Of course, this is pretty much the same set of dice you roll when you spawn into a traditional school system, except you roll with disadvantage when it comes to the long-shot.

I don't know, I was fortunate enough to roll the long shot, and it worked out pretty well for me. Though I will echo the article's note that forming emotional attachments continues to be a bitch if you didn't have a large peer group at a young age...

I agree in part and disagree in part:

Agree - they're absolutely "hacking" education for their kids. The 1:1 student/teacher ratio and the ability to custom tailor almost every part of the curriculum are the biggest selling points--and that's true whether it comes from a desire to give their kids the best they can, or a desire to micromanage and control every aspect of their lives.

Disagree - I think it's less about "average people" overall and more about opting out of learning from and being trained by what can feel like a gachapon of teachers and administrators in public (and to a lesser extent, private) schools. It probably seems to them like, "If I wouldn't hire this person to work at my company, why would I 'hire' them to do the much more critical task of preparing my child for their future?"

None of the arguments convince anyone. Homeschooling remains what it was in the creationism-and-spelling-bee days: an ideological choice.

In other words...

  Windows = public school
  Mac     = private school
  Linux   = homeschool

Could that be because newspapers like to report on those and people like to read stories about how awful rich kids are?

There are plenty of unpleasant kids from modest backgrounds. It's just that their tales are boring.

1) Private school is expensive as hell.

2) Yet, public school sucks. Most normies don't wanna learn and the system doesn't reward nor incentivize the smart, initiated students who want to excel. There are many normies that teachers just gotta essentially ... just babysit. And God forbid that a teacher stands up for themselves. Then some Karen has go and destroy that teacher and their career.

I can tell you from personal experience, going to school doesn't prevent this.

I know many teachers, and they have a very specific set of skills on how to teach. I wouldn't expect any old parent to know this and I suspect home school kids are worse off for it? But I'm happy to be pointed to evidence on the contrary.

This site doesn’t represent the world at large.

I was personally homeschooled, and while I ended up with a positive outcome, I cannot say the same thing for any of my peers (other kids I met through homeschooling groups.) There were many children that, in retrospect, were suffering from abuse or neglect that the structure of school could have prevented, or at least a mandatory reporter could have caught.

For more anecdotes, take a look at r/homeschoolrecovery (which is nearly 1/6th the size of r/homeschooling.) Many of the stories there are so gut-wrenchingly bleak. Any margin improvement in educational outcomes hardly seems worth it given some of the pain described there.

In my case, I chose it because the public schools in my part of town (low income) were low achieving, and proto-fascist in their policies on being able to control your own appearance. They had both state level (Texas, conservative) and city-level (Austin, progressive) political influences, the worst elements of both.

Just my own experience, but it doesn't much match what the article describes.

I'd like my kids to be free to follow their curiosities. It's definitely work to homeschool but for us, it may be worth it.

The most common reasons I hear are either that the public schools they are zoned for are terrible, mainly complaints over safety and/or drugs. The other common reason is just not seeing the value in the education being provided, often complaining of teacher quality or the design of a school system modelled after a program meant to churn out good factory workers.

Cruise. Around YouTube for older videos and connect the dots on how Common Core was a money grab that set us back a bit.

Go to local schools and see how school boards tie their ideology to how schools and classrooms are run to get that money. For years in San Francisco you enroll in the school lottery and hope you get to send your kid to the school close enough to you. Otherwise you spend 45 minutes each way to drop them off at school. On top of that classrooms cater to the lowest performing student. What parents with money wind up doing is sending their kids to Kumon like learning centers to fix the gap the classroom has in pushing their kid to be engaged with learning.

With everything else schools are also penalized for suspending or expelling students so teachers have to find creative ways to keep the bad apples away from everyone else.

For context I have family and friends working in public schools across differ states. There’s a reason people want to abolish the DOE and return curriculum back to the local school districts or the state.

I went to an ok school district and didn’t experience any of the problems today’s kids seem to face in school. People got suspended or expelled for being bad. Classrooms didn’t show political or biological ideology to the students.

Because public education has gotten progressively worse.

And, unfortunately, that's part of what's moving me towards homeschooling my child. We've not 100% decided on it yet. However, we are on the brink.

The issue we have is our school is underfunded and our child has special needs. Their day in class, from what we've observed, is primarily just daycare with no actual schooling. Even though they are on the border of being severe, they have no interaction with their peers which is a major reason we wanted them in school in the first place. The end result is they are spending a very large amount of time watching youtube or sitting in a corner.

The issue is our school district and our state does not want to fund public schools. They want to find ways to send money to private schools. The end result is the salaries for everyone involved are pitiful. Everyone that deals with my kid at school works 2 jobs. Some of them are making more money at mcdonalds than at school. And, surprise, the end result is even if they want to find staffers they can't find them.

Our district further bans parents from volunteering. So even though my wife is a SAHM, she can't lend a hand in my child's school to make up the staffing problem and improve my kid's education.

All of this has pushed us towards wanting to homeschool. Which really sucks because I don't think that's the ideal education for my child. I worry that we'll have gaps in the education we try to give them. I worry that they won't get to socialize with any peers. I worry that they will ultimately get left behind. But school isn't providing what we want.

Plus it's more or less a golden age for homeschooling: there's more resources available than ever.

I really don't understand why school vouchers aren't more popular. Parents need to have the ability to choose where to send their kids. They have much more agency in private schools where they are the people paying salaries.

I think the best way to fix the education system would be a voucher based system where the vouchers would be X dollars which would cover public and some private schools, but parents would have the option of choosing where to send their kids and if they want to spend more to send to better schools. Make schools compete for students.

There should also be some standard homeschooling kit or some sort of national resources that enabled parents to homeschool more easily.

Is there anything being done on this front that you think it's interesting?

From what I hear, it really feels like parents are more willing to homeschool than to be engaged with their children's education.

You thinking your kid needs some additional sauce to not be "average". Rad, teach them that at home. What about sending your kid to school prevents you from doing that?

I'm not saying school is perfect. But lately Parents care more than students about getting an "A" and if not it's the "Damn Teacher's" fault.

They want to protect their kids from the discomfort of not doing well in school. When they should be working with their student to help develop their talents.

The need for socialisation and being able to get along with the average had any meaning for as long as we had any hope for the "society" thing. Now it is obvious that there is no society (and it is arguable whether one really ever existed, maybe only for short periods in times of grave crises).

Universal education, for all children in a nation, is an incredibly recent thing. Its also essential for real participation in a democracy which requires, at minimum, an understanding of the governing body and at maximum whatever we're slogging through now. Could the curriculum be better? Definitely. You know who is stopping that? Shit politicians. We need better ones because no matter what you think, they aren't going away,

Education has also continuously and purposefully been underfunded and politicized by the political right and intermittently eviscerated by corrupt players on the left and right. This is on purpose. The rise of homeschooling is directly correlated with how much funding public schools have lost, the lack of safety and how difficult it is to operate successfully. You now send the kid to school and get cut with a thousand small asks for cash when we could just revise how taxes are collected and distributed. Put out a gun ban. We don't need metal detectors, and cops and clear backpacks and active shooter drills and teacher trainings and and and. We need LESS GUNS and most americans agree but private industry is limiting us.

The rise of homeschooling is correlated with how many people are concerned about the politicization of schools, their libraries, their teachers, their cirruculum.

We keep having presidents who appoint leaders to the department of education who do not believe in education being available for all citizens. Schools continue to expand their mission to feeding kids who can't be fed. To programs for kids who can't be home. No one seems as focused on fixing why there are so many hungry kids instead focusing on a 'lunch account' and the debt of middle schoolers.

This is all intensely documented and yet another example of cutting a public good. A public good by the way, that made America a place that everyone in the world wanted to go. Yes, I got picked on in school and was bored in my classroom. Yes it could have been better. This though, this is a concerted effort to get us to divest once again, just like we are from net neutrality, the post office, the EEOC etc.

A - It's illegal where I live, you have to jump hoops to do it B - I think an extra opportunity for socialising with kids is worth a bit of pain - we wouldn't have the energy for organising alternatives and also take care of the kids education C - By sending kids to a nice private school you get rid of a lot of problems of public school: unmotivated / openly hostile and punishing teachers, classmates with bad behaviour disrupting class, immigrant classmates who don't speak the language and / or create gang of people from the same country to gang up on kids (exactly like in prison)

When I went to school things weren't as bad as today and kids were not getting stabbed in public school, still it felt like a prison because of the slow learning pace and because everyone learns at a different pace and wants to learn about different things. School is simply the wrong idea for the majority of boys, it's just a silly machine that print mindless employees.

The strongest reason for not sending them to school is the latest EU mandatory gender theory / sexual education propaganda being taught to kids in school since last year.

Ultimately I decided that years of socialisation with peers trumps a few lessons about political BS; I'm confident I can teach them to distrust authority and teach them that they cannot trust blindly everything they hear in school or on the newspaper.

My friends who pursued illegal homeschooling are quite happy, they even found a teacher who is teaching kids illegally in someone's home, and by grouping the kids together across multiple families they have a soft school experience.

Eg, science, math, study hall, lunch, Spanish, History, Art, English… in a single day?

I loved it. What worked for me was studying for tests — and the harder the classes you took, the less homework there was (or it wasn’t required). I had a great history teacher, occasionally good math & English teachers, a great art teacher, and mediocre science teachers. The science TEXTBOOKS were fabulous — you could just read through those things and become a genius.

No more textbooks these days — it’s all some pdf segment to download. Bummer for my kids.

These days, there are way fewer tests, so my kids always freak when they have tests. I thought tests were great! Just one focused period to perform and then move on. Homework and projects were a big problem for me, because I could never start early enough — it was always a last minute dash. Maybe that trained me to produce fast output, though.

Kids were sometimes awful, but there was no way I was going to be popular so I just did my nerd thing. There were enough of us.

They had a great drama program which I loved — I did every play and musical I could. And they even had a speech and debate club — so I competed at “extemporaneous” speech—when I went to state competitions, they got the students all together to clap me out like they’d do for the football team. That was unnecessary and funny for the nerd.

My kids don’t get these kinds of opportunities, I fear. I was pretty lucky.

I would rather send my kids to a private school than try to homeschool them myself. Thankfully, the public schools in the the area I choose to live in are excellent. We do augment at home with tutors and extracurricular learning.

Obviously he also has his challenges in school. It's a public school but in Austria, so it ain't that bad. But there is also the saying that you aren't learning for school, you are learning for life.

So you aren't just learning for your subject, you are also learning to get along with people, how to avoid conflicts, how to manipulate a bit and how to trick some of the systems. All of that is not so much possible in homeschooling.

People do know that around here and it's more of a distrust into the system that might parents want to get their kids not taught in school in recent years, while their thinking behind the distrust does make them very bad teachers overall.

----

I agree this is probably the biggest tradeoff, but attention all parents, there's a cunning and affordable solution to the challenge of spoiling versus opportunity. It's guaranteed to work, anecdotally, at least sometimes:

Live in a big house and send your kids to a nice school, but roster them on truly hood (n.b. I mean real deal heart of the ghetto) travel sports teams. Only two requirements are as follows:

(1) that the team must be decently coached and

(2) practice field and home field must be in a genuinely scary neighborhood. Please don't assume I mean a run-of-the-mill bad neighborhood.

Ideally Pop Warner when younger and AAU BB by high school, but really anything other than lacrosse or fencing works. I personally was raised on hood travel baseball, and I am being 80% serious about this suggestion. Go Hurricanes.

The one thought that I imagine is being told you’re “above average” and “destined to do great things” your whole life by your socially-deemed successful parents is just another set of probably unrealistic expectations placed on kids.

There are more reasons to consider, but these are our most important factors.

Not everyone would recognize this, and be willing to call it out.

I wonder whether that came from the writer's religious homeschooling, and if so, whether it came from learning from decent people who taught and embodied the better Christian values? Or from a reaction to the distancing that can kinda be implicit (e.g., hints that people not in the religious group are a less-enlightened Other)? Or both?

There are lots of online resources, online courses, tutors who do remote tutoring (I do not think i could have found my daughter a Latin teacher locally very easily, for example), lots of courses both for conventional qualifications (my kids did (I)GCSEs - just as kids do in British schools, (except at schools they do them at 16, we spread them out with my older daughter doing her first when she was 11) and just to learn (e.g. MOOCs).

“An estimated 10% of K–12 students will experience sexual misconduct by a school employee by the time they graduate from high school.”

https://nij.ojp.gov/library/publications/case-study-k-12-sch...

But I do sit with him every night for 30 mins to go over alphabet and Math. I think I'll extend it to maybe 45 mins when he goes to primary, but anything longer than 1 hour is going to be harmful.

When I hear a question like this, I think: "Seriously?"

If it's not obvious to you why no one wants to to go a typical modern public school you probably haven't been in one in a while.

It's difficult to feel optimistic about a society that thinks this way, much less has a cultural and economic elite that is seemingly emboldened to think this way. "Average" people are the norm, the reality that "not average" people will have to deal with for the rest of their lives.

Learning how to co-exist with people who aren't like you is a universally valuable experience, especially for people who would fashion themselves as "not average."

Our education system is broken.

Following is recent video of my homeschooled son that this community might appreciate. It gives an opportunity to tailor education and challenge kids potential.

From what I know of the USA, all students are placed together in classrooms. Now I'm not sure if that's on the federal level or state level, but I cannot imagine the brightest students being held back by the weakest/misbehaving ones. Where I live we are placed into different grades, where students are grouped by their academic performance. There is no prejudice or superiority/inferiority associated with it and it just works.

I've only heard anecdotes from the Teachers sub on Reddit, but if that was my child in the USA I would homeschool 100%.

“We cannot continue to send our children to Caesar for their education and be surprised when they come home as Romans.”

- Voddie T. Baucham Jr. (possibly among others)

One of the tenants of collectivism seems to be to replace the parent-child relationship with a society-child relationship "for the good of society"

I am also "on the spectrum," which means that I'm a bully magnet (much better, these days, but it lasted far beyond grade school).

Had a number of other issues, that came to a head, when I was 18.

Dropped out of school, basically, in 11th grade, and got my GED, a bit before I would have graduated, if I had stayed.

Most of my education after that, was a redneck tech school, OJT, home experimenting, and a whole bunch of seminars and focused tech classes. Couple of math classes in college.

I did OK, but a hell of a lot of others, with similar backgrounds, did not.

I am ambivalent about homeschooling. I think it may do well, for some people, and not, for others. I know that there's a "Little Nazi" homeschooling program that's popular with the bedsheets-as-a-uniform crowd, but it might be possible to get a far better education, at home, than the best prep school could give you.

People whinge about Trump possibly abolishing the Department of Education, but maybe no DoE is better than the one we've got. Because between Goals 2000, No Child Left Behind, and whatever psychological experiment the education establishment has cooked up recently, I can't distinguish between the education system's serious proposals and sinister plots by a saboteur to undermine education from within.

What's really needed is a constitutional convention. Abolish and reboot the entire government, implement a multiparty parliamentary system with actually functional, corruption-resistant government agencies and bodies. Homeschooling is citizens' response to a state that's failed in its basic responsibilities.

But not convinced it’s possible to emulate the social interaction part diy

The problem is that it is really bad at handling children who are neurodivergent. My daughter is autistic and my son has ADHD and they just stuggled to fit in at school. They were filled with anxiety and the supports for them just weren't there. Spending on special needs supports is pitifully low despite Ireland being so cash rich right now.

So now we homeschool them and they are doing grand learning at their own pace.

But it's not just that that makes me favour home schooling. For me one of the biggest issues with state education pretty much everywhere the world over is the idea that at a certain age a child should have reached a certain academic standard and if they haven't then that is seen as a failure or at the very least a problem. This is complete and utter nonsense. We all learn at different speeds, some pick up knowledge early, some pick it up later. What matters is that by the time they leave school they are in possession of most of the life skills they need.

I also have issue with what is taught and how it is taught. Most subjects are taught with a focus on rote. Children are told to learn things, but aren't really told WHY they should learn things. That why bit is so important to help a childs mind develop.

For me there is also a bit of a morality issue. If you go an look at a school curriculum there will nearly always be something that you as a parent do not agree with. For me its the idea of teaching children that there only option in life after education is to get a job, be a good worker and keep going until retirement. I don't subscribe to that idea, I believe there are alternative life pathways. The problem is that if I send my children to a state school they will be forced to learn and accept things I fundamentally disagree with and that to me is morally dubious.

I was fortunate to have parents that are extremely well educated and my homeschooling gave me an education that is simply unavailable in a school. Not many kids have sat on the back deck in the Appalachians with their father, learning how to read Virgil in Latin.

There were lots of other homeschoolers in our county who were all religious nuts. Fortunately Virginia requires you to come in and take standardized tests every couple years to see if you're at grade level if you're homeschooling, so the worst cases got corrected. The school district also proctored my AP tests for me, even though they weren't classes the school offered.

My kids are in public school. The public schools where I live are excellent and actually deal with bullying. My kids would rather not go to school, but they're not being traumatized and they're getting a good education and have lots of friends. There's a major emphasis on social-emotional learning, which turns out to be heavily correlated with later performance. Our biggest problem is in high school with parents pressure cooking their kids to try to go to places like Harvard or Yale. I do what I can to counsel the kids and get them off that path. My own kids are firmly convinced that they're going to guaranteed admission state schools, and don't have to try to build a ridiculous resume in high school.

Schools don't have to be horrible. They just have a history of being poorly run in many places.

And no, educational videos on YouTube are not a replacement for a curriculum. We saw that during COVID where the attainment of children worsened.

There are bad schools and bad teachers. The solution is not bulldozing the entire system and replacing it with something worse.

This is like saying people should self-diagnose and medicate because there's a few dodgy hospitals and doctors.

Bad influence from other students

Bad policies for phone use

Bad teachers

Strange curricula influenced by ideology

Aggressive low performing immigrants from other cultures (Europe)

The last point will get me downvoted from people who can not handle the truth.

But a lot of the resources to help people homeschooling are weird christian nonsense.

because the parents are idiots;

because of the paranoid delusions about Them and What They Are Doing;

because the kids (and in many cases the teachers) are awful human beings that people (idiots or not) don't want their kids to be around several hours a day every day;

because of school shootings and other forms of violence;

because the value in this is no longer clear to anyone;

because the only people demonstrating "leadership" in this matter are leading outraged mobs around to prop up themselves and their power structures rather than anything productive.

Or, in our case, our youngest has autism and ADHD and was unable to be successful in the "not homeschool" environment (for numerous reasons), so we removed him from it.

What about other sources of diversity? Guess what, they are in sports and other community groups too. In fact, by avoiding the time suckers in traditional school, you’d be surprised to see just how quickly the kids can zip through their curriculum and join more extracurricular activities with meaningful social interactions. You mean school isn’t the only place to learn social interaction? Yup.

It’s time we put to death the idea that homeschooling is detrimental to social development. It’s utter nonsense. My wife has taught music at every grade level and in every school type imaginable and anecdotally the homeschooled kids are by far the most confident, socially capable of the bunch.

“Home-school Shooting”

It sucks, my sons went to catholic schools, and now an independent Catholic high school. The new breed of “evangelical style” Catholics are starting to appear. They are more political and reactionary in terms of religious politics/practice.

Where infrastructure doesn’t exist, homeschools and stuff like “classical education” are gaining traction.

No tech bro theories of exceptionalism and "anti-mediocrity" necessary.

Occam would be proud.

liberating education would be a major blow to the social engineers running the matrix -- or at least that's what i think when i'm optimistic... maybe these days they could easily compensate through the screens.

and if you have an urge to argue with this, then first read John Taylor Gatto's essays to understand what's going on. after that we can discuss the specifics.

1) Right-wing disgust over woke issues.

2) Fear of school shootings.

That's coming from a non-tech middle/lower-middle class setting. 20-30 years ago, when I was in school, most of the homeschoolers seemed (again anecdotally) to be based on religion or some other idiosyncratic reasoning rather than the reasons I cited above.

I'm a product of department of defense school system. My parents were lower class, I received a world class education. My mom taught me to read and count before kindergarten, mostly via playing card games with her. I was in NC at that time, and they thought I was a savant!

Overall, my experience was good, some bullying of course, but at that time administrators held the ultimate key which was we will first tell your parents, and then subsequently your parents commanding officer, which would result in work disciplinary action. When I lived in Japan, there were a couple kids that were bad enough to get that to trigger. Stupid stuff like huffing air freshener, or just beating the hell out of people.

My short stint in NJ public school was ok, but it lacked the rigor/structure of the DoDDs school. I ended up at a good engineering university, but had a good amount of debt.

In Philadelphia, public schools are essentially DMZs, with private schools for kids that want to do things with their lives. This sounds harsh, but our tax system reflects this, as well as our disrepair of public school buildings (lead, abestos).

My Dad gave up his best years to the military and his body suffered, but it was certainly not for nothing. He retired at 42, with a pension after 20y in USMC. Healthcare is taken care of.

It's hard to say whether it is the escalating cost of schools which are commodifying it "It's so expensive I shouldn't have to xyz", leading to low parental involvement (maybe that is normal?), or continuous concierge service for helicopter parents as well. My friend who is a teacher has an entire class of students exploiting the IEP system to get extra time on exams, less choices in multiple choice, less reading, landscape rather than portrait tests (yes this is real), and other things that absolutely blow up her ability to be efficient at anything in the class room. I'm sure there is an argument to be made in favor of this, but it cannot operate in this way. At her school (Allentown, PA) the inmates are running the asylum due to administrators treating parents as "customers" and the parents as "the service provider". It is a sad state of affairs. In my world, parents ALWAYS sided with the teacher no matter what, which meant you had no chance at causing a problem in that way.

I don't know if there is a good solution on the horizon. I think the overwork of parents, combined with the exploitation of the school for better marks is a sick system. Only private systems seem to be able to surf this in a meaningful way because they can remove bad actors.

cite: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/10/10/us/schools-pandemic-defen...

That being said, you cannot categorically judge either homeschooling or "institutionalized" education, as the quality entirely depends on the concrete situation. Both can be done poorly or done well. There may be aspects here and there that set them apart, where one is better than the other, but on the whole, in principle, both can be done well or poorly. Both can fail or harm the child.

Of course, to be able to evaluate the quality of education requires that we first have at least a sense, if not a definition, of what education is and what it is for. Immediately, this is where the trouble starts.

If you ask most people today what education is about, the most common answer I would expect is "to prepare you for a job". Primary education is to prepare you for university, and university is for preparing you for a job. Interestingly, this is not the traditional mission of education, which is perhaps best embodied by the classical liberal arts taught in the trivium and quadrivium. Their aim was to free the human person as a human person, and a human person is a rational animal. The classical notion of freedom is the ability to be what you are — human, i.e., a rational animal — which is quite different from the modern notion of being able to do whatever you want. This classical notion of freedom is the reason for the liberal in liberal arts. Now, the modern concept of rationality also differs from the classical, so even here we have divergence.

The point is that the liberal arts were distinguished from the servile arts. It is the teaching of the servile arts that would prepare you for the job. While the gains of a liberal arts education translate into benefits in all things, they were not per se for the sake of specialized work. Their value was not instrumental, even if they do have downstream benefits for the instrumental. This is like the difference between theory and practice. One seeks understanding, the other seeks to achieve some kind of subordinate or secondary good.

Now, as to why homeschooling is becoming more attractive, we need to consider the reality of education as it actually is today. I don't want to turn this into an essay, but a few big motivations are:

* the poor quality of education

* the alienating and hostile nature of many schools

* the hostile ideological presuppositions of an education system, often insinuated rather than explicitly commanded

As to how effective homeschooling is at correcting for these faults, that will depend on the particular situation, more or less. From what I understand, homeschooling parents will often meet with other homeschooling parents and draw from curricula that already exist for this purpose. Sometimes these parents decide to found school themselves (as we are seeing in some cases with the rising interest in classical education).

I wonder if typical HNers ever get aware of what a spectacle they make of themselves and their self-important narcissistic tomfoolery.

Training kids to sabotage their mathematical ability to "level the playing field" is the most asinine thing I've ever seen and I'm disgusted it's still being taught.

> That voice likes to say: You should just homeschool them. Opt out of interacting with average people, because average people will only damage your kids.

The author makes a statement about why they think people prefer homeschooling, and yet they do not mention having spoken to a single currently homeschooling parent to ask why they homeschool. This is like me writing an article about some group I'm not a part of (say, farmers) and saying "why don't they all get organic certified? As far as I can tell it's because most farmers don't like nature."

tl;dr: this is a completely uninformed tirade from someone who unfortunately had a bad experience with their religious upbringing, which involved homeschooling, and is generalizing the negative emotions towards all homeschoolers whatever their reason for opting out of school. Ironically this article that's ostensibly criticizing homeschooling parents as snobs is dripping with disdain and condescension.

The reductive & random assumption that people opt out of school they object to the students is baffling to me. Does it not occur to the author that people take issue with institutionalization of their kids in school? It's not the other children, it's the one-size-fits-all meat grinder of school most secular homeschool parents object to.

Bonus: The footnotes are hilarious. The footnote to their argument that people homeschool because they're snobs is:

> I don’t think I’m straw-manning, because I’m pretty sure someone is going to highlight the “opt out of interacting with average people” quote on Twitter/X and say “this, but unironically.”

"I don't think I'm inventing a weak interlocutor to argue against because I've invented another imaginary person on twitter who agrees with the first imaginary person I created" I'm honestly laughing reading this.

We homeschooled our two older kids, the eldest is now in their second year of an extremely competitive engineering university program. She wanted to go to Uni so she took some online classes to prep then enrolled in school in grade 9. That was completely different from my experience in large part because she chose to go to school, so she had no one to blame for "why do I have to be here?" like I did. She owned her own choices & succeeded.

As for "what about socialization" that is the most laughable part to me. Sure I learned "socialization" in school: kill or be killed. I learned to be a mean, cynical, jaded child who could survive in that institutional environment. My children were free to spend full days socializing with other kids when we got together, and met frequently at libraries & parks with other homeschool kids, as well as engaging in extracurriculars. And if they're having a spat with another kid? That's fine, they can take a break for a bit then reconnect with them later; no need to force them together daily.

The funniest thing to me about "what about socialization" is that when I was in school & chatted with a friend in class, guess what I was always told? "Do that on your own time, you don't come to school to socialize." Ha. But seriously, avoiding the maladaptive "socialization" of what I think can fairly be called "industrial schooling" is one of the biggest perks of homeschooling.

The extracurriculars were easier too because they were not already tired from an early wakeup and full day of school! My younger kids who are now in regular school now are absolutely fried after a day at school + extracurriculars.

The amount of energy I spend now supporting school for my younger kids is crazy. Stressful mornings harrying sleepy kids out of bed and out the door, kids upset over bullying and inequity in the classroom, begging for designer clothes (where did that come from?), getting them to do their homework, oh and then there's "teaching my kids shit they were supposed to learn in school but the teacher didn't teach them" i.e. I'm having to "homeschool" them in addition to school. Sooo many conflicts spring from school. Having my kids in school often feels like more work that homeschooling rather than less.

Academics are easy. Tons of free online resources + Outschool where you can pay a teacher for one-off classes. My older kids took the 8 week essay writing class then breezed through high school english. When younger, if they wanted to play iPad I'd say "do 30m khan academy then you can do 30m iPad." Regular trips to the library & read to them... it's really not hard to cover academics through middle school, then if they want to go to high school, go ahead. Or apprentice, or focus on something else.

If you have any questions about homeschooling from a veteran parent who's also had kids in public school, let me know.

>Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home.

Sure, but the parents choosing to homeschool are either the ones abusing or not (obviously they could have an abusive uncle but the parents tend not to think of this) if Not, then its not a counter-argument because they know it's not and they do not know about the school. If abusing the know it and they might prefer to homeschool for that reason.

>Pro-homeschooling: Kids learn faster one-on-one; Bloom’s 2-sigma problem is undefeated.

>Anti-homeschooling: Kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence can fall through the cracks without professional involvement.

many kids with learning disabilities and neurodivergence need more 1 on 1, and will also be more likely to get all the other negative school interactions that are arguments against schools.

>Here’s what I think is really going on.

I heard Elon Musk homeschooled his kids, anyway if you have the money, it's a status symbol.

Also about lousy school environment anecdotes going around here - I went to high school in Utah, where I heard a teacher tell the class that A.D meant After Noah, and B.C meant Before Christ. I WIN! Oh wait...

They are straight-A students (lowest grade: 94%; History -- my Daughter). They are shocked that they attend school for 7 hours a day and there are kids who "struggle" while they finish their homework on the ride home, don't study, and get the grades they get. They are in advanced classes and both have had a perfect score in Math all three years. Mom and I are also divorced and have been since they were 2 and 4. They make friends easily but struggled when they were Home Schooled because they have less exposure to kids their age. They were given the choice when my son hit 9th grade "continue or attend Public School or a school we can afford). They didn't want to miss out on "The High School Experience" but both, enthusiastically, want to Home School their own kids one day.

They aren't unique/gifted. There are plenty of students at their schools who do as well as they do and were not Home Schooled. The difference, though, is they "did school" in a given weekday for never longer than 1.5 hours. Most days were 30 minutes. September-April with summers off and that was it.

Religion was not a factor in our choice. My son's ASD Type 1 diagnosis played a role, the way Math was taught to me played a role, the arrogant belief that I could do better and the fact that my ex-wife didn't work played a role. Mostly, talking to other Home Schooling parents and their children and "wanting my kids to be like that" was the primary factor. Watching a 13-year-old speak intelligently and with confidence about a subject they understand and actually expect an adult to listen to them is kind of crazy, especially when they really are intelligent and should be listened to.

In a decade of Home Schooling, I have talked at length with hundreds of families and their children who took that path (various conferences, Home School events at local businesses, and extra-curricular activities done "during the school day" for Home School kids). I've observed a few things: All of them teach as much as we did. None of them will admit to it until their kids are in college or they decide to send them to traditional schools and "their child's education is validated by someone else." Nobody who is actively Home Schooling will admit to an outsider that their children get 1-1.5 hours of education a week day because you'll call CPS on us. All of their children are about a year or two ahead of children "their grade" despite this minimal amount of lesson time.

I read over and over and over again about how Home Schooled children are ignorant, don't believe in evolution, believe the world is flat, their parents don't actually "teach them" -- I have no doubt those children exist and I haven't seen them because the Home Schooled families I encounter attend conferences, belong to groups (we didn't), and care about their child's education. I live in a state that, at one point, had the largest number of practicing Home School families (not sure where it is, today) and the most liberal rules around it -- literally "take them out of school"; that's it.

Everybody seems "to know some invented Home Schooled child" who had some kind of major life problem. I usually challenge for specifics and it's always turned out the kid doesn't exist. Knowing any child who is Home Schooled is unusual. But knowing the one child validates your choice to NOT Home School, the statistics of which make them extremely rare, and you find they're parroting some anecdote they heard. My daughter's school[0] has about 1,700 students in it. Her last had about 500. I have asked every single one of her teachers, her counselors and several teachers they don't have "have you ever had a Home Schooled kid in your class, before?" I'd guess 40 educators and some staff/administrators. There's exactly one who had exactly one child in her class at her last job who was Home Schooled. He was an excellent student. And this in a state that has a lot of Home Schooled students. Judging by Facebook, you'd think there's one hiding around every corner peeing in people's Cheerios.

I suspect it's people feeling (needlessly) insecure about the choices they made for their own child and feeling threatened by the fact that I chose differently. I don't encourage people to choose to Home School. It's not for everyone -- for starters, you can't do it with two full-time working parents and that means it's simply not an option for most people. However, this topic very rarely came up without judgement from everyone who didn't Home School about what a dangerous choice I made when I was still Home Schooling. It's a lot more fun, now, since I can point to their success.

Yes, some Home Schooled kids struggle/drop out of college or can't hold down a job. Certainly none of us have met a kid who drank his way through Freshman year of College, or was ill-prepared by their public school and failed out. And we came from High Schools where everyone received a degree, too. Studies continually affirm the success of Home Schooled students, yet "everyone knows some Flat Earther child from Home Schooled parents." Children fail in every type of education. They fail less in Private schools and Home Schools. They fail more in Public school (largely because of "everyone goes there, including children in extremely difficult life circumstances"). The problem is that these wrong impressions of Home Schooled kids turn into laws that ban or curtail the freedom to have the choice of Home Education.

I know if I had chosen a more traditional route, my kids would have had the same probability of success. I would have been deeply involved in their education whether or not I was the one teaching them and that's how you get successful students in traditional education, too. While it might be nice to stand on some high horse, claim that "I just love my children more than you did", pretend that all of this was some massive sacrifice and I'm some super-parent by comparison to all of you who went the traditional route, that would be a self-aggrandizing lie. I paid for and followed curriculum. It was easy. The only challenging part of it is that "your kids will argue, yell and cry at you when they struggle"; they won't do that with a stranger.

With all of the extra non-lesson time they had, it was probably easier for them to excel. But I don't look down on people for not making that choice. Quite the opposite, everyone looked down on me for the entire duration that I was a Home Schooling Dad. It's silly.

And I'd do it all over again if given the choice for one reason alone: My kids are incredible self-learners and that was the one thing that I was very intentional about. Both of them have the confidence that "nothing is beyond their ability to learn" and that it's a simple matter of finding the right information, studying and practicing. My daughter is a shining example of this: She has learned to plays Guitar, Drums, Bass, and Piano (some proficiently, some she's well on her way). She has never had a lesson. She can read music and tabs and she can sit down and compose as well as learn to play anything she wants to learn to play on Guitar, Bass and Drums. She's getting there with Piano, but it's a much more difficult instrument and she just started last Summer with that one; she's got a few years behind her on the others. But I bought her a full sized weighted-key MIDI piano last summer and I had 15 years of lessons, competitions and study in that instrument as a child/teenager, so I have a good understanding of typical progress in learning it. She took it to Mom's and decided she didn't want to take it back and forth but brought it back here over Christmas break. I listened to her practicing and had to walk into her room to make sure it was actually her playing rather than the computer playing back some MIDI file. In three months she's as far along as I was after 5-6 years of lessons. She doesn't even realize how well she's playing; nobody told her it was unusual for her to be able to play some of the things she's playing at her skill level. A teacher would have never had her playing those things. She just went ahead blissfully unaware of the fact that it's extremely hard to play some of the things she's learned to play and that probably made the biggest difference of all. She wanted to play it, so she sat down and learned how to play it, never getting discouraged over the fact that "you don't learn something like that until year 5." Her technique (fingering ... stop snickering) is even correct.

Both of my children love to learn new things, just like me. Except, I didn't learn that about myself until formal education was over. They have always known that about themselves.

[0] My son attends a private school that is very small and the results were the same but less surprising to me.

I’m glad I learned in school how to deal with bullies

Because we spend more per student but with awful results.

Because our brightest don't become schoolteachers.

Because education is years if not decades behind the skills curve.

Because big, powerful teachers unions make change impossible.

Because parents have spared the rod and spoiled the child.

Anti-homeschooling: Statistically, you’re in greater danger of all those things at home. And the risk gets bigger if you eliminate outside influences that might notice when something’s wrong.

You’d have to be an idiot to think that this argument could be used in a conversation about homeschooling with any particular potential homeschooler.

The bad news is that there are 8 billion of us and more every day. There’s not enough space or resources for us to isolate ourselves. It can’t end well.

I know a few parents who've taken objection to this. They would rather have their children be properly taught, rather than be taken advantage of for their high impressionableness.