Providing access to education, but not necessarily providing the education yourself.
It isn't always feasible, due to either a lack of time or a lack of knowledge on the parents' part to provide a full education to your own children. Which, of course, is why many homeschoolers use partnerships with other families and, sometimes, schools.
Homeschooling can be a great option but it's not feasible for everyone, esp. those without the time and/or resources to be able to do homeschooling. It's still important to look at public education critically to look for ways of improvement since there are many that rely on public education as one of the, if not the only, available source of group education in their communities.
There is also a cost in learning. I'll doff my hat to parents who have the time, energy, resources and ability to teach their own kids a wide range of subjects but in practice this seems to be the exception. Most homeschooled kids I've known have been very behind their schooled peers.
One of the common mechanisms that homeschooling parents use is a co-op mechanism. A group of homeschooling families in an area decide to school their children together, with varying degrees of cohesion. This, especially coupled with extracurricular activities, can easily address any concerns about socialization. The adults I know who were homeschooled and seem to have socialization issues by and large were homeschooled in a bubble and not encouraged or given opportunities to socialize. Another benefit of these co-ops is that they can allow for shared resources and expertise that replicates some of the other benefits of a more traditional school environment.
An easy example of this might be to take advantage of guided tours of theatres or museums. It's not often easy to get a guide for one parent and one child, but organizations will accommodate a group of 30 more frequently. Another example of this collaboration is electives. Even the best-intentioned homeschooling parent might not know some skill their children have taken an interest in (e.g. cartooning), but if another homeschooling parent knows that skill (e.g. a professional cartoonist), it's common for such parents to make arrangements for lessons in the interest of the group. A parent with an interesting hobby (e.g. model rocketry or electronics) could very easily expose other children to that hobby in an educational way. A group of willing parents can go a long way towards replicating the breadth of educational experience that a traditional school and its resources can provide, without any of the drawbacks.
The main thing stopping us is that we both enjoy our careers and neither of us wants to teach. I think if there was strong evidence that homeschooling conferred significant benefits we would probably make the sacrifice to do it, but based on my research it seems like a wash.
The added factor is that my wife was home schooled, and my view of homeschooling is somewhat tainted by that. The homeschooling community she came from isn't exactly a strong advertisement for homeschooling, but I recognize there are also bad schools out there.
The strongest part of her education seems to have been the co-op classes, but those classes are really just like sending your kids to a private school. At that point I'm not sure why you wouldn't just send your kids to school outside of an ideological commitment to homeschooling.
Also, not overly compatible with parenting school-age children. If you pull kids out of school, you generally want to be efficient with your travel. And if you elect to homeschool, it's difficult to work or fully experience the destination at the same time.
Getting buy-in from your own parents is a giant hurdle, because they need to dedicate a huge portion of their personal time to schooling you. That's not an easy undertaking.
I have not seen any efforts in developing materials that children, once they've decided they want to be homeschooled, can give to their parents to convince them that homeschooling is a good idea.
That's interesting to hear, as someone living in a different country I always assume that the reason to homeschool is so you could give your children better education.
I don't have kids of my own, but was homeschooled all the way through and it was a great experience for me. My parents barely needed to be involved for the high school years except to get me resources I needed or to check my work. For subjects that my parents couldn't teach, they either enrolled me in co-op classes that I would attend a couple times a week or a video-led course that was offered by an instructor that I could contact if needed. This offered tremendous flexibility in terms of scheduling, thus I could take extra time to sort through difficult topics. Co-op classes can be substituted for part-time enrollment in public schools.
The socialization aspect was solved by a combination of things:
- Regular involvement in a homeschool group that had meetups and educational field trips.
- Extracurricular groups. For me, that was Scouts and Volunteering, but anything that builds skills, involves responsibilities, and is fun will do.
- Sports were not my favorite, but there's lots of ways to pull them off. Many larger homeschool groups and co-ops have their own options, and I believe that part-time public school also allows for participation.
- The freedom I had in scheduling allowed me to hold a part time day job, which was a whole class of social and life skill building that wouldn't otherwise be possible.
Because the experience public school provides is an exceptionally low bar considering class sizes/ratios, commuting to and from school, etc. Also, we can pour resources into our kids public schools can’t or won’t. The data also shows homeschool outcomes to be at parity or superior to public school outcomes. We only have two kids though, and my partner is a stay at home parent. We also rely on Modulo, among other resources, for structuring education delivery.
Though why the fact some people might choose homeschooling with wrong goals in mind should prevent you from choosing to homeschool your own children, with your own goals and methods, which will be different from what other homeschooling parents would choose?
> Surely with homeschooling kids are going to get even more inconsistent results due to radically varying teaching abilities and knowledge of parents?
Some homeschooling parents might say that (1) the numbers play in their favor (no teacher would argue that it's far easier to teach 2 kids than 20), (2) that teaching a kid how to teach himself is far more important than having a teacher with a vast array of knowledge, and (3) what with online classes and homeschool co-ops, it's entirely possible to "share the wealth" and get your kid tutoring where you're not especially knowledgeable
Homeschooling does require a lot of commitment and consideration of your limitations as a parent. For example, I think there is value to cooperative homeschooling for some subjects (e.g., science, which requires equipment). Trying to "go it alone" for everything can be a bad idea. In addition, most states don't provide funding to school at home, so homeschooling parents also face an economic disadvantage.
Homeschooling is not the isolation that most people think it is. In fact, the vast majority of parents who homeschool (myself included) join forces with other parents who homeschool for events, activities, and learning opportunities, all of which bring with them natural socialization while still allowing for a far more tailored learning experience than you can get in any classroom. In addition, homeschool kids typically spend more time around adults and get a better understand of the socialization standard that is expected of them, allowing them to build mature relationships easier.
"Homeschooling" is an imperfect solution to the problem. Even the best-equipped parents have only a fraction of knowledge and experience necessary to prepare someone to build a robust and healthy society. However, one-on-one academic attention creates outstanding results in most students, which is why people hire tutors when they're falling behind, and why many of the most aristocratic in the past had private tutors for a majority of their lives.
Where I live, it's not legally possible to homeschool. My wife and I feel that the main advantage of sending our kids to school is the social aspect, and that we might actually be better at teaching them "knowledge", but we're not sure.
I mean, it could be the classic layman "oh, I could do that!" stance, and since everybody has been to school themselves they have a vague idea what the job of a teacher is like (which, of course, is in all likelihood a fallacy). That, paired with a certain cynicism about the job of a teacher in the first place (here, they've got super-safe jobs, almost no accountability, a strong lobby, lots of days off, and are mostly done work after half a day if they're so inclined) and less than stellar results of our educational system when compared internationally, gives us a certain "we couldn't do it much worse" feeling. As a matter of fact, as a homeschooler, you've only got your own kids to focus on, not a whole class of 30 children with a wide spectrum of different prerequisites.
But then again, maybe we couldn't do it very well at all. It's such a long-term commitment, one that requires consistency over years. And the relation between children and parent is different from a student-teacher relationship, there wouldn't be such a sharp distinction between what happens inside the school and the home.
Topics like bullying and other negative forms of social pressure are omnipresent in school settings, but withdrawing our children completely from such realities might turn out to be less good of a preparation for their later lives.
And lastly, without a doubt school teachings are colored by certain political world views, and they might not always be ones you agree with. But when you send your kids to school, you give up control over what they are actually taught. Of course, it is recommended to keep a close eye on that at any point in time, and also challenge contents where you think things are going wrong. But I also think it will become increasingly difficult to do this as your kids get rooted deeper and deeper in the school system, where the political and worlds views of the teachers will play as much of a role as those of the political parties that are in charge of your country's educational system.
So, whether or not to homeschool is a really tricky question - but as I said above, it does not even present itself in our case, because we have no right to homeschool where we currently live.
As someone who was homeschooled for most of my childhood, I would say the results of it are as much or more of a mixed bag than public schooling is. It depends largely on how much time and energy the parents pour into it, and it's very easy for them to not be doing enough even if they have intentions otherwise.
Additionally, homeschooling has a tendency to produce adults who lack real world experience and perspective due to the unavoidably sheltered nature of such arrangements. This is something that has taken me many years to overcome to become a functional person, and if I'm being honest, is still a work in progress even in my mid-30s. It's not something I'd want to saddle any potential children of my own with.
'School in my opinion is an abstraction that isn't necessary anymore. A relic of the industrial age, when information was sparse and communities were largely illiterate.'
While this may be true for many people, there are plenty of parents out there who would do a much worse job than school would in teaching their children.
Sure, there are parents who are great at homeschooling, and who might even have time to do it (some of them have jobs, I hear), but this is not true for the vast majority.
Schools, in addition to providing some modicum of education, offer children a place to be while their parents are at work, and one where they can interact with others of their age in a controlled environment.
Well, it's available resources about building and delivering an effective curricula across subjects and time. I have found a number of homeschooling resources, but the best organized efforts tend to be from religious perspectives (not surprising). We're not religious. My being an atheist and my wife being best described as irreligious (doesn't identify with a religion and puts approximately zero thought into the question) means much of that religious perspective is unwanted and is something I would consider detrimental. That I do seriously consider homeschooling should also make it evident that I reject public schooling as a good option; there are a number of reasons but your question implicitly assumes that to be true so I'll just restate it for others.
We do have relatives that have successfully homeschooled and I have seen groups that do their homeschooling together (homeschooling isn't necessarily about sitting at home by yourselves). So it's resources/support targeted to delivering a well-rounded homeschooled education, it's finding sufficiently like-minded others with whom to share the effort in a small group setting. With sufficient resources I could likely solve the time problem.
Absent that, we're looking at private schools for our kid. We'd probably just do this, but it's not a cheap alternative.
It isn't always feasible, due to either a lack of time or a lack of knowledge on the parents' part to provide a full education to your own children. Which, of course, is why many homeschoolers use partnerships with other families and, sometimes, schools.
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